by Mark Tufo
“Wow, this shit is getting old,” I whispered out of necessity because yes, there was a full-scale battle going on, but in terms of decibels it could have been as loud as a wine and cheese party at Snooty McSnooterson’s house.
Although who am I kidding, I would have gone and ate their cheese and drank their wine; right now that sounded like the least pretentious thing ever. Once again, we were pinned down, unable to do anything. In fact, our best option was to sit on our hands and watch as the world went round and round. I changed my mind from minute to minute on whom I was rooting for; you know the old saying, the enemy of my enemy is my friend? The problem was that they were both enemies. With their position and long-range weapons, the whistlers were cutting down the night runners in great swaths. Seems they were getting their payback from last night.
I thought that at some point the runners might break off the attack, right up until I nearly pissed myself in fright. A whistler fell off the train directly in front of me, landing on his head, which exploded out like you would expect of a watermelon from a ten-story drop. I thought maybe he’d lost his balance, right up until his friend joined him, though this one had a chunk the size of my fist missing from the side of his head. The runners had set up a trap that had completely encircled the whistlers. If I had to pick a winner, now I’d go with the runners on this one. They were on the clock, and they would have more meat than they could deal with, can’t imagine they’d go seeking out any more. The hatch rattled a couple of times as it was run into, but for the most part, we were left alone. I’d sat down, and at some point, Trip had joined me. We listened to the clicks and whistles, the popping of the staples from the guns, the scream-speak of the runners. After a while, it more or less became background noise.
“I wonder if Jack is going through the same thing.”
Right after I said that, I heard a motorcycle start up and then another. The whistlers were retreating. That was going to make things a bit more interesting. By my reckoning, we still had a good healthy four or five hours before the sun said hello. That was a long time to go undiscovered, especially with Trip’s desire to eat. I looked over to him; he had his back against the wall and was fast asleep, the remaining Phritos clutched in his hands.
“No snoring, okay?”
I removed the bag of snacks from his hands. I was fearful that he would adjust in his sleep at the most inopportune of times, squeezing that thing like a teddy bear. Right now, with the bikes pulling out, I could have sang the Star-Spangled Banner at the top of my lungs and not been heard.
“Weird time to take a siesta.”
I got up to take a look at the goings on. From what I could tell, a good third of the whistlers had fallen between the two fights. They were hauling ass, wanting to be anywhere but here. I felt like Rapunzel for a moment, wishing they’d take me with them. Only in the abstract. The night runners were busy feasting. Hearing muscle torn and sinew pulled apart and open mouths chewing, well, none of it was appealing.
Ravenous ravens couldn’t have picked clean a road-kill squirrel faster. The night runners were packing meat into themselves like they were expecting a two-year hibernation. Cartilage-like skeletons littered the area. This is about the time I expected the silver glow of their eyes to start staring into the holes in the car because either they would smell Trip’s corn chips or he would yell out in his sleep about how the Genogerians or some shit were coming to get him. There would be three or four intense hours where we would desperately cling to our lives and either just barely hold on or fade into oblivion in some ruined and damned world, just another pile of rapidly cooling dung in a place filling up with them. Much like the whistlers did, the runners began dragging some of the unfinished corpses off into parts unknown.
We were still a far cry from daylight, and as such, I did not want to risk traveling just yet. I pulled up to a corner of wall and got something I hadn’t had much of lately. When I awoke, shafts of light were streaming into the holes. I’d not realized just how well it had been aerated the night before. Trip had at some point rolled over and was now atop his beloved bag. I got up quickly and did a check through some holes on every side. No zombies, no whistlers, and certainly no night runners. I decided to go up top first before opening the door. I did a scan and for two hundred and seventy of the degrees, there was nothing, but that last ninety, in the far distance, was Indian Hill, gleaming like the lost jewels under a multi-color laser array. It appeared to be as inviting as a cold glass of water on a hot summer day.
I wasn’t buying that for a second, yet still, it was our only option. Answers weren’t going to be found on the desert floor. I just about fell off the edge of the car as it began to rumble. Took me a moment to realize that Trip had opened the large sliding door.
“What the fuck, Trip?” I asked as I walked over to where he was and looked down.
A steaming stream of piss was arcing away from his body. He was completely naked as he evacuated his bladder.
“Fucking shit, this world and its horrors,” I said as I moved away.
Trip had jumped down off the train, walked far enough away that he was in my field of view again, and started doing yoga. Yup, naked yoga, in the tree-lined hills surrounded by the bodies of our enemies.
“Trip, what are you doing?”
“Helps me poop.” He clasped his hands together as he brought the heel of his left foot into the side of his right leg.
“I hate you,” I mumbled.
The city looked like it was going to take most of the morning to get to. The motorcycles looked mighty tempting, but I was far from an expert at riding those things, and if—when—we got into trouble, I wouldn’t be able to get us out of it. I turned to tell Trip it was time to go. He was squatting, and yeah, I got a glimpse of some orange paste leaking from his ass. Looked like something that would be pushed from a caulking gun. I’m not sure when I am ever going to be able to clean that from my mind. He was swishing his hips around; at first I thought it was to make the movement a little easier, and then I realized it was so he could swirl his shit around like soft serve ice cream on the ground. I’m ashamed, and it’s going to take a bunch of Our Fathers, but I watched for far longer than I should have.
When he was done, I shouted down, “Trip, get your shit together, we need to get going.”
He turned to look at me, shrugged his shoulders, cupped his hands, and began to bend over.
“Not that shit!” I screamed. It was all I could deal with to know Trip was using discarded plastic bags as his preferred method of clean up.
I climbed down and looked over some of the whistler bodies, thinking that perhaps their clothing would yield some clues as to where they were from. Wouldn’t have been overly surprised if a tag on their jackets said “Made in China.” They’ll pretty much produce for anyone.
By the time I got down, thankfully Trip had dressed and we were ready to head out. I grabbed one of the whistler devices embedded in the ground. I was fairly certain it was used to attract zombies. In most cases, this would not be something I could find much value in. But it could be used to pull zombies away from somewhere we wanted to go, or could attract them right to us in case we had other enemies to deal with. It was a bit cumbersome, but worth it.
“Not on the bikes?” Trip asked. “My feet hurt.”
I shook my head. “My feet hurt too. Let’s get to the city; maybe we can soak them or something.”
Interestingly enough, I did not see the retreating steps of the night runners. Wherever they had gone to before first light, it was not the city. That was at least one for the win column. The sun was directly overhead as we journeyed off the tracks and got to the outskirts. Military vehicles by the score blocked this entrance point. I put my hands above my head in the severely off chance someone was actually manning them. But no, they were as silent as toys long forgotten by a teenager more concerned with the opposite sex.
“Think it’s time to upgrade my weapon,” I said, staring at my pistol.
; “Oh, I’m sure your wife thinks it’s adequate.”
“The gun, asshole.”
Didn’t take long to find what I needed: brand new P-12 that looked damn near identical to an M-4, though it shot 5.57 rounds. Everything was in pretty much the same place; I ran through loading, cocking, dropping the magazine, and dealing with jams just to familiarize myself with the weapon as best I could. Grabbed a camouflage backpack and stowed as much ammunition as I thought I could comfortably carry, and then added some more. In the back of one of the Humvee clones was a box of FTEs—Food To Eat boxes. The body is wondrous in its ability to hold off certain things, suppress them so you can continue on your quest, but once relief is in sight—this time, food—I nearly doubled over from the hunger pangs coursing through my body.
I ripped that pack open and was powering through meat stew as fast as I could squeeze the bag. Don’t know what kind of meat it was, but it tasted decent enough. Trip was staring at me with his mouth open.
“I’ve never seen anyone eat like that. Except maybe at a farm.”
I flipped him off and ripped the top off a bag labeled “manna casserole.” I gave it a cursory sniff; smelled like tuna, and I shoveled that in as well. The knot in my stomach began to loosen. If I’d learned anything about military food, it was that I now needed to chug about a gallon of water to keep it from congealing into a brick of cement. There was another truck with cases upon cases of the stuff. Like a FEMA vehicle; possible they were going to evacuate the city. No way the Hummers here and the light arms would have been any match for the monsters that inhabited this world. Now the question was, where were they going to go? Where was safe?
Trip and I were plowing through bottles of water at world-record paces, tossing the empties onto the truck. Even in this inhospitable trashed world, I didn’t want to be the dickhead litterbug. My stomach was pushing out from all the food and water I had just parked in there.
“Whoa, man you didn’t tell me you were pregnant.”
“Even if I was, that’s not something you say to people.”
I drank one more bottle; I could feel the water coming up my throat like gas does the filler tube in a car. Sated, taking care of some of my baser needs, I was really able to look around. The church off to my right had not at first garnered much attention from me. I usually avoided those, thinking that I’d burst into flames if I tripped a proximity alarm. For the most part, it was the same: steeple, windows, doors. But where the cross would have been, this was an “X.” Part of me wanted to know what that meant, and the ramifications; the smarter part knew that was a story for a later time.
“You ready for this?” I asked Trip as I looked at the city proper.
“Oh yeah.” He rubbed his hands together.
Couldn’t have been a hundred yards before we started to see the…anomalies. That was about all I could call them without losing my hard-earned lunch. What else do you call a soldier bisected by a telephone pole? For good or bad, his head was completely embedded, but his shoulders, part of his chest and thighs, and left foot were all on display. If this wasn’t bad enough, he was some twenty feet up in the air.
“Hold my hand.”
Trip reached out and gripped mine before I could protest. I thought perhaps he needed some comforting. Lord knows I could have used some.
“I can keep you rooted.”
I was in the middle of asking him “What?” when it struck. A wind that disturbed nothing, a heat that did not warm. We could watch as this undulating force moved across the earth. The only thing it seemed to alter was our perception. For the briefest of moments, we were overrun with zombies, stranded in a sea of them. I was trying to pull my hand away from Trip’s iron grip so that I could get my rifle into a firing position. The wave had not even faded off into the distance when we were hit with another. My brain, unlike my other internal organs, felt like it had been hit with a concussion grenade. It was reeling and listing to the side when it was smacked again. The zombies that had seen us and wanted to make short work of us were gone in an instant. It had happened so fast I wasn’t even sure I could call it real—not by any definition I was aware of. Trip pulled my rifle-holding arm closer in to me so that I could not fire; I turned to look at him.
“You all right?” he asked, his gaze never wavering.
“What just happened?”
“One of two things, man. Either man is playing God, or a god is just playing.”
I came back with the ever eloquent “Huh?”
“Someone or something is pinching together the walls of this reality.”
I wanted to tell him to shut his fucking mouth before I punched it into submission. Who wants to hear that kind of thing? Who is even capable of understanding that kind of thing? The proof of it was all around me, though. It would be extremely difficult to explain away all that was happening.
Did they die with their finger on the power button?
I could picture Doctor Dipshit draped over his reality crusher, his massive brain leaking onto the floor, his finger on a big red button that said “only press in case of emergency.” I wanted to kick Doctor Dipshit for dragging me into his hellish existence.
“It is not that simple. Once you dabble where you should not, it is not so easy to repeal your actions. Picture a stone thrown into a pond.”
“Sure I get that, the ripple effect. So we wait for the ripples to smooth out, right?”
“These ripples may never stop, and will most likely get larger, creating more havoc as they travel further away from the epicenter. It is possible that it will get so bad that all realities will implode as they crash in on each other. There will be no escape, for anyone. Life as we know it will cease to exist.”
“So these jackholes didn’t think it was enough to destroy their own world? They wanted to take everyone’s down with them?”
“In fairness, they were trying to save their own. It was their ignorance that was their undoing.”
“That’s not good enough! They can’t just say, ‘oops, my bad. Sorry.’ They dragged us, Jack, who the fuck knows who else into this shithole. Now they’re threatening everything else? What the fuck, Trip? Aren’t there some sort of checks and balances on this type of thing? Isn’t some cosmic entity responsible for making sure some egghead with too many degrees and no fucking common sense doesn’t end everything? Who just starts experimenting with wormholes when they obviously have absolutely no idea of what the fuck they’re doing?”
Trip said nothing. I was so angry I didn’t even realize that Trip had been mostly lucid for a few minutes, like maybe that reality-shaking bomb had forced his brain into place for a minute. Gave him some clarification.
I sat down on the side of the road. It all seemed kind of pointless at the moment. Staying alive, dying, helping or not, finding Jack, what was the fucking point? Once the other worlds dropped in uninvited, it was game over. The only thing that would make any difference at all to me would be to hug and kiss my family members one more time, and that didn’t seem to be in the cards. I looked up at Trip with something that bordered on hope.
“Anything? Is there anything we can do?”
“The ripple exists, that much is true, there is nothing we can do to recall it, but…”
I can’t remember ever hanging more on a word used to indicate the impossibility of anything other than what is being stated.
“Huh?” Trip asked grabbing a handful of his Phritos. “Where did these come from?” He was looking down.
“You cannot be serious,” I said as I stood rapidly.
I grabbed Trip’s shoulders and stared into his eyes much as he had done to me just moments earlier. I saw a shadow of understanding like a specter at three am running into a closet of nightmares. It was that quick.
“Want one?” He held up his hand. “Just one, though.”
“What happens in there, Trip? I need to know what comes after that ‘but.’”
“Usually a phrase that contradicts the initial statement.”
> “Just fucking great.”
I was at a loss. Trip was like that faulty charging cable; sometimes if you placed it at the right angle with the appropriate pressure you could get your phone to charge, other times you could mess with that thing for a half an hour and it was basically an amalgam of useless parts meant to infuriate you into submission. That wasn’t completely true, though; maybe, maybe not, but Trip had given me hope. I didn’t know what came after, but as long as there was a possibility, that had to be good enough—it was all I had. I’m not like those people who are eternal optimists. In fact, I kind of can’t stand them, always smiling and talking about how the city dump smells like peaches. I think there is something as fundamentally wrong with them as with the people who are constantly depressed, instead of the rose-colored glasses they got stuck with the gray drab. I had something to go on, and that’s what I needed: a reason, a purpose.
“The city is as good a place as any,” I said, steering Trip in the right direction.
He seemed content with that. And I’d learned a thing or two from him. Maybe on this level, he wasn’t always aware or cognizant of what he was doing, but deeper down, yeah, that psyche knew exactly what was up. And that was the gauge I was going to keep an eye on.
“Hey, I’ve eaten there.” Trip was pointing to a purple building hardly bigger than a double-wide trailer.
“Somewhere like that?”
“Nope.”
“You’ve eaten at Wilma’s in Indian Hill?”
“Yup, they have a three pleaks soup to die for.”
“Pleaks, Trip? What the hell is a pleak?”
“It’s like a candied bean.”
I wanted to tell him he was full of shit. Instead, we went over to Wilma’s. I don’t know if any part of the journey was worth it. There were at least five people stuck in the most unnatural of ways. Two looked like they had been picked up by a spoiled giant and slammed headfirst into the pavement. Where there should have been the brains from the destroyed skulls, there was only a seemingly undisturbed concrete neatly enveloping the young women’s waists. Their legs, which should have flopped over, were stuck rigidly into the air as if they’d been frozen in time that way.
