The Secret: A Thriller (5 page)

That was a problem for later. “Come on inside, man. I don’t know how serious the cops were about taking you with ’em.”

“Huh? Oh. Okay, yeah.”

I stood outside for a moment more. We really needed to find a way to protect ourselves. From strange creatures, the police, nosy neighbors…no matter what, I decided, my family and I would leave Henge as soon as we could. And not come back. My job was portable. And Rebecca was a writer. Children’s books mostly—all she needed was a room where she wouldn’t be disturbed. Well, and a working computer. And an internet connection.

Inside, Felicia and Rachel shrieked and ran to Tim. “Daddy! Did you find Mom?” Rachel asked, tears streaming.

Tim seemed to shrink. “No. Not yet. Listen, girls,” He looked around. “All of you. You need to know what I saw.”

Rebecca, Robbie and I sat on the couch. Tim’s daughters clung to him. He looked down at them, then stared at my family sitting together, and I didn’t want to know what he was thinking.

“Okay,” he said at last. “I ran out after Susie. I ran around for a while but didn’t see anything…then I heard some rustling noises in the woods. Could have been a javelina, could have been somebody’s dog. I didn’t care. It was a direction. So I headed in.”

I figured that explained the scratches and tears, anyway. The low brush nearby was hard to navigate in full daylight. So were the stinging nettles. The local joke was that they were intelligent, and mean, and worked together to stick us when they could.
Because
they could. My grandmother used to tell us kids stories about them, plotting in the darkness…

“Whatever it was ran away. I just…wandered, trying to listen. I got a little lost. At one point I heard some coyotes howling, not far off, and I figured that at least meant there was nobody in
that
direction because they’re so shy. But…the howling stopped all of a sudden and I heard a yip. Like something happened. So I went that way after all.”

“Daddy!” Felicia exclaimed.

“Hush, girl. I was looking for your mom.” He took a moment, looking lost. Then: “I found Old Center and followed it to the end. Then I figured—since I didn’t have any idea which way to go—I’d go see what was going on at the high school.

“I cut across the woods and came out by the projects.” That was the low-income housing area the town had built just after the prison had come in. “There was a kid, a teenager, walking down the street. He was dragging his left leg, and sort of twitching. I started toward him, thinking I’d help, but a police car came around the corner. There was a lot of shouting, not by the kid; he was clearly disoriented. Anyway, they came out to grab him. Only one of them got scared and shot him. Right there in front of me. I thought…thought they’d killed him. But they gave him some sort of injection—they said morphine but who the hell knows—and he was still moving when they put him in the back of the car. Well, twitching. But
vigorously
. He nearly knocked one of the police officers down just before they got him in there.”

Rebecca spoke up. “Tim, sit down. You’re going to fall over.”

He gave her a horrible grin, an expression I’d never seen on his face before. “Oh no I’m not. I kept sneaking over toward the high school. I saw them bring that kid in later. They had him zip-tied, with two others, and he still nearly hopped out of there before they could give him another injection. I heard them saying something about running out of tranquilizer. But here’s the thing. Whatever they gave him, they’d also
shot him in the chest.
I got a really good look at the wound. There is no way that kid should have been
alive
, much less hopping around.”

He paused and swallowed. “I saw them bring in ten people last night. All of them were twitching, at the very least. And that spooked me. But later on? I saw Slimy Bob Germain too. He was walking around, preaching his normal drivel. And—Ash, you know the guy. He’s got that Cowboy Church just out of town, but everybody knows it’s a tax dodge.”

“Okay,” I said. Not everybody knew. A lot of people went to Germain’s church regularly, with his “West ‘By God’ Virginia” sign out front, and they had to find something worthwhile in it or they’d find something else to do on Sunday mornings. And on Saturdays, when he held meetings and got people to work—painting, fencing, generally improving his property for God, and that part bugged me. But still…“Go on.”

“When Reverend Bob talked to the cops, they listened. A couple of them knelt right in front of them, and he touched their heads as if he were blessing them. And once, when one of the twitching people they brought in looked like she was going to get away—this was by a weird crab-walk because she was tied up, but the tranquilizer didn’t seem to be doing anything to stop her—he just went over to her, raised his right hand, and talked for a bit. I swear, she quieted right down.”

Tim stopped talking, and we sat in silence for a few moments.

“Doctor Sullivan?” Robbie asked. “Did you figure it out? Do you know what it means? Is it terrorists like the police said?”

Tim gave a short laugh. “No. Well, maybe. But…you guys have heard the stories about mothers who lift vehicles off their children, that kind of thing? What I think is, it’s like that. Mostly we think we’re only so strong, or we can only do so much, and we’re right. Because our brains limit us. So one person might be several times stronger than another, but their muscle tissue is nearly identical. One of their brains just…believes…it can do more. It recruits more muscle fibers. And so that person is stronger, but there’s no physical test to prove it, other than watching to see what they can do. I think, whatever’s happening, it’s like that. Something is, technically speaking, knocking our expectations out of whack.” He sagged, a little. “But I have no idea how or why.”

“Hard to believe,” I said. “That this is all mental. What about the hairy guys, with fangs?”

“Just people,” Tim said. “People who…started to believe something different. Like you, with your barefoot running. I can’t do that.”

“You could learn how if you tried,” I told him. “It’s just practice that does it.”

It was, too, but I didn’t think Tim would ever believe me. Or have the patience to work himself up to it.

For years I hadn’t been able to run more than a quarter of a mile without hurting. But I’d read a few things about barefoot running, and figured I didn’t have anything to lose—so I tried it, only to discover my feet were so conditioned by years in what I now called foot-splints that they couldn’t so much as walk for an hour without pain. Lots of pain. Which…pissed me off.

So I’d slowly built up my feet’s capacity to, for God’s sake,
walk
without shoes. Hell of a thing to forget how to do. And then, eventually, I learned to run. Now, for the first time in over ten years I was able to patter along the roads without knee and hip pain. For which doctors had on several occasions prescribed orthotics for my expensive built-up foot-cradling shoes, and cortisone shots, and oh by the way, they’d gently hinted, maybe at thirty-five I was just slightly too old to be pounding my legs and feet into the ground anyway….

Don’t get me wrong: I was grateful to be able to play in the street again. But I hated thinking of all the years I’d wasted following expert advice. And buying shoes from companies with no evidence backing up their claims.

“No,” Tim told me. “I’ll never be able to do what you do. Because I don’t believe in it. I know too much about
exactly
how you’re stressing your feet. I’d never be able to pull it off. If you had the first clue about anatomy? You couldn’t do it either.”

I looked at Rebecca. Her frown showed her to be at least as skeptical as I was. “You heard the police asking for you?” I asked Tim.

“Yeah. I don’t know if they actually want me as a doctor, or if they saw me out there last night. Either way, I can’t be a part of whatever they’re doing.”

Robbie jumped up, took Rachel’s hand, and spoke. “So we can’t stay here in the house,” he told us all. “It’s too open. It’s not safe. And lots of people could know we’re all here.”

I put an arm around his shoulders, proud of him for figuring it out. I hadn’t seen him handle himself in a crisis before. “Good call, kid.” Then, just to see what he’d come up with: “So where do you think we should go?”

He gave me his patented retarded-adult look. “The old basement. Obviously.”

Everybody spent a few minutes thinking that over. But we didn’t bother arguing about it. He was right.

“Dad?” Rachel asked Tim. “What happened to your arm?”

“Oh. It was that kid.” Tim took a moment, looking into each of our faces. “I tried to help him later. He was lying against a wall, still tied up, and I got a chance to sneak in and take a look at him. I thought he was asleep, or unconscious, but when I tried to move his arm out of the way he grabbed mine. I don’t think it’s broken, though. Lucky, I guess.”

* * *

G
reat-Granddad’s basement, all that was left of his house, was off in the scrub woods. There was no road anymore, and barely a trail, so we couldn’t carry any supplies to it in a vehicle. But the basement was almost entirely underground and most people didn’t have any idea it was out there. Or at least I thought they didn’t—once in a while I’d check the place out and find discarded underwear or condoms lying around. But it had to be better than the house. We’d seen just how safe our home was last night, and what we’d seen and heard today hadn’t improved things.

Best of all, we could get to the basement from our backyard without crossing any roads. If we were lucky, nobody would see us trekking off into the woods.

I still wanted to try to get online, and to get out of town entirely if we could. But first we had to get through today somehow, and see what we could learn afterward. I wanted our families to be safe. Or as safe as we could get them.

We loaded everybody up with whatever we thought they could carry for the first trip. The plan was to leave Rebecca and Abby at the basement while the rest of us came back for a second load—or maybe a third. The pile of stuff we absolutely had to take kept getting bigger. It was nearly funny.

But Tim pulled me aside. “Ash…two things. First, that kid who’d been shot? His wound? It was closed up, almost healed. I know it sounds crazy but it’s what I saw.”

“Okay,” I told him after a moment. “I don’t know what’s crazy or not anymore. But I believe you. Only, where does that leave us?”

“No idea. I just wanted to tell you, because…because we should tell each other what we see. The other thing is, I want to stay here. I think somebody should watch the house, just in case the police come back.”

I shook my head. “So you want to stay where they might look for you? When you’re at least half of the reason we need to leave in the first place? Come on, man. You’re tired. Let’s just go.”

He bit his lip, then looked over my shoulder. “Okay. You got me on that one. It’s just…what if Susie comes back? We can’t leave her a note telling her where we are. Going off like this feels like giving up.”

I put my hand on his shoulder. Carefully, because he seemed pretty fragile just then. “She might figure it out.” But I didn’t think she would, any more than he did. “Tell you what. You go ahead. I’ll stay here with Abby, until the last trip. And Tim? She may not figure out where we went, but maybe she can leave
us
a note. We’ll leave one asking her to do that, and we’ll keep checking. Okay?”

I didn’t really believe coming back to look for notes, and potentially leading people to our hideout—or even telling anybody who got into the house that all they had to do was wait inside if they wanted us—was a great idea. But if it had been Rebecca I’d have tried anything.

Tim nodded slowly, and headed to the garage to grab some tools we might need. I watched him go—he drooped. The guy needed sleep.

On the other hand I wouldn’t want the kind of nightmares he might have.

* * *

A
fter they left I got more supplies ready for the next trip but mostly sat around—playing word games with Abby, who had stayed with me, and feeling grateful that my family was still okay. I wanted to feel worse about Susie than I did. This situation was awful for Tim and his daughters…and maybe for Susie too. If she was still around.

Mostly I was just relieved, though. And quietly desperate to get away from all this with my family as soon as I could.

And I
still
wanted to get online. The rest of the world had to have been told some sort of story. For all I knew it could even be the truth—I could use some. Terrorists? Quarantine? Bombs? Prison riots? Weird mutant ninja monkey-people? What was really going on?

Come to think of it, if that EMP had come from a nuclear weapon, however small…and another explosion had gone off in the direction of the prison this morning…were we in danger from radiation? If so, what should we do about it? I looked around my living room. Right over there, on the south wall, we’d had two complete encyclopedia sets when I was a kid. These days, who bothered? All that stuff was online.

Man. I needed Google. Tomorrow, I decided, I’d see what I could do about that. Though Tim ought to know about radiation.

I didn’t get out to the basement until evening. Tim was still jittery and manic, busily reinforcing its door with some pressboard he’d had in his garage. The door was counter-weighted: it leaned into a slight hill, all that was left of what had by all reports been a huge house, at about a thirty-degree angle. You had to lift it to get inside, and descend a set of concrete stairs.

Rebecca gave me an unreadable look when I arrived. But I was pretty sure she hadn’t been out here in years. So, my guess: It was a dirt-and-bugs thing.

I grinned at her. “Bright side? We might not have to stay here too long.”

Robbie snorted. “If we do, at least there’ll be plenty of little critters to eat. Dibs on the spiders!”

I beamed at him. “There’s a good boy.”

None of the females laughed. But even Tim snickered a little.

Still. It really was pretty messy. The floor was dirt…dank, damp dirt. Not much we could do about that. The basement was divided into two rooms. The door between, if it had ever existed, had been removed before I first saw the place. But I’d forgotten about the two windows on the east wall, the side furthest from the entrance. They were only about four inches tall, and only about two inches above ground outside. From their reasonably-clear appearance, Rebecca had probably been cleaning.