I got a new job tending bar. If The Walking Dead and Cheers had a love child it would be this place. A place where everybody knows your name, assuming your name is BRAINS. I like the crew a lot, really good people that I fell in with very naturally. A woman named Kali runs the place and when I signed on she gave me a bottle of Jack Daniels, a welcome to the family sort of gift. Unopened bottle even. Didn’t stay that way long but I’m treating it with the reverence it deserves and savoring each drop. If Kali was trying to buy loyalty it totally worked.
The job itself is pretty easy, grunt stuff like washing dirty drinking jars but also tending the bar for strangers and locals. I end up hearing a lot about a lot just standing there. A dude named Aiden is head of security and has me on night watch Thursdays and Saturdays from midnight to 8am. People are watching out for people, like up at Eights, there is a human bond there. Still working at that slum, too, so double paychecks for the big guy now.
On my second day at work there was gunfire in the bar. A girl named Amy, quiet stoic type with a mohawk and badass rifle, I like her a lot, put a round in the floor to stop some crazy caveman dude from hauling off a girl he’d thrown over his shoulder. One of the new deputies, Bren was her name I think, had the caveman at gunpoint but he was still trying to leave so Amy shot the floor to make him stay. Turns out the girl was his friend and it just looked like a kidnapping but a shot was fired and the floor is dead. It freaked me out, I screamed like a little girl when the shot went off but shit, guns make me nervous.
So I decide to get one after that. Kali and Boots helped me get ahold of an HK UPS40c I think is what it’s called. I have five rounds but I haven’t loaded or fired it yet because I needed instruction. Aiden stepped up for that and I learned a lot, also got a lesson from a Russian woman named Mo. This Mo is a force to be reckoned with, some kind of special forces training and she’s big, taller than me. I think she could break me over her knee if she wanted to, but I uh, don’t think she wants to. I’ll confess there is something intriguing about her and when she was touching me to work on my shooting stance I was not thinking much about shooting. Of course Inga appears in my mind whenever my thoughts drift to someone else. But anyway, yeah I got a gun and won’t be seen without it from now on.
The other thing that made me arm up is hard to write about. There is a woman named Lara who runs a trade post here in town. She was kidnapped and hurt bad, mentally and physically. I was part of a rescue party and the scene was grim. The asshole kidnapper was shot from what I heard, I was not in the room, and fell through a window. Hope the bastard is dead, he needed killing after doing what he did.
And WHERE was the Sheriff of Zombieham while this was all going down? “Fixing barricades” yeah right. After she was safe and getting care at the hospital there was “mysterious” explosion at the place where the guy took Lara, but I’m pretty sure I know who did that. Let’s just say Sputnik was involved, I don’t even want to write a name down about that. But the explosion brought a hoard of creepers into town and everyone ended up on the rooftops. And WHERE was Roscoe P. Coltrane? Fuck knows is where. So yeah, cavemen and rapists and zombies, oh my! The answer? Gun.
