EYEHEARTZOMBIES

The lid popped open. I had squinted my eyes, expecting strong sunlight to come screaming in at me, but it didn’t. It was dark out. That meant we had been driving for at least six hours. Probably going around in circles, but I was still lost. I was also stiff from being folded up in the trunk for so long. My plan of throwing myself at them and killing my way free suddenly seemed a lot more foolish. I tucked the screwdriver into my back pocket, though, hoping they wouldn’t find it.

Looking up from the truck, I saw three faces. The two closest were the two burly men that had kidnapped me. I didn’t recognize the third one right away. They lifted me bodily up out of the trunk and carried me to a tree near the car. We were parked in the middle of a strand of trees in the middle of the desert. There were maybe six or seven trees total, all rather stunted and small. They tied me to the largest of them, then stepped away and I finally got a good look at the third man.

It was Max.

“You bastard!” I coughed at him, my mouth as dry as the desert around me. He just laughed at me. He turned around and walked back to the car. One of the big men followed him. The other stayed to guard me.

I could see Max and the other guy talking. These guys were huge. The more I looked at them, the more certain I was that they couldn’t possibly be naturally that large. Their hands would have wrapped around my thigh easily. Their mouths looked like you stuff live chicken into them with room to spare. They were gigantic.

“Hey,” I croaked to my guard. “Hey. Give me a drink. Throat’s…dry.” He brought over a canteen of water and poured some over my face. What managed to run into my mouth just enraged my throat and mouth and my thirst doubled. No, tripled. I gasped and asked for more, but he just ignored me.

Max’s other guy finally came back over, and they started mumbling between themselves. They looked at me, then looked back over at Max. He just sat in the car, waiting on whatever was going to happen.

They talked for awhile longer, probably ten or fifteen minutes. I had slipped the screwdriver out of my back pocket and had started working at the rope they had tied me up with. It was some of that annoying nylon rope. Relatively thin and it just gets tighter and thinner the more you mess with it and pull at it. I tried not pull at the rope, but just dig away threads and snap them with the screwdriver. After ten or twenty minutes I had eaten through about half of one of the strands of rope wrapping around me.

They stood there talking some more. By now I had picked up a word or two of what they were saying. Max wanted them to kill me. Apparently one of them thought they should get do it and get it over with. The other seemed to doubt whether it was a good idea to kill a made man, even with the orders of another boss. So Max had been telling them he was a boss. Oh well, he could die like a boss, then. Something bloody and unflattering would do nicely.

I continued to dig at the rope that was holding me to the tree and finally I felt the last thread of it snap. As the rope began to unwind and fall off of me, I stood up, throwing the rest of it away and leaped onto the back of the thug closest to me. I landed on his back, one arm around his neck and I heard him grunt from the impact of my hundred and eighty pound body hitting him full in the back. With the other hand I drove the screwdriver into his eye. I felt it punch through the eye socket in the back and bury up in his brain. He twitched and started to fall to the ground. I jumped off of him, letting the screwdriver fall with him.

Max yelled from the car, “What the fuck is he doing loose?! Kill him, you idiot!” and I could see him scrambling with something inside the car. Probably a gun, but I didn’t have time to see if it was.

I rummaged in the dead man’s jacket and found a gun holstered under his left armpit. I pulled it out and fired three shots point blank at the other thug, who was just turning from looking at Max to look at me again. One hit him in the stomach, one in the chest, and the third in the head. He fell over backward, spewing blood in a crimson rainbow as he went. I heard him gurgle once and then he was silent from then on.

Max had been watching what I was doing and realized he couldn’t do anything against me. He jumped to the driver’s seat of the car and thumbed the key in the ignition. It started and he threw it into reverse, trying to run me down. I rolled to the side and fired a shot into the engine. It didn’t hit anything important and he threw it into drive. The car shot forward and bumped across a bit of desert to the deserted miner’s road they had brought me out on. I fired at the car until it was out of range and I was out of bullets. I knew where he was going, though.

I threw the gun away, took the gun from the second guy and started walking back toward town.