[#076] The Reliquary

Moonlight spilled through the endless rows outside, the wind rustling a path through the tall corn as I set the heavy pewter chest down in the porch light. My fingers traced the divine swirls and sprawls etched into the surface of the foot-long box as I listened to the night song falling quiet. The owls roosting in the barn hid. The coyotes howling through the distant trees fled, and the stars alone accompanied me as I undid the clasp and pulled up the lid.

Half a dozen mechanical children danced a circle around a fallen log. A bulbous gut hunched there, bordered by the arms and legs of a man and topped with the bristles and tusks of a boar. The monster drew its arms to the sky, to me as I watched, and opened its mouth in a noiseless laughter.

The wind ceased, and I gazed out at the rustling corn to watch Him emerge.

[#075] Cleaning House

My pristine kitchen window framed a gorgeous golden-pink portrait of the sky as the sun dipped beneath the rolling farmlands to the west. I swiped a finger along the frame and admired Mrs. Mender's handiwork when it came up clean of dust. A month earlier the sill had harbored a streak of filth and insects I could never stand to touch myself, but all my problems had gone away since I let the maid into my life. Now the carpets were vacuumed, the sink was clear of dishes, and I could stand to look at the toilet for the first time in years. She even arranged my books!

I opened the cabinet for a mug to fill with fresh coffee. I sighed with happiness as my eyes played across the rows of unblemished ceramic and glass waiting to greet me. "Worth every penny," I said to myself.

Deep, brown liquid life flowed from the percolator, the glorious and bitter scent filling my heart with warmth. I sipped and sauntered down the dust-free hallway to the den, where my old dog lay panting on the floor beside the couch, nosing at the space beneath. The massive leather seat was much too heavy for Mrs. Mender, and so I couldn't be surprised if it still held a couple morsels I had dropped in my sloppy late night meals. It occurred me as I watched my chubby beagle try to crawl beneath the furniture that I should pull the couch out and finish the job myself.

After all, she had done so much for me. It would be a shame to leave such a blemish on my perfect home.

Setting my mug on the table, I wrapped my hands around the closest arm of the couch and pulled. It was heavier I remembered, or else the fabric caught on something held fast to the corner behind it. I leaned over to peer down the back, and a strange cry filled the air as I knelt on the cushion. Startled, I quickly leapt backward and tensed.

From beneath the couch arose a weak cry muffled by the overstuffed leather.

Adrenaline surged through me. My renewed strength strained against whatever fingers held the couch in place, and the muscles in my arm began to throb and ache. Giving it one last go, I shot forward and knocked the couch back to startle it from the grip of whatever lay beneath, and then I grabbed the side of the furniture and nearly rolled backwards with it.

The couch pulled away from the wall to reveal a shivering, yellowed mass of flesh drenched in the sweat of fear. I couldn't help myself but laugh as my dog dove on it, and the thing began to scream.

Living in a house of monsters isn't hard if you learn to handle them. You've got to show them you mean business, and you can't be afraid to break a few bones while you establish boundaries. Or while you spill a gallon of purple monster blood up and down the walls.

After all, if worst comes to worst, you can always hire a maid.

[#074] I received a Presidential Alert on my phone this morning.

My phone is always set to vibrate. Two things I do each night before I head to bed are: A) Make sure the thing's plugged in to charge, and B) Make sure the volume's set to zero, just in case someone from work tries to call me. I couldn't even tell you what my ringtone sounds like. I might have heard it once when I left my sound on by mistake.

So you can imagine my surprise when the loud buzz of the emergency alert system pierced the veil of sleep around 4:30 in the morning. It's a frightening sound by design, and I struggled to ignore it. We get an Amber Alert every year or so, but they're always so far from home I've never heard of the towns listed in them.

Nothing interesting like that ever happens in Summerdown Grove, so you grow to forget them if you can.

Fast forward a couple hours and I'm crawling out of bed to the sound of my neighbor pounding on my front door. He asked me if I got the message. He said everybody else on our block got it too, and nobody could get a straight answer from the cops. He was gathering people in the bomb shelter beneath his basement, as he put it, "just in case."

I slammed the door in his face and stumbled back to bed, picking up my phone on the way. The screen flipped on without a lock, my stormy wallpaper replaced with a black screen and a white text box labeled "PRESIDENTIAL ALERT."

It read:

"SMMRDWN GRV AREA: TAKE SHELTR IN BSMENT, DO NT OPN DOORS R ANSWR PHNE, TRST N ONE"

I don't have a basement, so I'm cowering under my bed and tapping this out on my shitty phone keyboard. It's hailing now and the power's out, but I can't hear anything else unusual. The neighbor called a couple times, but I just don't know what to think.

Especially since the alert was dated for tomorrow night...

[#073] Summers Past

The familiar tune drifting through the evening air was a time machine, pushing my tired brain back to June of 1986 when my friends and I ran free along the sun-drenched streets of Summerdown Grove. Fresh from school, the five of us had hit the road with slingshots and sneakers and a compass in our heads that always pointed to adventure. We'd hiked the edges of the forest and balanced on the rafters of the old rail car factory, and once we'd even bolted screaming from the haunted house on Medicine Row. We read comics under flashlights in tents beneath the stars, and September loomed in the distance like a razor-fanged specter waiting to rip the carpet out from under our feet.

And then the first day of school finally came, and Jacob didn't show.

We'd left him at the baseball diamond just a day before. Our mothers had booked our last weekend of freedom solid with trips for school supplies and doctor's visits. I was fourth to be picked up, and I remember waving sadly to Jacob while our station wagon pulled away from the park, just as the churning music of the ice cream truck emerged from the distance and I sighed as though my greatest problem that year was missing out on a strawberry shortcake bar.

That was the Saturday before school began. Though he still hadn't shown by the next Friday, a couple more weeks passed before I finally heard the word "kidnapped."

By June of 1988, I was alone. Lucas had disappeared the year between, and Brent's parents got scared and pulled up stakes. Michael's dad got a job in another state, and Travis simply drifted away from me. I hadn't thought of him until today, when a boy who vanished from my life thirty years ago grinned at me from the evening news, older and bearded and scarred.

Travis was missing. His wife had last seen him hiking out to the corner the night before to fetch a treat for his bed-ridden son... From the ice cream truck.

I stood with my eye to the peephole as the truck cruised down my street for the second time in ten minutes. It hadn't occurred to me before, but that day on the baseball diamond in 1986 was the last time I'd heard the cheery tune cranking from the speakers of that old, beat-up machine. Thirty years I'd gone without seeing or hearing it, and just tonight it came back.

A tiny hand print smudged across the truck's big, filthy window. The driver's side was tinted pitch black. The thing slowed to a crawl as it passed my house, then sped up again when it reached the neighbor's plot. It puttered along the rest of my street, all while cranking out that hideous song.

I racked the shotgun in my hands as the truck turned wide at the end of the block for a third run.

[#072] Planetfall

I was halfway to work on the eight o'clock bus when the first ship fell from the sky.

A crash of tangled metal cut the clatter in an instant, and only the screaming of a single babe broke the silence draped across the stretch of morning road as every car in sight squealed their brakes. I counted hours from the seconds between the squealing and the wreckage, as the bus turned sideways in the slow motion of my overwhelmed mind.

Memory skipped a few steps after the world began to tilt. I remember staring at the blood on my fingers in shock as I struggled to remember how I ended up in the median. Wheels spun in the air inches from my face. In the distance I could just make out the triangular shell of flashing lights and burning metal, and the bodies scattered in the field around it, all gray flesh and beaks and bones cracked and crackling in the fires.

Twelve more scattered across the state alone. Nobody saw them coming, and their wreckage took a hundred thousand lives across the globe without a single shot fired. First contact was a blood bath, even though none of the invaders lived to issue demands. None of them could tell us why they came or why they crashed.

Or why the scorches on their ships made it seem as though they'd been shot at from behind.