Shifting

Twelve

Mrs. Hatchell found us in the early morning. I awakened to find her tapping at my boots. There was a carved frown of disapproval on her face. I glanced at Monika, sleeping in her cot across the room and felt a flush of embarrassment. This was quickly followed by a feeling of irritation. I wondered if she would ever get over treating me like a kid.

“Yeah? What is it?”

She waved me out into the hall. I grunted and rolled gently off the cot and put on my shoes quietly so as to not awaken Monika, who made a murmuring sound but stayed asleep as I left. I stumbled into the hallway. Hatchell looked at me reproachfully over her reading glasses.

“Gannon, I don’t think you should be taking advantage of her.”

“Mrs. H.,” I said, “the world is being eaten nightly by monsters and I think there are more important things to worry about.”

She glanced back into the room, at Monika, still frowning. “Gannon, have you thought about your actions? Can you imagine bringing a new life into the world the way it is right now? It would be a crime.”

I made a sound of exasperation. “Is there something I can help you with, Mrs. Hatchell?”

She kept frowning at me. “The Nelson family came in last night, all except for little Holly Nelson. They’ve asked for volunteers to go back and get her. She’s only eleven.”

“Why did they leave her behind?”

She made a fluttering motion with her hand. “Something chased them out. They lost her out there at night. You know how her father is in a wheelchair. They are begging for help and most people are just looking ashamed.”

I nodded. There were few of us willing to go out and face the world as it was now. “I’ll do it. Me and Vance.”

She nodded and was about to stalk off when she paused. “One more thing. There’s a storm coming in. A big, strange one by the look of it.”

“Great,” I said.

After she left I gently awakened Monika and we went out to find some breakfast and Vance. The Nelson family found us first and gave us tearful thanks. I nodded and felt uncomfortable. Mrs. Hatchell must have gone and told them immediately. Everyone knew the odds were bad. I hated the idea of coming back and telling the Nelson’s that their daughter was torn to pieces, or worse, that she had turned into a lizard and we had killed her.

I sighed, knowing that I was committed now. Looking outside, the skies did indeed look to be darkening with a storm. The wind was gusting up and plucking the last of the leaves off the trees.

Monika sent me out into the storm with a worried look. A lock of her hair kept slipping down into her face and she kept pushing it back. I liked that. She gave me a thermos of hot coffee she’d gotten somewhere and a brown sack with a tunafish sandwich in it. I hated tunafish, but I smiled anyway.

She gave me a kiss on the cheek that left a wet spot that quickly cooled in the winds to an icy tingle. She only said one thing: “Come back.”

Vance watched all this with interest and was on me before we had gotten across the parking lot.

“Well?” he demanded.

“What?” I said in annoyance.

“Did you?”

“What?”

“You know what, dammit. Did the best man win or not?”

“I think she likes me, if that’s what you mean,” I said vaguely. On some level I was enjoying his discomfiture as much as he was enjoying mine.

“Come on, Come on,” he complained. “Did you get down to business with her or not? That cot was pretty dammed cozy.”

“I got a second cot for her.”

“You what?”

“I’m not going to get into any details with a joker like you.”

He stared at me for a moment.

I attempted a poker face, but it didn’t work.

“You wimp!” he exclaimed. “You didn’t do a thing, did you?”

“Shut up, Vance.”

He sputtered and made sounds of disbelief as we turned onto Bohlend drive and began climbing the slope. The Nelsons lived at the very end of Bohlend drive just outside of town.

“You know what,” Vance told me. “If you were a dog, you would be poodle. One of those poodles that rolls over on its back when you come near and wizzes itself. A real piss-and-shiver dog.”

I turned on him and might have punched him, but we both heard something big rumbling behind us. It was the storm.

We looked up blinking at the sky. It didn’t look right. There was a black billowing cloud shaped like an anvil in the middle of the overcast sky. A contrasting wisp of white like a streak of cotton moved quickly over the face of the anvil. There came a flash of light, like lightning, but there was no thunderclap, just the rumbling sound. The anvil-shaped cloud was impossibly dark, and seemed unnatural. Worse, the flash of light inside it seemed to be twinged with red.

“Lightning?” I said almost hopefully.

“What kind of devil’s lightning is that?” demanded Vance. “It was red. I swear it was red. Man, did you see it?”

I nodded, but wasn’t really listening to him. I had caught sight of the lake. I gestured and pointed.

We had made it up to the top of the only hill in Redmoor on the East side. It wasn’t very high, but it was enough to see over the trees and houses to the Lake. The water there was as black as slate flecked with silver. Even at this distance I could see the waves the storm was kicking up. It was like looking at an open beach along the Atlantic. And out there, under the storm and under the waves too, I thought I saw a light. A blue-green glow. After a few seconds the glow died down and the Lake was just roiling dark water again.

Vance turned back to me, and I could see from the horrified look on his face that he had seen it too. For once he was speechless. The wind was beginning to gust up into a roar at times now. The trees bent and whipped at the sky.

“Let’s get moving. If that girl is out here we had better find her fast,” I shouted over the winds. We turned and hurried up Bohlend Drive.

We actually found the girl. I think we were more surprised than she was when she popped out of an abandoned car and came up behind us to grab our coats. We hadn’t even made it up to the Nelson place yet, and we were so distracted by the storm that we hadn’t heard her cries as we passed the car in which she had hidden.

Holly Nelson was a preteen and not a little girl anymore. You could tell she would have real breasts and hips within a year or two, but right now, she was wearing pajamas with yellow bears blowing bubbles on them. She was rail-thin with long wet hair that had pasted itself in black stripes over her face. Her bright green eyes shone with fear out of her very pale face. In her hand, she gripped a six-inch long screwdriver with a green resin handle.

“I–I was hiding in the car,” she told us in between sobs. “Things came after me, little things. They couldn’t get in. I spent the night in there.”

“We’ll take you back to your parents, everyone is fine,” I told her.

“Things?” asked Vance, grabbing her arm. She nodded, and I saw Vance’s radar go on. He eyed the soaking landscape around us nervously. I couldn’t blame him.

Vance patted her shoulder. “Were they flying things?”

She nodded again.

Vance recoiled and his hand leapt from her shoulder as if she somehow had delivered a shock to his fingertips.

“Let’s move,” I said and there was no argument from either of them. We headed back toward the medical center. We had less than a mile to go, but the storm was moving in off the Lake unusually fast.