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.