Keepers (8 page)

We were a few blocks from my house when Beth pulled the U-Boat over to the curb and put it in park. “Listen, I want to tell you something, okay? Something that’s just between us, right?” She was a long way past serious; she seemed almost scared. “
Right
?”

I nodded my head.

“This is gonna sound weird, okay, but...I never had any friends when I was your age, I never got to do any of those things that kids your age get to do, right? I always felt mad about that, about missing out on things. Hell, I’m not even sure if I
know
what kids your age like doing ‘cause I never did it.”

“Could you please not...not say that?”

“Say what?”

“‘Kids your age.’”

She shook her head and smiled. “But you
are
still a kid. You’re not even ten yet.”

“I know, but....” I looked at my hands, which I couldn’t feel.

“Okay, you, I guess you deserve that. If I live to be twice the age I am now, I doubt that I’m ever gonna know what it feels like to get shot, so you ought to be entitled to age points for that. Deal—I don’t call or refer to you as ‘kid’ anymore.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” She leaned over and kissed my cheek. “I wanna know what it is you like to do, I guess. Will you show me that? Will you teach me how to have fun like a person of your age has fun?”

“You might think it’s stupid.”

She put the car in drive and pulled away from the curb. “Bet’cha I don’t.”

And she didn’t.

Over the next year-and-a-half I taught her (in no particular order): how to build a fort from boxes, blankets, chairs, and umbrellas; how to climb a tree; the fine art of thumb wrestling; how to make a kite from scratch; how to tell if Godzilla was going to be a good monster or bad monster before he even made his first appearance in the movie (not as easy as it sounds); the proper way to build and paint the Aurora monster models; why Steppenwolf kicked 3 Dog Night’s ass; how
Mr. Terrific
was just as cool as
Captain Nice
but
The Green Hornet
was by far the coolest of them all; why the
Bazooka Joe
comics sucked monkeys but the bubble gum could be re-chewed at least three times before it lost its flavor; and, probably the most valuable tidbit of wisdom I tossed her way, how, if you sat or stood in the proper position and had the right muscle control, you could make a fart last up to thirty seconds and not dump in your pants (eating popcorn at least twenty minutes before attempting this difficult stratagem is immensely beneficial to a successful outcome).

Whenever we were together, which was often, Beth had a childhood, and I had the woman against whom all others would be measured and come up lacking.

But for that night, it was her kiss lingering on my cheek as I walked toward my front door and my father’s putting his hand on my shoulder for the first time in an eternity (“How you holding up there, son? Ever tell you about when I got shot during the war?”) that made me feel that maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t such a worthless little kid, after all.

Godspell On Crack

“...
to have spoken once as civilized men
...”

I put the Mossberg on a small table just inside the guest bedroom and knelt to open the trap door. This was the first time I’d used it since having it installed, and I was surprised by the thin cloud of sawdust that blew into my face. Coughing, I waved the cloud away, blinked until my eyes were clear, and started to drop my legs into the opening.

Something outside slammed against the side of the house with enough force to shake the floor and cause the Mossberg to nearly fall off the edge of the table.

I scrambled to my feet, grabbing the shotgun as I ran toward the living room. Whatever slammed against the house had raised some dust of its own, because a dissipating smog of sandy debris was skirling against the window. It wasn’t until I was just a foot or so away from the window that I realized it wasn’t dust at all.

Crouching, I pulled back one side of the curtain to take a look.

It was a cavernous mist—so thick in places it was nearly impossible to make out the shape of Magritte-Man’s truck in the street—that churned as if caught in a strong wind. But there
was
no wind. There hadn’t even been any humidity. The old joke might say that if you don’t like the weather in Ohio just wait a minute, and sometimes it sure seems that way, but barring any sort of significant meteorological aberration, no way in hell could a mist this heavy and wide-spread form in a matter of...I quickly played in reverse everything that had happened since I’d loaded the shotgun...
ninety seconds
?

I looked out the window again. At the rate this was going, the mist would turn into heavy fog in no time.

Ninety seconds.

Dropping the curtain back into place, I moved through the living room toward the back door. The mist couldn’t be a natural phenomenon. Yes, the weather here can make some extreme swings from time to time, but not like this, not a mist-bordering-on-fog that looks like it followed the tail of a major storm in summer, not in less than two minutes, so it stood to reason (didn’t it?) that Magritte-Man and his droogies had to have created it. It had only been two minutes, so whatever they were using to generate the mist couldn’t have worked up enough vapor to encircle the entire house—hell, even if they had more than one (dry ice, a fog machine maybe?), there still hadn’t been enough time.

I threw open the back door and stepped onto the porch, the Mossberg pointing out from my hip.

The mist formed a semi-solid wall that spread out to create a barrier around the yard and rose so far into the evening sky it was impossible to see where it ended and the October clouds began. I leaned over the porch railing to see just how far the barrier extended; at both the far left and right edges of the house it curved so sharply and so abruptly it actually formed corners before continuing.

It was surrounding the house.

Yeah, your sanity is just fine, just peachy, solid as a rock.

Fuck off.

Such language…

I felt a damp chill and exhaled; my breath became silver vapor as soon as it hit the air and billowed in front of my face, faintly glowing. From deep inside, the mist shimmered with light—nothing bright or blinding, but enough to illuminate the yard and the outside of the house.

Moving down the steps I looked from side to side for some sign of the others. I caught a glimpse of one of them when a pair of thin beams cast by their night goggles glided across the mist from about ten yards to my left. Mossberg at the ready, I ran toward the spot from which the beams had come; just as I hit the mist the handle-grip of the shotgun punched into my ribs, causing me to cry out as I tumbled backward from the force of the impact.

It took a few seconds for my torso to stop throbbing and the breath to find its way back into my lungs. What the hell had I slammed into? Rolling onto my side, I picked up the Mossberg and checked to make sure the gun and knife were still in place, then got to my feet and looked around for whom- or whatever had hit me. As far as I could tell, I was alone in the yard—whose boundaries were rapidly shrinking against the encroaching mist. In a few minutes it would be all the way up to the back porch.

I turned back toward the spot where I’d remembered seeing the beams and moved closer, slowly this time. I knew this was probably the wrong thing to do—after all, the back door was unlocked and stood wide open (
Why not just send out written invitations, Pal?
)—but I had to let them know I wasn’t going down without a fight.

I heard a dog bark from outside the barrier, another one howled in response, then the song of an unseen nightbird was answered by the yowls of a stray neighborhood cat.

The mist was playing with me; whenever I moved forward, it retreated, expanding the boundaries; if I moved back, it would advance, swallowing more of the yard. I did this three times, moving backward and forward to make sure I wasn’t imagining it, and I wasn’t—the mist moved in the opposite of my direction each time. Finally, I remained still, as did it.

Flexing the fingers of my left hand, I reached up; a small area of the barrier pulled away from the tips of my fingers. I folded my fingers into my palm and watched the area begin to fill in, and that’s when I came up with my right hand still fisted around the shotgun’s handle-grip and punched at it.

I heard the bones break well before the pain had a chance to register, but by then I was down on one knee and whimpering, my right hand cradled against my chest. As far as I could tell, I had broken my fourth and fifth metacarpals. A jagged, bloody scrape lay across the width of my hand, made thin and black in places by my swollen knuckles.
Jesus
! It had been like pummeling my fist against a slab of granite. I could still feel the vibration of the impact all the way up my shoulder and neck.

Struggling to my feet, I grabbed the Mossberg with my left hand because my right was useless for the moment. The mist remained strong, churning, forming surreal shapes.

I wondered if my neighbors had noticed what was surrounding my house. Were any of them watching right now, their curiosity piqued, or was this mist engulfing the entire block? It had to have occurred to at least
one
person that this wasn’t normal, right? And in Cedar Hill if anything not normal or even mildly interesting happens, well, then, you call the police or the trusty news team at Channel 9 and get a mobile unit right over. If they’d dispatch a crew to cover the opening of a new electronics store one county away, they’d sure as hell send someone to a local neighborhood to cover the appearance of an intensely localized weather anomaly.

Never count on the help of others when you most need it. Take my word on this. I wasn’t about to assume that any of my neighbors had called or were
going
to call anyone to report this, so I did the only thing I knew for a fact would get someone on the phone to the news or police; I rose to my feet, lifted the Mossberg over my head using only my left hand, pointed it into the air, and fired.

The force of the blast wrenched my left arm backward and tore the handle-grip from my grasp. The shotgun flew back and landed in the grass about five feet away. I half-spun around, my shoulder screaming, nearly losing my balance. Almost none of this had to do with the physical effects of firing the weapon—some of it, yes, you can’t fire a scattergun with only one hand and not get jolted down to your marrow—but more than anything, it was the
sound
of the shot.

Under the best and most controlled of circumstances a gunshot is deafening, but it seemed as if this one had gone off in the center of my skull; it hadn’t just been a noise or an explosion—it was a pulverizing force that ripped the air from inside me and jammed an invisible icepick into each side of my head. I stumbled around in half-circles pressing my hands against my ears (I had done this before, I
knew
that I had held my ears like this before, that there had been pain and panic then, as well...but where and when and
why
?) while stomping my feet and working my jaw in order to create some kind of pressure and
pleaseGod
make one or both of my ears pop but nothing helped; at one point the pain and weight became so great I thought I was going to pass out, then a soft
hiss began to issue from the base of my brainpan, someone letting the air out of a bicycle tire, and I pulled my hands away and felt
the cool air enter my ears with a soft
whoosh
. I shook my head once, then twice to see if I could jar anything into functioning, but there was only a thick, gluey numbness; I didn’t hear so much as
feel
the hissing, which was rapidly giving way to a deep, disturbing thrum. I blinked, turned slowly around, saw the shotgun lying in the grass, and made a beeline for the thing. It was vital I have something to focus on besides the disorienting pressure in my head, and the Mossberg would do just fine. Looking up to where the mist met the clouds, I prayed that the blast hadn’t blown out my eardrums and rendered me permanently deaf. I shook my head once more as I swung down and grabbed the shotgun with my good hand, and as I returned to a fully upright position there was hiss and a buzz and a pop and something that sounded like a sheet being torn into shreds by a pair of teeth, then a moment of nauseating dizziness and then...sound. I could at least discern (if not actually
hear
) sound again. Not much, just the echo of a dog’s bark coming from somewhere deep under the Atlantic Ocean, but it was there, and I could recognize it, and that meant that the damage wasn’t (
thank you thank you thank you
) permanent. Despite the circumstances, I smiled as I made my way up the back steps and into the kitchen. It was only as I was locking the door and shoving the kitchen table up against it that I allowed myself to acknowledge what I hadn’t wanted to admit while out there: the noise and force of the blast had been so fantastically intensified—so brutally magnified—because they had been contained.

The mist wasn’t just surrounding the house, it was
encasing
it.

I thought,
this must be how a pheasant under glass feels
.

Then a remembered voice:
You might say they’re not from around here
. But who’d said that, and when? Where? Like with holding my ears, I
should have
known, but....

I looked out the window over the sink. The mist roiled forward, stopping only a few feet from the bottom step of the back porch. Two thin red beams danced across a part of the wall, then one of Magritte-Man’s cronies stepped through and simply stood there. The glow from his night goggles made him look almost comical. He gave a quick nod of his head to affirm that he could see me. I flipped him the bird with my right middle finger and immediately shrieked from the pain. I had to do something about my broken hand and I had to it now or I wouldn’t stand a chance. The Pedestrian (I now choose to think of him and the others by this name) waved a hand to get my attention, then made an odd gesture. I stared at him, shook my head, and he repeated the gesture, albeit a bit more exaggeratedly.