The town they arrived at was called Flint.

It was nothing more than a strip of body shops, diners and gas stations.

Off in the trees, a few dilapidated double-wide trailers hunkered down, as if hiding. Cheney had been a small town but Flint... Flint was like Cheney's placenta.

They stopped at one of the gas stations and Frank noticed the price per gallon and chuckled to himself. He didn't even carry a wallet anymore.

The windows fronting the little ramshackle building had been smashed but there was still a chance, Frank hoped, still a slight chance that not everything had been plundered.

There was a desk in there somewhere with a half-full bottle of Kentucky bourbon just waiting to be discovered... poured... tasted.

Frank's saliva glands slackened, and he started to feel a little dizzy.

Please, please say that desk exists.

"What desk?" Jane asked as they exited the car.

How long he had been talking—he couldn't know. "Nothing, no desk." He said somewhat confusedly.

"Are you okay? You look... pale. I swear if you say, look who's talking I will seriously consider eating you."

"I wasn't going to say anything."

"Good."

"I'm just hoping they have..."

"Booze?" she said, raising her eyebrows at him.

"...supplies," he stated, simply.

"Booze," she confirmed.

They walked up to the broken door, barely clinging to its hinges and Frank held it open for her. "Dead ladies first," he said. "And I also need cigarettes."

The inside of the gas station mini mart was, as Frank had expected, gutted.

Bits of random paper mixed with the glass and other miscellaneous debris crunched under their feet. The urge to organize prodded Frank in the back of the neck—even if he just pushed some of the junk to one side to make a proper path... but no. He resisted.

It smelled stale and damp. Jane found what was left of the magazine rack and began sifting through the remains. Frank's eyes scanned the shattered remnants of the beverage coolers then searched for a doorway leading to the inevitable back room. A back room with a desk.

The tattered pages of the glossy women's magazines in Jane's cold hands showed one beautiful woman after another. She tossed the magazine on the ground and breathed in, filling her dried lungs with dead air.

Make-up. She wanted some make-up. She touched her split lip gingerly. And a stapler. Vanity outlives life.

She strolled over to where she'd last seen Frank.

"I'm going to walk across the street to that drug store for a second," she said.

"Okay," he said from back in the storeroom where he had found the desk but was having trouble trying to pry open the locked drawer. He heard her crunch out of the mini-mart and crunch her way across the gravel parking lot.

For a second he wondered if she had the car keys on her—he could escape right now.

Man, I am dramatic. Escape?

This wasn't prison or some POW camp where he lived in a three-by-three-foot hole, surrounded by rats and pig shit and bamboo spikes and... and then he remembered the booze.

The desk was not cooperating.

He was trying to be nice. He was trying to be quiet—not that there was any need, but something in him didn't want Jane to know the depths of his desperation.

By now, her crunching shoes had receded into the distance, so he decided the best course of action was the old smash-and-grab.

He turned the desk over with a loud crash and began kicking furiously at the bottom of the offending drawer. It cracked and he suddenly realized he may have just broken the bottle inside. If there was a bottle.

Shit.

He dropped to his knees and examined the edges of the drawer, checking for leakage. Gotta be careful, he thought.

In his periphery he spotted a letter opener under strewn sheets of paper and lunged for it. He jammed the blade into the lock and twisted it carefully, cursing the movies for making lock picking look so easy—a fucking hairpin or a pocketknife could open Fort Knox in the movies.

After several failed attempts and the tip of the blade breaking off, he thought that maybe he could pry the thing open with something. Something thin and metal—like a slim-jim or a metal ruler or... a tire iron!

He scrambled to his feet and rushed out to the 4 Runner, throwing open the rear passenger side door and lifting the seat. He noticed the keys still dangling in the ignition, but he was on a mission. There it was—the real key to the doors of eternity—that which could unlock the gates of heaven. That beautiful wrought iron X positioned in its little slots, just waiting for this—the perfect day to make its appearance.

It snapped out of its plastic home eagerly, happy to be in Frank's sweaty palms. The weight of it felt right—not too light, not too heavy, like it was made just for him.

He kept himself from running to savor this little moment of preemptive victory then walked back inside to the office and approached the desk with a wicked smile.

He again, positioned himself on his knees and held aloft this thing of wonder—offering it to the gods—no, just showing it to them.

See this? This is mine! I am man and I can employ tools to achieve my goals!

Delicately, almost tenderly, he slipped the flattened edge of the tire iron between the desktop and the drawer and leaned. If he did this right, the drawer would pop off its hinges and land squarely on his lap—the bottle clinking happily against pencils and old tubes of chap-stick—a gentle wave of brown liquid sloshing in slow motion, catching a glint of sunlight through the destroyed window which would, in turn, splash across Frank's face like an angel's kiss.

For a fleeting moment he thought, wow, I am one pathetic, degenerate alcoholic, but quickly brushed the thought aside and leaned on the tire iron just a bit harder.

The hinges snapped and the end of the tire iron, suddenly freed, came up fast, clocking Frank in the chin.

The drawer fell on his lap and slid to the floor as he fell backward against an overturned chair.

There was no clinking.

There was no victorious music.

He righted himself and grabbed the drawer. Pens, pencils, even the old tube of chap-stick, a few coins and paperclips but no bottle. A stack of papers obstructed his view of the bottom of the drawer which he immediately tossed over his head on the off chance that physics didn't apply in this drawer and the bottle was hidden in a place much too small for a bottle.

Nope.

The laws of physics were working just fine.

A few drops of blood dripped through his beard and fell on the dusty floor between his legs.

He dug his fingers through his tangled hair on his chin and felt the sting. He pulled away red fingers.

Fuck.

Jane walked in.

He looked up at her—dazed. She looked more alive. Rosy even.

"Hey..." she started then looked around the office which was now in total disarray. "Are you okay?"

"Huh? Yeah."

"You've got blood in your beard."

"I know."

"Okay. Well, I picked up a few bottles of Jack Daniels over at the drug store. I didn't think they'd have any of the hard stuff here." She looked around the destroyed room. "Did they?"

"No..."

"Well, that's all they had was Jack. Everything else was pretty much smashed. I found the two bottles in the back office on a bookshelf. I hope whiskey works."

"It's fine."

"Good." She stood there looking at him. "You sure you're okay?"

"Yeah... I just. There was..." He decided to change the subject. "You look different," he said. She definitely looked more alive. And though the light was dim in the office, he could see her eyes which were luminous green and as vibrant as the endless expanse of trees they'd been driving by.

"Yeah, I found some eyeliner and stuff that was still new—still in their packages."

"Great. You look... great," he said, a little stunned by his bluntness.

"Thanks," she said, flipping her hair. "For a dead girl, right?"

"For a girl."

Jane blanched for a second then lowered her head, swinging her blond curtain back in place obstructing her face. "Thanks," she said softly.

She stood there looking at Frank a bit longer through the gaps in her hair. He looked exhausted and discombobulated.

"Seriously, you're okay?" she asked.

"Yeah. Two bottles, right?"

She nodded.

"Yeah, I'm good," he said and pulled himself to his feet. "I'll... I'll get some gas."

As he walked past her in the doorway, he caught a glimpse of something silver flashing in the sun (the way the bottle was supposed to) near her mouth.

She must have seen his eyes and said, "They're staples."

He stopped and examined her lip more carefully.

"Yes, they are," he said. "Sorry about that."

"No worries. All fixed," Jane replied. "Sorry about your balls."

"It's... okay." Frank plodded out to the car suffused in the mixed sensations of failure and victory. He hadn't found any booze, but she had. Maybe she was his guardian angel—this dead girl, this hot zombie who'd smashed his nuts. And to think, he had actually considered bashing in her skull at one point.