A Plague Upon Your Family zf-2

by Mark Tufo

  “We gots to get that minivan off the road.”

  “Gots huh? I don’t think you should be driving anything, Mike.” Tracy said.

  “Aw it’s not like he’s going to get a DUI. Loosen up girl.” My mother-in-law said between swigs.

  “Mom! Don’t encourage him.”

  “You still got that tractor Carol?”

  “Actually had it running about a month or so ago to plow the driveway. Don’t really have a desire much now to go out. “Though if you hadn’t brought this whiskey I might’ve been changing my mind soon.”

  CHAPTER 22

  Now the question was, did I want to plow the driveway and let any old schmoe have a direct route up or did I want to drag the minivan and all its contents up here. If I dragged it up here and something happened where we needed to get out again we were screwed. Plow the driveway it was then. If anybody came a knockin we’d deal with it at that point. Not like this was I-95 to begin with. I went back into the house and put on everything and anything that I thought would stave off the frigid cold. Whisky glow was only going to get me so far. And yes I know that alcohol doesn’t really warm you up. It does the opposite in fact by thinning your blood. It just makes you FEEL warmer. I had bundled up near to the point of becoming a beach ball with appendages and was three steps down the porch before I realized I had forgotten something. Now I know this was the safest I’ve felt in weeks but still I marched back in pretending to ignore my wife’s questioning gaze and grabbed my nine-millimeter.

  The barn, where the tractor was located, was about 100 yards or so from the house. I encountered six death blotches between the house and the barn. I shook my head in marvelment of how Carol had survived. Had she slept? It wasn’t like she could post a guard. She didn’t have a dog anymore. Bastion had died I think two summers ago, struck by the tractor. Tracy had cried for near on a week. Her father had got that coon hound the day he found out he had cancer. He often told people that on his worst days of getting chemo, it was the tail wagging, tongue-licking Bastion that helped him get through the day. Even on his deathbed he had told Carol that the dog had probably given them an extra half of year together. Carol loved that dog, if only for the fact that it had given her and her beloved husband extra time.

  It was two years after Everett’s death that she had hired a handyman to get rid of some trash from the back acreage. Something Everett had been promising for close on 15 years. It was more of an inside joke that Everett had never gotten around to it than a point of contention. When the man had come running up to the household with a broken bloody bundle in his arms, Carol had intrinsically known what he carried. She had wept nearly as many tears for the mangy Bastion as she had for her husband. Another link to him was gone. She buried Bastion alongside her husband in the family cemetery.

  So I circled back to the original question. How could she ever sleep knowing that at that very minute, a mindless, hungry predator might be closing in. I shuddered. I had reached the front door to the barn, now not nearly as prepared to enter into the gloomy interior.

  “They don’t lay in wait Talbot.” I said out loud. It was a trick nearly everyone uses to steel their resolve. I think it’s more to let whatever monster is lurking know that we’re coming in ready or not. I just wish the monster gave the same courtesy. I clicked over the ancient light switch. Two light bulbs lazily lit the room. you could still wear night vision goggles in here and not get any glare through them. The tractor stood dead center in the barn and every deadly implement known to farming kind graced the walls all around me. I was sweating. I felt that it was dignity saving to blame it on the multiple layering I was swathed in.

  I had reached the tractor when Justin shouted to me from the door. I realized then my mistake. Not that I was going to shoot Justin or even that he startled me enough to do it accidentally but if someone of ill intent had come up on me, my multi layered fingers couldn’t fit in through the trigger guard. “You are just all sorts of a hot mess, aren’t you Talbot.” I again said out loud to myself.

  “I asked if you needed any help Dad.” Justin answered thinking I hadn’t heard his first query, which I hadn’t. I had been whistling demons away at that time.

  He looked like shit and five degrees below zero was going to do little to help him. “Sure.” I didn’t know what the cause of his recent detachment to us was but if he was going to throw a lifeline it was my duty to reel him in. “Gotta a gun?”

  “What do you think? I’m your son.”

  “Smart ass. Okay let’s just do a quick search through the stalls and the loft. This place gives me the willies.”

  “You sure it’s not me?” He asked, half of the question was smart ass reply half though was a true question.

  I didn’t have a fifty fifty answer. I let it drop. Within minutes we discovered that the only other tenants of the barn were an extended family of field mice. I decided that if they were going to leave us alone then I would follow suit. Yep you guessed it. Mice scare the crap out of me. Yes I’ve been to battle. I’ve killed my fellow man and monsters of myth. It’s just something about that hairless tail that really shoots a spike of fear through me. I don’t really want to talk about it. Just add it onto the growing list of Talbotisms.

  The tractor cranked after the third time and a good blast of starting fluid into the carburetor. “You up for doing some plowing?” I asked Justin.

  He looked at me like I was pulling his leg. “You serious?”

  “Sure go ahead.” I told him. For those of you that thought I did this only because I didn’t want to be out in the North Dakota winter only have it partially correct. Isn’t this part of the reason we have kids at all? So they can do the shit jobs that we used to do. Like taking out the trash, mowing the lawn, shoveling walkways. You don’t really wonder why farm families used to be so huge do you? It’s not because screwing is the only thing to do. It’s because there is so much work to be done. Okay and screwing was really the only form of entertainment.

  I stepped back before Justin had the chance to lurch the tractor into gear. The kid really couldn’t so much as drive a nail, if you catch my meaning. He definitely inherited that from his mother. I figured the tractor to be about 8 feet wide and the doors to the barn easily double that width and still I wondered if he would hit the frame. Would that kind of strike be enough to take the ancient structure down? And would we survive being buried by 87 tons of sharpened metal objects? Probably not, I walked out to guide him through. Not bad, I thought, as he had a good six inches of clearance on his left hand side.

  “Alright.” I shouted. “Just make a pathway down to the minivan so we can get it back up here.” Justin gave me a thumbs up.

  I turned to walk back to the house and hopefully a steaming mug of cocoa. I was lost in the reverie of melted marshmallows when the warning shout came.

  “Look out!” Came the distant shout from the house. I looked up towards the porch. Tracy was cupping her hands together for the bullhorn effect. When she realized she had caught my attention she made an over agitated gesture with her arm. I dove to my left, the blade of the plow pushed air past my face, Justin was looking off to his right and had not even noticed that he had almost made me a snow angel. So angel might be a little liberal but it’s more of an analogy. He turned back towards me as he passed. Something between ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘Damn’ crossed his face. I stood up and brushed the snow off of me, just staring at him as he passed.

  I looked back up at the porch Tommy had an expression on his face I couldn’t remember ever seeing. It was rage. The glare he directed at Justin got to me more than the mice. All of a sudden Carol’s house didn’t seem quite as accommodating. We were going to bring our problems with us no matter where we went. I had momentarily let myself get swayed into a false sense of security. I wouldn’t let that happen again. Eliza was still out there and apparently we were of great interest to her. Maybe not me as much, however, we were on her short list for people she wanted dead.

  The co
coa was good but I was too distracted to thoroughly enjoy it. Instead of going in and staying in, I sat out on the porch and watched Justin actually do an admirable job of clearing a pathway. He only stopped once as the plow bit into the frozen corpse of a zombie, spreading frozen chunks of meat along a twenty-foot swath of driveway. He hopped down off the tractor, showed the right amount of disgust as he untangled the ensnared carcass. Or was it pity?

  I froze twice as much on that porch as I would have if I had stayed on the tractor. I waited until Justin pulled the tractor back into the barn. This time he actually did take off a chunk of door frame. I shuddered thinking that could have been my skull. I heard the engine rattle to an end and then I began my long ascent out of the deck chair. Convinced at this point that the fluid around my knees had completely frozen. My injured knee popped like a firecracker when I got it to full extension. Numbness from the cold kept the pain down to a dull roar. When this thing de-thawed I was going to be whimpering like a kid at Toys ‘R’ Us that didn’t get the Deluxe Batman figurine with a fully stocked utility belt.

  “That sounds like it hurt.”

  I had been too wrapped up in my own misery to hear Tracy come out.

  “Not as much as it’s going to tonight.”

  “You going down to get the van?”

  It was obvious what I was doing. She was fishing for something. I knew the game. I just rarely if ever won.

  “Yeah, figured I’d better get it now before either it or me freezes.”

  “You want me to go with you?”

  I turned to look at her. “What’s up Hon?”

  “What? I can’t walk with my husband.”

  “Hold on. That’s not what I said. We both know you like the cold weather about as much as I like ham.” (Did I not tell you about that yet? I’ll get to it eventually.) “And yes I appreciate the company but it’s got to be closing in on negative ten out here and I think a wonderful cooling northerly breeze has begun to kick up. So what gives?”

  “Fine let’s walk.”

  We were halfway down the driveway before she spoke. But I noticed her turn towards the barn before she said anything.

  “What’s going on Mike?” I didn’t need any clarification. If I had, just her previous look to the barn would have erased all doubt of what subject we were broaching. “Mike, Justin was looking right at you as he drove that plow.”

  “Figured as much.” I said.

  “He tried to kill you Mike.” Tracy said with force and conviction.

  “I would imagine.”

  She grabbed my arm and forcibly spun me towards her. “How can you be so caviler about this? I saw his face Mike. He was smiling! Fucking smiling!”

  How I could feel any colder was beyond me but I did. I was freezing from my core outwards. I looked back towards the barn and the source of my unnatural icebox sensation. Justin stood between the great doors looking at us both. He waved with all the enthusiasm of a dead cheerleader. Tracy saw what I was looking at and wrapped both her arms around herself in a useless tactic to hold in body heat, or keep evil out.

  “It’s got something to do with that scratch he got when he went to get Paul. He got infected with something but that’s not quite right. It’s more like he got possessed.”

  Tracy gasped at that word. When she was 12 she had slept over her best friend Dawn’s house. Dawn’s father had the brilliant idea to bring his daughter and Tracy to the drive-in featuring arguably one of the scariest movies of all time, the Exorcist. Since that point forward, Tracy had always had a higher than ordinary fear of the devil and his minions. Hey all of our psychoses need to start somewhere.

  “But not completely.” I added hastily. It did little to moderate her fear. “Justin’s still in there and he knows something is wrong. There are times like earlier today where I felt that his old persona was closer to the surface. Now I don’t know if that was an act on his part or not but I’ve got to think that when he lets his concentration lapse or when he’s focused on something else that whatever is inside of him can gain some measure of control.”

  Tracy shuddered again.

  “Come on let’s get down to the van. We stand out here too much longer and we’re going to look like we ran into Medusa.” She didn’t argue.

  “Do you think the antibiotics are helping?” She asked as a frozen tear descended down her cheek.

  “I think it keeps the infection in check. I’m not sure the meds alone can cure it though. Without them though, whatever it is would be able to gain a bigger if not complete foothold.”

  “Mike what are we going to do?”

  We had reached the van. I fumbled with the keys, partly to stall an answer but mostly because I couldn’t feel my fingers. I struggled with my door, seems it had frozen in place, couldn’t really blame it, although I looked like a dork as Tracy’s opened up with a minimal effort from her. The inside of the car was little better than a meat locker. If the car didn’t start, I wasn’t sure we’d be able to make it back up into the house before we solidified.

  Heat and humidity suck as far as I’m concerned. I’ve voiced that opinion, over and over throughout my life. My argument was that you could only get so naked to get cooler whereas you could always put more clothes on in the winter to get warmer. But this was different, I was physically distressed at how cold I had become. My thought pattern felt addled as I nearly snapped the key in half trying to turn it the wrong way in the ignition. Tracy didn’t look much better off than me.

  “Did you say they have Philly Cheesesteak’s in Chicago?” She asked.

  I had no clue what the hell she was talking about but it distracted me enough before I sheared the key off. The engine did the slow ‘whirring’ sound of a car that has no desire to start and wants to make it abundantly clear on its stance. I held the key in place many long seconds after I should have let it go. Whirrr...whirr...whir...vroom. Glacial air spewed from the heater vents as the engine caught. My breath cascaded down into my lap in frozen droplets of water. The slap of wintry infused air slapped across Tracy’s face and she broke out of her fog.

  “Holy shit, that’s cold!” She said as she placed her hands over the vent.

  “If only I could invent an air conditioner to work that well.”

  She didn’t see the humor as I reached to shut the ‘heater’ off. After some careful thrusts on the gas pedal to flood the engine with some fuel, I placed the car in gear. Somewhat certain it wouldn’t stall. We both held our breaths as the transmission engaged drawing some life from the engine and nearly extinguishing it. I held one foot on the brake and one halfway down on the gas as I flooded high explosive fluid through the valves. A minute or two later we were up by the house. Tracy got out before we stopped moving, heading straight for the house.

  “Don’t sweat it hon.” I said to her retreating back. “I’ll get the stuff out of here.” I didn’t even get the customary wave over her back for that. I shut the car off, grabbed what was immediately close to me and rushed to follow. My damaged knee made forward progress an aggressively slow endeavor. There was an infinitesimally long delay as I got to the door and there was a flood of people heading out to grab stuff out of the van. Courtesy dictated that I move to the side and let them out so they could help. I pushed myself through the throng, courtesy be damned. I was a heartbeat and a half from frostbite and I liked all my digits exactly where they were.

  Tracy hovered dangerously close to the roaring fire. I almost pushed her in as I jockeyed for position to gain some heat. Degree by degree we came back to our own. The tingling pain of blood flowing back to extremities was an actual welcome sensation. It meant life, life in all its glorious triumphs and disasters. I kissed Tracy long and hard there, welcome in the fact that we still endured and doubly thankful that one appendage still had the grace to feel the press of blood.

  “Get a room.” Jen said as she sat down in one of the lounge chairs next to a bookshelf.

  We broke our kiss, warmth radiated down from my lips. Tracy
even looked a little flushed. I was going to try that Viagra out tonight, guaranteed! I shouted ‘Yes’ in my head, with the fist pump and all.

  “We got all the stuff in. Some of the food is frozen solid though.” Jen finished.

  To reiterate her point, Tommy came into the room with a Twinkie clamped in a pair of salad tongs. He pushed me over a little to the side so that his Twinkie could get some heat.

  “Am I in your way Tommy?” I said with good-humored sarcasm.

  “A little bit Mr. T, could you move a skosh?”

  I laughed. “Yeah I figured it was time to get some of these clothes off anyway.”

  “Great!” Tommy said, never taking his eyes off his cold prize. “You were kind of in the way.”

  I stood up and like I expected, my knee let it be known about its condition. I wondered how a Percocet would interact with a Viagra. I couldn’t see the sense of having a hard on I could slam in a door. I involuntarily crossed my legs at the errant thought.

  “You alright Mike?” Tracy asked.

  “Yeah just my knee.” Although it was obvious from my gesture that wasn’t the cause.

  “Maybe you should get that checked out.”

  Again obviously she was talking about my knee but when I answered I was thinking completely about something a little closer to my belt line. “Yeah you’re right, I’d definitely like to get that checked out.” My lascivious leer almost gave me away as Tracy looked questioningly at me.

  I shuffled out of the room like someone double my age and half hopped, half pulled myself up the stairs to the old room Tracy and I used whenever we came to visit. Which hadn’t actually been in a few years now that I thought about it. Not since Everett had died to be specific. Sure Tracy and Carol talked almost daily but that’s not the same as basic human contact. Again I marveled at how she had survived so well in such an inhospitable place all by herself. In point of fact, it was most likely the reason she had survived was because she was in such a place.

  I finally made it to my room, thankful that someone had the presence of mind to bring some of my stuff up here. There wasn’t a whole hell of a lot but I had grabbed a crap load of knee braces and ace bandages when we were in the Rite-Aid and I was going to make good use of them now. I was going to have to peel my layers of clothing off like an onion sheds skin before I could do so. My knee was a sorry sight when I finally got down to it. It was black and blue and nearly double the size of its brother. I gingerly wrapped it in two ace bandages. The elastic knee brace I had snagged would not stretch large enough to accommodate the swelling. I knew I needed to put ice on it but after my near death by popsicle-experience today I couldn’t even begin to imagine placing frozen water anywhere on my body.