“Outta the way, son!”
Buddy exploded through the doorway with an AR-15 Assault Rifle in his hands, the one he kept tucked under the bench seat.
“NO!” Lonnie reached out for the barrel of the rifle as he was shoved aside, but it was too late.
The blast to Amy’s stomach knocked her off her feet. For a calming moment she lie still on the plush carpet. Then her eyes widened as she growled and used her hands to push herself up again.
“What the Sam hell kinda shit is this?” Buddy whispered to himself.
Amy opened her mouth and let out a hissing shriek that made the hair on Lonnie’s arms stand on end. He stared at what should have been a fatal shot to her abdomen as it leaked out a slow stream of thick black ooze and bile. There was no way what he saw was possible, no way she could have lived through that.
Hope fluttered in the depths of his nauseated stomach. It was a second chance. He could still fix whatever happened to her to make her do something so vile. She could still come back and then they could fix whatever was broken between them too.
A slew of gunshots burst out from the rifle and Buddy jarred back from the kick. Glass shattered in the windows and drywall shot out like shrapnel. Amy’s body danced around like a broken puppet until one of the bullets caught her right between the eyes.
The rest happened in slow motion. Lonnie’s eyes locked onto hers. He could have sworn her beautiful, brown, completely human eyes met his with tears in them before she fell to the ground and lay closed forever. He heaved great breaths that rattled his cheeks. He could barely see through the river of tears that poured from his eyes.
“Got her! I got the devil-bitch!” Buddy exclaimed with the rifle rested in both his hands. “Goddammit, son, you just can’t keep a woman alive, can you?” He laughed and shifted the gun so it rested against his shoulder like toy soldier.
Lonnie’s brain didn’t register a single word his father said. His hearing was dulled by the rage that built up inside him. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from Amy’s bloodied, bullet-ridden body. All hope was gone. There was no piecing back together what they once had. Amy was dead and Buddy had killed her.
Buddy.
His own father.
He slowly tore his eyes away from the still body on the floor to look at the man responsible. Fire burned behind his cool, blue eyes.
“First your mother, now this poor girl? What is it with you? You got a lady curse on you or something, boy?”
“I didn’t kill mom! You did!” Lonnie snapped as his muscles shook with rage. “You’re the reason she’s dead!”
“What the hell did you say to me, boy?” Buddy turned on Lonnie and took a few sauntering steps toward him. “Your mother, God rest her soul, did what she did because she couldn’t handle you anymore. With all the trouble you went and got yourself into she thought she was some terrible mother, the poor woman, and she could deal with it.”
“That’s a fucking lie and you know it,” Lonnie growled as his vision shook. His face deepened to a terrifying shade of crimson. “Both their lives are on you! My mother couldn’t take being married to a selfish, abusive prick and saw no way out but to do what she did!” His surroundings started to vibrate with anger. “You killed mom and now you’ve killed Amy! The only woman I’ve
ever
loved! We were going to get married, start a family together, and you fucking killed that!”
“I think little Miss already decided you were too big of a pussy to be the father of her little rugrats. Looks like she was trying to make babies with that fella over there before, y’know, she ate his dick, so to say,” Buddy sneered and chuckled as he shifted the rifle to his other shoulder.
Lonnie took a deep breath as he glared, his expansive chest rising and falling slowly. His teeth clenched together until his jaw hurt. His breathing started to quicken without his control. There was a disturbing grinding noise coming from the inside of his mouth.
Buddy didn’t seem to notice the edge Lonnie teetered on. With one last detrimental statement, he gave his son a nice, big shove into the black void he’d been trying so desperately to avoid. “You were a shit son and you would have been a shit father too, so consider what I just did a favor.”
The weather-beaten man’s gruff voice resonated in his head like a distant echo as Lonnie faded away again, down into the recesses of his mind.
He had to hold on.
He couldn’t lose control again.
But before he could grasp the last bit of his consciousness, it slipped away from him and everything went black.
VI.
When Lonnie came to, he was lying on his back on the floor. He opened his eyes slowly and then squeezed them shut again when an unbearable pain streaked across his forehead. What the hell happened? He forced them open and craned his neck as he sat up to look around the room, the stabbing in his head the last thing on his mind as the events started to piece themselves back together.
The last thing he remembered was Amy gunned down by his no-good, son of a bitch father. He remembered her face as she fell to the ground. It had been contorted with wild and ravenous hunger, but the eyes had still been hers.
The woman he loved had still been in there when Buddy Lands mercilessly pulled the trigger and ended her life. She was gone forever. Lonnie wiped his face with the back of his hand at the tears on his cheeks. Blood replaced the clear wetness and streaked across his skin, but he didn’t notice. He looked over at Amy’s motionless, ravaged body.
Her skin was sickly pale with a greenish-gray tinge. Her chest, shoulders, and head were riddled with bullet holes, coated over with a tar-like ooze that seeped out slowly. Her red stained mouth hung open. Empty, glazed over eyes stared up at the ceiling. They were the eyes of a creature with no feelings, no thoughts, and no desires other than to rip apart flesh and eat it.
But that couldn’t be right. Lonnie swore he’d seen her eyes as he’d always seen them—big, bright, and beautiful, full of love and life. The ones he glared into now were old and decrepit, as if cataracts had taken over and snuffed out the shimmer he once loved to get lost in.
It was all too much to bear. His chest tightened and threatened to cut him off from oxygen completely. As he gasped like a fish out of water, each intake of air wheezing in his lungs, he turned away from Amy, unable to look at her any longer.
Whatever lie on the floor next to him, with its legs and arms flailed awkwardly, was not the Amy he knew. It was a monster. It wasn’t meant to live. It was a good thing Buddy had done what he did.
He turned and noticed a second body sprawled out on the floor by the door. The face was unrecognizable, smashed in to oblivion and drenched in blood. The only way Lonnie knew it was Buddy Lands was from the Alabama t-shirt he wore. They’d gone to that concert together six months after the death of his mother. It was the first time he saw his father smile after she committed suicide.
“Buddy?” Lonnie said as he scooted over to the man’s side and knelt over him. “Fuck. What’d I do?” Tears mixed with the blood smeared across his face and ran down his neck, staining the neckline of his white tank top. “What did I do?” He closed his eyes and turned his face up to the ceiling. He took a deep breath and counted to ten, even though he knew it wouldn’t do him any good. It was too late.
The sound of something dragging along the carpet filled the room, but Lonnie was too distressed to turn and look. The body of the man Amy had fed on dragged its wrecked lower half as it made its way slowly to where Lonnie sat. Its jaws opened and closed silently in anticipation of its first feeding. The closer it got, the more excited it became. Small gurgles and groans escaped its cracked white lips.
Lonnie’s head snapped up to stare the undead thing in the face just as its hands closed around his ankle. He tried to scramble away, kicking his leg out to shake it loose, but the grip was too strong. Its teeth chomped the air as it pulled him closer. Lonnie thrust his free boot-clad foot into the thing’s jaw, wrenching it sideways, loose and unhinged, but its fingers remained grasped firmly on his wide ankle. He kicked again and again, not letting up until its head was caved in and his leg was finally free from the unrelenting grasp.
Propped up on his elbows, Lonnie tried to catch his breath as he stared at the dead man at his feet. What was going on? What kind of illness was this? Questions flooded his head, but no answers followed. He was jerked from his thoughts when another hand grabbed his upper arm.
Buddy was writhing on the ground, his hand grasping for his son desperately. The only noise he could make with his smashed in mouth and nose was a bloodied gargle. There were no cheek bones left, no mouth or nose or eyes to distinguish. The only thing still intact was his cranium. How was it even possible that he was still alive? It defied all logic.
The gargles became more urgent as Buddy yanked on Lonnie’s arm again. The young man was pulled to the ground by the forceful grip his father had on him. He’d been on the receiving end of Buddy’s hand before, but it’d never felt so strong. What he felt in that moment was inhuman.
“Fuck, no!” Lonnie yelled as he tried to pull Buddy’s cold, hard fingers from him. The bones creaked as each one was pried from his warm flesh.
Once he was free, Lonnie snatched up the rifle. He used the butt to bash in his monstrous father’s skull until it was a pile of red mush and broken bones. Each time the gun came down, Lonnie let out a sound he never wanted to hear again. It was a mixture of a pathetic whimper and a disheartening cry. It was pathetic.
When the body stopped gyrating in feeble attempts to seize the only living thing left in the room, Lonnie threw the gun aside. He sat on his knees and looked at the mess that was once his father, the man who gave him life and helped bring him into the world.
He tried to work up the same flow of tears he’d shed for Amy, tried to muster up the overwhelming feelings of loss and regret again, but he couldn’t.
He stood and wiped the fluids from his nose and mouth, not realizing he was only wiping more of his father’s blood across his face with his stained knuckles. Unlike before when he was a sad, lost, heart-broken mess over losing the love of his life, his chest now rose slowly and deeply. He glared down at Buddy Lands and spat on the beaten, disfigured face.
“Rot in hell, you stupid, no good, son of a bitch.”
VII.
The rusted out blue Ford roared down highway twelve. The tires hummed and the body clanked as it sped as far away from the trailer park as it could get. Buddy’s loaded AR-15 sat on the passenger side of the bench seat, Lonnie on the other with both hands clenched around the wheel.
His emotions were a jumbled mess. He wanted to cry, laugh, scream, cheer all at the same time. Amy was gone. The horror of her death would plague him forever and somewhere deep down would always be the urge to weep for that loss. Buddy, on the other hand, no matter how brutal his death came, was a burden lifted from Lonnie’s shoulders. He’d always said when his father died it would be a relief for him. No one ever believed it would be true, but it was. He felt free for the first time in his life, and that was both uplifting and sad.
From the tree lines on either side of the road dozens of ravaged people shambled aimlessly around, their mouths red with blood, their clothes stained and torn, and their arms reaching for any living thing stupid enough to get close to them.
One of the females reached out for a living, breathing, teenage girl in red track pants and a Chesterton Indian’s t-shirt who ran by at full speed, just inches from the strong, dead hands. Its fingers grazed the tips of her long brown hair as she disappeared into the woods, leaving the undead woman to snap her ragged jaws at the hot air, lost over where her meal had run off to.
For a split second, the straight sheet of chestnut hair flowing behind the petite figure made Lonnie’s heart ache. She looked just like Amy from the back. She always was a good runner, but mostly from the cops.
What happened to the world overnight? How could things have changed so quickly? When Lonnie went to bed everything had been normal—a drunken normal, but still relatively normal. People weren’t trying to eat each other or tear each other apart with their bare hands. Was the disease, or whatever it was, airborne? If so, then it was too late for him. He was already a dead man. But if it was a blood disease or a virus spread by fluids, then there was still a chance for him. The question was did he want it? Did he want to live? Did the gut-wrenching sadness over Amy surpass the joyous freedom in losing Buddy?
A line of cars were stopped several feet in front as he tried to turn off Dune’s highway twelve and onto IN-49. He hadn’t been thinking about where he was going as he drove, but he realized, as he hit the breaks, that he’d been heading the same way they used to drive to the Michigan cabin.