The old community centre hadn’t changed much. Alex had gone to company Christmas parties there when his mom had worked at Sobeys, but he hadn’t been there since he was twelve. It wore a new coat of paint, and one window in the main door was boarded up, but other than that it was nearly identical. At least from the side they were approaching.
As they got closer, Nicole and David walked toward the large, fenced-in backyard. Alex, noticed something unusual in the front of the building.
No, it wasn’t a fortress, but Alex understood what David had meant when he said, “not yet.”
The street in front of the building had been torn up in September; they were laying a new sewer line. After a little over a month, the project was unfinished. It looked as if the workers were just on an extra long break and would return at any moment. Large piles of gravel, dirt, and broken asphalt were piled in the empty parking lot.
“That’s the first line of defence,” David said, brushing off the work he had nothing to do with. “This,” he said with a grin, turning Alex around, “is the second line of defence.”
Behind the piles were eight wooden road-blocks with aluminum signs attached. They had once read “Road Blocked” or “Local Traffic Only.” Now they read “People In Here!”, “Enter at Own Risk!”, and “Get Lost Monsters!” in crudely spray-painted neon-orange letters. It wasn’t likely that the mudmen could read. They just hunted. But people—other kids or adults or, hopefully, a rescue team—would be able to read the signs and know that they were inside the centre.
Attached to these barricades were long spikes. Alex remembered from a book he had read about knights that they were called pikes. Each one was about seven feet long, and angled in such a way that their points came to about chest height on the average man—or mudman. They weren’t made of sturdy wood or metal like the ones he had read about, but he knew what they were there for: to catch the things that were stupid enough to run into them. The Mr. Watts mudman smashed his face through a window—cutting himself up pretty bad—just to get at him, but big spikes were more obvious, and could be avoided easier than glass. Alex didn’t think that the spikes would work, but they were good for appearances. They looked sharp and threatening.
Maybe looks and threats would be enough to stop the mudmen, Alex thought, doubtfully.
An empty parking area—a no-man’s land—lay between the pikes and what impressed Alex the most; what must be the third line of defence. It also reminded him who David Rudderham was: the kid who was skipped ahead and always did well in the science fair—though he never won any with his large, impressive contraptions. One such contraption now stood before him. His imagination made it clear to him how it worked (assuming that it did work—he also remembered that David’s contraptions had about a 50/50 track record).
Strung between two sturdy fence poles was a rope at about waist height. One end was tied to the pole on the left, the other was merely looped around the pole on the right through what looked like a big washer. The rope on the right continued up the side of the pole to the top where a clothesline wheel had been attached. It was strung to the roof of the centre. There, the rope attached to a stick with hammers, long screwdrivers and a gardening spade pointing up, making a small gate. Behind that was the main piece of the contraption; the part that would do some damage, assuming it worked. It looked like a piece of telephone pole, sawed down to a five-foot length (Alex looked up and down the street and noticed that the poles had also been replaced when the sidewalks were put in). The pole was covered in more screwdrivers, saw blades, rake heads, shovel scoops, and a dozen other objects that could cause damage on their own, let alone when attached to a weight that had to be at least a hundred pounds.
After taking it all in, he took a step closer to it, his hand out to touch the rope strung between the poles.
“What are you, stupid?” Nicole asked from behind him, in the aggressive tone Alex already recognized.
“Yeah, I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” David said, in a much calmer voice. “You put any weight on that, and that will come down on you in a second.”
“Cool,” Alex replied, looking at the death-trap—not as dangerous, but as interesting. He turned to David. “Does it actually work?”
David scoffed. “Of course!”
Nicole rolled her eyes. “He has no idea if it works. It hasn’t done a thing yet. Nothing has gotten through to it.”
“Well,” David argued, “we actually just finished setting it up when we heard your dog, so we didn’t get to test it or anything. But it will work. I mean, it makes sense that it would. Right?”
Alex stared back up at the “smasher,” which he could now see was clearly labelled as such in the same crude spray-paint. “Yeah. Yeah, it would totally work. One of those things would walk into the rope, ‘cause they’re stupid or whatever, and then that thing comes and ... SPLAT!”
“You do realize that you almost did just that, right?” Nicole sighed.
“But he didn’t!” David said, defending Alex. “Because he’s not stupid.”
“Yeah,” sneered Alex, nodding at David. He looked down and realized he was, ignorantly, mere inches from what had to be the trigger for this thing. Moments ago, he hadn’t seen it at all. He had, for what felt like the hundredth time in the past three days, come so close to death.
Evidently David sensed this awkwardness in Alex. “Plus, you know, I’m gonna paint warnings on it. Like the spikes. Just in case.”
Trying to regain some composure and clear the sudden look of fear and embarrassment from his face, Alex nodded. “Yeah,” he said, putting his hands on his hips, hoping the superman-like pose would convey confidence. “That sounds like a good idea.”
David walked over to Alex, a large grin on his face as he looked over the SMASHER! with obvious satisfaction. “Yup, it’s pretty good,” he said, putting on some degree of modesty. “I’ve got ideas for a bunch more too! I’m gonna make one with a swinging arm, that has a big blade at the end!”
“Aw, cool!”
“Yeah! And one with—”
“Boys!” shouted Nicole. “I hate to ruin your little brag party, but if you remember, there’s a bunch of those things ... deadies or mudmen or whatever you want to call them, coming after us. Right now. You led them to us, remember?” She glared at Alex through squinted eyes as she spat out the last part.
Alex was about to respond—something along the lines of shut up—when a droning sound distracted him. A distant car alarm?
“Oh crap,” David said, looking to the side of the building they had just come from. A moaning and shuffling sound came from around the corner.
“Well, that’s great!” Nicole said, throwing her arms in the air. “Now they’re gonna get to the easy door!” She stomped her way across the lot, past the boys, glaring at them as she passed. She looked back only once, and it wasn’t to either her brother or Alex. “Come on, girl!” she shouted in a moderately pleasant tone to Shadow, who had been standing with her while her owner almost accidentally killed himself. The dog glanced to Alex, then back to the corner that the car-alarm noise had just come from, and quickly walked after Nicole, who resumed her stomp across the parking lot.
Alex watched them, then looked to David with a look that clearly said: Now what do we do?
“Don’t worry,” David said, turning Alex in the direction his sister had just gone. “There’s another way in. Just as easy ... well, maybe not exactly as easy, but you know, still pretty easy.”
“Oh, good,” Alex said, relieved that he had not doomed himself and the people who had just rescued him.
“Yeah,” David continued as they walked. “So, how are your legs? They okay?”
“Um ...” Alex kicked at the gravel beneath his feet. “Yeah, they’re fine. I mean, still kinda sore. As long as I don’t have to run a marathon or climb too high or something, I’ll be fine.”
“Oh,” David said, not making eye contact. “That’s good.”
After climbing th
e seven-foot fence, followed by a very flexible emergency rope ladder, Alex practically fell through the second floor window into a room full of junk; the new home that Nicole and David had made for themselves. He felt a mix of relief and pain. His legs ached. His arms ached. He was out of breath. He had the feeling that he might throw up, though he was unsure if that was from the exertion or the sounds coming from outside.
They had been followed. And it sounded like there were a lot of them.
Alex rubbed his legs—his knees mostly; they had smacked the wall through the rope ladder more than once on the climb. He wouldn’t cry—not when he had just met these people. As he massaged his legs, a realization hit him quite suddenly:
Shadow! She’s still down there! How will she—
“Okay—start pulling!”
David’s voice cut off his bleak realization that he had left his only surviving friend—his saviour—to face the mudmen on her own. Again. He turned quickly to the window. Nicole was tugging at a rope similar to the one that was being used as the trigger to the SMASHER! He rushed over, squeezing between her and the wall, caused her to grunt both in agitation and from the strain of whatever she was hoisting. He had to find Shadow.
She wasn’t far.
They had dragged her through a small opening in the fence that hooked into the wall of the building. Too small for a person to fit through, but it just allowed room for the dog. Now she dangled from the end of the rope, about ten feet from the window. David was still on the ground. He looked very anxious as his gaze moved between the dog being lifted and the fence, which was being pushed inward by over a dozen of the mudmen.
They seemed unsure why they could not get to David or the dog-on-a-rope, as if they didn’t know the fence was there. The ones in the front were getting mashed against the chain-links harder and harder by the ones behind them. Rusted edges of metal dug into their faces, leaving grid patterns in their black and red blood. They were mangling their hands trying to shove them through the far-too-small holes in an attempt to grab David, though he was several feet away.
Fortunately for David, the fence held them back, though if they kept pressing, or if more showed up and added to the pressure, it would soon collapse.
“Could you hurry, please?” he yelled up, shielding his eyes so he could better see Alex’s face. “I really don’t want to be down here with them!”
Shadow whimpered as she slowly inched toward the window, her legs dangling uselessly beneath her.
Alex turned to face Nicole. “Can’t you go any faster?”
Nicole stopped tugging and glared at him. “Look,” she said, her voice much calmer than Alex had expected from her expression. “We haven’t known each other very long, but I get the impression that you are ... how should I put this ... useless. And slow. And whiney. Pretty sure I don’t like you. Does that seem about right to you?”
Alex was dumbfounded. Who says stuff like that to someone they just met?
He was even more shocked when she shoved the rope into Alex’s hand and let go with a simple “here.”
The weight of the dog at the end of the rope—a little over 50 pounds the last time she had been to the vet—forced Alex to lurch toward the window. He let out a yelp and a grunt as Nicole walked away.
Alex heard Shadow whimpering and hated Nicole for possibly hurting her by letting her fall, even for just that split second. He also heard the sounds coming from the mudmen: sick moaning, like weak screams coming from each one of them. He wasn’t sure if it was just in his head, but he thought their voices were getting wetter. He pictured the pressure of the fence literally liquefying them and drowning them in their own blood.
He felt like he might throw up again.
“Come on, come on, come on!”
David’s calls brought him back to the moment. He tugged at the rope, though with much more difficulty than Nicole seemed to have. He knew that she was probably stronger than he was. Of course, she was older/bigger, he told himself, so he shouldn’t feel too pathetic.
After another minute of tugging he stepped to the window, making sure to keep the rope taut. The dog hung directly below him. She was trying to keep her head above the windowsill, but her paws simply couldn’t hold her up as they swung below her. Her claws made a scrambling sound on the siding and Alex thought fondly of chasing her through his house as she skidded through turns, leaving scratches on the hardwood floor.
He doubted he’d ever go back to that house.
“Pull her in, please!” David called, much closer to the window than he had been before.
Alex peered past the dangling, scrambling dog and saw that David had climbed up the ladder directly behind her, pushing her up as he went. The fact that it was difficult to hoist the dog with help now made Alex feel pathetic. He put that aside, however, as he nodded to David and pulled his dog in by the harness.
She shambled through the window and immediately began chewing on the ropes.
David fell through seconds later, huffing and puffing. He pointed at the window as Alex looked at him. “The ladder,” he said between breaths.
“What?” Alex asked, confused.
“The ladder,” David repeated. “Pull the ladder in!”
This didn’t really help with Alex’s confusion. “Why? What if there are—”
“Just pull the damn ladder in!” Nicole shouted from outside the room.
“All right, all right!” he yelled back, as he tugged it up and through the window. He left it in a pile by this “less-than-easy” entrance.
David looked at Alex, then at the messy pile of ladder, sighed, pulled himself up, and carefully rolled the ladder up into a neat bundle. “It’s easier to use this way,” he said. It made Alex remember something else about David—or at least something he guessed from the fact that the boy had been skipped ahead: he was a know-it-all. Alex began to wonder if it would have been so bad if the siblings hadn’t found him at all.
The room they were in was eerily white: white walls, white tiled floor, off-white ceiling. He recognized a lot of the items in the room as belonging to the karate school that sometimes used the building.
There were also a lot of items that did not seem to belong. The most glaring one was a dismantled paper-cutter, the same large, green type that he knew from the teacher’s lounge at his school; the huge blade lying on top of the grid-like base, nuts, bolts and pieces of wood surrounding it.
“That’s for the next defensive machine for outside,” David said. The inventive boy picked up the blade. “This thing will do a lot of damage.” He swung it like a sword, making a whip-like sound through the air. “You know ... with enough force behind it.”
“Yeah,” Alex replied. “Radical.”
NICOLE
Sick of the two boys, but satisfied she had established who was in charge, Nicole headed down the hall to her room. She thought of it as her room, though the three—soon to be four—of them had been sleeping in it. Ryan was probably in his corner of the sleeping room, exactly where she had left him when they heard the dog barking and went to investigate. He might have moved, but she doubted it.
He hadn’t spoken a word since his father turned.
He was getting better, though. The room held two large mats and a few karate uniforms and practice cushions that she had dragged up from the karate school and which they all slept on. The previous morning, Nicole, having become a very light sleeper, woke up when she heard a shuffling. She saw David sleeping—evidently his sleep habits went unchanged.
Then she heard it again. A scrambling, scratching sound.
“David,” she whispered; then louder. “David!”
He didn’t open his eyes, and instead rolled over, tugging on the karate-uniform-turned-blanket, just like he would have done at their house when he was woken before he wanted to be. “What?”
“Do you hear that?”
“What? No.” Then the noise came again. “You mean that?”
“Yes, I mean that!” It took all of Nico
le’s will to keep whispering, though it was a loud, angry whisper. She had to stay quiet because it seemed like the sound was coming from the walls around them.
“Um, Nicole?” whispered David, looking around. “Where’s Ryan?”
“What?” Nicole said, surprised. “He’s right—” She turned, pointing to the spot on the other side of her—the place where the near-catatonic Ryan had lain for nearly the whole time they had been there. He wasn’t there.
“Oh crap,” she muttered, forgetting to whisper. “Crap, crap, crap!”
“Um ... Nicole?” David said.
“Shut up, shut up! Crap, crap, crap!” she pawed through the pile of uniforms that Ryan had been using as blankets, as if he had merely shrunk and gotten lost in them and not been stolen or eaten by one of those ... things.
“Nicole!”
“What? What do you want?”
She turned on David, ready to punch him when she saw what he was looking at.
Some of the mats were set up like a box against the far wall. Like a pillow fort. As they looked at it, one of the walls shifted and they heard the scrambling, scratching sound again.
“Ryan?” Nicole called to the mat-fort.
David, feeling oddly brave, walked to the box and knocked on its roof. “Knock, knock,” he said, lifting it up enough to peer inside.
Ryan was inside, curled up, and staring at the crack of light that David had just created. “You okay?” David asked.
Ryan nodded very slightly, which was pretty much the only way he communicated anymore.
“Okay,” David said with a smile. “Just checking.”
Nicole was shocked to see the box. Ryan had barely moved in two days. “Did he build that?”
“I’m guessing,” David replied. “Unless one of us did it in our sleep.”
“It was a rhetorical question, spaz,” she said, shaking her head at her brother. She looked back at the box. “Good to see that he’s doing something, I guess.”
David seemed to be at at a loss for words—for once. “I guess,” he repeated.
Ryan had stayed in the fort almost constantly since then. He didn’t appear to have moved at all while Nicole and David had been out retrieving Alex.
Rise of the Mudmen Page 13