Frank had used what was left of the nasty water in the sink to give himself a good once over. He didn't feel quite as clean as he had after his first scrub-down, but truthfully, he wasn't as worried about his skin as he was about his tarnished ego, which had slunk back into the deep recesses of his being to quietly shiver and cry.

They were back on the road.

Conversation had been painfully awkward and thankfully, fairly limited.

Frank had broken into the second bottle of Jack and was drinking enthusiastically. His head was spinning in a potent mixture of inebriation, guilt and soul-crushing embarrassment. He lit a cigarette and sulked.

"You might want to pace yourself," Jane said, eyeing Frank as he took a rock-star sized gulp. She agreed to drive so Frank could drown his liver unhindered.

"Thanks for your concern," he grumbled.

"You're going to pickle yourself and honestly, I'm not sure you'll be edible if you keep at it. Think of me. If I run out of blood, I'm going to need to eat and you're gonna be nothing more than a whiskey sponge. Not appetizing."

"I retract my earlier comment."

Jane shook her head and smacked him on the shoulder with the back of her hand. "Calm down, Frank. It's not like I haven't seen you... do it before."

"Not helping."

"Sorry about the cold-water thing. Truth is, I am fully aware of your size and it's... just fine."

"Just fine?"

"I mean, it's great. Big even." She glanced over at Frank. "Huge maybe, would be a better word. Massive."

"Okay, okay. That'll do."

"Seriously, don't be all guarded and cagey. It's no big deal."

Frank took a final, decisive drag from his smoke and tossed it out the window. "Yeah, well, you weren't the one who accidentally fucked a zombie's eviscerated torso after being caught jerking it to a fashion magazine."

"I didn't actually catch you. I just heard that... incredibly high-pitched scream and wanted to make sure you were okay."

"It wasn't that high-pitched."

"It was pretty high-pitched. Dogs were howling. Birds scattered from the trees. But really, I was just concerned for your wellbeing. You should be thankful that you've got someone willing to run into harm's way to make sure you're okay."

"Fair point." He took a normal sip from the bottle. "Thank you."

"You're welcome."

They drove on for a minute.

"You feel any better?" Jane asked timidly.

"I don't know. I'll get over it. It's just... Jesus. That was the worst thing that's ever happened."

"Worse than ending your career by shooting your cash-cow in the face?"

"Yes... worse than that."

"Worse than the zombie apocalypse?"

"Yes. No comparison."

"Wow."

"I know."

Again, the mile markers ticked by in silence.

"Look," Jane started, "Would it make you feel better if you caught me jerking it?"

"What?"

"If you saw me masturbating. Would you feel like we're even then?"

Frank's brain, partially saturated with Jack, reeled at the barrage of naked Jane imagery flashing through his mind. He looked over at her bathed in the softening, rich light of golden hour. She appeared photoshopped, smoothed out, almost too perfect.

She glanced over and raised her eyebrows.

"Yes?" he said, questioning whether this was really happening.

"Well, tough shit, pervert."

"You are evil," Frank said grinning and shaking his foggy head.

"I know."

As the sun continued to set, they settled back into their comfortable mutual affinity, allowing an unspoken agreement to occur. They would no longer discuss the incident but knowing glances and vague inside jokes were tolerable.

Their conversations meandered from music to favorite coffee to politics and washed out in a protracted comfortable silence, letting the music shuffling on Frank's phone fill the truck with a driving pulse. He was a good level of drunk and fell in and out of consciousness as the bruised sky was consumed by night.

After another hour, Frank rubbed his eyes, craned his neck looking out the window and searched for a second but couldn't find the moon. It was incredibly dark, ethereal and tranquil.

The music was on but now turned very low. Jane's face was calm and focused as she drove, tendrils of her hair swirled around the headrest like living things as the mild wind blew in through the partly opened window.

Frank felt his stomach groan.

"Do we still have anything to eat back there?" he asked, adjusting in his seat. He turned to look. "What's in this bag?"

"Yeah, I forgot, I grabbed a bunch of granola bars and things at that last gas station. I think there's some..."

But there was no time to finish the sentence.

There was a sudden impact, and the 4 Runner was spinning wildly out of control, as it thumped over unseen obstructions on the road.

Frank was thrown against his door and held there by centrifugal force, watching out the front windshield as the headlights sliced across trees, blackness, trees, blackness, trees.

The windshield had broken, spiderwebbed and dented in, a splotch of red smeared horizontally across it. Then the 4 Runner came to a grinding stop half on the shoulder, in a wash of smoke and dust.

Frank found his voice cowering somewhere behind his stomach. "Holy shit."

"Yeah." He heard Jane's voice miles away. He smelled the acrid bite of burned rubber mixing with the pungent aroma of freshly turned dirt.

"What happened?" he asked.

"I don't know. I just took my eyes off the road for a second..."

"We hit something."

"Yeah. A few things I think," Jane said.

"Give me the keys to the footlocker." Frank had his hand out and felt the keys drop into his palm. The smoke that had poured in through the open windows was still too thick to see much of anything except blobs of color undulating in the dim dash lights.

He climbed into the back, stretching his body over his makeshift bed and unlocked the trunk, grabbing a shotgun. He actually surprised himself by having the presence of mind to check the chamber for shells. It was loaded. The shotgun proved to be quite the burden as he attempted to squirrel himself back into the front seat, getting caught in seatbelts and cup holders. A scathing deluge of expletives squeezed out between his gritted teeth after he yanked the shotgun from whatever its barrel had wedged itself under and smacked himself right in the face.

He felt the knot rising just above his left eye.

"Whoa, slow down champ. It might not be anything."

Her words did not help.

"Slow down? You slow down!" He wished he could have thought of something better. The smoke was beginning to clear and he could just make out Jane's outline. She was pushed back against the door with her hands up. "There's blood on the windshield!" he insisted.

"Yeah, I see that. Just keep that gun pointed the other way."

"Well, maybe you should pay more attention to the road instead of... of..." he was struggling. "Instead of fucking putting on make-up or whatever you were doing."

"I wasn't putting on make-up. I wasn't doing anything."

"Well... goddamnit!" he said slamming the stock of the shotgun into the seat and accidentally discharging the weapon through the roof. There was more smoke again.

Jane was waving her hands in front of her face and coughing. "Well, that was loud."

"Shut up," Frank grumbled.

He got out of the truck in a huff and went around front where dust still floated lazily in the headlights. The grill was pretty much smashed. There was a dent in the hood and a lot of blood but no signs of serious structural damage. The truck would still drive. But with the window basically crushed and no knowledge of how to replace it, he knew he'd have to soon part with his beloved 4 Runner. It had been a good run.

"What'd we hit?" Jane asked out the window.

"What'd you hit." He corrected. "I don't know. There's blood and shit all over the place but I don't see... oh wait. Looks like two zombies... no wait, maybe three. No, that's just one of the zombies in two pieces."

"Are they all bloated and gross?"

"It's a little hard to tell, you fucking creamed them doing 90."

"I was only going 75."

"I don't know. They're smeared all over the place," Frank swung his arm exasperatedly.

"Maybe we're near another town."

"Yeah, maybe."

"Maybe we can stop and get me some clothes," Jane said, hopeful, ignoring the incongruence of her statement.

So far, all the places they'd stopped hadn't offered any kind of suitable clothing. Gas stations, as it turned out, were not the place to find the latest haute couture. She had, however, been able to replace her old scrubs with newer scrubs from the urgent care building. The sad comic irony had not been discussed.

"Yeah. New clothes," he said, pulling hunks of dead flesh off the front bumper. Frank wondered why he suddenly felt like he'd been married to his women for decades. He began to curse again as he returned to the car and put the shotgun in the back seat, grabbing an old rag from the back. He started wiping the blood off the damaged windshield while continually glancing up at the section of roof that was bulging upward, dotted with buckshot holes.

Damnit.

She'd better not say a word about that. Not one word.

He dragged what was left of the two exploded corpses over to the shoulder—laying them evenly spaced, side by side, perpendicular to the yellow line on the asphalt. They steamed in the cool night air and smelled terrible. At least their heads had been destroyed on impact so he wouldn't have to waste any more ammunition.

He wiped his hands on his jeans and walked around to the driver side and opened the door. Jane was sitting with her hands on the wheel, her eyes big and earnest.

"I'm driving," he said.

"Okay," Jane squeaked and hopped out of the seat, trotting around to the passenger side. There was a laugh waiting somewhere inside her, he could sense it.

"You sure you're okay to drive?" she asked.

"Oh, I'm fuckin' sober now."