Chapter 5 #2
At the end, he’d lucked into catching the groundhog in a net as it had rushed toward the main entrance of its burrow.
The rodent was big, at least fifteen pounds of struggling fur, claws, and long front teeth.
He wrangled it into one of their larger cages and slapped the door shut.
His client, a woman he estimated to be in her mid-sixties named Shelly Sparrow, had been surprised to see the burrow entrance inside her garden.
Along with her payment, Shelly gave him tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, and yellow squash, all in a large paper grocery bag.
Back at his truck, he stripped off his sweat-drenched shirt and draped a towel over his seat back for the drive out to Parson’s Pond.
His nipples hardened in the blast of the AC, and snippets of his conversation with Tracey echoed around his mind as he guided the truck along the sandy dirt trail that circled the pond.
The paper bag of vegetables rustled and crinkled in the footwell of the passenger seat.
In the bed of the truck, the groundhog scratched and whistled and screeched.
After pulling off under a group of maple trees, Demetrius got out.
The air was thick with humidity, but the shade beneath the trees helped him feel cooler.
Bugs circled him as he grabbed the cage and carried the groundhog deeper into the woods.
The second time he stumbled over a root, he decided it was far enough back from the trail and set the cage on the ground.
“Sorry to evict you, but you weren’t really being a good neighbor, were you?” Demetrius said as he fiddled with the clasp on the cage door. “This is a nice wooded area. You’ll have a lot of stuff to eat and plenty of places to dig a new house.”
When he lifted the door, the groundhog ran out and waddled away into the undergrowth.
He watched its small tail sway until it vanished from sight behind a group of trees.
Back in the truck, he checked his shirt, grimacing at the feel of the material, but he pulled it on anyway before he started the engine.
He let the AC run as he remained parked beneath the trees, hands in his lap and staring out into the trees.
Tracey was really hurting. Even though they weren’t what Demetrius thought of as close friends, they’d gone through school together and fought some pretty crazy battles side by side.
And after the witch-demon had been handled in the spring, how often had he stopped by to check on her?
Had he asked her to meet him at Margie’s for lunch even once?
He and Cody had been given their company back, but what had happened for all the others?
He drove back to town, brow furrowed and eyes squinting even though he wore his sunglasses.
The sun was high and bright, bleaching the color from everything around him.
He had nothing to do back at the office, and Cody would be busy with two other jobs this afternoon, so he had some time to himself.
On impulse, he turned onto Bleakman, a tree-shaded side street that passed through a couple of neighborhoods until he entered the Stone Hill subdivision.
He found his way back to the house on Shale Road where he and Cody had taken out the zombie.
Parking at the curb across the street, he draped his hands over the steering wheel and studied the house.
Over the years, a number of people had left Parson’s Hollow.
After the attempted werewolf coup years ago, real estate prices had, unsurprisingly, plummeted.
As more and more creatures of the night threatened the town, a number of residents sold their houses at a loss in order to move their families away.
Others had simply packed up and left, leaving their homes vacant, populated only by mismatched furniture and a few tchotchkes.
Some new buyers were snatching up properties at extremely low prices.
These new residents leaned toward the influencers and creative types who had become fascinated by Parson’s Hollow’s monster magnetism.
Others were investors looking for the next hot short-term rental spot.
The City Council meetings were filled with heated conversations about how to get in front of it all before it completely changed the feel of the town.
Other houses, like this one, sat empty and fell into disrepair. He wasn’t sure which scenario was worse.
He wiped his forehead as he crossed the street, looking from corner to corner, trying to see deeper into the shadows behind the dry, brown bushes, kindling waiting for a spark.
The sunlight was so bright it made everything look flat, even from behind his sunglasses.
Sweat prickled the back of his neck, and he shook a tingling feeling out of his hands as he walked the cracked and crumbled concrete driveway.
A shiver went through him once he passed into the shade of the house, and he caught himself angling slightly away from the faded aluminum siding.
In the backyard, he stopped at the spot where Cody had taken out the zombie.
The puddle of gore had dried to a dark patch swarmed by flies.
He followed the zombie’s footprints over the fallen section of fencing into the tree line.
Stopping, he removed his sunglasses to inspect the ground around the trunks of the trees.
Nothing moved. Birds called and a dog barked from a yard down the block, but everything seemed to be avoiding this yard.
He ventured deeper into the trees. Weeds and ferns blanketed the spaces between.
Vines climbed the trunks, burrowing into the bark and snaking along the ground.
He moved slowly, careful not to catch his foot in a clump of vines and weeds as he turned his head back and forth, inspecting what little he could see of the ground.
About a yard into the trees, he stopped and squatted.
Ferns had been trampled and several vines broken by someone.
He moved aside leaves and dying greens to expose a partial imprint in the soft dark soil.
It looked like the tread from a kind of work boot, much like he and Cody wore on a daily basis, but smaller.
It was a much different print than the smooth-soled shoes the zombie had been wearing.
Someone else had been watching this house. Or them.
Demetrius snapped a couple of pictures, then scouted around the area a little more. He found no other prints, and he emerged from the trees into the heat of the afternoon, retreating to the shade along the side of the house. Pausing outside the side door, he tried the knob.
It was cool and slick in his hand as it turned easily. The hinges rasped when he pushed the door open. The smell of damp rot and mildew wafted around him.
He shouldn’t be doing this. Not without something from the paranormal tackle box in the bed of his truck.
And definitely not alone. But it was the middle of the day, and if he walked away from this door, even just to grab something for self-protection, he didn’t know if he’d have the nerve to go inside when he returned.