Peter Stenson - Fiend

He looks over, a Newport dangling from his swollen lips. He says, How the fuck do they know?

Who?

Hollywood and shit.

What do—

Like there’s rules to the fucking apocalypse? Bro, this shit here, whatever is going on, you can bet your ass it’s never happened before. Not in some movie. Not in a book. It’s some dinosaur shit, you know?

I tell him I have no idea what he’s talking about.

Extinction, man. The end. Finished. Us. Humans. Thanks for playing. Better luck next—

Yeah, got it, I say.

Typewriter starts to chuckle—like real live chuckles, like he’s playing a part in a B movie. I think about those scratches on his back, if something could be transmitted that way. I think about him turning, his face even paler, him ready to tear my throat like the little girl did the rottweiler. I don’t write it down, but I put it at the top of the list in my head: Typewriter might become one of them .

He finally quits with the staged laugh. He says, Just kind of weird that we’re the motherfuckers chosen to last.

We’re quiet after that and I’m chewing on his word chosen . I’ve already peaked and am coming down and we’re out of shit and I can’t stand the silence, so I turn on the radio. Static. Typewriter pushes in a CD. It’s techno. I hate the shit, like it’s so stereotypical that baseheads listen to trance, but at least it’s a distraction. I call KK. My parents. Nothing. I picture them all dead. I know my parents would be lying in bed together, both of them in Christmas Carol flannel nightgowns. I wonder if Jared is next to KK.

Typewriter pulls off Interstate 35E. Cabela’s, a giant Lego-shaped hunting and fishing store, sits in the middle of a sea of asphalt. I can’t see any cars in the parking lot. Typewriter turns down the music. The energy in the car shifts, and neither of us says anything. This world shouldn’t fucking exist.

We park right in front of the entrance. Through the glass windows we see the store is pitch black. Typewriter takes the keys out of the ignition but I stop him. I say, Maybe we should leave them in the car.

Why?

Then he understands. He says, I’m not trying to get left in—

Neither am I.

We get out. We’re nothing but swiveling heads, spooked by every gust of wind. I try the door. Locked. I give the plate glass a kick. It hurts like shit. Typewriter slams into it with his shoulder. He yells, Fuck.

Shut up, I say.

We look around for what could have heard us. Somewhere an owl cries and I think this is about the worst omen the world could possibly give us. Typewriter kicks the door again. The glass won’t budge. This makes sense, a store housing guns having fortified security. I keep kicking. I feel useless, my efforts, my inability to break into a fucking store.

And it’s with this refrain of failure that my idea to smash the car through the door is born. I tell Typewriter.

Not smart, he says.

We need the guns, I say.

And the car.

How else are we going to break—

Not with the one car we have.

I tell him I’m not talking about the whole car. Just enough to crack the glass. That it will be a little damage to the front bumper. That’s it, I say, I promise.

He shakes his head.

I get into the car and back it up, maybe fifty feet from the entrance. Fifteen miles per hour is all I need. I give it some gas. I’m closing in on the entrance and it’s a brilliant idea and I hit the curb and bounce and then I’m at the door and there’s a solid thud. My head hits the wheel. My ears ring. I look up. The glass is smashed, the door cracked. Perfect.

I get out and the ringing’s even louder and Typewriter’s yelling something I can’t make out and I realize the ringing isn’t inside of my ears, it’s a siren. I’ve set off an alarm system. Red lights flash inside the store.

Type’s practically shouting into my mouth. He points to my head. I wipe my forehead and feel it’s wet with blood but I tell him I’m fine. I point to the doors and we climb over the hood and into the store. I don’t know what the fuck alerts the walking dead to their victims—light or sound or smell—but I know that flashing strobes and piercing alarms can’t be helping us. The cut on my forehead fills back up. I wonder if it’s maybe the smell of blood that attracts these motherfuckers.

In and out, I shout.

Typewriter nods.

The scene alternates between sheer darkness and flashes of emergency red—a rack of raincoats, sleeping bags, camping stoves—pulsing every second, maybe quicker, and I’m just waiting to see decapitated Svetlana naked and ready to tear into my jugular.

We’re making our way to the back-left corner and I barely notice that my hand is holding on to Typewriter’s T-shirt and we’re inching forward during our milliseconds of red, still and flexed during our breaths of blackness.

The strobes remind me of my short time being a club kid, all about watered-down Minnesota raves, abandoned warehouses along the Mississippi, grams of ecstasy, techno, filthy red couches, and reach-arounds from random girls/maybe guys—basically my nineteenth year on this earth. I’m remembering one night in particular, Halloween, me dressed as a slut in fishnets with a run up my inner thigh, having smoked more scante than I’d ever done before. I’d stumbled through that warehouse, knowing I was going to die. I could feel it at the base of my throat, death. I knew that my only chance at redemption was fresh air. The strobe lights and my heart pounding and my dick practically hanging out of my miniskirt costume and everyone I saw some gross perversion of people who had once said they loved me.

The sirens are so fucking loud.

Both then and now.

I’m swallowing spittle thicker than come.

That night, inch by inch, I’d made my way to a steel door, the flashing Exit sign like pure love. I’d pushed with all of my might. It wouldn’t budge. I crumpled there in my miniskirt and pumps. My left stuffed tit had fallen out. I cried because this was the end and I was dressed like a slut and I felt better than I’d ever felt before.

Typewriter says, Right there, the guns.

I can barely make out the glass cases of guns. I’m hoping for machine guns and grenades like Call of Duty and I just want the siren to stop and the lights to pick a side, red or black, and I’m still holding Typewriter’s fat arm like a life preserver. He hands me a canoe paddle. I ask if he sees something. He doesn’t respond. I’m about to cry because this isn’t my life and there has got to be something so bad coming our way and I tell myself in and out, then back to the car, back to the deserted highway, but then where?

Typewriter smashes the case full of handguns. He shouts for me to do the same with the shotguns. I run behind the counter. The first display holds shotguns, that much I know, mostly because the barrels are fatter than the butt plug from Svetlana’s arsenal. I swing the oar into the glass and it shatters, bits raining down on my hair. I reach in and grab the first shotgun, some Terminator 2 short-barrel number. It’s heavy like a motherfucker, but I love it, the weight. It’s the first gun I’ve ever held. I scan the store, giving it a pump. I’m almost hoping for some walking dead piece of shit to charge me.

Something lands at my feet and I scream like hell, jumping toward the wall. It’s a giant green duffle bag. Typewriter already has one full of the pistols. He walks to the other case, presumably full of rifles.

I take the shotguns out one by one. I wonder why we could possibly need this many guns. I’ve loaded ten into the bag, with six or seven still to go. A bag of pistols. Another bag of rifles. Like what are we expecting? Then I think about us being the only ones left. Just us—Typewriter and his B cups, me and my forehead tic—driving around, breaking into stores, killing fictional characters. How long can this really go on? A week? A month? A year? And then I’m thinking about that Halloween again. About wondering how long the shit I’d smoked would last. About how long it would be until the rave was over and I could get out of my whore getup, how long until everything got back to normal. How fucking badly I’d wanted things to go back to normal. It’s funny, you go through your whole life thinking everything sucks, that if only you had this, said that, then things would be better. But when shit happens, like real shit, say smoking enough scante to kill a village or choosing drugs over KK or the world dying and reanimating, it’s only then that you pray for the rewind, when you realize your life had been just fucking peachy before.