Eighty-Sixed: Chapter 65 - Drained

The fire extinguisher sputtered out its last drop of foam. It was empty now, its contents depleted.

When Grace followed David into the house, the junction box on the side of the house inexplicably burst into flames. Mickey had rushed to the work shed, grabbed the extinguisher next to the door, and quickly stopped the fire before it spread to the house. The box was left covered in what looked like curdled white skin. Dropping the canister to the ground, Mickey turned and looked at Jeremy, who had never moved while Mickey was racing back and forth. He stood still next to the Cutlass Sierra he and David had driven to Cornerstone, Illinois, from their parent’s house in North Carolina.

“She just may kill your brother,” Mickey said, panting.

“She won’t really, will she?”

“I believe she just might,” Mickey said in disbelief at the very words leaving his mouth. “I’ve never seen her like this. She’s always been stubborn, but this is something else.”

“What does that mean?”

“It’s like there’s a darkness in her now, or something is missing — or both. Hell, I don’t quite know what I mean. She’s off, Jeremy. Off. That’s the best I can explain it. And in place of whatever’s missing, it seems like something in its place may just be crazy enough to pull that trigger.”

“Not if I can help it,” Jeremy said and finally moved, trotting toward the back door where Gracie had disappeared just moments before with the barrel of her shotgun nudging into David’s back.

“She’s not herself, I’m telling you,” Mickey said, stumbling after him. “And you don’t know half of what that woman’s capable of even when she’s in the right state of mind. I’m not sure even if I know anymore.”

Jeremy reached the back porch, hopped up and over the two wooden steps, and paused before entering.

“You don’t suppose the gun’s unloaded, do you?” he asked Mickey, who was now directly behind him.

“What good’s an unloaded gun, son?” he asked.

“I figured it was worth asking.”

“Both Olivia and Grace know their way around firearms,” Mickey said proudly. “I’ve made sure of that. But it may be our undoing.”

They quietly entered the kitchen, stepping gingerly, and immediately glanced at each other, each feeling the crackle of dry static in the air, which was acutely opposite the pressing humidity outside. It was like being in a sawmill, dry and dusty, baked and parched.

“I hear you in there,” Gracie called from the other side of the wall in the living room. “It Doesn’t matter. It’s already done.”

“Done?” Jeremy said and ran full-tilt, panicking through the doorway into the next room. Mickey followed with abandon close behind.

The shotgun rested on its butt in the corner like a decorative prop, as if it hadn’t been used just moments before as a prod in David’s back. Gracie sat upright in her knitting chair, her back straightened and her hands resting on her knees, with David on the sofa beside her. They both stared at a space against the wall opposite them where the television had been just minutes before.

“It was the same thing I saw when trying to escape from that kid in North Carolina,” David said. “Swallowed up the television like it had swallowed up that car. Like it swallowed up that kid.”

“And my radio in my shed,” Mickey said.

“You saw it?” Jeremy asked his brother. “It was another black hole?”

“It was right there,” David said and halfheartedly pointed to where nothing but a bare spot on the floor remained. “It was there just like Grace said, but it disappeared right before our eyes.”

“Grace, just what did you think you could accomplish with this masquerade?” Mickey demanded as he stomped across the room and snatched up the shotgun by its barrel length.

In a smooth series of actions, one, two, three, he slid sideways the shell latch behind the gun’s magazine directly inside the receiver and removed two shells from the magazine before holding down the slide release and shucking the gun’s bolt rearward. This sent the chamber’s lone remaining shell flipping in a spiral outward from the side of the shotgun and onto the floor, where it rolled beneath the sofa where David was sitting.

“You’d have killed your very own son-in-law,” he sneered at his wife.

“David is already supposed to be dead,” Gracie said, her voice defeated. “You were there when we buried him just a couple of weeks ago. Or however long it was now. Hell, I don’t even know anymore.”

“Well, Gracie, my dear,” Mickey said with anger still dripping from his tongue like venom, “the world has obviously been flipped upside down, and David’s not dead after all. And he’s not the only one who better figure out how to deal with it.”

Grace turned her head and shot an icy stare at her husband.

“Our grandchildren are gone,” Gracie hissed at him. “They’re gone as if they’d never existed. That’s not something I’m ready to deal with.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Mickey shouted. “You think a single one of us in this room doesn’t know that? But you shoving a gun in our faces isn’t going to fix a damn thing, and you know it!”

“No, I don’t know it,” Grace said, pointing at the spot where the television had just been. “Right there! There was a black hole. In our house. Right. There! And it was a black hole that supposedly started this whole thing, spinning us all back to 1986 like we’d just gone on a merry-go-round.”

“But that doesn’t mean shoving David into one of those things will fix any of this!” Mickey said, continuing to shout.

Gracie stood upright, facing down her husband’s shouts with nothing but a scowl.

“I told you I saw a guy get sucked right into one,” David said as Jeremy took a seat next to his brother on the couch. “Didn’t change a thing. We’re all still here. Mark and Rosie still aren’t. If I thought jumping into one of those things could bring them back or fix any of this, I’d do it in a heartbeat. I would. But all I think it would do is get me killed.”

“Again,” Jeremy said.

“What?” David asked.

“Again,” Jeremy repeated. “It would get you killed again because Grace is right. We all just buried you. And while I don’t see how jumping into a black hole could fix anything, maybe we’re not thinking about it correctly.”

“Thinking’s not going to fix this,” Gracie said.

“Clearly, that would explain your lack of sense,” Mickey said.

“Seriously,” Jeremy continued. “What if it’s not just about one person going in? What if it’s much more than that?”

“What do you mean?” David asked.

“The whole world went in before, right?” Jeremy said. “Everything and everyone.”

“That’s what they say on the news,” Gracie confirmed.

“Then wouldn’t the whole world — not just one person — need to go into another black hole — or maybe the same one somehow — to make everything go back?”

“Where would that leave me?” David asked.

“I don’t know, David.”

“It would kill me, Jeremy. Literally.”

Jeremy looked down at his hands, surprised at how dirty they were, with black lines under his fingernails. It had been days since he last showered, three days at least, since their captors had released him along with their parents and since he and David embarked upon their ill-fated cross-country journey.

“Does it even matter?” Mickey asked. “It’s not like these black holes pop up with any predictability. And if they did, it’s not like we have a clue as to what would make one big enough to swallow up the earth.”

As he finished speaking, David jumped, startled, as the phone on the table beside him started ringing.

End Part IV