“That’s weird,” Kyle said, after a long pause.
“What?”
“All of those.” He pointed to the posters on the bulletin board. Almost all of them were pictures of missing cats. Muffy. Fluffy. Charlie. All of them had been lost or vanished in the last couple of weeks. There were twelve posters, all told. Most offering a reward, with little tabs offering a phone number. None of the tabs had been pulled.
Randy shrugged. “Fox probably got ’em.”
“There are foxes around here?”
“Yeah, I’ve seen three in the last week. A buddy of mine down the street says one’s got a den under his shed. I’ve never seen so many before. Once, when I was a little kid, I saw one trot through our backyard. I think you were still a baby. It was a gray one, too. A big male carrying a squirrel. I’ll never forget it. The fox stopped and stared at me. I swear I thought it was going to say something. But it just shook its head, flipping the squirrel back and forth like it was proud of its kill, then trotted on. Scared the crap out of me. I never saw it, or another fox, again, until lately. These were red though, not gray like that one.”
“Really, a fox could do all of that?”
“Yeah, a fox has got to eat.”
“They eat cats?”
“Makes sense doesn’t it? People leave their cats all the time, don’t they? Little dogs, too. I think a fox will eat just about anything, especially if they have young ones to feed. It’s getting to be that time of year.” Randy smiled, or tried to smile. His nose crinkled up just like Baba’s, and Kyle looked instinctively at his watch. He had told Mrs. Shirkline he would only be gone half an hour.
“I guess it makes sense. I just never considered there were foxes around.”
“You don’t have a cat, do you?”
“We’ve never had pets.”
“Us, either. Must be a family thing.”
“Yeah,” Kyle said. He made a mental note to tell Mrs. Shirkline about the foxes. It wouldn’t be the end of the world if Dippy went missing, but Mrs. Shirkline would be terribly upset if she thought her beloved corgi had been torn apart by a wild animal—and she might not be able to watch Baba when Kyle had things to do.
“Well,” Randy said with a nod, “I need to get a move on. I’ll swing by soon and see your dad.”
“He’d like that.”
“See ya, Kravitz.” Randy hustled off toward the beer aisle, and Kyle glanced back at the missing cat posters, trying to remember if he had ever seen a fox in The Ridges.
5.
Rain pelted the windshield of Kyle’s car. The back seat of the VW Beetle was loaded with brown grocery sacks. Kyle had read somewhere that fish helped Alzheimer’s patients, so he had a couple of packages of wild salmon that Baba seemed to like, but there wasn’t too much other seafood that he would eat aggressively. Fruits and vegetables, especially apples and berries, didn’t last long in the house. There was a time when Baba wasn’t so picky and would eat just about anything—just like Kyle—but lately he seemed to want only things that were wild, even raw, like salmon. Kyle wasn’t opposed to eating sushi, since that was his heritage too, on his mother’s side of the family, whom he had never ever met, but Baba wanted his meat raw all the time now.
He made a mental note to talk to the doctor and see if it was normal behavior for eating habits to change so drastically.
It wasn’t a long drive from the store to the house, but long enough to dwell on Baba, so he tried to think of something else.
The first thing to pop into his mind was the wall of lost cats. For some reason, even though he’d never owned a pet, the thought of all of those cats gone missing bothered him.
He knew nothing about foxes. Biology bored him. He was more interested in old TV shows than he was about the wildlife that lived in The Ridges—even Wild Kingdom with Marlin Perkins hadn’t piqued his interest in animals.
Birds. Squirrels. Rabbits. They were just there to annoy the Pinters’ dogs and make them bark. He’d just never had reason to pay attention before. Not that he did now. He just thought it was weird about the cats. And . . . the timing.
Maybe there was a reason why the next door neighbor had three refrigerators.
He’d only caught a glimpse of the new neighbor once since she’d moved in, and that was as she pulled her little sports car into the garage one morning, right before he’d gone to bed after creating an application to track stock performance. His eyes had been more than a little blurry—but not too blurry to know a beautiful woman when he saw one.
The top was up on the car, a little European two seater, but the windows were down, and even though it was just the break of dawn, the woman had on dark sunglasses. Her hair was pulled into a ponytail, and she was wearing a skintight running suit—all red, which was starting to bother him a little.
His mind was collecting information and sorting it. Unconsciously, he had created a new application database and titled it RED. All of the colors related to the new neighbor were a subtle shade of red, crimson. Not bright, eye-catching red, but elegant, subdued, if that were possible for red.
The woman moved lightly, athletically, getting out of the car to check the mail, then hurrying back to deposit the car in the garage.
Kyle could not take his eyes off her. Something rumbled to life inside of him that he wasn’t sure still existed after his tryst with Ramona—flat-out hunger and desire. He had an unintended erection before the garage door closed.
Other than that one time, he’d never seen the neighbor again, and it had been nearly two months since the moving van had been emptied and had pulled away into the dark of night. He watched, though, and jumped at every noise he heard, hoping to catch more than a glimpse.
Mrs. Shirkline had said she’d heard from another one of the neighbors (not the Pinters—Mrs. Shirkline didn’t like them, either) that the woman was an airline stewardess and wasn’t home much. Her name, according to the newly printed name on the mailbox, was V. Volman. The V. stood for Vivian.
There were never any lights on in the house at night, and Kyle couldn’t begin to think why a sexy redheaded stewardess would need three refrigerators and be involved in the disappearance of so many cats—but his gut told him that they were all somehow connected.
As Kyle turned into the neighborhood, past the pillars with THE RIDGES carved in them, the rain began to fall harder. Thunder boomed in the distance. The defroster in the VW was about to croak, so the windows were steaming up, but Kyle saw something in the road ahead of him. Maybe twenty yards. A faint outline. A dog. Small. He had time to slam on the brakes and swerve and miss it.
The dog froze and stared into the headlights—past the headlights, really, as if it were looking right at Kyle, trying to make eye contact.
It only took Kyle a second to realize that it was not a dog at all but a fox, a gray fox. It was old, mangy, and wet. He could see the fox’s rib cage, see it struggling to keep its breath.
Lightning flashed, and the fox turned its attention to the sky, looked briefly back into the headlights, then limped off and disappeared out of view.
“Whoa,” Kyle said out loud to himself. “That was weird. Randy must have conjured you.”
He took a deep breath, still in awe of the sighting, and shifted the car into gear. He let the clutch out slower than usual, crept forward, and had no choice but to slam on the brakes again.
This time, a red fox leaped from the right side of the road, out of nowhere, sped across the road, paying Kyle no mind at all, and disappeared on the left side in just about the same spot as the gray fox. It looked as though the red fox was pursuing the gray fox . . . which seemed odd. It was frothing at the mouth.
Did foxes hunt foxes? Kyle wondered. He shook his head. Of all the things he didn’t know about foxes, he didn’t think cannibalism was a pattern of behavior.
But, then, what did he know? He wrote computer programs for a living. Maybe he should have paid more attention to Marlin Perkins after all.
He inched home
, the windshield wipers furiously waving away the torrential downpour. He could see barely three feet in front of the car.
The garage door was moody, working only half the time, and usually not when Kyle needed it the most, like in a rainstorm or a blizzard. It was nearly an antique, and time and lack of maintenance had taken its toll. Luckily, though, the garage door popped right up when Kyle hit the button.
He was still thinking about the foxes when he got out of the car, but that quickly changed when he noticed the back door standing wide open. Rain bounced off the cement floor, and a cold wind wrapped around Kyle, making him shiver.
“Baba!”
A loud clap of thunder was the only answer he received.
Kyle didn’t even think about the raw salmon in the car. He ran through the house screaming for his father . . . but Baba was nowhere to found. The house was empty.
6.
Baba had wandered off before. The first thing Kyle did was call Mrs. Shirkline. The phone rang ten times before he hung up. Her answering machine was obviously turned off.
He looked out the window, and it didn’t look as though Mrs. Shirkline was home.
The storm was directly overhead, and the thought of Baba lost somewhere in the neighborhood, not sure where he was, what he was doing, or even who he was, enraged Kyle. Alzheimer’s was an evil disease. Sometimes, Kyle wished Baba would have a heart attack and die in the blink of an eye, instead of wasting away day by day, little by little.
He threw a jacket over his head and ran outside, calling after Baba, hoping beyond hope that his father would hear him.
The Pinters’ dogs were howling as if it were a full moon, even though it was midafternoon. The clouds were dark. The rain was cold. The heat of the sun was blanketed, hidden, almost like an eclipse, but it wasn’t.
It’s just a storm, Kyle kept telling himself. It’s just a storm, and Baba is safe.
He skirted the Pinters’ yard, eyeing two dogs in the backyard that were barking at him furiously. He circled the block quickly, coming up behind Vivian Volman’s house.
Lightning flashed overhead, sending tentacles of electricity reaching out into the black sky. Thunder boomed, and it was so close it scared Kyle, made him jump. He was afraid he was going to get struck by lightning.
What would happen to Baba then?
So he ran under the eave of the garage and stopped. His heartbeat matched the downpour of the rain. He was soaked to the bone, and he couldn’t tell if it was rain or tears that ran down his face.
The rain started to let up, and Kyle decided to make a run for his house. He’d call Randy. Get the cousins out looking for Baba. They’d helped before.
Something caught his eye as he started to run toward home. The door to Vivian Volman’s side-entry garage door was ajar. He couldn’t help himself and eased back, stopping just outside the door. All he could hear was three refrigerators running simultaneously. It was not out of the question that Baba had wandered into the garage seeking shelter from the storm. Baba might not know what a garage was any more, but Kyle was certain that his father still had enough sense to avoid danger. At least he hoped so.
Kyle pushed the door open slowly. It didn’t creak—it was freshly greased.
The garage was not completely dark; it was lit from the remaining daylight outside, but the storm made it look like it was dusk instead of midafternoon.
An odd metallic smell accosted his nose as soon as he stepped inside. The smell was familiar, evoking a memory he could barely grasp, but somehow, somewhere, deep in his early childhood, there was an incident that involved a lot of blood.
All Kyle could really remember about the incident was screaming, and then screaming more, and then screaming until nothing came out of his mouth until Baba appeared out of nowhere and promised that he was safe.
There was no such comfort now. But the smell was definitely blood, and the memory was strong. It was his turn to save Baba. Times sure had changed.
For a moment Kyle thought about turning on a light, but he realized that he was trespassing. Vivian Volman might even think he was a burglar, shoot first and ask questions later, if she was the kind of woman who kept a gun in the house. Since she appeared to live in the house alone, Kyle assumed Vivian Volman was the kind of woman who kept a gun in the house, so he decided against turning on the light.
He could see a little way in front of him, from the light coming through the door.
The refrigerators were to his left a few feet, lined up against the back wall. One of them kicked off. A whirling fan blade sounded like something was dripping on it. Plop. Whirl. Plop. Splatter. Splatter.
“Baba, are you in here?”
Silence. No answer.
“It’s me, Kyle. Please be here.”
He took a deep breath, thought about running home when no answer came again. But his curiosity easily won him over, and he didn’t budge Even he couldn’t argue that Gladys Kravitz would not have opened the doors to all three refrigerators in Samantha Stephens’ garage, given half the chance.
So . . . reluctantly, looking over his shoulder first . . . Kyle opened the first refrigerator. It was empty and smelled brand new, as if it had never been used.
The second refrigerator was new and empty, too.
He was starting to feel relieved. There had been no question in his mind that the refrigerators were being used to house all of those missing cats . . . That’s exactly what he had expected to find. Of course, three refrigerators full of dead cats would have only confirmed his suspicions. Then he would have been compelled to find out what the reasoning was, why Vivian Volman was collecting cats in the first place. He was really, really, glad that he was wrong. Vivian Volman didn’t look like a cat killer.
The third refrigerator was at least thirty years old. It was olive green, not white like the other two, and it was dented and scratched up. The drip, drip, drip on the fan blades was coming from this refrigerator. A little voice in the back of Kyle’s mind urged him to run home, but he couldn’t . . . he just couldn’t leave without seeing what was inside the old refrigerator. So he opened the door, and a scream froze deep inside his chest.
Kyle could not move.
Time stopped.
He wasn’t even sure if he was breathing.
He was awash in the light emanating from inside the refrigerator. Thunder boomed overhead. Flashes of lightning reached across the floor, hurting Kyle’s eyes even more than they already were. The inside of the garage was filled with strobe light effects. Nothing seemed real or reachable.
The refrigerator was not stuffed with dead cats as Kyle had expected.
It was stuffed with dead foxes.
Partial foxes. Fox heads. No bodies. Cleanly sheered at the neck. All staring at him as if they expected him to help them . . . but it was too late. Rivulets of blood ran down the back of the refrigerator.
Each shelf was lined with exactly six fox heads, with the exception of the top shelf . . . there were five there . . . room for one more.
All of the heads were facing forward, all placed equal distances apart. And all of them were red. Red foxes. Like the one he had seen as he pulled into The Ridges, chasing the gray fox.
Nothing made sense at the moment. Kyle shook his head and slammed the door shut.
“Help me.”
It was a whisper.
Baba’s voice.
But Kyle couldn’t see anything, couldn’t begin to process that he had somehow missed Baba when he came into the garage.
He cracked opened the refrigerator door, ignoring the severed fox heads as best he could, to give himself a bit more light. His stomach lurched at the sight.
This time he saw Baba.
His father was balled up in the corner of the garage, naked, holding his throat as tight as he could, keeping blood from pumping out. It looked as though the carotid artery had been cut clean open.
Baba’s eyes were filled with terror, and Kyle had the distinct feeling that something, or somebody, was st
anding directly behind him.
7.
A million questions ran through Kyle’s mind, but there wasn’t time to do anything but try to save Baba—he wasn’t thinking, wasn’t afraid, wasn’t anything but focused on helping his injured father.
If there was something behind him . . . it could just bring it on. Baba was hurt, and he’d tear through cement walls to get to him if he had to.
Kyle took a step forward, but he didn’t move. A strong hand appeared out of nowhere and held him back. He cocked his head and came face to face with the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
Vivian Volman was staring back at him, holding him with more strength than he thought a woman could possess.
“He won’t recognize you yet. Wait.”
“But . . . he’s hurt,” Kyle said.
“I am here to make sure nothing happens to him.”
Confused, but oddly comforted, Kyle submitted even though he was afraid and could not even begin to forget the fox heads in the refrigerator. “You’re too late.”
“Maybe.”
Vivian had soft, thick, red hair—the most beautiful hair he had ever seen, though the sheen seemed to be fading, becoming less lustrous by the second. Her eyes were almost golden with distinct vertical slits, almost like a cat’s eye.
When she blinked, the pupil was normal, black and round . . . he must have been seeing things . . . and the color was more green than golden. The light in the garage was playing tricks on his eyes.
He pulled to get to Baba again.
“Wait.”
Kyle watched his father struggle, watched the wound on his throat close up and heal itself as though it had never been there in the first place.
There were also wounds on Baba’s legs . . . it was a wonder he could walk, they looked so deep. At the very least, Baba had limped into the garage. In another blink, those wounds vanished, just like the slit on Baba’s throat.
Vivian Volman relaxed her grip. “We haven’t much time.”
Kyle rushed to his father, ignoring his confusion.
Baba reached up to him. “I’m sorry.”
Zombie Raccoons & Killer Bunnies Page 26
