The Grim Reaper Comes Calling

by Darrell Maloney

  “I don’t think it would be proper until Sarah gets released. If the offer still holds when Doc gives her discharge papers, we’ll likely take you up on it.”

  Chapter 42

  Dave wasn’t the only one who was a bit concerned about his staying with Red while his wife was staying at Doc Matlock’s clinic on the town square.

  Tony, the ranch hand who had a major crush on Red, was dead set against it and didn’t care who knew it.

  Before Red even made Dave the offer he was making his position known.

  “Red, you know how people talk. Why, if a single man were to stay with a single woman, the town gossips would be saying you were pregnant within a week.”

  “Tony, don’t be ridiculous. The town gossips don’t know Dave, but they know me better than that. Besides, his little girl would be staying with him.”

  “Little kids gotta go to sleep eventually, Red. The gossips will say that’s when all the hanky panky is going on.”

  “Like I said, they know me, even if they don’t know him. And besides, since when have you known me to care about what the town gossips had to say?”

  “Well, maybe you should, Red. They can get some rumors started that’ll ruin your reputation before you even know it.”

  “Are you sure you’re not against me inviting him because you think I’ll fall in love with him instead of you?”

  “Um…uh… of course not, Red. Don’t be silly.”

  “Oh, I know what it is. You think that because I’ve seen Dave naked and I’ve never seen you naked that he has a better chance with me?”

  She had him on the ropes and was intentionally trying to irritate him. The fact was, she had indeed seen Dave naked after he was beaten into unconsciousness by John Savage’s henchmen the previous spring.

  She was a nurse, and she needed to clean him up and inspect his body for broken bones or contusions that might be a sign of internal bleeding.

  She stifled a smile.

  In all the time she’d known Tony, this was the first time she was able to shut him up.

  “What? Seriously? Tell me you’re kidding.”

  “I certainly am not.”

  “Holy crapola.”

  “Tony, you have such a colorful way with words. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to start my rounds. And no, I don’t need any company. To be honest I’ve had a pretty rough day and I’d like to be alone.”

  “But…”

  “You’ll see me tomorrow, Tony. You already said you were coming into town to bring Mrs. Montgomery a head of beef. Hey, if you don’t mind me asking, what kind of deal does McDermott have with Mrs. Montgomery? It seems he sends two or three head a month to her. How does she pay him?”

  “Oh, they have a system. Her cooks butcher it and weigh out the meat. Half of it is labeled for Mr. McDermott and the ranch hands. When we go in she cooks it up for us but doesn’t charge us for it because it already belongs to the ranch.

  “The other half is hers to pay for her butchering and cooking duties. That half she can use to feed her guests. They’ve had that arrangement for several years, long before the lights went out. It seems to work out pretty well for both parties.”

  “Oh. I’ve always wondered about that. Anyway, good night, my dear friend. Come by tomorrow and we’ll continue our conversation if you want.”

  “I’ll do that. But can I ask you a question first?”

  “Sure.”

  “Do you think there will ever be a time when you consider me more than just your… how did you put it? Your dear friend?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Would it help if you saw me naked too?”

  She laughed out loud.

  “I don’t know. Maybe. But I doubt it.”

  Before he headed back to the ranch Tony rode to Mrs. Montgomery’s boarding house on the outskirts of town.

  Something was eating at him and wouldn’t let him loose until it was resolved.

  He found Dave sitting alone in the drawing room, reading an old magazine. Beth was upstairs getting a bath.

  Tony greeted him as the budding friends they were becoming and made small talk for several minutes.

  Then he took a deep breath and dove into the real reason he was there.

  “Hey Dave, would you mind if I asked you kind of a personal question?”

  Dave put the magazine down, his curiosity piqued.

  “Sure. I guess. What is it?”

  “I heard a rumor that Red has seen you totally naked. Is there any truth to that?”

  “Yep. It’s totally true. From my head down to my toes. Every inch of me.”

  “Were you two… you know…”

  “Actually I was beaten all to hell and she was nursing me back to health. It was a medical examination and nothing more.”

  Tony breathed a sigh of relief.

  Dave went on.

  “In fact, I was unconscious during most of it. When I came to I was embarrassed as hell. I remember her laughing at me because I turned beet red. I mean, I’ve been examined by female doctors and nurses before, sure. But when I came out of consciousness the very last thing I expected was to be buck naked with Red poking and prodding me.”

  “What did she say about the whole thing?”

  “She said she wasn’t impressed. That my naked body reminded her of photos she’d seen in a medical journal in nursing school.

  “A medical journal pertaining to adolescent boys. She also said something about parts of me suffering from arrested development. I was afraid to ask what parts.

  “Bottom line, Tony, is you’ve got nothing to worry about. If she was looking for a macho man with a Mr. Universe body I didn’t measure up. She wasn’t impressed. And I am one hundred percent totally devoted to my wife. That’s why we’re staying here with Mrs. Montgomery until Sarah gets sprung from the clinic. Then we’ll all move into Red’s house together.”

  “For real?”

  “Yes. For real.”

  “Tony, look. Red is a beautiful girl and all, but we are not a couple and never will be. You just hang in there, buddy. Eventually she’ll get tired of killing her own mice and changing her own light bulbs and she’ll give you a shot.”

  “You really think so?”

  “Yes. I’m positive. Now can we stop talking about my shortcomings? It’s kind of depressing.”

  “Sure.”

  Tony had a huge grin on his face.

  He heard it from the horse’s mouth. Dave had no interest in his girl and had no plans to stay with her anytime soon.

  All was right with the world again.

  He still had Red.

  In his own mind, anyway.

  Dave said, “I heard you’re bringing a steer into town for Mrs. Montgomery tomorrow.”

  “Yep.”

  “When do you expect to be finished?”

  “I don’t know. About noon, I reckon. Why?”

  “I’m going hunting for feral hogs tomorrow. I’d have preferred to go in the morning, but I can wait until noon. If you want to go, that is.”

  It’s funny the difference a day makes.

  The day before Tony considered Dave his rival for Red’s affection. Almost an enemy.

  Now all that was behind him, and they were becoming good friends.

  Chapter 43

  Kristy had a bad feeling as she climbed the steps to the death house on Maple Street.

  On the porch were a small tricycle and a slightly larger bicycle.

  In a way she understood why some people weren’t equipped to handle the stresses of the new world. People were soft. Most people didn’t know how to hunt for game. It was an art lost for several generations.

  The same was true of fishing.

  Most fishermen these days were sports anglers. They went out occasionally on a Saturday morning and didn’t really care much whether they caught enough for a meal or not.

  Their main mission wasn’t to catch fish. Not really.

  It was to get away from their wife
and kids for a few hours, to drink a few beers with their buddies, and to wash the work week from their souls.

  If they caught a fish or two, that was great.

  If they didn’t get a nibble… well, that was okay too.

  In the new world if a fisherman put his line in the water and came up empty, his family went hungry that night.

  And neither wife nor kids were happy about that.

  The same was true of trapping and snaring small game. In most families, the last person to set a snare or a trap was Great-Great-Great-Grandpa Jed back in the twenties.

  And on and on and on.

  It wasn’t limited to the men, either.

  All women in the 1940s knew how to sew. Not just replacing a button, but actually making the family’s clothing using patterns and Singer sewing machines.

  They knew how to grow gardens and how to cook.

  Not Hamburger McHelper, but real food.

  And they knew how to prepare for the winter, by canning their extra fruits and vegetables.

  Why do they call it “canning” when the food is placed in jars, anyway? Anybody know?

  Never mind. It doesn’t matter.

  The point is over the last several generations we’ve gotten soft. For the most part, we’re no longer hunters and gatherers.

  We’re supermarket shoppers now.

  If Walmart or Home Depot doesn’t have it, we get along without it.

  Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that in the months following the blackout twenty to thirty percent of Americans decided they couldn’t cope.

  They gave up.

  They committed suicide.

  And in a lot of cases, murder.

  The tricycle and bicycle on the front porch of the Maple Street house told Kristy that at least some of the bodies rotting inside belonged to children.

  And that made her furious.

  The way she saw it, if the parents were too weak to scrounge and forage, they had every right to take the easy way out and commit suicide.

  But they had no right to take the kids with them.

  Kids are typically more resilient than adults.

  They don’t eat as much, and they can roll with the punches.

  Kristy believed with all her heart that if the kids were given a choice they’d have wanted to live.

  Sure, with their parents gone they’d live on the streets. They’d probably run in packs with the other orphans.

  But they’d have a bloody chance.

  The other kids in their group would be their support system.

  They’d share whatever food they found.

  They’d relearn the lost arts of hunting, fishing and trapping.

  They’d learn to grow gardens.

  It wouldn’t be easy. It would be the hardest thing they ever had to do.

  And some of them wouldn’t make it.

  But most of them probably would. And in the end they’d be much stronger than their parents ever were.

  The problem was, in almost all cases, the kids weren’t given a choice. Or a chance.

  Kristy had been in enough death houses to know the drill.

  If there was only one child, the father typically waited until the child went to sleep and then shot his son or daughter in the head.

  This method didn’t work when there was more than one child, unless the father shot through a pillow or fashioned some type of sound suppression device. Otherwise the first shot would wake up the other children.

  So much for a stress-free death.

  It was more common for the parents to slip their children two or three adult size sleeping pills.

  That way they were so out of it they didn’t even realize what was going on when one of their parents (usually the father) placed a pillow over their faces and pressed down with all his body weight.

  Once the children were dead the parents generally shot themselves.

  At least in Texas. Because pretty much everybody in Texas has at least one gun.

  It’s practically a requirement, like owning a cowboy hat and saying “yee-haw” at least four times a day.

  In other parts of the country, where guns were more restricted, people who didn’t have enough medication to intentionally overdose were left to messy deaths, like jumping into a river and drowning, or jumping off a bridge or high building.

  Most families were brought together and arranged.

  Kristy didn’t understand why, exactly. But more often than not the children were carried out of the bedrooms where they died and into the living room or the den. Someplace large enough to hold the entire family.

  They were laid side by side, and their hands were placed together or the parents placed their arms around their dead children.

  Kristy, furious that the children had to be murdered, thought that part particularly ludicrous.

  The parents’ arms draped over the children’s bodies almost appeared as though they were protecting their kids, even in death.

  Kristy had seen such scenes dozens of times and always wanted to scream at the corpses of the parents.

  “It’s a little late to protect them, after you’ve murdered them!”

  As much as she wanted to she never actually screamed.

  It would have been stupid and pointless.

  Chapter 44

  Another thing Kristy saw a lot of, and didn’t understand, was that there were almost always Bibles in close proximity to the bodies.

  She got the impression that the families read from the Bible to find comfort, or that they prayed together for an easy transition into heaven.

  Because as Christians that’s where they obviously thought they were going.

  Again, she wanted to scream at the parents.

  Man has been debating the existence of God since he developed language and started walking upright.

  Wars have been fought over the debate. An awful lot of people have died for their religion of choice.

  Consider this…. every religion thinks theirs is the right religion and that all other religions are fakes. That their vision of God is the only one that counts.

  Which one is right, which ones are wrong? Who knows?

  And in the end it doesn’t really matter.

  Because the grand question isn’t really which religion is right.

  The grand question is does God exist?

  Either he does or he doesn’t. There isn’t a middle ground.

  If God doesn’t exist, then we needn’t worry. When we die we won’t be going to heaven or hell. We’ll just drift off to sleep and return to the great black space where we were before we were born. A place we’re not even conscious of. A place where we, for lack of a better term, simply cease to exist.

  And if there is a God, we’re not going to heaven anyway.

  Not if we killed our children and then killed ourselves.

  Murder is a sin in every religion on earth.

  It’s the most dreadful of sins, and in most religions it cannot be forgiven.

  Now there are a few religions where a murderer who truly repents his sin might be given absolution or be forgiven.

  So it’s possible that the well-meaning parent who murders his own children might be given a pass through the Pearly Gates.

  But hold on a minute.

  That all goes out the window, doesn’t it? When he kills himself, that is.

  For suicide is murder too, in God’s eyes.

  Suicide is the murder of oneself.

  It’s the one sin which truly cannot be forgiven.

  Because a suicide victim is dead.

  He can’t repent his sins and be rebaptized and made clean again.

  Because he’s dead.

  The window of opportunity in which the sinner can be made whole again has closed.

  It’s too late.

  A dead man cannot go to the confessional and admit his sin and be absolved of it.

  Because he’s dead.

  It all made perfect sense to Kristy.

  She couldn�
��t understand how the truly faithful could read scripture and pray in their last days and think they were going to get their ticket for heaven punched by doing so.

  All the while planning for their last act on earth to commit the most egregious of sins.

  The Mac Daddy of sinning itself.

  The big one.

  And it was all so senseless.

  Kristy was a teenager from a troubled home.

  In the eyes of most people she should have been the last person in San Antonio who was surviving.

  But she was.

  She wasn’t thriving by any means.

  But in the harsh and deadly place the post-EMP world had become, surviving was good enough. It was the best one could hope for. Because nobody but nobody thrived anymore.

  Once inside the house Kristy wasn’t surprised to find the family of four sitting in four recliners which had been pushed into a circle.

  The bodies were bloated and severely decomposed and smelled absolutely terrible.

  The children, a boy and a girl, were relatively undamaged in that their heads weren’t blown apart.

  They may have been given an intentional overdose, or they may have been suffocated.

  Kristy hoped they felt no pain.

  The mother sat in the recliner between the children, their little hands gripped tightly in her own.

  Her head was shattered by a .45 caliber bullet.

  Kristy could almost see the whole thing play out in her head.

  After the children were murdered they were placed in their recliners.

  The mother sat between them and held their hands.

  She likely said a prayer.

  When she was ready she closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

  And her husband held the gun to her temple and pulled the trigger.

  Then the husband took his place in his own recliner.

  He held the hand of his son and probably said another prayer.

  Then he held the gun to his own temple and committed the worst of sins.

  He murdered himself.

  Kristy picked up the gun, which had fallen from his hand and landed in his lap.

  It was another nice thing about scavenging in death houses.

  Few people would go in them because of the terrible stench and the horrors of what they might see.

  That meant the suicide weapon was more often than not still in the house.