by Dayna Ingram
When they’re out of sight, Renni immediately falls into action. She helps me into a sitting position, my back propped against the cash register counter. She leaves for a second and comes back with a package of a lingerie nurse’s outfit, tearing it open with her teeth.
“This one had the most fabric,” she explains as she uses the bra piece to wipe the blood away from my newest wound. “It’s not too deep.”
She rips pieces of nylon and lace and ties them together, going back for one more package, and ripping and tying, until she’s fashioned a bandage for my shoulder which she secures with some pantyhose knotted under my arm pit. Then she fishes inside her pocket and hands me two Endocet.
“You’ll have to dry swallow,” she says.
For some reason, her saying this reminds me of the giant penis I had been picturing hovering next to her head in Ashbee’s, and I start to laugh. I get kind of hysterical as the phantom cock begins to materialize again—this time black, uncircumcised, and unusually veiny. The cock looks less silly with a backdrop of dildos and butt plugs, but it gets too close to Renni’s cheek and I pop it with a blink. It spurts and expires like a water bubble.
I swallow the pain pills. “I ruined your dress.”
“Haven’t you heard?” Renni makes a face like, meh. “I’m rich.”
We hear some thumping and banging coming from the office, like the sound of rearranging furniture that you learn pretty slowly is probably not what your parents are doing at two in the morning when you can’t sleep.
“Hope Carmelle can find her panties,” I say. “She loves her panties.”
A holdover from her stripping days, her underwear are almost more important to her than her outerwear. She used to love to model them for me. I used to love to test their elasticity with my teeth.
Renni starts sniffing, and scans the ground. “Is this piss?”
I would flush with embarrassment, but honestly I think we’re beyond that at this point. Besides: “Zombie,” I say.
Renni looks dubious. “Can zombies piss?”
“Zombie!” I shout and point emphatically behind her.
The door to the office opens and Carmelle and her lover—fully clothed now—step out just as Renni leaps up and catches the zombie by its neck as it launches itself into her. Its putrid breath is horrendous from here, but Renni doesn’t flinch. It drips unthinkable shit and maggots from its mouth that plop onto Renni’s cleavage and slide down. Renni struggles for only a moment, as if to tease the zombie that it might have a chance, then the muscles in her arms tighten, her lips pull back from her teeth, and she slams the zombie’s head into the glass countertop, which shatters on impact. Shards rain down on me; I cover my face with my arm, but peek beneath the crook of my elbow to watch Renni slide the axe out of its makeshift sheath on her back, and bring the business end down on the still-twitching zombie’s neck. Its severed head rolls to a stop near my feet. Carmelle and her lover shriek in unison.
Then Carmelle notices me. “Devin, oh my God, you’re hurt.” She squats next to me, tentatively touching my bandages and stroking my hair. Her scent belongs to her lover now, and Carmelle in turn smells like her: cheap cucumber-melon body spray. I don’t have the strength to push her away, but apparently I do have the strength to start crying right now, because that is what I start to do.
“Oh, baby,” Carmelle croons, crying too. “Baby, what happened to you? What the hell happened?”
Renni comes up behind Carmelle and hoists her up by her armpit—her favorite place to grasp people, evidently. “We’ll cover the specifics with you later.” She releases Carmelle harshly, then turns to the other woman. “We have to get out of here. More of them will be drawn here by all our noise.”
“Whad are dey?” the lover asks.
Renni kicks the severed head in her direction. “What do they look like?”
“Devin needs to get to the hospital,” Carmelle says. I’m becoming too familiar with that phrase.
Before everyone can start arguing about what our next move is going to be, I push myself up on shaking arms, palms pressing into glass shards, and make a suggestion.
“Let’s get the hell out of this town.”
Renni comes over to help steady me, but I hold up my hand, stopping her. “Do you have a car?” I ask the lover. She seems surprised that I’m addressing her.
“Yuh huh,” she says with her swollen mouth.
“Give Carmelle your keys.” No one questions me. The lover tosses her keys to Carmelle. Everyone looks to me for further instructions. I must look pretty strong and brave underneath all this blood. That, or they pity me. “We’ll go to Indiana,” I say. “Cherry’s there with Brad. We’ll call her, meet up, turn on a radio and see how far this thing has spread. After that, if I’m still breathing, we’ll go to the hospital. Questions?”
Carmelle goes to touch me again, but I move a little bit away from her. “What do you mean, if you’re still breathing?”
Renni wipes off the grime-covered axe blade on the zombie’s dust covered back, and sheathes it. “Solid plan, Devin. Twister—” she says, addressing Carmelle, “You go with C-Cup—”
“No,” I cut her off. “She rides with you. I’ll go with Carmelle.”
Renni doesn’t fight this decision with anything other than a tendon spasm in her jaw and a minuscule narrowing of her eyes, but it’s enough to make me want to explain my reasoning.
“I’m no good on a bike.” I rotate my shoulder weakly, wincing. “Can’t hold on.”
Renni doesn’t argue. She throws a sneer at C-Cup. “Might want to tie your hair back. Your head’s too big to fit my helmet, and I only got the one.” Then she dons her ever-present and miraculously dur-able sunglasses and heads out over the zombie-strewn threshold.
C-Cup looks one last time at Carmelle—who shoos her along with her eyes—tries not to look at me, and skitters after Renni. Alone with Carmelle, things are quiet. Outside, I hear Renni fire a couple times, the car alarms and dogs continue to sound off, but in here—I can breathe.
Then Carmelle says, “Baby….”
“Is there a back way out of here?” I ask. “We should hurry.”
Lover Girl drives a deep maroon Volkswagen Bug, one of the newer, more plastic models, complete with pink fuzzy dice that hang from the rearview mirror and leopard print car seat covers. I do little to hide the pleasure I’m taking in mucking up the decor with all my annoying bleeding.
In the car, Carmelle keys the ignition and says, “Buckle up.” I just laugh at her.
It’s a little tough getting through Main Street with all its abandoned vehicles clogging the road, but Carmelle manages to get our small car through some tough gaps. It’s probably like a video game for her now, like it was for me in the beginning too. A racing game, Need for Speed or Burn Out, or one of those Grand Theft Auto mob capers.
I cough a little bit, and some blood comes out onto my hand. I smear it languidly along the car’s freshly waxed dashboard.
Carmelle has decided to take the side streets out of town, which looks to be a good idea. If the crisis is growing, the main throughway will be packed, the highway a nightmare of people who chose “flight” out of their only two survival options. On these side streets, you wouldn’t even know there was a crisis, except for how silent it is. Some houses are even boarded up over their windows and doors, as if preparing for a hurricane. Renni keeps pace with us a car length behind, her face masked by the helmet’s tinted visor. Carmelle’s lover clings desperately to Renni’s waist, hair whipping all over her face (guess she couldn’t find a hair tie), flicking bugs from her teeth with her tongue.
Carmelle’s Lover, C-Cup. I don’t want to keep calling her either of these things.
“What’s her name?” I ask Carmelle.
She takes a deep breath, like an inverted sigh, and tightens her ten-and-two grip on the steering wheel. “Bambi.”
I start to laugh but it quickly morphs into another blood splatter cough, which lasts awhile.
“God, Devin, you’re really hurt,” Carmelle says.
“Not really.”
The Endocet isn’t really working, or maybe it is and I’m only feeling a fraction of the pain, but that fraction is pretty high, like a double negative integer, an imaginary number. I don’t know. I don’t really know math, or metaphors. All I know is I’m tired, and I’m one bite closer to that forever sleep everyone’s always writing songs and poems about. It doesn’t seem that bad, at this point.
“Oh, baby,” Carmelle sobs. Most of her makeup has already sweated off her face, but what little of it remains now drips down her cheeks with her tears. “I never wanted any of this to happen, you know? I never planned any of it. This is the first time we, Bambi and me—it just happened.” She pauses here, as if waiting for me to argue with her. I slump down lower in my seat and close my eyes. “Baby, I swear,” she continues, in that voice she uses when she wants my permission to do something we both know is stupid—Baby, I swear if we puree these carrots on high we don’t have to wait for them to thaw out; Baby, I swear I can stay out until five a.m. and be at work by eight, no problem; Baby, I swear the red light means it’s off. “I swear, baby. It was just this one time. Just this one time.”
“Carmelle,” I say. “I don’t care.”
“Don’t say that, baby. Talk to me.”
“We’re just roommates anyway,” I say, fighting swirls and lines of lasers behind my closed eyes, curiously shaped like zombies. “We were just like roommates. Roommates can’t cheat on each other. It’s not in their contract.”
“How can you say that?” Carmelle’s voice rises in direct proportion to her indignation. “We were in love!”
I make a rough choking sound deep in my diaphragm that’s meant to be a scoff. “Right. Guess you just never got around to filling me in on that part.”
“This isn’t my fault!”
I suddenly have this out-of-body experience of floating up near the roof of the car and watching my body move independently of my consciousness. Slowly, my arm reaches out for the door and levers it open, then tucks back into my side, and my whole body, head first, just tumbles right out the door, before Carmelle even has time to slow down. But when I open my eyes, I’m still sitting here.
“This is absurd,” I say. “Don’t you get it, Carmelle? None of this matters now. Fuck who you want to fuck, love who you want to love. It’s all over anyway. That’s what all this means.” I clutch the bandage on my shoulder, flex the aching muscle in my calf. Briefly, I wonder when the last time was that I got a tetanus shot.
“What if I want to love you?” she asks, in a voice I’ve never heard from her before—small and uncertain.
I look around behind us at Renni on her motorcycle. I blink back the fuzziness at the edge of my vision. “It might be too late for that.”
She thinks I’m still talking about her naughty Twister game with Bambi. “We can survive this, you know? Haven’t you ever heard of couple’s therapy? We can get through this. I don’t want to lose you.”
It’s tough not to launch into a barrage of the obvious questions—Then why the fuck did you cheat on me? Blah blah blah blah—but I swallow them down. Because it’d be like asking an unsuccessful suicide victim why they did it, why did they blink at the last second, wince and breathe—“Oh, shit”—and turn their head that fraction of an inch to the left that kept them alive? Who knows, who cares, move on. Move on, move on, move on.
“Everyone makes mistakes,” Carmelle says, dodging around a stalled Buick. “I mean, let’s face it, we weren’t exactly getting along, you and me. We barely see each other anymore. We just don’t make the time for each other, like we used to.”
“You’re right,” I say, as dryly as the blood pooling in the back of my throat will allow. “We should make more time. Maybe a game night. I’ll go out and buy a deck of cards. You already have Twister.”
“I’m being serious, Devin,” she says.
“So am I,” I say, starting to cough again. “I love Twister.”
“Devin,” Carmelle starts in, but suddenly we find ourselves merging into heavy traffic on Chester Road—which runs right over the state line—and she slams on the brakes. My body slips forward and my head whiplashes into the dashboard. Just one more bruise to add to my steadily growing collection. No blood, at least, but a head injury is not doing any favors for my fuzzy vision either.
I force myself to focus and look out the windshield at the line of bumper-to-bumper vehicles. Carmelle rolls down her window to get a better view, and a plume of exhaust fumes blows into the car with the warm wind. I can hear horns blaring one after the other, people yelling over the noise for everyone to stop yelling—“Lay off the horn! No one is moving, you get it? You’re making it worse, okay!” Chester Road is a four lane throughway running along private farmland, with two lanes heading eastbound deeper into Ohio and two lanes heading westbound to Indiana. But all four lanes are now filled with westbound traffic. We sneak into the fray by virtue of being a compact car, smack in the middle of a white minivan bussing about six kids whose under-ten-years old faces are glued to a DVD playing in the back of one of the headrests, and an F-150 pick up truck loaded with bushels of canned beans, spam, Twinkies, and bottled water. (And, sure enough, a silver set of jumbo-sized truck nuts.)
Renni pulls up to Carmelle’s window, and flips up her visor. “I’m gonna ride ahead.” She shouts. “Be back.”
I have a strange feeling I will never see her again, and my stomach plummets like I’ve just shot down a roller coaster, but I just nod. Bambi waves stupidly back at Carmelle as they drive away.
“Look, some people are standing on their roofs,” Carmelle says, pointing all around us. “We should take a look.”
“You go ahead.” The effort it would take for me to function my limbs in any other way than I am now—which mainly involves digging my nails into my thighs to keep from crying, and rotating my ankle every now and then to wake up my dead calf—doesn’t seem worth it.
“I’ll help you,” she says. Before I can protest, she’s climbed out her side of the car and rounded to mine. The fresh air feels good when she opens the door, but all the noise and the fumes cause me to swoon.
“Easy now,” Carmelle says, wrapping her arms around me and lifting me up. That’s when I lose it, when all I can feel is her weight on me and my weight on her, and so what if she smells like honeyed almonds or cucumber melon, or coconut, or who the fuck cares. She feels solid, and familiar, and I’ve missed her so much, and I just want one thing, one thing in the middle of all of this surreal insanity, one thing that’s real.
I hold on and cry into her neck, going pretty much limp except for my arms which refuse to let her go. She eases me back into the seat and lets me cry, leaning her thighs against mine, running her fingers over the hair on the back of my neck, whispering into my ear words that don’t even make sense to me anymore—“Baby, baby, it’s okay, oh baby, my baby, I’m so sorry, everything’s okay.”
The only thing that breaks us apart is a sound like thunder rolling in from the east. Its effect on the crowd of boisterous traffic is what alarms us into parting—every car horn quiets down, all yellers shut up their mouths, even car engines turn off. Carmelle pulls back just enough for us both to look up out of the open car door and watch the flying V of Air Force jets scream through the sky.
The jets streak by overhead, then pair off and circle to other parts of the city. They’re followed by a handful of military helicopters whose jungle camouflage paint only makes them stick out like targets. They fly up a bit further and then break off and hover in circles, flying low. If I squint, I can just make out the silhouette of a gunman seated behind a turret. A Channel Two news helicopter pops out from behind a cloud, but is quickly chased off by one of the military choppers, like a scene out of an absurd Pac Man game.
“Come on,” Carmelle turns back to me, lifting me up again. “We have to see what’s happening.”
I struggle
not to wince too much as Carmelle boosts me onto the hood and then to the roof of the car, holding each other as we stare at the scene only a couple hundred yards up from us. Apparently, while we were busy taking the back roads to avoid traffic, our town officials were busy calling in the National Guard to stop it completely. There are several trucks with the National Guard insignia stamped on the sides, some Jeeps, police cars, and four Army caravans crowded together to form a makeshift barricade. There’s a swarm of Army men and women and National Guardsmen milling around the barricade, guns held at their sides—big guns, rifles—and some of them are wearing those little white anti-contamination masks.
No one’s really doing anything, all of us citizens are just kind of awed, kind of dumbstruck by the whole situation. Sitting back in our cars with our families or friends, just waiting to see what will happen next.
A new caravan of shiny camouflaged trucks and Jeeps pulls up behind the barricade. The front line of vehicles parts slightly to let a big tractor-trailer through; a few people press forward, thinking maybe this is their chance to escape, but some gunmen are on them in nanoseconds, threatening them back. The tractor-trailer rolls forward, and turns left, and we can see what it is hauling: a large concrete wall. A second tractor trailer moves in behind the first and turns right. They set up their perimeter as we watch, dumbfounded. Then some flunkies begin unloading several other trucks, pulling out long coils of crisscrossed wire, bundles of metal poles, and an armload of large posthole diggers. They spread out into the fields at either side of the blocked off throughway, and start laying the fence.
“They’re fencing us in,” I say. “They’re literally fencing us in.”
Seeing this, the crowd grows agitated, and they begin their shouts again, this time not calling for people to move their asses but for some sort of explanation. In response, a voice booms out all around us as if being beamed from the clouds.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the voice opens, as if warming up a crowd at a concert hall. “Please return to your vehicles and tune your radios to channel one oh seven point six. Evacuation procedures will be broadcast to you once you have all returned to your vehicles. Ladies and gentlemen, please return to your vehicles and tune your radios to channel one oh seven point six. Evacuation procedures will be broadcast to you once you have all returned to your vehicles. Ladies and gentlemen….”