A Little More Dead (19 page)

Chapter
Thirty-Five

DAY FOURTEEN

The next morning was overcast and cool.
The American flag waved with a brisk breeze rushing across the front yard,
still standing tall and proud in the face of defeat. The day looked like Paul
felt – turbulent, dismal,
empty
. Dan manually opened
the double garage door and hopped in behind the wheel of Shelly1, revving the
beefy engine hard enough to vibrate the tools hanging from the unfinished walls.
Paul took one last look at the picture of the balding man leaning against the car,
wondering where the rest of his family went. Wondering if he killed them before
sneaking back into his own house like a thief in the night.

“Paul?”

His head snapped around to Wendy.

She tried flashing him one of her pretty
smiles but fell short. “You ready?”

He studied her for a few seconds, not
anywhere close to being
ready
,
wanting to run somewhere that didn’t exist. His blank gaze swung out the garage
door and got lost in the gray, exhaust fumes making his breakfast churn in his
stomach.

Those
things
were out there.

Hiding.

Waiting.

And now they were going out there.

“Ready,” he replied, sliding in back
while Wendy climbed up front with Dan.

The car’s exhaust rattled when Dan
pulled out and Paul couldn’t help but feel bad for the car show guy. He had a
good thing going here and didn’t deserve to lose it all like this.

“Are you going to sit here all day or
what?” Wendy said, buckling her lap belt.

“
Gotta
let her
warm up for a minute,” Dan replied, giving her some gas. “She’s a classic.”

“Is she? I must’ve missed that the last
twenty times you said it,” Wendy replied, tying her hair back in a black
scrunchie
.

“I treat my cars like I treat my women,”
Dan said, petting the dash.

“Oh, so you’re going to take the car to
KFC for dinner?”

“Ha-ha.”

Wendy leaned back and laughed. “At least
take her to Popeye’s.”

Paul swallowed thickly. He felt like
everyone had already forgotten about Sophia.

“Hang on bitches,” Dan said, burying the
gas pedal.

The golf clubs and fishing rods shifted
in the trunk as the car left trails of burnt rubber down the driveway. He
fishtailed out onto the road, pelting the ditches with gravel. They didn’t
bother shutting the garage door and headed south on two-lane highways that
would, eventually, take them between San Antonio and Houston. There would be
some unavoidable population centers along the way, but if all went well they
might smell the ocean by tomorrow afternoon. It was a new beginning. To what,
Paul could only laugh at inside.

They rode in silence, always on the
nervous lookout, especially when siphoning gas or moving vehicles blocking the
road. Barely two weeks in and their daily chores were already taking a toll.
And it wasn’t just the physical exertion of doing everything by hand, but the
mental drain as well. Always thinking you saw something move in the bushes,
always feeling like somebody was watching. Paul thought he’d be more used to it
by now but, if anything, it was getting harder. He just wanted to sleep. Sleep
and never wake up.

“Fucking zombies,” Dan uttered, turning
the wipers on intermittent as a cold drizzle began to fall.

Dan started spitting this phrase out
during long moments of uncomfortable silence and Paul wished he’d come up with
a different tick. It was a crutch for when he couldn’t think of anything else
to say. Wendy’s new tick of listing off foods she would absolutely die for was
getting on Paul’s nerves as well. It would take an entire farm with the ability
to produce fresh cheese, sausage and mushrooms to make a pizza these days and
talking about the impossible made absolutely no sense. Paul wanted to bring
Sophia back to life but they didn’t hear him going on and on about combining electricity
with human hearts because he couldn’t think of anything else to say. No, he bit
his tongue even though that’s
exactly
what was rattling around in his head.

Bringing her
back to life.
Somehow.

“Who do you think looked more like a
zombie before this crap began, Mickey
Rourke
or
Janice Dickinson?”

Wendy laughed.
“Probably
Mickey
Rourke
.
I don’t know what he was
thinking.”

“God hath given you one face, and you
make yourself another.”

She looked over at him.
“Hamlet?
Wow,” she purred. “If I didn’t know any better, Dan
Kippler
, I might think you’re trying to impress me.”

Dan grinned and stepped on the gas,
flying down the winding road with reckless abandon. Dan and Wendy were lucky.
They’d already left the Jacobsen house behind and he was still there, holding
his wife’s rigid body on that L-shaped couch. He could see them hooking up and
why not? Everyone else was either dead or almost dead. He snorted, fogging his
window. What a kick in the ass the whole thing was. Now
he
would become
the eternal third wheel, always in the way, always spoiling the moment.

The thought of his wife up on that hill,
alone in the rain, disrupted his moment of feeling sorry for himself. If
disemboweled, his insides would look like the dark skies above. His distant
gaze zoomed in on a UPS guy sauntering along the left side of the road up
ahead. The skinny man heard the
Chevelle’s
approaching rumble and immediately stumbled into the car’s path, his brown
pants and coat ragged and torn.

“Hang on!” Dan jerked the wheel to the
right.

Shelly1 swerved, wide tires angrily
screeching against wet pavement. The front end bumped the man with a dull thud
and Wendy screamed. Dan laid on the horn and blew past, spinning the corpse in
the car’s dust. Despite the muscle car’s speed, the UPS driver got up and
hobbled after them. No longer delivering packages, now he was taking them.

Dan turned to Wendy with a drawn face.
“If that guy scratched this car, I’m going to be so pissed.”

Three miles later, they passed a big
brown UPS truck that had t-boned a blue pickup with someone slumped over the steering
wheel inside.

“Slow down!” Wendy said. “You’re going
way too fast.”

“No, I’m not.”

“When do I get to drive?”

“When you’re
ready to handle the power.”

Paul blew out a heated breath, studying
a bank sign that normally would’ve told him the time and temp. Now, however, the
dark sign told him that money was just as useless as everything else. Paul
swallowed dryly. They were on their own.

Dan slowed way down. “Damn, this is
getting hairy,” he said, carefully squeezing between a new
Camaro
with a crumpled front end and a yellow Hummer.

Paul kept his eyes on the nearby houses,
searching for signs of life. A loose dog ran from one yard to another.
Raindrops fell on a framed garage that would never see its finish. A non-digital
billboard for a country radio station came into view. The morning show’s
smiling faces made him shift in the backseat. Those people weren’t smiling now.
No, now they were probably dead and Paul considered them lucky if they were.

He rested his head against the glass and
shut his eyes. Why did he leave Sophia there like that? A deep-seeded cringe
tore through him. It was so stupid. Dan and Wendy would’ve been fine on their
own. If anything, he would just slow them down. Look at what happened with the
camper. He could’ve killed them. It would’ve been easy to stay behind with his
wife.
Peaceful.
Just the two of them sharing sunsets
and long talks up on the hill.

Someone tapped him on the shoulder and
he pulled his gun.

Wendy’s face soured. “Relax, it’s just
me.”

Paul slowly holstered the weapon,
wondering why Wendy was looking at him like he was a wild animal, like he
might…hurt her.

“Are you alright?”

He blinked blankly and she passed him a
bottle of warm water.

“Drink.”

He obeyed and took a long drink before
passing it back.

“Keep it.”

Tires hummed and the engine purred at
seventy miles an hour.

Wendy stared out the front windshield,
watching another small town slide past. She cleared her throat. “I can’t even
imagine what you’re going through right now and I won’t pretend to,” she said
without looking back. “Sophia was so nice to me and didn’t talk down to me
because of where I worked and…” Her voice quivered. “And I just wish I could’ve
gotten to know her better.”

Paul fought back the tears, wishing she
would just shut the fuck up already. She didn’t know shit.

Wendy twisted around like she’d heard
him say that out loud. “Where did you two meet anyway?”

He looked down to his hands and shook
with a bump in the road.

“At the gym,” Dan replied, glancing at
him in the mirror.

“That really happens? I thought only
creeps hit on people at the gym.”

Paul ignored her ill-fated attempt at
humor.

“How did you approach her at the gym?”

“He didn’t,” Dan said, taking a curve
too fast, tires squealing. “She approached him when he got pinned under a hundred
and five pound barbell on his chest.”

A bitter laugh shot from Paul’s lips.
“Try two hundred and five pound barbell on my chest, asshole.”

Wendy’s eyes bounced between them. “Did
that really happen or are you guys messing with me?”

“Oh, it happened.” Dan eased up on the
gas pedal. “Luckily for him, no one else saw it.”

The car’s spinning tires filled the dead
air between them. Seconds ticked off like minutes. It seemed like just
yesterday Sophia had stolen his breath for the first time and now she was dead
and never coming back and it was
all his
fault. Paul
twisted his fingers in his lap. He should’ve never left her alone back there
like that. He promised he wouldn’t. Silence gripped the car as they grew closer
to the ocean, Paul second-guessing their big plan with each mile that passed. He
leaned his head back and shut his eyes, the road vibrating the seat. There was
no future at the beach because there was no future without her.

“Can I ask you a question?”

Paul peeled his eyes open to see Dan
turn to Wendy.

“Why is it that strippers like to wear
those big clunky high heels?”

Her gaze narrowed. “What?”

Dan sat up a little straighter. “You
know, those clear plastic things that look like something KISS would wear on
stage.”

“I don’t know, Dan. Why do librarians
wear ugly flats?”

He adjusted his grip on the wheel and
turned onto a gravel road. “I’m just
saying,
why not
wear some classy, black high heels once in a while? If those clod-hoppers were
so great, how come you never see normal girls wearing them out at the bars and
stuff?”

“
Normal girls
?” she said curtly.
“I see plenty of
normal girls
wearing
stripper heels at the bars and stuff.”

“Yeah but I’m talking about those thick
plastic…”

“I know what you’re talking about, Dan,
and I don’t know why they wear them! I think they’re ugly too.”

Dan stopped the car and got quiet,
running his fingers over the leather steering wheel. Paul could hear him
swallow. “Were you a dancer? You can tell me.”

“Oh, can I?” She folded her arms across
a brand new v-neck t-shirt, hiding her assets. “Thank you for the permission
but I already told you I waited tables and…”

“Did the books,” he finished for her.

Paul squinted at a two story house with
brown siding on a large plot of land stretching into the twilight settling
around it. “Where are we?”

Dan studied the dark house with the
engine softly idling.
“Close to Victoria, Texas.”

“Where the hell’s that?”

“Probably forty
or fifty miles from the Gulf; not exactly sure.”

“What?”

“You were asleep for a while, man. We
made good ground around Houston.”

Wendy turned to him and nodded her
affirmation but it wasn’t possible. He just shut his eyes a minute or two ago
and now it was almost dark. Dan backed Shelly1 down the long, double drive and
parked near the house’s expansive deck in the sprawling backyard. He shut the
motor off and the eerie quiet swept in with the bats above. Paul drank some
water and surveyed a fenced-in area holding at least a dozen longhorns, all of
which seemed to be faring okay. A big red barn sat in the tree-lined backyard,
with what goodies lurking inside only time would tell. The house was just as
big and the thought of clearing everything made him groan.