Michael held his ears and screamed at the top of his lungs, “Zena!”
“Don’t let her die like everything else in Michael’s life!” Elizabeth screamed.
“I might hit Zena,” Red yelled back. “And gunshots might attract the human gangs I’ve seen out here!”
A strangled yelp came from the fight. Zena stood over the limp body of the Doberman. Blood wetted her muzzle. Was that a windpipe hanging from her mouth?
She wagged her tail for Red’s approval, while the other pack dogs cowered nearby, tails between their legs. They seemed to assume that Zena would be their new leader. Her cocked head indicated confusion. She glanced at Red as if to say, why the hell aren’t these fools going away? and leapt at a black mongrel, tearing off half of its ear. The pack scattered. She trotted back with the ear in her mouth to set it at Red’s feet.
“That’s my girl.” He knelt on one knee, checking her over for injuries. Other than a few scratches, she had come out unscathed.
“I love you, Zena.” Michael hugged her around the neck, tears streaming down his face, sniffling. “You are the strongest, prettiest, bravest dog in all of the world. I knew you wouldn’t die. You can’t ever die. I love you.”
The dog, Red was sure, actually smiled. When Michael pulled away, he was covered in Doberman blood, but he looked happy.
“Let’s go,” Michael said, wiping his nose on his sleeve, giving a wide grin. “This house is gonna be sweet.”
Over the next eight hours they wandered out of from the suburbs, deeper into the country, until they found a side road full of humble older homes on multi-acre lots.
“I don’t know, dear,” Elizabeth said, nose in the air. “I had my heart set on a new edifice with tray ceilings and a theater room.” Red glanced at her sharply, only to see she was smirking.
Who would have guessed the ever-blubbering woman had a sense of humor? He laughed and remarked, “My needs are simple: a small house with a real fireplace.”
Michael brought them to a winding gravel driveway, which led to a Cape Cod-style home with peeling barn-red paint and white trim. They went to the backyard first where a large metal shed and a wide meadow backed up to woods. An orange hand pump stood in front of the shed. Michael primed it until rusty water gushed forth.
“It is beautiful!” Elizabeth exclaimed, hugging Michael to her waist, tears streaming down her face.
A lump formed in Red’s throat as Michael handed him a tin cup full of still slightly brown-tinged water. Bottled water had been Red’s staple beverage before the apocalypse. Now, he gingerly held the cup between his fingers, considering that all ground water was sure to be contaminated by runoff from abandoned factories, and God help them all, failing nuclear power plants. He figured it was only a matter of time before they all came down with radiation sickness or cancer, but he suppressed the thought, as he had done since the fall of civilization. “You sure you’ve never been here before?”
“Only in my dreams.”
“Have you had other dreams that come true?”
“Sometimes.”
“Like what?”
“That you’d be coming down the street with your wagon and I’d have to talk you into letting us come with you.”
“You expect me to believe that?” Michael shrugged. “Anything else?”
“Aliens.”
Red choked on his water.
“Michael’s dreams are spot on about some things,” Elizabeth said between laughs, “but some of them are just way out there.”
She ran her fingers under the water, splashing it all over her face, not seeming to notice how Red’s hands had started to tremble.
“Aliens, you say,” Red said carefully. “What were they doing?”
“Bad things.” Michael said somberly. “Evil things.”
“Like what?”
Michael’s hands flew to his face. He began to rock back and forth, screaming like he’d just broken a bone.
“Good Lord, Red.” Elizabeth shot him a vexed frown. “Learn to back off. Hasn’t he been through enough?”
She hugged the boy to her chest, stroking his blond hair.
Red stood there, feeling awkward. “Uh, sorry, kid. Um, you’ve found us a real nice piece of property. Be sure to thank your granny for me.”
Michael stopped rocking to meet his gaze. “You like it?”
“Very much.” Red held up his cup. “Cheers to you, Michael. Well done.”
The boy searched his face for any sign of insincerity.
“Show us the house,” Red said, trying to steer the three away from talk of aliens.
“It’s old,” Michael said. “But you’re gonna love it.”
Chapter 7
The house was stuffy and smelled of musty urine. Elizabeth went straight to a window, slid it open, and let in some fresh air. The walls were wood-paneled and the mismatched furniture looked as if it had been acquired over the span of several decades. The kitchen cupboards were grainy oak, covered with dings and nicks, but well built. The pea-soup green linoleum had seen better days—the subfloor showed through in various places. A faux–marble topped table, trimmed in chrome, stood in the center of the room.
The kitchen, dining area and living room, though delineated by different flooring, formed a continuous U-shape around the staircase in the middle of the space. The living room had two wooden rockers with gingham cushions. A blue sofa sat across from them. A framed image of Elvis painted on black velvet, flanked by two sconces, with burned-out candelabra bulbs, hung on the wall behind it. A huge television, complete with aerial, sat in the corner, but it wasn’t like they could watch the news or a movie anyway.
One wall in the living room was made of stone. Red’s heart did a cartwheel when his eyes fell on an object more valuable than gold. There, standing majestically in dull black splendor, making up for the house’s other deficits, was a wood-burning stove.
Elizabeth slapped her cheeks in pure joy. “An old-fashioned stove!”
“And look over there.” Michael pointed through the glass sliding doors at the back of the kitchen. On the far side of the patio was an outdoor fireplace. An iron tripod and Dutch oven were already waiting inside of it. A fireplace poker and shovel still hung on their hooks, drilled into the stone of the fireplace housing.
“Jackpot!” Red exclaimed, picking-up Elizabeth and twirling her in his arms.
“The people who used to live here were into camping,” Michael said. “If you look around, I’m sure you’ll find other useful stuff.”
Red picked up Michael, held him high, and twirled him in the air, too. “Good job, kid! You’ve found the perfect place!”
Michael grinned and seemed pleased by the praise. It was good to see him happy like a normal kid. The thought hit Red—what if I had died and my children had lived? Would anybody have stepped in to take care for them? At that moment he vowed to protect Michael. Considering the circumstances, the boy had adjusted remarkably well. The rocking back and forth thing…well, he’d just have to accept that as collateral damage to the child.
He looked over at Elizabeth, who was waltzing with Michael across the living room, with dawning admiration. The child was no relation to her, just a strange kid she had spotted wandering through the streets alone, parentless. She’d lost two children of her own, could barely function, yet she had taken Michael under her wing and cared for him all this time. Michael and Elizabeth were exceptional people. Why hadn’t he seen that before?
Red and his companions spent the twilight hours exploring the property. Exhausted, they flopped down in the musty smelling house and woke with the birds chirping outside their window. Red returned to the shed first thing in the morning. The wooden structure was full of tools he could use to support his new and rustic lifestyle. He figured now was the time to learn how to chop wood. How hard could it be?
He set out into the woods, which spanned three or four acres. The trees were close together. Poison ivy climbed up trunks. Light filtered through
the leaves, keeping the air about ten degrees cooler than under the open sky. He decided to make it easy on himself by starting on a tree that had fallen on its own. Spongy white toadstools covered the trunk. He scraped off some of them and began chopping at the trunk near the base.
After ten minutes of hard labor, he’d barely made a dent.
“Dang!” He wiped the sweat from his brow. “How did the men do it back in the old days?” His hands were already blistered and he hadn’t cut a single log. Sliding his fingers along the edge of the ax, he realized it must be dull.
He envisioned the atoms inside the blade shifting like the ocean, scraping over a pebbled beach like a sheet of sandpaper grinding metal into a fine edge.
“Let it be,” he whispered.
The edge of the ax smoothed and gleamed in the dappled light. Running an index finger over the sharpness, he whispered, “Incredible…”
“Hi,” an upbeat voice came from behind him.
He spun around to see Michael standing there, holding a bucket of water. “What ‘cha doing?” he asked.
“Cutting wood.”
“You’ve been out here a long time.” Michael’s inquisitive blue eyes landed on the wedge he had cut into into the fallen tree trunk. “But I don’t see any logs.”
“Knock yourself out, kid.” Red offered him the ax. “Here you go.”
Michael turned up his nose. “I’m busy.”
“Doing what?”
“Elizabeth said she’d make a pumpkin pie if I could find a pumpkin. I’m gonna plant these.” He held out his palm to show a fistful of pale seeds.
Red smiled at his innocence, but thought he ought to explain. “Those seeds will take months to produce a pumpkin. You’re not going to find one today.”
“When I touched them, I saw pumpkins,” Michael said with a gritty look of determination. “And I’m gonna have me some pie.” He stomped off through the woods in his sneakers, back toward the house.
Worried how the emotionally damaged boy would handle failure, Red decided to follow him. He hung about the yard, coiling a long rope, just to look like he was working instead of hovering about like a mother hen. From the corner of his eye he watched Michael get a hoe from the shed and use it to loosen dirt in the middle of the back yard. He mounded the soil with his hands, pausing to send Red glares for his lack of faith.
“Creator of earth, sea, and sky—,” Michael held the seeds a few inches from his mouth and closed his eyes. “Speed these to our bellies.” Even though the air was warm, his breath fogged over the seeds.
Red thought his eyes were playing tricks on him when tiny twinkly lights drifted out of the boy’s mouth and absorbed into the seed hulls. He wasn’t sure if the boy was aware of the phenomenon. If he was, it hadn’t fazed him in the slightest. Without further ado, Michael pushed three seeds into the little mound of dirt, repeating the process until he’d planted all the seeds. By the time he was finished, the yard was peppered with tiny mountains of dirt.
Red turned his baseball cap backwards and leaned against his ax handle, watching Michael water the mounds. He couldn’t help admiring the boy’s work ethic, but he wanted to be there for the inevitable disappointment. An hour passed. Michael walked from mound to mound checking for sprouts. The scene reminded Red of Linus in the field on Halloween night waiting for the mythical Great Pumpkin to appear. If he remembered the storyline correctly, the Great Pumpkin was a no show.
“I was so sure this would work,” Michael sighed, shaking his head.
“It will,” Red said. “But these things take time, several months actually.” He gave the boy a reassuring pat on the back, guiding him toward the door to the house. “Let’s go inside and open a can of pre-grown corn.”
Chapter 8
The smell of bleach bombed his nose as soon as he opened the back door. Elizabeth had cleaned the house from top to bottom. Throughout the course of the day, she must have carried fifty buckets of water from the pump. There was a stack of wet dishes in a dish drainer on the countertop. A fire burned in the stove, and as if she had read his mind, corn warmed on the stovetop.
“There are two bedrooms upstairs,” she informed him. “Michael, you may have your own room. I don’t care which one. You decide.”
Michael’s face perked up. “Really?”
“Sure.” He put down his fork and started to stand up. “After you finish your dinner!” she said sternly. Michael shoveled it in like there was no tomorrow and then hurried up the stairs.
“I’ll make up the couch for you tonight,” she told Red. “And tomorrow night you can have the bed. We’ll alternate.”
“We don’t have to alternate. You can have the bed,” Red replied between spoonfuls of warm corn. He watched her closely as she stooped to pick up a yellow kernel from the floor.
“That’s very gentlemanly of you,” she said.
If she only knew what he was thinking…he had been admiring her bottom as she padded around the kitchen. An image of Elizabeth lying naked in a field of violets popped into his mind. He planted kisses on her lush cherry lips, then her smooth graceful neck, lingering at her breasts before working his way down. He tried to repress his imagination, but it wasn’t easy.
Elizabeth paused as she dried a dish, quickly turning to give him a frown of disapproval.
“What?” Red acted innocent, as he realized he had corn stuck to his chin.
“You know what.”
“I don’t, really.”
“Quit being such a pig.”
He wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Sorry.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Huh?”
She studied him closely, making him feel like a little boy under the scrutiny of a school teacher. Her expression relaxed and she slung the dish rag over her shoulder. The next thing he knew she was in his lap, pressing her lips against his own.
Stunned, it took him a moment to process what was happening. He was caught in her power, helpless to do anything other than respond to her kissing. His hands explored the length of her spine. He’d never needed anyone so badly, so very badly. The strength of his emotion had taken him totally off guard.
He heard Michael coming down the stairs. The boy’s approach wasn’t about to stop him, but it immediately dampened Elizabeth’s enthusiasm. She quickly extricated herself from Red’s grasp and started stacking dishes. Dang it! Red thought, feeling let down.
“I’ll take the blue room,” Michael announced as he entered the kitchen. “You can have the yellow one.”
Red was hardly listening. The fire of his desire, reduced to embers by the aftermath of the plague, had just sparked to life again, kindling a hope that life could be good again.
Stop it, he told himself. That kind of thinking could burn a man. It was easier to have nothing left to lose than to reach for something he couldn’t hold onto.
“This place effin’ stinks!” he said, slamming his fist on the table, making Elizabeth and Michael jump. He left the kitchen without finishing his meal.
The next morning he left the house at daybreak and spent his day alone in the woods with an ax. Come winter, learning to chop wood might be the difference between life and death. Then again, he had found chainsaws in the shed as well. All he needed to do was get them running again.
Gas was difficult to come by, but in light of how much work it took to cut a tree down by hand, he was willing to expand his search parameters. The gas supply had dried up fast when everybody fell sick. At the plague’s peak, after the power companies had shut down, he paid five hundred dollars for a single gallon. Finding a full can of fuel hidden away somewhere would require a lot of footwork.
By afternoon the blisters on his hands bled. The idea of a chainsaw seemed better and better with every throb from burst blisters, but for now he had to tax his aching back and arms. When he finally saw the tree fall, he let out a whoop and danced in a circle. Something about sweating under the strain of hard physical labor cleansed a man’s soul.
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He would go home, apologize to Elizabeth and Michael for being a big grumpy ass at dinner last evening, and take them out to the woods to show them his accomplishment.
Despite being tired to the bone, his steps felt lighter, his thoughts brighter and more optimistic, as he walked toward the house. He could do this—survive and thrive—even if only for a while. A cheerful whistle passed through his lips as he stacked kindling into his arms. He made his way through the woods, into the yard, but never noticed the hump in what had previously been more or less flat lawn until he tripped over it and fell flat on his face, kindling jumbled uncomfortably beneath him.
“Dammit!”
Finding his footing, he looked around for the sticks he had gathered, but they had disappeared under long vines with curling tendrils. Vines that he could swear were extending even as he stared. Huge fan-like leaves further concealed the ground. As he leaned over to peek under a leaf, an apple-sized green ball caught his eye.
“What the…”
Straightening abruptly, he realized he was standing in a pumpkin patch twenty feet wide. “Impossible,” he whispered. The boy’s seeds had sprouted during the night to fill half the yard.
“Michael!” he bellowed. “Elizabeth! Come out here! Hurry!”
In a minute, they were rushing into the yard, Elizabeth carrying a mixing spoon, Michael his coffee can of jewelry. Zena trotted behind them, pausing to bite at a moth flitting in the air.
Elizabeth’s mouth dropped open at the sight of the vines taking over the yard. Spellbound, she and Red linked hands.
“It’s a miracle,” she said.
“I told you we’d have pie,” Michael said matter-of-factly, and by the end of the week they’d eaten three.
Red the First Page 3