X~&~O

X & O

by - A.R. Dash

Prologue:

The loud banging caused Kevin to jerk up out of his sleep.

The thumping in his head felt like sledgehammers striking his temples over and over again. With both of his hands Kevin reached up for the sides of his head to try to massage away the pounding headache. The night before he had clearly had too much to drink. By far, this was the worst hangover this was the worst hangover ever. He had to admit to himself that his drinking problem had spiraled out of control.

The next wave of pounding made Kevin open his eyes.

'Thump!—Thump!—Thump!'

He looked around the room.

'Thump! Thump! Thump!'

His eyes touched everything.

They stop at the door.

The pounding wasn’t inside of his head, it was coming from the other side of his room door.

Kevin looked towards his nightstand at the digital clock.

‘6:13am’

"What the Fuck" He thought to himself.

A burning anger began to rise with-in him. He wondered who in their right mind had the audacity to be pounding on his door so early in the morning.

Ready to go to war, he grabbed his pair of glasses that sat next to the clock and slammed them on his face.

The door echoed.

“Thump!--Thump!—Thump!”

Kevin flung the sheets off of his legs and jumped up from the bed.

He was mad at the world.

With four long and angry steps, he charged towards the door ready to let whoever was on the other side have a not so nice piece of his mind.

He grabbed the doorknob and gave it a strong twist and in the mist of his anger he realized that the door was not locked.

Whomever it was on the other side of the door could have just walked in; or anybody could have just walked in for that matter.

Kevin had to slow down with the drinking. And he knew it: but he couldn’t think about that at the moment.

He had to find out who was on the other side of the door.

With a tight grip on the door knob, He snatched the door open with almost enough force to pull the door off its hinges.

Kevin’s eyes widened at the sight of the gun that was being raised towards his face.

Kevin took a deep breath.

The gun didn’t stop coming up until it had reached its target. Kevin’s face.

Just inches away from his nose.

Kevin had never let go of the door knob. His hand tightened around it.

In a haunting voice, the man holding the weapon spoke.

“If my daughter dies, so do you Kevin.”

The man holding the gun had death in his eyes.

Kevin swallowed what felt like a lump of clay but he wasn’t afraid.

Slowly, the gunman began to back away but he never stopped pointing the weapon at Kevin’s face.

The gunman’s voice echoed with danger.

“Today is Wednesday. You have one week to make a decision.”

Suddenly, he stopped with his backwards walking and turned his head to the left as if he had heard something. One of Kevin’s neighbors opened their room door and stuck their head out into the hallway. The gunman stuffed the weapon into his jacket pocket then spun on his heels and walked away. But then he turned his attention back to Kevin.

“If you don’t save my daughter, not even God himself will be able to save you.”

His eyes burned with seriousness as he spun around to walk away.

“Do the right thing Kevin.”

The gunman spat over his shoulder.

Kevin watched him until he was no longer in sight. As the threat disappeared, the neighbor looked at Kevin and then shut his door as if he didn’t see anything.

Kevin stood there clung to his doorknob with a twisted thought. All Kevin could think of was how bad he wished that the shoe was on the other foot. He so desperately wished that it was him who was pointing the gun at the man instead of the other way around. There wasn’t a second thought in Kevin’s mind. He was certain that if he was the one holding the gun, the man would have been as good as dead.

Kevin couldn’t help but to scream.

“AHHHHH!!!”

With brute force, he slammed the door shut. Once he was safely back inside of his room, he let his back fall against the door, and he slid down the door until his butt hit the floor.

“Why don’t you just leave me the hell alone?” Kevin asked the empty air.

The man who’d just pointed the gun at Kevin name was Danny and Danny had already destroyed Kevin by taking away the only thing that Kevin loved, his family.

But now Danny needed Kevin’s help to save his daughter’s life.

Kevin felt like crying. But he didn’t.

Instead, he stood up on his feet, walked over to his bed and picked up the half empty bottle of Vodka that was on the floor.

It wasn’t even seven o’clock in the morning, but that didn’t stop Kevin from twisting the cap off of the bottle and taking his first drink of the day. The strong hot liquid burned its way down his throat and passed his chest and before it settled in his stomach, he was ready for the next drink.

*

For most of Kevin’s life he had to deal with many issues. Some of the more stand out one’s was that he was insecure and that he had a weight problem.

As a young boy, he had to adjust to a lonely life being as though he had no siblings and almost no friends. The only thing he had to keep him company was food. As a result, he spent most of his free time eating. In food, he found a safe haven to combat the cruel jokes shouted in his direction by the popular kids at school. No one seemed to care.

His parents were great providers and took good care of him but even they were of little help. They were so caught up in their own day to day lives that they were completely clueless to the bullying he was suffering at school. But somehow, they did notice the overeating habit that he had suddenly acquired.

In the beginning, they try to support him and encouraged him to lose weight but after constantly catching him sneaking food into his room they showed signs of giving up on him. They would even lock certain foods away from him. When they noticed that even that wasn’t helping, they turned to the next worst thing, insulting him.

At one-point things were so bad for Kevin that he didn’t even want to come home from school because as soon as he walked through the door, he would hear something from his father like,

“You’re such a disappointment”

After high school, Kevin had met Karen and the tough years were soon behind him. She was his calm against the storm. She was bright, beautiful, outgoing and for reasons unknown to anyone, she was strongly attracted and in love with Kevin.

They got together when he was eighteen and she was seventeen. Soon after, they jumped the broom and got married.

The love they shared motivated Kevin to lose weight and to care for his appearance.

After a few years together Kevin gained a boat load of self-esteem and was able to tone up his body so nicely that females who never paid him any attention started to notice him.

Kevin ignored them as they once ignored him. All Kevin cared about was Karen. Not only did she have his back, but she also possessed his heart, his mind, his body and his soul.

Kevin started working as a welder when he was twenty-one and at the same age, Karen got pregnant and had a set of twin boys.

Life couldn’t get any better.

Then the worst thing ever happened.

After sixteen years of welding, the bright flames began to affect Kevin’s vision and eventually he was diagnosed as being legally blind in his left eye.

The company’s doctor’ forced Kevin to retire at the early age of thirty-seven.

That is when the trouble began.

It started with Kevin getting depressed.

Then he turned to drinking.

Kevin became distant.

And finally,

Karen got lonely.

So she started to cheat.

It didn’t take Kevin long to find out about his wife’s infidelity, and when he did, all he could do was drink more.

Somewhere lost in his drunkenness, he found himself needing Karen but she, for the most part, had moved on.

Karen still had a love for Kevin so she played tug of war with her heart going back and forth from Kevin to Danny. But every time she gave Kevin a chance, Kevin found a way to pick the drinking over his lonely wife.

In the end, Danny won the tug of war match and not only did he get Karen pregnant and steal her heart, but he also stole Kevin’s twin boys’ and Sach, the dog that Kevin loved so much.

Danny had literally stolen everything that Kevin worked his entire life for.

He even somehow convinced Karen to place a restraining order against Kevin.

But God works in mysterious ways.

Here it was, a little more than a year after Danny and Karen had a baby girl named Karma, the tables had completely turned, and they desperately needed Kevin. And if Kevin didn’t help them then, their precious daughter Karma, would die.

Kevin sat on the edge of his bed gloating in the memory of a day, earlier in the week, when he’d first heard about what had happen to his unfaithful wife and her new lover, Danny.

*

As the story goes, Karen, Danny, the twins and their new baby Karma, were coming from a family outing late one evening.

Everything was fine.

Suddenly, an unexpected thunderstorm took over the sky.

All the family wanted to do was make it home.

Lightening cracked the sky and thunder shook the clouds. Everyone in the car rode in silence except for the occasional cry out from Karen for Danny to slow down.

Because of the fact that he was only going 30mph, every time she spoke, he would cut his eyes at her as to say that he was annoyed.

But 30mph seemed too fast for Karen due to the rain.

The windshield wipers seemed to be losing the fight against the tubs of water and Danny did his best to steer the car against the heavy rain and slippery road.

“Just slow down Danny?” Complained Karen.

Danny was over frustrated and instead of cutting his eyes towards her, he turned his head and stared at her for a split second.

That would be the split second that would change their lives forever.

As the two adults glared at on another, a sudden scream from one of the twins in the backseat.

“Mom!”

Cried one of the twins. And both adults looked to the backseat.

The car drifted slightly across the double yellow lines into oncoming traffic and a car collided head on with Danny’s car.

They weren’t traveling fast enough for the accident to be devastating and no one lost their life, but Karma was seriously injured.

Somehow, because of a defect in the car seat, when the two cars collided, the force of the impact caused baby Karma to eject from the car seat and her fragile body flew through the middle of the car and smashed into the windshield.

*

For the past week or so, ever since the accident, Karma was boxed up in an incubator in intensive care, holding on to life by a string. Desperately she needs a blood transfusion. But not any blood will do.

The little girl was born with a rare XO blood type and it is extremely hard for the doctors to find a blood donor.

When the doctors told Karen what the problem was, she immediately thought about Kevin. She wasn’t certain that Kevin and Karma had the same blood type, but she was certain that Kevin had told her that he’d been born with a rare type of blood’

Day in and day out, Karen had been reaching out to Kevin, almost begging him to go to the hospital to see if his blood matched her daughters.

But Kevin refused to go to the hospital.

Now that the doctors had put a time limit on the little girl’s life, it seemed that Danny was taking drastic measures and placing the

situation into his own hands. Literally, he was threatening to take Kevin’s life if Kevin didn’t go down to the hospital and perform the blood transfusion.

To Kevin, Danny was nothing more than a joke and his actions were nothing more than a frantic hail Mary.

Kevin wasn't in the least bit intimidated; he was actually rather amused.

Danny had single handedly destroyed Kevin’s life and stolen his family.

Kevin told himself that the sun would fall from the sky before he lifted a finger to help them.

Kevin didn’t look at himself as a monster and he did have a heart, a big one at that. He knew that the baby was innocent; he knew that the right thing for him to do was to go down to the hospital and check to see if his blood matched baby Karma’s. But this was his one chance at revenge. If he didn’t take this chance to get even with Danny and Karen, there may never come another chance for him to do so.

About an hour had gone by and Kevin had graduated to his second bottle of Vodka. He sat at the edge of his bed thinking about the baby Karma and how she had nothing to do with all of the non-sense that was going on.

The alcohol began to do what it tends to do to people and Kevin found himself beginning to feel a little compassion for Karen and Danny.

He knew that they had to have been going through hell because if it were his child that was in Karma’s shoes then he knew that he would also be going through great lengths to try and save her.

With that thought in mind, a creepy feeling crawled up his back because he realized that Danny just might not be bluffing.

The thought soon passed and then an image of his twin sons came to mind.

Brandon and Bobby were their names.

Kevin loved the twins more than he loved life himself.

He would do just about anything for them; anything that is, except for go down to the hospital to see if his blood matched Karma’s.

Kevin remembered his first time seeing the boys after everyone found out about Karma’s dilemma.

The boys had come over to visit and as they sat on Kevin’s bed.

Karen must’ve told the boys that Kevin had a rare blood type that might match baby Karma’s because the entire time that the boys were with Kevin, they looked up at him with puppy dog eyes.

Kevin decided that the best thing he could do, for himself, was to tell the boys that he didn’t think that his blood could match with their sister’s. It was almost impossible.

It was less than a one and a million percent chance that Karma was born with the rare blood type that he had.

Kevin knew that he had told the boys some non-sense but the boys appeared to buy it and that was all that mattered to Kevin because he didn’t want his boys to look at him like he was some kind of cold hearted person.

By 8:30 a.m., Kevin was just about done with his second bottle of Vodka and he laid back on his twin size mattress.

His hand dangled over the edge of the bed with the bottle of Vodka that only had a swig left in it.

Kevin felt himself dozing off.

His last thought was of how crushed Karen and Danny were going to be come next week knowing that Kevin still hadn’t found his way up to the hospital.

With a wonderful sting of victory flowing through his body, Slowly, Kevin’s eyes closed, and his mind drifted to a dreamland where everything was perfect.

In this dreamland, Karen, himself and his twin boys, Brandon and Bobby were back together and as happy as the family they were supposed to be.

Chapter 1