After
a few minutes, she pulled back and looked up at me with those huge green eyes,
“You can still come with us,” she said so quietly that no one else could hear
her, “Pick up a radio. If you change your mind call us every night until you
can catch up,” then turned away and picked up her pack.
“Well,”
James said abruptly, “Good bye then!” turned east and began walking towards
Phoenix.
I
waved at the Fallons then turned to follow. I’d turn around every few minutes
and see Kailee wave at me. I’d wave back then turn around a few minutes later
until finally I turned back and they were gone.
*
*
*
We
might have picked up a radio on our way to Phoenix but there was nothing
between that rest stop and the outer suburbs of the city. Nothing but road,
endless stretched of desert, and the heat.
By
noon it had reached up over a hundred easily. I had stripped down to a tee
shirt and shorts but James had kept most of his gear on.
“Holy
fuck! It’s so hot!” James would cry out in a crazy ‘I love you, you love me’
singsong voice, “It’s so
hot
! It’s
so
hot!
It’s
so hot!”
He
kept this up for almost two hours before finally giving it a rest. Even when
the sun went down, the heat continued to bake us. We found an abandoned camper
to hole up in for the night but the heat inside was stifling. I finally had to
crawl up on the roof to get any sleep.
The
next day we were up before the dawn trying to get as much distance behind us
before the sun came up and started baking the entire world again. But all too
soon, it was up and turned our world into a furnace. We sweated, and cooked,
and burned all day as we walked east across a country devoid of everything
except scrub desert and the endless stretch of asphalt we walked on.
The
next day, we reached Phoenix
We
could smell the city long before we could see it. The smell of smoke, fire, and
decay blew over the hot air and out into the desert let us know that there was
unlikely to be anything left of human civilization there.
When
I could finally see the city, I knew we weren’t going to make it straight
through. Like Los Angeles, Phoenix was a vast burning Wreck that stretched to
the horizon. It would take us at least two days to get through it.
We
hit the edge of the suburbs in a place called Buckeye and spotted a local
Walmart. I hadn’t seen any dead for the last few days so it was a shock to see
a few dozen wandering around the nearly empty streets.
“Time
to get your head back in the game, Tonto,” James said as he pulled his armor
out of his pack and strapped it on.
I
did the same and followed James down the onramp and onto the side streets. We
made it to Walmart without incident and went about clearing a few dead that
were inside. I grabbed as much water as I could carry, filled my water pack,
and then headed back to the sporting goods section.
There,
I loaded up on ammunition and picked up a shotgun while I was at it. While I
read the instruction manual of the shotgun I spotted a large selection of hand
held radios. Big ones. Expensive one. There was even a satellite radio. I
wondered if the satellite radio worked.
I
looked over my shoulder in the half light
and could hear James smashing his way through something at the other end
of the store. I pulled a set of very powerful hand held radios
out of their box, put in the batteries, and
switched one of them on.
I
listed to the pop and crackle of static, then pressed the send button, “Kailee?
Are you there?” I whispered.
I
released the send button and listed to the hiss of the static. Then, from far
away, I heard a faint, “Gallup….” followed by more static, then a male voice
that said, “…headed east…dead on the move…” and nothing more. I listened for a
few more minutes then switched off the radio and stuffed it into my pack along
with as many extra replacement batteries I thought I could carry for the unit.
I noticed it had gotten awfully quiet and headed towards the front door.
Outside
James was sitting on top of a Sesame Street children’s fire truck ride. He sat
there quietly next to Burt and Ernie looking at me with those dead eyes. I saw
the tip of a .38 pistol poking up over the edge of the fire truck’s dashboard
pointing directly at my head, “Ass Cracker?” he asked. I thought the next sound
I’d hear would be the report of that pistol. Instead he said, “Do you think
Burt and Ernie are gay?”
I
stood there with my mouth open but before I could even think of an answer James
whopped as loud as he could scaring me half to death, “Of course they are you
pin prick! What else could they be, two dicks living together? Sesame Street’s
controlled by faggots and queers! Trying to indoctrinate the children! It
sickens me,” he said and put a bullet from his pistol in Burt’s head, then
followed with a coup de grace for Ernie. The sound was so loud and so close I
jumped back crashing into the doors of the Walmart and yelled out, “Fuck,
James!” Then I noticed that a few of the nearby dead had taken an interest in
us.
James
was laughing his head off pointing at me wheezing out, “You jumped like a
fucking Mexican…uh…what do you call it? Fucking bean? Running bean? Wetback
Beans! No, um…jumping bean! That’s it! A goddamn Mexican jumping bean! Good
gawd
that was funny!”
I
got my heart beat and breath under control then replied, “I think we have more
important things to think about than Burt and Ernie’s sexual orientation now
James.”
James
grimaced and repeated what I had said in what he thought was a little girls
voice, “…Burt and Ernie’s sexual orientation…blah, blah, blah. Then let’s get
moving, you fucking ball polisher. Suck all the fun out of everything, will
you?”
We
moved back out into the pounding heat and towards the freeway until we hit the
city limits of Phoenix and the belt route that would take us around the
downtown area. We were at the easternmost edge of the city when James climbed
up on top of a tanker truck and pulled out a map.
“North
or south, dickless?” he asked.
I
thought about it for a minute looking at my own map then said, “Keep south on
I-10. It takes us deeper into the dessert and away from the northern suburbs.
Either way, we’re not going to make it through Phoenix in a day so we’re going
to be spending the night here.”
“Well
holy fuck, Magellan! Then let’s get going!”
We
got going but between the ungodly heat, the burning wind coming out of the
east, and the stench and smell of the Wreck, it was slow going. So slow in fact
that halfway around Phoenix, just a few miles from the city center we ran out
of water.
James
stood on the overpass pissing down on one of the dead who was nothing more than
a crawling torso singing his own version of “Raindrops keep falling on my
Head,” “...but that don’t mean my eyes will soon be turning
red
! No! ‘Cause I’m…
dead!
...and…I’m crawling through the
piss, yes!
But I’m not gonna start crying about the urine! Because
I’m
freeeee
, nothing worrying
meeee
!” He concluded shaking off the last
few drops and zipping up, “That, asshole, was a command performance in ‘P’
minor. Get it?
Pee
minor.” He said as
he jumped off the sidewall.
“I
get it James. Very subtle.”
“Yeah
well fuck you too. It’s hard being this goddam funny all the time you fucking
sourpuss,” he said as he sat down and took a long drag from his water pack,
“And guess what Moses? I’m out of water,” he said looking at the end of his
drinking tube as thought it had just betrayed him.
I
still had half a pack left. That would get us to their next water stop. I was
thinking the next gas station but James had other ideas. He sat down on the
edge of the overpass with his legs dangling above the dead, swinging his feet
like a little kid. He had a faraway look that I was beginning to associate with
trouble.
“I
think it’s time to visit downtown and get some water.”
Deep
in my head, I knew he wanted to wade into the dead not to get more water but to
feed his inner beast by hacking, chopping, and blasting apart the things that
filled the streets.
“Lot
of dead down there, James,” I said. In fact, I hadn’t seen so many dead since
Los Angeles. The streets were crammed full of them. We’d either have to head
back to where there were fewer dead or keep going and hope they thinned out.
James sat there on the edge of the freeway looking at all those dead people. I
think I might have convinced him to find another place to fill up our water
supply but then he spotted it. And by “it” I mean the Diamondback’s Stadium.
“Oh
my sweet lord,” James whispered.
“What?
What is it?” I said looking around frantically trying to spot whatever threat
James had seen.
“Can
it be? Can it possibly be?” James said standing up and pointing to the north and
west of us, “My
gawd
, it is.”
“Is
what?!” I asked. I had dropped my pack and gotten out my rifle and was looking
frantically all around for a wave of sprinters heading our direction when James
finally identified the object of his attention.
“The
Diamondback’s Stadium,” he whispered.
“What?”
I said looking over at James.
“Chase
Field, home of the ungodly, homosexual, pole queen, bare-backing, ballsack
cleaning
Diamondbacks
. The very bane
of my existence on this fucking planet.”
It
took me a few seconds to wrap my head around that comment. In a world full of
walking dead, where the chance of experiencing an agonizing death was a near
sure thing, the worst thing in James’s life was the home field of a Major
League Baseball team. One that did not currently exit in this world in any way,
shape, or form.
I was about to say as much when I saw that
wild look creep into James eyes and knew we would be making a detour there.
James had a purpose. James had a mission. James had a vison and nothing, least
of all his teenage sidekick, was going to keep him from pursuing it.
“Knob
jobber?” he said by way of addressing me, “We will go to Chase
Fucking
Field. I will walk onto the
pitcher’s mound, and I
will
place the
world’s largest crap right on that white thingy those faggots put their fucking
foot on. Yes, sir!” he said turning towards me, “And I’ve got a goddam colossal
log-jammer that I have been cooking up for
days
just waiting to go!” he said.
“It will be there for all time,” he whispered
in something like religious awe, “For all time my turd will sit on the
pitcher’s mound forever mocking the ass pirate, pillow biting, anus drilling
Diamondbacks
. Yes, sir,”
he finished then starting looking for an off
ramp that did not lead to a vast horde of dead.
That
almost proved to be a challenge that even James couldn’t overcome. The dead
were everywhere and while we walked and walked and walked trying to find a
break in the rotting masses, James was getting more and more aggravated yelling
and cursing at the dead as they stumbled around below us, “Fuck you!” he’d yell
at them as though they had intentionally gone and died and were reanimated just
to keep him from his lifelong dream, “Fuck
you!
Fuck
you!
And fuck
you
, too!” he
yelled as he chucked a piece of concrete at the dead mingling below. “Eat
shit!” he’d scream as we’d approach another off ramp crammed full of dead,
“Suck cock and die!” and, “Ahhh, fuck it all!”
After
two hours of this, our water situation, which we could have resolved by hitting
any of the gas stations we had passed, was now getting critical. But going into
a gas station would have meant heading away from Chase Field. We would have
been able to get water but the dead would have seen us and started a horde effectively
ending James’ dream of dropping a turd on the Diamondback’s pitcher’s mound.
Finally,
with water running low, the dead beginning to get an idea that lunch was in the
area somewhere, and the chance of us bumping into a sprinter increasing, we
found an off ramp marked “Chase Field, Exit 7
th
Street” that was
nearly devoid of the dead.
“Holy
fuck! You see, dipshit?” James said doing a little jig at the top of the off
ramp, “The Pope himself must want me to desecrate Chase Field. And I will.”
I
didn’t see the point of telling James that the Pope was probably dead, or if he
was still alive, didn’t give a damn about Chase Field. So down we went into the
Phoenix Wreck.
It
was worse that I can tell you. It was worse that you can imagine. We should
have died so many times that day but didn’t that, as we finally ran from the
now burning hulk of Chase Field, I began to think maybe the Pope himself did
want James to desecrate Chase Field. But I am getting ahead of myself.
I
followed James off of the freeway and into the streets of Phoenix looking to
the left and right, my head on a constant swivel for the hordes of dead that
were a mere two blocks over on each side of us.
“Moses
parted the Red Sea,” James said by way of explanation, “We are parting the Sea
of Dead,” and giggled as we stopped in a gas station and filled out packs with
water and grabbed all the candy that had been overlooked by past scavengers.
After
drinking our fill, we geared up and moved towards the stadium. I had my rifle
out with its silencer screwed firmly on and was terrified to see James had out
his shotgun, “James!” I said and when he looked at me pointed to my silencer.