They Could Care Less

55: Time Has a Shovel and Plenty of Grounds to Dig

"How did you find me?" Thea asked and looked over at him with curiosity in the car.

"Heather told me," he answered as he drove onto the street where Zachary used to live.

"Oh, I forgot she still has that app," Thea said as Jackson parked outside a small little red house that reminded Thea of her home back in Texas. They got out of the car and started to make their way across the lawn to the door, the door was open and they heard noises coming from the inside and the backyard. Across the lawn there were scattered panels of wood, metals and other building gear. Jackson walked in first and Thea followed. They found Hussein in the kitchen along with some people Thea vaguely recognized from school.

"Oh, you're here!" Hussein exclaimed and smiled. "Don't look so sad, my man Zach wouldn't wanna see that! He was always happy, until his last breath! So don't make him come back from the dead to teach you a lesson about joy," Hussein said and continued to smile. Both Jackson and Thea forced their smiles as Hussein gave the other people in the room brief directions before he spoke to the latest arrivals.

"You two can start by going upstairs, Jackson can start by cleaning out his bedroom. Thea, you can take his office. There are already boxes in there, you just have to put his things in and tape the boxes up. We're donating most of his things to charity, but some we're keeping in a storage unit to honor him," Hussein told them and adjusted his baseball cap.

"It's nice seeing you two again," he added before he turned around and left.

Thea searched for his office and found it instantly. She walked inside and looked around, the room was tiny with a desk, chair, a few boxes and shelves. Thea took a deep breath before she started with the desk. She pulled out the drawers and threw away useless receipts. She pulled out drawer after drawer and either put things into boxes or threw them away. She got to the last drawer and saw some pill jars. She read the titles quickly before she threw them away, it was too late for those. Underneath the jars was a envelope. Thea was about to throw it away too when she felt something rock solid inside. She frowned as she opened it up and looked inside. Her mouth opened as she pulled her necklace out, the necklace she had thrown at Dr. Derryck over a year ago... The necklace she had been so stupid to throw and never took back. And it was finally back in her hands again. Thea teared up as she noticed a few papers in the envelope. She sat down and pulled them to see what they were, and before she knew it, she was reading his dark childhood.

Growing up poor never bothered me as a young innocent child in Africa, because there were no rich there. There we were equal because we had all been born into lives with simliar conditions that there was no bragging or fighting, we were one big family as a village. That was of course before they came to blow up our homes.

I had just turned nine, and I remember waking up one night to the sound of people screaming and airplanes flying ahead of us, though I didn't even know what an airplane was back then. My mother rushed me and my brother out of our home quickly with two bags of food, a bit of gold and memories. She held her hands as we ran away from them, the people who wanted to destroy us. We did our very best to escape and I remember being so young and uneducated that I only ran along without asking any questions. The bombs and troops seemed to get closer as we only ran faster. I saw the people who had loved me and cared for me, one by one die as we only kept running. I thought, maybe they were just sleeping and would be up when we came back. But none of those things ever happened, I never went back and they never woke up.

We got to a forest by dawn and we decided to rest there. Our legs were hurting and my brother had multiple blisters on his feet, I went to sleep as my mother helped heal my brother's wounds. The next morning I woke up and saw that my mother was already up cooking breakfast for us. We ate our tiny portions of breakfast without complaints because me and my brother both sensed that something was terribly wrong. We were right, there was something wrong but we never knew how badly it was. When we were done we put the fire out and continued to blindly walk through the forest in the hopes of getting to the city where we could find new safety. We wandered during the days with the frying hot sun high on the sky and little water, and during the nights we slept with leaves on top of us as we shivered. The one that suffered the least was me, because I was young, didn't understand things and could do nothing to help. A terrible fever had hit my brother our tenth day wandering in forests and keeping away from roads in case they would ever find us and kill us. My mother was worried sick as she did what she could to heal him with the few supplies we had, but nothing seemed to help. It got so bad that he would have to be carried by my exhausted mother and I feared that they would both die.