Necrophobia - 01 Page 4

  Her voice filled me with calm. I could feel my guts unwinding knot by knot.

  “What’s the password?” Paul asked.

  I almost started laughing. “Zulu Foxtrot!” I shouted.

  Locks were freed and the door opened. Ricki pretty much fell in my arms and I held her tight.

  “It’s been quiet,” Paul said. “No activity.”

  Ricki looked over at him and sighed. “He’s running this like a military operation,” she said. “He’s already worked out a strict rationing system.”

  Paul beamed at me.

  I smiled back. I was getting the feeling that he was enjoying this. But it was only a matter of time before the novelty wore off. Summer camp was always fun at first, but you got sick of it soon enough and especially one where things wanted to eat you.

  Ricki was sniffing the air. “I smell smoke,” she said. “You’re not smoking again…”

  “No…not me.”

  Diane came down the steps with a cigarette in her mouth. “Hey, little sister, what’s up?”

  At that precise moment I couldn’t have said whether Ricki was pleased to see her sister or annoyed at her very presence. It was really hard to tell. Paul, on the other hand, was very pleased to see her. I could see it in his eyes: he was completely smitten with his aunt. She was the hot, wild woman of every boy’s fantasy.

  “No smoking,” Ricki told her.

  “Relax, Polyanna,” Diane said. “I’m almost done.”

  Ricki glared at her and Diane just laughed. “The Glare” usually worked with me, but it was powerless with Diane. Ricki thought her older sister was pretty much a dirtbag and Diane thought her younger sister was wound too tight. I did not look forward to having them together in the close confines of the basement.

  Diane finished her cigarette and crushed it out on the steps.

  Ricki blanched.

  Paul grinned.

  I led Ricki away into the rec room which looked something like a barracks with all the stuff piled around in there—canned and dried food, jugs of water, boxes of clothes, flashlights, candles, batteries, etc. etc. etc. Ricki being Ricki had apparently been in the process of making one of her detailed lists of provisions. Paul had been handling the security and rationing.

  “Where in the hell did you find her?” Ricki asked me.

  “She was walking up the street. I picked her up.”

  “She was just out walking?” Ricki rolled her eyes. “How typical. Well, I guess we’re stuck with her.”

  “Well, she is your sister.”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  Diane sat on the couch with her arm around Paul while he detailed how we were going to survive the zombie menace. I stood there, having one of those moments of unreality. You wake up in the morning and everything is fine and within a matter of hours you and yours are hiding out in the basement like some 1950’s nuclear family fearing the atomic menace of the Communists. And, dear God, if that’s all we had to worry about. It was not only unreal it was insane. I had to take a moment and breathe in and out to calm myself. I had to fight the nasty urge to start laughing uncontrollably and have a nervous breakdown.

  It was unbelievable.

  But that was the reality of our situation.

  The world, our world, had shifted on its axis and we were stuck with it, for better or worse.

  DOMESTICS

  “You want some more SpaghettiO’s, Pauly?”

  “No, I’m good, Aunt Diane. I’m stuffed.”

  Diane turned from the hot plate. “Ricki? Steve?”

  We both grunted that we were fine. Funny, as I wired the air conditioner earlier that morning I had been thinking it was a nice summer day, a great day to grill a couple sirloins out in the backyard. I had it all envisioned in my mind. The steaks sizzling over a bed of hot charcoal, the cold Budweiser in my hand. Maybe a game of Jarts with Paul after supper, then a good, mindless action movie before bed. A typically suburban sort of day. Instead I was eating SpaghettiO’s in the basement rec room on paper plates and living out some outtake from a George Romero movie. Just goes to show how much your day can change from the time you get up to the time you go to bed.

  “You should get the kind with the little wieners in it,” Diane was saying, her discourse on the joys of SpaghettiO’s going on for nearly twenty minutes by that point. “You know they’re my favorite.”

  “I know,” Ricki said.

  “My favorite, too,” Paul said.

  “Since when?” Ricki wanted to know.

  He just shrugged. Diane sat next to him and put her arm around him, pulling him close. He wasn’t minding that at all. He was falling completely under her spell and Ricki was feeling threatened as she always did by Diane’s presence. We were about to witness an escalation of hostilities and I knew it. I could already feel a tension headache knocking on the back of my skull.

  “I like ‘em best,” Diane continued on. “The kind with the little wieners, I mean.”

  “They’re great,” Paul chimed in.

  I wanted to slap him. I really did. Don’t get me wrong: I never hit him. I didn’t believe in that sort of thing. But the more he clung to Diane’s side the more pissy Ricki was going to get. Ricki doted on him the way mothers always dote on their sons, particularly when they only have one. And when Paul started siding with Diane, that was an insult to Ricki. It was all childish as hell and I knew it, but sometimes the relationships between sisters can be very complex (and dangerous).

  “Yes.” Ricki maintained her composure, though she was tensing and I could see it. “I guess the last time I went grocery shopping I wasn’t using my head.”

  Diane shrugged. “We all make mistakes.”

  Ricki chewed her lip. “Yes, don’t we? I guess I should have foreseen a future when we were all trapped in the basement because of walking dead people and my sister would demand a pasta product with little wieners in it.”

  Diane giggled, elbowing Paul who giggled, too. “You’re mom’s getting sarcastic with me,” she said.

  Ricki gave her a forced grin. “What gives you that idea?”

  “Chill it, Ricki. I was just saying I like SpaghettiO’s with the little wieners in it best. That’s all.”

  “Yes, Diane. We got that part. I know you like the kind with the little wieners in it best. You’ve told us about fifteen times now. We get it. I get it. Enough okay?”

  “Oooo, Ricki’s getting miffed. Look out,” Diane said.

  “Just shut up, okay?”

  Diane rolled her eyes. “Your mom’s been like this ever since she was a kid, Pauly. See, gramma always paid more attention to me and it drove your mom nuts so she overcompensated by getting straight A’s and being Little Miss Goody Two-Shoes. I never really cared about all the attention because I was always, like, so what? But your mom craved it.”

  “That’ll do, Diane,” Ricki said, starting to boil.

  “Don’t wig out, Ricki. I mean, damn. Don’t be so touchy.”

  “I am not touchy!”

  Diane laughed. “It’s okay, baby sister. You have a fragile ego. It’s not uncommon in younger siblings. That’s why you can’t handle criticism or people poking fun at you.”

  See, this is what I was worried about. Those two always got under each other’s skin. Perfectly innocent conversations about SpaghettiO’s with little wieners escalated into ugly cage matches at the drop of a hat. And it didn’t have to be canned pasta products. It could be the color of the sky or the mole on Diane’s ankle or the tires on my truck. And you never knew when it would start. Blood was always in the offing with those two and sometimes I got very exhausted just trying to steer conversations in lighter directions.

  “Why don’t you just be quiet?” Ricki said hoping to have the last word. “I’m sick to death of listening to you.”

  No dice. Diane laughed again. She looked over at her sister, wrinkled up her face, made her fingers into cat’s claws and said, “MEEEEEOOOWWW! Somebody want to get my sister a saucer of mil
k?”

  “THAT’S ENOUGH!” Ricki cried out, on her feet. “I HAD TO PUT UP WITH YOUR SHIT GROWING UP BUT I SURE AS HELL WILL NOT IN MY OWN HOUSE!”

  “Whoa,” Diane said. “Talking about somebody needing a little wiener. Steve, see what you can do about that.”

  “That’ll do,” Ricki said, trying desperately to control her temper and barely succeeding.

  “It’s cool, Polyanna. Lighten up, man. Everybody needs a little wiener now and then.”

  Ricki walked away into the back bedroom. It was the smart thing to do. The adult thing. Diane did not know when to shut her mouth and every time we had her over, which was seldom, it turned out like this. It was tough being diplomatic with the both of them sometimes. Believe me, I very often wanted to grab both of them by the scruffs of their necks and crack their heads together. You’re sisters! Act like it! But that wouldn’t do. I had to take the long view on this. True, Diane did not know when to shut her mouth. She often said things that were silly, stupid, or hurtful. But I don’t think she meant to be hurtful. It was just her way. She thought everything was a joke. She took nothing seriously. Ricki, on the other hand, took everything seriously. What was needed was a little diplomacy. A little give and take: Diane had to think before she opened her mouth and Ricki had to thicken her skin a bit.

  But, then again, the politics of sibling rivalry were very complicated.

  I went into the bedroom and Ricki smiled thinly at me.

  “I guess I lost it,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “She drives me crazy.”

  “I know. Just don’t let her push your buttons.”

  Ricki nodded. “I try…but she knows exactly what buttons to push.”

  I told her I understood completely because I did. “Let’s just be easy right now. I’m just worried about Paul. He doesn’t need to see any of that. He’s taking all this pretty well, but he needs to see a unified front.”

  “She takes control of him so easily.”

  “He’s just a normal male,” I told her.

  “I suppose. But it irks me to see my son smitten with the Crab Queen of Greater Yonkers.”

  We had a good laugh over that.

  I left Ricki sorting through blankets and sleeping bags and went out into the rec room. Diane, true to form, was telling Paul about her ex-boyfriend who only had one ball. He’d gotten the other caught in a chain link fence when he was eluding the police and it had to be surgically removed. “After that,” Diane said, “we called him Sterile Daryl.” Good old Diane. I think that was yet another reason why Paul loved his aunt: she did not talk down to him. She treated him like an equal and did not insulate him like Ricki and I did (or any adult for that matter). There was something very refreshing about that and, at the same time, very disturbing from a parental point of view.

  “I’m going upstairs for a minute,” I told them. “I want to get the rest of my shotgun shells and take one last look and make sure everything’s locked down before dark.”

  “I’ll join you,” Diane said.

  “Me, too,” Paul piped up.

  “You’re staying,” I told him.

  “Oh, Dad.”

  “Stay. Man the door, mister.”

  “Aye, aye.”

  I went upstairs and Diane followed me, lighting a cigarette. I checked all the doors and windows. Across the street, Jimmy LaRue was still posted at the window with his rifle. I saw nothing out there moving, either of the living or dead variety. But what worried me was that mob of zombies up in Dunwoodie. They were moving south which meant they’d be cutting right through Lincoln Park and possibly our neighborhood. That scared me. I didn’t know where they had all come from but in my mind I saw them crawling out of graves and leaving morgues and walking out of mortuaries, gathering into a funeral procession of the living dead, a voracious eating machine that would take down anything in its path.

  That scared me.

  I stared out the window and Diane came right up behind me. I could feel her breath on the back of my neck and her breasts pushing into my shoulders.

  “Anything out there?” she said.

  “Nothing.” I cocked an ear towards the window. “You hear that? Still a lot of shooting.”

  “Yeah.” She pressed her breasts harder against my back. “I smell something burning, too. Like campfires. Must be houses burning out there. A lot of them by the smell.”

  I kept looking and I saw somebody come walking up the sidewalk in the distance making for Orient Street. It was Rommy Jacob. I had no doubt of it. He had reanimated and was out on the prowl, stumbling along mindlessly looking for something (or someone) to bite.

  I extricated myself from Diane and she followed me around, smoking her cigarette. I don’t know what she was doing with the ashes and I really didn’t want to know.

  “We better get back downstairs,” I said.

  She extinguished her cigarette butt under the faucet. “Okay. I like do to what I’m told. I’m easy.”

  Good old Diane.

  THE AWAKENING

  Moments, it seemed, after sundown Jimmy LaRue called on his cellphone. “You people locked down good over there?”

  “Sure, Jimmy. Got room if you want to join us.”

  “No, shit, I’m fine. Just called to warn you.”

  I tensed. “About what?”

  “The dead ones,” he said. “I got a call from my sister up on Crotty. She says there’s hundreds of ‘em moving down Belmont Ave. They’re coming this way.”

  “Okay, we’re ready.”

  “Keep your head down, Steve. She’s says they’re tearing apart everything in their path.”

  “Will do.”

  That’s when the waiting started. I had been hoping for a quiet night. I thought it might let everyone breathe a little easier and wind down. But it wasn’t going to be like that. I explained the situation to everyone. I had no idea what we might expect. I had seventeen rounds for the Browning Hi-Power and fifteen shells for the Remington. It wasn’t a lot but I hoped it would be enough if it came down to it. Even if the dead broke through the doors upstairs I couldn’t imagine them breaching the basement door. It would have taken a truck to break through it…but, then again, I remember what I had seen up in Dunwoodie. The sheer numbers.

  We settled in because it was all we could do.

  The city was still functioning as such because we had power and water. I was grateful for that. We watched TV and it was nothing but despair, doom and gloom. It was disturbing to watch the national news and hear them talking about the dead rising. It was happening everywhere, all over the country, and we saw scenes from Denver, Chicago, Atlanta, and Houston—throngs of the living dead in the streets. The National Guard and Army were out in strength putting the dead back in their graves and running major decontamination operations but they were seriously outnumbered. According to what was being said, it wasn’t just the dead they had to contend with but looters and rioting and open insurrection in the streets. It was absolute chaos and it was getting worse by the hour. There were so many subversive groups out there that had just been waiting for a collapse of social order to start kicking up their heels and they wasted no time in making a nuisance of themselves.

  We saw a few scenes from Manhattan that showed the Theater District and Times Square completely empty of people. Oh, the neon was still going but there was no one there to enjoy it. The financial district was overrun with zombies. There were unconfirmed reports that the Air National Guard had hit certain sections of Brooklyn with cluster bombs. Rumor had it that Bed-Sty was burning and Flatbush was nearly entirely zombified (to borrow Paul’s word). Supposedly, Los Angeles had been so besieged by the dead that there had been napalm strikes in the San Fernando Valley and the resultant firestorms were sweeping neighborhood to neighborhood. It hadn’t rained in southern California in over a month and things were tinder dry. The hot Santa Ana winds were pushing the fires into Beverly Hills and West Hollywood. The freeways were
jammed bumper-to-bumper with the resultant exodus. It was a real mess. CNN claimed that the napalm strikes were ordered by an Air Force officer who had no authority to do so.

  It was a fucking mess.

  The President would address the nation in the morning.

  Martial Law had already been declared nationwide and the police and Guard were putting down riots in Southside Chicago with extreme force, opening up on looting mobs with machine guns. Another unconfirmed report said that the President had ordered a full withdrawal of American forces from overseas stations and theaters. The CDC was flashing 1-800 numbers on just about every station concerning an outbreak of infectious disease being spread by the walking dead. Nobody was saying it yet, but I knew pretty much what was happening: anybody bitten by the zombies was dying and returning as a zombie.

  It was all being collectively known as The Awakening.

  It was bad in the US, but absolute hell in other places. In the Middle East, governments already weakened by mass uprisings of the civilian population were teetering as the dead swarmed the streets. Rumor had it that Iran was using chemical weapons against its own people. Tensions had risen to new levels between Pakistan and India. The North Koreans were blaming the United States for it all and promising “retribution of an unprecedented scale”. For once, they were being taken seriously and the Navy had positioned guided missile cruisers in the Yellow Sea which were armed with nuclear warheads.

  At first, Paul had been real excited about the images of zombies in the streets. One of his comic books had finally come to life. But it wasn’t long before he grew quiet, clinging to Diane. I held hands with Ricki. I never thought I’d live to see the end of the world but it seemed to be happening. We were on the verge of international social collapse and ensuing chaos. Everything man had built up in the past 5,000 years of civilization was starting to unravel.

  After awhile, I turned the channel to Nickelodeon.

  We watched Spongebob and even managed to laugh a little bit.

  I wondered if we would have anything to laugh about a week from then.