Meddling Kids

by Edgar Cantero

  KERRI: Nate! Ammo, now!

  Andy didn’t wait to regain balance before she dove for the shotgun, a shell in her hand, and as she landed over the weapon, the nth shrieking monster leaped on her. She rolled aside to avoid being pierced by three claws at once, pried the pickax out of the wall, nailed the last wheezer’s hand on the floor, and then finally chambered the shell and blew its head into goo.

  KERRI: Nate! NATE!

  Andy took a split second to reassess. Six wheezers were still stuck in the doorway, trying to chew one another’s arms out of the way. The room was covered in two layers of writhing mutilated aliens and black gore. It took a while to make sure no human corpses lay among them. She skipped over the dead bodies toward the burst dormer window.

  He wasn’t down on the ground. Kerri spotted him first, at the end of the west wing, hanging off the roof.

  Both girls called him.

  “Don’t listen!” Peter shouted into his ear. “Just go!”

  Nate clung to the ivy on the walls, grabbed a thick trunk and slid down along it, the gnarls and severed twigs tearing the skin off his palms. The girls saw him crash-land on top of the conservatory roof, roll off it, and hit the ground somewhere in the shrubs.

  Kerri stopped breathing for a second, clutching Andy’s arm, until she saw him stand back up. Then there was an ephemeral relief, before her eyes convinced her brain that Nate was actually running toward the dock.

  “Nate?! What are you doing?!”

  They saw him jump into the motorboat, then stop by the controls and touch his pockets. Kerri had the ignition keys.

  “Fuck it,” Peter said, already aboard the rowboat. “Come on!”

  “Nate, don’t!” Kerri yelled from the window, watching Nate switching boats, untying the rope, and taking the oars. “Nate!”

  Andy pulled Kerri inside a second before a wheezer that had crept up the façade onto the roof slashed her face off. It jumped into the room with them, jaws open at a thylacine angle, in the same second Kerri pulled her knife out and thrust it upward into its abdomen. It landed half dead, its guts lost in flight.

  “Out!” cried Andy, pulling her away from the window and toward one of the new doorways the wheezers had been so kind to open for them.

  A wheezer cut them off from the gap inside the hollow wall. Tim viciously pounced at it, throwing it down and biting at its neck as the thing tried to shake him off.

  “This way!” said Andy, pulling Kerri to the opposite hole, loading shells into her rifle as she ran. They were relying on moonlight now, but Andy somehow recognized the next room.

  A stampede of six-limbed monsters almost knocked the door off its hinges.

  “We’re trapped!”

  “No,” Andy replied. “This is where you disappeared.”

  “What?”

  “This is the room where you fell into a trap! Where was it?”

  “I…I was standing over there and I…pulled that lamp!”

  Andy grabbed Kerri by the waist, stood on the corner, and pulled a candleholder on the wall. It came right off into her hand.

  Right at that moment, the door came down, along with two wheezers stomped by the rest of the hollering pack.

  ANDY: Aw, fuck this.

  She shot at the floor. The trapdoor they were standing on crumbled under their feet, dropping them inside a hollow wall to land on a slide, Andy clutching Kerri all the way down and smothering a scream while orange hair went weee along the way, all through the first floor and down to the basement.

  A single, bile-coughing wheezer was standing in the coal room where they arrived, its back turned to the end of the slide. It heard the girls crash-landing into the coal pile behind, scrambled to face them, and had its head blown into subatomic matter, thus starting and ending its overall contribution to the story in one paragraph.

  Kerri clambered on the coal pile, tried to climb back up the ramp.

  “We forgot Tim!”

  “He’s fine, come with me!”

  “No! We need Tim!”

  Andy had to pull her out of the ancient coal room and into the basement proper, frenzied screams of the besiegers booming all around them as they raced through the mansion’s foundations. Under the paroxysm of their flashlights she caught broken glimpses of shadows scuttling around corners, passageways into blackness, a heavy door that seemed secure enough.

  She opened it and yanked Kerri inside with her and pulled it shut behind them, and only when the door latched did she recognize the room. She whirled around and tried the door again: locked.

  “Oh fuck.”

  “This is the dungeon!” Kerri cried, grabbing her own skull. “This is the same fucking dungeon!”

  “I know,” Andy panted, striking a match, about to gouge her eyes out for that mistake. “But they can’t reach us here!”

  “They can reach Nate! And Tim!”

  “Nate’s got a better chance out there, and Tim can hide!”

  “Until when?! Who’s gonna let us out this time?!”

  “Kerri, please, calm down!”

  “They’re outside! They’re scratching the walls!”

  “I know!”

  “We are going to die!”

  “Kerri, keep it together, please!”

  They were holding each other’s wrists now, Andy’s imploring hand feeling Kerri’s frantic pulse and failing to calm it for what felt like a frozen minute, until she had to drop the match burned down to her fingertips. Darkness prevailed.

  The ruckus outside was subsiding.

  Andy searched her pockets. Ten minutes into the war, her once perfectly sorted equipment was in shambles. She found a couple of glowsticks somewhere, snapped one, and examined the wide, empty, preposterously jail-like cellar. A dungeon, for all intents.

  Kerri had retreated to the back of the room. Her eyes were barren. Her hair had died.

  “We should’ve never come here,” she murmured.

  “No, Kerri, you said we had to come, and you were right. We gotta stop him from gassing Blyton Hills, remember?”

  “We should’ve never come to Blyton Hills.”

  “We had to come.”

  “We didn’t! I was better out there!”

  “None of us were better out there; we were a disaster!”

  “I was safe!” Kerri yelled, yielding to tears. “I was better on my own, three thousand miles from here, and you dragged me here again to die!”

  “What? That’s not true!”

  “This is your fucking fault!”

  “Kerri, I would never put you in harm’s way; I love you!”

  “You don’t love me! If you loved me so much, why did you fucking leave in the first place?!”

  Andy stopped halfway to her, the shock wave of those words almost blasting her off her feet. The anger in Kerri’s eyes hurt to watch.

  “If you loved me so much, why were you just waiting till you turned sixteen to grab a backpack and leave?! Shit, you could’ve come to Portland with me! We could’ve been together! But you just hopped on a train to nowhere to be the lone rider and you left me alone! (Voice shattering.) I was terrified! My life was spiraling out of control! I needed you, for fuck’s sake, I needed you then! And I had to wait for your fucking postcards from Alaska whenever you remembered I exist!”

  She bent, exhausted, vocal cords burning, brushing her lifeless hair apart.

  “You don’t love me. You left me.”

  She sobbed like a gentle rain after the storm. She retreated back to her corner and slid down to the floor.

  “You hate me,” the rain said.

  Unremarkably, the universe had once again vanished. Not outside that room, Andy realized, but including the room. A green glowstick, Kerri, and herself. That was the total inventory of the cosmos.

  And it was disintegrating. She could feel it in her gut—her soul withering and crumbling into space dust.

  Kerri was crying from the debris of her own cataclysm, stranded, light-years away, and she was trapped on her o
wn planet, prehistorically overwhelmed, unable to reach. Andy looked into herself, fathoming the void, searching for something to hold on to. Something to evolve from. Something that could grow, one single seed.

  “I was afraid.”

  She said.

  “I was afraid to talk to you. To share what I felt. I thought that if you knew, if I poured my heart out for you, you wouldn’t be able to handle it, it would scare you away. ’Cause it scared me.”

  She gazed up, into the lonely crying star.

  “So I did the easy thing. I left because I would always know where to find you. I ran away to get my shit together, and I thought about you every single day. You were my last thought before I closed my eyes and your name was—is!—it’s the first word on my mouth when I stir up, but I couldn’t woman up and tell you. So I just kept it to myself, and whenever it hurt too much all I had to do was dial your number and hear your voice, and I’d feel better. And it never, ever crossed my mind that you would be needing me. (Tearswipe.) I was selfish. I was a coward. I am sorry.”

  She was kneeling down to Kerri now, her hand hovering near the orange planet by the neon-green light of Glowstick Nebula.

  “Kerri, I’m so sorry I wasn’t there for you. But I am here now.”

  Kerri’s hair stirred, a once-fearful civilization gazing up to the sky with hope.

  “And I’m getting you out of here.”

  Darkness dispelled.

  Kerri looked around, smelled, listened.

  “They’re gone,” she whispered.

  Andy’s sensors hummed back on. The room had returned. It was just dirt and bricks, but it was something to work with.

  “The necromancer’s got us, but he doesn’t know yet,” she said. “Don’t speak up. We’re nowhere we haven’t been before.”

  “But last time Peter was here to get us out.”

  “I know.”

  “And Nate deserted us,” Kerri sobbed.

  “I know,” Andy repeated through a grimace. That one hurt like someone fingering a fresh wound. “But Tim didn’t.”

  “Oh, God, Tim,” Kerri moaned, fighting the gloom off. “If something’s happened to him…”

  “Nah, he did pretty well up there. The monsters were within the walls, inside the brickwork, and Tim chased them back in. (Points at a vent.) He must still be inside.”

  “How is he going to find us?”

  “He will,” Andy said, as she fished out of her jeans the last treasure in her armory—the one thing she had found when the universe faded, the one thing she always held on to.

  A plastic penguin.

  She squeezed the little toy next to the vent, and the sound wave of a squeak rippled through the walls of the newly silent, carcass-ridden haunted house.

  —

  Parsecs away, under the Milky Way, firs watched the thin white scar of a rowboat in the middle of the lake.

  PETER: Faster, Nate.

  The lights on Deboën Isle were gone; the sighing of waves breaking onshore long lost.

  “Don’t think about it, just move. Fuck Andy and her stupid plan. (Leaning forward, whispering.) This was all a mistake, Nate. Their mistake. We should’ve never come back.”

  Nate canvassed the horizon. The jagged line of trees could be made out against the sky in any direction, though in one direction stars were yielding ground to wind-riding rain clouds. No shore seemed nearer than any other. Nate realized he wasn’t sure he’d been sailing in a straight line after all.

  As soon as he’d started rowing, his arms had kindly pointed out that, in the last eighteen hours, they had descended a mineshaft, gone spelunking, climbed back up, trekked, run, and fought a horde of carnivorous underworld fiends. Rowing didn’t seem so taxing when Andy was doing it, but that was two days ago and, as Nate’s arms patiently reminded him, he was no Andy. The straw that breaks the camel’s back always looks light enough, until it lands.

  He squinted back at the isle, camouflaged against the storm. He checked the stars. Four or five of those stupid tiny glowworms should form Ursa Minor; he should know which. Kerri would know which.

  “What, are you waiting for a signal or something?” Peter said. “Oh, wait. Here comes one.”

  Nate returned his attention to the surface. He didn’t feel it, but the moonlight showed ripples on the still water. Coming from the storm’s direction.

  Damn high ripples under his watercraft.

  The boat rocked gently once, violently twice, and then a wave nearly flipped it over, sending the sailor overboard.

  Darkness, and then cold—in that order—stung every pore in his skin.

  He frantically swam up to the surface, too scared to even stare into the depth of the second-deepest blackest lake in the Americas.

  “Here, let me help.”

  He grabbed Peter’s bloated white hand, and Peter smiled back from the boat, worms crawling out the corners of his smile.

  Every fir in the county heard Nate’s scream.

  “Kidding!” Peter said, laughing, a beautiful punchable white grin across his face. “Sorry! Come on, Nate, it was a joke! Hurry up, or you’re gonna die in there.”

  He smiled a rascally apology, offering a hand over the bulwark—a clean, strong hand that Nate refused to take.

  “I’m sorry, man. I couldn’t resist. Come on. We need to get out of here.”

  Nate, blood and gore washed from his face, stayed in the water, barely afloat, completely ignoring his body’s cries of pain, staring at Peter from this new perspective.

  When he finally climbed back on the boat and sat across from Peter, wet clothes stuck to his skin, wounds too cold to bleed any longer, something had changed.

  Peter retrieved the oars that had fallen overboard and handed them to him. Nate didn’t take those either. That had been the last straw indeed. As light as they come.

  NATE: Why would you do that?

  PETER: (Confused.) Do what?

  NATE: Help me. Why would you even want me to escape?

  PETER: (Frowns, puzzled, then shrugs.)

  NATE: If you are a smear in my heart, if you are a piece of Deboën left inside me, haunting me in the shape of my dead friend…why would you let me go now? You wanted me in that house. You wrote messages inviting us.

  PETER: (Genuinely nonplussed.) I don’t follow you. (Then challenging.) I thought I was a manifestation of your subconscious.

  NATE: Yes. Either you are my subconscious and you want me out of here because you’re scared—which means I’m scared, but I should be braver than you—or you’re truly an avatar of Deboën and you don’t want us here anymore…because we can actually beat you.

  PETER: (Blank.)

  NATE: In either case, you’re a coward, and I should go back.

  A gentle thunder unexpectedly switched sides and rumbled triumphantly for Nate as he snatched the oars from Peter’s hands and forced his arms to start rowing again—back to Deboën Isle.

  Peter sat as powerless as an overwhelmed female character in a Victorian drama.

  “How…” he began, amusingly astonished. “How the fuck did we go from me scaring you shitless to me being a coward?”

  “Logic,” Nate puffed. “You keep mocking Andy, but you were never that smart yourself, Pete.”

  “Oh, so I’m Pete now. Very logical. So one minute I’m Peter, the next I’m some evil spirit, the next I’m your subconscious voicing your inner mind, registering side details and bringing them to your att—ooh, what’s that red thing over there?”

  Nate turned, expecting literally anything. There was a red buoy dozing on the water, some sixty yards to starboard. It was probably the same one Andy had spotted two days ago; they’d seen it through Kerri’s binoculars.

  He could see the landmass of the isle now, much closer. The buoy was way off his path. He checked Peter.

  PETER: (Shrugging.) What?

  Nate nodded and forced himself to veer.

  “What?” Peter cried. “We ain’t going to the isle anymore?”

>   There was something about rowing for the buoy that reminded Nate of approaching that one mental patient even the other inmates avoided. The nearer one got, the crazier he seemed, just like a weather buoy standing under the rain in the middle of the Atlantic, determined to announce to the world that there was something worth signaling there, although logic dictated that most likely there wasn’t. Nonetheless, in his experience, Nate had noticed crazy people have a way of being right.

  Some grueling minutes later, the boat bumped gently into the buoy and Nate put his hand on the hard plastic surface. He felt strangely good upon thinking he was the first person to touch it in years, to give it that level of attention.

  When it bobbed, he noticed the marking spray-painted on the side.

  He searched his pockets for the flashlight he’d lost long ago. He couldn’t make out any rocks or reefs in the water anyway. He moved the boat around and saw the complete monogram. He knew the book it had come from.

  A rope hung from the upper tip of the buoy, sinking underwater. Nate took it in his hands—it felt viscous and sticky—and fished out a lidded jar.

  “Want me to open that for you?” Peter offered.

  Nate opened it himself. The inside was perfectly dry. An interested moon seemed to peek over his shoulder, lighting the scene; and yet, it had just begun to drizzle.

  He tipped the jar over. Rice poured onto his left palm, padding for the soft, prickly object that fell right after.

  He’d seen one like this before—a nest made of twigs and straws, pressed into a rough ball. He unwrapped the nest and moonlight shone on what was hiding inside. Fortunately, its color almost blazed in the dark.

  It always used to do that.

  It was a flock of orange hair.

  —

  Two blank lines later, they were still sitting there.

  Peter shook the daze out of his head.

  “Okay, I think I speak on behalf of at least fifty percent of the people on this boat when I ask, What the fuck is going on?!”

  Nate looked up at him, red herrings scampering away from his mind.

  “How come you know Dr. Thewlis?”

  “Who?”

  “The dentist. This afternoon, in the car, you pointed out the town’s dental clinic. When did you ever visit Dr. Thewlis?”