5 Minute Fiction: Ice Cream Trucks And Zombie Clowns1

by Brandon Perkins

It probably wasn’t the smartest move to get in the ice cream truck and go — especially with the needle nearing “E”— sometimes though waiting just don’t cut it. We may have been safe inside that garage, but that safety only felt temporary: the zombie clowns kept gathering and it was only a matter of time before they found a way in. Once we broke through the garage door, it took approximately 2.5 seconds for us to run over the first of those smiling undead, red-nosed motherfuckers. This one’s hair had sprouted into an orange frizz that splattered on the ice cream truck’s windshield and his stretched-long floppy foot snapped off at the ankle under our back right wheel, steaming a fuscia-colored mist in the rear view mirror. My day had already gotten better.

“They’re everywhere!” my girlfriend screamed. “Do we have enough gas to outrun them? What if we get a flat tire? Can they get in here? Do these doors lock? What happens if they get in here?”

I didn’t answer, instead choosing just to drive and maim as many zombie clowns as I could. Their disease-stuck smiles infuriated me. The way their pigment-sucked skin flaked into a powder and clashed with swollen red lips, it mocked humanity. It mocked the very characteristic that the disease had stolen from them. I was too angry to worry. My girlfriend was right about one thing though, the possibility of a flat tire made me a little nervous. At the rate their swollen heads, hands, feet, and bellies were bursting below the ice cream truck, something was bound to blow. With each jarring jolt that lurched the truck and its contents—namely my girlfriend, her daughter and myself—I hoped with all my still-beating heart that each pop wasn’t rubber but the explosion of zombie clown flesh. So far so good.

So far so good, until a clown jumped up on the passenger side footing and my girlfriend shrieked while shielding little June Bug. Somewhere in the middle of her piercing monosyllable, she asked me what to do. The clown shined his sharp teeth and violently bit into the window repeatedly, fortunately to no avail but the streaks of undead blood and the rhythm of loud, knocking thuds were alarming. Reaching behind my seat for anything long and hard, I laughed at myself after saying “pause.”

“Pause, what?”

“Nevermind,” I said. “Here, take this and roll down the window a bit. Then jab the fucker right in the throat.”

They were weak in the throat and she took the broken broom handle and did just as I suggested. It was the first time I remembered her complying without the slightest of lip. I enjoyed it, but not nearly as much as the family of three clowns my ice cream truck ran down. I had a kill count of 25 and that plateau (which was surely going to be a mountain before the end of the road) officially made the truck mine. That I looted it from the economy’s suicide and society’s collapse no longer mattered. Killing clowns did and killing clowns is what I was doing. And Saffron got her first kill after the one she jabbed in the throat fell under our wheel.

“We need some killing music!” I shouted. “I gotta have something better on my iPod. I don’t need Rage Against the Machine or anything, but I’m not sure that François Hardy is gonna do it either. Oh! Unless you can find that one song with Jimmy Page, I can’t pronounce it — oh shit, did you see that clown’s head fall off on that mirror?— but baby, you know what song I’m talking about.”

“You really need that song right now?”

“I don’t need any specific song, I need to hear something that isn’t these clown heads under our tires. Well, I want to hear that, just not without some accompaniment.”

“I need something relaxing, all you have is fucking rap on this iPod. What’s wrong with you? June Bug is scared, she doesn’t need that street shit making her anymore anxious.”

“Mommy! My ears,” June Bug said, pointing to her ears.

“Yeah, see? June Bug is more worried about your language and argumentative nature than these silly circus freaks. She could take on 150 of them and live to tell the tale.”

“Hundred-fifty and live to tell the tale, Mommy.”

“Sorry about my potty mouth, June Bug,” she said before turning back to me. “But I’m not argumentative…whatever…how dare you. Just listen to your rap and get us out of here.”

That’s when the gas light turned on. I had never driven this particular ice cream truck before, or any commercial vehicle at all, but we were depending on its fuel to last the four remaining miles that were needed to get out of dodge. It was only a guess that those effected by the disease would be fewer and farther between outside of the city limits, but moving felt a whole hell of a lot better than just sitting there. Especially when movement included a whole trail of dead clowns.

The trail was piling higher every few seconds and all the smiling faces, decorated in disease and death, were starting to blend together. The occasional fat clown provided a noticeable change of events, rocking the ice cream truck with significantly more violence, and the child clowns momentarily reminded us of their former humanity, but the miles of unnatural skin color and deceiving laughter became nothing more than another patch of empty suburban houses. One foreclosed complex was just as impressionable as one giggling zombie, while I just tried to avoid the former and destroy the latter. While we were trapped in that garage and could hear their taunts from outside, I never thought that running over those clown motherfuckers with an ice cream truck could be boring — but it was starting to get that way.

At least until we hit the city center, where the clowns suddenly seemed to possess an increased ingenuity. I quickly started to miss that boredom. Somewhere between the Wal-Mart and the City Hall, they began attaching themselves to and then attacking the ice cream truck at an exponentially frenzied rate. I could see their fat hands and rosy noses in every piece of glass and hear their banging on every side of aluminum. It easily drowned out whatever rap song I wished wasn’t on my playlist.

“Well, June Bug,” I shouted and strained, “are you ready to take out your 150? Why don’t you guys find some weapons back there? Popsicles probably aren’t going to cut it.”

I quickly swerved the truck and felt it go up on two wheels before skidding back to the asphalt and shaking off a half dozen zombie clowns. The remaining bastards that managed to keep their hold on the ice cream truck were howling with laughter, maniacally escalating like a clan of underfed hyenas. That’s when the sliding window was finally smashed. Clad in a purple spotted shirt, I caught a glimpse of the clown wiggling his way inside the truck while my girlfriend and little June Bug wailed on him with broom sticks. He just kept laughing and I wondered if his silly shirt was donned before or after he came down with the disease that had brought upon this apocalypse.

“This isn’t working, can’t you do something? Hurry, he’s getting inside!”

“I’m driving, what do you want me to do? If we stop it’ll only get worse,” I gasped. “Aim for his throat.”

The clown then fell onto the floor, his laughter echoing inside the empty ice cream cabinets. His squeal continued even as my girlfriend was twisting the broken broom handle as it pierced his neck. The fuscia mist that used to be human blood was filling the ice cream truck. Within 90 seconds, I couldn’t see through the mist and realized that breathing it in was probably enough to finally catch the highly contagious disease. It’d take a few days before we knew for sure, so the more immediate problem was not being able to see the road. Opening the windows wasn’t an option, as the banging and knocking never ceased, and one “bleeding” clown was better than a handful of hungry ones.

“He’s dead—”

“Again?”

“Yeah, smart ass, this time for real, but I can’t see anything back here. June Bug, are you okay?”

“I’m scared, Mommy.”

“I know, baby. We’ll be okay.”

And then we weren’t. I’m not sure that we had hit a corpulent clown or some other road block, but the ice cream truck flipped and skidded on its side. When we came to a stop, everything was eerily silent for a few seconds. It was like no one involved in this dangerous farce could believe their luck or our lack of it. June Bug started to cry. And then her mother. The laughing got louder and some of the fuscia mist had dispersed through the broken windows. A zombie clown whose head looked bigger than my torso was on top of me before I had a chance to orient myself and unbuckle my seat belt. I guess we never really had chance to make it out of dodge.