‘Stop looking at his face!’ I silently screamed at myself. This was much worse than the impersonality of passing an accident on the side of the road. This was High Def death brought to you in 1080dpi. ‘What is wrong with you?’ Does that mean I’m in trouble when I refer to myself in the third person, isn’t that some form of psychosis? I think I was trying to stall with myself. I’m a borderline germaphobe. I didn’t want to have to touch what was left of this person. There’s no telling what diseases he was carrying. If I had been someone else I would have punched them and told them to get moving. This internal dialogue was not getting my family or me out of danger any quicker. That thought got me moving, but when I plunged my hand into his pocket I was compensated with the liquefication of Jared’s (I had to name him something, it somehow seemed easier than fat dead guy) fat tissue. I pulled my hand out only to find it attached to a two-foot long sinewy snot-like substance.
All the Clorox wipes in Lowe’s weren’t ever going to make me feel clean again. I did, however, have the luck of the Irish on my side. Clutched in my disgusting disease riddled paw were keys, and hopefully not to some stupid little Hyundai out front. I stiffly walked into the store and found the cleaning supplies. I felt like I was on autopilot. I was moving but no one was steering the ship. I dumped a bottle of Pine-Sol on my arm. It smelled horrible, it burned my skin, it was bliss. When I had emptied the bottle, I wiped off most of the gunk with clean-up towels, just a fancy name for paper towels. I then dug into the disinfectant wipes that promised to kill 99.9 percent of all germs and even some viruses. I could only hope that zombieism wasn’t in that .1 percent. I began to come back from the obsessive-compulsive abyss. I didn’t want to be THAT guy, the one that sits in a corner continuously rubbing at his now bleeding flesh with a small mountain of used wipes at his feet. It was close, but I felt like I had passed the worst of it. I went out to the truck that we were going to be using and tested the keys. They worked, which was a damn good thing because I’m not sure if I could have stuck my hand into any more glistening, decaying flesh again today. I walked back past Spindler, my face just a few shades lighter green than it had been.
“Wimp,” he laughed. I think he thought he was being funny.
If I wasn’t concentrating so hard on not puking I would have responded. I didn’t even shake my head in disapproval. The vertigo would have been too much.
We were nearly completed at Lowe’s. I was on my last haul dragging a pallet mover loaded with wood, nails, caulking and some other odds and ends when I saw Spindler toss his cigarette out the bay. His hands were shaking as he went to pick up his rifle.
“Useless,” I muttered. Who the hell stands on guard duty against a deadly enemy and puts his rifle down. I would remember next time to bring someone else.
I heard the engine long before the useless Spindler gave the warning. I stopped pulling on the pallet jack and started racing over to the open bay, unslinging my gun on the way to assess the new threat. Spindler started to slide away. I knew it! I knew he’d be useless in a fight.
“Get your ass over here!” I said quietly but laced with menace. “Or I’ll shoot you myself.”
He sneered, but grudgingly did as I ordered. I could tell from the self-serving calculation on his face that he was trying to gauge which threat was worse, me or the incoming vehicle.
The Ford F-350 slowed to a stop about twenty-five feet from us. I couldn’t see into the windows because of the way the sun was shining. Why the hell were visions of Snoopy and the Red Baron racing through my head? The seconds ticked by, I could HEAR Spindler sweating. The drops were cascading to the floor. It wasn’t going to be long now, no matter how much he feared me, before he went running into the sunset.
“Why did you come on this raid?” I asked, not meaning to say anything out loud.
Spindler jumped at my words. “It’s my van,” was his response.
I looked at him, but when I realized he wasn’t going to continue I prodded him further. “So?”
He licked his lips nervously before he continued. “I had a Cadillac once, I loved that car, it caught fire.”
His choppy delivery was grating on my nerves. Again he didn’t elaborate; this time I didn’t care. I was saved from more ‘conversation’ when the passenger side door of the truck opened. My rifle wasn’t at the ready but my grip intensified. Spindler began to bring his to the ready position. The foot that was stepping out, stopped suddenly. I grabbed Spindler’s barrel and shoved it towards the ground. He got the message but that didn’t mean he was happy with it. The cowboy boot covered foot once again began its descent to the pavement. The largest man I had ever seen in my life stepped out of that truck, not as in fat man from the Monty Python movie, ‘The Life of Brian,’ but rather of the Arnold Schwarzenegger variety from ‘The Terminator.’
He would have looked intimidating even if he hadn’t been carrying a Gatling gun. A Gatling gun? Who gets a Gatling gun? My brain asked in overdrive. It had to have weighed a couple hundred pounds, plus all the ammo, and he hefted it as if it were no more than a paint ball marker. If he opened fire we’d be dead before we could think about it. While we were mesmerized by the gun, his friend stepped out of the crew cab door. He was a good-sized individual also, but compared with his steroid-induced partner he looked like Pee-Wee Herman. He carried a more traditional weapon, if you can consider a SAW a traditional weapon. A SAW is a ‘light’ machine gun, but at sixty-five pounds it’s still no slouch to carry around. We were outgunned and nearly cut down when Spindler dropped his rifle. Lucky for us our two rivals weren’t prone to panic, they both tensed but neither fired. The bigger man laughed. It was a mean laugh though. His watchful eyes never left mine. Obviously he was sizing up the only threat left to him.
“That’s my store,” he said matter-of-factly.
Why I let my smart ass mouth rumble sometimes I don’t even know. My mother always said it was going to get me in trouble. “Do you mean literally or figuratively?” I wanted to laugh when I saw him thinking about my words. He hadn’t a clue as to what I had just asked him.
“Umm, both,” he said, realizing he may have just said something stupid.
I was laughing inside, but I knew if I gave a hint of that internal merriment away he would step over my blown-out brains to get into the store.
“Any chance we can share, big guy?” I asked, but I fathomed the sheer bulk of this guy let him get whatever he wanted.
“The name is Durgan,” he bellowed. “Not ‘big guy.’”
What the hell is his hang up? “Okay big…Durgan.” Is that a first or a last name, I wondered. “There’s plenty of store here for the both of us.”
“You don’t get it puny man, this is MY store!” The veins in his forehead threatened to burst as he yelled.
Damnit, where’s a good zombie when you need one. It was then that I noticed the woman zombie we had seen at the church. She was standing a couple of hundred yards behind the men in the truck, seemingly watching this melodrama play out. I didn’t have time to waste worrying about her now, I had bigger fish to fry at the moment. I heard liquid pattering to the ground next to me. What I thought was more sweat from Spindler turned out to be piss plunging from his bladder.
“See! Your little friend agrees with me.” Durgan said, laughing his fake laugh again. “You have until the count of three to leave before I make you look like...” He turned to his friend and I heard him mumble, “what’s that cheese with all the holes in it?”