“Which would be the truth,” he muttered. He marked another P on his map. This time the possum was under a hedge. Its eyes glowed red in the dusk. Milo glanced behind him to see if there were any lights shining that might have bounced off the back walls of the possum’s eyeballs, but no.
Bethany tagged along as he finished his round of his three chosen blocks. He continued to make notes, including adding in another six possums, four with red eyes turned in his direction, spooky in the fading light.
Milo decided he would pick new blocks tomorrow, but in the meantime, he put his first two maps on the front step of Tad and Sherry’s house and studied them side by side by porch light, with Bethany peering over his shoulder.
“That’s the Nasser house,” Bethany said, touching a house on the daytime map, which had more blank space for writing. “And that’s where the Dylans live. This is where Rachel and David Saleh live with their kids, Jen nifer and Alison.”
Milo stared at her, then wrote down what she said. She filled in names on all the houses on his diagram. It was useless, he thought, to make these notes, since he was going to pick another route tomorrow, but what the heck, he might as well know more about the people he’d be living among for the next three weeks. Maybe he could shift the focus of his study, or maybe, if he kept the data dry enough, he could use what he had. Refocus the study somehow.
“Did you really see all these possums?” Bethany asked, touching red Ps on his second diagram.
“What do you think, I’m going to mark something down that’s not true? It’s not even relevant data. I don’t care about possums. I’m interested in people.”
“I knew I’d been seeing more possums than I used to, but I didn’t realize there were this many,” she said. She lifted the map and studied it, then looked across the front lawn. “Gimme your red pen.” She held out a hand.
He gave her his red pen, and she wrote a P on the square in front of Tad and Sherry’s house. He lifted his gaze and saw the red-eyed stare from a hunched shadow under the hydrangeas.
“They’re freaking me out,” Milo said. He stood, watching the possum, and went to the hose coiled against the side of the house. He shook loose a few coils, stuck his thumb over the end of the hose, turned it on, and then sprayed a stream of water toward the possum.
It gave a grunting snarl and turned tail, leaving behind a puff of smoke and a smell of burned wires. Milo shut off the hose.
“What?” Bethany said.
Paladin woofed from the back yard where Milo had left him. “Dumb dog,” Milo said. “Can’t even bark at an animal when it would matter. He waits till it’s over before he adds his two cents.”
“How come that thing smelled like electricity?” Bethany asked. “Sometimes they’re rank, but that isn’t right.” She headed for the bush.
“Wait a sec,” Milo said. He followed her. “Anybody ever tell you you’re an idiot? If something’s strange, that doesn’t mean you rush toward it.”
“You are so much more boring than Sherry said you’d be!” Bethany said. She stooped and peered under the bush. “It’s gone anyway. Except for—ouch!” She snatched her hand back and stared at reddening fingers.
“What happened?” Milo grabbed her hand and saw the red was a rash, not blood. He peered at the dirt under the bush and saw a twisted piece of what looked like white metal.
“Ow ow ow,” Bethany said.
“Let’s wash that off.” Michael kept a grip on her arm and dragged her into the house, where he thrust her hand under the kitchen faucet. She did some shrieking. He gently washed her hand with antibacterial liquid soap and warm water. The red stopped spreading, but it didn’t fade. He held her hand under the light. The skin of her fingers was peppered with tiny blisters. He got out a kitchen towel and wrapped her hand in it, wondering if he should make her an ice pack. By this point she was sitting on a chair, crying.
“I’m sorry,” he said. Maybe he should have listened to her when she told him to let go all those times.
“No,” she said, and hiccupped, “it’s all right. I feel better.” Tears ran down her cheeks.
“I should probably take you to a hospital,” he said.
“Get that piece of metal first.”
“Okay.” He opened the tool drawer and got out a pair of pliers, then fished a glass canning jar from Sherry’s neatly arranged supplies. He headed toward the front yard, only to be stopped by a Hawaiian-shirted semi- man-shaped mountain.
“What did you do to my little girl?” roared the mountain, shoving Milo back into the kitchen. Seeing Bethany’s tears, the mountain took a swing at Milo, who ducked the fist but lost his feet.
“Daddy!” Bethany shrieked. “He didn’t do anything! I hurt myself, and he was just trying to take care of it!” She waved her towel-wrapped hand.
By the time Milo and Daddy and Bethany had straightened things out, the piece of mystery metal was gone.
Milo slept in the next morning. The previous night, while he and Bethany and Dad were sitting in the waiting room of the hospital emergency room, Bethany had told Milo which kids were headed to summer camp, what jobs the dads and moms were going off to, who stayed home (only two grownups in his three sample blocks), which houses had nannies and/or maids, and who the neighborhood housekeepers and gardeners were. He had written it all down, numbering each house on his map and then organizing a page of data for each house. Bethany’s dad hadn’t said anything to confirm or deny Bethany’s intel; mainly he flipped through car magazines from the hospital’s battered collection of reading material.
Collecting all his data from one informant whose veracity he had not yet had a chance to check wasn’t an ideal situation, Milo thought, although he hadn’t really talked to his professor about field studies and how they were conducted. Still, he’d lost his taste for making his rounds. If, while he was wearing his little brown pseudo-UPS outfit yesterday, everybody already knew who he was—he cringed, then overslept.
Paladin woofed him awake, finally, around eleven AM. The dog slept at the foot of the bed, all the manners Milo could get out of him, considering Milo was living in Tad’s oldest kid’s room, and that apparently was the kid the dog liked best. The first couple of nights the dog had actually tried to sleep on top of Milo. Since Paladin weighed more than a hundred pounds, Milo had protested, wondering how his nephew survived the crush of the dog at night. Locking the dog out of the room didn’t serve; the dog whined at the crack under the door all night. Leaving him in the back yard was marginally better, until one of the neighbors woke Milo up at three AM. to complain about the howling. Finally they compromised. Paladin slept across Milo’s feet, and Milo was happy the rest of him remained uncrushed.
Paladin woofed again. Milo struggled to his feet and pulled on a pair of boxers, then wandered out to the kitchen to get Paladin some kibble. It was only after he’d dished out two scoops that he realized someone was pounding on the front door.
He went to the door and peeped out. Bethany and her father stood on the welcome mat. He opened the door.
“Nice,” said Bethany, looking at his boxers. He looked down, too, and realized these were the Valentine ones, covered in hearts with little arrows through them. Bethany’s dad grunted something Milo couldn’t understand, though he caught the gist of it. He closed the door, dressed, and returned.
“So I was telling Dad about the possums on your map,” Bethany said when they were all in the kitchen. Milo fired up the yuppie coffeemaker, fetched his clipboard, and joined the other two at the breakfast nook table. He flipped to the map of last night’s walk and showed it to Bethany’s dad. Who, surprise, grunted.
“I know,” Bethany said. “It’s a lot. Hard to believe, except I was there when he was doing this part—” She traced her finger along half the route—“and I saw them, too.”
Bethany’s dad grunted.
“Yep,” Bethany said. She turned to Milo. “We’re both going with you tonight.” She glanced at the top of his map, saw that he’d writ
ten start and end times for his evening observation. “Seven PM. We’ll be here.”
Milo transferred basic data to one of his empty maps (names and numbers of residents in each house, with the residents’ ages, where known), went to Kinko’s to make new copies, and then stopped off at Toys R Us to gear up. He dressed as himself for his afternoon route and stopped pretending he wasn’t interested in everything he passed. Most of the houses were empty again. He had to get up early one of these days and see the houses before all the kids took off for their summer prisons of day camp, summer school, or planned activities. He hadn’t repurposed his study yet. Maybe he should collect the data and then design his paper around what he actually found out.
Maybe he should just spend his summer the way he had when he was a kid, doing nothing but fun things, and come up with some other project a week before school started again.
He should at least give it two days before he gave up. He didn’t anticipate showing Sherry any of his data, but he could imagine her sneering at him for again not finishing something he had started. Not that he cared what Sherry thought.
Bethany and her dad showed up at seven on the dot.
Milo issued them each a fully loaded Super Soaker Flash Flood.
“Thanks,” said Bethany’s dad. He tested the action by nailing an innocent hydrangea bush. “Nice.”
As they strolled along the sidewalk, with frequent stops for Bethany to fill Milo in on local unwildlife and for Milo to make notes, they were greeted by neighbors this time. Milo often had to endure introductions. Bethany told everyone Milo was practicing to be a census taker in 2010. He was glad he had his Super Soaker on a shoulder strap. There was a lot of handshaking involved, and people told him more than he could write down.
“How come you didn’t use the dog as a spy tool?” Bethany asked. They had stopped on a corner and studied the different directions they could go.
“Paladin is not a calm dog,” Milo said. “He’d be pulling my arm out of the socket every time I stopped to take notes.” So far they hadn’t seen any possums, and Milo was feeling let down.
“Daddy, what’s that black van doing?” Bethany pointed down Elm Street toward a block that was not part of Milo’s route. A tall, shiny black van was parked in front of a fire hydrant.
“Good question,” said Bethany’s dad. He glanced at his Super Soaker, then at the van. In a cage match, Milo guessed the van would crush the Super Soaker.
“Hey, there’s a possum,” said Milo. It was under a snowball bush in the Salehs’ front yard. And yes, its eyes glowed red for no apparent reason.
“Do we just shoot it to see what happens?” Bethany asked.
Milo marked a P on his map. “Let’s look around some more first.”
“What if it’s the only one we see?”
“It’s not,” said Milo. He pointed his pen toward the Ford house. Another small animal shape hunched beside the stone pedestal the mailbox sat on. It turned red eyes toward them.
“Why are they watching us?” asked Bethany’s dad.
“We’re big potential threats in their environment,” Milo said. “Although I’m not sure that’s why. But if I were an animal, I’d be watching people, too. Let’s find one more, and then we can zap it.” He wasn’t sure why he thought they should wait for three. Something about leaving a breeding population? Not that he could tell gender in distant possums. Who knew if the first two were boy and girl? But he was giving a nod to ecological correctness. Besides, what could water do to a possum? Get it wet.
“There’s one over there,” said Bethany. She pointed down the block away from the black van. “Hi, Alanis.”
They paused while Bethany talked to a girl about her age for a few minutes. Milo made more marks on his map: the girl (not a woman, not a child; he settled on G), two dogs, and three more lurking possums. Bethany’s dad, whom Milo had learned was named Razi, though Milo didn’t dare call him that, lurked like a possum, a silent presence behind the three of them.
“What’s with all the guns?” the girl asked.
“We’re going to shoot a possum,” said Bethany.“Have you noticed them?”
“The last three nights,” said Alanis. “First time I saw one was after I babysat the Ford kids. Walking home afterward, those red eyes, oh, my God, I was ready to scream!”
“Can we do it now, Milo?” Bethany asked.
“Sure,” he said.
“Let’s pick one.” Bethany pointed to a possum under a hedge in front of the Bliss house. “Ready? Aim—”
“Don’t cross the streams,” said Bethany’s dad as Milo put down the clipboard and swung his Super Soaker into position.
Was that a Ghostbusters joke? Milo wondered as Bethany yelled, “Fire!” and they all let loose on the poor unsuspecting possum. It screamed and smoked and waddled away. They all dashed to where it had been. No twisted metal this time, only scorched leaves in the hedge.
“That is not a natural animal,” said Bethany’s dad.
“Let’s shoot another one,” Alanis said.
Milo retrieved his clipboard. They turned a corner, located another possum, and fired. This one shrieked as well. It sounded more like a Star Wars robot than an animal. Bethany’s dad kept shooting it until he’d expended all his ammo, and this time they found a little piece of something in the smoking spot the possum left behind. “Nobody touch it,” said Milo. He pulled gardening gloves, pliers, and a glass baby food jar out of his back pocket and put the piece carefully into the jar. It was hissing still. “Now we just have to figure out where to get it analyzed.”
“My company has a lab,” said Razi. Milo handed him the sealed glass jar.
They searched in vain for more possums, even consulting Milo’s map from the night before. All of them had vanished.
Paladin barked his way into Milo’s dream about alien possums, and this time he was serious. Before Milo opened his eyes, Paladin gave one last yelp and shut up. His weight shifted off Milo’s feet. Milo knew someone else was in the room.
His bedside light switched on. He sighed and opened his eyes. Two men with short hair and dark business suits were there, the black one with his hand around Paladin’s muzzle, and the white one beside the bedside light. They both struck Milo as armed, though their clothing didn’t bulge visibly.
“To what do I owe the honor?” Milo said.
The white guy sat in Milo’s nephew’s desk chair, seemingly unperturbed that it was shaped like a captain’s chair on a TV starship. “We’ve got a bill for you.”
“Huh?”
“Destroying government property. You know how much those surveillance devices cost?”
“No,” said Milo.
“They’re prototypes. This is a pilot project. They each cost more than you could make in a year if you were actually employed, and you damaged three of them.”
“I don’t have any money,” he said, though he suspected poverty was no defense.
“It’s all right. You can work it off.” The man lifted Mi lo’s clipboard, with its stack of marked and unmarked maps. “We’ve been observing you, and even though you’re really raw at information gathering, we think you have potential. All you need is training.”
“But I—”
“Think about it, kid.” The man set an invoice down in front of Milo, who gasped when he saw the total. Way too many zeros. “You’d be working for the Department of Homeland Protection, so you know you’re guaranteed a lifetime of work. You can get this money somehow—though with your student loan situation, we’re not sure how—or you can make this all go away by signing up to work for us. We’ll give you training and real good benefits. You have until tomorrow to decide.”
Milo helped Tad unload the van of suitcases and progeny. Sherry had griped, griped, griped all the way home from the airport. Europe was full of people who didn’t speak English and didn’t shave anything and smelled bad. The Cokes tasted different. Everything was dirty and small and old. And the house better be in good shape, or Mi
lo was going to learn all about pain.
Milo just smiled as Tad and the kids rushed forward to greet Paladin. He decided he’d wait a while to tell Sherry he had a new job, a new underage girlfriend, and a sociology paper that was going to raise his GPA. Let her stew while he savored.
“What happened to my hydrangea bush?” she screamed.
He’d forgotten to clip off the burned parts. The rest of it looked fine. Oh, well. If it wasn’t the hydrangea, it would have been something else. That’s what Razi and his wife said. As did most of the other people he’d met around here. Sherry was always complaining about something, and the neighbors knew better than to take her seriously.
Oh, yeah. She’d find out pretty soon she’d lost her neighbor cred.
Milo smiled.
THE RIDGES
By Larry D. Sweazy
Larry D. Sweazy (www.larrydsweazy.com) won the WWA (Western Writers of America) Spur award for Best Short Fiction in 2005 and was nominated for a Derringer award in 2007. His other short stories have appeared in, or will appear in, The Adventure of the Missing Detective: And 25 of the Year’s Finest Crime and Mystery Stories, Boy’s Life magazine, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Amazon Shorts, and other publications and anthologies. His first novel, The Rattlesnake Season, was published in the fall of 2009. Larry lives in Nobles ville, Indiana, with his wife, Rose, two dogs, and a cat.
1.
The red fox stopped, suddenly, when a rusty floodlight flipped on automatically, illuminating a limestone pillar. Twilight was setting in, and the predator had been pursuing a rabbit that was proving to be more athletic than it should be. The rabbit’s scent was overpowering, but the bright light caused the fox to stop and freeze. After a brief pause, she didn’t see or smell any immediate danger, and she decided to resume the hunt.
Before moving on, the fox squatted and left her mark at the base of the roughly carved pillar that was wrapped in out-of-control ivy and bind weed. If she could read English, or understand the language of man, the fox would know that she had just crossed a boundary and entered a gathering of human homes known as The Ridges.
Zombie Raccoons & Killer Bunnies Page 24