Present time...

    It's just another day, Dunbar thought as his feet pounded the sidewalk of Main Street. His side had gradually recovered over the last few days; he supposed his previous discomfort had been the persistent result of his flight's turbulence. He had not yet begun to feel wholly as if he was back to his usual self — like the Mack truck his mother built him to be — but he was getting there, and that counted for something.

    As Dunbar licked his own wounds, he had also spent the majority of the previous three days at the assistance of Cosima's recovery.

    The day of the robbery, the siblings sacrificed nearly four hours of their lives at the police station for questioning. For being severely traumatized by the ordeal, Cosima's memory was as fine-tuned as ever. She described the culprits as two men. The first was white, mid-thirties, six-feet, two-hundred pounds, and dark hair; the other Hispanic, late-twenties, maybe five-foot-ten, around one-seventy, and also dark hair.

    Afterwards, Cosima was sent to the hospital. Much like the airport had been on Dunbar's arrival, the hospital was inordinately congested. Many of them suffered from the sickness, with the occasional broken bone or domiciliary accident. The siblings sat in the waiting room with their shirt collars pulled over their faces; the air was thick with the bacteria, mucus and puss that awaiting patients practically oozed from their orifices. Dunbar was sure that the man beside him would actually cough up a lung. An old woman had even died in the waiting room, a few rows away from Dunbar and Cosima. That was their cue to leave.

    Dunbar and Cosima had been allowed to return to their mother's house that night, though, not without a police escort. A cruiser parked in front of the house until the following morning, so as to dissuade the culprits from returning for more of their mother's possessions.

    Despite the cruiser, Cosima refused to sleep. Instead, she sat on the couch with a switchblade in her breast pocket. Dunbar had tried to assure her that she would not need it. After awhile of wasting his energy on deaf ears, he decided he would do something productive. Until the morning sun began to peak over the horizon, Dunbar dedicated himself to dressing Cosima's wounds. After the swelling reduced, none of them had been particularly bad; at least, not enough for stitches to be deemed a necessity.

    The next morning was spent assessing the damage. The missing items and the broken window of the front door provided the most immediate headaches. Then there was also the fact that the thieves — who had not yet been identified by the police, even with Cosima's spot-on descriptions — spared nothing in their rampage through the house. The family photos that once lined the walls of the main hallway had been ripped from their hooks, leaving fragments of shattered glass lodged in the crevices of the hardwood floor. In the living room, there was a fist-sized hole deep enough to expose the beams inside the wall. Many of the porcelain accoutrements of the bathrooms had been cracked or otherwise destroyed. The thieves had taken Tracey's collection of fine china as well; the rest of the dishes they shattered across the kitchen's linoleum tiles.

    Tracey's funeral was the afternoon following the assessment. Everything continued as planned, except for a few small details, such as the fact that the company Cosima contracted to provide the floral arrangments refused their services due too not receiving a payment in advance. Thankfully, a friend of Tracey's, who had cultivated an expansive garden in his backyard over the years, allowed Dunbar to take a few dozen lillies for Tracey's funeral. Dunbar promised to repay him for the favor. The list of compensations only grew as Dunbar was notified by the funeral home that the organist had not received payment, and neither had the collectors of two other service fees. The providers of these services, however, had been more sympathetic toward Dunbar and Cosima's situation. They requested half of the payment on the day of the funeral, and the other half within the following week. Dunbar, who was already strapped for cash, managed to provide a little more than half of the payments on the day of the funeral in hopes of proving that he was good for it. The providers did not seem to mind.

    Dunbar stopped at a street corner on the far east end of Main Street. It was a different scene than the majority of the commerce of the street, with all of the usual restaurants, boutiques, and "high-end" shopping centers. This end was dingier. The store fronts were not as colorful and inviting. There were more bars and seedy apartment complexes than there were deluxe outlets and cafes serving six-dollar coffees. There also seemed to be at least three liquor stores every few miles. But none of that was what Dunbar struggled to get there for — "struggled" in that Dunbar's taxi driver refused to drive him any further than ten blocks outside of East Main Street, muttering something about having been robbed once, and all but physically removed Dunbar from the cab; thus, Dunbar walked.

    Dunbar had came all that way for a small shop crammed in between a bar and a defunct strip club. The shop's plate-glass store front advertised items that Dunbar thought were the epitome of the old saying, "One man's trash is another man's treasure." Over the entrance, a blue neon sign buzzed with the words Press Play Pawn and Loan. Just beneath that was another neon sign, flashing red, that screamed in the intensity of its brightness that the shop was open.

    Dunbar headed for the pawn shop with a duffel bag hoisted over his shoulder. It was heavy, but nothing he could not handle. Physically, at least. Emotionally was a different story.

    Although he had only known the man for the first six years of his life, Dunbar had a strong connection with his grandfather.  The two of them collectively served a little under fifty years of service in the U.S. army. What his grandfather called his "glory days" were spent hurling frags in the mountains of North Korea, and in the trenches of Vietnam's dense forests amongst a hailstorm of machine gun fire in the 1950s. Dunbar's grandfather kept many of his pistols and knives from his tours in a storage locker, and left much of the vast collection to Dunbar in his will. The combined weight of the weaponry pulled on Dunbar's shoulder.

    Concerned that the money from pawning his grandfather's collection would not suffice in paying the rest of the debt owned to the funerary service providers, Dunbar had taken the liberty of adding a couple of his own into the bag. Among them was his M11; the pistol that had accompanied him on nearly every one of his numerous deployments. He had not thought that he could part with it, but in light of recent events, he had no other choice.

    Much to Dunbar's initial refusal, Cosima asserted that she would give him half of her upcoming paycheck to, hopefully, get a few of the more sentimental pieces of the collection back. Cosima worked in real estate. Her paychecks did not have as many zeros as a check to an agent that handled property in, say, Beverly Hills, but she made quite a pretty penny.

    Dunbar looked twice before crossing the street, despite how fruitless the caution seemed; the whole strip was strangely vacant. After the horrors he and Cosima witnessed in the waiting room of Jackson-Aimes Memorial Hospital, he thought that maybe everyone was holed up in their homes clutching their rosaries and Robitussin with their little rabbit-ear television sets focused on the national news, waiting out the sickness like it was the end of the goddamn world.

    A loud bell clanged over the doorway as Dunbar entered Press Play Pawn and Loan. A cloud of sickeningly sweet incense and floral potpourri laid siege to Dunbar's airways. He sneezed violently.

    "Good afternoon, sir," chimed a raspy, slightly high-pitched voice of a man outside of Dunbar's field of vision.

    Dunbar glanced around the cramped shop. He was taller than the shelves forming aisles on the shop's floor. On some of the shelves he could makeout things as useless as tapeless VHS tapes, abandoned remote controls, and a cluncky cell phone that paid homage to the '80s. Every wall was lined with some used product or another. On the back-most wall, behind the glass check-out counter housing mostly tarnished gold chains and gaudy rings, were brackets piled with pawned firearms, knives, and few deactivated grenades. The other three walls were lined with shelves of thousands of DVD players, CDs, musical instruments, computer parts, televisions, and stereo systems.

    The graying scalp of a gaunt, pale man appeared from a door behind the counter. He had a snaggle-toothed smile pronounced by buggy blue eyes and laugh lines all over his face. He had to have been at least fifty. He was fairly short, too, Dunbar noticed, as the counter reached halfway up his stomach. He looked to be as harmless as a gnat.

    Dunbar approached the counter. The matted, brown carpet  — whether it was manufactured that shade or developed it from years of uncleanliness was uncertain —  crunched beneath his feet.

    He did not know whether or not he should place the heavy duffel bag on the counter, concerned that it may crack the glass, until the small man beckoned him to do so. He could hear a faint crack as he did, and waited for a spider-web series of splits to appear in the glass before the explosion that would cause it to cave in, raining shards all over the jewelry display inside of it. After a moment, nothing happened. He relaxed.

    "I'm Norman Rogers, owner of this fine establishment," the small man smiled broadly as he dragged a hand of arthritic fingers across his scalp to smooth his graying comb-over. "What can I do for you today, sir?"

    'Fine establishment' is debatable, Dunbar thought. "I need to pawn a collection of weaponry from the Vietnam, Korean, and Middle-Eastern wars. You're the only pawn shop in the area, so I'm trusting that you won't swindle me," Dunbar spoke lowly, a slight squint in his eyes. Intimidation was his forte, and he was prepared to break out his coercion arsenial if need be.

    "Never swindle, never swindle," Norman laughed nervously. "I run an honest business, hence why this ole pawn shop has been in business for thirty years."

    Dunbar began to unzipped the duffel bag, but Norman's hands had already pludged inside before the zipper had reached half-way.

    Dunbar retracted his hands, and let the man do his job.

    The first gun was Dunbar's M11. He hated the idea of pawning that gun more than he hated the assholes who robbed his mother's house and beat Cosima to a pulp... Well, not really, but he contemplated it. He also hated the way in which Norman handled the gun. He carelessly yanked the magazine off, checking to make sure the gun was not loaded, to which Dunbar scoffed; of course he would never leave the gun loaded, unless he was in the Afghan desert shooting at the Taliban. Norman then shoved the magazine back on, and callously flipped the gun over to and fro, examining every minute detail.

    Dunbar sighed harshly and drummed his fingers on the glass. After a while his eyes began to wander. There was a nice rifle on the bracket just behind Norman's head. He wondered what idiot would have pawned a brand new Weatherby and left it there to be sold for far less than the gun was worth. The day that Dunbar accepted an undervalued price for anything in his duffel bag is the day that the Taliban surrender and adopt the U.S. flag. In other words, it's never going to happen.

    Just beside the Weatherby, veiled in a thin cloak of dust, was an enlarged photo of a very large woman. She was as pale-skinned as Norman, and Dunbar thought it might have been because she rarely saw the sunlight; after all, according to her extremely rotund stature, he imagined that she would not fit through the average doorway. Her hair was a short, shaggy shit-color that looked, even through the film of dust, like it was greasy from neglect. Dunbar counted four "chins" — rather, fatty flaps — on her neck. Despite her downfalls, she had pretty eyes. They were a very pale shade of green than Dunbar had never seen before. He wondered who she was.

    As Dunbar studied her face, Norman happened to glance at the seasoned soldier. He followed the illusory trail mapped by Dunbar's gaze up to the photo of the woman, then sighed.

    "That's Darla," Norman said.

    Dunbar cast his eyes on Norman, who was still toying with the M11 in his hands.

    "My wife," Norman clarified. "She died of diabetes complications six years ago."

    "I'm sorry," said Dunbar. He had not known what else to say, so he was partially glad that an apology was the established response to hearing personal tragedies.

    "No need," Norman said, before his voice fell into a whisper, "she was a real mean broad. Let me tell you, if you pissed her off, she'd wait until you went to sleep, and then you'd wake up gasping for air with her sitting on your chest."

    Dunbar choked back a chuckle. He did not know if he should laugh or pity the man.

    "Funny thing," Norman added, his voice still maintaing a whisper, "when we met in high school, she was only eighty pounds."

    That time, Dunbar did laugh. Loudly.

    After a moment, Norman joined him. The irony was irrefutable.

    "Hey, man," Dunbar said, the remnants of laughter still fluctuating his tone, "why were you whispering? There's only the two of us here, right?"

    "No," Norman asserted. His snaggled-toothed smile resolved into a solemn stare.

    Dunbar glanced around momentarily. As far as he could see, there was no one, despite Norman's ominous gaze suggesting otherwise.

    Norman's voice was shaken with nerves. "I swear to Jesus, Mother Teresa, and Mary... Darla haunts me."

    Dunbar stared at him for a few seconds, though, it felt much longer. He imagined Norman having lost his mind somewhere in all of yesteryear's "treasures" that he bought, priced, a tossed onto the saleroom floor in the heaps of other crap. Dunbar even thought of some old collector wandering into the shop and Norman talking them into purchasing the inoperative mind. But Dunbar concluded that Norman could not have been serious, so he chuckled.

    "You're a funny man, Norman."

    Norman blinked with an expression as blank as a canvas. "I'm serious."

    Dunbar's face fell. He had half a mind to grab his duffel bag and flee like a bat out of hell from Press Play Pawn and Loan and its delusional owner. He was just about to act on that, zipping the duffel bag and throwing it over his shoulder, when, as quick as theives, the door of the pawn shop burst open with a noisy clang from the bell.

    Two masked men dressed in black from head to toe, with small guns held with a certain tightness in their gloved hands, barged into the shop, knocking shelves off of the walls and stacks of worthless junk all across the matted carpet.

    "Put your fuckin' hands were we can see 'em, Blacky!" the taller of the two shouted, his pink lips blooming from the hole in his ski mask.

    Dunbar, with a bright shock of surprise, lifted his hands off of the glass counter. His bag dropped to the floor with a loud thud.

    "You do the same fuckin' thing, Comb-Over!" the masked assailant added, waving the small gun wildly in the air.

    "Oh, Jesus Christ, we're gonna get shot!" Norman screamed in a pitch that was characteristic of a prepubescent girl.

    As unfortunate as the past couple of weeks have been — from getting shot, to his mother dying, to her house getting robbed and his sister being beaten like a goddamn pinata, and now being held at gunpoint in a shitty pawn shot with a lunatic and the so-called ghost of his dead wife —  the only thing Dubar could think of was that, despite never having been a smoker, he really needed a cigarette.