Alright boppers, welcome to the Coffin Hop! a tour de force of the spookier side of the blogosphere! To celebrate, we're kicking things off with part one of my serial narrative...

RIDE!

50 minutes to go:

Twin roads flow across the mirrored lens of Mitch’s bug-eyed goggles. A black respirator mask covers the bottom half of the face. The helmet is straight out of the local army-navy surplus and patched in overlaying stickers of old-school punk bands. Cheap headphone wires dangle out of its battered shell to connect to an archaic Walkman. Skate-Punk Bushido armored in a cracked plastic carapace of shoulder, knee and elbow pads. Fingerless gloves throttle the handlebars. A saddle bag stuffed with last minute essentials thumps rhythmically against the hip. Scuffed up steel-toe combat boots pedal a steady momentum off Mitch’s ‘Baby’ – a three thousand mile old 24 speed mountain bike.

Mitch thinks in narration, staying sane by telling himself he’s in a bad story:

You kidding me? Nothing beats the Ride, man. Nothing. What’s the Ride you ask? Well, let me tell you! It’s escaping the car’s bubble, but without having to hoof it around on foot like some asshole. It’s the liberation of a motorcycle, only with the stipulation that you must be your own engine. It’s fighting the long harsh climb, straining, burning for every inch of the hump up in a city that’s nothing but hills built on top of hills. Only to reach the top and...

… drop back down again.

Surrendering to the plummet.

G-force snagged.

Releasing the brakes defiantly, with the wind roaring against a wide shit-eatingen grin as the passing trees, homes, cars, clouds melt into a wave of rushing color until you’re swept into an Impressionist’s vision of a rollercoaster ride. And for a moment, for just one brief holy moment in an otherwise unspectacular life, you actually feel free. Free from all the drama and bullshit and heart-ache that drove you pedaling out the door in the first place. Times like that you wish, just fuckin’ wish, you were the last man on Earth so the Ride would never end.

A belly rumble of thunder erupts and segues into a monstrous groan; a trapped final gasp escaping at last from a coffin’s yawn that drowns out Mitch’s ruminations. Something springs out of the corner of his left eye. Mitch is going too quick to register it as anything but a blur, just the silhouette snap of a grasping hand snatching desperately at the place his neck was approximately one second ago. He veers right and pours on the momentum.

But it’s like my Dad always said about wishes, the words ripped aloud now between a steady stream of short jagged breaths, how when they come true… it’s only just to bite you on the ass.

The city skyline behind his flight back-dropped with an overcast sky hanging low; shimmering in a pallor of stone-gray and radon-green. Red lightning sparks within the cloud’s gut and the thunder ruptures with the roar of a biblical leviathan rising from an ancient slumber. Spread out around the narrowing road before him, a small mob of the Infected, aimlessly shamble and twitch with spastic tics towards him. Black veins web across exposed flesh and spread a pustulant necrosis across rapidly decaying skin. Most of them are splattered in blood – and it’s hard to tell where theirs ends and their victims’ begins. Their lips and cheeks have peeled back into a relentlessly chattering sardonic grin. But it’s the eyes that freak Mitch out the most. Because when you look into them, even for a second, that’s when you knew that someone was still in there. Frightened, lonely, powerless, aware. With stares screaming in mute horror at the hideous croak their throats bellow, with repentant black tears trickling into the ravenous scythe of their grins.

Fingers caked in dry blood reach futilely for his shoulder from just off the right, and from out of nowhere. Mitch pedals faster and reminds himself that forward is the only way to go when you’re knee deep in the Shit.

Hours 45:30:22 – 1:08:03:

How long can you just sit on your ass waiting for the world to hurry up and end already?

Mitch lasted 45 hours, twenty-two minutes and nineteen seconds before realizing he had had enough.

It all began three days ago. The Green Storms rolled in from God knows where. At first it just knocked out everyone’s cell phone service and drowned the radio waves in a strange insect static. Before anyone had time to properly freak the fuck out, the rains fell and with them the Infected rose. The rain was piss colored and stunk twice as much, it stuck to the skin with a slow acidic burn. Everyone on TV said it was this rain that created the Infected. Or at least that was their best guess. Maybe it got into an open wound, or some fool tried drinking some,or maybe it carried an airborne bug that mutated rapidly, maybe it was the meltdown in Japan, maybe it was Climate Change, maybe it was God’s Long Overdue Wrath or perhaps even his esteemed competition picking up the slack… the only certain thing was that there were no shortage of either theories or the hysterical talking heads with which to expound them. Not that he got much TV time pre-catastrophe.

Within an hour of the storm’s arrival a banshee wind rumbled through Terminus and killed the power in his neighborhood. This left nothing to do for Mitch but wait it out in the dark. That’s what they said to do before the power died: Hold the fort down. Board up. Don’t open the doors. Stay inside. Hide. Wait it out. So Mitch did just that, sitting there in his attic efficiency apartment. Scared that they, whatever the fuck ‘they’ were, might see his flashlight through the window somehow, he promptly made a tent of his comforter across his bed and used the top of his head as the pole. There he read old comic books the way he did as a kid after bed time.

Around the improvised tent, with Wattie quivering in his lap, the apocalypse serenaded them. A piss rain cadence sizzled against the windows. Sirens. Gun fire. Screams. Car crashes. Helicopters. Loudspeaker squawks. Moaning thunder that rattled every dish in the sink and shook the walls until the paint cracked. More gun fire. More screams, only closer now. The Green Storm erupted. The thunder shook the earth and for a minute he wasn’t sure if it wasn’t an earthquake. It’s din swallowed up the screams and firearm crackle and raged through the night. Finally… when it had passed in what Mitch could only guess was the early morning there was nothing left but a terrible, lingering silence.

So he stewed in it. Sweltered in the attic heat sans air-conditioning. Ate cold soup from the can. Smoked immense amounts of weed until the buzz amplified the silence and paranoia to unbearable levels. Did street recon from the corner of his blinds. Caught nothing, just a few neighborhood cats wandering about the abandoned lawns and porches. When there was light, he read and he tried not to step too heavily when he moved and was careful not to flush the toilet lest someone, or something, would hear him. Mainly he wished what little food he had wasn’t microwavable and that he could risk cracking a window open.

Then the second night. He spent it listening for 'them' in the dark, lingering perhaps down the hall or in front of his door. Wattie squirmed in Mitch’s teddy bear clutch until managing to free himself before finding an appropriate shadow to nestle in. All he could hear was the absence of the refrigerator’s motor, the missing hum of electricity, the distinct lack of ambient traffic, nor the white noise lullaby of night in the city signaling that everything was okay in the world. Eventually Mitch passed out in that dark and woke to the dirty gray light filtering through. Early morning: Birds twittered and with a resolve equal parts desperation and boredom, Mitch decided, “enough.”

One hour, eight minutes to go:

Mitch is in his downstairs neighbor’s apartment. He’s perched on the arm of a dour recliner over an archaic land line with the receiver cradled shoulder to ear. The number he dials miraculously rings but his eyes are on the bedroom door; hastily barricaded with the couch Mitch dragged in front of it shortly after kicking in the front door.

For the record though he did knock first.

The phone seems to ring endlessly before his mother’s voice answers. He recognizes the greeting automatically as that of the answering machine. When the beep resounds he finds himself unable to say anything and hangs up. He scrolls through the numbers in his cell phone’s directory. The problem was almost everyone he knew had a cell phone. He considers trying 9-1-1 again but knows he’ll just get the same busy tone. One number does jump out at him. A long shot. Val’s Dad. He fishes his cell phone out of his pocket and pulls up the number. At least it was good for something still.

There is a crash from behind the bedroom door. Then the sound of something fragile crackling under a mindless tread.

He jabs the number quickly. The phone rings. He holds his breath.

It rings once…

… and a bump resounds off the door.

Twice, three times, four…

… another bump or was it something on the stairs?

The door’s shut but not locked. Locked not being an option. He’s needs to be ready to bolt back up to the attic when –

“Hello, hello, oh please god, don’t hang up…!” Val’s voice drowned in static and desperate hope.

“Val!” Mitch can’t help but laugh victoriously and catches himself with a slap over his mouth too late.

“Mitch?” the hope deflating into flaccid confusion.

“Who else?” he whispers the words with forced nonchalance; eyes steady on the barricade. “You okay?”

“What?” she huffs imperiously, “Have you looked outside?”

“I mean are you… well, y’know like those people on the news?”

“’Infected’? No, no… I’m fine. We’re both fine. How’d you…?”

“I’m at the downstairs’ neighbors. Remember him… the crazy cat guy? Anyway, I remembered he had a land line. Got lucky, I guess they’re still working for some reason. Long story short, there was no one here and the phone’s still working. Well his is at least.”

“Have you been able to reach anyone else? Have you heard anything? Do you know…?”

A thump hammers across the bedroom door. Mitch about leaps out of his seat but gulps back down the terror with a forced smile.

“Nothing…, I mean it’s like I said, I’ve been stuck up here,… I mean stuck at my place since everything went down. I haven’t been able to reach anyone but you.”

“Great…,” she sighs and a muffled voice shouts incoherently in the background. Val’s response comes exasperated even through the static, “… it’s Mitch, Daddy. What? Yes, that Mitch. No, he… what? No, he doesn’t know anything. I…, Daddy, please.”

Mitch snorts a laugh. Apocalypse or not, some shit never changes.

Val pops back on: “Look Mitch, I’m… well, I’m glad you’re still… well y’know. But I really can’t talk right now. We’re packing up to leave…”

“’Leave’?” Mitch bolts upright, “Where?”

“The vacation house in Tennessee. Daddy figures he knows some back roads there, it’ll take awhile, but since it’s up in the hills and there’s hardly anyone around for miles, well, maybe we can hold out up there until everything calms down.”

“Jesus, Val… that’s great!” Mitch laughs and punches the air victoriously. This is met with a croaking groan from the other side of the bedroom door and the start of a lackadaisical pounding across its surface.

“What is that?” Val gasps somewhere between concerned and annoyed.

“Nothing…,” Mitch looks around the apartment for somewhere to hide or a weapon or another way out but remains tethered by the phone cord, “Val, listen. Don’t leave yet. Wait. Take me with you.”

“What?”

“Take me with you.”

The silence that follows grinds up a handful of seconds and spits out an eternity. Mitch is afraid she’s hung up, but then he realizes he can hear her breaths crackling through the static.

“Val?”

An exhausted sigh: “I don’t know, Mitch. We’re gonna be leaving here in like, an hour, once night falls. Daddy figures maybe if we leave then, they might not be able to see…”

“I can be there in an hour.”

“How? You don’t even own a car…”

“I can be there.”

“How?”

“I got my bike.”

“And what?” Her voice shifts to that unique harmonic between bemused disbelief and mounting annoyance she usually reserved for their ‘talks’. “You’re just gonna pedal here?”

Mitch shrugs in that unique way she especially despises, not caring whether or not she can see it: “Yeah, I’m just gonna pedal there.”

“Mitch, no, no, no… please. Think something through just this once…”

“What?”

“You won’t last a minute out there.”

“I’ll last sixty if I know you’re waiting at the end of them…,” Mitch forces the laugh and rubs a nervous hand through his scalp.

“Jesus, Mitch. Look, I’m sorry, but… but I really don’t think Daddy’s going to just sit here and wait around for you to show up.”

“Why?”

Val sighs again, much softer and Mitch knows she’s rubbing the bridge of her nose the way she always does when he puts her on the spot: “Look, I don’t want to sound like a bitch or anything, but, well you broke up with me, remember? You were tired of all my…”

“C’mon, Val!” Mitch catches the anger in his voice and quickly shifts tactics.

“I mean, sure, I get it. But, really? I mean whatever else went down between us we’re still talking about the end of the world here. That’s gotta go beyond whatever happened to us.”

“Don’t do this to me, Mitch...”

The pounding continues and the door buckles on the hinges.

“Val, please listen… I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry for everything I did and didn’t do. I know I fucked up. I’m not pretending otherwise. But I’m not asking you for a second chance here. I’m asking you, as one living human being to another, to wait. Please… give me an hour. That’s all. Just give me a chance and I can be…”

…And he realizes there is no one there. Even the static is silent. The phone’s dead. He goes to dial the number again just when a sharp bang splits the center of the battered bedroom door.

He blinks the fear off and sighs the shock straight out of him. He looks around the apartment, dumbfounded, as if emerging from a dream. He glances down at the phone, sees the wall clock hanging off the doorway to the kitchen right as the minute hand clicks to the next notch in a blink…

…and it is right then that he knows exactly what to do.