The Secret: A Thriller

by David Haywood Young

  Plenty of reasons for me to be unconscious for a while. But…maybe there was something more to it.

  I rocked on the porch.

  * * *

  After an hour of pointless musing, I decided I felt fine and wasn’t going to figure it all out sitting there in the dark. If I sprouted fangs, what the hell, maybe it’d mean we could get something other than canned food to eat for a while.

  And the cabin didn’t leak light. So we could leave the lamp burning for a while.

  * * *

  Abby shrieked!

  I rolled off the recliner I’d been sleeping on, grabbed the lighter I’d stuck in my shirt pocket, and flicked it to life. She was sitting straight up, clutching a blanket to her neck.

  “Bad dream?” I asked.

  She shuddered. “Sorry, Daddy,” she said. “I guess…I guess it was about vampires.”

  I sat next to her and gathered her up in a hug, then lifted her to my lap. “It’s okay, hon,” I told her. We sat like that for a while.

  “Daddy? Will you sleep on the bed with me?”

  “What? Don’t you like me anymore? How come you want to beat me up?”

  She giggled. “I just want to cuddle.”

  “Uh huh.” I’d been kidding, but she really did whirl, kick, and flop her arms around when she slept. But I figured we didn’t have anywhere we needed to be tomorrow, so what the heck. We (or at least I) could sleep late.

  “Sure,” I told her. “We can do that. If you promise this isn’t a trap.”

  She giggled, then waited until we were settled and I was almost asleep to ask if we could light the lamp again, and leave it burning.

  Yep. Still my daughter.

  I slept very well.

  * * *

  In the morning I didn’t see Abby in the cabin and sat up quickly, panicked.

  I wanted to call her name but if somebody outside had her…I moved to the front window and slowly lifted the blackout curtain.

  There she was, sitting in the rocking chair. Close by, and not in danger. I let out a slow sigh, then went out and asked her to let me know before she did that again.

  She quirked a quizzical eyebrow at me. “Daddy? You were still asleep.”

  All Abby’s life Rebecca and I had encouraged her to be as independent as possible. I still thought that was the best way to raise a kid. But…“Just until we figure things out, hon, I’d like to know where you are. All the time. Okay?”

  She considered this. “What if we figure it out and it’s still dangerous?”

  I leaned on the porch rail and thought about that. My little girl still needed to grow up and deal with the world on her own, didn’t she? “We’ll figure that out too, if we need to,” I told her. “Meanwhile, can you humor me about this?”

  “I guess, Daddy. If you’ll let me know where you are too.”

  I didn’t plan to be more than a few feet away. Maybe not ever again. “Deal,” I told her. We shook on it.

  * * *

  We ate more cold canned food, not wanting the smell of cooking food to draw anything—or anyone—to our new home. Then Abby wanted to play under the boulders.

  It was obviously a challenge to my overprotective daddyhood. Which was probably overdue. “Go to it, baby girl,” I told her, and handed her a lighter. “Use this if you can’t see, and give me a call if you need help. Uh…you do know it’s really really dark down there, don’t you?”

  She scoffed. “I’m not afraid of the dark!”

  Okeydokey then. I just smiled and wished her luck.

  I wondered just how comfortable we should let ourselves become in the cabin. It was a fully functional home, and well-stocked, and as far as I knew leaving Henge wouldn’t make us any safer. So…it made sense to stay.

  But in the long term, what kind of life was this for my daughter? She’d do better if she had friends, or at least someone besides her dad to play with.

  On the one hand I was glad we didn’t seem to be in a lot of immediate danger. On the other…

  It struck me that I needed to check out the area anyway. We might even have neighbors. They might be friendly.

  Or they might be a reason for us to move on very soon.

  But…not today. We’d take a day of playing, eating, and relaxing.

  Tomorrow we could worry about tomorrow.

  * * *

  The next day I still didn’t feel like exploring—but I knew I needed to.

  Abby didn’t want to go either, but I wasn’t going to leave her behind. “Come on, hon. We need to see who’s living around here. Maybe we’ll make friends with them.”

  “Daddy? I don’t want to go to other people’s houses. It’s scary.”

  She was near tears. “I know, kid. Look, we’ll be careful. We’ll hide in the woods and watch, okay? Maybe we won’t need to talk to anybody.”

  * * *

  Much later—I’d guess it was a couple of hours’ worth of discussion involved—she agreed to go with me. “But only if we hold hands, Daddy.”

  Well, okay. That worked for me too.

  Standing on the porch, though, armed with a .45 in a shoulder holster, a .38 shoved in my belt, and a shotgun in my left hand…the world outside our little cabin in its clearing seemed both distant and hostile.

  And: vigilant. I’d been feeling eyes on us for the last half hour or so. Ridiculous, I knew. I tried listening for birds, telling myself they’d let me know if someone was coming…but would they, really? Here Abby and I were, standing on the porch. We’d been walking around all morning. The birds sang just fine.

  Maybe I needed to give the bird thing a rest. Though if they did shut up, or a bunch of them took flight, it’d probably be worth seeing if I could figure out why.

  I figured our best bet was to head uphill to the road and follow it in whichever direction gave us the most cover. Southeast or northwest to start with, though I expected it to change direction often.

  I took Abby’s hand and we climbed the mountainside. Both sides of the road looked rugged, and would provide pretty good cover. If we were careful, and if we didn’t break a leg or sprain an ankle. “Which way, Abby?” I asked her.

  “Left, Daddy. You should always pick left when you don’t know. That’s the rule.”

  “That so?” I grinned at her. Rebecca had told her that, years ago, though I didn’t remember the context and hadn’t heard it since. Left was southeast. “Left it is, then.”

  We crossed the road and started working our way through the woods on its other side. It probably didn’t matter, but I hoped anyone traveling on it would be less likely to spot us if we were uphill of them. And I remembered from the hunting trips I’d made as a boy that it was hard to shoot uphill and hit anything.

  The road twisted its way along mountainsides. We followed, crossing whenever we needed to do so to stay on its uphill side. After about a mile we spotted two driveways, both on the downhill side of the road.

  We passed them by—I figured we would either check them out or pass them by again on the way back, depending on how Abby was doing. She’d always been a tough kid, and loved to hike back…before…but we weren’t exactly strolling along at full speed. We did so much scrambling on boulders and route-finding around trees that what I guessed was two miles probably took us three hours.

  She did fine, though.

  * * *

  “Daddy? Are we going to go in?”

  We’d been circling the further-out house for a while. I saw no signs of occupancy. No smell of woodsmoke or cooking food. It didn’t have an outhouse, so it probably had indoor plumbing…which might even work. But if it didn’t…anyway, there was no obvious latrine outside.

  The house had once boasted a large picture window on its downslope side. It looked like it had given a great view of the valley below, and I hoped somebody had spent a lot of time looking through it, ideally with good company. And maybe even a beer or two, or whatever their alcoholic preference might have been.

  But, now? The window was th
oroughly broken. From downslope we could see curtains billowing in the north wind that had started whistling by as we hiked.

  I was pretty sure whoever had lived here wasn’t enjoying their view anymore. A smaller window in the front of the house was also cracked, but the big one in back depressed me.

  I rested a hand on Abby’s head. “What do you think, supergirl? Do we go look?”

  She frowned up at me. “I don’t think anybody’s in there,” she said. “But we have to look, don’t we?”

  “Yeah,” I told her. “We do.”

  * * *

  It wasn’t just that the house looked empty, and I thought anybody living there would have made some attempt to block the broken windows. Or that there was no sign of a car in the driveway—or the half-open garage. The house just felt empty.

  I’d have put it down to a general sort of fatalistic approach I’d been taking to things—what happened, happened, and it wasn’t up to me to get upset; my job was to survive. But…it was more than that.

  And Abby? Did she feel the emptiness too? Or was I, just maybe, letting my imagination run away with me?

  Whatever. The next step was to go look.

  I stashed my daughter in a stand of trees—she rolled her eyes but I wanted to keep her as safe as I could. Then I went up to the front door, stood off to one side (thinking anybody inside would still have at least a fifty percent chance of guessing where I was standing if they wanted to shoot through the wall, because the door had glass panels). And then I knocked. Perfunctorily.

  No response. Which didn’t necessarily mean anything.

  So I tried the knob. Locked. “Anybody in there?” I called. “I’m coming in, and I’ll break the glass in the door to do it. But if you’re here, I don’t want to mess up your house.”

  Then waited a little while, wondering just how hard my daughter was rolling her eyes at that one.

  Of course I could have crawled through the smaller broken window instead. But I wasn’t in the mood. I took the shotgun and busted out a panel in the door, then reached in and unlocked it.

  “Anybody here?” I called again.

  Again with the lack of response. But once I stepped inside I could smell…death.

  I saw a lot of dead bugs lying around—way more than seemed reasonable. And had no idea why they were there. But the smell wouldn’t be coming from them.

  I scouted the interior, cursorily, because again I figured if anybody had been living inside, recently anyway, they would have cleaned the place up. At least enough to get rid of the stench. The smell was strongest from upstairs, so I went to check it out.

  In the master bedroom I found what had probably been the family dog. He was lying on a king-size bed with a frilly pink bedspread, his belly swollen and his eyes yellow-gray with death. There was something wrong with the inside of his mouth—was that food in there?

  I stepped closer to check it out, then came to my senses. It didn’t matter why or how the dog had died.

  I walked through the rest of the house, checking for any obvious danger, then went back out to get Abby.

  “It was empty?” she asked.

  I sighed. “Their dog died upstairs. You should probably stay away from that. But otherwise, yeah, nobody home.”

  “Okay. Where do we go next?”

  “Not so fast, kid. Let’s both go in and look a little more carefully. See if there’s anything we can use.”

  * * *

  The worst part of that had been the suddenly much stronger stench when I opened their refrigerator. A smarter man would have waited until he was done checking out the house.

  We’d found some canned goods, and plenty of things like blankets and pillows that we didn’t really need.

  I decided to leave it all where it was, except that I wrapped the dog up in the bedspread and took it outside.

  Abby watched me, then tilted an eyebrow. “Are we going to bury him? I’ll bet these people loved their dog.”

  I’d thought to clean up a little just in case we ended up using the house as a shelter ourselves—it never occurred to me to bury the damn dog. But with Abby around, what else could I do?

  * * *

  It was getting dark by the time we got to the other house we’d found on the way back to our cabin. The ground outside the first house had been rocky, so I’d ended up building a cairn for the dog. Abby had helped.

  The strange thing? It felt good to do it. Just a dog, and one I’d never met. But…my daughter was right. Survival wasn’t our only priority. A strange word to use, maybe, but: humanity was important too.

  We might need to preserve whatever we had left of it.

  * * *

  I got the same sense of emptiness from the second house. With less apparent reason—no broken windows. But again there was no car in the driveway. This one didn’t have a garage, so…

  I told myself to quit making assumptions. The inhabitants’ car might have died when everyone else’s did, back when this all started. Maybe one or more of them had walked home, after. Or ridden a bicycle. Or a horse, or a helicopter. I needed to look and see what was there, not stand around making up theories.

  I didn’t smell cooking food or anything else that would have told me people were around. But how much did that really mean?

  Wherever the strange certainty had come from—the absolute conviction that the house was empty—I knew it would be beyond foolish to trust it.

  I walked up to the front door again. This one had no glass panels—and I still didn’t want to go through a window. Especially since none of them were broken yet, here.

  Shrugging, I tried the knock-and-call routine again, and got the total lack of response I’d expected.

  But when I tried the door it opened easily.

  I stepped inside, onto a tile floor with an adjoining living room, and flicked my eyes between the open doorway from the living room on my left to what seemed like a kitchen and a hallway, straight ahead, which had doors on my right side. Bedrooms, probably.

  Nothing and nobody jumped out at me. I checked the place out, again, this time stopping to look under beds and even disturbing what looked like a pile of dirty clothes on the floor of their laundry room.

  Nobody. I made sure of it.

  But…why hadn’t I been just as careful at the first house we’d checked out? Had I seriously brought my daughter into a house without checking carefully to be sure nobody was hiding inside? Possibly terrified at the intrusion, clutching a gun, ready to kill if disturbed, out of a completely reasonable and predictable terror of strangers?

  What was wrong with my head?

  But I couldn’t stop to think about it now—since I’d at least checked this place out more carefully, I needed to bring Abby in with me.

  Outside, I found her already starting toward the house from the hiding spot I’d found for her.

  “I heard you coming, Daddy,” she said when she saw my face. “It’s okay. I was being careful.”

  Yeah. Maybe. But was I?

  We checked the house out thoroughly. I liked it—it was much larger and more comfortable than the cabin. This time I left the refrigerator closed (what was I going to find inside that we could possibly want?) and…well, the place just felt welcoming to me.

  No running water, though, and of course no electricity. And…maybe the place was too big for us?

  I liked the space. But with all these rooms, Abby would be out of my sight a lot of the time. If we used them. And it would be a lot harder to try to listen for anybody approaching, because if they were on the far side of the house I’d never hear them coming. Plus? No convenient outhouse, and I was pretty sure building one would be a lot of work.

  Still. The place just felt comfortable. I liked it. Maybe part of me just wanted to pretend the world hadn’t changed, that we might be able to live in peace for a while.

  Of course I knew better. But when we left I stuck a little piece of a leaf in the front door—leaving it unlocked as before, but if anybody opened
it the leaf would fall. As long as nobody figured out I’d put it there deliberately I’d at least know, if we came back, whether anyone else had used the front door. I’d found the house’s back door locked, and I left it that way. But with another leaf.

  We headed back to the cabin. I realized, just before we got there, that for all I knew its owners had shown up. Or someone else had moved in. So I had to hide Abby, walk up carefully, knock, and wait. Again.

  After a while I opened the door and looked inside. Nobody home, and the rug was still over the trap door where we’d left it.

  Next time we went exploring we’d have to figure out a better system to let us know if anybody had come by.

  Meanwhile, though…it was getting late. I was tired, hungry, and thirsty—and I couldn’t see how Abby had kept going through all this. She was just a kid, and I was used to her sudden collapses when she decided she was tired. Not today, though. Maybe she was done with that. Which should have been a happier thought than it was.

  So we went in, leaving the door open again so we could hear what was going on outside, and ate.

  Okay. I knew we were just beginning to figure this stuff out. But…would we ever again be able to relax and know what to expect from a new day? We were alright, so far, but I felt very much as if that was pure luck.

  On the one hand, checking out our neighborhood made sense, and we needed to do it. On the other, it felt to me as if we were mostly flailing about.

  When would all this start to make sense?

  Chapter Fifteen

  That night we slept with the windows partly open, for sound, and with the trap door also open. I blocked the front door somewhat with the rocking chair I’d brought in from the porch, but didn’t plan to defend the cabin if we heard anyone coming—we’d head for the tunnel and crawl out under the boulders, closing the hidden door behind us, and taking our chances outside.