by John O'Brien
He was facing three things. The first was the fact that he’d killed the three bodies lying in the driveway. Second, he and Erin were still stranded. And the third big one was the question of what in the fuck was going on. There was no way he could explain what he saw to himself, let alone anyone else.
“Why’d you shoot them?’
“Oh, well, officer. You see, they were possessed.”
“Oh, of course. That happens from time to time. Glad you made it through safely. Can we give you a ride somewhere?”
Yeah, that’ll go over well, he thought, poised at the door.
“Daddy, I’m scared,” Erin said.
“I know. Me too,” Sam replied.
“I don’t want to go in there. What if that happens to us?” Erin queried.
Erin’s question gave him pause. He had been concentrating on what he he’d witnessed and the ramifications. He’d had thoughts about how it might have occurred, but didn’t think about the possibility that it could still happen to them. He’d assumed that the event was over. They’d been in the area for some time, so he doubted it was a matter of slow poisoning.
Or really location-based for that matter.
He eased out from beneath the shadow of the porch and looked skyward, searching for those mysterious streaks of light. It was possible that they orbited the earth in cycles, but he highly doubted it. The sky remained a clear blue, with the sun wending its way closer to the western horizon.
“If it was going to happen to us, I think it already would have,” Sam answered, stepping back to the door. “And we need to go inside to call. We have a responsibility and can’t just leave.”
“I know that, Daddy. I wish we could, though. I just want out of here.”
“I know, Erin. Wait here, okay. And call if you see someone.”
“Daddy, don’t leave me alone.”
Sam didn’t want to leave her, but neither did he want her inside confined quarters. He needed to have freedom of movement and choice should he encounter more of them. Even though he wanted Erin close, the last thing he wanted was for her to be struck by a stray bullet.
“Erin, I’m just going in a little ways to check if it’s clear. Then, I’ll call you in. Okay?”
Erin nodded, her eyes glistening with unshed tears.
“I won’t be more than a few feet away,” he said, then turned to peer inside.
“Hello,” he called. “I don’t mean any harm, I just need to use the phone.”
He knew that anyone inside would have heard the commotion outside, but wasn’t sure of their reaction. They could well have hidden themselves, cradling a shotgun. Going inside was dicey at best.
“I’m coming in. Don’t shoot.”
Radiant light filtered inside and Sam could see a partial layout of walls and floors. Directly ahead, a long hallway ended in a large room with large picture glass windows visible from where he stood. Reaching inside, Sam flicked several light switches. The lights ensconced in their decorative fixtures remained dark.
Well, shit. That doesn’t bode well for finding a working phone.
He slithered through the entrance, his gun ready to be brought to bear in an instant. A framed opening branched to the left just a few feet away. Pressed against the log wall, he listened carefully for a soft footstep or breathing. He considered the best way to enter the room. If he went in with his gun at the ready, he might provoke a similar response from anyone waiting inside. Given that no one responded to his calls, if there were anyone inside, they’d probably have very itchy trigger fingers considering the recent gunfight. However, if he just strolled in as if he were a dinner guest, he’d be at a disadvantage. He was all that Erin had, so he raised his sidearm and stepped into an open kitchen, his weapon sweeping the corners as his eyes searched for any assailant. It was empty.
Lowering his handgun, he looked around. The wide kitchen, dining room, and large living room were open to each other. Tall poles rose in places to the high ceiling, providing structural support. The entire western side of the house was composed of large picture windows that looked out over the river and the tall mountains beyond. A massive stone hearth occupied nearly an entire wall of the living room, ashes covering the fire pit. Several game animals poked their heads from their mounts on the log walls—impressive antlers atop stuffed heads. A large game fish was hung above the hearth, its brilliant colors glowing in the late afternoon sun that shone through the windows. The entire interior and exterior was the epitome of a very fine hunting lodge, down to the antler chandeliers that hung throughout.
A pool of liquid was gathered by the fridge, leaking from under the twin doors. Sam tried a different bank of lights, only to find the same result. There obviously wasn’t any outside power flowing to the house. A quick investigation of the rest of the home, two bathrooms and three enclosed bedrooms, revealed that the man had been the only one in attendance. He lifted the cordless phone from its cradle and found it without power or dial tone.
Well, shit! he thought, and called Erin inside.
He searched for a cell phone, and finding none, he ventured back outside to go through the pockets of those lying along the dusty driveway. He found three cell phones and two sets of keys. None of the phones would turn on. Heading to the pickup, he turned the key without anything happening. There wasn’t the click of a bad battery or struggle with the engine trying to turn over. It was just as dead as its owner. Filled with unease, he headed back inside.
Erin stood at the windows, gazing out at the scenic vista. Wrapping his hand around her shoulder, the two of them contemplated the peaceful scene. However, it didn’t offer peace to Sam, the stress of their situation preventing anything remotely close to it.
“The phone isn’t working,” Sam said.
“What are we going to do? Head back to the car?” Erin asked.
Sam gazed at the sun sinking lower toward the peaks and the river flowing between the nearby embankments. Even though it was summer, there were only a couple of hours of daylight remaining.
“It’s getting late and I don’t think we’d make it before it gets dark,” Sam answered.
He hadn’t planned on having to spend the night outside, so he hadn’t bothered bringing anything warm, or the sleeping bags. The warmth of the day would quickly become chilly at night in the mountainous region, so he wasn’t really left with many choices. They could either sleep somewhere outside, which would leave them open to whatever came along, or they could remain in the house. Neither option was really appealing, but inside would grant them a measure of warmth and protection.
“I guess we can stay here until morning,” Sam finally said.
“In the dead man’s house…ewww,” Erin replied.
“I don’t see any other choice, Erin. We can’t make it back to the car and it’s not safe to sleep outdoors.”
“I guess so, but still, ewww. I’m NOT sleeping in his bed,” Erin stated.
“I figure we’ll just sleep on the couches and figure this stuff out tomorrow,” Sam responded.
Sam felt a little strange, being inside the man’s house while his body was lying outside, and knew that it wouldn’t look good if the sheriff finally showed up. He contemplated going through the cupboards in an effort to find something other than sandwiches to eat, but it just didn’t feel right. He did open the fridge to find the contents within warming; the items in the freezer thawing.
He closed and locked the front door, unsure of what to expect but wanting a warning before any company magically appeared before him. Shuffling back to the living room, he slumped down into one of the comfortable recliners and stared out across the picturesque landscape. Erin sat in another chair, occupied with her own thoughts.
Sitting in another man’s chair, looking out the windows of his house, added to the surreal nature of the past hour or so. It seemed as if each encounter since leaving the cave, each event, had grown proportionally worse. First, the electronics died, then the northern lights were seen in the skies ove
r southwestern Montana in the middle of the day. Then, the vehicle dead in the water and finding the man pretending to steer his stalled car, and then this whole thing. The phantasms he saw drifting through the people and vaporizing upon their deaths was more than his mind could grasp. If it had been just the one man, then he could write it off as a quirk of the way the light fell, but three men from different angles, well, that couldn’t be explained by any rational process. Couple all of that with a regional, if not larger, power outage, and the thoughts in his mind weren’t pleasant ones.
An EMP blast from a nuke or something like a vast solar storm could explain everything else, but nothing could explain those apparitions, he thought, his mind churning.
Sam sat and pondered any and all possibilities, but couldn’t think of a single thing that could explain the oddities. The mimicry of the apparitions and the obvious agony written in the eyes of the men he shot. Their hungry and aggressive behavior. The behaviors could be rationalized to a degree by some rampant virus, such as rabies, but the ghost-like images didn’t fit in with any argument along those lines. Each and every thought of the phantasms came back to possession or spirits and something to do with religion.
And the dead shall walk the earth, the thought rose. Okay, Sam, knock that shit off. Those men weren’t dead.
His mind kept going in circles. Each time he came back to the mystery surrounding the misty figures seemingly attached to each of the men, his mind stumbled as if it had hit a concrete wall. He just couldn’t work past or through it, however hard he tried. The impossible remained just that. There was just no way he could explain what he saw.
Okay, so I can’t explain it. But, it was there. Either both Erin and I are drugged somehow, or those things existed. That’s what I have to go on. The bottom line is that they exist until I see otherwise. Now, the question is, how far does this extend?
“Daddy? What happened to those men? I mean, what was that?” Erin asked, coming out of her silence.
“I honestly have no idea,” Sam answered.
“You saw it, too, though, right? I mean, the ghosts they had with them?”
“Yeah, I saw it,” Sam admitted.
“What do you think it means?”
“I think it means we need to be really careful.”
“Do you think they were possessed? Like, by a demon or ghost?”
“I don’t think it was something like that, but honestly, I’m at a loss to explain it,” Sam responded, reluctant to say even that, not wanting to feed her fears.
“What are we going to do?”
“There’s a small town several miles up the road. I suppose we should head there and tell the police what happened. However, let’s keep the ghost part to ourselves for the moment, okay?”
“Why? They’d want to know about that, wouldn’t they?”
“Because it would make them think we’re crazy, and they wouldn’t listen to anything we have to say,” Sam replied.
“We aren’t crazy, are we Daddy?”
“No, Erin, we aren’t crazy.”
“Okay, I won’t say anything. So, do we have to walk to the town? My feet hurt,” Erin queried.
“Well, the truck outside won’t start, so I don’t see any way around it. Sorry, but it shouldn’t be far. We’ll rest up here and start off early.”
While Erin chewed on a sandwich, Sam felt restless. What was supposed to be a one-day trip out of their way to get the Challenger mobile had turned out to be so much more. Outside, there were three bodies that he had shot and killed. And then there was the further consideration that they might have to march into more of a maelstrom, the possibility that there may be large scale destruction or chaos from an EMP blast. A solar storm could be recovered from, but if they were walking into a nuclear aftermath, well, that posed a much greater risk.
One thing at a time, Sam. Get to the town.
To work off his anxiety, he strolled around the house, looking through the rooms. He didn’t touch or take anything, as that would further any notion that he’d killed the people outside in order to rob the place. Slowly, the sun settled behind the hills and gave the landscape a golden glow before darkening.
* * * * * *
Sam woke, his eyes snapping open as he remembered where he was. He saw Erin standing at the picture windows, staring out at the sunlit fields. The morning sun cast its rays against the pines on the shoulders of the distant slopes. Still foggy-headed, he tossed off the blanket he had pulled over himself and strolled to her side.
The river rolled by, wavelets rising along its length as the current flowed over rocks below the surface. At a near corner, the surface was placid, indicating a deeper pool of water. He watched as the pool briefly rippled, a fish snatching something on the surface.
“I couldn’t sleep,” Erin stated. “I kept waking up from bad dreams.”
“I’m sorry. We’ll get this all sorted out today,” Sam replied, putting his arm around her shoulders.
“You know, Daddy, I think those things we saw were souls,” Erin said.
Sam didn’t know what to think about her explanation. With a night between them and the events of yesterday, the memories seemed more unreal, and he had started to convince himself that he had imagined the visions. Erin mentioning them again brought self-doubt. The images had been slowly pushed into the realm of imagination, even though Erin seemed sure of what she had witnessed. On the one hand, he couldn’t deny what he’d seen, but on the other, he was sure that what he’d seen couldn’t have been real, had to have been created by some trick of the light.
“Erin, I’m not sure what we saw, if anything. I think…” Sam began.
“They were real. I saw them,” Erin interrupted.
“Okay, hon. We should get ready to leave,” Sam responded.
“You saw them, too, right?”
“Let’s just get ready to go. And remember, we aren’t mentioning this to anyone.”
Sam’s body felt as tired as his mind as he struggled to don his backpack. Erin was slow to lace up her boots and do the same. Their reluctance to continue was clearly shown by the slowness of their preparations. Sam was ready to conclude this one way or the other, but didn’t want to face what was assuredly going to happen once they met up with anyone involved in law enforcement. The three bodies lying outside had brought a halt to their vacation.
There was the slim possibility that the police would see what happened and chalk it up to self-defense, but he highly doubted that would happen. At a minimum, there would be a lengthy investigation with charges brought. But, he couldn’t very well just walk way. Forensics had matured to the point where there would be something linking the deaths to him; to walk away would only make it worse down the road.
Before opening the front door, Sam looked through the peephole. He didn’t see anything moving; nothing had changed from the day before. Stepping out onto the porch, the rising warmth of the morning was winning the battle with the chill of the night. Sunshine bathed the landscape. If it wasn’t for the memories of yesterday and the three lumps lying in the driveway, it would be filled with a peaceful beauty.
They began their walk to the highway. Sam had Erin close her eyes and guided her as they neared the bodies. The buzzing from scores of flies hovering over the corpses was loud, even from a distance. Others crawled over the blood-streaked wounds and orifices. Sam and Erin’s approach did little to disturb those feasting on the remains. Movement to the side caught Sam’s attention—a coyote circled in the nearby field, wary of the two-legged predators but not wanting to leave an easy meal.
The buzzing faded as they drew away from the bodies and approached the road. Sam wasn’t sure about heading toward town, but he didn’t know what else he could do. They began, feeling the heat rise from the pavement as they heard the familiar crunch of gravel under their boots. There were a couple of sandwiches remaining, which wouldn’t last them past the day.
He knew that the coyote would swoop in once they left the area and wasn�
�t sure whether that would be a good thing or bad should they come across the sheriff or one of the deputies. There wasn’t a thing he could do about it, though, so he focused on those things he could control. The stress of the situation threatened to drown him under its weight, but he had Erin to think about, so he kept his feet moving.
The highway mostly followed the river, the waterway meandering along the low spots with the road keeping straighter lines. Sam felt his anxiety increase as they drew closer to the next house, hoping that he didn’t have a repeat of the prior day. No one was visible at the end of the long driveway, but he was wary. With the pavement atop an embankment, he and Erin could easily be seen from a distance.
Several horses pressed against the rails of the fence near the roadway, either curious or hoping that apples would magically appear. For some reason, the animals didn’t seem to be affected in the same manner as the people he’d come across. Sam ignored the inquisitive eyes of the equines and kept his eye on the house and surrounding barn-like buildings. Two dusty marks marred the surface of the road, leading Sam to believe that one of the men who had responded to the gunshot came from this place.
The sun climbed higher into the blue sky, the dry mountain air wicking away moisture. Sam felt hot air slide down his throat with each breath, drying out his nostrils. Erin walked alongside, her heels dragging across the gravel. Normally, he’d tell her to pick up her feet, but the stress and heat was draining away his energy.
The next residence was closer to the road, but mostly hidden behind thick foliage. All that showed above the greenery were the sloped roofs of several buildings. Sam slowed, cautious as he drew closer to the entrance of the driveway. The dirt road was much like the others they’d passed, rutted with short clumps growing in the middle. It curved and vanished through a wide gap in the hedge lining the front.
The figure of a woman appeared in the gap, walking across the driveway. She had the same twitchy movements as the first man they’d encountered. Sam’s heart froze, along with the rest of his body. His stomach sunk as if he had eaten a boulder. The woman lurched forward, then sprinted madly for a few steps before continuing to shamble.