A short story exclusive for my friends and fans…

Breeze in the weeds

Quarterback keeper! Hudson had a great run right down the sidelines, a gain of 7 yards. Will replayed the scene in his HeadGear display over and over. After the play, a SkyCam pulled in on Hud’s expression, one of surprise and jubilation, and it made Will smile. He could almost feel the slaps on the shoulder pads.

He switched to watch plays from Hud’s EyeSpy, an indestructible HeadGear component embedded into every player’s helmet. It was exhilarating, putting the ol’ armchair quarterback right back into the action. Will nearly broke his recliner, avoiding a virtual sack.

Will turned his head toward the other recliner, May’s recliner, the empty one. He was going to comment on Hud’s game, then caught himself. He dropped back in the chair hard. His HeadGear jostled and, as if it knew, reset to the Gears prescribed by his doctor. “Gears,” a fancy name for apps, and this app was supposed to be intuitive. It was supposed to make it all go away. Better than the bourbon, they said.

They were wrong.

All the smooth jazz and sensory salts in the world could not numb him. Nothing could. He’d quit his job. He’d quit the poker club. He’d even quit going to Hud’s games in person. Will didn’t go anywhere anymore. He even had his groceries delivered. Last week he had canceled even the deliveries. The more nothing he had, the less he felt anything.

If only that formula worked. The math didn’t work. Something minus everything still left pain. The oppressive weightlessness of nothing, no matter how much more was taken away, the pain was still too much.

No phone, no lights, no motor cars, not a single luxury, like Robinson Crusoe, it’s primitive as can be. That was him, fast becoming Primitive Man. In stained polo, sweats, and slippers, eating a bag of chips. Eat. Sleep. Repeat. He’d forgone sleeping, save Gear and blood-alcohol comas. Maybe some day he’d quit the eating, too.

###

Still, reminders. there were reminders, pesky neighbors. Ben Barker, next door, caught him at the curb one day and said, “If I’da not known better, I’da thought it was you had died.” 

He would like to think that he had.

A summer squash sat on the kitchen counter, a shriveled thing now that didn’t look like it had ever been edible. He was dead like that. The last thing she’d harvested from the garden. The last thing she’d touched.

“Gawddammit!” Will said, and threw his empty tumbler across the living room. He relived the shock and irony of it all just all the time. A snake. A damn snake in the garden, and her home alone out there poking around. This was the 2030’s, not the 1830’s. How the hell could  you die from a snake bite these days?

“Dad?” It was Madison.

“Ughh, sorry. Didn’t know anybody was home. Why aren’t you at the dance?”

“No dance tonight, dad. Just the Afterburner.”

“Huh?”

“You know, the firepit.” She picked up his glass and set it on a table. “Besides, I’m tired. Gotta work tomorrow early.”

She turned cheese wheels for a local goat cheese operation. 4:30 in the morning. She took it up when her mom went. Extra money for the household, she said.

“How’s Ivan?” Will asked, throwing his weight around in the chair, turning this way and that to keep up with her as she tidied up. “He go to the pit?”

“They’re back and gone again. They’re walking Hali Durham back home.”

“Hudson’s dating her now?”

“No,” she laughed.

“Ivan?”

“God no,” she laughed louder. “Ivan the Terrible? No way.”

The kids called him that. What did they know about history? Nobody deserved a name like that. Boiling priests and babies. Dismembering and drowning children. Names could stick. 

Will bore such a name, given to him in his line of work, one he would carry to the grave. He was an Extractor, known simply as Torque. In all his wet work he employed twisting tortures no one could endure. His name was whispered in fear throughout the underworld, but it had never been spoken in his suburban home. Names, like emotions, caused pain.

She was talking about the Afterburner. Kids melting soles of their shoes trying to fire walk. Somebody spit Everclear at the bonfire and singed his eyebrows. Smores didn’t go with beers, she said. 

They had carved pumpkins at the fire, she’d said. “Ivan’s is…strange.”

“Eh.” Exchange kids were always unique. That’s why they always got one. Cultural exposure, May had said. Good for the kids, she said.

“Yeah, but you should see it.” she looked off toward the kitchen. “Weird.”

“Jack-o'-lanterns are always a little weird.”

“His has a knife stuck in it.”

“Uh?”
“Your knife.”

“Really?” He’d been looking for that. He wallowed up out of his chair and followed her to the kitchen.

Next to May’s gray gourd sat a fat orange pumpkin with a Buddah grin. That had to be Hud’s. Next to that was an oblong one, laid over on its side with--sure enough--his knife sticking out of its ear. Will walked around the counter, eyeing it.

“What’s that say? Feeb?” Will looked to Madison. “Who’s Feeb?”

“Feels,” she corrected. 

He nodded and poured himself another tumbler. He took a pull right from the bottle.

Madison cleared her throat. “You watched the game?”

“Yeah, sure. The boys had a good night.”

“Did you see all the blood?”

“What are you talking about?”

Madison shook her head. “Figures.”

“What figures?”

She cleaned up after the games. Part of her other job for the district. She told him about things sometimes, like the fat wallet full of cash under the bleachers. Retainers, spent condoms, full diapers… She was going on and on about blood this time. Skycams didn’t catch the half of it, she was saying. A lot more goes on at a game than the game.

“Well, did they?”

“Did they what?” Will tipped up his HeadGear, pulling the visor screen out of the way so he could catch more of whatever she was saying. 

“Did they show Ivan and the blood?”

“What’re you talking about?”

“I was working concessions, so I just saw a scab vid. Somebody probably put him up to it, I dunno. A kid on the Jags was wearing an earring, and part of his ear got--”

“Earring? That’s damn foolery!” Will said. An earlobe with a simple stud earring could be twisted three revolutions before tearing the flesh. 

“Tonight proved that for sure. When his helmet got knocked off, half his ear went with it. They stopped the game for a while--surprised you didn’t notice.”

Maybe he had, maybe he hadn’t. Maybe he’d dozed off a little, or maybe they ran an extended commercial break. Maybe he’d been in his Gears again for a while. 

He shrugged.

“They had to find that bit of ear. Never did find the earring, though.” She stopped wiping the counter to fix him with a look. Her mom’s look. “I think Ivan’s got it.”

“The earring? Why the hell--”

“He’s the one who found the earlobe,” Madison said, “and get this--he licked it.”

“He what?” he said, though Torque had done this before for effect.

“I think the seniors put him up to it, made him live up to his nickname.”

“Ah, why the hell would they go and do that?” Will wagged his head. “I don’t believe it.” Ivan the Terrible was a good kid. He was a lineman for the team and lumbered around like a big bear. Why couldn’t they call him something like that? Like Yuri, the bear? Hell, why not Yogi bear? 

Hudson once said it was to scare the other team. “Who’d want to cross Ivan the Terrible?”

Who indeed?

May would not have stood for that. She would have set the kids straight. The school, too. She would have confronted the coach himself. May was a second mom to their exchange kids. She was the irrepressible Force of Mom, adopting kids and kittens and opening their home to all. 

Changing the world one household at a time. She saw to it they had an exchange kid every year since the twins were ten. She said it was good for them, good for the school, too. After seven years of it, hosting exchange kids had come to be their new normal. Every year, there was a settling in period, but it always balanced out. 

That’s why he agreed to hosting Ivan just months after the snake bite. The kid was on a waiting list. Coming out of Russia, he wasn’t anybody’s first choice. Hell, nobody wanted him. Will wanted him. Will wanted to honor May’s tradition. He wanted to keep things as normal as he could for the kids. 

Ivan wasn’t making it easy. 

“I have it in my feed,” Madison said, peeling off her headband and handing it to him. “See?”

Will looked at her. He closed his eyes and slowly opened them again. Focus. Here and now. He held the HeadBand by his fingertips, careful not to crush it. The HeadBand was a CommCorp device primarily for music and music vids, and it was fragile--but not because it was cheap. He brought it up to eye level and expected the flash of projection from it he had experienced when he was shopping for Madi’s Christmas just last year. 

“Turn it around,” she said, and helped him aim it at his eyes. 

Then he saw it. His field of vision filled with the ball game again, the Friday night lights, batteries of blinding ball field lights. The shrill whistle from the officials. Proximal sound of fans to his left and right. He looked down and saw bleachers and knees. He righted himself and saw the two teams on a timeout, milling around. Many were on hands and knees searching, maybe for the ear.

Then there was Ivan, the focus pulling him close to the viewers. Some blood on his jersey. He smirked at the camera and held up something dripping red. Then he popped it in his mouth, sucked it clean, and extracted it. It looked like a bit of dried apricot. Even the most manly of the boys surrounding him were grossed out. 

Ivan laughed at them, then at the camera.

Will pulled the HeadBand away and studied his daughter. “That’s…that’s just--”

“Weird, right?”

“Yeah, but…it’s just a stunt.” Will said. “Silly high school stunt.”

“Mrs. Mulligan says he could get sick from it. A blood-borne pathogen.”

“Bah! She’s probably scared of rare meat, too. Eats her steak well-done, I’m sure,” Will said. “Blood’s just salt water.”

###

Will woke up in his chair. He jolted like he was coming out of a seizure. A thousand volt pop could revive a subject for more questioning. 

HeadGear reported it was after 2am. Madison was in her mom’s chair, looking at him expectantly. She had just asked him something again. 

Will reached for his tumbler, but it was not on the end table. He sat up and shook his head to clear it, but that was even more disorienting. He pried off his HeadGear and held it in his lap, absently watching it blink.

“When did Hud get home?”

“That’s what I just said. He isn’t. They’re both still out.”

“At this hour?”

The exchange kid coordinator was pretty firm about curfews and exchange kids staying overnight with other families. She would not like Ivan being out like this. Maybe they were at Hali’s. Maybe there was another party on her side of the Outback. Maybe Hud would have left him word. Surely he did.

Will Jacked-in to his HeadGear and let his eyes flick through channels. 

Weather. Sports. More sports. Replay of the game. 

Nothing from the boys.

He willed it to call up Hudson. 

Nothing.

“That’s strange,” he said, then gave the HeadGear specific verbal orders. 

Still nothing. 

“I tried ‘em, too,” Madison said, her expression had morphed to concern. 

Will glanced again at the time display. It was way too late to reach Hali’s parents.

“Did you try Hali?”

“She said they left a long time ago, both of them getting--” Madison reported, then stopped abruptly.

“What?” Will asked. “What is it?”

“She said they were arguing’s all.”

Last year, he might have called the law, at least Bartel, his buddy on the force. The exchange program was hyper-vigilant. Calling the law would have been the right thing to do. It would have kept the exchange kid safe, maybe. May would have.

Will knew better than to make such a call, even from when he was a kid. Get the law called on you and the whole team would be doing laps--and worse--as punishment. Will didn’t want anything ruining Hudson’s shot at a scholarship.

He huffed up out of his recliner and rummaged through the closet. The big flashlight there was dead. He tossed it on the counter by the jack o'lanterns. 

Madison offered a fix: “Use your HeadGear. Better than a flashlight, any day.”

Before he could argue with her, she did something to flip the unit around on his head and fire it up. 

“You’re not going,” Will stated.

“You need me.”

“Really?” he asked. She was about to go on about twins again, like she did at times like this. She knew, she claimed, when Hud was up to no good. She knew right down to his test scores when he was struggling. She had been right about the concussion. It gave her a migraine that Friday before Hud ever called the house. She had a sixth sense about him. It was a twin thing. 

“I know the way out back,” Madison said. “You’d just get lost. Especially in your condition.”

“And what condition is that?”

“How much have you had to drink, dad?”

He never liked that question, and she’d asked it a lot more lately.

The answer wasn’t a quantity, more a state of being. Drink. Drank. Drunk.

Just then his HeadGear flared.

He pulled it down over his eyes. Madison helped adjust it. In the transparent heads-up display Hud was a washed out white, his face was bowed large from the HeadGear’s fisheye lens. “Come quick!” Hud said, then in a rustle of a struggle, the image went sideways. Then it was falling. When the camera impacted with the ground, Will felt his knees flex with the virtual impact.

 “Help!” Hudson said, then the display went dark and quiet again. Even the ticker and alt screens winked out for a moment. 

Will blinked until he could see better. His heart was racing. He clutched the edge of the counter as he worked his way around it. He felt like he was in a fun house, but it was no fun at all. He pulled an old revolver from the junk drawer. 

“Really?” Madi asked, gesturing at the gun. 

“You heard him.” Will wanted to ask, maybe, if she felt anything. Then he threw the idea out. Pitch the Twinnection she bragged on about. 

Will chose to trust his gut. “Hud’s in trouble.”

###

All through their childhood, the kids called the 20 acre patch behind their house the Outback. It was a mangy, scrubby piece of easement no one claimed, but neighbors had a way of taking it for granted or taking advantage of it. Some folks parked junk cars in the Outback. Others let their garden range farther and farther afield. “It’s where we bury the bodies,” the neighbors would joke sometimes. That made Torque wince a little. What did they know? Who had a clue what he really did for a living? 

There were years where Will and his immediate neighbors worked together and made a respectable corn maze. It was the scariest thing, especially when the guys from work hid inside to freak people out.

Every season something was hopping in the Outback, from sledding to mudding, hunting to slipping away with a lover in a treehouse or duck blind.

Over the last few years, however, it had gotten badly overgrown, and more wildlife seemed to come take cover out there. The Packard kids from across the field were said to have caught or killed possums, raccoons, squirrels, foxes, skunks and rats--all just last summer. They were on a nature kick and used every bit of the animals like the Indigenous. Will wished the Packards were Jacked into HeadGear. They could be helpful at a time like this.

Madison walked ahead of him, washed out white in his HeadGear’s glow. She knew the way, she claimed, and she did seem to be making good progress. He had a hard time keeping up. He wished he’d taken time to switch out of his house shoes, maybe put on a jacket. It wasn’t cold, but it was damp and cool, and moisture was clinging to everything. 

He flashed the beam of his HeadGear at a shadow, and something like a coyote ducked away. He turned back forward just in time to see Madison drop and disappear from the white floodlight.

“Madi!” he yelled and rushed forward. “Madi!”

She’d dropped down into a ravine, gone right down the trail into it. The HeadGear washed out her face like her brother’s had been. She was a ghost, frozen in time. A deer in the headlights. 

“What?”

“Oh. Uh. You okay?” 

She didn’t look okay. “He is in trouble.” 

Will did his best side scramble down the ravine. Twigs and sand got in his shoes. “What is it?”

She hushed him and turned back to the trail ahead. She stepped forward very slowly, one foot, then the other, quiet as a cat. She stopped. Her shoulders bunched up. Will thought something ahead had her scared. He thought she was about to scream at it.

Madison kept looking ahead, but she reached back a hand for him. He huffed forward and grabbed her hand. It was cold as a fish. She squeezed. When was the last time his little girl had held his hand?

They stayed like that a long time. 

He turned his head left and right, but he didn’t let her out of the edge of the bright flare this time. 

He forced his eyes closed. Squeezed them. Fighting back Torque. He could handle this himself. He could hear their breathing and the thrumming of his pulse in his ears. Far across the Outback, sometimes when the breeze was right, it sounded like someone was working on a car--revving it up at this hour? Behind him, in his own neighborhood, he heard an owl. 

He snapped his eyes open. Madison gave his hand a tug and they moved on. They picked up speed on the other side of the ravine, but the trail was more erratic, and there were more rocks. He got one in his slipper, and he limped on it a ways until he just had to stop. 

He leaned on Madi as he shook out his shoe. “Think we’re--getting--anywhere?”

She whispered, “This was a bad idea.”

She sounded just like her mother.

They stayed together, him sweeping their surroundings with the HeadGear, her clutching at his arm. Something moving in the dark made them huddle closer together. He couldn’t catch it with the light. “Just a cat,” Will said. “Probably just a cat or something.”

Madison pulled him down closer by putting a hand on his shoulder and putting some weight on it, like she was keeping him from floating away. She leaned in like she was going to peck him on the cheek, like she used to do at bedtime. “Ivan’s bad,” she whispered close in his ear. “Really bad.”

“Why do you think so?” 

“I just know,” she said so softly he didn’t know if she even had any voice to it or if it was just the air and her lips moving. “I can feel it.”

Maybe she could feel it. Maybe she felt whatever happened to Hud. Will thought again of the pumpkin in the kitchen, the Feels one that Ivan had stabbed. “He hate’s Feels?” 

 “All the Feels,” she shuddered.

“Eh.” Will pulled her closer. 

“Emotions,” she breathed. “He hates them.”

“Everybody has emotions.”

She nodded against his chest.

Will wrapped both arms around her.

###

There was a show once on his Stream, some nature documentary that started with a time lapse of the sky over a ratty field like this one. It went from day to night to day again during the intro. Will felt like they stood there long enough to watch the stars skim clear across the sky. He thought the night was already lightening to day.

They’d stood there long enough.

“Ah, c’mon, kid,” he said, and took the lead. They were halfway across the Outback and had seen nothing but varmints. Ivan and Hud had probably found a kegger over by Hali’s. That’s all.

Will tugged Madi along, eager for this all to be done. It was cold and wet. His feet--well, he’d just as well be barefoot--the slippers were ruined from mud and sticks and rocks and---

“Quiet!” Madi rasped in a stage whisper. She pulled at his hand.

He turned back to see what her problem was. The flare of the HeadGear bleached her, but it caught movement behind her. He turned his attention to that. She whirled, too. 

Nothing. Breeze in the weeds.

“We’re about there,” he said, and turned.

A large figure trampled him. Will stumbled and fell. He landed hard on the pistol tucked in his waistband.

Madi shrieked. 

Will forced himself to breathe.

Madi’s cries were being shaken from her as she was carted off.

Will struggled to his feet. The stars were spinning. He wanted to run after, but he could hardly stand up. 

He summoned his soulless work self. Torque, the Extractor, must save his children. He shut his eyes against the night and pulled up his own darkness. He let out a shuddering, steamy breath and clutched the pistol now in hand.

The HeadGear was a Hollywood searchlight, blasting a gray beam into the mist. Everything else was black as pitch. The stars were cloaked in cloud. Not even the stars should see this.

One of his slippers was lost. He thought he’d broken his tailbone in his fall. He was not on the job, not in the field--but then again he was in the field, the field behind the house. He shook his head and blinked hard. He needed a drink.

“Madison!” He called. “Hudson?”

He pointed the pistol in the direction of Madi’s last cry. Then he lowered the weapon. What was he going to do? Shoot at his daughter?

“Ivan?” he queried.

Will heard a rustling and caught his breath. He lurched to pick up his HeadGear, stumbled, and crushed it underfoot. The light fizzled out of it.

The gun was no comfort. His only comfort would be action.

He took a few steps toward Madi, then back a few toward Hud. He ran, now barefoot, immune to the pain. He ran all-out, but didn’t last. He crumpled over wheezing, about to vomit. He had to walk the rest of the way to the edge of the Outback, clutching his side. 

Nothing here was out of the ordinary. No one was out at this hour. 

Will coughed and gasped, then turned and pushed himself back toward Madi. It was too dark to see much of a trail. When the underbrush got too thick or the footing too challenging, he’d double back blindly and pick up the trail again. He could hardly catch his breath at all now, and his heart was aching.

Madison was right, he was in no condition to be out here. 

This was all his fault. 

Like an ice bath of recognition, it came up him, through him. When it reached his scalp, he was flush with new knowledge: this was really all his fault. Everything. The kids were out there somewhere at the whim of a giant teen-aged madman. A foreigner Will knew nothing about. Nothing at all. He’d done closer checks on the credentials of plumbers at his house! He’d invited a stranger into their home. So stupid.

And May. 

She’d toiled in that garden on the edge of the Outback and died from it. That was his fault, too. Who’d insisted they live on the edge of town? She’d wanted a place in the developments. She was a girl from the Swipe who came out here knowing nothing of snakes or gardens or wildlife or land. His insistence--now almost twenty years past--had killed her, nonetheless. 

He had wanted it all. He had wanted the wealth and even the infamy of being an Extractor. His life as Torque was one of mystery and power. He had managed to hide it from his other life, even from himself at times, for he wanted this other life, too. The wife, the kids, the suburban home. He had wanted it so badly, and now he had lost it so carelessly.

Will hurled over and vomited, a violent stream of it purging him completely. His sinuses stung and his eyes watered. He wavered, then fell near the pool of it. 

He sat, head in his hands, weeping. 

It was out of his control, and yet Torque the Extractor demanded control.

He couldn’t control this exchange kid any more than he could the snake that killed his May. 

He heaved with the pain of it, the senseless loss of everything. His wife. His children. Himself.

He was raw and broken.

“You, too, then.” He thought he said, but it was Ivan’s voice.. 

Will looked up. Ivan was towering over him. He was negative space in a field of wispy clouds and early morning stars.

“You hate the feelings…but you do have them.”

Will wiped his nose. “Can’t get rid of them.”

“Give me your gun, and I will stop the feels.”

Will nodded and felt around for the pistol in the weeds. 

Torque then grasped it, and in one quick motion pointed it at Ivan and pulled the trigger again and again. He was raging with each pull of the trigger, stripping his vocal chords in a primal roar. He sprang to his feet, unloading the rest of the rounds into the meat sack writhing on the ground. Torque’s nostrils flared with the cordite and copper. He bared his teeth at this vile thing that had taken the children. The Extractor would pry their fate from the last gasps of the bloody boy he crouched over. “Where are they?” Torque rasped, wrenching at the Russian. “What have you done--”

Movement behind him. He turned, still standing over the corpse. If it was the law, he was licensed--sort of. If it was a neighbor, it didn’t matter any more. He would be done here. He would walk away.

“What are you--what have you done?”  It was Hudson. 

Will was mouthing his name, incredulous.

Madison emerged at Hud’s side. “Get his gun,” she ordered her brother. Her glare was locked on her father.

“Madi?” his voice pained him.

“You loaded the gun,” she said. “When? Why?”

“He…he hurt…” 

Hudson ducked in, snatched the gun from the grass at Ivan’s side, and was again standing with his sister. He held the weapon by the tip of the barrel, out in front of him like it was a snake. He glared at Will as if he were a monster.

Torque swayed into him, awash with calculation. “You knew it was empty?”

The kids nodded. Madison looked down at the corpse. She bit her lips together. She had both his HeadGear and Hudson’s in her hand. 

“This was a set up?” Torque reasoned it out. “You set me up?”

They shrank some at his tone. 

“Why?” the mechanical inquiry demanded a response.

Both of the kids were looking at the corpse, their eyes pooling with shining tears.

“It…was an Intervention,” Madison said.

“Trying to wake you up,” Hudson added, “to bring you back.”

Torque stumbled and his facade fell away. 

Will wiped his bloody hands on his sweatpants.

“We missed you,” Madi said. “We wanted you back.”

“I…I’ve been here. What are you--”

“You have not been here. ” Hudson said. “Not even at the Blue and Gold breakfast.”

Will searched his mind. The father and son breakfast for seniors on the football team. He groaned.

“You’ve been stuck in your head,” Madi said, “ever since mom…”

“But tonight. Ivan…the ear? All this?”

“Faked it,” Hud said. 

“You should get that,” Madi said. 

“What do you--”

“Mom knew you did this for a living.”

“She what?”

“Always told us not to piss you off,” Hud said.

“You knew?” Will stepped away from the body. He approached his kids with caution, as if they might vaporize. These kids--always in the know….still accepting him. Would they now? 

He held out his arms and they shared a hug.

“Hudson, go get the camping tarp,” Madison, the fixer,  said. She looked at WIll, then at Ivan, then added, “and the wheelbarrow, too.”

Well, that’s it, friends. My first attempt at something horror-adjacent. I was trying for something seasonal, this being October.

PLEASE PROVIDE FEEDBACK. Thanks.