Seven years of marriage went down the drain. She felt she was lucky they’d never had children, even though she loved kids, but Warren had been infertile. It was something she knew going into the marriage and they’d talked of adopting.
When he first started hitting and abusing her she attributed it to his anger at not being able to have children. His brothers had all sired children, but he never would. The plans they’d discussed about adoption never materialized.
She was happy about that decision.
While she had wanted children, as a teacher, she was able to enjoy them while still having freedom to enjoy the unencumbered life of not having them at home. She thought it was the perfect life that she’d won.
But the violence got worse the longer they were married.
Early in the marriage, it was the sulking and silence from him when Kellie had done something of which he didn’t approve. Then he started getting more demonstrative. He hollered at her more and she still recalled to this day the first time he hit her. He said it had been an accident in which he hadn’t meant to really hit her; it was that she’d made him so angry he just lashed out.
He convinced her with presents and candlelight dinners and that handsome smile that he really didn’t mean it. She forgave him.
Some months after that, he had another accident during an argument over her purchase of a little puppy. She knew it was her fault for buying the little guy without asking him, but he was so cute and Kellie always had loved little dogs. She thought for sure Warren would love the little Pug she named “Rip Van Wrinkles.”
Warren was pissed for a long time and complained about every hair he found in their usually well-kept house. If the dog had an accident, Warren would go on about it for hours and sometimes days. If the dog barked or growled, Warren found a reason to complain. One time when Wrinkles was caught on the bed, Warren pulled the blankets off, dog and all, and threw them at Kellie, telling her to keep the damn dog off the bed or else.
When Kellie had had enough and told him “fine, I’ll take him to the pound in the morning and you won’t have to put up with him,” Warren lost his temper and kicked at and missed the friendly little dog, which scampered out of the way and ran to hide under the kitchen table.
Kellie went to get the frightened dog to calm his fears before he had an accident when Warren, still upset from missing the dog with his foot, threw his beer at the dog and accidentally hit Kellie in the back of the head. He said he was sorry that she’d gotten in the way of his throw.
The heart-shaped necklace with the ¼ carat diamond was accompanied by a dozen long-stem roses sent to her classroom was his apology, but Wrinkles had already been taken to the pound. She forgave Warren, again rationalizing that it was her fault for getting the puppy in the first place.
The bracelet was his apology from when he grabbed her hair and was pulling her into the kitchen to show her how the coffee maker she’d left on by accident had boiled the coffee dry, leaving a burned smell in the kitchen and a cracked carafe. She’d just gotten home from school and he had a beer in his hand when she walked through the door. She was barely able to yelp when he swaggered up to her, a smile on his face, the smile which melted women’s hearts.
Instead of kissing her like she thought he was going to, Warren grabbed her hair and hollered right in her ear “are you trying to burn our house down you stupid cow?” He was already pulling her to the kitchen while she was trying to ask him what he was talking about. He had grabbed her hair hard and she felt it being pulled out when she was bashed into the hardwood archway which separated the kitchen from the dining area. Her left temple struck the hardwood frame and left her dizzy as Warren screamed about the coffee maker and the smell and the carafe, which he threw into the sink, shattering it.
It was later that night, after Warren had fallen asleep that Kellie had left him for the first time. She went to her sister Jennie’s house and cried herself to sleep in her sister’s bed with her sister beside her, just like when they were kids. Jennie’s husband, Rich, who was a dear man, had offered up his room and wife. He slept in their sons’ room with their three boys while Jennie and Kellie talked through most of the night.
Jennie counseled Kellie to get away, to get a divorce and never go back and offered her home, small as it was, as a place for Kellie to stay until she got things figured out.
Kellie finally fell asleep.
Kellie stayed with her sister for three days, calling the school to say she was sick the next morning, a Friday and the entire weekend. On Monday she went back to school. Jennie sent her husband to Kellie’s house to get a change of clothes and some personal belongings.
Warren wasn’t there when Rich made the clothing run, which was good with him. Rich and Warren never really got along, even when Kellie and Warren weren’t fighting. Also, Warren was huge and Rich was a portly, gentle man. In a fight, Rich would get his ass kicked six ways before he could put his dukes up to defend himself.
Kellie said she was going to contact a lawyer after school, but she was intercepted by Warren with two dozen long stem roses in the parking lot, and made sure Kellie’s friends all saw him there.
Kellie always left the school with two or three of her friends.
She was so predictable and Warren knew it.
Kellie might have told her friends they had been fighting, but he was sure she hadn’t told them he had hit her. That wasn’t the way Kellie was. All of Kellie’s friends would see the roses, would see tuxedo he was wearing, would notice the heart-shaped flower pedals he’d arranged on her car. They’d all be envious of the way Warren apologized with gifts and old fashion romanticism.
Kellie would listen to his apology and know her friends would be eavesdropping or watching from their own cars. Kellie wouldn’t make a scene because it wasn’t her way. They’d all see how Kellie had a man so big, so wealthy, so powerful, bend down to one knee to apologize for some wrong he had done. The other women would go home to their husbands and say things like “why can’t you be more like Warren?”
If they only knew what Warren’s personality was really like behind the façade he made public, they would thank God their husbands weren’t like Warren.
Kellie did contact an attorney, but not that night. That night she really tried to believe him when he said he’d never hurt her again and how he had been upset by losing some big account and every other excuse he could throw in. It was the first time he had admitted that it wasn’t her fault that he’d hurt her.
She really tried to believe him when tears rolled down his face. She contacted an attorney when less than a year later she found a pair of women’s panties in the center console of her husband’s Lexus. They had been going out to dinner that evening when Warren was pulled over for speeding, again. She reached for the registration and insurance papers in the console only to be surprised by something Victoria Secret had sent someone else. Warren might have been able to explain them as a gift he was hiding to give to her later on, except the note that was bobby-pinned to the panties was in someone else’s hand writing and read “Warren, anytime you get lonely again, I’m ready!’ and signed by Suzy with a phone number underneath.
Kellie hid the incriminating evidence while Warren was out of the car talking with the officer.
He talked the female officer out of issuing a ticket and Kellie listened to him as he gloated how he had used his charm to get out of a ticket…again.
She pretended nothing was wrong through dinner because she refused to make a scene in public and listened while Warren told of his exploits at work and how another big account had come to him. All through his ramblings, Kellie kept the face of the adoring wife and Warren ate it up.
But inside, she seethed at the disgusting bastard.
Back home, Warren took a shower in preparation for a night of loving with his wife and while he did, she put the panties on the bed sans the note which she kept, packed as many things as she could into a suitcase and left.
A new Toyota
Sequoia was delivered a week later to her sister’s house, where Kellie was staying until she could get an apartment. It came with a large red bow. Inside were a heart-felt apology and the title for the car in her name.
She kept the car after the divorce and gave her three-year-old Volvo to her sister and brother-in-law. He was going to fight it in court, but Kellie had kept enough proof, and didn’t ask for more than her share of their joint belongings, that in the end he signed the divorce papers and called her a worthless whore.
~ ~ ~
As Jerry scanned the fields and distant roads, he couldn’t tell that Kellie wasn’t waiting for the sunrise, but instead she was recalling their first encounter. She had been afraid of him when they had first met in the field behind his shelter.
Her world had fallen apart in more ways than just her personal life. She had been a news junkie and when the first reports of flu that was killing people broke, she followed every story, read every article she could find in newspapers and the internet.
She’d teach during the day, but in the evening her TV was on CNN or MSNBC or Fox News, laptop on the corner table of the sectional in her living room and her dog Molly by her side. To her, it seemed like an avalanche, like the ones she and Warren had seen outside of their rented chalet in Vail, except it wasn’t snow destroying everything in its path, it was the flu.
It hit home for her when her sister’s kids all died within 14 hours of each other. Rich was by their sides and took his own life when the youngest child finally slipped into that long good night. Jennie, who had planned to be with her family when the end game finally played out, never arrived because of wrecked vehicles on the roads and bad planning. She’d been a flight attendant and in the wrong city when the airlines were shut down for good. She was driving home when her end came.
When Kellie arrived at her sister’s small house, everything was in order and her brother-in-law and three nephews were lying together in the same room where she’d cried her eyes out to her sister less than a year before.
Her sanity slipped away for days as she cried and screamed and yelled at God for the hell He hath wrought. She got in her car, followed by her dog Molly who she barely even noticed, and drove away. She didn’t want to destroy the last peaceful scene of what had been her family.
Kellie crashed the car on a dirt road outside of the city. She came around a corner too fast and the tears in her eyes, or memories and rage in her mind, made her miss seeing the two cars that had met head on and were in the middle of the road.
The quickness at which she made the decision to accelerate and die right there or hit the brakes and try to avoid the accident scene could have been measure in 10ths of a heartbeat.
She accelerated.
Molly, sensing something, jumped on the floor board from her passenger seat.
She hit the wrecked cars at 42 miles per hour.
The screaming shriek of tearing metal, the hood slamming into the windshield shattering it, the driver’s side front tire exploding and the sound of tires sliding on the hard-packed dirt road were all drowned out by the sounds of eight air-bags deploying.
She sat in the driver’s seat for two full minutes.
She was stunned by what she’d just done.
She couldn’t even die right, she thought to herself.
Molly climbed up from the floor and sat on her lap. Her mutt face stared at her.
She’d wrecked the car.
She didn’t die.
What was wrong with her life that she wouldn’t die?
Molly licked her face once and sat back down on her lap.
Finally getting some grip on whom she was and where she was, she looked down into Molly’s big black eyes. Her black whiskers had dust on them, the brown wiry fur on her ears had gotten damp from some liquid pouring out of the dash, and her little black nose was smudged with some powder from the airbag that’d deployed on the passenger side of the car.
But Molly was happy to see her.
Kellie hugged her dog, the precious and loyal friend she’d received from her sister after the divorce, and extricated herself from the car. She hadn’t been injured, but the car was wrecked.
She started walking in no particular direction and Molly sometimes followed and sometimes led.
The first night she slept in a house she’d come across that didn’t have dead bodies in it. The second night she slept in a Winnebago that was parked in a driveway.
By the third night she was well away from the city. She could have driven any car of her choice, but she had no where to go so she and Molly just continued to walk aimlessly. When Molly got hungry, she’d find her some food. When she was thirsty, streams and garden hoses made her happy.
The third night she slept in the foyer of a vacant manufacturing building that was vacant. She would later look back on that night as her luckiest since the fall of the world. The not-deads, the mutated humans Kellie had not encountered yet, often took refuge from the sunlight in such buildings.
In the early morning hours, something had frightened Molly to where she jumped on Kellie, waking her. Molly had heard voices from, what Kellie would later find out to be, a vigilant hunting party.
Peering through the blinds, she could see the flashlights of a half-dozen men. They were vulgar and dirty, armed with various weapons. There were no women with them. She watched as the men started to circle the building in which she had taken refuge, and listened to hear if they were going to break in, or they were like her and just looking for a place to sleep.
The broken window also allowed her to hear the men talking. She came to the quick conclusion there was no way she would allow men like these to take her alive. They walked with a swagger, carrying guns and smoking cigarettes. They had the look of thugs, of ruffians and men who would do unspeakable horrors without regard for anyone’s life but their own.
Grabbing up Molly, she found a door that opened deeper into the little factory in which she’d been sleeping. She found a cleaning closet that had a door that locked on the inside. She hid like a frightened little girl. Tears and sobs that might betray her were kept in check.
For five hours she and Molly hid out. She heard the men enter the building and Kellie took pills she’d liberated from a pharmacy from her pocket, ready to swallow them all if they found her. A single gun shot echoed in the building and it made her jump. Molly started to growl, but Kellie’s hand placed over her nose quieted the little dog.
Then there was silence. It sounded like the men left, but Kellie remained in the closet for at least an hour to be sure they were gone. She was careful to stretch her stiff muscles before she finally worked up the nerve to unlock the door and look out.
Slowly she made sure there was no one still lurking.
From the light streaming through the opaque windows, the sun had risen and she could see the men who had been here had shot at a community board with pictures of what had probably been the company’s annual picnic.
No one was on the factory floor and she didn’t see anyone from her vantage point. Since she had been sleeping on the foyer’s couch, if the men were still in the building, she figured they’d have taken up residence in the offices with the comfortable furniture and carpeted floors.
Still holding Molly, she crept to the door under the exit sign on the side wall of the factory floor. The door had “fire exit” on it so she was pretty certain she could push it open and head into the woods.
Holding tightly to Molly she tried to push it gently open. A loud click from the latching mechanism announced that the door was unlocked, and the door opened. She slipped through quietly and then allowed the door to close as gently as she could without having a handle on the outside on which to hold.
There was a heavy wooded area behind the small factory and she kept along the side of the building as long as she could, ducking below the one window she passed. She looked around the corner of the end of the building and seeing no one she ran to the tree line. Molly jumped out of her arms as t
hey ran through the woods.
Molly led the way and Kellie followed her. She never knew if the men were still in the building. She never stopped to find out. She’d had her fill of violent men and there was no way she would let herself be taken by them. She put the pills back into her pocket and slowed to a walk behind Molly. She didn’t know how lucky she’d gotten, but, in a startling revelation, she realized she wasn’t ready to die.
She was walking through a field of soybeans later that afternoon when a man waved to her from a quarter a mile away. Hearing a real voice startled her and she was afraid. Molly growled and looked in the man’s direction, but didn’t leave her side.
The man, backed by a younger man and an elderly black gentleman, approached her slowly and carefully, making it clear to her they were armed, but not threatening her.
In the middle of the dozen-acre field, there was no place for her to hide. She berated herself for not staying near the wood line, but it was a cool day for Alabama and the sun was hidden by clouds, making her walk almost enjoyable. The field was not over grown with weeds and thickets and it made walking easy.
Kellie found a comfortable place to sit with her dog and wait for the men to approach. She reached into her pocket and collected up the pills she stored there for the end. If they killed her outright, so be it, but she wasn’t going to be used as a sex slave or punching bag.
The pills in her hand, she waited for the three men to approach her.
Molly, never leaving her side, watched the men get closer, alternately with watching Kellie to see what her owner wanted her to do.
When the men were about 20 paces from her, the leader, a clean-shaven, middle-aged man with a tanned face, a dirty NASCAR baseball hat with the #48 on it, a white tee shirt and faded, but clean jeans stopped the trio. He had what looked to be a military weapon in his hand, but he was holding it by the handle, not like he was ready to shoot someone.
The younger man on his left side looked a lot like the leader, but much heavier and softer. He had a rifle, but it was slung on his back. Kellie thought the man about 17 or 18 years old and not like the men from earlier in the morning. He was smiling at something his dad, she guessed, was saying and his hands were in his shorts’ pockets. He didn’t look like a young man who was out for raping and pillaging.
Hell Happened (Book 1) Page 4