2.3. Lonely Heart Never Had Nobody


It was just the two of them: Red and Henrietta, Henrietta and Red. In his father's old bomb shelter. Alone.

Just Red and Henrietta. Just Henrietta and Red.

She lounged on the mattress that had been there since the beginning of the Red Scare. It had been covered with bed-slips, sheets, covers and comforters, pillows and more pillows. These hadn't been in the shelter since the beginning of the Red Scare. No, they had been there only as long as Red had figured out the coding system for the door.

He had found it carved in the rubber bottom of his father's old hunting boots. Right foot, all the way across...

Henrietta had brought them there from her ever growing collection of gothic bedding, willing to spare them for a hide-out such as the bomb-shelter.

It had been quite a while since any of them had been to the bomb-shelter. Always too busy, always so mixed... it had been months since all four of them had been down there in the dim yellow lights of the back-up generator, allowed to wallow in their misery without the outside world to interfere with them. You could just... disappear... when within the bomb-shelter.

Red had thought about it many times; he had done it many times as well, never fully going through with it.

The dehydrated food was bad and the water soon stale.

...beggars can't be choosers.

Books of dark and gothic literature, complied by all of them, were stacked within each corner: The Castle of Otranto, Dracula, the Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Rosemary's Baby, and many more like them. Stephen King had his own corner, piled high with as many books that Henrietta could get her hands on... Dean Koontz was burned.

Red never bothered to actually read any of them. They were more of Henrietta's and Joshua's gig. Rather, he spent his time plucking away at his bass guitar, thumping out a simple base-line to which his feet loved to step to.

"Red," she started, leaving him to lick his dry lips and wander of to the shelf covered in half-eaten rations, bottles of water, a digital clock, a music player plucking out Serj Tankien and an assortment of other useless junk. His fingers danced over the dust-covered shelf as she continued on, "What's troubling you?"

He glanced at her from the corner of his eye and he slowly pulled the photos from his back pocket. He stepped over slowly, nervous beyond measure, and he gave them to her. With his breath held in too tight, he went back to the shelf in hopes of distraction.

The dust didn't perform on Wednesdays. No refunds.

"What the..?" She focused at the most up to date one the group had. With a quick flip of her wrist, she looked at the back, eyes flickering as she read. "What year was this?"

"Three," he answered stiffly, panic seizing at his spin.

"Before, during or—"

"During," his tongue sopped his ashen lips.

"Are you feeling it..?" Her tone was hesitant and curious, concerned and distant, worrisome and soft.

He swallowed down the breath that he had been holding since the start and he slowly nodded.

She stood up carefully, pictures all but discarded against the bed. She stepped over to him, small feet making small taps against the floor. "Red, let me see,"

He nodded and rolled his sleeves up, revealing a group of disarranged scars, all small and white and thin. None of them were new but the flesh was pink from his scratching and picking.

"Roll up your pants," she ordered, voice quickly rolling with a motherly sort of confidence.

He rolled his pants up the best he could due to their close proximity to his thin but wiry claves, revealing white paste skin. Old scars streaked them too, but nothing new.

"You didn't do anything, did you?"

He shook his head, still muted by some form of pride that his body still held. If he spoke a word, he would probably break-down again, like the night before.

And she stood frozen for a long time, face and eyes unreadable in his shamed-state.

Dangerous things bubbled in his chest and before he knew it, Henrietta had wrapped her warm arms around him and had pulled him into an even warmer embrace.

Water dripped from the ceiling and down his cheek, sliding a drop down it and over his trembling lips.

"I'm really proud of you, Red." She muttered and kissed his cheek.

The roof was leak-proof.