by Mark Tufo
Finally, Addy yanked at my arm and led me between two houses, over a wooden fence with a locked gate, and to the unlocked back door of a house as old and worn as the rest of those in the neighborhood. Turning on her flashlight, Addy proceeded inside as though it was her own home. I found out why when we went into the garage and found a Jeep. Just like the Bronco that Randy had taken, the cargo area in the rear of the Jeep was stocked with food, water, and some ammunition. A rack with packed tightly with five-gallon jugs was mounted to the trailer hitch. It was one of the group’s bug-out vehicles.
Outside, the riot raged.
Something banged the garage door loudly and startled both of us. We stood frozen by the Jeep until we were sure that whatever had made the noise passed by.
Addy got behind the wheel and belted herself in. I did the same on the passenger side. I didn’t ask whether she knew how to drive and she didn’t volunteer the information. She simply explained that our plan was to wait until the police drove the rioters out of the neighborhood, and then we’d leave. I hoped we’d be gone before the spreading fires reached us, or more men and women like Randy came to the house.
We waited there, silent for a long time, listening to the sound of the battle between police and degenerates grow louder, until it finally passed by. That’s when we both felt it was safe to start talking. She said that with her father gone, she had no more relatives in Houston. I asked her if she wanted to come stay with my family, but she told me she was driving the Jeep to her aunt’s house in Oklahoma. She said I was welcome to come along. I told her it was dangerous to drive up through Texas alone. She argued that it was just as dangerous to stay in Houston. She was leaving, and not waiting until dawn to do it. Her father was dead, and the thing that seemed most important to her was to put Houston as far in her rearview mirror as possible.
Still, she shed no more tears over her dad.
When the noise of the riot and the police had receded far enough into the distance, Addy drove the Jeep out of the garage with me in the passenger seat, holding Jim’s rifle, ready to shoot anything that gave us trouble.
Fires burned in every direction, dozens of dozens of houses were in flames. Bodies lay in the road and in the front yards. Wounded degenerates staggered. Some crawled. I took a look back up the street and saw the battle between the police and rioters several blocks down. One block away, the Bronco lay upside down with no sign of life inside.
Addy didn’t look back.
We dodged the bodies in the street and soon were out of the battle zone. We saw police cars—some parked, some on the move, all with at least two patrolmen. None gave us any trouble, probably because we were moving away from the riot.
As Addy drove the streets on the way to my house, I had the thought more than once that she and I were two of a kind. Or at least similar, made for one another, brought together by chance. Mushy romance movie crap. I fantasized about kissing her and doing more, but I did nothing like that. I watched the roads for hostiles and kept my finger ready to pull the rifle’s trigger.
People were out in the street all along our route. That wasn’t unusual. Lots of the degenerated people spent time walking around at night, going nowhere, doing nothing, just ambling. Some of them talked to themselves. A few were manic. Occasionally they were violent. Some wailed for no reason at all. Others sat on the curb and stared at the asphalt.
The world was an asylum, and the patients were out of their cages.
The prion encephalopathy was making the world worse by imperceptible degrees every day. Everyone who could still form a thought—me included—wistfully believed that things had gotten as bad as they were going to get, and that soon, maybe even in the next year, they’d start to get better again, they’d return to the way they were—a happy world of rush hour traffic, expensive lattes, summer blockbusters, and puppy love.
As flawed and cold as was the paradise created by all the generations who’d built it, nobody wanted to let it go.
It was a quiet drive until I pointed for Addy to turn off the main road to get into my neighborhood.
Instead of taking the turn onto the street, she drove into the parking lot of a long-closed grocery store that sat on the corner.
“What?” I asked.
The Jeep rolled to the center of the acre-sized patch of asphalt before Addy brought it to a stop.
I quickly looked around for degenerates who might be ready to give us trouble but spotted none. I turned back to Addy.
She focused her gaze on her hands on the steering wheel and seemed ashamed when she said, “We haven’t heard from my aunt in six months.”
Guessing where she might be going with her admission, I figured I’d give her another argument to sway her to stay in Houston with my family. “Do you think you’ll be able to find gas all the way to Oklahoma?”
Addy pointed at the rear of the Jeep. “There’s enough back there on the rack to get me all the way.”
Neither of us said anything for a moment until I tried another approach, “You want to believe your aunt is fine and waiting for you but you don’t believe it, not really.”
Addy slowly shook her head.
“It’s hard admitting that, isn’t it?” I silently wrestled with choosing to say the next part, but the world wasn’t one that suffered sugarcoated truths anymore. “Everyone in your family might be dead.”
Addy nodded and rubbed her eyes. Maybe trying to hide a tear. Maybe she was just tired.
“We don’t have much,” I told her. “You’re welcome to stay until you get in contact with your aunt. Maybe then you can go, when you’re sure.”
“And your parents?” Addy looked at me with a smile and damp eyes. “What will they say when you bring a girl home to stay?”
“My dad has the PRNP mutation,” I told her. “He’s not…” It was hard finding words that weren’t painful to utter. I pointed at my head. “Mom’s not gone, but she’s going. Me and Levi take care of them. Mom will be happy if you move in. I’ll move into Levi’s room and you can have mine.” I looked over at Addy, feeling like I was blurting all my arguments in no cohesive order.
Addy leaned over and unexpectedly pecked me on the cheek. “You’re sweet.”
I’d never been kissed by a girl until that moment and as much as I wanted to say something back to her, I couldn’t. I was tongue-tied, surprised, and spinning with unexpected emotions swirling in my head.
Addy, apparently having decided what she was going to do, put the Jeep in gear and got us rolling again.
Chapter 181
When we turned onto my block, Addy had the headlights on bright, illuminating the street all the way down to the next intersection. The street’s usual nighttime degenerates were out but where they usually were up to their random acts of nothing, many of them were scattered in the road down by my house, standing motionless and staring.
Addy saw it too, and she took her foot off the accelerator and looked warily back and forth.
As we neared, I saw that Oscar’s house was completely dark. Dark houses weren’t out of place on our street but it was unusual for Oscar’s house. They almost always left the porch light on.
Were the degenerates staring at Oscar’s house?
The dark windows worried me. I wondered if Oscar had gotten tired of asking me to leave with him and had gone to Mexico without me. I found myself hoping the utility company had cut their electricity. Maybe Oscar’s dad didn’t have as much money as he let on. Maybe he was even further behind on his bills than our family was.
Looking past Oscar’s, I saw the lights were on at my house. I tensed when I noticed the front door was open. That’s when I realized the motionless degenerates in the street were staring at our front door.
Addy asked, “Why would they be staring?”
“That’s where I live,” I told her in a voice that betrayed my concern.
The Jeep rolled slower.
I pointed for emphasis. We were still three or four houses away. “Pull up in fro
nt.”
“They’re in the way,” Addy told me.
There was no way past the degenerates, unless she ran them over or pushed them out of the way with her bumper. “Just go right—” I didn’t finish. I flung my door open, and ran.
None of the degenerates seemed to care that I was running past, but it was clear they were all staring at the yellow light glowing from our open front door.
A man’s wail pealed into the night, loud and long.
The degenerates around me cringed. A few stepped back. None turned away.
The wail found an abrupt end just as I came to understand that the sound was coming from inside my house.
I cursed and crossed the remains of our front lawn. With Jim’s rifle still in hand, I bounded up the front porch steps, stopped against the wall just outside the door, and listened.
Bad things were happening inside. A panicked thought in my head demanded that I rush in, unloading Jim’s rifle into anyone I didn’t recognize. My dispassionate side was in control though, and it said, “be quiet, be careful, be deadly.”
Shuffling of feet, bumping of bodies, and strange voices were coming from inside. None of it was happening in the front room. The sounds were coming from one of the bedrooms or from the kitchen in the back of the house.
I peeked around the doorjamb for a look into the living room and I involuntarily stopped breathing.
Something imploded in my chest, leaving a void where my heart had been an eye-blink before.
Amidst the shambled furniture in a spot in the center of the floor—a spot the furniture seemed afraid to venture close to—lay Levi. One of his arms was twisted around at a painful angle and bent where there was no joint. His shaggy hair was matted red—thick and gooey. Around his head, in a puddle on the floor that stretched wider than his boney shoulders, pooled his blood. He wasn’t wheezing. He wasn’t breathing shallowly. He wasn’t shuddering from the pain of his broken arm and bleeding wounds. Levi was dead.
Another wail ripped the air.
From back in the kitchen, my mother whimpered.
Men—no—big boys at the end of their pubescence, boys with deep clear voices, laughed and chided.
I stepped into the doorway and saw the family shotgun leaning against the wall just inside the door. That’s where we kept it, near the place where we expected threats to materialize.
Why hadn’t Levi picked it up and stopped what had happened here?
Why?
With my jaw clenching, I silently leaned Jim’s rifle against the wall and picked up the shotgun. It was the weapon with which I was familiar. Until earlier that night when I’d killed that degenerate with the bounty hunter’s pistol, it was the only firearm I’d ever pulled the trigger on. It was the weapon my dad had taught me to shoot with.
With the weight of the shotgun comfortably in my hands, I stared dry-eyed at the corpse of my last brother. People, in general, were of little value to me, little concern. Their problems were not my problems, but Levi wasn’t one of those slack-jawed generic-faced people out on the street, he was my brother. He’d taught me to count and taught me to read back when mom and dad were too tired from working to look after me when they got home from work. Levi played games with me. He taught me how to ride a neighbor kid’s bike. He taught me how to use a computer.
Levi was weak and gentle, but smart and loving. And now he was another piece of broken furniture in a house being destroyed by goons who were still in the kitchen.
I had no more time for Levi. I had shotgun business to tend to.
A hand slapped flesh back in the kitchen.
The young men laughed.
Another slap was followed by a grunt. Another.
I held the shotgun pointed forward and gripped it tightly as I crossed the living room.
I silently stepped over Levi’s body, and then moved sideways to get a peek into the kitchen through the open doorway.
“Pull it! Pull it out, you retarded bitch!” One of the young men was standing in front of my mother. She was on her knees just inside the kitchen, sobbing, but out of resistance. The goon held a handful of her hair, and he was grinding her face into his crotch.
I inched over to get a view down the length of the galley kitchen.
My father was bound to a wooden kitchen chair. His wrists were duct-taped to the chair’s arms. One of the goons was leaning against a nearby counter, smoking a cigarette, and looking gleefully down at my dad, telling his buddy, “Do it again. Do it again.”
The third and last intruder was trying to pull one of my dad’s fingers away from his closed fist.
“Pull it out, Bitch,” yelled the nearby goon, at my mother.
I silently stepped through the overturned furniture to get myself into a good firing position.
The guy wrestling with my dad’s hand pried the finger out. My dad struggled against his bonds. Tears were rolling silently down his face as his mouth struggled to form words that had escaped him months ago.
“Do it again.”
The guy with my dad’s finger in a tight grip produced a cigar lighter, one of those wicked little things that blasts out the butane under pressure and sounds like a tiny blowtorch. The goon clicked the lighter and put the flame to work searing the flesh on the tip of my dad’s finger.
My dad wailed so loud it drowned out all other sounds. When Dad’s lungs ran out of air, all that was left was the hysterical laughter of the three goons, all looking at my dad like he was the funniest damn thing they’d ever seen.
My mother’s sobs flowed in a new wave.
I got both feet planted and had a clear line of sight down the shotgun barrel at all three intruders. I said, “Hey, dead man.”
The guy with a handful of my mother’s hair snapped his head around to look at me. His face turned to surprise, and his mouth opened as some vulgar string of words lined themselves up for an exit from his soon-to-be disassembled brain.
From six feet away, with my shotgun pointing right at his mouth, I pulled the trigger.
The gun boomed.
The goon’s head disintegrated as the shot tore through bone and brain, splattering it on the popcorn-textured ceiling, cabinets, and floor.
I racked another shell as the body went over backward into the kitchen. The two goons at the far end looked up from their business to see me, their murderer.
Stepping toward them, I pointed the shotgun at the guy who hadn’t thought fast enough to get his leaning ass off the counter. I fired.
The satisfying boom of the gun sent lead shot through the man’s arm and chest. He spun off the counter and fell to the floor, leaving only a puff of red haze and cigarette smoke.
I pumped another shell into the breech.
The guy who’d used the lighter on my dad’s fingers dropped it and was scrambling to pull a gun out of his waistband. He was moving back, trying to get around my dad’s sprawled legs, hoping to use my dad as a shield.
I pointed the shotgun and aimed a little wide.
The shot ripped through the third guy’s arm and sent him spinning onto the table to roll off into the chairs on the other side.
Loading another round, I hurried into the kitchen, careful to avoid slipping in the first goon’s blood.
At the far end, I saw twitching legs of the guy who’d been leaning on the counter. Instead of mean laughter, he was wheezing with blood gurgling out of his mouth while his eyes silently pleaded.
I said, “This is what death feels like.” I fired again, putting a full load into his chest. He instantly stopped moving.
I pumped the shotgun and stepped to the other side of my father.
The last guy was struggling in the overturned chairs between the table and the wall.
I dropped to a knee and pointed my gun at him from under the table.
“No!” he pleaded.
Wasted breath. There was nothing he could have said or done to change what was going to happen.
I fired.
His face turned to red
mush as the wall behind him splattered with his blood.
I stood back up. The shotgun was empty, and the extra shells were stored in Levi’s bedroom. I laid the gun on the counter and took the pistol out of my waistband.
I hurried through the house, looking for any more hooligans that needed extermination.
None.
Next, I checked the backyard. It was empty except for the weathered wooden crosses on my brothers’ graves. I came to a stop there, fixated on the crosses as my breathing calmed. I still felt a hollow inside me—the same one I’d felt the moment I saw Levi’s body. As for the men I’d killed, I had not one ounce of guilt. They were less than nothing to me.
Inside, Mom was sobbing, still lying on the floor. Dad was still bound to the chair, silent.
“Are you okay?”
I turned to see Addy standing in the kitchen door where the bounty hunter had stood earlier that night.
Again, I was at a loss for words.
Chapter 182
Three of my dad’s fingers on one hand were charred on the end. Two fingers on the other hand matched. The guy with the torch had been working from the pinky finger toward the bigger ones on each hand. Lucky for us, I guess. Dad still had enough strength in his hands to do most of the work.
In the dark, with my dad copying my movements, we dug three graves in a row beside the twins. They weren’t deep, maybe three or four feet. Through it, Dad kept forgetting that some of his fingers were ruined, and when he gripped the shovel handle too tightly he cried out. His mind had all but lost its ability to create new memories. Good for him. He didn’t have to live with the pain of another dead child. He didn’t have to have that pain compounded by the truth of the matter, which was that he was still tall and strong despite his years, and could have killed those three punks with his bare hands before they’d so much as put a bruise on anyone in the house. But his mind was too weak to figure out what needed to be done.
Addy was in the kitchen, trying futilely to comfort my mother. But Mom was suffering. She wouldn’t get off the kitchen floor. All the effort left in her had been spent on moving to a place on the floor where she could lay on her side and see through the doorway into the living room. There she bawled, watching Levi’s blood coagulate on the floor while his eyes stared unblinkingly at nothing.
