Zombie Raccoons & Killer Bunnies (32 page)

Bethany and her dad showed up at seven on the dot.

Milo issued them each a fully loaded Super Soaker Flash Flood.

“Thanks,” said Bethany’s dad. He tested the action by nailing an innocent hydrangea bush. “Nice.”

As they strolled along the sidewalk, with frequent stops for Bethany to fill Milo in on local unwildlife and for Milo to make notes, they were greeted by neighbors this time. Milo often had to endure introductions. Bethany told everyone Milo was practicing to be a census taker in 2010. He was glad he had his Super Soaker on a shoulder strap. There was a lot of handshaking involved, and people told him more than he could write down.

“How come you didn’t use the dog as a spy tool?” Bethany asked. They had stopped on a corner and studied the different directions they could go.

“Paladin is not a calm dog,” Milo said. “He’d be pulling my arm out of the socket every time I stopped to take notes.” So far they hadn’t seen any possums, and Milo was feeling let down.

“Daddy, what’s that black van doing?” Bethany pointed down Elm Street toward a block that was not part of Milo’s route. A tall, shiny black van was parked in front of a fire hydrant.

“Good question,” said Bethany’s dad. He glanced at his Super Soaker, then at the van. In a cage match, Milo guessed the van would crush the Super Soaker.

“Hey, there’s a possum,” said Milo. It was under a snowball bush in the Salehs’ front yard. And yes, its eyes glowed red for no apparent reason.

“Do we just shoot it to see what happens?” Bethany asked.

Milo marked a P on his map. “Let’s look around some more first.”

“What if it’s the only one we see?”

“It’s not,” said Milo. He pointed his pen toward the Ford house. Another small animal shape hunched beside the stone pedestal the mailbox sat on. It turned red eyes toward them.

“Why are they watching us?” asked Bethany’s dad.

“We’re big potential threats in their environment,” Milo said. “Although I’m not sure that’s why. But if I were an animal, I’d be watching people, too. Let’s find one more, and then we can zap it.” He wasn’t sure why he thought they should wait for three. Something about leaving a breeding population? Not that he could tell gender in distant possums. Who knew if the first two were boy and girl? But he was giving a nod to ecological correctness. Besides, what could water do to a possum? Get it wet.

“There’s one over there,” said Bethany. She pointed down the block away from the black van. “Hi, Alanis.”

They paused while Bethany talked to a girl about her age for a few minutes. Milo made more marks on his map: the girl (not a woman, not a child; he settled on G), two dogs, and three more lurking possums. Bethany’s dad, whom Milo had learned was named Razi, though Milo didn’t dare call him that, lurked like a possum, a silent presence behind the three of them.

“What’s with all the guns?” the girl asked.

“We’re going to shoot a possum,” said Bethany.“Have you noticed them?”

“The last three nights,” said Alanis. “First time I saw one was after I babysat the Ford kids. Walking home afterward, those red eyes, oh, my God, I was ready to scream!”

“Can we do it now, Milo?” Bethany asked.

“Sure,” he said.

“Let’s pick one.” Bethany pointed to a possum under a hedge in front of the Bliss house. “Ready? Aim—”

“Don’t cross the streams,” said Bethany’s dad as Milo put down the clipboard and swung his Super Soaker into position.

Was that a
Ghostbusters
joke? Milo wondered as Bethany yelled, “Fire!” and they all let loose on the poor unsuspecting possum. It screamed and smoked and waddled away. They all dashed to where it had been. No twisted metal this time, only scorched leaves in the hedge.

“That is not a natural animal,” said Bethany’s dad.

“Let’s shoot another one,” Alanis said.

Milo retrieved his clipboard. They turned a corner, located another possum, and fired. This one shrieked as well. It sounded more like a
Star Wars
robot than an animal. Bethany’s dad kept shooting it until he’d expended all his ammo, and this time they found a little piece of something in the smoking spot the possum left behind. “Nobody touch it,” said Milo. He pulled gardening gloves, pliers, and a glass baby food jar out of his back pocket and put the piece carefully into the jar. It was hissing still. “Now we just have to figure out where to get it analyzed.”

“My company has a lab,” said Razi. Milo handed him the sealed glass jar.

They searched in vain for more possums, even consulting Milo’s map from the night before. All of them had vanished.

 

Paladin barked his way into Milo’s dream about alien possums, and this time he was serious. Before Milo opened his eyes, Paladin gave one last yelp and shut up.
His weight shifted off Milo’s feet. Milo knew someone else was in the room.

His bedside light switched on. He sighed and opened his eyes. Two men with short hair and dark business suits were there, the black one with his hand around Paladin’s muzzle, and the white one beside the bedside light. They both struck Milo as armed, though their clothing didn’t bulge visibly.

“To what do I owe the honor?” Milo said.

The white guy sat in Milo’s nephew’s desk chair, seemingly unperturbed that it was shaped like a captain’s chair on a TV starship. “We’ve got a bill for you.”

“Huh?”

“Destroying government property. You know how much those surveillance devices cost?”

“No,” said Milo.

“They’re prototypes. This is a pilot project. They each cost more than you could make in a year if you were actually employed, and you damaged three of them.”

“I don’t have any money,” he said, though he suspected poverty was no defense.

“It’s all right. You can work it off.” The man lifted Mi lo’s clipboard, with its stack of marked and unmarked maps. “We’ve been observing you, and even though you’re really raw at information gathering, we think you have potential. All you need is training.”

“But I—”

“Think about it, kid.” The man set an invoice down in front of Milo, who gasped when he saw the total. Way too many zeros. “You’d be working for the Department of Homeland Protection, so you know you’re guaranteed a lifetime of work. You can get this money somehow—though with your student loan situation, we’re not sure how—or you can make this all go away by signing up to
work for us. We’ll give you training and real good benefits. You have until tomorrow to decide.”

 

Milo helped Tad unload the van of suitcases and progeny. Sherry had griped, griped, griped all the way home from the airport. Europe was full of people who didn’t speak English and didn’t shave
anything
and smelled bad. The Cokes tasted different. Everything was dirty and small and old. And the house better be in good shape, or Milo was going to learn all about pain.

Milo just smiled as Tad and the kids rushed forward to greet Paladin. He decided he’d wait a while to tell Sherry he had a new job, a new underage girlfriend, and a sociology paper that was going to raise his GPA. Let her stew while he savored.

“What happened to my hydrangea bush?” she screamed.

He’d forgotten to clip off the burned parts. The rest of it looked fine. Oh, well. If it wasn’t the hydrangea, it would have been something else. That’s what Razi and his wife said. As did most of the other people he’d met around here. Sherry was always complaining about something, and the neighbors knew better than to take her seriously.

Oh, yeah. She’d find out pretty soon she’d lost her neighbor cred.

Milo smiled.

THE RIDGES

T
he red fox stopped, suddenly, when a rusty floodlight flipped on automatically, illuminating a limestone pillar. Twilight was setting in, and the predator had been pursuing a rabbit that was proving to be more athletic
than it should be. The rabbit’s scent was overpowering, but the bright light caused the fox to stop and freeze. After a brief pause, she didn’t see or smell any immediate danger, and she decided to resume the hunt.

Before moving on, the fox squatted and left her mark at the base of the roughly carved pillar that was wrapped in out-of-control ivy and bind weed. If she could read English, or understand the language of man, the fox would know that she had just crossed a boundary and entered a gathering of human homes known as The Ridges.

The fox was uninterested in the boundaries and languages of man. At the moment, she was only interested in finding enough to eat to last through the night at hand.

Like all foxes, this one knew no boundaries other than her own—but this was no ordinary fox. She had no fear of man—and she
did
understand their language.

All too well.

Kyle Ludlow had been given the unlikely nickname of Kravitz by his ex-girlfriend, Ramona, not long after they moved in together. For the most part, Kyle didn’t mind the nickname even though it implied that he was a busybody, or as Ramona was quick point out, after his many quirks had gone from cute to tiresome, he was
more
than a busybody—he was a class-A nib-shit.

As far as Kyle was concerned, you can’t argue with the truth. He had accepted his inner nib-shittyness long before Ramona Withers came into the picture.

What Kyle had minded, though, was Ramona’s constant nagging and judgmental attitude about everything,
from the color of the living room curtains in their furnished apartment to the two “allowed” sexual positions in their brief romantic relationship. She had an opinion about everything, and no one else was allowed to have an opinion that was opposed to hers. Period.

Like
he
was the only one with issues.

Ramona hit the road after a couple of months of living together, and he went back to his nib-shit single life, living in the suburbs, in the basement of the house he grew up in, writing C++ programs at night and caring for his ailing father during the day.

It was an okay life, even though it could be a little monotonous and monastic. He’d sworn off the Internet dating life after meeting Ramona on a website that was supposed to cater to geeks only. She was a geek all right. A control geek. There were worse things than being on a female diet, or fast, as Kyle liked to think of it, but he did get lonely sometimes.

His dad, referred to affectionately as Baba since Kyle could remember, was getting worse by the day, and he needed Kyle more than Kyle needed to find another relationship to destroy—so the fast was okay. Life as a C++ monk could stay just the way it was at the moment.

The nickname Kravitz, however, caught on with his friends (three that you could actually touch, the rest could only be reached by keyboard), family (four cousins on his father’s side who lived within a three-mile radius), and neighbors (everyone on Kyle’s street knew he was a class-A nib-shit whether they liked it or not), even though most people were unaware of the genus.

Even Kyle would forget, from time to time, that the name had originated from his ill-fated relationship with Ramona.

Kyle was constantly explaining to new people that he
was not related to the pop singer Lenny Kravitz. To start with, they looked nothing alike, and singing was not a talent that Kyle even remotely possessed.

It would’ve been cool to have Roxie Roker (Helen from
The Jeffersons
) as a mom, though.

He looked like a typical thirty-year-old slacker, a little too hip (in his mind) to be classified as a computer nerd—but he was forever dressed in cargo shorts, T-shirts with stupid quotes like the classic “I’m With Stupid,” and sandals, in the summer—so he essentially
was
a classic computer nerd, minus the taped-together glasses and proverbial pocket protector.

His winter wardrobe consisted of flannel shirts, jeans, and hiking boots. His black hair hit the middle of his back and was usually tied back in a ponytail, the only outward sign of Asian ancestry. His Anglo ancestry was more apparent, overwhelmingly so—he was the spitting image of his father, whose family had immigrated to America from England in the twentieth century, save the color of his hair. Baba had a royal profile but lacked the British accent, manners, and bloodline to act as if he were anything other than a commoner.

Kyle’s pale skin was void of piercings and tattoos, but neither were entirely out of the question. The right moment had not presented itself, and Kyle’s aversion to needles was legendary—he’d screamed endlessly during all of his vaccines—so it was almost a certainty that he’d only submit to a needle if it was absolutely necessary.

His eyes were as blue as a perfect day at the beach, and his skin was quick to burn, which was one of the reasons he rarely ventured out into the sunlight for any length of time.

One of the great things about being a freelance computer
programmer, about working from home, was he could work when it was best for him.

Nighttime was when Kyle Ludlow felt most alive, when he was in tune with his own true nature. He had always been more active at night, even when he was a baby, according to his father. His mother, a beautiful girl from Japan whom Baba had met when he was stationed in Okinawa after the fall of Saigon, had died two days after Kyle was born, so Kyle had no memory of her, but he had apparently kicked all through the night, every night, during the pregnancy, right up to the time he popped out, feet first.