NUKE Love!: A Road Trip Through the Zombie Apocalypse... by Scott Christian Carr

 
     
     
     
    T he Bus, man, it cuts a swath through the desert, careening from side to sandy side of the empty heat-puddled highway. Headed for the Heartland—Burning Man, just a neon memory in the rearview.
                  Fizzy is fiddling with the radio, twisting the ancient knob between sunburned, mud-caked fingers. Smoke-stained beard.
                  “Anything?” Howdy calls out from the smoke and tie-dyes. Burno, he just takes another long pull on his joint.
                  “Debbie, man! Look for Debbie—you KNOW she’s on…” Gregg smirks. “Go on, bro. Tune in and turn on your girlfriend!”
                  “She’s not my girlfriend,” Fizzy roars. Turns from his seat, hands off the wheel. She’s—”
                  “Eyes on the road, man!” Burno sputters a lungful of blue smoke.
                  Fizzy yanks the wheel. The bus, it swerves—narrowly avoiding a jaws-of-life epilog with a rusty minivan barreling down the otherwise empty interstate. In the rearview, the peeling bumper sticker:
     
    THERE’S NO PLACE LIKE HOME!
     
                  “Whoa…!” Burno laughs. “They were close enough to smell the crap in my pants!”
                  “This shit can’t be happening,” Howdy is chewing on his knuckles.
                  “It’s not,” says Burno. “Fizzy missed ‘em.”
                  “Not them. I mean THIS SHIT, it can’t be happening, right?”
                  “It ain’t,” Fizzy calls from the driver’s seat, eyes locked on the road. Still fiddling with the radio.
                  “But your girlfriend said—”
                  “She’s not my girlfriend!” Fizzy’s denial is contradicted by a blasting voice of clarity from the radio—
     
                  —and, we’re back. This is everybody’s favorite girl, Diamond Debbie. And we’re in Day Three of what the authorities are calling The Catastrophe, but what we here at Satellite Underground like to call, The Big Shit. That’s right, folks, grab your tickets and pop your popcorn, ‘cause this is no joke. Looks like the dead are still walking the Earth…
     
                  “Dude, I can’t believe you fucked her…” snorts Burno.
                  “Yeah, I did!” Fizzy smirks. Fingers tapping the wheel.
     
    …and this next one goes out to my favorite booty call, who was lucky enough to be at Burning Man when The Shit hit the fan for the rest of the world. And for all we know, he’s still out there, burning away…
     
    “No fucking way!” The bus erupts into raucous applause.
    “No fucking way,” Howdy’s tone, more somber. Gazing out the window. “What the fuck is that?”
                  Behind the amorphous, hulking shapes that for three days have floated lazily across the skies—like dark clouds, but solid. Almost organic, and heavy despite their airless drift—something new:
                  Laser lights from horizon to horizon. At first, like distant heat lightning, then taking shape and form. Connecting. Spelling out letters in neon green. Burning through the clouds, etching the sky.
     
    SYSTEM ERROR
     
                  All eyes turn to the windows of the speeding, flower-painted bus. Mouths agape.
                  “Uh oh. Dat ain’t good…” Burno breaks the stoned silence.
     

 
     
     
     
    T he self-proclaimed antichrist, he sits in the Philly bar working on his fifth Pabst Blue Ribbon. Shot of Jack on the side. He calls himself The Bad Man, but just about everybody else—they just call him Stephen Redding.
                  “Yo, Koop!” the Bad Man hails the bartender, “’Nother order of nuclear wings.” The Chicken Koop boasts the hottest wings on the planet.
                  “You got it, Steve-O,”