They Watch Us, You Know by Todd Glasscock
“They watch us, you know.” Lowell scratched his forearm as he stepped off the porch, then lit a cigarette once we were both outside.
“Who?” I asked. “Your space people?” Our daily walks around the neighborhood were supposed to be for Lowell’s benefit, meditative, prescribed by his counselor as part of the rehab program the courts set up to keep him out of jail this time. Usually, I had to make him go on them but today he was eager to go. Our neighbor down the street, Dean Mixon, had invited us over for sweet tea and Lowell loved Dean’s tea, almost as much as he loved nattering with Dean about UFOs, aliens, Bigfoot or whatever conspiracy took their fancy. Dean believed all that nonsense, even claimed to have been abducted and taken up in a spaceship for who-knew-what kind of probing.
“Not ‘space people’ as you so rudely put it, Herb.” Lowell looked at me and shook his head, his cigarette smoke making my nose crinkle. “Them.” He nodded at Riley and Ella’s front yard, on that August day as dry and yellow as Lowell’s fingernails that were again scratching his forearm.
“Ella?” After all this time, since our break-up, I couldn’t say her name without feeling a little regret in the pit of my stomach.
Lowell kept scratching and squinted past the lawn to the holly bush under Riley and Ella’s kitchen window. “Not Riley and Ella. No, no, not them. Under there.”
“I don’t see nothing.”
“Squint a little. Like me.”
I squinted, still not sure what I was looking for. “What am I supposed to be seeing?”
“That glow. The blue glow.”
I did catch a sparkle of sunshine from a little round blue glass ornament nestled in the dirt under the holly bush. Looked like a long-forgotten bauble might’ve dropped off a Christmas tree. “That ball under the bush?”
“Yes. That is it. That is them. Angels.” Lowell lit another cigarette. “They visited me in jail. They need our help. So, I put that there for them to see. I am helping them put their plan in motion.”
“Watching us? Angels that visited you in jail? Angels that need our help. And you’re putting their plan in motion?” I rolled my eyes at him, thought he might launch into some new conspiracy theory about the women who had gone missing in town over the past few days in line with aliens or JFK or Bigfoot or now apparently angels. Dean likely had fed this new thing to Lowell’s drug-addled brain. “What’d you do, Lowell?”
He flicked his half-smoked cigarette to the ground, smiled, and nodded at the blue ornament. “I put that there so they could watch us. Keep an eye on us and Ella and Riley.”
“You did what? What is that thing, Lowell? Some kind of camera?” I glanced at the ornament; it seemed to blink like a doorbell camera. Then it clicked in my head. All the scratching, the talk about angels just standard druggie nonsense. Mystery solved. “Oh, I get it now. Y’all had me fooled all along. Riley’s your dealer. You got this little camera for him to watch out for cops or something.” Then another slight burning sensation hit my stomach. If Riley was a dealer, Ella was in on it, too. That meant Ella had sunken low since she left me for Riley a year ago. Riley never left the house. Ella did. She left, sometimes late at night—I knew, because when I couldn’t sleep, I watched their house, wondering always if I could ever get Ella back—and brought home shady looking people, women usually. Drugs and prostitutes. That was it. Riley dealt meth and maybe even cooked it in some secret lab, while Ella entertained his customers with girls. It was like some convoluted TV show and thinking about it got me worked up because now I knew and any minute the cops would show up on a raid and we’d all go to jail. I grabbed Lowell’s shirt sleeve and looked him in the eyes. “Lowell, are you high? Is that what that scratching is about? Riley give you a little sample for being his lookout?”
Lowell frowned and pulled away from me. “I am not high, Herb. I am not helping Riley. I am helping the angels, and I am helping Ella.”
I turned away from my cousin determined now to act, put a stop to all this nonsense. Like I should have in the first place when I first took Lowell in and agreed to help him with rehab. Mind racing, I charged across the mushy yellow yard. Damn it, I should’ve seen it, should’ve known Riley Amarillo—fake name if there ever was—was a dealer. Got Lowell hooked again. Probably Ella too. And who knows what else he’s got her doing. I reached the holly bush, bent to grab the blinking blue camera, but as I did so, an unseen force lifted me off my feet. Pain shot through my ribs, the air went out of me, and I hit the ground with a solid thud. I squeezed my eyes shut, tried to catch my breath. I hadn’t been hit that hard since high school football practice, and the last person to hit me that hard back then was Lowell. Once I caught my breath, I opened my eyes.
Above me, Lowell frowned. He had my shoulders pinned to the squishy grass. “We got to go.”
I tried to push him away. He was scrawny, but still carried the high school linebacker’s strength. I guess he’d worked out some while locked up. I stopped struggling, relaxed, and said, “Can’t go if you don’t let me up.”
“You are right.” He got off me, offered to pull me up, and did so with a grunt as the ground tugged at me, which was strange, as dry yellow St. Augustine tended to crumble when touched.
I looked down. Some of the yellow grass clung to me. I went to brush it off when someone spoke to Lowell and me.
“What the hell are y’all doing?” Ella, one arm slack in a blue sling, appeared in the screen door.
“Nothing. It is nothing.” Lowell tugged on my sleeve. “Herb, we have got to go. I am sorry Ella. I do not know what struck Herb. We will go.”
I balled my fists and resisted Lowell’s urgent need to go and tried to look up at Ella’s once sweet, cheerful face, into her inviting blue eyes. I wanted to explain I planned to rescue her from Riley, but I couldn’t seem to focus on anything except that sling. What had Riley done to her? Thinking of Riley just got me angrier, mostly at myself, and I felt my face flush with a bit of anger and embarrassment because how many times had I watched Ella come out at night like some stalker? Why hadn’t I gone over there and grabbed her and taken her away from Riley and the clear danger she was in? Or called the cops and stopped it all? That’s what I should have done.
When we dated, Ella used to always complain I never did anything, never acted on anything ever, not even picking a place to go eat. She got sick of it and left me for Riley. I still loved her, but I did nothing, as usual. I looked up at her, my face still hot, and tried to smile.
Ella nodded at Lowell, her lank dark hair falling limp against sunken cheeks, eyes lost and cheerless, probably because Riley had snuck up behind her, wrapped an arm around her waist. He seemed to glare at me, which gave me a chill, and tugged Ella inside, letting their screen door rattle shut.
Once that screen door banged shut, it kicked up something in me that pushed into my brain the notion to rush into the house and take Ella from Riley, get her some help, get Riley arrested, try somehow to keep Lowell out of it so he wouldn’t get in any more trouble. I got one foot on the porch step before Lowell jerked me away, grappled me, spun me around, and frog-marched me to the curb, all while telling me, “It is not time yet. You need their help.”
Once back on the street, he let me go. I took a deep breath to calm myself, backed away from my cousin, and felt in my pocket for my phone. “This nonsense is gonna end right now, Lowell. I’m dialing 9-1-1. I’m gonna stop all this.” I punched in 9. Lowell leapt at me, chopped at my wrist. The phone fell, its screen cracking against the curb, and then in one swift motion, Lowell had me grappled again.
I strained to free myself as Lowell once again frog-marched me away from Riley and Ella’s and down the street toward the Mixon’s, him mumbling all the way over “It is not time, it is not time.” His strength was incredible for someone who, when I picked him up at county three months ago, looked like a string bean. I guess he had worked out.
& & &
Halfway to the Mixon place I relaxed, and Lowell let me walk on my own. I said nothing as we walked. Lowell would not shut up. “I know you are mad at me, Herb. You will understand why I did what I did when we get to Dean’s. Dean will explain. He will show you everything you need to know.”
I rolled my eyes, nodded. I hoped I wouldn’t have to hear much from Dean Mixon or Lowell Craft when we got to the Mixon’s. Hopefully Dean’s husband, Garland, would be there and I would have somebody sane to talk to while we sipped Dean’s treacly tea.
“They are here, too,” Lowell said as we got up to the house, an old baroque Victorian-style place that looked straight off the Addam’s Family set.
I thought Lowell was talking about Dean and Garland, neither of whom were out on the front porch where they drank their tea every afternoon. But, no, Lowell was waving at Dean’s tacky—or campy as Dean liked to call it—lawn ornament, a blue glass globe on a wrought-iron stand near the porch steps.
The sun shone on the globe; it glowed as if electricity moved through it, like it might be another camera. Even more peculiar, though cloudless and hot, an ozone smell bit the air like before a rain. A chill prickled my arm as I walked by the ornament and followed Lowell up to the porch past an empty glass-top table where we sat with the Mixons for tea.
When we got up there, I said to Lowell, “Is that a camera, too?” I nodded at the lawn ornament. “Is Dean in on Riley’s drug ring? Maybe it’s the whole goddamn neighborhood?”
Lowell ignored me. He looked around, seemed disappointed no tea sat on the table, then knocked three times on the ornately carved dark maple door using the gargoyle-headed knocker Dean had installed in another fit of campiness. I half-expected Lurch to open the door and say, “You rang?”
As Dean Mixon did through the doorbell camera. His voice startled me, made me jump. My jumpiness made Lowell laugh.
Lowell settled down when Dean said through the camera, “Y’all made it. I’m so glad. Sorry, there’s no tea. We’re a bit rushed. Come in.”
The door creaked open, as seemed appropriate, and Lowell ushered me inside.
& & &
Dean, who wore a mustache not unlike Gomez Addams, smiled warily at us and turned his head slightly, as usual, to show off the diamond stud earring he claimed to have gotten in the Merchant Marine when he crossed the equator. The living room where he greeted us was dimly lit, yet the earring glowed with a blue tint or seemed so to me.
“Sorry about the tea,” Dean said. “There’s not enough time.” He touched the earring.
“It is okay,” Lowell said. “Maybe when this is all over.”
Dean stopped feeling the diamond stud, glanced at me, and frowned. “Something’s not right with him.”
Lowell gave me a look and smiled. “You know he is—what do you call him—Mr. Skeptical?”
“No, it’s not that.” Dean scanned my legs. “Oh, my.” He nodded at Lowell and reached in his pocket, while Lowell almost dove at me and began swatting at my pants leg.
Startled, I stared down at Lowell, then looked at the floor. Blades of yellow St. Augustine swarmed and wriggled like grubs on the throw rug below me. My upper lip curled as my nose caught a whiff of something like a cross between rotted meat and ozone.
“Here, Lowell, catch.” Dean had backed away from us toward a coffee table and tossed Lowell what looked like an oversized thumb drive. Object in hand, Lowell crouched next to me—I stood still, too terrified to move—and touched the object to one of the wriggling grass blades. It let out an eardrum-piercing banshee screech before vanishing with a pop. The now screeching mass circled around Lowell’s feet and was sucked, popping, into the object like dirt in a vacuum cleaner.
“All clear.” Lowell raised up, tossed the object back to Dean, looked at me, and smiled. “Now do you believe?”
Though my mouth was a little dry, I managed to say, “Angels? No, I don’t believe in aliens or angels or any of your and Dean’s nonsense. I don’t know what I saw or what just happened here, but I’m not about to explain it away as supernatural.”
“I see.” Dean stood over near the coffee table. He shook his head at my reply. “I guess this one is just going to have to see to believe. Well, that can be done and it’s certainly another reason not to dawdle. Come on. This way. Garland and our friends are waiting.” He motioned us toward a weighty dark wood hall just to the right of the living room.
“I’m not going anywhere until you tell me what’s going on.”
Dean nodded at Lowell. “I’m afraid you’re wrong.”
Before I knew it, Lowell had grabbed me, twisted my arm behind me, and got me in position to once again frog-march me. It was useless to resist. So, on we went, following Dean down the dark wood hallway.
& & &
Dean led me and Lowell down a staircase shrouded in a mist to, of all places, a basement.
A voice boomed out of the vapor, “Is he clear?” This voice gave me a chill like the one I got earlier peering at Dean’s lawn ornament.
“He’s clear,” Dean said.
“Bring him through,” the voice said.
The mist parted. Lowell let me go, though he stayed at the foot of the staircase, blocking me from any attempt at running. Unexpectedly—to me, anyway—Garland appeared before us wearing a satiny green wide-collared shirt, like it was 1977 and he was ready to go to the disco and strut like John Travolta. His grin emphasized the gray sideburns he’d worn since the 70s. “Good to see you, Herbie.”
His voice did not boom. That chilled me further. I nodded at Garland without greeting him and tried to survey the basement. The mist swirled thick around our ankles. It didn’t distract me long. What caught my attention was one of two luminous blue eyeballs that hovered behind Dean, who now sat in front of a control room console complete with buttons, knobs, dials, flashing lights and a scope straight from the starship Enterprise’s bridge.
“He seems a little too fearful to do what we need.” The booming voice had spoken again. The voice came from the larger of the two eyeballs, which had floated up to me.
Overwhelmed with anxiety, I tried to understand what I saw and heard. Clearly, I had been wrong about Lowell’s angels or aliens, or whatever these eyeballs were. I shivered as I gawked at them.
“He is skittish, my cousin,” Lowell said from the staircase, “but he can fight when he wants and has reason to. As he does.”
“He needs to calm himself,” the larger of the two eyeballs said. “He has too much fear to be useful.”
Someone touched my shoulder. I almost messed myself before I realized it was Lowell. “No need to be afraid, cousin. No one here will harm you.” His voice weirdly soothed me. “The angels are here to help.”
“We aren’t ‘angels,’ though that’s how your cousin understands us,” the smaller eyeball said. “What you’re seeing, well, we’re copies of intelligences long gone.”
“Sort of like gods,” I managed to say, screwing my courage to the sticking place, so to speak.
The smaller eyeball made a gesture like someone shaking their head. “No, no, no, just copies of someone who once existed as meat, just like you.”
The smaller eyeball explained at one time the Lorelei—their race of artificial intelligences —could copy themselves indefinitely.
“You can’t die then. What’s there to worry about?”
“We’re mortal. Most anyway. Most have chosen mortality. For that, you should be grateful. Otherwise, we’d replicate and replicate until we overran this planet, this solar system. As we’ve done to so many systems since our creation. That’s what you have to worry about.”
“You’re here to consume us, then? An alien invasion. Great. One we can’t fight. We’re all going to die.”
Dean turned in the black wobbly office chair he’d been sitting in. “It’s not like that, Herbert.”
“And you’re in on it.” I lunged at Dean. Lowell grabbed me, restrained me. I sighed, accepted my fate. Resistance, as they say, was futile. There I was in a mist-filled basement, my drug-addled cousin restraining me, with an old gay couple and two alien eyeballs, all plotting to end the world. They were no different from religious nuts, dictators, billionaires, and terrorists—everyone we had no control over, who, if they couldn’t rule the world, would destroy it, and make everyone else miserable in the meantime. It seemed there was nothing we could do to stop it. These people had thrown reason, logic, and love out the door to get what they wanted. I sighed again, thought maybe it was time for it all to end, thought it might be interesting to see how the world might end, and decided to play along with their absurd charade.
“So,” I said, “who are we fighting? Those grubs Lowell vacuumed up earlier?”
“Those ‘grubs,’ as you say, are part of a larger, more dangerous organism,” the smaller eyeball said.
“And Riley’s part of this organism?”
The smaller eyeball nodded. “That and much more—Riley is the organism. He was much like us, once. But he’s grown since we started observing him. He’ll continue to grow as long as he has something to feed on.”
“Like people.” My stomach did a little flip. The end might be near but the prospect of getting eaten by aliens still disturbed me.
“People, plants, buildings, others of his species,” the smaller eyeball said.
I swallowed and said, “By people, you mean Ella?”
“Ella. All the others he’s taken. Forced her to take.”
Those women I would see at nights with Ella when watching the house. . . They. Were. Food. “No, that can’t be right.”
“I’m afraid it is, Herbie.” All this time chatting with the smaller eyeball and taking all this in, I hadn’t noticed Garland come up to me and pat me on the shoulder. His touch didn’t shake me up in the least, oddly enough, and I didn’t want to pull away or run. “Now that you’re with us, everything’s going to be all right.”
“Wait.” I put my hands up in protest. Something in me still wanted to resist this nonsense, somehow bring it to an end. “Who said I’m in on this? I didn’t volunteer for any of this. I’m not going to help you end the world.”
“We’re not ending the world, Herbie,” Garland said. “You have to help. You’re the only one can help, you’re the only one can fight this monster.”
“Me? What have I got to do with it? How am I going to fight some amorphous monster?” I was stalling them with my questions. I wanted them to admit this nonsense about Riley being a monster was a charade. I just wanted to hear the eyeballs tell the truth—they were alien invaders who had suckered my cousin and friends into their plan. “You have some special thumb drive like you gave Lowell to suck Riley back to hell or whatever?”
“We are wasting time,” the larger eyeball thundered. “Why you is not important right now.”
A sense of threat came over me. Fight or flight or flight then fight? That was the question. I was ready to run and then find a way to fight. “Damn straight it’s important.” I searched past Lowell for some way out. “I’m not gonna fight anything I don’t know how to fight without good reason.”
“This arguing is senseless,” the larger eyeball said. “We are running out of time. Get him up to speed, Dean.”
I glared at Dean. “Yeah, Dean-O, old friend, get me up to speed.”
“You’re right,” Dean said to the larger eyeball without looking up from his scope. “Come here, Herb. Take a gander.”
“You want me to look into that thing?”
Dean raised up from the scope then and shot me a hard-but-grandfatherly-stern look, one that dragged out the angry two-year-old in me and I stamped in a hissy fit. “I demand to know why I’m so important in all this.” I knew they were trying to brainwash me. I’d bet the scope had something to with it.
“Now, now,” Garland said. He had taken hold of my arm. “It’s about Ella and your connection to her and Riley.”
“You’re the most closely connected to them,” the smaller eyeball said. “We need that strong connection to get to Riley. You get us near him, we have the means to contain him.”
“Why not do it yourself, then?” I looked around at all of them. “Float over to him and . . . and . . . and . . . contain it?”
“If either of us,” the smaller eyeball nodded at its larger compatriot, “have direct contact with Riley, he could easily absorb us. That makes him more powerful.”
“That’s all you need to know for now, Herbie. Time’s wasting. Go on.” Garland gave me a hard nudge toward Dean, who’d gotten up from the rickety office chair. My earlier fatalism washed over me again. Resistance seemed futile once more.
Dean urged me to sit. “Let me know if the scope needs adjusting.”
With a shrug, I sat, looked into what reminded me of an old Viewfinder toy, and got slapped with a vertiginous vision—all the neighborhood rushed me at once. “Whoa!” I leaned away from the chair, reeling, somewhat nauseous.
“Here, I’ll help.” The smaller eyeball floated toward me. “It takes a moment to adjust to seeing your world so clearly.”
I tried to roll away from it, but Dean and Garland stood behind me, stopped me, pushed me back to the scope. A tendril of energy jutted from the smaller eyeball like a shoot from a seed. The tendril tapped the back of my skull and shot an electric jolt down my spine that made me sit up straight like I had when the elementary school principal scolded me. The power surged white-hot through my body, and I felt my eyes dilate. I shuddered and blinked, and the smaller eyeball thundered, “Now look.”
What choice did I have? These eyeballs were no angels, but they had godlike powers, and I felt like a dog with a shock collar on it. Obey or feel this thing’s wrath. I stared into the scope again.
Instead of vertigo, I saw the whole neighborhood flattened out like the satellite map the GPS brought up on my car’s dashboard display.
“Touch the dial to zoom in,” the smaller eyeball commanded. “Find Ella’s.”
I did as it said. Once I had my bearings, I zoomed up to Ella’s front door. About then, a figure burst from inside the house and clambered down the porch steps. Though her back was turned, I knew it was Ella by the blue sling that tucked her left arm against her ribcage.
She awkwardly raised her right arm toward the front door. A thunderclap followed.
“Oh, dear.” I felt Dean’s breath on my neck. “She’s done something stupid.”
“You heard that?” I raised up from the scope. Dean urged me from the chair. I obliged.
Three more loud cracks echoed in the room we were in. I looked around. Clearly, everyone heard the noise.
“Well, shit,” Dean said from the chair. “It’s Ella. She’s busted out. She’s got a gun and heading our way.”
“That is no good,” the larger eyeball said. “Come, brother. We need to hide. Riley will be coming soon.”
“Agreed.” The vaporous light flickered and faded from the basement and that was when I made my escape.
& & &
When the eyeballs disappeared, I had glimpsed a way out of the Mixon’s basement—Lowell had left the staircase unguarded—and I ran. I had a new reason to do so—Ella.
Heavy footsteps clomped behind me, but I had head start enough that I got up the staircase to a door we’d come through earlier. Winded, I stopped, looked behind me. Lowell, red-faced, was gaining on me. I opened the door, turned and shut it behind me as Lowell pounded into it.
The door shuddered and I heard a thump and groan. I hated to hurt Lowell, but I had to get to Ella.
I never ran so hard in my life, not even wind sprints in my high school football days, and made it through the oppressive hallway, the living room and out to the Mixon’s front porch. There my dash came to an end, as I overstepped the last porch step and smashed straight into that godawful lawn ornament. It splintered, spraying blue glass shards everywhere.
To brace my fall, I stupidly reached out with my arms, and almost broke my wrist. I screeched as I sat up; the pain from my wrist shot all the way up my arm. I clutched my wrist, got oriented, and it came to my attention a gun was stuck in my face.
“Don’t move, motherfucker!” Ella, rage-blinded, stood above me, aiming a pistol between my eyes.
Paralyzed by fear, I lost track of sound, sense and time. The world moved in slow motion like a scene from war movies. Ella held her ground above me. In my peripheral, half-trotting, half-lumbering, all rage in a twisted face was Riley Dunning. He was leveling a shotgun at Ella and me, screaming despite half his jaw missing. The pistol barrel moved away from my face. Then the other side of Riley’s face disappeared in a fine pink mist as Ella shot him and he crumpled to the ground.
Sirens and the ugly, acrid odor of gunpowder broke me from my trance enough to feel a hand on my shoulder. It was Lowell helping me up. He held Ella by the waist. “Let us get inside before the cops see us.”
My wrist throbbed. Lowell helped Ella and me up the front porch steps and inside the Mixon’s home.
& & &
We were all gathered in the basement, surrounded by the vaporous mist. Lowell sat with Ella on a couch along the far wall, the large eyeball hovering next to her. Ella sipped from a steaming cup of coffee, all calm considering she’d just shot and killed her abusive drug-dealer boyfriend and had an alien artificial intelligence hovering by her side.
Garland was wrapping my wrist in a splint. Dean again peered into the scope. “We have to be on guard.”
“What’s there to worry about?” I winced as Garland adjusted the splint. “Riley’s gone. We got Ella.”
The smaller eyeball, who hovered next to Dean, chimed in. “Police for one. They’ll be looking for a murderer directly. Now they’ve found that body outside. And Riley Dunning is not dead.”
“Um,” I said.
“That wasn’t Riley,” the smaller eyeball said. “Just a manifestation of the being he’s become.”
“He’s pure evil, what he is. He’s a monster.” This was the first time Ella had spoken since we were brought down here; she seemed to believe whatever the aliens had told her about Riley. “The things I’ve done.” She began to sob.
I went toward her, determined to tell her the truth about the alien invasion, but stopped and turned at the sound of a loud knock.
“Police are at the front door,” Dean said. “Garland, go up and get rid of them.”
Ella raised her red, swollen face. “No, no. I don’t think it’s the cops. It could be him. Please don’t . . .”
But Garland was already through the veil and up the steps.
Dean peered into the scope and narrated the action upstairs. “Two cops. Man and woman. Garland seems to be doing well. He was always one could talk anybody into anything. How do think he got me?” Dean snickered at his joke, a memory of a better time, I assumed.
From upstairs came a loud pop. Two more followed. Then silence, terrible silence.
“Dear, god.” Dean rolled away from the scope. His eyes were wide with shock. One side of his mouth went slack. He groaned and slumped in the chair.
“Dean?” The smaller eyeball floated toward him.
The vaporous mist cleared around us. In a flash, the eyeballs vanished.
Ella was sunk in a heap on the couch, sobbing. I went to her. Lowell stood, held up his hand, stopped me before I could sit beside her.
“You will need this.” Lowell handed me the thumb drive.
I gave him a puzzled look. “Don’t the eyeballs need to be here?”
He nodded. “They do. That will contain Riley long enough for them to feel safe. Got it?”
I nodded. That’s when I saw Lowell held Ella’s 9mm in his other hand. “Lowell?”
He didn’t look at me. He moved past me, gun in hand, toward the stairs.
“Lowell, you’ll get yourself killed.”
He ascended the stairs a few steps and leaned against the wall, aiming the pistol toward the landing. “He is coming. I do not think he is alone. Herb, step in front of Ella. Keep her out his sight as much as possible.”
I did as Lowell said. Across from me, Dean sat stiff in his chair. I wasn’t sure if he was dead, though his eyes were open and dull. I don’t know where the eyeballs were.
My heart hammered when we heard the first footsteps.
Garland appeared first, and for a moment, I think we all felt a little relief. Maybe things hadn’t gone as wrong as believed.
The relief went away as quickly as it had come. Garland, face streaked with blood, a hole where an eye had once been, buckled on the next step, lurched, and fell. His body rolled and thumped down the stairs before it slapped into Lowell’s knees. Lowell looked at the dead man, frowned and fired up the staircase at whatever happened to follow Garland.
Another gunshot echoed around the basement. Lowell’s shoulder jerked back. He dropped his gun, fell to one knee. Above him stood a police officer, a woman with slicked-back blonde hair pulled in a ponytail. She bled from bullet wounds all over. Her eyes looked dead. Yet a blue halo seemed to surround her. She grinned, shot Lowell in the knee he balanced himself on. He crumpled and landed face down against the steps.
“Lowell, no!” I started for the staircase. Someone grabbed my hand, tugged at my arm, pulled me back with an almost electrical force that in my panic made me think it might be the eyeballs coming back but realized with a glance it was Ella.
“You can’t go, Herb. You can’t stop him.” With a powerful surge Ella pushed me aside. I stumbled, but did not fall. “He’ll kill you. It’s me he wants.”
Shucking off the blue sling that had impeded her all this time, Ella ran toward the police officer, who waited at the foot of the stairs, open-armed, grinning. Ella fell into the officer’s arms, embraced her.
“You are mine again,” the officer said, ominously, the aura around her pulsating.
I stood, stunned for a moment, amazed by Ella’s sudden recovery. She looked like her former self, the one I knew, the one I loved. The almost skeletal body had filled out. Once lank hair blossomed and shined.
In that distracted moment, neither Ella nor I saw the officer raise her gun and squeeze the trigger.
She shot me. White-hot pain punched me in the knee. I dropped. My eyes spangled. Sound wandered away. Dizziness followed. I assumed I would die. I mouthed, “I love you” to Ella.
She struggled with the officer. The glow intensified. Tendrils of light lashed from it. Tendrils of light lashed from Ella.
I wobbled, but did not fall. Somebody or something held me up. I closed my eyes. Opened them to see Lowell trying barehanded to rip the officer’s head from her shoulders.
Ella was still in the mix of all that chaos of bodies and light. With her suddenly healed arm, she clutched at the officer’s Kevlar vest and raised the other arm. A spike of blue light burst from Ella’s raised hand, shot forward and stabbed itself into the officer’s eye.
The gun went off again. A bullet whizzed past my ear. Sound came back to me then. I screamed and watched.
With Lowell on top of her and Ella in front of her, the officer reeled. Her pistol clattered to the basement floor.
Ozone filled my nostrils. Calm came over me. This was it then. I had heard tell calm came over people before they died.
Whatever was inside the officer wailed and the officer sank to her knees. Lowell rolled off her, but Ella fell with her. The aura stopped pulsating. Ella clawed at the officer’s face, began to pound the officer’s head into the floor. Blood spattered. The officer lay still. The light had faded.
“Go to her,” somebody behind me said. “It’s time.”
I tried to see who held me. “But I’m dying.”
From behind me came some semblance of a laugh. “You are not dying. Also, you can walk. It will hurt, but you can walk.”
With a groan, I stood, took a step. Sharp pain radiated from my knee, but the mystery person behind me hadn’t lied. If I shuffled like a zombie, I could walk. Before I got to Ella, I looked back. The large eyeball winked at me. I swear it did.
Ella straddled the dead officer and panted from exhaustion. She had almost obliterated the officer’s head. “I am sorry,” she said to the pulpy mess. “It had to be done.”
“Ella.”
She twisted to see me. I reached out to help her up. “I’m sorry. I wanted to help.”
She took my hand, leaned against me. “You did help me. I heard what you said. I know you and Lowell and everybody else were trying to help. I felt that love from all y’all. Riley was a force to be dealt with. I was the one who had to deal with him; I was the most connected. Love’s what broke me free of him to deal with him. And I dealt with him good.”
“I do love you,” I said. “We all do.”
“Even with all the things I done?” She lowered her eyes.
“Yes.”
“Everyone here has shown me nothing but love, more than anyone ever in my life.”
“You did nothing wrong, only what was necessary.” The eyeball had floated up to us. It glanced at me.
“That’s it, then?” I felt a little wobbly, and with a little groan lowered myself to the floor and sat. Ella knelt beside me, held my shoulders, kissed my forehead.
“It is over for Riley and the threat to your world.”
“Others like Riley could be out there somewhere?”
The eyeball made a motion as if it shrugged. “Could be. The universe is a vast place.”
& & &
It was a clear cool evening—for August, at least—when we spread Garland and Dean’s ashes outside the old club where they met. Lowell held a new blue glowing globe so the eyeballs and Ella—hidden from the law—could watch from the Mixon’s basement as a breeze mixed the old couple’s ashes together. I leaned on a crutch and thought, sentimentally, Dean and Garland got to dance together one last time. Lowell said a short prayer and we left.
& & &
Later that night, the eyeballs arranged our travel plans. Lowell, Ella and I sat comfortably in the crash couches our new friends had made for us in their craft. They had never had or needed a “meat” section in their ship, which had been kept in the Mixon’s garage. It might take a little bit to get used to us, they said, but they needed our help. The universe was vast. Strange things could be out there, and we were all ready to watch for them.
* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Todd Glasscock 2026
Image Source: Dey from Fictom.com