Chet & Floyd vs. The Apocalypse: Volume 1 Read online

  Chet had to admit that Floyd was onto something. It didn’t matter too much to Chet that he was wrong. Not this time. Since it meant so much credit to his own survival. Usually he would rather take a bullet then be wrong. Chet smiled, “Maybe you’re growing as a person,” he thought.

  When securing the store, they left two small rectangular openings in the front door, each about the size of a mailbox. The rest was nailed, fastened, locked and bolted. They even went to the extent of pouring a good amount of homemade concrete at the base of the door. Nothing was taking this out. The windows were pretty well closed off, but people would have better luck coming through those. They never did though. They always tried for the door.

  Chet looked out of his rectangle. His was the one on the left, which always annoyed him a little. Floyd got the one on the right since had the shotgun. Because both of them were right-handed, Chet was at a disadvantage when marauders attacked. He placated his annoyance with the virtue of meeting his friend half-way. Chet was proud of his ability to compromise.

  “I was wondering if you could think of any zombie movie that had people pour concrete at the base of the door,” Chet said.

  “What are you talking about?” Floyd said.

  “I can’t think of any. That was my idea. You have to admit that I didn’t steal that from anyone else.”

  “Could you please pay attention to what’s going on? I think we have more pressing issues.” Floyd nodded to the clamor outside.

  Chet looked out his rectangle and saw a flat bed truck rolled up onto the sidewalk in front of the store. There were six men, two which were holding onto the woman who was screaming and trashing.

  “See her moving? I don’t think she ever thought we were going to kill her,” Floyd said, looking annoyed.

  “They all have guns,” Chet said. “We only have one gun. How do you think they find enough gas to run a truck that big?”

  “Maybe we can catch one of them and find out. We could use more fuel for the Skull Beetle,” Floyd said. The men outside were talking to each other and gesturing to the woman and the store. She was telling the men about Chet and Floyd being inside and about Floyd’s gun.

  “I don’t think they have bullets for those guns,” Chet said.

  “I don’t think so either.” Floyd listened to the woman for a moment then started. “Look at that Chet!”

  Chet had seen it at the same time Floyd did. They marveled as a Golden Retriever jumped out of the truck’s cab and padded over to the woman, who kicked at it as it tried to smell her.

  “I haven’t seen one of those in a long time,” Chet said.

  One of the men took a tire iron from the back of the truck and hit the woman over the head with it. Hard. Her body fell limp. One more hit to the head, and the man nonchalantly threw the iron back onto the truck. The woman quivered for a few moments and died.

  “I think we have some cannibals here Chet,” Floyd said.

  Chet jumped backwards and threw his hands in the air. “This is exactly what’s wrong with us Floyd. Did you see how they did that? They didn’t have to talk about it or feel conflicted about it. They just smacked her over the head and got done with it. What is wrong with us? We have no business being alive. We could learn something from them Floyd. We really could.”

  The men dragged the woman’s body, and together they heaved her onto the bed of the truck. One of them went about the business of strapping her in place so she wouldn’t bounce off as they went down the road.

  “Do you think they’ll leave us alone?” Floyd asked.

  “Probably not,” Chet said. “If they are anything like anybody nowadays they’ll think were holed up in here because we have something. They’ll especially think it when they find out how well this place is locked up.”

  “We don’t have anything,” Floyd said.

  “Well the jokes on them then,” Chet said and smiled. “Do you think they’ve seen us yet?”

  “I don’t think so. Let’s hang back.” Floyd and Chet pulled back a bit from the front door openings and peered through a couple peepholes they drilled in the walls. After the men had secured the woman to the bed of the truck, they leaned against the vehicle and stared at the tobacco store. One of the men, a tall, swarthy looking fellow whose entire wardrobe consisted of leather, shouted at the store.

  “I know you are watching me. You may as well tell me what you’re hiding in there. Give us our fair share, and we’ll leave you alone. Believe me you had better give us enough, or we’ll have to get in there and take what’s owed. Don’t be stingy now. Act as if your lives depended on it.”

  “We don’t have anything in here. There is nothing. No food or water. We have less than you. You should give us our share of whatever you have on the truck,” Chet said.

  “I could cut the woman’s legs off from the knees down and shove them through the holes you have cut in the door,” the leather clad man said, smiling. His compatriots laughed. “That’s not really what you meant though, was it?”

  “Not really,” Chet said. Floyd punched him in the shoulder. “What the hell Floyd!”

  “You’re making us look like a couple of jerks,” Floyd said.

  “You’re not saying anything. One of us has to say something.”

  “Say something smarter,” Floyd said. Chet held up his hands in front of him in a calming gesture. He put his mouth back up to the peephole.

  “Hey! Just kidding before. We have some great stuff in here. We have water and a lot of it. We have a ton of food. All these canned goods are so awesome. I have been stuffing myself for days. I can also tell you that this tobacconist had a lot of great cigars that I just can’t seem to stop puffing on. I am in Shangri-La here you guys. This is my heaven. You should really come over here and check it out.” Chet looked back through the hole. The men were chuckling.

  “You are full of crud buddy. You obviously don’t live around here, but we do. That place has been picked clean for as long as I can remember. It was just about stripped the day the world went up in smoke. When the destruction happened and people knew there wouldn’t be another tobacco crop, they went nuts for their smokes.” The leather man said it, and Chet knew it to be true. He had been one of them. The people looted the liquor and cigar stores en masse to stock up on items that they would probably never see again.

  “I’ve got something real good in here for you. Come and get it,” Chet said.

  “What do you have planned?” Floyd whispered.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What are you going to do when they come over here?”

  “I already said I don’t know Floyd,” Chet said. “Do I have to think of everything?”

  “I will come in there if you don’t come out. You can count on that,” the leather-clad man said. “But it seems like we have ourselves enough to eat for a day or two.” He slapped the thigh of the dead woman. Her body jiggled from the blow. “I could leave a couple sentries here to watch you and keep you safe inside until we get hungry and come back for you.”

  “Not a bad idea.” Chet yelled through the peephole.

  “It is but it’s not what we’re going to do. We’re going to come in there right now and find out what your hiding, take it, kill you, throw you on the back of the truck next to your woman and have ourselves a big old barbeque.” The leather-clad man’s group whooped at the suggestion. They broke apart and walked toward and around the store.“We have a gun,” Chet yelled. The men kept coming.

  “Do you have any bullets?” The leather clad man asked as he sauntered up to the front door.

  “What should I tell him?” Chet whispered to Floyd.

  “Tell him yes,” Floyd said.

  “Yeah we have bullets,” Chet said.

  “You had better use them,” the leather-clad man said. He had walked all the way up to the rectangle openings, put his face close and looked around the room. His view of the empty, ransacked tobacconist shop was obliterated by the view of a brick as Floyd smashed him dire
ctly between the eyes. The leather man fell flat backwards. Chet and Floyd heard his gang smashing the fortified windows and back entrance.

  One of the men, a smallish squat one went back to their leader and kneeled down, checking his bloodied face. He gave a yelp as a small metal object smacked him in the forehead. The blonde rubbed his head as and wiped at a small trickle of blood that ran down a tiny cut. He looked at the door annoyed.

  “Got him!” Chet yelled to Floyd, who was at the back door making sure they were holding.

  “Got him with what? Oh, no. No. No. No. Chet you are not going to use those darn ninja stars again.” Floyd shook his head and sighed.

  “What do you mean? These things are awesome!” Chet said, brandishing a throwing star and posing as if for a movie poster. “This one looks like a wave.”

  “Those things are worthless.”

  “They are not!”

  “They totally are!” Floyd said. “Since we found those things a month ago, I’ve had to watch you prance around every day, pretending to be the next Bruce Leroy. If they were worth anything, somebody else would have taken them. They aren’t real throwing stars. They are cheap metal knockoffs. They aren’t even sharp.”

  “Watch this.” Chet said and sent the throwing star at top speed out of the left opening. The star bounced off the blonde’s forehead again, knocking him backwards. A torrent of curse words filled the air.

  “I have to admit your aim is impressive,” Floyd said. “But all you’re doing is pissing them off.”

  “It’s worked before,” Chet said.

  “We’re running out of time for that,” Floyd said. “Sometimes people leave us alone because you annoy them with those things, they’ve thought it too much of a bother. After all, that must totally sting.”

  “You bet it does,” Chet said, watching the squat blonde hold his head in his hands.

  “That being what it is, we are constantly getting closer and closer to there being no food at all for anybody. No commodities. Nothing. Sooner or later we will be worth the bother. If we were the last morsel of food on the planet, someone would be tearing their way in here tooth and nail. It wouldn’t matter how many shurikens you bounced off their head.

  “Words!” Chet screeched. Floyd always thought Chet got a little scary when they were in the midst of violence. There was something really off about the guy. Like he was barely hanging on. “I am a samurai! Your simple words mean nothing to a man of the way. I wrote the Blue Cliff Record. I have stood in midst of The Great Wave off Kanagawa. I have played Dynasty Warriors 3 on the PlayStation until my hands bled.”

  “Samurai didn’t use shuriken,” Floyd said. “Ninjas used them against the samurai. It was beneath the samurai to use such a weapon. Throwing stars have no honor.”

  Chet gave Floyd a pitying look. “You just don’t know anything about samurai Floyd. I will have to teach you someday.” The sound of splintering wood came from the back of the store. “Do you think we’re in for trouble?”

  “How many of those things do you have?” Floyd asked. The worried look on his face that gave Chet the answer he needed.

  “Plenty. About half a backpack full,” Chet said. “Enough to annoy-urai them for a bit. Let me know when they start breaking through the back.”

  “Will do,” Floyd said. Chet went back to the front door. The blonde man was now standing and rubbing his head as he held on to the truck. Chet threw a star that bounced off the man’s ankle. He crumpled in a heap.

  He screamed at Chet while clutching his ankle. “YOU SON OF A B…AAAAG!” He didn’t get the curse out as another star hit him right in the front teeth. Or rather, where his front teeth were a second before the impact of cheap metal sent them spinning into the street.

  Chapter - 4

  “I refuse to say die Floyd,” Chet said. The now toothless man was lying in the gutter, groaning.

  Where it was relatively boring at the front of the old tobacco store, it was a Mardi-Gras size riot at the back. The remaining men were tearing into the back door and windows, trying to get inside.

  “I don’t think you have much say in the matter,” Floyd said. He was pointing his sawed off shotgun at the back door. He didn’t look to Chet like he had much of a plan.

  “I think we do Floyd. Don’t be such a quitter,” Chet said. “We have had a long relationship, and I don’t want to end out friendship at such a time as this.”

  “Are you coming up with a way we can get out of here without ending up with on a spit? I would really like to hear what you have in mind,” Floyd said. Chet seemed oblivious to the impending onslaught. Floyd didn’t like the look in his eye, as it usually meant that Chet was going to give some sort of speech. He was right.

  “I have far greater worries then our current situation,” Chet said. He was walked over to where Floyd was waiting at the back door and crossed his arms. A splinter of plywood landed at his feet where some smashing implement was whittling away at their fortifications.

  “Do they have a sledgehammer?” Floyd asked.

  “I am worried about our friendship, and all you can think about are basic hand tools. You are so negative lately. I don’t know what to do with you. You’re always crying about something. It’s hard for me Floyd. It’s hard for me because when you spend time with another person, you tend to take on that person’s mannerisms a bit. There is no helping it. Would you agree?” Chet asked.

  “I would,” Floyd said. And arm reached through a hole in the back window to unhook the latch lock. Floyd threw a piece of brick at the arm right above the elbow. The man shrieked, cursed and quickly withdrew his arm.

  “I need you to be more positive Floyd. I need some good feedback from you, or I don’t think we can be friends anymore.”

  “Are you sure about that Chet? I think you have pretty good need for me right now,” Floyd said, picking up another rock.

  “Let’s try a little exercise,” Chet said. “I think for the next thirty minutes the only things we are allowed to say are positive or complimentary. Nothing negative is allowed. We really need to move our chi in the right direction.” A flaming wad of brush was shoved through the hole in the back door. To Floyd’s astonishment, Chet didn’t even seem to notice. The room was quickly filling up with smoke, and the debris was lighting so fast you would have thought the place was doused with lighter fluid. Chet’s right shoe caught on fire, but he would only stare at Floyd.

  “Fine Chet. I am positive that we are about to burn to death, and I would like to compliment you on your ability to catch fire.”

  “A little sarcastic, but a start is a start.” Chet calmly took off his flaming shoe and threw it in a corner. “I think we need to get out of here.” Floyd was thinking the same thing when he smelled it. That lovely, unmistakable odor wafted into his nostrils as clear as day.

  “Chet! Do you smell it? Is that what I think it is?” Floyd said. Chet inhaled deeply and immediately doubled over in a coughing fit. Floyd rolled his eyes and followed his nose to the locked tobacco cabinets against the far walls.

  “There’s nothing in there,” Chet said, coughing. “You’re just smelling the wood burning. This was a waste of time”

  “Where’s your power of positive thinking?” Floyd asked. He kicked in the false wall in one of the cabinets. It revealed boxes of cigars and bags full of pipe tobacco.

  “Sweet mercy,” Chet said. His lungs hurt too badly to say anything else. He felt sick from the smoke, and his eyes teared up painfully. “I think this is it Floyd. I don’t like the thought of being eaten. I hope I carry some weird disease that only my biology can tolerate but gives those that ingest me hallucinations and a torrent of painful diarrhea.”

  “One can only hope,” Floyd said. He was ripping out cigars and tobacco and throwing them in the center of the room. The burning cigars he threw in a far corner. “In the meantime, why don’t you take down that extinguisher and put out the fire.”

  Chet remembered the industrial grade extinguisher they had fou
nd under a pile of rubble in the apartment above the tobacco store. Although he had thought it odd at the time that the place would have such a thing, he would have been a little paranoid about fire too, if his whole livelihood revolved around something combustible.

  “Why didn’t you remind me about that earlier?” Chet said.

  “I don’t like being chastised,” Floyd said. He leaned over a burning cabinet door, lit a Rocky Patel Vintage and smiled. He shoved himself backwards as Chet sprayed extinguisher on everything smoldering or burning. “Watch the tobacco.”

  The tank emptied quickly and Chet was pleased that most of the fire was out or smoldering. He chucked the tank against a wet wall where it thudded heavily. Then came the least expected noise. Silence.

  “They must have gone,” Floyd said, blowing a thick wad of smoke into the ceiling. Chet didn’t have the indecency to point out that Floyd was failing miserably at blowing smoke rings. No matter how much time Chet tried to work with him on it, the trick never caught on. “They’re probably going to come back with more people. They think we’ll be passed out from the smoke or already cooked. Easy pickings.”

  “There’s nobody out front,” Chet said. “All gone. The truck’s gone and that woman is too. It’s kind of ironic.”

  “What?”

  “We took her from her family to eat her. We let her go. She still gets eaten. Her family will think we did it.” Chet smiled.

  “That’s not funny Chet,” Floyd said.

  “It’s not my fault that irony is such a clever thing, no matter how macabre.”

  “‘Macabre’ is just a fancy word that keeps a person from sounding like a sick pervert,” Floyd said.

  “Are you calling me a pervert, Floydykins? Be careful. You might just hurt my feelings.” Chet picked through some of the cigars. “Oh, snap. Check this out.” Chet produced a straight briar pipe from the pile of tobacco. He brushed off the wood and blew through the bit.