Day Twenty Four

I’m waiting for lukewarm water to soften up a bag of parmesan noodles. I’m not all that hungry. It seems like my appetite is lessening to accommodate my shrinking waistline. Maybe this is what starving to death is like. Outside, it’s raining hard; I can hear it drumming steadily on the roof of the sunroom and every few minutes, a rumble of thunder rolls across the sky like a nuclear bomb. I’ve retracted into myself so deeply I don’t even realize the sounds at the front door mean there’s someone knocking until the rap-rap-rap of knuckles on glass turns into the pounding of something solid on the steel trim of the storm door.

The dead don’t knock, and the living don’t seem to visit much anymore. But there it is again, another solid thud against the door frame, this time coupled with the muffled, angry voice of a woman,

Kathryn.

I open the slats on the blinds and there she is, her face red and her eyes demanding. I twist the dead bolt and turn the knob, and the front door swings open for the first time in weeks. Kathryn has her right arm drawn up tight against her body in an Ace bandage sling. In her left hand, she’s holding a compound bow, the limbs covered in camouflage tape. Over her shoulder, there’s a leather quiver stuffed with arrows dressed in bright orange fletching.

I give her a look up and down. “Afternoon, Robin Hood.”

She pushes past me out of the rain and into the house. “Fuck off.”

“Fuck off to you, too. The tea party isn’t for another hour, but you can help me stuff some peppers if you’re into it.”

She shoots me an evil glare and lays the bow across the back of the couch, then unslings the quiver and leans it against the wall. She stares at it for a moment and then drops heavily onto the loveseat and sighs. “You look like a piece of shit. Nice Castaway beard, Wilson. And nice sunburn.”

I hate this woman, but it’s been a while since I’ve had a conversation with another human being. I suppose I can stand her for a few minutes, at least until I can figure out why she’s sitting on my sofa in her wet clothes.

As if she reads my thoughts, she wipes the back of her hand across her dripping forehead and slides a loose strand of wet, greasy hair behind her ear. “I’m wet.”

“I see.” I don’t get her a towel.

Kathryn looks around the house, craning her neck for a peek up the stairs at the closed bedroom door. “Where are the Rachel and Amanda?”

“They’re in the back yard.”

Her eyebrows raise, the lower at me like I’m too stupid to tell them to come in out of the downpour. “In this weather? It’s raining, you asshole.”

“They’re in the ground, you cunt.” At this, she winces; I’m not sure if it’s the c-word that causes the wince or the realization that I’m telling her my girls are dead, not dead and then dead for good, slowly seeping into the soil next to the shed.

She looks at her shoes. “Oh… oh. Okay.” Kathryn slumps her shoulders and drops her head to her chest. “Oh.” Her body seems to go completely lifeless for a few minutes and then she starts to heave, big, silent sobs lifting her shoulders and then pushing them back down into her body. I do nothing. After what seems like forever, she stops and lifts her face. Her cheeks are puffy and they’re still red, and now they’re blotchy, too. She looks into my eyes and I look away. “How…?”

“Doesn’t matter and I don’t want to talk about it.” Half true; it does matter, but not to anyone but me and I’m not in a sharing mood. “Want to smoke a joint?”

Kathryn looks at me, then notices the bag of marijuana on the end table. “Yeah”, she says. I roll up a nice little blunt and light up, then pass it to her. She draws deeply and holds it, then leans her head back and exhales a cloud toward the ceiling, then takes another drag before passing the joint back to me. I take a quick hit and give the blunt to Kathryn. “Finish it. All yours.” Her eyes are already softer and I can almost see a smile on her angry lips. She takes another pull and then licks her fingers and pinches off the end, the embers tossing up tiny little sparks as the flame dies out between her index finger and thumb. “Thanks. I’ll use this later.” Kathryn lifts up the flap over a breast pocket on her vest and drops the joint in, then pats the pocket to make sure it’s there.

I’m looking at her arm, the one in the sling. There’s blood soaking through the brown elastic of the bandage. I tip my head toward the compound bow. “A little hard to shoot one handed, isn’t it?”

“Fuck off.”

“How’d you get hurt? Looks like you’re still oozing a little bit.” I stand and walk to the bathroom and pull the Tupperware bin from under the sink. It’s filled with Band Aids and hydrogen peroxide and Neosporin and tape and gauze. Back on the couch, I reach for her arm. “Let me take a look.”

Kathryn doesn’t move for a moment, then reluctantly starts to unwind the bandage, unwrapping roll after roll from her arm, around her neck, over her shoulder, over and over and over until three lengths of Ace bandage are coiled in a dirty brown pile on the floor. The flesh of her forearm is white and swollen, lines pressed into her skin from the bandage. She turns her palm up and there it is, a tablespoon sized chunk of skin and muscle gone and only a red, dripping cavity left in its place. It looks like a bite.

“It’s a bite”, Kathryn tells me. Thought so. “Martin did it. He did it before I shot him with this”. At the word “this”, she points her chin at the bow. “I shot him through the eye and he stuck to the wall with the arrow poking out of his eye and into the wall behind his head.”

I tell her it must have been a hell of a shot while I dab at the wound with a paper towel, sopping up pus and blood. It smells and I’m thinking it’s infected.

Kathryn starts to giggle. “I was trying to hit him in his chest.” With this admission, she begins to laugh, harder and harder until she’s convulsing, her cackles raising in pitch and ending in un-ladylike snorts.  

“Party rock is in the house, tonight”, I tell her.

She stops laughing and looks at me with a weird little frown tugging at the corners of her mouth. “Where in the world did that come from?”

I don’t know. I’m a little high. In the bathroom, I wet some toilet paper and use it to clean her bite as good as I can. I’m not a doctor. I squeeze some Neosporin – “Sporin”, Rachel used to call it when she was little and needed boo boos fixed – onto a gauze pad and press it onto the wound. “Ouch”, Kathryn says, and then she starts to laugh again. I peel some tape off the roll and rip it with my teeth, pressing the pad over her bite and fixing it in place. Rinse, repeat. “How bad does it hurt?”

Her eyes are glassy. “Not so bad right now. Feels better when it’s up. Right now it’s not up, but it’s not throbbing like it was. I should put it up.” The bandages are disgusting.

“We’ll get you something else to use for a sling.” I glance at the Ace bandages. “Those are fucking gross and they need to go outside, or in a hole, or be lit on fire or something.” I ask Kathryn what happened that made Martin bite her. I would have bitten her, too. Her shoulders slump again and she tells me how Martin wouldn’t get off the couch, wouldn’t get them food, wouldn’t sit with the neighbors for the neighborhood watch meeting, wouldn’t even stand up to take a piss after a week or so. One morning, she tells me, she went downstairs to his basement man cave and found him standing in the laundry room, holding a tattered, bloody half of their cat Bugsy in each hand. She tells me how the blood from the cat was all up his arms and smeared over his chest and his neck and his face, how there was cat blood in his hair and on the floor and on the walls and how could he slaughter their cat without her hearing so much as a peep, anyway? She tells me how much she loved that damn cat, and then she tells me how Martin finally let both halves of Bugsy drop to the floor and come for her with his bloody hands reaching, searching, grabbing at the air but not finding her. She ran up the stairs, she tells me, and then she tells me how she had told Martin to put a God damned door on the basement, that she knew someday they would wish there was a door there, and how now she knows exactly why the door was so all-fucking important, because if there had been a door on that basement room, then Martin would still be down there and she wouldn’t be sitting here with a hunk of her arm in his mouth and him pinned to the wall in their kitchen with a hunting arrow sticking out of his ruined eye socket. She expends a good deal of energy explaining the popping sound the broadhead arrow made as it burst Martin’s eyeball, and how there wasn’t much blood, but there was some other kind of fluid, something clear and thick that leaked from his eyeball as it collapsed around the shaft of the arrow. I learn that Martin’s eyes were brown, and at that Kathryn’s blue eyes swell with tears, but she does not cry.

“He was a lazy prick and he wouldn’t go back to work, even though he could have”, she says. “His parents gave us money, their retirement money, and we lived the same way we did when he was working. Isn’t that selfish?”

Yes, it’s ridiculously selfish. “No”, I say.  

“My sister took the kids.” Kathryn and Martin have two children, a boy and a girl. The youngest, Samantha, or Sam, is a couple years older than Rachel with blonde hair, already in eye makeup and cropped little shirts meant to drive tween boys ape shit. She is a rag just like her mother, and trouble waiting to happen. The boy, Sean, is in his mid-teens and completely engrossed in the Boy Scouts. He sells popcorn nearly the whole year, door to door throughout this neighborhood and the other communities that surround us. He’s a nerd and a half. I find myself not really caring about Sean and Samantha. “She took them before the phones went out and went to Indiana. I haven’t heard from them and I don’t know if they’re alive or if they’re dead and now Martin is on the wall in the kitchen like some kind of fucking decoration.” She laughs a little bit, followed by what I think is a sob. With her good arm, she wipes her nose on her sleeve. “It’s just me now on my side of the circle. Well, me and Robert, I think.”

I tell her it’s just her and share a little bit of my experience with Bob/Robert and the pups. Then I remember my noodles and pull myself off the couch. In the kitchen, I drink what’s left of the water from the bowl and mix in the powdered cheese, dump not quite half of the noodles into a clean bowl and walk back into the living room. I hand Kathryn the bowl and she looks at it like someone just put a plate of dog shit in front of her, but she starts to eat. After a few heavy bites, she’s polished off the noodles.

“It’s pretty much just me on this side”, I tell her.

Kathryn leans her head back on the loveseat. “I saw Sanjay go by last week. Well, some of him, anyway. A couple of ghouls were dragging him off through the yards out towards the park.” I decide not to tell her about my role in the ugly demise of Sanjay and ask her why she’s here. I remind her that we hate one another.

“You’re safe”, she says. “You seemed to find a way to toughen yourself up and fight. The rest of us, well, not so much. Everything, everyone, it’s all falling apart.” I remind her that things fell apart weeks ago, when the first cough sent tiny particles of the flu from a mouth to some hand rail somewhere to someone’s hand to another mouth, and so on, mixing up lines of DNA in an endless strand so that the body dies but the brain does not. When the first body got up off the ground and took its first furtive step, that’s when things went to shit, when the world fell completely and uncontrollably apart. “Yeah”, Kathryn sighs. “That’s when it fell apart.” She closes her eyes and in a few minutes she’s asleep, snoring softly. She looks less angry to me; she looks almost peaceful.

I want to shoot her bow.

I sling the quiver over my shoulder and lift the bow from the back of the couch where Kathryn left it, and walk into the back yard barefoot. At the fence, I see a cluster of six or seven Walkers milling about near the stop sign at the corner. Cool. I jog to the gate, slip through, and crouch low as I work my way through the front yard and around the side of the house. The rain has slowed, and everything is humid and wet. From behind the tree, I reach over my shoulder and slide one of the arrows from the quiver and slip the notch over the bow string. The arrow rests quietly on the rest and I flex my palm against the grip. It feels good, and I remember summers in the side yard of my boyhood home, shooting arrow after arrow into hay bail targets with my father’s hunting bow when he wasn’t home. I was never allowed to use his bow; when Dad was around, I had the privilege of using a thirty year old fiberglass straight bow that creaked and cracked when I pulled the string tight, and with it, my arrows never seemed to hit anything but air.

I creep slowly along the pool enclosure, then past Bob/Robert’s fence. Despite the rain, I can smell what’s left of the man already beginning to stew from behind the weathered panels. The Walkers are moaning and groaning, their twitchy walk leading them in circles, going nowhere in particular. I raise the bow and sight along the arrow, tracking a woman with grey hair. Her face is pointed in my general direction, but she’s not seeing anything, really, her jaw slack and her tongue leaking from the corner of her mouth like a slug. I draw the bow, aiming for her face, and let the arrow fly. It whistles as it carves a channel through the thick, damp air and flies in a perfect, straight line. The arrow continues to whistle as it sails over the woman’s head, a good three feet above my intended target. A couple seconds later, I hear the far off clatter as gravity plucks the arrow from the sky and drags it onto the blacktop of a driveway on the next block. Well, shit.

One more.  

I nock another arrow and aim lower, concentrating on my breathing as I draw the bow for the second time. I release, and this arrow whistles, too. I watch as it streams through the air, a lightning bolt dressed in orange feathers. I hear a soft pop as the arrow slides cleanly through the woman’s neck, continuing on another few feet until the skull of a boy impedes its forward motion. The arrow drives into the boy’s head a few inches and stops. The boy stops, too, and drops to the pavement. The old woman has a large, black stain that spreads from her neck to her breast bone. She doesn’t miss a beat, and without so much as a glance at the boy, she continues her aimless march through the intersection.  

It’s starting to get dark. The sun is sinking slowly behind the black clouds that are rolling in from the west and I’m hearing thunder far off in the distance. Back inside, Kathryn is still snoring peacefully. I lean the quiver back against the wall and gently lay the compound on the dining room table. It’s a fine weapon. The house is gloomy. I cover Kathryn with one of the fleece blankets I’ve been sleeping under and stretch out on the couch. Kathryn sighs in her sleep, and I remind myself I hate her.

I’ll throw her out tomorrow. Tonight, it’s nice to know I’m not sleeping alone.

Day Twenty Three

The sun is streaming into the living room from between the gaps in the plywood. Another day in paradise. I fell asleep in my clothes; the house smells like pot and so do I. My mouth is dry and tastes like someone shit in it while I slept. I need water. My bare feet hit the floor and my head spins. I’m hungry, and as I stand I realize my jeans are loose. I pull my shirt up and notice my little Buddha belly is disappearing, slowly transforming into a bit of a washboard. Funny, I finally get that beach body I’ve always wanted only after there’s no one left to appreciate it.

I catch my reflection in the mirror as I pass by. My hair is getting longer and I haven’t shaved in a couple weeks. My beard is coming in with a whole lot of grey. I look like a morph of Robinson Crusoe and Charlie Sheen, the crazy tiger blood Charlie. Perfect. I’m the love child of two dudes, and one of them isn’t even real. I suppose neither of them is real, when I think about it for a few seconds. I wonder to myself if Charlie Sheen is still holed up somewhere, surrounded by porn stars, or if he got sick like most everyone else and is roaming the streets of Hollywood, dead eyes searching for something they’ll never find.

Same routine:  move the board, list the plywood, slip into the back yard through the French doors and pee. It’s quiet, except for the birds; there are always birds, always the sweet summer sounds in the trees. It’s already hot out, and there’s a cicada buzzing somewhere up above me. The flowers along the north side of the fence are in bloom, pinks and yellows and reds. They’re beautiful, and it’s nice to have something pretty to look at. When the people around you are dead, pretty much everything else looks dead, too. I zip up and pad over to the mulch bed and pull a few handfuls of weeds before plucking some flowers. They’ll look nice on the piles of dirt near the shed. I lay them gently and neatly at each little patch of raw earth. I miss the girls, terribly. I feel them coming, rising up from deep in my belly, big, heavy sobs that shake my whole body before erupting into long, wet tears that run freely down my cheeks and spill to the ground.  

I sit like that for a while, crying, smelling like stale weed and sweat. When the sobs finally subside, I rise and step into the pool with my clothes on. The water still smells of chlorine, but the ring of algae is getting thicker and the water level is noticeably lower. I strip my clothes off and work them around in the water, a half-assed attempt at a spin cycle. I let the Levis sink to the bottom of the pool and wring water from my tee shirt, soak it again and toss it to the deck, and repeat the process with my jeans, making sure I spend a few extra seconds under the water before bursting up into the warm, summer air. The Levis plop onto the pool deck with a wet splash; I work water through my hair with my fingers, scrubbing with the tips of my fingers. It feels nice, and I realize I’m longing for someone to touch me, someone alive and real.

I’ve always hated being alone. Now, I’m really alone. It’s been, what, a week that I’ve been the sole occupant of this house. Just one week. My God, it feels like fucking forever. I wonder just how long forever really is, if a week feels like an eternity. I suppose I’ll find out.

I pull on another tee shirt from the patio. It’s hard and scratchy from drying in the sun. The Levis I work over my legs are pretty crusty, too. But they smell like the outdoors, they’re clean. This pair is loose on me, too. I have some smaller clothes upstairs; I’ll need to break them out. I remember they’re in the bedroom and my heart sinks. I don’t want to go in there.

I look down at my arms. They’re pretty pasty; normally, I’d have a pretty decent tan going on by this time of year.  I guess survivors don’t get a lot of sun time in the new world order. Besides, the pool is now my bathtub, not to mention the fact I had a dead woman in it a few days ago. Ah, fuck it. I strip off my shirt and jeans and quietly drag one of the zero gravity loungers close to the door and toss my clothes onto the steps. I wipe a few spider webs from the chair and stretch out, leaning back so the chair lets me float on my back, delicately balanced on the pivoting brackets. The sun is hot on my skin and it feels good. I close my eyes and listen to the birds, trying to imagine the sounds of water splashing, of Rachel laughing… the taste of margarita salt on my lips. I can almost feel the tequila in my head, making my brain swim just a little. For the first time in forever, I can feel the tension leaching from my pores, dripping from my body with each bead of sweat. I’m… relaxed. Imagine that. Yesterday, I fed my neighbor to zombies, and today I’m peacefully sunning myself on my patio. Naked.

The birds are calling to each other from the tree tops. Rachel is playing in the pool. I can feel the cold, misty stem of the margarita glass slipping from my fingers, slowly. It drops to the patio with a thud. Another thud. And another. My mind is foggy; glasses don’t thud, they clink, shatter. Thud, again.

I open my eyes. Thud. The sun is higher in the sky, more than directly overhead now. I’m half blind. Did I fall asleep? Thud. For how long? Thud. Christ. Thud. At the south side of the fence, the far side of the pool, I can see the top of Bob/Robert’s head. It’s banging into the fence rhythmically. Another thud, this time followed by a long, hollow moan. Well, shit. It looks like Robert has managed to die, but not die.

I sit up and my skin is like ancient leather. Looking down, it’s red. Not just red, but fucking RED. I can’t believe I’ve actually found a way to get myself terribly sunburned, right smack dab in the middle of the apocalypse. Perfect.

Bob/Robert must have turned in the past day or two; I’d last seen him watching me deal with my back yard intruders a couple days ago. I slowly rise to my feet and groan as my skin, tight like a glove, stretches and pulls and flexes. It doesn’t quite hurt yet, but it will. I slip my Levis on and already wish for some fabric softener and the luxury of the washer and dryer as the rough denim works up my legs like twin sheaths of steel wool. I can’t wait for tomorrow, when the pain will be a hundred million times worse and there won’t be anyone around to hear me whine about it.

Bob/Robert is still banging his head against the fence as I make my way to the far side of the pool. The fence is white and there are flecks of red on my side dotting the spot where he’s been slamming his head against the wood and the blood from his forehead has spattered. I can imagine what his side of the fence looks like. Bob/Robert notices me and groans; it reminds me of the sound Tim “the Tool Man” Taylor makes at the beginning of Home Improvement. It’s almost identical, except for the fact that Tim Taylor isn’t dead and pounding his head against the back side of my fence.

My fence was built by the previous owners of our house. It’s not your typical subdivision fence with slats nailed to two by fours, at least not in the sense. There are slats, and there are two by fours. But the genius do-it-yourselfers who owned the place before I did decided to get creative and left a foot of open space at the top of the fence, so where there should have been an extra foot of privacy is a foot of open air topped by a two by four laid sideways and supported at the center of each span by another piece of two by four screwed in vertically. It’s one of these pieces of vertical two by fours that Bob/Robert has started pulling on, rocking against the fence with the full weight of his body. The entire fence is swaying with the motion; the lumber wasn’t in the best shape years ago, and it’s sure not going to hold up to the determined rocking of an overweight dead man for long.

Bob/Robert stops yanking on the fence and turns his head to look over his shoulder. He doesn’t turn his body, and I can hear the pop and snap as the vertebrae in his neck strain to swivel his meaty skull to an impossible angle. Journey and Ozzy, his Irish Setters, are growling from the patio, their heads low and the hair along their backs raised. Bob/Robert’s torso finally gets the hint and rotates with the rest of his spine and he turns to face the dogs with a jerk. His head cocks to one side, the same way the pool kid’s head did, and he takes one unsteady step in the general direction of his patio and the dogs. The fence is safe, for now. Bob/Robert isn’t.

It’s here where I get my first glimpse of how typical, loving family pets react to their undead guardians. It’s neither typical nor loving. Ozzy, or maybe Journey, springs from the patio and bounds across the small back yard, rocketing into Bob/Robert’s belly with the force of a small car. I can hear snarling and growling and teeth snapping. Bob/Robert stumbles backwards two steps, his arms pinwheeling, and goes down hard on his back. Journey, or maybe Ozzy, her hackles raised, slinks across the yard and digs her long teeth into the meat of Bob/Robert’s calf, shaking her head like she’s playing with a tug toy. But she’s not; the denim of Bob/Robert’s jeans tears as does the meat of the leg Journey has between her teeth. Blood flows freely over her muzzle and she shakes even harder, ripping chunks of flesh and muscle free from the bone. Bob/Robert lets loose a howl that’s stifled into a bleating whine, growing higher in pitch as Ozzy’s teeth sink deeper into his neck, finally tearing through his larynx and shutting off his cries forever.

The dogs are going absolutely ape shit and Bob/Robert is thrashing in the grass, his arms and legs waving and kicking wildly. I wonder if it’s him that’s doing the moving, or if the dogs are driving his activity at this point. Both Setters are drenched in slick, red blood. Ozzy, or maybe Journey, has given up on the gaping hole in Bob/Robert’s neck, trading gristle for the soft, loose flesh of his belly. Bob/Robert is no longer thrashing and I can see through the ragged flesh that used to be his flabby neck that the pearly white rings of his upper spine have chewed apart, leaving his skull and what’s left of his face independent of the rest of his body. Bob/Robert’s jaw is still working feverishly and his eyes are wide in their sockets. The rest of him, though, is no longer active aside from random jerks and twitches as Ozzy and Journey tear wet chunks of skin away.

And it’s here, in the warm summer afternoon, with my stiff jeans riding harshly over what will surely become one of the worst sunburns of my life, that it hits me, hard:  I’m no longer the husband, the father, the funny guy in the office that everyone used to like to be around. I’m never going to be that guy again. In the period of a few weeks, I’ve killed, I’ve escaped being killed, and I’ve watched death and undeath in just about every sense imaginable, and in ways that before The Flu would have been unimaginable. I’ve lost the capacity to feel, to care, to give a rat’s ass about anything but surviving. I realize, as the sun continues to work its magic over every inch of my still-exposed skin, that I don’t remember much about Bob/Robert, and even worse, I don’t very much care. What I find myself thinking as I watch his dogs chew flesh from bone and quarrel over a hand that’s been worked free of the wrist, is that beyond the carnage in Bob/Robert’s back yard, up two steps and through those sliding glass doors, is a kitchen, and a pantry. Food.

Bob/Robert didn’t acquire his considerable girth eating rice with condensed milk.

I summon the strength to turn my head away from the dogs and pad quietly across the pool deck to the sunroom and step into the gloom of the house. It’s cooler in here, but not a whole lot. It smells musty and humid, and the aroma of decay is drifting down from the bedroom where the blood-soaked carpeting has begun to ferment. I pull on a pair of socks, even my feet are a brilliant red, and then my boots. In my duffel, I rummage until my fingers tighten around the grip of the Glock. I pop out the mag and make sure the clip is full, and slap it back cop style with the palm of my hand and tuck the gun into the waist of my Levis along with the laundry bag and head back outside.

Ozzy and Journey have made one motherfucker of a mess of their master during the five minutes or so I was inside. Bob/Robert’s naked torso, along with one leg, is sprawled face down across the patio. A pool of red the size of a truck tire is spreading from half a dozen leaks where pieces of him have been bitten and ripped away. Another leg is next to the fence, with a good nine inches of femur protruding from the meat of the thigh; it looks like a ham. I don’t even see the arms. Ozzy, or maybe Journey, is tugging at a length of slick, grey rope leaking from a gaping hole in Bob/Robert’s belly.

Quietly, I lift a bistro chair from the patio and prop it next to the fence and climb over, dropping onto the grass next to Bob/Robert’s head. His eyes are still moving, and they follow me as I step over. His tongue is working, licking away at the air. Ozzy and Journey are oblivious as I slip the Glock from my jeans and wrap both hands around the grip, making sure to keep the muzzle pointed at the ground. Good thing for all those cop shows I used to watch. I side step my way across the back yard, carefully picking my way between chunks of flesh and skin and who-knows-what-else.

The patio door is ajar, and I quietly slip into the gloom of Bob/Robert’s breakfast nook. The kitchen is just to my left, and I step softly around the bar stools and high top counter. The window over the sink looks out on the back yard and, I notice, this vantage point provides me with a damn good view of my pool and patio. So much for privacy fencing. I’m standing there, getting pissed as I think about Bob/Robert watching my girls as they played in the pool, probably rubbing his dick against the cabinet while he did it.

Journey and Ozzy are still tugging at a hunk of slippery intestine. Good dogs.

I reach up and pull a cabinet door open. Dishes. The next one is filled with drinking glasses, and one whole shelf is dedicated to those Looney Tunes glasses from Burger King in the late seventies. Foghorn Leghorn, Bugs, and the Road Runner smile back at me from the cupboard. I’m not positive, but I think I’d broken every single one of those glasses before they were a week old, and I don’t remember getting into much trouble over it, either.

Door Number Three. The cabinet over the stove is filled with boxes of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and packets of rice pilaf and the modern version of Rice-a-Roni. Noodles with alfredo sauce. Noodles with butter sauce. Noodles with butter and garlic sauce, and they’re all coming home with me. I drop the contents of the cabinet into the laundry bag and try the next cupboard. There’s jelly, and jars of peanut butter and boxes of crackers, and they all go into the bag as well. The last cupboard is half empty; the remainder of packages of Twinkies and Hostess Cupcakes litters the first shelf. The upper level is crammed with little jars of vitamins and herbals and prescription meds. Since I won’t likely be making it to the Walgreen’s any time soon, these all go into the bag, which I pull tight and sling over my shoulder.

From behind me, there’s a low growl and I hear myself saying “fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck” in my head as I remember I didn’t close the patio door. Slowly, I turn my back to the counter to face the fucking Hounds of the Baskervilles. Ozzy and Journey are staring me down, the hair on their backs raised as they growl in harmony. Both dogs are completely drenched in blood; it’s literally dripping from the long fur of their necks onto the linoleum of the kitchen floor.

Ozzy and Journey aren’t moving; they’re just growling. I’m for sure not moving. I’m still not moving as I notice their eyes aren’t quite right. In fact, they’re wrong. The warm spark of life is gone from them, and a cold blanket of fear wraps around me as I realize I’m staring into the dead eyes of – wait for it – zombie dogs. Zombie. Fucking. Dogs. Unbelievable.

 The dogs don’t move. I don’t move. The Glock is on the counter to my left. It’s go-time. With my right foot, I kick at one of the bar stools, punting it into Ozzy (or Journey) just as he springs from the floor. The stool catches him in mid leap and he topples backwards as Journey starts her leap. The two of them topple onto the floor. I make a leap of my own, up onto the bar, my back scraping hard along the edge of the counter top. My hand slaps frantically along the counter until my fingers find the hard plastic of the Glock, and I manage to bring my arm around just in time to squeeze a couple rounds into Ozzy’s chest as he leaps up from the slippery, bloody floor. The slugs slam into him, driving him backwards across the kitchen and once again into Journey. With both hands on the grip, I take a slow breath and squeeze another two shots into Journey’s head, half of which peels away with a splash of   spatters onto the far wall. Ozzy growls and looks at me with those dead dog-eyes and I pump three shots into him; the first two blow holes into his neck below his muzzle. The third hits home, ripping through the soft black nose as it bores a tunnel through Ozzy’s sinuses and brain cavity and blasts a fist-sized hole out of the back of his head.  

Man’s best friends are dead. Again. I slide down from the counter and heft the laundry bag over my shoulder, which hurts like hell from my sunburn. I wonder if Bob/Robert has any aloe in here.