Growth (13 page)

“This is really a job for the animal control officer, let me call him—”

“That man would not know his own ass from a hole in the ground.” For Mrs. Kobritz, this was pure blasphemy, worse than if a demon had possessed her and proclaimed to the town that Satan fucked her in the ass every Sunday morning before church and she was enjoying the living hell out of it. “And you know it.”

Sandy didn't know what to say. She certainly couldn't argue with Mrs. Kobritz. The animal control officer, Mark Higgins, was a sloppy drunk who was more than happy to catch neighborhood dogs and exterminate them to pump up his quota and justify his salary. She sighed. “Fine,” she said eventually. “I'll be out as soon as I can.”

She hung up and dialed Elliot's parents, Randy and Patty, and asked if she could drop Kevin off. They were over the moon that their son had a friend, and would do anything to help. Sandy called up the stairs to Kevin. “Grab your toothbrush and pj's and anything else you need. This might take a while.”

 

 

Technically, she was off the clock. Despite Sheriff Hoyt's insinuation that she was rarely on duty, she'd spent too much time at work this week already, and that made the union and the folks at OSHA nervous. And technically, she shouldn't have been driving the cruiser. She shouldn't have still been in her uniform.

But Sandy figured being chief superseded all that and besides, no civilian was going to complain. Instead, she worried if she was pushing her luck by slowing as she approached the Einhorn place. She wanted to see the circus firsthand but knew she shouldn't risk being seen. She should be going so fast that if somebody happened to glance down the driveway, she would be nothing but a blink of headlights in the last faint glimmer of summer light.

Being on duty a few hours too many could be overlooked. Spying on cops working a crime scene was another thing. She chewed this over and kept the needle at sixty miles per hour as the cruiser passed County Road E and knew she had just over thirty seconds until she passed the Einhorn place. She took her foot off the gas.

Even though she'd decided to sidestep this particular hurricane, she was still curious. She flicked off the lights and coasted in darkness.

As she got closer, Sandy knew they hadn't found Ingrid. If they had, the place would be quiet. Now, it was ablaze with raised lights. Stuttering sparks of camera flashes drilled into the night as Mike, the county forensics investigator, did his best to document everything. Lots of lights. But no sirens.

The cruiser slowed until it almost rolled to a complete stop. She got a good look up the driveway. There was no question. Sheriff Hoyt and his boys were still looking for a body.

Lights flashed on the Johnson's front porch and made Sandy jump. The front door opened and slammed. A young girl, maybe twelve or thirteen, which would have made her one of the older children, ran out into the front lawn. A split second later, Meredith's stern silhouette filled the doorway. “You get back in here right now.” Her voice was like a steel bear trap, and with each word, it snapped shut. “You know very well you are not allowed outside this late. Get back in here and say goodnight to your father.”

The girl turned, clenched her fists, and stamped her foot. “He's sick. I won't touch him.”

“You will give him a kiss good night or you and I will visit the shed. Is that what you want?” It was too much for the girl to resist any longer. She lowered her head and started back to the house. Meredith suddenly noticed Sandy's cruiser, sitting motionless on the highway. She called out, louder. “What are you doing out there, sitting in the dark?”

Sandy didn't have much of an answer.

Meredith wasn't listening anyway. “You don't fool me, Chief Chisel. You mind your own business.” With that, she swept the girl inside and slammed the door.

Sandy feathered the gas and passed the driveway, still keeping the headlights turned off. She followed the road by starlight.

Mrs. Kobritz's house was a half mile down. It was a relatively new house for the area, meaning it had been built in the last fifty years or so. The front yard was full of flowers and rainbow-colored wind wheels. They hung motionless in the headlights as Sandy parked the cruiser next to Mrs. Kobritz's Toyota.

It looked like every light in the house was on, spilling golden light into the deepening shadows. Sandy kept her headlights on and walked up to the front door. She knocked. Rang the doorbell. Sandy called out, “Mrs. Kobritz?”

No answer.

She tried the front door. It opened. “Mrs. Kobritz?”

Silence.

“Shit,” Sandy breathed. Why couldn't anything be simple? She called out again, but knew the house was empty. If Mrs. Kobritz or Puffing Bill had heard, they would be at the front door in a heartbeat. Still, she couldn't leave the house without checking. So she made a quick sweep. No surprises. It was empty.

The house was built at the crest of a low hill, surrounded by a typically expansive lawn. Flower beds and wind wheels bordered the grass. Attached garage. No barn. No outbuildings at all. A low fence of crosshatched railroad ties separated the back lawn from the cornfields. She flicked her Maglite around the immediate property, just in case Mrs. Kobritz had fallen and was hurt, but Sandy knew it was useless.

No one was around.

Sandy went back to the cruiser. She turned in a long, slow circle under a darkening sky. It didn't make any sense. Mrs. Kobritz had answered the phone maybe fifteen, twenty minutes ago. Her car was still in the driveway. She couldn't be far.

Sandy turned on the spinning red and blue lights at the top of the cruiser and hit the horn a few times. She thought about turning on the sirens, but it felt wrong. She thought of her son and wondered how long she should spend out at Mrs. Kobritz's. She saw herself explaining the twenty-four-hour guideline if someone came into the police station and reported a missing person.

Missing for twenty minutes didn't exactly inspire panic.

Still, there was no denying that, in her heart, she knew damn well something was wrong. Mrs. Kobritz wasn't the type who tended to flee to Vegas on a whim. Mrs. Kobritz wasn't someone who slipped away in the dead of night to escape child support payments.

Mrs. Kobritz was someone who gave the closest neighbor a seven-page list of detailed instructions on how to water the flowers if she left on an overnight trip.

And Mrs. Kobritz would never abandon her dog.

Sandy hit the horn a few more times and kept the lights flashing. Nothing. No hearty welcomes. No invitations to join her for dinner. No shouts of recognition. Nothing. She decided she would take one more walk around the perimeter of the property and wound her way through the little orchard and garden, into the backyard.

She saw something moving in the corn.

Sandy tensed and waited. The corn rustled.

She heard something wheezing. Puffing Bill came out of the rows, trying to sniff the air with his ruined nose. He saw her, momentarily forgot whatever had been on his mind, and bounded over to her with his own peculiar hopping gait, lost in a frenzy of dog happiness, his stump of a tail wriggling furiously.

She didn't realize she had been reaching for her sidearm until she unsnapped the holster and felt foolish.

Sandy waited, hoping to see Mrs. Kobritz follow her dog up the back lawn. She never appeared. Puffing Bill banged his head into her knee, demanding affection. Sandy gave his head a quick, perfunctory pat. He settled onto his haunches, tucked his one leg across his chest, reared back, and looked up at her. Cocked his head, clearly not satisfied. When she didn't respond, he gave up, disgusted, and took a leak near the roses in the backyard.

It was so quiet she realized she could hear the dull rush of traffic on I-72 two miles away.

She called out, “Mrs. Kobritz? Hello? Mrs. Kobritz?”

Nothing. Not even crickets.

Puffing Bill froze when he heard Sandy's voice. He looked back to the corn and there was a suggestion of a distant rumble in his throat. He had remembered that something was wrong.

She'd never seen the dog scared. She'd once seen him take a slow walk around one of the big rigs rumbling in the vacant lot next to the Korner Kafe, as if the dog had been sizing up the truck, looking for a weakness. Nothing scared him.

She flicked her Maglite at the corn, swept it back and forth. The frantic movements of the light created lurching, fragmented shadows that leapt away at the flick of her wrist. She slowed the light at odd moments, trying to catch someone unaware. But her meager light could only illuminate five or six rows deep. Sandy knew that out there, out in the deep darkness, the fields went on for miles and miles, broken only by the occasional dirt track or highway. It was a vast, wild ocean, rolling on and on under a hazy bubble of stars.

Sandy turned off the Maglite and left the backyard, going around to the front, wishing she hadn't left the flashers going on the roof of the cruiser. The spinning red and blue lights gave Mrs. Kobritz's front yard and driveway a tense, jittery feel, and even if nothing was wrong, she couldn't help but feel the lights were making the situation worse.

Puffing Bill joined her, sticking close. He remained at her side as she crossed the front lawn to the cruiser. His ears were up, and he kept his eyes moving.

She opened the driver's door and switched off the lights. Puffing Bill slipped past her and hopped nimbly into the front passenger seat. He put his one paw on the dashboard and swiveled his wide head, surveying everything from behind the windshield.

“Great. Thanks.” She called the office on her cell, wanting to keep the news of her old babysitter quiet. “Liz. I need to report a missing person.” She went down the list, giving Mrs. Kobritz's vitals, promising she'd find a picture soon, and told Liz to get the word out.

Sandy didn't want to, but she got in the car and went next door to ask the sheriff if he'd seen or heard from the Einhorns' neighbor.

Earlier, Sandy had missed Jerm entirely.

He'd been pedaling up Highway 17, handgun tucked safely in the front of his shorts. He'd seen the headlights crest over the horizon a mile or so distant and knew he had a few minutes to slip into the corn and let the car pass. But the lights had disappeared, and he figured he'd missed them turning into a farm or home. He kept pedaling.

His cousin had once told him that all cop cars had square headlights. It was like a law, or something. So Jerm kept an eye out for square-shaped headlights as he pedaled along the highway, past endless rows of corn. His lungs burned and his legs ached, but the cold, heavy metal of the pistol pressing into his belly gave him strength to keep going. He couldn't wait to show it off at school tomorrow.

When the cruiser came gliding out of the darkness of the highway with no lights and a nearly silent purring engine, Jerm damn near had a heart attack. If she'd had her headlights on, Sandy would have spotted him in an instant.

Jerm saw a ditch and yanked his handlebars to the left. He bounced down an embankment into the nearly empty irrigation ditch, jumped off, and swiftly rolled his bike into the concrete culvert that ran under the highway.

Above, he heard that crazy church lady yelling at somebody. At first he thought it might be him, but relaxed when he realized it was one of her kids.

The water was ankle-deep, and in the stifling heat of an Illinois summer, Jerm barely felt the tepid water. He leaned his bike against the wall and moved deeper into the large pipe.

Ten feet in, the light from the stars faded. Except for a flash of reflection on the surface of the water once in a while, the light had vanished. The air became palpable, as if it were a black, impenetrable liquid. The culvert was nearly four feet in diameter, and Jerm found he could move forward fairly quickly through the utter darkness, as long as he hunched over and kept his head down. He stopped when he thought he was halfway through the tunnel and froze, listening.

The engine fluttered above and the cruiser sped away. Jerm grunted in relief.

Something sloshed in the water down at the other end. The sound echoed down the closed space of the pipe and reverberated past Jerm.

A shape broke the circle of light. It fluttered one moment, went still the next.

He pulled out the cell phone he'd stolen from his brother, knowing full well that his brother had plucked it out of some tween's backpack at the mall. He couldn't make any calls, couldn't even break the code to get into the phone, but when he turned it on, it gave off a soft glow, and he used that light to guide him farther down the tunnel.

He got close enough to see that it was an old woman. She was turned away, huddled against the side of the cement pipe, knees drawn to her chest, skinny arms hugging herself. Frizzy, gray hair hung over her face.

Jerm got closer.

Recognized her as that old bitch, Mrs. Kobritz. She had some sort of growths popping out of the wrinkled skin around her mouth and nose; they looked like little torpedo-shaped mushrooms. When she turned her head and opened her mouth, she didn't make a sound, but he could see even more of the mushroom things erupting out of the inside of her cheeks and across her tongue. One arm reached out for him. The fingers twitched, and she vomited a thick black paste over her distended stomach.

He scrabbled backward, slipping in the algae that coated the bottom of the tunnel. Strangely, he found it was hard to break eye contact. Her eyes pleaded with him. They seemed horribly aware of her situation, and she silently begged him for help, for relief, for something he could not understand.

Jerm finally broke the contact and twisted around and looked back down the tunnel to his bike. His feet found purchase on the slime-covered concrete and propelled him down the pipe. His fingers clawed at the cement as he splashed along. He got close to his end and risked a look back.

The shape of the woman was still there. She hadn't moved. His heart slowed, and he found he could take a breath. He turned back, took a deep breath, and prepared to scurry the last ten feet to his bike.

A new sound reached his ears, echoing and distorted as it spiraled down the pipe to him. It was soft and sinister. He aimed the phone back down the tunnel. After a few seconds, the light faded and he had to hit the button again to wake the phone up. At first, he couldn't see anything. He whipped the phone back and forth, sending the shadows in the tunnel reeling and swaying like drunk yo-yos.

He gradually realized the scattered movements along the curved walls of the concrete pipe were truly crawling toward him, and it wasn't just the frantic sweeping of the faint light. The sudden knowledge made him drop the stolen phone, and he lunged for his bike with both hands. He pushed the bike backward out of the culvert. It toppled over sideways in the weeds. He clambered out, and even though his bike had fallen over, he felt triumph as he emerged from the darkness into the starlight.

Then he felt something crawling up his calf.

It was almost like a cluster of tiny cactuses moving across his skin, as dozens of the spindly creatures crawled up his legs. More dropped on him from the top of the culvert. They swarmed across his body, moving in snakelike motions, slithering up his legs, scurrying down through his hair, crawling under the collar of his Motör-head T-shirt, squirming underneath his cargo shorts.

Thousands of insect legs overwhelmed Jerm, crawling across every inch of his flesh. He stumbled and fell forward, clawing at the centipede-looking things that crisscrossed his face. He rolled over, splashing through the wet weeds, kicking wildly. He staggered back up, ripping and grabbing them. He ignored his bike and simply started running.

He could still feel them, though, as his feet slapped the pavement. Felt the smooth worms with stolen legs that had no head and no tail. Felt the tiny legs grip and latch his skin.

He kept slapping and pulling them off as he ran off down the dark highway.