Ryan sank to the floor. “I don’t know what to do. That was the last MRE, now we have to try, what, fifty-year-old C-rations? Safe or not, it will surely taste like a homeless person’s ass. I could kill us with a bite.” With a heavy sigh, “You would have known, Lillian, you would have known every possible thing to worry about, down to the names of each individual bacterium.”
His shoulders jerked and he found it hard to breathe. “I was always stuck doing the dirty work even if you were better at it. You were always better at it.” But as he spewed these words he felt a seed of guilt growing deep inside his chest. He knew it wasn’t her fault. He knew it wasn’t Emily’s fault. He knew the truth but he still felt angry. He had to feel angry.
“Hey, Emme, come here,” he snapped, waving a hand and calling her over. She obeyed without question. He wiped the moisture from his eyes and looked down at her. “I’m sorry if I get mad sometimes, but Daddy is trying his best. Okay? Things are just—hard.”
Emily gave him a hug and nodded. He wasn’t sure if she truly understood his meaning, but this was enough. “Bears?” she asked like a mouse, face still against his chest.
“Yeah, I think it’s time for some Bears.”
Chapter 18
The following day Ryan and Emily jumped the foreboding fence into Mrs. Mannford’s yard, though perhaps not literally. That would have been impossible.
Ryan was finding it increasingly difficult to get around on his bad ankle. Red lines had appeared around his wound, reaching out in a spider web pattern for a half inch in every direction. He took this as a bad sign. If not for the fact that they’d soon be out of food and he was in desperate need of medicine, he would like to have stayed at home with Emily while looking for new ways to distract her from the topic of “Bears” until he could resolve their power situation.
Ryan had to get his wife’s phone working. He had to know what was on it and soon. Whether their physical survival depended on this or not, to him it didn’t matter. He needed to see the videos she’d left them. He had to put some things to rest.
“All right, Emily. We have three goals. One. Two. Three,” he said as they were about to break open Mrs. Mannford’s front door. He was sticking to his plan of explaining things to her so she could keep up on learning to speak. “We need to find some eat eat—food. Food,” he repeated. “Daddy, and you, need some more medicine for the doggy bite.” Emily shied away at mention of such a wicked creature. “And maybe something to power the tablet.” Just before he was about to break the window he decided to try the knob. The house was unlocked. His brow furrowed as he swung around and saw Karen’s white Accord parked in the driveway. It was not as dirty as the rest of the cars.
“Pyr?” Emily asked him.
“That’s right. Pyr. Power. Pyr.” His hand rested on the cold, copper knob for several seconds before he finally lifted his hand. “Let’s go.”
“Go,” she repeated, and held out Bullwhip Barbie like she was their advanced scout checking the foyer for enemies.
Karen Mannford’s house was cleaner than the rest. Though dust had settled here, it was nothing like his own home. Nothing was out of place. The cherry wood bookshelves in the living room were neatly filled with hardbacks and picture frames. A folded afghan was laid over the back of an overstuffed white couch with a blue toile pattern. A writing desk had several sheets of parchment paper and a score of neatly arranged No. 2 pencils.
Ryan inhaled. “It’s fresh.” He sniffed the potpourri diffuser on the desk. “Mmm, that’s nice. Maybe I need to get us some of these.”
He’d never before seen the inside of Karen’s house; it was forbidden, on the far side of the impossible fence. He peered at the staircase leading up and wondered, not for the first time, how Karen might have kept her bedroom. She had a traditional style that reminded him of Colonial New England, lots of landscape paintings, and blue and white. Plenty of family photos of her and her children, Danny and Ruth. Her kitchen, by contrast, had a Tuscan vibe with a palette of beige, ocher and red, and small plaques imprinted with portly chefs or bottles of wine, hanging wherever an empty parcel of drywall space could be found.
The trash in the kitchen had been taken out. The dishes had been done and put away. Clean towels were set on the counter beside the empty dish rack. A bottle of familiar cheap wine, recorked, was standing against a series of stainless containers ranging from large to small, flour to sugar.
Emily went to the back door and peered through the blinds. “Lany?”
Ryan set down his backpack and looked out with her. “I don’t think she’s here, Emme.” The yard was overgrown with grass just like his.
“Gone? Lany gone?”
“Yeah, I think so. Lany went to Heaven.”
“Lany gone.” Emily huffed with distress. Even after all she’d been through with Cerberus, the mean doggie, she still wanted to see Karen’s little cocker. She loved that dog.
Ryan began opening cabinets and frowned. “What the—?” He tried another set and found them empty as well. “Okay, that’s weird. I know Karen cooked a lot, she talked about it all the time.” She’d said if she hadn’t been a teacher she might have gone to culinary school instead.
Ryan checked the cabinets on the other side, finding only stainless steel pots and pans, an oven stone and broiling pan. “Where does she keep the food in this Martha Stewart paradise?” He pivoted and found a slender door. “Pantry, good.”
He took long strides over to it, breath held. “Wait. What? Empty? Hell, there’s not even dog food remains.” It too was clean and swept.
“What’s wrong, Dada?”
He shook his head at Emily’s sudden creation of a real sentence. It might have been two words, one a contraction, but it was something. He coughed, “Um. Nothing, Emme. Dada’s fine.”
“Fine?”
Emily helped, opening the lower cabinets next. He steered her away from the counter under the sink, not sure what chemicals were kept in a non-baby proofed home. And, like the rest of them, there was nothing of use. No food. No drinks. Nothing but kitchen equipment and cooking utensils. He peeked in the fridge for safe measure—clean as a brand new unit right off the sales floor.
He plopped down at the kitchen table and sank onto his elbows. “Super,” he hissed.
His stomach growled furiously. Because of his ankle pain, he’d taken a long hit of that crunchy weed before they’d left. All it had done was make him hungrier.
“I don’t get it,” he groaned. “She seemed like a really prepared mom. There’s not even anything to snack on.” He let his ankle rest while Emily tried to drag him off to play.
“Come on, Dada. Outside.”
“No, Emme. We are not going outside. The grass is too tall for us to see.” He paused and considered that. “On second thought, let’s take a look.”
“Dada! Hooray!” she cheered.
Karen’s backyard was smaller than Ryan’s by a quarter. There was a trampoline on one end, wrapped in a safety net. A lavish two floor dog mansion was against the back fence, white with wood siding and navy shutters.
Emily took off into the grass.
“Careful, Emme. Look out for snakes!” He hobbled after her but wasn’t all that worried. In the sections of the yard where he guessed Lany had marked her territory the grass still wouldn’t grow. Emily whirled and ran around the yard, having space for the first time in weeks. “Don’t lose your Barbie!”
“Bahbe no gone!” she responded and squealed.
Ryan passed through the tall grass and felt his toe catch on a rise of dirt. He stepped back and looked down. Before him were a pair of almost unnoticeable mounds of dirt. They were hard packed and mostly smooth. The one on the left had a pair of dirty headphones on top, the one on the right, a cracked porcelain vase painted with blue flowers. He puzzled over this for a moment, then took off in a loping sprint, pain radiating in his leg. Emily was climbing up on the trampoline.
“No, ma’am. We’re not getting up on that today. M
aybe later when I’m better.”
“Pweese, Dada. Pweese.”
“But I can’t jump with you, and Daddy doesn’t want to feel left out. Okay? I can be a little cry baby when I’m left out on the fun things.”
Emily’s face twisted up and then she laughed, taking off in the other direction. “Run! Run! Come on! ‘Mon! Run!”
Despite the agony in his leg he limped after her. This was a bad sign.
After a few minutes running in circles he herded her back into the house for answers. They stomped upstairs and checked the bedrooms. The beds were pristine and made. Every surface was clean and all items were in their place. Ruth’s room, Karen’s eight-year-old daughter and youngest child, was to the right of the landing with pink walls and flowers and pop music posters. She had a white daybed in the back corner, and a metal desk with a fairly up-to-date computer across from it. Ryan couldn’t help but check the sticker on the tower to see what processor it used—storage capacity available, memory included.
“Not bad.” He rubbed his chin and nodded. “I doubt she was using it for just homework.” He leaned around the desk and saw a top-of-the-line Nvidia Graphics adapter box.
With all the fluff and garish shades of pink, her room was everything a pre-teen girl could love. Emily might want a space like this when she got older. But would her tastes be different given the situation? No pop stars? No teen idols? No peer pressure? Either way, he was ready to paint her space and collect trinkets in whatever way she fancied at the time.
After a moment of milling about, picking up stuffed animals and sniffing them, he noticed a dog collar and tag were hanging from a metal post on Ruth’s bed: Lany.
Ryan turned around and left everything where it had been, even straightening the Nvidia box he’d flipped over. Emily checked the room behind him, making sure he hadn’t missed anything fun.
Danny’s room was next. Like his late father, Danny had been a huge St. Louis Blues fan. Hockey equipment was piled up in the corner beside his queen bed which, oddly, was neatly made. The brown sheets were smooth as poured chocolate, the fluffy pillows stacked in a triangle pattern against the light headboard. He had a desk and computer, though this one was much older. A newer model Android phone sat beside the keyboard. There were assorted papers on one side of the desk, grades and some sort of school release from the look of it. A box of fireworks was beside the door. Ryan didn’t dare touch a thing.
Emily had taken to Ruth’s room and chosen a couple stuffed animals as her own: a grey and black penguin with black balls for eyes, and a colorful cat-like anime character with exaggerated features.
While she browsed distractedly, Ryan searched the bathroom, hoping to find something valuable. Inside the medicine cabinet was a full prescription of Prednisone and three Percocet. He hoped those might help with the pain of swelling, but knew they wouldn’t solve his problem.
“I wonder how hard it is to make penicillin,” he muttered and took a couple clean towels from a wire shelf above the toilet. They smelled fresh.
Before heading back downstairs, curiosity seized him by the shirt and changed his direction. He set the backpack down in the hallway and entered the bright master bedroom at the end.
A queen size mattress set atop a high, ornate wooden frame with a soft headboard that looked right out of Pottery Barn. Beside it, a stack of lined papers arranged with a red pen and an empty porcelain tea cup.
He could clearly imagine Karen sitting up in bed late at night studiously grading her students’ papers while sipping chamomile tea and streaming nineties hits on her phone. She would always put these tasks off until late; she wanted to spend time with her kids and visit with the neighbor right after school. After the grades were finished, she would check on her children and turn in alone, taking one last glance at the picture frame to her left.
Ryan held the wooden frame in his hands and swallowed. “Now I know how you feel,” he said and set it back on the table. It was a studio photo of Karen and her late husband Danny Mannford standing beside their two children, everyone dressed in jeans and matching white t-shirts. Ruth looked about five and Little Danny, ten-ish. They both had their mother’s round face, dark hair and dark eyes, but their father’s long nose and cleft chin. Ryan allowed the veil of loneliness to loom over him for a time, making every achy muscle’s discomfort magnify. He sat on the end of the bed, careful not to disturb how well it had been made. At least Karen had had her children, as did he. All hope was not lost.
“Dada,” Emily said, tugging on his pant leg. “Hungry.”
His lips quirked upward and he sighed. “Me too. And for some real food. What I wouldn’t give for a sandwich from Kopperman’s. Mmmm, Any Pork in a Storm. Or heck, just an overstuffed pastrami. What I wouldn’t give...”
Emily looked worried at his proposition.
“I wouldn’t give you up for it.”
She wasn’t convinced. “Come on, Dada. Hungry. I go eat eat? Now. ‘Mon.”
He dreaded to check their food supply back at casa de Sharpe Version 2.1. He only had a few more days, and with this ankle, maybe less. Then there were the dogs. They weren’t a big issue when going from here to next door, but walking to the market a mile away could be incredibly risky. He wasn’t having a repeat of Cerberus’s attack. He couldn’t go through that again.
“I’ve got to find a way to defend us.”
When they were leaving the house to go home and see what they had for dinner, Ryan came to a conclusion over the mystery nagging at the back of his mind. It wasn’t that Karen’s home smelled of death, or that it was torn to shreds by animals or shat in by monsters. It was that it looked too clean for this post-human age. It was too well put together. There was no food in the kitchen, and everything of sentimental value was lovingly put in what seemed to be its perfect place. It looked like the idea of a clean house, designed by computer or made into a painting, not the kind kept that way by daily effort.
“Hello?” he ventured, cocking his head to listen. “Hello? Anyone here?” He took a step, sharp darts shooting through his ankle, making him stifle several choice obscenities for the sake of his daughter.
“Hello!” Emily shouted down the stairs.
The two of them waited for a reply. A dog barked somewhere distant.
“Hey, Emily?”
She looked up at him and narrowed her eyes. “Dada?”
“Karen’s car is in the driveway, right? So, where did the bodies go?”
Emily had as much of an answer for this as he did.
Chapter 19
“That’s why I like teaching 6th grade,” Karen Mannford said. “The students are at that part of life before they turn into teenagers and become total jerks. They still want to learn, and everything in the world is amazing, especially science. It’s all laid out before them and they just want to know it all. And, well, I love being part of that. So exciting. It’s one of the most special things I could ever do. You know the old saying, if you’re doing what you love it’s not really work. Don’t get me wrong, it has its moments, but I can’t imagine doing anything else with my time. You know what I mean?”
Karen lifted her glass of cheap red wine, slender fingers wrapped around its bowl to tip the contents into her half-grinning mouth. Her full lips brushed the rim of the glass as the sour tang of fermented grapes tickled the nerves of her tongue, forcing her facial muscles to twitch in aftershock. After a moment she licked the glass clean and then thumbed free her lips of what red had been left behind. Ryan wished he could have seen her posture as she drank—neck bared, breasts raised—but leaned against the fence, their insurmountable barrier, she was only a disembodied head hovering over dog-eared wood.
“I know just what you mean,” Ryan hurried to fill in the silence. Watching her drink was somehow mesmerizing. He knew it was mostly because of her moving lips. Today was a cool day, partly cloudy, space filled with a buzz of city life and few insects, but he was feeling warm at present. It had to be the wine. “And regarding tee
nagers, there is no way I’d teach high school. I mean, college can be like high school at times. A bunch of hormone filled half-children half-adults who think they know better than you, that would rather party or get laid than be lectured about the hexadecimal system. Except, college for them is also like a job, though instead of the added perk of being paid for that misery, you have to fork out big bucks for years later. Come to think of it, when I put it like that, it sounds like masochism.”
“Oh, come on.” Karen tossed back her head and chuckled. It was a deep throaty sound that came all the way from the belly. Her ringlets of dark hair brushed her shoulders and fell back in waves. “Back when you were teaching, I bet you had a pretty girl who sat on the front row like in Indiana Jones. Whenever she closed her eyes you could see the words ‘love you’ written on her lids.” Her long eyelashes fluttered, bringing attention to her eyes, blue like steel.
“Heh, well, eh, not exactly.” Ryan took a long sip from his glass, surely not looking nearly as interesting as she had.
“Come on, don’t be coy.”
“Oh, yeah, because you know assistant computer science professors are real sexy. That’s who all the girls want to get with, they’re just clambering for that. ‘Come on over here baby and check out my Python. I know how to work it.’”
Her face screwed up. “Um, your what?”
“Nothing, it's just a computer language.” Ryan peered down the length of the fence to his feet. “I’m just trying to be witty, that’s all.”
“I see.”
“Yeah...”
She changed the subject immediately. “You guys doing anything big for the fourth of July? We’re thinking of going to Fireworks on the Mississippi, and Danny already has a stockpile of his own in his room. Can’t take Lany, of course. Jittery as dogs are around loud noises, her breed especially, she’d be terrified.”
The Two That Remained Page 12