by John Inman
An array of thick muscles stretched from the torso of the beast to the outer edges of the meaty wings. The muscles on the breast of the thing were thick and bulbous. Heavy sinews also stretched from the jaws to the back of the skull. Jonas tapped a fat tendon with the barrel of the shotgun, like a professor pointing out an equation on a blackboard.
“Look how strong it is,” he said. “In flight and in the tearing of flesh. This thing is truly a carnivore.”
“It’s also huge,” Terry breathed, his jaw slack in wonder. “It’s not a bat at all.”
“No,” Jonas said. “But there are resemblances.”
“What are you saying?”
“I don’t know. I’m not a zoologist.” Jonas turned his eyes away and scanned the arroyo, first in one direction, then the other. He was jittery, nervous. And still scared to death. He admired Terry for looking so calm after everything that had happened. “At least we now know what they look like up close. Maybe we should take this carcass to the authorities and let them study it.”
“And let them arrest us at the same time? I don’t think so. As cool as it is that you blew one out of the sky, Jonas, it really doesn’t change things. We should still get our asses out of here, and we should elude the authorities when we do. What happened to the patrolman was an accident, but they may not see it that way. We have little more than two days left before they blow this mountain off the map, and I really don’t want to be standing on it when they do. Nor do I want to be arrested for murder while trying to leave it.”
Ten minutes earlier, Jonas had made peace with Terry’s decision to leave his home, his mountain, his town. But now he was having mixed feelings about all of it. What the hell was wrong with him? Then his eyes wandered back to the creature lying dead on the rocks. And the spray of blood that covered the ground beneath it.
“I didn’t mean to kill that man,” he whispered. “I… I was just trying to scare him. It… it wasn’t really murder, was it?”
Terry scooped his arms around him and pulled him close. “No, of course not,” he murmured in Jonas’s ear. “You only did what you had to do. I thought about it too.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” Terry said, a tiny smile touching his lips. “But you were quicker.”
Jonas eyed Terry closely. “So you still want to go, then? Off the mountain? Abandon everything you own?”
There was deep sadness on Terry’s face as he slowly answered. He couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the creature at their feet. “We have no choice. These creatures could scatter themselves to the four winds if they aren’t stopped here. You and I can’t destroy them if we can’t find them, so we have to let the authorities do it.” He took Jonas’s hand. “Let’s get into town before a drone flies over and they start wondering where their policeman went.”
Jonas eyed the sky, the reality of what Terry said sinking into him like a three-inch-long incisor.
“Town it is,” he said. “Then back to the cabin to pick up Bruce and my portable typewriter. Me and that typewriter go back a long ways. I’d hate to see it blown up.”
“Then we’re out of here?” Terry asked, his eyes even more anguished than they had been before. But still determined.
“Then we’re out of here.” Jonas nodded, already hating himself for saying it, as he suspected Terry did.
Cowed by their own disappointment at abandoning everything they loved and everything they thought they could do to protect it, Jonas and Terry slouched toward the Jeep. They kept a leery eye on the sky for drones. Or, God forbid, another swarm of slavering creatures.
Guilt over the policeman’s death followed Jonas every step of the way.
Chapter Twenty-Four
TERRY SAW immediately that the residents of Spangle—the ones who were still alive, at least, and too damn stubborn to leave—had been busy protesting the imminent destruction of their homes. There were banners painted on bedsheets and nailed to walls and rooftops from one end of town to the other. Save Our Homes! the banners cried. Don’t Bomb! another said, and a third pleaded Drop Troops Not Napalm! One brave citizen, clearly with the heart of a rebel, had painted words directly on the street from one end of the block to the other in gleaming white. It took Terry and Jonas a couple of minutes to figure out from the ground. Dear Dot Gov, the words read. Fuck You.
They read the sign twice, then glanced at each other and snickered.
“More people stayed than we thought,” Terry said.
“Yeah, and they’re a little upset,” Jonas answered.
As they drove through town in their battered Jeep, they could tell they were being watched. Not only by drones buzzing overhead, monitoring their movements for the authorities, but by the occasional wary face peeking out from behind drawn curtains and through dusty upstairs windows.
Terry spotted a young man scurrying from one side yard to another. He was wearing camo and toting the biggest gun Terry had ever seen in his life.
Jonas noticed the gun too. “He must be hunting elephants,” he commented wryly.
“Who knew they were such a problem, elephants?” Terry sniped, and both men shook their heads in wonder.
Streets and lawns were littered with flyers dropped from the sky. Patches of blood-stained sidewalks and front walks. The stains were from older kills, and the blood had turned black, rotted in the sun. Flies had given up on the bloodstains long ago. The smell of death no longer lingered on the air as it had the last time Terry was here. The silence, however, was far more unnerving. Now a sense of looming disaster hung over the town. As well it should, he supposed, since the town was about to be bombed into oblivion.
Terry parked the Jeep under the shade of a huge pepper tree at the side of his street. He gazed across Jonas to the house with slate-gray walls and white trim that he had called home for the last seven years. It was a neat little craftsman. Single story. Three bedrooms, a breakfast nook off the kitchen, one bath, a sundeck in the back, and with more memories clinging to every room than Terry would ever be able to count.
A shingle swayed in the wind from the edge of the front porch. The shingle read Terence Jones, Notary Public.
“That’s it,” he said quietly. “That’s my house.” He glowered at the unkempt lawn. “Try to imagine it with the yard mowed.”
“I like.” Jonas smiled, covering Terry’s hand with his. “Nice color.”
“Bobby’s idea. I wasn’t thrilled with it at first. But now… I am.” Terry’s voice sort of petered out, and Jonas squeezed his hand for reassurance.
“Let’s get this over with,” Terry said, kicking open the Jeep’s door and swinging his long legs out of the cab. Jonas followed, and hand in hand they walked up the front walk to the tiny porch with a row of untended geraniums turning to straw in terra-cotta pots lining the front door. Terry carried his shotgun in the crook of his arm. Jonas still had the little .38 tucked into the holster at his hip.
On the porch, Terry stood motionless, staring at the dead flowers. Jonas took it upon himself to pluck the key from Terry’s hand and unlock the front door. He stepped back and let Terry enter first.
It had been so long since he had been inside the house, Terry sucked in his breath, almost floored by the emotional connection it still held over him. The pictures on the walls. Snapshots of him and Bobby. Photos from their simple wedding at City Hall. Bruce’s toys still scattered across the floor where Bruce had left them the last time he played here.
The rooms smelled musty and stale. Terry stepped into the kitchen with Jonas at his heels. Everything was clean but dusty. Terry was tempted to open the fridge and see what he would find, but he was pretty sure he had left food in there. Milk. Lunch meat. Eggs. Stuff that would be rotten and reeking to high heaven by now, even if the power was still on.
He exhaled a long sigh and tried to ignore the thumping of his heart. He pointed to a room off to the left. “My office,” he said. “The papers are in there.”
Jonas strolled the rooms, snooping, studyin
g everything he saw, pictures especially. Terry went directly to his desk and started dragging out all the important documents he thought he should save before the bombs fell. Social security crap. Credit cards. IDs. His diplomas from college, and the certification papers that qualified him to be a notary public. Bobby’s papers, too, he gathered up, since he supposed he would need to register his spouse’s death with the coroner’s office at some point or other. He grabbed his address book with phone numbers of friends and family, along with email addresses and the passwords for all his computer files. From a small safe buried in the office floor, he extracted a thousand dollars he and Bobby had stashed there for emergencies—Terry suspected now would qualify.
When he’d recovered everything he thought he would need, plus his laptop, and stuffed it all into a spare accordion folder he found tucked in a desk drawer, he went in search of Jonas. He found him standing in front of the same picture Terry had on display back at the cabin. The picture of Bobby and Terry, hiking the mountain not far from the cabin during the first year they were together.
They stood silently for a long moment, Jonas and Terry, each staring at the blown-up snapshot.
“Your Bobby was handsome,” Jonas said, his voice barely loud enough to hear.
“Yes, he was,” Terry said, with the faintest of smiles twisting his mouth.
“You must miss him,” Jonas quietly said, sidling closer to Terry.
“I’ll always miss him,” Terry said, laying his hand on Jonas’s back. “Like I’ll miss you if you ever go away.”
“Thank you,” Jonas said, his eyes sad, his lips a thin line.
“Just try not to go away,” Terry added, his tiny smile gone.
And Jonas nodded. “I’ll try.”
They left the house in single file. As Terry closed the front door behind them, he reached out to lock up, then, at the last second, pocketed the key and walked away, leaving the door closed but unlocked.
“Terry?”
“There’s nothing but memories left to steal. They won’t do anyone any good but me.”
They turned toward the Jeep. Again, as they traversed the front walk, Jonas took his hand.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Terry shrugged. “I never really thought we’d have to abandon everything. I always thought things would somehow work themselves out.”
“I know.” And once again Jonas said, “I’m sorry.”
Before climbing into the Jeep, they looked up and down the street. At the rumpled bedsheets with messages painted on them, nailed to walls and roofs. At a tumbleweed skipping along the gutter a block down as if it, too, was in a hurry to get out of town while it still could. A stray cat observed them from the mouth of a sewer at the end of the block.
“Do you still think they’ll bomb?” Jonas asked. “I mean, with people here?”
“They’ll have to if they want to stop the creatures from spreading. They’ll try to round up as many citizens as they can, I suppose. Like they tried to round us up. Too many civilian deaths from their bombing raid won’t look good on the evening news.”
“Letting the creatures swarm all over the planet won’t look good either.”
“No,” Terry agreed, his jaws tense. “It won’t.”
Terry reached out and took Jonas’s hand. With his other hand he tossed the accordion file containing all his papers on the front seat of the Jeep. “Drop your face mask,” he said, grabbing the shotgun from the back floorboard. “Let’s walk. I want to see the town one last time.”
Jonas did as Terry asked. Hand in hand they strolled along Terry’s street. Through his tinted visor, Terry studied the familiar houses they passed. He remembered dogs that once came out to talk to Bruce when they passed on their evening walks. Wondered where those dogs were now. Had their owners taken them with them when they left? Or had the poor family pets gone wild after their owners were killed, leaving them orphaned, set loose in the world to fend for themselves? Or worse yet, had they starved to death, locked inside the very homes that had once shielded them from danger?
“So much sadness,” Terry said, shaking his head. “This used to be a happy town. I guess the happiness was the first to go.”
They were in the business district now, which was only a couple of blocks from Terry’s house. Terry smiled to himself, realizing how small-townish and unsophisticated it all must look to Jonas.
“Is that where you got your hair cut?” Jonas asked with a smile, pointing to a tiny storefront with a barber pole and Ed’s Barber Shop painted in electric-blue paint over the front door. Through the plate-glass window, they could see two barber chairs and the row of plastic lawn chairs that constituted the waiting area.
“That’s it,” Terry said with a grin. “Not exactly Vidal Sassoon, I know. But Ed usually left my scalp attached.”
“Well, that’s the important thing.” Jonas returned the grin.
They walked on. There were more tumbleweeds here on the main drag, wedged under the bumpers of abandoned cars and tucked into doorways where the wind had carried them.
Coffee shop. Thrift store. Tiny mom-and-pop market. Insurance salesman. Doctor’s office with a blood bank next door. They passed a seedy beer bar, where a couple of old guys were playing pool as they waited to be firebombed. Terry knew they were playing pool by the rattle of the balls. He knew they were old because he could hear them laughing and coughing cigarette coughs while they listened to country music on the jukebox. He knew they were waiting to be firebombed because, really, what the hell else would they be waiting for?
Farther down the block on the corner stood an IGA store. There was a traffic jam of discarded shopping carts strewn across the parking area where looters had helped themselves to the goods, then abandoned the carts when the electronic brakes on the fuckers stopped them at the edge of the lot.
Across the street from the IGA stood a massive brick building that took up a quarter of a city block. The building had clearly been abandoned long ago, and there were no signs now on the outside to show what business might have once transpired inside. Terry saw Jonas eyeing it, wondering what the hell it was.
Jonas moved closer to Terry’s side when they passed the brick monstrosity. He pulled Terry to a stop and flipped up the face guard on his crash helmet. Tilting his head back, he studied the somber three-story structure in front of him.
Without being asked, Terry volunteered the information he knew Jonas wanted.
“It was a research facility. They used to develop and manufacture vitamin supplements here. Shipped them all over the country until a scandal closed them down.”
That caught Jonas’s interest. “What sort of scandal?”
Terry thought about it. “I don’t know exactly. I think a few people died taking their supplements. Lawsuits followed. If I remember right, the owner committed suicide. The factory has been sitting here in the middle of town abandoned ever since.”
Jonas leaned his head farther back, studying the brick facade. He released Terry’s hand and backed into the street to get a better perspective.
The building was shaped like a big shoebox. Very little imagination went into its construction. Redbrick walls had turned dark with age and muck. Built in the ’70s, Terry figured, the corners were crumbled from exposure to the sun, the front doors and ground-floor windows boarded up tight. Terry had walked past the abandoned building so often over the years, he barely noticed it anymore.
Today he noticed.
“Look up there,” Jonas said. “The windows on the top floor. They’re all broken out. You’d think it would be the windows on the ground floor that would be vandalized, not the ones way up there.”
“You’ve lost me,” Terry said, not really listening. He was wondering if it wasn’t time they headed back to the Jeep and got their asses out of town. Bruce was probably eating through a wall by now, wondering where they were. “We’d best get home,” he said.
But Jonas didn’t move. He was still staring at the broken windows on
the third floor of the abandoned factory.
“I can see movement up there,” Jonas said, his voice hushed.
“Up where?”
Jonas pointed. “In those third-floor windows.”
“What sort of movement?”
Jonas hesitated. “Sort of a… fluttering in the shadows.”
Something in Jonas’s voice set Terry’s nerves on edge. He glanced up and down the street. Then he lifted his chin high and scanned the sky from one horizon to the other. Checking for drones. Checking for helicopters. Almost reluctantly, he let his gaze travel back to the spot where Jonas was staring.
At that moment, in the shadows past the broken windowpanes of the research facility’s third-floor windows, Terry saw movement too. And Jonas was right. It could only be described as… fluttering.
“Drop your mask,” Terry whispered, closing his own.
Jonas’s gaze skittered to his face; then he quickly did what Terry asked. Only then, through the tinted plastic of the windscreen, did he turn his eyes back to the third-floor windows. They both did.
The fluttering movement seemed erratic yet somehow organized. Like a ritual or something. Like bees, maybe. Bees communicating through movement and touch and smell and instinct.
Only whatever it was moving around behind those broken windows was bigger. Much bigger.
“Maybe someone’s up there,” Terry said.
“Someone? No. Something? Yes.”
“It could be a town meeting.”
“Like what? The PTA? I seriously doubt it.”
Terry didn’t appreciate the sarcasm, but he supposed he deserved it. His heart sank as he muttered the words, “I’m almost afraid to ask what you’re thinking.”
Jonas’s eyes remained focused on those squares of moving shadows three floors up.
“This place is centrally located, isn’t it.” It wasn’t a question. It was a general statement of fact.
Terry frowned. “Couldn’t be more centrally located if it tried. As you already undoubtedly know.”
