Curiosity was killing him I could almost sense it. “There’s only a couple Mike. I know it’s Jed and all, but still.”
I pointed to a small nametag festooned to Jed’s breast pocket.
“Oh fuck.” Brendon, turned on a dime, Travis and Justin were on his heels.
I stared long and hard into Jed’s eyes trying with every particle of my being to discern some small part of him that may have retained anything remotely resembling humanity. There was nothing there. He would eat me as quickly as the next without the smallest bit of remorse for what he did. I slowly removed the weights that BT had placed the night before. Each one seemed to be attached to my heart, miring it down into the depths of despair. BT came up just as I had finished pulling the last 50 pounder out of the way.
“Oh I knew if I waited long enough I wouldn’t have to move those things again.” BT said in way to jovial a mood for my liking. He saw that I was not enjoying his conviviality. “What’s up Mike? I mean Nicole came back crying and then the boys said that we had to get stuff ready to go, but they said there was only a few zombies.”
I just pointed out the door. Jed had followed me and watched me hungrily as I cleared the doorway.
“It’s just a…Jed? Is that Jed? What the fuck is Jed doing here?”
“Look at his name tag.”
“What the fuck is a zombie doing with a name tag?” BT asked. His features turned ashen as he focused in on the little white card.
I hated nametags and this one wasn’t going to do anything to change that. Anyplace you ever had to go where people needed a nametag was not a place that I wanted to frequent. I don’t give a shit if you’re Cindy from Spokane, I didn’t know you before tonight and I have no desire to know you after. Do they use them at High School reunions so that you recognize then laugh at the football jock who is now fifty pounds overweight and balding? Or maybe for the prom queen who pumped out 5 kids, smokes like a chimney and now scratches her ass in public? I mean if that’s the case then I guess they’re alright, but Jed’s nametag didn’t give a name, only a message. ‘Found You’. Those two ominous words were a personal affront. Don’t get me wrong I understood that this world was now a survival of the fittest. It was a depraved cruel world and getting harsher by the moment. Zombies were everywhere and would attempt to eat us with wild abandonment. Renegade roves of thieves, muggers, pillagers and general degenerates were also out there and given the opportunity would take everything they could from us. But this was different. We were being hunted, purposefully sought out for extermination. My fears for my family soared to new depths of despair. Like life wasn’t already hard enough. I had come to love Jed, but I thought no more for the bullet I put through his head than he would have had he got a hold of my flesh.
“FUCK YOU!” I screamed into the day, hopeful that my words would find the ears of those that came after us.
And they did, but not with the desired effect. The car that had delivered Jed sat idling in the shadows of an alleyway across from the sporting goods store. Cigarette smoke poured out through the slightly open window, a mirthless laugh escaped the driver’s dry and cracked lips “Soon Talbot, so very, very soon.” The car pulled out and away on the deserted roadway as Jed’s body twitched one final time on the frozen pavement.
CHAPTER 15 
Within ten minutes we were loaded up and on the road. My mood couldn’t have been any more sour if I had just come home to realize my wife had run off with my best friend and taken the dog. (Wait, scratch that, if she had taken Henry that would have been worse.) A small grim grin bubbled to the surface with that new thought.
“Mike.” Tracy said her face a lighter shade of white. “Mike.” She said again when I didn’t immediately respond. “Brendon’s having a tough time keeping up.”
“Huh.” I said breaking free from my black thoughts.
“Brendon, the other minivan, they can’t keep up.” She said, her knuckles white on the dashboard.
The tachometer was buried deep in the red as the Terrible Teal machine was topping out at somewhere near 120 miles per hour. I couldn’t be sure because the numbers only went to 110 but the needle was pressed firmly against the upraised stop pin. Brendon’s van was a distant memory in the rear view mirror.
Tracy placed her hand on my shoulder. “Mike.” She said pleadingly. BT sat quietly in the back. A few more shades lighter and he would be able to get into some of the finer country clubs in the area. A tire blow out now would most likely send us into the Guinness book of records for most barrel rolls. Well as a kid I had always wanted to get into that book of oddities. Probably for something more mundane like how many pieces of bubble gum I could chew and not necessarily for being the world’s largest rolling meat grinder. My foot eased off the accelerator. I had placed so much force on my right leg trying to press the gas pedal into the floorboard that I was now in the unenviable process of trying to alleviate a charley horse while also keeping this missile on the straight and narrow.
Even with Brendon traveling at a steady 70 miles per hour, I was out of the van and massaging my offending calf before Brendon even came into sight on the horizon.
“Jesus Mike, what the hell are you doing?” Jen asked as she came out of the van.
I looked over to Brendon he looked strained. Pushing the non-aerodynamic brick down the highway at speeds he didn’t feel comfortable with had made him break out in a sweat.
“Sorry man.” I said to him.
“It’s nothing.” He lied as he pulled his fingers off the steering wheel.
“Dad, you don’t look good.” Nicole said with concern.
Justin smiled from the rear seat in the van.
“It doesn’t matter.” I said bleakly.
“What doesn’t matter Mike?” Tracy asked as she came up beside me.
“All of this, none of this. No matter how hard we run, no matter where we go, they’ll still come. They’ll come a time, no matter what I do, I won’t be able to stop them from taking you, any of you.”
“Mike, it’s not just you.” (I wasn’t going to add this part but it’s part of the story and it only scratches on the outer corners of breaking the man-code.) BT said tenderly. He had come out and was actually giving me a hug. “We’re in this together. We’ll look out for each other. I would no sooner let anything happen to any of your kin than I would let something happen to myself.”
He was big enough to be my dad when I was maybe 5 or 6 years old, the proportion was correct. I lived that lie for a few more seconds as I collected my despair, and didn’t so much dispose of it as try and compartmentalize it. I could tell it was surging and would soon leak from under the door of my makeshift compartment and probably out through the keyhole but for now I had gained a measure of composure and was once again ready to face the world, for the most part.
“Tracy, you want to drive?” I asked her. It was then I think everyone must have thought I had finally given up.
“What? My knee is killing me.”
“Uh huh.” BT said as he got back into the van.
That was mostly true, but there was still a part of me that might have relished the thought of screaming off the road at a buck twenty and plowing into a utility pole. I would not give my pursuers that satisfaction. Someone was going to catch a lot of lead for pushing me this hard, and maybe an arrow or two for good measure.
Tracy drove well, which in itself was something of a feat. Normally the only way she got behind the wheel with me in the car was when I was entirely too inebriated or had suffered one of my many varied injuries. Under either circumstance I didn’t give a rat’s ass on how she got me to where we were going. I can’t even begin to relate to you in this narrative how many times the kids had come home from somewhere where their mom had driven them and had horror stories about this and that person being cut off, semi’s turning over and small planes bursting into flame. I think there was even something in there about a dam busting but that might possibly have been an over-exaggeration. I dozed in and out of a fitful sleep. My mood fluctuating between pissed off at my lot in life and happy that I wasn’t being pissed on. Basically varying degrees of suckydom.
Tracy kept to a geriatric pace off 55ish, it wasn’t that the conditions merited the reduction in speed, I’m just not so sure how willing she was to get to where we were going. It’s all great in the abstract. ‘I’m going to save my mom!’ but when you get down to the nitty gritty and you realize that you haven’t heard anything in weeks from your 79 year old mom, who lives alone on a farm in North Dakota in one of the coldest winters in recorded history during an outbreak of zombieism, well that reality begins to make a weight of its own. Like a dying star, it creates it’s own
