Humanity's Death: A Zombie Epic (26 page)

He was right; she didn’t care; but being around
Mark made her feel safe. Strange as he was, he made her feel so
comfortable. He never got angry. Never screamed.

She always wanted to see him blow up, just once,
but not a fat chance in hell. He yodeled though. Very loudly. It
made her love him even more. That fat belly and those chubby
cheeks, red and burning with yodeling passion.

And his cheeks were red that day, the day she
watched him smile for the last time.

3

A week before she'd watched a documentary, well, if
you want to call it that—on the History Channel. Some crap about
the Rapture. People disappearing, cars crashing, planes falling
from the sky, and all the nonbelievers stuck on earth while the
Christians sat happy go lucky with Jesus.

She had a long day that day. Finals. A stack of
papers still ungraded sitting beside her half glass of raspberry
wine. She flipped through the channels. She finally landed on the
satellite radio channel for alternative music. A rare pleasure. She
allowed herself to lose all touch with reality while the music
glared.

She listened to the tunes of The Offspring’s
“The Kids Aren’t Alright.”

Then she remembered growing up off highway 9 in
Upstate SC by a shallow and muddy creek, filled with its dangerous
water Moccasins. She remembered her daddy’s whiskey breath. He’d
tied a long rope to a tall tree that hung over the creek. To that
he’d tied an old tire. And it was on that tire that the Creek Kids
(that’s how she saw them at least) would swing back and forth, and
many times, let go and crash into the water, causing red clay mud
to rise up. It was by that creek that she'd gotten her first
kiss.

Barry Chance was his name. A blue eyed boy rebel
that she followed everywhere. His long blonde rat tail ran down his
tan smooth skin.

“Mary Jane! Catch!” The baseball cracked against
her skull. She didn’t get mad at him though, even though he knew
she didn’t play ball and didn’t know how to catch. His daddy beat
him black and blue for putting that lump on her head. She didn’t
see him much after that; but she never forgot his screams while his
daddy whipped him with a switch from a briar patch.

Soon after her daddy got a new job and she left
the Upstate and moved down to Horry County. That’s where she went
to middle school, high school, and eventually college.

Damn good days.

She remembers watching the news with her father
after getting home during her senior year, the class of 2001. The
country was up in arms, ready to kill everyone and everything that
looked different. “Nothing but bad news. Nothing but bad people
daddy. Least that’s how it seems.”

“
Focus in on
the
seems
part,
kid.” She always liked when he called her kid. It wasn’t
disrespectful, but meant with enduring love. The love between a
father and a daughter. “For every bad man, there are at least three
good men. But, the news aint never gonna talk about good
stuff.”

“If it leads, it bleeds. We learned that in
communications class.” She said.

On the T.V. a man in a blue suit and white hair
screamed and pointed at the camera. He warned the “demonic
terrorists” that their days were numbered. He said the war would be
fast and precise. He spoke of smart bombs and special forces.

Her dad cut off the T.V. and looked at her.
“Don’t let this old world get you down. Trust me. Life is gonna go
well for you. You’re one of the good guys. And believe it or not,
us good guys out number the bad guys.”

As she lay half-conscious on the floor (right
about then Rusty Ray was learning about anal adventures of the
worst kind), the tears came as she remembered her dad.

Where was he now? A dead man roaming the
highways looking for living flesh to eat? And where were all the
good guys now? Dead. Gone and dead. Walking around dead. All the
good people are dead. And she was never one of the good people,
because all the good people died early on. They died trying to help
other people. She stayed hidden in those early days. She didn’t
help anyone. She looked out for herself.

She didn't look for her husband. She didn’t look
for her son. She knew they were dead. She knew she couldn’t save
them.

So She saved herself. And that made her a bad
guy. A rat that hides and comes out when everyone is dead or gone.
What did she get for it? This bottle of booze? This half rotten
city-state? The filthy inhabitants? The sex between her and
Duras?

But what about Duras? Did she really hate him?
She loves him. He was all there was now. She'd loved her husband
to. She'd loved her son to. But she couldn’t save them.

“I could not! I swear it! I couldn’t save you!”
She screamed and fell to the carpeted floor, cradled in a fetal
position, and sobbed.

4

She didn't know
how long she laid there. But the tears slowly dried up. Better
memories came through. She was back with her father, out deep in
the woods. A long weekend of hunting was almost over. Now they did
what they always did, and wasted what was left of their ammo on his
beer cans. He’d throw them in the air, and she'd show him her skill
with well-placed shots. The sound of the blast, followed by the
echo through the woods always excited her and made her feel
powerful. Her father brought her up watching
Lethal Weapon,
Predator
, and she even
liked the
Crow
. But she
especially loved
Alien
s. The
heroics of the “not so beautiful” (as her father put it), Sigourney
Weaver emboldened the feministic side of her brain and made her
want to always be just as fast, smart, and good at killing as any
man.

“ROTC? Really? Sounds great kid!”

It was freshmen year in at Socastee High School.
“Junior ROTC, but yeah dad, like a modern day Spartan Hoplite.” The
year before, she'd become engrossed in ancient Greece, especially
the Spartans. A proud warrior culture and dominators of Greece for
centuries. And, although her dad still struggled with memories and
regrets about his days wearing the uniform and marching deep in
dangerous jungles where he watched friends die and saw the bodies
of dead kids he knew his bullets had killed—he never bad mouthed
the military or the government and always supported her positive
warrior nature; a girl growing up in South Carolina had to have a
little kick to her step, not to mention be able to handle the kick
from a Colt revolver, double gauge shot gun, and any other weapon
these local rednecks wanted to throw her way.

And it was a redneck that she fell in love with
in early fall of her freshmen year in high school. Barley Thomas, a
thick neck dumbass that had the disgusting habit of chewing
tobacco. Why in god’s name she loved him never really made much
sense.

It didn’t last though.

He was driving her home. She slurped on a
chocolate shake from Dairy Queen that he just purchased her with
the money he made cutting lawns on Saturdays and Sundays.

“Listen Barley. It’s over.”

His neck pulsed and his eyes enraged. He slammed
on the accelerator. His mildly retarded eyes jiggled in the moon
light. Rain fell outside and slapped hard against the windshield of
his rusted red Chevy blazer. An ancient piece of shit vehicle if
there ever was one, and in a moment she was going to find how
shitty the brakes were.

He rounded a curb at blazing speeds, all while
cursing up a storm. Nothing but dark trees dashed by on either
side. She'd never seen him angry before, but he’d told her about
his father, who he claimed had the temper of a wild alley cat mixed
with a caged dog that hadn’t been fed for a week.

He rounded the curb, and headed down a long
patch of road that didn’t have any light on it. Trees arched over
the road creating a dark green canopy.

White lighting crackled in the sky and dashed
Barley’s face with hot light. His knuckles were white from gripping
the steering wheel and a large vein pulsed on the side of his neck,
“You ain’t gonna leave me! No way! No how! Not today! Not tomorrow!
Nooooooo!”

She said nothing. She watched his shadowy face
barking like a devil hound; she continued slurping on her chocolate
shake. Then she felt the cup’s contents splash cold onto her face.
She closed her eyes and tried to calm myself. She breathed
deeply.

Only a moment in time, only a moment in
time.

“Yeeehawww! Bitch you are mine!”

She stared daringly up at him. His eyes burned
with madness and tears. Snot and tobacco juice spurted from his
mouth and nose.

Another streak of lighting lit up the road and a
herd of deer darted across the dark asphalt; there pretty white
tails high in the air. What happened next is what she thought death
would be like— at least what she thought it was like back then—a
darky misty void where the slight echo of the living is faint but
hearable. Cause after waking up and seeing the paramedics, she knew
she was alive, but she also knew a few moments earlier she existed
only in a dark world full of strange and soft voices; her world had
been turned black. The lights had gone out and she didn’t even have
a chance to say goodbye.

When she gained her senses, she stared around
and saw Barley being lifted on a stretcher, well, she didn’t see
him exactly, because his was DOA and covered up with a white sheet.
She'd broken his heart and he died for it. The tragedy was that she
didn’t really care. The guy was sounding more like a crazed animal
that needed to be put down. So, while laying around the hospital
with a broken arm, three bruised ribs, and a hell of a concussion,
all while drugged on pain killers—she concluded Barley’s untimely
death wasn’t so untimely after all; indeed, may have been a
blessing, both for her and the pathetic redneck woman he would have
eventually married, beaten, and impregnated. This would continue
the violent Thomas lineage started by his granddad, Ted Thomas.
Barley had spoken with great pride while telling her about how his
granddaddy “strung up enough niggers to keep this town safe and
pretty.”

Years later, as spit fire freshmen in college,
she fell in, at least for a short time, with a crowd of hippy
types; the people who are not really hippies, have no idea what it
even means to be a sixty’s soul child, but none the less wear
tie-dyed shirts, flowers in their hair, and smoke a shit ton of
weed. It was with this group that she traveled to a little festival
called Sun Shine in the Pines, which isn’t anything but a swelling
of more soul child wanna bes crowded in the trees of the hick
county of Marlboro, SC.

This trip wouldn’t have been much of anything
but a sad distraction of drugged up yahoos dancing around like
colorful arrhythmic zombies, had it not been for the loss of her,
once whether important, virginity. It all happened in a fast bang;
Tyler Bledsoe was in and out faster than sweat could drop off her
face.

His breath smelled like burnt weed pipe resin
and he stank from a least two days without a shower. He climbed off
of her, and fell over onto his side of the tent, reached and
grabbed a glass jar, popped the top, removed a pre-rolled joint,
took a red Bic lighter from his left pocket, struck it, and lit the
joint.

5

Her baby sister. She was just a kid. Hell, they were
both just kids back then. Her sister wore a black cap and gown.
Mary was then a senior at College of Charleston, go Cougars. Her
sis just graduated Socastee High and was a spitting image of a
Greek goddess. Her dark brunette locks curled up and flowed out
from under her cap. She’d just stepped off the stage and Mary
embraced her tightly, “Momma would be so proud.” Mary said.

Her momma had died when Mary was in eighth
grade. Her lungs had turned black with cancer from decades of
relentless chain smoking. Those last few months of her life were
unbearable to watch. Vomiting, hair loss, and her father’s grim and
pain covered face, with lines that said I’d take the Vietcong
jungles over this any day.

Her momma’s face had sunk in so far in those
last days. Just a pale and patsy whisper of a woman. “Death ain’t
nothing but a thing. Just something we all I have to face.” Momma
said while lying flat on her back on the hospital bed. The room
smelled of cleaning liquids and her daddy sat in a corner chair
staring out the large window, down at the roof of another hospital
wing. Momma held Mary's hand with her left and Sarah’s with her
right. They stood on either side of the bed. “Your daddy’s seen
plenty of death. Aint that right baby?”

Her daddy just kept staring. He didn’t say a
word. That was his way when he was in a lot of pain. Just plain
silent. Mary always wondered what went through his mind in those
moments. He never spoke about the war, at least not in detail.
Nothing about the loss of friends or holding the entrails of his
good buddies. But she knew he saw his fair share of hell. Mary
could see it in his eyes, and while momma laid there dying, his
eyes stared out like he was watching the war happen right there in
front of him. “Your daddy has his ways. Don’t mind him. He will
mourn how he wants.”

“Momma.” Sarah said with tears dripping. Mary
watched her sister’s tears drip like rain droplets; then her own
started to fall.

“Heaven aint so far away baby. Don’t cry for
me. Things can only get better from here. Always remember, good
people don’t die, they resurrect.” Momma said. She was a religious
woman, raised by a stout, tall, and red headed fire breathing
backwoods southern Baptist. He’d died of cancer to, the same kind.
The Lord seemed proud to take his most faithful while leaving the
skeptics behind to use their death’s as evidence of His
nonexistence. But, looking down at Momma’s dying face, all Mary
could think of was a poem she once read by some unknown, wanna be
poet: