“Probably best not to think about it.”
But now he had me considering the possibility. I tried to imagine all the moisture in the air turning to snow. It would be a blizzard, the type of which hadn’t been seen since the Ice Age. The house would be covered within days, and after that…
There lay madness. Rather than thinking about it, I returned to the crossword puzzle. Carl picked up an old issue of
It occurred to me that another Ice Age might occur anyway. Yes, there was still sunlight somewhere above the cloud cover. I knew this because there was a silver disc where the sun would normally be. But would the clouds and fog continue to block the sunlight? What would happen then?
I shivered.
“I’m guessing that the toilet don’t work?” Carl asked.
“Yep,” I nodded. “If you’ve got to take a dump, you’ll have to use the outhouse. Just don’t sit in the spider webs.”
Carl frowned. He hated spiders.
“Okay. I’m going to go sit on the throne for a spell.”
“Have fun. Don’t let anything bite you on the behind.”
“That’s not funny, Teddy.”
Carl put on his raincoat and boots, grabbed an umbrella and slogged outside with the magazine rolled up and tucked under his arm. I got up, wiped condensation from the kitchen window, and watched him make his way across the swampy yard. He was hurrying, so I figured he had to go bad.
But five minutes later, he was moving even faster when he burst through the kitchen door, dripping water onto my linoleum.
“Teddy!” he gasped. “You better come quick. There’s something in the outhouse!”
“I told you there were spiders.”
He shook his head, and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down.
“Groundhog?” I’d had a problem last summer with them burrowing beneath the outhouse and shed.
Carl swallowed hard. “No, it’s not a varmint. I’m not sure what it is, but it sounds big. Just come look, damn it!”
I shrugged into my rain gear and followed him outside in annoyed resignation. The humidity had dropped again. The air was chilly, and the mist seemed to cling to my face. Even still, the fog wasn’t as heavy as the previous day, and I could see a little better. I noticed that my apple tree was leaning at a forty-five degree angle, the soil around it too wet for the roots to keep their purchase. Rose and I had planted that tree together when it was just a little sapling, and the sight made me sad.
We reached the outhouse, and Carl suddenly stopped.
“I don’t see anything,” I said.
“Open the door and have a look inside.”
I approached it cautiously, but didn’t hear or see anything unusual. I steeled myself and flung the door open. The hinges creaked. I stuck my head inside. There was that faint odor common to all outhouses, and I thought I caught a hint of that strange smell from the day before—the fishy stench. But it was muted. Other than that, everything seemed normal; two holes, three rolls of toilet paper, a bucket of lime to dump down in the hole, a can of aerosol disinfectant, and a lonely spider web hanging in the upper corner.
I stepped back outside. “Yep, that spider sure is scary. Big, hairy sucker. I’m glad you called me out here, Carl. Give me the magazine and I’ll kill it for you. Then you can get about your business and I can go dry off.”
“There’s no need to make fun of me, Teddy. I’m telling you, I heard something inside. It sounded big.”
“Well, there’s nothing in there now. Take a look for yourself.”
He didn’t move. “It was down underneath—you know, beneath the outhouse.”
“In the pit?”
Carl nodded.
I stepped back inside and stared down into the holes. And then I saw it.
Well, actually, I didn’t see it.
If you’ve never been in an outhouse, I reckon I should explain how they work. When you build an outhouse, you start by digging a pit. You make it as deep as you can—usually at least ten or fifteen feet. Then you construct your outhouse over the hole. The toilet itself goes right over the pit, so that when you do your business, your waste has somewhere to go. You sprinkle a bit of lime down the hole to aid in the waste’s eventual breakdown and to cut down on the smell. But every time you look down that hole, you’ll see an indicator of your previous visit: a congealed pile of urine and feces and toilet paper.
That’s what I wasn’t seeing. It wasn’t there anymore. The waste pit was gone. There was nothing—just a black, seemingly bottomless hole, certainly deeper than the original pit I’d dug. Something had tunneled up beneath the outhouse, and decades worth of foulness had drained down into the trench and vanished from sight.
“Well, I’ll be,” I whispered.
“What is it?” Carl asked. “What do you see?”
“I’m not sure. Remember the holes from yesterday?
Out by the woodpile and in the field?”
“Yeah.”
“We’ve got another one.” I stepped back outside. “Something dug a hole underneath the outhouse and took a really nasty bath.”
“Where does the hole go?”
“I don’t know, but I’m sure not gonna crawl down inside and see. No thank you, sir.”
We stared at each other while the rain soaked through our clothes.
“Teddy, what the hell is going on? What kind of a critter makes a hole like that?”
“I don’t—”
A blast of thunder cut me off, and we both jumped. A second later, another blast followed. There was no lightning in the sky.
“Did you hear that?” Carl asked me, still a master of asking the obvious.
I put my finger to my lips. “Listen.”
There was something else, over the gunshots—a thrumming sound, growing louder and closer.
Carl stiffened. “It sounds like—”
A helicopter exploded through the treetops, seesawing wildly as it roared overhead of us and swooped towards the empty field.
“Maybe it’s the National Guard!” Carl shouted above the noise. “They finally came to get us!”
My spirits lifted. It looked like we were saved.
We waved our arms and shouted at the top of our lungs, but the helicopter continued away from us. It looked like it was in trouble. Black smoke billowed from its engine.
Another gunshot rang out, and then a figure emerged from the forest. It was Earl Harper, still dressed in his combat fatigues and looking like a crazy, drowned rat. Just as mean, too.
He hollered something unintelligible, raised the rifle, sighted through the scope, and squeezed the trigger. There was a flash of light and smoke, followed by another blast. Then he lowered the gun and ran towards us.
“Good Lord,” Carl grunted. “What’s he gone and done now?”
I couldn’t answer him. I felt numb, and my feet were rooted in the mud.
Carl picked up a length of dead wood—a thick fallen tree branch—and held it at his side like a club. I just watched the helicopter in stunned disbelief.
It veered to the left and then to the right, as if the pilot were flying drunk. It pitched back toward a grove of pine trees and away from of the field, then shot upward again. The engine whined.
“I hit it,” Earl cackled as he ran up to us. “I got the bastards! Didn’t I tell you? A black fucking helicopter! It’s just like they talked about on the Coast-to-Coast AM show. I warned you all. God damned U.N. invasion troops!”
The helicopter swerved back over the field again. Smoke now poured from the engine in a thick cloud. Earl
