An Unkind Winter (Alone Book 2)

by Darrell Maloney

  Sarah almost called an exterminator, but Dave had a better plan.

  Dave considered himself thrifty. Sarah called him a cheapskate. But it boiled down to the same thing.

  Dave said, “Why hire an exterminator? They cost a fortune, and they always pressure you to sign a service contract. I can do it for a fraction of the cost.”

  And he did.

  He bought several bug bombs and set them off in the kitchen. Then the family evacuated the house for several hours, came home, and swept up the little ant corpses.

  They never had ants again.

  But they did have four left over bug bombs, in the cabinet under the sink, right next to the can of Raid.

  Dave took one out. He crept slowly into the pantry, placed his handgun on the floor, and said a silent prayer.

  Then, in one quick motion, he depressed the button on top of the bug bomb to activate it, opened the door to the garage, and tossed the bomb inside. Then he locked the doorknob, grabbed his weapon, and scrambled back to the kitchen.

  He didn’t know whether the single bomb had enough poison to kill a man.

  He knew it killed the hell out of the ants. But he’d set off five or six of them to do it.

  He also knew at the very least it would cause anybody in the garage to cough furiously, and to try to escape the noxious fumes.

  He watched the locked doorknob.

  It never moved.

  He also never heard a cough.

  There was no one in the garage. He was all alone, with the man he’d shot dead, just four feet away from him.

  Dave sat looking at the dead man, through the night vision goggles, for what had to be half an hour. He suddenly became cold, and started shivering.

  He knew the temperatures had dropped. He’d watched his breath as he was creeping up the stairs, hoping it didn’t rise and give him away. But he never actually felt the cold until now.

  He supposed it was adrenaline that kept him warm. Now that the threat was over, and he was starting to relax, his heartbeat was returning to normal. His adrenaline was no longer pumping.

  He was no longer afraid.

  He went to the safe room and put on his parka and his slippers. He thought about starting a fire, but looked at the clock and saw it was only three hours before sunrise.

  Still, he desperately needed some coffee.

  He took his campfire coffee pot and added a tablespoon of Folgers dark roast, added water, and took it onto the back deck.

  His single burner propane stove was still out there, although he hadn’t used it since the end of the summer.

  He cranked it up, put the coffee on to boil, and noticed for the first time that there weren’t two dozen rabbits at his feet.

  Then he looked over at the fence his back yard shared with the Castro’s house next door, and saw that his secret gate had been left open.

  “Oh, crap!”

  -20-

  Hi, honey. I wish I knew for sure that you’d find this some day. In a way, I feel ridiculous for writing. It seems strangely akin to a man sitting in solitary confinement talking to himself simply because there’s nobody else around to talk to.

  But it helps. I guess whether you ever read these words or not, it probably keeps me from going insane.

  I killed a man a couple of nights ago. And now I’m going to hell.

  I mean, I didn’t intentionally murder him. I thought he was armed. It was dark, and he was in our kitchen going through the drawers.

  He turned around, and I saw something shiny in his hand.

  I swear to God, honey, I thought it was a weapon.

  When the sun came up and I could take a close look at him, I saw it wasn’t a weapon at all. It was a spoon. I killed another human being over a goddamned spoon.

  I shot him three times. Two of them hit him in the chest. The other went into his shoulder. When I saw what I’d done, I just cried.

  That was two days ago. He’s still there, still in the kitchen, sitting up and leaning against the cabinets. His eyes are open and he’s staring off into the sky, like he’s watching the clouds roll by or something.

  Baby, I don’t know what to do. I’ve killed before, in Fallujah. At least I think I have. In war, when you’re firing at the insurgents along with three other guys, and then you find ten enemy bodies, you just assume that your bullets took some of them out.

  But this… this is different. This guy wasn’t even armed. He couldn’t have hurt me. Yes, he was stealing from us, and yes, he deserved a beating for that.

  But I didn’t beat him and send him on his way. I executed him.

  Now I don’t know what to do. It’s cold. So cold. I should have buried him right away, but I felt it was somehow disrespectful.

  Now his body is frozen solid. And so is the ground outside. I went over to the Castros’ house to dig a hole in their back yard, and the ground is so hard it chipped the shovel.

  I hate my frickin’ life. I wish I’d just die and get it over with.

  -21-

  “I’m sorry, dude. I thought you had a gun. I really did.”

  The cold corpse sitting on the kitchen floor didn’t say anything. It just stared off into space.

  Dave, wearing a parka and heavy gloves and still shivering, went on.

  “You shouldn’t have come in here, man. What were you thinking, breaking into a house where somebody was sleeping? Didn’t you think there was a chance of you getting shot?”

  He wondered for a moment whether he should cover the body with a blanket. Not to keep the intruder warm, but rather so Dave wouldn’t have to look at him.

  He finally decided not to.

  He decided that somehow having to look at the man he shot down was his penance for doing so. And try as he might in his own mind to justify the killing, he still felt bad about it. He felt as though some kind of punishment was in order. He somehow felt he deserved to be punished.

  He once took a couple of psychology classes in college. He had no real interest in psychology. He just took them on a whim, really, as elective courses, because he needed a few more hours.

  One of the few things he remembered from one of the courses was an old professor saying that every emotion humans felt was rooted in something that happened to them earlier. At the time, he thought the professor was just a special kind of stupid. But then he put some thought into it and he realized the old man might be right.

  He was angry when a good friend’s wife cheated on his friend… because he’d been cheated on himself and he knew how much it stung.

  He felt pity for the homeless man on the street corner, because there were times in his life when he struggled as well.

  He felt sad when a funeral procession drove by, because he’d lost loved ones too.

  He wondered what the old professor would say about the guilt he felt for shooting this man. Was he subconsciously seeking redemption for the lives he’d taken in Fallujah as well?

  He doubted it. He was merely being a Marine, and doing what Marines do best… killing others who are a threat to their homeland. Only the rebels he was fighting weren’t a threat to Dave’s homeland. There were some in his unit who believed the rebels were merely defending their own homeland against aggressors from a faraway land. He even had a lieutenant who explained it was no different than if Iraq attacked Alabama. The good ole boys in Alabama would take up arms and try to force them back out.

  “They’re doing essentially the same thing we’d do.” The lieutenant said. That might make them the enemy, but it doesn’t make them evil.”

  Dave had tried to see the lieutenant’s logic, but wasn’t able to. He’d never been very political himself. Certainly not enough to debate whether the war was right or wrong. Whether the Marines were over there to save America’s freedom, or simply to invade a country that was no threat to us.

  In the end, it didn’t matter. He’d let political people debate whether it was just. All he knew was that the Iraqi rebels were shooting at him, and he had no choice but
to shoot them first. He didn’t want to go back to Sarah in a black zipper bag inside an aluminum coffin.

  He decided that couldn’t be it. That couldn’t be where his feelings of guilt were coming from.

  Perhaps it was because he shot a man who certainly wasn’t a threat to him. The man sitting there, looking at him through glazed eyes, was only half of Dave’s size. Dave could easily have overpowered him if he’d known he wasn’t armed. Could have beat him bloody and thrown him out the front door, with a warning to never come back.

  But he knew that no jury would fault him for what he’d done. The man was a thief who came into the house uninvited. He was rifling through Dave’s kitchen in the dark. And he had something in his hand that Dave thought was a weapon.

  Dave didn’t know squat about the law. But he knew that it was legal to kill another person in self defense.

  Justifiable homicide, he thought they called it.

  Or maybe something else. He didn’t know. He wasn’t a damn lawyer. All he knew was that if they came and took him away and put him on trial, that no jury would convict him. They’d put themselves in his shoes and ask themselves what they’d have done in the same circumstance.

  And they’d acquit him. They’d tell him it wasn’t his fault. It was the dead man’s fault.

  And they’d set him free.

  So if he wasn’t feeling guilty for shooting the enemy in Fallujah, and if he wasn’t feeling guilty for shooting the man in his kitchen, then where, exactly, did the root of his guilt come from?

  He finally decided that the old professor was just full of crap.

  -22-

  Dave went into the backyard, carrying a plastic pet crate that Sarah once used to take the cat to the veterinarian.

  He figured if it was good enough for a cat, it was good enough for bunny rabbits.

  He’d been in a general funk for five days while he had to try to deal with killing the intruder. For five long days he’d been barely able to function, unable to sleep, alternating between anger and grief, and convinced he’d just lost his chance to go to heaven someday.

  He cried, and yelled, and had even gotten so angry at one point he’d gone into the kitchen and kicked the body. But all that did was darn near break his toe. Even with three pairs of socks and some oversized house slippers to cushion the blow, the man’s leg was as hard as concrete.

  Now, he decided, it was time to get on with the business of living. He’d have plenty of time to deal with the whole prospect of dying, and what happened after, later on.

  Right now he had bunnies to catch.

  Mikey had left the gate open between the two yards, and the rabbits had been hopping back and forth between them since.

  They’d even tried to dig holes in the Castros’ yard, but none of them were very deep. It had rained hard just a couple of days before the freeze, and the soil had been pretty saturated.

  Dave supposed that was why the ground had frozen so hard and so quickly. He wasn’t a scientist, or a meteorologist. Or whoever knows the reason such things happen. But it made sense to him.

  And whatever had made the ground freeze so hard, the rabbits learned the same thing he did.

  There would be no more digging for awhile.

  That meant that any plans the rabbits had to escape and run free were foiled.

  Bad for them.

  It also meant that the body in Dave’s kitchen would be there for awhile.

  Bad for him.

  Oh, he could have dragged it out to the street in the dead of night.

  But it would have attracted a lot of attention. Not necessarily while he was moving it, but afterward.

  After all, bodies lying in the street weren’t an uncommon sight in the vicious world Dave now lived in. Homeowners often shot looters and dragged them out to the street to get rid of them.

  And as a warning to others.

  But most of those bodies… in fact, nearly every one of them, weren’t sitting upright.

  Dave imagined that anyone who happened to pass by, and the neighbors looking out of their windows, would look at the body and wonder how it came to be that way.

  Some of them might be so curious that they would go closer, to examine the body more thoroughly.

  And if they did that, there was a good chance they’d notice the drag marks leading from the body to Dave’s house. And then of course, they’d wonder why in the world such marks would come from a vacant house.

  Like it or not, Dave was stuck with the body, just like the bunnies were stuck with their current prison. And just like Dave was stuck with his.

  At least until springtime.

  When the earth thawed, he’d finally give the intruder a proper burial. He’d set some of the rabbits free, take some to Frank’s, and leave some in his yard.

  And he’d set off to find his family and bring them back again.

  But that was a long time away. First he had rabbits to catch.

  He’d softened some dried carrots in water, then sponged as much of the excess water off them as he could, so they wouldn’t freeze again immediately.

  He carried the cage into the Castros’ yard and then took the carrots out of his pocket.

  He tossed the carrots in the cage and called, “Here, bunny, bunny…” until he suddenly felt like an idiot for doing so.

  He let the baited cage sit while he went back to his own yard. He hoped to go back in a few minutes to find all the rabbits nested neatly in the cage, looking up at him as if to say, “We’re ready, you can take us home now.”

  Yeah, right.

  He knew he was in for an adventure.

  Once in his own yard, he wanted to make sure that additional rabbits didn’t hop into the next yard as fast as he could get them out of it.

  On his back deck were two folding tables that he and Sarah used to use to dry vegetables. At harvest time, they cut the vegetables into small cubes and placed them into large stew pots. Then they set the stew pots out in the sun so the vegetables would dry out.

  On top of the folding tables.

  Dave had used the tables for the same purpose a few months before, and they’d been gathering dust since then.

  But now they had a different use.

  Dave unfolded each of the tables and laid them on their sides, with one end of each against the fence and the other ends touching each other. Once done he had a triangle-shaped enclosure. The enclosure would keep any more rabbits from getting out. Any he was able to chase back through the fence would be trapped inside the triangle, until he could close the gate behind them and then move one of the tables aside to release the rabbit into his own yard.

  At least it sounded good in theory.

  He was assuming, of course, that the rabbits would be amenable to being herded like cattle.

  Instead, they were anything but.

  Oh, they looked docile enough. As he stood in the center of the Castros’ yard and looked around, he could see each of them hunkered down, trying to hide their little faces against the bitter cold.

  But they all eyed him despite the temperature. And when he came near any of them, they bounded away in all directions.

  He chased them for half an hour, managing to get about half of them through the makeshift gate and into his triangle enclosure.

  And once there, he was able to release them into his own yard without incident.

  That part worked fine.

  After half an hour he took a break. He retrieved the cat carrier and took it back through the gate, lifting it over the tables and placing it on the ground in his yard.

  That’s when he noticed that one of the rabbits had gotten over on him and stolen the carrots from the cage while he was setting up the tables.

  He couldn’t help but laugh at the situation. He’d been schooled by a bunch of fluffy furballs.

  In the end, he got them all back home again, except for a few that were small enough to squeeze through a crack in the Castros’ fence. He peeked over the fence into an adjacent yard a
nd saw one of the small rabbits looking at him.

  Taunting him, it seemed.

  “Good luck, little bunny. I hope you survive to old age and make lots and lots of babies. Maybe we’ll see each other again.”

  Before he went through the fence the last time he picked up the black bag of empty soda bottles he’d accidentally left there after the last trip to Frank’s house.

  Now he understood why he ran a few empty bottles short, even after he carefully inventoried them.

  The bag had been ripped open. He presumed the rabbits had done it, looking for food. Actually, it had been Mikey, looking for treasure.

  Something inside the torn bag caught his eye.

  One of the soda bottles had a note taped to it.

  Dave,

  Please knock on our door on your next trip. Eva and I have something important to discuss with you.

  Frank

  -23-

  Hi, baby.

  The dead man’s name is Miguel. And he isn’t even a man. He’s a boy. A high school kid.

  I got tired of calling him Dude. So I went into his pockets to see if he had a name.

  The only thing he had on him was a house key and an ID card from John Jay High School.

  It said his given name is Miguel. Then below that it had “Mikey.” I guess that’s what he went by.

  I shot a damn kid, honey. How low does that make me?

  I’ve been talking a lot to Mikey the last couple of days. He doesn’t say much, and just stares off into space. Thinking, I guess. Or maybe he’s the strong silent type.

  I was hoping he had a driver’s license on him. Or something with his address on it. So I could at least leave a note on his house to tell his family what happened to him. And to tell them I’d give him a proper burial once I could dig a grave.

  But all he had was that stupid ID, and a house key that could fit most of the houses in the city.

  The ID had a metal clip attached. I clipped it to the collar of his windbreaker.

  I have to say it’s a good photo. He was smiling. Not a bad looking kid, really.