The Nightmare People

6.

She watched the red Chevy pull away, then turned from the window and looked for something to do, to distract herself from any thought of where Elias and Mr. Smith might be going, what they might be going to do.

She started to reach for the kitchen phone, to call Bill – that was what she always did when she was bored or lonely.

Then she stopped.

Bill wasn’t there. Something had taken his place.

Bill was dead.

Tears welled up suddenly.

Bill was dead.

She clenched her teeth to keep from screaming.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. She wasn’t some tragic soap-opera heroine. She was an ordinary suburban kid, about to start her junior year of high school. She was supposed to be worried about sex and clothes and whether her friends were on drugs, not about monsters eating her boyfriend, or Elias taking his father’s gun and going off to shoot people.

Bill was dead. That thing had eaten him.

And she had talked to it, touched it, tried to kiss it, for God’s sake!

She didn’t want to be with Elias, with that gun, or with Mr. Smith, who seemed a little bit crazy – he might be a nice enough guy ordinarily, but he was strung pretty tight just now, what with having gone four nights without sleeping while he worried about those creatures. She didn’t really know him, anyway, and until he calmed down she didn’t want to know him.

She didn’t want to be in that little Chevy, driving over to Bill’s apartment.

And she didn’t want to try and act normal right now, either. She didn’t want to talk to Emmy Ryerson about trying to sneak into the Ringo Starr concert at the Merriweather Post Pavilion, or to her mother about buying her school clothes for the fall, or to anybody about anything normal, because she knew that in the back of her head she’d keep remembering that Bill had been killed and eaten, and she’d want to scream.

She could just lock herself in her room and try to forget all about it, and she even took a step toward the stairs before she realized that wasn’t going to work.

You don’t forget something like that so easily.

She had to do something.

She looked at the kitchen phone.

Bill was dead, and so were all his neighbors, except for Mr. Smith. And his family – Harry and Sid and Jessie. They were dead, too.

Oh, God, even little Sid!

She had to talk to someone about it. Elias and Mr. Smith were too busy trying to do something about it; she just needed to talk, to try and understand it. She wasn’t ready to do anything yet.

She knew some of Bill’s neighbors. She’d babysat for some of them. She’d talked to them.

She knew some of their friends and relatives, too.

She reached for the phone and dialed.

Chapter Five:

Later Saturday