Tim Curran - Resurrection

Rhonda had tears in her eyes; she didn’t know what to think.

First, Mrs. Blake had invited them in, given them a lecture about fighting, and then filled their heads with lots of weird politics, and now…now this. Rhonda knew none of it was right. Rita was getting flushed and that meant her temper was rising. It was only a matter of time before she got out of hand and Rhonda figured on getting out of hand with her.

“We should go…go and see if our parents are home yet,” Rita said, fully expecting Miriam to come down on her.

She was not disappointed.

“Oh, no, no, no,” Miriam said. “I won’t hear of it. You’re safe here and I’m not about to let you go. It’s not safe. It’s simply not effing safe out there.”

Rhonda and Rita looked at each other. This was all getting to feel like they’d been kidnapped or something. Were being held against their will. Like they were Hansel and Grethel being held by the hag in a candycane cottage. And with the way Miriam’s eyes were lit up with some dirty, dim light, maybe that wasn’t too far off the mark.

Rhonda sighed. This was going to be up to her and she knew it. People were of the notion that both Zirblanski twins were hotheads and savages, but that wasn’t necessarily the case. They both had their moments, but more often than not Rita was the one who lost control first. It was boredom, maybe. Rita was very high strung and when she had no outlet for the energy that surged inside her, she had a nasty habit of striking out at whatever was near. More often than not, that happened to be Rhonda. Not that Rhonda was above giving it back in spades when that little witch started it, but she was the calmer of the two. The more reasonable. You pushed Rita into a corner, she’d scratch your eyes out; you pushed Rhonda into a corner, she’d warn you to back away before she scratched your eyes out.

Rita said, “What do you think is out in the rain? You sound like you think there’s monsters out there.”

“And maybe there is, Miss High and Mighty. Maybe there is at that.”

Rhonda swallowed. Could the monsters out there be worse than the one holding them hostage in here? Their parents had always told them to steer clear of the Blake house. You see a rattlesnake, dad had said, you don’t go into its den, you give it a wide berth. The general consensus in the neighborhood was that Miriam Blake was crazy and Rhonda was starting to think that was probably true. She was really starting to weird-out now. There were lots of magazines in the house, things like Guns amp; Ammo, Soldier of Fortune, and the National Revue. But there were also stacks of those nutty papers from the grocery store checkout. A lot of them were the Weekly World Examiner, had black and white photographs on the cover of the president shaking hands with space aliens or giant jellyfish eating ships at sea. THE HARRY POTTER WITCH-CULT, said one headline. HUBBLE TELESCOPE PHOTOGRAPHS FACE OF JESUS IN CRAB NEBULA, said another.

Rita was getting angry. “Are they liberals, those monsters?”

“You listen to me, Miss Smarty Pants. You’re just a child and you can’t know the ways of the world. There are things adults know and others we keep from you young people,” Miriam said, her eyes wide and wet and shiny. “Do you know what happened out at that Army base? Hmm, do you? Well, I do. A lot of us know things the liberal media are ignorant of! It was terrorists that caused that explosion out there! Al Qaeda and those effing sand niggers that knocked down them Twin Towers out in New York City! They’ll blow the beejeesus out of all of us if we let them! They caused that explosion to cover up that stuff they put in the water, the stuff that’s making everyone crazy now! Everyone but me and you two girls! You think I’m making that up? You think old Miriam Blake is off her nut? Well, I’m not, because I know what’s out there! Even now, girls, even now the crazy ones are waiting for the sun to go down so they can leap out and start cutting throats! Down in cellars and up in attics, oh they’re waiting with mad eyes and yellow teeth until they can come out and kill! Kill us all! You hear, kill us all!”

“You’re nuts!” Rita said. “You’re nuts, nuts, nuts!”

Miriam slammed her fist down on the coffee table. Then she jumped up and got her shotgun. “Nuts, am I? Oh, poisoned by liberals, both of you! But you’ll see, you’ll soon see that good Mrs. Blake is right! You’ll see the effing horrors of the night and you’ll see them very soon now!”

Rhonda grabbed Rita’s hand before Rita started spitting like a cat. “We’re leaving.”

But Miriam, grinning and drooling, put the shotgun on them. “Oh, no you’re not! You’re not leaving until your Auntie Miriam says you can leave! Do you hear that? Did you hear what I said, you little bitches?”

Scott Reed was thinking about how the school board were going to try and hang him on this one and he didn’t figure the union was going to be able to protect him. It was an accident was all. But when it came to one of their precious school buses and the kids inside, oh, they were going to have his head.

As he moved through the dirty water that came up to his hips, he told himself just to play it the way he’d planned: some nut had sideswiped him and sent the bus careening down Coogan Avenue into the water. It seemed perfectly reasonable, but it was, of course, an utter lie. And Reed wasn’t real good at lying.

Never had been.

He hoped those kids weren’t going crazy in the bus. And more than that, he hoped they were still there, that none of them had tried to take off on their own.

The rain had turned into a deluge again and Reed could barely hear himself think. He’d left the bus some thirty minutes before. It should have been a pretty easy trek, but somehow he’d gotten turned around. He didn’t know Bethany very well. But the bus had broken through the barrier at Coogan Avenue and sped down a hill, around a corner, then into the water.

But if that was the case…where was that damn hill and where was Coogan Avenue?

Reed paused, the water sloshing around him, a lake clogged with dead leaves and trash and bobbing debris. The rain poured down and visibility was shit. It was like being lost in some alien world. It was hard to get your bearings when you could only see ten or twenty feet in any direction.

You got turned around, you idiot. That’s what happened. It’s this damn rain. You made for that corner the bus took and instead of going up Coogan Avenue, you turned into a side street.

Which meant, of course, that instead of getting out of Bethany, he was deeper into it now. Not good, not good at all.

Swearing under his breath, realizing he had just made an even bigger mess of things and doubtful that he would even be able to find the bus now until the rain let up, Reed moved through the foul water towards the buildings lining the street. He pushed a floating tree branch out of his way and watched an overturned rowboat float by like a dead alligator gone belly up.

But the rain was pouring down with such ferocity, he could not even see those buildings, let alone find them. So he stopped and felt the panic rising up inside him like lava working its way up the cone of a volcano. Nothing but rain and gray mist and rising water and…dammit, this was a real lovely fix, now wasn’t it?

Just Reed alone, a bad case of the heebie-jeebies blooming in his guts. He turned this way, then that, the rain forcing him to cover his head with his soaking jacket. Lot of good that did to keep him dry. He felt something bump against his leg and he uttered a dry little scream.

Oh, for chrissake, you got to get it togther here.

He stopped, breathing hard, his heart pounding away. Just breathe in and breathe out. Calm down. Easier said than done, though. Being out unprotected in the streets like this was like being lost in a wind tunnel full of blowing water and spray. Even though everything was wide open in every direction, he felt claustrophobic like he had woken in a box.