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surplus store we’d found a while back. When I opened it, I groaned.
    Within lay the food of champions. And that wasn’t saying much. Some old PowerBars (and not even in the good flavors) stared back at me. There was a bit of beef jerky and a couple of MRE rations.
    God damn, I missed food.
Real
food.
    Not fast food, really. I’d stopped craving pizza and burgers and fries within the first few weeks and my body had thanked me for it by leaning out. No, now I missed weird stuff. Like cereal with skim milk. Or yogurt.
    I know, I know, here I was in the middle of the desert and I was longing for bacteria-laden dairy. Whatever. I still wanted it. That’s just how the brain works, I guess.
    After much consideration, I chose to pull out the bag of jerky and tossed it on the driver’s seat while I put the rest of the tin back in place behind us. We couldn’t eat much from our meager collection, not until we scrounged up some more stock to replace it, which meant either making a few store runs for trade items or taking a job from one of our better-paying customers.
    When I glanced toward the barber shop, I saw Dave coming back out. He no longer carried the burlap sack of heads, but he had another curiously
small
paper bag in his hand, a remnant of the fast food I no longer craved.
    He threw open the driver’s side door and got in. His lips pursed and he yanked the jerky bag from under his ass and tossed it and the take-out sack into my lap.
    “What?” I asked as he roared the engine almost to the point of flooding it and gunned it back toward the highway.
    He didn’t answer, but his white knuckles told a pretty fucking clear story.
    “What?” I repeated. “What did Jimmy say?”
    “Wasn’t there,” David’s teeth never unclenched as he spoke. “Left a note saying to leave the heads by the door.”
    “Ah.” I looked down at the bag in my lap. “I assume
this
is what he left for payment?”
    Dave blinked. “Oh yes. Please, open it!”
    I sighed as I unrolled the greasy bag and reached inside. I pulled out one small box decorated with cartoon characters.
    “Bandages,” I said as I stared at the colorful artwork.
    “Oh no,” Dave said, enunciating very carefully now. “Not just bandages. Sponge-Fucking-Bob-Square-Damn-Pants bandages.”
    “He lives in a pineapple under the…” I trailed off as Dave’s eye twitched. “Sorry.” I shook the box. “Half-full.”
    David jolted his head toward me. “You’re kidding.”
    “Nope.” I put the box back in its bag and tossed it in the back for storage later.
    There was no response from my husband for probably about five miles.
    “Fucking cheapskate,” Dave finally muttered, his knuckles white on the steering wheel as he stared at the expanse of highway.
    I didn’t answer, mostly because there was nothing to say. I mean, we’d have cheerfully dressed wounds for a little bit, but I doubted Dave wanted to hear that.
    I stared out my window. We hardly even noticed the burned and bloody cars that had been cleared to eitherside of the road anymore. They were just part of the landscape now, like the desert or the mountains.
    There was only barren wasteland to our left and right. Once it had been part of a city, but now… nothing. Well, almost nothing. Off in the distance, I saw movement down on the streets and in the flattened parks. Zombies lurching around, looking to feed.
    “Hey, slow down,” I said as I reached in the back for one of the rifles with a scope. “I think some target practice might do me good.”
    Dave did as I’d asked, dropping our speed gradually until we were only going about ten miles an hour. I rolled down the window and balanced my gun on the ledge. Carefully I took aim at a zombie dressed in filthy doctor’s scrubs who was standing on a street corner by what was left of a bus stop. Just standing there, like he was waiting for the 5:30 to…
hell
, I guess.
    I gently squeezed the trigger and was rewarded by the plume of blood that