Brad tried the door. When it opened the warning chime told Brad the keys were still in the ignition, but he leaned in and verified they were there. After one more glance around, Brad turned the key. The sedan’s engine fired up immediately. Brad shut it off and pocketed the keys.
He glanced back at the house.
Out of nowhere, Grandpa Joe flooded back into Brad’s memory.
“They’re trees when they’re standing,” Grandpa Joe had told him. “That’s when they’re safe. You can never trust them once you put the saw to them. Do you know why?”
“Why?” young Brad had asked.
“It wakes them up,” Grandpa Joe had said. “Once they’re on the ground, they’re called lumber. You know why?”
“Why?” young Brad asked again.
“Because they walk,” Grandpa Joe had said. They were standing next to a felled pine. Grandpa Joe held his de-limbing axe over his shoulder and he motioned for Brad to back up. As Grandpa Joe worked his way down the tree, his sharp axe liberated the trunk from all the branches propping it up. With each swing, the trunk twisted and wriggled, working its way to the ground. “You take your eyes off this thing for one second and it’s gonna roll over your ankle and snap off your foot. You understand?”
“I think so,” young Brad had said.
Brad shook his head to clear away the memory and he dropped into a crouch next to the open car door. A loud “Tock!” came from the backside of the garage. Brad shuffled across the snowy driveway to the edge of the car as another “Tock!” sounded.
The garage doors rattled. The one which bulged out looked like it was about to fall. Brad ducked even lower, with just his eyes above the edge of the hood. As he watched, the roof of the garage—what was left of it—began to shake and rattle. A sound like giant rocks scraping together came to him through the snowy air. “TOCK!”
Brad felt reality swimming away and another memory of Grandpa Joe tried to surface. He shook his head and pushed away from the sedan, sprinting for the house. The “TOCK!” sound came once more before he slammed the door shut behind himself. As soon as the door was shut, and the next echoing TOCK was muffled, Brad felt the intrusive memories start to fade. He pressed his back to the door and reached up over his left shoulder to turn the lock.
The next TOCK sounded like it came from the driveway. Brad scrambled away from the door and put all the bracing back into place—locking the door tight. The living room windows near the driveway began to rattle in their frames. He moved to the couch and pressed his hand against the plywood covering the windows. The whole wall was shaking. The picture frame next to the door bounced against the wall. Brad tiptoed away from the couch and crouched over near the bookcase on the far wall. He watched from across the room as the undulation moved slowly down the wall, towards the kitchen.
The plates in his kitchen cabinets began to rattle when the rumbling suddenly stopped. Brad took a deep breath and waited. Just as he exhaled, a new sound began. This one was less of a rattle, and more of a movement of air; like his house was a big violin, and something was moving a giant bow across it.
Brad covered his ears. The luffing sound hurt his ear drums, like driving around with just one back window open. Brad moaned, but couldn’t hear his own voice. He doubled over on the floor. He thought his head might implode with the pressure, and he was beginning to have trouble inhaling. Brad crawled on hands and knees, under the blanket-barrier to the hall, and down the long hall to the back of the house, while the noise in the living room slowly faded.
He stopped at the door to the mudroom, and sat in the absolute darkness as a mixture of new sounds rang out from the front of the house. One noise lasted several minutes and sounded like a giant hunk of metal being dragged across concrete. Brad felt the next sound in his teeth, like he’d bitten into a big chunk of styrofoam. Brad cringed and plugged his ears again.
He squinted and curled into a ball for several minutes until the noises stopped. Brad removed his hands from his ears and laid on the floor, relieved by the silence. He crept back to the living room, stopping frequently to listen for any distant sign that the sounds were returning. When he’d heard nothing for a while, he peeked past the blanket into the living room. Based on the intensity of the sounds, he expected to find destruction, but his living room looked normal in the soft glow from the partially-blocked skylights.
One picture next to the door was slightly askew, but even the kitchen seemed intact. In the hall to his bedroom, the crack between the plywood and the window frame looked bigger—more light seeped in. Brad approached cautiously, but eventually pressed his eye right to the crack. Once his eye adjusted, he had a pretty good view of the driveway.
The car he’d crouched behind just minutes before—maybe Herm’s car—had turned ninety degrees, leaving big sweeping tire-streaks through the fresh snow. Whatever turned the car left no tracks at all. Brad scratched an itch on the side of his head and found his fingers sticky with fresh blood. He turned his fingers slowly in the light coming in through the crack and wondered about the dark red blood.
Brad made his way back to his bedroom. The light in the closet was still on. In the bathroom mirror he found the source of the blood. A small trickle escaped his right ear, and ran down to his cheek before ending in a smear. Brad sat on the edge of the tub and dabbed at the blood with a glob of wet toilet paper. He gently brushed his fingers together next to each ear. He could still hear okay, but felt a low throb from the right side of his head.
“Just the essentials,” Brad said to himself.
He jumped up and moved with purpose over to the closet. From the top shelf on the left, he pulled down a backpack. Back in the bathroom, he shoved in various pills and a few toiletries. At his bureau, he dressed himself and then stuffed a few extra socks, shirts, and underwear into his back. Most of the space in the backpack he filled in the kitchen. He added easily portable food and bottled water to his stash. Brad finished his preparation in the living room, where he kept his hiking boots next to the wood stove. He took a deep breath and listened for any more driveway sounds before he un-blocked the door.
BRAD DIDN’T EVEN set both feet on the porch before he turned around. He’d forgotten how cold it was outside, and the swirling snow made it seem even colder. He ran back through the house to get his coat, hat, and gloves. This time he left the house and quickly broke into a hunching jog. The snowfall was heavier. He could barely see across the driveway through the swirls of snow, and his feet swished through a few inches of fresh powder. He circled Herm’s car to get to the driver’s door. What he saw stopped him short once again.
The back of the car—now facing the house—looked fine, but the front part was utterly destroyed. The edges of the wound were smooth and shiny. The front left quarter of hood looked like it had been flattened under a giant weight. Vital fluid still dripped from severed hoses and stained the fresh snow.
Brad scanned the driveway for another vehicle.
He found a big Humvee about fifty feet towards the road. It sat unmolested by whatever had destroyed Herm’s car, but he couldn’t find any keys. He looked around for his own truck, but it was nowhere in sight. More trucks were parked down in the field, near the back gate that led out to the vine patch. Brad put his hood up, to keep the snow from blowing down the back of his neck, and loped across the field. He found the doors unlocked, no sign of the casually-dressed government guys, and no keys.
By the time he reached the last vehicle, he’d given up hope. He reached in the cabin, felt for the ignition, and jerked his hand back when he hit the keyring. Brad smiled. He jumped in, slung his backpack on the passenger’s seat and turned the key.