by Ricky Sides
Thud. Thud.
Thud.
Each slam against the door made her heart race. She took tentative steps back, trying to slow her whistling breath. Her mind whirred emptily, like something cut loose.
Thud.
Each thud was progressively weaker, as though the man was losing interest in forcing his way in. What if he’s dying, her nurse’s instincts whispered. He needs your help, Cassie. He’s been in some kind of accident. You’re a nurse! You have to help him!
Cassie shook her head no, even as she took a step toward the door. Then she froze, held in place by indecision. She blinked and ran her hands over her face, pulled her hair from the elastic, and then gathered it back into a ponytail and looped the elastic around it, tightened it.
The thumping stopped.
Was he gone?
She went on tiptoe to the front window and twitched a section of curtain aside. She had to press her cheek to the glass to get to the angle where she could see the area just outside the front door. The man was still there, facing the house. He had quieted, but there was something implacable about his swaying stance. He was not leaving any time soon.
Head injury from a motorcycle accident, her mind told her, but that internal voice had grown less authoritative and more desperate. Trying to convince. It explains the odd behavior. It explains his nose, his eyes…the…the…
“He had eyes like an animal,” Cassie whispered. Like a hyena, or a lion–not cold, exactly, but just not…not…human. Whatever had happened to the man had swept his humanity from him.
She remembered the phone and bent to retrieve it from where it had slid up against a baseboard. The screen was cracked, but the phone still worked. She dialed the police. Her hands were shaking and that surprised her–she was handling this well, thinking it through, following logical steps to resolution…wasn’t she? Her body didn’t seem to agree.
The phone rang three times, and then the call dropped. She dialed 911 again. It rang once and dropped. Bullshit…the call shouldn’t drop. She was on the town’s Wi-Fi. Bullshit, bullshit. Rage, terror, and a distressingly blank helplessness washed over her, making her feel faint. She squeezed the phone in both hands, and a scream that she wouldn’t allow locked her chest and gritted her teeth.
She looked out the window again. The man was still there, still swaying, but now he faced the side yard.
Think, Cassie, think. She squeezed the phone harder as if to press ideas, solutions from it. Dan. Call Dan. Call your husband. He wouldn’t answer, though, because no cells were allowed in the classroom. She wished she could text him, leave him a message that way, but texting-enabled phones had been outlawed while Cassie was in college. Now it was numbers or nothing. Most people didn’t even bother to have cell phones anymore because the plans had become prohibitively expensive as the economy had worsened.
Call Lucy’s school.
…go get her. Go now before–Donna’s voice. Why had she said to go get Lucy? Why didn’t 911 answer? What was going on? A deeper unease–brought on by the shadow, Donna’s call, the man, his eyes, no phone–stirred her guts, almost to nausea. She glanced into the kitchen and the stack of neatly folded towels looked like something from another life. Something had changed. Something big and it was more than just the noseless, soulless, bright-eyed apparition desecrating the suburban peace and normality of her front porch.
The car was parked in the garage behind the house. Just to be safe, she would drive to get Lucy, and then go to the police. The ladies at the care center might look at her as if she’d lost her mind, but so what. Better safe than sorry.
She would call Dan on the way and leave him a message. Once she had Lucy, maybe she would drive to the Vo-Tech to see if she could get in to see him. Get him to come with her and Lucy and…why was she thinking about getting them all in the car?
More importantly, why was she still standing here?
Move it, Cas, she told herself and with that small, authoritative command, she was moving through the house, gathering purse and keys. There were ten long strides between the laundry room door and the garage. Always before she had lamented the lack of a decent back yard and she had told Dan a hundred times that they should sell this house and buy one of the houses in the country with football field-sized yards, but not anymore. Not with that boogieman on the front porch, and that…whatever it had been…that had cast that long shadow behind the Shapiro’s house. How many ‘whatevers’ were out there? Had one of them gotten Donna? Maybe the homeless had finally risen up, just as the Clergy Party always said would happen. She’d never paid attention to their nonsense before; they were too strident, too reactionary. But they might have been right all along. There were so many homeless. Cas had always felt bad for them, but…
Her hand was on the knob of her laundry room door and she just stood there, frozen. She’d paralyzed herself with the thoughts of a homeless uprising.
Jesus, Cas, will you please just MOVE?
She glanced as far left and right as she could by pressing her cheeks to the cool glass–the little yard was clear–and she turned the knob to ease the door open. Her nerve endings sizzled with red caution, the small hairs on the back of her neck waved and tickled. The day was a nice one, weather wise, nice for June. Not too hot, not yet. Stop stalling!
She stuck her head out, looked left and right again. Cas, go…go, go, GO…
She went, pulling the door closed behind her and stepping with deer-like tentativeness onto the concrete steps. From there, she made her way to the garage.
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