Authors: Tim Curran
Resurrection (24 page)
The others, Reed simply did not know.
When they’d loaded up that morning at Fairstreet Elementary, he’d smiled to each and every one as they climbed into the bus with their gym bags and Fairstreet Flyers jerseys on. But that had been his only interaction with them, really. Lucy Costigan was their coach and she handled them. All the way to Park Hills she’d sat right behind Reed, driving him nuts. He could almost feel her body heat seeping through the seat, kept imagining those long tanned legs and muscular thighs. Every time she bumped the back of the seat with her knee, his dick had woken up and stretched like a hungry tomcat.
Chuck Bittner, true to form, was telling everyone how his old man was going to raise hell about this.
Reed wanted to tell him that when his old man wasn’t home, he was out raising things in other men’s pants, but he figured he didn’t need to lose his job.
“Okay, kids,” Reed said. “It may take time for them to find us down here in Bethany, so what I’m going to do is to wade out into the water and find help. There’s got to be somebody around. If I don’t see anyone, I’ll head back up the hill to the road, flag a car down.”
“But…but what about us?” Tara Boyle wanted to know.
Sure, kid, Reed thought, get used to saying that because you’ll be saying it your whole life:
What about me? What about me? What about me?
Way he was seeing it, Tara would have climbed over the bones of the others to save her own ass and the way
she
probably saw it was that Reed had one job above all others and that was getting
her
to safety.
Piss on the others.
“Quit whining,” Alicia Kroll told her.
“But I want get out of here.”
“’
I want to get out of here’,”
Alicia mocked in a petulant voice.
There were a couple stifled laughs.
“Quit worrying, Tara,” Cal told her. “Mr. Reed’ll be back in no time. I’m sure he’ll make it in time. If not…well, we’ll just keep sinking and sinking and—”
“Okay, Cal,” Reed said. “That’ll do.”
“Maybe we should go with you,” Bobby Luce said.
But Reed shook his head. “No, Bobby. I need you kids to stay here and sit tight. That water’s too deep. In fact, I want to put you in charge until I get back and I expect the rest of you to do what Bobby says. If you don’t, you’ll be locking horns with me.” He glared at Chuck Bittner. “And that goes double for you, missy.”
More laughter.
“You better watch it,” Chuck told him.
And, oh, dear God, how Reed would have loved to slap that little shit right across the face, tell him a thing or two about his old man. How he spent his free time. But if the kid hadn’t figured that out yet, then he was just plain stupid. Reed was willing to bet that Chuck’s old man had that queer cowboy movie on DVD. Wouldn’t have surprised him any. Reed had heard there were men fucking in it and that showed you where the world was headed, Sodom and Gomorrah all over again.
“I’m just ribbing you, Chuck.”
Chuck just looked away.
Hard one to figure sometimes. Uppity little braggart one moment, brooding and silent the next. Reed had heard that Chuck’s mom had died a month ago. It didn’t seem to be bothering the kid, though. At least that you could see. But word had it she had left him and his old man years back, wasn’t much but a barfly with an expressway between her legs.
Reed opened the emergency kit and showed Bobby the first aid kit, the flashlights they could use if it got dark. He didn’t bother explaining the road flares or the rest of the equipment. Things went well, he’d be back in twenty minutes anyway.
“So sit tight, kids. I’ll be back in a flash.” He moved to the front of the bus and back into the water. “And nobody goes outside. Stay in your seat or in the back of the bus. And I mean it.”
He took one look back at those faces, some excited and some worried and some genuinely upset, and holding onto the rail, started down the steps into that chill gray water. An empty water bottle went floating by.
There was some laughter in the bus and Bobby told somebody to knock something off.
“Just you wait,” Chuck Bittner said.
Reed stepped into the drink and felt for the street. By the time he found it, the water was up above his bellybutton.
“
This is great,” Cal Woltrip was saying. “Just like that movie…
Lord of the Flies.
We’ll be here for weeks.”
“Yeah, we’ll go savage,” his brother Kyle added. “Who gets to be ‘Piggy’?”
Then Reed was out of earshot, making his way around the bus.
Well, this is just going swimmingly,
he thought and then giggled despite himself. Flooded empty houses and dark buildings stared back at him. And that dark water lapped around him, filled with unseen things.
2
When Mitch first met Chrissy it was on the public beach up at Black Lake.
He’d just come off a pretty nasty relationship and he hadn’t been doing much but drinking and feeling sorry for himself for weeks, calling in sick a lot at work. Then, one Saturday morning, hungover and feeling pretty much like shit, he’d decided to lay off the booze and the pity parties and drive up to the beach and take a swim.
That’s how he met Chrissy.
Just a little slip of a girl with huge dark eyes and a mischievous grin, glossy dark hair reaching down the center of her back. She was sitting in the sand near the water, trying to build a castle with shovel and pail, using dry sand that kept falling apart on her.
Mitch was walking by and she had said, “Hey, mister! Can you help me with my wall?”
Mitch just stopped, smiled. “Your wall?”
“I’m building a wall.”
“Why are you building a wall? For your castle?”
She shook her head. “To keep the ants out.”
“The ants?”
“The giant ants. I saw ‘em on a movie. Giant ants with big teeth.”
Mitch had looked around, brushing a buzzing fly from his neck. He wanted to tell this little girl that she shouldn’t talk to strangers and all that business, but just looking at her in that little pink swimsuit, he didn’t have the heart. She was sweet and honest and cute…how could he not help her? Of course, right away he was wondering what her mom would say when she saw her little girl talking to this strange man.
“I’m Chrissy,” the girl said. “And I have to build the wall to keep the ants out. If the ants get in, I can’t build the castle. Because the ants will eat everyone.”
“Oh, I get it.”
“What’s your name?”
“Mitch.”
“Oh.”
“Where’s your mom and dad, Chrissy?”
“My mama went up to the stand to get ice cream. She’ll be right back.”
“Your dad?”
“Oh, he’s in heaven,” Chrissy said, filling her bucket.
Mitch had felt a sharp pain in his belly at that. This girl didn’t have a dad and the idea of him being gone, being dead, was just part of her little world. There was something terribly wrong about that.
“Are you gonna help, Mitch?” she said.
Swallowing, feeling emotional depths he’d never knew existed, Mitch kneeled in the sand, wanting to protect this little girl from the pain of life itself. He showed Chrissy how to dip wet sand from the water’s edge and create a wall of blocks, wetting them down and cementing them into place. Chrissy was fascinated by his engineering process. Just a wonderful, easy kid that smelled of sunscreen and wet sand.
“You’re pretty good at this,” she said.
“We used to do it when we were kids.”
“Okay…tell me.”
So as they amassed a wall that was easily three feet in height and four feet in length and topped it with a battery of sticks and reeds, Mitch found himself talking about building things when he was a kid. How he and Tommy used to build things from sand, clubhouses from scrap wood, how they’d dug forts under the ground and tree houses high in the air. And as he told her about it, he found that he really
liked
telling her. There was no bullshit to kids, he soon realized. They really were interested in things. They did not pretend interest. Up until that day, Mitch hadn’t given kids much thought. They were little people that skipped up the sidewalk, hollered and screamed like they knew you drank too much the night before, and banged on your door for candy come Halloween.
But suddenly it was all different.
Sitting there, Chrissy just fascinated by him, he wished she were his daughter. That he could take her to carnivals and movies, pick her up after school and cook hot dogs in the backyard for her and all her friends. Regale her with the silly stories of his own youth which she seemed just enrapt by.
About fifteen minutes later, a voice said, “I see you’ve made another friend, Chrissy.”
A tall, striking redhead was standing there and after introductions were made, Mitch learned that her name was Lily.
“I…uh…Chrissy needed some help,” he said, feeling very uncomfortable. “I was just helping her.”
Lily nodded. “I know. I’ve been watching.”
Mitch didn’t say anything.
He supposed Lily had been scoping him out.
“You have to be careful these days,” she said.
“Sure.”
“You’re a real natural with her,” Lily said. “Do you have kids? You must.”
Mitch just shook his head. “No, but I’m having fun. I think I might go buy one.”
They both laughed.
Chrissy said, “Is that where you get kids?”
But Mitch was staring into Lily’s deep green eyes and wanting to swim in them and knowing, somehow, that he was going to get the chance. He liked Lily and she seemed to like him and isn’t that just the way it worked sometimes? Love just found you purely by accident and took you away?
“Mama,” Chrissy said. “We have work to do.”
So then the three of them spent the next two hours working on the wall and building a fine castle behind it, listening to the waves and the gulls and the incessant monologues of a five year-old girl who could speak at dizzying length about the secret lives of butterflies, Popsicle sticks, and the shapes of clouds in the sky. And, the nefarious activities of giant ants, of course.
And that’s how Mitch came into their lives, just a few short years after Chrissy’s father had died in a car accident.
That’s how it happened.
That’s how he had fallen in love with Lily and married her.
And that was the day that Chrissy first captured him and owned him, had owned his heart every day since.
3
That afternoon in Witcham, there was a seeping grayness that was gunmetal, quicksilver, and leaden. Gray rain fell and gray mist rose from the puddles and sluicing pools of debris and that uniform grayness flooded the city, keeping it and holding it with a gravestone stillness, a waiting, and an expectancy. It pressed itself against rain-specked windows and slid over roofs with a sly whispering and climbed stripped trees in dingy coils. Leaves fell before its dead breath and covered the ponds and leechfields in a multicolored mantle that went first brown and then ultimately gray as everything else.
Deke Ericksen, dressed in dripping foul-weather gear that belonged to his father, arrived on Kneale Street by foot, struggling through puddles until finally he stood at the door of the Barron house and knocked. Standing there, feeling the damp down into his bones, he listened for sounds of life and heard not a one. He might as well have been knocking at the door of a tomb.
C’mon, Chrissy,
he thought,
I walked six blocks in this to see you.
Somebody had to be home…didn’t they? Sure, a lot of people were abandoning the city with what was going on, but Chrissy would have said something to him…wouldn’t she?
Deke looked around, seeing nothing but rain and dripping trees, lots of houses that looked empty. He shook the water from himself and tried the knob. It was open. He stepped into the house, feeling the warm dryness in there reaching out to him.
“Anybody home?” he called out.
Somebody was there, he could sense that much. Somebody was nearby maybe holding their breath or peering from a half-closed door.
“It’s me,” he said, “Deke…Deke Ericksen, Chrissy’s friend.”
And then a voice, weak and low, said, “Deke?”
The living room.
Deke hung his rain gear from the coat tree by the door. He stepped out of his boots and went through the archway. Chrissy’s mom, Lily, was sitting on the sofa, knees pulled up, a slightly puzzled expression on her face. Damn, she wasn’t looking right. She looked thin, thinner even, and pale like her blood had been sucked out. Her red hair was pulled back into a ponytail and she was staring off into space.
