by Mark Tufo
from my house. You see, we’ve worked together for years to achieve what was nearly
within our grasp and then your tight little ass clouds his mind to the point where
he had forgotten how he has gotten to where he is. AND I WILL NOT BE LEFT BEHIND!”
Mrs. Deneaux shrieked. “I have worked too damn hard and endured too many hardships
to be cast to the side just as all my work is about to bear fruit.”
“I’m calling him.” Lori reached over to the phone on the table next to her couch.
“Go ahead. I don’t think he’s going to have much to say. I placed a rather large bullet
in his brain.”
Lori gasped. “You lie!” she said vehemently. “You wouldn’t tell me that! I’ll be able
to tell the police.”
“Are you truly that stupid? I thought the old adage about getting your brains screwed
out was figurative…now you go and prove it’s literal. Funny what you can learn.”
“You’ll never get away with this.”
“I have some pretty highly placed friends, Lori. Plus, now with Winston out of the
way, affording some top-notch lawyers won’t be a problem. Who can even begin to imagine
what sort of defense they will come up with? And none of it will matter in the least,
I’ll have at the minimum three jurors in my pocket. They’ll be rich and it’s not like
I’m an at-large threat to society. I’m just some sweet old lady that went temporarily
insane when her husband stepped out with a Girl Scout. I won’t even have to pay off
any of the women jurists; they’ll be on my side anyway. At the most I’ll get five
years for manslaughter, but it’ll be too late for me to serve it by the time this
goes to trial anyway.”
“Too late?” Lori asked resignedly.
“End of times is coming, Lori. I’m doing you a favor here today. A pretty, stupid
little thing like yourself wouldn’t make it a day in the new world that’s about to
come.”
Lori’s face began to wrinkle up in confusion.
“Oh, I just can’t take that look of ignorance anymore.” Mrs. Deneaux said as she grabbed
a pillow and blew a large hole through it, the exiting bullet leaving the sobakowa-filled
pillow and perforating Lori’s slender neck. Her hands did not even have a chance to
stem the flow of blood before she fell over, her head hitting the coffee table.
“Do you have any Fresca?” Mrs. Deneaux asked, going into the rapidly cooling woman’s
kitchen. “Should have known.” Mrs. Deneaux said, staring into a fridge full of bottled
water and vegetable juices. “Oh ho! What do we have here?” Mrs. Deneaux said gleefully
as she moved some bottles out of the way. “Glen Livet? That has to be for the nights
you expect Winston over.”
Mrs. Deneaux spun the top off and took a large swallow. She took two more swigs before
she put the bottle on the counter and walked out, never once glancing at the body
of her victim.
She was in one of the best moods she could recall as she pulled into her complex.
Usually just pulling into the sub-standard housing area was enough to dampen her mood;
not today, though. As she turned the corner to the straightaway that led to her townhome,
she had to slam on her brakes, causing the heavy car to leave a skid mark. She had
almost taken out her third and fourth casualties of the day. A man had been walking
some sort of animal on the back roadway.
“There are laws about having livestock within the city limits!” she shouted at the
man once she opened her window.
“Yeah, we’re fine thanks for asking,” the man said, looking at his knees and how very
close the car had been to making them bend the opposite way that God had intended.
“And for your information Henry here is an English Bulldog.”
“Looks like a pig. Now get the hell out of my way,” Mrs. Deneaux said as she drove
past.
For two days she had sat in her apartment drinking expensive wine and listening to
music, expecting a heavy rapping on her door at any moment. Even if she had performed
a professional hit and left not a trace of evidence at her husband’s, her image would
show up extremely well in a half dozen of the high-definition video cameras he’d had
installed a few years previous.
Maybe it would take longer if Lori was discovered first to put all the pieces of the
puzzle together. But Winston was extremely rich and perceived as powerful. His absence
would not go unnoticed for long.
“I wonder if I should have hidden his body?” Mrs. Deneaux said as she took a sip of
her wine. “No, that would have looked premeditated, I suppose.”
It was on the third day that she heard the plethora of sirens approaching. “Are they
really going to make a spectacle of this?” she asked, looking through her window.
It was then that she noticed the shuffling abomination directly across from her house.
She grabbed her pistol, which she had unloaded so as not to appear as a threat to
the police, she grabbed it and reloaded. Then she closed her curtains and shut off
all the lights, dimming the music until it was barely audible. The wine and the gun
she kept close to her.
“So it has started.” She took a swig directly from the bottle.
Epilogue 2
“Will, have you ever stopped and wondered why we’re doing this?” June the biochemist
asked as she peered into the heavy glass cage that housed their latest experiment.
“June, you think too much. We’re some of the last humans left on the planet and we’re
absolutely safe in this underground bunker with enough supplies to grow old with.
We get to do our work without any governmental agencies auditing us or some watch
group raising the alarm.”
“Just because we can do a thing doesn’t mean we should,” she said, still peering into
the cage.
“That’s not what you said last night. Sorry, sorry,” he said, placating her when she
turned an angry eye on him. “You’re forgetting something, June. We do what they ask
because if we don’t we become just another expendable mouth to feed.”
June had turned back to the cage and the grotesque animals within. The ashen gray-skinned
monkeys looked at the pair; gray, intelligent eyes peered at the humans in a longingly
hungry way.
“No good can come from creating zombie animals, Will. You have to see that don’t you?”
“I see scientific advancement!” Will exclaimed, slamming the side of the case, causing
a microscopic fracture to form. The bigger monkey in the front licked his lips as
the man’s hand came in contact with their enclosure. June shuddered.
Epilogue 3
“It’s been too long, my friend,” my best friend Paul of close to thirty years said
as we sat on the couch.
My wife Tracy and Paul’s wife Erin had gone into the kitchen, to get more wine. It
was my birthday and the missus had invited some friends over. It was a nice, quiet,
subdued sort of party; nothing like the wild ones of my youth. Oh how I missed those!
Being an adult had its perks, but if there was one thing I yearned for in regards
to the past, a party was probably the biggest; the unknown of what the night was going
to bring. Each one a blank slate in my mind, waiting for a memory to be indelibly
carved into my ripples.
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“It has been,” I said to Paul. “How is it that we live ten miles apart and we never
see each other?”
He shrugged. “Come on, man, want to go outside for a second? I could use some air.”
“Sounds good…me too. Henry, hold my spot,” I said as I nearly tripped over the big
dog.
“Don’t know what it is about you and dogs, Mike. Cats are so much easier to deal with.”
I didn’t answer. We’d been having this debate for years. I’d tell him how loyal dogs
were and he’d tell me how independent cats were.
“How’s work going?” I asked as we stepped out onto my back patio.
“It’s work. Want a hit?” he asked as he produced a marijuana filled bowl.
“Man, I really don’t smoke anymore. This new shit they have out is so friggin’ potent,
I have a hard time finding my feet after taking a toke.”
Paul laughed; he’d gotten his medicinal marijuana card some six months previous and
had been telling me I should get mine as well. When we’d been in college, one of our
biggest fantasies had revolved around the ability to walk into a store and choose
from all different types of weed like someone would a pack of smokes. And now that
it was a reality, I wasn’t grasping at it.
“This stuff’s not bad,” Paul said as he exhaled a large plume of sweet smelling smoke.
“You smoke nearly every day, man. I haven’t touched it since last June when Widespread
was in town…and even then I thought I’d gone for a rocket ride.”
“It’s your birthday, man.” Paul placed the bowl in my hand.
“Fucking peer pressure,” I told him as I brought the bowl to my lips. I took a larger
hit than was wise for someone who rarely partook.
“Shit’s called Time Traveler.”
“What?” I asked, coughing out a plume of smoke.
Paul’s words stretched and elongated as he spoke, almost like he was saying them in
a car that was racing by. I felt a fundamental shift in my reality, like it had been
knocked askew. My eyes rolled back in my head momentarily.
“Oh shit, dude.” Paul laughed. “You look fucked up!” He helped me to sit down.
Henry had come out to investigate. He was looking up at me; his barks also had that
in-out, in-out reverberation.
My eyes were spinning like I was a slot machine at a Vegas casino.
“Oh, Paul, please tell him you didn’t have him try the Time Traveler,” Erin said as
she came out back.
“Whoa.” I tried to steady my movement despite the fact that I was sitting still in
a chair.
“Talbot, your eyes are shining,” Tracy said as she came out; she was smiling.
“I freel frunny.”
“Yeah, well you sound funny too, buddy.” Paul took another drag and then handed the
bowl over to his wife.
And then, like an elastic band that has snapped back into place, I felt fine…like
whatever had been sent out had now come home. “That was intense,” I said as I looked
around.
“You good now?” Paul once again had the bowl and was attempting to hand it to me.
“Fuck no, man, I’d rather give myself a root canal. Now my mouth is as dry as sand.
Tracy, do we have any more beer up here?”
“I don’t think so. Want me to go down into the basement and get you some?”
“No, no, stay here I’ll grab them. Paul, you want one.”
“What do you think?” He asked taking the last sip off of his.
I walked back into the house, the brightness of the lights had me grab on to the counter
for a moment as I reestablished equilibrium. It was like my left and right eye were
working independent of each other, each absorbing an image and attempting to overlap
them; the effect was disconcerting. One was always slightly behind the other.
“That is the last fucking time I smoke.”
I used the counter as a handrail. I smiled because I knew it for the lie it was. I
just wished that they still had the ragweed of my youth. Not this super-hybrid high
TCH stuff. I reached my hand out, having to wave it around a few times until it collided
with the basement door handle.
“Stereographic vision would be spectacular right now,” I said aloud; I guess asking
the patron saint of vision…if there was such a person.
I was halfway down the steps when the change took place. The sixth step from the top
was the plush, brownish cut-Berber rug of my home, and the seventh from the top was
unadorned wood—and not finished wood, but rather, utilitarian plywood.
“What the…”
I took another step down; both my feet now on the new rug-less stairs and then I began
to hear noise—and not the soft scurrying sound of mice, this was a full-blown party,
loud music and raucous laughter. Smoke swirled around my eyes.
“What the…” I started again.
Most of the people Tracy invited had already filed out for the evening. This had to
be my kids, but none of them were home…unless one of them snuck back in. But to what
purpose? To have a raging party right under my feet? Did they think I wouldn’t find
out?
I hastily went down the rest of the steps to put the kibosh on it. I got to the landing
expecting kids to go scurrying like mice caught on the open floor when the lights
go on. Nothing.
“Hey, man, what took you so long? You got the beer?” Paul asked.
He was about ten feet away sitting at a table that I’d last seen in my parent’s basement.
A small glass was in the middle of the table and he was holding a quarter getting
ready to shoot it in. He looked a good twenty pounds lighter and twenty-five years
younger.
“What the fuck is going on?” I asked softly.
“Hey, babe. You alright?”
“Be-Beth? What are you doing here?”
Her eyebrows furrowed as she looked at me. “Did you take mescaline without me?” she
asked, grabbing my hand.
“I loved you once,” I told her as I pulled our co-joined hands up to look at them.
With my free hand I touched them. “Is this real?” I asked her.
“You loved me once? Mike, are you alright?”
“Do I look alright? Do I look older to you?”
“You just turned nineteen not forty,” she said.
“I just came down here to get beer. Wait…what? I’m nineteen? My oldest child Nicole
is twenty-two.”
“You have kids now? And somehow one of them is older than you. What’s going on upstairs?
Maybe I should go check it out,” she said, making a move for the basement steps.
I got in front of her. “Um…no that would be a bad idea…my w-wine is up there.” I’d
nearly said wife, I wonder how that would have gone?
“Wine? You don’t drink wine.”
“I’m nineteen now, I want to become more sophisticated.”
“Mike, get over here, I’m on fire. I want to kick your ass,” Paul shouted from the
quarters table.
“Come on, let’s get some air.” Beth led me to the bulkhead that went outside.
“This is my folks’ house,” I said as I really started to take a look at my surroundings.
“Yeah, Mike, remember? They left for the weekend. We came home to watch Dusty for
