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CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Top Kepler
Jean Kepler put up with her husband for thirty seven years. He was a staff sergeant when she met him and for the next twenty four years he continued to be an active duty marine. He retired from the corps, but never quit. Jean was used to that. It was what defined them as a couple. It was what sent them all over the world for two decades. It was how they raised their children, one of which was also a retired marine. It was how they made their decisions. She held herself like a marine, woke up early and worked hard until there was no more work to be done like a marine, and she cursed like a marine. The only thing which separated Jean Kepler from being a marine herself was a haircut and a uniform. She’d washed them thousands of times, ironed them thousands of times, sewn patches and dropped them off for alterations and dry cleaning and fuck all. She had just never put one on.
Top was his title. His real name was Eugene, and he was good to her. He had honor and integrity. He had spirit. He had history and personality and wasn’t ashamed to mix the two into conversation. Jean was the only person in the world who knew all of his stories, but she never let on. She loved him from their very first date. She missed him when he deployed. She worried for his safety and cursed him when he was out of communication range for weeks at a time. But he always called her, and somehow he’d always managed to get back home to her even when so many of their friends, family and Top’s own subordinates had not.
All of those things made her hesitate before squeezing the trigger on that shotgun he kept in the den.
You don’t pull a trigger, you squeeze it.
Top had taught her that. She’d wanted to get the blasted weapon since she woke up that morning and she’d wanted to smear his brains all over their bed sheets, the one’s she’d bought on sale a few months ago. Jean had looked down at him and thought something was different about her husband, but she had waited.
While Loretta Gates was hacking through the end of the rock pit her family had been digging for more than a century, Jean was up making coffee. She scrambled eggs and popped some bread in the toaster. She laid out all of the normal breakfast items: butter, jelly, creamer and the sugar bowl with the USMC logo on it. She poured some orange juice and placed it on the table just prior to zero six hundred because that’s when her husband always walked in, freshly showered, shaved and ready for whatever the day held.
“Morning, Top,” she said. It was a nickname she’d called him almost a full year before he achieved the rank in the marines. She was always the first. When he was a staff sergeant, she called him Gunny. When he was a gunnery sergeant she called him Top. When he became Master Gunnery Sergeant, Jean continued to call him Top, and once he retired, the nickname stuck amongst the closest friends and relatives. Now that they were like local celebrities, everyone called him Top.
“Good morning,” he said and sat down to begin eating.
Jean fiddled around the kitchen and drank her coffee. She wasn’t a fan of breakfast. “How are your eggs?” she asked.
“Fine,” he said. He sipped his coffee and then crunched on a piece of dry toast.
The smell hit her as she wiped down the counter. It was a rotten, irritating smell. She wiped her nose in an attempt to ease the irritation.
Not in my goddamn kitchen. Not in my house.
She sniffed the rag she was cleaning with, but it smelled like lemons. Turning to her husband, she began to speak, but stopped as her mouth opened. Top ate another bit of toast, sipped more coffee, took another forkful of eggs and stuffed them into his mouth.
Something was different about him. She couldn’t put her finger on it. Maybe it was the way he chewed. Maybe the way he held his MARINES DO IT BETTER. ASK A SAILOR’S WIFE coffee mug. Maybe he was a couple days late for his haircut or a few missed whiskers from the morning shave. She sat across from him, dropping the rag she’d held into a small puddle of fabric. Jean squinted as she looked at him and grimaced again at the stench of rot.
“Something bothering you, dear?” Top asked.
“No. I’m fine. You?”
Something isn’t in regs, Top. Spit it out you old bastard. What is it?
“I’m fine. Breakfast is excellent, dear.” He smiled at her. It was a crooked thing on his face. A not right thing on his face. A lie on his face. She saw them crawling in his mouth, the evil things, whatever they were. She saw the blood staining his teeth as he chewed them up. She saw his eyes fill with black liquid like the coffee she’d served him—the same coffee she was drinking. It swirled into the whites of his eyes and filled them with blackness.
What in the bluest fuck is wrong with you, Top?
Quietly, Jean Kepler excused herself from the table and went into their den. Inside of the maple cabinet—locked when they had children, but normally left open anymore—she found his Remington Model 870 shotgun, loaded it with a pair of three inch shells and pumped one to the ready. Top had taught her how to load and fire the weapon along with many others decades before. She went hunting with him on occasion and more frequently out to shoot at targets. She liked guns.
“Practice makes ready,” he always told her. “You can’t protect yourself if you can’t handle the weapon.”
She could protect herself. Always did. And she liked the feel of the shotgun in her hands, the feel of leveling it off at the head of the thing which was sitting in Top’s chair. She settled the butt of the shotgun into the crook of her shoulder and laid her cheek against the cold stock. Then she squeezed because you don’t pull a goddamn trigger.
Top’s head exploded in a cloud of pink mist and blue smoke. The explosion was deafening, but not loud enough to drown out the sounds of blood, brain and skull as they hit the wall first, and then the floor. His body slumped forward, slapping down on his half eaten breakfast before it slid out of the chair. Blood spilled into a pool, pumping from the smoking hole in his head with each remaining heartbeat. His fingers danced for a moment, and then settled.
Jean propped the weapon in the corner of the kitchen between the cabinet where her large spaghetti pot lived and the wall under the telephone. She walked over to the table and sat down. Inside her coffee mug, there was something floating which might have been a bloody and slightly charred fleck of skin, but she paid it no mind and sipped the hot liquid with a blank expression.