Scribner Horror Bundle: Four Horror Novels by Joshua Scribner (31 page)

No, he didn’t need to think of that.
He just needed to remember.

But he did look. He did focus into the
shrunken backseat.

And Monica was not there.

Remember!
He just had to remember.
And he did remember. He remembered the last time he had seen her.
He remembered a clear image, the image that hadn’t registered in
real time when he had first looked into the
backseat.

Now, what he saw in that image was a
little girl who had, for some reason, taken off her seatbelt, the
strap and buckle loose on the side of her booster seat.

A woman screamed.

No, he didn’t have to look.

Remember was still there. He had
remembered. He had remembered the image that told him that he was a
terrible father, that he had neglected to pay attention and now the
unthinkable was reality. But there was still remember. It was
bigger, somehow.

But Sully did turn toward the scream.
He did walk toward the road. A few steps were as far as he needed
to go. Because he could see the bloody mass from there. She was
just across the road, but up a little, having somewhere flown out
the window. He had been a terrible father, and now she was on the
road.

Remember!
screamed out, in his own
voice. And Sully remembered.

#

Sully remembered that time had been
lost. He remembered that he had yet to return to school from
Christmas break. He had yet to celebrate his thirty-first birthday
in February. He had yet to even celebrate New Year’s Eve. Anna had
not given him the first draft of her new story that she projected
to be ready at the end of next month. Next month was January, not
April. Because this month was December, not March.

It was dark now. Sully remembered that
he was not driving Monica to meet her mother. He had dropped her
off a little while ago. He was now on his way home. He had become
tired and pulled over to rest his eyes. He got the car back on the
road. And again, Sully would not make it. He was far too shaken
from experiencing his worst fear, all too materialized in the
dream, vision, or whatever the hell it was.

Was it an omen? It didn’t matter. He
would assume it was. Fuck getting over the fear. He could fear his
life away, so long as Monica would still be with him.

Sully hit the next hotel exit. He
didn’t have to sit in the car this time, though. He was able to
function. He thought that might be due to the clarity. If it was an
omen, then he would simply not let that omen be
fulfilled.

But then he thought it was more than
the clarity that allowed him to function. It was more that what he
had just been through went far beyond the threshold of what he was
willing to consider and willing to feel. Maybe he was just
suppressing it, because if he really let it come to the surface, it
would destroy him completely, just as it would if it had been
real.

He would not think on it again this
night. Instead, he went straight to bed and fell right asleep. In
his dreams, the coma men were not in the mist, and he was able to
breathe and move around.

#

It had not been a white Christmas. In
Oklahoma, it rarely was. Sully had seen two that he could recall.
Now, a few days after Christmas, driving home, Sully got to see the
little flakes. They melted when they hit the ground, but it was
still nice to look at, adding character to the plains, which seemed
to stretch out forever. Not far after Oklahoma City that snow
stopped. The show was over, and Sully knew he had to think about
the things stabbing at his mind. There would be no trance this
time, driving on the sleepy interstate. He would have to think and
think hard.

The night before he had suffered the
worst experience of his life. Nothing he remembered in his waking
life and no nightmare he could think of touched it. The tornado had
been hard, but it was something he could bear; the fear of death
was something he could bear. The monster, the thing from the sky
that had tormented him on the second trip, was something that he
could handle. Its threat had been horrifying in the moment, but the
threat of it returning had not been enough to stop him from making
the trip again, living his life.

But last night. Last night he had
known what it would feel like to have his daughter taken from him.
It had, like the other visions, seemed so real. But worse than
that, was that its scene was in the future. It seemed like an omen.
Make the trip again, and lose the most important thing about you.
It was a fear that you didn’t know for the first part of your life.
It was a fear that changed you. From the first time you saw that
little face, the first time you saw its belly bob up and down and
saw its eyes open, unless there was something terribly wrong with
you, you feared losing that more than you feared the depths of any
hell.

“My worst fear,” Sully said out loud,
driving down the road. He was not a shrink. He was a mathematician.
He didn’t understand the way the mind worked, how far it could go,
what crazy could be. Flashbacks seemed feasible enough.
Evolutionary programming. Your mind’s way of saying, hey, I need
you to remember this, so you don’t let it happen again. But the
totality of this went beyond flashbacks. It was more than a memory
of the night when he had met the tornado. The thing from the second
trip, his daughter dying, they had nothing to do with the
tornado.

Or did they? Symbolically. The
monster, like the tornado, had come from the sky. And to do what?
Snatch him up. Make things black. And Monica. Was his mind so
desperate in its attempts at self-preservation that it had linked
traveling with the fear of all fears? That seemed like a rational
explanation. At least, it seemed as rational as he could come up
with right now. And it made him feel a little better. An idle
threat was a lot easier to swallow than a horrific omen.

The high-tone of his cell phone
brought him from his thoughts. Anna maybe. Or possibly Faith,
calling to say that they had made it safely to their place. That
would be nice. The vision had increased his fatherly protective
sense. He had wanted to know that Monica was safe ever
since.

Sully hit the button, said hello, and
then was surprised to hear neither of the expected female
voices.

“Sully,” his father said.

Sully had to take a few seconds to
gather his thoughts. Then he said, “Yeah, Dad. What’s going
on?”

“Where you at?” his dad asked with
urgency in his voice.

“Not far past OKC. Why? Is everything
okay? Is Mom okay? Anna?”

“Oh. Yes. They’re both fine as far as
I know. I was just wondering where you were at. I was wondering if
you had seen the mess up on Thirty.”

Sully was intrigued, and for more than
one reason. He wanted to know about the mess on Thirty. But he also
wanted to know why his dad would do something so uncharacteristic
as to call him about such a thing. It would be more like his dad to
wait until the next time he saw him. His mom might call, but even
she would wait until he got home. And there was something with his
dad’s voice, a kind of nervousness.

“What happened?” Sully
asked.

His dad took a few seconds to answer.
Sully thought he could hear a slight strain in his breath. “Another
propane explosion. This time a truck. Massive thing. They’re still
cleaning up the mess.”

“Wo!” Sully said and then waited. When
his father said nothing, Sully asked his next question. “When did
it happen?”

Again, his dad took a while to speak.
Then he said, “Late last night.”

“Anyone we know?”

His dad was quicker this time. “Oh no.
Don’t even think the fella had business around here. Must have come
off the interstate looking for a rest stop to park at.”

“I guess so,” Sully said.

They were both silent for a few
seconds, then his dad said, “Well, I just thought I’d let you know,
in case you were close to it.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

“All right, Sully. We’ll see
ya.”

Sully hung up his cell phone. For a
little while, he continued to wonder about his dad. But he gave up
on that when something else entered his head. It was something that
he thought he never would have considered had there not been other
pieces of madness in his life. But now it was something he could
not ignore. He had now made three trips, and there had been three
deadly fires, each time, while he was gone. One was nothing. Two
was a coincidence. Three was a pattern.

#

When Sully got home, he found Anna at
the dining room table, sitting in the middle chair. A look of want
was on her face, but it wasn’t the look she had when what she
wanted was him, that look that said she would take him, like it or
not—and he always did. This look actually contained a question.
Cattycorner to her was the short stack of papers.

“It happened again,” Anna said. “I
didn’t want to write another short story, but this one showed up,
and I couldn’t resist.”

A magazine was going to publish the
last short story she had written. The pay wasn’t really worth her
time, but the publicity would be good.

“I’ll read it immediately,” Sully
said, answering the unspoken question.

“Thanks,” Anna said.

Sully took the manuscript back to the
bedroom. It absorbed him immediately. He read it, page by page,
over his head, as he lay flat on his back.

A small town had been hit by a strange
affliction. Several of its residents had become catatonic, standing
or lying around, not speaking or otherwise communicating with
anyone. With no explanation, and suspecting terrorism, the
government sent in a team of medical experts to investigate. The
experts arrived to find the entire town afflicted, but now they
were moving. Men, women, and children were digging holes in the
ground. They would not respond to the investigators in any way.
Stunned, but confident in their gas masks and body suits, the
investigators decided to look into it. A series of clues led them
to a house in the center of town. When they found nothing in the
house, they realized that they had been tricked, but it was too
late.

They came outside to find themselves
surrounded by hundreds of mutated snakes. These snakes looked about
like any bull snake would, a few feet long, brown and black, a tube
for a body. But these snakes had heads about the size of baseballs,
and they were fangless. The snakes attached themselves to the
investigators and sucked like oversized leeches. But no blood or
anything else corporal came from the investigators. When the snakes
were done, the investigators were zombies. These zombies then
joined the other zombies in building new dens for the snakes to
live in. The snakes then discussed plans to extend their colony
before the humans could figure out what was going on and use
technology to destroy them.

Finished, Sully returned to the dining
room, where Anna was still at the table, now munching on a
salad.

“So?” she said.

“All right,” Sully replied, pulling up
a chair. “I think I got it.”

Anna laughed, but Sully barely
noticed.

“The reptilian mind in very primitive.
Snakes don’t think that much. They’re basically reactive,
instinctive.”

“Sure,” Anna agreed, smiling, letting
him know that he was onto something.

“Now, your snakes have somehow
developed a bigger brain. They have the higher cortical areas that
would allow them to use higher reasoning. They can think like
humans do.”

Anna nodded. “Well, actually, they’re
a little more advanced, but keep going.”

The snakes had been able to use some
sort of telepathy to get the human zombies to do their bidding. So
Anna was right; they were more advanced.

“But snakes don’t have a spirit,”
Sully said. “At least, according to popular religion and the needs
of your story, they don’t.”

Anna nodded
enthusiastically.

“So they sucked the spirits out of the
humans.”

Sully stopped and thought about Anna’s
previous story and what she had told him, then said, “That’s why
the humans became like drones. Their spirits were removed, but
their lifeforce remained. They became like vacant lifeforces. Alive
in the physical sense, but empty, thoughtless shells, good for
nothing but obeying orders.”

They stared at each other for a few
seconds. Then Anna said, “You got it figured out. Now tell me what
you think about it.”

Sully had to refocus his mind on a
different line of thinking. Anna had asked for more than the
riddle’s solution; she wanted to know if he had had a good
time.

“It’s great, hon!” Sully said. “Send
that puppy off.”

Anna nodded. “I’ll get right on
it.”

Sully’s mind drifted. He thought of
his visions and the coincidences of three fiery deaths. And of all
the people to discuss this with, none would be better than Anna.
Anna could look at things in a different light. Anna had made the
transmudane her livelihood. But somehow, Sully couldn’t talk to her
about it right now. He remembered thinking he hadn’t told Anna
about the earlier things, the tornado and the beast from the sky,
because he thought he needed to do this alone. But he was now
positive that wasn’t the case. His silence was caused by fear, and
his fear was unlocalized. He couldn’t point to a reason. It was
like traveling had been, and in many ways, still was. He didn’t
know what his fear protected from or even whom it was meant to
protect.