Warner slept on the floor that night, gripped onto Aleksandra's coat like a blanket. When he woke up that morning, he showered, changed his clothes, then sat at the table until his kids woke up. Not that they had to, they didn't sleep well either. When they came into the dining room, they were sobbing and frantic, still somewhat in denial. He just looked down at his hands for a moment, before dragging himself out of the chair to grab the boxes of cereal from the cupboard. Both BnL brand, one was plain and the other packed with...
He looked at the box, but none of it really made sense to him.
Slowly, he poured out some bowls for his kids, sitting at the table, wrapped up in wool blankets their mother... Warner sniffled. They were in the blankets their mother had made for them for their second birthdays.
As Renblow set the bowls before them, he kissed each one on the top of their head, before sitting down across from them at the table. He looked to a corner of the room, where they had packed their bags as full as possible for the coming month and their eventual permanent residence aboard the Puteshestvennik. He had little room to pack much more than regular clothes in his first suitcase, so other trinkets had to go in a separate bag.
At this point, the Renblows were waiting on Klepatsky to arrive. The man agreed to bring his minivan since they were going to ultimately end up in the same place.
Warner quietly considered the bright red card he had been handed, uncharacteristically free of decals apart from a large number and the magnetic stripe on the side. The light from the window reflected on it perfectly, enough that he could see outside as well.
His gaze settled on the three wooden crosses that stuck up from the ground. He turned his head to look at them through the window. With a quick grunt, he pushed himself from the table and headed into the mudroom of the house, where he grabbed the push broom from its rack, then headed outside. There was no wind, but the thickness of the air threw him into a coughing fit and forced him to shut the door. Grimacing, he grabbed a mask and tried again. This time the stench was the worst part, but it was survivable now and that was good enough for him.
Gritting his teeth against the horrific fetor, he made his way to his past children's graves and set the broom to the dirt, pushing the gathered debris off the top. Warner didn't stop his work until not only the graves but every step of ground for three meters around was totally clear. Only when this was done did he stop, satisfied that he had done a good job.
It... He looked sadly upon the ground around him. It was enough that he could feel that he respected the graves, but his tight white-knuckled grip on the broom revealed how truly frustrated he really was.
Suddenly, in a wild fit of rage, he chucked the broom at the ground and screamed through his mask, back arched towards the sky, "Fuck this horrid place! Fuck you Buy 'n Large!" He picked up the broom again, swinging it out and throwing it as far into the trash heaps as he could, "I don't want your shitty starliner! I want my fucking wife back. I... I want her back..." Warner's legs gave out from underneath him and he collapsed at his children's graves, punching the dirt in rage, "I want her back, damn you!"
Klepatsky had only just gotten into the driveway when he heard Warner's anguish behind the house. Rushing around the building, he found himself confronted with Warner cradling a pair of bleeding knuckles and a mask slowly filling with tears. Stooping down to help the mourning man, Klepatsky pulled Warner up from the ground, bringing him into a loose embrace instead.
Warner just slumped into Klepatsky's body, washing his shoulder with tears.
Klepatsky observed the rumbling and the bumbling of the private roadway, gravel jumping up and hitting the undercarriage of the van, steering wheel jittering this way and that as he struggled to stay in a straight line. In all his days, the man had never experienced a road like this; all roads he used were part of the company-owned infrastructure, kept clean enough that the chance for dangerous debris was only relatively low. Here, however, the road was made of debris.
As he struggled to keep the wheels of the van on the road, it couldn't be helped as his eyes shifted to look at Warner in the passenger seat. The Renblow family was sitting in the car, sulking in a horrible, deafening silence.
Settling back to watching the road, finally bringing themselves to the end of the private throughway. Klepatsky stopped, checked for traffic - not that any would actually be there - and moved onto the public roads. As they moved back into the well-traveled roads, the car radio began to pick up a signal again. Some voice, too human to be a real person, was talking about the Hostile Takeover music tour as something of a last hurrah to Earth.
Smiling a little, Klepatsky offered the Renblows an easy smile, "Well won't that be nice? You'll get a beautiful send-"
Warner reached out and flicked the radio to another channel, playing soft jazz from the last world war. What a time that was, Klepatsky mused; he was only a child at the time and his father had been drafted to work in one of the drone control centers. He didn't come back. Really, nobody knew what happened to him; unlike the military, BnL was under no actual obligation to inform the family what happened to their father. So, yesterday when the manager came to inform Warner of his wife's death, that was something the programmer had been rather jealous of.
Still, shamed into silence by the Renblow family, Klepatsky settled in for the long drive to the city.