Afraid

by Jack Kilborn

  Merv, whose name graced the marquee of the diner, had hired Jessie Lee back at the beginning of summer.

  “She’s a kid, needs to work to help pay for her wedding,” Merv had said, winking in a way he thought was charming but Fran considered condescending. “Besides, it’ll give you some time off. You’ve been running this place solo for seven years.”

  Fran could have objected, and Merv probably would have listened. But badly as Fran needed the money—and everyone in Safe Haven seemed to need money these days—fewer hours at Merv’s meant more time with Duncan. So Merv hired Jessie Lee, but more often than not Fran wound up working her shifts anyway.

  Al, one of their regulars, had grown roots on the last counter stool. He held out an empty cup of coffee as if begging for change. Al was sixtyish, fat, and sported a walrus mustache that was waxed to little curls on either side. Nice guy, so-so tipper, a little too talky and a little too flirty.

  The diner phone rang. Fran made no move to get it. Dollars to donuts it was a local, wanted to know if he could get a meal in before they closed for the night. Fran opened the top of the coffee machine, put in a cleaning tablet, and pressed the brew button. She took the practically empty carafe of leaded and gave Al another hit of caffeine. After five rings, the phone stopped.

  “That was probably a customer,” Al said.

  Fran smiled a waitress smile. “I’m not in it for the money. I’m in it because I love filling salt shakers.”

  Al chuckled. “Well, you make a damn good cup of coffee.” He twisted the end of his mustache. “And you’re easy on the eyes, too.”

  Fran knew she was tired because—for the briefest instant—she imagined herself romantically involved with Al. She squinted at him, marveling at how desperate she’d become.

  While Fran didn’t consider herself beautiful, she had a full head of long, curly blond hair, and pale blue eyes, and a body that still fit nicely into a size six. Her late husband had told her, often, that she looked like Melanie Griffith. Fran could see the resemblance, when her makeup was on and she wore something flattering. She certainly didn’t lack for male attention. At one point or another, Fran had been propositioned by every eligible bachelor in town, and by countless others during the busy tourist season. But she hadn’t been on a date in months.

  If she were in her twenties like Jessie Lee, she would have gone out more often. These days, romance came in the form of Lifetime on cable, books on tape borrowed from the library, and late-night baths with plenty of bubbles and a detachable oscillating shower head.

  She’d given up hope on men. And though she didn’t mention it in therapy, Fran knew she’d also pretty much given up hope for happiness, as well.

  A car horn snapped her out of her reverie. Fran glanced out the storefront window, saw a pickup truck motor past. Then a car. Then another car. Something was going on. Perhaps some kind of sports thing. A local team had apparently won, judging by the yells accompanying the horns. Fran didn’t follow sports, and she was in no mood for the diner to fill up with fans. She eyed the cat clock on the wall, its yellow eyes synchronized to its pendulum tail. Almost midnight. Merv had left an hour ago, trusting her to cook if any business walked in. None had. And none would. It was time to get home. She walked to the front door and flipped the hanging sign over to CLOSED.

  Picking up a tray, Fran did a quick tour of the floor, pulling ketchup from the tables. She took the bottles back to the counter and unscrewed the caps, soaking them in some seltzer water from the soda fountain. Then she pulled a box of ketchup from under the counter and used the spigot to top off each bottle.

  “This is kind of embarrassing.” Al held the check in his hand and a pained smile stretched across his hairy face. “I only have eight dollars on me.”

  Fran sighed. Al’s bill was $8.32. Some shift. She wondered if she even made enough to cover groceries; she’d planned to stop at the Circle K on her way home.

  “Don’t worry about it, Al. You’ll get me the next—”

  Fran’s words caught in her throat when the lights went out. The darkness came fast and complete, as if someone had cinched a black bag over Fran’s head. She immediately shoved her hands out in front of her, banging her knuckles while reaching for the counter. Her fingers gripped the edge of the counter, tight, as if there were a chance it would be pulled away from her.

  Since the accident Fran didn’t do well in the dark.

  The silence carried weight. Along with the lights, the perpetual whir of the pie cooler had vanished, along with the white-noise buzz of the overhead fluorescent lights and the whoosh-whoosh of the dishwasher that Merv ran practically nonstop in the kitchen. Claustrophobia crawled up Fran’s shoulders and perched there like a gargoyle, ready to bite.

  Something jingled—keys—and then a sliver of light came from where Al sat. He pointed the keychain’s beam in Fran’s direction. Her heart pounded so hard she could hear it.

  “I … I guess we blew a fuse,” Fran managed, trying to keep the panic at bay.

  “I don’t think so.”

  Al directed the light away from Fran, toward the store-front window. The streetlights were out. So was the Schnell’s Hardware sign across the street.

  A car honked and buzzed past, making Fran almost wet herself.

  “Traffic signal’s out, too,” Al said. “Might be a power line. Might be the generator.”

  Al’s light played across the stools along the counter, casting long, creepy shadows. The darkness smothered Fran. It clogged her nose and pushed into her lungs, making it hard to breathe.

  “Can … I borrow that?” Fran swallowed what felt like a golf ball in her throat. “I need to find candles.”

  The beam hit Fran in the eyes. She stood there, clutching the counter, afraid to move.

  “Missy, you look scared out of your head. Afraid of the dark? Is—oh … I’m sorry … I forgot about …”

  Fran couldn’t see Al, but she could guess at the expression of sympathy his face now wore. She tried to make her voice sound stronger.

  “I just need it for a minute, Al.”

  The silence stretched. Fran felt a scream kicking around in her belly, threatening to come up.

  “You know what?” Al finally said. “I’ve been eating here for twenty years, never been in the kitchen. How about I go with you?”

  The relief Fran felt was physical. She sighed, filled her lungs, and walked over to him in the darkness.

  Josh VanCamp turned in time to see his firefighting partner and close friend, Erwin Luggs, run straight into him.

  The tackle was high, off-center. Four years of high school varsity football practice instantly kicked in, muscle memory prompting Josh to roll away from the pouncing body, retaining his footing even as Erwin ate the ground.

  Josh felt something warm and wet on his face, stinging his eyes, and he recognized it as blood just as he dropped his flashlight.

  “Erwin, what the—”

  Erwin rolled onto his back, illuminating Josh’s face with the light he still retained. This brought a burst of pain as Josh’s pupils constricted, and he held up his hands to shield the glare. Then, behind him, he heard the familiar sound of the fire truck starting. He glanced over his shoulder, saw the blue and red flashing lights pull away, down Gold Star Road.

  Josh took two steps toward the truck, then stopped. He wasn’t sure he wanted to catch whoever was driving. Closer investigation of the headless men in the cockpit proved that a broken helicopter blade couldn’t have been responsible for their injuries. Josh hadn’t ever seen a decapitation, but he saw that the cuts were jagged, not clean, and the high seat backs were intact above the shoulder line. A spinning blade would have cut off the seats as well as the heads.

  Someone had murdered them. And Josh had no desire to meet that someone.

  He went to his flashlight and shone it at Erwin, who hadn’t yet gotten off the ground. Blood soaked his friend so completely he looked like a red monster. Josh ran over and knelt next to him, ha
nds and eyes seeking out the spot that was bleeding.

  “Deer.” Erwin stammered. “Something killed a deer.”

  “You hurt? You okay?”

  “I’m okay.”

  Josh offered a hand, helped the larger man to his feet. Then he dug out the cell phone in his front pocket. No signal. He walked ten feet left, and ten feet back, the phone before him like a talisman. Nothing.

  He stared back at the helicopter, wondering what to do next. In the bay of the chopper were four empty seats and a large gurney with thick leather straps that looked like something out of a Frankenstein movie. The distance from the neck restraint to the ankle restraint had to be near seven feet, and the chest strap was long enough to encircle a rain barrel. What could have possibly been strapped there?

  “We need to call the state troopers,” Josh said.

  Erwin was trying to find a clean patch on his shirt to wipe his face, but there were no clean patches and he only succeeded in smearing the blood around.

  “What about Sheriff Streng?”

  Josh knew that this was beyond Streng’s capabilities. He was a nice old guy, probably competent in his day, but whatever was happening was too big for him.

  “You wait here for the sheriff, I’ll head over to Sal and Maggie’s place and use their phone.”

  “Josh … that deer … it was almost cut it in half. Whatever killed it …”

  Josh finished the sentence in his mind: Is out there in those woods. He took another look at the Frankenstein gurney, set his jaw, and headed into the trees.

  Just before the electricity went out, the phones throughout Safe Haven began to ring. First one. Then five. Then twenty. Then several hundred, all within a five-minute period. Late-night phone calls usually didn’t mean good news, but every resident who received this one immediately shrugged off any sleepiness and began dialing other residents, per instructions.

  Land lines and cells, from old-fashioned rotary ding-a-lings to the modern rock ringtones programmed in by teenagers, echoed out through the night, through the woods, carrying across Big Lake and Little Lake McDonald, fading out and finally mingling with the crickets and owls.

  An exodus soon followed, whoops and hollers and horns accompanying vehicles as they headed into town. At long last, prosperity had found its way to Safe Haven, filling the heads of every man, woman, and child with dollar signs.

  The celebration would be short-lived.

  • • •

  Sheriff Ace Streng pulled onto Gold Star Road, the Jeep’s four-wheel drive biting into the sand and gravel surface and leaving tire marks in its wake. His brights were on. So were his undercarriage beams and the hunting spots on the overhead roll bar. All of that wattage, and the light still couldn’t penetrate more than two feet into the forest. These trees were ancient, thick, and they lined the sides of the road, their tops bending over and obscuring the night sky. It was like traveling down a winding, high-arched tunnel.

  Streng drove by a house almost entirely hidden by foliage, tried to recall the name of the owners. His mind gave up the answer a mile after he passed. The Kinsels. Snowbirds, gone someplace that didn’t have minus-thirty-degree winters and four feet of snow by January.

  “Where are you hiding?” Streng asked himself, scanning ahead for the swirling red lights of Josh’s fire truck. Streng could imagine a whole fleet of helicopters lost in these woods. If daylight never came, they’d never be found. The forest liked to hide things. A plane went missing ten years back—one of those experimental one-seaters flown by some rich moron who hadn’t bothered filing a flight plan—and it had taken a week of continuous searching before they found the wreck, less than two hundred yards from Big Lake McDonald’s east shore. By that time, a family of raccoons had already moved into the cockpit, and an egret had built its nest on the tail section. The coyotes took care of the pilot.

  He reached down and rubbed his right calf, then his left one. Shin splints. The pain sometimes acted up when he drove. Every so often he toyed with the notion of seeing a doctor about it but always dismissed that as weakness. As his late father liked to say, “It’s better to have two bad legs than a single healthy one.” And Dad knew that from experience.

  His cell rang, and Streng peered down his nose at the number. Mayor Durlock, from Safe Haven. In a town of less than a thousand, a helicopter crash was headline news, and the mayor never missed an opportunity to speak to the press.

  “Sheriff? Something wonderful has happened.”

  “Not for the people in the helicopter.”

  “Helicopter? What? Oh.” Durlock sounded sleepy. Or maybe he’d been drinking. “This is about the lottery.”

  “Lottery?” Streng asked. But he was talking to a dead line. No signal. He tried redial, it didn’t work, and he tucked the phone away and concentrated on driving.

  Still no sign of Josh, and the road dead-ended in maybe a thousand feet. Streng passed Sal’s property and was reaching for his cell to call the firefighter when he heard the sound.

  Having grown up in the Northwoods, Streng knew animal calls. The warning hoot of owls. The howl of timber wolves. The crazy piccolo chorus of the loons. This didn’t sound like anything Streng had ever heard before. It was loud and shrill, but with a gurgling quality to it. Like a woman screaming underwater.

  Streng brought the Jeep to a stop and rolled down the windows, his ear facing the forest.

  “OOOOHOOOOOHOOOOHOOOOOGGGGGGGGHHH …”

  This time it sounded less animalistic, more human. But what could cause a person to make a sound like that? Was it Josh and Erwin, screwing around? And where was it even coming from?

  He pulled onto the grass alongside Sal’s house, put the Jeep in park, dug the flashlight out of the glove compartment, and stepped onto the scrub grass. The night was unusually quiet, as if the woods were collectively holding their breath. Streng adjusted the beam for maximum distance, unbuttoned the strap on his Kimber Compact Stainless .45, and walked in the direction of the sound.

  “AAAAAAAAHHHHHHH NOOOOOOOOO …”

  That was someone in agony, and you couldn’t fake agony like that. The fire truck was still nowhere to be found. All that lay ahead was Sal’s place.

  Reflexively, Streng pulled his sidearm from his holster and thumbed off the safety. He’d been carrying it cocked and locked. Now it was ready to fire.

  He moved at a brisk pace, minding his footing but intent on helping the screamer. Streng was old-school, military trained. He kept the flashlight at his hip in a sword grip and his gun before him at chest level. He’d been shown, years ago, a method of locking wrists so both flashlight and pistol were aiming at the same thing, a move favored by cops in the movies. What the movies didn’t show you was the sympathetic limb contractions and hand confusion that occurred while under fire, where combatants would often shine their gun and try to shoot their flashlight. The new moves weren’t always the best moves.

  Another scream. Definitely coming from the house. Every light was off, making Sal’s two-story cabin look like the silhouette of a mountain among the trees. Streng directed his beam at the front door, and from a dozen yards away he saw the pry marks on the jamb, the splinters sticking out like witch’s fingers.

  Streng tucked the flashlight under his armpit and touched the knob cautiously, as if it were hot. The door opened with a faint creak, and Streng again gripped the flashlight and moved in a crouch as low as his shin splints would allow. The air in the house radiated warmth, and it tingled against his cool skin. The acrid smell of burned popcorn filled his nostrils. The silence seemed total, complete. Not even the click of the furnace or the hum of the refrigerator.

  “JEEEEEESUS CHRIIIIIIIIIIIIIIST!”

  The scream brought Streng back in time, twenty years earlier, to a traffic accident scene. A pedestrian pinned under a trailer truck, his face pressed against the burning hot muffler. They couldn’t move the semi, couldn’t lift the semi, couldn’t do a damn thing until the tow truck came, and as the victim’s face cooked
away the screaming became so intense that Streng had actually pulled his gun and considered shooting the poor bastard.

  This scream conveyed the same thing; unimaginable pain.

  He took the stairs two at a time, calves crying out, jaw set hard, gun steady and leading the charge. The top ended at a hallway. Streng went left, toward the scream, knowing he should announce himself as a police officer, but some instinct, some voice in his subconscious, told him it would be better to use the element of surprise.

  Streng stuck his head though the bedroom door, shining his light, gripping his weapon, and he turned out to be the surprised one.

  “Hello, Sheriff Streng.”

  The intruder’s voice was high, breathy, with a foreign lisp. Streng’s beam spotlighted him, standing next to the bed with a gun to Sal’s head. Sal sat on the edge with his legs over the side, his chin and chest bobbing up and down as if he had an accelerated case of the hiccups. Streng glimpsed something on the mattress next to Sal, something bloody and naked and sprawled out—Jesus, is that Maggie?—and then Sal screamed again, the force of a foghorn, as the intruder twisted some sort of pink-handled knife into Sal’s arm.

  No, not a knife. The intruder was manipulating Sal’s bone—either the radius or the ulna—which protruded through the split flesh.

  Streng aimed his .45, centering it on the intruder’s face.

  “Drop your weapon!” he yelled.

  The intruder offered a humorless smile, continuing to jerk the bone back and forth. Sal’s entire body vibrated, his back arched in a scream that Streng felt in his fillings. It went on and on, briefly stopping for Sal to refill his lungs. Streng felt his stomach quiver and clench, the acid burning the back of his throat.

  “Your hands are shaking, Sheriff. Are you sure you can hit me? I hope you don’t miss, for Sal’s sake.”

  “Drop the weapon!”

  In a blur the intruder switched aim from Sal to Streng.

  “You drop yours first, Sheriff. I’m sure we can talk this out, like civilized men.”