Enter Darkness Box Set by K M Fawkes

Author:K M Fawkes [Fawkes, K M]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-09-11T06:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

“What’s the topic of discussion tonight?” Brad asked as he approached his front door. Jack, Vance and Charlie were sat on camping chairs outside, each with a beer in gloved hand. Remington was by his master’s side, but came over to sniff Brad’s hand before settling next to Charlie again.

“We started out gossiping about the wolf,” Jack said.

“Coyote,” Brad corrected.

Vance handed him a beer. “Right. And you killed it.”

“I had to,” Brad said. “It was either the coyote or the cow and I know which one I’d rather eat.”

“Damn straight,” Jack said.

“You were amazing,” Charlie said. “We were all…well, amazed.”

“It was nothing,” Brad muttered as he opened his beer. “What did you guys move on to talking about, anyway? Since my amazing and heroic efforts weren’t of enough interest.”

“People that we’ve lost,” Jack said quietly.

“Or seen die,” Charlie added.

“God, why?” Brad demanded, pausing with his beer halfway to his lips.

“Well, we’re all a little drunk,” Charlie said, swaying gently in her seat.

That explained the slur in her speech, then. Brad looked down at her. She was one of those people who got a little red in the face when she drank. She was also apparently a lightweight. There were only two empty bottles by her chair.

“Charlie gets maudlin when she’s drunk,” Jack explained, stroking Remington’s ears softly as he cast a smile at his tipsy wife. “And, anyway, don’t therapists say it’s good to get these things out into the open?”

“Therapists say a lot of things,” Brad said with a shrug.

“My wife was a therapist,” Vance said suddenly.

“Seriously?” Jack asked. Charlie sat up a little straighter and Brad got the feeling that this was uncharted territory for Vance.

“Yep,” he said. “She specialized in marriage counseling.”

“Did that make your life easier or harder?” Brad asked with a smile.

Vance grinned and shook his head. His southern accent seemed to deepen as he said, “That woman never gave me an easy day in my whole life.” He took a long sip of his beer. “She didn’t have the bots. She didn’t need ’em for one thing, and we wouldn’t have had the money, for another. But one of her patients did. And that’s how she caught the virus. She couldn’t make it to an MRI machine in time.”

He took another long swig of his beer before he continued. “And since they wouldn’t let me back in, I couldn’t be with her. I was on the phone with her when she died. Video chat, because we both knew it was close to the end. I’ve never seen so much blood in my whole damn life.”

“I couldn’t believe it the first time I saw someone die from it,” Jack said with a nod.

“Who did you see?” Brad asked.

Jack shrugged. “I didn’t know him. It happened on the train, near the beginning. Some guy in a business suit started coughing and couldn’t stop, but we couldn’t get the conductor’s attention. The call button wasn’t working.”

Jack looked down at his hands and took a breath. “He just…he collapsed on the floor.

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