Bad Men Will Come by Jonathan Fredrick

Author:Jonathan Fredrick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2022-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

A God in Disguise

After Rosalind hung up on the police, she immediately began to hyperventilate. She ran out of the bedroom so she wouldn’t scare Jalen and hurled the disposable phone against the wall, shattering it to pieces. Her mouth opened to scream, but the sound came out funny, strangled and high pitched, like an early-warning alarm somewhere off in the distance. She sank to her knees, pressed her face against the plywood floor, and slapped the ground until her palms stung with pain. Her cries took root then, deep inside her, and emerged in a thick, guttural wail. Rosalind covered her head with her arms and convulsed with sobs.

At some point during all this Jalen had climbed out of his crib, toddled over next to her and plopped himself down. He reached for his mother now and patted her between the shoulders in the same gentle manner that she used when trying to get him to burp.

Rosalind lifted her head and did her best to twist her mottled face into some semblance of happiness.

“How did you get here?” she asked.

Jalen’s cherubic face lit up and he slapped his uncoordinated baby hands together as if climbing out of his crib had been some great feat of acrobatics. In a sense, it was. For the eleven-month-old it was a marked leap in cognition. This was the first time he’d successfully scaled the bars. He’d only begun to walk a couple of weeks before.

Jalen didn’t have on any clothes, just a fat diaper ballooned with piss. That, coupled with his round belly and his jelly-rolled arms and legs, made him look like a pocket-size sumo wrestler. Rosalind stood gingerly and walked toward Jalen’s room.

“C’mon,” she beckoned. The boy rolled onto his stomach, worked his feet under him, and padded after his mother. Rosalind got a diaper from the box that lay on the floor and noted there were only three remaining.

“We’re going to go on a trip,” she cooed as she tore off the dirty diaper and strapped the fresh one over his chubby legs. “We’re going to go far, far away. Yes we are. Far, far away from here.” She pulled his shirt over his head and smooshed her nose into his. “And we are never, ever gonna come back.”

Rosalind thought about where they would go—or rather, where they could go. Nowhere in Cain City, that was for certain. There wasn’t a place in town where they wouldn’t suss her out. She admonished herself for not thinking this far ahead. For not planning on this eventuality. But you wouldn’t let it come into your mind, would you? she told herself. Wouldn’t put that possibility into the universe for fear it’d come true. Stupid girl. It came true anyway, and now look at you.

Rosalind had two hundred dollars to her name. That’d be enough to get her a bus ticket to Knoxville. An older cousin lived there, Amanda. Amanda was six years her senior, the daughter of her Aunt Janie, one of her mother’s sisters, and the closest thing Rosalind ever had to a sibling.

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