by David Beers
She babbled in the end.
Babbled, his mother. Linda Jennifer Hems, babbling like a loon. Michael didn't know everything, didn't know how cancer worked its evil magic on the body, but he did know his mother wasn't a babbler. His mother always said exactly what she meant. And yet, in the end…
"Give me my makeup. It's time to go to the doctor," she said.
There was no doctor appointment. She was in something his father called hospice, which meant that his mom was about to die. It meant she got to stay home instead of the hospital with all those needles poking into her skin. That was good, at least it was sold to Michael as good, that his mom could be at peace in her own home.
It wasn't good, though. Nothing about it was good.
She couldn't breathe, the cancer in her lungs eating up her ability to suck in oxygen. She would start screaming, her voice echoing throughout the house as Michael's father struggled to put her oxygen mask on. Michael just watched, not crying, though desperately wanting to. It scared him, seeing her like that, bald and screaming, almost not knowing those around her.
Michael thought she would live. He really did. He thought, from the moment his parents sat him down and told him his mother was sick, that she would beat it. Moms didn't die so young. Moms lived a long time; Michael didn't know a single kid whose mother had died. She would be okay and things would go on as if this hadn't happened.
Except things didn't get okay again.
She got sicker, and sicker, and sicker, until his father sat him down again.
"Your mom's going to die, Michael. There's nothing more the doctors can do."
Michael saw tears in his father's eyes for the first time. They didn't fall out, but stayed there, looking like tiny pools in his face. Michael said nothing, just felt his heart fold in on itself like some kind of car being crushed in a junkyard.
And now she was dead. His dad didn't lie.
Michael hadn't seen his father since they got back to the house; he was busy, taking food that people brought and finding places to put it all. Busy talking to people. Busy being a host. There were a lot of people in the house, all of them holding plates of food and talking quietly. Michael tried not to look at any of them because he didn't like what he saw in their eyes. Pity. Not empathy. Not necessarily sadness. But pity because he didn't have a mom anymore.
He just wished they would all leave so that he and his dad could be alone. He wished his dad would hug him. Michael wanted to be in his dad's arms, wanted to cry into his shirt, and wanted to be told that things would get better, even if they wouldn't. He wanted comfort, but there was none in this house. He wanted his mother back, but she was dead.
Someone brought Michael a plate of food. He took it and said "Thank you" without looking up. It sat on his lap, untouched, but no one seemed to notice. He didn't know what to do with the plate, though he didn't want it. Food was something alien to him right now, something that his mother would never again enjoy.
Michael spent the whole day in the house, wanting to cry, wanting to hold someone, but instead sitting on a couch with a cooling plate of food on his lap.
32
Present Day
The light woke Wren as the sun rose above the horizon, and its rays shone through the blinds, hitting his eyes. It felt warm across his face, and he woke up slowly, blinking a few times. The television was on in front of him, though the sound muted. He reached for the green cup next to him, but realized it was empty as he picked it up.
He hadn't drank anything last night.
And then it all came back to him. Wren didn't straighten up in his recliner, but his brain started revving. The man that had come to the door, looking for Michael. He would have shot Wren dead, right there on his stoop, if the neighbor hadn't come outside.
Michael? Was he here?
Wren stood up, noticing that his head wasn't reeling like it usually did when he tried to stand up so quick early in the morning.
Funny how that works, isn't it? Linda said.
He ignored her; there wasn't time for chit-chat right now. He walked back to Michael's room, his legs steady beneath him. He didn't bother knocking, just opened the door, and saw the empty bed before him. Michael wasn't back. He'd been gone all night and somehow Wren had fallen asleep instead of going out and looking for him. He hadn't even gotten drunk, just fell asleep. He stared at his son's bed, not knowing what to do. When was the last time Michael had stayed out like this without telling him? Did he even know? Had it ever mattered before?
Wren went back to the living room and picked up the portable phone before heading to the kitchen. He looked at the refrigerator and found Thera's number on it. The number had hung on this fridge for a long time, and Wren had never come over here to look at it. Michael's messy scrawl filled up the paper, and looking at his son's handwriting finally brought on the tears. They didn't escape from his eyes, but they blurred the numbers he was trying to punch into his phone.
It didn't ring, just went straight to Thera's voicemail. And Michael didn't have a cell; Wren had never bought him one.
Wren pulled the phone away from his ear and looked at it like he'd never seen such a contraption before. Where was Michael? Had those people from last night found him?
The crunching of gravel brought Wren out of his own head, his eyes flashing to the window at the front of the trailer. The blinds were closed so he couldn't see out, but hope rose in him like a balloon. Hope that it might be Michael, that he was finally home. He quickly walked to the front door, sticking his hand out to grab the knob, ready to turn it and find his son outside.
Wren stopped with his hand touching the cold metal of the knob.
Other cars could make that same noise running across gravel. It didn't have to be Michael, or one of his friends dropping him off. It could be anyone. It could be the man from last night, and if Wren just opened the door with arms wide, he could end up in a lot of pain.
Wren sidestepped over to the window, sticking his finger in between the blinds and pulling it down less than half an inch. A gray car sat outside, one that Wren had never seen before, and the man stepping from it wasn't Michael, wasn't one of Michael's friends. A man in a dark jacket and light jeans stood up, holding a gun next to his leg.
Wren stepped back from the window, careful not to shake the blinds.
Had he been seen?
What did he have in here? What could he possibly do? There wasn't any doubt in Wren's mind that this man came here to kill. No one carried a gun like that, not unless they meant to use it. Wren's brain was trying to shut down, what he just saw overloading his mind and crippling his ability to act.
He would die, in his own home, if he let that happen. Wren turned his hands into fists, taking in a deep breath. He heard the man walking, slowly, across the gravel, knowing that his time on this world was short.
Only one thing came to his mind, the only thing in this house that he knew for sure could cause a lot of damage. A lot of people in this neighborhood had guns, some probably even legally, but Wren didn't. He never owned a gun because Linda didn't like them, was scared of them, and even now—stupidly—he respected that fear.
Wren went to the kitchen, opening the small oven, seeing what he wanted inside. He reached in and gripped the cold metal of a cast iron pan.
Not much time.
He hoisted it out and and went to the door, standing beside it, holding the pan’s handle with both hands. The man stood on the porch now, still, not moving, but waiting. Had he heard Wren? What was he waiting on?
Focus, Wren, Linda said.
He heard the movement a mere second before the door flew open, the frame near the knob bursting, sending small fragments of wood into the air. Wren flinched but didn't move. He stood there at the side of the door holding the frying pan like he played Major League Baseball.
He watched the gun appear as the man stepped forward, his arm coming more and more into Wren's line of vision.
Not yet, he thought, moisture starting to
pop out across his palms.
He saw the man's nose, and swung.
The metal made a solid thunk sound as it connected, and the man didn't let out a single noise. He collapsed like a puppet whose puppeteer let go of the strings.
Wren dropped the pan as he stepped into the doorway—his hands shaking—and looked down at the man. Older, clean shaven, his nose a bloody mess of cartilage and skin. Wren didn't know what to do, had never cold cocked someone with a frying pan before. Never seen a man on his porch bleeding with his eyes staring at the sky before.
It took a few minutes of Wren standing there, looking, before he made a decision. He reached down and grabbed the man's ankles, and slowly, painfully, yanked him inside the trailer before closing the door. Wren reached down to the man's chest, putting his palm over his heart. Nothing beat back from the other side.
"Jesus Christ," Wren said, falling on his ass from his squatting position. The man was dead. Lying on Wren's carpet and dead.
* * *
Wren sat there for maybe an hour, his hands shaking, unable to come up with any sort of plan that would get him up off the floor. Wren was a drunk, a horrible father, and a widower, but he wasn't a murderer. He might have tussled with Michael now and then, but that was it. He had never killed someone, never thought it would be a possibility in his life.
In the end though, his thoughts went back to his son, to Michael. He could sit here forever, staring at this body until it started decomposing, but that wouldn't bring Michael back to him.
The thought of calling the police went through his mind, indeed, but also in his mind he saw the men from last night. Those men were about as official as official could get. Those men knew their business, had been trained in their business by professionals, and Wren came to the conclusion that calling the police might put him back in the same position as before.
And if the cops did show up here and found a dead man lying in Wren's living room, he would be detained at the least. His name would be put into some kind of database somewhere, and the people that sent this man would know where he was—with the police.
Wren got up and walked to the kitchen, his third time in here today, and each time for something vastly different than usual. Even this trip, while similar in some fashion, was much different in purpose. He searched through a few drawers until he found what he wanted. Then he went to the cabinet, the main cabinet he went to every single day, and pulled down a bottle of vodka. He wasn't getting through this day sober; Wren might not be as quick as he was before Linda died, but he wasn't stupid. If he went twelve hours without alcohol, he would start going into withdrawals: diarrhea, uncontrolled shaking, fever, vomiting, the whole shebang.
He poured the liquor into the flask he'd brought out from the drawer. He would try not to get drunk, but he needed to have something in his system if he was going to keep functioning.
Wren tilted the flask to his mouth, taking a small nip of it. He wanted more, God yes, but not yet. First, he had to find his son.
33
Present Day
Andrew Blount didn't like this part of the job. It was necessary, and important, but it wasn't what he preferred to do. For lack of a better term, he was babysitting, him and Lane both. Sure, there were other things involved in this, but the main thing he did now was make sure that these two kids didn't get out of this room. As of right now, they were the only two people in this town that knew what the hell happened here.
Andrew's watch said almost nine in the morning. He held a cigarette in his hand, leaning forward so that his elbows rested on his knees. The girl and boy both sat on the hotel bed, the girl with her knees to her chest and her arms wrapped around them, the boy sitting with his legs outstretched, crossed over each other, and his hands folded in his lap.
Andrew didn't look over at Lane, but he knew they should go through the questions again. They'd been going at these same questions for hours, and the answers weren't changing any. The point of the questions wasn't to get answers though; the point was to break the two people in front of him. He was no cop and, for the most part, their answers wouldn't change what happened in this town. As soon as Will showed up here, fate had decreed a certain kind of end for this place. No, the questions were to wear them down, to confuse them, to make them doubt their own stories.
The girl would break momentarily. Andrew had seen it before, numerous times. She cried a lot over the past night, but she was still holding her core together. When that went, she wouldn’t be able to stop crying. There would be an attack of some sort, most likely, and they would have to sedate her one way or another. The guy on the other hand, he was a bit different. Stronger, somehow. Andrew saw stress running through his body, the tenseness in his arms and legs, the bags underneath his eyes—all of it signs that he was wearing down, but he wasn't close to breaking.
Which was fine.
They could go through the questions again. They could go through the questions for another fourteen hours; eventually, everyone broke. That's the thing that those people down in Gitmo didn't understand. You didn't need to waterboard people to get information out of them. You only needed to talk, over and over, with no sleep. In the end, the mind simply cracked like a dry twig, unable to hold up. Sure, it took longer, but it also kept names out of the news. Not that the news would ever know about what took place in this room.
The guy though, he was taking longer than Andrew wanted. The sooner they broke, the sooner Andrew could get some sleep. Once the mind broke, it wasn't fixed easily. They wouldn't become the people that had been picked up last night, not without a lot of help from a trained professional. Once these two snapped, they would be putty.
Andrew finally looked over to Lane, who was ashing his own cigarette on the floor.
Lane looked back over at him, his eyes saying the same thing that Andrew thought. Both were tired. What did it matter, really, if these two broke? The troops were rolling in, and this place would probably be ashes and memories by next week.
He looked back to the two kids. Will would be pissed. Andrew had gone a lot longer than this when interrogating people before. Andrew hadn't been sent down here to work with Will because he took shortcuts. He'd been sent down here because something new had arrived.
He shook his head and reached over to Lane, motioning for another cigarette. Everyone in this room might be dead in twenty-four hours. No reason to sleep, to waste the last bit of life with his eyes closed. He took the cigarette and lighter from Lane, put it to his mouth, and put flame to tobacco. Andrew didn't smoke much, not like Lane, but right now he would take whatever he could get to help keep himself awake.
Plus, if he didn't start with the questions again, he was going to sit here and eventually begin thinking about what the result of all this would be. Not pretty, was how he thought of it right now, but if he went deeper, he might see some truths that he didn't want to. He knew the risks when he started this career, knew the life it meant, but somehow he had envisioned he would make it out alive. Now, though, he was thinking that might have been a pretty naive thought.
Never mind.
"Again, tell me why you two went out there, Michael," he said, his eyes finding the kid's.
* * *
Will looked down at his cellphone. Twenty years ago he would have never thought this possible, what he saw now. Will watched everyone arriving, watched them when they entered the town, watched them when they entered the motel. No one had to call; no one needed to check-in. All they had to do was show up. Someone, somewhere, made a lot of money off this.
"Not you," he said to himself.
He leaned against the headboard of the shitty bed he lay in. There weren't a lot of places to stay in Grayson, and he would much rather spend his last week somewhere fancier, but even Will's division had a budget. The less money they spent, the less likely anyone was to lift up the hood and see exactly what was going on inside the engine.
Will looked over to the bottle of pills on the nightstand. He tried not to count th
e hours once they started building up without sleep like this. Keeping up with them used to make him feel like some kind of hero, when he was younger, before Bolivia. Now, it just made him feel ancient. When the hours started adding up, he couldn't help but think how much longer he had to stay awake. The pills on the nightstand would keep him going though. Those damn things would keep a blue whale going. Whenever he felt the weight of sleep falling on him, he put one in his mouth, and Will’s fatigue lifted like a morning fog when the afternoon rolls in.
He put his phone on the bed and reached for the bottle. He took a pill out and dry swallowed it. Another thirty minutes and he'd be ready to rock and roll again.
Another thirty minutes and it would be go time.
Two hundred men, all of them coming to this motel, all of them coming to spread the merciful hand of Will's judgment.
He sighed. Thoughts like that used to make him feel powerful. Then they made him laugh. Now…they just made him sigh. Will's judgment. He kept the town from being decimated by a bomb so that he could try to live a little bit longer, and in doing so put the known world at risk. His judgment, at least since he landed in Georgia, hadn't been particularly effective, and he was wondering right now if it hadn't been downright dangerous.
What was he going to do when these people got here? He'd been planning all night, two notebooks full of drawings, maps, and scribbles sat to his right, but in the end, it came down to simple choice. Who did he need to kill in this town to find the infection?
The cops had to go, without a doubt. He couldn't have anyone trying to be a hero if the word got out that his men were moving through the town. Of course the roads would be guarded, but he wasn't taking a chance that someone would get something out over a radio wave. Plus, dead cops could be blamed on any number of things—all you had to do was pick a minority group and the media would move to it like termites to wood.