BT had dragged me to the far end of the room. He motioned for me to turn off the radio. “That pipe looks good-sized,” he said.
My gaze had been drawn to it from time to time, but by “good-sized,” if he meant an infant could crawl through it easily, then, yeah, it was good-sized. Anything adult-shaped, not so much.
“Harmon will fit,” he said. My gaze immediately went over to the private, who looked like she was having a difficult time holding on to the fraying edges of her resolve. The pipe was cast iron; couple of rounds would open it up.
“You realize that’s most likely a sewer line, right? You bust that and it’s full, we could drown in shit, BT.”
He turned away from me, ripped his cap off and ran his hand over his head. “FUCK!” he yelled so loud I must have heard it a dozen times as it echoed back and forth. When he calmed down somewhat, he turned back to me. “You got anything useful in that mind of yours?”
“They’re in,” Tommy said as he pulled his head back through the door and threw the lock. All of our attention was directed to the door; we were all expecting a mad rush and the attempted twisting of the handle. What we got was worse, in its own way. We could hear what sounded like wet cardboard being rent. I think maybe my psyche was doing its best not to piece together what was happening; it was Winters who brought it to the forefront.
“Are they eating the mummies?”
The sound was nauseating; allowing the mind to create visuals the eyes could not see was infinitely worse. It provided a subconscious opportunity to be distracted, as my people began to talk quietly amongst themselves, just loud enough to drown out the slurpings and chewings but not loud enough to draw the attention of the enemy.
“What are the odds they finish their meal and head on out?” BT asked, I gave him a look he usually reserves for me. “Forget I asked.”
The eating went on longer than any of us expected. Seemed to me the smarter zombies had kept this small prize secret from the waiting horde; it appeared that some zombies were a little more equal than others. I was starting to think it was a little like Animal Farm out there.
I did some tapping on the pipe, as did BT. We both concluded that yeah, there was fluid in there, but no, it wasn’t full. That didn’t necessarily mean anything because if it was running water, it could still fill this chamber up. It had been an hour since the zombies had tucked into their impromptu feast.
“How long does it take for them to eat?” I asked.
“What’s your rush? We’re dessert,” BT replied.
“There’s that, I guess.”
Spirits were understandably low. We had no reason to think any help was coming and we were stuck fast; our seemingly only avenue of escape involved a shitty pipe and a Marine on the verge of losing her shit. Somehow it was fitting. Just when you think things can’t get worse, they somehow do. We could hear movement outside the door; we would find out soon enough why.
It was Tommy who bent over first, holding his left ear, then the sound swept over all of us: shriekers, and a few of them, too, by the sound of it. They were out there singing their discordant notes. I’m not a frequent migraine sufferer, but like most, I’d gone through a few over the years. This was like those times, only some inconsiderate asshole kept manually forcing my eyelids open so they could flash a 15,000 lumens light into my corneas, thus burning imprints into my tortured brain. I was fearful I was going to snap my teeth off as I gritted down on them.
“Stenzel! Get the door!” I couldn’t even consider opening my eyes wide enough to look through my red dot.
BT had grabbed Stenzel’s rifle and was by my side, his pain so intense he was shaking. Stenzel cracked that door wide open. I don’t think they’d been expecting that particular maneuver. BT and I opened fire; shriekers registered surprise as we fired into their heads, reciprocating their pain in spades.
“Karma’s a bitch,” I managed to get out as the pain abated. The other zombies began to crowd to the door while also letting the shriekers move away. We cut through them; the carnage enough that neither the aggressors nor the escapers could make progress. After I was through my second magazine and there didn’t seem to be any viable targets, I had Stenzel shut the door.
“Can’t tell you how much I appreciate that, sir,” she said, leaning up against the wall.
We were all drained. I had my hands on my knees.
“What if they get more?” Harmon asked.
“From what I know, they’re fairly rare. We dealt them a killing blow.” BT handed the rifle back to Stenzel; she hardly looked like she was able to support its weight. I had a few of the flashlights turned off to conserve battery life. If it was depressing beforehand, now it was downright disheartening. My claustrophobia was beginning to make its presence known in full; it didn’t help that BT stayed within an inch of me at all times. If that was how he reacted to his fear of tight places, it sure was a strange response. We were sitting with our backs against the wall; I was continually circling the limited options we had. Basically, they all involved opening the door and attempting to blast a hole through the zombies and escape to freedom. Unfortunately, the success percentage meter kept stopping at zero.
“Movement.” Winters had his ear up by the door. We waited long minutes for an update. “Sounds like they’re removing the bodies.”
“Probably to get bulkers down here.” BT had stood, but I noticed he did not step away. If we got out of this, I was going to need to have a private talk with him regarding personal space. He motioned to his headpiece; this was our signal to go to a private channel. He grabbed his radio and flipped it open to get to the embedded keyboard.
“If we die down here, no one is going to know.”
“We will,” I responded. He was less than amused. In fact, he made it over to the anger spectrum.
“Any ideas?”
I shook my head instead of responding.
“It’s got to be the pipe. There’s nothing else.”
“I’m not sure she can fit, and if there is any significant bend, she won’t be able to traverse it,” I replied.
“Don’t even tell me you’re thinking of giving up.”
“Just looking for something with at least some sort of odds we can hang a hat on.”
“Why now?”
“Ha ha,” I responded aloud, which sounded funny in the silent room.
“Whatever they’re doing, it sounds like they’re done.” Winters looked over to me.
Was expecting to hear and feel the coming of the immense ones; I even hazarded the thought of letting one in to see if it could crash through a wall like the Kool-Aid man. Wonder how much property damage that thing had done over the years? That’s how desperate I was; thinking about letting a six-hundred-pound behemoth into our small lair. I could imagine that going wrong in a dozen different fascinating ways.
“Come out,” was whispered in my head–well, everyone’s head. That was easy enough to tell, as all of us were looking around at the other, wondering what had just happened and who had said it. All of us still sitting, stood, as if choreographed. I placed my hand up to halt all the obvious questions I was about to be bombarded with and for which there was no possible way I could answer. “Come out,” was repeated again and another five or six times on top of that. It was a soft insertion, without the harsh urgency of the shriekers. This coherent yet terrifying sentence was followed by a jumble of words that didn’t fit together quite so nicely but still conveyed a powerful message:
“Eat.”
“Hunger.”
“Feed.”
“Food.”
“They fucking talk now?” BT could not contain himself any longer.
“Not coming out,” I said aloud and thought it. I knew my track record; I could, on a limited basis, reach out and give them a message if they were close enough.
“Feed. Must.”
Tommy was looking over at me; he could hear the dual messages I was sending.
“We’re prepared to die in here. No chance we’re going to let you eat us.” This I kept on the mostly private party line.
I was convinced the zombie speaker sighed at the notion of us becoming wasted food.
“Starving.” It was more of a feeling; I could feel its stomach cramps. If he was trying to elicit sympathy, not only was he barking up the wrong tree, he wasn’t even in the right forest. I was about to tell it to fuck off, when something even stranger than what was already happening, happened.
“Half,” the zombie said.
“Half what?” BT asked, but he was looking at me with his brow arched.
“Half eat, half go.”
“Wait…we give you half and the rest of us are free to go?” I asked.
“You aren’t seriously negotiating with them, are you?” BT might not have been the most distressed, but he was the one showing the most visual cues.
I held up my hand. “Hear it out,” I told him. “Four. I’ll give you four.” It was either Winters or Harmon who gasped. “Not one more.”
“Which four you planning on giving?” BT asked.
“I’ll volunteer.” Harmon raised her hand.
“Stop, everyone stop. I’m not looking for volunteers and I’m not ordering anyone. We already have our takers.” I pointed over to the four by the wall. It distressed me to no end to potentially use them so callously, but I had to believe that their higher essence was long gone from this place. There were long moments of silence interspersed with labored breathing from the stress we were all feeling.
“Four,” was all it said; I was not sure what to deduce from this. “Open.”
I looked around at my squad.
“Don’t do it, Talbot.” BT beseeched. “We can’t trust zombies now any more than before they could talk. They’re mindless predators.”
Right now, mindless didn’t seem fitting. “Open, then what?”
“I can’t believe this is happening right now,” he said, turning away.
“That makes all of us,” I told him.
“Rest go. Eat later.”
“Bird in the hand.” Tommy was looking at the door.
“Open,” it urged.
“We ready? Do not fire unless necessary. BT?”
“I’m cool man, I’m cool.” He took in two big breaths of air then blew them out slowly.
I opened the door. I more than expected to be pushed back from the onslaught of zombies pressing through; there was just one. If I had to peg a label, I’d say it was a lawyer, once upon a time. His short hair, which was unkempt now, had probably been well cared for. He was wearing a suit that looked like it might have cost more than my entire wardrobe, such as it was. Not sure what that meant, as most of my clothes back in the day consisted of shorts, t-shirts and jeans. But still, even five-dollar Star Wars shirts from Walmart begin to add up. The dry cleaner was going to charge him an arm and a leg to get the blood, brain, piss and shit stains out of them, but it still might be serviceable. The zombie snarled at me as I moved aside.
“Four,” it said in my head and attempted to vocalize. Sounded like a hissing snake might. It was sniffing at the air and occasionally sticking its tongue out like the reptile it seemed to be. I stiffened when it moved a step closer to me. It hissed again when I placed the barrel of my weapon square into its chest. The advantage shifted to him in the close quarters; all he needed was the smallest of nibbles to effectively win. There was something hugely different about this zombie, though. He had more than a survival instinct. I could feel it in his thoughts–again, nothing verbalized; it was a part of his being. He did not want to die. He would not be one of the mindless horde that sacrificed bodies for position. He looked over each and every one of us. There was a ravenous leer to his gaze; he looked like a serial rapist in a downtown bar who had just got in a large shipment of Rohypnol.
The lawyer licked its lips as it surveyed the menu. It sounds funny when I write it down; at the time it was terrifying, but when his gaze hit BT, he looked like Bugs Bunny when Lola Bunny strolled on by, eyes popping out, heart pounding hard in his chest, kind of thing. He growled at me when I pushed against him with my barrel, directing him toward the deal. Neither of us liked being this close. I was reminded that man’s turn at the top was at, or already had come to, a crashing demise, and he didn’t feel he was getting the respect he deserved as the usurper.
The zombie moved past all of us to look at his treasure. “Dead.” There was displeasure in its voice. Got a feeling he would have preferred something more of the rare prime-rib variety.
“Them or nothing.” I motioned for the door. He looked from us to the dead and back again. And then even once to the door. I had a feeling he was contemplating calling in for reinforcements. “Do it,” I told him, the end of my rifle no farther than three feet from his head. “Might be the end of us, but you aren’t getting any parting taste.”
“What the fuck you doing, Talbot?”
“What part of you thinks I have a playbook for what is happening right now?” I answered him without ever taking my eyes off the zombie. Instinctually, I knew that if I was in any way distracted, it would take that as an opportunity and roll those dice in its head. And I didn’t like that one bit. Yeah, this one was a self-preservationist; odds were it was friends with Deneaux.
“Go,” it said. Out of the corner of my eye, I looked to Harmon; thought I might have to tell Winters to grab her if she decided to bolt, but she was holding steady.
“Then?”
“Eat later,” it said again.
It didn’t elaborate, and that was open to entirely too many interpretations. Maybe he’d let us get topside then they’d start the hunt again? Or maybe they get us out of this room then surround us? I was all about the former and the fighting chance it afforded us, not so much the latter; we’d be in a prison made solely from zombies.
“We’re taking you. I think you’re going to be our golden ticket out of here.”
“Talbot, we’re taking zombie hostages now?” BT wanted to know.
“Most definitely. This one is all about himself.”
“Go,” it reiterated.
“Tommy, turn its shoulder.”
Tommy roughly forced it to face our exit. I traded weapons with BT and took my 1911 back. I placed the barrel firmly against the back of the zombie’s skull. “We get out of here alive, so do you.” I pushed it forward with the gun. It snarled. “Stay close.”
“Um, sir, no disrespect, but no fucking way,” Stenzel said.
“I’ll take that under advisement. Now get the fuck over here, Corporal.”
If we’d got packed any tighter, we would have been able to tell each other’s preference for boxers, briefs, or commando status. All was fine as we got out, and even the stairwell was clear, but the exit door was jam-packed with zombies. The eye shine they produced bobbed around as they jockeyed for position.
“Tell them to move.” I forced the zombie’s head down, I was pressing the gun so tightly up against his skull.
We had a dozen or so theories about the zombie intellect, ranging from mindless brain eaters to a collective hive mind. “Dewey” here from Dewey, Cheatum, and Howe, well, he was a revisionist. He was going to force us to rewrite all the rules. Or so I hoped; I was banking our lives on it. If he was part of a collective, then his individual life meant nothing in the grand scheme of things. Survival of the colony was of utmost importance. It wasn’t lost on me in the slightest that it would be a lawyer who was placing himself above all others.
“Live or die, Dewey. The choice is yours.”
“Dewey?” BT asked.
“Tell you later.”
“Live.” A murderous clown born of hell, bent on rending the souls of the damned, would have had less malice in its tone.
I could feel a “push” order emanate from it. Nothing was happening–nothing that we could tell. It was all due to how congested the zombies were; there was no room for them to shift, like an emergency vehicle attempting to get to the scene of a particularly gruesome accident through the densely packed vehicles that had the misfortune of trailing behind. I’d been in some binds with zombies, but this time was the worst. We were pressed into single file; the zombies were as tightly packed as a Christmas toy encased in styrofoam. You know the kind. Ever open one of those things up only to realize its broken and not only is your kid bummed out, now you have to try and get it back into the box to bring back to the store? It’s like the fucking thing grows once it’s exposed to the air. I’ve had better luck telling my wife I was going out with the boys on our anniversary. Just so we’re clear, that’s an analogy and not something I’d ever be dense enough to try in real life. Not twice, anyway.
Every part of me was brushing up against something or someone. I’d never felt so personally compressed or compromised since my tunnel travails with Trip. Felt like ketchup frosting being piped through a squeeze bottle. I was barely holding on. I got progressively intense sensations from the zombies, not that they were going to break and run, but rather: “Fuck Dewey’s orders, let’s eat.”
We were crawling along, a verb I wished I had steered clear of, as I could swear I had things creeping on me from the close proximity to the zombies. My skin itched and it was all I could do to not rip through it. Staying quiet and not doing overtly human things like scratching, coughing, sneezing–that was what was keeping us alive in the precarious position we found ourselves in.
Dewey was the boss, or a boss, at least, and he’d not be the first that had to suffer through a mutiny. The zombies begrudgingly yielded their space, and the farther we went, the more begrudged we were each inch. Our small steps were rapidly shrinking to shuffles. Harmon yelled out; I saw a wet tongue wrapped around some loose strands of her hair. I shoved Dewey’s head so far down he was looking at his double vested buttons; we felt the slightest shift in pressure.
“Done playing. Get us out of here. Just keep remembering it’s always going to be you first, and I got a feeling even your mother wouldn’t miss you. Probably sued her for more play time when you were ten, am I right?”
“Mike, focus,” BT said in hushed tones.
“Laser-guided,” I told him, even if that wasn’t mostly the truth. Laser something, but more like an array. My mind was scattered as I fought the demons in my head. I was more than slightly astounded that there was a significant part of me that wanted to blow Dewey’s head clean from his body and then do as much damage as I could to the putrid meat bags around me, whatever that lead us to. The panicked terror was grabbing so deeply into the folds of my mind, it was doubtful I’d ever get another night of peaceful sleep that was not brought on by medication. Good thing my squad was in the same boat; we’d be able to force a volume discount.
It got marginally better when we made it out of that first corridor, and by marginally, I mean we’d gained enough inches of space around us that the zombies couldn’t sample a taste of us simply by an errant lick, which had happened more than I’d care to remember. You can take the zombie out of the graveyard, but you can’t…oh screw it; the analogy wasn’t that good. Suffice it to say there was a rebel or two among Dewey’s crew that wanted nothing more than to tear into us like a bag of steaming microwave popcorn. I can’t even begin to say why they didn’t. Fear of reprisal? Shunning by their mates? Couldn’t have been Dewey’s leadership alone. Not much of any of this was making sense. But as long as we escaped, it didn’t need to. I don’t overburden myself with all the “whys” of something; I prefer to leave the thinking to those more qualified.
“I see light.” Winters had some tempered excitement; hard to get too thrilled about anything, given our current state. I’d been concentrating so hard on a one-inch square on the back of Dewey’s head, I’d never even noticed that the flashlights were beginning to get drowned out. A zombie's foot found its way in between mine and I stumbled; I was thankful I did not have my rifle or I would have fallen over. As it was, I reached up with my free hand and wrenched down on Dewey’s left shoulder. At the same time all of this was going on, the zombies had pressed in closer. Looked like our benefactor had other designs on how he wanted this to go down. The bullet I fired through his right earlobe and into a zombie in front of us looked to be enough to dissuade Dewey from pursuing this proposed change in our agreement.
Anger poured forth through our limited connection, I say limited because apparently, he could communicate with the zombies on a whole level we weren’t able to detect.
“Can’t believe I missed! I’ll make sure that doesn’t happen again. How about you, Dewey? You gonna make sure that doesn’t happen again?” He didn’t answer. I blew that ear off his head; there was a small cloud of cartilage debris and a smattering of blood. “I asked you a fucking question! Answer me, because the next one goes right into your brain bucket. Are you planning any more tricks?”
The “No” he gave me felt like it had been pried from the jaws of a pit bull who had sunk his canines deep into a raw t-bone.
“Got to admit, Dewey, that was pretty shitty of you. I kept up my end of the bargain and you decided in the middle of the whole thing to go and change it up? But then, you were a fucking lawyer, right? Your kind aren’t happy with your fair share; you want everyone’s fair share.” I didn’t tell him that when we got outside, I was fully planning on blowing his brains out. At that point, he’d be too dead to care about it. Seemed duplicitous of me to give him a hard time about changing the deal when I’d meant to all along; maybe I was mad that he’d tried first. He’d got pretty close to succeeding, too.
I could see the door that proudly announced we were about to exit onto 7th Avenue; we were about to be right by M&M’s World again. It hadn’t been that long, but by now it felt like almost a year had gone by. Although, that doesn’t make sense; the saying is “time flies when you’re having fun,” and so far, there had been very little of that on this mission. Could see zombies on the roadway as we exited, and a fair number came outside with us.
“What gives, Dewey?” My intention had been to put one in his noggin then make a run for it; he’d obviously had enough foresight or intuition to realize my plan and now had a security team hemming us in.
“Free,” he said at first then, “both” followed.
“Wily fuck, aren’t you.”
“What’s going on, Talbot? Why they still around?” BT wanted to know.
“Dewey here is a pretty smart guy. I let him go, he lets us go.”
“That’s a bad idea,” he replied.
“What’s your alternative? You want to keep moving through this shuffling clusterfuck?”
“This a vote, sir? Because I’m going with no,” Stenzel said.
“I’ll let you vote, Stenzel, as long as you agree with me.” I pulled my pistol back from Dewey’s head; he turned slowly, his black eyes locked onto mine.
“Remember,” he said. I think he was referring to the fact that I had indelibly burned myself into his memory. Another enemy in an ever-expanding list of them. Dewey made sure that his shoulder bully-struck mine as he walked away; the zombies parted and he went back into the underground area. The zombies around us slowly moved backward, reluctantly yielding ground.
“Everyone good?” I looked around at a bunch of pale faces. “Great,” I said before anyone could answer. “Let’s move.” Dewey was true to his word; the zombies turned to watch us go, but none made an overt gesture to follow.
“How long you think we have?” BT had come up beside me.
“Not as long as either of us would like.”
“You realize you’re a master of answering a question without actually giving anything of substance, right? How you missed your true calling of politician, I don’t know.”
“I swear too much.”
“That the only thing holding you back?”
“Not really; no way would I be able to do all the handshaking and kissing of miniature germ factories. Can you imagine? Out there kissing Mr. and Mrs. Maguire’s adorable bundle and the thing sneezes on me? I’d seize up, and you know that would be the picture the newspaper ran with. My opponent would be all over it; how can you trust a man to do right by our community when he can’t even stand babies?”
“Is that how it would go down?”
“Pretty much, I’ve thought it out.”
It was the first smile I’d seen on the man in a while, which, in turn, made me feel better.
“Let’s move, people.” We were double timing. I was amazed I was able to get my legs going; they felt like sticks of timber. We’d gone an entire city block without any problems–hardly something we could have done when people ruled Manhattan, so it was even more impressive now.
“We’ve got eyes on us, sir,” Winters said.
I turned to look behind. He was pointing up. I noticed on every other building or so, there was a zombie, sometimes two, standing there, watching as we went past.
“How is this even possible?” BT wanted to know; we all did. He was just the first to voice it.
“Take them out?” Stenzel was sighting in.
“Not yet. When we get closer to our destination.” Though I didn’t know if this would work; they seemed to be stationed everywhere. No way we’d be able to kill enough of them to make a difference then melt away without giving our location to their ground forces. We were a city block from the NBC studios; there were still zombies either on fire escapes, roofs, or in windows, all just watching, and I would imagine relaying information back through the zombie mental hotline. Communication during a battle was paramount to a successful outcome. Knowing where the enemy was, calling in for help or extraction; all of it was vital, and if the zombies now possessed this strategic ability, everything had got significantly more complicated. Zombies like Dewey had to be in the minority; I was now weighing my decision to not kill him.
How many zombies could he directly influence? Was he a hundred-thousand-watt antenna, or merely a strong walkie-talkie? Could he bounce signals off others of his kind, giving him a network? Logistically, him and others like him would be a nightmare. If Dewey was unique, one of a kind, I had done a great disservice to humanity not blowing his brains out. Our lives were a drop in the bucket compared to the hell he could rain down upon the remaining survivors. The best thing I could do now was report back on my findings as I understood them. We were a couple hundred yards from the Rockefeller Center, our ultimate destination, when the zombies began to move.
“Looks like they finished lunch,” I said. “We’re going to move fast. Winters, you get us up and running; I’ll get a quick message off to Etna, then we’re going to make a run for the church.” Winters looked like he’d swallowed a few eggs whole. “You’ve got this,” I told him.
“It’s not quite the same as setting up our equipment.”
“I have faith.” I smacked his shoulder.
“That’s one of us,” he mumbled as we entered.
“Stenzel, Harmon, stay at the front. Keep me informed about any gate crashers. Do not engage. Pull back to our location.”
Stenzel nodded; Harmon paled. I knew she was dedicated, but I was concerned for her military readiness. Right now, it appeared as if BT was right and I should have left her behind. I knew deep down that would have been the worst thing for her, but now I was left wondering if bringing her had been the worst thing for us. We ran past a desk where, apparently, in better times, we would have met for a tour. We ended up climbing eight floors and into the Saturday Night Live studio. It was difficult to reconcile the juxtaposition of the terror we were in the midst of with standing in a place that had delivered laughs immeasurable over decades. I’d been a fan of the show since…forever. Some of my earliest memories revolved around Chevy Chase stumbling and bumbling over things; I smiled despite it all.
Winters took a cursory look at the massive cameras and then headed back to the studio booth where five chairs were stuffed along with a wall of equipment. He absently scratched the top of his head as he looked over the panels that made a commercial airplane’s instruments look like Mr. Coffee auto-brew settings in comparison.
“No power,” Winters mumbled. I didn’t hover over him; what was the point? And anyway, I was too busy walking the same hallowed ground as John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Eddie Murphy and dozens, maybe hundreds of other comedians that had made my life more bearable.
“Tina Fey.” BT was sitting in one of the seats reserved for the studio audience.
“Excuse me?” I asked him.
“Had a thing for her. She was my celebrity crush; I told Linda as much.”
“You’d better shut up about that or I’ll tell my sister.”
“I will stick my finger in every bit of food you are going to eat for the rest of your life if you do that.” He was boring through me with a tangible gaze.
“Fuck. No power,” came through my earpiece. I could hear the frustration in Winters’ voice as he worked. He was speaking to himself, maybe forgetting he was talking to everyone, as he mumbled his way through the problem.
“Always wanted to come here,” BT said.
“Of course you did; how else were you going to stalk her.”
“Don’t turn something innocent into something sordid.”
“Were you barred from here? Restraining order, maybe?”
I could see his jaw tighten as he became angrier.
“Hmmm…now that I think of it, my sister and Tina share some similarities. Have you ever screwed up and yelled out ‘Tina!’? Oh fuck. I can’t believe I asked that. Forget that I said anything.”
“That’s the thing, Mike, there are things you say that can’t be unheard. Maybe if you gave your words more than a cursory glance before they exited your mouth, the world would be a better place.”
“You did fuck up!” I was pointing at him.
I don’t think I’d ever watched a blood vessel burst in real time; it was looking like that was about to change. Instead, he finally let out a pent-up breath. “You’re an asshole. That’s your sister you’re talking about.”
“Or Tina.” I was saved from BT’s wrath as Winters spoke.
“Sir, if you could come to the booth.” His tone did not convey hope. BT followed.
“LT, this is Stenzel. We’ve got a small group coming down the road.”
I turned my mic back on. “Get behind the reception desk; see if they go by.”
“Roger that.”
“Generator is dead.” Winters looked up as we entered.
“Okay, then why do you not look particularly glum?”
“Glum? That’s the best you could come up with?” BT asked.
“You a thesaurus now? This your way of getting back at me for the Tina Fey thing?”
A massive finger hovered a few inches from my face.
“Uh…there are solar panels on the top of this roof. It’s possible we have enough juice to run this.” Winters saved me from having my brains swirled by a sausage finger.
“Okay.” I was hesitant; he was talking about power, but everything was off, near as I could tell. “Does it work?”
“I don’t know but I’m going to switch it over and see. It either does or it doesn’t.”
I knew what he was saying; if the panels stayed dark there was nothing we could do to get them up and running, short of getting some fuel for the generator, wherever that was located. And it seemed like our allotted time was running out. I’d rather he had just done it without the set-up for a big reveal; those generally didn’t go as you expected. I’d been on one blind date in my life. Paul and his girlfriend at the time had thought this girl and I would make a great couple. Now normally, this wasn’t something I would do because of too many variables, but Paul and Candice had both said numerous times that she and the other girl, Wendy, could be sisters. And Candice–she was a looker and a sweetheart; I thought she might be the one Paul settled down with. Unfortunately, she jumped off the deep end with a religious cult; went from stable to nucking futs in the span of three months.
But back to the date. We were at the restaurant and Wendy was late, like, three beers late. Finally, Candice stood up and was telling us she was here; I turned and tried to find the girl that could look like her sister. I scanned a group of seven or eight people twice and the only family resemblance came from a middle-aged gentleman that could have been her uncle. When she said her hellos to Candice and Paul and barely gave me a look nor offered an apology for her tardiness, it was safe to assume where this night was going. Let’s be politically correct for once and say that she didn’t even have a great personality. After the meal, I ordered a shot of vodka and another beer. When they came I downed them quickly and stood.
“Paul, Candice, as always it has been a pleasure. Can’t say the same, Wendy; I’ve had more meaningful and lively conversation with a goldfish.”
“Where you going, buddy?” Paul asked.
“Heading home. Gonna go take a big shit and flush this night down the toilet.”
Paul smiled, Candice fumed, and Wendy nearly choked on the cheesecake she was inhaling.