Zombieland: The Prison Tower
Vol. 158: new short story, same old creepy attitude
How many times have I seen Welcome to Zombieland? I know that I’ve seen it so many times that I can come across it at any scene and know what’s happening and what will happen next. How ‘bout those opening credits, all those horrible three second images of people trying to survive, and often not surviving.
These tiny, terrifying vignettes have always intrigued me. I wanted to know more, so I did the research. This wasn’t easy, what with the world collapsing once the zombies took over. The amount of historical information and official paperwork that is forever gone is staggering, but a few threads remain. And some surviving witnesses.
Here’s the first of The Zombieland Stories.
Trey Alvarez was afraid to go to work. No, that was too gentle a word. Trey Alvarez was terrified to go to work. He feared being at the prison with every fiber of his being. His teeth ground against each other when he put his uniform on. His left eye had begun twitching with anxiety two weeks into the job and hadn’t stopped since. He’d get dressed for work and the eye would spasm like a clock ticking out the seconds.
Drive to work. Tickticktick.
Enter the facility and clock in. Tickticktick.
Listening to that day’s assignments and heading out to his area, well, his lower eye jumped so hard that even the inmates were laughing at his obvious nerves.
His grandmother told him that his eye was counting off the seconds of his life, which Alvarez thought was a pretty fucked up thing for a grandmother to say, but he also believed she was right. His grandmother was a vidente, someone who sees what others don’t. Alvarez believed that he too had the sight, but when he told his grandmother that he often knew what would happen before it happened, she snorted and told him that the gift came to women alone. You’re just a good guesser, she said.
The prison was a men’s high security facility located on the fringe of Las Cruces. Growing up around a prison housing the worst men in the state never bothered Alvarez. He rarely thought about the prison at all. Why would he, he wasn’t a criminal. He’d been totally wrapped up in sports, becoming a lettered athlete and big deal in his small high school. He played baseball in Summer and football in the Fall, and his dreams every night were visions. Clear and linear, they showed him having a football career that brought happiness to his whole family. His grandmother’s visions came while cooking or walking to his Aunt Silvia’s, but his sight came to him in his sleep. Everybody dreams, she would say. You don’t have the gift. He believed that he did.
His goal back then was to get to college on a football scholarship and be scouted. There was a time in his life, from sophomore to senior, when he was convinced he could turn pro, get out of town, and make millions. But that was before The Tackle.
That’s how he thought of that event in his mind, capitalized because of its significance. October 27th. His school was playing Washington High and Alvarez was all set to catch a beautiful throw from Jim Koch, when a tackle from Washington, a huge Indian kid, came out of nowhere like a city bus and slammed the bottom half of Alvarez’s body. It was like his feet were rooted in place while his legs and hips were spun around to face the other way. He heard a tremendous crack! and they slammed to the ground, the Indian guy’s eyes bugging out as Alvarez began to screech in pain. When the other kid finally pulled himself off, they both looked in horror at the bloody shin bone poking through the skin of Alvarez’s leg. It had been a twisting break, one that the doctor had told him would heal, but it would never be the same. Expect to favor it for the rest of your life, the doctor had warned. So in just a second, his plans had disintegrated.
The thing was, the night before The Tackle, he had seen himself in a dream. Hopping up and down on one leg. That was all there was to it, and Alvarez had badly misinterpreted this dream. He had wondered why he was playing hopscotch.
Being a guard at the prison was a good job. Great pay and good health insurance, which he needed since Lily was due in three months. Pat Landry’s brother had put in a word, talked up Alvarez’s athletic ability, and after two interviews and a background check, he had the job. It wasn’t anything he had wanted for himself, but at twenty-three, he was married and a soon-to-be father. There was enormous relief at the chance of financial security. That didn’t mean he relished the idea of having to sheepdog murderers and rapists, but he couldn’t wait to start getting those paychecks.
Time went by slower than he’d ever thought possible. You know how they say that if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life? For Alvarez, each day he spent as a prison guard felt like triple the number of hours he was actually there, because even when he was at home he never really left the prison.
His days were no longer filled with the expectation of making a living with his talent, but he wasn’t totally without hope. His dreams, his gift of sight, had stopped showing him fame and football. Now, they showed him flying like a bird. One second he’d be standing, the next, he’d feel his feet leave the ground and he was soaring, weightless, looking down, feeling the wind in his hair on a bright blue day. This was good. Flying meant he could expect something lucky. Maybe a promotion or hitting the lottery. He didn’t know what, but he knew something was coming, and he needed to hold onto that. He loved Lily and their newborn, but he desperately needed something to hope for.
These inmates were far worse than he’d expected. Most of them had done things that Alvarez wouldn’t consider even on his darkest day, and they tended to do these things to people who couldn’t fight them off. Women, children, the elderly. One guy had been a nurse in a care facility and had done things to coma patients that should have gotten him the death penalty.
And then there was Rudy Teager, likely the most psychotic of the current inmates. Alvarez couldn’t imagine Teager ever being civilized enough to not be in a cage. He must have been an innocent child at some point, but when Alvarez pictured a five year-old Rudy Teager, it was as a spawn of Satan-type kid who would pull butterflies apart. At nineteen, Teager had broken into the home of a pregnant woman whose husband was working the nightshift. After the fun of kicking her to death with his steel-toed work boots, he wiped them clean with a baby blanket from the nursery and went to his shift at the refinery. The husband had come home and found his wife. Turned out, he and Teager worked at the same place, just different shifts.
Teager had been in high security for twenty years and was likely to be here another twenty. His parole had been denied twice. Of course, there was a high likelihood that he’d die in prison, which is what the guards always said would be the best outcome for society. Teager had spent his twenty years lifting weights, watching tv, reading, and assaulting weaker inmates. He was smart in a way that is more accurately called ‘devious’. To the outside world, he was nothing to admire. But here, instilling fear is worth admiring.
Alvarez clocked in for second shift on April 12th and said hello to Connor as he was clocking out.
“Got any plans?” Alvarez asked, just to be friendly.
“Going right to bed,” Connor grumbled. “I swear, when one person gets sick around here, everybody has it within hours.”
“Poor ventilation. Feel better, man.”
Alvarez went to the briefing and was surprised to hear himself being assigned to Tower 3. That was the watchtower nearest the front gate, and it meant that he would be assigned a rifle.
“Captain, I’ve only had a few hours of rifle instruction-”
“I know, so put all you’ve learned to good use. We’re working with a skeleton crew this afternoon. Guys are blowing chunks all over the place. Guards and inmates. Looks like a super flu, so you’ll at least get to be away from everyone up there. Go get your weapon.”
He was right about some kind of super-speed flu going round the prison. From Alvarez’s vantage point twenty-four feet up in the tower, he watched inmates vomiting on the basketball court and along the fences. Most of them would stagger a bit, then drop to their knees in exhaustion, but in a minute or two they were back up and sprinting around. They looked like hell, but they had more energy than ever, so it was some kind of flu he’d never seen before. Cellphones weren’t allowed on duty, so he couldn’t google and see if there were other reports in town. He kept calling in the locations of the sick but after thirty minutes the medical staff stopped acknowledging his reports.
Ramos staggered out to the yard around four o’clock and stood there taking deep breaths and Alvarez knew what was coming. He watched Ramos heave his lunch all over his uniform. Then he heaved again, and this time is was chunky and red.
Alvarez continued to follow protocol and called it in. No one answered. Things must be bad inside. He was glad now to have been assigned the tower, though he kept radioing for Ramos’ sake. Nobody should vomit up that much blood.
“Infirmary, this is Tower Three. Infirmary, this is Tower Three. We need staff to the North Yard. Repeat, medical staff to North Yard.”
He waited thirty seconds, then tried a different channel.
“Captain Wilson, this is Alvarez in Tower Three. Officer Ramos is down in the North Yard, needs assistance ASAP.”
The security door to the yard flew open. Of all the people who should have come, somehow Teager came jogging into the yard, unchained and unaccompanied. Now there was no doubt something was very wrong.
Before Alvarez could throw open the tower door and shoulder his rifle, Teager spotted Ramos kneeling on the ground and yakking up blood. Teager did a full-body tackle on the sick guard that ended with Ramos on his back and Teager on top looking like he would tear Ramos’ throat out. Now that Alvarez saw Teager in the full sun, he saw the man’s chin dripping blood and black teeth that were bared at Ramos.
“Teager! Off him or I’ll take your head off!” Alvarez bellowed down. It had no effect on what was happening, which was that Teager still had Ramos pinned, and while they were surely trash talking each other, they both had their necks stuck out and it looked like they were sniffing at each other. Alvarez yelled again.
“Teager! I said get off him or I’ll shoot!”
The inmate was determined to test the rookie, that was clear. He hadn’t budged.
Alvarez had hoped he would be able to get through his career without ever discharging his weapon but Ramos’ life was at stake. He aimed and shot Teager in the calf. The hole in the leg of the prison pants squirted out a weak fountain of black liquid, but Teager didn’t scream. Instead, his head whipped around as if the sound of the rifle was the only thing that interested him, not his leg wound. The color of Teager’s blood was frightening enough, but as Alvarez watched, his terror building upon itself like scaffolding, Teager sighted him standing at the tower railing and leapt to his feet in a second, doing a strange, ape-like run towards the tower.
Even more confusing was that Officer Ramos, his own face now dripping with black, was on his feet and running alongside Teager.
“Ramos, go inside! I’ll take care of him, get yourself to the infirmary! Ramos! Do you hear me?!”
Teager was climbing the tower stairs two and three steps at a time, and with Ramos directly behind him, Alvarez was in no position to get a clear shot that wouldn’t hit the officer too.
“Teager! Down! Down! Ramos, get the hell off the stairs, I can’t get a shot!”
The two men had nearly reached the platform, just eight steps from the top, when Teager spun round and delivered a sudden kick to Ramos’ face that sent him over the railing headfirst. He plummeted to the ground below in a way that should have shattered his skull and every vertebrae in his spine, but from his peripheral vision Alvarez saw Ramos slam into the ground, then jump back to his feet, spin around and go full tilt into the metal facility door like he thought he could drive his body right through it. Alvarez didn’t have time to wonder what was wrong with Ramos because Teager was charging up the final steps of the guard tower.
“Down, Teager! I swear, I’ll put one right in your skull!”
Alvarez was backed all the way to the outer wall of the guard house, his hands shaking just a little as he pointed the barrel at the inmate’s bloody face. Teager didn’t hesitate for a second. His cloudy eyes looked right into Alvarez’s terrified ones. He gnashed his gore-filled teeth and charged.
Alvarez fired, hitting Teager in the chest. Propulsions of black liquid splattered across Alvarez’s face and into his open mouth. It was pure instinct that made him cringe and spit in an attempt to get the filth out of his mouth, but it was already sliding down his throat. That half-second of disgust was enough to allow Teager to dart in and tear a chunk from Alvarez’s left bicep, stretching the meat and skin between his teeth until the mouthful snapped away in ropes of blood and saliva. Alvarez could only look down as it was happening. The rifle clattered down the tower steps.
He screamed pouring out his pain and horror in screams that he didn’t know he was capable of, and Alvarez continued screaming as the much larger Teager dug his filthy fingers into the wound and clawed out some stringy chunks to stuff in his mouth. Alvarez was penned in, he could only step a few inches to the left, and when he did this in an attempt to squeeze past, Teager howled in rage. He clenched Alvarez’s shoulder, his thumb digging into the wound, then grasped Alvarez’s right shoulder too. Alvarez couldn’t believe the pain as Teager squeezed, feeling that his bones would snap in the next second, but before that happened, Teager suddenly flung the guard over the railing.
As he fell to his death, many thoughts crossed Trey Alvarez’s mind. He thought of his wife and his baby son. He thought of his mother and his grandmother. And he felt the weightlessness of soaring through the air like a bird.
Thanks for all the good wishes for my mom. She’s home now, and after a month away, I was finally able to come home last night. It’s not over though. She starts with in-home physical rehab today. Anyway, thanks for your messages.
Hail Dio!
Next week: We’re looking at paranormal mysteries AND the horrors of Ernest Borgnine, and you know which deliciously horrifying movie I’m gonna dig into-The Devil’s Rain! The Devil’s Rain! Finally, the Borgnine/William Shatner melted candle movie!