Growth

by Jeff Jacobson

  She hated to leave the shotgun in the car, but kept her right hand on her Glock and eased up to the front of their car instead, playing dumb and giving a girlish shake of her short blond hair. The longer she kept them off balance, the better. “Well, gee, I’m new here, and I don’t really know, you know?”

  She backed up to the house, never taking her hand off the Glock. “I can check with the family who lives here. I’m sure they can help.” She wanted the men to think there were more people inside, just to make them hesitate that much longer.

  “I got a map here,” the driver said in an effort to bring her closer to his car.

  Sandy went up the stairs backward. “No thanks. Wouldn’t help much.” She found the door handle behind her with her left hand and twisted it.

  The other two men in the car opened their doors. They stood, and Sandy noticed that they all wore long-sleeve flannel shirts, despite the heat.

  “Listen,” the driver said. “I think we’re getting off on the wrong foot here. We just need to find our way back to the interstate. That’s all.”

  Sandy took one step backward, into the house.

  The passenger twisted suddenly, revealing that the man in the backseat had a handgun and it was leveled at Sandy. He fired, twice.

  Sandy felt the wood chips from the front door spray into her face before she heard the shots. She fell backward, hit the floor, and rolled out of sight.

  Cochran had been watching and waiting and now kicked the door shut. “Keys!” he hissed, holding his cuffed hands out to his side.

  Sandy didn’t think twice. She fished the key out of her pocket and one of the men fired again. Four holes appeared in the front door, waist high. Cochran rolled over to her and when his back slammed into her, he held the cuffs up as best as he could.

  Sandy unlocked the cuffs and said, “Open the door. Quick.” She figured they would be expecting them to dig in deep inside the house and wouldn’t expect a sneak attack.

  Cochran’s face made it clear he didn’t think it was a good idea, but he crawled back over to the door and waited for her signal. She nodded, and he whipped the front door wide open. Sandy saw that one of the men was coming straight up the stairs and hadn’t expected an open door.

  She squeezed the trigger three times. At fifteen feet, shooting from a sitting position, resting her Glock on her knee, it wasn’t difficult to put all three rounds straight into the center of his chest. The man went to his knees, but didn’t drop his handgun. She then understood why they were all wearing long-sleeve flannel shirts.

  They all wore Kevlar vests.

  So she readjusted, shot him in the head, and yelled, “Shut it!”

  Cochran slammed the door.

  The windows exploded in a maelstrom of glass and lead.

  Sandy tossed the Glock to Cochran. He caught it and gave her a look filled with confusion. “Go.” She angled her head at the kitchen. “Out the back door. Hurry. Get around the side before they think about it. Stay low and shoot whoever is on the porch.”

  Cochran didn’t have to be told twice. He scrambled up and dove over the fridge through the kitchen doorway. More gunfire blasted through the front windows. Good Christ. It sounded like one of them had a fucking fully automatic assault rifle out there.

  Sandy wriggled on her stomach through the broken glass over to the Einhorns’ twenty-six-inch TV on a stand in the corner. She scooted it over the front door and wedged it at an angle under the door handle. The rabbit ear antenna stuck out wildly.

  More gunfire, but she couldn’t tell where it was going because the glass was nearly gone from the windows. She wanted to stick her head up and see if Cochran had managed to get out the back door but worried she would catch a bullet in the back of the head. Instead, she propelled herself back across the floor using her elbows and toes and slid into place behind the couch.

  She’d given up her only gun, but she still had the Taser X26P on her left hip and wondered how well their fancy bulletproof vests would protect them against 13,000 volts. That is, if they didn’t shoot her first.

  She didn’t have to wait long.

  A barrage of gunfire erupted and the front door shuddered under the onslaught. Sandy flattened herself into the floor. It sounded like whoever had the assault rifle was emptying the clip into the front door, and sure enough, after a several seconds of mind-numbing gunfire, there were a few moments of relief as he switched magazines.

  Sandy got ready.

  The man with the machine gun kicked open the front door, knocking the TV aside, and raked the Einhorn living room with automatic gunfire, whipping the gun back and forth, spraying bullets like he wanted to water the flowers but only had a few drops left in the hose.

  Sandy closed her eyes and prayed, promising the Universe that she would do whatever she could to raise her son as a decent human being if she lived through this. Splinters of wood and powder from drywall settled over her like remnants from a hurricane. She blinked the dust out of her eyes and watched from under the couch as the man’s feet stepped over the threshold.

  He froze, watching and waiting for movement. He was big, and she didn’t think her nifty little spinning and kicking trick with Cochran would work on this guy. Cochran was a lawyer who spent most of his time in a suit and tie; this man was a professional mercenary.

  The back door clicked shut.

  The man ran for the kitchen and as he reached the couch, Sandy fired the Taser. Twin electric dragons snaked up and chomped hold of his flesh; one snapped at the inside of his thigh, the other hit his left testicle. He made a surprised grunt and toppled over. The assault rifle flew out of his hands and clattered across the refrigerator in the doorway and landed in the kitchen. His forehead cracked into the side of the fridge, throwing his skull at an odd angle as the rest of his body hit the floor.

  Sandy hoped he’d broken his neck. She scrambled up, stepped on him, and hopped over the fridge. If he wasn’t dead, she had less than five seconds before he was moving again. She went for the assault rifle and turned around to find the man struggling to his feet.

  At some point, sometime after she had shot the first man in the head, she had stopped thinking like a law enforcement officer and now the foremost image in her mind was her son’s face. She had left him behind to respond to an emergency telephone call that had turned out to be a lie. And now she would let nothing stop her from getting back to Kevin. She would take him in her arms again or she would die trying.

  The man ripped out the barbs and didn’t make a sound.

  Sandy didn’t want to waste any more time with somebody that could pull the end of a fishhook out of his balls without whimpering. She brought the assault rifle around. She wasn’t used to the light trigger, though, and squeezed it too soon. The rifle jumped in her hands and bullets stitched across the doorway, right above the man’s head, as the recoil raised the barrel higher and higher. She released the trigger and readjusted, but it was too late.

  A dull click; the rifle was empty.

  He wrapped the Taser wire around both fists like a boxer wrapping tape around his knuckles, then put one knee on the fridge, keeping his eyes locked on her the whole time.

  Sandy heard gunfire out in the front yard but couldn’t worry about Cochran now.

  She dropped the assault rifle, wondering if she had enough time to reload the Taser. She needed something, anything, to use as a weapon, because the man was going to take her apart with his bare hands.

  She grabbed the knife block off the counter and cracked him in the skull with all three pounds. Butcher knives spilled all over the floor. The blow dazed him for only a half second. Blood pooled and started spilling into his eye. He blinked, shook his head to clear it, and crawled completely onto the fridge.

  Sandy was already scrabbling for the knives. Her fingers curled around a thick handle and she leapt at the man, coming down on him like a lithe little grim reaper. The steak knife sliced the side of his face open from temple to jawbone; the flesh peeled away from the
bone like a rotten orange.

  A giant fist, bound in Taser wire, came out of nowhere. It caught her on the chin like a one-hundred-mile-an-hour fastball and lifted her off her feet. She landed flat on her back amid the rest of the knives and she heard a deep, wrenching crack from the house itself.

  The floor dropped several inches.

  Sandy lost her knife and scrambled for the back door as she heard the man roar and leap from the fridge. He landed a few feet behind her kicking legs and she wished she could have seen his expression as the floorboards gave way and he crashed through to the basement in an avalanche of rotten timber, linoleum squares, and knives.

  She had just grabbed hold of the back door handle when the floor collapsed, and was able to hang on. She swung it open and caught herself on the threshold. She pulled herself over and glanced back down into the basement.

  The man had landed on the mirror and dresser, cracking it with the impact, and rolled off to the floor as debris rained down around him. He stirred, and reached out to grab at his left leg.

  Through the cloud of dust, Sandy thought she saw something else moving down there. She caught flashes of what looked like long black centipedes crawling through the wreckage, all drawn to the struggling man. The human fingers followed, crawling over and under the linoleum and splinters, exactly like the spider creatures in the body bag back at Dr. Castle’s office. Then things even bigger crawled out. These had longer tentacles than the insects, moving along with two uneven rows on both sides of the legs of small rodents like rats or squirrels. They cautiously crept out of the septic tank and slithered through what was left of the floor. Sometimes she could see exposed backbones along the tendrils.

  They swarmed the man as he rolled and tried to get away, and she saw that his left leg was bent horribly just below the knee. A shard of startlingly white bone jutted out from just under his kneecap. Sandy knew that he wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon and rolled away from the kitchen.

  The shooting out front had stopped. She stayed low and crept around the south side of the house, keeping the barn to her right. One of the doors was open, but she couldn’t see far into the darkness inside. She slipped into the bushes that had grown wild up the side of the house and crept under their canopy to the front corner of the house, trying to catch a glimpse of the third man or Cochran.

  In the driveway, the third man was out in the open. He was dragging his dead comrade, the guy Sandy had shot in the head, back along the walk to the vehicles. Sandy wondered if he was taking the body to their car, removing the evidence. But he opened the cruiser’s back door and rolled the body into the backseat. He slammed the cruiser’s door and went to the rental car’s trunk.

  He pulled out three large tanks, all strapped together with a backpack harness in the front. The man bent over and spent a few minutes attaching some sort of hose-and-gun-looking thing to the tanks. A pool of dread grew in Sandy’s stomach, and sure enough, when the man stood, he carried a goddamn flamethrower.

  Sandy wondered what the hell else they had in the trunk.

  The man stood back from the cruiser, then opened up with a jet of flame that blasted through the open front windows and incinerated everything inside. So much for the shotgun.

  Satisfied, the man turned back to the house and marched back up the walk. He stepped out of sight, and for a few seconds she couldn’t see because the steps were in the way, but it wasn’t long before he dragged Cochran over to the porch. Sandy shrank back, lowering herself to the dirt and watching with one eye through the rose thorns.

  Cochran was still alive. He moaned as the man left him at the bottom of the front steps. The front of Cochran’s white shirt was stained red.

  The man called out, “Jack? You in there, Jack?” He didn’t give Jack much time to answer, stepping back and spraying the second floor with flames. Sandy could feel the heat from the flamethrower even twenty feet away. The roof caught with a dry, muffled whump.

  The man circled around the house, heading south, moving to Sandy’s right, between the house and the barn. He gave the gable a fresh coat of fire as he moved. When he could see both the front and back doors, he yelled, “I know you heard me, Miss Police Officer. You’re listening to me. You come on out here before things get bad in there. You and me will talk. We will reach an agreement much better than what you will experience inside, I promise you that. Come out right now and you will live.”

  Sandy grew flat into the dirt and turned her head away.

  He gave the house another spray.

  She felt something against the back of her thigh. A tickle at first. Then warmth, pressing down, harder and harder, until it erupted into full burning. Part of her knew it was just a tiny spot, just an ember, just a piece of the roof, but it still felt like her entire leg was on fire. She bit down on her sleeve and tried not to scream.

  The man was on the move again. “You make me wait much longer, I might lose my temper.” He circled around the back, maybe worried that she was trying to get out a window on the other side of the house.

  As soon as he passed the back corner, she jerked around with a fistful of dirt and slapped at the burn. The ember was about the size of a dime. She bit down on another scream as she pushed harder, filling the wound with cool soil and extinguishing the glowing wood.

  She stuck her head back around the front to see if the coast was clear and saw that Cochran was on his feet, stumbling to the rental car. Sandy was impressed. He’d been playing possum. Not entirely, though, as she watched him lurch along. He’d taken a bullet in the gut somewhere. He bent down and picked up something in the grass. The first man’s gun. Cochran made it to the car and opened the front door, dropped into the front seat.

  Start the car, dumbass, Sandy almost said aloud. She was trying to decide if she should try for the car and escape or use him as a distraction while she ran for the cover of the corn. If he saw her, the man might use the flamethrower to try and burn the whole field, but the plants were strong and green. The fire wouldn’t spread.

  Then she heard Cochran saying the cornfields were full of monsters.

  She’d also been thinking of trying for the barn, and now wondered if it was full of bugs. The darkness inside didn’t look so inviting anymore.

  That left Cochran and the car.

  He was still just sitting there, and she finally realized Cochran didn’t have the keys. She was worried she might have to take her chances in the corn when she heard Cochran yell something. The third man came into view, yelling back, “Thanks for contaminating the car, asshole.” Liquid flame spurted out of the end of his weapon.

  Just before it reached the car, Cochran fired. An explosion of fire blew out the windows of the rental car at the same moment the bullet took out the third man’s forehead. He collapsed, finger still tight on the trigger. The jet of flame arced over his head and burned a streak in the lawn.

  Sandy thought she heard Cochran screaming for a moment, then all she could hear was the crackle of flames and the hissing and popping of the old wood of the house as it burned. She tentatively emerged from the bushes and took it all in. The house was fully engulfed in flames. Both cars were on fire, sending black, poisonous-looking smoke into the cloudless blue sky. The flamethrower finally ran out of fuel, and the grass smoked in the sunlight.

  She pulled out her cell phone and saw that it had been cracked from one of her falls. The screen wouldn’t respond to her touch. At least she still had her radio. She hit the button, “Liz? Liz? You there?”

  “This is an official channel. Identify yourself. And this better not be who I think it is,” Sheriff Hoyt’s voice came back.

  CHAPTER 21

  Bob was happy.

  He felt like he was back in high school, in the homecoming parade. He’d been voted Homecoming King, and Carol, the Homecoming Queen, had red hair and a curvy figure and a reputation for drinking beer with the boys and getting frisky in her daddy’s Chevy. All was right with the world.

  Something jostled him and
he looked down at the surprisingly modern controls of one his combines. He had to remind himself that this wasn’t 1976. All the red, white, and blue that covered the town wasn’t for the bicentennial. This was the Fourth of July parade, and he was bringing in his son’s crop to show everyone in town that his son was just as much of a farmer as his father and grandfather before him.

  This was perhaps the proudest moment of his life.

  He just wished he felt better. There was a coldness in his chest, and something was wrong with his eyes. They wouldn’t focus. And his arms and legs wouldn’t respond for about two or three seconds after he tried to get them to move.

  Good thing the combine pretty much drove itself.

  He couldn’t remember signing up for the parade, but the antique car club stopped and gave him plenty of room to follow Troop 2957. He gave all the scouts a cheerful wave. At least, he hoped it was a wave. It was getting a little hard to tell what his arms were doing. The combine was still moving; he could feel it rumbling along at least.

  That was all right, though. He could make out the green of the park coming up on the right, and that’s where he wanted to stop and rest for a while. Maybe he would let one of his men drive the combine home.

  He was feeling a little tired, after all.

  Sheriff Hoyt had just about had enough from this self-entitled bitch. “You were warned and I guarantee you this: I will see you in jail before sundown.”

  “Listen to me, asshole. You’ve got bigger problems. Arrest me later. Right now, we have an emergency. There’s something in the corn. Look southeast. You’ll see the smoke. There’s—”

  Sheriff Hoyt cut her off. “I know you think you’re something special, but you are gonna find out the hard way that . . .” He trailed off, still keeping the button on his radio down. The sound of grinding metal overpowered the halfhearted theme from Raiders of the Lost Ark as the local high school marching band stomped past the viewing stage.