REWRITTEN 6/26/16

Road Trip Part Two

I didn't actually think the zombie apocalypse was the terrible, wrenching tragedy that literature portrayed it to be. Oh no, lots of people were dying in horrible painful ways. Lots of people had died in horrible, painful ways even before shit hit the fan. No major cities, electricity, or Internet? The horror! Welcome to the 1900s, people. The whole dead coming back to eat us thing wasn't much different from any other natural disaster, war, or shit storm, either.

Looking out the window of the police car, I could see how the world was beginning to revert back, slowly, to the time before industrialization. The snow had collected in giant piles all over the place and then started to melt in the weeks that passed, eroding away the concrete with no one to salt it.

I could picture what it would look like in spring, and I smiled. Maybe I was cold, but I'd never liked the cities and couldn't wait to see them crumble away and be replaced by prairie and trees.

In my time, there was less than .01% of the natural prairie left in the state of Iowa. Maybe we would see the return of that prairie as the years passed. Maybe there would be fields of sweeping grass waving in the breeze underneath a clear, unpolluted sky. The forests would grow wild, uncultured, and expand to claim the land and cities, and maybe the water would slowly purify itself and turn blue again.

Maybe it would look like my home, the Elf Realm.

"Eyes on the road," Onyx snapped, smacking me on the shoulder and jerking me out of my odd reverie. I returned to my scattered senses just in time to realize that we'd drifted all the way over the white line and were about to collide with a tangled wreck of two cars.

Shit.

I wrenched on the steering wheel, white knuckled, and the tires squealed as we swerved violently back towards the other lane, avoiding the wreck by inches. I was glad for once that I'd opted to live dangerously and not wear my seatbelt, because if I'd had that thing buckled, I probably would've lost my head.

"Sorry," I said awkwardly, breath shaking out of me. I pressed down on the brakes until the car slowed to a more reasonable speed. We'd left the downtown behind and were cruising down the interstate, stalled and rusted vehicles lined up in half the lanes leading away from the city.

"Stop the car," Onyx ordered. "You're going to get us killed. We'll walk from here."

I stopped right in the middle of the lane, not even bothering to pull onto the shoulder. An overturned trunk lay right beside us, a puddle of oil underneath it. "Where are we even going?" I asked as I got out of the car, following Onyx as she strode confidently down the battered and cracked road.

She froze in her tracks, shrugging after she thought about it for a moment. "I don't know. That's your job."

"This was your idea," I reminded her.

"You went along with it."

"That doesn't make it my responsibility!" I threw my arms in the air, my angry words disturbing a cloud of roosting birds in a nearby copse of trees.

Onyx shrugged again and kicked at a rock. It skittered off the road and disappeared into a clump of snow. "Not my division."

I narrowed my eyes at her. Oh, she did not just pull that.

Suddenly, a squat, hulking building rose out of the stark, broken skyline of the smoky buildings in front of us, framed by the snow white sky. Dark blue letters marched across its front, reading Walmart. I stared at it in confusion. We'd travelled much further than I'd realized, almost all the way out to the city of Coralville. If the Walmart was right in front of us, then the Costco would be nearby as well, along with the Coralridge Mall.

Awesome, I thought even as I scratched at the back of my head in puzzlement. How the fuck had we gotten out here?

"Onyx, I think I'm going crazy. How did we get here?"

"Are you kidding me right now?" Onyx snapped, glancing over her shoulder and sounding a little scared. "Why the fuck did I let you drive if you can't even remember how we got here?"

I shrugged apologetically. "I lose time occasionally. There was this one time, at school, when I was at the top of a staircase, and then I was suddenly at the bottom, and I had no idea how I'd gotten there. It was weird."

"I'm surprised we didn't lose our lives," she grumbled under her breath, though she definitely intended for me to hear her.

"Fine! Then you can fucking drive on the way back!" I yelled, my temper and rage boiling up over the edges of the pot without warning.

"I will!" she shouted back, spinning around so she could stalk over and shove her face in mine.

I snarled, fists clenching and preparing to snap up and clock her under the chin. Then I would slam my other hand into her stomach and hook my foot behind her ankle, sending her crashing into the ground.

I didn't get a chance to preform even the first action, though. A low gurgling sound interrupted us, low and throaty, and curling drunkenly on the wind. My left ear twitched, picking up the sound first, and I spun in that direction, eyes zeroing in on the dented guardrail and the incline that stretched behind it.

"Mine!" I yelled, prepping to sprint towards the moan and its accompanying muncher.

"No, mine!" Onyx replied, shoving me out of the way. She shifted into her massive horse form as I hit the ground, gravel grinding into my elbows. I somersaulted back to my feet and shot forward, dodging nimbly around Onyx's rump. The muncher's head appeared behind the guardrail, and it basically didn't have a face, just a blackened and gore-streaked skull and unblinking, yellow eyes.

A curl of fire appeared in my palm, and I ducked in front of Onyx, unafraid of her massive, stone-hard hooves. She swore at me angrily but thankfully decided to not bash my head in. Skull-Face groaned and raised its grasping, bony fingers in greeting. With a flick of my wrist, I sent the little lick of flame spinning through the air and into its brain.

"Win!" I yelled, pumping my fist in the air.

"Shut the fuck up," Onyx responded haughtily, turning her back on me.

"You know you're just jealous," I said. The little spot of violence had done wonders to quell the rage inside me. "Come on, let's go."