THE RED WAKE

Chapter 25

                       CHAPTER 25

 One month after invasion...

St. Michael Illinois...

     “Did you make it the way I like, Jennygirl?” 

    It was a question that James Montague had put to his wife every Wednesday for the last fifty-one years of their lives together. And Jeanette Mckennit Montague smiled as she replied in the same way she always had. 

     “Shut up and eat your lunch.”

     Before…back before the world went to Hell, they would always laugh. It had been their little game, their way of reconnecting over the years, through all the good times and the bad. But today…  well today was different. 

     It was the morning of their fifty-second anniversary. 

     It was the day they had chosen to die.

     Jenny felt the wind run through her hair as she turned away from the man she’d spent the last five decades of her life learning to understand. 

     She knew that he shouldn’t be at the wheel. But driving was one of the simple pleasures that life had left to Jimmy Montague. They’d taken his license away a while back. His reflexes had grown dull over the years, his eyesight weaker than it had been. That one had hit Jimmy hard. He was a proud, independent man. As they’d grown old together, he’d prided himself on his ability to get around. Mobility had always been important to Jimmy. To him, the ability to provide transportation for them had come to represent a kind of freedom. It was the grandest, most eloquent gesture of rebellion against the authority of old age that Jimmy could mount. Hell, many of their friends had lost their driving privileges years ago. 

     He always drove the Daimler when they visited their friends in places as far away as Ohio. And until his seventy-second birthday, he’d insisted on driving to visit their daughter Sandra in Maryland. That was the year he’d crossed over the divider and sailed along, happy as a clam, directly into oncoming traffic. There had been a really bad moment when Jenny thought they were going to die, and take a goodly number of the surrounding drivers with them as well. Jimmy had managed to swerve off onto the shoulder just as a Greyhound bus thundered by, its horn blaring as it passed them on the right. The huge bus would have knocked them into another area code. At least that’s what Jenny would say to Sandra when they finally reached her daughter’s apartment in the suburbs outside DC. 

      That bus nearly socked us into another area code. 

     After that, Jenny had insisted that she would not travel with Jimmy again if they didn’t fly. Being a proud man, Jimmy swore he’d never ride in another goddamn Greyhound bus. He lost his license that same year. He was seventy-five years old. The list of his ailments was growing. Arthritis curled his hands around the wheel of his beloved Daimler like claws. And the aching in his hands had only gotten worse recently. He’d lost some weight these last few weeks, nearly fifteen pounds. And he was coughing more and more. She’d feared he was dying from emphysema, before all the mess began. Their doctor had set her mind at ease about that one. But Jimmy gave up his three smokes a day routine just the same. 

     Still, his cough was getting worse. Jenny feared an infection, however she had no way to confirm her suspicions. Their doctor, a nice Chinese boy named Lim, had shot up his own offices during the craziness. He had killed three patients before the police were able to get to him. Lim had forced them to kill him, right there in the front office of his own practice. The other folks they had seen recently had either tried to break in to steal something or were busy trying to survive. Jimmy kept his shotgun close at all times in any event.