The Borrowed World (Book 4): No Time For Mourning

by Franklin Horton

  There was a fire circle behind the barn where the family occasionally had gatherings. Tommy built a fire there. Once there was a bed of coals, he took a wire shelf from an old refrigerator and balanced it on rocks a few inches over the coals.

  “You think anyone feels like eating?” Carla said from behind them.

  “People have to eat,” Randi said. “The babies will be hungry.”

  Carla gestured at the burnt-out house. “How can you sit here beside that and feel like eating?”

  “Sit down,” Randi said, gesturing at an old wooden chair nearby. “There’s no use getting so upset first thing in the morning. There’s nothing we can do to change anything that’s happened.”

  “I don’t feel like sitting,” Carla spat. “And I sure as hell don’t feel like eating.”

  “Sit down anyway,” Randi said firmly. “Before I sit your ass down.”

  Carla took a seat, crossing her arms defiantly in front of her chest. Randi looked at her daughter, seeing in her both her own personality and that of the ex-husband she detested. She always had to be careful dealing with Carla. She had to make sure she didn’t overreact when the girl began to too closely resemble her ex-husband. She couldn’t punish the girl for something over which she had no control.

  Tommy put the skillet on the fire. He poured beef chunks and some of the fat from the jar into the skillet. He sliced potatoes with his pocket knife, dropping them straight into the pan.

  “I know what you think of me,” Randi said to her daughter. “I know you think I’m a bitter old bitch and that the last thing you want in this world is to end up like me.”

  Carla started to open her mouth but Randi jabbed a finger at her.

  “Don’t say a word. I know you better than you know yourself. I know exactly what you think. It’s exactly what I would be thinking if I were sitting there.”

  Carla stared off at the burned house, keeping her mouth shut.

  “Do you know how I got home from Richmond?”

  Carla shrugged. “You walked.”

  “You say it like I walked from here to town,” Randi said. “It was nothing like that. How far do you think we walked yesterday?”

  “Couple of miles each way,” Carla replied.

  “I did three times that every single day to get home,” Randi said. “For weeks.”

  Carla didn’t reply.

  “You know why?” Randi asked.

  “Duh, you wanted to get home, of course,” Carla said.

  “Why do you think I wanted to get home?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Think about it,” Randi urged. “You think it was only because I was worried about my mom and dad? You think I was worried about whether my flowers were getting watered?”

  Carla turned up the corner of her mouth. “No.”

  “Then who the hell was I worried about?”

  “Your grandkids, probably,” Carla said.

  Randi took a deep breath and eased it out. Carla’s tone challenged her sometimes. “You think that’s it?”

  Carla hesitated. “No.”

  “Who else?”

  “Maybe you missed Sherry and me,” Carla admitted.

  The frying pan was beginning to sizzle. They hadn’t had any luck finding a spatula so Tommy was using a sharpened stick to nudge the food around the pan. The cooking beef was providing enough grease to keep things from sticking as long as Tommy didn’t let the pan get too hot.

  “I was so worried about you two,” Randi said. “I couldn’t get it out of my head. I lay awake at night trying to speak to you in my head and hoping you might be able to hear me. I tried to tell you that I was coming. I tried to tell you I would be there to take care of you as soon as I could.”

  “It’s not like we didn’t have anyone,” Carla said. “We had grandparents. We had uncles. We were okay.”

  “You didn’t have your mother,” Randi said, standing up and staring at Carla. “You think anyone in this world cares for you the way I do? Even if you were okay, I wasn’t!”

  Carla looked at the ground. For once, she said nothing.

  “I shot a boy about your age one night,” Randi blurted out.

  Carla stared at her mother in shock. Tommy raised his head in surprise. Even he had no idea of what his sister had been through on the way home.

  “Why?” Carla asked. Her voice was not accusing, not challenging. She’d lowered her tone. She understood this was serious for her mother.

  “There were two men, young men, who sneaked into our camp one night. They were trying to rob and kill us. We had reason to think they’d done the same thing to some hikers they met along the way. They set our shelter on fire thinking we were in it. I happened to be awake and some things happened. I shot him.”

  Randi looked at her brother and daughter. Their eyes were glued to hers. She needed to tell this story. She needed her family to know.

  “Did you…kill him?” Carla asked.

  Randi shook her head. “I wish I had. It would have been much better than watching him scream and cry in pain as he bled there in the dirt.”

  “Lord, Sissy,” Tommy said. “It breaks my heart that you had to see that.”

  “What did you do?” Carla asked.

  “I fucking threw up,” Randi said.

  “Did you get help for him?” Carla asked. “I mean, he could be okay, right?”

  Randi gestured around her. “Where? Is there anyone helping us now?”

  Carla looked away.

  “There was no help,” Randi said. “We were in the middle of the woods. Phones didn’t work by this time. There was nothing we could do.”

  “Is that why you’re... different?” Carla asked.

  Randi frowned. “I wasn’t aware I had changed.”

  “You’ve definitely changed,” Tommy said.

  Carla nodded. “Definitely. You were always kind of a bitch, just not so intense. It’s hard to be around sometimes.”

  Randi looked at the fire. “I guess it did change me. Maybe the trip in general changed me. He was the first, but not the last that I either killed or played a part in killing to get home. The world out there is like what we saw here yesterday. It’s just as ugly.”

  “That must have been hard,” Carla said.

  It was a big step for her to acknowledge her mother’s experience. They were usually on opposite sides of the fence from each other. Maybe this was a step toward meeting in the middle.

  “It was very hard,” Randi acknowledged. “There were a lot of mornings like this, where all I wanted to do was forget the things I’d seen the day before. I couldn’t, though. I didn’t want to eat, but I had to. Those guys I came home with reminded me every day, every time I didn’t want to eat, that food was fuel and I needed it to get home.”

  Carla looked at the pan on the fire, her stomach twisting in knots.

  “So you eat the food whether you want it or not,” Randi said. “You eat it because you have people you’re responsible for. People who need you. You eat it because you have shit to do and that shit requires fuel. Do you understand?” She looked at her daughter.

  Carla raised her eyes from the fire to her mother, then nodded. “I do, Mom. I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry about what?” Randi asked. “That’s not something I hear from you very often.”

  “Sorry for everything you went through getting home to us,” Carla said. “I didn’t appreciate the effort it took. I didn’t know what you went through.”

  Randi shook her head, her lips tight. “Don’t be sorry. Knowing what’s out there is an asset. A hard-earned asset.”

  Chapter 16

  Wallace County

  Valentine was born in 1970 in Hell For Certain, Kentucky. He was the sixth child of Tarzan and Eliza Powers. His father was only one of the many boys named after the Johnny Weissmuller character that had captured the imagination of 1930s theater patrons. Tarzan had been a coal miner in a time when nearly every man in that region was a coal miner. When Valentine
was four years old, his daddy’s leg was crushed when a chunk of slate the size of a sofa dropped from the mine roof with no warning. The miner walking behind Tarzan had been completely flattened, only the toe of one boot protruding from beneath the rock. Such was the life of a coal miner.

  The doctors put pins in his leg and there was a metal frame around it that was supposed to make it heal straight. Tarzan was given a gallon jug of rubbing alcohol and told him to put it on the pins every day so they wouldn’t get infected. Valentine had been fascinated by the way the pins disappeared into the skin of his father’s leg making him look like some kind of laboratory creation.

  There was no managing Tarzan’s pain. He felt excruciating pain in his leg. He said it felt like it was on fire. The doctors had nothing to offer him, explaining that the pain would go away as his body healed. With no solution in sight, Tarzan eventually graduated to drinking the rubbing alcohol and totally neglecting his pins. They grew angry and inflamed, with red streaks shooting up his leg. Eventually the doctors were forced to remove it at thigh level to keep the poisoned blood from killing him. Tarzan was a full-fledged alcoholic at this point, perhaps even slightly crazed by drinking the rubbing alcohol.

  The removal of the limb did not make the pain go away. The missing leg continued to burn and throb, making Tarzan sleep restlessly and cry out. Although the phenomenon of phantom limb pain was known to the doctors, there was no solution.

  Tarzan became prone to rages that could not be traced to anything in particular. The family knew it was the pain slowly driving him crazy. His anger was free-floating and seemed to emerge from nowhere, the way a thunderstorm might materialize on an otherwise beautiful day. He lashed out during these spells, pulling and beating on anyone within reach. They tried to stay out of his reach. It was not always possible.

  One time Tarzan had pinned Eliza to the couch beside him, angered over some money she’d spent on the children. She got away from him before he could land a solid blow, which only angered him more. How dare she attempt to evade a beating! He rose and tried to chase her but he’d failed to properly secure his ill-fitting prosthetic and fell across the coffee table, breaking two legs from it and sending copies of Life magazine in all directions.

  “Help me,” he slurred at Valentine. “Leg.”

  Although Valentine was only six years old at this point, he knew that to help his father with the leg would only result in his mother getting beaten more severely. Valentine picked the leg up and stared at it.

  “Gimme my leg!” his dad hollered.

  Valentine ran out the front door with it, tossing it over the sagging porch rail and into the yard. A mangy coonhound came and sniffed at it, found it unworthy of further investigation, and went back under the porch.

  “Get back here!” Tarzan yelled. “Bring me my leg!”

  Valentine hid under the porch with the coonhound and cried until his mother came and got him for dinner. His father had passed out on the floor by that point and they stepped over him the way that folks stepped over dead snakes.

  Valentine eventually grew to be a large young man, who was still terrified of his father. He understood that there would be an inevitable point in their relationship where he’d have to hand out a beating to his father. They were on a collision course that had been determined many years ago. As much as Valentine, or Val as his friends now called him, dreamed of pounding his vile, hateful father into the dirt, the idea scared him. To confront his father would be of the same magnitude as confronting the devil in the dark of night.

  Fate spared Valentine that confrontation. Looking at it another way, that confrontation and the closure it might offer were stolen from him. It occurred on a gloomy January day when Valentine and his siblings were at school. His mother had taken a job as a cashier at the new discount store in town. When they got home that evening, the house was dark and cold. Tarzan was gone in the car and he’d let the coal stove burn out.

  Eliza didn’t call anyone that afternoon. Tarzan being gone was not an unusual thing. Drunk and unemployed, he often sought the company of like-minded individuals. He’d apparently been doing exactly that on the day he went missing. The state police found his car later that night. He’d rolled off the mountain near the Ace of Spades, a mountaintop beer joint near No Name. Although the crash in itself had not been fatal, Tarzan had sustained a deep laceration on his upper arm as the vehicle tumbled off the mountain. He lay there unconscious and bled to death before he was found.

  Though stunned by his death, it could not be said that the family missed him. They adapted to his loss the way a creek adapts to the removal of a stone from the riverbed. They went on with their lives, each of them damaged in some way by their interaction with Tarzan.

  Valentine eventually went to work for a company providing security guards to the coal mines. The best part of the job was pouncing on parked lovers and scaring the shit out of them. As more and more mines shut down, the need for private security dwindled and he eventually got on at the community college. It was a much better gig. He got good benefits and a state salary. He still held out hope of getting to be a real cop, but this was the next best thing. He got to meet a lot of young girls who were impressed with the badge. He got to talk tough to mouthy punks and throw them off campus. He even got to write tickets.

  It was a dream job until the terror attacks came. The school had closed down soon afterward due to the lack of power and hadn’t re-opened since. There was no prospect for when that might change. He’d been lucky to cross paths with Baxter and the Glenwall folks. They were feeding him and giving him a place to stay. He hoped to be able to experiment with some new law enforcement techniques he’d been developing. He’d always thought that being campus security was too restrictive. Now there were no restrictions at all. As long as he didn’t screw up the good thing he had going, he could probably get away with anything.

  Perhaps this was the dream job he’d waited his entire life for.

  Chapter 17

  Randi

  Randi’s family had four horses grazing the scant pastures of their hillside farm, along with the cattle. Her dad always enjoyed them, though he never showed them or participated in any of the events that control the lives of true horse people. These animals were his private pleasure. Randi joked that he liked to check his fences on horseback so he could pretend he was a cowboy and recall the western movies of his youth.

  “Matt Damon ain’t got a thing on Lash Larue,” he’d once told her.

  Those recollections brought a stab of sadness as she saddled his favorite horse. What remained of her family was going to head to Jim’s valley, where she hoped they could find sanctuary and a place to outlast this bump in the road. She knew they could tough it out and survive here at her parents’ place. They could rebuild. What kind of life would they have, though? They had no other heated structures besides the house, and they didn’t have the time or materials to build a new one. They would never feel safe here after what had happened to her parents. Randi understood now that the luxury of feeling safe would only come from being with a group.

  Tommy was saddling another of the horses. He hadn’t said much all morning and she was concerned about him. Their physical exhaustion only compounded the fragility of their mental state. Without conversation to pull her out of it, she felt herself slipping into that sucking pool of emotional blackness.

  Without preamble, Tommy said, “I changed my mind. I’m not going with you.”

  It took Randi a moment to process what he’d said and pull herself back into a place where she could form a sentence. “What the hell does that mean? Why not?”

  “Can’t do it,” he said. “That’s all there is to it. I can’t let those Cross bastards think they ran us off. I’m going to stay here and be a thorn in their sides, pick them off one-by-one. Few weeks of that, they’ll be burning their furniture and eating their dogs because they’re too scared to step outside.”

  Randi finished cinching the saddle and walked around t
o where she could see her brother. He was concentrating on what he was doing, his brow furrowed. His fingers struggled with the task, exhaustion pulling at the body like quicksand. He had a deep tan and his black hair needed cutting. In his sleeveless shirt and cap, he looked exactly like the country boy he was. She felt her maternal side kick in.

  “It’s going to get cold soon and we don’t have much of anything left. How do you plan to live? Where do you plan to live?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” he said. “I’m going to camouflage the dairy building with branches and straw. It’s out of the way and it’s dry. It doesn’t freeze. I’ll make me a bed in there. I’ll do some hunting and eat what canning you don’t take with you.”

  Randi sagged against the barn wall. “Well shit, Tommy, now I feel like I should be staying. I thought I had this all figured out. Now I’m doubting myself and I’m too fucking exhausted to rethink it.”

  “You had things figured out for you, Sis, not for me,” he said. “I don’t think I ever said I was going with you.”

  “I want us all to stay together.”

  “We can’t. Like you said, you have to get these kids to safety. You don’t need me to do that.”

  “I could come back,” Randi said. “Once I’ve got them in a safe place. We can both be thorns in their side.”

  Tommy finished with his saddle and looked Randi in the eye. “That’s up to you. I ain’t deciding for you. I’m deciding for me and I’m staying.”

  Randi knew better than to argue with him. He was as hardheaded as she was. It was likely hereditary. She knew that he wasn’t trying to change her mind in any way. He was simply doing what he felt like he needed to do. Everybody processed this shitty situation in their own little way. She’d learned that much.

  “I want you to take the fourth horse too,” he said.

  “Won’t you need it?”

  Tommy shook his head. “No, it’ll draw attention. You can use it as a packhorse. We’ll load as much of the canning from the dairy onto it as we can. That way you’re not showing up at your friend’s place empty handed.”