Badass Zombie Road Trip (24 page)

“Can you blame it? You did want to eat the poor thing.”

“What makes a dog a ‘poor thing’ when a rat is dinner?”

“I don’t know, Dale. I don’t make the rules. Did you go after it?”

“I wanted to, but I was way too hungry for that shit. I wasn’t sure I wouldn’t, you know, eat the first person I saw. Luckily there was a dumpster just across the road. So I hit it and came back as soon as I was done.”

“What kind of dog was it?”

“A pissed-off one.”

“I meant what breed?”

“I don’t know. It all happened so fast.” Dale held his hands apart, trying to shape the size of the dog from memory. “It was brown and small.”

“Little and brown? The way you tell the story, I thought it was a freaking Doberman.” Jonah glanced down at the zombie’s blood-streaked chest. “Where did your shirt go?”

“I tossed it. Trust me, you don’t want to see it, and I don’t want that thing back.”

“This is going to get old.” Jonah groaned as he rubbed his temples. “Can you at least try not to make such a mess when you eat?”

 
“I can’t help it,” Dale pouted. “The little bastards wiggle a lot, and it’s hard to keep the blood from squirting on your clothes when you bite down—”

“Jesus, we’re going to end up spending a fortune in clothes if you keep getting blood all over them and throwing them out.”

“I guess I could always eat in the nude.”

Jonah considered the image of the naked zombie rummaging around in a dumpster, looking for rats to eat. He considered it in the same way he considered a punch to the balls. With extreme horror. “I don’t think that will be necessary. Just do your best to stop ruining your clothes. Or, at the very least, don’t throw them away.”

“Sorry, man, but I was pretty sure you would be with Candy when I went looking for you. She definitely didn’t need to see that.”

“What do you mean you knew I would be with her?” Jonah asked.

Dale grinned a mouthful of crimson-tinted enamel. “Come on, man. I knew you couldn’t just go to bed without at least talking to her for a few minutes. I just didn’t think you’d be making out already. That was a pretty fast hookup. I’m impressed.”

Jonah wanted to strut and cluck and crow, but he pushed those urges aside in favor of decorum. Besides, there would be plenty of time to rub his hookup in the living Dale’s face when this was all done. And once he actually hooked up. “Just so you know, we weren’t really making out. Just talking.”

The zombie didn’t seem to hear him. “Oh, man, she’s so hot. Did you get to second base? Are those tits real? I bet they are.”

“Dale! Get your mind off her tits and back on your thumb.”

“I’d rather think about her tits than my thumb. Or better still, my thumb playing with her tits.” The zombie’s remaining thumb jumped at the prospect, twitching in the air as Dale stared into the distance, lost in his fantasy.

Jonah wanted to be angry, but he couldn’t blame Dale. Candy was just so sexy. With a sigh, Jonah agreed, “Me, too. But fantasizing about fondling Candy’s fantastic breasts all night is not going to help that.” He pointed to Dale’s missing digit.

“What are we going to do about it?”

“I don’t know. What can we do?”

Dale scrunched his face up in thought, and, for a moment, Jonah supposed that the zombie was going to be at it for a while. But only a few seconds into his thinking, Dale announced, “Satan.”

“What about him?”

“Maybe he can fix this.”

Jonah stared at the empty space where Dale’s finger used to be. “What makes you think he can do that?”

“I look at it like this: I’m dead, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And if we get my soul back, he’s going to bring me back to life, right?”

As Jonah thought about this for a moment, a sudden nausea swept over him. “God, I hope so. I mean, I didn’t really specify. He just said he’d give it back. I didn’t even think about what to do after that.”

“Stop panicking. I’m sure he meant he’d return me to life. After all, what good would a soul do you?”

What good indeed? Jonah furrowed his brow in frustration. “I don’t see what this has to do with—”

“With this?” Dale raised his maimed hand. “I’m thinking if he is going to bring me back to life, then he will have to fix the other damage being dead has caused me. So we can just stick this on the bill.”

“Other damage?”

Dale nodded.

A little hesitant, unsure if he wanted to know or not, Jonah asked, “What other damage?”

Dale grinned wickedly at the question. “Trust me. You don’t want to know.”

“Come on. If you’re harmed in any way, I might be able to help you.”

“I’m telling you, man. You don’t want to know.”

The more the zombie refused to share, the more a morbid and sinister curiosity consumed Jonah. “I should know. You’re my responsibility since you, umm, shuffled off your mortal coil. I need to know.”

Dale shrugged as he sat on the edge of the bed. “Suit yourself. Where to begin?” He tapped his fingertips together, staring at the missing thumb as he contemplated his choice of words. “Well, for starters, what kind of shape do you think the asshole that shit a toilet bowl full of undigested food is going to be in right about now?”

Jonah gagged at the insinuation. “I can’t imagine.” Though he supposed he could. He just didn’t want to.

“Yup. Those Happy Burger wrappers alone chewed my ass up. It’s like the Grand Canyon back there! And you think that’s bad? Let me explain how delicate one’s foreskin becomes when you’re dead.”

“No need. I think I’ve heard enough.”

Dale, however, hadn’t told enough. He ignored Jonah and plowed right along with his disgusting descriptions of dong-centric desiccation. “Just the slightest rubbing from underwear alone leaves it raw and cracking, no matter how much lotion you put on your pecker. And since there’s no blood flow, you don’t really bleed from those sores. No. You sort of ooze black stuff that, oddly enough, tastes like chicken.”

Jonah’s eyes widened as his stomach flipped. “You tasted it? That’s disgusting!”

“Disgusting? That’s not the half of it. Can you imagine how swollen your balls get when you can’t follow through with your daily masturbatory routine? Of course that might just be a case of bloating rather than backup. And, by the way, they are totally blue and quickly approaching black, if you get my drift.”

“Okay! You win! Enough!”

“Some win. If this shit’s the prize, it sucks.” Dale’s derisive chuckle was almost as nauseating as his laundry list of complaints. “Do you think Satan is just gonna shuffle my coil back into my mortal being and let all of this just ride? Or is he going to fix me up properly? ‘Cause, to tell the truth, I don’t think my precious soul will like the new me very much. Do you?”

Jonah stared at the zombie, stunned, shocked, and speechless. Dale proceeded to stretch out full length across the bed, his muscles creaking and bones cracking, as he waited for Jonah to make up his mind. But as far as minds went, Jonah felt quite out of his. He was pretty sure he had left his mind along I-80 just inside the California state border.

Or in an apartment in Sacramento.

Or in a convenience store dumpster in Reno.

Or on the lips of a beautiful redhead right here in Green River, Utah.

At length, Jonah asked, “What’s your plan?”

“We go look for it,” Dale said. He held the wounded hand up to the light, displaying it for Jonah again. “We find my thumb and take it to North Carolina with us. And then we hope Satan can put it back.”

“Do you honestly think that having the thumb will make a difference?”

“Don’t know for sure, but I’d hate to be wrong.”

“What if he can fix you without it? What if he doesn’t need it?”

“What if he does? You claim the living Dale won’t be happy if I’m a killer? How will he feel about losing his thumb because you couldn’t keep a simple promise?”

Touché
. Dead Dale hit a homerun with that little jab, rounding all the bases of Jonah’s guilty field without breaking a sweat. Jonah grunted in abhorrence to being laid so low with but a mere phrase. “Thanks a lot for putting it that way, friend.”

Dale dipped his head in appreciation. “You’re welcome, but you’re the one who keeps going on and fucking on about all of this being your fault.”

Which was true as well. Yet there were so many factors to consider. “I bet we won’t be able to find it.”

“This town is the size of a fucking trailer park. Where the hell is it gonna go?”

Jonah covered his face with his hands, wishing that all of this would just go away. Well, the parts with dead Dale. The parts with Candy he would keep. And treasure. Forever. Through his fingers, he asked, “You really think we need it?”

“I want it. That’s enough for me.”

 
Peeking between his fingers at the grinning dead man lying on his bed, Jonah knew he didn’t have a choice. If he said no, Dale would just badger him about it all night and he wouldn’t get to sleep, anyway.

“Fine,” Jonah conceded while rubbing his tired eyes. “You get one hour. Hear me? One hour. Then I’m coming back here and going to sleep. I still have a thousand miles to drive.”

“Great!” Dale shouted as he leapt up and grabbed a clean shirt. “But I want three hours.”

“One.”

“Three and I’ll back off the chick.”

“You’ll what?”

Dale pulled the shirt on, fumbling with the buttons now that his thumb was missing. “Help me look for three hours, and I’ll step aside and let you have a crack at that sweet thing. I’ll even join your cheerleading squad.” He punched the air and added, “Go, Team Jonah! Get that pussy!”

It was an interesting offer, which both insulted and intrigued Jonah. If Dale promised to stop his incessant flirting with Candy, then maybe, just maybe, Jonah would have a real chance to win her affections. Though the underlying insinuation that Dale could pluck her like a flower right from Jonah’s bouquet, well, that was enough to make a man mad. He ran hot and cold with the thought, wanting to both beat the zombie to a pulp and thank him for being so generous.

Jonah relented. “Three hours. But I don’t need you to help me with her. I’m doing just fine on my own.”

“I saw how just fine you were. She was real anxious to stick around and let you finish whatever I interrupted. Wasn’t she?”

“Dale!”

“What? The bitch bolted from the poolside like it was a fucking rape scene.”

“Now it’s two hours,” Jonah growled. “And if you say one more damned word about her, it’ll be five minutes. Understand?”

“I got it. Don’t get your panties in a fucking wad.”

Jonah followed Dale out to the parking lot, trying very hard not to concentrate on the word ‘panties’.

Or fucking.

****

Green River, Utah

134 hours: 45 minutes: 58 seconds remaining

Jonah had no idea what to expect. He had no idea what kind of plan Dale had for finding his missing digit. No idea how they would find this thumb-sized needle in a town-sized haystack. But the solution was as plain as the nose on a dead man’s face.

Dale claimed he could smell his missing thumb.

Like some odiferous homing device, the severed thumb apparently called to Dale in the language of a distinct aroma, begging him to find and rescue it. Green River may have been a bit on the small side, but it was still big enough to wear Jonah out with the effort of the search. Besides the trudging around from hidey-hole to hidey-hole, they also had to avoid the patrolling policemen and nocturnal townies. Three hours later, an already tired Jonah became a very, very exhausted Jonah.

Fighting for breath and aching to the bone, he leaned against a signpost and announced, “I would like to remind you that your two hours were up an hour ago.”

Dale trudged past the post, silencing Jonah’s complaint with a hiss. “It’s near here. I can smell it.”

“You smelled it from the parking lot of the McDonald’s to the back alley of the Food King. You smelled it in two different trailer parks and a retirement home. If you smelled it any better, you’d have found it by now. Just stop for a minute, would you?”

Dale deigned to stop and let Jonah rest. “What are you complaining about? It’s not your thumb that has gone missing.”

“I’m complaining because I’m tired. I know a side effect of being dead means you don’t get tired, but I’m not dead. Remember? And I
am
tired. I’m tired and my feet hurt and my back aches and I think we’re lost.”

“We aren’t lost.” The zombie sniffed the air. “I know right where we are.”

“Then where are we?”

Dale pointed to the sign against which Jonah was leaning. “Juniper Street. Can’t you read? Now shut up and follow me.” He stopped to sniff the air again. “I know we’re close.”

Jonah looked up at the sign, confused by the familiarity of it. “Haven’t we been down Juniper Street once already?”