The Unwanted Winter - Volume One of the Saga of the Twelves (35 page)

It was Andrew Ibarra, his
one-time friend from grammar school.

“
Holy shit, Drew, you
scared me half to death. I almost sharted big-time!” exclaimed
Anthony trying to gather himself, physically shaking off the
desperate fear threatening to consume him.

He glanced back at his
friend. With the wind blowing his hair all over the place, it took
him a few seconds to get a clear view. Andrew still looked the
same, except, he was tall, lanky now with long arms and legs, and
much bigger hands and feet. His head was plopped upon an elongated
neck making him appear a bit awkward, but it was something he’d
grow into once his man-weight began to kick in and he filled out.
Aside from that, he was just about the same everywhere else. His
dark eyes still matched his dark hair, though he’d cropped it
shorter than he used too when they were younger. His face was
bigger, of course, but still narrow and ended in a pointed chin,
his nose the most prominent feature. He wore a light jacket,
despite the chill with black, high-top Nikes, black jeans, and a
black thermal shirt. If Anthony had to guess, he’d say overall
Andrew resembled more of the man he would become rather than the
child he had once been. That said though, he would turn out to be
one of those people who didn’t change much as they aged.

“
God damn, dude, didn’t I
tell you I was going to be here in like five minutes?” responded
Andrew as he let his hands and arms fall to his sides, since the
need to protect himself had since faded.

“
Yeah, but really, did you
have to creep up on me in the middle of a storm, yelling like some
wild banshee? I could’ve stomped on your ass or something.”
Anthony’s chest was heaving with relief as tried to gather his hair
in some semblance of control, the wind made sure he only partially
succeeded.

At his side, Andrew’s
smile merely widened.

“
Dude, I brought these
just in case,” said the other boy, holding out twin objects, in
each hand.

Anthony looked down and
was shocked. They were straight out of the Twilight Zone, they were
so surreal. They had made them when they were little, third graders
possibly, but he wasn’t sure. It was quite a long time
ago.

They were probably the
first ready-to-use weapons
ever
made by the two of them. They were Dodger
baseball bats, the miniature type only about 16 inches long, both
purchased by their respective fathers before either of them could
walk - or so they’d guessed. Their collective memories clouded when
they tried remembering as far back in time.

Over the years, the boys
had dented and abused them. The idea of having a little baseball
bat had long lost its appeal the older they’d grown. Andrew had
long stopped thinking of his as a bat all together and had taken to
believing it was actually a police baton. He had played with it as
such for quite some time before he’d taken it with him on one of
his overnight stays at Anthony’s grandmother house. He’d shown
Anthony it wasn’t quite a bat if one looked at it from the right
perspective. Rather, it was a club to be used to smash up bad
people.

It was during that
explanation, Anthony remembered he had one as well; a tiny bat all
bludgeoned and stained with
his
misuse over the years. Immediately, he’d gone in
search of his own.

Andrew had tagged along.
Within a few minutes, they’d found it at the bottom of his huge
football toy box, plastic, with a large “NFL” logo emblazoned
across both sides.

Anthony had looked at his,
his small head turned to one side, because it was hard for him to
see it as anything other than a baseball bat sized for
Pokémon
. Mostly due to
the small knob at the very end, which wasn’t very practical he’d
concluded. The thing didn’t weigh enough to slip from one’s hand
mid-swing.

He’d mentioned this to
Andrew and they had both stared at their bats, wondering what to
do. After a minute or so, Andrew asked the simple question that,
eventually, put them on the path to creating their first real
weapons.

“
Is there a way we can saw
off this thing at the end?”

Anthony had peered at his
friend, his tiny brow drawn together in concentration. He
remembered the multitude of tools in the shed at the very back of
his grandmother’s property, saying, “Yeah, there’s a way. My
grandma has hundreds of tools in the shed – saws, clamps, hammers,
and screwdrivers – all kinds of stuff. We can use them to cut off
the knobs for sure!”

At that, both boys had
leaped to their feet and dashed off for the tool shed. Within a
half hour, they’d sawed off the bottom three or four inches of the
bats, had sanded down the newly formed, jagged ends, and stood back
to admire them. Still, they didn’t feel right. They’d both frowned
in consternation. It wasn’t long before Anthony remembered all
batons had some form of a handle or grip or something. And that’s
when inspiration had struck him. He hurriedly rummaged through his
grandmother’s belongings until he found exactly what he was looking
for – Duck Tape!

Andrew watched his friend
as he began to tape the bottom three inches of what was once been a
baseball bat, but was rapidly becoming something else - a Billy
club. When Anthony had finished and held it up for Andrew’s
inspection, the boy’s eyes had lit up in wonder.

“
That’s it, Tony! You did
it, you did it!” he screeched excitedly as he reached for the Duck
Tape and did the very same to his piece of battered wood. Moments
later, he too possessed a 12-inch Billy club, made specifically to
bash up bad guys and put them in jail for good!

They had made real
weapons!

Now, shaking his head from
the reverie of the past, Anthony looked down at them in Andrew’s
hands, the very same clubs they’d forged seven years
prior.

He had only one question:
“What the hell are we going to use those for?”

Somewhat shocked at
Anthony’s reaction, the other boy jerked aback, clutching a
separate club in each hand. “Dude, you said yourself, this little
chick semi-threatened one of your sisters, who’s to say she’s
freakin’ crazy, because her parents are the same way. You want some
geeked out dad of hers coming at you all Hulk Hogan and shit? I’m
pretty sure you’d want one of these things in your hand to protect
yourself!”

Anthony straightened up a
little, his eyes darting to his right, which was a thing he did
when he was considering something he initially had no intention of
considering. Andrew did make a good point. Who’s to say Nixy’s
parents weren’t a pair of psychos equally proportionate to their
daughter? They could be even worse! There were no
guarantees.

“
You
make a good point,” Anthony ventured after a second or two, “but I
don’t want us to go up there all
agro
carrying these things like
we’re going to cause trouble or something. I just want to make sure
the little douche-bag leaves my sisters alone from now on, that’s
all.”

“
Yeah,
man, no biggie. We’ll keep them stowed in our back pockets just in
case we run into the
Hills Have
Eyes
clan or something, alright?” answered
Drew without a drop of humor in his voice.

“
Cool,
then, let’s go, before hell breaks loose over our heads and we get
drenched by this rain that is
so
gonna pound the neighborhood.”

With that, they turned
uphill and began walking. Each of them wriggling and twisting,
trying to put their childhood Billy clubs into their back pockets.
All the extra clothing they wore hampered their efforts.

~~~~~~~~<<<<<<{ ☼
}>>>>>>~~~~~~~~

A Terrible Truth

Monday, November
22
^nd
,
4:32 pm…

Anthony and Andrew reached
the end of the street where the homes clustered together – more
like crammed - shoulder-to-shoulder, as if deliberately built to
lean against one another. They stopped and looked around, not sure
what to do next, because nothing had changed. They both knew the
street they lived on didn’t go to the summit of the hill, and that
still seemed to be the case. There was nothing new, but house after
house, no more than four or five feet apart.

Anthony wondered, for some
odd reason, if their builders had violated the city building codes
by constructing them in such proximity.
Lame thought, Tony…

Crap, now what?

He cleared his mind,
realizing the little, foreign chump had been
lying, as they’d suspected all along. Anthony turned around
and looked back the way they’d come. He could see his father’s
Dodge Durango parked on the left side of the road from where he
stood. It was over a hundred yards down in the decline of the hill.
He could even see the roof of his house from where he was standing,
in the middle of the dead end street.

The wind blew
again,
cold
. He
could feel his cheeks were reddening. He could feel the skin
tightening. A heartbeat later, he felt the splatter of something
wet on his forehead. Before it fully registered, another one hit
him on the chin. Instinctively, he looked up, seeing and feeling
half a dozen more fall from the sky.
Great, it is going to start raining now
, he thought just as…

“
Hey Ant, come and check
this out!”

Anthony glanced back up
the road to find Andrew had walked almost to the very end of the
street, thirty feet from where he was currently standing, motioning
for him to follow. Seriously considering if it was worth getting
wet, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to go home and get out of the cold
or continue. He hesitated, gazed about briefly seeing the sprinkled
raindrops all about him.

“
Come on, man, let’s get
this over with!” Andrew pined loudly.

Anthony spun and trotted
up the road to stand beside Andrew. He glanced over to where the
other boy was pointing.

Blocked by his original
line-of-sight, Anthony found himself staring at a newly formed dirt
road, cleared (or bulldozed) right between the last house on the
right side of the street and the first house standing at street’s
end. It appeared newly formed, no more than seven feet wide - a
rudimentary road at that, meeting the existing street at a
forty-five degree angle. From there, it went straight up the hill
for about one hundred and fifty feet. This was all guesswork of
course. Anthony could only gauge the distance by eye.

Beyond, it turned sharply
to the left, further up the hill and eventually passed out of
sight.

“
I guess the little booger
wasn’t lying after all,” muttered Andrew.

Anthony took a few steps
closer to the wide dirt path and turned back toward his friend with
a grim look on his face. “What do you think?” queried Anthony,
unsure of what to make of the road or Nixy’s story.

“
I think we should march
up there and get this shit finished. I’m cold and getting hungry,
and it’s beginning to rain,” was Andrew’s immediate and obvious
response.

“
Yeah, I hear you. Come on
then.”

They walked up the
straight portion of the dusty road, now slowly becoming a pasty
cross between wet dirt and mud as the rain continued to sprinkle
its’ surface. At the turn in the road, they craned their necks
ninety degrees to the left, both discovering the road made a
beeline up the hill, another two hundred feet. It seemed to reach
the very top of the hill itself from there. They had to assume
this, though, since the summit was still out of their
sight.

To the boys, the
construction of the road itself looked plotted between the lines of
existing properties. It traversed right through areas where there
were no existing fences or walls. It must’ve been built in an area
recently zoned for residential development. The farther they went,
the more wild and unattended the land around them became. Those
places where an occasional oak or spruce would grow without fear of
its roots tearing up sidewalks or plumbing or like underground
infrastructure. This was a place where the Los Angeles Fire
Department didn’t site residents for overgrown vegetation. The area
was covered in chest-high growth just about everywhere. This looked
precisely like unincorporated land to them.