Gary had a three-foot lead on the closest zombie. BT got into the next house or I would have to go back and tell my father I had lost his son. “God, I could use a little help right now.”
The security screen of the house I had just tried swung open.” Get your ass in here!” A woman screamed at me.
BT was heading to the fifth house when he heard the woman. Gary was running towards me. I swung my head back and forth. Gary might just make it, but no way BT could get back though.
BT saw my dilemma. “Get your ass in there, Talbot! I’ll figure something out!” he shouted, still running.
“Listen!” the woman shouted at me. “I didn’t make it this long to die with my front door open. Either get your ass in here or get eaten on someone else’s lawn!”
I spared one more look at BT, who was on to the next house. “Godspeed, BT,” I said softly before running back up the stairs and inside. The woman didn’t spare me a second glance as she waited for Gary to get there. “He’s not going to make it,” she said, more to herself than to me. “Your friend is not going to make it,” she said, getting ready to pull the door shut.
“He’s my brother,” I told her, placing my rifle against the doorjamb to hold the rifle steady, and more importantly, to keep her from shutting the door too early. I had a shot, but it was a shitty one. There was about a three-inch window between Gary’s head and the closest zombie’s head. As long as Gary didn’t do any bobbing and weaving, I should be fine. At least, that’s what I kept telling myself as I applied slow, steady, even pressure to the trigger. The rifle went off before I was ready. I watched in alarm as a tuft of Gary’s hair blew back from the force of the bullet. His trailing zombie fell, taking with it some of the closer ones in pursuit.
Gary’s hands were still pumping as he fought for more speed. I saw the glistening of red welling up from the side of his head as he hit the bottom step. He jumped, launching past me and the stunned woman, collapsing on her living room floor. Blood pumped from the wound on his head. “I’ve been shot,” he said right before passing out.
The woman slammed the door shut, or at least, tried to as my rifle was still in the way. “How the hell have you made it this long?” she asked as she pulled my barrel in, quickly slamming the door and reengaging the lock.
“I get that a lot,” I told her as she moved me inside so she could shut the heavy steel front door. I admired her security. If I had half this set-up, I would still be in Colorado, riding the apocalypse out in relative style. That was a pipe dream, but a dream nonetheless.
“Josh! Get the first aid kit!” the lady yelled up the stairs.
A kid of about twelve or thirteen came running down, carrying an oversized white case with a large red cross on it.
I expected at any moment for her husband to come down the stairs also. When that didn’t happen immediately, I began to wonder if this lady and her son had opened up their door to strangers. I would remember to ask her later, after she finished making my brother stop bleeding on her carpet.
“There’s a lot of blood, Mom,” Josh told her. “He didn’t get bit, did he?” the boy asked in alarm.
“No, the one over there shot him,” the lady said as she cleaned the wound.
“Why mister? Why did you shoot him?” Josh asked me.
“He’s my brother,” I tried to say in explanation.
“If I had a brother, I wouldn’t shoot him,” Josh told me.
“Wait, no. I didn’t shoot him because he’s my brother. I was trying to save him.”
“By shooting him? Mom, didn’t Uncle Dave tell you not to open the door for the crazy people?” Josh admonished his mother.
The woman looked up at me. “Are you crazy?” she asked, still wiping blood and placing gauze in the wound to staunch the blood.
How did I answer that? More than a fair amount of people, especially recently, had called me crazy. I did the prudent thing, I stayed silent.
“Wonderful,” the woman said sarcastically, wrapping tape around Gary’s head. “Your brother will be fine unless of course you’re not quite through with him yet.”
“Why do I keep running across comedians?” I asked her.
“Come on, put your rifle down and help me get him onto the couch,” she told me.
“What about the zombies?” I asked her, not yet quite willing to yield my only means of defense.
“They can’t get in,” Josh told me. “The only way things can get in here is if we let them in,” he said pointedly looking straight at his mother.
“They needed help,” she told him quickly.
By the time we settled Gary down into the couch, he looked to be more comfortably asleep than anything else.
“He’ll be fine,” she said, sticking out her still bloody appendage. “My name is Mary, Mary Hilop.”
I looked in horror at the proffered hand. “Um, your hand is soaking with blood.”
She pulled it back slightly to look. “There’s like three dots and it’s your brother’s blood anyway.”
“I don’t know where he’s been,” I told her.
“Oh, for Christ’s sakes,” she said, heading into the kitchen and turning on the faucet.
“You’re not worried about contaminated water?” I asked her in all seriousness.
“It’s well water and are you going to make me regret my decision to let you in?”
“My name is Mike Talbot and that’s my brother, Gary,” I told her. “And why did you let us in? You don’t know what kind of people we are.”
She stood for a long time with her hands under the water. (And, I’ll happily admit, she was using liberal amounts of dish soap.) I think she was deciding what she did or did not want to tell me. She finally turned the faucet off and turned to face me. “This morning I was saying my prayers, like I do every day. You know knees on the bedroom floor, hands on top of the bed, and I was just getting up when I heard an answer back.” She looked me straight in the eye, wondering if I was going to think she was nuts.
I didn’t so much as flinch. That was far from the craziest thing that had happened to me, and I’m just talking about today.
When she realized I wasn’t going to try and have her committed, she continued. “The voice said I should help those as I would want them to help me. And when I saw you and the other two running from the zombies out there, I put Josh and myself in your places and thought what would I want someone to do, so I opened the door.”
“That was very brave of you,” I told her, meaning it.
“Did I do the right thing?” she asked me.
“Well, I think so. You saved my brother and my lives.”
“But were you worthy to be saved?” came her next question.
“My brother is,” I told her flatly. She left it at that, and I silently thanked her.
“What of the other man?” she asked.
“BT, his name is BT and he’s quite possibly the best friend I have ever had. We’ve traded saving each other’s lives so many times, I’m not even one hundred percent sure who is in the lead, although I suspect it is me. I have got to go and try and find him.”
“Not for a few days,” Mary said, turning back to the kitchen window. She stood on her tiptoes and pulled the shade to the side. “The zees will stay out here for a few days before they go to wherever they go or some other hapless idiot starts running down the street and then it starts all over again.”
I’m pretty sure she just called me a “hapless idiot.” I’ve been called worse, but it still stung.
“When they first came, they were out there for a couple of months.”
“You never had a breach?”
She turned back to me. “No my ex-husband ended up being a paranoid delusional. He spent more on the security of this house than the actual worth of this place.”