Amor Fabula Ep. 07

He considered that as he kept pushing the trashcan. "Maybe they don't have as many cell phone towers out here like they do in the city. I think those towers are affecting our brains, and our brains are full of that shit the planes are spraying in the sky..."

"Don't start with that again, please." Anne cut him off. "And don't bring that up in front of the children. They have enough to worry about with their parents gone."

"We can't keep lying to them!" Elias protested.

"What are we supposed to say, that the government is trying to kill them? That the government wants us to kill each other for who knows what diabolical purpose? You're crazy, Elias, for even thinking we should tell them. Those kids can't handle that!"

If he were in a bad mood, he'd argue with her. Elias was thinking about doing that anyway, even if they were the only two sane people out there and the world was falling down around them. What stopped him from opening his mouth was when he glanced at his mother.

Anne was wearing a black top that was snug enough to curve around chest. Her bras always made her tits look perky and tasty. Anne's waist was lean, and her gray running shorts were made of Lycra or Spandex, or some other tight plastic blend that held tight around her thighs. She was just over fifty years old, but incredibly she had the body of a twenty year-old. That's when it dawned on Elias that he'd slept with her, as he'd been putting that incident way in the back of his mind where he wouldn't have to deal with it.

Anne saw the way Elias was looking at her. Maybe she knew what he was thinking, after reading his eyes and the look on his face. "We're going to burn in hell for what we did last night."

"After what we saw in the city, I think we're already in hell." He replied.

Elias took his full trashcan into the neighbor's yard, where his mother made him go and knock on the front door to see if anybody sane was still living there.

"Tell them we're trading trashcans, because our can is full." She insisted.

Elias felt like an idiot apologizing to a front door, but he did it. Their trashcan was full up to the top, while the one in the neighbor's yard was down at one-third. He switched the two and rolled the lighter can out to the road.

"Leave it here for a minute." His mother told him. "Let's take a walk down the street to see if we can find any other people."

As Elias walked along with her, he wondered what she was looking for. A doctor maybe, or a cop? A long time ago, his mother had been Catholic. Maybe she was looking for a priest to absolve the unpardonable sin they'd done together.

The house across the street didn't have any cars parked on it. Those people had probably fled, Elias suspected, although he couldn't think of a safer place to run to that was better than this isolated neighborhood. The house after that had shattered windows. When they got close enough, the mother and son could smell death wafting out of it, so they didn't step inside.

"There might be food in there that we can use." His mother decided. "We'll come back when it doesn't smell so bad."

As they returned to the road, they saw a man ambling toward them. He had a big belly, and he wore a white shirt and tie over slacks. The man held a large kitchen knife in his hand. Both the knife and his clothes were stained with blood.

Elias didn't know what to do. When his mother raised her rifle and aimed it, he was scared enough to walk behind her. She didn't say anything to that man. She simply pulled the trigger and took the recoil, and the man covered in blood fell down. The blast was so loud Elias nearly jumped out of his shoes.

"Help me drag him back behind one of these houses." Anne said, as if she'd been doing stuff like that all her life. "We have to cover him up somehow. Maybe we'll stick him into a trashcan."

"Why?"

"The dogs around here will smell the blood. They'll come to eat him."

That was disgusting, Elias thought. He didn't like dogs to begin with, and now he disliked them even more. With his mother's help, they dragged the body into a yard and shoved it into a trashcan. Anne was rambling by then, talking about how they needed more weapons and more bullets, because there was no telling when the crazies would come by Jay's house to make a house call.

They tried not to get blood on them, but that didn't work out so well. It ended up all over their arms and shoes. They had the dead man's wallet, too, in case the authorities came by and started asking questions. His name was Victor Cordero, or at least that was his name before he'd been shot. Elias wondered if corpses still qualified to have names.

"We can't go back like this." Anne said, as sure as she was about everything else. She went to the water hose at the front of the house, and used it to wash away what she could. When she finished up, she passed the hose over to her son, while she went to knock on front door.

Elias gave his arms a quick rinse. "What are you doing?"

"Just checking for sane people." Anne replied, leaving the front porch and walking down the side of the house. "Here, they left a window cracked open."

As Elias walked over, he noticed that none of these houses had bars on them. He was so used to seeing bars on doors and windows that he thought it was that way all over the country. All over the world, even.

"Give me a push." Anne said, once she'd pulled the window up a little further.

"You want to go inside? Are you serious?"

"Sooner or later, we're going to need more supplies." She said. "Are you going to help me or not?"

Because he was taller than his mother, he went around her and pushed the window open as far as it could go. When she started climbing, he started pushing, until her waist was on the sill and her butt and legs were teetering outside.

He'd slept with his mother, Elias remembered, but he still didn't believe it. It was such a surreal moment to him that he questioned whether or not it had actually happened.

Anne clambered inside, then she was up and calling out if anybody was in the house. When she got no reply, she told Elias she would open the front door for him. He picked up the rifle and walked over.

After watching so many cop shows and military movies, Elias knew how to clear a room. Since he didn't have a gun like his mother did, he cleared room after room while holding the bloody kitchen knife he'd stolen from a dead man.

"I'll go through the kitchen." Anne called out. "Why don't you look through the rest of the house? Maybe you can find another gun."

As Elias rummaged through drawers and closets, he felt that the ghosts of the people who lived there were watching him. He hated that feeling. He hated being inside that house, going through the private belongings of strangers. It was an older couple, Elias soon discovered, after he came across their small, framed pictures. The woman didn't have anything valuable, as far as he could tell. The man had a lot of fishing gear and hardly used, expensive tools in the garage.

When Elias stepped back into the house, his mother was raiding a hallway closet for blankets.

"In case the weather goes cold." She explained, excusing the pilferage.

The highest shelves were past her reach, so Elias stayed nearby, waiting for her to ask for help. His mother was going through bed sheets and towels first, apparently finding it wise to choose the right colors from the selection she had available to her. That didn't make any sense to him.

At the same time, Elias was watching her from behind. He appreciated his mother's toned arms and small waist. He liked the way her tight butt flared out. It was all that yoga she did, Elias figured. Anne stretched out a lot, and she jogged, and she took her mineral baths and put cream on her skin.

Elias became fixated on thinking about her breasts. He'd been afraid of them before, but now he wanted to touch them. He wanted to see them uncovered, to find out what they looked like. When his mother finished sorting through sheets and towels that did not belong to her, she half turned and pointed up at the higher shelves. Elias moved beside her, but his hands weren't reaching out for blankets. They went around Anne's waist, before they curled on her bosom. His mother took a deep breath. It expanded her chest and crowded her breasts into his fingers.

He squeezed those nice, tender parts of her, feeling her body tremble as a result. Her hands went to his wrists, settling there but not rebuking him as he expected.

"Elias, we shouldn't stay out here too long." She told him. "Something might happen to the kids."

Elias let his mother go, only realizing how hard he was when he'd taken a step back and broken their contact. He wondered if he should apologize.

"Bring those blankets down for me." Anne pointed. "The ones that are mostly blue. We might need those."

His mother came to his room that night. She said she couldn't stay long because Becky was going through a fever. Elias wished she could lie in the bed with him all night, but she was assertive as usual. No matter, he knew what he wanted most. He pulled his mother's shirt and bra out of the way, right after he laid her down. Elias sucked on his mother's tits and listened to her moan. They weren't big or anything, but they were perfect for his lips, and for his tongue. Even when she pushed him away and left, he felt he could have kept going for hours. He was just getting started on those tits. They were the most delicious pair he'd ever tasted.

Elias felt guilty, when three days later Becky died. He had always resented his brother's kids, hating them when they didn't deserve it. Anne had done everything she could think of to save the little girl, even breaking into all of the houses nearby while looking for the missing medicine that could fix the child. They'd even gone into the house with the dead bodies stinking it up.

They buried Becky in the backyard, and they made a cheap headstone out of some old cement Elias found in somebody's tool shed. He wrote Becky's name and age on the soft cement with his finger. Everyone pressed their hands on it, leaving their mark on the grave forever.

His mother cried for days, always blaming herself for not being able to save the child. Elias went around the neighborhood, patrolling it with guns he'd taken from the houses of the dead. He saw smoke coming from the city, but there were too many houses and trees blocking his view. After climbing onto somebody's second story roof, he got a better view. Everything was on fire. He felt that somebody was deliberately burning it all down, because there were several big fires in different parts of the city.

Meanwhile, the planes kept spraying their chemical filth into the sky.

It was almost a blessing when Alex and Ana got sick, from Elias' point of view. The fevers gave Anne a purpose again, after she'd spent so much time moping over Becky's loss. She gave the kids so many vitamins and so much vegetable soup they started running away from her.

That's when Elias started going out further on his solitary patrols. He walked down a hill that led away from the nicer homes to other homes that weren't that nice. Maybe rich people died more peacefully, because he saw a lot of bodies out on the street, and a lot of violence marring their flesh. He avoided the streets that smelled the worst.

It started off as a joke, or as way for him to pass the time, but Elias began guessing at which vehicles had weed or other drugs stashed inside of them. After watching all those shows where cops pulled people over and searched their cars, he felt proficient enough to investigate vehicles at random. On TV, it seemed as if every other car had some kind of contraband inside of it, but from his amateur findings he calculated it was more like one car out of every seven or eight.

Regardless, he found a lot of stuff: small to medium amounts of weeds, packets of plastic with powder or crack cocaine residue inside of them, and lots of guns. If the entire world had gone crazy and everyone was dead except for a handful of survivors, maybe a new economy would start up, one that was based on alcohol, illegal drugs and weapons. Or maybe he was just overreacting, he wasn't sure. Time would tell if he were right or wrong. In the meantime, he was finding so much contraband that he ended up walking around with a shopping cart full of it.

One afternoon, he returned to his dead brother's house with a shopping cart full of potato chips, soda and beer. His nephew and niece had been mowing the grass earlier with an old, manual push-mower, but apparently they'd gotten fed up and were sitting in the shade of the house. When they saw him, they both got up and ran over.

"Where'd you get all that?" Alex's eyes popped open at the snacks.

"A liquor store about three miles down the hill." Elias shrugged. Since they were living together for so long now, he'd been ignoring his relatives a lot less. "I had to fight off a bunch of bums to get it."

"Did you really?" Alex looked awed.

Elias didn't like that look. He didn't want his nephew looking up to him, or following him around like a puppy. He relented. "I'm kidding. The part about the liquor store is true. I made up the part about having to fight somebody. There were some bums around, four or five of them. They'd broken into the store, I guess, and were sitting out on the sidewalk drinking hard liquor. I asked them if I could go inside to get some stuff, and they said go ahead. If you want a bag of chips and some soda, grab it. You too, Ana. These might be the last chips you eat for a long time."

It was a dire prediction, that maybe they'd never have potato chips again, but the teens didn't catch it. They were still largely pampered and naive. That's why his mother was trying to get them to do chores around the house now, when before she would heap all of that work on him.

As the teens were walking off with their selected goodies, Anne came out to inspect what Elias had in the cart.

"I got you some vitamin waters." He showed her. "I know they're not the brand you usually drink, but that's all they had at the liquor store."

It would have been a miracle if she'd said Thank You, but no miracles happened that day. Anne twisted a bottle open, eying the plastic bags in the bottom of the cart. "What's in there?"

Elias felt stupid telling her about his idea for a post-Apocalypse economy. He thought his mother would laugh at him.

Instead, she pointed at the house across the street. "You can't keep that stuff here. Take it over there and hide it in the garage."

"What about the guns?"

"We'll have two guns for each of us. Hold on to the ones with the most bullets. I don't want the kids to see them, so keep them out of their sight."

Once Anne had taken out the rest of the chips and drinks, Elias began pushing his cart across the street. He wondered when his mother had become the ultimate survivalist woman, because she certainly hadn't been that way before.

Elias got drunk in the guest room, where the teens wouldn't see him. It was past nightfall when he started sobering up. Alex and Ana were already in their rooms and asleep, but his mother was missing. He got so worried we went looking for her outside, finding her in the backyard, smoking a joint. Ever since the world had gone to shit, his mother had changed so much he often felt he didn't know her anymore.

The marijuana made his mother giggle a lot.

Since he had no idea of how to approach her, Elias went back inside.

Elias was lying in bed when his mother came in. She didn't turn the light on and the smell of weed wafted in with her. She went to sit at the edge of the bed, where she started giggling over whatever was crossing her mind.

In the dark, she rustled around for a couple of minutes, but Elias didn't figure out she'd undressed until she stretched out on top of him.

Anne had become a magical creature again. Instantly, she aroused her son, just by lying on him naked and exhaling acrid breaths into his face. As Elias put his hands on her cool skin, cool from being outside, the want spilled out of him. He was in a hurry to get his clothing off, and in a bigger hurry to move her around and get on top of her.

His mother was still chuckling, up until he pressed his body against hers, and slid his cock into her pussy. She made a strange noise then. She'd suspired, mixing that in with a catch at her throat, and a mewl that was stuck in there with nowhere to go.

Elias had a few one-night stands in the past, but never one like this. He should have hated his mother for always relegating him to second place, for always putting his brother Jay on the pedestal, while he got the leftover crumbs. But he didn't hate Anne. Oddly enough, he loved her more than he ever had before. It was just as he'd speculated earlier; his mother had become magical.

It was so dark that Elias couldn't see any part of her. To make up for this, he reached out and touched her entire body. He spent forever on her breasts, the same as before, but there was something new and exciting in how he ran his fingers over her pubic hair. He even pulled out, simply to feel her lower hair and pussy. When he pushed a finger into her, he became hungry for her again, enough to push his cock back into that lovely place that had become so inviting to him.

Anne thought it was so funny when her son squeezed a loud moan out of her. She would blurt out laughter into his face, or turn her head and snicker to the side. It excited him tremendously because he'd never seen her act that way before. She was laughing up until he climaxed. After that, Anne held her son's arms as he trembled above her. When Elias was done, she simply rubbed his arms. It soothed him, and also her, as Anne soon fell asleep next to him.

He knew they couldn't be caught together in the same bed, so he left and went to sleep on the couch in the living room.

The next day, a small gang of thugs walked through the neighborhood. Elias counted three of them, all thin and gaunt. They had desperate faces and their jeans hung so low most of their underwear was showing. One of them opened up the gate leading into their front yard.

Anne stepped outside with the rifle, while Elias covered her from a window.

"You shut my gate up and you keep on walking." She called out. "You're not wanted here."

"We're just looking for some water." The man said, deliberating how much farther he should step into the yard, and whether or nor Anne would pull the trigger.

"You're a fucking liar." She replied.

They stared at one another, that skinny thug and his mother. Possibly, Elias figured, that young man might have thought that Anne was in her late thirties, or that it would be easy to rape her if he could first yank the gun out of her grip. When the thug saw the gun Elias had trained on him from the window, he reconsidered and shut the gate.

"Don't come back here at night, because I won't give you a warning shot." She threatened the man as he walked away. "And pull your fucking pants up!"

Another gang walked by a few hours later, when Elias and everybody else was outside. This time, he counted six of them. They were big, husky guys with rifles. Right away Elias figured them for military or cops, from the way they were spaced out and by how they kept giving each other hand signals, except they were wearing street clothes.

One of those men walked up to the fence, but he didn't try for the gate. "How many survivors live here?"

"Four. Me, my son and my two grandkids." Anne said, retrieving her gun. "Who are you?"

"We're just keeping the peace." The man replied. He was probably a sergeant or something, not that it mattered anymore. "How are you doing on food and water?"

"You ask too many questions."

The man grinned, before he pulled out a smart phone. "I'm putting your address down into our database. The U.N. people will be coming by to bring you food and supplies. Anybody in there need medical help?"