by JJ Pike
“Statistically speaking, Morgan, how many people die of untreated concussions each year?”
He was right. She could make no assumptions. Midge and Betsy needed to get to the hospital ASAP. She climbed into the front seat. “Aggie, get in.” She made it an order, not a request.
Aggie didn’t move.
Jo turned the key and revved the engine. “We need to get going. Now.”
Jim was behind Aggie but hobbling their way. She’d almost forgotten he was in the mix. Good to see he was ambulatory. When the bullets started to fly, he must have taken cover in their new ditch. Eventually, those ditches were supposed to become fully-functional tunnels connecting each of their properties, but for now their very first ditch had served as a trench. It had done its job. Jim was upright and appeared unscathed. He had lost his cane and was slower than molasses, but he made it to Aggie’s side and wrapped one arm around her shoulder. Aggie didn’t respond. Her eyes were fixed on her little sister.
Jo couldn’t wait around for them to get it together. Jim’s face was drawn, but he looked like the elevator still went to the top floor. “Jim, grab her and follow me, will you?”
Jim didn’t respond. Did she need to go all military on him? Use his rank? Get hostile? She didn’t want to, but she would always do what was necessary to complete her mission. If Jim wasn’t responsive, she’d make him responsive. She decided she’d give it one more try, appeal to his common sense before she went hardcore on him. “I want to get these fine gals to the hospital. I need your help, sailor.”
“Bets okay?” His voice was cracked and strained. Forty years of love and heartache, trials and tribulations slamming up against the fact that his wife might be dead.
Jo couldn’t help him. There wasn’t time for that. He’d understand. He’d seen combat. The only thing she knew how to do was get Betsy and Midge to a surgeon as soon as possible. “They’re both alive. Meet me at the hospital.”
She gunned the engine and careened down the driveway, cursing under her breath. Why hadn’t she set up a sentry? How had she allowed Arthur and his wife to come back to the compound? What use was her training if she fell at the first post and let her people sustain serious injuries or worse?
“Hang in there, girls. You’ve got this.” She hoped she was telling the truth. Betsy had been breathing when they set off, but if she didn’t get her patched up properly, she wouldn’t make it. She had no way of telling whether Midge had a brain injury or not. She hadn’t made a single peep since she’d been grazed by a madman’s bullet. What was his problem, anyway, coming to their place and shooting everyone up? Had the world already gone to seed? The questions circled her brain, buzzing and stinging and providing no answers. Were they in danger of rogue elements storming the place and taking them down? She’d thought she had at least a couple more days to prep the place, but this random shootout had her questioning all those years of training in pattern recognition. She needed to amp it up and prepare them for the worst humanity had to offer.
Chapter Four
Grandma Margaret—Mimi to her grandkids—was never late, which meant Alice had to get her skates on. The turkey was a vision with its crispy skin and tender flesh; the potatoes ready for hunking great dollops of butter and cream. All she had to do was give Paul the masher and he’d be as happy as a clam at high tide. She smiled. Bill had bought her a language course for her birthday and she’d been gobbling up the idioms. Clams were happiest at high tide because they weren’t prey in that short time. They could just enjoy being clams. She ran her hands through her fabulous son’s hair. That was what he was: a happy child, free from harm, away from predators, able to smash the potatoes and see only potatoes.
“Bill?” She poked her head around the den door, pulling the strings of her apron and folding it over the railing at the bottom of the stairs. “Are you ready to carve the bird?”
“Five minutes,” said Bill.
The game was on. She didn’t care for it, grown men chasing a pigskin ball and careening into each other, cracking skulls and addling brains. How was that fun? But he never missed the games at Thanksgiving. The rest of the year he was a model husband, but on this one day he turned into…she searched for the word…it was a good one…on this one day he turned into a schlub. She laughed. Bill was so far from being anything close to a schlub. She was lucky. She’d almost missed him back in college, but he’d made her laugh when laughing was still so hard for her, and that had clinched the deal.
The doorbell rang. Alice patted her hair, though she didn’t much care if it was messy. Bill said it was “charming” when she piled it on top of her head in a makeshift bun. So “charming” would have to do. Today was all about the meal. If dinner went well everything else could take a flying leap. Was that the right phrase? She made a mental note to look it up before bedtime. Now, she had to concentrate on making sure Mimi had a good time. She flung the door open wide and smiled at her mother-in-law.
“I hope you don’t mind…” Mimi left the phrase hanging.
Alice kept her smile in place but didn’t comment. It wasn’t always bad when Mimi started a sentence that way. Sometimes, but not always.
“I know you won’t mind, once you see. You’ll forgive me.” Ack. She was already asking for forgiveness. That meant it was a biggie. She was about to unleash something on them that would change their lives. That was her way. Act now, ask for forgiveness later. She’d brought the kids hamsters one year, an iguana the next. Alice had made her take the “pretty pet python” back to the pet store. Mimi was the quintessential grandmother: give them cake, then send them home so the parents can deal with the sugar high.
“Kids!” Mimi shouted over Alice’s shoulder. “Come see what Mimi got for you.”
Paul skidded out of the kitchen in his stocking feet, coming to a halt at the front door, potato masher still in hand. Petra slid down the bannister in her signature move.
“Shoes,” said Mimi. “Then with me to the car.”
“Clean up the potato you’ve trailed along the hall before you go,” said Alice. But the kids were down the driveway faster than you could say jackrabbit. Then Bill was behind her, kissing her neck, asking her what was going on. “Your mother,” said Alice. “Your mother is what’s going on.”
Petra screamed. Alice shucked Bill and shot out the door, hurtling down the driveway, spinning around the back of the car, ready for the worst.
“They are so cuuuuuuuuuute,” said Petra. So, it had been a squeal and not a scream. Alice couldn’t tell the difference. Not when it came to her kids. “Mimi brought us chicks.”
“I brought you two baby Leghorns and two Auraucana, also known as Easter Egg Chickens.” Mimi was pretty pleased with herself. “They’re both good layers and they can adapt to life in a run, though you know my thoughts on the matter. Chickens weren’t meant to be cooped up.” She elbowed Petra. “Get it? Cooped up?”
Petra laughed. She picked up a baby bird, as gently as anyone had ever picked anything up, and held it up to her mother’s face. “Feel how soft it is, Mom.”
Alice nodded. “Out back with them. Be sure to find out what they eat. These are yours to care for now.”
Mimi held her hand on Alice’s arm. “Give them ten minutes,” she said. “Let them enjoy that natural response, the joy that comes from being a child around young animals, before you lay the responsibility on them.” She roared with laughter. “Get it? Lay?”
Alice didn’t laugh. Mimi was trying to school her on how to raise her children, bad puns notwithstanding. They’d had this conversation before. More than once. Mimi thought “kids should be allowed to be kids” whereas Alice knew that “kids need to be prepared for anything.”
“Paul, you take one Leghorn and I’ll get the other. Leave the Easter Egg chickie for your mother. See if that won’t cheer her up.” Mimi leaned in close. “They lay blue eggs, you know. I thought that’d be something for the kids to squawk about at school.”
“I get it,” said Alice. �
�Squawk.” She even managed a smile. It was Thanksgiving. Everything was going to be perfect. She wasn’t going to get into it with Mimi. Let her say her piece and enjoy her banana cream pie before she went for a slice of pecan pie with vanilla ice cream and all would be well.
She reached into the back of the car and scooped up the last chick. It pecked at her hand, right in that tender place between her thumb and forefinger. It was surprisingly sharp for such a little beak. It pecked again, this time harder. She didn’t want to drop it, that would upset the children, but it was pecking at her and breaking the skin and drawing blood.
Alice switched the bird from one hand to the other, praying it would let up before she had a crater in her hand the size of the Grand Canyon. The pecking didn’t stop. Peck, peck, peck. Bolts of pain shot up her wrist and into her forearm, then up her forearm and into her skull, setting her brain on fire. How could something so small cause so much pain and damage? She blinked once, twice, three times. She wasn’t imagining things. She had moved the bird from her left hand to her right, but the pain was still coursing up her left arm.
The image flickered and faltered, spooling over the reel of her mind and slapping at the light source. It wasn’t real. What she was seeing was a memory, a dream, a trick of the synapses. She could see her hand, now that the pile had shifted. The chick in her fist wasn’t a chick.
It was a rat; a massive, stinking sewer rat, bringer of disease and scourge of nations. Its whiskers tickled her forehand as it opened its vicious little mouth, drew back its yellow teeth and, with one beady black eye trained on hers, sunk them into her newly flayed flesh.
Alice flicked her hand as hard as she could to get the rat to let go. It unlatched itself and hurried away. But it didn’t go far. She could hear it, squeaking and scampering ever closer. She held her breath, waiting. The scratching was close, so close she didn’t dare move a single muscle. She had enough room around her face that the verminous beast could crawl in and be right by her cheek. She wasn’t about to let that happen.
The nose came first. Alice could see it out of the corner of her eye, pink and wet and snuffing the air. He knew she was there. The snout came into her space, then the face with those deep, dark eyes. The ears were snagged on the concrete but popped in as he squirmed and twisted his head. Good. The space he was crawling through was tight and confining, just like hers. He didn’t have enough room to turn around and scramble away. She reared her head back as far as it would go and smashed it into the rat. He squealed and tried to back up. She cheered, triumphant. Blood trickled down her forehead. She didn’t care. She rammed her head into her adversary a second time. And a third. And a fourth.
She barely had time to register the blackout before it was absolute.
Alone in the inky darkness, Alice had no sense of time and no way of telling how long she’d been out of it. She used the pain from her bloodied hand and the egg-sized bump on her head to keep herself focused. “I am Alice Everlee,” she shouted, “and I head-butted a rat in the face until it left me alone.”
If Bill had been there, he’d have laughed. He loved everything she did, even the ridiculous and the bad. Always had. How had she been so lucky, to spend her life with someone who thought the sun shone out of her every pore? “Luckier than Lady Luck, that’s how lucky,” she said. “Lucky enough to triumph over a paltry building collapse.” She was going to find a way out of the subway. No matter that she was jammed in a concrete ravine with no way up and no way down. There had to be rescue efforts underway. Nothing like this happened in Manhattan without a massive number of firefighters descending on the rubble pile. She’d seen it a hundred times. “If it bleeds, it leads.” Wasn’t that what they said? The collapse of K&P would have made the news. There’d be pictures of the mayhem and destruction streaming on repeat into every house in the Tri-State area. Except hers. The cabin was blissfully TV-free. She could put her feet up, close her eyes, and drift off…
“Do not fall back asleep. You are forbidden to fall back asleep.” She’d blacked out, more than once, but now that she was back in the land of the living, she needed to stay there. Doing battle with the rat had set her nerves on edge. She blinked away the image of the rat coming at her again. The images her brain fed her were too real. The pink nose, the flickering whiskers, the long, sharp, yellow teeth. The jaws wide and ready, clamping down on her tender flesh, slitting her skin, drawing blood.
Suddenly she was wide awake and flooded with adrenalin. That wouldn’t last. The body wasn’t adapted to produce or sustain adrenalin at the rate she was pumping it out. She’d burn it all up, sooner or later. She needed to make use of whatever time she had. She needed to get someone’s attention. If she made enough noise, the rescue crews would find her. They had specialized equipment: sonar and radar and cameras on snaking cables that could fit into the tiniest crevice. They would hear her, then dig.
She didn’t dare use her feet to bang out an SOS. The pile had already moved twice, making her contort and gyrate to stay upright in her hole in the wall. One false move and she would be strawberry jam.
It was a Midge joke. “Why were the itty-bitty baby strawberries upset?” Midge had waited and waited. Her youngest daughter could outwait them all. Alice racked her brains, but she couldn’t guess. Three days and five dollars in secret, under-the-table bribes was what it took for Midge to spill the beans. “Because their parents were in a jam.”
Bill had roared with laughter, but Alice had winced. She tried to hide it with a small laugh and a shrug, but she knew Bill had seen her cringe. She couldn’t help it. Her parents had been hacked to death in front of her, their blood red against the pavement, their arms and legs a jumble of nonsense, their deaths impossible to comprehend. Midge’s joke didn’t feel like a joke, but there was no way she would punish her little girl for simply being a little girl.
She couldn’t think about that now. She wasn’t going to leave her children the way her parents had left her. Neither would she punish them for things they had no control over. She was going to make it out, make it home, make it up to them.
“Helloooo,” she screamed. No points for originality, but ten out of ten for volume. Was that the best thing, though? Shouting? She’d be hoarse faster if she strained her vocal chords. But what else was there? Her body was encased in fallen rock, precariously balanced, engaged in the world’s most dangerous game of Jenga.
There was metal. She’d felt it when she first woke. It had to be close to her face or hands. Nothing else was exposed to the elements. She could rule out her face. No metal there. Even if she’d been willing to bash her head against the jagged wall in front of her again, it wouldn’t conduct much sound. She and the rat had gone tête-à-tête, giving her the opportunity to acquaint herself intimately with the walls or floors or ceilings or basement or whatever it was that was up in her grill.
Good idiom. The kids would like that. “The concrete, which had fallen down into the tunnels below Manhattan, got up in my grill.” Or was that outdated already? She was always a step behind, and it wasn’t only because she worked all the time. They did it deliberately. Not just her kids, all kids. They made language their own. It was a developmental necessity, a bit like defying your parents. She’d read all the best books. Kids were compelled to differentiate themselves from their parents in order to claim their own identity. They didn’t really “hate” her, they were just expressing their frustration when she didn’t capitulate to their latest demands.
Being a parent was a lot like being a hostage negotiator, though the “hostage” might be a cell phone or a night out with friends or extra candy. “I withhold my love until you let me have X,” said the kids. Or “I slam doors and call you names until you let me do Y.” She’d been lucky for the most part, but Petra had been a handful in the middle teenage years. Thank goodness they grew out of that hormonal hell.
Bill was too soft on them. He let them get away with murder.
“Nice use of an idiom.” It was Bill’s voice. But youn
ger. “You definitely sound American now.” She smiled. She’d never believed anyone would love her the way he loved her: unabashedly, completely, in spite of her many flaws and failings. That was what it meant, “for better or worse.” It wasn’t about money or financial stability, it was a vow to love one another through all the vagaries of personality. Bill had been there when her demons threatened to take her down, seen her at her worst, loved her still.
She stared into the black, dank, void. Bill brought light and love and laughter to their lives every day. There was no one else she knew of who was so pure, so good. She wasn’t ready to die. Even knowing she’d been married to the best man alive didn’t mean she’d had her fill of him. She wanted to see that light again. No, needed to. She needed to see him, tell him, thank him, hold him. She needed to make it out.
