Rotten (32 page)

We all nodded in agreement that we had seen whatever it was flip over.

“It went flippy do,” Sarah added.

“Maybe we just couldn’t comprehend what we were seeing so our brain translated it for us with images we could understand.  And it seems what we were shown was something huge and frightening, witch’s towers, the Borg, the death star, a haunted hotel, the twin towers, etcetera,” Sully said.   

“It doesn’t really matter what it looked like, as far as I am concerned, the thing hatched out of the ground like it had been planted there, and I’m not believing some real world corporation built that thing in a couple years, I watched the construction, I saw what they did and they didn’t build that,” Beth said.

“The thing didn’t shoot off into space, either,” Will said.  “It just disappeared.”

“So was it even a spaceship,” Moonshine asked and looked at us.

“Dimensional,” Rotten said.  “Some people believe that the aliens aren’t from space, but other dimensions, and that they aren’t even aliens, but demons or fallen angels or just some multi-dimensional creature, which would explain why none of us could understand what we were seeing.  It’d be totally foreign to us.  All I know is that they are a lot more advanced than we are, but they are not gods and they are not all knowing.  But truth be told we don’t know if they left because we hurt them or if they left because they were done with their experiment.  We assume we hurt them and the timing was right, but we don’t know for sure.” 

“But still the question is why zombies?”  Princess said.  “They can make robots, Binks sure looked and acted human.”

“But even Binks wasn’t controllable, he helped us, he turned their weapon against them, and he didn’t like what they were doing,” Sully pointed out.  “They made Binks to be as realistic as possible, so much so that he had memories of college, but he sill wasn’t human, the zombies are human and that seems important to them.  So as a working hypothesis we will consider that even as advanced as they are they can’t create human beings and we can also assume that they want to.” 

“And why didn’t they know what Binks was doing when he was turning their machines against them?  If this was a movie, Binks would be an acronym and stand for something like Biological Individual blah, blah, blah and he’d be like Data from
Star Trek
and there would be one stationed on every mother ship.  He said his last name was Brinkley, so why wouldn’t his nickname be Brinks?”  Moonshine said.

Highland laughed.  “I thought of that too, dude.  Unfortunately his computers went dead after the ship took off, or I would’ve tried to get in touch with him or his dog.”

“So the bad feeling Sarah was having today really was caused by zombies who haven’t turned yet?” Princess said.  “Zombies behind glass who haven’t been released?”

“I can’t think of what else it could be and I know well enough to trust Sarah’s feelings, she’s not been wrong.  I believe they are just waiting for the trigger and this area will be overrun with deadheads just like Blacksport, Freemont, and Arlington.”  Sully screwed the top onto the whiskey he’d been drinking since the morning and carried it into the kitchen.

“Well, how do we stop that?” Mrs. Williams poured a cup of coffee and handed it to him. 

“Is that our plan, to stop it?  Are we going to be zombie, alien, and multi-dimensional creature hunters the rest of our lives?”  Sully sipped the black coffee.

“As much as I hate to say it, I don’t think we have a choice,” Princess said. 

“She’s right, do you know how paranoid we’d end up, hell, just plain crazy trying to live in the world now that we know the truth.”  Moonshine slid his foot into a stiff leather boot.

“So what’s the truth?”  I said.

“That everything we believed we knew and the things the world says are true is a lie, and the things that we thought were impossible or just plain fairy tales are indeed reality.  I can say that when the month began and I was planning my Christmas vacation I knew, without any doubt, that zombies and aliens and elite mysterious men in black did not exist.  Now I know they do and that is the truth.”  Sully set the cup on the counter, took off his coat, and slid his arms into the professor’s sweater. 

“I suppose there is a war and I will consider that we won the first battle, but there are at least two more compounds in the US that we know of, are we seriously thinking of taking them on?” Rotten looked around at us like we were crazy.

“I think we have to.  You said it yourself about how odd it was that we all ended up together and that we were some kind of nerdy hipster dufus super heroes,” I said.

“I’m pretty sure I didn’t say nerdy, hipster, or dufus,” he laughed.  “But yeah, I don’t believe in coincidences anymore, and we just happened to find the right person with the perfect skill set for what we needed through all of this and it’s like something has been guiding us.  What scares me the most is that this is not a new war, this war has gone on for all of written history and before it and it seems impossible that we could win or survive or make any kind of difference.  No one has ever won.”

“Well, that’s a depressing thought,” I said.

“So we’re going to Texas?” Will said.

We looked around at each other, not one of us wanting to make the final decision.  Truth was we were scared, more than scared, terrified.  Talk about being between a rock and hard place.  The zombie apocalypse is a horrible thing, it’s brutal, it’s messy, it’s exhausting and it is totally terrifying, but now that we had seen it and experienced it, the pre-zombie world was dull, dead, and just as frightening, although a lot neater. 

In Grady’s cabin we didn’t have a lot choices, the rules were simple and clear cut, and staying alive was the only truth.  In the pre-zombie world it was the same, except we had the illusion of choice, millions of choices, but none of them as important as (or as forgettable as) clinging to that individual spark of life. 

“I think we have to.”  Rotten sighed.

“Maybe it’s not so much about saving the world and we all know I’m not a fan of the world, maybe it’s about saving ourselves.  Maybe there have always been zombies out there, but they were just behind glass, you could feel them, sometimes you would see them like we did at the grocery store today, and sometimes they would hurt you, but because it’s the world you pretend it’s not true or it didn’t happen. The apocalypse is a hell of a lot more honest than the world we used to know and as scary as it is, it’s easier to see who to trust and who not to.  We have to go, at least I do,” Princess said.

“I want to go,” Rebekah said.

“We’re going with Princess,” Sarah said.

Highland looked around at us and smiled.  “I thought that’s what we’d decide.  Beth, give Princess what we found for her today.”

Beth picked up a bag from beside the door and handed it over.  Princess looked inside, laughed, and spilled rolls and rolls of duct tape, in every color and design, onto the couch.  “These super hero costumes are going to be so much better than the last ones.” 

“I was thinking we should get an RV, a really big one, like the buses rock stars use, but I’ve never driven one so I’m not sure if we want to waste the time for the learning curve.”  Highland sat down at the counter ready to hash out the details.

“Um,” Connie said, “I retired from Greyhound.  I spent twenty-five years driving a bus before I opened the dress shop.” 

Rotten looked at me and I knew what he was thinking.  It was happening again, and we were being guided by something bigger than us, bigger even than the evil alien undead multi-dimensional zombie gods.  So we sat around and made plans for the apocalypse, as we had been doing since we were children, with both seriousness and laughter.