“We’ll review your quote and get back to you by the end of the week," Phil said. “Then you’ll start right away?”
“Absolutely,” Brad said.
“Great," Phil said. “Talk to you soon.”
Brad flicked his computer mouse to wake up his monitor. He disconnected from the call.
He pushed back and put his feet up on his desk. Phil would probably stand by the fax machine, waiting for his transmission, but Phil could wait. Brad knew that Phil would never get approval by the end of the week. If Phil promised you a contract on Friday, he really meant you should expect it sometime in the next month.
The project had turned into a nightmare. Phil talked him into a five day engagement that turned into six weeks of work. Worse than that, Phil convinced the Cincinnati office to use another contractor so Phil could have Brad all to himself. Brad liked to make himself indispensable, but Phil was turning into a stalker.
Now, with the project nearly complete, Phil let the stakeholders change several major requirements. Two major sub-systems would have to be reworked, and one of the supporting applications overhauled. Brad produced an estimate for the change order, and now waited for Phil to get approval for the work.
“I’ll be lucky if I hear from him by September,” Brad said to the ceiling. “On the other hand, I don’t have to work until September, if I don’t want to.”
Despite the lower hourly rate, Phil’s insistence on overtime and weekend work netted Brad a huge windfall for June and July. He always kept a decent financial cushion to weather the lean times. Now he had enough money saved to coast for a year without another contract; not that he would ever indulge himself to such a degree.
Brad intertwined his fingers behind his head and leaned back farther.
“What if I just quit?” he asked nobody. “What if I just fax over a picture of my middle finger? Phil can get one of the Prague guys to finish up this mess. Sure, it will take him three times as long, but they only charge half as much. He’ll be a hero until they figure out the Prague guys don’t know jack shit about their data.”
Brad closed his eyes and tried to imagine what his life would actually be like if he quit. He always pictured a perfect life—he would have time to work on the house, clean up the yard, or maybe meet some new people in town. But he knew better. Between jobs he always obsessed about money and trying to find a new job. He wouldn’t be able to enjoy a stress-free life; it would make him anxious.
He shifted his weight and dropped his fingers to the keyboard. In a few minutes he figured out how to fax his estimate to Phil.
“Now I just have to wait,” he said to the monitor. The clock on his computer read half-past ten. “Looks like a good day for a pre-lunch walk.”
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Brad started down the path looking at his feet. This time he wanted to be careful where he stepped. Remembering his encounter with the mystery vines over a month before, he wore his hiking boots and jeans. A clicking sound ahead made him stop and look up. He stood, still a hundred yards from the place where the vine had wrapped around his leg, and listened to the clicking.
The clicking was loud, and sounded like it came from up on the hill. Whatever it was clicked about twice a second, then sped up to several times that rate, and then slowed again. Brad almost felt hypnotized by the rhythm. He started forward again, keeping his focus on the clicking. Nobody ever came back here except Brad. Even in hunting season, people didn’t stray this far. Dragging a deer a mile through thick woods didn’t appeal to the local hunters.
One year a neighbor he’d never met came to the door and asked Brad to unlock the gate so he could get his deer out to his truck. That was back when Karen had still been alive and married to Brad. She stood behind him as he talked to the hunter on the porch.
Wearing an orange hat and camo shirt and pants, the man had introduced himself and then explained his request, “I’m wondering if you can unlock your gate so I can haul out my deer.” The man stood drenched in sweat despite the cool November day.
“Boy,” Brad said, “you look like you’ve been dragging that deer for half a mile.”
“No,” the hunter laughed, “not quite that far, but it was quite a haul.”
“So, less than half a mile?” Brad asked. He felt Karen’s hand on his back. The hand might have meant “good job,” or maybe just “back off.” He didn’t know.
“Maybe a few hundred yards, I guess,” the hunter said. His smile faltered.
“So a quarter of a mile?” Brad asked.
“Look, if you could just open the gate, or maybe loan me the key?” asked the hunter.
“I’m just asking because our property extends at least a half mile in every direction from that gate, unless you took the deer across a road,” Brad said. “And since we spent the better part of five hundred dollars putting up signs every fifty feet, I would assume you know—we don’t allow hunting on our property.”
“Look, I’m sorry,” the hunter said. “I didn’t see your signs, and I didn’t mean to hunt without your permission.”
“Understood,” Brad said.
“But I’ve got a deer right on the other side of your gate. I certainly won’t hunt your land again, but what do you want me to do? Should I just leave it there, or are you going to let me through the gate?”
“I tell you what,” Brad said. “You can haul it back around our fence, or you can leave it there and I’ll have the game warden come collect it.”
The hunter left, furious. The confrontation didn’t give Brad any satisfaction.
Brad recalled his anger as he stood listening to the clicking sound. He didn’t even realize he’d stopped moving. The confrontation with the hunter had been years before, but he’d seen it play out right before his eyes, like a movie. He wanted to turn around and go back to the house. He forced his feet to move forward, up the hill, towards the clicking.
When Brad reached the edge of the clearing, the clicking noise stopped. It had been loud enough to echo off the trees to his left. After the clicking stopped the normal noises of summer began again. Birds sang, the occasional early cricket chirped, and squirrels rustled through the underbrush. Had it been his imagination that those sounds were absent during the clicking? Brad couldn’t decide.
The vines had spread since he’d been there last. They now covered the entire cleared area and stretched across the path where it picked up on the other side. On his left, he saw the vines curling up the trunks of the trees. Some trees were nearly choked with vines. The leaves looked brown on these trees—they wouldn’t live to see another spring. Pink and purple flowers stood out on the vines, but none were close enough for Brad to inspect. These vines were too long to cross. If they acted like the one he’d seen back in June, they would wrap all the way up to his neck, he figured.
Brad thought about going to town, to the garden center with the big greenhouse. They would know what the vine was, and probably how to kill it. He pulled his gardening gloves from his back pocket and crouched, grabbing the smallest vine near his feet. When he tugged on the vine, it immediately constricted, like a boa, on his gloved hand. Brad slashed at it with his knife, cutting off about a foot. He put his gloved hand in a plastic bag and pulled off the glove and vine.
Brad was still crouched down on his haunches when he heard the click again. It sounded just once. He moved only his head and looked up. He couldn’t see anything unusual. Trees, bushes, vines—tons of vines, a big rock, and clear blue sky.
Click—he heard it again.
Brad’s brow furrowed as he scanned the clearing again. Something was out of place. The rock—what was that giant gray rock doing over near the far tree line? He and Karen had cleared every inch of the pasture themselves. He would have remembered a big stately boulder at the edge of it. There was another problem with the rock—it didn’t have vines draped all over it. Everything else he could see was covered by the creeping menace. Only the rock sat unmolested.
He wanted to get a closer look, but didn’t think it wise to try to cross the vine patch. From where he stood, it looked like a truly horrible idea. Just one of those vines had incapacitated his bare leg a month and a half before, and it only measured a few feet long. Now the vines were piled in a tangled mess, looking waist-deep in parts.
Brad backed down the path until he found a clear patch of alders. He struck out on a course tangential to the edge of the clearing, hoping to circle around through the woods to the other side. A couple dozen yards later, he was stopped by the vines again. A swath of vines, about ten feet across, passed through the trees. Some curled up the trunks to choke out the low trees, but most just piled on themselves to form a little river of vegetation. Brad swung the bag containing the glove and piece of vine back and forth and considered his options.
He followed the vine river for a while, away from the clearing. It didn’t show any signs of petering out.
The clicking started again: click, click, click, click-click-click-click, click, click, click. Brad turned and listened. It was almost soothing. He reached out to steady himself on a tree and nearly put his hand on a curling vine.
Brad thought about his grandfather, Grandpa Joe. Grandpa Joe was a logging man until he started working as a surveyor for the state. By the time Brad was old enough to spend his summers with Grandpa Joe, the old man retired, but still cut firewood as a hobby. He used to take Brad out in the woods with him when Brad would visit.
Grandpa Joe always cut with his four foot bow saw, and delimbed with a razor-sharp axe. Joe carried the saw over his left shoulder and the axe in his right hand, so Brad carried the small chainsaw. Grandpa Joe called the chainsaw “Justin.”
“Why do you call the chainsaw Justin?” Brad asked one day.
“Same reason I keep it in a case,” Grandpa Joe said.
“Why’s that?” asked young Brad.
“I don’t intend to use it, but I have you bring it along Justin Case,” Joe said.
Grandpa Joe smiled at Brad when he saw that Brad finally got the joke. The old man could bring down a tree and have it bucked into perfect, four-foot segments before most people could even get their chainsaw started. And Grandpa Joe moved almost silently through the woods. The only noise you’d hear would be when he crashed the next tree to the ground.
Brad blinked several times and snapped himself from the memory. He shook his head and rubbed his eyes with his free hand. He felt like he’d been asleep on his feet. The clicking stopped again.
“Am I crazy, or did you get closer to me?” Brad asked the vine river. He pulled his phone from his back pocket to check the time.
“What?” he whispered. For some reason the clock on his phone read one in the afternoon. If it was right, somehow he’d spent over two hours on his twenty minute walk.
“Jesus,” he whispered. Movement drew his eyes to the right. On the tree a few feet away, blossoms opened up on the curling vine. They started from the tip of the vine and opened one at a time down its length. To Brad it looked like the world’s slowest fireworks display. They were a plush, throaty blossom, reminding Brad of Morning Glories. The flowers alternated in color: pink, purple, pink, purple. The ones down near the base of the tree were larger than the ones at the tip of the vine, which were almost at eye level.
Brad backed up two steps without taking his eyes off the strange flowers. He pulled out his utility knife, thinking he should get a sample with flowers on it, but then changed his mind. Those vines hadn’t been there when he zonked out. What if he was just one more hypnosis away from being enveloped by the vines? He tore his gaze away from the pretty flowers and scanned for a good exit route.
He could feel his heart beating faster. It had been so long since Brad really felt fear, it was almost nice. The fear felt like a leftover emotion from childhood; something he wasn’t sure he would ever experience again so completely. There’d been an adrenaline rush the time the woman at the gas station almost backed into his car, but no real fear. Brad fed into the emotion, wanting to keep it going. He started walking.
The vine river spread out—Brad walked almost directly downhill to get away from them. His direct route back to his road had been flanked. After a minute of picking his way through the woods, the vines around Brad started to peter out. His pace slowed until the clicking sound started again. It was still coming from up the hill, from his clearing, but it brought Brad’s fear back with a rush. He started to run downhill through the woods, back towards his house.
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Brad dropped his latest vine sample back at the house and grabbed his binoculars from the laundry room. He hauled his biggest ladder from its hooks on the outside of the garage and headed for the big pine trees down near the pond. His property sloped down from the new pasture out back, and then up from a gully to the house. From the ladder, he thought he might be able to get a look at the pasture.
He propped the ladder just below a cluster of branches and started climbing. Way off in the distance, he could still hear the rhythmic clicking.
“Music,” he said to himself. For a second, he tried to fish the earphones out of his pocket while he stood on the ladder, but then he changed his mind and climbed back down.
Brad talked to himself while he hooked the earphones up to his music player. "Just in case. Justin Case. Maybe if I can’t hear you, I won’t get hypnotized? Worth a shot.” He found some classic rock to act as his soundtrack for his little spying mission.
Even at the top of the ladder, he was still a little lower than the clearing on the far hill, but he had a pretty good view. The branches he leaned on were covered in sap, but they felt more stable than trying to balance on the ladder. Brad propped his elbows on a branch so he could steady his hands for the binoculars.