Because I have to protect Laura, my daughter, she thought, jabbing the knife into him further, driving him to the ground. She almost fell on top of him as he tumbled to the floor and she scrambled to her feet, her palms slipping on the blood that was now spilling more fervently out of him. She stepped away, back against the kitchen counter, and watched as his feet jittered on the floor for a moment and then grew still.
She released the breath she was holding and almost collapsed. A wave of relief washed over her, threatening to break the damn. A few tears managed to trickle down her cheeks and she allowed herself to cry. I did it, I beat him, I got him out of the way and, most important, I saved Laura!
Naomi didn’t know how long she sat huddled on the kitchen floor crying, but it was the sound of the police helicopter overhead, still searching for Greg Oliver, that snapped her back to her senses. She glanced at the clock on the microwave oven. It was after one.
Somehow she was able to drag Greg’s body into the garage and wrap it in an old, musty blanket from the laundry hamper. She shoved it into a storage space inside the garage, making sure it was concealed, then went back into the house. She hid the gun in the top drawer of her bedroom bureau. Then she spent an hour cleaning the kitchen floor, making sure to eliminate every drop of blood, then she peeled her own bloodied clothes off in the master bathroom and took a long, hot shower. She changed into fresh clothes placed her bloody clothes in the garbage and entered the house.
It was two forty-five.
She turned the TV on with the remote and, with the sound turned down, she tuned in to the local news.
For the next few minutes she monitored the news and was quickly brought up to speed. Despite securing the development, the police and SWAT team failed to locate Greg Oliver and concluded he'd slipped out as quickly as he'd gotten in. Door to door searches failed to turn him up, and there were no signs any of the homes were broken into. The search was now being widened and Greg’s photo was being broadcast on all the local and regional news networks in the hope somebody had seen him.
At three-fifteen, she heard a key slip in the lock. She sighed in relief. “Laura!” she called out.
“Hi, Mom.” She heard Laura set her backpack down on the floor near the hallway that led to the bedrooms, followed by the sound of her daughter’s footsteps as she walked into the family room.
She held back her tears as she held her arms out. “Come here.”
Her daughter hesitated a moment, concern flickering across her sensitive features, then she went to her mother’s embrace. Naomi held her daughter, reveling in feeling her child’s heartbeat, breathing in her scent. She could tell Laura sensed something was wrong. “What’s wrong, Mom?”
Naomi looked at her daughter and smiled, forcing back the tears. “Nothing, honey. Everything’s going to be okay.”
“There were a lot of police around,” Laura began, her features looking concerned. “What happened?”
“It’s okay,” She squeezed her daughter’s hands reassuringly. “Everything’s fine. The police were here, but I sent them away. It’s okay now.”
Laura’s eyes remained on her mother, as if searching for the truth somewhere. Naomi smiled at her daughter. She never asked about her father anymore. Naomi had accidentally killed Larry one night when they were arguing about going to the police after Laura pushed the neighbor girl down the stairs of their house. Larry claimed Laura had beaten the girl with a belt and burned her with cigarettes a few weeks before. He’d gone so far as to say their little girl was a monster.
Her child wasn’t a monster! Laura was her baby, her child, and no matter what she did or who she was, Naomi was going to love her, and care for her, and protect her no matter what.
Naomi smiled at her daughter, fighting to keep the tears back. “Go change into some shorts,” she said. “I’ll get supper ready. Maybe later tonight I’ll tell you everything and you can help me decide some things, okay?”
Laura smiled, all sweet dimples and child-like innocence. “Okay, Mommy.” Then Laura leaned forward and kissed Naomi’s cheek, turned and skipped toward the hallway and her bedroom.
Naomi watched her go, a sad sense of relief overcoming her. She may be a monster, she thought, the loss filling her so suddenly, so overwhelmingly, but she’s all I’ve got.
After collecting her strength, feeling sorry for what she’d done in killing Greg Oliver, a man she could instantly relate to because of her own situation, she rose to her feet and headed to the kitchen to prepare a light supper for two.
Story Notes
I remember getting the idea for this at an airport. I was flying home to visit my family and was waiting for my flight at the departure gate. The TV at my terminal was turned to CNN and the breaking story was about a hostage situation in Atlanta, Georgia. It seems a guy had broken into the home of a middle-class suburbanite woman and taken her hostage. If memory serves, I think he’d just robbed a bank, too, and been chased into the neighborhood by the police. Long story short, his female hostage kept calm and simply talked to him. She didn’t fight him, and eventually she earned his trust. She talked him into turning himself in and he did. In the days that followed she was all over the news, and we would later learn she'd discussed spiritual matters with him. The Christian Networks would go on and say that God had worked through this woman to touch this man’s heart into doing The Right Thing. Maybe. Whatever happened, for once, nobody got killed and nobody got hurt. The bad guy went off to jail and the woman became a hero and a celebrity for about fifteen minutes. Then she was out of the limelight.
The story was featured so prominently in the media during both legs of my vacation, that I could not help but amplify the situation as I turned it over in my mind. Most significantly, I kept thinking about the fact that she had a five-year old daughter (who wasn’t home at the time this all happened, fortunately). I wondered what would have happened if perhaps her little girl was off at school and came home to this hostage situation. Things could have turned a whole lot worse.
I had just finished my novel Bully and was working on a novella called The Power of the Primitive (which later became the seed for my novel Primitive) when I got the idea for this story, but according to my notes I didn’t actually start writing it until a year or so later. Sometimes stories take time to percolate. They have to rise on their own. That’s what this one did, and when I finished it in late 2007 I sent it to Tim Deal, the editor/publisher of Shroud magazine, who’d been asking me to send him something. Tim liked it but suggested some edits—the original version was about 9,000 words long. I managed to trim some unnecessary exposition scenes, which shaved about 2,000 words off, and it appeared in the Shroud #4 for Fall 2008.
After Nightfall
“DID YOU GET the feeling that hotel clerk was looking at us funny?”
Randy looked at his wife, Wendy, and shrugged. They had just exited the motel office where they had checked in for the night, and were returning to their Acura Legend for their suitcases. “Yeah, but...you gotta remember, this is a small town. We’re virtually in the middle of nowhere. To him, we probably are weird.”
“I still don’t like it,” Wendy said, as she pulled her suitcase out of the backseat and closed the door. Randy already had his in hand, and they walked down the small corridor to the room they had rented for the night. It was a late summer afternoon and they had left Los Angeles heading for Denver earlier that morning. They each had three weeks of vacation they had to use before they accrued another four weeks in their respective jobs. This was the first vacation they’d had since they were married three years ago. They wouldn’t have even stopped in this town for the night if it hadn’t been for Wendy; she noticed that the secondary road off Interstate 15 would cut the traveling time down by about a third. Randy agreed when she showed it to him on the map. Who was he to argue?
The secondary road was mainly deserted, taking them through barren desert. It was all tumbleweed, sand, and cactus as far as the eye could see. Occasionally
they were passed by another vehicle, but other than that they had the road to themselves.
Randy had been just about to ask her if there was a town on this stretch of road when he saw the tiny cluster of buildings on his right. He saw a gas station and pulled off the road. It was then that they realized two things: they were dog-tired, and they were starving.
“Why don’t we see if we can find a place here?” Wendy had suggested. Luckily there had been a motel right near the gas station and it had vacancies. Randy realized they had been driving almost non-stop since leaving Los Angeles earlier that morning and it was now six o’clock.
Wendy’s earlier question came back to mind fifteen minutes later at the coffee shop next to the motel. They had stowed their luggage away and strolled to the coffee shop for dinner. They were ravenous. They ordered quickly and talked about the trip as the hum of the clientele created familiar background noise. It was a nice diner, clean, well ordered. The people sitting at the booths appeared to be locals and smiled and nodded politely at them. A young couple that appeared to be in their early twenties was lounging in one of the booths; the boy's hair was long and he wore grunge-rock attire of tattered jeans and a plaid shirt and black Doc Marten boots. Likewise, the girl was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved plaid shirt. Everybody perked up when Randy pulled out his BlackBerry to check email from work and waited for a connection, but there didn't seem to be any in this area. The man in the next booth was looking at the device as if he'd never seen one before. So was the young grunge couple.
Wendy seemed to notice this interest when the waitress brought them their food – steak for Randy, grilled chicken breasts for Wendy. The waitress frowned as Randy put the device away. "What's that?"
"BlackBerry," Randy said. He pulled it out again and showed it to her. "It's like an iPod Touch and a cell phone all in one."
"What's that?"
"What's what?"
"An iPod Touch."
Randy shot a quick glance at Wendy. "You've never seen an iPod?"
The waitress shrugged sheepishly. "We kinda are in the boonies out here."
Randy grinned, relaxing. "Surely you get truck drivers coming through here. Sometimes they carry smart devices like BlackBerries and iPods." The truckers that were employed by his firm, Pacer, carried BlackBerries.
"We don't get many truckers through here," the waitress said. "Not since they closed Highway 10 and diverted the traffic to the Interstate."
Randy and Wendy had been traveling the Interstate when they thought taking Highway 10 would take some time off their trip. If they hadn't, they would have had to travel around in an almost horseshoe pattern to reach their final destination. Randy began digging into his steak. "Well, a BlackBerry is kinda like a mini-laptop computer."
"A laptop?" The tone of the waitress’s voice suggested she didn't know what a laptop computer was, either.
"Hey Mary! Coffee?" A man seated at one of the booths addressed the waitress, coffee cup raised.
"I'll be back," the waitress said and scampered off.
“I think you’re right about what you said before,” Randy said to Wendy quietly, slicing into his steak with greedy abandon.
“About the people?”
Randy nodded. “That motel clerk looking at us funny when we checked in. And...”
"The people at this place are looking at us funny," Wendy suggested.
"Yeah. And our waitress gives me the impression she's never seen a laptop computer, either."
Wendy nodded. This was the first time either of them had been out in such a rural area. Wendy had grown up in Phoenix, Arizona; Randy in Los Angeles. "Maybe they're just behind the times," she said, spearing lettuce from her salad with a fork. "My grandparents live in a small town in Colorado and things there are a little slow. Not that slow, though!"
They finished their dinner quietly and the waitress approached them. "Where you guys headed?"
"Denver," Randy said. He smiled at the waitress.
"We don't get too many travelers through here," the waitress said. "You driving straight through?”
“No, we’re staying overnight at the motel next door,” Randy said.
“We don’t get many people staying overnight,” the waitress said.
“You want dessert?"
"No. Just the check, please."
The waitress scribbled on the check, tore it off the pad, and set it on the table. "Have a nice stay," she said.
When they left the diner Randy couldn't help but feel everybody was watching them. He mentioned this to Wendy as they walked back to their motel. "Don't worry about it," she said. "We're probably the only form of amusement they've had all year." The early evening was fading with the setting sun. Shadows were lengthening and the other patrons began leaving.
When they got to their room, Wendy opened the suitcase and rummaged inside for her toiletries. "I'm gonna take a shower," she said. She disappeared in the bathroom.
Randy flopped down on the king-sized bed and turned on the TV with a flick of the remote.
Just as he suspected, there weren't many channels. This town was probably too far off the beaten path to receive cable service. He found a local station playing a re-run of Seinfeld, got bored, then flipped around. Everything he chanced upon was a re-run of an old sitcom or drama: Picket Fences, LA Law, Frazier, the X-Files. He found one station playing a movie: Jurassic Park.
He mentioned this to Wendy when she came out of the shower.
"Try to see if the news is on," she said, toweling her hair dry.
Randy flipped through the stations. There was no news. Randy checked his watch. "It's still early," he said. "Only eight o'clock. Local news probably comes on at ten."
Wendy was rummaging among the desk and pulled her laptop computer out. She flipped it open and looked around on the desk. "Guess this place doesn't have high-speed Internet connections."
"Some hotels still don't," Randy said. He got up and stretched. "Try dial-up."
Wendy tried the dial-up connection for fifteen minutes while Randy was in the shower. When he came out, she frowned at him. "I can't connect at all."
Randy toweled off. "Maybe it's a good thing we can't connect to the Internet," he said. "We're supposed to be on vacation. No need to check email. Let's just pretend we don't have the laptop."
"Long as you pretend you don't have your BlackBerry," Wendy said with a grin.
"Deal."
Neither of them was tired, and as Randy pulled his underwear on, Wendy suggested they dart across the road to the tavern for a nightcap. "Sounds good to me," Randy said. He pulled on his jeans and a tee-shirt while Wendy got dressed, and a few minutes later they left the room.
THE TAVERN WAS just like Randy would have expected; dimly lit, a bar lining the west wall, booths along the east wall. The jukebox played Garth Brooks. Randy hated country music, and approached the jukebox to see what other selections there were: "Enter Sandman" by Metallica, "Hard to Handle" by The Black Crowes; "Achy-Breaky-Heart" by Billy Ray Cyrus. There was also some vintage Aerosmith and Bob Seger, stuff from Randy's toddler years. Nothing at all from the last five years. "Nothing new here," he said, turning away from the jukebox.
"A lot of bars have nothing but old songs on the jukebox," Wendy said as they bellied up to the bar. "This isn't so unusual."
Randy shrugged. "Maybe.”
They each ordered a glass of wine. The bartender served them and they sat at the bar, nursing their drinks, savoring the taste. The bar was fairly empty for a Wednesday night. A pair of working-class guys were playing pool and a couple was seated in one of the booths. A pair of older guys were at the other end of the bar. One of them acknowledged Randy and Wendy with a nod and a wave. Randy nodded back.
"New in town?" the man asked. He looked to be in his late forties, a farmer or maybe a construction worker.
"Just passing through," Randy said.
"On your way to Denver?"
"Yes." Randy introduced himself and Wendy to the man.
The man's name was Hank. They shook hands.
"Nice to meet you," Hank said. "Sorry to hear you're just passing through. Well, I should say I'm glad, but I'm also sorry. This is a nice town. We don't get too many people stopping in for the night."
"Surely you get people passing through all the time," Randy said.
"We do, but never for the night." Hank sipped his beer. His companion, who Hank had introduced as Moose, sat morosely on Hank's left, staring at the bar. "The motel stays open for business though, just in case."
Randy frowned. Come to think of it, there had only been a few cars parked in the motel parking lot. He hadn't given it much thought until Hank mentioned it. "You mean we're the only guests they've had in a long time?"
"Only out-of-town guests." Hank sipped his beer. "Town used to do booming business before the Interstate was built in 1970. It diverted traffic away. That killed off a lot of industry in the area and a lot of towns simply died. People left, went to Denver or the outlying suburbs. Some went to New Mexico. Not us, though. We stayed. It's been tough, but we're managing."
"So other towns in the area have simply dried up?" Randy found all this interesting. "Are they ghost towns now?"
"In a way," Hank said.
Randy glanced at Wendy. He took a sip of his wine. "How do you guys get by?"
Hank smiled. "We do it by good, honest living. Home cooking, laid-back lifestyle, agriculture. We get by. Only thing we miss is the constant infusion of people from other parts of the country driving through. We miss out on a lot of things here. Sometimes it takes us awhile to catch up, but we eventually do."
"I can see that," Randy said. "The waitress at the diner we ate at had never seen a BlackBerry."
"What's a BlackBerry?" Hank asked.
Randy grinned and told him what he'd told the waitress. Hank laughed good-naturedly. "See what I mean? We're behind the curve, but we'll pick up eventually. That's why we're usually thrilled when somebody new passes through and stays for the night."
Screaming to Get Out & Other Wailings of the Damned Page 3