***
Two months after the Zombie Apocalypse, the blueberries were about to windup their mop up operations.
It had taken some doing, but a squad of blueberries had managed to sniff out the hidden doorway in Loretta's house and get into her panic room. It was tough going, the lock on the inside of the door quite substantial and unforgiving.
The panic room itself was very well kept and outfitted, more so than most of them, and this lady looked like she had held out longer than most of the preppers. From the looks of it, she could have gone on for years.
It was obvious she had died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The doors had been locked from the inside and no-one else was there. And though she had started to smell and bloat a little, it wasn't too bad. The blueberry in charge guessed she had been gone no more than a couple of days.
“I wonder,” said one of the peacekeepers, speaking Belgian French, “what she saw that did her in?”
“Who knows,” the head blueberry replied. “To me, she's just another one that thought she could have it her own way. Free will is a liability these days, soldier. Be glad you're part of the chosen.”
“It's a lot of people gone, sarge. This could never be right.”
“I'm going to pretend I didn't hear you say that, private. You'll live a longer and healthier life if you keep things like that to yourself. Hell, I'd recommend you don't even think it.”
The blueberry Sargent reached over to the wall and plucked the crewel work sampler off it, staring at it thoughtfully.
“And Faith shall throw the dead below.”
He set the crewel work sampler next to Loretta's corpse almost reverently, and straightened up. He tilted up his pale blue helmet with the big white UN stenciled on it and looked down, maybe a little sadly, at Loretta's corpse.
“Here's another one thought they could buck the new world government. When will they learn? If they were as smart as they thought they were, they shoud have known that if the zombie death ray didn't get 'em, the crazy ray would.”
Goodbye
By
Victor Allen
Copyright © 2014
All Rights Reserved
Most people who fall in love meet at work and it was almost like that with Elizabeth and Richard. They were both employed by the hospital, she as a nurse in the third floor neuro wing, he in the first floor lab. But their bittersweet story began at Stubby Ledbetter’s Downtown Drinking Lounge and Eatery.
The bar scene really wasn’t Elizabeth’s thing. The music was too loud, the clientèle was too drunk, and the eight hundred dollar Jimmy Choo pumps she wore (a graduation gift from her brother and something she called her Choo-Shooz) hurt her feet and made her feel like she was weaving around on tottering stilts. But the graduation party was a well deserved reward. Out of the twenty-one who had started in the LPN curriculum, only three had crossed the stage at commencement.
The majority of the people in the bar she recognized, even if she didn’t know their names. They were fellow graduates with whom she had shared many classes: Lab Techs, Surgical Techs, Radiographers, Phlebotomists, even a couple of freshly minted RN’s. There was Jennifer, the head of the RN curriculum, a very good nurse and a very good friend. She had been unfairly tagged with the moniker “The Grim Reaperess” because of an unfortunate Christmas Eve on which four patients had died on her shift as Charge Nurse.
Like most bars, Stubby Ledbetter’s was dark, packed, and noisy. Between the boozy gibberish of the graduates and the hammering music, Elizabeth was working up to a headache that wasn’t helped by the pick-up artist who had pushed up on her at her table. The oozing Lothario reeked of garlic from pizza and too many chicken wings. He was loathsome and oily, his hair slicked back and a thick, cockduster mustache festooning his upper lip. He lacked only a white, polyester leisure suit and matching loafers to round out the lounge-lizard cliché. She looked around helplessly for her roommate, Hazel, but she was nowhere to be seen.
“Come on, girl,” the ardent suitor said, his Billy goat teeth bared in an offensive smile, his glassy eyes roving down her blouse. “You know you want to get out there and cut a rug with Tex.”
“I would rather,” Elizabeth said, “wrestle a bear for a honeycomb.”
Tex didn’t seem offended, nor did he take the hint. He slipped his hand over Elizabeth’s.
“You don’t know what you’re missing.”
Elizabeth disentangled her hand. “I think I’ll chance it.”
From the corner of her eye, she saw someone making their way towards her table. She knew him as Richard, a lab tech, having had some classes with him. He was a lean, six footer, kind of cute, dressed in a white, pullover shirt and well-weathered black leather pants which seemed to Elizabeth to be more functional than stylish. He stopped by her table, much to Tex’s dismay, an aromatic cigar glowing red in his fingers.
“You’re Elizabeth, right,” Richard asked. His eyes were clear of alcohol and his tone suggested he bore a message.
“Yes,” she answered, “what’s the...”
“Tex Barker,” Tex interrupted rudely, by way of introduction. “The lady is engaged. Hit the bricks, pal.”
“Tex,” Richard echoed thoughtfully. “Yee Hah.”
Tex bristled. “A gentleman would put out that stinking cigar around a lady.”
Richard gave Tex a short, colorless study. “You’re right,” he said. He dropped his lit cigar into Tex’s unfinished drink with a liquid plop where it’s glowing tip fizzed out with a red hot hiss. He looked at Tex brightly.
“You were done with that, right? Say, listen... Tex. I know there’s nothing Elizabeth would rather do than trip the light fantastic with you, but she’s got an urgent phone call. You don’t mind do you? Sure, you don’t.”
Without waiting for an answer, Richard took Elizabeth by her elbow before she could object and firmly drew her away from the table.
Tex rose in drunken self-righteousness to follow, but was quickly swallowed up in the reeling mob through which Richard expertly escorted Elizabeth. He pushed his way through the crowd and all the way out the door into the steamy, June night where Elizabeth’s spiked heels seemed to sink into the soft asphalt of the parking lot. They stopped by Richard’s motorcycle, a very rare, rotary engine Suzuki RE-5. The bike was loud, hot, burned a lot of oil and was as much fun as it was a headache.
Elizabeth withdrew her cell phone from her purse and looked up at Richard.
“There’s no message, is there?” Elizabeth replaced the phone in her purse. “I didn’t have to be rescued.”
“Actually,” Richard said, “you did. When you had your head turned, Tex slipped some GHB in your drink.”
The wide eyes of Elizabeth’s brief shock quickly drew down to slits of ire. “Why that slimy little weasel,” she fumed. “Try to drug me! He’s about to find out what a stiletto enema feels like!” She turned around, ready to charge back into the bar.
“Best you not go back in there,” Richard cautioned. “It’s being taken care of.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look.”
Elizabeth looked where Richard pointed.
Some twenty yards away, two men had Tex hemmed against an outside wall of the bar. They both wore black, biker leather -as did Richard- and they showed no signs of allowing a sweating Tex to escape. One of the men was short and burly, the other so tall that his cowlick got lost in the lowest clouds.
“Don’t hurt him,” Elizabeth said, her eyes softening. Despite what Tex had done, she didn’t want him injured.
“Nobody’s getting hurt,” Richard assured her. “Just a little lesson in manners.”
Elizabeth eased a little, but remained pensive.
“Who’s the Sasquatch?”
“That’s T.J. The other guy is Roundman. They’re off duty cops, part of my bike club.”
True to his word, the two enforcers drove home a few hard points to a clearly panic-stricken Tex and sent him on his way with his
tail between his legs, but otherwise unharmed.
They looked over at Richard, giving him an acknowledging thumbs up before going back inside.
“I guess,” Elizabeth said, “I was lucky that you were here tonight.”
“It wasn’t a total coincidence,” Richard said. “I... uh... knew you would be here.” He smiled with the bright look of a kid hoping to avert a scolding. “Are you ready to go back in?”
Elizabeth considered for a moment. Even though it had been cool inside the club, the sudden clamminess and heat outside made goosebumps raise up on her flesh and she crossed her arms across her chest.
“I think I’ve had enough for tonight.”
“Do you need a ride home?”
“Have you ever known a woman to turn down a ride on a bike?”
Richard grinned. “It would be a first.”
He noticed her goosebumps and pulled his leather jacket from his saddlebag along with a second helmet.
“Keeps the road rash away,” he explained.
Richard helped her fasten her helmet (with Elizabeth thinking the whole time of how her expensively coiffed hair was about to suffer a bad case of ‘helmet head’), and helped her onto the back of the bike. While still on the ground, he asked her where to.
“How about your place,” Elizabeth said.
Richard looked at her curiously for a second.
“Okay,” he said. When he climbed aboard the bike and fired it up, Elizabeth linked her arms around his waist and laid her head against his back as if they had known each other forever.