Note to self: do not think of mythical monsters while trapped in the dark. That’s just dumb. Stop being dumb.

  I wriggle about on the boulder which, by the way, is not some smooth boulder you find at the top of a peaceful mountain. This is a coal miner’s boulder, motherfuckers! It has ridges and grooves and really, really uncomfortable pieces that feel the need to jam themselves up my ass. So the wriggling takes a while before I can get even close to a semblance of comfort.

  I lie there, listening to the moans and scraping from the flaming Zs, whose flames are slowly, slowly, slowly dying. And then gone.

  I now understand what complete darkness is.

  I didn’t get it even when Oscar was first leading me down here, because there was always the hint of some type of light. Now? No hint. There is a distinct lack of hinting.

  My eyes are wide open, yet I can’t see anything. I place my hand right up to my nose, and it’s as if it isn’t even there. I wave it around, but all that does is shift my body so I have to spend the next few minutes chasing down a comfortable position again. I do, and it probably isn’t long after that I fall asleep, even with the formerly flaming Zs’ (such a great band name) moans echoing up to me.

  ***

  There are no dreams, no nightmares, no thoughts whatsoever while I sleep. The only way I actually know that I sleep is that something wakes me up. I feel a light touch which, in the zombie apocalypse, is plenty of touch to bring me out of a sleep. I have the presence of mind not to panic and try to scramble away, since I know I’m up on a boulder in the pitch blackness, and any move could send me tumbling down to the Zs.

  The Zs? Did they make it up to the top?

  I listen, but don’t hear the telltale hissing, or moaning, or shuffling.

  What I do hear is a soft snuffling sound. Like a dog sniffing its food dish. There is no doubt that whatever touched me is also sniffing me. Jesus, are there animals down here in this mine? Did some possum work its way into the pit and is living off the scraps of those that don’t make it? Great.

  The snuffling gets louder until it is right next to my ear. I can feel something next to me, but the feeling I’m getting is that it’s much larger than a possum. I can also feel warmth coming off it from its breath and body heat. And the distinct smell of ... BO?

  So, it’s a large possum with warm breath and body odor. That totally makes sense.

  Then it licks me.

  “Motherfucker!” I scream, and start swatting blindly in the dark.

  “Ow! Hey! Stop!” a voice shouts.

  A voice I recognize.

  “Rafe?” I ask. “Is that you?”

  “Short Pork? Holy shit, man! How’d you get down here?” Rafe replies, only inches from me.

  “Fuck how I got down here. Did you sniff and then lick me?” I ask.

  Rafe doesn’t answer for a while then quietly says, “Maybe.”

  “You fucking asshole! You were totally going to try to eat me! You can take the canny out of Cannibal Road, but you can’t take Cannibal Road out of the canny! You fucking piece of shit!”

  “I wasn’t going to eat you, honest,” Rafe pleads. “I was just checking to make sure you were living. You know, like as in not a Z. I can’t see shit, so I sniffed you. You smell like Z, by the way. Then I licked you, just to see if you tasted like a Z. Also, to see if you were warm.”

  “You could have just patted me down,” I reply. “That’s how you find out if a person is warm or not.”

  “Yeah, but I can’t see you, and I was afraid I’d get my fingers bitten if I stuck out my hands,” Rafe says.

  “So you stick your tongue out instead? Because Zs don’t eat tongue? There is a serious flaw in your logic, fucker.”

  “I don’t have to explain myself,” Rafe huffs. “You should just be glad I found you.”

  “Really? Why’s that?” I ask. “You have some magic plan to get us out of here?”

  “Well ... no,” he admits. “But there’s safety in numbers.”

  “Not if one of those numbers tries to eat the other one!” I yell. There is a distinct possibility all my yelling is bringing more Zs, but fuck if I care. The dude licked my fucking face!

  “I wasn’t going to eat you!” Rafe yells back. “It was a joke! God, you are such an asshole!”

  “Better to be an asshole than a canny, any day,” I say. “Fucking cannies. Why I agreed to let you people come with us on this convoy, I don’t know.”

  “What the fuck do you mean ‘you people’?” Rafe snaps. “You know, not everyone got to live in their fancy little subdivision after Z-Day. Some of us had to fight for every second of every day until we found someplace that was just a little bit safer than being out on the open road!”

  “Whatever, dude,” I snap. “You have no idea what life was like for me and my family after Z-Day. Life was not all block parties and barbecues. We lost a lot of people trying to defend our neighborhood from the Zs. Not to mention the bums that would come by and try to take what we’d built.”

  “Bums? What the hell are you talking about?” Rafe asks.

  “Never mind,” I say, realizing that I’d rather not think of the bums. Brenda Kelly went a little overboard when it came to keeping people out. There were more than a few needless deaths at her orders.

  “What are bums?” Rafe pushes. “Homeless? People that didn’t have any place else to go, so they looked to you for sanctuary? I’ve heard a few stories from some of the others. I know that Stuart used to be the triggerman and kill anyone that didn’t just walk away from your precious subdivision. Fuck you, Short Pork. Say what you want about cannies, but at least we killed to survive. You just killed to hang on to your lawns and shit.”

  “Dude, there are no lawns in the apocalypse,” I say, but without any real conviction.

  The kid is right, we were not the best people towards the end there. Subconsciously, it’s probably one reason I blew that place up. It stood for a world that could never be again, and wasn’t exactly paradise pre-Z.

  We sit there and fume in our own wrongness while more and more Zs gather around our boulder. No clue how many, but from the sound of it there are a lot. Looks like we aren’t going hiking any time soon.

  We probably give each other the silent treatment for an hour. I even manage to refrain from talking out loud. Or I think I do. No way for me to really know unless Rafe tells me, and that defeats the point of a silent treatment. So we’ll assume I didn’t talk out loud.

  “How’d you find me?” I finally ask because I have a complete and total inability to keep from talking. “It’s not like you can see down here. Where were you before you found this boulder?”

  “Your torches lit this place up,” Rafe says. “I could see you from like a mile away.”

  “Ha, funny,” I chuckle.

  “No, seriously, man,” he insists. “This pit is huge. I was easily a mile away.”

  “That can’t be true,” I say. “You have no way to gauge that kind of distance. You think you were a mile, but you were probably only a football field’s length.”

  “I used to hunt people for sport and survival, man,” Rafe says. “I know how to gauge a mile. I was a mile away. Your torches were just bright dots in the distance.”

  “I only had the one torch until it got snagged by a Z I found up here,” I reply. “The other lights you saw were the famous singing group known as the Flaming Zs.” Rafe doesn’t respond right away. “I said, the other lights you saw were the-.”

  “I heard what you said,” he interrupts. “I just don’t know what it means.”

  “I set a couple of Zs on fire, and they chased me here,” I explain. “Me being me, I decided that the Flaming Zs would make a killer band name. But, alas, they weren’t meant to last as a group. You know why?”

  Rafe doesn’t answer.

  “Do you know why they weren’t meant to last, Rafe?” I ask again.

  “I don’t think I want to,” Rafe says quietly.

  “Because they burned out!” I laugh. “Bam! Zing! Rimshot! Cue laugh track!”

  “You are the most fucked up man I have ever met,” Rafe states. “And I knew all the gang leaders on Cannibal Road. Barfly must have nearly killed you a million times.”

  “Barfly, bro? Nah, we were tight, bro. Like best bros, bro. He totally dug my sense of humor, bro.”

  “No, he didn’t,” Rafe says.

  “No, he didn’t,” I admit. “He got tired of it, just like everyone else does.”

  Again, we sit there for a while with nothing to say. The Zs are getting louder and louder, so it’s not like we’re sitting in silence anymore. Their constant groans, and moans, and hisses are actually getting on my nerves. Up top you can hide in a shelter like a house or some other building. That shit will muffle their never-ending noise. Hell, even a car is better than this.

  “Moan, moan, moan!” I shout. “Hiss, hiss, hiss! Fuck you!”

  “That’ll teach them,” Rafe says.

  “Hey, let me ask you something. Strictly for academic purposes,” I say. “When we were giving each other the silent treatment, was I still talking out loud?”

  “What silent treatment?” Rafe replies. “You haven’t shut up since I got up on this boulder. At one point I honestly thought about jumping off and trying to make it against the Zs. You have some seriously fucked up shit inside your head, Short Pork.”

  “Don’t call me Short Pork,” I say. “I hated Long Pork. Short Pork is even worse. Just call me Jace.”

  “Only if you stop referring to me as a canny,” Rafe counters.

  “But you are a canny,” I say. “That’s the simple truth.”

  “Then you will always be Short Pork,” Rafe says. “So get used to it, Short Pork.”

  “Knock it off,” I snarl.

  “Or what?” Rafe asks. “What the fuck are you going to do to me with one arm in the pitch dark? The second you try to hit me, I’ll knock you the fuck out. I was a hunter, man. I can track with my ears.”

  “Who do you think you are? The Blind Swordsman?” I laugh.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “The Blind Swordsman,” I say. “That old series of samurai movies? You never saw those?”

  “Who the fuck watches old samurai movies? You must have been some nerd before the Zs,” Rafe says, laughing.

  “Listen, you little shit, while you were busy jerking off to the Pink Power Ranger, I was studying true cinema. The Blind Swordsman movies are classics.”

  “If you say so, nerd,” Rafe laughs again. “Nerd Pork. That’s what I’ll call you from now on. Forget Short Pork, you are Nerd Pork forever!”

  “Fuck off!” I yell, and take a swipe at him. My fist nails him across the chin, and he cries out. I hear some scraping against rock then nothing except for the Zs below. “Rafe? Dude? You still up here?”

  “That’s all I needed,” he says as his fist hits me in the chest. His other fist catches me in the shoulder, and he adjusts fast and throat punches me.

  I wish people would stop punching me in the throat. It makes it impossible for me to use my brand of sarcasm against them. I know sarcasm fu, yo.

  Another fist to the throat, then one to my cheek. I try to hit back, but he stays out of my reach. I guess I should have thought it through more before picking a fight with a trained killer. He’s no Blind Swordsman, but he did used to hunt people, like he said. I used to figure out how high to build fences, and how many rolls of razor wire we needed. We have different skill sets.

  I decide the only way to win is to just not get hit, so I flatten myself on the boulder and cover my head with my arm. I hear his hands swinging above me, then I catch a solid thump right between the shoulder blades as he figures out my strategy.

  “Knock it off!” I croak as I manage to squeeze a few words out of my damaged throat. It’s not as bad as the last time I took it in the throat. “Fucking stop! I’m sorry!”

  “What? What did you say?” Rafe asks, all out of breath from throat smacking me. “Did you say you were sorry?”

  “Yeah,” I reply. “I’m sorry, okay? I won’t call you a canny again. Just stop hitting me. I’m done. All done. Let me lie here and just slowly die, alright? Give me that peace, at least.”

  “We’re not going to die,” Rafe says.

  “How the hell do you know?” I snap. “There’s no reason to think we’ll live through this. No one can navigate a pit that’s a mile long and doesn’t have even a speck of light. Not while there’re Zs shuffling about.”

  “That’s not true,” Rafe replies, and I can hear the grin in his voice.

  “What? What aren’t you telling me?” I ask. “Rafe, you little fucker, stop messing with me!”

  “You’ll see,” Rafe laughs. “Just keep chatting, and then you’ll see.”

  “I am so sick of this,” I growl. “Why can’t I catch one break? There are lots of other people I’d rather be with down here than you. Hell, Stuart and Critter are supposed to be down here. I could have bumped into them. Nope, I get the c-.”

  “Hey,” Rafe snarls.

  “I get the kid, was what I was going to say,” I reply. I’m totally lying. I was gonna say canny.

  “I know,” Rafe says. “And you’re talking out loud.”

  “Mother fuck,” I grumble. Then I cock my head and listen. “Hey, Rafe?”

  “Yes, Jace?”

  “Do you hear Zs?”

  “No, Jace, I do not hear Zs,” Rafe replies. The smug is strong with this one.

  “Why don’t we hear Zs?” I ask. “Zs don’t sleep, and they don’t just walk away when there’s two very loud meals just above them, out of reach.”

  “Maybe someone killed the Zs,” Rafe says.

  “What? Bullshit,” I respond. “Who the fuck can kill a bunch of Zs in the pitch blackness of this pit? No one has those kinds of skills.”

  Rafe laughs a little more, and that’s when I hear the scrape behind me and to my left.

  I wheel about and strike out with my hand, but it’s caught easily.

  “Damn, Long Pork,” Elsbeth giggles. “Ain’t nobody whine and complain like you. Every single person in this pit can hear you.”

  “El? EL!” I yell, and try to hug her, but end up punching her in the boob. She punches me in the dick. That makes us even in El’s world. “Ow. It’s ... good ... to see ... you.”

  “Suck it up, and rub some dirt on it, Long Pork,” Elsbeth says. “We’ve got a long hike before we get to the others.”

  “The others?” I ask. “What others? Critter? Stuart?”

  “Oh, there’s more than that,” Elsbeth replies. “They been catching and bringing them in for days. Good thing I hung back once I knew they was tracking us.”

  “Wait? You knew these guys were around? And you didn’t say anything?” I shout. “They have Greta, El!”

  “I know, and we’ll get her back, trust me,” Elsbeth says, her voice sharper and more deadly than any blade could ever be. “They won’t hurt her yet.”

  “Why the hell didn’t you tell us we were being tracked?” I ask, still hurt by the thought that she let this happen.

  “I was going to, then everyone started shitting and puking,” Elsbeth says. “I wanted to wait it out then come tell you, but there was another distraction. Then you broke camp and left. I never got a chance. When I caught up, you’d left that farm, too.” She grabs my shoulder and gives it a squeeze.

  “Wow, I can’t believe it’s you,” I say. “What are the odds you’d be down here with me?”

  “Are you in trouble, Long Pork?” Elsbeth asks.

  “Well, duh,” I laugh.

  “Then where the hell else would I be?” Elsbeth replies. “It’s a full time job saving your ass.”

  “Well, I guess that’s true,” I say.

  “We going now?” Rafe asks.

  “Yes, we’re going now,” Elsbeth answers. “Did you lick him like I said to?”

  “Yeah. He got really pissed,” Rafe laughs.

  “You guys suck,” I say. “Totally suck.”

  Chapter Eight

  There are quite a few things I’d rather be doing than walking through a subterranean pit in an abandoned coal mine while hundreds of zombies prowl around me in complete and total darkness. Shall I list them? Yes. Yes, I shall.

  I’d rather be:

  1. Eating glass out of a rhinoceros’s asshole.

  2. Placing my private parts in a blender and hitting the puree button.

  3. Huffing Rush Limbaugh’s farts after he’s eaten six pepperoni and jalapeno pizzas from Pizza Hut. Deep dish, so they are nice and greasy.

  4. Sharting while naked and singing the Star Spangled Banner in front of a black tie crowd at Lincoln Center.

  5. Shitting out the undigestible glass I have eaten from previously said rhinoceros’s ass.

  6. Making sweet, sweaty love to Brenda Kelly.

  Okay, okay, I went too far on that last one. Nothing would be worse than touching any part of Brenda Kelly’s naked body. What? You think I am mocking the dead? Yes. Yes, I am. That woman deserves all the postmortem mocking she gets.

  I would say I’m in a blind leading the blind situation, but I’d be a total idiot if I ever call Elsbeth blind. Sure, there is absolutely no trace of light in any way, shape, or form down here. Sure, the ground is pocked with holes and strewn with random rocks, boulders, and fissures. Sure, I only have one hand, and it’s currently gripping one of Rafe’s belt loops instead of holding a weapon (i.e. a rock) and getting ready to bash some unseen Z in the cranium. And sure, Elsbeth keeps giggling like a schoolgirl every time she kills a Z and clears our path.

  But, it’s Elsbeth. If I can’t trust her to get my ass out of this frying pan, then I might as well lie down, curl up, and suck my thumb until the Zs find the Jace buffet.

  “Dude, you have got to be quiet,” Rafe hisses. “You’re bringing them right to us.”

  “Don’t worry about Long Pork,” Elsbeth says. “He doesn’t know how to be quiet. Hasn’t shut up since I met him.”

  “Thanks, El,” I say. “You really know how to defend a guy.”

  “Do I? Huh,” Elsbeth replies. “I thought I was giving you shit. Did I do it wrong? Is there a better way to shit give?”