She saw it spray in the air, white crown-shaped things tinkling over the walk.
She realized they were teeth.
He slumped over, went face-down. Did not move.
She pulled herself to her feet, jogging away. Bile kicked up into her mouth, her stomach trying to push its way into her throat. She stumbled off, not even looking where she was going until she slammed into a wrought-iron fence. Then she cried and coughed, her head echoing with dark noise like a scream in an empty room.
She looked up and saw the church.
Yes, St. Thomas’. She knew it very well, having made communion there. She took catechism in the school out back. It loomed up before her gigantic and black and gothic. She pushed her way through the gate, fell on the stone steps.
I’ll be safe in there.
They can’t get me in there.
They can’t come in here, not their kind.
In her brain was everything she ever was or wanted to be. Her life, her goals, her aspirations. She thought of the next CD Electric Witch was working on. The songs were better than the first. Her playing was so much better, so much more professional, not rough and raw. She could hear her own voice telling her that, yes, yes, girl, you’re gonna be a rock star, you’re gonna be big, band’s gonna be big… and then all that faded away into grayness as she saw how easily this town had stripped it all away from her.
She opened her eyes, looked up.
There was a man standing above her.
He was not a big man, but hard-looking, powerful, wizened.
“I guess you think you’re going to live, eh?” he said.
And then he descended on her.
9
The town was dead.
Cut River was a graveyard.
Ben Eklind and his wife Nancy cut through darkened yards, up shadowy streets, across lonesome boulevards. The chill night wind was at their backs, dead leaves skittered up walks, and everywhere, everything was sullen, empty, abandoned. The houses were dusty tombs, the buildings mausoleums. There was no one, nothing, just that awful creeping, electric stillness that buzzed in the air.
They’d run into town, breathless and bewildered, needing only to be free from the scene of the accident. From the dead guy who was anything but dead, maybe not truly alive in the human sense of the word, but definitely not dead. Caught in some twilight limbo in-between perhaps.
So they ran… into this.
“Sam…” Nancy kept saying under her breath. “Sam. Sam. He’s—”
“Yes,” Ben told her, holding her tight against him. “He is, darling. But we can’t think about that right now. We’ve gotta think about us.”
And that made sense to her.
They knocked at the door of the first house they found.
Nothing. No one answered.
Same at the one after that and the one after that. All the houses were dark, uninhabited. Phones were dead. Cars were in driveways. Yards were neat. Hedges trimmed. Everything looked normal… yet, there was something wrong here. They both knew it. It wasn’t just that psycho on the road, either. That was minor compared to this. Nobody anywhere. Not that you could see, anyway. But, down deep, down where the aboriginal being lived, Ben knew they were still here.
Somewhere.
Hiding.
Playing some wicked game of cat-and-mouse.
More than once, he’d been sure there was someone in the dark, someone just watching them.
“Maybe the world ended,” Nancy said, “and somebody forgot to tell us.”
Ben shook his head. “No, this is localized.”
“And how do you know that?”
“I just… I don’t know, just a feeling.”
“Oh really?” she said, as they moved up a nameless street. “I hope it’s not the same sort of feeling that told you to take the shortcut or we’re seriously screwed here, I think.”
He ignored that.
Something was wrong… but what?
He’d been through it all in his mind, the usual things. Nuclear war. Plague. Foreign attack, terrorists, alien invasion. Some natural catastrophe. Everything he’d sucked in from a lifetime of watching old movies on the late show. But none of it fit. None of it seemed to wash in his way of thinking.
Something had happened.
Something pretty bad.
He kept thinking chemical spill. Maybe some tanker truck had overturned, spilling a load of some toxic substance. The town had been evacuated. And maybe… yeah, maybe that guy on the road had been contaminated or something. He liked that scenario, it covered all the bases. He liked it until he stopped to consider that they, Nancy and he, might get tainted by the stuff, too.
But he kept thinking about it.
It was something rational to hold onto.
“Look,” Nancy said as they crossed an avenue. “Over there.”
Ben saw it. In the middle of the block, a small ranch house with its lights on. They’d been in Cut River for some time now and this was the first sign of life they’d come across.
Up ahead, he could see, there were more lit up houses.
Even streetlights shining like beacons in the murk. He sighed with relief. It meant they were still on planet Earth, anyway. Crazy as it sounded, he was starting to think they’d stepped off into some alternate universe.
The first three houses were dark, festooned with creeping shadows, wound up in webs of blackness. Scary, sure. It was all scary. But why was it that this ranch house, lights glowing in its windows, seemed more… threatening? There were other houses lit-up on the next block and street lamps, too, but this one, all alone in the tenebrous sea, really got under Ben’s skin.
He could feel a formless dread rolling in his belly.
It didn’t bother Nancy, though.
When they reached the house, he hung back. It wasn’t a conscious decision. Something atavistic, maybe, wouldn’t let him get any closer.
Nancy, however, went up the walk, totally at ease.
Ben looked around—a bird feeder, thick cedar bushes, a fence in need of paint, a newer pick-up in the drive, a few newspapers on the porch, rolled-up and unread—there was nothing wrong with it.
Yet, he knew there was.
Something.
“A cup of coffee,” Nancy was saying. “That’s what I need. Or maybe a drink. You don’t know us, but here we come.”
“Maybe we should just make for the main drag like we said,” Ben said.
She looked at him over her shoulder, annoyed. “Why?”
“I don’t know,” he said, realizing he couldn’t put it into words. “Why not?”
“Why not? Because this town is giving me the fucking creeps, Ben, that’s why not. We’re going here. Maybe their phone works.”
He followed her up onto the porch. “I doubt it. Lines are down.”
“Well, maybe they’ve got a computer. Maybe they’re on-line.”
“Not if the phone lines are down.”
She shook her head. “A lot of people use cable now, bright boy, or haven’t you heard?”
“It’s probably down, too.”
“Oh, quit being such a moron. I don’t need it, Ben. You hear me? My brother’s dead and I don’t need your bullshit right now.”
Yeah, Sam was dead. But Ben knew they weren’t that close, never had been. Right now, he knew, she was worried about her own ass despite what she said. It was funny how her insults didn’t bother him now. Any other time he would have been thinking about putting her down on her big butt, but right now her caustic tongue was almost reassuring.