Cruel World(21)

He turned from the woods, and just as he was about to walk toward the house, his eyes snagged on the lawn’s border further down.

The mattresses were gone.

His breath hooked in his lungs and hung there for a long moment before coming out again. He walked slowly until he came even with the spot where he’d left the soiled mattresses. There were shreds of fabric strewn in the dead leaves and some tatters caught on tree trunks. A dozen yards back in the woods the sun glinted off of the twisted steel springs exposed within the remains of the mattresses. They looked like broken bodies after some horrific accident.

A worm of fear glided through his stomach. The fence had broken somewhere, fallen down over time or perhaps beneath a large bear’s insistence. Quinn nodded, trying to swallow the dryness in his throat. He backed away from the woods, awaiting movement and the flash of dark fur somewhere in its depths. The rear deck bumped into the back of his legs and a groan escaped him as he fell onto his ass, the fall jarring his vision. He almost let out a laugh but cut it off, knowing how crazy it would sound.

He stood and went around to the front door as sunlight peered over the tops of the trees lining the drive. He ate a cereal bar standing by the kitchen counter, washing it down with the last of the milk. How long before he would have to go out looking for food? When he inspected the pantry, he saw that Mallory had told the truth. She and Foster had barely touched the stores within. There were two unopened cases of bottled water, multiple shelves full of canned food, and an entire corner holding Graham’s baking necessities. One shelf was solely dedicated to his father’s favorite Herring. He reached out to touch one of the slim containers and then turned away.

The freezer was well stocked with frozen chicken, turkey, ham, seafood, and ten pounds of ground beef. The fridge looked surprisingly empty and the reason why came to him as he shut the door. Today was Sunday. Mallory always went grocery shopping on Sunday.

He checked the TV and found the same result as the day before except now several stations were simply blank screens of darkness. Quinn flicked the power button and left the living room.

His father’s office was warm and filled with light, the mahogany surfaces like dark honey, the crystal glasses glowing. He sat behind the massive desk and powered up his father’s sleek desktop computer. The WIFI signal was strong in the upper right-hand corner and he clicked the Internet symbol. His father had chosen Yahoo as his homepage, and when it loaded, Quinn sat back from the screen, his fingers hanging over the keyboard and then falling to his lap.

The page was generally the same with its sidebars of ads and electronically shouted proclamations, but now at its center, instead of a rotating list of current news and photos, was a single video box, dark except for a red play triangle in its middle. There was no headline and below the box was an uneven mixture of letters and numbers running on in an unending paragraph that continued down and down as he scrolled. At the top of the page, his fingers brought the arrow over the play button on the video and hovered there before tapping it.

The video started, the camera showing a shaky frame of a pair of feet beneath a vehicle’s steering wheel. It swung up and focused out of the driver’s side window. The car was parked on an interstate somewhere that looked like Midwest farm country. Barren fields not yet greened by summer rolled into the distance and a string of power lines stood like sentries, their cables drooping between them. It was evening and the sun had fallen behind the horizon, its last glow seeping into the darkening sky. There was a rushing sound of static as the camera holder adjusted the zoom and then a man’s muffled voice.

Do you see it? Right there on the second hill.

The camera joggled some more and then focused on a distant rise that held a tangle of brush and the outline of a lonely tree with pointed branches drooping toward the ground.

Quinn leaned closer to the computer screen. There was something strange and familiar about the tree. Its top had a bulbous look, incongruent with the rest of its thin stature. It had the appearance of being broken halfway up and its base was so spindly it didn’t look strong enough to hold up the rest of its bulk. The camera dipped and came up again, a woman’s voice this time saying something that he couldn’t make out. The zoom engaged and the tree blurred before clearing once more, its features defining so that something within his mind forced his eyes to widen, his jaw falling open.

The tree moved.

It stepped to the side, its narrow trunk splitting in two as the camera tipped skyward. The woman squealed a warning. A thin, pale flash swung past the camera only feet outside the car’s window. The video blurred and filmed a split second of the car’s roof and the lower half of a man’s bearded face before ending and resetting to its beginning.