This Plague of Days Season One (The Zombie Apocalypse Serial) (20 page)

To Theo, it was his first and last confession about the boy he killed.
 

Secrets hide where ghosts go

“D
’Arcy sounds fruity,” he said when anyone called him by his given name. He preferred “Kenny”, short for his last name. Kennigan.

Kenny had three older brothers who had earned a reputation for being bad from The Corners to Poeticule Bay. They bragged that even the cops in Bangor were scared when they came to town. Of the three, it seemed two were often in jail for some petty crime. Mostly, they broke into the cottages of summer people.
 

The Corners had a population of just a couple of hundred in winter. When the summer people came, they roared up and down Black Lake in motorboats. That left many vulnerable cottages the rest of the year. Kenny’s older brothers often enjoyed the luxuries of rich strangers’ cottages for days.
 

Two of them were caught (twice) by the sheriff because they left tracks in the snow all the way back to their shack on the ass-end of The Corners. After that, whenever there was a break in anywhere Black Water Lake, the sheriff came knocking on the Kennigans’ door first.

Kenny’s father drank. His brothers, whenever they were home from the detention center, enjoyed beating their little brother. Kenny stayed away from home as much as possible. He had a pellet gun, so he walked the old logging roads through the woods looking for things to shoot: birds, squirrels and snakes. Kenny wished his targets were his brothers. He imagined it wasn’t just a little pellet gun for plinking in his hands.

Kenny was headed home in the late afternoon one Saturday when he saw a boy about his age with a bow and arrow. The boy had set up a fancy straw target. It was pretty big, but the boy missed consistently. Kenny watched him from behind some trees before he stepped out into the field and waved hello.
 

“Maybe you should start with the side of a barn,” Kenny suggested.

Theo Spencer smiled and pulled back the bowstring, intent on showing the townie boy his archery skill. He let a white target arrow fly. It missed, flew well past it and was lost in the field’s high grass. “For your information,” Theo said, “I’m trying to hit the grass behind that big circle thing.”

“Can I try?” Kenny said.

“Can I try that?” Theo asked, indicating the pellet gun in the boy’s hand.

They exchanged weapons. They didn’t talk much. They just enjoyed playing with the gun and the bow and arrows, experimenting with the unfamiliar. After some time passed, Kenny said, “No wonder the Indians lost all that land.”

“It was taken, not lost,” Theo said.

“Well, no wonder,” Kenny said.

They spent the next hour shooting the target with the pellet gun. The gun was less frustrating to master. They only stopped because it was suppertime and they heard Theo’s mother calling from the back step of the family’s cottage.
 

The next Saturday, Theo was back and Kenny was waiting, already firing at glass bottles and cans he had set up on a rock.

“Glass bottles aren’t so good as targets for arrows,” Theo said.

Kenny handed him another pellet gun. “Belongs to my older brother, Jimmy,” Kenny said. “Figured you’d be along. Don’t ever tell him he lent you his pellet rifle. He don’t know how generous he is. Wouldn’t want him to get a big head.”

That night Kenny had dinner with Theo’s family. The following weekend, Theo told him to come over after dark on Saturday night. Theo brought a telescope out into the backyard.
 

Impressed, Kenny let out a low whistle. Kenny called Theo “Moneybags” after that, and later, simply “Bags.”
 

Theo could name all the constellations. Theo taught Kenny what he knew about the moon, stars and planets. “The country’s so dark and the air’s so clear, it’s like the stars are closer out here than they are in Poeticule Bay.”

In return, Kenny told Theo about girls from school he liked. He was convinced several of them were very close to going to third base, though the meaning of the expression was hazy to both young boys. “Damn teases always chicken out just short of third base,” he complained. “I get a few kisses and they get too girly about it.”

Theo was shy around girls, so he was doubly impressed with Kenny’s progress. It never occurred to him that Kenny was lying, or that his feigned worldliness was an amalgam of boasts he’d heard from his older brothers.

When challenged, Kenny replied that it didn’t matter if it was a lie. “Just don’t let me bore you. It’s about a good story. A good story keeps us from looking at the shit.”

That fall, a couple of weeks before Theo’s family was to close up the cottage for the winter, Kenny brought a sleeping bag and the boys stayed in the backyard through the night to watch a meteor shower.
 

“They’re falling at four or five a minute,” Kenny said at the shower’s peak. “This is better than fireworks. I mean, you have to keep your eyes open and really look for them. It’s like hunting, but the payoffs come faster.”

The boys should have stuck with hunting shooting stars.
 

The next day, a Sunday, Kenny left early but soon returned. He found his friend in the wood house chopping lengths for the wood stove. In his hands he held two shotguns. “Don’t tell my brother Brian that you borrowed his .20 gauge. He don’t know how generous he is.”

Theo hesitated. “I don’t have a license or anything.”

“That’s why I took the .20 gauges. The .12 has too much kick for a little girl like you.”

“Then how come you don’t have a .12 gauge for yourself?”

He shrugged. “Eh, makes too much mess of the rabbit.”

Kenny held out the shotgun and Theo grasped it. He liked the weight of the weapon in his hands. The closest he’d gotten to a shotgun was watching criminals use them on TV.
 

Theo handed it back his friend and told Kenny to wait behind the outhouse. Theo raced into the house. He made two ham sandwiches and grabbed a couple of cold bottles of Coke from the refrigerator.

“I’m going for some target practice with Kenny in the woods!” he yelled up to his parents, who were both still in bed.

“Okay, honey. Be careful!” his mother yelled back.

The boys walked the logging roads that led deep into the forest. “My dad says there are goldmines around here somewhere,” Theo said.

“Gold?”

“Well, all the gold’s mined out now probably.”

“So, there are big holes and tunnels around here somewhere?”

“Somewhere,” Theo said.

“Cool. Didn’t know that. We should find one and make a fort.”

They saw no rabbits but satisfied their lust to try out the guns by shooting their cartridges at the Coke bottles they’d brought. The bottles shattered, each boy hitting his target the first time.

“Good shot, Bags. You’re ready to move up from hitting the broadside of a barn.”

“You know what we should do next time?” Theo said. “We shouldn’t drink from the bottles first. Think what it would look like if we’d shot at them when they were full.”

“That would be ten times cool,” Kenny replied, “but wasteful. There’s an old logging truck in the woods behind the mill. It’s a wreck, but there’s still some glass left in it.”

“Twenty times cool,” Theo said.

“We better wait till next summer, though,” Kenny said. “We’re far back here, but the woods by the mill is right up close to civilization. I wouldn’t want to be caught with a couple shotguns. Take the course and get a license this winter, will you?”

“Sure,” said Theo, not sure he was old enough to get a license, but he’d be eleven soon.

“Good. You gotta man up, Bags. If my brothers knew I was running around with a summer kid who can’t even shoot, they’d beat me senseless and make me marry you. But we have to get married, anyway. You’re pregnant.”
 

“It’ll be a tasteful ceremony, but you can’t wear white.”

“Yeah, I’m a big ol’ slut,” Kenny said.
 

That was the last time Theo ever truly
giggled
. They had laughed as boys laugh, giving themselves over to it with abandon. For the last time on a cool autumn afternoon under falling blood-red maple leaves, the boys’ laughter rang through the listening trees.
 

When they recovered, Kenny flicked his head in a come-along gesture. “Bags, it’s long past time we went to the moon.”

“You aren’t going to show me your bum, are you? I was just kidding about the whole marriage thing. I can’t marry you. You’re a slut.”

“I can’t marry
you
,” Kenny replied. “I want a bride with long blonde hair.”

The boys followed a logging road back to the mill. It was Sunday afternoon and no one was around. Before them stood a huge mountain of sawdust, four stories tall.
“Welcome to the moon,” Kenny said.

They hid the shotguns in the bushes and climbed the sawdust mountain. It was made of discarded sawdust, wood chips and small pieces of wood. It was hard climbing, but the fun was in hopping back down. They bounced down in spongy, springing lunges.

“Told you! No gravity! We’re on the moon!” Kenny yelled.

They raced up and jumped down, over and over. When they tired of that, Kenny showed Theo the top of the mountain. Long narrow chasms cut deep into the surface. Some reached a depth of seven to ten feet. “Frost did that,” Kenny said.
 

“Looks like those pictures of ice caverns in the Arctic,” Theo said.
 

“Looks like it could swallow you up, doesn’t it?”

At that, Theo jumped into one. Kenny went white. “Jesus! Get
out
of there! If it collapses, you’ll smother or burn or die smothering and burning!”

“You’re full of it.”
 

“No,
seriously
, Bags! Get the hell out of there!”
 

Finding traction on the side of the steep chasm was harder than Theo expected. Wood chips and sawdust gave way under his feet. Kenny lay on his stomach and reached down. Theo grasped his hand and climbed. Kenny pulled, rescuing his friend from the narrow cut. When Theo finally did throw a leg over the lip of the hole, he managed to roll out onto his back. Both boys gasped for air and coughed on the rising dust.

Kenny fell back, breathing hard. “Don’t do that again!”

“And you call
me
a girl.”

His friend sat up, took Theo’s bare hand and thrust it under the surface of the sawdust.

“
Ow! Agh!
” Theo yanked his hand back out into the open air and shook it.
 

“Yeah, it gets pretty hot, huh? On a summer day, you could cook a chicken in there in a few minutes.”

“Sorry,” Theo said.

“Hey, I wasn’t doing it for you. What if you up and died in there? I’d have to carry two shotguns all the way back on my own.”

Theo punched Kenny in the chest and they chased each other around the surface of the moon.
 

Then Theo stopped short and took in the view of the Corners below them.

“Yeah, we’re up pretty high. There’s the Mersey River. In the spring, they have the eel traps down there. The traps look like wooden boxes.”

“Are you kidding? Eels?”

“Somebody eats ’em. They pay a lot of money to eat that snaky fish.” Both boys shuddered. “The traps go all the way across the river. It’s kind of neat to see as long as you don’t think too long what it’s for, you know, with all the wriggling of those things in there.”

“People are crazy,” Theo said.

“Yep.”

They bounced on the sawdust mountain. Before they were done, the boys ran up five more times, each time telling each other, “Just one more time!”

When they were sweaty and covered in wood chips, they retrieved the shotguns from their hiding place in the bushes and headed back to Theo’s cottage.

“I’m tired, Bags. Let’s cut through the field. I know a short cut. This way.”
 

The boys left the logging road and walked through the forest amid patches of ferns and sorrel. The green moss felt softer and deeper than any carpet.

“When will you be back to your farmhouse?” Kenny asked.
 

“It’s just a cottage now. My dad talks about making it a real farm again, with goats.”

“Cottage? Still bigger than my house.”

“We’ll open it up again in the spring, though dad has some friends who want to come out in November for deer season. We won’t be here that much till the end of black fly season. Mom gets claustrophobia. She says the black flies are like walls closing in and the ticks freak her out.”

“I don’t blame her,” Kenny said. “I’d love to be anywhere else, but especially in the heat of July. It’s not as bad with the wind off the lake. Black flies and ticks. I hate the ticks!”
 

“You ever get down to Poeticule Bay? It’s not far and with the wind off the ocean, you don’t have to worry about black flies. ”

“We never go anywhere, except Waterville sometimes to visit my brothers.”

“They got a place there?”

“They got a
cell
there, yeah. They call it the Kennigan hotel because one of them always has a suite reserved at the detention center. They act like it’s no big thing, but I’ve seen all of them cry at sentencing hearings every time they go to court. Even Brian, and he’s the toughest of my brothers.”

“How come they don’t just stop doing things that get them sent to jail?”

“They figure they’ll never get caught. Then they do. They don’t know nothing else.”

“You’re not like them,” Theo said.

“Nah. I got high hopes. Maybe I’ll make it as far as Bangor.” He shrugged. “Big deal. Guy like you, you’ll call me up one day from some fancy office in New York with hot and cold running secretaries and you’ll say ‘Remember that great day we spent doing nothing?’”

“Yeah,” Theo replied. “And you’ll say, ‘Who the hell is this?’”

Both boys were quiet for a time, walking slower the closer they got to their destination. It was almost dusk when they came to a rusted barbed wire fence, twisted and sporadic, that ringed one edge of the field behind the Spencer family cottage.

“There’s a rock fence up the side of the field,” Theo said. “Dad says it’s all the rocks they pulled from this field when they farmed it. He’s talking about putting in Christmas trees next year. He’s thinking of filling up this field with them, to make it pay.”