Until the Change, Wilma had told herself that she’d chosen wisely when she had returned from college to stay, embracing the safe and the familiar; told herself that withdrawing from Hank’s affections all those years back had been about valuing the solid, stable life she’d worked so hard to craft.
But what had she chosen, really? What bargain had she struck?
Wilma felt a silken pressure against her leg, saw Imp brushing up against her, seeking reassurance. She spied Mortimer and Theodora and the others crouched nearby, tremulous and watchful, unnerved by the unaccustomed intrusions.
Wilma reached down to stroke Imp. As the others drew close, she brought her heightened senses once more to the struggles within her house, and without.
Cal led the way, the long weeds rustling and whispering around their knees and across the six-foot tin shields. It was only when they got within a few yards of the Wishart house that he was able, suddenly, to see the place clearly in the flare of Doc’s lantern. The stink of decay, of things unidentifiable and terrifying, grew stronger as they approached.
Doc whispered, “Ty shto ahuyel.”
And Cal could feel it. Whatever was inside screamed at them, hurling against them its power and its will: Stay out of here! Stay out! Stay out!
He shifted his sword in his hand, signaled them into formation. They had shaped the pieces of tin so that, when joined, they became a kind of turtle shell. A clumsy solution, but they’d been crippled by lack of tools and time.
Doc, Colleen and Goldie had just taken note of Cal’s gesture, begun to move, when a sudden stench billowed from the open door of the house. Colleen said, “Watch it!” even before the glow of the lantern picked up movement inside. A grunter was getting to its feet, slowly, staggering, and no wonder: dead for a week, rotting, swollen, decayed eyes staring. .
With an inarticulate gluey howl, another grunter corpse launched itself at them out of the weeds beside the porch, a rusted pair of pruning shears in one hand.
Colleen cursed, swung at it with her wrench with a blow that connected in a sodden horrible splat. But Cal knew, maneuvering the bulky shield and slashing at the creature that lumbered from the porch, killing was not the answer. They were dead already. The dispassionate precision that had taken hold during his battle with Stern returned. Cal cut, not at the head or face, but first at the hands, then at the feet.
Goldie was beside him, grappling and shoving at the attacker with makeshift pike and shield, keeping it at bay while Cal hacked. He heard Colleen curse again, and then snarl, “You dead son of a bitch, will you lay down already!” and turned, to see the smashed, reeling remains of the grunter trying to get up to attack again. He cut off the thing’s feet, sickened and hating himself, even knowing it could neither feel nor think.
The two corpses were still trying to crawl after Cal and his friends as they sprang up the porch steps and into the dark of the house, the tin of their four-walled citadel clattering into place. A whirlwind met them. Junk and dust and the very fragments of the house pounded against the reverberating metal. Splintered wood flew with the hideous velocity of crossbow bolts, denting their shields, bruising them, staggering them sideways. Bits of wire and springs writhed beneath their jolting shell, caught and tore at their ankles, stabbed through shoes while the dust of decades billowed into an impenetrable cloud.
Choking, Cal thrust the others out behind him, Doc limping from a shard of wood driven through the muscle of his calf. Back in the blackened, gore-clotted weeds, a yard from where they’d entered, they stood together gasping.
Colleen said, “House, one. New Yorkers, zip.”
Cal rasped out, “Again. Momentum.” He turned to Doc, “You up to it?”
Doc nodded, gray-faced. “Into the reactor.”
They braced. Cal waited a moment, gauging distance and direction. “Now!”
They plunged forward, the boards of the porch buckling and ripping under their feet and the joists underneath spearing up at them. Cal kicked the lock of the inner door with all his strength. It splintered inward and they pounded through as one, grouped beneath their shields.
The lantern Doc held exploded in his hand. He threw it away from him, stumbling, lost them fleetingly in blackness. Goldie cried out, and fireballs whirled into being, illuminating the onrush of missiles: cans and broken glass, iron burners from the stove and pieces of china and plastic sharp as razors. They lurched back together, shields clattering, an instant before the maelstrom. It staggered them, but this time Cal shouted, “Move!”
They battled forward, Cal squinting between the shields’ joining, wavering slits. Dust-thickened moonlight and sputtering, dimming fireballs painted visions suited for a madhouse.
In the corner, the refrigerator heaved and twisted, wrenching itself like a chained bull to get loose. The very baseboards and the moldings of the ceiling undulated and jerked, popping nails, battling to free themselves, to join the killing assault.
The space of the kitchen seemed to distort, twisting under the impact of malevolent will. The walls moved, cupboards gaped. Then, with the speed of a striking snake, the wallpaper pattern hissed out from the walls in gripping loops of thorny rope, and snared Colleen’s foot.
Colleen went down hard, both hands encumbered, corrugated tin slamming the floor beneath her forearm as her wrench sailed into an ebony void.
Their circle was broken. All about them, shards of broken dishes, scattered and corkscrewed silverware, smashed window glass slowly rose from their resting places and began to swirl in a large but closing ring, increasing into a howling, savage storm.
At the same moment, a dead grunter inches from Colleen heaved itself up from the floor where it had lain for weeks by the smell, oozing, bones showing through the shreds of its flesh. Cal slashed at it as Colleen wriggled free of her tangling shield, rolling away into the ruins of the kitchen table, which she immediately grasped as a weapon.
The table wheeled and thrashed in her grip. Cal handed off his sword to Doc, jerked Colleen up and back against him, and stamped on her shield’s curving top to stand it upright. She seized it, their circle closed again-and the storm within the house exploded with a screech.
Through the kitchen and down the hall, Wilma had directed them. It’s the door on the left.
Only in the darkness there seemed to be a hundred doors, all banging open and shut, with nothing behind any of them but black. The roaring tempest filled ears and minds, the house rocked on its foundation with a violence that wrung groans from the wood and brick and nails.
A voice screaming: GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT. Screaming in terror.
It was afraid.
Mortally afraid.
Images of icy water, of screaming voices, of blue sparks swirling out of emptiness. .
Doc yelled, “Cal!” as he went down. Cal, wrenching at the single door that hadn’t slammed open and shut, turned back. A sliver of floorboard had speared Doc from below, piercing his thigh.
Colleen, shifting her shield to shelter them both, was already dragging the physician back to the outer door. Goldie, standing alone and vulnerable in the no-man’s land between, looked to Cal, questioning.
The knob was in Cal’s hand, held shut, it seemed, not by a lock but by an invisible other on the opposite side.
With a desperation, a rage beyond his own comprehension, Cal jerked back. The door gave. Only a few inches. Only for an instant.
Two faces turned toward him. Identically featured and yet so different as to chill. Moonlit phantoms in blackness.
One substantial. . and one like a reflection in glass.
The knob leapt from Cal’s hand; the door slammed shut.
Cal dove for Goldie just as a huge serving dish sliced his way, grabbed him by the back of his vest and pulled him back. Cal stumbled, parrying objects with his sword. Staggering through the onslaught of the porch, they finally burst back into the damp night outside.
Doc was gasping, sprawled amid the devil grass, holding his thigh, blood spu
rting between his fingers, the gouge far worse than the earlier slash on his calf. Cal ripped off his bloody, grime-black shirt, removed the cleaner T-shirt beneath and folded it swiftly into a pressure bandage. A little distance from them lay the corpses of the two grunters. Cal suspected they’d rear to life again the moment anyone took a step toward the house, but they were quiet now.
Thunder growled overhead, and the air was thick with the smell of lightning and wind. Cal, Goldie and Colleen bent over Doc, getting in each other’s way trying to secure the bandage, to check him for other wounds. He waved them off impatiently.
“Don’t fuss over me; I’m all right. If I were to start dying, I would tell you.”
“We’re lucky any of us got out of there in one piece,” said Colleen, rising shakily and stepping toward the spare lantern they’d left on the curb.
“I don’t think it was luck.” Cal stared at the Wishart house, silent now, watchful. “It could have killed us any time it wanted.”
“Then what do you think it was?”
“Mercy. It did only what it needed to drive us away. Just like with Miss Hanson.”
“Only? Cal, that was the old college try.”
“No.” Doc said struggling to his feet, hissing through pain-clenched teeth. “I concur with Calvin. Our shields were down a dozen times. On any one of those occasions-” He tried to put weight on the bad leg, nearly fell. Goldie caught him under one arm.
“Guys, I know I’m the pessimist in the group, but what’s this?” The sweep of Colleen’s hand took in the mutilated grunter forms. “Ethnic cleansing?”
The answer came from the shadows. “Nothing short of death could have stopped them, once the voice got into their minds.” Wilma Hanson came up beside them with her gliding, soundless step. Seeing them up close, she put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, my heavens.”
“You should see the house,” Goldie said.
“How’s my sister?” Cal asked.
“Quiet.” Concern etched Wilma’s brow. “For quite some time now.”
When Wilma Hanson unlocked the door and Cal stepped within, he found his sister in a state of semiconsciousness, distressingly sallow and drawn.
But also, in some inexplicable way, more human.
The attic was a ruin. Boxes of Christmas decorations were upended, board games scattered, their pieces intermingled-the Game of Life, Candyland, Mystery Date. A tangle of quilts and outgrown clothes had erupted from careful folds to take wing and land where they might.
It was an echo of the Wishart house, as if a hurricane had burst from the center of the room, then retreated. And indeed it had, Cal reflected, threading his fingers through the silk of Tina’s hair. Thunder had entered her. The storm child.
“Two faces.” Doc sat slumped on an apple crate, spectral in the amber light from the lantern on the floor, its radiance casting long shadows up the walls and slanting ceiling. “You’re sure?”
Cal nodded. “The one on the bed, the one that looked real, he. . I dunno. There was this quality of, ‘Oh, Jesus.’ Like he was shocked. Sorry for me.”
“And the other?” Doc asked.
“The other. . it’s weird, he was so much clearer, even though I could see right through him. He seemed. . outraged. Only it wasn’t, ‘How dare you!’ It was more like terror. At least, that’s the vibe I got.”
“You’re our Lionel Hampton, man.” Goldie glanced up from the battered 1964 Sears catalogue he’d been leafing through. “Our king of vibes.”
“Unidentical identical twins,” Colleen muttered.
Wilma crossed to one of the few cartons still intact and retrieved an old photo album. Flipping to the page, she held it open. Cal regarded the bleached color photograph. Wilma radiant with youth and youth’s near-infinite possibility, Wilma with the twins.
Cal’s eyes went to Fred. Even then, it could be detected: the tighter set of his mouth, the opaque quality of the eyes, the hunched, defended posture.
Cal murmured, “It’s him.”
“I guess it makes a kind of sense,” Wilma sighed. “They were so close-”
“Close?” Colleen looked up. “Didn’t you say Fred hadn’t visited in all the months since the accident?”
Wilma hesitated, uncertain. “Survivor guilt.” Everyone turned to Doc. His eyes evaded, and he fought to keep his voice even. “You cannot bring them back, cannot undo the tragedy of it, so you try to avoid it, not think of it-all the while thinking of nothing else.”
Wilma nodded. “When all the machines stopped, Bob should have. . Fred must have found a way to prevent it.”
Colleen said, “The Source Project.”
Cal answered Wilma’s questioning glance with, “What Dr. Wishart was working on.”
Again, Wilma hesitated. Then she asked, “Is he draining the town?”
“Would he?” Doc asked. “The Fred you know, would he be capable of such an act?”
Wilma thought, yes. But how could she possibly make such an accusation against a friend? It felt like a betrayal. Then, like nonsense. Carefully, she offered, “Arleta is- was-a fearful woman, and she instilled that in them. We all worried about how much the boys depended on each other once, well… once Arleta stopped allowing company.” Then she added, oddly protective, “She just didn’t want anything from the outside world coming in.”
Cal gazed down at his sister, her eyes closed, the points of her ears peeking out between fine strands. It’s what he’d wanted for her. A bubble of safety. A line of defense between her and what he’d increasingly come to see as an assaultive world.
“It could be about more than just keeping his brother alive.” Cal’s gaze lingered on Tina, on the long pale lashes of her closed eyes. “Fred could be hanging on to Bob to keep hold of himself somehow, remind himself of who he is.”
“Or maybe just hold on,” Goldie said, not looking up from the catalogue. “I believe Fred’s a wanted man. By the Big Kahuna. The one wanting to chow down on all us tweaked ones. Source-zilla.”
“This isn’t getting us anywhere,” Colleen snapped. “It’s all goddam guesses.”
Turning to Wilma, Doc asked, “The energy drain. The sickness. How bad?”
“The children are getting weaker. Some of the old people, too. A few, we can’t rouse anymore.” She drew in a sharp breath. “And it’s spreading.”
“Calvin,” Doc said quietly, “whatever is sapping these people, there is a battle: Fred, clinging to Bob, and something else absolutely determined to break his grip. And soon I think, very soon, more than just those creatures will start to die, unless the deadlock is broken somehow.”
Wilma drew her shoulders back. “Well, we survived company thugs. We survived cave-ins. We’ve even survived the damn economy.” Turning to her guests, she inquired, “So what do we need to do to get these battlers the hell out?”
For a moment, no one spoke. Then Colleen said softly, “We kill it. Even though it kicked our ass. We find some way to kill it.” It occurred to Cal that she was calling Fred Wishart it rather than he to distance herself.
In the dust gloom of the attic, they contemplated how precisely they might destroy something that only one of them had even been able to glimpse. But to Cal, it was not the doing of the thing but the act itself that disquieted him. For in annihilating what dwelt in that shattered house, might they possibly destroy not just the illness but the cure?
“No,” he said at last to the others. “We need to know more.”
“Right,” said Colleen. “We’ll commission a study.”
“Like you said, it’s all guesses,” Cal replied. “Only doesn’t it feel like Goldie’s right, that Wishart’s fighting the same fight we are, that we’ve got a common enemy? And even if that guess is wrong, Wishart’s still our only link to- what did you call it?”
Cal’s eyes were on Goldie, but it was Doc who responded, “ ‘The real one.’ ”
“Look. I want to shotgun this nightmare out of existence, too. But we’ve got to try another way.”
“Hold it, hold it.”
“Colleen. .”
“Tina also came up with ‘crazy,’ right? Any hands here on how we should be approaching that?”
“Sometimes,” Goldie murmured, “you talk to a crazy like he’s okay, and he can become okay.”
“No, no, no-”
Cal cut in over Colleen. “Fred Wishart is terrified and he’s alone. . so alone is how I need to go in there.”
“Cal?”
The soft voice turned them all. It was Tina, eyes barely open. He knelt quickly beside her, taking her hand. It felt cold, but her fingers tightened about his.
“You okay?” he asked. She nodded and snuggled against him.
Wilma leaned close. “Cal, you’re tired, and you’re not thinking. I went in only with concern, knowing them, and totally unescorted.”
“I know.” Cal stroked silken hair. “But it’s not just aggression that fuels fear, it’s. . well. Wishart wanted to scare you, and he did.”
Doc asked, “Calvin, are you imagining you’re going to be able to go back in there and not be afraid?”
“Hell, why would he be afraid? “ Colleen answered for him. “Our boy here likes the idea of wearing a Frigidaire for a hat.”
Cal turned his gaze back to Tina. Her exhaustion appeared to have brought her back to herself, and him, at least for now.
“Tina?” His voice was almost a whisper. “Tina?”
Her eyes fluttered open.
“We’ve never broken our word, have we?”
Her expression clouded.
“I need to break it now. I need to try something that may mean I won’t be able to come back to you.”
“That’s not the deal,” she said in alarm, drawing back, rousing herself. “I can help you, like in the fog with the hornets.”
“Tina. .”
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