“What do ya mean Donald,” I asked. “Whose place is it that we’re going to?”
“It was Grandpa and Grandma Peterson’s homestead a long, long time ago. When they got old, they moved to town where there was electricity and things were easier, but kept the old place for the family to use whenever we come to visit,” he answered. “They’re not around anymore, but we’re still coming to visit.”
“Have you been there much?” I asked.
“A few times,” he answered, but not lately. “The last time we were there was for Grandpa’s funeral. The time before that was for Grandma’s.”
“That sucks. I’m sorry,” I said. “Is it cool there? I’ll bet its lots different, huh?”
“Well, yes and no. It’s a lot hotter, there are snakes and alligators to watch out for, but it’s still on the river, just like we are used to at home, so that’s good.”
“No electricity, huh?”
“Nope, but it’s ok. We use oil lamps and propane for cooking and heating. No air conditioning though, but you get used to that,” Donald said. “The fishing is pretty good there. You’re gonna like that. Different kinds of fish, but I’ll show you how to catch them. We use worms and cut-bait there.”
“What’s cut-bait?” I asked.
“Just what it sounds like, you dork. Cut up pieces of little fish or scraps of meat of any kind.”
“Oh cool! Do the alligators chase you in the kayaks?”
“Mostly not, but you have to watch out for them. There’s a huge old aluminum flat bottomed boat that we can use. Or at least there was the last time we were there. That’s a lot safer actually, and a lot less scary,” Donald answered.
And so the conversation went; us boys yakking it up about the adventure that we were headed towards. We were old enough to know not to bug Dave about ‘How much longer?’ Just about dark, we had to stop for gas. Dave bought us some McDonald’s take-out and told us that we were in the middle of Ohio. I’d never had McDonald’s food before. It was good! He got a couple of large coffees for himself. He said that we were going to drive all night and get as far away from Michigan as he could get us, then we’d stop somewhere off the expressway so he could sleep some, while us boys did something outside of the van. That sounded like a good plan to all of us.
Donald and I slept the rest of the night. We woke up to Dave telling us he needed to pull off for a while now to sleep. He pulled into a Walsanto parking lot, way in the back. He gave us $50 and told us to kill a couple of hours shopping for food, so he could get a good nap. We were instructed to get only things that the heat wouldn’t make a mess of. Stuff like unfrosted pop tarts for breakfasts, dry cereals we could eat without milk, and the biggest sacks of rice and flour they had. He said to make sure that we got store brands, to make the money go as far as we could. Nothing that needed refrigeration. He cautioned us on drawing attention to ourselves.
I played along as well as I could, but when we were out of earshot the van, I said; “I’ve never been in a store before Donald.”
“What? Whatd’ya mean?” he asked.
“Just what I said, Dad would never let me go to town. He was always ashamed of me.”
“Man! What a creep. Why was he so mean to you?”
“Like I said, he was ashamed of me because my existence proved that he had been eating the bad food,” I told him.
“The bad food… Really? Did you just say the bad food?”
“Well, yeah. You know, the GG-Factor genetic stuff that made us the way we are,” I said.
“Hahaha! Dude, you’re so funny.”
“Why?” I asked.
“You’re gonna tell me that you guys never ate store food, or restaurant food?”
“Never,” I told him. “We grew everything we ate, and cooked it from scratch ourselves. Do you guys?”
“Of course, you dork! Boy, do you have a lot to learn.”
Just then, we walked through some doors that slid open all by themselves, and into a different world. I’d never even dreamed of anything like this! I had no idea that there could be so many things to see in one spot. The colors and sounds and smells were incredible. The only thing I’d seen even remotely like this was yesterday at the farmers market, but that had been outside. This was all in one big room.
At that moment, I was overwhelmed with the realization that I had been cheated all of my life, just because of the color of my skin. Something inside of me changed during the next two hours, as we explored wonder after wonder. To Donald, this was just another Walsanto store, like those he’d been in a thousand times. To me, it was proof that my dad hated me. It was proof that I had a right to be angry…
“Hey there,” said an old man, that we just realized had been following us. “Y’all gray kids ain’t supposed to be in public without your folks. Y’all lookin’ to get arrested?”
“No sir, my dad can’t walk. He’s in the car just outside,” Donald lied. “He sent us in to get a few things.”
“Well, y’all better get ‘em and get then. We have laws here in the State of Georgia, says yer kind can’t do what yer doin’ by yerself.”
I felt that rage creeping up on me again, but Donald stepped on my foot to get my attention. “Remember what Dad said…” He nodded his head and smiled at the old man, and we went straight up front to pay for the things in the cart Donald pushed. “Let’s get out of here,” he whispered to me. I really felt the urge to hurt that old man. It was like the feeling I got when Dad whipped me for no reason, over something that Adam could get away with all day long. I wasn’t going to take this anymore.
Donald paid a black lady at the counter. She gave us dirty looks the whole time. She never really said anything wrong, but everything that she did say, she said nastily. We could both tell that she hated us. We could just feel it. As soon as we got out of those sliding doors again, I asked Donald, “What the hell was that? It’s worse here than it was in Linden! Is it like this in Florida?”
“Not where we’re going it isn’t. There isn’t anyone else around. Nobody.”
“Well good,” I said. “Because I wanted to beat the crap outta both of those people! What makes them think they’re so much better than us?”
“I dunno, dude. Just don’t go getting us in trouble. I had a hard enough time talking Dad into to taking you with us. We’re gonna be alright once we get where we’re going,” he said. “Don’t say anything to Dad about this. I don’t want him going back in there either.”
“Alright,” I agreed, “but I don’t get it. The black lady treated us like we were dirt. Black people are always yelling that they’re treated poorly just because they’re black. How’s that give her the right to look down on us because we’re the way we are? It’s not like this is our fault or anything. Dang!”
The rest of the day went a whole lot better. The weather was beautiful and the scenery was way different than anything I’d ever seen. It was… exciting, so I forgot quickly about being angry.
Dave told us all kinds of stories about growing up on the river down here, where land ended, and on the other side of the river, the everglades began. He told us that we couldn’t ever swim in the river, because there were just too many critters in it that would like to eat a young boy for lunch. I thought he was kidding at first, but he assured me that he was not. Then, he told us about a neighbor man who had fallen into the river while getting out of his boat at the dock. His family said that he had splashed around a couple of times, laughing and cussing, then something big had pulled him down. They never found his body…
He told us that we would be able to hear the panthers scream at night. He told us that they sound just like a woman screaming in the darkness. He said it would make our hair stand up on our necks the first time that we heard it.
Dave told us that there would be clouds of birds of every color and size. He said that the sounds and behavior of the birds was a good indicator of whether all was good, or if there was danger near. “Always pay attention to the birds,” he t
old us.
“All in all boys, it’s a beautiful place. I don’t know why I ever left there to begin with.” he said.
We were getting so excited to get there; we must have asked him a million questions, if we asked him one. The time and the miles were flying by now.
4
Finally, we turned off the two lane blacktop road and drove slowly down a two-track dirt drive. There was a curve in the drive that went around the end of a line of thick, bushy trees. Around on the other side the drive curved again to continue the way it had been going. I knew without being told that the bushes were there to hide the gate that was across the drive, with a chain and a lock on it, just ahead. Dave stopped, got out and opened the lock. He drove the van through, then got out and locked it again. About fifty feet further in front of us was an old looking, wood plank bridge that crossed a narrow stream. Again, Dave stopped, got out and inspected the bridge to be sure that it was still safe. Satisfied that it was, he got back in and drove across it. On the other side of the stream, there was a huge, old, red, wood sided barn with a green shingled hip roof on the left side of the two-track drive. It was the kind that had small gaps between the boards, so air could get inside, but small enough to keep critters and rain mostly out. The long front of it faced the way we were going. There were big hanging doors on the end that we drove slowly past. They were the kind that slid both ways and opened up really wide. Directly in front of the long side was a large fenced barnyard with no animals in it. It was simply full of tall grass and what Dave called kudzu vines that had overgrown the fences. Attached to the far side of the barnyard, was an identical building, but with no spaces between the boards, lots of windows and a long covered porch that wrapped all the way around it: the house. There was no way you could tell any of this was back here from the road and probably not even from the air, I thought. It was really cool!
“And here it is boys,” Dave said, faking a southern accent.
“It looks just like I remember it Dad!” Donald said, with a big ole smile on his face. We all bailed out of the van excitedly and headed for the porch. I had started to saying something to Donald, when he suddenly stopped and the smile on his face was replaced by a look of fear. My eyes followed to where he and Dave were looking and saw two men dressed in dirty blue denim bib-overalls and dirtier white long-sleeved button up shirts, rolled back at the wrist. One was tall and thin and had on a camouflage ball cap. The other was short and fat. He had no cap on, but had a whole head full of long, greasy, unwashed looking hair. They weren’t really white men, and they didn’t look black either. They were something in between I guess. The fat one had a double barreled shotgun pointed at Dave.
“Whatchu want here?” grunted the man with the gun, I think. He didn’t talk very plainly at all.
“This is my house,” Dave said. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Our house now,” the man said, laughing. “You an’ da gray bastards gonna tro us out?” he asked. Both men laughed at that, the tall one cackling.
That rage was back on me in an instant. Dave moved forward a step to the right, leaving me a straight path to the man with the gun. My mind was working fast. I decided that I was going to rush him and beat the crap out of him. As I began to move, Dave said; “If need be.”
BOOM!
I saw Dave go flying backwards, right over the porch rail, in a spray of red mist out of the corner of my eye as I charged. Donald screamed. Everything seemed in slow-motion. The barrel of the gun was swinging my way, but too slowly. It went off just as I grabbed it, and shoved the end away from me, tackling the man holding it like a professional football player. He flew backwards, and we hit the wooden porch hard, me on top of him with the barrel of the shotgun in my right hand still. Either the tackle or the fall knocked the wind out of the fat bastard. He gasped once for air once, both hands at his chest as I came up high with it, and smashed the butt of the shotgun down on the bridge of his nose with everything I had. There was a loud, sickening, crunching sound, and the fat man didn’t move again. The tall man howled, charging, and punched me in the right side of my face, hard. I stood quickly and swung the shotgun by the barrel like Babe Ruth swinging a baseball bat for a home-run. I hit the tall man in the left side of his head with the wooden stock. Red spray and teeth flew everywhere, as the side of his face caved in. Lots of it. I was consumed by the rage. I dropped the empty shotgun and picked him up like a rag doll, by an arm and a leg, over my head and threw him back-first onto a tree stump about five feet away from the porch. Over the sound of his spine crunching on the edge of the stump, I heard Donald screaming; “Dad, Dad, Dad!” as he ran around the porch rail to where Dave had fallen in a pool of his own blood and pieces of flesh. I looked around for any other danger, and saw none. I joined Donald on the ground where he held Dave’s head on his lap crying. Dave’s eyes were open, but I could tell that he wasn’t seeing anything. He had a big hole blown all the way through his chest. It was pieces of his lungs that he had landed in. Dave was dead. Just like that; within seconds of our arrival here.
As I knelt beside Donald, I heard a pounding sound from inside the house. It sounded like someone knocking on a door. Then I heard a girl’s voice yell; “Help me! Please help me!”
I charged into the house, following the sound of her voice and located a door, latched from the outside. I opened the latch, swung the door open and stepped out of the way all at once. A hybrid girl came charging out and ran to the front door, where she stopped, looking. “Are they both dead?” she asked.
“Yes, and Dave is too. Is there anyone else here?” I demanded.
“No. Nobody else. These men killed my daddy the same way when we came here looking for help to fix our boat, and kept me prisoner,” she cried. She turned her back to the bloodshed and looked at me with both hands holding her face. “Please don’t hurt me,” she begged.
“I’m not about to hurt you. You can count on that,” I told her. She ran over to me, hugged me tight and began crying. I was entirely befuddled. I had absolutely no idea what else to say, except; “I’m Adrian, what’s your name?”
“Maya,” she said.
“Let’s go help Donald. His dad just got killed,” I told her.
“Ok.”
I checked the throat of the first man I’d taken down for a pulse on our way back out the door. He was definitely dead. Then I went and did the same on the second one. He was deader. Maya stayed right at my side, crying softly but not saying anything as I moved over to where Donald was. I sat down beside my friend and put my arm around his shoulder and hugged him to me. He buried his face in my shoulder and cried and cried. Maya sat down on the other side of me, crying softly herself.
‘Man, what in the heck are we gonna do now?’ I thought. I reached over and closed Dave’s eyes.
After a bit, I stood up and looked around. The front door of the house that I had charged into faced the river that was only maybe fifty feet away from the porch. There were two boats tied up there, plus what had to be that big aluminum flat bottomed boat that Donald had mentioned, upside down on wooden saw horses. The dock ran along the shore, not straight out like I was used to at home. The boats could just pull right up and park beside it, and tie off. There was a roof over part of it that was in bad need of repair. Under it were some strange looking of tables. Probably for cleaning fish or something I thought.
“Maya, how well do you know this area?” I asked.
“Not very good,” she responded. “We came upriver in that boat over there, from The Island, out past Chokoloskee, out in the Thousand Islands. Daddy had some trouble with some men there over me, and he was taking me away from there. Why?”
“Well, we gotta do something with these bodies before somebody comes along and catches us with them, I was thinking.”
Donald stood up. “We’ll bury Dad up the rise, by the tree swing. Dad said that Grandpa buried his dogs up there because the ground never gets flooded up there.”
“Good idea,” I said
, “but what about these two?”
“We can take them downriver a little bit and toss them into the glades for the gators. They don’t deserve burying,” Donald growled. “Bastards!”
“Sounds like a plan then,” I agreed. “Maya, do you know how to drive your boat?”
“Yes.”
“Ok then, let’s get busy,” I told her. We let Donald spend more time alone with his dad, while we did that.
5
The next few days were pretty low-key. We let Donald mourn his dad. He was taking it really hard. He pretty much cried and slept. He did show us which bedrooms we could each use. He told us that we may have to adjust if any of his cousins showed up. We of course agreed to that. The rooms we had were all upstairs. The main bedroom downstairs, that had been his grandparents’ was left as-is for any uncles or aunts that might show up.
When we had used her boat to feed the two dead men’s bodies to the gators, it was the first time that Maya had been back into it during the ten days that she had been held captive. It had been a mess. We had removed everything but their nasty underwear from the dead men’s bodies before tossing them. They had taken her daddy’s money from his body. She took it back from theirs. They had taken his pistol, pocket knife, and watch. She got those back too.
The tall, thin man had got into her boat at some point, she said, and looked through her dad’s clothes for himself. He teased her by wearing some of his stuff in front of her, and tried to make her call him daddy. Everything he didn’t want, he just tossed around. Most of Maya’s clothing was untouched, but some of it had gotten wet by the frequent rain, and mildewed a little. We carried every single thing from her boat up to the back porch to sort out and clean up.
The thin man must not have been too smart. He hadn’t even figured out that the floor of the fishing platform on the whole front of the boat lifted up, and that’s where the most valuable of their things had been kept. All we had to do was move the pedestal seats out of their holders and the whole thing hinged up after it was unlocked. That’s where her dad had stored their fishing and hunting gear that they used on his days off. All of that was untouched.
Adrian (Genetic Apocalypse Book 2) Page 2