An Unwelcome Homecoming

by Darrell Maloney

The gray blocks? They were starting to feel unwanted, like no one would ever see their potential.

  Not anymore. Now they were happy blocks, looking forward to their new job.

  Sort of.

  Chapter 24

  Robert moved the first of the twenty pound bricks into the safe room.

  Just to prove to his sister he could.

  It almost killed him.

  Not to be outdone, Amy moved the next one.

  It almost killed her as well.

  Both collapsed on the floor of the den.

  “There’s got to be a better way,” Amy muttered.

  As it turned out, there was.

  For the next seven blocks, teamwork was the solution they’d been searching for. With Robert on one end, walking backwards, and Amy on the other end, they managed to get all seven into the safe room before collapsing again.

  This time they collapsed onto lawn chairs in the back yard.

  For as cold as it was, they’d both worked up a sweat.

  And nothing cools a sweat faster than a chilly breeze.

  Trying hard to catch his breath, Robert asked, “How many… more… of these stupid blocks… do you think we’ll need?”

  Amy stuck her tongue out of the side of her mouth and did some quick calculations in her head.

  “Eight more, I think.”

  He groaned, and started to say something.

  But she shushed him.

  Then, in a whisper, she explained, “I think I heard something.”

  She did indeed hear something.

  But she wasn’t sure what.

  Had they been inside the house they’d have heard someone on their front porch, laughing and saying, “Way to go, genius. How many doorbells do you know of that are still working with no electricity?”

  Then they’d have heard someone else saying, “Oh, shut up. I forgot.” Then someone knocking on the door.

  But they weren’t in the house. They were in the back yard, where Amy could barely make out the sound of people talking, but not the words they were saying.

  She motioned for Robert to stay where he was and stole quietly around the side of the house.

  Robert freaked out a bit.

  Since day one, since the day they moved into the Spear house with their mother and their father, they’d been forbidden from going on either side of the house.

  “If you are on the side of the house, someone might be able to see you, through the knotholes in the fence or in the spaces between the slats,” Monica explained.

  “A good rule of thumb is this: If you can see the fence at the front of the house, which runs between this house and the one next door, then someone on the other side of the fence might be able to see you.

  “In other words, children, play quietly anywhere you want in the back yard, as long as you can’t see the fence on either side of the front of the house.

  “And do not ever play on the side of the house, under any circumstances.”

  Amy was, under normal circumstances, a very obedient girl.

  But she wasn’t infallible.

  For she was also a very curious girl, and one who occasionally threw caution to the wind.

  When she heard something she immediately placed a finger over her lips.

  It was the internationally recognized symbol for “Shut the heck up or I’ll bean you.”

  Robert had been beaned many times by his sister in the past.

  He didn’t like being beaned.

  He immediately complied.

  Amy probably would have held her position next to her brother, except that when she heard the noise again there was something oddly familiar about it.

  It was a voice, she was certain.

  A voice she knew.

  She couldn’t help herself.

  Before she knew it, before she could talk herself out of it, she was standing before the fence at the side of the house, peeping through a knothole.

  Chapter 25

  She didn’t see much. The two voices were coming from her front porch, which was just out of her view.

  But from her new position she could hear the visitors much more clearly.

  “Are you sure this is where she lived?”

  “Positive. I watched her get off the bus here a zillion times at least.”

  “But that sign there in the window says that the bank was foreclosing on them.”

  “What in heck does that mean?”

  “It’s when you don’t make your house payments. And the bank makes you move out so they can sell the house to somebody else instead.”

  “I don’t think so. The bus dropped her off right here the day before the power went out. So I know for darn sure she lived here then.”

  Kristy peered into the glass on the picture window, cupping a hand on each side of her face for a better view.

  She said, “Again, are you sure? It looks like the house is empty.”

  Angela was puzzled.

  She knew that Beth was dropped off here the day before the power went out. So she definitely lived here then. But how could she have moved after the blackout when no trucks were working?

  She glanced around the corner of the house, thinking she might sneak into the back yard to peek into more windows.

  And she saw an eyeball, about the height of her own eyeballs, peeking through a knothole.

  Right at her.

  Understandably, Angela was somewhat taken aback.

  But not for long.

  “Beth? Beth Spear? Is that you?”

  Amy was busted.

  Big time.

  And for the very first time she was regretting breaking one of Momma’s hard and fast rules.

  But there was no way out of this one. She was caught, as red handed as red handed could be.

  “No, Angie” she slowly answered. “I’m not Beth. It’s Amy.”

  “Amy? Amy Martinez? What are you doing here? Do you live with Beth and her family now?”

  It suddenly occurred to Amy that she’d screwed up badly.

  But she was clear minded enough to know she had to do damage control before things got much worse. Before someone strolled down the street and saw Angela and her sister talking to someone in the back yard of a supposedly vacant house.

  “Wait on the front porch,” Amy whispered loudly.

  “It’ll take a couple of minutes before we can get the door open. It’s blocked with furniture. Wait on the front porch until we can let you in.”

  She rushed to the back door and into the house, Robert hot on her tail.

  “Are you nuts?” he said. “We can’t let them in.”

  She threw her hands up in exasperation.

  “We have no choice.”

  About a year and a half before, once Dave determined that the blackout wasn’t caused by a power surge or a blown transformer, he went into action.

  In an effort to make his house look empty and protect it from looters he took everything out of the front room.

  He stacked some of the furniture in the front entryway to block the door.

  Amy and Robert had to struggle mightily to push a large dresser, then a chest of drawers, then an antique roll-top desk out of the way of the door.

  It took them five minutes, while Kristy and Angie waited patiently outside.

  Waited and wondered why in the world Amy would be occupying little Beth Spear’s house.

  To Kristy, it was a good thing.

  She assumed that Amy and Robert would be living at their own house. And that Beth’s family, the Spears, would be occupying this one.

  Kristy planned to visit both families in her quest to form her group. If Amy’s family and Beth’s family were already teamed up, it meant they were already receptive to the whole concept of banding together for mutual protection.

  And that would make it easier for Kristy to talk them into letting her and Angela join in.

  Of course, that wasn’t the case.

  But Kristy didn’t know that yet.

&nbs
p; Chapter 26

  It took several minutes for Amy and Robert to push the heavy furniture aside enough to open the front door.

  Kristy and Angie, while they were waiting, squatted down on the front porch to lower their profile. It helped that the hedge row in the front yard had grown long and unkempt after not being trimmed at all the previous year.

  Why they squatted, Kristy was unsure of. She took the measure based on Amy’s whispered response to them being there.

  Whispers equated to secrecy.

  Kristy suspected they were trying to keep a low profile. Which also explained the empty front room and the bogus eviction notice on the window.

  Finally the door slowly opened, creaking as it went. After not being opened in a year and a half, it was bemoaning the intrusion and the indignity of it all.

  Amy’s face appeared.

  It looked familiar to Angela, though a tad bit older than she remembered.

  For Kristy the face was new, since all she’d seen until now was the little girl’s eyeball on the other side of a knothole. Kristy’s first impression was that this was a very pretty girl, with her long raven hair and huge brown eyes.

  She thought this was a young girl who’d someday turn heads and steal the hearts of many men. Provided she could survive that long.

  Amy waved them both in.

  They said hello to Robert, who’d been hiding behind his sister and who looked very upset about something.

  Angela spoke first.

  “Amy, what are you doing here? Where’s Beth?”

  “She’s gone. Her whole family’s gone. They were gone when we moved in here. And no, we don’t know where they went.”

  She seemed just as upset as Robert.

  “You shouldn’t have come here. Why did you come here?”

  Angela wasn’t sure she appreciated the tone of her friend’s voice. But it was a valid question.

  Kristy intervened, explaining herself while trying to calm Amy down a bit.

  “Don’t get mad at Angela. It was my idea to come here. We were actually coming to talk to Beth. We wanted to see if Beth’s family wanted to team up with us. To make it safer for all of us when we went out each day in search of food.”

  Robert, desperate to say something… anything, really, to prevent himself from being irrelevant, blurted out, “We don’t go searching for food. We have plenty.”

  His remark flew right past Kristy’s ears. Or maybe the words were heard but just discounted as nonsense.

  Angela caught their meaning but didn’t say anything.

  Amy winced at her brother’s comment but kept her attention on Kristy.

  “So you don’t know when Beth and her family are coming back?”

  “No. We don’t even know where they went. All we know is they were gone when we got here. We don’t even know if they’re dead or alive.”

  “Is your mom or dad around?”

  “They’re upstairs napping. And I don’t think you’d better be here when they get up. Dad’s gonna be pissed when he sees you here.”

  Amy didn’t see anything wrong with lying when it was for a good cause. She remembered telling Angela about some of her father’s vicious ways and thought there was a good chance her comment might scare them away.

  The thing about that, though, is that Amy was a very bad liar.

  Kristy noticed how she’d averted her eyes as she said her parents were upstairs. She also noticed the incredulous look on Robert’s face as the boy looked at his sister as though she were insane.

  Kristy suspected at that point the two children were all alone, and called Amy’s bluff.

  “Would you mind waking them up? I’ve got something very important to talk to them about, and then we’ll leave.”

  Amy, despite having a worthless scumbag as a father, took after her mother in most ways. That’s why lying came so hard for her. She was a good and honest person, a kind and gentle soul.

  And she tended to respect her elders, until those elders showed her they were mean and didn’t deserve such respect.

  Kristy, though not quite an adult, was on the cusp of womanhood and therefore considered an elder by young Amy. Further, Amy was an excellent judge of character. In just the few short minutes since she’d first laid eyes upon Kristy she got the sense Kristy was a good person.

  She felt her resolve melting away, and she already felt bad for lying to the older girl.

  Kristy went to a knee and took the girl’s hand.

  Amy saw the sympathetic look on Kristy’s face and knew it was genuine.

  Kristy said, “You guys are all alone, aren’t you?”

  Amy’s eyes welled up. She didn’t want to answer. She felt that by answering honestly she might be betraying everything her momma had taught her. Wasting all her momma’s efforts to keep her and Robert safe.

  At the same time, though, Amy had been struggling. She’d never been comfortable in the leadership role. When Monica drew her last breath Amy became, in essence, Robert’s new mother. It was a role she didn’t want and wasn’t comfortable in. The thought she wasn’t up to the task, that she’d fail to protect her brother and he’d pay a heavy price for her failure was always on her mind. It kept her awake at night.

  And, truth be known, she’d pass that torch to someone else in a heartbeat.

  She knew that Kristy saw through her first lie.

  She also knew she’d see through any other lies she offered up.

  “Yes. Our father left a long time ago. Our mother died a few weeks ago.”

  She wasn’t sure what to expect. The side of her which was disgusted with the new world thought maybe Kristy would get mad at her for lying. Or gloat because she’d gotten to the truth.

  Instead Kristy wrapped her arms around the little girl and held her tight, saying, “I am so sorry. You must be the bravest little girl in the world.”

  Chapter 27

  The snow in Blanco seldom sticks around for very long.

  Blanco lies in the Texas Hill Country, which gets its share of snow, but average low temperatures of thirty five degrees in December and January aren’t conducive to the buildup of successive snowfalls.

  Blanco is closer to Galveston than it is to Amarillo. It’s closer to Corpus Christi than it is to Wichita Falls. One is much more likely to see a Texan sporting a t-shirt in December in Blanco than in, say, Fort Worth.

  Having said that, any Texan will testify that the Lone Star State has some of the most peculiar weather in the nation.

  Red stood at her drawing room window, sipping a cup of slightly stale but totally black coffee. Beth stood at her side, nursing a cup of hot chocolate.

  The miniature marshmallows she dumped into the cup were three years old now and hard as a rock. But it didn’t take them long to soften up.

  “It’s really unusual for snow to be here three days after it’s fallen,” Red said. “Last winter was brutal. I hope this winter’s not the same.”

  “Did you get a lot of snow last year?”

  “Some. I think it snowed three or four times. And just like this, it hung around a lot longer than anyone expected. But last year it wasn’t the snow that was the problem.

  “It was the ice.”

  “The ice?”

  “Yes. At one point our temperatures never went over freezing for three straight weeks. And we had two or three heavy sleet storms during that time. The ice accumulated and accumulated and at one point was almost three inches thick.

  “It was so thick it brought down nearly every power line in the city.”

  “Wow, that sounds dangerous.”

  “Well, it could have been worse, but there was no electricity running through them anyway, so mostly they were just tripping hazards. That made just walking around even more treacherous. I mean, people were having a hard enough time trying to walk on ice-covered sidewalks. Then there were electric wires all over the place we had to step over. It made things so much harder.”

  “What happened to them?”


  “When spring finally came a bunch of volunteers all got together and cut them into long pieces and rolled them all up. They’re all in a big stack in case the electric company wants to hang them back up someday, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon.”

  The back door opened and Dave walked in, depositing a stringer of fish into the kitchen sink.

  “Anybody home?” he called out.

  “In here, Daddy.”

  Dave joined the pair, asking, “What are we looking at?”

  Red said, “I was just telling your very inquisitive daughter here how brutal the winter was last year. And how unusual it is for snow to hang around for several days.”

  “Yeah. San Antonio was bad too last year. The worst I’ve ever seen. I hope this early snowfall doesn’t mean a repeat this year.”

  “I’m afraid it might. I mean, this is the same way it started out last year. Last year we had a snow storm like this and an ice storm before the end of November.”

  “Any idea what day it is?”

  “I’m not sure. I’ve lost track, like everybody else. I think it’s December 5th.”

  “I think December 5th last year was when we got our first ice storm in San Antonio. It stayed below freezing every night for more than a month. Sometimes it got warm enough during the days to melt the ice a little, but not enough to dry it out. When nightfall came everything froze back up again.”

  “Same for here. Do you still regret staying in Blanco for the winter?”

  “I don’t know. I have my days. Some days I wish we could just tough it out, but that’s mostly when I get homesick and miss San Antonio.”

  “Well, you’ve seen how hard it is to walk on those icy sidewalks out there. Remember, at least they're flat. If y’all tried walking on that highway through hill country you’d alternate between struggling to climb up icy hills and struggling to keep from sliding back down on the other side. And you’d have to do that for over a hundred miles.”

  Dave smiled.

  “Like I said, I sure am glad we decided to stay here for the winter.”

  “Hey, whatever happened to the vehicle you were driving the first time you came through here?”