Etna Station

by Mark Tufo

  “ThornGrip? Riley, is that you, girl?” he asked taking in all that was happening and what had not yet happened. Wouldn’t have been tough to realize he was outgunned and out-manned, definitely not out-animaled, though. “You Talbot?” he asked, looking at me.

  Simple as it sounds, that is one loaded question. Not many people that knew my name were looking to shake my hand when the world was normal, certainly there were a lot fewer now.

  Deneaux had moved closer to the man, her pistol up and squarely aimed at the side of his head. “Michael?” she asked.

  “No,” I shook my head slightly.

  ThornGrip, I presumed that was her name, roared and charged Deneaux. The cold as ice woman didn’t flinch as she pulled the hammer back. The bear knew what that meant and pulled up short. She was snorting and huffing. Safe to say if Deneaux shot the man, she would be ThornGrip’s next victim. I warred within myself…how bad would that actually be? Would suck for the man, whom I figured to be an innocent in this, but we’d be rid of Deneaux. And really, that would be a fitting end for her, would it not? This was not a woman that was going to go peaceably in her sleep.

  “Everyone take a breath. Weapons down!” came out a little louder than I’d expected. Don’t you judge me for the fear and adrenaline pulsing through me.

  Deneaux eased the hammer back, I think she did the math as well. Maybe with a little more distance she could have killed the man and placed enough well-aimed shots to stop the bear, but here and now? No way. It was way too close. Even if the animal slammed into her already dead, it would cause her massive impact injuries she could not sustain. She put her hands up, though she still held on to the pistol.

  “My name’s Harold!” the man shouted, maybe hoping that introductions would keep the bullets from flying.

  “Michael, I’m Michael Talbot. You know Riley?”

  “Ah, yup,” he said in the traditional Mainer way. “She came to me a while back pretty banged up. Her, another dog, a cat, and the biggest damn bear I’d ever seen.”

  Ben-Ben was yipping like crazy, his face completely smushed up against the window as he desperately sought a way out, his tail wagging fast enough, I wouldn’t have been surprised if his ass end lifted up. I’d always thought dogs were a good judge of character, but could you trust your life by their reactions? Could be Ben-Ben just loved him because he’d supplied his belly with bacon. After that, who knew what sadistic things he may have been up to. Dogs are good judges of character, but bacon always wins out over ethics.

  “We, that is, my wife, Mabel, and I miss that dog something fierce. She’s a special one, but she seemed dead set on getting back to you.”

  “She was trying to get back to someone.”

  “Someone?” The man was astute.

  “A girl, Jess. She was killed, but her brother, Zach is still alive. Riley sleeps by his side every night. My guess is to make sure the same fate doesn’t befall him.”

  “Big group, here. You all family?”

  I looked over my shoulder to BT. “Yup. This one’s my younger twin. I pick on him mercilessly.”

  “You wish,” BT said.

  Deneaux was putting some distance between herself and ThornGrip, but not much got past that bear.

  “Put the gun down, Deneaux.”

  “Not in this lifetime, Michael.”

  “It won’t be a long one for you, then,” I told her.

  She reluctantly holstered it, the act was nearly hostile. If I was wrong and lived I’d never hear the end of it. She turned and was walking to one of the cars. Didn’t think that would stop the bear if she wanted in. ThornGrip would peel the top off like people do an uncooperative Cracker Jacks box with a prize in it.

  Riley whined and then barked a few times and wagged her stubby tail as she headed over to Harold. The man didn’t even think twice as he put the war relic down and got on his knees to pet the dog. Could hear the motor of a vehicle approaching.

  I didn’t say anything, but I was wondering what new wrinkle that sound would add to this situation.

  A large, red semi crested over a small rise. Instead of stopping a cautionary distance away, it kept on rolling toward us, though it was slowing down. Who looks at a scene like this ahead, the sheer number of guns, the dead zombies and a massive bear and still keeps coming? Was all I could think. Couldn’t imagine it being good, but I was willing to withhold judgment.

  “That would be Mabel.” Harold stood and was waving his arm back and forth. ThornGrip nearly made my heart stop, she’d come over to me and was sniffing my head, her nose, just the sniffing part, was the size of my fist and it was touching my ear. In a portion of a second, she could snap off my entire head like a Pez dispenser with her jaws.

  “Should have let me kill him, Michael,” Deneaux said.

  “Yeah, this is the time for that,” I told her. I turned so I was nose to nose with the animal. “Hi,” I told her.

  She pulled back so she could look into my eyes and snorted. I tentatively reached out with a hand. She growled low, but did not show her teeth. Truly didn’t know if that was a good thing or not, wasn’t in the habit of studying grizzly behavior. She bristled as my hand touched her neck and shoulder.

  “You are a stupid one,” BT said. “Aren’t you the one that’s petrified of Doberman Pinschers?”

  “This look like a dobie?” I asked as I scratched a little more vigorously.

  “No man, it looks like a wild fucking grizzly bear that could make you into pudding,” he answered.

  “I love pudding!” Trip yelled from inside one of the cars.

  Mabel, presumably, got out of the truck. “What trouble have you two gotten yourselves into now?” she asked of Harold and ThornGrip, both of whom let their heads droop a bit. No doubt who ruled this roost. I thought it funny that she completely ignored the rest of us. Riley barked and ran toward the woman.

  “Oh, my, my,” she said as she placed a hand on her throat and went into a squat. “Oh, it is so good to see that you’re alright, girl.” She grabbed the dog’s head with both her hands. “Don’t you ever give me a fright like that.” Then she reached into her pocket and gave her a treat, some sort of small, tan cracker thing. ThornGrip spun from me just as Trip opened the car door; they had both seen the same thing and were heading for the woman.

  “Cap’n Crunch Peanut Butter Crunchies! Last time I had that was Luxembourg–the Sofitel Hotel room service…silver plates man! Kept the werewolves away.” He looked over at me like I knew what the fuck he was talking about.

  “Cereal. The bear loves cereal. I think we’ve cleaned out the entire state of Maine’s supply,” Harold said.

  “Is that why you’re in New Hampshire?” I asked, though I had not taken my eyes off the race that was going on for Mabel’s pocket goodies. Trip had seen the bear but apparently didn’t care; that sugary snack somehow took precedence over being mauled. They were neck and neck for a moment, the bear looking over at Trip like she couldn’t believe he was this stupid either. She pulled up ahead of him and with just the slightest hip thrust sent him sprawling.

  “Ooooh, you bad girl!” Mabel admonished the animal some six or seven times her size. ThornGrip seemed mortified; she knew she was being dressed down by the woman. “That’s no way to treat strangers. No treat for you.” Mabel walked past her to check on how Trip was doing. He’d managed to sit up despite the spins. “Are you alright, dear?”

  “It’s just like the Rice Krispie shortage of 1972, all over again.” She reached down to help him up.

  She laughed and nodded like she knew what the hell he was talking about. “ThornGrip can be quite a bear when it comes to her sugary tidbits.” Mabel laughed at her own quip. “You sure you’re okay?”

  “I’d be better if I had my own sugary tidbit,” Trip told her.

  “You…you want some of the cereal in my pocket?” Mabel asked.

  “Fool was racing that bear for it,” BT told her.

  Mabel put a handful of food out to Trip, who, in
stead of taking it into his own hand, began to eat it out of hers.

  “Oh my,” Mabel said.

  “Talbot, why are you letting him be our representative?!” BT was pissed, like Trip’s brand of insanity was my fault.

  “Go get him,” I told BT.

  “Uh-uh. He’s on his own.” We were all watching as ThornGrip was sidling up to the woman. She roared into the face of Trip, who seemed oblivious as he mowed through the cereal. He had won the snacks and he was going to enjoy them.

  “I have a tractor trailer full of cereal! You’ll be alright.” Mabel reached out with her free hand to stroke the snout of the bear.

  Once the treat fiasco was sorted out and ThornGrip was sitting like a circus animal going through a dozen boxes of breakfast food, we were finally able to talk to Harold and Mabel. Found out that they had left Maine for the same reason we had, the giant horde of zombies. ThornGrip had urged them out of the house.

  “She must’a caught a scent, beat them by about five minutes,” Harold said. “I wanted to go north, farther into the woods, but the missus said we’d never find enough cereal for the eating machine over there. And she was right. Wouldn’t want her hungry…you saw how she is in a fight. ThornGrip, I mean, although Mabel is no slouch either. Mabel has a sister in Massachusetts and we’re headed down there. Between us,” he lowered his voice, “oh, how I hate to go to the land of Massholes.”

  I couldn’t help but smile. “I’m from Mass,” I told him.

  “You haven’t given him reason to doubt his opinion,” BT replied.

  Tracy had some of the kids over by the bear, I couldn’t see how that was a particularly good idea, especially since one of them was bound to have some Twinkie or something still stuck to it.

  “She loves kids.” Mabel tried to ease my concern.

  “To eat, I bet.” BT wanted nothing to do with the animal.

  Trip had gone through his Cap’n Crunch and was looking to the boxes ThornGrip had.

  “Are you insane?” Stephanie asked him.

  “Clinically? I think so,” he told her.

  I was telling them what we were up to when Deneaux came over.

  “Is that wise?” she asked.

  “Is what wise? I was going to see if they wanted to join us. You afraid you’ll lose the Scariest Among the Bunch throne?”

  She sneered at me before she lit a cigarette from across the roadway, ThornGrip’s head swiveled, she looked at the smoke and snorted before baring her teeth.

  “I vote for the bear. Anything that doesn’t like Deneaux is alright in my book.” BT said.

  “I didn’t realize I would be traveling with a comedy troupe.” She took a long drag and made sure to send a large plume toward the bear.

  “Talk about actually poking a bear,” BT said.

  “Washington state you say? That’s a lot of traveling. Took a few thousand zombies just to get me to go to Massachusetts. I’m too old to go cross country, especially these days.”

  “There’s safety in numbers,” I replied.

  “Seems to me those numbers weren’t helping all that much when we stumbled across you.”

  There it was, the dry truth as delivered by one who had lived in Maine his entire life. I kept my mouth shut, he had me there. If ThornGrip hadn’t come along when she had, I’d be working my way through the digestive system of a few dozen zombies. Even more of a reason to see if I could get them to join us.

  “I don’t mean to be insensitive, but are you even sure her sister is alive?”

  “Me and Mabel went round and round on that. We decided at the very least, we had to try.”

  “And then?”

  “Son, do you have it all figured out?” he asked.

  BT snorted.

  “Don’t,” I told my friend, he didn’t listen.

  “Figured out? Mike? Just look at the seat of his pants. You can see how scuffed up they are by how much he travels by them.”

  “Done?” I asked.

  “For now. He seems to get it.”

  “Zombies coming from the north and the east.” MJ had come up to me and was showing me the horde, the purples were a large blotch of storm. For a heart-stopping moment, I thought I saw the black hole that would signify a vampire and then it was washed over. If Payne was among them, she was well camouflaged.

  “Mabel, round up the bear. We got to go. That’s a nice device you have there.”

  “Lifesaver, literally. Though it does have gaps in coverage. Listen. We’re going to go as far south as Route 495.” This was a looping route that, in theory, circumvented the thick Boston traffic, but everyone and their brother used it. So, in reality, it was usually just a very wide, very long parking lot. “Then we’re going to pick up the Mass Pike.” This bisected the state from east to west. “If you get to your sister in law’s and it’s not going to work for you, just follow us.”

  MJ gave him a copy of our route. Everyone had a copy in case for any reason someone got separated from the group. We had proposed stops along the route, theoretically someone could catch us there or wait for us, but those weren’t etched in stone–way too many variables. Hell, we’d just hit one. Trip had sat down in front of the bear and grabbed a box that was next to a paw the size of his head. ThornGrip looked down and moved to intercept. She knocked the box out of his hands with a deft movement. Trip got up and posted on the bear. You know, his chest puffed out, his arms stiffened down by his sides, his chin jutting out and up, the universal gesture of “I’m a d-bag and I dare you to take a swing.”

  “Stephanie!” I shouted. “Could you please get your husband before he causes an inter-species incident?”

  She quickly looked around and ran to keep what was left of her husband’s head.

  “He’s a special one,” Harold said.

  “You have no idea,” I told him.

  “We got a lot of ‘special ones’ with us,” BT said from the side of his mouth.

  Harold nodded at the map. “We were going to take 95 down, but I’ll admit it would be nice to have company. I’ll stay on 495 with you, then we’ll head on further south to Norwood.”

  “Norwood?” I felt a pang pulse through me. (Not for Norwood–actually couldn’t stand the town, but that was due more to the sports rivalry we had while I was in High School.) I did some growing up in Walpole, the next town over.

  “You know it?” he asked.

  “Been there a few times.” I told him where I grew up. “Haven’t been back. You got an address? MJ could pull it up real-time give you an idea of what you’re driving into.”

  “You want me to get your wife?” MJ asked as he punched in the coordinates.

  “Not just yet.”

  I could understand that. In the likely event that the house was leveled or surrounded or a hundred other bad things that could have befallen it, he wanted to break it to her himself. The image came up; parts of Norwood looked like you would expect a small city to after the apocalypse–burned out shells of homes, whole blocks reduced to their foundations. The screen showed the scattered skeletons of hundreds of the not-so-lucky. Or the lucky. Who knows? Living through this era was nothing worth overly celebrating.

  “That’s her house.” He pointed to a small Tudor. It looked slightly out of place on the street, which held more one-story businesses than residential homes. Must have been old; the lone hold-out on a street developers had gotten their mitts on. On the plus side, it was still standing, and at the moment, there were no zombies running around it; wasn’t any movement at all. That in and of itself is not strange–not many people these days were out running around trying to draw attention to themselves.

  “What are you looking at?” Mabel had come up, she was drawn to the screen. “What’s…that’s Claudia’s house!” She was having a hard time figuring out what exactly she was looking at. “How did you get a picture of her house?” She looked to MJ.

  “It’s a real-time satellite feed,” I told her.

  I didn’t pick it up at first, not
something I would typically look for. But Mabel did, she took a deep breath. “She’s alive.” It came out as a relieved sigh.

  I looked over to MJ to ask what she’d seen that I’d missed. “Nothing moved,” he told her. “There’s a software analyzer that looks for that.”

  “Look in her backyard.” She was pointing at the screen and smiling.

  I saw nothing except rows of plant life. Then I got it. “It’s a garden,” I said.

  “A well-tended one,” she replied. “No weeds–see there? Claudia always was fastidious on the farm.” She stood back, proud of her sister and ready to hit the road.

  “Someone say weed?” Trip had to have been fifty feet away. BT flipped him the finger. “That’s not the right finger to use for hitchhiking. You know there’s going to be a time when people don’t recognize that gesture.”

  “Good thing it’s not today,” BT told him.

  “Well, I guess that’s settled,” Harold said, though he didn’t seem overly pleased about it. “Claudia is a neat freak. Not only do you have to take your shoes off when you enter her house, she gives you these little bootie socks to go over your other socks.”

  “Cleanliness is next to Godliness,” Mabel said.

  “He really doesn’t care,” Trip said as he wiped his dirty hands on his stained shirt and looked up.

  “If he does, you have a one-way ticket down.” BT backed up a couple of steps as ThornGrip came up to investigate.

  “Uh, that’s not a very big house,” I said to Harold as I glanced over at the bear. “And Norwood isn’t exactly rural.” There were implications I wasn’t saying. ThornGrip could keep a family fed for months, not to mention that nice coat she was wearing. If anybody saw her walking down the street, they were going to do their best to hunt her down both from hunger as well as just plain fear. I’d caught Mabel’s attention; she was looking at me like maybe knitting needles were going to shoot from her eyes.

  “And this Etna Station would be so much safer?” It was meant as a challenging question.