Jorgie sniffled and held a hand to his head. He appeared dazed, possibly suffering a concussion.
“You do that to my son again, and I’ll kill you,” Trevor stated a fact.
“Oh Dick, who are you kidding? You decided to kill me long before I woke you and the misses out of bed tonight. The real question here is how bad do you want your son and wife to live? That’s the real question.”
“What do you mean by that?” Ashley’s voice trembled from that combination of fear and anger.
“You see, right now you’re thinking that the big revelation here is that Richie has himself a half-brother. You’re thinking, who really cares if his dad knocked up some minimum-wage waitress a long time ago. I mean, it’s not as if he was cheating on his wife, right? The point isn’t that I’m Richie’s half-brother. Oh no. That’s no big deal. That’s just the way of the world. The point here is what pieces of the puzzle does this put into place for you. The real revelation is right in front of your eyes and you’re not seeing it. Why here I am, only half of what my little brother is and I have it all figured out. Why, I thought me being here would give you all those answers you’ve been wondering about. I mean, you do have questions, don’t you…Trevor?”
George smiled as if he did everyone a favor by calling his half-brother ‘Trevor’ instead of Rich or Dick.
“Yes, I have lots of questions. Like why are you holding a knife to my son’s throat?”
“Oh, c’mon now, I mean the real good questions. Like, why did you get the shit job of running this whole comeback show? Why is it you can order around dogs a lot easier than most folks can order around their kids? Questions about why this little brat of yours is so special.”
“A link…” Trevor spoke soft as he remembered the Old Man’s words. “…a link on a chain…”
“A link on a chain, huh?” George offered a better description. “More like a code for a combination lock, brother.”
“You’re not making sense,” Ashley complained.
“Oh honey, you need to start paying attention,” the brute said. “We’re talking big concepts here and you can’t see beyond the front of your nose. Hard to believe you’re such an important part of all this.”
That sparked Ashley’s attention.
“Me? What? What do you mean?”
“You still don’t get it, do you? Oh honey, you need to understand something. All of this,” he waved his arm-the one that did not have the knife to Jorgie’s throat-around the room but his motion referred to the nightmarish world in which they lived. “All of this, it’s on your shoulders.”
“What?” Ashley quivered.
The man finished, “You and Trevor here. You started this. You caused Armageddon.”
Ashley’s jaw dropped. Trevor’s eyes narrowed.
“Yeah, let that soak in real good. Let that sting for a bit,” the man smiled evilly.
Trevor tilted his head as the dots of understanding connected. “The other half of the equation. I was half, and Ashley was the other half. Is that what you’re saying?”
“That’s good. Yeah, A plus B equals C. You had to be A and her as B. That’s how nature’s been planning it all along. Now you’re thinking. Think some more for me. Tell your honey what I am. Go ahead, Dick.”
Trevor licked his lips.
“You are a mistake.”
Surprisingly, George nodded in agreement.
“You were never meant to be. Your mom wasn’t the right mix with my dad.”
“Yeah! Yeah! Keep on going.”
“My dad was meant…was meant to be with my mom. The same way I was meant to be with Ashley.”
George said, “A genetic code, Rich! All through history. I’m not so sure about this whole ‘meant’ thing, but you two had the ingredients for the recipe for Jorgie here.”
Dad and mom looked to their son. Jorgie stood but his head wobbled side to side, his eyelids fluttered. The blow left him dazed and unaware of the conversation.
Ashley asked, “What about my boy?”
George said to her, “Let me bet you a dollar that you were starting to get sick and whatnot before all hell broke loose.”
Trevor remembered how Ashley felt nauseous at about the same time people started disappearing and monsters started creeping around in shadows. He remembered waiting for her on the porch with her father while Ashley got sick upstairs. At the time, he dismissed it to nerves. However, more than a year later when they pulled her out of a green gooey cocoon with the initial batch of ark-riders, they realized she carried a child.
The doctors calculated she conceived not long before disappearing, but it was hard to tell exactly when given that they had been having sex almost every night. Richard loved it at the time. He attributed Ashley’s eagerness to her nerves about the wedding, too.
Ashley unconvincingly insisted, “You are crazy.”
“Think about it, honey,” the man enjoyed horrifying her. As he did, a nasty edge built in his voice. “Think about when the creatures started appearing. If you go back and check them old newspaper clippings, you’ll see. Not The New York Times or something. Check out The National Enquirer. Shit like that. Sometimes the tabloids get it right. Hell, they were ahead of everyone this time around. They got the last, best scoop.”
Trevor said, “What does that have to do with anything? We were planning for our wedding, that’s all. I was a nobody.”
“We both were, bro, but we weren’t destined to stay that way, were we? You and Ashley here, like gasoline and fire, baby. Put the two of them together and you get a big boom. That boom was Armageddon.”
Trevor’s mind raced. Since the day he first met the Old Man in the woods, he wondered why he had been chosen. Why had the estate been prepared and stocked for him? Why did he receive the library of memories? Why could he communicate with dogs and why did they follow his every command as if they were an extension of his body?
He saw George-this warped man that claimed to be his half-brother-stare at him, savoring the torment that came with each revelation. Trevor also saw that whatever trauma had deformed and starved his body had also robbed George of his sanity.
“Wait…wait a second…” Ashley’s hand wavered in the air. “You’re saying…you’re saying that when I…when we…I got-”
“C’mon honey, spit it out. You can do it but you can’t say it? Maybe you should’ve been a little more shy when Richie here wanted to go poking around between those nice legs of yours.”
“Our son,” Trevor jumped in. “When we… when he was conceived…”
“Yeah! Now you got it! Bingo!”
“Wh-what?” Ashley stuttered. “Because I got pregnant..?”
“No, honey,” George explained. “Because you got pregnant with this thing…”
George shook JB by the back of the neck.
“Thing? That’s my son!” Trevor snarled.
George spat back, “Too bad I can’t just slit his throat and undo what happened to the world. No, I guess the cat is out of the bag on that one.”
Trevor said, “He was meant to be. You were the mistake. You don’t belong.”
His half-brother curled his lips like a coyote warning off a badger.
“Yeah, I was a mistake. Sort of the fly in the ointment; the monkey wrench in the works. But I was first.”
“And you failed. I saw your cave. You failed. What happened, did you actually think you were the one chosen for all this?”
“When it all started, I felt the strength in me,” he curled his free arm as if making a muscle. “I felt confident, sure of myself, nothing could stop me. This was all…all my time.”
“So you gathered survivors,” Trevor said. “You found yourself a quiet little mansion in the woods. Somewhere secluded.”
“Yeah…yeah,” George agreed. “I could see a picture in my mind, isn’t that funny? I found a place like that picture.”
Trevor told him, “It wasn’t quite right, was it? Not exactly like the picture in your mind.”
George shook his head. “No. Not exactly. But close enough.”
“You saw this place. You saw the place given to me. “
George clenched his teeth, “This should’ve been my place. Mistake or no, I was first. It should have been mine.”