Chapter 3: The Neighborhood

  Maple Street had been, until approximately thirty minutes ago, the most boring street in Millfield, Ohio.

  Dave knew this because he had lived on it for four years, and in that time the most exciting thing that had happened was the Hendersons getting a hot tub, which had caused a brief and vicious HOA dispute that Mrs. Feldman still brought up at every neighborhood barbecue.

  Maple Street was not boring anymore.

  The Hendersons' hot tub was thirty feet in the air, balanced on top of what used to be their chimney, which had grown. Grown, the way a tree grows, straight up, the brick stretching and twisting until the chimney was a column four stories tall with a hot tub perched on top like a hat. Water was still in it. Steam was rising from the surface. From down here, it looked almost peaceful.

  Dave walked past it without stopping. There was nothing useful about a hot tub four stories up, and stopping to stare at impossible things was a luxury he couldn't afford. He'd figured that out in the first two minutes. The neighborhood was full of impossible things and if he stopped for each one he'd never make it to the end of the block.

  So he catalogued them as he walked, running a damage assessment the way he might at the office when the network went down, what's working, what's not, what's a problem right now versus a problem later, and kept moving.

  The Feldmans' place: intact, but every window was dark and the front door was open. Just open, like someone had walked out and not come back. A pair of slippers sat on the front step. The left one was tipped on its side, as if the person wearing them had stepped out of them mid-stride and kept going.

  Dave thought about Mr. Feldman, who was seventy-eight and had a bad hip and called Dave every time his email stopped working, which was roughly every six weeks. He thought about where a seventy-eight-year-old man with a bad hip would go in a hurry, without his slippers.

  He didn't think about it for long. He couldn't afford to.

  The Ortegas': the second floor had rotated about fifteen degrees clockwise from the first, so the whole house looked like a Rubik's cube mid-twist. A child's bicycle lay in the driveway. One wheel was still spinning, slowly, though there was no wind. The Ortega kids, twins, Marco and Maria, seven years old,rode that bike in shifts, fighting over it every afternoon. Dave had refereed the dispute at least a dozen times over the backyard fence.

  The wheel spun. Nobody came out to ride it.

  Dave kept walking.

  The Chens': gone. Gone. The lot was empty. Foundation, grass, mailbox, no house. The mailbox still had mail in it. Dave could see envelopes through the slot, a phone bill, maybe, or a catalog. Addressed to a house that had ceased to exist.

  Something about the mailbox broke through the damage-assessment mode. It was absolute ordinary mundanity of mail sitting in a box, waiting to be collected by people who lived in a house that was simply no longer there. Dave felt his throat tighten. He swallowed it down and kept walking.

  He had to keep walking.

  Emma was quiet on his back. Her hand stayed on his collar, pat, pat, pat, and occasionally she'd turn her head to look at something. Dave could feel her shifting in the carrier, the slight redistribution of weight as she tracked whatever caught her attention. Twice she made a small sound, not distress, more like the sound she made when she saw a dog across the park. Interest. She was taking in the end of the world with the attentive calm of a baby at a zoo.

  He was three houses from the end of the block when the system did something new.

  Text appeared in his vision, small and off to the side, like a footnote.

  ~*~

  Something nearby.

  ~*~

  Dave stopped.

  He looked around. The street was empty. The orange sky pressed down, flat and heavy. Nothing moved.

  ~*~

  To the left. Behind the green car.

  ~*~

  The Feldmans' Subaru. Parked in their driveway, olive green, covered in a fine layer of something that might have been ash or might have been pollen or might have been something else entirely. Dave stared at it.

  Something stared back.

  It was underneath the car. Low to the ground, pressed flat against the driveway. At first Dave thought it was a dog, it had the general shape of a dog, the way a child's drawing has the general shape of a dog, but it was too long, too flat, and its eyes were wrong. Too many of them. Six or eight, in a cluster, reflecting the orange light like wet marbles.

  It was watching Emma.

  Dave's hand found the crowbar. He shifted his weight, putting himself between the thing and his daughter. Emma couldn't see it from the carrier, his body was in the way.

  The thing didn't move. It lay flat under the Subaru and watched.

  Dave watched back.

  Five seconds. Maybe six. Long enough for him to notice the thing's breathing, if it was breathing. Its sides moved in a slow, uneven rhythm, and each exhale fogged the driveway slightly, like breath on a cold morning. Except it wasn't cold. The air was warm, almost tropical, and smelled of ozone and something sweet he couldn't name.

  ~*~

  It's scared of you.

  ~*~

  Dave blinked. The text sat there in his periphery, matter-of-fact.

  The thing under the car shifted backward. An inch, two inches, deeper under the chassis. Its cluster of eyes blinked, all of them, at once, a ripple of wet marble, and it made a sound that was halfway between a whimper and a hiss.

  It was scared of him.

  Or, more accurately, it was scared of whatever it sensed in the carrier on his back.

  Dave took a step forward. The thing flinched. Scrambled backward, belly scraping the driveway, and vanished around the back of the Subaru. He heard it scuttle across the Feldmans' empty porch and through the open front door, past the slippers, into the dark house, and then it was gone.

  Emma made the dog sound again. "Duh."

  "Yeah," Dave said. "Not a dog."

  He kept walking. His heart was hammering but his hands were steady and that dissonance of fear on the inside and competence on the outside, was something he was going to have to get used to. A half hour ago he'd been a man who sometimes got anxious ordering at new restaurants. Now he was walking past monsters with a crowbar and a baby and his hands didn't shake.

  He wasn't sure if the system had changed his body or his brain or both. He wasn't sure he wanted to know.

  The end of Maple Street opened onto Birch Lane, which ran perpendicular and led, eventually, to Route 9 and the overpass. Dave turned right and immediately stopped.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Birch Lane was not a lane anymore. The road surface was intact for about fifty yards, and then it dropped away into a crevasse that ran from one side of the street to the other. A crevasse, fifteen feet wide, dark at the bottom, deep enough that Dave couldn't see the floor even in the orange light. It bisected the road like someone had drawn a line and said no further.

  On the other side, the street continued. Houses, mailboxes, a fire hydrant, everything looking relatively normal. But between here and there, nothing but a gap.

  "Great," Dave said.

  Emma kicked her feet against his back. Her bottle schedule said she'd want milk in about forty minutes. She didn't care about crevasses. Crevasses did not produce milk.

  Dave looked left along the gap. It narrowed slightly toward a cluster of houses. The Morrison place, and beyond it, Mrs. Huang's ranch. The crevasse was maybe eight feet wide there. A hard jump. An impossible jump with a baby on your back, or at least it would have been impossible an hour ago.

  He wasn't sure what was impossible anymore. The category was in flux.

  He started walking along the edge, toward the narrower section. The ground near the crevasse felt wrong underfoot. Spongy, almost warm, like the earth itself was tender. Bruised. He tried not to think about what it meant that the ground felt like skin.

  A sound. From his right. A human sound. A voice, thin and reedy, coming from behind the Morrisons' garage.

  "Hello? Is someone there? Please, I can hear you walking."

  Dave's hand went to the crowbar. The Todd-thing had looked human too, at first. It had been wearing Todd's clothes and standing at Todd's height and for one terrible second Dave had almost said Hey, Todd, you okay? before the jaw opened too wide and the eyes went flat and the fingers ended in points.

  He didn't trust human sounds anymore. He'd lost that in the nursery, along with his house and his car and whatever comfortable certainty he'd had about the fundamental nature of reality.

  "Please," the voice said again. "I have a system, too. I can see yours, it says Dad. Is that right? Class: Dad?"

  Dave's chest unclenched. A creature wouldn't reference the system. A creature wouldn't read his class tag. A creature wouldn't say please twice.

  "Yeah," he called. "That's right. Where are you?"

  The garage side door opened. A woman stepped out, She was small, mid-seventies, silver hair pinned up with what appeared to be two chopsticks and a bread clip. She was wearing gardening clothes, dirt on the knees, and she was holding a rake in front of her like a medieval pike.

  Mrs. Huang. She lived four houses down from the Morrisons, which meant she'd walked here. Through this, with a rake.

  "Dave?" She squinted at him. "Dave Thompson?"

  "Hey, Mrs. Huang."

  The rake lowered about three inches. Her eyes went to Emma's carrier, and the hard line of her jaw softened. "You have Emma with you."

  "Whole time."

  "Good." She said it with the force of a verdict. Then she looked at his face, not the gear, not the loadout, just his face, and something passed across her expression. Recognition, maybe. As if she were seeing someone she'd met before, in a different context, a long time ago.

  "You look like your father did at the factory," she said. "The day the furnace blew. Same eyes."

  Dave hadn't known Mrs. Huang knew his father. He hadn't known there was a furnace story. The comment landed somewhere he wasn't prepared for, and he felt a prickle behind his eyes that he absolutely could not afford right now.

  "Mrs. Huang. What's your situation?"

  She told him. Brisk, efficient, the way she'd once delivered quarterly reports to partners who didn't want to hear bad news. She'd been deadheading her roses when the sky changed. Her azalea bush had lunged at Mr. Whiskers. She'd beaten it back with the rake, grabbed the cat, and walked to the Morrisons' garage because it had a steel door and no azaleas. Her system said Gatherer. Level 2. She had a quest: Find shelter. Accumulate resources.

  "I don't know what that means," she said. "I was an accountant for thirty-four years and now a computer in the sky says I should gather resources. I have a rake, Dave. I have a rake and a cat and I am seventy-three years old."

  "Where are the Morrisons?"

  "Not here. Nobody's here. I walked four houses and didn't see a single person." Her voice, which had been steady until now, wavered. One second. Then she reset. Jaw tight, shoulders back, the posture of a woman who'd survived worse. "Where are you going?"

  "Serenity Springs. Sarah's at the spa. I need to get to her."

  "That's on the other side of town."

  "Yes, ma'am."

  "You're walking."

  "Car's dead."

  She stared at him. Dave realized, with surprise, that what he was seeing in her face was respect. The respect you give a man who knows the math is bad and is doing it anyway.

  She went back into the garage and came out with a jar.

  "Plums," she said. "From my tree. Canned them in August. Emma can eat soft foods?"

  "She can."

  Mrs. Huang put the jar in his grocery bag with the efficient authority of a woman who had raised four children and was not interested in arguments about whether a man could carry one more thing. "The gap narrows past my house. There's a section where the two sides almost touch, three feet, maybe. You could step across."

  "Thank you."

  "Dave." She caught his arm. Her grip was steel cable wrapped in crepe paper, and she held on. "My system. It just changed."

  "Changed how?"

  She was staring at something he couldn't see. "I had the quest. Shelter and resources. But just now, when you walked up, it added a new one."

  She read it aloud, carefully, the way she might read a bank statement she suspected of fraud.

  "'Survive until the Dad returns.'" She looked up at him. Her glasses had slid down her nose. Behind them, her eyes were wet, the only crack in the practical, competent surface she'd been showing. "I didn't set that. I don't know who did."

  The orange sky pressed down. A breeze kicked up, carrying the smell of ozone and something sweet, like flowers that shouldn't be blooming in October.

  Dave didn't know what to say. He didn't know who had set it either. But his chest answered for him, the way the impulse had made him grab the dish soap. Irrational, certain, and true.

  "I'll be back," he said. "Lock the garage. Keep Mr. Whiskers inside."

  "I have a rake," Mrs. Huang said, as if this were an adequate defense against the end of the world.

  The thing was, looking at how she held it, feet planted, shoulders square, Dave wasn't entirely sure it wasn't.

  He left her standing in the Morrisons' driveway and walked along the edge of the crevasse toward the narrow point she'd described. He found it past her house. A spot where the two lips of broken earth nearly met, three feet of dark gap between them.

  On the other side, Birch Lane continued. Normal road. Normal houses. The beginning of the long walk out of the neighborhood and toward Route 9.

  Dave looked down into the gap. It was dark. Deep. The walls of earth on either side were striated with colors that didn't belong underground. Threads of gold and pale blue running through the dirt like veins. Something glinted at the bottom. Something moved.

  He didn't look at it. He looked at the other side. Three feet.

  Emma shifted in the carrier. Her hand tightened on his collar.

  One big step. He took it.

  The other side held. Solid ground. Normal concrete. He was on Birch Lane, heading toward the highway, and behind him the crevasse gaped and the things inside it receded from the edge where he'd stood.

  Emma made a sound. A new sound, sharper, more alert. She'd spotted something ahead, past the next block, where Route 9 should be.

  Dave looked.

  The road was there. But it wasn't empty. Something was on it. Something big, moving slowly across the intersection, taking its time. It was roughly the size of a delivery truck. It had too many legs. Its surface rippled with colors that shifted as it moved, like oil on water. Wherever it stepped, the asphalt softened and reshaped, pressed flat like warm clay under enormous weight.

  It hadn't seen them. It was heading the other direction, perpendicular, moving with the unhurried confidence of something that had no predators and knew it.

  Dave stood very still. Emma, as if sensing his stillness, went quiet. Even the pat-pat-pat on his collar stopped. She was holding her breath. He could feel it, her small ribcage, pressed against his back, paused mid-inhale.

  They watched it pass. About thirty seconds. It crossed the intersection, turned a corner, and was gone. The flattened asphalt steamed gently where it had walked.

  Dave exhaled. Emma exhaled with him, almost simultaneously, and the synchronicity of it, father and daughter breathing together, hiding together, surviving together, hit him somewhere unexpected. His vision blurred for a second. He blinked it clear.

  The system pinged. Small, quiet, barely there.

  ~*~

  LEVEL UP

  Level 1 → Level 2

  ~*~

  He didn't know what he'd done to earn it. Crossed a crevasse. Hid from a monster. Kept his daughter safe through six blocks of broken world. Apparently the system counted that.

  ~*~

  Not that way.

  Go around.

  ~*~

  He looked at the floating text. Looked at the intersection. Looked at the route he'd need to take if he went around the block instead of straight through.

  An extra ten minutes, probably. Through residential streets that might have their own problems.

  But not through whatever that thing was.

  "Yeah," Dave said to the text. "Going around."

  He turned left, away from Route 9, and started walking the long way. Behind him, on the other side of the crevasse, Mrs. Huang was already gone, back in the garage, steel door closed, rake propped beside it like a sentry. She would wait. She was very good at waiting. She'd been doing it her entire life, and she'd never once waited for something that didn't eventually arrive.

  Emma, on Dave's back, reached for the last of the glitter in his hair and missed. She tried again. Missed again. The glitter was just out of reach of her stubby fingers, and the injustice of this was apparently sufficient to override any fear of giant monsters, because she spent the next thirty seconds trying different angles with increasing determination.

  She'd get it eventually. She was a very determined baby.

  In the meantime, her father walked toward the highway, past houses where people he'd known were missing, through a world where the ground had veins and the sky was wrong and a system he didn't understand was handing out quests with his name in them.

  He thought about Mr. Feldman's slippers. About the Ortega kids' bicycle. About the Chens' mail.

  He thought about coming back. The promise he'd made to Mrs. Huang, the one his body had offered before his brain could weigh in. I'll be back. Said to a seventy-three-year-old woman with a rake and a cat, standing in someone else's garage, alone in a broken world.

  He'd meant it. That was the part that caught in his throat. He'd meant it completely, and he had absolutely no idea how he was going to keep it.

  He kept walking.