I hung up.
· · ·
Miss Carstairs and I watched the side of the van for several minutes. I tried to think of who else would in the neighborhood just now. Some houses were deserted; others, the owners were at work. Anyone with kids had left a long time ago, thank God.
“Who’s Dooley?” I asked.
Miss Carstairs smacked her lips and switched the flashlight off. “Dooley was a…a doll I had. As a girl.”
I made a face. “And that’s what you saw? A doll?”
“It was a cloth doll, stuffed up with sawdust,” she said. “It had two black beads for eyes, a red triangle for a nose, and a thin line for a mouth. There was a half-circle of black dots under each eye. It had brown yarn hair and a blue dress with a white pinafore. It was about this big.” She held out her hand at her waist, then frowned at it and bent over until her hand was about a foot and a half above the brick.
“She was my mother’s when she was young. Very dirty.”
“And that’s what you saw? Did you have nightmares about it or something?”
“You saw a real estate agent.”
“Maybe I’m not so fond of moving.”
The two of us waited for the ambulance to arrive. “Maybe I should call again,” I said. “And tell them that Jim was shot. I don’t know if I want the EMTs to pull up and get sucked into that van. We should at least have the police here to…”
I shrugged.
Miss Carstairs said, “You know that we do.”
“You know that we do what?”
“Have to do something about that van before the ambulance gets here. I’m old. You’re past your prime. The least the two of us could do is try to make sure those kids in the ambulance don’t get hurt. People with some use left in them.”
I bit my tongue. She wasn’t wrong. We were the abandoned houses of humanity: most of our copper wires and hardwood floors and seventy-year-old light switches stripped out of us, waiting for a match.
“What if they took his heart because that’s all that was left of him that was worth a damn?” I said. It wasn’t really a question.
“If that’s what they were after, they could have take more than his heart,” she said. “Even a mean old bastard like that who doesn’t take care of himself has a couple of hundred yards of good veins left in him.”
I looked down, which was a mistake. I pushed myself up with my hands on my knees.
“So our options are these,” I said. “We charge at the van and have the same thing happen to us that happened to Jim. Or we try to lure whatever’s in there away from the van. Into the house, maybe.”
“Here, kitty kitty,” Miss Carstairs said. Her voice shook.
But it still made me grin.
“I don’t think that’s going to work,” she said.
“We could wait for the ambulance and try to wave them off.” I looked down at myself. I was covered in dead grass and leaves but not as bloody as I expected. “Or…you could wait here and try to wave them off. And I could go inside the house and try to lure whatever’s in there after me.”
“What makes you think you can lure it at all, let alone keep it from killing me as it goes past?”
I frowned at the van. Thinking about it logically, I didn’t think I could lure it at all. But that was thinking for you. It always finds a way to say no.
“For starters, I’m going to take my SIG Sauer and blow out the tires. After that, the windows.”
· · ·
I could feel the eyes watching me through the windows of the few occupied houses along the street—officially and unofficially occupied, that was. Blackout curtains twitched; shadows shifted behind boarded-up windows, which inevitably had one slim crack along the side that had been missed or pried away, so the illegal inhabitants could see out.
Before I so much as pulled my SIG Sauer out, I walked along the narrow, overgrown alley beside the house. The overhang of the roof next door had blown off, and all kinds of asphalt shingles littered the ground. Half the porch had been pulled down to get at the glass bricks that had made up the wall, and broken glass bricks and plaster covered the roof shingles.
Thus it wasn’t that badly overgrown, and I was able to pick my way through, kicking the worst of the glass out of the way. I had my steel-toed boots on, and I was glad of it.
I made it all the way through the narrow alley to the backs of the houses. Here my luck ran out as far as an easy passage went; a stack of rotten one-by-fours lay behind the Sandersons’ house, nails sticking every direction. It blocked the back door.
I frowned at the gaping hole closest to the back of the house. The window had long since been removed. Not just knocked out, but removed—glass, frame, hardware, and all.
I wasn’t as limber as I used to be: I wasn’t going to be able to hoist myself through the remaining hole in the brick wall at a decent speed.
In the distance I heard the first faint whoops of sirens coming our way.
If I couldn’t make it through the hole soon enough I’d try to shoot or slow down whatever it was somehow and give the others a chance to escape. If it caught me it caught me.
I leaned through the hole and looked inside. It looked like a tiny spare room, maybe wide enough for a double bed and that was about it. The door had been removed from the wall and I could see through to the hallway. The door to the basement was across the hall, bare cement stairs leading down into darkness. More of a cellar than a basement. Next to that door was another one leading into another empty room.
I yanked my head out of the window and walked back toward the van.
The sirens were louder now.
My guts clenched in the way they do when you know you’re scared but you’re too stubborn to turn and run.
· · ·
I pulled the SIG Sauer out of the inner pocket of the coat. The door of the van was still closed but it seemed as though the cracks around the door were getting darker, like it was about to open.
I stopped about fifteen feet away, standing on the grass.
I knew that the second I stepped back onto the sidewalk it would have me. Nothing logical about it but I knew I couldn’t force myself to put one foot on the cracked cement, either.
Once the SIG Sauer was in my hands, the barrel seemed to lift itself upward and aim at the front tire.
I imagined shooting out the window instead and watching the van drive off, driverless, as I ran after it down the street. The gun was right—or my intuition was. The van needed to be hobbled before I tried anything else.
The SIG Sauer went off in my hands. I’d taken a good footing before I’d ever pulled the pistol out of my pocket, though, so the shot was clean and I didn’t stumble.
I’ve always been a good shot. The front tire burst with a squeal.
The van lurched forward, bumping up onto the curb, then thumping back off again. It was a rear-wheel drive, and the rear wheels kept pushing it forward, even as the front rims cut through the rubber of the flat in front.
Calmly, as if I had all the time in the world, I aimed the pistol at the back tire.
I squeezed, this time with a little more conscious thought. The bullet plunked into the back flank of the van, doing nothing much at all.
I relaxed and let the gun fire itself again: another squeal of blown tire and escaping air. The van dropped and the rims screamed against the curb.
It was still trying to roll forward. The front wheel was turned hard to the left as the driver tried to correct for the flat tires.
I stepped along the grass toward the curb—still staying off the sidewalk, mind you—and took another shot at the other back tire.
This one hit but felt like a lucky shot. The back end of the van dropped and two deep gouges cut into the asphalt behind it.
Momentum and one working tire would only carry the van so far, though. It rolled to a stop. The back tires spun, cutting deeper and deeper into the street. I smelled burnt rubber and the hot smell of fresh asphalt as the friction from
the rims heated it to the melting point.
Then the wheels gummed up and stopped.
I had lost count of how many bullets were left in the magazine, so I ejected it. There was still a round in it; I chambered it and put in another magazine from one of the Velcro pouches. I put the spent magazine in my pants pocket.
The van had made it all the way to the neighbor’s yard before it had rolled to a stop. I hopped over the sidewalk, keeping my eyes on the van.
The back had two black-tinted back windows, and I thought I saw one of the doors move a little.
As I passed the next alley between houses, I took a glance down it.
This alley was more overgrown than the other, but I could see all the way through to the back. No glass bricks to poke a hole through a foot, no asphalt roof shingles to slip on, no scattered plaster. This side might be safer. I couldn't see whether there was a window I could get through; it might have been grown over by some thick saplings.
I’d just have to see how it went. It’d be better if I didn’t lead whatever was in the van past Miss Carstairs and what was left of Jim. She was still standing in the same place, the turned-off flashlight still in her hand.
Watching.
I fired at one of the van’s back windows.
As soon as the bullet went through the glass it began to crackle. Cracks ran through the chunks of glass until the whole thing was a crude spiderweb. Then the whole panel dropped out in one or two big pieces.
When it hit the street it burst into scattered black diamonds.
Inside the van was still mainly darkness.
I shot the other panel of glass. It fell too.
The front glass didn’t shatter. It wasn’t even cracked. The bullet must have come out elsewhere—the roof.
I fired again.
Light flooded the interior of the van as the front windshield slumped inward, scattering across the front seats and the steering wheel like a gush of water.
There was nothing inside the van. Nothing, nobody.
The sirens were getting louder.
I glanced over at Miss Carstairs.
Behind her stood the realtor with a vapid expression on her face and her head slightly tilted, as if I’d just asked her a question about the ceiling tiles or the central air—as in, was there any?
Miss Carstairs’s eyes had rolled back into her head, showing only whites. She sagged backward against the agent.
Still with that slight, blank smile on her face, the woman grasped Miss Carstairs by the shoulders and lowered her behind the porch’s brick wall.
Then she straightened up and smiled at me.
“You bitch,” I said, and raised the SIG Sauer.
She vanished.
· · ·
I jumped over the sidewalk as I ran toward Miss Carstairs. The weapon went back into the holster inside the coat. In two seconds I was on my knees next to her and Jim. She was half-laid across him.
I touched her neck and felt a thin thready heartbeat. I shuddered and dragged her away from Jim’s body, back out into the morning sunshine on the grass. Jim’s chest still looked like the top of a volcano. A crater.
The ambulance pulled around the end of the street and turned toward us. I leaned my head against her chest but there was no chance of hearing a thing, not with the sirens running. I put a hand up, palm out, toward the ambulance. A second later the siren cut off. I put my head down again.
Breath.
Heartbeat.
Weak.
I didn’t start CPR. The professionals were almost within arm’s reach.
They hopped out of the front doors and came jogging toward me. What happened? What’s the situation? Report.
I pushed myself back from Miss Carstairs and said, “Another body. On the porch.”
One of the EMTs dropped to his knees; the other one followed the line of my finger and jogged toward the porch. She stopped and swore, then pulled out a portable radio and spoke into it. She glared at me.
I glanced at her, then shifted my gaze over to the van.
One side of the back door was open.
· · ·
I’m a writer. I write stories of post-apocalyptic horror.
I’m not sure where I’m going with that, but I feel like I should note it.
I stood up. The woman EMT started shouting at me to get down. She didn’t have a gun on her or anything—at least, she didn’t pull one out. And normally, yes, I would be the first person to admit that the last thing you want to do is to piss off the medic.
I stood up and walked toward the back of the van. All of a sudden the SIG Sauer was in my hands again. I knew at that moment that I was going to be arrested and charged with Jim’s murder. They’d say that the gun had misfired, and that’s what had blown up Jim’s chest. Never mind that my clothes weren’t sprayed with blood, and that Jim’s heart tissue was gone.
Times like these, you reach for the easiest explanation. You see it all the time in stories. Well, I’ve seen it in real life, too. Anytime the world doesn’t work the way a person thinks it ought to, they come up with some kind of conspiracy to explain it. Men on the moon, JFK’s assassination, banks charging them too much interest.
But that’s for the little things.
When the conspiracy gets too big, and the truth gets too obvious, it vanishes. You don’t see it. You see something else. It doesn’t have to fit the facts. It just has to be something.
And then you grab the explanation with both hands and hold on. You ride the tiger because that’s the only way to keep from looking it in the face as it bears down on you.
I looked inside the back of the van and didn’t see anything. There was nothing there to see.
I’m going crazy, I heard myself think.
More sirens were on the way. Cops this time—maybe a couple of fire trucks. Whatever was going on, the first-response team was going to be ready to handle it.
Ha, ha.
I was at the edge of the sidewalk, the one that ran along the curb from house to house to house. Where was everybody? I looked around. A few people had come out onto the sidewalk further down the street. Not a lot of people. It wasn’t that kind of neighborhood.
I knew that later they'd say they’d seen whatever everyone else saw. Whatever that happened to be.
I put one foot onto the sidewalk, then the other. My heart thudding in my chest.
The SIG Sauer aimed directly into the back of the van. The empty van. But one half of the back door was still closed.
I was five feet away. Then three.
I reached out to the other half of the back door and swung it open, then fired the magazine and the chambered round into what I found crouched there until I was dry-firing over and over and over again.
A few seconds later, or at least that’s what it felt like, someone took the gun away from me. My arms were jerked behind me and cuffed together. The metal was cool and the cuffs pinched. I registered the fact, then dismissed it.
I was turned around. Someone had my left arm, someone else had my right. Miss Carstairs was on a stretcher being carried toward the ambulance. Several cops were standing around Jim’s body on the porch. Someone was shining a light into the abandoned house.
I was almost to the patrol car when I thought of something. I looked to my left.
The real estate agent was watching me with a half-interested smile. Did I want to put a bid on the house or not? she seemed to say.
“Don’t panic or anything,” I said. “But there’s another gun in my pocket.” I had clean forgot about my little holdout, a Beretta Tomcat that I kept in my right front pocket at all times.
She smiled and held out a hand. I guess she must have forgotten that my hands were cuffed.
In the end it was the real estate agent on my right who took it away from me. I looked from face to face and back again, looking for some sign of what I’d seen in the back of the van.
Something borrowed.
Something blue.
I stil
l don’t know if I’m crazy or not.
Or what the hell it was that I shot in the back of the van. The TV news channels say it was a teenage kid in a blue hoodie.
But whatever it was, I at least know that that it was not.
I hope.
About the Author
DeAnna Knippling likes Left 4 Dead and Alice in Wonderland, and has finally found out a way to combine the two: Victorian zombies. Her new series is Alice’s Adventures in Underland, in which bad things happen to good rabbits. DeAnna has published short fiction in Crossed Genres, Big Pulp, Penumbra, and more. She lives in Colorado Springs, Colorado, which is also the setting of her first published book, Choose Your Doom: Zombie Apocalypse, a pick-your-own-adventure books for teens and up.
You can find out more about DeAnna at WonderlandPress.com, including a newsletter that will tell you when the next story is out...and give you a free book.
I like comments, reviews, responses, criticism, notifications of typos, general effusions, clever jokes, puns, barbaric yawps, and suchlike. Please look me up at Wonderland Press and drop me a line :)
As always, this story is dedicated to Lee and Ray,
without whose love none of this would be possible.
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