by J. Thorn
“What did they say?”
“They said they’d think about it.”
A half hour later, we all sat at Robinson’s dining room table and ate dinner. Peaches wanted to eat outside on the deck, but Robinson overruled her, for Diego’s sake. It was bad enough Diego had to get two people to help him walk, best to limit his movement to the bare minimum. The food was nothing extravagant: barbeque ribs, corn on the cob, and some pre-made potato salad Bowser had purportedly picked up from the Walmart deli. Not four-star restaurant quality, but certainly better than the frozen dinners I was used to consuming. Or, God forbid, the outdated junk food Aamod always sold me. It felt like months since I’d had a meal so filling.
“Quit your begging,” Robinson said to Jax, who was going from person to person hoping for kind favors.
“How old is he?” Peaches asked.
“He’s four.”
“Twenty-eight in dog years,” I said.
“Got you beat then,” Peaches said. “He’s a police dog?”
Robinson laughed. “Only in spirit. I got him for that reason, tried to get him professionally trained, but he wasn’t having any of it. Don’t get me wrong, he’s not stupid. He just didn’t want to work that hard.”
Now everyone laughed.
“I don’t blame him,” Diego said.
“Yeah, who wants to work hard?” I said.
Jax must have known we were talking about him. He went up and nudged Robinson’s hand, indicating he wanted attention. Robinson gave in to the shepherd’s demands and began petting his head. “He’s just more of a love dog, I guess.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” Peaches said.
Then the conversation shifted to the newcomers at the party, Diego and Luna. They had met six months ago at the car dealership where they both worked. He was a mechanic. She was a sales consultant. They had recently got engaged, and were supposed to get married this past weekend. But the world had other plans. Last night, as they attempted to flee the city along with everyone else, they had become trapped on the highway in bumper-to-bumper traffic that eventually came to a complete and permanent stop. So they spent the night in their car and woke up to the stark realization that none of it was a dream. With the highway an ugly mess, they had to hike most of the way back to the city, and decided to cut through Canaveral Groves to hopefully save some time. Tired and weak from the journey, Diego had been in a bit of a daze when the headlights of Robinson’s squad car blinded him. Luna had just missed being hit herself. It was the first moving vehicle they’d seen all day, and it nearly ended their engagement.
“Have you thought about what I asked?” Robinson said. “About staying the night. I can’t promise it will be comfortable, but we’ll make room.”
Diego and Luna looked at each other and made a quick decision without even uttering a word.
Then they both nodded.
It took some time to come up with the sleeping arrangements. Robinson had a three-bedroom house, but only two of the rooms actually had beds, and one of them was a twin that grandma currently occupied. The other bed was Robinson’s queen bed, of course, which he insisted Diego and Luna take. I think it was his small way of continuing to show that he was sorry for the accident. Peaches and I gathered some extra linens and made nests on the floor in each of the other rooms. I would be in the guest room with my grandma. She would be in the last room, an office, with Olivia. The man of the house, Robinson, would sleep on his favorite recliner, while his old friend Bowser got the couch. Jax had a hard time picking one spot, and would likely change sleeping stations throughout the night.
We all hung out in the living room and chatted for an hour or so, and then one by one, said goodnight and took our tired asses to bed. Robinson’s cooking had worn everyone out.
I sat up and read for a while by candlelight, getting a quarter of the way through Titanic with Zombies before blowing out the candle and going to sleep. It had been the longest day I could remember. I had a feeling a lot of days going forward would be like this one.
A few hours later, I woke up sweating like a straight guy in a gay bar. Having no air conditioning was gonna drive me nuts, and it was only bound to get worse as we moved into April and closer to summer. I was used to sleeping with few clothes and lots of covers, and the temperature somewhere around seventy degrees. It had to be better than eighty in the house. We really needed to find a generator, and lots of gas to keep it powered. I vowed to make that my number one priority.
I tried to get back to sleep, counted over a hundred sheep, and then finally gave up. I threw on a shirt and left the room.
Out in the living room, Robinson was snoring so loud I was afraid he’d wake the neighbors, and they were most likely in a coma. I could vaguely remember my grandpa snoring like that when I was young. It sounded like a clogged-up vacuum cleaner. I couldn’t believe Bowser was able to stay asleep. He did have a pillow planted over his face—maybe he couldn’t take it and suffocated himself.
On my way to the kitchen to get a bottle of water, I noticed Peaches sitting on the back deck by herself, a single candle on the table flickering orange light.
I got an extra bottle of water and joined her outside. Jax rushed out behind me before I could close the sliding door.
“Hey,” I said softly. “What are you doing out here?”
“Nothing. Couldn’t sleep.”
I sat down beside her and opened one of the water bottles. I set the other one down on the table. “Me neither. It’s so hot in there.”
“Tell me about it. I considered moving my blankets out here.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” I said. “But it’s not just the heat, even though that’s a huge part of it. My ears are still ringing from earlier in the day. I can hear it when everything gets real quiet.”
“Really? You mean from when you shot that guy?”
“Jerry.”
“I think you did the right thing.”
I nodded. “He didn’t leave me much choice. But the effects are still imprinted on my mind, and apparently in my ears too.”
“Well, I don’t have that problem, but I am concerned about Olivia.”
“What do you mean?”
It took her a minute to answer. We both stared off into the darkness, listening to the sounds of the night.
“It’s just a lot of responsibility,” she finally said. “I don’t know if I’m up for it. I feel like, since I’m the only female in the group, there’s an expectation for me to step up and take care of her, when the last few years I’ve barely been able to take care of myself.”
“You’ve been doing a great job taking care of Olivia so far.”
“That’s just one day though. She’s gonna need more than that.”
“Yeah, but you’re not alone in this. I’ll help you. I’m sure the others will, as well. Robinson has a son. He had some experience raising a kid.”
“Not in a world like this. Everything is different now. How is she gonna get an education? I won’t be able to teach her much. I sure didn’t do well in school. And what if she gets hurt or sick? What are we supposed to do? It’s not like we can just take her to the hospital. She’s so fragile, and I just don’t want to see anything bad happen to her.”
“The world is not a terrible place, despite everything that’s happened. If anything, it’s probably less dangerous than before. I could help teach her stuff. And people have raised kids for thousands of years without electricity or modern medicine. It’ll be more difficult, sure, but it can be done. It’s just gonna take all of us some time to adjust. Maybe a lot of time. This is only day one. She’ll be fine, all of us will. You’ll see.”
“I wish I had your confidence, Jimmy. Where do you get it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s a new thing for me. I think maybe I’ve always had it and just never realized. I bet it’s the same for you. For the first time in my life, the person I always wanted to be is coming out, and it feels good. It feels right. I used to spen
d most of my time living in fantasy worlds, idolizing fictional characters, wishing I could be a part of something special, something magical. It was therapeutic. It healed me. It helped me forget that I was an accident my birth mom didn’t want to take responsibility for, or the constant bullying in school, or that no girl wanted to go out with me, even the ugly ones.”
Peaches looked at me with a genuine sad face. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not. Not anymore. I’m through feeling sorry for myself. I’m ready to just be me, and be proud of it.”
Peaches smiled and put her head on my shoulder. “Thank you for keeping me company. You have a strange way of cheering me up … but somehow it works.”
“Somebody had to do it.”
“Well, I’m glad it was you,” she said.
Then she did something that made my heart begin to beat like crazy in my chest. She looked up at me, gently placed her lips on mine, and then kissed me. And so I kissed her back.
Her lips felt so soft, so moist.
So perfect.
It was my first time kissing a girl, and although I’m sure my inexperience showed because I was intensely aware of how I was moving my mouth, she made me feel like I was doing it the right way.
She made me feel like it didn’t matter.
She led me, and I followed.
When she finally pulled away, and our lips separated, a giant smile rose on my face. I couldn’t hold it back. This was what I had been missing for so long, and it was worth the wait.
Fuck the rest of the world, I was having a good time.
Jax was laying down a few feet away staring at us with great interest.
“I think he’s jealous,” Peaches said.
“He can go kiss his dad.”
Peaches laughed and put her head back on my shoulder.
We continued to talk until eventually Peaches began to nod off, so I took her to her room. Then I went to my room, got as comfortable as I could in the nest of blankets on the floor, and replayed that kiss over and over again in my head. I was still smiling as I drifted off to sleep.
And into dreamland.
The next thing I knew I was walking across the top deck of a large ship. It was nighttime, the air outside cold as an iceberg. Dark water filled the horizon in every direction.
Someone was walking next to me, a male wearing some kind of blue officer’s jacket. I didn’t recognize him, but he had a look of deep concern on his face.
“Where are we going?” I asked him.
“As I said, sir. Down to the third-class hospital.” He had a British accent.
I wondered why all of this seemed so damn familiar. Had I been here before?
The officer led me down a few flights of stairs to a small examination room, where three other men were waiting for our arrival. I was just glad to be out of the cold. Two of the men stood on opposite sides of an examination table, the last was sitting on a bench on the far side of the room, struggling to keep his eyes open. He looked seriously ill. He had a large purple welt on one-half of his face.
“What’s the matter with him?” I asked.
An older gentleman who looked a bit like Colonel Sanders said, “He has a fever, captain. A very high fever.”
Holy shit, I’m a captain. Captain of what?
“But why does his face look like that?”
“I believe that Peaches may have passed on whatever ailment she has when she bit him. Thus, the site has quickly become infected and has begun to swell at an alarming rate.”
“Wait a minute … Peaches is here?”
“Aye,” said the officer I had followed. He pointed to one of the two connecting doors attached to the exam room. “She is in the second patient room, for our safety.”
I slowly walked across the room and stopped in front of the door to the second patient room.
“What is that sound?” I asked. “Is that a clogged-up vacuum?”
When nobody answered, I turned around and realized there was a good reason. Everyone had left.
Good.
This way Peaches and I could be alone.
I opened up the door to the second patient room, and upon stepping inside, was instantly transported back to my old room at the bookstore. Peaches was sitting on my bed smoking a cigarette.
“You better put that out,” I said. “Grandma will get upset if she knew you were smoking inside.”
“Grandma isn’t here anymore,” she said softly, and then took a long drag. “It’s just you and me, captain.”
I sat down on the bed next to her. “It’s really hot in here. It was really cold out on the deck.”
“What are you gonna do about it? Take off your clothes?”
I started blushing. I could feel something begin to move around due south of my belly button.
She ran a hand across my face and then pulled me closer. “I want you to kiss me … like you did before. Can you do that for me?”
“I’ll do anything you want me to do,” I said.
When our lips touched, I was in heaven again.
So perfect.
Then she sunk her teeth into my bottom lip and tore it off like it was a piece of barbecued meat. I jumped back in disgust and covered my mouth. Warm blood trickled down my chin.
“Why did you do that?”
She didn’t respond. She just sat there, chewing on what used to be my bottom lip.
I ran out of my bedroom and back into the examination room. All of my ship companions had returned. The officer in the blue uniform asked, “Is there something wrong, sir?” But I ignored him and continued to run away, out of the exam room, up the staircase, and back out onto the open deck.
I was expecting cold outside but instead I got heat. A blistering, burning, feverish heat. It was inside of me. My vision began to blur. I felt dizzy. I felt like I’d just stepped off one of those spinning carnival rides.
And I knew I was infected.
Someone grabbed me, shook me, and the world spun faster. “Are you okay?” they asked through the ever-expanding echo chamber that was my head.
I tried to respond, tried to ask, “Where am I?”
As I collapsed to the wooden deck, the last thing I heard before passing out was, “You’re on the ship of dreams, sir.”
When I came to, I was no longer on the Titanic, but in a dark room I barely recognized. I felt my face and thanked God my bottom lip was back. Then I looked around, trying to figure out where I was. There was a single sheet on top of me and an unlit candle beside me. Next to the candle was a book. On the other side of the room was a twin bed. Someone was sitting on it and looking directly at me. My eyes were foggy, so I rubbed them and sat up to get a better look.
It was my grandma.
“I never thought you’d wake up,” I said. “But it’s good to see you again, grandma. Even if…”
Even if this is just a stupid dream.
She slowly rose from the bed and walked over to where I sat on the floor. Then she looked down at me with an expression I don’t think I’d ever seen her show.
Indifference.
“Aren’t you gonna say something?”
Nope, she had nothing to say to me.
But it wasn’t until she tried to attack me that I realized I was no longer dreaming.
Chapter 25
When I imagined my first time putting handcuffs on a woman, I never thought the woman would be my grandmother—maybe somebody else’s grandma, sure, but never mine.
But that’s exactly what I had to do. I had to help handcuff my seventy-nine-year-old grandma to a dining room chair—the same chair I had eaten dinner in hours earlier, when the worst thing I had to worry about was whether or not Robinson’s cooking would have me up all night on the shitter. And it was all because she’d put her hands around my throat and tried to choke me to death. Thankfully, due to her age I was easily able to overpower her until the police arrived on the scene. And by police, I mean Officer Robinson.
After helping secure her to the cha
ir, Robinson and Bowser stood on opposite sides of the dining room table and stared at me like I had the answer to some question they were afraid to ask. Peaches was in the living room changing Olivia, while Diego and Luna were still sound asleep in Robinson’s bedroom. Lucky them.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
“She’s your grandma, Jimmy,” Robinson said.
“No shit.”
“Well, what do you want to do?”
I stared at my grandma, trying to collect my thoughts. She had her head down, calm and peaceful, quite the change from minutes earlier. It was as though a switch had gone off in her, so much so that I wondered if maybe she was falling back into the coma. The moment the cuffs went on, she stopped struggling. She stopped wanting to attack not just me, but anyone she could get her hands on.
So what did I want to do? That was easy. I wanted to go back in time to when life was easy, before the world began to self-destruct. But it didn’t matter what I wanted to do, only what I could do. And if there were something I could do, or some explanation for what just happened, I had no clue what it was. But I’d try my hardest to find out.
“Leave me alone with her,” I finally said.
Robinson and Bowser exchanged a quick glance and then left the room.
I added a few more lit candles to the center of the table and then sat down next to my grandma. She continued to stare into her lap, eyes open, not acknowledging my presence. It reminded me of the girls I’d used to sit next to in the school cafeteria.
“Grandma, can you hear me? It’s your grandson, James. Or Jimmy, like you always called me. You don’t know how glad I am to see you awake. But I need you to help me understand what’s going on. Why did you attack me? Were you confused? It’s okay if you were. You’re probably scared, wondering where you are. We’re at Officer Robinson’s house. Do you remember Officer Robinson? He was the cop who helped us out after the robbery.”
No response. She didn’t move a muscle. She remained locked in that statuesque position, head down and disengaged. I couldn’t tell if she was ignoring me or just didn’t hear a word I was saying.
