“We have to keep going,” I told her with my hands on her shoulders. “You’re not going to believe what comes next.”
Another firework ignited the sky through a canvas of scratchy pines. In the throb of red light, I saw Adelaide still had someone else’s severed ear in her hair. I brushed it off — as cold and slippery as a jellyfish.
“What was that?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
NEW TEXT MESSAGE
SENDER: “Holden” (509) 555-8727
SENT: 8:36 a.m. Mar 20 2015
WTF did I grab a BROOM?
4 Hours, 21 Minutes
LJ’s yuppie block on Overlook Drive led to our kitchen, and it nearly ruined Adelaide’s mind. An exterior space funneled into an interior one like a carnival funhouse. The sky swooped down to become a ceiling, the mansions flanked in to form walls, and white-hot sunlight exploded in our faces, a nuclear flash. The narrowing transition was jarring, violent, all sharp edges and friction. Had the walls and floor not aligned just right around us, it seemed, we could’ve just as well been inside a giant sausage grinder.
So now Addie and I were home, in the hallway overlooking the kitchen, fumbling and blinking. Sunlight blasted through the back windows at a low morning angle and bounced off the countertops, splashing amber tesseracts on the walls. Parquet creaked underfoot. The Keurig machine chuffed. The refrigerator whiteboard read, in Addie’s own elegant cursive: PAPRIKA, PAPRIKA, PAPRIKA, GODDAMN PAPRIKA (guess what I’d forgotten last time I’d been to Fred Meyer). The digital oven timer displayed 8:56 a.m. It was the morning of December 31, twelve hours before the party we’d just left.
I exhaled through chattering teeth. You never get used to it.
Addie still had snowflakes and beads of frozen blood in her hair. “Daylight,” she whispered. “Where did daylight come from?”
I turned to her. “So . . . I can explain.”
For a second she looked like she’d be fine. She quietly surveyed these new surroundings, recognizing her coat on the wall and her (duplicated) boots by the door, glancing outside into the hot wash of sunlight, nodding her head lightly in acceptance . . . then she slapped both hands to her mouth and screamed.
“Addie! It’s fine—”
She juked me in the hallway, feinting right before springing left. She went for the kitchen and I followed. I grabbed her elbow but she twisted free.
“Addie—”
“Don’t touch me.”
I couldn’t blame her for being terrified. Time was running backward. My mind shuttered — I needed to make some narrative sense of this and I didn’t even know where to start. Where did the macabre sequence begin? At Jitters, with Holden? The New Year’s Eve party Addie died at? Or that irreversible moment when I’d first purchased the haunted Mosin Nagant from—
Okay, Addie had a steak knife. She’d reached over her shoulder and drawn it sword-like from our magnetic cutlery stand. She held it out now, at me, her bare shoulders rising and falling.
“Explain everything,” she snarled.
“I’m figuring out how.”
“Where are we?”
“The kitchen.”
“Not what I meant, Dan.”
“This is the morning of . . . December thirty-first,” I said, stepping forward. “We just woke up. Remember? You heard the airlock splitting, from the bedroom. We ran down here barefoot, and the beer was overflowing and flooding the pantry—”
On cue, a heavy glug echoed from across the kitchen.
Addie flinched and pointed the knife at the pantry door, and then back at me. Yesterday’s homebrew batch (the last one we’d ever brewed together) had fermented aggressively and cracked the plastic airlock open. Frothy, contaminated pre-beer had dribbled down the slopes of the five-gallon carboy, soaked through the packed towels, and flooded our pantry. A total, smelly mess.
She stared at the milky brown puddle gathering under the pantry door. “But . . . we cleaned that up.”
“We did.”
“So why is it back?”
“We’re back,” I said. “I think it’s like time travel.”
“You think?”
“Just put the knife down.”
The blade shivered between us, catching a flash of sunlight. She softened, just a bit. “You . . . wait a minute. You said I was dead?”
“Yes.” I clasped my hands together. “But let’s not start the story there. So there’s this antique Russian rifle that—”
“Nope. Let’s start with me being dead.”
“Okay. You’re dead.”
She forced a laugh. “No. I’m not.”
“You are.”
“Clearly I’m not.”
“We just walked from LJ’s lake house on Sunday night to our kitchen on Sunday morning. Please, Addie, step out on a limb with me.”
It was starting to hit her. She glanced outside, a harsh band of light on her face. A gauze-like mist coated our backyard, burning off through shafts of sunlight. Her lip quivered and she held a hand to her mouth, as if stifling a bitter laugh: “Nope.”
I saw her grip on the knife slacken, and I went for it, but she firmed up her stabbing posture. I retreated, just half a step.
“Nope, nope, nope,” she said with tears glimmering in her eyes. “This is a dream, Dan. Just a horrible, vivid, pants-on-head-crazy nightmare.”
Glug. The beer puddle rippled, like a ticking clock.
“We need to keep moving.” I reached again for the knife.
She pulled back. “Killed by a drunk driver?”
“Yes.”
“On New Year’s Eve?”
“Yes.”
She sighed. “Bit of a cliché, huh?”
Something slithered snake-like between my ankles, tugging my jeans. Claws clicking on the floor. I recoiled, staggering — and saw a crawling blur of sequined gray and yellow scales. Baby the savannah monitor. On weekend mornings, like this one, Addie would sometimes just open the enclosure door and let our ‘practice-child’ roam the first floor of our house like a free-range crocodile.
She scooped up her lizard with one hand, keeping the knife pointed at me. She sagged a bit under Baby’s thirty pounds, and her voice broke a little: “What . . . what was my funeral like?”
I shrugged. “There were lemon bars.”
“I hate lemon bars.”
“Well, you weren’t there.”
She flashed a wounded grin and squeezed Baby like a stuffed animal. The lizard plopped its big head on her shoulder and nuzzled, and in a grotesque way, Addie looked like a mother holding a cold-blooded child. The heavy tail swished left to right between her knees, a scaly pendulum marking our dwindling time.
“I guess I just . . . hoped you’d say it was something more dramatic.” She stroked the leathery ridges along Baby’s backbone. “Like, I don’t know . . . Died rescuing orphans from a school bus fire.”
“Mauled by a Velociraptor,” I suggested, watching the knife.
She rolled her eyes. “It’d have to be a Utahraptor, Dan. Velociraptors were actually much smaller than movies portray them—”
We’d had this conversation before, in many forms. Once, while camping out by White Bend, we’d spent half the night awake in our tent, drinking cheap beer and imagining exotic and amusing ways to buy the farm. Her favorite? Skydiving out of an airplane, bouncing off a fifty-foot trampoline, hurtling a half-mile back into the stratosphere, and being hit by a meteor. So, in light of that, I can understand how a DUI fatality was a little disappointing for her.
I shrugged emptily. “It’s the everyday things that get you.”
“Did my parents cry?”
“Of course.”
“Did Holden cry?”
“Everyone cried.”
“Did you?”
I should’ve lied. But my mind was stretched too thin; I was too exhausted and rattled. And impatient. We were losing time here, held up and bickering at knifepoint while the real threat caught up and approached. So, yes, I he
sitated.
She noticed. “What? Really, Dan?”
Enough of this; I lunged again for the steak knife. She shouldered away, but too slow this time. I snatched it from her and hurled it into the living room. It stuck in the arm of the sofa.
She looked back at me, eyes wide.
“We need to keep moving,” I said. “The man in the gas mask. He’s going to keep following us, everywhere we go—”
“Who is he?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why does he want you?”
Something about her question — the way she suggested the Gasman wanted me — reminded me of the hobo suicides back in the Soviet Union. That one particular guy who’d hitchhiked all the way to the Kalash to hang himself with stolen barbed wire like a pagan sacrifice. All because the Gasman had summoned him; reached thousands of miles to dig its icy fingernails into his brain. Was I being summoned?
I sensed a cold presence in the house.
Addie saw something in the mirror — behind me — and gasped.
I whirled. “What?”
The living room? It was empty. Just the couch, the television, and Baby’s plywood enclosure. The daylight was fading through the bay windows, graying out, like the sun was passing behind thick storm clouds.
She pointed. “You didn’t . . . you didn’t see that?”
“See what?”
She was shaking. Spasms. She squeezed Baby against her chest, and I worried the big reptile would lash out and bite with those fishhook teeth. I touched her shoulder — her bare skin felt like candle wax. “What, Addie?”
She flinched at my touch. “In the mirror. I saw us.”
“Us?”
“I saw us,” she said. “You and me, just now. We ran through the living room, behind you.”
I looked again. Still empty.
“We were . . . covered in blood.” She stroked Baby with trembling fingertips. “Blood and snow and ice. We were carrying neon-green glow sticks. Just running right back through the house. We looked scared, worn out—”
The chandelier bulbs exploded like a string of firecrackers. Addie yelped under a shower of sizzling sparks. The stink of burnt filaments. The house was filling with shadows, and the outside daylight was dimming, fogging out.
“We’re fine,” I said, tugging her along. “But we need to get moving—”
“Are you sure I’m dead?”
It hit me then, delayed as a thunderclap. My mind jolted to ParaNews, to that bizarre eyewitness testimony from the Kalash back in the eighties — the night watchman who’d seen a ghostly man and woman crossing through the haunted armory. Speaking English. Carrying green glow sticks.
Oh my God.
It squeezed my stomach, like an invisible hand. So that was it, I guess. I was already part of the Head-Scratching Rifle’s history. Addie and I, we were already trapped in its hellish Mobius strip, years before I’d purchased the thing from Ben Dyson’s widow through Joe’s Guns. Years before I was born, even.
She read it in my eyes. “What?”
The oven clock died with a hollow click. The house creaked around us in the changing temperature, a symphony of deep echoes. Like a U-boat descending to a depth it wasn’t designed for, groaning and leaning inward under the force of millions of tons of frigid seawater. Pressing in on all sides. I noticed the yeasty beer puddle was now frozen to the floor, a bumpy sheet of brown ice.
“Time to go.” I led her down the hallway.
She hauled Baby over her shoulder, the big lizard’s tail clumsily thudding against the wall. A framed photo of her parents fell and broke. Her teeth chattered: “Go where?”
To the front of the house, I guess. To wherever this decaying memory of December 31 would blur and link into the next one. They always seemed to get fuzzy around the edges, the details running together like watercolors. And already I heard those telltale footsteps coming up on the unfinished back porch, heavy and methodical.
“It’s freezing,” she said. “All of a sudden—”
“He brings the cold with him.”
Like rancid meat brings flies . . .
We reached the front door, stacked with my shoes and her boots. The glass window was opaque, frosted with blades of ice, but I already knew it wouldn’t lead to our front yard on New Year’s Eve morning. It led to the next car down on my train of thoughts, further back in time. On to the next memory. With the Gasman behind us.
THUNK.
On the other side of the house, the back door rattled noisily in its frame. Thank God for the subtleties of doors, right?
Addie spun. “Oh, crap—”
“Yep. That’s our cue to leave,” I said, pulling her.
“How do we stop him?”
“Doors.”
“What?”
“He has trouble with doors,” I said. “For a while, at least.”
“Can we stop him?”
I didn’t know. How many victims had tried before me? How many corpses had the Head-Scratching Rifle created? And somehow we were already a part of the legacy. We’d made a cameo appearance, carrying green glow sticks in Saint Petersburg’s Kalash armory, a good ten years before either of us had even been born.
“Dan.” Her voice shivered. “Something’s wrong with Baby—”
But a chill shot up my spine and lingered between my shoulder blades. It was true; we were already deeply tangled in the rifle’s sticky web. As for that free will thing I’d lectured Holden about? Maybe there was no such thing.
The Gasman forced the back door. THUNK—
“Dan. Oh my God, Baby is—”
“Keep moving.” I opened the front door. “We have to stay ahead of—”
“Dan!” Addie shrieked. Raw horror.
I turned and realized Baby had gone as limp as a ragdoll in her arms. A dead sack. Beaded eyes unblinking, staring flatly at the ceiling. And the lizard’s back half — hind legs, tail, and all — was sliding downward under the tug of gravity. Her torso just . . . stretching, lengthening, Gumby-like.
“No, no, no,” she cried—
But her beloved pet of five years came apart before our eyes. The skin split like an overripe banana, a spurt of cold reptile blood darkened Addie’s dress, and the bottom half of Baby thudded wetly to the floor at her feet. Leaving her holding the upper half in sickened disbelief.
We don’t pour salt on slugs for fun. They do.
Cruelty is their language—
“Addie!”
She backed away, opening her mouth to scream—
THUNK-CRASH—
The back door splintered. The Gasman was inside the house.
* * *
I lost her between times and places.
“Addie. Wait!”
She’d whipped away from me, through the door. I reached for her and missed; her hair slashed my face. I stumbled, the world turned over, and then she was gone. In a mottled flash of rearranging light, I was alone again.
My knees hit cement.
Gunshots. I heard a deafening rattle of gunfire, like a line of broadside canons, reverberating endlessly. My eardrums throbbed with pressure. I clapped my hands to my ears, stumbling upright.
The shooting range?
Yes. Alright. Next memory down: the BullsEye indoor shooting range in Boise. November, maybe? A firing line of booths and a twenty-five yard shooting bay against a beveled steel backstop. Targets on motorized pulleys. Air thick with grit, smoke, and the chime of brass casings pinging off carpeted dividing walls. It was a bustling Saturday, “Date Night” (if you bring a girl, the range fees are halved), and Addie had attempted the thankless task of teaching me how to fire a pistol. I recognized our booth. On the table, her Beretta something-or-other, two red boxes of ammunition, a few illustrated targets. Her latest masterpiece hung on clothespins: a tight cluster of .40 caliber holes, right in Jar Jar Binks’ brain.
Everything was there. Except her.
“Addie!” I shouted again, drowned out by more banging gunfire.
“Addie!”
There she was.
I found her in the back, behind the red trash bin, sitting on the smooth cement floor. She rocked there with her fingers clasped around her knees. The front of her New Year’s Eve dress stained with Baby’s drying blood. Shallow, gulping breaths. Tears glistening on her cheeks. Her mascara was smeared; she had raccoon eyes.
She didn’t look at me. I touched her knee.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“This is just a dream,” I told her, slipping my earmuffs over her head. “None of this is really happening.”
“Baby’s safe?”
“Baby’s fine.”
I left out the flip side of that statement: And you’re dead.
“It’s just a monitor lizard anyway,” she said. “It’s . . . stupid to cry over a lizard. Like crying over a goldfish—”
“It wasn’t just a lizard. It was Baby. Our practice-child.” I glanced down at the oily blood on her dress. “Man, thank God it wasn’t a real one.”
She laughed.
I held her hand and squeezed. She rubbed her eye.
“Sorry.” She hated crying in front of me.
“It’s fine.”
“I love you, Dan.”
“I love you, too.” I raised my voice under another staccato rattle of gunfire. “This is just a horrible dream, and we’ll survive it together.”
She swallowed and nodded, her cheeks colorless.
“And I promise, Addie, we’ll wake up together. Okay?”
“Okay.”
I didn’t have time to wonder if I was lying. I felt an odd coldness growing at my back, like standing near a walk-in freezer. I turned and Addie gasped.
Down the rectangular shooting range, the Gasman was approaching; a dark shadow in a tailed coat. He passed unnoticed behind the firing line of target shooters. Circular glass eyes fixed on us. Unhooked breathing hose swinging.
Addie grabbed my shoulder, pulling herself up. “He really won’t stop, huh?”
OUR LAST NIGHT: an edge of your seat ghost story thriller Page 11
