Containment (30 page)

With a whine, Jules buzzed, “I liked the games at the other place better.”

Danny didn’t answer her and instead chose to push the dice toward her. Ignoring them, Jules continued, “I like my games at home better too. I miss home. I just wanna go home, Danny. When are we gonna go home?”

“Just roll the dice, Jules. It’s your turn.” Danny wanted to be at home too, but seeing how far and how thoroughly the catastrophe in Alaska had spread he had begun to wonder himself whether home would be waiting for them at all anymore.

“I don’t wanna play anymore. I wanna go home.”

Again, Danny was forced to imagine home and what was waiting for them now. Were his parents still alive? Was anyone back home still alive or were they like all the other people out there that were bent on killing and terrorizing? It was long past time for this nightmare to end. His affect was becoming as flat and pale as the morning skies. He was only playing the game to burn the hours until it was time to sleep again. He looked over at Jules and saw that she wasn’t in the mood to wait to sleep. She had simply lay back and closed her eyes in frustration. He was amazed at how easily she could embrace her slumber. It was typically much harder for him to find the peace to slip into an actual restful sleep. When he closed his eyes, he still saw his friend Martin laying across the seat in the minivan those many days ago. Sometimes, he saw Tony, who had been killed trying to help them get away from their first hiding place. It didn’t seem right to him that a person of his age would have seen so much and such cruel death.

Danny finally decided that perhaps sleep was an option worth pursuing for himself too. Right there across the glossy Milton Bradley game board, he spread himself on his stomach and wished for sleep to find him.

About twenty minutes into his nap, when his mind wandered somewhere between sleep and awake, Danny thought he heard somebody walk into the room. Their voices defied detection as they spoke in hushed, hissing whispers. Danny was reminded of the times in which his parents had ventured into his room after he’d gone to bed but before he had truly embraced sleep. He would lie there with his eyes closed feigning sleep. Usually, possum playing led him to sleep’s embrace. Maybe his parents knew this. Maybe all parents knew this. Maybe it was a game that they all played without ever really knowing that the other was playing. These thoughts, mixed with the voices, played themselves across his mind, like flashes of color and light...a neural pyrotechnics show exclusively for him.

And the old trick worked yet again because it was several hours later when he found himself being shaken awake by Jules.

“Danny. Danny. It’s dinnertime. Get up, Danny.”

“Okay, okay. I’m awake.” He rose from his belly with game tokens and cards stuck to his face and in his hair.

Meals still tended to be good for everyone, especially because there seemed to be such an abundance of virtually everything. There were plenty of proteins, starches, and sweets. They even managed to still be holding some cans of fruits and vegetables. Drinks were usually sports drinks, sodas, or water.

This meal was no exception. They ate heartily and shared the rare smile and even rarer laugh. Mealtime was when everyone was at his or her best. Some ate out on the back deck under the grey but dry skies, while others ate at the glass top bronze table inside.

The only one absent was Malachi, who had taken to his solitude again. His interaction with others was reserved solely for Dr. Caldwell, but even that was very limited.

The reclusive police officer had withdrawn again and isolated himself from everyone else. His behavior was still worrisome, but it was also viewed as much less of a threat than before. This, of course, stemmed from his recent reliability and his keeping to himself his extreme opinions about others. He was still considered and referred to as creepy in conversations between the women primarily, but even they, Emma included, recognized that his contributions had kept them all alive at one point or another.

While the others ate that night, Malachi retreated to a small bathroom situated in a hallway on the ground floor next to the unfinished utility room. It was in a dark corner of a dark hallway, lit only by the fading pale light of the evening sun and a lonely creeping strip of flickering light down near the floor.

He sat on the closed toilet and pressed his hands together in front of his face. His silent prayers were being given voice by a series of grunts and whimpers. Even through his clenched, trembling eyes, Malachi could see him.

“That’s right, Mal. You should be prayin’ for the things you done.” The air in the dark room became rank and foul all at once, tainted with the foul waste that was collecting in the bottom of the un-flushed toilet bowl below him.

“You been a bad boy again, Mal?”

Malachi cracked open his eyes slowly to reveal the confines of the small room. He’d chosen the room because it seemed so small that even a floating spectre wouldn’t be able to find enough room in which to taunt him. He was relieved when he didn’t see anything but the dancing shadows of the minuscule flickering light of the single burning candle on the sink counter top.

He became acutely aware of how badly he was sweating when a rivulet of beaded perspiration streamed down his forehead and onto his cheek. He swabbed away the salty liquid with hands that were as moist and heavy as kitchen sponges.

The sorrow surprised him at how quickly it overtook him. When the tears and quiet sobbing struck, he lost near total control of himself. He leaned forward and planted his forehead onto the wall.

The wall was cold and firm; solid and real. Maybe it could bear some of the heavy regrets and lingering pain that were overwhelming him. He pressed into the plaster even harder, feeling the uneven pattern and ridges imprinting themselves on his skin. The pain, like the hard wall, was real...tangible.

When the wall didn’t seem strong enough and with nowhere else to lean, he tried to turn inside. He tried to find the strength of his faith. He saw a string of pastors and Holy Fathers from his past and even managed to remember some of their voices. But from them, all he could hear were words and no power. They could well have been speaking Aramaic for all he knew. It didn’t matter because the words were as empty as politicians’ promises; they said them because they were paid to do it.

He squeezed his temples to the point of pain in search of some buttressing strength. When he sought strength and faith and power from his past or his mind, the faces he saw and the voices he heard were those of his mother and his grandmother.

It was to them that he clung when the violence began, aimed first at them and then later at him. Despite the anger and the betrayal and the bruises and cuts, his mother’s smile was ever present in his memory. Sometimes, he wrapped himself in the red warmth of her smile where no hands, no words, and no thoughts could harm him. It was a sanctuary he had always carried with him, but one that was becoming increasingly more difficult to find in the tangle of memories and torment that was his mind.

“You know she didn’t even want you don’tcha?” the voice asked. “At first all she could think about was seein’ someone and makin’ you go away. And then she tried to give you away, but no one wanted you. Even when you was a baby, people could see that you were going to be a bad boy. Even as a baby....”

With desperate, pleading tears and a trembling face, he forced out of himself with a shudder, “You’re not real. You’re not real. Just go away. You’re not real.”

“Oh, I’m real, Mal. I’m as real as you...cuz I am you. Don’t you get it?”

Malachi swung around as deftly as he could in the minuscule space. The candle’s flame leapt into the air as if it was trying to make a run for it, but in the end elected to stay on the comfort and security of the wick. The cast shadows followed the flame’s lead, trying to flee from the foul smelling box of a room, but they too retreated when the candle decided to cancel its emigration, shadows being only as brave as the light that leads them.

Nothing. The room was empty, save for him and his lone companion: the candle. He sat back down and nearly squealed when his father’s unshaven face was suddenly just inches away from his own. “You were a mistake, Mal...an unwanted mistake. That’s why all those things happened to you. No one wanted you; not even your own mother.”

Malachi shot up from his toilet seat and flung open the door. He very nearly fell forward through the door but caught his balance at the last moment. He backed away from the open bathroom door and the little flame that seemed so distant and alone, his eyes darting left and then right to make sure that he wasn’t being pursued.

He was at least maintaining a better sense of where he was and not confusing the present and the past. The voices and the faces were as real as those of the people upstairs, though. If he tried, he just knew that he could reach out and touch them if he wanted. Maybe that was what he needed to do. Maybe it was up to him to push them away and punish them the way they had done to him all those years ago.

He could feel all the fear becoming anger. Then, at the height of his anger’s boil, he remembered his past’s evangelists and their fiery sermons. He remembered the sense of righteous understanding and that there were absolutes in life. There was a simple yet powerful comfort in knowing that there were rights and wrongs on which one could count, as well as good and evil from which one could be damned.

And then it hit him. He knew what he needed to do. Every house should have one and hopefully this house would be no exception. He ascended the stairs and found a small bookshelf that had more knickknacks than books but didn’t find it. He went to the coffee table that had been moved into a corner of the living room and dug through the magazines and picture books and still no luck. Of all the books he might find, he couldn’t imagine that he wouldn’t come across this one. He stopped in the middle of the room and thought about it for a moment, while everyone in the dining room stopped eating and stared at him. He was utterly oblivious to their gazes.

Where could it be? He spent several seconds thinking and considering and then he remembered seeing them in people’s bathrooms in the past. With urgency in his step, he made his way down the narrow hall on the main floor and stopped at the entrance to the bathroom. Although this room was larger and was lit with several candles, he couldn’t help but feel the tenuous hold of fear from his encounter in the other privy downstairs only moments before. He held his breath and waded in, hoping that his search would yield success quickly.

He looked in drawers, in the basket next to the toilet, and in the small linen closet and still found nothing. He finally looked in the least likely of places, the cabinet doors under the sink where one typically finds personal hygiene items, cleaning products, and extra toilet paper. He used his small pen sized flashlight from his belt to be able to see. At first, there was only what he expected, but behind the stack of toilet paper rolls he caught sight of a dark covered book. He pulled the tower of paper down as if he was Godzilla on a rant in a toilet paper roll version of Tokyo and there it was, waiting for him.

He hugged the book to his chest and breathed much easier. He opened the cover and began to read quietly but aloud, “In the beginning there was only darkness....”

Jerry tried peeking through the long narrow window next to the large double doors but couldn’t see anything. Between the darkness on the other side and the opaque cloudiness of the treated glass, it was no use. He wasn’t able to see anything. He tried the handle but already knew that it would be locked. Why would this door be any different than the majority of doors they’d encountered?

“Why the hell are we stopping here?” demanded Art.

Meghan admonished him with, “Irreverent much?”

Neither pausing nor softening his tone, Art continued, “You in the mood for prayer?”

Thinking to himself that he liked Art less and less, Jerry was able, after considerable effort, to avert launching into the rant that was threatening to leap into the fray, a rant that was something of a constant for him in his past.

The past tirades were typically characterized more by humor than by aggression, but they usually surfaced as a response to someone else’s aggressive posturing. He found that when someone else was already provoked and on edge, it became that much easier to poke fun and taunt the person. His mouth got him into altercations, both physical and vocal, on numerous occasions, but he never seemed to learn from his past dealings and then had to accept the consequences which often included bruises, several suspensions from school, and lost jobs.

He was likely considered by most of the adults in his life to be a smart-assed slacker who was better at picking apart others’ problems than he was in solving his own or making anything of himself. And the thing was, they were right. He was all that and more...or would that be less? No matter. There was a line from an Everclear song that summed him up nicely:
“I am a loser geek, crazy with an evil streak.”
Yeah, that was him alright.

All that changed, and all at once. No one, not even he, saw it coming or would have predicted that he would ever have chosen the path that he was traveling. Maybe it was his friends from college, home for the summer, bragging about their exploits and living the life that he wanted for himself. Maybe it was that he was sick of always being broke and having nothing to call his own. Maybe he was sick of living under his parents’ roof and living by their rules and standards. Maybe it was just all about timing and he was due. It didn’t really matter.