80
The wind was rough and fast, how it shoved Jimmy, and the rain was cold now, and the dark went on like maybe there was no light anymore ever.
When he found the place where a road went to Jojo, he knew it because the white lines stopped. There were no lines broken or not broken, just a road black and hard under his feet, not as wide as the roads before it.
He was getting close. “Jojo help Jimmy,” he said, practicing the words. “Please Jojo help Jimmy.”
He thought he heard something that wasn’t the wind and wasn’t the rain, so he stopped and turned all the way around, remembering how his father never let him outside alone at night, not even to sit in the yard. It wasn’t the night that might hurt him. The night was just the day without light. But Father said there were things in the night you couldn’t see coming until they had their teeth in you, and then it was Too Damn Late. A lot of things could hurt you in daytime too if you saw them coming Too Damn Late. Jimmy turned around all the way again, but nothing was there.
He looked toward the lake. If something was coming to get its teeth in him, the lake was where it was coming from. The lake was black. No moon floated in the sky, and no moon floated in the lake.
Before anything could get its teeth in him, he started moving again. Uphill, toward the trees. Toward the house. In the house were lights and Jojo home again.
81
Wyatt and Joanna hurried through the house, confirming that every door and operable window was locked. If something not of this world wanted them, something that could control animals as large and powerful as elk and grizzly bears, locks would not avail them. The precautions they were taking gained them nothing, but they took them anyway, driven by the human compulsion to do something in a crisis.
Although Liam O’Hara had paid for cell towers to be installed to serve this end of the county, and although a large satellite dish with full-sky capability was positioned on the roof of the house, the phones didn’t work anymore. Neither did the computers.
With their vehicles disabled, the only way out of Rustling Willows was on foot. That was a fact but not an option. Wyatt had no confidence that they would be able to walk off the property alive. Or even as far as the end of the front yard.
In countless books and movies, humanity had been anticipating extraterrestrials for at least a hundred fifty years: some who were transparent in their intentions, others who were opaque; some benign and others sinister; some who were so intelligent and wise as to be godlike; others that were nothing but low-intelligence predators more vicious and well-armored than anything Earth produced, drifting through interstellar space in the form of indestructible seeds or eggs until they settled in a place where they flourished. If for thousands of years this land had been home to a mind-reading ET who’d been shocked by humanity’s capacity for evil, and if then it had fallen under the spell of the genocidal Asher Optime, spiraling into profound psychotic hatred of humanity, it might not be just Wyatt’s and Joanna’s survival that hung in the balance, but also that of all humankind.
Wyatt Rider felt as helpless now as he’d felt when he’d been twelve and had at last fully understood who his parents were and how they charmed and conned and often intimidated their victims—mostly the elderly, retirees who’d had everything they owned taken from them, in a few cases even their lives. He had confronted his mother and father, pressed them to stop. They didn’t need the money. They had stolen more than they could ever spend. But they would not stop because they didn’t do it just for the money; they did it for the charge it gave them, the sense of being smarter than those whom they impoverished and humiliated, the thrill when it was necessary to engineer an accident for one of their pigeons who gave them the choice of restitution or referral to the police. When young Wyatt said that he’d tell on them—how naive, how terribly childish that sounded in memory, I’ll have to tell on you—his father, Charlie, a big man, had seized his son’s arm and dragged him through the house and thrown him down the cellar stairs. He stormed down after Wyatt, thundering at him: You never rat out your own, and if you do, this is what you get, what you deserve, you dumb shit. The lecture and beating went on for a while. Throughout, Wyatt’s mother, Ingrid, sat on the stairs, a glass of white wine in hand, as though watching a drama on TV. After that, for more than two weeks, while his bruises faded, while his split lip and numerous abrasions healed, Wyatt was imprisoned in the basement, where he slept on an air mattress and bathed as best he could at a laundry sink. His mother brought him breakfast, lunch, and dinner—only soft foods during the first few days—and with the meals came cold and solemn instructions as to his place in the family, which she called “the operation.” We never did want you, Wyatt. For people like us, a kid is a ball and chain. Or can be. We were going to abort you, scrape you out of me and get on with getting on. But then we wondered if maybe having a kid would give us some cred with the marks. You know? Who would ever think a nice young couple with a cute little tyke were the kind to take them to the cleaners? If maybe it didn’t work out that way, then we could always have a family tragedy. But, holy shit, did it ever work! You were as cute as Christmas, and those old farts who never had kids of their own, never had grandkids, they all adored you. We’re draining them of everything, and they’re buying you toys, babysitting you for free. You were the grandkid they never had, and you didn’t even need to be told how to play those fools. You were a natural, the way you suckered them in. But you’re getting older now, kid. Year by year you mean less to the operation. You might be valuable again if you were crippled in an accident, maybe blinded. A blind boy would get us a shitload of sympathy from the marks. You understand me? If you want to go there, we can. Otherwise, it’ll work like this. You’ll be a good mama’s boy until you’re eighteen. Then we’ll give you maybe ten thousand bucks, and you’ll go off on your own, wherever the hell you want, find a scam of your own. You think you’re a choirboy, but you’re no different from us. You’re a fucking natural, kid. By the time you’re eighteen, you’ll know that’s true. Hell, you know it already. And if you ever doubt that, your daddy can always beat the doubt out of you. It’s no trouble for him. He’ll be happy to do whatever needs to be done to get you smart and keep you that way. For the following six years, Wyatt had felt helpless, even as he held fast to the belief that one day he would have the confidence, the experience, and the evidence to put them behind bars, thereby paying penance for having enabled them at first unwittingly and then grudgingly. He hadn’t felt helpless since the day the jury came back with its verdict. Until now. The thing that had spoken to Joanna through Jimmy Alvarez, the thing that had warned Wyatt off in the boathouse and now had cut them off from the world—whatever else it might be, it was the ultimate controlling, sadistic parent figure.