We took a couple steps into the room and silently took in the reality of what we were witnessing, then suddenly heard a noise. The front door of the house unlatched and slowly opened, and there were footsteps along the creaky floorboards.
“No,” I whispered.
Anxiously, we looked around the room for somewhere to hide, and I found myself crawling under the bed with my shotgun. I can’t remember if Jesse ushered me that way or if I, in that terrifying moment, found shelter there of my own accord. The stench was horrid, and I covered my nose with one hand and tried to keep a steady grip on the shotgun with my other. I tried to position myself in a way that I could get a decent shot at Drake if he discovered me, and I tried, unsuccessfully, to ignore the fact that a stinking corpse was only inches above my head on the other side of the mattress.
Jesse hid behind the door, where he waited for Drake to make his entrance.
That minute seemed to be the longest in my life. I found myself shivering under the bed while I listened to Drake slowly make his way up the stairs. One by one, the steps creaked as he drew closer and closer, and I wondered if I was going to pass out. Even though my heart was pounding furiously in my chest, I felt completely weakened with fear. I wondered, if the moment came, if I would even have enough strength to pull the trigger.
After Drake ascended the stairs, I watched, from below the bed, as the black shoes and the bottom of the black jeans walked into the room. They stopped maybe five feet from the bed. I was terrified, and I wondered if he would hear my beating heart. Or maybe he’d hear me shaking.
Then he started to kneel down. Was he going to see me? The shotgun was too long, and I wouldn’t have time to swing it around and aim properly before he saw me. And in my panic, I still couldn’t remember: Was the safety on or was it off? Why couldn’t I remember?
The air went completely out of me. I closed my eyes and prayed for Jesse to shoot Drake and stop him before he did anything.
But Drake only bent down to pick up the prescription bottles on the floor. When I opened my eyes and saw the hand that had taken Jenna’s life that close to my face, a grotesque chill enveloped me.
“Get down!” Jesse yelled. He stepped out from behind the door and Drake, clearly flustered, dropped onto the floor beside the bed.
Lying there, he looked right at me, and if seeing the hand that killed all of those people was terrible, looking directly into his dark eyes was that much worse. He didn’t look shocked to see me under the bed; instead, he just looked angry—like a spoiled child who was having a toy taken away. I was most amazed by what I didn’t see in his eyes: fear. You expect to see fear in the eyes of a man who has been ordered to the ground by a gun-wielding stranger in his own home, but when I looked into those eyes for the briefest of moments, I didn’t see a single ounce of it.
I crawled out from under the bed and saw Jesse, gun drawn, standing over Drake. Not quite knowing what to do, I aimed my shotgun at Drake as well. I was still trembling so much, I wondered if I would be able to hit Drake if I needed to fire my weapon, even at this point blank range.
“You’re gonna just lie there and stay calm, you understand?” Jesse said.
Drake said nothing.
“Where’s the boy?” I asked.
He still said nothing.
“You heard him,” Jesse barked. “Where’s the boy?”
No response.
Jesse hunkered down beside Drake, his gun aimed right at his head, and said, “I’m gonna give you one more chance. Where’s the boy? We can make this mighty painful, if need be.”
Drake lifted his head just a little off the floor and tried to look at Jesse, and for the first time, I thought I saw some of what had been missing flash across his face: fear.
“The storm,” he said. “It took him. The storm took him.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
Jesse and I decided we would have to personally escort Drake to the police. The island was cut off from all outside help, but we’d heard, every day, that cop car drive through the streets and a woman ordering people to remain indoors until further advised. Usually, we heard the announcements in the mornings and in the evenings. It was still only afternoon. We would wait until we heard the announcement that evening, and we’d take Drake right to the source.
We both found his explanation of Hot-rodder’s disappearance troubling. He explained how the kid had wriggled out of his grip and started to run away, but then, out of nowhere, a big ball of lightning floated down from the sky and took him. It literally wrapped itself around him like some kind of electrical cocoon, and even though he fought against it, the ball shot back up toward the storm clouds with him in it.
I imagined Hot-rodder screaming and kicking in his spherical cage as the storm reeled him back up, and it was a horrifying image—almost as bad as the one I had of him bloodied and dead beside Drake. Maybe just as bad.
I wished I could have been there when it happened. I wished I was there to reach out and hold him back.
I imagined Alan’s hand slipping out of mine and into the waters of the Kern River.
Maybe I could have stopped them. Maybe I could have held onto both of them.
Drake said little more than that. Most of the time, he was stone faced, and knowing his defeat and imminent return to the authorities, he looked down at the floor and avoided eye contact at all costs. It amazed me to think that this man, who had evoked fear in so many people at the park during his killing, was really, beneath it all, just a coward. Maybe that’s simply the nature of those who are willing to senselessly take the lives of men, women, and innocent children. Take the weapons out of their hands and innocent people out of their path, and they are exposed for what they really are: spineless, worthless cowards.
It repulsed me to even be in the same room with him.
Before I went down and searched the garage for something to shackle him with, we briefly discussed just putting an end to him right there. Jesse commented that we should just drag him out into the backyard and put him out of his misery, and even though I didn’t know if he was that serious when he said it, we looked at each other and contemplated it. Would it really matter? Would anyone really grieve Drake’s death, and by doing so, wouldn’t we save the court a lot of money for what would be an inevitable verdict? But we decided against it. I’d like to think that’s because, when standing next to one of the true evils of this world, I felt a need to be unlike him. What terrified me even more than what he’d done was the idea that I could do something similar. A horror writer I knew once told me that what makes evil so frightening is the fact that we can see ourselves in it. I’ve always remembered that, and I didn’t want to see any of myself in Drake.
I was able to find some rope and duct tape in the garage while Jesse kept the prisoner under guard. We may have gone a little overkill with it, but we bound his hands, his legs, and duct taped his mouth, and together we carried him back over to my house with the duffel bag. We were exhausted from carrying our prisoner. I had his feet and Jesse had him by the shoulders, and fortunately we didn’t see anybody on the streets, because I don’t know what people would have thought. From a distance, we probably appeared to be two grown men lugging around a corpse.
When I looked at the clouds, I would have sworn they looked even lower than they had just an hour or two ago, and they were certainly darker. What was happening to them? Why were they descending so rapidly?
It is difficult to describe, but it felt like the storm was about to intensify again. Every night was worse than the one before. Perhaps it would soon be raining again, and the cloud-to-ground lightning would resume. I wondered if I would see those lightning balls again. Was that what had taken Hot-rodder? Would the lightning start taking out buildings? If it could take out bridges, what would be next? Maybe the storm was an extermination of some kind: a big can of Raid spraying down on us ants.
We had gotten close to my house when the obvious occurred to me. I stopped for a moment and put down our psycho bagg
age, both to catch my breath and to talk to Jesse.
“We can’t let Darrel see him,” I said, panting.
Jesse got my drift. He nodded in his quiet way.
“Or my boys, or the others. Especially Marsha. She’ll probably have an aneurysm if she lays eyes on him.”
“Go inside first and open the garage,” Jesse suggested. “Tell them to stay out of the garage. We’ll bring it in from the outside.”
I liked how he called Drake it, because that’s what it was. It was hard to think of Drake as even being human.
I went inside the house and to the garage. I bumped into my wife, of course, as I was coming through the hallway, and I’d seen that look on her face before; in all my years of marriage, I’ve never been able to get anything past her for very long. Madison has a gift for catching onto me. Whether it was stealing one of her favorite wine coolers that she likes to hide in the back of the fridge or the chocolate-covered raisins she hides in her nightstand, I always got caught. It was inevitable. So there was no way I was going to bring a mass murderer into my garage without my wife picking up on it. She has too good a radar.
“What happened?” she asked. She was happy to see me, I could tell that much, but she was worried. We’d taken too long. I told her we were going to the bridge and would come right back, but that stop at Drake’s added a good forty-five minutes to our excursion. She had been worried sick, and I felt terrible for it.
I couldn’t lie to her. I believe in my heart that the truth is always better than a lie—that’s certainly what I taught my sons—but this was one pill that was going to be very, very difficult for her to swallow.
“We stopped at Drake’s house on the way back to get more weapons,” I said.
“Eddie, you told me that you were going to come right back. You promised.”
“I know, I know. I’m totally in the wrong here, but we were already outside, it was basically on the way, and I felt it was the right thing to do.”
“You felt it was the right thing to do?”
“Yes.”
“Was it worth it? Did you find any weapons?”
“No weapons,” I said, but I knew I had to deliver all the news. I tried to brace her and took her by the shoulders. I had no idea how she was going to take this. “But we have Drake. He’s outside.”
Her eyes fluttered in incomprehension, and I felt that she was searching my face for some indication that I was lying.
I was about to explain myself even further when my son walked around the corner of the entryway. He didn’t waste any time in getting right back into his petitioning.
“Dad, I’m telling you, I need to go to Klutch’s house,” he said, and I didn’t appreciate his demanding tone. “I think Candice is there, and I wanna see if she’s okay. You yourself just went outside, and look, you’re fine.”
He must have noticed that I was holding his mom’s shoulders, and with our faces close together, assumed we were in the midst of an intimate encounter. He mumbled something about us being gross and went back into the living room, where I could already hear Marsha and Samantha bickering about what they could forage out of the food supplies to make a snack. The way I heard it, Marsha wanted to make peanut butter and jelly for everyone, but Samantha thought they could find something better.
My wife’s eyes never left my face, and she was speechless, an incredibly rare phenomenon in our house.
“He’s completely tied up and bound,” I explained. “Trust me, he can’t move a muscle. We were gonna keep him in the garage until later tonight, until we hear the police car telling people to stay indoors, and then we’ll take him there.”
“You brought him here?”
“Where else are we going to take him?”
She pressed the open palms of her hands on her forehead. “I can’t believe you did this. This is crazy, Eddie. Really crazy. What’s going on?”
“He won’t be here long,” I explained. “And we need to keep everyone out of the garage, especially Darrel. Where is he now?”
“Still in the guest room, sleeping, I think.”
“Okay, if anyone needs to stay away, it’s him,” I explained. “I don’t want to see Darrel get an up-close and personal look at the guy who killed his wife. I’m gonna open the garage, but everyone needs to stay out of there.”
“Okay,” she said, but was quick to remind me: “Don’t do that again. Don’t make me worry like that, Eddie. I can’t do that again.”
“I know, I’m sorry.”
I went through the house and opened the garage door, and then I helped Jesse move Drake into the garage. We placed him along some boxes near the side wall. Even if he was able to exhaust himself by wriggling a few inches, there was nothing of any interest that would help him get out of his binding. He seemed to know resistance was futile, because he hadn’t tried to say anything or force his way out of the ropes. Maybe the duct tape over his mouth was unnecessary, but I wasn’t taking any chances.
We left him there and went back into the house to rest. But I kept a close eye on the door so nobody would accidently stumble upon our neighbor.
I felt like I needed to sleep, and outside I heard more thunder. I plopped down on the couch, and Marsha and Samantha brought everyone a plate of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and bananas. Apparently they’d compromised and gone for half fruit, half sandwiches.
We had all barely taken a bite of our food when I heard a knock at the front door.
Chapter Twenty-Three
When I looked through the peephole, I saw my quiet and rather hermit-like neighbor, Dominic, standing outside. I mentioned him before; he’s the guy I had only briefly seen on a couple occasions and a resident who, according to most of my neighbors, nobody really knew. Every neighborhood has its own Dominic, I think—the guy you might live next to for decades without hardly ever saying hello to or crossing paths with. We had only lived in Naples for a few months, but I had the feeling that if we spent the rest of our lives in that home, it would have pretty much been that way.
I opened the door and was immediately struck by his complete imperviousness to the situation at hand. My wife, standing beside me, was too. Nothing about his demeanor, posture, or words conveyed the reality that he—like us—was stranded here amidst a horrifying, supernatural storm. He carried himself lightly, almost playfully, like a child in the midst of a disaster he could not fully comprehend. Carrying a handheld radio in one hand and eating a Twinkie with the other, Dominic, with his pear-shaped body, his white beard, and those big rosy cheeks, always reminded me of Santa Claus. I’ve read that there is an actual world-wide club of Santa look-alikes, and though I never got around to asking Dominic about it, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that he was a member.
“Hello,” he said, waving the hand with his half-eaten Twinkie in it. “I’m Dominic, your neighbor.”
I was still struck by his demeanor; he sounded like a neighbor swinging by to invite us over for a leisurely glass of wine.
“Yes, I’ve seen you once or twice. I’m Eddie, and this is my wife, Madison.”
“Oh yes, pleased to meet you both,” he said, waving hello again with his Twinkie.
“How are you holding up?” I asked. “Are you okay?”
“Me?” he said, almost surprised by the question. “I’m great. Doing superb. Wonderful, actually.”
“Good,” I said, and then there was a brief yet awkward silence. He didn’t announce why he had come over, and judging by his appearance, it didn’t seem that it was due to him being in need of anything. “Is there anything you need? Would you like to come in? We have plenty of food if you need some.”
“Oh, I’m just fine,” Dominic said, indicating his Twinkie. “I have enough food to last me a lifetime in there, trust me. I stocked up years ago just in case of some kind of natural disaster like this. One can never be too careful, you know.”
“Well, good,” I said, but I hoped Dominic had done more than just stock his pantry and garage with bo
xes of Twinkies, or else a heart attack might take him out before the storm ended.
“Oh yes,” he said. “I didn’t come over because I needed anything. I just came over because I had to tell somebody what I discovered. It is most exciting, and I just had to share the news with someone. I hope you don’t mind.”
“No, not at all.”
“What did you discover?” my wife asked.
“The storm is talking to us,” he said. With eyes glittering, he lifted up his small handheld radio as if it were evidence of his great discovery. My wife and I glanced at each other and were both in silent agreement that Dominic might not be playing with a full deck.
Dominic, who I sensed wasn’t the best at picking up on social cues, thought we were somehow sharing in his joy, because he didn’t register the incredulous looks that must have been evident on our faces.
“The storm is talking to us, you say?” my wife said slowly, over-enunciating each syllable as if talking to a man who was hard of hearing.
“Yes, the storm is talking to us,” he said, in equally slow pronunciation.
“It’s talking to us?” she asked again.
“Oh yes, it is,” Dominic said and then, appearing flustered, addressed me: “I’m sorry, am I not making myself clear? Does your wife have difficulty hearing?”
“No,” I said, and caught myself laughing. The conversation just seemed a bit ridiculous to me. “We’re just not sure how your radio has anything to do with the storm talking to us. We’re just confused.”
“Oh,” he said. “I’m terribly sorry. Perhaps if you’d let me sit down and explain it to you, it would be helpful. I’m sure you’ll both want to hear this, actually.”
“Of course,” I said, and invited him in.
I introduced Dominic to Jesse, Owen, Marsha, and Samantha, who were all sitting in the living room and eating sandwiches. Toby and Mia were in my office, playing Legos, and my wife ran to quickly check on them while Dominic took a seat in the leather chair in the living room. Darrel still hadn’t come out of the guest room, and that was probably good, because his body probably needed the rest. I didn’t think he had gotten this much uninterrupted sleep since Jenna was shot.
Storm Taken: A Supernatural Thriller Page 15