by B. V. Larson
SHIFTING
by
B. V. Larson
Copyright © 2010 by the author.
Author B. V. Larson's Website: http://bvlarson.com
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the author.
One
“Are they dead?” Vance hissed in my ear.
I gestured for him to be quiet. I stared at the wreck for a full minute more, but nothing changed. The steaming sedan lay on its side in a ditch full of dead leaves. The windshield was a spider web of silvery cracks. A long, pale arm had punched out a hole through the windshield. A single fly crawled over the knuckles in hops and jerks.
The fly on the knuckles vanished.
“What do you think, Gannon?” asked Vance, still whispering.
I glanced at him. He was my younger brother, the only family I had left. Like me, his hair was black and his eyes were blue. His face was bloodless and tight with fear. His breath came in hard puffs that made white plumes in the crisp air. It was a cold day for Indiana in October. You could feel the first frosty promise of the winter to come.
“I think they’re dead,” I replied.
“Are they going to stay dead?”
“I hope so.”
“Are we going down there?”
“Not just yet,” I told him.
He didn’t argue, and we waited. The arm hanging out of the windshield did not stir. The ticking engine cooled and the wisps of steam died down. Vance squirmed nervously, licking his lips and gripping his hunting rifle, a Mauser .30-06. I could not blame him. I had the hilt of grandpa’s old Marine dress saber gripped in both hands myself. Vance seemed to be looking everywhere at once. We had heard the crash not more than ten minutes ago and had worked our way down through the forest to it. We still were not sure as to the cause.
After a reasonable time, I stepped out onto the asphalt. I looked up and down SR 446, not that you could see very far in the forest. There was no other traffic. Cars were rare these days. One end of the highway went north and back home past Redmoor. In that direction lay what locals called “the Cutright”, a boat launching area on the lakeshore. Farther north, the 446 went on over the bridge across Lake Monroe. In the other direction, heading south, you eventually hit U.S. highway 50, which drew a stripe across the southern tip of Indiana. At least it used to, before things had changed.
This car had been traveling north toward Redmoor and the lake. It had Kentucky plates, and they were probably coming out of Louisville. We had heard rumors about Louisville—none of them good.
“Let’s go,” I told Vance. He watched me with frightened eyes then finally got up and followed five paces behind.
The woods sound different on a cold day. Each footstep is muffled somehow. Most of the leaves were still on the trees in their fall yellows and reds mixed with green, but there were enough on the ground now to make every step crunchy.
I peered inside the windshield. The car had come to rest on the driver’s side. The driver’s body lay against the side window with his face pinned between the steering wheel and the windshield. It was his arm that had punched through the windshield. Still gripped in his other hand was a large revolver. His throat had been torn open by something. No doubt, this had caused the crash. His eyes were open and he looked decidedly dead.
There was another passenger, however, a woman in the backseat. After the car had done its death roll off the highway, she had ended up crumpled against her closed car door.
Vance clucked his tongue in my ear. I glanced at him. He had come to crouch next to me.
“She’s pretty, dammit,” he said. “There’s blood all over her shirt. She’s dead. What a dammed shame.”
I moved around to the back window and kicked it out. I looked her over. Her wrist hung at an odd angle, probably broken. There was a matted bloody area in her hair where she had hit the car roof. I reached in and put my hand on her neck, just to be sure. I felt a light, fluttering sensation under my fingers.
Vance paced behind me, shaking his head. I gripped his coat, stopping him.
“She’s not dead. Help me get her out.”
Two
It took us about twenty nervous minutes, but we managed to build a crude stretcher out of the dead man’s coat and some branches. I wondered how she would react if she woke up and noticed she was riding on the bloody clothes of her companion.
In the open trunk I spotted a large wad of newspapers. They were copies of the Louisville Courier Journal. I checked the dates, and they were from last month. I decided to take them with us. Outside news was valuable.
While we built the stretcher, I noticed a tripod-shaped print in the mud near the car. It was a deep print, indicating something big had made it. It looked like a hoof-print. I chewed my lip for a second, glancing at Vance. I knew what his reaction would be; he would want to run—right now. I covered the hoof-print with a scoop of dead leaves and worked faster on the stretcher, eyeing the trees around us distrustfully.
“What’s wrong, Gannon?” asked Vance.
“Nothing.”
When it was time to lift her, she seemed to weigh nothing at all stretched out between the two of us. I wondered if we were doing the right thing taking her in. Sometimes, these days, strangers went bad on you. They rotted and changed overnight, like fruit that you had forgotten about and left on the counter for too long.
Vance at first took up the rear position, letting me lead. But almost immediately, he halted.
“Let me lead,” he said.
“Why?”
“It’s no good,” he shook his head. “I can’t keep a sharp eye out with her stretched out in front of me, I keep thinking if she’ll die or not and what her voice will sound like and…”
“Okay,” I said, and we switched places. Walking behind him, I noticed he had a new heavy lump weighing down his coat pocket. It had to be the dead man’s pistol. Vance still believed in guns, but I did not. They did not always fire anymore, because like everything else, they had changed. Sometimes, usually when you had a frenzied monster chewing on your foot, they would misfire or jam. That’s why I carried my grandpa’s saber. It always worked. Vance’s theory was to have a lot of guns, hoping at least one of them would go off. I didn’t argue. There was no need. Whoever lived the longest would be proven right.
As we carried her, I thought about the benefits of being attractive. Would we have worked as hard to save the driver, if he had been the one to survive? We had even brought the backpack she had with her in the backseat. True, she didn’t weigh much, but I had to wonder if we would risk so much for someone less interesting. The world was anything but fair.
“You think she’s a hitchhiker?” asked Vance from up ahead between white puffs. We were going uphill and the loose leaves were sliding around, slowing us down.
“I don’t know.”
“How old do you think she is? She looks like she’s maybe twenty.”
“Kind of young for you then,” I remarked.
“Really young for you,” he said with a dark glance.
“You’re still thinking about her, even though we swi
tched,” I said, grinning.
“Yeah. I bet you are, too.”
I didn’t respond, I didn’t have to. We both knew the truth of it. She was possibly the only adult female under thirty left alive in the county. We trudged westward, deeper into the woods and away from the highway. The shores of Lake Monroe were to the left and less than a mile off.
“Who do you think she is?” Vance continued when the land leveled.
“She’s probably up from Louisville. Plenty of people have been trying to get out to the countryside.”
“So what went wrong? Do you think one of them changed and caused the wreck?”
“It would have to be her if that happened, it was the driver’s neck that was ripped.”
“Maybe,” I said, thinking of the hoof-print I’d seen. I had hoped Vance would shut up and walk faster if I didn’t talk much. But as his brother, I knew better.
Vance glanced nervously over his shoulder at the girl between us. “She looks really normal. I bet something got in. Maybe they had a window down, and something flew in there.”
“Could be.”
“I hate the flying ones.
“Yeah.”
“You know, I’m not sure that we should take her back to our cabin.”
It was my turn to frown. I said nothing, but he had a point. You never knew who was dangerous.
“We should take her to the Preacher. We are supposed to be patrolling the highway, and we definitely have something to report,” said Vance, “He’ll know what to do, and I bet he could tell if she’s dangerous or not.”
“We couldn’t make it there before dark.”
“Yeah, I don’t want to carry her that far anyway. We’ll have to take her to the cabin. Then we could get out the Durango and drive her over.”
“It would still be dark before we got back.”
He nodded. We both thought about it as we trudged on. Things always got much worse in the dark. Vance managed to shut up for about twenty minutes, saving our breath for walking.
“What time do you think it is?” I asked him finally. The girl was slowing us down now, getting through the denser trees was a problem with a stretcher, and we had to hunt for open trails.
“It looks like four o’clock at least,” he said. Neither one of us wore a watch, of course. Watches didn’t work right anymore. Complex electronic things were useless now, they either ran too fast, or too slow, or simply spit sparks and died when you turned them on. No one knew why. The Preacher simply said that the laws of the world had changed, and it was time to learn how to live by the new laws.
“Let’s pick it up,” I said.
He glanced back at me, immediately suspicious. “Tell me,” he said with eyes narrowed.
I sighed and told him about the tripod-shaped print in the mud back at the wreck. Half-way through my confession, he dropped his end of the stretcher. The girl rolled partly off the stretcher and her head lolled into the leaves.
“You idiot, Vance,” I said, easing her back onto the stretcher. “What if her spine is damaged?”
“Then she’s dead anyway,” he snapped. “I can’t believe you had me running around in the woods cutting sticks to carry her without telling me something big was out there. I used to wear your hand-me-down feet-pajamas and the moment a girl shows up I can’t trust you anymore?”
“You would have run off.”
He scowled, stamped around and threw up his arms sputtering. “Maybe! But I would have told you, Gannon!”
He had a finger pointed at my chest, and I looked down. “Sorry.”
Getting an apology out of me was rare, and he was impressed, but still angry. “Something is out there and you were letting it follow us back home without even telling me.” He complained further for about a minute before I cut him off.
“It’s getting dark fast, we’ve got a ways to go, let’s just get going and pick up the pace,” I said. I took my end of the stretcher and looked at him.
Vance hesitated. He looked around at the trees, which seemed to crowd in closer every minute. A bird cried and the wind rustled the upper branches of the forest. He looked down at the girl, and I knew he was thinking about ditching her. He lifted an arm that had flopped off and placed it back onto the stretcher. We both saw smudged high cheekbones and eyes that would be wide and bright if they ever opened again. I wondered what color they were. Her hair was a honey-brown blonde. I could tell just by looking at it the color didn’t come out of a bottle.
I could not carry her alone and defend myself if Vance took off, so I was quiet, letting him think it over. We both knew he was deciding if she lived or died. He stared at her.
I think it was her face that saved her in the end. I wondered how many times over the millennia lives had been decided in just such a moment.
With a grunt of annoyance, Vance took up the stretcher again and we hustled deeper into the woods toward our cabin.
Three
We barely made it. Darkness comes fast in the woods, and tonight the setting sun was aided by sheets of mist which crept up from Lake Monroe. The fog pooled around the base of the hill, and moved its way up to the cabin. Both the mists and the darkness seemed to be in a race to beat us to the door. By the time we got there, the shadows from the trees formed a wall of impenetrable gloom over the clearing around the yard and the last yellow gleams of sunlight trickled through the branches. We set down the stretcher and scrambled to open the barbed wire barricades that were set up all around the cabin. Vance stabbed himself on the wire in his haste.
“Aww! Friggin’ wire,” he complained.
I watched blood well up on his hand in alarm.
“Don’t let the drops hit the ground,” I said.
“I know, I know, the scent.”
He wiped his bleeding hand on his coat. I chewed my lower lip, sure that some fresh blood had gotten on the wire and the ground, but we had no time to hose it down and dig it out now. We had to get inside.
In the cabin, the air was musty and dank, but smelled wonderful to me. For the first moment since we had set out that day on patrol, I felt the tension ooze out of me. I felt tired.
It was then, as I reached to close the cabin door, that I saw it.
A line of three-pointed prints crossed the yard and went around behind the cabin to the garage. Vance was looking over our guest whom we had laid out on the old ratty couch in the living room. I hissed unhappily and Vance was at my elbow in an instant.
“What is it?”
I pointed to the line of prints.
“It didn’t follow us, it beat us here,” said Vance. He made a show of smacking himself in the forehead with the palms of his hands. “I never even heard it. I don’t like this, Gannon.”
Neither did I.
* * *
We quickly overcame a slight pang of guilt and searched the girl’s backpack. Inside, we were surprised to find a passport.
“Czechoslovakia?” said Vance in bemusement. “Her name is Monika. That’s something anyway. If we have to bury her, at least we know her name. Is she some kind of student or mail-order bride or something?”
I handed him my find. It was a printout from a webpage. It was a profile from one of those people-search type pages. The picture at the top was Monika’s. She looked even better in the photo, and I noticed that her eyes were greenish. We read the note together.
Nice, responsible, patient and experienced 20 year-old Czech girl who has the thoughts of young person, but the responsibility and maturity of one older :)
Dear family, I wish I could live with you in Belgium - Antwerpen, or in Australia in future time. I worked as an au-pair for one year in the UK - Midlands. I lived in a family with 4 children, 3 dogs, and 6 horses. I was busy, but happy :) I can speak English fluently sometimes, sometimes less so. I have got a big family with many small cousins. I passed school at Klatovy with mark B in last years. I like astrology and paintings. I would like to earn extra money for my next studies. If you would like to know something more from
me, please contact me.
Thank you! –Monika.
Vance was nonplussed. “What’s an au-pair?”
“A nanny,” I said.
“Ah,” he said, sounding a bit disappointed. “Well, at least she’s not married.”
“She sounds sweet,” I said. Somehow, the innocence of the ad made me feel homesick for the old times—the days when I did not have to setup barbed wire around my house before bed.
“Girls with accents can be hot,” said Vance speculatively.
Getting annoyed with his attitude, I turned on him, but then Monika made a mewling sound. We both leaned forward.
“We should have set her wrist.” I said, grimacing at the sudden thought. “Before she wakes up with that.”
“We didn’t have time,” Vance hissed back. “Anyway, we don’t know how. Doc Wilton will have to do it. What I can’t believe is that now she wakes up, after we carried her for hours.”
I took her injured hand and tried to lay it out as straight as I could. She squirmed. I could tell I was hurting her. Vance hurried to get more lanterns. It was dark outside now and we only had the one Coleman hanging from the ceiling.
Monika moaned at my crude ministrations. Her eyes fluttered open. Great way to meet a girl, I thought, the first thing she knows about me is that I’m causing her pain.
She looked up. Bafflement turned to fear, then to terror as she recalled what had happened. She said something incomprehensible that I imagined must be in Czech.
“I’m sorry, Monika,” I said gently, “Try English.”
Her mouth opened and closed a few times. “What happened?” she asked. She did have a soft European accent, which I liked immediately.
Vance came over, twisted his mouth and quickly said, “I’ll get you some cokes and stuff.”
He vanished into the kitchen. I knew he was leaving me behind to tell the girl about her dead companion.
