Badass Zombie Road Trip (4 page)

The second thing that happened was simpler and more realistic.

Dale awoke with a sudden jerk.

“Where are we?” he asked. From dead-asleep to wide-awake in a split second, Dale pressed his face against the passenger window and took in his surroundings. His attention snapped back and forth, from car to road to landscape, like an overexcited dog. After a few seconds of silence, he asked again, “Where are we?”

“Nowhere,” Jonah squeaked. He had hoped that Dale would remain in hibernation until they were entrenched in the state. “We’re an hour from Reno. Go back to sleep.”

They watched in silence as a passing sign made a liar out of Jonah. It proclaimed that the sunny state of California was very pleased to welcome them.

“Jonah?”

“Umm … yes?”

“Why did that welcome sign have the words ‘Sunny California’ on it?”

“Did it?” Jonah half asked and half said—half hoping Dale would think this was all just a dream and go back to sleep. “You’re imagining things.” As he said this, they passed a billboard that assured Dale that Jonah was indeed a liar by offering the cheapest hotel prices available in the sunny state of California. Exit seven, only five miles on the right!

“Jonah?” Dale asked.

“Dale?” Jonah asked.

“Are we where I think we are? And you better not say what I think you are going to say, or God help me, I will rip your head from your shoulders and shit down your neck!”

Jonah thought long and hard about this question. There was no use denying it anymore, as Dale was eyeing a steady stream of highway markers and billboards that revealed the lie for what it was. He would rather not have Dale make good on his head ripping, neck shitting promise, but the jig was indeed up.

Jonah drew a deep, soulful sigh, and said, “California.”

Dale said nothing in response, which surprised Jonah. Jonah was further surprised when Dale grabbed the steering wheel and tried to flip a bitch against the four lanes of busy interstate traffic.

“What are you doing?” Jonah screamed.

“I have to get out of here now!” Dale screamed.

The car wandered from lane to lane as the men fought for the wheel and screamed at one another. Cars honked and swerved, some very close to Jonah’s Focus, and a multitude of middle fingers and fists raised in their direction in shows of aggression.

Jonah swatted at Dale’s death grip on the wheel. “Let go! You’re going to get us killed!” After Jonah landed a particularly nasty blow, Dale relinquished the wheel.

He stuffed his fingers into his mouth as he eyed Jonah with distaste. “You gotta get me out of here, man,” Dale said, around his mouthful of fingers.

“What is wrong with you?”

“I have to go back!” Dale snatched Jonah by the collar of his t-shirt, which made driving very difficult. Once again, they were all over the road as Dale choked Jonah into submission, crying, “Take me back! Take me back!”

“Dale!” Jonah coughed. “I can’t breathe!”

The maniac released Jonah, but kept up with the begging and pleading. “Jonah, you have to go back now. Please. I’m begging you.”

“Get ahold of yourself. You’re acting like a crazy man. Stop being such a crybaby.”

Dale took on a sudden hurt look. “I thought you were my friend.”

“I am your friend.”

“Then why do this to me? I told you I couldn’t come back here. Take me back. Now!”

Jonah wanted nothing more than to grant that single request, but four lanes of traffic and no available means of egress made it a very hard thing to do, indeed. “I will as soon as I can. Let me find an exit.”

Before an exit presented itself, something else did. Over the honks and aggression of the other drivers, a familiar noise arose: the whine of a siren. And with it came the steady pulse of blue lights in Jonah’s rearview mirror. A motorcycled officer waved for them to pull over.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Jonah said.

In a faint whisper, almost too low for Jonah to hear, Dale said, “God has nothing to do with it.”

Jonah wondered what this meant as he eased the car into the far lane and onto the shoulder, as a good driver should.

“What are you doing?” Dale asked, aghast.

“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m pulling over.”

“Don’t pull over.”

“What?”

“Keep going.”

“Dale, it’s the cops. We have to stop.” Jonah put the car in park and cut the engine.

The sudden silence produced a heart-wrenching wail from Dale. “No! Keep going. Go! Go! Go!”

At this point, Jonah began to wonder about Dale’s sanity. There had been times in their past when Jonah had contemplated the idea that Dale might be a bit off his hinges, but this was the first time he bore witness to such a livid display of psychosis. Dale twisted and squirmed in his seat, shooting glances at the cop dismounting from the motorcycle behind them, then back to Jonah. As the officer approached the car, Dale pawed at his door handle, but Jonah had long since child-locked the thing. The big man grew more and more agitated, clawing at the door as he whimpered and begged Jonah to let him escape. But Jonah would not be moved. He remained a shore of sanity against Dale’s swelling tide of madness.

Until Dale started to crawl across the front seat.

“What are you doing?” Jonah asked as Dale scooted toward him.

“If you won’t get us out of here, I will!” Dale yelled.

Jonah squealed as Dale attempted to usurp the driver’s seat by force. “Stop that! We can’t both be in the driver’s seat!”

“Then get out of my way!” Dale was all arms and legs and wild intentions. “Move over!”

“I can’t!” Jonah tried to push Dale away, but it was no use. The man rolled onto him like a train—almost as heavy, nearly as unstoppable—shifting his full weight straight onto Jonah’s lap, among other places. Pain bloomed from Jonah’s groin, firing warning signals of eminent collapse to his overworked brain. “Jesus! You’re squashing my nuts! Get off before you castrate me!”

A tap sounded from the driver’s window. Dale fell still somewhere between the steering wheel and Jonah, who had fallen still somewhere under and around Dale. And this was how the officer found them, tangled in a mass of limbs and frustration and painful testicles, stuffed into that narrow space between the driver’s seat and steering wheel. A space meant for one man, not two idiots.

The officer lowered his helmeted head to window level. He stared at the pair from behind dark sunglasses. He didn’t look pleased.

“Hello, sir,” Jonah said, his voice oscillating from boyish to mannish to boyish again.

In an act of incongruity, Dale whispered, of all things, “Too late. Too late.”

The officer continued to look very displeased. He tapped on the glass again, then motioned that he would like for the glass to be gone.

Jonah granted his swish by rolling down the window as best he could with a lap full of Dale. He glanced at the eye-level nametag, but couldn’t make out the man’s name. It wasn’t that the name was obscured. The letters were perfectly visible, they just didn’t make any sense. Every time Jonah tried to make the letters form a word, the whole thing slipped away in a puff of confusion, and he lost the idea of what it could have been.

“Afternoon, Officer,” Jonah squeaked. “Can we help you?”

The officer looked to Jonah, then Dale, before he did the last thing Jonah ever expected the man to do. He smiled. It was a wide, leering grin, an ear-to-ear white, shining light of a grin. It was not the smile of a happy man. It was something else. Something uncomfortable. Something unsettling.

It was the most frightening smile Jonah had ever seen.

The officer then removed his glasses, revealing a pair of eyes so blue that Jonah winced at their electric glow.

“Looks like you boys are in a bit of a pickle,” the officer said.

If Jonah had been in his right frame of mind, he would have realized that the officer’s accent wasn’t native to California, nor was the man’s choice of words. He spoke with a low, country twang. A rich, Southern brogue. If Jonah had been in his right frame of mind, he would have realized that the reason the man’s grin was frightening was because he had way too many teeth for a normal person. Jonah, if he had been in his right mind, would have also noticed that the man’s eyes and teeth shone brighter than the California sunshine, which was also unnatural—though not impossible, thanks to better living through chemistry. But these things were neither here nor there, because Jonah was most certainly not in his right frame of mind. He was, at the moment, in a very wrong frame of mind. The frame of mind most psychologists would define as panic.

“Pickle,” Jonah echoed, unsure what the word meant.

Dale said something entirely different, though not unexpected. He said something that Jonah was afraid Dale was going to say, though it was Jonah’s fervent wish that he wouldn’t.

“Fuck you.”

****

I-80, California

The officer lost the mile-wide grin, and Jonah nearly lost control of his bowels. “Please step out of the vehicle,” the officer said, and backed away to give them room to do just that.

“Thanks a lot,” Jonah said, as he untangled an arm.

“What?” Dale asked as he unwound a leg.

“You know what!” Jonah grunted as Dale shifted off of his lap. “You shouldn’t have said that.”

“Me? You’re the stupid fucker who drove us here. I told you I couldn’t come back to California, man. Weren’t you even listening to me?”

“I just thought—”

“What? That you would do me a favor by shitting on my wishes? I asked you to forget about it. You promised.”

For a moment, Dale was as serious as death, and in that moment, guilt rose over Jonah. “I’m sorry, Dale. I really am.”

“Sure. Sorry. Too late for that now, numb nuts.”

“I thought I was helping you. I didn’t realize you were going to act like a complete jackass the moment we crossed the state line.”

“I’m not being a jackass; I’m being realistic. You have no idea how much you’ve screwed me.”

“Anytime, boys!” the officer shouted from the front of the Focus.

“We’re in for it now,” Jonah said.

“What’s all this ‘we’ shit?” Dale asked.

Jonah growled, “One doesn’t make a proclamation such as ‘fuck you’ to an officer of the law and get away with it. No sir. No how. Not in my book.”

“In your what?”

“My book! In my book, there’s a certain logic to the world, where saying ‘fuck you’ to an officer of the law brings about consequences. Even if you aren’t the one who said the actual words. Even if you’re just in the proximity of said words. Such as having the speaker of said words straddling your junk!” Jonah jerked his car door open and rolled out into the stale roadside air.

Dale popped out of the passenger side, yelling, “Yeah? Well, in my book, best friends don’t drive you to California when you specifically asked them not to!” He slammed the door, rocking the little car with his anger-fueled surge of strength.

But Jonah didn’t care about the car at the moment. The only thing he cared about was making his point. He strode to the front of the vehicle as he asked, “Your book?”

“Yeah. My book.”

“I’m surprised you even know what a book is.”

“What? I don’t get a book ‘cause I ain’t as smart as you?” Dale arced around the car too, heading toward Jonah until they were nose to nose, shouting at one another.

“Your book,” Jonah started, “if you even have one, is handwritten in crayon on construction paper, and illustrated by cutouts from porno magazines and beer advertisements. Your book is a treatise on how many ways you can hump a sleeping girl without waking her. Your book is a running column of numbers on what amounts of what liquor you can drink before puking your guts out. Your book is dog eared and torn to pieces and has a flip cartoon in the corner of a stick figure jacking off. Your book, if you have one, is just … wrong!”

“At least my book is interesting,” Dale countered. “At least my book isn’t just a manual on one hundred ways to masturbate to pictures of women that will never fuck you while the rest of it is how to betray your best fucking friend!”

“Gentlemen!” the officer shouted.

Jonah and Dale turned to face the man about whom they had both forgotten, and shouted in unison, “What?”

“There is only one book that matters.” The creepy smile had returned.

“Jesus Christ,” Dale whispered, his words almost lost in the noise of passing cars.

The officer shrugged. “Sure, he got the best lines, but that’s what happens when you’re the lead character.”

Now that they were out of the car, Jonah got a proper look at the officer, and didn’t like what he saw. He was a big man, taller than Dale and wider than Dale and more muscular than Dale. And that was saying a lot, because Dale was a very big man to begin with. The officer must have been almost seven feet, with broad shoulders and long legs. He popped off the helmet to reveal sandy blond hair and sharp, handsome features. In short, he was very big, very wide, and very good looking.