Scary Out There

by Jonathan Maberry

  “Can’t you hear it?” she asked. “Can’t you feel it?”

  But it was obvious that Jason couldn’t. With his eyes bugged out like they were, moaning and sweating through his gag of tape, it was obvious that he had no confidence in her whatsoever.

  She’d started at his ankles, which perhaps she shouldn’t have. They were bony and needed to be bound and re-bound together to make sure the cuts would line up right. But it wasn’t as if she’d made a butchery of things. The cuts were clean, and straight, which was quite a feat, considering Jason had come fully awake and squirmed and kicked something fierce. In the end she had to lean down and lie across his knees to get it done, and even then he flopped. His heels splashed in the red water welled into the pool tile until she lost her temper and snapped at him. But that wasn’t fair. The chlorine had to sting.

  “I know, I know,” she said as she pulled up the skin of his calf. It made an ugly sound coming away from the muscle, and she grimaced. She had to be careful not to pull up too much. It was surprising, how easy it was. She thought it would be more like slicing meat, feared that it would be tough, like leather or steak, something ragged and in danger of tearing. But the scalpel was sharp. She pressed and skin parted. Like butter.

  • • •

  Jason died from the blood loss. There was nothing she could do about that. She was no surgeon. He cried a little, and she supposed it had been bad. Painful. But it was really so much easier after he stopped struggling, and twitching.

  Darla wiped sweat from her face. She glanced up at the clock on the wall, kept up by its metal cage. It had taken a while. Jason was tall. He had a lot of leg. She leaned over and took a breath and rinsed her red hands in the cool water of the pool. Then she wiped her forehead again and adjusted the way she sat before reaching into her backpack for the needle.

  • • •

  The first time they swam together was a Wednesday night. The pool was quiet. The whole school was quiet, except for the church group of twenty-five or so that gathered in the forum on the other side of the gym. Jason was already swimming when she came in. She watched him for two laps before he paused to check the door and saw her standing there. He grinned wide.

  “Great,” he said, hanging off the edge. “I wasn’t sure if you’d come. Aren’t you going to swim?”

  Darla looked down at her clothes. She’d wanted to make sure he hadn’t stood her up before she changed.

  “Yeah. I just wanted to watch a bit, as long as you were already in.”

  “And? Like what you see?”

  “You’re dropping your left elbow in the catch,” she said.

  Jason’s smile faded only slightly as he nodded. He could take criticism. He wasn’t used to it, but he could take it.

  “I’ll work on it while you change,” he said.

  Once she was in her suit, Darla waited until Jason pushed off, and then dove in beside him. He was a freestyler, so that’s what she swam. It wasn’t her favorite, but she could do it all. They touched their lap dead even, and if he was upset by that, he hid it well.

  “You’re incredible,” he said. “Better than me.”

  “No one else on the boys’ team would admit that,” she said.

  “Well,” said Jason, “I’m not anyone else.”

  They met again on Thursday night and again the week after that. Jason’s times got better. He was easier to talk to than she thought he would be. By the fourth time they swam, she realized she had a crush on him. She probably always had.

  • • •

  The stitches weren’t even. They zigged and zagged through the insides of Jason’s pale, hairless legs like broken up railroad tracks. Darla hoped they would hold. In the center part of his thigh was a bulge. Inside it was the strange little mermaid’s purse, under the skin and pulsing its wrong-placed heartbeat. She’d put the needle away, and the scalpel, after rinsing them clean in the pool. Her bag she set up on the bench even though it was probably ruined, wet and stained eternally red.

  “I’ve got to clean this up,” Darla said. “Underneath you.”

  She took a deep breath and slid both hands under Jason’s back and hips, then rolled him up and over, back into the pool with a splash. She tried to ignore the limp way his arm slid across his stomach, and how cold he was. He drifted fast down to the bottom, his lower half trailing blood in a dark crimson cloud. She watched for a minute, just until the red started to fade, and he settled. Then she started to scoop the mess over the edge after him. There was so much blood that it was blood tinged with pool water rather than the other way around, but the pool would clear it all away. She scooped and scooped, pushed redness to the side with her hand flat, like a bulldozer. She splashed and diluted and spread it around until it disappeared.

  “Okay,” she said, and wiped her hands on a towel. She was exhausted. She wished she’d eaten more at the Anchor than just a quarter pound cheeseburger and salted fries.

  “I should have ordered two,” she said, and leaned over the side.

  Jason was gone. For a mad second she looked up and all around the bleachers, like she’d somehow missed him. But then she relaxed. There he was, curling around the deep end of the diving well. He twisted and darted into the corners. He kicked hard, and Darla smiled. The stitches held.

  In the pool, Jason turned his head and looked at her. He seemed unsure at first, but then he swam up fast and launched himself up and out of the water.

  His eyes didn’t look quite the same without lids, but they were still his, deep blue, and friendly. He pulled his lips back in his signature Jason grin. That didn’t look quite the same either, with so many new rows of teeth, but she would get used to that.

  He dragged himself eagerly forward, and Darla held her hand out.

  “You know, Miranda Halverston has never swum a day in her life,” she said.

  Kendare Blake binge-watches The X-Files every couple of years. Her favorite episode is the one where the virtual reality game starts to really kill people, because she likes to hear Scully say that Mulder is getting his ya-yas out. She’s also the author of six novels, including Anna Dressed in Blood, Antigoddess, and Ungodly.

  Website: kendareblake.com

  Twitter: @KendareBlake

  Facebook: facebook.com/kendare.blake

  * * *

  The Old Radio

  R. L. STINE

  * * *

  I’m in Full Panic Mode,” Ziggy said. I saw drops of sweat on his forehead, and he was tapping both hands on the table the way he always does when he’s stressed.

  “Too soon,” I said. “Let’s give it one more try before we both go into fatal error shutdown.” I stared at the pieces of laptop in front of me on the table until they blurred into a solid mass of metal and plastic.

  “Connor, why did we do this?” Ziggy said. He brushed back his wavy blond hair. His chin quivered, another sure sign he was about to freak. “Why? What made us think we could do this?”

  I blinked hard, making the electronic pieces on the table come back into focus. “We took it apart,” I said. “We can put it back together.” I kept my voice low and steady. I needed to keep Ziggy calm. I didn’t need the big guy to go all berserk on me.

  Ziggy and I have been good friends since ninth grade, mainly because we’re both tech nerds who think we can build anything, program anything, and figure out what makes everything in the world work. We’re friends because we both want to be the next famous computer geniuses, not because our personalities are the least bit alike.

  Actually, we’re not alike in any way. He’s big and flabby and blond and red faced and sweats a lot and wears horrible bad-taste T-shirts with lots of unfunny sayings on the front, usually stained and smelly because he’ll wear the same shirt for a week. He’s heavy into trap and EDM, I guess because his name is Ziggy, and he knows how to deprogram his PlayStation games and turn them into new games he invents, and even though he’s sixteen, same as me, I don’t think he’s ever had a girlfriend.

  On th
e other hand, I’d be one of the cool kids if I didn’t have to wear inch thick glasses and if I cared at all, which I don’t. If I keep my mouth shut and you can’t see my braces, I’m not a bad-looking guy. I have straight, long brown hair, which I use to hide my ears because they’re way too big. I’m almost six feet tall, thin, and lanky. I’m not into sports, but I look like I could be.

  I’m the calm one. I’m the one who keeps it together. If Ziggy is fire, I’m ice.

  My dream is to invent the next Facebook. I mean, someone has to invent what comes next, right? I don’t have any ideas yet. But when I do, I’ll be ready, because I’m learning as much as I can.

  Which, of course, is why Ziggy and I took apart my mom’s laptop. We wanted to get our minds around every circuit, every chip, every drive, every megabyte, every tiny piece of the hardware. We wanted to know it, to see it, to absorb it all.

  That’s what we do. We take things apart to study them. Then we put them back together. Only, this afternoon we couldn’t get the laptop back together. We had it all back in place, except for three printed circuit pieces, which looked kind of important. “Mom is going to be a little angry with me,” I murmured.

  “Forget your mom. Harry is going to kill you,” Ziggy said. His whole face was drenched in glistening sweat now.

  Harry is my stepfather, and he has a temper. Although you have to really know him to tell when he’s angry. Because Harry never yells. He never raises his voice when he’s angry. He’s one of these guys who kind of implodes. He gets totally quiet. It’s like he only inhales. His eyes get real big and his lips go white. You wait for steam to shoot out of his ears. But he never says a word.

  Harry is manager of one of those storage unit places where people stash the stuff they don’t have room for. He’s always bringing home weird things that people leave behind when they empty out their units.

  “You’re right,” I told Ziggy, shaking my head. “Mom understands that you and I have to experiment. But . . . this is the kind of thing that makes Harry’s eyes pop. Like the time we took apart my iPhone to replace the battery.”

  “That was a major fail,” Ziggy murmured.

  We both stared down at the computer parts on our worktable. Ziggy tapped his fingers on the wooden tabletop. I picked up a memory chip and tried to slide it into a slot. “Yes!”

  Outside the window, the afternoon sun was sinking behind the trees. The sky darkened to evening. Ziggy and I were in our workshop. It’s the front room of the little two-room guest cottage behind my house. The cottage was sitting empty, just falling apart. So Harry said I could use it as a workshop if I promised to keep it neat.

  Right now, it was very neat. Except for the two computer pieces that sat on the worktable, refusing to fit into the laptop. “Let’s start the laptop,” Ziggy said. “Maybe it’ll work without these pieces.”

  “Fat chance,” I muttered.

  Ziggy and I nearly jumped off our tall wooden stools when we heard a hard knock on the door behind us.

  “It’s either Mom or Harry,” I said. “We’re doomed.” My hand trembled as I frantically shoved the two loose computer pieces out of sight. I took a deep breath. Could we fake our way out of trouble?

  The door swung open. Harry walked in wearing his blue uniform with his name badge on the shirt pocket. He carried a large wooden object in both hands. It looked heavy. It made a loud thud as he set it down on the edge of the worktable.

  “This is for you guys,” he said, mopping his forehead with his sleeve. He patted the top of the boxlike thing. “Do you believe someone left this valuable antique in a storage unit?”

  I squinted at it. “What is it, Harry?”

  His mouth dropped open. “You don’t recognize it? It’s an old radio. See the dial? The knobs for changing the station?”

  “That’s what radios looked like?” Ziggy said. He stepped up to it and twisted both knobs in his hands. “Where do the earphones go?”

  “Very funny,” Harry said, rolling his eyes. “The sound comes out of this speaker.” He tapped a rectangle above the round glass dial. It had some kind of brown cloth cover.

  “Only one speaker,” I said. “No stereo.”

  Harry shook his head. “What’s wrong with you guys? This thing is seriously valuable. It’s probably seventy years old. I thought you guys would love it.”

  I smoothed my hand over the dark polished wood. The radio was in very good shape. Only a couple of thin scratches on one side. “Does it work?” I asked.

  Harry shrugged. “Beats me. Plug it in and see. I thought you two would have fun taking it apart and fiddling around with it.”

  “It’s cool,” I said. “Thanks, Harry.”

  He turned to leave, but then stopped. “Hey, is that your mom’s laptop?” he asked. “What’s it doing here?”

  “We’re fixing it,” I said.

  • • •

  I slid Mom’s laptop to the end of the table and moved the old radio in front of our stools. I clicked the knob on the left a few times. It was obviously the on/off switch. The other knob moved the pointer in the round dial.

  Ziggy turned the radio around, and we peered into the back. Several dust covered glass tubes were plugged into a metal chassis. They looked like slender lightbulbs.

  “They didn’t have chips or circuit boards then,” I said. “I read about this. These are called vacuum tubes.”

  “Weird,” Ziggy murmured. He uncoiled the thick brown cord from inside the back. It was a little frayed, but the two-pronged plastic plug was tightly attached. “Let’s plug it in. Maybe we can hear some old radio programs.”

  I laughed. “Wouldn’t that be awesome? What if it’s some kind of time-warp machine, and it only plays music and stuff from seventy years ago?”

  “I think I saw that on a Twilight Zone,” Ziggy said.

  He plugged the cord in. I clicked the on/off knob. The dial lit up with an orange-yellow glow, but no sound came out. “Not looking good,” I said.

  But then a crackling sound came out of the speaker. I turned the knob and the crackling grew louder. “Static,” I said. “Let’s see if we get any stations.”

  I turned the other knob slowly. The static became a shrill whistle. Then more static. There were numbers printed on the dial. They went from 55 to 160. I moved the pointer a tiny bit at a time. Static and more static. “No stations,” I murmured.

  “It’s broken,” Ziggy said. He hopped down from the stool. “Gotta go. Almost dinnertime.”

  I kept my ear close to the speaker. I moved the dial as slowly as I could. Static. Crackling. Whistling. No voices. No music. “Maybe we can fix it,” I said.

  Ziggy turned at the door. “Of course we can. We’re geniuses, right?”

  I stared at the two unattached laptop pieces on the table. “Right,” I said.

  • • •

  After dinner I played with Nicky, my four-year-old brother, for a while. We like to have wrestling matches on the living room floor most nights. Nicky likes them because I always let him beat me up.

  When Mom took him off to bed, I did some homework. Then I went online and read some things about old radios. At nine o’clock, Mom and Harry were in the den watching a Law & Order. They watch that show whenever it’s on, which is always. I don’t think they heard me when I told them I was heading out to my workshop.

  A light rain had started to fall. I ducked my head and ran over the wet grass to the front door of the guesthouse. Shaking rainwater from my hair, I clicked on the lights. The old radio glowed darkly on the worktable.

  I climbed onto a tall stool and slid the radio around. I knew why it wasn’t working. I peered into the back, fumbled around, and pulled out a slender wire. The antenna. I’d read on a website that old radios needed antennas to work.

  The antenna was connected inside the back of the radio. I stretched it out along the edge of the table. It was about three feet long. I turned the radio to face me and clicked it on. Once again, the dial lit up instantly. About
fifteen or twenty seconds later, the speaker began to crackle with static.

  I circled my fingers around the knob and slowly began to move from number to number. Static. Still nothing but whistling and static. Until the dial landed on number 70.

  I nearly fell from the stool when a man’s voice came from the speaker. “What do you expect me to do?” he said. As clear as if he were in the room with me.

  I froze with my fingers around the dial. And listened.

  “Just forget about it for once,” a woman said. “Cut me some slack for once in your life.”

  “She’s right, Nate.” Another man’s voice.

  “You shut up! Shut up, Mike!” Nate screamed angrily. “Do I need your face in my business?”

  “Nate, I’m not going to apologize,” the woman said. Her voice trembled.

  This is some kind of drama, I thought. Maybe a play. Or a crime story.

  Do they still have crime stories on the radio?

  “You embarrassed me in front of my whole family,” Nate said. “You humiliated me in front of my brother, Mike. Tell her, Mike.”

  “Leave me out of it,” the brother said. “I don’t like the way this is going, Nate. You need to get control of yourself. Before—”

  “Shut up!” Nate screamed again. “Nothing is good enough for you, Anna. You wanted to move to Glen Mills so we moved to Glen Mills. You wanted a house on Clement Street. I bought you a house on Clement Street.”

  “Do you want an award, Nate?” Anna shouted. “Do you want the Nobel Prize because you bought us a decent house?”

  Whoa.

  I jumped to my feet.

  I live on Clement Street. I live on Clement Street in Glen Mills.

  This isn’t a radio play, I realized. These people live on my street? This is really happening?

  No way!

  I forced myself to breathe. My mouth was suddenly dry as cotton. Was I listening in to someone’s conversation? Someone in my neighborhood?