“Do not talk to my brother!”
“Your old man never mentioned me, little guy? Well, there was a time when we were blood brothers. But I’m guessing he never said a word about—hell, about the first twenty years of his life, probably! You barely knew who he was. And then he died in some goddamn cave? And nobody even bothered to go get his body? What the hell kind of people are you?”
“DO NOT TALK TO MY BROTHER, YOU PSYCHOTIC DICK!”
There was a split second of silence, a stalemate where all they heard was the wind.
And then Spock sneezed.
Stan turned to the bubble under the rug and hooted with pleasure.
“Classic,” he said.
He grabbed the dog, bound him up in the rug, and stuck him under one arm.
“Time for chickenshit’s bath,” he said, and gestured out to the frozen lake. “Hope he don’t mind cold water.”
He bounced the sharp point of the poker on the floor like it was a walking stick.
“Do not follow me, big sister,” he told Zoe, his eyes crawling over her body once more, “or you’ll get more action than you can handle.”
Once he’d gone, she and Jonah sat on the couch, stunned. After a moment, she took his face in her hands so she’d know he was listening.
“I need to go out there,” she said. “To get the dogs back. And I need you to stay here. Okay, Jonah? I need to hear you say okay. Can you say okay for me—and mean it?”
Jonah wriggled until Zoe let go of his face, then scrunched his eyebrows down, like a teacher had told him to put on his thinking cap.
“Okay, I w-won’t go outside,” he said.
“Thank you,” said Zoe.
“But you can’t go either. That m-man doesn’t f-fight fair, so we’re not going to f-fight. Right? You said.”
“How about if I just go for five minutes?”
“No, Zoe.”
“Okay, how about two minutes?”
She was trying to calm him down by teasing him a bit, negotiating the way he always did.
“No, Zoe! No minutes! I want you here.” He stopped and fished around for words. “Even I get scared sometimes.”
Zoe knew if she went outside, Jonah would follow her, and she couldn’t take the chance. So she did the unheroic thing, which she hated herself for. She sat on the couch with her arm around her brother and made certain he never looked out the window behind them. It wasn’t as hard to distract him as she thought it would be. They found the wicker basket with Betty’s knitting supplies, and Jonah starting fixing the hole at the top of Zoe’s hat. For a while, the only sound in the room was the clicking of needles, though at one point, Jonah paused to scold her: “You really should take better care of your things.”
Zoe tried not to look out the window either. She didn’t look when she heard Stan walk past them toward the lake, his boots crunching over the snow and Spock whimpering inside the rug. She didn’t look when Jonah began rubbing his eyes and said what he always said when his body was shutting down from too much stimulation and he was seesawing on the edge of sleep: “I’m not tired. My eyes just hurt.” She didn’t even look when he put down the needles and fell asleep with his head in her lap.
But then she heard Stan hacking at the ice on the lake with the poker, trying to stab his way down to the water. And that’s when she looked.
He was making a hole to drown the dogs in.
There were binoculars on the coffee table. Zoe grabbed them. The night was black and starless. A void. The world had just been … shut off.
Stan was working by the light of his truck’s headlights. He struggled to hold Spock as he chipped deeper and deeper. For a second the dog managed to squirm out of Stan’s arms—but he couldn’t move fast enough on the ice. He slipped and slid desperately until Stan grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and threw him into the hole.
Then Stan pushed Spock’s head under the water with his foot.
When he was sure the dog couldn’t climb out, he loped back to his truck for Uhura.
For the next few moments, he didn’t see what Zoe saw.
He didn’t see the lake begin to glow, gradually at first and then—though it made no sense—brighter and brighter until it looked like the ice covered not water but fire.
And he didn’t see the figure at the farthest edge of the lake moving toward them—moving across the ice, moving calmly, yes, but as fast as a galloping horse.
Zoe was at the window now, with no memory of having stood up and walked toward it. It was the window, she realized later, that made it possible for her to watch all this without thinking she’d lost her mind: not just because the pane of glass separated her from everything happening out there, but because it was like a screen and, if she was going to be honest, she’d watched a lot of crazy stuff on TV.