So we're trying to go round robin with these little zombie chapters, but somehow I ended up with Leo and April in the same cycle.
This is Connie Nervegas, by the way. We'll post in the author's notes who wrote the chapter and I'll start changing the summary every time too.
You get bonus points if you can identify the obscure cultural reference buried in this story. If you win I'll tell everyone in the next author's notes that you got bonus points.
April switched on the CB radio and listened for a signal through the static. "Hello? Is anybody out there? Anybody still alive anyway?"
Static.
She wiped the sweat off her forehead with a dried up dishcloth and wondered if it she should try calling Raph's cell again. Usually he answered right away with a grunt. The last time she checked in with Don and Mikey in the Battleshell she'd heard Thriller playing loudly while Don howled along off-key and Mikey protested about senstivity to the loss of mankind.
"Do we have any fabric softener?" Leo asked as he carried an armful of her laundry to the basement stairs as if he were the maid.
She turned the knob on the CB radio and said to him over her shoulder, "We don't have a washing machine so it doesn't matter if there's any fabric softener. My stinky clothes can wait. Or you can break into the laundromat if you're that desperate to keep me from smelling bad."
He dropped them on the floor in a neat pile, picking up a stray sock and placing it on top of the pile like a cherry on top of a sundae. "It's not that you smell bad. Well, you do... But I mean, it might be safer for you if you smelled more like soap and less like normal human bodily fluids. Especially, this time of the month..."
She slowly turned around with one hand on her hip, her lower back aching from the dramatic gesture. "What is that supposed to mean?"
He sighed, toned arms hanging limply at his sides. "Don't you think your blood might attract them?"
"They're not sharks! Any human smells will attract them!" She turned around and poked the CB knob. "You know what's worse than having your period with no pads or tampons or washing machine for your bloody laundry when you're trapped with a bunch of clueless men in 90 plus degree heat and humanity is dying out due to a zombie apocalypse?"
Leo sat next to her, hands folded on his knee politely. "No. What?"
"Nothing!" she yelled as she tossed the dishrag across the room. She nearly burst into tears and then pictured all the people suffering and slowly dying all over the world, only be to reanimated as a corpse to haunt the living and decided to suck it up. A lack of tampons wasn't the worst problem in the world. "Any my legs are as hairy as a bear and it's so hot and my pants are all itchy and getting caught in my jeans!" She thought maybe that little issue would tip the scales to weigh as heavily as the loss of all mankind.
He put a hand awkwardly on her shoulder and gave it a pat. "You know, we should go raid a Wal-Mart or something or a house down the road when they get back with the Battleshell so that we can find you some nice things. You are our only female and we need to take good care of you!"
April smiled slightly at his wide-eyed partiality to her as their only surviving female in the area. "Yeah, well. I have a job to do. And I guess you could tell Don and Mikey to go take a washer and dryer from Sears on the way so that Don could have fun installing it and maybe it'll distract him from talking about rebuilding all of mankind for about two minutes."
"Holy shit, yes!" Leo exclaimed, throwing his hands in the air. "If I have to hear about breeding you with Casey and any other surviving men again I might strangle him. But then we'd be down one person for patrol, I suppose," he muttered. Then his face turned grave. "I shouldn't joke about death like that. It isn't necessary. Maybe I should punish him with katas every time I hear him doing it."
She turned off the CB radio and stiffly got out of the desk chair, joints cracking as she limped upright. "Don't worry. Sooner or later, Sensei will hearing him doing it and then he'll get it. He can't keep up the happy perky act all the time. And it's just a coping mechanism anyway. You know he's not thrilled about the extinction of mankind."
"Uh, huh," he mumbled as he looked out the window distractedly. "Raph would be here joining in, you know. 'Fuck humanity! What did they ever do for us?!' And then he's growl or something."
They both stood at the window looking out into the golden sunshine. It looked like any other late summer day. The earth didn't care what happened to them. It was reassuring that the earth didn't need them to survive. "You know he's okay. If anybody can survive traveling through a zombie apocalypse, it's Raph. He's probably cruising around on his motorcycle, flipping them off as he goes past."
Leo sighed sentimentally at the idea, rather than smiling or laughing. "Yeah, he's a beast, like that. But he's our beast. I wonder if he visited Johnny No Thumbs' shelter before he left. Probably forgot."
"Why don't we try to ring him up on the CB then?" April suggested, hoping to give Leo something to do. He didn't do well sitting at home, doing the housework with the woman of the family. He never complained, but he sighed a lot, which was worse.
He sat down and tuned the knob immediately. "Johnny No Thumbs? Hello? Do you read me? This is Leonardo of the Hamato Clan."
They both listened to the static and heard April listened to another random voice interfering that didn't make sense. Sometimes they picked up things that didn't make sense. Old signals dating from years before that nobody had bothered to take down or were now stuck playing until the facility lost power and the message ended. This time it was a French woman babbling French nonsense, followed by a mechanical voice spouting off numbers.
Then she heard a familiar oily voice say, "That you, Green Thing? Or is this Butch? Aren't you all green though? Yeah, this is Johnny. I just Bald Tony out looking for some toilet paper. All we have is one ply and it drive my wife up the wall. I can stand frying zombies with a flame thrower, but I can't take my wife bitching about the lousy toilet paper I got during the rush on the stores when things were getting bad."
"Tell her to use a leaf," Leo grumbled.
April slapped his arm. "I'm sorry. He's usually really polite."
"Billions of people are dead and all Mrs. No Thumbs cares about is cushy toilet paper?"
Johnny laughed as if he'd just heard a great joke. "Anyway though. How are things out on the farm? Butch there yet? He cleaned out most of my good stuff. I generously let him take the portable generator and some of the rations when he threatened to kill me."
Leo leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms behind his head. "You just let Raph stroll off with your best stuff? Didn't Bald Tony or Sue or Ho'opono? Where were they?"
There was a short pause and April assumed he was stuttering or coming up with an excuse. "Well, Sue was on a raid. He was pinned down by these goons on Fifth Avenue. They're holed up in Bergdorf Goodman around the Givenchy section. They're using the skinny mannequins as decoys at night. They put them outside and..."
April interrupted, "Well, if there are a ton of dangerous people out there, then move out to the country. Send Sue to get some supplies and head out this way or something."
"...Oh, yeah. Will do! Have fun picking corn out there. Say hello to Butch when he gets there," Johnny said as he logged off the CB Radio.
April and Leo gossiped about Johnny's thugs and Leo reckoned that he needed to replace them all if they let Raph walk in during a tantrum and steal their best supplies. April reminded him that most people are afraid of Raph. "You probably aren't since you've bathed with him since infancy."
She twiddled the dial, thinking she would stop for a while and read a book. Mostly they were old farmer's almanacs from the 1950's. But they were still full of amusing things.
She caught a faint blip on the radio. "Is anybody..." It sounded female.
Leo sat straight up in his chair, all four legs thudding to the floor. She said as clearly as possible through the statis, "Yes, we're here. Tell us where you are. We can send someone to find you."
The voice on the other line garbled out an address. Leo wrote it on the kitchen table's wooden surface in permanent marker in his haste to record the whereabouts of the new survivor and April scowled at him. She said, "We'll send our people to find you. Don't worry."
She turned off the machine just as the voice started again. She hoped it wasn't important information lost in the static.