“We have to get back upstairs, before they get in here,” Nicole said. She knew that David would spiral out into a full panic if she didn’t stop him “You guys okay?”
Alex nodded. “Yeah.”
David dragged himself to his feet, but said nothing. At least he seemed more manageable now.
Once they got to the bedroom, they slammed the door behind them. Nicole checked that Ryan was still in his fort, then helped Alex block the door with a pile of mats. All they could do was wait for the inevitable.
After a silence, David slowly walked to the window to see how long they had, how close they were to the door, how many others had come to join them.
“Um ...” he said, not turning back to the others.
“What?” Nicole said, panicking. “What? What?”
“They’re ... um ...” David continued, confusion in his voice. “They’re not moving.”
Both Nicole and Alex stared in disbelief.
“What?” Nicole asked, confused.
“They’re not moving.”
Alex moved to the window and looked out. The two boys stood, infuriatingly silent.Nicole pushed them aside. Looking out, she couldn’t understand their fascination. The mudmen weren’t moving. No, she realized. They were. They were also still on the spikes, and it looked like they weren’t getting off them.
“They’re… stuck,” Alex said.
“Ugh ... that’s ... grosser,” Nicole said.
“Grosser than when they were dead?” David asked.
“Yes, grosser than that,” she replied, unable to take her eyes off the creatures as they writhed against the spikes. “They’re ... pushing them in.”
“Ugh,” Alex added, pointing. “More stuff is falling out of that one!”
“Aw, gross!” David said, with a bit of a laugh.
All three kept staring.
Nicole eventually walked away. “It’s gross. You guys are gross for looking at them.” She sat against the far wall and tried to ignore the boys as they gawked.
They watched the mudmen struggle—sometimes moving a bit farther into the spikes, sometimes trying to back up without success—for fifteen minutes. They were silent, other than the occasional “Oh!” or “Gross!” if one of the impaled figures did something particularly disgusting.
“What’s up with that one?” Alex asked after a while.
“What do you mean?” David asked, looking where Alex pointed. “Nothing, why?”
“It’s not moving,” Alex replied.
“Are you sure?” David asked, moving to get a better view of it.
“Yeah, I don’t think he moved at all since we saw them.”
“Really? They were all moving.”
“No. No. I don’t think that one moved.” He paused, looking at the four figures outside. “Look, the other three—they’re moving right now, trying to get us, or whatever, but that one isn’t. He’s just ... dead.”
“They’re all dead,” Nicole said flatly, from her seat. “They just don’t know it yet.” She thought that was a clever way of explaining the things.
“Yeah, I guess,” Alex said. “But that one is really dead. Like, dead-dead.”
David now also focused on the singled-out mudman. “Dead-dead.” After another moment of silent staring, “I think you’re right. I think he’s dead-dead.”
“I’m not allowed to say ‘deadies’,” Nicole said, finally standing up, “but you guys think ‘dead-dead’ is a real term.”
Both boys ignored her. They were much more interested in why one of the four impaled mudmen was dead-dead while the other three barely noticed that they were impaled at all.
They discussed the situation, tossing out theories and comparing the states of all four mudmen, looking for some differences: they all looked to be in the same condition, more or less, same damage, a similar amount of stuff had fallen out of each of them. If anything, there was less stuff piled up under the dead-dead one. It was as if it had died on contact with the pikes and hadn’t tried to struggle off as the others did.
“The spike is in his head,” Alex thought aloud.
“What?” Nicole and David said simultaneously.
“The spike is going through his head!” He pointed again.
Nicole and David looked out. Sure enough, of the three that were still moving, two were impaled through the chest and the third through the shoulder. The dead-dead one was impaled through the eye. The pike went through the other side of his skull with bits of brain hanging off the point.
He hung much more limply than his three not-quite-dead companions.
“So ... is that one ...dead?” David asked, as if just to make sure.
“Looks that way,” Nicole answered. As she turned to face him, she had a smile on her face. She added, “And now we know how to kill ‘em.”
KAITLYN
The hour passed.
Then another; then another; then another.
Kaitlyn couldn’t keep away from the windows. The fact that there was nothing to see was both fortunate, and horribly draining.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“Kaitlyn,” Dave said. She knew she had asked for the time every few minutes since her mother left. “It’s not—”
“What time is it?”
He sighed. “It’s 3:25.”
“Exactly 3:25?”
He looked as his watch to double check. “Yes. Exactly 3:25.” He paused. “She’s probably just ...”
“Just what?” Kaitlyn asked, looking away from the window for the first time in an hour. “Just what? Just hanging around? Just waiting ‘til it gets dark?” She sniffed back a tear. “She said she’d be back in an hour! She said ... she said ...” Her lip quivered, and her eyes watered over. She looked back to the window.
“She’ll be back,” Dave said. “I genuinely believe that.”
Kaitlyn nodded as fresh tears washed over the old ones.
The sun continued to shine, as it had since Joanne left. The street looked the same way it did every October. Wet leaves lay on the ground. Some people had put their Halloween decorations out already. Jack-o-lanterns lined front steps. Only one house was boarded up. No one else had come back.
Everyone else was gone.
There were no cars. No people walking. No animals. None of those things either; those monsters. It was possible that everything was over.
“What time is it?”
“3:31.”
DAVID
David’s first plan didn’t work.
The idea was to throw objects from the windows at the mudmen, hitting their heads hard enough to kill them. The problem with the idea was that, even though Alex had told them he
