Post Episode:
I went back a couple of weeks later, alone. I wandered around the burned-out gym and the destroyed football field. Don’t know why I felt the need to do what I was doing. Thanks to Eric, we now had people back at the base working on something like noise-canceling headphones. They were big and bulky and right now, I didn’t see how they could be used in a tactical situation. But I was told these were early prototypes and soon they would have something that fit into our gear and weighed under a pound–we’d hardly notice it. I believed that as much as I believed in war rabbits. Errant thought, but true, nonetheless. I’d been in the military long enough to know it would probably weigh more than fifteen pounds and have to be mounted on our chest or some such shit, but it was a start. I thought on Eric a lot and the more I did so, the more I came back to the realization I didn’t believe him to be human, or to have ever been human. The demon truck was just a small piece of it; I dwelt on his line about watching humanity for a thousand years. Who says something like that and then leaves? Yet, through all my doubts, here was an ally, potentially. Tough to gauge someone whose thoughts were probably very alien to my own, but there I was. Humans, as a species, were on the ropes and getting burns on our backs as we quickly slid down them; we could only hope there wasn’t a noose waiting at the end. If help was out there, in any form, I was going to do my best to secure some. I wrote a note and stuffed it into a large manila envelope which I emblazoned with block letters that spelled out his name. That should keep anyone else away. I used a liberal amount of tape and adhered it to the front of the high school. The odds he would ever come across it, I pegged at a billion to one. About the same odds of there being a zombie apocalypse, so yeah, stranger things could happen.
I wrote:
Hey Eric, it’s Michael Talbot. First off, thank you for getting us out of that jam. Wait, now that I’m writing this down, if it weren’t for you setting the whole thing up, we would have never been in trouble. Almost a self-fulfilling prophecy at that point. Forget it. A simple thanks is what I’m shooting for. Ultimately, I don’t know what your motives are, but if you’re in the neighborhood and humans still exist, I wouldn’t turn down your help, and I’ll even offer you a beer.