An Unwelcome Homecoming

by Darrell Maloney

  “I told her to practice her frying pan throwing so she hits him on the head next time. She said she would.

  “And we haven’t had any murders in town since John Savage died. Aren’t too many people around who miss that sorry bag of dirt.”

  Luke stepped into the conversation to shake Dave’s hand and welcome him as a permanent resident.

  Lilly helped Dave out by saying, “Don’t congratulate him too much, Luke. He ain’t taking the job.”

  “Well, I’m sorry to hear that, Dave. We’re always looking for good people to help our town grow.”

  Sarah took the opportunity to offer her own hand, to Luke.

  “Luke, let me formally introduce myself,” she said with a smile. “I am Sarah Anna Spear and this is my face. I’m sorry I’ve hidden from you and I promise I will stop doing it.

  “It’s just that, well, women do get curious and I’m afraid of embarrassing myself if I ever lower my eyes to check you out and you catch me doing it.”

  Luke shook her hand and said, “It doesn’t bother me, really… what bothers me more is when people don’t understand me or judge me before they find out what I’m all about.

  “And thank you for showing me your face. It’s a very pretty face, by the way.”

  Dave barged in and said, “Watch it, Luke. She’s spoken for.”

  He said it with a smile.

  Sarah left with Red and Lilly, all for different reasons.

  Sarah to tell her girls why they dragged her to the town council meeting and about their dad’s job offer.

  Red had to start making her evening rounds, and Lilly had a pot of rabbit stew simmering on her propane stove.

  Dave milled about for a bit, shaking hands and explaining over and over again that he appreciated the offer, but he already had plans to get back to San Antonio.

  After half an hour or so he remembered he’d promised Miss Handy a report.

  He hurried back to her place to find her sitting on her front porch in her rocking chair, a small candle burning on the table beside her.

  “Miss Handy, you need to get back inside. It’s way too cold out here for you.”

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah. You need to quit worrying about how cold it is and learn to quit taking so long. Did you take the job or not?”

  “You knew?”

  “Of course I know, dummy. Nothing goes on around here without me knowing about it.”

  “Well, why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because it wouldn’t be proper, me spilling the beans and spoiling the mayor’s surprise. He may be a whippersnapper, the new mayor, but I like him. He was one of my last students, two years before I retired. He brought me an apple every day that spring. He knew it was the only way I’d pass him. Kid was awful in math. Just awful.

  “Now answer my question, dummy. Did you take the job or not?”

  “No, ma’am. I turned it down. I appreciate the offer, but Blanco’s not my home. San Antonio is.”

  “Ah, well, probably for the best. You can’t stack firewood worth a diddly damn anyway.

  “You’re still not leaving until springtime, are you?”

  “No ma’am.”

  “So I’ll see you again in a few days?”

  “Count on it.”

  “Goodnight, dummy. Give those sweet girls a hug from me.”

  “I will.”

  Chapter 50

  Kristy, now pretty much healed from her attack, hadn’t gotten over her need for vengeance. It was the fire which drove her to get out of bed every morning. It consumed her thoughts as she lay in bed each night waiting to fall asleep.

  She didn’t even know his name, yet his face was burned into her memory, likely forever.

  She didn’t know exactly where he lived, but she knew several places where he hung out, because she’d seen him there during her food runs.

  Looking back, she realized that she’d overlooked some clues that should have made her realize he was a dangerous man.

  He’d called out to her, more than once, with rude comments.

  “Hey sexy mama,” she remembered him yelling at her once. “Want some company to keep you warm tonight?”

  The two men with him had laughed at his crudeness, and she’d written them all off as dirt bags. Which they were, no doubt. But she didn’t think they were particularly dangerous. She was embarrassed at their crudeness, but didn’t necessarily feel threatened.

  Looking back, she wondered if she should have given it more thought. Maybe if she’d identified him then as a sexual predator, she’d have been more careful not to let her guard down that night.

  Then she caught herself, chewed herself out.

  No, Kristy. Don’t be stupid. And don’t blame yourself. You’re trying to accept responsibility for another person’s bad behavior, and it’s not your fault.

  Nobody told him to be a rapist.

  He chose to do that on his own. There are a lot of other men out there who have sexual urges who don’t act on them by preying on the weak and vulnerable. They just don’t. The fact that this bastard did is on him and nobody else.

  Another thing that bothered her was that if he’d do this to her, he’d do it to others.

  There weren’t a lot of women out there on the streets, looking for food each day. But they were out there. Most women she knew had partnered up with a mate or a male friend and formed a partnership of sorts. He’d go out to collect the food and she’d keep up the home front, protecting her children and sometimes his children as well.

  It was perhaps an arrangement harking back to the Leave it to Beaver days, when Ward went off to work each day and June played the role of the good little housewife. As outdated as it was, it still seemed the safest way to go and worked for a lot of people.

  For there really were a lot of predators out there, sexual and otherwise. And because they were far less likely to attack or rob a fully grown man than a woman half their size.

  Kristy realized that if something were to happen to her, then at some point Angela and Amy would have to venture out into that big bad world.

  And if the animal who beat and raped her was still out there he very likely might do the same to them.

  Her mind was a tangle of turmoil, of many things she wasn’t certain about.

  But she was positive of one thing.

  The so-called “man” who attacked her had to go. He had to be killed not just to satisfy her thirst for revenge, but also for the good of the community.

  To make society better.

  To protect other potential victims.

  Yes, he had to die.

  And as one of his victims… maybe his last victim, she felt she’d earned the right to do the deed.

  They’d moved out of the basement and into the house a couple of weeks before.

  They’d all gotten cabin fever, from being confined in close quarters together for so long.

  These days they spent their time running around the main part of the house.

  At nighttime, since it was winter and very cold, they all slept in the wooden safe room in front of the fireplace in the den.

  It was built with three sheets of half-inch plywood. Dave constructed it that way knowing that an inch and a half of plywood would stop most bullets.

  But it had the added benefit of being very effective insulation as well.

  They’d modified the safe room to include bunk beds. Kristy and Angie slept in the bottom bunk and Amy in the upper. She said she liked the upper bunk because heat rises, and she was always toasty warm.

  Robert, on the other hand, turned up his nose at the prospect of sharing a bunk with his sister.

  He took a thin camping mattress he found in the garage and placed it on the floor, beneath Kristy and Angie’s bottom bunk.

  A winter sleeping bag, coupled with the fact he was only four feet from the fireplace, and he was as cozy as he could be.

  Plus, he got the added benefit of knowing the girl he now had a major crush on was sleeping less than a
foot above his nose.

  Sometimes Angie, as she slept, let her hand drop over the side of the bed.

  If Robert was still awake, he had to fight the very strong urge to reach out and take it in his own hand, just to try it on for size.

  In his fantasies Angie would wake up to find herself holding hands with Robert and they would fall in love and get married and have a hundred babies together.

  Then he’d come to his senses and think “Yuck! What was I thinking? I don’t want no stinkin’ babies! What’s wrong with me?”

  Robert knew the basics of where babies came from and all that, his mother Monica giving him a brief overview of what would come after he became a man and found a woman to be his wife.

  He wanted no part of any of that foolishness.

  He had no way of knowing, because she hid it so well, but Angela dreamed at night about Robert and how he’d be her husband someday.

  Sometimes she couldn’t sleep and she’d drape her hand over the side of the bed. She was hoping, of course, that he would take it and affirm his love for her.

  But that never happened, and she assumed he had no interest in her.

  Two ships, at that point in time, were passing in the night.

  And the captain of neither vessel knew it.

  Chapter 51

  It was the middle of January, but no one knew exactly what day it was anymore.

  Calendars no longer existed, for the companies which made them were all out of business.

  Some people made their own calendars, but most of them were pretty worthless. Only the older crowd was taught a little ditty in grade school to help them remember the number of days in each month.

  Thirty days hath September, April…

  It was a lot like the old spelling rule: I before E except after C, in that most of the people taught the saying many years before still remembered it.

  Neither is taught in school anymore, which might be the reason most young people don’t have a clue whether April has thirty or thirty one days. And that many of them are atrocious spellers.

  In any event, the calendars people were making in the new world Kristy and the others lived in were very inconsistent.

  If they were made by old folks they were generally accurate.

  If made by anybody else then more than likely every month was given thirty days. And February was given twenty eight.

  It was partly for that reason, and also because people had forgotten how many days had gone by, that calendars in the new world were merely suggestions.

  A little boy once asked his grandfather, “Hey, Pops… the clock in the living room says it’s 2:10. But my watch says it’s 2:07. And the clock in the kitchen says it’s 2:11. And your watch says it’s 2:13. How do you know which one is right?”

  Pops, for lack of a better answer, told the boy, “It doesn’t really matter, as long as they’re close. Let’s just say that the one you see at any given time is the one you go by.”

  The same was true of calendars in the modern world. If one thought it was Tuesday the fourteenth, and a neighbor’s calendar said it was Wednesday the twentieth, the former was quite likely to accept the claim as gospel truth and adjust himself accordingly. Because he had to admit to himself that he didn’t really know. Perhaps his neighbor had been keeping better track.

  It was one of the quirks of modern life in the dark world.

  Truth was, though, that a growing segment of the population no longer really cared what day it was. People only kept track of the days in the old world so they’d know when they got up in the morning whether to get dressed for church, or to get dressed for work, or to get dressed for the doctor’s appointment they made the week before.

  Or none of those. If it was their day off they could curse themselves for waking up early and then roll over and go back to sleep.

  In the new world nobody went to church or work or the doctor’s office anymore, so knowing which day it was no longer mattered.

  For Kristy and Angela, keeping track of the days had only one valid purpose: for knowing which day Saturday was, so they could go to the weekend market at a nearby park.

  The weekend market was a gathering of barterers.

  Those who had things of value to trade met up with those who had commodities of all kinds.

  One could get anything at the market, from home-brewed beer to toilet paper. A case of bottled water to ibuprofen or bandages. A bottle of Coca Cola to a working radio. Marijuana or heroin to a flashlight with batteries that actually shined a light.

  They used to go all the time, even on the days when they had nothing to trade.

  The next best thing to eating a Payday bar was seeing it and pretending the world was back to the way it once was.

  Of course, since Kristy had a habit of scavenging at death houses, where others feared to tred, she occasionally had things of value to trade herself.

  A few preppers attended the weekend market, and those who had gold or silver coins or jewelry could get high-end items like a generator which worked or a television and DVD player.

  Kristy almost purchased a generator a few months before with an eighteen carat gold chain she’d found in a night table. She’d been told that common lamps still worked, provided there were unused light bulbs to put in them and a power source.

  The lamps they had. The light bulbs they had. But they lacked a power source.

  The generator would have given them that, and they were oh, so tired of living in the dark.

  But Angie, more and more often now the voice of reason, convinced her the generator was a bad idea.

  First of all, it ran on gasoline.

  And that would be just one more thing they’d be in constant search of.

  Second, a house which had light visible from the street at night was a target. It was like a beacon to the world that this was a house where people had something few others had. This was a special house.

  And there were a lot of people out there who’d force their way into such houses to see what other special things the occupants might have.

  The generator was a liability they didn’t need.

  It never occurred to them at the time they could do what Dave Spear had done and black out the windows. No light coming from the Spear house would ever be visible from the street.

  The trouble was, it was dark and dreary even in the daytime.

  The back of the Spear home, which wasn’t visible from the street, wasn’t blacked out.

  That’s why Kristy and the little ones tended to congregate in the living room or dining room during the day. In the living room or dining room there was enough natural sunlight coming in the windows to read, or to color, or play board games.

  Kristy liked doing crossword and other puzzles, and she always snagged puzzle books when she came across them in her death houses. The smaller kids had no use for them, and that was fine with her.

  On nice days they could go outside and sit on the back deck, mingle with the rabbits, or break up the scrap wood in the yard behind them to replenish their firewood supply.

  On this particular day, whatever day it was in the middle of January, the sun was shining and it was unseasonably warm.

  All four were outside, sitting on the deck and enjoying the day.

  Chapter 52

  The house directly behind the Spear house, and accessible by a trap door in the fence, was a disaster.

  Not long before the blackout, occupants angry because they were being foreclosed on decided to destroy the place on their way out the door.

  Such things are actually pretty common, and have always been a major headache for the banking industry. A certain type of classless people think nothing of going months without making mortgage payments. Then when the evil bank has the nerve to serve them an eviction notice they get angry at the bank. They accept no blame for the problem and see no fault of their own.

  They often exact revenge, and since firebombing the bank is a federal offense and frowned upon, they take it out
on the poor house instead.

  The occupants of the house behind Dave’s took it to the extreme.

  They took boots and sledge hammers to every wall in the place. Burned large patches of the carpet in every room. Broke all the cabinetry and many of the windows. Poured powdered cement into each toilet to permanently clog the pipes, then broke the toilets and sinks to boot.

  The coups de gras was to plug the tub in the upstairs bathroom as well as the overflow port, then to turn the water on full bore.

  Water ran for days before someone from the bank came by to verify they were gone. And of course by then the damage was done. The floor between the ground and second stories collapsed and the house had to be condemned.

  Bad news for the bank, good news for Dave Spear.

  Seeing a red sign on the front of the house saying the building was condemned and would be demolished gave him an idea.

  He didn’t think the bank would mind if he helped them demolish it.

  Since the bank was out of business and probably would be forever, he couldn’t go to them and ask them to approve the idea.

  So he took that as an okay.

  In the first year of the blackout, when he had a lot of time on his hands, Dave started removing wood from the home. He piled it in the back yard in a huge mound, then covered it with pieces of unburnable sheetrock so others wouldn’t know what treasure lied beneath.

  Monica discovered his wood pile, and Amy and Robert had been raiding it ever since.

  Robert liked cutting the wall studs into pieces using the hand saw Dave left behind.

  Amy liked jumping up and down on sheets of plywood and rag board and breaking them into fireplace-sized pieces.

  Since this was a nice day, and since their stockpile of firewood in the den was getting rather small, they went through the trap door into the yard behind them to do their thing.

  That left Kristy and Angie alone, sitting on the covered deck, to while away the day.

  “Hey Angie, do you have any idea what day this is?”

  “I don’t know. Sometime in January, I think.”