twilight or the crappy lighting at the gas station, but his skin looked blue and streaked with veins. His eyes looked like every capillary in them had burst at the same time. I couldn’t get my keys in the ignition fast enough.
When I finally sped away he started walking the way I had gone, like he was going to follow me. I was still shaking when I got to the house. Erin was in the shower and I had time to collect my nerves and get some liquid courage (cognac) in me. By the time Erin had got out of the bathroom, dried off and changed, it all seemed like a bad nightmare that was rapidly diminishing from my memory. You know we don’t have a television in the house.” (I so wanted to stop him there and ask him how in the hell that was possible, hadn’t he ever heard of ESPN? How do you not have a TV in this day and age, that’s like a stone age man not having a cave. It’s just not natural, but again this didn’t seem the appropriate time to interject.) “So we didn’t get any news reports. We were just sitting in the living room talking about the day and listening to one of my CD’s, when I heard this thud.” (I knew that thud.) “It wasn’t at the front door, it was at the living room window. So I’m figuring it’s some bird that smashed into the window, but how stupid does the bird have to be to smash into a shade drawn window? I guess that’s why they call people bird-brained.” He strained a small laugh through his teeth.
“It wasn’t a bird though,” I finished for him. The memory was traumatic for him and he was having difficulty relating it.
“No,” he choked out. “It was the guy/thing from the gas station and he was holding what was left of Rebel.” Rebel was Paul and Erin’s beagle, about as mellow a dog as ever lived, quick to wag a tail and give a lick. I felt bad for his loss. “I could hear Erin screaming behind me as she was looking at the same thing I was. At first I wasn’t sure what he was holding. It was just a jumble of fur, splintered bone and blood. It could have been anything, I guess,” he sobbed. After a few minutes he continued. “I had just let him out. He...he was adamant about going outside. I thought he really had to pee, so I let him out. Even with Erin screaming and the horror of what that thing was holding began to dawn on me I was still with it enough to notice there were about six or seven more
That was news to me. “You called?”
“Yeah I didn’t think I got through, I must have tried a couple of hundred times. I was on my last bar of battery when it finally rang on your side.”
“When?!” I asked incredulously.
“Damn, must have been yesterday morning,” he answered.
“When I went to the armory,” I finished more to myself than him.
“When…when I saw the boys across the street I thought the cavalry had shown up. When I realized you weren’t with them I wanted them to leave, I really did. But I also wanted to live. I wanted to be able to protect Erin. You know how that is, right? Trying to protect a loved one I mean,” he said as he looked up at me from his beer.
I nodded in agreement. I know that feeling all too well, and I also knew how it felt to feel as if you had failed. I couldn’t blame my friend for wanting to get help. I was pissed my kids thought it would be a good idea to go and get him though. He stood up and swayed back a bit. He was looking for a hug, which I was all too willing to give. I told him I loved him and that he should go sleep it off, not so much because he was drunk but because I wanted him to stop drinking my damn beers. Paul felt absolved as he stumbled to the couch. A small smile spread across his lips as he pulled the blanket up to his chin and fell into a relaxed sleep uninterrupted by the interminable pounding of dead flesh against his abode.
I finished my beer and another three as I pondered what would happen when the zombies did break through our defenses. That they would break through was never in doubt as far as I was concerned. How I was going to be prepared for it was another matter. I had no desire to be trapped in my unfinished attic waiting to starve or freeze to death while a bunch of pus-mongers roamed freely through my house. I had a couple of ideas I wanted to immediately implement but the loud boisterous snoring of Henry reminded me that perhaps now wasn’t the time to be doing home alterations. There was one thing I could do though as I went back upstairs and grabbed my jacket, flashlight, crowbar and rifle. It was kind of nice falling asleep fully dressed, it made getting ready a lot quicker proposition. The cold nearly snapped me out of my mild inebriation. What it actually did though was a much more pleasant sensation of awakening me fully while letting me keep my burgeoning buzz. Maybe there was an angle I could exploit here if the world ever returned to normal. “Drink Arctic Blast Beer, Be Fully Awake When You Say Something Inappropriate!” I could have a guy give a wide-eyed thumbs up as he grins to the camera after having received a slap from an attractive young lady. “Arctic Blast – When You Need To Know When You’ve Said Something Stupid! Remember Every Offending Remark! Every Hilarious Antic! Every I Love You Man!”
So. Maybe the world wasn’t ready for Arctic Blast Beer, a cold detonation with every twist top!
CHAPTER 17 
Journal Entry - 15
I knew where I wanted to go, I just didn’t know if it’d be worth it. It seemed like a considerable amount of preparation to walk a measly fifteen feet. Almost directly straight out from my front door in the middle of my lawn was a storm drain, I know what you’re thinking, oh how convenient! Well it wasn’t when I was throwing the football around with my boys, I had once had to go to my doctor because I had hyper-extended my knee on the damn thing. Who puts a storm drain on a lawn? I had never opened it or seen it opened in the time that I lived here. After some serious prying I was finally able to force the frost to yield its prize. The cover came up with a loud bang. I had a momentary glimmer of guilt and even stopped to look around and see if anyone had noticed my transgression. There would be no 9-1-1 call tonight. The top thudded to the side, the sound deadened by the frost in the air. I took out my flashlight and shone around in the hole for all the good it was going to do. If I had looked closer on the day that I tripped I would have realized it wasn’t a storm drain, I guess I just always assumed, but we know about that idiom. It was an electrical conduit. That made much more sense being in the front lawn. The problem was that it was no more than twenty-four inches around and most of that space was taken up with, wait for it, wait…yup, you guessed it, electrical cabling. All right, so much for exit strategy Plan A. The more I looked down that hole the more trapped I felt. We weren’t so much holding the zombies out as we were keeping ourselves in. Hell, we were like cattle all penned up awaiting our slaughter. I could not escape the truth of that phrase.
If I had not let the stupid higher reasoning overrule my gut feelings I would have packed everyone up and left that night. Oh how I wish that was how it had played out.
I went back into the house, grabbed another beer and sat with Paul in the living room. He didn’t say much as he was still asleep. I sat in the dark. I was in a brooding mood. Complacency meant death. My mind was feverishly coming up with and summarily dismissing possible escape plans. I had some viable ideas for defense and I would employ those later in the morning, but I could not for the life of me come up with a foolproof plan for evacuation WHEN the time came.
Tracy awoke me some hours later. I had fallen asleep in the chair still clutching my half drunken beer. I hadn’t spilled any but I still hadn’t finished it and with the thing now being body temperature warm and my mouth tasting like burnt cheese, that wasn’t going to happen, party foul be damned!
