Mark Tufo - Alive in a Dead World

Would she live long enough to see another sentient being rise from the ashes of our deaths? Would dolphins come ashore and finally take their rightful place as care-takers of the land? Would zombies give anything a chance to get a foothold? They ate everything. They were worse than locusts. They stripped the land clean of every type of animal. Looks like it was going to be the age of plants. I hope Eliza likes roses.

I had spent the last few seconds mulling over my dark thoughts when Josh interrupted me. Maybe the kid had an idea what he was in for. “I will be thirteen. I miss my dad, but I know he’s not coming back. I don’t tell my mom that because she needs to believe that I think he is. I need to see what it is like out there. We won’t be able to stay here forever, no matter what my mom says. Sometimes I think that she just doesn’t want to think about it. I think about it every day. We’ve got maybe six months of food and three months of bottled water, so what time are we leaving?”

“You’re a realist, Josh, and I can appreciate that,” I told him, and that was the honest truth. “But you’re not my kid and the danger out there, it’s real. This isn’t a training exercise. I would no sooner put you in any needless danger than I would any of my own.”

Mary had at some point come up the stairs and had been at Josh’s doorway while I spoke to him. She grudgingly nodded at me for what I said to him, but she still didn’t want him to be with me. The kid might have been thinking about going out at some point while he was with his mother, but he had never before voiced it. So again, something else was my fault by default.

“Come on, Josh. It’s time for bed,” Mary said, grabbing her son by the shoulders, steering him towards his bed.

It didn’t seem that late to me, but that wasn’t what this was about anyway. I took one longing look at the Lego’s I wanted to play with and headed downstairs, making sure that BT led the way. If he fell down the stairs behind me, I’d be crushed.

Mary came down a few minutes later. “I’d appreciate if you didn’t put any wild thoughts in my son’s head,” she said hotly.

“Those ‘wild thoughts’,” I told her with air quotes and everything, “came from the mouth of your son without any prompting from me.”

“He doesn’t understand what is going on!” she yelled and then brought her voice down to that inside yelling tone, cognizant of the fact that she had just put her offspring to bed.

“I think you underestimate him. He understands, probably even more so than you. He knows that his father isn’t coming back, he understands that you have a finite supply of food and water and more importantly, he understands that as the man of the family, he is wholly unprepared to defend the both of you. I’m not arguing in the least to take him with me, Mary. I’m just telling you what is going through the boy’s head. He’s growing up fast because he has to. Just because last year he might have been playing with Pokemon cards and plastic dinosaurs doesn’t mean he can’t comprehend the danger around him now.”

Mary sat down hard, I thought for sure she was going to miss the couch completely, again. As it was, she had to put her hand on the armrest to keep her ass from going to the ground. After she had situated herself properly, she brought her wet hand to her face. “What the hell is this?” she said, showing her hand to me.

What the fuck? I thought. It’s not like I took a piss on her couch while she wasn’t looking.

BT raised his hand like he was in the second grade. “I tend to drool a little, when I sleep sometimes,” he finished, adding the qualifier.

“Gross,” Mary said, heading for the kitchen to wash her hand off.

“Thanks man,” I said to BT. “That took the heat off for a minute.”

“She’ll be back,” he said as we heard the water running in the next room.

“Wow, she’s pissed,” Gary said, coming into the room with us. He was talking, but looking at the wrapper to the granola bar he was eating. “These are fantastic, I’ve never heard of them,” Gary said around a mouthful of nuts. (I’m not sure exactly about the contents he was chewing on, I just wanted to write that). “I’d sleep with one eye open, nope maybe both eyes, one for Deneaux and one for Mary. It really is kind of funny how you bring out the worst in the females around you.”

“Ah, brother, the one constant I have in life, no matter how far I fall, someone in my family will be there to kick me where I lay.”

He smiled.

“Touching,” Deneaux said sarcastically. “What time are we leaving in the morning.”

“We?” I asked her.

“I want to find him as much as you do,” she said falsely.

“You don’t lie as well as you think you do,” I told her. “And you’re staying here.”

Her facial expression nearly matched Mary’s from a few moments previous. Deneaux left, heading to the opposite side of the house where there was a sitting room and a large chair. I could only hope that she would get sucked into the oversized cushions and teleported to an alternate reality, one where old crones were stoned for being witches. I think Salem may have had it right.

“Why would you let her know you’re suspicious? I’d rather tell a pit viper I was highly allergic to its venom and I didn’t have an antidote,” BT said.

“No way,” Gary said. “I’m calling your bluff.”

“Let it go, BT,” I said as BT turned to Gary. “He knows not what he says. And I want her to know because if she had anything to do with Paul getting hurt, I’ll kill her and she knows it. She’ll get desperate and even the devil can make mistakes.”

“So you’re going to leave her behind with me? Thanks, I don’t remember when I ended up on your shit list.”

“Luck of the draw.”

“Wonderful.”

“Maybe you can try to keep her away from Mary. The more Deneaux talks, the more poison she spills into Mary’s Kool-Aid,” I said.

“What does that even mean, Mike?” Gary turned to me.

“You know. Kool-Aid,” I said, not clarifying a thing.

“I have no idea what he means, do you, BT?” Gary asked.

BT shrugged. “I understand about half of what he says and of that only twenty-five percent makes sense.”

“You guys should take it on the road. I’m saying that Mary’s Kool-Aid is her business and that Deneaux is spreading lies about us, well, me specifically.”

“I know what you’re saying. I was making sure that you did too,” Gary said.

“Should we take shifts?” BT asked, eyeing his couch hungrily.

“I’ll take first watch,” I told them, my gut was telling me something was not quite right with the night. Odds were it was the road kill meat MRE, but it had been a while since I’d felt lucky and I’d rather be awake and alert for whatever came down the road.

Nothing happened while I stared out that window, yet the unease in me did not abate, but rather grew. I kept waiting for something, I occasionally even checked on the softly snoring Deneaux to see if she was trying to sneak up behind me and plant a knife in my neck. I could swear on more than one occasion, I felt the icy, cold tip break skin. Only once, did she scare the hell out of me when, on one of my many circuits around the house, her black eyes were staring at me through the gloomy night. She must have had a lot of enemies in her day; she was sleeping with her eyes open. This I knew because her snoring had not stopped. She looked like a cold, calculating reptile like that and I more than half expected her to strike from that chair. I’d take Durgan any day. He wasn’t smart enough in life to do anything but come straight at you. Deneaux seemed to have mastered the fine art of subterfuge. There wasn’t an angle she probably hadn’t exploited at one time or another, and I was wholly convinced, up to and including murder.