Shifting

by B. V. Larson

  “I got a second cot for her.”

  “You what?”

  “I’m not going to get into any details with a joker like you.”

  He stared at me for a moment.

  I attempted a poker face, but it didn’t work.

  “You wimp!” he exclaimed. “You didn’t do a thing, did you?”

  “Shut up, Vance.”

  He sputtered and made sounds of disbelief as we turned onto Bohlend drive and began climbing the slope. The Nelsons lived at the very end of Bohlend drive just outside of town.

  “You know what,” Vance told me. “If you were a dog, you would be poodle. One of those poodles that rolls over on its back when you come near and wizzes itself. A real piss-and-shiver dog.”

  I turned on him and might have punched him, but we both heard something big rumbling behind us. It was the storm.

  We looked up blinking at the sky. It didn’t look right. There was a black billowing cloud shaped like an anvil in the middle of the overcast sky. A contrasting wisp of white like a streak of cotton moved quickly over the face of the anvil. There came a flash of light, like lightning, but there was no thunderclap, just the rumbling sound. The anvil-shaped cloud was impossibly dark, and seemed unnatural. Worse, the flash of light inside it seemed to be twinged with red.

  “Lightning?” I said almost hopefully.

  “What kind of devil’s lightning is that?” demanded Vance. “It was red. I swear it was red. Man, did you see it?”

  I nodded, but wasn’t really listening to him. I had caught sight of the lake. I gestured and pointed.

  We had made it up to the top of the only hill in Redmoor on the East side. It wasn’t very high, but it was enough to see over the trees and houses to the Lake. The water there was as black as slate flecked with silver. Even at this distance I could see the waves the storm was kicking up. It was like looking at an open beach along the Atlantic. And out there, under the storm and under the waves too, I thought I saw a light. A blue-green glow. After a few seconds the glow died down and the Lake was just roiling dark water again.

  Vance turned back to me, and I could see from the horrified look on his face that he had seen it too. For once he was speechless. The wind was beginning to gust up into a roar at times now. The trees bent and whipped at the sky.

  “Let’s get moving. If that girl is out here we had better find her fast,” I shouted over the winds. We turned and hurried up Bohlend Drive.

  We actually found the girl. I think we were more surprised than she was when she popped out of an abandoned car and came up behind us to grab our coats. We hadn’t even made it up to the Nelson place yet, and we were so distracted by the storm that we hadn’t heard her cries as we passed the car in which she had hidden.

  Holly Nelson was a preteen and not a little girl anymore. You could tell she would have real breasts and hips within a year or two, but right now, she was wearing pajamas with yellow bears blowing bubbles on them. She was rail-thin with long wet hair that had pasted itself in black stripes over her face. Her bright green eyes shone with fear out of her very pale face. In her hand, she gripped a six-inch long screwdriver with a green resin handle.

  “I—I was hiding in the car,” she told us in between sobs. “Things came after me, little things. They couldn’t get in. I spent the night in there.”

  “We’ll take you back to your parents, everyone is fine,” I told her.

  “Things?” asked Vance, grabbing her arm. She nodded, and I saw Vance’s radar go on. He eyed the soaking landscape around us nervously. I couldn’t blame him.

  Vance patted her shoulder. “Were they flying things?”

  She nodded again.

  Vance recoiled and his hand leapt from her shoulder as if she somehow had delivered a shock to his fingertips.

  “Let’s move,” I said and there was no argument from either of them. We headed back toward the medical center. We had less than a mile to go, but the storm was moving in off the Lake unusually fast.

  Thirteen

  It was the most savage storm I’d ever seen. Earlier, there had been no thunder, but now there was plenty of it crashing in the sky with more red flashes deep up in the clouds, lighting them up from the inside like a light bulb under a gauzy blanket. Here in Indiana we are a long way from open seas and hurricanes, but we do get a tornado now and then. I’d always heard about them, and we had the warning system, but I’d never seen an actual funnel cloud up close until today.

  “What the heck is that?” demanded Vance, and I saw that the black clouds were passing over the area of the Lake where we had seen the lights in the water a few minutes before. A silver gushing cloud rolled out over the lake centered on this point. It rose higher as we watched and formed a swirling dark conical shape that aimed down into the lake. The mist and winds it kicked up at the bottom swallowed the trees along the lakeshore.

  I gazed at the storm for a second, thinking hard. I realized that the storm had touched down just about where I had met the changeling and spoken with her the night before. Were the two events related? I had no idea. But I wondered if that pile of rocks I’d set out there would still be there to mark the spot after this storm. I doubted it.

  “It’s a water cyclone,” I said, “we’ve got to run, and we might have to find a cellar to hide in.”

  Holly was pulling desperately on my coat. I worried instantly that she had hurt herself. She had no shoes on and I’d been wondering all along when I was going to have to pick her up and carry her.

  But it wasn’t her feet. She pointed behind us and screamed something but I couldn’t make out the words. I looked behind us and I yelled myself.

  They were coming. The flying ones.

  I’d developed a theory about them that differed from everyone else’s. Some people thought the flying ones were birds, because they ranged in size from about that of an adult crow to that of a goshawk. Others theorized they were leaves originally, because they were shaped like leaves and had the skin-texture of a leaf—if you can imagine a leaf that is fleshy, like a big slab of steak. Worst of all was the sucker-like mouth that could chew through the back of your coat and latch onto an artery to suckle. I myself figured they were too leaf-like to be birds, and too big and mobile to be leaves—I figured they were both. Somehow—I felt in my bones I was right the very first time I thought of it—I knew they were both bird and leaf, merged together in whatever unnatural fashion these changelings were made, like two colors of candle wax melted and molded together to form a new color in a new shape. Except that these new shapes were abominations, things like flying kites that wriggled through the air and which seemed to catch currents and glide like flying squirrels down upon their fleeing victims.

  Behind and above us, moving in wild swirling patterns in the turbulent winds were perhaps a dozen of them. I could see glittering eyes like black marbles. Their open maws worked beneath those eyes, contracting and expanding in anticipation, seeking our flesh to latch onto.

  We ran.

  I took Holly’s hand with my left arm and drew my saber with my right. Normally, you could hear them coming when they swooped down on you from out of the sky, but today with the storm beating down on us we couldn’t hear a thing except for the roar of the cold silver sheets of rain pouring on the asphalt and the wind screaming in the trees. Still, I sensed their nearness and whirled and slashed just as two of them dived for us. One sheared apart to flip and slap on the wet pavement like a gasping bass in the bottom of a fishing boat. The second made it down and adhered itself to the back of Holly’s head. She shrieked, hitting that special, ear-splitting high-pitched note that only young girls can reach.

  I lifted my saber but realized I couldn’t do anything without risking her life. I reached out and tried to rip the thing out of her hair. It felt like a wedge of muscle. The cold rubbery flesh was strong and I thought that a stingray must have felt like this. Vance had joined us then and he gripped the thing and tugged at it too. His lips curled back to bare his teeth in
disgust, but he did it. Our efforts only made Holly scream louder. Blood trickled down her face as her scalp opened up.

  Then there was a silvery flash as her hand raised up and punched at the thing. It was the screwdriver she had been carrying. She stabbed at it repeatedly. I saw one of the black spherical eyes pop. Then it let go and Vance and I stomped the unholy life out of it.

  We both took up one of Holly’s arms and ran. We half-carried Holly the rest of the way into the parking lot. Jimmy Vanton and Carlene Mitts were there to greet us with shotguns. They boomed at the things that darted about like kites in the sky. We didn’t stop running until we slammed open the glass doors and stumbled, dripping with rainwater and blood, into the waiting room.

  We had made it.

  Doc Wilton gave Holly a dozen or so stitches in her scalp and there was a spot up there she would have to comb over and hide for the rest of her life, but she would live. When I came to see her, munching on the sandwiches and coffee Monika had given me so long ago, but which I had never had a chance to eat, she was still gripping her screwdriver resolutely. I nodded in appreciation, she was a survivor. I didn’t know whether to be glad for her or to mourn the rest of her childhood she had already missed out on.

  “Thanks guys.” She gave us a smile.

  Vance and I mustered up smiles of our own. For the next hour or so while the storm raged on outside, we were heroes. We felt relatively relaxed inside, confident nothing could breach our walls. Even if it did, there were too many of us, too well-armed and too battle-hardened to be taken. The center had been vandalized back in the seventies and the owners had taken pains to put in thick, wire-filled windows that were hard to crack much less to break through. We felt safe inside, the way that medieval armsmen must have felt in their stout stone castle walls. Let the storm do its worst, we thought.

  After the strange storm blew past and the winds died down, a fog settled over the town it left behind. The fog was of a peculiar quality, and I was reminded of the silvery cloud of vapor I’d seen earlier today swallowing up the lakeshore. I had to wonder what might wander out of that fog. Soon, we could only see half-way across the parking lot. Half an hour later, even the nearest of the cars drifted in and out of sight behind patches of heavy white vapor.

  Still, with the storm gone and Holly rescued, we felt safe inside our walls. We felt it, a rising confidence. We had turned the corner on this whole thing. We could understand it and we could beat it.

  We could not have been more wrong.

  Fourteen

  The white fog outside the center kept growing thicker.

  “Somehow, just looking at it, I don’t like it,” said Vance beside me. Monika communicated the same sentiment in a more direct way by sliding herself under my arm.

  “How’s Holly?” I asked her. I knew she had been spending a lot of time fussing over the girl.

  “She is improved.”

  “Did something move out there?” asked Vance.

  “I didn’t see anything,” I said. “The wind stirs that stuff around sometimes.”

  “What’s with this fog, anyway?” Vance demanded petulantly. “A storm is supposed to leave the air nice and clear.”‘

  “That was not normal storm,” said Monika.

  “You got me there,” admitted Vance.

  We were peering out through the closed glass doors in the lobby. Most people avoided the lobby now, figuring logically that any intruders were likely to start with the front door. It had afforded the best view of the storm, however, so there I stood.

  “What I really don’t like are those red flashes up there,” Vance continued.

  I didn’t like them either. They were still going on, occasionally, red flashes of silent lightning far up in the clouds. They were completely outside all the normal rules when it came to storms. The light from them shone through as a pinkish glimmer. I thought about how odd it was to have any kind of lightning and fog at the same time. I could not recall having seen both at the same time before. Not ever.

  Then came a heavy whump, which none of us missed, the sound that an elephant might make when falling against a building. This was followed by a splitting crunch, and another heavy whump.

  Vance took a step back from the glass. I joined him. Monika took at least two steps back and half-tripped over one of those waiting-room chairs that are all connected together in a group like a weird chair-couch.

  “You gonna tell me that was nothing?” Vance hissed out between clenched teeth.

  “What’s going on out there?” asked a deep voice. It was Brigman walking up, our old history teacher. As far as I knew, only he and Mrs. Hatchell had survived from our old school. I was glad to see him. His deep voice had always commanded instant respect from us back in school. He was bald and fat, but had thick arms with a lot of hair on them. On his shoulder was a red fireaxe he’d probably pulled out of a firebox at the school. He tossed a steady stream of peanut candies down his throat with the other hand.

  Vance tried to shush him, but that was an effort doomed to failure.

  “Don’t wet yourself, boy!” Brigman laughed. “That’s just Erik Fotti out there, probably trying to drive that police cruiser around in the fog. He’s on guard duty until dusk.”

  I nodded, a bit relieved. It seemed likely that Fotti would be out there, screwing around with the police car. I sensed that he already fancied himself our new sheriff. He had quietly taken ownership of our town’s only police cruiser and its shotgun.

  No more sounds came from outside for a bit, and we unconsciously started to relax. That’s when the power went.

  It wasn’t just the lights powered by the generators that died. Everything around us died. We had a lot of things rigged up now and some of the lights were connected to car batteries in the dimmer hallways. Everything went out, every machine in the place.

  It got very quiet for a few moments, and then we could hear the cries of concern from back in the labs and examination rooms and nurses stations. Everyone was asking the same thing.

  “I’ll check the generators,” said Brigman.

  Monika left to go check on Holly.

  “Let’s break out the Colemans,” I told Vance. He nodded and we were on it, setting up propane lamps all over the building. Fortunately, the possibility of losing the generators down in the basement had been prepared for. We worked quickly, it almost felt good to have a chore, it drove out thoughts of the fog and the whumps.

  I was back in the dentist’s section when I ran into Erik Foti. He was messing with his cassette player and seemed agitated.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be on guard duty?” I asked him.

  He tossed me an annoyed look and shook his cassette player. AA batteries rolled across a table and he put in two more. “Yeah,” he said. “I took a break for the storm, okay?”

  “Fine, but the storm is pretty much over with.”

  He gave me a wry look. “Things still look pretty strange out there.”

  “What’s wrong with your player?

  “I guess it’s dead or all the batteries are,” he said mournfully. “Flashlights aren’t working either.”

  I frowned and took up a flashlight, messed with it, switched batteries. Nothing. He had three cassette players out on a table and they were all dead, all of them.

  “I’ve got to tell the Doc about this,” I said. “And you should take a look out there.”

  He nodded, a bit sheepishly. “Hey,” he said as I was leaving. “You did a fine thing out there bringing that girl in, Gannon.”

  I flashed him a smile and walked quickly toward Doc Wilton’s office. On the way, I noticed by the light of the Coleman in the nurses’ station that the battery operated wall clock was motionless. There should have been emergency lights on over the exits, and those were out too, I realized. I began to shoulder my way past the people wandering dazedly in the halls. I broke into a trot.

  Fifteen

  I threw open Doc Wilton’s door, ignoring the PRIVATE sign on it. The int
erior was dimly lit by a tiny bathroom-sized window up high over the bookshelves.

  “Doc?”

  She didn’t answer right away. She was working with something in her hands. I couldn’t see what.

  “Doc, the power’s dead. Everything is dead. I mean everything, all the batteries and flashlights—” I broke off, realizing for the first time that the thing in her hand was a small handgun.

  “I know, Gannon,” she said quietly.

  “Doc, we really need you right now. People will panic without light tonight,” I said quietly.

  Wilton didn’t look up, but she put her pistol down on the desk in front of her.

  “Have you got one of the lanterns, Gannon? I’d like to read something to you,” she said in a distant voice. Her head was still lowered.

  “Yes,” I said, “yes, I’ll get one. Stay right there.”

  I headed out into the hall, moving fast. I gritted my teeth, expecting to hear a single, popping shot behind me. When it didn’t come, I hurried to find a lantern before it did.

  In situations such as we were in, the social rules regarding suicide changed. None of us spoke these thoughts aloud, they were too terrible to voice, but we knew that it was understandable, should anyone wish to take their own life. Our own sheriff had done it on the third day, after his four young children had gutted his wife and left her to die on the kitchen tile. He had blown them apart, I think with the same shotgun that Erik Fotti so proudly toted today, and then he had turned it on himself.

  Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that we condoned suicide or that we wanted anyone to do it. Rather, the act had lowered somewhat on the unthinkability chart. Now it was more on the level of quitting a shitty job. You argued your coworkers out of it when you could. You would miss them, but you didn’t blame those who checked out. You understood them.

  When I got back with the lantern, the gun was gone and she had a small clothbound book out instead. I set the lantern on a shelf and turned it up a notch. It hissed and brightened.