He pulled it out of the way and then found the remains of the last fire. He was able to discern at least two logs; charcoal crumbled under his touch but towards the ends he found unburned timber. Ever the optimist, he decided to build a pyre before looking for something like kindling or paper to complement the lone match.
He raised the drawer and smashed it on the bricks. In minutes he had assembled what felt like a decent little pyre of splintered timber in and around the unburned portion of the two small logs. When – if – he got it going, the shards of drawer would burn quickly. Hopefully the logs would take. Once he had light, he would be able to find plenty of fuel for the fire by wrecking more furniture. He sat back on his haunches for a second; now he just needed paper.
Luke rose to his feet and made his way back along the wall until he came to the coffee table again. He knelt and reached underneath, his hands finding a shelf. He groped blindly, hoping to find a long-forgotten magazine or newspaper but instead his fingers encountered a web.
He yelped, nearly losing the match in his teeth and snatched his hand away, wiping it on his jeans in disgust. He hated spiders and right now, in the darkened old house, he imagined there was a big sucker just waiting for him to put his hand back in. He heard another creak from the floor above and shivered.
Nope. Nothing for it.
He pulled the match from his teeth and put it in his jacket pocket.
“Come on you pussy,” he grated. “It’s just a web.”
Taking a deep breath, he reached in again and swiftly moved his hand along the shelf from side to side before grabbing the first item his fingers found. A book! From its size and weight, a thick paperback.
“Yes!”
It was a shame to burn a book, but there was no way he was reaching into that dark recess again when the book would provide perfectly good fuel.
Back at the fireplace he began to rip pages out of the book, crumpling them into balls and placing them strategically in and under the timber pyre he had put together. When he was satisfied, he pulled the match out of his pocket and gingerly pinched it between his thumb and index finger as he located the closest ball of paper with the back of his hand.
He struck the match on the brickwork of the floor of the hearth.
Nothing.
“Come on!”
He struck again. A spark.
On the third strike it burst into a bright but weak flame and he quickly held it against the crumpled page. It caught immediately. Shadows began to dance in celebration on the walls of the cozy living room.
Sighing with relief, he pushed the ball a little further under the broken timber of the old drawer with his hook. The fire consumed the paper quickly without the wood catching and he quickly shoved another of the crumpled pages next to it.
Finally, the slenderest of the shards took, and he quickly ripped more pages out, pushing them under the flaming kindling. The smoke was thick and grey, the varnish on the timber of the broken drawer burning with a faint chemical smell.
Now able to see by the light of the fire, Luke’s eyes fell upon a basketful of evenly cut logs barely a foot to the right of the mantelpiece. Next to it on the floor was a low stack of neatly folded newspapers and a big old axe, its haft resting against the wall.
Luke shook his head and smiled wryly.
“Oh well, better late than never.”
He put two of the cut logs on the fire and watched the flames lick and dance over them for a few minutes. He’d always found fire hypnotic and remembered one of his mother’s favorite things had been to sit out on their balcony around the fire pit on cool fall nights.
He felt a trickle of loss but did not allow himself to think about what had happened earlier that day, lest the trickle become a flood that would sweep him away.
He picked up the annihilated paperback and turned it over.
The Skeleton Crew, by Stephen King.
A collection of short stories by the master of horror. Just what he needed in a dark, abandoned home.
“No thanks Stevie boy,” he said aloud. “Love your work, but not tonight.”
He tossed it aside and stood up, looking around the room. It was a typical American living room. TV in the corner. A bigger coffee table in the center of the room. Fireplace, sofas. Christmas decorations still hanging from walls.
He walked across to the wall beside the TV and looked at the framed pictures on the wall.
From what he could tell, it had been owned by a handsome silver haired couple in their sixties. Their portrait was in the center and around them, like satellites around a sun, were assorted children and grandchildren.
Luke felt a sense of sadness wash over him.
I’ll have to tell Brooke…
Then it hit him. Brooke was gone. He had forgotten in the moment and fell to his knees as the grief washed over him afresh. The groan of anguish that escaped his lips was almost animalistic and faded into sobs as he lay down on the carpet and tucked his knees into his chest.
3
When Luke awoke it was still dark and the fire had died down to embers. He sat up. His head was heavy and his eyes dry. He crawled to the hearth. Within a few minutes he had the fire blazing again and adjourned to the sofa, his head on a cushion with his feet hanging over the armrest at the other end.
It was no use. He couldn’t sleep now, his mind headed straight back to the confrontation earlier that day and replayed it over and over, trying to work out how he could have prevented the awful event that followed. He blamed himself. Blamed Isaac. Even blamed Brooke.
“Why couldn’t you have just stayed behind the barricade!”
He cried. He raged. He cried some more.
Finally, after an hour, he got up from the sofa, drained, and went to the doors by the fireplace, pushing them open.
The glow of the flames revealed a hallway with stairs leading to the second floor to the right and a neat kitchen to the left. Luke propped the door open with an armchair and went through to the kitchen. He was surprised to find the pantry full, a treasure trove of canned food.
He wasn’t hungry though. He was thirsty and there right in front of him was a shrink wrapped six pack of Evian water. Even better, right behind the water, was a six pack of Budweiser.
Luke pushed aside the water and grabbed the beer before heading back into the living room.
***
Four and a half beers and a lot of tears later, Luke heard the creaking upstairs again. Imbued with a healthy dose of Dutch courage, he looked up at the ceiling and scratched his chin.
“We should investigate, Captain,” he said in his best Mr. Spock voice.
He stood up a little too quickly and steadied himself before heading to the door. He froze on the cusp, performed a drunken U-turn and headed back to the fireplace.
“Aha! Come here my friend, I may need your assistance.”
He picked up the axe he found earlier and hefted it before heading back towards the hallway. The cloudy night had obviously cleared; there was more moonlight coming from the floor above now. He could make out the stairs clearly.
“Set phasers to stun Spock, I’m going in – yes, Captain…”
He climbed the steps two at a time and reached an open landing that the previous owners had used as a study, the light from the double size window revealing a desk, long dead computer and a small sofa.
As he passed, Luke ran his hand affectionately over the computer monitor, and then entered the upstairs hallway. When he reached the first door on the right, he did his best Bruce Lee and kicked it open so hard it bounced off the wall and slammed back into him as he went through, nearly knocking him over.
“Ouch… smooth move, Captain,” said Spock.
A bed. A dresser. A wardrobe. Nothing else.
He walked back into the hall and whistled nonchalantly as he sidled up to the next door. No use trying to be stealthy now. This time he tucked the axe under his arm and turned the door knob, letting the door creak open before gripping his axe and c
harging in with a roar.
Another empty room, but, as his yell faded he heard a faint scrabbling coming from the hallway, as if he’d awoken something… or someone.
With his heart beating hard he headed into the hall again. Ten feet along, to the left, was another door. This one open.
“You might want to come out now!” he called. “I’m armed, and we don’t want any accidents, do we?”
The only reply from within the room was a bump and scrape and he slowly crept towards the open door, axe raised and hook at the ready.
“Okay, we’ll do it the hard way.”
He rushed the door and skidded to a halt as a long, low shape dashed towards him then pulled up with a loud hiss followed by a menacing mewling sound.
A freakin’ cat! It was easy to make out its shape in the dimness. No ordinary cat though, it was at least twice the size of any housecat he’d ever seen, and it was in full attack mode, its body sideways, back arched and spitting venomously. Luke took an involuntary step back when it darted another few steps forward as if daring him to attack.
Luke relaxed and held up his axe in surrender.
“Easy big guy. I’ll let you be.”
That was when he heard a mewling from the shadows behind the angry feline. He looked at her dangling underbelly and put two and two together.
“Ahh, no offense meant by the big guy crack. You’re clearly all woman. I’ll leave you and your babies to it.”
The momma cat didn’t stand down as he slowly backtracked into the hallway. He heard her threatening mewling all the way to the bottom of the stairs. More comfortable knowing who his mysterious roomie was, Luke headed back down and into the kitchen. He decided he’d had enough beer and grabbed a bottle of water from the six pack he set aside earlier. He drank the whole bottle before heading outside to relieve himself.
Back in the living room, he made sure to close the door to the hallway and stoked the fire before laying down on the sofa.
He was asleep within seconds.
4
Luke awoke the next morning with a fuzzy head. He downed another bottle of water for breakfast – it wasn’t bad considering it was about six years past its expiry. Lacking energy, he lay back down, and his mind turned to what he would do next.
In the end, he did nothing. He had zero motivation. He was unable to think of anything for more than a few seconds before the events of the day before swamped him. The grief didn’t abate. It sucked the strength from him and he found all he could do was lay on the sofa, drifting in and out of fitful sleep.
He had no idea what time it was when he finally roused himself from the sofa again, but he was starving. He made a quick trip into the jungle like backyard and took a leak before heading back in and treating himself to a can of tiny potatoes washed down with the last can of beer.
He was crying again as he swallowed the last few bites and slammed his hand down on the table in frustration. Grief, it appeared, came in waves and it seemed the only way to escape it completely was to sleep.
Wishing he had more beer, he dragged himself to the sofa and collapsed in a heap. Sleep took him eventually and he dreamed of Brooke. She was walking down a steep set of steps carved into a mountain. He followed, always behind and never able to catch her. He called and called, but she never turned around.
“Brooke!”
His eyes snapped open, awoken by the sound of his own desperate yell. Loss swept over him anew.
On the third morning in the abandoned home, he woke up feeling a little better. Sunlight was streaming through the glass of the front door and he was hungry again. He fixed himself a cold breakfast of beans and franks and, as he ate, came up with a plan of action.
He couldn’t stay there any longer and had no interest in heading back to the others in the city center. In fact, he wondered if he ever would. When he took his dirty plate back to the kitchen, he spotted a faded postcard stuck to the fridge door by a magnet.
Greetings from Portland, Maine! It said in happy yellow letters over a beach.
The coast. He remembered visiting Portland with his grandparents as a kid and loving it. It seemed as good a place as any to head for. Why not? It would be a long, long walk but what else did he have to do with his life for now?
Decided, he went into the living room and pulled the drapes open. The family in the picture smiled down upon him and he gave them a thumb up.
“Thanks for having me folks, but it’s time I got moving.”
They didn’t look the sort to have guns, so he didn’t bother looking. He decided he would keep the axe, just in case of feral humans – the only problem was, he didn’t want to carry it.
He went through the kitchen and opened the connecting door to the garage. It was a big garage, big enough for two cars but only contained one under a canvas cover. The rest of the ‘man cave’ was perfectly ordered, shelves full of gleaming, well ordered tools.
Luke decided his first job would be to fashion a holster of some sort that he could use to carry his new weapon on his back. Number two would be to find a sack or backpack of some sort. He planned to raid the kitchen before he left.
An hour later he had fashioned a crude over-the-shoulder holster from a tool belt he had found in the garage workshop. He’d removed the pouch and all but one of the larger leather loops and had to stretch the circlet (probably designed to hold a hammer) carefully until it could accommodate the thickness of the axe handle.
When he was satisfied, he put the belt over his right shoulder, looped it under the opposite arm and then turned it until the circlet was up near his shoulder blade. He slid the axe handle into the leather circlet and allowed it to slide down until it caught the head.
Pulling it out by the head wasn’t ideal, it would have been much better handle first, but there was no way he could fashion anything like a clip to hold the axe upside down in a short period of time.
He practiced pulling it free by the axe head until his muscles were sore, getting quicker with each attempt. Next, he graduated to two moves. The initial pulling the axe free, then a release, allowing it to fly into the air before grabbing it by the handle with the same hand as it fell.
He dropped it the first three times. Caught it on the fourth attempt. Dropped it on the fifth. Caught it. Caught it. Caught it.
He drilled for an hour and, while he wasn’t quite satisfied, knew he could get more practice as he went.
He didn’t find a backpack but settled for a small hessian sack he found under the sink in the kitchen. From the pantry he placed as many cans as he thought he would feel comfortable carrying, along with the last of the water. He finished his cache with a steak knife, can opener and a salt shaker.
After filling the sack, Luke went back the garage to collect his axe and pulled open the roller door. Sunlight flooded the space and he suddenly wondered what vehicle was under the cover. He thought he could spare a minute to look.
Whatever it was it looked low and mean. He bent down and grasped the corner of the cover and slowly pulled it up slowly to reveal the grill.
“Holy shit!”
Luke ripped the cover back and over the car to reveal a gleaming black ’69 Mustang. He knew the car on sight, it had been his dad’s obsession.
His dad saying, When I get my ’69 Mustang… was the trigger of many good-natured ribbings from his mom. Sure Honey, as soon as the mortgage is paid off you can start saving for it.
Luke smiled and ran his hand down the masculine lines of the muscle car as he reminisced. It was a peach. In perfect condition, the black paintwork flawless and the chrome gleaming.
He tried the door. Locked. Maybe there were keys in the kitchen? He knew it wouldn’t start, but suddenly he had the urge to sit in the car. He headed back inside and scoured the kitchen for the keys.
He’d seen most of the house and was pretty sure the former owners had left in another vehicle. They certainly hadn’t died in the house. That meant the keys should be here somewhere.
It was no
where to be found and he headed back out to the garage almost ready to give up when he saw a plastic organizer on the wall beside the door. He didn’t dare to hope as he rummaged through the pockets, pulling out pens and old bills before finding the Mustang keys in the bottom pocket.
Luke rushed to the driver’s door and slotted the key home, popping the lock and pulling the door open reverently before starting to climb in. He was brought to an abrupt halt when his axe caught the top of the door opening.
Jeez! Idiot.
A few seconds later he was sitting behind the steering wheel sans axe. The interior smelled of leather and very faintly of gasoline. He breathed the scent deep. He spent a minute or two running his hand over the wheel and running the automatic transmission through its gears. He imagined hammering that sleek mother through the abandoned streets.
There was no way he could get out of the Mustang without at least trying the ignition. He picked the keys up from the passenger seat where he had dropped them and slipped it into the slot beside the wheel.
“Come on!” he whispered and turned the key forward.
Nothing. Not even a click.
Oh well.
A little disappointed but not surprised, he climbed out. He took the time to pull the cover back over the car, he couldn’t bear to leave it exposed. Besides, who knew? One day he might be back.
He was about to head out when he spied a tall metal closet on the opposite wall. He decided to have a quick peek. It didn’t have any locks so there was a low chance of finding a firearm, but one never knew what other treats might be on offer.
It was empty but for two hangers upon which hung black motorcycle leathers. Jacket and pants. They were well worn but looked heavy duty. On the floor of the cupboard was a helmet.
Hmm. Leathers and helmet. No motorcycle. As he ran his fingers down the sleeve of the jacket, Luke re-enacted the conversation that in his imagination might have led to such an outcome.
“It’s me or the bike George, you’re too old for these shenanigans!” he said in his best old lady voice.
Luke's Trek Page 2
