His head bobbed. “But, Beverly and I, it was like we knew each other when we met. We joked, she laughed. And a good laugh, too. Not some cursory thing. A belly laugh. Then we had a nice dinner and she wanted to dance so we went across the street—”
“To Slap Happy’s Dance Club,” Skid finished for him. “On Friday night.”
“Yeah, bad timing. She had to go to the bathroom and just disappeared.” The smile he’d been carrying melted into a look Skid didn’t want to see. “I cried when I got home because that hurt. I’m not ashamed to say it.”
Skid picked up a stick and tossed it onto the embers. Bright orange specks flew into the darkness and died. “You going to call her when you get back?
He raised an eyebrow. “Not if?”
She shook her head. “No, when. This thing isn’t all up to me. I got you and Cord, and Bud Light Dave’s out there somewhere. We’re all going to set this straight.” She tossed another stick into the fire pit.
Brick grabbed a branch and stirred the coals; he leaned forward and blew slowly on them. Fire jumped, then caught.
“When we realized something weird was going on,” he said, “I wanted to make everything go back to normal. Now I just want to get back and see Beverly.” He took the branch in both hands and snapped it more easily than Skid thought possible. “And I won’t let anything stop that, you know. I mean anything.”
She leaned back into the tree, sleep nagging at her again, but something else nagged harder. She wanted to know where Dave was and if they could do this without him.
“I want to do something else, too,” Brick said. “There’s this older woman named Katie, and she looks like I should know her. Some déjà vu stuff. She comes into my shop a few times a week and orders a large cup of black coffee and a chocolate muffin.”
“Sounds like my kinda gal,” Skid said through a yawn.
“She told me something the last time I saw her.” He fumbled with his hands, trying to form some kind of shape but looked like he was trying to hand-bra some boobs. “She said I should offer a muffin, red velvet baked in a mini-loaf pan to at least sort of look like a brick because—”
“Yeah, you go by Brick, I get it.”
“Well, that’s a good idea, but she also said I should fill them with cream.” He looked up, his hands still at hand-bra level. “You think that’s because she thinks I’m soft?”
Skid laughed, only a short, quiet laugh, but a laugh all the same.
“I’ve never heard you laugh before,” he said.
“It happens sometimes,” she said, trying to wipe off her smile. “This Katie didn’t mean you’re soft, Brick. She meant you’re sweet. You seem like a good guy, I’m sure that’s all she meant. I think that’s why Beverly likes you.”
Brick flinched at the sound of her name and something flamed across his face.
“I—” Skid started, but a third voice made her jump. Brick looked over at Cord.
“Would you guys shut up,” Cord said. He lay by the glowing embers, propped up on his elbows.
“I’m sorry our bonding moment was too much for you,” Skid told him.
“That’s not it,” Cord whispered. “Can’t you hear?”
Skid and Brick fell silent, their moment gone. Then she heard it, in the distance. Drums.
Chapter Nine
September 6
1
Brick threw dirt on the coals, damping the fire they’d just revived, but this didn’t throw the small flat spot where they’d camped into darkness. A bright moon that seemed larger than their own sent buttermilk light soaking through the thin canopy of trees. The drumbeats didn’t grow louder, at least they didn’t think so, but their ears became more attuned to the rhythmic pounding coming from beyond this small patch of woods. The drummers played a single steady beat, like the cadence on a rowing team.
“I didn’t sign up for this,” Cord said, his voice high and tight as a guitar string. “I wanted to stay home. I feel like I need to be on record about my position on this.”
“Why bother?” Brick said, tying his bedroll onto his explorer’s pack. “So we can feel guilty when you die?”
“Screw you, Brick.”
Skid brushed dust from her pants. “Live in the now, Cord,” she said, giving her right thigh another swipe before resting her hands atop two of the throwing knife hilts peeking beneath the jacket around her waist. “I’m terrified. I don’t want to be here either, but the world might be coming to an end and someone had to do something. We’re someone.” She faced Brick who turned and frowned at her, the pack now slung over his shoulders. “I expect better from you, Chauncey.”
The big man’s eyes flared.
“Chauncey?” Cord barked, then slapped a hand over his own mouth when he realized the word had been too loud.
The broken camp dropped silent, Brick’s thick, angry breathing the only thing they could hear over the drumming. Skid shook her head and started walking south, toward the drums.
“We’re in a different universe, and boys are still stupid,” she said. Brick huffed, then followed. “You going to be okay, Brick?”
“No,” he growled behind her. “I feel like I did playing football. I’m going snap and take out the next guy that jumps in front of me.”
“You played football?” Skid shrugged but didn’t turn around. “You seem like more of a Home Ec guy.”
Cord hurried to catch up. “Nice moment you’ve got going here,” he said, his voice a forced whisper. “But let me get this right. We’re moving toward the drums? We’re in an alien—literally alien—world, we don’t know what we’re facing, we’re armed with four throwing knives and fifty feet of pot rope, and we’re walking toward potential danger? Hell, I need a drag off that rope.”
Brick reached over his shoulder and pulled loose the leather thong that tied shut one of the side pockets of his pack. He slowly pulled out a steel blade at least a foot long, the guard curved upward on both sides in a Jokeresque smile.
“I have this.”
“And what’s that?” Cord asked. “A can opener?”
“It’s a tekpi.” Brick flipped his wrist, the blade shone in the moonlight.
“A what?”
“It’s Raphael’s weapon in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.”
A look of recognition crossed Cord’s face, but quickly fell back to defeat. “Oh. Okay. That makes me feel great—if we run into Shredder. We’re as safe as if we had abso-fucking-lutely nothing to defend ourselves.”
Brick held the weapon up as if it were his middle finger.
“Awesome. That’s just awesome. This is what you’re doing now?”
“We’re going south because that’s the direction we need to go to get to the lab.” Skid reached behind her head and pulled her ponytail tighter. She’d hate for it to come loose in a fight. “We—”
Distant machine gun fire filled the night, the sound nailing the group’s feet to the forest floor. The rat-a-tats came in dozens of short bursts, then in a couple of long streams, then the world grew silent.
Skid started walking south again. “That should make you feel better, Cord,” she said over her shoulder. “The drums have stopped.”
2
Everyone stared at Susan, her arms still crossed, her face stern. She stood against the wall of what had been the back of the room when the ghost-hunting group filed in but, because of her, was now the front. They looked, mostly in awe, like they expected her to deliver a speech, or bless them, or kick them out of the house, or something.
“You’re Tommy Sanderson’s sister?” Tamara said. “I saw… I saw your brother.”
Susan shook her head. “No, you didn’t.” Her words were flat. “If Tommy’s ghost is doing anything, it’s still mooching off my mother. Like I told the lady from the newspaper, even his ghost would be too lazy to haunt a house.”
“But—”
Susan waved her off.
<
br /> “I read the article in the paper,” the plump young man with the Pepsi said to Susan. “It didn’t sound like you wanted anything to do with this house. Why did you come back?”
“It was my father,” she said flatly.
A hush fell on the group.
“Your father?” a woman asked. It was the nurse, Carol. “Do you still—”
“Speak to him?” Susan started to laugh but thought better of it. “Heaven’s no. That psychotic bastard killed my family, and since I was an adult at the time, I no longer had a home to go to. The house was mine, but I certainly couldn’t live here.” She took a long breath, like the discussion had already exhausted her. “I was watching television, a true crime program called The Slasher Files or something ridiculous like that. My family’s murder was one of the segments, not that they bothered to contact me.”
Susan gripped the back of an overstuffed chair where the firefighter sat, knuckles turning white.
“I saw him. He was older, of course, much older. I hadn’t seen him since 1984. He talked about that night, about the anger that gripped him, about storming down to the basement to retrieve his sword from atop the workbench, the sword my grandfather brought back from World War II. He talked about marching up the stairs to the bedroom. He claimed the experiments he did in the basement had driven him mad—” She stopped, the words momentarily caught in her throat. Susan coughed into her shoulder before continuing. “He could have received the death sentence, but the jury felt this was a crime of passion, not planning. He got life in prison, but it was something he said right before the first commercial break that got to me. He said when he came back downstairs, chasing Tommy after killing my mother and our dog, that the house was full of people. That isn’t true.”
“What do you mean?” asked a young woman by the fireplace. “I did a report on this case in my Intro to Criminal Justice class at college. That’s exactly what happened.”
Susan frowned, a look that seemed more natural on her than anything else. “I’m sure that’s what your research found. Haven’t you all noticed things are different now?” She slowly dragged her eyes around the room, the faces blank, at least mostly. “Product names are wrong? Actors you’ve never heard of are playing parts in your favorite movies? The national animal of Canada is now the moose.”
“Yeah,” the fireman said, turning in the chair to look up at her. “Poptarts is one word. Didn’t they used to have a hyphen?”
“Maybe?” she said. “But the national animal of Canada is the beaver.”
“That doesn’t sound right,” the plump young man said. “Who would pick a beaver as a national animal?”
“Canadians, I suppose,” Susan said. “The point is that the madman on the video claimed the house was filled with strange people and that when he got to the kitchen, a giant in a red flannel shirt beat him unconscious. I know this story better than anyone on this planet, and that is wrong.”
The goth woman in dark grays and blacks stood in a corner by herself, her hand raised tentatively over her head. When she spoke, her voice was soft, like she wasn’t used to using it. “Did he say the man had a big, black beard?”
Susan nodded. “Yes, he did.”
“And did he say if there were women in the kitchen?” Goth lady wrapped her arms across her chest as tightly as they would go and glanced at Susan through her bangs.
“Two,” Susan said. “One he stabbed in the arm. The other, with dark hair and a ponytail, looked ready to hit him too. When he regained consciousness, everyone was gone but the police.”
“Well, I was there,” the woman said, the words came out fast. “I’d signed up for the tour and things happened. Weird things.” Her eyes darted nervously underneath those black bangs. “We were all there. The whole ghost tour. When the police came, the big man and a smaller man in khakis got arrested, then it felt like a bubble burst and we were back here. Now. I think—” She stopped and seemed to try and shrink into the wall. “I think we actually were there; I mean here, when it occurred. We were here in the house in 1984 when the murders happened.”
A smile, or something like a smile, worked its way onto Susan’s lips. “That’s what I’d hoped,” she said. “I’m here because I want that to happen again. I need to see my father.”
3
The woods where they’d briefly camped had been at the bottom of two gently sloping hills, the trees at its boundary not thinning so much as giving way abruptly to another expanse of knee-high grass that rippled in the night breeze. The moon, which had looked so large through the thin roof of leaves at their campsite, seemed smaller in the wide-open space, small enough that Skid confessed it was probably their same moon. Brick pointed out a few constellations they all recognized. Cord complained. This was Earth, apparently, just a different Earth, with more whining.
“We could go around,” Cord whispered loudly. “Nothing’s stopping us from going around.”
“Go around what?” Skid asked, never slowing her pace. “We don’t know where the drums and gunfire came from.” She pointed to the east, west, south. “It could have come from there, there, or the way we’re headed. We’re not going to find out until we get there.”
Brick, who’d insisted on reinstating initiative marching order, stopped suddenly and went down on one knee. Cord dropped behind him. Skid didn’t need to guess that Cord was the kind of guy who understood hiding behind the big man was a nice place to be in a fight.
“What is it?” she asked, looking across the limited horizon available. The crest of the hill was close, an orange light glowing beyond it, but they weren’t close enough to see where the glow came from.
Brick lay the palm of his hand on a ten-inch-wide depression in the grass. It, and a matching one, came parallel from the west then turned up and over the hill.
“Tire tracks,” he said with a tenseness Skid had never heard in his voice. It wasn’t fear. “Some kind of truck, big and far apart.”
“Where—” Cord tried to say, but Brick cut him off with an index finger in front of his mouth.
Brick stood and started back up the hill. “Whatever we see here,” he said as they neared the top. “Don’t freak out.”
Skid jogged up the rise in front of the men, their man-nonsense too much for her. The success of this night is all up to you, kiddo, ran through her mind. To hell with you, Dad. But she realized that although Randall R. Roe wasn’t right much, those words were. She took a deep breath, hands gripping the knife handles at her belt tightly so Brick and Cord wouldn’t see them shake, and walked over the rise secure in the knowledge that whatever was on the other side, she wasn’t ready.
The world over the crest seemed to be on fire, at least in bits and pieces. Orange flames crackled from what used to be small, round, thatch-roofed houses. Some still stood, with people roaming between them. The tire tracks stopped at a military Humvee tilted onto its side about halfway toward the burning village. Multiple Humvees lay in ruins farther down the hill.
Dear lord.
“What happened?” Cord asked.
Skid took in a deep breath and exhaled before answering. “It looks like we’re not the only ones from home.” Not for the first time, she wondered what happened to Dave. Was he sitting back, having a beer, while they did the dirty work?
“There are bodies.” Brick held the tekpi tightly in his fist and looked out over the field. “Lots of bodies.”
Then the breeze shifted and brought with it a smell—smoke saturated with oil and something they couldn’t identify but had a pretty good guess as to what it was. A few of the figures below tossed limp, bloody corpses onto a bonfire. Cord gagged. Skid gently grabbed his shoulders.
“Come on, keep it together.”
“Something’s happening,” Brick said, paying them no attention. He pointed toward a Humvee that was still relatively intact, although the driver’s side roof was dented like it had been hit with a giant’s fist.
The milling people were closer to the village. A few formed a circle, one of them gesticulating wildly. Brick leaned forward on his thick left leg, his right one behind it, then switched, stretching his hamstrings. “I’m going in for a closer look.”
“We can just go around,” Skid said, but Brick was already off, running low with his back bent, like it made any difference. Maybe the villagers would think this dark, hulking figure was simply a bear. But people killed bears, too. Brick reached the vehicle and stopped. No one in the village noticed, or if they did, they decided this shadow on the hill wasn’t a threat.
“We can just go around? That’s what I said in the first place.”
“Shhh,” Skid said and followed Brick to the second Humvee, staying low.
“Damn it, nobody ever listens to me.” Cord ran after her.
The sickening smell of burning flesh grew thick closer to the village, and voices reached their ears. The words were strange, their delivery thick, like growls. If they lived through this, Skid would have to tell Cord he was right; they should have gone a different way. Brick held a hand toward them as they approached, palm first, his other hand up to his mouth. The orange firelight, now closer, blazed in his wide eyes. His mouth set in a grin with no humor behind it.
“Don’t scream,” he said, his voice soft, but hard at the same time. “Whatever you do, Cord, don’t scream.”
Cord shrugged. “Why me? Why did you say that to me?”
“There’s something at the front of the Humvee. It’s a body.” His grin didn’t falter.
“Hey, Brick,” Skid said, slow and soft. “I think you’re getting overly excited. Maybe we just need to go back over the hill and take a little break, okay? Maybe have some cookies. Did you bring cookies?”
“It had this in its hand.” He pulled something about three-feet-long from the tall grass; it was a sword, the blade curved like in Aladdin. “It’s a scimitar.”
Brick held the tekpi out to Skid, who took it. A cold feeling grew in her gut. “What’s on the other side of this truck?”
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