by J. Thorn
Samuel turned to see the first of the horde coming into view, shuffling down the path in slow pursuit. More howls reverberated through the silent stillness until they raised the hairs on his neck. Mara looked at Samuel, and they made a decision without speaking. Samuel stepped into the inky blackness of the cabin, pulling Mara in behind him. He slammed the door shut with nothing more than her sweaty hand in his and a heart hammering in his chest.
***
Major opened the door to a desolate and empty scene. He had become so accustomed to the horde occupying the space that the Barren felt like an underwater realm, filled with a formless void of darkness and silence. The locality held no trace of its occupying army of the undead—it had pulled up stakes and set off on the path, following Samuel and his talisman. He could not muster a lick of concern over the girl. She was cute, like a pixie, punk-rock chick, but Major felt like he was far beyond the ability to ever experience a crush again. While he felt no direct animosity toward Mara, he would gladly remove her if she was in his way.
The howls grew in intensity, but Major did not need verbal confirmation to figure it out. He could feel the alpha male coming. And the wolf was angry. He had been denied the hunt and the spoils.
“We going after them?”
The question broke Major from his thoughts. He turned to see Kole standing several feet back. He had dirty scraps of cotton in his hands that he would use to dab the blood from his face. Kole blinked constantly, and his puffy, red eyes looked possessed.
“Can you see?” Major asked.
“Yeah, enough,” Kole replied.
“The horde followed the path, which I’m sure they used. Samuel said he saw it extend to the east on the other side of the Barren. No doubt he headed that way with Mara.”
Kole growled at the sound of her name.
“And now the pack is coming hard out of the west. Seems like we got ourselves a party!”
“What are we going to do with them?” asked Kole.
“It may not be up to us,” replied Major. “If the horde or the pack get to them before we do . . .” Major let his sentence trail off with a shrug of his shoulders. “Hike up your boots, Sally.”
Kole bristled at Major’s insult and wiped another drop of blood from his face.
***
Samuel had lost the ability to register sensations. He groped like a drowning man bobbing in the infinite ocean. He felt his eyes bulge and dry as he forced his lids open only to see nothing but blackness. He flailed his arms in hopes of striking Mara and verifying her existence, as well as his own. He opened his mouth and screamed, but the space stole the words from his ears. He sensed his body floating and stopped fighting the momentum. Samuel drifted until the images in soft focus came to life inside his head.
“Another round?”
The bartender looked at him with his mouth slightly agape, the beginnings of a smile that would never quite blossom.
“I don’t think so, pal.”
Samuel shrugged his shoulders and looked at the young woman sitting next to him. She wagged her index finger back and forth while stifling a drunken giggle.
“C’mon, man. One more for me and the lady. We’re walking through campus after last call. Not like we’re getting behind the wheel.”
The bartender rubbed the iron-cross tattoo on his outer bicep and snapped the dish rag down on the edge of the bar. He grabbed a clear, tall bottle covered in Cyrillic and poured two fingers of vodka into each shot glass.
“Six bucks.”
Samuel reached into the pocket of his jeans and pulled out a ruffled ball of paper money. He slapped a ten-dollar bill on the polished maple bar and lifted one shot glass with each hand.
“Thanks, man. Keep the change.”
Samuel spun to face the woman on the stool next to him. Her face glowed, a mixture of alcohol-infused color and youth.
“Don’t know if I’m going to be able to make it back to my dorm,” she said, accepting the shot glass from Samuel.
He felt a bolt of electricity as her hand touched his. The charge traveled through his torso like a whiskey burn and settled in his groin with a slow smoldering. She moved her leg inside of his and ran her toes up his calf. Samuel looked down at her bare foot, untethered from her sandal, and fantasized about seeing her perfectly painted toenails next to his ears.
“You can always crash at my place. My roommates already left for the semester. Got the whole place to myself.”
She smiled and let her eyes peek at Samuel’s lap. She let the look linger.
“Certainly don’t want you to be all alone now, do we?”
Samuel looked around the bar at the survivors. The underclassman and underage kids had binged through the early evening hours and had already been escorted home or put into a cab. The shot and beer regulars had not returned yet, although once spring bled into summer, they would come to reclaim their neighborhood bar, at least until dorm move-in day in August. For now, Samuel felt like the bar was his, and the people finishing their drinks in it belonged to him as well. He had taken the remainder of his finals yesterday and printed out the last history paper in the university computer lab that morning. Samuel’s parents wouldn’t be expecting him home for another week, and it would be a week after that before he’d be back on the assembly line at the factory, making enough money in the summer to pay for his books in the fall.
Pride motivated Samuel more than the promise of a good job or the adulation of his family, who marveled at him as he became the first to steer toward a college degree. In fact, Samuel believed most material possessions owned him. He had a car, a beauty of Detroit engineering. Samuel loved his 1988 Dodge Daytona, but he still had a year of payments left on it. He belonged to that car, or more accurately, to the bank that owned it. He spent long hours at the circulation desk. The countless stupid questions and disparaging glances from blue-haired librarians felt like a chain tethering him to a world he knew he was inevitably entering. The position came with a stipend, which, to Samuel, was another way of getting owned. He savored the few moments in his life when he felt truly liberated, and this night was going to be the first in a string of six or seven that would belong to him and him only.
“No, you don’t. I’m afraid of the dark, so maybe you could come into my room, tuck me in.”
The girl smiled, which precipitated a burp, which turned into a full revolution ignited by the acidic burn in her stomach. She turned in time to project the vomit over the bar and onto the webbed plastic mat that kept the bartenders from slipping on the wet floor. She coughed and spattered like an old truck, and Samuel could do nothing but stare at the skin horizon that appeared under her shirt and above her shorts when she leaned forward on the stool. He studied the smooth, white skin, turning his head sideways. Samuel was glad she did not ruin that space with a tramp stamp, like most of the girls at college did. He knew the ’90s were just the beginning for tattoos, and he really liked the hot biker-chick look. But on this lady, he was hoping to slide in behind her and enjoy the unobstructed view of the beads of sweat that would collect in the small of her back. He imagined her long, blonde hair splayed out and falling down over the sides of her breasts. He would grab her hips and hold on for as long as the ride lasted.
“Get her out,” said the bartender while unfurling countless paper towels off a roll and dropping them to cover the puke. “And I had better see that piece-of-shit car of yours on the street in the morning.”
The remark and ensuing odor of sickness snapped Samuel out of his fantasy. He noticed that he had been rubbing her back while she vomited, and his fingers had moved further south until they caressed the waistband of her hip-hugger jeans.
Samuel blinked, returning him back to the present and his mental prison cell. He took shallow breaths, knowing the memory was not finished. He thought of Mara, wondering if she was being forced to relive a time from her past, the reopening of wounds that had never quite closed.
He felt the warm, penetrating feel of her tongue i
n his mouth. Samuel pulled her closer with two hands on her hips. The alcohol killed the taste of vomit on her lips, but did not protect his nose from the odor of summer trash coming from the dumpsters in the alley.
“Right here. I want you right here.”
Samuel put his hands on her breasts and pushed them up, feeling the stiffness of her nipples through the thin T-shirt. He looked into her eyes and saw the hazy glaze of 3:00 a.m. in them. The woman’s head moved in stuttering motions as Samuel fought a losing war against the vodka shots.
“I have a queen-size bed in my room. We can do all kinds of stuff on that.”
She grinned and slid her hand inside his jeans. Samuel moaned, tilting his head back against the wall until more loose mortar rained down on them.
“Get a fucking room!”
Samuel and the woman looked down the alley at the opened steel door at the back of Joey’s Grill. A short-order cook with a soiled apron and a cigarette dangling from his lips emptied a garbage pail into the dumpster with a wet smack.
“Get out ‘fore I call the cops, or worse yet, ‘fore Slimy Larry comes back to his cardboard house and stabs you both in the gut.”
Samuel giggled, and the woman slid both hands around his waist.
“I can’t walk no more,” said the woman.
“I think I’m parked around the corner, at a meter.”
She stepped back, lifting her head off his chest. She drew an index finger down over her bottom lip, smirking at Samuel before waving it at him. “Naughty boy. Gonna have to punish ya.”
“The house is only a few blocks. I’ll be fine. No faster than twenty-five, I promise.”
The cook shook his head. He flicked his cigarette into the dumpster while stepping through the steel door, pulling it shut with a sound of metal on metal that echoed through the alley.
“‘Kay,” the woman said, “but hurry.”
Samuel led her from the alley to the sidewalk. A few lonely souls skulked by, caught in drunken limbo. The bars had made last call, and the breakfast restaurants hadn’t opened yet. He glanced to his right and watched the neon sign of the bar flicker into cold darkness. He turned in the other direction and stared until he saw the taillights of his Dodge, the twenty-inch tires snuggling up to the curb.
He had done this before. Many times. Samuel knew the drill, knew his limitations like every good drunk. He would ease into the street, stay slow, and keep to the residential streets. Avoid traffic, and that would allow him to reach home safely. Intellectually, Samuel understood the risks he was taking, but the young college girl pawing at him skewed all of the statistics. He would return to his room and they would explore each other like first-time lovers do. It was the aroma that drove him mad. Samuel could smell her.
“Lezzgo, silly,” she murmured, placing a hand in his lap.
Samuel shook his thoughts loose and put the key in the ignition. Fear slid across his face until he realized it was the wrong key. After four more tries, Samuel discovered the ignition key and started the car. The Dodge came alive with a throaty rumble after he pushed the clutch to the floor and pumped the accelerator three times. Pearl Jam’s “Oceans” came through the speaker system, and the woman fumbled for the volume knob, turning it until Samuel felt like Eddie Vedder was singing to them from the backseat.
“Album of the year,” she murmured.
“This is killer. Not sure how Pearl Jam is going to top this record.”
Samuel fastened his seatbelt and looked over both shoulders before easing into the empty street. His body took over as if the effects of the alcohol, the slurred speech and the slowed reflexes, had subsided. He looked at the girl and pointed to her seatbelt. Samuel wanted to see the way the nylon restraint would run between her breasts, accentuating her curves.
“I trust you,” she said. The woman closed her eyes and leaned back against the headrest.
Samuel put the Dodge in first gear and eased from the curb. The parking meter stared at them as they drove past, its cyclopean eye red and menacing. He coasted underneath the first traffic light, which blinked yellow in the pre-dawn darkness of Fifth Avenue, the main strip dissecting the quaint college town. The next set of lights swung in the gentle summer breeze, red.
“Wazzup with these?” he asked.
The girl just mumbled.
Samuel waited and looked back and forth, wondering why the second intersection’s lights had not gone to blinking yellow, and more importantly, why they were red in his direction. Before he could contemplate the answer, a dagger of light pierced his rearview mirror, and by the time Samuel reached to flip his mirror to the nightshade angle, the vehicle was beside his.
The chrome side mirror captured the reflection from the copper street lights in a way that made it look alien. But it was the 1977 Chevy Corvette attached to the mirror that made Samuel forget about the sexual tryst he had in the works. The tinted windows and T-tops made him think that the vehicle had to be from California. They did not have the need or the legislation to make that happen out here. Chrome side pips ran from the back of the front tires underneath the door until they flared out at the rear. The black paint job glistened as if the car were wet. The ‘Vette slowed at the intersection until four inches separated the passenger-side window from Samuel’s. He waited as the window came down with the slow lurch of a handle turn.
“Dodge,” said the voice from inside the Corvette.
Samuel paused and looked over at the girl. She smiled and then winked at him.
“Ain’t even close. You got sixteen pistons under that hood. Over three hundred horses. Go pick on someone your own size.” A voice came from inside the Corvette, hidden in the blackness. “No balls. I get it.”
Samuel gripped the leather covering on his steering wheel.
“I can handle the lady too, seeing as how you ain’t got what it takes to satisfy her.”
Samuel looked at the light and back at the empty void of the Corvette’s window. He nodded and turned his attention back to the dangling traffic light, anticipating the turn to green. He set his left hand on top of the steering wheel and dropped the right on the gear shift set between the seats. He revved the engine a few times and used his left foot to push back into the seat. Samuel took his right foot off the brake and teased the clutch with his left until he felt the gears of the manual transmission edging forward, pleading to open up into a full gallop.
When the light turned green, Samuel slammed the accelerator to the floor and popped the clutch with his left foot. The Dodge lurched forward, and he heard a giggle from the woman sitting next to him. The engine drowned out the passionate wailing of Eddie Vedder as the CD player moved on to play “Release.” The rear tires of the Dodge screamed, and the acrid, bitter smoke of burning rubber reached his nose as the Dodge pulled him underneath the traffic light and down the right side of the street, now serving as a drag strip.
The Corvette appeared to hover next to Samuel’s car, teasing and taunting him like an angry sibling. It stayed locked in position, using the oncoming lane as its own. Samuel heard laughing coming from the passenger-side window until it ran back up, drenching the Corvette in complete, inky blackness.
Samuel glanced at his gauges, the needle pushing toward sixty. The blinking yellow lights at the intersections faded like fireflies in the summer night. He tried not to think about the people on the sidewalks witnessing the race. Samuel loved this college town. They knew him here. They knew his car.
The Corvette roared, and Samuel saw the black sports car lurch forward. He smiled and shook his head, frustrated by the driver’s decision to toy with him and, at the same time, impressed by the sheer brutality of the Chevy’s 305 block. He feathered the clutch to bring the RPM gauge back into the red before shifting gears. Samuel’s blonde cohort smiled while holding the seatbelt across her chest.
Samuel watched the taillights of the Corvette move forward as his own speedometer broke the century mark. The two cars rocketed down the sleepy street like two bullets from a gu
n.
When the Corvette jacked low and dipped a shoulder into the highway onramp, Samuel realized he had to concede. He knew the Daytona did not have the handling of the Corvette, and he pulled the car to the curb, feeling the effects of the alcohol replacing the adrenaline of the race. He picked up the woman’s purse and searched through her wallet until he found her ID, complete with home address. Samuel glanced at the woman and he turned the car around. He drove toward her apartment, where he would most likely need help to take her safely inside.
The race left him dizzy as its effects receded in much the same way that the alcohol had hours earlier. Samuel would have to lick his wounded pride and forego the physical satisfaction of a sexual conquest. He found no solace in doing the right thing.
He felt her hand in his, tiny and vulnerable. She squeezed to let him know she was still there. The room came back into focus, and he recognized the same indistinguishable furniture that had been in the other cabins. Samuel’s breath hitched in his chest. He stood in the middle of the room with Mara at his side.
“Did you see it?” he asked her.
She nodded and wiped a tear from her face.
“I should have learned from that. It was so close to being a catastrophe.”
Mara turned and trailed a finger down his cheek. “We all fall short. We all screw up.”
Samuel brushed her hand aside and walked to the window. Blackened film covered the windowpanes as it had all of the cabin windows in this locality. He tried seeing out of one, hiding the rest of his tears from her.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“Another cabin. Probably a little further down the path, but not too far from the Barren.”
The moments preceding his visceral memory flooded Samuel’s head. He recalled the shuffling horde of the undead and the distant but closing sound of the pack howling at the dead sky.