The Fall of Polite

by Sam Kench

  Hearing the reinforcements arriving, Eamon stepped back into the dim kitchen and stayed crouched. The first of the arriving teens, the lone female of the bunch, came through the door and continued straight into the living room past Eamon who pressed his gun barrel to the back of her knee and fired his last shot just as the second reinforcement stepped into the doorway.

  The girl hit the ground screaming. Eamon stood up and rammed the handle of his revolver into the nose of the standing psycho. He grabbed onto the shotgun clutched by his enemy, and spun him into the room with a tug. Tearing the gun from the young hunter’s hands, Eamon sent him crashing into the girl. Still holding the empty revolver, he racked the shotgun with a one handed jerk and caught the gun by its pistol grip. He fired a single blast from the shotgun that shredded both of the demented teens with buckshot. He fired twice more at their fallen bodies, catharsis whistling between his gritted teeth.

  Eamon stepped out into the hallway and spun around as a bullet whizzed over his shoulder. He fired his shotgun down the wide hall at the last sicko who was just out of his range. Buckshot spread to the ceiling and floor without hitting its mark. This last one looked the oldest of the bunch, but that was probably just because he had been the first to start growing real facial hair. Eamon walked toward him, unafraid. He didn’t fear bullets, he didn’t fear death, he wished only to end life.

  The frightened teen squeezed off two more shots that went high, then fired one that struck true. A 9mm round struck low on Eamon’s chest, left of center, and exited out the back. He felt the impact but condensed any pain down to a low grunt suitable for being struck with a pebble from a slingshot. The hit did nothing to slow him, missing all his vitals, and in the eyes of the frightened teen, seemed to only quicken his assault forward.

  Eamon clutched the empty revolver in his fist and launched it down the hall at the teen’s head. As the gun clattered to the linoleum floor the sicko grabbed at a red splotch on his forehead and accidentally fired a shot into the ceiling.

  While the teen was off balance, Eamon closed the distance. He strode with fervor at a pace matching a shorter man’s run. When he was within firing range, Eamon pointed his shotgun at his distracted target’s head… then lowered his aim, and blew the legs out from underneath the sick bastard.

  Hot buckshot tore through the teen’s lower body. He dropped straight onto his chest, bloody legs slamming down a moment later, barely attached to the rest of him; hot wings with all the meat stripped off.

  Eamon stepped closer still, relishing in the cries of agony from the 19-year-old psychopath. He placed the shotgun barrel against the back of the sicko’s head and fired.

  After the blast, there was no head for the gun barrel to rest on. Underneath the chunky red blur, the linoleum floor was blackened and chipped.

  Eamon took a deep breath without drawing in any air. He turned around and shouted into the rest of the retirement home, ‘Get out here!’ He called to any enemies who remained. He dared them to come out and he promised them painful deaths, but there were none left.

  Killing these bastards felt good in a way he hadn’t expected and he wished there were more of them so he could keep on doing it. Every second he spent killing was a second he didn’t feel choked by the death of his wife and daughter.

  After several minutes, Eamon calmed down. The fire kept burning in spirals around his soul, but he eventually calmed his exterior self-enough to unclench his fists. The retirement home’s go-to shuffle board song playing over the speaker system became audible once again as his adrenaline lowered and the blood left his ears. Gerry Rafferty's voice seemed to taunt him. He walked back to the courtyard, threw the shotgun to the ground and picked up the one he had left behind.

  ‘Where has this guy been?’ Probey said with a big smile on his face. ‘Oh ho, that was absolutely magnanimous!’ Probey said, attempting to use a word he didn’t know the proper definition of. He clapped passionately until Peter joined in. Eamon ignored them. With each breath in and out he managed a convincing impression of a bull after a particularly rough rodeo.

  Eamon made his way across the courtyard and threw open the double doors back toward the front entrance.

  ‘That’s what I like to see, Eamon!’ Probey exclaimed joyously, letting out a chuckle as the doors drifted shut. Probey turned around and composed himself. He looked Georgie in his wider eye. ‘I think Eamon’s going to fit in real well.’

  7. A BRIEF REPRISE OF CALM

  MARIA WAS STARVING. For the first time, that thought was not hyperbole. She had run out of food and survived off of snow alone for the last three days. Her journey was slow going, and if she had been on foot, she would have collapsed from exhaustion long ago. Her headache felt unlike any she experienced before.

  She moved cautiously, avoiding any people she came across, taking empty backroads whenever possible, and waiting long stretches of time to be sure the path ahead was clear before advancing. She was nearing her destination: her Aunt’s house. She had crossed the toll line into Vermont and made it within the Brighton town limits.

  She made no stops to search for more food. In fact, she hadn’t left the truck since she had gotten into it, save for stopping to answer nature's call or popping the door and scooping up clean looking snow as a water source once it melted. It was warm in the truck and she felt safe inside of it, though she knew it wasn’t as safe as it felt.

  She went in circles around Brighton until she found her Aunt’s road. She hadn’t been down it in a couple of years.

  Driving down the one lane road, Maria took note of the disturbed snow. Tire tracks ran in both directions and superseded the ones she now left in her wake. Still, the road was peaceful.

  Maria drove slowly, looking up at the dead trees and their dry branches that stretched overhead, forming a crisscrossed canopy above the road. Closing her eyes as the truck rolled forward, she thought back to the last time she had been here…

  Her dad driving, Mark in the front seat, her in the back. It was the summer before she started high school. She had got it into her head that it was her last summer as a kid. The change in Mark after he made the switch from one brick building to the other was impossible to miss.

  She remembered sticking her head out of the window and feeling the gentle breeze blow through her hair as she watched the flowery purple canopy passing over her. Green grass lined the sides of the gravelly road and amber sunset rays warmed her cheeks.

  Maria smiled for a moment and felt good.

  Then she opened her eyes. All of the warmth and color left, invaded by cold snow, wet slush, and sharp branches.

  Maria pulled into the driveway of her Aunt’s house, a brown two story building with pointed architecture. Maria had always thought of it as a grandma’s cottage even though it belonged to her Aunt.

  There were no vehicles in the driveway or anywhere in sight. Maria sat at the wheel, the truck idling. Her eyes moved from window to window, looking for any kind of movement or sign of life inside. Staring at the front of the house, she wished she could see through walls.

  Stepping out of the truck, Maria readied her gun. She cocked it and pointed it down at the snow with both hands. She listened to silence for long enough to be sure it wasn’t changing anytime soon, then approached the house.

  Her heart was heavy as she turned the knob and opened the unlocked door. She locked it behind herself, kicked the snow from her boots as a force of habit, then looked around the daylight suffuse interior.

  ‘Hello?!’ She called out to the silence. Her eyes scanned the ceiling above her as if to somehow detect her aunt’s presence on the second floor. ‘Aunt Kim?!’ She called out to the silence.

  Maria made her way through the house slowly, fearing the sight of her aunt’s corpse behind every closed door… but that sight never came. After 10 methodical minutes of careful searching, the house proved to be empty. As did the cellar and the shed in the backyard. Her Aunt was gone, though she didn’t seem to have packed anything for what
ever journey she went on.

  The youngest Dubrek found herself too tired to barricade the doors or round up all the food in the house. She wolfed down the first bits of food she came across in the kitchen. The provisions she ate were small, but her stomach had shrunken, and they filled her up. She could barely keep her eyes open and the sight of a queen-size bed turned her legs to jelly.

  She commandeered her missing Aunt’s bed and began her first good night’s sleep in long while. How long exactly? Maria couldn't be sure. Time had both compressed and elongated since the fall of polite like an accordion playing the Grim Reaper's favorite tune. Since leaving her house she hadn’t dreamt. Each instance of sleep along her journey had been a pained slide into blackness followed by an abrupt shock back to reality with nothing in between.

  In her Aunt’s bed, she did dream, but she would wish she didn’t. She awoke the next morning to wet sheets, her hair a sweaty mess, obscuring her fearful vision. Her mind had gone back to the basement for six hours of torment, re-living the worst night of her life.

  She spent the next day gathering and sorting through the useful supplies from around her Aunt’s cottage: food, bottled water, batteries, an old double barreled hunting shotgun and shells that hadn't been used in close to a decade. There was enough food to last at least a month, maybe longer if she rationed it carefully. She realized that if she gathered and melted snow, she could use the water to bathe herself and fill the back tank to hopefully maintain a flushing toilet. Each night when the sun fell she had the same nightmare again, and again, and again.

  HER NEW HOME was quiet during the days and quiet during the nights, except inside her own tormented mind. Each night Maria laid her head to rest, the exact same nightmare grabbed hold of her. This went on for a week, then two weeks. Each time, the pain felt fresh and the fear felt real. Within the dream, this trauma wasn’t a memory. Each night it was happening as if for the first time. In each echo of trauma, Maria screamed for Mark. She always begged and pleaded and hoped that he would save her, and over and over again, he never even tried.

  Throughout her quiet days in the cottage, she couldn’t keep her mind off the dream she would soon be living. She grew to hate Mark more and more. He didn’t try to help; He didn’t even try…. Every night she felt hopeless and weak and ruined.

  She began to fill her days with exercise. She told herself that she would never let anyone have the same kind of power over her that Buddy had. She told herself that she would not and could not ever rely on anyone or trust anyone again the way she had with Mark.

  There were no distractions to her work. She trained tirelessly to improve her strength, her endurance, her flexibility, her fighting ability, her capacity for violence. She sparred with invisible targets and punched walls until all the skin was gone from her knuckles.

  Maria was driven by an anger like a corvette with a brick on the gas pedal. She had a target in her mind that fueled her rage, and with Buddy already belonging to the land of the dead, she pictured Mark as her bullseye. Each night she dreamt of him abandoning her, leaving her for Buddy to rape, all to protect himself. Each day she imagined beating Mark to a bloody pulp, and savored that wonderful catharsis in place of an abundance of food.

  8. A SLASHED EYE BLINKING IN FROZEN DAYLIGHT

  MAISEY AWOKE IN AGONY, feeling two sets of hands on her. She broke out of unconsciousness with a contorted scream, like a recording suddenly let off pause. The wound hammered onto her skull by the brick-wielding crackhead was nothing when experienced beside her split eye and gum. Her vision swirled in the cold morning air, unprocessed. Continuing to scream, she reached for her eye until she felt two of the four hands restraining her.

  ‘Don’t touch it.’ A woman’s voice above her said as she was lifted to her feet.

  ‘Shhh, we’re going to help you.’ A man’s voice reassured.

  Maisey attempted to stop screaming by twisting the tap on a stream of curse words that she couldn’t turn back off.

  ‘It’s okay we’re going to get you taken care of.’

  ‘Where’s the kid?’ The female voice asked kindly.

  Maisey tried to ask ‘what?’ but the one-word reply slipped out of her mouth as ‘Fuck!’

  ‘Don’t worry, you’ll be okay.’

  The strangers held Maisey up by her shoulders and began to walk with her. Maisey attempted to stand on her own, and instead found herself passing out.

  ***

  THE CAUTIOUS OPENING of her healthy eye led Maisey to the realization that her slashed eye had a pad of cotton over it. A roll of gauze was wrapped around her head to hold the pad in place. Her pain had been more than halved by something she was given while out of consciousness. A hot throb replacing utter agony. Her skin hardly registered any feeling at all. As she reached a hand toward her split eye, a voice called out.

  ‘Don’t!’

  Maisey stopped short of touching the bandage. She was sitting in a padded chair with wooden arms and legs.

  ‘It’s very important that you don’t touch your eye… or your mouth,’ said a doctor leaning over her. He took her by the wrist and lowered her hand away from the wound.

  Maisey’s healthy eye flitted around like a pinball, taking in her surroundings as her senses came back to her. She found herself in a high school gym, its basketball court floor space taken over by cots and sleeping bags. The beds were populated by people from all walks of life. Three children sat with their parents on the cot to her right, an elderly couple held hands on the one to her left.

  The doctor put his hands on Maisey’s shoulders and refocused her attention. ‘You should be able to speak just fine but if it causes significant pain, then stop. I gave you something for the pain. It’s quite strong but your wounds are severe. Is the pain level manageable right now?’

  Maisey’s mouth opened and closed, only soft unformed sounds escaping past her lips. She half expected cotton balls to tumble out of her mouth.

  She looked over the man’s outfit. He only looked like half a doctor, wearing a white coat over a Patriots jersey and blue jeans.

  ‘I can do more for the pain if you really need it, but we're running low on just about everything and there’s no telling when we’ll get another aid package. The big cities have priority. I reckon maybe just the capitals at this point but it’s hard to know anything for sure. We have people out looking for more supplies… but you know how it is out there.’

  ‘I- I’m-…’

  ‘Can you tolerate what pain is left?’

  ‘Uh… yes.’ Maisey felt something inorganic in her mouth as she spoke; not the cotton balls she had expected but something smaller, something woven through the interior of her gums. Sliding her tongue over it caused a sharp reaction in the doctor and would have in herself had the pain medication been less effective.

  ‘Oh, no, please don’t do that.’ The doctor pulled off his glove and ran his hand through his graying hair. He held his other hand out in a cautionary gesture. ‘You could rip your stitches.’

  ‘Stitches?’

  ‘There are dental sutures in your mouth along your gum line. Try not to touch them. They should do a good job of enabling you to speak without feeling immense pain or doing further damage to your gum line. You can thank Martin for those if he comes back around. He looks like me, only even older if you can believe it. I did the stitches along your face and eyelid. Do you remember what happened?’

  Maisey looked down at the floor, dumbfounded. The waxed wood had lost its sheen from the hundreds of gym shoes that scuffed it every school day and sporting event. Maisey spoke her thought process aloud. ‘I don't- I only remember... a woman cut me with a- with a razor blade, I think.’ She took a look around the gym, slower than before as she attempted to will her lost memories back home.

  The room was far above capacity. Two obese women fought over a sleeping bag by the bleachers. A cluster of people stood near the door at the other side of the gym shouting indistinctly at each other. There were men and women statio
ned around the perimeter holding assault rifles, most of them dressed in military gear, though a few wore police uniforms, and fewer still wore just plain clothes with the small addition of laminate badges. Most of them were busy directing people through the shelter, organizing supplies, or tending to urgent administrative tasks.

  ‘You also had a wound on your head from some kind of blunt object.’ The doctor said. ‘Do you remember that?’

  Maisey didn’t. The last thing she remembered was hurling a scream into the wall of the burned out shoe factory.

  ‘That’s why we had to shave your head.’

  Maisey reached for her hair, and couldn’t find it. Her lips parted, but no effort toward speech was made. She hadn't realized her hair was gone yet with her scalp being so numb. She felt along her bald head, sheared short, then shaved with a disposable razor. Her fingertips inched across her numb scalp until she felt a spot that still registered pain. There was an indent near the center. How deep? She couldn't tell. Her heart gasped. She hadn't cut her hair in several years. It was a point of pride, the physical feature she was most proud of. She found it to be a source of strength when times got tough. Now times were their toughest and her strength had been shorn to the floor and swept into a garbage bag.

  ‘You’ve been here for five full days. You had a serious fever when you first got here and were delirious, but thankfully that’s gone away now.’

  Maisey gripped the chair’s arms tightly. ‘I’ve been in this chair for five days?’

  ‘No. No, you were on that cot before,’ The doctor pointed to an unconscious man on a white cot, staining it red with blood from the stump where his left leg used to be. ‘We were afraid you might slip into a coma, but, well, we've avoided that outcome at least... I want to run a test of your vision if that’s okay. Your left eye will have a lot of strain put on it.’