rest stop: chapter 15

TODD

Todd could do without the dark. He really could. Didn’t anyone who worked for the water department believe in lights? Or signs? Or… something?

It wasn’t that he couldn’t find ways up - they were all over the place. The problem was, to prevent scrap metal thieves from stealing them and selling them to China, the manhole covers were all bolted down.

He had tried standing under one at what sounded like a busy intersection, hanging on to the ladder and shouting, but it was all car traffic; no one could hear him. Even if someone walked by, which they didn’t, they would be past him in two strides and never notice a thing.

So he kept moving in what he thought was a fairly straight line, hoping for an exit. Because there had to be one eventually, right?

Too bad they don’t teach sewer survival skills at the community college, said the voice in his head.

“It’s amazing how little you know about such a common thing,” he agreed.

At least you’ve had ‘An Introduction to Giant Leeches’.

Todd laughed. “You’re right.” Oh my God I’m talking to myself. How long have I been down here?

You’re probably just still in shock. I would be, too, after everything that’s happened. I’m sure you’ll be fine, once we get out of here, maybe spend a little time with a therapist or ten.

Now I’m talking to myself about talking to myself.

“Karyn, I’m sorry!” he said, to no one but her. “I should have been there. I should be there.” What would she have done, when he didn’t show? What must she think?

Nothing that isn’t true.

“She probably called my house. And then the store,” he said, playing it out, step by step. “Work would’ve called my house, too, when they found the store empty. My folks would say I didn’t come home, so they probably watched the video recorders and…”

Someone knew he had been kidnapped. By now, maybe several someones. And he hoped to God that one of them was Karyn. That had to be better than abandoning her, right?

Six of one…

“The first thing I’m going to do when I get out of here is put a cork in you.”

Promises, promises.

CURTIS LANGLEY

On the far north side of town, where Black River was little more than a brook with ambition, there were dozens of family farms. Some grew sugar beets, many grew corn, and one, in particular, raised a few cows for the farmer’s market crowd: CowTown.

Bad joke, thought Curtis for the umpteenth time as he lugged the big bale of alfalfa up to the fence. Joke or not, the lake dwellers would pay half again as much for pasture-fed as they would for grocery store beef. Sure, it was hot, sweaty work, but it beat pumpin’ gas.

Moo!

Holy christ, thought Curtis, did that cow just say moo? He had literally never before in his life ever heard a cow moo. Cattle made all kinds of noises, most of’em farts, but ‘moo’ was a storybook word.

Moooo! said the cow, emphatically. It was over by the pond, and it seemed to be caught up on something. Cows were incredibly stupid. You could give them a basketball, and they’d find some way to break their legs on it. That’s just the way beef was.

Curtis pushed the bale up and over the fence, and the other cows immediately began to wander over. At least they were smart enough to eat. He climbed over the fence before they got in the way and strode toward the pond.

The cow at the water turned and looked at him, its eyes rolling white. That meant pain. Could it have gotten ahold of some barbed wire somewhere and gotten tangled in it? As he got closer, Curtis could see that it was holding one leg up off the ground.

“Hey, there, girl,” said Curtis, looking under the cow to see what it was caught up on. He reached out with one gloved hand to pat her reassuringly on the back.

Something shot around from behind the cow and grabbed his arm. It was like a slimy pink rope, and it pulled him right off his feet and over the cow. He landed hard on his back in the mud at the edge of the pond, and it knocked the wind right out of him.

He looked up, and he could see three or maybe four shiny black diamond-shaped things on the cow’s belly. One of them had hold of his arm. As he watched, it dropped off and used the pink rope to pull itself toward him.

“What the fuck?” Curtis said. He tried to shake it off. The rope was cutting off the circulation in his arm. He reached into his pocket and brought out his flick-knife. He popped the blade and cut the pink ropey thing, then stabbed the thing’s body with it, over and over.

Flap! He turned, and another had dropped off the cow’s belly. He got to his knees, rubbing the injured arm, then got to his feet and staggered toward the fence, keeping an eye on the slimy thing on the ground and the cow, which seemed to be trying to cut him off.

“Whoa, Bessie,” Curtis said. The cow didn’t pay any attention; it was definitely pushing him toward the pond. Quick as he could, Curtis swung himself up and over the fence. When the cow came for that, he backed away. The slimy thing on the ground seemed to have given up; it was inch-worming toward the pond.

The cow stopped and stared at him.

“What the fuck?” said Curtis.

Moo! the cow said.

“Moo yourself.”

Wait a minute - weren’t there three of… ?

THAT NIGHT IT RAINED

Local weathermen (why did there never seem to be weather women?) predicted afternoon showers, talked knowingly about how long they’d last and compared the number of inches of rain that the county’s residents could expect in comparison to this same time last year. And, in keeping with cherished tradition, they were wrong on all counts.

If it was a shower, then Noah’s Flood was a Slip’N’Slide.

The first night and day were no big deal. Living near the Lakes, you expected weather. The second day, everyone’s yard was a pond, but that had happened before, too. On the third day, the basements of houses at low elevations began to flood.

It wasn’t until day four that monsters began to climb out of toilets all over town.

rest stop: chapters 12 - 14

BILL

“I’ve (hack) really gotta (kaff) quit smokin’,” coughed Bill, drawing the sweet nicotine deep into his bubbling lungs. It was true, of course. What would Maureen do without him? Worse, what if all she remembered of him was of his final years spent dying a slow death from lung cancer, throat cancer, or worse? She drove him crazy, but she deserved better than that.

The rain clouds had walked and talked all around the sky, but so far not a drop had fallen. Unfortunately, not a single fish had taken his bait, either, and he was running dangerously low on beer. There weren’t even any ducks for company.

Maybe he’d have better luck up by the crick mouth.

He reeled in his line, stowed his pole, pulled up the cement block that he used as an anchor, and dropped his oars. The crick was upstream and the current near the highway bridge was a bitch, so it took Bill the better part of an hour to get his boat over to the crick’s entrance.

It didn’t exactly do his lungs any favors. In fact, when he finally got out of the current, he coughed so long and so hard that he wound up in the weeds, retching grey bits of what he hoped wasn’t lung tissue into the brown water.

When it was over, he spat, then spat again to get the taste out of his mouth. That was when he spotted it, nestled in the greenery just at the water’s edge. Something golden.

At first he thought that it was a beer can; it was about the same size and shape, but the ends were rounded and the symbols etched into the side didn’t look like any logo he recognized.

Curious, he leaned over to pluck it from the bottom, but the shift in weight caused the whaler to swing back out into the crick. He had to push the boat back over with one oar, and then he couldn’t see the whatever it was for all the mud that his paddling stirred up.

Bill stuck one oar into the bottom to keep the whaler in place and waited for the mud to settle. It was probably just a thermos or something that fell overboard from one of the pleasure boats that docked along the river, but every once in awhile you came across interesting stuff. His workbench at home held all manner of odds and ends from the old paper mill and other businesses that used to line the river’s banks, including a cow skull from the slaughterhouse that used to exist a stone’s throw from this very crick.

Finally, the water settled enough that he spotted the flash of gold again, and ducked his arm in to grab it. As he lifted it out, it was heavier than he expected, certainly heavier than a lost thermos.

He held it up in the fading light that and studied the markings along its sides. They were embossed into the metal, but if they were words, then they weren’t in English or any other alphabet that he knew. There also didn’t seem to be any way to open the container, or seams of any kind. It was cold to the touch, too - much colder than the water - which again made him think Thermos but, if it had just been dropped recently enough to still be cold, why hadn’t he seen the boat that dropped it? Nothing much larger than his whaler could navigate the crick, it was too narrow.

Pleased with his find and suddenly tired of being on the water, Bill set the gold cannister in the bottom of the whaler and pushed off with an oar. It meant no fish for supper, but he could probably talk Maureen into pizza. He reached into his vest pocket for a stick of gum. Maureen tolerated beer, but it would be best if she didn’t smell the cigarettes on his breath.

In a few moments he was back out in the current, letting it push his little boat back toward the bridge and his Toyota. The golden cannister rolled a bit in the bottom of the boat. He could hardly wait to get it home and fiddle with it.

KARYN

Numb. So this is what that felt like.

Todd ran away. She knew it was hard, and scary; nobody knew that better than her. But of all the things that she had thought about, all the possible scenarios that had played out in her mind since the drugstore test confirmed her worst fears, the thought that he might just head for the hills had never entered her mind.

Maybe he just needs more time to take it all in, she thought, and nodded to herself. She was still taking it in, and she had known for longer than he had. But it wasn’t like him not to call or write or… or something. That conscientiousness was part of what had drawn her to him in the first place. He always looked out for her feelings, and treated them as if they were the most precious thing in the world.

So why no word? And where in the world could he have gone?

She had called his house first, hesitating until the afternoon because she kept expecting him to call her first. It was weird talking to his mom; they had been close from the beginning. For a moment, Karyn almost almost came right out and told her, but when she heard that Todd hadn’t come home from work, the words froze on her tongue. It was all she could do to ask Mrs. Armstrong to have him call her when he got home.

“Is anything wrong?” Mrs. Armstrong said, sensing something.

“No,” Karyn lied. “No, just have him call me, please.”

After that, she called the party store, but Todd wasn’t there and they seemed to be either really busy or really angry, so she hung up, the phone dangling in her hand.

Next came Greg, his best friend, whose number she got from the class directory, and when he had no idea where Todd was she made her way through all of the other friends that she knew about, leaving messages everywhere and receiving none in return.

Bit by bit, the day worn on. Dinner with her family was quiet, with her two younger brothers, Joel and Josh, going on and on about how they should be permitted to take the family boat out on the lake by themselves. They were fifteen and sixteen, after all, and all of their friends were doing it.

“Has that argument ever worked in the history of the world?” she said, which earned her glares from both of them, but part of her was glad. She hadn’t been allowed to take the boat out by herself until she was seventeen. At least one rule seemed to hold true from one sibling to the next.

After dinner she took a bath, rather than her usual shower, and spent most of it staring at her still-flat belly.

“That won’t last long,” she told it. She patted it gently, wondering how long it would be before she began to show. Even now, it was weird to think that there was another person in there, a new person, and that she was somehow involved. She wondered if all new mothers felt that way. If so, her mom had never mentioned it.

That was when she realized that she was crying.

Later, after the boys had gone to bed, she knocked on her parents’ bedroom door and, when her father’s deep voice said, “Yes?”, she went in and told them.

Her mother asked if she was sure. Karyn nodded.

“Where is Todd?” said her father. He seemed more upset that Todd wasn’t there than anything.

“I don’t know,” she said. “He didn’t…”

That was when the phone rang. Who would call so late? Her mother picked it up, said “Hello?” and listened for a moment, then held the handset out to Karyn.

”It’s for you.”

Karyn took the handset.

“Who is it?” said her father. “Is it Todd?”

“No,” said her mother. “It’s Valerie - Todd’s mother.”

Karyn put the phone up to her ear. “Hello? Is this Mrs. Armstrong? This is Karyn.”

Karyn listened. She felt sick, but the words coming out of the phone didn’t make any sense, so she asked Todd’s mother to say them again. When she was done, Karyn said, “Yes, I will,” and Todd’s mother hung up. After awhile, the phone beeped at her, so Karyn handed it back to her mother.

She looked at her parents.

“What is it, honey?” her mom said.

“What did she say?” her father said.

“She said Todd’s missing,” said Karyn. “She said the police say he’s… that he was kidnapped at work. They… he…” She fell onto her butt, dropping the phone in the process. Her parents were out of bed in a moment, on their knees with her, but she still couldn’t make the words make sense.

Todd’s mother said a serial killer had taken Todd, and that the police thought that it was likely that Todd was dead, and that she should prepare for the worst. The worst? How could she prepare for the worst? There was no time; it was already here.

HAYDEN

Hayden’s latest test subject was better than any video game, ever. That was what he called the insects and animals that came his way: Test subjects. His first test subjects had been toys, but he soon lost interest in those. They just sat there; they didn’t move or try to get away. When he blew them up or burned them, they were just junk. When you did that with living things, they became… holy. Sacrifices to the great god Science.

Like his fish. The moment he had dumped the leech-thing in the tank with them, the tetras and the guppies headed for the opposite side of the tank. Not that it had helped them.

He sat on the edge of his bed and watched. The whatever-it-was swam like a snake, stretching out and undulating. It was fast, too, and ruthlessly efficient. The moment a fish was within range of its crazy tongue, it was caught on the end of it and shuddering. The fish would swell up after that, and become almost translucent, and the thing would reel it in and slurp the fish down like a shake through a straw. Then the empty skin would be cast aside and the next fish pursued. It always seemed to be hungry.

Hayden pictured what must have happened to the dog sack, back when it was still a dog. Maybe it had gone to the river to drink, the leech-thing (or whatever it was) had stung it, and been pulled out of the water as the dog died. He wished he had been there to see it.

He Googled every kind of leech, but nothing that he saw looked much like it, except in a very general way. No leech that he saw had a tongue like that, anyway, or that flowery head part, and no one at school had ever mentioned something like this in the river before. Crayfish, ducks, snakes, bluegill, sunfish, muskrats, lampreys, yes, but nothing like this.

Maybe it was like the zebra mussels, something that had come over in one of the big carrier ship’s bilges. Or maybe it was something new. Either way, it was cool as hell. And maybe tomorrow he would catch a frog, something closer to its size, and see who ate who.

The possibilities were almost endless, and summer vacation had barely begun.