“It’s your house, my man,” BT said. “I don’t see why not.”
I was more inclined to send him packing for a few minutes, but I don’t think he was going to do any heart to heart talking with Deneaux anytime soon.
“What’s going on, Mike?” BT asked. “I caught some of her conversation with Mary, but I kept drifting in and out. All I could really tell is that she wants to get out of here as quick as possible.”
“It’s nothing concrete, BT, but she’s trying to cover her tracks.” I related the story of finding Brian and how he was facing away AFTER she had called him, and how she now was in possession of Paul’s rifle. I also mentioned how she had said she was alone, but the house she was staying in provided clues to the contrary. “It’s nothing but a suspicion, but she did something she’s trying to cover up and she wants us to leave the scene of the crime before we turn up any evidence.”
“Brian’s dead,” BT said wiping his hand down his face. “Man, I almost don’t want to go back to your brother’s and see what this does to Cindy.”
“I cannot leave here until I know about Paul. There’s no way I could look Erin in the face and tell her that I have absolutely no clue what happened to her husband and my best friend.”
“So Brian was a zombie? Why lie about anything to do with that then?” BT asked confused. “Could the bullet have spun him around or anything?”
I looked over to Josh before I replied. “Exit wound was on his face.”
“Gross,” Josh said, I agreed implicitly.
“She’s acting so shifty, even more so than usual. I don’t have a good feeling about Paul.” I hitched a little, I’m still mostly human I thought, I’m still entitled to have feelings. “I’ve known him for thirty years. I owe it to him at the very least to find out what happened.”
“You’ve got to prepare yourself for the real possibility that he is no longer with us,” BT said tenderly.
“I know that man, I do. With a rifle, Paul wasn’t a huge threat; well without…” I didn’t, I couldn’t finish the damn sentence.
“I’d like to head out with you in the morning,” BT said. “Help look for him.”
“Me too,” Josh threw in before I could even tell BT no.
“No, on both counts.”
“You gonna stop me?” BT said, trying to rise up off the bed and use his height advantage as a mitigating factor.
“BT, Josh could stop you right now.”
Josh looked over at me like maybe I shouldn’t be throwing him under the bus quite like that.
“Dammit, Mike! I’m as weak as you right now,” BT said, cursing. “I can barely move.”
I didn’t rise to his bait, I did think about putting him in a headlock though, just because I thought I could probably take him. But merely to gaze upon the man is to feel intimidation. “You sure you never played in the NFL?”
“Why? Because I’m big and I’m black?” BT said with some force.
I thought about it. “Well, yeah.”
He laughed. “Played some college ball, had some pro scouts interested. It never went any further.”
And he dropped it, I don’t know if there was no more to add or he didn’t want to talk about it.
“What time are we leaving tomorrow?” Josh asked.
“No way, kiddo,” I told him. “Your mom, if given the chance, would throw me out into the street in front of a convoy.”
“A what?” Josh asked.
“A bunch of trucks,” BT clarified. “And he’s right. It’s too dangerous out there for you.”
“I’m almost twelve,” Josh said, making it sound as authoritative as possible.
“Yeah, and I’m sure you’re going to want to make thirteen,” I told him. And then reality with its ugly iron fist hit me with an uppercut. What really is the rest of his life going to encompass? Eventually, they are going to run out of food and they will have to leave their relatively safe haven and neither seemed to have the skills to scavenge in a hostile world. Basically, they were living on borrowed time.
That didn’t mean I was taking him with me on a learning expedition, but I still felt for the kid and his mother. Her ex-husband, his father, was gone (
Between zombies and criminally opportunistic humans, the world was merely a shell. The day of humans as the dominant species on the planet was coming to close and it was just as violently dangerous and deadly as the great comet strike that took out the dinosaurs two hundred million years ago. There would be a few viable communities still intact, places like Little Turtle or Easter Evans School, but as the zombies’ resources became fewer and fewer, they would seek these last food zones out relentlessly. Nothing would be able to withstand that type of onslaught.
Ultimately, the zombies and Eliza would have won, but what was the prize? She would rule a planet of mindless eating machines. I can’t imagine she had thought this out completely. She gets off on the power she holds over people and the fear she instills in their hearts. Zombies didn’t care, at all, they eat. And make no mistake, we would be just like every other extinct species on the planet, gone and for good. Seen any Tasmanian wolves lately? Maybe a dodo bird or two? There is no species regeneration. And Eliza and Tomas would hardly qualify as Adam and Eve.
Would she live long enough to see another sentient being rise from the ashes of our deaths? Would dolphins come ashore and finally take their rightful place as care-takers of the land? Would zombies give anything a chance to get a foothold? They ate everything. They were worse than locusts. They stripped the land clean of every type of animal. Looks like it was going to be the age of plants. I hope Eliza likes roses.
I had spent the last few seconds mulling over my dark thoughts when Josh interrupted me. Maybe the kid had an idea what he was in for. “I will be thirteen. I miss my dad, but I know he’s not coming back. I don’t tell my mom that because she needs to believe that I think he is. I need to see what it is like out there. We won’t be able to stay here forever, no matter what my mom says. Sometimes I think that she just doesn’t want to think about it. I think about it every day. We’ve got maybe six months of food and three months of bottled water, so what time are we leaving?”
“You’re a realist, Josh, and I can appreciate that,” I told him, and that was the honest truth. “But you’re not my kid and the danger out there, it’s real. This isn’t a training exercise. I would no sooner put you in any needless danger than I would any of my own.”
Mary had at some point come up the stairs and had been at Josh’s doorway while I spoke to him. She grudgingly nodded at me for what I said to him, but she still didn’t want him to be with me. The kid might have been thinking about going out at some point while he was with his mother, but he had never before voiced it. So again, something else was my fault by default.
“Come on, Josh. It’s time for bed,” Mary said, grabbing her son by the shoulders, steering him towards his bed.
It didn’t seem that late to me, but that wasn’t what this was about anyway. I took one longing look at the Lego’s I wanted to play with and headed downstairs, making sure that BT led the way. If he fell down the stairs behind me, I’d be crushed.
Mary came down a few minutes later. “I’d appreciate if you didn’t put any wild thoughts in my son’s head,” she said hotly.
“Those ‘wild thoughts’,” I told her with air quotes and everything, “came from the mouth of your son without any prompting from me.”
“He doesn’t understand what is going on!” she yelled and then brought her voice down to that inside yelling tone, cognizant of the fact that she had just put her offspring to bed.
“I think you underestimate him. He understands, probably even more so than you. He knows that his father isn’t coming back, he understands that you have a finite supply of food and water and more importantly, he understands that as the man of the family, he is wholly unprepared to defend the both of you. I’m not arguing in the
