'Til Death Do Us Part

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Mike Journal Entry 4

“Got another beer?” I asked John. Drunk was infinitely better than tripping and the quicker I could change my altered states the better. I had long ago stopped staring at the van’s gauges. They kept swirling and melting into each other anyway. The roadway wasn’t much better, but I still had enough presence of mind to keep watching that…barely.

I almost slammed into a tree when I felt the icy prick of death against the back of my neck, or it was the beer John was handing to the front. “Fuck,” I said as I reached back and grabbed the beer. “My hand, John, my hand!” I told him.

“What’s the matter with it?” he asked sitting up to take a look.

“Nothing, just put the beer in my hand next time.”

“Oh you need a beer?” he asked. “Why didn’t you just say something?” He reached in the cooler and placed another freezing can against the back of my neck.

At least this time I was ready for it and I grabbed it quickly. The glow of the burning city in my rearview mirror would have been surreal under normal circumstances. I couldn’t get over the sensation that Godzilla was real and he had just laid waste to the entire area. I hoped that Gary, BT, Mary, and Josh had made it out, because from my vantage point, it didn’t look like anything had survived.

“Man…you crying?” John asked, he was completely leaning over the seat, mere inches from my face.

“I’m fine,” I told him, trying as nonchalant as possible to wipe my tears away.

“Are you out of beer?”

“I’m good,” I told him, but we need to find a place to hole up. I can’t keep driving, if that’s what you’d even call this.”

“There are some cabins a few miles up the road. It’s a little bit off the highway, nice and secluded,” John said.

John’s flashes of lucidity were always welcome. “Just point the way,” I told him.

His index finger was up by the side of my face as he was quite literally pointing the way. I thought he might have been joking at first, or maybe he’d only leave it up there for a moment or two, but ten miles later his finger began to bend as we were coming up on our turn. Then straightened back out as we made the left.

“You think it’s safe?” I asked him as we pulled up to a small camp ground that had six or seven cabins for rent.

“We never got caught,” he answered.

“Who?”

“Me and the wife…we never got caught,” he answered.

“And who would have been doing the catching?” I asked.

“That’s not the point. Come on,” John said as he quickly exited the vehicle.

“Caught doing what?” I asked to his back as I followed. “And that’s exactly the point.” I was three mother fucking steps away from the van when I realized I didn’t have my rifle. I was paranoid, I swear I could see zombies all around, or it was light poles, reality was blurring heavily with hallucinations. I ran quickly back to the van and began to look inside when after a moment I couldn’t find what I was looking for, I had completely forgotten. I jumped, hitting my head on the ceiling when right next to my ear, John asked what I was doing.

“I don’t remember,” I told him.

“That happens to me all the time,” he explained,

“It was important.”

“It always is. If you were meant to have it, it will come back. If not, then you’ve set it free,” he told me prophetically.

“Isn’t that love?” I asked.

“We hardly know each other.”

“I’m never tripping with you again, John,” I told him.

“OH! That’s why I feel so funny. Come on we should go inside.” He said as he fumbled around with a large key ring he produced from God knew where. The keys themselves were making strange echoing vibrations inside my head as they jangled together.

I looked longingly at the van, wishing I had found or could even remember what I was looking for. But I still followed John to the cabin. I don’t know if the drugs were having an effect, but each cabin was painted in some of the most garish colors I had ever seen. The one we were going to was plum purple; the one next to ours—which I was glad we were not going to—was blood red.

“These are some intense colors,” I said to John, hoping that I wasn’t hallucinating this also.

“I’ve never noticed,” John said, standing on the small porch. “We should probably get in, the funky people are coming.”

I didn’t know who the ‘funky people’ were or why I should care, but John seemed to be distressed about it and that was good enough for me. He led me inside. I’d seen closets that were bigger than the cabin, but it had a bed, a small fridge, a television and a chair, pretty much anything a lone man or a couple on a getaway needed.

“I think I know what I forgot,” I told John excitedly.

“About what?” he asked. He was looking through the cabin’s side window.

“The beer, I forgot to get the beer.”

“It’s alright, man,” John said as he took two strides to get across the room to the small dorm fridge. “They’re probably warm but they’re wet.” He flashed a smile as he opened the door, at least a case worth of Natty Lite was stuffed inside.

Had I not been so fucked up on acid, I would have gagged at the display, but as it was, they looked like gleaming cans of honey. “Wonderful,” I said as a funky person slammed into our door.

“Whoa you think they want one, too?” John said as he went to open the door and ask just that.

“We don’t have enough to share,” I said selfishly as I grabbed one of the lukewarm god nectars.

“Probably right,” he said as he let the door handle go.

“Man they’re persistent,” I said as I downed the beer in two or three gulps. Even as high as I was, I was more in tune with how disagreeable the sub-par beverage was thonking around in my gut than I was with the zombies that were trying to gain entry. “I really wish I had a gun,” I said arbitrarily.

“Are you a fed?” John asked warily.

“What?” I asked as I turned to him, not realizing that I had another beer open and was now pouring it down the front of my poncho.

“You said you wanted a gun, only feds have guns.”

I turned back to my beer and with a conscious effort I tilted my hand back up so it would stop soaking me. “Naw, man, I ain’t no fed, I just think we need one.”

Glass shattered from the side window, at least four or five sets of hands reached through the curtains.

“Whoa that’s intense!” John said.

“Zombies!” The word finally found its way through the folds of my convoluted mind and out my mouth. Arms poked through the window and the door looked like it was in danger of giving at any moment. Like a caged animal I looked frantically for a back door, even in my state it would have been extremely difficult to miss something like that in a cabin so small.

“We should get in the basement,” John suggested.

Again I spun around like a top on Red Bull. “John there’s two windows and a door that leads outside. There’s no basement.”

“There isn’t?” he asked with alarm. “That’s bad news then, we’ll have to share our beer with the funky people.”

“John the Tripper, they don’t want the beer.”

“Well that’s good,” he said as he physically relaxed.

“Not so much,” I said softly, the seriousness of the situation was beginning to break through the stranglehold the hallucinogen had on my mind. I grabbed the lamp and pulled the shade off. I started to swing it around to get a feel of the heft of it to see if it could do any damage if it came in contact with a skull, but unless that skull belonged to a squirrel I was going to be in a little bit of trouble.

“Hey, man, that lamp cost twelve dollars. Stephanie is going to be pissed.”

“Why would your wife care? And how do you know how much this cost?” I asked him, holding the lamp nearly under his nose, almost in accusation. I didn’t know why that seemed like such an important matter, but right now I didn’t have anything else to fixate on.

“Stephanie owns these cabins. I’m supposed to manage them but I usually forget,” he said sheepishly.

“So does this place have a basement then?” I asked, again doing a pirouette like a drunken ballerina, but I guess that analogy is wrong because the drunken ballerina would still have been more graceful.

“No, man, you told me we didn’t,” John replied forlornly as he grabbed the lamp from my hand. “It’s too bad, too, because I was growing some killer weed down there. I even had a little rhyme, too, ‘The Purple cabin leads to the land of enchantment, smurple!’”

“That’s how you remember?”

He nodded.

I backed up, and two zombie hands had sought purchase on my poncho. I wrenched myself free.

“We really should get in the basement,” he said his eyes wide.

“I couldn’t agree more,” I told him.

“Why not?”

“Why not what?”

“Why couldn’t you agree more?” he asked in seriousness.

“Figure of speech.”

“Like an hourglass?” John asked.

“Sure, the basement, John.”

“Oh yeah, and you’re not the Fed right? Because if I ask…you have to tell me.”

“I don’t think that’s the case anymore, John. But no, I’m not a Fed,” I told him as the door began to crack under the zombie assault.

“Good thing.” John moved a small throw rug aside. A little hinged trap with a recessed ring for a pull lever looked back up at us. “See, I told you we had a basement,” he said triumphantly.

“How big is this thing?” If the size of the trap door was any indication, we were about to be inside an earthen cubby hole, and I for one would rather have taken my chances with the zombies. The thought of lying in the dirt underneath the floorboards as zombies walked above us was sending me into a near state of panic. Zombies walking across our graves; something was fundamentally wrong with the whole picture that was flashing across my mind.

“You prepared to have your mind blown?” John asked me. He pulled on the small ring and the door opened.

I was completely unprepared for what I was looking at. It looked like a rabbit hole, albeit a little bigger, a child could scramble through comfortably enough, it looked just big enough for a male. I looked over to John who had a huge grin spread across his face. “No fucking way,” I told him. Now all I could picture was being stuck in a tube staring at John’s feet as we wasted away.

“I know, right?! Isn’t it awesome! We should grab some beer,” he said enthusiastically as he hustled over to the fridge and started shoving cans in his pockets.

“John, how deep is that thing?” I asked, taking a step back; fearful that it would suck me in and never let me go. “I have claustrophobia, John!” Fuck the near panic, I was in full blown hysteria mode, I would have willingly gone to the zombies at this point rather than deal with the wormhole.

“See you on the other side!” John said as he quite literally dove into the hole. I expected to hear him start screaming that he was stuck or that the giant worm from Tremors was chasing his ass.

“Great, Talbot, like you needed another fucking reason to not go into the hole,” I said aloud after thinking about the movie that had scared the crap out of me in my youth.

“You coming?” drifted up from the hole. I thought I was imagining it, but then I distinctly heard him tell me to bring more beer. The zombie falling through the window was the last bit of motivation I needed. I screwed up royally and got into the hole feet first. I was death-clinching the small lip of the trap door as I pulled the door shut just as the zombie inside crawled over to me, it’s mouth not more than a few inches from my fingers. I was plunged into a darkness a blind person would have sensed.

I could hear the zombie scrambling to its feet. I let go of the lip just as it stepped on the trap door. My fingers were pinched a little bit, but it was nothing compared to the slamming of my heart in my chest. I wasn’t moving, John had slithered down the hole like a snake, and I was stuck fast. I tried to wriggle along, but my arms were pinioned above my head, and I didn’t have the room to bring them by my sides and help me move.

I wanted to cry. I could feel the walls collapsing on me, breathing was getting difficult. My next option was to push the hatch open and kill the zombie in the cabin, but I knew I’d never get out of the hole quick enough. It would be gnawing on my face as I struggled to get free. Die in the dark or have my face eaten, those were the two choices I was weighing out when John spoke.

“You coming, man?”

“John, I’m stuck!” I screamed. The zombie above me stopped its shuffling. The cabin door finally gave way with a resounding splintering.

“Did you grab more beer?”

“Would you leave me here if I didn’t?” I asked, truly concerned.

The zombies above me were having a field day on the cabin; what little possessions were in there were being reduced to rubble. I could hear the planks on the trap door creak every time one or more of them stepped on them and I sincerely hoped they would hold up. I shrieked—yeah dammit, I shrieked—when I felt John’s hand wrap around my ankle.

“Did you hear that, man? Sounded like a banshee,” he said in all seriousness.

“That’s probably what it was then,” I said in a near falsetto voice, not yet getting my rampant emotions in check yet.

John was pulling me down the hole. I was trying my best to not eat dirt…I was not succeeding.

“Hi ho, hi ho it’s off to work I go!” John was singing at the top of his lungs.

“You’re kidding, right?” I asked in response to his song choice. I was being dragged through a tunnel by a tripping madman singing Disney songs…with zombies above me. I couldn’t have made this shit up if I tried.

“You ready?” John asked me.

“For...?” I was beginning to ask as I felt myself falling. It seemed like I was suspended in space for hours, free falling through the cosmos, but now that I’m looking back on it, I’m pretty sure that was a side effect of the drugs I was on. The fall was no more than six feet, and I landed awkwardly but softly on some strewn hay.

The cavern—that was what it was—was lit up with some small lanterns that John must have placed here. “Where the...what the hell is this place?” I asked, standing up. I had a good inch or two from the top of my head to the ceiling. I tried my best to not think about it or my claustrophobia would begin to set in again.

“Chateau de Simms.” He smiled, his face caked with dirt, I rubbed absently on mine realizing I probably looked much the same. “Come on, come on,” he said, grabbing my hand and pulling me further away from the entry hole.

The cavern opened up, the ceiling now a good eight or nine feet from my head, the knot of claustrophobia around my heart began to loosen. The room stretched further out than side to side, maybe twenty-five feet by ten feet. I was having great difficulty with spatial relations and the echoing was completely throwing me off, threatening to give me one hell of a case of vertigo. I could smell a faint scent that harkened back to days of yore.

“Oh, my babies!” John wailed.

“What’s the matter?” I asked, looking around wildly.

John sat down heavily by a row of huge potted plants. Correction, huge Pot plants. I had only seen plants this size on the news during drug busts.

“They’re dying,” he said sadly as he caressed some of the sticky buds.

“John the Tripper, I need to wrap my head around this can you start from the beginning?” I asked.

John looked up and over at me, tears threatening to fall from his eyes. “Well, scientists say that the universe was once in an extremely hot and dense state which expanded rapidly...”

“No, man, not that far back.”

“Mesozoic then?” he asked clearly confused with my request.

“This cavern, John the Tripper, let’s start with this cavern,” I clarified, or so I had thought.

“Cave formation begins when rainwater absorbs carbon dioxide as it falls through—”

“Oh fuck, man, you’re hurting my head.”

“Here smoke some of this,” John said, extending his arm, a fairly good sized joint in the palm of his hand. “This will help.”

“Like I need more drugs.” I said sarcastically rubbing my temples.

“Exactly,” John said as he looked in his hand and seemed surprised at what he found. “Did you give me this?” he asked. He sparked it up before I could respond, even if I wanted to.

I’ll admit the sweet smell of the smoke was enticing, but I needed to be closer to reality as opposed to the opposite.

“Man, this is some good shit,” John said as he took a sharp inhalation. “Where’d you get it?” he asked as he pulled the joint away and was looking at the burning end. “Colombia maybe?”

“I don’t really remember,” I told him; that seemed easier than trying to reason with him.

“You got anymore?” he asked, taking another toke.

I shook my head negatively as I began to explore our surroundings. Besides the landing hay and the potted pot plants, there were some tailgating fold-out chairs, a small collapsing table, a bunch of candles and some UV lighting that seemed to run on a cord that went back up the hole we had previously exited from.

At the far end of the cavern was another hole a little bigger than the other, this one looked like you could crawl on hands and knees, but I was in no rush, the mere thought of it got a quickening in my pulse.

“Did you make this place?” I asked John, hoping he would be on a cohesive thought upswing.

“It was here,” he said with abbreviation as he took another hit.

“The tunnel from the cabin was here also?”

“No, I did that. I was pretty sure an alien spacecraft had crash landed here in the ‘40s. So I rented a ground penetrating radar set-up. When it bounced this hole back up, I had to see what it was. Figured the ship would be down here too, it wasn’t.”

“The previous cabin motel owners—or Stephanie for that matter—didn’t care that you dug a hole in the middle of that room?” I asked, pointing back up.

“At first I snuck the dirt out in my pockets in the middle of the night.”

“Like The Great Escape?” I asked, remembering a World War Two movie my dad and I used to enjoy watching.

“Well I wasn’t really trying to escape, but sure,” he replied, looking at me like I was the crazy one; and maybe in his skewed reality, that was the truth. “Then, when I got to the cavern, I decided I liked it a lot and I bought the motel…or maybe Stephanie did.”

“This is all yours?”

He was smiling again, whether from the weed or being the proud owner I wasn’t sure.

“You’re fucking loaded aren’t you?” I asked. “Like one of those über-rich trust fund babies aren’t you!” I said, pointing and laughing at him.

“I had a friend stole two pounds of dope from me, when he sold it, he put all the money into eBay stocks. He felt so guilty he gave me thirty million.”

“Dollars? That’s unreal.”

“What?”

“Wow, you’d never know you were worth that much.”

“I’m not anymore.”

I figured he had smoked, snorted or swallowed the vast majority of his windfall.

“Stephanie took the profits and rolled it into Google. I think at one time she said two hundred and fifty million.”

“Holy shit, John!” I nearly fell on my ass just thinking about the staggering amount. “Why are you still living in that little house in backwoods North Carolina?”

“Where would I go?” he asked in all seriousness.

“Anywhere I suppose.”

“Why? It was home.”

“Yeah, John the Tripper, I guess you’re right. Home is home, that’s pretty deep.”

“Not really, we’re only about twenty feet down.”

“I meant the...forget it. Shit two hundred and fifty million, that’s pretty impressive.”

“It’s only money.”

“That’s what people who have a lot say. For those that are or were struggling, it takes on a different meaning.”

“Want some?”

“I don’t think it’s worth much anymore.”

“Right, the funky people. They’ve been kinda of fouling everything up.”

“Is this place safe?”

“It’s deep enough that we don’t need the tin foil hats. The funkies can’t get here, and the government already removed the spaceship, so they ain’t coming back. So yeah…safe as any place can be.”

“I need to come down, John. All I’m seeing is tracers, and the reverberation in here is throwing me off. “

“Then you’re gonna love this,” he said as he snapped some glow sticks.

He started to twirl his arms. The kaleidoscope of colors was mesmerizing. I don’t know how long I watched, but the chemical reaction was beginning to peter out when I finally pulled my gaze away.

“Come on sit down,” John told me. I had not even known he sat; the colors were still swirling vividly in front of me. “Smoke this.” He handed me a pipe that looked suspiciously like a peace pipe.

I took a long drag, the aromatic smoke filling my lungs, the smell of vanilla wafting around our enclosure. “What is this?” I asked, looking at the pipe, realizing that I should probably have asked before taking a hit. With John all bets were off.

“It’s a personal blend.”

“Your words are not as comforting as I would hope, John.”

“North Carolina tobacco, with a smattering of Turkish hashish,” he told me as he handed the pipe back.

The sweet-spiced tobacco melded nicely with the tangy tickle of the hash. The buzz was pleasant and rounded the edges of the harsh trip. I was feeling better—not normal, not by a long shot—but at least I didn’t feel like I was going to come out of my skin. Although I figured I had already done that once today and that should be enough.

We sat there for an indeterminable amount of time. I found great comfort in John, for a man so out of step with the ‘real’ world, he was the lord of this domain. I smoked until I couldn’t lift my arms any more. We talked some, for the life of me I can’t remember anything except the profoundness of it. And then John told me to go to sleep.