by P. T. Phronk
“Keep driving!” he said. His wild eyes and shaky voice now lacked his trademark veneer of sarcastic detachment.
“You fuck!” Jasmine said, and attempted to turn around, but he leaned forward to rest on the wide center console of the truck and press the knife against her neck hard enough to draw blood.
Jasmine pressed herself back in her seat. “You’ve ruined me, Ash. You’ve ruined this whole family. My dad, Trista. I loved her so much.”
“You think I didn’t love her?” Ash said.
“You only wanted to fuck her. You wanted to use her. Just like you tried to let those men use their home.”
The knife shook in his hand. “Don’t you put this on me. They were only supposed to scare you all off. Write on the windows, let off a few warning shots. It was supposed to be gradual, but then … that … that storm moved up their plans. That haunted fucking house distracted you from the warning signs, like it wanted to keep you there even if it killed you. And fucking Trista!”
“Ash, don’t you even say her name,” Jasmine said.
“She read my text messages, you know that? The scrawny bitch snuck into my room while I was watering her orchids and cutting her lawn, and thought she could invade what little privacy I had left. If you ran off with her, you’d have seen her dark side too.”
Jasmine shook with anger. “She trusted me. I didn’t sneak around her room at night. I didn’t stare at her like she was a slab of meat. Why did you kill her, Ash?”
He bared his teeth. “Because I didn’t have time to keep her locked in that room until she starved.”
Jasmine twitched with anger, and the knife came millimetres from carving into her neck.
I needed to do something. “Where are we going, Ash?”
He glanced at the open road ahead of us. His eyes were rimmed with red and twitched wildly, seeing things that we didn’t; he definitely didn’t keep them closed while the invaders lost their minds. He gave me an address. “You think one safe room would have held all of us? No, that was just for Alex and his kid. There are two more safe rooms that your company was kind enough to build for us. You saw what was out there, in the storm.” He shook like he was freezing. “There’s no time left. Those … those things are out there, and soon we’ll all be their slaves. You saw them, didn’t you?”
“No, Ash,” I said.
“They’ll enslave us all!” he said, his voice hysterical. “Keep driving and get me to the next house, and you won’t get hurt.”
But he’d killed Trista for knowing less. The moment we dropped him off to terrorize a new family, we’d join the pile of bodies Ash had left behind him. That was a problem—an unacceptable security risk.
I shook my head. “Scared men,” I said.
“What?”
“The end of the world is beating at our doorstep, and it’s still scared men making things worse instead of better.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
It was the first thing that came in my mind, and perhaps I was only stalling. I’d devoted my life to safety and security. It didn’t always work—for the Foster family, the safe room had created more problems than it solved. But sometimes safety measures did the job they were designed to do.
Plus, I’d vowed to start tackling my problems head on.
I floored the gas pedal and turned the wheel sharply. The truck veered off the road and down an embankment. I aimed for the nearest tree.
When the bumper wrapped itself around the tree, the safety belts around Jasmine and me did their jobs, but Ash was not so lucky. As the front of the truck crumpled, he flew through the windshield, hit the tree, and came to resemble the red mist that he’d been so frightened of.
My life didn’t flash before my eyes. I didn’t see Todd and Wes waving up at me from the sky; no, my imagination was not as vivid as Caleb’s, and certainly not as … external. But I did think of my family, and how many times in the past twelve hours I’d been close to joining them.
Judging by how Jasmine was staring at the red paste on the tree that used to be Ash, she was not seeing her family either—her girlfriend Trista, her father Marcus, both dead or likely to be. She was as much an orphan as me now.
“Are you hurt?” I asked.
“Why did you—where—” she stammered, in shock.
I helped her unlatch her seatbelt. Both front doors were buckled so badly that they wouldn’t open, so we crawled into the back seat of the truck, past a worn-down tube of red lipstick, past a discarded wrapper for a cherry candy, and spilled out a back door onto the shoulder of the road.
When we’d crawled far enough away from the car to be sure it wouldn’t hurt us if it exploded, the pain set in. My knee still wouldn’t bend. My forehead felt slick from where it had left a layer of skin on the truck’s airbag. Jasmine’s breaths were shallow and shaky; perhaps from the shock, perhaps from a few broken ribs.
I took her hand in mine. It calmed her down, and gave her a job to do, because I could barely support my weight without her steadying me after every step.
We’d crashed in front of a driveway. We limped up a dirt road until we could see past the trees, to where the driveway was leading, hoping that it would be somewhere with a phone, or there would be someone there who could help us.
It was a house. A mix of old and new, it had a central foyer, with wings stretching to either side. The bulge at the end of the west wing could have been a ball room. A few APT Security signs poked out of the front garden like hexagonal flowers.
Jasmine and I looked at each other.
“No,” she said.
“Not in a million years.”
So we continued walking, slowly. We were sad, we were in pain, the sky darkened above us, but we continued walking, and we imagined a better world.
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Also by P.T. Phronk: The Arborist
The tree was not there last night. Now, the terror is growing.
The Arborist is the standalone prequel to Three Incidents at Foster Manor. Discover what happened to Amy’s family, and explore the origin of the terrifying mysteries that are gradually driving the world mad.
Get The Arborist here: https://forestcitypulp.com/books/the-arborist-by-p-t-phronk/
About P.T. Phronk
P.T. Phronk writes about things that don't exist, things that might exist, and things that shouldn't exist. In other words, he writes fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Sometimes all three at the same time.
He received a PhD in psychology after writing a dissertation about why people like frightening films. So he literally wrote the book on horror, and continues to tinker with dark creations by cover of night, while by day, he writes about the mysteries of the human psyche as a brain scientist.
Get in touch with him any time on Twitter: @phronk
Also From Forest City Pulp
An old man—a monster—with power and privilege beyond imagination, preys on the weak, the innocent, the oppressed. One insatiable desire compels him above all others, and he’ll stop at nothing to achieve it.
A timid girl who fears everything—having struggled since the day she was born against poverty, racism, colonialism, and misogyny—must decide to continue
living in fear, or fight for what she deserves.
Each owes the state of their existence to factors compounded by the generations—factors that have left them at extreme opposite ends of the social divide. When they cross paths, only one will survive.
Get All the Fine Hungers by cal chayce here: https://forestcitypulp.com/books/all-the-fine-hungers-by-cal-chayce/
Thanks
Thank you to:
Wording, for editing in such a way that it not only improved this book, but will improve all my writing from now on. You can permanently upgrade your own brain at http://www.wording.ca.
Alexa, for proofreading. If you enjoy typos, then make sure you avoid her website at http://alexabooks.wixsite.com/authors.
Everyone who read The Arborist and said something about it, whether it was a comprehensive review, or just asking “when’s the next one?”
Meg, for everything.
