The Summer It Came for Us

by Rix, Dan

  Maybe it could only see us when we moved. Weren’t there some reptiles that only sensed movement?

  My throat worked through a hard, sticky swallow.

  The Glipper’s blurry edges slowly expanded and contracted, like it was breathing.

  Meanwhile the bulb above us continued to flicker, and I feared it would go out, leaving us in pitch blackness. Static electricity rolled off the creature in waves, forming a dense, prickly sensation that squeezed around my arms and throat. I could feel my hair tugging at my scalp, lifting and pulling toward it. I could taste the electricity in the air.

  “What do we do?” I whispered, trying not to move my lips.

  A paperclip began to buzz on the glass coffee table.

  Malcolm cleared his throat and spoke to it. “What do you want? Are you a spirit? A ghost? What are you?”

  It continued to hover on the wall, just like any other shadow—like Malcolm’s, Jace’s, and my shadows on the floor—except there was nothing making this shadow.

  “What did you do to our friends?” Malcolm said.

  “I don’t think it speaks,” I said.

  “Fire a warning shot,” Jace said. “With your gun.”

  “I’m not going to shoot at it,” Malcolm growled. “That’s how wars get started.”

  “Well, if it’s confined to the wall, it can’t touch us, right?” Jace said hopefully.

  “I doubt that, but let’s find out.” Malcolm began slowly moving toward it.

  “What are you doing?” I hissed.

  “Research.” When the Glipper still didn’t attack him, he relaxed a little more and stepped out in front of me, glancing between the Glipper’s shadow and the ceiling bulb, the only source of light in the room. “What the hell’s casting the shadow?”

  He held out his hand, and on the wall, the shadow of his hand inched toward the Glipper’s shadow.

  Seeing both their shadows in the same plane, I tensed up, feeling as though he was somehow entering its dimension, where it could attack him. What would happen if their shadows touched? Maybe that was all the creature needed.

  “Malcolm, stop,” I said, breaking my own rigid composure to pull his arm back.

  “What’s it waiting for?” he muttered, staring at the thing in awe.

  “For someone like you to be stupid. Come on, we should go.”

  “Nuh-uh, I ain’t letting this thing out of my sight. I want it right here where I can see it. Jace, let’s get another light.”

  Jace tiptoed over to the desk and flipped on the desk lamp, which sputtered and buzzed weakly. He trained it on the Glipper.

  Gaining strength, the sixty-watt bulb erased Malcolm’s shadow, but only dimmed the Glipper’s a little. If anything, its outline was even more crisp in the harsher light.

  “The fuck’s making this shadow?” Malcolm said.

  “Guys, I think we should go,” I insisted.

  But in a way, I understood Malcolm. Having it right in front of me was less scary than when I’d seen it in the picture and didn’t know where it was.

  I wasn’t freaking out like that first time.

  When, really, I should be freaking out.

  “I’m going to touch it.” Malcolm stepped up to the wall. The thing towered over him.

  “Malcolm, not a good idea,” I said.

  “I just want to see.” He raised his hand toward what would be the Glipper’s hand, which I now noticed had three long fingers, tapering to razor-sharp claws. “Weird, it’s like the shadow’s rippling . . .”

  “Malcolm, don’t—”

  Too late.

  Malcolm touched the shadow. His fingers dipped into the wall as if it was liquid. “Whoa, you guys got to feel this.”

  “Malcolm, please stop,” I begged, my hand inching up to my mouth as I absently chewed on my fingernails.

  Now up to his knuckles in the wall, he murmured, “It’s like . . . it’s like the shadow’s a doorway—”

  Without warning, the Glipper’s shadow peeled off the wall and latched around Malcolm’s wrist, and he yelled, “Fuck!”

  “Malcolm!” I shrieked.

  Heart in my throat, I ran forward to help, but there was nothing I could do.

  He clawed at it, scratched at his wrist, but the darkness slithered up his forearm. “No, shit, get off me!”

  Then, to my horror, it began pulling him into the wall.

  Chapter 20

  Horrified, I watched the shadow reel him in up to his palm, his wrist, his forearm—sucking him straight into solid concrete like it was a sheen of liquid.

  But we were underground. There was nothing on the other side but earth. Where was it taking him?

  “Get off me, fucker!” Grunting, Malcolm planted his other palm against the solid part and heaved, regaining an inch, before he was sucked in up to his elbow.

  He couldn’t beat it alone.

  I grabbed his shoulder and pulled with all my might. Suddenly, he was yanked in up to his biceps, pinning my arm between his hard pecs and the concrete, which didn’t give for me, I noticed.

  “Remi, you’re going to get crushed,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “I’m not letting go—Jace, help us!” I screamed.

  Jace ran in and grabbed his other elbow, and together, feet sliding on the floor, we dragged him free an inch at a time. At last the Glipper let go, and the three of us crashed to the floor.

  “Jesus fucking Christ.” Malcolm scrambled backward into the couch, clutching his arm, which was now bleeding from three long scratches—made by its claws.

  “Your arm,” I whispered.

  “Later.” He leapt to his feet and drew his gun, but before he could shoot, the Glipper’s shadow strode sideways and vanished into the corner where the two walls met.

  I spun around, searching for it, but the only other shadows in the room were ours.

  Gone.

  It was gone.

  But really it could be anywhere.

  I whipped around again, jumping at Jace’s shadow.

  Malcolm reholstered his gun, his eyes burning with fierce resolve. “Now we know. It grabs you and pulls you into no man’s land.”

  “No man’s land?” I repeated weekly, my heart still doing terrified somersaults. A wretched feeling coiled itself in my stomach—dread or fear, I couldn’t tell which—and I thought I would be sick.

  It had tried to pull Malcolm into a wall.

  “Whatever’s on the other side,” he said. “Wherever it lives, wherever it’s from, I don’t know.”

  “What—what did it feel like?” I stammered. “On the other side?”

  “Nothing, it was just . . . just cold and staticky.”

  A shiver broke free and shook my whole body, made my teeth chatter. “So that’s where it took Zoe?”

  He shook his head, his expression grim.

  Suddenly, I remembered.

  “Vincent . . . Vincent said he was at my house, right?”

  If he was still alive, maybe he’d found a way to beat this thing.

  Malcolm grabbed his keys. “Let’s go.”

  “Mom,” Jace called on our way out the front door, “whatever you do, don’t go in the basement.”

  “Jace, sweetie, wait, I just got a call from Remi’s mom—”

  Jace slammed the door behind him, so I didn’t catch the rest of what she said.

  Back in Malcolm’s convertible, my phone started pinging with a dozen missed calls and text messages.

  All from my parents.

  By now, they’d probably caught wind of Zoe’s disappearance.

  I must have lost reception for a bit because of the Glipper, which seemed to mess with electronics.

  I would see them in two minutes anyway, so I didn’t bother checking the messages but texted back a shaky, I’m fine, be home soon, while the car rocked side to side on the drive there.

  The moment I hit send, my phone began ringing.

  Ugh, could they not wait two minutes?

  I ignored
the call and stuffed the phone back in my pocket.

  “Vincent said something . . .” Jace drummed his fingers on the car door in agitation, “. . . a matter-antimatter annihilation event. That’s what the homeless guy called it, too. Whatever that flash was.”

  “That’s impossible,” said Malcolm. “We must have heard Vincent wrong.”

  “I thought that’s what he said, too,” I piped in. “What is antimatter, anyway?”

  “It’s like normal matter, but with a minus sign in front of it. Any time antimatter touches normal matter, they cancel each other out and convert into pure energy.”

  “So that’s the flash we saw?” I asked.

  “No, I said it’s impossible. You’ll never find a lump of antimatter just sitting there. Antimatter is only ever created in the centers of massive stars or at the edges of black holes or inside high-energy . . .” He trailed off, and his knuckles tightened on the steering wheel.

  “Or inside what?” I said, leaning forward.

  “. . . or inside high-energy particle colliders,” he finished.

  “Ah,” said Jace.

  “That’s not what we saw,” said Malcolm.

  He turned onto my street, and I was about to respond when I caught sight of my house.

  “Uh . . . guys?”

  “Shit.” Malcolm slowed way down.

  Parked in my driveway was the same black Ford Excursion we’d seen at the police station. Inside the kitchen window, I made out the silhouettes of my mom and dad talking to Special Agent Meyer.

  My skin turned clammy.

  Why were they here? Why were they at my house?

  Two other agents in black suits stood guard on the porch, scanning the street.

  “Keep driving, keep driving,” Jace hissed.

  “Keep your pants on, dumbshit.” Malcolm parked across the street and yanked the parking brake. “Text Vincent. Tell him we’re here. Ask him where he is.”

  Jace dictated out loud as he texted, “At Remi’s house. DIA all up in this shiz. Where you at, buddy?”

  We’d all programmed Vincent’s number back into our phones, since it had been erased.

  We waited in tense silence.

  Surprisingly, his phone buzzed with a reply.

  I leapt forward. “What’s he say?”

  Jace frowned. “He says, ‘Give the phone to Malcolm.’”

  “’Cause you’re being a douche.” Malcolm pried the phone out of his grip and continued the conversation himself.

  Malcolm read off Vincent’s next text. “‘I’m here, where are you guys?’”

  “Tell him we’re here, too. Ask him where he is?” Pulse racing, I looked toward my house, hoping to spot him inside with my parents, or catch sight of him ducking in the shadows. But I couldn’t see him.

  “What’s wrong with him? We’re right fucking here. He’s the one who’s missing.” Eyebrows knotted, Malcolm continued texting Vincent.

  The phone buzzed with another reply.

  “The fuck?” Malcolm murmured.

  “What? What did he say?” I pried my gaze off my house and leaned forward between the seats.

  “He says . . . he says we’re the ones who are missing.”

  “Mom? Dad? What’s going on?” I poked my head into the kitchen, where my parents were talking to Agent Meyer.

  My mom clutched her chest and let out a sniffly sigh. “Oh, thank God, there she is.”

  Her puffy eyes glistened under the lights, as if she’d been crying.

  I glanced between the three of them, confused. “Yes. Here I am. Is this about Zoe?”

  “Next time answer your phone, sweetheart.” My dad eyed me sternly.

  “Yeah, sorry, I lost reception . . . what’s going on?” To agent Meyer, I said, “Did you find anything?”

  He inclined his head. “I’ll let your parents explain.”

  “Uh, explain what?”

  My dad cleared his throat. “Want to tell her, hon?”

  But my mom merely shook her head, sniffling.

  I stared at them. “Tell me what?”

  She squeezed her eyes shut, looking on the verge of tears all over again.

  “Awww, hon, it’s okay . . . she’s back now, she’s fine . . .”

  Huh. After what happened to Zoe, they must have been really worried about me.

  Considering how they usually treated me, you’d think they’d be glad to be rid of me.

  I wasn’t detecting the usual scorn from them. Just concern.

  While he comforted her, I muttered aside to Agent Meyer, “We saw your thing, by the way . . . your Glipper . . . it was in my friend’s basement—my friend, Jace Johnson.”

  He pressed his lips together and texted something on his phone.

  Sorry Jace.

  Now they were probably going to order an airstrike on his house.

  “It’s gone now,” I felt compelled to add.

  Now where was Vincent?

  I peeked past them into the rest of the kitchen. Still no sign of him.

  But he said he was in my house. He said he was right here.

  Was he hiding from us?

  I still had no clue what he meant by his last text, that we were missing—we’d lost connection to his cell phone right after he sent it.

  No, we were here. I was here. We’d been here the whole time.

  So where was he?

  “I’ll be right back.” I slipped back into the foyer, glancing briefly into the living room.

  Not there either.

  “Remi, wait.” My mom started to follow me.

  “Mom, stay, I’m just going to plug in my phone.” Once I’d shaken her, I crept up the hallway and whispered into my bedroom, “Vincent?”

  My room was empty.

  No one in the closet, no one under the bed.

  He always was the wiliest one when we played hide and seek. Once, he’d unscrewed a vent and squeezed himself into a duct. We only found him because the heat came on and forced him out. Like Malcolm, Vincent took his hide and seek very seriously.

  You better not be hiding from me, Vincent.

  I plugged in my phone and retreated back into the hallway, and my gaze went to Trevor’s closed door.

  My pulse began thumping in my temples. Could he be in there?

  I crept forward, my knees suddenly weak.

  “Remi, don’t go in there,” called my dad from the end of the hallway. “We need to talk to you, come back here.”

  So, more confused than ever, I followed him back into the kitchen.

  Having finally composed herself, my mom took a deep breath and said, in a wavering voice, “I was—I was cleaning Trevor’s room, and I found—I found—oh, just show her.”

  She gave up and gestured at Agent Meyer, whimpering and dabbing a tissue to her eye.

  Agent Meyer stepped forward and laid a tattered, yellowing page from our local newspaper on the table. “Your mother found this. Read it.”

  “Come on, she doesn’t need to read it,” said my dad in a gruff voice.

  But I snatched it off the table before he could stop me. The paper ripped under my fingers, even more brittle than it looked.

  “Careful with that,” said Meyer, watching me carefully. “That’s evidence.”

  “Evidence of what?” My dad’s voice had an edge.

  “Just let her read it.”

  Although it looked like it had seen years of wear, the article, I saw, was dated from today.

  “This was . . . this was in Trevor’s room?” I asked softly.

  “Look, it’s obviously a prank,” said my dad. “It was Malcolm . . . he’s sick like that.”

  I would have defended him, but I had already started reading the front page article, and a terrible chill was crawling down my spine.

  Tragedy on Ridgeview Drive

  Four Big Pine teens—Jace Johnson, Remi Weaver, Zoe Caldwell, and Malcolm Malone—are still missing after they were last seen on Thursday heading up Ridgeview Drive in a red Subaru Forrest
er, and are now presumed to be dead . . .

  That was as far as I got before it crumbled to ash in my hands.

  “Yes, I had it in my hands,” I told Malcolm and Jace over breakfast at Joanne’s Diner on Wednesday morning—after spending all of Tuesday giving useless police statements and begging my parents not to handcuff me to the bed, I’d finally convinced them to let me go out again. “It was an article that said we were missing, just like Vincent said.”

  Malcolm studied me over his cupped fists, his mouth a severe line. “It say anything about Vincent?”

  “I don’t know, it just fell apart in my hands. It looked really old.”

  “And it was in Trevor’s room?”

  I nodded. “I mean, you don’t think it was, like, something he’s had all this time, do you?”

  “What, like a prophecy?”

  “I don’t know. But there’s no way that article was from Monday.”

  “Obviously,” said Jace, cleaning up the last of his pancakes and moving on to my untouched plate, “because we’re not missing, Vincent is.”

  After seeing Zoe vanish into thin air and our encounter with the Glipper, Monday night had been a tense one.

  The DIA had interviewed all of us, and we’d stayed up until dawn, biting our fingernails and waiting for any updates about what was going on.

  But it was always the same.

  We’re looking into it . . . nothing definite yet . . . we’ll let you know . . .

  In other words, they had dick.

  I got the weird impression they were more interested in watching us than solving the case.

  Suddenly, I realized I was starving. I grabbed my plate back from Jace and started piling eggs into my mouth, glowering at him when he tried to steal another piece of bacon. “Fuck off,” I mumbled through a full mouth, “I paid for this.”

  He raised his palms and backed off.

  Time to tell them my theory.

  I washed it all down with a gulp of coffee, swept my hair back, then gave them both a serious look.

  “Guys, what if we’re dead?”

  Malcolm raised an eyebrow.

  “Excuse me?” said Jace.

  “Like, what if we’re dead, and we really are missing?”

  “But we’re not.” Jace went for my bacon again, and I shooed him off.

  “But the article said we were,” I said, “and when I touched it, it had this weird feel to it, like it wasn’t even from this—well—dimension.”