by Lake, E. A.
I found a chair and sat it in front of the door, protecting my friend. I wasn’t going anywhere. I was about to have my first shower in almost a month. Wild horses couldn’t drag me away from that chance.
Clean and freshly dressed, Violet and I made our way out of the building. Standing on the shaded sidewalk, I watched as she flipped her long wet hair several times.
“What I wouldn’t give for a blow dryer,” she commented, following me back to the first building.
“What I wouldn’t give for one of Lettie’s brownies right now,” I replied, leading her past the single female armed guard by the front door. “I’m so hungry I could eat dirt.”
She stopped me by jerking at my arm. Her eyes darted around the room, checking for danger I assumed.
“Just be careful,” she whispered. “They might try to poison us. Maybe we should tell them to trade plates once we’re served.”
Laughing away her fear, I urged her forward. I had noticed Susan waiting on the far end of a hall when we first walked in, so I figured the food was in that direction.
“We’ll just watch them take the first bites,” I said, mostly to myself. I don’t think Violet was listening all that closely. However, I doubted I would be waiting for anyone else to begin eating, not with the amount of growling my stomach was doing.
Baked chicken, mashed potatoes with butter melting on the top, and bright orange carrots adorned the center of the table. I winked at Violet. If they were trying to kill us, we’d all be dying.
A beautiful white linen cloth covered the large oval table, making me pause before I sat. The dichotomy of our surroundings was pronounced. Outside, people worked in the sun, dirty and hungry. They struggled each day for another meal, another sip of water. Inside was a world from almost a year back. All existing in the same place, changed by the unknown.
“Tell me, Stu,” I began after taking a large bite from a greasy chicken thigh. “What happened late last summer? What caused our world to become like this?”
Wiping his mouth first, he posed for his answer. “I have several theories, and none of them involve the worn out idea of an EMP attack.”
I glanced at him, confused. “Why not an EMP attack? Seems like the most logical choice.”
He shook his head. “A man came through Ironwood several months after the attack, shortly before I came here. Riding an ancient motorcycle from the 50s. He was from the southwest somewhere. Arizona, New Mexico; makes no difference. He said it was the same down there. Shortly after we arrived here, a group of travelers came through headed west. They came from somewhere in southern Ontario, over near Sudbury. Same thing there.”
Well, he had half of North America covered. That would have been a number of high-level EMPs. That seemed unlikely.
“If you ask me,” he continued, “and you have, I say it was high-intensity solar flares. Something in the magnitude we’ve never experienced before.”
I nod while taking a large spoonful of potatoes, the butter coating my tongue. Up until that moment I had no idea how much I’d missed that one dairy product.
“Where do you get butter from?” I asked, licking the back of my spoon to get every last drip.
I saw Susan dab at the corners of her mouth with her white linen napkin. “We have a woman with a small herd of cattle. We agreed to product her property and she graciously offered to provide us with milk and butter. She has some chickens as well. Quite a few actually. Thus, our noontime feast.”
“Would you like to hear my other theory, Bob?” Stuart begged for my attention from the other end of the table. I shot him a small smile. There was something about these two didn’t make sense.
“Aliens!” he shouted. Like a child at a carnival, his face exploded with glee. “Someone from a far off distant galaxy has other plans for our world. Throwing us back into the dark ages was just the first step.”
A fist pounded the table at the other end. “Stuart!” Susan cried out. “Please stop with you childish thinking. Our guests don’t want to listen to such drivel. Be an adult.”
His face shrank along with his shoulders. Going back to his plate, I watched him pick at his carrots with his fork.
“You’ll have to excuse my brother,” Susan apologized. “Sometimes he lets his brilliant mind wander to places that it doesn’t belong.” She set her hands in front of her face. “Say, how would you both like to stay with Matt and I tonight? You don’t deserve to waste your time in that horrid place my brother insisted you stay in last night. Wouldn’t nice soft beds with clean sheets be better?”
I nodded blankly. What didn’t make sense before became clearer in my mind. Both of these people were trouble. But who was running this place: brother or sister? Which one was our real enemy?
Day 321 - continued - WOP
“Maybe you’re not listening, or maybe you’re just too stupid to see what’s going on,” Violet shouted, taking aim at me once again. “There is something really weird about these two. And we shouldn’t trust them at all. I say we leave now, and forget about the salt.”
Lunch was over and Susan encouraged Violet and me to take a stroll around town. Stuart didn’t seem happy with the idea at first, but it grew on him when my teen traveler asked if we could go visit her old house.
For some reason, one thing that almost floored me most as we excused ourselves was we were allowed to roam freely…sans guards. But I knew people would still be keeping an eye on us.
Violet led the way and within minutes we stood in her parents’ former living room. Most of the house had been thoroughly searched I could tell, most likely looking for the missing drugs. If they had left any food behind, Violet couldn’t recall, it was gone now. Even the beds and linens had been removed.
A newer TV sat on the far wall, the one without a window. Fifty inches, I thought. Would have been pretty cool to flip it on, cop a squat on the couch, and watch a couple innings of the Cubs, but we didn’t have the time. Nor the electricity or any more sports teams probably.
“What’s freaking you out?” I asked, watching her twist her fingers through her hair. The girl was going to have massive snarls if her anxiety didn’t get under control soon.
She glared at me as if I were the dense one. “He’s a freak and a killer. I don’t care what he says; everyone at the bar that night said he killed the sheriff. A friend of mine watched the mayor get hung. And they said Callies laughed the whole time.” She started pacing again, working the length of the 20-foot room. Something she had probably done in the past.
“And what’s with that sister of his?” she shot at me, along with a light arm punch on one of her passes. “I mean she seems nice, but so did Dotty’s mom. Dotty was one of my friends.”
The tale stopped too quickly. I opened my arms, signaling for me. She stared blankly at me.
“What happened with your friend’s mom? Finish the story.”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “Well, one night her mom found out her dad was cheating on her. So she took the kids, cut all their hair off, shoved them in a car, and made them watch her burn their house down. She was crazy. She got busted, of course, but she was nuts.”
Strolling to the front window, I stared at the vacant streets. No one seemed to live on this end of town, the south side. I rubbed my forehead, wondering if Violet was losing it.
“That’s a delightful story, Violet,” I began in a somewhat mocking tone. “Not that it has a single thing to do with our current situation.” I turned and faced her again. “Does it?”
She hustled straight at me. “Dotty’s mom was beautiful, sweet, well respected, adored by all.” She snapped her fingers in front of my eyes. “And just like that, she went batshit crazy.”
“I’m lost here. Just who do you think is crazy?”
Violet’s eyes shot open wide. “Both of them,” she vented. “There’s something not right with either of them. And one of them’s gonna blow. I think it’s the woman. We spend the night at her place, tomorrow morning she wants me to call her
momma — or some crazy shit like that — and the next thing you know, we’re all dressed up playing rich crazy people right alongside of them.”
Holding my chin, so my mouth wouldn’t drop open, I nodded thoughtfully, several times…many times actually. “Have you ever been diagnosed with some sort of overactive imagination kind of thing? Maybe something that goes along with your anxiety.”
She walked away, shaking her head. “She’ll probably cut your nuts off, make you one of them kind of servants. Give her baths and shit.”
“A eunuch?” I asked, wondering how she came up with some of this stuff. “Don’t you want to find some kind of memento to take back with you? Something you didn’t have time to grab before?”
“I’m not like that,” she answered blandly, her face becoming emotionless. I’d seen this look before.
“There must be something here you want. Maybe a picture or something that reminds you of your dad.”
“I don’t want to remember my dad,” she answered hastily. “And I don’t want to talk about this no more. We need to leave.”
She was out the front door so fast I had yet to push off the comfy couch. I found her throwing rocks from the gravel driveway into the backyard.
“You don’t know me,” she continued without looking back. “I know you don’t like me, and I don’t care. And you know nothing about my family or what I need.”
Okay, she was 13 and prone to fits of self-pity. That much came with the territory. And I really didn’t go out of my way to spend any time with her. Most of our encounters were of the forced variety, ala getting my finger shot off. But that didn’t mean I didn’t like her…most of the time.
“I like you just fine, Violet. And I know you’ve been through a lot. And you miss your dad—”
“You don’t know nothing about nothing, do you?”
I tried to get her attention, but she ignored me by spinning away. “Tell me something about yourself you think I’ll find interesting. Try me, you might like me.” Her head spun and she glared at me. I gave her a smile.
She spiked a small rock past me, thumping it into the side of her former home. Her lips twitched, her eyes narrowed. We were perhaps at a breakthrough moment.
“My dad was mean to me and my mom, just words but he was awful,” she confessed. Her tone sounded like casual conversation. Something like ‘the weather is so nice today.’ “He’d get mad about something and start in on us. Make us cry. Tell us he was going to leave us both. Just take Nate and leave us to the wolves.”
She shuffled on the porch. “First time it happened I was scared, real scared. I thought Mom and I would starve to death. I was only seven. Then, the more it happened the more I prayed it would stop. By the end, I wanted him to leave. Just so he’d quit telling me and mom how worthless we were. I never knew when it was coming, but once it started, he just kept going, and going, and going. Not until me and mom were on our knees in tears, begging him to stay did he stop.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. What a lame response on my part.
“We didn’t talk about it much because he always promised afterwards he wouldn’t do it again.”
Her eyes showed none of the pain I expected. This had been going on a while I was afraid. And for a moment, just a flicker of a heartbeat, my blood ran cold.
Day 321 - continued - WOP
“When my dad got that cut on his leg, the one that got all infected,” she continued, taking a seat on the corner of the small front porch. “My mom had me empty all the medication out of the pills before we gave it to him.” She looked up and shrugged. “He was in a lot of pain before he died. He begged us, with tears in his eyes, for more medication. And we kept feeding him those empty pills, one after another.”
Her admission was painful, for me. Not so much for her.
“He caused us enough pain, all because he had a bad temper. Mom tried to get us help once. They talked to him and told us to work it out. Probably wasn’t as bad as it seemed, they said. When I killed that man on the road, it was like I was shooting him.”
I tried to part my tight lips, but they were stuck and dry. I don’t know medically what you’d call Violet, or even Marge for that matter. But I knew what they went through wasn’t good.
“That man, Stuart Callies,” she made eye contact briefly, “he’s got a lot of my dad in him. Seems all nice to everyone, but he’s waiting to explode.”
“And his sister?” I asked.
She nodded, scratching at the side of her face. “That’s my mom, waiting for revenge. But probably not on her brother, though. There’s something in her past. And if you’ve lived a day like that, you can see it. I can at least.”
Carefully, I took a spot next to her. There were no tears on Violet’s face. But the lump in my throat made it hard to speak.
“I’m sorry for what you had to go through,” I said. “I didn’t know.”
Cocking her head, she looked at me seriously. “I’m 13 and my life is shit. First my dad, then the world, then a bunch of strangers. It’s not fair. It just ain’t fair.”
She sighed. “I want a normal life, that’s all I want. But people just keeping messing with me. I thought maybe after Dad passed it could be calm. But here I am again; stuck in the middle of a situation where my brain tells me we’re in trouble.”
I laid my hand on top of hers. Once upon a time, I was a teen. But not like Violet. I remember one time at 14 not being allowed to take the L with my friends to a game. I thought my world was over. That was nothing compared to a single moment in her life.
“Let’s just be really careful,” I managed to spit out, sounding terribly inept. “Let’s agree to watch each other’s back, and listen to what the other has to say. Let’s get out of here safe and sound, and get home. Okay?”
She was quiet for a long while. Something else was going through her mind.
“Sometimes I wish I was dead,” she admitted. “Maybe all this pain would be gone.”
Her words hit me hard, real hard. I fought to keep the tears back. Slowly I wrapped my arm over her thin shoulders, squeezing her lightly.
“I’m so glad you’re alive and here with me, Violet. I’m happy to have you, and your mom, and Nate, and all the others in my life.”
“But you’re gonna leave, aren’t you?”
Finally, the truth came out. I had known this young girl for almost six months and for all of that time she looked at me with extreme hatred. Now I knew why.
“You’re nice to me,” she stated in a quiet tone. “Dizzy’s nice to me and he makes my mom happy. I don’t want you to leave. You keep the bad people away.”
Tears streaked my cheeks. Maybe it was the thought of home, so far away, almost unreachable. More likely it was the fact that I was wanted, needed. Even in a place I hardly considered home.
I was the guy with a temper when I arrived in No Where. But fear, followed by a desire to stay alive, took away all of my wrath. I had never so much as struck another human being before I came here. Now, I had killed two men, men who wanted to kill me.
The remorse sometimes became unbearable when I was alone at night. I wept for the souls I extinguished. But in the light of day, in the eyes of a young teen, I had found the truth.
I wasn’t a monster. I was a survivor, a protector. And I was needed.
Now it was time for my own moment of truth.
Day 321 - continued - WOP
It would hurt to say it aloud, but Violet had already displayed what pain looked like when set free. If she could admit that her life wasn’t perfect — or anywhere near that — then I could as well.
“I’m never getting back to Chicago,” I admitted, forcing the words from my lips. “I’m never going to see my wife again. Not my mom or my dad, my brother. None of them.”
I noticed her look up at me from the corner of my eye. There was more.
“I don’t like killing people, but I don’t want to die. The first man,” I shot her a look to see if she was still watching me,
she was. “The first man made me throw up afterwards. Didn’t have a choice, though. The second guy, that meant nothing to me. I just waited too long before pulling the trigger.”
“He shot your finger off,” Violet added, reaching for the stub on the end of my left hand. It was covered in scar tissue and still looked bad. “You were protecting me.”
“Was I?” I made direct eye contact with her, and she shrugged. It was my question after all. “Or was I just pissed at the world, like you, and wanted to take it out on someone? I don’t know.”
“What are you going to do for a woman if you stay?” she asked, changing the subject away from its depressing course. “Mom has Dizzy, Lettie’s too old for you, I’m too young. Aren’t you gonna be lonely?”
Funny, in all this time I’d never thought of another woman other than Shelly. My memory of her waned with each passing day, but until now I’d never given up hope of getting back to her. Her face, her smile, her laugh, her charm faded more, becoming only a distant memory more like a dream of something I never had.
“I’ll be fine,” I answered, trying to smile. “I’ve got to get back to liking me before I can like someone else.”
“Maybe someone will come along.”
A small laugh came out of my mouth. “Yeah, maybe. But for now, we need to concentrate on getting back home in one piece.”
She sat up on her knees and leaned close. She placed a small kiss on my cheek. “I’m glad you’re my friend, Bob.”
I looked at Violet closely. And for a moment, I felt good inside. For a brief time, the world seemed all right.
“I’m glad we’re friends too,” I said, giving her a small hug. “Neither of us are perfect, and that’s okay. We’re fine though. Just fine.”
For the next half hour or so, Violet and I sat on the porch. Neither said much. What more was there to say? The world was an awful place. Both of us were stuck in the middle of No Where almost against our wills. But we had family — well, she had family — and good friends and a place to call home. If that’s all we could have at this time, that was all right too.