Escape From Norriswood

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Ackeridge Road was an older subdivision in the quieter part of Norriswood, near the elementary school where Tara and Rosalyn had both gone. At the bottom of Ackeridge, the main road ran east or west through the entire town, depending on which way you turned. Tara knew that if you turned right, headed east, she'd slip through three kilometers of brush lining the road on the right, and an open valley down to the left, and catch sight of the smoke billowing endlessly into the sky, the steel infrastructure beneath decayed, the glass windows chipped, the building that had once stood like a great magnet in the town, pulling human bodies to Norriswood, keeping them there.

As Terry gassed the truck toward Ackeridge now along main road, Tara felt him suddenly have to slow the truck down, veer it in off the road.

Sharp red and orange flames flicked upwards from barrels lined up across the road. Smoke rose into the air, and a small crowd of people seemed to be gathered in the street.

"This could be bad," Terry said. He flicked the left-turning signal on then, and u-turned the truck, headed back west. "Make sure you're covered up back there, Hardy."

Terry took them up Austin Road, where Tara saw that the properties here now were old enough for the trees in the front yards to stretch upwards and outwards. The leaves and branches shielded the view of the houses, and Tara wondered who was living inside.

She heard his voice then. It sounded distorted, louder than usual, and she realized it was coming out of a bullhorn, rising up around them from back down on the main road, near the mill. She felt then that she would recognize the voice from any distance away; it was her father's.

Hardy sat upright in the back of the truck, and pulled the blanket off her face. "That was my dad," she said.

Terry was silent at the wheel. Sitting next to him, Tara thought she could see his jaw flexing, thought she could hear his molars shift and grate against one another.

"Terry?" Hardy said. "That was my father. With the megaphone, the guy talking."

"I heard you."

"What's happening?" Tara said, and she heard Hardy's own voice ask the same thing, a slight echo as they said it a half-second apart.

"I don't know," Terry said. "Let's get Rosalyn first, and get her and Tara somewhere safe, and then maybe we can find out."

"But Terry. It's not like my father to be out in the streets like that. Something really messed up must have happened."

Terry rolled through a stop sign, and then took a sharp right down a side street. "How do you know it's your dad?" Tara said. She couldn't help it; she'd been thinking it the entire time since his voice pushed into her eardrum. She turned to look at Hardy: "I heard my dad's voice, too."

Hardy's face was still, unmoved. Tara tried to read the lack of expression on her face, the lack of tension around her eyes where she felt it herself.

Terry dipped the pickup down another road. "Almost there now," he said, and he exhaled, a depth to the air he pushed out of his lungs. From the passenger seat, Tara watched porch lights flickering, heard a wind chime melodize into the night. Everything lay so unsuspecting. Then the fire alarm from the mill bawled out over the neighborhood, and Terry slowed the truck to the curb.

"Which one is it," he said. Tara pointed towards Rosalyn's house, four doors down from them. Something spiked in her stomach when she saw it. Even the way the light ebbed out of the living room window seemed a replica of Rosalyn's own house in Norriswood.