Chapter 10: Memory Cards

Five months ago

I didn't remember the last time we got out. Since the evening curfews started, Elise and I found ourselves staying in our apartment more and more. On an unseasonably warm Saturday morning, we snuck out to The Fort during the day, intending to organize some of our supplies, but by the time we got out there, we decided that the beautiful day could not be wasted.
Elise smiled at me. “You wanna take a walk?”
I shrugged. “Sure.”
Holding hands, we walked down the hill, passing through an arch of leaning birch trees and down into a large meadow full of weeds and wildflowers. A narrow path led out of the field into a thick stand of trees, wound through the forest to a small creek.
A rickety-looking footbridge crossed the creek at the deepest but narrowest part. The water gurgled around smooth green rocks, through a thick bunch of reeds.
I stopped and stared down into the creek. I imagined that I could feel the cold of the early spring water.
“I think it will hold,” Elise said, inching across the bridge, staying on the outside edge to keep here weight on the heavy beams that spanned the water.
I held the railing tight, though it wobbled and shook. I didn't move.
“You okay.”
“Huh? Yeah, I'm great.”
“It will hold,” Elise said, bouncing on the beams. Something creaked. “See?”
I stepped up onto the beam, stood for a second and then stepped back down. “Yeah, looks safe.”
“That water isn't even that deep,” she said.
“I can't swim.” I smiled, embarrassed.
“Really?”
“Really.”
“No shit?”
“Are you trying to make this as difficult as possible?”
Elise smiled sweetly. “No. Hold on.” She inched back to my side of the creek, until she was standing close enough to slow dance. “Hold my hand.”
Without hesitation, I took her hand.
She stepped back, leading me out onto the bridge. I glanced down at the swirling water underneath me. It was crystal clear and I could easily see the bottom, ten feet below.
“I figured 'Don't look down' kind of went without saying. Duh.”
I laughed. “If I drown.”
“I won't let you drown, doofus. Besides, what were you doing when all the other kids were learning how to swim? Were you experimenting with inappropriate touching?”
“Games. Video games. I was a hardcore gamer.”
“I didn't know that. You don't play video games, now though.”
“Yeah, I quit.”
“Why?”
“I don't know. I just quit.”
“Sad.”
“Sad that I played video games?”
Elise shrugged, still holding my hands. “No, I just think its sad when people give up the things they love to do.”
“I guess.” Silence, but for the sound of water rushing. “I, uh, I was playing one night, I was maybe fifteen, just off in my own world and the phone rings, I didn't even hear it and then hours later, not sure even how much later, there's someone pounding at the door. I don't hear that either.”
“Did you get in trouble with your parents?”
“It's the cops. They knock on the window so hard, that it breaks. I heard that.”
“Did you get busted?”
“My parents had been in an accident, a truck hit their car.”
“Oh my God, Dave.”
“My, uh, my mother tried to call from the wreck. From in the wreck. She tried to call me and I didn't hear the phone ring. I was playing HALF-LIFE and I missed my mother calling from a car wreck. They both died on the way to the hospital. The paramedic told me later that my mother still had her cell phone in her hand.”
I stopped, let go of her hands. I rubbed my eyes. We had gotten halfway across the bridge. I took a deep breath, but it caught in my throat.
“I don't know what to say.”
“You don't have to say anything,” I said, shaking my head.
Elise took my chin and turned my face back up to her. She swept her hair back out of her face and then traced her scar with her index finger. “My Dad was a cop. A sheriff in Shipley, Indiana, where I'm from. People liked him. He was a good man and a good sheriff, but what he really could do was shoot. He never said he wanted a son, but I had a .22 in my hands as soon as I could hold one. I mean, he would play dollies and have tea parties, don't get me wrong, but he just loved to shoot. He never missed. Ever.”
“Is that why you're the poster child for the NRA?”
“Don't be jealous.”
“Before they changed the rules about that sort of thing, Dad used to drive the Sheriff's car around when he was off duty, not that you're ever off duty as a sheriff, but when he was just out and about. He would take me out for ice cream or maybe we would stop at the Outpost for an Icee.”
A shadow crossed Elise's face. A cloud passing over her head or a memory passing within. “One night we stopped to get an Icee. Cherry was my favorite. My Dad liked Grape. We were arguing about it. I was ten-years-old, sitting in the passenger seat of the sheriff's cruiser parked in front of the Outpost. Dad always called the gas station/convenience stores 'Stop and Robs'. On that night, he was right.”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.
“The three guys robbing the place started shooting as soon as they saw the cruiser. The first bullets went through the passenger side window and hit me in the face.” Elise touched her scar. “Just grazed me, but my dad...they had just shot his only daughter. He was halfway out of the car, so none of it hit him, but...he was like a machine. He drew his pistol and fired three shots. Bang. Bang. Bang. The three of them dropped. Jimmy, the deputy, told me that the first two shots were a head shot and a heart shot.”
“Oh, shit,” I said, just so I could exhale.
“The third guy, though, hadn't been hit at all. He just fell down when the other two did. Playing possum. While Dad was calling it in on the radio, and holding a compress to my bleeding face, the other man walked up and shot him in the head. If I'd been watching, I could have done something. If he hadn't been talking care of me, he would have seen the man coming. If I had not been shot, he would not have missed. He never missed. I never miss. It's the least I can do.”
I wanted to tell her that it wasn't her fault. To tell her that her father was a responsible adult and that the knew the risks of his job and that he did the right thing protecting his daughter. I wanted to tell her all these things, but I didn't. Sometimes you have to carry your weight and it isn't someone else's place to try to absolve you of your sins, even if they aren't exactly your sins.
I hugged my wife and we both fought tears as long as we could. After a few minutes, she led me the rest of the way across the bridge. “See? I told you I wouldn't let your drown.”

Chapter 9: Newbie

You can't hold your breath forever.
The thought flashed through my head the second time that I went under. The time I don't come up.
The river flushed me along in an airless grip of green light. The dark water beneath me froze my feet, even as I could see the sunlight filtered down from above.
You can't hold your breath forever, even if you wanted to. There's a part of your brain, this automatic reflex part, that forces you to take a breath, forces you to drown. This is me, over thinking even as I am trying to save myself.
The muddy silt on the bottom felt soft and cold as it dragged past me, like a conveyor belt going the wrong way.
I tried to remember how to swim, but fear blanked my mind, tightened its grip on my limbs.
Lungs burned.
I tried to flail my arms. I tried to...
Hot pain exploded in my back.
A scream turned into a cough and for a second, three frantic heartbeats, I'm breathing water.
Hit something.
A algae-slick log.
I have time to realize that I'm stuck in sharp branches before my mind decides its time to start breathing.
The water tasted like dirt, smelled like dead leaves.
Elise.

The sky was dark when I surfaced. Stars so bright and numerous that they looked fake.
I floated fast, swirling, first facing upstream, then down. The lights in the sky twirl so fast that they looked like the print of Van Gogh's Starry Night that used to hang on the wall of Elise's dorm room.
I was stuck. I remembered. A log. I can't swim. One thought snuck up behind me, tapped me on the shoulder with one cold, skeleton hand.
Corpses float.
Mud beneath my hands and I was laying on the shore. I thought about CPR for a long time, laying there, staring up at the Van Gogh sky. I didn't cough up any water. My heart was not beating wildly in my chest. I felt my neck, searching for the pulse that was not there and my skin was cold.
My arms dropped to my sides.
I pulled in a deep breath, but I could hear the gurgle of a lungful of river water that told me it wasn't going to work.
I could smell, though. Dead leaves and river water and summer and and something else. Barbecue. Somewhere somebody was grilling out. Hot dogs and hamburgers. The smell was smoky and fat on the air. I imagined a hot dog, blackened from the charcoal, the bun soft as a cloud. A cold Pepsi out of a cooler full of ice. I'm dead and somebody was having a picnic.
I couldn't move.
Sleep dropped on me distant and dreamless as a log at the bottom of a river.

I was on my feet and moving before I was even awake, confused as having changed channels to a movie already in progress. My legs were stiff. Sleepwalking. That was new.
I was walking down a street lined with charming brick houses flanked by enormous trees, sighing in the summer wind. Just this side of noon, the was already hot, though I did not feel it. My hands ached from the cold.
I stood in the middle of the empty street staring at my hands. They were white, the nails bluish.
“Fuck,” I tried to say, but a gallon or so of water came out instead. Leaning forward, I released a deluge. I'm a little teapot, I thought, tip me over and pour me out.
After a few minutes, I gave up.
Standing up straight, I could smell the barbeque again. People. Maybe they can help me. I followed the smell, hurrying the best that I could on stiff legs.
The street opened up a block later, revealing a large park several blocks long. I stopped at the end of the street unable to believe what I was seeing. A brown and white horse raced down the street, mane blowing in the wind, hooves rumbling like thunder, rumbling like a Biblical prophecy. It crossed the park, tearing up grass and earth in its wake.
Several more horses joined him and suddenly there was a stampede, dozens of horses, eyes wide, nostrils flared. Shear terror in such a beautiful animal that it broke my unbeating heart.
That's when I saw the zombies. A hoard of them coming from the same direction the horses had come. The zombies fastest was barely a stagger and the horses easily keep ahead of their undead pursuers. The horses circled in the grass, though, their group getting small, tighter.
I didn't even see the trap until it was closed.
At the treeline, the zombies appeared, filtering out from their hiding places.
“Oh, shit,” I tried to say, but only a fetid belch escaped me.
The zombies close in.
To their credit, the horses fought. They reared up. They kicked. But for each horse there were ten zombies clawing at them.
I couldn't watch. I continued down the street away from the park heading towards what I thought was west, though I wasn't sure. The smell of barbecue returned. I'm not sure if I am more excited about the prospect of food or the prospect of people.
My eye itched and I scratched at it, thinking that I must have gotten something in it when I was in the water. My stomach growled loud enough to hear if you were standing close enough to me.
The barbecue smell drove me crazy. I scrambled after it, my stiff legs stumbling over the curb. I pushed my way through a gate into a small back yard and froze, smelling hot dogs and hamburgers and...
The dead woman lay in the grass just outside her back door, her insides ripped open, a quick and dirty anatomy lesson. Her gas grill sat unlit.
I could still smell the barbecue.
I couldn't do this.
I was so hungry.
I couldn't.
I'm...so...sorry.
I fell on her clawing with my hands, burying my face in her guts. She tasted like hot dogs and hamburgers and filet mignon. She was apple pie, blueberry pancakes and crispy bacon. She was my first kiss, first lay and first love. I loved her flesh more than I'd love anything. Elise. My mother. My father. My grandmother. Anyone. My face was so deep in her insides that I couldn't see anything, so far that I couldn't breathe even if I had needed to.
I ate her corpse like Thanksgiving dinner and then collapsed once again on the grass. My eyes were slick with blood and I rubbed at it, dig at it, until I could feel it burst in my skull.
I got to my feet and went inside her house. The bathroom was just inside the backdoor off the kitchen. I find a mirror.
My skin was pale, blue at the lips and eyes, one missing, its dark socket torn by something underwater. My face was awash with old blood. I turned on the faucet and after a second cold water came out. I washed my face with antimicrobial soap that smelled like lavender. Drying my face, I realize I must be using the good towels, the ones for company. I don't imagine that I was the company that they were thinking of. A dinner guest.
Outside, the woman was till laying where I ate her.
“She was dead when I got here,” I try to say, an eruption of blood and dirty water instead.
I left the house and walked three blocks before I found a street that I recognized. I followed it west toward the late afternoon sun, until something in the street caught my eye. I stopped.
A samurai sword lay in the street.
My laugh splattered on the pavement as I scooped up the sword and headed for the bridge that crossed the west branch of the Hoosier.
The bridge was not the only thing that was missing. The world was gone. I stood at the edge of the river and saw nothing at all. Empty space, perfectly nothing, a bottomless pit between here and there.
This was why zombies don't cross water.
I closed my eye and I could still smell the water. I could still hear it. I opened my eye. The hole in the world reaches on forever. My head swam with terror and vertigo. I couldn't cross the space. It would be easier to step off the top of a building. I had to, even though I've proven that river-crossing is not my specialty.
I hurried back towards the houses and found two cinder blocks in a garage. I grabbed an orange extension cord on the way out.
I lashed the cinder blocks together with the extension cord. I tested the weight. Heavy enough. A proper anchor. Dragging the cinder block anchor behind me, I stumbled down to the edge of the great, deep nothing and closed my eye.
I could smell the water. I could hear it. I took a step forward, eye still closed.
The shallower water was warm in the afternoon, soaking my shoe. I pushed out into the water, the bricks sinking into the silt of the river bottom.
I was fine until the water reached my face, warm against my lips.
I panicked.
I could keenly remember the last moments of my life, my real life. The water in my nose and mouth. The water in my lungs. I shivered.
Even as I stepped forward, even as the water began to cover my face, I still lifted my head uselessly as if to keep my face above water to breathe.
I kept my eye clamped shut.
I moved across the river bottom, dragging cinder blocks behind me. The makeshift anchor kept my corpse from drifting away in the currents. My second attempt at crossing a river actually worked. The learning curve, though, was a bitch.
On the other side of the river, I left the bricks in the shallows and lumbered out of the water like the Creature from The Black Lagoon. I kept my eye closed until I was safely on the shore.
I know that the water is there, but the chasm of nothingness is too much for me. It made my head swim. As zombies go, I was kind of a pussy.
Standing in the middle of the highway, I stared west toward Blakefield, toward Elise. I checked my pocket to make sure I still had the pass key card. It was still in my pocket. I had lost my gun, my backpack, my eye and my life, but I still had the cheap piece of plastic. Oh, and my samurai sword.
Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
I staggered west.
I'm coming, Elise.

Chapter 8: Cut Scenes

Six months ago (still)

I believe that children are the future.
Not all children, I mean. Most are probably just the seeds of future uselessness. I know a lot of people who most probably seemed full of potential when they were kids and now look at them.
One child. Steve. He is the future. I don't know his last name. The news reports weren't giving it out. Steve the frozen kid, dead and then not dead. Steve, just, Steve. I mean, who knows Typhoid Mary's last name, right?
The video they showed on CNN of the press conference shows the doctor, Doctor Rayvic Prosser. In the background, Steve, huddled in a heavy sweater, between his two loving parents, both of them hugging him tightly. His hair is dark, but is eyes are darker. They have a look, like he doesn't know what is going on, like he doesn't know where he is, who he is. The parents hug him harder and it looks like they're holding him down. Dr. Prosser talks and talks, but says nothing. He uses the word “miracle” a lot. It practically becomes a drinking game. Everytime Prosser says miracle, you drink. Everytime the parents smile, you drink. Everytime Steve looks like a lunatic off his meds, you drink. By the time the fifteen minute press conference is over, you're dead from alcohol poisoning.
I had to get out of the house.
I sat on campus, enjoying unseasonably warm March weather. The Mills was buzzing with activity as the student body emerged from the frost and ice of winter into the new life of not-quite-spring.
The Mills is what the students of Blakefield Mills University call the school. Blakefield, Indiana used to be big mill area. Like saw mills. From the pamphlet:
“Blakefield Mills University is nestled in the autumn foliage and rocky creeks of Blakefield, Indiana in the southern half of the state. At turn of the century, the town had been a milling town with a small, local school. As the mill grew, the town grew with it, and the school to accommodate it. At the end of World War Two, the school became a college, home to hundreds of returning G.I.'s and eventually became a well-respected liberal arts college with a leading ROTC program. Today, the Mill creeks winds through campus, past the Old Mill Building once the hub of industry in Blakefield, now one of the many administrative buildings.”
Blakefield Mills University. BMU. Bowel Movement University, the locals call it. “Turds float on the Mill creek.”
It takes a long time, as a townie, to think of it as The Mills and not by one of the other, more colorful nicknames.
I planned to go someplace else for college, everybody who lives in town does. People come from all over the country, the world, to go to school here. When you've lived in the shadow of BMU your whole life, the outside world beckons.
The dead, frozen boy. I tried not to think.
I sat on a bench watching several young men trying to kick the ice off of the two-story tall Mill wheel. As the weather warmed, it was one of the last places that defrosted and every year at least one student got arrested climbing on it and one student fell off and didn't finish the semester. I watched the frat guys swarming on it and tried to figure out which was which. “Go Archers!”
Yeah, I thought, go Archers!
“Think he'll fall?” Elise hovered just above me.
“I really hope so,” I said, forcing a smile.
“I haven't heard from you in a little while,” she said, sitting down on the bench next to me.
“Yeah.”
She nodded her head, pursed her lips. She looked so beautiful in the moment, that I wanted nothing more than to kiss her.
“What the fuck, Dave?”
She wasn't in a kissing mood, though.
“There's just a lot going on,” I lied.
“I thought there was something going on with us.”
“Yeah.”
“I'm not going to sit here and try to decode your bullshit, okay. I'm going to get up and walk away and chalk you up to experience. Okay?” She stood up.
I stared at my feet.
“This is me walking away.” She turned.
“That stuff you were talking about. That night.”
“Yeah, That Night.” She sat back down, brushed the hair out of her eyes, unconsciously revealing her scar. Did I scare you off? Didn't you see the news? That kid?”
That frozen, dead kid.
I shook my head. “It isn't that. I mean, it is that, but not like you think.”
“Look, Dave, I don't know what you want to say, and I won't know until you do.”
“I think, I know, that the world is going to end. The dead aren't going to stay dead and they are going to kill us.”
“That's what I said.”
“I think so, too. I know it. I've been getting ready for it. I mean, I'm almost looking forward to it, I've been preparing so long. Sounds crazy, I know. I felt lost since my parents died and this has given me a sense of purpose. Does that sound too fucked up, too crazy?”
“Yup.”
I laughed.
“What's the problem, then? This suddenly-not-dead kid should prove to you that you're right. I think the same thing you think. I've been preparing, too.”
“You make me wish it wasn't going to happen,” I said. “I want to be with you.”
“What's the problem, then?”
“You'll die.”
Elise hugged me. “What makes you think that I'll be the one who's dying? You can't shoot for shit.”
We both laughed.
“Will you marry me?”
Elise grinned. “No fucking way.”
“Until zombies do us part?”
“You're serious?”
I nodded.
“You are insane.”
“Is that a 'yes'?”
Elise stared at me for a few moments. “Of course it is.
I took her hand and stood up. “C'mon.”
She almost stumbled as I pulled her to her feet. “Where are we going?”
“Court house.”
“Holy shit!” somebody down by the Mill Creek was screaming. “He fell, call 911!”
I turned to look, but all I could see was blood on the ice. People were hurrying down the hill toward the water.
I turned away.
We were married that afternoon. I watch Elise sign her maiden name on the license. Elise Mallon.
Typhoid Mary's last name.
On our wedding night, as Elise, my wife, slept, I sat at the computer checking my e-mail in the dark.
One e-mail from Ben. No message, just a link. This is how he snuck “Two girls, one cup” on me. I clicked on the link. Bare bones website, nothing but a video. “Fuck,” I said. It was the Steve press conference. I yawned into my fist.
The video fast-forwarded to the end and then didn't end.
Steve still looked crazed, but his mother let him go, turned to Dr. Prosser, shook his hand, gestured toward the boy. Her face is pure motherly love.
Until Steve sunk his teeth into her neck.
Blood sprays the camera.
The father gets to his feet, grabs the kid by the back of his neck.
The mother clutches her neck, arterial spray gushing.
The boy still latched on.
The father punching him in the head as hard as he can.
Dr. Prosser heading to the camera, clawing at it, the blood smearing.
The video ends.
I leaned back in my desk chair and realized that my mouth was hanging open. I tried to shut it, but found that I was unable. I turned around and looked at Elise, asleep in my too-small bed. My wife. She should see this. I took a deep breath and logged off the internet. I got up and crawled into my bed, next to my wife and went to sleep.

Chapter 7: Hax

I stood on the rocky banks of the Hoosier River, skipping stones across the sparkling water. On the opposite bank, there were more zombies than I'd ever seen before. A hundred? Maybe more. They moaned and clawed at me with reaching hands.
The zombie's eyes were full of dumb cunning, a quality that I always attributed to a voracious appetite, but that wasn't right, they didn't want to eat me, they simply wanted to hurt me.
I'd been so psyched when I passed the WELCOME TO LINCOLN BRIDGE, INDIANA sign with its obligatory AN HONEST PLACE TO LIVE. It only took me twenty-four hours to make an hour drive. “Fuck yeah.” The halfway point.
Lincoln Bridge was a bit of an fluke in Indiana: it was an island. The Hoosier River flowed from North to South on its way down to the Ohio River passing Lincoln Bridge on the East side. Abraham Lincoln had once stopped to drain his stove pipe hat there and they had to actually build a bridge to let him get across the river. The Chamber of Commerce took that and ran with it, changing the town's name. A shallow creek on the west side of town was dredged until the Hoosier actually split, transforming the city into an island in a river. I found all this on Wikipedia when I had to write a paper about a facet of Indiana history.
Now, the bridge was gone.
I leaned over the crumbled edge of the concrete where broken off pieces of rebar poked out of the pavement like earthworms. I spit and then watched it fall to the river below.
It had been here a week ago when I'd passed this way heading for Elise's sister's place in Shipley.
“Well, fuck.” I quietly took in the scene. The support columns still stood in the middle of the river, but the road itself was gone. It had been bombed.
I guess the military bombed it to contain the eastward spread of the zombies. The zombies wouldn't cross the water. I don't know why.
The religious people said that the water, like a baptismal font, represented rebirth in the light of the Lord's love and the vile evil of the zombies could not bear said love in their damned souls. The scientists, on the other hand, said that the limited intelligence of the reanimated nervous systems could not process the difference between the liquid and solid states of matter, so the zombies would not cross the water as it represented to them an anomaly to their spatial reasoning.
I don't know if I believe either of those explanations. Maybe they are just afraid of the water. God knows, I am. I can't swim a stroke.
I took a deep breath and threw another stone. Splash. Splash. Splash.
Every zombie in Lincoln Bridge seemed to be standing on the other side of the river with more joining the crowd every minute.
I picked up another flat rock, brushed it off. I felt the heft of it, swinging it a few times in my hand. The zombies watched my every move. I faked throwing the stone and they all flinched like a German Shepard chasing an imaginary tennis ball. “Made you look, dirty crook,” I said.
I paused halfway through throwing the stone. I wondered how long they would stay there. If I could find a place to cross the river, somewhere else I mean, maybe the coast would literally be clear.
I tossed the rock into the water, backing up, away from the river. I scooped up a few more stones as I crawled backward up the grassy slope toward the road. When I got to the top, I tossed another stone.
The zombies continued to stay put.
Maybe this would work. The real test was yet to come.
I stepped out of their field of vision, waited until a hundred count and then peeked.
They were still standing there. When they saw me, they moaned in a frenzy.
“How do you keep an idiot in suspense?” I stepped back again, out of their sight. “Tell you later,” I said and ran.
I'd seen something when I was crawling up the hill.
I'd seen a boat.
I ran across the street and down the hill on the other side, where a housing development sprawled along the river. As I slid down the hill and hopped the chain link fence, I could see the rowboat sitting on top of a pair of sawhorses.
Halfway across the yard, I stopped running. “Fuck.”
The side of the rowboat was missing. They must have been repairing it. I shoved it off the sawhorses. It hit the ground and rocked. “Piece of shit!”
I glanced back the way I'd come. I couldn't see them, but I knew they wouldn't stay put forever.
Panicking, I looked around. Broken boat. A pair of oars. An orange life vest. An anchor.
A big, fat lot of good that was going to do me.
Unless.
I stood on the edge of the river in my orange life vest, watching the swirling green water beneath me. I tried to choose a relatively shallow, narrow part of the river just around a slight bend and out of sight of my fan club on the other side of the river.
I took some rope that I found in the shed, tied it to the ring at the end of the anchor. I felt the weight of it in my hand. It was much heavier than the rocks that I had been skipping.
But, if I was lucky...
I swung the anchor around on the end of the rope, trying to get some decent centrifugal force on it. I let it go. It splashed down in the middle of the river, taking half the rope with it.
So much for luck. “Try again, dipshit,” I said and reeled the rope in. I brought in maybe ten feet of the wet rope and then it stopped. I tugged on it. It didn't budge. The anchor was stuck.
I waded into the water a few steps, yanking on the rope, but it still didn't budge.
I took a deep breath and leapt into the water. I went straight to the bottom. My life jacket gave me enough buoyancy a moment later and I bobbed up coughing and sputtering.
I gasped for air, frantically wiping the water from my face with my free hand.
I grabbed a hold of the rope with both hands and dragged myself along, headed toward the middle of the river as the current battered me, trying to pull me under, sweep me along.
I reached the point of the river where the rope went straight down into the water, where the anchor had gotten stuck. Now came the hard part. I would have to inch my way to the other side, without the help of the rope.
The anchor came free and I was swept down river.

Chapter 6: Multiplayer

6 months ago

The killer lesbian sat on a stone bench outside the shooting range reading from a thick, dog-eared book of the poetry of Dylan Thomas. She was petite in a long, flouncy skirt and a black and orange striped sweater. Over that, a black t-shirt that carried the slogan ZOMBIES LIKE GIRLS WITH BRAINS. Three stick-figure zombies with x's over their eyes chased a stick-figure girl with a triangular skirt and pigtails.
I couldn't help but smile.
She looked up at me, shaded her eyes from the February sun and smiled. “Are you in advanced marksmanship?”
“Huh? Oh, yeah. What are you reading?”
“Oh, Dylan Thomas. Poetry. I'm an English major. Would you like fries with that? Sorry, force of habit.
I laughed. “Dylan Thomas. Cool.” I dug deep. “This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper?”
“Close, but that's T.S. Eliot. Dylan Thomas is “Do not go gentle into that good night.”
I wondered if this is how nerds flirted. Or, at least how nerds flirted with gay girls.
“Oh, right.” I checked my watch and then sat down next to her. “I'm Dave.”
“Nice to meet you. I'm the killer lesbo.”
“Uh...” I didn't know what to say.
She left me hanging for a second and laughed, gesturing to where the ROTC students were sitting. “I heard the A-team over there whispering, but they only got it half right. I'm not actually a lesbian, but I am killer.”
“Have you been...practicing that line?”
“Honestly?”
“No, by all means, lie to me.”
A smile lit her face. “Yes, I have been practicing that line in my head. My name is Elise and I am a great, big nerd.”
I nodded my head. “When nerd boys ask nerd girls out, what kind of things do they suggest they do?”
“Coffee.”
“Really?”
“Oh, yeah, caffeine is the social lubricant of our generation.”
“So, do you want to get a cup of coffee some time?”
“Yes, I would. You know where they have great coffee?”
“Where?”
“My dorm room. I go there all the time.”
“Really, I've never been there. I'd love to check it out sometime.”
She scrawled her number on her bookmark and gave it to me. “I'm done with classes by seven, if you want to hang out.”
“Uh, yeah.” Nerds flirting, remember.
Behind us, our instructor unlocked the shooting range, propping the door open with a cement block.
Elise hopped up from the bench, stuffing her book into her backpack. “Let's go shoot some shit,” she said.
I watched her for the whole class. I watched her because she was beautiful and because she bit her bottom lip when she shot and because she never, ever missed. I watched her because I could not take my eyes off of her. She caught me looking at her, grinned, and stuck her tongue out at me and twisted her face in an insane grimace.
I looked away, my face flushing.

“Dude, what's wrong with you?” Later, Ben lounged in my apartment in a ratty pair of jeans and a slightly rattier t-shirt. NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD glowed black and white from my grandmother's television. Elise wouldn't be out of class for several more hours and I had time to kill.
“What do you mean?” I knew exactly what he meant. I had been slowly trying to reveal my obsession with him, hoping that he would pick up on my subtle clues. “All I asked was if you thought this could really happen.”
“Night of the Living Dead?”
“Yeah, so?”
“We've watched Night of the Living Dead, Evil Dead one and two, Resident Evil, Dawn of the Dead, original and remake, Day of the Dead and some zombie shit that wasn't even in English.”
“So?”
“So, what the fuck? You've dropped all your classes. You're taking all this ROTC shit. What are you going to enlist?”
“No, I just...”
“Just what?”
“I want to be ready.”
“Ready for what?”
On television, zombies burst through the door into the house. We both stood and watched it for a second.
He looked at me. “That...isn't...real.”
I stared at my feet. I could still recover this. I could still explain, make my case. I realized that I could not do this alone. I needed help. I needed Ben's help. “Not yet.”
Ben grabbed his jacket. “Get some medication man, okay? You need professional help. Seriously.”
He left.
I stood there for a long time after he left, staring at the floor. The movie went off.

“You okay?” Elise waved her hand in front of my face.
“I'm sorry,” I said. I took a sip of my coffee. “Stupid stuff.” Elise's dorm room had a fold-out sofa instead of a bed and the two of us sat on the sofa, facing each other. Her room was decorated in warm, earth tones and fabric hung from the walls giving the place a warm, comfortable feeling rather than the usual solitary confinement cinder block chill of a dorm room. Elise had her own cappuccino machine and the sweet smell of the coffee wrapped around me. I don't think I've been so comfortable before.
I brushed a small lock of hair out of her face, gently touching the side of her cheek. I don't know why I did this, I had never done it before and to the best of my knowledge only ever saw it done in movies. A small, pale scar ran in a straight line from the corner of her mouth almost to her ear. I hadn't noticed it before as it was almost invisible against the pale of her cheek, but I realized that she'd kept her hair covering it when she could.
“Why did you do that?” She yanked the lock of hair back into place.
Why had I done that? “Because...” Why had I done that? Why had I done that? “I'm sorry, I just wanted to touch you.”
I brushed the hair out of her face again. She grabbed my hand, but gently. I rubbed the smooth line of her cheek with the tips of my fingers. She let me. Her scar didn't even register. “I didn't even see it. It's nothing. Less than nothing.”
“You're just saying that to get into my pants.”
I kissed her cheek. “How am I doing?”
She fought a smile.
I noticed that she had a little tattoo. It read Petite Mort. “What does that mean?”
Embarrassed, she covered it with the long sleeve of her sweater. “I don't want you to get the wrong idea about me.”
“You aren't a...serial killer are you?”
She smiled. “No.” She pulled the sleeve back down. “Petite mort,” she said with an inflection that told me it was French. “French, right? Its another way to mean, like an orgasm, but that fall, like a little bit of death. Like dying for just a second.”
“Oh.”
“Dave, I really like you.”
“I like you, too.”
“I'm not like this usually. I'm really, occasionally shy, but I, um, I really want to have sex with you, but I need to tell you something, to tell somebody, and I just need you to listen, you don't have to believe me, but just don't laugh, or, you know, I'm not going to have sex with you.” She took a deep breath.
I held mine.
“I think, no, I know that at some point in the immediate future that something really bad is going to happen. I think it is going to involve dead people. I can't explain it really, but I think dead people aren't going to stay dead. I think it is going to be horrible. Like a fucking horror movie. I think that dead people are going to kill us.”
“Wait,” I said. “Let me get this straight. You...want to have sex with me?”
“You are such a doofuss,” she said and kissed me, hard, seizing my hair with her hands. Elise kissed with her entire body, her hip bones grinding against me. With her free hand, she grabbed at her long skirt, pulling it up, baring her legs. I grabbed at the skirt, pulled it from her hand and yanked it up above her waist. Her hand suddenly free, she grabbed at the front of my jeans, unbuttoning me. She managed my boxers down with one hand, her other hand never leaving the hair at the back of my head. I pulled her panties down and eased myself down on top of her, inside of her. She was hotter than lava. Her body rocked and I had to hurry to keep up with her. “Don't stop,” she said, and that was the hottest thing I'd ever heard a woman say and I was sure that it was the end for me, but the pain, the amazing pain, that she was causing me by pulling on my hair held me back better than thinking about baseball. Finally, she shivered, couldn't stop shivering and I went, not able to hold back a single second longer.
I felt like I was dying for a second.

I woke up in the middle of the night and for a minute did not know where I was. I'd fallen asleep in Elise's bed. Embarrassed, I sat up, covering my naked body with the comforter from her bed. At the foot of the bed, I saw Elise curled over on herself watching the news on a little TV. The light made the whole room electric blue.
She turned when she heard me stir, and I could see that she was still naked. The flickering light outlined the small curve of her breasts and her belly.
I smiled before I realized that she was shaking.
“Are you okay?”
“That boy, the boy who froze a few months ago?”
I'd only just woke up and I was still a little fuzzy. Frozen boy? I vaguely remembered something about that. “Yeah, the kid who died.”
Elise shook her head, eyes slick with frightened tears. “He isn't dead anymore.”

Chapter 5: Spawn Camper

I slammed on the brakes.
The car skidded to a halt just short of Rodney's pick-up truck.
I had been driving for forty-five minutes, if you could call what I was doing driving. I sped when I could, crept when I had to navigate abandoned cars, stopped when I had to put something in neutral and push it out of the way. The whole time my hand ached and burned. I cradled it against my belly when I could, driving with one hand.
Forty-five minutes out of Shipley, where everything had fallen apart, and not sure where I was. I knew that I hadn't yet reached Lincoln, the halfway point, yet, but otherwise I could be anywhere.
I put the car in park and, leaving the headlights on, jumped out and ran up to the abandoned pick-up. I could see that the doors were flung open. I stopped just short of the cab. Closed my eyes and swallowed hard. I almost could not bring myself to look inside.
I took a deep breath and looked. The truck was empty. The windows weren't broken and there was no blood.
“Thank God,” I said aloud. Why had they stopped? I walked past the truck to where a row of cars sat abandoned. I'd stopped so many times to move abandoned cars that my mind immediately jumped to that conclusion. I looked over the cars trying to decide how to start moving them to get through.
Wait a second.
The cars were parked perpendicular to the road. End to end from one side of the road to the other, even into the ditch and up onto the hills that flanked the road. There was no way around. I climbed up onto the hood of one of the cars. For a second, I wondered if I could ram my way through, if not with my little Toyota, then maybe with Rodney's truck.
There was another four layers of cars beyond the others. What the hell? Someone had arranged the cars like this. Why, though? The zombies would just crawl over it.
I looked back at my car. I could go around another way. I looked ahead the way I was headed. I had hoped to catch up to the others and this was the first sign that I might be able to do that. How many hours head start did the others have on me?
Maybe I could find another car farther along the path. I climbed across the hoods of the car until I reached the inner most row of cars. In the the glow of my headlight high beams, I checked the other cars. They all had flat tires.
I walked the line of cars as my eyes adjusted to the dark. That's when I found the first body. I rolled the it over and discovered that the entire bottom of his jaw was missing, part of his throat torn out. A zombie.
He had a large bullet hole in his head. A dead zombie, then. Dead-dead.
I would have to go back and go around. I did not have a map and I'd only come through the area once. Rural road 9 snaked from Shipley back home to Blakefield, but it made some truly bizarre twists and I just didn't have time for this shit. I turned to go back to the car and saw the other bodies. I squinted in the dark as I inspected the next one. A woman. She wore a large hiker's pack. A flashlight lay on the ground next to her. I snatched it up and flicked it on. I was surprised to find that it was already on, but it did not light up. I smacked it a few times against the palm of my good hand. It flickered. I shook it again and it put out a passable light. “Good enough,” I said.
By the light of the flashlight, I checked her body. She had the same large bullet hole in her face, but I couldn't see any other damage to her body. Human, then. Somebody shot a human dead. Not for her supplies, thought. Her pack was still strapped on her back. A dispute, maybe? I had purposefully avoided others during all of this, so maybe stranger things happened during human on human interactions than I had witnessed. That's why I had avoided other people to begin with. I told the universe a big I told you so and went about my business.
I drifted from body to body. Twice as many humans as zombies. I could see that the humans were dressed to travel, backpacks and in some cases, weapons.
They all had been on foot. Why? They hadn't even reached the blockade yet, and the road on this side was perfectly clear.
It occurred to me too late.
The road was blocked on this side, too.
This was a trap.
The flashlight exploded in my hand.
I ran back toward the car, but one of the headlights exploded and then the other. I had been facing the headlights as I ran, so I was struck nightblind as I was dropped into total darkness.
I threw myself on the ground beneath one of the cars, a high-clearance SUV. Fat blobs of light burned behind my eyelids. I slid under the next car, a much tighter fit, and crawled on my belly to the next one. That's why Rodney's headlights had been off. They'd been shot out.
I inched through the four rows of cars, almost getting stuck under the last one, until I reached the edge of the blockade. I had no doubt that the shooter could hit the car, but he'd shot out the headlights, so I was hoping that I could use the darkness to cover me until I got to the car.
My hand burned from all the climbing around. I pressed it against my lips. Kissing my own boo-boo. I examined my other hand to make sure that motherfucker hadn't shot off any my other fingers off. They seemed to be okay. The smell of motor oil and gasoline filled my nostrils.
I waited until my eyes adjusted to the dark and then I tried to get a look around. On the right side of the road lay an empty field beyond the ditch. I couldn't see far enough to know how far the field went, but out here, between the towns, the fields could go on for miles. On the left side of the road, a smaller field sat between the road and the treeline, which presented me with a wall of impenetrable darkness.
I missed my good flashlight that I had left in Rodney's truck. I stared at the truck and wondered if it was still in there. Hell, the darkness had started to hurt my eyes and even that piece of shit the dead woman was carrying made me feel better.
Until, of course, that fucker shot it.
Question: What kind of person shot a human being in all of this?
Answer: A cold-blooded fuckrag who just didn't care.
This Q&A wasn't making me feel any better. Pain screamed in my bad hand and shot up my arm. I had to cram my face into my forearm to keep from screaming. My head swam. Trying not to pass out, I took a few frantic breaths.
Okay, I really needed to focus on this.
Question: What kind of person shoots out the lights at night?
I heard a crunch on the pavement. I reached down and slid my pistol out of the holster. If the shooter came down here, maybe I could get a shot at him.
I listened for awhile, hard to do over the car's idle, but I didn't hear anything. The cicadas and the crickets seemed to be having a battle of the bands, their nighttime noise growing louder and louder as I strained to hear over it. A bullfrog belched startling me and I bumped my head on the car's exhaust pipe.
I nodded my head. He wasn't coming down here. He was hidden and happy to stay that way. I, on the other hand, was certain to come out eventually. It was only a matter of time. He was happy to stay and wait and shoot me dead when I did. That was reassuring in its own way.
Okay.
Back to the Q&A.
Question: What kind of person shoots out the lights at night?
Answer: Someone who can see in the dark.
Night-vision goggles. You could probably buy them online. I was impressed and a little surprised that I hadn't thought of it. Come in pretty fucking useful right about now.
I had the fleeting image of the thermal images from the movie Predator. I could feel my heart beating wildly against the pavement. I was reasonably sure, though, that it wasn't an alien predator with x-ray vision. I almost laughed.
I looked at the car again. I would not make it to the car no matter how fast I ran. I could not see how far the empty field stretched, but I imagined it went pretty far. Wouldn't make it that way either. Wouldn't make it to the car, and to continue the way I was going would just add me to the pile of bodies.
Where then?
I couldn't see the shooter, but I imagined that he was on the left side of the road. The dead woman had been carrying a flashlight. She had been shot at night.
I wondered if I could see the shooter during the day. The sun rose in the east. That meant, that come the morning, it would practically be coming up the road behind me. Didn't really help me, unless the angle was right and it was in his eyes. I didn't feel that counting on good luck was the way to go.
Could I just sit here all night? He would expect me to run, to panic. He shot the flashlight and the headlights to scare me. It was a game. I don't think I was playing right. If I ran, he would shoot me. If I stuck my head out to look, he could shoot at me and maybe get me to run. But, if he just started shooting wildly, he would be admitting that he didn’t know where I was. Just sitting here, I took away all the options. If he wanted to kill me, he would have to come down here. I was betting my life that he wouldn't.
I was just going to camp here, then.
Either he would risk coming down here, where he didn't know where I was or we'd would just have to wait and see what morning brought.
I meant to stay awake, but I fell asleep after a few tense hours. I dreamed of Elise. We were eating at a Waffle House, but the waitress was my third grade teacher and served us Spaghetti-O's. Weezer was in a booth behind us, but they wouldn't share the ketchup. Dicks.

I woke up for the second time with my face pressed against asphalt. The sun had only just begun to come up and for some reason I was alive to see it. I stretched my arms and legs out, got the circulation working. Next, I slithered my way to the shooter's end of the car blockade and was able to squeeze out from under the bumper of the final car.
I found myself sitting in a dry ditch. Queen Anne's lace and dandelions choked the ditch above dried and spiky grass hacked crew-cut short by some road crew. A large, roundish rock sat half buried in the baked mud. I dug my fingers into the ground and finally pulled it free.
The sun wasn't up all the way and the ground and air held a damp, coolness in the gray half-light.
If ever, then now.
I sprang from the ditch and ran toward the treeline.
It wasn't as far as I thought and I reached it quickly. I drew my arm back and let the rock fly as hard as I could in the other direction. It hit the ground and rolled for what sounded like forever. It hit a few trees, other rocks and a lot of leaves and sounded like a poor, scared bastard running through the woods.
I sat still, though. I was where I wanted to be.
Above me, in what I imagined was a deer stand, a kind of camouflaged hunting platform, sat the shooter. I couldn't really see him, but he jerked when the rock rolled. Maybe he'd nodded off. I hope he had a nice dream.
I took out my pistol and unloaded it up his ass.
I stopped pulling the trigger when his body tumbled out of the tree. Tethered to the stand by some kind of safety harness, the body dangled just above my head. Kid looked maybe fourteen. Smoothy baby face dotted with acne and patches of unshaven hair. His gun didn't fall.
I walked back to the road in time to hear my car run out of gas. I took what I needed from the other bodies, found some rounds for my pistol and started walking in the direction I had originally been headed.
In the daylight, I could see piles of bodies spread out across the road, but I could also see the car blockade on the other side of his little kill zone. I figured that I would find a car there and maybe a map. I didn't know much about sniper rifles, if that was even what he had, but I bet he used the cars to mark off his range.
Just as I reached the edge of the blockade, I found Rodney's body. He was facing the wrong way. I looked back at where the shooter had been. Rodney had run interference. He had taken the shot that allowed the girls to get away.
“Sorry man,” I said, pulled the cap off his head and covered his face with it.
On the other side of the car blockade, I stopped and puked my guts out. I had never killed a living person before. “Fucking kid,” I said, wiping my mouth. I drank from a bottle of water, spit it out, splashed water on my face, in my hair. “Fucking kid.”
I found a green Ford pick-up with a full tank of gas and the keys in the ignition. I found a cooler of pop in the back. I guzzled six Pepsi's, searching for a map in the glove boxes. If I had to, I would get through the apocalypse on caffeine alone.
On the map, I traced Rural road 9 with my finger from Shipley to Lincoln. I found where I had turned off and I figured out where I had to go to get back on track. I still had about a half-hour to get to Lincoln, assuming there was no more abandoned cars and then another hour to get to Blakefield and back to The Fort. This would be the hardest stretch. I wondered again how far ahead of me Elise was.
I dropped the pickup into drive and sped away kicking up gravel and dust as the sun rose behind me. Lonely, I turned the radio on for background noise and got only static on every station. I almost turned it off, but at the last second, I decided to leave it on. Something was better than nothing.

Chapter 4: Single-Player

8 months ago

“So what is the Fort anyway?” I was the one driving which was a little strange considering that I didn't have the slightest idea where I was going.
“Turn left here,” my boss, Hutch, said. He filled the passenger side of the big truck and sipped from a sixty-four ounce Pepsi. The heat worked better than the radio, but we listened to the truck's iffy stereo anyway. Queen was cutting in and out. Another one bites the dust occasionally biting the dust itself. It didn't matter, anything was preferable to the Christmas music that was playing in every building in town.
“S'like a military base or something?” I'd lived in town my whole life and never heard anything called The Fort. I'd begun thinking of the place in captial letters.
“Huh? No, just a wearhouse.”
“Oh,” I said. When we were kids we called our clubhouses “forts”. I had pictured a magnificient tree house, all Swiss Family Robinson with rope ladders and multiple levels of hammocks and swings.
I noticed that we'd gone a few miles out of town into a more secluded wooded area. In town, the trees were encased in ice that looked like glass, out here the forest was so tight, it looked like the side of a glaciar.
“Up here on the left,” Hutch said.
I still didn't see anything, but I turned off the main road onto a bumpier side road that led deeper into the sharp, white woods. There was no tracks in the snow on the road, so I wasn't sure at anytime whether I'd meandered into the woods. I wasn't used to driving the truck in the winter yet, so my arms were tense and I'd started to sweat, imagining rolling the truck down one of the steep, icy hills that flanked the road. Another mile passed like that before we reached a clearing. The Fort.
It was even better than my imaginary tree house.
I could see why they called it The Fort. The reinforced concrete structure was larger on top than on the bottom giving it a Fort Apache, Garrisson-style look. The top level had a few rectangular windows, but the lower level only had the one loading bay door.
It looked like a helluva place to repel an invasion.
Or, at least, a good place to hide while the invasion raged outside.
I backed the truck up to the loading bay door and killed the engine. Like a human avalanche, Hutch slid out of the cab of the truck. I could hear the fresh snow crunching under his feet. He went around and unlocked the big door with the key card.
“Don't let me lose that. There's only two of them and I'd lose my dick if it wasn't in my wife's pocket.” Hutch had the worst memory of any pre-elderly person I knew.
As we unloaded some expensive-looking medical equiptment, he explained that The Fort used to belong to the Department of Natural Resources, but that the university acquired it. I could really see it. If the building had been built out of Lincon Logs, it would look like an old-timey ranger station. “We only put valuable stuff in here,” he said,”like this whateverthefuckitis.” He patted the machine of uncertain purpose with his meaty hand. “'Cept nobody ever comes back and gets the stuff, so it just sits here.”
I looked around the inside of the enormouse builidng. No windows on the first floor, only one door that apparenly only had two keys, secluded and spacious.
Be it ever so apocalyptic, there's no place like home.
I was already planning how to move stuff around, the place had an old forklift parked in one corner, when Hutch said he was ready to go. He'd left the key card sitting on the top of the machine of uncertain purpose when he gone to relieve himself. I picked it up as we headed out the door. As the snow started falling again, I tried to decide if it would be easier to try to make a copy or just lose this one. Hutch slapped the button on the way out and the large steel door rattled down behind us. Driving out would at least be easier than driving in had been, I had my own tracks to follow.

Later that day, I had my target shooting course. I aimed my pistol and cracked off a shot. I slipped my safety goggles off and inspected the damage. I'd hit the square paper target, but just barely.
I sighed. I'd cultivated a naïve trust in formal education. I felt that if you wanted to learn something you took a class. Practice makes perfect. I don't know. Maybe if you start young enough. I was facing the sad fact that I had absolutely no natural talent for shooting a pistol. Everything I had accomplished this semester had come from constant practice. I'd gotten into Advanced Marksmanship because there were six spots and only four applicants, all of them ROTC. Practice made good enough, but that was far from perfect.
I retrieved the target and stood in the firing range booth staring at it. One of the ROTC Action figures said something to one of the others about my feeling sorry for shooting it. That was the same guy who, when he found out that there was a non-ROTC female who had signed up for next semester's Advanced Marksmanship course, said that he didn't think it was legal for lesbos to carry guns. They said she had been permitted to take the class without the prerequisite. She must be good with a gun. If she was a lesbian, than she must be a killer lesbian. More power to her. The more tourists in this course the better. I kept staring at the target. It was kind of funny. It probably did look like I was sad that I had to put Ol' Yeller down. I mean...
Oh, shit.
I pulled out a black sharpie from my backpack and on either side of the center of the target drew two huge bloodshot eyes. Underneath the center, I drew a mouth with blood dripping from broken teeth. I returned the targed, reloaded my pistol and sank four out of five shots between the eyes.
I realized that I had been screaming as I fired.
Turning to get my things, I noticed that the Action Figures were staring at me.
I passed the time on the bus ride home the way I always did: counting people. There were thirteen people on the bus, not counting me. I kept a rolling tally of the people I saw outside on the frozen sidewalks. Fifteen. Sixteen. Seventeen. Twenty. Twenty-three in Starbucks. One at the ATM. That made twenty-four. I made a gun of my hand and carefully shot each one in the head. Bang. Bang. Bang. The bus window fogged up with my breadth. I wiped it off with my sleeve and continued the count.
Later at home, I shrugged my winter coat off and flicked the television on for background noise while I microwaved a Hungryman dinner. I'd given up my double-single dorm room and got a late lease off-campus apartment. It was not much bigger than my dorm had been, but it gave me a little more privacy. I took a can of Dr. Pepper out of the fridge and opened it.
After reading the dead-dead article, I'd meant to follow the news more, to keep up with what was going on, but the news was like watching LOST if you hadn't been following it, it was hard to just jump in and understand what was going on.
CNN was talking about a kid, ten-year-old Steve, who had been missing for several days in a Wisconsin snowstorm. Apparently, he had fallen through the ice on a frozen pond and drowned. The pond had frozen back over and his remains had only been discovered when a local youth league hockey team swept the ice clean to play. They showed a cell phone snapshot of the boy, frozen like an insect in blue amber.
I switched the channel.
Fox News. Authorities in Southern Florida were currently searching for a man who had murdered three women. Authorities had been at a loss to explain how the suspect had gained access to these women's apartments as the buildings had been old, but secure, until a witness described seeing a man, with a clipboard and a hardhat with a cable TV logo it, entering the premises on three different occasions. The witness said that nothing seemed odd at the time, even though the apartment buildings did not actually have cable.
I flipped the TV off.
I sat there for a moment drinking my Dr. Pepper.
I flipped the TV back on.
Fox News was still talking about the Florida killer and his clipboard.
I couldn't help but grin. There were many important lessons to be learned from serial killers.
The next day, after Hutch and Ben had left for the afternoon, I retrieved the truck keys from the board and headed out to the back lot where the trucks were parked.
I had been trying to get into several first aid classes, but they fill up fast, even the half-semester ones. I got a book out of the library and started making a list of supplies that I would likely need.
The University Medical Center was an uninspired block of Indiana limestone. I parked the truck back by the loading dock. I took several deep breaths trying to calm myself and then, very calmly, hopped out of the truck.
A security guard stood before me.
I might have peed a little.
“Hey, man,” the guard said. “You running late?”
“Yeah,” I heard my inner serial killer say. “My boss is a total asshole, though, so don't say anything.” I felt bad. Hutch is a really nice guy.
“Heard that.” The guard smiled, producing a pack of cigarettes from jacket. As the snow started falling, he stepped into the windbreak provided by my truck and lit up. “You know where you're going, right?”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, holding my empty clipboard up.
He waved me on with his empty hand.
I got my hand truck out of the back and headed inside. I had only been in the cold for a minute, but I couldn't stop shivering even after I got inside the building. I passed an employee that was pushing a laundry cart to a utility elevator. I nodded to him and waved with my clipboard. He returned a bored expression.
It took me twenty minutes of wandering to find the supply room and I'd almost given up when I turned the corner and found it. At University Storage we only ever moved equiptment, furniture storage containers. We didn't move supplies usually. They were dropped directly to the Medical Center and stored there. That was two things to remember. First, stick to regular schedule. Second, figure out the layout on a legitimate trip, so that when you come back later you'll know where to go. Case the joint, bitch.
The supply room wasn't where the nurses, doctors and medical professionals got there supplies from. They got their stuff from the supply closets up on the medical floors. The stuff just sat down here until the upper floors need restocking. It would be forever before anybody noticed this stuff missing, if ever.
I looked over the pallets and then took one of everything. Rubber gloves, syringes, compresses, bandages, first aid kits and a defibrillator. I didn't yet know what to do with it, or even how I would, uh, defibrillate myself without help, if it came to that, but I had my book. I would have to figure it out.
I stacked the supplies as neatly on the hand truck as I could, making it look as unified a pile as possible.
“Excuse me,” a nurse said, startling me.
“I have an invoice,” I said, holding up my clipboard.
“How's that working out for you?” She grabbed a case of rubber gloves and disappeard down the hallway.
I stood there for a minute. Was I really doing this?
“Yes,” I said out loud. I liked the decisive sound of my voice in the supply closet. I sounded like I knew what I was doing. I'd listen to me, if I weren't me. Good enough, I took the stuff and headed for the truck. The security guard was gone. Without warming up the truck or clearing the windshield properly, I sped out of the parking lot.
I stopped three blocks away and, with my hands shaking, scraped the snow off the window and let the cab warm up. The hard part was over. I just need to take the stuff to The Fort, drop it off and get the truck back. My adrenaline had been pumping so hard that it made my hands, now numb from the cold, hurt. I held them hard against my chest. I waited for the feeling to return to my fingers.
Finding the turnoff wasn't difficult after it was pointed out to me. I'd been driving past it my whole life and never realized that there was anything even back there.
The constantly falling, miserable snow had covered our tracks from the previous days trip, so I slowed to a creep to navigate the barely visible road. I flipped the high beams on, figuring no one could see them from the road and there was no one to see them from the The Fort.
One thing that I had not worked into my overall strategy was the cold. If the situation blew up during the winter, which was entirely possible, that I was completely unprepared. I would have to think about gas-powered heater, warm clothes, maybe some blankets...
Something darted out in the dark.
I slammed on the breaks. The wheels slid. The truck spun.
“Fuckfuckfuckfuck...”
The road out to The Fort was too narrow. Halfway through the spin, the truck left the road.
I pulled back uselessly on the steering wheel like a fighter pilot trying to pull out of a nosedive. “...Fuckfuckfuck....”
The truck lurched forward. The headlights lit snow blasted tree trunks. “...fuckfuckfuck...”
The truck stopped. “...fuck.”
I was still mostly on the road.
The truck started to slide forward. “Fuck?”
The truck tilted forward like a seesaw. I leaned back in my seat like that was going to make any difference.
My right foot ached with the pressue I had down on the break pedal, but I was terrified to let go of it. I gently dropped the truck into reverse and, as carefully as I could, moved my foot to the gas. I gave it some gas.
The truck responded with the dentist's drill whine of a tire sliding on ice. “Fuck.” I killed the engine, but left the lights on. I put my gloves on and opened the truck door. A cold blast of winter took my breath away. Trying to not fall on my face, I climbed from the tilted truck. Frozen snow covered the hillside and I slipped, catching the trunk of a tree to keep myself from sliding down into the dark cold at the bottom of the hill beyond the headlights. On my hands and knees, I climbed back up to the road.
The darkness was illuminated with a bluish light from the snow, giving the whole scene the look of a photographic negative. On another day, it might have seemed really beautiful. Not tonight.
“Fuck.” The truck was off the road with its rear tires in the air.
Okay, I was in a truck I was supposed to be using that was filled with stolen medical supplies and I was trespassing. I walked around the truck.
In a little hatchback, I could have hopped on the back and maybe gotten the wheels back down on the road. Even then, though, I would need someone to help me back the car up.
Ben.
I yanked the glove off my hand with my teeth and pulled the cellphone out of my pocket. I had not told Ben about any of this and wasn't sure if I could trust him. He could be flaky at times and I didn't know if he would take it seriously. I put the phone back into my pocket. I wiped my sweaty face with my bare hand. There was no other option. I took the phone back out. A friend will help you move, but a best friend will help you move a body. I'd only known him for a semester, I didn't know if we had that kind of relationship. I put the phone back in my pocket.
I walked around the truck again, stomping my feet to fight the numbness. The cold had gotten in to my sweat and was freezing me. I looked up at the dark, square shape of The Fort. I wondered if there was anything up there that could help me.
I marched up in the dark and the cold, swiped the card in the lock and stepped back.
Nothing happened.
I swiped the card again. Nothing happened again.
I pulled out my phone, flipped it open and used it as a flashlight. I swiped the card again. The small led screen red ENTER PIN. There was space for four digits.
“PIN? You gotta be fucking kidding me.” I didn't like the sound of my voice. It sounded like a guy who had no idea what he was doing. I would not follow this guy.
I kicked the snow, through a punch. In raw frustration, I kicked the snow again. Kicked the wall. What would Hutch use as a pin? There must be hundreds of possible combinations. What would Hutch use? His birthday? Don't know it. Anniversary? Hutch forget his anniversary and got in deep shit with Mrs. Hutch.
He forgot his anniversary. He forgets everything.
I typed: one, two, three, four.
The door motor kicked to life and the door started to rise. I ducked underneath it as it went up and flipped on the lights.
I saw the forklift before I'd even stood up all the way.
It took me an hour before I figured out how to get the forklift running and it was harder to manage on the snow than the truck was, but I managed to wedge it behind the truck and lower the fork down on the back. It put the weight of the fork on the back of the truck enough to get the wheels on the road.
I climbed back into the truck, started it up, dropped it in reverse and ever so gently back up. If, somehow, I backed over the forklift and sent it skidding down the hill on the other side, I was just going to go off into the snowy woods and freeze to death like that Steve kid in Wisconsin.
The truck wheels caught and I heard the truck bump the forklift as I backed up. Just enough.
I jumped out of the truck. The forklift was still on the road, though it had been scooted backward by the truck, but it didn't matter, because the truck was back on the road.
I returned the forklift, unloaded the truck and stashed the medical supplies inside the empty space of the machine of uncertain purpose, which had a coffin sized hole in it. I thought distantly, as I pushed the boxes inside, that it might be parts of a CAT scan machine. I still had to take the truck back.
By the time I got home, it was nearly three AM. I slumped on the couch with a cold Dr. Pepper, when what I really wanted was a coffee. I didn't have a coffee machine, coffee, a pot, a mug or any sugar, so that wasn't going to happen. I would have to remember to get that stuff when I went to the University Food Service. I'd heard a report about a meat recall due to E. coli, that made me think. E. coli was the shit bacteria. It made people jump. Shit always made people jump. When I went to get food, I would say,”Boo! E. coli! Gimme your tater-tots!”
I laughed, but didn't like the sound of my voice in the silence of my apartment.
I flicked the television on. CNN was still flogging the dead kid, frozen solid, spread eagle like an eternal snow angel. I flipped the TV off again. I couldn't face the kid.
The apocalypse had just been a hobby, but, tonight I stepped up my game.
The next step I had avoided for fear of drawing unwanted attention, now I saw no other way of moving forward without it.
I needed another pair of hands. I needed a partner.