Beyond Dead | Book 4 | The Island

by Frost, Christopher

  “Why do you want to know?”

  “Easy, Kat,” Justin said.

  “I can appreciate your concern for a stranger wanting to know about your destination. I just know of a safe place and good people that might just take you in. It isn’t Canada and I don’t know if you have your heart set on that but I think my friends have a good thing going. There’s another child there as well. Not a baby. But a nice young boy.”

  Robby and Justin both looked at Kat waiting for her to answer.

  “How can we trust you?” Kat asked.

  “You can’t. Not really. The best I can do is give you my word and you will have to decide from there. I have to get moving. Losing daylight. It’s your choice, miss.”

  “Ok. We’ll take the address and make a decision on the way,” Kat said and then hesitantly added, “Thank you.”

  “I’ll write it down. Just one more thing. Any of you three have a cell with enough charge left in it?”

  “Yeah but what’s the point? We can’t make calls. The system is down,” Robby said.

  “Not a call. Just one of those selfies you kids are so fond of. Let my friends know you met me and it’s all good.”

  “I’ll get my phone,” Justin said with a grin.

  Justin held his phone out in front of him with his long outstretched arm. Kat with the baby on Bob’s right and Robby and Justin on his left. Bob held two thumbs up and hoped that would be enough to get them on the island. If not he doubted they would really be in any danger from his old group. Bob did his best to smile as did Robby and Justin. Kat’s face was hard under the dirt and dried tears.

  “Good luck.” Bob shook the three kid’s hands and lastly said to Kat, “You have a beautiful boy there, miss. He’s lucky to have a mother as strong as you.”

  The group and Bob drew apart in separate directions. Robby had found a map book in the backseat and was thumbing through it to find New Hampshire and the roads that Bob had written down for them. It seemed easy enough but Robby couldn’t even be sure that he had ever read an actual map before. Even back in school.

  Chapter 20

  Rebel lay on the deck of the Formula 400 Super Sport with a red bikini top and Daisy Dukes cut so you could see the bottom of her ass. She wore a reflective pair of Ray Bans and held a glass of champagne in one hand, the bottle on the deck next to her bare feet, and a cigarette smoking between her fingers.

  “It’s about time boys,” she yelled up to them with a Cheshire grin.

  “Amy” Ransom started to say when Tuck cut him off.

  “You’re dad wants us to let you know he’s pissed, Rebel,” Tuck said. He called her by the only name he had ever known her by.

  “Oh ya?”

  “That’s what he said. Also he wants you to go back to the house.”

  “Is that so?”

  “It is.”

  “So why isn’t he here to get me?”

  Elvis chimed in under his breath to his brothers but still loud enough so even Rebel could hear, “Probably putting it to someone’s nanny.” All three brothers had sneering laughs.

  Tuck stepped from the dock on to the deck of the boat and took the cigarette from Rebel’s fingers. He took a deep drag and said, “I don’t know. I’m not a fucking family therapist. You know how to drive this thing?”

  “Yes,” Rebel told Tuck. He handed her back the cigarette and blew the cloud of smoke from his nostrils.

  “Then let’s get moving. We’re wasting daylight here kids.” Tuck moved to the back of the boat and sat down grabbing Rebel’s bottle of champagne and pulling a cigarette from her pack and lighting it. “Where we headed, Chief?”

  Ransom Palmer looked down on Tuck with disdain but held his regal composure.

  “Amy, could you please head up towards Weirs Beach and we’ll check that location out today and work our way up toward Meredith?”

  “Sure thing, Chief.” Rebel winked at Tuck when she called Ransom ‘Chief’. He smiled back at her as he took a long pull from the bottle.

  The Trinity Twins were all sitting at the bow as Rebel pulled the boat out of the dock and followed Ransom’s orders steering the boat toward Weirs Beach. She couldn’t imagine that that was the place to find any kind of supplies but she knew better than to argue with Ransom. Rebel might have felt a small bit tougher with Tuck along but they had just barely met and she had known Ransom Palmer for her entire life. He was not a man to fuck with. Regardless of that cane that she was almost a hundred percent sure was just for show.

  Rebel looked to the stern and saw that Tuck’s eyes were on her. She was pretty sure they were. He sat with Ransom and smoked her cigarettes and drank her liquor. As the boat rose and fell over a small lake wave Tuck smiled at her and she could feel herself get wet. It was too bad she was with Forrest and had confessed that she would be a good girl. Tuck was also with that old lady and the kid. But she couldn’t help but wonder if everyone went to shore and she was left alone with Tuck on the boat if he wouldn’t come up behind her and press himself against her and just take her shorts down with the muscular arms before he grabbed her hips and they became one.

  As Rebel steered the boat her hand lingered at the waist band of her Daisy Dukes before she knew no one was watching and she dipped two fingers below the waist line and felt her hardened clit and the amount of wetness that had accrued.

  Chapter 21

  Morning light was piercing through the trees as leaves fell from the gentle wind. The road was painted with all colors of autumn’s death. The Hobo King walked through the leaves shuffling his feet. He was tired and had been walking all night. Beside him he had Adam and Christine and behind him still walking on all fours was Candy. The remainder of his horde he had left back on Crystal Avenue at the church. He could still feel them and could feel the other dead the lingered inside homes and around the back road streets but he did not call out to them.

  The walk had been long. Although there were plenty of cars left behind and still fueled he wasn’t sure that he could find the place he was searching for at the wheel of a car. All of it had to come back to him piece by piece like putting together a giant jigsaw puzzle. Some streets he remembered while he walked through the night in the utter darkness until he realized the street he was on held no piece for him. He would return to his forlorn (does this work?) path and carry on.

  He knew the house before he ever stepped foot in front of it. All of the houses that lined the road had become more and more familiar and until he was a child again riding a tricycle down the same quiet street and he stood in front of the dilapidated remains of 312 Laconia Street. A duplex – the left side the one he grew up in for some time – with paint faded by the sun, moss growing between the lines of the shingles on the roof and a yard littered with so many toys and broken down cars it looked like a used car lot.

  “No,” the Hobo King told his three creations, “stay here.”

  Alone he walked up to the house and stepped up to the screened porch that had more screen missing than there. The door hung open off its hinges and the Hobo King stepped inside and over a few bags of trash that had been picked open by rodents and were now heavily covered in flies. He went to the door of the house and tried the knob. It was unlocked. With a deep sigh – this is a bad idea – he turned the door knob and stepped into the house closing the door behind him.

  It was a bad idea. The filthy house was not what he saw when he looked around. It was decades earlier in his mind and the house was in pristine condition. He saw shadows of his parents by the red stove as his father had come home from work and wrapped his dirty hands around his mother pulling her close. His brother was at the table racing a ZL1 Hot Wheels across the table between his glass of milk and around his plate like it was a racetrack. The Hobo King was in his booster seat – not strapped in – and eating macaroni and cheese. The only thing he would eat when he was that age.

  He stepped into the living room and saw his father drinking a beer while a cigarette smoldered in the ashtray. His fat
her looked disheveled and had a beard growing along with his hair that was getting too long. His mother was yelling while holding a fistful of mail with OVERDUE stamped on the front. On the floor near his mother’s leg he was just a child and crying as his parents fought. In the shadow of the hallway his brother stood with an action figure that he was removing the limbs and head from as he watched his parents fight.

  There were small pools of blood on the stairs. Handprints in blood that were left in the echo of his past and smeared on the walls climbing up the staircase. The Hobo King followed the trail of blood up the stairs to the next floor. He saw a beautiful young woman in a floral dress with a red ribbon bound in her hair to hold it out of her face. She was lying on the floor and reaching out for the small boy in the closet. The Hobo King walked to the boy and looked down at his mother as she cried out in pain, “Albert.”

  Albert?

  That was his name.

  Albert was his name!

  Alby, his mother would call him when his father wasn’t around. She had hated the name Albert but it had been his paternal grandfathers name so it had become his. As his brother was named for their paternal great-grandfather, Colburn.

  “Alby Tucker,” his whispered the name like a secret.

  Albert watched as his young self went to his mother and his older brother climbed the stairs with blood and tears on his face. Behind his back he held the silver plated revolver that his mother had just used to kill the drunk who wore the name of FATHER in their house. Only he had lost that part of himself over the months of not having a job after getting laid off and fell deeper into the juice than the pursuit of another job. His father had begun to steel and then rob and then robbed and stole and one night while his mother was rocking him she had cried into his small neck and told him that she was sure that her husband had killed a man.

  Colburn came up the stairs and walked over to him and grabbed him by the wrist trying to pull him way from his mother. The Hobo King wanted to reach out and smack his older brother across the face to get him away but these were only memories. Vivid high definition memories. Yet, memories just the same.

  “I saved my boys,” Alby’s mother argued with his older brother.

  The bang from the gun shook him to his core. Not only the image of his young self from the past but also the present Hobo King shook with fright and wrapped his arms around him as he tried to step away from the scene. Young Alby crawled backward like a crab vanishing into the closet as Colburn walked after him, the gun still in his hand, the barrel still smoking.

  “I had to,” Colburn told Alby, “Mommy was bad.”

  Alby hissed at his brother.

  “No!” the Hobo King swung his scepter down so that it would have struck his brother directly on top of his head and killed him instantly. Instead the skull top of the scepter struck the floor and smashed through the decayed flooring.

  Tears stained the Hobo King’s face and his eyes were once again full like a dirty oil drum. His hand reached out for the dead image of his mother as if he could pull her back to this reality by sheer will alone and the house began to shake.

  Adam, Christine and even Candy appeared at the top of the stairs feeling their master’s distress. The Hobo King looked at them with a wide grin on his face while his eyes cried tortured tears. His hand was still outstretched trying to pull his mother back from the dead.

  “Do you see?” he asked his three creations as blood began to ooze out of both nostrils and the floor boards were tearing away from the nails that held them in place, “Do you see what I see? Can you see him?”

  “Yes,” Adam spoke the simple word.

  The creations could see what their master wished them to see.

  “Find him,” the Hobo King said to Candy as his spat between his clenched teeth and blood sprayed onto the dusty floor. His eyes had begun to leak the oil like substance along with his tears and blood was now dripping from his nostrils and ears and painted his lips a shade of red a woman might wear on an evening out.

  “Find. My. Brother.”

  Candy turned and lunged to the bottom of the stairs with all the grace of a cat and tore off into the early morning daylight. Not only had they seen the image of what had happened that day but also all the images of the Hobo King’s memories. His days spent in foster care, first with his brother and then by himself as his brother was taken somewhere else. Then an older image of his brother when the boy had become a man and found Alby in a soup kitchen and tried to take him away. Alby had dumped his hot soup and then steaming cup of coffee on his brother and run out into the night and filled his veins with enough poison that he should have died and not just woke with the needle still in his arm.

  “Father.” Adam gripped the Hobo King by the shoulder and the Hobo King turned on the First and slammed his body into the wall. Sheetrock broke and the added to the dusty air. The Hobo King pressed his scepter against Adam’s throat and it lilted his head back.

  “Do not ever call me by that name. I am not your father.”

  Adam gripped the scepter by the head of the skull and pushed it down away from his throat.

  “Father. Okay?” Adam asked. Unfazed by the Hobo King’s reaction.

  Christine stood as he once had in that hallways as a voyeur forced to watch the end of his mother’s life.

  “Okay?” Adam asked again. The hand that was not forcibly trying to get the scepter away from his body was reaching out for the Hobo King’s shoulder and in a very human way he squeezed the Hobo King as though he might have had the capacity to care.

  “Adam, Adam, Adam. I’m so sorry,” the Hobo King said and grabbed the First by the back of the neck and pulled him close and held him in his arms. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know what came over me. Please, forgive me?”

  The same words that had been echoed over three decades earlier in the same house to a woman and her two sons after Alby’s father had had too much to drink and became violent. He always regretted it when he was sober. But the monster that lurked inside this house when he was not sober was a completely different beast.

  “I am so sorry.” The Hobo King stroked Adam’s head and cried against him as he held him very much like a son.

  “I am so sorry.”

  March 28th, 2017 to September, 22 2017

  Dear Friend,

  I am taking a hiatus from Beyond Dead. It will not be long and I will not leave you hanging. You have come this far with the group of survivors on Governor’s Island and Bob that I promise their story will continue. For now I can give you a small teaser of what is to come. The story is going to take a few months of a time jump forward until the winter has settled over New Hampshire and Lake Winnipesaukee has frozen over.

  When winter has come to New Hampshire in 2017 I will put my fingers back to the keyboard and return to the island, the Hobo King, and potentially we may learn the fat of Bob on his quest for his daughter. The latter I cannot promise. I know we all love Bob but I don’t know if his story will continue.

  So, if you live in New England or watch the news know that when you hear of snow falling on our small state that I will be in front of my computer with a mug of green tea, bottles of seltzer water, and the music will be playing on my record player.

  For now, I have other characters clawing at my brain wanting to tell their story so I must heed their call and spill their story to the page.

  See you this winter!

  Best wishes,

  Christopher Frost

  October 8, 2017

  Post Script.

  A few months ago, I started to reformat my Beyond Dead series for Amazon KDP. As an indie writer I believed this would give me the best avenue to get my voice out there as a writer, especially with the option to have my book read for free if a person belonged to the Kindle Unlimited program. The problem with revisiting all of these stories was the opportunity to, let’s say accidently, make edits and changes to not only the story but also the continuity. One such example was the original town the Hobo Ki
ng visits, where he starts to remember his past, was originally called Nutfield. The problem with naming it Nutfield in this dystopian world was that I have used Nutfield in other stories and those characters would come to end in this Beyond Dead world.

  There are suggestions and hints that I could always use a multiverse scenario where both worlds exist simultaneously but with different realities. For me that isn’t really a path I want to explore. Never say never but at this point I’m going to leave the multiverse alone.

  It has been three years since I started book five of the Beyond Dead series, the subtitle – as I’ll reveal here because you deserve it – is The Winter. At this moment as I work on The Winter I am sure this will be the final installment of the Beyond Dead series. My intention was to make a six episode arc but I think I would be cheating the reader if I broke up The Winter just for the mere fact of making a sixth book.

  I’m rambling on. I’ll try to stay on track and let you know why it has taken three years to get the fifth book completed.

  If you follow me on Instagram or Facebook you know that I have greatly struggled with mental health. I won’t go into detail about diagnosis and medications and all of that but I am an advocate for those that struggle and if someone reaches out to me I do my best to help them with what I have personally experienced. Over the last three years I have been in some dark places. So dark that at times I thought I might actually take my life because the thought of waking up the next day was too much to bare. Luckily I did not make that choice.

  I met a great doctor by the name of Dr. Hafez and this brilliant man who had come all the way from Egypt changed my life. I started TMS – transcranial magnetic stimulation – and began a year long journey to try and escape the hell of depression.

  Winter’s passed and I always thought of Beyond Dead but could not bring myself to revisit the series and I pretty much assumed it was dead and buried. Until this year.