Children of Eternity Omnibus

by P. T. Dilloway

  “No. Just a chipmunk or something.”

  “Great. Keep an eye out while I go in to get what we need.” He used the bolt cutters to slice the lock in half and then opened the door. Samantha stood outside as Joseph had requested, every rustling leaf or hooting owl sounding like a siren to her ears.

  Someone laid a hand on her shoulder. She spun around, her arms raised to strike, only to find Joseph standing there with a green canister marked with a red skull-and-crossbones like the door. “Careful, baby. You almost blew us up,” he said.

  “What is that?”

  “Nitro,” he said. “Definitely not a toy.”

  “Do you know how dangerous that is?” She didn’t know how she knew, but something told her nitroglycerine was a very volatile chemical. If jostled or shaken enough it could explode, killing whoever was nearby.

  “I know. There’s nothing to worry about. We’ll drive slow all the way back to Seabrooke,” he said.

  “I don’t want that in the car. You can either take it or you can take me.”

  “Baby, don’t act this way. Nothing bad is going to happen. I’ll be really careful with it. I’ve got a safe container for it all made up in the trunk.”

  “No. This has gone too far. If anyone finds out, they’ll put us in jail for the rest of our lives!”

  “Sam, you’re overreacting. I know you’re scared, but there’s nothing to worry about, really. I’ve taken care of everything. Tomorrow night we’ll use this stuff on the bank vault and we’ll have the money we need. No one is ever going to know. Trust me.” He ran his free hand along her arm. “Please. Don’t be mad at me.”

  “I’m not going through with this. If you want to rob this bank so badly, you can do it by yourself,” she said.

  “Sam, don’t be this way.” He set the nitroglycerine in the knapsack to take her in both hands. “I love you. I’m doing this so we can be free. So we can be together forever without having to worry about scrounging enough money to pay the bills. I don’t want that kind of life for us.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with doing an honest job,” Samantha said. “At least then you don’t end up in jail.”

  “An honest job? Like my father, with that shitty old truck of his and that shitty old house where Mom died? I’m never going to end up like him. Never!”

  “Fine. Do what you want. I’m leaving.”

  Joseph pressed down on her arms until she yelped with pain. “You aren’t going anywhere. You’re going to stay with me. I’m never going to let you go.”

  “Stop it! Leave me alone!” She squirmed until she got one arm free, which she used to slap Joseph across the face.

  “You bitch!” he shouted. He punched her in the face, sending her tumbling to the ground. He stood over her, the muscles in his neck tensing with rage until she thought his head might explode. “You don’t leave me! You’re mine!”

  Samantha lay on the ground, one hand pressed against her left eye and the other raised in supplication. Joseph had hit her. Tears squeezed out of her swollen eye to run down her cheeks. He hurt me. Why?

  Joseph knelt down beside her, taking her hand. The muscles in his neck had stopped trembling, his face going back to its usual color. “I’m sorry, Samantha. I shouldn’t have done that. It’s just that I love you so much. I’m doing this for us, don’t you see? So we can be happy.” He kissed her eye. “I’m sorry. I’ll never do that again, I swear.”

  She looked into his eyes, which had begun to water. He didn’t mean to, she thought. He loves me. “I’m sorry too. I shouldn’t have made you mad. I know you’re doing your best.”

  “That’s my girl. Here, I think I know how to make you feel all better.” He kissed her eye again and then moved his lips down her cheek to her lips. He loves me, she thought again as his hands reached back to undo her bra.

  Chapter 38: The Final Nightmare

  Prudence dropped to all fours in the middle of Main Street in front of the pharmacy. “Can’t…go…on,” she said, grunting with each pause.

  “You have to,” Wendell said. He climbed down off her back, now a pigtailed toddler in canary yellow pajamas. “We can’t stop now. We’re so close.”

  “Go…without…me.”

  “I can’t. I’m too little.” As if to emphasize the point, Wendell shrank another half-inch.

  “I’m too big,” Prudence said. A fit of coughing, wheezing, and grunting seized her throat. “Please…go.”

  “No. There has to be another way.”

  “Like what? Reverend Crane…was right. We’re…doomed.”

  Wendell sank down next to Prudence, unconsciously sucking on his thumb as he thought. They couldn’t fail now, not when they only needed to get another couple miles. It’s not fair, he thought. We’re so close! Tears came to his eyes as he put a hand on Prudence’s gut and listened to her strain for every breath. The hundreds of excess pounds were killing her. The only question remaining was whether she would die before Samantha finished them off.

  Prudence deserved better than this. She worked as hard as anyone in Eternity to make sure all the children had clothes to wear and sheets to sleep on. She had braved the sea with he and Samantha to get supplies for the children back home. What had she done to deserve such a cruel fate?

  If he couldn’t save her, at least he could comfort her in their final moments together. He snuggled up against her chest, tucking his head underneath her chin. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “For…what?”

  “For all the terrible things I said to you. You’re not a stupid fat girl. Without you, we’d probably all still be under Reverend Crane’s thumb,” he said.

  Prudence rubbed the top of Wendell’s head with her snout. Poor little Wendell, she thought. He tries so hard even though he’s so small. She didn’t know what they would have done after the hurricane without his knowledge about architecture and engineering. They probably would have ended up living in the caves like primitives. They certainly couldn’t have built the boat to take them here without his help. And for all that she and everyone else paid him back with bullying and insults. “I’m…sorry too,” she said. “You’re…not…a girl. You’re…the…strongest boy…I know.”

  “You mean that?” She nodded. “Mr. Pryde mistook you for my sister once. If I had a sister, I’d hope she was like you.”

  “If you…didn’t…love…Sam…antha…could you…and I—” Prudence couldn’t find the strength to finish the sentence. As she tried to get air into her lungs, she felt an intense desire to find a cool patch of mud. It’s happening, she thought. Not much longer and she would lose that final shred of humanity.

  “Prudence? Prudence? Don’t go. Please.” He shook her sagging belly with his tiny hands, but she didn’t move. She only lay there, struggling to breathe. I can’t let this happen, he thought. There had to be some way out of here.

  He spotted a truck parked nearby, a newer one than Mr. Pryde’s, but he was certain it operated on the same principles. Halfway to the vehicle, Wendell tripped and couldn’t get back up again. A long white gown covered his body, an infant’s body now. He tried to say something to Prudence, but only gibberish came out. He wailed the cry of a baby missing its mother, the sadness of the call opening Prudence’s eyes. He clapped and giggled at this.

  “What?” she managed to get out. He pointed first at the truck and then at her. “Can’t…drive.” He pantomimed steering and then tapped his chest and pretended to hit imaginary pedals. She understood now. If she steered and he used the pedals, they might be able to drive. It was worth a shot.

  She rolled onto all fours and then hobbled over to pick up baby Wendell with her mouth. He climbed onto her neck so she could let him into the truck. Using much of her remaining strength, she flopped into the bed of the truck, reaching in through the back window to grab the steering wheel. Wendell gave a set of keys to her, which she put in the ignition as she’d seen Mr. Pryde do and then turned the key.

  After the engine started, she shifted into reve
rse. Wendell pushed down on the accelerator with both hands, the truck lurching backwards in response. He slammed on the brakes for Prudence to shift into drive. They were on their way.

  When Prudence’s hands finally turned to hooves halfway there she had to use her hocks to steer. When Wendell became too weak to push down on the pedals with his arms, he flung his entire body against them. Since neither of them could speak, they worked out a system where Prudence grunted once for Wendell to accelerate and twice for him to brake.

  As a sharp curve approached, Prudence squealed twice. Wendell threw himself onto the brake in time to keep them from smashing through the guardrail. Prudence wheezed with relief and then got them going in the right direction again.

  She snorted for joy when Mr. Pryde’s house came in sight. They’d made it! She swung the truck into the driveway and signaled Wendell to hit the brake. With one hoof she shifted the truck into park and then plopped over the side of the truck onto the ground. For a moment she lay in the dirt, immersed in the feeling of being home. I’m not a pig, she told herself. Not yet. She rolled onto her feet and came to stand beneath the door as Wendell crawled out the window.

  Prudence trotted up to the front of the house with Wendell clinging to her neck. The door was already open, as if someone were expecting them. Prudence stood in the doorway, sniffing around for an intruder, but she couldn’t smell anything.

  Samantha waited for them at the top of the stairs. Prudence squealed in terror at the sight of the bloody meat cleaver in Samantha’s hand ready to slice Prudence into cold cuts. Instead, Samantha tucked the cleaver into her belt and applauded. “Well, I guess this answers the question of whether a pig and a baby can drive a car,” she said. “Congratulations, you got a lot farther than I ever thought possible. Unfortunately, it’s not far enough.”

  Samantha glided down the steps to stand before Prudence. She reached out to take the now newborn Wendell in her arms. “You make such a darling baby. I’ve got a crib all ready for you and a bottle of milk on the stove. I’m going to keep you like this for years and years. Then maybe after I get bored I’ll let you grow up a little.” She tickled Wendell’s belly, causing him to cry.

  She reached down with one hand to scratch Prudence under the chin. “And you make such a darling sow. I’m sure you’ll fetch a lot of blue ribbons at the state fair over the next few years. There’s a spot out back where you can lay in the mud and root around in the trash when you feel like it. We’ll find you a nice mate so you can make plenty of piglets.”

  I can’t stay like this, Prudence thought. I can’t live like this forever. She wanted to cry, but couldn’t, so she settled for wheezing mournfully.

  I’m not going to stay like this forever, Wendell thought. He wouldn’t let Samantha do this to him. There had to be some way to stop her. What could he do? He was a baby; all he could do was cry, throw up, poop, and pee—

  He turned to Prudence, looking her in the eye. He communicated the plan to her without even gestures this time, relying on the kind of telepathy developed by siblings or lovers. Prudence grunted to indicate she understood.

  Then Wendell peed on Samantha, a steady stream of urine that soaked her blouse. Startled by the sudden drenching, she loosened her grip on Wendell enough that when Prudence crashed into her, Wendell fell onto Prudence’s back. Prudence charged up the stairs as Samantha cried out in rage, “You’ll never get back! Never!”

  Prudence found the bedroom door and slammed against it with all her considerable weight. The door gave way in an explosion of splinters. She galloped through the doorway, squealing at the sight of herself lying on the bed in human form. Wendell cooed and clapped his little hands together with joy. Prudence nudged him up onto the bed, where he crawled over to sit on his own chest. Then Prudence hopped onto the bed, lying across the much-smaller stomach of her human form. Now what? she wondered.

  “Do you think it’s that easy?” Samantha asked from the doorway, the cleaver poised over her head. “You think you could waltz in here, click your heels together three times, and magically teleport back home? You fools. I would have spared your lives, such as they were, but now I’m going to enjoy hacking you up into suet.”

  As Samantha readied to bring the cleaver down onto Prudence’s skull, Wendell finally understood the missing ingredient. It wasn’t enough to simply touch his real body; he had to touch its mind as well. Wake up now, he thought as hard as he could. It’s time to wake up. This has all been a terrible dream, but now it’s over.

  Wendell’s eyes shot open. He found himself tied to the bed as before Joseph Pryde had given him a terrible green potion. He could move his head enough to see Prudence flopping around the bed, no doubt still battling Samantha in her dreams. “Prudence, wake up! It’s only a dream. You’re safe with me here in the real world. No one is going to hurt you. Wake up.”

  Prudence’s body stopped moving. For a horrible moment Wendell thought she must have died. Then she cleared her throat and asked, “Are we alive?”

  “I think so,” he said.

  “Are you sure this isn’t a dream too?”

  “I don’t know, but even if it is, we’d better untie ourselves and get out of here.” Freeing themselves didn’t prove difficult. A trick he’d learned from Samantha was how to angle his wrist so that a knot appeared to be tight, but in reality had enough slack for him to slip his wrist through once he relaxed. He freed his right hand and then untied the rest of the knots.

  After he freed Prudence, she crushed him in a bear hug. She kissed him not on the forehead or cheek, but on the lips as he’d always hoped Samantha would do. Prudence’s lips were dry, but at the moment they tasted as sweet as honey. “You saved my life,” she said. “Another minute and I would have died a pig.”

  “You were never a pig,” he said.

  “You were never a girl,” she said and kissed him again.

  Chapter 39: Plans

  They spent the rest of the night hiding in Mrs. Schulman’s house, watching the road for Samantha and Joseph to return. They never did. “Maybe they’ve decided to change their plans,” Prudence said. Which meant they could be anywhere by now.

  “No, he wouldn’t do that,” Wendell said. “He’ll go through with it no matter what.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Call it a gut feeling,” he said. Then he realized what he said and rubbed Prudence’s back. “A hunch, I mean.”

  “I know,” she said, but still let one hand slip down to her stomach. She left it there a moment to make sure it wouldn’t start growing again like her nightmare. “What do we do?”

  “We’ll have to find a way to stop them at the bank without alerting the police.”

  “But how? There’s no way we can stop them on our own.”

  “Come on, didn’t what we went through teach you anything? If we can drive a car as a pig and a baby then we can stop these two from robbing a bank.”

  Prudence wanted to believe Wendell. She wanted to believe after all they’d gone through they could do anything together, but she knew Samantha. Samantha had destroyed Jonas Pryde, Reverend Crane, and Hector Delgado. What hope did they have against her?

  “We’ll find a way. We’ll save her,” Wendell said.

  The passion in his voice stirred something in Prudence’s heart. “And then I suppose you and her—” Her voice trailed off as she thought of Wendell kissing Samantha the way he had her earlier. “I’ll understand if that’s what you want. What happened with us earlier, that didn’t really mean anything. We were both so happy to be alive.”

  As Wendell studied Prudence’s face in profile, tears threatening to cloud her eyes, he understood she would not understand. “It did mean something,” he said.

  She threw her arms around him, pressing him so tight against her chest he thought he heard bones break. “You mean it?” she asked. He nodded, unable to get enough air to speak. He was still trying to breathe when she kissed him. Before he could return the kiss, she shoved him down to
the floor. “Someone’s coming,” she said.

  They lay on the ground, hand-in-hand as a pair of headlights swept past. “That must be them,” Wendell said.

  “They’re going to figure out we’re gone. They’ll find us,” Prudence said. Her body began to tremble as she imagined being dragged back into that bedroom and fed another terrible potion.

  “They’ll never think to look here,” he said. He ran a hand through her hair, trying to soothe her, though he wasn’t convinced himself. “They’ll think we went into town.”

  “Then they’ll call off their plan. They’ll run away and we’ll never be able to find them,” Prudence said. She made a good point. As soon as that brute realized they were gone, he would think the police were onto them. He would look for another target in another town.

  “We’ll find them,” he said.

  “How?” she asked.

  “We’ll find a way,” he said. He didn’t know how, but he would think of something. There had to be a way of finding them. As he lay on the floor considering this question, the headlights swept over them again.

  Prudence waited for the car to pull into the driveway and Samantha to get out with her boyfriend. She felt around her for something to use as a weapon, coming up with only a pink slipper. We’re doomed, she thought.

  The headlights continued to slide past them, disappearing down the road. “They’re gone,” she said. A horrible thought struck her then. “What about Mr. Pryde and Mrs. Schulman?”

  “We’ll go check on them,” Wendell said. He took Prudence’s hand and led her up the hill towards Mr. Pryde’s house. When she started to puff and sweat from the effort, he squeezed her hand for encouragement instead of mocking her as he would have done before. “You can make it. Only a little farther.”

  They made it up the hill and went up the porch steps. Prudence expected Samantha to be waiting at the top of the stairs inside as in their nightmare, but the house was silent. They climbed up the stairs, hurrying to Mr. Pryde’s bedroom. Prudence let Wendell open the door and go in first, not wanting to see whatever horror awaited them inside.