The Breadwinner Trilogy (Book 1): The Breadwinner (3 page)

“Moira Lewis.”  She shook his hand, still smiling at the dark haired young man who towered over her.

“I think it’s safe to say you’re with me tonight?”  He nodded his head back at the club and she rolled her eyes at his smug demeanor, but yet couldn’t wipe the smile from her face.

“Whatever you say, big guy.”  She took his arm and they walked right into the night club she was just previously denied entry to.  She winked at the guards who chuckled as she strutted by in her strappy gold stilettos. 

The rest of the night Moira didn’t dare leave Samson’s side.  She was only 19 and had snuck into clubs before, but never managed to get into one this nice.  They danced the entire night, chatting and drinking and enjoying the designer drugs his friends had bought back at the swanky hotel room.  Samson and Moira made love until the sun came up and when she woke up, she slipped out of the suite without even a goodbye.  Samson spent the rest of the trip wondering what happened to the sexy blonde, hoping he’d run into her again but when he returned to school, he soon forgot about her somewhere between classes and parties.  He graduated that June with his bachelor’s degree.

Two months later he was packing up the remainder of his things before he left the following morning for his first year of law school.  There was a knock at his bedroom door.

“Son,” his father spoke before entering.

“Yeah pop, what’s up?”  His father walked into the large, practically empty bedroom.  Samson noticed his father’s grim expression.  “What is it?  What’s the matter?”

His father, almost identical in stature to Samson, sighed and folded his arms across his wide chest.  “I’m going to need you to explain to me why there is a pregnant girl asking for you downstairs.”

Samson felt his stomach drop.  His mind began racing and he didn’t know how to respond to his father because he wasn’t very sure who the girl downstairs might even be.  A dozen female faced rushed through his mind and he felt his face grow hot as a wave of nausea came over him.

“I thought we discussed you being more careful than this.”  His father spoke in a hushed but angry tone.  “You need to get your ass down there now and figure this thing out.”  Samson stood, frozen in place, dumbfounded.  “I said now!”

He rushed down the long hall in a panic and thought he might pass out when he reached the bottom of the staircase and immediately heard the girl’s loud voice as he she talked to his housekeeper.  He turned to look at his father coming down the stairs behind him, his face still held a stone cold expression.  He swallowed the lump in his throat and walked slowly into the living room. 

The room fell silent and there before him sat a small framed blonde with a big swollen belly.  “Can you give us a minute?”  His father and housekeeper left the two alone.

Moira cried in his arms and he held her gently.  She had nowhere else to go.  She began showing and her drunken father threw her out.  She had no job, no friends and no other family.  “I’m sorry.”  She looked at him with her big blue eyes and didn’t bother wiping the tears from them.  Samson didn’t know how else to respond other than to take responsibility for his drunken carelessness in Miami.  They were married in an expensively quiet ceremony without love or enthusiasm the following month on a weekend where he normally would have been out with his new law school buddies.  His father paid for an apartment and a nanny off campus for Moira and Keira, the new baby, when she was finally born.  Samson had never seen himself as a family man, but he was ready for this life whether he liked it or not.

He finished law school and Moira relished in his family’s money, becoming the woman he always knew he would grow to hate.  Keira of course had nothing but the best, but so did Moira, and she had no shame in letting Samson know how much she adored his money.  That’s the way it started and that’s the way it had always been.  A few years later they had their second child, also an accident, but also equally amazing for Samson and Moira.  It brought them closer for a while, but eventually they fell out of whatever temporary love they had found themselves in and went through the appropriate motions of wealthy family life in a wealthy family town.

“Did you hear me?!”  Moira yelled from behind him, snapping him out of yet another cruel daydream.  Samson hadn’t heard anything else and almost continued ignoring her but Moira’s voice became soft.  “We can’t do this without you.  Babe.”  She lingered condescendingly on the last word and he knew the face she was making without even having to see it.  Big doe eyes and pouty lips.  It was a daily routine with her.  The madness that was his wife, almost like a game.  Seeing how far she could push him.  All for fun, all for her own benefit, all to make him feel like the man he had now come to be, and never letting him forget that in their status of society, no matter how crippled the world, he was the breadwinner.  The staple of the family.

Family, he thought to himself before he answered.  “I’ll make sure things are right next time.”  Samson slammed the door behind him as he ventured out of their home in Franklin Woods.

V

Samson walked down the driveway and quickened his pace as he passed the wreck in in the street before his house.  If I could find a tow truck, I’d move this shit myself.  He hated that their house was one of the first in the development.  “Too much noise and traffic”  he had told Moira when they were first looking at houses several years ago, but she had fallen in love with it the moment she stepped foot in the damned place.  So in Samson’s mind, the brutal accident that had become a permanent fixture on his property all came back to that miserable decision to purchase the third “Castle” (as Moira so tenderly referred to it) from the guard house in Franklin Woods.

As he strode by the empty houses toward the exit, he thought of all his neighbors, now dead, some from his own doing, and the others probably offed themselves before they could succumb to the travesty of the world.  He remembered the wild, angry look on Will’s face when he had first spotted Samson in his yard during the first few days of the infection.  Samson knew his longtime golf buddy had plenty of plywood in the shed next door that he needed for their windows.  He hadn’t seen Will or his wife Tracy since it had all started so he figured they had gotten out of dodge as quickly as they could. 

Samson had entered the yard quietly that afternoon, making a beeline for the shed.  He hadn’t noticed Will in his haste, half standing, half leaning, on the steps of his luxurious cedar deck in his sweatpants with the oversized and swollen bite mark on his left shoulder.  Samson fiddled with the lock and tossed it aside.  Will always left the key in the padlock.  What’s the point of even locking the thing up Samson would wonder any time he had been over his friend’s house for a cocktail or a barbecue.  He tossed the lock to the grass at his feet and swung the door open.  Bingo.  Samson entered the shed and grinned at the stack of boards in front of him.  Picking up two pieces of plywood in each hand, he turned around to begin stacking them in the yard.  “Holy shit.”  Samson muttered to himself and dropped what was in his hands.  Will had begun to shamble toward him.  Lifeless, yet still moving, still growling.  His eyes were vacant and cold, his mouth hung open and blood had crusted onto the sides.  Samson slowly lowered himself and picked up one of the pieces of thin wood, he knew what he had to do.  Faster than Will could react, Samson ran to him and swung the plywood up, striking Will underneath his chin with the corner in an uppercut like fashion.  The blow knocked Will back and down to the perfectly green grass he had just been standing on.  Aiming the corner of the plywood with a swift precision, Samson rammed the corner of it over and over again into Will’s forehead.  Blood splattered and stained Samson’s clothes, the sickening crack after crack of his friend’s skull filling his ears.  Finally on about the tenth blow to the head, Samson realized Will had stopped moving, stopped groaning.  He angrily launched his makeshift weapon down onto the body of his dead friend, exhaling loudly with a grunt.  He looked up and away from the bloody mess toward the open sliding door that led inside Will’s house.  He thought of his friend’s wife and wondered if Tracy was still alive somewhere in that house.  He climbed the porch steps and slammed the sliding door shut.

Every time he passed Will’s house he thought of that day.  Thought of his body, still rotting in his yard, and his wife, either dead or aimlessly shambling about in some room with no purpose.  Just another house I can’t steal food from, Samson thought as he passed the guard house and exited to his right out of Franklin Woods.  Town was to the left, deeper into the community of Franklin, and the bay was to his
right.  Town was useless to him after his last few trips.  The only building he felt like he hadn’t carefully snuck around in was the high school and he had no intention of checking it out.  Since finding Al he hadn’t seen a soul that was alive and he’d exhausted the small town’s resources between Franklin Woods and Paradise Bay in just a short while.  The disadvantages of beach town living, nothing here in the off season.

The city, beyond the borders of their quaint area, ten miles away, was not an option.  “What are you, stupid?  You’ll never come back!  And then what would we do without you?”  Moira would scream, always shrill, always wild, anytime he brought it up.  Samson often wished he had the balls to just go, just go to the city and never come home.  What was the point anymore?  But then he would remember the children, and he knew he couldn’t leave them with Moira like that.  It wasn’t that Samson hated Moira, he just had always known what he was to her, a wallet.  And now, in the wake of what the world had become, he was less than a wallet, he was a grocery bag.  The thought of it made him bitter with each passing day.  How she would admire not only herself, but all her material possessions and the house that she lived in and how she truly believed status or class still mattered.  Every single time she would look in a mirror and smile at herself, Samson wished he could smash her pretty little face into it.  He imagined the shards of glass embedded in her flawless skin, her shiny blonde hair tainted with blood.

Trudging down the middle of the road he appreciated the peace and quiet of the end of the world.  The lush greenery swaying in the breeze coming off the water, the soft whisper of tides touching the shores.  Before he knew it, he stood on the docks.  The empty boats rocking in the wake, the abandoned Dockside Bar and Grill’s closed doors tempted him.  Looks like nobody’s home.  He approached the building cautiously and tapped his wedding band against the metal of the dock’s banister loudly.  He looked around and listened.  Watching the windows closely, he tapped again.  There was no response from his surroundings and no movement inside. 

Opening the door, Samson took his knife out and poked his head inside.  The place smelled of spoiled food so badly he thought he would vomit.  Coughing, he removed his handkerchief from his pocket and held it up to his face.  Tables and chairs were on their sides strewn about the floor.  Broken drinking glasses crunched under his feet with every step he took toward the bar.  I could use a drink.  Or four.  Samson moved behind the bar and raised his eyebrows.  He grabbed a bottle of American Honey whiskey and made a face at it.  Ought to help with the smell at least.  Throwing the top behind him he turned the bottle upside down and drank.  He grimaced as the liquid warmed his insides and he exhaled loudly.  Rotten fruit, jalapenos and olives littered the bar counter.  Moving toward the kitchen he took another swig from his newly acquired bottle. 

Samson peeked through the grimy glass to make sure no surprises lurked in the depths of the rotting fish smell and set the whiskey down on the bar top.  He brought the handkerchief back up to his mouth and walked into the kitchen.  The place was filthy, filled with maggots and rotting fish.  His stomach turned and he immediately regretted the American Honey.  Hands on his knees and vomiting, Samson knew he just needed to check the stock shelves for dry goods.  “Pull it together big guy,” he said to himself and spat.  Holding the knife up, he listened for any response to all the noise he had just made.  Satisfied with no company to greet him from the shadows, he moved on to the pantry.  He thought about Moira and how funny it would be to see her in this kitchen right now, sobbing and retching, probably pissing herself with fear.  He noticed an abundance of empty cans littering the floor and kicked one out of the way as he walked to the pantry. 

“Yeah!”  He shouted in glee as he discovered instant mashed potatoes, a few cases of soft drinks and a bag of rice.  “You’re probably full of fucking bugs, but I don’t care.”  He talked in a baby voice to the bag of rice as he tied it up and set it by the pantry door.  He shrugged his bag off his shoulders and put a few of the bottles of soda into it along with the 4 boxes of InstaMash.  “Gotta get my carbs!”  He cheerfully said to no one and zipped up the bag, placing it onto his back.   He put his knife back in its place and grabbed the bag of rice, not a gold mine, but it’ll do just fine by me.  He quickly exited the putrid kitchen and grabbed the American Honey on his way by the bar, you’ll taste better in open air.

Samson figured he had lucked out a bit and decided to use this peaceful time by himself to celebrate.  Setting down the bag of rice outside the entrance, he strolled down the docks, admiring the luxury boats that were not his.  “They’re money pits Sammy, we have plenty of friends with boats.”  Moira’s voice echoed in his head as he remembered when he told her he had spent the day looking at potential purchases a few months back. 

“I’ll take this one you bitch.”  Samson chuckled as he took a drink from the whiskey bottle.  He placed his belongings down on the dock and boarded a gorgeous Viking Sport Cruiser.