by Alan Ryker
Bryce crawled around the piping and made his way to the cross-hatched panel on the house’s skirt. He stared out. Though it was cloudy, after the darkness of the nest and the crawlspace it took a few moments for Bryce’s eyes to grudgingly adjust. When they finally did, Bryce saw that if deputies had been watching the back of the house, they’d left, probably after he had blocked the front door.
He slid from beneath the house and crouched in the dust. He sniffed the air.
Anna was near. She’d found a new place to nest.
Leaving gunfire and shouting behind him, Bryce trotted across the bleached prairie.
* * *
Bryce stepped into the yard. He could smell Anna’s nest in a large corrugated tin building. It smelled ripe. It wouldn’t be as ideal as the last nest, but she did have a talent.
But she had a flaw, too. She was soft. This was her son’s yard, and he could sense Anna’s family inside the house.
They needed new hosts, and they needed to be rid of Anna’s meddling family. So Bryce turned from the workshop and headed for the house.
The front door was unlocked. He stepped in, savoring the cool entryway tile on his bare feet.
“Have they found her yet?” A woman’s voice came from around the corner.
Bryce closed the door. It clicked.
The woman stepped around the corner, holding a small walkie-talkie to her ear. She froze. Then shrieked.
Bryce tackled her, and sitting on her chest, backhanded her across the face, knocking her out.
Two little boys sat on a couch. A television near Bryce played cartoons, but they stared at him.
The moment of silence stretched on until the smallest one shouted, “Mommy!” and dove at him. The taller one followed after, saying nothing through his bared teeth.
Bryce caught the smaller one with a hand on the chest and shoved him back into the other. Their heads clunked together, and they collapsed to the ground moaning and crying.
Bryce wrangled both the boys beneath one long arm, and with the other, carried the woman like a plastic sack by the waistband of her pants.
He dropped the woman to open the shop door. It only opened an inch before hitting something heavy. He went to the garage door. It went up a couple of inches then stopped.
He sat the boys down. “Don’t move,” he said, grabbing the handle with both hands. He tried to muscle the garage door open. He strained until it felt as if his body would rip itself to pieces, but the handle broke off and the door slammed back to the ground.
He roared, then turned and saw the boys running away across the yard. He grabbed their mother and lifted her by the hair. She groaned.
“Boys,” he said.
They kept running. Bryce grabbed the shoulder muscle beside the woman’s neck and squeezed. She moaned, then screamed as he squeezed harder. Back to full consciousness, she gripped the wrist of the hand wrapped through her hair and dug in her nails. She kicked at the ground, trying to get to her feet.
The boys turned. The little stocky one immediately tried to run back, fury again on his round face. The older one grabbed his arm and restrained him.
Bryce squeezed harder, feeling the woman’s trapezius muscle pulverize in his grip. She shouted for them to keep running, but couldn’t contain her agonized screams.
The boys came back.
“Open the door!” Bryce shouted.
He listened for movement inside the shop, but heard none.
Still holding the woman by her hair, with her nails still digging into his wrist, he kicked the door. It cracked up the center. He kicked it again, then ripped the broken half away and tossed it aside.
The smell of the hoard washed over him like warm water. His heart rate slowed. As he tossed the woman over the barricade of junk shoved in front of the door, Bryce felt calm again. Things had gone badly, but this would be a good nest, and he would have a new start.
He turned to grab the boys, and one of them shoved a sharp stick in his eye.
Bryce distinctly felt his eyeball pop. He grabbed the older boy’s wrist with one hand, and the stick with the other. By the time Bryce had pulled the stick from his eye, gingerly trying to keep the rough bark from catching the cornea and yanking the eye out entirely, the boy was shrieking in desperate pain.
Bryce felt the small forearm bones grinding in his grip. As vitreous humor ran down his cheek, he felt no pity. Only the wriggling in his veins stopped him from killing the boy. The little gods didn’t demand much of him for what they gave in return. One thing they demanded was hosts.
He tossed the boy into the nest. The small one was punching him repeatedly in the testicles and thighs. He tossed him in, after.
Bryce dragged them to the dark, moist corner in the back. Anna had been busy. She’d built a wall of furniture, separating off the back corner from the rest of the shop. The inside of this fortress was piled with cans, and moldering newspapers, magazines and books, along with the filling of stuffed furniture.
It looked very cozy.
Bryce looked around for her. He saw her eyes peeking from beneath the pile.
“Bind them. Bury them,” he said.
She didn’t move.
“Now!” he roared, leaning forward, letting his entire body tense up.
She scrambled from beneath the heap and straight for him on all fours, then stopped, ticked back and forth. Bryce could see her struggling against him, but he was the king. He threw a spool of thick wire at her.
“Now.”
She gave in, and did what she was told.
It would be a very good nest.
CHAPTER 22
Early that morning, Pete stood at the kitchen counter, staring absently out the window at the cloudy sky and dunking mini chocolate doughnuts in his coffee. He liked the way the chocolate melted into the coffee, sweetening it and leaving a glistening film of fat on the surface.
But Pete was more focused on the day before him than on the small delights of doughnuts and coffee. His resolve to remove his mother from her house, however difficult, hadn’t exactly faded, but it was mitigated by growing anxiety at her likely reaction. Lately, she’d had the same strong will he’d known his whole life, but also something new, something that surpassed stubbornness or the independent rural attitude. Something darker.
He should have gone back right after visiting Victor’s spot, when he was still feeling brave. Even then, though, he delayed. He rationalized it as letting her cool down, and maybe that had been his main motivation, but some part of him wanted an excuse to put off the task of dragging his mother forcefully out of her home.
He finished his coffee, rinsed the cup, but saw that the film from the melted frosting would require soap and set the mug in the sink.
Miraculously, rain was coming. Peter had seen the maps, and the wall of clouds was so wide as it swept across the country that unless it just decided to part itself down the middle and bypass Kansas altogether, it had to give his poor crops some relief. So Pete had some hatches to batten down before he could go deal with his mother.
And again he knew that, though very rational, the delay was also very welcome.
As he stood out on his porch, enjoying the sweet, cool breeze and the cloudy sky more than he could have ever imagined possible, he noticed a sound. Approaching sirens. He stepped off the porch and walked up the long gravel drive until he could see the road. He saw the cloud of dust first, then the spinning lights. They belonged to patrol cars.
That was odd. He’d occasionally seen fire trucks racing along dirt roads, but never the cops.
Then they pulled into and alongside his mother’s property, and Pete started running.
By the time he arrived, three sheriff’s cars were fanned around the front yard. No one had noticed Pete yet, and he gasped for air as he tried to take in the scene.
A man Pete recognized from television as Sheriff Matthew Taylor issued orders with a car between himself and the Grish household, as if the danger were within. He sent deputies w
earing heavy bulletproof vests and carrying pump-action shotguns running to positions around the house. They ran low, keeping their eyes on the windows.
But the ambulance scared Pete the most.
As Pete watched, stunned, a car pulled into the driveway behind him. Turning, he met a stern-faced deputy about his own age.
“What are you doing here?” the deputy asked as he stepped from his vehicle. “Who are you?”
“Peter Grish. This is my mother’s house.” Pete felt cowed for a moment before his fear began that easy transformation into anger. “What the hell is going on? Does this have something to do with the house being condemned?”
The anger in the deputy’s face faded, but the intensity remained. “Stay right there for one minute.” He got back into his car and pulled it into barricade formation with the others. Then he approached Sheriff Taylor.
Pete couldn’t hear what they said, but the sheriff became instantly interested in Pete and waved him over.
“Your mother lives here?” the sheriff asked.
“Yes. What’s going on?”
“Is she a danger? Is she violent?”
Pete stared at the sheriff, waiting for the punch line. “Of course not, she’s a little old woman.”
Then he thought of the shotgun and his own fears the day before. He thought how intent he’d been on keeping Rebecca behind his body, in case his mother had truly lost it.
“I mean, you don’t want to rile her up, though. Why?”
“A social worker named—” he looked at the sheaf of papers in his hand, “—Rebecca Shoemaker called 911 and the Sheriff’s Department this morning, reporting an emergency here. She didn’t know the nature.”
“Hold on, why did she think there was an emergency here?”
“She said that Anna Grish called her, saying she was in trouble.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Let me finish, then we can try to figure out what’s going on. Dispatch sent a deputy and two EMTs. They checked in that they’d arrived, then went silent. Ten minutes later, Rebecca Shoemaker arrived.” The sheriff described her phone call.
“I don’t understand. You think my mother had something to do with this?” Pete’s head was spinning. His stomach began to try to reject the doughnuts that had been sitting in his gut as heavy as a lump of clay.
“No, we don’t. But I had to ask.”
“Has anyone been inside? Is she okay?”
“We haven’t gone in yet. There’s been movement inside, but no response so far. We’re assuming whoever is in there is hostile. You’ve been watching the news? About the missing people?”
Pete nodded, but the sheriff was growing farther away as he sank into himself. It was as if Pete’s skull had grown huge, and Pete sat in the dark center, barely able to see out of eyes a mile away, or hear the echoes coming in through his ears.
“Before this morning, fifteen people had been abducted, that we know of. There are probably more. People have been disappearing every night.
“What we think is that your mother did what no one else has been able to: make a call before whoever is doing this got to her. And we think that, for some reason, the person or people stuck around and took the emergency responders as well.”
“Oh my God,” Pete said. “She’s in there with some sort of mass murderer?”
Sheriff Taylor shook his head. “We don’t know exactly who we’re dealing with, but there’s no reason to think this person’s primary goal is murder. The fact that the perp is still here is a good sign, because they don’t tend to kill on-site. But we need your help. Tell us about the house.”
Pete explained the house. He explained its condition, the degree of hoarding that had taken place there. The shame crept over him, but the sheriff took all of the information in thankfully, without judgment.
“Where are they likely to be, inside the house?” the sheriff asked.
“The front room, the kitchen, and maybe the first bedroom. The rest of the house is pretty inaccessible.”
“What about the back door?”
Pete shook his head. “It’s totally blocked.”
“Pete, we’re going to do everything possible to get your mother out of there unharmed. Thanks for your help. I don’t expect you to go home, but you’re going to need to stay back. All the way off the property.”
Then the sheriff turned away, finally responding to his squawking radio.
A deputy led Pete down the driveway and back to the dirt road. Another deputy had set up a checkpoint there, which Pete found absurd, considering the road saw all the traffic of five cars on a busy day. He supposed it was standard operating procedure.
At first, the deputy, whose only job was to keep civilians out and let emergency workers in, tried to make some small talk. Directing traffic on a gravel road left a lot of free time. He was a young man. Tall, blond, mustached. Standard issue, except that he seemed too kind to work in law enforcement.
Pete looked up at the clouds overhead. They were growing darker. The cool breeze had started to pick up. They were definitely in for a good rain. It would have been a joyful day if it weren’t for everything else.
Pete looked at his mother’s house and the surrounding law-enforcement officers and tried to understand what was happening. He couldn’t. The hoarding, his mother’s strange new behavior, the abductions…Why had everything gone crazy all at once? It couldn’t be coincidence. It was like reality had decided on new terms.
The sheriff talked, while more and more deputies appeared. They must have been calling them in from highways all over the county, and from their beds.
Pete was happy to see them, but also frightened. And he suspected that they weren’t arriving in such numbers because his mother was so important, but because one of their own had disappeared.
Pete supposed the extra motivation was good, but they looked too amped up.
Then the sheriff started talking over the bullhorn, and a few seconds later Pete’s walkie-talkie went off.
“What’s going on out there?”
“There’s trouble at Mom’s. Don’t let the boys leave the house.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Not sure. It might have something to do with the missing people.”
“Oh my God, is she okay?”
“They don’t know. Honey, I can’t talk about this right now. I’m sorry.”
Despite the blaring bullhorn, Pete eventually made Kathy understand that he’d tell her what was going on as soon as he knew. He hated being vague, but in this case the few details he knew were more worrying and confusing than helpful.
Before long, it became apparent that whoever was inside wasn’t going to respond. Over the checkpoint deputy’s radio, he heard the sheriff say, “We’re going in.”
Pete craned to get a better view, and saw canisters being shot through the windows.
“What are they doing?” he asked. The deputy had an anticipatory hand on Pete’s arm, though it went less than half way around his bicep.
“It’s tear gas. The perps can’t hurt who they can’t see, right?”
Pete nodded, but didn’t know how long he could keep his calm.
The deputies smashed the door open and poured inside. For a moment, everything was quiet, which simultaneously filled Pete with hope and fear.
Shotgun blasts tore through the silence, and Pete took off.
The deputy wrapped him up in a bear hug, but Pete continued forward, dragging the man behind him.
“Stop now or you’re getting tased,” the deputy grunted.
Pete spun around and threw the deputy onto his ass in the dirt.
“My mother’s in there!”
“And if you distract one officer from his job, she could die.” The deputy had already pulled his stun gun.
Pete ground his jaw, but nodded.
Muzzle flash turned the inside of the house brilliant white for a fraction of a second at a time. With every blast, Pete imagined the buckshot h
itting his mother.
He didn’t know who or what to fear.
The deputy had a hold of Pete again, and when the doorway was suddenly filled with trash, which flowed out onto the porch, Pete once again dragged the young man forward until threatened.
When it seemed that the nightmare would never end, it finally did. Men dug out the door, and then began carrying people out. Heedless of the deputy, Pete went to find his mother.
He watched as deputies and emergency workers carried out the dead and injured.
First came the officers, looking as if they’d been fighting in trenches for weeks. Pete tried to ask one who wasn’t as badly hurt if he’d seen an old woman, but the man had been deafened by gunfire.
Soon after, they began to remove the corpses of completely filthy, nearly nude people. It made no sense. Then Pete recognized old John, then Don, his mechanic. But it was the sight of Rebecca—so battered he almost didn’t recognize her—that started him staggering forward. He tried to get closer, but his legs didn’t want to work. He stumbled to his hands and knees when brushed aside by EMTs and deputies.
Sitting in the grass, he waited for the inevitable. These people…They looked as his mother had.
Nearby, an EMT explained to Sheriff Taylor that there were people in various states of injury and insanity buried beneath the trash. Digging them out would be slow work, as they had to take care to ensure that trash didn’t get shifted on top of other buried people.
Was Pete’s mother down there? Buried in the trash? Or had she done the burying?
His head spun, and he was barely managing to keep his stomach when his walkie-talkie beeped and buzzed.
“Yeah?” he said.
“The gunfire stopped? What’s going on?”
Kneeling there, he had no notion of how or where to begin. And then Kathy started screaming.
Pete leapt to his feet, smashing the walkie-talkie against his ear. “Kathy! Kathy!”
He ran toward the sheriff, but the young deputy intercepted him. Once again, Pete kept going, but this time other deputies joined in.
“I tried to be nice, but now you’re going to have to leave the property.”