Red the First (5 page)

“
That’s very gentlemanly of
you,” she said.

If she only knew what he was
thinking…he had been admiring her bottom as she padded around the
kitchen. An image of Elizabeth lying naked in a field of violets
popped into his mind. He planted kisses on her lush cherry lips,
then her smooth graceful neck, lingering at her breasts before
working his way down. He tried to repress his imagination, but it
wasn’t easy.

Elizabeth paused as she dried a dish,
quickly turning to give him a frown of disapproval.

“
What?” Red acted innocent,
as he realized he had corn stuck to his chin.

“
You know what.”

“
I don’t,
really.”

“
Quit being such a
pig.”

He wiped his mouth on his sleeve.
“Sorry.”

“
That’s not what I
meant.”

“
Huh?”

She studied him closely, making him
feel like a little boy under the scrutiny of a school teacher. Her
expression relaxed and she slung the dish rag over her shoulder.
The next thing he knew she was in his lap, pressing her lips
against his own.

Stunned, it took him a moment to
process what was happening. He was caught in her power, helpless to
do anything other than respond to her kissing. His hands explored
the length of her spine. He’d never needed anyone so badly, so very
badly. The strength of his emotion had taken him totally off
guard.

He heard Michael coming down the
stairs. The boy’s approach wasn’t about to stop him, but it
immediately dampened Elizabeth’s enthusiasm. She quickly extricated
herself from Red’s grasp and started stacking dishes.
Dang
it!
Red thought, feeling let down.

“
I’ll take the blue room,”
Michael announced as he entered the kitchen. “You can have the
yellow one.”

Red was hardly listening. The fire of
his desire, reduced to embers by the aftermath of the plague, had
just sparked to life again, kindling a hope that life could be good
again.

Stop it, he told himself. That kind of
thinking could burn a man. It was easier to have nothing left to
lose than to reach for something he couldn’t hold onto.

“
This place effin’ stinks!”
he said, slamming his fist on the table, making Elizabeth and
Michael jump. He left the kitchen without finishing his
meal.

The next morning he left the house at
daybreak and spent his day alone in the woods with an ax. Come
winter, learning to chop wood might be the difference between life
and death. Then again, he had found chainsaws in the shed as well.
All he needed to do was get them running again.

Gas was difficult to come by, but in
light of how much work it took to cut a tree down by hand, he was
willing to expand his search parameters. The gas supply had dried
up fast when everybody fell sick. At the plague’s peak, after the
power companies had shut down, he paid five hundred dollars for a
single gallon. Finding a full can of fuel hidden away somewhere
would require a lot of footwork.

By afternoon the blisters on his hands
bled. The idea of a chainsaw seemed better and better with every
throb from burst blisters, but for now he had to tax his aching
back and arms. When he finally saw the tree fall, he let out a
whoop and danced in a circle. Something about sweating under the
strain of hard physical labor cleansed a man’s soul.

He would go home, apologize to
Elizabeth and Michael for being a big grumpy ass at dinner last
evening, and take them out to the woods to show them his
accomplishment.

Despite being tired to the bone, his
steps felt lighter, his thoughts brighter and more optimistic, as
he walked toward the house. He could do this—survive and
thrive—even if only for a while. A cheerful whistle passed through
his lips as he stacked kindling into his arms. He made his way
through the woods, into the yard, but never noticed the hump in
what had previously been more or less flat lawn until he tripped
over it and fell flat on his face, kindling jumbled uncomfortably
beneath him.

“
Dammit!”

Finding his footing, he looked around
for the sticks he had gathered, but they had disappeared under long
vines with curling tendrils. Vines that he could swear were
extending even as he stared. Huge fan-like leaves further concealed
the ground. As he leaned over to peek under a leaf, an apple-sized
green ball caught his eye.

“
What the…”

Straightening abruptly, he realized he
was standing in a pumpkin patch twenty feet wide. “Impossible,” he
whispered. The boy’s seeds had sprouted during the night to fill
half the yard.

“
Michael!” he bellowed.
“Elizabeth! Come out here! Hurry!”

In a minute, they were rushing into the
yard, Elizabeth carrying a mixing spoon, Michael his coffee can of
jewelry. Zena trotted behind them, pausing to bite at a moth
flitting in the air.

Elizabeth’s mouth dropped open at the
sight of the vines taking over the yard. Spellbound, she and Red
linked hands.

“
It’s a miracle,” she
said.

“
I told you we’d have pie,”
Michael said matter-of-factly, and by the end of the week they’d
eaten three.

Chapter 9

Red, Elizabeth, Michael and Zena spent
the week after Michael’s pumpkins sprouted roaming nearby towns and
the countryside, scrounging for seeds. During their travels, they
went through the small town located just down the road from their
new home. Before the plague, Red had driven through it a dozen
times, but had never stopped, never paid it any mind. For the life
of him, he couldn’t remember its name. Even before the plague it
had stood half-empty. What a shame, considering the old brick
buildings still had a lot of life left in them.

Over several days, they visited a
string of small abandoned towns, which seemed to be less picked
over than the city. Michael drove Red nuts with his insistence on
checking every home for jewelry boxes. He’d pull out drawers and
open closets looking for coins, gems, silver and gold—anything
precious and portable.

“
Let me teach you a little
something about the law of supply and demand,” Red would say, not
hiding his irritation with the boy’s obsessive hobby.

Michael listened politely, insisting
that he understood jewelry wasn’t valuable now, but there was no
telling what it would be worth later.

“
By the time
later
gets here, we’ll all be dust.”

“
That might be true for you,
but think of your grandchildren.”

Red would throw his hands up into the
air. “I give up!”

Elizabeth quickly reminded them of the
task at hand. “Men—daylight’s burning.” That was her subtle way of
telling them to shut up, quit bickering and keep
looking.

They found individual seed packets of
green beans, cucumbers, asparagus, musk melon and more. They gave
them to Michael first so that he could give them his spontaneous
little blessings. Just outside of town, they found an apple
orchard, heavy with bloom and buzzing with bees. An abandoned
strawberry farm produced a bumper crop and Elizabeth tried her hand
at jam. By the end of summer, they were up to their necks in
vegetables and fruit. Especially zucchini. Huge ones. And lots of
them. August and September were devoted to mastering the art of
canning. And zucchini bread.

The more Red settled in with the woman
and boy, the further the alien encounter at Schlotz’s retreated
into the depths of his recollection. It had happened during the
darkest period of his life; he considered the possibility that it
had been caused by a psychotic breakdown. Michael had never brought
up the aliens in his dreams again, so Red decided to let it
rest.

Fall arrived in colorful array. The
woods became a smorgasbord of red, yellow and orange. Cool nights
were spent snuggled together under old quilts for warmth. The
wood-burning stove was always stoked and they had taken to reading
novels by candlelight. They steered clear of books in which the
characters lived in the world as it had been just before the
plague, because the contents left them longing for what they had
lost. It was safer to read about characters from ancient times or
on other worlds. They waded through a lot of classics like
The
Iliad
,
The Hobbit
, and
Dune
.

One afternoon, a knock on the door
startled the three of them from a game of Uno. Red ordered
Elizabeth and Michael to hide in the pantry. When they were safely
hidden away, he opened the door to a brown-skinned man with black
hair and mustache, and wire rimmed glasses.

“
Hello,” the man said with a
thick Indian accent. The stranger’s smile quickly faded when Red
pressed the end of a revolver against the man’s cheek. The man held
his hands up in the air in a gesture of surrender. “Please don’t
kill me.”

“
If you’ve come looking for
trouble,” Red said, “then you’ve found it. If you haven’t come for
trouble—then you have nothing to fear.”

“
No trouble,” the man
replied.

“
Who are you?”

“
Dr. Vanan
Patel.”

“
A medical
doctor?”

“
Yes, yes,” Patel nodded
vigorously.

Red ordered him into the house and into
the kitchen, where he tied Patel to a chair.

“
How did you find
us?”

In his thick Indian accent, Patel
explained about his reoccurring dreams. They kept telling him to
drive north. So he did. But his truck had conked out about ten
miles down the road. It was full of medical supplies.

Elizabeth came out of the
pantry.

“
A doctor,” she gushed as if
a celebrity were sitting in the kitchen. “It’s a pleasure to meet
you. Red, untie him right now.”

“
Not until I’m sure he’s
telling the truth,” Red said between gritted teeth, pissed that
Elizabeth had come out of the pantry.

“
Oh, come on, now—why would
he lie?”

“
Let me handle this.” Red’s
voice was so cold and calculating, she didn’t dare oppose him. “We
are going to leave him tied up until I can verify his
story.”

“
Fine,” she said with a
pout.

“
Don’t you even think of
untying him after I go to find the truck.”

“
This is overkill, Red, he’s
definitely a real doctor.”

“
Elizabeth...” he said
testily.

“
Okay, okay, I won’t untie
him until you’re back.” She turned to the hostage. “I’m sorry, Dr.
Patel. It’s nothing personal, it’s just that Red is very
protective, but don’t worry—he’ll treat you right when he figures
out you’re telling the truth.”

Patel nodded.

Red made sure Elizabeth’s gun was
loaded and told her to guard the hostage. Leaving Zena with her, he
brought Michael with him to find the supply truck. They walked down
the road until they spotted an army truck with a red cross on the
side, about ten miles away, just as Patel had claimed.

“
Cover me,” he told Michael,
whose gun skills were coming along nicely under Red’s tutelage. The
boy’s Ruger LCP was equipped with a laser, but the kid really
didn’t need it at this range. Red ran toward the truck, keeping his
head low. He flung open the driver’s side door, aiming his gun at
the seat. Empty. He did a similar check of the back of the
truck.

“
All clear,” he told
Michael. Checking out the back, he saw that the stranger had been
telling the truth. Popping open the hood, he examined the
engine—just a broken hose. As he worked under the hood, he had
Michael watch what he was doing.

“
This will be your job some
day,” Red said. “It’s time you...”

Searing pain grazed his temple. A
bullet pinged as it ricocheted across the highway. Flinging himself
over Michael, he knocked him to the ground, shielding the boy with
his own body.

Whispering in Michael’s ear, he said.
“Don’t let them see your pistol until I give the word. I’m going to
play dead. Push me off of you like I’m a corpse, and when I say
now
, it’s
Call of Duty
for real. In the
face, in the stomach, wherever you can shoot ‘em. Don’t hold back.
Got it?”

“
I got it,” Michael
whispered back.

“
Now, push me off of you the
best you can.”

With a heave, and a grunt, the boy
managed to shove Red’s weight off to the side. Red flopped like a
piece of meat and remained still. His head throbbed, and warm blood
was streaming through his hair, but Red knew it was only a flesh
wound. He also knew from his time in the military, though, that
head wounds were difficult to assess at a glance. He was counting
on his injury to look far worse than it was.

Although his eyes were closed, he heard
footsteps approaching, and men’s voices. There were at least four
of them, but he couldn’t be sure.

“
Is that your pop?” one of
them asked Michael.

“
You killed him!” Michael
screamed. “Why! Why!”