Burning the Bridge--Part 1

"Wake up."

What?

"Wake up," I heard Joanna say. "We have to go now."

I got up out of the bed and asked her where we were going. She said we had buisness to do in the city. I looked at the clock. 4:45 am. What buisness could we have? What buisness had we been doing every night? Why didn't I just go home? All these questions were racing through my mind as I pulled myself off of my makeshift bed and got dressed. I stumbled out to the car and pulled it around to the door. I watched at Shawn walked pregnant Joanna out to the car and set her in the front seat.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"Just drive west on 70" Shawn said.

I drove west until I drove into the city, then Joanna gave me directions to a house. I drove through the run down neighborhood until I came to the white house on the corner. They got out, went in, and came out with nothing. Or at least nothing that I could see. I drove away, and joanna directed me to go to a shopping plaza in the center of town.

When she walked out into the parking lot, she was broke. When she came back, she had well over fifty dollars. Some of you may have already figured out what's going on here, some of you haven't. But at that time, I really had no idea. For the sake of the G rating on this site, I am not even going to say exactly what happened, but I'm sure you can connect the dots.

We drove out of there and went back to the house. Repeated the process again, and I still had no idea what was going on.

"How long until your baby is due?" I asked Joanna.

"About a week," She replied.

Seems to me she was wrong, as she went into labor two days later. What caused this, I don't know.

Joanna told Shawn that she didn't want him there when the baby was born, the reasons being so distorted that even I couldn't figure them out.

So we sat back at the apartment with Shawn's brother and his girlfriend. I played Halo 2 while they cleaned the house.

I suddenly realized that something was missing. Malcom, Joanna's other son. He was only about three years old, and had a tendancy to disappear. I wandered out into the hallway and checked the front parking lot.

"Where the-" Suddenly and explosion ripped through the night silence. I spun around in the direction of the noise. The gas station across the street was on fire! "Good lord!" I screamed. I ran back into the apartment building and nearly knocked Malcolm down on my way through.

"What wrong?" He inquired.

I grabbed his hand and pounded on the apartment door. "What?!" Shawn screamed.

"Didn't you hear that? Get out of there!"

The three of them came bounding through the door.

"What's going on?" Shawn demanded.

"The Sunoco just went nuclear!" I yelled, as I drug Malcolm down toward the opposite door. They followed me out into the front of the apartment complex and joined the other residents. The sound of fire engines came toward us from far off in the distance.

"Joanna had the baby," Shawn told me. "It's a boy."

"Great," I said. "Like she needs another baby."

...

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