by Kate Morris
Somewhere in the woods to her right, a branch snapped. Avery stopped along the side of the gravel road and peered into the forest. It was getting dark, and the rain had brought with it a fog that was settling in on the valley, so all she could see were patches of inky blackness and gray shadows with silver mist encroaching around them. She pushed her hood back to rest on top of the headphones around her neck. She waited.
Then another stick broke, making the same sound they did when she stepped on one. Was someone in there? She held her breath and counted to ten. It was silly to be afraid, and yet, something cool blew across the back of her neck, something she knew and recognized as apprehension. Avery took a few steps retreating backward into the middle of the road and waited. Nothing. She breathed slowly, even held her breath straining to listen and search through the silence.
A series of noises came next, startling her: rustling leaves, brush being moved, more broken and snapped twigs. The sounds were getting closer. She didn’t need a written invitation. She wasn’t going to be one of those stupid bimbos in a horror flick like Renee enjoyed watching and dragged her along to every time a new one came out to the theater. Avery bolted. She told herself it was to get a little faster cardio at the end of her walk. It was a lie, but she was even okay with that. Lying to oneself wasn’t really a lie or a sin. It didn’t count.
About thirty yards into her healthy jog- fueled probably by irrational fear- she heard something skid across the gravel far behind her. She didn’t dare look over her shoulder. She just kept going, picking up the pace. She crested a gentle hill and could finally see the lighting marking the driveway entrance to her home. Someone at the house must’ve turned them on for her. Probably her mother. She was appreciative as never before.
Something made a noise in the woods to the left of the road this time. How could it have possibly caught up to her? Whatever it was, it was moving on four legs to have eliminated her lead. A bear or the occasional bobcat would be spotted in this county, but nothing had been reported lately. Mr. Campbell always called over when he heard of something in the area because he knew how much she and her siblings walked the woods and spent a lot of time out of doors.
The start of their fencing to her right signified home. She wasn’t there yet. It seemed so far off, those driveway lights. The fog was thickening as the sun set lower. Avery pumped her arms and legs harder as her lungs began to burn. Whatever was in the woods was definitely tracking and stalking her. She could hear it not trying at all to be quiet now.
She slid on the gravel coming down a slight hill and almost went down. Avery panicked and was going too fast to stay safely on her feet. She had to slow down but knew she couldn’t. In fact, she ran as if Abraham, who was the fastest kid in the family, was on her tail in a game of kick the can.
Their driveway with the stone pillars and lanterns was only fifty yards away. Then she heard something that sent a shiver up her spine so hard she was surprised she was able to stay upright. It was a loud screech of pure anger and terror. A primal scream would be the only way she could properly assign it a name. It was blood-curdling, terrifying to the core. Whatever was chasing her had made that sound. It echoed down through the woods on either side of the road. She wasn’t entirely convinced it was an animal. Not entirely. It crashed through the underbrush and tree branches behind her to the left, likely coming onto the road again.
What she heard next made her cry out in fear as she rounded the corner for her driveway and slammed her palm on the automatic gate mechanism. Avery didn’t even stop. She kept going, hoping the gate closed fast enough to keep out whatever was after her. The wrought iron was nearly eight feet tall and heavy-duty and carried in the middle of the panel her father’s family crest, hand-forged in different metals and elaborately shaped.
She actually fell on her bottom going down the driveway but sprang right back to her feet instantly. Her ankle felt a little sprained, but that wasn’t about to stop her.
Then she heard whatever it was out there hit their gate. Knowing it was only probably six seconds behind her all that time, just enough time for the gate to slide home into its housing caused her not to slow down. The rattling of the gate was loud in the deafening silence of the still evening. Then the heavy gate was rattled and jarred roughly on its secure hinges. She hoped they were secure and the locking mechanism held. She also hoped it didn’t scale the gate.
Avery made it to the house, the soft amber glow and normally comforting view of her family through the long panels of glass as they all bustled around inside carrying large platters of food to the table did not provide her any reassurance tonight. She didn’t go to her apartment but burst through the door to her parents’ home. Spinning, Avery slammed the door so hard she feared the glass might break. She turned the deadbolt and stepped back, fully expecting something to come crashing into it.
“Avery, darling,” her mother said, approaching from behind her.
“Turn off the music,” she said softly, her lungs burning, the metallic taste of blood in her mouth from running so far and so hard without the proper training. Her heart was beating so frantically, she feared it might explode.
“What?” Ophelia asked confusedly.
“Now! Turn it off!” she screamed and didn’t wait for her mother. She hurried to the control panel on the wall and slapped at the stop button. Then she engaged their home security system, something they rarely used unless they were all going to be out of town together on a vacation or something similar.
“Ave, what the heck?” Abraham asked with concern, walking up to her drying his hands on a white kitchen linen.
“Something…” she tried to explain but couldn’t.
“Darling, you’re shaking like a leaf,” her mother commented.
“What happened, Ave?” he asked again and stepped toward the glass entry doors.
“Abraham! Get back from the doors,” she screeched hysterically.
“What…?” he murmured and stared at her as if she’d lost her mind.
“Abraham, go around and make sure all the doors are locked and the kids are all inside,” she ordered loudly.
“Darling…” her mother started, but Avery cut her off.
“Mom! Stop! Something was just chasing me down our road. I barely got away!”
Her mother’s gray eyes widened, and she dashed away with Abraham. She could hear them calling the children. Avery turned on all the outdoor spotlights and cut the interior lights in the kitchen, entryway, and dining room. Soon, the noise and usual commotion of her family died down, and everyone gathered around her with concerned faces. Abraham was holding Finnegan on his hip. Her little brother was only seven. He frightened a little easier than the older kids.
She dashed to the wall unit again and hit the button for 9-1-1 on the open speaker system. It went to a busy signal. That didn’t make sense. She tried it two more times before getting a dispatcher on the built-in speaker.
“9-1-1, what’s your emergency?”
“Yes, this is Avery Andersson. I live on Meadowbrook Lane. There’s something in our neighborhood. It…it just chased me down the road. I almost didn’t get away from it. Please, send help.”
“I have your address and location. Ma’am, are you someplace safe?”
How to answer that. “Yes, I’m in my home.”
“Lock all the doors and if you have a firearm…”
“We don’t.”
“Make sure all the doors and windows are locked. We’re exceptionally busy tonight with similar calls. It’s going to be a while before we can get out to you, Miss Andersson.”
“What?” Abraham whispered to the group.
Avery blurted, “How long?”
“At least an hour, ma’am.”
“Please, hurry!” Avery cut the call impatiently.
“An hour?” Kaia asked the rest of the group.
Her mother seemed as displeased as she was. “Listen, everyone, I want the littlest ones to stay here with Kaia and Cyrus. Abraham and Ephraim, I want
you to come with me. Avery, you, too.”
She led them down the hall to one of the bigger pantry closets and shut the door.
“What happened?” Ophelia immediately asked. “You say a man was chasing you, darling?”
“Yes, no,” she tried to tell them. “I don’t know…what it was.”
Avery explained very quickly as her knees quaked and her hands trembled. Just reliving it was terrifying. By the time she was done, her mother ordered Abraham and Ephraim to check every window and door of the house again.
Two hours later, the police finally showed up, buzzing the gate, which they rarely closed. Avery told them what happened, and they promised to canvas the neighborhood. Whatever it was, was probably gone by now. It felt pointless even telling them. She even tried to get information from them. They weren’t responsive to her prodding. Apparently, she didn’t have the skills of Tristan Driscoll.
Her mother wanted her to stay in the house, but she insisted she would be fine in the apartment. It was already embarrassing enough. Her mind was starting to doubt what she’d felt had happened. The same thing had occurred after the attack at the bar. She had tried to rationalize the whole incident away. Her brother walked her to her apartment, though, and found a folding chair in the garage and told her to prop it under the door. He tried to stay, but she refused. She forced him to text her when he got back in the house safely, and he did.
As she lay in her bed a while later, Avery stared at the wall of windows. Tristan was right. She needed a locking door to her apartment. Tomorrow, first thing, she was going to town to get one and…and what? Install it? She had no idea what to get or how to do it. Maybe Abraham would. She’d just drag him to town with her.
Much later in her bed, she pulled the covers up a little higher and tried not to think about what had happened. Surely it wasn’t what she thought. Surely not. That would just be too much. There was no such thing as coincidence. There were just facts and events. Her mother and two oldest brothers had believed her enough to be scared into action, though. She hadn’t even told them the worst part. It was inconceivable, even to her. She hadn’t told them about the scream. She hadn’t told the other thing, the most terrifying thing. Avery hadn’t told them about the man’s voice in the woods or the horrific, disjointed and broken speech.
Chapter Eleven
Tristan rose at five a.m. and hit the gym for an hour and a half before heading out for a circuit in the Jeep. His route took him about a hundred miles around in a projection that would bring him back to the base. He stopped at the different areas where there were pull-offs and wrote down what he observed. He was in a mood. He wanted to write down ‘herd of deer’ because that’s all he saw but, instead, wrote that the fracking site was all-clear, meaning no environmentalist hippies trying to blow the place up. Some of the sites had workers moving around, making adjustments to equipment or also checking to make sure things were running smoothly. He could always tell who the workers were: they wore bright yellow, reflective vests and hardhats. Sometimes the suits showed up, too. The company executives trying to be cool like one of the little guys with a safety hat on. The Army had some of those types, too. Go figure.
He had sixteen such check-points plus the two refineries and the power plant on his loop. The power plant would come after lunch. Around noon, he stopped for lunch in town, a small local diner in the square that served good, homecooked food. He ordered the turkey club and sat at the counter.
Someone behind him at a booth was gossiping, the usual neighborhood stuff. First, it was “Fred got a new truck,” then it was “Margie just retired,” then “And did you hear? Sally Cummings just passed. Yes, got that flu that’s going around.”
This part piqued his interest, and Tristan stopped drinking his iced tea to listen.
“And the whole Sinclair family’s down with it, too,” the elderly lady was saying. “Jess Turnbow’s daughter has it, too.”
Out of his peripheral vision, Tristan saw two older men walk past him to join the conversation at the booth. Soon, they were all recounting the people they knew or had heard of who were sick or were now deceased from it.
“And Joe Donnelly? He up and beat on that young law clerk workin’ for him. Damn shame. He damn near beat that kid to death. Sheriff’s department got called in to help on that one. City police were already dealing with two others, newcomers who just moved here.”
“Probably who brought this flu to our town,” someone speculated.
Tristan knew that a lot of small towns like this thought of people who’d just moved in as newcomers. It was certainly no reason to be so suspicious, but he understood how people who’d never lived anywhere but the same small town they were raised in would think like that. Not him. He had no roots anywhere. He liked it that way, too, and couldn’t wait to get out of this town.
“And the one Mike was called to was first thought to be domestic violence…”
“Here’s your turkey club,” the waitress offered with a smile. At least she was friendly. Of course, he probably tipped better than the locals. Same as all the ‘outsiders.’ He thanked her, and she left.
The conversation was still ongoing. The name ‘Mike’ came up again, and he figured it out that he worked for the city as a cop.
“Wife stabbed the husband to death with, guess what?” a woman asked in a conspiratorial tone. “A screwdriver.”
Tristan flinched. That would’ve been a mess.
“She was trying to kill their two kids, but the children- bless their little hearts- were hiding from her in the mini-van in the garage. Can you believe that?”
“Terrible, I tell ya’,” a man said.
“And Marlene Winkler? She said her neighbor tried to hurt his wife, so she locked him out and called the police. They took him away in one of those straight jacket things.”
“The whole world’s goin’ crazy.”
“And I know I saw someone trying to get into my neighbor’s house the other night, so I called it in. Now, I know what ya’ll are thinkin’. I’ve had a few false alarms before, but this time I know I saw someone. He was all bent over and acting strangely, mumbling to himself like he was on drugs or something. He was trying their door, then the garage door. They’re on vacation in Florida, go down there every year…”
Tristan tuned out and ate more of his sandwich while she availed everyone of her neighbor’s yearly stay in Florida for the winter. Then she went on to talk about their kids and their grandchildren. Good grief. He wanted just to tell her to get to the point.
“Well, anyways, he was tryin’ to break in. I called Mike, but he didn’t get there in time. Guy got away. Mike said they’d keep lookin’ for him. Told me they’ve had some problems with people like that lately.”
“Probably those frackers got some bad drugs. You know they all do drugs,” one of the other women said as if that made sense. Tristan had never had any experiences with the oil workers that would lead him to think any of them did drugs. They all seemed to take their work seriously and were very hard workers doing difficult jobs.
“Just last night there was a call came in,” another man with a gravelly voice said. “Heard it on my scanner. That weird family, what’s their name? Live on Meadowbrook Lane. Damn, what’s their name? Right, the Andersson’s. Now I remember. That’s who it was. Heard their oldest daughter called the sheriff about something on the road chased her or something like that. Crazy.”
Tristan’s heart sank into the pit of his stomach. Andersson’s on Meadowbrook Lane? It had to be Avery’s family. She was the oldest. Avery had called the police? Somebody was chasing her? He set his sandwich down. If she was in trouble, why hadn’t she called him? Of course, she wasn’t going to call him. Why would she? That was a stupid reaction on his part. And why did the man call her family ‘weird’- that was rude. Maybe these local yuck-yucks weren’t worth defending, after all. They guys at the base said they didn’t like them, but Tristan tried to give people the benefit of the doubt. That benefit was
now revoked.
“What was it?” one of the older women said.
“Don’t know. Took ‘em so long to get there, whatever it was had run off.”
“Coyote?” a man asked.
“Don’t know,” he repeated.
“Those people are odd if you ask me,” a woman said. “Don’t send their children to school. I heard a long time ago from Annie Stephens they all run around there like total heathens. Don’t know how school ever gets done. And their father? Where’s he even from? They’re just strange. Children should be in a school where they belong, not roaming the countryside like a bunch of hooligans.”
“Well, I don’t know how their mother could call herself a psychiatrist and allow her children to behave like that.”
This was all news to Tristan. Dr. Andersson was a psychologist, not a psychiatrist. And her children, the one he met, seemed intelligent and mannerly and kind. And drop dead gorgeous. And kind. Avery was a kind person, conscientious of her actions and words and thought before she spoke. Probably a little too trusting. He hadn’t slept much the past two nights remembering her permitting him into her apartment wearing only a silky robe and what he could only imagine as nothing else. The outline of her soft curves was very apparent. Sleep really hadn’t been coming to him lately, not since he met her. And now someone had chased her down? He was starting to wonder if he should offer his services as a personal security advisor. Or just her bodyguard. That would work, too.
He finished his sandwich, left enough money for the bill and a generous tip. Tristan rose and went to the table full of gossips. He couldn’t stop himself even if he wanted to. All six sets of eyes shot up to his.
“The public school system in this country is shit. All of the Andersson kids are super geniuses who would be bored in your local schools because most of them are already taking college courses. And Dr. Andersson is a clinical psychologist with a Ph.D., not a psychiatrist. If you’re gonna gossip, get your facts straight.”
And with that, he left to the sounds of “Well, I never!”. He chuckled as he got in the Jeep and drove off. Let them stew on that for a while instead of dwelling on making shit up about the Andersson’s.
