by Chloe Garner
“Invasion of the body-snatchers,” Jason said, staring out the window at a pair of men leaning against a building, smoking. They both stared back.
“Have you got cell service?” Sam asked. Jason pulled out his phone and held it up to the window.
“Nope.”
“Could be the mountains,” Sam said, unconvinced.
“I had full signal at the hotel,” Jason said.
“So did I.”
Driving back through the little town, they didn’t see anyone else.
“Town gives me the creeps,” Jason said. “If I’m not going to get to start shooting things, would you two mind getting the hell out of here?”
“Please,” Samantha said from the back seat.
“Fine with me,” Sam said.
<><><>
Jason walked up onto the sidewalk and turned around backwards.
“I say that I should get another cleaning day out of this, as soon as we figure out what’s wrong with those freaks and blow them all away,” he said. Sam tried to warn him, but he walked backwards into someone, anyway. He spun.
“I am so sorry,” he said. The woman he had backed into laughed, shaking out her hair.
“I wasn’t looking where I was going,” she said.
“And I was freaking walking backwards. I’m sorry,” he said. She looked up at him and smiled and his heart skipped. “You are really, really pretty.”
She laughed and covered her mouth with her hand.
“Thank you.”
“You just heading through?” he asked.
“Here on personal business,” she said. Sam, behind him, cleared his throat. Jason turned.
“Sorry, I’m Jason, and this is my brother Sam and his girlfriend Sam.”
Sam glared.
“Oh. Um. Hi. I’m Allison.”
“There isn’t much around here, Allison. What are you finding to do to entertain yourself?” Jason asked.
“I actually have an appointment I’m going to be late for,” she said softly, ducking her head and turning slightly to the side. The word ‘appointment’ triggered it.
“The little no-name town about twenty miles east of here?” Jason asked. She looked at him, startled.
“How did you know?”
“Just got back from there. What are they doing for you?” he asked. She dropped her eyes again.
“That’s a little personal,” she said. Jason tried again.
“We’re really interested in them,” he said. “Came a long way to see them. Would you be willing to talk with me, maybe, over dinner later?”
She looked up at him and laughed.
“You’re a bad guy, aren’t you?”
He chewed the inside of his cheek and shrugged.
“Probably.”
She looked over her shoulder, then back at him and blushed.
“I guess it’s better than being alone,” she said. “Which room are you in?”
“How about I find you. What time?” Jason asked, thinking of the box of ammo. If she snuck up on him, there’s no telling what he’d have out to play with.
“I don’t know. I don’t know how long this is going to take.”
“Call it eight, then? Late dinner? What room are you in?”
She paused, then told him, waving once at him then once at Sam and Samantha, and skittered off to her car.
“You aren’t making it past the door with that one,” Sam said as she drove away.
“I’m not his girlfriend,” Samantha said.
“How would you rather I introduce you?” Jason asked.
“Just making sure we are all clear,” she said.
“You two have a thing?” Jason asked. Sam opened his mouth in disbelief, then shook his head.
“I’m going to go talk to Simon,” he said. Jason followed.
“She was really pretty, though, wasn’t she? Allison.”
<><><>
Samantha was laying on the bed, singing to the radio, when Sam made the connection.
“They were all terminal,” he said.
“Hmm?” Jason asked, looking up from a gun.
“All of them,” Sam said. “They were all dying, weeks or months to live kind of stuff, when they went missing. Brain tumor, lung cancer, heart failure. The girl at the convenience store had bone cancer and they didn’t think she’d live through the drive down.”
“Allison is dying?” Jason asked.
“I think that’s a good guess,” Sam said. Samantha sat up.
“There are healers, out there,” she said. “Good ones. It’s possible that someone is using natural magic to really cure people.”
“Or,” Sam prompted, feeling the other side coming.
“There are healers out there who use dark magic to prolong health,” she said. “There are all kinds of nasty side effects, and a lot of the time the people they cure become beholden to them. They can’t leave, or the effects will rub off.”
“I’m voting that kind,” Jason said. “They were creepy.”
“Witches are secretive,” Samantha said. “Looking at how you guys think about them, it’s no wonder. But, yeah, I’m voting dark magic.”
“So what do we do?” Sam asked. Samantha shrugged.
“Let’s start with what you two would do,” she said.
“Sneak around after dark. Go break into the church, see what he’s got hiding in the basement,” Sam said.
“Ask Allison what happens after she goes to see that priest,” Jason said, reassembling the handgun.
“Both good,” Samantha said. Sam watched her, trying to figure out why she still felt so unsettled. She didn’t give him any clues.
“What?” he asked. She chewed on her bottom lip, staring down at the bed.
“There are a lot of innocents involved,” she said. “Makes me nervous to have that many of them around.”
“Allison,” Jason said. “You know, that’s a really pretty name. Not Ally or Al. Allison. You know?”
He looked at Samantha. Sam snorted and ducked his head back behind his computer.
“You call her Al and then you come tell me how that goes,” Samantha said.
“I bet she doesn’t put a knife to my throat,” he said.
“Would if I lent her one,” Samantha said.
“Not everyone is as flying-leap crazy as you are,” Jason said.
“No, just the girls you date,” Samantha said. Sam glanced up to see Jason mime a knife to the heart and laughed.
“Children,” he said.
“He started it,” Samantha muttered, laying back down and turning up the radio.
<><><>
Sam and Samantha waited an hour after Jason went to dinner with Allison to head back to the unnamed town. The sun had set, but the sky was still darkening, and Samantha still had her sunglasses on.
“What’s up with those?” he asked, motioning as he drove. She looked out the window.
“My eyes are sensitive to sunlight,” she said.
“Jason thinks you’re a vampire,” he told her.
“No such thing as vampires,” she said.
“You do seem to take that pretty personally,” he said.
“Barring unknown alien invasion, there are three sentient groups on Earth: demons, angels, and humans. That’s it.”
“Aliens?” Sam asked.
“The point isn’t to invite argument over the existence of intelligent life in the universe. It’s meant to rule out vampires, werewolves, mermaids, yeti, bigfoot, whatever. It’s always people. Usually people who lie.”
“Mermaids are real,” Sam said. “We’ve hunted them before. Call themselves finfolk. Evil. Evil like you wouldn’t believe.” He looked at her. “Okay, you probably would, but they didn’t sing. Or hug fish.” He looked up at the sky, where the first stars were beginning to show. “I think there are probably more things out there than you know about.”
She smiled.
“It isn’t important.”
“Why aren’t you upset?”
Sam asked.
“About what?” she asked. It was genuine. Her feelings were a bit cloudy and muddled all the time, because what was guilt or excitement or fear without the conscious thoughts that went with it, but the truth was something that stood out like black and white. He simply knew that she wasn’t trying to be deceitful.
“Hey, will you lie to me?” he asked. She looked at him, confused.
“What?”
“I can tell that you’re telling me the truth. It’s weird. Will you lie to me, just so I can hear it?”
She tipped her head back.
“Okay. The game is called two lies and a truth. It’s an ice-breaker game in social groups. Ever play?”
He shook his head.
“Well, the name of the game is also all the rules there are. Ready?”
He nodded and she put her feet up on the dashboard, thinking.
“Okay. I’ve never left the country. My father was an accountant. I once packed from Nebraska to Utah on horseback.”
Sam felt the statements over in his mind. She had shaded them pretty carefully, but it was still clear-cut.
“Your father was an accountant,” he said. She nodded.
“I went to Canada once for a few hours on a school trip, and we didn’t make it all the way to Utah before my mom got giardia and we had to stop.”
“That’s impressive,” Sam said. She smiled.
“You could tell for a fact though, couldn’t you?”
He nodded.
“I could even tell that they were close to true,” he said. She nodded.
“Hiding gets a lot harder when the person you’re talking to has a lie detector in their head,” she said. “Kind of scary.”
He shrugged.
“I guess. Anyway, why aren’t you upset?”
“I repeat: about what?”
“Jason.”
She sunk lower in her seat, relaxing like a cat, her knees tucked nearly to her shoulders.
“What else was he going to do? I never expected him to suddenly decide he was in love with me to the exclusion of all others. Or even that he believed that love was something other than indigestion.”
“The other night…”
“Shouldn’t have happened. I picked up some bad habits along the way, and I learned how to play hard. I miss it, sometimes. I figured it wouldn’t do any harm, and I was mostly right.”
“Was that supposed to make sense? Because I’m pretty sure you didn’t actually say anything.”
“It hurt you and I made you expect it to mean something. And he’s Jason. That’s got to be a mistake, all by itself, right?”
It was supposed to be a joke, but there was something true about it that he didn’t understand.
“You regret it,” he said. “I mean, all you did was kiss him. What is there to be that upset about?”
She laughed.
“You were the one who asked why I wasn’t upset.”
“That he turns around and hits on someone else a day and a half later.”
She sighed and rolled her head to one side.
“It’s complicated. I have rules for how I behave around people, and I broke them. I regret that. But I really enjoyed myself, doing it. If he expected it to mean something, I’d regret breaking my rules a lot more.” She looked at him. “A lot.”
He hit the edge of town and turned the headlights off, pulling the Cruiser off the road behind the autoshop.
“Mind walking from here?” he asked. She got out and pulled her backpack out of the backseat.
“Ready,” she said softly. He grabbed a shotgun out of the far back and loaded it, pocketing a half-dozen rounds, then checked his handgun and hunting knife. Samantha reached into her backpack and pulled the machete and hatchet one after the other, swinging the hatchet in her left hand with a sense of familiarity. They headed up the hill into the sparse trees, working their way parallel to the main road. There were no streetlights in the little town, but the houses were still lit and cast little pools of light around the fenced yards. Samantha pulled a pair of binoculars out of her backpack and scanned the homes, then handed them to Sam. On couches, individuals sat, woodenly staring at televisions. One couple was standing rigidly two feet apart holding a conversation.
“It’s like a pantomime,” Sam said. She nodded.
“I’ve never seen anything like it, have you?”
“No.”
“Let’s get down to the church.”
The little white-stone church was unlit and Sam knelt to pick the lock while Samantha kept watch on the street.
“I was expecting the church to be closed, but for the entire town to be dead at ten,” he said.
“More normal than you might think,” Samantha answered softly. He swung the door open and pulled a small flashlight out of his pocket. She pulled a flattened lantern out and popped it up, pulling out a lighter to light the oil wick.
“Remind me to tell you about firelight,” Sam said, pointing at the lantern as he closed the door behind them. “That’s a better idea than you probably know.”
She nodded, wandering along the wall of the front chamber. There were a few small tables with token objects on them.
“This doesn’t look very used,” she said. He shook his head. The surfaces he was looking at were dusty, even the ones that should have been touched routinely. He found a stack of prayer cards and motioned to Samantha.
“Guess no one has anything worth praying about,” she said. They were so thick with dust that they were hard to read. They went into the main sanctuary where row after row of pews were equally ill-used. The main aisle was clear, though, as were the front three rows and the altar.
“I bet everyone has their assigned seat,” he said. She nodded. She held the lantern over the podium and frowned. He came to look, finding a Bible just as thick with dust as everything else.
“It’s all for show,” she said. There’s something very wrong going on here.”
“Hey,” he said. “How come you can come in here now, when you couldn’t earlier?”
“Before, it was a place of worship. Now it’s just a crime scene.”
“Same building,” he said passively. She nodded.
“The impression of goodness or evil is often just as importance as the presence,” she said.
“I have no idea what that means.”
She laughed softly.
“Took me about ten years,” she said. “Rules.”
There was a door at the side of the church that Samantha tried, but it was locked. The dust paths on the ground indicated that it was in steady use. Sam came to open that lock and they found themselves at the top of a staircase.
“After you,” he said. She held out the lantern and spun the hatchet once, making a cutting sound through the air with it, then beginning cautiously down the stairs. Sam pulled the handgun out of his waistband and checked the front door of the church once more before he followed. She relaxed slightly when she turned at the bottom of the stairs, apparently finding the room below empty.
“This shouldn’t be empty,” she said. The room was bare, washed to slick featurelessness. A spigot on the wall and a drain in the floor were the only hints at what it might be used for. He agreed with her assessment. The room was clearly well-maintained and well-used, but there was nothing - literally nothing - in it.
“They must have a storage room around here somewhere,” he said. She nodded. The walls were unyielding concrete, though, and upstairs the sanctuary was simply plaster over white stone, with windows thrown in. There really wasn’t any place to hide another room. They did a careful search of both stories, anyway, then gave up.
“Plan?” she asked.
“Go back, find out what Jason found out, then come back here tomorrow and watch. Maybe we can figure out what they’re doing in here.”
She nodded.
“Yeah.”
<><><>
“She says it’s a healer colony,” Jason said. “You only get in by invitation. They
have people in various cities around the US who can refer you, and you come down here and, it doesn’t matter what you have, they heal you. The guy who referred her was apparently in a car wreck and had brain swelling that was going to kill him. He showed her his medical reports. He worked as an administrator at the hospital where she was getting treatment.”
“What’s wrong with her?” Samantha asked.
“Lymphoma,” Jason said. “But it’s the brain tumor that’s killing her.”
Samantha frowned and nodded.
“She’s been irradiated twice. Doctors say she won’t survive another attempt, and the chemo isn’t shrinking the tumor in her brain fast enough. She’s got weeks.”
“And she’s here by herself?”
“It’s one of the conditions. Leave whenever you want, but come alone. They say it’s faith-based holistic medicine. She said he gave her the first day’s worth of medicine, and she’s supposed to come back tomorrow.”
Samantha sat up on her bed and looked over at Sam.
“I have to get my hands on that,” she said. “I can tell you exactly what we’re dealing with, if I can get some of what he’s giving her.”
“She already took it. He had her take it before she left.”
“Did she see him prepare it?” Samantha asked.
“I was dancing pretty hard, trying not to creep her out with the questions I was already asking,” Jason said.
“What did you tell her?” Sam asked.
“That you were considering doing it, and that Sam and I came to check the place out. That we’d leave if we decided it was okay. She thought they’d be mad about it, but I said that you were really nervous, wandering around alone. And how brave she must be.”
“Gee,” Sam said. Jason grinned.
“I don’t like her being alone with them,” Samantha said.
“I offered to drive her over tomorrow, but she said no,” Jason said.
“How long did they tell her it was going to take to heal her?”
“Three days of treatments, then the final treatment the evening of the third day,” Jason said. He looked at his hands. “She’s so desperate.”
Samantha sighed.
“I know. If they want her alone, though, I can’t imagine this is a philanthropist witch. It doesn’t matter how they’re giving her her health back, I promise it costs more than she’d pay.”
