Fast Friends

“Tammy, are you sure I can't help with anything?”
Amy’s voice brought Tammy’s attention up from the grazing board she was finishing. “Hmm, how about some more of that chardonnay?”
Amy grabbed the bottle from the ice bucket and located Tammy’s wine glass among the chaos on the kitchen island. She raised her eyebrows at Tammy. “A glass, or enough that you have a glass when we take everything to the dining room?”
Tammy rolled her eyes and touched her chest in mock indignation. 
Amy poured two fingers of wine, then teasingly pulled the bottle away and raised her eyebrows at Tammy--who shook at rolled up piece of prosciutto at her. Amy laughed and teased, pouring another drop or two into the glass. "You can put your meat away, lady, it doesn't work for John; it certainly won't work for you either."
She topped off the wine. 

“Okay, I am going to go check on the guys and the kabobs, make sure that they haven’t gotten distracted by something nerdy, and forgotten they are cooking. Let me know when you are ready for me to help transport, and I will have John help me set up for cards.”
“Oh, you’re the best, Amy.” Meat on the grill was always such a mixed bag for her. She loved to eat it, but the smell always reminded her of the burn victims she had seen during her clinicals.
Amy slid out of the room like a whisper. Tammy stopped her preparations for a moment to watch her go. She and Kenneth moved into this house six months ago. Within an hour of the moving truck driving off, the doorbell rang. By the time she made it down the stairs to the front door, no one was there. Just a box with a note taped to the top. 
I am sure you are hungry, and who wants to cook after moving? Just set the box back on the porch and text when you are done, and we will collect it. Do not worry about washing anything. After you are settled in, we can get acquainted. Until then, WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD. Amy and John Park. 
The note ended with a phone number, a house number, and a cute little smiley face drawing. Opening the box, a second note listed all of the ingredients in the pasta dish contained in the thermal bag. The second container held pre-cut ingredients for a simple salad, oil and vinegar, two bottles of sparkling water, garlic bread, a piece of carrot cake, and a piece of peach cobbler—along with plates, silverware, glasses, and condiments. 
Looking over her shoulder, Kenneth said, “Do they not think we have plates?”
She remembered tearing up while she explained. “No, they know we likely haven’t unpacked and didn’t want their gift to make more work.”
“Okay, Tam, but we aren’t going to really give the dishes back dirty, are we?”
“That is exactly what we are going to do. Kenneth, we have moved five times in ten years. This is the kindest gesture anyone has ever offered as a welcome. They didn’t pop up and expect to be entertained; they didn’t make more work for me. They just provided comfort with no expectation. It would be rude not to accept it for what it is.”
In the following months, she and Amy have become close friends. The guys get along fine, but she and Amy are nearly inseparable. 
Their friendship fit so well. They were all in their forties, and neither couple had ever had children. Tammy was a nurse, Amy was a social worker, John was a paramedic, and Kenneth was a rescue diver. She could hardly believe how fast they all got comfortable with one another. With Kenneth’s job being so transient, they rarely stayed anywhere too long, and it was so hard to make friends without the usual social anchors of kids and church.
Tammy took another drink of her wine and gathered up the grazing boards. She grabbed a grazing board and her wine; she could send Amy back for the second board. Time to start game night for real. They were playing spades tonight; last week at Amy’s, it was Settlers of Catan, and the guys had cleaned house. She was ready for some payback.
She rounded the corner from the kitchen into the dining room. There was a sliding glass door that led out onto the sunroom. and the patio where the guys set up shop to grill some kabobs. She loved this part of the house, with the high ceilings and detailed carpentry. It was perfect for her. Lights of natural light between the two big windows and the door to the sunroom. Dark walnut crown molding and matching chair rail. It spoke to her the moment she laid eyes on it.
She tried twice, unsuccessfully, to lay her board down on the sideboard with one hand, before finally giving up and setting her wine down first. Laughing at herself, she stepped toward the door to call out for everyone to come in.

Amy was in the sunroom and headed her way already. John was close behind her with a tray of kebabs, and Kenneth was closing the lid on the grill out on the patio beyond the exterior door. But who was that in the backyard with him?

 Tammy squinted against the light, thinking it must have been a trick of some sort. But no, there was another man in the yard beyond the concrete pad where the grill was set up. He wore a purple robe of some sort. Tall, dark-skinned, with locs that nearly reached the ground.
“Kenneth, who is that?” She called out to him.
He didn’t answer; he couldn’t hear her from this far away. But when she looked back, the man wasn’t alone. On either side of him, two men appeared, both shirtless, in athletic shorts and sneakers. She was still trying to make sense of the scene when the blond man on the left raised a big hammer up to his right shoulder, then pointed toward the house with his other hand. The man in the robe lifted his arms high in the air, and some kind of ball appeared between his hands.
Amy turned to see what Tammy was looking at and started screaming.
“Get down, get down now.” 
Amy dropped to her knees and held her hands up in the air toward the patio right as the explosion hit. A wave of hot air and debris blasted Tammy off her feet. The roar of wind mixed with the crunch of breaking glass and splintering wood as the sunroom was leveled by some kind of blast.
Tammy lay on her side, her back against the wall. Her head was ringing, and there was a searing pain in her left shoulder. She tried to turn her head to see what was causing the pain and couldn’t. There was something propped against the side of her head. 
She shifted her body and screamed from the pain in her shoulder. She cast her eyes a little to the left. A wedge of glass, still attached to a piece of broken window frame, was lodged in her shoulder. It was the piece of window frame that kept her from turning her head; every time she did, it pushed the glass further into her shoulder.
She cried out, “Kenny, baby, help, it hurts so bad.”
She opened her eyes despite the pain. Amy was in the middle of the pile of debris that used to be her sunroom. There was some kind of fire behind her, no, not behind her. Surrounding her. Tammy tried to clear her head. She squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again. But the scene was the same. Amy stood in the pile of rubble. Her hands in the air. She was screaming something that Tammy couldn’t understand. Fire shot toward her from outside the broken walls and broke around her like a wave around a rock.
The burning meat smell of the BBQ was everywhere now, and she wretched from the nausea and pain. She couldn’t see John, or Kenneth. But there was something, no someone, on the ground between Amy, and where Tammy lay bleeding.
Her heart dropped, and the pain, the fire, the fear, and confusion all dropped away as the realization of what she was seeing dawned on her. An arm stuck out of the bloody mess of half-burned clothing on the floor. A muscular arm—with a Bart Simpson tattoo on the forearm. That tattoo belonged to the man she loved.
What she couldn’t understand was the charred pile of exposed bones and tissue that arm was still tenuously attached to. That couldn’t be the man she loved, because whoever that was had sustained injuries that you cannot survive. She was an obstetrics nurse, but she didn’t have to specialize in emergency medicine or trauma nursing to know that you cannot be lying face down on the ground with your ribs and spine exposed and your lungs a few feet away and still survive.
The sound of screaming broke her focus on the destroyed body that somehow had the same tattoo as her husband. The man in the robe was charging in toward Amy. Small streaks of fire shot out from the man’s hand, but were deflected somehow, before they hit her. She was waving her hand around, and the spheres were shooting off in different directions. Amy was screaming in defiance as the man got closer and the balls of flame came faster.
Beyond Amy, and the hooded man, Tammy could see John fighting the other two men. Both of them had hammers, and John danced across the yard like a ballet dancer trying to keep away from them. He twirled and jumped. With every movement, he narrowly missed a swing from one of the giant hammers. The blond man darted in low and swung for his legs, while the dark-haired one spun backhand blow toward his head. John jumped the low sweeping blow, but even from her spot on the floor Tammy could see the high blow was going to connect with John’s head. She tried to scream but nothing came out. A fireball blasted the brown-haired man in the chest, pushing him back several feet.
Tammy looked back to Amy in time to see her deflect several of the fireballs back toward the hooded man. As he stumbled back toward where the dark-haired man was on a knee recovering from being struck Amy swung her arm through the air like she was throwing a sidearm pitch. At first nothing happened, then as the hooded man and dark haired man both gained their feet Tammy’s Nissan Sentra came flying across the yard. Not driven or rolling,but flying sideways like it had been tossed by a giant. The front bumper hit the hooded man and knocked him to the dirt with an ugly thud. The dark haired man got his hammer up, holding it vertically like a staff in two hands as the car crashed into him. He was thrown out of Tammy’s field of vision and her car slammed to the ground.
Amy came running toward her, She reached for her hand, paused and examined the glass sticking out of her shoulder. She mouthed, “I am so sorry.” And yanked the glass by the broken bit of window frame. The pain was excruciating. Amy spit in her hand and rubbed it across the bleeding wound and whispered,, “Il tocca dell’ angelo.”
Tammy stared in horror as the wound closed itself. Amy did not wait to see if she was okay, but yanked her to her feet.
 John came running toward them, screaming.
“Go, go, get to the Bellow.”
Tammy had no idea what that meant, but Amy dragged her out of her dining room and through the kitchen out the back door, before she could ask. She heard John running behind them. Amy was nearly carrying her as they ran. How can she be this strong? Tammy thought.   What happened to her car? Was it a tornado?
They approached Amy’s garage; the big door was down, and Tammy thought they were going to run right into it. But Amy did something with her hand, yelled a word that Tammy didn’t know, and the garage door crumpled like a wad of notebook paper and flew out over their yard. 
She dragged Tammy into the garage, pulled an aging and faded Led Zeppelin, Houses of the Holy, tapestry off the wall, and revealed a giant circle painted there. It had multiple concentric rings and letters and numbers in sequences that made no sense to Tammy. They turned to face the garage opening. John was standing in the driveway. The blonde man with the hammer was stalking up the drive toward them, his big hammer spinning like a baton in front of him as he did.
Amy pulled a terrifying-looking axe from the wall and yelled for John. He held out his hand, and the axe floated on a direct path from her hand to his.
“John, come on.” Amy implored him.
“Go, I will see you at home, or I will see you in the divine. But you have to get her safe.”
Amy grabbed her uninjured left arm and held it tight. “Hang on Tam, this is going to suck.”
Tammy looked at her in disbelief. “Amy, what the fuck?”
Amy reached out and put her hand in the center of the circle on the wall, and the world began to blur. The last thing Tammy saw before she lost all form, and thought was a rush of fire tearing across the yard and enveloping John.