Allison

by Strand, Jeff

  Allison

  Jeff Strand

  Allison © 2020 by Jeff Strand

  Cover art © 2020 by Lynne Hansen, LynneHansenArt.com

  All rights reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without written permission from the author.

  For more information about the author, visit JeffStrand.com

  Subscribe to Jeff Strand’s free monthly newsletter (which includes a brand-new original short story in every issue) at http://eepurl.com/bpv5br

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Books By Jeff Strand

  Prologue

  Thirty-five years ago

  Dad set down his book and frowned. Nobody should be knocking on the cabin door at all, much less this close to bedtime. It was a loud knock, like somebody was in trouble.

  They rented this cabin every year so that Mom and Dad could escape the stress of their jobs. They both worked where people were angry a lot, so they’d come out here for one week each summer, far from everybody else. “I get to be with the two people in the world I actually like,” Dad would say, though he’d grin when he said it, because he liked plenty of other people.

  Mom would paint and take lots of walks. Dad would bring a giant stack of books and rarely leave his recliner except for meals, bed, and the outhouse. Allison would read and draw and take walks with Mom and make up songs and play games and write stories and do whatever she wanted from moment to moment. She loved it out here.

  Dad got up and walked over to the door. “Can I help you?” he called out.

  “We’re lost,” a man said on the other side.

  Dad sighed and opened the door. Somebody on the front porch pushed him so hard that he almost fell. He hadn’t even regained his balance before two men walked into the cabin. One had greasy black hair and the other had greasy blond hair. Both of them had guns.

  Allison screamed.

  “Shut that kid up or you know what happens,” said the man with black hair, pointing his gun at Mom. The man with blond hair already had his gun pointed at Dad.

  Allison dropped her crayon and hurried over to Mom’s chair. Mom put her arms tightly around her.

  The men might have been brothers. Their faces looked the way Dad’s did at the end of the week, since he didn’t shave while he was on vacation. They were covered in sweat but shivering as if they were cold. Their clothes were dirty and torn and they could have been wandering out in the forest for a long time.

  “We didn’t want this,” said the man with blond hair. “It’s not our fault you never left. If you’d gone somewhere, just for a few minutes, we could’ve come in and nobody would have to get hurt.”

  “Nobody still has to get hurt,” said Dad. “What do you want?”

  “What do you think we want?” The man acted like it was the stupidest question he’d ever heard. “Money. And everything else valuable you’ve got in here.”

  The black-haired man walked over to Mom’s chair, keeping the gun pointed at her. “You’ve got a wedding ring, right? Give it here.”

  Mom immediately tugged on her ring. It wouldn’t come off.

  “Are you playing around with me?” the man asked, his face ugly with rage.

  “Rings aren’t supposed to just pop right off! I won’t give you any problems.” She pointed toward the kitchen area. “There’s soap over there.”

  “We don’t have time to screw around with soap! Just give me the ring before I shoot it off!”

  Mom tugged on her ring so hard that it looked like she almost broke her finger. After the ring came off, she handed it to the man. He held it up to look at it more closely, then shoved it into his pocket.

  “Your ring, too,” the man with blond hair told Dad. Dad quickly took off his wedding ring and handed it over. “Now your wallet.”

  “It’s in the bedroom.”

  “Why’s it in the bedroom?”

  “Listen to me, sir,” said Dad. He was using the tone of voice that Allison recognized from when she got in big trouble, where she could tell he was trying really hard to stay calm. “I’m completely willing to cooperate with you gentlemen, but I need you to work with me. I get that you’re desperate and I get that you’re hurting. But my family and I were just sitting around in a cabin enjoying our vacation. Of course my wallet would be in the bedroom. It’s not a trap.”

  The man with blond hair vigorously nodded. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, you’re right, you’re right.” He pointed to the other man. “Go get it.”

  The other man hurried into the bedroom.

  “It’s next to the bed,” Dad called out.

  The man emerged quickly with the wallet. He tried to shake it open while holding the gun, but realized that wasn’t going to work so he tucked the gun into the waistline of his jeans. He opened it up and took out a few bills. “What the hell is this?” he demanded, angrily shaking the cash at Dad. “There’s like thirty bucks!”

  “How much did you think was going to be in there?” Dad asked.

  “More than thirty bucks!” The man stuffed the cash into his front pocket, then flung the wallet to the floor. He took out his gun again.

  “We were never going to be a big score,” said Dad. “You’ve got two rings and thirty dollars. Take them and go buy what you need.”

  “Or maybe we should kill all three of you. Tear this place apart. See what you’re hiding.”

  “I just need you to be reasonable. How about our car? Take the car. It’s parked about half a mile away. I’ll give you the keys and tell you where it is.”

  The man with black hair pointed his gun at Mom and sneered. “How about we have some fun instead?” He licked his lips and looked at Allison. “How old are you?”

  “Leave her alone,” said Mom.

  “How old?”

  Allison looked him in the eye. “Ten.”

  The man chuckled. “Wow. I thought you were at least twelve. Big for your age. Ten, huh? That’d be interesting.”

  “The fuck’s the matter with you?” the other man said.

  “I was kidding!”

  “You were kidding because I called you out on it.”

  “No, it was a joke.”

  “If I’d gone along with it, you wouldn’t have hesitated. That is some diseased shit. You need to sort out your issues.”

  “It was a joke!” the black-haired man said. “I was trying to lighten the mood!”

  “Why the hell would we need the mood lightened?”

  “I—I don’t know. Why not? It was a joke, okay? I’m not into that stuff. If you’d gone along with it, I would’ve shot you in the face.”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “No, I’m not threatening you! Be real! I’m saying that I made a joke
and you took it seriously. If you don’t have a sense of humor, that’s not on me.”

  As the men argued, Allison noticed that Dad was glancing around the cabin. She thought he might be trying to find the closest weapon. She hoped he didn’t do anything—the men weren’t paying attention to him, but they both still had guns.

  “Fine,” said the black-haired man. “It wasn’t funny. Let’s just go, okay?”

  “I’m not ready to go.”

  “You were the one calling me diseased!”

  “Because you were going all pedophile and shit. The mother ain’t ten years old.” He leered at Mom. “What are you? Twenty-nine? Thirty?”

  Mom didn’t answer. She looked like she was about to cry.

  “If you touch her,” said Dad, “I’ll kill you.”

  “Oh, you will not. You’ll watch it happen and you won’t do a damn thing, because even if you don’t care if I blow your brains out, I know you don’t want me to shoot your little girl. If you want, we’ll lock her in the bedroom so this doesn’t fuck her up too much.”

  Allison knew she had to use her power.

  Her power frightened Mom and Dad. They didn’t understand it, she couldn’t really control it, and they mostly just tried to pretend that it was a figment of their imagination. But no matter how scared they were of what she could do, these men were much scarier, and she wasn’t going to let them hurt her parents.

  She couldn’t just do it whenever she wanted. Only during what Mom called “intensely emotional moments.” This was certainly one of them.

  She looked at the man with black hair, stared at him as hard as she could, concentrated with all of her might, and tried to make him walk out the door.

  He took a couple of steps backward, away from them. His eyes widened in surprise, and then he just looked confused, like he didn’t understand what was happening to him.

  He was still pointing his gun at Mom. Allison didn’t like that.

  The black-haired man very slowly lowered his gun. His arm twitched as he tried to stop this from happening. Allison wondered what it felt like. An invisible hand pushing down on his arm?

  Then he shrieked in pain and dropped the gun as his arm broke.

  It was broken bad. Allison could already see the blood through his shirtsleeve.

  The blond-haired man, who’d seen everything, just gaped at his friend. Allison’s power scared Mom and Dad, and she’d never actually hurt them with it. These men had to be absolutely terrified.

  Good.

  She couldn’t control her power enough to make them walk out of the cabin, so she had to destroy these men, make it so they couldn’t hurt anybody else. It wasn’t evil. She was protecting the people she loved.

  She concentrated on the blond man’s leg. It suddenly bent upward, breaking at the knee. He screamed and fell to the floor.

  He still had his gun.

  His other leg bent up and broke. That wasn’t what she was trying to do. A broken rib shot up through his chest. That also wasn’t what she was trying to do. She tried really hard to focus all of her attention on his hand with the gun. When all five of his fingers suddenly bent backwards until they snapped, she was happy.

  His head twisted around and he stopped moving.

  Oh, God.

  Had she killed him?

  Was she a murderer?

  The black-haired man ran toward the door. Allison thought she should let him go—all she’d really wanted to do was get these men out of the cabin—but what if he came back? What if he hurt somebody else?

  What if he told somebody what she could do, and Allison got locked up and studied? Experimented upon?

  These were all good reasons not to let him flee the cabin. Though Allison also couldn’t pretend that she wasn’t simply angry.

  She broke both of his legs at the same time. He fell forward and hit the floor of the cabin so hard that blood shot up from his chin.

  She broke his legs even worse.

  Then his arms.

  She tried to split open his skull but couldn’t quite make that happen. Though she did get him to smash his face against the floor a few more times.

  Then, horrified, Allison realized that she’d lost control of herself. The blond-haired man was dead and the black-haired man was so badly broken that he couldn’t hurt Mom, Dad, or anybody. She needed to calm down. She needed to stop.

  She closed her eyes and took a few long, deep breaths. Her whole body was shaking, and maybe she’d have to go for a walk by herself to completely get this to pass, but the worst of it was over. She’d be forgiven. She’d had no other choice. Yes, it was nightmarish, but it was a good thing that she’d done. Maybe she was even a hero.

  Allison opened her eyes. As she looked around the cabin, she saw the dead and broken bodies of Mom and Dad.

  1

  Allison Teal tried to figure out what to name her new cat. The poor little guy was skinny, arthritic, and had cataracts in both eyes. The people who’d either abandoned him or found him somewhere had just left him outside of the animal shelter, holding the end of his leash down with a large rock to make sure he didn’t run away.

  He hadn’t tried to hide when Allison brought him home earlier that afternoon. He seemed to know that his opportunities for adoption weren’t great and that he was getting a pretty sweet deal here. He’d gobbled down some dry cat food, done some exploring, and was now asleep and purring on the electric blanket she’d set on the couch.

  The heartbreak of owning a pet that had already lived most of its life was coming—and Allison was devastated every single time—but it was worth her own pain to make this cat’s last years happy ones.

  At fifteen, she’d ended up with a foster family who didn’t care if she got a dog as long as it didn’t shit in the house. She’d gotten Smiley, an eleven-year-old beagle with one eye who walked with a limp. Her foster dad asked why the fuck she’d want that thing, and she’d said she wanted a dog that nobody else would love.

  What she couldn’t say was, “Well, Scott, I have these abilities I can’t control and I’m scared that I might accidentally kill my own pet. If that happens, I want to at least be able to tell myself that I saved him from the gas chamber, and that he was still better off for having met me.”

  Allison was almost forty-six years old now, and she’d never accidentally killed a pet. She wasn’t even sure her powers worked on animals. But she continued to adopt old pets (she disliked the term “rescue,” which felt like she’d carried them out of a burning building), the uglier the better.

  Only one at a time, though. Her house was no zoo.

  The black and grey hair on his side kind of looked like a spiral. “Spiral” was a better name than “Ugly-Ass Old Cat.” Maybe she’d go with that. There was plenty of time to decide; it wasn’t as if she’d have any visitors to ask the cat’s name.

  She left Spiral on the couch and went into the kitchen to fix a snack. It wasn’t a long walk. Her house was tiny, but she didn’t need much space indoors. This house had suited her needs for the past ten years because it was isolated yet not too isolated.

  She couldn’t live too close to other people. Certainly couldn’t live in an apartment. She couldn’t take the risk of sobbing over the death of a beloved pet and discovering that she’d murdered her next-door neighbors. Intense emotions were what unleashed it. It had gotten her kicked out of one foster home for breaking another kid’s arm—only his arm, thank God—and had caused various other problems in her life.

  A couple of times she’d had to quickly pack up and move far away.

  Allison had tried life as an all-out hermit for a while, and that simply didn’t work for her. The company of a dog wouldn’t keep her from going insane. A decade ago, with her financial situation relatively stable, she’d bought this small house on a large plot of land, with nobody else on her street, and kept mostly to herself. But when she wanted to make the short drive to Youngstown, Ohio, she could.

  She’d never had a lover. Romantic relati
onships were incomprehensible for someone who had to maintain an even temper whenever she was around other people. She controlled her mood with prescription drugs, but unless she wanted to go full-on zombie, it wasn’t enough.

  No friends. Only casual acquaintances, just enough to have human company once in a while. If she got together with a group of friends and they laughed themselves silly at a hilarious anecdote, she could shatter somebody’s ribcage.

  She couldn’t hold a regular job. This had been a real problem when she was first on her own, until she’d found work as a medical transcriptionist where she could do all of the work at home. She’d had to visit the office every day to drop off her diskette and pick up the new cassettes, but that wasn’t a “high emotion” kind of thing. Now she had a full-time accounting job, one she could do entirely from home, with conference calls and webcam meetings replacing the need to go inside a building and interact with other people. It was high pressure, high stress work, but that was fine as long as the people who generated the stress were nowhere near her.

  It was not a hell on earth existence, but it was certainly a disappointing one.

  Her power was a total curse. No plus side at all. If she’d been able to move physical objects, she could’ve been a freaking superhero! She could’ve been the most productive, most famous construction worker ever. Or she could’ve been a magician, astonishing audiences with her “illusion” of moving things with her mind. Telekinetic powers in general would be awesome, but hers only worked on living things, and perhaps only on humans.