by Joseph Zuko
Karen headed straight for the living room and Leon took the bottles into the kitchen. He started mixing Karen a cocktail right away. The girls noticed that their Mama was back.
“Mama!” Valerie always sounded so excited.
“Mama!” Robin copied. Karen had only been gone for fifteen minutes, but for the girls it was long enough to celebrate. Karen set the backpack in the middle of the room and she knelt down onto the carpet to give both girls a hug. Troy sat up on the edge of the couch.
“How are you feeling?” she asked her brother.
“Hungry, but I don’t want to eat again.” Troy’s words sounded steadier than before. Karen hoped he would be back to normal by morning.
“I got you girls something.”
“What is it?” Valerie asked.
“A new shirt.” Karen opened the pack.
“Oooh. Thank you. This one’s all dirty.” Valerie began to pull off her own shirt and a second later Robin followed her. Valerie’s shirt had been soaked by Troy’s sweaty back on the trip to Mama’s today. Karen found a nice pink shirt with a Disney character on the front at the top of the bag. She took it and pulled it down over Valerie’s head.
“Where did you get it? The store?” Valerie asked. There was no way Karen could tell her daughter the truth.
“Yep, we got it at the store.” Karen pulled out a purple shirt and squeezed Robin’s head through the neck hole. It was baggy on her little two-year-old body, but perfect to sleep in for the night.
“Too big,” Robin tugged at the end of the shirt to show her silly Mama that she had made a mistake.
“It’s all they had and it’ll be fine.” Karen finished helping the little one get her arms into their proper holes.
Karen stood back up and checked Troy’s ice pack. He needed a fresh one.
“When you were gone I looked around for Mama, but I couldn’t find her. Did she go with you?” Troy winced as Karen removed his ice pack. Karen needed to dance around this question for a little more until the concussion had worn off completely.
Leon scooted around the corner into the living room with an iced drink in both hands, “She’s still at the store shopping. We’ll pick her up later.” He handed Karen her drink. It was not a great lie, but it seemed to work on Troy for now. He leaned back onto the couch and rested his head on a pillow.
Leon pointed again at the photo from Lizzie’s, “Let’s do this in the dining room.” He pivoted and headed back the way he came.
“I’ll be right back girls,” Karen gave both of them a kiss on the top of their heads and then she followed Leon with the framed photo. She had no idea what she was going to say or do with the photo. It had been a long time since Karen had even been to a funeral.
When she arrived at the dinner table Leon already had a candle set up. He had just finished lighting it and stepped away from the table to make room for her to place the photo next to the flame. Karen carefully set the frame on the table and then took a spot next to Leon. They stood shoulder to shoulder, heads down and drinks held close to their chests.
Tears formed at the corner of his eyes. He shuffled his feet and cleared his throat, “I’m sorry.” He paused for a moment and gathered his thoughts, “We did not enter that house with violent intent. We merely were searching for a vehicle to aid in our escape. Unfortunately for you, Lizzie, the worst did happen.” Tears flowed off of his cheeks and onto his blood stained shirt. “We won’t make excuses. We cannot rationalize today’s events. We can only offer our deepest apologies, our most sincere regrets and the promise that we will carry your memory in our hearts forever.” Leon used the back of his hand to clean off the tear tracks on his face.
Karen didn’t realize that she had broken her deal with the tear duct union until a drop rolled off her chin and landed on her chest.
“To you Lizzie,” Leon said as he raised his glass into the air.
Karen raised her glass as well and choked out, “To you.”
They drank. The cool liquid burned down her throat in the best way possible. Leon had found a lime in the cupboard and poured them two vodkas on ice. The Absolut was refreshing and hit the spot. It was a good start for the night.
“Thank you, Leon. How did you-?”
He cut her off again, “My father worked at a funeral home when I was a kid. I grew up going to them every Sunday. I think I’ve been to about five hundred different funerals over the years.”
Karen sipped at her glass, “It’s a good drink. I wish I had some cash to tip the bartender.”
“You are welcome.” Leon wiped his eyes clear one last time. Karen stepped away from the table and over to the sliding glass door that led to the backyard. She wanted to say something about her Mama. She peeked through the blinds and the barricade and there was Penny. Laid out on the ground next to the dead salesman. Just seeing Penny’s body again was too much for Karen. She wasn’t ready to give any kind of eulogy. She would probably get out one sentence, fall apart and turn into a heap of tears on the floor.
Tomorrow. I’ll say something tomorrow. When Troy’s feeling better and can help me get the words right to acknowledge this wonderful woman properly.
Karen emptied her glass. The buzzed feeling she needed to get through tonight was starting to hit her. Two or three drinks more and she would be right where she needed to be. Leon was there ready to take her empty glass and get her a fresh pour.
Leon’s fingertips grazed Karen’s hand as he took the glass. He swore he could feel the charge of energy zap out of her hand and into his. He turned away from her and headed back to his home bar.
“Make it a double,” Karen placed her order.
“Yes, Ma’am.”
CHAPTER 12
Jim woke to the sting of a needle poking into the skin of his forearm. He looked up at the woman with the needle, Tina smiled as her thumb pushed the plunger and forced the antibiotics into his body.
“Devon?” Jim’s voice was rough and he coughed a little at the end of his question.
“He’s stable. Thanks to you. We don’t have a heart monitor so I check his vitals manually every couple of minutes.”
Jim could smell real food cooking in the kitchen. It smelled spicy, mouth-watering, and he couldn’t wait to eat it. “How long was I out?” He rubbed his face. His fingertips skirted around the wounds and massaged his temples.
“Thirty minutes. It’s almost eight o’clock.”
Jim looked outside and night had fallen. The dark purple sky held only a sliver of light. The sun was minutes away from setting on this day.
It was almost over, or was it?
What horrors would total darkness bring?
Frank and Sara stood on the back porch smoking cigarettes and drinking Cliff’s beer. They looked refreshed and cleansed. All of the dirt and blood that had covered their bodies had been washed away. Sara took a drag from her burning stick and coughed out the smoke. She was no pro, that was for sure, but she kept at it.
Cliff entered the living room with a bath towel in his hands, “Hey, buddy can you do us a favor?”
“What’s that?” Jim stretched out his sore muscles.
“Go take a shower. The smell is killing us.” Cliff handed the towel over to Jim.
“What about the transfusion?” Jim accepted the towel and looked to Tina.
“You’ve given him enough. I already unhooked you. So go please and put your clothes in the washer.” Tina tended the steaming pan of sizzling food. “When you get done you can have dinner.” Tina ran a spatula through the shredded seasoned beef.
Jim got to his feet and pulled off his shirt. His back was covered with cuts and bruises from the fall out of the bedroom window at Frank’s brother’s house. On his way to the bathroom he picked up the plush Burt and Ernie dolls on the table. Next to the table was the other backpack that Jim had loaded with his extra underwear, socks and the medical kit from his bathroom downstairs. The dolls still had blood on them and he wanted to get them cleaned up before it was too la
te.
Jim stepped in front of the washer and dryer that was tucked in a closet adjacent to the front door. He dropped his shirt into the empty washer then he stripped down to his underwear. He was long past the point of caring about being this nude in a stranger’s house. He tossed all of his nasty clothes into the washer, put in some soap and kicked on the machine. When he turned back to head for the bathroom he spotted the new sawblade weapon Cliff had built hanging on the wall behind him. Cliff passed at that moment to go check on his girls when he noticed Jim checking out his handy work.
“I just made that,” Cliff beamed with pride.
Jim pointed to it, “May I?”
“Sure.”
Jim reached up and grabbed the sawblade, “Wow, it’s lighter than I thought it would be.”
“It’s made out of aluminum.”
Jim thumbed the nearly razor sharp tips of the saw, “Damn it’s sharp as hell too and the grip feels great.”
“I was inspired by your spear,” Cliff folded his arms across his chest.
“It’s really nice. It will definitely do the job.” Jim hung the vicious weapon back up on its hooks.
“Yep, you don’t have to worry about it jamming up or ever having to reload it.”
“That’s why I made the spear. There was a beauty of a shotgun at the store where I made it, but I didn’t know how to use it and to carry enough ammo would have weighed a ton. So I went with a knife on a stick.”
“Well, it got you this far.” Cliff said as he began to head down the hallway for his kid’s room.
“Yes, it did.”
Tina could hear their conversation from around the corner in the kitchen. It finally clicked why Cliff wanted to build it. Not just for protection, but to show it off and get some accolades from another man and it worked.
Was this the beginning of a bromance? Tina thought.
Jim limped into the bathroom and shut the door behind himself. His reflection was ghastly. His body was covered in bruises and cuts. He had never seen it so beat up in his life. His elbows, shoulders, chest, back and knees were all black and blue. The falls and car crashes were harder on his frame than he could have imagined.
Jim set the backpack, towel and dolls down on the counter. He unzipped the bag and pulled out a bottle of peroxide. Jim learned this trick to get blood out when Karen had given birth at home and some blood got on the bed. The midwives poured some peroxide on the stain and it came right out. Jim couldn’t believe it. Up until that moment he thought a blood stain was permanent. He held Ernie over the sink and poured a little of the old bubble medicine out onto his orange face.
He executed a perfect Ernie impression, “Gee, Jim how did I get all of this blood on me?”
Back to his normal voice, “An infected human’s brains were smashed all over the floor and you were too close to the carnage, Ernie.”
Ernie, “Boy, I haven’t been this messy since the first night Bert and I hooked up.” Jim did the Ernie laugh.
Jim, “Ernie, I had no idea. You and Bert were a couple this whole time?”
Ernie, “Yep, I’ve been giving it to old Bert for forty years now.”
Jim, “How do you keep your relationship fresh after all this time?”
Ernie, “We role play sometimes. You know bad doctor and the dirty nurse or nasty teacher and his filthy student. In the nineties we discovered ass to mouth and that’s been fun.” Ernie laughs again.
Someone knocked at the bathroom door and it startled Jim. He had gotten lost in a weird world of puppet perversion for a second.
“Jim, are you okay? I heard voices.” Sara asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine.” Jim’s face went flush. “I’m just cleaning my kid’s doll.”
“Are you decent? Can I come in?”
“Yeah, I guess,” he looked himself over in the mirror. His one article of clothing was a pair of skin tight athletic shorts that still had a protective cup tucked into the front. They left nothing to the imagination, but he was a married man. What did he care?
She opened the door slightly and peeked in, “I saw the cuts on your back and thought you might need help to clean them?”
Jim rinsed off Ernie in the sink, swapped him for the towel on the counter and wrapped it around his waist, “Okay, sure. Thank you.”
Sara opened the door. She had a stack of clothes in her hands, “Cliff said you could borrow these until your clothes were done getting cleaned.” She set them down on the counter next to Jim’s backpack. Sara had a chair from the dining table waiting out in the hall. She picked it up and set it down in the center of the bathroom. Jim took a seat with his back to her. She put on a pair of rubber gloves, picked up the bottle of peroxide and a cotton ball. She soaked the ball of cotton and started at the top of his neck. Jim shuddered when she pressed it to his skin.
“It’s cold.” He shook off the shivers.
“Sorry,” she said as she attacked another cut.
“It’s alright.” Jim could smell the beer on her breath and the smoke on her clothes. It smelled incredible in comparison to his B.O. The peroxide bubbled up all over his back as she spread it from one cut and scratch to the next.
“Do we have a plan?” Sara asked only to break the silence. In their new world plans were good ideas that never worked quite as well as they had hoped.
Jim thought it over. All day long he had been reacting to the situation and not given the luxury of long term plotting. He breathed in a lungful of air, “We need to rest up. Get some food. Devon needs a little more time before we move him. What do you think?”
“I don’t know if I will be able to get any sleep, but we need to try.” Sara got a new cotton ball. The old one was solid red.
Jim’s head dropped and he pretended to be back asleep.
“Exactly.” Sara let out a giggle.
Jim raised his head and looked into the mirror to see her face, “In the morning, no matter what, I have to get to my mother-in-law’s. I have to find my family.”
Sara nodded her head, “We will.” She cleaned out the last of his cuts, set down the bloody cotton ball and pulled off her rubber gloves. “That’s as good as it’s going to get.”
“Thanks doc.” Jim said as he got to his feet.
Sara picked up the chair, “Hit the showers, stinky. Oh and Jim, Bert and Ernie are my favorite Muppets so let’s keep the ass to mouth comments to a minimum. Okay?” she joked as she closed the door on him.
Jim was frozen, too embarrassed to say sorry. He looked down at the two dolls on the counter.
Ernie, “Smooth.”
Classic Bert voice, “Yeah, real smooth.”
Jim stripped down out of the rest of his clothes and cranked the water into the red, “I want it just under blistering.” He talked to himself. “Hot enough to take the first layer of skin off. That might get me clean.” He stepped up into the tub. The blast of superhot H2O felt amazing. He wanted to spend an hour under the shower head, soaking in its glory but he also wanted to get out there and scarf down that food. He reached for the bottle of Cliff’s shampoo and realized it was the exact same stuff he used at home.
We have so much in common.
Why didn’t we ever hangout with these people that lived just upstairs? Jim pondered as his hands scrubbed quickly over his body.
Cliff set up a chair next to Morgan in front of the TV. He handed her a fresh beer and opened one for himself, “How are you doing?” he asked.
“I’m great.” She sipped at the cold can. “It feels good to be out of my little old room. It’s exciting here. All these new people and the kid getting stitched up. I get to see my grandbabies. It’s fucking fantastic.” Her words slurred into one long one. Three beers in and now only Cliff’s trained ear could pick up what Morgan was saying.
“It has been exciting here today.” Cliff looked over the room. Tina was checking on Devon. Her fingers were wrapped around his wrist and she counted out the beats of his heart. Frank sat at the kitchen table, a heap of his guns l
aid out in front of him. He loaded and checked each of them. Sara sat next to him at the table. She was getting a crash course on firearms. Guns and ammo 101. They looked like a team of mercenaries planning their next raid.
Cliff’s attention was pulled back to Morgan when she laughed out loud at a joke on the TV and whacked him on the shoulder with the back of her hand.
Cliff cleared his throat and started again, “It’s good to spend time with you outside your old place. I’m sorry I haven’t been by much in the last few weeks.”
“Don’t worry. You’ve got work, kids and a wife. You are busy. I get it. I was busy once too.” She waved him off.
“You’re right, but I should have made more of an effort.” Cliff leaned in closer so she could hear him without him raising his voice. “I wanted to tell you that I love you Mom.”
She turned away from her show and squinted her face in confusion, “What the hell are you talking about? What’s all this mush about? I told you to call me Morgan, damn it.”
The near death experiences from the day’s earlier events had got Cliff more emotional than normal. Seeing the family torn apart out in the parking lot had put things into perspective. Life was short. Now it seemed even shorter. It could have been his family out there getting ripped to shreds. The two beers helped tip him over his emotional edge.
“Hey, come on. We don’t know what’s going on out there. We don’t know how much time we have together and I wanted it on the record books, Morgan.”
“Well don’t get all sappy on me boy. You know I hate that.”
“Would it kill you to say it one time?” Cliff threw his arm around her shoulders and playfully jiggled her gently back and forth.
“It might. Stop that shit. You know shaking me makes my stomach feel sick.” She shrugged off his arm.
Cliff sat up straight and stared down at his beer. He knew Morgan was never one for affection and there was no changing her now.
She shifted in her seat and then turned to Cliff. A light had gone off in her brain and she just remembered something. The look on her face told Cliff she thought it was hilarious. “What was that silly guy you liked as a kid, Wee Wee Shurman?”