Two for the Road

[Ponyboy314]

“…if you break the law, you’ll hear from me, I know…
I’m just-a doin’ my job on the highway patrol…”

from Highway Patrol by Junior Brown



If anyone else was still alive out there somewhere, and they could see Ryan Beckett now, they would swear he had it made, at least in the short term.

In truth, if one only wished to count the next couple or three weeks, Ryan did probably have it made. Certainly his refuge was secure, and more importantly, it had been convenient. It hadn’t needed to be reinforced or boarded up to provide the security he now counted on. The building had always been a veritable fortress. Of course, there were good reasons for that. The possibility, remote though it may have been, that someone organized might decide to attack the place “Assault on Precinct 13”-style, it needed to be safe from forced entry and from gunfire from the outside. Steel shutters covered the front and back doors at the push of a button, and the building itself was accessed by a short set of stairs that rose about six feet from ground level, meaning that the windows (all of which were shatterproof) could not be so easily reached by anyone trying to break in.

Then of course, there was what the inside of the building could offer.

One of the rooms contained a couple of bunks, which helped considerably during the night shift when those on duty took turns sleeping and manning the lighthouse. The pantries and refrigerator in the lunchroom were at least stocked well enough with everyone’s personal munchables to keep him going for a while, though not a long while. Of course, there were the showers, without which he would certainly have been pretty rank by now. Under his chosen bunk was a large duffel bag containing anything and everything he couldn’t or wouldn’t leave behind, and now, its contents constituted every personal possession he still had to his name. Everything else he had owned was now sitting pretty in his two-bedroom apartment near the center of town, and Ryan was keenly aware that he had already seen it for the last time. His bag was at least some kind of connection to his life before it all went to shit, and at least some part of him thanked the Captain for telling the whole gang to pack for a few days, since when it all reached their town, they were all going to be busy to the point that no one was going home for a while.

The Captain never bothered to suggest that it would be for good, and Ryan Beckett sure as hell wasn’t going to thank him for that.

What Ryan could certainly have used was more ways to make the time click by faster. The TV had stopped broadcasting and so had the radio, and both had aired their last meaningless emergency messages the same day that he, by a stroke of luck (good or bad, depending on his mood), became the last survivor of his station, probably the last survivor of the Colorado State Police, and for all he knew, the last surviving human being on the face of the earth. Well, almost.

Ryan had planned his life in detail before he even got to high school, and up until a few days ago, everything had been going according to plan. He graduated and went right into the Navy, serving as a combat medical corpsman for four years, right in the middle of the War in Iraq, where he had spent fourteen months of his life in the worst of it, and wondering all the while what the anti-war pussies were bitching about, since they weren’t the ones dodging sniper fire and telling wounded marines that it was just a scratch. Four years of that, one war, two minor scars (and the Purple Hearts to go with them) and a Bronze Star for Valor that he was pretty sure he didn’t deserve, he mustered out and chilled out for a couple of months before going into the police academy. It had all been gravy since then, since drunk rednecks, brawling bikers, and indignant speeders didn’t carry the suck factor of an IED or the telltale crack of a Dragunov sniper rifle with his name on it.

Ryan Beckett’s life had so far played out before him almost exactly as he had hoped down to the most minor of details, making him feel like a Broadway director who sees his vision come together on stage on opening night. Now, he thought about his life a great deal as the days passed slowly. Had he made one decision differently, where would he be? What if he had decided to stay in the Navy? What if he had chosen college over the service? What if he had requested assignment at a different station? What if he had opted for the Pueblo Police Department rather than Highway? What if he had decided that the road from the barricades back to this place was too full of them and someone else should make that trip that had ultimately saved his life? What if he had joined the Air Force instead? Where would he be? What would he be doing? All he knew for certain is that he wouldn’t be here. He would be dead, or worse, would be dead and staggering around this new world that was now almost devoid of living, breathing people.

You rolls your dice and you takes your chances, as they say.

Ryan Beckett had four years on the Colorado Highway Patrol, but whether or not one could count the last few days was open to debate. As long as he was in his station and wearing his badge, was there still such a thing as the Highway Patrol? Was this a strange and unexpected version of early retirement? Aside from such musings, he was now twenty-seven and the four years had shown his buddies that he was no wet-behind-the-ears rookie anymore. In his first year, he had certainly been called that enough times, along with other terms such as “cherry,” newbie,” “junior,” and so on. He had taken his hazings in stride and gave little thought to them, other than how the others would feel if he whined or bitched about what was nothing more than a rite of passage that the others had already experienced, and in any event, after his time in the Navy, it was hardly the first time he had gotten such treatment. He had also done the usual rookie crap like interminable night shifts, almost living on dispatch, washing and waxing the cruisers, cleaning the cells, and all that other crap that the veterans had long since gotten out of their systems. He had proven himself to be a valuable officer, a real team player who served diligently and had everyone else’s back. Although four years wasn’t nearly enough to be part of the old breed who could use terms like “back in the day,” but he was certainly a notch or two above the new guys, who had received from him the same treatment he had gotten. It was all in good fun.

And like everything else, in ways great and small, it all had led to his continued presence on mother earth, still breathing while everyone else in his station had gone down in the same blood and flame that had consumed everything else. It was certainly a lonely existence, but even Ryan wasn’t certain which would be worse: being utterly alone in the world or having to spend the end of the world with the only other person that, as far as he knew, was still alive and kicking.

And it certainly wasn’t one of his buddies from the Force. That would make this whole thing easier to bear. Although he was happy to know that he wasn’t playing I am Legend the Home Game, he certainly could have wished for better company as his species neared its twilight.

His companion had experienced some serious strokes of luck as well. Charges of assaulting a police officer, drunk and disorderly, and possession of marijuana had resulted in a few days in the slammer to await a bag full of indictments, and that cell was undoubtedly the only reason that two people were left on earth instead of one.

What a pair. A cop and a criminal. The 21st century version of The Odd Couple, and an odd couple they most certainly were.

[Ponyboy314]

“Purple light in the canyons,
That’s where I long to be,
With my three good companions,
My rifle, my pony, and me…”

from My Rifle, My Pony, and Me by Dean Martin and Ricky Nelson
from the 1959 film Rio Bravo



As the day began to head into the early afternoon, Ryan’s boredom hit him full force and he decided that the time was ripe to engage in the one activity that allowed him to see the sun without cowering behind a window, and to actually give them back a little of the pain they had inflicted on him, and whether or not they felt pain at all was totally beside the point. This was no longer his town or his world, but he needed to at least be in control of something, and to him, nothing could be better than controlling which of them would keep stumbling around and which others would just get planted in the street or the dirt without a good portion of their heads.

What Ryan Beckett did remember was as things got bad, a lot of people who should have defended themselves hadn’t been able to bring themselves to do it. Even those raised on decades of Blaxploitation flicks, Lethal Weapon, and Die Hard, those to whom blowing peoples’ heads off was little more than a minor thrill to advance a bad story, found that movie screens and reality were not the same thing, and something deep within them, perhaps their fears of their own mortality, had stayed their hands and made them unable to end another life. Of course, the lives of their would-be targets had already ended, and there was no humanity left in those things that were then, and probably still were, driving humanity to the brink. Pulling the trigger is never easy the first time or usually a few times after that, regardless if someone is a mob hitman just getting his feet wet, a gangbanger about to go on his first drive-by to pop some punk ass Bloods, or even a Green Beret about to waste a Taliban fuckwad from a thousand yards.

These days, Ryan Beckett had no such reservations.

He had taken human life, the real thing that is, not just this twisted facsimile of humanity that now roamed the whole of the world. To be sure, his first times out in Iraq had been harder than the ones that would follow, and contrary to what some still thought, medics and corpsmen damned well went armed, and that continued myth that medical personnel were off limits to the enemy and thus they should not be able to shoot back out of fairness was more or less bullshit, Geneva Convention be damned. In World War II, medics in the European Theater weren’t armed since even the Nazis made an effort to respect some rules of war, but medics sure as hell went packing in the Pacific, and the story was the same in Vietnam, where the VC could kill the medics first if they could identify them. In Ryan’s war, the insurgents similarly would fill a Navy corpsman full of holes if they saw one, and Ryan didn’t go anywhere without an M4A1 in his hands. He had used it, as he had been expected to get in there and shoot with the leathernecks until someone got hit, and more than once, he had seen blood spray off of the scumbag he had lined up in his sights, and he had seen them not get back up. He knew he had killed, but within him, the fact that he had killed those who regarded killing infidels as a holy mission to be cherished rather than lamented didn’t change the fact that it was rather wounding to kill another human being.

But near the end of his tour, he had caught an article in a copy of Navy Times, which dealt with that specific subject, and it was small wonder that his parents sent him that particular issue. The article was all about combat medical personnel, and how someone undertook some kind of study (didn’t they always?) about how cases of PTSD were noticeably less in medics and corpsmen, largely because their jobs were to protect the lives of their comrades more than anything else, and since the enemy was the biggest threat to their lives, killing an enemy could easily mean saving a friend, and every insurgent down was one less to kill a comrade tomorrow. Their options, thus were clearer than most: kill an enemy or lose a friend. Make the enemy bleed or hold the hand of a dying marine because someone else made him bleed.

Ryan didn’t know if the study had gotten it right, but it did change his perspective, and as his tour ended, he found it easier to squeeze the trigger and put his enemy down. In the time since, although his war memories did come back to him now and then, he didn’t feel a twinge of guilt over those he had killed. Especially since he knew that had they killed him or anyone else in his platoon, not only would they have not had any reservations about it at all, but would have danced and cheered over their bodies, and would have set them on fire and dragged them through the street, all under a burning American flag, and on camera, no less.

That being said, after joining the Force, he had only experienced three occasions in which he had needed to draw his weapon, and never had he been forced to fire it on the job. He regarded himself as lucky in that regard, since killing fundamentalist psychopaths who viewed murder as a divine mission and blasting away drunk drivers and rowdy bikers were two different things. He had killed the enemies of America, but he did not come home to kill Americans. None had pushed him to the point where it was necessary, and for that, he was grateful.

Lying on one of the desks in the station was a new friend, one in whom he had absolute trust. It was a Remington 7mm Magnum bolt-action hunting rifle, with a scope so powerful that a decent marksman could hit God in both kneecaps. He still giggled at the story that went along with how it ended up in the evidence room. A buddy of his a month or so back had pulled over a drunk hick in the dead of night on north I-25, who then proceeded to deny that he had been drinking at all, using such well-known defenses as he “never touched the stuff,” and so on. Of course, this was sharply contrasted by the fact that his floorboards were virtually covered by empty cans of Coors Silver Bullet and an unopened six pack that was still on the seat next to him. This of course was even less damning than the fact that after the officer asked him politely to get out of his truck, he proceeded to toss his cookies all over the cop’s shoes. A subsequent search of the truck revealed a glove box full of crystal meth and that Remington on a rifle rack behind the seat, with a few boxes (one almost empty) of ammunition in a plastic toolbox. He had already pled guilty but wasn’t getting his rifle back. Ryan filled his shirt pocket with some rounds and tossed a couple of beers (which was always on hand in the station, since parties were hardly uncommon) in a beat-up old backpack. This was the high point of his day. It was all shit from here.

The roof could be accessed by two ladders, one outside going down the back wall and one inside in the hallway that led to the roof hatch, lest a fire trap anyone inside. He took his kit up the ladder and sat down in a metal folding chair near the edge, cracked a beer open, and shoved cotton balls in his ears. He was sitting on the southern edge of the roof, and from here, he could see almost all of Pueblo, Colorado. The fires, which had mercifully spared much of the town, had burned themselves out, and the wrecks that had blocked many of the streets, trapping a lot of doomed motorists, could be easily seen from where he was, even without the scope. If he squinted, he could even see the barricade where the rest of his station had desperately tried to hold them back and allow time for the National Guard to get the civilians out, but the Guard never came back from the city center and it didn’t matter anyway, since the dead were already behind them when they took up their positions at the barricade. But reflections on the world that was could wait. That was not why he was up here.

After taking a swig of Rolling Rock, he looked through his scope and spotted one of the few that were visible from here, and near enough to be hit. It was a woman, staggering around, going nowhere and taking forever to get there. She was a hundred and fifty yards off easily, but through the scope, he could tell a lot. She was either thirty or getting close, and despite the gray, veiny skin, Ryan could guess that she had probably been quite the babe when she was alive. All she was now was a dead target.

“Sorry, babe. It wouldn’t have worked out anyway.” He tried to gauge the wind and held his breath, sighting her in and squeezing the trigger. He couldn’t quite see where on her head the shot struck, but the top of her head exploded, leaving nothing intact above her lower jaw. She fell on her back and the contents of what remained of her head spilled out behind her. Ryan took another swig. It was as much enjoyment as was probably left in the world, so he might as well make use of it. The beer would run out soon anyway.

Ryan slapped another round in the magazine. A quick scan showed something he had not noticed the last time he had been up here. A one-story house about three hundred yards off, and a dark shape passing one of the windows. He focused and saw that something was inside, and that it stumbled past a large window every few seconds. It wasn’t easy to see and would certainly be hard to hit, at least in the head, but nothing ventured, nothing killed.

Ryan drained his beer can this time, not caring if it would hamper his aim. He sighted his rifle on the window, trying to pick a place where that head would pass. Of course, it did, and he took a good look (as best he could) to at least know what was about to lose its skull. It was a man, perhaps middle aged, but he couldn’t quite tell if it had been balding while alive at this range, but that huge gut could probably be seen from space. He hesitated and gave the thing another few seconds. It passed again and Ryan squeezed. The teachings of his dad, the Navy, the Marines, and the Force had all left their mark on him, and he could see that head come apart on impact. Two down. Today was a good day.

Ryan could see other tiny specs moving around in the distance, but despite his skill with a rifle, Audie Murphy he was not. Only one other was within range, at least that he could see, and this one was a doozy. It was about thirty or forty yards past the woman he had taken down, and this one was old enough to be her grandmother. She was grody as hell, dressed in a blood-stained muumuu, but the most noticeable feature was actually something that wasn’t there, her legs, one of which was gone at the knee, the other of which was gone completely, though at her age, her legs probably hadn’t been of much use to begin with. She was trying to drag herself up the road by her arms and wasn’t making much headway. This one would be easy.

He aimed and squeezed. The head exploded in even more spectacular fashion than the other two. Without more targets, he lit a smoke and polished off the other beer.

The world was theirs now, but on this roof, with his trusty Remington, he was king. King of what, he did not know, but from here, he could waste them and they couldn’t do a thing about it, and that was something.

[DannusMaximus]

Pony, keep it up! I've recently 'discovered' the ZS Art forum, and I feel like a fat guy who's stumbled into a warehouse full of Doritos. Happy. So happy...

[Ponyboy314]

“Bad girls…talking ‘bout the sad girls…yeah…”

from Bad Girls by Donna Summer



The feeling Ryan had as he descended the ladder back into the station was as close to fulfillment as he was likely ever have. He had dropped some and got to feel the sun on his face, and while he had already taken several down before having to hide in the station, anymore, the feeling of the warm sun was a bonus whose value could not be measured. But he had had his fun, and now, it was back into the world of artificial lights and grinding tedium. Of course, it was now time to deal with something that had proven to be the most unpleasant aspect of his continued existence on earth. As mentioned before, he was not alone, and the dead made better company than his companion. At least he could shoot them in the head. This one…there was no actual justification for erasing their existence that he could think of.

The person in question was in cell number two, and had been filling that cell for ten days, and might never have occasion to leave.

Ryan packed what he could in a brown paper bag, many of which were still in a drawer in the lunch room. A Hi-C juice box, a couple of slices of wheat bread, and some salami that was rapidly nearing its expiration date, as well as one of the few oranges that Ryan had not reserved for himself. He braced himself for the bullshit that was sure to accompany his entrance into the hallway with the cells.

Ryan tossed the bag into the cell unceremoniously. It landed on the floor with a plop.

“Eat. And if you don’t like it, tough shit. You should be happy that I’m feeding you at all. I could double my time in here if I just let you starve. And no, I’m not expecting a ‘thank you.’ Now munch away and try not to give me any shit.”

“Well Barney fucking Fife, how many did you nail today?”

“How many shots did you hear?”

“Three.”

“Then that means I dropped three. I’m not in the habit of missing, and you should remember that if you ever start feeling the need to fuck with me.”

“I don’t suppose any of them were wearing a jacket like mine?”

“No, because if they had, I would have shot each one twice, which I might end up doing with the last living person wearing those bullshit colors. Now eat your fucking lunch. I’ll be back with dinner in a few hours.”

The colors to which his companion in cell number two referred came in the form of a black leather jacket with a red hourglass design sewn on the back, beneath the rather elaborate patch bearing the gang’s name: The Widows. They were one of the most feared female biker gangs in the American West, with chapters all over the place from San Diego to Oklahoma City, and had proven themselves to be a real menace. The gang was formed from a group of biker trash who got tired of being nothing but nameless slam pieces for the sweaty, chunky-butt guys who treated them with the same regard that a Colombian drug lord treats his favorite clap-infested whore. They broke off and formed their own clique twenty years earlier or so and since then, the colors had spread far and wide, as had the very idea of a chick biker gang, and inevitably, rival gangs (such as the Bordens, The Typhoid Marys, The Jezebels, and Eve’s Avengers being the best known and the most problematic), popped up here and there and showed that hell did, in fact, know no fury like a biker chick with both gears and an axe to grind.

This one was Daphne Lewis, one of the younger ones of the local Widows chapter and a real pain in the ass. Like male biker gangs, they loved their retarded nicknames, and Daphne’s was Duckie, and Ryan didn’t even need to have seen the small tattoo of Daffy Duck on her left forearm to guess the reason for that nickname. She was probably his age, maybe a shade under, with raven-black hair with a strong (and clearly unnatural) red streak running down one side, and dressed like the biker slut he dismissively believed her to be. Her studded leather boots reached almost to her knees, and her trampy fishnets went the rest of the way up. She had removed her jacket, revealing a black t-shirt with the phrase “Stop Staring at my Tits” in small white letters across her chest. Predictably, she wore black fingerless gloves and her red nail polish had mostly rubbed off, since Ryan had no reason whatsoever to indulge her and let her reapply it. She was more foul-mouthed than a career merchant sailor and her rap sheet read like a cautionary tale for children. Pinched for carrying a concealed weapon at eighteen, nailed for DWI three years after that, and assault and battery the next year. This time, however, she had gotten drunk and as high as the International Space Station before someone at a biker party mouthed off to her, and Duckie had proceeded to drag him out by his greasy hair and give him the first steps towards a savage beating, until he got back up and attempted to show her what a real beating felt like, until the sirens and flashing lights came up the street, resulting in a grand biker exodus from the house and handcuffs around Duckie’s wrists. Of course, not before she slugged the arresting officer (a female officer that is, which meant that Duckie was not going to be shown any fucking mercy once they booked her), and the fact that she had a shitload of dimebags in her inside pocket wasn’t going to look good, either. She was still waiting for the hammer to drop when everything went to shit, and this, of course, saved her life, not that Ryan believed that she was worth saving. He hated her with every fiber of his being and saw her as nothing but a pain in the ass and a career criminal who had no business surviving when all of his friends were dead.

And the fact that she was very attractive did not register with him. She was a punk-ass biker bitch and he was the law. That was all there was to it.

Duckie ripped into her lunch with the manners of a medieval peasant and had polished off half of it before Ryan could even realize that she was actually eating rather than inhaling it.

“I see that your time in charm school really left its mark on you, Lady. I can just imagine you in an evening gown and pumps with a pearl necklace, clinking martini glasses with the rest of the blue bloods. Wait, the pearl necklace part probably wouldn’t be new, would it?”

“Get fucked, Law Dog. You can’t keep me locked in this fucking animal cage forever.”

“I assure you, I can. Since your gang loved you so damned much and no one posted for you, you’re staying in there until we can get you in to see the judge.”

“Yeah, and I don’t know if you’ve been keeping up with current events, but the whole goddamned world is wasted. Sooner or later, you’re going to have to let me out.”

“Well that’s just your tough shit now, isn’t it? I’m not letting you out so you can strangle me in my sleep or waste me with my own gun. You think I’m stupid?”

“Actually, that’s exactly what I think. I thought an IQ over four disqualified you from becoming a pig.”

“Have it your way. I’ll be stupid out here, you be a fucking genius in there. After a while, you might start thinking about which one of us you’d rather be.”

Ryan walked off, confident that she was more pissed than he was after that encounter. Thank God for small victories.

Still, sometimes he did let it gnaw at him. He couldn’t stay in this place forever, and sooner or later, his personal code of ethics would clash with his sense of street smarts and making a decision about what to do with Duckie would prove to be a bitch and a half.

It was just more shit he didn’t need.

[by-the-throat]

Now that is an interesting secondary character!

Looking forward to seein' where this goes.

[trevor3433]

To be honest I was expecting a greasy biker dude, then you said "...feared female biker gangs..."
Lol. didn't see that coming.

Good work!! Keep it up!

[FrANkNstEin]

Talk about unexpected....

[Snapshot7.62]

Uh-oh, first moar zombie 's here. MOAR!

[Ponyboy314]

“Should I stay or should I go now,
If I go there will be trouble,
And if I stay it will be double,
So you’ve got to let me know,
Should I stay or should I go?”

from Should I Stay or Should I go? by The Clash



Ryan spent the rest of the afternoon trying, and failing, to distract himself from the numerous matters that preyed on his mind. Not the least of those was the fact that his food supplies were hardly ample, and with another annoying mouth to feed, they were dwindling fairly rapidly. Then there was the issue of where he would go once circumstance forced him to abandon the station. He could see from the roof that Pueblo was out of the question. But before the TV and radio stopped broadcasting, he had heard that I-25 was a mess, that not being surprising considering how many populated areas were on the Interstate in either direction. There was Colorado Springs and worse, Denver to the north, and he was pretty sure that the roads leading out of those cities were choked with wrecked and burned cars, and in any event, major cities were the last place anyone wanted to be. To the south, the towns were much smaller, just Trinidad and across the New Mexico line, Raton, and there was no town of any reasonable size until one reached Santa Fe, and beyond that, Albuquerque. But south still wasn’t looking great even if the interstate going through Trinidad was reasonably clear, since Raton Pass through the mountains left no way out other than back if the road was blocked. Perhaps open country was a better option, but that left fewer buildings for safety or supplies. The farmhouses and small town domiciles were hardly fortresses, and although he didn’t know for certain, the small mom-and-pop stores out in God’s country had almost certainly been cleaned out by looters. Ryan had fleeting thoughts of trying to reach a small town police or county sheriff’s station, but here, he had full access to everything. In another station, he would be a visitor and the key codes to the armories or evidence rooms would be unknown to him.

Such was the biggest problem he was facing at the moment. Every conclusion he reached did nothing but showcase why one plan or another wouldn’t work, but nothing in his head led to a course of action that might save him.

He still had perhaps two weeks in this place before heading back out in that world that was no longer his, and he was increasingly unsure that two weeks was enough time to formulate a master plan that would get him out of this mess.

Then, there was the matter of getting to wherever he was going. A couple of cruisers (including his own) were in the fenced-in parking lot in the back, and his own Ford pickup was out front. How far would they get him? Were the gas stations all drained by panicked survivors? How many abandoned cars still had gas, or was an empty tank the reason they were abandoned in the first place? And as mentioned before, how far could he drive before running into a nine hundred-car pileup that stopped him in his tracks? Would he be reduced to walking? How much could he carry on his own back? Certainly he could find a bicycle somewhere, but how much could those carry? How would he get up a hill with a full backpack and other supplies hanging off his ride? And all of these questions still brought him back to the predominant thought nagging on him: where would he go?

And although this was certainly not the main consideration in his agonizing musings, what would he do with her?

Now that was a dilemma. It was humanity versus practicality, with either option coming complete with a built-in set of consequences. He could simply leave her behind, after all, she was a criminal, so it was her own fault that she was locked in that cell, wasn’t it? He could leave her with a couple of sandwiches and just get gone, and once outside, he would be so focused on his own hide that she would never enter his thoughts again, right? Sure, she would die of starvation or thirst, but how was that his problem? He had enough of his own. Surely no reasonable person could expect him to waste brain cells contemplating the fate of a criminal, right?

And his other options? If he was too much of a goody-two-shoes to let Duckie die slowly and alone in a cage, probably cursing his name as she breathed her last, he could end it quickly. Wouldn’t it be an act of mercy if he put a bullet in her head so she wouldn’t suffer for days on end? It would be quick and clean, meaning that Duckie would buy it faster than anyone else in this whole world anymore. If everyone else had died hard from the gnashing teeth of a walking abomination, how was a clean shot to the head anything but a godsend?

Or, he could let her go. That would be easy. Just open her cell, force her out of the building, and tell her to go in the opposite of whatever direction he was going. She would be out there on her own with those things around every corner, but she would at least have a chance. Not much of a chance, but perhaps slightly better than nothing. Hell, she was a biker bitch, used to the open road, so her chances might be better than his. Then, whatever her end might be, it would not be of his making. Something else would take her, but it would not be him.

Then, there was the possibility of the two partnering up and making a go of it together. Sure, they were as opposite as two people could be, and they had spent their short time together doing everything possible to aggravate the other, but that was inside with nothing else to do. Once on the road, they would have no choice but to watch each others’ backs and keep each other alive, since two heads are better than one. With the dead swarming all over the earth, how could they possibly still have the time or energy to snipe at each other? Their differences could be put aside in the quest for survival. Perhaps it would be the proverbial deal with the devil, but a necessary expedient for the sake of staying alive.

But then there were the consequences. Although the concept of right and wrong had more or less died out with the rest of humanity, he still took it seriously, since it had been an important part of his life from the very beginning, and letting it go, even now, was not so easy. Leaving Duckie in her cell subjected her to a long, terrible death, and regardless of any hopes he had of simply having to much else to think about, Ryan knew himself well enough that her languishing in her cell for days until she died in agony would nag and bite at him every second. Shooting her in the head to make it quick wasn’t much of an option either. She was helpless, trapped in a cage, totally subject to Ryan’s will. It would be a cold, heartless way to send her on her eternal way, and his soul would always be stained with Duckie’s blood. And anyway, how was that his place? Even at the apparent end of days, how could he possibly assume the right to decide when Duckie died? Judge, jury, executioner…Ryan Beckett was a cop, and therefore none of the above. No, he still wore his badge, and even now, it still meant something to him to look in the mirror and see it on his chest. This was simply not something that a decent human being did, whether they wore a badge or not, and if anything, being one of the last people on earth did not absolve him of his responsibility to uphold his own code of ethics. They were, after all, all he had left.

But then, there were practical considerations when it came to letting her go. The rest of the world had died out there, screaming in terror and agony as the dead took them, so what chance would she have out there on her own? It could only end one way, and even if he was far away, her death would still be on his hands. He would be the one who told her to walk the other way, right into the mouths of those things that waited out there for fresh, living prey. At least the dead, as far as he knew, were just brainless monsters. He was not, so what was his excuse? Simple, he didn’t have one.

But then, what would happen if they braved the world together? How quickly would their animosity die out? Would it ever? Could these two very different people ever really work together? Was it even remotely possible for their personalities to take a back seat to the necessity of staying alive? Would a repeat offender like her ever really watch the back of the very type of person who had sent her up more than once? Or would she regard this as the perfect chance to actually waste a cop and get away with it without question? And could he even watch her back? Ryan had spent years protecting people from others just like her, so could he even force himself to protect her, even if it was really just self-interest masquerading as pure altruism?

There simply was no answer to any of these questions. There was no place to go, no real way to get there, and no clear course of action when it came to dealing with Duckie. No matter what he did, his chances of survival were not good, and if he either sent or left Duckie to her death, survival would come at the expense of his soul, with which he would never part lightly. There was no simple answer. There was no clear road ahead. There was no right thing to do that could not cost him his life, and no practical way to stay alive that would not cost him his humanity.

It was not just the walls of the station that had him trapped.

All of this flittered in and out of Ryan’s head for several minutes, and he was hardly shocked that no grand ideas came to him. All options carried terrible consequences, and he had yet to determine which among them he could bear. The next two weeks would weight heavily on his as he tried to find a way to see this whole thing through to the end, whatever that end might be.

Ryan forced his head back to the here and now and walked back to Duckie’s cell. She stared right at him upon his arrival.

“Back for the peep show? Sorry, but I don’t strip down for less than a twenty in my g-string.”

Ryan was unconcerned with her pitiful attempts at humor. He just took a good, and rather theatrical whiff of the air.

“When was the last time you had a shower, Lady?”

“Not since you fuckers locked me in this fucking dog pound.”

“Well, we’re fixing that shit right now. You smell like a skunk raping a dead fish. Actually, that’s how bikers usually smell. You smell worse than that.”

[Ponyboy314]

“Well I guess what they say is true,
I could never be the right kind of girl for you,
I can never be your woman…I can never be your woman…”

from Your Woman by White Town


Ryan wasn’t exaggerating. Ten days without a shower, cooling her heels in a cell that hadn’t been cleaned in at least twice that time was bound to up anyone’s stink factor, and in Duckie’s case, it certainly had. The fact that she was easy on the eyes was thoroughly canceled out by being hard on the nose.

“So what are you going to do? Take me to the showers and get a free show? You wouldn’t know what to do with it if you had it, Barney fucking Miller.”

“Sure I would. I’d slap you in the face a few times and not bother to get you off. You know, the same shit you’ve gotten from every other guy who ever fucked you. And no, I’m not taking you out of that cell. I don’t trust you any father than I can spear-toss you. But you have too much skunk to go with the skank, so here’s what we’re going to do.”

Ryan was gone for a few minutes, leaving Duckie to wonder what kind of humiliation this pig had in store. She wasn’t pleased to see what he was carrying when he got back.

In his hands were two plastic buckets, both filled with water, and a bottle of body wash bobbing up and down in one of them and a sponge floating in the other. Tucked visibly in his shirt pocket was a small bottle of shampoo. A towel was over his shoulder, but of note to Duckie was the fact that his duty belt had been removed, but his handcuffs were tucked into the waistband of his pants. No, Officer Ryan Beckett was not a fool.

“Here’s the deal, Weasel Knevel. Use this shit to wash yourself and your clothes. Hang your shit on the railing of the upper bunk to dry it. Sorry our holding cells don’t have sinks, but that’s the bitch. Be happy they at least come with a shitter, because we don’t have that many buckets. After you dry yourself off, keep yourself covered with this towel. No need for you to get off on the prospect of me seeing your naughty parts.”

“Oh, like you won’t be sneaking a peek? You probably haven’t seen slash that didn’t require a credit card and an active e-mail account. You’ve never seen it hotter than what I’m packing.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t be trying to catch a peek. After all, I don’t go shopping for real estate that’s already been occupied by that many low-class tenants. But let me remind you that you’re still not coming out of there. Put your hands through the bars.”

“Say that again?’

“What, you think I’m opening that cell without cuffing your ass? Not fucking happening. So, either put your hands through the bars or stay in here and stink like moose shit. And if that situation persists, I might not be able to tolerate coming in here to feed your ass, or replace that roll of toilet paper that’s damned near gone. So, knock off the bullshit and ante up.”

Duckie played along, putting her hands through the bars, and not resisting as Ryan cuffed her. He took the cell keys from his pocket and unlocked her cell, placing everything inside. He then removed the cuffs.

“I know you’d prefer a shower, but this is as close as you’re going to get. And no, I won’t be looking. I could probably have better sex if I went to jail myself. Back in a while.” With that, Ryan left the hall, closing the door to the hall behind him. He never gave a second’s worth of thought to turning on the cameras in the hall and watching her on the monitor.

Still, the camera outside of her cell was in plain view, and Duckie couldn’t shake the idea that Ryan was out there, hand down pants, skinning his meat mule as she scrubbed off ten days worth of grime and dirt, but for the most part, she only thought about how good it felt to get clean. She hadn’t even realized how nasty she had gotten until she had removed her t-shirt, and yes, it did, in fact, smell like a skunk was raping a dead fish…on a slab of old cheese after someone farted on it. Somewhere, deep within her though, she allowed herself to believe, just for a second, that Officer Beckett had actually done something nice just for the sake of doing it. It was the first complimentary thought she had ever had about a cop, but she shook the thought away easily. He was still a cop, and they were all the same. He was out there, waxing his carrot like no tomorrow. Perverts with badges, that’s all they were.

Of course, Ryan was doing no such thing, but Duckie was willing to believe anything that cast him in a negative light.

She required multiple scrubs to get that rather disgusting layer of film off of herself, dried off, and proceeded to scrub her clothes it took more than an hour for the whole process to be done, and this constituted the most activity she had experienced in the ten days since getting locked up. The fact that it was hardly her first time in the slammer was all that had kept her from losing her mind. Prison time is slow time, and while she never got used to it, she had learned the mental tricks that help a person keep it all together. Insulting Ryan every chance she got didn’t hurt either.

Duckie hung her “laundry” up to dry and wrapped herself in the towel, still feeling the need to don her jacket. She knew all too well that the rest of The Widows were most likely all gone, and had been for days. No one was coming back for her, and if she got out, she would never find her gang and hit the open road again. Like everything else, those days were over. Although she might feel the freedom of the air wishing past her face again as she tore down the interstate, she would never again look to the sides of her and see her sisters with her, ready to handle whatever comes. Although she didn’t know enough to make a comparison, her colors had become like Ryan’s badge, the last holdout of the life that had been. Her life had been a tough one, both on and off of her hog, but as long as she wore her colors, she was part of a family, one that would step in and back their sisters up. When one got into a scrap, they all did, though her memory was hazy about her last fight at that biker party that had turned out to be her last hurrah. She couldn’t for the life of her remember where the rest of The Widows were, but she was certain that they had backed her up somehow. That was how they rolled.

As long as she still wore that jacket, the Widows weren’t completely gone. She was all that was left of two decades of freedom on the open road, and even now, she refused to let it go. Still, Duckie felt not one twinge of hypocrisy when she seethed at Ryan Beckett for still wearing his badge and uniform. To her, he was nothing but a pig, the mortal enemy of all those who wanted to live in true freedom, the one who dedicated his life to stifling those who just wanted to live by their wits and throw caution to the wind. She thought only that he kept up the charade of being a cop to still feel important, to still be in a position to keep people like her pinned beneath his polished uniform shoes. He was a law enforcement officer who was simply too damned stupid and haughty to accept that there was no longer any law to enforce.

Ryan and Duckie still held on to what they once had with whatever strength was still left to them, not realizing nor caring that they were holding on to a dead past that wasn’t coming back. They also didn’t bother to realize that his refusal to remove his badge and her inability to take her colors off once and for all made them the same at heart, but the differences between them had blinded them both to the simple fact that both cried at night for everything that they had lost, and feared what might come the next day.

It’s hard to imagine what they might do if either had realized that they had much more in common now that the world was dead and all stereotypes had died with it, but there was a line between them that neither thought or cared to cross, and worse than that, that the refusal to see what made them the same instead of what separated them could, and perhaps would be the death of them both.

[walterde]

haha, i like the last line. Popcorn on the left leg, 128 oz Coke on the right, I'm ready for the long ride so lets keep it going!

[Cascade Failure]

Good stuff.

[Ponyboy314]

“Just the two of us,
Just the two of us,
Just the two of us,
You and I…”

from Just the Two of us by Bill Withers


Not knowing how much in the way of naughty bits he might see were he to walk in unannounced, Ryan stopped and barely cracked the door to the cells.

“Hey Biker Lady, you decent?”

“If you’re asking if you’ll see tits and muff if you walk in, then yes, I’m fucking decent. If you’re asking if I’m a decent human being, then it doesn’t fucking matter, does it? You’d never admit it, even if I cured cancer and AIDS.”

“If someone cured cancer and AIDS, you’d steal it and sell it on the goddamned black market. Now stop being a bitch for a collective nine seconds. I have something for you.”

Duckie was pretty sure that what he didn’t have was the key to the cell in his hands and a promise of her impending release from her ten-day Fortress of Solitude. She certainly guessed right on that.

Ryan walked in with another brown paper bag and dropped it to the floor between the bars. The foul biker bitch stench was gone, and her clothes, such as they were, were drying, but unfortunately, her bitch attitude wasn’t as easy to wash as hair. Duckie picked it up after Ryan backed away. She sifted through it and was at least moderately surprised at what she found. Inside was a hairbrush and a toothbrush (she hadn’t brushed her teeth in ten days, either), toothpaste, and amazingly, a makeup kit, courtesy of one of the other officers’ duffel bags, one of Ryan’s female coworkers in fact, who undoubtedly had bought it hard at the barricade with the rest of his station. A small vial of red nail polish was also inside, as was a bar of Lady Speed Stick. A medium-sized perfume bottle (cheap Wal-Mart type stuff, though it was still probably better than anything Duckie had worn before) completed the post-apocalyptic hygiene grab-bag. He also tossed her a fresh roll of toilet paper. She had been running low.

“To what do I owe the pleasure? Trying to butter me up before dropping the other fucking boot? Let me guess, prettying up the package before you try and fail to bend me over and load me up like a shotgun…”

“Sorry, no dice, Lady. You’re not my type. My type does not usually include chicks with more crabs than that show Deadliest Catch. Anyway, I thought you could use some of this shit. The previous owner doesn’t need it anymore, I sure as hell don’t need most of it, and no need to let it all go to waste. So either you use it or it gets tossed in the trash or left behind when I jet. So use it. No, I’m not expecting a ‘thank you’ for that either, even though I suspect it’s probably the nicest thing any guy ever did for you, other than pull out once or twice.”

Duckie ignored the remark and instead allowed herself to focus on the fact that he had just mentioned that he was already contemplating getting the hell out of Dodge. That one caught her a bit, as that brought her uncertainty of her future right to the forefront of her mind.

“Oh yeah, that. So tell me, Lenny fucking Briscoe, you blowing this taco stand soon?”

“No shit, genius. What, you think I’m going to be a permanent resident? This place isn’t exactly stocked like a fucking fallout shelter. I’m going to have to split sooner or later, and because I keep tossing you what little food I have at my disposal, it’s looking like sooner. What do you care? You my fucking biographer now?” Not that Ryan wasn’t keenly aware of why she cared, and that was something he didn’t want to deal with right now. It had already mentally worn him down earlier that same day, and he was no nearer to an answer now.

“Well, what the fuck are you going to do with me when you hit the road? You haven’t said a word about that. You going to leave me in here to rot or let me grab my hog and get back to where I belong?”

“And just where do you belong?”

“On the road, dumbass. The only way anyone is going anywhere is on the road, and that’s my turf. You can’t possibly be thinking of leaving me in here to fucking die, are you?”

“To be honest, I’ve had a fuck-ton of things on my mind since it all fell apart, and most of them are a hell of a lot more important than you. I’ve got my own ass to think about, you know. It’s not my fault that you got yourself busted just before the end of the world. Lousy timing, Lady, lousy fucking timing.”

“Yeah, but you’re one of those kinds, aren’t you? One of those fuckers who has some kind of code of honor or some shit, right? You won’t just let me die in this fucking sewer, that’s not you.”

“Really? A minute ago you thought I was going to throw you on the ground and rape you in the ass. What’s changed since then?”

“I was fucking kidding and you know it. But what are you going to do? All you’d have to do is let me take my hog and I’ll go wherever you’re not going. What’s the problem with that?”

“The problem Lady is that I don’t know if you’ll just follow me and cut my throat while I’m taking a piss in the woods. Seriously, how do I know you won’t do that, just to finally plant a pig in the ground knowing that you can finally get away with it?”

“I’ve done some fucked up shit in my life, but I’m not a fucking murderer. You’ve seen my rap sheet, haven’t you? You see any murder charges in there?”

“No, but that doesn’t mean shit. You could have killed ten people for all I know and just never got caught. You think you’re the first biker I’ve ever dealt with? I’ve seen some who’ve done worse than that, and they didn’t just kill other punk-ass bikers. Last year, one of those assholes from the Saracens wasted a deputy up around Fort Collins. What’s to convince me that you wouldn’t do the same shit, or already have?”

“But there’s nothing to suggest that I would. What’s that thing you cops always say? All suspects are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law? I saw that shit on ‘Cops.’ Did you stop believing that just because everyone’s dead and there’s no one left to tell you what to do?”

“That was then, this is now. I have to worry about my own ass. All I want to do is live through this, and if I let you out of there, my chances of doing that won’t improve. I’ve always played by the book, but that book is fucking history now. You’re a goddamned criminal, or did you forget that? Criminals belong behind bars, so maybe that’s where you should stay.”

“And let me fucking starve to death? Letting those things eat me alive would be quicker than that!”

“Well sorry, that’s not my goddamned problem. I have nothing but problems right now, and you think I should complicate things by worrying about you too? For fuck’s sake, don’t I have enough to worry about? I’ve got a million things on my mind, and I don’t have the luxury of staying awake all night worrying about a goddamned biker slut! You have no fucking business expecting me to let you out of that cage! Were you worried about that when you decked a cop? Fuck no! I haven’t decided what I’m going to do with you yet, so stop asking! I’ll do what I think is smart, and that’s all. You just fucking sit there. What happens, happens. At least try to remember that you’ve already outlived damn near everyone else on this fucking planet! You know, I really don’t need this shit right now, I really just don’t.” With that, Ryan got up and stormed off, slamming the door behind him. He didn’t want to hear her voice. Not now.

Of course, what pissed Ryan off more than anything else was that her query cut right to the heart of him. He did a fair job pretending that he didn’t give a shit what happened to her and could leave her to die without a thought, but he simply would not let on that his inability to decide what to do with her was preying on him and was bound to cost him sleep.

Ryan simply wasn’t going to give Duckie that kind of power over him.

[ZMace]

Odd couple indeed.

[ozwyn]

great story so far, interesting and damaged characters.

More please when you get a chance!

[Ponyboy314]

“You say yes, I say no,
You say why, I say I don’t know,
You say goodbye, and I say hello…”

from Hello, Goodbye by The Beatles



As Ryan had predicted, his night went by with too little sleep and too many nagging thoughts. Where he would go and what he would do had previously been the primary issues of concern, but now what he would do with Duckie had completely taken over and his mind was so conflicted on the issue that he wound up with a pounding headache by midnight. In the end, he was so emotionally exhausted that sleep finally, and mercifully carried him away, and it was close to eleven the next morning when his eyes finally fluttered open. Of course he had dreamt, and just as had happened the previous few nights, flickering images of his friends, dying horribly at the barricade, had made their way through his sleeping mind, but this time, even though she had not been there, Duckie’s face was inexplicably among the dying. It’s hard to imagine where his mind would have been the next day, but the details of his dream faded from his mind within minutes of waking up. The lingering effects of his headache took longer to fade.

Just as he had before everything ended, Ryan went through a semi-unconscious ritual whenever he woke up, as did most people, and the end of the world hadn’t changed that. He yawned, shook off the cobwebs, forced the few remaining images of last night’s dream from his mind (a new addition to his morning routine), scratched his balls (balls that Duckie sometimes accused him of not having), took an epic piss, and then got to shaving and showering. He put on a fresh uniform and buckled his duty belt on. Then he made coffee, and considering that he was now the only one drinking it, that was one thing that wasn’t going to run out anytime soon. Still, the creamer wasn’t going to last much longer, and Ryan wasn’t looking forward to using the powdered stuff. But then, any port in a storm.

While sipping his morning Joe, Ryan looked out one of the windows, seeing that world that no longer had any place for him. None of them were in sight, but he certainly wasn’t taking that for granted. It was actually a rather peaceful, if unsettling scene, and the weather looked unseasonably warm for April in Pueblo, Colorado. It was probably in the mid-to-high 60s, a perfect day for some target practice from the roof.

But that was secondary to another consideration: He and Duckie had really gotten into it the afternoon before, and that probably meant that she was going to be an even bigger pain in his ass, if such a thing were possible, and that was one thing he sure didn’t need. He had other things to think about, and he wasn’t happy that his mind had involuntarily pushed such matters to the back of his mind, leaving her as his main concern. Ryan decided then and there that he had to at least pacify her a bit so her could get back to the bigger issues of staying alive after leaving this place.

Even those whose experience with law enforcement was limited to primetime police dramas and unrealistic cop flicks were familiar with the concept of ‘good cop, bad cop.’ Basically, ‘bad cop’ scares the living shit out of the perp, using a high decibel level, screaming that they’re going to throw the book at them, tack on any extra charge they can think of, that they’re close friends with the district attorney and they can pull strings to make that sentence as long as possible (usually bullshit), and at worst, threats of physical violence that weren’t really going to happen. Then bad cop almost flies into a fake, rehearsed fit of rage until good cop comes in to restrain his mad dog, loose cannon partner, and then acts like the perp’s best friend, here to protect and take care of them, and guide their lost souls back to the true path of redemption. It was all an act and the best-known cliché in police work, yet it was still effective and the police still defaulted to it frequently when they needed results. Ryan had been there a time or two, usually playing good cop. He simply wasn’t ferocious enough to ever be bad cop. Until now, that is.

Good cop, bad cop was all for show. He had been bad cop last night for real, and hadn’t even realized he was doing it. And now, he had a biker chick in cell two who had no reason whatsoever not to become more problematic, and Ryan now had to fill the role of good cop just to smooth things over a bit to allow him to think and plan without her screaming in his face.

Coffee was as good a method as any for starters, and a common tactic of good cop was to walk in with coffee for the perp, just to establish a little trust. He didn’t know if that would work here, but it was certainly worth a try.

Ryan poured her a cup as well, carefully avoiding any coffee mug with a police-style design, especially the one that read “Cops do it Undercover.” Instead, he opted for a Denver Broncos mug, which seemed fairly neutral. He brought a bottle of creamer along and took it all to the cellblock. He walked in and sat down on the bench opposite her cell, as Duckie sat in self-righteous indignation, arms folded, her icy blue eyes burning a hole right through him.

“You want some coffee?”

“Fuck you.”

“Is that a yes or a no?”

“Just give me the fucking cup, Adam Twelve.”

Ryan had her stay seated while he placed the mug in front of the cell, backing away before letting her retrieve it. He still wasn’t a fool.

“So Lady, you take creamer?”

“Black only. Creamer’s for faggots and Stepford wives.”

“Have it your way. I’m not a homo, but I do like a little creamer.”

“You brought her, you cream her.”

“Very clever. You learn that one at Biker College?”

“There something you wanted, or are you just here to whack your dick while I watch?”

Duckie got up and turned around, putting on her t-shirt. Just before donning it, Ryan caught a glimpse of something that he had seen before, though never in person. It gave him at least one shot at establishing familiarity with her.

“So who was he?”

“Who was who?”

Ryan kept his voice calm and even, restraining himself from making a verbal demand that she stop being a belligerent bitch and a half. “The guy you fucked up? That tat just below the nape of your neck…the one of the heart with the knife going through it. That means that some guy tried to fuck you over and you beat the living shit out of him, am I right?”

“How the hell did you guess that?”

“I told you, you’re not the first biker I’ve ever dealt with. We have books and files on all sorts of shit about you guys. Every tat tends to mean something, and if we can identify them, that gives us at least some idea of what we’re dealing with. Some desk fucker from the FBI came out here a couple of years ago and gave us a boring lecture on that sort of thing. But apparently, you’ve jacked a dude up once or twice. Isn’t that tattoo a warning to all other guys that fucking with you means a first-class beating?”

“What the fuck is that to you?” Duckie’s impatience was evident.

“It might be helpful to know who I’m dealing with, if I’m to make the right decision as to what to do with you.”

That seemed to get her attention, but she rolled her shirt down and put on her jacket, covering that tattoo and most of her others, excepting the ones on her legs, clearly visible through her fishnets. “Some fuckwad from the Copperheads out of Salt Lake. At a rally, we fucked the shit out of each other but then he turned around and told me that I was just another piece of road trash and the next we fucked I’d be facing the wall like the the slut I am. I didn’t like that, so I fucked his shit up with a table lamp. His own people turned around and kicked the shit out of him for fucking up like that. The Widows and the Copperheads were pretty tight, and they didn’t want that prick fucking it all up. That’s how I earned my heart.”

“Uh-huh…small wonder you thought you could tool Officer Conyer’s ass, huh?”

Officer Megan Conyers was the one who busted Duckie eleven days before, and got a solid sock in the jaw for her troubles, which was still visible when she bought it the hard way at the barricade a few days later. But Duckie didn’t know who she was fucking with and proved to be no match for Megan in a fight, who proceeded to use her collapsible baton to bind her up and slam her to the ground before cuffing her as other bikers took off while other flashing lights approached out of the dark. It was only Megan’s boundless professionalism that kept her from beating Duckie into a formless mass of red pulp.

“From what she told me later, it’s a good thing she showed up. That guy you smacked around was a fat fuck twice your size, and he was getting up to snap you in half when she got to the scene.”

“I could have taken him. I would have torn his balls off and stuffed them right up his ass.”

“Yet you couldn’t take a woman even smaller than you. She really manhandled you, or at least that’s what we’ve all heard.”

“I could have fucked her up, too.”

Ryan thought about that, and didn’t find it pleasant. Megan Conyers was a good friend of his. They had never been partners and had certainly never been anything but buddies, but he liked her and respected her, and Ryan certainly believed she deserved better than to die the way she must have while this biker bitch was still on God’s green earth. “Why would you want to?”

“I don’t like pigs.”

“You don’t say. Before I leave this place, try to remember that this pig has to decide whether or not you die in that cell. Make sure I have a reason to make the right decision.”

“So either I play nice and kiss your cop ass or you’re going to let me rot in here? Is that what you’re saying?”

“It’s not that simple, but I’ll be more inclined to trust you enough to let you out of there if you can give me a cumulative five minutes where you aren’t acting like a rebellious fucking teenager. On another subject, I’m sorry that I made you skip dinner last night. I didn’t want to deal with you, but that’s no reason for you to just sit there and starve. I’m making myself some breakfast, and I’m bringing you some. I’ll be back in a minute.”

Ryan got up and began to head out. He heard her voice over his shoulder as he exited the cellblock.

“Thanks for the coffee.”

[Wrecking Ball]

OH damn, I love this!

[Ponyboy314]

“Is it any wonder I’m not crazy?
Is it any wonder I’m sane at all?
Is it any wonder I’ve got too much time on my hands?
Ticking away with my sanity,
I’ve got too much time on my hands…”

from Too Much Time on my Hands by Styx



Ryan hadn’t expected gratitude of any kind after handing Duckie her first cup of coffee in at least eleven days, but concealed his surprise when he received it. Instead he simply said, “You’re welcome.” And that was the end of that. He made himself breakfast, amounting to a couple of English muffins and some Quaker oatmeal, and brought Duckie the same. She couldn’t have been impressed by the fare but devoured it ravenously anyway, as she knew that there was no point in being picky. Ryan left her alone, hoping that she would catch on to the idea that not being a bitch all the time might increase her chances of ever setting foot outside of that cell.

He took up that Remington 7mm rifle and headed to the roof, once again with a couple of beers. He stuffed cotton in his ears again and began looking for targets. It was certainly slim pickings today. He couldn’t see but two within range and anything else was far enough away to constitute nothing but a waste of a perfectly good rifle round. Ryan cracked a beer open and slammed about a third of it in one go, hoping to loosen up a little and shake off the stress of the previous day and night. One of his targets began lumbering closer to the station, and once it appeared to be within two hundred yards or so, Ryan looked through his scope and tried to gauge the wind. He wasn’t letting this one go.

That was because this particular walking dead thing hit a little close to home. This one was a male, a teenager, and the jersey he wore showed him to be on the Zebulon Pike High School football team, the Mountaineers. He was white and not particularly big, meaning that, stereotypes aside, either this one was the quarterback or a big believer in team spirit. Ryan was willing to believe the former and sighted his scope right on the thing’s head, adjusting slightly to compensate for the light wind.

This one was going to be good. After all, years before, Ryan himself had gone to Zebulon Pike High School, and had clear memories of having nothing but contempt for jocks and their boundless egos. He also remembered a specific hatred for the quarterback, making it a pleasing thought that this walking corpse was probably the last quarterback that the Zebulon Pike Mountaineers would ever have.

Ryan smiled as he squeezed the trigger, and this time, he could clearly see where his shot impacted. It struck right underneath its right eye, and within a split second, not only had the top of its head been blown right off, but it actually had flown off intact and popped about five feet in the air. He had never seen a spectacle quite like that, and somehow felt fuller for the experience.

“Wow, what a sack by linebacker Ryan “Bad Mother Fucker” Beckett, number sixty-nine! The quarterback is toast! Looks like the Mountaineers lost six yards on that, making it 3rd and fourteen on their own twenty-five yard line. If the Mountaineers don’t pull off some magic on this down, they’re looking at a punt, and with this kind of field position…” Ryan allowed his own self-congratulations to drift. It had been an awesome shot to the tune of Sergeant York reborn, and still, the trigger was becoming ever easier to squeeze. When he had to go back out there into enemy territory, he at least knew that dropping these things wouldn’t be a problem for his psyche.

Ryan polished off his beer and opened the other as he waited for another target to get just a little bit closer. With the unaided eye, he watched the semi-human form stagger this way and that, slowly coming within his range. Once it did, he raised his rifle and centered his scope on its head, but it took him a second to realize just how short this one was, and he was pretty sure it wasn’t a midget.

What he saw did make him blink a few times and slow his breathing. It was a child, a little girl who looked like she had made it to her sixth birthday but not her seventh. She looked almost like the classic version of a girl her age, as she wore a blood-stained pink dress, pink tennis shoes, and what appeared to be white socks, and as if to really ram the point home, there appeared to be a ribbon, a red one, in her hair. From what he could see, it looked like the one that got her had bitten her neck, and badly, as the amount of dried blood that stained her dress was considerable. She didn’t make it far before dying of either blood loss or the undead virus (or whatever it was, Ryan was no scientist), but had gotten far enough away that her attacker did not catch up to her and finish what it had started. That meant that she had at least lived a few minutes after the thing had torn part of her neck away. Ryan had no children, and never thought one way or the other about them. Years earlier, when he had begun planning his life, neither relationships nor children really factored into it, and he regarded both as a ‘take it as it comes’ issue.

Ryan clicked the safety on his rifle and recovered it. He couldn’t really say why, but he just couldn’t do this one. He finished his beer and sat in silence for a few minutes, unable to make much sense of the many thoughts that had infiltrated his mind, but sometime after, he finally forced himself to act. The dead girl was still in range, and Ryan raised his rifle and blew her head to pieces. In the end, he could do it, but he certainly wasn’t going to take the same joy in it that he had with the “quarterback.”

This one was hard, but allowing that poor child’s body to continue to wander the earth was something he just couldn’t bear. Ryan set his rifle down and just stared off into the world, feeling suddenly very alone. True, he did have company downstairs in the cellblock, but it was hardly the kind of company any reasonable person would want. And out there, somewhere on this dying earth, was a place he would soon head towards, in what would probably prove to be a futile gesture at staying alive. He would probably not find anything out there but more death and desolation, more ghost towns and stumbling cannibals. It was a dead world and soon, he would not be able to hide from it any longer.

That poor little girl. Were her parents terrified, wondering where in the hell she was the day she died? Were they both already dead when it happened? Was she trying desperately to get home when she was attacked? Being so young, did she recognize the thing for what it was? Had the thing that killed her actually been her mother or father, or teacher or babysitter? It all came back to the same terrible thought: it didn’t really matter how it happened. That poor kid spent her last minutes on earth in agony and utter terror before a terrible death took the many decades of life she might have still had. Despite his efforts, Ryan imagined that little girl curled by the fence in someone’s yard, probably crying for her mother, unable to comprehend what the world was becoming, and probably completely unaware that her young life was about to end, and worse, that the end of her life would not mean the end of her.

It was no way for anyone to die, but certainly not some poor little girl who never had a chance once these things got their hands on her.

Ryan pitched his beer cans over the side in disgust and went back down. He had had enough of this game for a while.

He didn’t have contact with Duckie again until late afternoon, after feeding himself and then her. He had spent the intervening time sitting in the desk sergeant’s chair, trying to cope with the horror of seeing that poor child who, without his aim, would have been doomed to wander the world without a soul until nature finally took her dead body back. Thoughts of finding safety and plans concerning Duckie were pushed out of his mind, their place taken by that little girl who had ruined his love for the game that had been the high point of his otherwise drab days.

When he brought Duckie her dinner, such as it was, she repeated the questions she had asked whenever he went to the roof.

“And how many today?”

“How many shots did you hear?”

“Two. That means two dead fuckers, right?”

“Yeah, two dead fuckers, that’s right.”

“I don’t suppose any of them were wearing my colors, were they?”

“Is pink your color?”

“Uh, no. Why in the fuck would you ask me that?”

“Then no, neither of them were wearing your colors, Lady.”

[by-the-throat]

Grinding them out, you are a machine my friend.

The last chapter has been my favorite; wrestling with the moral quandry of shooting a kid (zombie) is never easy and I think you dealt with it well. The contrast between the ol' Columbine glee of shooting the quarterback and the hand wringing over the girl made for an interesting chapter.

[Ponyboy314]

“Oh man, this is awesome,
Loading up a shotgun,
Bury me in cash,
In a big black coffin…”

From Rob the Prez-o-dent by That Handsome Devil



Ryan left the cellblock, not wanting to spill his guts about how seeing a little walking dead girl had drained the fun and life out of him for the time being. What he did not yet know was whether or not he would be able to go on the roof and snipe again, or if it was just that little girl that stung him. Perhaps he would find out the next day, if he could at least bring himself to give it another go. That was a decision for another time.

Still, Ryan did have other concerns at the moment. When the Captain asked for a volunteer to head back to the station and gather whatever ammo was left, Ryan reluctantly volunteered for the assignment, since no one else was jumping at the chance and no one apparently wanted to run the risk of getting smashed by panicked locals driving like madness trying to get away from the chaos, nor did anyone really want to get trapped by a horde of those things without any fellow officers to help them. For those reasons, Ryan didn’t want to go either, but someone had to. He had been ordered to get on dispatch and report in to let them know he’d made it to the station, but when he did, he only heard the horrible sounds of his friends dying, and repeated attempts to raise someone, anyone on the radio had all failed. Sometimes he kicked himself for not going back and at least seeing for himself, and wondered if that made him a coward. Other times, he believed that staying was the only smart thing to do since the barricade had been overrun and the station was the place where anyone who made it out was sure to come. Of course, none did.

But he had tried to take an accounting of what remained in the station’s armory, but in the days after Pueblo had been overrun, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He had checked out what was available in the evidence room, but he had not been in the armory yet. But if he was going to go back out into that world soon, Ryan had to at least know what was at his disposal. He forced himself to punch the door code and walked in, knowing that there wasn’t going to be much left.

The armory looked like the last few minutes of a gun store’s ‘going out of business’ sale. The rifle racks once held a large number of weapons, but almost all of those were now back at the barricades, covered in the dried blood of those who died there. There had once been nearly a dozen Remington 870 shotguns, and his own was still lying on the desk in the conference room, but in the armory, only one remained, and a quick look of the remaining store of 12-gauge shot shells and slugs showed only a dozen or so boxes of five shells each, and if he ran into too many of them out there, those would not get him far. Still, he knew they were worth taking. Every round was likely to save his life.

There had also been seven or eight M4A1 Carbines of the same type he had carried in Iraq, but the state police presence in Pueblo hadn’t maintained a SWAT team or anything of the like, so the carbines had little in the way of tactical accessories, but the carbines were all gone. Completing the station’s heavy firepower were nine or ten M16 assault rifles, some of which had been prehistoric A1 models, the same as his father and uncle had lugged around Vietnam, and a few A2 models, both of which had been dumped off on law enforcement agencies all over America (like his own, for instance) when the military began transitioning to the A4. But the A2 was quite familiar to him, as he had trained on one in the Navy and the grunt riflemen in his marine platoon had used it. He certainly knew his way around it, that was for sure, which was fortunate, since a single M16A2 was all that was left, just that and that Remington 870. Perhaps it was adequate for a single person, if there was any ammo for the M16 that is.

The drawers under the rifle racks had been the storage area for ammunition, but Ryan was not heartened by what he found. Only eleven M16 magazines remained, all fully loaded, but beyond that, there weren’t but three more boxes of 5.56 rounds, each box holding twenty. That wasn’t much, considering that he didn’t know how many he would have to fight before finding someplace else to lay low for a while. He knew from reports from other towns, and from Pueblo itself, that gun stores had been hard hit during the chaos, and more than one store owner had been shot at for his stock, while others had been forced to kill looters attempting to break in. There was a station of the Pueblo Police Department about two miles south of his own, but that put him in an area that he knew was fairly infested and containing more than its share of car wrecks. And in any event, he doubted that someone just left the armory door open out of professional courtesy.

No, what he had on hand was it.

But he had a peek around the evidence room, which of course had provided him his Remington 7mm rifle, and there were at least two other firearms in there that could be of use, both being pistols. One resulted from a bust that he himself had made. He had pulled over a speeder one fine afternoon about three or four months earlier, and a quick run of the plates had shown the car to be hot. He cuffed the guy and later found out that he was a two-timer with a bag of warrants out on him, and was being hunted by no less than the DEA. His trunk had contained a couple of bags of uncut cocaine and one of heroin, and a revolver was found under his seat, and Ryan was certainly glad in retrospect that the dumbass decided to give up rather than pull it on him. It was (appropriately enough) a Smith and Wesson Model 28, nicknamed the Highway Patrolman, a name that obviously tickled Ryan more than a little. It was loaded of course, packed in a beat-up old leather holster, with one box of hollow points for it, though the box was half empty. But the good part was that the armory had a few boxes of .357 magnum rounds, since a couple of the older guys at the station carried them as their duty weapons.

That being said, Ryan was less than pleased that the one gun that could truly save his hide was a revolver. His carry weapon was the standard issue Beretta 92, but of course, most of the 9mm rounds had already been used up at the barricade, and there weren’t but four boxes left in the armory, and one of them was barely half full. But fifteen rounds could easily mean fifteen dead cannibals down for the count, but the six rounds that Highway Patrolman held wouldn’t get him far if he was cornered by a number of them, especially considering that it would take a few seconds to reload it and the easiest thing to do when rushed was to drop a round while trying to load a revolver. And he could personally attest to the fact that a 9mm was mediocre against people but perfectly adequate to blow through the skull of one of those things outside, but the .357 was excessive. It couldn’t carry enough rounds, reloading took too long, and a beast like a Highway Patrolman against the dead was like calling in an air strike on an enemy latrine.

For obvious reasons, there were several more guns in the evidence room, so many that a foolish person would walk in and think that they had just hit paydirt, until they noticed that confiscating a firearm did not mean that a bunch of boxes of ammo would come with it. Most of the guns in the evidence room were hunting rifles and shotguns with little or no ammo, usually just what was in the weapon when the previous owner got pinched. Apart from the .357 from his old bust, there was only one other gun with even a reasonable amount of rounds to go with it.

In a bag on one of the shelves was a 9mm Browning Hi-Power, and in another bag stapled to it with an identical case number were three magazines, all fully loaded. Next to that was a plastic holster, designed specifically for a Hi-Power, and of course, in addition to the case number on the bags was the name of the perpetrator. The fact that the holster and magazines were on the offender but the weapon was found a few yards away was all that kept a charge of carrying a concealed weapon from being tacked on. That being said, it didn’t take a supercop to know that the gun and holster went together. Not that it really mattered. A clever defense attorney could find a way around a concealed weapons violation if the weapon simply wasn’t concealed on the perp at the time of the bust, regardless of whether or not the perp had a holster and magazines for it. Besides, it hardly mattered anyway. The offender in question had already been charged with assaulting a police officer, drunk and disorderly, and possession of marijuana, and with two felony convictions already, this time a conviction meant going up for the long haul, and the evidence for all three charges was ironclad, and as if all that wasn’t enough, prosecutors, judges, and juries did not usually look kindly on defendants like these.

In this particular case, the defendant’s name was Daphne Lewis.

[ForgeCorvus]

great story so far, interesting and damaged characters.

More please when you get a chance!

Ponyboy writes damaged very well........which does make me wonder if hes some kind of head-shrinker in RL


And MOAR please

[Wrecking Ball]

MOAR pl0x.

[Ponyboy314]

“We’re running with the shadows of the night,
So baby take my hand you’ll be all right,
Surrender all your dreams to me tonight,
They’ll come true in the end…”

From Shadows of the Night by Pat Benatar



After seeing what was at his disposal in terms of weapons and ammunition, Ryan concluded that his chances of survival were probably not good, and topped this off with the belief that if he tore across country in a deuce-and-a-half fully loaded with firepower, medical supplies, food, clothes, and so on, his chances really wouldn’t be much better. It simply wasn’t a world in which anyone could waste much time thinking about the long term anymore. There seemed little point in thinking in terms of months or years if the likely life expectancy could be measured in days, or at best, weeks. It did give him cold comfort to know that what he was taking was as good as he had any right to expect, but it still didn’t help to know that the reason that his supply of weapons and ammunition was sufficient that he would probably be dead soon anyway, regardless of what he was packing. But out there, at least he would have a chance of finding food, and would have the firepower to protect himself as he searched for it. In the station, when the food ran out, firepower wouldn’t mean a damned thing. In other words, leaving the station meant going back out there and probably not living long, but staying in the station meant certain death after the food ran out, which within ten or twelve days, it would.

And then Ryan began to think about whether or not he wanted to stay in the station for all of those ten or twelve days. When should he leave? When the food was finally gone? How smart would it be to take to the road if he was already out of food? Wouldn’t it be smarter to leave a few days earlier, so that he could at least take some with him? And what about Duckie? If she had pissed him off to the point that he was leaving her in that cell, would he spare any food for her, and would it matter if he did, considering that starvation or dehydration would kill her soon enough anyway? And if he let her out, would he let her have any of it, or would he believe that the simply act of letting her out was as much courtesy as she could expect from him?

One way or another, the one conclusion that he could not escape is that he needed to take at least some food when he left. Finding it would be dangerous and he needed what he could get. Equally inescapable was the fact that he would have to leave earlier, and he still had no idea where he was going. Since he had no source of information whatsoever about what the roads or towns looked like, or what areas had already been looted within an inch of their lives, it probably didn’t matter anyway. A few days worth of food would at least keep him alive, perhaps long enough to find more, and possibly another place to hole up for a time. As far as what would happen to Duckie, that was her problem. He doubted that she would care much about what happened to him.

Among other things, Ryan was slowly realizing how much he missed the things he had totally taken for granted only a couple of weeks earlier. But aside from the decadent convenience of internet, cell phones, and pizza that could get to someone’s house faster than the police at time, there was one thing he hadn’t even realized he missed until that day. He had at least been able to climb to the roof and see the sky, which those confined for too long tend to miss, but he had not seen the stars since locking himself inside from the dead.

After the sun went down, Ryan, leaving his Remington hunting rifle behind, climbed to the roof and sat down in that same metal folding chair, with the usual two beers in hand. The stars and the rest of the night sky looked unspectacular before from the streets of Pueblo, but now, there were no longer any other lights to compete with the stars. Pueblo was dark, almost completely so. Ryan could see a couple of building in the distance with lights on, and he did allow himself to believe for a second that someone was still alive out there, but the power was off, he knew that, and these were almost certainly just buildings that operated on a solar backup, just like his station did. No, he and Duckie were alone in this dead town.

But the lack of artificial light had allowed the night sky to shine in all its natural brilliance, and he was unconsciously glad that the end of the world couldn’t touch that, even though he had never cared about such things before. It almost made him cry, but he choked it back. Still, the message was clear: the stars were still shining after the end of the world, and when Ryan finally bought it, which probably would not be long, they would still keep shining. Never in the whole of his life did he feel so small.

Ryan climbed back downstairs, not able to tolerate the scene anymore. The darkness concealed the blood and bodies, the walking dead and twisted car wrecks, and he didn’t want to think about that right now, not with so much else going on. This was not his best day, and he began to fear what awaited him out there when there was no longer a state police station in which to hide.

That night, of course, Ryan dreamt. But this one was different, and there did not appear to be any haze around the edges, as was so common in dreams. This one was sharp as a knife, as though he was now dreaming in high def. It was as though the darkest thoughts possible were beginning to circle him like sharks circle a bleeding and thrashing tarpon.

In this dream, Ryan was walking down the halls of his station, and nothing seemed or felt out of place. His dreaming mind did not let on that the dead had slaughtered the living or that he was almost alone on earth. In his mind, everything was okay. True, he was all alone in his station, but that had happened more than once in reality. This dream was of a world, or at least of a day, in which the normalcy of the old world came back to him.

Ryan went about his business in the station, filling out this or filing that, but then turned down towards the cellblock to make sure the prisoners weren’t getting too rowdy or slapping each other around. It was all routine, nothing out of the ordinary here. Please move along.

But what did surprise him is that the cells were empty, and back in the real world, they never had been. There was always some redneck sleeping off his last date with Wild Turkey, or a bruised and bloodied biker who picked a fight with the wrong guy and so on, but this time, from where he stood, all were empty, or at least appeared so.

In his dream, Ryan called out to see if anyone knew where the prisoners had gone, but no one answered. He headed down the block, checking each cell and indeed, there wasn’t a speck of life in any of them, until he got to the last one, and the door was open. He walked up to it with his hand on his weapon until he was greeted by a gothic spectacle.

Inside the cell was Duckie, sitting on her bunk, dressed in biker slut chic as always. But in her arms was a little girl, probably six, wearing a blood-stained pink dress with a chunk missing from her neck. She was dead, but Duckie was cradling her as though it were her own child.

A frozen Ryan then watched as Duckie raised her head, showing that her face was gray and rotting, but she spoke, and her voice was that of someone trying to speak even though their mouth was full, and as she did, blood poured from her lips as she spoke each syllable.

“So Pig, don't you want to hold our child?”

Ryan was jolted out of his dream as he sat bolt upright, screaming a banshee-like wail that filled every room in the station. His hand slapped his waist where his weapon would be until he realized that he was back in the real world and the grotesque scene was left behind in the world of nightmares. Still, his head was pounding, his ears rang from the volume of his own screaming, and he was sweating so much that his eyes were stinging.

It took a few seconds before he was fully awake, but the image of Duckie and that little dead girl was not in a hurry to fade from his mind. Still sweating, still quivering, and still scared to death, he got out of his bunk and headed towards the cellblock, wearing only his boxers and a blue t-shirt with “Navy” in bold gold letters on the front. All the way there, he could hear Duckie yelling for him, though he didn’t even try to discern what she was saying. After he reached the cells, she got up and clasped her hands around the bars, demanding to know what was happening.

“What the fuck was that? What’s going on?”

“Lady?”

“What is it?”

“When I leave this place, I’m letting you go.”

[trevor3433]

Look Ponyboy, I'm all for reading your work but with your speedy updates your not giving me any time to read your old stuff!!!

jk. Keep 'em coming!!!!!