She really was an all right girlfriend. I needed to remember that. I needed to treat her better. Getting this far might not have been possible without her.
I nodded. We got out of the SUV. Josh climbed into the front seat and Dave into the passenger side. My shovel felt heavy in my hands. I held a hand against my stomach. I thought I might get sick. I know I was breathing fast. Hard.
The sky outside was black from both clouds and dusk.
“You okay?”
“Wonderful,” I said.
I peeked into the tiny windows on the garage doors. My daughter had chopped Donald’s arm off inside there. I cupped my hands, but to no avail. I could not see a thing.
Allison was looking all around, making sure nothing was sneaking up on us. I was thankful for the second set of eyes. “Nothing?”
“Not a thing. Let’s go inside,” I said.
The front porch held a swing suspended from chain links. Two wicker rocking chairs sat on either side of a small wicker end table. Fucking cute.
The glass storm door was unlocked, but the main door was not.
“Have a key?”
I shook my head. I’m sure my ex had a spare hidden somewhere. Think the kids even told me about it. Might have said it was under one of the rocks along the landscape on the side of the house. Kicking in the door would feel so much more satisfying.
I held the glass door open. “Hold this,” I said.
Allison stood next to the door, keeping it open, and out of the way.
I backed up a few steps, and then threw my shoulder into the door. Fucker was solid. I tried again. Realized it wasn’t the door that was going to give, but the frame. My third attempt shattered wood inside the house. The fourth time, we were in. The whole door collapsed into their foyer.
It was my first time in the house. Was I bitter? Spiteful? Sure as shit. So when I came for the kids, I waited in the driveway. I honked my horn. I sat waiting for them, swearing and cursing the very foundation of the tiny mansion. Now that I was inside, I hated Donald more. The foyer was huge. Large tiles, antique artifacts on display, and a chandelier. A fucking chandelier.
Money can buy you anything it wants. Even happiness. The old cliché was shit. He bought my family. He bought my happiness from me. Not stole it. Bought it. It made my ex a tramp in my eyes. Worthless. And he bought her with his money as well. Kids might not see it. Might not understand it. Eventually they would. They would know their mom actually walked away from her family because her husband -- me -- was tired, and worn out from working to support everyone. Fuck her.
“Charlene? Cash?” Yeah. I yelled. “Charlene? Cash?”
Something fell over somewhere upstairs. I looked at Allison. She’d heard it too. I took the stairs two at a time. My shovel out in front of me.
The house was dark. I tried the light switch at the top of the stairs. Didn’t expect them to work. Not sure why. The lights came on, felt like sun rays exploding from the ceiling.
Five rooms. Guessed three were bedrooms. One a bathroom. Maybe the fifth a linen closet. That door -- to what I guessed was a linen closet, was closed. The others, open.
“You stay right here,” I said. She could defend the stairs. “Nothing comes up. Nothing goes down.”
She nodded. “Got it.”
The upstairs hallway was wide. Two doors on the right, two on the left. The one straight ahead was the bathroom. I saw the shower curtain.
Way I saw it, three options existed. Two I could handle. It was either Donald or Julie in one of these rooms. I had no problem killing them. The third option was that it was my kids hiding. That one didn’t make sense, Charlene had said they’d fled.
Confident, I strode toward the first door. There was an odor that assaulted my nostrils. Shit, and piss, and decay. My face crinkled, a failed attempt at protecting my nose. I looked back at Allison.
“Wait there.” I just mouthed the words. The element of surprise, and all of that.
I sucked in a deep breath and held it. Entering the room, I tried to be ready. The shovel, what I’ve come to think of as my wide-point bladed spear, set to kill, not stun.
Julie was in the first bedroom. Must have been Charlene’s. Even with her back to me, I knew it was Julie. She sat on the bed. I saw the edge of a picture frame in her hand.
“Julie?” I said. It might as well have been mouthed, too. I didn’t even hear me. Swallowing did nothing. My throat was that dry. I tried again; it was spat out in a loud whisper, “Julie!”
Her head pivoted, first to the right -- to stare at the wall, then slowly toward me.
I was at the foot of the bed. Don’t remember walking into the room.
The picture in her hand was of our kids, and us. A 4th of July picnic, when the two were much younger. In matching U.S. flag shirts, we surrounded the base of a tree. Cash on my knee, Charlene standing between Julie and me. All smiles.
Julie’s eyes were flat and lifeless now. A clump of hair was chunked out of her skull. A creamy white foam crested her lower lip and poured down her chin. Long sticky-looking strands of saliva stretched from her chin to her chest. She was not taking good care of herself at all.
In a two-handed grip, I raised my shovel, ready to spike it down into her face.
She didn’t move though. Didn’t come at me. She didn’t do a thing except look back down at the picture in the frame.
I’d not of believed these things still possessed anything human in them before now. I thought they were gone. Whatever disease had entered them had destroyed their innards and spoiled the soul.
This time when I swallowed, I felt plenty slide down my throat. It was not what I’d expected.
“Chase?”
Was Allison really yelling for me?
Julie’s head turned again, looking past me toward the open door. The picture frame dropped. A hollow sound of wood frame on hardwood floors, and the quick splack of glass spider-webbing all at once.
In an instant, Julie was on all fours on the bed, and like a wolf, charging for the opened door.
I had a mere second to register the attack about to happen, and swung downward with the shovel. The sheet-steel flattened her out on the mattress. When her arms rose, fists planted, she pushed herself up. I battered her with the shovel a second time.
“Chase,” Allison said.
“Kinda preoccupied,” I said.
I spun the shovel 90 degrees, so that the spade was no longer flat when I swung downward at her head. It was perpendicular. Although it did not slice through the back of her neck, it did cut in deep. The blood did not spray, but oozed.
I hacked at her neck repeatedly until the most of the spine was severed, and her head hung dangling by some skin and muscle off the side of the bed.
She wasn’t dead. Her hand still moved. Her fingers rolled into fists, and unrolled, and rolled again. She was not a threat. She would not sneak up on anyone, if she’d ever managed to get off the mattress and out of the house. If anything, she was now dying. It might turn out to be a slow and painfully agonizing death, I couldn’t know for sure. I didn’t know the science behind their make-up. I left the bedroom and closed the door.
“One down,” I said.
Allison was not at the top of the stairs.
I ran into the second bedroom. Cash’s. It was done up with Star Wars memorabilia. Action figures on shelving, and posters from all the movies. The bedspread and curtains depicted famous light saber battle scenes from the different movies. Hated to admit, but happy for my son. It was an awesome room. Beat the bunk beds I had in my apartment for him and his sister to share.
I went to the next room. The master bedroom. “Allison?”
I ignored the queen sized sleigh bed, the expensive dressers, and vanity. I hated the slippers by the bed, and the robes hanging on a coat rack in the corner. The wall mounted flat screen television was nice. I used the wood handle to smash the screen as I checked the closets and the bathroom.
No one.
In the hallway, I stuck my head into that bathroom -- and found nothing. “Allison?”