'Til Death Do Us Part

CHAPTER EIGHT

Mike Journal Entry 3

“Why would you do that?” I asked in alarm. There were times to take acid, most of them revolved around good friends, about twenty-five backwards revolutions of the earth around the sun and some great tunes. None of those things were in attendance right now. “John.”

“Who? Whoa I’m seeing trails.”

“John the Tripper, we’re about to face zombies, man, and you gave me acid. I don’t even know how to deal with this right now.”

“Relax, man,” John the Tripper said, putting his hand on my arm. “It’ll happen on its own.”

I’d had a few ‘bad trips’ over the years, one involved a girl and the other was just a low point in my life, felt like the world was crashing down. The key word in my last statement was ‘felt’ like it was crashing down. How the hell was I going to react now that it really was? I think the years had wizened me enough that I would be able to handle the onslaught of the chemicals to a certain extent, but we were still talking about tripping on acid during the destruction of a city on fire during a zombie invasion, this oughtta be a blast. (Can you see the sarcasm dripping off of the page?)

“We gotta get out of here, man, before this kicks in.”

“Before what kicks in, man?” John the Tripper asked as he was staring intently at the webbing between his fingers. “I’m a fucking dolphin,” he told me.

“Let’s go, Flipper.” Then I laughed, my time was running short.

I almost stepped down into the garage when John pulled me back in. I noted apprehensively how easily I almost lost my balance. His face looked drawn out, but his eyes burned bright. “Wait!” he shouted loudly as if we were at a Black Sabbath concert. I’d seen them three times but never with Ozzy, twice with the great one Ronnie James Dio at the helm, and once with Ian Gillian of Deep Purple fame, not that any of this is conducive to the story it’s just to show that my thoughts were beginning to stray even more so than usual.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, thinking that maybe the cooler was out of beer. For the briefest of seconds I did not even acknowledge the fact that quite possibly he was talking about zombies. I’m not sure if my life had been in greater danger at any one point more so than now just because I was not aware of my surroundings.

“Don’t take your hat off…not ever,” he said, then the corners of his eyes crinkled up from his infectious smile. “Want a beer?”

“Sure do.”

“Well let’s go, the cooler is in the van.”

When’d he do that? I thought, “Well that’s one benefit of the zombie apocalypse…drunk driving isn’t a crime anymore.”

At some point, John was no longer next to me but had opened the door to his van and was now seated comfortably in the back seat. I walked over and was about to get into the driver’s seat when I noticed he wasn’t shutting his door.

“You want me to get that?” I asked, looking at him through the rearview mirror. He looked up at me with a startled expression.

“Get what?”

“Right,” I said as I got back out and slid his door closed. I shut my door, the dome light went out and the garage suddenly seemed darker by significant degrees since we had started this endeavor. The ash that had been sifting through the numerous structural holes now looked as if it was being pumped in. We were in serious danger of death by smoke inhalation and I had suddenly become fascinated by all the numbers and letters on the dials of the VW’s dashboard.

John tapped lightly on my shoulder with a beer, it brought me back. “Thanks,” I told him. It was a cold Old Milwaukee in a can, not necessarily my favorite. But I had adopted a new beer credo for the end of times: my new favorite beers were, first, free ones, and secondly, cold ones. John had fulfilled both of those obligations. I popped the tab and was amazed at the feeling of the carbonated bubbles as they bounced off my nose and adhered to the remainder of my moustache and goatee. That first pull of that disgusting beer might as well have been nectar flown down to earth by the gods themselves. I was momentarily in Heaven right up until zombies began to break into John’s house.

“Party crashers,” John laughed as he pointed behind him. Zombies were at the entrance to John’s garage. “Must have left the door unlocked. I do that a lot.”

“Shit,” I said, praying that when I turned the key in the ignition the van would start; but that would only solve one problem. I truly didn’t think that the zombies would be so kind as to open the garage door for me.

The van rocked as the first of our uninvited ‘guests’ slammed into the side. The van started as John had promised, and it sounded good, but was about as useless as tits on a turtle if we couldn’t get out of the garage. Then I busted out laughing over my crappy quip. I mean to the point where my stomach was cramping, the muscles on the side of my face that controlled smiling were in agony because I was smiling so long and so hard, tears were rolling down my face. To compound it, zombies were at my window, biting and gnashing at the glass which just seemed like the funniest fucking thing on the planet at the moment. Somewhere deep, deep down inside, I knew I was in a world of trouble. Weird thing about it was that I just didn’t care.

It had been a long time since I had been able to just let loose, and I guess when you’re faced with your imminent demise, that’s as good a time as any.

“You see his mug?” I said, tears still streaming as I pointed to the nearest zombie. I looked into the rearview mirror and immediately sobered up—if only for a moment. John was playing with something, much like someone else I had loved had been doing so long ago, felt like about forty years, but in reality was only about six months previous.

“What do you have there?” I asked John

John was busy sweeping his hand back and forth. I couldn’t tell because the zombies were so loud crashing into things, but I think John was even making airplane noises.

“John the Tripper!” I yelled.

He stopped mid-flight.

“What do you have there, buddy?”

“Who the hell is ‘Buddy’ and this is a garage door opener that I am pretending is the plane that took me to San Francisco back in ‘69 to catch the Dead.

My excitement was short-lived as I realized that, without power, the opener was better off as the toy plane…and then the garage door rumbled open. I didn’t give a shit how, I dropped the transmission into drive and headed out. I had to go over the lawn to avoid a small contingent of zombies in the driveway.

“Don’t hit her azaleas or she’ll have a cow. Ran over them once with my Segway. She was pissed for twelve years, three months, and a day-and-a-half.”

“So it took her that first part of a half day, twelve years, and three months later to get over it?” I asked. He said it so seriously that I could not doubt how long she was mad; the Segway part though was a little tough to swallow.

“And a day,” he answered as he shrugged his shoulders.

“How’d the garage door open, John?” I asked.

He looked up again then past the mirror to the window outside. His hand immediately flew up to his head where he touched the tin foil hat and became comforted. “When’d we get outside?”

“Oh boy,” I said as I did a curb check bouncing the front passenger side wheel off of a curb. I had been so busying studying John’s expressions, and then I had been distracted by a particularly interesting smudge on the small mirror—it looked to be a cross of a young Elvis with a touch of Jamie Lee Curtis thrown in there. Can’t explain it, it’s just what I saw at the time. I nearly rear-ended Johnson’s propane truck—I knew the name from the foot high lettering on the rear—but pulled the wheel far enough to avoid that fun little disaster in the making.

“Where we going?” John asked.

“Out of the city first, then we’ll decide. I don’t think where I want to go is the same place as you,” I said, thinking that he was going to want to hook up with his Stephanie. I hoped that wouldn’t be the case. First off, because I’d lose my ride. And second, I kind of liked the crazy bastard even if he did dose my ass without me knowing. Setting him loose in this world was the same as signing his death certificate, and I didn’t think I’d be able to do that with a clear conscience.

If I had just pointed the damn van north and gone towards home I most likely would have caught up to Gary, BT, and the bitch. There were a couple of plusses to our detour and some minuses.