“God damn, dude, didn’t I tell you I was going to be here in like five minutes?” responded Andrew as he let his hands and arms fall to his sides, since the need to protect himself had since faded.
“Yeah, but really, did you have to creep up on me in the middle of a storm, yelling like some wild banshee? I could’ve stomped on your ass or something.” Anthony’s chest was heaving with relief as tried to gather his hair in some semblance of control, the wind made sure he only partially succeeded.
At his side, Andrew’s smile merely widened.
“Dude, I brought these just in case,” said the other boy, holding out twin objects, in each hand.
Anthony looked down and was shocked. They were straight out of the Twilight Zone, they were so surreal. They had made them when they were little, third graders possibly, but he wasn’t sure. It was quite a long time ago.
They were probably the first ready-to-use weapons ever made by the two of them. They were Dodger baseball bats, the miniature type only about 16 inches long, both purchased by their respective fathers before either of them could walk - or so they’d guessed. Their collective memories clouded when they tried remembering as far back in time.
Over the years, the boys had dented and abused them. The idea of having a little baseball bat had long lost its appeal the older they’d grown. Andrew had long stopped thinking of his as a bat all together and had taken to believing it was actually a police baton. He had played with it as such for quite some time before he’d taken it with him on one of his overnight stays at Anthony’s grandmother house. He’d shown Anthony it wasn’t quite a bat if one looked at it from the right perspective. Rather, it was a club to be used to smash up bad people.
It was during that explanation, Anthony remembered he had one as well; a tiny bat all bludgeoned and stained with his misuse over the years. Immediately, he’d gone in search of his own.
Andrew had tagged along. Within a few minutes, they’d found it at the bottom of his huge football toy box, plastic, with a large “NFL” logo emblazoned across both sides.
Anthony had looked at his, his small head turned to one side, because it was hard for him to see it as anything other than a baseball bat sized for Pokémon. Mostly due to the small knob at the very end, which wasn’t very practical he’d concluded. The thing didn’t weigh enough to slip from one’s hand mid-swing.
He’d mentioned this to Andrew and they had both stared at their bats, wondering what to do. After a minute or so, Andrew asked the simple question that, eventually, put them on the path to creating their first real weapons.
“Is there a way we can saw off this thing at the end?”
Anthony had peered at his friend, his tiny brow drawn together in concentration. He remembered the multitude of tools in the shed at the very back of his grandmother’s property, saying, “Yeah, there’s a way. My grandma has hundreds of tools in the shed – saws, clamps, hammers, and screwdrivers – all kinds of stuff. We can use them to cut off the knobs for sure!”
At that, both boys had leaped to their feet and dashed off for the tool shed. Within a half hour, they’d sawed off the bottom three or four inches of the bats, had sanded down the newly formed, jagged ends, and stood back to admire them. Still, they didn’t feel right. They’d both frowned in consternation. It wasn’t long before Anthony remembered all batons had some form of a handle or grip or something. And that’s when inspiration had struck him. He hurriedly rummaged through his grandmother’s belongings until he found exactly what he was looking for – Duck Tape!
Andrew watched his friend as he began to tape the bottom three inches of what was once been a baseball bat, but was rapidly becoming something else - a Billy club. When Anthony had finished and held it up for Andrew’s inspection, the boy’s eyes had lit up in wonder.
“That’s it, Tony! You did it, you did it!” he screeched excitedly as he reached for the Duck Tape and did the very same to his piece of battered wood. Moments later, he too possessed a 12-inch Billy club, made specifically to bash up bad guys and put them in jail for good!
They had made real weapons!
Now, shaking his head from the reverie of the past, Anthony looked down at them in Andrew’s hands, the very same clubs they’d forged seven years prior.
He had only one question: “What the hell are we going to use those for?”
Somewhat shocked at Anthony’s reaction, the other boy jerked aback, clutching a separate club in each hand. “Dude, you said yourself, this little chick semi-threatened one of your sisters, who’s to say she’s freakin’ crazy, because her parents are the same way. You want some geeked out dad of hers coming at you all Hulk Hogan and shit? I’m pretty sure you’d want one of these things in your hand to protect yourself!”
Anthony straightened up a little, his eyes darting to his right, which was a thing he did when he was considering something he initially had no intention of considering. Andrew did make a good point. Who’s to say Nixy’s parents weren’t a pair of psychos equally proportionate to their daughter? They could be even worse! There were no guarantees.
“You make a good point,” Anthony ventured after a second or two, “but I don’t want us to go up there all agro carrying these things like we’re going to cause trouble or something. I just want to make sure the little douche-bag leaves my sisters alone from now on, that’s all.”
“Yeah, man, no biggie. We’ll keep them stowed in our back pockets just in case we run into the Hills Have Eyes clan or something, alright?” answered Drew without a drop of humor in his voice.
“Cool, then, let’s go, before hell breaks loose over our heads and we get drenched by this rain that is so gonna pound the neighborhood.”
With that, they turned uphill and began walking. Each of them wriggling and twisting, trying to put their childhood Billy clubs into their back pockets. All the extra clothing they wore hampered their efforts.
~~~~~~~~<<<<<<{ ☼ }>>>>>>~~~~~~~~
~ 26 ~
A Terrible Truth
Monday, November 22nd, 4:32 pm…
Anthony and Andrew reached the end of the street where the homes clustered together – more like crammed - shoulder-to-shoulder, as if deliberately built to lean against one another. They stopped and looked around, not sure what to do next, because nothing had changed. They both knew the street they lived on didn’t go to the summit of the hill, and that still seemed to be the case. There was nothing new, but house after house, no more than four or five feet apart.
Anthony wondered, for some odd reason, if their builders had violated the city building codes by constructing them in such proximity. Lame thought, Tony…
Crap, now what?
He cleared his mind, realizing the little, foreign chump had been lying, as they’d suspected all along. Anthony turned around and looked back the way they’d come. He could see his father’s Dodge Durango parked on the left side of the road from where he stood. It was over a hundred yards down in the decline of the hill. He could even see the roof of his house from where he was standing, in the middle of the dead end street.
The wind blew again, cold. He could feel his cheeks were reddening. He could feel the skin tightening. A heartbeat later, he felt the splatter of something wet on his forehead. Before it fully registered, another one hit him on the chin. Instinctively, he looked up, seeing and feeling half a dozen more fall from the sky. Great, it is going to start raining now, he thought just as…
“Hey Ant, come and check this out!”
Anthony glanced back up the road to find Andrew had walked almost to the very end of the street, thirty feet from where he was currently standing, motioning for him to follow. Seriously considering if it was worth getting wet, he wasn’t sure if he wanted to go home and get out of the cold or continue. He hesitated, gazed about briefly seeing the sprinkled raindrops all about him.
“Come on, man, let’s get this over with!” Andrew pined loudly.
Anthony spun and trotted up the road to stand beside Andrew. He g
lanced over to where the other boy was pointing.
Blocked by his original line-of-sight, Anthony found himself staring at a newly formed dirt road, cleared (or bulldozed) right between the last house on the right side of the street and the first house standing at street’s end. It appeared newly formed, no more than seven feet wide - a rudimentary road at that, meeting the existing street at a forty-five degree angle. From there, it went straight up the hill for about one hundred and fifty feet. This was all guesswork of course. Anthony could only gauge the distance by eye.
Beyond, it turned sharply to the left, further up the hill and eventually passed out of sight.
“I guess the little booger wasn’t lying after all,” muttered Andrew.
Anthony took a few steps closer to the wide dirt path and turned back toward his friend with a grim look on his face. “What do you think?” queried Anthony, unsure of what to make of the road or Nixy’s story.
“I think we should march up there and get this shit finished. I’m cold and getting hungry, and it’s beginning to rain,” was Andrew’s immediate and obvious response.
“Yeah, I hear you. Come on then.”
They walked up the straight portion of the dusty road, now slowly becoming a pasty cross between wet dirt and mud as the rain continued to sprinkle its’ surface. At the turn in the road, they craned their necks ninety degrees to the left, both discovering the road made a beeline up the hill, another two hundred feet. It seemed to reach the very top of the hill itself from there. They had to assume this, though, since the summit was still out of their sight.
To the boys, the construction of the road itself looked plotted between the lines of existing properties. It traversed right through areas where there were no existing fences or walls. It must’ve been built in an area recently zoned for residential development. The farther they went, the more wild and unattended the land around them became. Those places where an occasional oak or spruce would grow without fear of its roots tearing up sidewalks or plumbing or like underground infrastructure. This was a place where the Los Angeles Fire Department didn’t site residents for overgrown vegetation. The area was covered in chest-high growth just about everywhere. This looked precisely like unincorporated land to them.
So… maybe Milbur Street was finally going to reach the top of the hill after all. At least, it seemed that way to Anthony.
Without word to one another, Anthony and Andrew made their way up the last of the road. The rain and the wind picking up slightly as they trod the steep incline toward the summit. Above them, the sky was so dark and turbulent; it looked more like the surface of the ocean than a conglomeration of clouds. At this early hour, the streetlights of the city were beginning to flicker on en masse. The storm was blocking so much of the sun’s rays, they’re light-sensitive sensors deemed it was dusk.
As they attained the top of the hill, they found themselves in a wide, relatively level clearing, about two hundred feet circle from where they stood at the end of the newly wrought road. Some of the area must’ve been flat for years. It was overgrown and strewn with debris of all sorts, while, in other places, they could see some sort of large machinery had moved the earth to make the overall area of level ground wider, more spacious. It was piled directly opposite the road from them, forming a wide arch at the verge of the clearing and the downward slope of the far side of the hill. Anthony estimated the wall of dirt might be as high as ten feet at some points along its expanse. It served as a decent barrier, hindering the view of the city from that particular vantage.
None of this, though, was in the least, disconcerting. There was nothing about the clearing that struck Anthony as odd. As he continued to glance around, it was plain to see there’d been a lot of earthwork done to the area. He could well imagine the amount of time and effort it would take to scrape the new road all the way to the summit. Even moving the debris to widen the clearing must’ve been tremendous.
Then, it struck him.
It was the first inclination that something wasn’t quite right with the place. He peered about, double-checking. He was correct. There was absolutely no such heavy machinery in evidence atop the hill - none at all. There was no construction trailer, no electrical power (even temporary) running up to the site, either. There wasn’t even a Port-a-potty in sight. What sort of general contractor ever operated a site without a nice, private place to take a dump?
None that Anthony had ever seen or known. They loved their crap-time!
There was simply nothing up there.
Where did this Nixy chick live anyway? Did she live out in the open with all the bugs and furry friends? How did she keep her dresses so white if she had sleep on the ground every night? How did she brush her teeth? Anthony took a few steps onto the clearing, looking around, frustrated now. His arms outstretched as if he was asking the site itself to answer the hundreds of questions firing in his brain.
He was about to say something sarcastic to Andrew when he spotted something out of the corner of his eye, something angular and not made by nature. He turned to face it, gazing across the clearing, to the point farthest away from where they stood. He saw it nestled right up against the earthen wall, sitting at what he figured in his mind, was the very back of the site. Even then, he wasn’t certain what he was looking at, because it was too baffling and so unbelievably out of place.
Andrew walked up beside him. “Dude, is that a doghouse?” he said, skeptical of what his own eyes were showing him.
“Yeah,” began Anthony, “and a freakin’ big one at that.”
In unison, the teenagers took a few more steps closer to the structure, the details slowly comprehensible to the both of them – a perfect wooden doghouse with real roofing, painted a very light brown with wooden trim painted only slightly darker. It was a simple camouflage against the many, many browns of the earthwork behind it. It could’ve been in anyone’s backyard, anywhere in the neighborhood, housing any typical yard dog, aside from one major detail. It was about twice the size it should’ve been to house a dog the size of a Great Dane. The doorway itself was better suited for a pony than the usual canine companion typically seen in Highland Park.
“Do you think she lives in there?” asked Andrew with a slight quiver in his voice. He didn’t want to believe this Nixy girl could possibly live in a place like that with her entire family.
If she has one…
“I don’t know, man. This is just getting weirder and weirder,” replied Anthony. “Maybe, we should, at least, check it out. I mean, there’s nothing else up here. Let’s give it a quick once over and then get the hell out of here. This is getting a little creepy.”
“Ok.” Andrew didn’t sound confident at all now.
“We can, at least, say we did what we planned to do. We tried and did our best, right?”
“Yeah, man, yeah.” It was more of a stammer than a reply. Andrew was trying to convince himself to stay and investigate, staving off the urge to run back home and out of the strengthening downpour.
Anthony didn’t respond to his friend. He began to walk toward the over-sized doghouse, motioning for Andrew to follow him.
He got no more than fifteen paces when, all of a sudden, the sky above them seemed to explode, white hot and angry. They had no more than a second, hearing a mesmerizing sizzle from above, smelt burnt ozone, before a tremendous peal of thunder nearly knocked them senseless with the sheer magnitude of its’ sound. Both boys held their hands over their ears as the ground shook from the overwhelming clap. The wind came next, fierce and unrelenting, icy. They stood, rooted, as a solid wall of water approached them from lower levels of the hill, advancing quickly upon the very heels of the wind.
A moment later, there were slammed by the torrential rain. One moment they were partially wet, they next they were both soaked, through their jackets, their pants, even their underwear. The sheer weight of the water plastered their hair to their heads, leaving them in the clearing so stunned, for a short while, they didn’t move. They sto
od there transfixed, struck senseless. Made immobile by the deluge, they glanced about, then at one another, bewildered.
“Dude, run for the dog house!” It was Andrew’s voice ringing out, through the pounding splash of the rain, barely audible above the noise. He was yelling at the top of his lungs.
Anthony didn’t reply. Merely, he nodded, a sodden heap already. They both took off, running for the only shelter in the clearing. They ran over the muddy ground, already a quagmire, slipping and stumbling, the mud seemed to be everywhere at once. They were at the doghouse in no less than ten seconds.
Andrew plunged through the open portal. The door was propped open, pushed inward as wide as it could go. Anthony followed, suddenly night-blinded by the lack of light inside. Andrew ignored the dark and spun around to gaze back out at the downpour, a torrent with no end in sight, the sound roaring in their ears. It was like a freight train passing a few feet in front of the wooden structure. Lightning flashed, illuminating everything, including the inside the doghouse. Again, the thunder was quick on its heels, rattling the boy’s teeth inside their skulls.
It was in that instance of light, Anthony saw her. In the very second of harsh white glare, deep inside the wooden structure, as far back as she could push herself against the opposing wall, was Nixy. Her hair and her dress pristine and perfect. Recoiling, as if he had seen a rattle snake or worse, Anthony jumped back into Andrew. Though he complained loudly, Anthony hadn’t heard, shouting.
The Unwanted Winter - Volume One of the Saga of the Twelves Page 23