Seize the Night

cargo space behind them. He cocked his burly head and looked at me over the kids' heads, as if to say Ice it down.
    “I'm mellow,” I assured him.
    He sneezed a sneeze of disagreement.
    Bobby had been dead. As in dead and gone . As in deader than dead . All right. Time to get over it. Here in Wyvern, life goes on, occasionally even for the deceased. Besides, we were more than half a mile from the beach, so anything that happened here couldn't be that important.
    “Son, the Tinker Bell thing makes perfect sense,” Roosevelt said, either to placate me or because he had gone stark, raving mad.
    “Yeah,” said Jimmy Wing. “Tinker Bell.”
    “Tinker Bell,” the twins said, nodding in unison.
    “Yeah,” Wendy said. “Why didn't I think of that?”
    Mungojerrie meowed. I don't know what that meant.
    Doogie drove over the curb, across the sidewalk, and parked on the front lawn at the bungalow. The kids stayed in the vehicle with Orson and Mungojerrie. Sasha, Roosevelt, and Doogie took positions around the Hummer, standing guard.
    At Sasha's suggestion, Doogie had included two cans of gasoline in the provisions. With the criminal intention of destroying still more government property, Bobby and I carried these ten gallons of satisfyingly flammable liquid to the bungalow.
    Going back into this small house was even less appealing than submitting to extensive gum surgery, but we were manly men, and so we climbed the steps and crossed the porch without hesitation, though quietly. In the living room, we set down the gasoline cans with care, as though to avoid waking a quarrelsome sleeper, and I switched on a flashlight.
    The cocoons that had been clustered overhead were gone.
    At first I thought the residents of those silky tubes had chewed free and were now loose in the bungalow in a form that was sure to prove troublesome. Then I realized that not even one wisp of gossamer filament remained in any corner, and none floated on the floor.
    The lone red sock, which might once have belonged to one of the Delacroix children, lay where it had been previously, still caked with dust. In general, the bungalow was as I remembered it.
    No cocoons hung in the dining room. None were to be found in the kitchen, either.
    Leland Delacroix's corpse was gone, as were the photographs of his family, the votive-candle glass, the wedding ring, and the gun with which he had killed himself. The ancient linoleum was still cracked and peeling, but I could see no biological stains that would have indicated that a dead body had been rotting here recently.
    “The Mystery Train was never built,” I said, “so Delacroix never went to … the other side. Never opened the door.”
    Bobby said, “Never got infected—or possessed. Whatever. And he never infected his family. So they're all alive somewhere?”
    “God, I hope so. But how could he not be here when he was here and we remember it?”
    “Paradox,” Bobby said, as if he himself were entirely satisfied with that less than illuminating explanation. “So what do we do?”
    “Burn it, anyway,” I concluded.
    “To be safe, you mean?”
    “No, just because I'm a pyromaniac.”
    “Didn't know that about you, bro.”
    “Let's torch this dump.”
    As we emptied the gasoline cans in the kitchen, dining room, and living room, I repeatedly paused because I thought I heard something moving inside the bungalow walls. Every time I listened, the elusive sound stopped.
    “Rats,” Bobby said.
    This alarmed me, because if Bobby heard something, too, then the furtive noises weren't the work of my imagination. Furthermore, this wasn't the scuttling-scratching-squeaking of rodents, it was a liquid slithering.
    “Humongous rats,” he said with more force but less conviction.
    I fortified myself with the argument that Bobby and I were just woozy from gasoline fumes and, therefore, couldn't trust our senses.
    Nevertheless, I expected to hear voices echoing inside my head: Stay, stay, stay, stay …
    We escaped the bungalow without being munched.
    Using the last half gallon of gasoline, I poured a fuse across the front porch, down the steps, and along the walkway.
    Doogie pulled the Hummer into the street, to a safer distance.
    Moonlight mantled Dead Town, and every silent structure seemed to harbor hostile watchers at the windows.
    After setting the empty fuel can on the porch, I hurried out to the Hummer and asked Doogie to back it up until one of the rear tires was weighing down the manhole. The