The Damned Summer (The Ruin Trilogy) (3 page)

“Too good for the likes of this old fool,” he
whispered.

The clacking nails of Lloyd’s feet came from
the hallway as he returned with raised ears.

“I’m coming,” Frank replied hoarsely, setting
the picture back down.

Lloyd sat down and waited for him.

Frank reached the doorway and looked down at
his old friend. “I’ve shared more secrets with you than I ever did with her.”

Lloyd looked down and moved to Frank’s leg,
leaning against it.

“It’s not your fault,” Frank said, petting
him. “I know that. “It’s not my fault either.” He looked back at the picture.
“It’s just the nature of the Beast.”

Shambling into the kitchen, Frank rubbed the
blur from his eyes, opening the silverware drawer to grab a butter knife. His
fingers went to the spot where he kept the butter-knives, but instead of
feeling a metal handle, something pierced his fingertip.

The sudden pain caused him to remove his hand
from his face, looking down into the drawer. A steak knife laid among the
butters, its serrated teeth standing upwards like the lower jaw of a shark, a
lone tear of blood oozed down one of its tips.

"How the hell did that get in the wrong
bin?" he asked himself when an old memory hit him as the blood started to
thin out on the knife, bringing the color of the steel to a metallic red. The
same color his father's switchblade had been the night Frank had slit a Viet
Cong's throat.

Frank's father came to him on the night of
March 26th, 1969. Frank would be shipping out to the Vietnam War the following
morning. His father held out the knife. "Ain't got no advice for you when
it comes to war, boy, other than keep your head down. That's what kept me alive
in WW2," he had said with the same cold eyes he had both before and after
his war. He glanced down at the switchblade. "This came in handy a couple
of times as well. Killed more than one Nazi with this." He dropped it in
Frank's shirt pocket. "Keep her close and she'll do the same for you I
imagine." His father turned, shutting his bedroom door without another
word.

Frank had stared at his bedroom door for
almost a minute before reaching into his pocket, pulling out the knife. He had
been waiting for his father to come back and get the knife, changing his mind
about giving his son something, anything, much less an item he seemed to value.
His father had carried the switchblade around since he got back from the war like
it was a solid gold pocket watch. Why the hell would he give it to his son who
was about to go out and die. A son he had never really wanted to begin with.

Frank almost threw it into his desk drawer,
thinking to hell with what his dad wanted, but the feel of the ebony handle
felt solid in his hand. Pulling it up closer to his face, he hit the button.
The blade shot out like a rattlesnake.

He suddenly understood his father's
fascination with the knife, it was truly a tool for killing and nothing more.
The cross bar at the bottom of the blade pointed upward with the blade, making
them look like miniature tines of a pitchfork, with the blade being the middle
tine.

"Devil's back up weapon?" he
whispered to himself with a  smile on that long ago night. If only he would
have known the truth of his words.

So he took it to Nam, thinking it belonged
there more than he did, and his father had been right, it had saved his life
once, but in the process he had lost the knife. That had been fine with him
both at the time as well as now.

What had once helped steel his nerves for the
war, had started to feel like a scorpion in his pocket. Instead of the knife
helping him to stay strong, it seemed to be draining him, feeding off what
strength reserves he had left. It seemed to be feeding off the jungle as well,
getting heavy with death and misery.

He slammed the drawer shut, forcing the
memories away as best he could.

"I think I'm sticking to just tea for
breakfast today, boy," He told Lloyd. "Not in the mood for
toast."

Lloyd let out a quiet exhale through his
nose. So much for getting a scrap of crust this time.

They climbed in the family SUV and made their
way to the local diner for breakfast.

“You need to get rid of this gas hound,”
Linda said.

“I need it for the dig,” Steve replied. “Once
that’s over, I’ll downsize.”

Linda looked at him. “Sure you will.”

“Yes, I will,” he said with a smile. “I’m
overdue for a mid-life crisis sports car.”

“Now you're sounding more like yourself,”
Linda said with a sigh.

“Where we headed?” Steve asked the two women
in his life.

“The only place in town that serves a decent
breakfast,” Linda replied, looking out the window.

“Joe’s Cup,” Sarah said from the back seat.
“Best pancakes in the state.”

“Not too bad of an omelet, either,” Steve added.

“If you put hot sauce on it, don’t even think
about trying to kiss me,” Linda said with a scowl.

“Oh, they’ll be hot sauce,” Steve replied
with wiggling eyebrows, as he grabbed her knee. “As well as hot kisses!” he
started tickling his wife’s thigh.

“Stop!” Linda said with a beautiful laugh.
“Keep your hands on the wheel!”

Sarah rolled her eyes. “This is almost
obscene.”

The aging American native man sat at the
diner, sipping his coffee in solitary silence. He had come to this small town
because his ancestors’ peace was being disturbed. His people were doing
everything they could to stop this trespass but the courts were slow in dealing
out justice, so he had come to speak to the man in charge of this grave
robbing. Perhaps he could speak some sense into this confused teacher.

It wasn’t until he had reached the area that
he started to understand there was something else stirring here. It floated on
the air like soot and ash from a rancid fire of the burning dead. It tainted
everything, even the coffee he sipped.

“What have they found?”
he asked himself, finishing his coffee and
placing money on the table for the bill. Right before he stood up his eyes meet
Steve Hendrix’s as he and his family stepped through the front door of Joe’s
Cup.

Less than eight feet stood between them. Both
men were full of stress and anxiety over what they considered a passion. Both
were also nauseous with the evil that had suddenly contaminated that love,
making it something putrid, like a beautiful woman who suddenly became a rotting
corpse as you kissed her for the first time.

They moved towards one another with dark eyes
and scowls. Neither of them condoned violence, but nor did either man shy from
it when it was necessary. A logical man would say this was not one of those moments,
unfortunately, neither one of these wise men were in a logical mood at the
moment.

“What in the hell…” Steve began.

“What have you found?” the old Indian
bellowed at the top of his lungs, his finger in Steve’s face. “What have you
unleashed?”

“History!” Steve yelled back as the diner
suddenly got quiet. “The history of this land and the people who lived here!”
Steve’s finger pointed right back at the old man’s face. “People that you have
no way of proving are your ancestors!”

“Does that really matter now?” The Indian
whispered as he got in Steve’s face, even though he was a good six inches
shorter than Steve’s six foot two frame. “Are you getting more than just dirt
on your hands now, professor?”

Steve’s mind stumbled as he tried to think of
what to say. “I’m not a professor,” he replied. “I’m a teacher.” He pushed past
the old Indian.

“All the more reason that you should know
better,” the old man said, walking out of the diner.

Linda and Sarah looked at one another,
mortified.

Steve looked back at them. “Come on, let’s
get a table.”

Linda was about to tell her husband she
wasn’t going to eat at a place where her husband just embarrassed the hell out
of her when Lenny Marshall started clapping.

Lenny was a short, stocky middle-aged man
that was known for being a loud mouth, but had enough of a personality to
usually get away with it. He also owned the local construction company that
Steve was using to excavate the dig site.

“That was a better show than anything that is
going to be on the Saturday Matinee!” Lenny said with a laugh. “Jenny!” he
called out to the waitress. “I’m picking up their bill.” He tipped his coffee
cup at Steve, “It’s the least I can do after such an entertaining show.”

Steve waived Lenny down. “You just get your
boys to be more careful with the backhoe and we're square.”

Lenny shrugged. “They’re construction
workers, they ain’t artists.”

“Fine, then you are paying for my breakfast,”
Steve replied. “You should be able to afford it with those union rates you’re
charging me.”

“You think my boys are rough with your
ancient pottery pieces, let’s see what happens to that shit when you bring in a
bunch a rats to do the work instead of union men.” Lenny said as he shoveled in
a forkful of pancake.

Half the restaurant laughed, including Steve,
so the tension in the room seemed to dissipate as Steve took a seat and looked
at his wife and daughter, who still stood in the same place they had been in
during the argument.

“What?” he asked, looking down at the menu.

With an angry sigh Linda went to the table
with Sarah following behind.

“You’re an asshole,” Linda said, looking at
her own menu.

“Aren’t you an excellent role model for our
teenage daughter,” Steve replied still looking at his own menu.

“That was so embarrassing, dad,” Sarah said,
looking around the diner to see if anyone from school was here.

“That was nothing compared to what I’ll do
when you start bringing guys home.”

Linda grinned slightly and shook her head.

Steve pointed at her. “Hey, you’re not
allowed to laugh at my jokes, you’re mad at me, remember?”

Jenny the waitress came over to their table.
“You crazy kids ready to order?”

“Got anything stronger than coffee?” Linda
asked.

Jake awoke with a dry throat and an aching
head. Sitting up, he ran his hand through his hair and looked at his pack of
cigarettes that sat on the nightstand, waiting for him.

"What would dear old dead pappy think
right now?" he whispered to himself as he lit up. The flash of his butane
lighter winked at him in the mirror on the wall.

"Smokes gonna make you slow and quick to
wind, boy," he said in his dead father's southern Illinois accent, looking
at his reflection. "Ain't one damn NFL player smokes, I guarantee
it," blowing smoke out of his nose just like his father had when he had
said it.

"Fucking hypocrite," Jake said,
walking into the bathroom to take a piss. His dad had loved how Jake seemed to
be a natural on the football field as a linebacker, and it gave them common
ground when their relationship was starting to become stressed due to Jake becoming
a teenager. When Jake's father died, he stopped playing, and he didn't miss it
a damn bit.

His old man could be a mean son of a bitch at
times, especially when he drank too much whiskey, but overall he had been a
decent father, and Jake missed the hell out of him. He didn't figure out the
only real reason he had played football was to make his dad happy until he
died.

It had been an accident at the corn
processing plant that had killed his father. He had been fourteen when it
happened so he never heard the grizzly details first hand, only what he had
overheard from conversations in other rooms late at night. His father had been
foreman over the maintenance crew and they had been trying to repair one of the
massive machines that was fucking up. It was supposedly bigger than most
people's houses and his father was on top of it, doing some damn thing to try
to get it to work. For some unknown reason, he slipped and fell into it. The
augur that twisted inside of the giant metal box chewed him up into red jelly in
less than three seconds.

The corn processing plant had paid out a good
sized settlement, between that and the life insurance his mother didn't have to
worry about money anymore. She could quit her job as a bank teller if she
wanted, luckily she didn't, because the health insurance she had through her
job was much needed when she was diagnosed with cancer a year later.

Lung cancer, which made perfect sense, she
smoked a pack and a half a day with ease. She had taken it all in with ease as
well, just like dad's death, just like when she found out that the plant had
blamed her husband's death on his own neglect of safety. She had explained it
all to him in whispers and a half smile. His father could be a mean son of a
bitch, but his mother was the Queen Bitch of Cold.

Soon she would be even colder, when she was
six feet under, and he would be all alone in the world.