Jason Frost - Badlands

Timmy shook his head. "No."

"Then shoot. Shoot the bastard."

Timmy lifted the gun.

"Fuck, Colonel," Dobbs said. "He's gonna do it."

"Shoot, Tim. Squeeze that trigger. We have to protect our family. Squeeze the goddamned trigger!"

Timmy pointed the gun at Dobbs's chest, his hand quivering as his finger hooked around the trigger.

"Shoot!" Fallows screamed. But when Timmy didn't, Fallows reached over and clamped his huge hand around Timmy's, his finger pressing Timmy's small finger against the trigger until the explosion.

The gun jerked back at the same time Dobbs jerked back, the front of his chest opening like a red orchid suddenly in bloom. He flopped to the ground, his right foot kicking a pattern in the dirt while his leg spasmed. But he was already dead.

Fallows unpeeled Timmy's cold fingers from the gun and patted him on the back. "Congratulations, son." He grinned. "You just killed a man for not killing your father."

Tracy looked out through the broken window of Bob's Big Boy and watched him running across the street. She laid her.357 back on her lap, folded her book face-down on the Formica table, and smiled. "Well now, what do we have here? A wandering minstrel?"

"Nobody here but us rock 'n' rollers," Eric said, standing outside the window. He held up the battered Martin guitar by the neck.

"You play that thing?"

"A little. Long time ago."

"I didn't know that. All this time and I didn't know you played the guitar."

He shifted the crossbow out of the way and strummed a C chord. "Everyone at the party laughed when I sat down to play." He strummed a D chord. "But thanks to Jiffy guitar lessons, now I'm asked to play at all the parties. Amaze your friends and confound your enemies." He strummed a few chord combinations that sounded like Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel."

Tracy applauded, laughing. "Where'd you find it?"

"The Exxon station down the road. In the John. I think someone was sitting in there when the quake hit and ran off without it. Funny thing is, someone had gone in there afterward and broken open the toilet paper dispenser. Took all the toilet paper, but left this guitar."

"Priorities change."

"Yeah, I know. Still…" He shrugged.

She held up her tattered paperback novel. "Found this under one of the tables back there. Along with a used diaper, a pair of high heels, a bill for chicken snack and a strawberry milk shake, and a Bob's menu."

"Lucky you. Finally something new to read."

"I read the menu three times all the way through, kind of forcing myself to hold off on the book."

"What about the religious bookstore next door?"

"C'mon, Eric, you know me. I don't want to read about someone worse off then we are. I want escape. Christ, it's like a romantic thing, almost sexual, not wanting to rush right in and read it. Prolonging it. Right away I told myself I was only going to read five pages a day, make it last. I'm already fifty pages into it." She adjusted her bandaged leg, wincing. "Thing about all this survival stuff is, it gets pretty boring."

Eric laughed. "You didn't think that a few hours ago when we were being chased or even an hour ago when we discovered what Bob's Big Boy's been serving lately."

"Yeah, well, you know what I mean. OK, we spend a lot of time just trying to stay alive, find water and food and keep from being turned into a blue-plate special. But after a while, your mind kind of adjusts to danger and accepts that as normal. Almost routine. You know?"

"I know. Like in the army. Even in combat there were times we'd rather have faced enemy bullets than sit around and wait another minute. That is, until the bullets actually started flying." He looked at the book cover and smiled. Missionary Stew by Ross Thomas. "Unfortunate title, considering."

"That's one thing that isn't so boring. Those men chewed down to the bone." She shuddered. "What do you think that means, Eric?"

Eric climbed through the gaping window and slid into the booth across the table from Tracy. She had her leg propped up on a chair, the bandages made from some E. T. sheets he'd found in one of the homes. The wood splints were cut from pine panelling he'd ripped from the walls of someone's den. He'd done a pretty good job, considering their resources, and was thinking that maybe the leg wasn't as bad as he'd first thought. At least Tracy didn't seem to be in as much pain.

"Not a lot of things it could mean. Somebody's hungry and eating the bodies. Not all that unusual when you think about it. In a way, it even makes sense."

"Jesus, Eric."

"I mean it. We've got a definite food shortage considering how many people are not prepared to hunt or grow their own. It would figure they'd turn to cannibalism. Kind of natural, in a way."

"Look, you've known me long enough to know I'm not that squeamish anymore. I've seen about every atrocity possible since the quakes. But this." She shook her head. "This is too much, I don't care how natural. It's damn spooky."

"Well, cannibalism usually takes longer to occur unless there are unusual circumstances."

"You don't call being shaken free of the rest of the continent by an earthquake unusual? Orjbeing enclosed by a dome of gas formed from biological and chemical weapons a teeny bit unusual?"

"Not for California. Come to think of it, that arm of yours is looking pretty tasty. Hmmmm."

She reached across the table and swatted him with her book. "As I recall, you've had a taste or two before."

He grinned. "You must be doing something right. I keep coming back for more."

She leaned over, her breasts pressed against the edge of the Formica table. "That's as far as I can move, pal."

Eric stood and leaned over, their lips meeting over the table that a few hours ago had been piled with human bones. They kissed slowly and warmly, tongues polishing each other.

When they finished, Tracy sat back and sighed. "Doesn't it seem to you like we're getting more than our share of physical abuse? Me breaking the same damn leg that was shot last month. It's like we belong to Wound of the Month Club or something."

"Beats dead."

"It sure helps to have a deep thinker like you around."

He laid the crossbow on the table, fit the guitar on his lap, strummed a few quiet chords.

"You think they're still out there?" Tracy asked.

"Who? Fallows?"

"No, the guys with the bad munchies. You think they're still hanging around?"

"Probably. It's only been a couple of hours since they dined on those two guys."

"I got this picture of a gang of them watching us right now, one of them with a pad and pencil taking orders. I'll take a thigh. Save the wishbone for me. Do humans have wishbones?"

"Do chickens have funny bones?"

"Christ, Eric. Give me a break. I'm talking about being turned into a boxed lunch and you're sitting there acting like early Bob Dylan."

"Relax. The fact that they didn't totally consume the bodies means that we probably scared them off. So, chances are they're not very heavily armed."

Tracy hefted her S amp;W.357 Combat Magnum. "First one to show me a sharp tooth is going to be swallowing lead."

"Swallowing lead?"

She shrugged. "I've been saving that phrase all my life."

Eric's fingers began plucking a soft melody on the guitar. He stopped, tuned it, plucked, tuned it again. When he played again, Tracy noticed his face growing pale, his mouth pulled into a tight grimace. He stared at the strings as he played, but not at the strings exactly, rather, at the dark hole in the middle of the sounding board. It was as if he saw something inside that hole, a portal to some time past. She sat and watched him, knowing he probably wasn't even aware that he was humming along.

She studied his face, the skin tanner now, more wrinkles around the eyes than his age would call for. They had been recent additions, the result of living outdoors. Facing the sun and rain daily. She knew what all this nature had done to her face, so she only looked in her compact mirror once in the morning when she was combing her hair. That was enough. The toughening of the skin into some human leather, the hands and feet thick with calluses, their bodies hard with taut muscles seemed to reflect an inner process too. A hardening of their emotions, callousing of their humanity. Yet somehow each acted as some kind of lotion for each other, soothing, moistening each other's heart. At least it had worked so far.