No Hesitation

Warning: This piece has quite a bit more profanity than I'm used to posting online and deals with a touchy subject—one that has touched my own family, and even myself. That's not an easy thing to confess. I apologize in advance if I offend anyone. I'm not advocating violence as a means of escape, but once upon a time there weren't many other choices. I also know there are decent fellows out there in the world, and I salute them for being the 'real men.'. I wrote this as part of a prompt for Creative Writing class. The assignment was to write a very short piece of conflict, starting  the story with: "This is what I should have done..."

No Hesitation

This is what I should have done. I should have pulled the trigger instead of hesitating long enough to talk myself out of it. The son of a bitch would be dead. 

I’d be in jail, but I’d be free. Free from nasty, hate-filled smirks...narrowed eyes a searchlight for any excuse. Free from waking up and not being able to get out of bed because something else might be broken besides the perpetual promise of “Never Again.” Free from my now twice-weekly duty of being a Rock ‘Em Sock ‘Em Robot. 

I should have pulled the goddamned trigger and blown his fucking brains all over the pillow while he snored, sleeping off his latest binge of whiskey and Whack-a-Me. Why didn’t I? Was I afraid I’d miss and he’d wake up, snatch the gun out of my hands and shoot me instead? He was so far gone that a KISS concert wouldn’t have disturbed his peaceful slumber. The gun had a brand new clip in it, so what if one bullet went wide...there were more. I could have put a sweet plug right between the motherfucker’s eyes and ended both my pain and his. 

Too late for that now, I think, as I set my face in grim determination to endure another round with the Raging Bull. He is between me and where the Glock lies hidden. All I can do now is take the blows and admonish myself. 

Why the hell did you even buy the goddamn thing? I ask myself as his wrath begins raining a hailstorm of blows. 

Go on, I silently urge him. Get it done. 

That’s right. 

Get it done and go to sleep. 

I may have just enough strength left. 

And this time, there will be no hesitation

An Auto Mechanic's Wet Dream

Jack stripped and lay back on the red satin sheets while she straddled him. He could see tiny niblets centered within dark aureolas and a curly, brown triangle beneath her translucent pink baby-doll, which she slowly lifted over her head and tossed into a nearby chair. 

Their lips met and they reached for each other simultaneously; their bodies becoming a tangle of tongues and fingers. 

Suddenly, they stopped, mid-foreplay.

“Jasmine,” stenciled in curly vines and decorative roses about two-inches above her left nipple, looked down disparagingly at Jack's deflated, mingy manhood and sighed: 

"I'm sorry, sir, but that hose is in awful shape, and since it's one of the smaller models, I’m going to have to charge you more for the parts and labor to get it functioning again." 

Hell Hath No Fury

“Cheating bastard!” I fumed and waited for Donald to come home.

I found out about the affair six months ago and spent the last two preparing my goodbye. I waited calmly, just beyond the perimeter of my hastily scrawled handiwork. I heard the key turning in the lock.

Donald stepped inside and smiled at me. “Hi, honey! I’m home.”

His last words echoed shock and pain as he was suddenly consumed by the bright, hot flames which erupted and descended back into the pentagram scratched upon the floor where Donald had once stood.

“No,” I laughed madly. “Now you’re home.”

The Mages of Morrow—Interlude: The Stone

This is a (slightly) edited excerpt from my novel "The Mages of Morrow." This is liable to be the last excerpt I post for awhile as I really need to get back to writing on it again. This is where I left off at when I won NaNoWriMo. It takes the story into Part 2: The Hinterlands. The character introduced here and in the Prelude: Boy at the Edge of the World, will turn up in the last third of the book. He is to be the main character in the two sequels: "The Sages of Sorrow," and (tentative) "The Pages of Pendrick." Don't worry, Mercy will still be around.  

You should know that I cried (bawled is a better word) when I wrote this. I still cry a little when I read it. The last word was the hardest word I've ever written...to date. 

The seeing-stone was finished. 

His uncle said it was the worse seeing-stone he'd ever seen and pronounced it totally unusable. But the boy said it was perfect and declared he would get it to work, if the "gift" ever settled itself upon his shoulders. 

"It's too small to see into, Pen." Uncle Ware said. "And why did ye shape it 'round them two bubbles?"

The boy turned to the side and pulled the cuff of his shorts up, showing the birthmark on his thigh. "To make it look like this," he answered. 

His uncle scratched his head and worried, as usual. "Well, why did ye run a hole inter it..there?" Uncle Ware pointed to the hole at one end of the oblong Sagestone. He'd watched the boy take the pick and work it with precision and skill...piercing the stone little by little...taking care not to rupture the interior bubble on that end of the stone. 

The boy walked over and opened one of the many cabinets in the workroom. From it's depths he retrieved a length of leather cord. He returned to the workbench and, picking up the stone, poked one end of the cord through and tied the ends together, fashioning himself a pendant from the seeing-stone. He pulled the Sagestone over his head and it rested lightly against his chest. His uncle gazed at it through sorrowful eyes. 

"Now, I can carry my Sagestone with me, everywhere I go!" the boy exclaimed excitedly. "I won't have to leave it behind if I need to go somewhere. Seeing-stones are too useful to be left on a stand in a book room."

His uncle furrowed his brow and frowned. "Boy, the physical weight of carrying a stone on you at all times is nothing compared to the mental and spiritual burden you will suffer. You must not wear it like a charm, for a charm it is not!"

The boy placed his young hand over his uncles wrinkled and calloused one. 

"Uncle..." he sighed. "Think of what happens when a sage is asleep in his bedroom and his stone is in his study. The stone may show visions of great magnitudes and not a soul would ever know. I have spent sleepless nights wondering how many lives have been lost simply because a prophesy went unseen. If...if..." the boy struggled for words..."If the gift of sight should be granted me, I want to SEE!" 

He patted his uncles hand and went about cleaning the workshop. When he was finished with the cleaning of tools and the sweeping of floors, he asked his uncle if he could retire. The uncle sent him to his room with a quick but affectionate hug. 

Long after the last rays of the sun that pierced the small window had crawled away up the workshop wall to hide in the deep corners of the night, Uncle Ware remained sitting on the bench. 

In the dark, by the thinnest slice of moonlight, a trail of tears glistened on his cheeks. 

The boy had been part of his life for thirteen years. He didn't need a seeing-stone to show him that soon—too soon, he knew—that most sorrowful and final of words would hang spoken between them.

Goodbye.

To read the previous excerpts, click on the titles:

Prelude: Boy at the Edge of the World
Part 1: The Spinnerlands (An Epigraph)
An excerpt from Chapter 1: Mercy at the Gates
An excerpt from Chapter 3: Leaving Crope
An excerpt from Chapter 8: "You never knew you had it in you?"
Part 2: The Hinterlands (An Epigraph)

Mercy Spins: An Excerpt from "The Mages of Morrow"

The following is an unedited excerpt from my NaNoWriMo novel: "The Mages of Morrow." This scene is from Chapter 3: "Leaving Crope." It is the scene in which Mercy describes to the gypsy Tom Stranger how she happened to find herself working as a sixteen-year-old waitress in a brothel in Crope. This is Mercy's "crossover" experience. Please feel free to comment on anything you like or don't like about this piece. This is a "rough draft" and will be polished at some future time. Oh, by the way, this excerpt contains a reference to a "real" event experienced by the author, when she was a young naturalist growing up in Ohio. 

The subdivision on the outskirts of Garrettsburg, Ohio was fairly new. Shiny new blacktop wound through the immaculate and exclusive gated community and the new houses were almost all bordered by some type of natural environment. One house was perhaps more isolated than the rest, it was down the very last road and sat on a parcel that included woods and a clear-running creek. 

This was the home of the family of the former Mayor of Garrettsburg. 

They'd just moved to the neighborhood, and were one of the first families in the community. They wanted to get away from town life after the Mayor left office when his term was up. They were a well-loved and well-respected family, and the Mayor had ran the town efficiently. He was looking forward to returning to a quiet life of his law practice and had plans to write a book. 

His wife was a successful entrepreneur, she owned a string of popular coffee and bagel shops in five counties. 

Their daughter was consistently on the honor roll and received top marks at school in every subject, especially her favorites: math and science. She wanted to be either a naturalist or a biologist when she grew up. 

She loved to explore the woods and creek on their property. Every summer when school was out, as soon as she woke up in the morning, she scarfed down a quick breakfast and headed out the backdoor, packed lunch in one hand and a copy of "A Field Guild to the Flora and Fauna of Ohio" in the other.

She kept a pen sticking out of the guide so that she could check off wildlife or plants that she'd identified. She took notes in the margins and in any blank space in the book that she could find, pretending that she was a real naturalist in the wild, documenting the habits and habitats of wild, dangerous animals. The only dangerous animal, the only predator she'd ever seen was a shy coyote that was out hunting in the early morning. She was downwind of it or she might not have seen it at all. She was frightened at first, but then the coyote saw her and hightailed it in the opposite direction. It had been just as afraid of her as she'd been of it!

One day, while she was hiking through the woods, she saw a deer. 

Deer were common in the area and she saw them often along the roadside at dusk when the family was riding home after some event, dinner or a movie, in town. She'd never seen one in what she'd come to think of as "her woods" before, however. 

Carefully and quietly she tracked it, stopping and crouching behind trees in order not to let it get sight of her. It stopped every so often and scent the air, as if it could smell her. Then it wandered off nervously a few paces and stopped to nibble the grass again. 

The girl crept around it, using what cover she could find while it was occupied eating, and tried to get downwind. 

The young doe, its sense of hearing much greater than a human's, heard a noise, maybe it heard the girl's breathing, although she was still a good twenty or thirty feet away from it. It looked up, wide-eyed, and angled its ears first one way, then another...honing in on the slightest noise. It sniffed the air again and caught her scent. The doe went scampering into a clearing ahead and...

Disappeared into thin air!

Poof! Just like that. 

The girl, who'd broke cover as soon as the deer took off and was attempting to keep pace with it, stopped suddenly in her tracks, stunned. 

One second ago the deer had been running in a sunny clearing. The next second it was like the deer had never been there. All that remained was a sort of shimmery something that looked like dust motes. Glittery dust motes. 

The girl dropped her book and headed toward the strange floating substance. 

As soon as she was close, she reached out her hand to touch it. 

She screamed, but no one would hear her. The sensation was like falling, tumbling, spinning. She began to grow dizzy. She shut her eyes tightly and prayed the sensation would stop. She thought that she might faint. She had a feeling of being smashed and stretched thin, like dough being kneaded and pulled to make pizza crust. Remarkably, there was no pain, only extreme discomfort. Her head felt like a balloon, her ears like they were full of cotton. 

Suddenly, her buttocks and then her back and thighs came into contact with something hard. Very hard. She heard noise: voices, music, a horse neighing. The sound of clop...cloppity...clop...and creaking. 

She opened her eyes. 

She saw a scene before her straight out of a western movie. She was in a town, lying on her side on the doorstep of a building. Looking around her she saw a horse pulling a cart driven by a man wearing clothes that seemed mismatched: a shirt and a vest from the Renaissance period and blue jeans. He reined the horse with one hand and in the other rested a sawed-off shotgun. 

The store fronts on the opposite side of the cobbled street had an old-time western feel to them as well: Hyatt and Son: Greengrocers, Evans Rx Emporium, and Mulholland Meat & Storage Locker were some of the signs. 

Slowly and with some dizziness, she got her feet under her and stood up. 

Looking further up the street she saw signs for other businesses that confused her: Crope United Kim Exchange and Crope Public Trust. This last one had a gallows set in a courtyard surrounded by benches. She shivered. 

If it were the scene of an old T.V. western, the gallows would have made sense. But there was something else, something out of place with the television western movie theory. Perhaps it was the burnt-out shells of automobiles, buses, and what even looked like tanks in random locations along the street. 

She turned around to get a better look at the building whose doorstep she landed on. She looked up at the sign: "The Good Man's Rest." A plaque next to the door read: "Fine food, drink and whatever other comfort a man's body requires! For a Good Man's Rest, Inquire Within." 

The girl, the daughter of the former mayor of Garrettsburg, Ohio, had her fist poised to knock on the door when it suddenly flew open. A dark-haired forty-ish woman stood just inside the door, looking at her and smiling warmly. Her eyes had an angry glint however, and the girl felt suddenly frightened. 

"Well...lookee, lookee what the cat dragged home! You new in town, little girlie? Come on in and take your rest with me." 

Mercy at the Gates—from Chapter 1 of "The Mages of Morrow"

This is an excerpt from the fantasy novel I was writing for NaNoWriMo. I won Nano on 11/29 with 50,100 words. It is not edited, so there will be improvement on it somewhere down the road. Also, this is a fantasy meant to take adults back in time to the stories of their youth, in a modern re-telling. That said be aware there is profanity and sexual situations. It is Rated R by my standards. You can read the first two intros here: Prelude: Boy at the Edge of the World and Part 1: Spinnerlands, if you like. 

Mercy sat at the gates. 

She was taking a break from the chaos that was the Good Man's Rest. She watched Domus welcome people in and out of the city. Why the village of Crope employed the Arctodus to watch it's gates was a mystery. They were so far north that there was no threat here of dragons (not that Mercy believed in dragons, she didn't) or other pre-history beasts. She wasn't sure she believed in pre-history beasts either. Ruby told her that Domus was a pre-history beast, but to Mercy he just looked like an ordinary grizzly bear, if a little on the gigantic size. 

The major difference was speech. 

When she first came to Crope and people told her about the dragons and beasts that could talk, she thought they were all crazy. This is before the town hired Domus. 

Then, one day, as she was sitting on the stoop of the inn, a cat came up to her. It meowed gently and she stroked it's fur. 

"I'm sorry. I don't have any food to give you right now, but I'll sneak some later, if you're still around."

"What time?" the cat said. 

Mercy jumped off the stoop and nearly choked on her tongue. From that time on, she encountered many domestic animals that could speak and some that could not. She asked Lovely Lucy about it one day when they were in the kitchen preparing meals for the evening crowd. Mercy paused in the midst of her corn-shucking. 

"Why can some animals talk and some can't?"

Lucy scoffed at her. "How the 'ell do I know? Get your ass back to work!"

Clem, one of the regular patrons of the Good Man's, leered at Mercy and grinned. Mercy shivered. She hated being around the man. He was always making passes, or trying to grab her in places on her anatomy where she preferred not to be grabbed. He winked at her. "Some animals were created smart, by the mages, like. Such as dragons and some domesticated animals. And some weren't. Like chickens. I mean, who wants to hear a chicken bitchin' at yeh when yeh go to chop it's head off!"

Mercy shook her head. "But I've seen some cats and dogs that can talk in Crope and some that can't. Why is that?"

"Cherry-girl, you got more questions than a constable!" Clem turned and stumbled off in the direction of the tavern.

Lucy looked angrily at Mercy, her thin, aging lips pressed tightly together. Sensing a beating coming, Mercy quickly continued shucking. After awhile she decided to try her luck with Lucy again.

"Lucy? Why can some tame animals talk and some can't?"

Lucy looked up, glaring. "You stupid thing. Don't you know anything about the world?"

Mercy wanted to say that, No, since she was not originally from this world, she didn't know. But Lucy had never believed that she was not from some far off village to the north of Crope and got violently angry when Mercy tried to explain, so she kept her mouth shut. 

Silence proved to be golden, because Lucy seemed to soften a bit. "Well, it's like Clem said. Some were created to talk by the mages."

"But what about the ones that can't talk?" Mercy asked. 

Lucy looked away as she replied, "They be the crossovers, like."

Like me, Mercy thought. But she knew better to say this to Lovely Lucy, who was really not as lovely as her nickname suggested. 

"Hey, girlie!"

Mercy jerked her head up, her reverie interrupted. Domus looked down from his stool, a very large stool considering his gargantuan size. His muzzle was a grizzled gray, indicating that he was no longer in the prime of his life...still, he had enough pep left to guard the gates of Crope during the daylight hours. He retired to a hut beside the gates after his shift. Why he was kept so close to the gates after dark Mercy could not understand. The gates were never closed and the giant Arctodus slept like a....well, like a bear. Regardless of his size, Mercy found the bear to be nicer than most of the humans she'd met in Crope. She took care not to get too close to him, however. The two-inch talons on his forepaws could slice your face off as neat as a paring knife. He wouldn't mean it, of course. But he was, like all his kind, as dumb as a door-pull. 

She looked at him questioningly. 

"Shouldn't ye be gettin' back to yonder inn? Yeh don't want ol' Lucy to come lookin' fer ye." 

Mercy realized that she had spent more than her allotted break time out by the gates, head drenched in thoughts and memories that did nothing but depress her even more than she already was. She jumped up from the step outside Domus' hut (a step tall enough to be a seat for an average human girl) and hightailed down the street toward the inn, just a few feet away. 

She entered the bar, gave her eyes a few moments to adjust to the dim light (it was always dark in the bar) and made her way toward the kitchen. She held her breath and hoped the kitchen was unoccupied. She'd been able to work in relative peace during the morning as Lucy had slept in, nursing a hangover. 

As she stepped into the kitchen, a pair of strong arms reached out and grabbed her. 

Clem had been hiding behind the door. 

He pulled her close and ran his hand up her waist to pinch one of her nipples. She tried not to show how much it hurt, because pain only made Clem more excited. She felt his breath on the back of her neck and smelled the reek of Burr whiskey, which was stronger than any made back home. In the corner of the kitchen, Lucy laughed menacingly. 

"Is today the day, Little Cherry?" Clem breathed. Mercy stifled the urge to vomit. 

She looked at Lucy, hoping the woman would intervene for once. She didn't. 

Instead, Lucy reached into her dress pocket and pulled out a long, thin needle. 

Mercy jerked out of Clem's grasp and scrambled to the center of the kitchen.

"This past week was not my birthday," Mercy sighed, although she knew she was wasting her breath. She had made the same statement every time since she arrived here, but Lucy wouldn't believe her. And rightly so, for Mercy had no intention of telling anyone in Crope when her birthday was. It was bad enough that she had told them she was sixteen, when she first arrived, so many months ago. 

"Well, damnit girl," Lucy replied, her voice rough as rocks. "You gotta have a birthday soon. Year's almost up. Soon it'll be the Harvester Moon, then the Cold Time. After that is Year's End."

Clem grinned from the doorway. "A man can't wait forever."

Lucy swung around to confront him. "You will damn well wait! Or be hanged. And won't nobody be able to he'p it. You know the law." 

"Curses to the Lars-damned law!" Clem spat. 

"You'll obey the law or I'll be th' one throws the lever on yer gallows! The girl is my property."

"I'm nobody's property. I'm a free person!" Mercy shouted. Some days she just could not hold her temper, especially on Finger-Pricking days when she had to endure Lucy referring to her as 'property.' She now knew how the slaves in the early days back in her world felt. She felt angry, and when she felt angry she got rebellious, and that was not a good state to be in when Lucy was around. Lucy rushed forward and Mercy felt the sting of a slap on her face. But she did not cry. She learned the hard way a long time ago not to give Lucy and Clem that satisfaction. It only made things worse. Instead, she did the second worse thing. She stared defiantly into Lucy's face. Lucy grabbed Mercy's hand and stabbed the needle in her middle finger hard. 

Finally, the tears began to flow as Lucy pulled out the needle and squeezed Mercy's fingertip ruthlessly. The blood pooled and began to slide down her finger. 

Lucy grabbed a small, thimble-like glass containing a measure of clear liquid from the counter. She held Mercy's throbbing finger over the vial until one drop of blood splashed down into the liquid, which immediately turned blue. The first time she'd underwent the Finger-Pricking test she'd been reminded of a pregnancy test. Except this was not a pregnancy test. It was an age test. How the substance in the thimble could tell Mercy was not seventeen, she did not know. It apparently involved magick, because Lucy purchased the potion from a local Sage. What she was told was that on the day when her blood caused the liquid to turn green would be the day she would be turned over to Clem for "training" in the Good Man's Inn main business: prostitution. 

Mercy breathed a sigh of relief and Lucy slapped her again. "Damn you, girl! Name the day!"

Mercy cast her eyes downward, not wanting to be hit again. She was afraid she would have a bruise already. She was silent, however. 

Lucy roughly shoved her toward the back staircase. "Go clean rooms, worthless virgin!" 

Mercy bounded up the stairway, giving full sway to her tears, the cackling laughter of Lucy and Clem in her ears. 

What she wouldn't tell them...she couldn't tell them. 

She had forgotten her birthday. 

#

Mercy at the gates. Waiting. Looking for a way out. She attempted to catalogue in her memory the faces of all the Spinners she saw, so that if she saw them again, she could ask them—no, beg them—to take her out. To take her anywhere but here. She put the foolish fantasy of home to rest a long time ago. She knew in her heart she would never go home again. At night, in her room, she dreamed of Santa Claus and Jell-o pudding. She sang in her sleep:

"I'm a Pepper, You're a Pepper, He's a Pepper, She's a Pepper..."

And sometimes she cried in her sleep, too. 

The Lust, The Flesh (an excerpt from Zombie Nation: St. Pete)

This week I'm sharing with you an excerpt of my story "The Lust, The Flesh" which appears in the local zombie anthology, "Zombie Nation: St. Pete." You can purchase the anthology here: Zombie Nation Publishing. I'll be having a contest in the future to give away a couple of copies of the book. I'm open for suggestions about how to do the contest and have received some wonderful ideas already. Please feel free to post your suggestion here: Contest Ideas.

I looked for Hollis among the animated corpses. He was near the end, munching on somebody's big toe. 

I repressed a gag and called his name.

He turned a wound-covered, pepperoni-pizza face to me. His eyes were still clear blue; they hadn't yet taken on that milky glaze of the undead.

"Christine! Will you join us? We're taking over!" 

"No, Hollis." 

Pink-tinged tears fell from his eyes, and were absorbed into the rotting flesh beneath. I walked alongside Hollis, keeping pace with the marchers, but keeping my distance as well. There was a man in a black suit on the other side of Hollis. He was mumbling to himself. 

I looked at Hollis. He was definitely crying. What the fuck? 

"...the wages of sin is death," murmured the Man in Black. He sneezed, spraying bloody snot all over the back of the zombie in front of him. The newly painted Jackson-Pollock-canvas didn't even flinch. 

"I love you, Christine! I want to marry you."

Highlight of my life. A proposal from a zombie. 

"You're a zombie, Hollis. You don't love anything except flesh and brains," I said.

The Man in Black lurched, as if my words caused him pain.

"The lust! The flesh!" he shouted.

"What's his dealio?" I asked. 

"He was a preacher,” Hollis said. “Practicing for Sunday's sermon when we busted into his church. He's still trying to preach, I guess."

I nodded. A fresh one. It seemed the newer the zombie, the more they held onto to their former selves. It was the passage of time that rotted the zombies’ grey matter. Hollis had only been reanimated a few days ago. Still, he seemed more lucid than the preacher.

"Hollis, what started this?"

Hollis shook his head. His eyes glazed over—I thought for a moment I was losing him—but they cleared, baby-blue again and he seemed okay. 

"Remember that festival awhile back? Zombie Fest? Well, there was a real zombie from California here and he infected someone."

California. That figures. Damn tourists always causing trouble.  

"A real zombie, Christine!" Hollis looked like an excited kid on Christmas; an undead kid with putrid, maggot-infested flesh.  

#

We were headed towards downtown. A crowd gathered, lining both sides of the street. If there were cars ahead of us, they quickly got out of the way, even on U.S. 19, where traffic stopped for no man.

The spectators began to jeer and throw things. Not a smart thing to do, in my opinion. "Go back where you came, you undead bastards!" a male voice yelled. 

And just where might that be? None of them had been buried, so the only thing they could return to would be their normal, living state—and that sure as hell wasn't going to happen. Here were people bitten and infected with a plague. From California. I laughed. Eighty percent of the population there are brain-dead anyway.

A zombie a few rows ahead of us dashed out of his line and grabbed the man from the sidewalk. The man struggled, but it was no use. The plague caused those stricken to have superhuman strength; especially when they were pissed off.  

The crowd screamed as the zombie bit into the struggling man's neck, severing his carotid. Blood spewed from the open wound. The man jerked twice…and then was still. I turned away just as the zombie lowered his head and began to feed. Hollis craned his head to watch, which disturbed me greatly. 

"Where are we going, Hollis?"

"We're goin' straight to hell, where old serpent Satan flaps his wings, to fan the flames of our destruction!"

"Cool it, padre," I said. "It'll be okay," He looked over and rolled his eyes at me as if to say 'Don't bullshit me, sister.'

A woman's voice rose amongst the spectators.  "I hope they kill every stinkin' one of you, zombie freaks!" Some of them held hastily crafted cardboards signs. One in particular read: "Leeve Our Branes Alone!" That one made me grimace. 

“The stupid always survive,” I grumbled. 

Hollis hadn't heard a word I'd said. He was drooling, still trying to watch the zombie buffet. I tugged his bloody shirt sleeve, and his head snapped back; he looked at me with an eerie calm. I shivered and hoped he didn't notice.

"I asked you where we're going."

"Uh, I dunno...hang on." 

Hollis tapped the shoulder of a female zombie in front of him. She was missing an ear and her nose was decayed to a pulpy mass. 

"Do you know where we're going?"  

"Coast Guard.” 

"Why are you going to the Coast Guard?" I asked, but I had an awful feeling I knew. 

Hollis again reached to tap No-Ear Woman. I pulled him back. 

"Never mind." 

Scanning the horde, I wondered who the mastermind might be, if there was such a being. I thought about asking Hollis, but he didn't seem to know much about the plans of his brethren, if there were any. 

I guess I knew then that I couldn't save Hollis. There was no cure for this plague, and by the time the government got around to doing anything, the whole state, from Key West to Tallahassee, would either be dead or undead. The thought brought tears to my eyes.  I had loved what used to be the man walking next to me. But I also knew I couldn't let him, or the others, transform me. I wasn't ready to put brains on my list of gourmet delicacies, so I had to take care not to get bitten. I still don’t know where the disease came from. Maybe some shit-head scientist fresh out of UC-Berkeley woke up one day and thought, "Geez, I'm bored...I think I'll create a zombie virus. Yeah, that would be cool!"

A shout from the crowd cut through my daydreaming. It was aimed at me.

"Whatcha doin' with them monsters, girl? You a zombie lover!!!" He was big, like an eighteen-wheeler with legs. He stuck a middle finger up in our direction. 

"Shut the fuck up, man!" Hollis shouted. 

"Make me, you friggin' corpse!" 

I couldn’t understand why these people came out to taunt an army of zombies. Hollis tried to get past me and lunge for Mack-Truck, but I pulled him back. Another zombie broke from the crowd and went for him, but he wasn’t alone. Two men were with him, and all three were armed: Mack-Truck had a tire iron; the other two had Louisville Sluggers. Mack swung the tire iron, and it connected with a loud crack. The zombie went down. It was dead, but the men continued to beat it into a lumpy, fleshy mass oozing on the concrete, not hard considering the fact that this zombie was already rapidly decaying. 

We continued the march. As we neared the police station, I became anxious. There were police cars parked at the station, but I couldn’t see any officers in the crowd. 

A shadow appeared at my side. I glanced up into another pair of living eyes. 

It was Kevin. 

Kevin worked in the same office I did. He was extremely shy and extremely unpopular. No one talked to Kevin unless they had to and Kevin, likewise, spoke only when spoken to. He was an efficient, hard worker. Therefore, the other employees were continually seeking ways to get him fired. I never understood why it was that slackers always wanted to see the people doing the work get fired. Hell, it was because of them that they got to slack off. 

"Hello, Christine," Kevin said, smiling. I had never notice that he had such a nice smile; probably because I'd never seen him smile before. 

I had also never seen him outside of the office. His casual attire was very different than the business suits he wore to work. He was dressed in blue jeans, a faded Lightning shirt and a black, leather motorcycle jacket, which set off his wavy brown hair and blue eyes. 

Damn! Kevin was hot!

"Um...Hi." 

"Sorry about your boyfriend," he said.

"Thanks." 

I was suddenly aware of Hollis stiffening at my side. My jealous zombie boyfriend. 

"Er...Hollis? This is Kevin. He works with me."

Hollis glared. 

"Idle hands are the tools of the devil!" Preacher barked. 

Kevin shrugged. "I think it's horrible what they're doing."

This seemed to satisfy Hollis, but not me. I looked at Kevin. He read the question in my eyes.

Kevin leaned over. 

"When we get to the fences, veer off with me and prepare to haul ass," he whispered.

"Why?" I asked. 

He looked wary. "Just be prepared.”

“Do you know why they want to get to the Coast Guard?”

"Well, they just can't go shambling into Tampa International Airport now, can they?" 

He had a point.