The Two That Remained Read online

  The Two That Remained

  by J. Fitzpatrick Mauldin

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright 2018, Cosmic Entanglement Media

  www.JFitzpatrickmauldin.com

  Chapter 1

  It took considerable effort for Ryan Sharpe to crawl his way back into consciousness. A migraine crowded out existence. His spine throbbed with an impact. A string of conflicting emotions, ill thoughts, raced through his head, a confluence focused on one goal—making him desire nothing more than to scream at his fucking insane wife till he went horse.

  What in the hell had she been thinking? What in the hell was her problem? One minute, he’d been arguing with Lillian in a strange, back room at Unified Biological Labs, her work. It had been over their weekend plans, dismal as they were; a need to clean the house so his mother could visit and spend time with their daughter. The next minute, Lilian was glaring at him with that blank look she gave after a discussion was over, and shoving him backwards with flat palms, nearly hurling Emily, their little ray of sunshine in a screwed up, sadistic world, into his arms like a ball. He barely caught Emily as they stumbled back into something cylindrical. Thank God for paternal reflexes, those were quick enough to save a kid from an oncoming Metro bus with only six hair’s distance separating a happy future and two suicidal parents.

  Lillian came forward once again, screaming, “GO!”

  Already off balance there wasn’t a thing he could do to recover. He clutched Emily in his arms and tottered helplessly back, his body pitching around until it had reached a forty-five-degree angle of freefall. To his surprise, however, something soft cushioned the impact. The fall hadn’t hurt as he thought it would.

  Was it memory foam he’d collided with?

  After an instant it almost felt comfy, arms surrounding him in a tender embrace, yet all the same wrong.

  Emily sobbed. Ryan’s eyes went wide. His peripheral vision faded to black. A curved door fell into place before them. Was he in a tube? That’s right, a tube. He kicked the door, but it wouldn’t open. A series of high pitched hissing sounds began. The space went cold, reminding him of a walk-in flash freezer.

  Emily clung to him screeching, “Dada. Mama. Dada. No like. No like.” Her head shook to the point of dizziness.

  Ryan wanted to scream but his throat was dry.

  There was black. Nothing but black.

  He was heavy. Sleepy.

  Sleep.

  Black.

  Bla...

  Fifteen minutes or fifty years later, impossible to tell, he was dragging himself scratching and crawling from the pit of oblivion. His body was stiff, achy, his head a total wreck, senses stuffed with cotton. Emily had slid in their fall from his stomach down to his lower right leg, yet clung tight. She was silent for a time, yawning over and over as awareness trickled back into her like the drip of an IV. The door of the tube swung wide to the sound of cracking ice. Ryan took Emily in his arms. The whirring sounds that filled the room died a moment later, leaving them in both silence and darkness as absolute as the grave.

  Emily felt like lead in his atrophied arms, so much he almost dropped her twice. His forearms trembled like the strange machine he’d been within, pushed past its designated limits into failure. But weak or not, his wife was going to get an ear full for what she’d done. This fight had been a long time coming.

  “What the fuck is your problem,” he mumbled, and regretted using the word in front of Emily. He sucked in a breath and his thoughts became clearer, though he had a hard time opening his eyes. Acid laced his every word, “All I wanted to do was have a clean house for once, so that when mom came over she’d be impressed, maybe think I could keep myself together, a functioning adult since I left Washu. Maybe, if I had some help, I wouldn’t have to trip over toys everywhere I went, or have cookie crumbs stuck to my socks. Maybe you—who’s supposed to be my help mate and partner in crime—if you would just do what you say and clean up after yourself, I wouldn’t have to move your stupid, Hello Kitty messenger bag and matching Hello Kitty thermos from off the couch every freakin’ night so I can finally sit down and relax. Watch a little TV. Binge on some Netflix. When do I get to rest? Huh? When? I get so sick and tired of being the only person in this house that ever does anything! Lillian! Hey! Where are you? We need to talk. Right now! We aren’t putting this off again. Today.”

  Ryan took a step in search of his wife, nearly slipped on a puddle, and froze. Something wasn’t right. His eyes weren’t closed. He blinked several times just to be sure. No. The room was dark, not subject to the florescent glow it had been moments earlier. He waited for his eyes to adjust, and after a few seconds, a blurry shaft of light in the hallway came into focus. It was then he noticed that the back room stank, of dust and dirt and moisture, like a foreclosed house not properly winterized, or a building an URBEX crew managed to sneak their way into. He went from feeling angry to feeling very, very sick, the scales of wild emotion thrown opposite by some unknown counter balance.

  Arguments over dishes didn’t seem much to matter any longer.

  His trembling arms warbled and twitched, Emily nearly slipping from his grasp.

  “Owwn,” Emily demanded, her word not properly formed yet understood by her Daddy. She bucked in his arms like a bronco, her tiny body somehow nearly as strong. “Down. Down.”

  “No, baby,” he reassured her. “Let Daddy hold you for now.” He couldn’t risk her to take off into the darkness. No. Something wasn’t right. She could get hurt.

  “Down, down!”

  “No!” he ordered, gripping her tighter.

  She threw her tiny arms around his neck and started to sulk, whines rising up from her stomach. She would just have to get over it. He squeezed his eyes shut as a wave of nausea washed over him, threatening to topple them. He felt like shit.

  “Shh, it’s okay, baby. It’s okay.” He rubbed her back, feeling the thin, sweat damp cotton of her yellow with red floral summer dress. He took a step forward, using the toe of his right foot to search for safe passage. The frothy surf in his stomach turned sharp and crashed against his insides.

  As he moved across the lightless room, a wan ray of sunlight pinged off something glass resting atop the hint of a table to his left. He turned to see and knew what it was. His wife’s cell phone. He reached for it, adjusting Emily’s place in his arms to put her weight on one hip. Her head slowly rose. A sound of crumpling paper came as he grasped the phone. A note. Lillian was one for leaving notes.

  “I better go where there’s some light,” he said, glancing around the room, confused. Had the power gone out? “Lillian?” he called and entered the tiled hallway. “Lillian, where—eh are you?”

  No reply, only a dim echo as his voice stretched out down the hall. The sick feeling in the pit of his stomach twisted and buried deeper. The space was empty, the building, silent. Not even the air conditioners were running, and it had been hot as hell when they’d come in. It was cold.

  He drew Emily closer, the warmth of her small frame reassuring against his chest. The fingers of his right hand closed around the note wrapped phone. He faced into the west, peering out the grimy, ceiling to floor windows and took a deep breath.

  The sky over St. Louis was grey, a sign of a day that might rain, or might screw around and ruin a Cardinal’s game in the last inning. Over the river and into the city, everything appeared to be as it should—a sprawling metropolis filled with great buildings, and a great arch, a place constructed of steel and concret
e and a wondrous sense of home. But as his head began to clear, he found something profoundly upsetting.

  Cars on the bridge weren’t moving. Same went for the ones on the streets below. The wind was blowing outside, he could see it working its way through the leaves of the trees as birds made their way across the sky, but there were no people. No activity. No music. No hum of city life. It was as if someone had pressed a massive pause button on the DVR of reality, targeting the world of man, and he was waiting for that same person to press play again. But no, that wasn’t right either. Where were the people? He couldn’t even see bums, and those were common place in East St. Louis on the Illinois side of the Mississippi.

  Emily spouted something incoherent and he nearly shouted with surprise. Silence had taken him.

  “What, baby?” he asked, considering her bright eyes. “What is it?”

  She held up a finger and kept babbling. “What’s that? What’s this?”

  He shook his head and untaped the note, trying not to let his imagination drive him insane. It was just a parade day or some sort of event, that was all. Nothing to be alarmed over.

  The note trembled in his hand.

  He read a few lines. His eyes felt dry, then went wet. His arms shuddered. He fell, crashing on his backside to the dingy floor. Emily fought to take off. He forced her to sit in his lap.

  He read on, then retched on the floor beside them. Emily laughed.

  He read on, whipping the puke from off his lips with the back of his sleeve. His worried expression compressed.

  He read on.

  He set the note along with the phone beside him on the floor in reverence. He put his hands over his face and massaged his temples, fingertips icy.

  Emily threw her arms around him and repeated, “Sad, Dada. Sad.”

  He took her in his arms and shook, thick snot leaking from his nose.

  What he’d read just couldn’t be possible. There was no way. These sorts of things didn’t happen, not really. Maybe after a night of drinking, a few weird movies, and some really spicy Italian cuisine from The Hill, then he might have a dream this ridiculous.

  But it was just a dream, right? Just a dream. Dreams aren’t real. They end when you wake up. They end when you find yourself curled up next to your wife at the stroke of 2 A.M. trying to undress her and getting a big fat no in response.

  He held his daughter close to his heart, one hand on the back of her head. “I guess it’s just me and you, honey. Just me and you.” But even as he said the words, trying to console himself more than her—since Emily knew nothing of what had happened—he couldn’t believe them. When Lillian pushed his ass back into that tube, he’d hit his head, or, better yet, UBL was a biochemistry lab. Maybe he’d been dosed with a hallucinogen Lillian’s team had been testing on rats, or...

  Shit, what do they even do here?

  He knew her work was important, at least to her, but she’d never told him a damned thing about it specifically. It was always a load of side-stepping, double speak and zipped lips over what they researched being some level of top secret. It was always, my boss, Peter, fucking Peter, said that I can’t tell the family. He made me sign an NDA.

  Ryan held the note up and read it again:

  Ryan, I don’t know how to say this, but by the time you read this note everyone will be dead, even me. I want you to know that I’m sorry I can’t come with you, but there was only enough space for two. Please, know that I love you, and that the reason I chose you over me for Emily, is that I knew you would be the better single parent. You will do better taking care of her than I ever could. I love you both, please know that. I left a few messages on the phone for you. It might not even work by the time you find it, but if it does, watch them.

  “Mama!” Emily shouted, and took off running down the hall.

  “Emily, come back!” Ryan leapt to his feet, collected the phone and note, and took off after her. He was rarely shocked to find that for a two-and-a-quarter year old, barely over two feet tall, Emily had some serious go. “We don’t know what’s in there!”

  She shot into a dim room with an exterior window letting in just enough light to see.

  “Mama!” she said, grabbing the end of a messenger bag and tugging. She grunted and groaned, exerting all the strength she could summon like a powerlifter. The strap of the bag was looped over the shoulder of a vaguely familiar lump of rags with sharp protrusions of white.

  Ryan put a hand on Emily’s arm and pulled her away. She frowned at him and slapped back, nose scrunching up. “It’s okay, baby. Let Daddy take a look.” She stepped back, keeping a wary eye fixed as if he were trying to pull a fast one.

  He lifted the messenger bag and heard a crack where the strap was veiled by shadows. There was a hollow thump on the floor. His breath caught.

  “What’s that?” Emily asked, stretching out her finger to point at the bleached skull tumbling its way across checkered tile. “Gone.”

  “No,” the word came out of Ryan’s mouth with the dry, rasp-like crumbling of ashen dreams. The bag in his arms had the logo for Hello Kitty across the front. The headless skeleton, dressed in dark jeans and a black Paper rock scissors lizard Spock t-shirt, was gripping a mug with the letters UBL printed in red down the side.

  “No. No. My LiLi. No.” He backed away. “No!”

  Ryan threw the messenger bag over his shoulder and snatched Emily up in his arms. She went board stiff under his sudden grip just before her muscles dissolved into toddler’s jelly.

  “We have to go,” he said, frantic in keeping her from melting out of his arms.

  The skeleton lying before them in a pile of rags had once been his companion, had once carried their child into this world, had once given him comfort in his darkest hours and made him a better man. Now, there was nothing before him but a nightmare.

  He turned on his heels, putting his back to the remains of his spouse and ran, ran as fast as he could holding Emily, his only remaining thread of sanity, tight against his chest.

  Chapter 2

  Ryan weaved around dozens of skeletons swathed in rags, bodies haplessly forgotten and left lining the path of stark hallways into the parking deck. They were at varying stages of decomposition or mummification. Some still had muscle and sinew, beef jerky flesh or bits of hair, but the majority were just bone—bare, white bone. He hadn’t been aware this many people worked at UBL until now; all he’d ever seen was Lillian, Peter, the janitor, and a receptionist named Phyllis.

  Emily protested as they ran, but as soon as Ryan got up to speed she cackled and cheered, before eventually falling into a resolute unease. She was starting to tell something wasn’t right, by the way her daddy was acting.

  “This can’t be happening,” Ryan told himself the entire way, the messenger bag slapping against his backside with each step. “It can’t be. It’s not. I just have to get home. Get some sleep. We just need a nap? Right, Emme? Nap?”

  She pushed her head deep into the crook of his neck. Naps were not an exciting topic in their house, and even if she had the need for one, the answer was always no.

  The lab was a graveyard, but that’s okay. It was all just a dream, Ryan told himself. Nothing but a hallucination brought upon by sleep deprivation or a biochemical agent. Maybe it was all the cheap wine he’d been sipping on the last two weeks in the middle of the day when Emily was asleep and Lillian was at work. It could have been made with water that had heavy metals not filtered out before bottling. Maybe he’d gotten lead poisoning, yes, that’s it! He’d gotten lead poisoning from drinking six bottles of Two Buck Duck Cabernet.

  “Come to think of it, it did have a lot of sediment at the bottom. Thought it was just swill.”

  The parking deck was silent like the rest of the lab, the only noise coming from his sneakers rapping against the pavement and echoing against the square columns and semi-insulated support joists. He wanted to scream into the deck for help, scream for someone to be there, anyone; even that stupid parking attended tha
t never wanted to validate him even though he had an official UBL parking pass from Lillian.

  Ryan crossed the ramp leading down onto the lower deck, and found his black Toyota Matrix parked on the outside line, mute sunlight spilling in through the slit before it. Emily saw their car and immediately wanted down.

  “Car!” she blurted. “My car!”

  “Hold my hand,” he said and took it.

  She resisted, as always, and slid her hand free like a boneless fish, groaning with annoyance. He let her go on ahead without holding her hand, staying between her and the ramp to guard against cars that might roll through the deck.

  The Matrix was covered in thick layers of dust. He peered around at the other cars in the lot. They were equally as disgusting. He could clearly remember having given it a good scrub a few days earlier. He’d even bought the real car wash soap this time, the kind that doesn’t leave spots, not just a squirt of Dawn dish liquid. He’d poured a healthy quantity in a black bucket with hot water, put Emily in a swimsuit, and the two of them went to town. With their microfiber rags they’d worked from hood to trunk, scraping off bugs and dirt and dust. Emily had focused most of her attention on the driver’s side headlight, but that’s all right. That headlight was really, really clean when she was done; and he’d told her so, and she’d liked the praise.

  Ryan checked the headlight while jingling his keys; it, too was covered in dust, but not just dust. It was that layer of dust and quasi-black, mottled-mold that cars collect when left alone for too long. Most often, this only happened when a vehicle had been sitting under a tree, and leaves and acorns fallen onto it were left to rot.

  His father had an old Chevy truck like that, left under an oak for thirty years. But the Matrix, Ryan’s car, had been parked in a deck. It should be glowing as bright as spit shined boots for as clean as they’d left it. Only, it wasn’t.

  He unlocked the car and set Emily in the back seat where she stood up. The car was musty and cool inside, like decaying fall foliage. He sneezed a couple times, and Emily did the same in an imitation sweet as syrup.