The Summer It Came for Us

by Rix, Dan

  Only then did it sink in. “He . . . he still committed suicide, even though I wasn’t bullying him?”

  “He still killed himself.”

  Was that why my parents here seemed nicer, because they never thought to blame me?

  “Remi, it’s time to forgive yourself,” he said.

  I shook my head, horrified at the thought. “No, I . . . that doesn’t matter . . . I can’t . . .”

  “You don’t need guilt to remind you anymore. You have changed. The lessons are in here.” He pressed his finger to my heart. “You will always remember him, I promise.”

  I squeezed his hand and held it to my chest, needing every word he said.

  In that moment, I flashed back to all those times over the months we’d had this same conversation. All those times he’d tried to convince me it wasn’t my fault, my brother’s depression was due to chemical imbalances, he would have killed himself anyway. All those times he tried to convince me to forgive myself.

  And I never listened, never heard him.

  It took traveling into a parallel universe.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” I whispered, feeling a strange, airy lightness in my chest, like a weight had been lifted. “It wasn’t my fault,” I said, louder. “I was a bad sister, but it wasn’t my fault.”

  He kissed me, and leaned his forehead against mine. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  Just like that, the topic was closed. That was all he needed to say.

  I sat back, my head reeling as I struggled to process it all—that Malcolm liked me, that Trevor would have killed himself even without me bullying him, that Malcolm liked me . . .

  Well, there was my proof that I’d forgiven myself—for the first time in almost a year, I was letting myself get excited about a boy liking me without ruining it with guilt.

  “Back to us,” I said, sliding back onto his lap and chewing on my lip. “So you’re falling for me? Tell me more about that.”

  He smirked. “Next question.”

  “Why didn’t you say something? You never gave me any hints you liked me.”

  “I made a choice,” he said. “I thought you weren’t ready to date, after your brother, but then . . .” he turned away, rubbing the back of his neck, “. . . then I got my appointment to the Naval Academy, and I knew you were going to UCLA, and I figured there was no way it would work out . . . so I made sure nothing ever happened between us. Then Sunday night I just said fuck it.”

  “No, that was the wrong choice, I had such a big—I mean, I kind of liked you back then, too. Ugh, this could have been us ten months ago,” I groaned, nuzzling into his chest. “Now we have a measly week together.”

  “Yeah, I regret it too. So let’s make up for lost time.”

  He lifted my chin to kiss me, and suddenly I didn’t care anymore. Didn’t care that I could have been dating him for ten months, that we only had a week, that we might not even get a week if we didn’t make it through that wormhole . . . that in fact, we might not even get until 10:47 p.m.

  We were together now, and that was all that mattered.

  Malcolm checked his cell phone between kissing me. “It’s ten. Time to go.”

  “Wait. There’s one last thing I need to do.” I rose and, knowing my cheeks were positively glowing, trotted over to the front door to retrieve the note I’d written to my parents.

  I crossed off one sentence.

  I’m sorry about Trevor. That was my fault.

  I stared at the note, feeling lighter already, almost giddy. I would never forget my little brother, never forget the monster of an older sister I’d been. Of course not. But I could move on. I could be happy. And I could try, every second of my life, to be a better person.

  And I would.

  A flash of movement pulled my gaze to the glass-inlaid door—through which I could see the empty porch, the moths orbiting drunkenly under the lantern.

  The fluorescent bulb flickered, then dimmed, sputtering back to life a moment later.

  In the foyer, the light bulb above me flickered.

  Then I felt the static electricity—like an invisible fog, it radiated off the doorway and enveloped me, raised the hairs on my forearms and prickled my scalp, my spine. The bulb above me fizzled and burnt out.

  I backed away from the doorway, feeling the chill all the way down to my bones.

  It was here.

  Outside, a shape flashed on the wall. A torso. The silhouette of a man.

  But no man.

  Tendrils of black smoke seeped through the gap between the hinges and coalesced into a shadow on the inside wall, then unfurled before my eyes into long, spiderlike limbs and an inhuman head, staring down at me.

  The air around it seemed to ripple, like heat waves rising off hot asphalt, and I knew from its tangy reek of ozone, from the roar of energy pouring off it and the way its shadow crawled like a living thing, that it was close.

  Closer to our plane of existence than ever.

  Right then, I knew.

  Tonight, the Glipper had come for me.

  Like some hideous paper doll, its flat two-dimensional arm peeled off the wall and reached toward my face.

  “Malcolm—” I started to scream before my breath choked off in my throat.

  Chapter 25

  Malcolm tackled me to the side, and the Glipper’s talons closed on empty air.

  It reached out again.

  “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.” Malcolm dragged me to my feet, hustled me toward the back door, but I stumbled over my own feet, tripped on one of his dumbbells, and went down again.

  The Glipper sank down the wall and flowed out along the floor like black ink, coiling around my ankle.

  I shrieked and tried to kick it off, but it was as stretchy as rubber, pulling up from the carpet like spiderweb.

  “Malcolm, help!”

  Malcolm had a flare ready.

  He popped the cap off and yanked the string, and the foot-long red tube hissed, then caught fire, screaming and blazing like the sun. I winced against the white-hot glare.

  “Back! Get back!”

  He waved it back and forth, and the Glipper shrank back, its shadow dimming under the blaze. At last it released my ankle, and I scrambled away, my blood on fire with adrenaline.

  At first I’d doubted him about the flares. Now I didn’t.

  Shit, those things were brighter than the sun. And we’d seen proof the Glipper didn’t like sunlight.

  The creature lashed out, tried to reach around the flare, but Malcolm thrust out, held it at bay.

  “Remi, go . . . run! Get in my car.”

  I clambered to my feet and sprinted toward the garage.

  In Malcolm’s hand, the flare began to sputter and die—his sixty seconds were up. He chucked the flare at the Glipper and tore after me.

  We’d left the garage door open, the convertible facing the street, the keys in the ignition.

  I leapt over the door into the passenger seat, and Malcolm landed next to me, dumped the backpack on my lap, and cranked on the engine, which gave a mighty roar.

  “Drive,” I yelled.

  The shadow burst into the garage and expanded onto all the walls, extinguishing the fluorescent lights with a pop, then loomed overhead like a black throat about to swallow us whole.

  Uh-oh, it was pissed.

  “Malcolm, DRIVE!” I screamed.

  He floored it, and we shot down the driveway.

  “Belts on,” he yelled, yanking his on as we skidded into the street.

  I clipped my own seatbelt, then was wrenched back in my seat by the acceleration, and all I could do after that was clutch the handholds and try not to puke during the high-adrenaline roller coaster ride down the mountain.

  We blew through town, running every red light.

  For a moment, the speedometer crossed ninety, before Malcolm braked for a hairpin turn, and I was crushed into the door.

  He’d memorized the directions to the third Lagrangian point.
r />   The clock on the dash read 10:07 p.m.—forty minutes until the wormhole opened.

  Suddenly, it felt like an eternity. We’d never survive that long.

  “Is it chasing us?” he asked.

  I swiveled to look behind me, my heart threatened to burst in my chest. Nothing but dark mountain road. “You think . . . you think we lost it?”

  He shook his head, white-knuckling the steering wheel.

  I faced forward again, fidgeted, too scared to sit still. “I was really, really hoping it wouldn’t come.”

  “Yeah, me too,” he said. “It’s alright, we got this. We get there, we each light a flare and make a beeline through the trees.”

  The clock changed to 10:08 p.m.

  “We’re going to get there too early,” I said.

  We’d factored in a drive going the speed limit. He was going twice the speed limit, and even that felt too slow to outrun what was chasing us.

  Now I understood Malcolm’s reluctance to leave early, in case we got caught out in the woods.

  “We’ll drive around a bit,” he said. “Maybe if we keep moving, it can’t latch on.”

  “Yeah, it doesn’t seem that fast,” I added. “Maybe we’ll beat it to the wormhole.”

  We both knew that was wishful thinking.

  This was a transdimensional being. It didn’t have to move through our space. It just disappeared and reappeared somewhere else at will.

  The road ahead wound through the pine trees, which lit up in the car’s high beams. As we passed, their tall shadows shrank behind their trunks.

  The Glipper could be anywhere.

  Malcolm unzipped the backpack at my feet and handed me another flare. “Have this ready.”

  It wouldn’t fit in my pockets, so I dropped it in the cubby in my door.

  Gradually, my adrenaline burned away, leaving a strange unease.

  10:32 p.m.

  Only fifteen more minutes, and still no sign of the Glipper.

  “Where is it?” I turned in my seat again.

  Had we actually lost it? Did I dare let myself hope?

  “Almost to the site.” Malcolm consulted the GPS on his phone. “Two more miles.”

  My heart soared.

  Holy shit, this was actually going to work! We were going to make it—

  Malcolm downshifted around a curve and the headlights swung onto a straightaway, and that’s when I saw it.

  In the middle of the road, its nine-foot silhouette stood in the cone of light, a shadow cast by a shadow.

  “Malcolm!” I jolted upright.

  He slammed on his brakes, but too late.

  Fishtailing out of control, the car sailed right through the Glipper’s form—which evaporated over the hood like mist—and skidded to a stop on the gravelly shoulder, kicking up a cloud of dust.

  The dust floated down through the headlights, now devoid of its shadow.

  I scanned the red glow of the taillights, but it wasn’t there either.

  We shared a spooked look.

  “Keep driving, keep driving,” I said.

  He gunned it back onto the road, and we drove on in tense silence. Hoping to catch sight of it, I watched through the side mirror as the dust cloud poofed out behind the taillights and faded into blackness.

  But the creature was gone.

  Malcolm gripped the steering wheel tighter, licking his lips. Feeling woozy, I focused on the road ahead, trying not to think about what that meant.

  If it wasn’t behind the car, and it wasn’t ahead of the car . . .

  Then it had to be in the car.

  I had about two seconds to process that before I became aware of the growing pool of shadow at my feet.

  “Malcolm, Malcolm!” I yanked my feet up onto the seat to get away from it.

  He looked over, swerving a little. “Remi—Jesus—the flare, get the flare.”

  Now frantic, I slapped around inside the cubby and dug it out.

  But my brain was misfiring, I couldn’t think straight, couldn’t remember what he’d showed me about using one . . .

  All I could focus on was the blackness creeping up the upholstery, here to drag me into oblivion.

  I scrunched my legs tighter, tried to twist away, but the belt cut into my hips, pinning me, and I let out a pained squeal.

  The shadow slithered up my tennis shoes and latched onto my calf.

  I screamed and scratched at it, tried to kick it off, but to no avail.

  While I struggled, it dragged my foot back down to the floor, and then, to my horror, it began pulling my foot through the floor, into a cold, prickly nothingness beyond. My leg should have been hanging out the bottom of the car, scraping on the asphalt, but I knew if you looked, you wouldn’t see it.

  I was being pulled into another dimension.

  “It’s taking me,” I cried, powerless to resist its pull.

  My body began to slide out from under the seatbelt.

  Malcolm swerved again, reached across my lap. “Give me the flare—shit!”

  He straightened up and yanked the wheel to avoid crashing through the guardrail.

  The sudden turn shoved me into the door, and the cap popped off the flare. A little string dangled out.

  The string.

  Just pull the string.

  I gave the string a hard yank, and the tube in my hand began to hiss.

  I jabbed it down between my legs, just as the tip erupted in blinding white flames and scorching heat. The shadows recoiled, and the Glipper’s grip on my ankle loosened and at last fell away, allowing me to pull my foot back up into the world of the living.

  “Nicely done,” Malcolm said.

  “Thanks,” I wheezed, clutching my racing heart.

  For a second there, I’d thought I was a goner for sure.

  The flare continued to burn in my hands, blasting me with heat. I held it outside the car.

  “What do I do with this?” I yelled over its roar, shielding my eyes.

  “Hold on to it, it could still be here—”

  A ribbon of shadow shot out from my seat and wrapped around my middle, squeezing the wind out of me before I could even scream. The flare fell from my limp fingers, bounced behind the car, and tumbled out of view. Eyes bulging, I scraped at my stomach, at Malcolm, at anything I could reach, as it dragged me, bucking and kicking, into the seat.

  “Remi!” Malcolm lit another flare and came to my aid, swerving left and right.

  But he couldn’t get at it, couldn’t reach it.

  “Clever bastard,” he muttered through gritted teeth.

  Its shadow was behind me, using me as a shield. Only its arm was exposed, and if Malcolm went for that, he would probably burn a hole right through me.

  “Malcolm,” I whimpered, “I lo—”

  “Not now. Hands in front of you.” He unbuckled my seatbelt and threw it clear of me, then slammed on the brakes.

  The car lurched to a stop.

  But I didn’t.

  Unbuckled, I sailed forward and crashed painfully into the dashboard, pulling the Glipper’s arm with me—and opening a gap between me and its shadow.

  Behind my back, Malcolm stabbed the flare into the Glipper’s shadow.

  The Glipper let go.

  “Close enough. Out of the car, Remi.” Malcolm unbuckled his own seatbelt, grabbed the backpack, and before I could even process what happened, or move, he was on my side, pulling me into the street, trying to stand me up. My knees kept buckling. Falling against him, I broke into shivers, traumatized from the encounter.

  “Move your legs,” he barked, holding me up by the shoulders as we stumbled away from the car. “Let’s go, go, go!”

  “I . . . can’t,” I wheezed, still recovering from having the wind knocked out of me.

  “Yes, you can.”

  I took a step, and winced from the pain shooting through my rib cage, now re-bruised.

  “Suck it up,” he said. “We’re not done yet.”

  “Asshole,” I mu
rmured.

  “Don’t give me that, Weaver . . . pick it up!”

  Begrudgingly, my feet started to obey. Ugh, his annoying peptalk actually worked.

  He dug out his phone and checked the GPS map, then pulled me toward the forest. “This way.”

  At the tree line, I glanced behind me, and saw the Glipper’s shadow slide out from under the car like a pool of black oil—eugh—but for whatever reason, it didn’t give chase.

  We plunged into the dark, murky wilderness.

  “How much time?” I asked, fighting another fit of shivers.

  “Nine more minutes.” Digging through our backpack, Malcolm handed me one of the spotlights, which I clicked on, sending a bright blue beam through the canopy.

  Malcolm thwacked another flare into my palm and got out one for himself, then re-shouldered the pack, tightening the straps.

  Three flares down, three to go.

  Had to make them count.

  A stick cracked behind me, and I spun my beam around, slashing through the shadows. Nothing there.

  Crap, where was it?

  “We got about a mile through the woods, let’s take it at a jog.” Malcolm broke into a run, leading us toward the pin on his phone.

  I did my best to keep up with him, leaping over roots and dodging between saplings, but Malcolm’s version of a “jog” seemed an awful lot like a dead sprint. He crashed through the brush, his long, powerful legs pumping faster and faster.

  “Malcolm, wait,” I gasped, collapsing into a crouch after a quarter mile, “you’re going . . . way too fast.”

  “You can rest when we get there,” he called over his shoulder, not slowing at all.

  I dragged myself back into a run, feeling as though I would cough up my lungs.

  Somehow, through a combination of adrenaline, hitting my second wind, and wanting to impress him, I managed to keep on his tail the rest of the way, though I kept thinking the Glipper would step out into my flashlight beam and eat me.

  We stumbled into a clearing at the edge of a cliff.

  “Here . . . right here . . . we made it!” Malcolm showed me his phone’s screen. The blue dot of our GPS location now lay right on top of the pin.

  I nodded, too exhausted to care, and collapsed into his sweaty arms, my lungs rasping for air.

  “You are . . . way too . . . fast,” I panted against his chest.