Dead Men (and Women) Walking Read online

  "Well Walt," hollered Ned back at his equally intoxicated companion, "He should've known better than to call up the biggest storm North-fucking-Carolina has ever seen on New Years Eve!"

  "Maybe if you hadn't drank so much we would've stayed on the road," said Walt, traces of vitriol in his voice.

  "Walt, do you see the conditions? This road is windy anyway! Yeah I drank, but come on, sober I would've done it too!"

  "Ned, you told me, 'I'm not going to drink too much, I'm going to be careful.' Well here we are," said Walt, his voice a low, seething baritone as he tried to hold back his anger, "in Podunk, North Carolina, stuck on some backwoods side road, and we ain't near nothin'."

  "Didn't even know it snowed like this in North Carolina. God damn not supposed to be like this."

  "Ned, would you watch your mouth? Seriously."

  "You tell me you have family down here," yelled Ned, ignoring Walt's comments as he stumbled around from the back of the 1995 Jeep Grand Cherokee they had driven all the way from Tulsa, Oklahoma, "I didn't expect your inbred, retard auntie and her dogs!"

  "Leave her out of this," said Walt angrily as he came around from the front of the car, his nice, suede shoes absorbing the moisture from heavy, wet snow that had piled on the roadside at a good eight inches in depth.

  "I'm angry is all," retorted Ned, his foppish mat of dirty blonde hair whipping into his face.

  "I thought there were going to be more. I know my Aunt Doreen ain't the sharpest tool in the shed, but when I got her invitation, I thought more people would go. I didn't think we were going to be the only ones."

  "Well you should've done checked with your relatives and seen who RSVP-ed!"

  The party had not been particularly exciting, thought Walt, using the word "party" extremely liberally. Knowing that there was not much going on back in Oklahoma, he figured why not go and drive out and check on his old aunt. He hadn't seen the elderly woman since he graduated high school, about 10 years ago.

  The only reason he invited Ned Jenkins was because the poor guy had lost his girlfriend, and his entire social circle was based around her. Walt was the only one in the office who really even got along with him. Ned was. . .crass would be the best word to use. In his college days, Ned had been a bit of a liberal, attending rallies and growing his hair out down his back. He was a real tree-hugging, anti-establishment hippie in those years.

  As far as Walt knew, it had been the Army that straightened him out. Now Ned was the office Tech Guy, and he was a Sales Representative for Texas Instruments branch in Oklahoma. Texas Instruments basically had a stranglehold on calculator sales to the country's high schools, both public and private.

  Despite being in the armed forces, Ned had remained fairly liberal in his politics, and often talked a lot of garbage about the mostly Republican-run state and national government. He also didn't care much for religion, which Walt could understand, even if he didn't care for his occasionally vocal disdain of Walt's devotion to Baptism. Ned also was in support of the homos. That made him uncomfortable, but Walt had never met one with Ned when they went for drinks after work or anything, so he just tried not to bring it up if Ned went off on a rant when they were knocking a few back.

  Now here was this man Ned, leaning against Walt's car, piss drunk, his Khakis & light jacket getting soaked in the wet weather.

  "I'm telling you man, your aunt is nuts!"

  "Leave her out of this man," said Walt again. "It ain't her fault you got drunk and drove us off the road in the middle of the woods, in a snowstorm!" shouted Walt, raising his voice as the biting wind howled through the trees.

  "Sure it is," retorted Ned as he trudged through the snow, warmed by whiskey, toward the shade of a looming willow tree. "She thought your whole family was coming, so she had too much to drink. And she just was offering and offering, the fuck am I going to say, 'no?" blurted Ned, incredulously.

  "All I know is you promised. You promised you'd stay sober enough to drive us back to Charlotte and the hotel."

  "It's not even that much of a drive!"

  "It's an hour."

  "Yeah, well, your aunt lives down all these windy-ass roads off the interstate, in some hick town in nowhere! No wonder your family didn't show. Though I mean, Scrabble and Dick Clark," slurred Ned, "That was a fuckin' party man. And she kept talking about that reporter guy on the Good Morning Show, Abner Hollis, all fuckin' night!"

  "So, she liked him. He was a North Carolina man doing stories on a little North Carolina towns."

  "He vanished man! Three years ago! Move on! He was goin' to do some story on a town that ain't even on the map. Feature their people. Probably a bunch of inbreeds!"

  "I know Ned, I heard her story too. It was called Samson, the town."

  "Never found him huh. Maybe he liked Samson too much. Or they liked him. Fresh meat, yum-yum."

  Walt, getting progressively more infuriated with his smarmy, so-called friend who was spitting his hospitality back into his face, removed his baseball cap, scratched his brown crew-cut, and looked diagonally to the right in order to avoid the baby-face soldier-turned-computer nerd's self-satisfied, intoxicated glare.

  "I for one know I enjoyed seeing my aunt. Even if the rest of my family, who live closer than me, decided that they did not."

  "Man that's why none of them went! Because they see her too much! Your aunt's a kook man. She has all them clown dolls, and you saw her talking to them like they were people."

  "Let's go into the car, huh. I'm freezing."

  "Yeah you know, you are pretty calm for someone who is more shit-faced than me."

  "I hold it well."

  Walt climbed into the driver's side seat, and Ned decided to go into the back seat and stretch himself out. Neither man could see far through the windows due to the ferocity of the storm, but Walt looked anyway, his dark brown eyes staring into the blinding white. In the rustling wind that crackled the branches, he could hear a thousand tiny explosions. Explosion. Fuck not now. The therapy he went to when he was younger helped him cope. He didn't need to do this now. Not while drunk. Not ever.

  "Hey Ned?"

  "Yeah, what is it man?"

  "I'm going to go the bathroom outside, I'll be back."

  "Hope your piss don't freeze."

  Tempted to say the same about his companion's brain, he instead bit his tongue and stumbled out into the snow.

  He had to fight the wind just to make it to the fringe of the forest where he would relieve himself. He had never been a man to piss on hospitality, but he didn't want to intrude on his aunt when she asked if the two boys wanted to stay the night in her small, rickety home. So instead here he stood, frigid, pissing in the snow.

  The road had been plowed when the two men drove to his aunts, but a good 3 or 4 inches had piled up on the small street in the time between when they went to his aunt's and when they left. It was serpentine and unlit, winding and curving like a drunken snake leaving a trail in the desert.

  Ned honestly had been driving decently, and may not even have been that drunk. But when they hit this particular turn, he had been going much too fast, and now they were stuck in an embankment. This much snow down here in North Carolina. It seemed unnatural. He had seen it when he went to Boston College, but never in Oklahoma or here in the south.

  His time in Boston had been interesting. While BC had been a politically moderate school in comparison to other institutions in the city, his fairly conservative upbringing made him feel awkward, even at a Jesuit establishment. Everyone there wanted Clinton in office in '96, he had been a Dole guy. But he voted Clinton.

  His political convictions weren't strong to begin with, and anyway, after the events of the two years prior, he just wanted companionship. So he voted, like his frat brothers, for The Other Guy. And those guys had made him feel comfortable. They knew about his loss, but they didn't patronize him ever. He was one of the guys. And you don't piss on hospitality. When you do, you piss in the snow.

  Walt unz
ipped his fly, and released the various drinks he had consumed that evening. After he was done, he turned to walk back to the Jeep to stay some facsimile of warm. That said, the car was not starting and consequentially, the heat wouldn't work.

  He tugged at the zipper on his pants, but it wouldn't give. It was caught in the fabric. He pulled harder and harder, exerting too much effort for somebody as uncoordinated as he.

  "Damn it," muttered Walt, as he tugged. Finally, the zipper gave way, and popped clear off his pants, landing in the snow.

  "Oh now of all the things," he grumbled, and reached down to pick it up, hoping in vain he could reattach it. He had planned on wearing these pants again tomorrow.

  As Walt bent over, his foot caught the edge of something buried beneath, and he stumbled forward, his face and body awash in snow. In the process, he kicked up a flurry and covered the zipper in a maelstrom of white.

  He didn't even scream or curse. Instead, he knelt in the snow, and turned his head to the sky, his ballcap helping to partially obscure the falling moisture. He looked to the heavens, and asked Him one question: "Why?"

  He started laughing at the ridiculousness of the situation. The laughter gradually gave way to tears. At first it was a sniffle, then it became the drunken sobs of a desperate, empty man. Walt heard the car door open, and footsteps approach him.

  "You okay, you've been out here forev--" Ned caught himself mid-sentence at the sight of his friend on his knees in the middle of a snowstorm, sobbing, his head in his hands.

  "What's the matter man," asked Ned, going over to his companion, and standing over him on the edge of the woods, looking down.

  "Leave me alone Ned," choked Walt quietly.

  "Look, Walt, I've never really seen you show emotion to begin with. Laugh, cry, nothing. This is weird for me."

  "It's weird for me too Ned," said Walt, looking up, his eyes glistening, his square, stubbled jaw streaked with tears.

  "Let me be, I need time to think."

  "It might help if you talk about it."

  "No!" said Walt, raising his voice in a rare moment of passion. "No it won't. I talked about everything for years, and look at me now."

  "You're a successful guy, a nice guy. And you ain't stupid," said Ned, thinking of anything positive to say.

  "You know how I got into college, Ned?"

  "How?"

  "Because of my father."

  "What, does he have money?"

  "No."

  "You know how I got my job?"

  "Your dad."

  "You're a smart guy too Ned."

  "Does your dad have connections in high places?"

  "I guess you could say that. Now he does anyway."

  "I don't get it."

  "It's okay, you don't have to. But just let me think, okay."

  "At least do your thinking, if that's what you are going to call it, in the car. It's God damn cold out here."

  "As the Lord as my witness, if you use His name in vain one more time tonight, or ever," growled Walt, a raging intensity seeping into his voice, "I will cold-clock you in the face right where you stand."

  "Jeez, get all creepy about God will you," muttered Ned, as he turned his back.

  Now Walt was standing.

  "It's not creepy, you bastard, It's not creepy, and you saying that hurts!"

  "Look, Walt, man,"

  "No, 'man', okay, I try an' not be too bad about it, but I need Him, okay. I need God. I need Him now as much as I ever did. There are days where I forget why I'm even here, and having that faith, it might sound stupid to you, but it keeps me from going over the edge."

  "I'm sorry, I wish you could have told me before."

  "I have. You just don't listen. You don't care about my beliefs. I'm just a simple country kid who blindly worships for no good reason, right?"

  "I never said--"

  "I have my reason now. Maybe it was blind faith because of my upbringing before. But now I have my reason, and now my faith helps keep me strong. God bless my parents for raisin' me right."

  "Hey, right and wrong is all subjective--"

  "Don't get like that Ned!" screamed Walter over the driving fury of the blizzard as the wind seemed to pick up again and swirl the flakes every which way.

  "To me, Ned, it's right. My daddy raised me right. He raised me right. My daddy raised me right . . ."

  Repeating this sentiment over and over, Walt fell to the ground crying again, and Ned approached him to offer consolation. Instead he was shoved to the ground.

  "Stay away." Said Walt, with a quiet demonstrativeness.

  As Ned put his hands in the frigid snow to help push himself up, his hands came into contact with the same thing that Walt had tripped over before. He started to dig at the snow, until he uncovered a warped sign with faded, black writing.

  Samson, 1 mile

  Ned stood up, incredulous.

  "Hey Walt."

  "So help me, Ned--"

  "No come here. It's a sign, buried in the snow."

  "I don't care," said Walt, sniffling, no longer crying.

  "No you do. It says 'Samson, 1 mile.'"

  "You're kidding."

  "No I'm not. And I might be crazy, but I think there is a trail that cuts through the woods here. There's a break in the trees. Never noticed it before, what with all the snow and shit."

  Walt ambled over to his buddy, and sure enough, there was the sign, written in plain English.

  "What do you think?" asked Ned.

  Walt looked at his friend, confused.

  "You want to try that path. See if we can get to the town, maybe someone knows someone with a tow truck or something."

  "I don't know," said Walt, stoically, gradually reverting back to his usual demeanor after his meltdown in the snow.

  "Well otherwise we just sit here until morning and hope someone else actually is dumb enough to drive down here too."

  "It's the middle of the night, I don't want to get lost."

  "Fine, play it safe. I'm going."

  "No wait," said Walt, "I'm going with you."

  "Anything in the Jeep we need?"

  "Yeah."

  Walt went back to the Jeep, popped the glove compartment, and pulled out a small switchblade. He was worried, because as soon as they uncovered the sign, one thought had been reverberating in his head

  Why would a town nobody was sure even existed have it's own road sign?

  The two men trudged through the forest path, the surrounding area possessing an eerie calm. The snow had driven off all the animals, and the only noise was the shrill howl of wind through the trees. The two men walked mostly in silence, except for a brief period right before reaching the end of the trail.

  "Hey Walt."

  "Yeah."

  "Are you okay?"

  "I'm fine."

  "We both know that isn't true."

  "I am okay. I was really drunk before though. A lot of stuff that shouldn't have came out did."

  "I'm sorry for being such an asshole though."

  "It's fine."

  "Can I ask you a question?"

  "Depends, what is the question about?"

  "Your father."

  "It was the Oklahoma City bombing."

  "Wait what?"

  Walt was silent. Then, it clicked in Ned's head. College essays and people who knew Walt from father-son workdays at his father's office, everything from before made sense to Ned.

  And then they were silent. They remained silent as they passed the first unlit, ramshackle home. And the subsequent homes they saw thereafter. They both knew they had found Samson.

  Walt stopped when they came upon what appeared to be a town center situated within the forest. It was small, a general store and the Town Hall. Situated a decent distance beyond the two places, with just one isolated shack in between, was a small, run-down church.

  "So," said Ned, looking to his companion. "Now what?"

  "We look for signs of life I guess. Some way to get the hell o
ff that road and back to the hotel."

  "Walt, I hate to break it to you, but I ain't seen one car in front of any houses since we been here. I seriously doubt that this town has a tow truck."

  "There must be one car in this place."

  "I don't know. We got here by a footpath, remember? Don't think no car could fit down that."

  "Well then we'll see if somebody has a phone at least. They can call a tow-truck to meet us on the roadside."

  "I don't see phone lines, Walt."

  Walt looked up into the snow, which had slowed to a moderately paced flurry. As it swirled down onto his head, he saw that, in this isolated woodland town, there were indeed no phone lines, or any sort of power lines.

  "Well regardless Ned, I think we really should try to get out of the cold."

  The two men looked around at the town's deserted, snow-covered center. They had passed roughly 15 houses on the way in, and, while the visibility was limited, it looked like there were a few more beyond the church. There was not a lit window to be seen. Finally they decided to settle underneath an overhang on the porch of the dilapidated general store.

  The two men decided to sit down on the creaking, wormhole-ridden wood of the stoop and stay awake. Neither man's jacket provided much warmth, and both felt the drain of the elements on their cognition and stamina.

  "Want me to knock on the door?" asked Ned.

  "People are sleeping, it'd be rude."

  "Yeah but this is downright dangerous staying out in this weather. We need to get inside."

  "Fine, knock."

  Ned stood up and went toward the general store. As he did, the rotting, wooden door creaked open a crack with a strong gust of wind. It apparently hadn't been shut tight.

  "Well ain't that creepy," said Ned, in a mild state of bewilderment.

  Ned pushed the door open further, and stepped inside.

  "Get back here!" hollered Walt. "That's trespassing! We're going to get ourselves in trouble!"

  "Relax, they'll understand."

  "You're an idiot, you really are. Your mama done dropped you on your head."

  Walt crept in behind his bolder companion. It was like walking into a crypt. The dust was palpable, and it filled up his lungs, causing him to cough rather violently. The shelves were stocked, yet cobwebbed, as though not a soul had laid a hand on them in years. Along the front counter was archaic honey candy in a packaging that looked straight out of the 1930's. And, as he searched for a light switch, Walt discovered that there was not one to be found.