by D. F. Noble
“What'd he say?” Alex asked.
Jake shrugged again. “It was weird. He sounded worried. Never heard him like that before. I don't know, like he was scared or something.”
Jake took another bite and scanned the lunch room. Alex watched him like a hawk, wishing that Jake would just spit it out and stop stonewalling. There were motherfucking aliens to think about. Aliens!
“So what was it about?”
“Like I said, it was weird,” Jake said. “Told me to take care of the family, to remember everything he taught me about hunting, and the woods and shit. It was like... like he was trying to say he wasn't coming back.”
“I'm sorry, man,” Alex said. “I hear the war is escalating over there. I'm sure it's gotta be hard on him. But he's in communications, right? So he should be safe?”
“Hope so,” Jake said. “Dean in detention again?”
Alex nodded. “As always. What are your plans for today?”
“Not much. Might just go out to Tree Top. You?”
“Aliens, man! Motherfuckin' aliens!” Alex said. “Ha, well... I gotta stay after school and work on a project in the library, but it's Friday! We should all meet up. Who knows…maybe we'll see some UFOs tonight!”
***
Jake was almost home. The bus ride was nearing its end, and since Jake lived on the outskirts of town, he was one of the last to be dropped off. The dozen or so left with him were also outskirters, living on farms and old houses outside of Hopp's Hollow. Jake had trudged to the back of the bus and tried avoiding eye contact with Steffi. She didn't seem pissed, but instead, she had that playful devil-may-care grin she had earlier that morning. As much as he did want to talk to her, he wouldn't allow himself. Girls were trouble and he knew it. They make you feel stuff, get under your skin, and drive you crazy. I'm already crazy enough, Jake thought.
The bus had come to a stop, and Greg, a fellow freshman who sported a full grown mustache already, had to nudge Jake to wake him from his daze. “Hey Dreamy McDreamerson,” Greg said. “Everybody's waiting for you to get off the damn bus. Get off the damn bus, asshole. You're cutting into my Xbox time. Go, go, go.”
“Jesus,” Jake moaned and grabbed his backpack. As he stood up, Steffi reached across the aisle and stuffed a piece of paper into Jake's pocket, and then smiled. Jake shot a startled glance at her. Her hand had come intolerably close to his crotch, and already Jake could feel blood rushing to areas that didn't need blood in them just yet, especially not right in front of everyone. He made his way down the aisle and stepped down onto his driveway.
Jake watched the bus pull away. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the paper. It was a letter. He felt his heart begin to race. Oh what now? he thought and opened it. There in the looping penmanship of a girl, Jake read:
I think you like me. Guess what? I like you too. Maybe we can hang out sometime and just talk? Maybe if we're just by ourselves you won't be such an asshole? Text me. My number is...
Gravel crackled beneath his feet as Jake walked on. Text, he thought, I don't have a cell phone. Fuck my life. A big shit-eating grin spread across his face. He fantasized, as was his nature, and dreamed of Steffi; Steffi in the moonlight, exotic, angelic, and almost ghostly. He then heard the caw of a crow and his mind returned to earth. There, off to his right, perched above the corn on a scarecrow, sat the big black bird. The sun burned directly behind it, a fiery ball framing the bird inside, making an emblem, an image, a symbol.
Red Crow, Jake thought. That's a sweet Indian name.
C hapter 8
The Sky Is Falling
Carol stirred the green beans she was cooking on the skillet, trying to get them just right (slightly blackened and glazed in honey; a new experiment she learned from the cooking show that ran on her small color TV she kept on the kitchen counter). Behind her, Wes sat in a highchair, coloring wildly in a book. In a few moments Jake would be home, trotting in from school.
Carol would ask him how school went. Jake would give her a short answer and then he would disappear off to the woods, his bow over his shoulder and his quiver on his back. Since their falling out, Carol had tried to muster the strength to make things right between them. She couldn't find it. When Jake had come home that night, bent her wrist and let her know what he really thought, what he knew about her…it felt like their bond had been severed. He would hardly regard her, say a word to her, and even though he was her son, she was frightened of him. More so, she was ashamed and couldn't bear to face him. Jake was different. She didn't think he was on drugs—she knew what that was like. But since his friend Ronnie disappeared a couple years back, Jake had become withdrawn. Something must have happened to him, but she didn't dare ask.
Things were rough, rough all over, but luckily her husband had a good job in the military, and as soon as he was back home they were going to move out of this shithole called Hopp's Hollow and find a decent place to raise their family. For now, it was cheap and would have to suffice, but at the very least, they were on the outskirts of town. Out here, there was a sense of normalcy, and when you looked out the window, you weren't seeing a crackhead or pedophile walking the street. She was thankful for that.
Then the TV went static. Dammit, Carol silently cursed, setting the spatula down. She went to slap the thing on its side and only made it a step, then froze in her tracks. Something strange was in the fuzz.
It was her last cognitive thought before a cataclysmic seizure swept over her body. Carol began to spasm where she stood. Violent tremors rocked her, and if she would have been aware, she would have realized she was standing on her toes. Pain—incredible, powerful pain—jetted through her eyes, setting fire to her brain. There was so much pressure, as if a volcano was trying to erupt from her skull.
Carol's head snapped back, almost touching the space between her shoulder blades. The cartilage in her neck was visible through her throat, pressing tight against the skin. Her hands were reaching up to her face, reaching for her eyes—they had to go. Carol's forefingers plunged into her own eye sockets. There, towards the bridge of her nose, her well-manicured fingernails bit deep into the ocular cavities like daggers. Her body twitched as if electrified, and then, with a terribly wet ripping and suction sound, her eyes came out.
Carol raked her nails down her cheeks as soon as the eyes were free, digging into the skin as if it were merely playdough, deep enough that the skin pulled apart and revealed her teeth.
The eyes hung there for only a moment. Carol yanked them till they sickly snapped from the nerve endings. When they were completely free, the tremors stopped. Carol stepped forward to the TV, her head cocking much like a dog, tilting to one side.
And still the static swirled.
Behind her, Wesley colored away, oblivious. The thing that was Carol, its head snapped towards the child. Somehow, even with no eyes, its hand found the knife she had so recently cut carrots with.
***
Jake heard it first; a low whining sound in the distance. He stopped just in front of his house in the driveway and looked up. It was a plane, tiny and far off in the sky, but it wasn't flying. No, it was cart-wheeling down.
Holy shit, it's going to crash! I'm going to see a plane crash! What the fuck!?
The sound grew louder, and something in him, some instinct, told him there was no way he was hearing that plane off on the horizon. Jake turned about, and there behind him another plane spiraled down, almost like a leaf, spinning, spinning. It was closer, much closer. He could see it was red and brown, even make out the windows.
All those people...
Jake tracked it till it disappeared behind the tree line. There was a flash there, and flames and smoke rose up over the trees. The sound came next, horrible and abrupt. Jake stood in awe, his heart beating, his breaths shallow. As if in a dream, he turned back to his house, and in the distance he spied yet another plane nose-diving.
The sky is falling, the sky is falling...
Some mix of emotion rose up in Ja
ke: Dread, excitement, some kind of nervous energy that made his body feel rubbery, and weakness. Then from the back porch came a crash of the screen door. Jake's head naturally turned to it. Something strange was in the air…an electrical buzz Jake couldn't put his finger on, but still it was there, heavy, making the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. He made his way around to the back porch and stopped. Hanging from a post his mother usually kept a pot of flowers on was a black plastic trash bag. Something heavy hung inside and red liquid slowly dripped from it. Jake poked at it with his finger and found the contents to be mushy. Feels like meat, he thought.
Jake tentatively came up the stairs of the back deck, every hair on his body stood on end. The screen door was closed, but the back door behind it was cracked open. He could see his mother. She had her back to him, and she was watching static on the TV.
Jake noticed the mess second. The kitchen table, the walls, everything seemed to be spattered in red. Absently, he thought, Something must have gone wrong with a pasta dish. He imagined a kettle exploding sauce all over the kitchen.
He found himself at the screen door, about to open it, and heard his mouth say, “Mom?”
Her ragged, eyeless face turned to him, and Jake would have screamed just then, screamed as loud as he could, if only the wind wouldn’t have been knocked from him at the horrid sight. He stumbled back, trying to catch his breath and tripped on a lawn chair. Jake landed hard on his ass and his mother—his eyeless, bloody mother, with her teeth showing through her cheeks—stepped forward towards the screen door. Jake scurried back, his eyes darting from the knife she carried back to her terrible face. That wasn’t pasta sauce. That wasn’t sauce all over the kitchen, or all over Wesley’s highchair. It was blood. It was the blood of his baby brother, which now, he was certain, was what hung from that black trash bag on the flower hook.
Run!
Jake scurried off the porch, his body feeling like a wet noodle. He slipped in the gravel of his driveway and went to his knees. Just behind him, one quick look over the shoulder, and he saw his mother—black and red pits where eyes used to be, pale skin now splattered with blood, her cheeks torn and ragged, and a butcher knife clenched in her hand—come stalking across the porch he’d just stumbled down.
His flight or fight reflex took a firm grasp then, and he ran, ran with the speed of a cheetah on meth. Jake could barely feel his feet hitting the ground, felt as if he were running on thin air, with only one single thought on his mind: to put distance between himself and his mother.
Ahead of Jake was a barn. It was on their property, but Jake’s dad let a local farmer use it. A thought formed in Jake’s head, The hayloft. He didn’t think he could increase his speed, but by having an objective, a goal, he was able to. Jake burst through the barn door and slammed it shut behind him. However, there was no lock, and in the gap, just before he closed the door, he could see his mother tromping forward. She wasn’t running, more like power-walking with the rigid movements of a robot. Jake spun on his heels, looking towards the ladder that led to the hayloft. His first immediate thought was to climb it and pull the ladder up so she couldn’t get to him. But then, on the wall beside him, he spied hung rows of tools.
A machete caught his eye. A moment of doubt swept over him. Surely this was a dream. Surely he was asleep on the bus and having a nightmare during the day; a day-mare. It’s my mom, how am I supposed to fight her!? But she killed Wesley! She killed her own son, she’ll kill me, too!
So Jake plucked the machete from the wall and made for the ladder. He passed a tractor when he heard the door behind him crash open. One look back, and this time his mother was sprinting.
Jake knew then that he wasn’t going to make it to the ladder.
He spun and dodged a vicious slash from the monster that used to be his mother. Her butcher knife clanged against the tractor hard enough to send a few yellow sparks into the air, and Jake took flight, racing around the machine. She stayed on his tail, somehow sensing his movement without the ability to see.
“Mom,” Jake moaned from the other side of the tractor. “Stop!”
If she heard him, she showed no signs of it. She merely stomped around his way and Jake knew he couldn’t keep up this circling around the tractor game all day. He was going to have lose her, or, he thought and grimaced, kill her.
“Mom,” Jake pleaded and shot back towards the barn door. He'd lost his love for her for some time, but the thought of... the thought of actually...“I don’t want to hurt you!”
She then broke into a sprint, her knife raised above her head and some strange and electrical sound coming from her mouth. Jake watched the blade, transfixed. He was no longer fourteen. He was no longer a boy. In this moment he was only alive, and wanted to stay that way.
NOW shouted a voice in his head, and instead of running, instead of bursting back out of the barn and fleeing, Jake swung his machete. It wasn’t as if time had slowed, no. It was more like everything became more profound, each fraction of a second becoming brighter, more intense. The musky smell of the barn, the light peaking in through the gaps of the walls, his machete snaking forward in a deadly arc, and his mother’s contorted and malevolent alien face somehow smiling.
Jake cried out as he swung, and his aim was true. His machete bit deep into the elbow of his mother’s arm with a mind-numbing shink sound. The strike, metal against bone, reverberated down his blade into his arm and Jake sidestepped her rush. She steamed past him and slammed into the wall beside the door, her weapon clanging on the dirt floor beside her. She turned to face him, her arm bleeding and hanging limp and gashed open by her side. Her other hand reached out for him and Jake swung again, cutting her fingers away.
“Stop!” Jake wailed. “Mom, stop!”
She showed not a single sign of pain, just grunted at him like an animal. Her hand swiped for him, and with her fingers missing, she only slung blood. The warm fluid arced across Jake’s face, a droplet stinging his left eye. Jake squinted and stepped back. Half of him naturally wanted to rub at it, to clear his vision, but he knew, even mutilated as she was, his mother would come for him. Pushing the pain to the back of his mind, Jake ducked low and swung again.
The machete cut the air with a whistle and bit deep into his mother’s ankle and became lodged there in the bone. She teetered forward and shrieked, almost falling on him, but Jake was quick and strong for a boy his age. He pushed her aside as she leaned forward, pivoting her weight with his hip in a classic hip-toss. Her face collided with the dirt floor in a puff of dust, and Jake stepped away, carefully avoiding her thrashing limbs.
“I’m sorry,” Jake said, tears brimming on his eyes as he plucked a pitchfork from the barn’s wall. “I’m so sorry.”
Jake placed one of the prongs from the pitchfork at the back of his mother’s skull. His foot then kicked forward on the tool and sent the spike shooting through her brain and out of her mouth. The sound made Jake weak in the knees and he felt for a moment that he might throw up. The feeling passed after a couple severe dry-heaves, and finally, the body of his mother lie still. He had to step on her calf to pry the machete clear from her ankle. All this he did in shock, doing only what needed to be done. The horror of the moment left him feeling almost robotic, as if he were on autopilot. Then his father’s voice rumbled through his head, saying, “A man does what a man has to. Even when it’s the last thing he wants to do, he does what is right. That’s part of being a man, Jake. You protect your family. You stand up when people around you can’t stand. You help them up. You find the way, no matter how hard it is, and at the end of that, you’ll look back, and you’ll know what it means to be a man, and nothing—no one—can take that away from you.”
How am I going to explain this to dad? Jake wondered
A part of his mind answered him. You won’t have to. He’s probably crazy by now, too.
Jake shivered at the thought. And then came a series of realizations. Jesus Christ…Dad knew…this is what he was talking about�
��and Alex…the signal from SETI…Jesus, Dean and Alex are still at school… He stepped outside and closed the barn door behind him. He was going to go inside and use the phone. He wanted to talk to his dad, wanted to make sure he was alright, but something caught his ear.
There were screams on the wind, screams of children.
It’s not just here, not just my mom. Another grownup is going crazy. And then it dawned on Jake: Oh shit, the school bus…all the kids…I need to get the gun (fuck it's hidden at Tree Top! No time)…my bow…my arrows…
Jake sprinted through his kitchen and up to his room, unzipping the case that held his compound bow. In the back of his mind, he knew how little time there was. Time Wesley never had because Wesley didn’t have a chance. He was just a baby. With that thought, the quiver went over his shoulder and he found himself running, running down his driveway, feet flying like the wind, his lungs like hot air balloons, big enough to swallow up clouds. The machete pumped in one hand, and his bow in the other.
Let me get there in time!
***
The school bus was just ahead. It was lying on its side down in a small ravine, its roof pushed up against some trees. Jake could hear the terrified voices. He could see small hands slapping against the glass of the bus’s back door. In his mind’s eye he could see what happened: The bus driver, Mike, going crazy behind the wheel, losing control, and then in the aftermath, turning on the children.
With the way the bus had tumbled on its side, its back emergency door had been blocked by a tree. Jake knew the kids were trying to open it, but it was useless. A moment later and Jake was tossing his bow and machete up on top of the bus and crawling up. Voices cried for help, cried for their moms and dads, and Jake ran to the retracting door at the bus’s front. Somehow the thing was still closed, but through it, he gazed on in horror. The bus driver Mike was pulling the innards from a young girl with his bare hands. Her name was Mackenzie, and she was only in the fourth grade. Jake had skinned and gutted deer with his dad plenty of times. This was different. Guts coming out of an animal, that was food and that was an animal. Seeing the intestines of a little girl…