The Summer It Came for Us

by Rix, Dan

  Big mistake.

  All through the opening credits I was a nervous, fidgety wreck and I couldn’t think of anything to say, and of course, he was no help. He said eleven words to me the entire night. I knew, because I counted them.

  Cute dress, when he picked me up.

  Here, I got you a hotdog.

  See you tomorrow, when he dropped me off.

  Yeah.

  The door swung inward and there was Malcolm in a tank top, his gray eyes luminous in contrast to his oil-black hair. My heart gave a quiver.

  “I—I couldn’t sleep,” I blurted out, heat rushing to my cheeks. “Can I—can we—can I talk to you? About what we saw?”

  He jerked his head for me to come inside.

  Shutting the door behind me, I followed him through his gloomy living room, trying not to focus on all the tan, sculpted muscles of his wide shoulders.

  Instead, I glanced around, curious to see how Malcolm lived.

  His house always seemed so dark, so brooding, so . . . off-limits.

  Except for a ratty sofa chair, there was no couch, no coffee table, no other furniture. But dominating half of the room was a huge metal rack and bench for lifting weights, the leather worn and cracked from use. The metal weight plates leaned against the wall, denting the plaster.

  You could tell what the focus here was.

  I understood why he never invited us over. After his dad’s death, his mom had started self-medicating her depression with drugs and alcohol, had married a verbally abusive alcoholic, and now spent her life numbed out on opiates. She relapsed after rehab every time.

  I’d tried to talk to her once, but she wasn’t all there.

  No wonder Malcolm wanted to get as far away from this dump as possible.

  At his kitchen table, a bunch of black metal pieces were laid out on a canvas cloth, streaked with grease.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  A muscle in his jaw twitched. “It was my dad’s. You hungry?”

  “A little.”

  He shuffled to the stove and piled scrambled eggs and bacon onto a chipped plate, then extended it back toward me without turning around.

  I rushed forward to take it, mumbling thank you.

  “I couldn’t sleep, either,” he said, filling me a cup of coffee. “Try this. It’s good.”

  I liked cream and sugar in my coffee, but since he didn’t offer any, I didn’t dare ask.

  I took a tentative swallow from the mug he offered, and barely managed to stomach the bitter, nutty fluid without a grimace . . . although it did make my insides tingle.

  I took another sip, watching him over the rim while he watched me back.

  Just be cool, Remi.

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “Oh, yeah, it’s good,” I lied.

  “You don’t get a second cup,” he said, reading me like a book. He went back to polishing pieces on his table, and I knew I’d said the wrong thing already.

  “It tastes like asshole, actually,” I said. “But good asshole.”

  He smirked at my joke, bringing out just a hint of his dimples.

  That tiny smirk made me all warm and fluttery inside.

  I could totally see him as an officer.

  His mere presence inspired—no, demanded respect.

  Here I was, lighting up at a tiny morsel of his praise like an obedient dog. I couldn’t help it around him. I wanted to move like him, talk like him, be like him. I had this stupid compulsion to please him . . . to impress him.

  Because he was so damn hard to impress.

  “Malcolm, I saw the lights, too,” I said quietly, twisting my fingers together in front of me. “The lights Zoe saw right before we crashed, I saw them too.”

  He didn’t answer, and the only sound was the clink of metal as he polished.

  “You think they were from something else?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, without looking up.

  “Because the place was shut down.”

  The notice we’d seen on the door, citing some legislation from Congress, said it had been shut down in 2006 due to “safety hazards.” Supposedly, it had been inoperative for over a decade, gathering dust.

  Zoe had been right.

  “So maybe a maintenance crew went out there and fired up the lights,” he said. “I don’t know what we saw.”

  “But no one’s been there for years,” I said, “so whatever happened to us that night, it can’t have had anything to do with the collider?”

  I meant it as a statement, because I knew it had to be true, but it came out like a question.

  “I mean, you saw what it looked like,” I added.

  “What it looked like,” he said, setting down a metal tube, “is a place that got shut down after some bad shit happened there.”

  The hairs on the back of my neck bristled.

  Did he mean, like, a science experiment gone wrong?

  “But that was a decade ago.”

  “So it’s got nothing to do with what happened to us that night, I agree,” he admitted finally. “It was a dead end.”

  I nodded, continuing to hover next to him while he began assembling the metal pieces.

  “Do you think Vincent was abducted by aliens?”

  My gaze fell to his hands, and with a nervous jolt, I realized what he was holding—a gun.

  “Aliens, no,” moving deftly, he fit the last parts together with a series of clicks, “but something took him.”

  He snapped in an ammo clip, pulled back a sliding piece of metal, and released it with a loud cocking sound, then aimed it at the wall across from us, one eye narrowed down its sights.

  My eyes froze on the weapon, and my heart was suddenly twanging in my ears.

  All that black, glinting metal . . . I’d never seen a gun this close before.

  It looked so . . . lethal.

  Especially with Malcolm’s precision-steady aim.

  “It’s a Sig Sauer P226, Navy edition.” He relaxed his arm and showed it to me sideways. “You know how to work a firearm?”

  I shook my head, still unable to take my eyes off it.

  “There’s a live round in the chamber, let’s make it safe. Magazine release here, then pull the slide back—” He pushed a button on the side and slid out the ammo clip, then slid the sliding thing backward and dumped a bullet into his palm. “Now the gun’s empty.”

  I nodded, not catching any of what he was saying.

  “Even if it’s empty, even if the safety’s on, even if you’ve physically checked the chamber for a round, you never, ever point a gun at anything unless you intend to kill it—always away from you, always away from others. No safety feature is a substitute for correct handling. Do you understand?”

  Again, I nodded.

  I didn’t want to know this.

  I didn’t want him to be telling me this.

  “Now let’s get ready to kill. Load in your mag, rack the slide, now you’ve got a live round in the chamber”—he demonstrated, and I flinched at each metallic clink of the weapon—“and now if we pull the trigger, this gun will fire.”

  “Do . . . do you have to cock it?” I whispered.

  “Nope. Trigger’s double-action, which means the hammer gets cocked, and re-cocked each firing cycle. You just keep pulling that trigger until whatever you’re shooting at is dead. Let’s make it safe again, and I’ll show you how to hold it.”

  Like before, he ejected the clip—“Always eject the clip first, otherwise you rack the slide, you put another round in the chamber”—and pulled back the slide, flinging the bullet out. He tilted the gun toward me so I could see the empty chamber. “This weapon is safe, but assume it’s not.”

  Then, while my pulse made a drumroll in my chest, he guided my clammy hand around the grip and seated my palm firmly against the back of the gun.

  I let him guide me, hyperaware of the heat of his touch.

  He raised my left hand and pressed it snugly against my right, then angled me so th
e gun was pointing at the window. I started trembling.

  “It’s okay,” he said, “it won’t fire.”

  He came up behind me, adjusting my hands and arms and lining up the gun so I could use the sights, and all the while his breath raised goosebumps on my neck.

  I risked a peek at the side of his face, and saw his intense focus up close—jaw tight, lips slightly pursed, high cheekbones casting deep shadows.

  Then our eyes met.

  I stopped breathing for several harrowing moments, my gaze darting between his eyes and lips, not knowing where to settle. As we stared at each other, time seemed to slow and speed up at the same time. Something inside me tightened, until it felt like it would snap.

  His face and mine were inches apart . . . so close we could kiss.

  We could kiss.

  The jolt of nervousness was enough to make me nauseous, and I fought down a swallow, hoping he didn’t see.

  Did he want to kiss me?

  Was it too obvious I wanted him to?

  A loud buzzing made us both jump, breaking the moment.

  His cell phone was ringing on the kitchen table.

  With a lingering lump in my throat, I watched as Malcolm extracted the gun from my hand, then turned his back to pick it up.

  “Hello?”

  Beyond him, the trees outside glowed in early morning sunlight—I’d been so focused on Malcolm, I hadn’t noticed the sunrise in full bloom.

  “Yeah, this is him—morning, officer.”

  Hearing him, I snapped to attention.

  The police were calling him?

  He hunched over his phone, gripping it tighter. “Uh-huh . . . yeah, right up on Ridgeview, we were in a red Subaru Forrester . . . that’s—that’s excellent, we’ll be there in ten minutes. Thanks.”

  He hung up, stared at his phone a moment longer, his brows knitted.

  “What did they say?” I asked.

  “Call Zoe. I’ll call Jace. We’re going to the police station.”

  “Why? What happened? What’s going on?”

  “That was officer Shapiro,” he said, finally looking up. “Apparently, there was a witness to our crash.”

  “Picked him up last night,” officer Schapiro explained to the four of us once we met him at the Sheriff’s Department. “Found him wandering the woods up near Ridgeview Drive. He’s homeless, so I’m not sure how much we’re going to get out of him, but it’s a start.”

  “Well, what’d he say?” said Malcolm. “You said he saw the crash?”

  I struggled to pay attention, still lightheaded from Malcolm’s gun lesson and our weirdly intimate moment. The nervous pinch in my sternum had yet to go away.

  “He says he saw a red SUV crash into a ravine, and let’s see . . .” Schapiro consulted his tiny notebook, “. . . says there were five teenagers in the car, but he could only make out two of them—a black boy and a blonde girl, by which I assume he means you, Miss uh—” He snapped his fingers at Zoe.

  “Caldwell,” she mumbled, knotting her fingers in front of her. “Zoe Caldwell.”

  “Right . . . and your friend Vincent.”

  Malcolm and I shared a surprised look.

  Since the crash, this was the first person—besides us—who could confirm Vincent’s existence at all, the first person who’d actually seen him . . . who remembered him.

  Infuriatingly, that would make sense if we went with Jace’s dumb theory that we’d all been inside a “psychic bubble,” this homeless man included.

  “So what did he see?” Malcolm pressed. “He see what happened afterward, what happened to Vincent? Was there anyone else there?”

  “That’s the thing,” said Schapiro, shaking his head. “He wouldn’t tell us . . . says he’ll only talk to you guys.”

  “Wait, he wants to talk to us?” I repeated, going wide-eyed.

  “That’s what he said.”

  “So let’s go talk to him,” said Malcolm impatiently. “What are we waiting for?”

  Chewing his lip, Schapiro regarded us over his desk. “I don’t know, guys, I get a bad feeling from this dude.”

  “Yeah, guys, maybe we shouldn’t,” Zoe said weakly.

  I waited for her to elaborate, but she merely stood there, picking at her fingernails.

  Sensing me watching her, her gaze flicked to mine, then quickly dropped to the ground.

  Was it just me, or was she acting fidgety?

  “I’ll talk to him,” Malcolm said.

  “Yeah, me and Malcolm’ll rough him up.” Jace punched his palm. “We’ll get him to talk, alright.”

  I shot Jace a glare. “He’s homeless, you ass, he’s not a criminal.” Turning back to the cop, I said, “Sir, he’s the only witness. Can we please talk to him?”

  I was sure the cop would deny me.

  His radio let out a loud squawk, followed by garbled voices, and he reached down to lower its volume.

  But then he straightened up with a loud sigh. “Hell, we can’t get anything out of him. Let’s go. We’ll have myself and another officer in the room with you.”

  He led the way past a few empty cells to a door to an interrogation room, but when he reached for the handle, he paused and looked back.

  “Just a heads up,” he said. “Whatever he saw out there . . . it spooked him.”

  The man stared at us as we filed into the interrogation room, his bloodshot green eyes gleaming with a wild intensity from behind a wiry beard.

  “This them?” he said gruffly.

  “You should know,” said the woman cop in the room with an eyeroll in Schapiro’s direction. “You were the eyewitness.”

  “Yes, it’s us,” I said. “We were the ones in the car. You wanted to talk to us?”

  “Some crash that was . . . some crash.” His unblinking eyes fixated on a point behind me, the effect unnerving. “Y’all lucky to be alive”—his gaze flicked to Jace, and he cracked a toothless grin—“well, mostly alive.”

  I tried not to dwell on whatever he meant by that.

  “So you saw it? You saw what happened?”

  He nodded slowly. “Been seeing a lot of strange things up on Ridgeview Drive . . . lot of strange things.”

  “What about the bright light?” I said. “Did you see the bright light?”

  “Was it a UFO?” Jace said.

  “Oh, I saw the fireworks, alright,” he said. “That was a matter-antimatter annihilation event. Beautiful, wasn’t it?”

  Aside to us, officer Schapiro murmured, “You might take this with a grain of salt.”

  “Where was your vantage point?” Malcolm asked.

  “My what?” the guy barked.

  “Where’d you see us from? The road, or down in the ravine?”

  “Me, I was down below,” he said. “That was my campsite you ran over.”

  “Didn’t look like much of a campsite,” Jace muttered.

  “No, it wouldn’t, now, would it? Not after you ran it over.”

  I shooed Jace back, giving him a warning look, then turned back to our witness.

  “The other boy that was with us—the fifth person in the car—did you see where he went?”

  “Your friend’s gone, ain’t he?”

  “Yes!” I stepped forward again. “He got out of the car, right? And then he started running . . . ?”

  “Didn’t run fast enough, did he?” The homeless man chuckled darkly. “Your friend fell into a hole, that’s where he went.”

  “A hole,” I said dumbly, “like, a ditch? What do you mean?”

  “No, nonono . . .” He leaned forward at the steel table, and both officers’ hands nudged toward their holsters. “He fell into . . . a hole.”

  The way he said it made shivers crawl up my back.

  “Did . . . something take him?”

  “Moved like a shadow, it did. Came right out of thin air and sucked him up. You can look, but you won’t find him . . . won’t find him nowhere. Him, he’s already been eaten.”

  “Eat—eat
en?” I said, exchanging a frightened glance with Zoe.

  “Eaten,” he repeated with relish.

  “Eaten by . . . by what?” I whispered.

  “Eaten by the Glipper.” He leaned forward again with those wild green eyes. “And it’s coming to finish off the rest of you.”

  Chapter 13

  “Are you okay?” I said to Zoe after we left the interrogation room and were lingering in the front office, while Malcolm and Jace waited at the counter for an update. “You’ve been really quiet lately.”

  She shrugged, looking pale. “Just tired.”

  Code for scared.

  “He’s crazy, Zo. You heard him. Everything he said was made up. That’s what the police think.” I gestured to officer Schapiro and the other cop, who were filing the homeless man’s statement with skeptical head shakes.

  “Well, we saw something, right? Last night?”

  “You saw a shadow. And if you mean the pattern in the dirt, anything could have made that. Maybe there was a magnetic rock underground.”

  She nodded, staring vaguely into the distance. Not really listening.

  I didn’t know why I was trying to debunk her fears, they were my fears too.

  Maybe I was just trying to reassure myself.

  “There’s no such thing as a Glipper,” I said firmly. “Whatever that even is . . .”

  I trailed off, deciding she’d been looking under the weather all morning, even before we talked to the witness.

  “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  “No, yeah, it’s just . . . I had this weird dream last night, that’s all.” She wouldn’t meet my eye.

  Okay, now she had my attention. “A dream . . . about what?”

  She chewed her lip, her eyes looking cagey.

  “Zoe, just tell me. I won’t judge you, I promise. And we shouldn’t be keeping secrets from each other.”

  Nodding, she took a deep breath. “There was . . . there was something there with us, something in the car with us . . . when we crashed.”

  I thought back to the eerie cold I’d felt, and tried not to shudder.

  “Wait, in your dream, or you actually remember this?”

  “No, I feel like . . . like . . . like the dream awoke the memory, and now I remember a presence in the car.”

  “What, like a spirit?”