Savage (28 page)

It was then that he'd decided they should do something more than just sit and have tea.

“It's kind of a mess,” Dale said as he pushed open the door to the garage. He moved the beam of a flashlight over the multitude of boxes, stacks, and piles of items he'd accumulated over the years in his contracting job. “I've got a battery-powered lantern somewhere over here,” he said, playing the light along the side of the three steps that led from the kitchen doorway to the garage floor.

“There's a lot of stuff,” Isaac said from the darkness behind Dale.

“Yeah,” Dale agreed, finding the lantern on a shelf to the left of the door. He turned the knob on, hoping that the battery still had some juice left in it. The light came on, chasing the shadows to the four corners of the vast and cluttered space.

“There we go,” he said, placing the lantern on top of a stack of boxes that contained floor tiles left over from a kitchen job a few years back. He'd always meant to sell those tiles, but had never managed to get around to it.

“Yeah,” Dale said again, looking around at the representation of the life he'd once had, before the stroke. He had a habit of holding on to anything that could be used again on a future job, and it was all here, stacked inside the garage that hadn't seen a car in well over ten years. It was like a yearbook of his job life. Every item reminded him of the work he had put his heart and soul into—every tool or box of supplies, the cans of paint, and boxes of ceiling tiles. Hell, he even had dynamite that he'd used to clear away some old tree stumps when he'd been hired to add a solarium to a property. “There is a lot of stuff.”

Isaac started carefully down the steps. “Reminds me of my house,” he said, eyes darting around, taking it all in.

“You have a lot of stuff, too?” Dale asked. He and Sidney had always suspected that Isaac's mother was a hoarder.

“Lots of stuff,” Isaac said, as he continued to look around. “Never know when you're going to need something,” he added. Dale wondered if he wasn't parroting his mother.

“That's true,” Dale said. “Probably why I saved all this myself.”

“Yeah,” Isaac agreed, peering into some of the boxes.

Dale was careful as he made his way along the stacks of project leftovers, taking it slow and easy so that he didn't lose his balance. Sidney had forbade him from coming in here alone.

“Hey, Isaac,” he called out. “I could use your help over here.”

He could hear the youth making his way over to where he stood beside piles of extra wood leaning up against the garage wall.

“Yes?”

“See all this wood here?” Dale asked.

The young man nodded.

“We're going take it into the house.”

“Why?” Isaac asked.

“We'll use the wood to cover up the windows, and reinforce the entrances to the house.”

Dale watched the youth to see if his explanation was sinking in.

“We'll use the wood to cover up the windows and doors so things can't get in,” Isaac said, showing that he did indeed understand.

“You've got it,” Dale said.

Isaac approached the pile and began to pick up the smaller pieces first, collecting them in his arms.

“If you don't mind, you can handle the wood, and I'll take the tools,” Dale said as he maneuvered around the young man to a dusty old duffel bag filled with equally filthy tools. These were his emergency tools, the ones that should have been tossed out once he got new ones but hadn't been. Just like everything else in the garage.

Without thinking, Dale reached down with his bad arm and tried to pick up the heavy bag. It clattered back to the concrete floor. “Damn it,” he hissed, cursing his infirmity. He changed hands, picking up the bag while trying to maintain his balance.

He saw that Isaac was watching him, his arms loaded with wood.

“What's wrong with your arm?” the young man asked.

The tool bag was heavier than Dale remembered it being, and he placed it on the floor again at his feet. “I had a stroke a few years ago,” he said, feeling a flush of anger go through his body. “Not quite back to where I should be yet.”

Yet.
That made him angry too since he knew that there was no chance he'd ever be back to what he was.

He picked up the tool bag again, his frustration lending him some strength. “Let's get this stuff into the house and—”

“I got hit by a car when I was just a little boy,” Isaac blurted out. “The tire ran over my head.” He wasn't looking at Dale as he spoke, his hand going up to touch a scar on the side of his head. “That's why I'm . . . different.”

He then looked at Dale, pulled the wood up tighter in his arms, and turned to leave the garage. “Gotta get this stuff into the house,” he said, turning and heading for the kitchen.

Without a word, Dale followed, dragging the tool bag behind him.

Dale was much slower at navigating the stacks, and Isaac was already out of sight when he heard a tremendous crash from the direction of the kitchen door.

“That's okay, Isaac,” Dale said, trying to quicken his pace, thinking the young man had dropped his armload of wood. But as he maneuvered around an old washer and dryer he'd been hoping to get up on Craigslist, he didn't like what he saw.

Isaac was on his back at the foot of the stairs, pieces of wood scattered about him. The young man's body had gone completely rigid, his hands like claws moving up toward the sides of his face—to his ears—but hesitating.

“Isaac,” Dale said, dropping the tools and lurching toward the youth. He had no idea what he could do, but he had to at least try. “It's okay, buddy, everything is going to be okay.”

Isaac's mouth was moving; he was trying to speak, but he couldn't seem to get the words out.

“What's wrong? What did you do? Did you fall and hit your head? What . . . ?”

He was convulsing now, as if he was having some sort of seizure.

On a small workstation table covered with cans of paint, Dale saw a stack of old towels that he used as rags and drop cloths and made his way toward them. Grabbing a handful, he returned to where Isaac still thrashed and twitched and managed to lower himself to his knees beside the boy using his cane and the stair rail. Then he placed the towels beneath Isaac's head.

“It's all right,” he said, trying to reassure the youth. “Everything is going to be okay.”

Dale had no idea if the kid was prone to seizures, but without phones to call for help, there was nothing to do but sit with him and wait it out. He patted Isaac's chest with a comforting hand. “You just lie there for a bit, and we'll see if you feel any better in a while.”

Isaac's hand shot out, wrapping painfully around Dale's wrist, pulling him closer as he looked into Dale's eyes.

“The bad radio,” Isaac gasped. “It's getting . . . louder.” His hand hovered clawlike and horrible around the hearing aid in his right ear and the scar on the side of his head.

Dale had no idea what the young man was experiencing, but the look on his face told him it was something awful.

The bad radio in Isaac's Steve ear was telling him to do things . . . horrible things.

He couldn't understand what was happening as the static crackled, and the sound tried to worm its way inside his head—inside his brain.

The bad radio wanted to take over, to push him so far down that he—
Isaac
—wouldn't exist anymore.

He didn't want to go away . . . didn't want to listen to the bad radio and the horrible, horrible things it was telling him to do.

But the bad radio was loud—strong—filling his head with a powerful message of violence and terrible images of what it was doing out there in the storm.

It forced him to look through its eyes . . . its many, many eyes . . . so many eyes.

It forced him to see—

Everything
.

“Where again?” Officer Isabel asked as she turned the corner onto Bennett Street, the driving wind and rain pummeling the police vehicle.

“It's off of Lansdale,” Sidney said, trying to see through the deluge of water.

“Got it,” Isabel said over the hissing rain and the rhythmic back and forth of the wiper blades.

A gnawing nervousness was growing in Sidney's belly. She wanted to tell the officer to hurry up, but she knew they were going as fast as they could in the dangerous conditions.

“Hey, slow down,” Rich suddenly spoke up, his face practically pushed into his window as he struggled to see in the storm-swept night. “Do you see that?”

Officer Isabel brought the car to a halt and stared through her own window. “Where are we looking?”

Sidney slid across the seat and tried to follow Rich's gaze.

“What are we looking for, Rich?” Cody asked as he leaned toward Isabel, attempting to look past her shoulder into the darkness.

“I . . . ,” Rich began, still searching. “I thought I saw . . .”

And then.

“There!” he said, tapping his index finger on the glass. “It looks like a truck . . . or maybe an SUV. Oh God, please don't let it be the K-9 truck.”

A sudden, solemn silence descended on the group. Two other groups from the police station had escaped just ahead of them in two more department rides. Sidney guessed that the little girl Amy and her mom were in the K-9 vehicle.

“Where?” Cody asked, looking all the harder. “I still don't—”

“Shit,” Officer Isabel cursed, and that was when Sidney saw it. It was indeed the police SUV, and it was lying about ten feet into the woods, on its roof.

Isabel was trying to bring their vehicle closer to the wreck when something surged up from the road in front of them. The police officer let out a shrill scream as the headlights illuminated what was in the road ahead.

It looked almost like a wave of water about to flow over them, but where would a wave of water come from on an old backwoods road?

But as it flowed closer, Sidney recognized it for what it really was.

She wanted to scream too, but it was too late.

The wave—yes, it was a wave, but not comprised of water—was alive, made up of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of living things, warm-blooded and cold—insect, reptile, amphibian, and mammal.

Life, large and small, merged together into an undulating wall, surging toward the vehicle as if it was one single entity. If it wasn't so damn horrifying, it would have been fascinating.

“Hold on,” Isabel shouted, swiftly putting the car in reverse and flooring the gas. The tires screeched and smoked as they spun upon the wet road, finally gripping enough of the tarmac to send them racing backward.

They were all screaming, and Snowy barked viciously, aware again that they were under attack.

Cody pounded the dashboard, screaming a single word over and over again as if it could somehow make them move faster. “Go! Go! Go! Go! Go! Go!”

And for a moment Sidney thought they had managed to outrun the wave, that it was going to fall like real waves upon the beach, but the wave defied all logic as it surged up, growing impossibly larger, towering over the vehicle, before crashing down upon the road and flowing beneath the SUV. They could feel it through the floor of the police vehicle, striking against the truck's underside, before flexing its terrible, singular self, pushing off from the ground and lifting the truck from the road.

They screamed together as the SUV flipped, the windows exploding inward as the vehicle came to rest in the road upon its side. Sidney and Snowy fell in a heap atop Rich, pressed against the car door.

“Sorry,” she said, trying to reposition her eighty-pound dog and get herself off of her friend.

“It's okay,” Rich said, lending her a hand. They all carefully righted themselves, amid sounds of the living wave sliding across the SUV, probing, seeking a way inside.

Seeking the life within.

Rich peered over his seat as Officer Isabel frantically searched for her shotgun, and Cody struggled to stay out of her way.

Sidney attempted to find the proper handhold to haul herself up through the shattered window now above her. She planted her feet against the back of the front seat and started to push herself up toward the opening when a shape moved across the window.

The wave probed at the edges of the shattered window frame, fingers made up from what appeared to be the pink, hairless bodies of moles and baby mice about to spill over inside the vehicle.

Sidney dropped back down as Snowy began to furiously bark. She searched the inside of the car for some place that they could go, believing that it was only a matter of seconds before the mass of life flooded the vehicle to get at them.

“Can we crawl out the back window?” Sidney asked as Rich tried to maneuver himself over the seat.

But it was too late.

The living mass started to extend down into the overturned SUV, and Sidney came to the sickening realization that she might not survive the night after all.

The blast from the shotgun was deafening within the enclosed space, and the tendril comprised of insects, mice, moles, and hundreds of earthworms exploded spectacularly to spatter them and everyone inside the SUV.

“Get out, get out now!” Officer Isabel screamed.

Sidney didn't need to be told twice. She climbed up the back of the front seats, grabbing hold of the window frame to haul herself outside. Isabel was already out, sitting atop the front passenger door, shotgun aimed.

“Move it, Sidney,” she commanded.

Sidney spun around on her knees and leaned back in through the broken window. “Push Snowy up to me!”

Rich and Cody managed to get the dog up, her legs scrambling wildly for purchase as Sidney pulled her through the window, nearly falling off the SUV in the process.

The shotgun fired again, and then again.