by Mark Clodi
Hank turned towards the cowboy and brought his shotgun up, Juan watched in disbelief as Hank’s hand got caught in a pack of some sort and saw that he was not going to get the gun up for a killing shot in time. Juan chambered another round and was just taking aim when Hank fired his gun. The cowboy took the shot in his lower torso and went down. His momentum allowed him to fall forward and drag Hank to the ground by his legs. Both men were out of view behind an abandoned car but, to Juan's relief, a second later Hank was up, one arm still wrapped in the backpack strap. As he came up his target was still unseen from Juan’s angle, he had cover behind a car while on the ground. As his shot rang out Juan saw Hank flinch and pull his head back to avoid being sprayed with cowboy brains.
Juan took a deep breath and relaxed only for a moment because several new zombies had been attracted by all the gun fire. Kevin had crept back to the front of the store roof next to Juan. He timidly pointed to a mailman slowly approaching from Hank's rear. He watched has the barrel of Juan's gun followed the mailman's path. Simultaneously Kevin heard the shot and saw the storefront glass of the camping supply store splattered with red and black matter.
Hank immediately looked up and let out a yell, “Fuck! Don’t shoot me ya dumbass! I swear ya holed my shirt with that one!”
'Maybe I did.', Juan thought, that zombie had been awful close when he took the shot and the spread of the shot gun made it all the more likely he would have winged his friend. He made a mental note to check on the choke of the shotgun when he had a chance, probably it was something he could set on the fly, this was a good shotgun, they stole only the very best. If he could adjust it to a tighter pattern it should give him a good compromise between getting a head shot and getting the distance he needed from the gun.
Hank took a second to adjust how he was carrying his second backpack and then made a mad dash across the fairly open ground of the street to the convenience store. Once he got up to the dumpster Kevin was there and Hank handed off the back full of water and food to him. Kevin had trouble pulling it up onto the roof, he was surprised at how heavy the pack was. Hank shrugged off his second pack, rummaged around for the empty stuff sack he had put in it and handed the pack up to Kevin.
“I am going into the store for a second, to get some more water and uh, a couple other things, I will be right back.” he told Juan and Kevin.
Jumping off the dumpster Hank ran back around to the front of the store. A sad part of life was that the need to use the bathroom still happened at inconvenient times, like when you are running away from slowly shambling undead. The store was full of the slow zombies too. Hank hesitated and looked up at Juan who was staring down at him.
“I need a bat Juan!” Juan threw an aluminum bat down to Hank, who slung his shotgun over his shoulder by the strap and pulled the door open. Stepping inside he resisted the urge to back out again, the smell! Oh the smell was bad! It smelled like these zombies had been stuck inside for days, slowly decomposing. Real stupid zombies too, as the door opened outwards. The closest zombie wore the uniform of the attendant, a Gas n’ Go logo emblazoned with the name ‘Gus’ on his left breast. He showed signs of bite marks on his arms and face, half of his cheek was off revealing some broken teeth and a shredded, lolling tongue.
“Bye Gus”, Hank said as he slammed the bat into the zombie’s head, dropping him.
Hank counted nine zombies in the store, plus there were probably a few crawlers, there always seemed to be. Killing the slow zoms was not real hard unless they mobbed you, the zombies in the store were spread out enough that Hank felt sure he could take them all down without a problem. As he finished off the last crawler a few minutes later Hank felt pretty good, the store was cleared out, even the back rooms and office. He carefully approached the bathrooms, the men’s was clear. Thankfully the electricity was still working which made taking care of his business that much easier. Once he was done he looked around the store for anything else they might need. He decided that the dirty yellow mop bucket in back would be good. The wheeled bucket was once used for mopping up the floors, now it would serve as a decent sink up on the roof. He filled it halfway with water from the low tap in the back then made his way out of the store, stuffing his pockets with candy bars and grabbing a four pack of toilet paper as he made it to the front door. Outside he saw Juan peering down at him worriedly.
“No worries amigo. I just had to use the little boy’s room. Catch.” So saying Hank tossed the toilet paper up to Juan who batted it onto the roof with his shotgun. “Can you think of anything else we might need?”
“Si.”
“Er, what there Juan? I think ‘si’ is a mighty fine word, but it don’t tell me what you want, right?”
“Si, get those prepaid phones and minute cards.”, came Juan’s accented reply.
Hank raised his eyebrows a bit at this verbose reply and went back into the store, leaving the water bucket outside.
“Let’s see, phones, phones. What the hell was he talking about? Oh, I see, yeah, smart boy that Juan.” He muttered to himself as he looked over the stuff on the counter. Sure enough the store sold pre-paid phones and re-charging cards, which were behind the counter. How to charge them up though? Hank thought he had seen an extension cord in the back of the store, first he went out to talk to Juan again.
“These amigo?”, Hank held up three of the pre-paid phones.
“Si”, came the reply.
“Okay, I will toss em up. Say is there an electric outlet up there anywhere?” After tossing the phones up to Juan on the roof Hank turned around and looked at the zombies nearby, several were edging close to him and he knew he was going to have to finish them off before he went back inside to see about the extension cord. As he clubbed the first one with his bat a nearby slo zomb broke out of its shuffle and dashed at him, taking Hank by surprise, “Why you little son of a bitch!” Hank exclaimed before poking the thing back with his bat. The zombie woman was in good shape, heck she was probably still mostly a girl, maybe 17, no bite marks anywhere on her that Hank could see and her clothing was not bloody, as if it had been changed since she came back from the dead. She twisted around and came in along one side of the bat and probably things would have gone downhill if it had not been for the water bucket that Hank had left near the door. The zombie stepped right into it and it slid out from under her, spilling her to the ground, a loud blast made Hank jump as Juan shot the thing from the roof.
“Outlet. Si.”, Juan said.
Hank nodded and approached the next closest zombie, he finished off five before Juan’s voice warned him, “H-hank! Zombies.”
Looking around Hank cursed. Shit there was another whole mob of them heading his way, some at a faster shuffle leading the pack right towards him. He grabbed up the mop bucket and headed around the corner for the dumpster, where Kevin was waiting to pull up his latest acquisition and Hank himself. A few of the faster zombies were already in the mouth of the alley and as a precaution Juan blasted them. He did not know if they could climb up the dumpster, but did not want to take any chances.
Once Hank was back on the roof, the three of them backed towards the center where they were out of sight of most of the undead.
Hank started dumping the contents of the backpacks out on the gravel stone which covered the flat top of the building. They had their backs to a large piece of machinery which could have been a furnace or air conditioner and had what Hank referred to as a ‘pow-wow’.
“This is how I see it, we stay up here for the night, don’t draw any more attention to ourselves and then try to make our way back to the Mike’s Club tomorrow morning. I think we might be able to get one of those cars working. I know I put down the worker in the store, his car is probably that piece of shit fiesta on the side of the building. It ain’t worth much, but we don’t have far to go. Those phones gonna do anything for us Juan?”
Juan looked the boxes over and then handed one out to each person, Hank read the box and saw that once activated they could be
keyed to be used as a walkie-talkie, that would be useful.
Like the others he opened his box and spilled the contents onto the roof. A few minutes later they were all reading through the manuals trying to figure out how to get their phones working. Hank pulled the credit card sized ‘minute cards’ from his pockets, he had grabbed as many of the 500 minute ‘One Up’ cards that he could fit in his shirt pocket. Entering the numbers into the phones they were able to activate them all, however the power levels in the batteries were all very low. Juan and Kevin plugged theirs into the all weather outlet Juan had found on the roof, then started messing about with the phones, trying to get the walkie-talkie feature to work. Hank gave up in frustration, pushing his phone towards Kevin, who seemed to be having the best luck figuring his out.
“Kev man, you gotta do it, I just don’t mix well with computers. I am a good cook though.” Juan rolled his eyes, “Well I am a cook, of sorts. You guys deal with the phones, I should be able to get this food cooked up for us.”
Stoves and cooking Hank could do. Within twenty minutes he had two bags of the beef stroganoff reconstituted and ready to eat. Everyone had already gotten into the drinks and water and before they ate Hank pointed at the mop bucket, which still had some water in it. “I know it ain’t the cleanest, but you guys might want to wash up a little before we eat. Kevin I grabbed these cloths for you at the store, thought you might want to change, but you can wash up better after dinner with the bottled water.”
They all washed their hands, Juan also pulled out a tube of clear hand sanitizer out of his front pocket which they all used before eating. No one knew what was causing the dead to rise again, but germs were a real suspicion. Hank tossed out packs of freeze dried ice cream for dessert and they all lounged around while it got dark, mostly listening to Hank talk.
“So Kevin you up to speakin’ a piece yet? No? Sh’all right, me and Juan can fill ya in about what has happened to us over the last few days. This started for us on Monday, only Thursday now, four short days, seems a lot can happen in that time…”
Chapter 2
Hank called up Juan on Monday morning, “Hey buddy you ready? Ya know I gotta change that transmission out of the caddy and man that guy is waiting for it, called me on Saturday night. At home!”
“Si, I am ready Hank, come an’ pick me up.”, replied Juan. Hank had moved to Denver nine years ago, he loved the outdoors and while it was not his native South Carolina, it also had things that South Carolina, at the time, did not have, namely gainful employment. When he moved up he took a job at “Carl’s Imports”, a garage that specialized in foreign cars, repairing them with cheaper, American made, parts to save the original owners a lot of money. Add the non-certified mechanics for their make and model of car and the place was a gold mine. The location worried Hank a bit when he applied for a job, south east Denver was filled with lower income housing and most of it was pretty old too. However under the veneer of age was a sort of quiet dignity, the houses were old, but had new paint, well cut yards and very little actual crime.
After nine months on the job Hank bought an old 2 bedroom house about 7 blocks from where he worked. Like all people moving into such a position, Hank figured he would be walking to work every day and saving a bundle on gas, the reality was it took 10 minutes to walk and 2 minutes to drive. So he drove pretty much every day, figuring he was paying the gas for an extra 16 minutes of free time every day.
At first his job was just a job, he got along with the people he worked with, even if most of them spoke Spanish and he could only remember three words of it from his high school years. Over the months though, that changed, after three years Hank was even invited over to several of his co-worker’s houses for dinner and he could get along pretty well in his second language, well enough to work, well enough to joke around and well enough to understand when most of the ‘old school’ Hispanics started asking around why he did not have an ‘esposa’.
Hank was not the marrying type, he did not talk about it much with his friends, though they could never quite stop asking him when he was going to ‘settle down’ with a good woman. He figured it was just a cultural thing, plus their wives could not stand to see a good ‘catch’ like him getting away. Now nine years later and with thirty seven years on this earth Hank could just not see himself changing to the point of marrying anyone. He drank beer on their back patios or in his friend’s garage, never on the front porch stoop like a bunch of ‘boyz in the hood’, the women of the house would never allow that. Hank enjoyed hanging out with his co-workers, in particular he was good friends with Juan, a slightly younger man of thirty four years who lived a couple of blocks down the street from him. They rode in together, they worked like a well oiled machine on any projects they had, they just ‘clicked’.
Juan’s wife was a huge driving force behind the neighborhood conspiracy to find Hank a wife, so far though Hank had parried every attempt of hers to pair him up. And this was seriously hard fighting, if setting people up were a sport, Nanci would be in the major league. Parties were thrown with Hank invited, oddly there were always a few single women. Dinners with an added female companion; movies where one of her single friends tagged along. Hank didn’t mind and enjoyed the odd relationship of fencing he had with Juan's wife.
Eventually Juan asked him if he were homosexual. This was not something Juan did after two years of friendship, but closer to five years into their relationship and it just came up one day when they were working on a Camaro that belonged to one of Juan’s cousins. A nice car and Hank could not figure out what the hell Juan was talking about butterflies for. He had a surreal moment where he was thinking to himself, “This can’t be right, ‘Am I a butterfly?’, what the hell Juan?” Juan had looked at him really embarrassed and as he explained Hank become more and more embarrassed. They had been working together for so long that sometimes Juan forget that Hank was not a native speaker and didn't understand all of the Spanish slang. Juan patiently tried to explain that 'mariposa' was a word with a slang meaning of 'homosexual'. It was a gentle, teasing way of asking if Hank were gay.
Hank had burst out laughing when he finally figured out what Juan was talking about. He had always been tight lipped about his past and this was the result, his friends and neighbors thought he was gay! Nanci and Juan were devout Catholics and Hank had attended church with them a few times, even though he was more of a non- denominational kind of man. Nanci had come up with a theory, Juan explained, that Hank was religious and gay. So religious that he would not think of blasphemy by actually practicing his homosexuality, which is why no one ever saw Hank with another man.
Hank told Juan he just didn’t want to date anyone, he explained that he had been married before, a long time ago. The experience he had as a very young married man had left him sour on the whole thought of ever having a relationship again. Hank and his wife had two kids too, which was news to Juan. No one had ever seen any pictures of children in Hank's house or at his work space in the garage.
Hank wen on to explain that the two kids he had conceived while married turned out to be those of two different men, if the dna testing were to be believed, but that was getting ahead of the story a little. By the time Hank had found out about his kids he been ready to believe anything. By then all his savings were cleaned out, payments were coming due for loans he had never signed on and his own mother had to tell him she came over to talk to his wife and found her in bed with another man. Hank’s parents were not rich, but they had fronted him money for the divorce and the subsequent paternity tests.
Soon after the paternity tests came back Hank had hard decisions to make. His wife sued him for alimony and told him privately if he paid it he could still see ‘his’ children every two weeks. Hank had declined to pay alimony, his ex filed suit to keep him from seeing the kids he thought were his, a two year old and a four year old. Life had gone on. Only not quite. His ex was fucked up, no one doubted that by then and Hank had been given a choice of pressing charg
es against her for wrongfully signing on over seventy thousand dollars of loans with his name or of putting her away for forgery and a host of other charges. Still thinking of ‘his’ kids, he declined to press charges and was subsequently hit up for full payment of the loans. Hank hired yet another lawyer, this one an ace at resolving credit disputes, the lawyer explained the situation to the creditors and while they commiserated with him about the mess he was in, they said he had not pressed charges and they were still owed the money and needed payment. Eventually Hank declared bankruptcy, he had tried for months to keep up with the payment schedule demanded by the creditors, but his salary was just not enough and then, suddenly, he had no salary coming in anymore.
His ex would not leave him alone, she had kept coming by where he worked and demandimg money, if he did not pay she caused a scene in front of the customers. Hank thought his boss was pretty good for putting up with it as long as he did. Even after Hank had a restraining order his wife still showed up. Even after she was arrested and spent three days cooling her heels in jail, she continued to come back. Then cars started being vandalized at night, then a rock was thrown through the front window. Finally his boss called him in and they had ‘the talk’. Hank couldn’t be fired for what was going on, but South Carolina was a ‘no cause’ employment state and his boss explained that he had to let him go due to all the problems caused by his ex wife. The man was decent enough though; he paid Hank three months' salary and gave him a great letter of recommendation.
Apparently the news was out; there was no work in the area. In two weeks of applying for jobs he should have landed, no one even so much as called him back. That was when he stopped paying the loans and instead paid a bankruptcy attorney. The process took a surprisingly long time, during which Hank moved back in with his parents. He stretched the money he had and looked into attending college. Four days after his bankruptcy was finalized his parents were driving home on a rainy night and never made it. A state patrol officer explained that they had been in an accident, slid off the road and rolled, they had died quickly. The weeks that followed were a blur, funerals to arrange, the estate to settle, bills to pay off. They were some of the worst of Hank’s relatively short life. At the funeral his wife had shown up. She caught his attention and beckoned him over. She told him that if he did not give her the money ‘she knew’ his parents had left him she was going to start in on him again, he had two choices, pay her or live in hell.