by McBain, Tim
He wondered what was even left of her now, in real life, after most of a summer and all of a fall shut up inside a studio apartment. All of the windows closed. When he tried to picture it, he saw her as a puddle around spinal remains. He knew it didn’t make sense for her other bones to be gone, but that’s the way his mind saw it.
Erin
Presto, Pennsylvania
171 days after
The air was different today. It smelled like snow. A cold, clean smell Erin used to like. But not as much anymore. The cold scared her now. Winter was unkind. It didn’t care if you had enough food to make it. Either you survived, or you didn’t.
There was something else different about today. An excitement that buzzed through her nerves like an electric current. She still wasn’t sure if she was wasting her time. But she had to do it.
Today she wasn’t a scavenger. Today she was a hunter.
She rode a few hundred yards from the house before she hopped off her bike and dragged it into the dried husks of the overgrown weeds at the side of the road.
Hopping over fallen trees and avoiding thorny brambles, she made her way back toward the house through the woods. Was she stupid for doing this? Only time would tell.
Hunkered down in the bushes, the cold slithered its way inside her clothes wherever it could. It was easy to stay warm on the bike. Not so much standing still like this.
Erin pulled the sleeve of her coat back, exposing her wrist. The winter air took advantage, poking its icy fingers in to prickle over her naked flesh.
Her eyes followed the spastic movements of the second hand as it rounded the final stretch, sweeping past the 11 mark and then the 12 before starting the whole rotation over again. She rubbed at the glass face with a gloved finger, clearing away a smudge. It was an old clunky men’s watch, but it worked.
With every second that ticked by, Erin grew more and more impatient. And more convinced that this was a fool’s errand. A fool’s errand by a fool named Erin.
Maybe she was wrong about the whole thing. Maybe she really was just losing it from the lack of food. She wasn’t even sure which possibility bothered her more.
She yanked her sleeve back down and let her eyes wander over the winter landscape.
It had snowed a bit the day before, only an inch or two, but more was on the way. It had melted in some places — the road and some of the open grassy areas that got direct sunlight during the day.
The exposed patches of grass still glittered with a layer of frost. Her mom used to make these cupcakes every Easter. They looked like little baskets with jelly beans representing the dyed eggs. The frozen grass reminded her of the green dyed coconut shreds her mom put on top of the cupcakes.
Before she saw her prey, she felt its presence. Or was it that she could hear movement, at first so quiet that she couldn’t exactly hear it, but she could sense it in some intuitive, animal way somehow? She didn’t know.
The adrenaline flooded her with another wave of anticipation.
She sunk a little lower behind a clump of spruce saplings, and before long, she heard it. Really heard it. And saw it.
It reached the edge of the road and paused. Erin had the urge to giggle, though she didn’t find any of it funny.
Almost equally strong was the urge to scream. Because this was wrong. She fought both compulsions, squeezing her hands into fists and holding still.
Her prey gave a cursory glance around, as if looking for danger. Almost like someone looking both ways before crossing the road. And then it scurried off in the other direction, away from Erin’s hiding spot.
Erin gave it a head start, counting silently in her head. She would tail it from a distance. Watching and waiting for the right moment.
The hunt had begun.
Deirdre
The Hole
9 years, 22 days after
“Way I figure it, I’ll be out of the ditch sometime tomorrow. Maybe the next day at the latest.”
The lantern glowed no more, extinguished after Curtis wandered off, so the disembodied voice called to her through the dark. It echoed off of the shed walls in a way that made it hard to place in terms of distance or location in the room. All of that added up into something eerie. More eerie than it should have been, she thought. It’d been a weird night.
Deidre nodded and then remembered that Shelly wouldn’t be able to see it, so she repeated her affirmation verbally:
“That sounds about right.”
She sipped some coffee, taking the big thermos straight to her lips. She heard Shelly do the same, slurping at the lid full of coffee she had and gulping it down. Mouth noises sounded strange and loud in the dark, hard to figure out.
“Need a refill?”
“Not yet. So what I’m saying is, I’ve heard the stories. I know what to say to get out of the hole. I tell them that I don’t know what I was thinking, and I see things clearly now, and Father knows all and he knows best, and I forgot about that for a little while, but I remember now. Shit like that.”
“Right.”
“So once I’m out, we’ll need to meet up, need to make a real plan.”
Deirdre didn’t know what to say, so she said nothing. The silence hung in the air between them.
“I guess you never really agreed… I mean, I never really asked you, exactly, did I? So, like… Will you help me?”
Deidre sipped her coffee and found swallowing difficult due to the large lump now present in her throat.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll help you.”
They were quiet for a time, the dark stretching out around them. The rain had died down, and the thunder petered out before that. Now the chirp of crickets swelled to replace those sounds.
“Thank you.”
Deirdre shrugged and then remembered that Shelly wouldn’t be able to see it.
“It’s nothing. I suspect you would do the same for me.”
She took a long drink of coffee.
Izzy
Presto, Pennsylvania
171 days after
She waited. This time he’d come. He had to.
Izzy was further back from the house than usual. There was a dusting of snow on the ground, and flakes were starting to fall again now. Erin said this was it, her last chance to scrape together a little more food before the next big snow.
Izzy struggled to look disappointed when Erin left, because the reality was that she couldn’t wait for her to leave. Not in a mean way. But the last two times she’d come to get a glimpse of Squirrelman and his friend, she’d been disappointed.
Today was the day. It had to be.
Her eyes scanned the still life below. With the perfect veil of snow surrounding it and peppering the roof, the cabin looked like a gingerbread house with a dusting of powdered sugar.
But something about the little hut seemed different today, and it wasn’t just the snow. Lonelier. What was it? She stared at it, face scrunching in concentration.
It was the snow. But not just its presence; its perfection. There were no footprints. That meant that from the time it first settled until now, Squirrelman hadn’t stepped a foot outside. When had the snow first started sticking? Sometime yesterday afternoon. She’d helped Erin haul water from the well, and she remembered hopping from footprint to footprint while Erin manned the pump.
So he hadn’t been outside since then? That seemed like a long time. He certainly would have had trash from at least one meal. And shouldn’t he have gone to the bathroom once or twice in there? Izzy was sure there was a toilet inside, but Squirrelman seemed to prefer wizzing into the bushes, like her brother used to do when they went camping. She guessed it saved him having to haul extra water to flush.
And then another detail caught her eye. The chimney. There was no smoke flowing from it.
A feeling of dread came over her.
Had he left? And if so, why?
She chewed at a chapped piece of skin on her lip.
How many days had it been since she’d seen him? Four? Maybe five?
>
Izzy shifted her weight. Her thighs burned from squatting, but she couldn’t sit unless she wanted a real bad case of snowbutt.
She waited an almost unbearable minute in the winter stillness, fidgeting and shuffling her feet. She couldn’t stall any longer. Izzy followed her prints back up the hill, but when she reached the place where she’d hidden her bicycle, she veered right, following the path of the driveway down towards the cabin.
Of everything she’d done so far, the sneaking out and even the spying, she knew this was the most dangerous. When she reached the edge of the yard, she paused, giving it one last thought. If she crossed the grass, she’d leave footprints. This was one of Erin’s deepest fears, and why she tried not to go out in the snow. She was obsessed with someone finding her trail. Izzy thought it was silly until now. Paranoid. But there might be no turning back after this.
She couldn’t stop herself. She had to know for sure.
She skirted around the side of the house, to a low window toward the back. Bubbleguts roiled furiously in her belly.
Izzy reached the window and cupped her hands around her eyes to cut the glare from the glass. Peering inside, she saw a cluster of empty water bottles on the counter, an open can of tuna, and a tangle of dirty silverware. She squinted, looking beyond that, further inside the cabin.
She caught a glimpse of a sleeping bag, the army green fabric bunched and disheveled. And there was something else. Something was wrong here.
But before her eyes could take in any more, she was seized roughly from behind.
Decker
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
166 days after
He stood up on his knees to reach the doorknob and wobbled a little before he got his balance. His arm unfolded and extended in slow motion, fingers splaying and wrapping around the handle. It squeaked when he turned it, and he heard the click of the latch pulling free from its holster. He held still like that for a beat, and then he pulled.
Nothing happened. The door resisted his attempt, held motionless. It was stuck. His breath caught in his throat, a little scratchy click emitting from deep within his neck.
He panicked, yanking on it three more times in rapid succession and bashing the corner of his hip when the jamb let go all at once on the third tug. The impact sounded like the head of a hammer as it finished striking a nail into a two by four. The pain flamed up and out quickly, though, and he found himself laughing, his eyes looking down at the pointed spot that had taken the beating and come out unscathed.
He kneel-walked out of the way of the door and flung it wide. Green carpet striped the floor out there, little gaps of wood running along the wall, another old-timey detail he hadn’t thought much of until just now.
He listened. Everything was still. Normal. Empty. Nothing jumped out at him from the other side of the doorway, nor did any dead girls take shape in that narrow space between rooms he looked upon.
He hunched down in the doorway to rest his hands on his thighs a moment. Everything made him shallow of breath now. Even something as simple as opening a door. It was hard to not feel pathetic, but he reminded himself that it wasn’t long ago that he couldn’t imagine opening this door. Yet here he was. He just had to keep it going like that, divide the whole into tiny pieces in his head and keep accomplishing one task at a time.
Finally he lowered his hands to the floor and shuffled to his left. The pea green carpet felt rough and fibrous and just a little bit fuzzy, almost like ancient felt that had dried out and gone stiff over the years. Felt or not, it surely was ancient.
When his fingers reached the lip of the top step, he stopped and looked down. The green carpet led down twelve steps to a landing and two more to the floor. That dizziness flashed in his head again as he contemplated the open space between him and the living room floor below, but it was gone just as quickly.
No hesitation this time.
He looped a hand down, skipping a step to the second one down, the other hand following suit a second later. His knees edged in behind that, everything working together now, but slowly, carefully. It was too easy to picture himself reconfigured into a heap of limbs on the landing below.
All of his weight shifted like that from the heel of a hand to a kneecap and back, everything balanced right on the edge of every step. But he didn’t think about it anymore. He just did it, finding himself at the bottom much quicker than he had anticipated.
Good. The hardest part was over, so he lay down on the landing, curling up on his side in the fetal position. His heart thumped in his chest, his ribcage quaking against the floor, and the sweat poured out of him for some time after that burst of exertion. It was an odd feeling, to lay still and perspire, to feel it ooze out of him. It smelled terrible, like that funky smell when coconut starts to go bad accented with a hint of piss. He was sweating out crazy toxins now, he figured. More waste in him than water at this point.
With that sense of relief, the notion that the worst was behind him, his adrenalin waned a little, and all of the aches and pains seemed to grow stronger. Muscles in his lower back knotted, and his arms and legs felt dead again, powerless and limp like they had before. A vomitous feeling spiraled in his gut. He hadn’t eaten or drank anything in such a long while that he knew he’d only vomit that yellow bile, if it came to that. At least it would match the doors in here.
Nothing would stop him, though. Not anymore. He knew that now.
He rose again, fighting through another dizzy spell to crawl down the last two steps to the floor. This room smelled different. Stale. Like before all of this, old people hadn’t lived here so much as been stored in mothballs for years, wrapped in sheets of plastic.
His fingernails scraped at shag carpet now, a sky blue that didn’t at all match the color palette upstairs, another detail he’d paid no mind until now. He got the sense that whoever lived here before didn’t venture upstairs often and never updated it. He preferred to spend his time up there, though. Not for the company of the creepy old furniture and carpeting, of course, but because of the superior vantage point of the windows. He could look down the hill both ways, seeing a long stretch of road on either side. Of course, he’d never seen anyone go by. No cars. No pedestrians. Just a few flocks of turkeys and a handful of deer once.
He passed under the arched doorway into the kitchen, and the floor changed again. Linoleum, dulled and scraped from years of wear. It felt colder than the carpet or wood, or at least Decker thought so.
The dizziness throbbed in his head now, his limbs jerking in time with it like he was dancing along with the beat, flinging his extremities like a ragdoll’s every time that kick drum hit in his head. But he was almost there. It was almost over.
He lurched up to grab his coat where it hung on the hook, gripping it with clawed fingers until he could right himself, and then pulling it free. He sat back, bending at the knee so his calves folded under him. He pulled the coat on, already feeling better mentally even if the fabric itself was cold as hell. Strapping the coat around him almost felt like a hug.
Goose bumps rippled over his flesh again. He rode it out and zipped up the coat. Next, he peeled his legs out from beneath him and slid his boots on, not bothering with the laces, one of which was untied. He spotted where his hat had fallen out of the coat pocket, so he scooped that up and slid it on as well.
Good. He was ready to venture outdoors.
He glanced to his left. Another door. This one wasn’t as intimidating somehow. His eyes fastened to the shiny silver of the handle. He imagined how cold the metal would feel since the other end was outside.
He inched toward the door, and then it hit him. He hadn’t brought the bucket with him. He could see it in his head, the clean bucket nestled between his bed and the dresser, right next to the piss bucket, both of them equally worthless to him unless he wanted to crawl all the way back up there.
Nope. He took a breath and cut back to his right, digging around in the cupboards under the counter. The first two containe
d glass bowls, cookie sheets, cake and pie pans. The third one held a suitable substitution. A red plastic pitcher, probably a lifelong courier for Kool-Aid, perhaps the occasional lemonade or orange juice from concentrate. It held maybe a half gallon. Not ideal, but it would do.
He gripped the handle of the pitcher in his teeth and crawled for the door again, undoing the latch and moving out into the cold.
Erin
Presto, Pennsylvania
171 days after
Her hand latched onto the kid’s bicep and spun her around. It was rougher than she’d intended, but Erin just couldn’t believe it. Couldn’t believe she’d actually caught Izzy poking around houses by herself.
“Izzy! What the- crap?!” She stopped herself from throwing an F-bomb at the kid. Swearing around her was one thing. Swearing at her was another.
Izzy’s eyes went wide, exposing the bright white sclera around her irises, the way a dog did when it was scared or threatened or maybe thinking of biting you. Erin didn’t think Izzy would bite her, but she did think she might burst into tears. Or beg for mercy. Try to get out of the deep shit she was in. Instead she started screeching and jumping up and down.
“Help! Help!”
Erin just stared at the kid, not sure of what to make of this display. Help? Did she think Erin was going to beat on her or something? And not that she was going to, but who did she think was going to come to her rescue?
More sounds tumbled from Izzy’s mouth, a jumble of panicked syllables it took Erin a moment to parse. It wasn’t until Izzy clutched at Erin’s sleeve and dragged her closer to the cabin that she picked out the words.
“We have to help!”
Erin struggled against her, but Izzy’s grip was strong.
“Izzy-”
But the kid kept yanking and screaming, completely hysterical.
Erin wrenched away from her, grabbed the sides of her head, and forced Izzy to hold still.