One beer, Barry thinks as he hobbles to the kitchen and yanks open the refrigerator door, would be the perfect way to flush this massive, stinking shit of a day right down the toilet.
Of course, he doesn’t have any beer.
At least, not a real one.
Allie won’t let him keep the stuff in the house, especially not after his last physical. Doc Maro had ordered blood work, and the blood had spilled Barry’s dirty little secrets, revealing high blood pressure and bad cholesterol and a liver that simply didn’t work half as well as it should.
“Too many years of hard living,” the doctor had said, pausing to cluck out a tut-tut-tut that stung like a series of slaps, “and hard drinking to boot.”
Kind of ironic, really, considering how much Dr. Glen Maro used to drink back in high school. After a day of tormenting freshmen, he’d peel out of his pre-patched letterman’s jacket and blow off a little steam with a few Budweisers, or the hard stuff if his father forgot to lock the liquor cabinet. Under the bleachers next to the football field, way out on the winding dirt roads nobody was watching, in the unused horse barn on Old Man Haney’s overgrown farm on a Friday or Saturday night—the party was never too difficult to find. Going on damn near fifty years later, Glen, who would be called “Doc” when all was said and done, had once held the unofficial title of “Drunkest, Meanest Sonovabitch” on Wilson Island, North Carolina.
Now, though, he was a pillar of the community. Town physician. Deacon at the White Sands Christian Fellowship. Member of the board of aldermen. The local legend, the hellraiser who’d set the bar for all the shit-heels and delinquents to come, was a “fine, upstanding citizen.” Getting pickled in the public eye wasn’t in the cards anymore. Neither was bullying others.
Or was it?
Maybe some of Glen’s bluster, swagger, and cruelty remained, manifesting as prescriptions and meal plans and dietary restrictions.
And judgment, Barry thinks. Let’s not forget that.
Tut.
Tut.
Tut.
Barry can’t help but wonder if Doc gets a perverse thrill out of the humiliation his patients experience every time he orders them to turn their head and cough. Now, thanks to the prick of a needle and some numbers generated in a lab somewhere, Doc wasn’t just checking for a hernia.
He was grabbing hold and squeezing tight.
Betrayed by my own blood, Barry muses, and some asshole who used to give younger kids wedgies and swirlies but now dishes out heart medication and condescending glares with equal abandon.
And so, no beer.
None of that cheap bourbon that Barry likes so much.
No alcohol of any kind.
Not in the house and not in his gut. If Barry stops at the ABC store, steals off to the Tugboat, or so much as sneaks a peek at the beer aisle at the grocery store, his loving wife will know.
She’ll smell it on me.
And then there would be hell to pay.
And he can’t even get drunk to dull his senses during the dressing-down.
Instead, Allie keeps root beer on hand. Root beer. As if that somehow makes this easier, comforts the cravings, relieves the frustration, soothes the insult brought on by age and a failing liver and a rat-bastard doctor. Sometimes on really tough days, when Barry’s thoughts go grim, he thinks maybe his loving spouse of forty-two years is taunting him.
Barry is an old man.
Wearing slouchy pajama bottoms and a baggy T-shirt.
Staring down the barrel of a 9 p.m. bedtime.
Not an ounce of fight—of fire—left in him.
Searching the fridge for a beer that doesn’t exist.
Something reeks within the refrigerator, though. Leftovers that have gone forgotten for a little too long, maybe. Not his concern. He’ll let Allie deal with it tomorrow. Pushed all the way to the back, behind cups of probiotic yogurt and Tupperware containers of tuna casserole, stand six tall bottles of brown glass.
At least they look like beer, Barry thinks. If anyone peeks through the window, they’ll see me taking a swig and think to themselves, “There’s old Barry, still throwing them back like he used to! There’s a guy who knows how to take life by the horns and live it up!”
One bottle clinks against the others as Barry drags it out.
“You love root beer,” he mutters to himself, casting his voice high and shrill, mocking his wife.
But not loud enough that she could possibly hear.
The glass is cold in his hand.
“It’s caffeine-free,” he whines in his godawful approximation of Allie’s voice, “so it won’t keep you up all night.”
He shoves the refrigerator door closed.
“Don’t forget to put the bottle in the recycling bin!” he singsongs through curled lips.
He turns the bottle over in his hand.
Diet root beer. Oh my God.
She’s definitely fucking with me.
Barry twists the cap from the bottle, tosses it onto the counter. It’s bedtime, and the alarm clock will be shaking him awake before he knows it. He’s three steps out of the kitchen before he realizes he forgot to turn off the lights. Grumbling, he shuffles back through the door and snaps the switch.
The house is dark.
Midway down the hall between the kitchen and the bedroom, a nightlight is plugged into an outlet. It casts a feeble orange glow along the walls.
Dark.
And quiet.
He takes a swig of the root beer—correction, the diet root beer—as he shuffles toward the bedroom. He holds the cold, fizzy, artificially sweetened liquid in his mouth, savoring it. He has to admit, it tastes pretty good. Not good enough that he’d ever say as much to his beloved, of course. And definitely not good enough to make up for the day he’s just had.
Not hardly.
His boss, Mr. Winslow at Surefire Pest Solutions, is just a kid. But he likes to throw his weight around. Enjoys yelling. During the best of times, yeah, but even more so when the sailing is anything but smooth. At the moment, with the crew unable to keep up with an ever-increasing glut of assignments, the water is choppy. And Mr. Winslow has made it obvious that he doesn’t care for Barry. Why? Who knew? Sometimes one person just didn’t like another, rhyme or reason be damned. One thing is certain: Mr. Winslow has no respect for Barry’s thirty-five years of killing termites and cockroaches and carpet beetles.
Mr. Winslow has barely been alive that long.
When Surefire Pest Solutions isn’t living up to its online customer reviews, it’s Barry who weathers the full force of the boss’s wrath. And today had been one of those days. It didn’t matter that the company was painfully understaffed to handle the number of jobs they were receiving. It didn’t matter that Barry shouldered half those jobs, late though they might be, all by his lonesome. It didn’t matter that Mr. Winslow could stop riding a desk chair and kill a few bugs himself to help the company get caught up on service calls. It only mattered that Surefire’s reputation—one built, at least in part, on Barry’s back—was suffering. Bad Yelp reviews piling up. And that likely meant young Mr. Winslow was getting an ass-chewing of his own from the retired founder of the business, the real Mr. Winslow, a man “Li’l Winslow” called “Daddy.”
That notion makes Barry smile and offer a cheers to the man upstairs.
Approaching his partially open bedroom door, he sees that the room beyond is filled with shadow. He sighs. Allie’s already turned out her bedside lamp, which means she’s sound asleep. He’ll need to move carefully in the room to avoid stubbing a toe or waking his wife. And he’ll have to fumble with his CPAP machine, another form of torture imposed upon him by the Allie/Doc Maro tag team, to make sure the damned thing is filled with water and ready to—
The smell stops him cold.
A foul stench.
For a split second, Barry wonders if he left the fridge open, if the rank scent of leftovers is following him.
This is worse, though.
Much worse.
A sickly sweet aroma, not unlike spoiled milk.
But also not unlike the stink of an overwarm butcher shop.
Meat.
Blood.
As Barry pushes the door open and steps into the dark room, his toes brush against something crinkly on the floor. The curtains are drawn, but there’s enough moonlight filtering in from behind the fabric, enough of the nightlight-glow coming in from the hallway, that Barry can get a feel for his surroundings, Looking down, he sees a white trash bag, dark and slimy fingerprints leaving smeared trails across the plastic. He nudges the bag with his foot. The contents are murky and dark, soft and wet.
Barry wonders if Allie has been fussing about, collecting trash to be taken out for tomorrow’s garbage pickup. Leaving the spoils of her work on the bedroom floor like this, though, is not her style.
And what the hell has she been cleaning anyway? What’s in the bag?
He looks to the bed where she sleeps. Still. Unmoving. He’s about to risk waking her, about to ask her what’s going on.
The words catch in his throat.
Allie sleeps on top of the covers. And she’s not wearing a stitch of clothing. Her skin is pale in the gloom. Except where it’s not.
From her throat to her groin, her skin is dark, almost black, deeper than the shadows of the room.
Not dark.
Hollow.
Someone stands in the corner. Not far from the bed. Lurking in the gloom. A man. Tall. Thin. He is dressed in light-colored clothing, almost blending into the eggshell-white bedroom walls. But an apron of black leather—also glistening—covers his chest and stomach. A belt around his waist is studded with implements of glittering metal. His arms are covered, up to his elbows, in black leather gloves. In one hand he holds something meaty, about the size of a softball. His face is impossible to discern, not because of the darkness, but because—
Is he wearing my CPAP mask?
The man most certainly wears a face covering of some sort, and a long, whipping hose hangs from it, trailing all the way to the . . .
. . . bloody . . .
. . . floor.
The stranger drops the hunk of wet meat.
It plops to the floor, spattering blood, and rolls a couple of inches, falling to a stop in a wedge of pale moonlight
Is that Allie’s heart?
And the masked figure is now racing across the bedroom, quickly, silently. The hose from the mask whips back and forth, clicking strangely. His gloved hand darts down to his belt—a utility belt, just like Batman, Barry thinks—comes back up grasping something metallic and sharp.
Where the hell are his eyes?
Barry should be able to see them, even in the darkness, this up close and personal, right?
Root beer arcs through the air in an undulating spray as Barry, now holding the bottle by its neck, swings with all his might. The brown glass shatters against the stranger’s head in an explosion of foam and shards. The assailant grunts, stumbles back, bumps into the bed’s footboard, rocking the mattress, shaking Allie’s lifeless flesh, because it is lifeless, she’s dead Allie’s dead Allie’s definitely dead—
As the broken bottle thumps to the floor, Barry lunges at the stranger with a roar of horror and rage. His hands—arthritic though they may be—clench into fists. He punches the man in his apron-covered stomach. He brings a fist down against the mask that covers the man’s face.
Barry feels his fingers break against the unexpected hardness of the eyeless mask.
The intruder comes up, shouldering Barry in the gut, staggering him back, but Barry hasn’t had enough, and he moves in, punching at the man who has just butchered his wife, feeling the agony of cracked bones, his ruined fingers shifting and crunching against one another. He drives a knee into his attacker. He claws at the strange, eyeless face with his good hand. He flails. He can’t get to a phone, but he can yell his ass off, and maybe one of the neighbors will hear the disturbance.
At first his screams are inhuman and incomprehensible, raw, terrified bellows and shrieks, but the words eventually form in his head, coalesce on his lips.
“Somebody—!”
Something cold slashes across Barry’s throat.
Something warm washes down his baggy T-shirt.
He feels a sliver of iciness—of metal—still jutting from his neck. Panting, the masked intruder grips it tightly by the handle, twisting, sawing through bone and digging up meat. Barry’s arms fall limply at his sides. His legs begin to buckle.
One last thought races through Barry’s mind.
One damn beer.
That’s all I wanted.
Then it’s lights out, promptly at 9 p.m.
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