by Adam Cesare
Zzzzt!
Glenn jumped at the sound and the accompanying flash of light.
Just his phone.
He looked down into the glow:
9:00.
Why had he set himself an alarm to stop cleaning dishes and move on to the next task? Because it’s structure, Glenn. Because you’re nuts. He laughed, uneasy, and picked up the phone to silence the alarm.
WHAM!
Something crashed into the outside of the house.
Glenn flinched and the phone dropped from his hand, bounced off the counter, and landed on the floor with its screen facedown.
Glenn’s body tingled with the aftermath of the scare.
This night was taking years off his life. Who was throwing rocks at his house? Kids, of course. Some dopey kid trying to prank the new neighbor. A kid who wasn’t smart enough to do an actual prank, so settled for throwing rocks.
Glenn was in no mood. He hadn’t driven halfway across the country to be tortured by a whole new and exotic set of late-night sounds.
Stumbling through the darkness of the house, Glenn pawed his way to the front closet, where he found exactly what he wanted: his golf club. No, he wasn’t the “golfing kind” of doctor. He didn’t have a whole bag, just this one, for going to the driving range.
The club didn’t have the heft of a baseball bat, but it would do. He wasn’t going to do anything crazy, wasn’t going to hurt anyone—he just needed to look like he could and would.
Glenn felt his way back along the hallway to the back door. This area would be their mudroom once they were done unpacking.
But before Glenn could unlatch the screen, there was a second impact.
WHAM!
Standing still, he listened as the object tumbled down their roof. A split second later there was a sound like the crack of wood. Siding or a roofing shingle that would now need to be replaced.
“Hey!” Glenn yelled, spilling onto the top step of the back porch. “Stop that!”
There was no answer, so he made his way down the stairs and stood in the middle of the yard.
Stepping wide around the broken birdbath, Glenn held his golf club at the ready.
“The police are already on their way,” Glenn lied. “I’d get out of here quick-quick if I were you.”
No response. No sounds. No footfalls and giggling as kids fled into the night.
Even the crickets seemed to have gone silent.
He stood in the damp grass, staring hard into the dark, trying to catch sight of something, anything. His arms began to go to gooseflesh, and Glenn sighed and lowered his club, resting it on his shoulder.
The rock throwing seemed to be done.
He started back toward the house, but then he heard a familiar sound. The click of a lighter. It continued, the click-click of a wheel spinning but not sparking. He turned in time to see a blue-purple flame bloom out in the cornfield.
A large torch, flame fizzing and cracking, stood, a few yards into the field, flame reaching a foot or two above the tops of the stalks.
There was no movement around the torch. No pranksters in sight, simply fire licking at leaves and husks, ready to set the whole field ablaze.
“Jesus, kids—you’re going to burn the whole neighborhood down!” Glenn yelled. He remembered the little boy he’d helped in the aftermath of the parade, how sweet all the kids on that float had seemed, how happy he was that nobody’d been seriously injured. “Put that out and get out of there. You’re not in trouble, just get out of there.”
He stepped toward the cornfield. Patting his pocket, he remembered that he’d left his phone on the kitchen floor, possibly shattered. He needed to call the fire department—
As he watched, the fire spread, then split.
Now the center flame had become two torches.
“Hey. Stop!”
What was the phrasing Quinn had used to describe her new friends?
“Prone to mischief” was what she’d said. But this was too much. More than simple mischief, too calculated, too targeted.
The torches burned and then split again, flame dripping into the dirt with a sizzle. He took another step back, closer to his house, happy that the home didn’t directly border the field.
He could smell accelerant. Gas. Was the plan to light the whole field up? Was this a show just for him? He watched the four torches, flames dancing in the night.
What the fuck is going on? Glenn thought, more bewildered than terrified. If the goal was to burn up the cornfield, then this had evolved too quickly from a stupid prank to serious criminal mischief.
A wind that hadn’t been there moments ago picked up, blowing smoke and heat into his face. His eyes began to tear and for the first time since he stepped outside, he allowed himself to know that this wasn’t a prank.
That he wasn’t safe.
Under the whoosh of the flames and wind, there was the sound of running footfalls on grass at his back. Someone had either crept up on him, flanked him from the field, or had simply materialized behind him.
Glenn began to spin, golf club raised, his knuckles white around the grip—
But he wasn’t fast enough to stop the sharp blow to the back of his head. He was dazed, and then a tremendous pressure clamped down around his neck.
He couldn’t breathe; his focus was fading. He felt the golf club slide out of his grip and onto the lawn.
“Where’s yer daughter, Doc?” asked an unfamiliar voice.
But Glenn couldn’t get a word out. Whoever had him in a headlock, they’d hit him too hard, were squeezing too tight.
Before he could answer, his world went from amber flames to dead black.
Glenn Maybrook awoke to the stench of rot.
The odor was only marginally better than the pain.
Glenn could barely remember what a hangover felt like, but he knew that the throbbing at the back of his skull was worse. He tried to remember if the “worst headache of your life” was more indicative of a subarachnoid or a subdural hemorrhage and couldn’t.
How would he continue to practice medicine if he couldn’t remember a simple diagnosis?
A spasm of pain brought him to the here and now. The ache glided along the skin of his face, reached his nose, and ebbed backward. It felt like someone was skipping stones across the gray matter of his brain.
What is that smell?
Glenn used a finger to windshield-wiper the front of his glasses, then tried flopping onto his back and found that he’d been buried up to the waist in—
In what? And why did it reek?
Flailing, without being able to sit up, Glenn made a gooey, gross snow angel. He’d been knocked unconscious and left sinking into a pile of—topsoil? No. Manure? It was somehow worse than that.
It was . . . corn?
It was corn that had been separated from the cob and left to rot. Some of it was green, some of it brown, and some of it weirdly untouched by decomposition, still a bright, cheery yellow. If the stench was any indication, the pile had been putrefying for a long time. Some of the corn was still in sacks, but pests had long ago gnawed holes into the burlap. And at the thought of pests, Glenn realized what else he was sitting in. There were mouse and rat feces everywhere, mixed in with the rotting corn. Wispy tubers of fungus and mold grew among the turds, some of the growths tickling his chin. Whoever had knocked him out had then carried him, half buried him, and left him here to rot, too.
But why? Glenn looked up, took in as much as he could.
The room he was in wasn’t a room at all, but an enclosure in a larger space, similar in size to a bathroom stall. To his side, the floor beyond the corn pile was dirt-streaked concrete, speckled with footprints that looked like they were made by large boots.
Glenn was facing the back wall, made of solid wood paneling reinforced with chicken wire. The roof was far above him, taller than the walls of his enclosure, and in the darkness, he could glimpse concrete and steel beams. Glenn craned his neck, looking behind him to see
that on the other end of the small cubicle was a chain-link door that appeared to be padlocked shut. Beyond the chain-link was a bare bulb, the only light. Under the bulb was a folding chair and a set of stairs that led up. He confirmed that he was in a basement of some kind.
He tried to stand, pushing down with his arms only to feel the suck of the corn and shit against his clothes like quicksand.
The futility of the movement chilled him to a stop.
Glenn looked down at his knees, the kneecaps poking through the corn. He stretched to grab his knees. He pinched at his pant legs, and his fears racked into sudden focus . . .
He couldn’t feel his legs.
No. No, that couldn’t be.
They’ve paralyzed me!
But. That wasn’t right. He didn’t feel disconnected from the lower half of his body. He felt like he could still move, if barely. He wiggled his toes, felt the fabric inside his sneakers.
He tried again and found that he could flex his knees a bit, under the corn.
Like a neon sign, the answer broke through Glenn Maybrook’s fogged mind: those are not your knees!
With a surge of strength, Glenn dug himself out of the slop. He used his hands to free his legs enough that he was able to hoist himself on top of the muck.
And then he scrambled over to whoever else had been dumped in the cage with him.
He began to dig.
Come on, Glenn. You’re a doctor. You felt those cold knees. You know that whoever’s under there, they’re more than “hurt.”
He tossed handfuls of slop behind him, rats scurrying away from the clatter as he hauled lumps of wet, putrid corn at the side of his chicken-wire-and-plywood cage.
It was a few moments until he’d uncovered his cellmate up to the waist, then a few more until he’d dug out his neck.
One final brush was all it took to reveal the corpse’s eyes.
A gasp caught in Glenn’s throat, becoming a nauseous retch.
Dr. Weller.
The town’s former doctor.
He’d looked a lot better in the pictures he’d left hung in his office.
Dr. Weller was buried in here with Glenn.
And Dr. Weller was very, very dead.
“Help!” Glenn found his voice, his scream all at once. The exertion caused his head to flare with renewed pain. “Help me! Get me out of here!” His words echoed around in the larger chamber above his cage.
He stood and as if trying to answer, Dr. Weller’s mouth began to move. The dead man’s jaw worked up and down, the lips stiff, a bad ventriloquist.
Oh God. Weller was alive. This had all been a cruel, elaborate prank.
Glenn got closer to inspect. And watched a mouse crawl out from between Dr. Weller’s teeth, apparently done nibbling the dead man’s tongue. Whiskers streaked with pink froth, the mouse dove off the bump of the corpse’s chin and disappeared into the rotting corn.
Glenn began to scream again: “Heeellll—”
“Please don’t do that,” someone said, tone even but amplified by the darkness. The voice was deep. Digitally disguised. “Please just sit tight, Doctor. You’re still alive. Count your blessings.”
Glenn did not like the sound of that.
“Who the hell are you? And where am I?” he yelled, but his head throbbed and the place stank and after everything, he thought he was going to pass out.
“Do what’s asked of you, and maybe—just maybe—you won’t be among those who die tonight.”
Twelve
The heat in the middle of the dance floor was pleasant at first, but after three songs, it became oppressive. Even with both barn doors open wide, the body heat of so many kids added up.
“You’re a good dancer,” Cole shouted, bringing her back to the moment.
“Thanks!” she replied, even though she was thinking that this wasn’t really dancing. It was really more just grinding and fist pumping. The party’s soundtrack had been unexpected. Underground hits that wouldn’t have been out of place after-hours in Center City mixed with souped-up honky-tonk, that Kenny Chestnut shit that would have been booed out of any house party in Philly proper. Quinn was no music snob, but at one point, the kids of KSH had started line dancing. Seriously, shuffling out into three rows—twist, turn, tap your boots. Which was weird, but if she was being honest also, yeah, kinda fun. And much harder than it looked.
Quinn scrutinized the sweaty mass of kids surrounding her and Cole. She’d misjudged them back at the school: the young people of Kettle Springs weren’t boring or lily white or your oh-so-basic red state clichés.
Girls danced with girls, guys with guys, and nobody looked scandalized. A couple of black guys chilled at the pong tables, getting along just fine with cheesy-looking white boys. Everyone could hang. More than anything else had in the last strange, confusing few days, the dance floor—and maybe the drink—put Quinn at ease.
Which wasn’t to say there weren’t . . . moments. The kids of KSH were completely obsessed with Cole.
Everyone was eyeing her date. Quinn and Cole were at the center of it all. Guppies in a fishbowl. It was a position not entirely unfamiliar to Quinn, who’d spent most of the last year trying hard to disappear.
Her therapist said she was trying to hide, that withdrawing wasn’t a valid coping mechanism. But Dr. Mennin wasn’t the one who had to go to school, put up with the whispers. The more people googled the specifics, the more they found out about what had happened to Samantha Maybrook. That Mom was a dope fiend, hooked on opioids, who’d graduated to heroin. How, basically, her mom’s brain had stopped telling her lungs to breathe. The thought of which made Quinn want to disappear, and when Dr. Mennin called her on it, she called bullshit. But she knew, in her heart, the woman had a point.
She’d started seeing Dr. Mennin just before the overdose—the last overdose, when Mom had promised to get clean. If Quinn wanted to float away before then, afterward she felt flattened. Her dad was the thing that kept her in the world. He pulled her out of bed. He made sure to be home when she got home from school. He took her to the movies, made her eat, lay on the floor next to her bed until she fell asleep. But eventually it did start to get better. It did. And then Dad finally fell apart. Grief doesn’t depend on dates—that’s what Dr. Mennin told her again and again.
And now . . . Now she was dancing with Cole, watching all the people watching them, and thinking about calling her therapist. If that wasn’t a sign that she still needed professional help, Quinn couldn’t imagine what else could be.
Suddenly the air around her was humid and cloying, and no amount of closing her eyes to reset was ever going to bring her back to normal.
As a Steve Aoki song reached its final breakbeats, Quinn found her body screaming for a time-out.
“I need a drink,” Quinn whispered in Cole’s ear. “Not a drink-drink. Some water.”
“Cool, cool,” Cole said. Thankfully, he didn’t follow her as she moved through and around the dancing bodies toward the makeshift bar outside the barn, in the clearing. No, he didn’t follow—instead Quinn caught a glimpse of Ronnie and Matt approaching Cole as she made her way to the two plywood-covered sawhorses that the kids were calling the “bar.”
There didn’t seem to be any water, so Quinn poured herself another screwdriver, this time correctly: heavy on the OJ, light on the plastic-bottle vodka. She lightened it even further with a few ice cubes that she plucked from one of the keg-filled kiddie pools, gross as the pools might’ve been.
Quinn pressed her drink to the side of her neck to cool herself off as she stood to the side to watch the party. There was a drunk boy, perched on the edge of the in-ground fire, looking like his friends had convinced him to jump it. Quinn looked away, not wanting to watch if this dope was about to hurt himself.
Quinn also noted that the silo had a small sliding door on its side. She watched a girl exit, a thick plume of smoke or vape following her.
The droplets of sweat running down Quinn’s back slowed, then began
to cool as she sipped her drink.
Without Cole by her side, Quinn was anonymous again. It felt freeing.
She wandered around to the rear of the barn, tugging her blouse from her lower back as she went. Over here the party thinned. There were a few giggling shadows, people making out in the shade of the far side of the barn. Out in the corn, she heard someone puking, the sound reminding her to look where she was walking, just in time to sidestep a suspicious-looking puddle. And then, near the edge of the high school party oasis, she saw a latecomer wandering out of the corn.
Ginger walked out of the shadows. The skater girl’s hair color was distinctive, even if she’d ditched her sweatshirt for a tank top and had put some kind of product in her hair.
Quinn squinted at her.
Was that seriously a faux-hawk? Quite the fashion statement.
Back at their lockers, the girl had given Quinn a loner vibe, but then again, so had Rust, and he’d shown up at the party at Tillerson’s. Maybe this was truly a unifying event. No outcasts here; the high school had come together to howl at the moon for one night at least. Quinn smiled at the thought.
“Hey,” Quinn said as Ginger approached.
There was no response.
Ginger was alone and . . . staggering.
Ginger hugged her bare arms, raised her eyes, and seemed to notice Quinn for the first time.
Her lips worked, trying to speak, but Quinn couldn’t make out what she was saying.
Ginger hopped forward on one foot, then paused to turn and look behind her, then stumbled to the ground.
“Ya all right there?” Quinn almost said “youse,” but that would have been a put-on, an affectation—Quinn wasn’t from that part of Philly.
Quinn laughed, uneasy when Ginger didn’t stand back up.
Quinn stepped forward to give her a hand, but was suddenly aware that the two of them were alone out here.
In the back of her mind, selfishly, Quinn was thinking how helping Ginger could become an excuse to leave the party early, to go home to her dad. She’d had enough for one night. Helping a drunk girl home was as good an excuse as any for getting out of this field.
But as Quinn walked closer, it was clear that something was wrong.
