The Narrows(107)

Ben unholstered his gun and approached the Blazer next. The driver’s door stood ajar and the keys still dangled from the ignition, though the engine was off. There was a tremendous amount of blood on the vinyl seats and dark, soupy matter congealing in the footwells.

When he got back in the car, he was breathing heavily. He sat for a few moments behind the wheel, not speaking.

“What happened to your backup?” Brandy asked. She sounded nervous, her voice as taut as a rubber band stretched to its limit.

“I changed my mind.”

She set his cell phone back on the console. “No signal. I guess the storm knocked the towers out or something.”

“Yeah,” he said. Then he pulled back out onto the road.

3



The sky had just begun to lighten when Ben swung the car onto Gracie Street. To the left, the cornfield that flanked the road had been pulverized by the power of last night’s storm. To the right, the muddy swamp and stoic, empty houses that made up the abandoned part of town looked now like a prophecy. When they motored by the old house where Brandy had discovered her brother yesterday evening, the girl hung her head low, brownish tangles of hair covering her face.

According to the GPS, the tracking device—the bat—was located on the other side of the field, past the husks of the empty houses. Brandy looked up and out the window and Ben followed her gaze. The razorback silhouette of the eastern mountains stood in sharp relief against a sky that was brightening to a bland yellow at the horizon.

And then he saw it and he knew.

“There,” he said.

“I see it,” Brandy answered breathlessly.

The turret that climbed almost three stories into the air was that of the old grain silo off Gracie Street. Weather-rotted and the color of bone, it was like the beacon of some lost dystopian civilization. This monster was comprised of wood staves that were gapped and split and bleached from decades in the sun. The cupola resembled a Chinaman’s hat, capped with an ancient weather vane that did not appear capable of turning in even the strongest wind. Bats hovered around the top of the silo like giant flies and more of them clung from the railing that encircled the structure just beneath the cupola. A few more darted in and out of rents in the staves.

“Jesus Christ, look at them all,” Ben mused.

Brandy said nothing. The expression on her face was one of unmitigated terror.

“Are you gonna be okay?” he asked her.

After a couple of seconds, she nodded…but said nothing. She looked about as fragile as fine china.

Ben cut the wheel and bounded over the muddy field. Twice, the car got stuck and he had to switch back and forth from Drive to Reverse to jockey it loose. Finally, he turned onto a paved yet potholed slab of roadway that curled up an incline toward the silo. When they got to within a hundred yards of the structure, Ben geared the car into Park.

“What do we do now?” Brandy asked. Their commingling respiration was fogging up the windshield.

“I guess I go in there.” He was peering through the windshield and up at the silo. Sunlight had just begun to strike the eastern side of the structure.

“I’m coming with you.”

“I think it’s probably best if you—”

“No. I’m not sitting here alone. I can’t. I’m coming with you.”

He said nothing more.

Surprisingly, Brandy got out of the car first. Ben followed. He went around back and opened the trunk. He took the shotgun out of its rack then filled the pockets of his uniform with extra shells. He handed some to Brandy and told her to fill her pockets, too.

“You know how to use this thing?” he asked, hefting the shotgun. “Just in case something happens…”

“Yes. My dad taught me.”

He nodded sharply. “Okay. Good.” He took the bolt cutters out of the trunk then slammed the trunk closed. Wincing, he looked across the field at the looming cylindrical structure. The rain had lessened to a hazy drizzle but the air had turned bitterly cold. Storm clouds hung low to the ground. “If I tell you to run, to get the hell out of here, I want you to do it. Understood? No arguments. We won’t have time for it.”

“Understood.” She looked as insubstantial as a mirage standing there in the lightlessness of a predawn drizzle. Ben thought that if he closed his eyes, counted to ten, then opened them again, the girl would have disappeared. “What do you think we’ll find in there, anyway?”

“I have no idea, but I guess we’ll find out soon enough,” he said honestly. “All right. Let’s go.”

Together they crested the gradual incline toward the ancient, weather-ruined grain silo. It had stood there for all of Ben’s life, the familiarity of it tantamount to the streets of the town he had navigated since childhood or the various rooms and hallways of the old farmhouse on Sideling Road. But there was a sinister darkness cloaking it now, like how maturity brings with it a certain clarity of distinction between good and evil, and with each step that carried him closer to the thing, he felt his heartbeat amplify and quicken in his chest and his flesh, despite the cold, begin to perspire.

“Do you smell that?” Brandy asked. “It smells like chemicals.”

Indeed, that ammoniacal stink was growing stronger the closer they came to the silo.

It seemed to radiate from it like waves of heat off a desert highway.