“Asses.” He was trying to tell me about the fight.
“Someone said something, and you didn’t like it,” I prompted.
“Pretty much.”
He saw me studying his wounds and gave me a mock glare to make me stop.
“I was just pitying Someones,” I said.
“I flattened them!” Matthew announced proudly. “Fuckers said something about someone I love. I mean, not love love. Love. Care about. Family. Not family family, but family.” Matthew was definitely drunk. His speech intrigued me. “Was about my sister. Not my real sister, the one who died. My chosen sister.” He looked at me significantly, then looked to the ground, then looked at his bandaged knuckles.
I hadn’t known they’d had a sister. None of them had ever even mentioned her before. I reprimanded myself for not having asked. Those thoughts hit me before I even realized he was referring to me when he said “chosen sister.”
“How many Someones?” I inquired.
“Three.”
I laughed a little. I couldn’t help it. Matthew laughed, too.
“Badass!” I said, and he clumsily bumped my fist with his. “Doesn’t matter what they say.”
“Don’t care what they say about me, but I care what they say about you.” He patted my knee.
“Fuck ‘em,” I said.
He laughed hard at this. “For such a sweet little thing, you’re worldly.”
We sat some more and Matthew got drunker.
“Will you tell me about her?” I asked. “Your sister?”
He tried to look into the flask to see how much was left. I took it from him, felt the difference in temperature where the fluid ended, and indicated the line of it with a fingernail. Matthew took it back. “Thanks,” he said. He had at least three shots’ worth left. Okay, now probably two. “Ruthie was a good kid.” He paused and took another long pull, followed by another. “But she wasn’t very strong. We tried to protect her. We tried… Aw, fuck.”
His hand was shaking too much to hold the flask, which was pretty much empty anyhow. He’d dropped it. I picked it up and set the silver container by my backpack. I wrapped both my hands around the hand he still had in the air and eased it back to his side. He’d been holding it up as if the flask was still in it.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry for bringing it up,” I told him.
“Nah. Eric keeps saying we need to process this shit. That we need to talk about it, repeatedly. Need to work through it instead of trying to bury it.”
“Burying it seems easier.”
He nodded drunkenly. “Fighting, too.”
I hugged him. He pushed his face into my hair for a couple of minutes, then released me.
“Wanna stay out here for the afternoon,” Matthew said finally, calmer. A question and a statement.
“Yes.”
We lay down side by side on the cold concrete table and he stretched his arm out for me to use as a pillow. We pointed at images in the fluffy clouds drifting overhead until he passed out and I eventually fell asleep. I couldn’t have been out long before my first nightmare hit.
“You were dreaming,” Matthew’s voice woke me up. “Whatever it was, it’s gone now.” He kissed my forehead.
I opened my eyes and he smiled, still drunk.
“Let’s go home,” he told me.
I was sitting at the picnic table again early that evening, this time with Eric on the ground beside me. Matthew had fallen asleep on his bed almost as soon as we’d gotten back to the lean-to, and Eric had asked me to take a walk with him, and he’d led me back to the concrete tables I liked to hang out on so much. I’d opted to sit backward on a bench with a leg resting against his shoulder, so I wouldn’t have to stop touching him. His pant legs had bunched up when he’d stretched his legs out.
“What’s this?” I asked, reaching down to trace a line around a mark on his shin. I could usually identify what left his scars, but not this one.
He watched my finger go round and round, then across it. “Through and through. Bullet hole.” He guided my hand to the back of his calf to feel the edge of the exit wound. Then he tugged the hem of his pant leg down.
I’d never been shot.
“What happened?” I rubbed across the small circle again, this time over cloth. “What was it like?”
It was obvious he didn’t want to talk about this. Maybe he was realizing how difficult it was for me to talk, after all. He’d shared this type of stuff before, plenty—but only with his brothers. He’d never tried talking about any of it with someone who hadn’t pretty much lived it with him, and now he saw part of why it was so hard for me.
Leaning back, he looked up to the sky, as if hoping something would appear and tell the story for him. He finally managed to Tell Of. “When I was fourteen, we went on vacation, my mom and my brothers and me. Dad had to stay home for work.” He closed his eyes. “When we got home, he was royally pissed at everything, as usual. I had a cold. I remember my mom was making me some soup. She didn’t bring him something fast enough. I don’t know what, a remote or a drink. Something mundane.”
I closed my eyes, allowing the sound of his voice to transport me with him. Back to the small, dingy, dreary house with three boys, a helpless woman, and a very angry man. No Ruthie, I noted.
“Dad bellowed, ‘You’re worthless!’ and stormed out of the room. Usually, that would mean he’d be out of sight for a few hours, but not this day. He returned a minute later with a gun and pointed it at Mom. The seconds seemed to move impossibly slow and lightning fast at the same time. Thom and Mattie were on the other side of her. I moved forward, but we couldn’t stop what was happening. And then my mom was lying on the floor, full of holes, covered in blood. There’s so much blood in a body. How does it all fit?”
It wasn’t a question that required an answer.
“She bled out on the ratty yellow carpet of the living room, next to the kitchen counter. My leg was the only other casualty. As Mom fell, Dad kept shooting, and I got in the way. Felt like I was on fire. Never got rid of the stain on the carpet.”
“What happened to your dad afterward?”
“Mom had been holding a knife, cutting vegetables to go in my soup, so he said it was self-defense. Before the cops arrived, he’d threatened the three of us into backing up his story when questioned. Also, the police precinct in the area was a corrupt good-ol’-boys’ club, and one phone call from my dad’s friend made the whole thing go away. They took a report, but there was no follow-up whatsoever. So… nothing happened. They didn’t even ask for his gun.”
He slung his arm around my leg and set his head against my knee. His touch was light on the inside of my calf.
“Scout?” Matthew asked in the morning, walking up to where I was by the lake. He didn’t look the least bit hung over.
“Sure.” I followed him out to his motorcycle. This was an exciting surprise. I hadn’t been on one of those in far too long.
Matthew apologized about the lack of helmets.
“I wouldn’t have wanted one,” I commented.
“Should protect your head!”
I told him about my final encounter with a motorcycle helmet. At the farmer’s, I stowed my helmet on a wooden fence post. One morning, I grabbed my helmet and went for a ride. When I got back, I smacked it onto the post again. More earwigs than I could count fell out of the post in crawling swarm-balls. I inspected the helmet and couldn’t find any bugs. I never found any of them on my person, either, but that cured me anyway. In this new world, I would go without motorcycle helmets.
Matthew laughed at me when I told him about the earwigs. “You don’t shy from stabbing a rotter, I’ve seen you play with leeches down at the lake, but you can’t stand bugs?”
“Just certain bugs. Don’t get me thinking about them.”
Matthew got on the bike and I slid behind him without hesitation, and we sped away from civilization, waving at Eric and Thom and Jeff as we exited the camp. I caught a glimpse of That Look
from Eric, but just a flash of it.
We stopped at a garage. Oil stains dotted the floor. Tools were strewn everywhere. I resisted the urge to pick them up and organize them.
“Ooh!” Matthew held up a mostly full gas can. He sniffed it to confirm it was gasoline and that it was still good, then strapped it to the back of the motorcycle. “Sweet!”
Someone had left a pickup jacked up. I plopped onto the mechanic’s creeper on the floor and rolled under the vehicle.
“We could make this work for the other truck,” I said.
“Accelerator cable?” he asked, and I made a noise to confirm it. “Nah, what you put in is fine. Why mess with it?”
“I’m taking it, unless you want to try to salvage this truck.”
“I might. Leave it for now.”
“Okay.” I didn’t move from under the vehicle. “Exhaust is rusted out.”
“Tell Of about your roses,” he said while I inspected the truck’s underbelly.
“He freehanded it,” I said after a brief pause. “Started with linoleum cutters.” I knew this information would get back to Eric and Thom if I didn’t stipulate it should be private. I didn’t put such a limitation on it. Matthew didn’t usually ask, and he’d picked the right time. “He used a box cutter, an X-Acto knife, et cetera. He had a wooden box full of those implements. He said once the blades got dull, the cuts looked better. More like he wanted them to look, I mean.”
“How’d he get the texture like that?”
“Reworked it a lot.” I picked a piece of rust from the truck’s underside. “And there was his rotary tool—a Dremel.”
“Wow. That must’ve sucked. It looks cool, though.”
“It just makes me look… more defective,” I mumbled, picking at a little more rust.
Matthew took hold of my boots and pulled me and the creeper out from under the truck.
“Defective?” he said, standing over me.
“So ugly.” I scooted sideways and hopped to my feet. A mosquito flew into my mouth and I started spitting.
“There’s no… You’re not defective.” Matthew laughed at me while I tried to get the last bit of mosquito off my tongue.
I peeled away its clear wings and held them up, looking at the sunlight through them.
Matthew watched as I pulled a spider off his shoulder and let it weave a bit of web. Soon, she was hanging, strung between my hands. I set her aside in a corner, out of the way. Matthew observed this, and tried to determine how to finish his thought.
“Odd in your squeamishnesses, yes,” he said, “but not defective.”
I didn’t acknowledge his words. I was looking in a shiny convex mirror hanging on the wall at his eye level, seeing him in it. He looked back at me through it, then took the mirror from the wall and attached it to the bike.
“For the corner at the end of our trail,” he said.
“Good.” This way we would be able to see people approaching our lean-to area from the camp.
“Anyway, don’t let Eric and Thom hear you talk like that unless you want a real lecture. You’re beautiful.”
Coming from Matthew, this didn’t bother me. I didn’t feel threatened by it, and Matthew was sincere. I decided it was a point we could disagree on.
“Thanks,” I said, without enthusiasm.
“Seriously, get past it, or I’ll tell them, and you’ll never hear the end of it. Sorry. To think of you sitting through that…”
He trailed off, and I didn’t want to chase after his thoughts. I’m part lampshade.
“Look!” I exclaimed. An old Vendstar 3000, a hand-turned twenty-five-cent candy dispenser, sat in the corner, tucked behind a stack of tires. A three-container vendor: Sprees, M&M’s, and Runts. We disassembled the machine and poured the contents into bags. Matthew chomped on a handful of M&M’s while I picked the bananas from the Runts I was about to eat.
“Got something against bananas?” Matthew teased.
I popped the candy bananas in my mouth and deliberately crunched them hard.
“Ouch!” he guffawed. “Don’t mess with the lady. That hot little number has sharp, tiny teeth!”
“The bananas’ taste clashes with the other Runts.” I held up my fists.
“All goes to the same stomach.”
“Doesn’t all have to go there at the same time.”
We moved out of the shade of the garage and had a quick fight before packing up to go home. As we got onto the motorcycle, weighed down with new treats, I spoke.
“Matthew?”
“Yeah, Kitto?”
“Thanks.” I pressed my cheek against his back and he pulled my arms around him tighter, and he took us home.
“Where’d you pick up that hammer of yours?” Eric asked. We were walking through the woods. Just wandering.
“Farmer’s.”
Eric grinned his Cheshire Cat grin.
“What?” I asked, again expecting to get teased.
“When I saw you pull it out…” Eric laughed. “Stunning. Mattie calls your backpack ‘The Miracle Bag.’ You always have exactly the right item in there. You’ve totally stolen my heart with that thing. Carabiner holder strap, drink pocket, flashlight pocket, safety pin collection…” He continued to list features of my eccentric backpack setup.
Eric smiled and the corners of his eyes crinkled. Then I felt high and low again, glowing in loving him and paralyzed by the idea of losing him.
“We could be a disaster,” I warned.
Eric pulled me closer and put his forehead to mine. “We’re not gonna be a disaster,” he promised.
I noticed movement behind him. My vision wasn’t what it used to be—I saw stars more and more often—but what I saw twenty feet out was unmistakable. A batch of rotters limping our way.
“Company,” I murmured to Eric.
“That’s so weird!” Eric said as we put several rotters down in quick succession.
All of these rotters were extremely abnormal. There were conjoined twins. There were children with extra limbs and contorted girls in tattered costumes. Three of the rotters had an abundance of hair—it covered their faces. We’d been attacked by a freak show of rotters who had evidently broken free from a traveling carnival. Another former performer was completely covered in tattoos and chains and piercings. There was a woman so fat her rolls were pulling themselves apart in gory valleys of viscera and watery yellow-red juices. Beside her was a man so gaunt he looked like he had practically no body fat at all. His skin stretched tightly over his immensely tall body. Its skin. Its. I don’t know why, but I was relating to the people these used to be. They’d likely been preyed on when living. They’d had their turn to do the preying, too, but their time was up.
While Eric and I were busy ending already-over-but-still-miserable lives, Matthew and Thom showed up.
“Boo! I thought we’d catch you doing something interesting!” Matthew joked exuberantly. He and Thom helped us with the gruesome task of de-animating a corps of freaks and clearing them away for the sake of sanitation. Thom was quiet, but Matthew was wound tight. It’s no secret he loved his warrior side.
“Dude! We slaughtered those things!” Matthew said.
Eric obligingly fist-bumped him. Thom and I looked at the piled bodies and felt. I mourned for who they’d been, and for what they’d become. And I was more than a little jealous. Their journeys were over. I sighed, again saddened that oblivion wasn’t an option. I knew Thom understood that side of me, perhaps better than anyone else.
Thom wrapped his arms around my shoulders from behind and leaned his head on mine and sighed.
“I know,” I told him, fastening my arms tightly around his.
Eric joined me as the sky turned a magnificent burgundy with the sunset. We sat on the lean-to’s deck, and he traced his finger up the outside of my leg, over the fabric of my pants, from my knee to the top of my thigh. Over my etched wild roses. I slipped away from his fingers. It wasn’t intentional, just automatic. I wanted him to touch me.
He still wanted to know more about the roses. I knew Matthew had already filled in some of the missing information for him, and I didn’t want to talk about it further.
“Gonna get ready for bed. Early bed,” I mumbled.
He didn’t pursue me into the lean-to.
I wriggled out of my clothes and pulled on one of Eric’s shirts (it hung almost to my knees, making it a perfect nightshirt). It was clean but still smelled of him. I felt bad for shutting him down, and stuck my head out through the curtain. He was sitting on the corner of our little deck.
“Eric?”
He looked up. I moved my head to indicate he should join me inside.
He complied immediately. “What’s up?”
How to do this? I looked around. “Need a ‘sock on the door,’” I muttered, trying to find a way to keep this private. “I don’t want Thom and Matthew to walk in. Need privacy.”
“Oh! Hang on!” He fished under his clothes pile and pulled out a piece of paper and a fat marker.
TRESPASSERS WILL
BE PROSECUTED!
THIS INCLUDES YOU,
THOM AND MATTIE!
Eric looked pleased with the hastily scrawled message. He’d put on such a serious face before writing it, I couldn’t help but give a giddy laugh. Nerves.
He ran out to attach the sign to our curtain-door, and hurried back in. Worried I’d lose my resolve if he waited too long? He wasn’t wrong to think that.
I got down on the floor, lying on a sleeping bag, on my left side. I patted the floor behind me and Eric sat. I took a shaky breath and reached for his hand, grabbing at air. He put his hand out where I was swiping. I wrapped my fingers around his wrist, feeling his pulse. A quick calculation: his normally low heart rate was already over a hundred.
I knew he knew what this wasn’t going to be, that the “sock on the door” reference was just for privacy, and this wasn’t going to be pleasurable in any way.
I related some memories of my stepfather working on the rose etching as I pulled Eric’s hand so it cupped my heel. I placed his fingers so they followed the curve of my foot’s arch, where the design’s leaves and thorny branches begin. I tugged his wrist up a little. He caught my meaning. Lightly, his fingers glided over my disfigurement. His hand crept slowly up from my foot and ankle, over my calf, along the side of my knee. Up the outside of my thigh. There, under the hem of the shirt that was really his, he paused.
Survial Kit Series (Book 1): Survival Kit's Apocalypse Page 18