The Grim Reaper Comes Calling

by Darrell Maloney

  She was halfway to the door before she changed her mind.

  It wasn’t that she suddenly developed an average amount of patience.

  And it wasn’t that she decided she’d give her BFF the benefit of the doubt.

  Rather, it was because she suddenly remembered the last time something like this happened. A month or so before she was cooling her heels on Red’s desk, waiting for her to come back from wherever-the-heck she was, when her patience ran out and she left a very similar nasty note on the desk.

  She fumed for hours, and later found out someone had come to get Red because they couldn’t find Doc Matlock.

  Old man Feeney was in full cardiac arrest a block away and Red had gone to tend to him.

  Once she found out the circumstances she felt like a fool.

  She didn’t want the same thing to happen again.

  She picked up the note, wadded it up and put it in the garbage can, then made a new one.

  Missed you.

  Love you.

  Lilly.

  There, much better!

  If anyone said she was being unreasonable and impatient this time she’d gouge their eyes out with a rusty screwdriver.

  That’d show them.

  She walked down the steps of the police station, headed back to her job at the library.

  The sandwiches the two of them were going to have at the town square’s gazebo would wait until dinnertime.

  Things were slow at the library all day anyway.

  Maybe she’d get lucky and she’d have no customers at 4:30. Then she could sneak out early, like last time.

  Half a block later, when she was walking back to the library, Tony turned the corner at the end of Main Street, headed her way.

  Now, Remember this is a tiny spit of a town with no working vehicles, few residents who get out during the day, and generally not much going on.

  The commotion caused by a buckboard wagon rolling down Main Street at a high rate of speed gets some attention.

  Windows opened and people stepped outside to get a good view.

  It was not unlike a fire truck driving down any residential street in any city in America with sirens wailing and horns blowing.

  And it was quite a spectacle, with Red bending over her patients, Tony on the wagon master’s bench and Beth riding shotgun.

  She for one was apparently having the time of her life, for she was grinning ear to ear despite the seriousness of the situation.

  Dave brought up the rear, twenty yards behind the wagon.

  He had the easiest ride ever.

  He didn’t even have to direct Bonnie. Probably could have dropped the reins and taken a nap, really.

  Bonnie saw Red in back of the wagon and just followed her home.

  She wasn’t going to pass up those apples she was promised.

  No way, Jose.

  Doc Matlock heard the commotion from two blocks away, as everyone else had.

  He met them outside, two gurneys lined up side by side on the sidewalk, two treatment rooms awaiting their patients.

  Red briefed him as the men took Sarah first, then Lindsey, into the building.

  “Thank you, Red. Are you in a big hurry to get out of here?”

  Red had seen Lilly, walking back up the street toward them.

  A lesser person would have bowed out, would take the opportunity to make her lunch date.

  Red wasn’t a lesser person.

  “Nothing that can’t wait, Doc. You have me the rest of the afternoon if you need me.”

  The office was lit only by sunlight coming through the windows. Typical of the times, but certainly not acceptable for treatment of a deathly ill patient.

  But that wasn’t a problem.

  Without being prompted Tony slipped out the back door and started a 5000 watt generator chained to the back porch.

  Instantly the ceiling lights came on.

  Dave could tell it was a monster when the big machine roared to life.

  Where in heck did you get that? I didn’t know generators that big came with pull starts.

  “I don’t think they do. This one has an electric start.”

  “And it still works?”

  “We got it from a local prepper,” Doc explained as he thoroughly examined Sarah. “He was able to protect it by taking the key components off it and storing them in… a… I wanna say he said a Fairway cage?”

  “Close. A Faraday cage. It protects electronic components from EMPs.”

  “Ah, yes. A Faraday cage. Anyway, it was a hefty price… I had to promise him free medical care for life. But I think it was worth it for both of us.

  “Now then… the patients and Red can stay. Anybody else needs to get lost so we can try to make these ladies whole again.”

  Chapter 33

  Amy hated crawling out of bed in the morning.

  She didn’t used to.

  She used to be a morning person. Her mother once told her she was so happy to live in a world where the sun came up twice each morning.

  Amy, not quite understanding her meaning, asked her to explain.

  “Well, the sun comes up early each morning and makes the world brighter. And that’s nice and all.

  “But then you get up. And when you open your bright little sunshine eyes the world is brightest of all!”

  Amy was a girl who thrived on compliments. And that memory was one of her all-time favorites.

  Of course, it was a happier world in general back then.

  That was before her mother got sick and her father got mean.

  They lived in the smallest house on the block then, the only renters on the street. Some of the neighbors she went to school with threw that up in her face.

  When Amy was in first grade a couple of the meanest of the girls started calling her the little maid girl. That was right after word got around that the reason their house was the smallest on the block was because it was originally built for the maid of the family in the much larger house next door.

  Amy came home crying that day and Monica had to soothe her wounded pride.

  “But I don’t want to be called a maid,” Amy wailed.

  “I don’t know, I don’t think I’d mind,” Monica responded. “I’ve known several maids in my time. It’s not as snooty as a lot of professions. I’d rather be a maid than a congressman or a banker or a stock broker.

  “Maids clean up after other people, sure, but they don’t take advantage of people or steal from them like congressmen do. They don’t take advantage of people’s hard times like bankers do, or try to cheat them by getting them to buy things they know will lose money like stock brokers.

  “Maids earn an honest living and don’t raise their children to be mean and pretentious or to bully others or imply others aren’t not as good as themselves.”

  If Monica’s personal biases showed it was certainly unintentional. But in her lifetime she’d been taken advantage of personally by crooked bankers and stock brokers, and she wanted her children to be wary of them.

  As for the congressmen, Monica learned long before that no elected member of the United States Congress or Senate was worth the dog shit on the heels of their shoes. Not a single one.

  She wanted her children to know early on never to depend on the government for anything.

  “The government serves only themselves,” she told them. “Even when they pretend to do something good for others, it’s really only to make themselves look good so they can get re-elected.”

  Monica grew up poor, as did her husband Ronald.

  They never had any breaks given to them, and it seemed they had to work twice as hard to get half of the things the “privileged” people had.

  It wasn’t right and it wasn’t fair, but it was what it was.

  Monica tried her best to protect little Amy, and later little Robert, from bullies and from the evil people of the world.

  Sometimes she succeeded, sometimes she didn’t.

  But she was always there for th
em.

  A few years before, when Ronald went to prison on a drug charge, there was a period of bliss in the Martinez house. Monica was a much better mother than he was a father, you see, and with Ronald away there were no arguments about how to raise the children.

  Monica had to work two jobs, but one was only part-time. For the first time Ronald didn’t waste a significant amount of her pay on his motorcycle or his liquor.

  For the first time in their lives there was food on the table, not just some nights but every night of the week.

  Often on Saturdays there was enough for a matinee movie, as long as they all shared the same box of popcorn.

  Then Ronald got out of prison and the good times were over.

  Prison made him mean, as it does to a lot of men.

  He was mad at the world, convinced it owed him something. In Ronald’s mind he’d never been given his fair share of the breaks. They always went to someone else; people who didn’t deserve them.

  They got the breaks, he got the shaft.

  Ronald was mad at the world, but he couldn’t incur his wrath on everybody.

  His wife and kids got the bulk of that.

  Ronald beat Monica on a regular basis. She took it because… well, because she saw it as a woman’s role.

  She’d witnessed her own mother’s beatings at the hands of her own father, then a succession of step-fathers and boyfriends.

  To Monica, it was merely her turn to be a punching bag.

  Part of the natural order of things.

  Sometimes Ronald went after the kids and Monica stood in the way to protect them.

  She took their punches for them.

  Again, because her upbringing taught her that was her job.

  Ronald was never one who loved going to work each day and earning a paycheck.

  Monica wasn’t surprised, therefore, when he went out each day after the blackout saying he was going to search for food.

  And came back each night carrying a stuffed backpack she’d never seen before.

  Many had blood upon them.

  Ronald eventually died by the same sword he lived by. Shot for his possessions in the same way he shot many others.

  When he failed to come home that night she instinctively knew she was rid of him forever. Not necessarily a bad thing.

  When she looked back, she realized the only good thing he ever did for them was finding and seizing Dave Spear’s house, fully stocked with food and provisions.

  Amy slept in her old friend Beth’s bed now. It was by far the nicest bed she’d ever slept in, in by far the biggest house she ever lived in.

  For the first time in her life she had plenty of food.

  For the first time in years she had no fear of being beaten by her father.

  She should have been happier then than at any other time in her life, anxious to jump out of bed and start each new day.

  But no.

  Amy hated crawling out of bed in the morning.

  Because her mom was dying.

  And that ruined everything.

  Chapter 34

  Amy’s mornings had become a horrific routine of late.

  Her bedroom window faced to the east, and even though Dave Spear covered her window panes with black construction paper to keep light from escaping, she could still tell when the sun came up.

  Each of the black squares covering her windows changed from a dark black to a medium gray color.

  Each night she slept with her back to the window.

  Because each morning she dreaded seeing it.

  Each morning she put off rolling over to look at the window.

  Put it off as long as possible.

  She’d like to have stayed in bed all day, but it wasn’t her nature.

  Even as bad as the world was now, even as sad as her own world had become, she was antsy and always moving.

  Eventually each morning now she came to the point she couldn’t delay any longer.

  She’d hold her breath and roll over, hoping the paper was still dark and she could go back to sleep for awhile.

  Occasionally it was, and she rejoiced.

  Most often it wasn’t.

  On this particular morning, a bright late-summer day, the construction paper was as light a shade of gray as she’d ever seen it.

  She very reluctantly, very slowly, sat up and put her feet upon the floor.

  Very reluctantly stood up and put her feet into the slippers on the floor next to the bed.

  And she tip-toed into the hallway, taking a peek into Lindsey’s old bedroom.

  Even in the semi-darkness she could see Robert sitting up in bed. He was scratching the side of his face, though she couldn’t see enough detail to tell whether his eyes were open or closed.

  She yawned.

  It caught her off-guard. She tried to stifle it but was unable to do so.

  And as subtle and silent as the yawn was, Robert still heard it.

  He instantly plopped back down on the bed and tried to pretend he was sound asleep.

  She could have called him on it, but chose not to.

  She knew his reasons for not wanting to get up and go downstairs, for they matched her own.

  She, being a year older than Robert, considered herself several years more mature. All big sisters do.

  Big brothers too, for that matter.

  Yes, she could easily have told him she knew he was awake. She could have called him a chicken and made him feel very small and made him get up to accompany her downstairs.

  But she’d always protected him from bullies; the last thing she wanted to do was to turn into one herself.

  Instead she flipped him off and said not a word.

  Her mother wouldn’t have approved. She’d have told Amy that wasn’t a nice gesture. That it was rude and insulting and unacceptable.

  Amy didn’t even know what it meant, not really. She could wager a guess, but she’d be wrong.

  Early on, when she’d give her brother the middle finger and her mom would chastise her for it, she’d argue.

  “But Dad did it all the time. Every single day, practically. And he always said… that word you don’t like. All the time. At least seventy million times a day.

  “You never told him it wasn’t acceptable.”

  Monica would typically sigh before answering. And then she’d choose her words carefully, try to be patient.

  “Honey, you know why I never challenged your father or told him he was wrong.”

  Monica was right. Amy did indeed know that if Monica had challenged Ronald or tried to correct him in any way she’d have been rewarded with a black eye or bloody lip.

  “Besides, just because your father was uncivilized and rude doesn’t mean you have a right to be. I want you to be a refined young lady and a polite member of society. Okay?”

  “Okay…”

  “So you won’t say that word anymore or make that rude gesture anymore?”

  “No…”

  And she didn’t.

  Until the next time, that is.

  Robert, with his eyes clamped shut and pretending to be asleep, never saw the rude gesture. And even if he had, he couldn’t complain about it.

  It would expose his ruse. She’d very likely make him get up and go downstairs with her.

  It was much better to lay there, still as could be, and pretend to be blissfully unaware that she was awake and up and preparing to take that dreadful walk down the stairs.

  She approached the top of the staircase slowly, as was her habit, listening for any sound her mother was awake.

  Hearing absolutely nothing at all, the sense of dread built even higher.

  She paused at the top step and closed her eyes.

  To herself she said a little prayer.

  “God, I know you need to take my momma to heaven. Please, I ask you with all my heart… do not take her today.

  “Thank you.

  “Oh, yeah, I forgot.

  “Amen.”

  Then, as she
had every single morning for weeks, she opened her eyes and called out.

  “Momma?

  “Momma, are you up?”

  No answer. But that didn’t mean anything, not necessarily.

  As Monica grew progressively weaker she started to sleep in more and more often.

  Slowly, very hesitantly, Amy made herself put one foot in front of the other. Down those seventeen steps.

  Her “hell walk.”

  Near the bottom she could look through the opening above the banister to see her momma still sleeping on the couch, still covered up with a blanket.

  Apparently sleeping, and hopefully so.

  She called out again, this time a bit louder.

  “Momma, are you awake?”

  Then, just, “Momma?”

  She reached the landing and forced herself to walk toward her mother, tears forming with each step.

  “Momma?”

  Then a glorious thing happened.

  Monica moved first her arm, then her head. She lifted her head and opened her eyes and said, “Amy? Good morning, honey.”

  Only then did Amy realize she’d been holding her breath.

  Now she sucked in two lungs full. The smile which Monica always said was worth “ten buckets of gold dust” returned to Amy’s tiny face and the tears were suddenly forgotten.

  She wiped them away with the sleeve of her pajamas and ran to he mother, crawling onto the couch with her.

  While the Martinez ladies snuggled together on the couch, Robert left his post at the top of the stairs, where he’d been anxiously eavesdropping.

  He was overjoyed too, at the knowledge his mother had made it through another night. She was alive for another day, and he too could breathe a big sigh of relief.

  He walked down the stairs and joined them. They were a mass of hugs and smiles and “I love yous.”

  Love was in the air for several minutes, until Amy caught her brother’s eye.

  In half-spite and half-disgust, she silently mouthed a single word to him:

  “Faker!”

  Chapter 35

  Sarah Spear took over four hours before she finally decided on a couch that day three years before.

  “I want it with a floral print, but not too flowery, if that makes sense,” she told Dave.