“Yeah, man! What the hell’s wrong with you?” Runner added. Where’s yer manners?”
“I wanted it to be a surprise!” Dave tries to explain, weakly.
“Well, it sure was that, Dave,” said Mikki, seizing her chance to scold him and thrilled that his friends seemed to have enough sense to do the same.
“Aw, hell, we all got food, ain’t we?” Gabe asked the group.
A chorus of yeah sures went up and everyone started digging in the bags they carried, pulling out whatever passed for food. As expected, it was mostly camping gear stuff and canned or prepackaged food appropriated from assorted grocery stores. They started piling up whatever they had onto the picnic benches, sharing whatever they had.
Mikki sidled up to Dave before he sat down and asked, “So Dave, tell me, how did all these friends of yours get here?”
“Oh, I called ‘em on the radio.”
“No, no. I mean, how did they get in here? How did they get through the barricade.”
“Oh! Floyd showed me how to open that up, so I let them all in. We already pulled some of it down.”
“Yeah, we don’t need that anyway,” Runner added, overhearing the conversation.
“You did, what?” Mikki asked, incredulous.
“Yeah,” Dave explained proudly. “No need for that. It just keeps people out.”
Mikki’s rage meter was spiking to dangerous levels. It was already higher than she could remember. She tried to speak but her brain was temporarily disengaged. She opened her mouth but no words came out. Eventually, one word did emerge.
“Floyd!!!!” she screamed at the top of her lungs.
Everyone stopped whatever they were doing, as if they had all frozen in time. Floyd ran over to her and asked, “What is it? What’s wrong?”
Skinny Slim asked, “Are you OK, ma’am?”
Mikki still couldn’t make words form. She looked around at all the eyes that were fixed on her, then her brain finally clicked back into gear. She gave a very big, very odd, very disconcerting smile. Through tightened lips she asked, “Would y’all excuse us for a bit. I gotta talk to Floyd. Y’all have a nice time!”
She very slowly but firmly walked to the cabin, latched firmly onto Floyd’s arm. She squeezed so hard, Floyd thought it was caught in a vice.
Once inside, Mikki shut and locked the door. She froze. She didn’t move. She didn’t blink. Her breaths came in deep gasps.
“Baby?” Floyd began, but she snapped up a hand, palm out and facing him, stopping him from saying a word.
Very slowly, in hushed, intense words, she said, “You…showed…Dave…how to…open…the barricade?”
She made sure no one outside the cabin could hear her, but also made sure Floyd fully comprehended the full vehemence of her anger. She needn’t have worried about anyone listening in. They all laughed and whooped it up when she dragged Floyd into the cabin, like a schoolboy about to get a whuppin’. The gang outside was already eating and carrying on and having a grand old time getting acquainted.
“Well, yeah,” Floyd admitted, sheepishly.
“And why, in the name of Zombie Freakin’ Hell did you do that?!”
She could barely contain herself, and Floyd knew it. But he had a good defense. As quick as he could, he spurted out, “Because I wanted him to know how to leave. He couldn’t leave unless he knew how to get out through the barricade!”
“Well, great, job, Dumass! He opened the barricade all right! He opened it up and let all his bubba friends in. And they’ve already started tearing it down!”
“What?”
“Yeah, tearing it down! That dumass Runner guy said we don’t need it anymore, so they started tearing it down!”
“But we do need it!”
“No shit, Sherlock!”
“Well, how was I to know Dave would call a bunch of friends? And why the hell would I ever think they’d be stupid enough to tear down the barricade?”
“I don’t know, but thanks to you, our one line of defense around this one little spot on earth we could call home has been blown all to hell!”
“Well, what about you?”
“Me?”
“Yeah, you! None of them would even be here if you hadn’t invited them!”
“I didn’t invite them!”
“The hell you didn’t! If I may quote, ‘Well, if you ever get in the area, y’all stop on by.’ That was sure as hell an invitation!”
“Well, I was just bein’ nice. I never thought anyone would ever actually stop by!”
“And I never thought anyone would invite a bunch of friends over who were stupid enough to tear down a barricade!”
The two stood there, fuming at each other in total silence. The thought dawned on both of them simultaneously that they had both been wrong, yet they had both done nothing wrong. No one could have foretold the recent chain of events. They couldn’t be mad at each other for not being fortune tellers or mind readers.
The anger slowly dissipated as they stood there. Neither one spoke. Neither one knew what to say. Eventually, Floyd stepped forward, wrapped his big arms around Mikki, and said, “I’m sorry, baby.”
“I’m sorry too, Floyd.”
She melted into his arms.
Holding on to him tightly, with her head buried in his shoulder, Mikki asked, “So what the hell do we do now?”
Chapter Thirty-Two
The two stayed locked in the cabin for two hours, waiting for the party outside to calm down. They didn’t bother trying to assign cabins to anyone. First, they didn’t want to encourage anyone to stay, and second, they were pretty confident that Idiot Dave had already told them to take any cabin they wanted other than cabin one.
Unfortunately, the noise from the party didn’t die down. If anything, the noise had gotten louder. Someone brought out a portable CD player and a stack of CDs and cranked it up. Good thing there weren’t any zombie critters left in the woods, or the noise would have surely attracted them.
“Damn! What the hell are they doin’ out there?” Mikki complained, heading to the window. The windows all had horizontal blinds and Mikki peeked through one of the slats. “Floyd, are you a big drinkin’ man?”
“Drinkin’ man? You know I’m not. How many stores we been in and I never grabbed any alcohol?”
“Well, our new neighbors are, that’s fer sure. You gotta see this.”
Mikki moved to let Floyd get a look through the blinds. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.
The two didn’t know whether to laugh, be offended, go out and stop it, or join in. Skinny Slim seemed to be the local bartender, with various bottles of hard liquor set out on a picnic table. He had a bunch of plastic cups for everyone, who were all coming up to him repeatedly for refills. Occasionally, he reached into his bag and grabbed something else to add to a drink.
A few of them had already had way too much liquor. Baby Doll was lip locked in overly wet tongue kisses with Runner, who was sitting on her lap (she would have crushed him if it were the other way around). Belle was in a similar situation, sitting on Gabe’s lap. Dave had apparently passed out. He was lying on his back in the dirt, while Babette was laughing like a hyena at everything around her. Chester was throwing up in a corner by one of the cabins. Apparently there were no underage drinking laws for this bunch. They clearly weren’t from Idaho.
“So whadda we do, Floyd?”
“Do? Nothing! I’m not going out there. No point talking with a bunch of drunks. Let them drink themselves into a stupor. Once the liquor’s all gone, maybe they’ll be more reasonable in the morning.”
“Well, you got a point there.”
With all the racket going outside, neither Floyd nor Mikki was in the mood for making love, so they looked through the board games and decided to play Risk to pass the time. Mikki had the upper hand for the first hour, but several bad rolls on her part let Floyd take the lead. He kept skipping turns to load up his soldiers until he couldn’t be stopped, then he took over Mikki’s countries one by on
e. Mikki had a brief rally, but after three hours, she finally conceded. The party was still going on outside.
If anything, the noise got louder and angrier. They peeked out the blinds again to see a fight had broken out between Jackass and Runner. Both were drunk off their asses, and they missed more punches than they landed. Jackass got off a good one, though, that sent a tooth flying out of Runner’s mouth. Too bad. Runner had the best teeth of all of them.
Gabe and Skinny Slim tried to break up the fight by pulling the men off of each other, but they only got sucked into the fracas. Something someone said got the women into it, with Baby Doll and Belle slapping the shit out of each other. Soon, it was a huge brawl, with half the people beating on each other and a couple trying to break it up. Idiot Dave stayed passed out on the ground through it all, his wife and kid having returned to the cabin long before, without him.
The pair turned away from the window, disgusted. Mikki wanted to kill every damn one of them, but Floyd insisted she couldn’t go around killing people just for being people. There weren’t enough living people to go around nowadays as it was. Best to just live and let live.
“Yeah,” Mikki countered, “but they ain’t lettin’ us live! And this is our place!”
“So what do you want to do? Kill every one of them? Bury all the bodies and pretend this never happened? These ain’t zombies, Mikki. These are living, breathing, human beings. You really want to commit murder? I know you killed people before the brain-eaters showed up, but from what you said, that was always in self-defense.”
“It was in self-defense, but a person’s got a right to defend his property, too, Floyd, and this is our property!”
“Why? Because we showed up and didn’t leave? How is that any different from what they’re doing? Is it really worth killing for? And what happens the next time? And the next time? The word is out about this place now. How many graves will we have to dig? Where does it end?”
“So we just give up?”
“No. In the morning, we have a talk with everyone. The liquor will be all gone, they’ll all have nasty hangovers, and we can lay down the law.”
“Oh, like you did with Dave? That worked out real well!”
“I was trying to be nice to Dave. Not anymore. I want our campground back as much as you do, Mikki.”
There was nothing they could do at the moment, and they were both too aggravated to sleep, so Mikki opened a deck of cards and they played Go Fish again. They switched to War for a while, too, but the ruckus outside never abated. Once the fight was over, everyone was happy again, laughing and hollering at the top of their lungs until well past midnight. It was nearly 4 AM by the time everyone had staggered into one of the cabins, or passed out and had to be dragged inside.
Chapter Thirty-Three
It was after 10 AM when Floyd and Mikki finally awoke, the memories of the long night still fresh in their minds. Neither one had slept well. When they finally opened the cabin door, the entire place was as quiet as a tomb—and as filthy as a city dump. All sorts of trash, plastic cups, and empty bottles were everywhere, punctuated by the occasional puddle of dried vomit. Some kind of pot boiler had been set up in the fire pit. At least Daisy didn’t seem to have left any more of his calling cards during the party.
“I ain’t cleanin’ this up,” Mikki said from the doorway.
“Damn straight,” Floyd agreed. “I’m goin’ fishin’.”
“I’ll get us some corn and eggs and a couple o’ those oatmeal packages for breakfast. We can eat in our cabin.”
“Sounds good. Try to avoid the locals if you can ‘til I get back.”
“No shit, Sherlock.”
Floyd tromped off through the brush, following the little dirt path to the lake. It was about a 10-minute walk, but he made it 15. He was in no hurry. He frankly didn’t know what to do. He mulled over every possible option in his head on how to deal with the situation, and none of them were any good. Things got even worse when he came to the end of the path and discovered the boat was gone.
Where the hell is the boat? Where the hell is the DAMN BOAT? Floyd shielded his eyes against the sun. Sure enough, the boat was out in the middle of the lake. It looked like two men were in the boat, poles out in the water.
Floyd waved at them. They waved back. He waved even bigger. They waved back. He tried to signal for them to come back in. They waved back. Floyd gave up.
“FLOOOOOOYD!!!”
“Now what?” Floyd asked himself, as Mikki came running up to him, screaming his name. She was clearly upset and all out of breath. She must have been running pretty hard. He had never seen her this out of breath, even when fighting a horde of brain-eaters.
“The corn is gone!” she blurted out.
“What?” he asked, incredulously.
“The corn is gone!”
“What do you man, ‘the corn is gone’?”
“What the hell do you think it means, you big damn doofus dumbass! The…corn…is… gone! Every damn ear has been picked off the stalks! Somebody must have picked every last one of ‘em while we was sleeping or somethin’!”
“That doesn’t make any sense. We barely used up half the field. That corn should have lasted us the rest of the season. They couldn’t possibly have eaten that much.”
“Since when does anything about this bunch make sense. All I know is, all the corn is gone. Hey, wasn’t you supposed to be out fishin’?”
Floyd just pointed out to the lake. Mikki’s eyes followed his finger as she squinted against the midmorning sun. Finally, she made out the form of the boat with two men sitting in it.
“Are you shittin’ me?” she finally said.
“Well, we wanted them to take care of themselves. We can’t tell them to get their own fish and then complain when they do. Same with the corn.”
“I guess not, but these morons ain’t gonna last a month if they use up everything we got. Corn takes a long time to grow, and I didn’t see none of them plantin’ anything new!”
“Is that breakfast,” Floyd asked, changing the subject.
“What?”
“That.”
Mikki looked down and realized she was still clutching two eggs in each hand. “Son of a bitch,” she said.
Floyd laughed. Mikki laughed with him.
“Let’s get some oatmeal and cook these up,” she said.
They sauntered over to the kitchen, taking their time, wondering how this day could get any worse. They were about to find out.
“What’s goin’ on in here?” Mikki asked. “Makin’ soup?” Her question initiated a loud burst of laughter, but no one bothered to answer the question.
The three women folk were all in the kitchen in a corner, chatting and joking loudly with one another. Skinny Slim and Jackass had pots and pans all over the place, while Dave looked on like a lost puppy that desperately wanted to be adopted. Corn cobs were everywhere as the group had been stripping off the kernels. The largest metal pot was on the stove, filled with boiling water.
Seeing no that one else was going to answer Mikki, Dave piped up excitedly, “We’re making corn mash!”
“Corn what?” Mikki asked, perplexed.
Floyd knew what that meant, however. He grabbed Mikki by the arm and pulled her outside. “Have fun, everyone!” He called back over his shoulder, as he dragged her out of the kitchen. For some reason, that caused another round of laughter and unintelligible comments aimed in his direction. He headed straight to the fire pit and took a better look at the boiler.
“Well, I’ll be damned.”
“You sure do say that a lot, Floyd.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” he replied.
“OK, point taken,” Mikki laughed. “So what bug climbed up your butt all of a sudden?”
“Moonshine.”
“You mean, like whiskey?”
“Yup. Copper boiler. Corn mash. That’s what you need to make moonshine.”
“Wait a minute. Hold on there just one second! You tell
in’ me that these morons stole every bit of our corn to make whisky?”
“I reckon.”
Floyd wondered if a person’s head could spontaneously explode. If so, he was about to see it, firsthand. Mikki’s face turned bright red, then almost purple. Her right eye started to twitch. Floyd had never seen that happen before. She clenched her fists and crushed the eggs she had forgotten she was still holding, which only made her madder. She threw the shells onto the ground and wiped her hands on the sides of her shirt. Floyd would have laughed, if it wasn’t for the blue streak of curses that came out of her mouth at the top of her lungs.
It was as if an air raid siren had gone off. Mikki’s screaming rant shattered the still air. Soon, everyone in the kitchen came running with a babble of “What’s wrong?” “What happened?” and other questions. Belle asked Mikki, “Are you ok, honey?”
“Hell no, I ain’t OK!” Mikki screamed. “Y’all stole all our corn to make whisky?”
“Hey, it’ll be good whisky,” Jackass quipped.
“And that corn wasn’t any good anyway,” Dave offered.
OK, Floyd was now convinced that a human head could not spontaneously explode. Otherwise, they would have all just been covered with Mikki’s brain matter.
“This ain’t no damn supermarket!” Mikki screamed. “There ain’t no damn delivery truck gonna pull up here with fresh supplies!”
“Calm down, Mikki,” said Dave.
“Oh, no,” Floyd muttered, knowing that was exactly the wrong thing to say to Mikki.
“Don’t you tell me to calm down! Don’t you never tell me to calm down! The dumbest thing you can say to a woman is calm down, because ya know why? It don’t make us calm down!!!”
“Well, she got a point there,” Babette said to the two other ladies, who both nodded and muttered in agreement.
“Y’all don’t get it! We are on our own here! That corn is for food! To be eaten!”
“Well, it’s for drinking now!”
With that comment, Mikki fully understood why they called him Jackass. Everyone else thought it was funny.
“Look, it ain’t that big a deal,” Skinny Slim assured her.
Floyd & Mikki (Book 2): Zombie Slayers (Dawn of the Living) Page 16