Floodwater Zombies (14 page)

Kourtney lowered her head, ignoring them and peering at Doc from the top of her eyeballs. “You need to quit.”

Doc waved a hand through the air. “My momma didn’t raise
no
quitters!”

Rob and Mick laughed louder and clanged their bottles together before drinking.

“He’s on a roll tonight, Kourt!” Mick laughed. Brown curls poking out from his frayed Harley Davidson ball cap bounced with each rolling chuckle. “You’re gonna have to do better than that.”

“Here, here!” Rob smiled, lifting his bottle into the air and then taking another long swill. He swallowed with a sigh. “Besides,” he frowned, adding more wrinkles to the ones courtesy of too many Marlboro Reds and summertime rides on his Harley without sun screen. “Isn’t it bad enough we have to go outside to smoke in Doc’s own bar?”

She kept her eyes fixed on her father.
 
“Those things are going to be the death of you yet.”

“That or his shitty
drivin
,” Mick snickered.

Rob’s face suddenly turned serious. “Did you know that texting and driving kills more people nowadays than smoking does?”

Doc lifted his bushy eyebrows and pointed a crooked finger at Rob. “See? The man knows, Kourt.”

Kourtney tucked the towel into her belt and rested her hands on slender hips. “That is not true.”

Rob nodded confidently. “Saw it on Yahoo.”

She folded her arms, covering the Doc’s Bar and Grill logo on her tank top. “You saw it on Yahoo?”

Rob took a long drink and swallowed. “That’s right, but I don’t go on there anymore though, too many racists.”

Mick choked on his beer and began coughing.
“Racists?”

“Oh yeah, they pepper in racists comments after almost every story on Yahoo. And it doesn’t matter what the story is either,” Rob said, tightening his gray ponytail. “It could be a story about a great white shark attacking a surf contest and they’ll get on there and blame it on the blacks.”

Mick arched a skeptical eyebrow at him. “They will?”

Rob nodded feverishly. “They tear people apart left and right on there. Bunch a
snarkologists
.” He shook his head and rapped tight knuckles on the bar. “That’s bad energy, my friends.”

Mick’s eyebrow remained stuck in the middle of his forehead.
“
Snark
-who
?”

Doc nodded, scratching a thick white sideburn. “The world is angry right now, angrier than I’ve seen it in all my years.” He leaned on the bar and stared hard into Mick’s and Rob’s eyes. “And I was around during the Nixon administration, but recession or not, if we don’t start
lookin
out for one another, we’re never gonna make it.
Too many monsters out there.”

Rob and Mick nodded in silent affirmation and took a long pull from their bottles.

Kourtney pressed a button on a gun behind the bar, ejecting a stream of fizzy Coke into a red plastic cup. She plopped a straw into it and turned around. “All I know is there’s no way texting and driving kills more people than smoking does.”

“I can’t wait to start smoking!”

Rob and Mick froze mid-drink and slowly rotated their heads to the seven-year-old seated around the corner of the bar.

“Alex!” Kourtney gasped, clapping a hand over her chest. “You are not smoking ever!”

Alex stopped drawing and looked up.
“How’s come, mom?”

Her icy glare landed hard on Doc. “Because smoking is for losers!”

Alex shifted on the bar stool to adjust the leather holster around his waist. “I just hope I don’t die from second-hand smoke,” he said heavily, returning to his artwork.

Doc rolled his eyes and swept a hand through his slicked back salt-and-pepper hair. “Here we go,” he mumbled.

“Oh honey, you’re not going to die,” she said softly, crossing over to him and flashing Doc a dirty look along the way. “I’ll deal with you later,” she whispered.

“Can’t wait,” he said dully, pushing through a wooden door with a porthole window behind the bar.

“Here
ya
go, bud,” Kourtney said, setting the Coke in front of him and slipping a folded up one dollar bill to him beneath the bar. “Nicely done, squirt,” she whispered, kissing him on the head. Alex took the money without looking and casually deposited it into his jeans. Kourtney squinted at the drawing on the dark wooden bar. “What is that?”

“A hearse.”

Kourtney’s eyebrows dipped.
“A hearse?”

Alex nodded, inflating the tires with a black
Crayola
marker.

“Why are you drawing a hearse?”

He shrugged. “Saw it on TV.
Reminded me of dad,” he said bleakly.

She sighed and tucked a loose strand of brown hair behind an ear.

“I wish he was still alive,” Alex said, the marker going back and forth like a polygraph needle when someone is lying.

Kourtney forced a tight smile. “I know you do, honey. So do
I
.”

He stopped coloring to take a drink from the frosty Coke, his cheeks sucking inward as the clear straw turned dark brown. Just after he swallowed a large burp rattled his lips. “Can I be Michael Myers for Halloween this year?”

She frowned. “Michael Myers? How do you even know who that is?”

“I saw it on TV,” he grinned. “But I
wanna
be Michael Myers when he was little, in a clown costume with a bloody knife.”

She laughed and tousled his hair. “One thing’s for sure, kiddo, you’ve sure got your daddy’s blood
runnin
through
ya
,” she said, wiping down some greasy menus.

Rob and Mick watched the boy begin coloring again, their mouths agape.

“Never turn your back on that kid,” Mick leaned in and whispered.

Rob snorted, watching Alex switch out the black marker for a red one. “I just hope they don’t let him have scissors in school.”

Mick snorted. “If your daddy was killed in a hunting accident you’d turn morbid, too.”

Kourtney looked their way. “What was that?”

Both men raised their eyebrows and shook their heads, quickly turning to the nineteen inch standard-definition TV behind the bar, where a Twins game was all knotted up in late innings. The TV was nearly as dusty as the walleye mounted above it.

Two heavy-set women waddled up and set four empty glasses on the bar with a startling clatter.

“Four more, ladies?”
Kourtney asked, depositing the glasses into the sink.

“Please, sweetie,” the one with blonde hair and brown roots said.
“Can barely keep up with these girls tonight!”
She turned her gaze upon Mick and Rob and examined them from top to bottom, like a cocky detective.
“These jokers
behavin
themselves?”

“Hardly,” Kourtney said, scooping ice into four clean rocks glasses.

The red headed friend laughed sharply. “If their eyes were laser beams, the backside of your britches would have more holes than a golf course.”

Kourtney laughed and grabbed a half empty bottle of Jack Daniels.

“Sound jealous, Michelle,” Rob grunted, staring at her in the mirror behind the bar.

Michelle laughed, making her red curls shake. “You’re damn right I am!” She glanced at Alex and leaned into Mick’s ear. “I wish you’d ride me half as much as you ride your damn bike.”

Mick chuckled. “
Ain’t
enough Viagra in the world to make that
happen!
”

“Oh, you two wouldn’t know what to do with this much woman,” the blond said, running a hand along her curvy figure.

Rob grunted. “Have to put some of it in a truck because all of
that
ain’t
fittin
on the back of my bike,” he snickered, pushing his empty bottle to the edge of the bar.

“Don’t take any of his crap, Marge,” Kourtney said, sliding four Jack and Cokes across the shiny bar-top.

“Well, not all of us can have gorgeous bodies,” Marge replied, winking at Kourtney and dropping a twenty on the bar. Kourtney blushed and took the money. Mick and Rob waited for her to turn to the cash register before letting their eyes bore holes into the seat of her tight fitting jeans.

Michelle leaned in between them. “You wouldn’t know what to do with that either,” she said softly.

The bell hanging from the front door jingled as it burst open with a bang. Their heads snapped over to see Woody, Rachel and Rory standing next to a wooden coat rack carved into a weathered fisherman, donning a yellow slicker and matching hat. Sweat and blood dripped from their arms and chins as the ragged looking trio caught their breath. Woody’s chest, shirtless and covered in red scratches, rose and fell like someone who had just finished a marathon. His mouth opened to speak but nothing came out.

Rory’s eyes scoured the stale smelling room, darting from one bewildered face to the next. When he was certain the bar’s patrons weren’t the living dead, he helped Rachel to a stool at the end of the bar. Blood oozed from a nasty gash over a knee she favored with each painstaking step.

Kourtney slammed the register shut and set Marge’s change on the bar without looking. “What happened?”

“Call 911,” Rory said, carefully setting Rachel onto a round bar stool with cracked vinyl. She plopped down with a final groan, dropped her face into her hands and began crying.

Kourtney’s forehead creased as she came down to the end of the bar. “What happened?”

“Three people are dead out at the lake. Just call the police.”

Kourtney hesitated with her mouth hanging open, staring at Rory like he was nuts.

“There’s no time to explain!” he shouted, dropping onto the stool next to Rachel.

Kourtney jumped and went to a beige phone on the wall behind the bar.

Woody took the stool on the other side of Rory, feeling the weight of the stares upon them.

“What happened, Wood?” Mick asked, his mouth hanging open just as wide as everyone else’s.

The two women sitting by the front window exchanged glances and craned their necks to hear over Bon
Jovi’s
Raise Your Hands
.