Free Drink in case of Emergency by Carl Oliver

finally pushing up out of the bed and into a standing position. Chris saw him waver a little bit as the blood rushed away from his hungover brain.
    “It’s not that big of a deal. She broke in, right?” Scott’s question was less a question and more a statement.
    “Right through the window. She’s got the cuts to prove it.” Tyler responded, finally setting down the chair in the doorway of the laundry room.
    “Then we’ve got that. Could someone borrow me their phone, or not?” Justin and Chris both pulled phones from their pockets and lightly tossed them to Scott. With the grace and athleticism of a two year old girl, Scott deftly reached out and dropped both phones on the hallway floor.
    “Shit...sorry.” Scott reached down and picked up the phones. After pressing a few buttons on Chris’s phone, he shook his head in frustration and tossed it back to Chris. A few moments later he did the same thing with Justin’s phone. “Nope.”
    “Well, this sucks.” Justin said with a sense of calm that can only exist in the face of terrible news received during an overwhelming hangover.
    “You know if any of your neighbors have a phone?” Tyler asked, hopefully.
    “Well, she was bleeding purple blood, so she really might be a zombie. How about we just run down the street yelling for help until someone calls the cops and we can just lead them here?” Chris’s suggested.
    “Oh, she’s a zombie?” Scott asked, his voice thick with sarcasm. Before Chris could respond, Justin spoke up.
    “If we’re leading police to my apartment with a woman locked in the closet, I’d like to talk to them beforehand, just to give us the teeniest, tiniest chance of not getting arrested on the spot.”
    “Okay. But we need to resolve the whole issue of not being able to call my office, much less the police.”
    “You said that she lives alone during the week? Maybe she’s got a landline phone we can use?” Chris suggested, the complete silence that followed his question was only broken by the inconsistent thumping in the closet.
    “So. Not only have you locked my neighbor into my linen closet, you also would like to break into her home.” Justin stated as pulled a wrinkled t-shirt over his head.
    “Pretty much. Unless you have a better idea. Do you really call it a ‘linen closet’?” Chris replied sarcastically.
    “Fuck.” Justin rubbed his head in pain, at the hangover, and the frustration of everything that had happened in the last twelve hours.
     
    ****
     
    Chris was able to solve the lack of a lock on the hall closet by wedging a table between the doorframe of Justin’s bedroom and the closet door.  When the woman attempted to push the door open, the table wedged in tighter, she was trapped.
    Justin felt badly for leaving his neighbor locked up in a closet, but after he saw the broken window and purple goo on the floor of the living room, he couldn’t completely dismiss the tale that Tyler and Chris were weaving, no matter how much he wanted to. As ‘Tina’ continued her steady pounding on the closet door, he followed his three friends out of the apartment and towards her house.
    All four friends blinked painfully into the morning sunlight, feeling like while they slept, the sun had somehow moved closer to earth, causing the blinding pain that shot through their dehydrated brains.
    Moving down the stairs and across the green lawn, the group came up to Tina’s single story, light blue house. The grey front door stood ajar and the group hesitated before walking in.
                  “There’s no traffic.” Chris noted thoughtfully.
                  “Well we don’t really get traffic out here, I mean, not until you get out of the ‘burbs.” Justin replied.
                  “No, he means there’s no cars. At all. You can’t hear any cars on the road. I noticed it earlier, before she started chasing me.” Tyler said, looking around. It really was unnerving, how quiet