by Tracy Serpa
From her current position, she could only see the front left side of the room where she had been sitting for most of the day, watching MTV. She realized that to get out to rescue, she would have to go past the room, without knowing what waited there. Outside, Mike slammed the truck bed closed, and Sarah knew she had to move.
She stepped slowly out into the hallway, her back pressed against the wall. Sidestepping so she could keep an eye on the kitchen, she placed her feet gingerly on the floor around the object that covered most of it. She was more than five steps from the door and fully exposed when he came into view.
The jogger’s shirt had been yellow. A grisly bib of dark blood had turned most of it brown. He was kneeling in the middle of the den, his head tilted back, mouth hanging open. She was frozen in place, even as she realized that his eyes were open, glaring up and forward. His throat made a sickening gurgle as he breathed, his chest expanding and contracting in an off-kilter rhythm. But he didn’t move. He looked like someone in a trance.
Mike’s door slammed shut, and the truck engine fired up. Sarah saw the jogger’s left hand twitch violently just as she moved to take another quiet step forward. She set her foot in blood and slipped, falling forward. All at once, she lost control. The hysterical screams came ripping out of her chest as she scrambled toward the door, crying for Kai, for Mike, to wait, to stop, to help.
She reached the doorway and slipped again, the soles of her shoes now slick with her friend’s blood. Every inch of her body tensed for the impact of the jogger, and the pain.
“Mike! Mike!” she cried frantically, flinging the door open and stumbling out onto the porch.
She saw him lean over his steering wheel and squint in her direction. The driveway was washed in red light as he put on his brakes. Pushing herself up, she ran for his truck, scrambling down the stairs to the driveway. Mike parked the truck and got out just as Sarah reached Heather’s door and yanked desperately at the handle. Heather’s eyes were wide as she opened the door.
“Sarah, what’s wrong?”
Still waiting for the collision, the attack, the tearing, and the screaming, Sarah climbed over Heather into the truck cab, crying uncontrollably.
“We have to go; we have to get help!” she screamed.
“Kiddo, what happened?” Mike asked, his eyes on the open door.
“Lani—she’s dead, she’s inside, and he killed her!”
Just then, a horrible wail rolled out of the gaping front door, echoed by Sarah’s in the truck. Heather’s body tensed, and Mike’s eyes widened as the sound died out, leaving only a sense of terror hanging in the air.
“He’s still in there! Let’s go!” Sarah begged.
Before Mike could answer, the jogger appeared at the doorway, his features contorted in rage. He let out a bloodcurdling shriek and beat his own fists against his face and head. Mike stepped out from behind his door, a look of horror and fury coming over his face.
“Please, Mike!” Sarah shouted.
Next to her, Heather locked the door and pushed herself away from the window, terrified. She took her eyes off the jogger for a second and called out, “Dad!”
Mike seemed not to hear. He stepped forward into the driveway just as the jogger leaped out from the doorway and rushed at the truck. The headlights illuminated his condition as he charged, but he was moving too fast for Mike to respond to the grisly sight of blood covering the man’s face and shirt. The jogger was on him in seconds, raking splintered fingernails across Mike’s face and neck and snagging a hand on his shirt collar, the attacker’s momentum throwing them both to the ground. Mike landed hard on his hands and knees, his shirt collar ripping away as the jogger slid past the truck in the loose dirt and gravel. Almost immediately he was clawing at the ground and Mike’s legs as he scrambled like an animal to regain his footing. Heather screamed for her father as he stumbled back against the front edge of the truck, dazed.
“Get up!” Sarah yelled.
He turned to look at her and blinked slowly, bewilderment plain on his face. An angry welt was already swelling under his lip, and thin red lines ran across his cheek and neck where he had been scratched. Only a few feet away, the crazed man was scrambling forward, his eyes locked on Mike, who sat in shock on the ground. Sarah felt her mind clamp down over any instinct but survival, and she slid over into the driver’s seat and started the truck. The roar of the engine made Mike flinch, and then he jumped up to his feet.
“Wait!” Heather cried, wrapping her arms around Sarah and pulling her away from the wheel. Her father’s eyes had finally cleared; he yanked the driver’s side door open and leaped into the truck, shoving Sarah aside and pulling the door closed behind him. On the driveway before them, the jogger threw himself at the hood of the truck, mouth open and bellowing, as Mike slammed it into reverse and backed down the driveway at full speed. The crazed man grasped at the windshield once before he bounced off the hood and crashed to the ground. He rolled to his feet almost instantly, sprinting after them and grasping at the air until the tires kicked up too much dust and he became only a shadow disappearing into the dusk.
~
The last glow of the sun was fading behind the clouds as Jones sped down the highway. Paul sat quietly in the passenger seat, his hands wrapped around his phone and wedged between his knees. Sarah had not answered his calls, and he was repeatedly getting a busy signal from 911. They were having trouble getting anything on the radio, and the few local stations they picked up were playing languid ukulele tunes or oldies. The disparity between the music and their mood was dizzying.
“Right here,” Paul said.
Jones answered quickly, “I know.” He took the corner hard, swinging into the driveway and fishtailing on the dust and gravel.
Paul leaned forward trying to get a look at the house as they approached. Every window upstairs was dark, but the ones downstairs were tinged slightly by the faint yellow light from the motion sensors on out back. Rolling to a stop near the front, they saw the open front door like a puncture wound in the house. Paul jumped out of the truck.
“Sarah?” he called, loping up toward the door. There was no answer. Jones turned the truck off as Paul took two long steps into the house and skidded to a halt. A strange choking sound caught in his throat as he stuck a hand out to steady himself. On the floor of the hallway lay Lani’s body, her limbs thrust out at wild angles, stagnant pools of blood displaying footprints, slip marks, the spatterings of struggle. Her eyes were open, glassy, and unseeing.
Outside, Jones approached cautiously and called out for him. Unable to answer, he sank to one knee, the edges of his vision darkening. He moved for the door as Jones called out again, slightly louder this time.
“Paul, someone’s coming.”
He turned and made his way out onto the porch slowly. The whine of Kai’s engine approaching on the highway was a small relief. Paul slumped on the first step, watching as his brother veered into the driveway and rumbled down to park behind Greg’s truck. He leaped out of the cab, shouting, “Did you find her?”
“Jesus, Kai,” was all he could say. “Jesus, Lani’s dead.”
Kai pushed past him, heading straight into the house. Paul heard him stop for a moment in the hallway, and then the sound of his heavy steps taking the stairs two at a time. His voice came down, loud and hard, shouting, “Sarah? Sarah?”; then his footsteps sounded again, moving farther away from the front of the house. Shaking off the scene in the hallway as best he could, Paul shoved himself to his feet and steeled himself to walk back into the house. Jones, already on the porch with him, stepped behind him noiselessly.
They moved quickly into the den, avoiding the hallway and heading for the kitchen. Kai came thumping down the stairs again, his high school baseball bat in hand. His face was pale, grim, his eyes narrowed as he walked unfazed past the body in the hallway. Jones stood off to one side, unsure of what to do, while Kai paced the kitchen and Paul leaned against the refrigerator with his hands on his head.
“So she’s not upstairs?” Paul asked.
“No. I talked to her, and she said she was in her closet. I checked there first. Then I checked my room, yours, Dad’s, all the closets, the tub . . . I called for her. She’d come out if she was here.” Kai spoke rapidly, crossing the kitchen in three long strides before turning back. “Maybe the police got her.”
Jones cleared his throat. “What if—”
“Don’t!” Kai snarled. “I would have said I found her if she was up there.”
“She called me,” Paul mumbled.
“Me too. Her phone died.”
“Did she call the cops? Do you know?”
“She said she did, but then she hung up to call me again. But I can’t get through to nine-one-one. I tried,” Kai said, dragging the bat behind him.
“I don’t think the cops would have left Lani here,” Paul said quietly.
They all fell silent for a long moment. Suddenly Kai stopped pacing and turned toward the front of the house. His clouded features began to clear as his eyebrows lifted.
“Hey. Hey. The feed is here,” he said hopefully. “Did you see that? The feed is sitting in the driveway. You think Mike got her?”
Paul frowned. He hadn’t seen any feed, but then again, he had been focused on getting to his sister.
“Yeah, Mike must have her!” Kai’s voice rose. “He was bringing by the rest of the order, and he must have taken her.” He radiated relief so that the other two felt equally sure that Sarah was safely away from the house. Just then, Jones leaped away from the kitchen window and let out a stifled cry.
“What?! What?!” Paul cried.
Jones had landed crouched, his fingertips against a cabinet and the other hand spread out flat in the air. His eyes were wide and darting from the window to the door.
“Someone’s here. Outside. Out there,” he whispered. “Something just moved out in the back, past that window . . . big. It’s gotta be a person.”
Kai and Paul looked at one another.
“Mike’s truck isn’t here,” Paul said.
His eyes on his brother, Paul saw the moment that his features hardened into a stony mask; Kai’s jaw flexed, his eyes narrowed slightly, and the groove between his brows stood out in shadow again. He tightened his grip on the bat. Without moving or looking away from Paul, he shouted once, “Sarah?”
They strained, listening for any kind of response. The kitchen clock ticked loudly, and the gusty breeze hissed through the foliage. The motion sensor clicked on again, sending yellow light streaking through the window. Taking a deep breath, Kai shouted again, louder this time.
“Sarah, listen to me. If that’s you, find a place to hide where you can see the back door. I’m going to come out there—”
Jones hissed, “What are you doing?”
Kai ignored him. “—and I’m going to kill whoever else is on our property. You find somewhere you can see me, and you yell for me when I step out. I won’t let him get to you, kiddo, I promise.”
Paul finally straightened up. “You’re going to kill him?” he heard himself ask.
The look on Kai’s face was a blend of disbelief and disgust. He pointed the bat past Jones, toward the door that led into the hallway.
“You see what he did to her?” His voice was low, rumbling.
Raising his hands in deference, Paul answered, “Listen. I was at the beach, and something like this happened. People went nuts, Boomer attacked Greg—”
“And Trent attacked Brandon!” Kai yelled over him. “And some lunatic killed Lani!” With that, he stepped to the kitchen door and threw it open. The motion sensor light did little to illuminate the backyard; the dirt area between the house and the shed was easily visible, but past that, the shrubs and trees shadowed the grounds. Kai stood in the doorway, puffing up to fill almost the whole frame. Paul took a few steps forward, saying, “Don’t kill him, Kai. I don’t know what’s happening, but if the police show up, and you’ve—”
Finally Kai’s temper broke. He swung the bat with unbelievable force into the doorjamb, sending wood splinters out into the night.
“Sarah is out there!” he bellowed at the top of his lungs. Falling silent, Paul felt his shoulders slump. The only sound was Kai’s heavy breathing as he worked to regain his control and stepped down onto the dirt. The ground scratched beneath his feet. He waited, peering into the dark. Then he shouted, “Now, Sarah!”
There was no sound, no movement from the yard. Kai’s frame seemed to shrink a little. Paul watched him—his shoulders heaving, his hands wringing the grip on the bat. When Kai called out again, his voice broke.
“Sarah!” It was both a command and a plea. Again, no answer came. Paul stepped out onto the porch to join his brother.
“Kai, listen . . . I have my cell phone. Do you have Mike’s number? I’m sure she’s with him,” he said quietly.
After a few moments, Kai let the bat swing down in one hand. He kept his back to the porch as he shoved his free hand into his pocket, digging for the receipt from the shop. After a moment he loosed his grip on the bat, letting it fall to the ground, and dug in his other pocket as well. Just then, the sound of crunching gravel sounded from the side of the house, and a figure tore around the corner into the backyard. His yellow shirt was stained with blood, soiled with vomit and dirt. Paul cried out incoherently as he recognized the jogger from earlier in the day, sprinting straight for him, his teeth bared like an animal. He shrieked horribly and lunged forward; Paul braced himself for the impact.
A sickening thud sounded as Kai collided with the jogger, sending them both smashing into the side of the house. The jogger yelped and fell back, scrambling in the dirt away from Kai, who was working his way forward, his left hand pressed into his side. In his right hand was the bat.
The jogger scrambled a few more feet, then leaped up again and pounced at Kai. Paul watched in stunned horror as the maniac clawed and swiped, lashing out with his legs and fists, beating on his brother. Kai pushed away from his attacker just as the man snapped his teeth at Kai’s face. Swinging the bat up, he brought it crashing down on the jogger’s shoulder. Even from the porch, Paul heard what he thought must have been breaking bones. The jogger collapsed, snarling in protest. His body curled defensively into a ball in the dirt as Kai hefted the bat into the air again. Trying to lift his wounded arm to cover himself, the jogger howled in agony.
Any thoughts Paul had of mercy or consequences had evaporated at the appearance of the jogger. He had been too far away from the beach to really see the horde or what they had done to each other. But the connection between Lani’s ruined corpse and the bloody man on the ground before him was immediate and horrifying. As Kai brought the bat down on the man’s head, Paul felt only a dull sickness at the indescribability of the sound it made. A tiny, distorted scream escaped from the jogger just before his brother smashed the bat down a final time.
Kai stumbled away, trembling moans blending with his exhales. He backed toward the porch, as if he were unable to take his eyes off the figure in the dirt. The concrete step bumped his calves, and he collapsed onto the stairs.
Paul stood above him on the porch, not knowing what to do. His brain fumbled for words, feelings, judgments, plans . . . nothing came. On the step below him, his brother sat slouched forward, his elbows on his knees, his forearms hanging limply between his thighs. His right hand still held the bat. Slowly, he shifted it to his left, then leaned up on his hip and dug into his pocket. Paul heard crinkling paper as Kai drew out a receipt and held it up over his shoulder without turning to face him. His hands were shaking.
He said only, “Call Mike.”
Ten
Glad to leave the stuffy recycled air of the plane behind him, Gary stepped into the terminal at LAX and tried to shake Tanya Miller from his trail. She had been seated beside him on the flight from Honolulu and talked incessantly about her vacation home, missing her dogs, and the problem with tanning past the age of forty. He had guessed, but n
ot said, that she was actually well past that age; dark roots peeked out from under her platinum-blonde hair, and the strange gloss of her skin implied plastic surgery. On another flight, he might have been more receptive, but today everything grated on his nerves. Two hours into the flight, he had made a show of getting out a paperback, to no avail. She had simply turned the subject to her favorite authors. He hadn’t had the guts to put his headphones on and watch the in-flight entertainment. The last half hour sitting on the tarmac had felt like an eternity; it was difficult to block the scent of her breath, a mix of Bloody Mary and ham sandwich, while he waited for the pilot to announce that they could turn their cell phones back on.
“Oh, Gary!” she called from somewhere behind him. “Gary, I wanted to tell you . . .”
He didn’t stop, swerving between clumps of people heading to their gates. Fishing his phone out of his pocket, he checked again for any messages. Although he had none, he held the device to his ear and feigned a call, keeping his head down as he approached baggage claim. There was plenty of open space to stand, but he wedged himself between two groups from his flight to wait for his bag and ward off Tanya.
He was still pretending to be on the phone when it rang. The violence of the tune in his ear made him flinch; embarrassed, he picked up the call and said, “Sorry, I must have lost you.”
There was a brief silence on the other end, and then a quiet voice said, “Have you landed safely?” It was the same voice that had called two months ago and warned him about Brandon—the same voice that had offered him help.
“Yep. Yeah, I’m at the baggage claim,” Gary responded. He was working to appear and sound casual, and he was pretty sure it showed.