Most men can't make it through even five words of what I'm about to tell you (18 page)

The man in black put up one hand, to silence me. I stopped talking. We al stood like that for a moment, as if anticipating a

sound.

From outside, we heard a single gunshot.

We all froze, the moment when we had to decide whether a gunshot meant "run away" or "run to." As usual, John made the decision. Amy was next out the front door, I went last. We ran to the Porsche.

From outside the car we could see Falconer was slumped over, sideways. John circled around to the driver's side door

and yanked it open.

Amy gasped. Blood ran down the leather headrest of the driver's seat.

Falconer had shot himself. In the mouth, it looked like. John made a show of checking the man's pulse but it was pretty

obvious he was done.

Amy said, "Why? Why would he do that? David,
why would he do that?
"

"Maybe they... did something to him. Made him do it. I don't know. John, what are you-"

John was leaning into the car. He leaned over Falconer's body. The dead man's eyes were open. John leaned over, face

just inches from Falconer's, bracing himself with one hand against the armrest of the passenger door.

"John, don't do that..."

"Oh, shit. Dave, look at this."

"I'm most definitely not looking at that."

John pushed himself back out of the car. He looked up into the morning sky. It looked like rain.

"He had one of those mouth bugs in him."

"What? No. No, we would have seen it."

"Go look."

I had a better idea, which was to go inside and punch the man in black several times. I turned and crossed the yard and

charged in my front door.

Nobody home. Not that I could see, anyway. John and Amy came in behind me.

John said, "What an asshole."

Amy said, "So... he left us here with the severed head of a dead cop in the bath tub and a whole dead cop in a car in the

front yard?"

"This is what you get for skipping class."

John said, "We're clear on both of them though. I think. As far as going to jail you know..."

I said, "Either way, we got to get to the school before the cops show up here."

"I agree."

John turned to Amy and said, "We'll need you to open the box for us."

I put a hand on his chest.

"NO."

"Dave, we got no choice."

"No, John."

"I'll take full responsibility. Come on, somebody probably called in the gunshot already."

He strode off toward the kitchen, plucked the tool shed key off my wall, and went out my back door. Amy gave me an

uncertain look, then followed him.

I followed them out.

John had the shed open already, dragging the green cooler-sized box onto the lawn. I glanced around for witnesses.

Thunder rumbled in the distance.

I said before that there was no visible latch or lock on the box. That was true. But there was an
invisible
one.

I stared at the front of the box, and focused. A simple lever swam into view. Just like with Amy's missing hand.

I sighed and said, "Okay. Do it."

Amy leaned over and, to an outside observer, held the stump of her left wrist a few inches from the box. To my eyes, her

hand grasped the hidden lever and pulled.

The lid rose slowly, on its own.

Inside the box was what looked like a gray lump of fur the size of a football. It was actually metal, and the "fur" was thousands of rigid metal strands, thinner than needles, standing straight up. I said the thing looked like a steel porcupine,

John said it looked like a wig for a robot.

The only part of the device not covered by the metallic fur was the simple metal grip at the end, where it could be picked

up. On the handle, was a trigger.

John had told Franky the other day that we found the box in the woods. Actually, somebody else had found it in the

woods, near their house, and drove here to give it to me and John. The guy who found it was a fan, and thought we would

know what to do with it. He couldn't open it, of course. All he had was the strange markings on the front to creep him out.

We had the box for several days before we figured out the ghost latch. We had looked at the thing, which John labeled the

"furgun" because it had a trigger and we decided it was some kind of weapon. Later, John and I got good and drunk and

had taken the furgun out to a field late at night to test it.

John set up three green Heineken beer bottles on a log. We stood about 50 feet back. John had pointed the furry gun

thing and squeezed the trigger.

The thing made a sort of honking sound, like some people can make when they blow their nose. There was a strange

ripple in the air, like the heat-warped space above a fire. The beer bottle on the far right was suddenly five times bigger

than it was before.

John had cheered and whooped and declared the device to be an enlarging ray. He said he'd point it at corn fields and

use it to cure world hunger. We decided to test it again, shooting at the next bottle. It stayed the same size, only turned

white. When we approached it we realized the bottle had been turned into a bottle-shaped pile of mashed potatoes. John

stated that he would stil use it to cure world hunger.

We fired it at the third bottle and it immediately turned into a double-ended dildo. A black one. John shot at the first bottle

again, the one that had been made huge, and it turned it back into normal size. Only instead of Heineken it was now Old

Milwaukee.

He handed the furgun to me, and I fired at the first bottle. The bottle, and the other two bottles, and the log, were

consumed in a fire so bright it looked like a miniature sun had landed in the middle of the field. The light was so intense

that John and I were blinded for half an hour and saw blue-white spots in front of our eyes for most of a day.

When it ended, there was a twenty-foot circle of earth in front of us that had been scorched into black glass. The papers

said the light was reported by witnesses six miles away.

We declared the furgun to be both useless and dangerous. We put it back in the box and never spoke of it again.

Until today. John reached in and took the furgun by the handle. He hefted it, aiming it at the sky.

"I don't know about this, John."

"Let's go."

It was a little before seven AM so there were no kids at the school yet. There was a couple of cars in the parking lot, staff I

guess. We parked in a visitor's spot out front, behind a white van that I thought was a moving van but it had a colorful logo

painted on the side that said "Book Mobile."

We got out and John insisted on taking the furgun. He found a black garbage bag in his trunk to hide it in. In my mind it

made the object just as suspicious as having it out in the open, but there wasn't time to argue. Before John could close his

trunk, I noticed he had packed my chainsaw and a long cardboard UPS shipping container.

We walked up the concrete steps and stopped in front of the wooden doors I had seen in my dream the night before.

There was a little cardboard skeleton on the door, a Halloween decoration. Halloween was tomorrow.

I didn't think about it until later, but the skeleton was also on the door when I visited it in my "dream." That would have been pretty important to a smarter person, like Falconer. But then again, what did smart get him?

John said, "Okay. We go in, go downstairs, we haul out Franky's body, we put it in the back seat of the Caddie. We go

down by the river and dunk the whole thing under water."

"Man, I don't know that we'l be able to move him. I bet he weighs twice what he used to."

"I know the janitor here. It's Rick Reimer, remember him? Played drums in my band for a couple of weeks? We'll get him

to help."

Amy said, "I seriously do not want to drive around with that thing in the back seat. What if he, you know, erupts or

whatever. Shooting those little bugs everywhere..."

I said, "I bet he's more likely to do that when we try to move him, if anything."

"Assuming he's even actually here," added John. It was a good point.

"Well," I said. "I'm sure once we get down there a plan will occur to us."

Amy said, "Wait, wait. What if he's already hatched and there's thousands of those mouth bugs crawling around already,

just waiting for us to open that door?"

John and I said, simultaneously, "We'l burn down the school."

"Okay," I said, with a deep breath. "Let's do it. Amy, you wait here."

"No."

"Okay."

John grabbed the brass handles on the door, pulled. Locked.

"Shit."

We all stared at the locked door like a bunch of chimpanzees looking at a computer. John said, "I think I can pick it."

He couldn't. We stood around, fidgeting, while John pressed his body against the door and tried to surreptitiously pick the

door lock with the corkscrew on his Swiss Army knife. It looked like he was trying to open it with his dick.

Twenty minutes later I was about to tel him to stop, when a lady in her 40's, in a navy pants suit and a wide-brimmed hat,

walked up with keys jingling in her hand.

"Can I help you," she asked in that officious way of those who spend their day ordering around people who are less than four feet tal .

John said, "Don't worry. We're alumni. Thought we'd, you know. Come back for a visit."

She looked down at the trash bag John had sat at his feet and said, "What's in the bag?"

"Oh, nothing. It's a, uh, melon. From my garden."

She looked at it, then at John and then at me. Longer at me, for some reason.

"You'll need to come back during school hours, gentlemen. You can talk to the man at the door. We have a guard now."

John said, "Oh, that's fine. We're just gonna hang around until then."

"I'm going to have to ask you to step back while I unlock the door."

We all glanced at each other. John reached down and picked up the bag with the furgun in it.

I said, "Look, lady, I'm gonna level with you. This is an emergency."

She took a step toward me and thrust up her shoulders, trying to make herself taller. She said, "Well then I suggest you

cal the emergency department, fart -herder."

"We don't have time to... wait, what?"

She took another step. Right in my face. Her lips trembled when she said, "If you want to monkey the train, you'l need to

shark the turd tank. Now please fudge strangle manatee cheese panties pork boat."

I turned to John and before I could say a word, a blunt force bashed me on the side of the head and sent me to the

ground. I looked up through watering eyes to see the lady had swung her purse at me. Amy screamed.

John reached out to grab the purse and the lady retaliated by grabbing his crotch and twisting. John grunted and cursed

and fel to the ground. The lady began shrieking like a banshee, getting John in a stranglehold and forcing her weight

down on him.

I got to my feet and came up behind her. I grabbed wildly for her, got the brim of her hat. The hat came off in my hand...

along with her hair.

I looked stupidly down at the wig, then looked at the lady and sucked in a breath. Most of her skull was gone. From the

ears up, it looked like. I could see the white insides of her skul and two twitching pink blobs at the other end that I'm pretty sure was the backs of her eyes.

I heard a rustling to my left and saw Amy was wrestling the furgun out of the trash bag. She pointed it and squeezed her

eyes shut. Before I could tell her to stop, the gun fired with its honking sound.

Out from the end of the furgun came a large, ripe watermelon. It slammed into the banshee's back, splattering in a spray

of red and green.

The banshee thing barely noticed. I ran up and got on her back. She threw an elbow and caught me across the chest. I

stumbled back, fell again, scraping up my hands on the sidewalk.

The lady held her lock on John's neck. John's struggling was slowing, one arm flopping listlessly.

Then, from John's pants, came music.

Does that make me craaaaaaazzay...

Does that make me craaaaazzay...

Probably...

Gnarls Barkley. John's ringtone on his cell, in his pocket.

The reaction was immediate from the banshee. She threw her hands to her ears, screeching like an even bansheeier

banshee. She let go of John's neck and he turned and punched her squarely in the stomach.

Amy fired the furgun again, it honked, and the banshee's pants suit turned from navy to powder blue, with black buttons.

You really think you're in control?

Well I think you're craaaaaazzay...

I think you're craaaaazzay...

Just like me...

The lady screeched and finally col apsed, not like a corpse but like a building. She fel in a rough pile as if every bone had

turned to bits the size of pebbles.

And then, rising from her back like a man climbing off a wrecked motorcycle, was a shadow man.

It was
the
shadow man. The one I had seen on campus al those months ago. I don't know how I knew, but I did.

It backed away, maybe stil repel ed by John's ringtone. It floated toward the front door of the school and slipped through

the quarter-inch crack between the two doors.

"Shit!" wheezed John, face red, trying to catch his breath. "Find the keys! The lady's keys!"

Amy and I hunted around, frantical y. Behind me I heard John say, "Yeah" and realized that he had answered his cel

phone.

I found the key ring off in the grass by the sidewalk. John, on his phone, said, "No, I'm doing something with Dave. Come

by at three. No. No. No. Beer. Bye."

I tried every key on the ring, couldn't get one in the lock, then started over and got the second one to work in my shaky