Christopher Rice - The Vines

Then Nova shoots to her feet and cries, “What do you mean he went back there?”

The gas station is an island of light beside the two-lane blacktop. Caitlin turns into it at the last possible second, even though her BMW X5 has over half a tank, more than enough to get her to Spring House and back to New Orleans.

The attendant looks up from his magazine behind bulletproof glass, face shaded from the sodium-vapor lights by the bill of his John Deere baseball cap. When she goes to put her credit card into the reader, she sees that there isn’t one and is reminded that she’s not in Uptown, but several miles up the west bank of the river from Luling, where the population is sparse and one fuel-and-run could take away half a day’s business.

“Pay first,” comes the attendant’s voice through the speaker overhead.

Instead, Caitlin stands next to her shiny black SUV, the gas pump frozen in one hand. She figures she has only minutes left, so she opens the gas tank anyway and begins unscrewing the cap.

“Pay first, ma’am.”

Just then, the sedan that’s been following her for a half hour blows past the gas station. It’s hard to keep track of its continued speed in the darkness, but a few moments later she sees the sedan’s brake lights flash on, angry red eyes trailing away around the bend in the highway up ahead. Slowing. Calculating. Waiting?

“Pay f—”

“Fuck off!” Caitlin roars. She’s staring at the attendant before she realizes she’s whirled on him. The undeniable astonishment in his expression at such full-voiced fury coming from so delicate a woman chases away any remorse she might feel over her outburst, replacing it with bone-deep satisfaction.

When she nods and smiles, the guy begins reaching for something under his desk, without taking his glazed eyes off her. Whether it’s a gun or an alarm button, she’s not sure. And now that she’s confirmed she’s still being followed, there’s no need for her to linger.

Fifteen minutes later she is traveling up River Road when the sedan’s headlights appear in her rearview mirror again.

“I’m not getting this,” Kyle Austin says.

“Spring House, her plantation,” Mike says. “That’s where she’s headed.” Kyle is still sitting at Scott’s desk, watching the green-flared quadrants on the computer screen that show various angles on Caitlin Chaisson’s now-empty house.

Mike’s voice sounds tinny through the prepaid cell phone. Scott has given up trying to overhear, and now he’s headfirst in the kitchen pantry, probably getting ready to stress eat or make some kind of protein shake with five shots of bull adrenaline and a methamphetamine chaser.

“I mean, I don’t understand why you’re following her. The house on St. Charles is just sitting there, empty. Shouldn’t we make a play?”

“A play?”

“For the tape .”

“Yeah… but this might be more interesting.”

“ Interesting. We’re going for interesting now. What does—”

“Don’t be such a little bitch, Austin. She’s on the move, alone , at one in the morning—”

“So what, man?”

“So rather than looking for a needle in a goddamn mansion , I could maybe see if she’s covering up something about her fucking husband that we could use to get the tape out of her. You get me?”

“We’re not detectives.”

“We’re not murderers either, but that’s what everyone will think if she ever wants them to.”

We’re not? Kyle thinks.

Across the apartment, Scott seems to have produced his own answer to the question needling Kyle’s brain. He hasn’t been rooting around in the pantry for protein powder or energy drinks. Instead, he’s set a giant gun case on the counter from which he has removed maybe the largest handgun Kyle has ever laid eyes on. It’s a 500 Smith & Wesson Magnum, so long it looks like it would be impossible to aim with one hand. Kyle’s seen videos of the things online blowing the shit out of cinderblocks with a single bullet. Handgun hunting, they call it.

Scott’s got a cocky half smile on his face until he sees the expression on Kyle’s.

“Story of my fucking life,” Mike growls. “Tell you what, how ’bout you kids just sit back and I’ll clean up the whole mess, and when I’m done I’ll bring you a pretty hat you can wear to church with the other ladies.”

Mike Simmons hangs up on him before he can answer, and then it’s just Kyle, Scott, and the cartoonishly large gun sitting on the kitchen counter like a prop from a comic book. And Kyle Austin thinks, Maybe you should be the one cleaning up the mess. You’re the one who whacked Fuller with the goddamn pipe.

Scott’s expression is suddenly pale and distant, and for a second Kyle is afraid he’s about to be punished with an ass-whipping for not being visibly excited about Scott’s insanely large firearm. But Scott is staring past Kyle, at the computer screen and its night-vision views of Caitlin Chaisson’s mansion. And then Scott is walking slowly across the apartment, and when Kyle sees the giant handgun left all by itself on the kitchen counter, he has a mad urge to dash for it, as if it might be snatched up and wielded against them by a mentally imbalanced ghost.

“What the…?” Scott finally whispers. And Kyle is forced to turn his attention away from the abandoned gun to the computer screen.

What he sees there at first appears to be a trick of shadows until he realizes there’s only one concrete, physical explanation. One glass wall of the second-floor solarium is either gone or mostly shattered. He can’t see the broken glass, but he can see the clouds of insects now swirling freely through the solarium’s interior like a compact tornado. The cloud looks three times larger than he first thought. It looks like the bugs have knocked over some sort of appliance that’s now short-circuiting. The whole scene looks like a miniature version of a transformer gearing up to blow in a violent thunderstorm. In the split second before each pulse of light overpowers the night-vision lens with sickening intensity, Kyle glimpses a density of insects to rival the clouds of Formosan termites that used to shut down Zephyrs baseball games when he was a kid.

“Did they—did those bugs…?”

“Yeah,” Kyle says. “I think they broke the goddamn window.”

The next flash is fierce, far larger than the ones before, so bright Scott leaps back from the computer screen, one arm going up to shield his eyes. But Kyle can’t force himself to look away, because there was a shape to this explosion of light that the other pulses lacked, a brilliant, brief silhouette of a form that looked halfway human as it made its way through the tumbles of hovering insects like a propulsion of fierce white dye.

But the image is so brief Kyle is able to dismiss it as a trick of the eye. What he can’t dismiss is the gaping, jagged hole in the solarium’s glass wall that the flash illuminated in full for the first time. And now the clouds of insects are streaming through it and taking to the night sky, so many of them it looks as if they weren’t just filling up the solarium but the entire house.

There was a brief period in the more recent history of Spring House when Caitlin’s mother entertained the idea that she would do some of its gardening herself, and the tools she purchased for this endeavor—and even used on perhaps two or three different occasions—are still in a gleaming red box inside the gardening shed, right where she left them years before.

Caitlin carries the box, along with a flashlight—the biggest and brightest she can find—to the gazebo, taking the long route through the middle of the gardens so as to give her pursuer time to catch up. She doubts she will hear his car approach, although he (she assumes it’s a he) doesn’t strike her as the most professional of night stalkers, as evidenced by his own arrogant over-the-shoulder wave to his own planted camera. Still, she has one goal and one goal only. To get him to visit the gazebo. Alone.