by Brad Munson
And thank God there’s no one around to see me in this fucking costume.
He shrugged into the still-damp parka from his first excursion and button-zipped it up. Moving was a chore now, but he’d do what he had to do.
He unbolted the front doors and glared out at the storm. The wind was moderate – not quite gale-force, but pretty lively. At the moment, none of the razor-sharp disks were in sight.
Fifty feet, he told himself. Just fifty feet, over to Dead Leonard’s body, get the keys, and bolt into the tow truck. That’s all.
“Yeah,” he said aloud, and heard his words echo dully around the empty mini-mart. “That’s all.”
He gripped the door’s push-bar. “One … two …”
Three. He shoved the door open and lumbered into the storm. The rainfall slapped at his face, even as he ducked into it –
– and an instant later a thornwheel, big as a dinner plate, thwacked into his chest, dead center of the parka, the work-apron and the cookie sheet underneath. It opened up a gash in the parka, staggered him back a step … and shattered like glass.
Son of a bitch, he told himself. It actually works.
Ty didn’t take time to celebrate. He dipped his shoulders even lower, tucked his chin against his chest, and forced his way through the storm, off to the right, straight to the motionless body of the gas station owner. He kicked up surprising plumes of standing water; it was more than six inches deep already and getting worse by the minute.
Dead Leonard hadn’t moved a fraction since he’d fallen. Even the wind couldn’t move him. His clothes were so soaked he looked like he was made out of clay.
Crouching next to the body was an issue; his make-shift armor didn’t want to cooperate. Ty felt, heard, bits of wind-driven plastic spang against the outfit, thump against his arms, but he ignored it as he searched the dead man’s pockets for the keys. Parka first: nothing. Crap. He dug deeper, into the old man’s sodden jeans. Something big and twisty flapped by and he flinched away from it, ducked as it passed.
“Shit,” he said. He had to strip off one of the work gloves to get into the pocket of the mechanic’s jeans, and still … nothing. He grunted as he rolled the dead man over, refusing to look directly at the watery red ruin that had been the fat man’s face, and kept searching for the keys. And still … nothing.
They had to be there.
He stood up, almost swaying under the weight and the idiotic outfit. He was attacked by a sudden flight of small stones, blasting out of the storm and pepping him down one side. It was getting worse. The whole damn world was falling apart and he couldn’t even find a fucking set of fucking car—
Something silver-metallic glittered in the mud right next to Dead Leonard’s right hand. Ty froze and looked at it.
A flume, the size of a bath towel, writhed out of the dark and wrapped itself around his forearm. He gritted his teeth and tore it away with his one gloved hand. He could feel it twitch under his fingers, feel it try to crawl up his arm, stinging as it rose.
He flung it away and clutched at the glittering metal lying in the muck.
The keys were hanging from a steel ring that was looped through a scrap of misshapen leather that, Ty suspected, was supposed to look like an old-fashioned key. Then he looked at it a moment longer and realized that no, it wasn’t a key at all. It was a dick and balls.
“Class act to the end, Leonard,” he said …
… and a jagged piece of roofing tried to take his head off.
He was insanely lucky that it hit the side of the Iron Man half-helmet first, with its leading edge, and caromed off into the night. But it hit hard enough to jolt Ty out of his moment of disgust. An instant later, he was lunging away from the body, pulling himself around the front end of the tow truck and tearing open the driver’s side door.
He piled inside, struggling with all the makeshift armor. Just as he slammed the door shut, he saw the first of the fist-sized bone spiders crawling across the drowned tarmac, attracted to him for some reason he couldn’t fathom: movement, noise, smell for all he knew.
It didn’t matter. He was getting the hell out.
He shoved the ignition key home, punched a boot down on the clutch and held it, and fired up the ancient truck. It grunted at first, but caught. And he rammed his other boot down on the accelerator, torqueing the steering wheel madly to the left, as he heard the first scrabbling of the tiny creature’s steely claws against the truck’s body.
He may have run two wheels over Dead Leonard’s inert body; he wasn’t sure. And he couldn’t stop to care.
He followed the cop car’s path almost exactly, swooping across the parking lot and bouncing into El Grande Avenue. But where the cruiser turned right, to go back into town, Ty hauled on the wheel and turned left, and then left again almost immediately, shimmying and swaying his way to go up the off-ramp and onto Highway 121. He wasn’t the least bit concerned about oncoming traffic. He hadn’t seen a single car pass by since he’d arrived.
He struggled to find the gnarled knob on the dash that controlled the windshield wipers, then cursed loudly when the ancient rubber on the blades crumbled at the first sweep of the glass. It did almost no good at all; the windows were a gurgling, blurred mass, and everything outside was a wobbling black shadow against rushing gray shadows.
He didn’t care. He could see well enough to know he was traveling north, up 121, and that’s all he needed. He was no more than four, maybe five miles from the Notch, that cut in the ridge-line where he’d first entered the Valley and hit the storm. The tow truck shuddered and lurched under him as he barreled down the center line, hating the high speed, hating being man-handled by anyone other than Dead Leonard, but he didn’t care. Just get me to the downhill slope, he thought at the car as he peered through the globby mess beyond the hood and tried to imagine what was happening. Just get me there and I’ll take good care of you forever, I swear I will.
He saw something black and impossible pull up beside him and keep pace: a blunt instrument, as big as a steamer trunk, with thrusting blades at the front and rear, on a churning mass of legs that propelled the mass forward. The legs bent in all the wrong directions. No – not actually bent. Grew in the wrong direction, angling off and then breaking away and regrowing in another direction at ridiculous speeds, like sped-up movie footage. Nothing moved like that. No creature on earth could gallop on a thousand stubby legs and go forty, fifty, sixty miles an –
Shit!
Tyler Briggs stood on the brakes with both feet, literally rising up in the seat. The huge black mass in front of him had appeared out of the storm front far too quickly, and far too close. He’d veered and braked the instant he’d seen it, but it was hurtling towards him, a small mountain of blackness, bristling corners and horns of its own, blocking most of the roadway, too wide to get around, too close to stop too close too close too close –
Ten
Kerianne couldn’t stop drawing. Her fingers hurt. Her eyes were burning. Her wrist cramped up every time she turned a page and started another picture. But she just couldn’t stop.
She sat at her very own desk, the one Momma got for her at the Goodwill and painted with bright white enamel, so she could have her own place to work while Momma was downstairs in the shop working herself. Momma was the best seamstress and tailor in Dos Hermanos – “The only one in Dos Hermanos,” she would say, “so that makes me the best!” – and she worked all the time. All the time. Usually that didn’t bother Kerianne so much; she liked her own company and her books and her secrets. But now … now she just hurt.
The voices were getting worse, too. Not louder exactly, but closer, somehow. They used to just be whispers at the back of her head, like people talking softly at the other end of the house. But now it was like they were standing right behind her. And sometimes … sometimes it was like the picture she was drawing was talking right to her.
But that didn’t matter. Not right now. All that mattered was finishing the drawing of the big st
ocky thing with the million little legs under it, the galloper, with all the raindrops bouncing off it, splattering all around while it ran down the highway. She couldn’t see the highway, couldn’t draw it in, but she knew it was there and she already knew its name and she knew what it would do with those big sharp blade-horns up front when it rammed into you, just rammed in and cut you right up –
The knock on her door was like a gunshot.
“Keri?” Momma’s voice was high and urgent. “Keri, come on, answer me!”
She realized for the first time that Momma had been knocking at the door for a while now. The voices and the rattle-and-boom of the storm had kind of drowned her out. She knew she should put the drawings away. She knew she should jump back into her bed and pretend to be asleep because it was really late and Momma was going to be really mad, but she was just too tired. It just didn’t matter.
All that mattered was getting these last few raindrops in here and here and –
“Okay that’s it, I’m coming in.”
She heard the door open behind her, but she didn’t turn.
“I know, I promised I would give you your privacy, I said – what are you still doing up, young lady?”
Kerianne puffed out a huge sigh. It was done now. Finally. If it was like before, she would have a few minutes before her fingers started to twitch again. She hoped it would be a lot of minutes. She was just so tired …
Momma was standing close behind her. “Did … do you make that, baby?”
Kerianne let her head drop. It turned into a weary nod.
Momma was looking at the drawings on the floor now. And the ones on the bed and on her dresser. All of the pictures she’d made since she’d gotten home from school. That seemed like a million days ago.
She held up the one she’d made of the needleseed, the sort-of-round thing that was all spines and points and barbs with no real center at all. In her head, she could see the points growing and dissolving and breaking off to regrow, sometimes so fast you could barely follow. It made her shiver when she thought about touching it.
“You drew this?” Momma said. Kerianne must have looked a little disappointed, because her mother rushed to correct herself. “I mean, it’s really good, honey. There’s just so much detail. The line is so fine, I … I didn’t know you could do this.”
“I just started,” she said, and wiped her mouth with her aching fingertips. She was really nervous for Momma to look at these. “Drawing like that.”
“You just started?”
She nodded. “Yeah. Like yesterday. Before that I couldn’t draw at all.”
The voice that had talked to her when she was drawing the needleseed was all hissy, like it was made out of air. It kept talking about how it liked the soft parts like eyes and lips, ‘cause they were so wet and tasty and easy to get to.
“All of these?” Momma said, looking around her at the drifts of drawing. More than half the pages out of her big, thick drawing book were already used up. She didn’t want to think about what would happen when she ran out. Maybe she would have to start drawing on the walls. Maybe she should ask Ms. Trini or somebody for a bunch of paper from the Xerox machine at school tomorrow – well, today, actually. It was that late.
Kerianne’s desk was right in the middle of her room – not against one of the walls, but floating out in the center. That was the way she liked it; it let her put things on the wall in just the right way; it let her sprawl out or make herself small; it made her feel like she was the captain of her own tiny starship, right there in the command chair, especially when she looked out the window on the wall in front of her, the only window in the room, and could see the sky and the town and the rooftop of Kemmelman’s across the street. That was one of the cool things about living on the second floor. You could see everything.
Now Momma circled around to get between her and the window. She was holding up another drawing, the second one she did after the dragontongue that she gave to Ms. Trini. It was a picture of one of the really big bone spiders, the ones that were just growing now. Big-huge legs, all sharp angles and cutting edges, and pounding stumps at the bottom and no real face at all.
None of them had faces. Momma sort of noticed that.
“Where are the eyes?” she said. “Don’t your … things have eyes?”
Kerianne shook her head. “I don’t think they need them. They already know where they want to go.” At least that’s what the voices kept telling her. It was all planned out. They all knew what the others knew, and they all knew everything they had to.
“These are kind of scary, honey. Do they scare you?”
She nodded even more emphatically. “A lot. A whole lot.”
“Then why do you draw them?”
“Because I have to. I have to get them out.”
Momma went down on one knee right in front of Kerianne’s desk. She looked really worried. Her kinky red hair fell all around her face, only half-combed the way it was when she was too busy working to brush it properly. Her blue eyes were narrow with concern, and she had those little lines around her mouth that she got whenever she got worried.
She got worried a lot.
“Keri,” she said, and you could tell she was choosing her words very carefully, “Honey, I think you should stop drawing these for a little while.”
Something twitched just beyond the window. Kerianne tried not to look at it.
Momma mistook her silence for stubbornness. “Try to draw something else. You like drawing princesses, right? You drew one for me just last week.”
“It was two weeks ago,” Kerianne said. She remembered the day, and how Momma barely looked at it. “And it was a princess and her friend the handmaiden.”
Momma made herself smile and nod. “I remember. And it was great. Why don’t you draw me another one of her?”
It was dropping down from the roof. This long chain of bone and gristle with a curved claw at the end. Right outside the window.
“I … I can’t. Not yet.”
“Why not?”
It was right over Momma’s head, right outside the window. Now three of them, but not dropping down, growing down, building themselves right out of the rain, all twisted knots of rock or shell or something.
“Momma, please …”
Momma shook her head, full of regret. Her tangled red curls bounced almost cheerfully. “I’m sorry, baby. It’s way past time for bed, for both of us. Put that stuff away for tonight. We’ll talk about it tomorrow after school.”
“But—
“Tomorrow, baby. I have … I need to sleep, too. Just like you.” But Kerianne knew she was lying. As soon as she got her daughter tucked in she was going to tiptoe back downstairs to do just one more thing, one more thing, and Kerianne would hear the sewing machine whirring, far away but impossible not to hear, for hours and hours more.
But Kerianne stood up. Her fingers weren’t twitching yet. Maybe she really could get a little sleep before the voices made her draw again.
The hanging claws outside the window touched each other. In a heartbeat, they grew together, curved around each other, and made a rough circle as big as the top of a tea cup. A ring, really – a ring filled with bony teeth, tiny little razors that turned and gnashed and chewed on the air, swaying in the storm, about to bite right through the glass and –
“Now, young lady. Get into bed. Get some rest.”
It was right over her shoulder. Right outside the glass. If she would just turn and look she would see it, see what was making Kerianne draw these awful things.
“Momma. Look –“
Momma finally saw that her daughter wasn’t looking at her at all. She was looking past her, over her right shoulder at the window behind her. She turned –
– just as the hanging mouth, the biter vine, fell away, out of sight, down to the street two stories below.
“Is it the rain?” Momma said, frowning into the night. “I forget: you’ve never actually seen weather like this before. Not in
real life.”
Kerianne closed her eyes and forced the voices back. I know, she told them. I saw. “Yeah,” she said out loud. “The rain is all scary.”
She turned away from the empty window as her mother scooped the drawings off her bed and turned down the covers. Thunder made the whole room shiver, and they both stopped for a minute and waited for it to pass.
“You know what?” Momma said. “It scares me, too.”
Kerianne slipped under the covers. Momma pulled them up to her chin and kissed her on the cheek, the forehead, the cheek. “I love you, baby. Don’t worry; it’ll all be over soon.”
“I know.”
“And no more drawing scary things, okay? Not for a while anyway.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
Momma slipped away. She turned off the overhead light but left the little R2D2 light on her side table on. The door closed with a firm clunk.
Lightning flickered through the sky. More thunder came and went. Nothing else was waiting outside the window. Kerianne closed her eyes, took a nice deep breath …
Her right thumb twitched. Her right index finger crooked forward, scratched at the bed.
Biter Vine, a scratchy little voice whispered very clearly in the back of her heady. Two of them, hanging. They look like this …
Kerianne sighed bitterly and got out of bed. She didn’t bother turning on the light. She wasn’t sure she needed to even see what she was drawing. All she knew for sure was she had to do it.
She wasn’t done yet.
Eleven
Linda Kramer put the last of the refreshments out on the fresh new paper tablecloth and made sure everything was perfectly arranged: the donuts, the pastries, the fresh fruit, the coffee and tea.
“This,” she said only to herself, “is going to be a freaking disaster.”
But there was nothing she could do about it. Sheriff Peck, He Who Shall Not Be Ignored, had said they needed a pre-meeting before the big meeting, and it was up to her, somehow, to get it all arranged.