by Mark Tufo
I waited until she went back into the house before I did a complete 360 scan of the area. No poles. I did a little happy dance as I realized I was going to take a hot shower tonight.
“What’s the matter Talbot?” BT asked as Jen and Travis helped him up the steps. “Gotta pee?”
Except for being a few shades paler than he oughta be, the big man looked pretty good. This was turning out to be a pretty good fucking day and I was about to eat some chocolate chip cookies!
Tommy was already through the door. I could hear mock slapping as Carol was trying to shoo him away from her cookie sheet.
“Wait until I at least get them off the tray, you’ll burn yourself1” Carol shouted at him. Tommy hovered over her like a News helicopter at a crash scene.
Seeing her grandmother had reignited a spark within Nicole’s eyes. The sadness was still there but it had been layered over a little with love. And that was how people survived. They moved on. The bleeding, gaping wound slowly became infused with coagulants and then the bleeding would trickle to a stop. The flesh would scab over and slowly begin to knot itself together and eventually the scab would fall off leaving fresh shiny puckered skin that would in time eventually fade to a scar. It would be something you would remember the pain of for your entire life, and you would always have the reminder. But it no longer consumed the resources of the body any more to heal it.
The smiles around the kitchen table as we devoured first that sheet and then another sheet of cookies with the surprisingly good taste of gummy bears mixed in, renewed my faith. My faith in what? God, humanity, survival, just plain old cookies? I wasn’t sure, but I wasn’t going to question it. If I didn’t have another ultimate destination in mind I could have seen myself spending the rest of my days in this loving household. And then it struck me, why should I drag my family still another 1,500 hundred miles across the country. And for what? There was no guarantee that any of my family survived. Carol survived though and if she could do it, then so could they. But she’s in rural North Dakota, not much happened here when everybody was alive. Yeah, and my family is in rural Maine. If I could Google it, I’d bet the populations were similar.
Not knowing what had happened to my family weighed heavily but the thought of exposing my immediate family into even more danger to satisfy my curiosity was not an option.
I grabbed Tracy’s hand and took her in to the living room.
“I think we should just stay here, Trace.”
Her look questioned me, but I could see the excitement beyond. “Are you sure, Mike? I know how much you want to get back home.”
“I think maybe we are home.”
She hugged me fiercely, her leg crushing into my pilfered bottle of Viagra stashed in my pants pocket.
“You happy to see me Mike?” she asked with a smile.
“I sure as hell could be,” I answered her. She smacked me. We headed back into the kitchen. Her first and then me after some slight man parts adjusting. At least the momentary estrogen flood hadn’t completely emasculated me.
After a bunch more laughing and eating I went out to the porch. I would like to say that I had to loosen my belt because of the meal. These last few weeks stripped any fat reserves I had stored. I looked down the yard at the minivan wondering how many trips it was going to take to get everything up here. I also wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of leaving it down there either. It looked too much like an invitation.
I heard a burst of merriment as Carol opened up the door to join me on the porch.
“I can’t tell you what a wonderful thing you’ve done here, Mike,” she said.
“We had to come and see if you were alright, Mom.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about, and I think you know it.” I wanted to protest, it might have rung hollow though. “I mean bringing my daughter and my grandkids to me, alive and safe.” I started to speak. “Hush, I know what you’re going to say. But most people didn’t feel like it was what they had to do, Mike. A good number of folks turned their guns on their kin rather than stand and fight.” I looked at her in bewilderment. “No, Mike you didn’t HAVE to do anything but you did. You know when Tracy first married you, I wondered what the hell she saw in you.”
“Don’t hold back on my account.”
“Oh I won’t. To be fair, you’re a looker but I wasn’t sure of your character.”
“Holy shit Carol, is this a pep talk?”
“Hush I’m not done talking yet.”
“Can you at least bust open that bottle of Jeff?” I asked her
From somewhere deep inside the house I heard Tommy yell “Jack!”
“You always seemed nuttier than a pecan pie to me.”
“Oh, this is just getting better and better.” I took a long pull from the Daniels that she handed me.
“But when Nicole was born and I saw how you were with her, I thought I might have made a mistake about you.”
“Great.” I took another swig.
“Now stop! That’s not an easy thing for me to admit. You know Tracy is my only child and I damn near lost her in childbirth. So I only wanted what was best for her and at the time I didn’t think that was you. But I watched you with Nicole. She stripped away your East coast sarcasm and your ill temper towards the world. You loved her like no other ever could. The father’s pride that beamed in your eyes every time you held her, that alone made me realize my error. I’ve seen you with all your kids, Mike, and I know that you would do whatever it took to make sure that each and every one of them was safe. And for that Mike, I’m sorry that I ever doubted you. But if you take one more swig off my bottle like the last one, I’m taking it all back.”
I handed her the bottle back, I had actually taken a fair hit against the contents. I felt a little bad but it was rapidly becoming covered over with the warm tingly feeling of a buzz.
“What are you two doing out here?” Tracy asked, donning her coat.
“Reminiscing,” I told her.
“Reminiscing, huh? How much of that paint thinner have you had Mike?” my wife asked me.
“More than he should have, Carol said, holding the bottle up.
“We gots to get that minivan off the road.”
“Gots huh? I don’t think you should be driving anything, Mike,” Tracy said.
“Aw, it’s not like he’s going to get a DUI. Loosen up girl,” my wonderful mother-in-law said between swigs.
“Mom! Don’t encourage him.”
“You still got that tractor, Carol?”
“Actually had it running about a month or so ago to plow the driveway. Don’t really have a desire much now to go out. Though if you hadn’t brought this whiskey I might’ve been changing my mind soon.”
CHAPTER 22 Journal Entry Twenty
Now the question was, did I want to plow the driveway and let any old schmoe have a direct route up, or did I want to drag the minivan and all its contents up here? If I dragged it up here and something happened where we needed to get out again we were screwed. Plow the driveway it was then. If anybody came a knockin’ we’d deal with it at that point. Not like this was I-95 to begin with. I went back into the house and put on everything and anything that I thought would stave off the frigid cold. Whiskey glow was only going to get me so far. And yes, I know that alcohol doesn’t really warm you up. It does the opposite, in fact, by thinning your blood. It just makes you FEEL warmer. I had bundled up near to the point of becoming a beach ball with appendages and was three steps down the porch before I realized I had forgotten something. Now I know this was the safest I’ve felt in weeks but still I marched back in, pretending to ignore my wife’s questioning gaze and grabbed my nine-millimeter.
The barn where the tractor was located was about 100 yards or so from the house. I encountered six death blotches between the house and the barn. I shook my head in marvelment of how Carol had survived. Had she slept? It wasn’t like she could post a guard. She didn’t have a dog anymore. Bastion had died, I think two summers ago
, struck by the tractor. Tracy had cried for near on a week. Her father had got that coon hound the day he found out he had cancer. He often told people that on his worst days of getting chemo, it was the tail wagging, tongue-licking Bastion that helped him get through the day. Even on his deathbed he had told Carol that the dog had probably given them an extra half of year together. Carol loved that dog, if only for the fact that it had given her and her beloved husband extra time.
It was two years after Everett’s death that she had hired a handyman to get rid of some trash from the back acreage, something Everett had been promising for close on fifteen years. It was more of an inside joke that Everett had never gotten around to it than a point of contention. When the man had come running up to the household with a broken bloody bundle in his arms, Carol had intrinsically known what he carried. She had wept nearly as many tears for the mangy Bastion as she had for her husband. Another link to him was gone. She buried Bastion alongside her husband in the family cemetery.
So I circled back to the original question. How could she sleep knowing that at that very minute a mindless, hungry predator might be closing in? I shuddered. I had reached the front door to the barn, now not nearly as prepared to enter into the gloomy interior.
“They don’t lie in wait Talbot,” I said out loud. It was a trick nearly everyone uses to steel their resolve. I think it’s more to let whatever monster is lurking know that we’re coming in, ready or not. I just wish the monster gave the same courtesy. I clicked over the ancient light switch. Two light bulbs lazily lit the room. You could still wear night vision goggles in here and not get any glare through them. The tractor stood dead center in the barn and every deadly implement known to farming kind graced the walls all around me. I was sweating. I felt that it was dignity saving to blame it on the multiple layering I was swathed in.
I had reached the tractor when Justin shouted to me from the door. I realized then my mistake. Not that I was going to shoot Justin or even that he startled me enough to do it accidentally, but if someone of ill intent had come up on me, my multi layered fingers couldn’t fit in through the trigger guard. “You are just all sorts of a hot mess, aren’t you Talbot,” I again said out loud to myself.
“I asked if you needed any help Dad,” Justin answered, thinking I hadn’t heard his first query, which I hadn’t. I had been whistling demons away at that time.
He looked like shit and five degrees below zero was going to do little to help him. “Sure.” I didn’t completely understand what the cause of his recent detachment to us was but if he was going to throw a lifeline it was my duty to reel him in. “Gotta gun?”
“What do you think? I’m your son.”
“Smart ass. Okay let’s just do a quick search through the stalls and the loft. This place gives me the willies.”
“You sure it’s not me?” he asked, half of the question was smart ass reply, half though was a true question.
I didn’t have a fifty fifty answer. I let it drop. Within minutes we discovered that the only other tenants of the barn were some pigs, chickens, goats, a dairy cow and an extended family of field mice. I decided that if the mice were going to leave us alone, then I would follow suit. Yep you guessed it. Mice scare the crap out of me. Yes, I’ve been to battle. I’ve killed my fellow man and monsters of myth. It’s just something about that hairless tail that really shoots a spike of fear through me. I don’t really want to talk about it. Just add it onto the growing list of Talbotisms.
The tractor cranked after the third time and a good blast of starting fluid into the carburetor. “You up for doing some plowing?” I asked Justin.
He looked at me like I was pulling his leg. “You serious?”
“Sure, go ahead,” I told him. Those of you that thought I did this only because I didn’t want to be out in the North Dakota winter only have it partially correct. Isn’t this part of the reason we have kids at all? So they can do the shit jobs that we used to do. Like taking out the trash, mowing the lawn, shoveling walkways. You don’t really wonder why farm families used to be so huge, do you? It’s not because screwing is the only thing to do. It’s because there is so much work to be done. Okay and screwing was really the only form of entertainment.
I stepped back before Justin had the chance to lurch the tractor into gear. The kid really couldn’t so much as drive a nail, if you catch my meaning. He definitely inherited that from his mother. I figured the tractor to be about eight feet wide and the doors to the barn easily double that width and still I wondered if he would hit the frame. Would that kind of strike be enough to take the ancient structure down? And would we survive being buried by eighty-seven tons of sharpened metal objects? Probably not, I walked out to guide him through. Not bad, I thought, as he had a good six inches of clearance on his left hand side.
“Alright!” I shouted. “Just make a pathway down to the minivan so we can get it back up here.” Justin gave me a thumbs up.
I turned to walk back to the house and hopefully a steaming mug of cocoa. I was lost in the reverie of melted marshmallows when the warning shout came.
“Look out!” came the distant shout from the house. I looked up towards the porch. Tracy was cupping her hands together for the bullhorn effect. When she realized she had caught my attention she made an over agitated gesture with her arm. I dove to my left and the blade of the plow pushed air past my face. I looked up at Justin and saw he was looking off to his right and had not even noticed that he had almost made me a snow angel. So angel might be a little liberal but it’s more of an analogy. He turned back towards me as he passed. Something between ‘I’m sorry’ and ‘Damn’ crossed his face. I stood up and brushed the snow off of me, just staring at him as he passed.
I looked back up at the porch. Tommy had an expression on his face I couldn’t remember ever seeing. It was rage. The glare he directed at Justin got to me more than the mice. All of a sudden Carol’s house didn’t seem quite as accommodating. We were going to bring our problems with us no matter where we went. I had momentarily let myself get swayed into a false sense of security. I wouldn’t let that happen again. Eliza was still out there and apparently we were of great interest to her. Maybe not me as much, however, we were on her short list for people she wanted dead.
The cocoa was good but I was too distracted to thoroughly enjoy it. Instead of going in and staying in, I sat out on the porch and watched Justin actually do an admirable job of clearing a pathway. He only stopped once as the plow bit into the frozen corpse of a zombie, spreading frozen chunks of meat along a twenty-foot swath of driveway. He hopped down off the tractor, showing the right amount of disgust as he untangled the ensnared carcass. Or was it pity?
I froze twice as much on that porch as I would have if I had stayed on the tractor. I waited until Justin pulled the tractor back into the barn. This time he actually did take off a chunk of door frame. I shuddered thinking that could have been my skull. I heard the engine rattle to an end and then I began my long ascent out of the deck chair, convinced at this point that the fluid around my knees had completely frozen. My injured knee popped like a firecracker when I got it to full extension. Numbness from the cold kept the pain down to a dull roar. When this thing de-thawed I was going to be whimpering like a kid at Toys ‘R’ Us that didn’t get the Deluxe Batman figurine with a fully stocked utility belt.
“That sounds like it hurt.”
I had been too wrapped up in my own misery to hear Tracy come out.
“Not as much as it’s going to tonight.”
“You going down to get the van?”
It was obvious what I was doing. She was fishing for something. I knew the game. I just rarely if ever won.
“Yeah, figured I’d better get it now before either it or me freezes.”
“You want me to go with you?”
I turned to look at her. “What’s up, Hon?”
“What? I can’t walk with my husband.”
“Hold on. That’s not what I said. We both know yo
u like the cold weather about as much as I like ham.” (Did I not tell you about that yet? I’ll get to it eventually.) “And yes, I appreciate the company but it’s got to be closing in on negative ten out here and I think a wonderful cooling northerly breeze has begun to kick up. So what gives?”
“Fine, let’s walk.”
We were halfway down the driveway before she spoke. But I noticed her turn towards the barn before she said anything.
“What’s going on, Mike?” I didn’t need any clarification. If I had, just her previous look to the barn would have erased all doubt of what subject we were broaching. “Mike, Justin was looking right at you as he drove that plow.”
“Figured as much,” I said.
“He tried to kill you, Mike.” Tracy said with force and conviction.
“I would imagine.”
She grabbed my arm and forcibly spun me towards her. “How can you be so cavalier about this? I saw his face, Mike. He was smiling! Fucking smiling!”
How I could feel any colder was beyond me but I did. I was freezing from my core outwards. I looked back towards the barn and the source of my unnatural icebox sensation. Justin stood between the great doors looking at us both. He waved with all the enthusiasm of a dead cheerleader. Tracy saw what I was looking at and wrapped both her arms around herself in a useless tactic to hold in body heat, or keep evil out.
“It’s got something to do with that scratch he got when he went to get Paul. He got infected with something but that’s not quite right. It’s more like he got possessed.”
Tracy gasped at that word. When she was twelve she had slept over her best friend Dawn’s house. Dawn’s father had the brilliant idea to bring his daughter and Tracy to the drive-in featuring arguably one of the scariest movies of all time, the Exorcist. Since that point forward, Tracy had always had a higher than ordinary fear of the devil and his minions. Hey, all of our psychoses need to start somewhere.
“But not completely,” I added hastily. It did little to moderate her fear. “Justin’s still in there and he knows something is wrong. There are times like earlier today where I felt that his old persona was closer to the surface. Now I don’t know if that was an act on his part or not but I’ve got to think that when he lets his concentration lapse or when he’s focused on something else that whatever is inside of him can gain some measure of control.”
