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Something Borrowed, Something Blue
Copyright © 2016 by DeAnna Knippling
Cover image copyright © Nina Tuzankina | Dreamstime.com
Cover design copyright © 2016 by DeAnna Knippling
Interior design copyright © 2016 by DeAnna Knippling
Published by Wonderland Press
All rights reserved. This books, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission from the author. Discover more by this author at www.Wonderlandpress.com.
Something Borrowed, Something Blue
“Something borrowed, something blue. Something terrible will happen to you.”
Someone had gotten the rhyme all wrong, but I didn’t feel like correcting it. Instead I slurped my coffee and pretended that goosebumps hadn’t risen all along my arms. The side of the white van parked across the street had been painted with bright blue spray paint on the side facing my house. The paint had been sprayed slowly and carefully, which meant that there were blue drips all along the bottoms of the letters. It was like looking at blue blood splatter.
I didn’t like it.
I hadn’t built my home into a fortress because it made me happy. I wasn’t some kind of pathological doom-prepper. It was just that the bad parts of Detroit had crept up on me. So I did what I had to do: bars over the windows, an alarm system, security doors, and a couple of other surprises, like a loaded shotgun just inside the front and back doors.
I was on the neighborhood watch, I helped clear out squatters from abandoned homes, I worked my rotation at the soup kitchen. I might have set a fire or two so the city would pull a couple of places down.
I lived on a couple of blocks that were an island of sanity behind the lines.
And now this.
The driver-side and front windows were tinted pure black. Not legal in Michigan, I knew that much. And as for a side mirror, forget about it. There was nothing but a couple of trailing wires where it had been—and a nasty scrape down the side of the driver’s door.
I couldn’t tell whether there was a shape in the driver’s seat or not. Might have been. Might have just been the silhouette of the driver’s seat. Some of those seats have head rests that reach up over your head, even.
It didn’t feel like kids.
It felt like, I don’t know. A serial killer or something. It felt like any second now, one or both of the side doors were going to slide on open and a clown with sharp teeth was going to step out.
The coffee was no good. It landed like a mouthful of grounds in my stomach. I could feel bowling balls rolling around down there, grinding it up.
I spat off my front porch and went back into the house. The newspaper was lying at the bottom of four cement steps in the bright sunlight.
It could wait.
· · ·
I’m supposed to be retired now. I used to be an electrical engineer, worked at an auto plant in Detroit. I took an early retirement and considered myself lucky. Now I don’t. I replace about six or eight windows a year. Sometimes I see shadows moving across the back yard at night. Inside the fence.
The scary part is that I’ve got a rifle that leans against the bedroom window in the back of the house. More than once during a hot summer night I’ve left the window open and turned out the lights, then sat by the window, waiting.
I’ve picked up the rifle a couple of times. I’ve aimed it once.
At a shadow.
Through the scope the shadow turned into the figure of a boy dressed in black. Black clothes, black ski mask. He looked like a goddamned ninja. He leapt over the fence, landed without a sound just past my rosebushes, and floated across the grass of the backyard.
He seemed to spring up over that other fence like a deer. He jumped forward, put a hand on the top of the boards, and was over just like that. Again, without a sound.
I put the rifle down. I was shaking.
My wife, Alice, died last year. I was through the worst of the grief, or at least I thought so. But the house was lonely. I thought about getting a dog, but it’d be up all night barking at noises, and who could blame it?
Living in Highland Park was no life for a dog.
It was no life for me.
I thought about getting out. Moving. Be closer to one of my two kids or something. But I always got the feeling—especially this last year after their mom had passed of breast cancer—that I wasn’t…I can’t put my finger on it. I wasn’t right for the job of Grandpa. I kept saying things they didn’t like. And then when I kept my mouth shut, they didn’t like that either. I couldn’t win.
So I stayed at the house and wrote my stories: zombies and post-apocalyptic desolation. I had the source material at hand, so why not? I had always had too much of an imagination, that’s what they said when I was in school. Doesn’t pay attention. Spends too much time daydreaming. Gets good grades but doesn’t apply himself.
I can’t say that I’m a famous writer or anything. I sure wasn’t “literary.” I’m just an old fart typing up the adventures that I’d had, or that I wished I’d had, back in my younger years. Wars, explosions, sneak attacks, betrayals, falling in love, falling out of love, getting stabbed in the back by your best friend, epidemics, rogue computer intelligences, spies, mutations, vampires, zombies…good times.
I used to put my stuff up for sale on a couple of online bookstore, then take Alice out to a good dinner every month on the proceeds. I counted myself a happy man.
Until Alice passed, and things started to close in on me.
She wasn’t one of those women who light up a room. She wasn’t generous, or helpful, or even a good cook. But when she was gone it was like all the space went out of the house. She held up the walls. Kept me from falling down.
I had nosed around with the kids about moving into a “retirement community.” I wasn’t old enough for a nursing home, but I was too old for a new house. I had mowed lawns and put up storm windows and repaired roofs and roto-rootered enough plumbing for about a dozen lifetimes.
The kids had liked the idea of me moving out of the old place, as long as I wasn’t going to live with them. “Somewhere safer,” they said. “Somewhere that you’ll have someone to talk to.”
Somewhere that I wouldn’t be surrounded by guns and talking to myself all damn day. That, too.
Some nights, the wind howls through the suburbs and rattles the windows, especially in winter. Back when Alice was alive, it felt like there was nothing that could get to me. I might feel a little cold air leaking in around the cracks, so to speak, but that was it. I just burrowed down into the covers and rolled up against her backside while she snored, steady as a buzz saw.
Some people might be cut out to be hermits but I ain’t one of them. I could feel the wind blowing through the glass these days.
When someone smashes the glass in your soul, it’s harder to replace.
· · ·
I called one of my best friends, Jim Gardzinski, to tell him about the van. He was up, even though it was barely six in the morning, same as me.
His wife was still alive, but he had many of the same characteristics of a widower: he, too, admitted that he felt like the world was falling down around him, and that he’d been known to go overboard a time or two with regards to home defense.
He had a Rottweiler that he’d trained up as an attack dog. He’d been a night watchman before he semi-retired; he would go in and pick up a shift here and there for his old company when they couldn’t find one of those kids to cover a shift.
His house was a small, dark place made out of the same brick as mine but with a lot fewer windows. The windows that he did have, he tended to cover up with reflecting curtains on the inside and steel bars on the outside. The inside of the house didn’t have a speck of daylight to it except for the kitchen window, which he left with lacy white curtains as a courtesy to his wife, Chris. Chris was a thick, grim lady who had stayed by Jim’s side even though he clearly didn’t notice her there half the time. I think that was why it got to him so fast—whatever it was that made me feel like I was losing it.
It might seem strange that Jim’s one of my best friends. But this is who he is now, not the man I became friends with. I’m not the kind of guy who can just walk away from a friend, even when life’s troubles wear him down and turn him into something different. Darker. A friend of mine, a friend for all time.
I’m swerving away from the point, like maybe if I just explain a little bit more about how things were with Jim, it’ll be easier.
But it won’t.
· · ·
In a grand and expansive voice on the other end of the line, Jim said, “Bud Rozanski. How pleasant to hear your voice this morning. What is it? Did you read that article about the blacks rioting in Memphis in the paper this morning?”
“No, I did not,” I said. “To tell the truth I didn’t even pick up the paper. You know what I saw this morning?”
“Another house on fire, waiting for the fire department to put it out.”
“No, sir, I saw a white van parked opposite my house along the street.”
“Must be government spies,” he said, about half joking.
“And there was this rhyme painted on the side, in blue paint.”
“Say it ain’t so.”
“It said, ‘Something borrowed, something blue. Something terrible will happen to you.’”
Jim paused.
“That’s not right,” he said finally. “It’s supposed to be—”
I cut him off. “I know what it’s supposed to be. What I want to know is what it’s doing outside my house.”
“Anyone inside?”
“The windows are tinted so damn dark that there’s no way to tell.”
“Huh. Call the cops. If they come at all, they’ll issue the guy a ticket for illegal window tinting.” Jim chortled to himself over the phone.
“Ha-ha,” I said. “You coming over to check this out or not?”
“Sure, Bud. I’ll come right over. I’ll even pick up your paper and deliver it to you before some stray dog comes by and craps on it.”
I rolled my eyes. “Much appreciated. Let your wife sleep in, I’ll make some breakfast for the two of us.”
“Now you’re talking.”
· · ·
Ten minutes later we were at the little linoleum table in the kitchen, plowing through two plates of bacon and eggs and sausage along with a stack of quartered, buttered rye toast and about a pot of coffee. I always make coffee like I’m going to need it to strip varnish off an old piano, but Jim always complains that it’s still not strong enough. I ignore him when he complains. That’s the kind of generous soul I am.
The paper lay on the counter; I hadn’t even glanced at it.
Jim finished the last of his eggs—over hard—and looked up. I’d been waiting for him to finish. There was no point to having a discussion until after the eggs had been eaten. Nobody likes cold eggs. Cold bacon, you can still choke that stuff down. But cold eggs are like something out of a horror movie.
“Let me admit this right up front,” Jim said. “That van is the creepiest damn thing I’ve seen in twenty-some years of living in this damn neighborhood, no lie.”
I nodded.
“What do you want to do about it?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “It seems to me, as creepy as that van is, that it’s the least of my worries.”
“How is that?”
“It’s just a van,” I said. “What worries me is what came out of it…or what’s going to get put into it.”
Jim smacked his lips and focused on a couple of sausage patties. “The house across the street, you think?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, it’s not parked there because of your house.”
“What makes you say that?”
He gestured toward the kitchen window, and the bars outside it. “No way that anyone driving along the street could look at this place and think, ‘Easy pickin’s.’”
My shoulders relaxed a little. “That’s true.”
“And if you’re sleepwalking in the middle of the night, stealing white vans, and spray-painting all over their sides at night, I’ll eat my hat.”
“Why? Don’t you think I’m creative enough?”
Jim gave me a look that said if he were ten years older he would have kicked my ass. He stole a strip of bacon off my plate.
“No, asshole,” he said. “Because nobody can read your damn handwriting when you’re awake, let alone asleep.”
· · ·
The two of us lingered over a second cup of coffee each, then rinsed the dishes and put them in the sink. Jim had brought a long trench coat with him; I pulled my jacket out of the closet and looked at it. It was a…well. Some things you don’t joke about, even in the privacy of your own head. It was tan and water-repellent, and buttoned with brown buttons up to the neck. It was about a shapeless a thing you could wear outside of a muumuu.
It held a SIG Sauer P220 in the main inside pocket and had two Velcro pouches for additional magazines. I checked the weapon—no round in the chamber. The magazines were good to go. The opposite inside pocket held a small EDC kit, not enough to carry me through a zombie apocalypse, but enough to handle anything short of a major trauma.
I patted my pockets, then hunted around for my cell phone and keys. They were in the basket on the end of the kitchen counter, the one Alice had trained me up to use instead of dumping crap all over the place.
“Wallet?” Jim said.
“I don’t know that I want to be carrying ID,” I said. Jim pulled his battered leather wallet out of his pocket and left it in the basket next to mine.
We stood on the front porch for a few minutes, getting the lay of the land. Your mind has to shift a little. One minute, you’re moving along on autopilot, same as everyone else; the next you sharpen up and really start to pay attention. If you can’t maintain a state of wakefulness—or if you can’t get there in the first place—you don’t go into a situation that could lead to violence. That’s how accidents happen. The only tip I have is, if you can help it, don’t go into full-awake mode when you’re hungry. Hunger doesn’t sharpen the senses; it fucks with the blood sugar.
Nothing about the van had changed. I checked the asphalt underneath it, the way the dust lay on the blacked-out windows, the silhouette of the seat backs through the dim light coming through the passenger window. The gouge on the driver-side door.
Then I started running my eyes up and down the houses around the block. My shoulders tensed up. I reminded myself to relax and kept looking back and forth, up and down.
“You see it?” Jim murmured.
“Uh-huh,” I said.
It wasn’t the house across the street which was the problem. The house directly behind the van belonged to a Miss Carstairs, a librarian of the old type. She’d seen a book-burning in 1948 at the age of eight and was prepared to sell her life dearly for her books. No, it was two houses down from hers.
The one that had made me tense up as I was glancing past it.
Out of the corner of my eye, I’d seen something moving in that house, coming up out of the deeper shadows toward the front door.
Now, normally that wouldn’t be a problem. But the place had moved past “abandoned” and “condemned” to “gutted” and “ready for a match.” Even the squatters left it alone. There was a big hole in the floor of the front room, where the strippers had pulled out all the tile and the water dripping from the great big hole in the roof ha
d pooled up and fallen through.
The movement in the shadow came into view, stepping up to the threshold of the doorway but not crossing it.
It was a white woman with brown hair and a pop-eyed face, round eyebrows and mauve lipstick. She wore a brown jacket, a pink button-up shirt, and the kind of no-wrinkle slacks that make you think, “That’s gotta chafe.”
She smiled. I could see a slim, dark gap between her front teeth.
She reminded me of someone she shouldn’t have. A character of mine—nobody important or interesting, just a real estate agent who gets saved by the hero in one of my books. The name of the book isn’t important, the character’s not important, the fact that she gets her head blown off by a shotgun a couple of chapters in isn’t important.
“What do you see?” I asked Jim.
“Big black dog.” Jim’s tone of voice said that I was an idiot. “What do you see?”
“Not that.”
He grunted. The woman turned and went inside the house, the heels of her pumps clicking on the hardwood floor.
The hardwood floor that I knew for a fact had been stripped out and been long since sold on Ebay.
“I’ll be damned,” Jim said. “That dog just walked right over the hole in the floor like it wasn’t there.”
I wasn’t sure what to say. I’d just assumed that I was the one seeing things. Now I wasn’t sure. And that was even worse.
“Let’s check it out,” Jim said, like it was nothing.
“I want to stop by Carstairs’s place and see if she’s all right,” I said. “I don’t like the way that van’s parked in front of her house. Should just take a minute.”
“All right, but keep your pants on. I didn’t walk all the way over here to help you conduct a romance.”
· · ·
I knocked on Miss Carstairs’s front door, then leaned to the side and tried to look in through her windows. The house was quiet, narrow, and tall, with a high-peaked roof. I took a step backwards and looked up, to see if she was watching me through one of the upper windows. She didn’t have much of a porch on the house, just an awning over the front door. The walls were white fiber cement, sturdy as bricks.
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