by Matt Carter
“You got maybe thirty seconds,” Aldo said urgently. “Whatever you’re gonna do, you gotta hurry!”
I looked up. An idea formed. It wasn’t a very good one, but it would have to do.
“Thanks,” I said, quickly turning the Bluetooth off as I began to climb the nearest bookcase. The hanging ceiling panel above me gave way easily, and as I looked into the musty, dingy space it hid, I found it was large enough to hide in. Hoisting myself up by the ceiling’s metal framework, I scrambled into the dark crawlspace and set the loose panel back where it was supposed to be. Assuming Alexei didn’t sleep in here (something that soon hit me as frighteningly possible), I’d be able to make my escape eventually.
Also, assuming that the ceiling’s metal framework could hold my weight. Considering the age of this trailer, I chose not to think too much about it.
I looked down through a small hole in the ceiling panel that gave me a perfect view of the desk. Alexei entered the office, tripping slightly and laughing. After pushing aside some of the mess, he picked up the phone and began to dial. Right on schedule.
“Oh, hello, Henrietta!” Alexei said cheerfully. “So good to call you as always. Listen, I was wondering if you had heard the place is changing? Glen said he wants to throw tonight’s party in his backyard; he has a new fire pit for cooking he wants to try with his new body!”
He laughed hoarsely. What I would have given to hear the other side of the conversation that Aldo was recording. That squeaking noise again beside me, something walking, crawling across my hand. When I looked over and saw the very large, very fat rat, I gasped, startled.
Alexei turned his head around with a start. Though normally smooth and almost sedate in his movement, here he moved like a cornered animal.
“Please hold that thought, my sweetheart, okey dokey?” Alexei said into the phone as he set it down. He knew the noise had come from up here, he just didn’t know where. If only I could—
With the sound of snapping wood, his head jerked sharply to the side as if his neck no longer had any meaning. The crackling, popping sound of a stubborn tree branch being twisted off filled the air as his face contorted. Gill-like protrusions from his cheek formed wide, bat-like ears that rotated jerkily, looking for the source of the sound. A few black, dull eyes broke out on his forehead like a bad rash just as his bottom jaw unhinged and contorted. Three stalks, each about a foot long, topped with segmented, insectoid eyes, burst from his cheek and neck like fleshy flowers to join in on the hunt.
It took everything I had not to scream.
He stood up from his desk, listening, looking, even smelling with a nose that flattened into his face. He would find me. Soon. Then it would all be over.
The fat little rat trundled away from my hand. I reached out, grabbed the squealing rodent by the tail and tossed it through the nearest hole in the ceiling panels I could find. It fell with a dull thud on Alexei’s desk. He looked at it quizzically, then laughed a throaty, inhuman laugh as he grabbed the squealing, frightened rodent in one of his hands. I half-expected him to toss it into that gaping hole of a mouth.
What happened next was infinitely worse.
There was that snapping, popping sound again, and the hand that held the rat contorted horribly. His fingers lengthened and multiplied, looking like bony, white spider’s legs as they ensnared it. A toothy split, a new mouth, opened in the palm of his hand, pulling the squeaking, fighting rodent in with several tendril-like tongues. I could see it trying to claw its way free, looking up with confused, frightened eyes as it disappeared into the toothy palm of Alexei’s hand. Soon, the mouth disappeared and the fingers retracted, the only sign of the rat’s existence the misshapen bulge that moved slowly down Alexei’s wrist.
He went back to the phone and picked it up, shifting his lolling neck to better hear. “Sorry, sorry, just finding a fresh morsel. Not as tasty as some, but meat is meat. You know how I have a hard time resisting? So anyway, I shall see you tonight at nine? That’s the idea!”
I will never know how I kept my terror in check as I watched Alexei finish the call, slowly transforming back into a human. I remember him leaving the office some time later, I remember waiting, I even remember my escape and meeting up with Aldo, but only through a thick haze.
The only thing I remember clearly from that moment was fear.
Fear for having seen one of them for the first time.
Fear that I wouldn’t be able to fight them if it came down to it.
Fear of becoming one of them.
17.
This is All Splinter
Mina
“I’d rather not do this alone, but if I have to, I’ll understand.”
I wasn’t sure if this was a serious offer, scribbled at the end of the note jammed through my window, or if Ben was doing that thing where people try to speed up other people’s decisions by illustrating the absurdity of the incorrect options. Either way, there was really only one answer, the one I scribbled and jammed back into the frame in case he came back to check.
“I’ll figure something out.”
If Ben was right about what he had heard, we were potentially looking at more usable information than I could get from years of standard surveillance. List corrections, more people to be effectively certain about, maybe even new details on the nature of Splinters—their plans, their weaknesses. I couldn’t leave the task of documenting all of that to anyone else.
And in the equally likely event that this almost-too-good-to-be-true stroke of luck, bestowed upon us, however indirectly, by the thing that looked like Haley, turned out to be a trap, I couldn’t leave Ben to handle it alone.
Mom didn’t often interfere directly with my work anymore, but when she did, she was always serious. And at the hour Ben had named, she would almost certainly be at home. She would be expecting me to serve my time peacefully, especially after I’d practically volunteered for it, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t be aware of all the alternatives.
I was trying to think of some pretext to get her out of the house before the meeting when she called me to dinner. Even if I’d found one, it still would have left me with Dad to deal with. That was much less likely to be a problem, but it scared me more. At least with Mom, I already knew the worst that might happen.
If I got caught, and I almost certainly would, I could probably kiss my hard drive goodbye.
Again.
And it would be at least a month before I saw any of my equipment again, or anything else other than the walls of my room. There was no point dwelling on the cost. I had to go to the meeting. That much had been established. The only remaining question was how to get there with a long enough head start to watch it properly before someone was sent to find me.
It was past eight by the time we started eating, late even for a night when Mom was cooking, and I wanted badly to gulp down my entire plate of spaghetti as soon as I got it in front of me, but I was careful not to eat as if I were planning to be somewhere. Mom raised her eyebrows at the sheer quantity I had served myself, but as usual, she didn’t say anything.
She probably never would until I got at least curvy enough to fill out a B cup, and I didn’t mind if that never happened. What my mother referred to as her “assets” looked like almost as much of a liability in a fight or a chase as her taste in shoes.
At least the shoes could be used to stab something.
I like spaghetti. It requires concentration.
Once we were all eating, Dad asked his usual, unjustifiably optimistic, “How was everyone’s day?”
My day had, of course, been pointless, so Mom an-
swered, complaining about some act of sabotage against her current case without looking at him, as if I had been the one inquiring about the paperwork errors and political subtleties that plagued, as she would have put it, “people with lives.”
I listened, and somewhere between the sound of her voice and the two strands of spaghetti that kept unraveling from the end of my fork, I was f
inally forming the beginnings of an idea.
“Yeah, I think I read something about that,” I said in one of her brief pauses.
“About what?”
“That new witness they’re letting in?” I hoped I’d interpreted her ramblings correctly. “It was in the local news.” I hoped it was. It sounded like the sort of thing that might have been.
Mom narrowed her eyes at me, but that didn’t give me much of a clue. Whether she thought I was lying or telling the truth, she would be annoyed with me.
“Have you taken up reading the paper again, Mina?”
It was working. I snorted a little louder than I normally would have over the amount of actual paper that was wasted on information people had perfectly good access to without it. “No. Why?”
“I can’t think how else you’d be so abreast of current events.”
As I’ve said, I’m not much of an actress, but I flicked my eyes toward Dad and away again within the correct window of time.
“What?” Dad asked when Mom glared at him.
“I wasn’t online, Mom!”
She ignored me completely, and I took advantage of her distraction to eat as much as I possibly could before dinner officially came to an early end.
“If she has been, it’s news to me!” Dad protested, and Mom scoffed.
“You have to stop doing this to me, dear.”
She never called him “dear” when she was in a good mood, but when she was angry, it was her favorite way of not calling him “Sam” without directly saying why.
“I didn’t do anything!”
“You have to stop treating me like an obstacle! I do my best to take you seriously, dear, I really do. You could at least show me the same courtesy!”
Right around then, when the argument stopped being about me, she remembered I was still there.
“We’ll have a talk later, Mina,” she said without looking back at me.
I stuffed one last meatball into my mouth to chew on the way downstairs, threw my bag over my shoulder, climbed up onto the grass outside my window, and lifted my bike from its rack while the voices were still loud in the dining room. I didn’t know exactly how long I had before Mom’s “talk,” but by the sound of the one she was already having, with any luck, I’d at least get as far as the start of the meeting before she missed me.
The sun had fully set after the thirty-three minutes it took me to pedal up to Dr. Westlake’s, and when the sporadic excuses for streetlights along his one-and-a-half-lane road finally illuminated, all they did was cast reflections on the insides of my glasses, indistinguishable from obstacles in the darkness ahead. I’d just gotten used to riding right through them when one of the tall, person-sized obstacles turned out to be solid.
Ben didn’t make a sound when I hit him. Well, no sound other than “thud,” and he caught me before I could scrape my bike and my elbow along the ground.
“Shh,” he greeted me even though I hadn’t made a sound yet. He was still holding me up. At least he was off to a nice, cautious start this time. “It’s already started,” he whispered.
He guided me forward to another lump of darkness that turned out to have substance—his mother’s little blue SUV. He opened the rear door and hoisted my bike very carefully inside. I thought about pointing out that if he was killed or taken with the keys in his pocket, I’d be stranded, but I couldn’t quite assemble the right words to say it without making it sound as if I expected him to screw up even worse than last time. And that scenario was only marginally more probable than someone in Prospero stealing a bike off the side of the road anyway.
I could already hear laughter, voices, the crackling of a fire pit, and a low techno beat coming from Dr. Westlake’s backyard. No matter how distracted everyone was, there was no way we wouldn’t be noticed creeping up that driveway again. Our only chance of seeing anything was to circle around the back of the yard.
In the woods, in the dark.
Ben walked alongside me, up the drive of the next, darkened house over, toward the trees, not leading or following, not looking back, but not overflowing with the certainty he’d had when we’d last been there, either, when he’d declared that we were going to find the Miracle Mine. A few paces from the first gap between the trunks, I saw one of his hands shake just a little before disappearing into his pocket.
He was being more than cautious. He was terrified. That’s not a terrible thing. I’m scared of the woods at night and proud to say so. It’s not the irrational child’s fear that makes people do stupid things. It’s the rational kind that stops people from doing stupid things, the kind that comes from knowing, based on hard evidence, that the farther I go into those trees, the less likely I am to come out again.
Ben didn’t have that, at least, he hadn’t at last report when the only Splinter he’d seen for what it was had been a creature in the middle of the street, our side of the tree line. Something had changed.
“Did I miss much?” I whispered.
Ben shrugged. “They haven’t been there long. I was waiting for you.”
He hadn’t gone into the trees alone, ready to fix all the world’s problems just by being right at them hard enough. Something was definitely different.
“What happened?” I asked.
He waited long enough that I wasn’t sure he was going to answer.
“I saw a human one transform,” he explained shortly.
That was all the detail I needed just then.
We stopped in a small clearing, a good distance back from the tree line, but with a wide enough gap to let us see into the yard, crouching down behind one of the ferns. We were close enough to make out the fire and the figures standing around it, which instantly killed any worries I’d had that I might be wasting my time.
None of them looked entirely human. They weren’t trying to. Most of their human forms were partially intact, enough so that I could recognize the ones I knew with their faces turned our way. Alexei was in plain view, along with one of the theatrical society girls and that history teacher who’d only been very, very Probable before. Their extra parts were all wrong.
Arms were stretched out too far to reach the fire, some of them flattened out like giant tongue depressors to feel the heat on more skin surface. Most of them were at least half naked, with a blanket or jacket thrown over the side that faced away from the flames. Alexei’s head was thrown back as though he’d never felt anything so wonderful before. Along with the bones from whatever they’d been barbequing, there were liquor bottles and half-empty food packages everywhere, mostly candy. One woman toward the back was gulping down Skittles with one hand and bacon bits with the other two, but I couldn’t be sure of her identity due to the second mouth she’d also deemed necessary for this purpose.
There was a rapidly undulating mass, thankfully a good distance into the dark on the fire’s other side, which seemed to have parts enough for four people, but I could only hear two distinct voices coming from it.
For the sake of the small dinner still newly in my stomach, I would have preferred to hear fewer.
Even worse, every so often, one of the ones around the fire would take another one’s hand and press the skin together in the plain, clumsy, functional way I’d seen a few times before.
Felt once before.
It made me sick just watching, thinking about the thoughts they shared being pushed into me where they didn’t belong, much sicker than the sounds coming from that writhing tangle of an uncertain number of Splinters.
Still, distasteful details aside, this was a gold mine. One more thing was effectively certain: there were no humans here. This was not a diplomatic or strategic meeting for the benefit of collaborators. This was all Splinter.
I could distinguish six separate threads of conversation, if not all the words of the furthest ones. Two were about the quality of the food. One was about which of the company would have to leave in the near future to acquire more alcohol. One was about the aesthetics of gender-neutral skinny j
eans, and one was a small squabble about standard breakfast-eating protocol.
The sixth caught my attention simply because I couldn’t hear it at all.
Two figures, all the way on the opposite side of the yard from the fire, were whispering to each other, as if they were actually afraid of being overheard.
I was pretty sure Splinters didn’t keep secrets from each other. They were all pieces of the same big plague, after all, and specially designed to share information as easily as a touch, so whispers could only mean one of two things that I could think of.
One: Those two were discussing something they meant to keep even more carefully secret than the rest of this mess from any human who might happen by.
Two: They were so good and experienced at playing human themselves that notions like privacy had become habit for them, even among their own kind.
Either way, I needed to get closer. I wanted words, and I wanted faces.
Maneuvering there with Ben turned out to be a lot easier than I anticipated. I looked at him, then at them, then at the way forward through the trees, closer to their end of the yard. He nodded and followed my footsteps as quietly and quickly as I left them, as if we’d been doing this together all our lives. Whatever he had seen before getting there, I was glad it had happened when it did because the scene in that yard hardly seemed to faze him now.
The closer we got to the pair, the more I realized that faces were going to be a long shot.
One of the Splinters was fully dressed in jeans and an oversized hoodie. A bony, scythe-shaped appendage protruded from the left sleeve, and its owner kept running it absentmindedly over a hole in the knee of its jeans, producing a scraping sound like a whetstone.
“He’s like the Grim Reaper,” Ben whispered.
The other one was wrapped head-to-toe in a blue, king-sized comforter, its discolored, yellowish eyes just barely exposed.
Words were still possible, if not voices, exactly. The whispers were so soft and breathy that I couldn’t even determine gender, much less identity, but I could catch the consonants.
