Shifting

Twenty-Six

In the morning we made our way down into town. I felt with each step a sense of dread worse than I’d felt before facing the changelings. A changeling was of flesh and blood, and could be beaten. A vast loss of time was irreplaceable and could in no way be overcome. I couldn’t help but notice signs of time having past. The trees were beginning to lose their leaves now. Soon, there would only be a few left to hang on like the last loose teeth in an old man’s head. I noticed the roads seemed a bit more overgrown with weeds, as there was no one now to cut them. Had they looked that overgrown before I’d gone down that cave? I could not be sure. The streets in Redmoor were strewn with debris, but they had been that way after the storm, hadn’t they?

“Look,” said Monika.

I looked and we both halted. There was the center, at the end of the street. It was completely fenced, at least, as far as we could see. Chain links, arranged in a dull gray steel net, circled the parking lot. My heart sank. There was no way they could have gotten all that work done in one day.

Monika’s hand groped for mine. I took it, and together, with our stomachs in knots, we approached the medical center.

“At least, it looks like we aren’t going to be alone,” I said with a pathetic attempt at a light-hearted tone.

Vance was the first one to see us. There seemed to be a platform up against a tree behind the fence. A guard post, I supposed. He jumped down over the fence and approached with his rifle raised.

“Gannon?” he asked. I heard amazement in his voice. Monika squeezed my hand.

We got closer, and he didn’t look fat or bald or gray, that ruled out decades. I took a breath; it was the first I’d taken for awhile. Vance stopped advancing when he was maybe thirty feet from us.

“Vance, we’re back,” I said.

“Where…?” he asked, trailing off, looking from one to the other of us. “What have you been doing? We’d pretty much given up on you, I hate to say it.”

He didn’t rush up and hug us. In fact, he kept his distance. His gun wasn’t pointed at us, now, but it was at the ready. His frown told me he thought we might be shift-creatures. I realized that, in a way, he might be right.

“How long?” asked Monika, her voice quavered a bit.

“I don’t know,” said Vance. “Don’t you know? About two weeks, I would guess.”

Two weeks. I wasn’t sure if I should be relieved or not, but I was. I felt my chest muscles relax. I could breathe again.

“Two weeks,” I said, nodding. “Not that bad, I guess.”

Vance looked at us suspiciously and it seemed as if maybe he was embarrassed about his suspicions, but could not shake them.

“I don’t blame you for being worried, Vance,” I said. Then I told him our story. I told him about the cave and the creature Malkin that lived in it. I left out some of the details, but gave him the quick version.

He nodded, still looking uncertain. “Can I see you hands, and feet, brother?”

We showed him our extremities and they looked clean and normal. My bulbous pink toes and yellow nails had never looked so good to me.

Heaving a sigh then, he charged us and hugged us and jumped on us. He was Vance again. Even Monika smiled and it warmed my heart to see it. We all walked into the compound together.

“You smell like a monkey’s finger, Gannon,” said Vance affectionately. “How long has it been since you’ve had a bath?”

“Too long,” I said, smiling.

I gathered from talking to Vance that things had been relatively calm in my absence, allowing them to quickly build up the entire fence. He made a particular point to note that they weren’t using any more trees as fence posts. Not that the fence would actually stop one of them, if it were to come to life. Still, the fence did give you a certain sense of protection once you were inside the compound.

As we met the others inside, they had shocked reactions similar to Vance’s. Jimmy Vanton and Mrs. Hatchell in particular seemed shocked and disbelieving. I’m not sure that my return was entirely a benefit in their eyes. But Mrs. Hatchell soon warmed up, and everyone raptly listened to the longer version of my tale.

“How come these things only talk to you, Gannon?” asked Holly Nelson’s usually quiet mother, Shelly. She had hair that naturally formed a wild balloon of tight dark curls.

“We’ve all talked to one,” said Vance, speaking up in my defense. “Don’t forget the good Doctor Wilton.”

“What I want to know about are these glowing areas,” jumped in Mrs. Hatchell, never one to stay out of any conversation for long. “You say one of them is Elkinsville-absurd, but so is everything else these days. The second one though. What is behind that?”

Monika and I glanced at one another. “It is about where the pharmacy would be,” I explained.

“It’s her,” blurted out Monika, “the Doctor.” She looked shy afterwards and I could tell she was glad when no one argued the point.

“So, what the hell is she doing, burning sickly yellow incense out there?” asked Vance.

“We’ll have to find out,” I said. Everyone looked at me very intently. I realized slowly that my adventures, and even more critically, my returning unchanged from them, had raised my stature in the group. They were all looking at me to give them direction.

“And yes, I’ll do it.”

Monika didn’t look happy, but she didn’t object.

“Well,” Mrs. Hatchell said reasonably. “If one of those places is underwater, the Captain and the Preacher must have gone to the other, the one in town.”

I nodded, conceding the logic of it. The good Doctor now definitely warranted a visit. Then I thought about the Preacher and the Captain for the first time.

“You mean that neither of them has shown up?” I asked everyone. I stared at a group of blank, slowly shaking heads.

“I wonder if they could be under some spell or time-warp, or whatever, the way we were. What is the date?”

“The twenty-ninth,” said Shelly Nelson.

“Two days to Halloween. The Doctor kept talking about Halloween,” said Vance.

“Indeed she did. So no one has gone out to check on Wilton these last two weeks?”

Everyone looked a bit sheepish.

“That pharmacy is right on the other side of one of the lines on the map,” said Mrs. Hatchell. “One of the green ones. She set up camp very near a shift line, as you call them. No one wanted to go check that out, especially after your scouting party vanished.”

I nodded, understanding. “All right, I’m going to go make a social call then, first thing in the morning. Do you have any good food? We’re pretty hungry.”

Everyone jumped into setting up a good dinner. Nick Hackler cooked up some fresh barbecued chicken, stuff that had been kept on ice since the power had died, but now, even with the cold weather, it was getting gamey. We had a feast that night, knowing we had a long winter of canned goods staring us in the face.

Later, Vance and Jimmy Vanton, and even Mr. Nelson in his wheelchair came to talk to me quietly. Their eyes were haunted with shades of guilt. I did not ask them to come with me. Instead, I suggested that they all focus on gathering enough food to last the winter. They seemed relieved, every one of them.