The People Next Door Read online

  ‘No matter what it is, you have to tell us,’ Amy said.

  ‘He’s lying,’ Briela said softly. ‘He’s hiding it.’

  ‘Who?’ Amy said. ‘Who’s she talking about?’

  Mick sat back. ‘Render. Is it Vince? Vince is lying?’

  Briela nodded once.

  ‘About what? What’s he hiding?’ Amy asked her.

  Briela began to cry. ‘The future. We can’t stay.’

  Mick got to his feet. ‘I’m going over. Stay here with her.’

  ‘You can’t go alone,’ Amy said.

  ‘I’m not putting both of you at risk too.’

  Briela sat up. ‘You need us. There’s gonna be too many of them.’

  62

  Kyle stood in the Renders’ backyard, looking at his Egg, reading June’s text from the other night.

  come out and see for yourself. keep me company. house behind yours. my room = corner window 1st floor.

  But the house had four corners, so which one was it? Probably not at the front of the house, which left two possible corners in the back. He remembered seeing a den or some kind of study and billiard room on the northwest corner during his tour yesterday before the barbecue. That left the southwest corner. He walked around the back, sticking close to the house. All the lights were off. He could not see inside any of the windows. He passed the row of tall convertible windows that opened onto the veranda and turned the corner.

  There was a set of three smaller windows. One large at the center of the frame with a smaller window on either side. He pressed his cheek to the frame and tried to make out the room behind the glass. He couldn’t see anything, it was too dark inside. He was about to try removing one of the screens when he remembered the Egg. Maybe she had her phone with her. It was worth a try. He typed:

  Are you there? I came back for you. I’m outside your window. Need to see you. I’m sorry and I love you. Please let me in. Kyle.

  Minutes later the Egg vibrated in his pocket. He removed the device and looked down at the screen.

  parents trying to kill them all. Adolph and i are trapped in the3 basement, plese help og god kyle make them stop i don’t want to be a part of it

  63

  Mick led them to the guest house, upstairs, to the boxes he had taken from storage yesterday afternoon.

  He donned the backpack with the one-gallon propane tank connected to ten feet of hosing and the wand of the weed dragon torch. He opened the tank’s valve, thumbed the dial shut on the handle, and slipped the sparker into his left front pocket. He unstrapped the leather roll of Ittosai-Kotetsu chef knives, the blades ranging from four to nine inches. He removed the longest of the set and used his belt as a scabbard. He handed the shortest, a paring knife with a four-inch blade, to Briela.

  ‘Keep the tip pointed away from you at all times,’ he told her. ‘Hold it at your side and if anyone gets too close to you, you poke them with it. Understand?’

  Briela nodded.

  Mick loaded his father’s Browning 12 gauge with three shells and handed it to Amy.

  ‘I don’t know what to do with this,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t bother unless we get close. Then you brace it against your shoulder, aim it, and pull the trigger.’

  Amy frowned as he set the safety for her. ‘Maybe it won’t come to that,’ he said.

  ‘What are we doing, Mick?’ she said.

  ‘Getting our son back.’

  ‘And then what? Are you going to kill their entire family?’

  ‘That depends on what he wants, and whether or not we can trust them.’

  They went over the fence behind the pool, Mick boosting Amy, Amy pulling him up, the two of them swinging Briela between them in a chain that landed them in the grass as softly as cats. The backyard was empty. The tall windows of the veranda were closed and would be impenetrable.

  They backed in close to the house and filed around to the driveway. Amy and Briela flanked to either side as Mick prepared to take the front door at a run, but the front door was already open.

  Mick put a hand up to warn them to stay behind him as he crept up to the door. The foyer was empty, none of the lights were on. He waved Amy and Briela forward and they slipped inside and moved left.

  ‘You and I will go in and try to find him,’ he told Amy. ‘B, you stay here and watch the door. If anyone comes, cars or people on foot, you scream for us and go out the back and run home. All the way home, okay, honey?’

  Briela nodded, stepping behind the curtain at the front window, the short knife held against her right hip.

  Mick and Amy waded into the house, splitting around the stairway, Mick breaking right, into the living rooms; Amy branching left into the laundry, running at a crouch through pantry and dining room until they met up again in kitchen. The front rooms were empty.

  ‘They could be in the basement,’ Mick said, glancing at the spiral stairway at the end of the great room. ‘He had equipment down there. He’s building something.’

  ‘Or upstairs,’ Amy said, holding the shotgun across her chest.

  ‘I don’t think he’s hiding. Let’s start downstairs and work our way up.’

  They were halfway to the stairway when Mick caught a movement to his left. He stopped, putting his right hand up, the dragon’s wand at his left.

  ‘What?’ Amy whispered.

  ‘Shadows,’ Mick said. ‘In there.’

  They rounded the corner to the sealed interior of the veranda. The vast room was dark until they reached the arched entrance. A humming noise filled the first floor, the retractable windows opening, letting the warm summer night in.

  Then the lights came on and they saw all the people gathered to greet them.

  64

  Briela was standing between the front window and its thick velvet curtain when she heard the humming sound. She had been watching the driveway and front grounds but now turned toward the source of the humming on the other side of the first floor. The humming lasted until she had counted to eight and then the house was silent. She could feel it about to happen, the moment before everything went out of control, and she braced herself, holding perfectly still. The air on the other side of the curtain stirred and she glanced down.

  In front of the black toes of her boots were a pair of dirty white feet.

  Briela opened her mouth to scream, but the curtain was yanked aside and a cold hand fell over her mouth before she could make a sound. A loop of black rope fell around her neck and cinched tight. She was swept up, off her feet and rising, until she was staring into the grinning red mouth and lifeless gray eyes of Ingrid Gustafson.

  65

  Vince Render was standing at the center of the court, his wife Cassandra at his left, the two of them surrounded by the others. In his left hand he held a large silver pistol with an infrared sight, the light skidding across the floor and then disappearing for a moment before finding its home between Mick’s eyes.

  Kyle and June were standing to his right, their mouths sealed with tape, their wrists bound with plastic zip-ties. Kyle looked ashamed and frightened. June was flushed and crying. Beside her, guarding them, was little Adolph. He appeared to be feeling proud of himself, loyal to his father, ready to pounce.

  The others here, all forty or fifty of them, shared the death complexions of gray-white and some of the wounds and slashes were still visible but healing, even now healing. They had combed their hair and done their best to make themselves presentable to one another. They were here, upright, waiting. They were the Nash’s people, regarding Mick and Amy and Briela with cold black eyes and expectant smiles.

  Roger and Bonnie were near the front, holding hands still crusted with dried blood from feedings they had pursued on their own. Behind them Sergeant Terrance Fielding, who held a glass of iced tea he could not taste. Myra Blaylock, her chest flat and sexless, her hair long and straight. Amy’s students, Eric and Jason, as well as three others she recognized from school, were huddled together at the back, near the flutteri
ng curtains. There were others from the restaurant Mick did not remember infecting, or who might have been taken by Render. Jamie and Brett, his chef Carlos and a Hispanic woman who must have been Carlos’s wife. Kyle’s friends, Ben and Will and the Persian boy, Shaheen, who wore no shirt, his once smoke-dark skin now a deep, almost lavender gray. Melanie Smith, who stood hunched over a gaping absence of flesh at her middle, and the entire Larson family, Rita and her daughter Tami, the husband Don. The three thugs from the parking lot in new warm-ups of black, the blond boy with a scalp mending itself in puzzle pieces. A heavy-set security guard with the familiar neck wounds. Eugene and Virginia Sapphire, no longer looking old and feeble but restored, the wrinkled planes of their faces smoothed and pale. Dennis Wis neski, scowling as usual, his eyes fogged with the cataracts that marked his transition back toward the human camouflage. And more, others Mick did not recognize, the ones the Renders had taken since coming to town, or who had become victims of the other Nash victims. Somehow they had been drawn here tonight, organized by Vince, all of them standing in near-perfect stillness, not speaking, but waiting for someone to tell them what to do.

  ‘I’m glad you came back before I was forced to come for you,’ Vince Render said, watching Mick. ‘Things have changed.’

  ‘Kyle!’ Amy cried, surging forward, but Mick took her arm and held her back.

  ‘Why did you take so many?’ Mick said.

  ‘I don’t leave witnesses, Mick. I convert them. These aren’t just your neighbors now. They’re family. And that has always been the meaning behind the larger enterprise. Family. Cass and I were never able to bear our own children, but thanks to the change, we were able to rescue June from a life of small-town drudgery and Adolph from a foster family who did not deserve to live. Our family is growing, expanding every day.’

  ‘Touching,’ Mick said. ‘But my son is not your family. Untie him now.’

  Cassandra smiled at Amy. ‘What do you expect, Amy? He’s in love. He chose us.’

  ‘Romeo and Juliet got it into their heads to run away,’ Render said. ‘But they’ll come around. This is not a world where our kind can hope to survive on their own. You know this, Mick. Why do you keep pretending it can be any other way?’

  Mick hooked his finger through the ring at the end of the sparker, but kept it in his pocket. ‘What do you want, Vince? What is the point of all this?’

  ‘The Percys lost control,’ Render said. ‘But not before creating their own survivors. I told you the other four families have come on board. They are doing their part, and doing it well. It’s moving around the country now. It’s gone exponential. Nothing can control it. The only course now is to be a part of it, to work together, to hold on until the tide turns.’

  ‘You want to infect everybody,’ Amy said. ‘You want to change everything. Are you insane?’

  ‘Vince knows what he’s doing, Amy,’ Cass said. ‘He’s building another company and this time it will be an empire.’

  ‘I found other cases,’ Vince said. ‘I found evidence of outbreaks in Nigeria, Borneo, the Congo, and one very promising, truly isolated case in Peru, but none of them were as functional as the ones carrying the Vieques strain. Former members of my engineering team have run the algorithms. Cass and I and a small handful of interested parties … some in the government, others you might call investors with substantially deep pockets and a healthy interest in their own immortality … we’ve run the projections. Once we came to grips with what was coming, once we understood which side would come out on top, well, we admitted this was no longer an infection. It’s become a quantum leap in evolution.’

  Amy was unable to take her eyes off her son, who, she understood now, was being held hostage by a madman. And what about her daughter? Was Briela still hiding?

  Vince read something in the change in her expression. He smiled, said, ‘Ingrid? Did you find her?’

  Behind the crowd, moving in from the terrace, was Ingrid. Her hair was a red crusted mess, her eyes were dull black, and her neck was wrapped in thick layers of gauze. Only a month into summer and she seemed almost bored of dragging and half-carrying Briela, who had been hog-tied.

  Amy lurched forward again, and Mick pulled her back again. ‘Amy, no.’

  ‘That’s right, Mick,’ Vince said. ‘It’s important to keep our heads. We have business to conclude.’

  ‘Let her go!’ Amy cried. ‘You don’t need us!’

  Behind Render, Eric and Jason produced muffled sounds of amusement.

  Cassandra took Briela by the arm and yanked her away from Ingrid. The sitter held on and stumbled a few steps before Cassandra backhanded her into place.

  Mick opened the dial-valve on the weed dragon’s wand, removed the sparker, and squeezed the tongs before the cylindrical nozzle. A ten-inch flame the width of a beer can wavered faint orange and blue as Mick raised the torch overhead.

  All forty or so of the infected people present stared up at the torch with numb curiosity.

  ‘Let my children go,’ Mick said, nudging Amy in the back with his elbow. ‘Let your daughter choose if she wants to be a part of this. You have thirty seconds before I burn us all out.’

  Render laughed. ‘I’ve seen one of those before, Mick. It’s a garden tool, not a flame thrower.’

  ‘Are you sure about that?’ Mick said.

  ‘Listen to me,’ Render said, planting the laser sight between Mick’s eyes. ‘I’m trying to help you. I am trying to be your friend. I need your help and I want you to be on the right side of the change that is coming. This thing is strongest at the source, and we – the five surviving families, including yours – are the source. The rest of them, the third and fourth generations, they’re dumbing down from the mutations. They’re not much more than animals. They’re not interested in moderation and continuing civilian life. It’s going to get ugly out there. There are two sides now, but there won’t be for long. Do you want to live like a king or die like a mutant? Those are the only two choices.’

  Mick blinked as the red light flicked over his eyes.

  ‘I never wanted to be a king,’ he said, raising the torch higher, opening the valve all the way, the flame burning with the sound of a tiny jet engine now. Amy was fixed on Cassandra while Briela’s eyes stared back them, pleading. ‘I just wanted a better life for my family.’

  ‘What a waste of my time,’ Render said, thumbing the hammer.

  ‘Now,’ Mick said.

  Three things then happened simultaneously: Amy leveled the shotgun at Cassandra, June dodged sideways and kicked back hard, knocking her father off balance, and Mick withdrew the chef’s knife from his belt.

  Render’s aim faltered and a shot rang out overhead, echoing off the high ceilings. Mick dropped the torch, raised the blade and threw. The knife tumbled through the air and found a soft landing in Render’s stomach. Cassandra panicked at the sight of her husband with a blade in his belly and Briela slipped free as she reached for him. Kyle turned, took his sister by the waist with both tied hands, and dragged her out of the melee. June ducked and ran after Kyle, first toward Mick, then veering into the shifting mass of bodies.

  As soon as Briela was out of the way, Amy squeezed the trigger and blew Cassandra’s midsection open, peppering half a dozen others standing close to her.

  Mick began walking at Render.

  Render raised the gun and fired into Mick’s left shoulder.

  Mick advanced, bending to scoop up the weed dragon’s hose, swinging it around like a whip, the flame passing before a blur of pale faces that recoiled and snarled.

  Render fired two more shots, taking Mick in the shoulder and side of the neck.

  Mick flinched and continued walking. Behind him, Adolph leaped on Amy’s back, knocking her down and sending the shotgun twirling across the slate floor.

  Cassandra fell and three of the infected fell on her, clawing into her buckshot stomach. She howled and thrashed as two others took her by the arms and began to drag her out onto the patio.
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  Render staggered as he fired again and the fourth bullet tore into Mick’s thigh.

  Mick continued walking. ‘Get the girls out!’ he said to Kyle.

  Kyle found the paring knife in Briela’s back pocket, cut the rope at her feet, and the two of them crawled from under the swarm of trampling legs. June stopped to subdue Adolph, tearing him away from Amy.

  The boy fought her until June screamed, ‘They’re not your parents! Your parents are dead!’ Adolph screamed again but allowed June to lead him away. They followed Kyle and Briela to the front door, out into the yard.

  Render reset his stance and fired into Mick’s face, blowing six teeth and a good portion of his cheek into a powdery wet mist.

  Mick shook his head once, spitting blood, and continued walking.

  Render’s hand was shaking as he squeezed off shot number six.

  Mick did not feel the passage of hot steel through his splintering ribs.

  Render was clutching his stomach and preparing to let off the seventh shot when Mick caught the wrist holding the gun with his left hand and with his right removed the nine-inch Ittosai from Render’s stomach and drew it sideways through the throat. Moving in the fountain, Mick released the arm and took a fistful of Render’s hair, snapping the neck back as he spun, pulling the blade around in a full circle, severing the spinal cord. He broke Render’s back with his knee driving the body to the floor. With a fist of Render’s blond hair in his left hand, Mick sawed in a circle, pulling the neck with all his strength until the vertebrae snapped and the last of the flesh came free. He stood and raised the head for the others to see. The twenty or more who had not gone after Cassandra stopped in their tracks and regarded Mick with blank confusion.

  A howl of fury came from the darker patio area, and Cassandra followed. She came running in pursued by the others intent upon devouring her. One of her arms had been torn from the socket, her clothes and large chunks of her hair were torn, and one of her eyes was a bleeding socket.