War of the Undead (Day One): The Apocalypse Crusade (A Zombie Tale) by Peter Meredith Read Free Book Online

shitty truth: he had lung cancer.
    “I won’t cuss no more,” John told his daughter. “Or I’ll try not to as long as I can get this fuc…I mean this ole calculator working.”
    “Don’t use that one, Daidy. The seven sticks. I seen it. You should use momma’s coupon calculator. Remember that little one she always brung to the market?”
    “Oh yeah,” John said, picturing his wife. Once upon a time, Amy Lynn could hold her shop list in one hand, her calculator in the other, balance a baby under one arm and fetch cantaloupes with the other, all the while guiding a left-veering cart with nothing but her breasts.
    As Jaimee got her breakfast and fixed up her lunch, John went to fetch the calculator from Amy Lynn’s coupon drawer.
    The drawer hadn’t been opened in three years. John didn’t want to think about the neat stacks of cut out slips that were ordered, first by date of expiration and then again by desirability of the offer. He didn't want to remember how much time Amy Lynn had put into making sure she got the very best deals for her family. Quick as he could, he grabbed the little calculator with its vinyl cover and shut the drawer again, as if afraid that some spirit of Amy’s would come wafting out of the drawer to berate him.
    The great saint Amy Lynn would not approve of what he was planning.
    He went back to the table and ten minutes and one more beer later he had his sums jotted in his childlike penmanship on a single piece of lined paper.
    “What’s that, Daidy?” Jaimee asked, before picking up her bowl and slurping down the Captain Crunch flavored milk that sat at the bottom.
    “Nuttin’,” he answered, suddenly embarrassed. He threw a forearm across the two columns. “Just some figgers. Budget stuff, money and the like.”
    The column on the left was a list of his assets. There were two items jotted on that list: an eleven-year-old Toyota Corolla, the one thing he had splurged on since Amy’s death, and a savings account with a total of $107,254 in it. In a moment of pure ESP or precognizance or just plain maternal instinct, Amy Lynn, after a week with her strange new cough, had upped her life insurance to a quarter of a million dollars. The hundred grand was all he had left after paying the remainder of her hospital bills and her funeral expenses and that goddamned teak coffin.
    Despite being church-mouse poor, he hadn't barely touched none of it.
    The column on the right was a long list of bills he could expect to have to pay once he was diagnosed with the fuck-all cancer that was eating up his lungs and turning them black. When this was subtracted from the hundred grand, what was left was a depressingly large negative number.
    “Fuck-all,” he whispered, feeling the need to cough. He didn’t, he was so tired of coughing. He just breathed through the nasty phlegm making a gurgling sound deep within his chest.
    “Daidy, Mrs. La-fayette is here,” Jaimee said in an urgent tone. Her blue eyes went to the beer cans. She wanted them out of sight when Mrs. Lafayette came to take her on to school, but John didn’t bother to hide them. What was the use? He was already regarded as a good-for-nothing bum by the high-class rednecks of Izard County. What did he care what they thought?
    He was dying and no amount of so-called “bravery” on his part would change anyone’s minds about what a fuck-all good-for-nothin' he was. And even if he could change people’s minds about him, he wasn’t going to put Jaimee through the same hell he had gone through. And he certainly wasn’t going to leave her destitute.
    As soon as Mrs. Lafayette unleashed her last look of disgust his way and left, John got into his battered Corolla and went to Mac’s Easy-Pawn and for the first time ever he wasn’t going to drop something off.
    He was shopping for a gun.
     
4
Stephanie Glowitz
Newark, New Jersey
     
    Since she was so tall the flimsy hospital gown came to rest just above her knees and though she