by E S Richards
“I do,” Vic nodded. “I don’t want a corpse guarding my store. Especially not one as recognizable as Jenson.”
“Okay. Okay,” Blake repeated the word, the reality of what he’d just suggested they do sinking in. They were going to move a dead body. It was something he’d once acted out in a movie, but of course nothing he’d ever done for real. Very quickly Blake realized he needed to man up a bit more and act like the characters he’d played for real if he was going to keep his head in the zone and get through this disaster. “Out the front, or up to the roof?”
Vic thought about the question for a moment. He hadn’t seen anyone else when he’d been in that apartment building, but that didn’t mean there weren’t more people running around in the street. If there were then he didn’t want to take the risk of them getting into his store while the security gate was up. It would be longer, but he knew they needed to go up and around.
“We’ll go up,” he declared, shifting the chair he had climbed down onto just seconds earlier slightly to the right so it was directly beneath the hatch. “We can get on the fire escape from the apartment I was just in and down that way. It’s quicker than going all the way up and we should be less suspicious if anyone sees us.”
“Okay,” Blake nodded, certain that if anyone saw them moving a dead body, they would look pretty suspicious either way. He didn’t want to argue with Vic though. The storeowner was all he had and Blake didn’t want to lose that tiny advantage. “Let’s go.”
As he followed Vic up into the hatch, Blake suddenly found himself wishing he’d brought a weapon with him. Presumably the rifle Vic had taken earlier was still in the apartment, but Blake himself was entirely unprotected apart from his two fists. Thanks to his job he was naturally trained in several fighting techniques: Krav Maga, Jujitsu, and Judo just a handful of them that he had in his arsenal. But for however well he could throw or block a punch, Blake knew he couldn’t block a bullet.
The escape hatch that the two of them climbed up was narrow, hot, and sweaty. Blake could only assume it had been part of the building’s ventilation system, though he was unsure why it stopped being used as a part of that and became a contingency plan for the man in the shop below. Blake felt like he had only scratched the surface of what went on in Vic’s life and as he continued to climb behind him, he was certain more secrets and surprises would gradually become uncovered.
“Here we are,” Vic spoke down to Blake after about two minutes of climbing, roughly the amount of time that had been left on Jenson’s count down the first time. Looking up, Blake watched Vic’s body tumble off to one side and then the narrow tunnel was illuminated with light for the first time since they’d started climbing. Scrambling up the last few rungs of the ladder before he was at that level, Blake quickly freed himself from the escape hatch and stood to his full height in an abandoned apartment.
“Wow,” he sighed as he looked around the room, uncertain what he should be saying. The apartment looked just like any other. There was nothing peculiar or special about the place, just a standard space that could’ve belonged to anyone. In a way, it was a little disappointing. Blake had half-expected something to be different about the place, but the only thing that wasn’t as it should be was the rifle that lay next to the open window in the bedroom.
“Is he…?” Blake trailed off, wandering over to the window to look out onto the street below. Sure enough Jenson’s body lay on the sidewalk, a tiny pool of blood drying in the street next to him. “Wow,” Blake repeated, unable to take his eyes off of the body. It was the first real dead body he’d ever seen, but it surprised him how normal it looked. If he hadn’t known any better, Blake would’ve believed it was just a still from a movie set, the normalcy of it sending a little chill down his spine.
“Come on, my friend,” Vic spoke from the small kitchen, jimmying open the narrow door that led to the fire escape steps. “Let’s go down and get him.”
“Why don’t we just take the normal stairs?” Blake questioned, looking to the front door of the apartment as he exited the bedroom and deciding that that would be an easier route.
“We don’t know who’s on the other side of that door,” Vic shrugged in reply. “At least from here we can see that the street is empty.”
“Okay,” Blake agreed after a pause, seeing no reason to doubt his companion after everything that had already happened. If Vic thought the fire escape was a better option, then it probably was. Once again, Blake was happy to follow his lead.
“Keep your eyes open,” Vic prompted as he stuck one leg out of the door and onto the metal stairs. “You never know who might be watching.”
“Wait! Don’t you want your rifle?”
“No, my friend,” Vic smiled. “There are plenty more bullets for us to play with later.”
With a confused expression on his face, Blake watched as Vic hopped out onto the fire escape and began to descend. He didn’t understand why Vic was so comfortable going outside without a gun after what had just happened, or why he seemed so blasé about the whole situation. Blake wondered how many men Vic had killed in his lifetime. Was Jenson the first? Or was he just another name added to the bottom of a long list?
Dashing back into the bedroom and grabbing the rifle, Blake slung it over his shoulder before heading out onto the fire escape behind Vic. They were only on the fourth floor and Vic was nearly on the ground before Blake even started climbing down. First kill or thousandth kill, Jenson was still dead and the two of them needed to hide the body before they started worrying about anything else.
“Take his legs,” Vic smiled as Blake joined him on the ground, his eyes noticing the rifle the man wore across his back immediately. Blake was an interesting man and Vic was uncertain just exactly what he thought of him so far. He definitely wasn’t a hindrance in any way and Vic believed that Blake would eventually become an asset—hence why he’d allowed the man to stick around. But there was something about Blake that he had yet to figure out. Something that puzzled him and something that Vic believed—when he figured it out—would shed a lot of light on who the man really was.
“Let’s just move him into this alley and dump him,” Vic continued, feeling little compassion for the dead man whose hands he held in his own.
As Blake looked down at Jenson’s body, his feelings were somewhat different. He felt sorry that a life had been taken, but he didn’t feel any of the guilt or remorse that he had expected. Jenson had been a threat to them and they—or rather, Vic—had done what was needed to eliminate that threat. He picked up the man’s legs with ease and shuffled over to the alley that Vic had nodded to. With little regret, the two of them dumped his body in among a pile of trash bags, throwing a couple over his body to disguise it from any unsuspecting passersby.
“Good work, my friend,” Vic smiled at Blake, impressed by how little resistance or complaining he had been met with. Moving a dead body wasn’t an everyday sort of task, but Blake had handled it like it was, barely even batting an eyelid during the whole fiasco. “Let’s get back inside.”
They scaled the fire escape and were back in the apartment in a matter of minutes, Vic pulling the door to it closed while Blake removed the rifle from his shoulder and placed it on the kitchen counter. Both men stopped and looked at each other for a moment, weighing the other one up against their expectations and trying to figure out exactly what kind of man they had paired up with. Neither of them knew for sure, but perhaps unsurprisingly, as they looked at each other, both Blake and Vic knew they felt safer than they would’ve if they were alone. In the most unlikely of situations, in perhaps the most unlikely of places, they both appeared to have found a friend that they could truly rely on.
“Now what?” Blake asked as he tore his gaze away from Vic and looked around the apartment once more. “Do you think we should stay here, or go back down to the store?”
“I’m heading back down to my store, my friend,” Vic answered plainly. “Do you still want to join me?”
/> Looking back at Vic once more, Blake pondered the question. The apartment was nice and homey, much better equipped than his own apartment would’ve been. This was his chance to potentially avoid all the madness that came with Vic; the guns and the hoard of illegal supplies that lined the walls of his store down below. He could walk out of the front door and go back to his own life, forgetting everything that had just happened.
Or could he? A dead man lay hidden in the street below and for the first time in Blake’s life, he felt like he was excited about what was to come. He was terrified, of course. But he felt like now was the time to take a chance and to take a risk. He lived his life acting like a fearless warrior on the screen and pretending to be someone he was not. Maybe now, with Vic by his side, Blake could become the man he’d always wanted to be. The man he’d always pretended to be.
Vic stared at Blake with emotionless eyes as the stuntman made his decision, waiting silently to discover what it would be. Inside he knew the answer though. There was a twinkle in Blake’s eyes that told Vic he was ready for adventure. The setting for it all might not be the most romantic or the most straightforward, but the volcanic eruption had given Blake a chance to do something that Vic suspected he never thought he’d get for real.
“I do,” Blake finally replied, picking the rifle up from the kitchen counter and walking toward Vic. “Let’s go.”
Chapter 15
Sitting on the flat roof above his porch, Michael could just make out Mia’s group walking away into the distance through the murky sky that surrounded his home. He wore a scarf over his mouth and nose like Mia had instructed, but as he could literally see the bits of ash and debris floating in the air, he wondered whether it would be enough.
Knitting his fingers together, Michael held his hands behind his head and watched them go, thinking about whether he’d made the right decision. Introducing Mia to his mother earlier that morning had been a mistake; he realized that now. It had done nothing except get the two women fired up and now his mother was almost beside herself with anger that neither he nor Angelica had left the village. She didn’t understand why they were staying behind for her, especially when she had told them countless times to go.
It had undoubtedly been the hardest decision of Michael’s life. He knew that if he made it to Portland, he had a chance of seeing his children again. If he stayed at home, that chance was dead—as he eventually would be. But as much as he loved his children, more than he had ever thought possible, he couldn’t bring himself to abandon his mother.
Michael had only been four years old when his father died. Despite his age, he remembered it like it was yesterday. Every tiny little detail was ingrained in his mind forever; all he had to do was close his eyes and he was there again. It had happened in the very house he sat above now. In the one room he saw every day, the one place he couldn’t avoid. His mom had been out somewhere when Michael returned from school, so no one else was around. That meant he had been the one to find his father hanging from the light fixture.
Even after all these years, Michael had never asked his mother why his father killed himself. There had been a note on the floor under his father’s body, but it wasn’t one that Michael had ever read. All he knew was how it had affected his mother. She’d tried to take her own life no more than six months later, something that Michael hadn’t been aware of until much later in his own life. In fact, something that he hadn’t been aware of until he was twelve years old, when he found his mother passed out in a pool of her own vomit and learned that she had tried to take her own life on many other occasions too.
That was just after Angelica’s father had left them. He was only in Michael’s life for a short period of time, making his first official appearance just before Michael’s ninth birthday. His mom had been pregnant with Angelica only a matter of weeks later and very quickly their family of two became a family of four.
Again, Michael never asked his mom why Angie’s dad walked out on them all. One day he was there when they had breakfast and then when Michael and Angelica came home that evening, he was gone. Angie was only four years old, just like Michael had been when he lost his father. Albeit in a very different manner. Despite that though, the pain was still the same. Everyone still felt abandoned and everyone still felt pain. None more so than Michael’s mother.
All Michael had to do was close his eyes and he could hear his mother crying. The walls in their house were thin and it was a sound that had kept him awake at night through most of his childhood. He remembered holding Angie in the weeks after her father had left and letting her cry on his shoulder, because their mother was too stricken by grief to look after her. It wasn’t something that Michael held against his mother, instead more something that he resented Angelica’s father for. No woman deserved to go through that much pain.
Throughout it all, Michael had seen himself as his mother’s protector. Even when he grew up and opportunities arose for him to leave his home behind and move on, he turned them down. Without a real male role model of his own, Michael had fashioned himself into what he believed a man should be. He put his mother’s needs before any of his own, because she had never been lucky enough to find a man who would do that for her. Throughout everything, Michael was determined to be that man.
Life had been hardest when he’d met Sara and very quickly—and accidentally—got her pregnant. Doing what he thought a true man should do, Michael proposed and married her, encouraging Sara to move into the village with him. Deep down he’d known she hadn’t liked it there from the start, but in his attempt to be a real man and a good husband, Michael had forced himself to overlook those details.
Their relationship had been a whirlwind romance. Sara’s flight out of Helena Regional Airport had been catastrophically delayed and Michael—working the night shift that Thursday—had stayed up all night talking to her. Very quickly they had fallen for each other, and even though Sara lived several hundred miles away, she uprooted her life and sacrificed her future for Michael. He understood that now, but at the time, Michael hadn’t been able to see what was right in front of him.
He was blinded by the desire to be a real man and so everything with Sara had snowballed so quickly. It didn’t take more than a year of marriage for Michael to realize that he didn’t truly love Sara, but by that point it was too late. Logan had been born and after what he had experienced with his own father and with Angelica’s, Michael refused to be the type of man who abandoned his family. A few years later, he and Sara had even had another child, Lucie, in an attempt to save their marriage. That was the point when Michael finally saw sense and realized what he was doing. He wasn’t being a good man by trying to make the marriage work—it was over, and a true man would be humble enough to accept that.
So eventually, Sara, Logan, and Lucie had left, moving on with their lives and leaving Michael behind. He and Sara had parted on good terms, his intentions always good, just the execution of his actions lacking in thought. He only wanted the best for his family and it took Michael some time, but he finally realized that the way he was acting was not it.
It had taken some time—and an immense amount of self-loathing—but finally he had reached that conclusion. For all the ways that having a wife and children had made Michael a better man though, it had left him completely hung up on his abandonment issues. That was where it all stemmed from. He had watched his mother be abandoned twice and he had later been forced to abandon his own children. Now that he was faced with the option of leaving his village to save his own life or staying behind and living out his final few days by his mother’s side, there wasn’t really a choice for him. Michael would never abandon his mother—even if she didn’t see it that way. He was finally being the man that he had always tried to be and no one could change his mind.
“Mike?”
Angelica’s voice silenced Michael’s thoughts, his half-sister exiting the house and looking upwards. She knew that he liked to sit on top of the porch to think; it was unsurp
rising that was where she found him now.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” Michael replied. “You?”
Angelica nodded. She wanted to say something to Michael, to thank him for not leaving them behind and going with Mia and Jorge, but she couldn’t find the words. She had known she would never leave the village—no matter how much confidence she acted with when she was working in the airport, Angelica was deathly afraid of what lay beyond their valley and had no intention of ever finding out. Even if that condemned her to death. With Michael, she hadn’t been so sure. He had children out there that he could’ve gone to. She didn’t need to know why. Angelica was just happy that she still had her brother with her.
“Yeah,” she finally replied. “Help me up?”
Reaching down, Michael offered his hand to Angelica, gently pulling her body so she was able to scramble up the wall and sit beside him. Mia’s group was still just visible in the distance, the eleven of them hiking up one of the larger hills in an attempt to reach high ground. Once they were at the summit they would be out of view and it would be like they had never visited the small village at all.
“Who went with them?” Michael asked, uncertain which of the people he had grown up with had moved on. From the size of the group in the distance he knew it couldn’t have been many, but he was still curious who he would never see again.
“Stuart, Deb, Billy, Ethan, and Miles,” Angelica replied, remembering the names she had been told earlier.
“Huh,” Michael shrugged. “I thought Tom and Brady would go with them too.” For everything that Michael loved about the village where he lived, there were five things that he hated. He would’ve moved away years ago if it wasn’t for his mother and the horrible cancer that had claimed her body and rendered her legs useless, relegating her to a bed for the remainder of her life.