Seduced by Three (17 page)

During the few seconds he was incapacitated, Grace frantically tried to rid herself of the jeans that were tripping her up. But trying to get the pants off slowed her enough for him to grab a hold of her hair. He yanked on it hard to gain control of her again. Grace screamed out her pain as she felt the copious amounts of hair being pulled out of her scalp. Steve tilted her head up toward his.

“That was a big mistake,” he hissed.

His face was a study of rage. His eyes were wide, his jaw tight. A vein popped out on his forehead, and all of him was tinted a violent shade of red.

He slowly got to his feet and dragged Grace by the hair, through the rows of shelves, to the bottom of the shelter stairs. She fought him the whole way, swinging her arm and kicking her feet in an effort to get in one good shot that would loosen his grip on her hair. She almost ripped free from him once, and he released the fistful of hair. He wrapped both arms around her, holding her tight in front of him, and tried to lift her up the steep flight of stairs. Grace flailed desperately, trying to free herself from his grip.

“Bitch, hold still or I
am
going to shoot you!” he threatened as he lifted her higher off the ground to carry her up.

Grace’s mind raced for a strategy that would enable her to get free from him, to get rid of him. He was carrying her full weight, using both hands, and he was winded. His hot breath hit the back of her head as they neared the top of the stairs. She tried to head butt the back of her head to his face, but he must have seen it coming, because her head just met air.

Grace reached out an arm and grabbed on to the railing while trying to loosen Steve’s grip around her waist with the other hand. When she felt his grip slip slightly, she lifted both feet and pushed off the shelter door with all her strength.

Steve’s hold on her gave way with the sudden, forceful shove backward. Her hand tightened around the old, smooth wood of the railing as she began to fly backward with him. She didn’t let it go. She held onto the handrail with everything she had. Her body stopped, wrenching her shoulder and hand hard as she landed face-first at the top of the stairs while Steve continued his flight down.

The jarring
crack, crack, thud
sounds of his body hitting the wooden stairs and cement floor, unhindered by even a rudimentary attempt to break the fall, was sickening.

Grace scrambled to get to her feet despite the jarring pain of her cheek from landing hard on the steps. She whipped around to appraise the landscape below her and found the crumple of Steve’s motionless body at the bottom of the stairs.

Grace sat down on the step nearest the shelter door, trying to regulate the ragged gulps of air she sucked into her mouth. Her stomach churned as she tucked a lock of hair behind her ear with a shaky hand. She stared at the soles of Steve’s feet resting a few steps up from the floor. He lay on the cement, splayed in an unnatural position. Grace steadied herself before she stood and walked cautiously down the stairs toward Steve. As she got a better look at him, she recognized the vacant stare in his open eyes. He was dead.

She wanted to cry. How did she get to this moment, this surreal, bad TV drama moment?

She had almost lost her life because she’d hesitated, couldn’t do what needed to be done until it was almost too late. Her survival hinged on her acceptance of a new reality. It was a reality she hadn’t really internalized yet, until now. Now she was crystal clear on the fact that she was completely alone in the world and fatally vulnerable to anyone she might run across.

The shelter was so dark with only one halo of daylight streaming in as opposed to the four at Sarge’s shelter. On days it was overcast outside, Grace lived in a dark, murky abyss, and all she could think about was the endless days ahead of her there, alone. How long had it been? A month, maybe a little more since she had come back home.

After Grace had gotten rid of Steve’s body and inventoried the shelter, she’d discovered that a day didn’t consist of twenty-four hours anymore. Each and every day was nearly never ending. She tried, at first, to keep busy. She did a couple of puzzles on the floor directly under the circle of light coming in. She read a book. But soon after, she was antsy and a little bit stir-crazy.

It was snowing now, and the shelter was continually dreary and cold. Eventually, the restless feelings waned, and the only thing Grace felt was lonely. Her thoughts teemed with snippets, small moments in time that she shared with Sarge, Van, or Luke. She lived them over and over again in her mind. Occasionally, she would order up a side of morbid thoughts about her own death just to switch things up. The weight of it all crushed her. She couldn’t have a thought or memory that didn’t prompt another little piece of her to give up. Nobody knew she was alive, that she even existed anymore. She was so desperately isolated that she felt like she was disappearing, growing thinner, more translucent. Eventually she’d just fade away.

As time passed, the reason why she left the men seemed inconsequential. Her common sense still tried to argue that leaving was the right thing to do. She knew their lives together were easier with her gone. But with their absence, the ache inside her grew to be an ever-expanding black hole that was now swallowing her up.

After a month of the constant cold, combined with the negligible amounts of food she chose to eat, it wasn’t much of a surprise to Grace when she woke up feeling sick.

She scrambled to get her head over the side of the bed so she wouldn’t vomit on herself. Her stomach heaved, and her gag reflex jumped to life, but there was nothing in her stomach to throw up. Grace groaned as the nausea threatened to have her heaving again.

She lay on her back taking in air through her nose while she swallowed over and over again, trying to prevent a repeat performance. From there, she embarked upon the itinerary of sleep, barf, and repeat that took over her life for the few weeks it took to shake the bug. During that time, she ate little and got out of bed even less. Her body and mind were weakened, and as time progressed, even though she was over the flu, her motivation to eat, and later to get out of bed, disappeared.

She wallowed in her own self-pity. Her future seemed to be an unending stretch of loneliness. At this point, it was a struggle for her to even want to survive.

Like every other day in her recent past, Grace lay in bed, buried under layers of blankets, trying to buffer herself from the frigid cold of the shelter. Her mind wandered lazily when it touched on that last afternoon of sex with Sarge, Van, and Luke, and then it locked onto a fact that jolted her into focus.

She hadn’t had her period. She should have had it right when she got back, but never did. Her brain quickly sifted through a series of facts, questioning what was going on with her body, reviewing everything since she’d arrived back home. It didn’t take long to figure out what her flu had really been. She was pregnant. Oh God, the thought had never crossed her mind.

She was disgusted with herself when she realized why her pills had failed her. She’d taken a full course of antibiotics for the bullet wound in her arm. They had nullified the effects of her pills. She knew that could happen. She just hadn’t thought about that possibility at the time. She’d had too much on her mind.

Oh God, no.

Grace didn’t want to raise a child alone in this dangerous new world or in the gaping, silent void she lived in.

She needed to go back, not for her own sanity, because if it was just that, she’d stay and sleep in the bed she’d made for herself, both figuratively and literally. But she really had no choice but to go back if she was going to have even a remote chance of delivering a healthy child.

Grace began to make a significant effort to better care for herself while she waited for the foot of snow on the ground to melt. She tried to move around more, eat more, and did things to keep busy that would positively affect her state of mind. But it was an uphill battle, and as time passed, the low temperatures of the basement kept her returning to the warm cocoon of the blankets on her bed. And the eternal dusk in her shelter continued to suck any attempts at positive thoughts right out of her.

She’d thought she was strong enough, sane enough to go it alone. She’d been wrong. She was starting to lose it. The silence grated on her and left a raw loneliness that festered and grew as each day passed. She spent her days in a womb of her own, made of heavy blankets, in the dusky darkness, with a never-ending feeling of nonexistence. She passed her days in her head for longer and longer stretches of time. It was her prison, her punishment for being so impulsive.

She missed the men so much that she physically ached from the sadness, and the pain that attacked her daily was the only proof that she still existed at all. She was a ghost, disappearing a little more every day.

Grace had the vague sense that there was something wrong with her. It was something more than the physical and hormonal effects of the pregnancy, something that sucked her dry of any desire to help herself. She gradually became aware of the fact that she was nearing the point of no return. Her muscles were starting to atrophy, and she knew she would have to do something or she would end up dying there.

As soon as the weather broke just a little bit, she’d try to make it back to Sarge’s shelter.

She cried when she thought of the reaction Sarge would have to her return. She would have to be ready for a confrontation. She would have to deal with all of them when it came to the baby.

Over and over again, Grace thought about what she wanted to say to them. The words sounded disingenuous even to her own ears. She doubted they would believe that she loved them all, but she knew without a doubt that she did. When she first realized she was pregnant, she searched her heart. She asked herself who she would choose, if she could, as the father of this baby. But she couldn’t choose, just like she couldn’t choose between them when she was there.

Every day, she made one trip outside to dump her bathroom bucket. It was becoming increasingly difficult to climb the stairs to get out of the shelter. Her legs were weak and shaky, and she was out of breath by the time she got to the top of the stairs. But it wasn’t going to be much longer. The weather was changing. The whipping winds that came off the lake and the heavy blanket of snow that clogged the world above ground were transforming into tentative sunshine and slush. Despite her increasingly frail condition, she forced herself to give a shit.

In a corner of the shelter, she collected what she could strap to her bike for her return trip. All she had to do now was to wait until she felt sure she could make the trip back to them.

* * * *

Sarge lay in the silence of the shelter. They’d all just settled in for the night. The long winter and the shared loss of Grace had bonded all of them together. There were no more feelings of animosity, no tension, just sadness. The three men were brothers, friends.

It had been several months since Grace’s disappearance, and they all had suffered her loss in silence. Luke and Van had spent almost a month looking for Grace…or Grace’s body. They had finally given up when the lake effect snows blew in cold and thick around the house. If they continued to search, the footprints in the snow could lead anyone back to their safe haven. It was too much of a risk to leave the shelter. None of them had so much as uttered her name for a month after they called off the search. He couldn’t blame Van or Luke for not bringing her up much. He couldn’t do it either.

Sarge recuperated physically, but emotionally, he and the other two men were wasted. Grief and depression swelled like a rotten corpse in the close quarters, and its oppressive funk pressed in on each man as he suffered quietly in his own personal hell. If he let his mind wander, which was easy to do when confined in a small space all winter, it didn’t take long for his thoughts to go to a dark, painful place. The uncontrolled rambling of his mind had run through every conceivable scenario of what could have happened to Grace, and they all annihilated his soul, turned his stomach, and decimated his morale to the point that sometimes he wondered why he was trying so hard to survive. His life consisted of a dim room and two other men who were as inconsolable as he was.

Every excruciatingly slow day was filled with memories of the last day Grace was with them. He wasn’t sure then if what they were going to try would have worked, but now he felt ashamed. He was ashamed that he’d hurt her, and ashamed that he was so controlling and greedy. These months alone with his thoughts had transformed his perspective. Things he’d thought were really important then maybe hadn’t been as important as he’d thought at the time.

Months ago, Sarge had pleaded with God to bring Grace back to them. He had made all kinds of promises, he had cried, and then, finally, he had cursed. God hadn’t answered his pleas.

“You believe in God, Luke?” Sarge spoke into the darkness between the intermittent purrs of Van’s snoring.

“That’s a loaded question these days.” He paused for long moments. “I’ve thought the same things you’re thinking about. Why did God let so many good people suffer and die? Why did God leave the three of us here to live without Grace?”

“I’m starting to think that living through this is more of a punishment than a victory,” Sarge grumbled. “I mean, why bother? It’s funny, when I was preparing for whatever disaster came my way, I never considered that maybe I wouldn’t want to survive it.”

“That’s your chemicals talking.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“We haven’t seen the sun for more than five minutes at a time for months. Seasonal affective disorder. It happens to people who don’t get enough sunlight. Its symptoms are similar to depression. That, in combination with the fall of the free world as we know it,
and
the loss of Grace, well, I’ve seen people at the crossroads of Unglued Avenue and Losin’ It Lane for much less than that. It will get better. But tomorrow, you need to get some sun.”

Sarge grunted. “We’ll see. I don’t think sun is going to make a shit of difference about how I feel.”

When Sarge woke up the next morning, he tried to fight the sinkhole of despair that constantly threatened to swallow him whole. He turned his thoughts to spring. He had seed packets stored for a garden and everything he would need to start the seeds, including a portable greenhouse that needed to be assembled. It would give him an excuse to get out and soak up some sun like Luke wanted him to.

Van and Luke sat close together reading underneath a skylight.

“I’m going to the garage to start taking stock of what we have for a garden once the weather breaks. You guys want to come with?”

Van put his book down. “Yeah.”

“Luke?”

Luke just shook his head without even looking up from the page.

It was a mild day, and the bright sun was melting the thick carpet of snow. Sarge stamped off his slushy boots when he entered the garage then surveyed the inside. He pulled out seedling starter kits, the greenhouse, and some gardening books. He handed some of the stuff to Van and then caught sight of the small collection of tools he’d left out after making Grace her seat for the latrine.

“I haven’t been in here since the day after the EMP,” he said as he picked up the tools to put them away. “I was building the outside…” Sarge stopped and stood up straight. He turned as his eyes scanned the entire space.

“Son of a bitch!”

Van looked over at him, palming his weapon. “What?”

Sarge was silent for a few moments as his mind worked through the onslaught of thoughts firing at him one right after another.

“What?” Van barked.

Grace had run away from them.

The relief Sarge felt swirled around him, enveloped him, but quickly transformed into a tornado of misery. Pain and hurt whirled uncontrollably around him, stabbing him, creating gaping holes in his soul. The force of it pulled the air right out of his lungs, and the shock nearly knocked him to his knees.

“Grace wasn’t taken. She left.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Her bike, it’s gone.”

Van looked around. “It
was
here when they were putting the stakes in the yard, I remember seeing it.”

“Come on,” Sarge said, picking up the gardening supplies and heading for the house.

Sarge started talking to Luke before he even reached the bottom of the shelter stairs. “Did you do anything with that bike that was in the garage?”

Luke looked up. “Are you talking to me?”

“Yeah.”

“Uh, no. Why?”

“Grace’s bike is gone.”

Luke just looked at Sarge like he was waiting for the rest of the sentence.

“She left us, Luke. She didn’t get taken. She left us.”

The men silently absorbed the new information, letting the truth sink in and take root.

“Well let’s go get her,” Van said.

Luke shook his head. “No. We forced her to leave because of our bullshit. She was tense—stressed about the mood in the shelter. She felt like her presence created antagonism between us…created a toxic atmosphere, I think is what she said.”