All This For A Bottle Of Wine

one

Ellison & Tucker called to tell me they lost my shipping address. I’d ordered the specific bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon from their winery over two weeks ago and, being the passive guy I am, I didn’t think to phone them with my concern. Then they called me the day before Valentine’s to explain how their inventory showed a bottle set for sending but no address attached to its destination, so it had just been sitting there for two weeks without guidance. My bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon (well, Julia’s bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon, considering it was her favorite and her gift) was in the storage room of Ellison & Tucker about four and a half hours south of the specific restaurant (Julia’s favorite) where I’d reserved a candle-lit dinner for two at 8:00pm tomorrow.

Great.

So I hung up the phone, turned to my computer, Googled directions to Paso Robles, printed them out, and reached for my wallet and keys. It was already two-thirty, I noticed, scanning my small unkempt bedroom for reasons not to go. All I saw was the framed photograph on my desk—Julia had made it for our two-year—and under a snapshot of us happily enjoying our anniversary evening at an expensive San Francisco restaurant, the words: BRIAN AND JULIA FOREVER.  Her smile in that image only made the quest all the more necessary. She’d do the same for me, I reasoned.

I had to leave soon in order to get back before midnight—latest, depending on traffic. I’d only driven that far south once before, when I took Julia to Ellison & Tucker the first time. My cousin used to work there—gave us a nice discount, too—and Julia fell in love with their selection right away, a wine aficionado like her mother.

I didn’t need much for road trip supplies. This wasn’t exactly a trip.  

Basically ready to leave, I decided to take my backpack to the kitchen and fill it up with snacks and sodas. DJ had brewed coffee earlier and I eyeballed the pot for a while before choosing to bring some along in a thermos, reckoning a good boost of dark roast couldn’t hurt. The more caffeinated I became, the faster I’d drive. Plus I’d need all the energy I could muster driving eighty down I-5, the dullest stretch of asphalt I’d ever navigated.

DJ was in the livingroom playing Motor Storm on the PS3. He grunted and groaned as his vehicle cartwheeled viciously over rocky terrain and exploded in slow-motion across the screen. I stirred three spoons—better make it four—of sugar into my thermos and watched him through an open door. He paused the game and stood up, still wearing pajamas, and stretched his arms.

“Fuck,” he muttered, noticing me in the kitchen. He laughed. “That game’s fucking hard.” I nodded. I screwed the top onto the thermos and turned to grab my assorted snacks. DJ started toward me and motioned toward the backpack. “Where you going?” he asked. “You going to class?”

I patted my pockets to make sure I had my keys and cellphone. The microwave display read 2:44pm. “No. I—” Part of me wanted to lie. I knew he’d laugh. “I’m going to Paso Robles to get Julia some wine that she likes.”

“Paso Robles?”

“Yeah.”

DJ thought about that. He said, “That’s far, isn’t it?”

I nodded.

He laughed and shook his head. “Kinda last minute, isn’t it?”

“It’s not my fault,” I said, moving toward the front door. DJ followed. “The winery lost my address and they didn’t even call me until this morning—until like an hour ago.”

“Bastards.”

“I know.” I had a hand on the doorknob.

“You’re going now?” DJ asked, looking at his watch.

“I have to. I want to get back as soon as I can. It’s like a four hour drive.”

DJ whistled. He said, “You must be in love.”

I smiled and shrugged. “I’m in a hurry, that’s what I’m in.”

I opened the door.

“Wait a second,” my roommate said, “I’m coming with you. Let me turn off the Playstation.”

He was gone into the other room before I could tell him otherwise. In a flash he was standing with me in the doorframe, a coat on his back and pants pulled over his pajamas. In one hand he had the blue digital camera he’d gotten for Christmas. Just as I noticed it, DJ lifted the lens toward me and flashed a photograph. “Nice,” he commented. “I finally have a reason to use this thing now.”

 There was no reason to tell DJ not to come along. I was glad he’d offered, actually. The guy hadn’t been out of the apartment much these days and a road trip would be good for him. It kind of felt like taking the dog out for a walk. DJ had been living the carefree life of a bachelor, playing videogames and watching online episodes of Arrested Development since being fired from Macy’s. His company would be appreciated. It wasn’t like the thought hadn’t crossed my mind that DJ would want to go—we’d been roommates for four years and I knew he loved random adventures like this. But having the winery call me the day before Valentine’s and tell me that there wasn’t any way for them to have the bottle shipped here on such short notice (And whose fault was that? I had wanted to shout) was shocking enough to set my mind’s sight on getting that wine and nothing else.

I took one last look into the apartment and thought again about what I was about to do. This was an eight hour drive for the sake of a single bottle of wine. This was insane. No other way to look at it. DJ zipped up his jacket and dropped his camera into the front pocket, which he also zipped shut, and he said to me, “This is so romantic of you, Brian.”

“Yeah,” I replied. This is romantic, isn’t it? That thought made me feel better.

A two year relationship required sacrifices like this. Julia deserved something special—even if Valentine’s Day was essentially a marketing ploy—because our culture put enough social pressure on this holiday that Julia would notice if I didn’t give her a bottle of her favorite Cabernet Sauvignon, even if she didn’t mention it. This holiday was a trap. I wasn’t going to get caught. Hell—the restaurant I’d made reservations with required a pre-corking fee for bringing my own wine. We hadn’t even eaten there yet and I was running a forty dollar tab. This bottle of wine was basically a third guest and having already bought it a seat, the mission to Paso Robles was all the more worth it.

“Okay,” I said, my mind still wrapping itself around the plan.

“You ready?”

“I think so.” The logical part of my brain insisted this was a waste of time and gas.

 Just go. Just go. You’ll be back before Letterman starts.

“Yeah. Let’s go,” I said.

two

Locked the door. Took the stairs. Got in the car. Clicked seatbelts. Started engine. Picked a CD. Picked a track. Rolled down the windows. Started eating snacks. Left parking lot. Drove to freeway. Merged. Changed lanes. Changed CD’s. Picked a track. Turned up volume. Rolled up windows. Turned down volume. Got stuck in traffic. Paid toll. Crossed bridge. Got lost in city. DJ took pictures. Got gas. Bought gum. Got tired. Found fast-food. Ate dinner. Kept driving. Saw where James Dean died. It started storming. Sun went down. We finished the last of the roadtrip snacks. Changed CD’s again. Made it to Paso Robles. Parked at a rest stop. Rain slowed. DJ pulled out a joint. He got high. He offered. I declined. Called Julia. Lied. Found winery. Found a parking spot. Rain stopped.

Three

“Closed?” I moaned. No way. The dark floor-to-ceiling windows revealed no sign of operation within, just a bunch of wine shelves and tables blanketed in shadow, the bottles glimmering in pale moonlight. Standing at the front entrance—yep, it was locked—with my face flattened against the glass, I heard DJ laughing. The reflection of him sitting on the hood of the Jeep Cherokee, blood-red in the dim glow of a nearby lamp post, caught my eye.

He shouted, “When did they close?”

A small sign posted Friday closing time at 6:00pm—two hours ago, woops—but I turned and replied, “Like ten minutes ago. We just missed them,” and DJ had no need to remind me that I should have asked them about that when they first called—he’d done that enough during the drive.

Finding myself rather calm, I figured this unfortunate discovery was less shocking because it wasn’t like I’d gone into the journey with an optimistic view to begin with. The way my luck was going regarding everything about Valentine’s Day plans, I should have expected to find the winery burnt to the ground. Even getting dinner reservations to work out was a hassle because my work schedule always refused to coordinate favorably with any holiday or anniversary. I’d fought for that table—I’d fight for this wine. The winery hadn’t burnt to the ground. All this meant was DJ and I would have to wait until morning—we’d get a hotel, we’d sleep in the car, whatever it took.

It hit me, just then, as I stood by the locked entrance of Julia’s favorite winery, that I was doing a hell of a lot of work just for one evening. All of this for Julia. And what DJ had said, that this was “romantic” of me, seemed like reason enough. If getting locked out of a winery was the cost of being so blindly infatuated with a woman that you drove eight hours in one night to put that extra millimeter of smile onto her rosy cheeks, then so it was. She did deserve this. And maybe I deserved this—this setback in the wine recovery plan—for being such a lazy sonofabitch.

DJ took a photo of me standing in my moment of defeat. “Here’s when Brian finally realizes that this wasn’t such a great idea after all,” he said as he switched the camera to playback and laughed at my placid reaction. “Your face says it all.”

I headed back toward the car and was about to suggest that we head further into town and find a hotel for the night—I was even going to offer to pay for everything, even some munchies. I was about to promise us back home before noon tomorrow. That was the information I was about to put to words but instead I found myself struck silent by the bizarre expression on DJ’s face. He glanced up from the image on the camera and surveyed the front of the winery. His eyes dropped to the image. He muttered, “Oh fuck.”

I’d forgotten what I’d been about to say.

“What?” I asked him.

DJ handed me the camera. “Look—” he pointed to a spot behind me in the photograph “—see that guy in the window?”

I looked closely. Yeah, I thought, he’s looking right at the camera.

When DJ and I both faced the winery, however, that window was vacant and dark. Perhaps another flash from the lens would show the same guy standing there in the shadow of the wine shelves. I didn’t want to find out. I handed the camera back to DJ, who was giggling nervously.

“Who the fuck was that?” he asked me, his eyes wild. “You see that?”

“I see that.”

“Who is that?”

I shrugged. “A janitor?”

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” said DJ, looking again at the winery.

four

We got in the car. I started the engine. DJ turned off the radio. He said, “Let’s go.” I put the car in drive. I stepped on the gas pedal. Sirens. Two police cruisers came roaring into the parking lot. They skidded to a stop. DJ and I sprayed ourselves with cologne. Six armed officers got out. DJ said, “Oh Jesus.” A voice on a megaphone told us to get out of the car. We did. We were told to put our hands on the backs of our heads. We did. We were asked why we we’re here. I told them I was here for wine for my girlfriend for Valentine’s Day. The voice said an alarm had been triggered from inside. They needed to search my car. I told them, “Okay.” They found nothing stolen. They said nothing about the pot. Four officers were told to investigate the winery. They went around the back. Another car arrived. A woman got out. She started yelling for “whoever’s in charge.” She wanted to go inside. She shouted, “I’m the owner of this winery and I demand to know what the hell is going on!”

five

I stood with DJ behind my Jeep Cherokee and the Chief (as I’ve deemed him) was keeping Mrs. Ellison back with one arm and keeping one eye on us. I felt childish surrounded by all these professionals, stuck here in this grown-up situation. I wanted to take it all back and go to my room and pretend like I’d been imagining all of this. Here we were in the middle of a breaking-and-entering investigation, DJ and myself, two college students from way out of town, here for the ridiculous purpose of picking up a special bottle of red wine. We weren’t suspects, the Chief was clear on that, but the way he kept us within his sight made me feel like he still didn’t trust us.

Not only two hours late, but just in time to be hassled by the cops.

That’s when we heard four quick gunshots. The front windows of the winery flashed.

The Chief and Mrs. Ellison stopped wrestling. The other officer sitting on the hood of his cruiser who’d been spending all this time cleaning his fingernails with a pocketknife also lifted his dopey head to see what the ruckus was about. DJ tapped me on the shoulder and whispered, “Did you hear that?” and I was thinking the whole county probably heard those gunshots echo in this rolling grapevine valley. I nodded in reply and strained my eyes to see movement through the dark.

The Chief shined a flashlight up at the building. He radioed, “Pollack? Murphy?” A quick burst of static and then silence. The Chief looked at me and seemed terribly concerned. He frowned.

“What’s happening?” Ellison asked.

The Chief shrugged. “I don’t know yet, but you stay here.”

She pouted.

To his fellow officer he ordered, “Let’s go, Marcos.”

“Yes, sir.”

To me he said, “You stay here, too.”

Marcos and the Chief left us at the Jeep with Mrs. Ellison and started up toward the gloomy glass doors. I watched their reflections grow in the windows. My eyes drifted to where we’d seen a figure standing inside, caught for the moment of the photograph and then gone the next instant. Who had that been? Had that guy broken in and set off the alarm?

Of course this had to happen now.

DJ elbowed me. “Fucking nuts,” he said.

“I know.”

Ellison asked me accusingly, “What were you two doing here?”

DJ explained, “We were coming here to get some wine for his girlfriend, lady. We don’t have anything to do with this.” He motioned toward the winery. “We’re just customers.”

“Did you see anyone inside?” she asked, crossing her arms over her under-dressed chest. It was pretty cold out now that the sun had set and the way she was dressed implied she’d been too rushed to realize that. She had an aristocratic composure and the lightest scent of berries about her, like a grandmother who loved the theatre. Intelligent. Upper class, but sensible. Like a librarian who categorized wines instead of literature. “How long have you been here?” she asked me. “We’ve been closed for two hours.”

DJ smacked me on the shoulder, “Two hours?”

I said nothing.

“I told you you should have called before we left,” DJ commented.

Ellison kept her eyes on the winery windows as she asked, “What wine were you here for?”

I said, “The Cabernet Sauvignon.”

“The yellow or the beige bottle?”

“Yellow.”

Ellison said, “Mmmhmm,” and nodded. “That’s my favorite, too.”

DJ asked her, “What do you think is going on?”

“I was hoping it had just been a power outage because of the storm. Power goes out and the alarm system resets—sometimes it sets it off. The alarm company calls me automatically—” Ellison said, her voice trailing off in a way that implied she had come up with a more likely theory. Before I could ask her what she thought was really happening, she added, “But there’s been some strange people around here, lately, this past month or so.”

During a pause, I asked, “Like what kind of strange people?”

Ellison shrugged. “Most of the winery owners around here have been talking about trespassers trampling down some of their vines. No one’s said who they are—just finding all these footprints all over the place that lead nowhere.”

“Weird,” DJ replied.

“Some places have been broken into, too.” Ellison frowned. “Guess it was my turn.”

That’s when we heard the splash of shattering glass—a window, maybe—from around the corner of the building, followed immediately by an inhumanly savage shriek. The blood in my veins froze. Our attention was drawn to the edge of the entrance lamp’s reach, but we could see nothing. The stillness of night. Silence. Total silence. I held my breath and waited. The winery remained dark and vacant. A minute or two passed before DJ said, “I think we should just go.”

“We can’t go,” I replied. “The cops didn’t say we could.”

“They didn’t say we couldn’t.”

“Yes they did, you stoner,” I remarked, shaking my head. My roommate shrugged my response aside and frowned. DJ was scared. I was scared, too, but I wasn’t about to just drive away. I wasn’t even sure what was going on. What if someone needed our help? I was too curious about those gunshots and that scream to leave. Plus I didn’t want to abandon Ellison out here by herself. So I argued, “We can’t leave if we’re witnesses.”

Ellison turned. “What? You saw something?”

DJ shook his head. “You just want to get your stupid wine, is all.”

“We got a picture of someone,” I explained. “Show her the camera.”

He did, grudgingly.

“See?” I pointed. “In the window.”

“Creepy,” said the winery owner, “Kinda looks like Daniel.”

“Who?”

“The janitor, Daniel. But this makes him look like a zombie.”

I agreed, taking another glance at the image.

“Why’d you have to say that?” DJ whined, taking a step toward the Jeep passenger door.

“Well he does, doesn’t he?” Ellison remarked. She stared at the front of the winery for a long time and I tried to imagine what she was thinking. We’d been standing out in the cold for maybe ten minutes and not a single officer had returned. No call for help. No call for anything. The six officers who had shown up were now gone. I looked at the image on the camera for some understanding. I’d also had the notion that the figure in the window looked like a zombie—was that blood on his chin?—but I also knew DJ had an innate disliking for all things zombie (something about a traumatizing childhood experience with the movie Night of the Living Dead and a cruel older brother), and so I hadn’t discussed that idea with him, yet, for his sake.

“Maybe we should wait in the car,” DJ suggested. “Until they come back.”

“I don’t think they’re coming back,” Ellison replied softly. “Something’s happened.”

“Like what?” I asked her.

She said, “Two nights ago Margo Kensington’s house got broken into and someone ripped apart her two dogs. The cops said it was probably a mountain lion. But there were bloody footprints—Margo told me—that led right back out into the hills.”

“Footprints?”

Ellison nodded. “Cops either didn’t see or didn’t want to see.”

I noticed that DJ had a hand on the passenger door and was about to let himself in.

“People don’t like it when our peaceful little community gets shaken up,” Ellison commented, talking more to herself than to me. “Cops think it was a mountain lion? That guy in your picture wasn’t a mountain lion. Something weird is going on here.”

As she spoke, she took a few steps toward the winery.

I said, “Maybe we should wait in the car.”

That’s when a figure moved from out of the shadows at the corner of the building, from where the shriek had been heard. It was the Chief, thankfully. He moved briskly across the entrance plaza with a shotgun held over his shoulder like a knapsack and one finger on the trigger. Ellison exhaled happily and said, “Thank God,” as the Chief surveyed the scene and stood with us. He appeared flustered and nervous and out of breath.

“Did Marcos come back out, yet?” he asked.

“No,” I told him.

Ellison asked, “Did you hear that glass break? Was that a window?”

“I thought it was Jeffry,” the Chief said, “but I guess it wasn’t.” He lowered the shotgun and I was fascinated by the appearance of the powerful weapon, all metal and gunpowder—the ultimate zombie defense, I thought with a smile. “Marcos isn’t out here? We saw someone in the cellar and Marcos ran off chasing him and that’s when I—”

“Was it this guy?” Ellison asked, grabbing the camera from my hands.

“—thought I saw Jeffry.” The Chief ended his sentence and then examined the photo. He handed it back to me—and I passed it to DJ—and said to Ellison, “I can’t tell—maybe.”

“He was in the cellar—you said?” she asked with a hint of concern. Ellison turned around and scanned the darkness beyond the winery parking lot. There was nothing to see but the stars and the hilltops silhouetted in the foreground.

“Yeah,” the Chief stated. “But if that wasn’t Jeffry I saw run through the window, then there are two people we need to be looking out for. One of them,” he affirmed, “is your janitor. We found his shirt in the bathroom all ripped up and bloody, but he’s nowhere to be seen.” After a beat and a breath, he added, “The shirt said ‘Janitor’ on it, at least, so we assumed—”and shrugged.

Ellison hadn’t been listening. She said, “There are tunnels that lead to other sheds—out there—that you get to from the cellar. The tunnels go out into the vineyard.”

The Chief asked, “How many tunnels?”

“Five. There are five storage sheds—for delivery and stuff. Tools.”

“He could have gotten anywhere.”

That’s when Marcos opened the front entrance of the winery and waved to us from inside. Everyone turned. He shouted, “Hey, Chief—I found something.” The Chief rested the shotgun on his shoulder and cursed, then started toward Marcos. I glanced at wide-eyed Ellison, who had returned her gaze to the inky blackness behind us. When I tried to look for movement in the dark I simultaneously saw nothing and everything. My mind played tricks on me. The shadows moved. I kept hearing footsteps approaching. The fear urged me to escape in the Jeep; the wine retrieval plan insisted I wait it out.

I heard the Chief ask Marcos, “What did you find?”

And it was quiet enough to hear Marcos whisper, “Pollack and Murphy. They’re dead.”

six

The Chief wanted us inside. DJ wanted to leave. There was no negotiating. Ellison wanted to know if anything was stolen or broken. The Chief said nothing about that. He herded us inside and locked the door. I asked if we were in danger. The Chief told me not to worry, yet. We all wanted to know why we were being held inside. The Chief said bluntly, “It’s not safe.” The lights were kept off.  

seven

There was a half-empty bottle of wine (Julia’s wine, actually) on the tasting bar and Ellison noticed that before the shattered window in the corner of the lobby. While the officers hurried over to examine the glass splashed out like spilt diamonds on the hardwood floor, Ellison picked up the bottle and shook her head. I stood quietly near enough to hear her mutter, “Daniel, you drunk bastard.”

She noticed I was listening and said, “Some janitor, huh?”

I smiled faintly.  

“Looks like he likes the same wine as your girlfriend,” Ellison commented, holding the bottle toward me. I recognized the label, vaguely, with its yellow background. “We haven’t had it in stock for a while. Been some months since we could get the grapes to grow right.”

I nodded. Out of my peripheral I watched the Chief and Marcos clear a table of an elaborate wine bottle display and upright the table to block the hole in our defense. DJ was over there with them, watching them and not helping. He waved to me. I turned away from Ellison as she started toward the other end of the tasting bar—finding a candle in a drawer to light with a match.

To distract myself from the stress of the situation, I perused the wine shelves for the particular bottle that caused this whole mess. The Cabernet Sauvignon was one of Ellison & Tucker’s specialty wines and had its own table by the entrance (near the check-out counter) and I stood there with a bottle in my hands, reading the label by flickering candle-light. I could just take it right now. DJ and I could be on our way home in ten seconds if we just ran for the Jeep. These thoughts began to creep into my mind as soon as I felt the satisfaction of holding the Cabernet. Why not just leave now? I’d gotten what I’d come for. We were only inside because the Chief thought some crazy cannibalistic murderer had escaped the winery via underground cellar tunnels.

DJ joined me by the table and informed me, “That cop—Marcos—said the other two cops got killed by the same guy in the cellar. Said the guy who did it was biting the one guy’s neck. Fucking biting him.” DJ shook his head and chuckled anxiously. “What the fuck is up with that?”

I said, “I know, I heard them talking. I’m trying not to think about that.”

The dark winery was full of hiding places and I couldn’t help but fear that something horrible was lurking in one of them. The fact that people had been killed in this building, that some creepy guy showed up in the picture DJ took, that something terrible had broken through the now-blockaded window—it was a little too surreal for me to view with a rational grasp. As many horror movies I’d seen or ghost stories I’d been told, the concept that I had just recently stepped into a horror story of my own was difficult to accept.

“I guess I’d bite someone if I was trying to get away,” my roommate confessed. “If it was self-defense, I would. But not if I’m just going around killing people. Like murdering them.” DJ spaced out. I had forgotten he was stoned. “I mean I’d use a gun, at least. I wouldn’t want to go biting people. That’s just fucked up and crazy.”

I didn’t respond and wasn’t sure how to respond if I wanted to.

DJ noted my vacant stare and asked, “What are you thinking about?”

All of this for a bottle of wine.

“Julia.”

DJ nodded. “Are you scared?”

“No,” I lied, looking down at the silver nighttime glow on my clothes. The white logo on my navy blue sweater seemed luminescent and blaringly obvious in the dark. I felt vulnerable.

“I’m scared,” he admitted. He looked over and saw Ellison behind the tasting bar. “I wonder if she’ll let me have some wine.”

Ellison heard him. “Sure,” she said with a shrug. Pointing to the abandoned Cabernet she’d discovered there, she added, “This bottle’s already open.”

DJ laughed. “Hell yes. Awesome.”

He left me for the tasting bar and I moved to lean against a nearby wall—feeling safer with my back covered. I watched the officers scanning the parking lot outside with their flashlights. Marcos had a hand up to shield his eyes from the glare. Neither of them spoke. Elsewhere around the lobby I found myself counting how many tables there were, how many windows, how many ceiling fans—just passing the time. I saw the sign for the bathrooms burning blue to my right and a red sign beaming directions to the emergency exit across the room. A door near the tasting bar was marked with an EMPLOYEE label and it probably led to the cellar. I noted the unlocked deadbolt hanging from its doorknob.

“Not this shit,” I heard DJ say. “Red wine gives me migraines.”

Ellison had poured herself a small glass. She took two sips, closing her eyes as she swallowed, and the way she drank that wine was like she’d never get another chance again. Ellison exhaled and shrugged. She said to DJ, “I don’t blame you. It doesn’t have the same bite to it this time.” I watched her drop the whole bottle of Julia’s favorite into a trashcan and turn around to grab a different wine from a small fridge, a white wine. I spotted an unopened bottle of Julia’s Cabernet Sauvignon a little further down the counter, just sitting there. In my head I heard the bottle say, Don’t forget about me!

Ellison noticed the bottle, too. With a, “Hey—look at this,” she moved aside to grab it for me and seamlessly slipped it into a handled paper bag. I took it from her when she offered. “I remember you now—you’re Brian. You called earlier.”

“Yeah.”

She glanced down for a moment and said, “Sorry about that.”

I just then comprehended the fact that her winery’s loss of my shipping address was the real reason I was in this situation, when the details were explored. This bottle of Cabernet Sauvignon would have been in my hands two weeks ago if this winery hadn’t screwed up its paperwork. I didn’t felt bitter about that until now—oddly in the very moment I accomplished my primary wine retrieval goal—and I really didn’t want to accept her apology.

“Thanks,” I said out of habit, the word leaving my mouth with a sour taste.

She flashed a smile. “Figured you came all this way—” her voice trailed. She turned to look at the officers scanning the outside perimeter, her face somber. She shook her head and said, “It’s our fault you had to drive down here. It’s on the house.”

That was a small but thoughtful gesture.

“This’ll all be something you can talk about at dinner tomorrow,” she said with a smile.

I nodded. I sighed. She was right. This was simply how it was meant to be. 

How bizarre the circumstances we can find ourselves in sometimes, I mused, careful to keep all blaming urges repressed. There was no need to waste energy on that. I imagined that DJ could just as easily blame me for him being here. Feeling what that burden was like, I chose to let the blame slide. It wasn’t really Ellison’s fault I was here. I looked at her and we had a moment of eye-contact during which I said, “Thank you,” with added sincerity.      

Truth be told, having the bottle of wine in my possession was a huge victory for me. Surrounded by so much fear, the warmth of the bottle in my hands reminded me of holding Julia. A majority of my thoughts now turned to escaping this winery and wrapping my arms around my girlfriend. Regarding that goal, retrieving the item I’d set out for was a tiny weight lifted off my shoulders, as noticeable amidst the panic as the lifting of a feather. But still—there it was. The wine. Julia’s wine. And I managed a weak smile at the thought of giving it to her tomorrow and then excitedly relaying the events of this crazy night when zombies attacked us in the winery.

Zombies?

Back at where DJ was seated, Ellison gingerly popped the cork off the white wine and found two big glasses, setting them down with a clink—a loud sound for such a quiet moment, we all flinched. “Sorry,” she whispered, pouring the wine. DJ thanked her and they began to drink. Ellison laughed. The Chief tossed her an annoyed glance as he paced back and forth along the windows.

When Marcos meandered in my direction, I asked him, “Are more cops coming? Are we getting back-up?”

“We’re in radio silence,” he said. “We wait until we can assess the situation.”

Ellison responded, “Some nutjob broke in and killed my janitor and killed four cops in my wine cellar. I think we’ve assessed that enough.”

“He killed two cops,” Marcos corrected her. “We don’t know where Jeffry and Holden are.”

The Chief said, “We have to assume they’re dead.”

“Who said the janitor was dead?” I asked.

Ellison stood there biting her fingernails and said, “Well—” with a shrug.

DJ finished his glass and asked for another.

Marcos wandered closer to the Chief by the front window and I heard them talking quietly, over-hearing him say, “I just know that as soon as I was close enough to shine a light on him, he was holding Murphy and chewing the fuck out of his neck like a motherfucking zombie.”

With that, I tuned him out. I didn’t need any more fuel for the fear.  

All this time I was standing there in the winery while knowing that dead bodies were covered in a tarp in the basement below me. I hadn’t seen the bodies—I didn’t want to—but Marcos and the Chief had explained that the injuries involved neck wounds and “gnarly scratches”—another bit of evidence to validate the zombie invasion theory, which had before been nothing but a playful consideration to alleviate the severity of what was happening, not a real theory. Now that it was becoming more of a reality, I wished again for the moment when the gunshots and shrieking were the result of your standard garden-variety psychopathic burglar. 

DJ and Mrs. Ellison were working on their second glass, each, and Ellison was asking him where he and I were from. Marcos went to go look through another window. That’s when the Chief, staring though the front door, looked over his shoulder and whispered loudly, “I see Jeffry and Holden.”

eight

The rain had picked up again. It drizzled down in cones of light around the scattered lamps in the parking lot. The two police cruisers were closest to the entrance parked crooked in the handicap zone. Ellison’s car was perpendicular to the cruisers, a sleek gray Lexus that was half-swallowed in shadow. Then my Jeep Cherokee was partially bathed in lamplight further beyond Ellison’s, parked in the company of two uniformed officers. They lingered there, these men with ripped shirts and noticeable injuries, in the storm outside and watched us from the passenger side of the Jeep.

“What the hell are they doing?” Marcos muttered.

We had all hurried to the entrance to look through the front windows. DJ stood near and breathed heavily on the glass, fogging it with his wine breath, and being tipsy and stoned he happened to find that hilarious. When he laughed aloud Ellison hushed him and said, “No more wine for you, kid.”

“Call them on the radio,” I suggested. The idea came to my mind as quickly as my mouth formed the words, so I flinched when I realized I was speaking completely out of line.

But the Chief glanced at me and smiled. “Good idea, kid,” he said.

The five of us watched how the oddly docile officers would respond to the voice chirping from their radio speakers. Despite a few attempts on our part, the cops made no move to answer the call or approach the winery. From this distance of about fifty feet, I couldn’t see their faces. Marcos—apparently the one with the best eyesight—commented that “they look just as fucked up as Pollack and Murphy did when I put them under the tarp I found.”

More time passed.

That’s when another figure—shirtless?—moved through a cone of lamplight, but vanished before anyone had the chance to point him out. I saw the briefest glimpse and realized with a sick feeling that it was the man from the photographed window, recognizing his snarling face. The janitor. He’d gotten outside. He’d bitten two cops in the neck and then escaped through the tunnels.

“That’s the fucker I was chasing,” Marcos stated, gritting his teeth and moving toward the blockaded door. “I’m going out there. I don’t care what Jeffry and—”

The Chief stopped him with an arm and said, “No.”

Marcos grunted.

“We wait this out,” the Chief ordered. “Something’s not right about this.”

DJ nodded in agreement. I looked over at Ellison who still had her face to the glass, watching the rain pound down on her winery’s parking lot. Marcos stepped in front of me on his way back toward the lobby and the Chief followed him.

“What about those guys?” Ellison asked, noticing she was alone at the window.

“Leave ‘em out there,” Marcos said. “They’re fucking retarded.”

DJ laughed.

“Won’t answer their radios—” Marcos grumbled, heading off toward the opposite corner of the lobby alone. The Chief spent a few moments shaking his head at the officer and then moved along to another window, this one viewing a small plot of grass and the edge of the adjacent vineyard. There weren’t any people standing around out there, just the rain. I saw DJ sitting at the tasting bar where he’d been before, now with an empty glass, and it looked like Ellison was in search of another bottle. I was a little perplexed because I was fairly certain those idling officers were no longer the Jeffry and Holden of before, but infected zombies, though no one seemed willing to say it out loud.

The Chief seemed confident and calm. I found myself absently observing him as he patrolled the lobby, eyes on the windows, finger on the shotgun trigger. If he had been wearing a cowboy hat and grown out his moustache a little more, I could imagine him in the Old West thwarting off bandits. His cool-headedness eased my racing heart. He knew what he was doing.

The oddly reassuring truth was that I knew that we all knew what was happening. Cannibalistic murderers weren’t common around these parts, I was sure, and we’d all seen enough George Romero to know the tell-tale signs of an impending invasion. The clues couldn’t have spelled out the truth any more clearly—Ellison & Tucker was under attack by zombies. If I woke up at any moment to find that this was all a nightmare, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Relieved, actually.

That’s when the Chief passed by the front entrance again and said, “Jeffry and Holden are gone,” and immediately after that Marcos shouted, “Oh fuck! That’s not Jeffry and Holden!” and he started shooting at the windows, punching three chunks out into the storm, the muzzle blast flashing light onto the snarling faces of the two officers scrambling into the winery.

DJ, I saw, immediately leapt over the tasting bar, knocking his empty glass to the floor to shatter. Marcos unloaded two more shots into one of the attacking cop’s chest and then went down in a fierce tackle, both men crashing into a towering Valentine’s Day display that exploded over the floor around them. Marcos scurried to his feet as the Chief hesitated for only a moment before carving out half of the attacker’s hip with a close-range shotgun blast.  

They’d forgotten about the other cop.

“Jeffry!” Marcos screamed, firing his gun and missing the dodgy attacker bounding for the Chief. I was close enough to feel the Chief’s blood splatter on my face when Jeffry sank his teeth into the thickest part of the man’s shoulder. The sound—like chewing through thick sausage skin—was horribly loud and near. By the time I knew what was happening, the Chief was shouting and pushing himself away from Jeffry. Marcos stepped up and aimed and fired away. In the next instant Jeffry was a fireworks display of blood splatters who fell to a rest only when an ungodly amount of his flesh had been blasted from his bones.

“What the holy fuck!” Marcos screamed, running to the Chief.

 Even in the darkness it was easy to see that the Chief was bleeding all over the place. He was curled up and trembling, his jaw clenched, his hands balled into white-knuckled fists. I looked to see where DJ and Ellison were and spotted them ducking behind the bar. Marcos was on his knees with a rag over the Chief’s shoulder and Marcos was repeating, “It’s okay, sir. It’s okay, sir.”

Then the trembling stopped. The Chief opened his eyes as his muscles relaxed in death, stalling for a moment to blink and lick his lips and say, “Tell Deborah—” Thunder shook the floor and rattled all the wine bottles with an echoing clink. The Chief was dead. Marcos slowly stood up and wiped tears from his eyes, glancing at me with a mean frown, and then moved to pick up the shotgun. He stared at the weapon in his hands for an additional pensive moment and then sighed, “Goddamnit.”

DJ stood up and asked, “Is he alright?”

I could only shake my head, still recovering from the thunderous flurry of action I’d just witnessed. When I snapped back to the moment I hurriedly wiped the Chief’s blood from my face. Dead—the Chief was dead—as quickly as I’d met the guy he was suddenly bleeding on the floor. How to feel about this, I wasn’t even sure—was I supposed to be upset? No—probably not. But scared out of my fucking mind? Yes. I felt that for sure.

Marcos wasn’t taking it well, either. I watched him bash a basket of bottles with the butt of the shotgun and growl as the liquid splashed across the floor. He stopped for a moment to try using his radio, calling urgently for “HQ to send squad cars,” and asking if “anyone could hear him,” and finally turning to Ellison and asking, “You got a fucking phone? My radio isn’t reaching HQ.”

Ellison was too flustered to respond. Marcos had no patience for her.

The officer stomped away toward the windows with the shotgun lowered. He said to us over his shoulder, “That other bastard is still out there. We need to get to a safer location.”

I found myself behind the tasting bar with DJ and Ellison, feeling a bit safer already with just a few feet of counterspace between me and the lobby. A quick scan of the supplies beneath the counter revealed little in the way of weaponry—corkscrews and kitchen knives and dry rags—and I was compelled to grab a knife and wield it like an underprepared jouster. One arm was constantly wrapped tightly around Julia’s wine bottle—that I made sure of.

Ellison said, “I don’t think that knife’s gonna help much.”

DJ laughed nervously. I could see his eyes constantly glancing back to the Chief’s dead body. When he noticed that I had noticed his meandering focus, DJ leaned close to me and whispered, “That guy’s going to become a zombie, dude. We need to get to the Jeep.”

Marcos had wandered back toward the tasting bar, looking more composed after a moment to himself, and he gave us a reassuring nod. DJ gave me a long stare to try and get me to mention something about his zombie conversion concerns. Figuring that officers Jeffry and Holden had assaulted the winery with every intention to bite and kill everyone inside, they obviously weren’t themselves—no argument about that. They’d been converted. It was ridiculous of us to not assume the same would happen to the Chief. Still, I found it nearly impossible to say the words out loud.

“Do you think we could just run for the cars?” DJ asked, glancing at his shoes.

Marcos shook his head. “That won’t work.”

“Why not?”

Ellison took a swig of wine from another bottle, a different red wine, and I noticed the way she savored the taste as she swallowed. Again she gave the impression that she was drinking it knowing she’d never get another chance. I watched her pick another wine and do the same thing. She was spending a special moment with each bottle.

“Because we’re not going outside. We don’t know how many more of them there are.”

“Just the one,” DJ argued. “Just the first guy.”

I argued, “We don’t know that for sure, DJ.”

“What else are we supposed to do?”

Marcos said, “The Chief wanted to wait it out. We wait it out.”

“Look what good that did last time!”

We followed DJ’s finger pointing at where the Chief had once been sprawled out dead on the floor, blood oozing from a ragged gash near his neck. Now there was only a sticky-looking puddle on the hardwood floor and a series of bloody streaks from where the Chief had struggled to stand up, resurrected. We saw him in the corner looking quite puzzled at the adjoining of the walls like it was the end of the universe. Marcos whispered, “I’ll be fucking damned.”

DJ whispered, “You have to kill him.”

Marcos said, “You’ve got to be bullshitting me.”

DJ shook his head.

I said, “He’s not hurting us.”

There was a moment when no one moved and we all watched the resurrected Chief lurking in the corner, his blood-soaked back to us. We needed that moment to rationalize the idea that he’d once been dead and was now standing, and to do that we had to believe in the postmortem aggressive cannibalistic nature of traditional zombie lore. This was no joke—not anymore.

“No,” Marcos remarked with a knowing nod, “but he will.”

Ellison continued to take big gulps from each bottle on the shelves, decidedly detached from what was happening beyond the tasting bar. When Marcos stepped up quietly behind the Chief with the shotgun lowered, I glanced over to see if Ellison was watching but saw her reading the label of a new bottle and going teary-eyed, her cheeks reddened from intoxication. I saw her wavering as she stood still. Then I turned back and watched with DJ as Marcos severed the Chief’s upper half from his legs with one violent blast of lead. A bit of leftover strength forced out a ghastly screech from the decimated zombie. The cry echoed in the lobby and escaped through the broken window.

The screech was answered by another screech outside.

For whatever reason, Marcos cursed angrily and threw the shotgun clattering to the floor as though he were disgusted with it. He pulled out his handgun and aimed toward the windows, backing up to the bar. The first zombie showed up in a splash of shattered glass as it screeched and thrashed its way through another window. Marcos popped it between the eyes and sent the figure tumbling into the wall. Wine bottles fell and crashed. Another zombie. Another window broke and Marcos aimed and fired, missing the head, hitting the neck and decapitating the bastard right in front of us. A fine crimson mist wafted in my direction. DJ wouldn’t stop mumbling, “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit.”

Marcos was still backing up and picking off zombies and reloading and backing up. There were more screeches—each fallen zombie seemed to give out the same cry, which always brought more of them. With my eyes partly adjusted to the darkness, I could see figures running toward the winery from the vineyards across the lawn. I saw them come in waves of three or four or five, emanating from some horrifyingly endless source beyond the hilltop. They were definitely arriving from the direction of Paso Robles, though I had no reason to assume that’s where they were originating.

That’s when the front entrance defenses were crushed by a swarming horde of zombies—led by the snarling shirtless janitor—trying to flank us from the left. Marcos noticed them and gave up his one-shot-one-kill method, holstering his gun as he clambered over the bar. He nearly knocked our single candle away—our only source of light—and DJ quickly reached out to protect it.

An idea came to him as he stared into the candle flame—I saw it in his eyes.

“Molotov cocktail,” he said.

In a matter of moments I watched DJ grab the half-empty bottle of Julia’s favorite Cabernet from the trashcan and stuff one of the dry rags partway into the bottle so that one end soaked up the alcohol. Ellison had stopped tasting her wines. I saw her huddling in a corner facing the approaching onslaught with tears running down her face. DJ took the candle and lit the end of the rag, all the while flinching at each gunshot Marcos fired at the nearest attacker. I held out my knife and tried to prepare myself for any neck-stabbing and brain-gouging I might need to do.

DJ was smiling when the rag caught aflame and began to brighten. He laughed and said, “Watch this!” and threw it directly at the oncoming swarm. The bottle shattered over the face of the janitor, knocking him back a few feet and tripping up some of the other zombies, but the wine did not erupt into a ball of flame as anticipated. I looked to DJ and he let out a groan and slumped with defeat. “Fuck,” he said. “Fucking red wine.”

Marcos caught the elusive janitor in a moment of stillness and popped a bullet through the zombie’s forehead in a burst of bloody yellow ooze and brain matter. He managed to hold back the onslaught with a dozen well-placed bullets and, after their numbers dwindled to none, he turned around to make sure we were all okay, acting as though he hadn’t single-handedly saved all of us from gruesome death. The lull in the attack was misleadingly pleasant, I knew, but for a moment I was able to gather my thoughts. Mostly I couldn’t stop thinking about how wine made for horrible Molotov cocktails. Ellison cried softly to herself and we all chose to ignore her for now.

“We’re going to the cellar,” he said. “We’ll take one of the tunnels out of here.”

“But they could be down there, too,” responded DJ.

Marcos shrugged.

I said, “We can try to get to the highway.”

“Exactly.”

DJ whined, “The highway?”

“We can make it. There’s got to be a tunnel—” Marcos then turned to Ellison and grabbed her by the shoulders and asked, “Which of the tunnels takes us closest to the highway?”

DJ added, “Weren’t there dead people down there?”

Yeah, and they probably all got bit.

Ellison shook her head a few times and wiped away tears, regaining her awareness after another sip of a nearby white wine. She hiccupped and said dryly, “We’re still alive. Splendid.”

Marcos repeated his question.

“The second tunnel,” Ellison answered. “Second from the left.”

“We’re going there now,” Marcos explained. “Can you walk in a straight line, lady? We kind of have to hurry.”

“I can walk fine,” she said—honestly, too, for I was surprised to see her walk a straight line to the end of the bar where the cellar door was unlocked. She turned back and looked at the lobby, strewn with dead bodies and gore, and she said, “Give me a second to say goodbye.”

Marcos opened the cellar door. He switched on a light to illuminate the stone staircase in a fluorescent shine, bathing the brick walls in surgical-white hues. I was ready to follow Marcos down but wanted to make sure Ellison was following us. There were plenty of screeches to be heard in the darkness outside and at any moment another attack could rush us from another angle.

I was sure Marcos was low on ammunition.

“Come on, lady,” Marcos ordered as he herded DJ and me through the door. I turned around to watch what Ellison was doing. Marcos nervously scanned the nearby shadows for stragglers who might leap out at any moment. Behind me I heard DJ breathing heavily. It was awfully quiet for that moment while we waited between floors, trapped in this thin tunnel. “Jesus Christ—did you not hear me? We have to get the fuck out of here now,” Marcos persisted, edgy and short-tempered. I felt bad for the guy losing five of his close friends in one night.

Ellison finally abandoned her winery after excruciating hesitation and followed us downstairs.

nine

Wine cellar. Dim lighting. Six large oak barrels on stands. Smaller barrels everywhere. The smell of grapes. The smell of dirt. Quiet, save the dripping of water from the shadows. Five tunnel openings along the far wall. Ellison slid shut a door to close the staircase. DJ and I waited for orders. Ellison took a big breath of the earthy aromas around us and smiled. “I love it down here,” she said with a smile.

“Great,” Marcos commented from behind one of the barrels.

“What?” DJ whispered back.

“Pollack and Murphy are gone,” he explained. I moved to see what he was talking about and found him standing over a tossed-aside tarp and the wet blood-soaked dirt where he’d dragged the dead officers’ bodies. This area reeked like vomit, an acidic and nauseating odor, and I had to hurry away before throwing up all over the place. “They’re down here somehow,” he warned.

“Please don’t say stuff like that,” Ellison remarked. She was making her way toward the tunnels and I decided to follow her. She was headed for the second tunnel from the left, a thin opening that prohibited anything but single-file traffic. Before even glancing to see if any of us were following, Ellison was through the entrance and on her way into the pitch-black void, heading intently onward without a light to guide her. Her echoing footsteps were muffled by the earth walls and stifling ringing in my ears, a result of my mind filling in noise for otherwise total silence.

I stopped at the tunnel entrance to wait for company before pursuing the fast-paced winery owner. She was apparently going ahead on her own, for whatever reason.  DJ was lagging behind, examining the gory scene like someone out of a CSI screenplay—and not one of the detectives, but one of the curious onlookers trying to cross the caution tape. Marcos pointed at two sets of revealing red footprints leading toward the tunnels, nearly invisible in the dark but shiny and wet in Marcos’ flashlight. We all followed the prints with our eyes until they vanished down the second tunnel’s throat.

The same tunnel Ellison went down alone.

“Isn’t that—” DJ started, making the same realization.

“Yeah. She just went down there,” I said.

Marcos glanced at me. “She went on her own?”

“She looked like she was in a hurry.”

DJ shook his head. “We’re not going down there. They went down there.”

“We have to,” Marcos ordered. He checked the handgun chamber for bullets and seemed content enough to press forward. “She knows how to get out of here.”

Following the officer, I had to resist the urge to reach out and grab a handful of his shirt for guidance. Instead I reached out with my knife-wielding hand to slide a finger along the dirt wall, feeling the hair-fine tips of plant roots and the smoothed faces of stones long buried. I tightened my grip on the wine bag handle in my other hand, reminding myself that if I failed to protect the wine than this whole trip was for nothing. The tunnel was claustrophobic enough that I could hear everyone’s short and raspy breathing. There were handcuffs on Marcos’ belt that rattled softly with each brisk step as the three of us followed the flashlight beam farther and farther from the main room. Above us I could imagine rows of grapevines, I could imagine the stars and the moon, I could imagine Julia sleeping in her bed—

“Shh,” Marcos said, stopping immediately.

I bumped into him and apologized.

DJ asked, “What?”

“Shh—I said,” Marcos repeated.

“Oh. Okay.”

It was so dark that I couldn’t see DJ standing two feet behind me. He kept one hand entangled in the bottom of my shirt and that bit of contact was the only way I knew I wasn’t alone. Marcos clicked off the flashlight—instant suffocating darkness—and the knife nearly slipped free of my sweaty palm. I held my breath and listened. The inconsistent drip, drip, drip of water. But also—something else. I listened harder, turning my ear toward the sound, and waited for it to come back. Footsteps? No. Well—maybe.

“You hear that?” Marcos whispered.

“What is that?”

“Footsteps,” he said. “Above us.”

Through the distance of ground overhead, the stampeding footfalls of what sounded (and felt) like a hundred zombies began to intensify. I’d assumed there were plenty more of them wandering in the darkness outside of the winery, but part of me had hoped this was a more contained outbreak, that we wouldn’t leave this tunnel and find ourselves surrounded by flesh-hungry monsters. Now it was obvious that the horde was on the move—distracted by something, prowling for brains. DJ put it plainly when he whispered, “If that’s what we’re heading towards, I feel safer in this tunnel.”

Marcos clicked on the flashlight. “No,” he replied. “We’re getting the hell out of here.”

Again we moved, cramped, toward the storage shed. The small amount of light reflecting faintly on the walls was misleading in the comfort it supplied. I could at least see where I was stepping. The ceiling was thinner in places and the movement above would knock clumps of dirt onto our heads. I nearly shrieked when I thought a spider had leapt onto my neck but a quick slap of my hand assured me it had been only dirt, and DJ laughed. Two seconds later it happened to him, too, and I laughed back. He leaned forward and whispered, “I’m still baked as shit, just so you know.” Marcos told us to shut up, then he turned off his flashlight again and told us to hold still.

We’d reached the end of the tunnel.

A rusty red ladder travelled up to an open hatch about eight feet above. Marcos flashed a beam of light through the opening and from our vantage point I could see a corrugated aluminum wall of the shed adorned with shovels and hoses and gardening supplies. On the dirt at the bottom of the ladder were two shoes, Ellison’s shoes, and Marcos bent down to pick them up.

“Where’d she go?” DJ asked.

I shrugged.

Marcos dropped the shoes and said, “Where did Pollack and Murphy go?—that’s what I want to know.” He holstered his handgun and reached up to climb, but stopped. “I can hear them up there,” he whispered, turning off the flashlight. A faint moonlight filtered down through the open ladder hatch and put a luminescent glow around Marcos, whose eyes glistened wide while he surveyed and strategized. We could hear the screeches and moans of the horde above us which apparently had surrounded the shed, but not broken inside—lest we would have seen them stumbling into the open hole. The zombies were oblivious. The shed seemed secure.

So where was Ellison?

That’s when the faint moonlight my eyes were just about adjusted to was drastically upgraded to a bright blaring beacon that showered down visibility from the hatch. Someone had turned on a powerful light source above us—let there be light—and filled the end of the tunnel with some blinding clarity. All of us reacted with the same startled, “Whoa!” and Marcos nearly slipped from the ladder rungs. I lifted an arm to shield my eyes from the assault.

Ellison’s voice called down, “Is that you guys?”

DJ shouted back, “Yes, it’s us!”

She appeared in the opening, crouched with her hands on her knees, and she said, “Climb up already. What took you guys so long? I told you it was the second tunnel.”

Marcos moved aside and volunteered me to go first, choosing instead to stand back and face the tunnel behind us with his handgun prepped. I didn’t hesitate. One, two, three seconds later I happily allowed Ellison to grab my arm and hoist me onto solid wooden floorboards. I made a quick scan of the brightly lit shed and found it to contain the gardening supplies I expected, along with a bench and an ancient dusty computer. I noticed a knocked-over filing cabinet that had spilt its scribbled notes all over the floor. Mouse droppings and termite carvings—this shed was well-aged. Its tattered aluminum walls and unsteady drooping ceiling moaned in the breeze more than the crowd outside. I felt obligated to put down my ridiculously lousy knife for a better weapon, a heavy shovel, and picked one from the hanging supplies on the nearest wall. This two-handed weapon made it difficult to carry the wine bag, so I ran my arm all the way through the handle and cradled the bottle in my armpit.

A shoeless and disheveled Ellison reached down for DJ’s arm as he left the tunnel. He climbed up and looked around, thanked her for her help, and then said to me, “Fuck yes,” when he noticed I’d upgraded weapons. “Much better.”

“Farther reach,” I explained, swinging the shovel in a chopping motion—trying to imagine decapitating some motherfuckers. “Plus I’d have to get too close with the knife. I’d get bit.”

DJ moved to grab a weapon from the wall, too. He chose the pick-axe and said, “Now this is how I want to be remembered,” and swung the pointed tip down toward the floor. “This thing will scoop a bastard’s brains out with one hit,” he said with an odd amount of enthusiasm. I appreciated that he wasn’t freaking out and was, in reality, visibly enjoying this experience. He must have realized that his enjoyment was leaking and said, “This is what every guy wants to do, Brian. Haven’t you wanted a fucking zombie apocalypse to happen so you’d get a chance to kill a whole bunch of them?”

Ellison commented, “You guys are sick.”

Marcos appeared and helped himself out of the tunnel, ignoring Ellison’s outstretched hand. He gave the shed a disappointed once-over and then sighed. “How far to the road?” he asked the winery owner, glancing briefly into the hatch as though he might’ve heard something.

“It’s about two hundred feet that way,” she said, pointing, “and about a hundred feet back to the parking lot—where the cars are,” and she pointed another direction.

I watched Marcos digest this information. It made more sense to run for the parking lot and try to get away in a vehicle, not on foot. Especially when considering the amount of bustling about we could hear beyond the walls—how safe was it to be on foot? I was tempted to approach one of the filthy dust-caked windows to survey the threat level, but knew that I’d probably end up having my face ripped off if I was noticed and so I stayed near the center of the shed with the others, surrounding the open hatch like a campsite bonfire.

Marcos opened his mouth and said, “We should—”

That’s when I felt five cold rigid fingers claw into my leg and pull, hard and fast, and yank me down toward the darkness. I fell hard against the wood floorboards—heard snapping—and then felt fingernails clamping deep, drawing blood. Pulling me, pulling me, I had so little time to react that I didn’t even get a chance to scream. Some deep survival instinct compelled me to yank back and I managed to throw my arms up for Marcos and Ellison to grab onto—which they did—and the three of us forcibly retrieved my leg from the depths. The officer—“Pollack!” Marcos yelled—maintained his grip on my foot and was being hoisted into the shed with us, his gnashing teeth spitting yellowish foam, a bloody and furious look in his eyes.

DJ shouted, “Let go of my friend!” and sent eight inches of a steel spike through the top of Pollack’s skull with the well-placed swing of the pick-axe. A fountain of blood spurted out and the zombie relaxed and fell into the tunnel, bringing the tool with it and leaving a few bad scratches around my ankle—nothing severe. Hopefully nothing that would lead to infection.

“Right on,” Ellison commented with a shrug. She exhaled deeply with a hand held to her heart, noticeably shaking as she attempted to calm her nerves.

“They can jump?” DJ wondered aloud.

“Or they can climb,” Ellison answered.

Marcos sat me down and told me to take a second to relax. It felt like my heart hadn’t been beating the whole time I was about to die and now, safely sitting on the floor, it had to race to catch up again. My breathing was oddly regular—the adrenaline rush waned quickly. I gently nursed my wounds and turned to DJ. “Thanks,” I said, knowing that his reaction probably saved me. “Sorry you only got to use the axe once.”

“It was worth it,” he said with a shrug.

Marcos turned to Ellison and asked, “Okay. Now which way to the cars?”

“I can lead us there,” she answered, still shaking her head after that burst of action. “Christ, though, I’m gonna need a second to catch my breath.”  

“One minute,” Marcos said. “We need to get the hell out of here.” He paced away from the hatch and then came back to look down into the dark. He pondered quietly, “Where did they come from? When did this start happening?”

I remembered Mrs. Ellison commenting that weird people had been vandalizing the locals for about a month. She’d told us that one woman’s dogs were brutally mauled. The zombies had been around for at least a month, then, according to the local woman’s gossip. She said the same thing again, this time with Marcos around to hear. Marcos argued that if stuff like this had been happening for a month then the police would have caught on. DJ countered with, “You’d never see this coming. You never do. The invasion builds and builds quietly and then, finally, it spreads out. It has to. It can’t be contained. It never can.”

“But why now?” Marcos asked. He looked at his wrist-watch and frowned and, in that instant, I could imagine that Marcos had a wife and child waiting for him at home. A pretty and petite woman who held her looks even after childbirth, birthing a big baby boy, and I saw Marcos living in a moderately-sized suburban home with a front yard and a garage. An everyman. An officer of the law with an American flag tattooed somewhere on his body from his military days.

“Why not?” DJ replied.

That’s when Marcos felt the same five-finger grasp on his leg, only none of us were there to catch him when he fell. Quicker than a blink, the officer was splattered on the floorboards and whisked down into the darkness. His scream came next, followed by one gunshot, then another ear-piercing cry of pain. The sound of ripping flesh, gurgling liquid caught in the throat, the scuffle of movement over the dirt floor, the clanging of Marcos’ belt against the bottom of the ladder. We heard him yell for help and then go silent. We heard him die. Then we heard him being eaten.

Ellison stepped forward and slammed the hatch shut.

Then she went to me, still staring dumbfounded at the hatch, and hoisted me to my feet. She pushed the shovel against my chest as though to remind me that I was carrying it and she looked into my eyes, refocused me, and said, “We obviously need to keep moving.”

DJ muttered, “That’s fucked up,” over and over as he shook his head, turning away.

“Hey—kid.” Ellison snapped her fingers at DJ. “We’re going to get out of here. Grab that second shovel,” Ellison commanded, quickly and seamlessly taking control of the situation. I found the hardened expression on her face to be discomforting, yet necessary. Watching Marcos fall to the hands of the zombies was numbingly abrupt—my brain still had trouble wrapping around the idea. Marcos was gone—so was his pistol and his authority. Ellison probably figured she could either break down and panic, or take the reins and keep the hope alive. For Ellison I was grateful, especially in that moment.

She went to the desk and grabbed a set of keys from a drawer. “Tractor,” she said, pointing to the shed door. “It’s parked right outside. We’ll ride it back to the parking lot.” I watched her move toward the door and cringed when it looked as though she might open it. Instead she held a hand on the doorknob, the keys readied in her other, and Ellison said, “I’m going in ten seconds. You boys can stay here if you want.”

DJ spun around and grabbed a shovel like mine.

“We’ll be going slow,” Ellison said. “I need you both to keep them away while I drive.”

She’d drank a lot in the winery, I recalled, but ignored that concern for now. She was the only one who knew how to drive a tractor—so far as I knew, DJ being city-born like me—and there wasn’t any time for her to teach one of us. It was just a tractor, after all. How hard could it be to drive three miles per hour?

DJ and I stood side by side, ready.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

ten

Ellison turned the keys and the tractor engine coughed to life, rattling and hollering, drawing the attention of every zombie within eyesight. We’d been lucky that none of them stood in the path between the shed and the tractor—giving us the freedom to sprint swiftly over the muddy ground (which muffled our steps). It felt like the escape was flawless until Ellison jingled the keys and turned the engine to roar. This was definitely the most terrified and adrenaline-pumped I’d ever felt in my life, and I was well aware of the fact that these could be my final minutes. DJ and I shared a moment of eye-contact, sitting on opposite sides of the tractor driver’s booth, legs dangling over the side. We exchanged a lot of sentiment during that moment—or at least I did—while thanking each other for being a good roommate and an even better friend over these past four years.

I wanted to say: Thanks for coming with me.

“Here they come,” Ellison said, shifting the vehicular beast into gear. It trembled at the command and resisted—big heavy wheels spinning fans of mud behind, knocking down some bastards sneaking up on us—but ultimately caught traction and lurched forward.

DJ swung at something—I felt the rush of air as he nearly skinned my scalp. I had no time to turn around before a zombie sprinted at me from behind the shed, arms flailing and tongue lashing, and I had just enough practice from playing little league as a kid to know when to swing. His swollen head popped when the shovel struck, blowing yellowed brains into the air. I had no time to react before another one was shrieking for me from another direction. For that one I lifted a weight off its shoulders.

This was when I realized that Ellison was steering us directly through her vineyard, crashing through row after row of grapevines, smothering them in the mud beneath the slow-moving wheels. I had a moment when I could look at Ellison and swore she was crying, though it could have been the rain—which was lightening (a good sign?). DJ glanced over his shoulder and caught my eye again, this time with a different exchange. We’re almost there, his eyes said. We’re gonna make it.

And I believed him.

Ellison said, “We’re running for your car—yeah? You’re car is closer.”

I realized that she was speaking to me. A flash of motion caught my attention and I spun around to turn a teenage boy’s head into a replica of Pac-Man, the top half folding away with the nose and leaving the snarling mouth.

The tractor crashed through one last row of vines as it reached the peak of a small hill, revealing the winery below. On the decline side of the hill, Ellison managed a smile—I found it oddly endearing—as she splattered the grill with the guts of any zombie who stood in her path. The lawn gave way to the cement and the tractor finished its last dash to the Cherokee. Ellison killed the engine and said, “Okay, okay! Hurry! Go!” and shooed DJ to the ground.

I leapt down and scurried around the front—noticing how blood was boiling on the heated hood—and followed them to the car. Holding the shovel with one hand, I found my keychain in my pocket and prayed that I’d finger the right key on the ring. It was the one with the square base and—there it was! DJ was at the passenger door, Ellison at the back behind him, and I had to hurry around to the driver’s door to get inside. Everything felt like it was taking way too long. I had no trouble unlocking the door and using the handle and getting inside, it all felt rather flawless, but it felt like my actions were taking forever. I tossed my shovel into the backseat and unlocked the doors. DJ and Ellison were inside a moment later and suddenly we were much safer than we’d been in a long time. The sensation of relief was so great that none of us could speak or breathe, afraid to jinx it, maybe. DJ and I had only been out of this car for twenty minutes since arriving.

I eventually reached forward to start the engine. There weren’t any zombies around us, thankfully, so there was no need to hurry—yet. We hadn’t thought beyond this part of the plan. We had the car, but now what? Go home? What about Ellison? Why hadn’t she gone for her own car? I figured she wanted to stick together and so the thought of escaping by herself hadn’t crossed her mind. Did she want DJ and me to take her home? Surely she’d want to see if her family was alright. A question came to me mid-thought and I asked Ellison’s rearview reflection, “Did you want to use my phone? Do you have a cellphone?”

“I left it at home on accident,” she said. “Didn’t think I’d need it so I didn’t go back to get it.”

Ellison laughed. I thought she looked pale.

“Want to call your family?”

She nodded. “I want to see my husband,” she replied.

I found my cellphone in the center console where I’d left it charging and reached back to hand it off, looking for the driveway entrance as I drove. DJ was silent for the moment, his eyes focused outside, his hands still ready to use the shovel, still on the defense. Ellison hadn’t grabbed the phone from me, yet, and I said over my shoulder, “Here—use my phone.”

I glanced in the rearview and saw her weakly reaching for it, slouched forward drowsily. Her arm seemed reluctant to lift from her side, her fingers clenching into fists, the veins in her neck popping out as she strained to take the phone and failed.

“Oh fuck,” I said, stopping the car. The brakes squeaked.

“What?” DJ asked, looking first out his window and then at my face, then turned to see what I was staring at. Mrs. Ellison wasn’t looking so hot. “No fucking way,” DJ whispered. “Did she get bit?”

I stuffed my phone into my pocket, then reached out and pushed her backward. She resisted, lowering her head so that her hair fell into a veil around her face. I thought I saw her drooling—blood?—but it was too dark to tell.

“Don’t push,” she said. “I feel sick.”

“Did you get bit?” I asked.

DJ kept an eye on the perimeter.

“No,” she said. “I think I might be drunk,” she confessed.

I heard her laugh. Then she sobbed, hiccupped, and coughed. Yep—that was blood. She looked at what she’d sprayed onto her hands and then sat up, lifting her head. Her cheeks had sunk to their bony frames, her mouth stretched into a snarl—her lips bloodied and cracked and blue. It was not Mrs. Ellison any longer. Her eyes rolled back into her head for a moment, then returned. She was still fighting it. She’d been infected, somehow, and we were watching her change.

“Oh fuck,” DJ said. “You gotta kill her.”

“Me? You have a shovel.”

He shook his head. “I’m fucking done with this,” he grunted. DJ bit his lip and unbuckled his seatbelt. I watched Mrs. Ellison stare at her swelling hands and then ball them into fists. She began to cry. She moaned, “Why is this happening to me? It’s not fair. Why is—” and then DJ speared her head to the headrest, shoving her withering face inward like a sunken jack o’ lantern. Yellow ooze spilled down her neck and clothing, a sickly substance that reeked of rotten eggs, with a syrupy quality that reminded me of curdled milk.

“Jesus Christ,” I groaned, putting the Jeep into drive and getting the fuck out of there.

DJ slapped his head a few times and squeezed his eyes shut, mumbling, “That was so fucking gross, that was so fucking gross.” He stopped hitting himself and asked me, “What happened to her? Did she get bit?” He wiped his hands on his jeans—rubbing the guilt away?—and he added, “I hope I didn’t get any of that yellow shit on me. I can’t believe you just made me do that.”

“I didn’t—”

“Just drive!” he cut me off, waving forward impatiently.

“We fucking had to kill her!” I shouted, panicked, fed up with watching people die right in front of me. I had my fucking wine and I was back in the fucking car—so I was ready to get this show on the road. I shifted to drive, slammed on the gas pedal, spun the tires on wet cement—then the Jeep sped ahead toward the exit. Whatever was going to happen next, I was ready. I was done being at this godforsaken winery. I didn’t know if Ellison had been bit and I figured I had been a more likely candidate for conversion considering I’d been scratched by one of them. Realizing I’d shouted at DJ, I said, “Sorry.”

“This is so fucking insane,” DJ said, shaking his head. “I can’t believe—” he stalled for a moment when I took a sharp right turn onto the highway. The Jeep skidded over wet road and the back end fishtailed away from me, throwing Ellison’s door open and yanking her dead body away with the shovel. When the Jeep stopped skidding, the backdoor bounced shut on its own, conveniently ridding us of the gruesome sight. DJ said, “Good move.”

“Thanks,” I said, organizing my wits and then pressing down on the gas. We were heading home—home! I realized that I still had the wine bottle sheltered in my armpit and stretched out to slide the bag off. Having squeezed down so firmly for so long, my shoulder burst with a flash of sore pain and then went numb. I reached around behind my seat and stuffed the wine safely in the slot beneath the chair. Thank God I still got the wine.

Neither of us spoke for a while after that.

We drove further and further from the winery but still spotted an occasional zombie on the side of the road. Some of them crossed my path and fell mangled under my tires. We passed a scene where a cop had pulled over a suspicious vehicle and wound up having his guts eaten by a family of zombies. There were crashed vehicles left and right, obscured in the dark—though some of them had blinker lights flashing or small fires smoldering inside. It felt like we were miles from the winery but the severity of the invasion never diminished. Maybe I just thought a lot of time was passing—it was difficult to think rationally—and maybe we had only been gone for a few minutes. Some of the night sky was filled with the hellish smoke of distant fires.

How far did the invasion spread?

We kept driving. There was nothing else we could do.

“And don’t stop for anyone,” DJ added. “That’s totally against the rules.”

eleven

A big white bus was stalled jackknifed across both lanes of the highway—blocking our escape route—and rested crooked on melted tires as a roaring fire blazed within. Zombies crowded around its base as though feeding off the warmth, bumbling around mindlessly in the glow of the flames slithering out of the charred bus windows. I could read ELLISON & TUCKER WINE BUS (small world, I’d thought) on the side where bloody handprints had been spread from zombies trying to get to the undoubtedly well-cooked flesh inside. Parked about thirty feet from this scene, DJ and I had spent a good five minutes trying to come up with a plan.  

“Go around them,” he suggested, pointing to an opening behind the bus—a small section of shadowy road that hadn’t been blockaded.  

I’d considered that idea but found the lack of reliable light to be a concern, especially since this section of the highway took a snaking path through a collection of pointed rocky hills—and that blackness alongside the highway could be the start of a thousand-foot slope. There was a fence, too, but not a guardrail­—so to speak. It was a fence like a fence to keep cattle from becoming road-kill. For all I knew the road dropped into a bottomless abyss beyond that fence.

“Just go,” he repeated. “We can’t sit here.”

Alternatively there was the sharp rock wall of where dynamite had blown out the face of the hill to make room for the highway—no room to sneak by the front of the bus, either. We could have also turned around and gone back to Paso Robles and taken an entirely different route north. But time was a concern. Plus it didn’t make sense to go back toward the winery—which is where I’d come to associate as the spawning point of this whole disaster, though I guess I had no reason to.

“Okay,” I said, revving the engine to fence-smashing speed.

We shot forward like a bullet, rocketing alongside the burning bus and crashing through the fence and a zombie or two, losing traction immediately in the muddy shoulder. The Jeep spun sideways and the engine whined—though I was grateful to have four tires on solid ground—and I yanked the wheel around to correct us. DJ was shouting unintelligibly with his hands gripping the door and the dashboard. I gripped the wheel and spun, gassed it, gritted my teeth, and then let out the most aggressive howl I could muster—I felt the veins in my neck bulge. I poured every ounce of energy I had into that moment, into the necessity of finding traction and steering back onto the highway. This bus felt like our last hurdle before escape—like that wave at the end of The Perfect Storm.

But it wasn’t meant to be.

The back tires reached the end of the shoulder where the earth fell away to open air and the realization that we were about to start rolling backward took over. I let go of the wheel. I let up on the gas. Everything went silent and cold and gray. This was it. DJ and I both turned to each other to have another eye-to-eye Thank You exchange, but it was cut short by gravity. The Cherokee’s trunk swung beneath the hood and the whole vehicle back-flipped into the darkness. I closed my eyes and felt my body being twisted upside down and slammed hard into the roof as it crumpled from the landing impact. The Jeep bounced sideways and clipped a boulder—did it matter?—and spun us like a top down the bumpy slope, rolling over and over, crashing and shattering, metal bending and snapping, cartwheeling and spinning—probably a dazzling display to an outside observer.

Then a final crash. A splash of water. A rush of water. We were upside down in a creek—a river?—no, a creek. A well-fed creek due to the storm, however, and as I was realizing this I was watching the Jeep fill with water through the shattered windows above my head, below me. I needed to get my seatbelt unhitched and—if I could just reach it—there!—I fell headfirst onto the flooded roof and found it immensely difficult to turn myself right-side up in the small space. I swallowed a lot of water in the process but managed to reach out and use the steering wheel for support. After a big gasp of breath and a headshake to clear my ears, I looked for DJ.

I suppose it was just bad luck.

The other shovel—my shovel—had its handle snapped off during the crash and, at some point, found its sharp end jutting out from the chest of my roommate. It had impaled him through the back of the chair. He sat upside down, motionless save for the gentle rocking of the Jeep in the creek, with not a look of pain on his face but a smile. A real smile. Water bubbling up around me—the windows underwater—I reached out and touched DJ on the shoulder. I knew that I was going to be the last person to see him and I didn’t want to just leave him, not yet. I would have wanted him to give me a little respect if I’d been killed. So I said, “You—” and my throat was caught with emotion and I burst into tears. They came unexpectedly and furiously. Furious because this was the culmination of everything, the end of the horror story, this was how it was going to end. DJ got impaled with a shovel handle and I drowned in the creek. I cried because I hadn’t actually gotten to say goodbye. I cried because I felt like it was my fault. I cried because I knew this would happen—that one of us would die—and I cried because I was still alive and now I had to survive.

I hadn’t made it out of the accident scratch-free (I had a rather painful burning in my left arm that I was choosing to ignore), but seeing that DJ had been killed and that I was now alone—my survival instinct was forfeiting. Giving up felt like the best idea right then.

The Jeep filled with water and took DJ’s body with it beneath the bubbles, reaching a point where the current eventually lifted the whole vehicle and pushed it slowly downstream. This left about two feet of breathing room for me as the creek carried me away—in the wrong direction, but I wasn’t really complaining. I was mostly preoccupied with memories of DJ—my mind racing through the whole of our friendship—as though thinking about the memories would keep him alive for a little bit longer and help me forget what it looked like to see a bloody shovel handle spiked through his chest.

The Jeep struck a boulder that wouldn’t let it pass.

Thinking about DJ as my roommate, I realized that a lot of my favorite memories with him also included Julia. It was a gradual thought change from DJ to Julia, but the transition was smooth. I began to think of the way Julia kissed me, the way she smelled in the morning, the way she laughed. I saw her beautiful smile. I heard her tell me she loved me. I came back to thoughts of DJ—the mind moved so quickly sometimes—and I knew that DJ would want me to keep going. He’d want me to survive. If not for his sake, then for Julia’s. For the fucking Cabernet Sauvignon’s sake.

I smiled. I laughed at DJ and his sense of humor and all of everything that was DJ, and then I felt like I was ready to say goodbye. So I reached down and found the window frame underwater. A quick pull and leg kick got me out of the Jeep and into the deep center of the creek. From there I broke the surface and scanned the shores—gray walls. This wasn’t a creek at all. This was a cement ditch, used for feeding the local agriculture, probably. It was a giant water slide with six-foot walls, shaped like the Death Star’s canyon. The current whisked me downstream and I didn’t fight it.

That’s when something floating alongside me bumped into my hand—something soft and feathery—and I turned to see that it was the Ellison & Tucker bag. It was Julia’s wine. Oh my God, I thought, having completely forgotten about the wine after DJ died. It had floated its way out of the Jeep somehow and followed me. With a big disbelieving smile I grabbed the bag and stuffed my arm through the handle to the shoulder—my good shoulder—and felt blessed.

Above me, the stars were bright and wonderful, framed by the walls of the ditch. I saw a helicopter fly low overhead. I closed my eyes and laid back in the crisp water—glad for the floating feeling, weightless—and this could have gone on for minutes or hours. I felt myself falling asleep in the comfort, waking when water ran up my nose. But at some point the weariness overwhelmed me—the emotional rollercoaster of it all didn’t help my aching heart, either—and I passed out completely.

I probably should have drowned.

twelve

“Kid!” Noises. Voices? “You alright? Can you hear me?” I can hear you. Dark—my eyes—I opened them. “Hey—there you are. You okay?” A man. I was on the road. I was wet, but no longer in water. Pain—my arm. I looked and it was bloody. “It’s glass,” said the man. He grabbed the shiny edge of window stuck in my shoulder and said, “I’m gonna pull it out.”

Pain. Lots of it.

Blackness.

“Kid!”

It was that guy again. What did he want? Didn’t he know I was tired?

“Wake up,” he ordered. The man slapped my face, twice—Ow! I wanted to shout.

“Wha—What?” I mumbled. I coughed—there was still water in my throat. “What happened?” I managed to choke out, lurching forward to hug my knees. The man wrapped a warm coat over my back and I tightened the dryness around me to quiet my nerves. I was shivering. I was freezing.

“Found you in the ditch,” he explained, “stuck on the grate—about to get crushed by this Jeep that was in there with you.” He rubbed my back a few times and then stood up. He was a good-looking guy in a button-up shirt and khaki slacks, overdressed for a zombie invasion, and he drove a silver Lexus like Mrs. Ellison. I put him in his late forties. “Was that your Jeep?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Was that your brother in there?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Oh,” said the man. “Sorry anyhow.”

I started to get up. One shoulder still carried the wine bottle while the other shoulder still hurt—bandaged, now, but just as burning and painful—and I remembered watching him yank the shard of glass out. I’d never blacked out before, I realized, and that was twice in one night that I’d done so, now. The man assisted me upright, holding my good shoulder for a moment to make sure I had balance. I did.

“Thank you,” I said.

“I’ve got a car. We should keep moving.”

 “Who are you?” I asked, just curious.

“I’m Henry Tucker,” said Tucker with a handshake. “I just left my winery—it’s probably no better than what you saw out there. Where were you coming from? Not town.”

“Ellison and Tucker?” I asked him.

“That’s right. That’s my place—my wife and mine.” Tucker flinched as though from old habit he wanted to hand me a business card—I saw him almost reach for his wallet. He coughed into his fist and explained, “My wife went to check on an alarm and never came back.” Tucker looked around the road—this was a dirt road off the highway, I noticed—and said, “Now I know why.”

The knowledge that I’d witnessed Ellison’s final moments of life and watched my friend slam a shovel into her face was immense for about ten seconds. For ten seconds I wanted to tell him the fascinating coincidence that I would have been at that winery with his wife. I had so much to tell him. I had to tell him about his wife and how she was brave and smart and how she saved our lives—my life, at least—and how she turned into a zombie and how she died. I looked into Tucker’s eyes and I couldn’t say anything, however. He still seemed hopeful that she was alive.

“Paso Robles is being quarantined,” Tucker continued. “We should go.”

I limped my first few steps behind him as he hurried to the parked Lexus. He opened the passenger door and reached inside to grab the hunting rifle he’d placed there and I gave him a nod when he told me to watch my head. His generosity was overwhelming. The well-kept interior was warm and the seat cradled my aching body. The man closed my door and went around to his own, sliding behind the wheel with a hearty exhale, setting the rifle on the backseat.

He started the engine and shifted to drive. “I heard about it on the radio—the TV wasn’t working. Some virus is making people go crazy—some people are calling them zombies.” Tucker started driving north—back toward the flaming bus—but I didn’t want to tell him to stop. “I found my wife’s car at the winery with some cop cars, but she wasn’t there—the place was overrun. All of Paso Robles is overrun. Where are you from? Is it safer there?”

I couldn’t think of a lie—wanting to just be anywhere—so I said, “Santa Rosa.”

Tucker looked at me curiously. “Santa Rosa? That’s four hours from here. Five, maybe.”

“It’s four. I—I came down here for this,” I admitted, showing him the wine bottle I’d been cradling. He must not have recognized his winery’s label after the bag had turned soggy. I pulled out the bottle—thankfully the yellow label was printed on the glass, so it remained unscarred and legible—and showed him. “I wanted it for Julia—my girlfriend, Julia.”

“This is my wife’s favorite wine. This is our wine.”

I nodded. He looked into my eyes for answers.

“I saw her there,” I said, and proceeded to explain how I’d arrived with my roommate just moments before the cops and Ellison arrived. I told him about barricading ourselves inside. About the Chief and Marcos. I told him about DJ trying to make a Molotov cocktail and failing. Tucker laughed at that. Then I told him about the attack that took the Chief, how Marcos was pulled back into the tunnel, and how Ellison drove us to the Jeep on the tractor. He laughed and said, “I was wondering how that got there,” and I then had to tell him how Ellison got sick all of a sudden and turned into a zombie. I fibbed a little and said she attacked DJ before he killed her, but the news hit him just as hard. There were no tears, however, and the emotions he felt were hidden pretty well behind Tucker’s bearded face, but I did see the corners of his mouth quiver. And as we approached the burning bus—my old friend—I saw a tear on his cheek light up in reflection of the flames. He wiped it away with a sleeve.

He said, “Thank you for telling me that.”

I was silent. I held the wine bottle close to me.

The zombies who’d been around the bus before were now gone. We sat parked there for many minutes, no more than fifteen, and I quietly observed Tucker as he digested the news of his departed wife. I saw his eyes flicker back and forth, his thoughts racing through memories, probably, and he’d smile whenever something pleasant came to mind. Tucker sighed once and shook his head and told me, “I had a strange feeling I should have gone with her—when the alarm company called—I should have gone with her.” I made no response. Tucker dealt with his emotions and I waited patiently.

Finally, when I was pretty sure I’d allowed enough time for Tucker to process the news, I pointed to the end of the bus and said softly, “There’s a place you could drive around the bus if you go slow—that’s where I crashed when we were trying to get around.”

Tucker laughed awkwardly. “Better keep moving, huh?” he asked me.

“We shouldn’t sit still,” I replied with a shrug.

He nodded. “Yeah. That makes sense.”

With a very big sigh, Tucker took my advice and carefully squeezed the Lexus through the small bit of muddy ground that separated the highway from the fall. Part of me wished I had gone slower and taken my time, but I recalled the urgent panic I’d felt during that escape and reckoned that I had only been doing what I thought was best. How was I supposed to know the result of every decision? I let this guilt briefly enter and leave my conscience before Tucker had navigated his Lexus back on the road and headed north, denying myself any powerful emotional explorations until safely out of this nightmare.

We passed a small overturned car where the zombies from the bus must have migrated to, like ants swarming from one sweet to the next. Three helicopters flew low over the road and shined bright searchlights onto our car as they passed in a roar. “They’ve been shooting them from the air,” Tucker explained, and a few moments later we heard the helicopters circling around the overturned car and ripping those zombies to chunks with mounted machineguns. “We need to get as far from here as we can before they trap us in the quarantine. I don’t want to be here for that.”

“No.”

“Santa Rosa—you said?” Tucker asked me.

“Yeah. I go to school there,” I said.

“Sonoma State?”

“Yeah.”

Tucker nodded. “Our son went there,” he told me, smiling, then frowning.

I said nothing. The pull of sleep was dragging down my eyelids. It felt like the whole left side of my body was numb from the pain in my shoulder and I wanted to be done with the discomfort—and sleep promised me that respite. I accepted its offer. I closed my eyes.

“We’ll be there by midnight,” was the last thing I heard Tucker say.

thirteen

Julia tenderly kissed my lips. I felt her fingers scratching the back of my neck, a thumb tickling the back of my ear. I tilted my head toward her—her face still blurry from just-woken vision—and she kissed me again. Was this real? It felt real. I kissed her back. Tasted her tongue. This better not be a dream. I reached out and felt her arm, her shoulder, she was wearing something soft. I touched her neck and felt her warmth. This was amazing. Her lips on mine, I pulled her closer to me and kissed her harder.

“Brian—” she whispered passionately.

Then she touched my shoulder. The dream ended with stabbing pain.

“Whoa!” I cried out, very much awake—I found myself in my bedroom. Holy shit. 

“Sorry, babe,” she cooed, touching my other shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

I was so happy to see her, the pain vanished right away. There she was—Julia!—sitting on the foot of my bed, dressed warmly in white wintery clothes, with the most wonderful face and amazing smile. I wanted to keep kissing her. I wanted to wrap her in my arms and squeeze her as passionately as an injured shoulder would allow. But I was also incredibly tired and sore, and so I lied my head down on the pillows and took a big deep breath. My diaphragm was tender and my inhalation was limited by my pain tolerance. I am all messed up, I thought with a weak smile.

“Poor baby,” Julia whispered, leaning down to kiss me again.

“I love you,” I said to her. “It’s okay—I’m okay.”

In a rush of pent-up excitement she told me about Tucker using the address on my license to find my house and using my cellphone to call her at midnight—and how she met him at my house to help carry me inside and take care of my injury. Julia explained that Tucker was asleep in the livingroom.

She whispered, “He said you crashed the Jeep.”

“I did.”

“And DJ—”

“Yeah.”

Julia frowned. She’d known DJ a third of the time I did—and always as Brian’s Roommate—and so I couldn’t blame her if her happiness of seeing me outweighed the grief she felt for poor DJ, though I saw her eyes flinch and water when the severity of the truth set in. I knew that if I was given a chance to dwell on his departure, I’d start to cry again, as Julia surely would have done if she allowed the grief inside. The heaviness of death blanketed us in the dark for as long as we allowed sadness to paint the memories of DJ, and so I figured it was a good time to say, “He saved my life, you know.”

Julia smiled weakly and nuzzled against my neck.

I sighed. I’ll miss you, buddy.  

Trying to adjust my position, I cringed and gave up. Julia lifted her eyes to mine, searching me for what I might be thinking—probably so worried about me she didn’t even know how to act, seeing her boyfriend all battered and bloody. My grief wasn’t anything she could heal with bandages or kisses, and that frustrated her. My pain was upsetting her and I wished I could fix that, but I couldn’t. I pretended like it didn’t hurt, for her, and I scooted myself back to sit against the wall. She curled up and laid her head on my lap.

The dark bedroom windows confused me—it felt like maybe I’d been asleep for a long time—and so I looked for the alarm clock with a grueling turn of my rigid neck. It was four in the morning. Tucker had driven me all the way home—we’d probably arrived around midnight, as he’d said—and even though I knew it had all happened, waking up to Julia’s face made it all feel like a bad dream. I put the memory of the night before into a box and closed it, locked it, and dropped it into the shadow of my mind to never be thought about again.

“Goodnight,” I whispered to her, massaging the back of her neck.

“Thank you for the wine,” she whispered back.

I shook my head and closed my eyes and breathed, “You’re welcome.”

All this for her.

fourteen

“A toast,” Tucker said, standing and lifting his glass. 

Seated on the living room sofa where Tucker had spent the night, Julia and I mirrored his action with our own glasses. This room might as well have been heaven—so wonderfully familiar and homely (albeit a bittersweet feeling knowing DJ wasn’t here with us—a whole well of emotion I refused to dip into, yet). I admired every last inch of the white walls with one of Julia’s charcoal drawings hung over the fireplace mantle, the fake plant in the corner DJ bought at a thrift store and named Bennington, the furniture, the windowblinds, the chess table in the corner that we hardly ever used, the dusty tan carpet with its stains and spilt ash smears.

“A toast to the United States military—for stopping the epidemic,” Tucker started, referencing the news we’d heard upon waking that morning. The outbreak was focused to a fifty-mile radius around Paso Robles (for undetermined reasons) and by use of guard posts and extensive sweeps of the hillsides, they’d prevented any further outbreak. Any local county that received water from the same source as Paso Robles had theirs turned off as a precaution. Air travel was forbidden in the skies above, save for military transportation, and all incoming/outgoing movement was heavily restricted. “And here’s to not being stuck in that quarantine zone,” he added with a nod toward me. I nodded back.

Not finished, Tucker added, “Here’s to the people we lost.”

Before clinking our glasses together, Tucker whispered, “I love you, Angela.” He tilted back his glass and swallowed most of the Cabernet Sauvignon in one chug—a personal toast to his wife. Julia and I glanced at each other and didn’t know what to make of that, though Julia’s teary-eyed smiling face told me she found Tucker’s gesture very romantic. “I can see why this is her favorite,” he commented, staring at the cup. In a way, I guess he was looking at his wife. He smiled at the glass and swirled the last bit of the wine around.

Julia felt inspired to lean over and kiss me on the cheek.

“You’re a lucky man,” Tucker said to me, motioning for me to drink with him. I lifted my glass and Julia watched us. He added, “To surviving a goddamn zombie invasion,” and he and I both clinked glasses and chugged our wine.

Well, Julia’s wine, I reminded myself, eyeing the bottle on the coffee-table. It was Julia’s idea to pop the cork early with Tucker before he left to “give news to my son I’d rather do person.” It seemed like a respectful thing to do. Tucker hadn’t argued against a morning glass. In fact he said, “That would be more than appropriate,” and offered to pour us all glasses while Julia and I waited in the living room and watched the news of the clean-up. During those early hours the news broadcasters were busy finding scientists and experts to comment on the cause of the outbreak. What created the virus? When did it begin? Most of the Paso Robles locals being interviewed agreed that the outbreak probably began quietly about a month ago when the vandalism started.

Tucker had poured himself a noticeably larger amount of wine but he said nothing of it and neither Julia or I cared to. He’d probably grown accustomed to sharing small portions and giving more to himself—he was a winery owner, after all—and I was glad that Tucker only gave me half as much as him because I was honestly never a big fan of wine at all.

I drank to DJ.

Tucker, already standing, gave us a little bow and said, “I’ll be on my way now, my friends. I’ve got a bit of driving to do and I’m pretty sick of driving, so it’s best to just get it over with.”

Julia and I nodded. Julia stood up and took mine and Tucker’s empty glasses, setting down her own—still untouched by her lips—and went to bring the cups into the kitchen. I watched her walk away, mesmerized by the reality of the moment. I was home! I was safe! I heard Julia start the sink faucet. I wondered if she would drink this early in the morning—she was never known to. Maybe we’d have a toast of our own after Tucker left.

I stood with my savior in the living room and didn’t know what to say.

“That’s okay,” he said, also noting the silence. “I’m just glad I helped.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

I waited a beat and then added, “I’m sorry about your wife.”

He nodded. Tucker flashed a quick smile and sighed, reaching into his shirt pocket for sunglasses. As he grabbed them, however, they slipped from his grasp and clattered on the coffee-table. I leaned forward to pick them up, standing as I did so, and when I looked up at Tucker I found his gaze focused on his hand. I followed his eyes to where his fingers were curling into an awkwardly bent fist, as though some invisible force was crushing his hand.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“My muscles—” Tucker wheezed. “Ow—Jesus—I can’t—un—stretch.”

I looked at him. He looked at me.

“What’s happening?” he asked, pulling back his sleeve to show a pale and withering arm—veins pulsing, skin turning blue. “Holy shit—” He took a step back and fell against the door with a heavy thud, slapping his other hand over his heart, his mouth falling open in a series of gasping breaths. I remained on the other side of the coffee-table, watching, not sure what to think of this. Was he infected, too? How the hell did he get infected? He didn’t even fight any of the zombies.

Tucker tensed up for a moment and he knocked the back of his head against a door hinge, drawing blood and smearing it along the door as his body relaxed and slumped to the floor. He was still alive—he looked over at me, his face sinking in on itself, aging rapidly into a ghoul. Tucker lifted his arm toward me, straining to stretch, and then he gave up.

Julia entered the room and let out a shriek. “Oh my God, Brian. What—What happened?”

“He’s sick,” I said, backing toward her. “Like the others.”

She held a hand over her mouth. “No—” she cried.

But how did this happen? I felt like my nightmare was creeping into my waking life, that last night was supposed to have been forgotten and here it was again, laughing at my false sense of security. Tucker must have been bitten or scratched—but I was scratched, too—or somehow otherwise been infected. He was slouched against the door, drooling blood onto his oddly-clenched fists. I kept my eyes on him while reaching out for Julia and I told her, “Go in the other room and call the police. Tell them what’s happening.”

“Okay,” she said, tugging on my arm to get me to turn and kiss her.

I didn’t plan on getting any closer to Tucker than this, but I wanted to keep an eye on him. Just in case he got up and had that infuriated glint in his bloodshot eyes. The way he looked slumped against the door, it was like he’d drank too much wine and passed out drunk by the toilet. I knew he wasn’t asleep. I knew what was happening to him—I’d seen his wife go through the same process. At some point I was going to have to kill Tucker unless the police showed up first. In the other room I heard Julia speaking to someone on the phone, giving my address, telling them the situation.

“No! I’m not going to check for a pulse!” Julia shouted. A moment later: “Okay. Thanks.”

I’d closed the livingroom door and she cracked it open a tad to tell me the police were on their way. I gave her a smile and leaned in for a kiss—but stopped. That’s when I heard Tucker sliding his legs over the carpet. Instinct told me to slam the door shut. Julia shouted for me to come back, to get out, to run, pounding her fists on the other side. But I ignored her. She was safe in the kitchen. I could find another way out—there were two windows and a hallway available—but I had to decide quickly because when I turned around to face Tucker, the man was on his feet and snarling in my direction.

Act now.

Perhaps if Julia hadn’t been in the next room, I would have run for it. I would have dove through the window and leapt over the porch railing and sprinted for the neighbor’s house. But I didn’t want to leave Tucker alone in the same house as Julia. Sure—maybe he would have chased me outside—but I had a more important concern than my own safety. I hadn’t driven all the way to Paso Robles to survive a zombie invasion and come home to lose my girlfriend to another one. This had to end now and it had to end quickly.

My hand found the neck of the Cabernet Sauvignon on the coffee-table as I moved briskly toward Tucker, who pulled his thin blue lips up into a grin and I saw one of his teeth pop from his gums in an eruption of yellow puss. I was within his reach when he finally lunged, but I’d built up momentum with my throwing arm and cracked the wine bottle hard across Tucker’s face, shattering the bottle in a sparkle of red wine and red blood and glass. The zombie spun around and fell against the wall, but he was not finished. I knew that. I took the top half of the wine bottle and waited for Tucker to turn around before jamming the broken jagged edge deep into his neck, feeling it sever veins, contact with bone, and then I twisted the bottle and pulled it away. A geyser of blood sprayed sideways along the wall and oozed thickly over my hand. Tucker’s body fell to the floor when I pulled the bottle away.

“Holy shit,” I gasped, stepping back, tripping a bit over the coffee-table.

The zombie twitched once, twice—then went still.

Goddamnit, Tucker, I thought, sickened with what I’d just been forced to do.

The top half of the bottle was bizarre to me—the fact that I was still holding it—and I felt disgusted by all the blood on my hands. Gasping for breath, my head spinning, I fell onto the couch and began to urgently scrub the gore off my hands, off the bottle, finding it to spread everywhere no matter how hard I tried. To keep my mind sane I had to close my eyes for a moment and pretend like nothing had happened—that I hadn’t just stabbed a man in the neck. I focused on the positive: you killed him, you had to kill him, you’re the hero, you saved the day.

I exhaled slowly.

When I opened my eyes again I felt less afraid—mostly because Julia had come back into the livingroom and was crouched next to me. She caught my eyes and I could tell she’d been crying while she waited on the other side of the door. She said, “Tell me you’re not sick, too.”

I shook my head. “I’m not.”

“Is—he dead?”

“Yeah.”

Julia smiled and laughed nervously, lowering her head. I wanted to wipe the tears from her eyes but I didn’t want to get blood all over her. Her attractively calm demeanor helped slow my heart rate and having her there with me in this moment to hold my trembling arms was much appreciated. I closed my eyes and sucked in another deep breath—forgive me, I wanted to whisper to her—and let the last shudder of fear and disgust ripple down my spine.

Julia kissed me.

“Tell me it’s over, Brian. Please tell me it’s over,” she whispered, crying softly into my neck.

A sense of pride brightened my mood, for that moment, when I considered that I’d just saved my girlfriend’s life—a heroic position I enjoyed more than the pitiful victim role of the night before. I let a brief sinking sadness for Tucker’s unfortunate passing cross my mind—he deserved that much from me, even if we were strangers—and then moved on. I squeezed Julia tightly.

“It’s over,” I told her.

I desperately wanted to get into a hot shower as soon as possible. The police were still on their way. Maybe I could wait until after that. Oh—but how good it felt to be safe again. There had been a few moments of pseudo-safety during the night before and each time I would think to myself: It can’t get much worse. Of course then it always did. But sitting here—“Wait while I go get you a towel,” Julia said—and waiting for my lovely girlfriend to tend to my wounds (what better welcome for a battle-weary boyfriend?) felt like a real ending. Like the true finale of the nightmare. I could even hear the approaching sirens of the police. I imagined the end credits rolling, the screen fading the black, the moviegoers leaving the theatre.

It could have ended that way—had I not looked down at the wine bottle.

A small bit of text had been printed on the bottle separate from the label—the bottling date—and I found it incredibly peculiar that this wine was bottled a little over a month ago. That specific amount of time had become synonymous with the length of the zombie invasion, according to the news, according to what Mrs. Ellison said about vandalism picking up about a month ago. Perhaps I wouldn’t have made the assumption that the wine’s bottling date (“We haven’t had it in stock for a while. Been some months since we could get the grapes to grow right,” Ellison had said) was connected with the outbreak if I hadn’t seen it happen myself. I’d been wondering what caused Ellison and Tucker to get infected—neither of them had been bitten—but nothing came to mind.

The wine.

They’d both drank this yellow-labeled Cabernet Sauvignon.

Julia’s wine.

“Oh no,” I mumbled, nauseas boiling in my gut.  

If Ellison’s wine had been so spectacular the first time, I could only imagine how many people bought bottles of it the next time. How many restaurants around the country ordered cases of the wine (which, Ellison had ironically commented, didn’t “have the same bite to it”)? The authorities on the news channels hadn’t come up with a cause of the infection. Well—here it was, in my hand. It was in the wine—the grapes, the dirt, the barrels—and I’d seen what happened when you drank a few sips and the infection worked slowly or what happened when you chugged it fast and it went straight to the brain.

More importantly: How much did I drink?

There was a tightening in my gut. I lurched forward, startling Julia.

“Baby?” she asked, reaching out for me.

“No—” I groaned, gritted my teeth. My arms and legs tensed—the muscles felt like they were turning to stone, my blood thickened—breathing was difficult. My vision blurred and went a sickly yellow shade. The wine, the wine, all this for a bottle of wine! I gasped for air and Julia reached for me again, this time I shoved her away with a savage growl. The part of me that wanted to tell Julia to kill me, to run for her life, to get away, to stop trying to help me—that part was quickly being replaced with an urge to twist her head and tear my teeth into the meaty back of her neck. No! Julia! Run! Juuu—leee—uuh—oooh—Oh this can’t be happening this can’t be happening this can’t beeeee—

The End