by Jeremy Bates
“And it’s nighttime!” Bobby told her. “He can’t see in the dark!”
“Maybe he had special glasses.”
“He doesn’t.”
“You don’t know that. You’re not God!”
“You’re not either!”
“Guys!” Ellie’s mom said, sounding more scared than angry. “Quiet!”
“When’s my dad coming back?” Bobby asked after a moment.
“Soon, hon.”
“What if he doesn’t find the keys?” Ellie asked.
“He will.”
“But what if he doesn’t?”
“We’ll think of something.”
Bobby tried to think of something himself. They couldn’t walk back to his car because Barry—despite what Ellie’s mom said, Bobby still thought it was Barry coming after them—would catch them. They couldn’t stay in the truck either because Barry would probably check it. Bad guys always found where the good guys were hiding. So they’d have to run into the woods, and this was the last thing he wanted to do. Because bears lived in the woods, and they came out at nighttime, and they might eat all of them, and this was way worse than what Barry would do to them. He might only tie them up and say mean things, like he was going to cut off their heads. But he probably wouldn’t do this, because he would go to jail—
Bobby sucked back a breath as a new thought struck him.
“What’s wrong, honey?” Ellie’s mom asked.
Bobby looked directly at her for the first time. Her eyes were wide, and she looked really pretty, even in the dark. She always looked pretty, and she always smelled nice too.
“Maybe the monster’s following us?” he said.
“There’s no such thing—”
“It’s not!” Ellie said, cutting off her mom.
“Why not?” Bobby demanded.
“Because,” she stated.
“Because isn’t an answer,” he said, using the comeback Marty Phillips from school always used.
“Because it can’t live outside from under the bed!”
“You don’t know that!”
“Do too!”
“It can live anywhere it wants.”
“You don’t know that—”
“Ellie, enough,” her mom said.
“But Bobby started it!”
“Enough!” She lowered her voice. “We need to be quiet, okay? So…no more talking until Rex comes back.”
“What if he doesn’t come back for an hour?”
“Ellie, I’m not telling you again.”
Bobby heard Ellie huff, like she always did when she got in trouble. But she was smart enough to stay quiet. Otherwise, she might get grounded for a week, or maybe a month. Her mom was a lot stricter than his dad was.
A short time later Ellie said, “Mommy?”
“Yes?”
“What did I earn for being good today?”
“My affection.”
“I don’t want that!”
“Well, that’s what you got.”
“Mommy, you’re not my friend anymore.”
“Ellie, shush—” Suddenly she sat up straight, alarmed.
Bobby heard something too. A loud bang. It came from inside the cabin.
“What was that?” Bobby asked, forgetting that he wasn’t allowed to talk.
“I don’t know,” Ellie’s mom whispered. “Shit!”
“Mom!” Ellie said. “You swore—”
“Bobby, open your door. Let me out.” She reached in front of him and opened the door. Cold night air blew inside.
She slipped over his lap, stumbled as she climbed out, but then she was standing on the ground, looking in at them.
“Mommy, don’t go!” Ellie cried.
Bobby wished the same thing, but he was too surprised by everything happening to speak.
“I’m not going to go for long, sweetie. I promise. I just have to check if Rex is okay. You two stay here. Keep your heads down, below the windows. Keep the doors closed and locked. I’ll be right back.”
Before either Bobby or Ellie could reply, she slapped the lock knob down and closed the door. Through the window, she pointed to the ground and mouthed the word, “Down.”
Bobby ducked his head. Turning it sideways, he saw Ellie was ducked low on the seat as well.
“Maybe you’re right,” she whispered to him.
“About what?” he asked.
“The monster. It got out from under the bed, and now it got your dad.”
***
Tabitha dashed toward the cabin, instinct dictating her actions, telling her that only two things mattered: helping Rex and protecting the kids. There was no hierarchy to these imperatives. They both simply had to be done.
She burst into the cabin, stealth be damned. Her eyes took in the rustic room in a heartbeat.
Deserted.
“Rex?” she hissed urgently.
“Tabs?” his voice came back from the hallway.
She skirted through the room. Rex stood next to a chair facing a closed door. He appeared shocked and skittish.
“What’s going on?” she demanded, some of her fear ebbing at the sight of him unharmed. “What was that noise?”
“That was me,” he said. “I’m trying to get into this room.”
“What’s in it?”
He seemed about to answer, then shook his head. He brought his knee to his chest and drove his foot into the door. The bang seemed to shake the cabin. Wood cracked and splintered.
“Rex!” she said. “Quiet!”
He kicked the door once more.
It burst open in a firework of splinters.
Rex entered the room first, Tabitha following on his heels, curiosity mixing with dread. Two overnight bags sat open on a double bed. A lamp fashioned from snowshoes and garlanded with pinecones stood on a night table. A dresser/mirror combo lined one wall, next to a stiff-looking armchair.
And a body lay facedown on the floor, surrounded by blood.
“Oh!” Tabitha gasped, her hands going to her mouth in surprise.
Rex played the flashlight over the face.
“It’s Tony,” he said woodenly.
Tabitha’s mind spun. “But how…? Then who…?”
“I don’t know,” he said flatly. He went to the body, careful to avoid stepping in the blood. He crouched and felt for a pulse.
“Is he alive?” Tabitha asked, knowing the answer.
Rex shook his head in the negative. He patted down the rear pockets of the man’s jeans. Then, with some effort, he rolled the deadweight body onto its back.
A monstrous incision opened his belly from side to side, nearly identical to the one Daisy had suffered.
Tabitha felt momentarily faint.
Rex rifled through all of the man’s pockets, swearing loudly.
“They’re not here!” he added, referring to the truck keys.
“They have to be somewhere!” Tabitha said, fighting her ballooning panic. We need to go, we need to go, we need to go, she kept thinking over and over while struggling to understand who had been out on the road if Tony had been lying here dead the entire time. “They must be in another room—”
“I’ve checked everywhere!”
“Phones?”
Rex shook his head, running a hand through his hair. He was about to get back to his feet when something in his demeanor changed. He stiffened and became solely focused on the body. He directed the flashlight beam at the smiling, lipless wound. “What in God’s name…?” He extended his hand.
“Rex!” she cried. “What are you doing?”
His hand hovered above the gash for a moment before he plunged it into the bloody tangle of organs.
He’s gone crazy! she thought. He’s lost his mind!
“Rex!” she repeated, though the word was so hoarse with dismay she could barely hear it herself.
Rex removed his hand and held high something shiny pinched between his red fingers.
The truck keys.
CH
APTER 12
Rex stared in shock at the bloody keys. Someone was playing with them. Whoever had killed Tony and Daisy, the jackass was playing with them. He knew Rex and Tabitha and the kids were here on the lake. Somehow he’d known they would head to the Williams’ cabin. Because the keys weren’t for the cops to eventually discover. Why would the cops care about a set of keys to a rusty old pickup truck? The only people the keys mattered to were Rex and present company so they could escape—and the sick bastard knew this!
“What’s going on, Rex?” Tabitha asked in a voice near hysterics. “Why would someone do that with the keys? He must know we need them.” She was backing out of the room, her face a ghostly white in the backsplash of light from the flashlight. “This is fucked. This is so fucked, Rex. He knows! He knows we’re here!”
Rex wasn’t going to argue that point. He snapped to his feet—and stepped in the puddle of blood. He spun in a pirouette before grappling one of the bed’s end posts, reaffirming his balance. “Shit!” Watching where he stepped next, he exited the room. He gripped Tabitha’s hand and led her quickly from the cabin.
For a moment his heart seemed to stop when he didn’t see Bobby or Ellie in the cab of the pickup truck, but he breathed again when he opened the passenger door and saw them crouched in the foot wells.
“Daddy!” Bobby said, the terror on his face morphing into joy.
“Up on the seat,” he said, already rounding the hood.
He slid behind the steering wheel at the same time Tabitha climbed in the passenger door.
“I’m squished!” Ellie protested, as she was pressed tightly between Rex and Bobby.
Rex barely heard her above his pulse thumping inside his head. He jammed the key in the ignition and turned it. The engine coughed, then turned over.
“Are we going home now?” Ellie asked.
“Yeah, honey,” Tabitha said, her voice tight with emotion. “Hold tight.”
Rex flicked on the headlights, then took a moment to familiarize himself with the truck’s controls. He engaged the brake pedal, depressed the clutch, and shifted the stick into first gear. The engine revved and the truck jumped forward. Startled, he let off the clutch. Gears crunched. The truck lurched to a stop and stalled.
“What happened?” Bobby asked.
Rex looked at Tabitha. “Can you drive a manual?”
She shook her head. “Try again! You can fly a jumbo jet, you can drive a silly truck!”
Rex started the vehicle a second time and managed to shift into first without popping the clutch.
“Yay, Dad!” Bobby said as they chugged forward.
“Faster!” Ellie said.
“Shush, guys!” Tabitha said. “Let him concentrate!”
Rex knew he was revving too high. He clutched in and gassed off and shifted from first to second. Gears ground, but not too badly, and then the truck was picking up speed along the dark road.
“Piece of cake!” he said, grinning riotously. He accelerated.
“Not too fast, Rex!” Tabitha cautioned.
He shifted to third. The speedometer needle crept past forty.
With the headlights carving a tunnel through the darkness, Rex kept his eyes glued to the gravel road, doing his best to avoid the worst of the ruts and potholes. Even so, the truck was bumping and shaking on its worn out suspension hard enough to rival some of the worst turbulence he had experienced in the skies.
He eased a little off the accelerator.
“Thank you,” Tabitha said, and a quick glance in her direction revealed she was bracing her arms against the roof and the dash. Bobby and Ellie were hugging each other so neither flew off the seat.
Rex slowed a little more.
“Sorry,” he said. “Just want to get the hell out of here.”
“Let’s get out of here in one piece,” she said.
Rex realized he was as rigid as a statue. He exhaled and felt his entire body sag.
“You guys okay?” he said casually, wanting to signal a return to normality.
“Yeah,” Bobby said, letting go of Ellie.
“Yeah,” Ellie agreed, pushing Bobby’s legs off her. “But can we change cars when we get to the other one? I like it better.”
“In two minutes, sweetie,” Tabitha said.
Remaining in third gear, Rex navigated the beat-up road with general success, tapping the brake and gas pedals when needing to avoid the hazards.
“Cabin should be coming up on the left,” he said.
A few moments later, beyond a phalanx of gray tree trunks, the cabin came into view—at least the cabin’s windows, backlit as they were with the yellow glow of candlelight.
“Watch out!” Tabitha cried.
Rex returned his attention to the road and saw two figures crossing it, one standing, the other lying on his or her side—being dragged? The standing figure spun around just as Rex swerved hard to the right.
The truck roared into the forest. Vegetation slapped the windshield. The steering wheel spun loose from Rex’s grip. He stamped the brake with his foot, though it was too late. The truck crashed into a tree and came to a bone-crushing halt.
***
In his dream Rex was in the Captain’s seat of the doomed Airbus 320 that would crash into the French Alps in nine hours’ time. As the large aircraft climbed into the sky after taking off from JFK airport, he flicked on the autopilot to allow him to scan for other aircrafts in near proximity. He set the altimeters to standard pressure and turned off the landing lights. After confirmation from the high-altitude controller that no pilots in front of him had experienced turbulence, he switched off the seat-belt sign.
Rex turned to his First Officer in the seat next to his. “Good weekend, Freddy?” he asked.
Frederick shrugged. “Didn’t do anything special.”
“Jeanne’s well?” Jeanne was his wife of close to two years now.
“She’s fine.” He seemed about to add something, but didn’t. “How are you and Tabitha?”
“Good. We’re very good, actually.”
“She seemed nice.”
“She liked you too,” Rex said, referring to the time the three of them had a drink at a bar in Sea-Tac Airport.
Below them, New York City disappeared as they coasted out over the Atlantic Ocean. Soon they wouldn’t have any ground-based navigation facilities to rely on, so they performed the final checks to make sure the computer was accurately tracking their position.
With this done, Rex was going to phone the cabin crew on the upper deck to bring them coffee when Fred blurted, “She’s leaving me.”
Rex blinked. “Jeanne? Ah, shit, Freddy.”
“She’s met someone.”
“I’m sorry, man.”
“Some fucking vet. Not even a real doctor.”
Rex noticed the First Officer clenching and unclenching his right fist.
“You’ll be fine,” he said. “There are a lot of other women out there.”
“She’s kicking me out. She wants to keep the house we bought together.”
“There’s no working things through with her?”
Frederick shook his head. “She says we don’t have anything in common anymore. She says she’s bored. She actually told me that. The bitch.” He was still clenching and unclenching his fist.
“Hey, Freddy—you okay?”
The First Officer looked at him. “What do you think, man? My wife is leaving me.”
“Yeah, but I mean… You want to take some time off to deal with it?”
He barked a laugh. “You don’t trust me up here with you?”
Rex shook his head. “I just mean—why not take some time off? Go on a vacation or something. Clear your mind.”
“Jesus, Rex. I’m not going to fly the plane into a goddamn mountain.”
“Well, I’m here if you want to talk.”
“Thanks.”
This was the conversation Rex and Frederick had verbatim a week before Frederick took his life, along with the ot
her one hundred fifty-nine passengers on board Flight 2023.
Which raised the haunting question: Had Rex indeed been derelict in his duty as Captain by not reporting this conversation? Rex had asked himself this a thousand times since the crash, and the conclusion he had come to was that, no, he didn’t believe so. He didn’t know then that his First Officer had suffered previous episodes of depression. In fact, before that day, Freddy had never displayed any odd or depressed behavior whatsoever. To Rex, and the entire flight crew, he had always been a happily married twenty-seven year old doing a job he loved doing. Everyone was entitled to feeling down now and then. Frederick, he’d thought, was just having a down period.
Someone began banging on the flight deck door, shouting to be let in. Suddenly Rex became aware of screaming and pandemonium in the cabin. Then he realized Frederick had started the unscheduled descent that would kill them all. His first thoughts: It’s too early! We’re still over the ocean!
“Fred!” he said, his stomach dropping. “Don’t do this!”
“No can do, Captain.”
Rex tried to pull back on his yoke to gain altitude, but he found he couldn’t move his arms.
“Fred!” he croaked. “Don’t do this!”
The aircraft continued its eighty-degree death-plunge, accelerating, corkscrewing, nose rocking. The white clouds parted. The horizon was nowhere to be seen. Just the ocean, sparkling blue, coming at them far too fast.
So this is what it feels like to know you’re moments away from dying.
An image of Bobby flashed in Rex’s mind, and Tabitha and Ellie, and then—
***
Ellie’s head hurt just as bad as the time she was riding her bicycle without a helmet and lost her balance and swerved into a telephone pole. She not only smacked her head into the pole, but also fell off her bike, skinning her knees and palms.
She almost started crying now, but she knew that probably wouldn’t be a good idea. The monster would hear her and eat her. Maybe if she stayed quiet it would just leave her alone and go away.
But what if it didn’t?
What if it was coming for her right this moment?
She opened her eyes. She was lying on top of Bobby on the truck’s seat. When they crashed she must have hit her head on the dashboard and bounced back onto the seat again. No wonder her mom always told her to wear her seatbelt.
