“Is this what I think it is?”
“Deer meat.” I nodded. “From a six-point buck I got last year. You should have seen how long it took Carl and me to drag it out of the woods. Don’t know if you noticed, but we’re not exactly spring chickens.”
“I’ll bet you were tired,” she said, and as if to stress her point, she yawned.
“You can go on back upstairs if you want. I’ll finish things down here.”
“I don’t mind. I can wait.”
I grabbed a few more items, and then we waded through the ankle deep water and made our way back up the stairs. The flashlight beam started to falter, and I reminded myself to change the batteries. Wouldn’t do to be without light if those things attacked us during the night.
Could they get in? I wondered. They could certainly tunnel well enough; Carl and I had seen proof of that. But could they dig through a concrete floor? I thought about what we’d found at Dave and Nancy’s house, remembering the destruction and that bright red smear of blood on the wall. Then I recalled Steve Porter’s hunting cabin and Carl’s own missing house. Yes, I decided, they could indeed tunnel through concrete—or at least, dig around it enough so that a building collapsed into the ground.
How did you protect yourself against something like that? The answer was that you didn’t. There was no way.
So I tried to put it out of my mind.
When Sarah and I got back to the kitchen, Carl had assumed watch duties again and was telling Kevin about how he’d gotten poison ivy over every inch of his body after he lay down in a patch of it with Beverly Thompson back when we were teenagers. Both of them were laughing, and Kevin had tears streaming down his face as he clutched his stomach. The sound of it chased my fears away.
I fashioned a crude filtering system out of paper towels and used it to brew the chicory. It was nasty stuff, sort of like drinking hot tar mixed with cat piss, but Kevin and Sarah seemed to enjoy it. Carl took one sip, made a face, and left his mug untouched.
We agreed that it was pretty much pointless to stand at the window and keep watch. The darkness outside was overwhelming, and we couldn’t see more than a few feet beyond the carport. The little worms were still there and I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw their growing numbers. They were two feet deep in most places now, the pile so high that the ones on the edges of the carport spilled out into the wet grass. The ones around my truck came up over the tires, and were working on covering the bumper.
“If things ever get back to normal,” I laughed, “I’m going to gather those things up and open a bait and tackle shop down by the river.”
“Not me,” Carl said. “After what we saw today, I’m never baiting a hook again.”
I wondered again where they were all coming from and what could be chasing them to the top. Was I right in my hypothesis? Was it something worse than what we’d already seen?
We moved into the living room and talked for a bit more, but the yawns were contagious and soon we were all rubbing our eyes. Exhausted, we agreed that we seemed to be relatively safe for the moment and decided to discuss our escape plans in detail in the morning, and try to come up with some other options. Then we all retired for the night. Carl took one bedroom and Sarah took the other. Kevin sprawled out on the couch and I fixed him up comfy with some extra blankets and pillows. We posted a watch, just in case.
Carl drew the first shift, which was uneventful. I relieved him at midnight. I didn’t want to disturb Kevin, so I sat in the kitchen doing my crossword puzzle in the soft light of the kerosene lantern. I was still stuck on a three-letter word for peccadillo, something with an “i” in the middle, when I heard the soft whisper of flannel behind me.
“Sin,” Sarah said over my shoulder. “S-I-N. Three letter word for peccadillo.”
“Well I’ll be,” I whispered, grinning in the lantern’s glow. “I would have never figured that out for myself. Been trying for days. I’m mighty glad you folks dropped in.”
We both laughed quietly, and then a troubled shadow passed over her face. She stared out the window, in the direction of the crash site. We couldn’t see the wreckage. It was too dark. But it was there, just the same.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “That was a bad joke. I didn’t mean ‘dropped’ of course.”
“No, don’t apologize. It’s okay.”
In the living room, Kevin stirred uneasily on the couch. He called out for Lori and then turned his head and went back to sleep.
“Poor guy,” I muttered. “He’ll live with that for the rest of his life.”
Sarah nodded.
We sat in silence for a few minutes, listening to the rain because there was nothing else to listen to, except for the occasional snore from Carl, drifting down the hallway like a ghost.
“Why don’t you go back to bed,” Sarah said gently. “I’ll take watch for awhile.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” I replied. “I haven’t been sleeping too good anyway. It’s the nicotine withdrawal. Gives me nightmares.”
“I can’t sleep, either. I dreamed about Salty and Cornwell and the crash.”
“Well, I reckon we can keep each other company then.”
“It’s quiet,” Sarah said. “You’d think the sound of the rain would lull us to sleep, but it doesn’t.”
“Nothing friendly or comforting about that rain,” I agreed. “It’s unnatural.”
“So you definitely agree with Kevin’s theory?”
“I’ve been thinking about it some more since dinner. I agree that these events weren’t the result of global warming or some other ecological disaster. As for the spell book he mentioned, it could be, I guess. There’s weird stuff in this world. We’ve all seen it. Goes back to prehistory. People in the Bible practiced black magic. I don’t pretend to understand everything in our universe, but I know there are things that science can’t explain. Call it paranormal or supernatural or whatever, but it exists. My own mother had a book called The Long, Lost Friend. Lots of folks in the Appalachian Mountains had a copy back in the old days. It was a spell book, but mostly harmless stuff—how to cure warts and deworm your cattle and protect yourself from the evil eye—things like that. Folks back then, even God-fearing Christians, swore by it. All I know is the stuff worked. I remember one time, when I was little, we were all out chopping wood. My granddaddy cut his leg with the ax and my grandmother put her hands over the wound, said a few words out of the book, followed them with a prayer, and the bleeding stopped—just like that. So it did work. You don’t see it much these days, because now everything is explained and cured by science. Maybe that’s why we’re in the mess we’re in now—because of our reliance on science. Maybe we lost touch with something else. Our spiritual side. The part that still believes in—and needs—magic.”
Sarah stared at me with a bemused look. “Why Teddy, I didn’t know you were a philosopher, too.”
I laughed quietly. “Only one in Punkin’ Center, unless you count young Ernie Whitt or Old Man Haubner down in Renick—and he ain’t been the same since his horse kicked him in the head.”
“And where are they now?” she asked. “Ernie and Haubner?”
I shrugged. “Gone off with the National Guard. Dead, maybe. I don’t know. During your travels from Baltimore to here, did you see any signs that our government was helping folks? FEMA settlements or tent cities or anything like that?”
“No. There was nothing. There’s not a lot of dry ground left, at least in the places we flew over. Like I said earlier, just the mountaintops. Everything is flooded.”
“And it’s still raining,” I said. “Guess it’s just a matter of time before the waters reach us.”