by Tonia Brown
“That’s not what happened!” Jonah shouted. “How can he say that?”
“There’s more,” Dale said, nodding to the screen.
The blonde then explained that the thief’s accomplice had been in the store the whole time, pretending to be a customer. They showed the security footage again, and Jonah watched in vain. After a few seconds of this, the screen cut back to the perky blonde who informed the viewers that the young clerk was barely clinging to life in the intensive care unit of Nevada General. But one even more important bit of information trumped all others.
With a wide grin, the blonde explained, “The red Ford Focus was last seen heading toward Reno. Police say there is a good chance the perpetrators either live in the city or elected to stay the night.”
The station then listed several numbers that the public could call with any information that could lead to the interception of these dangerous criminals.
Jonah buried his head in his hands and groaned. “We’re doomed.”
“What’s all this ‘we’ shit?” Dale asked. “You’re the one who got his stupid ass on camera.”
“Yes, but you’re the one who tried to stuff her body into a dumpster.”
“I did not!”
“But that’s what they think. Isn’t it?” Jonah rubbed his sleep-filled eyes as he contemplated the various problems he now faced. “Okay. Okay. This isn’t too bad. They don’t know who we are.”
“Yet,” Dale grunted.
“Geesh, Dale. Must you always be so helpful?”
“I got you breakfast, what else do you want?”
Jonah eyed the bag and cup as he said, “Yeah, about that. Where did you go? And why? And how long were you gone? And—”
“Calm down,” Dale interrupted him. “I said I wouldn’t wander around, and I didn’t. I just went out to get you something to eat, and I intended to come right back. But I got caught up at the grill watching the news report. I came right back here after. Don’t you trust me?”
No. Jonah didn’t trust him. But he also didn’t want the zombie to feel like he couldn’t be trusted. A zombie that felt like he couldn’t be trusted might become a zombie that wouldn’t follow Jonah’s advice. This in turn might become a zombie that would just wander off on his own, taking with him the chance to redeem both of their souls. It was a frustrating challenge, which deserved a well-placed lie.
“It’s not that I don’t trust you,” Jonah started, “I just worry about you. I wasn’t sure where you went.”
Dale pointed at the bag and cup on the nightstand. “I got you food. Like I said.”
“Yes, but why did you need my keys and wallet?”
The zombie went quiet, and with his silence, a palpable guilt crept across the room. All at once the breakfast, the blankets, the eight hours of uninterrupted sleep made sense. Dale was playing the contrition game.
“Dale?” Jonah asked. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“What did you do?”
Dale mumbled his answer.
“You did what?” Jonah shouted.
“I took your wallet because I lost mine,” Dale repeated, then stood and began to pack his things.
Jonah was possessed with the sudden and very real urge to freak out. “Where? When?”
“I knew you’d freak out.”
“Of course I’m freaking out; half of our money was in your …” Jonah’s train of thought derailed as he was struck by an awful thought. “Did you have it at the store?”
“I don’t know,” Dale said over his shoulder.
“It didn’t fall out of your pants while you were… you know?”
“Eating dinner? No. I don’t think so. I think I lost it before then.”
Jonah breathed a sigh of relief, a sigh interrupted by the zombie’s obtrusive candor.
“But I can’t be sure,” Dale added.
With a loud groan, Jonah collapsed onto the bed. “Why me?”
“It’s getting really hard to remember stuff, man. I’m lucky I remember my own damned name.”
“Did you check the car?” Jonah asked.
“Why do you think I took your keys?”
Jonah had almost forgotten that part, but was pleased that there was a reasonable explanation. He scrambled to pack his bags as well, while mulling over the possible places the zombie could have lost his wallet, not to mention half their funds. “I don’t suppose there’s a snowball’s chance in Hell that you kept your money somewhere else besides your easily losable wallet?”
“Sorry, buddy. That snowball is toast. Wet toast.”
“Of course. Great. Just freaking great. But I suppose it’s my own fault. I should never have given it to you to begin with.”
Dale tossed his packed bags onto the bed. “We’ll be okay.”
“How? Now we have half the cash we did before.” Jonah zipped his bag with as furious a zip as possible. “We’ll never make it to North Carolina on what we have. As it stood, we were supposed to use what we made from the Reno gig to supplement our return trip.”
“So let’s play the Reno gig.”
It was a simple solution to a sticky problem. They already had the job, why not just follow through? Play the gig—even half-assed—get paid and get to the opposite coastline. Jonah shook away the idea before it started to sound too good. “No. We can’t. We have to get out of here. Reno police are sure to be looking for us now. If we stay off the interstate and stick to the back roads for a while, I think we’ll be okay. Maybe we can pick up a job a few states over when the money gets tighter.”
“Like Texas?”
Jonah smirked at the zombie’s poor geographical efforts. “Try again.”
“What? No Texas?”
“Too far out of the way.” Jonah made a quick visual sweep of the bathroom, then the main room, making sure they didn’t leave anything behind. “I’ll double check with the map, but I think we should pick up highway 50 and take it into Utah.”
“Utah? No way, man! I can’t go to Utah.” After giving the nightstand a quick kick, Dale shoved his hands deep into his pockets.
“What now?” Jonah asked with a smirk. “If you go into Utah, do you lose your left foot?”
“No, worse than that. Utah’s full of Mormons.”
“What’s wrong with Mormons? I know some very nice Mormons.”
Dale’s face twisted into a mask of disgust. “Yeah nice is the right word. As in nice girls. Nice, Jonah. Nice is the opposite of easy. To rhyme with sleazy. As in what I was hoping to get my hands on.”
“Geesh, Dale. I swear all you ever think about is your libido.”
“You said all I ever thought about was sex.”
“Same thing. It’s just a matter of semantics.”
Dale cocked his head and asked, “Are there Jews in Utah?”
“Semantics, not Semites.” Jonah tossed his pack over his back and nodded to the door. “Let’s get out of here before the rest of Reno wakes up and realizes we’re wanted men.”
“’Wanted men’. I like the sound of that.” Dale grabbed his things and stepped out into the warm morning, before he added, “Imagine that, Jonah. Before this, you couldn’t get a girl to even look your way. Now every sexy bitch in uniform for a hundred miles is going to be hot for you.”
“Yes,” Jonah said, pulling the door closed behind them. “Trouble is, so will all the men. And statistically, they far outweigh the ladies. In size and number.”
“Them’s the breaks when you’re wanteeed.” Dale let the last word drag as he cut his voice into a warbled rendition of a once popular song. The lyrics echoed down the stairwell as Dale sang, “Wanted! Dead or alive!”
Despite his overwhelming worry, Jonah smiled at the fact that such an old song had hit their figurative nail so concisely on the metaphorical head.
Chapter Thirteen
The Loneliest Road, Nevada
146 hours: 10 minutes: 20 seconds remaining
According to Jonah’s handy dandy road tr
ip book, the stretch of Highway 50 that ran across the Nevada desert was often referred to as “The Loneliest Road.” Being a young lad, he had never really given this moniker much thought. After all, what could possibly make a road lonely? It wasn’t like roads made enemies. Roads didn’t have best friends that constantly got them in trouble. Roads didn’t get turned down every time they asked a girl out, so why such a silly title?
Now he knew. After traveling for over six hours across the barrens of Nevada with nothing but a chatty and irritable zombie for company, Jonah knew exactly why they called it ‘The Loneliest Road’.
Highway 50 was a long stretch of two-lane road that changed very little in view, mile after mile after mile. The highway cut through several mountain ranges, creeping up to moderate peaks before plummeting back down into long, flat stretches through the Nevadan desert. Occasionally a hairpin turn would crop up, but other than that, it was a very long, very boring drive.
Had this been a real vacation, Jonah was sure that the nation’s Loneliest Road could have provided some level of entertainment. There were quite a number of things that caught his eye, not to mention his fancy. It seemed the state of Nevada had embraced this notion of the highway’s loneliness, and marketed it with a certain amount of bravado. Fascinating signs teased Jonah, begging him to come and view everything from abandoned mines to dinosaur digs to ghost towns. Even a mysterious tree bearing thousands of shoes upon its branches called out for Jonah’s scholarly attention. But no. There was no time for such frivolity. Maybe they would return, one day, when their immortal souls weren’t in peril and they weren’t running from the police.
Isolation aside, they passed a few ‘living’ towns along the way, all of which were small and quaint and polite and everything Jonah despised about his own hometown. One even claimed to be the friendliest town on the loneliest highway. Their sincerity in this was enough to make Jonah want to barf. This wasn’t the big-city glamour he was hoping to find on his once-a-year vacation. Dale seemed to agree on the matter, but of course, put it in a way that was truly Dale. Dead or not.
“What a shithole,” Dale declared.
“Come on, man,” Jonah said. “It’s not so bad.”
“Not so bad? That last town we passed through was smaller than my left nut.”
Jonah grimaced. “That’s a real classy way to put it.”
“You want class?” Dale asked, then answered his own question by belching loudly. An invisible cloud of eye-watering stink rolled across the small cab of the car.
At a single sniff, Jonah’s nose burned and his lungs seized and his mind screamed at the revulsion of it all. Dale’s breath not only smelled of death, it was death itself. Jonah waved away the cloying stench, trying his best to stay on the road as he retched. “Jesus! Don’t do that! Your breath smells like a freaking abattoir.”
“Is that French for minty fresh?” Dale laughed and belched and laughed again.
“Seriously, Dale.” Jonah rolled down all of the windows, letting in a steady stream of warm air and letting out the air-conditioned coolness. “Cut that out. I’m gonna puke if you don’t stop.”
“Roll ‘em back up. It’s too hot.”
“Then stop trying to kill me with your death breath.”
“You mean this?” Dale asked, hissing the last word, blowing another breath right toward Jonah.
Jonah grabbed his nose and recoiled. “Geesh! What is wrong with you?”
“Last time I looked, I died.” Dale laughed even more at his own limited wit, filling the car with another dose of unholy halitosis.
Jonah supposed that five hours of constant riding must have stirred up what was left of the dead rats in the zombie’s belly. It sure smelled like it. “We have to do something about that. Or I’m going to die from your toxicity before we get as far as Colorado.”
“Good.” Dale said, and sat back. “I wanted to stop, anyway.”
“Stiff again?”
“Yeah.”
“Me too.” Much to the zombie’s dismay, Jonah had pushed through the bulk of 50 in one go, not stopping for lunch or the zombie’s complaining or even his own aching bladder. He wanted to put in as many miles as possible before they risked pulling over. Perhaps now, five hours and three hundred miles later, it was time to take a break.
Dale rubbed his belly as he said, “Then let’s find somewhere we can… hey now. What’s this?”
In the distance, a car sat on the shoulder with its hood popped in the universal sign of engine trouble. It was the worst possible scenario for any driver: a breakdown on the nation’s loneliest road. How long had this person been stranded?
“Looks like someone is in trouble,” Dale said.
For a moment, Jonah slowed, but then he set his jaw, rolled up the windows, gripped the wheel tight and said, “That’s too bad.”
“Really? Jonah the Good Samaritan isn’t gonna stop?”
“No.” Although he really wanted to. “We don’t have time for it. And there is no guarantee that it’s not one of Satan’s tricks.”
“Wow, man. That’s harsh.”
“That’s the way it has to be.”
“Boy, you sound like me.”
Jonah ignored this insult and strengthened his resolve by keeping his eyes on the road and away from the scene to his right. Not even the flitting figure of someone waving them down was able to move him from his course. He had every intention of whizzing by the unfortunate soul, perhaps begging their anonymous forgiveness later via some cheap motel crucifix.
Without warning, Dale tossed his long leg over the seat divide and stomped on Jonah’s foot, which in turn came down hard on the Ford’s brake pedal. Everything in the car not tied down, including Dale, pitched forward as the car came to a lurching halt. Suitcases, guitar gear, fast-food wrappers and half-empty drink bottles rained down on Jonah like a ten-car pileup on a busy highway.
“Jesus, Dale!” Jonah shouted as he pushed the contents of the filthy Ford off of him. “What in the hell are you doing?”
Dale squirmed back into his seat, then wriggled around to stare at the car on the side of the road only a few yards behind them. “Man, oh man,” was all Dale had to say.
Jonah rolled his eyes, then glanced into the rearview mirror, unsure of what he was supposed to see that it was so important that it required such desperate actions. What he saw shouldn’t have surprised him, considering the man who’d forced Jonah to a screeching stop. Nonetheless, he was surprised. Pleasantly surprised.
Walking up the road, a sizable pack slung across her shoulder, was a woman.
A very attractive woman.
Thick in the bust, narrow in the waist, and thick again in the hips, she bore the kind of classic hourglass figure that drove men wild. Her hot pink t-shirt was bunched in the front then looped through the neck, squeezing and pushing her already fantastic breasts up and out to a drool-inducing degree. The woman’s black jean shorts were cut to a tantalizing length, showing just enough creamy upper thigh to make a man’s mouth water, but not so much as to qualify as a hillbilly accessory. Speaking of hillbilly accessories, she also sported a pair of knee-high boots, cowboy in style, which lent a quirky charm to her overall allure. But her crowning glory, the proverbial cherry atop this sundae of sex was her radiant fountain of bright crimson locks.
She had the reddest red hair that Jonah had ever seen on a woman.
Or anyone, for that matter.
Jonah’s throat went dry as the woman drew closer. Every step she sashayed toward him was met with a deep thunder of primal drumming in his ears. It took a moment for him to realize it was the sound of his own heart, racing and thumping and pumping tons of blood to his extremities. All of his extremities. At the first stirrings of a hard-on, he reached for the gearshift, with every intention of throwing it into drive and pulling away as fast as he could. Instead, his clammy palm landed on the zombie’s hand.
“No way, man,” Dale said. “We can’t leave her here.”
“Oh yes,
we can,” Jonah said, pulling against the zombie’s grip on the gearshift.
“No. Jonah, she needs our help.”
“You’re only saying that because she’s a she. If it was some hairy fat dude, you’d have laughed your ass off while I drove on by.”
“So?” The zombie furrowed his brow and shook his head, confused by Jonah’s stating of the obvious.
“So, we can’t afford a passenger. We don’t have time for this.” Jonah pulled at the gearshift again, only to have Dale clamp his free hand around Jonah’s wrist.
The zombie frowned, narrowing his eyes. He squeezed Jonah’s wrist very, very, very hard as he growled, “Make time.”
Jonah thought he heard a crack, or at the very least a pop, after which he winced in pain and nodded. “Okay. Okay! Let go.” With a smile, the zombie relented, and Jonah pulled his hand to his chest where he rubbed his tender wrist and counted to make sure he still had all of his fingers. Once satisfied with his recovery, he said, “I still think it’s a mistake. We don’t know anything about her.”
“We aren’t going to marry her, man. Just give her a lift.”
Before Jonah could protest further, the woman in question arrived. He watched in the mirror as she rounded the Focus and, much to Jonah’s dismay, approached from the driver’s side. Jonah could sense her as she stooped to look in his window, but he couldn’t bring himself to actually look at her. A light tapping rose from the glass, but still Jonah couldn’t find the courage to just turn and look.