reminisance

found this while fiddling around the computer and thought it would be nice for everyone to remember it: was Matt doing our shadow chasers in story-mode.

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We were well into our ritual squatting. Each weekend we claimed the Beckers’ basement for our own. For few hours it was our headquarters, workshop, and playground. It was unfinished save a door and two windows, one of which was almost always blocked by the camper the Becker’s owned. One corner was riddled with tools and other implements of creation. That same side of the room held a junk corner and sanded, unfinished stairs separating the two corners. A table, which was a pool table with the surface of ping-pong table with one-inch by one-inch squares on top, took up the largest area of the other half. The six of us had a few old chairs and a couple of mostly broken, but still usable barstools along with an assortment of dice, figurines and books. The walls were cinder blocks except for around the door and windows. A single incandescent bulb was fixed over the table.

Louis was doing his official dance of the evening in celebration of his dice roll.

“I think that means critical,” said Louis, in a voice which got higher with each word spoken.

“NOYCE!” said Jacob in the way that only he can, which is with an accent somewhere between British and Australian and with the mouth cocked slightly to the side.

Two dice hit the table: one five, one six. The dice stared at the ceiling while Louis was doing the math. “Twenty damage to that motha,” stated Louis gleefully.

The stairs that led to the living room were pretty loud and Mr. and Mrs. Becker were light sleepers to say the least. For this reason, we usually just went out the basement door a good twenty-five feet when we needed to pee.

“I’ll be back in a second. There’s my character if I get attacked,” I said as I moved towards the basement door. “I go pee pee.”

There wasn’t a light on this side of the house. Just the light that spilled out of the basement windows, and, so unless there was a full moon, it was pretty dark. Tonight held around a three-quarters moon and so there was a faint light, but not enough to see me from the road. That was all I cared about.

We usually didn’t hear any animals in the woods for whatever reason and, if we did, they were usually squirrels which made only light sounds of a few leaves. Tonight however, there was something pretty large moving through the sparse trees. It didn’t have the grace to be a deer, unless it was wounded. It sounded like it was dragging something. I cut it short and tried to make out what it was. It looked like a human, so I ran inside.

“There’s someone in the woods. I bet it’s those fuckers that egged the Friedmans’ house are outside coming this way,” I said in one of those quiet shouts.

A couple weeks earlier we had gotten blamed for egging a house in the neighborhood. The son of the family was a dickhead to be honest and a lot of people had it out for him. We got blamed because we were always seen out and about on weekend nights and, therefore we “fit the bill.”

“Let’s F them in the A!” said Michael with conviction not seen in our area since a local business owner threatened to kill the city council. .

We grabbed our implements of destruction: a short piece of PVC pipe, tee-ball bat, kayak paddle, small weight bar, badminton racket, croquet mallet and flashlight. The flashlight was pretty sketchy. It was one of the first generation shake-to-shine ones that weren’t very bright at a distance of more than ten feet on under no moon. Despite this, we exited the door in SWAT formation ready to fight if need be. I was point since I saw the humanoid. One wasn’t too far from where the gravel driveway spilled into the grass like the mouth of a river. He was shuffling our direction and it was pretty clear now that no human could move like that, despite his size and appearance. Its gate suggested it had a broken left ankle. No one around there could do make up that looked that real. The thought of a real-life zombie didn’t sit well despite our affection for the movies of that genre. Startled and wide-eyed, we scrambled inside.

“Was that a fucking zombie?!” I inquired somewhat hysterically, searching for something to hopefully prove me wrong. No one really knew what to do. The zombie continued our direction and got to the window. It just sort of stood there. It dead face was motionless save for its eyes which surveyed the landscape more like an animal than a human. After a few moments, we finally understood that this situation was real and gravely serious (pun intended).

Our plan was to swing the door open knocking the zombie against the retaining wall and basically bash its head in. Marcus, being the weakest and smallest, distracted the thing at the window while we readied at the door. Louis and I rushed the door and Mike was right behind us with an axe to lay the first blow.

It was a clean hit. The axe cut the head at a diagonal and the undead fell, dead, on the concrete pad, but what we hadn’t planned on was more than one. Michael took a bite to the arm from one that had come around the camper. I instantly felt sick in realizing we didn’t even look there as we rushed out the door. Kevin dealt a crippling blow swiftly to the creature, no doubt crushing its skull with the weight bar. We all stood looking at Michael’s wound. He hadn’t shouted, just let out a grunt of pain. Even now, he held a silent grimace as we pondered on what to do.

“Hit the pole to get my parents,” Michael said pretty calmly considering what had just transpired. The pole was one of two steel supports that ran through the house. THE pole was the one in the pair that ran right up to the Beckers’ parents’ room. Marcus started knocking on it and we could hear movement upstairs. Mrs. Becker finally appeared at the base of the stairs.

“What is going on?” Mrs. Becker sneered, obviously perturbed.

We all pointed to the corpse, which had fallen halfway into the door.

“It bit me,” said Michael as he moved his hand to expose the bleeding wound.

“It’s just a rat Michael and you barely have a prick on your arm. This isn’t very funny and me and your father don’t appreciate being woken up for your kicks boys. I don’t want to hear anything else out of you and don’t stay up much later,” she said as she turned to head back upstairs.

I feel sure she was too sleepy to notice the look of utter disbelief on our faces. She had looked right at the dead zombies and said they were just rats. No one could be tired enough to mistake Michael’s wound for a mere rat bite.

“What the hell is going on?” Kevin asked as he sat down bewildered and clutched his forehead.

“I don’t know man but we need to get something to patch Michael up,” replied Louis. This task was pretty simple considering Mr. Becker was a surgeon’s assistant. Mike was bandaged up and we went outside to take a closer look at these things.

We all stood around the corpse, looking for something to tell us it was unreal. The clothes weren’t of our time and resembled the style of workers in the Civil War era more than anything. The smell was putrid, but I’d smelled worse. Dead chicken pits on chicken farms in the hot summer of the South are probably the worst scent in our world. About the time I knelt to take a closer look, we heard movement in the gravel.

Louis peered around the camper and motioned with his hands the best way he knew how to say “zombie.” We grabbed our weapons and charged as a group. Jacob hit the thing in what would have been its stomach and I followed with a PVC pipe to the skull. Three down and at least two more in the road.

“Golf cart,” said Louis and we all moved to it and piled on. The golf cart was one Louis’ dad had ‘permanently borrowed’ from a place of former employment. Louis always drove it around the neighborhood and it was, in a way, kind of like our Batmobile. There was no mistaking it for Louis’ either. It had headlight stickers, two different color fog lights, a BMW kidney grille and tended to backfire. We took off across the yard in our makeshift death-wagon.

We made a round in the neighborhood taking out around eight or so. It was a lot like a Roman Gladiator match. Our chariot of death would rapidly approach our target and usually turn to meet a T-ball bat to the face. Once we had to stop and finish the job on foot because it fell into a ditch.

Jacob lived about a 5-minute walk away from the Beckers’ house so we decided we’d check in on it. His driveway was probably one of the steepest I had seen in a subdivision. The house itself was just on a flat place on a steep hill. The backyard was about fifteen feet below the level of the base of the driveway and then it just sloped down into a small patch of forest before a small creek. The golf cart definitely wouldn’t drive back up even with just a driver and cars couldn’t park anywhere but at the base of it. We stopped at the top and left our chariot to continue the search on foot.

There was a strange light coming from the woods behind Jacob’s house. It was blue and there definitely wasn’t anything down there that should be making that light. The only thing down there was just cattle if anything besides wildlife. About this time we hear something below us on the driveway: another zombie. The fastest way down Jacob’s driveway was basically to leap. I got to it first but my swing missed, almost throwing me off balance. The zombie had prepared for Louis and, after side-stepping his swing, caught him and gave him a nice bite to the forearm. There was no time for it to take flesh by the time my pipe broke its spine and it fell limp on the driveway.

“Dammit,” Louis said frustrated that the undead had gotten the better of him. The wound wasn’t as bad as Michael’s, but would need some attention fairly soon.

“We’ll go check out the light. I should be ok till after that,” added Louis obviously curious as to what was going on.

The trip through the backyard and then into the woods was more uneventful that we anticipated. I guess we expected about fifty zombies to be guarding the area. The light was a giant disc which was like most of the portals that you see in Sci-Fi movies. The other side looked to be a farm or something similar. We had pursued this whole thing this far, so we went through.