rest stop: chapters 9 - 11

KARYN CARPENTER

In her bed in her parents' house, eight miles away, Karyn had a vivid dream. In it, Todd was climbing into a cigar tube. She tried to tell him how silly that was, because cigar tubes only opened on one end.

"So do condoms," he replied, which was true, but what did that have to do with anything?

"If you go in there, I'm not coming in after you," she warned him, but he brushed her aside, now wearing a motorcycle helmet and a jumpsuit Elvis would have envied. As he climbed into the tube, he shrank like Alice, and dwindled away to nothing.

"He's right, you know," said the giant worm at her side. It smiled wickedly. "You've got to go in to get out."

"You're the whole reason we're in this mess," she reminded it, whereupon it climbed into the tube, too, and pulled the cap closed after it.

In her sleep, Karyn moaned and woke herself up. She lay there for a moment, thinking…

this is the last night before they'll know, the last night when everything is still okay

…but that wasn't true, because things had already changed - she had already changed - and they were going to change a lot more in the coming months.

She suddenly felt so lonesome for Todd that she began to cry, muffling her sobs with a pillow, lest her mother hear.

The sun was just above the horizon when she wiped her eyes and got up to pee, the robins already hard at their morning choir practice. No one else was stirring yet, not even her little brothers, and she went back to bed afterward and listened to the house wake up, savoring every sound, counting down the hours and the minutes until Todd arrived and they told her family the secret that would change their lives forever.

BILL HIGGINS

One of the down sides of living in Michigan, thought Bill Higgins as he loaded his fishing gear into his Boston Whaler, is the weather. He had lived in the Thumb all his life, but Lake Huron could still surprise him by throwing up hail one minute and sunshine the next, with temperature swings of as much as forty degrees just to keep you on your toes.

Case in point: this morning.

Oh, it had dawned all things bright and beautiful, the heat already radiating up from the ground as he bent down to get the paper off the porch. But by the time he’d had breakfast and gotten dressed, the wind had shifted to the north, the sky had darkened and the temp had to be mid-fifties now at best.

None of which would keep him from going fishing, of course. Ever since retirement from teaching - science at the middle school, then biology at the high school - not even snow could do that. But it meant an extra six-pack was required (purely for insulation, you understand) and, if it rained, probably no smokes.

“You’re not taking any cigarettes with you, right?” asked his wife Maureen, as she handed him the plastic bag full of sandwiches.

“Woman, didn’t you hear what the doctor said?” he grumbled.

She looked him dead in the eye. “The question is, did you hear what he said? You’ve got to last me.”

“How can I smoke when it’s gonna rain cats and dogs?”

His wife hugged herself against the chill. “Isn’t it supposed to clear up?”

Bill shrugged. He put the bag in the boat, covered it with the all-weather tarp, and tied it down against the rising wind.

Maureen grabbed his hat on each side of his head and pulled him in for a kiss. It was a long one, something else that had changed since retirement.

“Be careful,” she said. “Come home if it gets bad. No sense getting sick over a few sunfish.”

“Prob’ly won’t get any,” he said, and that was true – he hadn’t caught a thing all week. He normally did his fishing in Black River under the I-94 bridge. Maybe it was time to investigate the canals and see if he had any better luck there.

“What time do you think you’ll be home?” asked Maureen, heading for the screen door.

“Late enough for you and the milkman to do your business,” he said. “But probably not to squeeze in the mail man, too.”

“They don’t have milk men anymore,” Maureen reminded him for the umpteenth time. She never got the joke, or maybe she did and didn’t find it funny. Not after thirty years of marriage, anyway.

“I know,” he sighed, climbing into his old Tercel. “I know, I know, I know.”

He pulled the door shut. It squealed in protest.

“I know just how you feel,” he told it.

HAYDEN GREEN

Hayden Green was watching a dog sack.

He had made up the ‘dog sack’ name himself, because that’s what it looked like to him and, being eleven, he tended toward the literal.

The dog sack smelled. Bad.

During summer break, his parents kicked him out of the house when they went to work and didn’t expect him back before dusk, a rare thing in these electronic times. Hayden didn’t mind, even though all the other kids were playing video games at home or at camp or whatever other kids did. He was used to solitude. In fact, he preferred it.

He liked to ride his bike down to the woods near Black River. It was quiet there. Sometimes he brought a banana and a book, sometimes a sandwich, but he always brought his magnifying glass.

Carpenter ants looked like monsters under it, covered with hairs you couldn’t otherwise see. And when he discovered how to focus the light through the lens to burn stuff, he would pretend that he was Superman using his heat vision to burn messages into green leaves or kill the monster ants before they could overrun Metropolis.

Burned ants smelled just like burned popcorn, curiously enough, and they wouldn’t stand still to die - you had to cripple them first. Then, under the blinding light, they would suddenly stop moving, smoke, and pop.

Frogs moved too much, he found, and they died if you tried to stun them with a board, but you could get them to hold a firecracker or a small smoke bomb in their mouths if you were patient enough, a trick that worked with garter snakes, too. He would blow them up or burn them, meticulously inspect the damage, and come back the next day to watch the crows eat whatever was left. It was the circle of life in action.

But he had never seen a dog sack before.

There it lay, at the edge of the river, a bag of skin and fur with a collar where he guessed its neck must have been, but the bag seemed curiously empty. For one thing, it was flat as a pancake. Even if the dog somehow got run over, it was Hayden’s experience that the bones tended to shoot out through the skin. They didn’t magically disappear. And there was obviously no meat in the sack; despite the fact that it reeked, the crows wouldn’t touch it.

What could do that? he wondered. Would Drano do that? He wondered if his parents would let him get a dog.

He hunted around along the bank until he found a good solid stick, and used it to gently poke what was left of the dog. The corpse wasn’t all dried out, like he expected; the skin was supple and gave in an odd way. He got the stick under the edge of the collar and used it to flip the dead animal’s tag so he could see the name. It read Riley.

Something under the skin, or inside it, moved.

Hayden stepped back, stick upraised. There were rats all along the river, living off dead fish and sewage and whatever else they could find, and he had learned that they had no fear of him. He slid the stick under the edge of the dog sack, ready to run, and flipped the skin over.

The back side of the skin was soaking wet, and smelled worse, if that was even possible, but there was no rat. Instead, there was what he first thought was a fist-sized black rock, until it flattened out like a bloodworm, trying to flee to the water.

“Wicked,” said Hayden. He used the stick as a barrier, blocking its path. The front of it reached out and touched his stick, tried to go over it, so he raised the stick and it tried to go under it, so he stopped it from doing that, too.

Suddenly, the end of it squeezed out a long tube capped by something that looked like a flower, black on the outside and pink inside, which waved back and forth like a cobra. When he moved his stick, the flower whipped out and grabbed the stick right out of his hand. For something so small, it had a hell of a grip.

“Fuckin’ wicked,” said Hayden, who stood up and backed away a few steps as it wormed its way back into the water. It had to be some kind of leech, right? Some kind he hadn’t seen before. That meant scientific study was called for, under controlled conditions. If he could catch it and put it in his fish tank at home, he could observe how it hunted and stuff.

I’ll need my jar, he thought, trotting back to his bike. My jar and my fish net. Didn’t leeches carry some kind of disease? He would need the rubber gloves that he’d taken from under the sink, too.

Who needed video games when there was science to do?