Nick could have easily walked away unnoticed, but he realized he wanted to be here. Even though the work upset him, he felt it was important somehow to be a part of it. He pushed the wheelbarrow over to the two men laying down brick and began helping them. After an hour or so there was a huge walkable section of patio and it would certainly look nice once it was completed.
Someone came around and passed around bottles of water and Nick did what some of the other men did, taking a deep swig of water before pouring the rest of it over his head.
After a half hour or so someone else tapped him on the shoulder and pointed over his head.
“Ed fell off the roof,” the man said. “I need you up there more than down here.”
Nick turned for the nearest ladder and made his way up. He picked up a claw hammer and studied what a man nearby was doing, tearing off shingles and exposing the wood underneath. After a moment he thought he had a basic idea of what to do and followed suit.
They broke for lunch a few hours later, a man coming by, tossing sandwiches and bottles of water to everyone. Nick sat on the porch with three men who didn’t speak English and ate his in silence. It didn’t taste like anything to him and he suspected even if his taste buds were working properly it wouldn’t have. The mouth-feel of bread and meat with what he supposed was mustard was tolerable and his stomach didn’t object to it.
He spotted the tall, older guy who had slapped him on the shoulder earlier, talking to someone and pointing at the house. Based on Phoebe’s messages, she hadn’t wanted any of this work done. She had been very apologetic in the voicemail, respecting the agreement she and Nick had made. From the very start he had pegged her for someone who always followed the rules and thought that would make for easy going between them.
Nick didn’t blame her for any of the work Pop-Pop had begun on the house, especially considering he was now participating in it. He figured they would have to get into some kind of conversation about what was going on. He hadn’t figured out how that was going to happen yet.
Phoebe usually came home around six. He snuck a peek at his phone and saw it was one-thirty. He hadn’t seen anyone go in the house, but wondered if there was work going on inside as well. He concentrated on the old man, trying to listen to what he was saying. Surprisingly, he could.
“I need to have this all done by five-thirty,” the older man was saying. “I want that egress window done. These guys are done with lunch, get somebody in the basement now.”
The other man nodded, then headed in Nick’s direction.
“Necesito a alguien que trabaje en el sótano.”
“Uhh,” Nick said. He was what people would have described as olive-skinned and could have been easily mistaken for a multitude of nationalities. Since he was sitting next to a Mexican man, the man Pop-Pop had been speaking to must have assumed they both were.
Nick’s porch partner stuffed the rest of his sandwich in his mouth and shook his head. The man looked at Nick.
“Ver Miguel abajo.”
Nick was about to tell him he didn’t speak what sounded like Spanish when the words came to him. He needed someone to go downstairs and to see Miguel.
“Sí,” Nick said. He remembered a brief flash of sitting in a classroom and a teacher speaking American-accented Spanish. “Me llamo Nick,” he said and held out his hand.
“Just get downstairs,” the man said and walked away.
Nick made a show of finding the door to go in. Once he was in the mudroom he stopped himself from taking off his shoes. The workers inside would have kept theirs on. No shoes in the house was a Phoebe rule.
He stepped into the house proper and looked around. Nothing seemed different, but then they were working in the basement.
The basement.
Nick’s bed was down there. Could her grandfather already know? He took the stairs two at a time and looked around the corner. The mattress was gone.
He wasn’t as angry about that as he had been about seeing the work being done to the house. Maybe it was because he had no positive memories with the makeshift bed. He was starving for a connection to his past and seeing these men changing it was upsetting to the paltry few memories he had still.
“They probably were squatters. Doubt whoever owns the place even knows that bed was down here.” He turned and looked at the man standing in the doorway. The man was older, white-haired, hunched over like he had a bad back, and broad-shouldered. “Come on,” he said waving Nick in with his fingers.
Nick walked into a room he’d not been in since being back home. Two blank shelves made out of doors were pushed against the far wall. They probably had been the interior doors before the hollow, faux wood white ones had been put in. The shelves had been pushed to one side of the room and there was a big ‘X’ drawn on the outside wall.
“I already got the winda out, I can’t haul that thing around n’more.” He gestured toward the floor where some kind of electric saw was next to him. “The hole is all dug out, just need you ta do the honors. Cut along the lines and it should come free and we can walk right out. Try not ta use your arms.” The old man made and up and down motion with his arms. “Hold it steady and move with your body nice and slow.”
Nick grabbed the saw and held it up to inspect the blade. The muscles in his skinny forearms flexed with each movement. He took a step toward the wall, not wanting to do what he was about to do. This was a good change to the house, but one more step away from the house he had known.
The handle was comfortable in his hands. He planted one foot behind the other, put his thumb on the button to turn it on, reared back the saw back to chest high and stepped up to the wall.
Cutting was easy and relatively fast. After he’d made shallow cuts along all the lines, the old man had him go over them again, sawing deeper the second go around. Nick put the saw on the floor where he’d gotten it and he and the man pulled the cut pieces out, carefully avoiding the sharp edges.
Nick climbed into the well and stood up. The soil in front of him came up to about chest level and he looked around. There was a small construction vehicle with a forked shovel attached to it. That had to have been what they'd used to make that big pile of dirt a few feet away from the vehicle. Nick climbed out.
“A little help here?” He turned to see the old man reach a hand up like a zombie crawling from a grave. Nick knelt and grasped his hand, pulling gently so as not to hurt the old timer.
“Much obliged,” the old man said. He looked around, then at Nick. “That’s pretty decent work you did back there. You been on the job long?”
“No, it’s my first day,” Nick said. Despite not liking what was happening to his house and the old man’s part in it, Nick found himself liking him.
“Why, look at you. Speaking the King’s English and everything.” The man looked genuinely surprised as if he hadn’t considered that Nick had understood a word he had said until that moment. He extended a hand. “They call me Snoop, on account of me having a beagle when I was a boy and that damned comic strip.”
“I’m Nick,” he said and they shook. Nick realized something was wrong before he saw Snoop’s eyes bulge and his hands go to his neck. About two dozen feet away near the street a wood chipper was going and a man was constantly feeding branches into it.
Nick’s senses were sharp, zooming in on the wound on Snoop’s neck. The air was flooded with the aroma of hot copper and it smelled wonderful.
He grabbed the old man by the throat and pushed him to the ground, peeling his hands away from the gash.
Nick felt deep temptation to drink from the red spray coming from the old man’s neck, barely managing to hold himself back. Feeding from him seemed so right, the smell saturating his brain.
“Hey, what the hell are you doin’ to Snoop?” someone shouted. The voice had sounded like it had come from a long distance away, but it was enough to bring him back to his senses.
“He’s hurt!” Nick said, not looking away from the gash. He felt footstep
s and then someone was standing over him.
Snoop’s eyes began to roll and Nick realized he must have been cutting off his air; his hand was the only thing keeping the old man from bleeding to death, though.
Someone knelt next to him, sliding a hand beneath Nick’s. It was rougher, older, and by the way he took hold of Snoop’s neck, more experienced. Snoop was slapping at Nick’s arm when a new hand pushed his out of the way. Snoop began gasping for air and fighting feebly at the muscular arms holding him down. Nick looked at the third man and realized he was looking at Pop-Pop. He had his shirt off, exposing a muscular upper frame, the doffed shirt wrapped tightly around his other hand.
“You’re going to be okay, old guy.”
Nick thought that was a little funny. The two of them looked like they couldn’t have been more than five years apart and he wasn’t entirely sure who was younger.
“Somebody oughta call an ambulance.” Pop-Pop’s voice was calm, reassuring. He had taken command of the situation without raising his voice at all. Nick wasn’t surprised to learn later he was military.
The man who had ordered Nick into the basement, the foreman Nick supposed, pulled out a cell phone and called.
He stepped as far back as he could from the crowd, from Snoop especially. His blood was still pungent in Nick’s nose. He felt a pull that he wasn’t certain he could resist again if he got too close. For a moment, he considered turning and running away, leaving his paltry few things behind. Then the ambulance came and his curiosity got the better of him. He watched the two EMTs come with one of those beds on wheels.
They got Snoop loaded onto it and let the wheels out, although it was impossible to roll it on the lumpy lawn. The muscular old guy who had shouldered Nick aside insisted on walking right with him and quieted some of the other workers who wanted to carry Snoop.
No sooner had the ambulance pulled off when something big hit Nick in the back. He went down hard and before he could flip over someone’s knee pressed between his shoulder blades.
“If Snoop dies, you die first,” a deep voice said.
“I didn’t—it wasn’t me.” One of Nick’s lungs felt on the verge of bursting and he could hardly breathe from the pressure.
Then something cold and jagged pressed against his cheek. Nick smelled metal and when the serrated blade bit into his cheek he recognized it was a knife. He smelled his blood too, which wasn’t hot and sweet like Snoop’s.
“Hold it, son!” someone said. Probably the man who had helped Snoop. His voice was a mix between calm and alarm. Like he’d already seen everything that was going to happen over the next few minutes and he knew exactly what to do.
The person holding Nick down didn’t move.
At least he doesn’t have the knife to my throat, Nick thought.
“I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but you’re not going to kill him by slicing his cheek off. Put it to his throat.”
What the hell?
“Lift his chin up first so you can put the blade right on his Adam’s apple.” Nick’s hair was short so the man had to palm the top of his head and pull back. Nick cooperated, hoping—praying—this was going some way other than how it looked. The man’s weight shifted and he quickly moved the knife to Nick’s throat.
“Good,” the other man said. Nick was pretty certain it was the muscular old guy. He knew Nick hadn’t hurt Snoop, hadn’t he? Could he have known what Nick was? Had he seen the look of hunger or something in his eyes?
He had to do something right now. He couldn’t just lie on the ground while his murderer was tutored through slitting his throat. Nick focused his eyes. There were at least a half dozen people standing about ten feet away, watching, the muscly old man, now with his shirt back on, at the center of them. He had an all-white high top and a dour look on his face.
“Now I’m not going to tell you killing this man isn’t worth the cost, you’ve already calculated that for yourself.” Nick began to slide one hand toward the knife arm of the man on top of him. If the guy kept talking long enough maybe he could do something. What, exactly, Nick had no idea.
For starters, getting the man off him before he cut was just the beginning. One of Nick’s legs was going numb from the constant pressure on his back. He was certain he couldn’t take any one of these guys in a fight and if they grabbed him, he was done for. It might be better to let the one who started the work to finish it.
“Snoop’s dying because of this one!” the man on top of him said. He regripped Nick’s head.
“No. Dammit, no,” Nick mumbled. He looked again at the group of men surrounding him. Actually, only the old guy looked like he couldn’t care less about what was happening. The others looked afraid. Maybe they didn’t like what was happening. He looked at the old man again.
The old man was looking back. Really looking, like he was trying to tell Nick something with his eyes.
“You hold all the cards here. Whether he goes sideways or stops right there. When you grab a hold of him the choice is all on you.”
“What?” the man on top of Nick said. Nick was thinking the same thing.
The man nodded and then it clicked. He was talking to Nick.
Grab a hold of him… goes sideways…
Nick put his hand on the ground, slowly sliding it under his attacker’s elbow. He reached up as high as he could, snatched a handful of shirt and yanked. The man let out a yelp of surprise and fell over easily.
Nick pushed up onto his knees, not in any shape for a fight, especially with a knife-wielding hothead. He saw the man he’d been eating lunch with on the porch a short while ago, teeth bared in fury, half a second away from leaping at him.
Then came a blur of motion as the old man smashed his knee into the other man’s face. He must have come off his feet to do it because Nick saw both boots plant when he landed. The man with the knife lay motionless and the old man sauntered over and kicked the weapon out of his half open hand.
“Emilio is a little quick to jump to the wrong conclusion. I’ll have him taken back to the room.” Nick turned to see the foreman ushering a couple of men forward. They picked him up by the arms and dragged him off.
The old man turned and held a hand out to him. “I’m sorry about all this. You okay?”
“Yeah. Fine.” Nick took the hand and was yanked onto his feet.
“You speak English?” the old man asked.
“Well, yeah. Don’t you?”
The old man eyed him, then turned and began to walk away. “Come inside. Let’s get you cleaned up.”
Nick wasn’t sure if his legs were working yet. He chanced a step; so far, so good. He took another, then another and he was on his way.
At first, the only physical signs of the old man’s age were his hair and some minor lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth. Then he slid on a pair of bifocals and Nick would have placed him closer to seventy than sixty.
“Nothing’s too bad,” he said, dabbing at Nick’s neck with a cotton ball doused with alcohol. “You are going to need a stitch or two on your cheek. Either I can do it for you or you can go to a hospital where they’ll ask for identification and once your name pops up in the registry you get a phone call and have to explain what you were doing here.”
A chill ran through Nick. Obviously, Pop-Pop knew what he was.
“What are you, looking for work?”
“Yeah,” Nick said honestly. He left out the part about him actually living here.
“You said your name is Nick, right?”
He nodded and winced when the man poked too hard into his neck.
“I’m Colonel Adolph Stone, retired. The way you acquitted yourself out there, you have earned the right to call me Dolph.”
“Okay. Dolph. Sir.” Dolph smiled with one corner of his mouth and Nick got the hint. “Okay, Dolph.” He didn’t know exactly what he’d done to ‘acquit himself’. Dolph had done almost all the work, coaching Emilio into putting himself in a vulnerable position and then knock
ing him unconscious. If that was the way the man wanted to see it, Nick wasn’t about to correct him.
Dolph had sterilized his hands and was wearing latex gloves that looked like he couldn’t have had much feeling left. At first Nick had assumed it was to prevent the risk of his cuts getting infected but then he realized Dolph had known what he was. There was a great deal he couldn’t recall from his time in the Center, although he did remember his condition wasn’t contagious. Scientists didn’t know exactly how one percent of the world had gotten infected; fluid exchange of any kind wasn’t it, though.
That didn’t stop people from taking precautions.
He pushed the thought away. Not all people were that way.
Dolph picked up the needle and thread off the plate he had on the table. It was an actual sewing needle and an actual dinner plate. He steeled himself for what was coming.
“You’re gonna feel a little pinch. Try your best not to flinch.” It hurt more than a little pinch. He felt the needle sliding through his cheek and it also felt like he was being poked in the eye. Maybe it was a sympathetic nerve thing, he didn’t know if there were such a thing. Dolph moved unhurriedly. He tied off the stitches and snipped them with the pair of scissors on the paper towel.
“Those will stay in for a week and then you can cut them out. Maybe you can get a friend to do it for you if you’re too squeamish. I made them as tight together as I could so you have as small a scar as possible.”
“How many stitches?”
“Four.” Dolph was already packing things away. He threw the cotton ball, gloves, needle and remaining thread all in the trash and took out the bag. He walked it out to the bin in the garage, came back in, and washed his hands.
“It’s getting too late. I’ll drive you. First, you need some chow. You hungry?”
“No.” Nick shook his head.
“Sure you are. Your stomach and your brain just aren’t on talking terms. How long you been out?”
“Three months,” Nick said uncomfortably.
“Where are you staying?”
“With a friend. Only until I can find work and move into my own space.”
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