Charlie's Requiem Novella Read online

  Table of Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Authors’ Notes

  Charlie’s Requiem

  Copyright © 2015 by Angery American Enterprises Inc. All rights reserved.

  First Edition: December 2015

  http://www.waltbrowning.com

  [email protected]

  http://www.angeryamerican.com

  Cover and Formatting: Streetlight Graphics

  All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without prior written permission of Angery American Enterprises Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to locales, events, business establishments, or actual persons—living or dead—is entirely coincidental.

  Prologue

  By Angery American

  Going Home set a high bar for what life could look like after an EMP. But Morgan’s journey and even his home focuses on more rural areas. The small towns of Florida are nothing compared to the chaos the tourist corridor would be like. Could you imagine being at Disney or Universal Studios when such an even occurred? What would those tens of thousands of people do? Where would they go?

  If you’ve been following the series, you know the DHS isn’t exactly concerned with the well being of the people of this country. But what are they really working towards? Who are they looking out for?

  Morgan is doing his best to keep his small community safe, now let’s take a look at Orlando and how Charlie deals with the crisis. It’s a whole different situation surrounded by millions of residents and visitors all trying to survive.

  I want to thank my good friend Walt Browning, who did a lot of the heavy lifting on this novella. Our teamwork has produced some fine work here. We hope you enjoy this and if you want more we will be happy to continue.

  Chapter 1

  Day 1

  Orlando, FL

  I hate the mornings. The boy thought. He silently dressed, trying to not be noticed. Mornings were some of the worse times of the day. Sometimes, if she stopped by the bar on the way home after working the late shift, the mornings could be painful. He hoped this was not one of those days. It was quiet in the house. That was usually a good sign.

  The thin and wiry boy, almost a man at 17, meticulously folded his sleeping shorts and shirt, placing them in the upper right corner of his second of five drawers. The front of the shorts had to be pointing up and the shirt had to be folded like it had just been removed from its packaging. They always went into the same place. He only had the two sleeping shorts and shirts. The other pair, his favorites, were ready to be washed.

  He would do the laundry when they left later that evening. His mom would be gone for dinner with her. They always went out to dinner. He always cooked for himself. He liked to cook for himself. He knew that the food was cleaned properly and that the plates and pans were sterile. He always cleaned the pots and pans before he cooked and did the same afterwards. The plates were stacked in neat and tidy rows in the cupboard and the utensils were aligned perfectly in their drawer. The kitchen was his place. They never cooked and as long as the beer and ginger ale for his mom’s whiskey were in the front of the refrigerator, they left him and his little world alone. It was comforting to be able to control some of his environment when the rest of his existence was so disheveled and out of control.

  He liked being in control when he could. Being around his mom and her girlfriend was never a good experience. Most of the time, he was ignored. Some of the time, he was noticed. Being noticed wasn’t pleasant. The last time they noticed him, he still felt the pain from his swollen wrist and the cigarette burns. One of them got infected, but he knew how to handle that without involving anyone else. The antibacterial ointment usually took care of that. If it got worse, they had all kinds of medicine they had stolen from their jobs. Mom was a nurse at the hospital and her girlfriend was a nurse’s aide at a retirement home. Most of the medicine they stole was to get high, but some of it was antibiotics. He knew how to use the antibiotics. He had learned of their uses many times. His mom and her girlfriend had seen to that over the years.

  Mom and her girlfriend had been together for almost five years. His father got to see him every other weekend, but the judge wouldn’t let him go over more than that. His father sold tools and supplies for a large hardware manufacturer and was not home during the week. He loved his weekends with his father and it made his mom and her girlfriend very angry. He never spoke about it until after last weekend. That’s when they burned him again. He told them that he could leave the house when he turned 18 in a few months. They didn’t like that at all. His wrist still hurt and was swollen. He told his teacher he hurt it playing football in the park by his house. She looked like she didn’t believe him, but the cigarette burns were under his shirt and no one else knew about them. She sent him to the school nurse. It was his third visit in two months. She thought his wrist was broken, but he moved all his fingers and told the nurse he was going to the doctor that afternoon. She wrapped the wrist with an ACE bandage and let him go back to class.

  The boy silently moved through his room, putting everything into its proper place. Assigning order to his life of chaos was one of the few things he did to keep his sanity. His clothing was pressed and all wrinkles were removed. His tennis shoes were spotless. He used his mom’s white shoe polish when they got the occasional scuff-mark. His hair was always combed and off his ears. The guys thought he was weird. He ignored the girls. His mom had poisoned him on wanting to be with a girl.

  He never understood his mother. Why she would hurt him was unfathomable. Really, his mom rarely got involved, she just let her girlfriend hurt him. It had been five years since his mom and dad split up because his mom had met her, and the two had become a couple. That’s when he and his mom left his dad and moved into her house.

  His mom and her girlfriend shared not only a bed, but a growing problem with prescription pills. He wanted to tell his dad, but his mom’s girlfriend said she would kill him if he ever told anyone. She was big and mean and looked like she meant what she had threatened. A few times she had beaten him so severely that he had to stay home from school. The past summer had been particularly difficult and the three months at home had nearly driven him mad. Twice he had ended up at his mom’s hospital. Once with broken ribs and the other time with a concussion. Now, with school, at least he had time by himself. It was the mornings that brought so much fear. When the girlfriend drank and then got high, she was mean.

  Finally, everything in his room was aligned and in its proper place, and the boy quietly left his room and walked towards the kitchen on his way out the door. His book bag was strapped over both shoulders, the weight evenly balanced so that it was both comfortable and perfectly aligned on his back.

>   Suddenly, he smelled the smoke. It wasn’t the normal stale cigarette smoke that comes from a room that has had packs upon packs of cigarettes smoked in it over the years. It was the smell of fresh cigarette smoke, its acidity still strong with a sickening haze still floating in the air. The boy tentatively walked into the room, he had to pass through the kitchen to get out the outside door. That’s when he saw her, sitting at the kitchen table, a nearly empty bottle of Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey in front of the big, ugly woman that shared his mother’s bed. She still had her dirty green scrubs on from the night shift. Her head slowly turned as the boy entered the room.

  For his part, the boy moved as quickly and silently as he could, trying to get passed his captor. She was a large and lazy woman, really a man trapped in a woman’s body. But before he could get away, she reached out and grabbed his injured right wrist and twisted it with all the force she could muster from her still sitting position. The force of the attack dropped the boy to his knees. But instead of pushing him to the ground like she always did, she stood up and still holding his hand, violently twisted his arm until he heard and felt a pop in his right shoulder. He screamed out in pain, kicking her in the knee. She dropped like a rock, hitting the floor with a heavy thud. The boy rushed back to his bedroom, his right arm hanging uselessly at his side, the joint dislocated from the socket. He stumbled into his room and slammed the door shut, locking the knob and staggering to the far wall.

  Within seconds, the bedroom door exploded inward and the large, drunk woman shattered through the flimsy hollow core composite material and slammed into the boy, knocking him to the ground once again. She grabbed him by the neck and lifting him to his feet, she ran him into the jamb of the now shattered door.

  “Now, now!” she hissed. “We can’t have you going to school with a bad arm, now can we?”

  She throttled the nape of his neck and grabbing the back of his pants by the belt, she slammed his dislocated shoulder into the corner of the door jamb, not once but three times, until the shoulder was popped back into place. She dragged him to the kitchen, depositing him on the floor. The boy laid dazed, his entire right side numb from the nerve damage of the assault.

  The woman stormed to the kitchen table, looking for something. She returned with her pack of cigarettes and fumbling about, could find no lighter or matches. She cursed at him, and began tearing apart the kitchen while the boy lay on the floor, wishing that it was all just a terrible nightmare. His perfectly organized drawers were flung to the ground near his body, the forks and knives scattered on the floor he had just polished the night before to a waxy shine. Finally, the wretched woman found a pack of matches in one of the utility drawers. She ignited her cigarette and took a long drag on the stick. It glowed a sinister red as she reached down and tore back his shirt. With his right arm disabled, the boy could only scream as she plunged the burning cigarette over and over into his stomach. The boy began to lose all sense of time and space, his vision narrowing as the attack continued.

  “So you want to leave your mother and me!” she screamed. “After all we have given your ungrateful ass. And you repay us by leaving!”

  Another burning ember ignited pain on his right chest.

  Suddenly, he heard his mother screaming nearby. Oh God! He thought. Save me!

  “What have you done!” his mother screeched. “You ungrateful piece of crap! What have you done to make her so angry?”

  His mother kicked him. Suddenly he felt his pants being ripped off. He cried out, but only received another kick in the side. The air left his lungs.

  His left hand flailed on the floor, trying to find something to hold onto. Something to grab to pull himself up and get away. The forks scattered as his hand swung back and forth on the floor. Suddenly, an agonizing pain came from his groin, a burning flame seared through his body. He spasmed with a pain he had never, in his entire young life, experienced. His left hand found something and he swung it at the large woman, trying to get her off him. Trying to stop the pain.

  The butcher knife arced toward his drunken attacker. She saw the six inch blade just a little too late. She tried to bring her arm up to stop the knife from striking her, but her alcohol laden brain was a little too numb to respond quickly enough. The blade rammed into her neck. She dropped to the ground, laying over the boy’s legs, dead and bleeding on his fastidiously scoured floor.

  His mother stood over them, her eyes dilated and fixed. She was in her scrubs as well, having fallen asleep after her night shift and having taken some of the OxyContin the two of them had stolen from their jobs. She screamed at the boy and launched herself onto his partially pinned body.

  The boy snapped. His mother, the one person in the world that was there to protect and love her child, was trying to choke the life out of him. His mind, teetering on brink of breaking, shattered. His fixation on controlling his environment, his attempts to placate his mother and his docile acceptance of the abuse, all failed to stop the pain. His mind left him. His last sane thought was of the green scrubs that everyone in his life wore, at least everyone that had been hurting him. Now, his broken mind thought, I will not be hurt anymore.

  He finally left the house over an hour later. He cleaned everything and put all back where it belonged. He scoured the floors and returned them back to the highly polished shine that they needed to have. He scrubbed the butcher knife and placed it into his backpack, just in case he needed to make himself safe once again. And when he finally shut the front door… when he left the house for the last time, he left no one behind alive. He was finally free.

  Chapter 2

  Charlie

  Kirkman Specialty Clinic

  Orlando, FL

  Another scorcher, I thought. The Florida heat can be such a bitch.

  I pulled into the medical center parking lot, looking for that rare shaded space. It was hard to find. Newer buildings like this one tended to have small trees and an immature landscape. Construction is always cheaper when you start with a blank slate, meaning a flat, empty piece of land. Finding some shade would be nice since it would keep the car’s interior from getting baked while I visited. November normally brought temperate weather, but a weird warm front was touching Orlando as it cut across the southern half of the state. North of us, it was nice and cool, but we were going to have a few days of unusually hot weather.

  Finding no shade, I reluctantly pulled into a space near the back of the lot. Thankfully, I was there on business and not as a patient. My company doesn’t like phone calls from our clients complaining that their customer parking spaces were taken by my car. They don’t want their patients inconvenienced by having to walk a few extra feet because the spaces toward the front are taken by non-patients like myself. I have no problem with that. I am fit and 28 years young. It’s just humorous that the front three spots have a sign warning anyone not to park there. These spaces were reserved for the doctors. Just saying.

  The Kirkman Specialty Clinic was just like most of the other clients on my route. A square piece of prefabricated concrete with a layer of sprayed-on stucco. Faux columns stood sentinel at the double-glass door entrance, giving the structure some modicum of class. It didn’t work. It looked like all the other medical buildings I visit; Industrial cheap, gilded with cut-rate trappings. Inexpensive bronzed light fixtures oxidized in the Florida summer. Less than two years old, the hardware on the building was rusting and would have to be replaced, probably with more cheap hardware. A waste of money, if you ask me. But then again, no one said that doctors were good at anything other than their own profession. No one says that other than the doctors themselves. I have been on the job over six years and the stories I have heard of lost wealth were staggering. The doctors thought they were just as awesome in the stock market or land deals as they were in their own profession. Many found out they weren’t. But that’s a whole different story.

 
I popped the trunk on my Ford. I never would have bought a Ford, but I have to admit, the car is pretty sweet. Most of my friends were in a Toyota or some other Japanese or Korean car. Those models just had more “cool” when you’re young. But this company car has taken good care of me these past two years. My upgrade would be coming soon; and I was going to be able to pick from three different models. I will probably get another Fusion.

  I rolled my oversized sales briefcase behind me. It had all the new pamphlets and samples for our line of drugs. I hated that thing, just because it was so clunky looking. But given the amount of crap I have to bring with me, a large bag is a must.

  “Hi, Charlie!” the receptionist sang.

  “Hey Peg. How’s it going?”

  “Slammed as usual!” She replied with an expectant grin.

  I handed over the loot. A large brown bag with handles from a local department store. The bag was only a disguise. You see, the Kirkman Specialty Clinic was a cardiology center, one of the finest in Central Florida. The loot was three dozen doughnuts. Not good for the patients to see three dozen doughnuts going into a heart center’s break room.

  Peg gave me a conspiratorial smile and took the bag to the back. I sat down in the reception area, glancing at the patients around me. The room wasn’t too full, but I expected that. The only doctor here at this time was the senior partner. The other two were still at the hospital and wouldn’t be back for another hour. It didn’t matter though. Dr. Kramer was the senior partner; while the other two hadn’t been out of their residencies for more than three years. He’s a good man. Pushing 65, he has the reputation that the other two doctors use to enhance their status in the medical community. Their practice is a referral practice, and many of the patients often drive over an hour to see them. Dr. Kramer brings them in. He is the rainmaker. He likes me.