A Hero's Reward (3 page)

Greg pointed to a third reporter, this
one looked to be a journalist:

“Greg, the hospital said you had
minor injuries and that Margaret would be kept for several days. Can
you tell us anything about those?”

“Sure, my back hurts like the
blazes. I'm sure you all saw the video. Here, give me a hand for a
second.”

Greg had the reporter help him up and
turned around. He figured if the doctor said his back was a tapestry
of black and blue maybe it would be impressive enough to get the
reporters off of his back, so to speak. He pulled the back of his
shirt up and heard a collective gasp from the crowd. Flashes went off
left and right. He pulled his shirt back down and turned around.

“The doctor said I was lucky I
hadn't broken anything but that I was going to be in a world of hurt
for a week or two. He wants me to take a week of bed rest and then
start moving around again, slowly at first and working back up to
normal. Luckily my boss at A.B.Construction is giving me a couple of
weeks off to recuperate. And now, ladies and gentlemen, I'm thinking
that has to be it. I need to get a prescription filled and get some
painkillers into my system.”

The reporters parted, somewhat
reluctantly, and let him through. Greg walked across the lobby and
out a side door leading to another part of the building. The hospital
had a pharmacy attached and he was going to fill his prescription
there rather than waiting. It was a quicker wait than it would've
been elsewhere and he immediately took two of the pills when he left
the pharmacy. He headed out the front door to find a cab.

The warmth of the early fall sun felt
glorious on his face but the pain starting up in his back again was
enough to sour his pleasure in the sun. He wanted to get home to his
own bed and sleep for a week. A taxi pulled up and he gingerly
crawled in the back and gave the driver his address.

Greg exited the taxi when it got him
home, adding a hefty tip for the driver. The driver finally looked at
his passenger, looked across the street, then back at Greg:

“Hey, you're that guy aren't you?
The one I saw on Youtube last night?”

“Yup, sorry I'd love to chat but
I'm one busted up guy right now. I need to go collapse for a week.”

“No problem man, way to go
though. You showed the world that men can still be real men, not
these pansies that they call men nowadays. Rest up dude, you earned
it.”

The taxi driver gave Greg a thumbs up
while backing out of the driveway. Greg was nearly shuffling as he
moved up the walk to the front door. His screen door had closed
behind him yesterday but the inside door was standing open. He walked
in and saw the television on, showing the menu screen of the movie he
had been watching. He shut everything off and put the DVD away.
Looking at the stairs he decided there was no way he was taking them
and collapsed onto the couch instead of going up to his bed. He was
asleep before his head touched the couch cushion.

The phone woke him several hours later.
He had to look around to find it and by the time he did it had
stopped ringing. He sat back on the couch carefully, waiting to see
if someone had left a voice mail. A minute later the phone beeped at
him and informed him that he had a new voice mail. He called his
voice mail to retrieve the message:

“Greg? It's Emily.”

Why the hell was his ex-wife calling him?

“I just wanted to call to touch
base with you. I thought you might like to get together some time and
maybe talk? The evening news had your interview on it, the kids were
overjoyed to see their dad, the hero. I'll try calling again later,
you're probably knocked out on painkillers or still in the hospital
or something. Bye.”

He recalled that her politician-to-be
new husband had lost his race, some sort of scandal knocked him out
of it. So now, he guessed, she wanted him back because he had a touch
of fame or something? To hell with that, he was done with Emily, if
he could see his kids without ever seeing her again he'd be happy.

Greg looked around his house, he
supposed he was lucky she had remarried again right away. He had
inherited this house from his parents after his divorce so he would
still have had it, but she could have made a massive mess of the rest
of his finances. He still paid child support, he loved his children
and didn't regret supporting them in the slightest, but at least he
was spared alimony due to her new marriage.

He popped a frozen dinner in the
microwave, deciding that he was hungry enough to eat and checked the
time. No more pills for another two hours. He wasn't hurting yet but
he also didn't want to give that pain a chance to sneak back in
unnoticed. He was normally healthy as a horse, he didn't even get the
cold or flu most years, so the incapacitating pain he felt without
the pills felt foreign and emasculating to him.

He took his dinner to the TV room and
turned it on. As usual there was the normal run of crap on the
television: reality shows, cartoons, political shows, etc... Nothing
he wanted to watch, hell there wasn't even a re-run of MASH showing.
He looked through his videos and chose one to pop in. He spent the
evening trying his best to relax. He finally gave up and went to bed
early, deciding that extra sleep would probably be a good thing. He
was normally a back sleeper but as soon as he got into the bed on his
back he decided that he'd be sleeping on his stomach for a few
nights.

The next couple of days followed the
same pattern. He kept intentionally missing Emily's phone calls until
late on the second day. When he did finally pick up, the conversation
did nothing to soothe him except to convince him that he was correct
when he decided that he was better off without her.

“Greg speaking.”

“Hi Greg, it's Emily”

“Emily, what did you want?”

“I just wanted to talk to you.”

“What do you want to talk about
Emily, get to the point please.”

“Well I thought we might want to
get together to talk, maybe see if we want to get back together?”

“I think your new husband might
have something to say about that.”

“You silly, I divorced him a year
and a half ago, when that horrible drawn-out scandal finally came to
a conclusion.”

“Well Em, I can't say as I have
any desire to sit down and talk with a woman who stuck a knife in my
back hard enough that you could see the sun through my torso after it
came out.”

“Greg, that's an incredibly rude
thing to say.”

“Must be the painkillers letting
me say what I'm really thinking for a change, normally I'm more
tactful. I have no desire to have anything to do with you. If you
didn't have custody of the children I would be more than happy to
never see or hear from you again. Good-bye, Emily!”

Greg settled onto the couch. Despite
the painkillers he hadn't been sleeping well at night so he found
himself taking naps at odd points during the day. He stretched and
glanced out the window. The leaves had fallen off the trees a few
weeks back and now their bare branches looked like fingers stretching
towards the sky, waiting for renewal in the spring.

Yellow strings of police tape were
staked out around the debris of Margaret's house. He didn't know when
that had occurred but the tape caught his attention by shifting in
the breeze. The car from across the street was no longer in the
driveway so Margaret must have been released from the hospital. He
hoped that she was okay, he still had a problem reconciling the hard
face she normally presented to the public with the sooty, sorrowful,
angel's face that still haunted his dreams sometimes.

Greg thought through the conversation
he had just had with his ex. Amazingly enough he hadn't been bothered
by it at all, it had been more the annoyance level of being
interrupted by a telemarketer than by a past love. He decided that it
was probably the callous reference to ditching her new husband that
clinched it for him. From the timing she gave, she had only remained
married to him for about a year, give or take a bit. So it was
obvious what she had been after from that relationship. Once his
political aspirations were history, so was she. That reference and
the fact that she sounded different somehow, spaced out or tipsy or
something, made him happy that he seemed to actually be over her.

For the first time since it happened,
he could actually feel one hundred percent certain that their divorce
was the right thing to have done. He felt bad for his children
though. He made a mental note to ask them how their home life was
going the next time he got to visit them.

Greg drifted off to sleep lying on the
couch. When he awoke the first thing he noticed was the weather
outside. The pleasant fall day he had been observing as he drifted
off had darkened and chilled. The wind had begun to blow hard enough
that he could hear it inside the house and dark clouds roiled
overhead in the sky. The second thing he noted was that he was
ravenous.

As he prepared a quick dinner he
noticed the time and went for his painkillers. He could actually have
taken his next dose an hour earlier and his back hadn't been
bothering him yet, but he was starting to notice a twinge or two now.
He decided that he'd begin to spread them out further apart. He'd
only take them as his back started to twinge again. The prescription
did say every four to six hours or as needed so he'd go with 'as
needed'. Maybe he could get rid of the painkillers more quickly than
the doctor had expected. Since he hardly ever got sick he wasn't used
to taking medications. The pills he was taking made his thoughts
fuzzier than normal, as though each thought had to penetrate a
barrier to present itself to him and lost strength and import in
doing so.

He sat down to eat his dinner and
popped in yet another movie to watch. At this rate he was going to
have to go buy some new DVDs. He was running out of ones he was
willing to watch again. Maybe he'd check out that Netflix thing on
his computer. He wasn't technologically challenged; he knew how to
run his PC and any of the programs he wanted to use. Heck, he prided
himself that when he used to own a VCR, it had always shown the
correct time. He was more than a little obsessive about knowing how
to operate anything he owned. If he couldn't figure it out then he
didn't want to own it.

In the middle of his movie he was
distracted by lights outside. He saw Margaret's car turn back into
the driveway beside the ruined house. He watched it for a minute or
two but saw nothing else before his attention was drawn back to the
show.

Greg's attention was drawn away from
the move again half an hour later. The sounds of sharp impacts
carried in from outside. When he peered out it was hailing
vigorously. Shaking his head at the vagaries of the weather he went
back to his show. Before the movie was done he had fallen asleep on
the couch once again.

Greg awoke in the middle of the night.
The television was off, as was the DVD player. He cocked his head and
couldn't hear a single electrical appliance running. He kept
flashlights in a few places for just such situations and reached
under the couch for the small one he had clipped onto the couch leg.
Armed with his flashlight he headed for the circuit breaker box to
see if it was just him or if there was a major power outage
occurring. Nothing was tripped so he assumed it was a full outage. He
headed back to the living room and looked out the window. There was
little to no light pollution and he noted that the hailstorm earlier
had evidently turned into a full ice storm. It looked like there was
an inch or more of ice on every surface he could see. He could feel
the cold rolling off of his front window in waves and closed the
curtain to keep the cold out.

Curiously enough, he realized that his
last observation was false. There was no sheeting of ice on
Margaret's car. He opened the curtain again, just far enough to look
out. As a matter of fact, it looked like the windows were fogged up
on the inside and there were icicles hanging from the bumper and the
portions of the lower trim that he could see. His last dose of
painkillers was wearing off so the thought made its way to him
without much effort

She can't be sleeping in her damn car in this weather, can she?
She's going to freeze to death.

He walked over the bookshelf where he
kept his thermometer. It ran on batteries to communicate with the
sensor outside so it should still be working.

Eight degrees at two thirty in the morning. It's going to get
colder before dawn. Shit, should I just leave her be? I can't do
that, at least I can offer to let her come in and warm up.

Greg bundled up in the warmest coat he
had handy, grabbed his pair of work boots and slid them on. He opened
the door and was immediately struck by the cold. It was almost a
physical blow after the warmth inside. He quickly closed the door to
keep the heat in the house. His electric heat wasn't going to be any
help in a power outage. He began to walk across the street and had
slipped three times before he reached the sidewalk. The ice was
coating everything and was extremely slippery to boot.

Greg stumbled his way out across the
street, finally settling on treating his boots as though they were
ice skates. He stumbled less by keeping them in contact with the ice
but it meant he was moving every which way as opposed to a straight
line. He comforted himself by thinking that it was still quicker to
move that way than to have to try to pick himself up from a fall.

He reached the car and peered in. There
was definitely someone curled up in the back seat. He slid up to the
back door and knocked loudly, ready to offer the warmth of his house.
There was no answer, the person lying on the back seat didn't even
move. He knocked loudly once more and waited, the chill seeping in
through his coat, clothing, and even the sturdy work boots he had
been sure would keep his feet warm. To make matters worse, the
strange sliding gait he had been using was straining muscles in his
back and the whole thing was beginning to throb in a familiar manner.