Floyd & Mikki (Book 2): Zombie Slayers (Dawn of the Living) (16 page)

The two stayed locked in the cabin for two hours, waiting for the party outside to calm down. They didn’t bother trying to assign cabins to anyone. First, they didn’t want to encourage anyone to stay, and second, they were pretty confident that Idiot Dave had already told them to take any cabin they wanted other than cabin one.

Unfortunately, the noise from the party didn’t die down. If anything, the noise had gotten louder. Someone brought out a portable CD player and a stack of CDs and cranked it up. Good thing there weren’t any zombie critters left in the woods, or the noise would have surely attracted them.

“Damn! What the hell are they doin’ out there?” Mikki complained, heading to the window. The windows all had horizontal blinds and Mikki peeked through one of the slats. “Floyd, are you a big drinkin’ man?”

“Drinkin’ man? You know I’m not. How many stores we been in and I never grabbed any alcohol?”

“Well, our new neighbors are, that’s fer sure. You gotta see this.”

Mikki moved to let Floyd get a look through the blinds. “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.

The two didn’t know whether to laugh, be offended, go out and stop it, or join in. Skinny Slim seemed to be the local bartender, with various bottles of hard liquor set out on a picnic table. He had a bunch of plastic cups for everyone, who were all coming up to him repeatedly for refills. Occasionally, he reached into his bag and grabbed something else to add to a drink.

A few of them had already had way too much liquor. Baby Doll was lip locked in overly wet tongue kisses with Runner, who was sitting on her lap (she would have crushed him if it were the other way around). Belle was in a similar situation, sitting on Gabe’s lap. Dave had apparently passed out. He was lying on his back in the dirt, while Babette was laughing like a hyena at everything around her. Chester was throwing up in a corner by one of the cabins. Apparently there were no underage drinking laws for this bunch. They clearly weren’t from Idaho.

“So whadda we do, Floyd?”

“Do? Nothing! I’m not going out there. No point talking with a bunch of drunks. Let them drink themselves into a stupor. Once the liquor’s all gone, maybe they’ll be more reasonable in the morning.”

“Well, you got a point there.”

With all the racket going outside, neither Floyd nor Mikki was in the mood for making love, so they looked through the board games and decided to play Risk to pass the time. Mikki had the upper hand for the first hour, but several bad rolls on her part let Floyd take the lead. He kept skipping turns to load up his soldiers until he couldn’t be stopped, then he took over Mikki’s countries one by one. Mikki had a brief rally, but after three hours, she finally conceded. The party was still going on outside.

If anything, the noise got louder and angrier. They peeked out the blinds again to see a fight had broken out between Jackass and Runner. Both were drunk off their asses, and they missed more punches than they landed. Jackass got off a good one, though, that sent a tooth flying out of Runner’s mouth. Too bad. Runner had the best teeth of all of them.

Gabe and Skinny Slim tried to break up the fight by pulling the men off of each other, but they only got sucked into the fracas. Something someone said got the women into it, with Baby Doll and Belle slapping the shit out of each other. Soon, it was a huge brawl, with half the people beating on each other and a couple trying to break it up. Idiot Dave stayed passed out on the ground through it all, his wife and kid having returned to the cabin long before, without him.

The pair turned away from the window, disgusted. Mikki wanted to kill every damn one of them, but Floyd insisted she couldn’t go around killing people just for being people. There weren’t enough living people to go around nowadays as it was. Best to just live and let live.

“Yeah,” Mikki countered, “but they ain’t lettin’
us
live! And this is our place!”

“So what do you want to do? Kill every one of them? Bury all the bodies and pretend this never happened? These ain’t zombies, Mikki. These are living, breathing, human beings. You really want to commit murder? I know you killed people before the brain-eaters showed up, but from what you said, that was always in self-defense.”

“It
was
in self-defense, but a person’s got a right to defend his property, too, Floyd, and this is our property!”

“Why? Because we showed up and didn’t leave? How is that any different from what they’re doing? Is it really worth killing for? And what happens the next time? And the next time? The word is out about this place now. How many graves will we have to dig? Where does it end?”

“So we just give up?”

“No. In the morning, we have a talk with everyone. The liquor will be all gone, they’ll all have nasty hangovers, and we can lay down the law.”

“Oh, like you did with Dave? That worked out real well!”

“I was trying to be nice to Dave. Not anymore. I want our campground back as much as you do, Mikki.”

There was nothing they could do at the moment, and they were both too aggravated to sleep, so Mikki opened a deck of cards and they played Go Fish again. They switched to War for a while, too, but the ruckus outside never abated. Once the fight was over, everyone was happy again, laughing and hollering at the top of their lungs until well past midnight. It was nearly 4 AM by the time everyone had staggered into one of the cabins, or passed out and had to be dragged inside.

It was after 10 AM when Floyd and Mikki finally awoke, the memories of the long night still fresh in their minds. Neither one had slept well. When they finally opened the cabin door, the entire place was as quiet as a tomb—and as filthy as a city dump. All sorts of trash, plastic cups, and empty bottles were everywhere, punctuated by the occasional puddle of dried vomit. Some kind of pot boiler had been set up in the fire pit. At least Daisy didn’t seem to have left any more of his calling cards during the party.

“I ain’t cleanin’ this up,” Mikki said from the doorway.

“Damn straight,” Floyd agreed. “I’m goin’ fishin’.”

“I’ll get us some corn and eggs and a couple o’ those oatmeal packages for breakfast. We can eat in our cabin.”

“Sounds good. Try to avoid the locals if you can ‘til I get back.”

“No shit, Sherlock.”

Floyd tromped off through the brush, following the little dirt path to the lake. It was about a 10-minute walk, but he made it 15. He was in no hurry. He frankly didn’t know what to do. He mulled over every possible option in his head on how to deal with the situation, and none of them were any good. Things got even worse when he came to the end of the path and discovered the boat was gone.

Where the hell is the boat? Where the hell is the DAMN BOAT?
Floyd shielded his eyes against the sun. Sure enough, the boat was out in the middle of the lake. It looked like two men were in the boat, poles out in the water.

Floyd waved at them. They waved back. He waved even bigger. They waved back. He tried to signal for them to come back in. They waved back. Floyd gave up.

“FLOOOOOOYD!!!”

“Now what?” Floyd asked himself, as Mikki came running up to him, screaming his name. She was clearly upset and all out of breath. She must have been running pretty hard. He had never seen her this out of breath, even when fighting a horde of brain-eaters.

“The corn is gone!” she blurted out.

“What?” he asked, incredulously.

“The corn is gone!”

“What do you man, ‘the corn is gone’?”

“What the hell do you think it means, you big damn doofus dumbass! The…corn…is…
gone!
Every damn ear has been picked off the stalks! Somebody must have picked every last one of ‘em while we was sleeping or somethin’!”

“That doesn’t make any sense. We barely used up half the field. That corn should have lasted us the rest of the season. They couldn’t possibly have eaten that much.”

“Since when does anything about this bunch make sense. All I know is, all the corn is gone. Hey, wasn’t you supposed to be out fishin’?”

Floyd just pointed out to the lake. Mikki’s eyes followed his finger as she squinted against the midmorning sun. Finally, she made out the form of the boat with two men sitting in it.

“Are you shittin’ me?” she finally said.

“Well, we wanted them to take care of themselves. We can’t tell them to get their own fish and then complain when they do. Same with the corn.”

“I guess not, but these morons ain’t gonna last a month if they use up everything we got. Corn takes a long time to grow, and I didn’t see none of them plantin’ anything new!”

“Is that breakfast,” Floyd asked, changing the subject.

“What?”

“That.”

Mikki looked down and realized she was still clutching two eggs in each hand. “Son of a bitch,” she said.

Floyd laughed. Mikki laughed with him.

“Let’s get some oatmeal and cook these up,” she said.

They sauntered over to the kitchen, taking their time, wondering how this day could get any worse. They were about to find out.

“What’s goin’ on in here?” Mikki asked. “Makin’ soup?” Her question initiated a loud burst of laughter, but no one bothered to answer the question.

The three women folk were all in the kitchen in a corner, chatting and joking loudly with one another. Skinny Slim and Jackass had pots and pans all over the place, while Dave looked on like a lost puppy that desperately wanted to be adopted. Corn cobs were everywhere as the group had been stripping off the kernels. The largest metal pot was on the stove, filled with boiling water.

Seeing no that one else was going to answer Mikki, Dave piped up excitedly, “We’re making corn mash!”

“Corn what?” Mikki asked, perplexed.

Floyd knew what that meant, however. He grabbed Mikki by the arm and pulled her outside. “Have fun, everyone!” He called back over his shoulder, as he dragged her out of the kitchen. For some reason, that caused another round of laughter and unintelligible comments aimed in his direction. He headed straight to the fire pit and took a better look at the boiler.

“Well, I’ll be damned.”

“You sure do say that a lot, Floyd.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” he replied.

“OK, point taken,” Mikki laughed. “So what bug climbed up your butt all of a sudden?”             

“Moonshine.”

“You mean, like whiskey?”

“Yup. Copper boiler. Corn mash. That’s what you need to make moonshine.”

“Wait a minute. Hold on there just one second! You tellin’ me that these morons stole every bit of our corn to make whisky?”

“I reckon.”

Floyd wondered if a person’s head could spontaneously explode. If so, he was about to see it, firsthand. Mikki’s face turned bright red, then almost purple. Her right eye started to twitch. Floyd had never seen that happen before. She clenched her fists and crushed the eggs she had forgotten she was still holding, which only made her madder. She threw the shells onto the ground and wiped her hands on the sides of her shirt. Floyd would have laughed, if it wasn’t for the blue streak of curses that came out of her mouth at the top of her lungs.

It was as if an air raid siren had gone off. Mikki’s screaming rant shattered the still air. Soon, everyone in the kitchen came running with a babble of “What’s wrong?” “What happened?” and other questions. Belle asked Mikki, “Are you ok, honey?”

“Hell no, I ain’t OK!” Mikki screamed. “Y’all stole all our corn to make whisky?”

“Hey, it’ll be good whisky,” Jackass quipped.

“And that corn wasn’t any good anyway,” Dave offered.

OK, Floyd was now convinced that a human head could not spontaneously explode. Otherwise, they would have all just been covered with Mikki’s brain matter.

“This ain’t no damn supermarket!” Mikki screamed. “There ain’t no damn delivery truck gonna pull up here with fresh supplies!”

“Calm down, Mikki,” said Dave.

“Oh, no,” Floyd muttered, knowing that was exactly the wrong thing to say to Mikki.

“Don’t you tell me to calm down! Don’t you never tell me to calm down! The dumbest thing you can say to a woman is calm down, because ya know why? It don’t make us calm down!!!”

“Well, she got a point there,” Babette said to the two other ladies, who both nodded and muttered in agreement.

“Y’all don’t get it! We are on our own here! That corn is for
food!
To be
eaten!
”

“Well, it’s for drinking now!”

With that comment, Mikki fully understood why they called him Jackass. Everyone else thought it was funny.

“Look, it ain’t that big a deal,” Skinny Slim assured her.

“The hell it ain’t! We was planning on storin’ that corn over the winter. We gotta grow our own food here! We gotta take care of the animals. It takes
work
to keep this place goin’! Somethin’ you all don’t seem to know how to do!”

“Now that sounds downright insulting,” said Jackass.

“No! What’s insulting is you all takin’ everything Floyd and me worked hard for and givin’ nothin’ back. Look at this mess around here! You cain’t even clean up after yer damn selves? You wanna stay, you gotta work! That’s the deal.”

“Excuse me,” Skinny Slim interjected, becoming confrontational.  “Since when do you tell us what to do?”

“Since we run the place, that’s when!” Mikki retaliated.

“And who says you run the place?”

“We do! We was here long before you showed up!”

‘Uh-huh. And who was here before you?”

“Ranger Martin and about a dozen other people.”

“Yeah, that’s what Dave told us. And where are they all now, exactly.”

“They left. They’re all in New California Haven, which is where you all oughta be goin’!”

“Well, you don’t get to tell us where we oughta be goin’ or what we oughta be doin’! You don’t have any more right to this place than we do. So you was here before us. So what? Somebody else was here before you. You didn’t build this place. In fact, this here is a public campground. That means it’s open to anybody. This place belongs to all us taxpayers!”

“Tax—Are you shittin’ me? Who you paid taxes to over the last two years?”

“Don’t matter. This is public land and you don’t own it. I say we take a vote. All in favor of taking over the campground, raise your hand and say, ‘Aye!’”

Everyone raised their hand and said, “Aye!” except Dave. He started to raise his hand, then looked at Mikki who glared at him, so he put his hand down. Then everyone else looked at him and he quickly raised his hand and said, “Aye! Oh, yes, aye! Of course.”

“Looks like you just been outvoted, Little Missy!” Skinny Slim bragged, smiling at Mikki.

Must’ve been one helluva fight last night. Skinny Slim was missing a tooth. Come to think of it, Mikki didn’t remember Jackass having that shiner under his left eye before, either.

Runner and Gabe walked in at that moment carrying a bucket with a couple of fish they had caught. “Sorry, we broke your fishing pole, Floyd,” Runner said.

Mikki screamed and ran off. She entered the cabin and slammed the door behind her. Floyd just stood there, looking at the two pieces of broken fishing poke in Runner’s hands.

“What’d we miss?” Gabe asked.

“Nothin’. Skinny Slim replied. “Now since this place is under new management, why don’t you and you’re little girlfriend set about to cleanin’ up this place, Floyd? Can’t leave a mess like this around. It ain’t presentable for decent folk.”

Deep down inside, a fire began burning. A fire he had felt before. A fire that could be very dangerous. Very explosive. He tried desperately to put the fire out. He had to extinguish it quickly, or things were going to turn ugly. Very ugly. He knew all too well what Mikki was feeling.

He walked up to Skinny Slim and stopped less than a foot away, staring him down. Skinny Slim did not flinch. He stared right back.

“Well? You gonna clean this mess up or what?” he asked Floyd.

The rage and hatred burned in Floyd’s eyes, but he somehow managed to choke it down. He slowly backed away, turned, and slowly walked away to join Mikki back in the cabin.

“Yeah! That’s what I thought! Big man against brainless zombies, but you can’t handle a real man in a real fight! Walk away, Little Man! Walk away!”

Floyd stopped in his tracks, he looked back over his shoulder. Everyone gasped at the look on his face and held their breath for a moment that seemed like an eternity. Even Skinny Slim was a bit taken aback, although he refused to show it. Floyd turned away again and retreated into the cabin. Laughter erupted behind him, led by Skinny Slim.

“That’s right! Run away, you coward! Go hide away in your little hole!” Skinny Slim taunted. The laughter continued long after Floyd had disappeared.

“Mikki.”

“Yeah, Floyd,” Mikki asked, through a torrent of tears.

“Time for Plan B.”