‘It’s me! It’s me, Max! Max Skolnik! Jimmy’s kid!’
The door opened.
I am not exaggerating, a cloud of cigarette smoke came out.
‘Maxie?’ she said, putting her face through the crack.
At that moment, I did not notice much about her beyond the fact that she had a gold tooth.
‘It’s me, Auntie Jean!’ Max said.
And she threw open the door.
And we got inside somewhere safe, thank God.
This Jean lady cried for a real long time, hugging Max to her and sobbing into his white-blond hair until it looked kind of tan.
I am pretty sure she was drunk.
It was crowded in there, and smoky.
She told us that she’d been smoking nonstop because the smoke kills the compounds.
I didn’t believe her but she was right! Cautiously, we took off our protective gear and everyone was okay.
This was very good information – prime information to have.
There were cigarettes everywhere, flowing out of ashtrays and jars and stacked up on paper plates and old issues of Star News magazine. There were also a bunch of smelly candles. Scented candles, I mean. And all the scents together, with the smoke, made it smell pretty dense in there. Flowers and vanilla and cranberry and dive- bar drunks.
I helped Niko and Jean get Josie up onto the bed in the back.
After we got Josie on the bed, Niko just slumped down to the floor and I saw he was crying.
‘It’s okay,’ I said to him. ‘There’s nothing you could have done.’
‘I blew it,’ he said. ‘We had a shot. I know we could have made it. But I blew it.’
He just turned his face to the side of the bed and cried.
I patted his back. I didn’t know what to do. I’m not good when people cry. I do not know what to say and I just stand there flapping my arms like a stupid magpie.
I went into the front room where I saw that Sahalia was sitting in the banquette, facing away from the others and smoking a cigarette.
I shouldn’t have been shocked, but I sort of was.
She rolled her eyes at me.
Max’s auntie Jean was now helping the kids out of their layers. She was tugging a sweatshirt off Ulysses.
‘Lord, you got some chunk on you, don’t you, doll?’ she asked Ulysses.
He smiled tentatively at her.
‘Are you sure it’s a good idea to take off their layers?’ I asked her.
‘The poison’s in the cloth,’ she answered me, her gold tooth glinting. ‘Y’all got to take them off so I can get the air poison out.’
Batiste, Max, and Ulysses looked helpless. They were each standing in their underwear, fidgeting.
Sahalia, as you can only imagine, was having nothing to do with this. She took a long drag on her cigarette and shrugged at me.
Jean was wearing skinny jeans, high-heeled slippers, and one of those ladies’ Christmas sweaters with the tall shoulders and the sparkly designs. It had a snowman on it with a pointy orange nose and fake gems for buttons on his snow stomach.
She took all the clothes she’d taken off Max, Batiste, and Ulysses and put them in a big garbage bag.
‘Come on,’ she said to me, snapping her fingers. ‘Get down to your undies, pal, so I can do it all at once.’
‘No way! Not in front of you two.’ I indicated her and Sahalia.
‘For Lord’s sake, honey, I’m trying to keep us all safe here.’
She put her hands on her hips, a cigarette stuck in the corner of her mouth.
‘I’m fine,’ I insisted.
Jean went over to a coatrack on the wall and handed me a worn white robe that said ‘Marriott’ on it.
‘Go on in the toilet and put this on and throw out your clothes,’ she said.
‘You can keep your drawers on.’
I should have left my long johns on. Sahalia snorted when I came back in the room wearing nothing but my tighty-whities under the robe. I wanted to punch her right in the cigarette.
Jean had pulled her straggly hair back and something was different from when we’d come in, just a few minutes ago. At first I couldn’t place it. Then she took her cigarette out of her mouth and I realized what it was – there was now a lipstick stain on her cigarette.
But in all the butts on the table and near the door and all around the place, there wasn’t lipstick.
She had put on lipstick at some point since we’d gotten there, maybe fifteen minutes before. She had put on lipstick for a bunch of kids.
Isn’t that weird? I thought it was weird. And I do not know why I remembered it but I did.
‘All right, now, I’ll show you,’ she said. ‘This is how you clean your clothes nowadays.’
She took a huge drag off her cigarette and blew it into the bag with our clothes in it.
‘You wanna help?’ she said to Sahalia.
‘I’ll help!’ Max offered.
‘Are you drunk?’ Jean said. ‘Jimmy would kill me, I let his kid smoke.’
And then Jean started crying again, and Sahalia had to do all the smoke blowing by herself.
9 DEAN
FIRST I CHECKED ON the chainsaws. I detached the chainsaw battery from the car battery and inserted it into the chainsaw.
I pushed the button and
But I was relieved. Now we had weapons of some kind. Not so good against bullets, but close up they’d be . . . horrific. Hopefully just holding one would be threat enough to make any intruders leave us be.
My next stop was the storeroom.
I wanted to make sure the hatch was properly locked and I also knew I should do something about the bodies.
I brought two chainsaws with me so I could bring them over to the House, when I was done in the storeroom. I decided I should teach Astrid how to use one, just in case.
I was right – the bodies were beginning to smell.
I needed to seal them off somehow. My first idea was to put them in giant plastic bins. But none of the bins were big enough. Not by a long shot.
So then I turned to plastic sheeting, but we’d used all the plastic drop cloths when we sealed the gates.
I headed for the shower curtains. We had used some of those, but maybe not all.
And that’s how Mr Appleton and Robbie came to be shrouded in floral nylon shower curtains.
Maybe it sounds funny. But it wasn’t funny to me. It was a nightmare to roll them up in those curtains. Mr Appleton’s body was heavy and rank and stiff, as if someone’d siphoned out his blood and replaced it with cement.
Robbie was grisly, with the blood, but the sheet we’d thrown on him stuck to his face, so at least I didn’t have to look at him.
I got them wrapped up and I laid them side by side on the floor. The next step was to drag them over to the
