Dirty Rotten Hippies and Other Stories Read online

  Tojo almost sounded like he was screaming now.

  She loved the dog almost as much as Dan did. Forcing him to endure even another second of terror wasn’t an option. Letting out a stabilizing breath, she unlocked the door and pulled it open. Tojo nearly knocked her off her feet as he came barreling in with the spike still attached to his lead. She heard his claws scrambling across the kitchen tiles for a moment before he disappeared somewhere deeper inside the house. The spike made loud thumping sounds as it bounced off walls and doorjambs.

  Helen stepped out onto the stoop and felt her heart skip a few beats when she saw her beloved husband on the ground some twenty feet away from the toolshed. He was lying on his back and staring blankly up at the clear blue sky. Even from here, she could see the bloody, shredded mess that had been made of his throat. A natural impulse to deny the reality of what she was seeing came and went. There was no time for that.

  Not with her husband’s killer coming straight toward her.

  That this scraggly, long-haired man was responsible for the death of the love of her life was not in doubt. The man’s face was smeared with Dan’s blood and bits of bloody flesh were visible at the corners of his mouth. The front of his tie-dyed shirt was also sticky with a copious amount of blood. He stared at Helen with eyes so bloodshot they looked like the pulsing alien orbs of some nightmare creature. There was something wrong with the man’s skin and a smell so rotten it nearly made her swoon emanated from his orifices. As he came another lurching step closer, a loud farting sound ripped out of his backside. The gaseous eruption was so forceful it propelled the hideous man another step forward and nearly made him tumble to the ground.

  But he did not fall over.

  He kept coming.

  And the closer he got to Helen, the hungrier that groaning noise issuing from his rotting throat sounded. The edges of his mouth twitched and his jaw began to unhinge as he reached out to her with grasping, shaking fingers.

  Helen stepped down from the stoop and raised the shotgun, bracing the stock against her shoulder. “You stop right there, you bastard! Come one step closer and I’ll blow your dadblamed head off.”

  The man’s cracked and bleeding lips peeled back from his teeth, revealing blackened gums and a lump of swollen, putrid flesh Helen needed a moment to recognize as his tongue. She recoiled in disgust as another gust of foul-smelling air wafted out of his open mouth, causing her to loosen her grip on the shotgun as she took a helpless step backward. At the same time, another fart so loud it was like a gunshot blasted out of his backside and propelled him another wobbly step closer. His grasping fingers were now less than ten feet away.

  Helen got the shotgun’s stock braced against her shoulder again and called out to the man again. “Last warning, you son of a bitch. Back off or I’m blasting a hole right through your belly.”

  Her words appeared not to register as the man came yet another step closer. Helen’s grip tightened on the shotgun as she curled a finger around the trigger and tried to gird herself for a moment of shocking violence that seemed inevitable. Being a country girl all her life, she knew her way around firearms, but until today she’d never aimed a gun at another living creature, either animal or human. She didn’t doubt her ability to shoot this deranged and obviously diseased stranger, but she didn’t relish having to do it either, even knowing he’d savagely murdered her husband.

  Still another step closer.

  And another.

  That guttural groaning now sounded more like a hungry growl.

  Helen sneered. “Goddamn you.”

  She squeezed the trigger and the shotgun roared, rocking her backward a step. In her youth, she would’ve been strong enough to fully absorb the recoil, but she was an old lady and it’d been decades since she’d last fired a big gun like this one. The last time she’d done it to scare a bear away, firing the weapon over the beast’s head. That time the warning shot worked. The animal retreated into the woods and, as far as Helen knew, never strayed onto their property again.

  This time the warning shot did not work.

  The stranger shambled another step closer. He didn’t appear the slightest bit rattled by the close-range blast of the shotgun. He hadn’t even flinched. The reaction wasn’t natural. It was as if he didn’t understand the threat the shotgun represented. That something was wrong with him had been clear from the beginning, but now Helen realized she’d underestimated the extent of that wrongness. His brain was functioning on only the most primitive level. He cared only about getting to her and tearing into her flesh, just as he’d done to Dan.

  He was five feet away now and still advancing.

  Helen’s terror of being killed in so horrendous a fashion finally overrode her reluctance to kill. She adjusted her aim and squeezed the trigger again. This time the blast hit the man full-on in the belly, knocking him backward and causing him to topple to the ground. She let out a gasping cry of relief and lowered the gun as tears began to stream down her face. Shooting a human being, even one as monstrous as this one, felt as awful as she’d imagined. It was a feeling she hoped she’d never have to experience again.

  Her body shook with her sobbing as she worked to rub the tears from her eyes. She felt queasy and on the verge of puking her guts up when she realized she was still hearing that guttural groaning. Her tears quickly dried up as she again focused on the man she’d shot. Her vision was still slightly blurry from crying, but she perceived movement on the ground. After grinding the heel of a palm into her eyes to clear away the excess moisture, she gaped in disbelief upon seeing that the man was sitting up and attempting to get to his feet.

  Helen frowned, shaking her head. “No. No, no, no. That’s not possible. You stay down.”

  Except she was wrong about it not being possible, because within another few moments the groaning, lurching stranger was upright again. He wobbled around precariously in place for a moment and Helen was sure he’d soon fall over again, probably for good this time. She could see bits of shredded organs through the hole in his belly. He should be screaming in unbearable agony, but now that he was standing again, he appeared as unfazed by the wound as he’d been by the warning shot. He should be bleeding out on the ground, already dead or close to it.

  The weird thing about that was how he’d already looked and smelled like a dead man even before she’d shot him. Her brow furrowed as she processed this information and made a correlation with bits of popular culture she’d absorbed over the years. She soon arrived at an obvious conclusion, albeit one she found difficult to believe even with this visceral proof right in front of her.

  “Oh,” she said, grimacing as she raised the shotgun again. “You’re one of them. And I guess there’s only one way to deal with the likes of you.”

  She squeezed the trigger and the shotgun roared a third time. This time the blast blew apart the top of the man’s head, sending a spray of blood, brains, and bone fragments all over the yard. He fell over again and this time he stayed down. She observed him closely for signs of movement a few moments longer, but he remained absolutely still.

  She’d killed the walking dead man.

  This time the feeling didn’t hit her so hard. He’d been dead already, anyway, so it wasn’t like she’d committed murder. Not really. All she’d done was to correct a wrong. The dead weren’t meant to walk around in the world like living folk. It was an abomination. What she’d done could even be seen as an act of mercy. She wasn’t sure the sheriff would see it that way. He likely wouldn’t even believe her tale of a reanimated dead man, but did it really matter? She’d been defending her property and her own safety and had acted within her rights. The sheriff would look past the abnormalities of the situation and find a way to explain it all away, absolving her of any responsibility for the man’s death. It was the way things worked around here. Locals looked out for each other. And there was no doubt whatsoever this man was not local.

  She was about to go inside to phone the sheriff when she caught a glim
pse of something at the edge of her vision. Putting a hand to her brow to cut the glare of the sun, she squinted into the distance and saw something that brought back that queasy feeling.

  Two more shambling dead things had stepped out of the trees and were moving in the direction of her house.

  “Goddammit.”

  Helen supposed this shouldn’t have come as a surprise. On the TV shows and in the movies, there was never just one of these things. Sometimes there were just a few to deal with, but often they moved in great numbers. In packs or herds, whatever you wanted to call them.

  Indeed, even as she tracked their slow progress from the bottom of the gently sloping hill, she saw two more of the creatures amble out of the woods. Then came another. And another.

  Helen shook her head. “The hell with this.”

  A couple more she maybe could’ve dealt with on her own, but there was no telling how many more of these things might come out of the woods. She wasn’t a one-woman army, unlike some of the ladies on the TV shows.

  She needed help.

  Helen went back inside the house.

  After closing and locking the back door, she went over to the phone mounted on the wall by the refrigerator and began punching in the sheriff’s number. Tojo came back into the kitchen as she listened to the phone ring.

  He sat down at the back door and stared at it, growling.

  FIVE

  TRAVIS KEPT RUNNING FOR ANOTHER twenty minutes before again slowing his pace, recognizing the need to conserve his energy. He could no longer see the dead behind him, the leading edge of the horde having disappeared behind one of the bends in the looping stretch of road. They were still back there, though, and still dangerous. Pushing himself beyond the brink of exhaustion before he reached safety would be foolish. For all he knew, the dead might be capable of a level of rejuvenation after a period of rest, just like living humans. They might even be able to go back into berserker mode at some point. He didn’t think that would happen, but dismissing the possibility entirely wouldn’t be smart.

  He tried to guess how far he’d come since fleeing the festival grounds, but that was impossible to know with anything approaching certainty. Several miles at the least was the closest he could get to pinpointing it. Though he wasn’t carrying much in the way of extra weight, he wasn’t a trained runner and was feeling the strain of the unusual physical effort deep in his bones. If he managed to make it out of here alive, he’d be hurting for the next several days. It’d be nice to relieve his body of this burden and find a ride back to civilization, but so far no cars had come down the road from the direction of town. This struck him as deeply strange. There should be at least a few late-arriving festival attendees. There were always second-day stragglers at these things. Unless word of the massive calamity had gotten out to the larger world, that is, and that didn’t seem likely based on everything he’d witnessed as the situation had worsened through the morning.

  As things had deteriorated, he’d noticed people trying to call 911 or directly contact authorities. A few people claimed to have gotten through on the emergency line early on, but something happened after that and suddenly no one was able to reach anyone anywhere or even get a signal. Travis had no idea what the explanation for that could be, but it seemed ominous, as if access to the outside world was somehow deliberately being prevented. He also couldn’t imagine who would do such a thing or why, but that didn’t mean anything. There were always people or groups out there looking to hurt other people on a mass scale, maybe more so than ever these days. As crazy as the idea seemed on the surface, it was possible he was the sole survivor of the strangest terror attack in history.

  Whatever the case, help had never arrived and probably never would. Living to see another day was entirely up to him. He could keep pushing forward or give in to mounting exhaustion and surrender. Just lie down and die or wait to be rescued, though the odds of the latter happening seemed remote at best. For now he was still opting for pushing forward, but that was subject to change at any time.

  Another indicator of how far he’d come was that the cars and trucks of festival attendees were no longer lining both sides of the road. He estimated he’d seen the last of them slightly less than a mile back. Until now he’d been too focused on outrunning the dead things to bother with attempting to break into any of the vehicles, but now he was wondering whether he should turn back and try to get into one of those cars while he still could. He thought he’d left the dead far enough behind that backtracking a relatively short distance might still be a viable option.

  The deciding factor against this idea was the practical reality of what stealing a car entailed. Though he’d lived the free-spirited life of a group of hippie kids traveling the highways and byways of the land for a while now, he had no experience whatsoever in real criminal endeavors. The same went for his friends. Apart from their penchant for selling and indulging in various illegal substances, they’d all been conscientious law-abiders. In theory, he could knock out the window of somebody’s car, but what then? Unless someone had helpfully left a spare key in a place where he could easily find it (unlikely), he wouldn’t be able to start it. Any way he looked at it, the effort would be a waste of time and he’d lose ground for no good reason.

  It wasn’t a real option at all.

  He kept moving forward instead.

  About another half mile down the road, he began to hear a faint sound of music emanating from somewhere out in the woods off to his right. He stopped in his tracks and frowned as he turned to stare at the line of trees. The sound was so faint he first thought he must be imagining it, an auditory hallucination produced by his traumatized psyche. In those first few seconds after he stopped, he was almost certain this was correct, because he was no longer hearing the music. Then it started again, still faint but definitely there. He couldn’t quite identify what the music was, but something at the back of his mind detected something familiar in the sound.

  Still frowning, he moved closer to the edge of the road and the line of trees and perked up his ears, straining hard to better make out what he was hearing. What he knew was that it wasn’t aggressive hard rock, nor was it EDM or some other form of modern pop. No, this music was too soft and mellow for that. It was meandering guitar-based music. Sounded like a jam band, actually, similar to many such bands that had been set to play the festival over the weekend.

  A lot of hippies were back-to-nature types. They liked to camp out in the woods or live off the grid. Maybe what he was hearing was a small gathering of like-minded souls who’d come out to the country for the festival, but had opted to spend the night camped out among the trees instead of on the festival grounds. It was a theory based on not much, but it felt plausible to Travis. These people out in the woods might even be some of the second-day stragglers he’d been expecting to see all along but had somehow never materialized. He craned his head around, searching the road for signs of a parked vehicle. If he was right, there had to be one somewhere, but he wasn’t seeing it. Didn’t mean much, though. Though this was his third time attending this particular festival, this was still basically foreign territory. He knew the way out to the festival grounds from the interstate and the way back again. The lay of the land beyond that was a mystery, so the campers might well have parked on some other secondary road.

  He stood at the edge of the road a while longer, fidgeting and uncertain about what to do. The stretch of road he could see back in the direction of the festival grounds was still clear of dead things. He might have time to venture into the woods and attempt to make contact with whoever was playing the music. Or he might not. Thanks to the winding nature of the road, however, that visible part of it was not very long. Less than a hundred feet, probably. Made it hard to judge his safety level with any real certainty. Based on how slowly the dead things had been moving the last time he glimpsed them, he still believed he’d created a substantial buffer zone. Unless the creatures started accelerating again, he felt he could easily spen
d up to a half hour investigating the source of the music without unnecessarily endangering himself.

  Another thing to consider was his basic responsibility as a decent human being. There was a strong chance these theoretical campers were unaware of the carnage that had overtaken the festival. He had no doubt many of the walking dead things would stray into the woods rather than stay on the road. At the very least, it was his duty to warn these people. With any luck, they’d be able to take him to wherever their car was parked. It wasn’t just the humane and compassionate thing to do, it might be his best means out of here.

  His decision made, Travis stepped down into the shallow ditch at the side of the road and in another few seconds entered the line of trees beyond. Maintaining his focus on the music, which was still faint at that point, he worked at moving in the hopefully right direction. Progress was slow at first, because he occasionally had to stop and listen for a moment to better home in on the correct way to go before continuing. He was about fifteen minutes removed from the road when he was finally able to identify what he was hearing. He smiled when he realized it was the Grateful Dead, some live album rather than the more typical greatest hits collection. The song playing at that moment was “Casey Jones”.

  The realization further cemented his belief he was doing the right thing. These were his people. They’d never met, most likely, but they were kindred. Like many of their tribe, they were tuned in to the same spiritual wavelengths. These people would help him, he had no doubt.

  In another few minutes, he was hearing the music clear as day. The trees were less densely grouped together and he soon realized he was nearing the edge of a clearing. Soon he was able to glimpse a part of the clearing and saw the back of a tent erected there. As he reached the edge of the clearing, he saw two more tents. The tents were grouped around a campfire that appeared to have been doused a short while ago. Some embers were still smoldering a bright red in the pile of gray ashes.