by Mark Tufo
I gagged and pushed him away. “Fug man, what the hell did you eat?”
“Got some great mushrooms I’ve been gathering since you fell asleep. Want one?”
“No man, I’d rather stub my toe on a nail, and are you sure those are safe?” The caps were an angry red, and the stem glowed in the dark. That was when I realized it was night.
“Seem all right; give me a lot of gas though.” He pulled one away so he could look at it. “You think I’m mushroom-intolerant?”
“What time is it?” It was dark and the stars were out. It felt close to the witching hour if I had to guess.
I stood, looking for anything that might be creeping up on us, although in reality they’d had the good four or five hours that I had been zonked out to do so; that they would choose this exact moment seemed unlikely.
“Soon,” was Trip’s reply as he cocked his head to get a better look at what I am sure was poison before popping it in his mouth. “Tastes like raw oysters.” He made a slurping sound.
“What’s soon, Trip? You need to come down off Mount Batty for a few seconds.”
I don’t know if that knocked a cobweb loose or it was just coincidence that I’d said something, but Trip flipped to John for a moment.
“Jack will be back soon and he’s not going to be overly happy about it.”
“Well I’m glad that he’ll be back; we could use the help, and I can definitely understand why he wouldn’t be happy about it.”
His next words threw me for a loop: “He was home for a while.”
“Like with his family home?” A stab of jealousy ripped through my every fiber.
“Close, he was fighting his way back to them.”
The jealousy departed me, quickly replaced with despair. Despair for Jack, to be tantalizingly close to those you love only to be yanked back into this purgatory. That was much worse than staying here.
“Where exactly is he coming back?”
Trip stood and we walked about fifty yards to our south. He lit another joint and quickly vacated his higher self; the concern and sadness left as well. The happy-go-lucky hippie had made his triumphant return.
“Man, my stomach feels funny,” he said as he rubbed his belly; as he did so, his shirt would rise up occasionally. At first I thought it was a trick of the light.
“Trip, lift up your shirt.”
He did so without even asking why. Of course he went to the extreme and pulled it up and over his face and down the back of his head so it was stuck there.
“Holy shit, that can’t be good.” I reached out, wanting to touch it but wasn’t sure if he was radioactive or something. Trip’s belly was glowing a dull green. “If some alien comes birthing its way out of your sternum, I’m going to shoot you both,” I told him, backing up, thinking that maybe could be a possibility here. I mean, why not?
Trip finally pulled the material away from his eyes and took a look. He started poofing his belly out and walking around. “Look, I’m like a fleshlight!”
“Umm, Trip, maybe use some other word. That makes me slightly uncomfortable.”
He started pressing his nose. “I wonder if this will make the light brighter?
I felt a stir pass through me, a breezeless wind, makes no sense but that was what happened. No snaps of light, no mini-supernovas, no high intensity crackles of energy. I was looking up toward a nearby rise and one second no Jack, the next yes Jack. The effect was very much like those low budget movies; you know the kind, stop the motion of the camera, insert new prop, roll camera again. I’m sure that blew the minds of people in 1910, not so much anymore. Although when it happens real time, yeah, back to the mind blown aspect.
“Yack’s back,” Trip said.
Jack waved and half slid as he descended the steep incline.
“Dude, you all right?” I asked an obviously stunned Jack. His look conveyed all the information I needed to know. Here was a man whose soul had been laid bare and subjected to an amplified cattle prod. “You don’t have to say anything, we’re men, I get it.”
I noticed his hands, the dried blood on frayed gloves. “What happened to your hands? Looks sort of like stigmata.”
“I was almost home,” Jack replied, staring at the remains of his gloves.
Jack turned his back, obviously under mental duress. I placed a hand on his shoulder. There were no words needed; I understood everything he had conveyed.
Jack then turned and pointed directly at Trip. “You…you had better make this right.
Trip turned to look at Jack and pointed at his stomach.
“I have my own fleshlight!” Trip said proudly.
“Mike, could you get him away from me for a minute?”
Trip was doing his best to have Jack rub his belly like a magic lamp. I grabbed Trip by the shoulders and steered him away. Jack looked deflated, like he was carrying the weight of his world on his shoulders.
“Trip said you were home.”
Jack’s eyes flashed quickly to mine. A stab of pain was mixed with grief and anger. Yeah, I got all that in a second or two.
“I was close. I was so fucking close. I would have made it if I hadn’t run into a pack of night runners. It could have been worse though, I guess.”
I knew why, but this was his narrative, so I just let him keep talking.
“If I had made it and was actually able to see my family and friends and was then ripped back here, that would have been worse. Mike, what if that’s always going to be the case?”
Personally, I hadn’t gone down this road; I knew it existed on the map, I just didn’t care to know where it went. There were versions of me already living this type of existence thanks to a vengeful god. But if I, this one of me I was pointing a finger at, just started constantly flitting about like Scott Bakula in that show Quantum Leap, always trying to get home, I was going to lose my mind. Especially if Trip was my “Al.” Or even worse, I’d show up at home, give a quick hug and kiss to those I love, and be dragged away. To constantly be reminded of what you were losing? Fuck, that’s brutal. I wasn’t going to be a part of that.
“Let’s do this shit for real. You, me, us.” I slapped Trip on his glowing belly. “Trip assures us that we’ll make it.”
There was a spark of hope in Jack’s eyes. Much more softly, I added, “Or die trying.”
“That, my friend, does not sound promising. That sounds more than just a saying. A hell of a lot more.” Jack had caught me.
“Yeah, we should get going.” Trip finally pulled his shirt down.
“And, just for future reference, you should never add the whole dying part to the end of a motivational moment. It kind of kills it…so to speak.”
We were heading back to the armored car, which was about fifty yards up the path.
“So, did he really say we’d make it? Or were you just trying to deliver a motivational speech?”
“No, he said we could make it.”
“Could? And the other part?”
“Or die trying.”
Jack stopped. “That sounds like a weather prediction. It will be raining tomorrow, but if it’s not, the skies will be either cloudy or the sun will shine, unless of course a low-lying fog settles in.”
“I’m with you, man. I feel the same way. But what are our choices? We make it or we don’t. That’s been the way for all of us for a good long while now.”
Jack didn’t break eye contact with me for an uncomfortable amount of time. So, given we were two men, about a second and a half.
“Sorry,” he finally said. “All right, my moment of self-pity is over. We’re going to do this now. Every single thing that stands in my way is going to regret this day.”
“Jack, you have no idea how happy I am that you’re back. Otherwise it was me and him.” I was pointing to the man playing bongos on his distended, still glowing belly.
“Is that paint? Did he eat glow-in-the-dark paint?”
“Worse: glow-in-the-dark mushrooms.”
“Ponch,
Yack, I’m not feeling so good.”
Trip bent over and vomit erupted from his mouth much like a Mentos-filled Diet Coke. We were fifteen feet away and still we had to step back as he turned toward us. Want to know what was worse than the smell? Yeah, you guessed it, the puke was glowing as it roped from his mouth. The ground looked like some seriously fucked up surrealist had come around and done his magic. The path, as far as I was concerned, was a no-go zone. I went into the woods and as far around the spectacle as I could, walking past Trip another fifteen feet. He wasn’t projectile ejecting anymore, just had chunks of what looked like glopped-up Phritos falling out of his mouth. He was moaning something fierce. I think he was saddened about what he was losing. He even bent over a little more.
“I swear, Trip, you try and pick that up, I am going to butt stroke you to the side of the head.”
He didn’t move, so I had to figure he was debating it.
“Trip, are you all right?” I had to ask.
There was no telling what had been in those mushrooms. He wiped his mouth and when he spoke, his mouth glowed—I mean brightly, he actually was a flashlight. I stressed the word flashlight in my head.
“Let’s go,” Jack said in an authoritative voice once he got up to me. “And this glow worm had better not spray that shit on me.”
“I am tripping balls!” Trip exclaimed. “This stuff is like peyote on steroids! Not that I’ve ever taken steroids; they’re bad for you.”
Jack bowed his head, brought the palms of his hands up, and rubbed his face. Most likely to keep his hands occupied before he throat-punched Trip.
“Mike, do we continue?” he asked through the visage wipe.
“Don’t ask me why I think this, I just do. I think now is the perfect time.”
“In what world is this the perfect time?” Jack asked.
“This one,” Trip answered as he got back into the truck.
“Hard to argue with that,” Jack shrugged, following Trip.
Me? I just shook my head. I could only hope I was as right about this as I thought.
“You want me to drive?” I asked when I poked my head in and the driver’s seat was empty.
“Might be for the best,” Jack said.
“Those are not words my wife will ever say.”
I was thinking back to the beginning of the z-poc when I had destroyed her beloved Jeep. “Buckle up for safety,” I told my passengers; the engine cranked over, I released enough smoke to make a coal burning facility blush, and then I backed up, snapping a sapling and smacking hard into a mighty oak. “Sorry,” I grunted as I got the behemoth turned around.
Trip kept opening his mouth in random varying patterns, alternately lighting and darkening the cab. Once he even did the infamous hand warble, pretending he was an Apache warrior. Probably Hollywood bullshit, oh but how I’d loved it as a kid. Right now, not so much; apparently not for Jack either.
“You want to hold him down while I tape his mouth?” he asked.
“I’ll swallow my larynx if you do that!” Trip shouted in alarm.
“Trip, nobody is going to tape your mouth, but you have to stop screaming like we’re at a concert,” I told him.
“My preference still holds with the tape,” Jack added.
“Not helping,” I told him; he shrugged.
I drove for a few minutes. Trip had mostly stopped opening his mouth. That was right up until we got onto a little rise in the road and were looking down on the collider in the distance.
“I’m guessing the quarry just isn’t going to be a thing,” I heard Jack sourly mutter.
Ever heard of a nightmare wrapped up in some terror and topped with some horror? Well that was the gist of the outside of the building. Whistlers had set up a hellacious perimeter that was being attacked periodically by zombies and night runners. Right then the cab lit up as Trip’s mouth dropped open in shock. That he wasn’t expecting this did not bode well for us all.
“Something’s not right.” Jack was leaning forward.
“Sky’s blue,” I said sarcastically. “Or stars shine, take your pick.”
“Sorry. It’s the night runners. Now, they’ve never been overly particular about who they hunt down and kill, but it seems like they’ve joined forces with your beloved zombies and now they’re both attacking the whistlers.”
“Zombies making allies? Doesn’t even seem like they would have the brain power to do something like that.”
I took a closer look; the roaming gangs of night runners were indeed threading their ways through the zombie horde and into the frontlines of the battle.
“Why?” was all I could think to ask.
There was some night runner screeching and other random sounds, but as far as epic battles go, this one was fairly quiet. To me that was almost more disturbing. The loss of so much life with so little fanfare I found fucking shocking. I don’t know, maybe it’s me, but wouldn’t it be better to go out with the heavy whining of damaged jet engines in a hellacious thunder and lightning storm as your plane barreled down at a lung-tearing five hundred miles per hour while hundreds of panicked passengers cried and screamed as you raced toward a raging blizzard on top of a mountain with howling winds where the impact would shake the earth to its core and the resultant fireball would be seen, heard, and felt some fifty miles away? Or as you sat in your reading room catching up on the latest thriller when a tiny clot let loose from your leg, traveled up into your brain, and gave you a stroke, killing you instantly, so that when your relatives found you, you looked almost peaceful, sleeping even, with your head pitched slightly to the side? If you’re going to do something, even if it’s the last thing you’re ever going to do, it might as well be big, right? Am I overthinking this?
“We don’t have the firepower to make it through that.” Jack was checking his mags.
“Sure we do. I have a four-ton missile.”
“What are you talking about?” His question interrupted as I got our ride into a slow lumbering roll. “We could get hung up…”
“Yup, I get it,” I said tersely.
“Yet, you’re still going to go through with it?”
“Yup,” I said through a closed mouth.
“Make a hole!” Trip screamed, talking to the enemy we were coming up on, I would say rapidly, but that’s a lie.
“What in the hell are those balls?” Jack asked.
“Something we need to avoid.”
The truck topped out at four hundred and seventy-two PTZs; sounded fast, old woman in a Prius traveling uphill in a snowstorm with a flat gave us the finger as she passed on by.
“Gas is on the right, jackass!” my imaginary fellow commuter shouted.
“Mike, perhaps you could try pressing down on the pedal a little harder. I could push this thing faster,” Jack said with a little alarm, the enemy yards in front and a stiff headwind looked like it could stop us in our tracks.
In my worst Scottish accent, I turned to Jack and said, “I’m giving her all she’s got, Captain.”
He didn’t appreciate it nearly as much as Trip did. If he hadn’t been bracing for impact, he would have flipped me off.
We mowed over the first zombies like they were grass and we were a John Deere. Don’t remember the blood and guts part of mowing, though. Gore was striking our windshield in heavy wet clumps; a woman’s slender arm ended up on our hood. Not a one of us wasn’t looking at it. I can’t imagine having been Trip and trying to reconcile that in a mind that was already hallucinating. It didn’t help that she had a gold charm on her wrist with what we presumed were the names of her kids. A night runner shrieked at us with his silver glowing eyes and leapt out of the way before I could make him a casualty of war. What we lost in speed seemed to be made up for in bulk, so I thought.
“Four hundred and fifty-two PTZs!” Trip shouted less than an inch from my ear.
He was very intently watching our speedometer and I didn’t like that, not one stinking bit. We were starting to be tossed about a bit as
the body count began to rise and we were running over dead, dying, or recently squished. We hadn’t gone another fifty feet when Trip again yelled to let me know we were at three-fifty. At this rate we were going to stall out and be swallowed up by combatants well short of our goal. Stuck in a tin can with our enemies swirling around us was not the way I wanted to go out. In my head I was thinking I wanted to die in bed with my wife while—well, you know. But that evaporated real quickly when I thought about how she would deal with that. Actually kind of an asshole way to go out, really.
“I’m sorry, Jack,” I said, realizing we just weren’t going to make it.
“You know, we could have gone to the quarry…just saying.”
“I wish we had the Budge-O van!” Trip again screamed.
“Get the fuck out of his ear.” Jack pulled Trip back by the seat of his pants. Trip looked like he was about to throw a tantrum.
In my mind, I can’t for the life of me figure out why he would have wanted to be back in that piece of shit, but like anything that Trip says, you have to wade through the muck and mire to find the hidden valuable nugget. Sometimes it’s not worth the expenditure of resources, but then, every once in a while, you find something life altering.
“Reverse!” I shouted, matching Trip’s decibel level.
“Mike, that means you’ll have to stop,” Jack said, his way of telling me he didn’t think that it was such a good idea.
“At the rate I’m losing speed, I’ll be stopped soon anyway. Here goes nothing,” I told them as I two-footed on the brake.
It took far too long for me as I fumbled around with the gearbox. With a fair amount of grinding and metal on metal protest, I got our ride in reverse. We were greeted with the throaty roar of a souped-up Detroit muscle car.
“Damn!” I shouted as I stomped down on the pedal and spun the wheel, pulling a G-force packed one-eighty.
We were rocketing backward, making anything foolish enough to cross our path become one with the ground, but not in a Zen way. More of a forceful masochistic thing. There was no rear windshield and I was doing my best to turn us around and head back where we needed to go using the side view mirrors, which looked like they were on trampolines. Jack came up beside me and started pressing a few different buttons.