Gonna come visit him tonight.
Why don’t you leave him alone?
Me and him got a lot in common.
He’s nothing like you, nothing.
Oh, that’s where you’re wrong. You’re so wrong…
They followed the tracks and in time spied a house that was set well back. As a group they approached it. As they got closer they noticed the doors and windows were boarded up and the snow around the home looked untrammeled.
Gwen glanced at Mickey and raised an eyebrow. He stuck his lower lip out and motioned with his palms up. They stood together surveying the house, the surrounding trees and countryside and saw nothing. Though it was still light out the sun had fallen behind the bare tree branches.
Bear slid out of his pack and, with a Glock at one side and his mace at the other, he started forward.
“You three wait here,” Buddy said, sliding out of his saddle bags, the silenced 9mm in one hand, the hatchet in his other.
“That a hawk or an eagle?” Mickey nodded to a creature in the air.
“That’s an eagle,” said Julie.
“How do you know?”
“Eagles are a lot bigger than hawks. Longer wingspan.”
“Huh.”
Buddy stepped in Bear’s tracks. The snow around the house was up to his knees and he was a tall man. They reached the house and looked it over up close. The doors and windows on the first and second floors had been sealed from the inside with planks of wood. Without a word between them they set off in opposite directions, circling the house, giving it the once around. Vinyl siding had fallen off and lay half buried in the snow. They met up again at the back.
“Looks quiet,” Buddy said.
“Cellar door around the other side of the house,” Bear noted. “Locked on the outside.”
“It’ll do.”
Together they approached the back of the house and Bear opened the screen door. Through glass panes he could see the neatly aligned planks indicating the inner door was sealed shut from inside.
“Doesn’t look like whoever’s in there ever left,” Buddy said.
Bear broke the glass out of one pane with his mace and tapped on the wood behind it a few times, then again, harder.
They stood and listened but couldn’t hear anything from inside.
Bear broke the other panes and took a step back. Buddy held the screen door open as Bear swung the mace and splintered the planks. It took them a couple of minutes, and they made a lot of noise, but soon they forced the door open by pressing their weight against it.
Mickey, Julie, and Gwen had joined them in the backyard and stood looking around at the darkening sky.
“We’re going to check the house,” Buddy said. “There’s a chance someone is still in it.”
Mickey walked over to a car caked in a thick layer of snow. He brushed a swath of white from the hood and looked at the paint beneath.
Bear had already gone inside the house. Buddy had to unscrew the head of his flashlight a bit and shake it. After jarring the batteries inside the torch lit, and he screwed the top snug into place.
He stepped into a kitchen. Somewhere in another room the floor creaked under Bear, and the other man’s flashlight and green laser site tracked.
Buddy looked around. Weak light from the ending day leaked in through cracks between the planks secured over the windows. Dust particles flittered through the shafts of light. The kitchen had been left clean. One of the walls was discolored. Upon inspection he saw it was mold. He considered opening the fridge but decided against it. Whatever was in there was probably decomposed beyond the point of stinking, but he had no desire to see it.
“Buddy,” Bear called from somewhere else in the house.
He found the other man in a living room. A couch and two chairs were set around a coffee table low to the ground. The opposite wall was taken up with an entertainment center complete with flat screen television, cable box, DVD/VCR, and stereo.
The remains of four people sat in the living room—one in each chair, two on the couch. The bodies were in varying states of decay and desiccation. They almost didn’t look real to Buddy. He stood next to Bear, panning over them with the beam of their flashlights. A thick layer of dust covered everything. The green laser site mounted on the Glock tracked it from body to body.
“What do you think happened to them?” Buddy asked.
“I don’t know. Suicide?”
Skeletal hands rested on their laps or beside them, unbound.
Maybe they all took pills?
“Look.”
Bear turned his flashlight beam on the coffee table around which they sat. It was bare except for an old TV-Guide and a single sheet of loose-leaf paper.
Buddy walked over and picked up the dusty paper. He blew on it and sneezed, then read what was written and showed it to Bear.
“Who the fuck is Ted?”
Don’t let Ted out of the basement! Was scrawled across the paper in chicken scratch.
They searched the remainder of the first floor and found a sealed door that led down into a basement. Buddy rapped on it with the butt of his 9mm. He and Bear waited around but there was no commotion or any indication Ted or anything else remained in the cellar. The basement door didn’t open from the other side, so they surveyed the remainder of the home, noting the hardwood on the second floor carpeted with a blanket of dust, undisturbed, thinking no one had been moving in this house for some time. The wall in one of the bedrooms, much like the wall in the kitchen, was covered with mold.
Satisfied it was safe, Buddy went and got the others.
Bear shined the flashlight around the room. Even through the thick dust and strands of cobwebs he could see it was a nursery, with the walls papered in a soft pink. There was a dresser and a changing station with a box of baby wipes and a crib.
He walked over to the crib and looked into it, standing there for some time contemplating what it held.
“That’s a baby Joey,” Buddy said from beside him. Bear had not heard Buddy come into the room and had been unaware the man stood next to him but he was not startled and did not move.
“What’s a baby Joey?”
“You know, Meathead.”
Bear wasn’t sure how to take the comment, or where it came from. “You don’t have to be belligerent about it.”
“I’m not. Meathead. You know, Archie Bunker.”
“The TV show?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m not getting you.”
“Archie’s son-in-law. The Polack. Mike. Rob Reiner.”
“Oh yeah. That’s what Archie called him.”
“Right. Baby Joey was the kid Mike and Gloria had. That’s a baby Joey doll.”
Bear hadn’t seen a doll in a long, long time, and he wouldn’t have known this was a baby Joey doll or whatever if Buddy hadn’t told him. He wondered if the other man knew what he was talking about. Buddy had periods of clarity, and then he had… He wondered how to categorize Buddy’s episodes. Breaks from reality? Dementia?
“We used to watch a lot of re-runs Inside,” Buddy said by way of explanation.
Bear was a hard man, had done time, and could recognize other hard men. He had long suspected Buddy had been a guest of the state at some point or other, but it was never anything he’d chosen to broach with the other man.
He decided to go for broke.
“What were locked up for?”
Buddy did not answer. Bear turned and saw the other had gone as quietly as he had come. He turned back to the crib and pondered the baby boy doll lying inside.
“You got a thing for Paul Newman?” Gwen ventured.
“Nah,” Mickey said. “I got a thing for Paul Newman movies.”
“Mind if I share this room?”
“Come on in.”
He was stretched out on a king sized bed in one of the upstairs bedrooms, his booted feet on the mattress. His head and shoulders were propped up on a pile of pillows and he had his portable DVD
player on his lap.
Well, I’ve always thought the law was meant to be interpreted in a lenient manner, Hud Bannon was telling his father and a group of other men out on the Texas range. Sometimes I lean one way and sometimes I lean the other.
Gwen sat down on the bed next to Mickey and propped her M16A4 against the mattress near her. She unlaced her boots enough to pull one then the other off her feet. The room was dark, lit only by the glow from the DVD player’s screen. Mickey didn’t get up but scooted over, giving her some room. He had his assault shotgun on the comforter next to him and it rested between them. Gwen climbed under the covers, turned on her side, and rested her head on one of her hands.
“What I said to you the other day? That was really mean and I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Mickey said.
“I was trying to hurt your feelings because, well, I guess I was scared.”
“It’s okay.”
“What is this movie?”
“Hud.”
“Do you think they’ll ever make movies again?”
“Jeez. I sure hope so.”
“Was it tough for you?”
“What’s that?”
“Leaving your movie collection behind. In Eden.”
“Hell yeah. I can’t lie.”
“How many did you bring with you?”
Mickey smiled. “A few.”
“The ones you couldn’t do without?”
“The essentials? No. A bunch of westerns. I mean, some of them are my favorite movies of, like, all time.”
The windows were closed and boarded over but were doing a poor job of keeping the cold out. Still, it was better than spending the night outside in the snow.
“Can I ask you something, Mickey?”
“Shoot.”
“Were you married? Did you have any kids?”
“Divorced. One boy.”
“You were a dad?” Gwen smiled.
“Sure was.”
“How old was your son?”
“Twelve. He was twelve.”
The house creaked around them.
“What was his name?”
“Forrest.”
“What did you and…Forrest…you know, what did you do for fun?”
“We watched movies.”
“What was his favorite movie?”
“Forrest was like me. He didn’t have a favorite movie. I mean, how do you pick one movie, right? Or one anything for that matter?”
“Well, what kind of movies did he like?”
“Forrest liked westerns.”
Mickey watched the movie and Gwen watched him. She thought of her husband Bobby, murdered down in a basement by Julie’s boyfriend only several months ago. She felt no anger towards Julie. Harris had deceived her. He had deceived them all.
After some time Homer Bannon remarked that It don’t take long to kill things, not like it takes to grow.
Mickey looked over at Gwen. Her eyes were closed and she was breathing calmly, asleep. He curled his toes in his boots and returned to his movie.
You know something Fantan? shouted Paul Newman. This world is so full of crap, a man’s gonna get it sooner or later whether he’s careful or not.
The credits rolled and he turned off the movie then the DVD player. The room was pitch-black. He laid the portable player on the bed next to him, well away from the edge of the mattress. He rested there with his head and shoulders propped up and thought about his child, taken from him, of Julie and the baby within her, of Bear and Buddy. He listened to Gwen breathing next to him and sometime later he fell asleep.
Buddy unzipped his sleeping bag and spread it out on the living room floor. His head rested on one of his saddle bags. He looked up into the dark where the ceiling was. Bear was somewhere in the room with him, but he could neither see nor hear him. The dead family was there too, seated in their chairs next to one another, together until the end.
He grew restless listening to nothing and turned over on one elbow, unbuckling a saddle bag then rummaging about inside. Buddy found his mini-mag and switched it on, shining it inside the saddle bag. Boxes of ammunition for his weapons, his bayonet, his meds. He picked up an amber vial and looked at the label. Sesaquel. He shook it and there was a rattle. A few tabs left in the vial.
The Resperdol vial was empty. Two tabs left in the Zyprexal. The Thorazine. God, he hated taking the Thorazine. It knocked him on his ass. More vials, most empty, the others almost empty. Shit.
Buddy shut his flashlight off, lay back down, and stared towards the ceiling, his hands folded on his chest over the mini-mag. Mickey and Gwen and Julie were up on the second floor. Down in the basement there was probably something that had once been human and named Ted. Here in the dark was a dead family and a one-time bad man who went by the name Bear, with another bad man who went by the name Buddy.
Truth was, Buddy admitted to himself, he was scared.
Something was happening to him. Something he couldn’t control and he couldn’t understand. It had happened to him before, but not in a long time, and he had sworn to himself it never would again, but…he was scared, scared in a way he hadn’t been scared in a long, long time.
Creak
His gaze darted forward, peering into the dark ahead. Was Bear awake and moving around?
Creak-creak
No. It was coming from another room.
Buddy.
He recognized the voice and froze where he lay. He opened his mouth but nothing would come out of it. Bear, he had to wake Bear. His mouth was dry and his breath came to him in short, ragged gasps.
The thing in the dark was walking somewhere down here with them.
Hey boy, thought much about me lately?
It was in the room with them. Buddy tried to move, to roll over for his 9mm, but he was paralyzed.
Creak-creak-creak
It was nearly upon him. He closed his eyes, hyperventilating, and tried to extricate himself mentally from the situation, thinking of Henry and Monique and their smiling little faces, frozen in time. That freed him up enough so his trembling hand could turn the mini-mag around on his chest as his—
It’s lonely here, jig, why don’t you—
—thumb flicked the switch on, the beam illuminating the room. The corpses were in their seated positions, the room otherwise empty, no nightmare creature skulking through the shadows.
The hand was enormous and it splayed itself on his chest and held him in position. His immediate instinct was to fight but he was pinned to the floor. When he went to scream in fear and anguish he found a second giant hand clasped over his mouth and he realized—
“Buddy, shhhhh. Buddy, be quiet. Calm down now.”
Bear. Bear, oh god. He relaxed immediately. It was Bear stooping over him, holding him down, Bear’s mighty hand across his mouth, stifling his cries.
They made eye contact and Bear saw the recognition in his eyes.
“I’m going to take my hand off your mouth now. But you can’t scream. You can’t wake up the others, okay?”
Buddy nodded mutely and Bear took his hand off the man’s mouth. He gasped and gulped down breaths of air and Bear waited until he could speak.
“Are you okay? Now, I mean?”
“Y-yeah.”
Crusade (Eden Book 2) Page 8