Up in flames, p.20
Up In Flames, page 20
part #8 of This Rotten World Series
"You alright in there?" Tim asked. He'd talked to Tim plenty at the Ghost Town Truck Stop, recognized his voice immediately.
"Yeah," he said, feeling stupid. He'd lost track of time as he'd tried to cleanse the entire bathroom of his presence.
"You bit?" Tim asked.
"No, I ain't bit."
"Show me," Tim said.
"What the…" Something about Tim's words infuriated him, and he threw open the door.
"What the fuck are you trying to—
His words died away as the barrel of Tim's rifle entered the doorway. "Nothing personal," Tim said. "The boss says she wants everyone checked. Doesn't want one of the dead springing up in the middle of the night. Said she's seen that type of shit before."
Clean wanted to cuss Tim out, tell him his word ought to be good enough, but in the end, he wanted to know the others were alright as well, that they weren't bit, weren't going to turn at a moment's notice.
Clean held out his arms, twisting and turning them so Tim could see his unbroken skin, but that wasn't good enough.
"Shirt off," Tim said.
"Man, you're fucking kidding me—
"Shirt off," Tim repeated enunciating the syllables slowly, punctuating each one with a thrust of his rifle.
Clean stripped, though he felt really wrong about it, was furious about being told what to do.
"See? Nothing," he said, exasperated and a little put out.
"Pants too," Tim said. "You can leave your boots on if you want to."
"Did you already have someone look at you?" Clean asked as he began unbuckling the belt of his jeans.
"Nope, but I'm next. You get to do the same thing."
"Aw, man, I don't wanna see your hairy ass naked."
"No one does, but it's gotta be done."
Clean dropped his pants, twirled in a little circle. When he turned back around, Tim had dropped his rifle, and began removing his clothes. "Whoa, whoa, whoa," Clean said. "I don't wanna see this."
"Too bad," Tim said. "I take it you were never in an M.C. before."
"Not like officially."
"Well, an M.C. is much like the army," Tim began. "There's someone in charge, and then there's you and your brothers. They're like real brothers. In the course of your lifetime, you're going to see those brothers eat, shit, fuck, and sometimes run around naked. Doesn't mean nothing, because they're family. Just think of this like looking at your brother."
Clean didn't have a brother, not any that had lived anyway, just one cousin, who was now gone. There were other siblings, but they were all either older or younger than him. Only Luke had been of his age, and he had seen that motherfucker naked more times than he cared to admit. The reverse was probably true as well.
Clean nodded his head, and when Tim stood there naked, he spun around just as Clean had.
"We good?" Tim asked.
"Good."
Together, the two brothers walked out to the living room, declared each other clean. From that moment on, the two seemed to be inseparable.
****
Tarot stood in a spare bedroom, the guest bed appointed with revolting, flowery print, the type of shit you'd always find in an old person's home. The bed was too soft, the chair in the corner upholstered in a hideous pattern which made her eyes hurt.
Tarot didn't care about being naked. Thought nothing of it. Her sexual urges weren't visual in nature. One body, in her mind, looked the same as the next, so she didn't quite understand why everyone got hot and bothered when someone took their clothes off.
She did understand what it did to men, so when Jaiyama had suggested all the girls go upstairs, to the guest bedroom, she had gone along. It would be a shame to have to kill anyone in their newfound crew, though it could be a good thing to send a message right off the bat. Still, better not to court such a hasty response. After all, they still had to escape Monktree, and for that, they would need all hands on deck.
Tarot began removing her clothes, and so did Jaiyama, but Cammy stood there, awkwardly hugging herself.
"What?" Tarot asked. "You shy?"
"No. It isn't that."
"You think we're lesbians who just want to get up in your snatch?"
Cammy's face flushed red, and she had no response for that question.
Tarot would have laughed out loud if her jaw didn't ache so much. "None of us are interested in you like that. We just wanna make sure you're not bitten. If I wanted you, you'd know it by now."
"I ain't into no pussy no how," Jaiyama added as she peeled off her shirt.
Tarot did glance at Jaiyama, to see if the image in her imagination matched up with reality. It was as she suspected. Good body, if in unspectacular proportions.
Cammy, her body flushed Pepto pink, began disrobing, and Jaiyama finished taking her pants off. "Check me out," Tarot said as she spun around. When she caught Cammy checking her out, she gave the girl a wink, knew it would fuck with her, which was about the only fun she'd had since her friends had died. Maybe she was over them already. How long was a person supposed to mourn?
"What about me?" Jaiyama asked, spinning about.
"Looks good to me," Tarot said.
Then it was Cammy's turn. She had pulled her scrubs down, stood like the goddess in Botticelli's Birth of Venus, only her hair wasn't long enough to cover her breasts. She spun slow, like doing it fast would expose every nook and cranny of her body. For a moment, Tarot almost felt awkward for her. Instead, she refocused and studied her body looking for bites or scratches.
Seeing none, all the women breathed a sigh of relief, began putting their clothes on.
"You on birth control?" Tarot casually asked Cammy.
"What?"
Tarot shrugged. "I've seen the way you and Flash have been clinging to each other. Just figured I'd asked. The road is no place for a kid, especially not now."
"She's right," Jaiyama added, "you get knocked up, we'll leave your ass. Ain't nobody got time for that shit."
Cammy flushed even brighter. "It's none of your business and—
Jaiyama stopped her right there, held up a hand. "It is our business. This is our crew now. Something happens to you, and we all got to deal with it. Now you might not know what it means to run in a crew, but the first rule is this: Crew comes first. You can't get with that, then you best carry your ass on home right now."
"To Casper?" Cammy asked incredulously.
"I don't give a good goddamn where home is, but you better head on over there if you're gonna try and play homemaker."
"I'm not," Cammy said, shaking her head. "I won't."
Her stammering pained Tarot. She knew about awkwardness, had suffered through it her entire youth before she realized how big a piece of shit the majority of humanity was. Once she came to terms with that, she stopped caring at all, allowed herself to say whatever the fuck she wanted to say whenever she wanted to say it. Still, Cammy's embarrassment was unnecessary and cruel in this instance, so she tried to make it better. "Just get on the fucking birth control," she said as she slid her shirt over her head and plucked her jacket from the bed.
Jaiyama followed soon after, leaving Cammy alone in the room with her thoughts.
****
It fell upon Carl and Ernie to check each other out.
Carl was nervous about it, thought maybe the old man had some cameras hidden in his house or something. He wouldn't put it past anyone to be a pervert. Hell, Carl himself had put a hidden camera in every room of his house. Sometimes, on his lunch breaks, he would sit on his phone, trying to see if any of the government's men were going through his shit. Then the thought crossed his mind that maybe they didn't need to because they had spliced into his camera feeds, despite the sixteen-digit password and thirty-two-digit username he'd used when he set up the account.
"Come on," Ernie griped. "Let's get this over with. I got shit to do."
Ernie began undressing, a relatively easy process. Belt, jeans, pants, t-shirt. When he was fully naked, Carl watched him spin around. He was in pretty good shape for an old man, better than Carl himself.
Carl wasn't in terrible shape, but he had a bit of a paunch on him, liked to hit the donuts in the morning and the booze at night. He peeled off the clothing he'd stolen from the farmhouse, simple farmer's clothes, nothing like the biker-wear everyone else seemed to favor, but a damn sight better than the blood-soaked scrubs he'd worn around for a couple of days.
When he was naked, his cock shriveled inside his body due to embarrassment, he spun in a circle, and asked the question on his mind. "You're not a cop are you? You have to tell me if you are."
Ernie smiled and said, "Son, I'm the furthest thing from a cop you're gonna find out here. Hell, back when I was your age, I'd shoot a guy for even asking me that question."
Carl shrugged. "I just had to ask. We good here?"
Ernie nodded, and the two men put their clothes back on.
Carl flinched as another of the dead joined in banging on the front door. Once it started, the pounding didn't stop.
"They're here," Carl announced.
"Gonna ruin my fucking paintjob," Ernie snapped before he brushed by Carl.
Carl, fully clothed, wandered downstairs, found himself a TV and turned it on. The others looked like they were settling in for some rest, but Carl was still wired, frequently had trouble sleeping anyway. Perhaps a little TV would help.
The TV took a while to come on, and he checked the remote one more time to see if he had indeed turned on the power. Just as he was about to get up and check the connection, the TV blinked on. The first channel he turned to had a test pattern up, a message scrolling across the bottom of the screen warning people to stay inside.
"Pshh," Carl thought. A little late for that. He changed the channel, found much the same. From there, he scrolled through the stations until he found one that didn't look like Neapolitan ice cream.
He finally found an image on a strange channel, one he'd never paid attention to –Channel 33, public access. A group of people sat in a concrete studio, a cheap card table in front of them, various beverages on hand, including one beer, which made Carl's mouth water.
There were two men and a woman on the screen, with the woman sitting in the middle. The man on the right was large, had a thick red beard, yellow-tinted shooting glasses, and a black cowboy hat decorated with silver circles. His khaki vest was lined with shotgun shells. The woman was no looker, a serious face, a chin gone to jowls in her middle age. The man on the left wore a black t-shirt, a black and white picture of a little girl holding out her hand in a clawed shape.
Together, they talked, blathering on and on, throwing out nonsense theory after nonsense theory.
"It's aliens," the man in the shooting glasses said. "There's no doubt in my mind."
"Oh, come on. Aliens?" the man in the black t-shirt asked. "You're not serious."
"I'm deadly serious."
"Why would they do that? You can travel light years across the galaxy, and when you show up, you what? Point a laser ray at the planet and bring the dead back to life?"
The woman butted in, said, "No, no. It makes perfect sense. You see, if aliens are here, there probably aren't a lot of them, right? It must take a ton of resources to travel through space, so they need a weapon a small crew could use to take over a planet. They turn it on humans, and boom, next thing you know, we're killing ourselves."
"I don't buy it," the man in the black t-shirt said.
"Oh, and what do you think it is?"
"I mean it's obvious, isn't it? A bio-weapon got loose, something the government was working on."
Carl found himself nodding his head on the couch. The government had his vote.
A phone number flashed up on the screen, and Carl waited to hear if anyone would call in to the show. Outside, the dead banged on the door as the men and women in Ernie's house fell into fitful sleeping.
The people on the screen continued arguing back and forth, and Carl half-dozed, eventually slipping from an upright position to a sideways one, his eyelids growing heavy and eventually closing for good, the rhythmic pounding of the dead men on the porch lulling him into a dream world filled with flying saucers, men in dark sunglasses, and plenty of unwanted probings.
****
Ernie opened his locker, pulled out his gear, lifted boxes of ammo out, and placed them on the ground. The metal containers clanked against the wooden floor. He tried to keep it quiet, knew the rest of the crew needed to get their sleep. Tomorrow, they would be getting out of here. They could hide in a house all they wanted, but sooner or later, they would run out of food. While they had the ammo, they could get somewhere, maybe even take over someplace like they'd done before, only this next time, there would be killing, Cammy and Tim be damned.
He knew they felt it, the loss of being a good person. He could see it on Tim's face the moment he reappeared without a beard. He'd bet his good eye that if Tim had shaved his face the day before his buddy had died, it would have looked significantly different. The eyes wouldn't have been as hollow, the cheeks far less sunken, his skin less leathery looking. Besides himself, Tim was the oldest person in the crew. Today, he looked it. That's what breaking bad did to people, sucked the life right out of you.
For Ernie, he'd had that same hollow-cheeked look since he was in his twenties, since he did his first job for the family, sitting on top of a five-story building in downtown Chicago, waiting for the fat fuck to walk in front of a window so he could aerate his head.
Situation like that, a man has a lot of time to think. You're sitting there, smoking cigarettes, like he'd done back in the day, waiting for the man to appear at the door. Thank God DNA testing wasn't a thing back then. By the time he got home, the police would have been able to track him down by the pile of cigarette butts he'd left.
The hardest part about the whole situation was this: There was no going back. Once you went all in, you could never get that part of you back. Your integrity is like an invisible appendage, and when you go through with something that challenges it, it's like cutting off that appendage. Integrity ain't no lizard tail. It doesn't regenerate. Oh, you can stop the killing, as Ernie had done for those years when he lived with his wife, but it wasn't growing back. You were still different from other people, and you knew it.
He'd seen it in the army, seen it happen to good men, men who had been following orders, who had been fighting for justice and freedom and all that cheerleader bullshit… but when they pulled that trigger—didn't matter what the reasons were—they were never the same.
Tim he could understand, but Cammy was a different story. He didn't know why she was still here. She was a hospital worker for Christ's sake. She should have hit the bricks as soon as Jaiyama had thrown down the gauntlet. For whatever reason, she had gone the way of Tim, was willing to do the killing. It shocked him, but then that was always the case. Even with wise guys. Oftentimes, the person you didn't expect to be a ruthless killer would turn out to be the most bloodthirsty son of a gun. The person who joked the hardest often killed the hardest. He wondered if that would be the case for Cammy.
He shook his head, broke free from his musings. From his weapon locker, he pulled out his pride and joy, a monument to home defense as overkill. The sad thing was he was too old to wield the damn thing. Maybe if Bubba were here, he could have carried this thing around like motherfucking Rambo, but they hadn't seen nor heard from Bubba. Ernie was sad for that. He'd seen guys like that in the past, people who just needed a little guidance, a swift kick in the ass to be turned into something useful. Bubba had that in him.
Maybe Tim could carry it.
He pulled it out, felt the faint slickness of gun oil on his hands, figured he'd have to take the thing apart, get it ready for the road. But once they hit the road, man was it going to be nice.
With one hand, he flung out a sheet, laid the weapon on the ground, and began breaking it down. It had been a while. He'd bought the thing on a whim from some redneck farmer who figured out that every time he used the thing, his neighbor called the cops on him. You fired this bad boy, and every dead motherfucker within a mile was gonna hear it. Could be a good thing, could be a bad thing. Like most things, it was situational.
Short of having a personal minigun, the Stoner 63 was your best option. As he pulled it apart, swept it clean, and oiled its pieces, he began to bemoan his old age. He'd love to walk out into a crowd of the dead with this damn thing and mow them all down. Even if you didn't hit them in the head, the fucking thing would do so much damage that it would severely lower the viability of anything, living or dead, that crossed his path. He might be able to fire it for a minute or so, in short bursts, but it was too heavy for him to lug all day at twelve pounds—fifteen with a full belt of ammo and the tripod attached.
He sighed. It was a sad day when you realized you were too old to play with your toys anymore. But maybe Tim could use it. Hell, if Tim couldn't, he'd bolt it to the damn roof of his car. If he was mechanically inclined, he could have come up with some sort of computerized targeting or some shit. Man, that would be awesome. But, he didn't know shit about electricity but how to flip power breakers and replace outlets.
He polished the Stoner, made it shine in its blackness. He could almost smell the gun smoke now. He'd been wanting to hear this damn thing roar for some time. When he finished putting the Stoner back together, he did a quick visual inspection of the ammo belts. Ideally, you'd have a buddy standing off to your left, losing his fucking hearing, and holding the belt in the air while it was fed into the chamber. Whole lot less chance of jamming that way. The belts looked solid, so he hung them up for when he'd hand them to Tim, placed them around his shoulders like Mardi Gras beads.
From there, he pulled out the rest of his ammo, counted it up, reloaded his weapons. Placed his Colt 1911 in the back of his jeans. Just like Thomas Magnum had on Magnum P.I. Hell of a thing—here's a detective named "Magnum" P.I., and he uses a fucking Colt. Ernie could never get over that. Stupid son of a bitch. But that's Hollywood for you. The number of things the movies got wrong about guns, criminals, and gangsters could fill its own book.
