The Tent: A Novella (8 page)

With a grin, he shakes his head.
The age old question, hombre, but what fun it is pursuing the answer.

The kid is close enough for him to touch now, and stiffens, raises his shoulders. Head bowed, he looks up at Greg from beneath a furrowed brow and the ragged theater wings of his damp hair.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” Greg tells him. “I promise. But if you’re hurt, I want to help you, understand?”

Again, no indication from the boy that he understands anyt
hing, but despite his defensive posture, he does not move away this time, and Greg takes that as a positive sign. He slowly moves around the boy, inspecting his neck for bruises or wounds, and sees nothing but fish-belly white skin, the shivering intensifying.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Greg says in the same comforting, disarming tone he uses to such great effect on his dates. The backpack is covered in a
thick layer of slowly drying mud, the weight of which goes some way toward explaining the discomfort on the child’s face when the blanket touched it. God knows how far the poor kid trekked with all that crap on his back.

“First things first,” he says, “Let’s get this thing off you.”

The kid goes rigid, turns to stone, but Greg figures it’s now or never and quickly grabs the sides of the backpack, intending to lift it up to relieve the boy of his burden.

A moment of confusion as the backpack, much heavier than he anticipated, moves liquidly beneath Greg’s fingers, as if he has grabbed a slimy bag of fish, and he grimaces as the mud begins to slough off around and through his fingers. Repulsed as he is, he decides it is better to keep going. Dropping something this heavy back
down on the kid’s back might send him sprawling. That would be the perfect time for the other couple to poke their heads out of the tent, wouldn’t it?
Hey
, he imagines them yelling at him,
leave that poor kid alone
.

“Jesus,” he hisses through his teeth. “What have you got in here, kid, rocks?”

An inch from the boy’s flesh, and the backpack snags on something, something that resists Greg’s efforts, and no matter how hard he pulls, it refuses to yield to him.

The boy lowers his head further, begins to sob, and Greg feels a rush of guilt.

I’m hurting him. I should just—

It is at that moment that he catches of glimpse of what’s holding the pack in place. It’s something black and knuckled, like a long, thin, spindly twig, and it appears to be buried in the boy’s shoulder.

More of the mud slides off, splattering Greg’s shoes. He doesn’t notice.

“What the fuck?”
he asks, forgetting himself, as he hoists up the other side of the backpack as far as it will go, as much as it will let him, and notes another of the black knuckled sticks on that side too, the length of it seeming to sprout from the pack into a raw red puncture wound on the boy’s back, connecting one to the other.

The backpack moves, and with a cry of fright, Greg releases it, and watches the boy stagger forward a step before its weight.

“I don’t know…” Greg says, appalled. “I just…what the hell is that thing, kid?”

His mind floods with images of child torturers and abusive parents, of weird cults, and maniacs, and still he shakes his head. He has been alive for half a century and has never encountered anything like this.

And then he notices something hanging from the underside of the backpack, at the small of the boy’s back. At first glimpse it appears to be a water vessel of some kind, but it looks too fleshy for that, and although he has no problem admitting that there is a lot he doesn’t know about the world, one thing he’s pretty sure of is that canteens don’t glow, or look like plant bulbs. And as he watches, his hand straying to his brow as if to contain his confusion, the light begins to pulsate.

First: amber.

The child’s shuddering worsens.

Then orange.

The boy falls to his knees as the backpack, presented with a more formidable, mature, and therefore infinitely more useful host, begins to detach itself with the sound of a Velcro strap being torn away.

Then red.

And Greg Kohl, who has spent his last few years looking out only for himself, abruptly finds himself in service to another.

Forty-five minutes later, Danielle Miller, the camp attendant, arrives at work with a hangover that would have rivaled Greg Kohl’s in potency. And like the recently
appropriated
Mr. Kohl, Danielle’s thoughts are fixated this day on her partner, namely the girl she will, this coming weekend, be bringing to meet her folks for the first time. She suspects her mother will be shocked, but understanding, when she learns of her precious daughter’s sexual preference. She suspects her father will disown her. But the time for hiding, for lying and pretending she’s something she is not, and never has been, is over. And if the cost of liberation and honesty is the love of her father, then so be it. It will just mean that all those years of him claiming he would love her no matter what she did in life will make him the liar.

She pulls into the parking lot and kills the engine, sits for a moment in the stillness which is always her favorite part of the day. This is her second year working here, and so perhaps she no longer appreciates the beauty of the area as much as she once did, as others do, but she will always appreciate the quiet. Particularly today when she knows her bold claims about her father are not entirely true. She loves him, and always will.
And she knows he loves her too. She just wants more than anything for him to surprise her, to support her, to let them all move on as if nothing’s changed, because for Danielle, they haven’t.

She steps out of the car and grabs the brown bag containing the lunch Erica packed for her. The contents thrill her not at all. She’d much rather a double cheeseburger and fries from the nearby Wendy’s than the turkey wrap and kale chips, but they have a dieting pact and she’s determined not to be the first one to cave. She’ll still be starving afterward, but isn’t that
the point of a diet?

With a slight smile at the image of her beautiful Erica chastising her for her
thoughts of insubordination, she slams the car door, noting the presence of the old Toyota among the few vehicles remaining in the lot, and lets herself into the office. As it always has since it was first built, it smells of freshly cut timber, a smell she adores. Tossing her unappealing lunch on the chipped and scarred table, she goes to the window that grants a view of the trail and the camping ground at the crest of the hill.

She prays today of all days that
she won’t have to listen to the campers bitching about last night’s storm, as if she could have done anything to prevent it.

Then her heart sinks as a gust of wind across the campsite sends fallen material waving to her like a red hand.

Shit
. Of the two tents remaining in camp, one has fallen, victim, she assumes, of the storm. With a sigh of irritation, she realizes her hope that the owners left in the night as soon as the going got rough was a naïve one. She did warn them of the impending storm, after all. Told them it might be better to come back tomorrow. But those owners, a perv professor and his girlfriend—who looked young enough to be his daughter—clearly had other things on their minds to be bothered by such trivial things as caution.

She
’s about to move away from the window when, as if summoned by her thoughts of him, down the trail comes the creepy professor, the one who looked at her like a starving man looks at a rotisserie chicken when he checked in, his bespectacled eyes addressing her breasts as if they were doing the talking. He is disheveled and wearing what looks like a large muddy backpack, the weight of it clearly affecting his balance.

“Great,” she groans, encouraged even less by the stilted walk and pallid face of the man as he clomps his way toward the office, his expression like a man who has just received the worst kind of news.
Probably still drunk
.

What she cannot yet see from her limited viewpoint are the
small, faintly glowing, egg-like sores that are already beginning to surface around the professor’s throat. When she does register them, she will assume they are burns sustained from some kind of accident. She will only realize her mistake when those boils pop and send their contents into her eyes and open mouth.

And Danielle will forget
her diet in favor of a whole different kind of sustenance.

“So much for a hassle-free day,” she murmurs to herself, as she scoops up her keys and goes out to meet the professor.

In the pool at the bottom of the shaft dug by the creature at the behest of its puppeteer, its winged, flightless, dragon-like brethren swim in crude circles, blind and oblivious to the presence of the dead man impaled upon the stalagmite above them, but excited by the blood that rains down from Up There, a place the parasites attached to their undersides tell them they will one day visit for themselves…

…while Up There,
Greg the professor and Danielle, no longer driven by compulsions of their own, sit into their respective vehicles and shut the doors. They wait. Soon after, they are joined by the Professor’s girlfriend, and the couple from the other tent: Stan and Marcy Hopkins, all of them called to the parking lot by the parasite, all of them wearing faintly glowing necklaces of the creature’s incubating spawn. For a while none of them do anything but sit stock-still and listen to their new and merciless internal voices. Occasionally pain flickers across their faces as the parasite punishes their attempts to resist its influence, secreting painful toxins into their bloodstream until once more they are forced to obey, and rewarding them with brief surges of endorphins when they do.

At length, and in perfect synchronicity, bidden by commands clearer to them than the voices of their own muted consciences,
the egg sacs pulsing brighter as the creature nourishes its young in preparation for the hatching, Danielle, Greg, and Stan start up their vehicles and slowly reverse out of the campground parking lot.

Beyond the narrow lanes and the twisting mountain roads, the city awaits
, unaware of the alien threat that will soon infect its veins.

The parasite shivers in anticipation
as they clear the shadow of the mountain it has called home for a hundred thousand years.