A Slice of Survival

There they were. I didn't want them to exist but there they were anyway. The unwanted fingers dragging across the glass of my fragile mind. Burning daggers of agonizing truth ripped fresh rows of reality into the soil of my heart.

I jolted awake and grabbed for the pistol next to me on the leather seat like it was the last sandwich on Earth. I was going to blast a soup can hole through the thing scratching at my window until I saw who it was. At first I was confused and couldn't recognized the frightened and panicky face underneath the beanie.

My brother had returned from getting the tank of gas that was a mile away down the road from our empty Honda. A mob of people were sprinting towards us with entire tool sheds in their hands. His hand shook with the gas tank spilling many of the drops into greasy spots onto the dusty paint. I prayed as my heart beat like a cannon punching the inside of my chest repeatedly, so hard that it turned my entire body into a shaking stone. He got as much of the gas in the tank as he could by the time the wave of killers was only a child's baseball throw away. My brother got into the back seat of the car as I was starting it because he knew he wouldn't have made it around to the passenger seat before his head was cut off.

By a split finger snap of grace I started the car, put it in reverse and horse stomped it into accelerated evasion. Bottles of glass shattered against my windshield spilling fluids all over my front view like a stinky car wash. Mutterings from my brother for me to go faster made my anxiety fill the porous holes inside my bones. If I had to watch him die in front of me by the protestors I didn't even have an argument against I would beg to be immediately shot in the head. The screams of animal hate and murder words assaulted piled on top of the glass like buckets full of spiders dumped onto the wet pane. They must have thought we were trying to block the path of their rally when we'd pulled down that alley on the way to the bank for stamps. All we'd wanted to do was mail a letter to our grandmother in the hospital but the hysterical mob already drunk on confusion and high on herd mentality adrenaline thought two good old southern baptists were trying to disagree. Hyperventilating breaths of a pure desire to survive to see what the next fifteen seconds of life could look like propelled me backwards along with the gas.

I accelerated backwards into the empty street and skillfully spun the steering wheel into a long leaning right followed by a short and aggressive left to end up facing the open slip of road. Holding the brake down and pulling the gear shift into drive like yanking bed covers from a fellow homeless man as I was freezing to death, I forced the fragile car into drive and stomped on the gas. The acceleration was so forceful and desperate that my car swerved out of control for the first thirty yards while getting away, and I had to fight with both of my hands to maintain control of the car from myself.

My brother and I laughed. Laughter helped the psychotic chaos often those days. An inside joke I remembered from a month prior had even kept the pistol from going off in my mouth as I cried and chuckled the steel out of my teeth. Our sense of humor was getting pretty sick those days. It seemed like it had to. We'd both even caught ourselves laughing at someone getting robbed and beaten to win a car jack the other day. It seemed ironically funny because the guy who so desperately wanted the carjack was in a wheelchair and if he killed the only guy around for miles then he wouldn't be able to get into his monster truck. Besides, I don't know how he expected to use a car jack on a truck that could drive over a gas station.

Fear subsided suddenly into hunger. We had to eat or neither of us were going to make it. We just made it out of town to a diner that was only still open because the diner owners hadn't heard the four horsemen news. The tension like a boot pressed against our necks had subsided when we got something to eat. After grilled cheeses the waitress was asking us if we wanted desert. We were finally feeling better from the lunch and about to answer the woman when the husband and co-owner of the mom and pop restaurant, was brought out of the kitchen by a cannon without wheels pressed to his head. Five more animals poured out of the kitchen following the civil war steed and they looked like black bears holding shotguns and bats. We tried to get up and run and knocked over the fat lady to the floor like the saints the world had made us in those days. We both telepathically planned on listening to her screams being drowned out by the cranking ignition as she was eaten by the last generation of Earth but a bear kicked a chair crashing against the glass door so hard that the mini customer announcing bell chimed like a toy fire truck.

It was one of the weirdest sensations I'd ever felt in my gut and I'd ingested oceans of poison in my not-giving-a-shit days. Despite the panic and adrenaline pumping into my brain that was now awake with extra awareness, I was still hungry. A dry mouth swallow must have sparked the after taste of my lunch away from my pallet and suddenly I wanted something on top of the grilled cheese. My brother and I did get desert after all. We got to eat the two last deserts we'd ever eat of refrigerated Mississippi mud pie well held hostage in the diner kitchen of a man who's wife I'd knocked over to save myself. We still ate our deserts because e my brother and I did have sick senses of humor, and we also figured, "What the hell?" Unfortunately though, we ate our delicious sugar while we watched a nice middle aged couple get sliced into ham as we waited for our turn at the slicer.

END