Free Untaken by J.E. Anckorn

but I reckoned the local law enforcement boys had bigger things to worry about than Dad’s building projects.
    I was still beat from the day before. My muscles were stiff, and the blisters on my hands made it hard for me to hold the hammer. I was trying my best to help Dad, but with him standing over me, I was liable to drop things, to hammer nails in crooked and strip screws at the best of times.
    “Make yourself useful and go hunt up some supplies. Food. That kind of shit,” he told me as I served the two of us lunch—my specialty: fried eggs in ketchup.
    “I could go down to the corner store,” I said, “but Shaw’s is closed. I heard Mr. Kauffmann telling Mr. Leddy. Everyone went crazy down there and smashed the place up.”
    Dad rolled his eyes. “I don’t mean the stores. Use your head, Brandon. Look in the houses. Start next door with them lousy Biedermanns. Lots of people split town in a hurry. It’ll be easy pickings if we move now before them other fools think of it.”
    “Isn’t that kind of…stealing?” I pictured Lou in his big police cruiser. Lifting a bottle of sauce from the corner store was one thing, but breaking and entering was serious.
    “In a survival situation, you do what you can to feed you and yours,” Dad stated. “You think when those bastards attack, things like taking a few tins of franks’n’beans will mean shit?”
    I shook my head.
    “But having that food could mean the difference between life and death for us.”
    I could see the truth in that, but a prickle of gooseflesh crept down my spine as I hopped the fence between our yard and the Biedermann’s, then snuck between their neatly clipped bushes to the backyard.
    A dumb-looking garden gnome grinned at me from the patio. I hefted it by its pointy hat and let the sliding door have it.
    With the sound of Dad’s power saw chomping through timber, I didn’t think anyone had heard the glass break, but all the same, I made myself wait five long, jittery minutes before stooping through the shattered panel.
    Even though the Biedermanns had left in a rush, their house seemed so clean and ordered compared to ours. For the first time, I wondered if maybe Grammy hadn’t been right about Dad’s housekeeping. I mean, our house was great, but there always seemed to be kind of an uncomfortable feeling in there. Like, no matter how many windows you opened, you could never quite get enough light in. I don’t know if that feeling came from the fridge that was always empty but for beers and dried-up spills, or the floors that would never quite come clean, or something that came from Dad himself, who often seemed surrounded by some sort of hot, dark energy that made my skin prickle.
    The Biedermann’s was more like Grammy’s place. Everything clean. Pictures on the walls with honest-to-god frames around them, instead of tacked up magazine pages showing cars or chicks with their titties out—which was the kind of art Dad favored.
    There were photos, too. Tom and Louise and their two dopey kids posing together against cheesy photographers’ backdrops, or just out and about together, on vacation, or in the park. There weren’t any photos like that in our house. Just the old ones of Mom that I wasn’t supposed to see, and one of me taken at school a few years back, before Dad said they were a waste of money when he could see my face any old day just by looking at me.
    Besides, what would our photographs have shown anyhow? Dad driving off in his truck to go hunting with his buddies? Me trying to take the spliff from between his fingers when he nodded off smoking?
    I felt guilty for thinking that way. I didn’t want to be like one of those dumb Biedermanns. Dad was smarter than any of them—you could tell that just by looking at all the stuff they’d left behind when they ran away. Sure, some of the closets were empty, and a lot of the good food was gone, but there was plenty left behind. Rich pickings.
    They’d split with no real