Josh stood up and began to walk away from the table. “I’ll eat when he does.”
“You’ll sit down and do what I say, young man!” she yelled. “What have you said to him?” She turned venomous on me.
“We were building spaceships with Lego’s,” I said, backing up. “The only thing I said to him was how cool his ship had come out, and once or twice I asked him for a certain piece. What the hell is going on? I don’t know you well enough to illicit this response. I mean, sure if you spent the time to really get to know me, I’d be able to do this to you on a fairly routine basis.” I was shooting for humor, but ended up with a self-inflicted wound. She stared back flatly at me.
“We’ll be leaving tomorrow,” I told her.
“We are?” Gary asked, I noticed he had not stopped eating his meal. I wanted to thank him for his solidarity.
“You can’t!” Josh cried.
“What about BT? Is he ready to go?” Gary asked around a mouthful of something that resembled meat. “And Paul? We still need to find him.”
It was quicker than a cobra strike and could have been as lethal, the look that Deneaux shot at Gary.
My brain was tossing all this info together in the washing machine of my mind, but no matter how much spin I put on it, it still kept coming out dirty and stained. Deneaux had planted bad seeds about me in Mary’s head. Deneaux wanted us kicked out of here, but why? My mind began to spin faster, not just out of here, meaning this house, but out of here, meaning this city. She was covering something up and all that it could be was Paul. Brian was a dead zombie. How he became a zombie could be debated and how he was shot was up for question also, but the fact remained he had been a zombie and Deneaux had every right to dispatch of him. Clinical word I told my brain as I thought of my former ally in survival.
“Two days,” I told Mary, but her head was shaking in the negative. “I need two days. Tomorrow we will go out all day, looking for my friend.” Deneaux’s fork hesitated for a split second as it traveled to her pursed, shriveled lips.
She put her full fork down on her Chinette plate.
“Really, Michael, you just told her that we would be leaving tomorrow. I do not think it is fair to her that you should put her and her son in this much danger.”
“Thank you, Vivian,” Mary said, reaching out and clasping Deneaux’s claw, I mean, hand.
I looked at Deneaux with my “I know what you’re trying to do” gaze. She merely smiled.
“Fine, tomorrow it is,” I told Mary. Deneaux’s smile grew further, I was afraid her paper thin skin was going to tear as it stretched beyond its limits. “We’ll move to your neighbor’s house.” Deneaux’s smile evaporated.
Mary shot from her seat. “You can’t!”
“Sure I can. Who do you think you are to tell me where I can set up my base of operations?”
“That’s too close!” she yelled again.
“I’ve got one friend who is missing and another that hasn’t awakened in hours. And you’ve seen the size of him. How far do you think I can carry him? I’m not going very far until I get both issues resolved,” I said to Mary as much as I did Deneaux.
Mary plopped down in her seat, cupping her head in her hands. “Two days and you promise you’ll go?”
“I’ll leave this house and your general vicinity, yes,” I told her.
“That’ll have to do,” she answered solemnly.
“Yes,” Josh said, pumping his fist.
“Can I eat now?”
“Not at the table,” she said without removing her head from her hands.
That was fine with me. If I wasn’t with my immediate family, I preferred to eat alone. I didn’t generally like people enough to break bread with them and make idle chit chat about things I didn’t give a crap about; and don’t get me started if I came across signs of uncleanliness on their utensils or dishes. It was best to not go down a road lined with potholes, when holding such a fragile, glass-wrapped psyche like my own.
I grabbed BT’s MRE off the table before she could object and headed into the living room. Josh was immediately on my heels. Mary had not stopped him, probably hadn’t pulled her head up yet to take note. BT slumbered on as I tore open the near nuclear-proof plastic wrapping.
I don’t know how many of you have ever had dealings with MREs, but if you’ve survived this long, then you, my friend, are a survivalist and EVERY survivalist has at one time or another had an MRE, whether from the military or an Army/Navy surplus store. (You know those places that were located in the worst parts of every town and the guy behind the counter looks suspiciously at every customer like they could be the feds come to get his secret cache of hand grenades and rocket launchers in the back room.)
If, on the off chance that you have somehow made it this far without one, I will relate a short story. When I was in Marine Corps boot camp, eating was one of the only events that any recruit could sort of look forward to. I say “sort of” because we generally were not allowed to finish any meal. I can, without even thinking about it, honestly tell you that I threw more food away during my three and a half months of boot camp than I actually ate.
When we went to the dining halls, there was a chance I would get to shovel as much food into my mouth before the DIs would start barking at us to get back outside and in military formation. The times we spent out in the field without access to a dining hall, however, were times of depravation and starvation. The DIs would put a box of MREs out in a field, usually somewhere in the neighborhood of one hundred or so yards away, and then tell us that we had five minutes to eat. So, we would race out to the box and tear into it, which in itself takes a little to get through. Removing the metal banding straps without tools was always a good time to see who would bleed first, then as the piñata of meals fell to the ground, it was a scramble to grab a meal. There was not the luxury of choosing one particular meal over another. Did I tell you this one little tidbit? There are twelve meals in an MRE case and we had two boxes. There were thirty Marine recruits in my platoon, easy enough math. You think people fighting for a stupid, sold-out, hot toy during Christmas is fierce? Tell a starving Marine you just took the last meal.
Looking back on it, the ones that didn’t get the meal were probably better off. I can’t tell you how many fingernails I tore, trying to tear through the five mm gauge, sealed-by-a-glue-fanatic bags. Ripping with teeth was perhaps marginally better, chipped tooth, bleeding fingers, to-MAY-toe, to-MAH-toe, just give me my fucking food! Alright, so let’s see where we are. Sprint to box, five guys trying desperately to crack boxes open, ensuing fight for insufficient meals as they spill to the dirt, check so far. So now you have battled and won a meal and are hiding your kill from your fellow predators. You have successfully torn through the hard exterior carcass to get at the “meat and potatoes” so to speak. It doesn’t matter much whether it is wombat or porcupine meat, you’re going to eat it.
By this point, three of the five allotted minutes have been used up, and now for the topper. Apparently, Marine DIs do not make much money because they cannot afford watches that keep particularly good time. I would finally be at a point where I could rip open the food’s foil container and squeeze food down my gullet (forget the plastic utensils, forget chewing, this was all about sustenance) when the DIs would start screaming at us to assemble. Now some of you may not have ever joined the services. That is fine; we all walk our own path in life, some of you may have chosen the Army, or were maybe a little smarter and went to the Navy or quite possibly, you were a genius and joined the Air Force. But I was in the Marines. When your DI screamed at you to be somewhere you did it, no questions asked.