The Slab

by Michael R Collings

  Chapter Twelve

  The Huntleys, Last Week In August 2010

  Final Reckoning

  1

  August passed.

  Each member of the Huntley family tried to deal with the fact of death privately, individually.

  Suze spent much of her time at home in the far corner of her room, the farthest from the boys’ bedroom, moving her dolls in complex, repeated patterns on the carpet and speaking to them in a voice so faint and fragile that, standing in the doorway and watching her daughter, Catherine could never understand any of the imagined conversations. Suze would retreat to her room as soon as she arrived home from school on weekdays, and frequently not leave it for longer periods than to eat and go to the bathroom on the weekends. Catherine and Willard might try to entice her out-even demand that she join the rest in some activity in the family room, a game or a particular television program-but as soon as their attention strayed from her, she quietly disappeared.

  Burt didn’t seem quite so badly troubled. He was willing enough to spent time in the front of the house-perhaps too willing. He would clear a space on the family room floor and play for hours with his army figures, the same ones that Sams had so enjoyed watching in the make-shift tent on Burt’s bunk. He would send army against army, silently destroying formations with a single swipe of his arm or leg, and knocking individual soldiers over by striking them with the base of whichever one he held in his hand.

  Will, Jr., preferred the armchair next to the couch in the family room, where he would sit with his dog, Crud, for hours on end, ruffling the dog’s fur or scratching its ears. Sometimes he would simply hold onto the animal, cradling it tightly in his arms. Often, he would almost cry.

  Willard became more an automaton rather than a person. He woke at 5:00 am on work days, got ready to leave and let himself out of the house without saying a word, without making any extraneous sounds that might disturb the others. He never called home from work. He never spoke about his work while at home. He began arriving home later and later, sometimes an hour later than usual, sometimes two hours or more, always explaining curtly that “Traffic was bad.” Those words, exactly, never an alteration. “Traffic was bad.”

  On week ends he puttered around the house, futilely spattering plaster on the ubiquitous cracks that kept extending themselves in corners, on new ones that spread like narrow cancers in window corners. He never repainted any of the repairs. Occasionally he would work outside, doing what was required to keep the place presentable-mowing the front yard but rarely the back; sweeping the front sidewalk and drive when blowing leaves accumulated along the foundations of the house; trimming the hedges separating his house from those on both sides, but ignoring the overgrown shrubs along the back fence.

  Catherine responded worst of all to Sams’ death. She barely registered what the coroner’s representative meant when he said, in abstracted, formal officialese that nearly left her breathless: “If the child hadn’t been so old, I would call it SIDS-as it is, all we can say is that he suffered an ALTE that ultimately proved fatal.”

  “ALTE,” Willard had asked humbly.

  “An apparently life-threatening event. We found no other definable cause of death.”

  And, as far as the authorities were concerned, that was it. Dead child. So sorry. Nothing more to say.

  She wouldn’t let Willard remove the little box bed from the back room. He had wanted to carry it out to the back yard and take a sledge hammer to it, pound it until nothing remained but infinitesimal fragments that would blow away with the faintest breeze…but he never told Catherine. About a week after she had found Sams’ body, he made one effort to pick the bed up, then noticed that she had changed the bedding that morning, left the room, and rarely entered it again.

  Catherine did, though. She would perch on the edge of the box, its pine frame cutting painfully into the back of her legs, and stare blankly at the floor…and the place where he had been laying that morning, where the faint line of the shattered slab created a ripple in the other-wise smooth carpet.

  She also carried Sams’ blanket with her almost everywhere. It was still filthy-she had actually intended to wash it later that Saturday with the rest of the sheets and pillowcases from the children’s rooms but obviously hadn’t. The satin edging was ragged, stained, stiff where normally it would have been damp. It stank. But she either held it in her hand or tucked it under her arm or squeezed it between the waistband of her pants and her skin, where the touch of it made her flesh chill and shiver.

  There was no family anymore. Merely five people of varying ages quietly inhabiting the same space…the same house.

  Certain times of the day proved more difficult than others.

  Suze seemed to have no trouble falling asleep in her own bed, although the number of stuffed animals keeping Flat Cat company on top of her coverlet increased dramatically, until there was almost no room for the girls’ body. Still, once she burrowed her way under the layers of plush and politically correct, non-flammable, hypoallergenic filling, she slept deeply, rarely waking until well past dawn.

  But the boys…

  The boys’ categorically refused to sleep in the back room.

  It didn’t matter how much Willard blustered or wheedled, how often he led them by the hand back to their bunks and warned them to stay there or else…no matter how resolutely he carried out the motions of preserving the sense of a normal bedtime, the boys always woke the next morning twined together on the family room couch, sometimes covered by one of Burt’s blankets, sometimes completely uncovered.

  On week days, Willard never looked into the family room to see if they were there. He ignored them, moving through the darkened kitchen and living room and entry and out the door like a phantom. On weekends, if it was a good day, the boys were up and dressed before either Willard or Catherine roused, and things went…well, placidly. If it was a bad day, Willard would find them asleep, and stomp out of the house without eating and spend most of the rest of the morning in mindless, useless chores.

  Beyond that, the boys spent as little time as possible during the day in their room. If they needed to change, they whipped in, grabbed whatever clothes they needed, and locked themselves in the back bathroom until they were fully dressed. If Burt wanted a particular set of army figures, he would halt outside the door, take a deep breath as if he were about to dive into shark-infested waters, and race in and out as fast as possible. If Will left his homework or his school books in the room, he was more than willing to take whatever punishment his teacher might mete out for his lapse, rather than walk down the hall and retrieve them before heading out to school.

  In all, one could fairly say that the Huntleys were at a stalemate, neither openly-and perhaps healthily-grieving for loss nor taking any steps to move beyond it.

  Until late in the afternoon of Sunday, the twenty-ninth of August.

  2

  Willard was, as usual, immersed in the television-some football game or another, essentially identical to any other he had stared at over the past month except for the colors of each team’s uniforms, and even those were almost indistinguishable beneath their crusts of mud and swampy-green grass stains. There was a score, the teams were something to something, of course, but he couldn’t have told anyone what it was. The game was busyness, something to do, something to keep from thinking.

  Catherine was sitting at the other end of the family room couch, pretending to watch the game as well, but in reality paying more attention to her hands as they slid aimlessly up and down the nap of the bit of blanket on her lap.

  Neither looked toward the kitchen door as Will, Jr., entered, carrying something.

  He didn’t speak. He simply stood there, motionless, deathly pale and breathing so shallowly the rise and fall of his chest barely fluttered his shirt.

  Finally, Willard glanced up.

  Then stood up, urgently, in one swift motion. Catherine caught the movement out of the corner of her eye, then rose to her feet
as well.

  In a breath, both were at Will’s side.

  “What’s wrong?” They spoke at the same instant.

  Will didn’t answer. Instead, he raised his eyes-hollow, bruised, red-rimmed-to meet theirs. Then he dropped them to the object he held in his hands.

  When they saw what it was, their faces abruptly drained of color until they were as pale, as ashen-white as their son.

  It was just a dog-food bowl, Crud’s dented aluminum bowl that usually held crusted remnants of the morning’s helping of kibble.

  Today, it held that…and something more.

  The edges were caked with flecks of rust-brown, some distinct, round spots, others ragged smears that stained the metal as well as the remains of Crud’s food.

  Blood.

  Dried blood.

  “Will…?” Catherine could get no further with her question. It was as if she already knew the answer.

  Willard dropped to one knee and placed his hand over Will’s. “Where’s Crud?”

  “I don’t know, Dad.” Tears filled his eyes. “I’ve looked for him all over the house and the back yard. Then, when I went to re-fill his dish…”

  No one had to say what they were all thinking.

  Yip and Yap.

  Dead.

  Willard stood and circled his son with his arms. Catherine took the dish gingerly from Will and started into the kitchen to clean it.

  “Let’s go out and look for him again,” Willard said. “Maybe he’s just…”

  But he never finished his sentence.

  3

  It began as a distant rumble, a freight-train-bowling-down-the-tracks growl that escalated into an ear-drum shattering roar before the three of them quite registered what they were hearing.

  Then the walls shimmered, the shade on the floor lamp beside the armchair began swinging back and forth, slightly at first, then more and more rapidly, until it was vibrating so rapidly that it seemed more likely to disintegrate than to stop. The lamp itself began rocking, swiveling on its base until with a clattering of smashing bulbs it crashed against the floor.

  “Earthquake!” Catherine yelled.

  In the kitchen, cabinet doors flew open and plates, saucers, glasses cascaded onto the floor, shattering into glistening fragments.

  From the back of the house they heard two children screaming.

  Willard spun Catherine and Will around, almost shoving them as he yelled, “Outside! Get in the middle of the yard. I’ll get the others.”

  Before they began moving, before he finished speaking, he was running toward the hall, struggling to keep his footing as the floor quivered and thrust beneath him.

  He bounced once off the walls, stumbled around the corner that led to the back bedrooms The house was still trembling as if it were itself terrified of what was happening. The roar became even more menacing.

  Suze and Burt were huddled in the doorway to Suze’s room. All of the other doors were closed but shaking so violently in their frames that they threatened to burst open.

  “Daddy!” they screamed in unison.

  He grabbed Suze up in one arm and gripped Burt’s hand.

  Behind him, shards of drywall from the ceiling clattered to the floor, breaking and bouncing as if they had a life of their own. Somewhere, a window shattered.

  “We can’t stay here,” Willard yelled above the booming of the quake. “This place is falling apart.”

  Hauling Burt behind him so rapidly that the boy’s feet barely touched the roiling floor, he crossed Suze’s room in two strides, let go of Burt-who nearly tripped but managed not to-and opened her window with a single thrust, then popped the screen out with a second. Before it struck the ground, he had lowered Suze out the window until she was on her feet, then yelled, “Meet Mom out back!” and grasped Burt’s arm and began boosting him out the window as well. By then Suze was beyond the corner of the house and out of sight, and Burt was halfway there when Willard crawled out the opening and ran alongside the house, grabbing Burt up as he ran.

  Bits of stucco flaked off the side of the house as they passed, a dust-brown scuff of snow that caught in their hair and settled on their clothes.

  The ground was still shaking when the five of them clustered in the center of the back yard, far from trees, power lines, anything that could crash down upon them and injure or kill them.

  The ground still jerked back and forth as if it were electrified.

  Perhaps sixty, perhaps as many as ninety seconds had passed.

  A whining howl rose, banshee-like, from somewhere inside the house, just as the window of the boys’ bedroom exploded, frosting the ground below with fragments of glass.

  “Crud! Cruuud!” Will shook off his mother’s grasp and bounded toward the house. Willard reached him before the boy could cover more than a few yards, threw his arms around Will’s chest, and began pulling him back toward the others.

  “No, Will. You can’t!”

  “But it’s…”

  Another sound rose behind Willard. One even more horrifying that the dog’s cry.

  “Mommmy! Daddy!”

  Staggered by the voice, Willard caught Catherine’s eyes just as she started forward, whispering, “Sams!”

  Even as he shook his head, even as he gestured for her to stay with Burt and Suze, even as he shoved Will, Jr., toward her, even as one part of his mind screamed “Sams is dead! You know he’s dead! It can’t be him!” another part-a stronger, more desperate part-responded to his child’s cry instinctively, impulsively, and he raced toward the house, unconscious of the fact that the ground beneath his feet was abruptly solid and unmoving, and threw himself through the open window frame, impervious to the savage pain as broken shards sliced his arms and thighs.

  4

  Catherine knew Sams was dead, had seen his tiny body in the horribly white coffin as they had closed the lid and hidden him forever from her sight. She knew that she had seen the coffin lowered into the gashed earth and knew that whatever was left of her baby lay there, unmoving, unbreathing, unable to love her or call to her.

  She knew all of that.

  She knew it, and knew that Sams could not possibly be inside the house…and knew that Willard had to find him, bring him out, rescue him and return him to her.

  She sank to her knees and clutched feverishly at her older children. The pulled closer to her, trembling and crying in hope and terror and confusion and despair.

  “Willard!” she screamed. Then: “No, Willard!” just as somewhere within the bowels of the house, beneath the remains of slab that had shattered and disintegrated under the force of the earthquake, a gas line ruptured, two bits of metal collided with sudden violence, struck a spark, and-even as the side wall of the house began crumbling and sloughing away, detached from the rest of the structure by the earthquake’s fury-sheets of fire erupted from every window, every doorway, every crack, and the house burst into flames.

  From the Tamarind Valley Times, 30 August 2010:

  TEMBLOR STRIKES VALLEY;

  SEVERAL INJURED, ONE DEAD

  The 4.5 quake that rumbled across Tamarind Valley yesterday left minor structural damage behind, although several injuries were reported and one death resulted.

  Willard Huntley, 38, was killed when the gas line beneath his home burst, presumably as a result of the temblor, and exploded, destroying the house. He is survived by his wife, Catherine, and three children.

  The Huntley home was the only one seriously damaged in the quake which, though mild according to the Richter scale, nevertheless continued for over a minute, causing pictures to fall from walls and items to tumble from shelves in stores across the Valley. Authorities are unsure why the Huntley home was so severely effected when others nearby were not. In one home not a block away, a single vase fell unbroken from a piano, the only result of the quake.

  Tragically, the Huntleys were still recovering from the sudden death of their youngest child a month earlier. Samuel ‘Sams’ Huntley, 2? was found…r />
  Epilogue

  The Day After, 30 August 2010

  If Only…

  1

  Catherine and the children were not present the next day when investigative units from police, fire, and county inspectors’ departments sifted through the wreckage of 1066 Oleander Place. The family had been driven away a few hours after the quake by her parents, Howard and Eleanor Prinz, and were now in her childhood home in Santa Barbara, physically unharmed but in deep shock. Two physicians remained in the house rest of that afternoon and well into the evening.

  The police team, led by forensic specialist Emily Naples, arrived first on Monday morning. A short time later, Jorge Garces and his group, representing the Tamarind Valley Fire Department, drove up Oleander Place and, watched by small clusters of neighbors in front yards along the way, parked behind the police vehicle.

  As luck would have it, Edgar Sai was assigned by the city engineers’ department to represent them. He parked several housed further down Oleander and walked slowly up the hill toward the remains of 1066. He stood for a moment just outside the police tape surrounding the front yard, then shook his head sadly, sighed, lifted up the tape, and moved toward the blackened skeleton of wood and ashes.

  “How’s it going Em?” he asked as he was greeted by Naples.

  “Not much left of the place, is there?” she gestured to the fire scorched concrete and the scattered clumps of what once were roof beams, interior wall supports, and outer walls. “Fire department says it was a gas leak but it sure must have burned hot. Nearly everything inside’s destroyed.”

  “They got Huntley out yet?”

  “Just left in the coroner’s van. What was left of him. A few bones mostly. It must have been like an incinerator in there.”