But she had no vehicle, no phone, and even the radio was useless now, thanks to Sheriff Hoyt. She took one last glance around, making sure she wasn’t forgetting something, and started down the driveway at a jog. As she ran, she kept her eyes at the edge of the corn on either side of the gravel driveway. She hoped Cochran was right about the things wanting to stay out of the sunlight. Either way, she stayed in the center of the driveway all the way out to the highway.
The Johnsons had to have heard all the shooting and Sandy wouldn’t have been surprised if Meredith had been keeping an eye on all the unfamiliar traffic heading up the driveway to the Einhorn farm. Sandy hoped she had already called 911 again. The call would have been rerouted to the Manchester County Sheriff’s Department, but she didn’t care as long as they sent somebody out to investigate.
Sandy crossed Highway 17 and ran up to the front door. The possibility that the Johnsons were at the parade occurred to her as she ran. Sandy didn’t know if that would be considered too secular or just patriotic. If they were in town, she didn’t think it would be difficult to smash a window and climb inside to use their phone. Meredith would undoubtedly file some sort of official complaint, but Sandy didn’t particularly give a damn.
Sandy hit the doorbell and listened for movement inside. They had to know she was here. She knocked first, then pounded on the door. No response. The house was silent.
She knew this place didn’t have a basement and went to the big picture windows, cupped her hands to her eyes, and peered inside. The windows looked out from the combination living and dining room. The living room had a simple couch and a recliner. The ancient TV was still a piece of furniture in and of itself, wedged into a corner near the front door. A small, circular table filled the dining room. A beige and yellow kitchen waited beyond. All were empty.
She ran around to the back and saw that the big Suburban was still parked in front of the garage and a huge pile of firewood. It looked like they were still home. She went up to the sliding glass back door, stopping a moment when she noticed a stack of fire extinguishers on the patio. Peering at the gauges, she saw that they were all empty.
Sandy tried the sliding glass back door and it slid open. She stepped inside. “Meredith? Albert? You guys home?” It felt like an echo of the Einhorn farmhouse; no one was there. She left the door open and searched through the rest of the first floor. It smelled like something had died under the house. The kids’ rooms were full of bunk beds and crayon drawings of Jesus, but no children.
She stopped at the bottom of the staircase. Knocked on the wall. She’d learned the hard way not to sneak up on people in rural areas. Too many carried loaded firearms, and were liable to shoot you if you surprised them. “Hello? Meredith? Albert?”
No answer.
Sandy took her Taser out and went cautiously up the stairs. At the top, she checked the first door on the left. Bathroom. It was a mess, but empty. Sandy recoiled from the stench, raised her wrist to her nose, and tried to breathe through her mouth.
Unraveled brown and gray bandages had been strewn across the sink. Strips of medical tape festooned the counter like shriveled snakeskins. The gray crust that coated everything reminded her of what she had seen on the floor in the Einhorn kitchen. Clumps of toilet paper had been scattered throughout the bathroom as if somebody had been throwing them like confetti. They coalesced into a tiny mountain near the toilet at the far end. The pile of white paper had stuck together in winding lines, as if the darkened, soiled globs had drawn together like magnets. This left the clean tufted edges of toilet paper to unfurl like pale wisps of flowers on knotty gray vines.
Sandy wished she had her latex gloves but the box was back in the cruiser. She thought back to that night when Meredith had called 911 on Kurt Einhorn. Albert had been bitten or something. Sandy tried to remember. He’d said it was a possum. She’d been worried about rabies, but now she wondered if it had something to do with the fungus.
She didn’t touch anything and backed out of the bathroom. At the end of the short hall, there was one door left. It was closed, of course. It had to be Meredith and Albert’s bedroom. Suddenly, she didn’t want to open it. Didn’t care what was on the other side. She wanted to run downstairs and find the phone in the kitchen and call in the county boys. But they’d ask her if she’d checked the whole house and she didn’t want to have to tell them that she’d lost her nerve.
So she opened the door. Slow and careful.
The room was almost completely dark. Heavy curtains covered the windows. She couldn’t quite tell in the dim light, but it almost looked like they had been duct-taped to the window frame. The door continued to swing open, spilling more light into the room.
There was a circular pile of bodies on the bed. She realized it wasn’t bodies, not exactly. A tangle of children’s arms and legs were wrapped around a central gray mound. For some reason, the mound seemed fragile, like the crown of a jellyfish. It was nearly three feet across and fluttered with the slight wave of air that came as the door swung open.
Surrounding it, the arms and legs intertwined each other in a horrible, frozen wreath. Sandy looked closer and knew why she hadn’t seen a dog or cat in the house; their legs intermingled with the humans’. The whole thing was like looking at some rotten pustule skulking in a badly infected wound. Even after trying to make sense of the thing for several seconds, she still couldn’t see any heads. Instead, it was just limbs wrapped around a strangely raw, unfinished center that was covered with a thin gray membrane, like some half-cooked rotten egg, sunny-side up.
Sandy couldn’t tell if the number of arms and legs accounted for all the children or not. She tried to get a rough count, but it was impossible. They were far too tangled, twisted around each other in shapes that could never be achieved when they were alive. She doubted anybody would know how many of the family had been absorbed into this huge mound until they performed a careful autopsy. She knew that this was something they would be studying for years.
She stopped. Did that arm move? She watched it a while, but it was still.
This was definitely above her pay scale. It was time to call somebody.
The door flew at her, knocking her back into the doorframe. Meredith popped into view from behind it with wild eyes, swinging a fire extinguisher across her body, like an amateur swinging a tennis racket. The bottom rim caught Sandy in the shoulder and slammed her into the wall. With a speed only possessed by the truly disturbed, Meredith raised the tank over her head and brought it down like a sledgehammer.
If Sandy hadn’t gotten her arm up, it would have crushed her skull. As it was, it damn near broke the two bones in her forearm, and drove her to the floor.
Meredith shrieked, “They are going to heaven. They have been saved!”
At the sound of her voice, the twisted mosaic of limbs shivered and twitched. A fragment peeled away from the rough circle, and a number of children’s arms and legs unfurled from a central gray tentacle, like a palm frond that had decided to reach out and go exploring. When the gray, pulpy mass that ran along the center of the branch could no longer support the weight of the tiny limbs, it drifted down to the floor and the arms and legs grabbed hold of the shag carpet and pulled the tentacle forward. It rippled awkwardly along, searching for the voice.
“No, no, not Mommy,” Meredith said sweetly, and gave the crawling thing a quick blast from the fire extinguisher. “Over there. I brought you some food. To give you strength to reach heaven, my darlings.” The tendril shrank away from the puff of frost.
More branches were starting to unfold from the center mass, crawling off the bed, using the children’s arms and legs to propel the tendrils in the same way Sandy had seen the centipede creatures in the Einhorn basement use insect legs. The bigger ones down there had worked the same way, growing into individual fingers and toes and making them dance, connecting two long chains of human fingers and toes and rat and squirrel legs that scurried along in ragged waves, alternating sides as to snake along for prey in S-shaped patterns.