He placed his hat back on his head, dusted himself off, and switched his gait from a cavalier jaunt to cautious, creeping steps as he approached the metal shed.
I stood back as he yanked on the handle.
The rusty door squealed open. Something fluttered inside. Then, like something from a bad horror movie, a dozen or so bats came darting out of the shed right at us.
Grayson covered his face with his arms and screamed like a little girl. “Aaaahhhh!”
I nearly bit through my lip, but it didn’t help. I burst out laughing anyway. “Don’t tell me the great monster chaser is afraid of bats!”
Grayson’s eyes scanned the sky with disgust. “Rats with wings. That’s all they are.”
I pouted. “Even poor Batman?”
Grayson shot me one of his unreadable expressions. But if I had to guess, I’d say I’d just stepped in bat crap. I squelched the giggles banging against my tonsils. It wouldn’t do to get fired on my second day at work. I was still in awe that I’d survived day one.
“What now?” I asked.
Grayson took a deep breath and picked up as if nothing had happened. “Arlene’s definitely not holed up in there. It’s worse than their cabin.”
I shook my head. “Gross. Don’t remind me. No woman in her right mind would stay in that filthy, falling-down hole in the woods.”
Grayson gave a quick nod. “So either Arlene’s run off, or there’s another place she and Lester were supposed to meet when the end of the world hit the fan.”
I smirked. Grayson’s messed-up metaphors were becoming part of his charm. Like the cute guy in high school I let get away with saying “supposably.”
“But where else could she be?” I asked, glancing around the backyard. I waved my hand, and the thorn from a straggly rosebush pricked my skin. For some reason—maybe the pain—I thought of my mother.
The day after my father’s funeral, she’d run off with a guy named David Applewhite, who, I found out a couple of days ago, was my biological father. Maybe she hadn’t wanted to waste another second of her life with the wrong man.
Maybe the same thing held true for Arlene Jenkins.
“Maybe she really did run away,” I said to Grayson. “You heard those guys at the bar last night. None of them wanted Lester Jenkins on their prepper team. Maybe his wife didn’t, either.”
Grayson mulled over the idea as he inspected a rusty bicycle half buried in weeds. “Why would she have stayed with him this long, then?”
“Two reasons,” I said. “One, he was alive. Two, he owned an AK-47.”
Grayson smirked. “Fair enough.” He dusted his hands off. “I guess that marks the end of the line for this case.”
I sighed. “I guess you’re right,” I said as I stepped up onto a raised, wooden deck. It was the only thing in the backyard that seemed in halfway decent repair.
The heels of my new boots made hollow tapping sounds as I crossed the boards. I thought I heard the sounds echo back.
Strange.
“Did you hear that?” I asked.
Grayson looked up from the garden gnome he was examining. “What?”
“I thought I heard tapping. Or something. I’m not sure.”
Grayson’s eyes locked on mine. He put an index finger to his lips to shush me, and scanned the yard. I walked across the deck toward him. The echoing taps sounded again.
“Listen!” I said. “Did you hear that? Like muffled banging. Maybe from behind the neighbor’s fence?”
Grayson grabbed my arm. “I think it’s coming from under your feet.”
I shot him a look. “Well, duh, but I’m talking about—”
“No. I mean from under the deck.”
My eyes widened. “What?”
Grayson tugged me off the deck and scanned its perimeter with the intensity of a cougar on the hunt. He grabbed a plank and pushed.
A sinister glee swept across his face. “Aha!”
Chapter Twenty
GRAYSON YANKED UPWARD, and half the deck behind Arlene Jenkins’ house rose up like a cellar door. Underneath it was a concrete floor. In the center of the concrete was an oval, metal door I figured must’ve been salvaged from a submarine.
“What the hell is that?” I asked.
Grayson gave me a sideways glance. “Don’t tell me you’ve never seen a bomb shelter before.”
“Bomb shelter? In Florida? Dig too deep here and you hit water.”
Grayson stared at the gunmetal gray door. “It’s a fallout shelter, all right.”
Grayson picked up an abandoned rake and banged it against the metal door. From inside, the same number of beats repeated.
My mouth went dry. “You think Lester locked his wife down there?”
Grayson shrugged. “Who else could it be?”
“Cripes, Grayson! The guy’s an animal! Help me get this open!”
I knelt down and yanked on the industrial-sized combination padlock bolting the door closed. Whoever was inside banged out a few more beats. I looked up at Grayson. “We need a welding torch to cut through this thing.”
“Hold up a second.”
Grayson ran off down the side yard toward the front of the house. The faint banging resumed again.
“It’s okay,” I yelled at the bunker door. “We’re here to help.”
The banging stopped. Either whoever was down there had heard me, or they’d given up. I wrung my hands until Grayson finally reemerged from around the side of the house.
My jaw dropped open. Grayson had a stethoscope around his neck. In his hand he toted a grapefruit-sized, white crystal.
What the hell?
Caught between a weirdo above ground and one below, I wasn’t sure what to do next. I eyed the crystal, then the stethoscope. “You gonna perform a séance or an EKG?”
Grayson shot me some side-eye. “I left my shrunken heads in my other RV. Now shut it and watch the master at work.”
Grayson cracked his knuckles, knelt down, and laid the crystal on the ground beside him. He put on the stethoscope, then placed the end on the padlock. He twirled the dial on the combination lock to the right. His eyebrow ticked up. He turned the dial to the left. One more turn to the right and he looked up at me triumphantly.
“Voilà.”
He yanked on the lock.
It didn’t open.
I smirked as his victory face collapsed.
“Crap. Hold on a second.”
Grayson tried the same routine again. Right, left, right. This time, the padlock released. He picked up the crystal and glanced my way. “Brace yourself. Here we go.”
“What’s the crystal for?” I asked.
“To cold-cock the sucker.”
I swallowed hard, then held my breath.
With the crystal in his right hand, Grayson’s left hand slid the lock’s thick, metal pin from the latch. He glanced up at me, licked his lips, and curled his fist around the handle to yank open the door.
He never got the chance.
The portal door flew open as if kicked by a mule. It struck Grayson squarely under his chin. He sailed backward and landed flat on his back on the deck, knocked out cold.
“Grayson!” I screamed. But then a shadow caught my eye. I turned back toward the bunker. To my horror, something pale and hairy peered out from the opening like a giant, grotesque pupa hatching from an underground cocoon.
Reeking of death and smeared with blood, the creature flashed its savage eyes at me.
I froze in place.
Paralyzed, I was helpless as it lunged at me—bloody teeth snapping—red claws flailing.
I heard a gunshot.
Something struck my head.
My knees hit the deck.
The rest of me quickly followed.
Chapter Twenty-One
SOMEONE SLAPPED MY face.
Not woman-gently. Man-gently.
In other words, not gently enough.
“Ow!” I yelped and opened an eye. A black silhouette stood ove
r me, the midmorning sun burning a corona around its edges.
“Thank goodness,” a man’s voice said. “I thought I was going to have to take you to the hospital.”
I squinted up at Officer Wells. The glare off his belt buckle burned holes into my eye sockets.
“No hospitals,” I muttered.
He offered me a hand. I took it. As he pulled me to my feet, I couldn’t help but notice blood smears all over his nice, crisp uniform.
“What happened to you?” I asked. Then it all came flooding back to me.
The bunker. The submarine door. The monster!
I grabbed Wells by the shoulders and nearly jumped into his arms. “Where is it?” I screeched. “What the hell is that thing?”
“Calm down,” he said, patting me on the back. “You’re okay. You found our missing person, Arlene Jenkins.”
I felt woozy and sick to my stomach. “That ... thing ... in the bunker? That was Arlene Jenkins? But ... she looked like ... she ... she came at me like an animal!”
Wells took me by the arm, steadying me. “She was a bit on the wild side, I’ll give you that. Tried to put out my lights with a socket wrench. I had to wrestle her all the way to the front yard.” Wells shook his head. “Pinning her down wasn’t easy. If you ask me, that woman could turn pro.”
I rubbed the knot on my head. “She attacked you?”
“I wouldn’t go so far as to call it an attack. The poor woman wasn’t in her right mind. Freddy says she’s hysterical. Who wouldn’t be? She’s been locked down in that bunker for God knows how long.”
I shuddered at the thought. “Where is she now?”
“Inside. Freddy—I mean, Dr. Crum—is examining her right now.”
“Here?”
Wells nodded and tipped his hat. “Yes ma’am. That’s one of the perks of living in a small town. Doctors still make house calls.”
“Where’s Grayson?”
“Now you think of me,” he called out. “I’m okay, by the way.”
I turned to see him sprawled out in a deck chair. He waved at me weakly with the hand that wasn’t busy holding a baggie of ice to his chin.
“Can you stand?” Office Wells asked him.
“Yeah.”
“Come with us, then.”
Wells held me up by my elbow and led me into the house. Grayson followed behind us, grousing the entire way to the kitchen.
I rubbed the knot on the side of my head, then examined my fingertips. No blood. I looked up at Wells. “I thought I heard a gunshot.”
“You did. It was me.” Wells patted his holstered gun. “I was responding to a call a couple doors down. Shot a four-foot rattlesnake curled up on Mrs. Dolan’s welcome mat.”
I grimaced. “Oh.”
“Saw your RV and figured I’d stop and see what you two were up to.” Wells shot us both sour looks. “You guys seem to have a penchant for trespassing on the Jenkins’ private property.”
I bit my lip and looked down.
“But seeing as how you found Arlene, I’ll let this one go.”
A flashback of the bloody monster coming at me made me flinch. “How’d you figure out that thing was Arlene?”
Wells shrugged. “Process of elimination. Not too many platinum blondes around here. Especially ones with inch-long red nails and gold front teeth.”
Geez. I would certainly hope not.
Wells picked up a framed photo from the countertop. “See?”
I crinkled my nose at the photo of the bleach-bottle blonde smiling next to a dour-faced Lester Jenkins. She was flashing a set of grillz that would’ve given Urkel street cred. “What’s with the gold teeth, anyway?”
Wells opened the refrigerator and pulled out two bottles of water. He handed me one. “Portable wealth.”
I twisted open the cap. “Huh?”
“You know,” Grayson said, then winced. “Like during World War I and II. Whenever the economy tanks, gold remains a valuable form of legal tender.” Grayson wiggled his jaw from side to side like a snake, then pressed the baggie of ice back up against it.
“For real?” I asked Wells.
He nodded. “Pretty standard prepper protocol.”
I grimaced and tried, unsuccessfully, not to think about how one actually conducted a transaction involving one’s own teeth. An incisor for a sack of groceries? A molar for a tank of gas? Would Arlene have to knock out her teeth herself, or would her creditor do the deed? As a post-apocalyptic form of currency, it seemed to me that no one had actually thoroughly thought that plan through.
“Seems like a painful way to do business,” I said. “Yanking out your own teeth.”
“Grillz slip on over your teeth,” Grayson said.
Huh. Maybe they did think it through.
Wells handed Grayson a bottle of water. “Y’all drink up. You need to stay hydrated. And stay put. I’m going to check on Dr. Crum and Mrs. Jenkins.”
Wells disappeared down the hall. Grayson tapped me on the shoulder, making me jump. “Jittery, are we?”
I scowled. “Bats. Monsters. Rattlesnakes. What next? And don’t say aliens!”
Grayson grinned, then winced. He pressed his baggie of ice into my hand. “Hold this. I wanna get a peek inside that bomb shelter.”
“Grayson! Stop!”
But he was already at the sliding glass door. I held my breath as he opened it, scrambled across the deck, and disappeared into the underground bunker.
Great. How am I supposed to stall Officer Wells? Ask for more ice?
I slunk down the hallway and peeked inside the room I’d seen Wells go into. He was talking to Dr. Crum, who had somehow managed to find an outfit even more absurd than the donut shirt and pizza pants.
The doctor was wearing Birkenstocks and a burlap sack-dress tied at the waist with twine.
What the?
A moan drew my attention to Arlene Jenkins. She was lying in bed, her hands tied to the bedframe with what appeared to be strips of torn sheet. Her fingers were raw.
Double what the?
I stepped inside the room. “What’s going on in here?”
Arlene’s wild eyes locked on me. “Witch!” she hissed.
Both men’s heads jerked in my direction.
Wells rushed over, grabbed my forearms, and pulled me out of the room while Arlene screamed her head off.
“Why is she tied down?” I asked angrily. “Her hands ... the blood. Is she injured?”
“Calm down,” Wells said. “Nothing serious. She broke a few fingernails digging at the door trying to get out. We’ve got her restrained, but just until she calms down and comes to her senses.”
Crum joined us in the hallway. “Keep it down. I just gave her a sedative.”
I stared at the doctor. “She thought I was a witch.”
Crum shrugged. “Don’t take it personally. She thought I was a space alien trying to conduct experiments on her.”
“Really?” I studied Crum’s burlap ensemble. “From where? Planet Bedrock? What’s with the potato sack?”
Crum sighed. “It’s part of—”
Arlene screamed again.
Crum glanced at the door. “Listen, I’ll explain later.”
I frowned. “What’s going to happen to her?”
Crum slapped on his soothing doctor face. “She’ll calm down. She’s just a bit panicked. Trauma from being trapped in that bunker. I’ll stay here with her until she comes out of it.”
I frowned. “Doesn’t she have any relatives nearby? A sister, maybe?”
“No,” Wells said. “But Lester has a half-brother. Hank Chambers. I’ve already called him. He’s on his way.”
Grayson came hobbling down the hallway toward us. He eyed Crum’s sack-dress. “What’s up, doc? Laundry day?”
Crum blew out a breath. “I was on my way to Dreadmore when Wells called me.”
“Dreadmore?” I asked.
“It’s a kind of Medieval-themed survivalist camp,” Wells explained. “Preppers go out th
ere to practice living off the land.”
Grayson nodded at Crum. “I can definitely see the appeal. I mean, why wait around for some lousy apocalypse when you can live today like it already happened?”
Chapter Twenty-Two
“YOU SURE YOU’RE OKAY to drive?” I asked Grayson as we walked down the Jenkins’ driveway. “You might have a slight concussion. And it looks like you’ve got an alien creature trying to hatch out of your chin.”
Grayson shrugged. “I’ve lived through worse. How’s your bean counter?”
I felt the lump on the side of my head. “Lived through worse.”
We climbed into the RV. Grayson turned the ignition, hit the gas, and the Jenkins’ rundown, cookie-cutter neighborhood slowly disappeared in the rearview mirror. I turned to Grayson. He appeared deep in thought.
“Let me guess. Dreaming of joining the Dreadmore clan?”
Grayson snorted. “Hardly. Just trying to wrap my head around this whole thing. Jenkins locking his wife in that bunker. What if we’d never found her? Makes me wonder how many preppers might’ve already met a similar fate.”
I shuddered. “I don’t want to think about it. Where are we headed now?”
“I say let’s grab some lunch and get out of here. Lester Jenkins got his butt kicked by some disgruntled country boy. Arlene got locked in a fallout shelter by her husband. Preppers have a penchant for burlap and AK-47s. Case closed.” He turned to me. “I’ve seen enough. Agreed?”
“No.”
Grayson shot me a surprised glance. “Really?”
I shrugged. “Arlene thought Dr. Crum was an alien. That he wanted to do experiments on her. Doesn’t that seem strange to you?”
“Meh. Not that strange.”
“You’re kidding, right?”
Grayson laughed. “Listen, Drex. Nobody’s willing to admit it, but deep down inside, everybody fantasizes about being anally probed.”
Total sicko.
“Grayson, the poor woman was trapped underground for days! She was traumatized! Hysterical!”
“Exactly my point. It was psychosis. Aliens had nothing to do with it. I’d be off my rocker, too, if I’d been buried in a tin can with nothing but deer jerky and a stack of old Chuck Norris DVDs.”
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