But Purcell never looked at her. His rage was aimed at his sons, every word a razor wrapped in barbed wire. “Right now, you gonna march on back down to the Whistle Stop and bring my truck back.” Sandy now understood why the brothers had reacted as if each word was a physical blow. God knew what this man had done to them as they grew up.
“The walk will sober you up and make you think,” Purcell said and gave Sandy a challenging look. She didn’t object. It was a hell of a walk. The Whistle Stop was over twelve miles south. “And if there is one dent, one single hint of a scratch, when you get back here you will beat the living shit out of each other for my amusement.” It was not an idle threat.
They didn’t argue, didn’t glare at their old man—nothing. They waited silently, like cowed dogs that had the shit stomped out of them.
It was time to go. “Gentlemen.” Sandy nodded at them and their father and got back in the car. She backed up into a wide space, pulled around, and drove back down the driveway.
The spiders crept out of the darkness of the far southern edge of Bob Morton’s private cornfield, drawn toward the movement and soft sounds inside the Einhorn henhouse. The sagging structure was built out of leftover scraps of lumber that Kurt had scavenged from construction sites. He’d thrown it together down at the edge of the huge backyard, where the grass ran up against the rows of crops. He sank a few fence posts, surrounded them with old chicken wire to encircle a ten-foot rectangular pen, and built a little house that sat unsteadily on stilts at the end. Thirteen hens called it home. There used to be a rooster, but when it wouldn’t shut up early one dawn, Kurt, fighting a brutal hangover, trudged down the lawn, grabbed the rooster by the neck, and whipped the body around until its neck had snapped.
Under a perfectly curved sliver of a nearly blackened moon, the creatures scuttled into the cool grass and passed easily through the chicken wire. At first glance, they might have been mistaken for fat spiders. Spiders didn’t quite move like these organisms, though. These blobs lurched along unsteadily on mismatched legs. They moved slowly.
The spider-things gathered around all four of the support posts and swarmed up into the henhouse. As they climbed, the blobs hung unnaturally, as if they weren’t connected to the legs by any kind of bones, either internal or external. They swayed, plump and gray as death, as their too-many legs clumsily worked their way up all of the four-by-ten posts.
They left nothing but silence behind them.
As the nearly invisible moon passed through the long night, the spiderlike creatures laboriously crawled up into the henhouse. Dozens. Then hundreds. At first, there were a few mildly startled clucks, a few investigative pecks, as the chickens tasted the new creatures. The insects tasted sour, and the texture of the flesh was even softer than worms. The chickens snapped at the spiders in irritation, but even that slowed and stopped as the spiders overwhelmed the birds.
Silence descended upon the henhouse.
SUNDAY, JULY 1st
CHAPTER 6
When the sun rose, Sandy was out in the garage, beating the shit out of a punching bag while an old boom box blasted Ramones tunes.
She had learned long ago not to think about her job when she was punching and elbowing and kicking and kneeing and head-butting the bag. When she had started out as a deputy, she would come home and try and relieve her stress by gathering a mental image of some asshole she’d encountered on the job, then dump as much aggression and anger as possible on the bag, unleashing all that steam in one forty-five-minute eruption.
It worked fine, until one night on the job she almost put her fist through some drunk dipshit’s face thanks to her new muscle memory. Since then, while working out, she found it was better to disassociate from the worst images of humanity and focus solely on the movement of muscles as they drove her skeleton.
She would have preferred to hang the bag outside, but she had to be conscious about how she was viewed in the community. It was bad enough that some of her fellow cops teased her, saying that she must have been picturing the father of her boy when she was attacking the bag. She’d laugh, too, and say, “Sometimes.” For her, though, it was more about taking out her frustration about everything that she couldn’t control, wringing stress out of her body, simple and complicated at the same time.
Her ex, Kevin’s father, would probably say that she couldn’t make up her mind about a damn thing. The irritating thing was that he was probably right.
She stepped back a moment, gathering herself for another flurry of punches, and looked back to the door to the house. Kevin liked to get up late on Sundays, so she let him. She used to take him to church, but finally stopped when he asked her about her own beliefs, specifically what she thought happened when somebody died. She thought this might be one of those Hallmark or Lifetime moments where the parent sits down with their child for a life-changing talk, a moment they would both remember forever. She had also decided long ago that honesty was the only policy, with the exception of Santa Claus. She told him, “I took you to church not because I was worried about your immortal soul. I took you because… it was expected of me. I thought it was the right thing to do. I never worried about any of the stuff they told us. Life is beyond all of us. It’s up to you to find what you believe.”
Kevin nodded. Said, “Cool.” And ran off to play with his rocket ship models.
So much for the Hallmark moment.
Sunday mornings now, she let him sleep in and play video games if he wanted. He was old enough to pour his own milk into a bowl of cereal and had proved more than capable of feeding himself. It wasn’t always appropriate, such as Cheese Doodles at six a.m., but he never went hungry.
Last Sandy had heard, Kevin’s father was in southern Indiana, wiping down windshields while the other worker drained oil from cars in a Quik-Change. There was no paternity test. They both knew, without a doubt, he was the father, even if he never admitted it.
The other problem was that Barry, Bar to his buddies, had tried to disappear two or three times now.
The last time Sandy had caught up to her dear old ex, he was working at a big box superstore as the guy who collected the shopping carts. The confrontation in the middle of the massive parking lot was brief, painful, and embarrassing for both. Disgusted, Sandy got back in her car. She told him to get in touch when he was a man, and until then, well he could fuck right off.
Bar assured her he was getting his life together, and he would send her money.
They both knew this was a lie.
It was easier to pretend it wasn’t.
She usually spent Sunday mornings in the garage, then went back and made a big breakfast. If nothing important happened, like a car wreck or robbery or, God forbid, a murder, Sundays were her days off. The town, for the most part, complied. Nothing much happened and since things stayed quiet, Sandy could enjoy a full day at home with her son.
But lately something wasn’t working with Kevin. Most times, they got along fine. He understood the rules, he did his chores and homework without complaining too much, and was happy to once in a while put down his books or tablet and join her for dinner. The past few months, though, the timing was off, they weren’t connecting, and Sandy couldn’t figure out what she was doing differently, and wondered what problems her son was facing alone.
Whatever it was, she’d bet that it was probably related to the town, channeled through the school. She hoped it wasn’t a girl. He hadn’t exactly discovered sex yet and it took a backseat to his TV shows and books. She knew it wasn’t the most comfortable thing for him, being the son of the police chief, but they’d had long talks about bullying and how to respond, and she felt he would open up if that was the situation.