Strangers

by Michaelbrent Collings

  Jerry felt himself growing more and more desperate. Not for himself, necessarily –

  (no, not for you, Jer-Jer, not for the guy who deserves this, not for the one who failed so badly who screwed up who brought this all down on us because the sins of the father will be visited on the heads of the children)

  – but for the kids. They hadn’t done anything to deserve this. They hadn’t brought this on themselves, and he wanted – no, needed – to get them out of here. It was like this moment was the culmination of his existence, the chance he had to prove he was a good father. To save his girl and his –

  (remaining)

  – boy and wake them from this nightmare.

  He reached out and pulled on the door that led from kitchen to garage. It had already been tried. But maybe things would be different, he thought. Maybe….

  The door was still sealed.

  They were still trapped.

  Jerry remembered one of his professors in med school defining insanity as doing the same thing over and over, but expecting a different result. If so, then Jerry was insane. Mad as a hatter, standing there pulling at the door to the garage and knowing that this time, this time, the door would open.

  Because it had to.

  Didn’t it?

  34

  “This isn’t happening,” Jerry said. He pulled on the door again. Pull, pull, pull, pull-pull-pull-pullpullpullpull.

  Ann said something. It didn’t quite break through the haze of terror that had clouded his mind, but something about it must have knifed its way through. Her tone, perhaps, or just a sense of what she had probably said. Either way, Jerry stopped pulling on the door, though his hand remained clamped to the knob in a grip firmer than that of a rigor-stiffened corpse.

  “What did you say?” he asked. His voice was just above a whisper. The quiet tone not of calm, but of threatened mayhem.

  “I said that saying something isn’t happening doesn’t make it real.”

  And he knew, of course. Knew without looking that she was staring at the picture. The damn picture of Brian that hung in the kitchen, just like there was a picture of him in every room in the house.

  And Jerry realized that this place had stopped being a home a long time ago. It had become a shrine. And now… now perhaps it was finally finishing its long conversion, finally making the final modifications.

  Finally becoming a tomb.

  He turned. She was looking at the picture. So were the kids, their eyes blank, their mouths half open. Numb with terror present and horrors past.

  “It doesn’t make it not real,” Ann whispered again. And the kids nodded, their heads moving up and down like they were controlled by a single string, a puppeteer who had been dancing them ever closer to a dark abyss for longer than Jerry wanted to think about.

  Red rage dropped like a curtain over his eyesight. The lights in the house went on-off… on-off, the darkness coming to stay for longer and longer periods. It wasn’t a visitor now, but the lord of the home, and the light a furtive invader that was being thrust out.

  But all Jerry saw was that red. All he saw was his children agreeing with Ann as she all but accused him of not doing enough when their son died.

  He attacked the door. Because if not he would have attacked something – someone – else. He hit it over and over, slamming into it with arms and shoulders and hands and feet. His bad hand left trailing red bloodstains behind, like the last gasps of his existence. Like the only proof that he had ever been alive.

  He hit it harder and harder. He felt his elbow twinge, felt his shoulder pull to the side and wondered if he had separated or even dislocated it. A sharp pain barked its way up his side and he couldn’t tell if it was a stitch or a cracked rib. He didn’t care. He wasn’t hitting the door anymore. He was attacking the unfairness of it all. The sadness. The pain. The stress. Trying to kill it. To tear it apart. To break it down.

  To destroy his life.

  Something crackled. Jerry thought the noise was coming from him. He was vaguely aware of hands on his shoulders, of someone trying to pull him back. He resisted. Hit the door again.

  The crackling was louder. It turned into a crunch, then a series of quick snaps like the sounds –

  (like the sounds Socrates’ neck probably made when the killer twisted it around when the bastard killed our dog and tore his face of with his teeth)

  – of bones breaking beneath his weight.

  The door shattered inward.

  And Jerry fell through the now-open doorway, into the beckoning space beyond.

  35

  “We’re through!”

  At first Jerry thought he had said it, that he was the one who had spoken the first words of true hope heard since this had all started. Then he felt hands on his arms, felt those hands clench around his biceps and help him to his feet. “We’re through!” Drew said again, and helped Jerry into the garage.

  Sheri stepped through what bits of the door still clung to the frame, and joined Jerry and Drew in the garage. Ann, bearing the flashlight like a lance, came last.

  “We did it!” said Sheri. Her eyes were aglow with optimism, the promise of freedom clear in her visage. Then Jerry saw her expression fall as her gaze rose up. He followed her eyes, and saw what she saw.

  The garage door openers. There were two of them, one for each door in the four-car garage. Both mechanisms were destroyed, the metal-and-plastic casings hammered to bits, wires and cords hanging askew from them. What had once been orderly boxes that would do the family’s bidding now looked like grim insects from an alien world, guards that were meant to keep them locked inside.

  Jerry walked around the two parked cars. He grabbed the nearest garage door and pulled, but it wouldn’t open. He looked up at the garage door opener. “Ann,” he said, and pointed at it. “Give me some light.”

  Ann aimed the flashlight beam at the mechanism, and Jerry felt any short-lived hope he might have enjoyed fade away completely. It wasn’t just the machinery of the garage door opener that was destroyed, he realized. The tracks and chains of the mechanism had been bent and tortured as well. There was no way that the garage door could possibly open without the use of some heavy duty welding equipment. And a quick glance at the other track showed more of the same.

  The light fell away from the tracks as Ann pointed the flashlight away. Jerry almost barked at her, but caught himself. What good would that do?

  “The cars!” said Ann.

  Jerry looked at them dully. Had they been hammered to pieces as well?

  No, they appeared to be fine. He looked askance at Ann. She gestured with the flashlight. “Just drive through the door,” she said.

  A suddenly hopeful Drew turned to the key rack where the car keys hung. The key rack that itself hung beside the now permanently open door to the house.

  The key rack that was empty.

  All the keys, like all Sheri’s medicine, had been taken.

  Drew wrapped his arms around himself in a protective coat. He began rocking back and forth and Jerry thought how very young his son looked in that moment. He began weaving back toward the family, but had to go slowly because the lights were out again and Ann had the flashlight pointed well away from him, like she had forgotten he even existed.

  “Oh, God,” Drew whispered. “Oh, God, oh, God.”

  “Stop saying that,” said Sheri. Her own voice was quavering, a warble that sounded half angry and half steeped in fear. “It’s not helping anything!”

  Ann joined the fray, speaking quietly: “Stop fighting.”

  Jerry tripped over something in the dark and went down, banging his knee on the hard floor. He heard Drew speak, ignoring his mother and barking, “Why should I stop, Sheri? It’s true, we’re going to die in here, ripped apart just like the dog –”

  “You don’t know that!” Sheri again. Jerry stood in time to see her hold her hands out as she shouted, now angry and fearful and pleading. “You don’t know anything!”

  Drew op
ened his mouth to retort, but was cut off by Ann. “Stop it, both of you! Stop it stop it STOP IT!”

  Utter silence suddenly reigned in the garage. The kids wore expressions that Jerry had never seen on their faces. Not just fear, more than simple horror. They had never heard Ann yell at them before.

  Jerry didn’t know what to think of it, either. The family was coming apart, falling to pieces like a building after an earthquake, bits of mortar and brick coming down at first and then entire sections and finally the whole thing would come crashing down.

  But at the same time, it was good, in a way, to see Ann actually caring about something again. Even if it was to be angry, at least she seemed… alive. Alive, in a way she hadn’t been since Brian died. Like when she buried her son a part of her soul had gone in the ground as well.

  Ann stared at her children, then walked back into the house.

  The house lights went on as she left.

  But a moment later they fell dark again. And Jerry pulled the two kids with him as he hurried after his wife, following her back into the house that had swallowed them whole and seemed intent on destroying them; but that had also in a strange way started bringing Ann back to life.

  36

  Jerry wanted to take some control of the situation. He couldn’t get them out right now, fine. But he didn’t have to let them wallow, didn’t have to let them continue sliding down the slippery slope of sorrow that they had all been hell-bent on following for the past year –

  (and longer, Jer-Jer; don’t forget it’s been longer for you)

  – until they inevitably just gave up and waited to die.

  But he could feel the hopelessness around them. It surrounded them like a poisonous mist, bound them like chains that weighed them down and made them slow and stupid.

  “We’ve got to stick together,” said Jerry as the family trooped into the hall and then to the living room. “Stay a team.”

  It was a terrible pep talk, he knew. He was hardly a great orator or motivational speaker. Tony Robbins would probably demand the death penalty if he heard such a stiff rallying cry.

  But at least he was trying.

  And the lights came on again. This time they stayed on, too, as if the universe – or at least the electric company – had given its seal of approval to Jerry’s attempt to provide hope to the hopeless.

  Drew stared at the broken windows that lined the living room. He leaned almost casually on the baby grand and said, “We’re dead.”

  He said it in the same tone Jerry might have announced he was going to the store or to work. A foregone conclusion. Jerry’s heart dropped to hear his son give up like that. Like he was already dead, and had just been waiting for the right time to let everyone else know that it had happened.

  “No,” Jerry said. “We’re not. We’re alive. We’ll get out of this. We just have to… to stick together –”

  “And you’re the expert on that, aren’t you?” said Sheri.

  Silence smoldered in the room. Hate was better than despair, but hardly a substitute for hope.

  “What now?” said Drew with a sigh. Again, he sounded like he had already decided to die. Like he was really just killing time until the inevitable end.

  Ann finally spoke. She, too, was staring at the windows. At the black metal that looked like the inside of a coffin door must look.

  “If nothing else, someone has got to come looking at us,” she said. Her eyes started to shine a bit.

  Was that hope? Jerry wondered. It had been a long time since he’d seen it in her expression.

  Ann turned to the family, but she was pointing at the windows, at the bank of blank black eyes. “I mean, there’s sheet metal over all our windows.”

  Sheri and Drew stared at her blankly, and even Jerry could feel himself wondering what she meant. Stupidity was often the result of terror and panic, he knew. It seemed he wasn’t immune to that effect.

  Ann rolled her eyes. “You can see the metal outside our house! That’s the sort of thing that people investigate, right? I mean, someone drives down a street and sees a nice house with chunks of metal over all the windows… they call someone, don’t they?”

  Jerry saw his daughter’s face grow taut with hope. Even Drew actually pushed away from the piano, standing straight up as though ready to run to any helping hand that might be offered to them.

  But in that moment the lights went off. It had happened before, too many times for Jerry to count. But this time was different. The lights were off, but it wasn’t dark. Not completely.

  Something else was happening.

  And Jerry’s stomach clenched, because whatever it was, it wasn’t going to be anything good.

  37

  For a split-second, Jerry thought the light was coming from the flashlight that Ann still held. But that gave little in the way of illumination, just a slim gleam like the reflection off a razor blade, slicing tiny bits from the darkness.

  “The televisions,” Sheri said.

  She was right. The TV in the living room had turned on. Its screen was black at first, but it still spread a subtle glow through the room. Then it brightened to white. And Jerry saw cones of white coming from open doors throughout the house and knew that all the televisions in the place must have turned on.

  There was a flash, and they were treated again to a view of the stripper in the pink miniskirt, the one they had seen on the computer before it turned off, the headless woman writhing and grinding the beat of music only she could hear. Then she disappeared into static.

  “What’s going on?” asked Ann. A rhetorical question that no one bothered to answer.

  But in the next second the televisions themselves replied. And it was to Ann that they spoke, Jerry realized, as though responding to her statement that someone would see the metal shutters and come to help them.

  Onscreen was a closed-circuit video feed. It was a grainy feed, hardly the kind of thing that the manufacturer of the high-def television had intended to be viewed on the appliance. But it was clear enough to recognize.

  It was dark outside. And Jerry knew he was seeing a live feed. Even though he’d been operating on the assumption that it was daytime, he knew in his gut that this was now; that this was life as the outside world perceived it.

  Moon. Stars. Street lights visible as dim glows in the background of the picture.

  Mostly, though, the screen was dominated by the view of the house. Their house. The family’s house.

  Not that Jerry – or anyone else – could have told it was his house. But he recognized the lawn equipment. The trees. The gardens and grass.

  The pool.

  The house, though….

  “No one’s coming,” Drew whispered.

  Sheri moaned, and it was a sound that tore Jerry’s soul in two and then ground the pieces under its feet.

  “Drew…,” Jerry began.

  “He’s right,” said Ann. Her eyes were glued to the TV. It sat on the floor – they had tried to use the TV cabinet to break the windows and it, like everything else, had broken to bits – and now she knelt down before it like a supplicant to an oracular god. “He’s right. You don’t investigate that.”

  And Jerry thought – knew – she was right.

  The house was gone. Gone but there. In plain sight but invisible.

  Whoever was doing this had thought ahead. Had done his work well.

  The house – sheet metal shutters included – was covered from foundation to roof in the orange and blue striped circus plastic of a termite tent.

  38

  “You don’t investigate houses that have been tented,” Ann said again. “You drive the other way! Besides, police in this city barely have time to investigate the murders. What are they going to do about a bug tent, call in SWAT?”

  Jerry felt the slim chance he might have had to pull the family together spinning away from him. As a kid he had played Crack the Whip with other kids on his block. You linked arms with your friends in a long line, then the e
ntire line spun as fast as it could until someone at the end got flung off by centrifugal force. Great fun for an eight-year-old. Less fun now. Less fun when he wasn’t simply trying to hold onto one of the kids who lived next door, but to cling to hope and survival.

  “Ann,” he tried, “this isn’t the time to –”

  He didn’t know how he was going to finish the sentence he’d begun. What could he say? “Don’t worry, I’m sure someone will find us anyway”? She wouldn’t believe that. And he didn’t think he would, either.