Seed (2 page)

Charlie reluctantly gave up her position, craning her neck while her dad led her back to the overturned car.

“It wasn’t an animal,” she murmured. “It walked on two legs, like us.”

Jack slowed his steps at Charlie’s description.

“I saw it, Daddy,” she assured him, lowering her voice so her mother and sister wouldn’t hear. “I saw it before the lights went out. I saw it just like you.”

It was well after midnight by the time the Winters arrived home. To Charlie’s delight, an officer gave them a ride after reports were filed and everyone was checked out by paramedics. Aimee put the girls to bed while Jack sat at the kitchen table, staring at Charlie’s high-bounce ball next to his coffee cup. Somehow, she had managed to hang on to it through the accident, only having let it go when her mother insisted it was time for bed. Uncurling her fingers from around the cheap rubber toy, Charlie had carefully placed it next to her father’s coffee cup in a silent gesture of understanding. She had seen it too—the pair of eyes that had forced Jack to swerve and nearly kill his entire family.

What got Jack the most was their familiarity. He had seen those eyes before.

Aimee eventually stepped out of the girls’ room and quietly shut the door behind her. She took a seat across from Jack, holding her silence for a long while; but Jack knew what was coming. She wanted to know what happened. She wanted an answer that would satisfy her anger. Rather than ask the same question again, she caught Jack off-guard with a statement instead.

“You could have killed them. Imagine it, Jack… Charlie dying on her sixth birthday.”

Jack blinked at her, stunned.

“Gee. Thanks, hon,” he muttered. “I wasn’t feeling quite guilty enough.”

“You were falling asleep.”

“I was not.”

“I know you were. You’re just afraid to admit it.”

“What?”

“What do you expect, staying out all the time?”

“All the time?” Jack frowned. “Like what, once every two weeks?”

He shook his head, then lifted his cup and took a sip of cold coffee.

Aimee sat in silence, then got up and walked out of the kitchen without another word.

Jack slept on the couch.

The next morning Charlie refused to get out of bed.

“I’m sick,” she complained, tugging the covers up to her nose while Aimee pulled school clothes out of a dresser and tossed them onto Charlie’s bed, assuring the girl that she
would
be getting up, no matter what happened the night before.

“On your feet,” Aimee said, pulling the covers off of Charlie, who, at the shock of cold morning air, flailed atop her mattress like a waterlogged fish.

“But I don’t feel good,” Charlie whimpered. She sat up anyway, knowing her efforts were futile. When it came to school, Aimee was the last to budge.

“Blame it on the piles of candy you ate yesterday,” Aimee said. “I told you it would make you sick, didn’t I?”

Charlie jutted out her bottom lip.

“Maybe someday you’ll learn to listen to your momma.”

“Maybe someday I’ll really be sick,” Charlie muttered. “I mean
really
sick. Like green and dying and puking like…” She stuck her tongue out, twisting her face up in disgust. “Like
that
. And then you’ll be sorry.”

“Oh I will, will I?” Aimee tried not to grin.

“You might be dying,” Abigail chimed in from across the room. “But she’ll still send you to school.”

“Then I’ll die at school,” Charlie said matter-of-factly. “And all the kids will come to my funeral because the teachers will make them, like they make us get outside when the fire drill goes.”

“You can’t
make
people go to your funeral,” Abby said. “They only go if they feel like it.”

“They’ll feel like it.” Charlie pulled on a multi-colored sock. “I’m gonna be buried in the sandbox next to the monkey bars. They’ll have to go because it’ll be during recess.”

Abigail rolled her eyes at her sister while Aimee busied herself in the girls’ closet, eavesdropping on their conversation.

“And if they don’t want to go they’ll have to stay inside,” Charlie continued, “even though it’s recess.” She paused, narrowed her eyes. “Because they’re jerks.”

“Charlotte.” Aimee shot her youngest a stern look. “Watch your mouth.”

“That isn’t even a bad word,” Charlie mulled. She yanked on her other sock and slid off her bed. “And I can’t watch my mouth because my eyes are stuck on my head and my mouth is stuck on my head and how do you watch your mouth if they’re both stuck on your head, huh?”

Aimee exhaled a steady breath and held Charlotte’s pants out, patiently waiting for the girl to stick her scrawny legs through the holes.

“Hurry up or you won’t have time for Lucky Charms,” Aimee warned. “You too, Abby. Both of you are running late.”

The girls went silent while they dressed, zipping up zippers and pulling on t-shirts. Charlie fumbled with her shoe laces before throwing them down in frustration. After a minute of letting her struggle, Aimee popped Charlie back on the bed and tied her shoes for her.

“Momma?”

“Yeah, baby?”

Charlie frowned before raising her shoulders up to her ears. “Is Daddy okay?”

“What makes you ask that?” Aimee asked.

“The accident,” Charlie shrugged. “He looked really worried.”

“He was just worried that you and your sister weren’t hurt,” Aimee said with a smile. “You aren’t hurt, are you?”

Charlotte shook her head no.

“Good. Now hurry up and eat your breakfast. Grandma is giving you a ride to school today.”

Charlie was right: Jack was worried. There was the accident and the mangled car—it was enough to worry anyone, especially since it had been their only mode of transportation. But the twisted frame of that Saturn was the least of Jack’s concerns. What was really eating at him was that pair of eyes. They had scared him as a child and they scared him even more now.

The first time Jack had seen those eyes had been along the outskirts of his parents’ Georgia property. The house was a run-down double-wide trailer and its paint was peeling from decades of humid Southern heat. The siding was rusted over and popping its bolts, hanging from the bottom of the trailer like a silver-lined candy wrapper.

The property didn’t match the house. It was a great stretch of land; a good two acres narrower than it was long. Those two acres of grassland stretched back for what seemed like an eternity, ending at a wall of trees.

Beyond those trees and a few hundred paces north, an old cemetery sat surrounded by a rusted iron fence. There were too many headstones for it to have belonged to a single family, yet not enough to have belonged to the small town of Rosewood, Georgia. The day Jack discovered that cemetery, he ran from it in search of his parents, but something kept him from revealing his discovery.

Gilda and Stephen Winter weren’t prize-winning parents. That run-down double-wide was an accurate representation of the way their household was run: sparingly and with little attention. They had been blessed with those two acres after one of Gilda’s family members had bit the big one, but the shitty trailer was all Gilda and Stephen’s. They’d bought it off an old guy with one foot in the coffin a few months after Gilda got pregnant, and even then that trailer was waiting for the perfect moment to fall apart.

They hauled that already dilapidated trailer halfway across Georgia and parked it on that inherited land; that was all it took for the Winters to officially become homeowners. A few months later they were homeowners with a kid.

Growing up, Jack didn’t have much guidance. He ran around in bare feet throughout most of the year, took a bath every few days—Gilda would throw him in the tub when she was no longer able to take the stink—and only brushed his teeth because the TV told him to. He grew up wild; a modern-day Huck Finn. He’d run along the length of that property to the tree line, duck beneath a tangle of branches, and spend afternoons among the dead.

Despite his youth, Jack knew that spending time alone in a cemetery was weird, but something kept drawing him back. At first it was only once or twice a month, but as time went on he visited with more frequency. Eventually, he was there every single day for hours on end.

It was there, among the moss-covered headstones and rusted wrought-iron fencing, that he first saw those eyes. Just as the sun dipped beneath the tree line and Jack picked himself up to leave for the night, he saw a pair of glossy black eyes staring at him from behind the trees. Like two onyx-colored marbles, they could have easily belonged to a wolf or raccoon. But there was something off about them. They were soulless, empty, as if pulled from the pit of something twisted and unclean.

They were the same eyes he’d seen the moment before the Saturn lifted off the road and was thrown through the sky. They were the eyes that had haunted Jack in his youth. Jack knew those eyes, and it terrified him that they had found him again.

Chapter Two

P
atricia eventually forced herself to accept Jack as her son-in-law, but this accident was too much. Putting her daughter and grandchildren in danger! If Jack Winter thought Patricia Riley was going to turn a blind eye to his blatant recklessness, he had another thing coming.

“Charlotte is running a fever.”

Pat made the announcement the moment she stepped into the cramped little house. That house was another thorn in Patricia’s side. She’d raised her daughter in a proper Southern home, and here she was, living in a two-bedroom lean-to stuffed floor to ceiling with what could only be described as ‘the bizarre’. Aimee was a fan of antiques, collecting everything from tarnished mirrors to oversized furniture; Jack was partial to strange artifacts—ancient books and weird family portraits. It made for a peculiar collection of home décor.

Patricia diverted her gaze from the taxidermied fawn curled atop Jack’s crumbling piano to Nubs, the Winters’ shaggy black and white Border Collie. She wrinkled her nose in distaste as the dog approached her, taking a cautionary step backward in case the flea bag decided to jump all over her new skirt. But Charlotte distracted him when she slunk into the house, dragging a bright yellow Spongebob Squarepants backpack behind her. Nubs’ interest in Patricia was instantly withdrawn, and he trotted behind Charlie like the loyal dog he was.

“She was complaining about feeling sick earlier,” Aimee said from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a gingham-checked dishtowel. “I figured she was just making it up.” She lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “Guess not.”

“You should get her to bed,” Pat advised, approaching the kitchen counter to inspect her daughter’s in-process cooking.

Patricia Riley fancied herself a gourmet chef. As far as Jack was concerned, she fancied herself an expert at absolutely everything; especially the art of rearing other people’s children.

“Give her some Tylenol and run a cool bath if her fever doesn’t break by tonight.”

“Will do,” Aimee said.

“And I’d consider keeping Abigail on the couch for the night if I were you,” Pat continued. “Or you’ll have two sick kids instead of one.”

Aimee peeked into the girls’ room. Charlie was crawling onto her bed with great effort, pulling herself onto the mattress like a slug.

“Thanks for driving her,” Aimee said. “I don’t know what we’re going to do about a car.”

“Well, I have my bridge club every other day,” Pat said. “You know that. I can drive her every now and again, but I’m no chauffeur. A family can’t survive without a car.”

“We’ll figure something out,” Aimee said. “We’re only a few weeks off of a down payment. We’ll just settle on a cheaper model, get it sooner.”

“A
new
car?” Patricia raised an eyebrow. “You could probably buy two used ones for the same amount of money.”

“Jack has his heart set on a new one. He’s been talking about it for months.”

“What for?” Pat asked with a smirk. “So he can flip it down a few more roads?”

Aimee frowned.

“It was an accident,” she said. She had been hard on Jack herself and the guilt was creeping in. “We were planning on a new car and we’re going to get a new car. There’s no reason for us to change our plans.”

“Suit yourself,” Pat said with a shrug, as though Aimee’s choices had absolutely no bearing on her own situation. “But you’ll be wishing you listened to me,” she warned. “I’d have expected that by your age you’d have learned that your mother is always right.”

Aimee bit her tongue as she chopped a stalk of celery.

“Either way, I’ll check with Daddy to see if he’ll let you borrow the Oldsmobile for a few days. That is, if it’s okay with Jack.”

That sarcasm bore beneath Aimee’s skin, but she couldn’t say a damn thing about it. They’d need a car. Borrowing her father’s Oldsmobile was the prefect solution, at least for a while.

“If it’s okay with Daddy,” Aimee said. “We’d appreciate it.”

“I hope so,” Pat said. “Because you know how much your father loves that car.”

Aimee nodded.

“Thanks, Momma,” she said. “And thanks again for taking Charlie today.”

Pat forced a curt smile and pivoted on the balls of her feet, moving toward the front door.

“Don’t forget the Tylenol,” she warned. “If you don’t remedy the problem now, you’ll be sorry later.”

As soon as Pat stepped out of the house, Aimee rolled her eyes with a snort.

Jack’s job was far from ideal. He spent his days patching up flat-bottomed swamp boats and resoldering metal joints to keep his customers afloat. These customers, who came to the shop because they got hammered with the shop owner every other night, ranged from crawfish fishermen to bonafide ‘gator hunters. Jack spent half his day listening to stories about the Big One that got away, about the monster that nearly chomped a finger or two. By the time he came home, the familiar itch of a headache was tickling his brain, and the tension that had settled over the house didn’t do much in the way of letting him unwind.

Abby sat on the couch, watching television while doing her homework—something she hardly ever got away with. When Jack peeked his head into the girls’ room he found Aimee perched at the foot of Charlie’s bed, looking pensive.