A light flashes in my side view mirror. I turn around in the seat to better scope out our wake, but there’s nothing but darkness.
“Did you see that?” I ask.
“Yeah.”
“What was it?”
“It may be another vehicle.” Gideon takes an immediate left down a side street, then left again through an alleyway to a residential street. He parks in a random driveway and kills the ignition. After a couple of minutes, I drop my cigarette butt from the cracked window.
“Can I get one of those?” Gideon holds out a hand. To my confusion, he adds: “Fuck it.”
“Now we’re speaking the same language.” I chuckle, then light a cigarette and hand it to him.
“I used to smoke.” He takes a drag, relaxing into the seat some with the exhale. “Quit for a couple years now. Trying to get in shape.”
“Well, it worked.”
“Aww, thanks, baby.”
“I mean it. You’re so sexy. That must’ve come from a lot of hours at the gym.”
“Too many. It was my . . . thing. My escape. You had your ways, and that was mine. Getting stronger meant I could better protect myself.”
“Someone hurt you.”
He looks away.
“Who was it? Were you in love with her?”
His utter silence, the weight of a dam about to break, is his answer. He checks our surroundings one last time before clicking the key forward in the ignition. “No idea what that was, but we should keep moving.”
“Is that what you haven’t told me yet?”
He reverses out of the driveway onto the main street, then glances up at me with a slight nod.
“What was her name?”
“Ezri.”
“Was she your wife?”
“No, but I . . . planned to ask her.”
“What hap—?”
He grips my hand. “I’m . . . not ready yet, Grace. I’m sorry.”
After a long pause I decide to let it go. “It’s okay.”
Gideon points to a passing establishment. “That’s the bar I was telling you about.”
I read the sign. “The Devil’s Punch Bowl?” The “O” appears to be a swimming pool, or something. “That’s a bar?”
“Well . . . yeah. A tub club.”
“A what?”
“They had hot tubs and shit, with waitresses in bikinis that came around and served drinks and stuff.”
“Oh, wow. That sounds really cool.” I take one last look at the rundown, tan brick building with the dying palm trees out front, and I’m almost positive it looked that bad before the end.
Gideon pulls into a worn-out shopping strip with sagging sections of blue roofing, and we arrive at the record store, my own personal heaven preserved behind an iron bar-covered window.
“Hallefuckinglooyah, there is a God,” I say.
He parks between two splotchy, yellow strips that needed to be repainted years ago. But none of that mattered anyway, in the end. Not at all.
“Your laugh,” Gideon says.
I arch an eyebrow at him.
“I love it. When I first heard it, it reminded me of her, but I’m not sure why. It doesn’t sound like hers did . . . Maybe, it’s because it was the first time a female’s laughter had made me feel that good since her. I don’t know. But I knew then.”
“What?”
“That I was in love with you.”
“You were not.”
“I was. I’m sure of it. And . . .” He drifts off, glances out the window.
“Go on.”
“I mean . . . is it okay if I talk about her? About Eve?”
“Yeah,” I say, though I’m not sure if I’m telling the truth.
“As hot as it was watching you two with each other, it made me want you even more. Not that it made me jealous; it made you more desirable. Watching how you loved her. It made me want you to love me, too.”
I try to form words, to let him know I’m still okay talking about Evie, but instead, I stare into my lap and try not to cry.
Gideon takes my hand again. “I shouldn’t have brought her up. I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay. Eventually we’ll both have to open up and face it all, right?”
“Yeah. Eventually.”
I stare up at the enormous iron gate that encases the window of Play-it-Again Records, and for a moment, I’m staring into the face of my sweet man. “How will we get inside?” I whisper.
“Very carefully,” he says with a glance around, as if he doesn’t know we aren’t talking about the window. He removes a black case from beneath his seat, opens it to reveal a small tool kit, from which I grab the hammer.
“Force is not always the best way.” He takes it from me, setting it aside to retrieve a screwdriver instead. He holds it up between us with a wink, as if he’s perfectly aware we were never talking about the window, then he exits the car.
After a scan of the empty parking lot, I grab a rifle and my katana, and follow him.
“The thing with these old window covers,” Gideon says in a low voice when I get to him, “is that they were not anticipating someone having a few minutes to sit here and do this.” He unscrews the first bolt, then moves to the next, a few inches away. “In a world that never sleeps, who’s got time to sit here and work out twenty rusty screws without being seen?”
“Makes sense.” I follow the beeline of bolts around the perimeter. “Is there another screwdriver?”
“There may be. Check the bag.”
I head to the car to grab the tool bag, and a tall body stumbles into the lot. Green Nikes with a yellow swoop, and a white T-shirt splattered with entrails. We freeze, though it doesn’t see us. Gideon says the most important thing to do when you’re in plain sight of one of them at night is to be fucking still—movement helps them see where you are. But being still when they’re this close takes some serious mind-over-matter. When everything in you cries “run!” and you freeze instead, it’s an internal system malfunction.
Once the dead guy has moved on, I pick my nerves up from the ground and locate another phillips head to help Gideon with the window. The first rusty screw at the bottom right corner takes some elbow grease to get started, but I get it out and go to work on the second bolt. It comes right out, as does the third and fourth.
Gideon pockets his screwdriver. “Okay, I think that’s good.” Then he lifts his rifle, aims it at me, and fires.
“What the f—?”
The round whizzes by my ear and there’s a grunt as a body slumps to the ground.
“Fucker’s wearing black,” Gideon says. “Hard to see in the shadows.”
My heart’s in my throat when I spin around to survey the predator. Middle-aged Caucasian man in his Ralph Lauren black fleece bath robe with a bulging pocket. Out of curiosity, I reach into it and find a pack of Marlboro red 100s, almost full, and a badass silver Zippo with trippy, hologram swirl designs on both sides.
Gideon grabs the underside of the window encasing and lifts, yanking it away from the wall. “Come on, baby.”
I pocket my loot and skip up to him, ducking beneath the metal with my weapons.
“Try the window,” Gideon says, holding the encasing away from my body.
To my surprise, when I push on the window, it opens. I guess with a cage around it, they weren’t too worried about anyone opening it.
“Nice,” Gideon says. “Any signs of life—or death—in there?”
I pick up a nickel from the windowsill and toss it into the store, listen. After a few seconds of nothing, I slide it up and climb inside. Gideon squeezes under the encasing behind me, and I click on my flashlight.
“Untouched, it looks like.” He shines his own beam across pristine shelves of music in all forms.
I trail Gideon to the back of the store, where the cash register is, and he cases the area for weapons. He finds a small gun beneath the counter —a 9mm, maybe—checks to make sure it’s safe, and tucks it into his waistband.
I snatch the radio off the ledge. It’s not plugged in, so they must’ve just had it on display. Upon inspection, I discover a battery port full of batteries, but who knows if they’re good or not. When I push the button on the top, something pops up—a little hatch—and inside is a CD. And when I push the power button, a red light comes on, the sound of the disk spinning below the hatch, I do a victory dance that ends in tears and become sobs in Gideon’s arms.
“Thank you so much for this,” I say. “For bringing me here.”
“Are you kidding me?” He cocks an eyebrow. “With a voice like that, I’d be crazy not to give you all the reasons in the world to sing.”
Sixteen
As Gideon would say, my quality of life just “leveled up.” I now have more CDs than clothing. Than food, even. Playlist Haven and WiFi no longer exist to deliver my drug intravenously, but I can still listen to music. That’s giving me life itself, a reason to live it.
“You happy, baby?” Gideon takes a hand from the steering wheel to brush my cheek.
And my tears come in response. I fight them, because I don’t want to mess up my makeup. But sitting here, hugging a pile of things like Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral and The Fragile, Sarah McLachlan’s Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, and Sublime’s self-titled album, makes me a believer of the impossible. There is life after death in so many forms. One of them was given to us by a hole-in-the-wall record store.
“I’m happy you’re happy,” he says. “Things may be shitty, but at least if we have these little things every once in a while to keep us going . . .”
“This is no little thing.”
“Well, you know what I mean. And I get it. This is huge for you. It’s big for me, but I imagine it’s huge for you.”
“It is. And we’ll need a huge supply of batteries to go with it.”
“Those may be harder and harder to come by. So, as much as I hate to say it, you might consider rationing your music . . . ? Not tonight of course, because we’re commandeering a new, temporary homestead, and we’re celebrating our Apoca-versary.” He massages my inner thigh, and I move into his hand.
“If you ever decide to put those down,” he teases.
With a sigh, I lean forward to set the forty-something CDs to the floorboard. “We better not lose this car.”
“Well, that will try to be avoided. But no matter what, we’ll take care of your preciouses.”
I laugh. “We better. Because if something happens to them . . .”
“You’ll die.”
“Yes.”
“I already know, baby.” He takes my hand, but drops it again. “Shit.” He swerves around one in the street and glides to a stop with it in neutral, rolling the windows up. The sudden influx of undead is alarming, to say the least. One of them bumps into my side view mirror, pounds the hood, then lurches onto it, climbing to the windshield. He has a striking resemblance to my old math professor, Mr. Chapman, which strangely makes it more terrifying.
“What do we do?” I ask.
“Don’t move, stay calm, don’t make eye contact.”
Chapman peers into the cab through the windshield, and when he bangs on the glass, my heart jumps, but I don’t dare move. Another one climbs onto the hood with him, but when the search for fresh blood and flesh comes up cold, Chapman and his sidekick dismount the Lincoln, and it bounces up from the release of their weight.
“Jesus fucking Christ.” I squint into the horde, but I don’t see an end.
“Ditto.”
I grip the seat handle and inch my seat back until I’m lying flat beneath the window line.
“Whatcha doin’, Grace?”
“We’ll be here for a while. I can’t wait that long.” I snatch my new CD player from the floorboard and set it between our seats.
“Go for it, baby. Just not too loud.”
Before he gets the last word out I’ve unwrapped, opened, and inserted Flyleaf’s first (self-titled) album into the top, closed it, and pushed play. Gideon laughs, then that first guitar riff for “I’m So Sick” courses through the speakers, followed by the sweet-but-gritty voice of Lacey Sturm. Even here, surrounded by hundreds of human-eating-monsters, in a car that smells of decayed flesh, I have music, and I have Gideon, and there’s no place I’d rather be than in this moment.
I smile at Gideon and hand him my dugout. “Relax.”
“Good call.” He takes it from me, swivels the top and catches the bat when it pops up. After loading it, he takes the lighter from my outstretched hand and lights it.
“This is the best day of my new life so far,” I say.
“Oh, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet, baby girl.” Gideon winks over at me, then mouths the chorus.
“You keep saying I’m unfolding like a flower and shit, but you’re the mysterious one. I ain’t seen nothin’ yet? And you know Flyleaf? I mean—what the actual fuck?”
We share a good laugh, then fall into a silent pattern of smoking weed and sharing cigarettes while the whole amazing album plays, the dead shuffle by, and I shower myself with unfiltered emotion. And when the last note reverberates into stardust, and we’re sitting there in the dark, silent, and still streets, Gideon watches me weep. For the first time ever I’m fully alive, and I can’t get over how beautifully fucked up that is.
“I love you, Grace.” Gideon squeezes my hand. “Watching you right now makes me the happiest man alive.”
“I love you, too, Gideon. So much. For too long I denied myself love. I didn’t let myself love people or things, I mean really love them. Not even music—never fully letting go. It’s all hitting me at once.”
“No, I get it. I’ve never seen anyone experience such immense gratitude and appreciation for something before. That’s what’s so beautiful. It rips my damned heart out—in a good way.”
“I’m glad.” I wipe my eyes. My face must look insane with all of this blubbering. But a look in the mirror reveals minimal tidying up is necessary. I put on The Wall, and take out my newly acquired pack of cigarettes and Zippo while skipping through the songs for the intro to “Comfortably Numb.”
Gideon starts the car again, and in minutes, we’re up to about thirty miles per hour on a relatively clear road. When I find the song, and with the vehicle moving now, I turn up the volume and take out a cigarette. What an amazing moment. Celebrating with a cigarette sounds like a fantastic idea. But when I go to light it, I can’t get the damn Zippo to spark.
“Might need fluid,” Gideon says.
With my unlit cigarette between my lips, I pry the bottom from the Zippo to check the fluid level, and something falls from inside to my lap. My heart thumps when I pick up the half-inch-long red Ziploc baggie of white powder. I part the top and dip a wet pinkie inside to taste what Mr. Ralph Lauren was hiding away.
“That’s cocaine.” My chest swims with craving. “Oh my fucking God, pull over.”
Gideon screeches to a stop behind a wrecked Mazda Miata. “You’re fucking kidding me.”
“Nope. This is a shitload of coke. Over an eight-ball, I’m guessing.” I dump a little on the cover of Pretty Hate Machine and use the edge of The Wall to press it, forming two, fat rails in less than a minute. “Got a tooter?”
He reaches over to the glove box and opens it to a conglomeration of papers and napkins, and there, like gleaming virgins waiting to perform dirty deeds, are a pair of fast food straws.
“Score.” Gideon pops one from its paper wrapper and takes out his pocketknife, cutting a two-inch section off.
“I take it you’re a coke fan?” I laugh.
“It’s the end of the world, baby, who isn’t?”
“True
.”
When I take the tooter from him, I catch him stealing a glance at my stomach.
“Grace, I—”
“Please, don’t ruin this.”
“I’m not trippin’, but . . . promise me, once you get further along, you’ll be more careful, okay? Please. We want as little complications as possible with the . . . birthing. We want a healthy newb—”
“I understand. But I don’t want to talk about it —”
“I know. That’s all I wanted to ask, now I’ll leave you alone.”
I gaze at his peripheral for a moment before answering. “Yes, I promise.” Then I drop my left hand to turn up the radio, and exhale slowly before leaning over the CD case, tooter in my nose.
When I inhale the powder, the right side of my face goes numb from the bottom of my jaw to the top of my skull. With the rush of adrenaline and euphoria, I’m suddenly okay with being one of the last humans on Earth. If it means the drug faery keeps leaving us goodies like this, I’m down with whatever.
“That’s good shit.” I hand Gideon the case and the tooter.
He hovers over the white stripe, snorts it, then leans back, plugging each nostril with a sniff. “Fuck, you weren’t joking.” He grabs his dick, starts the car again, and there’s mischief in the slight curl upward at the corner of his lips.
“What are you up to?”
“I hear you like living dangerously.” He revs the engine and jerks to a start. As he accelerates, he unzips his pants, spits in his hand, and strokes his penis. And though I sense he’s that other version of himself, backed by rage, the Gideon I know nothing about, it makes me want to fuck him even more.
Adrenaline and desire pumping through my veins with the coke, I shed my boots and all of my clothes, then change the CD. I decide this mood calls for The Deftones’ White Pony. I pop it in and skip through the tracks until I find “Passenger.” Perfect.
I climb into Gideon’s lap, careful not to bump the wheel or block his view. “Is this what you wanted?” I take his dick in my hand and pull aside my purple lace, wetting myself with my saliva.
“Oh, God, yes.” He gropes my breasts and speeds up, thrusting himself inside of me. Heightened by the coke, my pleasure sensors go wild. Gideon rolls the windows down and the wind whips in, hungry as we are. He keeps his eyes on the road and one hand on the wheel, but the other grinds me back and forth by my left ass cheek. His zipper digs into my thigh, but I feel too damned good to care. In seconds, I’m gushing, screaming out the window as the orgasms roll like tidal waves, soaking us both.
Murray's Law: Urban Post-Apocalyptic Thriller (The Night Blind Saga Book 2) Page 9
