My Megan by Cary Rainey

 

 

4.

Lon Mackenzie owned the jewelry shop by the truck stop down by the highway.  She was our age, a single mother, lived out near the lake, stood a head shorter than me, had terrific boobs, was very sexy, and at four-fifteen the next morning I watched Nathan and Arnold set her on fire in my yard.  I had heard the guys screaming my name and I came upstairs and watched from my living room as Lon spun quickly and fell to her knees, her arms pinwheeling, and then went still.  Nathan and Arnold and I looked at each other, now brothers and strangers, inmates in a whole new asylum being built around us, for us, and now, at least in part, by us.

 

5.

Later that morning, Nathan came around to check on things.  I was already up – I fell asleep sometime before sunrise and I didn’t remember dreaming and it felt like I hadn’t been asleep at all.  It felt like I was a newborn.  Yeah, that’s it, I guess.  Like I was being born every second and just as I started to look around, to adjust to this darker world I was being shat into, I would be born again into a darker, more alien world.  I left Megan’s body, her dead body, in the basement and went for a walk through the house, a museum now.  That’s when I heard Nathan knocking on the door.

I opened the door and tried to meet Nathan’s eyes with mine, but it was hard.  I forced it, realizing, understanding at that moment what I was going to have to do, or, at least, the first of many things I would have to do.

I looked into Nathan’s eyes and motioned him inside.  On the way to the kitchen, I saw the gun tucked into the back of his pants.

He sat at the table and as I was pouring cold coffee for him (I assumed he wanted some), it started.

“How is Megan?”

I breathed deeply through my nose as he asked, and I answered that she was sleeping.  I set the cups, his and mine, on the table and sat down.  The coffee was left over from the previous morning and I was down to a quarter of a pot.

“How’s Barry?” I asked.  “He hanging in there?”

Nathan closed his eyes and shook his head.

“He’s all to Hell,” he said.  “You know what happened, right?”

I nodded.

“Last night, that…”  He stopped, searching for his words.  “We found Dina’s car.  It was wedged between a truck and a tree half a mile up.  There’s no way –”  

Our eyes met again.

“She was already dead.”  I said it, but it sounded like the voice in my head.

“She had to be,” he said, sitting suddenly straighter.  His eyes got wide.  “What the hell happened last night?”

“Same thing with Lon, right?”

He nodded.  “It was her truck.”

We were silent for a bit.

“Want to know what Mort says?”

“Sure,” I admitted and drank cold coffee.

“That was some kind of chemical weapon satellite, radioactive junk, and it…I don’t know.  Mort says it re-animates the dead.  And, shit, I saw what I saw.”

“It’s the real thing,” I said.

Again a momentary silence.

“And Megan, really, she’s okay?”  It was almost like he knew.

“Yeah, after I washed it off, it wasn’t so bad.  Have you been into town?”

His posture changed.  My mention of town took something more out of him.

“There’s nothing left,” he said flatly, like he was admitting to his wife that he was broke.  “That thing hit dead center and took it all out.  It’s trashed.”

“What about the highway?”

He shook his head again.  “No way in, no way out.  Mort thinks maybe there’s nowhere to go.”

“Why’s that?”  More coffee.

“I only heard part of it.  I guess he’ll repeat it tonight, we’re meeting at Barry’s, but he thinks it’s gonna start a war, basically.  Nukes and shit”

“Great.”

After Nathan left, I went to the basement and stared at the still dead body of my wife.