by Holly Black
“Bet they got a run,” the boy said. “The Braves. Mase is watchin’ the game.”
Eighteen or twenty miles! Carla thought. She wasn’t sure they had enough gas to make it that far, and she sure would hate to run out on a country road. The sun was shining down hot and bright from the fierce blue sky, and the pine woods looked like they went on to the edge of eternity. She cursed herself as a fool for not stopping at that rest station on Highway 84, where there was Shell gasoline and a Burger King, but she’d thought they could fill up ahead and she was in a hurry to get to St. Simons Island. Her husband, Ray, was a lawyer and had flown on to Brunswick for a business meeting several days ago; she and the kids had left Atlanta yesterday morning to visit her parents in Valdosta, then were supposed to swing up through Waycross and meet Ray for a vacation. Stay on the main highway, Ray had told her. You get off the highway, you can get lost in some pretty desolate country. But she thought she’d known her own state, particularly the area she’d grown up in! When the pavement had stopped and Highway 241 had turned to dust a ways back, she’d almost stopped and turned around—but then she’d seen the sign to Capshaw, so she’d kept on going and hoped for the best.
But if this was the best, they were sunk.
In the bathroom, Joe had learned that you spell relief p-e-e. It was not a clean bathroom, true, and there were dead leaves and pinestraw on the floor and the single window was broken, but he would’ve gone in an outhouse if he’d had to. The toilet hadn’t been flushed for a long time, though, and the smell wasn’t too pleasant. Through the thin wall he could hear a TV set on. The crack of a bat and the roar of a crowd.
And another sound too. Something that he couldn’t identify at first.
It was a low droning noise. Somewhere close, he thought, as he stood at the end of an amber river.
Joe looked up, and his hand abruptly squeezed the river off.
Above his head, the bathroom’s ceiling crawled with yellowjackets. Hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. The little winged bodies with their yellow-and-black-striped stingers crawled over and around each other, making a weird droning noise that wounded like a hushed, distant—and dangerous—whisper.
The river would not be denied. It kept streaming. As Joe stared upward with widened eyes, he saw maybe thirty or forty of the yellowjackets take off, buzz curiously around his head, and then fly away through the broken window. A few of them—ten or fifteen, Joe realized—came in for a closer look. His skin crept as the yellowjackets hummed before his face, and he heard their droning change pitch, become higher and faster—as if they knew they’d found an intruder.
More left the ceiling. He felt them walking in his hair, and one landed on the edge of his right ear. The river would not stop, and he knew he must not cry out, must not must not, because the noise in this confined place might send the whole colony of them into a stinging frenzy.
One landed on his left cheek and walked toward his nose. Five or six of them were crawling on his sweaty Conan the Barbarian T-shirt. And then he felt some of them land on his knuckles and—yes—even there too.
He fought back a sneeze as a yellowjacket probed his left nostril. A dark, humming cloud of them hung waiting over his scalp.
“Well,” Carla said to the red-haired boy, “I don’t guess we’ve got much choice, do we?”
“But we’re on E, Momma!” Trish reminded her.
“You ’bout empty?” Toby asked.
“I’m afraid so. We’re on our way to St. Simons Island.”
“Long way from here.” Toby looked off to the right, where a battered old pickup truck with red plastic dice hanging from the rearview mirror was parked. “That’s Mase’s truck. Maybe he’d drive over to Halliday for you and get you some gas.”
“Mase? Who’s that?”
“Oh, he owns this place. Always has. Want me to ask him if he’ll do it?”
“I don’t know. Maybe we could make it ourselves.”
Toby shrugged. “Maybe you could, at that.” But the way he smiled told Carla that he didn’t believe she would, and she didn’t believe it herself. Lord, Ray was going to pitch a fit about this!
“I’ll ask him, if you like.” Toby kicked a stone with the toe of one dirty sneaker.
“All right,” Carla agreed. “Tell him I’ll pay him five dollars, too.”
“Sure thing.” Toby walked back to the screen door. “Mase? Lady out here needs some gas pretty bad. Says she’ll pay you five dollars to bring her back a few gallons from Halliday.”
Mase didn’t answer. His face was blue from the TV screen’s glow.
“Mase? Did you hear me?” Toby prodded.
“I’m not goin’ a damn place until this damn baseball game is over, boy!” Mase finally said, with a terrible scowl. “Been waitin’ all week for it! Score’s four to two, bottom of the fifth!”
“She’s a looker, Mase,” Toby said, casting his voice lower. “Almost as pretty as Miss Nancy.”
“I said leave me be!” And for the first time Toby saw that Mase had a bottle of beer on the little table beside his chair. It wouldn’t do to get Mase riled up, not on a hot day like this in the middle of yellowjacket summer.
But Toby screwed up his courage and tried once more. “Please, Mase. The lady needs help!”
“Oh … ” Mase shook his head. “All right, if you’ll just let me finish watchin’ this damn game! I’ll drive over there for her. God A’mighty, I thought I was gonna have me a peaceful day.”
Toby thanked him and walked back to the van. “He says he’ll go, but he wants to watch the baseball game. I’d drive myself, but I just turned fifteen and Mase would whip my tail if I had a wreck. If you like, you can leave the van here. Café to get sandwiches and stuff is just around the bend, walkin’ distance. That suit you?”
“Yes, that’d be fine.” Carla wanted to stretch her legs, and something cold to drink would be wonderful. But what had happened to Joe? She honked the horn a couple of times and rolled up her window. “Probably fell in,” she told Trish.
The yellowjacket had decided not to enter Joe’s nostril. Still, there were thirty or more of them on his T-shirt, and he could feel the damned things all in his hair. His teeth were clenched, his face pale and sweating, and yellowjackets were crawling over his hands. Chills ran up and down his spine; he’d read somewhere about a farmer who had disturbed a yellowjacket nest, and by the time they got through with him he was a writhing mass of stung flesh and he’d died on the way to the hospital. At any second he expected a dozen stingers to rip through the skin at the back of his neck. His breathing was harsh and forced, and he was afraid that his knees would buckle and his face would fall into that filthy toilet and then the yellowjackets would go to w—
“Don’t move,” the red-haired boy said, standing in the bathroom’s doorway. “They’re all over you. Don’t move, now.”
Joe didn’t have to be told twice. He stood frozen and sweating, and then he heard a low, trilling whistle that went on for maybe twenty seconds. It was a soothing, calming sound, and the yellowjackets started leaving Joe’s shirt and flying out of his hair. As soon as they were off his hands, he zipped himself up and he got out of the bathroom with yellowjackets buzzing curiously over his head. He ducked and batted at them, and they flew away.
“Yellowjackets!” he gasped. “Must’ve been a million in there!”
“Not that many,” Toby told him. “It’s yellowjacket summer. But don’t worry about ’em now. You’re safe.” He was smiling, and he lifted his right hand.
The boy’s hand was covered with them, layer upon layer of them, until it looked as if the hand grown to grotesque proportions, the huge fingers striped with yellow and black.
Joe stood staring, openmouthed and terrified. The other boy whistled again—this time a short, sharp whistle—and the yellowjackets stirred lazily, humming and buzzing and finally lifting off from his hand in a dark cloud that rose up and flew away into the woods.
“See?” Toby slid his hand into
his jeans pocket. “I said you were safe, didn’t I?”
“How … how … did you do—”
“Joe!” It was his mother, calling him. “Come on!”
He wanted to run, wanted to leave tornadoes whirling under his sneakers, but he forced himself to walk at a steady pace around the gas station to where his mother and Trish were out of the Voyager and waiting for him. He could hear the crunch of the other boy’s shoes on the gravel, following right behind him. “Hey!” Joe said, his face tightening as he tried to smile. “What’s goin’ on?”
“We thought we’d lost you! What took you so long?”
Before Joe could answer, a hand was placed firmly on his shoulder. “Got hisself stuck in the bathroom,” Toby told her. “Old door oughta be fixed. Ain’t that right?” The pressure of his hand increased.
Joe heard a thin buzzing. He looked down, saw that the hand clamped to his shoulder had a yellowjacket lodged between the first and second fingers.
“Mom?” Joe said softly. “I was—” He stopped, because beyond his other and sister he could see a dark banner—maybe two or three hundred yellowjackets—slowly undulating in the bright sunshine over the road.
“You okay?” Carla asked. Joe looked like he was about to upchuck.
“I think he’ll live, ma’am,” Toby said, and he laughed. “Just scared him a little, I guess.”
“Oh. Well … we’re going to get a bite to eat and something cold to drink, Joe. He says there’s a café right around the bend.”
Joe nodded, but his stomach was churning. He heard the boy give a low, weird whistle, so soft that his mother couldn’t possibly have heard; the yellowjacket flew off from between the boy’s fingers, and the awful waiting cloud of them began to break apart.
“Just ’bout lunchtime!” Toby announced. “Think I’ll walk thataway with ya’ll.”
The sun burned down. A layer of yellow dust seemed to hang in the air. “It’s hot, Momma!” Trish complained before they’d walked ten yards away from the gas station, and Carla felt sweat creeping down her back under her pale blue blouse. Joe followed further behind, with the red-haired boy named Toby right on his heels.
The road curved through the pine woods toward the town of Capshaw. It wasn’t much of a town, Carla saw in another couple of minutes; there were a few unkempt-looking wooden houses, a general store with a Closed Please Come Again sign in the front window; a small whitewashed church, and white stone building with a rust-eaten sign that announced it as the Clayton Café. In the gravel parking lot were an old gray Buick, a pickup truck of many colors, and a little red sports car with the convertible top pulled down.
The town was quiet except for the distant cawing of a crow. It amazed Carla that such a primitive-looking place should exist just seven or eight miles off the main highway. In an age of interstates and rapid travel, it was easy to forget that little hamlets like this still stood on the back roads—and Carla felt like kicking herself in the butt for getting them into this mess. Now they were really going to be late getting to St. Simons Island!
“Afternoon, Mr. Winslow!” Toby called, and waved to someone off to the left.
Carla looked. On the front porch of a rundown old house sat a white-haired man in overalls. He sat without moving, and Carla thought he looked like a wax dummy. But then she saw a swirl of smoke rise from his corncob pipe, and he lifted a hand in greeting.
“Hot day today!” Toby said. “It’s lunchtime! You comin’?”
“Directly,” the man answered.
“Best fetch Miss Nancy, then. Got some tourists passin’ through!”
“I can see,” the white-haired man said.
“Yeah.” Toby grinned at him. “They’re goin’ to St. Simons Island. Long way from here, huh?”
The man stood up from his chair and went into the house.
“Mom?” Joe’s voice was tense. “I don’t think we ought to—”
“Like your shirt,” Toby interrupted, plucking at it. “It’s nice and clean.”
And then they were at the Clayton Café and Carla was going inside, her hand holding Trish’s. A little sign said We’re Air-Conditioned! But if that was so, the air-conditioning was not functioning; it was as hot in the café as it was on the road.
The place was small, with a floor of discolored linoleum and a counter colored mustard yellow. There were a few tables and chairs and a jukebox pushed back against the wall.
“Lunchtime!” Toby called merrily as he followed Joe through the door and shut it behind them. “Brought some tourists today, Emma!”
Something rattled back in the kitchen. “Come say hello, Emma!” Toby urged.
The door to the kitchen opened, and a thin woman with gray hair, a deeply wrinkled face, and somber brown eyes came out. Her gaze went to Carla first, then to Joe, finally lingered on Trish.
“What’s for lunch?” Toby asked her. Then he held up a finger. “Wait! I bet I know! Uh … alphabet soup, potato chips, and peanut-butter-and-grape-jelly sandwiches! Is that right?”
“Yes,” Emma replied, and now she stared at the boy. “That’s right, Toby.”
“I knew it! See, folks around here used to say I was special. Used to say I knew things that shouldn’t be known.” He tapped the side of his skull. “Used to say I had the beckonin’ touch. Ain’t that right, Emma?”
She nodded, her arms limp at her sides.
Carla didn’t know what the boy was talking about, but his tone of voice gave her the creeps. Suddenly it seemed way too cramped in this place, too hot and bright, and Trish said, “Ow, Mommy!” because she was squeezing the child’s hand too tightly. Carla loosened her grip. “Listen,” she said to Toby. “Maybe I should call my husband. He’s at the Sheraton on St. Simons Island. He’ll be real worried if I don’t check in with him. Is there a phone I can use somewhere?”
“Nope,” Emma said. “Sorry.” Her gaze slid toward the wall, and Carla saw an outline there where the pay phone had been removed.
“There’s a phone at the gas station.” Toby sat down at one of the stools facing the counter. “You can call your husband after lunch. By that time Mase’ll be back from Halliday.” He began to spin himself around and around on the stool. “I’m hungry hungry hungry!” he said.
“Lunch is comin’ right up.” Emma returned to the kitchen.
Carla herded Trish toward one of the tables, but Joe just stood there staring at Toby; then the red-haired boy got off his stool and joined them at the table, turning his chair around so he rested his elbows on the back. He smiled, watching Carla with steady pale green eyes. “Quiet town,” she said uneasily.
“Yep.”
“How many people live here?”
“A few. Not too many. I don’t like crowded places. Like Halliday and Double Pines.”
“What does your father do? Does he work around here?”
“Naw,” Toby replied. “Can you cook?”
“Uh … I guess so.” The question had taken her by surprise.
“Raisin’ kids, you’d have to cook, wouldn’t you?” he asked her, his eyes opaque. “Unless you’re rich and you go out to fancy restaurants every night.”
“No, I’m not rich.”
“Nice van you got, though. Bet it cost a lot of money.” He looked over at Joe and said, “Why don’t you sit down? There’s a chair for you, right beside me.”
“Can I get a hamburger, Momma?” Trish asked. “And a Pepsi?”
“Alphabet soup’s on the menu today, little girl. Gonna get you a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, too. That suit you?” Toby reached out to touch the child’s hair.
But Carla drew Trish closer to her.
The boy stared at her for a moment, his smile beginning to fade. The silence stretched.
“I don’t like ’phabet soup,” Trish said softly.
“You will,” Toby promised. And then his smile came back again, only this time it hung lopsided on his mouth. “I mean … Emma makes the best alphabet soup in town.”
Carla could not stand to look into the boy’s eyes any longer. She shifted her gaze, and then the door opened and two people came into the café. One was the old white-haired man in overalls, and the other was a skinny girl with dirty-blond hair and a face that might’ve been pretty if it was clean. She was about twenty or twenty-five, Carla thought, and she wore stained khaki slacks, a pink blouse that had been resewn in many places, and a pair of Top Siders on her feet. She smelled bad, and her blue eyes were sunken and shocked. Winslow helped her to a chair at another table, where she sat muttering to herself and staring at her filthy hands.
Neither Carla nor Joe could help but notice the swollen bites that pocked her face, the welts going right up into her hairline.
“My God,” Carla whispered. “What … happened to—”
“Mase called on her,” Toby said. “He’s sweet on Miss Nancy.”
Winslow sat down at a table by himself, lit his pipe, and smoked it in grave silence.
Emma came out with a tray, carrying bowls of soup, little bags of potato chips, and the sandwiches. She began to serve Toby first. “Have to go to the grocery store pretty soon,” she said. “We’re runnin’ low on near ’bout everythin’.”
Toby started chewing on his sandwich and didn’t reply.
“My bread’s got crust,” Trish whispered to her mother; sweat clung to her face and her eyes were round and frightened.
It was so hot in the café that Carla could hardly bear it. Her blouse was soaked with sweat, and now the unwashed smell of Miss Nancy almost sickened her. She felt Toby watching her, and suddenly she found herself wanting to scream. “Excuse me,” she managed to say to Emma, “but my little girl doesn’t like to eat the crust on bread. Do you have a knife?”
Emma blinked, did not answer; her hand hesitated as she put a bowl of soup in front of Joe. Winslow laughed quietly, a laugh devoid of mirth.
“Sure thing,” Toby said as he reached into his jeans pocket. He brought out a folding knife, got the blade extended. “I’ll do it,” he offered, and started carving the crust away.
