Jonas and the Werefish
7

The swelling in his leg from the snakebite had gone down, and his head seemed to be clearer now. He was still uncertain what was real and what was not, especially since his realization that the aliens were playing tricks and psychologically manipulating him.

It crossed his mind that perhaps the visitors were actually teenagers from another species in another universe and they had simply come to Earth to pull pranks. The stupid gag that’d been played with the cat’s tail out a hole in an empty seemed genuinely juvenile. And for that reason, Jonas distrusted the notion that there was an attractive female with large breasts and an overactive sex drive waiting for him to come rescue her from alleged incarceration in an old mannequin factory. It was even more suspect that the damsel in distress was a celebrity whom he would recognize from television.

But on the flip side, What if Iris Vandertrout was real? He certainly would not want to leave her to her own devices and the devices of the Visitors. Perhaps she could replace a car that was drivable and make her way to him, but she didn’t know where he was, any more than he actually knew where she was.

Jonas filled the generators with gas and was able to get the lights running again in his trailer and the salvage yard. He immediately went back to the CB radio and attempted to raise Iris again to get more information but with no luck. There was a distinct possibility that she was sitting in the dark somewhere, a hundred miles away, surrounded by old mannequins that... seemed to move occasionally in the wrong lighting and shadows.

Jonas kept his cell phone charged so that he could sometimes open it and reminisce over the pictures and videos of the woman he’d lost, Cara. It was creepy to him that some of the faces of the vegetable women and even the zombies who had tried to scale the walls of the salvage yard displayed facial features that reminded him of his lost love. It was almost as if they were evolving into the likeness of Cara. What kind of torment was this? Or what would be worse, if making the vegetable women evolve into clones of Cara was an effort to comfort Jonas and provide him with a new mate... or just fuck with his mind.

He played a couple of videos of Cara laughing and pontificating on ridiculous things like why butterflies are nearsighted but can see colors within 10 feet or so... or that the average cloud weighs more than 200 thousand pounds or that hummingbirds can remember the locations of feeders years later. She was kind of a whiz kid in some ways and total girlie girl in others but athletic. She was one of those chicks who looked great on the beach playing volleyball as she mercilessly whipped her competition.

Jonas came to the realization, quickly enough that for some reason he would not be able to raise Iris again on the CB. It would be incumbent upon him to figure out where she was and how to get there. In the old days, before the Visitors had saturated the planet with the mist and temporarily wiped out a lot of machinery and communications with EMPs, it would’ve been easy enough to just open the phone and say “Hey Google, where’s the old mannequin factory?” and get a lead. Or, one could simply open a site on the internet and print out a map or a set of directions. But he didn’t have that luxury in the post-apocalyptic world. So he had to figure another way to figure out where to replace, the last remaining female on the planet, and he did.

He knew that an auto salvage yard might sometimes send its tow truck dozens of miles or even hundreds on occasion to hook up a vehicle and tow it back to the yard or to a mechanic or someone’s home. And he knew also that it was likely that there were old-fashioned paper maps somewhere in the office or maybe even in the tow truck still parked in the junkyard: a tow truck that was still functional. And there might even be paper road maps in the glove-boxes of some of the wrecked vehicles in the yard. So the first thing Jonas needed to do was locate a roadmap, which was easy enough, there was a paper roadmap in the desk drawer below the CB radio.

The next task, which would prove more difficult, was to figure out where the old mannequin factory was located. And the simplest way to start the search was to look at the paper map he’d found. Some road maps show points of interest such as state or local parks, mountain ranges or geological formations. Some maps were designed for tourists and sightseeing. An old dildo factory might lure a few sightseers and or tourists; Jonas mused but did not take the thought seriously. The map he found in the desk drawer under the CB radio was just a regular old, run of the mill, paper road map with cities, towns, highways and no points of interest.

So the next step, Jonas figured, was to suss out which cities or towns were inside a hundred miles of the salvage yard and hope that he was correct in calculating that the dildo and mannequin factories were within that radius.

And then after that, Jonas eliminated cities and towns on the map that were likely too rural to accommodate either dildo or dummy factories; and then he eliminated cities and towns that were too far away from the main highways, etc., to easily transport their products to market and finally, he came up with what he considered to be a prime candidate: Fickle Creek.

Finally, Jonas gassed up the tow truck, which he’d decided upon because it had a CB radio: took a shower, and then made sure he had plenty of bullets for Second A and Big Medicine before hitting the road. Most tow trucks Jonas had ever seen only had a front seat for the driver and possibly one passenger, but this truck had a back seat too, which had a dog crate in it. It made sense, Jonas reckoned. Somebody might need to be towed and have their dog or another pet with them. There was no reason to remove the dog crate so he left it. He would’ve been much happier had someone left a box of crackers or some peanuts or something.

He was hungry.

He hoped there was a 7-Eleven or Stuckeys or something along the way that maybe he could forage and replace something to eat.

But then... he shaved.

He used a pair of scissors first to clip away his thick black beard. As attached and fond of his manly, misanthropic facial hair as he had become, he remembered how Cara had loved him best clean-shaven. So he lathered up his face with shaving cream once he’d trimmed away the symbol of his reclusiveness first with the scissors... and shaved it with a razor to the skin.

The bad news was that daylight was almost gone before Jonas rolled out.

He wrapped a couple of heavy metal chains through the gate and locked them with equally heavy padlocks. The last thing he wanted was to return to a compound full of zombies that were morphing into the likeness of his dead girlfriend. Nor did he want to be spotted on the road by the Flying saucers, but all things considered, there were no perfect conditions, and waiting for perfect conditions was a bigger fool’s mission than the one he was about to undertake.