Accidental Evil (7 page)

Now that she was staring at him, he
couldn’t
look away. Her crazy stare held him. His feet stopped moving and they were in a standoff.

She began to push up from the gravel, straightening her legs as her back slid up the pickets of the fence.
 

“My name is Gerard,” he said. His lips felt weird forming the words.
 

“I know who you are,” she said. “You’re one of them.”

He felt his eyes widen and blood thunder through his veins.
 

“What are you talking about?” Gerard managed to ask.

She extended one of her long arms and pointed her finger at his chest. His eyes were drawn to her thick, yellow fingernail and the bulging knuckles. The finger trembled as her muscles tensed. She looked like she wanted to run forward and stab right through his chest.

Gerard turned his hips and prepared to run.

“I know who you are,” she said. Her voice rose with the end of the sentence. “You come down here from the golf course. You’ve been struck by evil lightning and you want to infect the rest of us, don’t you! I’ve seen you boys up there, swinging your clubs around and laughing as the robots take over your bodies.”

Gerard tried to put a smile on his face. He was usually pretty good at getting along with the crazy types. He spoke their language. He dropped the smile quickly though. She wasn’t a garden-variety kook. This was one of the Grade A crazies. This one shouldn’t be out on the street. She was going to hurt someone.

He felt pinned to his spot by her pointing finger. It occurred to him that she was advancing. That trembling digit was getting closer and closer.

“Good day to you, ma’am,” he said. Gerard began a retreat. He started slow but picked up speed as soon as he managed to get his feet moving.

“I know you!” she called after him. “I know who you are. I can
see
you. Don’t you think for a second that I can’t.”

Gerard gathered his wits and turned south. He ran for the road that would take him back to his cousin’s little mobile home.

[ Adrift ]

A
PRIL
Y
ETTIN
WATCHED
THE
bad man run away. As hard as he tried, he couldn’t disguise himself from her. She had
keen
vision for them. Her eye was
practiced.
April imagined the word and saw the final C twisting into an S. Her aunt, Stephanie, would have spelled it “practised.” She always used the S form when she was talking about a verb or adjective, and the C when the word was a noun.
 

April couldn’t remember why it was so.

She looked up and down the road. They were everywhere, and they had hidden her house again. April sighed. They did the same thing almost every day. The house was always findable if she searched hard enough, but she didn’t know why they insisted on hiding it all the time. It was probably to inconvenience her. As long as she was searching for her house, she wouldn’t spend her time uncovering their schemes.

She looked across the road and saw Summer Folk walking with ice cream dripping down their hands. They were blind to the conspiracy around them. When the robots came down from the golf course, all those Summer Folk would be ground up and then rendered for their fat. And they had plenty of fat for the task. That’s why April kept herself so skinny. She wouldn’t be any use to them if they couldn’t find any fat on her. She strongly suspected that their vision was based purely on fat. Robots would run right into a skinny person. They couldn’t even see a skinny person.

April shuffled out to the sidewalk and headed towards town. If she started at the dam, she could work her way south, searching for her house. With any luck, she would find it before sunset and then she would be safe while the robots took over the town for the night.

One of the little Summer Folk waddled up to her.
 

April’s eyes grew wide as she regarded the older woman. Usually that was enough to scare them off. Summer Folk didn’t like to be looked at.
 

“Excuse me,” the woman asked, “do you know when the parade is?”

April bared her teeth and then smiled as the round woman backed up a pace. The robots could probably see this little woman from space. She had enough fat for ten robots on her.

“The parade?” the woman asked.
 

Some part of April’s brain worked independently, decoding the accent. April didn’t remember all the voices she was cross-referencing. She just let it happen automatically until an answer came back. The A in parade had a U sound to it. Her “you” had sounded like “yew.”
 

“Gettysburg,” April said. That’s what the back part of her brain concluded, so that’s what she said. The round Summer Folk woman put her hand on her chest.

“We’re from Hanover, about five miles from Gettysburg. Do I know you?”

There was that “yew” again. April wondered if it hurt the woman’s tongue to stretch so hard around those weird vowels. New England folks mostly kept their mouths closed when they talked. It was much more efficient and dignified.

April bared her teeth again. The Summer Folk woman finally got the point. She turned and waddled quickly away, glancing back to make sure that April wasn’t following.

April scanned the buildings on either side of the road. She thought she spotted her house, but it wasn’t right. There should be a white staircase leading up to her door. There was something about that staircase, too—holes in the treads or something. There were holes for the robots. It was so they couldn’t climb up and infect her in the middle of the night.

April decided to cross the street. She thought she might have more luck over there.

She stepped off the curb.

A bicycle skidded to a stop just before the front tire hit her.

April looked up.

“Hey, Ms. Yettin,” the girl said.

April squinted. She couldn’t be sure, but it looked like a friendly face. The girl was definitely not a robot, and she wasn’t one of the fat Summer Folk. She was an in-between person—undeclared for the upcoming war.

“Ms. Yettin? Do you need help?” the girl asked.

“They moved my house,” April said, frowning. She glanced up and down the street, regarding and dismissing each of the houses she saw.

Concern tightened the girl’s face. “Ms. Yettin? Do you remember me? I’m Lily? Lily Hazard?”

April looked at the girl with fresh eyes and tried to see her all at once. It was so difficult to not focus in on one little detail, like the way her toes stretched down to balance her on top of the big bike, or the dust caked on the inseams of her jeans. She moved her gaze up to the girl’s eyes and saw them surrounded by a much younger face. This girl, Lily, was from the past?

“You’re Lily?”

“Yes!” Lily said. “From fourth and fifth grade? You remember me?”

“Who and that?” April asked. She didn’t know what the question meant. It had been supplied by the back of her brain—the part that knew what a Gettysburg accent sounded like.

“Yes!” Lily said. “That’s me! I still get frustrated when people say ‘that’ when they mean ‘who.’”

“Language is fluid,” April said.

Lily smiled. “You’re right. You always said that and you’re right.” Lily leaned her bike over to the side and swung her leg over the handle bars. “You need help finding your house, Ms. Yettin?”

“No,” April said. The girl wasn’t a robot, but the robots might be tracking her. The last thing she wanted was for the robots to know where she lived. She shook her head to reset everything. Of course the robots already knew where she lived—they were the ones who kept moving the house. Why shouldn’t this girl help her find her house?
 

“Yes,” April said.

Lily’s face melted from concern to a smile. She was pleased. This made April pleased. The girl was too skinny to be tracked by robots.

“Come on,” Lily said. “I think I know where to look for your house.”

“Don’t let them see,” April said.

“No,” Lily said, shaking her head. “Of course not.”

[ Shepherd ]

“M
S
. Y
ETTIN
!” L
ILY
SAID
.
 

Her grade school teacher, April Yettin, had been veering towards the street again. Lily let Ms. Yettin roam ahead and then snuck between her and the road. She used the bike to separate herself from Ms. Yettin. She wasn’t afraid of her; not exactly. She was a little scared, but she still saw the kind teacher under the layers of disease.

Every time she veered, it started the same way. Ms. Yettin would blink several times and then jerk her head. Lily’s father kept an old record player in his study. The arm of the record player moved like Ms. Yettin’s head. It would hit a scratch and then jerk back. That’s what Ms. Yettin would do right before she veered off course—her needle would skip.

“My house should be over here somewhere.”

“No, Ms. Yettin,” Lily said. “You’re on the other side of the dam, remember? You moved two years ago.”

Ms. Yettin turned and looked directly at Lily. The girl’s hand automatically clamped down on the handlebars of the bike. She accidentally squeezed one of the brake levers and the bike skidded to a stop under her hands.

“
They
moved me,” Ms. Yettin said. “They move the whole house. They do it all the time.”

“Okay,” Lily said. “You’re on the
other
side of the dam, okay? Let’s go over there and I’ll show you.”

Ms. Yettin laughed at Lily. “We’ll see.”

“There’s Ricky,” Lily said. She pointed as she got her bike rolling again. Ricky was taking a black bag of trash across to the green dumpster. When he saw Lily and Ms. Yettin, he waved.

Ms. Yettin stopped.

“Come on, Ms. Yettin, there’s a way to go yet. You’re in the house up here on the right, remember?”

Lily thought it was nice that Ms. Yettin could walk around Kingston Lakes and remain pretty safe. Lily’s mother didn’t agree. She thought that Ms. Yettin should be taken somewhere supervised, where she wouldn’t be a danger to herself or the people around her. Lily hated that idea. Lily thought that a community should take care of its own, especially when that person used to be a teacher. They were public servants—they deserved respect.

Ms. Yettin was focused on Ricky.
 

“You remember Ricky? You loved him—he wrote that essay on boats that you sent to that magazine? Remember?”

“He’s infected,” Ms. Yettin whispered.

“Pardon?” Lily asked.

Ms. Yettin turned to Lily and then jabbed a finger towards Ricky. A dozen yards away and preoccupied with disposing of the trash bag, Ricky didn’t notice.

“Can’t you see the thing following him around like a dog on a leash?” Ms. Yettin asked.

Lily’s eyes grew wide.

“Ms. Yettin, that’s just Ricky…”

“He thinks that it’s doing his bidding, but it’s the other way around,” Ms. Yettin said. “He’s infected with robots and they’re going to boil his bones for the marrow. It’s not as good as fat, but they’ll take what they can get.”

“You gotta get home,” Lily said. She started pushing her bike again, and almost hoped that Ms. Yettin wouldn’t follow. For the first time, Lily began to wonder if maybe her mother had a point. Maybe some people were a little too creepy to be left to their own devices.
 

Ms. Yettin began to walk again. When Lily sped up, so did her former teacher.

“He’s infected,” Ms. Yettin whispered to herself. Lily held her breath so she could hear what the woman was saying. “Regular people can’t see the thing following him around.”

“Come on this way, Ms. Yettin,” Lily said. She pushed front wheel of her bike into the crosswalk, declaring her intention to the line of cars. A gap developed and Lily began to roll through. Ms. Yettin followed, but still seemed distracted by Ricky.

“We’ll have to cut off his head. That will cure it,” Ms. Yettin said.

“What was that?” Lily asked.

Ms. Yettin only smiled in response. Through the gap in her lips, her gums showed. They looked like they might be oozing blood.

“Come on this way,” Lily said. She rolled her bike on the path between two buildings. There were a few land-locked houses in the wide place between the road and the lake. They could only be reached on foot. When Phil Harpswell had his new refrigerator installed the year before, they had taken it in through the Trundell house and out the back door in order to get to the Harpswell place. Lily hadn’t seen it, but she had heard the story from several reliable sources.

The Yettin house was easier to get to. There was a path nearly wide enough to fit a car. In fact, Lily and Ms. Yettin walked side by side with the bike between them. They didn’t stop at the front door, but continued on to the side of the house. There was a staircase tacked onto the side of the building. It was painted white and had black no-skid pads glued to each tread. Lily rested her bike against the railing.

“You want me to walk you up?” Lily asked.

“No,” Ms. Yettin said with wide eyes. “You’ll fall through the holes. They lead down into hell.”

Lily hunched her shoulders up towards her ears and grabbed her bike. “Okay,” she said, trying to remain cheery. Public servant or not, she didn’t have the energy to show any more resect to Ms. Yettin. She just wanted to get out of there before the woman said something else creepy.

“Stay safe, Ms. Yettin. Good to see you.”

Lily waited as Ms. Yettin climbed the staircase without a farewell or thanks. Lily didn’t mind. As long as the woman was gone, she didn’t care if she ever gave thanks. When Ms. Yettin disappeared through the door at the top of the stairs, Lily rolled her bike to the house’s front door. She rang the bell and counted down from fifty. There would be no answer. If anyone was home, they wouldn’t have let Ms. Yettin go out wandering.

She got to thirty-four when the door opened.
 

“Hi, Mr. Yettin,” Lily said. She looked left and then right before she came up with his name—Harold. It didn’t matter. He would always be Mr. Yettin to her. It was an unwritten rule in her house—local adults were always Mr. or Ms.