“What the hell are you doing?” Rich screamed.
“Powell Road,” Sidney said. “Cliffside Condominiums?”
Everyone in Benediction knew the story. Big-time real estate developer Travest Powell had bought up all kinds of land and was planning on building a deluxe condominium complex. Some of the land had already been cleared when the market went bust, and Powell had ended up losing his shirt to the bank. He’d committed suicide on his private yacht, just before the bank was about to take that from him as well.
Cody put the car in drive and aimed the truck toward the wooded area. The remains of the road were still there, but it was a bumpy mess.
“Hang on back there,” Sid said, turning to see Snowy bouncing around as Isaac clutched the door armrest, looking as though he was about to be sick.
Or was the bad radio at it again?
The truck bounced so violently that she flew up and hit her head off the roof of the cab.
“Sorry!” Cody said through gritted teeth, doing his best to avoid the larger ruts as he steered the truck over the rocky road.
“Just stay on this road and we’ll end up near the cliffs,” Sidney said. She leaned backward over the seat to look out through the rear window, wondering if the mass of animals was following. Snowy enthusiastically licked her face, and she patted her dog lovingly, reassuring her.
There was some movement in the pouring rain and darkness, but it looked as though they were safe—for the moment.
Cody gunned the engine of the truck, and they bounced up out of a series of deep ruts where the dirt had been washed away by the storm’s steady rainfall. Sidney placed one hand by her side on the seat and the other on the ceiling in an attempt to brace herself.
“We should come out on Pirate Road, and then we’ll go around the cliffs and back onto Dobson,” she said, seeing a kind of childhood map drawn inside her head.
Cody continued to drive, his gaze on the road ahead of them intense. They passed the area where the land had been cleared of trees, rocks, and brush. One foundation had been laid before the endeavor had ended.
“Keep going straight,” she ordered, leaning forward in her seat and pointing through the windshield at the road ahead.
“I know,” Cody growled, concentrating on the rough road beneath them. Makeshift paths, really, that hadn’t seen any vehicles since construction was halted.
They continued to be bounced around by rocky and uneven terrain made even worse by the heavy rainfall. Sidney heard a sudden, plaintive moaning from the back and turned to see Isaac looking even worse.
“Hold on, Isaac,” she told him. “We’re almost to Pirate Road, and then things will get a little less bumpy.”
“No! No! No!” he cried out, and grabbed at his head again with both hands.
“What is it, Isaac? Is it the bad radio again?”
“Yes,” he answered, sounding as though he were in a great deal of pain.
Snowy’s tail wagged nervously as she tried to lick Isaac’s face. Sidney leaned over the seat, reaching out to place a comforting hand on the young man, but he was becoming more frantic.
“Hang on,” she said, her fingertips brushing his knee. “We’ll be safe soon.” She tried to reassure him.
“It’s loud,” Isaac screamed. “It’s so loud!”
“What’s happening to him?” Rich asked, on the verge of panic.
“I have no idea,” Sidney answered, watching as Isaac suddenly curled up in a tight ball on the backseat. “I think he may be hearing something that we can’t.”
“Why can’t we hear it?” Rich asked. “I know why Snowy can’t, but why him?”
“I don’t know . . . maybe it has something to do with the accident that he had as a child that made him the way he is. . . .”
Isaac uncurled from his fetal shape with a scream, his eyes wide and bloodshot. “It’s too close!” he shrieked, his bellow deafening within the confines of the truck cab. “Too close!”
He twisted toward the door and took hold of the handle.
“He’s gonna open the door!” Rich shouted.
“Isaac, no!” Sidney yelled, pushing her upper body over the seat to prevent the young man from opening the door. She grabbed at his legs, pulling herself over the top of the front seat to stop him. “You can’t!”
Isaac continued to cry out in torment, yanking on the handle. The door began to open. Sidney was able to reach across his squirming form and grab hold of the padded elbow rest to pull the door closed.
The car dipped, the entire front end of the truck plunging forward before heaving back up again, which sent them all tumbling about in the backseat as Isaac continued to cry out. Snowy yelped as Sidney did everything she could to keep the passenger door from opening.
* * *
Isaac knew that he shouldn’t open the truck door, but the bad radio was so very loud and calling to him.
He wanted to escape, to run away as far as he could so that he did not have to hear the horrible sounds anymore.
But there was another part of him, a part that wanted to go toward that horrible, horrible sound.
As the truck bucked and rocked, Isaac had no idea what to do, the bad radio growing so loud inside his head that he thought it just might explode. He didn’t want Sidney to see his head explode. That would be very embarrassing.
But the bad radio was so loud.
Sidney was trying to keep the door closed, trying to keep him in the truck, and he didn’t want to make her mad at him.
The bad radio was screaming, so close, and all he could do was hold his head to keep it from exploding and hope that his cries would drown out the noise in his mind.
* * *
Cody drove the truck up the sand-and-dirt incline, gunning the engine and making the tires spin for purchase as he made his way up onto Pirate Road.
He was going fast, focusing on keeping the truck on the road, and it was almost too late before he noticed the presence spread out over the road in front of him.
“What now?” Rich suddenly yelled, pushing himself back in his seat as he pointed out the writhing mass that stretched from one side of the road to the other.
Cody almost slammed on the brakes, but he was moving too fast. He didn’t want to risk sending the truck into an uncontrolled skid and decided instead to drive straight over whatever was covering the stretch of road before him.
Leaning forward in his seat, clutching the steering wheel so tightly that he was surprised it didn’t snap in his hands, Cody squinted through the rain and fog coming in off the ocean and stepped on the gas.
“Hold on.”
The headlights of the truck illuminated the writhing mass, reflecting off the wet and glistening shells of thousands of crabs and lobsters that must have come up out of the ocean to participate in Benediction’s night of total insanity.
The wheels of the truck drove over the multitude of spiky carapaces, sending pieces of shells, soft guts, and fluids spewing up over the front grille and hood and spattering off the windshield.
There came a loud bang, like a shot of gunfire, and Cody found himself having difficulty steering as the truck’s front end leaned down and to the right.
Blowout.
He smelled the cloying, heavy odor of burning rubber wafting into the truck, riding atop the smell of the sea, and heard the fwap! fwap! fwap! sound of a shredded tire disintegrating as he drove.
It was hard to control the truck, steering the best he could as he pulled over to the side of the road.
“Dude, this is not good,” Rich said.
“Yeah,” Cody agreed.
But it was about to get worse.
* * *
The truck stopped moving, and slowly Sidney unhooked her fingers from the armrest, cautioning Isaac to remain calm.
“All right,” she said, attempting to remove herself from across the young man’s lap while trying to keep some semblance of her dignity. “Let’s keep calm. Take deep breaths, Isaac, deep breaths.”
Isaac was tryi
ng; he truly was. The young man was rocking back and forth now, his lips moving wildly as he spoke so only he could hear.
“That’s it,” she said, reassuring him. Snowy nudged her nervously, sticking her large head underneath Sidney’s arm for attention. “Hold it together now.”
She looked to the front seat.
“What’s the story?”
“Don’t even have to look,” Cody told her. “Flat tire. Maybe more than one.”
“What’d we hit?”
“Crabs,” Rich answered.
“Crabs? Seriously?”
“And lobsters,” Rich added. “So what’s the plan now? Do we risk staying here or . . .”
Isaac let out a bloodcurdling scream, his fingers raking down the side of his face as he began to thrash. Sidney threw herself on him, trying to prevent him from hurting himself, but he was just too strong. His arms whipped around, knocking her backward into the space between the seats.
“Stop him!” Sidney cried, struggling to get back up.
Cody and Rich both turned, but it was already too late. Isaac had the door open and had fallen out onto the side of the road, moaning and carrying on about the things inside his head. Snowy had followed him and was sniffing at him nervously.
“Isaac!” Sidney cried out, pulling herself up onto the seat, reaching for him, but he was already moving, running across the road and into the woods, heading in the direction of the forest paths that led up to the hilly cliffs that looked down onto Benediction Cove.
Snowy chased after the young man, barking as she ran. They could hear him as he struggled through the heavy underbrush, grunting and muttering, the sound of him growing distant as he made his way deeper into the wooded area.
The shepherd turned to see if the others were following. Sidney jumped from the truck and was about to run when a firm hand reached out, grabbing her arm.
“What are you doing?” Cody asked, his eyes darting around for signs of danger.
“I’m going after him,” she said, attempting to pull her arm away.
“Are you crazy?” he asked. Rich had joined him, as had Snowy. “You wouldn’t last a minute.”
Sidney could no longer hear Isaac, the sounds of his progress swallowed up by the sounds of the storm.
“But we can’t just let him—”
“Yes, we can,” Rich said. “I’m sorry, but Isaac is on his own now.”
“Where the hell does he think he’s going, anyway?” Cody asked, angry. “I know he’s not right in the head, but you’d think the concept of self-preservation . . .”
Sidney had stopped hearing her ex’s rant after his question of Isaac’s destination. It was a good question.
Where is he going?
She stared off into the woods, remembering her childhood romps here, the many summer afternoons that she and her friends had spent climbing the cliffs and venturing into areas forbidden by their parents.
The pirate caves.
The cliffs were riddled with a system of caves that had supposedly been used by pirates to hide their booty in the late 1800s, even though no treasure had ever been found.
But it didn’t keep Benediction’s kids from trying to be the first to find some.
Isaac was being drawn toward the sound—toward the bad radio. He said it was louder, closer.
“I know where he’s going,” Sidney said, interrupting Cody’s rant.
“I really don’t care at this point,” Rich said. “He’s fried his own ass, as far as I’m concerned. And we might want to think about getting back into the car before something decides to make us a snack and—”
“Where?” Cody asked Sidney.
“The caves,” she said. “I think he’s being drawn to the pirate caves.”
“By the bad radio?”
She nodded. “Whatever that is.”
“So the bad radio is in one of the pirate caves?” Rich asked.
“Whatever is broadcasting the signal, or sound, or whatever it is that’s doing this . . . I think Isaac is being drawn to it.”
“It’s not safe,” Cody said, staring up toward the cliffs.
She looked as well, noticing for the first time since this nightmare began that they weren’t being attacked.
“Probably not, but it seems safer now than it has all day and night.”
They were all looking around now, surprised that they hadn’t noticed it sooner. There was no longer any animal or insect life around them.
“Can we be sure?” Rich asked.
“About as sure as we can be about anything that has gone on tonight.”
“So I’m guessing you still want to go after Isaac,” Cody said.
Sidney turned back to the car, retrieving the weapons that they’d made back at her house.
“Yeah,” she said, “I do. And I want to find this bad radio.”
“And then what?”
“What else do you do with a radio?” she asked them. “You shut the damn thing off.”
* * *
They each took their weapons, their spear and their knives, and started into the woods.
Sidney let Snowy lead the way, the white fur of the dog glowing in the early morning gloom like a ghostly apparition. She only went so far as she surged ahead, sniffing at the ground, before running back to them.
Sidney urged her on with a hand gesture, telling her to find him—to find Isaac.
She was on guard despite her exhaustion, every sense on alert, constantly looking around, eyes scanning every surface for bugs or animals, ears listening for the crack of a branch or the rustling of leaves. Cody and Rich were no better, twitchy and wary of every sound.
The rain was still falling, but Sidney dared to believe that it might have been letting up, that the storm might actually be receding. She listened to the sounds in the distance, the hiss of what seemed like a perpetual rainfall suddenly overwhelmed by the soothing roar of the ocean around them.
It was unbelievably muggy, and they found themselves shedding the extra layers that they’d put on back at her house. If they hadn’t, she was sure that they would have passed out from heat exhaustion. She was becoming winded, the constant stress and lack of rest chipping away at her stamina. She was tired five hours ago, but now she was experiencing something beyond exhaustion.
Snowy’s ghostly shape returned to them excitedly, and she yipped as she stomped her paws on the wet, slimy inches of leaf fall, before turning around and running off again.
“I think she’s found his trail,” Sidney told her friends.
Cody grunted, forging onward up the inclining terrain, using the end of his makeshift spear to help him climb. Sidney was about to follow, turning slightly to make sure that everything still appeared to be all right, and found Rich simply standing, staring off to where they’d just come from.
“It all seems so normal now,” he said. “If you didn’t know, you wouldn’t even realize.”
She could see what he meant. It was all so suddenly calm there.
But those feelings of quiet were quickly dispelled as the memories of the past hours rushed forward.
If you didn’t know, but she did, and she wanted to keep moving just in case.
“C’mon,” she said to him, and Rich looked at her and smiled weakly.
“So you two finally broke up,” he said, walking beside her.
She looked at Cody’s back as he climbed ahead of them, following Snowy. At one time she would have gotten a warm sensation, a tingle, when looking at him there, but now . . .
“Not the best time to be talking about that,” she said.
“No, but I just wanted to be sure it was really true, in case a beaver ate my face, or something.”
She couldn’t help but be amused by his nonsense.
“Benediction doesn’t have any beavers,” she told him.
“Yet,” he said, slipping on the muddy mixture of sand and dirt and almost sliding back down the hill. “This has all been in preparation for the beavers’ arrival.”
br /> “You’re such an idiot,” Sidney told him.
“But I’m still alive,” Rich said. “An idiot, but still kickin’. Has to count for something.”
Yes, it does, she thought. It was amazing that they were all still kicking, to put it in Rich’s terms. She wondered how many on the island weren’t and felt a depressing heaviness that nearly forced her to sit down in the cold rotting leaves and mud as she remembered that her father was gone. She saw him inside her head, sitting in the garage, surrounded by explosives.
And then she remembered the blast and the fire, and that he was gone.
“Never underestimate an idiot,” she said, feeling a burning surge of energy through her tired muscles as she pushed on ahead, attempting to catch up to Cody and her dog.
* * *
The island authorities had done all they could to make the pirate caves off limits to curious thrill seekers, putting up chain-link fencing around the openings with huge DANGER, and DO NOT ENTER signs that threatened criminal prosecution if ignored.
Fat lotta good that did.
For as long as Sidney could remember, the caves were those special forbidden places that everybody wanted to explore, their stories passed from the high school kids right down to grade school.
She didn’t really remember when it was that she had gotten her first look at the caves, guessing that it was probably some time in junior high school. One of her classmates had actually planned a party inside, and she and a friend had gone but left early because it had been so darn cold. And it was a good thing too, because the police had found out about the gathering and had shown up to make an example of those in attendance.
Sidney thought of that night, probably the first time since it had happened, as she stared up at the dirt-and-rock face of the cliff and the jagged opening that she could just about make out from where they were standing.
“He’s up there,” Cody said, pointing.
“I hope he’s careful,” she said. “That whole area is pretty rocky and unstable, especially after a heavy rain.”
They began to climb toward the opening, being careful themselves on the rocky incline. The rain had loosened the dirt and rocks, and it crumbled beneath their weight as they moved.