Flock Read online

  “It’s very nice to finally meet Katla’s boyfriend,” Marik said.

  I watched for a beat or two, wondering if Jack would have some kind of spooked reaction to the merman or shaman in front of him. He didn’t. Instead he gave me a quick pump of his brows. So far, Marik was more theater than threat.

  Right on cue, Marik pointed to his chest and said, “Look, Katla, we match.” Indeed, we wore the same Falcons T-shirt, on sale every Friday at the school’s spirit shop, technically a folding table from which the marching band sold school-logo apparel. My T-shirt was under a denim jacket and had a fluffy gold-and-green scarf cowling its neckline. His was over a white thermal undershirt and tucked into a pair of what could only be described as plaid golf pants — knickers, more specifically — circa turn of the century: 1900, not 2000. They were in the right color family, anyway.

  Marik noticed me scrutinizing his outfit. “Penny said to wear as much green and yellow as I could find.”

  How he had found some of the more unusual articles, the coordinating argyle socks, for instance, I hardly knew, but figured I had no room to judge, especially as I was currently wearing striped tights, green high-top Converse sneakers, and yellow pom-poms at the ends of my two braids.

  “Should we get seats?” I said. “It looks like the stands are filling up.”

  “Save us two,” Penny said. “I’m going to walk around with Jinky and help her get some shots of the crowd.”

  Jack, Marik, and I climbed up the steep steps of the home-side bleachers. Once again, I noticed the overall lightness of Marik’s bearing, despite his size. His crazy getup didn’t help. He was like a big stuffed animal. I was sure, regardless of the inroads he’d made with the school’s it crowd, that his outfit would invite teasing, if not outright mockery. Just my luck to be his seatmate. About halfway up the climb, someone called out, “Hey, Marik.”

  He stopped, lifting his head in the direction of the voice. Meanwhile, Jack had found us an open row of seats with enough room for five.

  A whistle again drew our attention to the upper ranks of the crowd. “Marik,” a male voice bellowed, “we’ve got a seat for you up here.” Gazing up, I noticed Abby, Shauna, and John in the group.

  “Thanks, but I’m with Katla tonight,” Marik said full throttle, turning more than a few heads in our direction.

  “Nice outfit,” a girl’s voice, closer than the other, called out.

  Marik performed a small jig in the aisle, which earned him a round of applause and more whistles, all good-natured and well-meaning, as far as I could tell. As Marik took a seat next to me on the bench, Jack dropped his arm over my shoulder, and I felt his own shake. Turning, I realized it was laughter rocking him. Go figure.

  Penny and Jinky didn’t join us until well into the first quarter, and they were both up and gone again from halftime until the start of the fourth quarter. Jinky, I noticed, was dangerously close to smiling when they got back; Penny, it seemed, could coax a curl out of the most stubborn of cowlicks.

  Our team won by a field goal. It took Marik a while to sort out the rules and the concept of partisanship but ended up as one of the Falcons’ biggest fans. Even I had to tee-hee at his enthusiasm. It looked like Penny had competition for Most Spirited.

  We were standing just outside the exit to the stadium, sorting out rides to the Kountry Kettle, when Jack’s phone rang. He stepped away to take the call and returned with an odd expression on his face.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I’ve gotta go. Something’s up at the farm,” he said, pulling me out of hearing range of the others. “Can you get a ride home with Penny?”

  I didn’t like the sound of “Something’s up,” mostly because I’d had more than my share of up since moving to Norse Falls.

  “Up how?” And where the heck was gravity when you needed it, anyway?

  “Midas is acting strange. He’s howling and pacing and clawing at the door to get out. My dad’s never seen him like this. And since he’s my dog, my dad wants me to come and settle him.”

  Midas was a huge yellow lab, an old one, so mellow he’d earned the nickname Old Meller. If he was spooked, it had to be something. My heart was already racing so fast it was halfway to the parking lot. I remembered my premonition from earlier that day.

  “I’m coming with you,” I said.

  Jack exhaled one short puff through his nostrils. I loved it when he went primal on me.

  “Why?” he asked. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m not thinking anything yet, but I want to come along,” I said, already stepping toward Penny and formulating an excuse for her.

  Jogging through the parking lot, Jack tugged at my arm with urgency. I could do without a lot of the baggage that came with our abilities, but having Jack pull at me insistently . . . Yep, that part of it made me all kinds of mad-happy.

  At Jack’s, his dad, Lars, met us at the back door, where he stood holding an exuberant Midas by the collar. Seeing Jack, the hulk of a dog barked and jumped, pushing off Jack’s chest with his front paws. It was an act of affection, but one that would have knocked a smaller person — me, for instance — back a week.

  “Down, boy,” Jack said.

  Midas returned to all fours, spun three times, and then leaped at Jack again, this time stretching his front legs onto Jack’s shoulders and baying at something outside.

  “See what I mean?” Lars said. “But he’s obviously relieved to see you.”

  Jack rubbed the dog’s shaggy head and ordered him down. Even I could see that Midas in a clearly agitated state was a danger to no one, but it didn’t tamp down the something’s-wrong sensation in my gut.

  “We’ll walk him,” Jack said. “It’s probably a skunk or an opossum. You know how he hates trespassers.”

  A few minutes later, Jack and I set out carrying a couple of Maglites with beams that could guide tanks. Though mine was a foot long, heavier than my own arm, and clublike, and though we were accompanied by a very large, overly protective dog, I still had the feeling that we were under-provisioned.

  As we trekked along a hard-packed dirt path, Midas pulled at Jack impatiently. At first, Jack’s spirits matched the dog’s; both were giddy and pumped with adrenaline. Soon, though, Midas’s feverish behavior grated on Jack, and he stopped, more than once, to scold and heel the unruly animal.

  The path led us deep into their back property. Much of the Snjossons’ land was planted in orderly orchard plots according to species. Sweeping my light left and right, I knew we were still skirting these tidy sections. We fell into a comfortable pattern, and even Midas seemed to relax with the even pace of our march and the harmony of nature’s nighttime music. I was particularly heartened by the chorus of birds overhead, and their songs were in perfect accord with the whoosh of wind as it ruffled leaves and branches. It seemed to me a symbol of the way Jack and I complemented each other.

  We came to the old stone bridge that crossed a brook. Behind it was a wooded area, too cragged and hilly to farm. Though I knew it was the shortcut to the back plots, something about the woods — the wildness in the diversity of size and type of trees, the density of their shoulder-to-shoulder stance, and the darkness they harbored — reawakened my misgivings.

  “Maybe we should take the road,” I suggested. The property was crisscrossed with a system of interior roads over which trucks were able to pass. It would be a longer route but more civilized, in my opinion.

  Jack stopped at a fork in the path. “Midas is pulling this way.” He pointed toward the woods. “As odd as that is.”

  “Odd how?” I asked.

  “He doesn’t usually go this far. Getting old, for starters,” Jack said, reining Midas in with a gentle tug of the leash. “He normally tires out about halfway through the first plantings. But even when he was a pup, there was something about the back plots he never liked.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “For whatever reason, the area always spooked him.”
/>   I swept my flashlight back and forth as if scouting for Midas’s bogies.

  Again, the dog strained to keep going.

  “Calm down, boy,” Jack said. “We’ll get there.”

  We started up again, heading for the woods. Taking deep breaths, I told myself that it was the back orchard, not the woods, that rattled the dog. It wasn’t much reassurance, but it kept me from visualizing the trees’ branches as snatching fingers and hearing threats issue down from their heights. As to Midas’s nervousness, I reminded myself that dogs were worriers by nature, operating on some kind of perennial Code Red, where everyone from the UPS guy to the cookie-peddling Girl Scout was up to no good.

  “How long has your family owned this land?” I asked, my voice taking on a breathy quality. This wooded area felt very different to me, as if thrumming with something ancestral. Plus, crazy as it was, I wanted the press of trees to know we were there, as if somehow conversation would quell other forces. Forces that had Midas now howling in some kind of doggy-distress signal.

  “He’s really agitated,” Jack said. Ahead on the path, our lights illuminated the dog’s snout-lifted-to-the-heavens yowl. “Sorry, did you ask me something?”

  “About the property.”

  “Right,” Jack said, coaxing Midas to continue. “We’ve owned it since the late thirties.”

  “And what was here before?”

  “Prairie, mostly. These woods are probably just as they were. Other sections were cleared, of course.”

  Above me, I heard a sudden snap of branches. Underfoot, I stumbled upon an arterial root contorting across the narrow path. As I shone my Maglite down on its tentacle-like spur, I had the creepiest, though fleeting, image of it throbbing.

  I was relieved when, up ahead, the trees thinned and patches of moonlit clouds became visible. I allowed myself a full, lung-expanding inhale. Only then did I realize how sharp and ragged my breaths had been. With the express of air, my ribs rattled.

  Weird.

  Midas howled again.

  Jack, pulled by the dog, increased his pace. They set out across a small open field to where a plot of trees loomed in the distance. I jogged to keep up. The prospect of being left behind made my legs quiver until they ached. It was the oddest response, until I realized that it wasn’t a reaction, that the reverberations weren’t being produced by my legs. They were, in point of fact, absorbing shock waves emanating from the ground.

  I caught up with Jack. He, too, was feeling the vibrations and held his hands up to the sky as if they were something to be caught like raindrops. Midas had begun running in a circle, yapping at the air.

  “What is that?” Jack asked.

  You don’t grow up in California without feeling the earth shake a time or two, but there was something different about this tremor, though I couldn’t have explained it at the time. I took a step past Jack to where a row of apple trees began a neat sentrylike formation and shone my light on their trunks. It was curious the way the silvery limbs were rippling as if themselves in fear. As I touched the rough surface of one, it seemed to shrink away, until I realized it wasn’t shrinking, it was slipping.

  “Jack!” I screamed, now holding on to the trunk and hopping from one foot to the other.

  My light fell to the ground and provided a single swath of illumination into the area thick with apple trees. They were, dozens of them, dropping before my eyes.

  As I clung to the tree in terror, I could hear Midas’s frantic barks as he bounded away and Jack’s urgent “Kat, oh, my God, Kat!”

  Now the ground beneath my feet was rocking like a rowboat. I felt something grab at my jacket collar, and I looked up to see Jack’s hand tugging at me. I released the tree and clasped his arm just as everything beneath me went as liquid as pancake batter.

  “Hold on!” Jack yelled.

  Instantly I was swept down with the collapsing ground. I screamed, though the roar of the shifting earth had me beat by a landslide — a real landslide, in this case.

  Self-respecting Californians know what the tug of the tide feels like, too. At least with a wave, you know it will break. I sensed with whatever it was at work here that it would be a one-way trip down.

  My hands slipped from Jack’s forearm to his palm, and rocks and dirt sprayed my face and caked my mouth with soot. My legs flailed wildly until finally catching the trunk of the tree I had so recently been standing next to. It was — crazily enough — now at a right angle from where I dangled, clinging to the side of the chasm, and it offered me a momentary support. Because I was no longer a dead weight, Jack was able to readjust his hold on me, grasping me under my arms. He grunted with pain, a cry so visceral I feared for us both, until I was able to swing a most unladylike leg over the side of what had become an abyss.

  We scrambled away from the hole and collapsed in a panting tangle of arms and legs.

  “What the hell was that?” Jack asked, clutching at me like I might again be wrenched away.

  “Did the earth just open up in front of us?” I asked, hacking up dirt and spilling tears.

  Ever the precautionary type, Jack lifted me back farther away from the area. We took many more moments to recover, and he held me as rolls of shock left me shaking uncontrollably.

  When I had recuperated enough to sit up, Jack, on all fours, crawled to where his flashlight lay emitting one forlorn shaft of light. He lifted it and swept it over the area, what was left of it, anyway. Midas returned, whimpering and ducking his head submissively.

  “I think we just witnessed a sinkhole open up,” Jack said, standing.

  “A sinkhole. Is that what it is?” I accepted Jack’s offer of assistance in getting up.

  “It has to be,” Jack said. “We’ve studied them in geology.” Again, he trailed his light over the collapsed area. “But this one looks bigger than the slides we looked at.”

  As his flashlight shone into the caved-in bowl of land, I noticed its edges were sheared off, as if carved away with a sharp instrument, and the depth was staggering. Especially considering how close I had come to plummeting into it. Seeing apple trees toppled like matchsticks upon its floor and others dotting the bowl’s sides like bent nails made me shiver.

  “We should go,” Jack said.

  Before we could start back toward the woods, headlights barreling down the interior road came into sight. Lars swung down from the pickup truck and walked briskly toward us.

  “I heard a crack out here, and that dog’s howl was probably heard clear down to Iowa,” he said. “What’s going on? Are you kids all right?”

  Jack raked his light over the hole. “This is what Midas was fussing about. A sinkhole. He must have sensed some early vibrations and dragged us out here. Crazy dog nearly got us sucked down into that thing. If I hadn’t grabbed Kat at the last moment . . .” He dropped his head, and it was his turn to shudder.

  For many moments Lars walked back and forth, mumbling and shining his own light onto the damage. “Let’s get you two back,” he said finally. “Get you cleaned up, and maybe a hot cup of tea or something to settle your nerves. There’s nothing we can do until morning. In the daylight, we’ll get a better look. And I’ll get a geologist out here for an opinion.” He scratched at his chin. “It’s the darnedest thing,” he said.

  I didn’t stay long enough for a hot cup of anything. Once I’d cleaned up enough not to frighten my mom, I asked Jack to drive me home. Thoughts were spiraling through my head faster than the earth had shifted below my feet, and I needed some alone time to sort a few things out.

  On the ride, Jack apologized for not taking Midas’s warnings seriously. For dragging me out into the dark. I did my best to reassure him that I didn’t hold him responsible and that it was just one of those things. The first part was true, the latter, not quite.

  “I don’t think we should share that we were at risk,” I said after a long pause.

  “What? Why?”

  “Even you have to admit, we have enough I-shouldn’t-be-alive s
tories to start our own TV show. To say we were there will invite gossip and speculation.”

  “I see what you mean,” he said, ten-and-two-o’clocking the wheel.

  “Your dad wouldn’t say anything, would he?”

  “I’ll talk to him,” Jack said. “He won’t want too much attention over the whole thing, anyway.”

  For once, Lars’s taciturn nature came in handy.

  While saying good night, Jack had to pause before choking out the words, and his eyes were haunted. He also had a hard time letting go of me. As always, I enjoyed the ferocity of his affection, but I could do without it coming on the heels of a life-threatening situation. We’d had our share of those.

  The next morning, Saturday, after receiving a Busy. Will call later text from Jack, I shambled down to breakfast, with a fitful night’s sleep having earned me the crazy bedhead that had my hair looking like dandelion fluff. Besides reliving my near fall into a muddy abyss, I had heard Leira crying off and on through the long night, so I understood the desperate slurps and full nasal inhalation with which my mom was ingesting her coffee.

  “Oh, hon, did Leira keep you up, too?” she asked. “I know your room gets the worst of it, which brings me to this morning’s plans: we want to show you a house.”

  Even if the lease on our rented property wasn’t about to expire, a move was overdue. My bedroom shared a razor-thin wall with Leira’s; last night was a good example of why that wasn’t such a perfect floor plan. And what had been an already cozy space for my mom and me had become a shoe box with the addition of Stanley, his gazillion books, rowing machine, and more sports equipment than I’d have figured for a pocket-protector type. With Leira finally home from the hospital and the pile-on effect of her carrier, high chair, rocker, and bazillion toys, the current situation possibly qualified us for a feature on A&E’s Hoarders.

  “You found a place?” I asked. I had left the house-hunting trips to my mom and Stanley, opting, instead, to watch Leira and give them some alone time. Besides, I would be graduating in nine months and had always planned on an away-from-home college experience. My opinion wouldn’t matter for long.