The Influence (34 page)

All of them were offering him jobs. 

He blinked, thinking for a moment that he was dreaming. 

He wasn’t. It was astounding, this sudden wealth of opportunities, and he scrolled down the list, reading each message, overcome by the offers, any one of which he would be grateful to accept. He noted the locations—San Diego, Long Beach, Denver, Dallas, Houston—and the proposed salaries: a hundred and twenty, a hundred, a hundred and forty, a hundred and ten… 

Stunned, he sat there as the sun rose in the east. He’d heard that the economy was starting to rebound, but this was so ridiculously over the top as to be unbelievable. These offers were solid. Guaranteed. He had his pick of twenty-four positions, and all he had to do was decide which one he wanted. It was a dream come true, the answer to his prayers, every positive cliché he could come up with. He smiled. Suddenly, he was no longer of this place, and the problems that had been consuming him up to now seemed small and unimportant. Magdalena was about to be history, and he would never have to worry about weird storms or metamorphosing monsters ever again. 

Only… 

This was
one
of the problems. He knew it even as he tried to deny it. Like other people who had come into contact with that…thing, his luck had changed, the polarities of his fortunes had reversed, and he wondered if that was a survival technique on the part of the monster, a defense mechanism, a way to distract people from what should be their real focus. Because he
was
distracted. He didn’t want to be, knew he shouldn’t be, but his brain was already sifting through the pros and cons of various cities, weighing the positions and their compensation packages. In his mind, he had moved on, and Magdalena and everything that had happened here was rapidly fading into the past.  

Jill
. 

The thought of her grounded him instantly in the here and now. 

Lita
. 

This
wasn’t
just an interlude, a memory best forgotten. The past two-and-a-half months had been an important transitional period in his life. Lita and Dave were lifesavers, there for him when no one else had been, and Jill was someone who, for perhaps the first time, he could see spending his future with. No matter what occurred after, his time in Magdalena had been valuable and significant, and what had happened here would send ripples, good and bad, throughout the rest of his days. 

First things first. He needed to talk to Lita, Dave and Jill, and tell them about the offers. He was hoping he could convince Jill to come with him—which, after that freaky incident with her ex-dog, shouldn’t be too hard—but he thought that he should also try to get Lita and Dave to get away from Magdalena. His cousin and her husband weren’t going to find a solution to what was happening here; they were going to get sucked into the vortex. He saw that now. Instead of vanquishing the monster, they would become two more of its victims. They had new money. They could afford to go elsewhere, even if only for awhile, until this all blew over. 

If
it blew over. 

He thought of Jill’s paintings and their apocalyptic visions. 

Quickly, Ross got dressed, opening the door and looking toward the Big House to see if Lita and Dave were awake. 

The ground between the shack and the house was covered with bright red flowers. They had popped up overnight, and they were growing in the yard, in the hard dirt of the drive, in the garden. Dazed, he stepped outside, onto the porch, to get a more panoramic view. They were everywhere. The entire surrounding desert was a sea of red.  

And the flowers had faces. 

His heart was thumping so loudly he could hear it in his head. His legs were shaking. Seeing that cocooned body in Holt’s shed had been utterly terrifying, a feeling he did not think could be surpassed, but the scope of this took his breath away. In his wildest dreams, he would not have thought it possible for flowers to be scary, but the little crimson faces surrounded by sunbeam petals frightened him on a primal level he did not understand. They looked like something out of a video game, but they were not smiling and looking at him, not swaying from side to side or dancing in place. They stared straight ahead,
thinking,
and the mere fact that the plants were sentient was so wrong that his entire body was covered in gooseflesh. 

The flowers were whistling a song, he suddenly realized, in unison, and it was the same tune he and Jill had heard from the chickens in the middle of the night. 

Another noise cut through the cool morning air. The sound of a door slamming. Ross looked to the right, back toward the house, to see Lita running across the yard toward him, barefoot and wearing a bathrobe, apparently oblivious to the carpet of flowers through which she was running. He knew instantly that something terrible had happened—even if it had not shown in her face, it was there in her body language—and he stepped off the porch to meet her, feeling the soft give of the flowers beneath his shoes. The sensation was repulsive, like stepping on worms. 

“Oh, Rossie!” she cried, throwing her arms around him. 

“What is it?” 

“My mom died!” 

“Aunt Kate?” Of course it was Aunt Kate. What a stupid thing to say. 

Lita was sobbing. “I have to go, Rossie. I have to plan the funeral, I have to…I don’t know what I have to do, but there’s only me, and it’s all my responsibility.” 

He held her. 

“I want you to come with me.” 

He hesitated for only a second. “I think we should all go. Me, you and Dave.” Pulling back a little, he glanced around at the flowers. “Jill, too. I think we need to get out of here.” 

Lita nodded, numb but understanding, even in her grief recognizing the enormity of what was going on around them. For the first time she seemed to notice the flowers and, grimacing, she climbed onto his porch, lifting up first her right foot, then her left, in order to look at the soles and make sure that contact with those red abominations had not affected her skin.  

“Wear my slippers,” he said, going inside to retrieve them. “Then go back and get dressed.” He brought the slippers out, handing them to her. “They’re probably a little big for you, but it’s better than walking in your bare feet through…” He motioned toward the flowers. 

“Thanks.” 

“So where is your mom? And what happened?” 

She sniffled. “Albuquerque General. It was a drunk driver.” 

“Just like—” 

“Yeah.” She shivered even as she wiped tears from her eyes. “We got the call last night, in the middle of that storm. I’ve been up ever since. Dave fell asleep about ten minutes ago.” 

“I’ll drive, then. You’re both tired. Go back in, get what you need to get, wake up Dave, make whatever arrangements you have to make, and let’s get out of here as quickly as we can.” 

Lita frowned, turning her head. “What’s that music? Are those…are those flowers
whistling?” 

“Yes,” he told her. “So do what you need to do, and let’s go.” 

After watching to make sure she got safely back to the house, Ross went inside and called Jill. She was obviously still asleep—it took her five rings to answer the phone—and when she spoke, she sounded frazzled. But he told her they were leaving Magdalena and they wanted her to come with them. 

“Leaving?” she said. “What does that mean? For good?” 

“I don’t know.”  

But he did know. Although he hadn’t planned on bringing anything with him other than his laptop and the clothes on his back, Ross suddenly realized that he was leaving Magdalena and not coming back. It was time to cut and run. Wasn’t that the phrase politicians used? It was always meant as a pejorative, but sometimes bailing was the best policy. You needed to know when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em, and right now it was time to cut, run, leave, flee and put Magdalena in his rearview mirror. 

“Yes,” he said. “For good. And I want you to come with me.” He quickly explained to her about the rash of job offers, and Lita’s mother’s death. “After what happened yesterday with your dog, and everything else that’s going on, it’s not safe to be here anymore. We need to be realistic. We can’t fight this. We can’t do anything about it. All we can do is leave. You said yourself that you can do your telemarketing anywhere. Well, do it somewhere else. Maybe it’ll be safe to come back later, maybe not, but for right now, I think the best thing to do is to get as far away from Magdalena as quickly as possible.” 

He expected an argument, expected to have to do more to convince her, but to his surprise, she said, “Okay.” 

“Okay?” 

“Okay. I’ll get some clothes together, some other essentials…” 

“And we’ll pick you up at your place.” 

“I’ll drive myself. I’ll meet you downtown by the gas station. A half hour?” 

“Sounds good.” 

There was a pause. “Are there any…red flowers around Dave and Lita’s?” 

“Millions of them. And they all have faces.” 

“Just making sure. I’ll meet you by the gas station. Love you,” she told him. 

It was the first time either of them had said it, but it sounded natural, sounded right, and, just as easily, he replied, “Love you, too.” 

Hanging up, Ross looked around the room, quickly deciding what to take and what to leave. There was a chance he might come back for the rest of his stuff later, but for the moment he was assuming that he would never return. So he only needed the essentials. And those were? Laptop and clothes. He packed a small box of CDs for the trip as well, but left everything else, since all of it was easily replaceable. 

Dashing as quickly as he could over the flowers, he packed his laptop and suitcase in the trunk, put the CD box on the floor between the two front seats, and ran over to the Big House, where Lita and Dave were ready to go. He hadn’t told them yet that he was leaving for good and decided to have that conversation on the road. They shouldn’t come back either, but it would waste time to have that discussion here and now, and he figured he’d be in a better position to argue his point once they were away from the ranch. 

“I called Jackass,” Dave was saying. “He’ll take care of the animals and bees for us, feed Mickey while we’re gone.”  

“Okay,” Lita said. She was crying again. 

“Let’s go, then,” Ross suggested. “Before…” He trailed off.  

Before what?  

He didn’t know. But he was gripped by the strong feeling—the
certainty
—that if they did not leave quickly, they would not be able to leave at all. Irrational, he knew, but what wasn’t these days? 

He could tell from their grimaces that Lita and Dave were both as repelled by the sensation of walking over the flowers as he was, but they made it to the car, put their suitcase and toiletries in the trunk, and got in, Dave riding shotgun, Lita in the back. No one said a word as Ross started the engine and circled around the head of the drive before setting out for the road, rolling over the densely growing flowers. He half-expected to hear screaming, cries of pain as the plants were crushed beneath the wheels, but there was only that maddening song, only the whistling, and luckily the closed windows and the sound of the car’s engine kept its intrusiveness to a minimum.  

He drove slowly at first, almost gingerly, as though the tires were going over glass or nails and might pop at any second, but gradually he grew used to the sensation, and while he couldn’t see the road, he knew where it was, and by the time they approached the downtown, the car was humming along at a good forty miles an hour. 

There were no red flowers here. He was not sure where they had stopped, if they had gradually thinned out or if there’d been a line of demarcation, but by the time they passed the empty beauty salon, the road was clear. And not just the road. The yards, the vacant lots, the open areas of dirt were all free from those terrible blooms.  

Maybe, he thought, the further they moved away from Holt’s ranch and the monster in the smokehouse, the fewer the flowers. But Jill’s house was on the other side of the town, past this point, and she said that the plants had popped up in her area, so obviously that theory was completely wrong.  

It didn’t make any sense. 

None of this made any sense. 

Looking to the right before turning left onto the main street, he saw that the chimney-shaped mountain, the one with the M, was almost entirely red. 

Jill had said that she’d meet them at the gas station in a half-hour. It had already been twenty minutes, but when Ross drove into the grocery store parking lot, there was no sign of her. He glanced down at the gas gauge. He had a third of a tank, enough to get them to Willcox, maybe Deming, but definitely not as far as Las Cruces. Pulling next to one of the two pumps, he decided to fill up for the trip while waiting for Jill to arrive. There was no one in the cashier’s booth, however, and the pumps were so old that they had no automated card readers, so he could not charge the purchase. He was about to go into the store to find out if someone could help him, when he noticed a crowd gathering in the street. 

And coming toward the gas station. 

He probably shouldn’t have been as concerned as he was; for all he knew, they were also worried about what was happening and were coming over in an effort to find some answers. But his gut told him something different, and he backed against the car, opening the driver’s door, ready at a second’s notice to get in and take off. 

A good twenty people, mostly men but several women as well, were approaching the parking lot from the direction of the church. Others were emerging from buildings along the way to join the crowd. 

Where the hell was Jill? 

“That’s Vern,” Dave announced from within the car. 

“It is!” Lita said. 

“Who’s— ” Ross began. 

“The one with the knife.” 

In the front line of the advancing crowd, a hard-looking, hatchet-faced man was holding a long knife in his right hand. Ross got quickly back into the car, locking the door and turning on the engine. 

Goddamn it, Jill! 

The group of locals, now numbering closer to thirty, stopped to the left of the car, next to the cashier’s booth. Ross scanned the gathering for other weapons—in his mind, the Magdalenans were horrorshow villagers carrying rifles, pitchforks, shovels, ropes, staffs—but Vern’s knife seemed to be the only one in evidence.