CHAPTER ELEVEN
Mike Journal Entry 4
“Got another beer?” I asked John. Drunk was infinitely better than tripping and the quicker I could change my altered states the better. I had long ago stopped staring at the van’s gauges. They kept swirling and melting into each other anyway. The roadway wasn’t much better, but I still had enough presence of mind to keep watching that…barely.
I almost slammed into a tree when I felt the icy prick of death against the back of my neck, or it was the beer John was handing to the front. “Fuck,” I said as I reached back and grabbed the beer. “My hand, John, my hand!” I told him.
“What’s the matter with it?” he asked sitting up to take a look.
“Nothing, just put the beer in my hand next time.”
“Oh you need a beer?” he asked. “Why didn’t you just say something?” He reached in the cooler and placed another freezing can against the back of my neck.
At least this time I was ready for it and I grabbed it quickly. The glow of the burning city in my rearview mirror would have been surreal under normal circumstances. I couldn’t get over the sensation that Godzilla was real and he had just laid waste to the entire area. I hoped that Gary, BT, Mary, and Josh had made it out, because from my vantage point, it didn’t look like anything had survived.
“Man…you crying?” John asked, he was completely leaning over the seat, mere inches from my face.
“I’m fine,” I told him, trying as nonchalant as possible to wipe my tears away.
“Are you out of beer?”
“I’m good,” I told him, but we need to find a place to hole up. I can’t keep driving, if that’s what you’d even call this.”
“There are some cabins a few miles up the road. It’s a little bit off the highway, nice and secluded,” John said.
John’s flashes of lucidity were always welcome. “Just point the way,” I told him.
His index finger was up by the side of my face as he was quite literally pointing the way. I thought he might have been joking at first, or maybe he’d only leave it up there for a moment or two, but ten miles later his finger began to bend as we were coming up on our turn. Then straightened back out as we made the left.
“You think it’s safe?” I asked him as we pulled up to a small camp ground that had six or seven cabins for rent.
“We never got caught,” he answered.
“Who?”
“Me and the wife…we never got caught,” he answered.
“And who would have been doing the catching?” I asked.
“That’s not the point. Come on,” John said as he quickly exited the vehicle.
“Caught doing what?” I asked to his back as I followed. “And that’s exactly the point.” I was three mother fucking steps away from the van when I realized I didn’t have my rifle. I was paranoid, I swear I could see zombies all around, or it was light poles, reality was blurring heavily with hallucinations. I ran quickly back to the van and began to look inside when after a moment I couldn’t find what I was looking for, I had completely forgotten. I jumped, hitting my head on the ceiling when right next to my ear, John asked what I was doing.
“I don’t remember,” I told him.
“That happens to me all the time,” he explained,
“It was important.”
“It always is. If you were meant to have it, it will come back. If not, then you’ve set it free,” he told me prophetically.
“Isn’t that love?” I asked.
“We hardly know each other.”
“I’m never tripping with you again, John,” I told him.
“OH! That’s why I feel so funny. Come on we should go inside.” He said as he fumbled around with a large key ring he produced from God knew where. The keys themselves were making strange echoing vibrations inside my head as they jangled together.
I looked longingly at the van, wishing I had found or could even remember what I was looking for. But I still followed John to the cabin. I don’t know if the drugs were having an effect, but each cabin was painted in some of the most garish colors I had ever seen. The one we were going to was plum purple; the one next to ours—which I was glad we were not going to—was blood red.
“These are some intense colors,” I said to John, hoping that I wasn’t hallucinating this also.
“I’ve never noticed,” John said, standing on the small porch. “We should probably get in, the funky people are coming.”
I didn’t know who the ‘funky people’ were or why I should care, but John seemed to be distressed about it and that was good enough for me. He led me inside. I’d seen closets that were bigger than the cabin, but it had a bed, a small fridge, a television and a chair, pretty much anything a lone man or a couple on a getaway needed.
“I think I know what I forgot,” I told John excitedly.
“About what?” he asked. He was looking through the cabin’s side window.
“The beer, I forgot to get the beer.”
“It’s alright, man,” John said as he took two strides to get across the room to the small dorm fridge. “They’re probably warm but they’re wet.” He flashed a smile as he opened the door, at least a case worth of Natty Lite was stuffed inside.
Had I not been so fucked up on acid, I would have gagged at the display, but as it was, they looked like gleaming cans of honey. “Wonderful,” I said as a funky person slammed into our door.
“Whoa you think they want one, too?” John said as he went to open the door and ask just that.
“We don’t have enough to share,” I said selfishly as I grabbed one of the lukewarm god nectars.
“Probably right,” he said as he let the door handle go.
“Man they’re persistent,” I said as I downed the beer in two or three gulps. Even as high as I was, I was more in tune with how disagreeable the sub-par beverage was thonking around in my gut than I was with the zombies that were trying to gain entry. “I really wish I had a gun,” I said arbitrarily.
“Are you a fed?” John asked warily.
“What?” I asked as I turned to him, not realizing that I had another beer open and was now pouring it down the front of my poncho.
“You said you wanted a gun, only feds have guns.”
I turned back to my beer and with a conscious effort I tilted my hand back up so it would stop soaking me. “Naw, man, I ain’t no fed, I just think we need one.”
Glass shattered from the side window, at least four or five sets of hands reached through the curtains.
“Whoa that’s intense!” John said.
“Zombies!” The word finally found its way through the folds of my convoluted mind and out my mouth. Arms poked through the window and the door looked like it was in danger of giving at any moment. Like a caged animal I looked frantically for a back door, even in my state it would have been extremely difficult to miss something like that in a cabin so small.
“We should get in the basement,” John suggested.
Again I spun around like a top on Red Bull. “John there’s two windows and a door that leads outside. There’s no basement.”
“There isn’t?” he asked with alarm. “That’s bad news then, we’ll have to share our beer with the funky people.”
“John the Tripper, they don’t want the beer.”
