Zombies! Rising from the Dead (10 page)

Rick
had been doing nothing but staring out the window in silence for miles now; it was
like he was trying to awake from a deep slumber, only thing was he
wasn't
asleep, he was in
shock. I had never seen my best friend so out of it and shaken.
“Um
no, no
...I haven't”
he
said, shaking the cobwebs from his head.

“Why don't you try to give him a call? See if they're okay”.
I was concerned;
no one had
heard from Frankie and his wife since this whole ordeal began.

Rick dialed and
Frankie picked up almost immediately.
Rick
in a moment of clarity put
him on speaker phone.

“Hey you guys okay?”
I said, relieved that we were able to get a hold of
them
.

“I just
I...I...I can't believe this is happening.”
He kept repeating.

“Where are you?”
I asked.

“We're here at the
store,
we can't get out of town.”

Rick and I looked at each other in despair.
The Game Pad w
as a single level store with
only one way in and one way out. The front of the store was simple, with three huge panes of
glass each
beside the other; not much protection from much of anything. Knowing that even if
those “things” didn't get to them it was likely that looters and scavengers would. We couldn't
say
anything,
couldn't do
anything
to cause further alarm. Frankie knew all this as well as we
did, he was no dummy.

“
Are you going to be all right buddy?”
I asked, hoping that he was in better than
standing that it would seem.

“Yeah, were
gonna
be fine. I've got all the windows covered, the backdoor is dead
bolted and barred,
and no
one can get in. We've got the car around back so no one knows we're
here, we have that old
heavy metal trash dumpster...”,
he paused.

“Yeah
,
I remember that
, what about it?
”
I said
.

“I pushed that in through the back doors and I've got
it
up against the entrance. I
flipped it over so it can't be moved, no one will be able to get in,
it
weighs a ton.”

Rick cut in,
“You got food and stuff? Whatever you do don't make any noise and don't
do anything to let anyone know you’re there, make it look abandoned”

“We are go
ing
be alright. We had a bunch of snacks from the machine and we got to the
store before it got crazy, we can hold out a long while if we have too. I think it will be alright, I have my gun here if things get out of hand.”
Frankie seemed confident and it
s
ounded
like he had everything covered, but remembering the layout of the store I questioned how long
the two of them could hold on or go undiscovered; and a little pistol might be fine against a few
rogue thugs, but against the damned things we now faced it seemed like little protection.

Without thinking Rick asked if he wanted us to come up and try to get them. I looked at him
wide eyed and shook my head. He knew it had been a mistake to ask, but now it was on the
table and we were obligated if he accepted our offer. I could have strangled Rick, his heart
was in the right place; but realistically there was no way for us to get to Frankie, there was
nothing
we could possibly do. An awkward silence fell over the situation as seconds passed,
seconds that felt like hours as we held our breath for Frankie's reply.

“No,
l
isten, we're okay, you guys can't get into town anyway, its nuts out here! The
only way you can get anywhere now is on foot.
It took us two hours to get from the mall back to the south side. There
ain't
nothing
you can do, we will be fine here”

We were glad that he
had let us off the hook, but felt guilty as we were basically leaving them to fend for themselves.
Frankie was right though;
considering what he had just told us it would have been fruitless
trying to get
back
into town and this point.

“Okay,
but
if you need
anything,
or hear anything let us know alright?
We're worried about
you buddy,”
I told him.

“Just play it cool. Don't make a sound, don't even go outside and you'll be alright,”
Rick added.

“You guys just take care of yourselves. It will all be under control soon, they've been
bringing in the military all day”
Frankie repeated.

“Alright, well we are go
ing to go
man, we'll talk to you later, k?”

“Okay, good luck guy, talk to you later”
Then just like that, he was gone.

I closed the phone praying that this wasn't the last time we heard from our friend.
We felt horrible, we wanted to help but there was nothing we could do. The word futility
came to mind, a word I had never truly understood until this day and now I understood it all too
well.

We drove the remaining twenty minutes back to Barkley
w
ithout incident.

We arrived back in Barkley only to find complete chaos. People were doing exactly the
opposite of what had been advised, (why this surprised me in this little redneck
podunk
' town I
don't know).

There was a gas station sitting on the right, just as
we
came into town, it had a line a
mile long. People came in all sorts of vehicles, some on foot with gas cans in hand. Anything
and
everything
that could hold a sip of fuel was brought up to the pumps. The panic and
desperation was sickening. People sat in their cars cooking in the summer heat, sweat pouring
off of them for some small chance to get what little fuel remained in the nearly depleted
pumps.
What would they use the fuel for? Were they going to make a futile run for safety? Had they
not
heard the news? Fucking morons, sooner or later this would be a
worldwide
pandemic,
maybe it
already was;
there would be nowhere to run. Bunch of stupid dumb ass rednecks with
little intelligence, and no common sense
to speak of
; little people with little minds.

Cars and trucks
packed with screaming children
filled the station. Distraught mothers
tried to calm crying babies who were heat-exhausted, their little faces beet red from over-exposure. What made the situation worse was that we recognized many of the faces there.

Rick pointed,
“Look at that”.

Up the road Mark's Grocery was also packed. People forcing their way past each other
scrambling to gather the last remaining food and provisions remained. They carried goods out
by hand
, pushed carts down the street;
or made off with things by whatever other means they
could manage. We could have been wrong, but it didn't look to us like any of them were
paying
customers.

Further down the road the sheriff's department was on high alert. All off-duty officers
and local volunteers had been called in to help assist in evacuations and emergency
preparedness;
I imagined that the scene was much the same across the entire state. Officers

were
gathered outside the makeshift head-post, shouting orders and giving direction through
hand-held radios. You could hear the squawk of the police radios as we drove past.

As we turned off down the street that would eventually lead us to Cider road, we saw a
large group of men congregating like a
ma
keshift lynch mob complete with guns, hatchets, and
cans of gasoline. One of the swarthy men had climbed into the bed of an old beat-up truck. A
large, bloated, barrel-chested man with a thick gray beard stood overlooking the scene. He was
wearing dirty overalls which obviously hadn't been washed anytime in the recent past. As we
watched he began to shout.

“
Let’s
get these sum' of a bitches, lets
fuckin
' kill '
em
!
”.
It was Haderson, I recognized
him immediately,
he
had
been Barkley's sheriff several years ago and
not
a particularly good
one at that. Wilburn Haderson was his name
,
but everyone around here called him “Willy”. Some folks were probably more forgiving than I
and overlooked his...tendencies.
I harbored
a deep disgust for the
incompetent bastard parading around as “the law”. Haderson was a

raging
alcoholic;
no better than half the drunks he himself hauled in. Years ago I had a run
in with him when my house
was
robbed, when Haderson finally arrived to take my
report his uniform wreaked as if it had been soaked in old Kentucky bourbon and the old fuck
was
so loaded he could barely stand; e
ven now I had no doubt he was full of the cheap booze
and cigarettes.