Was her period coming? A cramp spasmed. Suddenly she felt so sick she had to pull over. The cramp darted up like a spike, or, perhaps, a penis. A headache flared. Yes, it must be her period. “The Red Tide,” some of the girls called it. Why should women have to bleed from their wombs once a month? It wasn’t fair. Men should have to bleed from their penises too, then. But next her nose began to bleed, and that had never happened before.
Dizzy, she wiped her nose with a napkin, then she felt fine again. Weird, she thought. When she got back on the road, she realized her period wasn’t due for another week.
The agro site was pitch dark.
She stopped in the gravel access. The office lights were out; dark blotted the pens and white stables to ghosts of themselves, and the front gates were chained shut. Mr. Sladder’s little security car wasn’t to be seen. She looked past the wooden post fences, past the stables. In the distance, fog rolled along the wood line.
Power failure, she thought. Maybe Mr. Sladder’s car was inside the gate. But when she approached the compound, she knew something else was wrong.
She got out of the car. Total silence yawned over the site. Of course it’s quiet, she tried to assure herself. It’s the middle of the night. But it was more than that, wasn’t it? The site was too quiet.
“Mr. Sladder, are you in there?” She reached in and honked her horn. The night sucked up the sound. “Mr. Sladder!”
Headlights roved across her back. Startled, she turned.
Mr. Sladder was creaking out of the little white security car. He put a piece of gum in his mouth. “Nellapee? Oh, you come to see the horses, did you? ’Fraid we gotta problem.”
“What happened to the lights?”
“Dag power went out. I just come from the power station down the road. Thought some dag kids mighta got in there, messed with the transformers or somethin’.”
“Did they?”
“Nope. Place was locked up tight. Come on, honey.”
He unlocked the front gate and took her to the office, leading with a big boxy flashlight. “Dag quiet out here, ain’t it?”
Penelope didn’t hear him. She was looking out past the fence again. The fog seemed closer, thicker. It was eerie.
“Be with ya in a minute, darlin’. Got to raise me some heck with them morons down campus.” He sat at the desk and dialed the phone. Was it the chair that creaked, or his joints?
Penelope stood timidly. The flashlight seemed to warp the room.
First Mr. Sladder called the campus physical plant department. He was told that no power failures had been reported on campus and that the station meters showed no fluctuations into the agro site. He called the state police and was told that no traffic accidents that might’ve brought down a power line had been reported. Lastly he called the power company, who could not account for their power loss. But a “crew” would be sent “first thing.” “First thing when?” Mr. Sladder shouted into the phone. “First thing next week? Next month? Lugheads!” He hung up, sputtering. “Dag dabbit. Like to kick ’em all in their bee hinds, I would. Ain’t nothin’ but a bunch of blammed shammers.” The draining light made him look shrunken in the stiff uniform. His hat with a big badge on it sat ludicrously atop his cropped head.
“Come on, Nellapee.” He gave her a flashlight. “Let’s go check the junction box. I musta overlooked somethin’.”
Outside smelled funny. Something vaguely bitter meshed with the usual ripe stable smells. They walked between the white buildings. Penelope saw a flask in Mr. Sladder’s back pocket.
The old man looked worried. Could he be as afraid of the dark as she? She glanced past the fences to see how far the fog had crept, then realized they were walking in it. It came up nearly to her knees.
“Dag ground fog creeps up on ya. A fella can’t see where he’s walkin’. Careful of holes, hon. Holes all over the dag place.”
Mr. Sladder slid into the utility shed as if swallowed, light and all. Penelope stood alone in the fog, which the moon had made opaque—a murky, graying half glow.
“Blam it! Look at this!”
Penelope entered the shed, which was full of coursing rings of light. She smirked at an odor like burned plastic.
“Power surge musta blowed through here. Fuse housing melted ’fore the breaker pole could trip.”
The black pop switch on the center box read “On.” The main class CTL fuse sat in the melted carrier like a nugget of coal.
“Has this happened before?” she asked.
“Well, sure, honey. The lugheads don’t regulate the power proper is what. Just ain’t never happened this bad.”
“But you can fix it, right?”
“Me? Naw, hon. Have to get a ’lectrician out here to replace these boxes.” Mr. Sladder scratched his ear. Was he disturbed? “Just ain’t too keen on sittin’ around in the dark.” In the flashlight beam, the lines in his old face resembled knife cuts in meat.
Then a series of very loud crisp sounds echoed outside—
chunk. Crack!
Penelope jumped.
Again: chunk. Crack!
“Jiminy peter and Creesus Jeist! Ja hear that!”
She snatched his arm, which was thin as a wood rail in the starched shirt. “What was that? What’s happening?”
“Monkey business is what, dear. Scuse me while I consult my old friend Mr. Johnnie Black.” He took a quick sip from the flask and smacked his lips. “There she goes, much better. Now come on.”
The skinny arm led her out of the shed. The fog was everywhere now, a shifting great lake. It parted murkily around their steps.
“Mr. Sladder—”
“Jus’ you stay behind me, sweetheart.”
“Is someone here?”
“Dag straight I’m afraid, hon. Probably some town lugheads, comin’ up here all the time in their pickups, drinkin’, carryin’ on. ’Swhat happens ta boys when they’se not brung up proper.”
The farthest stables were out of use. Here, a section of the post fence had been broken, the twin crossbeams cracked.
“Looks like someone had a job here,” Mr. Sladder remarked.
Penelope remembered the two robust chunks. They’d been awful, irrevocable sounds. “Was it…an ax that did this?”
“’Fraid so, hon, and a big one, to drop beams as big as these.”
So people were running around the site with axes? “I’m scared, Mr. Sladder!” she whispered. “We have to call the police.”
“We’ll do just that, sugar. But first I wanna check—”
The animals, she finished in thought. An alarm went off in her mind. The horses! The ax! But that was too horrible to even think of…
They glided through the murk to the henhouses. The silence now seemed threatening. She prayed to hear something, but there was no sound at all. Not a rustle. Not even a single, simple cluck.
They aimed their lights through the chicken wire. Mr. Sladder’s words rolled out of his mouth like some slow, dark liquid. “Holy creepin’ Moses. What kind of dag madman—”