“You think it’s safe?” I asked him as we pulled up to a small camp ground that had six or seven cabins for rent.
“We never got caught,” he answered.
“Who?”
“Me and the wife…we never got caught,” he answered.
“And who would have been doing the catching?” I asked.
“That’s not the point. Come on,” John said as he quickly exited the vehicle.
“Caught doing what?” I asked to his back as I followed. “And that’s exactly the point.” I was three mother fucking steps away from the van when I realized I didn’t have my rifle. I was paranoid, I swear I could see zombies all around, or it was light poles, reality was blurring heavily with hallucinations. I ran quickly back to the van and began to look inside when after a moment I couldn’t find what I was looking for, I had completely forgotten. I jumped, hitting my head on the ceiling when right next to my ear, John asked what I was doing.
“I don’t remember,” I told him.
“That happens to me all the time,” he explained,
“It was important.”
“It always is. If you were meant to have it, it will come back. If not, then you’ve set it free,” he told me prophetically.
“Isn’t that love?” I asked.
“We hardly know each other.”
“I’m never tripping with you again, John,” I told him.
“OH! That’s why I feel so funny. Come on we should go inside.” He said as he fumbled around with a large key ring he produced from God knew where. The keys themselves were making strange echoing vibrations inside my head as they jangled together.
I looked longingly at the van, wishing I had found or could even remember what I was looking for. But I still followed John to the cabin. I don’t know if the drugs were having an effect, but each cabin was painted in some of the most garish colors I had ever seen. The one we were going to was plum purple; the one next to ours—which I was glad we were not going to—was blood red.
“These are some intense colors,” I said to John, hoping that I wasn’t hallucinating this also.
“I’ve never noticed,” John said, standing on the small porch. “We should probably get in, the funky people are coming.”
I didn’t know who the ‘funky people’ were or why I should care, but John seemed to be distressed about it and that was good enough for me. He led me inside. I’d seen closets that were bigger than the cabin, but it had a bed, a small fridge, a television and a chair, pretty much anything a lone man or a couple on a getaway needed.
“I think I know what I forgot,” I told John excitedly.
“About what?” he asked. He was looking through the cabin’s side window.
“The beer, I forgot to get the beer.”
“It’s alright, man,” John said as he took two strides to get across the room to the small dorm fridge. “They’re probably warm but they’re wet.” He flashed a smile as he opened the door, at least a case worth of Natty Lite was stuffed inside.
Had I not been so fucked up on acid, I would have gagged at the display, but as it was, they looked like gleaming cans of honey. “Wonderful,” I said as a funky person slammed into our door.
“Whoa you think they want one, too?” John said as he went to open the door and ask just that.
“We don’t have enough to share,” I said selfishly as I grabbed one of the lukewarm god nectars.
“Probably right,” he said as he let the door handle go.
“Man they’re persistent,” I said as I downed the beer in two or three gulps. Even as high as I was, I was more in tune with how disagreeable the sub-par beverage was thonking around in my gut than I was with the zombies that were trying to gain entry. “I really wish I had a gun,” I said arbitrarily.
“Are you a fed?” John asked warily.
“What?” I asked as I turned to him, not realizing that I had another beer open and was now pouring it down the front of my poncho.
“You said you wanted a gun, only feds have guns.”
I turned back to my beer and with a conscious effort I tilted my hand back up so it would stop soaking me. “Naw, man, I ain’t no fed, I just think we need one.”
Glass shattered from the side window, at least four or five sets of hands reached through the curtains.
“Whoa that’s intense!” John said.
“Zombies!” The word finally found its way through the folds of my convoluted mind and out my mouth. Arms poked through the window and the door looked like it was in danger of giving at any moment. Like a caged animal I looked frantically for a back door, even in my state it would have been extremely difficult to miss something like that in a cabin so small.
“We should get in the basement,” John suggested.
Again I spun around like a top on Red Bull. “John there’s two windows and a door that leads outside. There’s no basement.”
“There isn’t?” he asked with alarm. “That’s bad news then, we’ll have to share our beer with the funky people.”
“John the Tripper, they don’t want the beer.”
“Well that’s good,” he said as he physically relaxed.
“Not so much,” I said softly, the seriousness of the situation was beginning to break through the stranglehold the hallucinogen had on my mind. I grabbed the lamp and pulled the shade off. I started to swing it around to get a feel of the heft of it to see if it could do any damage if it came in contact with a skull, but unless that skull belonged to a squirrel I was going to be in a little bit of trouble.
“Hey, man, that lamp cost twelve dollars. Stephanie is going to be pissed.”
“Why would your wife care? And how do you know how much this cost?” I asked him, holding the lamp nearly under his nose, almost in accusation. I didn’t know why that seemed like such an important matter, but right now I didn’t have anything else to fixate on.
“Stephanie owns these cabins. I’m supposed to manage them but I usually forget,” he said sheepishly.
“So does this place have a basement then?” I asked, again doing a pirouette like a drunken ballerina, but I guess that analogy is wrong because the drunken ballerina would still have been more graceful.
“No, man, you told me we didn’t,” John replied forlornly as he grabbed the lamp from my hand. “It’s too bad, too, because I was growing some killer weed down there. I even had a little rhyme, too, ‘The Purple cabin leads to the land of enchantment, smurple!’”
“That’s how you remember?”
He nodded.
I backed up, and two zombie hands had sought purchase on my poncho. I wrenched myself free.
“We really should get in the basement,” he said his eyes wide.
“I couldn’t agree more,” I told him.
“Why not?”
“Why not what?”
“Why couldn’t you agree more?” he asked in seriousness.
“Figure of speech.”
“Like an hourglass?” John asked.
“Sure, the basement, John.”
“Oh yeah, and you’re not the Fed right? Because if I ask…you have to tell me.”
“I don’t think that’s the case anymore, John. But no, I’m not a Fed,” I told him as the door began to crack under the zombie assault.
“Good thing.” John moved a small throw rug aside. A little hinged trap with a recessed ring for a pull lever looked back up at us. “See, I told you we had a basement,” he said triumphantly.
“How big is this thing?” If the size of the trap door was any indication, we were about to be inside an earthen cubby hole, and I for one would rather have taken my chances with the zombies. The thought of lying in the dirt underneath the floorboards as zombies walked above us was sending me into a near state of panic. Zombies walking across our graves; something was fundamentally wrong with the whole picture that was flashing across my mind.