Nightwalk

by D. Nathan Hilliard

  “He said there were monsters popping up all over the neighborhood,” she continued, “and he intended to head for the entrance, so I tagged along. Then we spotted those things that just attacked us moving between a couple of houses, so we retreated here to Mrs. Dower’s place. I guess a few of her neighbors had the same idea. About ten minutes later we heard you guys shouting and shooting up the road, and then you showed up here.”

  “So who is Tommy?” I asked, still puzzled over the way she had related the story.

  “Tommy Murchison,” she replied, as if that explained everything.

  I gave the two of them my best blank look.

  “He’s not from around here, Ashlyn,” Casey interjected. “He didn’t live here when all that happened.”

  She tapped me on the knee then used the same hand to surreptitiously point in the direction of the front corner of the patio opposite us.

  At first I didn’t see what she could be pointing at, then I spotted him. A teenage boy or young man squatted on the corner of the roof where the patio wall joined the house, staring off into the darkness.

  Wearing nothing but a tan pair of cargo shorts and sneakers, he presented an image that struck me as strangely primal despite his clean cut features and neatly trimmed hair. The hunting knife on his belt and the bow leaning against his knees only enhanced the impression. He had one of those large compound bows, with pulleys and other doodads sticking on it I had never understood. The weapon certainly looked deadly, and I remembered the arrows coming out of nowhere during the previous fight.

  So this was the archer.

  “He looks like the handy type,” I whispered, “He sure as hell knows how to use that bow.”

  The girls looked at each other then back at me. Apparently they had real misgivings about something.

  “He probably is the ‘handy type,’ Mark,” Casey answered softly, “He used to be a Boy Scout…nearly an Eagle Scout, actually.”

  “So? Nothing wrong with that. Yeah, some Boy Scouts can be pretty dorky, but I don’t think we’re in a position to be picky about company here.”

  “You don’t get it,” she replied. “I said ‘used to be.’ About four years ago a cable repair guy went into his backyard to look at a junction box and discovered what had happened to most of the neighborhood pets reported missing that summer. It seems Tommy had been working toward his Junior Ed Gein merit badge.”

  It took me a second to grasp the reference.

  Oh.

  Oh my…

  “Holy shit,” I whispered, “you’re kidding.”

  “No, I’m not. He had skins drying in little homemade racks. There were pouches, belts, and moccasins made out of cat and dog skins in his garage, and he also had some kind of weird bandolier he fashioned out of cat skulls. They even found a mask he’d made out of a pit bull’s head…or at least the front half of it.”

  “Damn.” I tried not to obviously stare at the still figure. “What happened then?”

  “They took him away,” Casey continued. “It was a pretty big deal up in this area, although it only made the city paper a couple of days…I guess because he didn’t kill any people. Nothing but animals. But everybody knows that’s how serial killers often start, right?”

  “That’s what I heard,” Ashlyn chimed in. “So what’s he doing out, and back here?”

  “Beats me. I don’t know for sure if he went to prison. The news dropped it before they ever decided what to do with him. All I know is he didn’t live here with his parents anymore.”

  “And you’re certain that’s him?” I pressed. “It’s been four years.”

  “Absolutely,” Ashlyn replied. “He’s a couple of years older than me and Casey, but we went to the same school and we would know him on sight. Besides, I talked to him a little while we were out there. Only a little, but enough to know it’s definitely him.”

  Great. So now our group featured a potential psychopath.

  This night just kept getting better and better.

  “Thanks for the warning,” I grunted as I pushed myself back to my feet, “I’ll remember to keep my eye on him. But if either of you catch him even looking at you funny, you let me or Ed know right away.”

  The fact that Casey didn’t receive this admonition with one of her patented snorts of disdain came as a mild surprise. That meant the guy truly did worry her…and that worried me. I made a mental note to get a better feel for this individual as soon as opportunity allowed.

  Unfortunately, for now, I would have to settle for adding it to my already long list of fish to fry. There still remained the matter of finding Stella and getting Casey out of there alive.

  “But right now,” I continued, “let’s see if Ed needs any help. By the way, either of you see my hat?”

  A quick scan of the area revealed no sign of it.

  “Never mind,” I shrugged, “I’ll buy a new one to celebrate when we get out of here.”

  The three of us headed to the rear of the patio where four figures surrounded the lantern. I noticed two more flag covered shapes lying next to the wall nearby. I could make out Ed’s silhouette kneeling beside a form prone on the ground, and from the shake of his head I gathered the news wouldn’t be good as I approached.

  “I’m sorry,” I heard Ed say as we joined them. “I’ve done what I can for now, but it’s a very bad break. I can splint it, if we can find something to make a splint, but she isn’t going to be able to walk…even with help.”

  “Well, ain’t that great,” sneered the woman leaning against the wall across from him. She took a languorous drag from the cigarette she held then blew smoke into the night sky above us. “So that adds up to two dead, one maimed, and one crippled. You guys really know how to make an entrance. Thanks for dropping in.”

  “Ma’am, we truly are sorry about all this. We didn’t know you were here, and we were cornered with nowhere else to go. Believe me, we never intended to get anybody else hurt.”

  “Yeah?” She glowered back at him. “Well, better luck next time.”

  Judging from her bandaged wrist, this had to be the Mrs. Dower who had already managed to earn Casey’s scorn. I’m not sure what I expected, but it certainly hadn’t been this.

  My first thought was “ex beer-commercial star.”

  Think of that incredibly hot girl with all the curves but no speaking part in your average beer commercial…the one who sits down next to the guy holding the seller’s brand of beer right before the logo fills the screen? Now picture the same girl six or seven years down the road. No longer a ten, but an outstanding eight point five making the mistake of trying to convince everybody she was still a ten.

  I pegged her to be slightly north of thirty. She wore big hair, a short cropped football jersey, and a pair of dangerously low-cut pajama bottoms that somehow managed to hug her hips just tight enough not to fall down around her ankles. They revealed a figure that probably sported supermodel dimensions nine or ten pounds ago, but had now softened around the edges in a way certain to still turn heads any time she wanted them to. Rings sparkled on every finger, and as she bent to stub out a cigarette I couldn’t help but notice the Celtic knotwork tattoo running like a narrow stripe down her spine.

  Truthfully, she looked like a harem girl for some NFL team.

  Painfully aware of Casey standing next to me, I made a mental note not to stare.

  I could only hope I did a better job of it than the poor guy standing next to her.

  This guy looked to be more my age, but with a prematurely lined face, thinning blond hair and narrow stooped shoulders that bore his pizza delivery uniform with unconscious defeat. His nametag read “Hi, I’m SID” in big block letters plainly visible in the dim lantern light. I bet he hated having to wear the thing.

  He had certainly picked the wrong neighborhood to deliver to tonight. Judging by the fact Ed had bandaged his hand to the point of being nothing more than a round club, he must have been the “maimed” Mrs. Dower referred to.

&nb
sp; At the moment he did an impressive job of alternately looking in pain, nervously scanning the darkness around us, and only semi-surreptitiously ogling the display next to him. I suppose I couldn’t blame him. Hell, it looked like he had already suffered a pretty bad night so why should I judge?

  That left the woman lying on the ground and the man kneeling by her head.

  These two were obviously a couple…a fact further evidenced by the child sleeping on the ground by the man’s knees. All three wore matching green and white plaid pajamas, although blood soaked the left leg of the woman’s outfit. The boy looked to be about ten, and the fact he had slept through this latest bloodfest told me all I needed to know regarding his situation. I guess his father must have carried him there.

  The man appeared to be in his mid-thirties, although I wondered if he might also be injured. Sweat slicked his salt and pepper hair, and his square-cut face had the definite look of a guy toughing it out while trying to stay focused on the business at hand. At the moment, that business at hand was comforting the injured woman on the ground before him.

  Looking at him reminded me of my own comparatively good fortune. At least Casey remained healthy, so far…and although I didn’t know anything about Stella, there still existed a chance she hadn’t been involved in this horror show.

  But there knelt another man with a child who would never wake up, and a badly injured wife as well.

  And as I gazed down at the woman’s pain-lined face, I realized to my surprise I recognized her. This was Agnes Treadwell, the vice-president of the Coventry Woods Neighborhood Association.

  I remembered her from last December when she and Stella had joined forces to try and get a homeowner named Harvey Holland to take down a rather controversial Christmas display. It had depicted Santa Clause wearing a cowboy hat and flight goggles while flying over some Middle Eastern tableau and dropping a bomb. The bomb would fall and then a mushroom cloud made out of Christmas lights would illuminate with the words “Peace on Earth” written across it. Many of the neighbors had been appalled, but it made a huge hit when the papers reported on it and cars were backed up in a line for three blocks to see the thing.

  I suppose art is in the eye of the beholder.

  They had failed to persuade him to remove the thing, and their lawyer predicted no chance of a judge taking their side (at least this year), so they had abandoned the quest. Still, I remembered Agnes from the week she spent in our kitchen plotting strategy with Stella.

  Now I could see she was in dire trouble. Her face shone pale in the dim light, and blood soaked both her pajama leg and the large gauze bandage Ed had wrapped around her thigh. Other than the dead, she had fared the worst in our scrape with the monsters.

  And thinking of that fight reminded me of something.

  “Casey?” I murmured, “I vaguely remember one of those things getting in here. What happened to it?”

  “It’s dead,” she whispered back. “It killed the plumber guy over there under the flag. He had a shotgun and hit it once before it tore him up. Then it wounded Sid and Mrs. Treadwell before me, Mr. Treadwell and Tommy managed to finish it off. We drug its body out the gate.”

  ME, Mr. Treadwell, and Tommy?

  I almost groaned in dismay at the thought of her taking part in a fight against one of those monstrosities.

  I half wanted to give her grief for being a little idiot, but held my tongue. It was already over and done with. Besides, she would likely get mad and claim she didn’t have a choice, although I noticed she hadn’t mentioned Ashlyn or Mrs. Dower wading into the fray. Then again, I remembered how much those things had frightened her earlier, so maybe she really had been put in a position where she had no alternative but to fight.

  Yet the thought she had been within arm’s reach of one of those horrors while I had been out cold still made me slightly nauseous.

  Damn. If being a stepdad came with this kind of angst, then I should probably consider myself lucky I never had a kid of my own. Simply trying to get Casey back to Stella in one piece threatened to give me an ulcer.

  But speaking of getting anywhere…

  “So let’s see where that leaves us,” Mrs. Dower groused as she lit another cigarette. “There are man-eating monsters out there, my house is full of killer fireflies, and now we’re stuck on my front patio with a bunch of bodies that are going to be smelling really wonderful soon. If we’re gonna hole up here, then we need to do something about those.”

  “Hole up here?” I spoke up in surprise.

  The woman took another long drag of her smoke while measuring me with an expression that appeared a lot less than friendly.

  “Oh look,” her voice dripped with sarcasm, “the dead have arisen. Naturally it would be one of the people who led the monsters to us.”

  “Mrs. Dower…” I began.

  “Might as well call me Darla,” she growled while gesturing toward one of the flag wrapped figures. “It looks like the ‘Mrs. Dower’ thing is just a legal technicality now.”

  Oh great. Had we made this woman a widow? I knew we hadn’t meant for anybody to get hurt, but what we intended didn’t change what had actually happened. Now I fumbled for a way to respond.

  Once again, the pixie came to my rescue.

  “That’s not fair, Mrs. Dower,” Ashlyn interrupted. “He died before they got here. And you know there were already some of those monsters out in the circle. We’re probably lucky they showed up to help before those things attacked.”

  I gave an internal sigh of relief on hearing this, although I could see it definitely didn’t go over well in other quarters.

  “Stay out of this, smurf.” Darla glared in her direction. “The grownups are talking.”

  Ashlyn appeared taken aback. It obviously didn’t come natural for her to get snotty with an adult, and she certainly hadn’t expected such a response. She looked abashed and at a loss for words. But at the same time I could see Casey set her jaw and narrow her eyes beside her. And that didn’t bode well. I knew that look…and when it came to throw-downs, Little Miss Diplomacy was never at a loss for words.

  “Hey Darla,” she snarled, “maybe you ought to consider…”

  “Mrs. Dower,” Ed laid a hand on Casey’s shoulder as he rose to his feet beside her, “Once again, I’m sorry. I know you’re upset, you’re hurting, and you’re scared…but this doesn’t help. If we’re going to survive this night, we’re going to need to stay focused on where we are and what we’re going to do next.”

  Darla Dower glared at Ed for a moment before glancing past Ashlyn to lock eyes with Casey.

  Casey glowered back, but said nothing further. She let her stance and demeanor do her talking for her.

  The older woman allowed her gaze to linger for a couple seconds longer before looking away with a dismissive snort and refocusing on Ed.

  “Fine,” she replied and took another drag of her cigarette. “Which brings us back to what I was talking about…we need to do something about these bodies.”

  Wow. For a newly widowed woman, she certainly didn’t spend a lot of time grieving over her husband’s corpse. I couldn’t help but wonder about the story there. But I had my own business to mind and, like Ed said, we needed to stay focused on what to do next.

  “Ma’am,” I interjected, “I’m sorry but the best thing to do is probably leave them here. They’re already covered, and there’s nothing further we can do for them. We need to be moving on.”

  “Moving on?!” She stared at me with open disbelief. “MOVING ON?? Damn, that thing really did lay one upside your head, didn’t it! It knocked you plumb stupid. In case you haven’t figured it out, we should stay right here!”

  “That’s your plan?” Casey mused aloud. “Just sit down and stay here? I guess you can’t get much simpler than that.”

  “Butt out, twerp. We’re having a serious discussion here.”

  “Oh really…”

  “Ma’am,” I interjected, and felt relieved to see Casey settle
back into a slow seethe, “we need to…”

  “Now hold on,” Sid also interrupted. The pizza guy moved closer beside Darla and faced us. “She’s got a point. Those monsters are all dead so we don’t have to worry about them coming back. Staying here makes sense.”

  “Wait,” I shook my head, “I seem to remember the big one getting away before I passed out. I’ve seen that thing in action before, and I can damn sure see it coming back.”

  “No, Mark,” Casey murmured beside me, “it’s dead. Tommy went out after it and killed it in the middle of the circle. Its body is by the little lighthouse.”

  “What?” I gaped at her, then the figure crouching on the roof. “Alone?”

  “Yeah.”

  Holy shit! I couldn’t imagine the bunch of us tackling “Skull” and this guy did it all by himself? With nothing but a bow and knife? What the hell were they teaching in Boy Scouts nowadays?

  “They’re all dead,” Sid repeated, “so we don’t have to worry about them anymore and this place is defensible. But if we leave then we’ll have no cover, and there is no telling what else is waiting out there. There might even be something worse.”

  “But…”

  “Not to mention,” Darla jumped back in, “we’re almost out of bullets. The only one of us with any long range defense left is Robin Hood over there.” She nodded in the direction of the silent archer. “So we’re a lot better off staying put, with him up there where he can see something coming and shoot it before it gets here. That way he can kill it, or at least wound whatever it is and give us a better chance to fight it off with a wall between us.”

  As if to reinforce their points, a distant but huge cry warbled through the night. It sounded like somebody had crossed Godzilla with a timber wolf. A few seconds later a scream in the same direction announced dinner had been served.

  This was not going well.

  “Yes, but…”

  “And one last thing,” she bulled onward and gestured down at the stricken woman lying on the patio. “Mrs. Treadwell can’t walk. Remember her? You weren’t planning on leaving her behind, were you?”

  I looked down to see the Treadwells giving me a guarded look from their position on the ground. The husband must have carried his boy here in the first place, and we weren’t dealing with a toddler. The youngster probably weighed fifty or sixty pounds. I could see no way he could carry both the child and his wife. And after our experience with the Sawyers, I knew better than to waste our time trying to convince him to abandon the boy.