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

expect me to wait for you? Forever? Come on, get real! Especially with what’s going on down here? Life’s too short—
                  Debbie… I love you…
                  Look, Jones. What we had was… Look, I’m not trying to be mean. I’m just trying to be realistic. What we had was… I’ll always have a place in my heart for you… And I did wait for you. I waited when you said you were going on the three year lunar colony mission. I waited through all the postponements and delays setting up Tranquility II—I waited for you when NASA scrapped the project, waited through all of the failed ‘bring the boys back home’ retrieval missions… And then, when they told me you weren’t coming back, ever, I—
                  You ran out and you fucked the first guy you could find!
                  Honestly, Jones… I can’t believe that you want to do this on the air. I mean, really. This is what you want? To broadcast your needy paranoia all over the entire planet? Really? You honestly expected me to just dry up and die alone, waiting for something that’s never gonna happen? You say you love me, and that’s what you wanted for me?
                  I wanted you to love me—I thought you loved me…
                  You wanted me to die alone. Like you. That’s selfish and unfair, Jones. And I’m sorry, but you’re not coming home and I am not going to become a spinster for you. Look, I can’t do this. I’ve gotta play another song.
                  How many?
                  Excuse me?
    How many were there, Debbie? How many men have you fucked while I’ve been stuck up here? How Many? How many? HOW MANY?
     
                  “How many, Bill?”
                  “I’m sorry, excuse me?” Lt. Colonel Bill Hendricks glances up from his laptop to the geographic targeting screen spanning the length of his underground bunker. He turns down the radio—the Rocket Jones tear-fest will have to wait.
                  “How many?”
                  “How many what?”
                  “Pensacola, Florida… Waupaca, Wisconsin… Reno, Nevada… The list goes on and on and on… How many targets shall I set for the first volley?”
                  “I dunno… First things, friggin’ last, TALBY. First we’ve gotta clear up this system error. I don’t know where to begin… Are the Bombs ready?”
                  “Initiating…” a series of clicks and whirs as TALBY’s artificial, computerized voice murmurs meaningless streams of access codes and runtime logarithms.
                  Bill waits. Taps his fingers. Despite the space heaters and re-circulated air, he can feel a chill creeping through the mile deep, six foot thick, lead-lined walls of the launch bunker. He’s never felt so alone. Even TALBY’s overly enthusiastic AI interface feels shallow and artificial. Bill feels a pang of sympathy for Rocket Jones—but unlike Jones, he doesn’t even have the cancerous pain of lost love to cling to. Bill’s never had a girlfriend, and the chances of that happening now… Bill doesn’t want to admit it, even to himself, but he’s falling apart down here.
                  He waits for TALBY and stares at the launch screen. A pale geographic representation of the United States. Tracking the Z-Globules that drift mindlessly across the nation’s skies, and broken into territories and outbreak zones (zombie clusters marked in red, and almost always largest around the country’s smaller cities and larger suburban areas. Strange, thinks Bill. It would seem that the larger cities, with their high-rises and extensive police and military presence, were not conducive to spreading of the z-germ. And the rural areas just don’t have the population numbers to support a major outbreak). Across the length of the map,