“You sure you’ve never been here?”
He finally did look up this time. “I think I’d know where I’ve been or not been.”
“Just asking.”
Then there it was: a Brown Stone Hotel in downtown Philadelphia. At one time it was probably a pretty nice place. Ornate windows looked into a Victorian themed lobby adorned with marble floors and ceilings. Now, however, it looked exactly like what you would expect a building in a war zone to look like. Bullet holes pock marked the marble in a hundred different places. Furniture was burned or stained a brownish red color. (Don’t dwell, don’t dwell—I said the little mantra over and over.) Zombies that had been milling around inside came out when we rolled up. My first impression was that nobody was alive in there. How could they be? Then it dawned on me. Zombies only hang around when food is available.
“Hey, fucktard!” Someone shouted from above. “Yeah, you, fucktard!” the guy said as I craned my neck to look up the hotel. “Why don’t you get that big zombie dinner bell outta here!”
“We’re looking for someone!” I yelled up.
“Do I look like the fucking white pages, get the fuck outta here!” he yelled back, this time he showed the muzzle of hunting rifle to move his point along.
“Give me the damn gun,” I said to John as I pulled my head back in the window. John carefully handed it over the slowly awakening Azile. “Two can play that game, ass wad!” I yelled up as I stuck the formidable machinegun up and out my window.
“Oh shit!” He pulled his head back in. “We don’t want any trouble! Loud noise brings zombies, that’s all I’m saying,” he answered, not showing himself.
“You just let us know if you have someone up there. If you don’t we’ll be on our way.” I was about to ask if John’s wife was up there, but I didn’t know her last name. I looked over to John, his eyes were closed and his fingers were crossed. I was really hoping this went well, but I wasn’t counting on it. Let’s face it everyone knew the city’s nickname about brotherly love was a misnomer. New Yorkers feared this place.
“John, what’s your last name?” I asked, embarrassed that I had either forgotten it or that I had never thought to ask. Tracy told me I had the social graces of a goat, now I believed her.
Again I was surprised when he didn’t start in on some diatribe about how last names were a way for the government to keep us in check.
“Stephenson,” he said quickly.
“Okay,” I told him as I poked my head back out. Now I had my fingers crossed. “I’m looking for Stephanie Stephenson!” I shouted up.
There was nothing for long moments. I was about to yell back up; the street was starting to get crowded and I wanted to get out of here before I opened up again with the M-240.
Had I not been sitting, I would have had to find a seat when the ass wad from above answered. “Who wants to know?” he asked.
“Do I look like a process server, you idiot?” I yelled up. “Her husband is here.”
A pause but much shorter this time. “John, John is here?” a woman asked.
I was about to respond, but that was before the wind was knocked out of me by John crawling over my lap. “Stephanie, I let the sour cream expire!” he shouted.
“John, you silly, silly man. I have missed you so much,” she said, tears were dropping from her handsome face. She was pretty in a feminine, lumber jack sort of way. Her meaty forearms hung out as if she hoped she would be able to scoop her man up. “I don’t know who you are, mister,” Stephanie said, obviously talking to me. “But thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
John didn’t quite catch the connection when he responded. “I was afraid you might not remember me, you missed you’re last scheduled visit.”
“I would never forget you, my sweetheart. I was thanking the man that brought you to me.”
“Who? Ponch? Yeah he’s a good guy. He had shoes just like yours.”
“John, man, you’re really pressing on some places that are making me uncomfortable.” He didn’t move.
“Ponch?” Stephanie asked.
“It’s actually Mike, and you’re welcome. Your husband is a...unique man he’s saved my life more than once.”
“Thank you, Mike.”
“Okay, this has got to be snap decision time. We don’t have much time until this place is flooded with zombies. Either you guys need to come down here and travel with us, or I need to know how to get John up to you.”
“Hold on,” Stephanie said, going back into the room.
“John, what do you want to do?” I asked him.
“With what?” he asked back. He was looking at me less than three inches from my face, my personal space was getting severely violated.
“The general consensus is to stay put,” Stephanie echoed down. “But I’m doing whatever John wants me to.”
“I’m not sure he gets the gravity of the situation, Stephanie, this is probably your call,” I told her.
“Hi, Steph!” John yelled up.
“Hi, baby,” she said softly, throwing him kisses.
“We have food here for months, we have guns, and we’re relatively safe. Why don’t you all come up?” Stephanie said.
I’ll admit I was pleasantly surprised when I didn’t hear a bunch of protestations from behind her.
“Make sure he brings that damn gun with him,” was the only thing I heard from behind her.
“I think John should go up with you. Nobody deserves to go where I am.”
“Mike, there’s plenty of room for you and the girl,” she said as she shielded her eyes so she could see into the cab.
“I’m coming, Stephanie!” John said as he started to climb out of the truck.
“Hold on, buddy,” I said as I pulled him back in.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you who this buddy guy is.”
“We’ll circle around to that. Just hold on for a second. Azile you back with us?” I asked as I focused my attention on the girl.
“Mostly,” she mumbled.
“They’re offering sanctuary here. My suggestion to you is to take it.”
“Will Eliza be here?”
“Not anytime soon, and never if I have any say in it,” I told her honestly.
“I’m going with you then.”
“I don’t think that’s the wisest choice you could make, but I’d love to have you because I can’t stand driving this kidney killer.”
She actually had the corner of one lip pull up in a sliver of a smile.
“It’s just going to be, John,” I told Stephanie.
“How close can you get to the side of the building?” she asked, pointing to her right. The hotel ended and abutted up to an alleyway. “Right at the edge of the alleyway is the fire escape, the truck should be just the right height.”
Except for a couple of lampposts and a mailbox, I thought I could get pretty close.
“Move,” Azile said as she watched me guesstimating how I was gonna go about getting the truck in position. I figured I could make it in about a twelve or thirteen point turn.
“Thank you,” I told her as I moved a reluctant John back to his seat, then crawled over Azile.
Surprisingly, the street poles broke away with not too much effort on the truck’s part. The mail box, on the other hand, seemed to have twenty-foot-deep pylons set into the earth’s mantle. Black smoke poured from the twin smoke stacks as the truck strained against the blue box. The truck thrummed and vibrated as the box failed to yield.
“Fuck this,” Azile said as she threw the truck in reverse.
“Seat belt, man,” John said to me.
“Yeah good move,” I said as I quickly strapped myself in.
Azile took out more than a few zombies as she backed up a good hundred feet or so. The real fun, however, began when the truck started to move forward. She was whipping through the gears, and I wouldn’t doubt if we hit that box doing forty. I wouldn’t know I was too busy holding on for dear life to give the odometer a second
glance. Cable bills, vacation postcards, and birthday cards blew in the wind as Azile destroyed that box.
“Air mail!” John yelled.
“Fuck me,” I said as I quickly undid my belt and John’s. Azile had the truck within five feet of the black metal fire escape. “Let’s go,” I told John as I leaned across him, first checking out his rearview mirror, then opening his door. We had a window of opportunity; Azile had cleared a decent sized path.
John started to get out of the truck by stepping down. I grabbed him and pointed up.
“Right,” he told me as he stepped on his seat and onto the roof of the cab. “Nice view,” he said to me as I joined him.
I didn’t agree. I was looking back the way we had come. It looked like a casting call for Thriller coming down the roadway. There was a couple of feet separating the truck from the trailer and the trailer was maybe a foot and half taller than the truck itself. It was not that an imposing of a gap, so I was completely confused when John was looking at it like he was attempting to jump over the Grand Canyon on a moped.
This was the same guy that didn’t mind tunnels much wider than a snake’s asshole and flew a helicopter that looked like it came out of a cereal box. “John, we’ve got to get moving. Just follow me okay?” I stepped up and over the gap, no harder than if I was going to stand on a chair, and not those stupid office chairs with wheels on the bottom of them either.
He missed, his right foot hovered in the air came forward, caught the lip of the trailer and began to slide down the front of it. I reached over and grabbed one of his flailing arms and manhandled him onto the trailer.
“Any chance you want to move this along?” Azile asked, poking her head out. She was seeing the same sight I was.
“Working on it,” I told her. If John thought the gap to the trailer was the Grand Canyon, then the distance to the fire escape might as well have been the Valles Marineris trench on Mars. I don’t know the exact dimensions; I just know it dwarves the Grand Canyon. Maybe it would have been better off if I had just used terrestrial examples, like from the truck to the trailer looked like Snake River Canyon and to the fire escape looked like the Grand Canyon, but would that make any more sense? Who really knows how big the damn crossing is on the Snake River? Even Evel Kneivel couldn’t do it in his stupid rocket motor cycle.
“John, you can do this?” I told him.
“Do what?” he asked, all wide eyed.
“You can do this, honey!” Stephanie said as she started rushing down the escape.
Ohmigosh! I thought, she was a big-boned woman. Not fat…not at all. Just maybe like as a child she had been separated from her Amazonian tribe and come to live in Philadelphia with us lesser human beings. I was under the impression she could have, and should have been a comic book super hero. For a moment, I saw exactly what John did in her. She was statuesque, almost a demi-god.
“Just remember your support group,” she said as she was now standing on the escape directly across from us.
“Support group?” I asked her.
“He’s afraid of heights,” she informed me.
“What about that gyroscope he called a helicopter?”
“Small heights frighten him.”
“Is there even such a thing?” I asked John.
He shrugged his shoulders.
“Listen, John, you’re going to need to get to the end of the trailer and get a running start, then curve over right about here,” I said, pointing to where I was standing for just this reference. “Then you’re going to need to jump like your life depends on it…because it does. You got all that.”
He was nodding ‘yes’ as he was looking feverishly at his Stephanie.
“Mike, goddammit, hurry up,” Azile said.
“Honey, we’re running out of time,” Stephanie urged.
I should have known how poorly this was going to go just by how closely John nearly walked right off the back of the trailer.
“He has spatial issues,” Stephanie said to me after she took in a great gasp of air at his near blunder.
“What? Wait. John, hold on!” I said, but he was already barreling down the trailer. “Fuck.” He was making the turn and coming right towards me, then he missed, he flat out missed launching himself. My mind and my body were racing; John was hanging in the air like Wile E. Coyote in that moment before he plummets to the ground.
Luckily I had already been in movement as John was going by; I had one hand on his belt as one managed to get a grip of a fair amount of shirt material around his shoulder. I tossed him much like one would a midget down a bowling alley. (I mean if you’re in to that kind of thing, I’m merely using it as a descriptor.)
As he was arcing towards his wife, I was pin-wheeling my arms violently to keep my balance. I watched as John’s outstretched hands failed to grasp onto the metal railing, Stephanie plucked him out of the air like a little girl chasing airborne dandelions. I had just regained my balance as Stephanie gave me a questioning look. I had snagged her husband and tossed him five feet with no more difficulty than if he had been baby-sized—not that I’m advocating throwing babies.
“Momentum,” I lied to her.
She accepted my explanation. “Thank you so much,” she said as she hugged her weeping husband tightly.
“I never thought I’d see you again,” he told her. “I brought you something.” He extracted himself from her and showed her a giant Rasta-joint that I had no idea where he could have had it on his body and kept it so pristine.
“Honey, you know I don’t smoke,” she said as she kissed him fiercely.
“More for me and Ponch then,” he said turning back. “You coming, man?”
“This is where we part, my friend. It has been both an honor and a trip to have made your acquaintance,” I told him, I was sure going to miss him.
Azile’s horn blast negated nearly every part of John’s response, but I caught something about meeting again. I hoped so as I quickly climbed back down the truck and in. Azile quickly pulled away. I stared out my window as I wiped an errant tear away from my eye.
“You alright?” Azile asked after we had left the bulk of the zombies behind.
“Yeah I just hate leaving friends behind,” I told her.
“You’ll see him again,” she said really not even thinking about how her words were just placating platitudes.
I looked over at her.
“Sorry,” she said. “Just seemed like the right thing to say.”
“It’s alright, you were just trying to make me feel better,” I told her as I dragged my hand across my face. I rolled down my window and maneuvered my face so I could see it in the mirror; I was pleasantly surprised to see some facial hair making a comeback.
“You looked like you checked out there for a minute. Are you alright?” I asked her as I pulled my head back in.
“I...I’ve just never seen it that bad I guess. I was already on the road when the invasion hit. Hardly would have even known it happened on the open roadway. The real first clue I got was obviously the radio news reports, then the lack of them. And still I thought it might be some elaborate hoax until I noticed just how little traffic was on the highways. There was just no way that many people could be involved in something like that.”
“Just count yourself lucky. It was no bargain on my end. I would have much rather preferred a newscast letting me know what was going on as opposed to living it.”
She prodded me for more information, which I reluctantly gave out in bits and pieces. The vast majority of my recent memories were still sticky, pus-oozing sores, and I had no desire to peel back the scabs to see if they smelled of rot or not. After a few hours of the sanitized, abridged version, she realized she wasn’t getting much more and let me stew in everything she had made me stir up again.
I was not sad to see the Pennsylvania state sign become a distant milestone as we cruised into the Garden State. It was a damn shame that it took a zombie apocalypse to make the state not smell like a fermented
garbage pail.
The beauty of youth, I thought concerning Azile. She’d been through a lot in the last few days—maybe as much as me—plus she was driving and looked like she could go at it for days. I was fading fast; the mile markers were putting me into a trance. I knew she carried a severe hatred for all things Eliza, but did it burn so bright inside of her that she couldn’t rest?
“Are you sure about this, Azile? I know I asked before, but if you just helped me to find a new ride and turned this rig around there’s a decent chance you could have some sort of life somewhere.”
She didn’t say anything for nearly a mile. “I had no life before, and I can’t imagine finding one now. When Eliza killed my mother, the state awarded me to my uncle.”
I told her I was sorry when I figured where this might be going.
When she understood the origins of my apology she spoke. “No, no it’s nothing like that. It’s just that he was twenty-four and had absolutely no desire to take care of a kid. He was always decent to me, never did anything inappropriate. No…probably my biggest complaint was that he just didn’t know what to do. There I was this emotional wreck, crying all the time, looking for comfort, and he would leave me alone. He just didn’t know how to handle it.” She looked over at me to gauge my reaction.
“Raising kids is hard when you’re planning for it. Being thrown into the mix without a clue has got to be brutal,” I told her.
“He tried. He bought me more stuffed animals than he could afford, and that was another thing, he worked at a video store and was barely paying his bills before I got there. He had a one bedroom apartment and he gave me the bedroom when I moved in. He tried, he really did, but we both knew I was a burden. He didn’t bring dates home or go out with his friends that much either. He was always afraid to leave me by myself which was kind of funny, because he always left me alone in his room while he sat on the couch.” She finished with a faraway look in her eyes.
“Where is he now?” I asked.
“Bonneview Memorial Cemetery. The night I turned eighteen he went out and celebrated with his friends. He wrapped his twelve-year-old Honda around a tree six houses down from his apartment. Funny thing is…I heard it. I was laying in bed thinking about my mother and how much I missed her when the explosion of metal and glass crashing into oak shook my window. I didn’t know it was him, but I did. Does that make sense?”