by Jason Offutt
“How’s the windows?” the Mechanic hollered at the Redneck, who walked down the front of the small restaurant, tugging at the windows.
“This one’s not locked,” the Redneck said. He pushed it open, then shook his head. “I can’t get through it, though.” He looked at the Robot who never left his side. “But you can. Get in there.”
The Robot shook his head. “This hero stuff has its limits.”
“Come on, Arnold,” the Mechanic said, walking toward them. “Me and Terry will give you a boost.” The Robot grabbed the windowsill, and the Mechanic and the Redneck picked him up, and eased him through the window.
“Don’t forget to let us in,” the Redneck yelled through the window. “And watch out for raccoons and shit.”
“Raccoons?” the Librarian asked.
The Redneck put his index finger over his mouth. Nikki could see he was trying not to laugh. The Librarian shook her head, said something to the Mechanic too softly for Nikki to hear and they walked to the front door. The Robot appeared moments later, eating potato chips from a bag and they walked into the café.
Who the hell are these people? Nikki wondered. And which of these do not belong? They went together as well as the Scooby gang would in real life. If the world hadn’t ended, the Librarian wouldn’t be riding with the Mechanic and the Redneck. But she is now, and laughing. And the Robot? He wasn’t dressed like any of them, and he sure didn’t act like anyone Nikki had seen outside nerds in junior high school. They didn’t look dangerous. They looked …
A scream. Nikki winced as a shriek rang from the café. The Librarian shot out the door followed close behind by the Mechanic and the Redneck, the Redneck not spilling a drop from his open can of beer. The Robot calmly, mechanically, stepped onto the porch and pulled the door shut behind him.
“What the hell was that?” the Librarian screamed.
The Redneck, leaning against the truck breathing heavily, raised his beer hand and extended his index finger. “That was a fucking raccoon,” he wheezed.
“How did you know?” she spat.
The Redneck shook his head. “How the hell would I know there was a raccoon in there eating Chips Ahoy! out of the goddamned bag? I was just trying to rile Arnold.”
“Put that cookie down, now,” Arnold said. Nikki picked up the trace of an accent. Was that German?
The Librarian started laughing, then they all started laughing. The Redneck drained his beer, tossed the empty can into the bed of the truck, and opened another. He held up what was left of the six-pack.
“Anyone?” he asked. The Librarian nodded and he tossed one to her.
“Let’s keep going,” the Mechanic said. “We’re looking for a place to sleep. We need to find someplace safe …”
“And raccoon-free,” the Librarian interrupted.
“…and raccoon-free by dark. There’s got to be plenty of food and water left in this town. And hopefully at least one of these houses doesn’t have a moldy body in it.”
“Yeah,” the Librarian said, a shiver running through her. “Those stalk things freaking creep me out.”
The strangers walked across the street and approached one of the houses Nikki drove by in the night, the tall, straight trees in the front yard had masked the houses in shadows; they didn’t look so ominous in daylight. The Mechanic turned the front doorknob and pushed the door open with the end of the bat. The door was unlocked and swung easily open. The strangers stepped in and disappeared from Nikki’s view.
“They’re going to find me,” she whispered. “They’re going to go from house to house and they’re going to find me.” Nikki stuck her hands in the pockets of Jan’s bathrobe and balled them in fists to stop them shaking. Visions ran through her head. Rape, murder, the Preacherman cackling through his crushed, bloody nose as he slid his knife across her stomach, branding her to whatever he thought Christ was, flames bringing his church down around him. Gun. “Shit,” she hissed. Her pistol lay on the floor of the ruined church. She was unarmed, helpless. The front of the robe moved with the thundering of her heart. “No.”
“Oh, God,” came from outside. Nikki looked back out the window, the strangers spilled from the front door of the house. The Librarian dropped to her knees and vomited in the tall grass. The Mechanic leaned against the side of the house, the baseball bat held loosely in his right hand.
“Why’d you open the freezer, Jenna?” the Redneck asked, kneeling in the grass. “That had to be a whole side of beef.”
“I wonder how long the power’s been out?” the Mechanic asked.
The Redneck shook his head. “Long enough to kill my appetite forever.”
The Mechanic walked to the Librarian and held out his hand. “You okay?” he asked. She nodded. “Then we gotta go. We’re running out of daylight.” She nodded again, grabbed his hand and let him help her to her feet.
Sunlight burned through the Marstens’ front window from low in the sky when the strangers stepped from the tall brick house next door. The Librarian and the Mechanic sat on the wooden porch swing, the Redneck sat on the brick railing and cracked his last beer, the Robot stood watch on the steps.
“I like this one,” the Librarian said. “It’s got boxes and cans of food and powdered milk and bottled water and four bedrooms…”
“And more beer,” the Redneck interrupted.
“…and more beer.”
“Thanks for not opening the refrigerator,” the Mechanic said to her. “I don’t think I could take that smell again today.” He looked at the group. “Okay, we got the food. Anybody know how to cook?”
“I can warm up Pop-Tarts,” the Librarian said. “And I pour a mean bowl of Cap’n Crunch.”
The Redneck nodded. “Yeah, me, too.”
“Well, I can grill, but I don’t think I can grill canned chicken chunks,” the Mechanic said. “How about...” The Robot raised his hand, stopping the Mechanic. “Arnold? You can cook?” The Robot nodded.
“Hell, you’re full of surprises, Governator,” the Redneck said.
For the first time in hours, Nikki relaxed. The strangers were close, too close, but they weren’t coming any closer. She just had to stay quiet and they would go away tomorrow. She slipped from her place on the floor to a spot out of sight from the neighboring porch. A few more strawberries, another glass of wine, and a good night’s sleep, and they might be gone, away from what she now considered her home, despite the real owners decomposing in the back yard. Nikki hoped the strangers eventually found a place as perfect as this – in another town.
Nikki stepped toward the kitchen, listening to the laughter from the porch next door. She tried to remember the last time she laughed. Was it at Hooligans, before the night the fat businessman died? Or did Dad say something? Maybe the strangers weren’t … she started to wonder, then shook the thought from her head. Nikki couldn’t let herself trust anyone. Too much had happened to her. She thought about shutting the window, but enjoyed the laughter, the sound of conversation. She caught herself before she turned on the kitchen light, and smiled briefly. She couldn’t give herself away. Not now. She’d escaped.
Cool air suddenly blew across her face as the air conditioning kicked on to battle the summer heat. Nikki froze. She could hear the compressor working, humming. “Hey,” came through the crack in the open window. Nikki rushed to her spying spot at the front window and looked outside. The strangers jumped off the porch and ran toward the house – her house, toward the siren’s call of electricity.
“Fuck.”
July 11: Kingsville, Missouri
Chapter 22
Great green swaths of corn and soybeans covered the hills between gravel and paved roads north of St. Joseph; these crops would soon grow brown and rot where they stood. Karl’s nervous eyes glanced at the dash of the LeBaron, the gas gauge needle dipped toward E.
“We need to leave, now,” Maryanne screamed the morning they woke in St. Joseph to find Darryl had skipped town. Any sliver of composure gone from h
er, replaced by intense rage. Karl knew they needed to gas up the car before heading north, but he wasn’t going to open his mouth. Not then – not in her insanity. They got in the car and drove, heedless of speed, heedless of anything. “After all I did for that weasel-eyed piece of shit,” she said over and over, sometimes accompanied by, “I’m going to eat his nuts first, then his heart.” Seven miles north of the city, Maryanne directed Karl to turn off the interstate and its regular abandoned convenience stores and onto a seemingly empty rural U.S. highway for reasons Karl didn’t know and didn’t want to know. About fifteen miles later, and a few belts of Evan Williams, Maryanne relaxed.
“We need gas,” Karl said, necessity taking over where bravery failed.
“Are you shitting me?” Maryanne bellowed.
“No,” he said. “The warning light just came on.”
“Fuck,” she spat. “Why didn’t you say something when we were in St. Joe?”
Karl winced. “Because I thought you’d kill me.”
Maryanne’s silence in the passenger seat brought gooseflesh over his arms. Karl glanced over at her, and found her smiling. “You’re right, I would have,” she cooed, her voice suddenly too soft, too smooth, too happy. “But you’re a good boy. Now slow down, here comes a road sign.” Karl pulled the car slowly toward the green sign, battered by redneck target practice. It read “Kingsville: 2 miles”; the arrow pointed west. Maryanne’s smile quickly faded. “Pull over at the crossroads.” She motioned toward a gravel spot at the intersection between U.S. 71 and Route B. Karl put the LeBaron in Park, never looking back at her.
“Why did we stop?”
Maryanne unlatched her door and stepped out, gravel crunched under her feet. “Get out,” she commanded. Maryanne walked around the front of the car carrying her ever-present rifle. Karl wondered if he would have floored it if he were still in the driver’s seat. He knew he had to, sooner rather than later. This woman was insane, and she would eventually kill him, he knew that as surely as he knew that’s why Darryl left – he knew he was first on her list.
“Move away from the door,” she said as a parent might tell a child. Karl took two steps back into the weeds that now choked the ditches. No Missouri Department of Transportation tractors around to keep them clean anymore. No sir. After a few years, MoDOT might have its hands full. Maryanne slid behind the steering wheel and shut the door.
“Are you just going to leave me here?” he asked.
“Don’t get your panties in a wad,” she said, a grin tugged at the corner of her graceful mouth. “I’m going into town to get gas. You wait here and keep your eyes open. If somebody comes by, stop them. You’ll know what to do, Cowboy.” Maryanne’s grin faded as she handed the rifle toward him. “Just don’t get any ideas Momma won’t like.”
Karl reached for the rifle and saw his hand shake. He knew she saw it, too. Her blue eyes fixed on his, and they were dead, cold. Can I do it? he wondered as thoughts raced through his brain, thoughts of raising the rifle to her beautiful face and blowing her brains out the back of that blond head. His shaking hand tightened around the rifle barrel and she relaxed her grip on it. The rifle was his. He held the stock with his left hand, and wrapped his right index finger slowly around the trigger. Sweat started to bead on his lip. Maryanne grinned and pulled a .38-caliber police special from underneath the LeBaron’s front seat and cocked it. “You know if you missed, I’d shoot your dick off first, then work my way up.”
She laughed at Karl’s slacked jaw, put the car in Drive and pulled onto Route B, the morning wind pulling her blond hair behind her like a bride’s train. “Shit,” Karl whispered as she quickly pulled well out of his range. He sat in the gravel.
The LeBaron ate those two miles quickly. Maryanne slowed as she pulled into town, although it wasn’t much of a town. These tiny, piss ant villages dotted Missouri like pimples on a teenager’s back. Two streets paralleled either side of Main Street, and maybe a dozen more ran perpendicular. She didn’t plan to find out. An old Dairy-Freez, probably abandoned for years looking at the paint, sat at the entrance to town next to a NAPA auto parts store. Dusty, weathered houses followed, leading up to a business district of four buildings. Maryanne pulled up to the pump in the lot of the town’s only gas station – not a convenience store, a gas station – and got out. A hot July breeze caressed her as she stretched. Fucking Karl, she thought. He was going to kill me. That chicken shit was going to shoot me in the face. These thoughts came to Maryanne often, but she didn’t know where they came from. She just knew things, she always had. Now, in this dead, silent world, she knew things clear as a fresh glass of water. Nothing to interrupt the signal anymore, boy-o. That’s why she wanted Darryl, no, had to have Darryl. That bastard had slipped out without her knowing anything. She couldn’t have that.
Maryanne walked to the middle of the street and surveyed the town. Karl could wait out there on the highway, in the sun, with no water. Asshole wanted to kill me. Maryanne grinned. Yeah, he could wait as long as she wanted him to.
Main Street of Kingsville wasn’t much to look at. A hair dresser, “Karla’s Korner Klips,” the Rooster Café with a homemade sign “Closed due to Illness” scotch taped inside the front glass, and a small mom and pop grocery store – Carlyle’s Grocery, Best Prices in Town!” – made up the south side. City Hall, a city cop car out front, and the municipal park sat on the north. She tried the front door of Carlyle’s; it was locked.
“Damn, Carlyle, I just need a candy bar and some pads. Let me in. You know I’m good for it,” she said, then laughed. A red brick sat on the sidewalk next to the door; Carlyle probably used it to prop the door open on hot days like today. She wrapped her fingers around the brick, the weight felt good in her hand, and she tossed it through the glass door. The shatter sounded unnaturally loud in the dead air.
A smell wafted out, a sweet, rotting smell. It may have been old lunchmeat, or even Carlyle himself still minding the store despite being inconveniently dead, but she wasn’t there for much; just in and out.
“Like I said, Carlyle old buddy,” Maryanne yelled as she reached through the hole in the glass, unlocked the door and stepped in, “just a candy bar and some pads.” Carlyle stared at her from an old office chair behind the counter, the once-gray blackened mold that covered his body now dry and dusty, the stalk that had sprouted from his chest after his limbs finally stopped moving limp and dangling like a flaccid penis. The bulb empty, its contents now dead in this hot, dry store. “Here we go,” she said, holding up the box of generic maxi-pads. For some reason, she shouted. “Just something for my happy place. It’s going to start feeling sad any day now.” She pulled a couple of Snickers out of an open box and stuffed them in her front pocket, hoping they weren’t too melted. She fished a five-dollar bill from her back pocket and left it on the counter next to a medicine bottle. She picked it up, Ophiocordon. Hmm, old guy liked to get his jollies off. “And you have a nice day, yourself,” she said. Maryanne dropped the Ophicordon bottle onto the dirty floor, and walked from the store into the street.
The police car intrigued her. The LeBaron had served her well, but a cruiser had an engine the LeBaron couldn’t keep up with. She might need that. Maryanne stepped toward City Hall when she suddenly knew something was wrong. She just knew it. Something bad. She wasn’t alone in Kingsville, Missouri.
The grunt swung her around in the street. A half-dozen pigs, sows and one boar that had to run close to 450 fucking pounds, stood by the LeBaron, snorting. Some goddamned farmer, coughing up blood, or wandering around like some kind of brain-dead fungus bomb, had let them out. Probably died while doing it, falling into the muck and lying there still as a pile of chewed bones. A hog would eat anything – even the hand that feeds it. Even Kenny. Kenny worked on her daddy’s farm outside Castle Ridge, Colorado. Maryanne didn’t know why she liked Kenny, but she did. She was twelve; he was twenty and didn’t like her around while he worked. Maryanne just stared and stared and stared at his big, farm boy
arms, and his square chin. “Shoo,” he’d tell her. “I can’t work with you gawking at me. Go play Barbies or something.” But she wouldn’t leave; she was the boss’s daughter – she didn’t have to. Until ‘The Day’, then she never wanted to go back out to the farm again.
Maryanne leaned on the wooden fence; white flakes of paint showed her grandpa had taken more pride in his farm than Daddy. Kenny climbed the fence across the lot before he noticed her. Maryanne had tried to dress grown up, to show Kenny she was a woman, not a little girl who still played with dolls (even though she did), but she might have gotten the makeup wrong, and her mother’s clothes didn’t fit right. Not yet, anyway.
“Go home, Annie,” he said, grinning. “And wash your face. Wash it good.” Tears welled in young Maryanne’s eyes as she watched Kenny step over the fence, grinning – then she screamed. Kenny was going to die; she knew it. His gray eyes stared at her as he threw his leg over the fence, his grin mocking. Maryanne’s anger, her embarrassment, turned to terror. His boot landed on a shoat, he lost his balance, and fell headlong into the muck. The tiny pig squealed and its sow, a huge Poland China, thundered over Kenny in an instant. Maryanne sometimes still heard his screams in her head, the screams that lasted only until the hog ripped open his throat, and his life bled into the mud. Her father reached the hog lot too late, and dragged her away wailing into the house. She didn’t see the sow eat Kenny, but she knew it did.
“Shit,” Maryanne hissed as one of the hogs looked up at her and snorted. The others turned and glared at her. For the first time in years, she was afraid. She was no longer the predator – she was the prey. The .38 sat on the front seat of the LeBaron where her happy little ass should be, screaming out of this bum-fuck pig town. She glanced at Carlyle’s, with its shattered door and knew she’d find no shelter there. She looked nervously to her left at City Hall. The door was cracked, a black-shoed foot held it open. “Fucking great,” she whispered, but not softly enough. The boar grunted and started running for her, the others followed.