The People Next Door (32 page)

When Bob Percy forced me to look down over the balcony, everything I thought I knew about life and death and the borders in
between vented from me in a single, childish gasp of disbelief. Of course, by then disbelieving was no longer an option.

All of the families, including Bob’s wife and children, were standing in the swimming pool – which was mercifully not lit.
I could see that some were naked, others were clothed. They weren’t doing anything except standing in the water, facing the
ocean like mannequins. Sculptures in a fountain. It was not a large pool but there were more than twenty of them crammed into
it like sardines, standing shoulder to shoulder. Husbands and wives, the teens and younger children, some as young as five
or six in the shallow end. At least two were elderly, perhaps grandma and grandpa had been invited on the trip. The rain continued
to plop and sprinkle around them, but they didn’t mind the dark or the weather or anything else. I don’t know what their minds
were on, or if at that point they even possessed minds.

I stared at them for I don’t know how long. I was
beyond shock now. I was completely unmoored. They were so still and collective in their demeanor, I felt as though I were
witnessing a ritual, that these people were waiting on a divine revelation, or for their cult leader to appear.

‘Do you see it?’ Bob whispered beside me.

Of course I saw it.

‘No, not them,’ Bob suggested.

What else was there to see?

But then I did see it. The water. The surface of the pool was as he had described the water inside the cenote his son had
fallen into. It was silver, twinkling and flashing like his arm had been. No light shone down on it – the moon that night
was obscured by clouds – but the water reflected something, glowed like a thousand tiny dulled diamonds, scales on the back
of a giant snake, writhing and shimmering, alive.

They had taken to the pool, and taken it with them.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Bob said. ‘You can’t imagine what it feels like.’

‘You’ve been in with them?’ I whispered in disgust.

‘I don’t feel refreshed,’ Bob said. ‘
I feel reborn
.’

The wind was still blowing and the waves were swishing and sighing not a hundred feet away. We were speaking softly. They
couldn’t have heard us.

Nevertheless, at that moment they began turning in unison, like they were all experiencing the same premonition or the queer
sensation of being watched. They turned and looked up at us on the balcony. At first their faces were nothing more than expressionless
dark spots
in the darker night. But soon I could see faint spots of white, their eyes and teeth, and then more white, in the same places,
and I realized they were grinning. They began to murmur and mumble unintelligibly and it did not make sense but they were
clearly … aroused … by our presence.

That is when I turned and ran away from them. I ran down the stairs of the Percy villa, out the front door, into the night.
I ran blindly up the road and I don’t remember looking back, but I
do
remember them chasing me, walking after me, all twenty or thirty of them half naked and drained and maybe that was my imagination
working on a boost of adrenaline as I had never experienced, but then again maybe it wasn’t.

I crashed into our villa and woke my wife and our children. I told them to leave everything, throw on some clothes and get
in the car. We had rented a Dodge Durango with four bald tires and a weak battery but it started. The tires slipped and squeaked
on the wet road but we got out of there. I drove us to the tiny airport just a couple of miles away, but of course there were
no planes available, not at a little after three in the morning. I was all but hysterical. The first ferry left at six but
that was too slow and what if some of them decided to take the ferry with us? We purchased tickets for a puddle jumper leaving
Vieques at 5:45 a.m. Whatever I had seen, whatever Bob had seen me run away from, I could not shake the feeling that he and
the others would be displeased. That they wanted me to participate. That they would come looking for us.

We needed a place to hide for the next two hours.

I drove in circles, up and down the narrow streets of Isabel Segunda until I found the police station – and even then I debated
stopping. Every minute that we lingered was another minute we were at risk of the infection, or another encounter with the
infected. But I could not in good conscience just leave them to their own devices, possibly spreading it. I was certain it
had changed them in some terrible way.

I knocked on the door but the police station or small annex we found was deserted. We crossed the island and found another
in Esperanza, also deserted. We searched these two small towns for a patrol car or officer on horseback but the island was
asleep. No one walked the wet streets. I had left my phone at the villa and we had no other options. We went back to the airport.
We would deal with matters from the big island, after completing what was only a twenty-minute flight.

By sunset we were safely among the masses of travelers at San Juan International. I checked us into a chain hotel across the
street. I told my wife the truth, of the infection from the well, sparing her the worst details but mentioning dozens of ‘victims’.
We inspected ourselves and the kids, but, perhaps incredibly for me (for he had touched me at least five times), none of us
displayed the symptoms that Bob had. We showered and scrubbed anyway, and dressed in new clothes purchased from the lobby
gift shop.

I called the police department and two officers met me in the lobby of the hotel. I forced myself to speak
calmly in as plain a language as possible. I told the truth inasmuch as I could without making them think I was insane while
also scaring them enough to ensure they sent manpower back to the island. I gave them the name of our villas and the address
and said there was what I believed to be an infection or outbreak of some kind among the people renting units next door. I
used the term buckets of blood, said six families had been sickened, some were possibly dead. In an effort to ‘cleanse themselves’
they had taken to the pool in the middle of the night, but many were not ‘coherent’. The ones I had seen were catatonic but
upright, I explained.

To my surprise, a detective on Vieques called me less than two hours later, just before we were to board our American Airlines
flight at 12:45. We were in a food court in the terminal, seated at a crowded cafeteria-style restaurant. The kids were tired
and sullen, but my wife and I were still filled with anxiety. The detective introduced himself as Javier Arguelles and he
sounded every bit a professional officer who had taken my report seriously, not some Third World lackey who promised to look
into things
mañana
.

He confirmed my name and the address of the villa we had stayed in. He stated that he and a fellow officer of the Vieques
policia
had visited our abandoned villa as well as the six neighboring villas. He and his partner introduced themselves to the tenants
(he would not confirm their names to me, though I had given the ones I remembered to him) and were granted permission to
perform a search of all six villas. The families were not injured and did not appear to be ill, and all were friendly but
expressed dismay at the inquiry. They claimed to have no idea who I was.

No rooms with blood. No traces of any violence or of a cover-up. Just five families cooperating with what was sounding more
and more like a crank call. Detective Arguelles asked me to repeat my story, and I did so before asking him to confirm that
he had the right address and complex of villas. He did, but by now I was beginning to annoy him. I lost my temper and eventually
the call was disconnected. I am not sure if Detective Arguelles hung up on me or if it was simply a dropped call.

Perhaps they got to him.

The airline announced that our flight was boarding and I saw no reason to stay. Whatever further inquires I decided to pursue,
I could do so from home. We left Puerto Rico and our lives resumed, but I did not forget about that night or any of the things
I had seen. The image of those people in the pool haunted me for many days and nights, and I lost a lot of sleep wondering
what had become of the families. Had they gotten off the island, like we had? Had it changed them permanently, or was it a
passing sickness? If they had survived, were they functional enough to return to their normal lives?

The answer to those questions came nine days after we returned home to Colorado. My wife caught it first. Then my son, and
very soon after, our daughter. I was the last to go, so I was the one who watched them bleed
and writhe in agony. Twenty-six minutes was all it took to bring all four of us down. It happened too fast for any of us to
call 9-1-1. By the time I thought of reaching for the phone, my wife was dead. By the time I realized my attempts to revive
her had failed, the kids were gone. By the time I surfaced from the rapture of grief long enough to feel the fever spiking,
my wife was rising from the bathtub.

She cleaned up the children and locked them in the basement. She could not bear to look at them alone. She waited for me to
come back, and then we began the discussion about how to deal with our new condition. We decided not to tell the children.
Perhaps one day they would be ready for it, but not then, not that first night, or during that first endless week when we
all stayed in the house together, showering and showering and pretending we were ‘only sick with a terrible flu’. We did not
leave the house for six days, but on the seventh night we were forced to leave.

We were very hungry and the food we had in the pantry had done nothing to slake our appetites.

Of course my wife and I fooled ourselves in more ways than one. The children knew how they were different, how we had all
changed. But as we took our first meal together, as our eyes met over the first body we took there in the field off of Niwot
Road, a high-school boy walking home late because he was too drunk to drive, we each understood that we now shared a tremendous
secret. We each understood that this was a thing outside of the rest of our lives. We each understood that
we would have to be very careful until we found a cure, or a way out.

It occurs to me now, we never really left the island. We came home, but we have been stranded ever since. We understood a
great many things about what it meant for all of us, but we did not talk about it. We never have. How could we?

Sometimes it doesn’t seem real enough to bother.

‘Tell me how you found us,’ Mick said.

‘We were there, of course. In the fourth villa.’ Render stood and began to pace the room, studying his art. ‘After it all
went down, I did not know the first names of the other families, but I had their surnames and, more importantly, I knew Bob
Percy owned a car dealership in Mt Horeb, Wisconsin.

‘Using a Yellow Pages Internet search, I phoned Bob at his dealership. It was a Friday morning, five days after we had returned.
A receptionist transferred me and Bob answered in less than a minute. I recognized his voice instantly. He did not recognize
mine, nor did he remember me when I introduced myself by name, nor through the recollection of what had happened.

‘“Buddy,” Bob Percy laughed, and it was the same laugh I had heard less than a week ago, “you sound like a nice guy, but I
don’t have the foggiest dang clue what you’re talking about.”

‘“Vieques,” I insisted, clutching the phone. “Last week. I was in the villa next door. The well. The storm. Your neighbors
…?”

‘“Via-what?” Bob said. “Where is that again?”

‘“In Puerto Rico,” I shouted. “Why are you bullshitting me?”

‘“You must be confused, sir.” And he was so genial. He was either an amazing actor or truly believing the words coming out
of his mouth. He said, “I’ve never heard of Vieques, though I wish I had. My family and I have never vacationed outside of
the fifty states. I wouldn’t mind taking a trip like that right about now. Hardly November here and already colder than frozen
snot.”

‘“Your health problems,” I said. “I know all about them. You need a new hip, you have diabetes, and more than likely a heart
condition.”

‘Bob said, “Ahhhh, okay, now we’re getting somewhere. See, now I know you got the wrong guy. I don’t have any problems like
that and I have never felt better in my life.”

‘I argued. I pleaded and raged and calmed down again and Bob Percy, give him this, he was patient and polite, but he did not
give in. I realized there was nothing more to accomplish over the phone. I was furious. How many Bob Percys are there in the
world who live in Mt Horeb and own a car dealership?

‘I was in the process of purchasing a plane ticket to Madison six days later when my wife showed me the news item on MSNBC:
Mt Horeb, Wisconsin family found dead in home
. The media called it a heinous murder-suicide. People who knew the couple claimed they were such decent folks but yes, matter
of fact, they had been
having serious financial problems. That was the story, but I didn’t believe it.

‘The reason I did not believe it was because the Percy children, Tanya and Timothy, as well as Bob’s wife, Lynn, had been
beheaded before someone moved Bob to the garage, doused him in gasoline, and set him aflame. Where the investigators saw a
mentally unstable man under financial duress, I saw local townfolk, neighbors, someone who
knew
what an abomination they had become, coming for the Percys in the night, like villagers waving torches and pitchforks outside
of Frankenstein’s last stand.

‘Two weeks later another item broke in the same area, this one concerning two high-school students – a sixteen-year-old boy
and his fifteen-year-old girlfriend – from Dodgeville, Wisconsin. That’s a small town less than twenty miles from Mt Horeb.
They had been missing and their parents thought they had run away together fifteen days earlier – they had disappeared just
one day before the Percy massacre.

‘The girl’s Chevy Caprice was found in the woods near Yellowstone Lake, less than twenty miles from her home, covered with
tree branches. A hunter stumbled upon it and though he was seventy-eight years old and hardened by farming life and two wars,
he required medical attention from the shock of the discovery. The bodies inside had been stripped to the bone, devoured by
something the likes of which this hunter had never seen.

‘I tracked down the other families through the rental
agent who owned the villas. She was based in Seattle and knew nothing useful. From there it was not difficult to locate them.
I bought a large map of the States and a box of red pins. I followed the local, state, and national news. The map began to
grow clusters of the sort police use to triangulate a serial killer. The clusters matched the metro areas of each of the families.
Disappearances, missing women and children who went for a walk or a hike and never came back. Two of my investigators connected
the Greenwalds of Las Vegas to three beheadings in the Nevada desert thought to be the work of organized crime, the bodies
desecrated by coyotes. A spike in disappearances from the casino hotels. It went on and on. The faces on the milk cartons
changed.

‘For the next two years I became obsessed. I traveled, I surveilled, and eventually I introduced myself. I got close to and
met with three of the families. The Robertsons of Charlotte, North Carolina, and the Weavers of Boise, Idaho. Both claimed
never to have been to the island of Vieques and pretended to not remember me. All of the family members were in exceptional
health. The Chavez family were back in Miami, but were increasing their travels to New York City to visit relatives there,
where they had a greater population to blend into and poach from. I rescued them from a warehouse in Hoboken where they been
living like animals, stockpiling victims. Even after I confronted them with the evidence of their nighttime adventures, they
did not remember what had happened, and they did not know what they had become. Except, in a way, they did.
You could see it deep down inside of them, buried like a history of incest.

‘Whatever it did to them, it not only has the power to heal, like it only temporarily healed Bob Percy, it created a dark
other inside them that allowed each of them to carry on separate lives. Dahmer, Gacy, the Zodiac and Green River killers.
All of the great hunters operated with separate personas. It’s how they got through their sloppy days.

‘I helped them get it under control. I established safe houses for the families, fortified compounds where they could keep
a low profile until everything was organized. And I knew there had to be others. What if this thing could be harnessed at
the source? Imagine the power of containment, the value of patenting, the government contracts, the number of lives this could
save in combat theater, controlled manufacturing in the pharmaceutical industry, a cure for heart disease, alzheimer’s, cancer
…

‘I went back to Vieques, of course, making three trips in the eight months that followed that first trip. I searched every
square inch of that island for the cenote, but I never found it. A small team of archeology students I paid to scour the jungle
happened upon a blast site full of sand and rock near a beach that was being graded for new construction, but there was no
well. Maybe the Navy caught on and filled it in. Maybe the local authorities covered up one of the last great mysteries. But
all that is history. Dying history. The world is changing and we have a lot of work to do.

‘What I am curious about is why you are so quiet. I
find it strange you have not asked me the most important question, because there is a gaping hole in my account of what happened
on that island. What do you think, Mick? Did you see it? Do you see the black bottomless well in your world?’

Mick did not respond for a long time. He was trying to see a way through this and the only available path was dark.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what you want from me.’

‘Yes, you do.’ Render leaned forward. ‘The villas, Mick. A row of six. Six villas, six families. But I only mentioned five.
The Greenwalds, Gomezes, Robertsons, Weavers and Percys …’

‘And the Renders,’ Mick finished. ‘You’re infected like the others.’

‘Such an ugly word, infected. We prefer evolved.’ Render smiled. ‘So that’s only six. You’re forgetting, Cass and I were hiding
in the sixth unit, the one you never entered during your inspections with Bob Percy. There is still the matter of the seventh
family, the one in the stand-alone unit. What happened to them? Who are they? What have they become?’

Troy the security guard turned away and opened the master bedroom door. He stepped in, shining his light around. Into the
bathroom, around the fireplace and bench seating area, across the neatly made bed
.

There’s nobody in here, Mr Render. What did you say you saw?

I don’t remember, Troy. I get so confused these days. The
timing of these things. It’s hard to keep track of the nights when you live like this
.

Why did you shut the door, Mr Render? Sir? I’m going to ask you to back away now and please exit the house
.

One of us was here already. Check the walk-in closet, Troy. I know they’re in here somewhere
.

‘It makes you wonder,’ Render continued, standing, pacing the room. ‘When the living see the dead, we call them ghosts. But
when the dead see their own kind, when the dead see their victims, what do we call them? What do you call yours, Mick?’

The light in the room seemed to dim. Mick felt funny inside, and then he felt nothing at all, as if his physical sensations
were only memories.

‘It’s over,’ Mick said softly.

‘It’s only beginning,’ Render said. ‘Eugene and Virginia Sapphire are not over. You saw them. Were they behaving like the
good little dead senior citizens they’re supposed to be? Or were they … something else?’

The closet door opened then, and Troy turned, raising his Maglite. But it was too late for him. Eugene and Virginia came forth,
healing and bleeding and hungry, and it was too late for all of them. Oh, Amy, I’m so sorry I left you alone. I should have
taken them out myself
.

‘Which one of you was it, Mick? Can you even keep track of your family any more?’

Mick felt trapped inside a box. He couldn’t breathe. He felt as though he were having a heart attack. He placed a hand over
his chest and felt nothing but a deep ache spreading into his limbs. His heart did not beat. His
lungs did not fill. His body was so heavy. He was so very tired. He was always tired now, except when he was fighting to preserve
–

Render stopped pacing and hovered above him, eyes alight. ‘We breathe as if by habit. We sleep with open eyes. We can barely
stomach ordinary food and we are always hungry. We bleed without purpose and our hearts beat only in memory.’

‘No,’ Mick said. ‘You’re sick, a parasite.’

‘And you’re running out of time!’ Render yelled. ‘I can’t keep cleaning up after you. It’s time to work together and increase
our numbers or we are headed for extinction!’

‘You don’t know us. You have no right …’

Render said, ‘How long do you think you can continue to operate in this town before someone sees you the way I have seen you?
Eric Pritchard and Jason Wells, cut down like trees in the forest. Who was there to hear them scream?’

We walked into the woods together, all dressed in black. We’d followed the Honda in Amy’s Passat, then parked up the road
from the turn-off, covering the car with pine branches. The children did not ask questions, only followed their parents, their
instincts awakening as they trekked deeper into the hills. The silence between us as what we were about to do stirred our
hunger. I pointed up the hill and separated from them as I took the road and they flanked the boys in the gully. I looked
back one last time at my son’s face and saw a kind of frightened wonderment and, beneath that, predatory intensity
.

‘Officer Terrance Fielding of the Boulder Police
Department,’ Render said. ‘What was happening in your restaurant after hours, Mick?’

I crouched before the bar’s refrigeration unit while Terry droned on and on about the missing dentist. I saw white, and I
changed. I turned and rose, finding the baseball bat under the bar and bringing it up and around so fast Fielding never had
time to pull his gun. The blow staving in the temple as the cop spun sideways and flopped to the floor. I rushed around the
bar to finish it, thud thud thud, the wood striking the skull. Dragging Fielding into the kitchen to find Carlos my chef and
Jamie my best server watching me, the blood draining from their faces. Carlos going for the door as Jamie screamed, but they
didn’t get past the hanging rack of skillets before I caught them. Quick bites along the necks. The long night of sitting
with them, waiting for them to resurrect
.

‘Dr Roger Lertz and his mistress, Bonnie Abrahams, whose bodies were never found. Why did Amy take the boat back out after
I had already pulled you out of the water? When did you get to them? Before or after lunch? Did you take them alone or with
your entire family? What was it, envy? Did he provoke you?’

Kyle was excited by the sight of blood. All of us were excited by the prospect of blood. We turned back to fetch the ski,
then trolled in the afternoon sun, coasting up on Roger’s vessel before the dentist even knew we were there. I boarded first,
opening the cabin door, seeing Bonnie in there with her broken nose
.

‘It was an accident,’ Roger said. ‘She slipped, Mick. Tell him, Bonnie.’

Bonnie was crying. ‘You bastard. Don’t touch me! Get him away from me!’

Roger lunged, calling her a lying bitch, and I stepped in to separate them, Roger fighting back, fighting back and losing.
Amy and the kids boarded to join me, breaking a bottle over Roger’s head and then jagging him across the throat while Bonnie
screamed at us, a free for all until the berth was packed with bodies thrashing against one another
.

The swimming after, to wash away the blood. To cleanse. To forget
.

I dropped my family off on the dock. Silent, mutual understanding between me and Amy:
You have to go back and clean it up, clean it all up, Mick.
She waited and waited for me to erase all evidence, throwing the bodies overboard, and then I slipped, knocking my head against
the gunwale, falling into the lake
.

How many hours was Roger underwater before he revived? How did he spend his hours waiting for dark to fall, until it was safe
to come back and warn me about our new neighbors?