Grace Under Fire: Book Two In The Locker Nine Series Read online

  “I might do that. I appreciate the offer.”

  Their conversation was interrupted by the two boys crashing through the door and onto the porch.

  “We’re starving!” Dylan squealed, rubbing his belly.

  Blake was nodding along. “Yeah. I’m hungry too.”

  Leslie loved feeding children and she appreciated being in a home where there was enough food to feed them. That brought her back around to the thought of returning to her house. The idea of returning home, even with a month’s worth of food for the two of them, worried her. Would a month be enough? What would happen when the month ran out? Would the world be back to normal by then or could this go on longer?

  Leslie rose from her seat, trying to break the negative spiral her thoughts were locked into. “I’ll fix you something.”

  “Yeaaahhh!” the kids chorused.

  “Thank you,” Teresa said. “I want to finish my coffee and then I’m going to lay back down. I can’t believe I still feel so weak.”

  “Don’t worry about it, honey. It takes a while for that feeling to go away. All of your energy is going toward healing your body right now.”

  Leslie left Teresa on the porch and went into the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator, enjoying the small miracle of the light actually coming on when the door opened. Then there was the additional miracle of the cool, edible food inside. It was amazing how a few days without modern conveniences made her appreciate this convenience again.

  “What do you boys want?” Leslie called from the fridge.

  “Eggs,” Blake said.

  “Yeah, eggs,” Dylan piped in.

  Leslie shut the door and looked to the wire basket of eggs on the countertop. It was brimming, and she had not even checked the henhouse today. They had an overabundance of eggs. It made her wonder about her daughter. Was she getting enough to eat?

  Leslie doubted it. Paul, the scumbag she lived with, would not have any provisions for feeding the two of them. It was likely they were more concerned with getting high than getting fed. Food had always been second to drugs with them, clearly demonstrated by their pallor and sallow cheeks.

  Still, all of these eggs were surely going to go bad. No one would miss a dozen, would they?

  She could check the chickens when she left to go pick up her laundry. Whatever she found in the henhouse, she could take with her and give to her daughter. She could also check the refrigerator and see if there were any other leftovers that were about to go bad. She could clean the refrigerator out and take the old food. Then at least they’d have something.

  Leslie wasn’t able to get away from the Hardwicks’ house without Dylan wanting to go with her. She had expected that. He didn’t like to leave her side anymore. In providing the comfort and sense of security that he was missing with his own parents, she and Dylan formed a bond that made them nearly inseparable. Blake had wanted to go with them too, but Leslie assured him he needed to stay with his own mother. While no one was looking Leslie gathered some of the old leftovers from the fridge and put them in plastic shopping bags. She put them in the back seat of Mrs. Hardwick’s car, along with the morning’s eggs.

  She drove about twenty minutes toward the town of Damascus then took a left turn onto a road that headed in the direction of North Carolina and Tennessee. She spent twenty more minutes on that road, taking a few turns onto increasingly remote gravel roads. Before long, she found herself at the decrepit trailer were her daughter Debbie was staying with her boyfriend.

  Most homes looked bad now, with overgrown yards and piles of garbage, but it was clear that this home had been miserable even before the terror attacks occurred. The yard was littered with old tires and the dead vehicles that had shed them. The front porch and steps were ill-fitting, obviously obtained from another trailer.

  The mere sight of the trailer made Leslie’s heart sink. It was all she could do not to turn the car around in the driveway as quickly as possible and flee from this place. She hated to expose her grandson to this, to the sight of his mother and what she’d become. It hurt Leslie that her daughter obviously thought so little of herself that she allowed herself to live in such squalor. Leslie had raised her better than that.

  She eased the car into the neglected driveway. It had been a long time since it had seen gravel or any care at all. There were deep ruts in some spots that made the undercarriage of the car drag. Leslie parked and turned the ignition off. She sat in the car and watched the trailer.

  “Is Mama home? Are we going in?”

  “I don’t know, baby,” Leslie replied. She was watching for signs of life, trying to make up her mind. Despite wanting to turn around, she’d come this far and felt like she should see it through.

  A scrawny, shirtless man burst through the door and glowered at them. Seeing who it was, he tossed his head in a dismissive gesture, turned around, and went back inside. The rude jerk was her daughter’s boyfriend Paul. Leslie took his dismissive gesture as a sign that her daughter was home. Had she not been, he probably would have been even ruder.

  Leslie opened her door and slid out, being careful to take the keys with her. If the car was stolen, she had no idea how she’d get back to the Hardwicks’. She opened the back door and let Dylan out of his child seat, picked up the bags of food, and the two of them headed toward the front porch.

  Leslie leaned close to Dylan and whispered in his ear, “Be careful. These steps are rotten. I don’t want you to fall.”

  “They need new steps, Granny. Don’t they?”

  “They do, sweetie.”

  Paul had left the front door open. There was no screen door. Without air conditioning, they left the door open most of the time with nothing to stop the bugs, snakes, and rodents from wandering inside. The idea of her grandson sleeping in there disgusted her. In fact, the idea of anyone sleeping there was disgusting.

  Stopping at the opening, she looked into the dark maw of the trailer. She could see very little, each window covered with a towel or sheet serving as a curtain. Her nose told her way more than her sight did. The place smelled of mildew and rot.

  Leslie knew that soon enough many places would smell like this, without the benefit of modern heating and air-conditioning. This place smelled as if it always been this way. It smelled like the body odor of people who lived in the dark recesses of humanity, scared of the light of day. It smelled like abuse, crime, and neglect. It smelled like drug use and alcoholism. Like apathy and early death and the unloved.

  Leslie rapped on the aluminum door frame and faked a cheery voice. “Hello! Anybody home?”

  A high-pitched and agitated voice responded from the darkness. “Dammit, woman, you know we’re home. You done seen my ass on the front porch.”

  That was Paul in all his glory.

  Leslie ignored him, unfortunately used to his demeanor. She did not raise her daughter to be such a person but it had become increasingly apparent that her daughter saw herself as this kind of person. Leslie had tried for years to encourage her to make something of herself but had given up when Dylan came along. He was now Leslie’s priority. Her life was about making him more than his mother.

  “I brought some food,” Leslie announced. She went inside and set the bags on the coffee table. In the muted light coming through the door she could see that the glass tabletop was littered with powder residue. There were various lengths of drinking straws and a couple of rusty razor blades. Meth heads were like the U.S. Postal Service—come rain, snow, hell or high water, terror attack, or the apocalypse, a junkie was going to junk. Leslie felt vomit rise in her throat.

  “There’s some eggs. There’s also some leftovers.”

  Releasing the bags, she stepped back from the coffee table. This would have been the point in the conversation where a guest might normally be asked to take a seat, but Leslie did not feel comfortable sitting in this house. It wasn’t like Paul was likely to extend an invite anyway.

  The idea of stray razor blades and needles was concerning, bu
t she found herself more worried about the intangible residue of seeing such things. She worried about Dylan’s memories of sitting in this house. She wanted to turn and run, to take her grandson and go anywhere but here. She wanted to tell him that the woman on the couch in front of them was not his mother but some stranger.

  Leslie noticed Paul staring at her with his usual look of disgust on his face.

  “Now what the hell are we supposed to do with that shit?” he asked.

  Leslie shrugged, unable to ignore his lack of gratitude. “I reckon if you’re hungry enough you’ll eat it.”

  Paul leaned forward, flipped open the tops of the bags, then flipped them back shut dismissively. “What the hell good is that? You got some way to cook it?”

  Leslie met Paul’s eye. “I’m sorry. I thought you might be hungry and I wanted to bring some food by.”

  Leslie glanced over at her daughter, who hadn’t even said a word. Her gaze flitted around the room taking in Leslie, her son, and whatever else she was seeing there in the darkness. Her perception seemed impaired by whatever drug they’d managed to scrounge up. At some point, she finally processed that Dylan was there and that he was her son.

  She raised her arms in an open gesture, flipping her limp hands at him as if beckoning. “Baby, you come over here to your mama and let her love on you.”

  Despite the intention, it was not an altogether heartwarming gesture and Dylan hesitated. Leslie could tell he was scared. She put her hand on his shoulder and patted it, while at the same time pulling him tight against her. “It’s okay,” she assured him. “You can go over there.”

  Dylan’s lack of response to his mother’s request angered Paul. His eyes narrowed and his face reddened. “Boy, you get over here to your mama. Now!”

  His tone of voice shot icy daggers through Leslie. It confirmed what she had always suspected, what she feared that Dylan went through when he was with Debbie and Paul. Paul was a bully and Debbie would not stand up to him to protect her son.

  Behind her back, Leslie hooked a thumb in the back pocket of her jeans. It brushed the reassuring grip of her .38 revolver. Despite being a hiker town, Damascus sometimes had a hard undercurrent. There were drugs, rough men, and violence. Leslie knew how to shoot and she was never one to be intimidated by men. If she had to, she would blow Paul’s brains all over the cheap paneling of this trailer.

  “Go ahead, Dylan, give your mother a hug,” Leslie encouraged.

  Dylan looked up at Leslie for reassurance and then did as she asked. Leslie locked her eyes on the scumbag’s, showing him that she was not afraid of him and at the same time daring him to say another word to the child. Dylan went to his mother and she pulled him into her lap hugging him tightly, nuzzling against him in the way that a child might snuggle against a stuffed animal. It was not a natural and genuine type of affection, but the overly-dramatic reassurance sought by the intoxicated.

  It made Dylan uncomfortable. He looked at Leslie, his eyes asking for rescue. He was not used to this kind of attention from his mother. Debbie was whispering in his ear but Leslie could not hear what she was saying.

  The boyfriend swept his open hand toward the shopping bags on the coffee table. “That all you brung?”

  “All things considered, I would have expected a little more gratitude toward someone that brought you food. It’s more than you deserve. When’s the last time you got out and earned a meal?”

  He ignored the remark. “Where did you get this shit, anyway? We was down to your house the other day and the cabinets was damn near empty.”

  Leslie raised an eyebrow at him. “What were you doing in my house without me there?”

  “It was a social call,” he replied. “Debbie here wanted to see her baby.”

  It was on the tip of Leslie’s tongue to respond that if Debbie was that interested in her child they would be living together. She didn’t want to plant that seed in Debbie’s head though. Dylan was with her now and she fully intended that it would stay that way. She had already steeled herself that there might one day be a confrontation. If it came to that, she intended to threaten them with everything she had, from physical violence to reporting them for food stamp fraud.

  From the corner of her eye, Leslie could see the Debbie was tickling her son and making him giggle, whispering in his ear, and getting him to whisper back in hers. Leslie returned her attention back to the boyfriend.

  “So your social call involved you going through my cabinets?”

  “We was a little hungry. Surely you wouldn’t begrudge family having a bite to eat?”

  She didn’t respond to that but made some noise in her throat that she intended to be noncommittal. She didn’t acknowledge him as family.

  Not taking her eyes off Paul’s, she said to her grandson, “Dylan, honey, we better be going. I’m sure these two have stuff to do.” She knew they didn’t have anything to do unless it involved stealing or getting high.

  “Next time, bring something that don’t need cooked,” the boyfriend spat.

  “I ain’t the Piggly Wiggly,” Leslie replied. “There ain’t likely to be a next time.”

  “If you happen to luck up on some food the way you lucked up on this, I expect you to keep us in mind. Else I’m sure you’d go all brokenhearted if Dylan was to have to come live with us,” Paul said, a jagged smile breaking his scruffy face.

  Leslie shrugged. “We’ll see about that.”

  This apparently wasn’t the fear reaction Paul was shooting for. “Damn right we’ll see. A boy should be with his mother. You know the law would agree with that.”

  Leslie couldn’t hold back a laugh. “The law? You of all people are going to be throwing the law at me? You think I don’t know the shit you do? You think I don’t know how a low-down, lazy piece of shit like you, who doesn’t hold a job, pays for his drugs?”

  Paul’s eyes ignited like a furnace flaring to life. When he rose to his feet and started making his way around the coffee table, Leslie knew she’d pushed him too far. She was in danger now.

  She pulled the .38 from her pocket and thumbed back the hammer, just like she’d practiced when imagining this very moment. “Dylan, get in the car.”

  Debbie latched on to Dylan and he started squealing in terror. Paul kept inching toward her. Leslie flipped the gun a hair to the right and fired a hole in the paneling. It silenced the entire room and stopped everyone in their tracks.

  “Dylan, get in the car,” Leslie repeated, her tone firm but urgent.

  “Bitch, you shot a hole in my wall!” Paul spat through clenched teeth.

  She pointed the gun at him. “Next one will be somewhere you can’t patch.”

  Paul flexed his scrawny arms like he was itching to choke Leslie to death.

  She was not impressed. “I’ll do it in a heartbeat. Try me.”

  “You’d shoot the man your daughter loves? Right in front of her? You think she wouldn’t turn your ass in?”

  Dylan came to Leslie’s side and she steered him toward the door. “Honey, go get in the car now.”

  “Bye baby, mommy loves you,” Debbie slurred.

  When Leslie heard the car door shut, she looked back at Paul with venom. “You need to understand that if I have to kill you, I’ve already accepted that I’ll probably have to kill Debbie too. Now, you may be wondering what kind of mother would shoot her own daughter. It’s the kind who doesn’t want her grandson to be raised within reach of a piece of crap like you. I see people like you two on the news all the time. The boyfriend who beats a child to death while the child’s mother sits there and does nothing. It’s people just like you. If killing the two of you is all I have to do to keep Dylan safe forever, I’ll do it and I’ll still sleep at night. I love that little boy more than I’ve ever loved anything in the world and I won’t let anything hurt him.”

  From the corner of her eye, Leslie could see that her daughter was crying. That hurt a little but in some ways Leslie hoped it might be a wake-up call. Maybe her
daughter would realize how far down the ladder she’d slid. Leslie backed up until she was framed in the trailer door, staring into the dark recess of the living room.

  “I don’t want to see either of you again for a long, long time. Don’t come to my house again.”

  Leslie backed across the porch, went down the steps, and traced her path back across the trash strewn yard. When she reached the car, she turned back toward the trailer again, looking to see if anyone had followed her. No one had. She had no idea what they were doing in there right now and she didn’t care. All she cared about anymore sat in the car waiting on her and she got in to join him.

  Chapter Three

  The Hardwick Farm

  It had been a mistake to go to Debbie and Paul’s. It had been a mistake to expose Dylan to the conditions that his mother had chosen to live in, that she had chosen over him. Leslie decided instead to focus on doing the best she could for the Hardwicks. When Robert returned and they had to move on, she would come up with another plan. She would find a way for them to survive. She always had.

  The Hardwicks’ home had a natural gas water heater. Leslie drew a shallow bath and helped Teresa into it. While Teresa couldn’t submerge her incision, Leslie knew from her own experience that simply being clean would make her feel better.

  After Teresa’s bath, Leslie kept the children entertained. She tried to keep them from making too much noise when Teresa was trying to sleep. She kept the house clean and kept everyone fed, including the goats and chickens. One evening she even built a small campfire and allowed Dylan and Blake to roast marshmallows just to do something different.

  Every day she walked past the Radio Room, as the family called it. Inside, she could see flashing lights and digital displays, an array of equipment she didn’t understand, with buttons, dials, headphones, and microphones. All of it was silent. There had been no word from Grace, no word from Robert.