Dirty Rotten Hippies and Other Stories Page 7

  Flannel shirt guy grinned. “Mmm, that’s always my favorite part. Favorite part of the torture, I mean. My real favorite part is the fuckin’.”

  Jasper had his hand on his cock now. He smiled and said, “Me, too.”

  The circle of depraved humanity around Travis drew tighter and tighter. He considered making a grab for the shotgun. What did he have to lose at this point?

  Darlene had the front of her shirt all the way open now, allowing him a glimpse of creamy pale flesh and a lacy black bra. “Reckon my favorite part is later, when we eat them. Always work up a hell of an appetite when we go all freaky-deaky on a motherfucker.” She grinned broadly, exposing her meth-decimated teeth. “Don’t mind the fuckin’, though. Not one bit. Especially once Eunice and me break out the strap-ons and start plundering that ass until it fuckin’ bleeds.”

  They all laughed maniacally at that.

  Travis looked around at their leering faces and despaired. Eyeing the shotgun, he scooted his ass closer to the edge of the chair and psyched himself up to make his last-ditch desperation move. Before he could do that, however, they all heard the creaking sounds from the porch during a lull between songs from the boombox.

  Flannel shirt guy leaned over to stab the stop button, silencing “When Doves Cry” by Prince mid-song. “Did you hear that?”

  Their heads all turned toward the front of the cabin. The creaking sounds could be heard much more clearly now. From the sound of it, there were several people out there on the porch. There was another sound, too, a low moaning and groaning. And there was that ripe odor Travis knew so well.

  Darlene said, “We all heard it.”

  Jasper looked scared as his cock began to wilt. “Who do y’all think it is? The law, maybe?”

  Darlene grimaced as she gripped the shotgun with both hands again. “Raunchiest-smelling po-lice ever, if it is. Whoever it is, we ain’t goin’ out easy. Get your guns, bitches.”

  Travis started laughing softly as the rest of them began to gather their weapons. The sound grew steadily in volume until he was almost braying wild laughter.

  Darlene turned back toward him and leveled the shotgun at his face again. “Shut it, hippie. What’s so goddamn funny anyway?”

  She was trying hard to maintain her outward veneer of scary toughness, but he sensed the fear lurking beneath her gruff tone. The worry lines on her face were more pronounced now, too, making Travis realize his original estimate about her age might be off by several years. He guessed she was closer to thirty than twenty, but the extra years only became obvious when she was scared.

  Like right now.

  The rest of them looked uneasy, too.

  Travis at last managed to get his laughter under control. He chuckled softly and was still smiling when he said, “It’s not the law at the door.”

  Darlene sneered. “Oh, yeah? Well, who is it then?”

  He chuckled again. “It’s just a bunch of dirty rotten hippies. They’ve wandered over from the festival, just like me.”

  Darlene made a sound of disbelief. “Bullshit.”

  Still smiling, Travis shrugged. “It’s not, though. But don’t take my word for it. Open the door and see for yourself.”

  He was in no hurry to go to his grave at the hands of a bunch of reanimated dead things, but he preferred it over being sexually violated and brutalized by a gang of demented, meth-addicted hillbillies.

  The moaning from outside was getting louder.

  So was the creaking of the wooden porch planks.

  The naked lady he now knew was called Eunice went to one of the covered windows at the front of the cabin, peeled back an edge of the blackout shade covering the window, and peeked outside. Almost instantly, she gasped and jumped back from the window. The look she showed them when she turned around was abject horror mixed with despair.

  “What’s out there?” Darlene asked.

  The fear in her tone had deepened yet again.

  Travis began to laugh softly again.

  Eunice shook her head. “You’ll never believe it.”

  “Spit it the fuck out!” Darlene screeched, her voice suddenly laced with more anger than fear.

  Eunice shivered visibly and hugged herself before glancing briefly at Travis. “He’s right,” she said, nodding at him. “It’s a bunch of hippies, but there’s something really wrong with them. I think . . . I think . . .” She paused and shivered again, grimacing as she gathered her nerve. “I think they’re dead. Walking dead people.”

  Jasper guffawed. “Aw, hell. Come on. Y’all pullin’ my leg, right? There cain’t be zombies out there. That’s TV show bullshit. That resurrectin’ and walkin’ around nonsense don’t happen none in real life.” He glanced around at each of them in turn, even at Travis, smiling nervously the whole time. “Right?”

  Darlene made a huffing sound and brushed by Eunice on the way to the window, making the other woman grunt in dismay and stagger sideways. She peeled back the edge of the shade and took a look for herself. Unlike Eunice, she didn’t immediately flinch and retreat from what she saw. Instead, she stood perfectly still for a prolonged period of time before reacting, perhaps as long as a full minute.

  Then she turned slowly around and sighed heavily. “Shit. She’s right.”

  She moved away from the window as the rest of them took turns peeking out at the situation on the porch. Soon enough, they were all convinced. There were zombies out there. A shitload of them.

  Jasper pulled off the platinum-blonde wig and started pacing manically around the cabin, crying and running his stubby fingers through his real hair. “What’re we gone do now? We’re fuckin’ fucked. Oh my lord, how the hail we gettin’ outta this mess?”

  Travis tilted his head back and laughed a little louder.

  “Don’t know, brother,” Darlene said, addressing Jasper while glaring at Travis. “But we’re gonna start by getting rid of this piece of hippie scum-shit.”

  Travis gasped and leaned back in the chair, his eyes widening in alarm as she came at him and raised the shotgun, again aiming it at his head. “Wait, no! Hold up! I can help. I can—”

  Darlene smirked. “Shut the fuck up. You’re done.”

  She squeezed the trigger.

  EIGHT

  THEY HAD TO FIGHT HARD to make their way across the compound to Kyle’s trailer. By the time they got there, the compound was engulfed in bloody chaos. The living still slightly outnumbered the risen dead, but Oscar estimated the ratio would swing the other way within an alarmingly short span. The resurrected were fast and ferocious, overwhelming their mortal counterparts with shocking ease in most cases.

  The only reason Oscar made it to the trailer alive was because he stayed as close to Kyle as possible without actually gluing himself to him. Kyle fought like a man possessed, swinging the fire extinguisher about and warding off the many threats that came at them in a frenzied way that belied his years. He remained unscathed while countless people half his age fell victim to the rampaging dead things. The blunt end of the fire extinguisher smashed into and pulped the heads of seemingly dozens of them. There were numerous times when he had to abruptly wheel about and rescue Oscar from certain death with another viciously devastating swing of the only weapon they had at hand.

  Oscar was drenched in blood spatter as he followed Kyle up a short set of steps and into the trailer. Only once he was inside did he realize how close the pursuing dead things had come to taking him down. The door to the trailer was still standing open as the nearest zombie reached the steps and began to climb. Kyle grabbed Oscar and heaved him aside just in time to swing the door shut in the creature’s face. It’d reached the top of the steps by then, and when the door closed, the thing immediately began clawing frantically at it from the other side.

  Kyle locked the door and put his back against it to hold the creatures back. They were piling up on the steps and trying to batter their way inside. He pointed to a couch against the opposite wall at the far end of the trailer. The couch
faced a wall-mounted television. An all-girl porn movie was playing on the screen. On the couch was a busty young woman wearing only a tiny pair of black panties. Her eyes were closed and she didn’t react to either their arrival or the clawing and pounding of the zombies outside the trailer. Oscar guessed she was either unconscious or dead. Another victim of Delight, perhaps?

  A chill rippled through him at the thought.

  He frowned. “What? You want me to wake her up?”

  Kyle scowled. “No time for that. She’s on the nod. See the syringe on the floor?”

  Oscar glanced that way again. This time he saw the syringe and also noted the length of plastic tubing wrapped around her right bicep. “Oh.” He looked at Kyle. “What do you want me to do then?”

  “Roll her ass off the fucking couch and drag the fucking thing over here. We need to block the door. I can’t hold them back forever.”

  Oscar scratched the back of his head, his frown deepening at the thought of manhandling the woman in the suggested way. Putting his hands on a woman without being invited to do so was something he’d normally never even dream of doing. This was an emergency situation, but it was nonetheless difficult to rebel against his instincts and ingrained civility. “I don’t know . . .”

  “Fuck!”

  Kyle launched himself away from the door, grabbed hold of Oscar’s shirt, and spun him around, pushing him up against the door. “I’ll do it, goddammit. Just hold the fucking door. If you can’t do that, we’re fucked.”

  Oscar felt the pressure from the other side of the door the instant Kyle let go of him. He’d known it would be considerable, but he hadn’t expected it to be quite this intense. He had to brace his feet on the carpeted floor and put his back into it. The pounding made his whole body vibrate and it was all he could do not to break down and collapse into a blubbering, helpless mess on the floor.

  Kyle stomped his way over to the couch and brusquely rolled the woman to the floor, doing it with enough force to send her rolling all the way to the opposite wall. She remained unconscious even then, oblivious to both the rough treatment and the worsening situation outside.

  Kyle grabbed hold of the nearest end of the couch and dragged it closer to the door. Displaying a level of strength that was less surprising after his one-man wrecking crew performance out there in the compound, he stood the couch on end, turned it about, and flipped it over so the back side was facing the door. With that accomplished, he gestured for Oscar to get out of the way.

  Oscar didn’t need to be told twice.

  He scurried sideways and out of the way as Kyle shoved the couch forward and braced its back against the door, which was still shaking violently in its frame. Instead of taking a moment to catch his breath, he raced back down toward the far end of the trailer, soon disappearing through a door into another room. In a few moments, he reemerged gripping a device of some kind in his right hand. At first glance, Oscar took it for a standard-looking smartphone, but on closer examination he saw it featured a more rugged casing. An antenna stub protruded from the top. As he watched, Kyle pulled the antenna out to its fullest extension, punched in a number, and put the phone to his ear. By then Oscar was feeling resigned to his apparent fate. Pessimism colored his every thought and he had zero hope of Kyle’s satellite phone getting through whatever was blocking everything else.

  That abruptly changed when Kyle started talking, apparently to someone on the opposite end of a connected off-site call. Oscar was so astounded by this seemingly miraculous development the actual content of Kyle’s conversation with the mystery person at first failed to register. Then he heard the word “helicopter” and things snapped back into focus. He gathered the singer was initially having some trouble conveying the gravity and nature of the situation to the person on the other end. Some yelling and palpable anger on Kyle’s part soon changed this state of affairs, however, and within just a few minutes he ended the call.

  He flipped long locks away from his sweaty face and showed Oscar a cockeyed grin. “Cavalry’s on the way.”

  Oscar gaped at him in disbelief for a moment. Part of him almost didn’t want to trust in what the old heavy metal dude was telling him out of fear of the news being revealed as a cruel prank in the next instant. There was no reason to think anything like that would happen. The singer had fought like a madman to save his life, after all. This was just lingering paranoia, left over from his earlier musings on who or what was behind this unfolding tragedy.

  He heaved a sigh and shook his head. “I don’t believe it.”

  Kyle chuckled. “Believe it, man. All we have to do is hold out here for maybe an hour. That’s about how long it’ll take my people to get a chopper out here.”

  “A chopper?”

  “Helicopter.”

  Oscar made a sound of dawning awareness. “Oh. Yeah. Right.” Then his frown returned as he glanced at the door before again turning his gaze on Kyle. “But we’re trapped in here. Surrounded. How are we supposed to get out and rendezvous with the helicopter?”

  Still grinning, Kyle raised an index finger and pointed up. “We go out that way.”

  Oscar looked up and saw a skylight in the roof of the trailer. He then noted the latch on the window and understood it could be opened. The rest of it became obvious at that point. They were supposed to climb up on the roof and await rescue there. He imagined the copter hovering above the trailer, its spinning rotors louder than a thousand buzzsaws revving all at once while a ladder was lowered for them to climb to safety. The whole process would be nerve-wracking as hell, but it wasn’t like there were any other viable options. If he wanted to survive this nightmare—and he definitely did—this was the only way out.

  First, though, they would have to survive another hour inside the trailer. The dead had not ceased in their assault on the door. They continued to bang on it and claw at it, their fingernails scraping loudly against the metal. The middle of the door was bulging inward in several places. As they watched, the legs of the couch skidded a couple inches in their direction. It became clear the couch alone would not suffice as a barrier, not for an entire hour, so they set about fortifying the barricade by piling on everything in the trailer that wasn’t nailed down, as well as some things that had to be removed from their moorings, including a heavy mini-fridge and the wall-mounted television. Other additions to the barricade included chairs and a mattress from the bedroom along with a matching box-spring.

  After close to a half-hour of frantic work, some of Oscar’s worst concerns began to recede. They were still in a difficult and dangerous situation, but, against all odds, they seemed close to having it under control. At least as far as their personal safety was concerned, that is. Nearly everyone else in the compound and on the festival grounds was almost certainly doomed. That was a terrible, shitty thing. A tragedy of unprecedented proportions in the world of music. Oscar felt more than a smidge of guilt at the likelihood of being one of the few to survive, but deep in his heart he knew he’d never hand the opportunity over to someone else to go in his place. He wanted out of this catastrophic horror show more than he’d ever wanted anything else in his life.

  Kyle had taken some beers from the mini-fridge prior to helping Oscar heave it atop the couch. Now he opened two of them and offered one to Oscar, who at first waved it off and said, “No. I should try to keep my wits about me.”

  But Kyle was not to be dissuaded. “Come on, man. Drink up. It’ll help with your nerves when it’s time to climb up out of here.”

  Oscar didn’t need much more convincing than that. He felt steadier than he had at any point since the beginning of the outbreak, but he was still trembling and his heart was still racing. Adrenaline had burned off the effects of the beers he’d had earlier. A few more as an additional calming method couldn’t hurt. He accepted the beer and took a sip.

  “Hey, do you think I could use that for a minute?”

  He gestured at the satellite phone, tucked away now in Kyle’s vest pocket.


  Kyle shook his head sadly as he gave the phone a protective pat. “You can use it to call whoever you want as soon as we’re safely away. Until then, I want to keep the line open in case our ride out of here arrives sooner than anticipated.”

  Oscar supposed he could see the wisdom in that.

  They leaned against the wall where the couch had been and drank their beers mostly without talking over the next approximately half-hour, listening as the moaning of the dead continued to grow louder and more eerie-sounding. There was a sense of being adrift at sea in a lifeboat with hungry sharks circling endlessly in bloody waters. Oscar was mildly curious about the unconscious woman on the floor, but not as much as he would’ve been under less dire circumstances. He nonetheless was about to ask Kyle about it when the satellite phone buzzed.

  Kyle put the phone to his ear. “Yeah?”

  Oscar could faintly hear another voice emanating from the phone while the singer listened and occasionally nodded his head.

  Kyle grunted. “Ten minutes. Gotcha.”

  He tucked the phone in his vest pocket again, chugged the last of his current beer down, and tossed the empty on the floor. “Be right back.”

  Oscar shrugged. “Not going anywhere.”

  Kyle again disappeared into the room at the back of the trailer. He came back out with a loaded syringe a few moments later, knelt over the unconscious woman, and raised the hypodermic high over his head.

  Oscar frowned. “What are you doing?”

  “Giving her a jolt.”

  Oscar winced as Kyle slammed the syringe down and pressed the plunger as soon as the needle pierced the woman’s skin. Barely more than a heartbeat later, the woman sat bolt upright, gasping for breath.

  Kyle chuckled, glancing at Oscar as he stood up again. “Shades of Pulp Fiction, right? Not the first time I’ve had to do this. Come on, help me grab that fridge again. It’s about time to catch our ride.”

  Working together, they extracted the fridge from where it was wedged into the barricade and dragged it across the floor until it was positioned directly beneath the skylight. Kyle then climbed atop it and reached for the skylight. After fiddling with a latch that initially seemed stuck for longer than was comfortable, he was finally able to get the skylight unlatched and open. He then hopped down and invited Oscar to climb up on the fridge and be the first out on the roof.