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My heart stopped. It was like strong, cold fingers reaching behind my ribs and squeezing.

And then I was gone, out of the truck, out of anywhere. A storm of images exploded in my head, crazed mental snapshots like fever dreams:

-looking down, a black crayon in my hand, drawing pictures of three stick figures. One drawn with long hair, one shorter with a spray of red at the top-

-under my car, my old car, my Hyundai. On my back, another guy next to me, long blonde hair. I’m holding up a muffler and he’s threading in bolts, and I tell Todd we’re missing a bolt, that it rolled away, and he’s saying that the jack is tilting and GET OUT GET OUT BECAUSE THE CAR IS FALLING-

-running, breathing hard, through a ballroom in a Las Vegas casino. Chaos, then seeing Jim and knowing what I had to do, raising and firing and watching him go down, clutching his neck-

-blue canvas, knees in the snow, rolling a body, rolling it up because somebody could show up any second and it’s sooooo hard to move the dead weight-

Back. In the truck again, fingers clamped on the wheel. Plowing through deep snow, a mailbox flying toward me.

“David!”

I was driving in somebody’s front yard. I cranked the wheel, ground through a drift and landed in the street again. I saw Amy was back, in the passenger seat, pale as china. I reached over and grabbed her by the arm, pulled her over, like I could somehow stop her from getting sucked out of reality again if I hung on really, really tight. She screamed, “The light! Go to the light!”

No idea what she was going on about. Then I saw it, a pool of light in the pitch blackness just ahead. A flat of parking lot, a hint of an unlit red sign.

It was getting darker, blackness eating up the landscape around me, a power outage during a lunar eclipse. I cranked toward the embankment and jumped the curb, climbed over a little hill then landed with a lurch. I slammed the brakes, spinning on a white plane as flat as a hockey rink.

THUNK

We smacked a pole, light bathing the interior. I saw out of the rear view mirror the sign for a new doughnut shop, the place still under construction but the parking lot lights on. And then I saw nothing at all, because blackness settled over everything outside the little island of lit snow we had settled in. In a second we were cut off from the universe, nothing in any direction, like we had submerged in a lake of oil 500 feet under the ocean floor. Just black and black and black.

Silence. The sound of two people breathing. I felt a wet nose at my ear, saw Molly poking her head up, wagging her tail, bouncing back and forth on her paws, growling low under her breath.

Amy said, “They can’t get us! They can’t get us in the light! I knew it!”

“How did you-“

“David,” she said, rolling her eyes, “they’re Shadow People.”

She rolled down her window, poked her head out into the night and screamed, “SCREW YOU!”

“Amy, I’d prefer that you not do that.”

She pulled back in and said, “My heart’s going a thousand miles an hour.”

I looked out into the nothing, found the gun in my lap and squeezed it. A good luck charm at this point, and barely that.

Amy said, “Ooh! Look at that. What is-“

Little bits of light, moving around in the darkness in pairs. Twin embers, small as lit cigarettes, floating slowly around us. There were a few and then a few more, until dozens of the fiery eyes were peering in at us. And then, through the windshield, I saw color. A thin line of electric blue across the darkness, like a horizon. Then the blue line grew fat in the middle, expanding, widening like a slit cut in black cloth. It expanded until blue was all that was visible through the windshield.

It was an eye. Vibrant blue with a dark, vertical reptilian slit of a pupil. The hand on my forearm again. I thought Amy was going to break the bone with her grip. The eye twitched, taking us in. Then it blinked, and was gone.

The shroud of blackness was gone, too. Just the night now, shrouded stars and moonlit snow and a sad, dormant doughnut shop.

Amy said, “Are—are they gone?”

“They’re never gone.”

“What was that?”

A common question tonight. Again, no answer there. Instead I said, “I’m not leaving the light.”

“No.”

Amy craned her head around, looking in all directions again, then took off the cardboard glasses. I looked down at the Smith and realized something, probably several minutes too late. I grabbed the barrel and offered it to Amy, butt-first.

I whispered, “Take this.”

“What? No.”

“Amy, that thing, with the truck driver? You saw how they took him over, used his body? Well that same thing can happen to me.”

And don’t ask me how I know that, honey.

“No, David-“

“Amy, listen to me. If I start acting weird, if I make a move at you, you need to shoot me.”

“I wouldn’t even know to-“

“It’s not complicated. The safety is off. Just squeeze. And don’t get cute and try to go for my arm or some shit like that. You’ll miss. Just aim for the middle of me, jam it into my ribs. Shoot and get out, run for it. Don’t, you know, keep shooting me. Please, take it.”

To my surprise, she did. She turned the pistol over, the gun looking huge in her little hand. She said, “Well, what if it happens to me? What if they take me instead?”

“I can overpower you if I have to, get the gun away. But I don’t think it’ll happen. Not with you.”

“Why?”

I leaned back, suddenly feeling lighter without the gun. I swear the things generate their own gravity.

“It’s just a theory I have.”

Amy pulled her feet up on the seat and scrunched against me, shivering. The gun was in her right hand, laying across her hip and pointing vaguely at my crotch. There would be some real symbolism there, I thought, if this turned out to be a dream.

I said, “Besides, I don’t need the gun. I held up my hands and said, “They passed a law that said I couldn’t put my hands in my pockets. Do you know why? Because they would become concealed weapons. I can kill a man with these hands. Or just one of my feet.”

She snorted a dry, nervous laugh and said, “Yeah, okay. I’ll watch out for you then.”

I again gripped the steering wheel with both hands, tendons tensing across my forearms like cables. I sat like that, in silence, for an eternity of minutes. A whole bunch of words trapped behind clenched teeth.

Finally, I closed my eyes and said, “Okay. Look. You need to understand something. About this situation, who you’re trapped in here with.”

“Oookaaaay...”

She twisted around to face me. Those eyes were so damned green. Like a cat. “Don’t, just—just listen. Do you know why I was in the special school, why I was in the BD class in Pineview?”

She said, “Sort of. The thing with Billy, right? The fight you got into with him? And then later when he-“

“-Yes, that’s right. Listen. Men are animals. Get us together, take out the authority figures, and it’s Lord of the Flies. Billy and his gang, a couple of guys on the wrestling team, they used to make these videos. The kid, you know the Patterson kid, kind of fat? Anyway, they had got him after school and they tied him to a goal post and shaved his head and all that and it was hours before somebody found him and by then, you know, the skin on his face was all blistered from the contact with the feces...”

Maybe you can cut back on the details a bit, hmmm?

“...and they have this party and they show the tape, show the tape of them torturing this fat kid and him just screaming. And they sat there with their beers and watched that tape over and over and over and that’s the way it is in high school. Shit that would get an adult put in a straight jacket is just brushed off. ‘Boys will be boys.’”

I hesitated, scanned the night for something, anything. I saw a lone bird on a power line, flapping its wings but it didn’t seem to be going anywhere.

“Anyway, the Hitchcock guys, I got gym with them and they pick me outta the crowd. It became this daily thing. Little shit at first but they kept pushing it further and further and it took more and more to keep them entertained. And the coach there, he hated me, so he would make sure and not be there. I mean, I literally saw him turn his back and leave the room when they came after me one time, made sure I saw him do it. And, one day they got on me and took me to this equipment room in back, this little storage area with shoulder pads and wrestling mats stacked all around and it’s hot as an oven and there’s this moldy smell of old sweat fermenting in foam padding. And things got crazy. Like, prison yard crazy. And, eventually it ends and they leave me there and they’re walking out through the locker room and...”

Hmmmm... would she notice if I suddenly changed the subject?

“...Well, I had taken to bringing a knife to school, not a switchblade or anything cool but a little two-inch blade on my keychain. It was all I had. And I get this blade free and I get behind Billy and I slice him, right up his back, a shallow little cut up his spine. It wasn’t deep but it got his attention and he fell over, thinking he was dead, blood all over the bench and the floor. And I got on him, sat on his chest and I started jabbing at his face, cutting, the blade bouncing off bone in his forehead and blood and...”

I thought long and hard about how to dress up this next part, but couldn’t think of a way. I wondered when the doughnut shop was scheduled to open.

Filling in the silence, Amy asked, “What did they do to you?”

“Let’s put it this way. I’ll never, ever tell you.”

She had no answer, which either meant she was totally unfamiliar with the concept or very well familiar. I pressed on.

“So, I wound up-“

-cutting out his eyes-

“-hurting him pretty bad, he lost his eyesight. I mean, like, legally blind. I wound up getting charged with aggravated assault and several other things that are all synonyms for aggravated assault. The school was talking a permanent expulsion. My dad—my adopted dad—he’s a lawyer, you know, he had a series of meetings with the school and the prosecutor and it was a mess. They wound up testing me for mental illness, which I knew even at the time was a way to get me off because the case could be made that the school should have protected Billy from me, should have diagnosed me, whatever. I met with a counselor who had me talk about my mom and look at ink blots and role play with puppets and draw a picture of how I viewed my place in the world...

...and I knew it was a scam, a lawyer trick, but I kept picturing Coach Wilson turning his back, again and again and I figured, hey, screw them. The prosecutor, this bearded Jewish tough guy, didn’t want to push the charges. He said it was a five-on-one fight and shit happens, didn’t want to see me disappear into the jaws of the juvey justice system. The school backed off on the expulsion under threat of lawsuit and, bada-boom, I wind up spending my final year at Pineview.”

A speck of crystal landed on the windshield. A lone snowflake. Another landed a few inches away.

“So,” I said, “four months later Billy is adjusting to life without eyes, saying goodbye to sports and driving and independence and knowing what his food looks like before he eats it and never knowing if a fly has landed in his soup. He takes all of his pain pills at once. Demerol, I think. They find him dead the next day.”

Silence. Desperate to hear her say something, anything, I asked, “So how much of that story did you already know?”

“Most of it. There was a weird rumor that went around that you had snuck into his room and poisoned him or something stupid like that, with rat poison or something which was stupid because the police would have noticed that.”

“Right, right.”

I started that rumor, by the way.

“You must have felt horrible when you found out. About Billy, I mean. That’d be awful.”

“Yeah.”

Nope.

What followed was the longest and most tense conversation pause of my life, like being stuck on a Ferris Wheel with somebody you just puked on. Exactly like that, by the way. The truth was, I didn’t feel sorry for Billy. He teased a dog and got his fingers bitten off. Fuck him. Fuck everybody. And fuck you, Amy, for somehow getting me to tell you this. Sure, yeah, I felt bad about it, Your Honor. And that day years ago when I heard about the kids shooting up the school in Colorado I shook my head and said it was a tragedy, an awful tragedy but inside I was thinking the look on the jocks’ faces when they saw the guns must have been fucking priceless. So, yeah, as far as you know, I felt just as bad about Billy as a good person would. And I’ll never, ever tell you otherwise. Never.

She said, “Still, who knows what he would have done to somebody else if you hadn’t-“

“-I don’t feel bad about it, Amy. I lied about that part. When I heard, I felt nothing at all. I thought I would, I didn’t. The guilt just wasn’t there because I’m not that type of person. And that’s what I’ve been saying, that’s why you’re in danger here. I don’t think those things, those bits of walking nothing can use you but I think they’d know me as one of their own. So keep the gun on me. And keep your finger laying along the side of the trigger and be ready to squeeze it as hard and as fast as you can.”

Silence again. Did I say that last silence was the longest and most awkward of my life? The record didn’t stand for long.

I would give everything I own to somehow take this conversation back.

I said, “We have no idea what they were doing to you, Amy, when those things took you all of those times. But they’re not going to do it again. This being scared bullshit, it’s exhausting for me. And you know, I reach a point where I say, you can kill me or tear off my arms or soak me in gasoline and set me on fire, but you won’t keep me like this, imprisoned by fear. Now, after everything I’ve seen, I’m not really scared of monsters and demons and whatever they are. I’m only scared of one thing and that’s the fear. Living with that fear, with intimidation. A boot on my neck. I won’t live like that. I won’t. I wouldn’t then and I won’t now.”

After a long time she said, “What do we do?”

“We sit here. Just keep the gun on me, okay? We’ll sit here and wait for the sun. Then I’ll talk to John. John will know what to do.”

I can’t believe you just said that.

4:20 AM

Unbeknownst to us at the time but knownst to us later because he would tell us, John had decided to go to the Drain Rooter job site early to get a look around on his own. So while Amy and I sat camped out in my Bronco at the unborn doughnut shop, John was rolling his Caddie up the snowy road past Amy’s house. He didn’t get far, of course, arriving at a bundle of vehicles trying to un-stick a jackknifed Drain Rooter semi tractor trailer.

Now, I wasn’t there. So this story is hearsay. If you know John, you’ll take the details for what they’re worth. Please also remember that, where John claims to have “gotten up at three-thirty” to perform this investigation, it was far more likely he was still up and somewhat drunk from the night before.

John says he pulled up to the scene, which was roped off with yellow and black tape that announced it as a Hazardous Material Area. He observed several guys in yellow jumpsuits milling around and cleaning the scene with some urgency, so of course he immediately decided to cross the “DO NOT CROSS” tape. Two steps in, John found himself standing on a faded pink stain on the snow, as wide as a car. He deduced that this was blood, though the truck driver’s body (in parts as it was) was gone. He stood over this large blood stain and said, out loud and in the hearing of several bystanders, “This is blood! David must have been here.”

At this point two elderly security guards in parkas, the guys who normally work the front desk at the plant, asked John to step behind the tape. John claims that here he told the guards that he could not speak English and when this failed to persuade them, he faked a violent seizure. I am unclear as to the purpose of this part of his plan. John flung himself down and began rolling around in the snow, thrashing his limbs about and screaming, “EL SEIZURE!!! NO ES BUENO!!!” in a Mexican accent. Half a dozen pairs of boots came mushing through the snow toward him.

Then, from the ground, John saw something that stopped him cold. The semi trailer was, according to him, “bleeding from the ass.”

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Copyright © 2008 David Wong and Jason Pargin - All rights reserved. No part of this book or website may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the express written consent of the author and publisher. This online book is a work of fiction. People, places, events, and situations are the product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidence.