Mark Tufo - Whistlers

I just about turned, and was going to scope out the rest of the bus, when I decided I needed to check. I’d read more than one news story in my life where some sicko would bind himself up in plastic wrap and hide inside that blue goo with the hopes of getting some sort of thrill. On a side note, what has to go wrong with your life that Saran wrapping yourself and getting into a human shit and piss-filled chemical tank for hours so you can watch random people expel waste product is your idea of a good time? I mean really, how far off the rails have you gone? Is there any chance of coming back from that? If there was someone in that tank, I may have had to shoot them just out of principal, because I’m not ever going to shake their hand.

“This cannot really be what my life is reduced to. Can it?” I was nervous talking as I slowly moved closer.

I’m pretty sure my gun was shaking as I moved it to point down the hole. There were things that went bump in the night, and then there were monsters, and anything that had the power to hide inside a chem-potty was the latter. My finger, instead of merely resting on the trigger guard, was applying nearly all of the force necessary to give someone a high speed enema. Fitting I suppose, considering where I was. I moved as fast as I could, my weapon pointing straight down to where I was looking. For a moment, I did see the beady eyes of something looking back at me—a white, wide smile plastered on its face, and a thumbs-up just for good measure. My trigger finger tightened an imperceptible amount.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I laughed as I loosened my grip on my rifle. “What kind of sick fuck puts the logo of a smiling man on the bottom of a shit can?”

The potty had never been used, or it had been cleaned thoroughly. Either way was fine with me. It did give a clue that whatever had happened in this place had happened suddenly, because I had to believe that if this person had spent the time retrofitting this thing in here, that he fully intended on using it. Why go through all that work otherwise? He’d had to have fled before he got the chance to fill it. Once the bathroom was checked out, I gave the rest of the bus a looking over. He had moved all the seats on the right side from the traditional school bus configuration to placing them against the bus wall, thus making a very large bench or thin, long bed. I guess it just mattered how you were going to use it.

On the left, he had the aforementioned toilet, then a couple of rows of seats. Some were removed and an old, round kitchen table, that looked like it had been weathered in Minnesota, installed. There were a few more rows of seats and then right behind the driver’s seat, there were two military footlockers secured to the floor of the bus.

“That’s what I’m talking about! Fuck you, wormies!”

I had not yet realized the pale ghostly figures looking in were zombies. I quickly got down onto my knees so I would be closer to the serious cache of weapons I just knew had to be stored in there. I was even more excited by the padlock that was in place and locked. That just meant he hadn’t had the chance to take anything out. I don’t know if an orphan kid just adopted by super rich parents on Christmas morning could have been more excited than I was at that point. I looked around for something to bust the lock, which I found next to the driver’s seat. It was a club, but not the traditional club you might be thinking of. This was an anti-theft deterrent, popular back in the 1980s from where I’d come. It had a U-shape on each end; this was so that you could put one end around your steering wheel, adjust the bar by telescoping it out, and using the other U to go on the brake pedal. In theory, a car thief could still start your car, but could not steer it, rendering it useless for their despicable ends. Thieves had since figured out how ineffectual the thing was, steering wheels bent with surprising ease, letting the club be removed and the car still stolen. I should have realized that his outdated deterrent was a portent of worse to come. He either got this thing at a dollar store or a yard sale. Either way, he’d paid too much.

The second piece of the puzzle came into focus as the padlock took two semisolid hits before the haft literally fell away. I was either really strong or he’d gone the cheap route again. I wasn’t so sure this lock could have stopped a determined toddler. Even as I was opening the top of the locker box, I was reasoning that perhaps he had no money for a lock and anti-theft materials because he’d blown it all on Uzis and hand grenades.

“No, no, no,” I said, staring in disgust at the vast array of cheap weaponry that could be purchased at any mall in the same store you could get a Buddha statue or a soap stone dragon.

I picked up throwing stars, nun-chucks, and knives made from steel hardly thicker than tinfoil. There were swords that I was pretty sure would bust trying to chop a watermelon. It was packed with the crap, like he had somehow intercepted a shipment from this place’s version of China. He would have been better off hammering nails through a bat. The nun-chucks would serve a purpose, just not the ones they were designed for. I grabbed them and walked over to the bus door; the zombies seemed to go into a minor frenzy when they saw me coming their way.

“Do you ass-wipes really think I’m coming out?”

I went down one step and then, at the bottom stair, I wedged the useless batons between the step and the door. The chain that held the two sticks together looked like it was made from low grade plastic. The wooden part, though, seemed solid enough, at least for what I was asking it to do. The zombies had been pushing against the door. Hard enough that, at times, they would crack the seal, and a few unlucky bastards would get their fingers stuck when it snapped back into place. I was convinced that eventually they would get lucky and pop the handle and flood into the opening. The nun-chucks were just a little piece of insurance against that. I went back to the crap-tastic arsenal and picked up a throwing star. What the hell? I had time to kill. I tossed it with some force, flicking my wrist. The star went straight and true for the toilet wall. I was waiting for the satisfying ‘thunk’ of blade sinking into plastic. What I got was the clatter of a star point shattering and falling to the ground with the rest of the apparatus.

“Toilet…one, throwing star …zero. I really hope this idiot wasn’t trying to defend a family. Do I have a family?”

I felt this pang in my chest alluding to that fact, but I could not conjure them up in my mind. Instead, I was left with a wondering hole. I didn’t have too much time to work on the sorrow as I stared at the as yet unopened box. I was sort of debating if I should just let it be and kind of ‘hope’ that something good was inside of it instead of cracking that lock and discovering the lackluster truth. Who knows? Maybe there were Tasers in there, or maybe a big bottle of bell-pepper spray. Shit, possibly even a crossbow with a draw of hundred and twenty-five pounds. It could happen. It was not a sign of good things to come when the lock fell away while I was merely lining the shot up and bumped against it lightly. It was impossible to not get my hopes up as I flipped the lid on that box. Why I wasted the emotion was beyond me. There were boxes and boxes of Burst-Pielets that, except for their round shape, looked surprisingly like their rectangular cousins Pop-Tarts.

Of all the things I was regaining, the memory of Pop-Tarts was one of them. Not where I was, who I was, if I was with somebody, or why there were monsters straight out of a nightmare chasing me. Nope, this is what I got to remember. I didn’t even know if I liked the flat, frosted, pastry-looking thing.