Lineage(112)

“You’ll be dead.”

A slithering ribbon of dread ran through Lance’s stomach. The voice that had cut him off wasn’t Andy’s. He felt his hand begin to shake as he pressed the phone tighter to his head.

“Andy?” His voice came out a whisper. A sound like a thick zipper being drawn open came from the earpiece, and Lance swallowed the hard ball that formed in his throat.

“You’ll be dead before you know it, boy. Just as well come back and get it over with.” His father’s voice sounded as if he were speaking through a mouthful of liquid. Maybe it’s the electronics, Lance thought numbly. Maybe it can’t recognize words from a dead voice box.

“You can’t hurt me,” Lance said, his voice weakened by the thought of how his father was even speaking through the phone.

“Look at your arm and tell me I can’t. We’re getting stronger every minute, boy.” Anthony paused and a sound like lips being smacked together filtered through the earpiece. Lance had a sudden horrible image of his father’s soul seeping out of the phone and into his own ear canal, poisoning and destroying the tissue as it passed. “Don’t tarry too long, we’ll be waiting.” The line crackled and then went deathly silent.

The sound of a horn blared and Lance blinked, his eyes focusing on the oncoming headlights of a large black pickup. His arms jerked the wheel, and he watched the world tilt as he swung away from the truck’s enormous silver grill, its left fender missing the rear end of the Land Rover by inches. The other driver blasted the horn again as the truck sailed past, his enraged eyes finding Lance’s for a split second.

Lance steadied himself, his breath bordering on hyperventilation as he focused on the road ahead and slowed well below fifty miles per hour. A tinny squawking drew his attention to the passenger seat, where he had dropped the phone. He picked it up, barely holding it with two fingers, as if it were a putrid piece of meat. As he brought it closer to his ear, he recognized the sound of Andy’s voice.

“Lance! Can you hear me? Lance!”

“I’m here. Did you hear that?”

“Hear what? You were saying something about your grandmother being alive and then you were gone. What the hell is going on?”

Lance slowed the SUV to a crawl and turned off the highway, past the sign reading Riverside Serenity, a home for caring.

“I can’t explain any more right now. If you don’t hear from me within the next few hours, call the police and send them to the house. Tell them to drag the waters just in front of my place. I gotta go.”

“Lance wait, I need to tell you…”

Andy’s voice was lost as Lance stopped the car in the vacant parking lot and set his phone down on the center console. As he climbed from the SUV, the building reminded him of a massive crouching predator, its mouth open in the form of the two darkened front doors. With growing trepidation, he walked toward the structure, and noticed an expanding wall of black clouds just beyond the tall pines encircling the grounds.

The uncomfortable heat and humid air was carrying a storm. He could hear the faint rumblings of thunder, a promise of the fury the clouds longed to unleash on the world below. The storm’s got teeth, Lance thought as he closed in on the face of the building, and he shivered before the cool air of the indoors touched his skin.



John wiped his brow with the back of his hand, the skin there slick with sweat. He glanced out of the pickup’s window at the darkening sky. He couldn’t remember the last time it had been this hot and rainy in September. The world’s gone a little haywire, he thought, as he rounded the last bend and Lance’s house came into view. He felt a little disappointment when he saw that the younger man’s SUV wasn’t parked in its usual spot.

John pulled the truck around the short loop and stopped in line with the front door. He breathed in and let out a shuddering breath. The nausea he had pushed away the night before crept back in. He hadn’t had a drink since the night he told Lance everything he knew about the young man’s origins, and it was beginning to catch up with him. He hadn’t gone this long without alcohol in well over fifteen years. The shaking in his hands and the unsteadiness in his legs he could handle, but the roiling sickness of his stomach was almost unbearable.

He breathed in a few more times, rubbing the webbing between his thumb and forefinger with his opposite hand. May had done this to Henry when he came down with the stomach flu. She’d said it was an Old-World cure, that she’d read it in a natural medicine book somewhere. John hadn’t put much faith in it then, but it had calmed his son, and it seemed to be doing the trick now. The nausea eased enough for him to open his door and get onto his feet beside the truck.