Dead Clown Barbecue (19 page)

"Yes, sir."

"Well, stop that. How many nuns have you eaten?"

"None."

"Good. That way lies hellfire. But have you seen your teeth? They're works of art! What a waste to have such amazing choppers and not to sink them into any succulent flesh! What do you eat with them? Celery?"

"A lot of tree bark," Nathan admitted.

"Tree bark? Why, that's . . . well, tree bark isn't bad; if you soak it in water it's sort of like jerky . . . but that's still a tremendous example of not living up to your potential. Do you really mean to say that you haven't eaten so much as a squirrel?"

"Yes, sir," said Nathan, opening his mouth wide to show the troll that there was no squirrel fur between his teeth.

"That can't be allowed to continue," said the troll. "Here, eat . . . uh, a bird."

The troll looked around for a bird, but saw none. This enraged him, because when he
didn't
want birds around, the damn things fluttered all around his head.

"Or . . . that deer!"

"I think that's a pond."

"No, no, next to the pond."

"I think that's a log."

"No, no, standing on the log."

"I think that's a moose."

"That's not a moose, you fool, that's a . . . oh, it's another log. Doesn't look like a deer
or
a moose, actually. Here, eat this raccoon."

The troll spent the next two hours trying to catch the raccoon, while Nathan stood there, politely waiting. The troll grew angrier and angrier each time his massive hands failed to grasp the raccoon's neck, and soon he was spitting out words that Nathan had never heard before, but that he assumed were not synonymous with "joy" and "peace to all."

"Wretched taunting cur!" shouted the troll. "Forget the raccoon, then! Here, eat this panda!"

"I don't think pandas live in these woods," said Nathan.

"You're right, they don't. But I am being driven nearly mad with the knowledge that your teeth are not being put to proper use! It vexes me beyond all comprehension! It is like seeing a man with a six-foot tongue who licks nary a thing! Oh, my brain throbs just thinking about it. Can you hear it throbbing? Can you?"

"No, sir."

The troll clawed at his scalp, then brightened. "Here," he said, holding something out toward Nathan. "Eat this."

"But that's your arm."

"Then just bite it."

"That idea strikes me as —"

"Do it!"

And so Nathan bit down on the troll's arm. Cognitively, the troll had known that this would cause him discomfort, but it wasn't until Nathan's fangs pierced his skin that the full extent of the lack of wisdom of this idea occurred to him.

The troll let out a shriek that could be heard throughout the forest.

"Aaah!!! My arm! My tooth-marked arm! Release it! Release it!"

Nathan opened his mouth and the troll pulled away.

"I feel, all things considered, that it is best if we do not continue to interact," said the troll, summoning up as much dignity as he could, which was not much. "I wish you the best of luck in all of your future endeavors."

"Thank you," said Nathan.

And so the troll left, eventually finding peace and comfort under a bridge, and though a great many people saw him again, none of those people were Nathan.

Which brings us to the conclusion of this side adventure of Nathan "Fangboy" Pepper. As stated previously, it was not an adventure of great importance in his overall saga, but it did have a reference to eating a panda, and thus cannot be entirely discounted.

DEAD IN THE WATER

Because I'm a Tampa guy, I wasn't all that concerned about the zombie infestation of St. Pete. I mean, sure, I had rations, weapons, and a full tank of gas like everybody else, and I kept tabs on the situation whenever I went online, so it's not like I ignored it. But there's about ten miles of bridge between the two cities, and our side of the Howard Frankland Bridge was protected by soldiers with machine guns, so there was no way in hell those rotting corpses could make it over here.

Even now, when I'm forced to acknowledge the irony, that attitude seems reasonable. I don't care how many people are on the news going "We told you so! We told you so!" It was a
ten-mile bridge
over a freaking
bay
that was protected by
soldiers with machine guns.
Zombies move, like, a mile an hour. How'd they overwhelm us? It's crazy.

I heard about it because the neighbor kid — Kyle, who was an obnoxious little brat but really didn't deserve to have so many fingers bitten off two days later — ran up and down the street screaming that the zombies were through the barricade. I turned on the television and, yep, they were through. A couple of weeks ago I'd vowed "No zombies are gonna kick me out of my home!" but I quickly retracted that vow and raced out to my car.

The tires had been slashed. Dammit! Sure, I'd slashed a few tires in my life, but I'd never be so tactless as to do it during the zombie apocalypse!

I knew who'd sabotaged my escape. It was my jerk of a neighbor Greg, with whom I'd been engaged in an (admittedly petty) feud over . . . actually, I don't even want to tell you because it makes Greg and I both look bad. Let's just say that I understood why he did it, but that didn't make me any less terrified about my chances of survival.

A spare tire would've been nice. I'd had one, a few months ago. Should've replaced it.

Okay, this was bad, but it didn't mean that my destiny was to be devoured. My neighbor Alex across the street had just come out of his house, carrying a large blue duffel bag. His six-year-old daughter was right behind him. I hurried over there to greet them.

"Hey, Alex," I said. "How's it going?"

"You heard the news, right?"

"Yeah, yeah. Crazy stuff, huh? Thought we were safer than that. I hope the people in Clearwater don't have the same problem."

Alex didn't say anything. He opened the trunk of his car and crammed the duffel bag in there.

"You did make a wise car buying decision," I said, gently patting the roof of the vehicle. "Very roomy. Nobody can ever say that you don't know how to shop for cars."

"I'm not taking you with me," said Alex, shutting the trunk.

"Why not?"

"Because you yelled at my daughter for writing in chalk on the sidewalk."

"That's not true! I didn't
yell
at her. I just asked her not to squeak it so much. I was hung over."

"Yes, well, a drunkard is not the kind of example I want for my daughter as we rebuild society."

"So this is where it begins, huh?" I asked. "This is where we turn against each other in a time of crisis? This is where we lose our humanity?"

"Looks that way."

In theory, I could have wrestled him to the ground, bashed his head against the cement driveway, and stolen his car keys, but I wasn't quite ready to regress into savagery yet. Instead, I said "Fine," in a tone of voice that made it clear that I was more than a little disgusted by his behavior. Days from now, if I was dead, he'd remember the way I said "Fine," and feel a great sense of remorse. This would always haunt him, a subtle nagging at his conscience that he could never quite escape, until his dying day, which was hopefully at the hands of the zombies.

Okay, no, I didn't really want him to get eaten by zombies. The guy had a kid. The subtle nagging at his conscience would be sufficient.

I walked back to my own driveway. Alex hadn't even asked why I couldn't just use my own car. I wondered if he was the one who'd slashed my tires instead of Greg. Bastard.

Maybe I could call a cab. What was the worst thing they could say? "
Are you serious? You think you can just call a frickin' cab and get out of here at this time of widespread panic? And even if you could get a cab, do you have any idea what the fare would be with all the time you'll spend stuck in bumper-to-bumper dead-stop traffic? What kind of deranged idiot are you?
"

Actually, they probably just wouldn't answer.

I took my cell phone out of my pocket an instant before it rang. The display said that the call was from Millie Loans. My "friend with benefits."

I had only received those benefits once, mostly because I'd considered it a "friends with benefits" situation and she'd considered it an "eternal love" situation, and she'd reacted poorly when I corrected her afterward. I wondered if she was calling for one last fling before our doom.

"Millie?" I answered.

"Tony?" She was crying.

"Yeah."

"Have you heard?"

"Yeah, it's insane. You'd think that the city of Tampa could afford more bullets."

"Will you take me to St. Pete?"

"I can't," I said, thinking I'd misheard her or she'd misspoken. She obviously didn't want me to take her
to
St. Pete. She wanted me to take her someplace that emphatically was
not
St. Pete, such as Quebec. "Somebody slashed my tires. I'm trying to get out of Tampa myself."

"I have a car," she said. "I'm about five minutes away from your house. I just need you to come with me to St. Pete."

"Wait a minute . . . you want to go
into
the city? On purpose?"

"My brother is there. He just called. He's still alive."

"Seriously?" It was not out of the question that there were survivors over there, I guess, but it was still a pretty big shock. Like everybody else, I'd written off the St. Petersburg population several weeks ago.

"Yes. Nobody else will help. We have to go get him."

This didn't sound great to me. "We can't just drive over there," I said. "The bridge is swarmed."

"I know that. I have a jet ski."

"You want to jet ski over to St. Pete?"

"Yes."

"And he'll be waiting there on the other side?"

Silence.

"Millie . . . ?"

"He's kind of trapped. But not that far away from the beach. I have guns."

"I have guns, too! That's not the point."

"I'm about to turn the corner. See you in a second."

"I thought we had five minutes!"

She hung up. I snapped my phone closed and tucked it back into my pocket. This was going to suck. I could turn down a desperate woman in her time of need over the phone, but in person I'd be able to see the tears, and I was screwed.

Her green truck turned onto my street. As she pulled up in front of my house, I saw that she did indeed have a jet ski in the back.

"How many people did you call before you worked your way down to me?" I asked.

"Several. You said you have guns?"

"Yes."

"Good. Throw them in the truck." Her face was tear-stained, but there was a definite no-nonsense tone about her. This was a very different Millie from the one to whom I'd said "Uh, I didn't realize that we weren't still just friends. My bad."

I popped open the trunk of my car and took out my bag of guns. I only had two of them, a pair of pistols, but they were fully loaded and I had about four-dozen rounds of extra ammo. That was at least fifty dead zombies, unless I missed, which meant that it was more like three dead zombies.

"I think this is a bad idea," I said.

"I don't."

"I'm not doing this," I told her, using my most authoritative tone of voice.

Unfortunately, by the time I said it to her in that tone of voice, it was half an hour later (all of the traffic was intelligently moving in the opposite direction, so we made good time) and we were already in the water and sitting on the jet ski, with me holding tightly onto Millie with one hand and the bag of guns with the other.

Millie didn't answer. She started the engine, and we sped off through Tampa Bay toward St. Pete. The Howard Frankland Bridge was several hundred yards to our right, and we could see a couple of army (Navy? Air Force? Marines? Coast Guard? I didn't know the divisions very well) soldiers mowing down zombies, but it was nowhere near the military presence we'd had before today.

Nobody tried to stop us. I guess they had more important things to deal with, or figured "Screw it! If those morons want to get themselves munched by zombies, who are we to tell them to do otherwise?"

Whether we saved her brother or not, I assumed that the "benefits" part of our relationship would return. That was only fair. If not . . . well, I mean, I wouldn't force myself on her or anything uncool like that, but I'd definitely be annoyed.

After about a mile, she moved underneath the bridge. I asked her why, but she didn't hear me over the jet ski engine, and I didn't care enough about the answer to poke her to get her attention. I did have to admit that the jet ski was pretty fun. If you took the zombies out of the equation, it would've been a very enjoyable afternoon.

When we were about halfway across, there was the sound of another engine, much louder than the jet ski. I looked around for the source. Sounded like a plane. Or planes.

Ah, there they were. Three of them. Moving fast.

I guess the missiles they launched shouldn't have been a surprise to me, but they were.

My first thought, I'm ashamed to admit, was "Oh my God! They're trying to blow us out of the water!" How self-absorbed is that? Yeah, as if Millie and me on a jet ski were worth three sets of missiles. I mean, c'mon, it's not like we were secret agents or anything like that.

No, the missiles were aimed at the bridge, and all three of them hit their targets.

The bridge exploded above us. I screamed something (probably "Shiiiiit!!!") as Millie swerved the jet ski to the right, trying to avoid the immense shower of bridge chunks that rained down upon us, not to mention a strip of bridge that — I swear this is true — had to be at least half a mile long.

It smashed into the water like . . . well, like a giant piece of a freakin' bridge hitting the bay. It didn't crush us, which was nice, but the huge wave flipped over the jet ski. Millie and I plunged into the water.

There was another wave, and for a moment I lost track of the jet ski. Then another piece of bridge came down upon it, and that was the end of our mode of transportation.