It wasn’t possible to keep up the speed all the way. I had to stop for gas twice. The old Suburban wasn’t built for efficiency, and fuel prices sucked ass.
I crossed the state line around 7:30. It was still light out because of Daylight Savings Time, and probably would be until just before 9:00 at night. Good. I wanted light, and lots of it.
Writing this, I’m really thinking back on that day – one of the blackest days of my life – and I realize that on the road to Gainesville, some shit should have caught my attention that just didn’t.
There were fewer cars on the road, but there were more accidents than usual. Bad ones. Had it been an ordinary day there were probably six or seven times I would’ve pulled over to either help or see if everyone was okay, but that particular day I had my own problems, and I was distracted. I’m sure I missed a lot of what was happening along the way.
When I think back to that drive, I remember seeing at least three cars completely flipped over, sitting on the shoulder or smack in the middle of I75 on their roofs. I must have been in some kind of shock not to really wonder about it. All that aside, there were other signs.
Thanks to the self-service credit card readers at gas pumps and quarter-operated air pumps for the tires, you never even have to speak to the attendants at most gas stations. So I should have found it odd that the attendant began staggering out of his little room toward me as I was getting back in the Suburban, but it barely registered at the time. I knew I’d paid up, finished my fueling, and didn’t give him a second thought. I looked at him, threw him a quick wave, but I didn’t see him Not really. He was probably only two feet behind my truck when I hit the gas.
And now that I think back, there was something wrong with him. His jerky movements, the strangeness of his eyes. His purposeful intent as he approached me. His eyes weren’t really . . . what’s the word?
They weren’t there.
In retrospect – fucking hindsight again – I’m damned lucky. I was carrying only a 5-shot Smith & Wesson .38 Special at the time, and while it would have been plenty of firepower, there’d have been no reason to think I needed it until it was too late.
They say the lightning strike most likely to kill somebody is the first lightning strike of the storm. That’s because it’s when people least expect it. For me, the zombie at the gas station was the first lightning strike. And I was just lucky enough to be out of its reach.
No sense in looking back. But what I’m saying is the signs were there. It had begun and I had no clue. I told Jamie I was in Atlanta – well, that’s not entirely correct. I’m outside of Atlanta, in an area called Lula. It’s unincorporated, sparsely populated, and only about 20 minutes outside of civilization. But for that 20 minutes of driving, there’s nothing. So where I live feels pretty isolated.
And these days I tend to like it that way.
You should know that at this point I hadn’t reconnected with Gem yet. I was on my own, having had my way with a number of women through the years, and lots of them having had their way with me. In fact, it seems women had just plain had it with me.
Not that I was a bad guy. I never slept with a woman I didn’t believe I cared for at the time. How long that went on depended a lot on them. I wasn’t attracted to the completely dependent type with no interests other than me, the kind that sat around and waited for me to decide what to do, and I didn’t like the ones that seemed not to really care if I was there or not. I was seeking a balance; a woman who had her own life and interests, had an interest in mine, but who didn’t hang everything on my plans, and who didn’t hang on my every word.
That was Gem. She was the best fit I’d ever had. Beautiful and tough. Comfortable and easy. No guilt, no pressure, but great sex. And when I had something for work that I needed to do, she was genuinely interested.
Hell, I was only an electrician, but if I had a circuit layout to design, she’d sit there and drink coffee and just watch me lay it out as though what I did was art, a creation. In a way, I guess it was, but not like her stuff. She was a true artist. Paint and clay ran through her veins.
She’d always been an artist and illustrator, but the latter was more for architectural design, and it bored the shit out of her. It was a way to make money when her art wasn’t moving in the local galleries, but there was too much structure and no freedom of expression. I could always tell when she was working on building illustrations; she was grouchy and cussed a lot. She’d put down her weed for coffee and the edginess showed. But even her architectural drawings were amazing to me; the perspective, the shading. No bullshit. She was and is pure artistry, and I got into watching her do her thing. When she got into her own creations, whether with paint, clay, copper or paper, she blew my mind. The woman could make a shit statue that blew my mind, for Christ’s sake. As for her mind, it functioned in this world, but also in an alternate world; we’ll call it the abstract world. She saw things differently. Nothing sequential about her – she had her own approach, is about the only way I can explain it. She shifted the order to suit her brain and made it work even better out of order.
A genius in her own right. And I lost her. I didn’t even realize how important she was to me until I did. I guess I’ll explain that later. Back to the problem of the day. Shit. The problem of the rest of time, unless something drastic changes. The Zombie problem. There. I used the word, and if you laugh, then it’s years later and the problem is just a footnote in history.
And you have no fucking idea how insane it really was.