Zombie Ocean (Book 3): The Least Read Free Page A

hump every bit of grass on the street and shout out, "Damn she's fine!" when they were done. They'd done it, racing each other along with tears of laughter in their eyes and lights flicking on in windows behind them.
    At the end Green-O had solemnly awarded them a scrap of paper each which read:
    Hand job
    "Where do we cash this in?" Zane had asked.
    Green-O just winked, looked between them, and nodded.
    He turned to run but Zane caught him in seconds, dropped him on the floor, then he and Robert took turns humping him sideways, yelling, "Damn she's fine!" They'd laughed about that for years.
    The streets were cool with the wind blowing down off the Mississippi river. This was his home, but it hadn't felt like home since Zane.
    His mom's duplex sat near the corner of Riney and Frayser School drive. It looked nice enough, small but with some new aluminum siding he'd put up himself, a neat patch of grass with a cement walk-up, though that was all a façade. Inside the plumbing was haphazard, the air con was busted, the windowless basement was his bedroom, illegally, and there were rats. They'd never had the money to do it up or get out, what with his dive trips and training, his grandmother's cancer which had churned on for six long years, his two sisters both going through rehab with one of them now serving in Syria and the other in jail, and the landlord forever raising the rent.
    He checked the street but there was no sign of Green-O's red Cadillac.
    He slotted in the key and opened the door.
    "Hey, Bobby," his mom called from the kitchen. She sounded fatigued, another double shift at the hospital. It was taking it out of her, had been sucking her dry for years, but a job was a job. It was just one of many factors that kept them both in a strange twilight state, between partners, between dreams, between lives really, just existing.
    He squeezed down the narrow beige hall and into the pokey kitchen, where orange cracked tiles lined the floor and the white kitchen cabinets seemed more ingrained food stain than actual wood, despite long bouts of scrubbing. The small back window was cracked and beside it the air con ticked over halfheartedly, puffing gusts of cool through the swampy southern humidity.
    On the table was a huge weight of spaghetti bolognese, with his mom sat in a plastic bucket next to it, weary like a smoked-down cigarette butt, but smiling still through the straight lines of her new brown weave.
    He couldn't help but smile. She was the best thing in his life; she'd always pushed him to pursue his diving though it meant ultimately he couldn't go to college, as holding down a job at the Yangtze fulfillment center and diving had taken all his time, but she'd had faith.
    He sat down. The spaghetti looked amazing, and sitting there with her weary smile glowing on him, it felt like the concerns of Green-O and his gang were figments from a different world.
    But they weren't. 
    "I screwed up, mom," he said.
    Her eyes woke up. Though he was twenty-three she wasn't above giving him a whupping.
    "So tell me," she said.
    * * *
    They packed fast and light. His mom knew Green-O and what kind of man he'd turned into. She knew the law and that it would never protect them in advance, not on the strength of such a vague threat. One of them would have to die first, or get arrested. Then the cops might listen.
    After he'd finished talking she made a show of studying his cheek, even moved to the medicine cabinet to get out antiseptic alcohol.
    "Am I supposed to drink that now?" he asked. "It wasn't a cut."
    She applied it to his cheek anyway. 
    The plan was fuzzy, but they'd been saving for years to leave, getting seven thousand dollars together. Most of it was in the bank, but they had enough cash to stay in a Big Eastern motel or something while he dived tomorrow, then catch the Greyhound west afterward, hopefully bound for Colorado Springs.
    "I like the idea of Seattle," his mom said. "I mean, for a holiday. Of course we're