“Nope. Come on. Keep going. Vrrrooooommmm . . .”
That last part was Amy making an engine sound as she steered me toward the truck, like she was driving me. She reached around me and opened the door, then pushed me into the seat like you see cops doing with handcuffed suspects. She slammed the door, circled around and sat in beside me. We sat that way for a moment; I glanced out my window and saw the whole group watching. I reached up with a shaking hand to twist the key and realized the engine was already running. I tried to slow my breathing. I couldn’t keep my hands still.
Amy asked, “Are you okay?”
“Just, give me a second.”
“You kicked that guy’s ass.”
“Amy . . .”
“Come on, let’s go. Before he gets up and beats the crap out of you.”
WE GOT BACK to my house to find it ransacked. It was difficult to tell because I’m not the world’s greatest house keeper myself, but by the time I was in the kitchen I knew they had been here: I don’t normally keep the oven open. I whipped out the gun and prowled around the house, finding it empty. Amy asked what they were looking for. I dodged the question by pointing out what a pity it was they tossed the place because it was immaculate before they got here and that it was too bad she didn’t get to see it when it was clean. I went to the kitchen and ran water over my bleeding knuckles.
“Look,” Amy said, from behind me. “They threw laundry all over your floor in there.”
“Yeah. And they wore the clothes first, the bastards.”
“And what were they looking for again?”
A pause. I was on the verge of revealing what was probably our biggest and most dangerous secret to someone whom I had known for all of a day. I let out a breath and looked right into her eyes. The irises were too green, that was the thing. Like grass after a week of spring rain. And there was a piercing, electric intelligence in those eyes that I was too stupid to notice before. Seeing right through me. And I suddenly had the very dismaying realization that I probably could not lie to this girl, for one very simple reason. She was smarter than me.
I said, “They were looking for the soy sauce. I know they didn’t find it, though.”
“The what?”
I didn’t answer. I did a walk around the house, saw if anything was broken. It looked like they had taken the batteries out of my clock for some reason, and the glass fixture on my ceiling fan was cracked.
Amy followed me around, pestering me with questions, suddenly desperately curious. The truth was, I wasn’t sure how to explain it. After about the fifth time she turned the conversation to it, I held up a silencing hand, made a shushing sound, and put a single finger to her lips.
“All will become apparent in good time, sweet Amy.”
For a second, I seriously thought she was going to punch me. I went outside and did a walk- around of the house, glancing nervously at the toolshed and praying that the door wouldn’t be standing open.
I noticed the flag was up on my mailbox. This was Sunday. I went over and opened it, found a palm- sized package inside. There was no name, no address, no postage. I stared at it with some trepidation, then peeled it open, thinking it might be the world’s tiniest mail bomb. Inside was a necklace, a little gold cross on a delicate chain. I had seen it before, though seeing it close I noticed that the cross was formed of two tiny nails, bound together by thread-like wire. There was a piece of paper inside, too, a folded piece of stationery bearing a cartoon puppy with a pencil in his mouth. The writing was in sparkly pink:
All of the I’s were dotted with big, friendly loops. Everybody wants to help.
When I went in, Amy was in the bathroom running water. She emerged, stuffing Altoids mints into her mouth from a tin. I went to the fridge and said, “You want something to drink? I have, uh, some fruity Leinenkugel’s beer and, uh, some kind of terrible plum- flavored liquor John’s friend from the Czech Republic sent him. It tastes like the juice from a single plum was squeezed into a fifty-five-gallon drum of paint thinner.”
The cans of Leinenkugel’s had masking tape on them with JOHN’S printed in ink. Amy looked around me and said, “John is protective about his beer, isn’t he?”
“I put that label on there. When company comes I want them to know the Leinie’s is his, not mine. Do you want it?”
“Uh, no. I don’t drink,” she said, shaking her head and brushing the hair from her eyes for the four hundredth time since yesterday. “I mean, I drink liquids. Not alcohol. I couldn’t mix it with the pain pills. So who do we tell about the monsters?”
“Uh, what?”
“All this, everything we saw. Who do we talk to about this sort of thing?”
“I think the government has an eight hundred number but you just get one of those automated answering things. No. John and I are going to, uh, look into it. Today. Before they have a chance to come for you again.”
I closed the refrigerator and faced her, then told her an abbreviated and less retarded version of John’s story about the Drain Rooter site and the Mall of the Dead.
She said, “Why don’t we just go? To another town, or state, or Canada. When’s the last time you’ve heard of somebody exploding in Canada?”
I shook my head.
“Why not?”
“There are things you still don’t know. The shadow people . . . they’ve spoken to me. They know my name. It’s . . . personal somehow. With them. I think trying to get away from that by leaving—even climbing into a rocket ship and leaving the fuckin’ planet—would be laughable. To them it’d be like watching a hamster trying to escape by running on his little wheel really fast. I picture the rest of my life, running scared, forever. No. I can’t. I won’t. We’re gonna go in there, where they live. And we’re gonna go armed.”
“I wanna go.”
“Amy—”
“No, don’t even try. I want to see. I have a right to.”
“Amy, we’re going into that place with the intention of leaving it as a smoking hole in the ground.”
“I know.”
“No, you think this is cool, I can see it in your eyes. It’s not cool. We do not have this thing under control. Let me tell you a story. When I was little we had our sewer line back up. Toilet overflowing and all that. So they had to come and root it out, and what they pulled out of the sewer line was a woodchuck. There was a break in the pipe somewhere, two joints that had pulled apart, and this thing had gotten in. Okay? I mean to a woodchuck, this had to be the adventure of a lifetime. Hidden tunnel, seeming to go on for miles. So he’s crawling and exploring and waiting to see the hidden treasure at the end. And then, he gets drowned.
