“Caller, we’ve got a very bad connection here. Please restate your-”
Then nothing. Becky stopped to look at her phone and saw a single bar. While she was watching, it disappeared, to be replaced by NO SERVICE. When she looked up, her brother had been swallowed by the green.
Overhead, a jet traced a white contrail across the sky at thirty-five thousand feet.
“Help! Help me!”
The kid was close, but maybe not quite as close as Cal had thought. And a little farther to the left.
“Go back to the road!” the woman screamed. Now she sounded closer, too. “Go back while you still can!”
“Mom! Mommy! They want to HELP!”
Then the kid just screamed. It rose to an ear-stabbing shriek, wavered, suddenly turned into more hysterical laughter. There were thrashing sounds-maybe panic, maybe the sounds of a struggle. Cal bolted in that direction, sure he was going to burst into some beaten-down clearing and discover the kid-Tobin-and his mother being assaulted by a knife-wielding maniac out of a Quentin Tarantino movie. He got ten yards and was just realizing that had to be too far when the grass snarled around his left ankle. He grabbed at more grass on his way down and did nothing but tear out a double handful that drooled sticky green juice down his palms to his wrists. He fell full-length on the oozy ground and managed to snork mud up both nostrils. Marvelous. How come there was never a tree around when you needed one?
He got to his knees. “Kid? Tobin? Sing-” He sneezed mud, wiped his face, and now smelled grass-goo when he inhaled. Better and better. A true sensory bouquet. “Sing out! You too, Mom!”
Mom didn’t. Tobin did.
“Help me pleeease!”
Now the kid was on Cal’s right, and he sounded quite a lot deeper in the grass than before. How could that be? He sounded close enough to grab.
Cal turned around, expecting to see his sister, but there was only grass. Tall grass. It should have been broken down where he ran through it, but it wasn’t. There was only the smashed-flat place where he’d gone full length, and even there the greenery was already springing back up. Tough grass they had here in Kansas. Tough tall grass.
“Becky? Beck?”
“Chill, I’m right here,” she said, and although he couldn’t see her, he would in a second; she was practically on top of him. She sounded disgusted. “I lost the 9-1-1 chick.”
“That’s okay, just don’t lose me.” He turned in the other direction, and cupped his hands to his mouth. “Tobin!”
Nothing.
“Tobin!”
“What?” Faint. Jesus Christ, what was the kid doing? Lighting out for Nebraska? “Are you coming? You have to keep coming! I can’t find you!”
“KID, STAND STILL!” Shouting so loud and so hard it hurt his vocal cords. It was like being at a Metallica concert, only without the music. “I DON’T CARE HOW SCARED YOU ARE, STAND STILL! LET US COME TO YOU!”
He turned around, once more expecting to see Becky, but he only saw the grass. He flexed his knees and jumped. He could see the road (farther away than he expected; he must have run quite some way without realizing it). He could see the church-Holy Hank’s House of Hallelujah, or whatever it was called-and he could see the Bowl-a-Drome, but that was all. He didn’t really expect to see Becky’s head, she was only five-two, but he did expect to see her route of passage through the grass. Only the wind was combing through it harder than ever, and that made it seem like there were dozens of possible paths.
He jumped again. Soggy ground squashed each time he came down. Those little licking peeks back at Highway 400 were maddening.
“Becky? Where the hell are you?”
• • •
Becky heard Cal bellow for the kid to stand still no matter how scared he was, and let them come to him. Which sounded like a good plan, if only her idiot brother would let her catch up. She was winded, she was wet, and she was for the first time feeling truly pregnant. The good news was that Cal was close, on her right at one o’clock.