Day 5
Infernum resurget.
What a fool Double Dee found himself to be. Infernum resurget. Latin. The demon was speaking Latin. Why hadn't he thought of that earlier? It was the most logical possibility of them all. Demons spoke Latin. Everybody knew that. Double Dee had figured it was nothing more than the suggestion of mass media and pop culture that had incurred that assumption. So, being the presumption pompous know-it-all he knew everyone thought he was, and often proved himself to be, he had not even explored the option, even though had he even given it the first inkling of consideration, and had listened to its phrasing, perhaps it would have made itself clear earlier, and he would have gotten more sleep in the last 48 hours. But there was nothing he could do about all that now.
Inferum resurget. At least, that was what Double Dee thought it had said. Double Dee supposed he couldn't really blame himself for his folly too heavily - Latin was a dead language, after all - one no one had ever heard spoken by an original native speaker. That was, until now. It didn't sound the way Double Dee imagined it in his head. The intonations and pronunciations were markedly different, if subtly and implacably so. But that was the way language changed over the centuries, he knew.
Infernum resurget.
Double Dee was a bit of a pedestrian when it came to the language and its complexities. But from what Double Dee understood of the language, that little snippet he could decipher from the beast's embittered shrieking meant in, as far as Double Dee knew, in no uncertain terms Hell is rising. Or Hell rises. But that was just semantics.
Double Dee gathered from the look in the beast's unblinking eyes that that was threat in no minced words. It glared at Double Dee the whole night long. If Double Dee hadn't known any better, he would have said the thing's gaze was affecting his mood and stomach - it would turn and twist in pain intermittently throughout the day and night.
The demon soliloquized at Double Dee in its furious tongue off and on throughout the night and day between lapses of either exhaustion, rest, or observation; perhaps it was waiting to lull Double Dee into a calm, then burst free when he had become distracted with another activity. Either way, it seemed to enjoy the moments it would burst back into soliloquy, often choosing them at what it seemed to surmise as Double Dee's most vulnerable moments, looking to jolt Double Dee with a sudden shock of piercing speech. It seemed to enjoy taunting him. Ever since Nazz had come to him last night to see the thing, he was sure to stay wary of the Hellbeast in his midst. He would not grow too careless with it, lest it come back to bite him, or dice him to bits with the talons adorning each of its cruel fingers. Double Dee chuckled to himself at the thought. How could fingers be cruel?
When you use them cruelly, my boy, he thought.
After he discovered it spoke Latin, he listened more carefully to its words. He could pick out certain words and phrases here and there. He heard the demon say "mors certissima" which meant either "death is certain" or "certain death," Double Dee could not figure out which. He also made out the phrase "Dies irae," which he knew from the title of a favorite poem of his called "The Last Judgement." It would lapse into lyrical incantation, what Double Dee could only assume (but look where that had gotten him) was prayer, which would begin and end with "Ave Satani." Hail Satan. But of course. What else should he expect of a fallen angel, lackey of Lucifer himself? Double Dee shivered. The recitation of the Dark Lord's name by the demon brought the thought of, by proxy, the sheer tangibility of Satan at Double Dee's fingertips with one of his followers chordling cruelly at his feet, screaming at him in twisting intonations probably regarding its master Satan, the Hellfire below, and other such things it must have known quite intimately. One of the Hellbeast's favorite terms seemed to be "abominamentum," which pretty clearly translated to "abomination."
It was three in the morning, Double Dee realized. He needed some sleep.
And several hours later, Nazz woke up late enough into the morning to hate herself for it, if just a tiny bit. Raindrop in a flood, and all that stuff. She had woken up only just short of an hour before Ed had, which would have been depressing had she known he'd preceded her in tardiness.
She sat up and checked her bags on either side to make sure no one had some through in the night and robbed her blind. She rolled her sleeping bag up and packed it back up in one bag. In the other, she pulled a box of Moonpies and unwrapped one. Took a bottle of water from the same bag and had breakfast while she planned her day out.
Yesterday's travels had gotten her nowhere. So she figured she'd invest in a new plan of action, one she'd turned over in her head briefly last night but had not fully considered. But now, with no other ideas readily within the grasp of her half-sleeping mind, it became the de facto agenda of the day's search. She would ride across the city, to places she and her parents had gone when they'd been. Familiar gas stations. The Maltron office building downtown, where her father had had many meetings. The park. Then, worst for last (and pragmatism; it was all the way on the other side of the city), the Cherry Stem Shopping Pavilion.
Her schedule in some sort of order she slung her bags on the bike and her back respectively, walked the bike back out to the street and rode off in search of familiar places and mass graves at 9 in the morning, a short while before Ed let himself into Double Dee's house and shook Double Dee awake, and Double Dee let out a pathetic cry of distress and surprise before he realized it was Ed who had him, and not the coal-black beast locked in the dog kennel in the garage.
Ed seemed grim and it took Double Dee a moment's worth of collection of his surroundings to place the reason for his expression. There was someone else in the house with them.
An hour prior, when Ed woke up, he had not shaken the excitement from the previous day's adventures, and the prospect of a pet demon was still pinballing back in forth in his hollow skull. After checking up on Mom and finding she wanted nothing more of her son at that moment than a glass of water, Ed bounded down the stairs and hastily retrieved her request.
As he'd obtained the ingredients, he'd danced around the kitchen in a state of utter joy. He had always been a bit of a clutz, of course, so as he galloped around, he knocked into things and sent other things toppling to the floor. He picked up after himself, of course, because he was a good boy, but the loud bashing and clanging still attracted the attention of none other than his father, who stumbled into the kitchen in his boxers and black tank top. Ed had been dancing around with his back to the doorway, shaking his buttocks as he filled his glass with water, and as he turned he'd frozen, sloshing a bit of water onto the floor as he found himself face to face with the Man Who Never Moved, who had made a special exception this particular morning.
"What's got you all worked up?" the man asked, scratching his ass cheek under his boxers.
"Nothing," said Ed, nervous and sweating.
"Don't make me get worked up over this," the scraggly man said simply.
"I'm just happy, Dad," Ed said, approaching with the glass of water, all he had in the way of a humble offering for his father. "Like usual."
"Whatchu got to be so happy about?" Ed's dad scoffed bitterly, letting Ed past and up the stairs. Following behind him like a mean old dog chasing him home from school. "You livin' in full color, boy? Or are you that far gone?"
"Everything's ok, Dad." He turned to his father at the top of the stairs and smiled. His father didn't reciprocate.
"Everything's pretty fuckin' far from okay. It's a simple question. All it needs is a simple answer."
"Um...what question again?" Ed asked, biding his time. He rapped at his mom's door but his father flung it open before Mom had a chance to say anything. Ed waited till he heard her frail voice shake, "Come in, baby." And he did.
"What are you so happy for?"
Ed delivered the glass to his mom and looked at her, frightened. She smiled at Ed, then looked up at her husband. "That's just our son, dear. He's a little ray of sunshine."
Ed's dad stared at the two. "Alright." And he kept standing there, waiting for Ed. Ed put off leaving, sticking around to let his mother pet him and hug him, kiss him on the forehead "Have a great day, dear," she said.
And Ed approached the door, which his father filled even with his slim body and shoulders. Ed waited anxiously. Dad stepped aside and let Ed through. Ed walked down the hall, his father at his back. Ed always got jumpy when Dad walked behind him. He never knew what he'd do back there. Sometimes, he'd jab a finger in Ed's back till Ed snapped and got angry, then got in trouble for it. Sometimes, he'd get up close behind him and step on his heels just to be irritating. Sometimes, he'd put Ed in headlocks. He'd always wait to do anything, wait till Ed put his guard down, sometimes not even do anything at all, trying to play innocent, like he didn't follow behind Ed on purpose to make him anxious. Dad was like that. A real goof.
He followed Ed on his heels down the stairs, following him quick, stepping erratically, like he was trying to get a hold of Ed's heels but kept missing, and it made Ed jump with each step out of worry. "What?" Dad asked, innocuous.
"Nothing."
He kept doing it, gunning at his heels but always just missing. "What?"
"Nothing!" Ed shouted, annoyed. Dad's hands clasped his shirt by the shoulders and slung him around to the wall. Dad held him up against it with his hands, putting a knee in his thigh to make sure he kept still.
"It's not a hard question! But you won't answer it, will you? You gotta go run to your mommy -" He sneered as he said the word mommy, wheezing it in a high, nasal tone. "You're just a little mommy's boy. You won't answer your dad. You know what that tells me? Huh?" He shook Ed inquisitively. "You know what that tells me, huh, dummy? It tells me you got something to hide, something you don't want me to know about. You been a bad boy, Ed? Have you?" He brought his face close to Ed's, and Ed turned his head to avoid touching his nose with his father's, but Dad grabbed his face and turned it to face him again.
"No, Dad! I've been a good boy!"
"What did you do? Are you going to tell me what you did? Did you hurt somebody?"
"No, Dad! I didn't, I swear!"
"Then what. Did. You. Do. You'd better tell me right now, boy. What's got you jumpin' with joy?"
"Me and Eddy, and Double Dee -"
Dad shook him again, knocking the thought clean out of his head. "What? You and Eddy and Double Dee, what?"
"We caught somethin' in the Cul-de-Sac a few days ago. We got it locked up in Double Dee's basement."
"What is it?" Ed hesitated. Dad dug his fingers into Ed's shoulders. Ed squirmed, moaned softly, trying to worm out. "You catch a girl? Got a girl locked up and now your friends are takin' turns with her? Tha'd explain it!"
"No, Dad! No! We don't got a girl! We're not bad like that!"
"Then what?"
"We got a monster…" Ed mumbled.
"A what?" Dad asked incredulously.
"We caught a demon comin' outta the woods, from that glowin' hole thingy out past the trailer park, and me and Eddy and Double Dee -"
"Don't fucking lie to me! You're no good at it! You're too dumb for it! Don't you know Dad's got a mind like savant? Your dad's like a new-age Einstein compared to you!"
"I'm not lying! I swear to it! I swear! I'll take you to it, promise! I'll bring you to see it, just please believe me!"
"You're lying."
"I'm not lying, Dad. I'm not a liar. I'm good. I swear."
"You got a demon in your loser friend's house?"
"No, the other one. Double Dee's house."
Dad's eyes darted around Ed's face, Ed's cheeks wet from a couple hot tears squeezing through. Then Dad grinned. "Alright, then. Take me to it. I want to see it."
They crossed the Cul-de-Sac in silence, Ed still walking ahead. His father on his heels the whole way. Ed rapped at Double Dee's door and waited. Double Dee didn't answer. He knocked again, and waited again. Dad started jabbing him in the ribs from behind. He wouldn't stop. Jab, jab, jab. "Stop it!" Ed cried in annoyance.
He dared look his father in the eye and was met with pure, unadulterated rage. Ed spun back around and banged, banged, banged at Double Dee's door, but there was no answer. Finally, he just turned the knob and let himself in.
His father followed him, right at his back, his hot, liquor-tainted breath wet on his neck. As soon as the door came open, Ed saw Double Dee there, passed out on the couch and hurried over to him as Dad figured the house out and strutted over to his approximation of where the garage should have been. He tried the knob but found it locked. "Is this it?" he asked as Ed shook Double Dee. "Ed."
Ed looked. "Yes, sir." Dad found it locked from the inside and twisted the bolt, and he let himself in as Ed finally got Double Dee to wake up. Double Dee shouted and awoke with wide, wild eyes that fell back to sedation at the sight of his buddy...then turned to concern at the sight of his distress. "Ed?"
"Double Dee!" Ed hissed under his breath and turned, moving out of Double Dee's way so he could see past to the door to the garage, which he'd locked in case the Hellbeast got frisky and let itself out of its bindings.
He saw Ed's father standing there, a step back from the door, the door itself flung wide open, Ed's dad's jaw slack and eyes wide in terror. "Jesus," he said. "What the hell is it?"
"Um," Double Dee began, "we've approximated that it's of an, erm, underworldly descent, Mr. Ed's Dad."
"Jesus" was all Dad managed in response. "Oh, gawd. What the hell is it?"
"It's a demon, Dad," Ed said softly.
Dad stared at it through the doorway, and Ed and Double Dee could hear the demon start up its screaming again, and Dad covered his ears with his palms and stepped back. "Ed…" he gasped, "Let's go, Ed."
Ed and Double Dee stared at him as he continued to stare at the demon as its diatribe grew louder and more furious. "ED! Let's GO!"
Ed hurried to join his father. Dad hurried out and took his son with him, and Ed pulled the door shut behind him, finally getting himself behind his father instead of in front, leaving Double Dee alone in the house as its only Earthly inhabitant, wondering just what he had witnessed transpire across from him.
Jonny and Plank woke up on his couch to a knock at his door. Jonny got up and approached it, hoping to find Kevin standing there, and when Plank peeked through the peephole and spoiled the surprise, Jonny wasn't disappointed. Kevin was waiting outside, leaning on the wall of the house with a leg crossed over the other, trying to look nonchalant and cool. It seemed like an unlikely friendship was blossoming! Jonny had never felt as close to another person as he did to Kevin these last few days. It was all incredibly exciting! His mom and dad would be so proud once they got back.
"Howdy, Kevin! What brings ya to these parts? You want some breakfast cereal with me and Plank?"
The absolute unfettered joy that cracked Jonny's voice as he spoke sent shivers of discomfort through Kevin's spine. "Uh, I already ate, woodboy. I was wondering if you wanted to help me out with somethin'."
"What, Kev?" Jonny asked, leaning in his doorway, crossing one leg over the other.
"I was gonna crank up my dad's truck, get some stuff together, and, you know, bury Jimmy's mom and dad."
Jonny's heart dropped. "Why?"
"Cuz they're stinkin' up the neighborhood out there, Jonny," Kevin said, and Jonny sensed some irritation in his voice.
"Shouldn't we wait till we got some adults around? They'll know what to do. Or we could try the police again, or, better yet, we could just go straight over to the Fire Department and ask them for some help. It's just right down past the school, there."
"Yeah, Jonny, I know where it is. But we're all adults here, ain't we? You don't think we can handle this ourselves? Besides, our parents get back or the cops show up, we just tell 'em why and where we did it, and they can cart 'em off the ol' mortuary themselves once it opens back up."
"I'm just saying. There's a lot more options here than do-it-yourself work."
"Jonny, I'm taking my truck, I'm taking some tools, I'm getting Jimmy's parents' bodies and I'm takin' 'em out to the Pit out back a' the school. Are you comin' with me, or what?"
Jonny nervously rubbed Plank's head with one hand and the back of his peach-fuzzed skull with the other. "I mean...I guess."
"How's this - I won't even make ya touch 'em." He made a hand motion that asked 'ya happy?'
Jonny rubbed his arm, looked around his living room and walked out, shutting the door behind him.
One lot over, Sarah sat at Jimmy's side, brushing his hair with her hand. He laid on his side with his back to Sarah, balled up in fetal position, staring in the middle distance. Sarah could him sniffle every once in a while. When she heard that, she would rub his cheek or arm and hum or sing to him. She always knew what to do when Jimmy was crying.
She heard someone come in below. She wondered who it was, but barely cared. She wondered if it was Nazz. Nazz hadn't come back last night, Sarah had noticed. Or if she had, she'd slept over at Kevin's again. Everybody was all redistributed throughout the Cul-de-Sac. Nobody stayed where they lived anymore, except Jonny, but that kid was a loon anyways, and her parents, who was half injured and half stupid, anyways, respectively, of course. She wondered what Nazz would do when she got back, seeing Jimmy like this. He couldn't take care of himself and never moved. He refused to eat or drink. Sarah had stepped out a few times during the day, granted, but when she was there, he never got up to pee or poop. He was just catatonic. She wondered how Nazz would feel. Wondered if she would kick them out. Enough was enough, time to give her her house back. It would be even worse if she brought her parents back with her. Then they'd definitely be rousted out. She'd have to bring Ed off taking care of Mom duty to come carry Jimmy back over to his house or theirs. Probably not theirs, not with Mom and Dad the way they were.
And for all intents and purposes, she was alone. Jimmy had always been the only one to make her happy and now all he was was a tear factory. He'd lie there and cry, and she'd sit there and cry and they'd all be crying.
She heard someone coming up the stairs now, and soon there was a knock at her door. "Come in," she squeaked, and Kevin peeked in, Jonny leering through behind him. "Yes?"
"Hey, uh, Sarah, we were wondering, does Jimmy wanna come see his parents before we, ya know...bury 'em?"
"No. He doesn't want to see them. Could you leave us alone, please?" she said, maybe too venomously. But Kevin just said 'okay' like he was pleased to serve and shut the door again. Sarah heard him talking with Jonny on the way back down the hall and the stairs. She heard the front door open and shut a moment later.
Jonny started sniffling and a moment later, Sarah started humming to him.
After a ways, Kevin and Jonny walked in silence out of the house. They walked to Kevin's house and gathered up the necessary tools and loaded them up in Kevin's dad's truck. After a decent while's awkward silence, Jonny said, "What's Nazz up to, Kev?"
"I don't know," Kevin spat bitterly. "She's off somewhere with my bike. She said she'd be back by last night and guess what, Jonny boy? She was a no-show."
"You think she's all right?"
"Yeah. I think she's all right. If I didn't, I wouldn't be so pissed off. I'd be out there too, lookin' all over for 'er. But you know what I think she's out there up to? Lookin' for you guys's parents. She's out there, where ever she is, hunting all over for 'em. And she's usin' my bike to do it!"
"Oh" was all Jonny could think of to say.
"Yeah. And Rolf's locked himself up in his house, doin' God knows what in there, and he won't answer the door no matter how many goddamn times I go over there and knock on it! He won't answer the phone, not the landline in his house or the Jitterbug me and Nazz bought him for his weird fish-flogging manhood ceremony. It was his birthday party, for Pete's sake! But his weird-ass European-ass culture can't just call it that, nooooo, it has to go the way a' the Mexicans and their stupid quinceaneras and all that jazz, and it's all really pissing me off!"
It was then Jonny wondered if Kevin was a racist. Jonny thought quinceaneras were really cool actually. Jonny realized it wasn't the time when Kevin leaned against the side of the truck's bed and slid down it to sit on the driveway, leaned up against the tire. He even took his hat off and ran his fingers through his hair. Jonny noticed Kevin had very nice hair. He wondered if he moosed it or anything. It probably wasn't the time to ask him, though. Jonny just knelt next to Kevin and stared at him while he tried to figure out something to say. Kevin looked at him, and it was only then that Jonny realized the look on his face must have looked like he pitied Kevin, because Kevin's face turned to all muscles, and he shouted, "And what is it you're lookin' at, exactly!"
He grabbed Jonny's chin and turned his face to look away from him. Jonny ignored the directions, and looked at Kevin again. He extended his hand, paused, reconsidered this, then patted Kevin on the shoulder. "There, there, Kevin. Everything's going to be alright."
Kevin's lip was quivering but his face muscles were flexing really hard and trying to stop it and he blubbered: "It's just that I just, that I'm tired -" And Kevin couldn't hold it anymore and started crying and slobbering and all that ugly stuff Brad Pitt doesn't do in real life. Jonny knelt to his knees, put Plank facedown on the concrete and hugged Kevin. Kevin was clenched up tight between Jonny's arms and Jonny thought for a moment it felt just like when he was on that field trip and hugged the drug store Indian in Arizona, Kevin was so stiff. Then Kevin's muscles released all over, all at once, and it was like he had realized the floodgates and it all came pouring out. He was just a wet blob now of repressed emotions fighting desperately to pour out all at once, and his body could just barely handle it without literally exploding.
Kevin wrapped his arms around Jonny and Jonny thought he was reciprocating the hug, but Kevin locked his arms at Jonny's back and pulled, hauling himself to his feet and shuffling off to his house, still blubbering like a madman, becoming increasingly frustrated with the fact that Jonny would just not let him go, and he bucked and flailed suddenly, surprising Jonny, and shouting with a raspy, tearful voice, "Get the hell offa me!" But Jonny knew how to draw out a moment, so he didn't, and Kevin desperately pawed at the front door of his house for a few seconds before realizing he'd locked it, pulling out his keys and then suddenly giving up, shuffling over to his busted-out bay window, ripping the tarp off it and climbing inside, dragging Jonny the whole way.
Inside, away from prying eyes, Kevin didn't have to play the tough guy no more and he turned into Jonny's arms and brought his arms up under them and wrapped Jonny up again around his back, slinging his arms all around Jonny and squeezing and crying. Kevin had given in, and he let his forehead fall to Jonny's shoulder as he sobbed relentlessly. Jonny led them, shuffling, over to the couch, and they sat and Jonny held Kevin as he racked with sobs. "Let it all out, buddy," Jonny said, stroking the back of Kevin's head as Kevin quickly released one arm from hugging Jonny and pulled Jonny's hand away from his head, then going straight back to the hug.
After a few minutes of this, Kevin's faucet started drying up and he started calming down, and Jonny went and got him a tissue from the kitchen, carefully stepping over the arsenal laid out across it, and Kevin cleaned himself up in silence. He wished it had been Nazz or at least Sarah he'd cried to instead of Jonny, but begger's really couldn't be choosers, he knew, so he really had no choice (that didn't make him out as a real dickhead) but to embrace the situation. After a few more minutes, he worked up the confidence to speak again and not be embarrassed about the whole thing. "Thanks, Jonny boy."
"Yeah, no prob, Kev, you know, everybody's got some little emotional parts in 'em, and there's really nothin' wrong with just lettin' loose every now and again -"
"Jonny, you're ruining it. I'm tryna give you this."
"Oh, okay. I hear ya, Kev."
"And Jonny, if you do not stop calling me Kev, and don't start callin' me right, I'm gonna pound ya."
"Yeah, that's fair."
Ed's dad didn't say another word to him all day. He'd gone right back to being comatose in front of the TV. The generator cut off just before noon, but Ed didn't hear Dad go out and fix it. All he heard was silence.
Nazz arrived at the Maltron building downtown, one of the tallest buildings there, and the only one that, if you looked at it at just the right angle, it looked like an owl, with its twin pyramidal skylights on top, sloped summit and the pairs of round windows adorning all four sides of the building's upper floors. She'd loved it when they used to visit the building when she was small, when they had just moved to Peach Creek and her father needed to travel the short distance to the offices for the odd meeting or two.
It was located on a street with very few straggling victims of the earthquake, but that was probably just the financial district. She pulled up on the bike, climbed off and walked it over into the building with her. Its glass window front was busted out, allow easy access inside. The lobby was deserted, as she should have expected. A shattered chandelier sat in the middle of the floor, surrounded by an ring of glass shards spread out across the lobby. Nazz carried the bike to the front desk and hid it behind the counter, laying it on its side and locking it up to the desk's leg, which was bolted to the floor tiles. She slung the bag on her bag off and continued into the building.
The walls were marble and cracked enough to make Nazz nervous about going upstairs. There must have been some clever saying her dad had recited to her that spoke on the intellectual faculties one must lack in order to climb to the high floors of an unstable skyscraper. But she did it anyway, and had the foresight not to even try to use the elevators to do so. She beelined it for the stairwell, checking the map on the wall of all the floors and the businesses housed thereon, and cracked open the stairwell's heavy door, and gazed into the pure black within. She took out her flashlight and climbed. She hadn't thought ahead this much, having to climb fifteen floors worth of stairs. She climbed. And climbed. And climbed.
Took a break. And then climbed some more. sHe reached the fifteenth floor, where her dad's affiliate design company stored its offices and meeting space.
As she pushed the door open, she realized she had never actually once, in all the times they had travelled here for her dad's meetings, been to the floor he would be having them on. It was all too professional, too high-class or dangerous for a little ditzy blond girl. It was still dark. She shined the light around. She found herself in a corridor lined with large (broken) ceiling-to-floor windows with pairs of double doors in each of them. Lines of business storefronts, she realized. She found the design company stood directly across from the stairwell, much to her luck.
She flicked her flashlight off as she entered. Light flooded into the floor from the ceiling-to-floor windows. The natural light made up pretty adequately for the lack of power. There were dark corners, sure, and dark corridors to match them. All the windows had not busted out of the partitions up here, although they seemed to have at least partially busted out of the exterior windows, as a steady breeze rolled through up there and blew Nazz's hair.
She hoped she might find her parents here, or at least evidence that they had been here. The design company held important documents vital to her father's work, and she didn't see any reason he wouldn't be clamoring to come and get them before they fell into unwanted. Slimy hands of other architects, and then he'd have lost the sense of originality to his buildings. And if there was something her father did not want, it was to lose to lose that flame of originality, that 'wow' and 'huh, I've never seen that before' factor in his work.
The curious girl she was, Nazz first approached one of the busted-out windows looking out over the city and peered out over the landscape.
Wow. Vertigo. She stepped back.
It was all the harrowing stuff she'd seen yesterday, but it felt like she gazed down on it from a mile in the sky. It was interesting.
She moved on quickly. She really had no time for this.
She figured she'd probably get back and find that they'd beaten her there, and her mother would chastise 'Nazz, silly girl, what were you thinking?' and she'd laugh, before she didn't mean it cruelly. She hoped that would happen, at the very least.
She flicked her light back on to explore the dark recesses of the offices.
From down a long, dark corridor of offices, she heard something thud. It was probably nothing, just a bit of debris finally separating from its base and hitting the floor. But, nonetheless, it wigged her out. But she kept going. She pointed the light into office after office as she passed them, each time terrified to turn her light into one room and find it occupied, and the man or woman inside would turn and look at them with glowing, unearthly eyes. The prospect of unearthly eyes reminded her of the thing she'd seen at Double Dee's house a couple nights prior, whatever it was. Because it totally was not a demon, not matter what they said. Nazz didn't believe in those things.
On her left, she passed a small bathroom. On the right, a larger office, its windows busted and a breeze rolling in through them. Inside, Nazz saw a small on the floor in the back, silhouetted by the morning sky.
She stepped in and looked around for evidence they'd been there.
She heard a whimpering voice from behind.
She turned...and heard a voice, the same voice, snap at itself, hissing an angry whisper...coming from the bathroom across the hall. She couldn't make out what the voice was saying nor who it belonged to. Frightened as she was, she approached the bathroom door and listened.
The voice fell silent for a long moment. It felt like two minutes had past before she heard a soft, almost feminine but decidedly male voice whisper, quivering in horror, "What did you do with her hands?"
Whoever it was, it wasn't Dad, nor was it Jonny's Dad. So she got the hell out of there. She hurried down the corridor, crunching through broken glass and running out of the company's double doors as she heard, she was certain, the high-pitched SHRIEK of an unoiled door being thrown open.
She ran to the stairs as a swath of light passed across the hallway. She realized after a quick moment it wasn't her own flashlight.
"Hey!" called a deep male voice from down the hallway, and she heard running footsteps coming toward her as the flashlight beam bounced, still trained on her, and she could her a set of keys jingling with each running step the man took. "Get back here!" the man, who Nazz realized must have been a security guard, shouted.
But Nazz had already committed to running, so she busted through the stairwell door and ran down the stairs in the dark, fumbling for her flashlight and, pretty predictably, she thought, fell down the whole flight, flicking on the flashlight as she went, pain shooting across her body from different points of contact as she rolled down the hard, concrete and metal steps till she and the flashlight hit the landing between floors. She took no time stumbling up and following the flashlight as it bounced off the wall and rolled for the gap between the flights of stairs looking down the entirely of the stairwell, and she threw herself at it as it rolled toward the gap under the railing and caught it before it could fall.
The door to the fifteenth floor flew open above and she heard a man running after her.
She jumped up and fled down the stairs, quick, fast and in a hurry, flight by flight, forgetting how much it killed her lungs and body to run that long down that many stairs, and when she hit the lobby she kept running, ignoring Kevin's bike and just trying to get out, and she skidded across the floor on the broken glass and couldn't fix her balance in time, so she fell, putting out her arm to catch herself and smashing it into the glass-covered floor, imbedding her arms with dozens and dozens of stabbing shards. She screamed but skittered back to her feet anyway and ran for the door as the security guard came running from the stairwell.
He was gaining on her as she leapt through the window - and she heard a crash of glass and clattering of keys and she realized, without looking back, that he had fallen over the chandelier in the middle of the floor, somehow missing it in the midst of the chase.
She took off across the street and hid inside another office building, then turned around to watch the Maltron building.
After a moment, he came running out of the building, bloody from his fall. He ran back and forth down the street looking for her. But, for all intents and purposes, she was gone.
She watched him stand in the lobby or out front for the next fifteen minutes, talking with someone on his walkie-talkie. Her heart pounded harder and harder each time he'd pass dangerously close to the front desk, nearly finding Kevin's bike and no doubt impounding it.
She took the waiting time looking between the Maltron building and her arm, picking the pieces of glass one by one, sucking in long, slow breathes and letting them out again. Slow and steady. The backside of her forearm looked like it had hit with a blast of buckshot.
After a good long wait, she saw him walk back to the stairwell and head back upstairs. She went back for her bag and Kevin's bike and rode the latter right out of downtown.
Next up was a Cefco gas station her father frequented each time they came through. An old friend worked there and her dad enjoyed swinging by to visit him. It seemed like as good of a shot as any of finding them, and Jonny's parents with them.
She had to take a break on the way. The running had taken a lot of her energy. She ate another Moon Pie and drank a bottle of water. Then, she was back on her way.
It took an hour and a half to get there. The gas station was located in a more scenic part of the city, where storefronts were more rare and were replaced by sprawling fields and woods. She was close to the city park. The campsites of the park were her next stop, and they were nearby.
Before Nazz reached the gas station, nearly a half-mile away from it, she rode past a small encampment of, at most, a hozen people grilling under a pavilion, once very recently a popular spot for city children to hold birthday parties which they had turned into a makeshift living space with canvas tent add-ons and lawn chairs spread about. She heard deep, male laughter echoing across the field toward her from the pavillion. She ignored the encampment, moving as quietly and as low as possible to avoid catching their attention. She feared they would see her as she rode away and call to friends or wives, shouting "Hey, there's a girl over there!" or calling directly to her, shouting, "What are you doin' over there? Get over here!" But she rode past them without a problem and soon, they were distant enough to look like ants.
Then she was upon the CEFCO, which stood at the front of a small lot of overgrown grassland leading, the further it went back, into the woods at the very edge of the city par. It was still too close to the pavilion and its laughing inhabitants for her liking, but nonetheless she hit the brakes on the bike and it skidded to a halt under the awning of the gas station. It looked like every other building in the world did now, cracked, with no windows to speak of. Dude, glass companies were gonna be making a killing in the near future.
She approached the open-air front wall of the store where its windows, advertising cigarettes, beer brands and that the station was "NOW HIRING!" had once hung. She didn't see anyone inside, but persisted anyways. She had to be sure. She knew there were other portions of the gas station. A small pair of rooms in the back that operated as inventory storage and a small office respectively, not to mention the areas behind the cold beverage racks the storage room let into.
Nazz walked carefully over the broken glass littering the gas station interior. Most of the snacks and product the store carried had been stolen, and most of the racks sat empty.
She jumped over the counter and stood behind it. She tried the "EMPLOYEES ONLY" door but found it locked. She knocked. "Hello? Mom? Dad?" she stepped back and waited. Knocked again. "Hello? This is Nazz Von Bartonschmeer, Martin's daughter. Hello?"
There was no answer. She tried the door again. It was still locked. But she really wanted to get back there.
So she jumped the counter again and tried to climb through the beverage racks on the wall. Even as slim as she was, she couldn't fit.
She came out the front of the store and walked around the back, taking the side facing away from the encampment of people nearby even though they were far away and not likely to see her at the distance, since they hadn't even seen her as she'd ridden right past them.
As she turned the corner to the back of the store, she thought she was faced with nothing more than the overgrown field that stood behind the gas station. But upon a closer look as she approached the back door, she saw a torn camouflage tarp on the ground hidden by the surrounding grass, covering a half dozen bodies lined up with their feet facing the back door of the gas station.
Suddenly, Nazz didn't need to go inside anymore.
Nazz slowly approached the tarp, suddenly filled with a sharp anxiety that made her heart jackhammer, jumping up into her throat and sending a nauseous twang up it into her mouth with each twisting, frenzied beat.
She threw the tarp off.
The body closest to her was a tall, slim man in a sweater vest, tan shirt and jeans. He was balding with long, curly hair and a patchy mustache. He had a chubby face, even though he had a rail slim body, and his jaw hung slack. He wore glasses, but one of the lenses carried a small, round bullet hole and the eye socket beneath held a pool of stagnant, congealed blood running down the side of his face.
It was Jonny's dad. Next in line, a portly woman with brown, equally curled hair. Dead. Past them, a blond couple that Nazz couldn't bare to look at.
She turned and ran back around the front of the gas station, grabbed up Kevin's bike and took off, even as she struggled to catch her breath even though she couldn't have been winded, she'd barely run twenty yards and just started riding it, and within seconds of frantic peddling, her eyes were blinded with hot tears that streamed down her face and she was racked with sobs even as she fled.
She couldn't see. It wasn't like the pitch black blindness of the stairwell; everything was blotchy, swimming in her vision and covered in dark blotches that swam across her line of sight, and everything was fuzzy and vague and foggy through her eyes.
She couldn't see ahead of her, and she accidentally rode the bike off the road, hitting a ditch straight-on with the front tire, buckling it and sending her flying head-over-tea-kettle, catching some air time across the field ahead and then slamming hard on her outstretched hands and knees, her head hitting the ground and catching on it, sucking it down to her chest and sending her rolling over herself before skidding to a halt in the field, crying and in pain.
In pain from falling down the stairs at the Maltron building and now from crashing Kevin's beloved bike. She rolled onto her stomach and pushed herself up off the ground with weak, shaking arms and felt so ridiculous at her weakness as she sobbed and sobbed and couldn't stop sobbing, even as she heard the running footsteps coming across the field, heard legs dashing through the tall grass and being lashed with it as they ran.
And soon, Nazz felt hands touching her, voices asking if she was alright, men and women's voices, and she just wanted to run but she just could not catch her breath and the blotches in her eyes were getting worse and everything was too fuzzy to make out and blurring together, mixing like batter in a cake, and there was more darkness in her vision than not, and then she passed out.
Kevin and Jonny had picked up a tagalong before leaving the Cul-de-Sac, and now they all three stood with shovels at the Pit, digging out a pair of identical graves right next to one another, Kevin's dad's pickup backed up to the graves nearby, parked right next to the abandoned old rusty front loader. Eddy had insisted he had only come out of boredom and told the others not to "blow a gasket about it" as he worked alongside them. Jonny worked with Eddy and Kevin dug his grave alone, trying to keep it all together. Since he'd cried with Jonny, he was struggling to keep from crying all the time. The simplest thought was enough to drive him to the verge of tears. Thinking about Nazz. Or Rolf. Jimmy's parents in the bed of his dad's truck. Jonny's loneliness and desperation for human interaction to the point he'd help someone he'd barely spoken to dig a grave for another pair of nearly complete strangers. The thought of Eddy helping them out through the begrudging kindness of his heart made Kevin shake.
Kevin was glad he dug alone. It allowed him the opportunity, if he needed it, to cry. He knew he had to get himself together though. He needed to be strong for the others. But maybe, he thought, they didn't need him to be strong for them. His eyes welled. His nose ran. He sniffled.
At the next grave over, Eddy listened, incredulous, clutching his shovel with both hands. Jonny worked diligently next to him. Eddy leaned over and whispered, "Hey, fathead." Jonny, fathead, stopped and looked at him. "Is shovelchin over there cryin'?"
"Oh, yeah," Jonny nodded, "he does that." Jonny went back to digging.
Eddy looked back over toward Kevin, then went back to digging. "Hey, Jonny," Eddy said.
"Yeah, Eddy?"
"Is everybody actin' weird around here or what?"
"Everybody's just stressed out. People act outta character when they're upset."
Eddy glared at Jonny. "Since when'd you turn into Dear Abby?" That was new from Jonny, trying to give him insight into someone else's brain, and doing so without coloring it in his own personal oak-tinted glasses first. Jonny seemed like a completely different person than the one he'd been even a few days ago. So did Kevin. Since when was Kevin lamenting to Eddy the stress of leadership and crying in open graves next door to Eddy? Hell, Eddy seemed like a different person now even to himself. He had become so quiet and reserved the last few days. He couldn't remember everything he had done yesterday, but he was pretty damn position he had not spoken to one person all day. Well, at least that wasn't of his own volition, at least not partially. He could have gone over to Double Dee's to hang out, but not with him obsessing over that thing in the garage or even with that thing in the same house, for that matter. He still clamored for affection. He had run into Kevin and Jonny on their way to pick up Jimmy's family and jumped at the opportunity for some kind of human contact.
Eddy felt a strange emptiness inside him, one that had been growing recently. Things had been changing around the Cul-de-Sac and around town. He'd never thought of himself as a fan of routine, but several constants that had always been present in his life had now changed. For one, he'd hardly gone a period of three days without seeing one or both of his parents. Right now, he was on day 5 of independence. He worried about his mom. His dad could drop dead though, for all he cared. It seemed like every parent in the Cul-de-Sac was either dead or missing, with the exceptions of Ed's parents, who were completely useless. School wasn't meeting any more. It seemed like everything had fallen apart, in nothing more than 4 days since the earthquake. 4 fucking days, and the world turned into the wild,wild west. These were lawless times.
Eddy realized how much he really did hate change, deep down. Moving from summer to fall was like a culture shock for him. Even re-arranging his room was enough to ruin his day most times. He wanted things to stay the way they were forever. Things had changed so much so fast these last few days, it gave Eddy whiplash and left him speechless. He just needed to get his bearings again, and he'd be fine.
"Since me and Kev got to be good friends, Eddy," Jonny said.
"What?" Eddy hissed, "Since when are you and the wet hanky over there 'good friends?'"
"Since the last few days. Golly, Eddy, keep up."
Eddy held up his shovel. "You see this, Jonny? This is gonna go right where the sun don't shine if you don't get the fuck outta my hair with that stupid superiority complex you grew all the sudden. You catch me, chief?"
"Aaaalright, Eddy. Whatever floats ya boat. Y'know, maybe ya should should get some rest. You seem stressed out."
Eddy let out a grunt that rose in pitch with his anger like a tea kettle, gripping his shovel with both hands. He could've cracked Jonny upside the head with that shovel right then, he was so angry. But instead, he swallowed it up and shoved it down like clothes in a suitcase, and he went back to digging.
Ed came up the stairs and peeked into the living room to see what his dad was up to. But he wasn't sitting in the recliner in front of the dead TV anymore. Ed let out a breath he'd been holding and walked out the front door like a human being.
He went over to Nazz's house and knocked. He waited diligently for an answer. None came. After a couple minutes, he knocked again.
After his second set of knocks, he heard a window on the second floor slide open. He stepped back and looked up. Sarah leaned out the window to look down at him. "It's open, stupid!"
"Where's Nazz?" he asked.
"She's out on business. Whadda you want?"
"I just want to see my baby sister," he said. Sarah sighs above and mumbled, "The door's open, stupid." Then she disappeared back inside and shut the window. Ed reached for the door, turned the knob and found it unlocked. He let himself in. He wandered through the house for a bit before he found the stairs, then bounded up them.
At the top of the stairs, he was met with a problem. He had no idea which room Sarah was in.
But Sarah came out to meet him, so he didn't have to worry about it. "Hello, baby sister," Ed said, playing with his jacket.
"There. You've seen me." She went back into the room and began shutting the door.
"Um," Ed said, and hurried over to stick his head through before she got it closed. "How is Jimmy today?"
Sarah sighed and turned to face him, letting the door fall open, crossing her arms in front of him. "He's devastated, Ed. He's been ruined."
"His mom and dad?"
"No, because the polar bears are dying, Ed. Yes, he's upset about his parents. Of course he is."
"Oh. Well. Um. I think Mom would like to see you, you know, some time soon. She misses you, baby sister."
"Well, what else is new?"
"Um. Everybody missed you being there at the house with us."
"Dad misses me?" she asked, partially hoping he really did, but bitterly knowing he didn't.
"No, not him," Ed said, and looked at her pitifully. Sarah realized he meant he missed having her there. She sighed.
"Jimmy needs me, Ed," she said, motioning to the catatonic boy on the bed behind her. "He's all broken up. He hasn't even moved since he found out."
"Is he going to be okay?" Ed asked. It was sweet and sincere. Sometimes Sarah forget he was much more than a block of wood, like Plank.
"I don't know, Ed," she shrugged. "Maybe he'll come back when it stops hurting. He hasn't peed or pooped on himself yet, not that I can tell, so he's gotta be goin' to the bathroom when I'm not looking, so maybe he'll get better." She looked back at him. "God, I hope he will." She turned back to Ed but didn't meet his gaze. "How's mom and dad?"
"Mom's still sick. Dad's still rude."
"What's he doin' to you, Ed?"
"Nothin'."
"What's he doing, Ed?"
"Just bein' Dad, y'know how it is."
"Yeah. Well…" Sarah looked back at Jimmy again. He had his back to them, facing the window, still all curled up. He looked so small lying there. "Maybe he'll be better off if I'm not here. Then he doesn't have to worry about sneaking around me to go to the bathroom. Do you want me to come home tonight, Ed?"
Ed grinned at her. "Well. I'll see what I can do, okay?" she said, and Ed nodded.
"Okay, baby sister. I'll see you tonight." He pointed at her and snapped his fingers. "Maybe."
Sarah chuckled. "Alright, dummy. See you later."
"Okay!" And off he went. Sarah walked back to the bed with Jimmy and got in. She laid there with him for nearly an hour.
Within the hour, the graves were dug, and the Eddy, Jonny and Kevin carried Jimmy's parents, wrapped up in sheets from the linen cabinet in Kevin's house, more trying to suffocate their bodies' stench than out of respect for them, at arm's length over to the holes and lowered them inside, Eddy grumbling in annoyance the whole way. They filled the holes back up in no time and before Jonny and Eddy could make a run back to the truck to grab hold of the good seat (the truck was a two-seater), Kevin asked them to hang around while he took off his hat, held it over his waist and said a quiet prayer.
"Um, God, Jesus, please watch over these two people who we have laid to rest today. Well I didn't know 'em very well but I'm told they were well loved by Jimmy, at least till they made some mistakes at the end, there. Please forgive them, God, for whatever mistakes they have made. From what I saw in my spot, they seemed like pretty cool dudes. Uh, they seemed like a pretty cool dude and, uh, lady-dude. We hope you, God, and Jesus, you too, will guide their souls up to Heaven. Thank you for you guys's time. Amen. Alright, I'm done now. You ain't gotta stand around and listen to me go on no more, since you seem so ready to go."
They rode back to the Cul-de-Sac, Kevin frowning through the windshield, Jonny smiling, satisfied, in the passenger seat, and Eddy packed between them on the bitch hump, grimacing.
When they made it back, Eddy went home and Kevin started walked over to Rolf's house with Jonny on his ass. "Where we headed, Kevin?" Jonny asked.
"I'm going over to Rolf's house. Yo, Jonny, I gotta do this alone, alright? I gotta to Rolf, and he's a pretty difficult guy to get a hold of right now."
Jonny stood there in front of Kevin, trying to figure out a way to stick around. "You try his Jitterbug again?"
"I'm just gonna knock on his door. Alright? I'll talk to you later, Jonny."
"Aaalright. See ya around, buddy." Jonny left, feeling as sad as he looked. Kevin continued to Rolf's house feeling like he'd had a weight taken off his shoulders, and he knocked at Rolf's door expecting not to get an answer.
But Rolf answered, and he did it pretty quickly. "Hello?" he said. "What is it you request of Rolf?"
"His time," Kevin sputtered and corrected himself, "Your time, man. That's all I want." Rolf stared at him for a minute, flexing his jaw. Stone-faced. If he was thinking all the time he stood there staring, Kevin couldn't read it on his dull face. "Just a few minutes, Rolf."
"Why do you need this time of mine? Have you a valediction? If you have, say it here and say it now, my good friend! I have no time for the chitty-chitty-chattery chat, yes? There is much to do!"
"A valediction? What? I just wanna talk, Rolf. Ain't you got time to talk, man?"
Rolf grumbled. "What must you speak of?"
"What happened? With your dad, dude?"
"He has risen to the clouds. He has joined Nana, locked arms with his brothers and become the next link in the eternal chain. His magnificent presence graces the land of the - what do you say? - The You Ess of Ay no longer!"
Kevin caught a glimpse of the house behind Rolf's form in the doorway. Things were clean, too clean to be a part of Rolf's house. It took Kevin a moment to realize it was so clean because it was nearly empty. Rolf had cleared the living room nearly completely of furniture but for a small lawn chair and Rolf's massive TV with the tiny screen, as well as several TV dinners and a half-finished jug of homemade milk on the floor surrounding the two pieces of furniture. "What's up, Rolf? You movin' out, or somethin'?"
Rolf stared at Kevin for a moment. "If you must come into my home, you must."
He stepped aside. Kevin hesitated, then stepped inside.
The house was barren. The only other piece of furniture left in the living room was a gas lantern sitting in a corner. "What's happenin' here, Rolf? I mean, are you leaving?"
"Alas, yes, my friend, I fear I have a purpose no longer for staying in the Cul-de-Sac." He spoke gravely as he walked off into the kitchen.
Kevin saw the metaphor of Rolf walking away from him, which pissed him off because A.) Rolf was walking away from him, and B.) Kevin was beginning to comprehend the contextual usage of metaphors, which was irritating because he had insisted in class last week to his English teacher that he would never, not ever, understand them. In protest, Kevin stomped off after him, past a pile of ratty old luggage packed to the brim as well as some overflowing garbage bags being used as auxiliary luggage. "What? Why? Why are you leaving?"
Kevin saw as he followed Rolf that all the cabinets in the kitchen had been flung open. A black garbage bag sat, half-filled with kitchen instruments, on the floor, jutting with pots, pans and silverware. A fork had punched through the plastic on the side. Kevin approached a cabinet still stuffed with tupperware and began shoving them down into the bag. "Do you have the mind of a foul?" Rolf called back over his shoulder. "I have no reason to stay!"
Kevin stood by the kitchen island. "Is it because of your father?"
"Have you a valediction, shovelchin Kevin?"
Kevin tried to make himself look big and imposing and smart, standing with his legs apart net to the island. But Rolf could only see him get smaller and smaller until he seemed like nothing more than an infant. "Don't go."
Rolf stopped packing and turned to Kevin, offended. "What is this? Do you think Rolf is bound in following your instruction, yes?"
"Please, don't go, Rolf," Kevin said softly. "I want you to stay."
"You do not listen to Rolf."
"Rolf, dude, I am in a real weird place right now and I don't really wanna have to deal with this."
Rolf spun on his heel and continued packing. "Then you may go."
"Nazz has been gone for like two days now and I don't even really know if she's comin' back, man. I should a' even let her go alone, but I just figured she'd get off pissed off at me for tryin' to 'imply her inferiority' by my asking or whatever so I didn't, y'know?" Kevin could scarcely hold back the tears as he spoke. He figured if he continued, it would only get worse, but he was on a roll now and couldn't stop. "And she was supposed to be the goddamn search party and now we might hafta send out a goddamn search party for the goddamn search party, and now you're leaving too. I might never see you again either, man. So now with you and Nazz pretty much officially out-of-commission, I gotta stoop down and hang out with weirdos like Jonny fucking 2x4 and Eddy McGee. What am I supposed ta do without ya, man?" By the time he finished, he was fully crying.
Rolf noticed and stopped packing once again, and slowly approached Kevin, leaning down to peer at his wet face. "What is this? Do Rolf's eyes deceive the brain of Rolf? Does shovelchin Kevin cry now, at Rolf's feet?"
"Rolf, like I said, it's a weird time for me."
"Rolf has not cried since, oh, he has left the old country. This was what, ten, fifteen years in the past? Rolf has grown past these things!"
Rolf turned his chin up at Kevin and spun again to continue packing, finishing the cabinet and moving onto the next. Kevin felt anger bubbling up from within and wiped his face with his sleeve. "Where would you be going? Do you even have a place to go?"
Rolf would not even look back at Kevin now. "Yes, I will go join my cousin Bob in his conquest of, what is it, the Middle Western of the You-Ess of Ayy."
"You're going to the Midwest?" Kevin spat, clearly punctuating each word to emphasize its ridiculousness.
"It is the only place Rolf may go! Rolf may not return to the old country, as Rolf cannot fathom to deduce the methods of travel! All methods Rolf know baffle and confuse Rolf! Tell me, my friend, wise patriot of You-Ess of Ayy, how is it the infernal contraptions do not fall down? How?"
"Well, they're jet planes, Rolf, and they got jets, and they turn the wings on the side, and...they shoot jet shit past 'em and it makes it go up - Rolf, I'm really not in the right mindset to explain the aerodynamics of air travel right now, dude. I just - who is your cousin, man? You never told me about this guy. Who is he, Rolf? This Bob dude?"
"He is of Rolf's familial tree. He is Rolf's family. Rolf has no family here, not with the passage of his dear beloved father."
"You were terrified of your dad, Rolf."
"But yet, he was still Rolf's papa, no? His body carried the very blood of Rolf! Have you no knowledge of the family unit?"
"Yeah, I think I got 'knowledge about the family unit,'" Kevin mocked, "I know about family here, dude. You don't think you got family here? We're your family, Rolf. You're our brother. You took a look at the Cul-de-Sac lately, dude? There ain't nobody 'round but us here. Except for Ed and those guys, we're all outta adults to take care of us. We gotta stick together, man! You and everybody on this Cul-de-Sac, man, we're family. We're brothers. You and me, man, we're brothers."
"Rolf knows not of what brotherhood you speak! Rolf has no siblings, not in this country." He sinched the garbage bag shut and tossed it to the pile with the others. He took a moment to gather his strength, pulling another garbage bag from a roll as Kevin stomped closer to him. Rolf ignored him, and took to pushing the kitchen island off its base to reveal the firepit below.
"Neither do I, dude. But your blood brothers ain't your only brothers," Kevin said slowly, trying to sound wise. "Your friends are, too."
Rolf snapped the bag out and began picking up the coal from the pit, tossing them into the fresh garbage bag. "Rolf should not have opened his home this afternoon. Have you a valediction?"
"I don't know what a valediction is, Rolf! Talk to me, man!"
Rolf grew angry, crushing a lump of coal in his fist. He dropped the garbage bag and stomped toward Kevin, cocking his head out from his shoulders toward Kevin's face, veins in his face and neck bulging as he spoke. "You have taken enough time from Rolf's day already, no? You must be going! Rolf must leave at once!" He backed Kevin out of the kitchen and into the living room.
"When are you leaving? Would you a' even said bye if I didn't come here?" Kevin's back hit the front door, the knob jabbing his backbone. Rolf shoved Kevin aside and threw the door open and motioned for Kevin to leave.
"It is no time for goodbyes! Rolf leaves at first light in the morning!"
"Why are you in such a hurry?" was what Kevin would have asked Rolf, and he had nearly gotten half the words out of his mouth before Rolf had slammed the door in his face. "Fucking dick!" Kevin shouted at the closed door. Through it, he heard Rolf begin to throw a barrage of incomprehensible curses at Kevin, even as his voice retreated off back toward the kitchen.
Kevin stomped back to his house and slammed the front door on his way in, knocking loose glass out of cracked windows on the front of the house. He sulked into the kitchen and began playing with the gun collection he had apparently inherited, checking each of the pistols for their calibers of ammunition and then scrounging them up from the disconnected corners of the house. For some pistols, the only bullets he could find were in their cylinders or the magazines already jacked into their grips. He would continue to load and reload the pistols as he sat cross-legged on the floor in the kitchen for several hours until he was interrupted by a loud noise.
But before all that, shortly after Kevin took Rolf's front door to the face, Nazz had been sat facing a very old man on one knee who applied disinfectant cream to the scrapes on her knees. The skin around his eyes were well-worn and deeply wrinkled. The man, whose name Nazz thought was Penny, seemed to be no stranger to laughter. Nazz wondered if he was one of the men she'd heard laughing before, but his voice was not as deep nor as boisterous as that laughter. Mr. Penny's voice was soft and high-pitched, like the risen pitch of a tea kettle but hardly as obnoxious. His lips were hidden with a big, white mustache.
Nazz felt her face and her nose in particular, which she could tell was already scabbing over from where she'd drug it along the earth in her mad dash race from the CEFCO.
Mr. Penny was not smiling now. He had gone from rubbing disinfectant on Nazz's knees to inspecting her arms and shoulders, which she bore in the cheap sleeveless tee shirt she'd been wearing since yesterday. His calloused hands touched a bruise, inspected it, then pressed its thumb against it, and reflexively Nazz grunted and pulled back, but Penny grabbed a hold of her arm to keep her in place. "These bruises couldn't have been obtained when you fell." His cool blue eyes turned to meet hers under his big white eyebrows. "Are you sure everything's all right?"
"Yessir," Nazz said, as monotone as everything else she'd said so far to the others so far. "I fell down some stairs."
"Mm-hmm," Mr. Penny said, eyeing Nazz sidelong with his brow furrowed and pursed lips visible even under his mustache. "I've heard that one before. And what of this arm that's full of holes, miss?"
"It was a few minutes after I fell. I slipped on some busted glass and put my arm out to catch myself."
Mr. Penny's neck tightened and he bared his teeth almost as reflexively as Nazz had snatched her arm away, grimacing at the prospect of the injury's acquisition. Nazz noticed he had nice teeth, well cared for in his long life. He made a distressed noise along with the slightly exaggerated face that had been meant to make her laugh. She hadn't even cracked a smile. When had she gotten so serious? At least he seemed to believe her with this injury. "Ouch."
"It didn't hurt till I pulled all the glass out."
"Mm," Mr. Penny grimaced again, "I'm not sure I would have had your resolve to do so. You pulled it all out yourself?"
"Yes sir," Nazz said, proud of her resolve.
"May I see your hands, now, miss?" Nazz abided and she turned her hands over so that Mr. Penny could inspect them, her palms open to keep from hurting. Any time she tried to ball them up, it hurt like hell. She'd torn them up pretty good hitting the ground. She had already picked one rock out sitting around waiting to be tended to, as the other members of community had stood around just out of sight as if barring that had made them noiseless as well, discussing what to do with her. A wide, thick slab of skin on her right hand had been torn loose and hung down over her wrist, but she had slid it back into place before Mr. Penny had come. But Mr. Penny gently touched a finger to it, and the skin slid in his hand, and he frowned again. "You'd have thought the grass would have done more to cushion you. The ground's done quite a number on your hands. Your knees weren't so bad. Now I see where you took the brunt of the injury."
With his free hand, Mr. Penny played with a slim gold chain dangling from his neck that Nazz flinched at the very sight of. It reminded her of her father's chain. It took Mr. Penny no time to notice her apparent obsession with the piece of jewelry. He held it out to her from his neck and smiled a wrinkled smile. "My granddaughter gave it to me," he said, very proud.
Mr. Penny took Nazz's hands again and gently removed another rock from Nazz's hand. He rubbed them down with more cream, pulled a bucket of water over and brought a hand towel from inside, squeezed it out, and cleaned the blood off Nazz's hands with it. He grabbed up a roll of bandaging and wrapping her right hand with it. He put bandaids on the other hand and said she could leave the knees to air out if she cared to.
She nodded and he helped her to her feet, a gentleman from a classic age. With her bandaged hand, she reached down a picked up one of her two bags, which she had insisted she bring with her even as she left the bike behind. It hurt to pick up but the pain subsided once she got the strap onto her shoulder. Before she could grab the other, Mr. Penny had already bent over and grabbed one of its straps, then stopped and looked up at her. "May I?" he asked and Nazz hesitated before nodding to him in the affirmative.
She had made a bit of a scene when she'd woken up at the pavilion and found the men around her unzipping one of the bags to rifle through, to search out any 'contraband' she had with her, by which she suspected the men had meant marijuana or some other depressant. Nazz had loudly and somewhat violently refused, yanking the bag away for fear of theft. The men spoke of how little trust she had for them and a woman behind them, Molly, who watched while she leaned against a support beam, had said, "Could you blame her? I wouldn't trust a soul either, if I was her."
They had seen nothing more when she had arrived but some sort of feral girl with a mess of hair, a bloody face, bloody hands and legs, covered in dirt from the crash. A violent, silent girl who barely seemed human.
She composed herself as she awaited medical attention, washing her face with the hand towel Mr. Penny had used to wash her hands and her lower legs before them, and had fixed her hair simply by running her hands through it, a feat her mother had playfully scoffed and shook her head at. She had such nice hair, her mother insisted.
With her hair fixed and face, arms and legs clean, she emerged looking brand new, if only with her beauty besmirched by scabs from dirt scorches torn across her nose, forehead and cheek. She probably looked like shit. It wouldn't be till she used the hot, sweaty lady's room tacked onto the back of the pavilion that she noticed she must have bashed her eye into something, because the blood vessels in it had burst and turned most of the white of her left eye blood red. What a mess.
When she had arrived, after cleaning her face with the towel and bucket hastily and anxiously handed over by a slim, nervous woman called Annie and before Mr. Penny was let through, she was vetted by a tall, handsome man whose hard, blue-collar edge was not hidden by his soft features, fashionable gray jeans and long sleeve jean shirt over a Ramones tee and small, round, wire-rimmed glasses, and a slightly shorter woman with a mane of thick, shoulder-clipped curly strawberry blond hair and similar fashion sense (perhaps one always dressed the other), what Nazz could imagine to be a husband and wife pair of leaders for the small community. The man was named Brewis (which Nazz had initially, of course, mistaken for Bruce and had been lightly corrected by him in good humor) and his wife was named Nat.
They interrogated her briefly, asking her what her name was, where she was going, where she'd come from and why she was leaving like a bat outta hell. To the first, she made the mistake of answering honestly, telling them her real first and last name, which Nat had commented was a "mouthful" with annoyed Nazz, which she remedied with the rest of her answers, which were "Lemon Brook," "Cherry Hills," and "because I was being chased by some yellowjackets." Brewis seemed to take more to her answers than Nat, who seemed suspicious, likely because she wasn't distracted by her light sobs and apparent innocence and precociousness like Brewis.
They asked her if she had come from friends or family in Cherry Hills and Nazz said yes, she was coming from some family. Her father, she claimed much to Brewis' sorrow, had been abusing her while her mother purposefully ignored it, and she had taken the opportunity of the earthquake's aftermath to escape her father's evil reach. She felt like a traitor for even talking about her "father" like that, when the real thing, for her, was one of the kindest men in the world. But they couldn't know that, or else they might ask her to take them to them, and then she'd be in deep shit.
She didn't intend, however, on giving them the time to follow her up on her lies, since she planned on slipping away as soon as possible, which would be at its latest, she figured, that night when everyone went to bed.
They'd told her they wouldn't try and take her back home. They would offer her food and shelter for a few days till she recovered and then she could choose to leave or stay if she'd be willing to work for them in exchange for the continued housing, of course. They'd asked several more questions, one of which, strangely, was whether or not she had a gun. Nazz had said, "No, of course not." They asked if she had any other weapons and Nazz had said, "No, of course not."
Dusk was rapidly approaching as she awaited dinner among the population of the group. She noticed that one of the tents, the flaps of which hung open, was filled with rifles.
For a while, Nazz went over to an edge of the pavilion where Molly sat with what was left of Kevin's bike, slowly but surely putting it back together. Somehow when she crashed, she'd manage to rip both the handlebars and the front tire off. A couple pot bellied men spent a half hour picking up pieces while Brewis and Nat interrogated Nazz, and now they sat on the table of the picnic bench Molly sat on, with her back to it, figuring out how each piece fit. Molly told Nazz she had been a tomboy in school and in an purposeful act of rebellion, had learned how to take cars apart and put them back together just to hold it over the guys who thought they knew better. She'd actually gotten so good at it, and had such little idea of what to do after high school, she'd gone to a trade school and gotten certified as an auto mechanic. She had been working as one for the past eight years since high school.
"I've never tried to fix a bike before, but I fix cars for a living, so how hard could this really be, right?" Nazz shrugged. Molly looked at her again and said with a little less confidence, "Right?" Nazz laughed and Molly chalked that up as a win. "It's a nice bike, if I do say so myself. A real hot rod." As Molly twisted a nut onto the stem where the handlebars used to be, Nazz saw that she wore a small, child-like blue watch on her right hand.
She asked at one point to go to the lady's room, which she was of course allowed, insisting that she bring her bags along with her (Brewis whispered to an irritated friend that she must have had trust issues because of her parental abuse), which was also of course allowed, but with the company of a wife among the community, Cheryl, who said she had to go to and that she'd show Nazz the way. Nazz swore to herself and followed.
"Nazz Von...what was it?" Cheryl asked, sticking her nose entirely where it didn't belong.
"Nazz Von Bartonschmeer."
"Von Bartonsh…" she trailed off. "What is that, German?"
"It's Dutch," Nazz said as they went into the lady's room. When Nazz caught sight of her face, she let out a surprised, "Holy shit!" to which Cheryl laughed and locked herself into the only bathroom stall. Nazz waited as she inspected her injured face. Nazz, being too self-aware to not notice how attractive she was, let her vanity take hold a moment and she lamented her injuries, hoping they wouldn't leave scars. After that, waiting for Cheryl to get out of the bathroom, she wondered if Cheryl had offered to join her purposefully to make sure she wouldn't run. Nazz had the backpack with Kevin's pistol slung over her shoulder for easy reach.
Later, she had dinner with the community at the picnic tables under the pavilion, where she sat at a table with Brewis and Nat, as well as Mr. Penny and a boisterous man (who laughed a lot) Brewis and Nat jokingly referred to exclusively as "Brainiac." Brainiac was a 40-year-old man of middle height with a clumsily cropped head of short blond hair, who laughed a lot and made many good-hearted jokes. He wore a pastel green polo shirt that bulged at the waist and nearly flowed over at the stomach with tight tan shorts and a pair of loafers with knees socks. He sat on the sides of his feet, the soles pointed at one another. He struck Nazz a pretty harmless geek.
Mr. Penny sat and laughed along with the others, but did not speak.
Just before dinner had been nightfall. Nazz had been to pavilions like these before during the day and at night and knew very well the sounds that visiting them brought. She knew the loud songs of night bugs that would surround the small enclave of humanity, whirring rhythmically through the night in ever-heightening pitch.
But this pavilion brought with it no chatter of insects. Only dead silence Nazz had missed during the day. The only sounds were Brainiac and other men's laughter.
After dinner, Brewis and Nat took Nazz around the backside of their encampment, on the other side of their canvas tents, where they laid out a blanket and pillow for Nazz to sleep on. Brainiac and Cheryl, apparently husband and wife, joined them at their bed station nearby, which was another blanket with an air mattress and comforter on top, with a wind-up lantern to the side along with a pair of books. A romance novel (probably for Chery) and a book on survivalism for dummies for Brainiac. After a long, loud, lighthearted conversation the other four tried to make Nazz join in on, Brewis and Nat left and Brainiac asked Nazz what she'd get up to tonight. Nazz said she'd probably just call it a night.
Nazz laid on the blanket for what she measured as, give or take, a couple hours. Brianiac and Cheryl had fallen silent more than an hour ago and after the hours had past, she sat up to see if Brainiac and Cheryl were asleep.
They were not. Cheryl laid in bed with a flashlight reading her book and Brainiac was sitting up, looking out over the grasslands beyond. He looked over and smiled at Nazz. "You a night owl too?"
Nazz shrugged. "I just woke up."
Brainiac lifted his brows and grinned at her like he's caught her in the act of something, and then laughed. "Well, I prosper at night. Can't say the same for most others I know though. I'm at my best at night and most other people, heck, I'd say everybody I know, they're all at their worst. Everybody gets so grouchy at night, and so irritable. I just wanna share the night with somebody, y'know? Even she gets pretty grouchy." He pointed down at Cheryl, who grunted grouchily. "You a night owl?"
"I guess," Nazz mumbled uncomfortably, then caught herself picking at scabs and quit doing it.
"Yeah. All the best people are night people. You should be proud a' yourself, Miss Nazz. Hey, I know you're not really trustin' anybody right now, and you probably don't much care for me, but I just want to ask if you'd like to go see somethin' kind a' cool, kind a' strange out a ways toward the woods out there?"
Nazz sat and looked at Cheryl, who didn't look up from her book.
"I won't bite'cha, I swear to God, Miss Nazz."
Nazz thought it might be a good time to make an escape should anything go wrong. She shrugged and grabbed up her bags, wincing in pain at the gripping of them in her hands, and she stood up.
Brainiac laughed and stood up as well, and he hurried over. "Lemme get one a' those bags off ya, ma'am."
He took one of the bags from her shoulder without much waiting for a response. It was the one Nazz wouldn't have offered up; it was the one with the pistol.
"You ready?" Brainiac smiled at her. She shrugged and he smiled harder and they set off - but Brainiac stopped suddenly and turned to her. "You don't gotta if it makes you uncomfortable. I just figured you'd like to see it."
"I'm fine," Nazz said, and followed Brainiac through the lashing grass of the field. She looked over and, even in the darkness of the night, could see the CEFCO's silhouette in the middle distance.
She followed Brainiac out to the middle of the field and he stuck out an arm in front of her. "Be careful, now. You're liable to fall right in."
He and Nazz approached a strip of the field Nazz suddenly realized gave off a vague, red glow. They approached and edged up to the glowing fissure sawing through the field as far as Brainiac was willing to risk going. At the last step Nazz took, which was ahead of him, he reached out and grabbed her arm to make sure she didn't fall in. He had a strong grip. "Don't fall in," he said, nearly breathlessly.
She stepped back so he'd let loose of her and he did. He cleared his throat and they both peered down into the hole. "It's pretty warm, right? Get too close, it'll singe your arm hairs if you've got any. We set up camp near it on account of its heat. I don't know if you noticed, on a warm night like this, but when it was cooler a couple nights ago, you could feel the heat in the ground emanatin' off a' this."
No wonder there were no insects around.
Nazz looked at Brainiac, who was looking down into the hole. Then, he cut his eyes toward her and grinned. "Isn't that somethin'?"
A few hours prior, an hour or so after Kevin left Rolf's house, Ed was settling in at his own, comfortable at the thought that Sarah had come to join him about a half an hour ago. He had just left her room a few minutes ago and still had the big smile on his face that he'd been wearing since she arrived, one that had only faltered when coming down the stairs onto the first floor, where he quietly and quickly moved to the stairs, looking and listening for the presence of his father, who he couldn't see hide nor hair of. He hadn't seen Ed all day, not since leaving him in the living room right after they got back from Double Dee's house. Something about him not being around all day made Ed nervous, but he shook that off because Sarah was home!
He laid on his bed, hands interlocked behind his head, staring at the ceiling, feeling Sarah's movement upstairs as it vibrated through the house, smelling her light flowery scent as it ruminated around.
After laying there for a while, he read a comic book and went back up to check on Mom, then on Sarah, who smiled at him and everything. Smiling at him was something she never did. But for whatever reason, possibly because she was back near mom, he figured, she had been really sweet to him since she got back. He'd come in on her sitting on the floor, playing with dolls she hadn't touched in nearly a year. Seemed like things were getting back to some sort of normal for Ed, even if he could tell Mom was only getting worse.
He sat with her as well as Sarah for a brief while, but whereas he sat with Sarah in silence, he sat with Mom and talked for maybe twenty minutes. Well, he mostly talked and she mostly listening, smiling at him and stroking his cropped hair.
After a while, Ed reluctantly peeled himself away from his mom, shouting, "Love ya, Mom!" back through the door as he closed it, and he waited to finish shutting it long enough to hear her say, "I love you too, sweetheart."
Then he bounded back downstairs and went through his comic collection, looking for one he hadn't read in a while. It took him twenty or thirty more minutes of looking, because he would get distracted at how cool each and every one of the books in his collection were, and he'd spend time flipping through each one, appreciating the care put into the story and the generally pretty terrific artwork, even in the black-and-white photocopied indie comix.
He hadn't even picked one out in particular yet when he heard the front door open and shut above, then heard the slow, heavy footfalls cross the ceiling over his head that he was very familiar with; it was the gait his father walked when he came home stinking drunk. Ed thought he heard Dad walk over to the TV, like usual, but he heard another door open and shut and didn't hear his footsteps anymore. He must've gone out to the garage, he figured.
Ed found a book he liked that had fallen through the cracks of his memory and cracked it open as he flopped out on the bed. A few minutes later, he heard the garage door to the house open and shut again, and his father slowly made his way back through the house. It was definitely his trot, and he was definitely drunk; when he was, his footfalls were slow and deliberate, as if he planned each one out specifically and strategically to look like he wasn't drunk, but he was so drunk he couldn't tell he walked as slow as a Triffid on the streets of London.
As he came out, he listened to his dad's footsteps make a wide turn as they came around the kitchen and into the hallway, then heard them rise up the squeaky stairs to the second floor. He tried to go back to his book but couldn't concentrate. Not to mention he'd lost his place.
He'd finally found it again when he heard the gunshot that cracked from upstairs and shook the house's very fountain, jolting Ed and sending him jumping up off the bed in fright like a cat, his haunches up just like one, before he fell back down onto the bed. He didn't initially peg the sound as a shotgun blast; what would Dad be doing in the house firing off the shotgun? Another thought ran quickly across his mind; that's what he'd been doing in the garage, evicting the 12 gauge from its prison in the gun safe there.
It took Ed till the second shotgun blast shook the house for it to shake any reason into him, and he jumped off the bed and raced up the stairs to the first floor, then bounded around the hall to run up to the second story, his mind racing the whole way. He thought maybe Dad had shot himself until the second shot had rung out. That meant what else but that he was taking pot shots at Mom and Sarah? He'd fired the gun off twice, afterall. His mind went searching for a best case scenario. Maybe Dad was just blowing holes in the walls or in the ceiling, just generally scaring the shit out of everybody like he had a bad habit of doing when he was drunk.
Maybe, if, and that was if he had taken the shotgun to Sarah or Mom or both, that Sarah or Mom or both had jumped out of the way in the last second and were totally fine, and they'd stay totally fine until Ed made it to the top of the stairs until he could stop Dad, grab him and yank the shotgun away like he'd done with the baseball bat he'd taken to the kitchen two years ago, tearing everything up and nearly breaking Mom's arm with it. Then, when Ed had thrown the bat out the window in a desperate attempt to save himself the pain of it, Dad had beaten the shit out of him anyway with his bare hands. That was the only time he'd ever been to the emergency room where he was the one who was hurt.
Another thought ran through his mind as he leapt from step to step up to the upstairs. He had never beaten Dad in a fight before. He had always only ever gotten his ass kicked by his old man. What hope did he have now of stopping him, wrestling the gun away and stopping him from hurting anybody else? Even in the kitchen with the bat, when he got done with him, he'd gone back to hurting Mom. He had no time for that though. He was running out of time before the next shotgun blast. Then, just before he reached the second floor, another thought ran through his head.
He'd been the one to make Sarah come home tonight.
Ed's socked foot touched the floorboards on the second floor and sent a creak rumbling across them. He spun his head down the hall toward Mom and Sarah's rooms, and as he did, so did Dad as he stood in the hallway between the two rooms, Mom's room's door wide open but Sarah's shut. Dad's shirt, pants, face and arms speckled with hot warm blood, eyes wild but strangely absent as if he'd resigned himself to the back of his subconscious or maybe he was just black-out drunk and his brain had taken five out back.
But his wild, empty eyes found Ed, and Dad began to swing the shotgun around as Ed came running at him, foot after foot slapping the floorboards, and he nearly slipped with each frenzied step in his slippery socks, and he was afraid he'd fall before he reached Dad, and then he'd be on the ground when he got the shotgun around.
Ed ran one foot after the other in the longest strides of his life right at Dad, a Mack truck roaring down the interstate, breaking the speed limit, and Dad was guiding the barrel of the shotgun right at Ed's head, his finger beginning to clasp the hair trigger and Dad's other hand bringing the pump back, ejecting a smoking shell that bounced off the wall, leaving a scorch mark, then bringing the pump forward again -
Dad forgetting to pump the shotgun before Ed came up the stairs, Ed realized, was the only reason his head hadn't been scooped off already. He was looking straight down the barrel now, directly into the black abyss it offered up to him as a glimpse into his future. The shotgun was ready to go now, and Dad squeezed the trigger with the gun levelled at Ed's face.
Ed brought his hand up and knocked the barrel off course and it vomited a fire-hot, spark-spitting, ear-bleedingly loud roar of buckshot from its barrel, the tiny pellets once housed inside the shell losing track of their shape together within and spreading, whizzing through the air inches from Ed's face and eyes and nose and everything they would have blown off if Ed hadn't knocked the barrel away, and they ripped through the wall next to both Ed and Dad's heads, sending both weaving slightly to the side to avoid shrapnel.
Dad was already pumping in the next shell and ejecting the spent one as Ed realized he was still clutching the shotgun because the heat of the barrel burnt his palm and fingers and sent sharp nerves of pain up his wrist, but he didn't let go. He yanked the shotgun as hard as he could, but his father had a death grip on the stock and pump, and Ed instead drug his father across the floor, shoes scuffing and squeaking on the floorboards.
Ed made sure to guide the barrel away from himself as he pulled it along his side, and he brought his hand around and grabbed the rifle between the trigger guard and the pump as Dad pulled the trigger again, spraying fire and buckshot down the hall where it dispersed without much destruction at this distance. Ed heard the pellets rolling across the floor as they lost their power and looked past the shotgun into his father's eyes, which burnt like Ed's hand on the barrel, which was only getting hotter and burning worse.
Ed took his hand off the barrel, not to relieve the pain but to move it down to the pump grabbing his father's hand to try to stop him from racking it.
Ed had the momentum of the 12 gauge and his father's movement at his fingertips, he realized, and he swung them both around to the wall, slamming Dad's back into it as Ed tried to pry Dad's fingers off the pump. The shock of the hit against the wall loosened Dad's grip from the trigger and he let it go to punch Ed in the head or chest, whichever his knuckles met first.
Ed yanked the shotgun away, prying Dad's fingers back, and, for one stunned moment, thought he'd won. Then Dad's fist hit Ed in the breastbone and knocked the air out of him, and he dropped the shotgun onto the floor and fell back, putting his arm back to catch the wall before he hit the floor.
Ed's father scrambled for the shotgun and reached out for it with his left arm, reaching it under his right as Ed still gripped the right's fingers in his hand. Ed saw past Dad as the old man reached for the gun, and saw that they were right across from the staircase to the downstairs.
Ed pulled Dad's hand and felt bones in the fingers either pop or break, and Dad stumbled toward him instead of the gun. Dad fell onto Ed, who let go of his father's fingers and grabbed Dad with both hands, balling up fistfuls of fabric from Dad's shirt, shoving himself back off the wall with his elbows. He thrust Dad back, whipping his momentum the other way, shoving him back and back and back, and it seemed like the stairs would never get there, time was moving so slowly, and then Dad's dead eyes popped wide open in shock as his shoes found nowhere to step underneath him. Dad fell down the stairs and Ed followed down with him.
Dad's feet hit the steps below at a bad angle and he shouted and tipped backwards, and they sailed down the stairs through the air for a moment before Dad's back found the edges of the stairs underneath him and slammed painfully into them.
Then Ed was flying forward over his dad, his head sailing down toward the stairs below. He tucked his head down as he fell and brought his arms up, and hit on his elbows and then rolled onto his back, smashing into the edges of the steps just like his dad above, pain lighting through Ed's back and chest and shooting fireworks through his eyeballs and they both tumbled down the stairs together. They tumbled over each other and against the railing and the wall, and then before long they hit the floor on the ground level of the house.
Ed's brain was scrambled at the bottom of the stairs, looking up at the front door in front of him and ceiling past it. Near Ed, Dad was stumbling to his feet.
Dad was up on his feet in no time. He'd taken his share of head injuries. Ed was coming up to his own feet when Dad, his eyes dull and jaw slack, brought his foot up and kicked Ed in the shoulder, sending him flying back into the front door, slamming into it painfully.
Ed heard a voice he recognized as both feminine and familiar calling his name from up the stairs as he recovered, and quickly realized Sarah was screaming his name. "Stay there, baby sister!" Ed cried as loud as he could up the stairs, hoping Sarah could hear him.
As Dad reared back for another blow, either fist or foot, Ed didn't wait to guess which, Ed threw himself up and across the floor at his dad, tackling him back into the stairs, sending them smashing into and through the bannister at the base. They tore straight through it and Ed landed on top of Dad on the floor of the hallway beyond, knocking the air out of Dad's lungs, shocking him into a moment's calm, and Ed took the time to climb up on top of his father, put his knees in the man's stomach and start swinging fists at the old man's head.
Dad recovered from his calm and put his arms up to shield his face.
Ed heard running footfalls above and turned as they came down the stairs to see Sarah running full tilt for the front door. "RUN, BABY SISTER!" he cried.
Suddenly Dad bucked, twisting out from under Ed's weight, and Ed fell against the wall as Dad stumbled back up to his feet, bringing down onto Ed a series of his own fists. Fist after fist, beating Ed to the ground.
Ed hunkered down and crawled forward, protecting his head like his father had. Dad swung and swung and swung. Most fists hit and they hit hard, but some missed went flying through the air. Dad put a lot of momentum into one punch and swung and missed, and fell on top of Ed, knocking the wind out of his son again. Dad was too drunk to get up immediately.
Ed kicked and flailed and crawled out of from under Dad as Dad clawed at his neck and back, then grabbed onto Ed's pants at the waist and let Ed drag him along by them. Ed's pants were coming down.
Ed stumbled to his feet and knocked his dad off with a kick, but Dad caught Ed's leg in his free hand and took Ed back to the ground, this time next to the doorway into the kitchen, and all Ed could see inside that kitchen were the glistening blades of Mom's collection of kitchen knifes sheathed in the knife block on the counter. Just a few feet away.
He started crawling for the kitchen with his dad grabbing onto his legs. Ed yanked one away from his reach and sent the bottom of his sock right into Dad's nose, and it shot blood right out onto the floor.
Dad snorted and coughed, surprised at the sudden, overwhelming taste of blood that poured into his mouth. He hocked a bloody loogie at Ed as Ed slipped from his grasp, skittering up to his feet and running right at the knife rack across from him in the kitchen.
Dad jumped up, right after him, right on his ass, and as Ed reached for the knives in the rack, Dad slammed his weight into his son's back and knocked him into the counter, once again knocking the wind out of him, and his hand overshot the knives, sending it skidding across the counter and bouncing off the wall. Ed flailed at it with both hands, knocking it around instead of grabbing it, and Dad wrapped an arm around Ed' neck, taking a hold of one of Ed's hands with his other. With his free hand, Ed knocked the knife rack over into the sink basin, spilling the razor-sharp blades all over the basin and felt like the dumbest motherfucker who ever lived.
Dad took his hand off Ed's arm and grabbed Ed's head with it. He took his other arm out from around Ed's neck and put it on the other side of Ed's head, then bashed Ed's head down into the counter. Ed's face bounced off it and he felt a torrent of blood run from his nose down his mouth before Dad slammed him into the counter again, then a third time for good measure.
Dad took his hands off Ed, and without a say in the matter, Ed toppled over onto the floor instead of continuing the fight with his old man.
The world was spinning and he couldn't get a grip on the tilt-o-whirl. He could see the kitchen, all shaken up and spinning, and he could see Dad but couldn't keep an eye on him. He was trying to stand but slipping and sliding everywhere like everything was covered in oil or something. He just couldn't get a grip. Time was moving slow for Ed, it usually did when people were in life-or-death situations, and especially so when they knew they were about to die. From the way his limbs and head and eyes were working, he wouldn't be able to keep it up with Dad any more. For one of the first times in his life, he'd hit his head too hard. He knew he couldn't make it up before Dad got one of the knives and stuck him with it, but that didn't stop Ed from tryin to get up.
As Ed struggled to stand, Dad reached into the sink basin, which sat under a window to the outside and picked up a knife from inside. He went to turn to face Ed, grimly but heroically, if only in his own mind, but he caught a glimpse of bright-colored movement through the window and spun back around to look at it.
He laughed at how much of a drunk, stupid fool he was. He had caught a glimpse of his own, bloody reflection. He laughed at it until he caught silver gleaning through the glass, and then muzzle flares blinded him and bullets cut through the glass and ripped apart the window frame, riddling Ed's Dad with bullets through his chest and neck. The force of the gunshots knocked him back and his arms pinwheeled as he struggled to stay upright.
Eight bullets were fired through the window rapid fire, one blast after another, but only six found their target. One lodged in the window frame and the other shot over Dad's head and stuck in the ceiling above. But another bullet punctured a lung and Ed's Dad felt something in his chest collapse like an accordion. He tried to speak on the matter but found his breath whistling from a hole in his throat instead. A hole which was quickly filling up with blood.
Then he fell down.
Kevin, breathing hard and heavy and erratic, lowered his pistol from the broken window and caught his breath, which took a good minute.
At another house at the other end of the cul-de-sac, in a dark, cluttered space, a voice, twisting and reshaping with each syllabic utterance, whispered into the black void, where it felt at ease, at home. It said, in a tone one (had anyone been present) might have determined as sorrow, a phrase which, had it been translated to our tongue, may have gone something like:
"The Devil is dead, long live the Devil."
