by Joseph Fink
“Did you listen to what she was saying?” Sasha said. “No one is picking up at 9-1-1.”
“I heard,” he said. “But maybe their number just went down for a couple minutes, or they were experiencing heavy call volume. Or maybe you made that up too. For your sake, I hope it wasn’t that last one.”
He pulled out his cell phone, held down the 9, and waited for the beep. Even though Esther knew it wouldn’t work, she felt some comfort being around Mr. Gabler. He was so utterly boring, so completely without adventure, that he seemed the antidote to all the strangeness of the night so far.
“I’m looking forward to having you out of my home. Come to me at this time of night telling me a story like that.” He shook his head. “I always liked you, Esther. You seemed like a good kid.”
He stood with his phone to his ear for a full minute.
“Huh,” he said. “It’s just ringing.”
“That’s what we told you!” Esther said.
“It’s the truth, Mr. Gabler,” Agustín said.
Mr. Gabler tried again, and there was still no answer.
“Okay,” he said, sounding less angry and more concerned. “Here’s what we’ll do. Come on.”
He led them back out of the kitchen to the front door.
“Let me have a talk with your parents. I’m sure everything’s fine. I’ll walk you back to your house and then we’ll get this settled.”
Esther realized that the only thing that would make someone as boring as Mr. Gabler believe was seeing for himself, so she nodded politely and said, “Sure, Mr. Gabler.”
Outside, the moon was huge and orange on the horizon. The stars twinkled. A cool wind blew, autumn flexing its muscles slightly even in warm California.
“I think we can get this straightened out with a quick word with your parents,” Mr. Gabler said as they walked, to no one in particular. There were no cars on the street. No people. Esther wondered if Mr. Gabler noticed how desolate the entire neighborhood had become. How quiet. Not even the blue light of television flickering in front windows or from second-floor bedrooms.
And maybe they would get back to her house, and her parents would be waiting at the door, worried. They would yell at her, probably ground her, and she would love that. She wanted nothing more in this moment than her dad to say, “What in the world were you thinking?”, for her mom to say, “Are you trying to punish us? Is that it?” with pained disappointment in her voice.
Instead she heard engines. In perfect synchronization, the two white ice cream trucks turned onto the street and approached, side by side. They drove at exactly the same speed, an oncoming wall of headlights and metal.
“Uh, Mr. Gabler,” Esther said.
“Oh look,” he said. “Here’s some other people now. Maybe they’ve seen something.”
“Mr. Gabler, no,” Agustín said.
But Mr. Gabler was already waving at the trucks. The two trucks turned toward each other, barely missing a collision and skidding to a halt in a V-shape blocking the street. Dan hopped out of his truck, and Ed Pumken slumped out of the other. Ed held his hat crumpled in his hand. Dan, as though to show him up, took off his hat, carefully brushed it and fixed any indentations, then put it neatly back on his head.
“Hi, is there a problem, sir?” Dan said to Mr. Gabler.
“Seems these kids are having some kind of emergency. Do you have a cell phone? Mine isn’t getting through to the police.”
Dan made an exaggerated frown, a parody of a concerned citizen.
“Oh no, I’m afraid I don’t have a phone on me. Ed, do you have a phone?”
Ed laughed, an ugly bark.
“No phone either, I guess,” Dan said. “I apologize for that. But I believe I might be able to help you with the children.”
“Yeah?” Mr. Gabler said. The vibe these two were putting out was starting to make him suspicious. He backed up protectively in front of Esther and the others.
“Oh yes,” Dan said. “You see, I told them to go home already. It seems they did not. Always a pity when children are so disobedient, you know?”
“Rotten kids,” Ed said.
“Crude, but not unfair,” Dan said, nodding at his brother. “You see, it is getting late. It will continue to be late. It will stay late for a long, long time. And Mr. Gabler, if I can be honest with you . . .”
“How do you know my name?” Mr. Gabler took a step back, unconsciously spreading his arms a little to cover the kids behind him.
“Mr. Gabler, it would have been better if you had remained in your home, yawned a bit, and then gone to bed. It would have been so much simpler for you to have dreamed through it like all the rest.”
Dan opened up the side of his truck. There was a pile of gleaming, perfect apples, red as the inside of an eyelid, red as the tip of a tongue, red as a fresh paper cut. He grabbed one off the top. Ed smirked in anticipation.
“But it’s okay!” Dan said, in his friendly salesman voice. “We always keep our options open. Just for folks like you. In fact, I’ve prepared quite a special surprise.”
He held up the apple. “Healthiest fruit in the world,” he said. “They’ve done studies, you know. No substitute for an apple.” There was something terribly wrong with the apple. Its skin rippled and bulged, like there were worms writhing inside. Narrow slits broke open in the skin, and viciously sharp razor blades blossomed out of the apple, like terrible flowers, until the entire apple was bristling with deadly edges.
“I’ve prepared quite a surprise indeed,” Dan said. He tossed the razor-blade apple from hand to hand. The razors sank into his skin, and his hands went wet. His smile did not waver once.
ESTHER DIDN’T KNOW what to do in this situation. Nothing in her life’s experience had told her what to do when a man started tossing around an apple studded with razor blades.
Ed laughed at the group’s panic, as they backed up to the side fence of the house along the street. He waved his arms at them, revealing yellow pit stains.
“Boogey, boogey, boogey,” he shouted, and laughed again.
Dan, his fingers red and wet, wound up and threw. The apple shot like a bullet, no arc, pure speed, and—thwick—embedded in the wooden fence behind them. Already he had grabbed another apple from his pile, and it was sprouting razor blades from beneath its skin, making a soft, squishy sound as it transformed.
“Back to my house,” Mr. Gabler said, and they started to run in that direction, but two more apples cut them off, popping into the fence right in front of a startled Agustín, who stopped so abruptly he fell backward into Esther. She caught him and pushed him back upright. Without talking about it, they turned and ran the other way, trying to rush past the trucks, but an apple swished right above Esther’s head, and they had to stop again.
“You had a chance to leave,” Dan said. “I’m afraid you chose not to. We all have decisions in life, and we have to live with the choices we made. Or no longer live with those choices, as the case may be.” He clutched razor apples in both hands. His smile was no longer cool and professional, but had lolled open into a toothy sneer.
“What do you want?” Mr. Gabler shouted.
In answer, Dan set off a flurry of razor apples, landing everywhere on the fence behind them except where they stood. Despite all of the apples he had thrown, the pile in his truck seemed no smaller than before.
“Alright,” Mr. Gabler said. “Okay. Alright. Here’s what we’ll do.” He turned and, in a single fluid movement, kicked the fence with a startling amount of power. Weighed down by all of the apples, the fence tumbled flat. “Run!”
Esther didn’t let herself think about what they were doing, because she knew that their chances were slim, and doubt could easily overtake her, leaving her frozen and in easy reach of Dan Apel’s nightmarish stock of weapons. Instead she leapt over the razor-studded fence and ran into the neighbor’s backyard.
The house was the one across the street from her own. It wasn’t until she was fleeing through the wo
man’s yard that Esther realized how little she knew of this neighbor, or any of her neighbors. Outside of a couple houses right next to her own, she didn’t even know what her neighbors looked like, let alone their names. The old woman whose backyard she was currently sprinting through had only ever been an object of derision in the Gold family, because of the lady’s tendency to call the city about any tiny perceived violation of code.
For instance, her father had once gone outside to find a police officer writing a ticket to one of the Gold family’s own cars, parked in their own driveway.
“Got a call from a neighbor, complaining,” the police officer had said. “This car is blocking a driveway.”
“It’s our car,” her dad said. “In our driveway.”
Even the police officer could see that this was going to be a tricky one to explain to a court, and so he retreated into a look of blank authority.
“It’s blocking the driveway. We got a call from a neighbor.”
This interaction repeated a few times before the cop couldn’t deliver his own argument with conviction and left. The old woman across the street had watched all this from her window, and thrust the curtains shut in frustration when no ticket was issued.
Now Esther was running for her life through the old woman’s backyard. Apples studded with blades whizzed over their heads. As the fruit struck, they spat up dirt clods from the lawn and sprays of pebbles from the path, embedded into the back deck, shattered the stucco on the side of the house. The apples came impossibly fast, no pause between volleys. One deadly missile after another.
“Can you all hop a fence?” Mr. Gabler yelled as they approached the wooden barrier between them and the next neighbor’s yard.
“Yeah,” Agustín said.
“Yes,” Sasha shouted.
Esther had never hopped a fence before and was clumsy under the best of circumstances. She couldn’t believe that apparently Mr. Gabler and even Sasha could hop a fence and she couldn’t. But she could see that this fence was firmly embedded into cinder blocks. It would be difficult to knock down, would slow them at a time when any slowness was fatal. She would have to get over the top somehow.
“Definitely,” she lied.
She hit the fence at a run. She knew that if she swung a leg over, she would get stuck in an awkward straddle, and she didn’t have the upper-body strength to push herself fully over. So in a move that she would never have tried in any situation where she was not fleeing for her life, she flopped herself over in a flailing somersault, landing hard on her back on the other side. Her head just missed the cinder blocks holding the fence up.
“You said you could climb it,” Mr. Gabler said, vaulting the fence with a surprising, well-practiced grace.
She scrambled up. Her neck was sore, but everything else seemed to be working okay.
“Well I made it over, didn’t I?” she groaned.
A truck revved to life behind them, then another.
No time for discussion. Again they ran. She vaguely knew the yard they were fleeing through, having been friends for a brief time with the girl who lived here, Susan Watkins. But Susan’s family had moved out after only a couple years, and the house had been occupied since by a series of increasingly careless renters. This yard was nothing like the paragon of tidiness they had just passed through. The grass of this yard stretched yellow and dry up to their knees. There were hidden dangers within the brittle lawn, bricks and bottles invisible until a toe smacked painfully against them. The back deck consisted of only a fire pit that had not been cleaned in years and two lawn chairs made of ancient plastic strips manufactured in a defiantly ugly yellow.
The apple truck burst through the fence behind them, tires bouncing over the cinder block base like it was nothing. It looked like a simple ice cream truck, but physics appeared meaningless to it. Dan hung out the window. He zipped two apples at them and laughed. One sliced through a lawn chair, and the ugly yellow plastic twanged into two.
The barrier to the next yard was not a fence, but a wall. Concrete blocks. Having gained some confidence from making it over the last fence, Esther let the momentum of her run carry her up the side and off the top. Her landing was complicated by a row of rose bushes planted under the wall, which caught her body about as well as rose bushes could. The pain was immediate and overwhelming, but she didn’t have time to let it slow her down. She pulled herself off the bush and ran again, covered in little red spots where the thorns had gotten her.
“Let me help you next time,” Agustín called.
“I’m doing it. I’m fine,” she said. No one else could make her graceful or give her experience hopping fences that everyone else in the world seemed to mysteriously just have, so she would have to keep using sheer adrenaline to get her over. She started to sprint again, and then came to a skidding halt to keep from falling into the water.
A swimming pool took up most of the yard. Esther’s left foot half hung over the side, and she teetered. There was a blue-gray diving board, hanging at an unsafe angle off its rusted base. An overgrown orange tree leaned over the pool, bursting with fruit, much of which had fallen into the water. The deep end was a bobbing carpet of leaves and oranges. She managed to pull herself back and cut to the right. The rest of the group had cut left, so they ran on either side of the pool toward the next yard. The reflected light from the pool’s surface made ripples over their running bodies.
Bam. The truck blew through the concrete wall as if it were papier-mâché. Not a dent or a scratch. Dan flicked three more apples out of the driver’s-side window, which buzzed past the runners, whipping into the orange tree. A thick branch was neatly severed from the trunk and fell, laden with ripe fruit, into the water.
Esther was at the next wall. This one was taller. She went for it. Everything around her turned white. She had popped her jaw on the top. Her vision came back to her. She fell over the other side. Her face ached. Fortunately, she did not land in any thorns. But the yard held something even more unwelcome.
Ed’s truck had torn through the side gate, and he was parked in the middle of the yard, cutting off their path forward. They came panting to a stop and looked around for an escape route. The wall exploded behind them, and the other truck was in the yard too. Surrounded once again. Esther closed her eyes, waiting for that buzzing sound and the pain that would come after. But Dan didn’t throw another apple. He merely watched with that awful smile, his legs up on the dashboard and his neatly manicured hands behind his head.
Ed got out of his truck with an exasperated huff, rattling up the side panel to reveal a huge pile of orange pumpkins, orange as infection, orange as guts, orange as week-old roadkill. He clamped his grubby hand around a pumpkin’s cartoonishly green and twisted stem.
“Those have knives in them too?” Esther asked.
“My apples have razor blades,” Dan corrected, looking furious again. “Not knives. Come on, they tell stories about me. Get the details right.”
“Sorry. Those pumpkins full of knives like your knife boy over there?” Esther corrected herself.
Dan turned red, but Ed smiled in appreciation for the joke at his brother’s expense.
“Nah,” he said. “Ain’t you ever seen a jack-o’-lantern?”
The pumpkin Ed was holding heaved and morphed, and then the front of it split. Two triangle eyes, a triangle nose, and a wide wicked grin. Before they could react to that, the inside of the jack-o’-lantern sparked alight, a fire so hot it was nearly clear, then the entire pumpkin burst into violent flame. Ed made a quick twist of the wrist and flung it at their feet. The pumpkin exploded into a pool of raging fire, the heat distorting the air around them.
“Through the house,” Esther said, already running. If they stayed where they were, they’d be fried. The others followed her through the back door. In the living room, two men she did not recognize but who had been her neighbors for much of her life were sitting in front of the TV. Both of them were fast asleep, one’s head on the other’s shoulder
. The TV showed flickering blue lines, the only light in the house. The walls seemed alive in the wavering blue light. Esther and the others ran past the television and through to the front door, across the street, on to the house on the other side of the cul-de-sac. Esther desperately turned the knob of the front door. It was locked. Only Take One! Don’t Be Naughty! said a sign on the door, with an arrow pointing to a bowl. The bowl was still heaped high with candy. Not a trick-or-treater in sight.
The pair of trucks came roaring out from either side of the house they had just fled and turned to pincer in on the group at the door. Dan held a razor apple. Ed held a jack-o’-lantern already engulfed in flames.
“Let me,” Mr. Gabler said.
He grabbed the door handle, pulled up on it, and slammed his shoulder into the edge of the door farthest from the hinges. It popped open.
“How did you learn to do that?” Sasha said as they ran into the entryway. The house was full of knickknacks, old-fashioned rotary phones, glass bells printed with names of foreign countries, ceramic figurines of children doing old-timey activities.
“I wasn’t always a dentist, you know,” Mr. Gabler replied. He looked like he wasn’t interested in elaborating on that. They hustled through the kitchen, past a woman snoring at the counter, and into the backyard, where the sound of the truck engines was getting louder by the second. They only had moments before they would be once again surrounded.
“Okay, to the right. Let’s get back to Mr. Gabler’s house,” Esther said.
They went right. Over the fence. This one Esther took with something close to ease, only banging her ankle on the top of it as she swung over. She was getting okay at this.
Another swimming pool, this one covered for the coming winter. Then a yard that was landscaped in a clever way that separated the small yard into sections of garden connected by a meandering path, having the effect of making the yard seem much larger than it was and also making fleeing through it a nightmare of dead ends and obstacles. Then her next-door neighbor’s yard. She didn’t know anything about her neighbors other than their names and faces, and their adorable beagle named Romeo who lived in the front yard. Almost certainly this backyard was full of stray balls and frisbees her family had lost over the fence into the overgrown bushes, never retrieved for fear of having to bother the neighbors.