A Gray Life: a novel (13 page)

Still October 8
th

As Louise swung the glass-paneled door open, we held our breath expecting alarms
to go off. We knew it was impossible (no electricity), but it was our first break-in. No alarms sounded when we inched our way into the kitchen, and no people came running out of the dark, demanding to know what exactly we were doing in their home. However, it was so dark inside the house that if people had been waiting around the corner to brain us, we would have never seen them coming.

“Find a flashlight.” Louise whispered.

“Okay.” I whispered back.

Maybe it seems dumb
for us to whisper in a potentially empty house, but it felt right at the time. Carefully, we opened drawers and cabinets in search of lights, candles, anything.

“Gotcha!”
Louise squealed, forgetting to be quiet. She held up two battery-operated lanterns.

Armed with light, we took a tour of our new home. I’ll tell you
what, it was the slowest, most gut-wrenching tour I’ve ever taken. There we were, stumbling through dark corridors, an underfed boy and woman. No one to protect us. We had to protect
ourselves
. The prospect was enough to make me shit concrete (very bad, I know).

We
got through the entire house intact, physically and mentally, but it took a dang long time. Part of what took so long was the size of the place. I’d never been in a house with seven bathrooms.

Who needs all
that many bathrooms, especially when there’s only six bedrooms, and three of them are guestrooms. The other rooms consisted of a nursery, a room that would be every little girl’s dream of a pink princess paradise, and a master suite. All of them had an untouched look and feel, leading Louise and I to believe the house was some rich person’s vacation home.

Our trek through the house left us tired. We ended it by returning to the kit
chen. I hadn’t noticed at first, but there was light in the kitchen, the red light spillin’ from the moon, but still light. It was coming from a skylight. A skylight in a kitchen was another luxury I would never understand the need for. I wondered how much it had cost to have it installed, back when things had cost something.

Since we knew the h
ouse was empty (and sort of secure), we moved onto our next impulse: our growling stomachs. Being in an actual kitchen made me
hun
gry, and Louise’s eyes were telling me she was hungry too.

I didn’t hold out
much hope a vacation home would be well stocked, but I’m glad I was wrong. The fridge yielded only catsup and mustard, but the pantry…oh, the pantry.

The owners must have expected
a nuclear holocaust for all the canned and boxed goods they stockpiled. It was like finding a treasure trove within a treasure trove. Louise and I searched the shelves with disbelief. If our lanterns weren’t lyin’ to us, then we had just become food millionaires.

Cookies, crackers, candy bars, soups, fruits and veggies (canned,
dur), Vienna sausages, ravioli, the list went on. We had a junk-food feast all through the night. It was the best meal I’d had in nearly a year, even if I wanted to throw it up after. My stomach wasn’t used to taking so much in, and it protested strongly when I reached for my sixth chocolate chip cookie.

Louise
was filling her face with canned deliciousness, but she looked as green as I felt.

“We’d better quit before we empty out the pantry in one night.”
She said.

It was partly a joke, but I believed we could’ve done it. The outcome would’ve been pointless and painful, but cause of death?
Exploding stomach. Didn’t sound like a bad death after all the different ones I’d seen.

Louise
suggested we sleep in the living room together for safety. I thought it was a capital idea. After all, we’d been sleeping in the same vicinity for over five months. A raid of the front closet gave us two hockey sticks, but no guns. Throw pillows and blankets on the sofas made for a luxurious sleep. Once upon a time, my dad used to complain about being sent to the couch, but I loved it. Compared to a bedroll on a cement floor, I slept like a king. In theory, anyway. I was actually too scared to close my eyes. Even with a full belly and Louise sitting up all night with a hockey stick, I couldn’t feel safe enough to close my eyes.

Didn’t help that we’d left the hall closet door open, and I could see
the open doorway leading to oblivion from the sofa.

T
he dark abyss of an open closet door meant the possibility of monsters with fangs, viscous fluid dripping from them. With what we had seen Outside, it was plausible a demon might lurk in between the coats inside the closet. As each second passed, I was more inclined to believe a monster would leap from the shadows to devour us. Every second that did
not
happen, I was more convinced that it was going to.  There was even one mad second when I prayed for it to happen, simply for the agony of the unknown to be over. It was paranoia that put me to sleep.

Something happened during the next few hours, and I can’t be sure of the details. I heard movement, felt Louise get off of the couch, and then I heard more noise. The back
door opened. Louise was screaming at an intruder. She brought down the hockey stick on them, and down again.

“Stop!”
A familiar voice cried. “It’s me.”

When I heard that, I rolled off of the couch and ran to the back door. There, sprawled on the kitchen floor with two duffe
l bags beside him, was Michael.

* * * *

Still (yes, still) October 8
th

Over a breakfast of dry cereal and SPAM, Michael
told us how he came to escape.

“First of all, I didn’t think it’d take me so long to get to you two.” Again, none of us have watches, but
an approximate four or five hours had passed until Michael had found us. “After you two escaped, Brian went for the knife. He got it before I could, but I tackled him. I held him down hard for a few minutes before realizing, he wasn’t moving. When I flipped him over, I saw the knife had been shoved into his face at a diagonal angle, starting from under his jaw and poking out from the opposite side.” I wished he hadn’t told us as much as he did. “His face…” Michael grimaced, “He may have deserved to die, but I can’t get the way he looked out of my head. I’ve never killed anyone before.”

“
You had to do it. It’s okay, Michael.” From her tone, I imagined Louise was forgiving him for more than was necessary at the moment.

He wiped his eyes and continued.
“I wanted to run after you two…but my stomach hurt like hell.” Louise and I studied the bloody hole in his t-shirt. “And I wanted to gather all the supplies I could. I made myself rest, and an hour later, I emptied out His house of all the useful items. There wasn’t much food, but there were other things like matches, tools, and guns.” His foot kicked the two duffle bags on the floor. “Then I get here and Louise almost kills me.”

“
I thought you were a creature, or Him!” Her face was streaked with red splotches.

“I know. I’m glad to know you
can defend yourself if need be.” His tone wasn’t demeaning, but the words made Louise balk.

“If need be? After the world ends, there’s no room for a damsel in distress, shithead.”

They both smiled and looked at each other in a way my parents had plenty of times before. They didn’t kiss (they hadn’t made up that far), but I could tell they wanted to. Yuck.

“What about your wound?
Are you okay?”

Michael lifted his shirt. A big patch of gauze was covering
a hole in his gullet. “I cleaned it best I could. Plus, I don’t think he hit anything major.”

Louise scoffed.
“How do you know that?”

“
Cause I’m still alive.”

* * * *

There was a knock at the door. Who knew Juniper was at the hotel? No one.
Has to be the maid
, she thought.

No one announced themselves as “housekeeper” or “room service”. Just silence while Juniper decided whether or not to open her door. Then it occurred to her that the boy from the street could have followed her the few blocks down to the hotel. She didn’t feel the perverse excitement that belonged to the boy. What she was sensing was sadness and …regret.
Couldn’t have been the molester from before.

Juniper
guessed who it was before he spoke through the door.

“It’s Christopher.”

Christopher. Her estranged husband.

The man she had given up her life for to start a new one. Not that
Juniper’s old life had been overly fabulous, but it had been
hers
. Because of his inability to cope with their dying world, she'd had to start over a third time. Good thing prostitutes were in high demand no matter the social condition of things.

Condition of things.

The condition of things
had been Juniper’s most motivating factor when leaving Christopher.

You’re too drunk right now, so maybe I’ll give this note to you later.

When you drink like this, it worries me. It makes me wonder what’s so lacking in your life that you have to drown it out with alcohol. In truth, it breaks my heart.

If this goes on, I don’t know how much longer I can be on this road with you.

This is part of the reason I tried to let you go before.

I knew in my gut
that you would do this. I knew you would hurt me. I just didn’t know how…This must be it.

And still I love you. It makes me weak and a coward to confront you. I wonder if I’ll even give you this note.
Most likely, I will just repress my unhappy state, hoping that you’ll change. But this
is
you, isn’t it?

Juniper hadn’t given
Christopher the note the first time he had come home drunk, or even the second time. In all other areas of her life, she wasn’t one to let things continue to happen. With Christopher, she didn’t know what she was doing. She let him keep on drinking because she was afraid to be without him. And she was also stupid because she believed he would change. Oh, he changed. He changed right into an asshole. His normally blue aura became a dingy yellow. All his feelings of love, kindness, and humor corrupted into grating waves of emotions Juniper hardly recognized as human.

She had tried reading animal
emotions before. The experiment had failed every time. Every so often though, she would get a flash of happiness or anger from a cat or a dog. As a child, Juniper had felt something coming from the gorilla habitat at the zoo. A large gorilla once stared straight at her, and she stared right back. Its feelings were so clear that she could practically hear its thoughts: the gorilla was bored. Below the mellow feelings, there was anger. At the core of many of its strange emotions, Juniper knew there would be anger.

On one end, she was fascinated with the encounter. On the other, she was frightened at the implications. While apes and humans were different, they weren’t
too far apart genetically. Obviously, the difference wasn’t a huge if Juniper could sense their emotions so clearly. What separated humans from apes (in her estimation) was the anger. Humans had plenty of their own anger, but it wasn’t an underlying emotion in all of their actions. Being inside of the feelings of the creature made her see there was a veil, a very thin veil. Lately, Juniper sensed the veil was disappearing, for everyone. If she really thought about it, Christopher’s anger (and even the boy’s anger) closely resembled what she had felt that day in the gorilla habitat.

“Can I come in?”

He didn’t sound (or feel) drunk. It was probably safe to let him inside. Juniper opened the door.

For a drunkard, Christopher looked remarkably sober. His hair was combed, his buttoned down shirt was clean, and his khaki pants were unsoiled by beer or piss. It was like looking at the man she had married, instead of the monster he had become.

“How did you know I was staying here?”

Juniper didn’
t step aside to let him in, nor did Christopher try joining her in the room.