Alive! Not Dead!

by R. M. Smith

  “Maybe it’s a guilty conscience; I don’t know.”

  “What do you have a guilty conscience for, Dan? Did you want me to go through with it with Mits just so we could be let go?” she asked.

  “No, I think it’s because you were the strong one,” I said. “You killed Mits when it should have been me.”

  “We agreed that it was over, Dan. Mits is dead. What’s done is done.”

  “I still feel bad about it,” I said, my head down.

  “Well don’t!”

  I raised her hands up in mine and kissed them. Then I let go and offered her a hug. This time she took it. I said “I am so sorry Mindy. I was way out of line.”

  “You are my man,” she said.

  “Yes, I am. I will never mis-treat you ever again.”

  “You better not. I’ll kick your butt.”

  Rachel came back inside. She stood behind me with her arms crossed. She asked Mindy “Are you ok?”

  Mindy nodded, wiping the tears away.

  Mason and Vera came back in, too. Vera was smoking. Mason came over to me. He put his hand on my shoulder as I stood up. He put his hand out for Mindy who took it. “If you two need to talk, I am here.”

  “We’ll be ok,” I said.

  “Alright,” he said nodding. “We better get to work, then.”

  On Halloween, Mindy and I told Mason all about our run in with Mits. He was very understanding and supportive. He told Mindy that she did the right thing. Killing Mits was the only way we would have survived the situation. If Mindy wouldn’t have killed her, eventually he thought that Mits would have either taken us back to Skin, demanded more time alone with Mindy, or she would have killed us both.

  After that, no one talked about Mits anymore.

  Mason married Mindy and I a week before Thanksgiving on the large yellowed lawn of a huge casino not four miles north of the hotel we had been staying at. The front of the casino had a large Indian face that would’ve looked nice lit up at night. It was the Mohawk Casino.

  Our wedding was very nice. Rachel found some plastic flowers in one of the hotel’s entrances. She made a small bouquet out of them for Mindy to hold while Mason performed the ceremony. I had to chuckle to myself because Mason still didn’t wear a shirt – even for our wedding. Inside some of the casinos’ stores Mindy and I found some very nice clothes to wear for the wedding. Mindy picked out a long white gown and I found a tux that fit pretty good. Mindy also picked out a nice wedding ring and band – and a beautiful diamond necklace that would have sold for $75,000.00 if things were still like they were.

  I was surprised that someone hadn’t already stolen it – or any of the other fine jewelry for that matter. It looked to me like the casino hadn’t been looted at all. The storefronts along the casino’s hallways weren’t broken into; nor were the large skylights above the halls. The skylights gave us plenty of light to see during the day.

  There were stores with fine watches, clothing stores with leather jackets and biker gear (Mason nearly fell over himself trying to get through the open door), stores with fine furniture, pillows, and blankets. Vera got a new hat while in the biker store and a couple more Harley lighters. She liked the jacket she was wearing so she didn’t take anything else.

  “I don’t like stealing,” she said with a quirky smile.

  “Unless it’s cigarettes,” Mason said. She shot him a dirty look.

  Deeper inside the casino, we followed signs to a buffet. Through some swinging doors, we discovered the kitchen. There were two large walk-in freezers at the back of the kitchen that weren’t quite air-tight. Most of the food was still frozen in the middle. All of us spent time together cutting off the thawed parts of hams, turkeys, and chickens. Mindy was using the knife that Mason had given her. Mason would take the trimmings out on a balcony overlooking the southern parking lot of the casino where he would cook them on a gas grill. The grill still had butane – plus there were seven or eight more bottles in a store room right off the balcony, so we had plenty of heat for cooking. Mason spent a lot of time going through the kitchen finding different ingredients to toss on the food as he cooked it.

  There was plenty of wine to drink as well. It was warm, but it worked fine. Mason would get toasty on two glasses. Vera would always scold him when he started to fill another glass.

  During the day I spent some time strengthening my wrist by shooting my bow and arrows down in a parking lot below the balcony. Mason would always give me the hardest time when I would miss a small target that I had set up.

  We all had our own rooms in the hotel connected to the casino. Mindy and I had our own room. Mason and Vera had theirs and Rachel had one of her own. Mindy and I made sure our room was a little further away from the others because – as newlyweds – we figured we might get a little loud at night.

  The casino slowly became our home.

  Each night we would sit on lawn chairs on the open-air balcony eating the dinner that Mason had prepared. We’d sit there after, Vera and Rachel smoking, Mason telling stories about people that he had met through the years. Mindy and I would sit by side, listening, laughing, holding each other’s hands. I would catch Rachel looking at our held hands more and more. I imagined she was missing the company of a man – or maybe a woman. I felt sorry for her. She was the loner in our group.

  All of us would also keep our eyes to the south. We never saw anyone. There weren’t any bodies in the casino, either. It was like all of the people that had lived in Billings had simply left.

  A few days later we stayed inside for dinner. While Mason was outside cooking, he saw one of the first snowflakes of the season float down and land on his bare shoulder.

  That day, he cooked a lot of extra food. He had us cut up several sides of beef. We stored it in coolers inside the walk-in. He told us with the winter coming that he wouldn’t be able to cook outside if it got too cold. He told us we might be living on beef jerky by the time March rolled around.

  He also told us that we needed to start preparing clothing-wise for the coming winter. We made our way through the halls of the casino again, looking for any heavier clothing or coats, but when the disaster hit, it had been summer, so all of the winter clothing was in storage. We brought extra blankets into our rooms from the other rooms in the casino’s hotel.

  Mason told us that instead of sleeping in our hotel rooms, we actually needed to bring our tents inside and sleep in them. That way we would have an enclosed area where our body heat would keep us warm. I asked him why he didn’t think blankets would be enough on our beds in our rooms. He told me to simply trust his instincts; so I did. He also said he had some antique kerosene lamps that might put off a little heat, too.

  We cleared some tables and chairs out of the buffet dining area and set up our tents in there. We were close to the food still. Mason took some of the coolers and put them outside on the balcony so they would stay cold. I put some cases of wine out there too.

  A few days later, a blizzard hit. Billings was buried under a heavy blanket of 4 feet of snow. The temperature dropped significantly. The girls were all complaining how cold it was in the casino. Vera complained about a cool draft blowing through the room. With no electricity, Mason told them there would be no heat. He told us to get into our tents. They were still cold, but after a while they started to warm up with our body heat. Mindy and I brought a whole bunch of blankets and some books into our tent. We bunched the blankets up in a corner and used them to lean against while we read.

  Rachel was still complaining about being cold, so Mindy asked her to come into our tent with us. She sat on the opposite side of us. She read a stack of magazines as she warmed up.

  The wind howled outside. Snow continued to fall.

  Mason and I stood on the balcony one morning looking out into the city. The snow was untouched as far as the eye could see. No animal tracks broke the freshly fallen snow. No footprints were seen. There was no sound other than the wind through the trees or the sound as snowflakes hi
t the already piling up snow.

  It was a world of quiet white.

  No streets had been plowed. There were still some cars on the streets; now unmoving, abandoned during the disasters. These were now large lumps in the snow. It was so odd to see all of the snow untouched. It felt like we were in the far north reaches of the planet where no animal lived.

  In a sense, it was true.

  And now we were the animals.

  IN COLD BLOOD

  Days turned to weeks. Weeks turned to months. We were alone; the five of us - alone in the bitter cold. Our tents barely kept us warm at night. Outside, blizzard after blizzard howled over the city. We were unable to open the south door of the balcony now. Snow had drifted over it. Looking out the other doors of the casino gave us a view of total whiteout conditions; even some of the skylights were covered in snow.

  It was almost always dark now.

  The only light we had was from the kerosene lamps. Even those didn’t put out much heat. We were running low on kerosene, too.

  “Now you see why I wanted to go to the Gulf,” Mason said, shivering as he ate some cold beef, drinking a sip of wine.

  “Why don’t you put a shirt on then, you old coot,” Vera said ribbing him.

  He smiled. “I never said I was cold, dear. I was just thinking that some ocean salmon would be mighty tasty about now.”

  “Or some hot wings,” Rachel said.

  “Or a double-bacon triple-cheese cheeseburger with all the trimmings from Mr. Meaty’s!” I said. “I loved those damn things.”

  “Oh God, me too,” Mindy said with a smile.

  “We need to stop talking this way,” Mason said with a grin. “It will just make us hungrier.”

  “I wish I had something different to read,” Rachel said. “I’ve been reading the same magazine now for days. I wish I had the book I was reading in my room. It was real good.”

  “Let’s go for a walk then after we eat and get your book,” Mason said. “It would be good to stretch our legs, anyway.”

  We made our way out of the buffet area with Mason leading the way. He was using one of the kerosene lamps for light. I told him to make sure there was plenty of kerosene in it because I didn’t want to be lost in the dark like Mindy and I had been back in Denver. He assured me there was plenty of kerosene.

  The hallways were all dark. The snow had completely covered the skylights. The sound of the wind was loud in the dark halls.

  We went back toward the hotel end of the casino. Our rooms had been on the second floor. We tried to look out some of the windows but they were covered by drifts. We had no idea how deep the snow was.

  Mindy asked “Do you think we could suffocate in here if we got totally buried under the snow?”

  Mason stopped dead in his tracks. He said “I never thought of that…”

  “I wonder how deep it is out there,” I said.

  There was an emergency fire exit door at the end of the hallway where our rooms were. It was on the east side of the building. Mason handed me the kerosene lamp as he tried to push the door open. It didn’t budge.

  He thought about it for a minute. He then went to the first hotel room to our right which would have been on the south-east side of the hotel. The door to room 72B was locked. He kicked it open. The room was in disarray. A TV lay broken on the floor. The bed had been stripped of its blankets. The bathroom door was closed. The curtains were shut in the room, too. He walked over to them and opened them. There was a small step-out balcony on the other side of a sliding glass door. Dim sunlight came through.

  We all looked outside. What we saw was totally amazing.

  We saw that there were drifts as tall as the casino hotel itself. We could barely see the casino sign outside by the road. It was nearly buried. There was an exposed rear end of one car in the parking lot. Everything else around it was buried. The wind caused eddies to swirl around the car. It was the only place where we didn’t see snow. We could actually see a small circle of bare pavement.

  Even in pictures that I had seen in the past of the snow in mountain passes could not compare to the depth of this snow. It was easily 40 feet deep.

  And it was still snowing.

  We didn’t notice the scuffed footprints in the snow on the balcony.

  Mason opened the sliding glass door. It clicked when it opened all the way. Cold air blasted in.

  “What are you doing?” Vera asked.

  “We need some fresh air. We won’t feel this way down in the kitchen. Don’t you worry; it won’t get any colder where we are.”

  A zombie reached through the open sliding door. It snatched Mason’s arm. The zombie’s skin was severely frost bitten. The skin was black and chipping off. Mason was totally taken by surprise. The floor was slowly getting covered with the snow blowing through the open door. Mason slipped. His foot hit something on the floor. There was a click! It was a pistol. He reached down quickly as the zombie lunged to bite his arm. Mason was too slow. The zombie took a deep chunk out the back of his arm. Mason screamed, blood flying, making the snow around him turn red.

  There was another click!

  Mindy and Rachel were trying to pull the sliding door closed. They were trying to keep the zombie out. It was now feeding on Mason as he screamed beneath it.

  Over Mason’s screams we heard an eerie noise. I will never forget it. It grew louder and louder over the wailing winds of the blizzard. It was the sound of garbled voices; thousands of them, maybe millions of them. Rachel and Mindy stopped yanking on the sliding door. We all looked out into the snow.

  The snow piled up around the rear end of the car started to crumble down. A zombie broke through the surface. Click! Its skin was severely frostbitten, too. Then another zombie came trudging through the deep snow at us. Its arms were stretched out, reaching. They were gargling on the snow, choking on it.

  Behind us, a zombie came stumbling into the room. Another one followed it. Another zombie broke through the bathroom door.

  We all stood there, helpless. Where could we go?

  I reached down to grab the pistol. I got it and shot at the first zombie coming through the door. Most of its teeth were missing. Its tongue was black. Its eyes were wild.

  The gun clicked.

  It was out of bullets!

  I pulled the trigger again.

  Click.

  Click.

  Click!

  I woke up.

  It was dark in our tent. From the light emitted from the lamp in Mason and Vera’s tent I could see Mindy trying to get our kerosene lamp to relight. It had gone out.

  Click!

  I put my hand over the top of hers.

  She looked over at me. “Hey,” she said.

  Just a dream, I thought. Just a dream! Jesus!

  “I gotta use the john,” I said getting up.

  The kerosene lamp came back on. “Finally,” Mindy said. “I didn’t think it was going to relight.”

  “I’ll take a look at it when I get back,” I said. I picked up the kerosene lamp. Won’t be a sec.”

  “K.”

  I followed my shadow out of the buffet as I walked toward the restrooms. My mind kept going back to the zombies in the snow. It was so surreal seeing them pushing out of the depths of the snow in my dream.

  The restrooms were to the right down a short wide hall. The toilets didn’t flush so we used certain ones to pee in and certain ones to poop in. Since it was just me and Mason going into the men’s room, we had a lot of toilets left to fill. There were probably 25 sitting and 40 standing toilets in the restroom.

  There was also a draft in the restroom which kept the smells going the opposite way of the buffet. I am sure it was designed that way originally.

  Inside the restroom, I set the kerosene lamp on a long bathroom sink made of a dark marble. I saw my reflection in the cracked mirror. My beard had grown so long and my teeth were starting to yellow. It had been so long since I bathed. I couldn’t figure out why Mindy still told me I wa
s handsome - I looked like a caveman. My breath had to stink, but like they say, even a skunk can’t smell its own stink.

  Chuckling to myself, I went to the urinals, unzipped, and took care of business.

  The kerosene lamp went out.

  I froze. I stood there still unzipped.

  Suddenly there were hands on my shoulders. Not scaly hands but soft, gentle ones. They slid down my arms and rested on my hips. The right came around the front and softly grabbed my cock.

  I started to turn around, but the left hand came up and held me in place. Mindy whispered very quietly “Just stay still.”

  I said “Ok,” a smile forming on my lips.

  Her other hand started to jerk me, slowly. I grew hard. I loved the way she was stroking me. She hadn’t done it like that before. She pressed herself against my back. I felt her hard nipples through her t-shirt on my back. Her other hand slid down and started to caress my balls.

  She stopped for a second. In the total darkness, I didn’t understand what was happening. Then she turned me around and started sucking me. I felt her tongue on me. She teased the tip, chewed it a little, then sucked me hard. She squeezed my ass when I came in her mouth.

  Then, in the darkness, she stood up in front of me. I was expecting a kiss but instead she turned around and walked out of the restroom.

  Smiling, I pulled my pants up, went over to the sink and relit the kerosene lamp. I walked back down the short hall into the buffet.

  Back in our tent, I smiled at her as I came through the flap of the tent. “That was nice,” I whispered.

  She looked at me sideways. “You had a nice pee?”

  “Oh yeah,” I gushed. “It felt awesome. Warmed me right up!”

  She laughed a short questioning laugh. “Ok..?”

  I moved toward her, still smiling. “Don’t you need to go pee now?”

  “Um…” she shuffled away a little, a grin on her face. She whispered “You know I’m on my period, silly.”

  I stopped short. I didn’t move.

  “Dan? You ok?” she asked.