The Wright Way

Chapter 32 - The Wright Way

A moment after the knock on the door, I'm standing by it, listening. It's quiet outside. Sensing a movement behind me, I look back to find Joshua with a rifle in his hands. I have all but forgotten about his intentions to sneak firearms into the room, and it's a relief that he'd acted on that, likely while I was showering. He holds it as if he knows how to use it, too, which is more than I can say about myself. I look at him with newly found respect.

"Yes?" he says, moving to stand by the door. I move to the other side of it, looking around for something I could use as a weapon, but there's nothing save for the chair that I could perhaps swing like a club.

From behind the door comes the voice of Joshua's father. His pronunciation is not very sharp, so I have no idea what he's saying. Apparently, Joshua does understand, though, for he lowers the rifle and turns the door handle.

I wince, half-expecting for the door to be kicked open and for a bunch of white-clad people to barge in. Yet it only opens a bit, and Joshua looks out through the crack.

"Thank you," he says, accepting something with one hand while handing me the rifle with the other, apparently not wanting for his father to see it. "You did find enough?"

There's a grunt of confirmation, and then something that sounds suspiciously like 'get lost'.

"First thing tomorrow morning," Joshua says before shutting the door again. Then he turns and shows me a package wrapped in a few plastic bags.

"Let me introduce to you," he says, "our starting capital."

He walks over to the window, unwrapping the package. I watch him retrieve a few bundles of cash from the plastic bag and place them one next to another on the sill. His hands look ghostly pale in the moonlight.

I reach out and pick a bundle. It consists of twenty-dollars bills, perhaps a hundred of them judging by how thick the bundle is. Joshua picks another bundle and shows it to me. The number on the top bill is '100'.

"Holy crap," I say. "There're thousands here."

"All in all, should be about ten thousand." He nods and smiles and then starts wrapping the money back into the bag. "As you can see, I'm not the only one person in my family who likes to keep his cash at home."

"Keeping it is one thing, but giving it to you is something different. He must love you a great deal to lend you so much."

"Love has nothing to do with it." He gestures at me with the newly wrapped plastic bag before getting up and walking to his bed. "A little bit of blackmail works miracles." Bending, he places the money under the bed, and then sits down on the sheets, stretching.

I stare at him. "Are you saying you blackmailed a sick, old man?" I come over and stand next to him. "Seriously? How?"

"Just mentioned that I might start talking to people about his educational techniques and stuff."

I blink at him, the gears of my tired brain working slowly.

"Did you beat you or something?"

He frowns. "Beat me? Oh no. Daddy was never violent."

"Then what?" The room is warm, yet I feel chilled as the guesses come, overflowing my mind, with one of them looming dark and ominous over the rest. "Did he...molest you?"

He looks at me for a while, his face a pale oval in the dark.

"Define 'molest'?" he says at last.

"Oh no, Joshua," I say and then I sit next to him and draw him into a hug, equally surprising both of us.

The image of the man with the walkers gains an ominous tinge in my mind's eye. The way he looked at Joshua, the few words he used, his obvious distaste for our presence and the confusing unwillingness to express it out loud. When he saw Joshua, it wasn't love of affection that he felt. It was fear.