NaNo 2006: Machine Break 04
The very next day after the break-in - and that meant it was Monday, and Monday meant school - Allen was told to stay home, the Big Guy’s wife ordering him to stay in bed while his oh so dear niece sits on the sturdy bedside table, throwing marshmallow bits at his face, waiting for seven and a half to show up on the clock before she leaves for class. This happens very early in the morning, and soon it is almost seven thirty in the morn, and Cielo places a quick peck on his bruised cheek, right over the patch of gauze taped to his face, and he spares a moment to try and wink back, but she is already out of the room, down the stairs, and he hears the loud banging of the main door that says she has left the building, dear household members, she will be back in eight hours.
Allen lies back down on his bed, this being the one right next to the window, and he looks out at the grey sky; it was likely that it will rain in the next few hours, and then he would need another blanket, or a sweater, or a simple long-sleeved shirt, because it was easy for him to feel cold, and rainy days were always cold. He reaches out for the window latch, wanting to pull it in and ease it shut, but his arm was either too short or the window too far, so he gives up on straining himself and lets out a sigh of defeat.
He stays there, an unmoving figure - or rather, mostly unmoving, as he is still a living being capable of movement - and he slowly drifts off to half-sleep, his breathing slowing ever so gently as the minutes go by - and he jerks awake as the phone down the hall rings rather loudly, loudly loudly loudly and it starts to grate on his just-woken up brain and body. Allen decides to get off the bed, dizziness a source of complaints from all over his body, and yet he ignores these little warning bells and stands up, his cold feet searching the floor for the fluffy white house slippers that he kept hidden from everyone’s sight except when he was all alone to use them. And so he stands, peeling off the patches on his face, for he was fully healed and these were just for show lest the neighbors wonder why he was well after one night’s worth of heavy beating, and he walks over gingerly to the phone, its shrill ringing sound making him want to yell “FANDANGO ON A COW’S BUTT” for some strange reason.
He must have hit his poor head a little too hard.
He picks up the handset, sets it to his ear and says the usual greeting, Good morning, how may I help you?, and then waits for the person on the other end to speak and state his business. But there is no sound or speaking voice to be heard for a few seconds, and Allen repeats his greeting, and again, and he tries for a fourth time, deciding to consider the call a prank if he didn’t receive any sound from the other end, but he does get response after the fourth try.
It was a scratchy sound first, and then a bit of static, and then a bad-tempered male voice comes on, and Allen dislikes the voice right off the bat. The voice sounds hoarse, too, and very much like that of a man who had too much to smoke or too much to drink, or both, and Allen dislikes what the voice says a lot more when it did speak.
“Get out of the house.”
Allen tenses, his grip on the handset tightening, and he frowns at nothing in particular, a bad feeling blooming inside his chest. He doesn’t like the sound of this man at all.
“May I know who’s calling, please?” He asks the caller, his free hand clenching from where it was resting on the phone table. The thieves should still be in the hospital, or at least at home. Was this their friend, or accomplice?
But the man doesn’t state his name; he goes on to insist that he leave the house, leave as soon as he can. “You have to leave,” the man continues, “You have to warn her. You have to warn her, tell her she’s being hunted down.”
“Who’s being hunted down? Sir, you’re not making any sense,” Allen answers the man, though he has a small idea who, and why, and what for, because after all, they were “sick”, and he didn’t like being hurt because of something he had no control over. So he asks the man again, louder this time, to be more specific, and the man insists that he leave the house as soon as he could, and annoyance starts to blossom in Allen, and he opens his mouth to ask again, but the line went silent, and then it went dead, and he stares dumbfounded at the handset before setting it back down on the base angrily.
Allen then goes back to bed, and forces himself to lie down in peace, but his mind is troubled and going in circles.
The call had put rats in chest.
***
Arashi woke up an hour earlier than everyone else in the Corva household, that meaning waking up at four in the morning rather than five, and he tucked the folds of his blanket around his little so-called brother after he had gotten off his bed. It was very late in the evening when the shop owner, mister Janssen, had arrived with his wife and children, and after the initial panic and flurry of questions - for the third time that night, too - Arashi was prodded into telling the good sir about his situation, and the missus had made him promise to stay at the house until he found a better-paying job. The missus then went to cuddle the little boy, and Arashi looked on awkwardly, his gaze shifting as his little charge was ushered to the bathroom for a proper bath and Allen prodded his side with an elbow, because the missus was a very pretty woman and young adult males have very colorful imaginations when it came to pretty women. And soon, when they were all cleaned and brushed and in sleeping clothes, Arashi and his little brother-like companion were lent the guestroom on the second floor, the one right between Allen’s room and the unused study. It was a warm room, a homely room, and Arashi went silent as the little boy dived right in on one of the beds.
He had a lot to thank this family for; the first thing being Janssen’s saving him from debt.
It was about two years now, Arashi thought as he made neat of his bed, and it has been two years of kindness on the Corvas’ part, and a lot of gratitude and guilt on his. Arashi was ten when he found the little boy, cold and hungry and every bit as thin as he was, and since then the two have shared their lives together, Arashi nursing the boy closer to good health and the other being his source of happiness when he couldn’t find anything worth smiling for. As life got harder for them they had to live in separate places, the little boy staying in a small shack at the squatters’ area in the outskirts, at the care of those who had compassion for their plight, while Arashi took on the dare of the city and worked himself near death.
He folded his own clothes carefully, and laid them on the bed. They had been washed the night before, and they smelt clean and new. Arashi gave a small sigh.
Arashi went through the motions of proper hygiene care, and then went through the everyday ritual of making one’s self look proper in front of a mirror, and when he was done he was shaking his little adopted boy awake, telling him to get up and not be a nuisance in this household.
“Wake up, hey,” He said, pulling at the boy’s ear affectionately, “Wake up and get clean. You have to help out in the shop. Heeey…”
“Mmmsleepy, ‘rashi,” The boy mumbled, burying his head a little deeper into the pillow and blanket. A dull ache echoed though Arashi’s chest - of course the boy would want to stay in bed a little longer, he thought; they weren’t used to comfort, after all. He shook his head and yanked the sheets off, then started to tickle the soles of the boy’s feet.
The boy jolted awake with a loud yelp, throwing a pillow at Arashi, all flushed.
“Dun’ wake me up like that!” He exclaimed, his movements similar to flailing motions. “It’s unfair and it’s embarrassing!” And his face was an adorable shade of pink, as the shade usually was at this age, and Arashi laughed at him.
He could remember the boy’s name, actually. It was given to him that night about seven years ago, when they first met, but the boy had asked for the name to never be said unless it was needed.
Two syllables.
Kage.
A few good minutes of cajoling later and they’re back at the kitchen - which is now a little less messy than it was the night before - and helping set breakfast on the table, all pretty-smelling and sweet to look at, and the two had a good day’s worth of hearty eating, though Allen was still upstairs and in his bed. Cielo, who always seemed to pop into a room with a quiet sense of mirth, had decided it a good idea to poke fun at Arashi over breakfast, and Damien had asked him questions like did he have a girlfriend yet (to which the little boy had looked at Arashi, and then at Cielo, and had started to giggle, much to Arashi’s embarrassment and Damien’s mirth, though Cielo was busy breaking her toast apart to notice anything at all), and the Big Guy - Arashi only ever heard the shop owner be called this from Allen and Cielo - left the table early, newspaper in one hand and car keys on the other, off to drive his children to school.
It was a good morning, and while the little boy - Kage, if you will, so that it might be easier for all who is reading this - was helping clean up in the kitchen after breakfast, Arashi had gone straight to the shop, having an hour free before his work at a local private school library started. He started sorting through the mess - they didn’t have much time to clean right after the scuffle - broken beverage bottles going to one black plastic bag, popped-open packs of preserved food in another, and he had half an hour left on his watch, as he wasn’t the only one cleaning up. Cielo had gone upstairs to clean and finish incomplete homework - and make fun of her uncle, Arashi mused, as he knew by now that Cielo’s sense of comfort was inappropriate humor - and here he was, slowly getting the feel of what he was doing, with Damien humming to some tune Arashi didn’t recognize, and then he had only ten minutes left before he was late, and he took his leave, bumping into Cielo on his way out, she having just come down from upstairs and was all ready for a day of learning ahead. She gave him a smile and a wave, and they walked out of the alley with each other, and he took left and she took right.
That last had made his day complete.
Work was a little dusty, a little smelly, a little annoying and a lot of boring, this being work at a library after all, and libraries were the same everywhere. The Dewey decimal classification system was also annoying, because Arashi was visual in the sense that he liked things arranged by color or letter, and for some reason numbers never registered to his mind as images but as something hateful and irritating to deal with. There were more books to arrange, this time, most likely because it’s the term paper time of the school year for seniors. So off he went, setting the books back to their shelves, mechanical in his efficiency - and then the distinct sound of something blowing up made him stop.
Arashi stood, motionless, his heart thudding loudly in his chest. The sound came in the direction of the shop. He couldn’t mistake the sound of an explosion for anything else, and that made his heart beat painfully fast inside him. Kage, he thought, Shit, Kage, no this isn’t happening oh God no please this isn’t happening no he’s safe right he has to be-
His mind continued on this vein, until a woman bumped into him, her face concerned and scared. “That was an explosion, right? Right? Because I saw black smoke rising from about a block down and I’m really worried…”
Arashi stared on. Panic. Panic started up in his mind.
One block down.
The shop’s one block down.
Arashi ran out of the library, going as fast as his feet could take him.