by Siara Brandt
“There were two accidents in town around the same time,” Lise explained. “They had their hands full.”
Linwood had seen that for himself. He had been forced to detour around an accident on their way into town. He turned to his mother. “You’re right. Something should be done to find him. We should assume that he’s probably in shock.”
“A group of men are out looking for him right now,” Erna told him.
“And they’ve been gone for the whole two hours?” Linwood wanted to know.
Lise looked at her mother who nodded.
“Someone should have spotted him by now. Obviously, more needs to be done,” Linwood said.
“We were advised to stay inside and lock the doors,” someone told him.
“By whom?” Linwood asked.
“By the police.”
“Against what?”
“They didn’t say.”
“Is there something out there that we don’t know about?” a frowning Linwood questioned the listeners. No one had an answer. Linwood was thinking about the things he had seen at the restaurant, but he didn’t want to alarm anyone until he knew what was going on. Back at the restaurant, hey had not even had a chance to order dessert. Instead they had left money for the bill and a generous tip. Linwood had decided that the waitress had earned it by locking those doors. Then, together with Floris, he had run for the safety of their car while some men wrestled the man in the parking lot to the ground. They didn’t stay to see what happened in the parking lot or the kitchen. They tried to call ahead to let his mother know they were on their way and to tell her what they had seen, but the storm had hit with full force by then and they had assumed it was responsible for them not being able to get any phone reception.
Floris chimed in with her two cents worth. “Don’t people in this town know when someone is dead or not?”
“Floris!” Linwood said sharply, more sharply than he usually spoke to her, but the circumstances were anything but ordinary. He could be excused for his lapse. In a more moderate tone, he said, “You’re not helping.”
Floris didn’t seem to hear him. With a sharp intake of air, she suddenly put her hand to her mouth. “Was he- embalmed?”
“That’s impossible,” Linwood told her.
“Before he left,” someone informed Linwood. “It turns out that Elbert Durnan, the funeral director- Well, he admitted that he hadn’t- taken care of the body. He should have been, right? Embalmed?”
“Where is the funeral director?” Linwood wanted to know.
“We haven’t seen him since- the incident. He left shortly after the others.”
Linwood looked at the overturned casket and the flowers still strewn across the carpet. He felt righteous indignation. “He should have stayed here and helped clean this mess up,” he said. “Someone needs to take responsibility.”
“There was an FBI agent here,” someone said.
“Someone called the FBI?” Linwood asked, surprised.
“No one called him. He was just here. He’s gone now.”
Linwood knew they were looking to him for some kind of guidance. They needed someone who could take control of the situation, and since no one else seemed to be capable of doing it, it would be up to him.
“It’s hard to think that he could he have just disappeared,” he heard someone say. “Especially in his condition.”
“He didn’t just disappear,” Linwood said. “He’s out there somewhere. We just need to find him. That’s the foremost concern here.”
Right away, Erna suggested that everyone get in their cars and start looking for her brother. At the same time, she said that they would have to leave someone behind at the funeral home, of course, in case Uncle Alford returned there.
“Has anyone thought about going by his house to see if he’s headed there?” Linwood asked.
“That’s more than seven miles away,” someone reminded him. “Do you really think he could have made it all the way there in his condition?”
“If he’s been doing it automatically for the past fifty years or so, he might,” Linwood answered the man.
Everyone was thinking the same thing at the same time though no one made the comparison out loud. Dogs and cats did it all the time. Pigeons, too.
“Well, maybe that makes sense,” someone else said. “If you woke up in a coffin would your first thought be to return to the funeral home?”
That settled it.
“Lise, you stay here in case he comes back,” her mother told her. “He seemed to recognize you.”
Recognize her? It was more like he had wanted to take a bite out of her, too. Only the quick reaction of the FBI agent had gotten her out of harm’s way while, at the same time, other men had rushed to restrain her uncle. It turned out he was unrestrainable. That was when he had bitten one of the men on the arm. Savagely. Deeply.
“Linwood, you drive,” her mother went on. Unbelievably, Lise heard Bayley ask if they could get pizza on the way.
Floris asked, “Maybe we should check into our hotel so we don’t lose the room?” And then, “I could go for some pizza, too.”
“Should we lock everything up?” someone asked.
“Not if Lise is going to stay here.”
“Besides, who’s going to steal something from a funeral home?” someone wanted to know.
“It happens. I heard of chemicals being stolen from a funeral home once. I guess they can turn anything into drugs these days.”
Linwood gave a disapproving scowl. “Let’s not waste time talking about drugs.”
“Yeah, this is Stone Creek. That kind of stuff isn’t going to happen here.”
Just the dead coming back to life, Lise thought to herself.
“All right,” Linwood said, his voice lowering authoritatively. “We’ll go by Uncle Alf’s house to see if he shows up there. If not, we’ll come back and make sure they hold our room.” He glanced at Floris. Thinking to pacify her, he added, “And then we’ll get something to eat.”
To himself he was thinking that the only good thing out of this was that he wasn’t going to have to give that eulogy. But it was the only good thing.
After everyone else filed out of the funeral home, Lise looked at the empty room. She had already decided that she was done here. She was going home. She was certain that if her uncle was going to come back here, he would have done so by now. She was absolutely not going to sit in an empty funeral home all by herself and wait for someone who might or might not still be capable of violence. There was another thing she knew for certain. She was glad she wasn’t getting in that car with the rest of her family. Through the open doors, she could hear them arguing over who was sitting where and what toppings they wanted on the pizzas. The last thing she heard before they drove off, was Linwood telling everyone to make sure they had their seat belts on as they set out after someone who might be dead or might be alive, someone who could be anywhere by now.
What she didn’t know, what none of them knew, was that this was just the beginning.
Chapter 8
On the other side of town, Myrtie Nezer had waited out the storm. Only after the worst of it had passed did she even attempt to fall asleep, and she would be sound asleep right now if it hadn’t been for the racket in the alley behind her house. She heaved a deep sigh and threw back the covers. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another.
Wide awake now, and growing angrier by the minute, she got out of bed and pulled on a robe. Tightening her belt with resolve, she stepped into her slippers, the comfortably-worn ones her granddaughter had given her last Christmas.
It wasn’t that she didn’t like cats, she told herself as she went downstairs. She just knew what that sly tomcat was up to in her carefully-tended flower beds. She had caught him several times already, enough times that she knew by now that the huge feline knew to wait until after dark and she was already in bed before he came sneaking around.
From upstairs, the snores of her husband continued uninterrupted. At the bottom of
the steps, she hesitated and listened for a few moments, trying to decide if he really was asleep or if he was just pretending to be. She decided he wasn’t that good an actor and made her way across the dark kitchen.
She stood at her screen door for a while peering out into the dripping, rain-washed darkness to see if she could catch the cat in the act. She wouldn’t be so angry if she didn’t suspect her husband was deliberately putting food out for the cat. There was only one reason for him to do that, of course. It was to purposely make her angry, something he was very, very good at. And that’s how Myrtie felt right now. Angry. In fact, she was seething more and more with each passing minute. She decided then and there that if she found one single chicken bone in her flower beds, Eben would pay for getting her up in the middle of the night. Oh, she had endless ways of making him sorry he had even thought of inciting the cat to do its business in her tulip beds. That was her driving thought as she reached for her broom. If she found any food at all, even a wing bone left over from dinner, she was going to use the broom on Eben. Forty years of his childish bullshit was enough. Forty years would push anybody to the limit. She wasn’t about to let some stray cat, or her devious husband, take away her one enjoyment in life. Her yard and her flowers. Both of which the whole town talked about. Both of which had consistently earned her first place in the annual Stone Creek best yard competition.
She was distracted for a moment by the TV in her neighbor’s living room. Why were the Herndons up at this hour watching TV, she wondered. She shook her head. The Herndons did a lot of strange things.
She stepped out into the darkness and immediately smelled something rotten. Rotting meat, she realized. She pursed her lips and squinted into the darkness. It could only be chicken scraps.
Just when she thought the rain was ended, it started up again. It didn’t last long but it was heavy enough that she had to turn her windshield wipers back on. Lise already knew her mother wasn’t going to listen to her excuses about why she had left the funeral home. Or her apologies. Ones she wasn’t going to make anyway. Once they found Uncle Alford, no one would be thinking about the funeral home anyway.
Drat.
There was something going on ahead of her. She saw a line of cars blocking the main intersection in the center of town. She was about to turn down Cross Street to see if she could go around that way, but she turned instead down the alley right before it, thinking that other people would have already thought of going down Cross. She lived six miles outside of town and all she wanted to do was to get home and put this night behind her. She wasn’t going to get stuck in traffic if she could help it.
She tried to see what was causing the line of cars. Was there another accident? The odds against that were- They had to be astronomical. If it wasn’t enough with the accidents, the trouble at the funeral home, and the disruption of phone service, now it looked like at least part of the town was experiencing a blackout. It couldn’t all be connected, could it? Of course the blackout would have been caused by the storm, just like the disruption of phone service which had been off and on for the past few hours.
Before she reached the end of the alley, she was surprised to find her way blocked by a parked ambulance. It was just sitting there in the dark. There were no lights on but she knew someone was sitting inside it. She could just make out the dark outline of a head from the faint flickering light of a TV in the house next to the ambulance. At least someone had power. Hopefully, when she got home, she would have power, too. But first she had to get there.
Quin had started getting sicker. Soon his nausea was so bad that he couldn’t drive the ambulance anymore. Because the hospital was not an option, they took him to the clinic. There was only one person there, a nurse practitioner who told them she had been seeing sick people all day long. She had been on her way out the door when they arrived, but she agreed to look at Quin before she left.
As far as Gillie could see, she didn’t have a clue what was wrong with him. She gave him a prescription for antibiotics and some samples, and said that was about all she could do for him. She recommended that he follow up with his doctor tomorrow. Gillie suspected that even she doubted the antibiotics were going to help. She refused to give an opinion on what was happening, at the hospital or anywhere else.
So Gillie was driving the ambulance on his own after dropping off Quin, Liam and the two kids they had narrowly missed hitting. It wasn’t long before Gillie found that the ambulance was too conspicuous. Everywhere he went, there were sick people who thought he could help them or take them somewhere where they could get help. By now, there was no doubt in Gillie’s mind that this was some kind of epidemic, or at least the beginning of one. With the hospital shut down, isolation seemed the best option. And that’s just what Gillie planned to do after he found some supplies. Isolate. He was deciding where the best place to get those supplies would be, when he saw that the road was blocked ahead of him so he turned down the first alleyway he came to.
While big drops of rain spattered from the trees onto the windshield, he sat there trying to figure out what his best route home would be, after he stocked up on necessities. As he sat there, he wondered where he was going to park the ambulance when he did get home and whether he was going to be in trouble for having it in his possession in the first place. Could he be charged with car theft? Ambulance theft? Illegal theft of an official vehicle was probably a much worse offense. Aside from that, he assumed there were restrictions against parking it just anywhere.
But there was something even more troubling on his mind. At first, the stories the two kids had told had seemed too incredible to be true. However, after realizing how frightened they were and after driving through town and seeing sick person after sick person, Gillie knew that whatever was happening needed to be taken seriously.
He was about to pull out again when he saw someone staggering around in the darkness. Whoever it was, was lurching drunkenly, almost violently around out there. Trash cans crashed loudly rattling Gillie. Was it someone from one of the bars making his way home on foot? That was the only explanation Gillie could think of. Whoever it was shouldn’t be wandering the streets alone in their condition. Not only could they wander in front of a car and be run down, but they could cause an accident in which other people might be hurt.
With his own accident fresh in his mind, he saw the man, who was nothing more than a shadow, fade into the darkness. Gillie waited for him to reappear. As he sat there waiting, he saw a car slowly turn down the alley. The car came to a stop directly across from him while the headlights continued to blaze the scene before him into stark white. Even so, Gillie had to look hard to be certain that what he was seeing was real.
Lise stared like someone who had just seen a ghost. Clear as day in her headlights, dripping wet and looking even worse than he had looked in the funeral home, was her Uncle Alford. She was about to get out of her car but then, but before she fully opened the door, she hesitated. Remembering the man he had attacked back at the funeral home and the savagery of the bite, she couldn’t make herself get out of the car. Her anxiety only grew when the lights went out around her. Every porch light. Every interior light. While her car’s lights stayed on. Across from her, the ambulance just kept sitting there in the dark. She turned her own lights off.
Suddenly the lights of the ambulance began to flicker rapidly, like a dead white strobe lighting up a horror scene in a movie. Off. On. Off again. Then more rapidly on and off. She was so focused on the lights, that the siren about scared her half to death when it went off.
She could make out the driver now in the blaze of the headlights, and in the back of her mind, she was wondering why on earth a pizza delivery person was driving an ambulance.
As for her uncle, he seemed completely oblivious to the headlights. He was staring straight at Myrtie Nezer, just like he had stared at Lise in the funeral home. And then he lunged.
Myrtie had been leaning over one of her tulip beds looking for the meat scraps she was su
re were there. If the cat hadn’t yowled at that very moment, and if she hadn’t turned around because the cat had scared the living daylights out of her, things might have turned out very differently. As it was, the cat’s warning made all the difference.
Screw the broom, Myrtie thought in a split-second decision, a decision driven by an instinct of pure self-preservation. She grabbed her shovel, the one she always left leaning against the garage. She didn’t hesitate. There wasn’t time for it. She swung the shovel in a wide arc, her bathrobe-clad body spinning with the force like an Olympic discus thrower. The metal connected with bone, resounding with a ringing reverberation right in the middle of Alford Cagle’s forehead.
After Alford Cagle went down, or the apparition that looked like Alford Cagle, Eben Nezer appeared on the back steps of his house. He was scratching his protruding stomach through his bathrobe, completely forgetting that his legs were bare and that he was in his underwear under the robe which he hadn’t bothered to tie. He had been on his way downstairs for some leftover chicken. Myrtie’s specialty was fried chicken. That and creamed peas. He was partial to her poppy seed cake, too.
Eben stood there squinting at the spot-lit scene, demanding to know what was going on in his backyard in the middle of the night.
“What’s going on,” Myrtie hollered back at him. “Is you’re going to call Weldan at the sheriff’s office and have him get Alford Cagle out of my tulips.”
The pizza barn was closed. Although it was no one’s fault, right away Bayley started taking his disappointment out on everyone around him. With his attitude. With his muttered comments. With his thumps against the back of the seat, which Linwood was sure by now were being done intentionally.
“We should have left earlier,” Linwood heard behind him, and then, “We should have gotten pizza before we left town. At least the night wouldn’t be a total loss.”
