Timothy 02: Tim2 (14 page)

“JAN!” Vince screamed.

Damn, Hero boy was fast himself
. I stopped my bulk in a few steps, I knew what the pop in my right knee meant, I had just shredded my ACL and possibly my MCL, that much weight going that fast wasn’t meant to stop that quickly. Hugh was going to be a busy little boy. First things first. Shots flew down the hallway as Vince opened fire. I caught one in the shoulder just as I collapsed into the break room, my knee finally giving out.

“You fucker! I shot you! Are you dead?”

Upon reflection I wish I had just shut the hell up and let him come and investigate, but I was pissed. He
had
shot me and he had made me waste a meal. “Why don’t you come down here and find out,” I replied instead.

Half a magazine worth of bullets blazed, none close. I guessed he didn’t like my answer, or possibly more likely that I had responded at all.

I sat with my back against the wall. I was in a fair amount of pain. I had at least two bullets in me, one possibly shot from a bazooka and I had torn my knee up. If I were in the NFL, I would have just been forcibly retired.

Hugh was barely a distant memory as I sat there. He was so hard at work I felt like I was home alone. I don’t know how long I sat there; I think I may have even dozed off. Hugh was flooding my system with dopamine to help me deal with the pain as he made his repairs. I was awoken by Vince as he spoke.

“Her name was January Wolff, she was twenty-six years old, married, divorced. She worked in an elementary school. She was up for a teacher of the year award before all this shit started. She made a hellish trip of survival just to get here. Where we actually have a chance of holding out until help comes…and then some piece of shit like you comes and blows her head off.”

“Is this psychological warfare or some shit?” I answered.

“No, I just thought you should know who you killed. How decent of a human being she was.”

“Listen, Vince, maybe you shouldn’t have left her in a position she was wholly unprepared to defend. If anything, it’s your fault she’s dead.”

“What do you want from us?” he asked wearily, I think I struck a raw nerve. He was probably already feeling guilty about it and I had exacerbated the wound by pouring raw sewerage on it.

“Nourishment,” was my one word reply.

“Just let me have my girlfriend and we’ll leave. The rest are yours.”

“Let me get this straight so that we’re completely clear. I unstrap one of these little honeys, hand her over to you and you and her just leave?”

“Exactly.”

“You’d leave the rest of these people to fend for themselves? Doesn’t sound very hero-ish of you.”

“She’s all I’ve got. I had to shoot my brother and my best friend. I have no idea about my parents. I don’t care about the others…just her.”

“See, I don’t believe you. I think I give her up and then you’re all happy and shit and then try to kill me again.”

“I swear to you, you hand her over and we’re like ghosts. I swear it on my soul.”

“Well that’s a whole other conversation…that would be assuming that I believed in all the mystical shit. Tell me something about this special little lady and then I’ll make my decision.”

He didn’t say anything for so long I thought the deal was off, not that it was really ever on, but he didn’t know that.

“I was an addict…” he started.

“Was? I’ve known enough pill poppers to realize there’s never ‘was’ in their vocabulary.”

“I haven’t had a fix in five months.”

“Five whole months you say? Wow, aren’t you just special. I bet you have it down to the hour the last time you swallowed.”

“Shot.”

“Heroin. Nice. I guess if you’re going to do it, you might as well do it right.”

“April saved me.”

“That would be one of the girls behind me?”

A hitch caught in his voice, even cracking it a bit when he spoke next. “April...April Springer was at my group therapy session. She became my sponsor.”

“Was it part of your court appointment? The sessions?”

“Intervention.”

“That must have been a blast.”

“Yeah, never had so much fun in my life,” he answered sarcastically. “My brother is screaming at me, calling me a junkie loser. My mother is wailing, and my sister was in the corner getting soused on bourbon.”

“What finally convinced you to go? Certainly not the theatrics from your family, I’m sure as an addict you’d been hearing everything they had to say for years. Am I right? And then talk about the irony, you claw and climb out of your own personal hell only to be thrust into this wide scale perdition, that’s fucking rich.”

He didn’t say anything again for a while. “I had sold everything I owned. I borrowed from everyone that would give me a dollar. I stole what I could get my hands on. It got to the point where they wouldn’t even allow me in their homes for the holidays.”

“Gotta have your fix, though, don’t you? So what? You blowing dudes at the bus depot?”

Another pause.

“Oh shit I nailed it. Did a little sword swallowing for smack, how quaint. Man, at that point you needed to shoot up just to forget you had a little spunk on your chin. That’s pretty pathetic, man.” I got up and crossed the room, as I stood over April’s cot. I asked her if she was hearing this. Her eyes were huge as she tried desperately to pull in enough light to be able to see me. To her I was as dark as a nightmare in a bad dream.

I dragged the cot towards the doorway.

“What’s going on in there?” Vince asked with alarm.

“I just wanted to make sure she heard how truly pathetic you are. Oh I’m sorry…
were
.”

“She knows.”

“Really? And she kept going out with you? What’s the matter with you?” I asked, whispering in her ear. She recoiled from the sound; or it could have been my horrid, meat-rotted breath. “Wait. She was an addict, too? Oh, this makes sense. She was probably busy jacking old farts off in the Walmart parking lot while you were busy with your own specialty.”

“Listen, I’m not proud of it, but April was able to look beyond my past. She could see the person I could be.”

“You do realize that two addicts together rarely work out. You weak bastards are usually so co-dependent that one needs to slip up so the other can feel worth in their life. Then, because you’re weak, one will drag the other down with them.”

“She saved me, man. Please let me save her. Those first few days I went without shooting up I thought I was going to go insane…she got me through it. I won’t make it without her. She’s all and everything that I’ve got. There’s got to be something inside of you, some little piece that’s human. Compassionate maybe.”

“Keep talking,” I told him, not because he was winning his argument, but rather to hide what I was doing. “Sorry, darling,” I said as I stroked her hair, “but I’ve wasted enough food already and there’s got to be starving zombies in Africa.”

She blew out a heavy gust of air through her nose as I lifted her shirt and started chewing through her stomach. I didn’t go at it with my normal gusto. I tried to eat like a gentleman, like my mother taught, mouth closed and twelve chews per bite to really taste and digest my food properly.

April’s breathing quickened and became heavier as I sliced through her midsection. Her blood was pooling on the cot and straining through to the floor as I ate her abdominal section. I almost gagged when I realized she had eaten an oatmeal bar or something equally as disgusting. The flesh of her stomach lining mixed with the half-chewed dried berries was not a great contrast in tastes. I reached in and ripped free a kidney to eat so I could wash the taste out of my mouth. Her body sagged as the last beats of her heart pushed life fluid through her system. I wondered for a moment if she was still having thoughts and what they might revolve around. My guess was she was wishing she had shot up one more time. Had she known her end was so near, she might as well have gone out with a high.

“Say something, man,” Vince shouted. “I’m talking my gums out over here and I’m not getting any response.

“Sorry…I drifted off for a moment,” I said, dragging my sleeve across my mouth. “Keep talking, I’m listening.”

He rambled on incessantly about what a perfe
ct angel she was and how doves danced on her shoulders or some shit. I’d stopped caring about April the person the moment she became dinner. It might have been a half hour later and Vince was still droning on. April the saint had become April the carcass; what was left of her wouldn’t feed a family of mice. I did leave one special part intact.

I stood up from the cot. “I’ve made my decision.” I said as I tossed something down the hallway. It fell moistly against the floor. “Don’t let it be said I don’t have a heart.”

Vince’s screams were barely covered by the volley of bullets he sent down the hallway.

“Oh wait,” I laughed from inside the break room. “I guess
you have the heart now.”

The echoes from his shots finally died down, then the fun began as he started to smash things up and down the aisles. I could have attacked pretty much at any point, but this was so much more fun as he circled the drain into the depths of his own hell. What a pussy, brave enough to smash harmless bottles of mayonnaise but not enough to charge in here.

“Bet you could go for a little sugar smack now couldn’t you?” I shouted.

“I’ll rip your asshole through your throat, you fucking freak!” He was bellowing so loud I figured he had to be tearing his vocal chords.

There was more crashing and smashing, it was moving away from me. I could just make out a female voice trying to soothe him, talk him down from the precipice. It was one of the two women still left. Not the one who had skated out on me, and then it hit me. Those two were out in the store somewhere and there was no way my Charlene was guarding this exit way.

“I think I’m going to find my wayward little girl,” I told the store manager. He seemed to be lost in his own misery to care all that much.

I sauntered down to the end of the hallway, took a cursory look over to where things were still clattering to the floor, and then headed off to any location that a scared woman might try to hide. “Either towards the candy or the Kleenex, what do you think, Hugh?” He had just about completed his repairs and was coming up to poke his ugly head around.

“Eat now?”

“You’re worse than a tape worm. I’ll admit April was a little on the slender side, but come on, she wasn’t finger food either. And don’t you even think about an elimination. I’ve got some unfinished business to attend to first,” I said as I tried to quell down the gurgling in my stomach.

I moved away from the mouth of the hallway and the sounds of the retreating disturbance. I found what I was looking for two aisles over; a small mountain of wrappers were on the floor, Snickers, Reese’s Cups, Hershey bars, and at least a half dozen others. As I approached the discard pile, I was able to see a trail – some empty, some not – of candy leading away. It looked like a kid with eyes too big for his arms had come and grabbed all he or she could secret away.

I followed until the trail grew cold, okay poor pun, the last candy bar, a bite-size Kit-Kat was at the door to the cold storage room where, when the store was running normally, the produce would have been kept. I slowly pushed the door open, the smell of rotten fruit permeated everything. I had thought dead flesh was rank.
Why would my little princess hide out in here?
There had to be somewhere else in here she had hidden herself in, peanut butter and the smell of decay don’t mix well.

I walked in, letting the door shut behind me. “Charlene, are you in here, my sweet?” I called out in a sing-song voice.

I could not pinpoint it, but I heard a sharp intake of breath.

“Oh…I bet your heart is just trying to bust out of your chest right now. Probably slamming against that
skinny little frame of yours. Are your hands clammy? Did that peanut butter just dry up your mouth? We had something between us, my sweet Charlene. And you went and fucking ruined it.” The last sentence went from a sweet to menacing tone.

“It’s getting down to the nitty-gritty, did you know that? There’s only Vince, you, and some other bitch. Well, and then of course…me. How well can you see in this murkiness? You might be wondering if I am handicapped in the dark the same way you are? Well, let me assure you that I am not. Hugh has really beefed up the optics
system, I’d say it’s equivalent to ‘setting sun’ bright in here for me. Odds are you can just about see your hand in front of your face and little more. Man, that’s gotta be scary realizing I’ll see you WAY before you can see me.”

I heard some scurrying or rustling over to my right. It was faint, and just as easily could have been a rat, but it was worth checking out. I was convinced this time Charlene wasn’t going to move.

“I wonder if all that candy you’re so liberally eating will make you taste any better?” I asked.

I scanned around the room trying to ascertain her location. “Are you even now looking over to the double doors wondering if Vince the cavalry captain is going to come charging in on his dust broom? Don’t count on it. You see I just finished off his good tasting girlfriend; or how about flavorful fiancé, that has a much better ring to it don’t you think? Well, either way, he’s pretty far over the edge right now. If he lives, which I wouldn’t bet on, he’s going to do his best to get out of here and find some black tar – that’s heroin for those not in the know. He’s a recovering addict…or as I like to say, procrastinating junkie. They always go back, even the Holier-than-thou, my-shit-don’t-stink-anymore converts. Those are the assholes they find face down in a pile of their own vomit with a needle sticking out of their arm and a Bible on the bed next to them. Praise the Lord, Charlene!” I thumped against a box next to me. I could picture her twitching from the sound of it.