Alive in a Dead World

“Sweet, thanks,” Mike told her, doing his best to smile back, but the munchies had taken a serious hold on his social skills and all he could do was concentrate on the treat.

“What do you want?” Paul asked cautiously.

“Nothing much,” Debbie answered coquettishly.

“Huh?” Mike asked, looking up, half a brownie in his mouth, chocolate on his cheek.

“You don’t get out much,” Debbie said, smiling. She wiped his cheek with a wet towel she had behind the counter.

“She wants in,” Paul said.

“In what?” Mike asked.

“Dude, get your face out of the brownie.”

“Sorry, man, I’m pretty hungry.”

“We just had dinner.”

“Yeah, but that was before.”

“Before what?” Debbie asked.

“Ah nothing,” Paul told her evasively. “Mike, Debbie here thinks we are up to something with Gert.”

“No,” Mike said, looking around. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I don’t want to play hardball, but I saw Paul trying to get into Gert’s room the night we all listened to a very loud rendition of ‘Running with the Devil’.”

“It’s ‘runnin’,” Mike corrected her.

“So you know what I’m talking about?” Debbie asked him.

“All I said was that it is a common misconception that the title is ‘Running’ when there is actually no ‘g’.”

“It’s your word against ours,” Paul told her.

“Do you think Gert’s going to need much more than that to get you two kicked out?”

Mike was busy finishing off his second brownie when Paul agreed to let Debbie in on the next prank.

“When?” Debbie asked, joining them at a small table tucked away in the shadows of the small shop.

Mike could not get over the feeling that they were spies in German occupied France during WWII as they discussed their plan. Some was due to the subject matter they were studying, but a larger portion revolved around the magic bud they had enjoyed fifteen minutes ago.

“We have to lay low for a couple of days. He’s so high-strung right now that whenever someone’s door opens, he yanks his open. It’s pretty friggin’ funny,” Mike said, having a hard time not snorting.

“He scared the shit out me the other morning,” Paul said. “I was going down to take a shower, I don’t even know how he heard me, but I was right next to his door when he jumped out and told me he ‘Got me.’ Dropped my shampoo and everything. I know he’s close to losing it because he actually apologized.”

“Don’t you feel bad?” Deb asked us.

“A little, but it’s him or us, and I’d rather it was him,” Mike said, and Paul nodded. “I don’t want him to go all Hara Kari on himself or Texas library roof., I just want him to relinquish his job as dorm douche. Oops! Sorry.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Deb laughed. “Both of my parents were in the Navy.”

They had left it at that point and promised to reconvene their clandestine meeting two days hence. Either that was too long or Deb was too amped up, but she decided to take matters into her own hands.

“What’s going on?” Paul asked Deb as he came up to the dorm room after his Sociology class.

The entire population of the dorm occupants were milling around outside.

“Hey, buddy,” Mike said, tossing a football in the air. “I was sleeping, and someone pulled the damn fire alarm.”

“Didn’t you have English Lit?” Paul asked.

“Was that today?” Mike asked, throwing the ball back up in the air.

“I know it was you!” A soaking wet, towel-clad Gert yelled at Mike as he dropped the ball from the distraction. “I can’t prove it, but I will. You super-glued my lock and I couldn’t get in after my shower!”

“Whoa! Hold on there, boss! I didn’t even think you European types showered,” Mike said.

“You think this is funny? You freshman turd! I’m freezing my ass off in a towel.”

“I actually think it’s hilarious, but I still don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, Jert,” Mike said.

“It is Gert, Gert Hans. And I promise you that I will have you and your roommate thrown out of this school.”

“Listen, Hansel, I was sleeping. I was having this weird-ass dream about huge Pop-Tarts. I have no idea why you are out here soaking wet and in a towel. And why do you not have flip-flops on? Oh, please don’t tell me that you go into a public shower without footwear? That is just disgusting. That’s how people get foot fungus. Man, you’ve been in school long enough! Haven’t you learned anything?”

Gert was so sure that he had nailed Mike, that he was completely put off by Mike going on the offensive.

“I know you did it,” he said weakly. “I know you did everything.”

“I’m a little sick of your accusations. You’ve written us up five times for puissant violations and now our academic careers hang in the balance because you’re a control freak. My roomie and I have walked the straight and narrow for almost three weeks. I was hoping for some congratulations, but instead, you accuse us of even more trouble-making. I’m sure the list of folks who loathe you is a relatively long one. Maybe you should go back and rethink who else would do this to you.”

Gert stood there, anger flaring, his skin tone changing hues, from blistering blue to raging red. Paul was certain Gert was about to go ballistic.

“Um,” Debbie interjected into the testosterone fray.

“What?!” Gert spat.

“Umm, you’ve got a little something hanging out,” she said, pointing down.

Gert was so lost in his anger, he did not know what she was talking about.

Mike looked down and then made his pinkie finger fold and unfold. “The lady said you have a little something showing,” Mike laughed.

Paul almost went to his knees, tears running from his eyes as Gert’s red rage turned to a fevered flush when he realized he had just exposed himself to a girl.

“You know, I’d say you could get in a lot of trouble for that if we had actually been able to see anything,” Mike yelled to Gert’s retreating back.

“What did you do?” Paul asked Mike.

“Dude, I’m serious. I was snoozing hard,” Mike answered his friend.

Paul turned to Deb who was now wearing a wicked smile. “What did you do?”

“Pretty much everything he said Mike did. I waited until I saw him head for the shower, then I went and shoved half a tube of super glue into his door lock. Then I waited until I was pretty sure he had just lathered up his head in shampoo, then I pulled the fire alarm.”

“That’s kind of risky; what if someone had seen you?” Mike asked her.

“I went to the third floor lounge and did it. No one ever goes there unless it’s to study and nobody does that at three on a Friday afternoon.”

“I thought we agreed to wait a couple of days?” Paul asked her.

“I did, but I changed my mind.”

“Nice.” Mike said, shaking his head in disbelief. “He looks like he’s about to cry.”

Gert was over by the fire truck, yelling at whoever would listen that someone had pulled the alarm on purpose and that they just wanted him to come out into the cold weather in merely a towel. The fireman was hardly even acknowledging his existence as he checked on the truck equipment.

“I need to get back inside before I catch pneumonia!” Gert was screaming now.

“Listen, kid,” the fire captain was saying. “We’ll let everyone including you in when we are convinced it’s not a real alarm.”

“I’m telling you it was not. It was pulled specifically while I was in the shower so that I would have to come out here like this. I even tried to go back to my room, but I could not get back in.”

“Dankins,” the chief yelled over to one of his subordinates. “Could you please get this kid a jacket and shut him up? I’ve got better things to do than play baby sitter with him.” And he walked away.

Gert looked like a war refugee, all wrapped up in an oversized fireman jacket, huddled up on the stoop of the truck. Paul and Mike didn’t know if Gert’s winning charm had won the captain over, but it seemed to them to be one of the longest fire alarm resets that they had ever been through.

“Man, he is never going to take a shower again,” Paul said, as the three of them sat in Debbie’s dorm room.

“I wasn’t kidding when I called him on the whole taking a shower thing anyway,” Mike said. “He always smells like ripe sauerkraut.”

“That’s so gross,” Deb said, holding her nose.

“Great prank by the way,” Mike told her, and she blushed slightly.

“Thank you,” she said, doing a small curtsy, that did not go unnoticed by Gert.

He did not know for what reason she had performed the small bow, but that she was flaunting her body to those two good-for-nothings infuriated him.

The trio laid off Gert for close to two weeks. The guy was wound so tight, he wouldn’t even go out anymore to get food. He had delivery come two weeks straight.

“I don’t think he’s even been to class,” Paul said to Mike as they watched the Chinese food deliveryman leave the building.

“Was that for Gert?” Deb asked, catching up to the two boys and pointing back towards the driver who had gotten in his car and was getting ready to leave.

“Yeah, that’s the third order of Chinese this week,” Mike said.

“I almost feel kind of sorry for him,” Deb said.

“You should. You’re the one that gave him the flu,” Paul said.

“He should have gotten a shot like the rest of us,” Mike said, absently rubbing his arm where the vaccine had been administered a month prior.

“Are you going to keep messing with him?” Deb asked.

“Hey, you’re the one that brought it to a whole new level,” Mike told her.

“Maybe we should stop, maybe he’s finally figured out that he can’t just do whatever he wants around here because he has a clipboard,” Paul said.

“That’s two warnings!” They could hear Gert yelling from the hallway. “One for keeping an excess of garbage in your room and the other for not making your bed!”

“Not making your bed? What the hell is he talking about?” Paul said as the three went over to the door and looked out.

Residents up and down the hallway were looking to the fuss, Gert was walking into rooms and going ballistic, writing students up for infractions that he seemed to be making up as he wrote.

Most students got the message and began to close their doors, hoping to escape the wrath of Gert Gone Mad. Paul was one of them.

“Leave it open,” Mike said.

“What are you doing, Mike? Look at him; he’ll write you up for your shirt,” Paul nearly whined.

“What’s wrong with Ozzy Osbourne?” Mike asked.

“Fine. I’m going to start packing my things.”

Gert was making a beeline for the only door still open. Mike stepped in his way just as Gert was about to enter.

“Whoa there, pardner,” Mike said with a Southern drawl. “Where you going in such a hurry?”

“Mandatory room inspection!” Gert was nearly frothing at the mouth, his pen was already making contact with the clipboard.

“On whose authority, Gert?” Mike asked him.

“What?! You dare to stop me!? On my own damn authority!” Gert raged, and then made a motion to push past Mike.

“Listen, asshole,” Mike said, pushing Gert across the hallway to the far wall. “I’m going to say this real soft so that you can’t subpoena any witnesses, so pay attention.” Mike got right up to his ear. “You ever try to enter my room without my permission, I will beat you to within 2.58 centimeters of your worthless existence.”

The rage in Gert’s eyes cleared for a moment as he looked into Mike’s eyes, trying to ascertain if this were an idle threat and whether he should continue with his mission as planned.

The tension in Gert’s bunched muscles eased as he realized this might not be the best time to make his last stand.

“This isn’t done, Talbot, all I need is one more infraction and you and your halfwit friend are out of here. And I’ve got a feeling that neither of you idiots will make it another week.”

Mike released Gert from his grip and left him to weasel away to another unsuspecting victim.

“What happened?” Paul asked, pulling Mike in the room and closing the door.

“We’ve got to keep pressing his buttons,” Mike said. “One of us is close to leaving and we need to make sure it’s him. That dude is a whole suit short of a standard deck.”

“Looks like all you get when you stretch an asshole to its limits is just a bigger asshole,” Deb said.

Mike stopped what he was thinking about, he looked over at Deb before he busted out laughing.

“What?” Debbie said, blushing, not sure exactly what she said to elicit such a response.

Paul had joined in with Mike and once tears started to flow, Deb joined in, not even sure what for.

It was the seemingly least innocuous prank that finally pushed Gert to his limit and the trio had nothing to do with it. The local chapter of Iota Gamma Upsilon sorority (or more commonly known by the call letters of their house as I Go Upstairs, a reference that many had found to be a truism much to the delight of all the party goers) saw to that. As an initiation right to their pledges, they had given each one a giant container of Vaseline and told them to use it around campus in any manner they saw fitting, but to not come back until the tub was empty.

Randi Betcher had used the container in a way that half the basketball team and part of the track team would not soon forget, but that is a tale for a much different kind of book. Wendy Treadman had decided that spreading the sticky gel on the door handles at every residence at the James House dormitory was just absolutely the funniest thing since just about ever!

She had just finished up and was heading out the door when Gert had hit her shoulder, nearly knocking the plastic jar to the ground.

“Watch it!” Gert had sneered at her.

She was going to call him a big fat jerk, but she told her best friend, Jenny, that he had crazy eyes and she just wanted to get away from there.

Gert had just received his first grade of C in his entire academic career and could not even begin to process the information. He had nearly needed to be tossed from the class when he got loud with the professor, arguing that he could not come to class because there were people out to get him.

Professor Garrity had told him that he needed to get some help and that maybe he should just go home and get some rest.

Gert had mumbled to himself the entire walk from the far side of campus. He had wanted to hit the little Humpty Dumpty girl that had gotten in his way as he walked into his dorm. When he made it to his room and his hand came down and made contact with the Vaseline on his door handle, something inside of Gert quite literally snapped. Had anyone been close enough to listen, they might have been able to hear it.

He didn’t scream, his normal and usual venting mechanism; this time he internalized it. Gert tossed his book bag, smashing his floor lamp which landed on top of his illegal toaster oven, something he had purchased since the attacks so he would not have to leave for dinner. Gert leaned up against the door, his ear pressed firmly against the cool metal, the first person that walked by his room was the guilty party; he was convinced of it.

Soft footsteps padded down the hallway. “Gotcha, mother fucker,” he breathed out softly. He waited until he was sure the guilty party was outside his doorway doing all sorts of unspeakable things against him again.

Gert ripped the door open. “I know what you did,” he said calmly enough, but the red-rimmed eyes and clenched fists belied his demeanor.

Debbie stared back at him in shock and a growing sense of foreboding. How could he know? I’m going to get thrown out of school for this.

Gert was somewhat taken aback when he saw Debbie standing there. He knew that she secretly had a crush on Mike Talbot, that asshole, but could she be in on the pranks with him? Of course! It all makes sense that she would be, probably trying to impress him, I’ll fucking show her.

“I need you to come in here so that we can discuss this.” His words were calm enough, but emotions swirled like a whirlwind inside.

Debbie felt trapped, but maybe she could mitigate the damage. She stepped into his room, Gert looked up and down the hallway for any witnesses, then quickly shut the door.

“Please sit,” Gert said motioning to his desk chair.

Debbie noticed the tossed book bag and shattered lamp, and for the first time since seeing Gert at the doorway, she took a long at the Resident Assistant. He looked bad, in fact, worse than bad. His eyes were streaked with thick heavy lines of red, his sockets were sunken and his features were even pale for a man of European descent.

“I need to go,” Debbie said, just realizing that she was in the den of the enemy.

Gert slapped her so hard, she thought she could hear her fillings rattle. Should have taken better care of my teeth was her only thought as she sat hard in the chair, the momentum of her fall sending the chair rolling for a couple of feet until the rollers came in contact with Gert’s throw rug and then her neck snapped back.

Gert was on her before she could defend herself. His heavy blows rained down on her. She wanted to scream, but Gert had delivered a shot to her stomach and she found herself devoid of sufficient air to produce sound.

Gert pushed Debbie off the chair and onto his bed. “Now I will show you how I discipline bad people the correct way,” he said as he began to pull his belt off.

“Please, no,” Deb said, weakly holding her hands up to defend herself.

Mike had left class early. He had been having another major disagreement with, his what? What was she truly to him? He didn’t know. They dated, they had fun and they were intimate, but she was in a committed, long-term relationship with a football player from a distant college. Oh man, I’m the OTHER guy in this relationship, he moaned.

He could think of worse ways to be used, but even though he was a guy, he wanted more out of the relationship. They were going to a concert next week, maybe he would give her an ultimatum then. Or not, he thought sourly because he would rather take a piece than nothing at all.

It was these thoughts he was thinking as he got his key out to enter into his room, but the key ring caught on his pocket and fell to the ground. “Fucker,” Mike said as he bent down to pick them up.

He heard a loud “thwack” as he stood back up. He was staring straight at Gert’s door. What is that crazy bastard doing? Another thwack, this one immediately followed by a low groan of a female.

What the fuck? Mike thought in alarm. Maybe if Gert had got laid once in a while he wouldn’t be such a butt dart. But this didn’t sound like any kind of lovemaking Mike had ever heard of. Mike was moments away from saying that this was none of his business. He was afraid he was going to go down the hallway and open that door and a leather-clad Gert would be holding a whip. Then, after he found out this was part of Gert’s sexual escapades, Gert would do the unthinkable and turn around to expose his assless chaps. That would be something Mike would never be able to burn out of his cortex no matter how many bowls of weed he smoked.

Another thwack. Mike jumped back startled, but the barely audible “Please stop,” galvanized his resolve.

He almost squinted when he opened the door in the belief that if he was about to see something he didn’t want to, his eyes would be closer to being completely drawn and he might be able to salvage the ability to eat the next week. Mike was completely caught off guard when he cautiously opened the door and saw Gert standing by his bed, hand raised high with a belt ready to deliver another blow.

“Umm, hi Gert, um your door was open and I…”

Gert turned around, his face pulled back in a mask of rage.

Holy shit! Mike thought. He was scared. He felt like his balls had just been dipped in ice water independent of the rest of his body.

A swollen-faced Debbie peered from around Gert’s frame, her hand came up pleadingly. “He’s insane, help me,” she muttered.

Mike became enraged as recognition of what was happening here rapidly dawned on him. The time for words was over. Mike charged Gert, every muscle, every tendon, every spurt of adrenaline surged in the reflex to protect Debbie. Gert was slow to change the course of his force and only half turned by the time Mike had crossed the distance of the room, slamming into the side of him at a full sprint.

Gert’s right leg caught on the rug as the force of Mike’s dive nailed him in the side and the two fell onto the bed next to Debbie. Gert’s lower leg was pinned against the oak side rail. The resultant snap did little to stop Mike as he mashed his fist repeatedly into Gert’s bloodied face.

“I will fucking kill you!” Mike raged, his knuckles bleeding and scraped to the bone from making so many connecting hits.

It was Paul that pulled his friend from the now passed-out form of Gert, saving his friend from a manslaughter charge. Gert’s attorneys did try to charge Mike with assault, but the judge threw it out. Gert got expelled from college. Once his leg healed sufficiently, Gert had to do a mandatory thirty-day psych eval which ended up being a one hundred and eighty-day stay at a sanitarium and five years of probation.

After that, they never did find out what happened to Gert, but like all things in life, they thought he might be back someday. Debbie went home for a couple of weeks and Mike was fearful that his plan to get rid of Gert would also get rid of his new friend. Mike couldn’t believe his happiness when Deb finally did come back, so much so, that he was happy he had given his “sort of girlfriend” the ultimatum that he had. The girl had said she wouldn’t break up with her boyfriend, so Mike broke it off with her. They missed the concert, but how big of a deal was that anyway? Now he was free to pursue whomever he desired and he gave Deb a huge hug when she got out of the passenger seat of her mother’s car.

“Good to see you!” He had been so thrilled, he accidentally/on purpose kissed her lips. Both of them had blushed when they realized Debbie’s mother was watching.

“Um, Mom? This is the boy that saved me.”

Mrs. Branch’s face quickly turned warm as she came over to give Mike a hug. “Thank you for helping my daughter.”

“You’re welcome,” Mike said, slightly embarrassed.

And that had been the start of a particularly warm and loving relationship for Mike.

***

Paul couldn’t understand why he got the “warm and fuzzies” when he thought about it. Maybe I’m just expressing my feminine side, he thought as he once again struggled with the door, hoping that he could marshal up more masculine traits at the moment and force the door open.

Paul was able to pull the door open just as the zombie made it onto the landing with him. Paul squeezed between the storm door and the front door. The zombie was intent on making a “Paul Panini” as it pressed up against the storm door with all of its murderous intent. Paul was staring eye to eye with the monster, his nose skewed at an angle from the pressure being applied to him. Shredded bits of used diapers spilled from the mouth of the zombie. Paul could not imagine anything much grosser except maybe walking in on his parents making love, but he wasn’t even gonna go there.

Paul reached behind him with his left hand for the doorknob, while with his right arm he tried to keep the zombie from pressing him into the grain of the front door. His hand, at first, could find no purchase, but as he frantically moved his hand back and forth across the handle and more detritus fell off, he finally made a friction-full attempt. His heart leapt as the handle turned and quickly plummeted when he felt himself falling inwards. Paul was able to pull his shot foot up over the front step and into the house. He was not so lucky with the other as the zombie pressed its attack and wedged Paul’s ankle between the storm door and the step.

The fulcrum that was Paul’s weight as it fell backward was easily enough leverage to apply the needed amount of pressure to snap the bottom part of his leg. His foot now dangled at a useless ninety degree angle from the rest of his prone body. Paul’s screams of pain reverberated in the house. He began to hyperventilate as he was having difficulty catching his breath. The pain was a fire that burned all rational thought from his mind. The zombie kept forcing the door against Paul’s useless leg. It was like adding a fresh dose of salt on a newly whelped whipping welt each time the zombie forced the door on his leg.

Paul instinctually kicked out with his “good” leg, barely even able to register the slight spike in pain when the wound made contact with the storm door. The blow had the desired effect as it pushed the zombie away from the door. Paul was able to drag his broken leg in through the opening, crying anew as the splintered bones came back in contact with their newly departed brethren and his leg was once again in the straight position on the foyer floor.

Glass from the storm door shattered as the zombie crashed back into it. The zombie was trying to reach its hands in. Paul screamed as he placed his hands down on broken glass. He pushed back and with a bloody hand, he slammed the front door. The leading edge of the front door clipped his broken leg as it swung shut. The pain was too intense for Paul, his body shut down in an attempt to keep him from going into shock. Paul laid there with his shredded hands, broken leg, sprained ankle and a bullet wound, his body fighting to restore some order. Paul could not and did not notice the small shadows that crossed his path as he lay helpless.

Chapter Twenty-One – Mike Journal Entry 12

It was hours later when Mary finally called Josh downstairs to eat, and I thought it would be a little weird if I stayed upstairs and played with his Lego’s by myself. As it was, it had been a brief, enjoyable respite from the horrors of the last few months. We created all sorts of alternate worlds with the plastic building blocks. Every last one of them did not contain a zombie, not a one.

The table was set with a meal consisting of an MRE and was as presentable as possible, considering the nature of the product being used. I pulled out a chair to sit with the rest of the dinner attendees when Mary spoke.

“That chair isn’t for you,” she said disdainfully.

“Okay,” I said furrowing my eyebrows. “Who is it for then?”

“BT,” she said as she tore a cheese packet with her teeth.

“You know he’s still asleep, right? I just passed him on the way in here and he’s snoring so loud, it sounds like he’s clearing a forest.”

“The fact remains that it is his seat,” she repeated.

“Okay.” My eyebrows still furrowed. I was missing something, but I had not a clue as to what.

Mrs. Deneaux was at the head of the table and was looking directly at me. She was smiling as she forked in a large portion of military surplus ham steak.

“Can I eat?” I asked Mary.

“You’ve worn out your welcome,” she said, looking at me with a piercing stare.

“Mom?!” Josh rang out. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Hush, honey. Eat your dinner.”

Josh stood up and began to walk away from the table. “I’ll eat when he does.”

“You’ll sit down and do what I say, young man!” she yelled. “What have you said to him?” She turned venomous on me.

“We were building spaceships with Lego’s,” I said, backing up. “The only thing I said to him was how cool his ship had come out, and once or twice I asked him for a certain piece. What the hell is going on? I don’t know you well enough to illicit this response. I mean, sure if you spent the time to really get to know me, I’d be able to do this to you on a fairly routine basis.” I was shooting for humor, but ended up with a self-inflicted wound. She stared back flatly at me.

“We’ll be leaving tomorrow,” I told her.

“We are?” Gary asked, I noticed he had not stopped eating his meal. I wanted to thank him for his solidarity.

“You can’t!” Josh cried.

“What about BT? Is he ready to go?” Gary asked around a mouthful of something that resembled meat. “And Paul? We still need to find him.”

It was quicker than a cobra strike and could have been as lethal, the look that Deneaux shot at Gary.

My brain was tossing all this info together in the washing machine of my mind, but no matter how much spin I put on it, it still kept coming out dirty and stained. Deneaux had planted bad seeds about me in Mary’s head. Deneaux wanted us kicked out of here, but why? My mind began to spin faster, not just out of here, meaning this house, but out of here, meaning this city. She was covering something up and all that it could be was Paul. Brian was a dead zombie. How he became a zombie could be debated and how he was shot was up for question also, but the fact remained he had been a zombie and Deneaux had every right to dispatch of him. Clinical word I told my brain as I thought of my former ally in survival.

“Two days,” I told Mary, but her head was shaking in the negative. “I need two days. Tomorrow we will go out all day, looking for my friend.” Deneaux’s fork hesitated for a split second as it traveled to her pursed, shriveled lips.

She put her full fork down on her Chinette plate.

“Really, Michael, you just told her that we would be leaving tomorrow. I do not think it is fair to her that you should put her and her son in this much danger.”

“Thank you, Vivian,” Mary said, reaching out and clasping Deneaux’s claw, I mean, hand.

I looked at Deneaux with my “I know what you’re trying to do” gaze. She merely smiled.

“Fine, tomorrow it is,” I told Mary. Deneaux’s smile grew further, I was afraid her paper thin skin was going to tear as it stretched beyond its limits. “We’ll move to your neighbor’s house.” Deneaux’s smile evaporated.

Mary shot from her seat. “You can’t!”

“Sure I can. Who do you think you are to tell me where I can set up my base of operations?”

“That’s too close!” she yelled again.

“I’ve got one friend who is missing and another that hasn’t awakened in hours. And you’ve seen the size of him. How far do you think I can carry him? I’m not going very far until I get both issues resolved,” I said to Mary as much as I did Deneaux.

Mary plopped down in her seat, cupping her head in her hands. “Two days and you promise you’ll go?”

“I’ll leave this house and your general vicinity, yes,” I told her.

“That’ll have to do,” she answered solemnly.

“Yes,” Josh said, pumping his fist.

“Can I eat now?”

“Not at the table,” she said without removing her head from her hands.

That was fine with me. If I wasn’t with my immediate family, I preferred to eat alone. I didn’t generally like people enough to break bread with them and make idle chit chat about things I didn’t give a crap about; and don’t get me started if I came across signs of uncleanliness on their utensils or dishes. It was best to not go down a road lined with potholes, when holding such a fragile, glass-wrapped psyche like my own.

I grabbed BT’s MRE off the table before she could object and headed into the living room. Josh was immediately on my heels. Mary had not stopped him, probably hadn’t pulled her head up yet to take note. BT slumbered on as I tore open the near nuclear-proof plastic wrapping.

I don’t know how many of you have ever had dealings with MREs, but if you’ve survived this long, then you, my friend, are a survivalist and EVERY survivalist has at one time or another had an MRE, whether from the military or an Army/Navy surplus store. (You know those places that were located in the worst parts of every town and the guy behind the counter looks suspiciously at every customer like they could be the feds come to get his secret cache of hand grenades and rocket launchers in the back room.)

If, on the off chance that you have somehow made it this far without one, I will relate a short story. When I was in Marine Corps boot camp, eating was one of the only events that any recruit could sort of look forward to. I say “sort of” because we generally were not allowed to finish any meal. I can, without even thinking about it, honestly tell you that I threw more food away during my three and a half months of boot camp than I actually ate.

When we went to the dining halls, there was a chance I would get to shovel as much food into my mouth before the DIs would start barking at us to get back outside and in military formation. The times we spent out in the field without access to a dining hall, however, were times of depravation and starvation. The DIs would put a box of MREs out in a field, usually somewhere in the neighborhood of one hundred or so yards away, and then tell us that we had five minutes to eat. So, we would race out to the box and tear into it, which in itself takes a little to get through. Removing the metal banding straps without tools was always a good time to see who would bleed first, then as the piñata of meals fell to the ground, it was a scramble to grab a meal. There was not the luxury of choosing one particular meal over another. Did I tell you this one little tidbit? There are twelve meals in an MRE case and we had two boxes. There were thirty Marine recruits in my platoon, easy enough math. You think people fighting for a stupid, sold-out, hot toy during Christmas is fierce? Tell a starving Marine you just took the last meal.

Looking back on it, the ones that didn’t get the meal were probably better off. I can’t tell you how many fingernails I tore, trying to tear through the five mm gauge, sealed-by-a-glue-fanatic bags. Ripping with teeth was perhaps marginally better, chipped tooth, bleeding fingers, to-MAY-toe, to-MAH-toe, just give me my fucking food! Alright, so let’s see where we are. Sprint to box, five guys trying desperately to crack boxes open, ensuing fight for insufficient meals as they spill to the dirt, check so far. So now you have battled and won a meal and are hiding your kill from your fellow predators. You have successfully torn through the hard exterior carcass to get at the “meat and potatoes” so to speak. It doesn’t matter much whether it is wombat or porcupine meat, you’re going to eat it.

By this point, three of the five allotted minutes have been used up, and now for the topper. Apparently, Marine DIs do not make much money because they cannot afford watches that keep particularly good time. I would finally be at a point where I could rip open the food’s foil container and squeeze food down my gullet (forget the plastic utensils, forget chewing, this was all about sustenance) when the DIs would start screaming at us to assemble. Now some of you may not have ever joined the services. That is fine; we all walk our own path in life, some of you may have chosen the Army, or were maybe a little smarter and went to the Navy or quite possibly, you were a genius and joined the Air Force. But I was in the Marines. When your DI screamed at you to be somewhere you did it, no questions asked.

The gut-crippling clutches of hunger were far outweighed by the prospect of suffering the wrath of a DI who felt you had wronged him. Some of you sneakier souls are thinking, don’t those camis have dozens of pockets? Yes, they do. Then why not shove your uneaten food in those and eat them later? Any former Marines want to answer this one? Because, my dear reader, DIs know about pockets and they know about what lengths a desperate starving recruit will go to. You would be treated less harshly in the real world if you had just killed a cop and his partner caught you first and was alone with you for a half hour before his back-up got there.

Some of you may scoff at that analogy, I had to stand at the position of attention while the recruit next to me suffered the wrath of two DIs for trying to heist a jelly packet that he had shoved down his trousers. By the time they were done with him, well let’s just say that the jelly packet would have been the only thing he would have been able to eat.

***

I ended up with a beef stew MRE packet. Think Dinty Moore, but gross. The fat congealed at the top of the packet was the thickest part of the whole meal, including the mystery meat. I ate everything, I was famished. I looked over to BT, who was still sleeping. It left me wondering if getting Tomas into the mix was a good call or not. I had no viable alternative, but still it nagged at me; knowledge is power and now Tomas had some. Life was already precarious. Why I felt the need to keep digging holes around the lip of the precipice was beyond me.

I could hear Deneaux in the next room trying to comfort Mary. It was like listening to a snake tell its prey that everything would be alright. Sure, for the snake it would be. I was staring so hard at BT, I wasn’t even looking at him anymore, if that makes any sense. I never noticed when his eyes opened.

“You scare me sometimes,” BT said, his vocal chords sounding coarse and dry.

I quickly pulled my thousand-yard stare back in. “Yeah, well you do that to me all the time.”

“So we’re here a few more days?” he asked as he pulled himself up to a sitting position.

“What’d you hear?” I asked him.

“Enough to know that you must have stomped all over Deneaux’s prized azaleas. She does not like you.”

“It’s more than that, I agree she’s not a fan, but there’s something more. Do you have enough strength to head upstairs?” BT nodded. “I figure the old bat has ears like one.”

Josh laughed.

“Josh is everything all right in there?” Mary called.

“You really shouldn’t let him get too much influence from Michael. He sets bad examples,” Deneaux chirped into Mary’s ear.

“Tell me again why you decided to come with us?” I asked, before she could respond, I continued on. “Or better yet, why did I allow you to come with us?”

I could hear her over-exaggerated heavy sigh from where I was.

“Mom, I’m fine, we’re going to play with my Lego’s again,” Josh said, winking to me.

“Be careful,” Mary said.

“From the Lego’s?” Josh asked, completely confused.

“You know what I mean,” she answered.

Josh shrugged his shoulders and mouthed, “No, I don’t” to me.

“I do,” I soundlessly worded to him and then waved him to go upstairs.

BT followed, the big man was moving slowly and had to take a break halfway up the stairs.

“You alright?” I asked him from the top of the stairs.

“I didn’t know you cared,” he said a little more heatedly than perhaps he meant to, as he apologized when he got up to me. “I’m sorry, man, I feel like I’ve got the flu, without all the phlegm.”

“Gross,” Josh said. “Come on,” he said, pushing the door to his room open.

BT almost crashed into a rendition of a B-1 bomber as he headed straight for the bed to plop down on it. Josh’s bed creaked and groaned from a pressure it had not been designed to bear. Josh and I stared for a few seconds waiting for the resultant collapse.

BT, getting wind of what we were doing, spoke. “It’ll hold,” he growled, and as if intimidated by his words, the bed did as it was told.

“Can I stay?” Josh asked. “I know you guys came up here to talk and get away from the women, but I’m a man too, so I should be here.”

“It’s your house, my man,” BT said. “I don’t see why not.”

I was more inclined to send him packing for a few minutes, but I don’t think he was going to do any heart to heart talking with Deneaux anytime soon.

“What’s going on, Mike?” BT asked. “I caught some of her conversation with Mary, but I kept drifting in and out. All I could really tell is that she wants to get out of here as quick as possible.”

“It’s nothing concrete, BT, but she’s trying to cover her tracks.” I related the story of finding Brian and how he was facing away AFTER she had called him, and how she now was in possession of Paul’s rifle. I also mentioned how she had said she was alone, but the house she was staying in provided clues to the contrary. “It’s nothing but a suspicion, but she did something she’s trying to cover up and she wants us to leave the scene of the crime before we turn up any evidence.”

“Brian’s dead,” BT said wiping his hand down his face. “Man, I almost don’t want to go back to your brother’s and see what this does to Cindy.”

“I cannot leave here until I know about Paul. There’s no way I could look Erin in the face and tell her that I have absolutely no clue what happened to her husband and my best friend.”

“So Brian was a zombie? Why lie about anything to do with that then?” BT asked confused. “Could the bullet have spun him around or anything?”

I looked over to Josh before I replied. “Exit wound was on his face.”

“Gross,” Josh said, I agreed implicitly.

“She’s acting so shifty, even more so than usual. I don’t have a good feeling about Paul.” I hitched a little, I’m still mostly human I thought, I’m still entitled to have feelings. “I’ve known him for thirty years. I owe it to him at the very least to find out what happened.”

“You’ve got to prepare yourself for the real possibility that he is no longer with us,” BT said tenderly.

“I know that man, I do. With a rifle, Paul wasn’t a huge threat; well without…” I didn’t, I couldn’t finish the damn sentence.

“I’d like to head out with you in the morning,” BT said. “Help look for him.”

“Me too,” Josh threw in before I could even tell BT no.

“No, on both counts.”

“You gonna stop me?” BT said, trying to rise up off the bed and use his height advantage as a mitigating factor.

“BT, Josh could stop you right now.”

Josh looked over at me like maybe I shouldn’t be throwing him under the bus quite like that.

“Dammit, Mike! I’m as weak as you right now,” BT said, cursing. “I can barely move.”

I didn’t rise to his bait, I did think about putting him in a headlock though, just because I thought I could probably take him. But merely to gaze upon the man is to feel intimidation. “You sure you never played in the NFL?”

“Why? Because I’m big and I’m black?” BT said with some force.

I thought about it. “Well, yeah.”

He laughed. “Played some college ball, had some pro scouts interested. It never went any further.”

And he dropped it, I don’t know if there was no more to add or he didn’t want to talk about it.

“What time are we leaving tomorrow?” Josh asked.

“No way, kiddo,” I told him. “Your mom, if given the chance, would throw me out into the street in front of a convoy.”

“A what?” Josh asked.

“A bunch of trucks,” BT clarified. “And he’s right. It’s too dangerous out there for you.”

“I’m almost twelve,” Josh said, making it sound as authoritative as possible.

“Yeah, and I’m sure you’re going to want to make thirteen,” I told him. And then reality with its ugly iron fist hit me with an uppercut. What really is the rest of his life going to encompass? Eventually, they are going to run out of food and they will have to leave their relatively safe haven and neither seemed to have the skills to scavenge in a hostile world. Basically, they were living on borrowed time.

That didn’t mean I was taking him with me on a learning expedition, but I still felt for the kid and his mother. Her ex-husband, his father, was gone (much like Paul, crept in. I squashed it heavily, but the thought kept peeking from around the edges) and he wasn’t coming back. How many “families” were there still out there like this? Isolated, each its own island of remoteness. There could still be a salvageable community in this city, but they would never be able to become cohesive. There was no communication, no ability to seek others out. The populace would be too fearful to create bonds anyway. There might be a few brave souls like Mary that would open a door to a stranger, but she was in the minority. We were just as lucky she hadn’t shot us instead.

Between zombies and criminally opportunistic humans, the world was merely a shell. The day of humans as the dominant species on the planet was coming to close and it was just as violently dangerous and deadly as the great comet strike that took out the dinosaurs two hundred million years ago. There would be a few viable communities still intact, places like Little Turtle or Easter Evans School, but as the zombies’ resources became fewer and fewer, they would seek these last food zones out relentlessly. Nothing would be able to withstand that type of onslaught.

Ultimately, the zombies and Eliza would have won, but what was the prize? She would rule a planet of mindless eating machines. I can’t imagine she had thought this out completely. She gets off on the power she holds over people and the fear she instills in their hearts. Zombies didn’t care, at all, they eat. And make no mistake, we would be just like every other extinct species on the planet, gone and for good. Seen any Tasmanian wolves lately? Maybe a dodo bird or two? There is no species regeneration. And Eliza and Tomas would hardly qualify as Adam and Eve.

Would she live long enough to see another sentient being rise from the ashes of our deaths? Would dolphins come ashore and finally take their rightful place as care-takers of the land? Would zombies give anything a chance to get a foothold? They ate everything. They were worse than locusts. They stripped the land clean of every type of animal. Looks like it was going to be the age of plants. I hope Eliza likes roses.

I had spent the last few seconds mulling over my dark thoughts when Josh interrupted me. Maybe the kid had an idea what he was in for. “I will be thirteen. I miss my dad, but I know he’s not coming back. I don’t tell my mom that because she needs to believe that I think he is. I need to see what it is like out there. We won’t be able to stay here forever, no matter what my mom says. Sometimes I think that she just doesn’t want to think about it. I think about it every day. We’ve got maybe six months of food and three months of bottled water, so what time are we leaving?”

“You’re a realist, Josh, and I can appreciate that,” I told him, and that was the honest truth. “But you’re not my kid and the danger out there, it’s real. This isn’t a training exercise. I would no sooner put you in any needless danger than I would any of my own.”

Mary had at some point come up the stairs and had been at Josh’s doorway while I spoke to him. She grudgingly nodded at me for what I said to him, but she still didn’t want him to be with me. The kid might have been thinking about going out at some point while he was with his mother, but he had never before voiced it. So again, something else was my fault by default.

“Come on, Josh. It’s time for bed,” Mary said, grabbing her son by the shoulders, steering him towards his bed.

It didn’t seem that late to me, but that wasn’t what this was about anyway. I took one longing look at the Lego’s I wanted to play with and headed downstairs, making sure that BT led the way. If he fell down the stairs behind me, I’d be crushed.

Mary came down a few minutes later. “I’d appreciate if you didn’t put any wild thoughts in my son’s head,” she said hotly.

“Those ‘wild thoughts’,” I told her with air quotes and everything, “came from the mouth of your son without any prompting from me.”

“He doesn’t understand what is going on!” she yelled and then brought her voice down to that inside yelling tone, cognizant of the fact that she had just put her offspring to bed.

“I think you underestimate him. He understands, probably even more so than you. He knows that his father isn’t coming back, he understands that you have a finite supply of food and water and more importantly, he understands that as the man of the family, he is wholly unprepared to defend the both of you. I’m not arguing in the least to take him with me, Mary. I’m just telling you what is going through the boy’s head. He’s growing up fast because he has to. Just because last year he might have been playing with Pokemon cards and plastic dinosaurs doesn’t mean he can’t comprehend the danger around him now.”

Mary sat down hard, I thought for sure she was going to miss the couch completely, again. As it was, she had to put her hand on the armrest to keep her ass from going to the ground. After she had situated herself properly, she brought her wet hand to her face. “What the hell is this?” she said, showing her hand to me.

What the fuck? I thought. It’s not like I took a piss on her couch while she wasn’t looking.

BT raised his hand like he was in the second grade. “I tend to drool a little, when I sleep sometimes,” he finished, adding the qualifier.

“Gross,” Mary said, heading for the kitchen to wash her hand off.

“Thanks man,” I said to BT. “That took the heat off for a minute.”

“She’ll be back,” he said as we heard the water running in the next room.

“Wow, she’s pissed,” Gary said, coming into the room with us. He was talking, but looking at the wrapper to the granola bar he was eating. “These are fantastic, I’ve never heard of them,” Gary said around a mouthful of nuts. (I’m not sure exactly about the contents he was chewing on, I just wanted to write that). “I’d sleep with one eye open, nope maybe both eyes, one for Deneaux and one for Mary. It really is kind of funny how you bring out the worst in the females around you.”

“Ah, brother, the one constant I have in life, no matter how far I fall, someone in my family will be there to kick me where I lay.”

He smiled.

“Touching,” Deneaux said sarcastically. “What time are we leaving in the morning.”

“We?” I asked her.

“I want to find him as much as you do,” she said falsely.

“You don’t lie as well as you think you do,” I told her. “And you’re staying here.”

Her facial expression nearly matched Mary’s from a few moments previous. Deneaux left, heading to the opposite side of the house where there was a sitting room and a large chair. I could only hope that she would get sucked into the oversized cushions and teleported to an alternate reality, one where old crones were stoned for being witches. I think Salem may have had it right.

“Why would you let her know you’re suspicious? I’d rather tell a pit viper I was highly allergic to its venom and I didn’t have an antidote,” BT said.

“No way,” Gary said. “I’m calling your bluff.”

“Let it go, BT,” I said as BT turned to Gary. “He knows not what he says. And I want her to know because if she had anything to do with Paul getting hurt, I’ll kill her and she knows it. She’ll get desperate and even the devil can make mistakes.”

“So you’re going to leave her behind with me? Thanks, I don’t remember when I ended up on your shit list.”

“Luck of the draw.”

“Wonderful.”

“Maybe you can try to keep her away from Mary. The more Deneaux talks, the more poison she spills into Mary’s Kool-Aid,” I said.

“What does that even mean, Mike?” Gary turned to me.

“You know. Kool-Aid,” I said, not clarifying a thing.

“I have no idea what he means, do you, BT?” Gary asked.

BT shrugged. “I understand about half of what he says and of that only twenty-five percent makes sense.”

“You guys should take it on the road. I’m saying that Mary’s Kool-Aid is her business and that Deneaux is spreading lies about us, well, me specifically.”

“I know what you’re saying. I was making sure that you did too,” Gary said.

“Should we take shifts?” BT asked, eyeing his couch hungrily.

“I’ll take first watch,” I told them, my gut was telling me something was not quite right with the night. Odds were it was the road kill meat MRE, but it had been a while since I’d felt lucky and I’d rather be awake and alert for whatever came down the road.

Nothing happened while I stared out that window, yet the unease in me did not abate, but rather grew. I kept waiting for something, I occasionally even checked on the softly snoring Deneaux to see if she was trying to sneak up behind me and plant a knife in my neck. I could swear on more than one occasion, I felt the icy, cold tip break skin. Only once, did she scare the hell out of me when, on one of my many circuits around the house, her black eyes were staring at me through the gloomy night. She must have had a lot of enemies in her day; she was sleeping with her eyes open. This I knew because her snoring had not stopped. She looked like a cold, calculating reptile like that and I more than half expected her to strike from that chair. I’d take Durgan any day. He wasn’t smart enough in life to do anything but come straight at you. Deneaux seemed to have mastered the fine art of subterfuge. There wasn’t an angle she probably hadn’t exploited at one time or another, and I was wholly convinced, up to and including murder.

I returned to my chair, I had the jitters. My legs were bouncing up and down, restless leg syndrome, my ass, this was a full on epidemic. I won’t swear on a stack of Bibles that it was three am (mostly because I was afraid the Bibles would burst into flame), but it seemed that the witching hour had come to fruition and then the dread of death washed over me and was gone.

“Shit!” BT yelled, sitting up. He turned to me. “Was that Paul?”

My head dropped as I nodded.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Paul was foggy as he began to pull from the slumber. Something darted by his face. The swish of a tail under his nose would have tickled if not for the fact that the pain from his broken leg blotted every other sensation into near muteness. All of his other injuries combined were little more than dots in the rearview mirror of the semi tractor trailer that was his broken leg. Another something landed on Paul’s stomach, he barely registered it.

It was night and that was the only thing Paul was certain of… Oh, and that he was still alive; he could tell because his leg repeatedly told him so.

“Got to sit up,” he said gritting his teeth. He craned his head around, looking for a chair or a couch that he could pull himself up to. “Coffee table will have to do,” he said, uttering the words more to shatter the silence and to help him concentrate on anything besides his leg. He first tried to use his hands to pull himself over, but the shards of glass still embedded in them made that an impossible task. He cried out, not in fear, not in frustration, but in futility. His leg, which he thought could not hurt anymore, became ignited with a white phosphorescent flare of immovable pain. He used his shoulders to prop up and see what was going on. A cat had bitten down on his pants where his broken leg was protruding, trying to get at the blood and meat that lay beyond the material. Paul tried to kick it away. The emaciated cat was faster, however, and hissed at him for his troubles.

The burst of adrenaline got him moving. At least, it lasted long enough for him to get his back up against the wooden frame of the table. He cried out again when he placed some weight on it and it slid further back, this time resting up against the couch beyond. Paul looked behind him and up; two cats with swishing tails and hungry looks stared back at him. I love cats, Paul thought. He had read the stories growing up about how when an owner had died and was not quickly discovered that his, but usually her, cats would eat their former master. He had believed it to all be propaganda perpetuated by dog owners, who invariably pulled out the article about the dog that had died on top of its master’s grave, presumably from a broken heart.

Paul clucked his tongue, trying to establish some sort of repertoire with the feral cats. One hissed and one jumped down by his left side, making sure to stay out of the range of Paul’s arm. The third pulled up his front paw and began to lick it, Paul could not help but think it was washing up before it dined.

“I am not food!” he yelled. The paw-licking cat looked up momentarily and then resumed its business. The one that had come down had jumped on Paul’s leg, ripping a small piece of denim away. Paul had to bite down on his tongue to keep from passing out again; he knew he would not awaken a second time. He blindly kicked out, finding a great deal of satisfaction when he heard the cat mewling in pain, something in its side, most likely a rib, had cracked.

“Huh! One down, two to go, fuckers!” Paul spat. “Oh no,” he said as he looked from the entry to the room he was in and saw two large toms sitting there, eyeing him greedily. “I’m in a cat lady’s home,” he bemoaned. He realized he could be dealing with dozens of cats and a toddler had more range of motion than he did. The majority of the cats were patient; they were predators, after all. Their meal was wounded, but could still deliver lethal blows. That was made evident by the cat that had been summarily ripped to shreds by the pack when its rib had been broken. The cats were starving and cared little where there next meal came from. They did not suffer any moral dilemmas with the prospect of cannibalism. The ones that had survived this long were the biggest and baddest of the lot and now all attention was back on Paul with the quick meal made of the one that had attacked him.

Paul looked around the room, star-lit eyes shone at him from every angle. He had never been so close to such a large assemblage of animals. It was unnerving, but still he could not reconcile the fact that they could do him any real harm. Through the haze of pain and the real danger ever present, Paul kept finding his head nodding down every so often, only to be jerked up. On more than one occasion, he noticed a few of the braver, or perhaps hungrier cats, had closed the distance to him. Their tails were wagging back and forth in an aggressive behavior. Paul had seen it many times before from the ones he had owned. They were getting ready to pounce. He felt around looking for anything that could be used as a weapon.

His hands made him wince every time he reached out, but he pulled them up as close to his face as he could. He needed to get out as much of the glass as possible, short of daylight, a pocket knife, a needle and some tweezers. The majority would stay embedded exactly where they were. While he was pulling out a particularly large shard, a gray tabby came within a few inches of his broken leg before Paul instinctually jerked his damaged leg back. The pain was immeasurable. Doctors always ask on a scale of one to ten how severe is the pain, Paul did not think that ten could even begin to describe what he was feeling. The room spiraled out of focus as he fought desperately to stay aware of his surroundings.

At least six cats had come to within a few feet as Paul, degree by degree, dealt with the pain. The smarter, larger toms waited behind for the kill to take place. Then they’d come in and take the lion’s share, without any of the risk. The smaller cats had to be more aggressive or they would not get any food whatsoever.

“Mike!” Paul screamed. The cats took notice of the words, like a long, lost vestige of a previous life, but not one moved away; hunger was an all-consuming feeling. They could move no closer to their own self actualization while the baser of their instincts was not yet sated.

“I will not be eaten. Not by a zombie and certainly not by a bunch of mangy fucking cats,” Paul said harshly. “And to think I used to love you more than dogs.” Paul pulled himself further up, almost sitting completely perpendicular to the floor. Either shock was setting in or Paul’s pain threshold had increased, but his leg was almost a manageable constant at this point.

A small cat with most of its left ear missing, had had enough and jumped on Paul’s chest, all of its claws in the ready and locked position. Sixteen thumbtacks pierced Paul’s midsection. Paul grabbed the cat by the neck, squeezing as hard as he could. The cat spat and hissed, bringing its hind legs up to scratch and tear at Paul’s wrist and forearm. The pain from the lacerations almost made Paul release his grip. Instead, he slammed the cat down by his right side. The cat was stunned, but not quite dead. He repeated the steps three more times, each bringing a satisfying crunch to the animal that desired to eat his flesh.

“Eat this!” he yelled, throwing the carcass into the fray.

Only a shark feeding frenzy would have been more disturbing. The mewls of pain as cat bit cat in their attempts to get at the meat of their peer was ear-piercingly loud. Fur flew in the air as the smacking of wet, tendon-snapping bites tore though the skinny feline. Paul looked away as one cat tried to escape from the pack with the eyeless head of the carcass. He noted the bloody welts on his shirt as he looked down. They stung, and they could possibly get infected, but right now he had much, much bigger fish to fry. He had to drag himself into a room that did not house any cats so that he could somehow set his leg, find a weapon and get the hell out of this house of horrors.

Paul looked to his left and right, trying his best to figure out a potential layout for a home he had never been in. To his right was some linoleum flooring which generally meant kitchen, the left looked to be his best avenue of escape. The carpeted hallway was less than fifteen feet away, might as well have been a mile with the condition he was in.

“Here goes nothing,” Paul said, trying his best to prepare himself. He positioned his hands on the flooring and moved his ass a few inches towards his destination. Then he dragged the rest of him to follow. A couple of the toms, who had not seemed interested in the least with him, now stopped their various inactivities to see what he was doing. Paul repeated the same step until he was at the far edge of the coffee table. The largest cat, a black and white, looked at Paul, then the direction he was heading, and padded silently past him and into the inky blackness of the hallway.

This oughta be fun, Paul thought as he moved again. This time, he would not have the table to rest against. His head swam as his dangling foot caught on the rug for a moment and then released. He nearly bit his tongue in half in an effort to stay coherent. Blood pooled in his mouth and flowed out the sides, mingling with tears rolling from his eyes. For the first time, Paul thought that he might finally succumb to what all of humanity strove to avoid--death. It hung heavy in the air.

He waited long minutes, his tongue searing from the teeth wounds. His hands enduring their own unique form of torture, begging to be raised from their perch. The iron-rich scent of Paul’s blood sent the cats into another frenzy. At least three that he could see were advancing. “Fuck you!” he screamed. They halted, but they did not retreat. Paul looked down at his broken leg. He could just make out the problem he was having. The open-ended eyelets on his boot, which were of the fast-lacing design used for speed in cold weather, were now catching on the fabric of the rug. The placement of his foot now ensured that every time he pulled back, they would snag.

He needed to remove the boot or somehow brace his foot in the upright position, although neither idea was something he knew how to accomplish. Going forward was not an option, not like this. Paul scooted back towards the table to catch his breath and re-think his strategy. He noted his boot did not seem so inclined to grab the carpet in that direction. He was not sure if it had to do with the pile of the carpet or if he had already pulled the carpet loops out. But at the moment, the kitchen seemed like the better option, but to what end?

“I can get a knife!” he said aloud. A cat that had been slinking closer tilted it’s head. That is, if they have fallen on the floor, he thought sourly. “At least it will be easier to slide on the linoleum.” Paul started his long migration down the coffee table and towards the kitchen. His boot did not seem to be snagging on the rug and he thanked his stars for that small fact. His right hand slipped out from under him as he splashed down onto the linoleum floor and into a puddle of an unidentifiable liquid. His shoulder and most of his lower back became soaked in the foul ammonia-laced smell.

“Cat piss,” he said disgustedly. Paul pushed himself back up with a grunt and took a longer survey of the room where he had decided to make his final stand. A small island dominated the larger than expected kitchen. Cat feces and urine covered much of the flooring. There was no clear path to the cabinets where he was headed. The cats lined up at the entryway as he sloshed his way in. Wet, warm piles of shit slogged through his splayed fingers; urine soaked his pants and burned as it came in contact with his bloody hands. As he made his way further in, the cats followed. Some jumped up on the island, others on the counter tops where they had been “shooed” by their previous master at least a hundred times. That was, until they ate her.

The ones on the counter followed Paul, step for step, as he slid below them. Paul looked up at their watchful, wary, hungry gazes. “I was wrong about you guys. I should have listened to Mike. He always said you were nothing more than rats with a ‘c’.” He finally got to the corner he had been heading for. He rested for a moment with his back against the cabinet. He tilted his head back. A cat was no more than six inches from his face, peering down at him. Paul reached up and was able to wrench it down from its high ground advantage by its ear. The cat screamed in terror as he used the momentum to throw it against the island. His grip had not been secure enough to deliver a death blow, but the supposed weakness was more than enough for the other cats to descend on it and disembowel the cat before it could muster any sort of defense.

“Can’t we all get along?” Paul panted, trying to humor himself. It worked badly. For the first time, Paul noticed the blood trail he had left coming into the kitchen. He was alarmed by the volume of it. “I don’t feel woozy,” he said aloud. “Better get moving.” Paul noticed as he spoke, the cats didn’t relent their hunt, but they did sort of hesitate. Their movements were more tentative, like they were being given a reminder of how times were. Paul turned his gaze on the cabinet he was resting against. Traditionally, corner cabinets were the biggest in the whole house and sometimes they did not even have sides. If that were the case, he thought he might be able to fit in it. He wasn’t sure what he’d do at that point, but it would buy him some time and maybe there was the off chance that a machine gun was in there next to a deluxe first aid kit and a charged cell phone with Mike on speed dial.

With some difficulty, Paul moved to the side a bit and opened the cabinet. He was not disappointed by the size. It could have been bigger, maybe large enough to fit a chaise lounge, but it was at least big enough that he could get in. He wouldn’t be in the lap of luxury, but he’d be out of immediate danger as he regrouped. He grabbed boxes of cereal and threw some at the cats as they skittered away.

“Whoa,” he told himself just as he was about to toss an unopened box of Trix. “I’m chucking food.” And then he saw some stuff that could do some real damage, cans of tuna. The force of throwing the cans pulled on his broken leg, but it was worth it when the third can cracked into the skull of one of the bigger toms that had been waiting, aloof in the background. The cat wasn’t dead, but the can had inflicted some heavy damage. The cat had fallen over and its right front and rear paws were twitching violently. It had enough sense to hiss and spit as the other cats turned to look at him and decide if he had just come on the meal plan. The cat tried desperately to pull its damaged skull up off the floor, but it was not to be. It put up a fight and took at least one eye out, maybe more, but Paul wasn’t completely watching. He was busy pulling out shelves so that he would fit in better. He wished it didn’t hurt so much to throw things or he would have tossed the heavy press board shelving into the food fight going on at the other side of the kitchen.

Paul wished he had a can opener. He thought he could just about make it to the end of days with the amount of canned food in here. But his hopes of finding anything that would further his ability to escape this house were nixed. Besides a healthy dose of cereal, canned food and Top-Ramen noodles, there were no melee weapons or meds. Paul put his hand into the cabinet and banged the back of his head on the counter top as he placed his ass inside. “Damn, that hurt!” he said, desperately wanting to rub the spot, but afraid of losing his balance and tipping over. He did not think he could stand another onrush of pain like he had earlier.

His words this time had an undesired effect. The cats were finishing their latest meal and his words pulled their lapsed attention back to him. And they understood escape. Paul was halfway in when five or six cats made a mad dash for him. Hunger outweighed the harm he could inflict. Death by the other cats was merciful in comparison to the hunger that ripped through their stomachs. Two went for his face. Paul picked up a can of corn and caught one of the cats in the chest as it launched at him. The other cat bit down hard on his cheek. Hot needles drilled through his eyes would have been less painful as the cat latched onto his neck with all four sets of claws. Paul was writhing in agony, the thrashing was setting his broken foot flailing about, but even that could not compare to the vermin adhering to his face and neck. He slammed it on the side of the face with the corn. The cat’s teeth tore through his cheek, taking a strip of meat as it was pounded away.

Blood from his neck pulsed out. It didn’t arc and he hoped the cat hadn’t gotten deep enough to do arterial damage. The other cats had gone for Paul’s damaged leg while he was distracted. He had not even felt the pressure as they dove on it, ripping at the frayed jeans, trying in desperation to get at the blood and muscle below. Now that the cat had been taken away from his face, his body and mind struggled in an effort to catch up with what was happening. Pain receptors flared to life as cat fangs sank deeply into his flesh. Paul could not even pull his leg away as more and more cats began to pounce. The accumulated weight was too much. Paul struck out with his good leg. As he kicked one away, seemingly two would take its place. They no longer feared taking damage; they had blood in their mouths now and they would not be dissuaded.

Paul’s screams filled the night as the cats tore through the denim. Ragged bloody strip after ragged bloody strip of skin, muscle and tendon were torn from his leg. Shock began to shut down nerve centers in his brain, and cognitive thought was becoming increasingly difficult. Paul hardly recognized the lower portion of his leg as two cats tore it from his body and fought viciously for the rights to eat it. Vast amounts of blood poured from the wound; cats became covered in it. Their cries of triumph were the last thing Paul heard as his head slammed back against the far end of the inside cabinet. It was three am in the world of man, but that meant little now.

Chapter Twenty-Three - Mike Journal Entry 13

Real life has a way of interceding on some of the things we would like to do from time to time. Paul and I lived in the same state, Colorado and we were actually only one town away from each other. I had not seen my best friend of close to thirty years in nearly six months. There was just always something to do, one of the kids would be having a birthday party, athletic event, just plain sick, or the car would need work, or a bathroom needed retiling. It’s just the way things work. We would have the best of intentions to get together and drink a beer or seven, but even when I would finally have a weekend night free, he would find himself in his own “real life stigma” and we would once again, promise to try to do something soon.

I missed my friend. We had literally grown up together, and shared some of the funniest times with each other, and not all of them were even drug-induced. Oh, to be sure, quite a few were, but not all. I’m sure in some of my other journals I have noted Paul’s fear of commitment; and that extended even to extracting a day in which we could get together. When I realized that my favorite group on the planet, Widespread Panic, was playing a two-day concert down in Telluride, my mind was set. I was going, and I was going to do everything in my power to nail Paul down to a promise. Might as well have grasped a Vaseline-soaked eel in my butter-slicked hand. But every once in a while, you just get lucky. I shut my eyes and swung. Paul agreed to go. Now he might be difficult to get that promise from, but once delivered, he would never pull it back. Maybe that was why he was so fearful about giving it in the first place.

I enticed another friend that I had also grown up with on the east coast and who now lived an hour away in Colorado Springs to join us for the event. Dennis was a good friend of mine, even if he was a Yankees fan. Not everyone can be perfect. I want everyone to realize I am in no way condoning the events that unfolded that weekend. I’m just trying to relate a story, so I’m covering my ass under the protection of the author umbrella. I had my Jeep Wrangler, (oh how I miss that car. I’ve actually thought a few times about going back and getting her as she sits in Vona, alone…sigh) stuffed with enough beer and booze you would have thought three times the number of people were going to this show.

Dennis sat in the shotgun seat and was in charge of the radio, Paul sat in the backseat and was responsible for the drinks. (Go back to the part where I said, I’m not condoning anything!) The show was at seven pm that night and the ride into Telluride took seven and a half hours from Denver. (Side note: I did not tell Paul or Dennis this small fact because I thought they might opt out.) We left at ten that Friday morning so that we could get down into Telluride, check in at our rental house, maybe get some food, and go to the show.

So it was before noon and we started off slow. That first Red Stripe was delicious. Now listen, I know it’s completely wrong, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that a “driving beer” wasn’t fucking awesome. I don’t know what it is: the loud tunes on the radio, the air blowing past your face, the illegality of it, maybe everything combined. So we started with a beer, and then a second, and then Mix Master Paul set up shop in the back seat. He literally started creating mixed drinks. Some grape, cranberry, vodka concoction was damn near perfect. By the time we hit the halfway mark, I was fairly lit. We stopped for a much needed bladder release and some grub and then hit the road again.

For the entire drive, we drank, and I don’t know if anyone reading this has ever had the true fortune of visiting Telluride, but it is a lot like the Alps right here in the States (so they tell me) with the winding mountainous roads and all. It was coming up on five thirty by the time we sloshed our way into town. We were so hammered we drew straws to see who would have to go check us in. Dennis pulled the short straw. Paul and I sat in the Jeep and smoked one of those funny left-handed cigarettes, like we needed it.

I was thrilled to learn that the concert venue, a huge open field, was within walking distance of our temporary abode. I’d pushed Slush, the patron saint of dipshit drunk drivers, as far as I dared. For those of you that have gone to a concert, I’m sure you’ve come across your share of the paraphernalia Nazis that will search every nook and cranny of your being for a roach. Most won’t even take you out for dinner beforehand. Well this was nothing like that. At the opening to the field, which was about ten feet wide, there was one staff member. This I could tell because he had on a bright yellow shirt that said “Staff” on the back. He was busy talking to a group of girls that were heading in.

I had a liter of vodka shoved down the front of my pants. I guess I was drunk enough to think that nobody would guess that I was anything but well endowed in the nether regions. Between my bowlegged walk, and the extreme bulge in my pants, I shouldn’t have made it. I pulled the bottle out the moment I crossed the threshold into the park, and if anyone saw, they didn’t comment. I think we could have carried a keg in and nobody would have given a shit. I would remember that for tomorrow’s show.

Widespread came on maybe an hour later, I couldn’t tell, anything resembling timekeeping in my head had been eradicated for the evening. So there we are in this field that is more like a bowl surrounded by jagged peaks, pretty special place to see a show, when black, ominous clouds began to roll in. They were the kind that screamed “storm.” I’d occasionally steal a glance at them as they rolled over the tops of the mountains because they were that cool looking, right up until the rain started. Widespread was on the third song of the night when the heavens split open. This is no exaggeration. Are you a kid? Whether grown up or not? Or do you have a kid? Have you ever gotten a super soaker for any of the aforementioned people? Yes? Then you will know what I’m about to say. The rain was coming down in such a deluge, it was like being repeatedly nailed with a full spray from a super soaker.

Now for those of you who don’t know what a super soaker is, it is in NO way comparable to a squirt gun from the days of my youth or possibly yours. Unless you lined up about four hundred of them and just started spraying the hell out of one individual. That is the power of a super soaker. I think you could drain a pool with one in half an hour in a particularly intense water fight. So I’m roughly four to maybe five sheets to the wind, I wouldn’t have cared if it was hailing, but apparently the band had issues when the lightning began to crack overhead. They finished their third song and headed to safer parts. The crowd, my friends and I waited another hour or so. It was actually pretty cool. Some of the concert goers had the foresight to bring tarps and I found myself traveling from makeshift party tent to makeshift party tent. If you know anything about Widespread, it is, for the most part, a very laid back, Havin’-a-Good-Time type of crowd. There was not one tent where I was not offered some sort of smoke or drink for my travels, and more times than not, I partook.

The rain did not relent, and they finally called the show for the night. The mass exodus of wet, cold, hungry, wasted people began. At some point, I had taken my sneakers off and lost my socks, but the mud squishing through my toes was magical. (Hey, I’m easily entertained when I’m drunk). We more or less followed the crowd as they headed out, a fair portion over-taxing the local pizza joint, us included. Two hours later, we left with our two pizzas back to our rental. We ate like drunk people do, noisily and then divvied up the sleeping arrangements and headed off to bed. All in all, it was a pretty nice day. But the real fun was to begin on the morrow.

I awoke. One eye would not focus, no matter how much I tried, my mouth was shoved full of cotton, my head had become a blacksmith’s anvil and he was busy making horseshoes. My stomach was a churning whirlwind of undercooked pizza and a cocktail of differing brews. I had broken my own cardinal sin of mixing alcohols and was now paying the price. The one good eye squinted against the harsh sunlight that poured through the window. I rolled out of my bed and onto a wet pair of socks, I would have stopped in amazement to try and figure out how those had gotten there, but I smelled the cure-all of many a hangover. Bacon! Bacon! Bacon!

Paul was in the kitchen making scrambled eggs and bacon, and it smelled wonderful. I think if it hadn’t violated so many man-code rules, I would have kissed him. Dennis was on the couch, holding his head with one hand and a glass of what I figured to be juice in the other.

“Grab your drink on the table.” Paul said, motioning with his spatula.

“Drink? What kind of drink?” I asked, my stomach protesting at just the mere mention.

“No drink, no bacon,” he told me.

“What do you have, Dennis?” I asked.

“He told me the same thing,” Dennis wept. “And I really want some,” he finished pathetically.

“Come on, man! Food first, then whatever this devil’s brew is,” I begged Paul.

“Oh my God! This bacon is fantastic!” Paul said, tearing into a big strip.

“Ass,” I told him as I grabbed the glass off the table. I sat next to Dennis so that we could commiserate. Dennis just kept staring at his drink like he hoped it would evaporate. I’ve never been one to think before I act. “Here goes nothing,” I said to Dennis. I was trying for a wicked grin, but I’m sure that it was more of a sickly smile. I tipped the glass up and just started gulping. The cold fluid washed the cotton from my mouth and put out the fire caused from heartburn in my throat and stomach. (Don’t let anyone ever tell you getting old doesn’t suck). I don’t know if he had Alka-Seltzer in the drink also, but the roiling immediately stopped as did the hammer-smacking anvil in my skull, and immediate warmth passed through my extremities as a familiar buzz washed over me.

“Holy fuck!” I said aloud, holding up the empty glass, looking for an after trace of whatever magical ingredients had been present.

“Pretty neat trick, huh?” Paul said as he put a portion of food down on my plate and his.

“Are you kidding?” Dennis asked.

“Not at all, man,” I said. I had instantly transformed from one of the walking dead back to a fully fledged participant in the human race.

“Really?” Dennis queried, holding up his glass like I had mere moments before.

I was already heading for the table and the food, and if he didn’t hurry up I was going to eat his portion too. Dennis must have realized this because he downed his much like I had. It was pretty fun to watch his transformation as it happened.

“What the hell was in that thing?” Dennis said as he nearly launched himself from the couch.

“You’d really be better off not knowing,” Paul said around a mouthful of toast.

“Man, you should market that stuff,” I told Paul, as I mowed through my eggs.

“Nope, because then I’d have to disclose the ingredients.”

I looked at Paul like maybe I would beg him for the info, and then I thought better of it. Sometimes ignorance is bliss.

We ate our meal, cleaned up some and then decided to take a small tour of the town we were in. The day was phenomenal with not a hint of the rent-open skies from the night before. We went to the local liquor and grocery stores to replenish our supplies. We must have bought eight or nine pounds of deli meat so that we could make sandwiches when we got home from the show tonight and not have to wait for a pizza. The thought of those cold pepperonis from the previous night threatened to break through Paul’s elixir, but it held fast. We toured around the town, hung out with a bunch of our neighbors who were also concert-goers and played a bunch of cards. Every couple of hours, we were required to keep dosing with Paul’s medicine; and not once did I feel an after effect from the previous evening.

Our plan this fine night as the concert got closer was to stick with one type of alcohol--vodka; but like all the best of intentions, it quickly went out the window. Partied a bit beforehand, but nothing like our marathon session the day before. By the time we headed out for the show, I had a pleasant base buzz from which to build upon. If it were possible, the security this night was even more lax. They didn’t even check for our tickets. We could have driven a beer truck in. How fucking awesome would that have been!? Paul immediately went to the concession stand and bought a half dozen sodas to mix our vodka with. In retrospect, I sit here wondering why we didn’t just bring in our own cups and a couple of two liter bottles.

So there we are, Dennis, Paul, and myself. The sky was lit up a brilliant blue, the temperature hovering in the eighties, we were surrounded by majestic peaks on all sides. Throngs of people danced to the music in their heads (the show had not started yet) or played Frisbee or hacky sack, or just sat and talked. It was a festival and I was soaking it all in. The buzz was starting to build as we drank more and smoked some community joints. I somehow had the ability to suspend my germ phobias whilst drinking because if I’d been straight, I would never put a joint to my lips after passing anyone’s lips, especially some of the wookies that were passing them around. (Wookies are unkempt hippies that generally tour with the band. Something I would have been had I not had a family.)

There we three sat, laughing, and talking on our small blanket when this younger guy came across our path.

“Mushrooms?” he asked.

“Naw, man, we don’t have any,” I told him.

He looked at us a little funny, then must have realized we started partying a few hours ago. “No, I’ve got some,” he said.

I looked over at Paul. This had not been on the agenda at all. I turned to Dennis, who had no clue what was happening. He appeared to be checking out a sweet, little honey twirling around in a yellow sundress.

“Sure,” Paul said.

And then I thought something went wrong with the whole conversation, because the guy pulled out two Cadbury Easter Eggs from his knapsack.

My ever tactical self spoke up. “What the hell are those things?”

Paul paid him twenty dollars.

Dennis turned just as Paul got the eggs in hand. “Awesome man, I’m starving!” Dennis grabbed one from Paul’s hand and shoved the whole thing in his mouth. Paul started laughing. I was still confused.

“Hey, ris rastes funky,” Dennis said, still chewing.

“Here, wash it down with this,” Paul said, handing him a fresh drink.

Dennis gulped it down. “Where’d you get those? I think they were old or something.”

“Dude, you just dosed,” Paul said, still laughing.

“What?” I asked before Dennis could.

“The guy cooked up the mushrooms into the chocolate,” Paul explained.

“I just ate mushrooms?” Dennis asked, taking a large gulp of his drink and then turning back to watch the yellow sundress twirl.

“Shall we?” Paul asked, splitting the remaining egg in half.

“Why not?” I said shoving my piece into my mouth.

“Down the rabbit hole,” Paul said.

Twenty minutes later, there was very little that did not completely mesmerize me. Blades of grass became primordial jungles. The mountains were the great mountain barrier of the north that protected us from the hordes of Orcs that waited on the other side. The occasional cloud that drifted over became a message from the gods themselves. Dennis, at some point, had started to twirl with Yellow Sundress. It was funny trying to figure out which of them was further out there. By this time, stage hands had started some music through the PA system. I found myself encapsulated in the eclectic blend of music they played. Paul and I laughed at times so hard that tears would stream from our faces. I knew at least I was having a hard time keeping my equilibrium,

The sun, as if on cue, hid behind the tallest peak just as Widespread came onto the stage. Again, in retrospect, I’m sure the timing had more to do with the band than the sun, maybe. Yellow Sundress had at some point twirled away, possibly upwards. Dennis came back to share our small blanket as we grooved like only three middle-aged, white men can--horribly. But we didn’t care and nobody else did for that matter. We were havin’ a good time and that was what it was all about. At some point, the band or possibly a concert-goer told us that Widespread was going to play an extended show because the previous night had been cut short. That was fine with me. Anything that extended the magic of the night was A-okay!

We had not gotten as close to the stage as we would have liked, but we did at least try to get in as strategically placed an area as possible. We were immediately to the left of the soundstage. I did that on purpose so that we would have a point of reference to come back to. We were in a field with thousands of other people with no formal seating and we were wasted. Finding a particular person in that kind of environment is not the easiest thing to accomplish. Think Wal-Mart at Christmas time times ten.

After the first set break, there was the mass exodus to the portable toilets and the various food and beverage vendors. The johns were about a hundred and fifty yards straight back from us and the vendors were maybe two hundred yards back and to the left as we turned to look at them. Might as well have been five miles in the state we were in. Dennis volunteered to lay claim on the blanket while Paul and I made our way out to the head. I think he wanted to stay back because the task looked entirely too daunting when you looked over the sea of heads. I can’t say I blamed him. If I’d had the foresight to wear Depends and just go in my adult diapers, I would have. Don’t scoff at me!

There were lines, but they weren’t horrible. The worst part was tripping your trees off and then going into the small confines of a blue, plastic shell that smelled of piss and chemicals. Shit, yeah, that was the bad part. At one point, I thought I might be trapped by my bladder. If I had a watch, I think I might have set a world record for longest piss. I got so tired of standing, I leaned against the side. I will neither confirm nor deny that at some point, I might have missed the little side toilet. Give me a break! The thing is the size of a kidney, and I was swaying like I was in gale-force winds. At least, I didn’t get any on the ceiling to drip down on the next person.

I thankfully stumbled out from the head, now feeling like I had been reborn. Paul was nowhere in sight. I could tell I was still smiling from ear to ear because my cheeks were burning from the muscle contraction.

“You done, man?” someone asked, trying to get past me and into the toilet.

“What?” I said trying to focus on his/her face, I’m pretty sure it was a guy. That would be good because he’d understand about not being able to aim correctly. I still got out of there though before he maybe called me on it.

Even over the PA, I heard him. “Why is there piss all over the place? Am I stepping in piss?” he yelled, as I evacuated the area.

I gleefully headed over to the beer tent, because that sounded like just about the best thing on the planet. Still no Paul, but I was keeping myself some really good company.

“I would like three nectars of the gods,” I told the woman running the counter.

“You have ID?” she asked blandly, probably sick of listening to all the messed up people.

“I have three kids,” I told her. “Don’t you see all this white in my goatee? That’s from them.”

“I don’t care if you have three elephants, if I don’t see ID, you don’t get three beers.”

“Now three elephants would be pretty cool,” I told her as I gingerly went to the pocket that housed my wallet. At the best of times, when I am as sober as a newborn, I fear about losing my wallet or dropping contents out of it. So when I go out and know I’m going to be drinking, I keep it in a zippered or buttoned-up pocket and my OCD makes me touch that spot a good twenty times an hour to make sure that it hasn’t found a way out on its own. I will usually keep a twenty in my front right pants pocket for easy access with the added bonus of not having to take my wallet out.

“Do I really look nineteen?” I asked, trying to flirt my way out of getting my wallet out. I showed her the twenty.

She completely shut me down. “No, you don’t look nineteen at all, but I have to see everyone’s ID.”

“Your mellowing my high,” I mumbled as I grabbed my wallet.

“Just think how mellow it will be if you don’t get these beers,” she responded.

“You must have been a nun in another life,” I told her, trying my best to keep an eye on any errant articles from falling out of my wallet as I fished my driver’s license out.

“What makes you think it was a previous life?” she asked, grabbing my ID. Bitch didn’t even look at it as she handed it back. “Was that so hard?” she asked as she waited impatiently for me to put all the contents of my wallet back together and then try to find the twenty I had put back in a different pocket.

“You have no idea,” I told her as I briefly panicked until I located the wadded up bill.

Nineteen fifty for three beers. She took her time with the change, I guess expecting me to tell her to keep it. I waited patiently and she begrudgingly handed it over. I’ll be damned if I was giving her a nickel for making me go through that while I was in my altered state. I don’t think I won the particular encounter, but I didn’t lose either. Now I had to try and figure out how to get back. Easier said than done, but I figured at the absolute worst, I would be alone with three beers.

I found the sound stage just as Widespread came back on. I circled around a bit until I saw Dennis. He was once again twirling around with Yellow Sundress; she must have landed nearby. I looked up in the sky, I guess looking for her falling vapor trail. I tapped him on the shoulder. The relief slash joy that flooded across his features as he saw me was, in a word, awesome, and then compound that with his added joy when he saw what I was carrying was just plain cool as hell.

“Wasn’t sure I’d see either of you two again tonight,” Dennis said joyously as he took the proffered beverage.

“I knew you’d be thirsty, my friend,” I said, putting my arm around his shoulder.

“How’s Yellow?” I asked.

“Who?”

“The girl you’re dancing with.”

“I’m dancing with someone?” he asked in earnest, looking around for his mythical partner. “You seen Paul?” he asked when he figured I was messing with him.

“Naw, I hoped he made his way back here by now.”

“Maybe he’ll bring some beers too. That’d be great!”

And I nodded an enthusiastic agreement.

Widespread played an inspired second set. Dennis and I had finished our beers, and out of a toast for our missing friend, we split the third beer evenly and drank it down. Paul was still nowhere in sight. By this time, I think Dennis’ eyes were turning yellow. I could see a hint of panic in them as he tried to gauge his success rate at holding it or making it to and from the john.

Yellow saved the day. She was walking by without a care in the world, semi twirling as she moved past.

“Hi!” I yelled to her louder than I needed to. I imagined my face to be a washed out version of itself from the hard partying I was in the midst of.

She looked over, her smile never wavering. “Hi yourself!” she said.

“Are you heading to the bathroom?” I asked (yup that’s me! Always the smooth one.)

This time, her smile slipped for a second, like “What the hell was my problem?”

I wasn’t so messed up, (okay, yes I was) that I couldn’t see her confusion. “My buddy, here,” I said, pulling Dennis over to my side. He had not the slightest idea that I had been talking to his dance partner.

“Do I know you?” he asked. I wasn’t sure if he was asking her or me.

“We’re fabulous friends,” she said, her smile returning. “We might even be married.”

That was news to me, although I’d met Dennis’ ex and this girl blew her away, both looks-wise and personality. He could have done a lot worse, like going back to the miserable thing he’d divorced.

“Umm, okay, since you two are potentially married, your husband is in some desperate need of (I swear I almost said relief, but that would have sounded way to sexual) help. We’re a little on the other side of normal, and I don’t think he’ll be able to find his way to the restrooms and back.”

She laughed a warm, mirthful laugh and put her hand out for Dennis.

He grabbed it, then asked who she was again.

I had my doubts I’d see him again tonight. By now, I was wondering if I would be able to find my way back to our temporary accommodations. The odds weren’t stacked in my favor. I was constantly scanning the crowd for Paul. He had been missing a long time. Sometimes I would call out his name, thinking that maybe I had seen him close by. But always the person was walking away, threading through the crowd to parts unknown.

If you’ve read all my journals up to this far, first off congrats for getting through my ramblings. But you should have a good idea that I do not like big crowds and I do not function well within them. However, there I was thriving. The collective consciousness of that crowd was uplifting. My soul was bobbing up and down on the strong electric current. I know it sounds corny and maybe a little too hokey, but I was having a blast and who’s to deny what I was feeling, no matter how cheesy?

Twenty minutes later, half hour, seventy-eight parsecs? I don’t know. I saw the bright rays of Yellow Sundress gleaming through the crowd, and like a heralding angel, she was leading a beer-laden Dennis.

“I hope you two are married!” I told her.

She was still smiling, but I think she forgot she had ever said that.

“I come bearing gifts!” Dennis yelled. “And I’m not ever doing that again!”

I hoped he hadn’t meant peeing because eventually you’d just blow up.

Yellow handed Dennis a piece of paper with her phone number on it. “Enjoy the show,” she told him as she gently stroked his face and went twirling away into the crowd.

“Who the hell is that?” he asked me, handing me a beer.

I picked up the napkin that he had dropped. Her name and phone number were on it. I think her name was Susan, but I won’t attest to that. I stuck the piece of paper in Dennis’ rear pant pocket.

“Paul?” he asked, sipping his beer.

I shrugged my shoulders. “Did you get the beer Nazi?”

“No ID, no beer!” he said, smiling.

It was another few, maybe ten minutes and the lights dimmed down, the third set was starting.

“DUDE!” I heard from behind me.

It honestly took me a few moments for my reeling brain to put the image before me and match it up with Paul’s.

“BUDDY! Where the hell have you been?” I responded.

“I’m not really sure. I remember going to the bathroom with you and when I came out, I couldn’t find you. Then I realized I was starving, so I went over and got some beef teriyaki.”

“They have beef teriyaki?” Dennis asked as he turned to join the conversation. “Paulie! Hey buddy!”

“So I ate, and then I was thirsty as hell. I went and tried to get some beer, but I didn’t bring any ID.”

Dennis and I gave knowing glances to each other and started laughing.

I was floating around trying to get some brew and I ran into this guy that had brought a cooler in and was selling them for like two bucks a piece.”

“Two bucks? Damn!”

“So I bought like a six-pack.”

I looked down into his hands, bummed that I didn’t see any of them hanging there by the plastic holder.

“By the time I got the beer, I was all turned around and I had no idea which way to go. So I started playing Frisbee with this group and then I might have done some hula hooping. I was thinking that maybe I’d remember where we were by then.”

“Didn’t work so much?” I asked.

“No, so when the music started, I hopped on someone’s blanket and drank and danced.”

“So how’d you find us?” Dennis asked, still looking at Paul’s hands like beer might magically appear. That night it might have actually happened.

“I saw the girl in the yellow sundress and I seem to remember her being around us.”

“You saw Dennis’ wife!”

“What?” they asked in unison.

“Long story!” I yelled, wanting to get back into the groove of the music.

The music was playing again, my buds were back, I placed my arms over both their shoulders and we enjoyed the remainder of the show. I would have bet money that Dennis was the most effed-up one of us all, but I kept repeating over and over at how amazed I was that he knew the way home.

Nothing we passed looked even vaguely familiar to me. Other revelers walked around us, our footfalls echoing on the tree lined roadways as we trekked our way home. I caught snippets of meaningless conversations… “Jenny wasn’t even seeing him….”

“Which way to the universe?” (I could relate) “Is that a barracuda?” Even I couldn’t piece that one together.

A few homeowners turned their lights on to make sure no one decided to make their front lawns a resting spot. I saw more men and women openly pissing in the street than I will ever care to admit. I might have seen a couple having sex, or it was a lawnmower--I can’t be sure. More than once, Paul’s hand would reach out and prevent me from toppling over as I tried to scale the massive curb when the occasional car ventured forth.

Now I’m not so dramatic that I felt I was Bilbo Baggins on a quest for the ring that ruled them all, but by the time we got to our condo, I felt like it. Relief flooded through me as I took in my now favorite, intensely red couch and butcher block kitchen table.

“MEAT!” Dennis shouted, heading for the fridge. He started slapping packet after packet of various deli delight-ables on the counter top. Dagwood had nothing on us after we piled different animals onto our Kaiser rolls. It wasn’t twenty minutes later that I found myself deep in the throes of a food coma. Somehow, I had passed out and slept on the table. The next morning did not bode well for my back as I cantilevered off. Sometime during the night, my head had been cleaved in two. I could not focus on anything. I felt threadbare, like I had wrung my soul through a cheese grater. My cohorts weren’t in much better shape, although Dennis got to sleep his happy-ass in the back seat the entire seven-hour ride back home.

Paul was up intermittently to keep me company, but he just couldn’t stave off the effects of the night before and none of us was having anything to do with his secret elixir. Paul said that he didn’t even think that he could handle the smell of the ingredients anyway.

I relate this story because although it happened nearly eight years ago, it was truly one of the last times that the three of us as best friends, that had shared so many life experiences, journeys, quests and adventures got together. Dennis, just two years later, would die from a series of strokes and heart attacks. Unbeknownst to us, he had been diagnosed with type two diabetes. I guess he figured that if he ignored it, the disease would go away. It didn’t.

And like so many friendships as we grow older, there just isn’t the time available to devote to them. This Telluride trip would be, for the most part, mine and Paul’s swan song. Sure, we saw each other a few times over the remaining years, most notably Dennis’ funeral, but nothing like the days of yore. I don’t want to count our days of running from zombies. That is not a chapter I wish to include in our long and storied past. I will miss you, Paul, those days we played football, our experimentation with beer, and bongs. Our voyages to Indian Hill, to our college days and beyond. You were the best friend, damn near brother, that any man could ask for in life. I feel honored and privileged to have known you. A piece of my heart will always be missing with your passing. Rest in Peace, Paul 1966-2011.

So ends Journal Number Five. I did not get as much accomplished as I had hoped, yet I paid dearly for it. The world yet spins, but it has become a measurably darker place. Eliza stands on the threshold of victory and I fear that nothing stands in her path to stop her.

Chapter Twenty-Four

“My cat’s paws are always cold, I’ve believe it’s due to her walking upon the souls of the dead.” Book of Talbotisms #76

“So you’re telling me that you and BT both felt Paul?” Gary asked as they walked away from Mary’s house. Josh watched them from his bedroom upstairs, eagerly awaiting their return. Deneaux was watching them from the living room window, with what appeared to be the exact opposite expression.

“Paul’s passing,” Mike said. It sounded a lot stranger in daylight like maybe he had imagined it, but it was a pretty powerful feeling this morning.

“I hope you’re wrong,” Gary said.

“Me too,” Mike said in earnest, but his words rang hollow. He might have some doubts about what he felt, but not enough to overcome them.

They walked in silence for a little while longer. Gary, for some reason, just couldn’t seem to let the quietness of the day hold. Maybe he also did not want to dwell on the fact that they were more likely heading out on a body recovery than a rescue.

“Sure aren’t many zombies for a zombie apocalypse,” he said, looking around.

“And that’s a problem for you?” Mike asked sarcastically.

“I’m just saying, that you’d think they’d be everywhere. And here we are, just strolling down the middle of the road, like we own the place.”

“I, for one, am not complaining, brother. I would much rather be strolling than running for my life. You should be thankful too, because we both know I can run laps around you.”

“Not if I tripped you.”

“Nice, you tell Tracy when you get back what happened.”

“Forget it, I’d rather get eaten.” He laughed for a sec.

They had been criss-crossing streets with no real objective. They were just looking for something, anything. Mike thought about calling out or maybe even shooting a round into the air and then he thought a little harder about sounding the dinner bell. Just because there were no zombies here right now, in no way meant that they weren’t around in big bunches.

“I don’t know about this, Gary.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know how long we should just keep walking around, aimlessly looking for him.”

“Aimlessly?” he asked questioningly. “You mean you’re not using your Spidey-sense or something?”

“Spidey-sense?”

“Yeah, don’t you have some special powers or something?”

“I wish, maybe we should just get some wheels.”

“The noise will attract them.”

“I know, but we’ll be able to cover more ground, and maybe Paul will hear us.”

“I thought you said...”

“I know what I said, I’m trying not to believe what my Spidey-sense is telling me.”

“Spidey-sense sucks.”

“I agree.”

“Whoa! What do we have here?” Gary said, his attention focused ahead of us.

A lone zombie was standing on a small stoop. It did not, at first, pay them any attention as its gaze was fixated on something small in the side light window to its left.

“That a cat?” Gary asked softly as they got closer. The zombie still not privy to their existence.

“Looks like a small dog. Nope, that’s a cat. I can tell by that funky tail-twitching thing they do.”

“Someone must be in there,” Gary said as we stopped about twenty-five feet from the house. “No way that cat could have survived so long without some help; and it looks pretty fat.”

Another cat came up next to the large gray cat; they both seemed to be staring at the men. But this wasn’t with imploring, “help us” eyes; this was more like something predatory. “Do they look like they want to eat us?” Mike asked Gary. Their zombie friend finally turned around. Mike would swear its eyes got big as it noticed them.

“I don’t know about them, but he sure looks hungry.”

“You want the honors?” Mike asked Gary, as the zombie headed towards their location.

“I’ll shoot it, but you have to go into the cat house first.” Gary blew a hole through the back of the zombie’s head before Mike could even utter his response. It wasn’t like they had a choice anyway. Zombies would come running. They, however, would not stay out long if they could not find anything worth their while.

The zombie was still twitching as Mike made his way up to the porch. A third cat joined the other two who disturbingly had not moved even after Gary took his shot.

“These cats are freaking me out.”

“Get in the house. I swear I hear running feet,” Gary said with a wide-eyed expression, doing a quick three sixty of their area.

Mike knocked quickly on the door. “Hi, we’re friendly and we’d like to come in. Please don’t shoot us.”

“That wasn’t very convincing.”

“I’m all ears if you have something better.” They heard no sound, but a fourth cat was now peering out the side light at them. Mike tried the door handle. “It’s unlocked.”

“Get in, we’ll try our luck in there,” Gary said, as he pretty much pushed Mike in. Six cats with tails flicking back and forth were looking up at them cautiously. Gary shut the door behind Mike, nearly stepping on a cat in his haste to peek outside the side light.

“Zombies! I knew I heard them coming. What is that smell?” Gary asked, finally turning around and taking in the view of forty or fifty cats that had now assembled in the room.

“Wow, this sucks,” Mike said. The cats weren’t advancing, but they also weren’t retreating. The ammonia smell of abundant cat urine was prevalent as were the feces that littered everything, but there was also something sinister, some underlying smell that he knew, but was unwilling to identify. Mike would have written down now that it was death, plain and simple, but at that time, his mind struggled to keep away from that realization. Add to the fact that Gary’s gagging wasn’t helping the situation at all.

Some cats were mostly fixated on Mike, but in Gary’s moment of weakness, he saw some of the pests moving in closer. They halted their advance as zombies began to slam into the framework of the house. Gary’s head shot up. “Is that blood?” he asked, pointing to the floor a few feet past some of the cats.

The garish, orange-flecked linoleum which Mike imagined led to the kitchen was dotted in reddish brown splotches.

“It looks like it. Is anyone home?” Mike called, hoping to reestablish some normalcy to the situation. The cats seemed to get a little hesitant at the sound of his voice, but they didn’t take off and retreat to a safe place. “Come on, man! We’re on the second rung of the food chain, Talbot,” Mike said, trying to steel himself for what needed to be done. “Third, if you include sharks.”

“Has Tracy been nominated for Sainthood yet?” Gary asked.

“Just watch my back.”

“From the zombies or the cats?” he asked.

“The cats, definitely the cats.”

“Then I’m coming with you.”

They moved a foot forward, the cats yielded half that, seeming to grow bolder as they stepped deeper into the house.

“They’ve got in behind us, Mike. What the hell is going on?”

“I’d say that they’re pretty hungry.”

Mike’s trepidation increased as he got closer to the kitchen opening. The cats seemed very reluctant to yield the ground to their front. They were almost protective, like they had a prize they were unwillingly to share. A cat actually bit his boot as he crossed in, Mike gently kicked it away, not quite willing to add animal cruelty to his list of transgressions. He had never been a huge cat fan, but he’d never had reason to hate them until he walked into that kitchen.

“Oh God,” Mike said softly. Gary retched behind him.

A shredded human, bones glistening wetly with the remnants of bodily fluids and cat saliva stared back at them with an eyeless gaze. Its jaw bone was missing as was a portion of its lower leg. All that remained was a shock of hair on top and strips of blue denim. It was the white gold wedding band, lying a few feet from the body that brought Mike to the full realization of who lay before him.

Mike whirled, quicker than any of the cats could respond and lashed out with his heavy boot. The crack of ribs as he launched a cat into the far wall was only superseded by his satisfaction as he came down heavily on the spine of another. It wriggled its head uselessly from side to side, its legs now a useless jumble of spare parts.

The cats were mewling and scurrying about, some running, some defending.

“What is going on, Mike?” Gary asked. He was as scared as Mike had ever seen him.

“That’s Paul on the floor there and these fucking things did it!” Mike screamed as he lashed out at anything that was foolish enough to get within striking range. Within five minutes, he had killed or wounded at least a dozen of them. The rest had seen the folly of trying to tackle two full grown, healthy, armed and defensive men. Mike had received more than a few razor-sharp claw slashes, but that had only added fuel to the fire that the cats had ignited.

He didn’t know if Gary had gone on the offensive at all, but he had protected his back as some of the cats tried to launch themselves at him from varying pieces of furniture. Mewls of pain and rage echoed from around the house. They’d be back, most likely waiting for the cover of darkness.

“Cowards!” Mike screamed. He was shaking with his emotions, that fluctuated wildly from pain to rage to mourning. Gary grabbed him in a big hug.

“It’ll be alright, brother,” he kept saying over and over.

But it wouldn’t be, now or ever. This was one more hard stop marker in life that Mike would never be able to step back over. There would be life with his best friend of almost thirty years and then there would be a much dimmer life with him after. Mike sobbed into his brother’s shoulder to the point where his head ached and a good dry cleaner would never be able to get the snot out of his jacket.

“We need to bury him,” Mike finally managed to get out.

“I feel the same way, but I don’t really want to stay here long enough for the zombies to leave so that we can do that. Maybe we can head out the backyard and come back.”

Gary’s idea was valid in almost every way, but Mike could not leave his friend here with the cats to pick through whatever remained of him.

“The backyard it is, but we’re burning this fucker down,” Mike said with rage-fueled words.

Mike scoured the house, looking for some sort of accelerant to make sure this house would burn hot enough to rival the depths of hell. The best he could do was a small bottle of isopropyl alcohol. The cats did not come out, but there was not a room in that house that they were not observed by multiple eyes. The only thing that was stopping them and barely, was the size discrepancy.

“Mike, you should come here,” Gary said from the other side of the house, back from the kitchen Mike was doing his best to avoid.

Mike braced myself and did his best to remember his friend as he had been in life, not the carcass that lay on the floor. Mike almost sobbed when he went in. Gary at some point had draped a blanket over Paul. There would never be any way Mike could thank him properly for that.

“What’s up, brother?”

He handed Mike Paul’s wedding band. “I think you should be the one to give this back to Erin.”

Mike would rather hammer nails through his toes than have to give her back her dead husband’s ring. She would never forgive him. He lost two friends today. Mike nodded as he took the ring from Gary’s palm.

“The stove is gas,” he said.

Mike was still staring at the ring now in his hand, Gary’s words merely a jumble of mish-mashed sounds.

“Did you hear me?”

Mike nodded only because he heard the uplifting sound of a question and it seemed appropriate. But he hadn’t, not in any cognitive way. Mike was shutting down, the accumulated stress of the entire ordeal was beginning to break him. He had always thought those people that claimed they had an emotional breakdown were weak-minded. That was until he began to suffer through his own, and then he pitied each one of them, because if they had been pushed that far to the brink, something had gone horribly wrong in their lives.

“Mike!” Gary said on the verge of a yell.

“I’m here, I’m here,” Mike said like a little kid lost in the woods.

“Where the hell else would you be?” Gary asked.

“Sorry, bro, this is just…”

“I know, Mike, I know. We’ve all lost ones we love, but there isn’t time, not yet. You’ll have to grieve later. Can you do that for me?”

Mike stared at him through watery eyes. “When did you become the leader type?”

“You like that?” he asked.

“Not bad and thank you,” Mike said. He wasn’t better, not by a long shot and maybe not ever, but he was functioning. Mike was still at the abyss; except now it was to his back. He was not sure if this new precarious position was the best place to be, but it gave him a chance to make this fucked-up world pay, starting with the damn cats.

“The stove is gas,” Gary repeated. “And I found matches.”

The cats were back at the kitchen entrance. Hunger is a powerful motivator, even more so than the need to breed. And how many species killed each other for the right to do that?

“Do you think they know something is up?” Gary asked as he pulled the stove out to get access to the gas line.

“I wouldn’t doubt it. I’ve read that cats have an open gateway to the spirit world and I bet their ancestors are telling them that these shit birds are about to join them in the afterlife. I would imagine that news isn’t sitting too well with them.”

A large gray tom strode into the kitchen, emboldening the rest of his clowder. Dozens of cats were behind him and back out of eyesight, in the living room.

“How’s that going?” Mike asked Gary, never taking his gaze from the large gray, and the accumulating throng. He knew if he broke contact with him or them, they would attack. Mike knew they had size on the cats, but the combined weight of the small predators most likely outweighed them both.

“Got it!” Gary said with a grunt as he stood up with one end of the disconnected piping. The noxious gas fumes combined with the ammonia smell almost put Mike on his ass. Something about the hissing of the escaping gas or the smell triggered the cats into action. Mike noted that the gray had not moved as his minions streamed past.

“Gary, get out of there! We’ve got to go.” Mike hoped his voice wasn’t approaching falsetto, but he was scared. Gary never did call him on it, so either he had kept it together better than he thought or Gary was too scared to realize Mike’s man-code slip-up.

Gary scrambled over the top of the stove and moved to the backdoor before the cats could attempt to cut off their retreat.

“How many are there?” Gary said, fumbling with wooden matches.

“Enough,” Mike told him, and he believed it.

The gray began to shimmer in Mike’s line of sight as the room filled with dangerous amounts of liquid propane. His tail stilled, and like a military message, the cats as one unit, struck.

Gary had pulled the back door open and Mike was using his rifle as an ineffectual baseball bat. At least three cats had found purchase on Mike’s shins and dug in for the long haul. Their curved claws tore through his skin and the muscle that lay underneath. The pain was excruciating, Mike’s first instinct was to reach down and squish their necks, but he knew as soon as he bent down, they would attack his neck and face and then it would be game over. Mike gritted his teeth and kept swinging to dissuade anymore cats from weighing him down. Occasionally, he made contact, even Bucky Fucking Dent gets lucky sometimes (If you have an old sports book in your safe house look it up; if you’re a Red Sox or Yankees fan, you already know).

Mike heard the match as it struck against the box. He’d seen enough Hollywood movies to know a giant explosion was about to ensue. He could smell the sulfur as the match lit and then out of the corner of his eye, he caught a giant flare as Gary lit the rest of the matches in the small cardboard box.

Mike knew he was still alive because the cats on his legs were making him painfully aware of that fact. The fireball of matches passed dangerously close to his head as Gary gently tossed it deeper into the kitchen. Mike felt Gary’s hand close around his collar as Gary pushed the storm door open and pulled Mike out with him. They were still falling backwards as a flash of ignited gas blew past them. A wave of burnt fur and hair blew by Mike. The fur came from the cats inside, but the hair was his own. Glass shattered as the fire sought air in a need to increase its size. Two of the cats let go of Mike’s legs and were running around wildly in the yard, they were on fire. Mike hoped it took them a long time to die. The third cat was trapped between his legs as he pressed them shut more tightly. The cat was ripping wildly at Mike to get away. He grabbed him by the scruff and pulled him up and away. The cat’s claws were lashing out. Mike held it up and punched it as hard as he could squarely in the face. He was confident he had crushed its skull with the blow. Mike dropped it to the ground. It had paid the ultimate price for its betrayal to humanity and now he was done with it.

“Where’s my rifle?” Mike asked.

Gary tackled Mike. “Roll, dumb-ass, roll!!” He was screaming. “You’re on fire!” He was pushing Mike around on the ground. Mike might have been thick, but he finally figured out what was going on, as the smell of burning hair and skin did not decrease, but rather increased.

Mike rolled around like his life depended on it, which it did. He was finally not actively burning, but smoke was pouring off him; he looked like he had busted a radiator hose.

“Oh fuck, oh fuck,” Gary kept muttering, looking down at his brother.

“Pretty bad?” Mike asked. He was in a great deal of pain, but nothing that compared to the look of despair in his brother’s eyes. Odds were, Mike had third degree burns and had burned right through the nerve endings. “Help me up,” Mike said, extending a blackened hand.

Gary did not reach to grab it; he thought that maybe Mike’s skin would slough off if he did. The house roared behind them as the flames began to engulf the structure.

“Zombies are going to be coming, Gary. Help me up.”

“Umm,” he said and then he took off.

Mike passed in and out of consciousness for the next few moments as the pain began to catch up with him. Blasts of super heated air roiled over him as the house blazed. He thought he may have seen the large gray staring at him from the back door, but he couldn’t be sure. His corneas had been damaged and vision was becoming increasingly difficult. Burning tabbies streamed from some of the blown out windows just in time for the advancing zombies to hunt them down. Mike watched in horror as bulbous blisters began to form on his arms and hands. He may have cried out in pain, but the noise was lost in the destructive thunder of the flames.

Something passed by his immediate field of vision. He stuck his hands up to stop the ensuing bites, either from cat or zombie. Instead, he was hefted up from under his arms and deposited onto the cold, unyielding steel of a wheelbarrow bottom. They, or at least, the person who was pushing it, were now in motion. The heat from the fire hurt his face as the flames came close on the left side as they passed through the gate that led out to the front yard.

Zombies were everywhere. Mike tried to shut his eyes to the horror, but for some damned reason he couldn’t, his eyelids had been seared off.

“What’s wrong with me?” Mike asked.

“Don’t talk, Mike,” Gary said with labored breathing. “You’re going to be fine, fine.”

Mike had watched enough movies to know that line pretty much meant he was a dead man.

“You gonna make it?” Mike asked him. Gary was in pretty good shape, but running for your life pushing a wheelbarrow didn’t really sound conducive to a successful escape.

“Maybe, they haven’t seen us yet…Dammit! Said it too soon.”

“Gary leave me, I don’t think they’ll eat me.”

“Don’t think?” He paused to catch his breath. “Or know?”

He kept running. The wheelbarrow was about as comfortable, Mike imagined, as the old time, horse-drawn buggies of a bygone era, and probably worse because they at least, had some sort of crude, spring shock absorber.

“Mush,” Mike told Gary.

His comment did not elicit a remark. Gary was scared and running for both of their lives and Mike didn’t think he had the steam in him to make it.

“Gary, get me out of this thing.”

Gary didn’t say anything or slow down, at least not consciously, but he was flagging.

“Can’t…touch…you,” he said.

“If you don’t, we’re both toast,” Mike said and Gary winced. It was not the wording he was looking for. “Now, Gary,” Mike said with as much force as he could muster. It wasn’t much, but it would have to do.

The wheelbarrow almost tipped as he came to a stop. He quickly came around and picked Mike up underneath his arms, Mike was standing on shaking legs. “Run now!” Mike told him.

He looked to Mike and then directly over his shoulder at the zombies rapidly closing the gap.

“Run fucking now!” Mike told him, gingerly placing his smoldering hand on top of Gary’s shoulder. Layers of skin stayed behind as he removed my hand.

“No,” he said.

“Gary I…I can hold them from eating me, but I cannot protect the both of us, will you make me watch them kill you? Please don’t let that happen.”

“Are you sure?” he asked desperately. “I can keep pushing the barrow.”

“Absolutely,” Mike said, although he had no fucking clue.

“I love you, Mike.”

“I love you too, Gary. Now, get the fuck out of here!”

He wanted to hug his brother, but thought better of it. He turned and started to run. Mike stood there for a few seconds, contemplating how he was going to get his legs moving, when cats in varying states of disrepair began to stream by. Some had been burnt as badly as Mike had guessed. He had yet to take a complete inventory. Some had bites taken out of them and at least one or two looked like they might survive the entire ordeal. And then Mike heard their pursuers; zombies were coming up behind him and he didn’t have the strength to even turn around and look.

“Time to find a happy place,” Mike said aloud. Gary gave one long, woeful look from a few houses down before he turned the corner and was out of sight.

Chapter Twenty-Five

“What do you mean you left him behind!?” BT was asking, clearly agitated.

“You weren’t there, BT, he begged me to. I didn’t want to,” Gary said, finally catching his breath.

“I know, I know how he is. Stupid Talbot and his death wish persona.”

Mrs. Deneaux had not said anything from the corner of the room, but secretly she was overjoyed. Surely any questions of her culpability in the death of Brian and Paul’s disappearance would die with Michael.

“You ready to go back out and get his ass?”

“You know it.”

“You coming?” BT asked Deneaux.

“Not a chance. He got himself into this mess, he will have to get himself out,” she replied.

“I would have expected nothing less,” BT said flatly. “That’s the woman whose words you want to believe,” BT said to Mary. “If she had to step two feet out of her way to not step over you, she wouldn’t do it. We’ll be back.”

Josh raced out the door before his mother could stop him.

“Josh! What are you doing?” Mary cried from the front door; she was too afraid to follow him outside.

“I’m the man of the household now and I’m going to help them get Michael Talbot back here,” he answered not once raising his voice, just stating a factual matter.

“You will do no such thing!” she screamed, her face turning a bright crimson.

“I am and I will. Let’s go,” he motioned to BT and Gary. “I know all the short cuts around here.”

“Joshua Hilop! Get back here!” she screamed uselessly. “Do something!” she asked BT desperately.

“He’s safer with us than with her,” he told Mary, looking back at the hawk-eyed Deneaux.

She grabbed BT’s arm, but he shrugged her off. “I don’t have time for this little family drama. I have a brother to retrieve. I promise he’ll be as safe with us as he would be at your house.”

Mary was now beginning to doubt the sanctity of her own home, and looked to be moments away from joining the rescue party. “You hurry up and get back here,” she said to Josh. “I love you.”

“Mom, you’re embarrassing me.”

Mary went back into the house, shut the door and watched the small party of three head down the street from the vantage point of her living room window.

“They’re probably all going to die,” Deneaux said from the chair across the room. She lit a cigarette and took a long slow drag.

“What?” Mary didn’t think that Deneaux had just uttered those words because no one with a soul could have. She chalked up her missed hearing to stress. “There’s no smoking in this house.”

“Sure there isn’t,” Mrs. Deneaux said, shaking her ash on the carpet.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Tracy was alternating between sitting at the radio, pretending to read a series of books she couldn’t get into and working on the beefed-up fortifications Ron was installing when Henry started barking. A sound that was much closer to a sound a seal might make than any dog.

Tracy crossed the room quickly, trying to follow Henry’s line of sight, but since he was looking at a wall, she didn’t understand what he was getting all riled up about.

From Ron’s front door, you could see the long gravel roadway that was his street and that was where she went. She was slightly hesitant to open the door, lest something previously unimaginable was on the other side. But Henry never turned to look at her as she disengaged the lock and pulled the door open quickly. Kind of like the band-aid removal method--do it fast before it can sting.

Ron had come quickly with rifle in hand, almost pushing past Tracy to shield her from whatever Henry was going on about. Henry was all about conservation of movement and energy and would only reveal his true inner wolf when someone he loved was in danger.

“What’s going on?” Ron asked wide-eyed, looking around expectantly for any signs of danger.

“He just started barking, but he keeps looking at that wall,” Tracy said, clearly confused.

“Mice maybe?” Ron asked, trying to fill in the knowledge gap.

“Henry? Barking at mice? Not unless they are carrying his cookies away. What’s on the other side of that wall?”

“That’s south so about a fifty-foot clearing and then the woods,” Ron answered.

“South?” Tracy asked and she began to turn ashen.

“What’s the matter?” Ron asked in alarm. “What’s south?”

“North Carolina.” Tracy was slammed with a heavy dose of vertigo. “I’m…I’m sorry,” she said as Ron helped her to a chair.

“Let me get you some water.” Ron was back in a few seconds, Tracy felt a little better as she drank. Henry barked a few more times and then yelped once before he walked out of the room with his head down. Tracy’s glass shattered to the ground as she passed out.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“We were about three or four streets over,” Gary said.

“By the Fredericks’ house?” Josh asked, cutting through some hedges that had looked impenetrable.

“I don’t know; how would I know that?” Gary asked.

“Did you see a bright, bright blue house?” Josh said, extending his hands.

Gary couldn’t see how stretching your hands equated to brightness, but he went along. He thought for a few moments. He hadn’t really been taking in any qualities of the neighborhood. Houses, even garish ones, tend to become less important when one is looking for things that will possibly get them killed. “I don’t…wait, I think it was further up the street. I kept thinking that I hoped they got a good deal on the paint because it was pretty ugly.”

“Do we know where we’re going?” BT asked, clearly agitated.

“Yup.” Josh seemed to be reveling in this. He’d probably played this game a hundred times before, hiding from the enemy. It would have never been a real life scenario like it was now, but practice does have a way of making things perfect. Josh pulled two slats from the fence to the side so he could fit his slender form. BT ripped another five off to get through. Josh did not seem pleased, but he pressed on. Within a few minutes, they were assailed with the smell.

“This is the place.” Gary said.

“What gave it away?” BT asked, wanting to hold his nose.

Josh opened the gate from the homeowners’ backyard and was heading to the front when BT grabbed him by the collar and lifted him off the ground.

“Hold on. Gary, go check,” BT said. “You’re the fastest at the moment,” he added when Gary passed on by.

“I think that honor goes to Josh, but I’ll check.”

“Any chance you’ll let me down now?” Josh asked, his legs kicking in the air.

“Do not go anywhere, unless it is back to your house,” BT said as he gently placed the boy on the ground.

Gary got up close to the side of the house and inched himself around, taking a quick peek. He immediately turned back to where Josh and BT were. “Send him home NOW!” Gary yelled as quietly as he could.

“Now, kid, go home! Do not turn around! Do you understand me!” BT yelled.

Gary had started firing his rifle. BT urged Josh in the opposite direction as he brought his rifle to the ready. He was wholly unprepared for what he witnessed as he turned the corner to stand side by side with Gary.

Michael was completely surrounded by zombies. His skin was the color of burnt hamburger and large curled flaps of skin were peeling away from his singed chest and shoulders. These were being torn off by zombies, struggling to get at the flesh. Michael was screaming as pink, oozing, tender flesh was exposed while the zombies tore off the blackened parts.

At least a dozen zombies were dropped by Gary’s and BT’s rifles fire before Mike’s attackers took any notice. At first, two or three went after the pair and were quickly dispatched, but as Michael went to his knees and then his face, the rest turned and went for the new meat.

Gary was dry firing, screaming in rage as the zombies approached. BT was afraid that Gary was going to go into berserk mode and just start swinging his rifle like a club. BT was getting low on ammo. “Let’s go, Gary.”

“He’s my brother!” Gary yelled, looking up at BT’s face with tears coming from his eyes.

“There’s nothing more we can do here.”

Gary took one final look back at his brother who had not moved since his head made impact with the pavement. He sobbed as he ran, tears so occluding his vision, he had to be guided by BT.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“What is the purpose of waiting here, sister? Now is the time to pull back and regroup. Michael is long gone now, yet we have wasted days here.”

“We have wasted nothing,” Eliza hissed. “While you have been having secret rendezvous’ with the enemy, I have been summoning a vast zombie army to destroy everything in our path toward getting Michael, starting with this little town.”

With Eliza’s human sympathizers out of the way, Tomas had hoped his sister would give up her foolish quest, or at least, postpone it. In the meantime, he had kept tabs on Michael when he could. His former father was getting good at disguising his presence. Mike had delivered a victorious blow, and for the life of him, Tomas could not figure out why the man had not collected his things and gone home. Even with the infection in BT, that should have only delayed him a day at the most. And now his sister was planning on bringing thousands upon thousands of zombies to this town.

“What do you hope to accomplish here?” Tomas asked his sister.

“Either you are still trying to cover for him or you are not as powerful as you imagine yourself to be, but Michael is still around. And even now, he uses his limited powers to save himself. If only he would fully reveal himself to me, I would finish him off myself.”

Tomas was taken aback, he had not known his sister realized Michael was still here, but what was more unsettling was he did not know Mike was in distress.

“Don’t be so confused, brother. I have blocked you from him. This is one battle the great and mighty Michael Talbot will need to finish on his own without any outside help.” Eliza laughed as Tomas tried desperately to get around whatever she had put in place to hinder his ability to talk to him.

Tomas could feel the psychic push of thousands of zombies as they closed the distance from their original locations to get to where their mistress beckoned as he extended his powers to try and encompass Mike.

“This is insanity, sister, he is gone from here.”

Eliza was still for a moment as if she were listening for a pin to drop on a faraway floor. “Perhaps you are right for once, little brother,” she said as she turned to walk away.

Tomas was relieved, maybe something could be salvaged out of this after all. Then the barrier that had been erected between Michael and himself crashed to the ground. Tomas nearly fell to his knees as he felt the screams of Michael, and then there was silence, soulless black silence. “What have you done, Eliza!?” Tomas screamed, chasing his sister down.

“I have done nothing, dear brother.”

“Why did you let me hear that and then cut it off again?” he demanded.

“I wanted you to hear that, but I most certainly did not cut it off at the end. That was the end. Michael Talbot is no more. He is no longer alive in a dead world!”

Prologue

Story takes place December, near Christmas 2009, written December 27^th 2010.

Excerpt taken from a journal discovered in Vona, Colorado. Its location was a center console in a red Jeep Wrangler. The reader found the story humorous and decided to hold onto it, where it was finally paired together with the original writer’s works.

***

I’ve been feeling down as of late. We are on the run from zombies. This has not turned out to be the adventure I had hoped it would be. My hope was that I would make a lasting stand at my household with all my rifles, ammo, food and water. Yet, three weeks after the invasion I had been preparing for almost my entire life, my home has fallen into enemy hands. We’re cold, scared, and are draining through hope like a wino through Mad Dog 20/20. My ability to keep my family, friends, and to a lesser extent, our other traveling companions safe weighs heavily on me. My goal with these next lines is just an attempt to bring a smile in a deepening dark that is gathering.

In a time before there were zombies, we lived our lives like the vast amount of Americans in December. We overate, overspent and waited until the last minute to do our shopping around the holiday. This year was no different. I had just cashed my meager check this morning and my wife felt that we had to get a few more gifts for the kids.

“Go ahead,” I told her. Yeah, that went over about as well as you think it did.

“Talbot, get your ass up off that couch,” she said. It wasn’t loud, it wasn’t threatening, but to not act on those words would have been tantamount to suicide. Kind of like the criminally insane do when they point a gun at the cops and then the cops have no option but to open fire. It was the same premise here.

So I got my ass up off the couch and off to the mall we went. Yippeee! The mall at Christmas time. I’d rather go to a drunk dentist for a root canal; it was a lot less painful. The mall was so packed, there was no place to park. They had to plow the snow off a distant field and offer a free shuttle service.

“Recession, my ass,” I grumbled as I parked the car. The mall was a distant pinpoint of light, off in the distance. “Maybe that’s where the baby Jesus lays,” I said sarcastically.

“Talbot!” My wife smacked my arm.

We walked up to the sign that said “Shuttle” just as a white tin can, packed with holiday revelers left.

“It’s friggin’ cold out here,” I said, stamping my feet.

“Maybe if you had worn your heavy coat like I told you to, you wouldn’t be so cold,” Tracy said, with the all knowing “I told you so” lilt.

I opened my mouth to argue the point, but she looked much more ready to do battle than I. So just a little background and you decide if I had a valid point or not, not that Tracy would have agreed anyway.

By ’09, Tracy and I had been married somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-something years. Now, NEVER, ever will I claim to know what makes a woman tick, but I’ve been around this particular model long enough to know some of its quirks. I might have written this down in one of my earlier journals. but it’s worth reiterating. My wife researches and buys her cars on the recommendation of other folks’ opinions about how the heater works. So when we go auto shopping, we have to look for heaters that have an extra setting called “lava,” and until molten magma is pouring from the vents, my wife is not happy. I’ve actually lost the bottoms from more than one pair of sneakers as the glue has melted, and the soles have become un-adhered from the rest of the shoe.

There have been days when the temperature outside is zero or less and I have dressed in shorts and a windbreaker for long car rides, because I know that most likely, my face will, at some point, melt. This trip was no different, but it was a shorter ride so I actually had pants on and a light jacket, not in any way rated for the inclement weather we were in the midst of, but still I was not going to argue the point with her. It would have been a lot colder if I had to walk home.

So I waited, gritting my teeth, feeling my nasal passages beginning to freeze up. My wife looked fairly toasty in her heavy sweater and full-length jacket, scarf around her neck and leather gloves.

The shuttle showed up seventeen teeth-chattering minutes later. I had to rip my planted feet from the ground. Seems the melted glue had frozen fast to the ice slicked surface. Tracy entered before me and then I came in after. I stepped up on the stoop and looked to the left. Seems the shuttle had stopped to pick up half the state of Wisconsin before it got to our stop. An older gentleman gave up his seat when he saw Tracy approach him and somehow the seat next to her was vacant. I was about to plant my ass in it when it looked like someone had spilled half of an Orange Julius in the plastic bucket seat. At least, I hoped it was an Orange Julius.

Tracy shrugged her shoulders as if to say “What are you going to do?”

My next option was the large, silver, hand-hold poles that went from floor to ceiling on the shuttle. I was near to placing bare hand on metal when I spotted what looked like the world’s largest nose nugget wrapped around the bar twice. The offending brown-green slime was oozing its way down the pole, much like a low rent stripper. I was getting nauseous. Making it through the throng to another pole was out of the question. A kid of about twelve off to my left was sneezing like his mother was shoving pepper up his nose. The friggin’ germ factory wasn’t even covering his mouth. I felt like I was in a rolling Petri dish. And our shuttle driver must have been a foreigner because he was paying absolutely no heed to state and national laws in regards to load limits.

He kept packing people in like he was getting paid per pound delivered. I was being pressed closer and closer to the pole with the snot snake wrapped around it. I was using what minimal leverage I had trying to keep from pressing up against it. Something or someone was touching my ass. I kept praying that it was some hot Yugoslavian model, but the last time I had turned around, I remember seeing an overweight man who looked like he had just downed a bucket of fried chicken. I noted that his hands had appeared greasy. Now I wasn’t so sure what was on his diet and why his hands were greasy, but I was not feeling so good anymore.

I was losing the leverage battle. I pulled my hands up into my jacket so that I would have at least one barrier between the human goop that riddled the pole and me. I gripped it with both jacket-clad hands and moved a foot off to the side. Greasy Hands had two wet fingers shoved in his mouth and was sucking deeply. His other hand was still located where my ass had just been. I felt pretty dirty and violated. He winked at me when he caught me looking. I would have vomited had I the chance to make sure I could get away from it. My luck right now and this bus would break down with the doors unable to open.

Greasy tried to slide over my way, but a small, older woman blocked his path. I would have kissed her except for the thick moustache she sported, well, that and the scowl, well, those two things and the marble-sized mole to the left of her nose, or did she have two noses? I hadn’t quite worked that one out yet.

Someone else picked up the sneezing torch as Georgie Germ stopped. I think Fanny Phlegm started hacking up a lung. I could see particulates flying through the air like airborne missiles. I was going for a world record in breath-holding, forty-two seconds and counting. I wondered if anyone would pick me up if I could find enough open space to topple over. Greasy Hands probably would; that was of little comfort. And then I’d be left wondering what was on the floor and if the rest of the shuttle was any indication, then I’d be swimming in a sea of viral stew, with chunks of unidentifiable material.

Six or seven days later, the cross country journey finally came to an end. Two Nose cut me off as I tried to make a hasty exit. Greasy Hands immediately pulled up to my rear and Georgie Germ heralded our passage with a heavy barrage of wet, viscous germ spewage.

“Tell your kid to cover his mouth,” I said loudly to a mother, who was too busy playing on her phone to monitor her child. Of course, until I said something about her son, and then she became a Kodiak bear, protecting her cub. Her shrill screams of “Mind your own fucking business” are still etched on my eardrums.

Greasy Hands was making our last few feet out a free for all. As soon as we hit terra firma, I turned and slammed him back into the bus. He licked his lips at me.

I clenched my fists and was about to make him pay for our encounter, when Tracy alit from the shuttle.

“Ah, Talbot, I see you’re making friends again. I really can’t take you anywhere, can I?” Tracy said, laughing.

Greasy Hands winked one more time and got back on the bus. Obviously, this was something that got his rocks off and it looked like he had been doing it the entire holiday season. Tracy grabbed my tensed shoulder. “Come on, let’s go,” she said without turning back around to witness what I had.

We had gone a few feet from the bus when I made a great showing of patting my pockets down. “Aw shit, hon! I left my phone on the bus. Go in, I’ll meet you there.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“I’ll be right there. Go in; get warm.”

I had hit the right button; she headed towards the mall entrance.

I jogged back to the bus. Greasy Hands was sitting in the empty bus on the seat that I had previously rejected due to the supposed Orange Julius contents.

“Back for more?” he asked, standing up.

I pulled my fist back somewhere around Detroit and let fly. I caught him flush on the cheek as he attempted to dodge my blow. He sat back down heavily. He would be sleeping for at least the next few bus rides.

“Fuck, that hurt,” I said, shaking my hand around.

“You can’t do that here! Get out of here!” the bus driver was yelling at me.

“Calm down, I was just getting my phone. And why don’t you clean this pit up while you’re waiting for people? Starting with Sleeping Beauty over there.”

“Get your ass off my bus or I’m calling security! And don’t try to get back on, you’re not welcome!”

“I’d rather walk on my hands and knees back to the lot than get on this lab, gone bad.”

Tracy was by the mall directory board when I came in. “Your phone, huh?”

“My what?” I had already forgotten my lying premise.

“Remember? You went back to get your phone.”

“Right, right.”

“Did you find it?” she asked.

“I had it in my pocket the whole time.” I explained, trying to get my most innocent face in place.

“Your knuckles look pretty raw,” she said as I jammed my hand into my jacket so she couldn’t get a closer look.

“I fell,” came stumbling out.

“And you braced yourself with your knuckles?”

“It was a very awkward fall. I was lucky to even get that to stop me or I would have landed square on my chin.”

“Oh, and then your new boyfriend would have been so upset.”

“He could have at least taken me out to dinner before he started to take liberties with me.”

Tracy laughed. “Let’s go, we’ve got a lot of shopping to do.”

We hadn’t even started and I was already wiped out.

The mall was packed, but fortunately not as bad as the bus, but much more so than my living room, which I so desired to be sitting in. Most folks looked panicked. They were running out of time, and as of yet, not picked out their significant other a proper gift. This led many to go over the top, and at least one jewelry store was the beneficiary of that panic.

There were two competing jewelry stores on either side of an opening that led down to another string of shops. There could not have been fifty feet separating the vendors, yet one was filled to the brim with customers and the other had three people in it, two of which were employees and one who had yet to look up from her split ends she kept pulling up in front of her face.

The packed one was Kay Jewelers, you know the one. I bet you’ve already sung the jingle without any prompting from me. “Every kiss begins with Kay.” Sorry, now you’ve probably got that stuck in your head. The other was a place I’d never heard of called J.D. Robbins Jewelry. The only difference I could discern in the two stores was that one had a fancy ad campaign with a catchy jingle and the other didn’t.

I pointed this out to Tracy, but she didn’t seem nearly as intrigued about it as I was.

“I’ve thought of a jingle that I think would get that store packed!” I told her excitedly.

“I’m sure you have. Do I even want to hear it?”

“Okay, you know the one “every kiss begins with Kay?”

She nodded.

“Now use the same jingle only with these words, Every Jerk-off begins with J! That store would be fucking packed right now!”

Tracy nearly snorted on the cookie we had been sharing, but she quickly recovered. “What is the matter with you? It’s Christmas!” She was trying to sound disgusted, but I could tell she was inwardly laughing her ass off.

“I personally couldn’t think of a better gift,” I said lasciviously.

“Go find your bus buddy!” she laughed as she pushed me away.

One short year removed from that story, I find myself huddled in the cold with the remnants of humanity. How I wish I was back on that bus, not with Greasy Hands, mind you. I hope he was patient zero, but I’d even take Georgie Germ as long as he was on the far side of the bus. I could maybe do without Two Nose and the bus driver and maybe Georgie’s mother, but I think everyone else would be fine. This story has done what I’d hoped it would accomplish. It has brought a smile to an otherwise tired, scared man.

Blood Stone Part 2

Corporal Tenson could not believe his luck of late and he attributed it all to the blood red stone he had found two weeks previous at the destroyed Lakota village. He had been promoted to sergeant. His commanding officer, whom he could not stand, had swallowed a bullet and he was unimaginably wealthy if he could ever bring himself to sell the stone.

He had been so paranoid about possessing the stone, he had not even showed anyone, not even his best friend Aaron Gentry, a corporal in the same regiment he was in.

“What gives?” Aaron asked. He had been sleeping on his cot when he heard his friend rustling around.

“What are you talking about?” Scott Tenson asked back, stashing a small bag quickly into his front pocket.

“I’ve seen you pull out that bag at least a dozen times and you just stare at it.”

“You should just mind your own business,” Scott shot back a little testily.

“Sorry, just looking for something to talk about. It’s been so boring around here since the old man shot himself. I can’t believe he killed himself. I guess I would have too if I came home and my whole family was murdered. Some are saying that it was the shaman from the Lakota tribe we destroyed, seeking revenge.”

This had been a favorite topic of conversation within the unit since it had happened. The stories ranged from the mundane: the colonel had come home and discovered his wife was cheating and had murdered his family then killed himself; to the semi-paranormal and favorite among the men: that the medicine man’s spirit had done it as revenge; to the completely farfetched: a white witch had taken the colonel’s family hostage and forced him to attack the Indians. Not many believed that particular story, but speculation on it made the long nights go by quicker.

Maybe it was the hour of the night, maybe he was sick of hearing the same topic of conversation repeated over and over, but Corporal Tenson did something he never planned on doing.

“Want to see what I picked up at that camp?”

Gentry sat up. “Is that what’s in that pouch? Do you have a scalp or something? I thought they’d smell, but I haven’t smelled anything.”

“It’s not a scalp. Check this out,” Tenson said, turning the pouch over into his hand. The large red stone dropped into his palm.

Gentry inhaled sharply and then reached out to grab it, Tenson pulled his hand back.

“Sorry,” Tenson said, letting his friend grab the stone.

“What is it?” Gentry asked, holding it up to the lantern.

“My ticket out of the cavalry, and into a life of luxury.”

“Have you found out how much it’s worth?”

“No I haven’t told anyone I’ve got it. I’m too afraid they’ll make me turn it over to the captain.”

“Nobody knows you have it?”

“Just you, now,” Tenson said, smiling.

“I’ve got to show you something then,” Gentry said conspiratorially. He handed the stone back to Tenson.

Gentry reached under his cot and pulled something out that caught a glint of light a moment before he plunged it into Tenson’s stomach. The long bowie knife ripped through his stomach, spleen and kidney and brushed up against his spinal cord. The pain had been too intense to even formulate a scream. Gentry was not going to give him the opportunity anyway. He clamped his free hand over his friend’s mouth and twisted the knife back and forth as more and more pain and shock blazed though Tenson’s eyes. Gentry spoke.

“I’m sorry my friend, I really am. You saved my life once, and now I’m taking yours. It hardly seems fair. But I fucking hate it here and now I’ve got a way out and I had to take it, no matter what expense you had to pay for it.”

Gentry waited until he was completely sure his friend (although that didn’t seem like the right word anymore) was dead before extracting his knife from Tenson’s mid-section. He then wiped it off on Tenson’s blanket and covered him up with it. He quickly grabbed anything of any value in addition to the stone, which he clutched greedily, and slipped quietly into the night.

***

Eliza had watched the entire battle from her higher vantage point. She was mildly impressed with the Lakota’s savagery. Here were a people who had already lost everything dear to them, and still they fought viciously. She hoped the colonel would live, if only to be reunited with his bride, but either way, all that mattered was that the medicine man died.

She waited until the cavalry men departed as she walked amid the smoking ruins of the destroyed village. The Indians lay where they had been struck down. She checked each one of them, yet she could not find the shaman. A little known feeling rose in her breast; it was a sense of unease. She checked the only teepee that was not burning. It was the largest in the village and by its decoration, she figured it was a ceremonial gathering place.

The shaman was in there, but he was dead. He had been set in a place of honor in the center of the room, enshrouded in soft blankets made of deer and bison hide. Instead of her unease slipping away, it grew.

“This man died before the battle,” she said as she walked around him. She ripped the shroud off him, looking for a wound that could have caused his demise. She savagely ripped his clothes off, unsure as to the root of her anger. She kicked his body over onto his stomach when the front did not reveal any damage.

She kicked him again, this time from spite when she could not glean any information. His broken body hit the far side of the large teepee and rolled to a stop as Eliza strode out. Had her anger not burned so brightly, she would have been able to pick up on the faint traces of the information she so desperately sought.

***

Tomas had been one state removed when he began to hear rumors about the cursed cavalry unit. Each story sounded more fantastic than the last. But he had been around the frontier long enough to know that people with too much time on their hands like a fantastic tale. He did not sit up and take notice until some of these tales began to hint about a white witch, her cruelty only rivaled by her beauty.

“Eliza,” he muttered, draining his tankard of beer.

“Hey where you going?” the old grizzled man at the bar asked. “You’ve already paid for two drinks, I promised you the entire story.”

“Buy yourself a third,” Tomas said, flipping him a nickel and heading for the door.

The old man continued as if his drinking buddy had remained behind. “So they say that this white witch took the colonel’s family for some devilry until the colonel brought her the head of a great Indian chief. And when he came back without it, she had killed his family and then him. And then she cast some kind of spell on the men in the platoon. Seems they started killing each other. I think the witch part is made up. I think it’s more the medicine man sent some bad medicine.” The old man snorted and laughed at his own word play. “The Indians are some tricky ones. You have to be real careful how you kill them or they can rise up out their grave and get you.” He cackled. “Barkeep! Another drink for me and my friend,” the old man said, waving the nickel around.

The bartender shook his head and poured two more glasses. Who was he to judge? A nickel was a nickel.

Tomas bought the best horse he could find in the region and pushed the animal as hard as he dared. After five days of hard riding, and asking anyone he could for information on the battle site, he finally found himself amongst the ruins. Not much was left. It was mostly just pieces of shattered pottery here and there. After nearly a month, any bones of the Indians still left remaining from the scavengers had been picked clean. The village was nearly reclaimed by the land, save one large teepee. Tomas alit from his horse and strode purposefully towards it.

He said a small prayer upon entering. He noted the many footprints of animals that had entered in here previous to him, nearly obscuring the soft prints of the white witch.

“Eliza,” he said as he pressed his palm down onto the heel of the print. He looked over to where the shriveled husk of a man lay. He walked over to him. “Why have the scavengers not taken your sustenance?” Tomas asked. “And more importantly, what did my sister want with you?”

Tomas gently turned the man onto his back. His facial muscles had pulled up and dried into a perpetual smile. Tomas grabbed the blankets that had been strewn around the large teepee, almost shattering an ornate bowl as he grabbed the last one.

He turned the bowl over and over. “This is ceremonial,” he said to himself. “That makes you the shaman,” he said as he picked the man up and placed him on the blankets he had piled up. “Eliza, what trouble have you gotten yourself into now?” he asked as he left the ghost town with bowl in hand.

Tomas’ next destination was Durango, Colorado it was where the Cavalry 3^rd Regiment was stationed at Camp Foster. He needed to find out more information and the best place was always the local saloon. Liquor tended to make tongues wag, as did his power of persuasion.

“Who’d you say you were again?” The soldier slurred, trying his best to focus on the person in front of him. “This is some powerful whiskey.”

“That doesn’t matter,” Tomas said pouring the man, boy really, another shot. “You were saying about the curse?” Tomas asked.

“Nuffin’s been the same since we attacked that Injun village. Now I don’t normally care one way or the other about killing them, but these ones weren’t doing anything, they weren’t near to any settlement or anything. And there was something about that place.” The soldier shuddered just thinking about it. “It was dead there. Does that make sense? I mean before we even got there, you could just sense that something wasn’t right. Like the angel of darkness himself had settled upon the place.” The young soldier took another gulp of liquid courage.

“It was no angel and he was a she,” Tomas said, pouring the man another shot in his drained glass.

“What?” the man asked looking up from his glass. When Tomas didn’t answer right away, the soldier continued. “The Indians put up a good fight, but it almost felt like it was for show. That doesn’t even make sense to me.” The soldier paused, trying to grasp the correct words. “I…I mean they already seemed dead like they had nothing left to live for. Damndest thing though, we wiped out that whole village and there wasn’t a woman or a child among them. I mean normally, your first thought would be, yeah, raiding party, but it was their summer encampment. You could tell by the large gathering tent, that things means everything to them. They wouldn’t take it on raids.”

“Could the woman and children have left before you got there?” Tomas asked.

“I asked myself that,” he said, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth. “But we hit them so fast and so hard, they couldn’t have escaped. And I know we surprised them because most of ‘em were coming out of their teepees when we hit. It wasn’t like they had any advance warning or anything.”

“And this Colonel Broward, he led the charge?” Tomas prodded.

“Yeah, funny thing that.”

“How so?”

“The colonel never went out on a mission, ever. And he was hell-bent on getting out to this little fly shit of an Indian village and destroying it. We barely slept, or hardly ate. Eight horses died from being pushed over the edge of exhaustion. Those were some good horses.”

“To say nothing of the Indians that died,” Tomas added.

“What are you trying to get at, mister?” The soldier said. “I lost four friends out there,” he said as he rose up.

“Nothing, I meant nothing by it. Please sit; have another drink,” Tomas said, smiling.

“I think maybe I’ve had enough,” the soldier said, about to turn and walk away.

“You’ll leave when I say you can,” Tomas said forcibly.

The soldier stopped mid-stride and began to size Tomas up. He quickly sat back down. “One more drink for the road sounds good,” the soldier said as if he had been thinking that all along.

“You were saying?”

The soldier was smiling as Tomas poured him another drink as if the last few seconds had not happened at all.

“I mean not only did the colonel come with us, he led the charge. He looked like a man possessed. Like the devil himself was on his tail.”

“Probably was,” Tomas said seriously.

The soldier paused to reflect on Tomas’ answer. And then nodded his head in agreement.

“The colonel almost left without even burying our dead. I think Staff Sergeant Reddings would have shot him. So we buried our men, said a few short prayers and headed back, almost as fast as we had headed out there. Would have too, if the horses could have taken it.”

“Was the colonel looking for anything?”

“Looking? No. Like I said, the colonel couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there, like he was late for his own death.” The soldier laughed at his own quip. “Which I guess he was, considering he came home to a dead family. Then he killed himself.”

“So he didn’t kill them?”

“Why would he kill them? There were rumors that he had, but I was the one on the burial detail. I had to help get those bodies out of the house. I’ve seen a lot of dead. The colonel’s brains splattered all over his portrait will be something I can never drink away,” he said brandishing his drink. “But the kids and the wife? There was something wrong there; they were all shriveled up like peaches left out in the desert sun. None of them had a drop of blood in them and there wasn’t a drop of any spilled anywhere in the house. And I got the same feeling I did at that damned Indian village, something bad had been there, it was like I could feel the evil still lurking in the shadows.”

“Did the colonel leave a note or anything?”

The soldier merely shook his head from side to side. “I have fourteen months left on my enlistment. I need to get out of this unit before it gets me,” the soldier said desperately.

“Before what gets you?”

“The curse. We’re cursed now.” The soldier sneered as if to say ‘how do you not know?’ “I’ve been hearing that the medicine man of the tribe we killed had cursed the colonel for something and that was why the colonel wanted to kill him, but the curse didn’t die with the medicine man. He was able to do some magic that made the colonel’s family dry up. And he somehow turned friend against friend.”

“How so?” Tomas asked.

“Gentry and Tenson have been friends long before I ever joined the unit. And then one morning, neither one shows for revelry. Of course, it’s me that gets to go and check in on their tent. Tenson’s still in his rack, but I know he ain’t never going anywhere again. His blanket is soaked in his own blood and Gentry is gone. At first, I just can’t believe that Gentry did it. They were as close as brothers. But he was gone and so was his stuff. I need to get out of here,” the soldier said, placing his head between his hands.

“How long ago was that?” Tomas asked.

“Almost a month,” the soldier said, looking up. “You want to see it?”

“See what?”

“The tent, it’s still there. The captain is waiting for a magistrate to come out here to witness the crime scene.”

“Yes, very much so.”

Ten minutes later a swaying, Private Bucks was at the tent flap, looking around for anyone that might catch them, unwillingly to go in where he would be less noticed. Tomas, did as the private asked and did not move or pick up anything. He could sense Eliza’s presence here, but in a much more muted form. He could not explain what he felt, just that in some shape, way or form she had been here.

“My sister was here,” Tomas said more aloud to taste the tangibility of his question in the open air.

“Your sister?” Bucks asked.

Tomas looked over to the private. “Someone you would be better off never meeting.”

“Your sister is the white witch?” Bucks asked as he let go of the tent flap and began to back up.

Tomas moved quickly to halt his retreat. Bucks barely had time to register how strong the boy was.

“What do you know of this ‘white witch’?”

“Nothing. I don’t know nothing. Let me go. I knew there was something wrong with you,” Bucks said, trying his best to release the iron grip around his forearm.

“I will let you go when you tell me what you know,” Tomas said as he dragged the wide-eyed private back into the confines of the tent.

“Fine, anything that makes you go away. The night before we rode out against those Indians, I was in the tavern with Gentry and a couple of other guys. And we saw the colonel over at the far end of the place, talking to one of the prettiest women I had…or any of us had ever seen, but there just wasn’t something right with her. I wanted to get a closer look at her, but she scared the bejesus out of me. I never did get much closer than about fifteen feet. She looked up at me once, I…I felt like she wanted to kill me. And not that she ‘wanted to’, but that she could. All that beauty and she was just so cold, so deadly cold.” Bucks made a show of wrapping an imaginary jacket around his shoulders to shield himself from the memory.

“And you haven’t seen her since that night?”

“No, she’s not a face you would forget; but if I did see her, I’d be heading the other way.”

Tomas had fragments to this puzzle. Eliza had engineered a cavalry raid on the Indian village, but why? Was she looking for something? Was she afraid of someone? Impossible, Tomas thought, answering his own question. He hadn’t seen fear in her eyes since the day she bit him. Some five centuries previous. There was no doubt that something powerful that belonged to Eliza had been in this room. Is that what she was looking for? But why not come back and get it? Why go through all the trouble of setting this thing up and not following through.

“Did Tenson or Gentry say anything about the day of the raid?”

Bucks looked confused.

“Did they talk about finding anything?”

Bucks had not yet shaken the look off his face. And then a thought he might have never have retrieved, popped to the fore. “I don’t think it meant anything, but Tenson was always kind of a glum person. Always the first to bed, griped about everything, even the food, and sometimes that was actually pretty good. But after the raid, even while we were burying our dead, he was smiling from ear to ear. I thought it was strange as hell. But I was tired and we were, like I said, burying our dead. I didn’t much pay attention to him.”

“How long after you got back did Gentry go missing?”

“About a week. Come to think of it, Tenson started talking about places where he wanted to live and what he’d do when he got out of the cavalry. He even started coming to get drinks with us. He was actually turning into a pretty decent guy before Gentry gutted him like a fish.”

“Do you know where Gentry was from?” Tomas asked.

“Pretty sure it’s Louisiana. Yeah, New Orleans because he was always going on and on about the Cajun food and how he misses shrimp.”

Private Bucks thought he must have passed out for a few minutes. When he sat up, he realized he was on Gentry’s rack and the stranger was gone, if he had ever been there at all. The only thing he could focus on was the mounting headache starting to take root in the base of his skull.

Tomas headed east. Even without getting a location from Bucks, he would have been able to follow whatever Gentry was carrying. It was a faint trail, but it was there if you knew what to look for, and now he did. Did Eliza? He pushed his horse harder, but Gentry and possibly Eliza had three weeks on him.

It took Tomas nearly a week to get to Gentry’s family home. It was a ramshackle hut built of varying pieces of wood and held together more from force of habit than anything else.

A nearly toothless old woman sat on the front porch. She was strumming a banjo and stooped down every once in a while to pick up a jug with unknown contents. She would drink her fill and then put the container down to begin again on her picking.

Tomas was coming up on her blind side when she spoke. “You from the government?” she asked before turning around. When she did turn to the approaching boy, she spoke again. “No, not the government, you’re a powerful one, you are. What do you want with my boy?”

Tomas saw no reason to be obtuse with her. “He has something of mine, of my sister’s, actually.”

“The stone. That damned blood stone, I knew it was bad, and now it’s brought you.”

“Better me, old woman, than my sibling. You would not be having this conversation with her.”

“I can feel that thing in my house. It itches under my skin, like a tick. It burrows under the skin and spreads.” She shivered, even though the outside temperature was hovering around the mid nineties and the humidity had drenched her clothes. “He won’t give it up willingly.”

“I can be pretty persuasive.”

“I bet you can. Step closer, boy, so I can see what you are.”

Tomas did as she asked.

She put her instrument down and grabbed both his hands in a surprisingly firm grip for someone so fragile looking. She spoke as if in a trance. “You walk in both worlds, unable to die and unwilling to live. You have light in your heart, but a darkness where your soul should be. You have seen much pain and misery, yet you try to do as much as you can to prevent it as you go about your journey. You are much, much older than I, yet you look younger than my boy. I do not know who or what you are, but you are the rightful owner of that accursed stone, I can feel it in my bones.”

“Is your son home? The sooner I get what belongs to me, the sooner I can get going.”

“I think that would be for the best. Gentry!” she yelled, never letting go of Tomas’ hands or looking away from him.

Gentry came around the side of the shack and almost started to run when he saw the stranger on his porch.

“Don’t be a damned fool,” his mother said, not witnessing one nuance on his face as he came up behind her. “This young man,” she began and then winked at Tomas. “Says that you have something that belongs to him.”

“Ma? I don’t know what either of you are talking about.”

“You’ll kill us both if he won’t give up the stone, won’t you?” The old woman asked.

“Yes, and still, it will be a better fate than the one my sister would bestow upon you.”

“You’re the white witch’s brother?” Gentry asked, almost collapsing.

Tomas did not need to answer.

“I killed my best friend for that stone and I became a deserter. Both things are punishable by death and still I don’t know why I did it. I can’t even stand to look at it, yet I carry it with me everywhere I go. It’ll be a relief to get rid of it,” Gentry said as he reached far down into his pocket and pulled out a stone, which he’d wrapped in a small piece of cloth.

Tomas took a big intake of air as the stone was placed into his hand, now that the old woman had finally yielded it.

“What will you do with me now?” Gentry asked. All the spirit had been drained from him.

“You will go on with your useless life such as it is, knowing that you killed your friend for a stone that is valuable to no one, save one. I wish that I could feel pity for you, but I don’t. Good day,” he added for the old woman as he turned to leave.

“What is it? What is the stone?” Gentry asked.

Tomas held it up to the blazing sun. Two occlusions were outlined through the fiery red brilliance. And then like a comet flashing across the sky, the answer came to him. “It is my sister’s soul and that of the medicine man that trapped her here.”

It was the old woman’s turn to breathe deeply.

“Get it off my property! It should have never been here, there are things going on that should never be!”

She was still raving as Tomas found his way down the tree lined pathway that led away.

Post Script – If you have asked yourself the meaning of the picture that heads each of Michael’s journal entries, it is a simple and powerful explanation at the same time – it is his path home.