Backyard (25 page)

Earlene snorted.

“Nonsense,” she said. “It's expected. Everybody does it. Just you watch. These people will be doing the same thing to someone else directly. They might even hire me, tee-hee-hee. Besides, we're professionals. The only reason I'm getting a job of this magnitude is because I'm the best. That's what you have to think. Gardening scruples are for the little people who have tiny vegetable patches and some pansies. Only top-notch pros know, accept, and practice the fine art of gardening sabotage. Besides, we're getting paid $600, of which your share is $25. Not bad for a night's work, eh? Now, let's get on with it. Quietly, now. Shhhh.”

They both wore sneakers especially modified by Earlene with foam packing materials glued to the soles so as to be extra quiet.

“Don't jangle the cages,” Earlene said.

Shirelle unlocked the trunk and retrieved two large cages with old bedsheets covering them, and handles with big hand-grips sticking through rips in the sheets. Violent rustling from within them almost knocked the cages out of her hands, but she held on tight.

“That's the girl,” Earlene said. “Now, let's get moving. We're only a block away. Do you remember what to do if you see a car coming?”

“Run down the slope to the right until I'm out of sight.”

“Good girl. Now let's go.”

Earlene, carrying a large, filled-up paper grocery sack, guided Shirelle, with a heavy, bouncing cage in each hand, about a hundred yards down the sidewalk, then across the street to a slope that bordered a fringe of woods. Up the slope they climbed as the rain slammed down.

“Don't pant so much!” Earlene shouted to Shirelle as they crested the rise. “You're making too much noise!”

The sound of raindrops on plastic-coated rain slickers boomed like cannon shots to Earlene. Even the storm couldn't completely muffle it. That was a factor she had not taken into consideration when she planned the job. She cast quick, worried glances at the house, wondering whether, any minute, the lights would go on and the alarm get sounded before her task was done. And those cages, squeaking and squealing like all get-out. Someone forgot to oil the hinges! Earlene figured she could dock Shirelle $10 for such a gross transgression.

“Can't help it!” grunted Shirelle. “Too heavy!”

“We're almost there. Just a few more steps.”

Their eyes were accustomed to the dark now, and they got occasional assistance from the staccato flash of lightning. They carried no flashlights; Earlene figured they were too risky.

“Right here,” she said. “Set the cages down.”

Shirelle gingerly set down her jiggling loads and moaned in relief.

“Now, take off the sheets.”

Shirelle tugged at the sheets, which the rain had dampened into a heavy clinginess.

Inside the cages were masses of blurred gray motion. Earlene and Shirelle had stuffed six fully mature cottontail rabbits into each one, and they struggled and pushed against one another, biting and scratching, in anticipation of escape and something to eat. Earlene looked down at them appreciatively, then peered into her bag, which contained a special blend of spinach leaves, carrot shavings, and celery shoots, all irresistibly flavored with Earlene's not-yet-patented rabbit-nip.

“Now, I'll go spread the contents of my bag around the yard. When I come back, you can release the rabbits. If everything goes right, they'll make mincemeat of these gardens within a week.”

Shirelle smiled uneasily as Earlene stuck her hand in the bag, pulled out a fistful of special rabbit mix, and began walking away from her, flinging the rabbit treats wherever she could make out the outlines of a garden and giving her special attention to the arbor, which she hoped would soon be utterly fouled with rabbit feces.

Shirelle trembled with fear and guilt. She thought she had signed on with Mrs. McGillicuddy to learn the deepest and most arcane secrets of the gardener's craft. So far, all she had been doing was starving rabbits, cramming them into cramped cages, and preparing to destroy someone's else's gardening handiwork.

It wasn't right, but what could she do? She needed the experience an internship would provide. As for these particular distasteful tasks, she would have to gloss over them on her résumé.

The fury of the thunderstorm and the potential criminality of it all fueled the adrenaline that honed Shirelle's senses to the peak of performance. She heard the squeal of tires that could have been five miles away. She sniffed at something faintly oily and metallic, the ozone-y smell of charged particles careening into one another and yanking one another apart.

Then came a noise that was neither thunder nor the hammering of millions of raindrops on roofs, leaves, and metal gutters. It was unmistakable: some human or beast was moving through the woods behind her, crashing into branches and saplings, and snapping twigs underfoot. Shirelle turned to see a dark form struggling through the woods. It was grunting and breathing heavily; she could hear that now. It was coming straight at her.

“Mizz McGillicuddy!” she squealed in a garbled, high-pitched voice that made it sound more like “Masma Golidoddy.” “Mizz McGillicuddy!”

Mrs. McGillicuddy couldn't come right then. As she strode through the Fremonts' gardens, sowing the seeds of havoc and discord, the sky lit up, revealing something that made her blood curdle. Off to her left and separated from her only by the split-rail fence, the hydrangeas, and about ten yards of open lawn was a darkened form next to a couple of bushes. It had something in its hand.

“Jesus-Mother-Mary-Christ!” she whispered, her heart pounding away like John Bonham's bass drum. Thunder rent the sky. Then came another flash of lightning. The figure faced her. It was all rubbery and green with a protruding snout, and huge goggly eyes. A monster! Its arm was upraised and sticking out from it, glinting in the illumination of the lightning, was . . . a hatchet!

Earlene screamed as she had never screamed before. Hidden in that scream was a prayer that the wind and the thunder would stop so someone could hear her and come to the rescue. She stood there, petrified into immobility, only to be assaulted by new terrors. These came from her right. She turned her head. Lightning flashed. Earlene screamed again. This time she kept it going for a while, like a banshee's wail, or Livia's civil defense sirens on the first Tuesday of the month, at one p.m.

There, no more than ten feet from where she stood, was a tomahawk stuck in somebody's head. He was just standing there as if nothing had happened, a little short guy holding something, and with that awful thing protruding from his head! The sputtering, violent light showed that blood had gushed out all over the poor fellow's head, shoulders, and torso. His eyes were so wide open in death! Maybe he was alive, using his eyes to plead with her for succor. They stared, unblinking, at her.

“I can't help you,” she moaned once she had stopped screaming to catch her breath. “Sorry. Please pray for me.”

It was then she noticed that on the other side of the hideous tomahawk victim was Jackie Kennedy all wadded up in the middle of a hosta bed and staring at her, mouth agape, through rain-spattered cat's-eye glasses. Jackie Kennedy never wore cat's-eye glasses, Earlene suddenly realized. That's an imposter! A dead person impersonating another dead person! Oh, the perfidy! She shrieked again. Jackie Kennedy howled as if all the voices of the underworld were being funneled through her mouth.

Earlene began to run. Her legs pumped furiously as she panted from the exertion. But what was this? She wasn't going anywhere. She looked down at her feet as the distant thing with the hatchet approached the fence stealthily, but inexorably, and saw that she was running in place. Her feet were going up and down, up and down like pistons, giving her plenty of vertical lift, but nothing in the way of horizontal motion. The figure with the hatchet gurgled something, then did its own little high-pitched squeal, which sounded unnaturally quiet and contained, almost as if it were screaming underwater. Jackie Kennedy was still howling away, her pillbox hat loosened and tilted to the side of her head at an awful, Satanic-looking angle, and all Earlene could do was this stupid little in-place workout. Earlene screamed again. The horrible figure next to the fence flinched and raised its hatchet.

“Move, feet!” Earlene shrieked. “Move, feet! Move, you piece-of-shit feet!”

“Earlene?” gurgled the figure in its underwater voice. “Earlene McGillicuddy?” But, to Earlene, that just sounded like guttural monster talk. She shrieked a cry for help, and continued running in place, alternately cursing and pleading with her feet to do what used to come so naturally to them.

Shirelle heard the screaming above the din of the thunder and watched in horror as the lightning lit up shapes in a mad dance of confusion. Completely bewildered and utterly panicked, she began to hallucinate. She looked down at the cages and imagined the rabbits were Toby and Turner, the two hunting dogs her family owned when she was growing up. She flung open the gates to the cages. Twelve rabbits half-crazed with fright and hunger bolted out, running and hopping in all directions.

“Sic, Toby! Sic 'em. Sic 'em, Turner!”

Shirelle turned back toward the woods. She was instantly sorry she did. The shape thrashing through the brush and small trees was an animal, one of the biggest she had ever seen. It had weird-looking antlers, too; more like some alien's antenna ears, come to think of it. Lost in a hallucination whirling madly out of control, Shirelle reflexively reached into her pockets for a fistful of shells, and grasped in the air to crack open the breach of a twenty-gauge shotgun, just like she used to do as a little girl back home in Waydeen, sitting with her daddy in a blind waiting for geese to show up. Not finding either, she ran screaming back down the slope, into the street, then to the south, in the opposite direction of where Earlene's car was parked.

26

Battleground Backyard

“W
e should call the police!”

“Call the police and tell them, what, that there are Indian spirits disturbing the peace in our backyard?”

The thunder crashed overhead as George and Nan huddled together in their bed and hoped that the chaos erupting outside their bedroom window was just a communal invention of their febrile imaginations.

“Maybe the thunderstorm will scare them away,” George said.

“The thunderstorm won't scare them if they're spirits,” said Nan, who was shivering. She clung closer to George and pulled the bedsheet up over her head. “If they're spirits, they're probably the ones who are
bringing
the thunderstorm.”

Then came an unmistakable cry for help.

“That's definitely a human,” said Nan. “And it sounds like someone we know.” But what the heck was somebody they knew doing hanging out with a bunch of wailing, dead Indians?

Nan flung the sheet off her, sat up, and strained to hear more above the barrage of rain and wind that threatened to drown out everything else. “You know, that sounded sort of like that Earlene McGillicuddy.” Then came more screams, a pause, thunder, a piercing shriek, and an unearthly howl from right outside the window.

“That's it. I'm calling the cops.”

Nan reached for the phone and fumbled with it. She dialed three wrong numbers before she finally got the 911 operator. By then, George had shot out of the bedroom, his Smokestack Gaines bat at the ready. A shape approached him coming fast down the hallway. George stopped, leaned back, and cocked the bat, trying to remember how to turn his hips to get the proper torque and let one hand go after the swing the way Smokestack did. Here it comes, right down the pipe. Get ready to pull the trigger and . . .

“Daddy! Daddy! Don't hit me!”

“Sis?” George dropped the bat. Sis flung herself at him, crying.

“Daddy, what's going on outside? Something terrible is happening. People are screaming.”

“Don't worry, honey,” said Nan, poking her head through the bedroom doorway. “It's only the spirits of dead people buried here a long time ago.” The telephone was clamped between her scrunched-up shoulder and cheek as she waited for the 911 operator, who had put her on hold to field three calls about a bunch of rampaging kids driving around in a Duster and Camaro and tp'ing yards indiscriminately.

“The police should be right over. I mean, what else do they have to do in Livia? Just get back in your room. Your dad's going to go check it out.”

“Be careful, Daddy!” said Sis. She darted back into her room, then slammed the door shut and locked it.

“Don't open that door unless it's for us,” George said. “We'll have a secret knock. Four long ones, three short, two long, a pause, two short knocks, then one long one. Got it?”

He picked up the bat and walked through the darkened hallway and into the dining room. He hesitated before looking out through the back door window. There was nothing but the tumult of a thunderstorm going on now. Everything must be all right. He looked outside. The motion-detector light hadn't even been activated. What seemed like an hour passed.

“Get out there, George!” He almost jumped through the ceiling. It was Nan, who had crept up quietly behind him.

“Get out there! Someone might be getting murdered, and you're just going to stand here waiting for the cops?”

“The thought had occurred to me.”

“Get out there! I'm coming with you.”

George threw open the door, then the screen door, and charged into the rain and the blinding glare of the motion-detector light. Bat at the ready, he did a 360-degree turn to make sure he wasn't walking into an ambush. Outside of the floodlit patio, the whole backyard was in motion. In fact, it was pandemonium. Rain poured down. Thunder crashed. The wind howled. A series of lightning flashes revealed a terrifying sight: strange forms writhing and careening aimlessly in the darkness.

Zombies! George thought, then banished it as irrational nonsense, then accepted it as a distinct possibility. Dead people coming up from the grave to harass you at best, and eat you alive at worst, are zombies. That was a pretty well-established fact.

Two rabbits emerged from the darkness and hurtled past him. George swung and missed both. Then came the scream from the woods. Something took off in a mad dash toward the street. A large, hulking, shadowed shape emerged from the distant blackness.

George squinted through the rain to try to make out what it was. Sensing his vulnerability in the blinding illumination of the floodlights, he sprinted out of their reach and dove behind the trunk of one of the silver maples.

“Made it!” he whispered.

Nan hadn't followed him. She was standing in the lighted dining room, peering through the screen door, and holding a butcher knife. The shelter of the tree steadying his frayed nerves, George scanned the backyard through the sheets of rain. A sopping woman-y-looking thing in a hooded poncho and clinging to a big grocery bag stood in the middle of the yard next to the rose trellis. Her screams were being turned into really loud gargling by the rain falling into her upturned mouth.

What's a bag lady doing out here at this time of the night? wondered George. And running in place? Or is she something else indeed?

More lightning revealed the glint of a metallic object over to the right and farther toward the back,just beyond the fence and hydrangeas. A hatchet! And one of the zombies—this one
really
scary looking—holding it! Making weird noises, too, or was that just the storm? So, what was the deal here? Was the bag lady-thing a human, and, ergo, an ally, about to be sliced up by the hatchet-wielding zombie? Or were they both zombies just engaging in a pre-dinner howl?

“Hey!” George yelled, more to give himself courage than anything else. “Knock it off!”

He wondered whether anything could hear him above the din of the thunderstorm, and shivered as the cold, driving rain soaked him. It occurred to him that he would have to make his move because of two things: (a) He would die of hypothermia just lying there getting drenched behind the tree, and (b) the darkened form wielding the hatchet was turned in the direction of the screaming bag lady. It would soon lift itself over the low split-rail fence, crash through the hydrangeas, and march straight on an unobstructed path toward her and him.

It was time to show those zombies what a Smokestack Gaines bat can do when it means business. Just as he stood up and gripped his bat in the Smokestack Gaines style, with the pinkie of the right hand swinging loose like a broken gate, a racket sounded from the street: honking horns, sputtering engines, and the clattering of a loose muffler bouncing off the street that George had told Cullen at least a thousand times to have fixed. It was the Camaro and the Duster, and they were loaded with zombie-hating high school and college kids.

“Reinforcements!”

George gripped his bat with a new determination. He recalled from something he had seen or read that zombies could be thwarted by the sound of teenagers honking horns. Didn't that turn them into rocks if they heard it two hours before dawn, or something like that?

On further reflection, as all the shrieking and yelling subsided into a sort of moan chorus coming from three distinct points in the yard and the form carrying the hatchet stopped (turned to stone?), George wondered whether Cullen, Ellis, and their friends might be walking into a fiendish zombie feeding frenzy, with all these whatever-they-weres just waiting to spring their trap.

He tried to get a closer look at the bag lady. A series of lightning flashes lit her up. Her rain poncho hood had slipped off and her head was bowed back at an unnatural angle. Stringy hair hung, mop-like, all over her head, which appeared somewhat shrunken from this angle. The bag she was holding was turning to cellulose mush in the rain. Too ugly to be a bag lady, George decided. Spirit from the depths, no doubt, in distorted human form.

Kids were piling out of the cars. He had to do something and do it now. Where were the goddamn police when you needed them most? He prayed fervently that they carried a few silver bullets with them for just such an emergency as this. There they were; he heard a siren in the distance. By the time they got here it would be too late! His course of action was clear; he would have to sacrifice himself to save the rest of his family. And he would have to do it now. Now? Hmmm . . . now! George turned toward the street.

“Danger!” he yelled, his voice turned into a croak by the terrible knowledge that he could be on the wrong end of a fast-food feast in a matter of seconds. “Danger! Go back! Go back!”

It was no use. They couldn't see or hear him as they scurried through the rain into the house through the garage door. Kids! George moaned as he dove back for cover behind the tree, his resolve having morphed into abject, immobilizing terror.

Suddenly, he smelled wool. Warm, wet wool. And close. Very close. Something touched his shoulder. George jolted into the tree trunk, slamming his cheek against the wet, scaly bark.

“Jesus-fricking-Christ!” he cried, pain for the moment trumping fear and decorum.

Caressing his bruised cheek, he turned to see a cowled monk leaning over him. The monk, really short—more like a hobbit, really—held a long, rather crinkled and crude cross that looked in the lightning flashes like aluminum foil wrapped around joined sections of PVC pipe. In fact, George could see the hollow end of PVC pipe sticking through the bottom of the cross. He knew it perfectly, having made exactly the same kind of cross for last year's Christmas pageant. And that cowl. Hadn't he seen it somewhere before?

“Do not fear,” said the monk in a curiously feminine voice. “I'm a friend here to help you.”

George suddenly understood. Casting aside his suspicions concerning the makeshift cross and familiar-looking cowl, he whispered a heartfelt prayer of thanks that a force of good—an angel, no doubt—had been sent down on a moment's notice to do battle with the evil jerks assailing their home.

“What is your bidding, O Great Spirit?” George said. His voice quaked with worshipful amazement that he and Nan had made the right decision fourteen years ago in joining the Please-Redeem-Me Lutheran Church just down the street.

“I'll take the one on the right,” said the voice. “Old rubber face. You take the two on the left. When I count three.... One . . . two . . . two and one eighth . . . two and a half . . . two and three quarters . . . two and four fifths . . . two and seven eights . . .”

When the count of three finally came, George raised his bat and started twirling it, more in the style of a samurai warrior than Smokestack Gaines. He charged toward the thing with the disintegrating bag, which he could now see bore the imprint of Curman's Carnival Foods. The appropriate brain signals finally having been telegraphed to her feet, Earlene lifted her head, shrieked, and ran off toward the woods. She then collided with the vertical fence post and the weather station that sat on top of it and got twirled through the gate like a pinball ricocheting off a bumper paddle.

George turned toward the house. There was Nan. Brandishing her butcher knife and a flashlight, she charged out the door.

“Over there!” shouted George, pointing to another screaming figure who was cowering under the bedroom window. “Guard that one! And be careful with that thing!”

Nan shone the powerful beam of her flashlight into the face of a disheveled figure who looked up at her in abject terror and whom she could now see must have lost her way to an old-timers' fashion show.

What's with the veil and grandma glasses? Nan wondered. And how many consignment stores did she have to visit before finding that getup?

Nan could see there was little about this person, who was smushing her hosta as she crouched there all balled up in a fetal position, that anyone could consider to be terrifying. Here was just a scared relic of a bygone era, possibly trying to find her way back to another time and another place. But how? Was there some kind of time warp residing in their backyard?

“Don't worry about this one, George!” she yelled. “She's just a lost time traveler.”

Nan turned back toward Edith Merton, who was squeaking out weak protestations of apology now that Nan was pointing the tip of the butcher knife at her Adam's apple.

“What the hell are you doing mucking around in our backyard at this hour of the morning, and right under our window, no less? Huh? You stay right there, and don't move or I'm gonna slice your little pillbox hat to ribbons!”

Nan made a mental note to ask her, once everything had calmed down, where she had made such a find, and with a mesh veil and all. And those gloves!

Out of the corner of her eye, Nan noticed something amiss. She pointed her flashlight slightly to the right. There was Miguel de Cervantes's tree trunk likeness, its maple skull cloven by an Indian tomahawk. There was red all over his poor head. Someone had obviously doused the wood carving with paint, or ketchup, or . . . maybe even merlot. Oh, the sacrilege!

“Eeeek!” Nan screeched. “George! George! Someone has defaced Miguel something awful! Eeeek!”

“Wasn't me,” moaned Edith, who was gesticulating wildly toward the hatchet-wielding figure on the other side of the fence. “Wasn't me. Wasn't me. I swear! It was
that!
”

“I said stay still and shut up!” Nan said, holding the knife over her left shoulder in a downward-stab position and shining the flashlight at her. Edith quieted down and stopped gesturing. She shifted her tightly girdled haunches over onto some as-yet-untrampled hosta. “You want what happened to Miguel to happen to you? Don't mess with me, bitch, 'cause I'm just the gal who can do it, too. I've chopped chicken, steak, salami, hard-asa-rock cheese, and roasts with this thing, and I'm not afraid to use it on some worthless live meat. What really burns me up is that you're squishing some of my Krossa Regal hosta!”