What if he’s dead?
Her lungs filled with smoke, she coughed and hacked and used her left hand to beat at her chest. “Oh, God,” she whispered in a panic. “Oh, God, Clark…”
With every breath, she saw him lying frozen and lifeless, his body piled beside mounted garbage. He’d never survive out here. It was a miracle he’d survived last night, not to mention the night before that. It was unnatural.
“Damnit, Clark. Where are you?”
She was four blocks from their building now.
Five.
Six.
Nowhere. He was nowhere to be found. And neither was anyone else. It was like Armageddon.
Entering Grover Park, she passed a pair of tall oak trees, their branches bare. Sighing, she thanked God the streetlights were burning bright. Her feet crunched rock salt as she passed vacant benches and the sheer lifelessness of winter. Venturing deeper, further, calling out his name every few paces, she lit another cigarette and flipped the collar of her jacket. Freezing, the chill ran deeper when she realized Clark had probably been out here all night. And she’d be out here all night looking for him.
Down a winding dirt path, she stood on the tips of her toes to see over several piles of shoveled snow. Nothing. She sobbed, fighting off the tears. All hope had gone.
He’s dead, she thought. He’s gotta be…
But wait…
In the near distance, she saw something.
Something moving.
Something white.
Quickening her step, she saw that it was a t-shirt. And then she focused on the navy blue and gray of a pair of plaid pajama pants.
It was Clark.
And he was alive. Moving!
Smiling, grateful, she flicked the cigarette and rushed forth. Squinting through clouds of breath, she saw him clearly. The back of his head. His arms. His stocking feet.
She couldn’t wait to warm him. To get him home. To get him help. This could not happen again. No way. She wouldn’t let it.
Close enough to hear the sound of his footsteps, she called his name once more and reached out. The tips of her fingers grazed his shoulder before he stopped, whirling around.
His movement was fast. So frighteningly fast that it startled her.
And she froze.
Breath held, she saw the look in his wild eyes before his arm swung violently. Something in his hand caught the beam of a streetlight. Its glint was the last thing she saw.
* * *
Clark woke. Panting.
When he saw the bare trees and felt the intensity of the cold, he knew he’d done it again.
And he sighed. Disappointed. So very disappointed. And scared.
In his right hand, he felt something hard and smooth. Something he was clenching. Unknowingly clenching.
Lowering his gaze, the body slumped at his feet was the first thing he saw. Not far from it was a small, dark mound.
A ball?
No.
A head.
Sherry’s head.
When he saw the meat cleaver in his hand, saw the blood-soaked blade, he realized he hadn’t exorcised those demons after all.
Grownups
by Paul Anderson
Paul Anderson's short stories, articles, reviews, and interviews have appeared in scores of different venues, most recently in Perpetual Motion Machine's ONE-NIGHT STANDS series ("Survivor's Debt") and Written Backwards' QUALIA NOUS anthology ("In the Nothing-Space, I Am What You Made Me"). A teacher, presenter, and sometime-journalist, he edits the lauded magazine JAMAIS VU - THE JOURNAL OF THE STRANGE AMONG THE FAMILIAR (where James Newman is a regular movie reviewer) for Post Mortem Press.
Trent saw his sister Liz yawn and, with every ounce of his willpower, resisted punching her.
"Watch the road," she said, looking at his reflection in the passenger window.
Trent's lips thinned. "I'm just making sure you're not going off with another idiot. I mean, we're in a car, but I don't underestimate your abilities."
She glanced at him, her icy blue eyes dull--showing all the fifteen-year-old apathy she could muster--but he caught the flash of pain. She held the smartphone their mother had given her--rubbery pink casing, flashy screen, nothing at all inside--tight enough for it to creak.
"Would it help if I said I was sorry?" she asked, her voice softer than before.
"No."
"I wasn't thinking--"
"Shut up, Liz."
"I just thought he was cute and we were just talking--"
"Shut up!" he bellowed. The car swerved. He corrected it roughly.
She stiffened. "Fuck off, Trent--okay? Fuck off. I forgot for a second, that's all. And, you know something, bro? I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have forgotten if you hadn't 'forgotten', know what I mean? Who was it who wanted to jump the town fence? Hmmm? Who wanted to hang out with the Outsiders, huh?"
His right arm quivered, ached, to lash out, drive its fist into his sister's cheek, maybe slam her head into the passenger window. That would shut her up. That would show her the reality of the situation. It wouldn't be hard for him to do.
After all, he'd done much worse, now.
"You might've forgotten," he said, softly--so softly, "and I might've shown you how, but remember, Liz--that kid's dead. Not knocked out, not a little roughed up. Dead. And that kid wouldn't be dead right now if you hadn't talked to him, okay? Just remember that. You killed him the minute you forgot the rules Mom and Dad and Town Council gave us on this little field trip."
Silence from the other side of the car. He glanced over and saw her crumpled into the passenger door, trying to stare at him defiantly and failing.
Direct hit.
The Toyota--like Liz's bogus cell phone, something specifically given to them for this trip--hummed along in silence. The Interstate descended into a valley, the mountain hillsides furry with pine. An aluminum sky bore down.
His mind circled back to the rest stop and his stomach turned hard and unstable. He saw the tire iron connecting with the back of the kid's head; the almost-startled jump of blood. The sickening give as the kid's skull gave way. The way the body had slumped and tumbled off the picnic table.
How many people could've seen that? It wasn't as if the picnic area had been out of sight of the highway. Thank God he hadn't dropped the tire iron--
An angry, hectoring voice suddenly rose in the back of his head, Goddammit, you just killed someone and you're worried about who might've seen you? That you didn't drop the goddam tire iron? What the hell's the matter with you?
And--like that--his rage at Liz and his own jangled nerves imploded, leaving a gnawing core of nausea. His heart did a drunken lurch.
He took a deep breath. Sweat broke out along his back and brow; that kind of heavy, itchy sweat that felt like a thin skein of motor oil. He glanced into the rearview mirror and saw a pale, dark-haired boy that looked only seventeen-years-old.
I had to kill that kid, he thought slowly, earnestly, working the problem out. I had to protect Liz. What would've happened if I hadn't stopped it? We're already contaminated and what if that kid noticed how we're different? No one can know about us. God knows what happened to the Outsiders I took Liz to see. That's why we're off to see the man earlier than we should. If we poison our bodies and minds any more, we can't receive our souls.
There was silence in his head, the kind of waiting silence which makes you aware of the parameters of your skull, which makes each breath that much louder, which makes your skin itch along the back of your neck.
And then the voice, no longer hectoring but still seething, You don't honestly believe that, do you?
Mentally, it was like his tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth. For almost a five-count, there was no thought. It was swallowed by the static roar of shock.
Think about finding Liz and that kid at the rest stop, the voice said. They looked like teenagers, sounded like teenagers. What was so "different" that the kid would discover? If it looks like a duck and quacks
like a duck, then it's a duck, right? Except, our town has been telling us all our lives that it wasn't a duck, it was really a penguin. They've been doing it all my life and have kept Liz and me from seeing anything different, but does that make what I saw at the rest stop wrong?
The alien voice had transitioned into his own thoughts.
He swallowed, suddenly cold all over.
Years--a lifetime--of teachings rose up. I only look like a teenager! I don't have a soul! It's not possible! I'm in my thirties!
How do you know? the voice asked. How do you know you're in your thirties? Because your parents told you?
Something--faith, loyalty to his parents--tried rising up to argue that and couldn't. Birthdays weren't celebrated. Trent didn't know when he was born and who remembers their toddler-hood? It could've been seventeen. It could've been thirty-something. They were told that, soulless, they aged slower. Before, it'd made sense. Before...
If I don't believe this, he thought, then what am I doing? Why am I going off to meet this man?
He thought of his village--enclosed, cut-off, from any main roads. No Outsiders, no travelers. Just the Town Elders, the adults, and the children. He thought of seasons passing, marked only by the crops. He thought of Wednesday night meetings, and morning worships, and Sunday discussions. Everyone living together, working together, learning together, listening to the same lessons on emptiness, souls, worldliness, and corruption. God's waiting plan. God's empty vessels. Everyone hearing the same things, believing the same things, thinking the same things. The adults--those without children only--who went out into the world for various necessities never brought the world back with them.
Almost.
Trent, hearing just one word at a time over a long time, from around corners and across rooms and in backyards:
Stockton. Another town. Within walking distance.
All meaning: the world.
And Trent had gone to see it.
I can't have been the only one, he thought. In all the centuries, I can't have been the only one, but then where were the others? How can a group of people talk so much and not say anything?
"Trent," Liz said, alarmed. "Trent, slow down."
He saw the speedometer was past eighty and creeping towards ninety. He took his foot off the gas. Trent didn't have a license and his name wasn't on the car's registration.
He straightened his shoulders. He felt Liz's eyes on him. "What?"
She bit her lower lip. "You're scared, aren't you?"
"Terrified," he said and stopped himself from saying more.
"You did what you had to, Trent," she said, putting a hand on his arm. He said nothing. He resisted shaking her hand off.
She believes she's in her mid-twenties, he thought, and I used to believe I was in my thirties. I believed this until I bashed a tire iron into the back of some kid's head.
"You think it'll hurt?" Liz asked.
"What?"
She shrugged. "Getting our souls."
He gritted his teeth. "I don't know."
"Beth Holsteem wouldn't tell," Liz said. "No one would."
Trent forced himself to say, "We're going before our teaching was finished, Liz."
"No, I mean, in general. No one talks about him. No one says a word unless they have to. They say that he knows everything, that he controls the psychopomps, whatever they are, and that the psychopomps guide souls, but I don't understand any of it."
"I don't know, Liz," he said. An image of Marc Holsteem, after he'd come back from meeting the man, arose in his mind: gray at the temples, his young face wrinkled and aged, wearied and wary.
Marc had come back changed.
He'd come back as a grownup.
If nothing I've told you is true, Trent's mother said in the back of his mind, then how could that have happened to Marc? He was your best friend. It wasn't a case of one person leaving and a different person coming back. Marc aged, Trent. How could the man do that?
He didn't know.
They passed a sign for their next exit. An urge to bypass it filled him--like standing on the edge of a cliff, like looking down from the roof of a building. They'd get as far away as they could and, when he finally stopped, he'd show Liz the truth.
We've been brainwashed, he'd tell her. They lied to us.
Here's the reality.
Where would you go? his mother asked. You only have a little money, no identification, no contacts, no evidence. Where could you go?
Something went out of him and he slumped forward.
There was nowhere to go.
Only forward.
He glanced at Liz and saw none of his own emotions reflected on her face.
Trent slowed down to take the exit.
* * *
The sky was darkening towards evening when they pulled into the sprawling airport's short-term lot, facing the steel-and-glass octopus. The air outside vibrated with the passage of planes.
Trent's throat felt like a straw lined with wool. I'll ride this out. I'll protect Liz and ride this out. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the whole thing's true and I really am in my thirties.
"What now?" Liz asked. "Do we get out--"
Something struck the back window and both he and Liz jumped. Trent spun and saw what appeared to be the world's largest, blockiest, whitest fist. The hand was connected to an arm sheaved in loose black material, which fed into a black body that defied detail--Trent couldn't tell if the person wore baggy clothes or a coat or what.
"It's him," Trent said, his voice cracking, and forced himself outside.
Everything about the man across the roof exemplified size and height--he had to be nearly seven feet tall and his thickness was Trent doubled. The man's face was a thick block of pasty flesh, lightly chiseled with wrinkles. His lips were thin and long. His nose looked like a bent bird's beak. The man's eyes were hidden by bulky wraparound sunglasses. Jammed low on his head was a black fedora.
"Mr. Croit," the man intoned, and, in spite of saying the name with the proper French accent, his voice was the sound of boulders crashing. His overcoat flapped in the cold wind like a flutter of wings.
Numbly, Trent nodded. What are you going to do to us? he thought.
The man--who didn't bother offering his name--got into the car. The Toyota creaked, settled. Trent got behind the wheel.
"You two are early," the man said, taking up the entire backseat. His hat flattened against the ceiling. "You broke Town Code and went beyond your enclave's boundaries, seeing the Outside before you were ready for it. Is this not so?"
Shivering, Liz said, "It was an accident."
The man nodded. "But it is done. You will receive your souls early. It will not be pleasant."
Trent looked at the man in the rearview mirror. He'd suddenly lost the ability to swallow.
"One of you has stopped believing," the man said.
The words came down like a hammer blow, somehow worse than his matter-of-fact iteration that the process they would be undertaking would not be pleasant. He heard Liz gasp. It felt like his skin had developed a thin layer of frost. He kept his eyes locked on the steering wheel.
He's saying this to spook us, he thought. Nothing more. He doesn't know anything. We aren't the only ones who's ever broken Town Code. Did they stop believing? It's a way of goosing us.
He didn't know if he believed that or not.
Silence filled the car like the oncoming darkness. Trent watched the man in the rearview. In the gloom, the man was a massive dark shape; a black hole in the little car.
"You will learn to believe again," the man said finally. "The whippoorwills and the sparrows--the psychopomps that guide souls from the ether to our world--come whether you believe or not."
Two pinpricks of light suddenly flashed where the man's eyes would be, the illumination buffered by the man's glasses--white cores with blue edging. Trent stiffened and blinked.
The light was gone.
I didn't see that, he thought.
His
mouth was suddenly dry.
"We may leave now," the man said.
* * *
The man directed Trent onto various roads, each smaller and less traveled than the last. The Toyota's headlights stabbed the darkness of desolate two-lane highways. The trip seemed to simultaneously take forever and be over much too fast.
Finally, the man said, "Slow down. You will see a mailbox to your right, next to a dirt driveway. Turn into it."
One thought rose from the cacophony of Trent's head, How can you see anything?, but he slowed down and, when he saw the mailbox--it was once jungle green but was now just a rusted ruin pock-marked by .22 rounds--he turned in.
"Stop," the man said.
The headlights sketched out two ruts in the lush wildness of the grass. To the right, he could see the bulk of a house, but the roof had a slumped and broken look about it.
"It is unusual to have two on this journey," the man said. Trent looked into the rearview. Those two pinpricks of light flashed again in the darkness.
Trent looked away quickly.
"Mr. Croit," the man said, "you will stay while I take your sister. You are not to leave this car under any circumstances. Do you understand?"
Trent's head moved in a limp bob.
Cold air whooshed in momentarily as the backseat door opened and the man got out.
"Trent--" Liz started to say, her voice pleading, but her passenger door opened. The man said, "Ms. Croit?"
She mewled and unbuckled her seatbelt. She slid out, looking at Trent one last time. The fear in her eyes was animalistic, primal, the kind small creatures feel when they hear the hunter approaching.
The man led Liz away. Their shadows stretched out long and obscene ahead of them, merging with the encroaching darkness. They reached the edge of the headlights and kept walking.
Trent switched off the car and sat, shivering. He squeezed his eyes closed. What am I going to do? What's he doing to Liz? What's real?
In his mind, he saw that surprised jet of blood from the teenage boy's broken skull, felt the vibration traveling up his arm.
He saw two flashes of light from behind the man's glasses.
"Goddammit!" he screamed and pounded the steering wheel.
Widowmakers: A Benefit Anthology of Dark Fiction Page 23
