Chapter Ten: The Disappearing of Derecho Campbell

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It's Nate at the door.

"Are you okay?" he asks as soon as I open it, only realising after that I probably shouldn't have opened it at all, my brain moving slowly as it tries to think over everything I've seen.

"No," I tell him. "Come look at this."

I take him into Dad's room and show him everything in there. He's as shocked as I was, just as shocked. Silent with his skin turning a horrible shade of green under his freckles, washed out and worried.

"Are these real kids?" he whispers, biting his lip so hard that I can see it turning white under his crooked teeth. "The kids that we googled, the dead ones?"

"The ones that look like me," I confirm, the clipping still wedged in my sweaty hand. When he backs away from everything there, I hand it to him. "Look. This… the lady they're talking about is my mom, Nate. That's my mom."

He reads it really slowly, stumbling over the longer words. "Is this about you?" he finally asks, mouth scrunching up like he's confused. "Did someone kidnap you?" And it clicks. He looks back at Dad's room and goes, "Oh."

I've been doing a lot of thinking over the past half hour of reading, my fear settling into a calm kind of planning. First, I have to hide what I've seen. I don't want Dad to ask me about it because I'm not ready for that conversation yet. Not yet. I need to know what I'm going to say first so that I don't ask the wrong kinds of questions.

"Help me clean it up," I demand, marching back into that room like I'm not scared at all, even though I think I might puke. Nate doesn't move from the doorway. "Come on, help me. We have to clean this up before Dad gets home."

"I think we should leave," he says instead, his eyes so wide that I can see white all around them, Listen peering around him. "Right now, Derry, I think we should go. Let's go to my house—we can tell my mom and she can call your dad and maybe the police. Please?"

"What, why?" I'm furious he's not helping me as I crouch and kind of squint my eyes a bit, to avoid looking at details of the pictures I'm picking up. Like this, I can pretend they're just blurry images of something else. And that works, right up until I blink and see something I hadn't seen before, something really familiar.

Nate is still talking as I pick up the photo and stare at it. He's saying, "Come on, Derry, look at this. I'm scared, aren't you? This is scary—it's grown-up stuff and I don't think it's safe. What if your dad is the one who took those photos?"

"They're crime scene photos," I respond numbly, holding the photo in my left hand and splaying my right out next to it, for comparison. "He's not a cop."

"Yeah, exactly, so why does he have so many pictures of bodies? We need to go. What's that?"

I hope up the photo of the toddler on the hospital bed, and I hold out my hand. "Look," I whisper, seeing him notice first the baby's dark hair and dark eyes, and second the burn on her palm that's what the picture is of. The burn is gory and painful looking, a woman out of frame holding the baby still. It's a four-leaf clover. Just like the one on my palm, except without all the stretching and smudging that the years have given mine.

"The date says 2011," I say, pointing to the numbers along the bottom. There's a burning in my eyes, my body trying to cry even though I won't let it. "That's me, Nate. Look at her hand—that's me. Same burn, but hers is new and she's… I was three then, same as that baby."

"I don't know what's going on," Nate whimpers, hugging his arms to himself. "I want to go home. Please come home with me, please, please, please…"

He's terrified and I am too, confused and worried and, for the first time ever, scared that my dad is about to walk in through the front door. I cave. "Go grab my backpack from my room," I instruct him because I want to finish looking for more photos of me and he's too scared to stay in this room. I don't blame him. The dead lie everywhere. He bolts. I keep looking. Opening drawers and checking boxes on the desk, looking for photos anywhere I can.

It's the bottom drawer that I find it, hearing Nate thumping back down the stairs. It's a book, a children's book, and I've got a much newer copy upstairs on my own shelf. The Velveteen Rabbit and I already know what I'm going to find before I open it, remembering the letter I'd read.

To our Little Prentiss, who will always be real to us.

There's a photo tucked in there too. I unfold it and look at it for the longest time, while Nate is getting more and more upset with me. I don't show him the photo when I stand and walk towards him because it's possibly the most confusing thing of the night. I just hold it and look at it, until he takes it from me himself.

"Who's this lady with your dad?" he asks, but I'm pushing past to get my bag ready to go. I'm not scared of Dad coming home now that I've seen that—I've moved past scared.

Now, I'm nothing but angry. He lied. He's done nothing but lie to me, for as long as I've ever known him.

"That's my mom," I snap and turn towards the front door. But, Listen growls. I pause, cautious. Nate comes up behind me, his breath loud and annoying when I'm trying to hear what Listen's heard. "Shh," I tell him when he goes to speak.

The geese begin to fight. I think for a moment that they're fighting amongst themselves, like they do sometimes, screeching and honking and hissing and yabbering so loud that Listen barks along. But I've never heard them sound like this, the screeching that pitches so high I think one of them must be hurt before it abruptly stops. And, as soon as that screech stops, the others explode. I've never heard a noise like this before. And Listen is barking, barking, barking, and I realise: someone is out there. Someone is hurting them.

Someone is coming.

My cell is in my pocket, but it says, 'out of service,' and nothing happens when I hammer the speed-dial.

"Backdoor," I whisper, strangely clear right now. Most clearly, I'm sure that nothing is really happening. That would be ridiculous. Some part of me still thinks this is all some kind of big, horrible joke. But Listen refuses to follow us as we move to the back door, Nate still holding the photo with his eyes so big I'm worried they might pop out. Listen just keeps barking and snarling and slamming his paws on the front door. My hands are shaking as I disable the alarm for the back door only, clicking it open and shoving Nate through before turning to clap my hands for Listen to follow, but the dumb dog won't listen. Just looks at me and keeps on growling, and that's when the window smashes.

Something lands with a soft thumpf on the couch, glass tinkling around it. I stare at it. Listen turns to look too, and that's when it explodes.

Everything goes white. It's like looking into the sun, except worse, a throbbing, slamming kind of pain that vanishes everything from my vision. I worry that I've gone blind, but that's nothing compared to my ears. I'm distantly aware of falling backwards, of being on the ground, but the world around me has turned to nothing. I heard the bang, an absolutely deafening bang, and then nothing. And now nothing—everything is silent but for a steadily worsening ringing that drills into my skull and leaves me curled up small with my hands on my ears and the thought that someone must be pushing something slowly into my eardrum, it hurts that bad. Whumpf whumpf whumpf goes the world as though it's pushing at my head through the ringing. I don't know what to do, where to look, what's happening at all. I don't even know if I'm still at my house or if I've been knocked clear off the edge of the world.

But someone grabs my arm and hauls me up, dragging me along on my knees until it hurts so much that I have to try and stand and stagger after into the whiteness. Bang goes my knee into a fence post, more a feeling than a sound, my hand knocking hard on a corner, my hip hitting something else, and still the person drags me until I slam into a fence and realise we're at the back of the garden. I blink and there's a big black spot in the centre of my eyes, colours barely fading in, but I can see Nate on his knees crawling through the hole we use to get to the river, and I can see enough to follow even though I think I'm falling over still.

On the other side, I can see. Barely. Sort of. But it hurts, it hurts so bad, and when I lift my hands to my ears to see if they're bleeding, I can feel wet on my face. I think I'm crying. Maybe screaming. I can't hear over the ringing, even though the whumpf feeling of cotton-wool in my head is starting to fade out and let other muffled noises crowd in. Nate drags me up, pulling me backwards, and he is screaming. His mouth is wide open on his chalk-white face. I realise he's trying to get me to the river, where his canoe is, where we'll be gone in seconds if he can shove it out into the centre where the current flows. Gone away from whatever is chasing us.

So, I follow. I run and run and run and we make it, we make it, Nate dragging the canoe into the water as I stand on the bank and try to blink myself back into normality. I hear the grating sound of wood on gravel, I hear Nate sobbing for me to help him, and I watch as he gets it in the water and then turns to yell at me to join him.

And freezes.

I don't want to turn around. I can't. I can barely see, barely hear, my head trying to bust itself open from the inside out, and all I can focus on is Nate's stupid face. His wide-open eyes and his sticky-out ears and his splash of freckles and his white, white skin that only goes whiter, until it goes red.

I blink and he's in the river. He's slipped. But it's okay, he can swim.

I'm not scared; he can swim.

But he doesn't.

I've gone deaf again. I barely register that there's a bang behind me, the ringing back and the dizzy back with it, pushing me forward to take a step towards Nate, to see why he's in the water like an idiot, but my knees drop out. I fall. The ground is wobbly below me, tipping me up and throwing me down like I'm on the river already, even though it's grass I land on.

When the man picks me up, there's not really much I can do about it. I think I scream, right until he covers my mouth with a hand that tastes like burning and makes me choke, but I wouldn't know, not really. I still can't hear.

I hope that Nate's gone for help, because there's nothing I can do but scream and try to fight while feeling like the world is fighting me back, every movement making my head spin and spin and spin until I throw up, choking on it when the man's hand forces it back in my mouth. He still doesn't let go, and I can't breathe.

I can't breathe.

I think he's carrying me. My eyes are shut and my ears are ringing and my lungs are screaming, and this all continues until I'm slammed into something hard as the man trips into it.

I'm free, but there's no running. I couldn't if I wanted to.

There's a distant whisper of an alarm ringing, a louder roar of barking. I open my eyes to Listen with the man's arm in his mouth and he's tearing at it, looking wilder than I've ever seen him. There's blood, everywhere, and a gun.

"Don't shoot my dog," I choke, spitting vomit on the ground, my voice too loud to my aching head. "Don't shoot my dog!" I scream, but he does.

More alarms. More sirens. Someone is yelling, and the man turns on me.

I've got my hearing back enough for this. I hear Listen whining, trying to get up and failing. And I hear the man saying, as he looks down at me with his ice-blue eyes, "Get in and shut up, or I'll shoot it again. You want me to do that? You want me to kill your dog?"

I'm so scared, so utterly and completely terrified, I can't do anything but respond. There's nothing brave or clever about me at that moment.

"No," I say honestly, and I get in the car, curling up real small on the floor where he tells me to and only crying a little when Listen shoves past and leaps up into the car with me, staring at the man with his teeth bared. I hug my dog, my hand twisted through the strap of his vest, and I hope that Nate's gone for help, as the door slams shut between me and the outside world. But he lets me keep Listen; he doesn't shoot Listen.

And I'm sure that Dad will find me.

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End of Part One.