muttering water like a breeze.
He tossed a stone into the moonlight, listened to it splash in the deeper river. Where was the gateway now? Did it open and close? According to some of the more outre stuff he’d been reading about 2012, there were gateways all over the world, especially at the points where what were called ley lines met. He was not sure what these lines were. Planet Energy Lines would probably be the simplest definition. New Age Bullshit Lines was another contender.
He stood just where he and Nick had been, and tossed another stone. It gleamed in the moonlight, then splashed gently down.
“Damn.”
He heard something, though. He listened. It was on the other side of the river. He’d never heard anything quite like it before.
He listened again.
What was that?
Then he knew, and his blood all but froze in his veins.
That slashing noise could only be an outrider, and it was actually in the gateway, hanging between the worlds.
He hadn’t brought a gun, he’d been afraid that shooting it in the other universe would bring on some sort of catastrophe. He’d read all he could about parallel worlds, but little was actually known, except that experiments showed that they were actual, physical places. There was no scientific speculation about what might be in them. He thought that he was the only person who had ever speculated that certain animals must be able to cross this divide, that they had evolved the ability as a threat avoidance mechanism.
Had to be true. He’d seen a weir cat himself, and not far from here, when he was a kid. Damn big, damn black, and damn scary. Then gone—poof—right before his eyes.
The slashing sound grew louder. Came toward him.
Brooke stopped singing. Her voice floated across the night. “Wylie?”
Jesus, he needed to get back to the house, he needed to get his hands on a gun. Nick had been right to get them ready. That was a smart kid there. He had foresight.
The slashing was now right in front of him—but he couldn’t see it. It was loud, it was deafening—and then he could feel tickling, then pricking against his face, his neck. Crying out, he lurched back.
He fell against what felt like iron bars. Where he touched them, they became visible, and he saw that they were not bars, but the legs of what the kids called an outrider. And now the slashing sound was overhead. He was under the damn thing!
He rolled. The slashing came down toward him. He lashed out at it, kicking furiously toward the sound. Where his foot struck, he saw a section of the creature—a gleaming abdomen striped yellow, then a complicated eye, then a hooked claw on the joint of a leg.
Screaming now, he rolled.
There was a pneumatic, liquid hissing and boiling yellow sludge sprayed the ground around him. A stinger the size of his arm slashed his jacket and was gone.
But it was coming back, he could hear the mechanical slashing of the jaws, but more he could feel the thing probing with its legs, and he knew that the next time it attacked, that stinger would impale him.
A roar, huge, echoing off into the woods.
Silence.
Nothing there. Nothing at all.
“Dad?”
“Nick!”
His son scrambled down the hill that dropped to the riverbank. He carried his 10-gauge. He wore pajama bottoms and one house shoe. Behind him came Brooke. “Wylie! Nick! What’s happening?”
The moon sailed in splendor, the night birds called, the sacred peace of the Kansas night enclosed them, and the sweet little river rolled on.
Nick threw his arms around his father as Brooke came running up, seeking with her hands, almost hitting him, enraged with fear, then choking back sobs, then holding both of her men.
“An outrider,” Nick said. “I heard it and I saw it attacking Dad. Sort of.”
Brooke nodded.
“Martin’s in trouble,” Wylie said.
“We know,” Brooke responded.
“We just read it, Dad.”
“I was trying to get to him. To cross over.”
Faintly, from the house, they all heard Kelsey’s voice call out, “Is anybody home?”
“We’re coming, Baby,” Wylie called, and they all trooped back to the house, where she waited at the kitchen door, her hands on her hips.
She hugged her brother. “Thank you for saving our daddy.” Then she went into her mother’s arms.
Wylie was not too surprised at what his family knew. Kelsey was eight and an excellent reader. She was probably reading the book in everybody else’s downtime.
Brooke put on water for coffee. “I think we need to tell Matt,” she said. “We need some support out here.”
“Fighting them is acknowledging them. Believing in them. And the more we do that, the stronger the link to their reality becomes. So getting a posse out here might not be such a good idea.”
Brooke poured water into the coffee maker. “Then we need to not try to use that gateway at all.”
“She’s right, Dad,” Nick said.
“But Martin—he’s dying out there. Right now.”
Nick gave him a long, searching look.
“What?”
“Dad, just let it happen. You’re fighting and we can’t fight. We have to just write and hope they find it, and hope that it helps them. If one of us takes so much as a single step into that world—”
Kelsey’s eyes were wide, and Nick dropped it.
Brooke poured three mugs of coffee and sat down. Kelsey came into her lap.
“Nick, should you—this late?”
Nick gave him another of those searching looks. “You don’t remember?”
“He doesn’t,” Kelsey said. “He can’t.”
“Remember what? What am I missing?”
So softly that it was almost inaudible, Nick said, “I’m the guardian, Mom is the facilitator, you’re the scribe.” He glanced toward Kelsey, whose eyes were heavy. “She’s the sentinel.” He raised his eyebrows. “Remember?”
It didn’t make a bit of sense, any of it.
Nick stared into his coffee. “Our sentinel woke me up when she heard the outrider. If she hadn’t, you’d be dead now.”
He owed them his life. The bond that he felt with his family at this moment was the strongest thing he had ever known, the biggest emotion he had ever had. “Thank you,” he said.
Then he heard from upstairs, low voices.
Kelsey had closed her eyes now, and Brooke began singing “Dereen Day” again, her own voice as soft as a breeze, too soft to drown out the conversation Wylie was hearing.
He looked toward the dark stairs, then toward Nick—who jumped up and ran upstairs.
“Nick!” Wylie followed. Brooke only glanced at them, then continued singing.
Nick stood in front of Wylie’s office, his shotgun ported in his arms.
Wylie had known that there wouldn’t be anybody there. He went into the office. The voices were louder here, more distinct.
But nothing was breaking through, not here, not this far from a gateway.
“It’s my story,” he said to Nick. “My story’s calling me.”
