Tortures of the Damned

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Tortures of the Damned Page 11

by Hunter Shea


  Besides, he thought, you probably outlived the doctor.

  “You see anything?” Buck asked.

  Daniel was at the front window, his shadow a shade lighter than the pitch around them.

  “Nothing but a cat that ran across Yanick’s yard. We know we’re not the only ones around. I expected to see a candle lit in a few windows. Where the hell is everyone?”

  Buck swallowed his treat down with a swig from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He said, “Come tomorrow, we’re going to have to make some decisions.”

  Daniel shuffled around, but Buck couldn’t tell where. “There has to be a triage set up somewhere. I’m not even asking for a functioning hospital. Rey and Dakota need professional help. And we all need rabies shots, just to be on the safe side.”

  “Which means we can’t stay here,” Buck said.

  He let that sink in for a while.

  Buck continued, “You and I are going to have to find a way to transport your son and that girl. We can try local doctors’ offices first. If no one’s home, we can always head to that new medical center over at Ridge Hill. It’s closer than St. John’s Hospital. Even if the doctors have scattered, maybe your wife can find what we need. And then there’s the chance the military or FEMA or some other agency has boots on the ground and relief centers. But we’re not gonna know until we get out there.”

  “And what if those damn rats come out again?”

  “We bust the door down on the nearest house and hold them off. That’s the good thing about Yonkers. Everywhere you look, there’re houses. We’ll always be just a few steps from shelter.”

  Daniel grunted as he plopped onto the couch next to Buck. “Sardine and Saltine?”

  “That’s all yours,” Daniel said.

  Chewing the salty combination, Buck said, “It might get ugly out there, Dan. You and I have family to protect. I need to know that you’re willing to do whatever it takes to keep them safe.”

  Daniel didn’t hesitate, answering, “Don’t you worry about me. I’m the guy that blew a dog away, remember?”

  Buck patted Daniel’s leg.

  He believed him. Daniel might have been a quiet man who spent most of his time staring at a computer screen. But he was a good man who loved his family and was smart enough to realize how deep they were in the shit.

  Tomorrow they’d get to wade in that shit, chest-deep if necessary.

  53

  The next day, after a breakfast of cheese and crackers and dried cranberries, Max was shocked when his father announced they would be heading out in search of a doctor for Rey and Dakota, who were upstairs sleeping at the time.

  “I know you’re scared, being exposed, but it has to be done.”

  Max scratched at one of the rat bites. He knew this wasn’t just for his brother and Dakota. Everyone except Miguel had been bitten. They all needed medical attention.

  His mother hugged his father as they stood hip to hip. It was her less-than-subtle way to show they were on the same page. It was the end of the world as they knew it and they were still cornballs. His friends used to joke that his family was the San Juan Bradys. The crack never amused him.

  “The problem we have to solve right now is how to transport Rey and Dakota. They’re not up for any long walks.”

  “Or running,” Max added. His mother narrowed her eyes at him.

  Buck said, “I have a wheelbarrow in my shed, but it’s not the most stable thing in the world. One misstep and it could tip, spilling them out.”

  Miguel, who had been picking a cranberry apart quietly, said, “How about our bikes?”

  “We can take yours and Gabby’s bikes,” his father said. “But I don’t think Rey and Dakota would be able to pedal very far.”

  Max pushed away from the table. “I know what we need and where to get it. Mr. Burnes around the corner has a bunch of shopping carts he takes from Stop and Shop and ShopRite. He uses them to move his gardening stuff around. We can take them.”

  His mother looked to his father, then Buck. “What if he needs them as much as we do?”

  Max sighed. “They’re not his, Ma. He stole them.”

  Buck said, “We can check and see if he’s home, give him a hand if he needs one.”

  “Can anyone think of a better way?” Alexiana said.

  After a long, painful silence, his father said, “All right, Max and I will get the carts. We’ll be back in five minutes.”

  He took a shotgun from the small arsenal that Buck had arranged on the dining room table and handed Max a bat.

  “That’s all I get?” Max protested.

  “That’s all you need. Come on.”

  Buck locked the door behind them. Max took a deep breath. The air smelled good, crisp, not acrid like he’d expected. Down in the shelter, his mind had conjured up all sorts of images, sounds, and smells of what their neighborhood would be like after the attacks. This was counter to everything. It almost bordered on serene.

  They jogged around the block, their footfalls sounding like anvil strikes in the silent street. Max couldn’t help eyeing the sewers they passed, waiting for their furry friends to come gushing out.

  54

  Mr. Burnes was a seventy-year-old bachelor who lived on the biggest plot of property in the neighborhood. His one-story house was also the smallest. He was an avid gardener. In the summer, people came from miles around to see his rose garden.

  For a man who loved nature, he was not enamored of his own kind. Daniel had spoken haltingly to him a few times and couldn’t remember the man ever looking him in the eye. Any conversation seemed like an inconvenience. He’d rather run his hands through fertilizer than say good morning. It was a miracle he allowed perfect strangers to admire his roses.

  Daniel and Max spotted one of the pilfered shopping carts sitting by the shed. It was filled with bags of fresh topsoil. Two more carts rested against the rear of the house. One was filled to the top with clippers, trowels, multiple pairs of well-worn gloves, a hedge trimmer, two green plastic watering cans, digging forks, and other tools Daniel couldn’t even name. He was no suburban farmer himself. The other cart housed empty plastic flowerpots.

  “See, I told you.” Max beamed, throwing the flowerpots out of the cart.

  “Hold on,” Daniel said. “Let’s see if Mr. Burnes is home before we ransack his yard.”

  Max let a pot fall from his hand back into the cart with a look that screamed why bother?

  Daniel rapped a few times on the back door. When there was no answer, he tried the front, again to no avail. He half-expected to at least see one of Mr. Burnes’s neighbors poking their head by a window just to see who was breaking the cone of silence that had taken permanent residence over the block. Nothing.

  “Is he home?” Max asked.

  “Not as far as I can tell,” Daniel replied, hopping to look in the windows. Inside was dark and deserted. He thought of Mrs. Fumarelli and stopped looking. If the man was dead, did he really want to see his second corpse in two days?

  He helped his son empty out his cart. “Let’s go out the other side where it’s paved. That’ll make pushing these easier.” Before he could maneuver his cart, Max had shoved ahead, taking the lead, the cart in one hand and his bat in the other. Daniel laid his gun in the front bucket, recalling the countless times he’d placed his children in the small seat when they were younger.

  An image of a three-year-old Max came to mind, his then-pudgy legs poking out of the tiny plastic holes, hands grabbing for anything they could find on the supermarket shelves. How many times had they gotten to the car, only to extricate Max from the cart and find a pack of batteries, small bottle of spice, candy, or anything else his sticky little hands could get ahold of without their looking, tucking it under his legs? Daniel and Elizabeth took turns trudging back to the store to either return or pay for their son’s private stash. And there was Max, smiling away in his car seat, unaware that he was the most skilled thief in the county.

  The memory came to a
n abrupt end when Daniel’s cart collided with the back of Max’s legs.

  “Jesus, I’m sorry, Max. Did I hurt you?”

  Max didn’t move. He just slowly shook his head from side to side.

  Daniel grabbed the shotgun. “What is it?”

  His son pointed at the ground to their left. When Daniel saw what had stopped Max, he put the shotgun back in the cart. “Don’t look, Max.”

  Mr. Burnes lay on the pavement, one milky eye staring up at them. One arm stretched out as if he’d tried to arrest his fall by grabbing on to one of the resin chairs he kept at the side of the house. His skin was an ashy blue. Daniel would have thought the man just fell down and died if he wasn’t missing the lower half of his body.

  Max said, “It’s okay, Dad. I’ve seen dead bodies before.”

  And he had, at wakes for several older family members. Seeing a professionally prepared corpse in a coffin was one thing. Finding half a neighbor sprawled out by their house was an entirely different experience. Dried, red ropes straggled out from where his stomach should be, looking like the man had been made of shredded cabbage.

  “Just keep going,” Daniel said. “We have to get back with the carts before everyone starts to worry.”

  “But what about Mr. Burnes? We can’t just leave him here like that. Can we?”

  Daniel gripped the shopping cart’s handle. In essence, they could, but since Max had brought it up, he had to do something. He looked back into the yard.

  “Hold on.”

  He came back with a blue tarp that had been held by bricks on the top of the shed. They laid it over Mr. Burnes, securing the ends with the bricks.

  “Do you think someone will come along and eventually bury him?” Max asked as they pushed the carts down the hill. Daniel’s had a squeaky wheel that would have to be oiled before they set out.

  “To be honest, I don’t know.”

  55

  The moment Max and Daniel returned with the carts, the boy blurted out what they’d found at the side of the old man’s house. Dakota had been given a brief respite by the fever gods and was sitting at the kitchen table when they barged through the door. She was sipping a warm bottle of water and nibbling on a cracker.

  She’d been out of it for so long, she wasn’t sure if what she was seeing was even real. Crazy thoughts and images had been floating through her head day and night. Most times, she couldn’t tell if she was dreaming or awake. For all she knew, she was never awake.

  When she asked why they weren’t in the shelter, Elizabeth had explained everything. Rats? Who ever heard of rats attacking people?

  It did little to assure her that she was indeed awake, even when Elizabeth showed her a pair of bites under bandages on her calves.

  Even if this was a dream, it wasn’t necessarily a bad one. At least she wasn’t still in that dank shelter.

  Alexiana said, “We’ll cushion the carts,” and ran up the stairs.

  Buck said, “We’ll add some water and food in the carts with them. I can tie a couple of packs to the carts, too.”

  The next few minutes were a flurry of activity. All the while, Dakota watched them in a semi-daze, trying to quell the rumbling in her stomach. At one point, she turned to her right and saw Rey at the table next to her. He looked as bad as she felt.

  “Hey,” he said. “Nice to see you up.”

  She gave him a smile. Or did she imagine smiling? It was too tiring to figure out.

  “You look like hell,” she said to him.

  He tried to straighten in his seat and push his hair back. “We can’t all be as pretty as you,” he said low, looking around to see if anyone else had heard.

  “You’re sweet,” she said, or thought. Was there an echo when she spoke?

  Dakota felt a pair of hands slip under her armpits. Next thing she knew, she was standing. Her head swam. It felt as if she’d had four martinis.

  “You all right to walk a little?” a voice, Alexiana’s voice, said close to her ear.

  Dakota tried taking a step. Her knees felt like rubber. Yep, this was definitely four martinis on an empty stomach land. “Sure, I can walk.”

  “I think I’ll keep hold of you, just in case.”

  She watched Rey push himself from the seat, using the tabletop to balance himself. He took a rifle from a pile of guns—where the hell did those guns come from?—using it as a sort of cane as he followed them out the door.

  “I’ve got her, baby,” Buck said before lifting her and placing her in a mound of fluffy blankets in what looked like a shopping cart. When she moved her legs, bottles of water made plastic crunches. “I’ll drive,” he said.

  Her body vibrated as if she were sitting on the world’s biggest pocket rocket as the man with the cowboy hat pushed her down the middle of the street. The two kids scooted by them on a pair of bikes.

  “Slow down,” their father said. “I don’t want you more than a few feet ahead of us.”

  Dakota meant to ask where they were going, but things went kind of gray. She thought of rats, twitching pink noses, whiskers flicking this way and that.

  Oh please, let this be the dream part.

  She was so tired. She prayed the rats would go away so she could sleep in peace.

  56

  They’d gone three blocks without seeing another person. Daniel asked them to stop at the corner, jogging up the hill to a house across the street. He shouted hello a few times, jumping a hedge to knock on a window. When no one answered, he came back.

  “Guess they’re gone,” he said to Elizabeth, and resumed pushing the cart with Rey and their supplies. Elizabeth took one end of the handle, as well.

  “Who’s gone?” she asked.

  “There was a girl in there yesterday. She’s the one who warned us about the rats. She looked real sick.”

  They looked at Rey, who was awake, cradling a rifle that he kept pointed at the ground in the jouncing shopping cart. Droplets of sweat dotted his hairline and upper lip. She’d given him Tylenol and another antibiotic an hour ago, but she might as well have had him swallow Cheerios.

  “Daniel, where is everybody?”

  “I don’t know. It was like this yesterday. At least it’s not raining. And teeming with damn rats.”

  Buck looked over at them and said, “If those little fuckers come out again, I have a surprise this time.”

  Elizabeth was afraid to ask. Her heart fluttered when she spotted Dr. Manetti’s office. Kimball Avenue was littered with abandoned cars under a hazy, gray sky. And here, on a bigger and busier street, was something else they hadn’t seen before—big splotches of what looked like deep maroon paint in the streets and sidewalk. If it was blood, then where were the bodies?

  “Do you think there’s any chance he’s there?” she asked.

  “It can’t hurt to look. At the very least, he should have some different meds we can try.”

  Gabby and Miguel rode their bikes in lazy circles around them.

  Pulling up outside the doctor’s office, Daniel and Buck tried the front door. It was locked. No one answered.

  “We didn’t come here for nothing,” Buck said, kicking at the door with all his might. The lock broke away from the frame on the fifth blow. “If anyone was asleep inside, they’re awake now.”

  Daniel took Elizabeth’s hand. “We’ll check.”

  Buck waved them through, then went back to Alexiana and the kids. Max tapped the head of the bat in his palm, looking up and down the street, expecting trouble.

  “Hello, Dr. Manetti?” Elizabeth said as she stepped into the dark, empty waiting room. Daniel tried the light switch on the wall.

  “It was worth a shot.”

  Everything looked as it should on a day when the doctor wasn’t in. Nothing was out of place. When things went south, Elizabeth expected places like doctor’s offices and pharmacies to be ransacked. Anyplace that housed drugs was a target for looters or people like them in need.

  Somehow, his office had been overlooked. Maybe
it was because his shingle had been torn off the side of the house during Superstorm Sandy and he’d said it wasn’t worth replacing. “If people need me, they’ll find me,” he’d told her one day, clicking his pen incessantly as he always did.

  They crept past the reception desk, making their way toward the corridor in the back. There were three examination rooms down there, as well as the doctor’s office. Inside the first examination room was a large glass cabinet, two chairs, and an adjustable bed.

  “He had a key to open that,” Elizabeth said, pointing at the cabinet. “That’s where all the samples are.”

  To her surprise, Daniel smashed the butt of the shotgun into the glass.

  “No sense wasting time looking for a key,” he said.

  Elizabeth found her hands were shaking. This was stealing. No matter what had happened, she couldn’t simply wash away decades of a good, Catholic upbringing.

  Then she thought of Rey and Dakota, crammed in those shopping carts. And what if they all started to get sick? There hadn’t been enough gas masks to go around and they’d already been exposed when they had to flee the shelter.

  Opening drawer after drawer, she searched for anything that might come in handy. She grabbed a white coat from a peg on the back of the door and tossed a few items into it, including iodine, alcohol, and aspirin, as well as some bandages.

  “Let’s try the next exam room,” she said.

  After Daniel repeated breaking the cabinet glass, she hit the jackpot. Inside were some heavy-duty antibiotics, including cefepime, levofloxacin, and a generic of penicillin. There were also alprazolam, also known as Xanax, an antianxiety medication; Percocet, a potent painkiller; and Ultram, a nerve blocker. She threw those in the coat, wrapping it up like a hobo’s bindle, filling it with more from the next room.

  When they were done, Daniel placed the haul on Rey’s lap. Buck produced a plastic bag. “Gotta keep them dry in case it rains.”

  Elizabeth tried closing the doctor’s door, but the hinges were warped from Buck’s battering. She wrote a quick note that said: We’re sorry, but we needed the medication. Our child is sick. Please forgive us. She put it on the floor inside the doorway.

 

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