Shifting

Three

We barely made it. Darkness comes fast in the woods, and tonight the setting sun was aided by sheets of mist which crept up from Lake Monroe. The fog pooled around the base of the hill, and moved its way up to the cabin. Both the mists and the darkness seemed to be in a race to beat us to the door. By the time we got there, the shadows from the trees formed a wall of impenetrable gloom over the clearing around the yard and the last yellow gleams of sunlight trickled through the branches. We set down the stretcher and scrambled to open the barbed wire barricades that were set up all around the cabin. Vance stabbed himself on the wire in his haste.

“Aww! Friggin’ wire,” he complained.

I watched blood well up on his hand in alarm.

“Don’t let the drops hit the ground,” I said.

“I know, I know, the scent.”

He wiped his bleeding hand on his coat. I chewed my lower lip, sure that some fresh blood had gotten on the wire and the ground, but we had no time to hose it down and dig it out now. We had to get inside.

In the cabin, the air was musty and dank, but smelled wonderful to me. For the first moment since we had set out that day on patrol, I felt the tension ooze out of me. I felt tired.

It was then, as I reached to close the cabin door, that I saw it.

A line of three-pointed prints crossed the yard and went around behind the cabin to the garage. Vance was looking over our guest whom we had laid out on the old ratty couch in the living room. I hissed unhappily and Vance was at my elbow in an instant.

“What is it?”

I pointed to the line of prints.

“It didn’t follow us, it beat us here,” said Vance. He made a show of smacking himself in the forehead with the palms of his hands. “I never even heard it. I don’t like this, Gannon.”

Neither did I.

We quickly overcame a slight pang of guilt and searched the girl’s backpack. Inside, we were surprised to find a passport.

“Czechoslovakia?” said Vance in bemusement. “Her name is Monika. That’s something anyway. If we have to bury her, at least we know her name. Is she some kind of student or mail-order bride or something?”

I handed him my find. It was a printout from a webpage. It was a profile from one of those people-search type pages. The picture at the top was Monika’s. She looked even better in the photo, and I noticed that her eyes were greenish. We read the note together.

Nice, responsible, patient and experienced 20 year-old Czech girl who has the thoughts of young person, but the responsibility and maturity of one older:)

Dear family, I wish I could live with you in Belgium — Antwerpen, or in Australia in future time. I worked as an au-pair for one year in the UK — Midlands. I lived in a family with 4 children, 3 dogs, and 6 horses. I was busy, but happy:) I can speak English fluently sometimes, sometimes less so. I have got a big family with many small cousins. I passed school at Klatovy with mark B in last years. I like astrology and paintings. I would like to earn extra money for my next studies. If you would like to know something more from me, please contact me.

Thank you! — Monika.

Vance was nonplussed. “What’s an au-pair?”

“A nanny,” I said.

“Ah,” he said, sounding a bit disappointed. “Well, at least she’s not married.”

“She sounds sweet,” I said. Somehow, the innocence of the ad made me feel homesick for the old times-the days when I did not have to setup barbed wire around my house before bed.

“Girls with accents can be hot,” said Vance speculatively.

Getting annoyed with his attitude, I turned on him, but then Monika made a mewling sound. We both leaned forward.

“We should have set her wrist.” I said, grimacing at the sudden thought. “Before she wakes up with that.”

“We didn’t have time,” Vance hissed back. “Anyway, we don’t know how. Doc Wilton will have to do it. What I can’t believe is that now she wakes up, after we carried her for hours.”

I took her injured hand and tried to lay it out as straight as I could. She squirmed. I could tell I was hurting her. Vance hurried to get more lanterns. It was dark outside now and we only had the one Coleman hanging from the ceiling.

Monika moaned at my crude ministrations. Her eyes fluttered open. Great way to meet a girl, I thought, the first thing she knows about me is that I’m causing her pain.

She looked up. Bafflement turned to fear, then to terror as she recalled what had happened. She said something incomprehensible that I imagined must be in Czech.

“I’m sorry, Monika,” I said gently, “Try English.”

Her mouth opened and closed a few times. “What happened?” she asked. She did have a soft European accent, which I liked immediately.

Vance came over, twisted his mouth and quickly said, “I’ll get you some cokes and stuff.”

He vanished into the kitchen. I knew he was leaving me behind to tell the girl about her dead companion.

“There was a car crash, and you were hurt.”

She looked at her wrist and winced as she touched her head with her good hand. “Where is Ron, and Billy?”

“Um,” I said, “What do you remember?”

“We left the city,” her eyes were searching the ceiling for answers. The fingers of her good hand probed her injuries delicately. “I was with Billy and his father, there were so many terrible things on the road. We turned into the wood. Something…. Something bad appeared in front seat. It hurt Ron, we crashed.”

I nodded. “Ron was driving?” I asked.

“Yes, Billy is only eight.”

“Well, I’m afraid Ron died in the crash. But we didn’t see any sign of Billy.” Even as I said it, I had a sudden, dark thought. “The boy, was he sitting up front with his father?”

“Yes, what?” she looked at me quizzically. Her eyes were dark with pain, grief, fear and shock. She looked too wrung out to cry anymore. I knew the look well.

“Nothing,” I said gently.

We rigged up some tape and sticks and a crude sling for Monika. When she was able to function, we all ate dinner from our stash of emergency rations. There was a moldy half-loaf of white bread we had rummaged out of Billson’s market downtown, venison jerky from last winter’s hunting and peaches in jars our mother had laid down years back.

The cabin had been our folks’ place before the meter-reader from Indiana-Michigan Power had grown claws and a head like a pumpkin one day. The meter man had begun methodically killing everyone on his route, including Dad, until a concerned citizen had put a dozen rounds in that mushy skull and stopped him. I’d never really been sure what had happened to my mother. She had died in the woods the same day as my dad, but I never knew who-or what had done it. From the pieces I’d found, I knew she was dead, and that’s all I knew. Now Vance and I owned the cabin.

It was cooling down fast outside, so I lit a fire in the ash-choked stone hearth. Feeling expansive, I fired up the generator long enough for everyone to have a hot shower. Nothing feels quite as good as a hot shower after days of running around in the woods. After dinner and bathing and some fresh clothes, Vance and I cracked open beers and Monika had some coffee and lit a cigarette. I didn’t smoke myself, but it didn’t bug me.

She noticed me watching her. “I quit when I was teen,” she said apologetically. “But today I make special day.”

I nodded. Today was indeed a special day. We had had a lot of them lately. I wondered if she really had any idea yet how special things were.

After a while, she carefully extinguished the cigarette and tucked it back into her crumpled little pack. I could tell this was a woman who knew how to make things last.

Vance was haunting the front window, peeking through the cheap, dusty, mini-blinds. “Anything out there, Vance?” I asked.

He shook his head.

“Just the same,” I said, “I think we should turn off the gen and use the Coleman.”

“Good idea, no point in wasting fuel.”

Monika watched us closely, frowning slightly. I wasn’t sure if she was picking up on our worries or if she was just concentrating on English.

“Tell us your story,” I said to her.

She looked very pretty now with washed hair and she even managed to flicker a smile at me. I liked her smile. Foreign girls never seemed to smile as much as American girls did. To me, her first smile was an important event.

“You read my profile,” she shrugged. “I came to U.S. in April, to Louisville. The family was nice. There were three kids, Billy and twin girls. Bad things started in the news, strange things. You know. But we didn’t really think it would get to us. So suddenly, things went bad. One day, the mother left with the twin girls…”

A shadow passed over her face, and suddenly I regretted asking her.

“They didn’t come back. Ron looked for them, I took care of Billy, but days went by. One day he came back bleeding-Ron did. Then, after few more days, he decide to try to make it up to Canada to his Uncle’s house. He showed me pictures. I didn’t know what to do; they had already closed the airports. Anyway, we didn’t make it. You can see.”

By the end she was struggling not to break down. Her story was vague, but it was her story. I made a mental note not to pry. I saw some tears and I nodded sympathetically. I resisted the urge to reach out and touch her, to comfort her, fearing she might take it the wrong way.

Vance didn’t miss the cue, however. He slid up next to her and put an arm around her shoulder. She responded immediately by touching her head to his chest and closing her eyes briefly. He opened his mouth and privately showed me a bit of tongue, gloating. My jaw muscles bulged as I clenched my teeth and gave him a tight smile. I hated him sometimes.

Monika lifted her head back up and edged away a bit so that she was no longer in contact with him. I watched approvingly as she sipped her coffee. Vance looked disappointed.

Then we all froze. There was a tearing sound up on the roof. It was a long tearing sound, like that of ripping cloth.

“The tarps,” I said, knowing in an instant what it was. My dad had always been a bit of a Scotsman at heart when it came to repairs. A few years back Thorson’s downtown had wanted twelve thousand bucks to replace the cabin roof and Dad had decided to let it ride another year. In the spring rains, the leaks had come, and in a pinch he bought a stack of those cheap, blue, plastic tarps that every department store carried and tacked them down in layers up there. It worked so well, he had let it ride a few more years.

In that slow-motion instant while we jumped to our feet and grabbed weapons in my mind I heard Dad saying-”They look like hell, but I can afford a shitload of tarps for twelve grand, Gannon.”

And now, something was ripping its way through them.

I drew my saber and backed across the living room. I needed room to swing it without hitting someone. Vance held up the pistol he had lifted off Ron. I saw now it was a.38. He put three rounds into the ceiling where the wood was looking a bit pregnant and then the gun misfired and smoked so he dropped it.

He moved toward his rifle, which he had left leaning against the front door. He always did that. You could not forget a rifle that bumped you in the knees on the way out.

Monika was staring at the ceiling, horrified. She still sat against the wall at the kitchen table. I moved to stand between her and the ceiling, which was bulging now. There was nothing under those tarps I knew but plywood-and us. The sounds had shifted from tearing cloth to creaking and shredding. They were like the sounds a lath and plaster wall makes when you dig a crowbar into it.

“How the hell did it get up on the roof?” shouted Vance.

“I don’t know, maybe it jumped up there, those prints outside were deep.”

I held grandpa’s saber up with my arm fully extended, just as I’d learned in a fencing class back in a junior college course I’d taken. Vance thought I was a romantic fool, but I really did prefer the sword at close range and against this type of enemy. It always worked and you never had to reload.

I glanced at Monika, she had produced and unfolded a pocketknife, probably from her pack. I was glad to see she was prepared to do what she could. I’d see plenty of people taken down who might have been able to save themselves, but who seemed too horrified and surprised to fight for their lives. In these new days, our deeper, more animal instincts served us well.

The ceiling gave way and Vance’s Mauser boomed at the same moment. The thing that came down was one of the types we called trolls. It was as big as a large dog, but shaped more like a humanoid with overlong arms and curved claws instead of hands. It had bristly reddish-brown hairs that stood out in a stiff spray from its body. One leathery foot was splashed red, showing that not all of Vance’s shots had missed. The troll-thing landed on the sofa and perched on the back of it for an instant, between me and the cheerily burning fire. Before Vance could blow it away, it sprang impossibly fast, shrieking. Huge curved claws still full of splinters reached for me.

It was when the troll sprang at me that I saw the face. It had the face of a famished idiot, which I had expected, but the eyes were bright blue and very human. They looked like they belonged on a little boy’s pale face. They were Billy’s eyes, of course. I realized too, that the troll was looking past me with those strange, haunted eyes. It was trying to get to Monika, not me. It wanted to finish the job it had started out on the highway, and I was in the way.

The thing once called Billy opened its fanged mouth shockingly wide. It stank pungently of wet scat.

The Mauser boomed again, but this time it was a clean miss. Crockery popped somewhere in the kitchen as the round smashed into the cupboards. I heard dry clicks from the rifle after that. Vance cursed.

I forget what French number the move is called in the fencing manuals, but I slashed the crap out of it. I sheared away a huge hunk of meat, starting at the furry left shoulder, which came away from the body in an explosion of dark, sappy blood and flesh.

Monika was screaming in my ear as the thing that had once held her hand in the park thrashed about on the floorboards. I gave it a few hard thrusts, and it stilled. I might have been screaming too. I’m not sure.