Deadlocked 3

by A. R. Wise

  He shook his head and furrowed his brow. His wrinkled face had the peculiar ability to nearly scrunch up and hide his eyes and mouth in his expressive disapproval. "No way. Ain't you been listenin' to the copters?"

  "No, why?"

  "They tellin' us to stay inside. Get to the top floor. Wait for them to come get us." He shook his arm in the air as if shooing away flies. Flaps of skin waved beneath his boney arms like flags. "Said they'd shoot us if we were on the street."

  "Get off the street!" said another person from the other side of 13th Avenue. I looked over to see a fat woman leaning out her window just like her old neighbor. Her plump form barely fit through the sill and folds of her stomach flopped over the edge like pizza dough over a counter. "What are you doing down there?"

  "I'm getting my mom. You should try to get out of here too. They're taking people to camps and I don't think they're planning on letting you out again." I started to walk away. I didn't have time to explain myself to them.

  "Gonna get yourself killed," she yelled after me. "That's what you're doing."

  "Dummy," said the old man before slamming his window shut.

  "Fuck you, old man," I grumbled to myself.

  I climbed onto the back of a truck's flatbed trailer to escape the mounds of garbage on the street. As I pulled myself up I felt the sting on my right hip from the collision with the concrete barrier earlier. It hadn't been more than a nuisance for most of the day, but as I hoisted myself into the truck I felt the pain emerge again.

  "Son of a…" I grasped my hip and limped for a moment as the muscle in my thigh pulsed. "Should have taken some of those painkillers with me." I'd given them all to Laura. The thought of her, and the wounds she'd suffered to save Annie, made me realize how minor my own wound was. Her struggle shamed mine and I forced myself to work through the annoying cramp in my thigh.

  The butcher shop was destroyed. I wasn't sure if zombies had tried to get in or if it had been the living that did it, but the place was torn apart. Every window had been broken and nothing inside looked salvageable. I was confused why this store would look like this while most of the others seemed relatively untouched, but then I figured it out: Butcher shops have knives, and when the zombie apocalypse starts, the first thing people do is look for weapons. The sidewalk was stained with dried blood, which unsettled me, and I imagined a fight breaking out beneath my mother's window. I wondered if she saw it all happen.

  Beside the shop was the door to the apartments above. It was locked.

  "God damn it." I didn’t have my keys. I'd left them with Kim at the boat in case she needed to get her family away from the dock. It never occurred to me that I would need them here.

  There was a series of buttons beside the door that could ring each of the apartments and I didn't need to search for which one was Mom's. I put my finger on the little, dingy white button and was about to press it in when I was struck by the possibility that she might not answer.

  For this entire trip that thought had never occurred to me. What if she was gone? What if she was dead?

  My finger lingered over the button as I tried to imagine a world without her in it. Throughout my life she'd been the one that held my hand, literally and figuratively. While I'd spent the majority of my years being angry at her, as most teenagers do with their parents, there wasn't a day that went by without me experiencing her love. Her kind encouragement, her pride of even my most meager accomplishments, her strength of character in the face of adversity, the way she said goodnight to me, it all served as the foundation for who I'd become. I imagined her face in the threshold of my bedroom at night as she blew me a kiss and said, "Goodnight my son. My beautiful son." It was a ritual that seemed so pathetic to me once, but I now longed for.

  I pushed the buzzer and waited for her voice.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  I pushed it again, several times, but no one answered. Panic swelled in my chest and an unthinkable possibility began to creep into my mind. What if she was dead? I ran my finger across each buzzer and pressed them all. Finally, the speaker crackled as someone answered.

  "Who is it?" asked a woman's voice.

  "Billy."

  "Who?" she asked again.

  "This is Billy, from 3A. I'm Debbie's son."

  "Oh Billy." The woman's voice turned pleasant for a moment, but in that same instant I heard my name taper off into a dour note. It was the widow from 4B, Abigail Harris. She'd lived here for as long as I remembered and knew everyone in the building. She was a glutton for gossip and was rarely caught without a bit of tawdry news to spill about someone or another. "You'd better come in."

  The buzzer blared and the door unlocked. I threw it open and bounded up the stairs. I heard an apartment from several floors above open and footsteps enter the hall. I knew it was Abigail coming to greet me, but I didn't have time to wait for her. I needed to find Mom. I had to save her. I had to get to her in time. I was panicked and couldn't accept anything other than that she was patiently waiting in her apartment for me to save her. She had to be okay. She had to be.

  I got up three floors before Abigail had time to get down one. I saw her descending the stairs as I ran past. She yelled out for me but I ignored her.

  "Billy, wait!"

  "No time, Abby." I tried to open the door to apartment 3A, but it was locked. I pounded and yelled, "Mom, open up. It's me."

  "Billy," said Abigail. She waddled down the hall as quick as her old hips could manage. Her hair was in curlers and her face was half made up. She looked like a corpse in a casket at a funeral home.

  "Have you seen my mom? Is she okay?" I pounded on the door again.

  "Stop for a second," said Abby. "Honey, please, stop. Just stop."

  I saw despair in her old eyes. She held her hands out to offer a hug but I glared at her and my knocks on the door turned to punches.

  "Please, Billy," said Abby as she tried to step toward me. I lashed out at her advance as if trying to keep her at bay. If I ignored it, if I fought hard enough, it wouldn't be true.

  I could see it in her eyes. As the first tear fell across the blush on her cheek, I knew the truth. I tried to deny it as I shook my head and told her, "no," again and again.

  "I'm so sorry," she said to me. "Your mother's passed on."

  "What happened?" I shouted my question and startled the old woman. She stopped trying to embrace me and took a step back as rage surged through my muscles. I kicked the door and it shuddered on the hinges.

  "I've got the key, Billy," she said and fumbled with my mother's keys. "Stop it. Stop kicking the door."

  "Give them to me." I held out my hand to take the keys from her. She trembled as she kept them away.

  "You shouldn't." She swallowed hard as if I scared her. "Maybe you shouldn't go in there." She started to put the keys back into the pocket of her pink robe.

  "Give them to me!"

  She handed them over like a handbag to a mugger. I was panting from punching the door and I felt liquid dripping off my knuckles. Blood rolled down my fingers and over the key as I slipped it into the lock. There should have been pain from my self-inflicted wound, but I couldn't feel anything but dread as I went through the door of my childhood home.

  Abigail shadowed me as I walked into the dark apartment. The familiar scent of home, that mix of cleaning supplies, sanitizers, favored recipes or spices, and human pheromones that pervade and individualize each of our homes, hit me as I stepped past the threshold. A thousand memories came as the smell wafted over me.

  Christmases, Halloweens, and Thanksgivings all coursed through my memory as I walked back into my cold, dark home. I remembered the first time I got grounded, after getting into a fight at school. I remembered learning to cook a turkey, and how to build a tinfoil tent over the bird while it was in the oven. The memories came quicker than the tears as I tried to disbelieve what Abigail warned me of.

  My mother's bedroom door was shut and I looked behind me at the old
woman that was a silhouette in the doorway. "Is she in there?" I asked.

  Abby nodded as she held a tissue over her nose and mouth. I started to walk to the bedroom when she stopped me. "Wait," she said and reached out to put her frail, trembling hand on my shoulder. "You should know…" she had to stop as the encroaching sobs choked her. "That she loved you. She loved you so much."

  "I know."

  "No you don't, Billy. You don't know at all. Honey, listen." She pulled at my shoulder to get me to turn around and look at her. She put her right hand against my cheek and then placed her left hand over my chest. "You can't know until you have a baby of your own. You don't know how much she loved you."

  "I need to see her." I moved to walk away but Abigail pulled at me again to keep me beside her.

  "Wait, Billy." She was crying as she tried to talk to me and I had to look away to keep from crying with her. "I'm a mom too, and a grandma, and I know what it means to love a child."

  "I know, Abby."

  "But your mother." She smiled and her eyes glanced upward as if recalling a sweet memory. "Oh your mother loved you so much. I swear to the Lord Jesus Christ, that woman cherished you more than anyone I've ever known. In all my years, Billy, in all my years I've never met a mother that put me to shame. But your mom, honey, she made me wish I'd been a better mother to my three boys. If I could've been half the woman Debbie was, I'd have a damn fine seat in Heaven. A damn fine seat."

  "Thank you." I couldn't hold back the tears and the two of us held hands for a long moment.

  Finally, Abigail let me go. She patted my chest and said, "Go ahead. Go say goodbye. I'll wait in the hall."

  I was left alone to face my mother's closed bedroom door. If I opened it, there was no turning back. There's no sense trying to explain your emotions in a moment like that, but it felt as if opening the door to my mother's room was tantamount to killing her. As soon as I turned the handle, as soon as I saw her body, she would be dead and I would never have her back again.

  The pearlescent handle was cold as I gravely turned it.

  Sunlight poured into the room from the window over my mother's bed. The aging afternoon cast a beam of near crepuscular light over the floor of the room and onto the edge of her bed. I recalled myself as a boy running in to wake her up and ask for pancakes. I could see her face in the morning light in my memory as she woke up, turned to me, and smiled. Her wide, welcoming grin was another thing I'd taken for granted and would never have again. There was never a time that I entered a room and had not been greeted with that wide smile. She was always glad to see me, as if the sight of my face was all she needed to make her concerns melt away.

  This was the first time she didn't smile when I came home.

  Her body was laid out on the bed as if prepared for a funeral. Her hands were clasped over her waist and her eyes were closed. She had make-up on and wore a pretty red gown that I remembered her buying. It was a rare extravagance that spent the majority of its life tucked away in the closet. She wore a gold necklace with a locket that I recognized as a gift from my father. It held a small version of the picture my dad had kept on the boat of us together, before the divorce.

  "Hi Mom." My sobs couldn't be contained any longer and I fell to my knees at her bedside. I felt like a child again as I wiped my tears off on the edge of her bed and reached out to hold her hand. Her skin was cold, and her arm was stiff from rigor mortis. I slid my hand over hers and weaved my fingers into her clasped hands as best I could.

  "I can't believe you're gone. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry I wasn't here for you." I got up and sat on the edge of the bed. I traced my finger over her face and leaned in to kiss her forehead. "I never got to tell you I got a scholarship, just like we planned. I was going to start next Fall, and I decided you were right, I was going to try and get that Law degree." I laughed at how ridiculous the thought of that sounded now. "I'm still not sure I would've made it, but I figured I should give it a shot. If it would make you proud, Mom, I would've given it a shot." Tears fell down my cheeks and dripped on her satin gown.

  "You've probably already talked to Dad, huh? He's up there with you, probably bragging about how he saved my life." The thought of my Dad telling stories of his bravado in Heaven made me smile. "It's all true. He really did save my life. Do me a favor and tell him the two girls and their mom are safe. I almost screwed up and got them killed, but they're safe now. I tried to do my best. I tried to do what I thought you two would do if you were here. I tried to make you guys proud. That's all I ever wanted: To make you guys proud."

  I had to take my hand away from her to wipe the tears that fell down my cheeks. "God damn it. I can't believe you're gone. I never got to say goodbye. I never got a chance to tell you how much I love you and how much you mean to me."

  The sunlight that came in through the window crept over the edge of the bed. It washed over my mother's body and seemed to breath new life into her. Her skin turned from pale white to the borrowed hue of a golden sunset and it almost made her look alive again. I stood up and moved to the side to allow the light to fully embrace her. She was beautiful and serine. My sorrow felt suddenly out of place.

  I pressed my forehead against hers and prayed for her safe passage. Then I turned to leave. I paused in the threshold and blew her a kiss.

  "Goodnight my mother. My beautiful mother."

  CHAPTER TEN - LOCKED IN

  Abigail met me at the door with a handful of crumpled tissues that had been stuffed in her robe. We held each other and she stayed silent as I grieved. She would have held me for as long as I needed, but time was running out. The sun was setting and there were people that needed me.

  I took a long, deep breath and tried to shake off the anguish. I pretended it worked. "We need to get out of here."

  "Where are you going?" asked Abby.

  "Some friends are waiting for me, down at the docks. We're getting out of the city." I took her hand and started to lead her down the hall but she didn't follow. "Let's get you some clothes and we can get out of here."

  "Oh my dear, I'm not going anywhere."

  "Abby?" said a man's voice from the stairs behind me. I turned to see Fred, her brother-in-law, slowly descending the stairs from the fourth floor. His posture was crooked and he struggled to steady himself on the railing as he took each step with great care. "Is everything okay?"

  "Yes Freddy," she said and waved to him. "Don't try to come down. You're going to hurt yourself."

  "Who's that there?" he asked and squinted at me. "Is that Billy?"

  "Yes. How are you, Mr. Randell?"

  "Stumbling and fumbling, like always."

  "Go on," said Abby as if shooing away a bothersome stray. "Get on back upstairs. I'll be up in a minute."

  "Fine, fine," he said and turned around. "Billy, tell your mother I said hello."

  Abby gave me an apologetic glance and said, "I'm sorry, hon, I didn't tell him what happened."

  "What did happen? How did she die?"

  "She was shot. After they announced the evacuation there were just a few of us left here. Most everyone left town, but you know how your Mom was about the government." We shared a quick laugh in agreement. "They couldn't have dragged her out of here if they wanted to."

  "And she never turned into one of those…"

  "Zombies? No. She never got bit." She explained it as if I should have known it worked that way.

  "I thought they said the infection had gone airborne."

  Abby shrugged. "If so, it must not affect people that are already dead. There are bodies all over the streets."

  "Do you know who shot her?"

  "We're not sure. She went to the market on the corner to get some food for everyone that was left in the building, and the next thing we knew she was stumbling back in here with a bullet in her stomach. We found her on the sidewalk out front. Some folks said there was a cop hiding in the store and taking shots at anyone that came in. We haven't tried to go back since."

  That sta
rtled me. "Wait. You mean the store on the corner?"

  "Yes," she said.

  "I've got to go."

  "What's the matter?" She could see the sudden concern that overtook me.

  "I've got friends that went in there." I pulled away and then pleaded with her to leave the city.

  She just smiled and pointed above her head. "I've got him. We're just going to enjoy each other's company and let the world turn upside down around us for a while."

  I kissed her on the cheek and thanked her for everything. She wished me luck and I was off. Levon and Mark might be in trouble and I couldn't deal with losing anyone else today. I was about to run down the street when the dried blood on the sidewalk halted me. I'd seen it when I arrived, but now I knew it belonged to my mother.

  There was no time to mourn her. Not now, anyways. I had to get to the store to check on the twins.

  As I approached the store I pressed myself against the brick wall, beside the window, to avoid being seen. When I dared a glance in, I saw Levon standing in the back. It was a relief to see that he was alive, but I couldn't get a good view of anything else in the store beyond the wire shelves that lined the window. I crouched and moved toward the entrance.

  My new spot afforded me a better view and I carefully stood up to look over the stacked displays inside. There was a cop in there, talking to Levon and Mark. I sat back down, beneath the edge of the window and cursed my bad luck.

  Then I realized this was the man that killed my mother. He was in this store, and for whatever reason he hadn't killed Levon and Mark. Abigail said it was a police officer in this store that shot my mother, and seeing this man couldn't be a coincidence. He was the murderer, and I would have my revenge.

  He didn't kill the twins, so I was willing to bet he wouldn't kill me either. Maybe he had already run out of bullets, or maybe the twins had caught him by surprise. Either way, I was willing to take a chance if it meant getting the opportunity to kill the man that murdered my mother.