Accidental Evil (44 page)

“George, steer to port,” Lori whispered.
 

He looked over his shoulder and saw what had frightened her. There were people moving between the camps on the shore. They looked like skeletons wrapped in skin. By heading to port, she was steering them towards where the road came closest to the shore. George agreed with the idea—it would get them farthest away from the lumbering skeleton-people.

When the bow of the boat finally touched grass, Lori jumped out and wrapped the painter rope around a sign. George helped Ricky stand and let his brother lean on him as he got out. Even on dry land, Ricky rocked and swayed.

They moved up to the road.
 

Lori put her hand up against the sun and looked north and south on the road. There were skeleton-people to the north and limping, lumbering shapes coming from the south. They had nowhere to run.
 

“Back on the boat?” Lori asked.

George shook his head. The idea of floating above all those bones was horrible. There might still be something evil down in those depths.

“Let’s run for it,” George said.

Lori looked at Ricky and then back to him. George understood what she was thinking. It was like with his mom in the woods. The two of them might be able to outrun whatever it was, but Ricky never would. They were back in the same situation.

“We can try,” George said.

“You guys run,” Ricky said. “I’ll be okay.”

There was no way that George was going along with that idea. Especially the way that Ricky was looking off to the water. He didn’t look scared. He looked like he almost wanted to go back there.

“No way,” George said. “I’m staying with you.”

Lori nodded. “Me too.”

George and Lori got on either side of Ricky. He was strong enough to walk, but he had no balance whatsoever. He leaned heavily to one side and then the other. They headed south. There were less people that way, and it was the direction of their houses.

[ Parents ]

“They’re slow, but they’re coming right for us,” George said, looking off into the distance. “We should maybe hide and let them pass.”

“George, you dummy,” Lori said.
 

He looked at her. She was smiling.

“That’s your parents,” Lori said.

George didn’t know what to think about that. Was it really his parents, or just things disguised as them? Now that Lori said it, he recognized the shape of his father and the shirt that his mother was wearing. But she hadn’t been herself the last time he had seen her. He still had the sore ankle to prove it.

“I don’t know,” George said.

“Yeah,” Ricky said. “It’s them.”

“But Mom…” George began.

“She’s fine now,” Ricky said. “Look at me. I’m fine, right?”

George nodded. Ricky was always right about important stuff. They picked up their pace. As they drew closer, George recognized the other two people as well. One was a local. The other was the weird guy who had been around lately.

His mom finally figured out who they were. She broke away from his dad and began to limp towards them. George rushed to close the distance. His father sprinted past her and scooped George up in his arms. He raised him high, like he weighed nothing.

“I thought you were eaten!” his father said.

George laughed. He looked down and saw his mother kneeling in front of Lori with her hands out like she was praying to the girl. As his father set him down, George heard his mother apologizing to her.

“It wasn’t me, and I’m sorry for that. I hope you won’t hold it against me,” George heard her say.

“It’s okay,” Lori said.

George’s father was inspecting Ricky. The boy lifted his wet shorts and showed his father the wound on his thigh. George moved towards his mother and Lori. His mom pulled him into a big hug and kissed him while apologizing.

“It’s okay, Mom,” he said. “I knew it wasn’t you.”

“Yeah,” Lori said. “You were trying.”

“Your father said there was a giant monster. What happened?” his mother asked.

George shrugged. “He ate us. I think he exploded.”

She hugged him again. His mother turned back to the woman and the weird guy. “Katrina, we’re headed to the house in a minute. If the car is working now that everything is over, we can give you a ride.”

The woman nodded.

When Vernon shouted, they all turned towards him and Ricky.

“Absolutely not,” Vernon’s voice boomed. “You get that out of your head right now.”

Ricky leaned in and said something quietly to his father.

“I don’t care whose fault you think it is,” Vernon said. “Our part is done.”

Ricky was shaking his head. He had to steady himself on his father’s arm as he turned to look back towards the lake.

“What’s the crisis?” his mother asked.

Vernon turned. “Says he has to die so that the blood monster won’t come back. Says it’s linked to him because he’s the one who pulled it in.”

“Regardless, you’re not going to do it,” Mary said. “Your father is right.”

A silence spread through the group. In George’s estimation, Ricky seemed pretty serious.

“He did already,” Lori said.

Mary turned and blinked at her. George waited for his mother to tell the girl to hush. She didn’t. Maybe she still felt guilty about feeding the little girl to the monster.

“What was that, honey?” Mary asked.

“He already did die,” Lori said. “When me and George pulled him from the water, he was dead. He had no pulse and he wasn’t breathing. That’s dead.”

“It’s true, Mom,” George said. He pointed at Lori. “She knows how to do CPR. She brought him back.”

They turned to Ricky. He seemed to be seriously considering this new information.

“What happened to the thing?” a voice asked. They turned to see the weird guy, Gerard, had joined the conversation.

“I’m not sure,” Ricky said. “Ms. Yettin said I could send it back, but I think she was wrong. I did the next best thing. I called on the air to smash both of us. It tried to smash me before, so I thought it would. I don’t know what happened when it hit the water.”

“It exploded,” George said. “That’s how I got out. It exploded into bones and robots.”

“No,” Ricky said. “Maybe bones, but the robots were those flying things that the demon called its minions.”

Vernon looked up to the sky.
 

“You
were
dead though,” Lori said.

“Maybe,” Ricky said.

[ Home ]

W
HEN
R
ICKY
AND
THE
demon flew up into the sky, April Yettin took a quick look around at the people. They stood with their mouths hanging open as they tracked the shape of Ricky up into the sky.

April decided it might be time for her to get going. There was no telling where her house had been moved to, and it might be a long afternoon of searching.

“Ms. Yettin!” a voice called as April moved down the driveway. She turned and saw Lily and Sarah trying to help Wendy Hazard get away from the fountain. April always liked Lily. She moved in the girl’s direction.

“Can you help us?” Lily asked. “I don’t know where my father is. He might still be in the woods. I want to go find him.”

“Don’t go alone,” April said. “You two girls stick together and I’ll look for him.”

“No. I know where I saw him last,” Lily said.

“I’m okay,” Wendy said. “You go ahead.”

“We’ll all go together,” April said. Wendy gave her a sharp look. April started to remember that there had been bad blood between them at one point. It didn’t matter. That was all in the past.
 

April moved to take Lily’s place supporting Wendy.

“Lead the way,” April said.

The girls ventured ahead.
 

April propped up Wendy and helped her down the winding path of the golf course. The girls debated and then agreed on where they had come out of the woods. It didn’t take long. Lily’s father was nearly to the fairway. Once they found him, they all decided it would be best to leave through the woods and avoid further adventures on the golf course. Out on the road, they didn’t know if they were headed in different directions.

Wendy and Bruce debated if they should continue to try to get out of town.
 

Sarah had a different opinion. “I’m going home. I think that Ricky and that monster went away. I want to find my family.”

“Come with us,” Lily said. “I don’t know where we’re going yet, but you can come.”

“Honey,” Wendy said, “don’t promise anything until we decide.”

“Mom,” Lily said, looking her mother in the eye. “She can come with us.” Her eyes darted briefly down to her own wrist, as if that bruise was leverage. Perhaps it was. Wendy seemed less certain of herself.

“I have to find my house,” April said. She began to walk down the road towards town. Nobody stopped her.
 

Less than a minute later, April heard slapping feet behind her. She turned and saw Sarah catching up.

“They’re going out of town. I’m going home. I’ll walk with you for now.”

April nodded.

They continued in silence for a bit. April noticed that Sarah was constantly scanning the bushes and the skies. She had said that the monster went away, but she was clearly uneasy about the accuracy of her statement.

April was shocked at how consistent the world looked. She couldn’t remember a time when everything had seemed so solid and unchanging. She would look to her right, see a mailbox and a little house set back from the road, and then when she looked at it again, it was still there. It was unsettling how concrete the world had become since that morning.

April didn’t care for it.

“What am I going to do if those machines are still at my house?” Sarah asked. She slowed down as she considered.

“Stand on black,” April said.
 

Sarah looked at her skeptically.
 

“It has to be a deep, dark black. They don’t like anything that’s really black. It was in the book.”

Sarah didn’t answer.

“Anyway, you shouldn’t have to worry about it. Ricky took care of the demon, so his minions will have gone too. They only existed to serve him.”

Sarah looked at her and then looked away quickly.
 

Eventually, Sarah asked her question. “What are you talking about?”

“My book,” April said. “Ricky borrowed my book from my uncle. He wanted to make his magic act seem more engaging, so he borrowed a book I had. He was looking for the language of authentic rituals. He found it. The Ceremony of the King’s Flame calls a very hungry demon that feeds off of human flesh. Ricky was just looking for spooky sounding incantations, but there is power in language. It comes from within us.”

Sarah didn’t say anything, but April knew she was absorbing the information. A teacher always knows.

“When you say, ‘Stop!’ think about the sounds,” April said. “You grab attention with the S and T and then you bring everything to a halt with the P. You’re communicating with the shape of the word. In that same way, words can open portals to harness unseen energy.”

Sarah frowned and nodded. At that moment, she had remembered that April was crazy. They walked in silence until they got to the edge of town.

“I’m headed this way,” Sarah said. “You need me to walk you home?”

“No,” April said.

Sarah turned off. April kept going straight. As she walked, she examined each building, looking carefully for her house. She remembered what her uncle’s place looked like. The stairs to her apartment would be around the side. With no expectations, she walked by the place where it should have stood.

April stopped. She almost couldn’t believe it.

The house sat exactly in the right location. As she stood there, her uncle opened the front door.

“April? What are you doing out?”

He rubbed his head in the way that he always did right after he woke up from a nap.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’m back now. Are you feeling okay?”

“Why wouldn’t I?” he asked.

She thought about telling him. If Ricky and the demon had stuck around, the demon would have ground up her uncle’s bones and sucked out the marrow. He would have used the his fat to grease his machines.
 

April cocked her head at a new thought. She couldn’t remember if all that stuff about the marrow and fat was something she had read, or something she had made up. She glanced around her uncle’s house and remembered the good times there. She remembered sitting at that table with her mother while her aunt cooked dinner for them. She remembered her father coming through the door with the fish he had caught. He hadn’t even cleaned it yet. It was still flopping around and had squirted from between his hands.

“You okay?” Uncle Harold asked.

April smiled. “I’m fine.” She felt perfectly fine. It was sad that those people were gone, but she was home.

[ Fresh ]

B
Y
THE
TIME
THEY
got to the hotel by the highway, Lily’s parents were exhausted. They grabbed a couple of rooms and had dinner in the depressing restaurant attached to the place. Her mother picked at her shirt the whole time. They were too dirty to be out in public, but the hotel didn’t offer any sort of room service. After the meal, her father walked across the road and came back with a rented car.
 

It was their own little struggle for survival.
 

Shelter, food, and transportation were first. Before they let themselves sleep, they tracked down clothes and then got cleaned up.

Everything was taken care of by the time Lily set her head on the pillow. She still couldn’t sleep. There were too many unanswered questions.

Her parents wanted to forget everything that had happened. They talked of all the things they would have to do before getting on the plane. They needed passports, clothes, and luggage. They needed to change the tickets and adjust their reservations in Spain. Nobody talked about going back to the house and getting their passports or clothes. Her parents had their sights set on moving forward. Home was a detail they would sort out after they got back from Spain. Of course, that assumed that they would come back. Lily had a suspicion that after a month overseas, they might come up with an excuse to stay away from Kingston Lakes after everything they had witnessed on that strange day.