Todd (11 page)

Todd got out behind him.

"Hey!" Alan pelted
toward the corner and saw it again, this time behind and to his left. He
whirled around and saw nothing.

"Dad?"

"God dammit, there's
something
there!
" He cast about, snorting like a bull. "Did you see
it?"

Todd shook his head.

"
I saw you!
" he
roared. "I know you're there, I
saw you!
" The wind rustled the
trees. Otherwise, the
cul-de-sac
was silent.

He darted around the front yard
maple tree, saw nothing, and abruptly felt like an idiot. A litany of curses
exploded in his head, but he kept them there. He sucked air through his nose
and rubbed at his cheeks and chin, feeling three days' growth of prickly beard.
You sound like a lunatic,
he told himself.
You probably look like
one, too. Calm down.

"You didn't see
anything?" he demanded.

Todd shook his head again.
"What did you see?"

"Just—a flash. A flash of
blue. Over here." He gestured. "And over there."

Todd followed his finger with his
eyes, looking pensive. "Sorry."

Alan blew out a breath. "It's
all right."

He knew he'd seen
something
.
He also knew he would've sounded crazy to anyone other than his son. "It's
all right," he repeated. "Help me get this stuff inside."

They managed to find space for
most of the frozen goods. Afterward, Alan sat down on the couch, his mind
reeling. He was still stiff and aching from digging the graves earlier in the
day, and the walk to the gas station hadn't loosened him up. Now his right
eyelid was twitching. It felt like someone had glued an epileptic mosquito to
the bottom of his eyebrow.

Flashes of blue.
He wanted
to Google it, to find out if it meant anything: a sign of stress, a precursor
to mental breakdown, a symptom of migraine? Again he had that sensation of
being severed and cast adrift.
We really were on our way to a hive mind,
he
thought.
Just like the Borg.

Todd scored himself an ice cream
bar. He came into the living room and held a second one out, wordlessly, to
Alan.

"Thanks."

"You're welcome," he
answered, dutifully.

You'd better enjoy this,
he
ordered himself
. It might be the last one you get.
His tongue registered
something sweet and cold, and they were wonderful sensations in the stuffy house,
but he couldn't focus enough to really enjoy them. He was too worked up, too
anxious.

"Remember when I found that
flashlight?" Todd said. His eyes were fixed on his dad; he was trying to
cheer him up. Alan sighed.

"Yeah, I do." And
weirdly, it worked; he remembered the light flicking on, the sudden rush of
success, the feeling that they could get through this. He nodded. "I do.
Why don't you get your DS and play for awhile, okay?"

"Okay." He started
walking away, then paused and turned back. "I love you."

Alan's heart hiccupped in his
chest. The day had left him raw; the words might've been a zap from a
defibrillator. Ridiculously, he had to blink back tears.

He flashed back to the moment Todd
was born. He'd looked like a little alien. Alan remembered holding him, looking
into him, each trying to fathom the other. He remembered using those words all
the time—
I love you. I love you, Todd.
—because he had so badly wanted to
do it right, and his own father had never said it.

It had been easy when the boy was
small and vulnerable. It had gotten harder when he started talking. When he
started reminding Alan of himself.

Alan had known he was pulling away
from his son, and hated it; had watched those precious, intimate moments grow
so infrequent that they vanished. But Brenda had never shied away from
admitting her love to her children, and so they were able to stay in the habit
of saying it back.

And now the boy was eight.
Eight.
It was an impossible age, towering and wizened—older than the redwoods. Old
enough to start chafing at his old man's controlling hand, but still young
enough to say
I love you
without shame.

Alan had planted those seeds when
Todd was young, and Brenda had nurtured them, and here they were, blooming.
They were Todd's words, but they were Brenda's, too, and Alan's; the life
they'd tried to give him, coalescing into a person they could be proud of.

"I love you, too," Alan
managed, fighting to hold it together.

Todd nodded and darted into his
room.

Alan sank into the couch, drained
in every way possible: mentally, emotionally, physically. The muscles in his
back and thighs moaned. He let his eyes slip closed.

We'll get through this,
he
thought.

You won't,
something in his
head said.

We've got food and a
refrigerator, the water and gas are running, we're doing pretty well. I'll
paint a sign on the roof. Someone will come.

No one will.

We'll still be okay. We've got
everything we need.

Except you're going crazy.
You're seeing things.

That's gotta be normal. I'm
probably in shock.

When you go crazy, what'll
happen to your son? He can't survive without you.

He probably could. He's smart
and resourceful. We taught him how to say
I love you
and mean it. He's
empathetic.

His father scoffed.
Empathy's
not a survival skill.

He was still arguing with himself
when sleep dragged him down. The world disappeared, replaced first by memories
of Brenda and Allie laughing, then by vague, empty nightmares. There was
nothing concrete about them, no definite horrors. Only the sense that he was missing
something, that he needed to do more, that his life depended on it.

"Dad."

Alan's eyes slid open, seeing
nothing. The living room was black.

"Dad," Todd said again.
He was whispering.

"What?" His voice was
remarkably lucid; to his own ears, it sounded wide awake.

"I just saw it. The
blue."

Whispering? Todd
never
whispered.

"It's outside."

34

Alan jerked up, disoriented by
darkness and clinging sleep, but electrified by Todd's words. "Now? You
mean it's—?"

Then he saw the glow.

Hazy and dim, just visible through
the glass deck door. A steady, muted blue. If the TV had been on, or even one
of the electric lanterns, they would've missed it.

Alan rolled to his feet.
"Okay. Shhh. Stay behind me." His heart thundered. Was it a rescue?
Was it the attackers, whoever they were?

He crept toward the deck door,
staying low and keeping one hand behind. Todd obliged, staying where he wanted
him. Alan reached the glass and peered out, the rumble of the generator in his
ears.

There was something outside the
Ngs' place.

At first it just looked like a
writhing blue blur, flitting across the Ngs' wall. But as he watched it more
closely, he made out what he thought were two legs. It was walking. It might
have had arms, too, but they flashed around so quickly that he couldn't tell
how many, or even whether "arm" was really the right word. It might
have been feeling along the wall of the house. And it was
tall
.

"What is it?" Todd
whispered, and Alan shushed him.

Watching it strained his eyes,
like he was trying to read a book in low light. His mind wanted to classify it,
but couldn't—its constant changing shape and uncertain outline made it
impossible. He couldn't tell which way it was facing. He couldn't tell if it
had a face.

It vanished around the corner of
the Ngs' house. Part of him was relieved to see it go. Part of him wanted to
follow it.

Wait here,
he almost said.
He imagined leaving Todd to chase the thing down, only to find the boy gone
when he came back. But the alternative—bringing Todd along—wasn't any safer.

"What was it?" Todd said
again.

"I don't know." Alan
craned his head both directions, but the darkness was absolute now. He couldn't
see two inches in front of his face. He reached for Todd and heard him creeping
back through the living room.

"Where are you going?"

"I want to turn on a
lantern."

Don't,
he started to say.
He was worried it would see them; then he realized it probably already had. The
flashes of blue he'd been seeing—what else could they have been?

The lantern clicked, sending
Todd's shadow leaping up the wall behind him. He looked scared, his eyes pits
of shadow in the lantern light.

Alan didn't think to comfort him.
The reality of what they'd seen was ripping through him like shrapnel.

What was that thing? Oh, God,
what
was
it?

It could've been anything, he
tried to tell himself: some experimental invisibility suit, or a projection of
light from... from...

It came here looking for us. I
responded to that text and it came here. OH GOD WHAT IS IT I DON'T KNOW WHAT IT
IS

"Daddy?" Todd hadn't
called him that in years.

"We're leaving," Alan
said. "It's not safe."

Todd's eyes widened. "It's
gonna
hurt us?
"

"Come on." Alan took his
hand and led him to the front door, where the boy balked.

"I don't want to go out
there! That thing is out there!"

"That's exactly why we have
to leave, Todd." An afterimage of its arms crawled through Alan's memory,
squirming like a nest of worms. He didn't want to see it again. He didn't want
to think about what it was, or what it meant.

It did it. It made everyone
disappear. Somehow it did it and now it's setting up shop, taking over.
That
was crazy, it had to be crazy, but what else could it be?

The world had turned into all those
nasty religious stories rolled into one: judgment and rapture and hell.
You
worried about telling him about hell?
Alan's father sneered.
He already
knows, Alan. It's right outside.

Alan opened the front door. Todd
kept fighting him.

"
No!
" he screamed.
"
I don't want to!
"

Alan flinched, then leaned into
his son's face, hissing. "You want that thing to hear us? Are you trying
to get us killed?"

Todd started sobbing.

"Come on!"

The boy yanked free of Alan's grip
and spilled to the floor, scrabbling to get away. The lantern clattered and
rolled. Alan wanted to scream.

From the open door behind him, he
caught a glimpse of flickering blue.

35

He whirled. In the lantern light
he saw their front walk and the side of the garage; he could just make out the
edge of the lawn.
Nothing there,
he thought, but he didn't believe it
for a second.

Todd was still crying, nearly
hysterical, but he'd noticed Alan's sudden jump. "What?" The word
leaked out between hitching breaths. "
Did you see it again?
"

Alan picked up the lantern, his
fingers pinching the power knob. He didn't want to turn it off, but he had to
know.

"Daddy?" Todd was
regressing, his terror making him talk like a baby.

"It's okay." Alan's own
panic suddenly went cold. "Don't freak out, okay? I'm right here."
If
that matters for anything.
He flipped off the lantern, and they plunged
into darkness.

There were three of them outside.

Even this close, he couldn't make
out a definite outline, but they gave him a vaguely humanoid impression: legs,
a torso, possibly a head. Where there might have been a mass of writhing arms
before (or two arms, moving impossibly quickly), there was nothing now. If
they'd been people, they would've been victims of some congenital defect, born
without arms.

But they weren't people. The blurs
were too tall, too thin: their legs were too long for their frames or,
depending on the moment, too short. They might have been looking at Alan, or
they might have been facing the other way. It was impossible to tell because
they had no
eyes
. And he could see through them. In fact, he didn't feel
like he was looking at them at all. He was looking at his front yard at
midnight. There just happened to be a slight lessening of the darkness in three
places. Trying to focus on them, to make out their features, was like trying to
sculpt a handful of water.

Todd gave a long, low moan: a
horrifying sound that reflected the noise in Alan's head perfectly.

"Leave us alone," Alan
said.

No response. They were inscrutable
sphinxes, the tops of their heads nearly level with the garage roof.

"We didn't do anything to
you. Can't you just leave us alone?"

Todd went silent, listening.

"Did you—" Alan
hesitated. The question was pointless, but he had to ask it. "Did you make
everyone disappear?"

While he waited, stupidly, for
some kind of answer, Todd threw a shoe at one of them.

The blur didn't waver, or ripple
like a lake surface. It didn't do anything. The shoe sailed through it without
slowing and hit the walk with a dull scrape.

Then all three of the things turned
sideways—Alan didn't know how else to think of it—and vanished.

36

"Turn on the light,"
Todd begged. When Alan didn't respond, he used his best polite voice, the words
quivering. "Would you please turn on the light?"

But Alan was still searching the night,
trying to be sure they were really gone. He couldn't see anything, but they'd
been so faint to begin with that he couldn't trust his eyes.

Todd scrambled to his feet and
into the black living room, his footsteps staccato jolts against the background
hum of the generator.