Quarantine

Baden Sanders had watched the old man run down Main Street yelling for help. She was glad that the cop had gone up to him. She didn’t like messing with situations like that. She liked spending time alone most of the time. She spent some time with her younger sister Adalynn, but since she lived with her uncle now closer to the high school, she didn’t see Adalynn as much.

Living with her uncle was something she liked much more than with her parents. There was a little more freedom with her Uncle Thomas Harlan when it came to spending time with friends. Another great thing was Baden’s uncle wasn’t down her back all the time about something like homework all the time. He would just remind her to do it, and that was that. Baden either did it or failed.

She spotted her uncle entering Avery’s Kitchen. It seemed like a ritual for him. He would stop in every day on his way to work at the candy factory just to say hi to Four Trees’s mom. Baden was always curious about that nickname as much as she was about the man everyone called Grim who was standing outside with a cigarette in his hand. He was in his twenties and looked like he had lived in harsher environments than the normal old Four Trees. She wondered what he had seen in his life.

She took a step to go talk to him, but stopped herself. Why would she talk to a short-order cook that was in his twenties when she was just sixteen? Baden just found him interesting, and something that didn’t quite belong in this small town. She wanted to know where he had been and what it was like out of this small town.

There were rumors about him like he was the actual Grim Reaper who took the souls of the dead. Then there was one that was less common than the last one; he was some kind of killer hiding out in his hometown. That later got tossed aside by most of the teachers and the people that grew up with him. Most didn’t really like him, but he usually just minded his own business.

Baden looked away when he caught her staring at him. Grim placed the cigarette between his lips and sucked in the last of it. He smashed the end of it on the wall and looked at the girl staring at him.

He had seen her in the diner a few times, but he didn’t know her. Grim would be an idiot if he didn’t know why she was staring at him. Most of the younger kids who didn’t really know him did. He knew that he stood out in the crowd in some fashion. He always had. He wasn’t a football guy or a baseball player like most of the guys in high school. The only thing he did enjoy in this town was hunting, and that was something he had acquired from living in Alaska.

Devon wasn’t one to want the attention he got, but he was a guy who got that attention from the small town who knew him. Most didn’t know what to think about him. He couldn’t blame them either. He sometimes didn’t know what to think about himself too.

He walked inside to see Thomas Harlan already there to talk to Ramona. He was a constant sight at this time of day. Thomas had made it clear that he considered Ramona as a friend and maybe something more than that. Devon wasn’t sure about it and barely gave any thought to that although it did cross his mind when he saw Thomas.

Devon was more curious about the old man from earlier. He just didn’t know what to think about that. It was odd, and a little out of the ordinary. In the small town of Four Trees, Grim was going to hear all the gossip about it and ten or more versions of that story from people who wasn’t even there by the end of the day.

There was a smile on Big Rudy’s face when Devon pulled on his apron. “You’re finally back,” he said with a lot of excitement. “How was that cancer-stick?”

“Good enough to make me crave another, Rudy. Today is gonna be a long one,” Grim said. He didn’t know how right he was.

Grim didn’t know how right he was as he walked out of the diner. He had heard everyone talking about the old man. Only a few of the people got it right, but the rest changed the story either because they didn’t know the full story or to make it more exciting. That bothered him more than anything. The old man was probably just having a hallucination and didn’t look like he was a threat to anyone when he saw him running down the street asking for help.