by Mark Tufo
She’d had her suspicions since before they got married that Trip had an army of Guardian Angels that watched out for him. Why he had garnered such a legion she wasn’t sure, but she was intrigued enough to stay and find out. Her only fear was that at some point they would go on a group vacation and leave Trip to his own devices. For God’s sake, the man had somehow parlayed selling water at the tailgating parties for his beloved Grateful Dead into millions. This from the same man that sometimes forgot how to flush a toilet. She’d once caught him with the tank to the toilet off and a plastic cup; he had been getting ready to scoop the waste water out of the bowl and into said tank.
Just this morning he’d pulled into a gas station after he told Stephanie that they’d been on 0.0 gallons for a little past fifty miles. She hadn’t known. He’d found a hand pump, something she was certain he’d never used before in his life, and then proceeded to top off the bus. All the while waving away her concerns as he sparked up a joint.
“Good for the soul,” he’d told her between inhalations.
“Not if you’re on fire,” she’d told him.
“It’s a small joint; I’m not going to catch fire from this.” He stopped to take a look at the cherry at the end of the homemade cigarette. “Now, back in ‘76, Pinty made a huge one.” Trip extended his hands. “Now that one caught my hair on fire. Almost joined the army because of that.”
“What?” Steph asked. Looking around for zombies she knew had to be around. Trip couldn’t have cared less about his surroundings as he would take a drag and then make a few pumps to keep the liquid flowing.
“Yeah, I burned a patch of my hair down so low that Pinty said I was starting to look like an army man. I guess they give you these short haircuts.” Trip loosed an involuntary shiver thinking about it. “At the time, I figured I’d join and they could even my hair out to match the burnt part.”
“Wait,” Steph said. “You were going to join the Army for the haircut?”
“I didn’t have any money for a barber,” Trip said as if that explained everything perfectly.
“What stopped you?”
“From what?” he asked, looking at her blankly.
“Joining the Army.” She smiled, thinking of a drill instructor trying to get Trip to do anything military-like. Although, knowing him, she figured he’d be an officer before boot camp was over, some sort of promoting from within the enlisted ranks test.
“The Army was closed.”
“They were closed?”
“Yeah, it was Sunday. Even Army guys get to take a day off and partake of some Mother Earth.” He grinned once again, holding up his rapidly depleting joint.
“Why the Army and not the Marines?” Stephanie asked, trying to distract herself from everything else, if she was being completely honest.
“I wanted a little off the top,” Trip told her. “I’m not crazy.”
“Give me some of that,” she said, reaching. She didn’t normally smoke weed, but he seemed to be enjoying himself, and if she could take in just a small measure of that, then it would be worth it. She took two puffs, on the second she began to feel the effects. Only, instead of it relaxing her, it made her even more paranoid than she had been. “We should get back in the bus.”
“I’d like to see if they have any munchies. I could really go for a tuna fish and bacon sandwich.”
She’d never heard of the combination before, but it did have its merits.
“I’ll be right back,” Trip said as he finished gassing up. He put the hand pump in the luggage carrier under the bus.
Stephanie was frozen in a haze. She couldn’t decide if she should wait right there, go in with her husband or get in the bus and start it up. She didn’t know if it was messages from her own drug befuddled mind or one of Trip’s invisible entourage, but she thought starting the bus seemed the wisest course to take.
Trip came out a few moments later, his hands full of items he had picked up inside. The door had no sooner closed behind him when Stephanie saw the zombie peering through the glass at him.
“Trip, run!” she had shouted from the steps of the bus.
“Geez, I know you’re hungry, but I’ll drop stuff if I do that. I’ll be there in a second.”
Steph watched in agonizing detail as the door opened a crack, the zombie taking this point in time to figure out the machinations of the door. Trip was halfway to the bus when the zombie stepped through the opening.
“I want the food now!” Stephanie screamed. Looking over her husband’s shoulder at the rapidly approaching zombie, who, if he could have vocalized it, would have used the exact same words.
Trip started jogging. “Never seen someone get violent over the munchies,” Trip stated as he ran.
Stephanie ran back to her seat and grabbed her pistol, quickly getting back to the step, she pointed.
“Holy cow, Steph, I said I’m coming.” Trip added an extra gear to his pace. He was within ten feet of her, the zombie within grasping distance of her husband. She didn’t have a shot from this angle. Trip’s confused mug dominated her field of vision. “Is this because they didn’t have bread?”
“Get in here!” she shouted, grabbing his shoulder and physically yanking him into the vehicle with her free hand. Her right hand bucked as she fired the gun. The zombie’s knees buckled, his head slamming off the bottom step.
“Did he not have a ticket?” Trip asked, looking down upon the body. “Do I have a ticket?” he asked, dropping all the food on the floor so he could check his pockets.
Steph gingerly pushed the leaking head off the step. “Shut the door, Trip.” She could see dozens of zombies running across the parking lot towards them.
“I’m sorry!” he shouted before he closed the door. “I don’t have enough food for all of you!” And with that he pulled away.
Stephanie fell back into the seat behind Trip. The ordeal had only lasted half a minute and she was exhausted. She was mad at herself that she still held so much anger towards Curtez for throwing them out. He’d killed them plain and simple. Sure, not yet, but eventually Trip’s angels would be looking in the wrong direction and it would come swiftly and painfully. Life in the hotel wasn’t easy, and it was still dangerous, but nothing like life on the road. The odds they were going to find this Michael/Ponch guy were slim.
Maybe she could tell Trip to turn around. She was sure that if she pleaded with Curtez, he’d take them back. She’d do double the work if that’s what it took. She was about to tell Trip her thoughts when he abruptly stopped the bus in the middle of the road.
“Ready for some lunch?” he asked as if nothing had just happened.
“Sure,” she said with resignation.
“It’s okay, honey, I got some great crackers. You’ll never notice that there’s no bread.”
“You still think I’m concerned about the bread?” she asked with an edge to her voice.
“Well, who wouldn’t be?”
He gathered up some of the items that were on the ground and went out the door. She followed after a few minutes. He was busy mixing up a couple of cans of tuna with some mayonnaise. He had scooped out some mayo and then proceeded to dump the fish into the jar. Stephanie’s stomach roiled a bit at the thought of that much of the condiment. He popped open some Ritz crackers, doused it in spray cheese, put on a thick layer of his tuna mixture, followed by some turkey jerky and then topped it off with another cracker.
“They didn’t have any bacon,” he said abashedly as he handed her the makeshift sandwich.
Mayo dripped around her fingers as she took the mini-meal from him.
“Eat it, eat it,” he goaded, smiling as he watched her.
“Trip, I don’t think I’m hungry,” she said as some yellowish-white, paste-like substance began to congeal around her fingers.
“Put it in your mouth, you’ll feel better,” he told her as he made his own.
She tentatively nibbled around the edges. Her stomach wanted what her eyes didn’t. She relen
ted and bit halfway through.
“Oh, my gawd, this is delicious.” She made sure to wipe off the stuff that was oozing down her face.
“Told you.” He popped a whole one in himself.
They were sitting on the roadway, leaning against the bus when they had finally exhausted their supply of crackers. Trip reached his fingers deep into the mayo jar and pulled out a small amount of mixture. “Split it with you.”
“I’m stuffed,” she told him right before she took two of his fingers in her mouth. He looked slightly saddened. “Relax, tilt your head back.” Trip did as he was told and Steph proceeded to fill his mouth with spray cheese.
“Ewuff!” he said, trying to tell her that he had enough. Yet he didn’t move his head to get away. She started to spray the cheese onto his face and beard. He swallowed hard and started rubbing his face all over hers.
“You’re a mess!” Steph told him as she stood and ran to get away.
Trip stayed where he was, entirely too busy eating the food off his face to move. “This is too good to waste.”
“Thank you, Trip.” Stephanie came back and kissed him passionately. “I needed that.”
“I didn’t know I needed that until just now. You know what would go good with this right now?”
“What?” she asked him, her hand trailing down his shirt.
“Some wine. Some wine would go great with this cheese.”
“How about after?”
Trip touched the tips of his fingers. “Cheese, wine...more cheese?” He asked when he got to his third finger.
“I’m not talking cheese, Trip.”
“Later, honey. I think right now we really should get that wine.”
She was about to protest when she heard the sounds of man. Engines to be specific…and more than one. “So just now you thought getting wine would be a good idea? Who told you that?”
“It wasn’t right now, it was in the past…just a little while ago. And all the ritzy people drink wine with cheese, everyone knows that.” As he was talking, he was ushering her into the bus. He had no sooner shut the door and started the bus back up when they saw the source of the noise. A gang of bikers was coming up behind them.
“Are they bad people, Trip, do you know that?” she asked, looking from him to the approaching motorcycles.
“They’re not funky, that I know. The funkies mostly walk and run…always trying to cut in lines.”
“The wine, though, it would be bad not getting it?”
“Sure it would. You can’t effectively cleanse the palate without a proper chardonnay.”
“Well then, let’s go.” She sat down to make sure her firearm was loaded and ready to go. Stephanie got up to walk a few seats away from Trip so that if they started shooting at her, they wouldn’t be as likely to hit Trip.
“Hey, lady, no walking in the aisles while the bus is moving,” he told her, and he wasn’t kidding.
“Sorry. I’ll be more careful next time.”
“Darn tootin’.”
Stephanie kept her gaze tied to the approaching motorbikes. She was having a difficult time getting an accurate number; after twenty they all started to blend together. That is when she noticed that the scenery was blurring by quickly.
“How fast are we going, Trip?”
“Speed is all relative to how fast the earth is moving.”
“Okay, let’s say the earth wasn’t moving at all.”
“Ninety-six.”
Stephanie’s stomach lurched thinking that the giant tin can was hurtling down the highway that fast. “How fast are they going if they’re catching up?” she said aloud, not meaning to.
“Most of them look like Harley’s, a couple of Japanese models as well, all of them capable of doing a hundred and thirty to a hundred and forty. My guess is that they’re somewhere in the hundred and twenty range.”
“How can you know that?” Steph asked, looking over to her husband.
“Know what?”
“Are we going to make it?”
“One doesn’t ‘make’ wine, one savors it,” he said, and then she watched as Trip actually stood on the gas pedal.
The bus was a missile. And still the motorcycles gained. She could start to make out individual figures riding them. Most were clad in varying amounts of leather, some had guns mounted on their handlebars or were tucked away in side saddlebags.
“I’m in a scene from Mad Max,” she said, referring to a movie from the early eighties, one in which, as a much younger woman, she had walked out of due to all the violence. Her date at the time had stayed in for the remainder. Probably the most fortuitous time in her life. She had met Trip in the lobby; he had two tickets for the re-release of Disney’s Cinderella.
He’d walked up to her like he’d known her for years. “Want to go to a movie, I have two tickets?”
“Excuse me? No thank you,” Stephanie had replied.
“I was passing by the movie theater actually going to meet up with some friends. We were going to jam a little and then I saw the sign for the new releases and I figured I’d come in.”
“You came in alone but bought two tickets?”
“Of course, who goes to the movies by themselves?”
“I just walked out of Mad Max. I have no desire to walk back in.”
Trip had looked at her strangely. “Mad Max? The world’s already crazy enough, why would I want to go see an angry man?”
“What then, what did you get tickets for?”
“Cinderella, of course. It’s the re-release. Disney only opens their vaults every so often and when they do you have to snatch up the opportunity.”
“So you came in here alone and bought two tickets to Cinderella?”
Trip was beaming. “That and Jujubes,” he said, shaking the box in front of her face.
“Well then, Teddy can kiss my ass.” She grabbed Trip’s arm and they went into the theater.
“Was Teddy in the angry movie?” Trip asked after their first date.
She’d kissed him softly on the lips when he’d brought her home. “I’ll tell you next time we see each other.”
Trip waited until she went in and closed the door before going up onto the porch and knocking on the side window. Stephanie peeked out with a confused smile. “This is the next time I’m seeing you,” he told her.
Stephanie knew at that moment she was falling in love with the quirky man. It had only grown as time had gone on—even now as they blazed down the roadway—she just hoped the scene unfolding around them was not somehow their entire relationship come full circle. She wasn’t ready for the loop to close just yet.
“Did you ever find that change?” Trip asked.
“We’ll be fine, they’ll just take a picture of the license plate and send us a bill in the mail,” she told him to keep his mind from wandering away from what he was doing.
Her hands were shaking as she went to the back of the bus. The bikers were within a hundred yards; if there was any chance that their actions were anything but nefarious that threshold was crossed when she saw a wisp of smoke rise from one of them and felt the impact as the slug slammed into the rear of the bus. On the aisle across from her, it took three seats to stop the bullet. Small fibers of stuffing were suspended in the air, swirling about lazily in the maelstrom that was happening around them.
Stephanie moved back four rows and rested the barrel of her gun on the seat behind her. She thought about warning Trip, but he’d have questions she didn’t have time to answer. The shot was deafening in the closed area. She barely heard the explosion as the rear window blew out. She had to give Trip some serious kudos; the bus did not so much as shimmy in either direction. Although, in fairness, he probably hadn’t heard it, lost in one of his alternate realities such as he was from time to time. She had aimed high, the shot merely meant as a warning to those who followed that maybe there was an easier mark out there. Instead of dissuading them, it seemed to spur them on. More shots began to pepper the back of the bus. The
high ‘tinging’ as lead met aluminum reverberated throughout the structure.
“That’s some horrible feedback!” Trip yelled over the rush of air. “They should get their sound system checked out!” he added. “Want me to have a look at it? I was a roadie once.”
“NO!” Stephanie screamed. He most likely would have walked away from his steering wheel if she hadn’t answered quickly enough.
One of the bikers who had been struggling with his rifle tweaked his front wheel just enough to send the rear of his bike up and over the front end, colliding with the pavement in a devastatingly spectacular destruction of metal and flesh. His helmet or his head had exploded on contact; she wasn’t sure which as he was passed by quickly. She was saddened the accident had only taken out one other rider. The bikes were sent ripping through the underbrush on the side of the roadway. The drivers were merely stains left on the highway like a leaky old Chevy. After that incident, though, the bikers did spread out, making tougher targets of themselves.
Stephanie tried to get off more shots, but every time she poked her head up, the bikers were near enough to see what she was doing and would take some dangerously close shots at her. She remained ducked down by the side and was just able to see as the bikes began to move alongside. She wondered if they would try to board like a pirate ship.
A gaping hole blew in the side panel right next to her thigh. They knew exactly where she was. She looked quickly out her window to see a large, barrel-chested, keg-bellied man attempting to reload his revolver at a hundred miles an hour, his long beard whipping around his face, making the task just that much more difficult. Stephanie felt herself thrust to the floor of the bus as Trip pulled it hard to the left, the rear of the bus catching the surprised biker broadside. The much larger bus barely noticed the contact. The biker was sent spinning down the roadway at first leaving a trail of sparks and then leather, followed quickly by skin, blood, muscle and finally bone scraping against the ground before he was done moving.