The Two That Remained

by Mauldin, J Fitzpatrick

  Deep down inside, if given the chance, everyone can be a little bit freaky.

  Still, as sexual time spent with his wife began to dry up nearer to Emily’s birth, and afterwards, then return when Lillian was able again only to evaporate altogether when she began working at UBL, he began to feel guilty when he was in need of pleasuring himself. He began hiding this and coming up with wild stories if Lillian rumored anything that might just reveal his filthy secret. A man who wasn’t getting fucked had to fuck himself or he’d go crazy.

  With Lillian no longer around, he shouldn’t have still felt this way, but it was there, nagging at the back of his mind and tugging the strings of his heart. Perhaps it was because he felt as if he would be doing her memory a disservice, or perhaps it was because all the pictures of girls in this Playboy, which had turned him on as he casually browsed back at Stetson’s, hadn’t looked anything like his wife. In fact, many of them, with their curvy figures and large natural breasts, had reminded him of his neighbor Karen, and what he might have discovered under those cotton summer dresses she wore so well.

  Other than the awkward wet wakings, sleep had come well on Ryan and Emily’s vacation at Stetson’s, and with more surprises. The air mattress was comfortable and familiar, the series of shirts he’d cut and sewn worked as a decent sheet, and on the two clear nights they stayed there, the large front windows danced with color. Once more, the aurora had appeared, disclosing its bands of purple and green brilliance. The gentle glow had been distracting on the first night, but that soon passed. More than anything, Ryan wanted to know why it was happening. It couldn’t have been a coincidence.

  He stretched the cans of razor meat and left a large concentration on the street in front of their home. He took Emily inside, got her settled with some lunch, drink, and toys while he went out back within eyeshot to boil water. He’d nearly filled three fifty-gallon garbage cans, having used his gutters to funnel water through a makeshift cloth filter into each of them. This was far more than what he could safely store. Finally, they could use the excess for bathing, washing clothes, and filling the backs of their toilets so he could quit crapping in a bucket.

  As he made the fire and boiled the first batches of water, he considered where he might first look for a deep cycle battery. There were plenty of homes on his street that could contain such a thing. He hadn’t seen any RVs or boats recently. He would just have to start at one end and work his way back.

  “Could always check Mr. Jones’s garage,” he said, tossing another log on the fire. It had been easier to get it started this time with the Dura Flame logs taken from Stetson’s. He turned to check on Emily, and could see her through the window of the back door playing with Bullwhip Barbie. He took a sip of gin from a pint bottle, letting his throat burn. Little Jimmy had kept more than a Playboy in his locker. What a naughty little drugstore associate.

  As Ryan finished and went to color with Emily, once again not being allowed any crayon but white or yellow, he thought again of the aurora. He was a computer science nerd, not a meteorologist, but he did recall that increased activity could be caused by solar cycles when plasma is ejected more often from the sun. When these ejections occur, the plasma strikes the atmosphere and oxygen and nitrogen electrons are excited. They will then follow the electromagnetic field lines to the poles, where as they relax to lower states of energy, light is given off. He only remembered this because a friend of his in high school had a father who made neon signs, and said they worked much the same way. If Ryan was seeing the aurora this far south, the sun must have been ejecting a whole lot of plasma. Was that a sign it was about to go bad? Did everyone fall over dead only to avoid being vaporized by a supernova? Cosmology was not his field of study.

  “I can only guess,” he said, once again trying to steal a brown crayon and finish his palm tree while Emily was distracted.

  “Guess?” she asked, brows knitting.

  That afternoon they took a bath. Ryan took his while Emily slept on the floor of her room. It was a bath cold enough to force his man fruits to retreat into his body, but it felt nice to be clean. The water remaining in the tub was nearly black when he was done. This was the first proper bath he’d taken in this world aside from being rained on. That did not count.

  He peeked his head inside Emily’s room, saw she was still asleep, shut the door and went into the office. He set the Playboy out on his desk, trying not to let himself notice Lillian’s Hello Kitty memorabilia. As much as there was it was nearly impossible. After finding a picture of a gorgeous woman with dark hair laid back in a chair with her legs crossed, breast pushed up, lips forming a kiss, he slid off his pants and went to work.

  The fantasy formed clearly in his mind, meeting this mystery woman for no-pretense sex, parting her gates and begging him inside. There was no time for a backstory, it was raw and rough. She never left the chair, but instead wrapped her legs around him and drew him inside of her. Pleasure began to build inside his member along with the fap fap fap of his hand, when a sick thought he hadn’t seen coming crawled past his defenses.

  Chances were, whoever this model was, she’s nothing more than dust or bones by now. She was dead, sun-dried as jerky and lost.

  His cock was going limp in his iron grip. He pushed the thought away, renewed the force of his strokes double time and imagined taking the girl hard from behind. It was always easier to get off from that position, though being laid back in a chair, it was hard to convince his mind quite as much. Her curves and ass shook with the aftershocks of each thrust he gave her.

  “Almost there.” He kept it up, synchronizing the image in his head to the motion of his hand. The mind was where sex really happened, not the body. Pleasure was in the brain, release in the flesh.

  Then he couldn’t help but feel uneasy. The mystery woman’s skin began to slough away, turning from well-tanned to red, to nothing, showing her muscles in great detail. The tendons flexed and she cried for more, the flat of his crotch against her exposed gluteus maximus. Ryan wanted to stop but he couldn’t, it felt too good, and he wanted to finish. The woman reached back, put her hands on his ass, and pulled him deeper.

  “Cum inside me,” she purred. “Please, cum so hard inside me. I need your hot cum to fill me. I am so empty inside. Yes, that’s right. Fill me up. Fill me up. Fill me up! Yes!”

  Her muscles soon began to vanish, one strip at a time in a reddish storm of ashen dust. Her hair fell out in clumps. Her breast implants smacked onto the floor much like the razor-stuffed meat. Her backside, for which Ryan had his cock buried deep, began to rot. His hands no longer had anything to hold on to. Before he knew it, Ryan was thrusting into the air and the mystery model with her gorgeous makeup, perfect body, and insatiable sexual desire had become a smiling frame of white bone bent over a pile of fly-pecked meat.

  Ryan’s legs shot out and his back arched as hot semen fired from his cock and showered his bare thigh. He lay back for a moment and shook, eyes pointed upwards but not focusing on anything in particular. He checked the magazine once again and saw only a naked girl lying back in her chair.

  His heart jackhammered in his chest. “What the fuck was that?” He cleaned up with a wet wipe. “What the actual fuck?”

  Emily began to cry from in her room and he rushed to check on her, closing the office door to seal away his shame. Her hands shook as she tried to claw at him. An argument came from her lips he couldn’t understand. She was terrified of something, caught in the forest of a night terror from which she couldn’t wake. He rocked her from his place on the floor and shushed her.

  “Everything will be just fine, Emily. Everything is fine.”

  Chapter 28

  “Look up! You see that? Those are clouds.”

  “Clouds?”

  “Yeah. Clouds.”

  “Ice cream clouds?”

  “Sure, if you want them to be. Personally, I think this one looks like an elephant.”

  “Elfant?”

  “Yeah. Elfant. And t
hat one, maybe a zebra.”

  “Esbra?”

  “Why not?”

  Ryan checked his phone; no text. He adjusted his position on the blanket laid out in their back yard.

  “Look, Dada! Look! Ino!”

  “Ino?”

  “It’s ino!” Her arm was outstretched.

  “Do you mean rhino?”

  His phone vibrated. It was Karen. She was almost home with the fam, minus Daniel. Excitement flooded him.

  “Emily, you ready to play with your friend Ruth?”

  “Ruth?” She became excited. “Ruth! And Lany?”

  “Yeah. And Lany. They your friends?”

  “My friends.”

  “Mine too.”

  “I like Ruth.”

  “Glad to hear. She’s a good kid.”

  “Good kid.”

  He swallowed and reopened the messages on his phone. Before swiping and hitting delete, he read the end of Karen’s text again. These were the kind of words that could get him in deep shit with Lillian, but he wanted to bask in them one more time.

  Pop open another bottle, beautiful, we’re on our way.

  Chapter 29

  Mr. Jones’s house did not produce a deep cycle battery. For all the handiness Ryan had expected out of the old vet, the need for a large battery was not among them. The only batteries Ryan did find were a few AA and AAAs in a drawer, long since exploded, their crystallized acid all over the inside. What Ryan did discover, however, was an acetylene torch, and gas, as well as welding tools. He wasn’t sure what he could use them for, or what Mr. Jones had used them for being that his garage was pretty much empty, but noted them on his map and went to the next house.

  For once, Emily didn’t complain.

  Over the several hours they meticulously searched more homes, freely moving without the threat of feral dogs. Ryan made a game of it with her, having her search nearby places he felt wouldn’t be dangerous.

  “Super. Find something good?”

  “This a one.” She held out a metal spoon.

  “Oh, that’s good! We might can use that. Put it in your backpack.”

  She needed help.

  “This a one?” She held a can of roach fogger. “Work?”

  “How about no? Let’s not make that work. Here, let Daddy have that.”

  “Have that?”

  Ryan sang without any particular tune. Things like: “We’re searching cabinets high and low, but all we have is crap to show!” or “Never thought my Emme and me would be thieves. Glad I spent my attribute points on dexterities.” The lyrics made little sense, but it forced a smile on them.

  Crouched down beside a bed Ryan continued. “Emme, adventurer! She’s only two feet tall but her spirit’s worth ten! She can take down any old score of men! She’s Emme, the great! Emme, at any rate!”

  “No Dada. No sing. Is bad.” She shook her head.

  “Come on, I’m not that bad. I was in choir once upon a time.”

  She put a hand over his mouth and shushed him. Ryan rolled his eyes.

  Not only was he looking for the battery he desperately needed, but knew that they required fresh foods or greens, not just dry goods with basic calories. The kitchens of these homes, of course, were empty of such fresh things in a form that was safe to eat any longer, and so he checked gardens and backyards. He was hoping someone had planted lettuces, potatoes, or bush beans which had somehow thrived without help.

  He wasn’t having any luck in this part of town. Maybe he would further out. Maybe he would across the boulevard.

  This was the first day Ryan had felt hot. He knew it would only get worse as the season went on. He was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, and so was Emily, but that would have to change. Their clothes had been clean that morning, washed by hand and hung to dry, and yet they were already sticky with sweat. Before the day was done he’d be peeling them off salty skin.

  The first house after Mr. Jones’s was lackluster. It had turned out to be much like Karen’s; the place was clean, all the food gone. Not even any garbage. A skeleton was laid back in a bathtub while another was leaned over a sewing machine in the adjacent room. The pale carpet was stained where it seemed a lap dog had eventually laid down and died long after its owners expired. It made Ryan uneasy.

  The second house had been lived in by beer snobs. There were a hundred different varieties of unopened bottles and cans neatly arrayed on a series of dark oak shelves in the living and dining room. They were clear and brown and silver and yellow. Many of the labels Ryan recognized as local brews like Schlafly Pale Ale and 4 Hands Warhammer Imperial IPA. The medieval, cottage style kitchen was equipped with a keg and tap, New Castle below the counter in a powerless fridge. His mouth watered as he wished very badly the skunky beer was still good to drink.

  After a quick inspection of the home he discovered its former residents had been a pair of men with peppered beards that fell to their stomachs who shared the same bed. In a photo of them above the fireplace, they were holding pint glasses, filled with a dark heady drink, high above their heads as their lips met. A man in white robes was behind them, standing beneath a white canopy, smiling as wide as the Earth, hands clapping. Ryan didn’t recognize either of them, nor their sand-gold metallic Volkswagen Touareg left collecting leaves in the driveway.

  “Why not have the right to be as miserable as everyone else?” Ryan grumbled and went in search for something useful. Emily followed up the stairs behind him. “Now, the real question is: If you have a kid, how do you decide who the house husband is?”

  “Husband?” Emily looked up at him, her rainbow tied pigtails swaying.

  “Yeah, that’s what Daddy was. And Mama, my wife. We were married.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “Daddy is Daddy. No husband. No. No. No.”

  “Yes, I was.”

  She grinned and repeated her argument. “Daddy is Daddy is Daddy is Daddy is daday.”

  After a thorough search of the upstairs he found nothing more useful than a pair of collared shirts he liked, a cashmere sweater he wouldn’t need for a while, and a pair of unworn rain boots. Emily found a black ribbon and began dragging it behind her, making it dance on the dusty floor.

  As Ryan dug underneath the bathroom sink, around drain cleaner, blue toilet cakes and extra tp, he heard a choking sound behind him. Emily was nowhere to be seen. She had ducked around the corner, presumably to go poop in privacy—her M.O.

  “Emme?”

  She came darting into the bathroom with a panicked look on her red face. The black ribbon she’d been playing with was wrapped around her neck several times. Ryan felt all the color drain out of him. She was turning purple, her windpipe constricted.

  “Oh, God,” he spat, and tried untying the ribbon, but it was so tight he could hardly get a finger under it. The knot Emily had managed was strong. “My knife. Oh, God. Where is it? Where the fuck is it?”

  Emily wheezed, her tiny arms shaking.

  He dug at the bottom of his backpack and found nothing. Checked the pockets. Nothing. He’d just used his knife downstairs but couldn’t find it now. And he had no scissors. There was no time to look. Emily slumped to the floor, her eyes wide and pleading. Wrapping the new sweater around his hand, Ryan punched the bathroom mirror, cracking it. He hit it again, and again, till a shard of glass tumbled into the sink.

  “Hold still, baby. I don’t want to hurt you.” He took the shard of glass in his cashmere wrapped hand, slid two fingers under the ribbon to keep her neck from being cut, and pulled down. The shard of glass sliced through the ribbon and bit into the flesh of his fingers. Stinging air blew on his fresh wound as Emily gasped for freedom.

  She coughed several times in his arms, taking in rasping breaths.

  “Are you okay, baby?” He asked, holding her steady. Blood oozed from his left hand, staining the expensive cashmere. “Can you breathe?”

  She nodded, the color of her face returning to normal. Her neck was red and splotchy all the way around.<
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  “Why did you do that? Don’t ever do that again. It’s dangerous. I—I can’t lose you. You can’t go where I can’t follow. Okay?”

  She nodded again.

  Ryan let out a long breath and just held her. It took several moments before he realized just how bad he’d cut himself. He bound the wound and watched as the bandage soaked with red again and again. They searched the house and came across a small tube of superglue. Ryan pulled his cut together and glued it shut. The bleeding soon ceased. His hand trobbed.

  “Boo boo?” Emily asked.

  “Yeah, boo boo. I’ll be fine. And no more ribbons.”

  “No ribbons,” she agreed.

  Emily kissed her hand and tapped his injured hand. He wondered if this level of toddler medical care would have been covered by his HMO.

  Despite the disappointment, and a serious scare, at the third house, he found something equally useful as fresh food. In the bottom of a boy’s closet, who Ryan could only assume had just left for college, was a hand crank flashlight. Forget the hidden half-empty box of condoms lying beside it, Ryan certainly didn’t need those. He set the flashlight to the side and smiled.

  “Emme, stay close. Always where I can see you. Okay?”

  She nodded, still too afraid to speak.

  They took a moment and caught their breath. He started chewing one of the meal replacement bars. It was chocolate peanut butter flavored, but yet, still reminded him of chalk like all the rest. He wasn’t sure how a solid bar of chocolate could have such a grimy texture. After six or seven of these, they hadn’t made him sick yet, so he still figured they were safe enough. He offered one to Emily but she turned it down, opting to play with a basketball instead. She’d been skittish around food lately. He knew all kids went through these cycles, he did, but it still made him uneasy.