Beside the various sundries was a simple wooden dresser piled high with tight leather clothes, including an executioner’s mask, neatly arranged beside bottles of lube and other stimulating sex jellies.
One thing was for sure, he had discovered a careful secret. There were reasons people could stay together for a long time. Sometimes that reason was a mutual respect for one another, sometimes a simple monetary transaction to keep finances stable, other times there was a common interest or sense of adventure. He was certain the Marinoffs had had all three, and this is what they had called love. Apparently, whenever they had gotten mad enough at one another, or needed an intense sexual release, they knew exactly what to do to take care of it.
“My cute little Jewish neighbors were kinky freaks,” he said, and then found himself laughing. “Straight up freaks! Suck on that, Mr. Grey! You ain’t got shit on the Marinoffs!” His belly began to shake so hard he had to sit down. Emily stared at him and a barrage of questions came out of her.
“What’s that? What’s this?” She pointed everywhere.
“Well, that my dear is what they call a studded paddle. And that? A gigantic pink vibrating dildo. Lord that must hurt. And this? Oh, this? That’s a double-sided strap-on that no doubt was used to peg dear old Mr. Marinoff. And those, no get those out of your mouth, those are butt plugs. Eww.” He kept laughing, tears streaming from his eyes. “Shit, I was hoping to find something useful down here, maybe a water filter or clean containers or, I don’t know. But unless I can fix Lillian’s phone with a Sybian, freakin’ vibrating, rideable sex machine designed for clitoral stimulation, we’ll have to check somewhere else!” He cleared his misty eyes and started to breathe almost normal again. “Okay. Okay. Okay. I’m fine. Whew. That was...” He started laughing again. Emily was now imitating him, her hands also on her belly.
It took several minutes to calm down.
The flashlight was growing dim. He cranked it, light blinking as he did. When it came back to full intensity he noticed something beside the silken bed at the end of the room—other than the obvious silicon sex doll with pink hair propped against the wall.
“Oh my God! Oh my God!” He dragged a thirty-pound plastic box out into the center of the room and began reading its label: Duracell, Marine/RV Deep Cycle Battery. “That’s what I’m talking about, bitches!”
“What’s that?” Emily asked.
“Another piece of the puzzle, my love.”
“Puzzle? ‘Mon, Dada. Puzzle! I puzzle!”
He removed the electrical clamps connected to the battery running back to the bed, and with Emily in front, went back upstairs with his prize. They played and laughed for a long while, found some more toys Emily was interested in, including simple puzzles, and looked through photo albums at the happy couple that used to live here. They really were the perfect pair, the Marinoffs; Ryan only wished he had listened closer to their relationship advice. He had made his mistakes in his marriage, wandered off the path, and it had nearly come to ruin. He felt guilty for that now.
“Ready to go home?” he asked, and Emily nodded.
He put all but one of the Barbies in his backpack, made sure to recover her sippy cup and full lunch bag, and led them home.
If anything Ryan had learned from his in depth exploration of the homes lining their street, was that you never truly know your neighbors by the way they care for their lawns and flowers, or the way they greet you as you stroll by. Each home, each collection of lives, was a mystery unto itself, complicated, fickle, and as incongruous as the human condition. He found a comfort in this. A comfort in that he didn’t have to be defined by the mistakes he’d made, but that those mistakes had made him into what he was.
Before opening the front door of their home, he turned back towards the end of the street. He swore the mannequin was standing there, turned in his direction. He waved at it and went inside, locking the door behind him. Back in the kitchen he scrawled in his log:
Today was a nine.
“Eat eat?” Emily asked excitedly, and he found her sentiment catching.
“Finally hungry, huh? Let’s do something good about that.”
Chapter 31
“Things might have gone better if you’d just listened to my advice.”
“What advice?”
“Don’t be dull, my boy. You knew all along. That little lady of yours, beautiful as she is, needs to be taught a lesson from time to time. You got to be rough with her in private, but not abusive.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Mr. Marinoff?”
He laughed. “You know exactly what I’m talking about. You have to make her strip down and get on all fours. Use a couple of those wrist restraints over there. Wait here, let me get them for you. You can borrow them. Be sure to let me know how you like them. These are real soft on the inside so they won’t leave any marks.”
“Umm, that’s okay, sir. Really, it’s okay.”
“No no, I insist. It will really put her back in line if she’s been a mean one. Now then, where was I? Oh yes, get her down on her knees with that ass up in the air, wrists fixed behind her back on a spreader bar. That’s what I call it. Then leave her for a while, go eat a sandwich or have a cup of tea. Oh, but make sure to stuff a couple vibrators in her before you leave. Make sure she’s really feeling it. You can use one of those things that look like a shoulder massager and duct tape it over her clitoris. That’ll drive her wild, I guarantee it! The Mrs. loves it.”
“I don’t feel comfortable having this conversation. Can we just stop now? Please? This is not the kind of talk we need to be having. Go back to being my innocent neighbor. Please, sir. Please!”
“Then, after you’re done with your snack, come back and remove the vibrators, except the one in the hole you don’t plan on entering. Leave it in, trust me with this. Then, you got to really go after her. Give her a couple good slaps to the tuckus, then just slide it in. Make sure she’s screamin’, or if you prefer, as I usually do, put a gag in. Give it to her till you can’t take it anymore. She’ll thank you for it later, worship you even.”
“Uhh, please, you don’t have to tell me all this. This is—”
“You got to be rough with her. That’s what she’s into, right? None of that having threesomes nonsense. That’s bad for a marriage. Trust me, my boy. But this! Now this will really bring you together! Nothing like a little rough sex to get the blood flowing. And when you’re all done, or each round that you’re done, make sure to spill your seed on her where she can feel it the most. Mrs. Marinoff preferred it in her eyes, not really sure why. Even with the cataracts it didn’t seem to bother her all that much. Bits of it used to get stuck on the skin tags beneath the mark her glasses left. She’d just have me scrape it off with a spoon and feed it to her so she could get back her strength for the second round.”
“I want to wake up!” Ryan repeated again and again. “I want to wake up! I want to wake up! Dear God, I want to wake up! Help me! Help!”
Chapter 32
Over the next two weeks Ryan carefully categorized all their consumables, keeping a running tally in his log book. The good/bad quality of their days ranged from four to seven, mostly based on what kind of mood Emily found herself in. Her shoulder had fully healed and so had his ankle. His glass cut fingers, still stiff. They were feeling better, yet, the two of them had been butting heads over irrelevant matters—like any good father and daughter. Emily was starting to turn her nose up at what they had available to eat, asking for cheese sticks or chicken fingers instead. Even the chocolate meal replacement bars were, “blech,” as she would say while sticking out her tongue. Ryan couldn’t escape the thought that they needed to find fresh food, and so every house they entered he checked their gardens for edible plants. He was getting close to adventurous enough that they might try some of the mushrooms mentioned in Lillian's Foraging in Missouri book, but not quite yet. He feared he’d pick the wrong ones and end up tripping the rest of the day, or outright poison himself.
In the interest of making this task easier, he collected parts from various cars, and following the instructions in the magazine he found, tried to get a minivan across the road running. He swapped the hoses for new ones. Tried to crank. No power. A small hurtle.
Another oddity, was that the less food he allowed himself to eat, the less he seemed to crave. When he’d first awoken, he ate voraciously, stuffing as much as he could get down his throat. But now, only a few bites or a single meal replacement bar would have him full for hours, despite walking several miles. Many days he made only chicken broth for lunch while he let Emily eat whatever she would surrender to. Her enmity toward their immortal foods menu of rices, honey, and broth was getting to her. He forced them to both take vitamins, but wasn’t sure of their potency.
They needed fresh food stuffs.
There was plenty of safe foods in the houses they raided. While three of them were swept clean like Karen’s, many others had food more abundant than they could have eaten in a year. After twenty-seven houses, he delightedly found ten additional MREs. Whatever he couldn’t carry was notated on the growing map he kept in his backpack.
Emily and he made a game of running from house to house—all of which, in spite of their poor curb appeal and non-existent upkeep, she had called “pretty.” Sometimes he carried her on his shoulders and she’d pull leaves off low hanging branches, counting them; other times she splashed her way through puddles after it rained. He even felt safe enough to stop carrying the baseball bat or fireworks since the wild dogs had all but vanished. The only one they’d come across looked as if it were at death’s door. Ryan experienced only mild regret for winning this war.
Without the threat of dogs they’d seen other animals: three female spotted deer, a slough of rabbits, endless counts of squirrels, and even a few chipmunks. One day, a brightly colored tropical bird, with blue wings and a yellow chest topped with green, landed close by. Ryan wondered where it had come from, not being native. Emily fed it dry seeds found in a deck box beside several broken plastic feeders. The bird took to her like a new pet and followed them around for hours.
Then there were the cats. Not wild like bobcats, but now-feral domestic feline breeds that had thrived without their humans. One massive, orange tom had been carrying a limp rat in its mouth up North Skinker Boulevard, giving them a mew in greeting before vanishing behind a set of hedges. A few minutes later, Ryan and Emily happened upon the decaying body of a dog. One of his victims.
The strangest occurrence of all was on the second day when Ryan found the mannequin, much where it had been after leaving the Marinoffs’.
It now was facing west.
They waved at it as they passed by, searched a half dozen houses, and when they came back around it was facing east. He convinced himself it was just his imagination, and ignored this. At first.
The following day the mannequin was gone, but reappeared two streets over as they exited a home recently raided. Emily waved at the mannequin like it were an old friend. Ryan went cold even though his clothes were sweaty. It was clear that a piece of plastic, shaped like a man, was somehow following them. He had to do something to keep himself grounded in reality. He was losing grip.
Despite having one of the biggest pieces to the electricity puzzle, Ryan was still in need of a means to charge the battery. He did the prep work while Emily was napping, following the instructions in the magazine to the letter, emptying the old acid into a bucket and cleaning the cells with a solution of baking soda and water. After it had set for several hours he fearfully emptied out the cleaning solution, imagining the bubbling chemicals touching his exposed skin. He wished he’d found a better set of gloves before starting this process. All he had were a pair of rawhide garden gloves that by the time he was done, the fingertips were damp with acid and covered in black stains. He filled the empty battery cells with a mixture of alum, the acidic cooking spice he’d found at the grocery, and water. It was his understanding that all he needed now was to charge it. And so he hoped. Chemistry was not his field of study.
Every house they visited he looked for a solar trickle charger similar to what was shown at the end of the article. He needed something with at least five watts and twelve volts of power. If he had done the battery change to alum acid properly, and the cells weren’t corroded too badly, it should work well enough—so the article’s author, Jim Blanderhorne, claimed.
Ryan found himself clutching his wife’s phone at night, holding it tight to his chest in the hope it might just magically work on its own. It never did, yet it summoned all sorts of dreams involving Lillian, none of which were erotic in nature. He started dreaming of how they’d first met at Stanford his second year of school, and this had inspired him to keep a pack of Fruit Stripe Gum in his pocket at all times.
With a viable means to collect fresh water growing by the day, now up to ten fifty-gallon garbage cans with makeshift wire filters to keep the sticks and leaves out, Emily and he were wearing clean clothes and had a chance to get a bath when time allowed. The nights were still dark, and the house was becoming increasingly hot and damp with the season, but it was comfortable enough with the windows open. No immediate dangers to worry over. He was almost ready to declare that, Sharpe House patch 3.2, was fully deployed. He’d even started shaving daily, now that razors didn’t cost an arm and a leg, though his head hair was getting long and ragged, as was Emily’s.
For the next six days, Emily wouldn’t take a nap. Ryan had a lot to get done since it had rained hard at the start of those days. He had water to boil, non-potable containers to fill, limbs and leaves to clear off of the rain collectors and out of the gutters. He was so exhausted trying to get her to take naps that he decided he’d try and lay down with her instead. The result was often two hours in the middle of the day where she would slap him relentlessly in the face while rolling around in bed. He would doze in and out, and she would run around the room screaming as loud as she could just to hear her own voice. The bed became littered with Barbies and stuffed animals, plastic castles, Little People, and Legos.
On day seven of no naps, Ryan was fed up and took all the toys, tossed them in a box, to Emily’s dismay, put them in the hall, closed the door, and stapled blackout shades over the windows. Emily fought for a while, but with no toys or blue light as stimulation for her growing mind, it finally decided to shut down.
He didn’t think he’d ever taken such a sound nap in all his life.
They walked and walked and walked and walked all over The Loop. Ryan didn’t think he’d ever walked so much in all his life, but this wasn’t exactly true. He’d taken a 400 mile backpacking trip with Lawrence one summer, shaving off nearly twenty miles a day. It was more difficult hiking through an abandoned city with a two-year-old than the Rockies with your best friend. Though cute, and usually sweet, Emily was curious and exhausting. She needed to check out everything, and he had to be right behind her, making sure there was no danger in her extreme curiosity. His fingers ached at the thought.
By now, they were inspecting nearly eight houses a day.
The mannequin was now up by Fitz’s Restaurant in The Loop proper. Ryan was convinced it was alive. There was no other explanation for its constant change in location. It’s not as if it were an object in a program and could randomly be set to new coordinates on a rotating basis by a script.
It was moving on its own. Self-aware.
On the days they passed through The Loop they made one of the recently opened trolley cars their lunch stop. Streetcar number 511. The red and white Gomaco-built Brill-replica had been moved from Portland to St. Louis for this task, to be used in a vintage trolley service. How very odd. It was a spectacular replica designed after a 1903 streetcar, featuring a steel frame under a wooden body which contained modern locomotion and ADA, American’s with Disabilities Act, compliant modifications. Emily had begun calling it a choo choo and Ryan did his best to correct her. Streetcars and trains were not the same thing.
&n
bsp; Inside car 511, with its five broken windows and three bare skeletons, Emily and he would eat sticky rice and drink flavored water, taking a moment to rest their legs. Ryan would read Emily books with pictures and emphasize things such as color, numbers, and vocabulary. Mr. Brown Can Moo, Can You? by Dr. Seuss, a whimsical story where a man named Mr. Brown makes all sorts of sounds with his mouth, for which Ryan narrated flawlessly, was fast becoming one of her favorites. There were others, of course, but he only carried one or two with them per day. After reading a promotional book about Rudolph they’d gotten from taking pictures with Santa last holiday season, sixteen times in one sitting, he had to pick his choices carefully.
“Where Ho Ho?” she asked when he revealed a copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. He ignored her comment and started reading the book with gusto, then afterwards, moved to one about colors and nouns he’d procured from among the cheesy romance novels on Karen’s bookshelf.
One day on a whim, Ryan decided to take them across North Skinker Boulevard, parallel to the trolley route by four or five blocks, into a neighborhood of much nicer homes than theirs. What he found didn’t surprise him much.
He’d attended a couple dinner parties thereabouts. They were the homes of old money families with possessions bought out of regard for status rather than function, a concept that went completely against Ryan’s grain. He had been raised in a comfortable house, but not a wealthy one. Every purchase had a purpose, never to just look pretty or inspire an anecdote when guests entered the foyer.
The Two That Remained Page 19