Dark Advent

by Brian Hodge

  “I remember you,” he murmured toward the window.

  The sun climbed higher, brighter…had the colors in his room ever seemed this vivid? He reached over to the small bedside table and flipped on the ghetto blaster that took up half the top. A cassette of George Winston piano solos helped bring on the morning. The Autumn recordings…fitting.

  Breakfast was biscuits and canned apricots. Afterward he spent part of the morning playing with the three kids. For Julie, the youngest at six, he bushed out his hair and chased her as she pretended he was a monster. He tottered to and fro with his finest stiff-legged plod. Soon all three tackled him, and he let them pin him and tickle him until he couldn’t breathe.

  “We’ve got you now!” It was Nicholas, eight years old and the only boy among the three. “Surrender!”

  “Never!” Jason thrashed his head, defiant to the end.

  “Give us your Oreos and we’ll let you go!”

  “I already gave them all to Julie. She didn’t tell you?” Dissension among the ranks, that was it.

  “He did not!” she squealed. “You’re such a liar!”

  “Enough, enough,” came a voice from somewhere above. “That’s quite enough highway robbery for one morning.”

  Colleen stood nearby with her hands on her hips, watching the melee with a big smile on her face. She’d been the one to really take these kids under her wing, spending the most time with them, working to maintain some type of educational program for them. Getting them through the nights. In short, loving them.

  Reluctantly, the kids rolled off Jason but remained sitting beside him on the floor.

  “Why don’t you three go find something to read,” Colleen said.

  Nicholas twisted his head in bewilderment, an expression only a totally baffled kid can manage. “What for? Somebody said it’s Sunday.”

  “It won’t kill you,” she grinned. “Like extra credit.”

  The kids grumbled, slowly got up. You’d think they’d just been asked to wade through a swamp.

  “Can I ask you a question, Jason?” It was Farrah, the twelve-year-old.

  “Go ahead.”

  “How come you have long hair? Boys aren’t supposed to have long hair.”

  He leaned toward her, elbow propped on one knee, and gave her a solemn look. “I had to grow it out to make room for my brain.”

  Farrah wrinkled her nose and rolled her eyes, pushed herself to her feet, and shepherded the younger two off elsewhere.

  “I think you have some admirers,” Colleen said. Noting that he remained on the floor, she squatted down nearer.

  “They’re fun. They’re the most unaffected people here.”

  “I always trust people that kids like. Somehow they read things adults can miss. And they don’t pretend they like you if they really don’t.”

  “Yeah. That comes later.” He gazed over at a nearby wall where folded jeans had been arranged in cubbyholes. Was it his imagination, or did that wall look dingier? No direct lighting, hard to tell. “They’re resilient, too. Sometimes it seems like they’ve adapted better to all this than the rest of us.”

  Colleen rubbed her palms together. “Yes and no. They cry at night, sometimes. The younger two. And they still hang on to things. Like Nicky and his gripe that it’s Sunday. Little things that haven’t sunk in yet.”

  “You can live with the little things.”

  “Sometimes. And sometimes it’s the little things that trip you up.” She looked up from underneath her bangs, a very childlike expression in itself. Working with the kids agreed with her. She seemed to absorb something from them. “You know, for a long while I wondered why I kept living while everyone else I knew kept dying. Maybe they’re why. If I can keep them from being victimized by everything, if I can help them grow up decent, maybe it’ll feel like I counted for something.”

  “Yeah. Well. Some of us are still looking for reasons.” He grinned self-consciously. “Getting deep over here, I think.” He stood, stretched, pulled Colleen to her feet. “I think I’m about to set a bad example for them. For three days I’ve been threatening to make a run to a liquor store.”

  She looked left, then right, elfin eyes sparkling. “Grab me a couple bottles of white wine while you’re at it.”

  “Are you sure? I am not the guy you want picking out wine.”

  “You’ll do fine. At this point, choosy is the last thing I am.”

  Jason popped into his room for a sweatshirt, pulling it on over his flannel shirt. In the hallway he passed Billy Strickland, spoke, and got little more than a grumble in reply. A while back, Rich Patton had confided in Jason that there had been one dissenting vote when he’d been allowed in here, a vote Rich and Jack had chosen to overlook. Jason knew before it leaked out that the vote had been Billy’s. You want Erika for yourself bad enough to hate me? he felt like telling Billy to his face. Then go for it and don’t let me stop you. You won’t see me getting in your way. Because I’ve sure got mixed feelings about her.

  But he held his tongue. As always.

  Out in the parking garage he saw Caleb. The old man was sitting against the concrete retaining wall overlooking the street below, trimming his fingernails with a pocketknife that appeared too cumbersome for the job.

  “’lo, Jason,” he said. He leaned his head out and breathed deeply. “First nice day we had in near three weeks. Figured I’d enjoy it while it lasted.”

  “Don’t blame you.” Should I invite him along? We’re both latecomers here, that gives us one thing in common.

  “Gets so stuffy in there sometimes,” he went on. He shook his head and spat over the side, watched it fall. “Gets to smelling like one big fart.”

  Jason extended the invitation, and Caleb accepted.

  They took Jason’s car. He didn’t feel like lugging back a couple cases of beer and a few stray bottles on foot. It took a few grinds of the starter to get things going. Had it really been over a month since he’d driven? The seat, the stick shift, the wheel…they felt like comfortable old friends at the end of a long, hard day. Heading for the exit spiral, he shoved in the tape he’d been listening to the day he’d arrived. Bob Seger mourned the loss of youth and summer nights.

  “Hope you don’t mind,” Jason said, pointing at the tape deck.

  “Nah,” he said. “It’s your car.” He proceeded to clean his nails with the knife tip, and when they hit the street four floors below, he folded the knife and pocketed it. “You know, I went to a rock and roll show once.”

  “No kidding.” Jason grinned.

  “Sure did.” He laced his hands behind his head. “Couple years back. I worked my own farm, you know. Some of us went to that Farm-Aid show Willie Nelson and them others put on in Illinois.”

  Jason laughed. It really was a small world. “I’ll be damned! I was there too! I was going to college there then, the University of Illinois.” Tens of thousands of them had camped like an army in the stadium under a gray sky, not even caring it was dumping buckets of rain, listening to country, pop, heavy metal. Wanting, in some small way, to help.

  Caleb sighed. “My wife thought I’d done blown a gasket, packing off with some of my cronies and driving all night through three states to get there. But we had us a good time. And it…I don’t know…it seemed important. Awful important.”

  Jason nodded. “Everybody had a cause for something back then. It feels weird to look back now, after…”

  “Yup. Worse things waiting for us, that was for sure.”

  Jason looked at the dormant buildings towering near and far, the streets through which they so easily traveled. They said more in their silence than did a thousand treatises on disarmament, for more funding to fight disease, for combating whatever dark specters had loomed over the horizon. Worse things waiting.

  The liquor store was down on Market Street, and they had the parking lot
to themselves. Somebody had already saved them the trouble of knocking out the heavy glass in the front door, and inside the stock had been pilfered. Even so, blow off the dust, and you could still throw a colossal kegger from this place.

  Jason hunted down the imported beer and hefted a couple cases of Beck’s Dark while Caleb decided that a little Southern Comfort never hurt anybody. He took one bottle, shrugged his wide shoulders, took another. He followed Jason out to the car, watched as he set the cases beside the Mustang.

  “Wait a sec,” Jason said. “I’m supposed to get Colleen some wine. You mind loading those in the trunk?”

  “Just give me the keys.”

  Jason tossed them over, then ducked back into the store. White wine…he couldn’t shake the feeling that Colleen’s faith in him was still misplaced. He ran across some Liebfraumilch and grabbed two bottles, if only because he remembered it was the drink of choice for a girl he’d made out with at a college party.

  When he emerged onto the parking lot, he saw that he and Caleb were no longer alone. A black Chevy pickup was parked at an angle behind his Mustang. The gun rack in the back window was the first thing he noticed, and the shotgun it sported. Another was in the hands of the man stepping from the passenger side of the truck.

  “Throwing a party?” the driver asked. His voice was harsh and raw, like broken glass.

  Jason neared his car, sized the two men up, not liking what he saw. Something was familiar about the driver, maybe the other one as well. A moment later he knew. The driver had been one of the executioners across from Union Station.

  Shit…left my gun inside the car. This was getting routine.

  “Got an idea,” said the other, who had two weeks’ worth of beard and a big nose. “How’s about you loading us up too? Save us some trouble.”

  “Some other time,” Jason said with heart he absolutely did not feel. “We’re on a pretty tight schedule.”

  “Make time.” It was the driver. He’d moved from his side around toward the front of the truck.

  The bearded man looked closely at Caleb, then kept his eyes on Jason, obviously considering him the riskier of the two. He’d been holding his gun loosely with one hand. Now he held it in both. “These two look familiar to you, Lucas?”

  The driver peered closer at them. “Don’t recognize them.”

  “Me neither. Where the fuck you come from?”

  “Across the river,” Jason said. The last thing he would do was tip them off to everyone else at Brannigan’s.

  “Bullshit,” said Lucas. “There’s liquor stores over there.”

  “We drank it all,” said Jason, and it brought a sputter of laughter from the guy with the shotgun. It was stupid laughter, witless laughter, and instead of putting him more at ease, it further tightened the coil his insides were knotted in.

  Lucas planted one fist on his hip and pointed at them with the other hand. His finger stabbed toward Jason, then Caleb, then the store. “Last chance to do it without bleeding.”

  I’ll hate myself if we give in, but they’ll stomp us at the very least if we don’t.

  “Why don’t you take the whiskey, for starters,” Caleb said. For one brief moment all eyes were on him.

  He moved fast for any age. Caleb tossed one bottle straight up into the air, and this suckered even Jason. All of them glanced at the bottle as it spun and caught the light. Just as it reached its apex, Caleb swung the other bottle into the bearded one’s head. The two bottles broke at the same moment. A frothy brown explosion of Southern Comfort and glass showered onto the asphalt, and the guy went down with it. Lucas gaped for a second, then scrambled back toward his truck door, still open.

  Jason was right behind him, because if Lucas got to that other gun before Jason got to him first…

  Lucas was reaching for the gun rack when Jason kicked the truck door hard enough to dent it. It connected solidly with Lucas’s back and left shoulder, driving his skull into the cab frame. Jason dropped one of the wine bottles onto the lot, and with his free hand twisted his fingers into Lucas’s oily hair. He slammed his forehead into the roof’s edge once, twice, three times, released him. Lucas half turned and slid down, falling unsteadily onto his rump, leaning back against the truck and seat. Trickles of blood and spit dribbled from around his mouth as his eyes roved vacantly.

  “Shot anybody with his hands tied behind his back this week?” Jason asked him.

  Lucas’s eyes tried to focus.

  “That’s right, I was there that day.”

  A bubble of blood burst in the corner of Lucas’s mouth. “Fuck you.”

  “That’s original,” Jason said. He paused a moment, then slashed his foot across Lucas’s nose. Through the sole he felt it give, felt the soft cartilage tear, watched it twist to one side with a fresh rush of blood. Lucas whined deep in his throat.

  Jason recalled the look on Erika’s face that day as the gunfire erupted…like her world was falling apart. And this asshole was a part of that. Part of the cause. The problem. You’re either with us, or against us. No middle ground? Fine.

  Holding the remaining wine bottle by its flanged neck, Jason rapped it against the side of the truck. It shattered and splashed down the fender as if he’d just christened the truck, and he was left with a dripping, jagged-edged claw. He held it at Lucas’s throat, pressing the points in until Lucas shut his eyes.

  He deserves it. They both do. They all do.

  Erika’s face, draining of color.

  And I’m not the one to do it. I can’t. Not like this.

  Jason rose again, tossing the half-bottle aside where it landed with a brittle tinkle. He removed the guns from their window rack. No sense in tempting fate.

  “Tell your boss that two of his pussies just went up against an old man and a college boy. And lost.”

  Jason walked away, around to the other side. Caleb had one booted foot on the bearded man’s throat, with his own gun aimed down at him. He too was half-conscious, his cheek and ear a ragged patchwork of cuts.

  “I’m not that old,” Caleb said.

  Jason swallowed a sickly lump in his throat. “Let’s just get out of here.”

  Caleb shut the trunk lid and Jason fired up the engine, and they swung back onto Market with a lurch and a loud squeal of tires. And just as he swerved left to take the nearest corner, he caught sight of one more familiar figure, leaning against a light pole. Someone who’d vowed he wouldn’t forget Jason. Someone short, cocky…

  The guy who’d indirectly introduced him to Erika early last month down on Memorial. Apparently he’d been watching this entire scene from across the street.

  And he was giving Jason a thumbs-up.

  * *

  Jason had a brief conversation with Rich Patton when they got back. Without giving much of an explanation as to why he was so worked up, he reminded Rich what had been said about Brannigan’s being only a temporary solution. Well, their heads were on straight now, wasn’t it time they start putting the talk behind them and doing something about it? Wasn’t it time they start considering vacating the city? Not only because of the finite resources, but also because of the people they were forced to share them with.

  “And go where?” Rich wanted to know. “We can’t just pack up and move anymore, especially not with winter coming on. We gotta know where we’re going, what’s out there, ’cause you just might run right into something even worse. There’s no Welcome Wagon anymore, in case you didn’t realize.”

  Fuck it, Jason thought. He strode past furniture and people and toys with equal disregard, seeking out solitude within his room. Leaving Caleb with the task of dealing with the others.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Erika asked. “What happened out there?”

  “He had to hurt somebody,” Caleb answered slowly, thoughtfully. Yeah, and he was pretty good at it. “Matter of fact, we both di
d. He liked it and he didn’t, and that don’t seem to sit very well with him.” Caleb searched the growing concern on Erika’s face. “There wasn’t any other way, girl. Trust me on that.”

  Erika’s eyes switched from the doorway he’d disappeared into, to Caleb, and back again. She bit her lip. The worry line put in its inevitable appearance. “Do you think he’d mind if…?”

  Caleb smiled gently, cupped her cheek with a callused hand. “I don’t think he much would.”

  He watched her go, and was left alone to tell the tale. The way they all looked at him, like he was some kind of hero…he didn’t like that at all. Everyone knew about the executions Jason and Erika had seen last month, and it was now like they were all taking this as a big triumph over whatever brutal mindset had spearheaded that. Dream on. You don’t scare off folks like that by kicking a couple of them around. No, that’s like trying to put out a fire with gasoline.

  After the excitement had died down, and he’d frowned at the way Billy Strickland had gone grouching around after seeing Erika follow Jason, he catnapped while sitting up on one of the couches. He drifted in and out for a good long while, never able to rouse himself fully awake. So tired sometimes, he was. Age could be such a cruel foe.

  In and out, in and out, snatches of conversations passing by like wispy breezes, sometimes caught, sometimes not. Late in the afternoon he awoke to see the littlest child, Julie, staring at him and giggling. He knew at once he’d been sleeping with his mouth open. He grinned and swiped at her nose with one large-knuckled finger.

  Caleb’s stomach finally rumbled him awake, and he stretched. Smacked his dry mouth. He paused in mid-stretch when he saw the woman sitting catty-corner from him in an easy chair.

  “Diane?” he said softly, then blinked his eyes, rubbed them.

  She nodded slowly. And he saw in a glance that she wasn’t the same woman who’d left him behind to trek onward to Denver. Her face was more gaunt, and gone were the makeup and eye shadow. In their place was a year’s worth of weary. A little more sadness. A smudge of dirt. Her blond hair had grown out in the past five weeks, and was now tied back with a rubber band.