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  “Seriously? Don’t you read the news?” Cassie sighed in defeat. She wanted to sleep, but she knew it wasn’t happening until she gave this guy what he wanted. From the top. She closed her eye briefly, touching the bandage with her left hand. It felt strange. Rough. Not like the gauze she was used to. It almost felt like burlap.

  It has to be the meds. Cassie looked around the room as best she could, at the bed, the table across the room... things seemed wrong. Old. Not like the hospitals she had been in. But, she kept telling herself it was the medication. She knew she was seriously drugged up and she couldn’t move her head properly. Her eye was covered. Her ear was gone. She didn’t even know for sure but she thought she was wiggling her right thumb. She was afraid to reach over and touch it, in case her right side was missing... like Danny’s legs... like their bedroom wall with the lovely word “Poop” painted in massive letters centered between the wall’s two windows.

  “I was folding laundry. Had the news on, you know one of the basic channels like 4 or 7, brazenly telling you they’re New York City’s Weather Authority. Bullshit throwers and halfwits the lot of them. Danny had been at work. He had worked an extra shift that night since he had only just gotten back to work after fucking Sandy, but we were lucky. Our house was standing and then it was undamaged. I mean, we had only just gotten our power back. It was, what— two weeks ago that Sandy hit? I can’t even remember at this point. We had only just gotten power and our phones back. Things were getting back to normal for my neighborhood at least. Classes had just resumed. They weren’t going to cancel them again for a little bit of snow. Besides it was a Friday. My classes were only Monday and Wednesday, so I didn’t have to worry about being out traveling in shit weather. I suppose that’s the lucky part of being an underemployed contingent faculty member. Teacher my ass.

  “My parents were okay down in South Jersey. I called them first to see if they knew about the storm. They didn’t. Bless mom. Whenever it’s going to drizzle she tells me, but when a fucking blizzard is going to hit, she has no clue. I think there was some Laurel and Hardy marathon on cable. She figured my husband and my brothers would be working. Joey works at Newark airport and usually has to stay during this kind of thing. My Daniel works at the hospital, but he was trying to get home before he’d get mandated. He had to work through Sandy and had been there for more than 36 hours. There wasn’t even a place for them to sleep. He’s not medical staff— they had cots and shit— he just had to hole up in a corner. Then when he got home, by sheer luck thanks to a guy he works with since we don’t have a car and there was no public, he couldn’t go back for almost a week after because there was no way to get down there. I got off with my mom when Dan rang to tell me he would be heading home in a bit. Mom had asked me to check in with Rob.

  “My brother Robbie lives down the block, but when he’s working we barely speak. Not on purpose, we just don’t see each other. I looked out the back and saw his truck wasn’t there, so I figured I was on my own getting shit together— which is usual. I mean I don’t drive and I like handling things myself. I wanted to get home way before Danny did and I really didn’t have to do a massive shopping, so I headed first to the local bodega for some milk. I decided to take a leaf out of the Sandy book and walk the extra way to the liquor store for a jug of wine. The day after Sandy, Danny and I walked around the neighborhood and needed a drink after what we saw below the boulevard. We were lucky but... well, we got a jug of wine and got Tottenville’s last loaves of Italian bread from the bakery. I had spent the day before cooking whatever fresh veg we had in the fridge. So, for this supposed Snowpocalypse bullshit Nor’Easter, I decided before it hit, I’d do the same thing. Got some bread from the bakery, milk from the bodega, a jug of wine for me, bottle of Kraken for hubby.”

  “So you were drinking during this situation, Mrs. Sinclair? You noted earlier that while you were ‘decorating’ your bedroom with glow-in-the-dark paint you and your husband had been drinking. Were you likewise intoxicated during this storm, while you hurt yourself?”

  The man in the cheap black suit startled Cassie from her reverie. She had been staring at a black spot on the ceiling, a watermark that seemed to float and change before her one, seeing eye. As she had been speaking, it seemed to merge from a dark thundercloud into a shaggy sheepdog into her beloved black cat Drogon into the head of a raven into a solitary, long, black tentacle. It was probably the meds or the shadows on the back of her eyelid, but trying to identify the shapes helped her focus, helped her to tell Mr. Pink about what had happened. His voice shattered her illusion and she saw it was just a black spot on the ceiling. Probably some fucking slime mold.

  “No I wasn’t drinking. I got a jug of wine. I didn’t say I got to drink it. Can I go on, or are you going to stop in whenever you fucking want to Mr. PINK?”

  “My apologies, Mrs. Sinclair. Pray continue.”

  Cassie closed her eye and fought the urge to rip the bandage from her head, rip her body from the bed, run into the bathroom and stand before the mirror to see what the fuck she looked like. Maybe she should tell him to call Nurse Jones with the dope dopey dope shot to make all this shit go away. It was too much.... too much blood and noise and those things whatever they were ripping into her, stripping Daniels’ flesh away like a kid tearing off a bandaid.... Cassie tried to crack her neck, but it felt numb, deadened, unmoving. She swallowed, opened her eye and picked up the pieces.

  “So I went to the store. Got home. The sky started turning that dark steel grey like it does before a storm— flat, you know? It had been a very light snow when I started back, but it started falling thicker and faster and the wind really started picking up. It had been windy when I headed out, but it was really really bad by the time I got back. I cranked up the heat, figuring if I lost power again at least the residual heat would last for a bit and I changed out of my wet clothes, decided to take a hot shower since it might be the last time I would be able to take one if we lost the electric.

  “I had planned on popping open my jug, popping in season one of Sherlock— we had just gotten it and there’s nothing more soothing to the nerves than a glass of wine and Benedict Cumberbatch running around in his scarf.... But the wind, man. I couldn’t deal with the wind. When Sandy hit, I was home alone with the cats. Danny was at work. Robbie was home, but I didn’t want to go over his house, walk down the block in that tempest, leave the kitties— he’s got a few Jack Russell that do NOT mix well with kitties. I had closed up all the rooms after the power went out and sat up reading Dance with Dragons by candlelight. The fucking wind ripped through the house...I thought the walls were going to come down. They were buckling and shimmying around, doing things walls should not do.... So, when the wind began picking up with this storm— I started puttering around the house to ignore it all. Took out the garbage, but made sure the garbage cans were tied down. Secured shit in the yard, even though it’s not my fucking yard I still didn’t want the old fart’s make-believe purple wrought iron chairs to go flying through my window.

  “During Sandy, the old fart downstairs didn’t believe us that the wind would get bad. He had a mess of wood, old fence railings and shit in the yard. It was too much for me to physically deal with, so I secured what I could. Still a huge post came flying up, smacked the side of the house, and if it wasn’t for the air conditioner, it would’ve gone through the window. The landlord actually did something for a change and got rid of all the real nasty shit in the yard after Sandy, the boards with rusty nails and fucked up shit that went flying helter skelter... I guess the dumb bastard didn’t want anyone getting impaled, whatever; so this time it was just a few things here and there. I went inside, finished up dishes, cleaned the fucking tub, filled the tub with water just in case there was I don’t know a fucking meteor explosion or a general zombie attack during the blizzard and we were stuck for water, and then I checked the freezers. I mean I’m no prepper, but I like to make sure I’ve got it covered if there is a shit hits the fan situation.
We have extra food for us and the kitties, extra water, batteries, candles, and we have a deep freeze too. It’s great, but when you lose power, it can be a bitch.

  “I hadn’t taken out all the extra ice yet. The day or so before Sandy, I had taken every plastic container I had in the house, filled it with water, and packed them into that big chest freezer and the regular freeze, too. There were dozens of them— and I used most of them in the fridge when we lost power during Sandy, but there were still more and a few bags of ice too. We had no power for more than a week and none of our food went bad. But, there were only a handful of them left hanging around in the freezer. So, I reorganized them, filled up more, cranked up the fridge and freezer and sat down for a bit, waiting for Danny to come home. I peeked outside and it was getting so dark out there and the snow kept falling.

  “When I sat down on the daybed that masquerades as a fucking couch in our house, I almost pissed myself. Since our apartment is so damned small, we use every inch to store something. It looks horrible half the time, but we’re not hoarders. It’s just like my mom says, trying to fit ten pounds of shit in a five pound bag. So, under the bed in the TV room which is also the spare bedroom, dirty laundry holding area and home of the chest freezer, I have canning jars. We learned a few years ago, during a really nasty thunderstorm a few weeks after I had first gotten into canning that a mess of empty canning jars act like little barometers. When the barometric pressure drops really fast, all the lids on the unprocessed, empty jars pop. When I sat down to take a break all the fucking lids popped at once and the back of the house shuddered like it had been kicked by a Stone Giant or something.

  “I actually did run into the bathroom to make sure I didn’t piss my pants and I had thoughts of barfing too. The wind had my heart fucking racing. To make matters worse, Drogon ran through the hallway spitting and hissing. He never does that. My cats don’t fight with each other. They don’t hiss at each other. They don’t hiss at us. They’re brother and sister, from the same litter: Drogon and Orm Irian. They get along. But she was nowhere to be found and he was rampaging down the hall like a black streak of lightning and, to get even beyond worse, it looked like he pissed himself as he ran.

  “Now, just so you know Mr. Pink you dickhead, I am not one of those girlie girl chicks who freak out at spiders, dirty diapers, or the sight of blood. The only things that give me the genuine wiggins are horrible pics you see in your bookface newsfeed of real babies burned in bombings, the sight of worms— like parasites— in food I was just planning on eating, and that girl in the remake of the Exorcist going backwards down the stairs like a deranged fucking crab. I don’t get freaked out in emergencies. I am okay eating food with a face— I’d rather it have a fucking face so I know what it was— and I am not the kind of chick to get upset when the weather gets bad. But this wind it was different. It wasn’t like it was in Sandy. I suppose after Sandy you could say it was a trauma, a shock— nowhere near what other folks experienced, watching their homes flood, people they loved getting swept away... no. But during Sandy, I felt the house twisting and turning. I thought it was going to go up like Dorothy’s house.... but this time, the wind was different.... I kept hearing a line from a story I teach in school. Stephen King’s ‘One for the Road’... there’s death in the throat of a snowstorm wind, white death and something beyond death.

  “I heard that then at that moment when I was in the bathroom deciding between barfing and getting fresh knickers. It was a sound I cannot describe to you. I looked outside and by that time it was almost completely dark between the clouds and the sun starting to set. But there was a shadow moving outside. Something huge that I couldn’t see. I figured it was just the clouds. The way the trees moved, casting shadows in the last light of the sun. But...the shadow was on the wrong side of the yard. My backyard faces southeast. We get shadows in the morning, not in the evening. When the sun sets, my neighbor’s house is between us and blocks the shadows... there shouldn’t have been a shadow in the yard then... even with the clouds.. .and the shadow was moving the wrong way... it reminded me of the Balrog, but without the flame.

  “That’s something else that freaks me out. I should have said before. When I was a kid and read that chapter, when Gandalf faces the Balrog I think it was the only time in my entire childhood that I actually pissed the bed. I had horrible dreams for weeks about the Balrog in my backyard. I should have also said my brother Robbie’s house, down the block, was where I spent most of my childhood. It was my parents’ house before they sold it to him. So, in my dreams the Balrog was in our backyard, boiling our pool away with his heat and the back of our house was gone. He didn’t rip it away, it just wasn’t there. He reaches up into the back of the house and grabbed my brother Robbie out of his bed. He didn’t tear him in half though, he just ate him. Danny got tore in two...

  “So Balrogs freak me out. And I could’ve sworn that shadow in my yard with that sound tearing into the air was a fucking Balrog, but before I could barf, the front door opened and I really did piss myself. It was Daniel coming home. He had managed to get one of the last trains before service was shut down. When he opened the door, he immediately had been talking about how much snow was falling, asked me if I had gotten his texts, called for the kitties. I managed to yell to be careful of the piss in the hall before he traipsed through it and he realized there was something wrong. He came in to see if I was ok and I couldn’t quite tell him what had just happened because as I was looking out the window, feeling the piss flow down my fucking legs, the shadow disappeared. I thought for a moment that I was hallucinating—”

  “Does that normally happen, Mrs. Sinclair?”

  “What did I tell you Mr. Pink Dick. Don’t interrupt me.”

  “Answer the question, Mrs. Sinclair. Do you routinely hallucinate?”

  “I can tell you that even if I did, a fucking hallucination would so NOT account for my husband’s legs being ripped from his body, would it?”

  “No, I don’t suppose it would—”

  “Don’t suppose it would? Are you a fucking moron, Mr. Pink?” Cassie fixed her one eye blaringly on the dark form in the fedora hat who suddenly stopped tap tap tapping his silver pen, an idiosyncrasy that he had resumed during Cassie’s account of her frozen water containers. “I asked you a question, Mr. Pink. Are you a fucking moron?” Despite the pain coupled with the strange, deadened feeling in the back of her neck, Cassie did manage to point her chin toward her chest to better stare at Mr. Pink. It wasn’t quite lifting her head and wasn’t quite intimidating, but it would have to do.

  “No. I can’t say that I consider myself to be one, Mrs. Sinclair.”

  “It’s a fucking rhetorical question, you prat. But to answer your stupid question: no I do not routinely hallucinate. I have only hallucinated three times in my entire life. The first time I was in high school at a dance during a model congress function. We were in New Rochelle at an away weekend and some dickhead slipped acid into the punch bowl. I had maybe half a cup before I thought the lights were acting weird and my friend screamed, said the walls were breathing and promptly ran into the street to try and get the pretty lights to come into her hands. I thought her scarf was a snake and tried to get it off her while pulling her out of oncoming traffic. The second time it was the summer before my first term at college and I was visiting Teddy Roosevelt’s house with my parents. I didn’t know, at the time, that I had a nasty bout of E-coli from some tainted drinking water on Staten Island that the fucking mayor didn’t tell us about until after the fact, and I just thought I was feeling a bit peaky. Halfway through our trip, while I was sitting on a bench waiting for my parents to catch up to me, I thought the trees had elves in them and watched a little tree gnome pop out of a tree knot, pop up on my knee and call me a watery tart. I had a temp of 102 when I got home. The third time was the only time I’d say my hallucinations were self-induced. Hubby and I were smoking weed. It was too strong and inside of 20 minutes after my first puff, I saw the Great Goddess Ka
li standing in my linen closet telling me I was a fucking moron for smoking weed. I have neither smoked nor hallucinated since. Does that answer your question Mr. Pink?”

  “Yes, I believe it does, Mrs. Sinclair. Pray continue. You were standing in your bathroom and had just urinated on yourself.”

  “Thank you ever so much for pointing that out. Okay... Danny came up the stairs and knew there was a problem when he saw me in the bathroom. He can sometimes get a little panicky when he thinks that I’m sick, but he doesn’t panic when it really counts. A few years ago I fell and hit my head pretty bad. He wasn’t home when that happened and I know when he feels sort of at a loss, he gets confusticated. But this time, I was the one that was on the verge of panic. He threw down his work shit and came in to empty the tub, run a hot shower, and help me calm down.

  “Well, that was his intent at any rate, bless him...” Cassie’s voice broke for the first time since she had begun speaking. She tried to speak, but no sound came out for a second time, then her throat spasmed and she began coughing.

  The man in the cheap black suit didn’t move. He uncrossed his legs again and sat forward, his head cocked to one side in a way that reminded Cassie of her brother’s Jack Russell terrier whenever her brother said the word Park.

  After a moment or two, Cassie was able to speak again. “Do I have to actually ask for a drink of water here or are you going to wait ‘til I swallow my tongue?” Pain flowed down the front of Cassie’s neck, down her left arm, and embraced the entire left side of her body. She saw pinpoints of light flash across her limited vision and she realized there was no feeling, or very little aside from a dull, deadened weighted sensation, in her right side and down much of her back.

  The man in the fedora sat back, still hesitating.

  “Mr. Pink Dickhead, I’m not contagious. I’m probably dying, so there’s no more bullshit here, k? Danny won’t wake up. You want me to talk to you and I have been talking. All I’m asking for is a fucking drink of water. You can’t do that, I close my eyeball and stop talking. That simple.” Cassie shut her eye, licked her lips, and tasted an acrid tang, medicinal, metallic.