The Damned Summer (The Ruin Trilogy) (15 page)

The alarm went off with an annoying buzz. Jake
reached out and turned it off, sighing heavily as he opened his bleary eyes and
looked at the clock.

Dragging himself up off the bed, he made his
way towards his mother's room.

"Ma," he whispered, opening up the
door. "We gotta get ready to go for your treatment."

Opening her eyes, he saw just how much of a
hold death had on her on that unholy morning. The skin on her face was taut and
thin, with a pattern that looked like spider-webbed glass. Her eyes were
bloodshot, dripping with suffering and hopelessness.

His hardcore hangover suddenly didn't seem
like such a big deal as he watched her slowly climb out of bed. "Do you
need help?" he creaked with a dry voice.

She fended him off with a slow wave of her
hand, as the other held her forehead. "Give me a moment."

"Sure," he replied, leaning against
the doorway, wondering what the fucking point of life was.

Drew's hangover mirrored Jake's as he threw
bacon on the grill and took a sip of his coffee, trying to calm his stomach.

"No drinks at my grill," said
Drew's boss Joe as he walked by.

"There are today," Drew replied.

Joe stood just a little over five feet tall,
which meant he suffered from short man's syndrome by default, and as a result
he took very little shit from taller males in his employment. "What did
you just say?" he snarled like a pit bull.

Drew sat his cup down on the shelf above the
grill and looked his boss straight in the eye. "I'll be drinking from this
cup of java as well as the ice water beside it for the entirety of my shift
today. If you don't like it, then fire my ass."

Joe was surprised by Drew's behavior, and
honestly didn't know how to react. He genuinely liked Drew, he was a hard
worker and even though he was quite a few inches taller than Joe, he was still
classified as short, which in Joe's mind gave them a certain kinship. The black
eye and bruises on Drew's face also told Joe something bad happened last night
to the poor kid. Not knowing what else to do, Joe simply turned and walked
away.

"Bout time something went the way it
should," Drew whispered to himself, grabbing the ice water and pouring it
down his dry throat.

Johnny sat up and looked around, at a
complete loss as to where he was. The bottle of Dead Ace tipped over on the
floor started to revive his memory.

"There was somebody else here last
night," he mumbled, grabbing the bottle, looking at the dead bugs and
broken leaves inside it. "What the fuck?" he asked looking at the
debris floating around in the bottle, things that had easily been there for
years.

"I didn't drink out of a bottle full of
shit last night," Johnny said, throwing the Dead Ace up against the wall.
The dark liquid and glass sprayed across the pictures of ponies and princess
that hung on the wall as it shattered.

The memory of his laughter last night over
the missing girl suddenly reverberated in his head, forcing him to scramble out
of the room as his stomach started to revolt.

Making it out to the porch, he puked over the
broken banister, nearly falling over after his vomit as the rail broke he held
on to.

 "Bullshit," he mumbled, turning
his fall into a jump at the last moment as he launched off the porch and onto
the dark soil in front of the porch, shuffling for a moment before getting his
footing and then moving off towards his house, which was a good four miles
away.

"Motherfuckers," he said to
himself, which essentially cursed everyone involved with last night other than
himself.

Sarah dreamed of the fight from last night,
but Jake didn't stand on the sidelines this time. He circled around them like a
hungry shark, goading them on to prove who the real man was. Every time one of
the combatants would score a good hit, Jake would howl with laughter,
regardless of who scored the hit. Jake didn't seem to be on either of the
fighters' side, he was just happy they were fighting. He was feeding off their
violence. He looked her way, giving her a wink.

Her stomach suddenly lurched, ripping her
from the dream. Nearly falling out of bed, she stumbled to her bathroom, barely
making it to the toilet before losing the contents of her stomach.   

"I didn't even drink that much last
night,"
she thought to
herself, resting her head on the cool lid of the seat. After a few minutes she
gathered enough strength to stand up and turn on the faucet, splashing cold water
on her face.

She looked at her reflection. "Probably
just from all the bad shit that went down last night," she told herself as
a drop of water fell from the tip of her nose. "And that dream sure didn't
help calm my nerves," she grabbed the nearby towel, drying her face.
"That's all it is, I'm fine," she walked out of the bathroom.

Hangovers for the long term alcoholic are
quite different than those for young pups that haven't even seen twenty years
of life, much less twenty years of alcohol addiction. Jacky was within an elite
group of booze hounds, for he had been a slave to the bottle for over forty
years, and his love for it was as strong today as it was back when it first got
its claws deep in his heart in that nasty, dirt fuck war with the Cong.

His throat was as dry as a ten year old bone
baking in the Sahara sun, while his head throbbed as raging rapids flowed
in-between the thin space between the top of his brain and the roof of his
skull. The sensations that bombarded him would be enough to put even the most
experienced college binge drinker in a fetal position on the dirty floor of a
public restroom. For him, it was just another shitty morning, same as all the
others.

He lit up a smoke, taking a seat on the rusty
step leading up to his trailer. The demon was suddenly beside him, kicking over
a bucket so he could sit down beside Jacky.

Jacky squinted at the fiend, puffing smoke
out of his nose. "Where'd you disappear to last night?" The demon's
sudden appearance didn't faze him in the least. The beast only made him nervous
when he was sober. Drunk or hung over, he couldn't give a shit about what it
was or what it did to him or anybody else.

"Had some business to attend to,"
the demon replied, lighting up its own cigarette.

"I thought you had shut Frank down
already."

"It wasn't Frank. It was one of those
fine young men you just recently made friends with."

"What use could those dumb-shits
possibly be?"

The demon flicked his cigarette, sending
ashes drifting to the ground. "You know, the thing they say about youth
being fleeting is quite correct."

Jacky shrugged, shaking his head slightly,
completely lost at the fiend's point.

The fiend ignored him, watching the ashes
float to the ground like tiny broken angels. "It never ceases to amaze me,
those that hold such a high commodity are the easiest to manipulate, know what
I mean?" He smiled at his old friend Jack.

Jack slowly nodded back, knowing exactly what
he meant now. After all, the demon had done the very same thing to him decades
before.

"At least I was in a war," Jacky
defended himself. "Hell, I was in the tunnels during the war."

"Definitely," the fiend agreed.
"You were in a much scarier situation than these young weaklings. They are
pampered and ignorant compared to the shit you were going through. You had no
choice but to  partner up with me, it was the only way for you to
survive."

Jacky looked at his old comrade. "God
sure as hell wasn't lookin' for any partners down in the dark."

The fiend gave him a genuine smile, patting
him on the back. "The old man never gets his hands dirty anymore, he
leaves that for ones like us. Ones with the stomach for the shit work."

Jacky shrugged. "His loss."

"Yes it is, my man," the hell-beast
said with a chuckle, massaging Jacky's neck. "Most definitely!"

Linda walked into the waiting room, making
eye contact with Jake, who sat next to his mom. "Got you ready to go,
Margaret."

Jake hopped up, helping his mom to her feet.
She slowly rose from her chair, all of her arms and legs shaking from the
effort.

Linda moved forward to assist. "Want me
to get a wheelchair, Margaret?

"No," she wheezed. "Once I get
all the way up, I'll be much steadier."

Her words rang true, slightly. As soon as she
straightened up, her legs quivered a little less and her hands got steady.
Linda would have preferred a wheelchair, but she knew Margaret was still
refusing the use of it, at least for now.

"She'll change her mind
eventually,"
Linda
thought to herself.
"A strong will only lasts so long against this
monster."

They walked Margaret back to the room where
the poison called chemotherapy was administered. Sitting her down in the
comfortable, black, death chair, Linda took the business end of the poison line
and hooked it into Margaret's PICC line.

"There you go, darlin'" Linda said
as the caustic liquid started to move down the line and into Margaret's system.
"You need anything?"

"No, thank you. I'm going to try and get
some shut eye."

"Sure," Linda replied as Margaret's
breathing almost immediately went in a slow deep rhythm, verifying that she was
already asleep.

Linda turned to Jake. "How about you,
need anything?"

"Water would be cool."

She grabbed a bottle out of the nearby fridge
and handed it over. "How are you holding up?" The bloodshot eyes as
well as the stink of alcohol emanating from him already answered her question.
She hoped the smell of booze was just residual from last night and not
something he had drank on the way here.

He nodded to his mother. "Better than
her."

She nodded her head slightly, not really
knowing how to reply to that.

"How much longer she got?" He took
a drink, still looking at his mom.

"Not sure," Linda shrugged.
"Couple months most likely."

He nodded, looking down at the floor. The
sadness in his eyes proving to Linda he wasn't such a bad kid. Well, actually
he was bad, but at least he had some kind of heart.

"It's tough taking care of a cancer
patient, but you're doing a great job. Bet you could use a break from it."

Glancing at her, he gave a shake of his head.
"Naw, I'm good." It was the first time he noticed how Sarah looked
similar to her mom.

Being their closest neighbor, Linda knew that
Margaret was the only family Jake had. "Do you have anything set up for
when she's gone?"

Jake's eyes took a sharp tint as her words
sank in. He had no plans and didn't want to think about it; not now, not ever.
Instead of answering, he threw back his own barbed question. "How's Sarah
nowadays?"

"She's fine, getting ready for her
senior year," she stammered, caught off guard. "Well your senior year
too."

"Yeah, our senior year," he let the
comment just hang in the air for a moment, savoring how he had commented on his
sharing something with Linda's daughter, even though it was pretty
insignificant. It's the tone that matters, besides, he was thinking of something
else entirely.

Linda's eyes got a little chilly at that
point. "I'll be back in a while to check on her."  

"Sure," Jake replied, taking a
drink of water as Linda closed the door behind her.

He felt slightly bad about getting rude with
her about Sarah, but what did she expect? If someone asks difficult questions,
they better be ready for tough questions to be aimed at them.

Margaret's dreams mirrored Frank's from
earlier that day, the only difference was it was when she had finally decided
to run from
The Dead Bikers
. When she finally decided to try and escape
Spider.

Frank had been gone for almost three years
and Spider and the boys had gone hardcore criminal. Drug dealing, murder for
hire, prostituting minors, you name it, they had their fingers in it. The Feds
were closing in like a dead-man's noose and everybody in the club knew it, but
Spider kept saying everything was cool, and what Spider said, was the only real
law in the club. If Spider said it, it was true, no questions, period.

She had a train ticket to get her out of the
city and straight back to Storm. She had no intention of trying to find Frank,
that's not why she was going back. She was going back to Storm because it was
the only other place she knew. The only place she had ever truly called home.
The train was set to leave at four this afternoon, and it was ten till one
right now, so she said she was going to go grab some smokes at the store with
no intention of ever coming back.