When he awoke there was a girl with long blonde hair wearing a pair of tattered denim shorts, and a tight green shirt with a picture of a unicorn on it was, leaning over him.
Through squinted eyes as though she'd been hiding in the dark too long, the girl looked around nervously. “Oh, my gosh. I'm so sorry. I thought you were one of them,” she said, gesturing at the barricaded doorway. Squatting down next to him, she took his hand in hers as he looked up too stunned to speak. Her perfume was very strong and smelled of flowers and laundry detergent.
“Are you okay? I feel just awful about knocking you down. My name is Shannon, by the way.”
She was young and extremely beautiful. But Josey was having a difficult time looking at her face because as she squatted next to him he could see a bit of her panties between her smooth tanned legs. Her denim shorts were extremely short- just like the kind he often dreamed about girls wearing. He tried to speak but still felt too stunned.
“Oh, you poor man. I just feel awful about this,” she said, leaning down closer. She felt his forehead and ran her fingers through his hair.
He saw her sparkling chocolate brown eyes as she leaned closer.
She kissed him on the lips.
Unable to resist, he kissed back as her tongue entered his mouth. Her warm wet tongue was amazing. It was very long and extremely dexterous but he awoke when she started to lick his face.
Josey was sprawled in a dazed heap on the floor and slowly became more conscious hearing heavy breathing nearby. Keeping his eyes closed he felt for his crowbar; only it wasn't there.
A foul smelling warm breath filled his nostrils and he realized the source was only inches from his face. Remembering his knife, he reached into his pants pocket for it. He felt the wet warm tongue tasting his face again and couldn't feign unconsciousness any longer. Bellowing in fury, he held the pocketknife and flicked the small blade open.
He heard distant answering screams and opened his eyes prepared for whatever monstrosity was terrorizing him.
The furry face of a combination German Shepherd and all around general mutt came into focus with its long tongue inches from his face.
Folding the knife shut again, he put it back in his pocket- both embarrassed and relieved at the same time.
The dog sat a few feet away panting and looking at Josey, with its head cocked at an angle that suggested curiosity.
After finding it nearby he used his crowbar as a cane once again. It was difficult but he managed to get back on his feet.
The dog whined and backed away nervously, watching the big man while its tail wagged slowly.
“Are you a good dog or are you as crazy as everybody else around here?” He asked, keeping a wary eye on the scruffy dog.
It whimpered again and backed away a few more steps.
He saw its brown fur was mashed down in spots and fluffy in others as the tail continued to wag.
“A dog with a wagging tail usually means he won't bite, but that's not always the case. If you ever meet a dog that's growling or foaming you best just back away slow and get inside the house,” Josey's dad's voice spoke clearly in his head as he looked uncertainly at the dog.
Josey grew up in the countryside and there were always stray dogs around when he was a kid. His dad warned him when he was old enough to go outside by himself to always be cautious around a strange dog.
His dad’s advice continued running through his head, “Never run away if a dog looks mean- it'll most likely chase after you and if it is mean it might take a bite out of your leg. Just keep an eye on it but don't make direct eye contact, some animals see that as a challenge for dominance. When you back away from a strange dog, don't look scared even if you're terrified. Dogs can smell fear on you so act brave and use your head.”
He remembered vividly when his dad finished his long dog lecture how he showed him the bite scars on his upper thigh he got when he was about twelve years old. Those old scars made all his advice seem like something worth remembering and Josey was very glad he had.
“So this was your hiding spot, huh boy?” He asked, warily watching for any signs that it was a bad dog.
It backed up to the doorway to the stairs and cocked its head looking up at him as his tail wagged slightly faster.
“You look a little like a dog I had when I was a kid. His name was Frankenstein,” Josey said softly as he slipped off his left glove and held out his hand palm down toward the dog. Whistling and clicking his tongue softly he reached slowly, trying to relax, as he waited for the dog to sniff or bite him.
“Of course if you were a bad dog you probably would have bit me when I was knocked out back there, right? I really hope you're a good dog because I really could use a friend today.”
The dog wagged its tail faster as it stretched its neck and sniffed Josey's hand. After just a few sniffs the dog sneezed three times in rapid succession and shook its head. Then it sat down and lifted a paw, shaking it in the air.
Hoping his dad, who was possibly watching from Heaven, wasn't looking on in disapproval he took a chance with the strange dog and shook its paw gently.
The dog yipped playfully and licked his hand.
Josey sat down on an old broken TV that seemed fairly solid and petted the dog's head. It made appreciative whimpering sounds and his tail whipped back and forth more rapidly as Josey rubbed behind its ears lightly.
“Yer a good doggy aren't ya? Yes you are.” Reverting to baby talk, he smiled at the dirty dog. “What should I call ya?” He felt for a collar or ID tag and found none. Josey glanced under the dog for a second and said, “So, yer a boy. Small world, so am I.” He looked thoughtful for a moment and then grinned. “Since today seems a lot like all the scary movies I used to watch when I was a kid I shall name you after my favorite scary movie actor. I'll call ya Boris. He actually played Frankenstein's monster in a great film and if we ever get out of here I'm grilling you a steak and we'll watch it together. Okay?” he asked while scratching the dog's chin.
The dog quickly barked twice in apparent agreement.
“Well Boris, I guess I should introduce myself. My name is Josey. And if you don't tell anyone about the way you French kissed me I won't either.”
Boris was dirty and looked very thin, but his rich chocolate brown eyes and soft fur made him the perfect companion in Josey's estimation. He petted the dog for a few more seconds then looked down the dark staircase.
“Well, come on Boris show me your dungeon,” he said standing up and limping forward, again using his crowbar as a cane. In his other hand he held a small flashlight that shined down the steps. Boris quickly trotted down the steps. At the bottom of the stairs he turned, looked back up at him and gave a short yip of a bark.
“Okay, I'm coming.”
If there once had been handrails they'd fallen apart long ago. Tapping the steps with his crowbar, he felt the rottenness of the stairs and walked as gingerly as possible on the side edges of the steps where the wood seemed the least rotten. The boards creaked ominously and the whole staircase swung from side to side a few inches as he slowly came down the steps.
The dog stared up at him, his head cocked at an angle that suggested curiosity, with his tail wagging impatiently.
Josey had seen plenty of horror movies where someone goes into a dark creepy basement and always thought he'd be smarter in a similar situation. He shrugged and thought there was no choice but to continue down, but did shine the flashlight beam around the basement while still on the stairs in case there was something unpleasant lurking in the shadows.
The basement room was about thirty foot square with a couple of large rusting water heaters attached to pipes that appeared to go upstairs. There was also a fuse box, a large utility sink, several old rotten cardboard boxes, a few buckets, mops, brooms, and various unlabeled bottles. The whole room smelled of mildew and rotting things. The concrete floor was slick here and there with traces of stagnant water.
A squeak came from near one of the boxes and a rat scurried a
cross the floor as he shined the light in the far corner of the room. Boris caught sight of it and gave chase through a doorway that was the only other visible way out of the basement other than the stairs.
Josey finished coming down the steps and heard the rat squealing as Boris apparently caught it.
At least he's got something to eat, he thought, again wishing he'd brought his lunchbox from the truck. He counted the last of his nicotine gum- eight pieces. He popped one in his mouth after spitting the older tasteless gum into the corner of the room.
Doubting it still worked, he limped over to the sink attached to the cinder block wall and tried the faucet. The pipes rattled loudly for several seconds. There was a rusty brown splash of water before a weak stream of slightly yellow tinted water began to fill the old sink.
He shoved his head under the spigot and felt the wonderfully cool water running through his sweaty hair. After shaking his head, he cupped his hands and drank his fill.
Hearing the clicking sound of the dog's toenails walking up beside him, he turned around to see the dog’s bloody lips and a satisfied look in its brown eyes. After filling a plastic bucket with some water he set it in front of the dog.
Boris gulped from it as soon as it was on the floor. The dog drank until the bucket was nearly empty and Josey wondered how long it had been since he'd had any water.
Boris, in point of fact, had nothing to drink for three days and felt he would soon die before he caught a whiff and saw the man at the top of the stairs a few minutes earlier. Before all the men in the trailer park started reeking of madness and death the dog wandered around the valley for several months.
His former owner took him for a ride in his car after he discovered Boris chewing on his prized baseball autographed by Hank Aaron. At first his owner seemed really mad before taking him for the last ride he'd ever had. He pulled the car off the road and threw a tennis ball that Boris always loved to fetch into the dirt.
Boris jumped from the car and almost reached the ball when he heard the car being quickly driven away. The dog chased after it for a while then felt scared after realizing he was a long way from home and didn't know where he was.
Some people say dogs can't feel emotions, but had they seen Boris sitting in the dusty road watching the car disappear with his big brown eyes filling with tears they might have changed their minds. But some people are jerks and might have argued it was simply the blowing dust that caused the dog to appear to be crying.
Boris wandered the desert until he smelled water and found his way into the valley. It was a nice place. There were rabbits and other small animals to eat and none of the men down there seemed bad, at least until a few days earlier. Boris had been visiting the men the night of Juan's wake and was wolfing down some half eaten cold burritos someone had thoughtfully left out the night before. It was the last good meal he'd enjoyed until the rat.
When he sniffed Juan's corpse on top of the table in the early morning darkness, on Friday, the dog sensed something was wrong. Juan smelled of death, but under that there was a very bad scent too. When the dead man started to twitch Boris knew something wasn't right. He was a smart dog that way.
He barked at a man asleep in the dirt who held an empty beer bottle in his hands.
He awoke just long enough to throw the bottle at Boris.
The dog barked louder and ran around the men who had without exception all drank too much the night before.
After a second man threw a bottle at him and yelled at Boris, the dog whimpered and ran away as the man who smelled of death and something worse stood up and climbed off the table. As Boris ran away there were several drunken yells and screams but the dog didn't look back.
Since that night the dog had been chased and nearly caught several times by the crazy men until he found a hiding spot in the old laundry building's basement.
He looked at the big man walking around the room and felt better as he watched him. The big man didn't smell of death or madness and that was good enough for Boris.
Looking at the old cardboard boxes scattered around on the floor Josey doubted his chances of finding anything useful. But with nothing better to do he spent the next twenty minutes disturbing several scorpions, crickets, and a few giant spiders (the size of softballs) as he searched.
Boris slept curled up at the foot of the staircase. His ears twitched occasionally whenever he heard the scraping sounds of metal from upstairs but he didn't awaken. It had been a grueling time since Juan came back from the dead and everyone went insane, and the dog didn't get much sleep over the last few days.
A few minutes later, Josey studied the small collection of items he'd found after going through all the boxes. There was an old glass kerosene lantern with no wick, a few ounces of kerosene in a glass bottle, a good size length of clothesline, a box of mildew rotted clothes, some rusty bloated cans of peaches and processed luncheon meat, and a few candles.
He was hungry but distrusted the canned food with very good reason. When he was seven years old his mom threw away several bulging cans of food she found in his grandmother’s house after she died. When he asked why she did it, she answered, “Bulging cans of food are poisonous.”
Unfortunately, he hadn't believed his mother and retrieved one of the cans of meat from the trash. It was a can of Vienna Sausages which was one of his favorite foods. He took the can outside and pulled off the lid. The can didn't look very much bulged out and the small sausages smelled fine as he ate half of them and gave the rest to his grandmother’s cat, named Scalawag. He continued to feel fine for approximately ten minutes.
As it turned out his mom had been right. He was extremely lucky to have just suffered bouts of explosive, painful, and unpredictable diarrhea for the next two days after eating the tainted canned meat.
Scalawag hadn't been so lucky. The cat’s yowls went on for most of the night after they shared the sausages then abruptly stopped. His mother found the cat's stiff body on the back porch of the house the next morning. The poor animal had been throwing up and suffering diarrhea till it died sometime in the night. His father forced Josey, between bouts of diarrhea, to dig a grave and bury Scalawag.
After lighting one of the candles he worked on the lantern trying to fashion a wick from some of the old clothes. Filling the lantern with kerosene, he fiddled with the improvised wick until it was wet and managed to get it to light with the candle flame. After the lantern flared to life he blew out the candle.
“What now, Boris? Go try and burn our way out upstairs or go down your hallway over there?”
Boris opened his eyes and yawned hugely then turned to look at the young man while his tail whacked the dust covered floor.
Josey packed up the other items (minus the rest of the moldy clothes and cans of food) into his toolbox. He briefly toyed with the idea of opening the poisoned meat and throwing it over the wall for the zombies to eat. Then wondered if they were dead what would poisoned meat do to them? He was tempted to try it anyway, but then considered the rickety wooden staircase and decided not to take the chance on having it collapse while he conducted his experiment. Though, he did have a smile on his face while imagining the zombies eating the canned meat and then suffering from explosive diarrhea.
Getting back on his feet his knee was a little stiff yet much sturdier and not shaking at all. He held the lantern and toolbox in one hand and the crowbar in the other while walking toward the dark hallway.
Spider webs festooned the ceiling like party favors of the damned and the floor itself was dust covered concrete. A small patch of bright red blood and a few tufts of rat fur were all that remained to give witness to the dog’s recent meal.
Boris trotted ahead into the darkness with the clicking of his toenails echoing through the hallway. The sound was both unsettling and reassuring at the same time.
At least it's not as hot down here as it was upstairs, Josey thought while following the dog.
He opened a door on the right side of the hall and saw a
dirty toilet and some empty beer cans strewn across the floor. A dust covered bottle of tequila was in the sink and Josey picked it up. If he had felt optimistic he might have said it was half full, but in his current state of mind he assessed it as being half empty. He unscrewed the cap and skeptically sniffed the contents.
He'd gotten into the habit of sniffing unfamiliar liquor bottles after an unfortunate incident he had the first and last day he tried being a garbage man. Being a garbage collector had never been in his career plan, but after his college dreams were shattered he took the job out of desperation.
Some of his co-workers told him of finding all kinds of wonderful things in trash cans. Pornographic magazines and bottles of booze were the two best things that were often thrown away. They were usually tossed out after the former owner’s girlfriends, wives, or mothers discovered them.
His first day on the job, he was disillusioned because the majority of trashcans were full of poop filled diapers and regular trash. But inside one particular trashcan toward the end of the day, he found a bottle of whiskey that was nearly full. Not realizing how stupid he was being, Josey opened it and drank straight from the bottle. He drank for a couple of seconds before his taste buds informed him of what his nostrils should already have.
Josey was drinking a whiskey bottle that someone filled with urine.
While spitting and swearing, he never heard the kids in the frat house nearby laughing behind one of the upstairs windows. He quit the job that afternoon and swore never to drink from a strange bottle again- at least without pausing to sniff it first.
Josey didn't know it, but he actually had several hundred thousand people who loved him for having drunk from the bottle. One of the fraternity kids posted a video of the whole incident on the internet entitled Dumb ass garbage man drinks my pee.
Down in the laundry building's basement bathroom the bottle's contents smelled of tequila, without even a hint of urine. Josey decided to save it for later and reluctantly screwed the cap back on. He'd been briefly tempted to just relax down there and get drunk. It was an appealing idea, however the recurring idea that time was running out and the military would soon nuke the whole valley changed his mind. After putting the bottle inside his tool box he closed the bathroom door and walked on in silence, save for the occasional sound of the dog's toenails ahead in the darkness.
After a couple more minutes he came to a set of concrete steps going up.
Boris looked over at Josey expectantly.
Josey climbed the steps and knocked spider webs out of his way. At the top there was an old wooden door that was barred from his side with a large piece of wood set in metal brackets attached to the walls. After brushing away more spider webs, he pressed his ear to the door and listened intently. He heard nothing except the pounding of his own heart and the panting dog beside him. The board felt rough and he put his thick leather gloves back on, not wishing to tempt fate with a nasty splinter when he had a whole trailer park full of undead and a trick knee to contend with. After lifting the board as quietly as he could, the door freely swung open a few inches and the sunlight nearly blinded him.
Exchanging the board for his crowbar he tried to slowly and quietly open the door a bit more. It squealed but not as horribly loud as he'd feared, and he pulled it wide enough to see what was beyond. A set of concrete steps led up to ground level and the bright blue sky above.
While staring up at the cloudless sky, he grumbled, “How could a pack of zombies ruin a day as pretty as this? It just seems wrong, all of this. In the movies it’s always at a graveyard or spooky house and always at night not the middle of the frigging desert first thing on a Monday morning.”
The dog stayed down behind the now open door, sniffed at the air, and whined softly.
Josey climbed the steps and peeked above ground level. He saw they were about a half mile from Mrs. Remlap's house. He looked in all directions around the stairs and saw he was only about fifty or sixty feet away from the trailer with the American flag where the old man lived with his dog. Looking the other way, he could see his truck in the distance with a few zombies wandering around it while others still pushed and scratched at the dryers he'd jammed in the doorway.
It was ten o’clock according to his watch and it seemed like it was at least a hundred degrees already. His skin felt like the sun was baking him as he tried to think.
A piercing scream ripped through both his thoughts and the stifling air.
Josey crouched down low and looked for the owner of the impressive set of lungs.
An old man wearing a tattered straw cowboy hat, a dirty red and white flannel shirt, and filthy jeans, was chasing a jackrabbit toward the Remlap House. The last hope he held that they were all just slow poke zombies (like he'd seen in countless movies) vanished as the old man nearly caught the galloping jackrabbit. Josey stared in amazement as the long eared beast zig zagged and picked up speed. It wasn't the jackrabbit’s speed that amazed him. It was that the pursuer did not seem appreciably to slow down or get dejected by the long eared varmint's quickness, but continued after it with a single-mindedness that was disturbing in a way he couldn't immediately understand.
The man in the cowboy hat howled again and Josey saw several other men join in the pursuit of the jackrabbit as it hopped away.
He looked around shaking his head and muttered, “Pretty dang fast for zombies, aren't they?” Josey stared at the distance to the old man's trailer and began humming the tune of the song, Should I stay or should I go, popularized by The Clash.
The dog’s tail wagged in rhythm.