Free 2013: Beyond Armageddon by Robert Ryan Page B

first-class accommodations.”
    “Zeke told me about it,” Leah said. “Hoa Lo, right? One of the worst places for a POW.”
    “It wasn’t nice. It was a 19th-century prison built by the French. It still had a guillotine in it, although I don’t know if it was ever used on any of us. They’d take you in and show it to you, though, make you think you were next. They whacked my broken leg a few times, probably why it didn’t heal right. Put a little hitch in my giddyup.”
    Hank stared at his drink, his mind starting to wander down those dank corridors.
    “Don’t think about it, sweetheart,” Rita said. “I’m sorry I brought it up.”
    “No, it’s fine. I was just remembering something I haven’t thought about all these years. At the time it bothered me more than the beatings. It was this other POW. Some kid, a grunt right out of high school. Weird SOB. He’d been there a few months, most of it in solitary. A little while after I got there, they let him back into the general population. Barely said a word.
    “Anyway, on Sundays they let us use one of the rooms as a chapel. One of the guys was a chaplain, and we’d have a little mass. One day this guy walks in and starts saying we can forget all this ‘God shit,’ he’s already tried it and look what it got him. He’s turned to Satan, he says, and that’s who’s going to get him out of there. Then he pointed all around the room, calling us the enemy, saying we’d be punished for our sins.”
    “That’s awful,” Leah said.
    “Yeah. For a while I wondered if there was something to the Satan thing, because a couple weeks later the guy escaped. And nobody escaped from the Hanoi Hilton.”
    Rita shook her head against the Satan theory, then said, “Meanwhile, the doctor is telling me that Zeke had actually been dead for twelve minutes. The priest had already given him Extreme Unction.”
    “Okay then,” Valerie said. “That was an interesting trip down memory lane. On the bright side, that’s why I’m here. As soon as dad got home, they decided to have another kid.”
    Hank held up his glass yet again. “Another blessing. Here’s to life. And the Man Upstairs.”
    Leah’s mind drifted to the evening she had planned with Zeke. First a candlelight dinner she had prepped last night, then a massage, then a bubble bath with drinks, then…
    Having him spend the night was also a ploy so his folks could sneak over tonight and tomorrow to get his place ready for the party. The cleverness of their scheme made her smile. “I can’t wait to see Zeke’s face when he sees the home theater you got him.”
    “Oh, he’s going to love it,” Rita said. “You know how he loves movies. I wonder where he got that from?” She gave Hank a coy look.
    “Hey. There are worse things for a kid to be hooked on.” He looked at his drink with a raised eyebrow. “We really do need to cut ourselves off after this. We don’t need to be trying to set everything up half-drunk. I snuck by there earlier with the van and hid all the stuff in the guest room. You’ve got Zeke detail, right Leah?”
    “It’s a tough job but somebody’s got to do it. He won’t be there until seven tomorrow night.”
    “Perfect.” He held up his glass again. “Well, there is one more announcement I want to make, since we’re talking about movies. The deal on the business closed today. Hank’s Video is no more.”
    “Dad!” Valerie said. “That’s terrific!”
    Rita just looked at him and smiled. Leah could guess what was going through her mind.
    Hank had opened one small store in 1979, mostly because of a love of movies that ran in his family. They had never expected to get rich, just supplement his Army pension and disability payments. But fueled by Hank’s passion for movies and his military attention to detail, the store had grown into a chain. When Hank hit seventy last year, he and Rita had decided to sell, and use some of that hard-earned money to do all the things they