Alive in a Dead World

by Mark Tufo

  There have been days when the temperature outside is zero or less and I have dressed in shorts and a windbreaker for long car rides, because I know that most likely, my face will, at some point, melt. This trip was no different, but it was a shorter ride so I actually had pants on and a light jacket, not in any way rated for the inclement weather we were in the midst of, but still I was not going to argue the point with her. It would have been a lot colder if I had to walk home.

  So I waited, gritting my teeth, feeling my nasal passages beginning to freeze up. My wife looked fairly toasty in her heavy sweater and full-length jacket, scarf around her neck and leather gloves.

  The shuttle showed up seventeen teeth-chattering minutes later. I had to rip my planted feet from the ground. Seems the melted glue had frozen fast to the ice slicked surface. Tracy entered before me and then I came in after. I stepped up on the stoop and looked to the left. Seems the shuttle had stopped to pick up half the state of Wisconsin before it got to our stop. An older gentleman gave up his seat when he saw Tracy approach him and somehow the seat next to her was vacant. I was about to plant my ass in it when it looked like someone had spilled half of an Orange Julius in the plastic bucket seat. At least, I hoped it was an Orange Julius.

  Tracy shrugged her shoulders as if to say “What are you going to do?”

  My next option was the large, silver, hand-hold poles that went from floor to ceiling on the shuttle. I was near to placing bare hand on metal when I spotted what looked like the world’s largest nose nugget wrapped around the bar twice. The offending brown-green slime was oozing its way down the pole, much like a low rent stripper. I was getting nauseous. Making it through the throng to another pole was out of the question. A kid of about twelve off to my left was sneezing like his mother was shoving pepper up his nose. The friggin’ germ factory wasn’t even covering his mouth. I felt like I was in a rolling Petri dish. And our shuttle driver must have been a foreigner because he was paying absolutely no heed to state and national laws in regards to load limits.

  He kept packing people in like he was getting paid per pound delivered. I was being pressed closer and closer to the pole with the snot snake wrapped around it. I was using what minimal leverage I had trying to keep from pressing up against it. Something or someone was touching my ass. I kept praying that it was some hot Yugoslavian model, but the last time I had turned around, I remember seeing an overweight man who looked like he had just downed a bucket of fried chicken. I noted that his hands had appeared greasy. Now I wasn’t so sure what was on his diet and why his hands were greasy, but I was not feeling so good anymore.

  I was losing the leverage battle. I pulled my hands up into my jacket so that I would have at least one barrier between the human goop that riddled the pole and me. I gripped it with both jacket-clad hands and moved a foot off to the side. Greasy Hands had two wet fingers shoved in his mouth and was sucking deeply. His other hand was still located where my ass had just been. I felt pretty dirty and violated. He winked at me when he caught me looking. I would have vomited had I the chance to make sure I could get away from it. My luck right now and this bus would break down with the doors unable to open.

  Greasy tried to slide over my way, but a small, older woman blocked his path. I would have kissed her except for the thick moustache she sported, well, that and the scowl, well, those two things and the marble-sized mole to the left of her nose, or did she have two noses? I hadn’t quite worked that one out yet.

  Someone else picked up the sneezing torch as Georgie Germ stopped. I think Fanny Phlegm started hacking up a lung. I could see particulates flying through the air like airborne missiles. I was going for a world record in breath-holding, forty-two seconds and counting. I wondered if anyone would pick me up if I could find enough open space to topple over. Greasy Hands probably would; that was of little comfort. And then I’d be left wondering what was on the floor and if the rest of the shuttle was any indication, then I’d be swimming in a sea of viral stew, with chunks of unidentifiable material.

  Six or seven days later, the cross country journey finally came to an end. Two Nose cut me off as I tried to make a hasty exit. Greasy Hands immediately pulled up to my rear and Georgie Germ heralded our passage with a heavy barrage of wet, viscous germ spewage.

  “Tell your kid to cover his mouth,” I said loudly to a mother, who was too busy playing on her phone to monitor her child. Of course, until I said something about her son, and then she became a Kodiak bear, protecting her cub. Her shrill screams of “Mind your own fucking business” are still etched on my eardrums.

  Greasy Hands was making our last few feet out a free for all. As soon as we hit terra firma, I turned and slammed him back into the bus. He licked his lips at me.

  I clenched my fists and was about to make him pay for our encounter, when Tracy alit from the shuttle.

  “Ah, Talbot, I see you’re making friends again. I really can’t take you anywhere, can I?” Tracy said, laughing.

  Greasy Hands winked one more time and got back on the bus. Obviously, this was something that got his rocks off and it looked like he had been doing it the entire holiday season. Tracy grabbed my tensed shoulder. “Come on, let’s go,” she said without turning back around to witness what I had.

  We had gone a few feet from the bus when I made a great showing of patting my pockets down. “Aw shit, hon! I left my phone on the bus. Go in, I’ll meet you there.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “I’ll be right there. Go in; get warm.”

  I had hit the right button; she headed towards the mall entrance.

  I jogged back to the bus. Greasy Hands was sitting in the empty bus on the seat that I had previously rejected due to the supposed Orange Julius contents.

  “Back for more?” he asked, standing up.

  I pulled my fist back somewhere around Detroit and let fly. I caught him flush on the cheek as he attempted to dodge my blow. He sat back down heavily. He would be sleeping for at least the next few bus rides.

  “Fuck, that hurt,” I said, shaking my hand around.

  “You can’t do that here! Get out of here!” the bus driver was yelling at me.

  “Calm down, I was just getting my phone. And why don’t you clean this pit up while you’re waiting for people? Starting with Sleeping Beauty over there.”

  “Get your ass off my bus or I’m calling security! And don’t try to get back on, you’re not welcome!”

  “I’d rather walk on my hands and knees back to the lot than get on this lab, gone bad.”

  Tracy was by the mall directory board when I came in. “Your phone, huh?”

  “My what?” I had already forgotten my lying premise.

  “Remember? You went back to get your phone.”

  “Right, right.”

  “Did you find it?” she asked.

  “I had it in my pocket the whole time.” I explained, trying to get my most innocent face in place.

  “Your knuckles look pretty raw,” she said as I jammed my hand into my jacket so she couldn’t get a closer look.

  “I fell,” came stumbling out.

  “And you braced yourself with your knuckles?”

  “It was a very awkward fall. I was lucky to even get that to stop me or I would have landed square on my chin.”

  “Oh, and then your new boyfriend would have been so upset.”

  “He could have at least taken me out to dinner before he started to take liberties with me.”

  Tracy laughed. “Let’s go, we’ve got a lot of shopping to do.”

  We hadn’t even started and I was already wiped out.

  The mall was packed, but fortunately not as bad as the bus, but much more so than my living room, which I so desired to be sitting in. Most folks looked panicked. They were running out of time, and as of yet, not picked out their significant other a proper gift. This led many to go over the top, and at least one jewelry store was the beneficiary of that panic.

  There were two competin
g jewelry stores on either side of an opening that led down to another string of shops. There could not have been fifty feet separating the vendors, yet one was filled to the brim with customers and the other had three people in it, two of which were employees and one who had yet to look up from her split ends she kept pulling up in front of her face.

  The packed one was Kay Jewelers, you know the one. I bet you’ve already sung the jingle without any prompting from me. “Every kiss begins with Kay.” Sorry, now you’ve probably got that stuck in your head. The other was a place I’d never heard of called J.D. Robbins Jewelry. The only difference I could discern in the two stores was that one had a fancy ad campaign with a catchy jingle and the other didn’t.

  I pointed this out to Tracy, but she didn’t seem nearly as intrigued about it as I was.

  “I’ve thought of a jingle that I think would get that store packed!” I told her excitedly.

  “I’m sure you have. Do I even want to hear it?”

  “Okay, you know the one “every kiss begins with Kay?”

  She nodded.

  “Now use the same jingle only with these words, Every Jerk-off begins with J! That store would be fucking packed right now!”

  Tracy nearly snorted on the cookie we had been sharing, but she quickly recovered. “What is the matter with you? It’s Christmas!” She was trying to sound disgusted, but I could tell she was inwardly laughing her ass off.

  “I personally couldn’t think of a better gift,” I said lasciviously.

  “Go find your bus buddy!” she laughed as she pushed me away.

  One short year removed from that story, I find myself huddled in the cold with the remnants of humanity. How I wish I was back on that bus, not with Greasy Hands, mind you. I hope he was patient zero, but I’d even take Georgie Germ as long as he was on the far side of the bus. I could maybe do without Two Nose and the bus driver and maybe Georgie’s mother, but I think everyone else would be fine. This story has done what I’d hoped it would accomplish. It has brought a smile to an otherwise tired, scared man.

  Blood Stone Part 2

  Corporal Tenson could not believe his luck of late and he attributed it all to the blood red stone he had found two weeks previous at the destroyed Lakota village. He had been promoted to sergeant. His commanding officer, whom he could not stand, had swallowed a bullet and he was unimaginably wealthy if he could ever bring himself to sell the stone.

  He had been so paranoid about possessing the stone, he had not even showed anyone, not even his best friend Aaron Gentry, a corporal in the same regiment he was in.

  “What gives?” Aaron asked. He had been sleeping on his cot when he heard his friend rustling around.

  “What are you talking about?” Scott Tenson asked back, stashing a small bag quickly into his front pocket.

  “I’ve seen you pull out that bag at least a dozen times and you just stare at it.”

  “You should just mind your own business,” Scott shot back a little testily.

  “Sorry, just looking for something to talk about. It’s been so boring around here since the old man shot himself. I can’t believe he killed himself. I guess I would have too if I came home and my whole family was murdered. Some are saying that it was the shaman from the Lakota tribe we destroyed, seeking revenge.”

  This had been a favorite topic of conversation within the unit since it had happened. The stories ranged from the mundane: the colonel had come home and discovered his wife was cheating and had murdered his family then killed himself; to the semi-paranormal and favorite among the men: that the medicine man’s spirit had done it as revenge; to the completely farfetched: a white witch had taken the colonel’s family hostage and forced him to attack the Indians. Not many believed that particular story, but speculation on it made the long nights go by quicker.

  Maybe it was the hour of the night, maybe he was sick of hearing the same topic of conversation repeated over and over, but Corporal Tenson did something he never planned on doing.

  “Want to see what I picked up at that camp?”

  Gentry sat up. “Is that what’s in that pouch? Do you have a scalp or something? I thought they’d smell, but I haven’t smelled anything.”

  “It’s not a scalp. Check this out,” Tenson said, turning the pouch over into his hand. The large red stone dropped into his palm.

  Gentry inhaled sharply and then reached out to grab it, Tenson pulled his hand back.

  “Sorry,” Tenson said, letting his friend grab the stone.

  “What is it?” Gentry asked, holding it up to the lantern.

  “My ticket out of the cavalry, and into a life of luxury.”

  “Have you found out how much it’s worth?”

  “No I haven’t told anyone I’ve got it. I’m too afraid they’ll make me turn it over to the captain.”

  “Nobody knows you have it?”

  “Just you, now,” Tenson said, smiling.

  “I’ve got to show you something then,” Gentry said conspiratorially. He handed the stone back to Tenson.

  Gentry reached under his cot and pulled something out that caught a glint of light a moment before he plunged it into Tenson’s stomach. The long bowie knife ripped through his stomach, spleen and kidney and brushed up against his spinal cord. The pain had been too intense to even formulate a scream. Gentry was not going to give him the opportunity anyway. He clamped his free hand over his friend’s mouth and twisted the knife back and forth as more and more pain and shock blazed though Tenson’s eyes. Gentry spoke.

  “I’m sorry my friend, I really am. You saved my life once, and now I’m taking yours. It hardly seems fair. But I fucking hate it here and now I’ve got a way out and I had to take it, no matter what expense you had to pay for it.”

  Gentry waited until he was completely sure his friend (although that didn’t seem like the right word anymore) was dead before extracting his knife from Tenson’s mid-section. He then wiped it off on Tenson’s blanket and covered him up with it. He quickly grabbed anything of any value in addition to the stone, which he clutched greedily, and slipped quietly into the night.

  ***

  Eliza had watched the entire battle from her higher vantage point. She was mildly impressed with the Lakota’s savagery. Here were a people who had already lost everything dear to them, and still they fought viciously. She hoped the colonel would live, if only to be reunited with his bride, but either way, all that mattered was that the medicine man died.

  She waited until the cavalry men departed as she walked amid the smoking ruins of the destroyed village. The Indians lay where they had been struck down. She checked each one of them, yet she could not find the shaman. A little known feeling rose in her breast; it was a sense of unease. She checked the only teepee that was not burning. It was the largest in the village and by its decoration, she figured it was a ceremonial gathering place.

  The shaman was in there, but he was dead. He had been set in a place of honor in the center of the room, enshrouded in soft blankets made of deer and bison hide. Instead of her unease slipping away, it grew.

  “This man died before the battle,” she said as she walked around him. She ripped the shroud off him, looking for a wound that could have caused his demise. She savagely ripped his clothes off, unsure as to the root of her anger. She kicked his body over onto his stomach when the front did not reveal any damage.

  She kicked him again, this time from spite when she could not glean any information. His broken body hit the far side of the large teepee and rolled to a stop as Eliza strode out. Had her anger not burned so brightly, she would have been able to pick up on the faint traces of the information she so desperately sought.

  ***

  Tomas had been one state removed when he began to hear rumors about the cursed cavalry unit. Each story sounded more fantastic than the last. But he had been around the frontier long enough to know that people with too much time on their hands like a fantastic tale. He did not sit up and take notice until some of thes
e tales began to hint about a white witch, her cruelty only rivaled by her beauty.

  “Eliza,” he muttered, draining his tankard of beer.

  “Hey where you going?” the old grizzled man at the bar asked. “You’ve already paid for two drinks, I promised you the entire story.”

  “Buy yourself a third,” Tomas said, flipping him a nickel and heading for the door.

  The old man continued as if his drinking buddy had remained behind. “So they say that this white witch took the colonel’s family for some devilry until the colonel brought her the head of a great Indian chief. And when he came back without it, she had killed his family and then him. And then she cast some kind of spell on the men in the platoon. Seems they started killing each other. I think the witch part is made up. I think it’s more the medicine man sent some bad medicine.” The old man snorted and laughed at his own word play. “The Indians are some tricky ones. You have to be real careful how you kill them or they can rise up out their grave and get you.” He cackled. “Barkeep! Another drink for me and my friend,” the old man said, waving the nickel around.

  The bartender shook his head and poured two more glasses. Who was he to judge? A nickel was a nickel.

  Tomas bought the best horse he could find in the region and pushed the animal as hard as he dared. After five days of hard riding, and asking anyone he could for information on the battle site, he finally found himself amongst the ruins. Not much was left. It was mostly just pieces of shattered pottery here and there. After nearly a month, any bones of the Indians still left remaining from the scavengers had been picked clean. The village was nearly reclaimed by the land, save one large teepee. Tomas alit from his horse and strode purposefully towards it.

  He said a small prayer upon entering. He noted the many footprints of animals that had entered in here previous to him, nearly obscuring the soft prints of the white witch.