by Mark Tufo
“I’m good with that,” my muffled words came through her hair. “How the fuck are you so rock solid right now?”
“I never looked.”
“Smart woman. I’ve always said that.” I finally felt solid enough that I wasn’t going to just start bawling uncontrollably from the release of stress. It was funny how everyone was finding other inane things to do. Gary was actually counting change in his pocket.
“What are you doing with change?” BT asked.
“You never know when we might come across a working vending machine and I would kill for a Cran-Apple drink.”
“You know we can just bust them open right?”
“Not the same,” he replied.
“They stopped their pursuit,” Mad Jack said, starting up the sat-tracker.
“What we need to know is why they keep showing up like that,” Travis said, and I had to agree. It inspired confidence in me to see the next generation of leader asking the questions that needed asking.
“Augusta—we’re heading to Augusta,” I said. I was relatively certain my voice wouldn’t waver or crack. Knox was still out there, and last we knew his stronghold was in Bangor. I could not afford another run in with a lunatic at this exact moment.
“You mind if someone else drives?” BT asked in all seriousness. “You look a little tapped.”
“I’m good with that,” I told him truthfully.
“I’ll do it,” Tommy said. Deneaux stayed in the passenger seat; no surprise Porkchop climbed into the back with the rest of us. The damage to the rear end was more extensive than I could have imagined. The tailgate was pummeled in like the hammer of Thor had struck. The bed of the truck was actually creased down. The tail lights were distant memories, the trailer hitch was hanging askew and the air brake canister wasn’t looking too particularly well. We were going to need a newer, more fitting ride. I wanted to close my eyes and sleep away this nightmare, but even on a regular roadway, the back of this truck was only suitable for gravel.
We had to take the long way to skirt Belfast, which was still a hotbed of zombie activity. I didn’t pay much attention to what MJ was saying. I was doing my best to not have my teeth rattle out of my head. He was saying something about it looking more like an occupation than an invasion. There were entirely too many implications down that line of reasoning. We could run circles trying to figure it out and still nothing would change. Right now I didn’t care, they could have the town. Although, now I was wishing that MJ had completed his fission bomb. We’d been in the truck for nearly an hour and I’d had my limit, American drug traffickers held in a Thailand prison were treated far better than we were. I would rather walk and was about to tell Tommy to pull over so I could, just as he was pulling into Lemmy’s Used Car Emporium.
Emporium might have been a bit of a stretch...shit, flea market might have been pushing it. These were the cars that were traded in from those crazy radio ads from dealerships that offered money for any car that you pushed, pulled, or dragged in. Yeah, this was those cars. There were a plethora of Ford Taurus’s, the dreaded Chevy two-doors, and generic sedans. Right now that Chrysler minivan with the sliding door looked like Angels on high had hand-crafted it. I gave the truck the middle finger as BT helped me out.
“Quarter tank of gas,” Tommy said as he came out to talk to us.
“We keeping this thing?” BT asked.
“Man, you need to get your slip and slide checked out, that thing’s not safe for kids.” Trip said to me, as his wife massaged the small of his back. Speaking of kids, we’d done our best to ensure their safety by everyone pretty much pretending to be blocks of shipping styrofoam, packing them in tight. Good for them—not so much for us. Nobody ever opened the box and complained about broken packing foam. Deneaux was exiting the small building, a fistful of keys in her hands.
“Talbot, this helpful Deneaux thing is starting to weird me out.”
“Enjoy it while you can. It won’t last,” I told BT.
“That makes it better.” He went over to grab some of the keys.
I was in no particular rush to get behind the wheel of a car anytime soon. Want to know the odds of the first car we got started being that minivan? About a hundred percent. After some loud squealing from loose belts, she sounded much like the washing machine she was. Had to give it to Lemmy, either he was or he employed a hell of a mechanic. I wouldn’t have bet that ten percent of those junkers would have started. We actually got our pick. Gary, who was a decent mechanic, looked them over. We checked tires, fluids, and gas before we settled on six of them. I was not thrilled; in my morose frame of mind that was six opportunities for things to go wrong. It severely sucked to live in that house of pessimism; I’m not going to say I’d been Ollie Optimistic my entire life, but I wasn’t usually waiting for shit to go bad either, and I found myself doing that more and more. At least I couldn’t be blamed. The world was skewed severely against good and didn’t seem to be on the upswing just yet.
If there was this much bad, didn’t it stand to reason that there had to be some good? Maybe the settlement in Washington State was hoarding it. Made getting there even more paramount.
“We taking the truck?” BT asked again. I was sitting in the car my wife had picked out, it was a reasonable facsimile of a Jeep, albeit a foreign wannabe. Tracy and Stephanie had seen to the division of passengers in cars. Trip had loaded into the seat behind mine and began to play the drums on my headrest.
“I’m always so charged up right before a show. I’m going to have to puke soon.”
I turned, making sure to avoid his blur of beating hands. “What are you talking about?”
“Peyote man, if you don’t puke you can get really sick.”
“Sounds just like how I would want to start my trip. Nothing says ‘good time’ like a good puking.”
“See! You know!” He stopped drumming long enough to point to his nose, like all of a sudden we were playing charades and I’d hit the answer on the head.
“John, let’s go!” It was Stephanie, thankfully arguing him into another car.
“Gonna miss you.”
“Who is that Goddess?” he asked looking over to his wife.
“I don’t know, man, but if you play your cards right, you might get lucky.”
“You think?” he asked me with a twinkle in his eye. “You really think she’s a cupcake vendor?”
“Get out.” I pointed with my finger as I let my head sag.
“Hell yeah I’m getting out! The most beautiful woman in the world is offering me unlimited snack cakes. I’m all about that.” He’d got out of the car and poked his head back in. “I’ll see if she has a friend, man.” And then he walked off with his wife.
We had Tracy, myself, Nicole, Wesley, Sty, Ryan, and Angel in our ride, with the animals in the cargo area. Henry looked at Patches the way I look at Deneaux, especially in those tight quarters. We all had to take one for the team eventually; he was up. I think he was going for chemical warfare to keep her away. We did our best to keep fighters in each car. Again, not thrilled; we were already spread thin in that department. Our strength came from our unity.
We’d left the truck. I voted to keep it, use it as a battering ram if…I mean when it became necessary. It was getting gas for the pig that proved its undoing—that and the thing couldn’t go much past fifty. We got back on the road and had been driving close to two hours. We took a pre-scheduled stop to change some diapers, scope out some gas, and get an eye in the sky report from Mad Jack.
“Portland is a no go,” were the first words out of his mouth.
I’d hoped he was being dramatic; surely zombies can’t have the entire city. Wrong. The main highways, I-95 and 295 were out of the question; zombies lined the roadway like a gauntlet. We decided to backtrack to the zombie-free zone of Brunswick and pick up the much slower route 202, a two lane divided highway, common in this part of the country. These roads sucked because of their vulnerability to ambush. They were narrow and windy
and offered few ways off in the event of an emergency. Plus you couldn’t really throttle up the engine on them. It was tough to tell if the obstacles were there to thwart our efforts to leave or if they were there to make us stay. When I rethought my thought I realized I’d just said the same thing.
We needed to raid a store, plain and simple. Gas was a must, but so were the staples humans needed to survive. Stopping, however, was inherently more dangerous than moving. If I made it to Seattle without having an aneurysm, I’d feel pretty lucky. MJ found a small, secluded local store that wasn’t much bigger than a double-stacked trailer, in fact, it might have been; there’s no accounting for Maine Redneck ingenuity. No zombies and no people as far as we could spy; it was worth a go. We rolled up to it with two cars. The other four hung back. Trip was first out.
“Smell that?”
“Your feet?” I asked him.
“The sweet, sweet smell of Twinkie wrappers.”
“Just hold on for a second—I’ll go check it out.” I could not help but think back to the store that had been a zombie trap and a human lure. I knocked on the door, if it was the aforementioned trap, I wanted the zombies to come to me rather than relive the nightmare of seeing captive humans being slowly eaten alive. Nothing. I pulled on the handle, it was locked. I was actually kind of happy about that, meant maybe there was something left inside.
“Locked,” I called back to BT, trying not to be too loud.
“Hold on.” He rooted around in his car until he got the tire iron. He was just coming back when I heard movement above me.
“Tell your friend to stop moving.”
I looked up to see maybe the largest bore I’d ever had the misfortune to stare down. Fifty cal, ten gauge maybe, I don’t know, pretty sure it would make everything above my shoulders look like spaghetti with one shot. Not sure how BT missed this, but he was still coming.
I turned slowly, letting my rifle fall to its sling and raising my hands. “BT you might want to hold up man!”
He was confused only for a moment as he caught sight of the gargantuan gun. Got to admit I was pretty impressed when three rifles on our side were trained on the man that got the drop on me. Of course, it would be too late for me, but I’d be avenged. It was tense and it only got more tense as nothing was said on either side. It was quiet, like I was sitting on the back porch during a lazy summer night, quiet. It was the cries of a wet and hungry Wesley that broke the détente.
“That a baby?” It was the distinctive voice of a female this time. I did not look up, not wanting to see that barrel again.
“That’s my grandson, ma’am,” I answered.
“Are you Christian people?” she asked.
“I was baptized, if that’s what you’re asking. Haven’t been practicing much lately.”
“There’s always time for the Lord’s Prayer,” she admonished me.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Talbot?” BT asked, he couldn’t hear our exchange.
“She’s thinking I should join a monastery,” I told him. That got a laugh from my gunman.
“Oh don’t I know it,” the man said, “she’s been saying I drink and swear too much, though I haven’t had a drink in ten years. What are you doing here?” He got serious right quick.
“We’re trying to leave the state. We heard there’s a settlement in Seattle and we want to get there,” I told him honestly. Amazing the power of truth detection bullet lead has.
“We’ll get to this ‘settlement’ and whether it actually exists, more specifically later. First, what are you doing here?” he asked.
“We need supplies. We ran into a horde of zombies larger than anything we’ve encountered so far and we needed to vacate before we could grab our things. We have infants and children.”
“Oh, my,” the female said. I couldn’t see her, but I imagined she had put her hand to her throat in an expressive manner.
“What’s his story?” the man asked, motioning toward BT.
“You talking size or color? He gets pretty riled up if we start down the race road.”
“I don’t give a goddamn about his color.”
“Vincent, that will be quite enough with the expletives.”
“If you’re referring to size, I think it’s a growth hormone experiment gone awry.”
“Son, are you alright in the head?” Vincent asked.
“Sir, have you ever had a tank turret aimed at your head? It tends to make you act a little crazy,” I told him.
“Vincent, stop pointing at him.”
“Harriet, in case you haven’t noticed they have more guns pointing at us than I do them. He’s my only leverage.”
It was my goal to head this one off at the pass. I turned slightly to my group. “Please, guns down.”
“That was the only thing saving your life, son,” Vincent said as I heard the hammer pull back. I was not about to look back over my shoulder in wonder at the man that was about to murder me. I was on the move, mid-dive as a matter of fact, when I heard the staccato burst of an M-16, not the thunderous expulsion of the large caliber round I had been expecting. I never felt the burst of pain I’d been waiting for either. I got up, trying to figure out what exactly had just happened. Vincent and Harriet were dead, he had been thrown back through the window and was draped over the sill. A large part of Harriet’s brain was lying on the concrete next to me.
Deneaux was off to the side, the barrel of her weapon still smoking. “What?” she asked. “He had every intention of shooting you. Again, I saved your life. I figured when we joined back up that you would be the one doing all the heavy lifting. Had I known it would be my shoulders supporting, I may have chosen my path more wisely.”
“What the fuck, Deneaux? You couldn’t possibly have known he was going to shoot!” BT was pissed.
“You’re a smart man, Lawrence, as is your friend Michael. Great instincts most of the time. But you have your weak points, too, blinders even. Look at the ground beneath Michael’s feet. The discoloration—and if that’s not enough, look at the bullet hole divots in the concrete. You’re not the first person to show up here.”
“And how do you know they weren’t fighting off zombies?” he asked.
“They weren’t good people.” She put her gun down and lit a cigarette. “My guess is they killed the original owner and took the place over.”
“Oh please, do tell us how you came up with that theory, Mrs. Sherlock.”
“Look at the sign.” She pointed, took a drag then pointed again.
“What the fuck is that going to prove?” BT was hot.
“Just do it.”
He did, as did I. BT was not doing his best to contain the white hot anger threatening to bubble up. “Convenience Store. Big deal. What the hell does that mean?” he asked.
“Sometimes I don’t know why I bother. Whose convenience store is it?”
I was looking at the sign. “Joel’s...it was Joel’s,” I answered.
“They could have bought it off Joel,” BT said weakly.
“Harriet had a piece on you, Lawrence, and they had just given each other a nod. That giant gun was cocked and in Michael’s face. If not for me, your friend would be dead and you would be bleeding out. I shudder to think what they would have done with the women and children. Now be a dear and check inside, I’m getting low on cigarettes.”
“Did you see her gun?” BT asked me.
I shrugged in response. “I couldn’t see much beyond the tunnel of a barrel he was pointing at me.”
“You can’t do that! You can’t just kill people!” Tracy had come out of the car, and she was heading right for Deneaux, that finger of doom was out in full force.
Deneaux had not even turned to look. I’d been married to Tracy long enough to know that ignoring her was not an option.
“Bitch, I’m talking to you!” Tracy yelled.
“Oh-oh,” was all I managed. BT intercepted the fiery redhead before she could make contact. Deneaux would only suffer s
o much.
“Put me down, BT! She has to know that you can’t just butcher people!”
BT was looking over at me. “On your own,” I mouthed, that was what he got for interfering.
“Talbot!” BT yelled as he tried to restrain a writhing Tracy.
“Everyone just take a second! Please. BT, put my wife down. I cannot believe I am going to have to defend you,” I said as I looked over to a smiling Deneaux. “Listen, you know she’s already saved my ass a couple of times. Let’s just give her the benefit of the doubt on this until we can prove otherwise.”
“Benefit of the doubt? Is that how you’re going to justify murder? And what if you find out that woman did not have a gun? Then what, Mike?”
“Tracy, hold on. He basically told me straight up that he was going to kill me. I didn’t see Harriet’s gun, but Vincent had pulled the hammer back on his rifle which seemed like it was inches from my nose. I didn’t take a dive for nothing. I believed he would likely do as he threatened; that was why I was trying to get out of the way.”
The anger that Tracy had threatening to boil over was being shifted to me. It did not dissipate as one would hope, just redirected. I wouldn’t doubt if my wife was feeling a bit of betrayal as I shielded Deneaux from her assault. I turned to fire on the door locking mechanism, figuring it should be sufficiently loud enough to distract Tracy. I don’t know what I was hoping to find when I kicked in the door. Something that would unequivocally prove my stance. Maybe chained up puppies, starving or beaten bunny rabbits. Not that I wanted to see those things, but maybe I needed to. There was nothing. Well, except for some dried blood stains and shelving which had all been pushed over to the walls. I scanned the room quickly but there really wasn’t any place to hide, even the cash register station had been pushed flush with the wall. Looked like maybe Harriet and Vincent liked to come down here and dance every Saturday night or something.
That thought was not making me feel any better, imagining them trying to remember a better time in their life, so they came down here and did a little line-dancing. “Yeah, keep it up Talbot. Keep going down this road. Works wonders for your psyche. Hey, maybe it’s cleared down here because they run a field hospital for orphans. Yeah, that’s what the fuck is going on.”