by Ike Hamill
Mary turned. She didn’t see a damned thing. The whole day was starting to get a little too frustrating. Mary was losing her temper and wanted to yell at George. It wasn’t his fault. Instead of resenting his ability to see, hear, and move better, she had to use him. She had to use him as an extension of herself, so they would both benefit.
“You kids run ahead,” she said to George. “Take her and go thirty paces south, you hear me? Make sure you can still see me and you do what I say.”
“We still going to the cemetery?” he asked.
Mary nodded. “Go.”
George did as he was told. He wouldn’t take Lori’s hand, but he tugged at the girl’s hem until she followed him. The two ran ahead just as Mary heard what George had been talking about. There was something coming through the woods.
Any other day, she would have said it was a squirrel or maybe somebody’s cat. But this thing was relentless. It wasn’t scooting forward and then stopping to look around, it was coming at a constant speed, crunching through the leaves. Mary faced the sound of the approaching thing and backed in the direction that George and Lori had gone.
Mary didn’t see anything.
She heard the buzzing in the air and whipped her head around. She could hear the motor, but still didn’t see anything.
“Demons,” she whispered. “Electronic demons, maybe.”
People were so worried about drone strikes in other countries. What would happen if someone tried to take over a village with little robots?
“Is that what they’re doing?” she whispered to herself.
She ducked as she heard another buzzing sound. This time, she caught a glimpse of the thing as it whizzed by. It was black. She had seen those before—some of those same things had been in the air while she was rescuing her son. Mary crouched and picked up a good thick stick. She slapped it against her hand.
With a glance, she saw that George was obeying her instructions well. She adjusted her path and then returned to scanning the leaves. She would see it soon—she had to.
When the thing buzzed through the air again, Mary didn’t hesitate. Without thinking, she swung her good, strong stick and managed to clip the black thing as it passed by close enough that she felt the wind on her face. She heard it crash into a tree and then tumble down to the leaves.
Mary smiled.
In the trail of disturbed leaves that made up her tracks, she saw another thing scuttling. It was the size of a rabbit, but it didn’t hop. This thing moved like an overgrown cockroach. Mary took her good stick in both hands and slung it over her shoulder. As the thing closed the distance, Mary swung her stick like an axe. She had chopped her fair share of wood and the motion was natural. She plowed the thing down into the soft forest soil.
With no hesitation, she swung again and again. Her good, strong stick cracked and then broke in two. As she straightened back up, she heard them. There were more of the things coming through the woods, disturbing the leaves. She glanced at the dead one at her feet. It was a tangle of menacing little legs.
When she turned, George and Lori were just standing there, right at the range of her vision.
“Get moving!” she yelled.
Mary chased after them, pausing only to pick up another stick.
Chapter 39 : Hilliard
[ Vacation ]
KIRK HILLIARD SAT AT the kitchen table, reading yesterday’s newspaper when he heard the side door open. He wasn’t paying any attention to what he was reading. Kirk was trying to think of a way to get out of going to the party at his brother-in-law’s that evening. If he could get out of that, maybe he could swing by Peg’s for another visit. His Wednesday visit was still an excitement he felt in the pit of his stomach. She was so accommodating, and she made him feel attractive. Until he experienced how she lusted after his body, he never would have thought it important.
“Can I have my allowance early?” Jenny asked.
Kirk snapped down the paper, and surfaced from his vivid fantasy.
“You mean the allowance that you already asked for and got?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said.
“Do you fail to see the flaw in your logic?” he asked.
“If you remember correctly,” she said. “I asked for your help in getting a job. You always said that if I came to you and asked for your help, you would give it to me. Having asked for your help, and having been turned away, it seems like an advance on my allowance is completely reasonable.”
“If you remember correctly,” he said, snapping the paper back up between them, “I asked you to be my intern for the rest of the summer. Maybe if you hadn’t walked away from that offer, I would be more willing to entertain your allowance request.”
She rewarded him with a disgusted grunt and then turned to stomp into the kitchen. He skimmed the ads in the newspaper as he listened to her open and slam cabinet doors, looking for something that probably wasn’t there.
“I thought you were going to the parade,” he said.
“I did for a little,” she said. “It’s not the same without Big Jack.”
“Ugh,” he said. The horse was all anyone was talking about.
She came back to the table and dropped herself into one of the chairs. It barked back across the tiles as she landed. Kirk lowered his newspaper to give her a stern look, but she was staring down at her phone.
“What did you do with your mother?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“You went to the parade with your mother. Where did she go?”
She didn’t even bother to answer. Kirk let his paper fall to the table. It covered her phone.
“Jenny!” he yelled as she worked to recover her phone from under the newspaper.
“What?” she asked, looking up. The little device had the capability of completely resetting her brain. She looked at him like she was seeing him for the very first time.
“Where. Is. Your. Mother?”
“She went somewhere with your girlfriend. She was yelling.”
Kirk’s heart stopped beating.
“She and Shelly were supposed to go for a power walk tomorrow, but Shelly said that her new husband was having a crisis, and…”
Kirk tuned out the rest of the story so he could devote his attention to breathing again. For a second, he pictured Chelsea finding out about one of his dalliances and running off to a lawyer. That would be disastrous. He needed Chelsea.
“Where is she now?” he asked, trying to sound normal. For the moment, his thoughts of tracking down Peg that evening were completely forgotten.
“I told you, she went off with Shelly.”
“But when is she coming home? We’re supposed to go to your uncle’s place for cocktails.”
Jenny’s attention had been recaptured by her phone. She only shrugged at his question.
“Can you text her or something and find out?” he asked.
“Nope,” Jenny said. “Phones don’t work. Wifi too.”
“She says as she actively plays with her phone,” he said.
“This is local. I can’t do anything that connects to anywhere. I can’t even play games that have ads in them. Nothing works.”
“Oh,” Kirk said. He understood only one thing from her explanation—the cell phones were out. He leaned back in his chair and managed to snag the cordless phone from the charger. Chelsea always wanted to get rid of the landline, but Kirk routinely vetoed the idea. He knew the bozo who leased the land to the towers, and that guy couldn’t even be trusted to keep his own driveway clear. It was no wonder that the towers were always getting knocked out by this or that.
He punched the button on his phone and got only a strange tone.
Kirk frowned.
He stood up, sighed, and grabbed his keys from the counter.
Jenny looked up at the sound of jingling keys. “Are you going into town? Can I get a ride?”
“You just walked home from town and now you want a ride back there? Can you explain why that makes any sense
at all?”
She rolled her eyes and then looked at him like he was an idiot. “I didn’t know I would be stranded here without any way to communicate with the outside world. My cell didn’t work in town, but I figured that wifi would work here. If I can’t text, I might as well talk to people, right?”
Kirk shrugged. “Okay. Fine. But I’m only going as far as the Grill. I’m not going to deal with all the holiday traffic.”
[ Stranded ]
He turned the key again. The car began to sound weary as the battery lost its oomph.
“Huh,” Kirk said. He fished his phone from his pocket and remembered that it didn’t work when it was halfway to his face. He began to reach for the door and then put his hand back on the wheel.
“I guess we’re walking,” he said.
“What?” Jenny asked. Based on her tone, it would have been easy to imagine that she had never accomplished such a heroic feat in her entire life.
“I’ll walk down to Jim Stratton’s garage and see if he wants my business. I heard that he’s picking up a lot of Roger’s clients.”
“What. Ever,” Jenny said. She got out and somehow managed to navigate without removing her eyes from her game.
“I should find out when Roger’s getting out again,” Kirk said to himself. “He’s ten times the mechanic that Jim is.”
Kirk looked back at his house and then down the driveway. Jenny walked to town all the time. Kirk hadn’t managed the trip in quite a while. She was already moving that direction. Kirk got himself moving. There was no sense in delaying. He was going to have to track down Jim and see if he could get his wrecker out to the house. Kirk looked over his shoulder and thought about going back. He could always find Jim tomorrow, or maybe just wait for the phones to work. He shook his head. It was pure laziness talking. Lately, his only real walking had been on the golf course. It would do him good to get out.
[ Realization ]
They were only a couple minutes from home when Kirk put his hand on Jenny’s shoulder and stopped her.
“Was that from your game?” he asked.
She looked at him.
“What are you talking about?”
“That sound.”
“My phone is muted.”
They heard it again. It was a girl screaming. Jenny looked at him with wide eyes. It had been a long time since she had looked that vulnerable. There was something about seeing his daughter frightened that he liked. Maybe it was wrong to think that way, but it reminded him of a simpler time—a time when a monster in the closet could be banished with only a nightlight.
There was nothing simple about this day—the phones, the car, and now screaming in the distance.
“What was going on when you left town?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “The parade was starting. Everyone was watching it.”
“Nothing else?”
Jenny shook her head.
Kirk wished he had the car. There was a compartment in his trunk where he kept two guns. He had only shot them once, but they had made him feel secure hundreds of times. He wanted a little of that security at that moment.
“I’m going back to the house,” he said.
“Dad!” Jenny said. “Shouldn’t we go find out who screamed?”
“I will. I’m going back to the house first. Don’t go investigating without me.”
“Like I would,” she said.
[ Paranoia ]
Jenny shook her head as she looked back at her father. He was trying to run to the house, but had only made it halfway up the street before he slowed to a fast walk. He was pathetic at running. They had a treadmill, an elliptical, and a stationary bike, but her father just sat on his butt all winter and expected to get in shape by playing golf.
She thought most of this while she was trying to fill up the blue bucket in her game. Her phone popped up a warning, telling her that she only had twenty percent power left. Jenny frowned, shut off the display, and shoved the phone in her pocket. She looked around like there might be a charger on the street somewhere if she just looked hard enough.
Maybe that could be a job. Maybe she could get some kind of generator and offer to charge the phones of Summer People who ran out of battery while walking around downtown. With half of the Summer People, they barely got any signal in town. Their phones drained quickly as the devices tried to communicate with distant towers. They were always running out of batteries. Jenny shook her head, discarding the idea. If it was really a good idea, someone would already be doing it. And where would she get a generator? Maybe she could buy power from Mr. Dawn and run an extension cord out into the street. She decided to bounce the idea off her father when he returned. Even if he thought it was stupid, he would be proud of her for trying to come up with something. That might earn her a little more allowance.
Off in the distance, she heard him slam the trunk of his car. A second later, she heard the engine crank again. He was still trying to start the thing.
Jenny wondered where the scream had come from. It was probably from one of the neighbors that they didn’t know. They lived amongst lots of People from Away. It was the curse of having a decent house. Most of her classmates lived in terrible houses off in the woods.
People could say what they wanted to about her father, but at least Jenny lived in a decent neighborhood. The house she was walking by was ten times better than most of the places in town, and it was a house that was only occupied four months out of the year. The people who lived there probably had a place in Georgia or Florida, and only came up for the hottest time of the year. They would disappear long before the snow started coming down, and they would only arrive again after all the spring mud had dried up.
Jenny heard the scream again. She was close enough to see the place where the sound came from. She turned around and saw that her father was back on the road, trotting towards her. Jenny stopped at the driveway of the place and waited for her father. She studied the house. It looked short from the roadside. The house was just a brown peak of stained wood and triangular windows. On the other side, where the hill fell away, the house looked enormous. Jenny had seen it from the lake.
“The scream came from the A-frame,” she said. She pointed. That’s what her father always called this house. He was still trying to catch his breath.
Her father pulled out a gun and slid something back until it clicked.
“You’re not going to shoot them, are you?” Jenny asked. She was only half-kidding. She didn’t know what her father intended to do with the gun.
“Just for protection,” he said. “Wait here. I’ll go find out what’s going on.”
“Why is it safe here?” Jenny asked. “I should come with you.”
“Just stay back, please.”
He approached the house like he was in charge. That was something that Jenny really admired about her father. He always walked into things like he was in charge. She was going to do that when she was an executive of a major company. She would always walk into rooms with her head high and let everyone know who was in control.
She stayed on the path while her father pounded on the door.
Jenny thought about pulling out her phone for the camera. Maybe she would make a video of the whole thing. Maybe the police would want it as evidence if something was wrong. She decided against it—probably nothing would happen and she would just waste her battery.
“You’re sure it was this house?” her father asked her.
Jenny nodded.
“It doesn’t seem like anyone is home,” he said.
“Maybe they’re unconscious or whatever,” Jenny said.
Her eyes grew wide as her father reached for the doorknob.
When they heard the scream again, her father turned the knob and rushed in. Jenny stood there, unsure of what to do. She took a couple of tentative steps forward and saw her father rush down a flight of steps. She advanced to the door frame.
[ Rescue ]
When Kirk heard the
scream he reached for the doorknob. Never for a second did he believe that the door would be open. He expected that once he found it locked, his obligation would have been fulfilled. Instead, the knob turned and the door opened. Without any other ideas, he rushed in.
The first floor of the house was basically just a landing. Doors on either side probably led to closets. Based on the slope of the roof there wasn’t really room for anything else on that level. In front of him, a staircase led down towards the windows that overlooked the lake. He’d seen this place a million times from the water, and often wondered what the inside must look like. It was beautiful. Everything was rich, dark wood, polished to a shine. The back of the landing was a balcony, overlooking the room below.
The railing of the open stairs was brushed nickel. He grabbed the railing and descended as rapidly as he could. He filled one hand with a gun and left the other gun tucked into the back of his waistband. It felt stupid, uncomfortable, and somehow reassuring back there.
The stairs dumped him into the middle of a big living room. Huge windows showed him trees that dotted the hillside down to the lake. At the far end, a kitchen was separated from the sitting area by an island with stools.
It was classy and perfect, except for the place between the couches.
A wood and glass coffee table had been shoved over near the windows to make room for the terrible graffiti on the wood floor. Kirk approached slowly, leading with his gun.
“Hello?” he called. “Where are you?”
Kirk took another step. He’d seen plenty of horror movies that portrayed pentagrams. He knew the five-sided star inside the circle—everyone did. He’d never seen a ten-foot version spray painted on the floor of a million dollar house though. The red circle was perfectly formed. At least the vandals had been decent craftsmen. In each point of the star, there was a candle. Four of them were still burning. The one closest to the windows had already burned out.
When Kirk heard the scream again, he looked up and actually smiled. It was amplified. He spotted the speaker towers in the corners of the room. It wasn’t a person. The scream was being played through the stereo system. This was an elaborate joke. He tried to scuff the paint of the pentagram with his foot. The paint was dried. It was an expensive, elaborate joke. They might need to sand the floors to get that silly pentagram off. Kirk glanced around, looking for any sign that the place was currently inhabited. Maybe the owners had decided to not come up this year and their house had been vandalized by local kids or something. It didn’t explain the screams over the entertainment system, but there had to be some reason.
