Chance Damnation

by DeAnna Knippling

  “That was fast.”

  Theodore shook his head but didn’t say anything.

  Don said, “Aloysius got—oh, Hell, I don’t know how he did it, but he ripped up his leg pretty bad. And look at your head! You all right driving in to the hospital?”

  “Sure,” Theodore said. He swallowed a couple of times. “Say, you don’t have any water around, do you? Think I swallowed a bug.”

  Don, standing between Aloysius and the water buckets next to the row of trucks, waved his arm toward the buckets. Aloysius blinked. In the time it had taken Don to wave his arm, the plastic buckets had turned into plastic jugs, the kind the ladies filled with lemonade and iced tea for picnics on the river.

  “I’m sure there’s something wet over there,” Don said.

  “Thanks,” Theodore said. He walked toward the jugs, which, as Aloysius blinked, shifted from the ground into the back of a pickup truck, paper cups in an inverted stack on the right-hand side.

  “Did you see that?” Aloysius asked.

  Theodore didn’t answer. He poured himself a cup of something from the first jug, raised it to his lips, then paused. He took a big sniff of it, then tossed the contents into the grass. He poured himself a touch of something out of the second jug, sniffed it, swished it around in the cup, dumped it into the grass, and poured himself some more.

  “What’s that?”

  Theodore drank the cupful of liquid, then poured himself another cup and drank that, too.

  Aloysius poured himself a bare split from the first jug and smelled it. It turned his stomach, whatever it was, like milk that had been left out to sour for the chickens. He tossed it into the grass. “What’s that?” he asked again.

  “Tea.”

  Aloysius poured himself some tea to clean his paper cup, dumped it out, and poured himself more tea. It tasted off. Or not off, but different. Like it wasn’t just tea, but tea and a mix of cooking spices. Green and a little wild.

  “Theodore, you remember the demons attacking, don’t you?”

  He nodded.

  “And this was just water a few minutes ago.”

  He nodded again.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Pa’s gone.” Theodore crumpled his paper cup and tossed it in a trash barrel that had been set up next to the trucks.

  “I know that,” Aloysius said. “He’s dead.”

  “I said he was gone,” Theodore said. “Pulled over. Looked in the back to make sure he wasn’t sliding around. Gone.”

  A snap of cloth echoed off the church, and Aloysius looked up. Peggy and two other ladies were spreading an old tablecloth over a card table, clipping the yellow-and-white cloth around the legs with clothes pins. Peggy had changed her dress.

  “The church,” Aloysius said.

  The windows were unbroken; the roof undamaged.

  And backing down the stairs, holding one end of a folding table, in dark blue pants, light blue shirt, leather belt, and cowboy boots, was a demon.

  It was a miracle. Not a very nice miracle.

  “We gotta ask Sebastian about this,” Aloysius said. He felt giddy.

  “Come on,” Theodore said.

  “What?”

  Theodore was already walking toward his pickup truck.

  “What are you doing?” Aloysius asked. “We have to find Sebastian.”

  “Taking you to the doctor,” Theodore said.

  “What? I’m not going to the doctor.”

  Theodore grabbed Aloysius around the arm. “You come on. You ain’t got no sense today.” He pulled Aloysius toward the truck. “Get in.” Theodore opened the door and stood next to it with his hands at his sides, ready to catch Aloysius if he didn’t do what he was told.

  Aloysius got in, and Theodore shut the door behind him. As Theodore walked around the back of the truck, Aloysius put his hand on the handle, thinking about bursting out of the truck and running into the church to find Sebastian.

  Theodore stopped in his tracks and gave him a dirty look.

  Aloysius put his hand down. He was tempted to touch the handle again, just to get a rise out of Theodore.

  Theodore got into the driver’s seat, started the truck, and drove away.

  Aloysius looked into the church. A number of demons were moving around inside, mingled with the humans as naturally as though they were born to it.

  Theodore’s knuckles on the steering wheel were white. “Don’t go looking in there.”

  “Why?”

  “You ask too many questions.”

  Theodore drove away from the church, turning toward Highway 50 as he left the gravel road from the church. The hills rolled by, and Aloysius watched the yellow lines down the middle of the highway. Theodore pulled off the road at the turn to Highway 50 and stopped the truck.

  “It was here.” He didn’t look at Aloysius.

  Aloysius looked over his shoulder into the back of the truck. The tarp was nowhere to be seen.

  “What happened to him? Did he fall out?”

  “I had the windows down. I could hear the tarp sliding around in the back. And then he was quiet, so I looked back and he was gone. I looked.”

  “Where did he go?”

  “I looked.”

  “So he might not be dead.”

  Theodore shook his head.

  “Do you want him to be dead?”

  Theodore didn’t answer. Aloysius wasn’t sure how he’d answer the question himself; he was just as glad that Theodore wasn’t feeling talkative.

  “What if he’s been replaced with one of those demons?” Like a lot of things, it came out of his mouth before he thought about it. He wished he could have taken it back, as if by saying it, he’d made it so.

  “We have to talk to Sebastian,” Aloysius said. “You know he’s right in the middle of this, whatever it is. He was always getting into something.”

  “You wasn’t such a good kid yourself,” Theodore said.

  Aloysius snorted. “The only one of us that’s worth a damn is Robert, and I can’t stand him most of the time.”

  Theodore said, “Now.”

  “What’s that?”

  Theodore shook his head. Well, it wasn’t important just then. Aloysius said, “We have to talk to Sebastian. You aren’t really going to make me go in to the doctor, are you? You’re even worse off than I am.”

  Theodore pulled onto the highway. “You ain’t changed.”

  “Let’s set my irascible childhood aside for a few minutes, Theodore. I got to talk to Sebastian.”

  Theodore pointed at Aloysius’s pants. Aloysius had forgotten them. They were still split up to the crotch, covered with dirt and blood. Aloysius leaned over to the side mirror and looked at himself. Shit, his face looked like someone had taken a baseball bat to it.

  “I wonder why,” Aloysius said.

  “Got to make it look good,” Theodore said. “Can’t do anything suspicious. Talk to him soon enough.”

  “What am I going to tell the doctor?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I’m not you, Theodore.”

  Theodore shrugged.

  Aloysius stared out the window for a while. The fields were golden with wheat, then millet, then long, feathered grass. He wasn’t sure whether the crops were changing or his eyes were so unfocused that he couldn’t tell when the truck was passing different fields.

  And then he was asleep.

  He woke up with a jerk at the hospital, when Theodore opened his door.

  “What happened to him?” the nurse asked. “What happened to you?”

  Theodore shrugged.

  “Mr. Jennings?” she asked. Aloysius didn’t think he knew her. The hospital was always getting new nurses, usually young pretty things just out of nursing school, which was fine enough by him.

  “Speaking,” he said.

  “Can you walk?”

  Aloysius slid out of the seat. His legs were a little wobbly, but nothing to really worry about. Then one of his knees screamed in pain,
and he grabbed the truck door.

  Theodore caught him under one shoulder, switched his grip, and took on most of Aloysius’s weight.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” he said. “Shouldn’t have let him try it.”

  The nurse whistled, two fingers in her mouth and a piercing sound that split through his ears. Aloysius felt his eyelids stick to his eyes, blinked a few times, then closed his eyes again. A few seconds later, he was being laid down on a gurney and wheeled into the hospital like a side of beef into a meat locker. Ready to go up on a hook.

  Chapter 23

  It was nice letting the nurses take care of him—for a little while. Then the doctor came by and sewed up his leg, and that wasn’t nice at all. When the nurses came back, he was ready for them to be nice to him again.

  But eventually he got sick of it.

  He pressed the bell. Ting! No answer, at least in the five seconds he had before he ran out of patience. “Anybody got some clothes?”

  No answer. Fortunately, nobody was in the room with him. There was room for four beds, of which one had been pressed into service elsewhere.

  “At least give me my boots.”

  He levered himself around until he had enough leverage to lower one end of the bedrails, then slid out. It wasn’t that he couldn’t walk, but it felt like the stitches all along the inside of his leg were stuck together wrong, like a zipper with slipping teeth.

  Oh, they didn’t come when he wanted something as confrontational as clothes, but they showed up soon enough when they heard that bedrail dropped. He’d made it into the bathroom and was just taking a piss when the demon nurse showed up.

  He dried up, painfully. “Hey!”

  “Are you all right in there?”

  “I’m fine!” Aloysius tried to shut the door but couldn’t reach the handle without taking a step toward it. He wasn’t sure whether it was male or female; the size might have told him, had he had one of each sex to compare, but the nurse’s white garments (bulky white slacks) didn’t tell him anything.

  The nurse closed the door for him, leaving it open a crack.

  Aloysius jerked it shut the rest of the way with a bang.

  Then it did chuckle. “You have a visitor,” it said from outside the door.

  Aloysius said, “You going to stand there and listen to me?”

  “I’m going to make sure you don’t pass out.”

  “You’ll know I passed out when you hear my thick skull hit the wall.”

  “I’ll wait in the hall for you then?”

  Aloysius grunted.

  The demon clomped out of the room. Its hooves sounded odd. Not like footsteps. Footsteps—a man’s footsteps—go heel-toe, heel-toe, heel-toe. A woman’s footsteps sound the same, only sharper and faster, probably from the way the heels shorten the space between the heel and the toe. The demon’s footsteps were a single beat on the floor, with too long a pause between beats.

  Aloysius finished, flushed, and stepped out of the bathroom. He washed his hands and went back to bed.

  The bed, he noticed, was long enough for him to stretch his legs out the whole way, which was something of an oddity. He’d been laid up enough times to know the length of a standard hospital bed, anyway, and this was longer.

  “Leave the rail down,” he said, as the demon started to raise the side. It paused. “You know I’ll get out when I feel like it. You don’t want me jumping the side, do you?”

  It sighed. “Cowboys.” It pulled the blankets over him. “Ready?”

  “Ready for what?”

  “Your visitor.”

  “Who is it?”

  “She says she’s your lady friend.”

  “Sure,” Aloysius said. Then his mind was racing. What was he going to tell Honey? What could he tell her?

  “I’ll tell her.” The demon left without ducking its head.

  The doorways were taller, too.

  He looked around the room. The curtains between the beds looked the same, the bells were the same, the windows were a little higher. There was a swinging table beside him with a normal cup, but he saw a pink, plastic stein next to the sink, made for a larger mouth.

  “Aloysius?” Honey stood at the doorway, watching him ogle the room. “How are you?”

  “Better,” he said.

  “You want to tell me what you and Theodore were doing up in the rafters?”

  Up in the rafters? Well, he was going to have to go along with it.

  “We were being damned fools is all,” he said, which should cover just about any situation he was likely to have got into.

  Honey chewed on that for a few seconds. “You should tell me about it sometime. I like hearing about how you make a fool of yourself. I get a real kick out of it.”

  “Sorry,” he said. And he was. “Look, I know this is a bad time. There are lots of ways I could do this better, but you know me. Will you marry me?”

  Honey took in a quick breath, then sat on the edge of the bed next to him. The way her weight shifted the mattress felt like a caress. “You drop out of the rafters of the barn into a pen with a wounded bull, get the shit ripped out of you, and you want to know whether I’ll marry you?”

  “I been thinking about it,” he said. “This is just the first time I’ve had you alone since I realized I was being an ass, waiting to make everything perfect at the farm, get you a good place to live and something big and sparkly before I asked you. It doesn’t have anything to do with me making a fool of myself. Or I guess it does.”

  “I’ll think about it,” Honey said. “But I’ll tell you one thing. Before I say yes, you’re taking out life insurance on yourself.”

  Aloysius laughed. “How the hell am I going to talk someone into putting out a life insurance policy on me?”

  “When are you getting out of the hospital?” she said.

  Aloysius shifted uncomfortably in the bed. The bed wasn’t uncomfortable; he just wasn’t comforted by it. “What day is it?”

  Honey raised an eyebrow. “If you have to ask me what day it is, what makes you think you need to leave here at all?”

  He rolled his eyes.

  “Monday,” she said.

  “That’s long enough,” he said.

  “I brought you some clothes,” Honey said.

  “It must be love,” Aloysius said.

  Honey stood up and sighed. “You know I’ll marry you.”

  Aloysius grinned. He was glad he wasn’t trying to stand up; especially glad, when she bent over and kissed him on the forehead. He grabbed her by the upper arms and kissed her on the lips. She pushed him away and snorted.

  “Clothes?” she said.

  “Awww.”

  She sat on another bed while he put his clothes on, on the other side of the curtain. She’d found his boots in a closet, along with his stained shirt.

  “I wish they’d saved your pants,” she said. “Now, there’s something I’d like to hang up in a glass trophy case for you. One trophy for each time God saved your skinny white ass. You going to the farm tonight?”

  “Naw,” Aloysius said. “I’m going to have supper at the house and tell everyone. You coming?”

  “I suppose,” she said. “Peggy will burst into tears.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you think your dad’ll say?”

  Aloysius tried to swallow around the lump in his throat. “Why?”

  “Just wondering.”

  “No idea.”

  That was a lie. He was pretty sure his father would glare at him, as though he were angry enough to set his own eyebrows on fire. It wasn’t that Liam didn’t like Honey; he did. But he didn’t like Aloysius, and any time Aloysius brought attention upon himself, Liam glared at him, as if to remind him that he was being undignified.

  Well, let him.

  He’d just remember how close Liam had come to dying—no. He wasn’t going to let himself think like that. Liam had died, and if the world had changed to bring him back, it was a miracle.

  “You all
right?” Honey asked.

  “How’s—how’s Jerome?” he asked.

  “They still haven’t found him,” she said.

  Peggy, of course, squealed with delight when she saw Aloysius. “I wanted to come up to the hospital and see you, but Pa said, well, nevermind.” She gave him a hug. “Oh! I’m sorry, I forgot that you just almost got killed. I better treat you more gently for a while.”

  “Don’t bother,” Aloysius said. “You’ll just forget.”

  “Oh, you!” she punched him on the shoulder and winced. “Sorry. Honey, would you help me in the kitchen for a bit?”

  The side of Honey’s mouth curled around, and she looked sidelong at Aloysius. “What? Is there some juicy gossip that you need to pass on to me?”

  Aloysius said, “I better get on out of here.”

  “It’s just biscuits!” Peggy laughed. She tugged on Honey’s sleeve and pulled her into the kitchen. The two women were surprisingly similar, both tall and lanky. But Peggy seemed destined to a life of servitude to Liam, always trying to defuse the consequences of his capricious temper, like a wife, but worse. Aloysius promised himself never to be a—well, he wasn’t sure what to call it. Like his father, anyway.

  He pulled off his boots. It hurt more than he would have liked to admit. He was going to have to change his bandages tonight, too. The demon nurse, after Honey had convinced it that he meant to leave and there was no stopping him (and had told it why, because he had to announce their engagement to his father), had shown him how to do it (not that he hadn’t known already) and had given him a packet of bandages and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide to clean it up with.

  “Don’t take the stitches out,” it had said. “If I see you back here with an infection because you pulled the stitches out yourself, I’ll tan your hide. You come back here in one week. Seven days. Not ‘about a week’ as in a couple of years. Seven days. Earlier, if it starts to smell foul. If it gets septic, I’ll have to cut it off.”

  “My leg?”

  “You’ll wish it was your leg, if I get hold of you,” the demon nurse had said. He decided it was female.

  He left his boots by the door and walked through the kitchen. Peggy was going on at full speed, and Honey was nodding and pressing out biscuits with a biscuit cutter, her dress somehow untouched by flour, even though she wasn’t wearing an apron. Peggy was covered from knees to chest with the stuff, but she was wearing a butcher’s apron that kept most of it off her. Like as not, she’d take off the apron, proud of herself for staying clean, then shake out the apron and throw flour all over herself.