go of her hand and sat back up. The sharp pain in my shoulder a reminder of what had just happened. BT was looking at me in what I could only describe as shock. He moved faster than any man his size had a right too. He grabbed me and slammed me to the floor of the truck bed. I was beginning to feel light headed. He must have really knocked my head against the floor.
“It wasn’t my fault BT.” I said through fogged vision.
“I know that you damned fool, you’ve been shot.”
“Shot? Zombies don’t shoot guns. You’re crazy man. It sure is getting dark quick.”
“Not a gun, a crossbow.”
A crossbow! A fucking crossbow? Who shoots somebody with a crossbow? What am I an elk? What’s next? Someone gonna whip out a mace? Maybe a scimitar?
My shoulder, for lack of a better term, unraveled. Muscle, tendon, sinew, whatever, just literally began to curl like wet parchment. My biceps bulged, rivaling the Hulk, as my ripped tendons rolled up into them. I noticed with a note of envy how large my muscles looked even as my vision began to blur. (Guys can be vain! Just because I was dying of blood loss and shock didn’t mean I couldn’t appreciate how large my damaged muscles looked.) Searing pain immediately made me wish I would just pass out and die and be over with this. As bone separated from tissue, I’m pretty sure I involuntarily blackened my eye as my arm flung up. That was the least of my problems and I wouldn’t have even registered the fact had not my right eye dimmed and then blacked out before my left one.
“Talbot!” Someone screamed. Sounded like someone I knew. Well I must know them if they knew my name, right? Who gives a shit. “Talbot!” Again with the screaming but it sounded further away, even as I felt arms around me. From somewhere very distant I heard my wife. “Talbot don’t you di….”
I accelerated along a black tube as light emanated from every direction. Its source I could not discern. My speed seemed to be accelerating, although I think it was all relative. It wasn’t me that seemed to be moving so much as the tunnel was streaming past. I wanted to reach out and touch the wall to see if that was the case but I was afraid of doing more damage to my injured wing. Aw what the hell, my arm was barely attached anyway what more could I do. I moved my right arm around, unbelievably happy with how pain free the movement was. ‘Holy crap.’ I muttered. ‘He must have missed. Maybe it’s the wrong arm.’ Having been ambidextrous my entire life I often confused my left from my right. When I moved my left arm and again felt no pain the light of recognition dawned. ‘Holy Shit! I’m dead!’ That thought wasn’t nearly as dreadful as I would have imagined. Oh I was scared to a point, maybe more concerned. Alright I was a little freaked out. My thoughts obviously centering around what is at the end of this tunnel? Do I pull a Wile E. Coyote and smash face first into a faux hole in the wall? Do I come out to a huge drop and fall eternally? (Oh that would suck.) IS there a Heaven? Or worse a hell? My actions thus far in my life could probably gain my entry into either. Was my eternity going to come down to a rock, paper, scissor game between God and Satan? Wow, sacrilege on my final journey cannot be good in the ledger books. Maybe it would be possible to hang out in this tunnel a little longer and weigh my options. Wind buffeted me back as I tried in vain to approach the walls. The speed was picking up I knew I was nearing my final destination, no stops, no layovers. I had a momentary pang for my wife and kids. I did feel remorse that I was dying but only because I wouldn’t be there for them. I had ultimately accepted my fate, for what other choice was there? When I felt another presence nearby, it wasn’t nearly as comforting as I would have expected from the almighty. There was a great sense of anger, of sadness, of a life truly unfulfilled. It took me long moments to pull these vaporous thoughts away from own, the intermingling almost made me believe these errant thoughts were mine. Out of the corner of my awareness I caught movement as it at first trailed behind me by some lengths and then hastened to catch up and pass me by.
“Brendon?” I shouted. So lost was he in his mortality he took no notice of me as he shot on by. I watched in the distance as a light infinitely brighter than what I was experiencing now blazed in acceptance, in love, in its warm embrace. These euphoric feelings washed over and around me. My pang of regret paled, faded and was washed away. Those feelings lasted long after the walls of my tunnel slowed and then began to shift direction, back into the blight, the pain, the hurt, the uncertainty, the love. “He’s back.” Someone familiar sobbed from a hundred million miles away.
Epilogue 
Cops vs. Talbot
TALBOTSODE #1
So I started early dealing with the po-po. I was 16 years old when my high school thought it would be a good idea to deter drunk driving by placing a wrecked car on the front lawn of the school. For some reason that completely eluded me at that moment in life, I thought that was the most inconsiderate act possible. So of course that night my friends and I went and bashed in any and all remaining glass on that car. By the time the cops got there we were out of sight in the woods across the street. We watched them as they shone their lights across the wreckage of the wreck. We also saw them park inconspicuously across the street hoping that said vandals would return.
You know I went back. It’s in my nature. This time it wasn’t with a tire iron. I had made a Molotov cocktail out of some gas and shampoo poured into a coke bottle. My friends had told me ‘I was crazy’ and ‘You’re not going to do it’. So, you know of course, all that really does is incite somebody above and beyond normal stupidity into super stupidity. I was a fast kid, I played half back for the freshman team. How fast was about to be tested.
I went a little further in the woods, away from the cops and emerged from a spot where they could not see my egress. As I walked back up the road towards the school I tried my best to act as innocent as possible. I knew they were watching me. I could feel it. They wanted me to do something wrong just as bad as I wanted to. My first step off the relative safety of the sidewalk and onto the lawn of the school had the police on high alert. My time was short. I pulled out my trusty Bic. The first flick of flame ignited the gas soaked rag immediately. I was momentarily stunned by the flash of fire. The cops however, were not. Their car popped into drive and the engine revved followed almost instantaneously by their headlights turning on. I was bathed in headlights. The iridescent blues and reds sent me hauling ass.
I ran as close to the wreck as I dared, reaching back for all I was worth I hurled the bottle at the car, hoping that I hadn’t missed and have it hit anticlimactically on a tire, or sail harmlessly overhead landing on the soft grass. Neither of those things happened as the bottle smashed throat first into the rear quarter panel. The ensuing fireball probably saved my ass as the cops sheared off from their intercept course.
I’ll give them this though, they recovered quickly and were once again in hot pursuit. At one point the bumper of the cop car actually touched my ass. If I had stumbled there wouldn’t have been a thing in the world he could have done to avoid running me down, like some common criminal, which I guess I was now. When I got to the end of the school grounds I was met with an eight foot high chain link fence. Now remember, I was 16 and in great shape, one jump had me three quarters up and my body was half over the top when the cop car fishtailed to a stop directly underneath me.
The cop actually had the nuts to yell at me to stop. I told him to fuck off as I retreated into the woods. I was semi-surprised he hadn’t shot me. The car was towed off the grounds the very next day.
Talbot – 1, Cops - 0
TALBOTSODE #2
At the ripe old age of 17, having not learned a damn thing from the smashed up car in the previous story, I decided to leave a party I was at, bad idea. I was closer to four sheets to the wind when I decided that I needed to go to my house and grab my marijuana paraphernalia. Must have been 10 different bowls at that party to smoke out of, but NO I had to have mine. So I got behind the wheel of my car and luckily, not a 100 yards from where I started, I smashed into a curb. It blew out my right front tire. I grabbed the keys out of the car, opened the trunk and then drunkenly scattered everything I had in my trunk on the ground around the car.
I couldn’t find the jack to save my life. Although looking back, not finding the jack probably did save my life and someone else’s. I must have been making a hell of a racket because someone yelled out their window that I should just leave because they had called the cops. I might have mumbled something incoherently back to them, but in my addled brain all I could think was that I’d better change this tire quick before they got here.
Now I don’t know if it was a slow night at the old Police station or I blacked out somewhere along the line but the Boys were at the scene in what seemed like a heartbeat.
“Son, you need to stop what you’re doing right now,” The cop said to my back. How I missed the glaring
