“Always. It’s what I do best . . . Only time my compact body mass comes in handy.”
Ignoring his mini-tirade, Jamie turned the back light off and crouched low as he made his way from the porch to the grass. Like a military assault squad, they headed across his backyard, toward the Thompsons’.
Halfway to the Thompson garage, Ed pulled back with a frown.
“What?” Jamie whispered.
Blanching, Ed held his hand up for him to see. “It’s blood.” He looked around. “The ground’s saturated with it.”
Sick to his stomach, Jamie lifted his hands to see them stained red. Just like Ed’s. “Is it human?”
“How would I know? Blood’s blood. And this is definitely blood.” Ed’s eyes widened. “You think they’re the serial killers the cops are looking for?”
“I don’t know.”
Biting his lip, Jamie moved toward the detached two-car garage to look for clues. It took several minutes to jimmy the lock.
As silent as the grave, he and Ed moved into the small building, which was covered in plastic.
Like one of Dexter’s kill zones.
Ed stepped closer to him. “We need to get out of here and call the cops.”
“Not without some evidence.”
“Yeah, no, I’ve seen this movie. Nerdy white boy dies first. I’m out of here.”
He grabbed Ed’s arm as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. “Hold on a minute.”
Jamie went to the workbench, where someone had left a map of their small Mississippi town and a card case.
A card case that held driver’s licenses.
What the hell? Opening it, Jamie saw men and women from all over the country. What kind of . . .
His thoughts scattered as he saw his dad’s license there.
Why would they have his dad’s license?
Confused and terrified, Jamie looked back at the map, which had his house and those of every family in town marked with a red highlighter.
“Jamie,” Ed snarled between clenched teeth. “I hear something.”
As they started back for the window, Jamie froze at the sight of a mirrored wall.
Footsteps moved closer.
Ed ran for the window with Jamie one step behind him. They were both sweating and shaking by the time they were outside the garage. But as soon as their feet were on the ground, headlights lit up the entire yard.
They were trapped.
If they tried to get back to Jamie’s house, they’d be seen for sure.
With no other course of action, Jamie crouched under the open window and listened as the driver turned the car off and got out. Footsteps echoed as the driver walked into the garage.
“Hey, hon?” Mr. Thompson called out. “Have you been messing in the garage again?”
Lights came on in the house an instant before Teresa walked the short distance to the garage. “What?”
Ed ran for Jamie’s house while Jamie stayed behind. Rising slowly, he peeked in through the mirror to see the Thompsons standing in the center of their obvious kill zone.
“Someone’s been flipping through my journal. Was that you?”
“No. I haven’t been in here.” She walked over to the mirror.
Jamie gasped at what he saw there.
Oh shit! I knew it!
He lifted his phone and quickly snapped a photo of her, then he did what Ed had done. He scampered across the lawn as fast as he could. Running into his house, he slammed the door and closed all the blinds.
“Mom!”
Ed met him in the living room, where he was holding on to Matilda for everything he was worth. “I thought those things were myths made up by teachers and parents to scare us.”
“What?” his mom asked.
Jamie swallowed as his mother stared at them as if they were crazy. His breathing ragged, he held his phone out to his mom. “We’ve got to call the cops!”
“For what?”
“Our neighbors, Ma!” He showed her the picture. “They’re humans . . . slayers. And they’re here to destroy our colony!”
PAPER CUTS
GARY A. BRAUNBECK
Mutato nomine de te
Fabula narratur.
Change the name and it’s about you, that story.
—HORACE, 65–8 BC
They came for us, as they always did, when the sun shone high in the safe daytime sky. They pulled us from our coffins, from our beds, from our corners and alleys and pits, and they hurt us; oh, how they hurt us. Driving stakes through our chests as their legends told them they should, and then cutting off our heads—ah, but not before tearing our limbs from our bodies one by one; not before burning out our eyes with acid; not before tearing our intestines out in their dripping fists, not before wrenching out our tongues with their fingers, or pliers, or cutting them out with dull scissors; not before shredding our members from between our legs or burning them closed with hot irons, laughing in God-fearing righteousness as the stink of our ruined flesh filled the air.
We did not scream, even though the pain of our dying was great.
Even when, once they were done, they built the massive fires upon which our physical remains were tossed. No indignity, no torture, no final humiliation was too terrible for the likes of us, not in their eyes.
Nowhere in the world did they show us mercy; at no time in the history of their laughable, pathetic talking-monkey race did they ever attempt to show understanding. It was always their fury, and then the pain, the degradation, the torture, agony, and dismemberment, and always, always, the flames to be fed after.
Annette Klein would be the first to admit that she wasn’t the most graceful or coordinated person, even on her best days—she’d once twisted her ankle attempting to just stand up in a pair of high-heeled shoes that one of her friends had goaded her into trying on in a trendy shop—but even she wouldn’t have thought it possible for her to cause herself to shed blood in, of all places, a secondhand bookstore, yet bleed there she did. To make matters worse, it wasn’t just a little—no, that would have been a blessing; she had to get a series of not one, not two, but three paper cuts on the tips of the center fingers of her right hand, as well as a decent gash across the palm of that hand. Until that moment in the bookstore, she’d forgotten just how much blood flowed through the hand and its fingers, but as soon as she felt the sharp slices and saw the drops of blood spattering down on the pages of the book she’d been skimming, it came back to her. She’d always been something of a bleeder, even as a child, and for a few years her parents worried that her difficulty in clotting might be due to hemophilia, but luckily that turned out not to be the case. Her veins were just a slight bit closer to the surface than in most people, and as a result her bleeding was quick and her clotting slow, but it was never a genuine danger to her well-being.
That evening in the bookstore, however, she wondered just for a minute if things were about to—as many mystery and suspense writers might phrase it in the pulp novels she so loved to read—take a turn for the worse. Flash of lightning, roll of thunder, cue ominous background music.
A few minutes before wandering into the store, she had left her office, much later than usual, at the downtown branch of the community college where she worked as the school’s website designer. She was heading to the parking garage when she got the sudden urge for a cruller from Riley’s Bakery, so, despite the lateness of the hour, she turned abruptly and headed toward the fulfillment of her bliss. Riley’s was unfortunately out of crullers by this time (Well, duh! she thought to herself, it’s after 7, of course they’re out), so she decided to mend her broken heart with a box of chocolate-coated sugar-dusted doughnut holes. Walking out the door, popping the first one whole into her mouth, she bit down and closed her eyes as the rich, heavy flavors and textures spread out over her tongue. Then she nearly tripped over her own feet because she was walking and eating with her eyes closed. Despite her skill and dexterity at the computer, multitasking in the real world was not her for
te—okay, she wasn’t quite that bad, she could walk and eat at the same time, even talk on her cell simultaneously without leaving a path of destruction in her wake, but that required that she not, well, have her eyes closed. It’s the little things that keep us aboveground and breathing, so this one was on her.
She caught her balance just in time by shoving out her arm and catching her weight on the brick doorway of the adjacent secondhand bookstore. Her doughnuts, however, failed to survive the mishap, because the hand she used to brace herself against the doorway also happened to be the one that was holding the box of treats.
Cursing under her breath, she fished a small bottle of hand sanitizer out of her purse and applied it to her hands, and then—because she didn’t have any tissues—surreptitiously dried them on the sides of her jacket. She might very well have walked back to her car right there and then, but she caught a glimpse of something in the bookstore’s display window that caused her to remain: what appeared to be a near-pristine first edition of Carson McCullers’s Reflections in a Golden Eye, one of her all-time favorite novels. She had two other editions—a trade paperback and a cheap discarded hardcover found at a library book sale—and while each was in at least readable condition, she’d always wanted to have a really nice copy of the novel . . . and here it was, it seemed. She looked up at the streetlights that were just beginning to buzz and sputter to life and reminded herself that, despite the quaint appearance of the building fronts in this area, there was still enough serious crime taking place after dark that she really ought to be heading back to the garage—but just as quickly as these thoughts presented themselves, the book junkie in her laughed it off, its metaphorical gaze fixed unblinkingly on the McCullers novel.
Smiling to herself and feeling a bit like Helene Hanff finally walking into 84 Charing Cross Road, Annette opened the door and entered, wondering for a moment if she was about to meet the man who would play Frank P. Doel to her Helene. She couldn’t quite figure out if the small hanging sign was supposed to be turned to OPEN or CLOSED, because one part of it had come loose from the string, leaving the rest hanging there like a desperate spelunker who’d lost his grip on the way down and now dangled, waiting for someone above to give the rope a tug and pull him to safety. Oh, well—if the place was closed, the proprietor would say so soon enough.
Those fires that consumed the degraded remains of our physical bodies burned well into the nights throughout history and the world over; a few flames could still be seen licking upward from the embers in the days following our deaths, when the men of the villages set about the final stage of their so-called holy tasks.
The pits were dug, our agonized ashes poured in, soil and dung spread atop the smoldering remains, and in the following mornings, saplings were planted in the spots. And there they thought it would end.
But eternal life means eternal; it mattered not that we no longer had our meat puppets to transport us from place to place. Even in the core of a single agonized ash, eternal life remains eternal, as does the consciousness amassed during that life; and as such, we slowly felt ourselves absorbed into the young roots of the infant saplings, and then, slowly, into the rest of the trees that grew from the pits where our remains were buried.
The Earth spun. The moon waxed and waned. Vegetation began to grow around the trees, snaking up through the ashes. The scarred spots where we had met our degrading deaths gave way to blankets of green. The trees grew straight and tall, branches reaching toward the sunlight.
A season passed, and then a year, and then ten more.
Many came to these trees to admire their beauty and to enjoy their shade. Many a young man proposed to his true love beneath these canopies. Weddings were performed beneath them. Children were christened there.
The stars shifted their courses. Constellations appeared and then vanished. The sky changed. The villagers who had watched our deaths, who participated in our brutalization, themselves died, as did their children, and their children’s children, and the next three generations who followed.
But the trees remained, tall and imposing. Within their cores, we waited patiently, spreading our eternal strength throughout the trees until every leaf, every twig, every branch and piece of bark became one with us.
The Earth spun, the moon waxed and waned, townships replaced villages, and engineers and architects covered the land with roads and bridges and train tracks.
We waited, growing stronger in our new forms, our new homes. Through the vibrations above, below, and within the planet itself we found one another, and we shared our stories and our memories, and sang our bloodsongs to the night.
The Earth spun. The seasons changed. Telegraph wires were replaced by telephone poles.
The Earth spun. Townships were sacrificed in favor of cities; community was traded for commerce, cobblestone for asphalt and concrete, horse-drawn wagons for automobiles and airplanes. Telephones were antiquated by cellular and satellite communications.
And we waited.
People moved on. Families grew larger. Cities sprang up, demanding the death of trees to make room for them.
And we waited, knowing that it would begin again soon.
The first thing that threatened to seduce Annette’s senses once she was fully inside was the so-very-right smell of the place, something only a true lover of books could understand; the comforting, intoxicating, friendly scent of bindings and old paper was almost joyous; decades’ worth of floor wax and the almost pungent aroma of real wooden in-wall bookcases were nectar.
The walls were lined from floor to ceiling with sagging shelves full of books, and she could see at a glance that, though the stock in this section immediately inside the entrance contained everything from academic texts to the usual classics, its primary focus was on matters philosophical and occult. Everywhere she turned, there were books such as Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia, the ancient notes of Anaxagoras of Clazomenae detailing his conclusion that the Earth was spherical, The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, the Hindu Rig Veda, the poems of Ovid, the plays of Aeschylus, Lucan’s De Bello Civili; there were numerous sections that contained long-out-of-print works by Robert Nathan, Booth Tarkington, even Jessamyn West and Katherine Anne Porter. Annette’s heart beat with surprising excitement. Aside from the rare edition of the McCullers novel in the display window, who knew what other treasures she might find in here?
Approaching the counter, she saw that the proprietor didn’t use anything electronic when tallying up sales; no, he or she had an antique National Cash Register two-deep-drawer, three-key bank machine in polished cherrywood with flawless persimmon inlay, the kind of register that hadn’t been in use for at least a hundred years, and this machine was in superb condition.
She was admiring a copy of The Complete Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald that sat by itself on a wooden display square in a delicate, exquisite bell jar. The jar was on a small table by the counter; this book, too, seemed to be a first edition. Touching her fingertips against her thumbs to be certain no detritus from the late and much-lamented doughnut holes remained, she looked around the store for any sign of the proprietor. Okay, she said to herself, you know damned well that this thing has to be set apart like this for a reason, right? They’ve put it inside a bell jar, for pity’s sake. You shouldn’t even be thinking about this.
But even at thirty-six—just as she’d been at six, and twelve, and twenty-six—Annette Klein was never one to let common sense override curiosity, especially when it came to old books. She reached out, hesitated for only a moment, and then carefully, even delicately (for her), lifted the glass covering and set it to the side, making sure that it was balanced and in no danger of falling.
She picked up the book and began flipping through the pages until she came across “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” always her favorite of Fitzgerald’s stories, and had just turned the page when she felt the unmistakable, fiery-sharp slice of paper cuts on her fingertips. Pulling back her hand, she watched in disgust as blood from her i
ndex, middle, and fourth finger spattered onto the page she’d been reading. Shit, she thought. Oh, well—you bleed on it, you bought it. She unconsciously stuck the tips of the three fingers into her mouth and sucked at them, tasting the faint coppery flavor and almost gagging. She fumbled the book, still opened to the pages she’d bled on, down onto the counter and was searching her jacket pockets for some tissues, or a handkerchief, or anything at all she could use to wrap around her bleeding digits, when she saw why she’d managed to get paper cuts on all three of her fingers; each upper corner of the two opened pages facing her had for some incomprehensible reason been dog-eared so that two surprisingly sharp-tipped triangles jutted up, and the paper stock itself was of a sufficiently strong quality that these dog-eared corners felt almost solid. Why on earth would anyone do that to a rare edition of a book, let alone a Fitzgerald? Squeezing the fingers of her left hand tightly in her right fist, she leaned forward and stared at the book.
Was she imagining things, or did it look somehow thicker than before she’d picked it up? She squinted, feeling the blood running down her wrist. Her unwounded hand unconsciously went to the silver crucifix hanging around her neck, an heirloom from her grandmother. As her fingers absentmindedly traced the shape of the cross (something she always did when nervous), she stared at the book. What else was it about this that seemed . . . off? She reached out to close the book and felt the edges of the page almost snap out. She knew she felt the sliver of fierce, quick pain slice across her palm. This time she cursed out loud at the pain and turned away from the book before she soaked it with any more of her blood.
Now there was another book on the wooden display block where the Fitzgerald had been a minute before. How the hell had it gotten there?
“Oh, dear me,” someone said. “Oh, damn it, damn it, damn it. My fault, my fault, so very sorry.”
A short, stocky man dressed in clothes easily twenty years out of date came up to her and took her bleeding hand in his. “Oh, Jesus Christ in a secondhand Chrysler,” he said in a voice that sounded as if he gargled with Wild Turkey four times a day, “you really hurt yourself, didn’t you?”
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