"So how much water did you drink before you realized that?" I asked him.

Bearded Man was already heading into the kitchen; I think he was muttering something about Kelly Clarkson. I could hear the rattle of gla.s.ses and then a few of them smashing.

"You alright?" I asked as I tried to sit up.

"Thought I saw bugs," came his reply.

"What's with the tin foil?"

"What tin foil?" he said as he came back into the room holding two large gla.s.ses filled to the top with an amber colored liquid I could only hope was scotch and not Pine-Sol.

"Need some help?" he asked as he put the gla.s.ses down and extended his hand.

I was grateful for the help, but was afraid to touch him lest my burned flesh slough off in his grip.

"Come on, man, I haven't bitten anyone since that one time in the K-Mart parking lot, and I thought he was an alligator," he said, seeing my hesitation.

"I'm kind of burned bad, and I'm not sure if my skin will stay on."

"You're funny, man! You're dirty as h.e.l.l, I'll give you that, but you ain't burned. I mean I thought you were when you came in, but the more I looked at you the more convinced I was you were just a dirty b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

I looked down at my hands. There seemed to be some residual burn marks, but it was nothing like what I had been looking at when I was in the roadway. I winced as he grabbed my hand, still half-convinced he would fall backwards with a fair portion of human material stuck in his grasp. My body popped and snapped as I stood, but I felt like a caterpillar shedding its old coc.o.o.n and becoming a b.u.t.terfly. Okay...so that really isn't a manly enough metaphor, let's go with a snake shedding its old skin, that works much better and probably a lot closer to the truth considering what I was now. Half, half of what I am. I had to hold onto that other half with everything I had now. I picked up my gla.s.s and took a large swallow, the liquid alternating between burning and soothing my throat.

"How did the government know I was here?" Bearded Man asked.

I gripped the edge of a small table as a serious case of vertigo swooned by me. "Whoa, cheap high," I said, harkening back to a reference I had used since my youth whenever I got light-headed from rising too quickly.

"There is nothing cheap about my highs," Bearded Man said indignantly.

I thought I had crazy cornered, s.h.i.t was I wrong. "No one sent me, definitely not the government. I was trying to get away."

"From her?" he asked.

The swoon struck again, I tried not to let him see it.

Then he moved on. "I once ate a Snickers bar on a dare."

Who the h.e.l.l doesn't like Snickers bars? I thought, and who would 'dare' someone to eat one?

"Can we start again?" I asked.

"When did we finish?" he asked back.

How many G.o.ds have I p.i.s.sed off? I wailed internally.

"My name is Michael Talbot," I said as I extended my hand, thinking he would shake it, then tell me his name. He looked at my proffered hand like it was a claw.

"No way, man," he said.

I understood not shaking hands; he could be a fellow germaphobe. But that didn't make any sense considering that he had just helped me to stand.

"Okay," I said, pulling my hand back in, unconsciously rubbing it against my side. Blue jean material fell way like dried sand. I began to brush my legs. More fried clothing fell to the ground.

"Dude, you're messing with my high man," Bearded Man said as he backed up.

I stopped what I was doing, realizing that if I kept it up I would be naked in front of another man real soon. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, it just isn't my cup of tea. Okay, so tea doesn't seem masculine enough, let's go with lager, yeah it's not my stein of lager, much better).

"Are you melting?" he asked, still backing up.

"Molting more like it." I gulped down my apprehension as I began to ask him my next question. "Do you have any clothes I could borrow?" As it was, I had to wash store bought clothes twice before I would ever wear them, and now I was asking this unkempt stranger if I could borrow some of his stuff.

His eyes glazed for half a second then some lucidity popped in for a quick respite. "Sure I'll be right back."

What the f.u.c.k? I mouthed. This guy was insane...I was just hoping not criminally insane. I can deal with varying degrees of insanity; I'm a Talbot after all.

He came back a few moments later with a heavy woolen poncho, white socks with yellow stripes-I hadn't seen anything like those since grade school-a pair of pants that looked fashionable during the Nixon era, and some tightie-whities.

I gladly accepted just about everything except the underwear. They could have been brand new, but the mere fact that he had touched them made them soiled in my eyes. And these were far from Inspector Number 5's hands; the elastic waistband was all stretched and worn out and there was a small hole in the seat.

"I was going to toss those soon," he said as he watched me looking at the underwear.

"Well I'm glad you found it in your heart to hold onto them until you bequeathed them to me."

"You're welcome, want some french fries?"

"Thank you and yes." What the h.e.l.l else could I say? Who turns down french fries? Plus, I thought it would give me an opportunity to stash the underwear while he went into the other room to gather the mythical fried spuds.

I manically brushed the remainder of my singed digs off of me as Bearded Man made quite a show of preparing our side dish. The poncho which was scratchy actually felt surprisingly wonderful on my new itchy skin; the polyester pants were on the tight side and about two inches too short, but it beat naked any day. I hid the underwear in the poncho's oversized front pocket. I was putting on the socks when he came in with a tray of steaming french fries.

"Who are you?" he asked stopping a few feet from me.

At first I thought he was pulling my leg, but he just kept staring at me. "Michael Talbot remember? You just got me some new clothes? And thank you by the way."

"Oh right, I thought I was imagining you. Whoa french fries!" he exclaimed, like he just realized what he was carrying. He started popping the steaming starch sticks into his mouth. "Mmmmm, these are so good," he said with his eyes closed. He opened them and peered at me for a moment as if he was sifting through his memory trying to figure out who I was again. When he came up with a satisfactory answer, once more he asked if I wanted some.

He put the tray down and I ate some. They actually had some spices on them and were delicious.

"I used to be chef for a five star resort," he said as he watched me obviously enjoying his cuisine.

"These are fantastic," I said as I stuffed some more in my face. Apparently almost dying by fire and meeting G.o.d take their toll on one's appet.i.te.

"Nice poncho I've got one just like it, I wish I knew where I'd put it."

"What's your name?" I asked again as I sat down, wanting to get closer to the addictive food. Bearded Man seemed to have forgotten about them completely; this was fine with me, I was famished.

"John the Tripper," he said with a faraway look.

"Excuse me?" I asked almost wrongly swallowing a half chewed potato strip.

"John the Tripper," he reiterated.

I had to ask, but I already knew the answer. "Because you fall over things?"

"What's that got to do with anything?" he asked back.

"You said John the Tripper."

"What?"

"John the Tripper."

"What?"

"Your name."

"What about it?"

"I figured it might mean you fall over things, apparently not though."

"I toured for twelve years with the Grateful Dead," he told me.

"Of course you did. Any chance you filled in some of the down time with some serious karate and weapons training?"

"I watched a Bruce Lee film once, didn't understand it though."

"John the Tripper..."

He said "What?" again before I could finish.

"s.h.i.t," I said, rubbing my hand over the top of my head where my hair should have been. "Do you have a mirror?" I asked as I patted down my entire head. I was pretty alarmed at this point.

He pulled open a drawer in the small table that I had used previously to support myself. It was overflowing with handheld mirrors of varying size and shape.

He looked up at me a little sheepishly. "Sometimes I just need to see myself to know that I still exist."

"I can actually relate," I told him as he handed me one. My right eyebrow, along with all of the hair on my head was gone, burnt to a crisp much like my clothes had been, three-quarters of my goatee was gone. I looked pretty sketchy to say the least. I'm not sure if I would have gone close enough to this person in the mirror to drop a quarter in a cup. I looked like I was suffering some serious malady. I just hoped it wasn't catchy.

"Do you have cancer?" he asked as he rubbed my smooth head.

"I hope not, although that would probably be preferable to what ails me," I told him, eyeing the top of my head with the mirror.

"Does shaving your head keep the evil one out?"

I was so intent on trying to find some vestige of hair on my head that I almost missed his comment. Let's be honest, most of what the guy says can't be construed as anything other than crazy and I had just become a Telly Savalas stunt double (Yul Brynner? Does that help as a reference? Okay, how about Doctor Evil.) "What, John?" I asked finally looking over at him, my neck thankful I had stopped craning it in strange ways.

John the Tripper began to look around wildly. "Who's John?" he asked me.

"You are. That's what you told me."

"My name is John the Tripper."

"That's what I said," I answered, although I hadn't, I had only called him John now that I reflected on it.

"So there's n.o.body else here?" he asked, the concerned look on his face dissipating.

'Just the voices in your head buddy.' I wanted to tell him, but I was afraid we would get so far off topic that neither of us would be able to recover. "n.o.body else, John..." He was about to ask who John was again "...the Tripper." That seemed to appease him. This was going to be a pain in the a.s.s if I had to call him by his full man-given name every time I wanted to talk to him.

"Your hair...did you get rid of it because they were acting like tiny antennas?"

John was giving me a headache. His verbal gymnastics was like watching two highly skilled Chinese Ping Pong players playing a game hopped up on Red Bull. I couldn't keep up, or maybe more like a sure-footed goat on a Nepali Mountain pa.s.s, I couldn't follow his windings.

I shrugged. "John...(his mouth opened)...the Tripper (it closed) I don't know what the h.e.l.l you're talking about?"

"You're hair, man!" he said all wide-eyed. "Did you shave it off so that she couldn't communicate with you?" And before I could answer he added. "I wished I had thought of that, had to go out about five times to get enough tin foil to wrap the whole house. There are some funky people out there. Did you know that?"

Did he just call zombies 'funky' people? Well that was a different slant for sure. This guy didn't even know we were on the losing end of a zombie apocalypse, I didn't think I had the patience to explain it to him. And for what purpose? John the Tripper seemed to be making his way just fine through his made up world.

"I mean I toured with the Grateful Dead and even Phish for a while. Smelled some truly funked-out hippies, but those people out there..." he said, pointing through his tin foil-covered window, "...there's not enough patchouli in the world to cover up their smell."

"Do you have guns?" I asked him, but the odds were that if he had, he would have converted it into some makeshift bong by now.

In a moment of clear thought he looked at me like I was the one on a twenty-year acid stint. "Do I look like I would own a gun?"

I could hear explosions throughout the city. I would learn later that they were the propane cylinders for heating that were catching fire as the city burned.

I stood and walked over to the window.

"What are you doing, man?" John the Tripper asked, his eyes getting wide.

"I just want to look out the window."

"Hold on!" he yelled, running into the kitchen. He came out with what looked like two tin foil boats, at least until he put one on his head. "Here," he said, thrusting the other one at me.

"What do you want me to do with that?" I asked.

"It scrambles the signal."

"What signal?"

"How have you not heard her?" He tilted his head.

Oh, I heard her plenty, and it was a constant struggle to 'hide' myself from her. I could feel her evil oiliness as she swept by trying to locate prey or predator with her thoughts. "What the h.e.l.l?" I said as I grabbed the hat and placed it on. Well if I wasn't certifiable before, I had now joined the ranks plunging in with both feet. John the Tripper seemed appeased.

"Okay you can check now," he said with a waving of his hand.

What I saw just about took my breath away. The city looked like you would envision h.e.l.l. The sky was lit up a blazing red, dust and ashes moved down the street in tidal waves. "We can't stay here," I said, not able to tear my eyes away from the inferno I was gazing upon.

"Fire, fire on the mountain," John the Tripper sang the Dead tune as he was staring out the window next to me.