What the Hell Did I Just Read

  “I don’t think so, but I don’t want to eliminate any possibilities.” John sipped the woman’s surprisingly good coffee and studied the drawings. “This church she kept drawing, is this your church? Is church a big deal to you guys?”

  “She’d never drawn it before. The one Ted took us to is that biker church, they hold services in that old motel. It doesn’t look anything like a traditional church. In her drawings, it always has that steeple and that cross in the same spot.”

  “There is a church like this in town, do you know it? It’s next to a pond? And a haunted coal mine?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe she went there with friends?”

  “It’s possible. What do you think it means?”

  “Maybe nothing. Maybe everything. I’ll go check it out either way.” John stood. “I’ll leave you be, you’ve been a big help and I know this has been hard for you.”

  She stood, meeting his eyes.

  “It has been hard. I’ve just been so lonely here, Ted coming back from the war and breaking things off like he did, now Maggie going missing … do you know what that’s like? To have a hole in your life so big that your life is nothing but hole?”

  “I think we all feel like that, at times. Those of us who are lucky, we have someone we can cling to in those times when life feels, as you said, like one big butthole.”

  “That’s all I want, sometimes. Someone to cling to, if even just for a moment.”

  She dropped her robe. She was naked underneath.

  John looked her up and down. “I’m in the middle of a case, miss. Time is of the essence. Your little girl’s life could be at stake.”

  She stepped forward, running a finger down his chest. “I promise I won’t be long.”

  “I can promise I will be long.”

  John let his pants fall. “I’m telling you right now, this won’t cure your loneliness, or replace what your husband took from you when he fled. At best, all I can do is diminish his memory by giving you something far beyond what he ever could.”

  “That will have to do.” She lay back on the bed. “But maybe even that is asking too much. You see, my husband was quite the—OH MY FUCKING GOD!”

  “Do you want me to stop, Ms. Knoll?”

  “IF YOU STOP I WILL KILL YOU.”

  And so he did not stop, until her orgasmic cries filled the lonely halls of her modest home. John thrusted his staff into the moist—

  Me

  “John,” I said into my phone, “it is really, really important that you give me the actual story and not a bunch of bullshit. The truth is enough, you don’t need to sex it up. So, please, back up and just boil it down to the parts that, you know, actually happened. The thing with the drawings of the church, that was real, right?”

  “Yeah, a little traditional country style church, like you’d see on a postcard. White, steeple, probably some stained glass.”

  “Like the one at Mine’s Eye?” That’s a little wooded area with a pond around what had been a coal mine back in the olden days.

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, meet me there. The creepy kid drawing thing is a little cliché but it’s literally the only lead we’ve got.”

  John said, “There’s something else, though I don’t know what to make of this, either. Ted’s car got stolen. Old restored Impala. I found out just before I called you, it was missing from his garage when he got back from the ice factory.”

  “Huh. Maybe this whole thing was one big ploy to steal his car? Oh, I was able to get into the phone, the one we recovered from the ice factory.”

  John paused for a confused moment. “What phone? The pink toy one?”

  “I don’t … I mean, is that what it looked like to you the whole time?”

  “Yeah, it had a Disney princess or something on it. When you asked about hacking it, I thought you were joking. Were you able to make it work, somehow?”

  “Yeah. Maybe?”

  “And?”

  “It had photos and a video on it. Fake ones. There were pics of the little girl looking mangled and bloody, but I don’t think it means she’s actually been hurt.”

  “How do you know they were fake?”

  “There were pics of us on there. We were dead in those, too.”

  “Hmm.”

  “Yeah. I have a question, John. Who’s paying us for this?”

  “What?”

  “Amy doesn’t get enough hours at the call center and I don’t get any hours at the anything. Who’s paying us?”

  “It was never discussed. I don’t think Ted has much money.”

  “The cops called us in, shouldn’t they have like a consultant’s fund in the budget?”

  “I think that would require us having some kind of license or expertise or something. We’ve had this discussion before. Did you find anything on Joy Park?”

  “Well, it’s a porn star. Otherwise no.”

  “Yeah I saw that,” said John. “You think those boobs are real?”

  I consulted my notes. “I did some digging. If she got a boob job she got it early. She’s about twenty-seven I think, her earliest shoots are from five or six years ago, and she had big boobs then. Looks pretty natural when she’s on her back.”

  “You see that set where she’s coming out of the pool? Jesus.”

  It felt like we’d gotten off the subject somewhat. Then I suddenly remembered what I should have done when the call started. “Hey, what’s the code word?”

  “The what?”

  “The, uh, password Ted set up, to make sure you’re you and I’m me.”

  John said, “Oh, right. It was … wait, why do I have to say it? If you’re an imposter maybe this call is just a way to find out about the password.”

  “How would I have known we have a password at all?”

  John considered for a moment. “It was ‘bushmaster.’”

  “Yeah.”

  “I remember because that was my nickname in high school.”

  “Though, if you—”

  “Because I got so much bush.”

  “Though, if you were an imposter, I think I’d know within seconds. You think one of ‘Them’ could mimic the stupid shit that comes out of your mouth?”

  There was a moment of silence before John said, “That’s … actually a good question.”

  “What is?”

  “If it tried to be one of us, would it know how to say everything we just said? About the boobs and such?”

  “I wish we didn’t know how to say it.”

  “Serious question.”

  “No. I mean … I don’t think so. How could it?”

  5. AMY’S BREAKFAST WITH EVIL

  Amy

  Amy Sullivan’s cubicle neighbor, Shawn, was taking her home from work in his new Mustang. She was in the passenger seat eating a single-serving box of Cocoa Pebbles by shaking them into her mouth, then washing it down with a bottle of Orange Crush (the selection in the break room vending machine at the office actually matched her preferred diet really well).

  Shawn asked, “Are you sure you don’t want anything else to eat? You’re just downing handfuls of sugar there.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “I don’t know how you stay that size on your diet. I wouldn’t be able to fit behind this steering wheel.”

  “I have a painting of myself in my closet, it gets fatter every time I eat.”

  “You have a what?”

  She wondered if he was really just afraid she would spill something in his car, despite having told her it was fine every time she asked. Amy was trying to balance her meal with her one remaining hand and she knew it probably looked precarious. She had briefly experimented with a prosthetic left hand, to replace the one that had gotten lopped off in the car crash years ago. She and David had picked it out together from a catalog her doctor had given her—a metallic, Terminator-esque model that they both thought was hilarious. It kind of looked like she had gotten some of her fake human skin ripped off, revealin
g the robot underneath that had been there all along. Which, Amy had said, would actually make sense: if someone was going to create a cyborg intended to pass for human, it was more logical to disguise it as a hundred pounds of freckles and glasses than a muscular Austrian.

  The hand had only lasted about a month, though, before she stopped strapping it on every morning. The reason, she told everyone, was that it just wasn’t convenient to use—it looked like a robot hand from the future, but in reality was just operated by a cable that ran around her other shoulder, and she had to open and close it by shrugging. It didn’t have little motors in it or anything, like Luke’s hand in Star Wars—those were for people with Cadillac health insurance. It didn’t have much in the way of grip strength, either, and she found herself just doing everything with her right hand anyway. It was just habit, she’d now lived without the other hand almost as long as she’d lived with it.

  But the real problem was that, with the robot hand, it was like she suddenly had a PLEASE HIT ON ME sign draped over her neck written in a language that only the creepiest of guys could read. Those guys loved the robot hand, each and every one of them broaching the subject as if they were the first. She didn’t know if it was a fetish thing or if they just thought they could get her cheaper because she was a damaged floor model. All she knew was that whenever she entered the one remaining video game store in town, all four male employees would follow her from shelf to shelf, desperately trying to make conversation (“Hey, do you have a DotA account?”).

  But the convention had been the final straw.

  A group of former college friends had invited her to a gaming convention in Indianapolis and offered to pay her way (David would never have come within a five-mile radius of a gaming convention, even if he was bleeding profusely and just needed to pass it on the way to the emergency room). Everyone was going in costume, and Amy only needed a cheap pink wig and an afternoon modifying a white skirt and top to go as Ulala from Space Channel 5—a costume she had picked specifically because that character wore white elbow-length gloves. But she had accidentally left the gloves at home and everybody had thought the mecha hand was part of her costume, since to people unfamiliar with the game, the getup just registered as Generic Space Girl. Amy wondered if they thought she was so dedicated to the role that she had hacked off one of her limbs just to complete the ensemble.

  Anyway, some pictures of her at the convention got posted on the Internet, and they went somewhat viral since Amy is kind of a minor celebrity in some circles. She had quickly gotten snowed under with messages from creepers, and at least three of them had dug up her phone number. Half the messages were asking why she didn’t go for the more revealing version of the costume with the bare midriff; the other half were informing her that she was too ugly to wear such a thing in public. She was never in any actual danger, as far as she knew, but the sheer volume of it freaked her out and, well, brought back some bad memories. From that point on, she had this feeling like all eyes were on her the moment she stepped outside with the metal hand—she even had a panic attack, once.

  So, she put it away. She never told David why.

  The Mustang passed a flooded cornfield and Amy wondered if the road itself wouldn’t be underwater a week from now. Or a day. She wondered if that would be a valid excuse to miss work, or if they’d just fire everybody who didn’t own a canoe. At this rate, the office itself would be under before too long—she imagined everyone sitting at their desks, neck deep in flood water, taking calls while fish swam in front of their monitors.

  She asked, “What happens to the rabbits when it’s like this?”

  “What rabbits?”

  “Don’t rabbits live in tunnels? And moles and mice and such? Do they drown, when it floods?”

  Thinking quickly, Shawn said, “Rabbits are fast, they can outrun the water.”

  “But what if they’ve got babies? How would they get them out of there?”

  “Baby rabbits are good swimmers. They’re not like humans where they have to take classes, they can do it coming out of the womb. They’re fine.”

  She wondered how long he would keep making stuff up if she kept asking. She had asked David that same question the day before and his answer had been, “It started raining weeks ago, those lazy bastards have had plenty of time to get to the high ground. What are they waiting for, FEMA?”

  Most of the people Amy worked with were cool, which is one of the biggest factors in determining your quality of life, if you think about it. She had parlayed her five semesters of programming classes into a job that involved no coding at all—a call center for an alarm company, in which virtually all of the calls involved sensors getting tripped by dogs. Business had been booming for the home alarm sector in the area; everybody in Undisclosed wanted a system even though not one home in twenty had anything worth stealing. It was mostly scared people, hoping to fend off monsters. Whether or not the kind of creatures that turned up around town would even trip a sensor or show up on camera was a mystery to Amy, but of course she knew that what people were really buying was the ability to get a good night’s sleep (which was ironic, considering Amy had applied for the eleven-to-eight shift specifically because she couldn’t sleep herself). She liked it well enough, even at nine bucks an hour. She felt like a policeman, guarding people in their beds. Well, at least the ones who could afford a home security system.

  Shawn said, “You guys have a plan if you get flooded out?”

  “David says we can get a bunch of those inflatable sex dolls from the shop downstairs and strap them together as a raft.”

  Shawn laughed, but in a way that made it clear he didn’t approve. David made constant jokes about how he thought Shawn was trying to “get into her pants,” which meant that David did in fact think Shawn was trying to get into her pants. Amy had long ago learned the secret to reading people’s minds, a mystical two-step process that involved 1) shutting her mouth and 2) listening to what they say. People will scream their secrets if you just give them a chance. Even the liars can’t resist letting the truth ooze through the gaps.

  So, David would make his snarky little remarks about Shawn and Amy would tell him that the guy was married. David would then say something to the effect of, “You have a lot to learn about guys, Amy.” But he was wrong—she was pretty sure she understood the game better than he did. If she were to tell Shawn to pull over right now, then rip open her shirt and ask him to ravage her, he’d flee the car and stammer an apology, maybe politely ask her where her boobs had gone (“Oh, sorry, that was mostly bra”). He doesn’t want to cheat on his wife; he wants girls to laugh at his jokes and be in awe of his car. He wants to feel the way he did back when he was a cool dude in high school and not a twenty-six-year-old slaving away in an office with a kid at home, watching his prime tick away one can of Red Bull at a time. It was all harmless.

  They arrived at the apartment the sex shop wore as a hat and Amy saw David’s car was gone. So, he was still out working his missing girl case—without her. She juggled her umbrella and headed around toward the side entrance, the pink VENUS FLYTRAP neon buzzing overhead. She passed the one-armed concrete snowman at the bottom of the stairs, headed up, shook off her umbrella, and pushed her way through the door to the apartment. She glimpsed the kitchenette …

  And, just for a moment, thought she saw something strange.

  It was David, standing there with a mixing bowl in one hand and a whisk in the other. Like he was in the middle of cooking something. But—and she wasn’t even sure she really saw this—in that moment, he wasn’t moving. Like, at all. He was standing perfectly frozen, facing the window to Amy’s left. He wasn’t mixing, he wasn’t blinking, he wasn’t breathing. He was just standing, for a solid two seconds. Then Amy came through the door and all at once he popped into action, like a video that had been unpaused.

  Weird.

  “Were you transfixed by something outside?”

  David said, “What’s that?”

  “Yo
u were staring out the window.”

  “Was I? Just looking at the rain, I guess.”

  “Did you solve the thing with the little girl?”

  “We did, she’s back home safe and sound. Turned out there was nothing clown dick about it, it was just a local creep. We got the cops to track his phone and found his van. Whatever he was going to do, he never got a chance.”

  “Thanks to you!”

  “Thanks to us.”

  “Holy crap, David. You guys are heroes! This is amazing!”

  Amy thought she heard something unusual, but couldn’t put her finger on it. Then she suddenly realized it was what she wasn’t hearing. She poked her head into the bathroom and confirmed it: no plink-plink-plink of the roof leak.

  “Hey! They fixed the leak! This is the best day ever.”

  “Actually, I did. Got tired of waiting on the landlord. I went up and it was pretty easy to see, there was just a gap in the flashing around an exhaust vent up there, all I had to do was squirt a bunch of silicone caulk in the crack. Took five bucks and fifteen minutes, should have done it months ago.”

  “Still, I’m impressed. Didn’t know you even knew how to do that sort of thing.”

  “I didn’t, I looked it up. It’s not brain surgery. I’m making you waffles. You hungry?”

  She wasn’t, but said, “Starving!” David, it appeared, was having one of his Good Days.

  He said, “Then have a seat. With what I’ve got planned, you’ll need your energy.”

  She put on a devilish look. “Oh, really?”

  John

  John had been awake for twenty-two hours already and there was no sleep on the horizon, not when a girl could be getting molested/tortured/eaten or god knows what at the hands of god knows who. So, John swung by his house and changed out of his court appearance clothes, downed a mug of coffee, ate two Hostess CupCakes, and finished it off by smoking some crystal meth. Soon he was back behind the wheel of the Ezekiel Jeep and heading toward the church, feeling good as new.