Snippet #1758178

Maura DeMaria
Downtown – River’s Glen Community College
Day 6

At first, his attentions had annoyed her. No, on second thought, it wasn’t just his attentions. It was everything about Tim McCaffrey that annoyed the absolute shit out of Maura DeMaria. It was the way he dressed; it was the way he randomly spouted off bizarre and unsolicited facts about a variety of subjects; it was the way he hunched his shoulders over as he walked; it was the way he pushed his glasses up his nose, but most of all it was the way he continually mispronounced her name.

Studying him as she was just now over the table, her cards held to her lips pensively as she wondered whether he would see her bet or call her, she ran her eyes over his face. Maybe he wasn’t as annoying as she had originally thought. For all intents and purposes, Tim McCaffrey had saved her life.

When she had been hired on to do maintenance at the small community college, she had never expected to build lasting friendships. As the only female in the small maintenance department, she had become the butt of quite a few jokes and more than a ton of innuendo. The maintenance team was pretty alright, for the most part. Sam, the boss, was a quiet and soft-spoken slip of a man in his early sixties. He always seemed to have a cigar in his mouth, but he never lit it. Regardless of what he was doing, whether he was mowing the grass, fixing a broken hinge or swapping out furnace filters, that damned cigar protruded from his lips like it was glued there. He rarely spoke. Most of his assignments were handed to his crew in the form of notes. This proved challenging for Dale who was unable to read at all.

Dale was almost the complete opposite of Sam. While Sam was quiet and soft-spoken, Dale was loud and crude, a forty-something beer-loving jolly man. He thought the fact that the term ‘sexual harassment’ had the word ‘ass’ hidden within was ‘pretty frickin’ funny.’ His guffaws could be heard clear across campus – not that it was quite the feat… The community college campus consisted only of three main buildings and a maintenance shed. Illiterate, Dale would frown at the directives handed down from Sam but his pride refused to allow him to admit that he couldn’t read them. He’d figured out ways to figure out what each group of orders said… which opened up a great door for practical jokes when someone wanted to mess with Dale. Rather than mowing one day, he might be seen in hip waders cleaning out the pond. Rather than refueling the campus vehicles, he might be fixing a broken desk.

Dale idolized Elvis, and at random moments throughout his day, he would curl his lip and break into song. On Maura’s first day at River’s Glen Community College, Dale tried very hard to get her to swoon for his ‘hunka hunka burnin’ love’ as he shimmied and shook his beer gut around the maintenance shed for a good ten minutes. Needless to say, she was not very impressed, despite Tim’s laughter and the amused sparkle in Sam’s eyes. She muttered something about disliking Elvis and preferring real men like Rosie O’Donnell. It was that moment that she became one of the guys.

Tim McCaffrey, on the other hand, was nothing like Sam or Dale. He was quite strange to work with. He would go days without saying a word, and then days speaking incessantly. Introspective and quite nerdy, Tim was quite certain that the world would end on in 2012. He was quite certain that Bigfoot wandered the forests of Washington state. He was quite certain Loch Ness did indeed contain a prehistoric beast who was just incredibly camera shy. He was well versed on the paraphernalia necessary for a successful ghost hunt and could tell you the difference between a class A and a class C EVP. On Maura’s first day of work, he had given her what he called a ‘Zombie Apocalypse Survival Kit’… a backpack containing beef jerky, a blanket, four bottles of water, a bottle of aspirin, a sewing kit, survival guides, a can opener, a can of sauerkraut and a few other odds and ends. As she pulled out the sauerkraut, fixing him with a quizzical expression, he sheepishly explained that it was his favorite food. When she pulled out the sewing kit, she held it up and looked at him incredulously. “Excuse me? Is this ‘cause I’m a chick? I’m supposed to sew shit when the dead rise? Am I supposed to cook too?”

He back-pedaled quickly. “No, Maura (pronouncing it More-uh), it’s… you know… you never know when it’ll come in handy…” He pushed his glasses back up his nose as she glanced over to Sam and Dale, both of whom shrugged and pointed to three identical backpacks on the wall. “Really?” she asked, unable to keep the dubious expression from her face. “You actually believe this stuff?”

He had shrugged, and after she hung her backpack on the wall with the other three, nothing more was said about it. Maura was actually quite proud to work with the guys at River’s Glen Community College. For the first time, she felt like part of a team. The work wasn’t hard, but it was the hours spent in the maintenance shed that she loved the most. They had converted the maintenance shed into their own personal hideaway, complete with a bathroom, a refrigerator, a microwave, a sofa, a recliner, a table and chairs… it was a regular clubhouse. There was one rule – do your work and don’t do anything that would warrant anyone coming down to the shed to see what they were up to. Keep your nose clean, in other words.

One perk of working at the college was that Maura had the keys to the buildings. An aspiring ‘artist,’ Maura loved working with metal. Welding made her feel so powerful. After a full day of work, she would sneak into one of the classrooms that served for both auto mechanic classes and welding classes. She would fool around with metal working until the wee hours of the morning and then crash on the couch in the maintenance shed until Sam woke her the next morning. He never said anything to her. He never said much of anything at all, even when she’d fallen asleep with her most recent creation clutched in her hands.

The look in his eyes as he’d come in that morning was amusement, not the anger she would have expected. When Dale came in that morning and took a look at her creation, he laughed so loud, the sound reverberated off of the metal walls of the shed causing a saw to lose its careful balance on a peg and crash to the floor. “I suppose you’re going to try to tell me that’s a vase, right?” he asked, smirk on his lips. Maura said nothing and let it play out as it would. Dale ripped the two foot long metal tube from her hands, squinting at it, admiring the welding bead along the large sharp-cornered square base before lifting it to his lips and gesturing at her to hand him the lighter. She sheepishly held it out for him and just watched him for a few moments. When he pulled away from the mouth of the tube, he handed her creation back to her, his cheeks all puffed up like a comical frog. He was silent for a handful of long seconds before exhaling deeply and turning to Sam. “Can we keep her? Forever?”

The ‘vase’ earned a prominent spot in the middle of the card table, holding a metal flower she’d made to disguise it when it wasn’t in use. Now, as they sat around the table on the fifth day of Tim’s stupid Zombie Apocalypse, the metal flower was nowhere to be seen. The table was littered with ashes, pop tabs, discarded cards and empty beer cans. As Maura sat across from Tim, watching him as he called her bet, she smiled. He really had saved her life. In that moment, as she watched his long slender fingers push the glasses further up his nose, she was almost kind of attracted to him. Until he spoke.

“So, um… Maura…”

“It’s pronounced ‘Mar-uh’, not ‘More-uh’” she’d repeated for the thousandth time.

Dale and Sam looked on, both equally shitfaced on the beer and smoke they’d stocked up on. Tim nodded. “Right.” He looked down at his cards, staring at them intently, his cheeks growing red as he spoke. “Since… you know…” He jerked his head toward the door that they had welded shut that first day. “Since they… um… are probably the end of human civilization as we know it…” He coughed into his hand and scratched the back of his neck. “It might be… you know… um… up to us… to…”

Maura slammed her hand down on the table and picked up a stick of jerky, brandishing it at him menacingly. “Don’t you dare finish that sentence with ‘repopulate the human race’…” Both Sam and Dale laughed, loud and boisterously, the noise echoed by the slams of bodies against the outside of the metal walls of the shed – a sound to which they had grown strangely accustomed.

Tim went completely red at that and slowly laid his cards down on the table, muttering quietly. “I fold.”

“Damn right, you fold,” she muttered, reaching out and raking in a pile of pop tabs that had been pulled from the dozens of cans of beer they had poured into themselves in the past few days. “Just because I have a uterus doesn’t mean I want anythin’ to do with poppin’ out any kids.” She reached for another beer and popped the top, glaring at a very embarrassed Tim. The noise of the undead outside the shed was loud.

“Ugh, I gotta piss,” Dale groaned as he stood from the table. Moving over to the ladder in the corner, he popped open the hatch onto the roof that they had cut. They had little fear of the zombies getting into their hideaway. The door to the metal shed was welded shut. They had the escape hatch in the ceiling of the building. They had plenty of food and water and beer to last at least a few weeks. Definitely long enough for the National Guard to come. They’d be just fine. No worries. Just fine. Their lack of fear of what was going on in the outside world was evidenced by the loud wolf howl coming from Dale as he urinated off the edge of the building, screaming at the zombies. “Yeah, take that ya fuck! I just pissed in yer mouth… Like that? Aw, yer buddy’s jealous. Here, fuckwad!” He screamed his obscenities to the zombies, their moaning growing louder, the banging on the walls growing almost deafening.

“Jesus Christ, Asshole!” Maura screamed up to Dale. “Shut up!” She stood from the chair, grabbing ahold of the ‘vase’ and proceeded to climb the ladder. Stepping out onto the roof, she looked down at the thirty something undead surrounding the building. “That’s kinda scary, “ she muttered before looking up at Dale. “Seriously, stop taunting them! It gets so loud in there when they start beating on the walls like that…”

Rolling his eyes, Dale popped back down the ladder into the shed leaving Maura alone on the roof. As she stared down at the zombies, she snorted back some phlegm and spat down at them. “Go away,” she muttered before sitting crosslegged to pay some attention to her metallic creation.

Not even two minutes later, the noise of the zombies beating against the walls and the sounds of good natured laughter was suddenly drowned out by a horrible screeching noise, the sound of metal giving way. There was a horrible silence down inside the shed for a moment and then, suddenly, and “Oh shit!” Chairs scraped against the floor, as three voices spoke panicked phrases: “Oh Jesus!”… “We’re fucked!”… “Get the bags and get onto the roof!” Maura got up from her position on the roof to look down the hatch only to hear the shriek of metal again. The garage door had been breached.

“Get up here!” she screamed down to the guys below. “Toss me the bags, and just get up here!” Tim showed up at the bottom of the ladder, reaching out to make the climb, two bags slung over his shoulder, but bony hands pulled him away. The screams were horrible and Maura did the only thing she could thing of doing – she slammed the roof hatch down, covered her ears, and tried her best not to listen as her friends were torn apart.

When the screams had subsided, Maura remained on the roof of the maintenance shed, surrounded by dozens of zombies with nothing but a homemade ‘vase.’