Timothy 02: Tim2 (30 page)

“Tax accountant with teeth. Ooooh, how scary. What’re you going to do, throw a calculator at me? Maybe a ledger. Yeah, the corner of it could catch me in the temple, it could be real bad!” I said with an amusing lilt.

“I’ll fucking kill you!” he replied impotently.

“Gonna be a little difficult from that side of the door, don’t you think?”

“Listen, Tim-Tim,” Yorley interceded, “I don’t know if you are what you claim to be, or just some sick fuck who jerks off thinking about hurting people. Either way, I know why you want us, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let that happen. I’ll gun everyone in here down before I let that door open.”

“Yorley!” Scarlett gasped.

“Scarlett, you saw what he did in the supermarket! Could you stand it if he did it to your babies? If he made you fucking watch?!”

Scarlett was bewailing inconsolably.

“I’d make it quick, I promise…no suffering.”

“Shit, shit, shit,” I said softly. She was throwing a wrench into my plans. “I’m listening!” I told her.

“Well, I don’t expect you to leave, that would be asking too much. I just want us to have a chance,” she said.

“A chance at what?” I asked, truly perplexed.

“A chance at life.”

“Are you fucking kidding me? Why would I do that?” I questioned.

“We get a chance at getting away, or you get no chance at us at all.”

“Bullshit, you won’t shoot them!” I challenged.

“How sure of that can you be, Tim-Tim, because I’ll tell you what, I’m not going to be eaten no matter what. I’ll put a bullet in my brain long before that happens.”

“Shit, shit, shit,” I said, banging my fist against my thigh.

“Not sitting so well with you?” she asked as if she had heard me.

“Fuck you, Yorley,” I told her.

She laughed! She had the fucking audacity to laugh at me. How the hell did this happen? She now had me over the barrel.

“Better hurry up, Tim-Tim, air’s getting a little thick in here,” Yorley prodded.

“Get the fuck out of my way, Yorley!” Harold shouted.

I heard Yorley chamber a round. “You move even an inch in my direction and I will spill your guts all over the floor and in front of your family,” she told him.

Nothing in her voice made me think she was saying anything but the absolute truth.

“What do you want, Yorley?” I asked through gritted teeth.

“Well…normally under these conditions I would ask you to move and that you would be honor bound to comply. But I’m pretty sure you’ve got absolutely no moral compass, so even if you promised me you would move away, you wouldn’t. I’m as sure of that as I am of this rifle in my hands.

Smart
girl
, I thought. “Nailed me with your pop psychology, so now what?”

“You’re going to have to prove you’ve moved.”

“What do you want me to do, mail you a letter from a new location?”

“It’s not as far away as I would like, but you’re going to have to tap on the exhaust pipe.”

She nailed me again before I could even begin to formulate a trap.

“Now, before that ugly, oversized melon of yours gets any ideas, like maybe rigging something with a rope or tossing rocks, I’m going to want you to yell into the pipe.”

“It’s clogged, you dumb bitch.” She was really beginning to irritate the hell out of me.

“The sound will still travel clear enough down the metal. We going to play this game? And don’t stall; Harold says we’re running out of air. And to be honest, he looks like he’s about to panic…and if that happens I’ll have to shoot him.”

“Fine. We’ll play this your way,” I said, going up the stairs and across the yard to the smoldering ruins of the shed. “I’m here!” I yelled into the pipe.

“Keep tapping it and every time you do, count.”

“Just like
Sesame Street
.”

“Whatever.”

The tapping and the number remunerating made it extremely difficult to tell what was going on inside the shelter. And the more I thought about it, the less I liked the situation. Without the benefit of the limited shelter the shed offered I was in the wide open and Yorley had an effective fighting hole with which to dispatch me. How in the fuck had I been so completely waylaid into believing this to be a good idea? I mean, I get men and zombies think with their stomachs first, but at the cost of rational thought?

“This is your fucking fault!” I shouted to Hugh as I bolted for the neighbor’s house. Harold’s house was closer but that meant running straight back
towards Yorley. Whose shot went wide right, by the way.

“You fell for that shit?” she yelled, following my running with a trail of bullets. More than one connected as I crashed through the back door.

“Did you kill him?” Scarlett asked hopefully.

“Not yet, but I will,” Yorley replied. I watched as she got up slowly.

“Hugh, we’re in trouble. Release the hounds.”

We almost died while he tried to figure out the reference. I could see Yorley advancing cautiously. However, I was too busy bleeding from a few life-threatening wounds. Luckily she missed my head, but she had nicked my neck. I had at least one in my thigh and one in my shin, which, if I could put pressure on it, would let me know it was broken. He finally got my message as I showed him a mental image of Harold and of himself.

I was pushing away on the floor, leaving a noticeable trail when Hugh ‘called out’ to our comrade in arms.

“Oh my God!” I heard Scarlett cry out. “Harold what’s the matt—” her question trailed off into a scream that pierced the day.

Yorley, who was within about five feet of seeing how incapacitated I was, turned to see what the matter was with her friend. Hugh was working his magic, but he was spread thin with so many injuries. Scarlett was screaming.

“What the fuck?” Yorley joined in.

Hugh was somehow linked to our clone zombie, and we watched through his eyes as Harold had come out of the shelter, immediately attacking his wife who had one child in each arm and was unable to defend herself. She had put up her forearm in an attempt to stop him and he had latched on, biting clean through the shirt she had been wearing. A strip of skin an inch wide and half an inch thick came loose as either Harold pulled away or Scarlett fell over. It was difficult to tell from this angle. The toddler she had been holding slipped to the ground. I think he was fine, but Harold didn’t care about him so we didn’t see. He was fixated on the blood leaking from his wife. She pushed as far back as she could in the small stairwell. He had just gone in for seconds when Yorley got to the top of the stairs.

Her cry of alarm had gotten Harold’s attention. He pivoted his head to look at the new Cuban cuisine and must have liked what he saw because he began to come up the stairs. Whatever surprise or shock Yorley felt, she got over it quickly as she placed two rounds in his head. Hugh wailed as his clone died and our connection was severed.

“What happened, Yorley?” Scarlett was crying.

I couldn’t tell from my location for sure, but from the tone of her words, she sounded like she was in shock and probably not even aware she had been bitten.

“Give me the kids,” Yorley said, descending a step.

I had pulled myself over to the door and was peering out, making sure to keep as little of me exposed as possible. I would have shot the bitch if I hadn’t dropped my gun in an attempt to get away.

“What, Yorley! What are you going to do?” Scarlett was wailing. On some level she knew she was dead, but that’s a pretty hard notion to come to terms with.

“I’ll take care of them, Scarlett, I promise. Just hand them over.”

“I’m their mother.”

“You were,” Yorley answered sincerely. “Soon you’ll be trying to eat them. Give them to me before that happens.”

“I’m fine.”

“So was Harold,” she told her. “I knew that bastard wouldn’t just let him go. Must have infected him before he did. Son of a bitch…should have seen that coming. Come on, Scarlett, we don’t have much time.”

“I...I can’t. They’re all I have left.”

“I will shoot you if you make me,” Yorley said, raising her rifle to her shoulder.

“Wow, she is a cold bitch,” I said appreciatively and with more than a modicum of admiration.

“Food...” Hugh moaned.

“Fix us first! Then eat,” I told him. He wasn’t impressed with my answer.

At least he began to direct all of his focus to get us mobile again. At some point Yorley had retrieved the appetizers. She took one long look down at Scarlett and then a quick glance my way. Then she bounded off.

“Fuck,” I said.

“Food...leaving!” Hugh shouted, following my line of sight. He was abandoning his tasks and was beginning to wrest control from me.

“NO!” I told him. “Fix first!”

He was now less impressed. I felt my (our) broken leg start to twitch as he put locomotion on it. The pain was excruciating. Black spots at first danced in my eyes then began to blot out my vision. I knew if I passed out Hugh would take over and would be a lot less willing to yield the power once he possessed it.

“Fine!” I said through gritted teeth. “This is the way you want it…let’s play.” I marshaled up my white blood cells that had not yet fully recuperated from our last round. But Hugh was also degraded from our fight, plus he had his forces split, some still working on repairs others were being used in an effort to take over.

My body broke out in a bathing sweat across in its entirety. My thoughts became fragmented as my temperature soared. Hugh was cutting paths through my defenses like a blowtorch to snow. He was a virus on a mission. I pushed away from the door with my flagging reserves. Hugh was charging for the brain, and once he got to the control tower he wasn’t going to stop until one of us was dead and gone; and right now the smart money was on him. I wobbled mightily as I stood, a fortuitously placed hat rack the only thing allowing me to keep my balance.

“Who uses hat racks anymore?” I asked as I pushed away down a small hallway.

The bathroom was a few steps away…or a few miles, depending on perspective. The pain along with my weakness was threatening to topple me like a tree in the forest.

“KILL!” Hugh shouted.

“My sentiments exactly,” I told him.

As I gripped the edge of the bathroom doorway, I had one chance. If this failed I didn’t have enough left to stave him off for very much longer. I let go of the doorframe and fell towards the sink, thankful that the craftsmanship kept the pedestal style sink standing as I slammed into it. A small, mirrored medicine cabinet above the sink was my goal. My left arm betrayed me; I couldn’t move it at all. To move my right meant releasing my tenuous grip on the porcelain edge.

I shot my arm out there and gripped the corner of the cabinet. It tore loose from its anchors and toppled to the ground with me, glass, and a variety of washroom utilities cascading around me. I was thankful the same handyman had not put the mirror up or I would have slipped off it without my prize in hand.

At least three orange-brown prescription bottles landed on the floor near me, possibly more, but if they weren’t directly in front of me they were, for the most part, lost. I fumbled until I could bring a bottle up to my eyes; my vision was clouding from pain.

“Cialis. At least I can die with a hard-on.”

I tossed it aside; although that was a liberal use of the word, more like let it roll out of my clenching and unclenching near-traitorous hand. The next bottle was labeled: Valtrex. Somewhere in my head the word ‘herpes’ flashed.

“Next,” I said as I grabbed another bottle. “Fucking-A!” I shouted in triumph, which cost me a coughing fit. Penicillin. I twisted the top off, thankful that it was not screwed on the childproof side.

“One fucking pill? Are you kidding me? Douche bag has herpes, the clap…and needs help with stiffies. Must only be able to afford ugly hookers. What the hell,” I said as I swallowed the pill more suited for a horse by its size. I put my head down to wait for the fall of my siege, my head looking straight at the Valtrex bottle. “Cocksucker, herpes is a virus.” I reached, or so I thought for the bottle, neither arm was under my command. Three inches from help and I was powerless. I willed, begged, cajoled, and threatened them to move. Nothing, not so much as a stir, although Hugh hadn’t completely gained power either. Snot was pooling on the side of my face as it poured from my nose.

“More than one way to skin a cat…and I should know,” I said as I lifted my head as far as I could.

I brought my mouth down on the bottle and began to chew, plastic mixed in with the utter bitterness of the pills as I devoured the entire container and its contents in four large swallows. There was a momentary pang of panic as a piece of the cap lodged in my throat. Of all I’d been through, death by choking seemed the most ironic way to go out. Well maybe not considering some of the things I’d been eating as of late.

I was able to move my torso but I had lost all feeling in my lower extremities and arms. I got as close to a sitting position as I could and then let myself topple over into the side of the toilet. I hooked my chin on the rim of the bowl and pulled myself in. I greedily started lapping
water like a desert raised dog. When my mouth was full, I snorted in a large dose of mucous, the two combined were more than enough lubrication to get the obstruction moving in the appropriate direction. The water tasted like shit – go figure – but the air was sweet as I pulled it in. I didn’t know if I had enough time left for the pills to do anything or if they would even help at all. I was running out of fight and Hugh seemed like he could do this forever.