Zombies and Garage Doors

The Summer of Rendezvous Zero

    “They’re out there.”
    “Oh, you think so? As opposed to all the other nights, when really it was just moonshine and roses out there behind the garage door?”
    “On the plus side, we found a shotgun.”
    “On the minus side, neither of us knows how to shoot it. I vote you lock the door and shut up.”
    She wished she hadn’t laughed at Tommy Meyerson when he offered to give her shooting lessons. He was a good-looking Catholic boy, muscled and unbent and  Southern polite. She misses clomping girlishly up to his room in her rain boots.
     I walk through the valley where the shadow of death is. Kanye West rings prophetic in her head like a bell tower. She misses a lot of things from school: the easy high-five friendships, the hammock breezy springs, the Northeast-joyous bells in the afternoons. That life is lost, like a warm soaring dream that evaporates as you wake. It was, and not it’s not, and you have to let it go. Now, it’s all planet star nights and blood-blue dawns, farthing travels and heartbeat whispers; trash-scavenging desperation and broken garage doors.
    And. The unmanageable, unbearable, agony-bright hope that burns like a small fusion reaction somewhere in her sternum. Maybe, oh god please maybe. She can’t think it, she can feel radioactive groundwater welling in her ducts every time she goes near it. But. Maybe.
    So she exists in her nights tender-alert and piqued, listening for feet and smelling for blood, somehow, over all that rotting. They swap swagger stories by night, make up codes and constitutions under new moons. By day they travel hobbit-style across Middle America. She’s always wanted to see flyover country, but she always imagined she’d be in her parent’s minivan. They come across abandoned vehicles, but they don’t happen to have an ex-juvie sidekick with fortuitous hotwiring abilities. Honestly, she’d be happy to find some bicycles. But it’s an easy hope, bicycles.
    Not like the radioisotopic, decaying, radiating hope of maybe that keeps her on her Manifest Destiny home.