Bury Me in Black Page 4

  “Can I help you, Miss Justine?”

  “No, um, thank you, Benjamin,” she said, remembering her courtesy. “Just looking for the little girl’s room.”

  “That way,” he pointed. “Do try not to get lost.”

  When she returned, dinner was breaking up. David passed her as she walked back towards the table. He slipped a note into her hand. She pocketed it, quickly. Only when she had returned to her room, an hour or so later, did she bother to read it. Written on a cocktail napkin were directions to his secret hideaway.

  Meet me at midnight.

  ~

  She was used to keeping odd hours. Even before the quarantine, she’d been a denizen of the night. It took her all of five minutes to decide that she’d meet him that night. There was something tantalizing about the prospect of sneaking around this big house, especially right under Benjamin’s nose. She liked the idea of doing something that the snotty butler would most definitely not approve of. So, when the witching hour was upon her, Justine checked her makeup one more time in the mirror, and then headed out on her sneaking mission.

  His directions led her a back route through the manor, avoiding the main hallway where Benjamin—or whoever spelled him by night—was no doubt standing guard. She turned down a hall and immediately saw the shadows dancing to the rhythm of a nearby flame. Two high-backed chairs sat facing a fireplace, with an end table between them. A bottle of red wine had already been uncorked. One glass was full, the other empty. She approached slowly, still dressed for dinner. She’d thought of exchanging her dress for more casual bedwear but decided against it.

  “You made it,” he said, as she rounded the chair. She took a seat next to him. “Wine?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “Oh, come on. Don’t make me drink alone.”

  “Fine. I guess one glass couldn’t hurt.”

  He winked, and filled her cup, handing it her way.

  “Been a week now,” he said. He remained in his suit from dinner, but his tie was undone, as was the top button of his shirt. “Assimilating well?”

  “I’m working on it,” she said. She examined the wine bottle. “Where did you get this?”

  “Crowe’s private stores. I can be very sneaky.”

  “Well done,” she said, taking a sip. “So, all this just to pick my brain about Zeke, huh?”

  “No. No. I never said that. I want to know about you,” he said, leaning towards her in his seat. He took a gulp of wine.

  “Look…I see nothing new for months,” he said. “Years at this point, actually. And then you show up, out of nowhere, with all this knowledge of what it’s like out there. I need to know, Justine. Desperately,” he laughed. “I’ll pay you. Name a price. I’ve got my black card here,” he said, pretending to dig into his jacket for a wallet.

  She took another sip.

  “Are you married?” she asked.

  That wiped the smirk off his face.

  “Guilty. Yes. I have a young boy. Tommy. He’s here too.”

  “I saw them next to you at dinner. You don’t talk much.”

  “Spend all day every day locked in a house with your family. See if you don’t run out of things to talk about.”

  “Fine. Tell me about you first,” she said, holding the glass in front of her lips. “Then we’ll talk about me.”

  He did as he was told, and spun his predictable tale. David met his wife in college. He went to law school. She became a teacher. They settled in Garland, where they met Jacob Crowe. When the quarantine walls went up, Crowe gathered all of his friends. He’d been something of a conspiracy theorist, buying up all the food he could when news of the virus first hit. Days, maybe weeks before the full-on outbreak, Crowe had bought enough nonperishables to outlast everyone else. Then he’d hidden away in this Ridgewood manor, taking whatever friends he had along for the ride. David had been among those to accept his offer.

  “I owe the old man everything,” he said, pouring his third glass. Justine was halfway through her second. “I hate being bitter about it. It’s just, the crowd he’s assembled here, everyone’s so…”

  “Plastic.”

  “Plastic. Sure. That’s a good word for it.”

  “You’re from New York.”

  “Upstate. Yeah. And you’re a local, right?”

  “Uh-huh. Covington, Connecticut. Born and raised,” she said.

  “Where were you when it began?”

  “Ridgewood. My mother had just passed away, a few months earlier. I was living with my father. This was well before I ever met Zeke. Months before, actually. Life was…different.”

  The image constructed itself before her eyes. Just over her smirking drinking buddy’s shoulder, the room was changing. Black lines cut the room in haphazard scribbles, forming windows. The walls drew in closer, and next came the sketch of a kitchen table and the hardwood floor below it. The room came into shape, shaded in, the edges touched up. All in whites and greys and blacks.

  A charcoal pencil from God.

  And then she was there, sixteen years old, shivering in her school uniform. She wore dark blue knee socks and a black short-sleeved polo above a blue and black plaid skirt. It was a dreary outfit to wear on a daily basis, truth be told. Her father stood at her side, his arms crossed, examining that indentation in the living room floor. The hardwood pattern, in this one square area, was just the tiniest hint darker, the lines more stressed. A trapdoor.

  He placed his hands on his hips, balancing his weight on one leg. Jeff wore a Ralph Lauren polo, his jeans a little too tight for her taste. He had dark black hair that pulled back into a short ponytail. A goatee adorned his lips. He was forty, but still pretending to be twenty-six. With the slew of girlfriends, the drinking and all those cigarettes, he played the part pretty well. He’d never become a real adult. From the start, there’d been a ceiling on his maturation process.

  “We’ll listen to the radio,” he said, still examining the floor. There was very little fear in his voice. “We’ll know when it’s safe to come out.” He nodded to himself. “You know, this could be good for us, kiddo. We could get to know each other again.”

  “He was a child. Plain and simple,” she told David. “He avoided responsibility like the plague. He and my mother divorced when I was young. We’d lived together on the outskirts of Covington, the three of us. Not exactly living the high life. About a year and a half after the divorce, my mother re-married a Garland judge. I never wanted for anything after that. I’d see my father now and again. Our visits were always pretty brief. He hadn’t put up any sort of fight for custody. Seemed like he was just fine being rid of me. I don’t think either of my fathers wanted me, to be perfectly honest. My step-father, Ethan, was always pretty distant. He’d give me whatever I wanted to appease my mother, but she was the prize there. I was just the cost of doing business. Ethan tried stealing as much time with my mother as he could away from me, especially when she got sick. I was on my own a lot then. No curfew or anything. With Ethan, it was laissez-faire parenting pretty much from the jump.”

  “Laissez-faire parenting,” he repeated. “I’ll have to write that down.”

  She smirked with pride.

  “Anyway, left on my own, I migrated towards the wicked kids. Obviously. I made some mistakes. None too bad,” she said, catching his eye. “When my mother passed away, I had just turned sixteen. And in the battle of who wanted me less, blood ended up taking precedence. My father had moved to some rat hole in Ridgewood, which was pretty shocking in itself, given how nice most of Ridgewood is. The academy I was enrolled in bussed from Ridgewood and my stepdad agreed to keep paying out that year’s tuition.” She sipped her wine. “My father and I had been together for about a month when the bug started spreading. His idea was to wait it out down in that basement. Stay clean and avoid the shit storm that was coming. His words, not mine. He acted like it was no big deal, like we’d hide out for a week or so and be fine, but the way he prepared…I’d never seen him so read
y for anything in my life. Of all the things he’d screwed up, he did this right. He was ready for the quarantine.”

  Up and down the ladder they went. Clearing out the fridge. Grabbing whatever valuables were worthy enough to make the cut. He didn’t question her when she left her school books upstairs, so she didn’t question him when he brought the entire liquor cabinet down with him.

  “Of course, I was pretty upset at the time. I had a boyfriend, or at least something resembling one. An older boy, who went to college. Not being able to see him or talk to him before we locked ourselves away…it was a struggle. I wasn’t exactly lady-like in my demands.”

  “You couldn’t call this boyfriend of yours?”

  “Cell service was down by then. Internet, hard lines, all of it.”

  “Bunks. You can’t be serious.”

  Calling the basement chamber cramped didn’t do it justice. The little alcove was finished, the walls painted a dull gray. The bunks were up against one wall, a square table and two chairs beside it. The rest was storage, little nooks in the wall and a safe. There was enough room on the empty floor for two, maybe three people to lay down side by side. A doorway led into the tiny restroom, which wasn’t much more than a porta-potty attached to the house.

  “Serious as a heart attack, sweetheart,” he said, packing a cardboard box full of booze into one of the wall cubbies. He grabbed an auto magazine from his stack, plopping down on the bottom bunk. Typical. She didn’t even get her choice of the beds.

  Holding a cardboard box, she pulled the canned food from it, lining a shelf on the wall. She halted, peering at one can.

  “Show-kuh-jee?”

  “Show-koo-jee,” he said, resting a hand behind his head. “Some Army men were handing them out, so I took a few. Had one yesterday. They ain’t too bad.”

  Shokuji. She placed another on the shelf.

  “It was strange, living in that house for a month and not knowing about that basement chamber. I’d been stepping over it every day, and my father never said a word. He revealed it to me out of necessity, or else I might have never known it was there. It said a lot about my father,” she said. “Blood meant nothing. No matter what my last name was, I was eternally going to be on a need-to-know basis.” She sighed. “Once we’d sealed ourselves downstairs, there was no avoiding one another, obviously. We agreed never to talk above a whisper, so we’d hiss insults at each other night and day. We got less polite as the days went by, and we weren’t exactly the most chivalrous bunch to begin with.”

  Of course, they heard the break-ins. The first was the loudest, jarring her from her sleep. The door was busted in. Heavy footsteps followed, and voices. She caught her father’s eye across the room, watched as he held a finger to his mouth. She cupped both hands over her own, drowning out her shuddering breaths.

  The first intruders tore the place apart. She listened as they toppled dressers and turned over tables. They only stayed a short while, returning once more the next night to finish the job. Others followed. Different voices: some hushed, some loud and casual. The break-ins became less frequent after a time.

  She remembered the day her father awoke with the bug, remembered him screaming, blind, scabs over his eyes.

  “He contracted first, of the two of us. It didn’t make sense to me. Still doesn’t. The virus is supposed to transfer by blood. How could it seep through walls? Through floorboards? Wood? Concrete?” She took a breath, composed herself. “As time passed, we stopped talking to each other so much. Mostly out of frustration. Every time we’d start, it would turn into an argument. He’d take jabs at my boyfriend, or make assumptions about my sex life or my shitty grades. I’d tell him about how much of a deadbeat he was, how he’d never been there for anyone, how he was probably going to die alone. There was only one topic that was off-limits during our little boxing matches and that was my mother. He’d loved her once. Probably still did. She was the only reason we were together.” She swallowed, looking away for a moment. She pushed the hair from her eyes. “We weren’t good for one another, though. It was like our personalities meshed so...so perfectly imperfectly, you know? Like we were put on this earth to piss each other off. What’s the opposite of the saying ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder?’”

  She couldn’t recall what the argument had been about, but all the other details from the situation were still somehow so clear. It was as if she was watching from above, looking down on that cramped little chamber. She saw herself on the floor, a book in her lap, and he on his bed: the bottom bunk, sipping straight from the bottle.

  His lips were moving, but the voices in this room had been put on mute. She replied, quick and curt, and turned the page. He spoke again, up on his elbows now. Next, he was pointing. Next, he wore a grimace, obviously fighting to keep his voice down. She slammed the book down and stood. She must have raised her voice, because he flinched, angrily pressing a finger to his lips. She didn’t quiet down, didn’t listen. Her father was on his feet now too.

  He took a step towards her, reaching one hand out to cover her mouth. She batted his hand aside, pushing his chest backward. He barely budged, but was rattled. He reacted quickly, without thinking. A single backhand across her cheek knocked her to the floor.

  Her father stood over her, cursing himself. Pulling on his own hair. He reached down to help her back to her feet, to see if she was alright, but she curled into a little ball, refusing to show her face. She was sobbing, but still there was no sound.

  Still, the room was muted.

  That night, she lay awake in her top bunk, a red bruise beneath her eye. Her tears had dried and she lay still in the darkness, looking up at the retractable ladder, and the trapdoor above it.

  He gave his halfhearted apology the next day. A week later, he was drinking again, cursing at her again. Six weeks after that, he gave her a hard shove that sent her tumbling onto the ground. A month passed. Another. They learned to live with one another for a time. A few sparse times, she even remembered liking his company. She read every book she owned. She sent a text to her entire contact list in her cell phone. No one responded. Checking the radio had been a good idea on her father’s part, but the thing hadn’t made a sound in months. It was nothing but static. She was beyond stir crazed, living a cabin fever dream.

  They cut their hair every few weeks. He grew a beard. The booze didn’t last. He was worse without them. More irritable, quicker to anger. And his eyes had been wandering of late. Real or imagined, there was something in that stare. Three quarters of a year, and the walls seemed to close in tighter every day. Night after night, she’d look up at the ceiling, at that square outline of the trapdoor.

  ~

  They were yelling again. He punched the wall, seemingly putting all his might behind the blow. She cowered when he did so, covering her head. It was her natural reaction. That night, she wore jeans to bed.

  She waited, pretending to rest her eyes, perched in that top bunk. She could hear his rumbling breaths beneath her. She waited one hour, another. Then, slowly, she began to push her blankets aside. She sat upright, slithering towards the bunk bed ladder. She placed one foot on the rung, then the next. Slow, quiet. Her heart raced. She held her breath. Another step, another. Just one more. Her father gurgled, licking his lips, blankets strewn aside. He rolled over to face the wall, letting out a nasally snore.

  Her feet hit solid ground.

  She took a moment to steady herself. Her eyes halted upon the indentation in the far wall where he’d slammed his hairy fist.

  She hadn’t bothered to pack a bag. Instead she merely slipped her black Chuck Taylors onto her feet, zipped up her hoodie, and pulled down the retractable ladder. She glanced back once, making sure the old man still slumbered.

  Justine placed her foot on the lowest rung, grasping another rung at eye level. Pushing off, her other foot left the ground. Up and up she went, towards everything else.

  Towards the world.

  4

  -SCAVENGERS-
>
  -Marco-

  IT WAS IN HIS LUNGS. At least it felt like it was. It was in his eyes. It coated his throat, his tongue, his lips. His hair was drenched in it. The canister had been upended in the backseat of that beat-up hunk of metal, but they’d taken great pleasure in getting most of it on him. Marco choked and gagged, overcome by that pungent smell and taste. It was all around him and inside him, stinking the way that only gasoline does. The odor was overpowering, like sticking your nose in rotten eggs, the way a stench can be so strong it has a stinging presence. Like it’s aimed at you. Marco rolled in place, his entire body slippery and brown, and tried to pull his bindings apart, his tears mixing with the fuel. He could barely open his eyes.

  Outside the broken window, one of the twins fumbled with his zippo lighter. Again and again he flicked it open and shut, igniting the flame and then snuffing it out. Toying with him. Marco rubbed the gas from his eyes and watched the dancing flame. He felt itchy, as if the fire were on him already. He wondered if he would ignite all at once-poof-like a firework, or whether the flame would snake its way up his legs and his cock and his chest, then up to his neck and his mouth and his eyes, slowly eating away at him like a thousand red ants. It seemed like a hideous way to die. He wondered for a moment why God had made such a thing exist.

  Scratch—or was it Itch?—flicked his thumb once more and a single spark bounced off the lighter, bounding away. Marco drew totally still, expecting to catch fire then and there. The kid caught his eyes. He donned that evil smirk again, like the boy with the magnifying glass who finally has a bug in his sights.

  In the distance, a gun went off.

  At first he thought the car had backfired, but that made no sense. The damned thing wasn’t even on. The first pop must’ve hit a tire, as the car sunk an inch lower on the front, driver’s side. The second pop sent the back of the vehicle down as well. It was level again. It took Marco a moment to realize what had happened. Someone had shot out the tires. Both kids whirled around to face the city proper: the direction they’d come from.