MZS- North East Page 20

  New guy has placed his gun on the bar and is now retracing Patrick’s steps. It can’t hurt to be extra-sure we aren’t going to get attacked, but he should keep his weapon with him. His actions are tentative, but I’m sure with time they will become more fluid and confident.

  “Any word from Tucker?” I ask over to the bar.

  “Crickets,” Cupcake says. “But I haven’t heard a gunshot since we’ve been up here. Hopefully that’s a good sign.” He places his phone on the bar and returns to his work.

  Patrick makes his way to the edge of the room and carefully looks out around the rooftops. There are taller buildings around us; the elevated shooter that killed Jaden could also have us in their sights, unless Tucker really was able to take care of them.

  Completing his search for anything obvious, Patrick looks over the wall and down toward the street.

  “Looks like the zombies have moved off the Humvee,” Patrick reports while he turns to face the bar.

  Cupcake places some plates on top of the bar and then sets out five glasses. New guy hurries over and grabs the plates. He brings them over to the table in front of Todd and sets them down.

  While I look at the pizza, crackers and fruit, Patrick crosses to the bar. He and Cupcake manage to bring all five glasses over and we gather around the table. Our ability to sit down and eat with a dead body at the table worries me. It hasn’t been long enough to be this comfortable with death.

  Cupcake slowly raises his glass. A somber mood has washed over us and replaced my feeling of comfort and safety. This is just a pause, a brief respite from hell.

  “What’s up bitches?” Tucker bursts through the door like he’s arriving fashionably late to a party.

  Cupcake runs and wraps him in the tightest bear hug I have ever witnessed. Patrick is there quickly as well and embraces his friend with equal vigor.

  When Tucker gets over to the table, I also hug him tight. While we embrace, his hand slides down my back and cups my ass. He gives a little squeeze and then pulls back and winks.

  I would slap him if I didn’t have such a weird fondness for him.

  “No glass for me?” he asks in shock.

  “Hold on!” Cupcake runs back to the bar.

  “What about Terri?” Patrick asks.

  “She’s fucking hysterical. I tried to wake her, right? But she’s all slappin’ at me and swearin’ and shit. Just won’t wake up, you know? She must have been hammered. Anyway, I texted her with Cupcake’s digits, but I wasn’t sure she’d know it was from me. So then I wrote a note on this receipt I had in my pocket and stuck it on her forehead. When she wakes up, she can’t miss it.”

  “How did you stick it to her forehead?” I ask. I don’t know why that seems important.

  Tucker picks up a napkin, licks it and then sticks it to his own forehead.

  “Where is your phone?” Patrick asks, a better question.

  “Under a tree or something.”

  “What? Tucker how did your phone end up under a tree?”

  “After I toasted the last asshole, there was a bit of a zombie problem around the rig. While I was trying to figure out how to get in here, the moaning and buzzing got so loud I couldn’t think. It was really pissing me off, because not only was it loud, but it kept attracting more fucking zombies.”

  Cupcake has a revelation. “Holy shit. The buzzing is how they communicate and build a horde!” he says.

  “I don’t fucking know how they work. I decided to try recording the racket and then playing it back. They seemed to pay attention, so I took a nice long sample, hit play, and tossed my phone off to the sidewalk. Bitches followed it like dogs on a bone.” Tucker has a huge smile across his face.

  “That’s pretty creative,” the new guy says.

  Tucker suddenly realizes there is someone new in the group. “Dude! What the fuck, Pat-O, you’re not gonna make introductions?”

  “Tucker this is… Parker. Parker, this is our friend Tucker,” Patrick says, making the formal introductions.

  “Parker” has replaced “new guy.” He has a name, and now he’s one of us.

  “Nice to meet you, bro. You from Philly?” Tucker asks.

  Cupcake walks away from the group and over to the bar. He works quickly. I shouldn’t be surprised that this isn’t his first time mixing drinks.

  “No actually, just here for a visit,” Parker answers blandly.

  Todd slowly gets up, still holding Jaden’s body.

  At this point, I’m sure the weight is getting overwhelming. With things calming down, I also notice an odor from the body that I’m sure could be explained, but I’m not interested in the details.

  The whole group watches in silence as Todd walks to a couch near the low outer wall. He lays Jaden down gently and carefully positions his arms and legs. Delicately, Todd adjusts the flaps of skin and bone that remain so that the boy has some semblance of a head. It’s a disgusting and tender scene.

  Cupcake and Todd arrive back to the table at the same time. Cupcake hands Tucker the drink before picking up his own.

  I assume I am the sensitive one in this bunch of guys. We should say something about Jaden or acknowledge Todd’s actions. But words just don’t seem sufficient to convey what we are feeling.

  Todd stoops down and picks up his drink. With a purposeful stare, he looks at each of us for a long moment before moving on to the next person.

  “Viva,” he says, raising his glass.

  We all return his salute. “Viva.”

  Patrick – on the road, North of Washington D. C.

  Chapter 34

  Last night, in Philadelphia, Tucker was in charge. He decided to get drunk and diligently pursued his mission. Whether we were disciples or lemmings, we followed him without question.

  Cupcake told us that the first round of drinks was called a “Motts.” A pint glass filled with ice and then three-quarters full of vodka, a splash of pineapple, and then a float of dark rum on top. By the time you struggle through the dark rum, the pineapple and vodka go down like water.

  Running through Liberty Bell Square, up and down stairs in the hotel, and fighting with zombies took more out of us than I realized. We wolfed down the plate of food Cupcake brought to the table and then proceeded to scavenge the rest of the bar for anything edible.

  The scene vaguely reminded me of Easter morning but without the jealousy. I can remember being so jealous of my brother when he found an egg and celebrated like he had scored a goal in the World Cup. When it was my turn, I would try to top his celebration and always desperately searched his face for any sign of jealousy.

  McLean was the first to strike gold when she found a bag of party mix. She let out a loud “whoop”—which we all scolded her for—and placed the party mix on top of the bar. We opened the bag roughly and we all shoveled handfuls into our mouths.

  Todd tried to join us but it took him two drinks before he was numb enough to move. As bad as I feel for him, I am more impressed with McLean. She still had Jaden’s blood on her face and bits of brain matter in her hair. I know Todd was holding the boy when his head exploded, but Laney was the one who witnessed the event from point-blank range.

  When Todd finally started moving, Cupcake directed him behind the bar to the microwave. The two started in on the process of opening and cooking the pre-packaged pizza from the cooler. Cupcake couldn’t stop marveling that the pizza wasn’t frozen; it was “prepared ahead of time to be heated fresh when needed.”

  I didn’t want to tell him that it meant the pizza was at least three days old. It could have been three years old for all we cared though, it was so delicious.

  Once the alcohol was in full effect, Todd and McLean went off to a corner and talked quietly. It ended in a long embrace and I felt a tinge of morbid jealousy that they shared the bond of Jaden’s blood.

  Sometime after the sky grew dark, Terri messaged Cupcake from the Humvee. While cell phone networks are spotty, local Wi-Fi hotspots were still allowing messages thro
ugh. At first, Terri was pissed that we had “abandoned” her. Once she realized we could see the Humvee but couldn’t get to it in the dark, she settled down. After we told her there was a rack of beer in the back, she actually seemed to be happy about being alone.

  Fortunately there were a few phone chargers behind the bar, so Cupcake plugged in and left his phone out. We all took turns sending Terri messages and generally keeping her in the loop of our increasingly absurd conversations.

  The last message I remember reading from her said something about going to Washington D.C. I just don’t remember if it was that we should go or not. Like many drunken nights, this one ended in an argument and Cupcake took his phone away in protest of something. All I can remember is him standing on the bar declaring, “My phone, my rules” in some attempt at solidifying leadership status.

  Leadership is more about making decisions than about being wrong or right. I never really followed politics, but it seems if you have to lobby or campaign to be in charge, then you’re really not. When you decide and act with conviction, you become a leader, by default.

  My actions are what have me driving the Humvee today.

  The rooftop lounge of the Hotel Monaco in downtown Philadelphia was comfortable. Perfect for a night.

  Unfortunately, we are on the front lines of a war against the undead and we need more than a foxhole for the night. We need a fortress.

  Based on my foggy recollection of something about D.C., I thought I was supporting Cupcake and his decision to go. Instead it turns out I was the only one in favor of going. My basically false contention that it was “on the way” to wherever the hell we were going miraculously won the argument. Now I’m stuck.

  Today marks the fourth day of the zombie apocalypse. While I’ve never really thought through a timeline, I kind of expected the tide to be turning. Services like radio and television should have been restored.

  People who heeded the warnings and hid during the initial onslaught of death should be coming out of their holes. It’s not just the American way to fight back—it’s human nature that prevents us from sticking our head in the sand for any extended period of time.

  How long does it take for an intellectually superior force to assert its dominance over a larger foe? My experience with the undead shows them to be anything but intelligent. Relentless and overwhelming yes, but in the end they are dumb.

  Dumb, but focused. They want to eat and nothing will stand in their way. No pain, no emotion, and no way to be sated. How do you feed something that will never get full?

  That hunger is what allowed us to escape from the hotel this morning. The gruesome task of hefting Jaden’s body over the edge of the hotel and dropping it down to the pavement fell to me. The smell and then the sound of a body hitting pavement from eleven stories up attracted the undead horde that had been loosely milling about the Humvee.

  Parker, Todd, Cupcake, and McLean cleared the stairwell of zombies and waited for the horde to disburse. By the time I got down the stairs, they were all loaded into the Humvee and Tucker was manning his spot in the turret. Thankfully he didn’t need to expend any ammunition to secure my jaunt to the rig.

  Cupcake seemed secretly glad not to be in the driver’s seat anymore. It could be that I am projecting my own opinions onto him, though. One thing is certain: he didn’t realize what it would be like to sit in the back.

  “Do you think it’s safe to crack the window? It’s an oven back here,” he says. He has been trying to get comfortable for well over an hour.

  I suspect he will finally settle in just as we arrive at the Capitol building.

  It feels a little cliché to go to the Capitol in search of survivors. I love the United States, but I have no illusions that our country is too powerful or too benevolent to fall apart.

  “You want to talk about the temperature but we can’t debate the plan?” Terri whines. “Going to D.C. is stupid. It is not on the way to Mexico.”

  “I don’t know how things work in online communities, but in the real world if you are passed-out drunk when we need to decide what to do, you don’t get a say,” I say, to try and shut her up.

  Spending the night alone in the Humvee surrounded by zombies must have been frightening. It doesn’t surprise me that the whole rig smells faintly of piss. Still, I’m not going to forgive her for being blackout drunk while the rest of us were in a battle for our lives.

  “Well it’s been a while since I used the hard stuff to get the job done and it just got away from me a bit. What I did yesterday should have no impact on what’s a bad idea today,” Terri says. She’s almost pleading.

  If she needed to get obliterated during the day, I wonder what she used to get through the night? I have some vague memories of her texting with Tucker but the conversation was tactical: food, water, comfort.

  “Our logic is sound,” I insist, keeping my rational simple. “If D.C. is below the line of quarantine, that’s where we need to get to. After we’re safe, we can adjust our plans, if needed.”

  “We could have gotten south of the supposed quarantine line without having to deal with Baltimore and Washington D-period-fucking-C-period,” Terri insists. “It’s a bad idea and I have been against it since you got in the fucking car. You should listen to someone with survival knowledge.” She is not one to give up an argument easily.

  She’s had her nose buried in a screen from the first time we met her. To my knowledge, the number of zombies she’s faced directly is zero. When it comes to keeping score, my experience trumps her knowledge, but I can’t take the bait.

  “Look,” I say. “We all agreed on Philly and thought it was a good idea. That turned out like total fucking shit. If D.C. feels like it’s going to be a clusterfuck, maybe it’ll turn out to be secure.”

  “And if it’s not?” she asks.

  “Then we move on from there. I get that you want to plan and shit, but we’re running for our lives. Logic went out the window when dead people started moving around and eating living people.” I won’t argue about “maybes.”

  “Clearly you’ve never heard the expression that failing to plan is the same as…” Terri’s voice fades out.

  The sign on the highway says “Johns Hopkins Next Exit,” but it’s the smoke and flames to our right that catch my eye.

  Downtown Baltimore is completely engulfed in fire.

  Having never been to Baltimore before the zombie apocalypse, I don’t know if there were ever high-rise buildings. There are a few shells of buildings that look like they could have been skyscrapers, but maybe they were no taller than the few stories they are now.

  It feels like we would have seen a nuclear explosion from Philadelphia but what the hell do I know? How the city of Baltimore blew up is basically irrelevant to me. The “why” could be a little more interesting and affect our next steps, but there are too many possible answers to that.

  If Baltimore was blown up first, it could be based on its proximity to the Capitol. If the Capitol was relatively secure and Baltimore was infested, they may have been addressing the immediate threat first.

  Does that mean that the government is more interested in protecting themselves and their power than they are in protecting the people? Probably, but I didn’t need an undead uprising to tell me that.

  Whenever this happened, it was swift and without warning. There are almost no cars on the highway. Like Boston and New York, I can’t imagine there are too many times when the highways would be nearly empty. Maybe early on a Saturday or Sunday morning? It fits the outbreak timeline I have been calculating and makes me glad we got out of Boston.

  The lack of traffic allows me to drive fast, which leaves me questioning the sign we just blew past. I’m uncomfortable enough with the narrow road and concrete barriers. I don’t think I want to go through a tunnel. The sign, “Tunnel Entrance Ahead,” has me considering stopping the truck.

  “Terri, is there a tunnel on this road?” I ask nervously.

  She doesn’t respond
. Terri is typing and reading and focused on something other than being my copilot. If she weren’t so fat I would make her switch places with McLean, who I’m sure would be more reliable.

  A lone zombie shuffles toward us in the right lane. I drift over nonchalantly and clip the asshole with the right front of the Humvee. I can see the body bend unnaturally on impact and the thud is noticeable throughout the rig.

  “Jesus Christ!” Terri exclaims, showing me the terror in her eyes.

  No more words follow but she slowly unscrews the cap of her flask and turns to the window to take a long pull.

  McLean

  Chapter 35

  I’m glad Patrick is driving. He’s balanced and scared and that seems to work. I have no doubt that even if his first thought is for himself, he’ll include the rest of us in his ultimate decision.

  With the exception of Terri, I’m glad to have each of the people in our group. Cupcake is solid but not the leadership type; Todd has sharp edges but a sensitive core; Parker seems to be analytical; and Tucker is the best kind of crazy. We are an odd amalgam of personalities and skills, but maybe that’s what it takes to survive a disaster.

  Terri is a bitch. Back at our apartment building in New York she was a sassy smart woman. Once we got in the car and she started tippling that flask, it went downhill. Now her only remarks are contrary and negative.

  The fact that she gets to ride shotgun while I’m hunched over here in the back with Parker tweaks me more than a little, too. In fact, Parker or I would be better suited for the role of copilot. Though I suppose it also takes a special personality to sit back here in stifling heat with almost no visibility.

  Even when the events occurring around you are surreal, the ability to receive visual input and stimulation is reassuring. In the back here with no windows and limited sight lines out the front, we have to rely on our ears as much as our eyes. The fact that neither of us has gone crazy in the more than an hour we have been on the road is a testament to our mental toughness.