Blood Bought: Book Four in The Locker Nine Series

by Franklin Horton

  Before Robert could stop her, Leslie took a gulp of fresh air and barged into the house, holding her breath. She desperately unlatched and opened every window she came to. In the still summer air it would take some time before the house aired out but at least this effort might make it livable. Eventually.

  The odor wasn’t only offensive, it was likely dangerous as well. Robert couldn't imagine taking a child in that house and telling them that this was home, but that was their plan. They were here now.

  When he was certain he wasn’t going to throw up, Robert returned to the ATV and hauled more of Leslie's belongings to the porch. She was already dragging his previous loads into the fetid kitchen, trying to get them out of sight. On his last trip back to the ATV he removed the two white five-gallon buckets with their red lids. They were pre-packaged freeze dried kits, each holding a thirty day supply of food for one person, along with a water filter. Thirty days for Leslie, thirty days for Dylan. This was the original payment he promised Leslie for staying with Theresa while he went after Grace. After thirty days, he didn’t know what they would do.

  Leslie was still standing in the kitchen door when he got there, barring Dylan from entering the house. Robert set the buckets down and slid them across the peeling boards of the back porch.

  “I need to go in, Granny. I need to go to the potty.”

  Leslie gestured toward the corner of the house. “Go around the corner. The bathroom doesn’t work right now. We’ll just have to get used to going outside.”

  “But you told me not to pee in the yard,” Dylan whined.

  Leslie lost her patience. “Listen, if you need to go you’ll have to go outside. I’m done arguing with you. You can’t come in the house right now.”

  Dylan clutched his teddy bear and ran around the corner of the house. This was apparently an urgent mission.

  “Not too far,” Leslie called after him. “Just around the corner.”

  Robert saw the worry in Leslie’s face. She was still healing from the beating Debbie’s boyfriend gave her. Her arm was wrapped from hand to elbow in an elastic bandage, her face blotched with colorful bursts of bruising. She was no longer the amiable, relaxed woman she’d been at his place. She looked old and scared.

  "Do you have any friends in town you could stay with? Maybe someone whose home isn’t in such bad shape?"

  She gave him a sad smile, propping the door open with her body, hoping that might allow the smell to dissipate more. "This is home. The sooner I dig back in and reclaim it the better.”

  Robert had a sinking feeling in his stomach. The whole thing felt wrong but he just couldn’t make himself tell her to get back in the ATV and come home with him. This disaster unfolding around them was teaching him a lot about himself. He’d learned that he could be selfish and determined to the point that it sometimes alienated the people around him. He’d learned that at Arthur’s compound, nearly losing friends in the process. Sonyea and Theresa would probably resent him for a while, feeling like he should have handled this differently. Grace seemed indifferent. She didn’t question.

  He’d always been one of those preppers who talked about how you had to turn people away even if it was difficult. You couldn’t be handing your supplies out to starving families or begging children because that was taking food out of your own family’s mouths. It was a lot harder in real life. It was emotional and guilt-inducing. He felt responsible even if some logical part of his brain was reminding him that he couldn’t take care of everyone he knew.

  "I wish I could tell you to call if you needed help but that's not an option,” Robert finally said. “The best I can offer is to remind you that if you need our help, you know where we live. Pack food and water for you and Dylan. Take the Creeper Trail out of town and go back the way we came."

  "I know the way," she said. "Hopefully I don't need to." She didn’t come across as convincing, or even convinced herself.

  Dylan came flying back around the house and ran up the steps. “I peed outside,” he said with pride. “On ants.”

  Leslie stroked his hair. “You sit down here on the porch and play. I have to get some work done in the house before you can come inside.”

  "I wish I could stay around and help,” Robert said. “I hate leaving you like this, with your house in this condition, but I'm afraid to stay too long. We’re expecting trouble at home.”

  "We’ll be fine. You go on home and take care your family. I’ll take care of mine."

  Robert picked up his rifle and slid into the driver’s seat. Grace ran to the porch and gave Leslie a quick hug. She did the same to Dylan, whispering something to him that Robert couldn’t hear. When she was done, she scrambled down the steps and climbed into the cab, slamming the door behind her. She fumbled with her rifle for a moment in the tight confines of the cab, then positioned it so that the muzzle was hanging slightly out the window. She wanted to be ready to lay down suppressive fire if anyone became too interested in them.

  Robert released the parking brake and put the transmission into forward. When he hit the gas pedal, he was glad this particular vehicle didn't have a rearview mirror because he’d have been watching it. He had enough guilt, enough second thoughts already, without looking back to see that poor old lady and her grandson standing on the porch of that revolting home. Even a month ago, a home in that condition would have been condemned. People would be wearing hazmat suits just to enter it.

  He had to remind himself that the condition of her home was not entirely due to the situation the country was in, nor was it in that condition due to Leslie’s lack of preparedness. The blame rested squarely on that scumbag Paul, supposedly dead, and Debbie, who was still wandering around loose somewhere. For Leslie and Dylan’s sakes he hoped she was dead. If she was still alive, he hoped she was headed in some other direction, destined to become a pox on the lives of some other people in some other town. These good people did not need her in their lives ever again.

  Robert accelerated wildly through two blocks of neighborhoods, paying less attention this time to who might be watching. He was focused on getting out of town as quickly as possible. He was moving fast and trying to present as difficult a target as possible to anyone who may have them in the crosshairs. Near the town pool, the back street intersected with the Creeper Trail. Robert made the turn, punched the gas, and the rear wheels spun as they broke traction, sending a rooster trail of gravels into the air. He rocketed across the first of several trestles, the ATV having very little clearance with the railing to each side. His driving made Grace nervous and she clung to the grab handle with white knuckles.

  He passed an outdoor outfitter and a few small cafés, then found himself at the edge of the town limits. There the trail converged with the highway again, running parallel for a short distance. Robert slowed and cut across the grassy divider, dropping onto the public road he’d come in on.

  In the distance, he caught movement, and saw a single hiker ambling down the trail toward town. With a bandanna around her head and her scrawny, trail-worn frame she looked like any one of thousands of hiker girls that entered Damascus each year. She was walking funny and at first he thought maybe she had a sprained ankle. Maybe her feet were just hurting. He’d hiked enough over the years to recognize that discomfort. He’d experienced it himself. Sometimes it was shoes that weren’t broken in or a rogue blister showing up in a painful spot.

  If she was stuck on the trail now, somewhere far from her home, he sympathized. She had a hard road ahead of her. Wherever she was going, he hoped she made it.

  13

  When the ATV zipped by on the road outside of town, Debbie had every intention of calling out to them and asking if she could bum a ride to her mom’s house. By the time she thought about it and raised her hand to wave them down, they’d passed her by and were gone from view.

  "Dammit!”

  The effects of the pain pill were waning and her feet were stinging again. She craved another pill and would have taken one had it not be
en for that little voice inside her that was intent on self-preservation. That voice told her she needed her wits about her as she entered town. Historically, she’d not been one to listen to intuition. She often defied that part of herself that worked to keep her alive, consequences be damned. This time she felt like she needed to listen and remain alert. All she had to do was make it across town and to her mom's house. Once she did, when she was certain there was no one there to hurt her, she could barricade herself inside and do whatever she wanted. She could lay on the reeking, garbage strewn floor, take another of the pain pills, and slip into bliss like a warm bubble bath.

  One moment there was nothing but trees on either side of the road, then businesses began showing up. There were small trailer parks and scattered homes. Then the trail cut away from the road, veering into the residential backstreets of Damascus. The quiet was disturbing. It was funny how the void of silence could strike one as such a strange, ominous thing, but it did. She could hear nothing but the scuffing of her cut-up shoes grinding against the gritty trail with each careful step. There were no car engines, no barking dogs. There was no squeal of children playing during summer vacation. It was creepy. It was wrong.

  She looked for people, examining windows for the movement of curtains. She looked for open doors. Imagining now that all these houses were vacant, her mind immediately went to how many of them might have pain medications stashed away. She fully intended to find out. Food would be nice, but other people had probably been in there already looking for food. The residents themselves might even have taken their food with them when they left. With all of the craziness going on around them as the hikers took over the town, people who fled might have left their pills behind. She knew all the places they hid them. She could sniff them out like a trained drug dog. The cops had their skills, she had hers.

  She turned off the trail onto her mother’s street. She'd grown up in his neighborhood and once knew the name of everyone living in every house along it. Some of those people had moved along now, either dying or relocating. They’d been replaced by other people whose names she didn't know. She took a left turn onto a side street and then a right into the alley behind her mother's house.

  Even in normal times, this was always the way she went in. Entering through the back door allowed her to avoid the judging glances of the neighbors. Many of them, older women like her mother, shook their heads and made clucking sounds at what she'd become.

  “Such a disappointment, that girl.”

  She heard it and she had no patience for it. Part of her was fully aware of the truth of their comments. It wasn’t their brazen accusations that stung her, but the fact she knew they were right. That was what got to her.

  Debbie walked along the chain link fence, dragging a finger on the pipe rail at the top. She was just getting ready to swing through the open gate into her mother's backyard when she caught the first human sounds she’d heard since parting ways with the two cops.

  It was a child’s voice.

  She froze in her tracks, listening. It was a little boy singing to himself the way children did sometimes as they played. After a moment, it occurred to her that it was not just any child's voice but that of her own child. She had not immediately recognized it as a mother more bonded to her child might have. That voice should have triggered something deep inside her. It should have made her heart swell. It didn’t.

  She slowly backed the way she’d come, hoping to avoid detection. She crept into the neighbor’s yard and hid behind a tall board fence, the white paint peeling in thick chips. She put an eye to a crack between the boards and peered through. Adjusting her head, tilting this way and that, she indeed spotted her son sitting on the back porch of her mother's house, playing with a little car. If he hadn’t been so engaged with that toy car he’d have probably seen her.

  She had a flash of déjà vu. She remembered playing on that very same porch with cars just like that when she was his age. At that moment, she wished she could go back to childhood and choose another path for herself. If such a thing were even possible, she wondered if an alternative path would exist for her or if her future was predetermined. Was her place in the world unavoidable? Would she end up here again, experiencing all the worst parts of her life over? To hell with that. She’d just stick with what she had, bad as it was.

  Movement in the door behind Dylan caught her attention. Her mother staggered through the doorway, awkwardly stepping around Dylan, lugging a trashcan. She walked backward, dragging it with both hands to the edge of the yard and dumping it there. Debbie noticed for the first time the piles growing there. The mound of trash and human waste made her recall the state in which she and Paul had left the house. She found herself mildly embarrassed by it.

  In all fairness, they’d been high. Paul still had a good supply of drugs at the time. It was only food they were running short on, which was what led them to her mother’s house. They’d found things to eat but it was mostly the old crap in the back of the cabinets that no one wanted—canned beets, expired peas, torn packets of ramen with the seasoning packet missing. They’d thrown their garbage in the trash until it was full, then the sink, then on the floor. They didn’t care. It wasn’t their house and it wasn’t their problem.

  They continued to fill the toilet with their waste even though there was no longer any water for flushing. They could have brought some from a nearby creek and flushed with that but they didn’t want to make the effort. They could also have taken the garbage outside and left it but they didn’t do that either. Not their house, not their problem. The smell grew to fill the living space until there was no escape.

  She’d somehow managed to forget about all those nasty odors but now it was coming back to her. She could smell the house from her hiding place. How did she ever think she could stay in there? Was that what her mom and Dylan were planning to do? She couldn’t imagine her tidy mother, Susie Homemaker, sleeping in such squalor.

  "Paul, you were an animal," she whispered.

  Whatever happened there in that house had to be his fault. She wouldn't do those kind of things. She was not that kind of person. She was a good girl manipulated by a bad man. It was the story of her life.

  Suddenly exhausted and without a plan, she turned her back to the fence. She slid down and wilted at its base. What was she going to do now? She was pretty sure her mother wouldn’t allow her to live with them after what had happened at the Hardwick house. After Paul beating her while Debbie watched. Just another example of the bad things Paul did that she got some of the blame for. Why couldn't anyone see that?

  In her anger, she recalled that she hated her mother. Her mother had freed her from the storage building where she’d been imprisoned only to abandon her in the middle of nowhere with nothing. She’d practically been left to die. What kind of mother did that? How could people not understand that she was the victim here? Debbie lived in a world of cruel, devious, and coldhearted people. She was a good person and nobody got it. Nobody cared.

  She might be better off going to the park to find the hikers. They might take her in. She had a pack now and she kind of looked like a hiker, if you didn’t look too close. It was a shame she didn't have a dog. People liked dogs and were nicer to people who had dogs. Personally, she hated dogs, but she could imagine everyone in the camp petting her dog and treating her nicely just because she was a girl with a dog.

  A thought occurred to her. She wondered if they might extend the same courtesy to a woman with a child. What if she found Dylan a pack and told the other hikers that the two of them had been out there hiking together? She would have to make Dylan cooperate. She would have to coach him on a story and make sure he stuck to it. She could always tell people he was slow or something, then make him promise to keep his mouth shut if he got asked any questions.

  She wasn’t certain kids were as cute as dogs to most people. She didn’t know if they provoked the same warm reaction, but a kid was definitely better than nothing. It was certainly bette
r than relying on her own charms, which were questionable at best. It was a pointless idea, though. Her mother would never willingly give up Dylan.

  Seeing a newfound value in him, Debbie pondered ways to get her son back. She could simply run across the yard, snatch him by the hand, and take off running. That might work if her intention was to disappear from town with the child. Her current plan was staying in town with the hikers though, so her mother would probably come looking for her. In this small town, she’d likely find her. If her mother found her with the hikers in the park, she might blow her whole story. It would come out that she wasn't actually a hiker at all. She couldn’t let that happen. Getting in with those folks might be the only way she was going to survive this.

  Maybe she needed to kill her mother.

  She could wait for Leslie to come outside, then boldly stride over there and kill her in her own yard, right there in front of God and everyone. The only thing wrong with that idea was that it would also be in front of Dylan. If she killed her in front of him it was unlikely he would keep the secret. He wouldn’t perpetuate her lie if he knew she'd killed his precious grandmother. If she was going to do it, she had to do it without his knowledge.

  She thought about waiting until nighttime. She could creep into the house and kill her mother as she slept in her bed, but she’d probably have Dylan in there with her. She might also have a gun and shoot Debbie. She’d already proven she was the kind of mother who didn’t care about her daughter.

  Thinking about a gun made Debbie realize she didn’t have much in the way of a murder weapon. The only thing she had that was even close was the multitool, which had a blade. She pulled it out and examined it. She wasn’t certain it was long enough to kill someone. It was also awkward to wield. If her mother did have a gun, Debbie would be in the classic losing position of having taken a knife to a gunfight.