'Til Death Do Us Part

place. Although I wasn’t sure if I was still trapped in my mind, or Eliza’s for that matter (though I didn’t know who she was at the time). It was another forty-seven days (or an hour) before I ran across the next plant, it was most assuredly a brother to the one I had met earlier, it was slightly more full-bodied, but it wasn’t going to win any competitions at the Rose Off. I stopped briefly to acknowledge its existence and kept going.

Then I saw something in the far distance scurrying off. ‘Scurrying off’ was just fine with me, that meant it wasn’t coming my way, the best defense I would be able to muster would revolve around some rock throwing and in my High School hey days I hadn’t been able to get a ball much over 65 miles per hour and I know my shoulder hadn’t aged very well. Best I’d be able to do would be a nice bruising before whatever wanted to eat me slammed into my body with teeth a gnashing.

But whatever was going on, I was coming out of the abyss of sterility. The outer fringes of hardy life for sure, but who knows what I would begin to encounter as I kept moving steadily forward, but what were my options? Stay and languish waiting for death, but I wasn’t sure if I could really die here. I’d been walking for hours and I wasn’t tired, thirsty or hungry, I just was.

I was self-aware enough to realize that this woman (who I will now call Eliza going forward) hadn’t physically teleported me to anywhere, but mentally I was on a trip for the ages. And not like any trip I had ever taken in my experimental drug days of college (shit forget Tracy finding this, I’m glad, in one sense, that my dad will never see this, he knew I wasn’t the greatest student in school but he most likely didn’t know why, even at this juncture in life I had no desire to spill the beans on what I used to do).

Mentally I was out to lunch. Was my body still in the ground across from Little Turtle or had Eliza hefted me over her shoulder and was even now bringing me back to her lair for whatever insidious reason she might have? I had no idea. More than likely, I was propped up in the corner of my home drooling excessively after finally having traveled into the deep end of psychosis. How long would Tracy change my diapers before she just put me out of all of our miseries?

I walked on because sitting and reflecting on what was or could be or may be, really just isn’t my way. If you’ve read any of my journals I’m sure you’ve come to the realization that I act first and then have to figure out a way to get out of my newest predicament. Someday I’ll learn not to do that, but my guess is that it will be my last (day).

The pea green color may have been steadily brightening it was difficult to say, if it was happening at all, it was in degrees so slow as to not be registerable. But I just got the feeling that was what was happening. Still didn’t know if it even meant anything, although I would take any sort of light no matter the color over the pitch blackness I had been immersed in earlier. I would have feared any sort of movement in that environment. Looking back on all this now, I’ve got to wonder if Tommy’s hand played in any of this. I can’t imagine that Eliza would have given me any sort of handhold from which to pull myself out of the quagmire she had plunged me into.

The illumination had Tommy written all over it. In the short time that I got to know the boy he had stamped himself indelibly onto my life and the lives of all of those around me. It would have been just like him to risk everything to help a man he barely knew at the time. Although he was much more aware of the bigger picture than I was. I was under the very misguided thought process that I was only dealing with a zombie apocalypse, why and how could I have known any differently. Well like Alex’s meemaw used to say, “When it rains, you get wet.” No wiser words could have been uttered.

I miss Alex. My gut says he’s dead, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to confirm that until I meet him once again topside if the big man deems me worthy. Wow, I’m pretty easily distracted these days. I think a lot has to do with the injuries I’ve sustained. I think for necessity sake I will try harder to stay on task if only to finish this infernal story. Although it’s hard not to miss the ones that have fallen along the way, it’s when I write that the pain becomes acute, focused like the tip of a particularly sharp knife blade, it finds ways to cut and slice, deeply. Sorry. Where was I? Right, I didn’t know it then, but it had to be Tommy’s influence in this alien scape.

Fuck! (I yelled it, then wrote it, that was cathartic.) The puke green light was getting brighter. I think I’ve established that. I was coming across increasing vegetation, nothing that could really even sustain a lone locust but there was a comfort of shared life here. I hadn’t seen anything scurry off since that first time and was now beginning to wonder if I had even seen it or whether it was just my mind trying to establish some sort of normalcy to this void although a Wendy’s or Subway would have been preferable (but not McDonald’s, never them again.)

Still I wandered, much like Moses. (My blasphemy alone in these journals is probably enough to keep me exiled from THE epitome of gated communities.) My guess was I was meant to ‘wait’ in this place while my real self wasted away, would I know when that end came. Would I cease to exist here or would that mean I was now forever bound here. Did the zombie girl have that kind of sway? Could she parlay my soul? I wasn’t much of a people person, but who the hell was I going to issue snide and sarcastic comments to if I was alone. I could always berate myself, it wouldn’t be the first time, but that would get old quick.

I kept walking for what else was there, and then, in the hazy distance, there was an irregularity. At first I could not discern it and then it began to dawn on me that I was seeing objects not of nature. Man made? Could it be? My heart leapt, that of course was until I began to think of where I may or may not be, would I want to come across anything made by the sentient beings of this place, because that would mean the sentient beings were around also. Maybe that would be preferable, one quick death instead of this long drawn out crap.

Typical Talbot, jump headlong into the teeth of the tiger instead of gently skirting around. I guess I just work better with the gun pointing at my head rather than having to think my way out. Well when you have as little going on in your head as I do you could see why I tend to go with my strengths! As the day wore on I began to see wisps of smoke coming up from a variety of homes, I guess huts might be a more apt word. Well shit, if I want to get honest, more like earthen mounds with a thatch roof.

“Hello,” I said, I wanted to yell it, but I still felt like a stranger in a strange land and until I knew the customs I wanted to be as discreet as possible. I began to peer inside of a hut when the flap of deer hide used as a door began to rustle. I stepped back as a heavyset man. No…that was the wrong terminology, he wasn’t fat, he was thick as if he were hewn from one solid block of wood. There wasn’t a curve on the man, he was all hard angles. I had height on him and that was it, his arms looked as thick as my legs. He walked right past me and I couldn’t have been more than six inches from him. I wanted to shout at him to look at me, but the square set of his jaw outlined in a scowl made me think twice.

I could hear guttural talking inside, it sounded Germanic but the brutish words issuing softly made even the harsh modern day German language seem French. The only reason I dared peek in was the voices sounded young, I might be able to take the off spring of the thick man that had just passed me by. You’ll notice I said ‘maybe’. “Hello?” I asked as I walked in. I had a girlfriend back in college that was taking German as a second language. She used to speak it all the time around me. You’d think I would have at least retained the word ‘hello’ in German. Nope not me I was too busy staring at her tits, sue me. I’m sorry if what every male on the planet does offends you.

Listen, the planet right now is in the midst of a near extinction event, I can help with the repopulating of our home. It’s VERY, VERY simple, because if you’re a woman and a guy is next to you, he wants to have sex—except for the obvious exceptions, related, dead, or zombie. Other than that, if he’s had a good sandwich today, humping is the only other thing on his mind. I mean now that sports have literally been wiped off the table, what else is there really?

I think I’m avoiding this next part; I’ve been sucker punched in the gut with less wind knocked out of me. The inside of the hut had a stone fireplace off to the side, a small table was in the center and a pile of filthy animal skins was in the far corner where I imagine the family, I use that word loosely, slept. A girl with long raven hair was leaning over a table, tears fell heavily from her face, her torn and worn skirt was draped around her shoulders, her skinny legs caked in dirt were shaking violently, an even younger boy was facing away from the scene he kept repeatedly banging his head against a stout branch, the sobbing and the hollow knocking were the only sounds in the small enclosure.

“Are you okay?” I asked. My heart was thumping wildly in my throat. I couldn’t think of anything else to say. The girl had been raped and the young boy, I figured to be her brother, had not dealt with the violence very well. What kind of monster does this? I put my hands up in as non-threatening a posture as possible and approached. I had made up my mind, I was going to kill that man or die trying.

“Miss,” I said trying to sound as comforting as possible. Her tears and mutterings kept up, the boy was now rocking back and forth crying heavily himself, he was saying something, but even in a foreign language I could tell it was gibberish by its tone and cadence. The girl had still not acknowledged my presence as I approached. She