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“Not sure,” I said back. “Move. Give me room. ”
Benny had been crowding in too. Both of the boys backed up.
The second time I was certain I’d seen honest-to-God movement. I snapped another couple of pictures, then moved my focus. I swayed the lens to the left by short degrees, pausing to take more pictures of any hint of activity. I couldn’t tell if I was seeing tendrils of fog or tatters of old uniforms; it might have been wind waving the grass, or it could have been something else. I was too far away to judge, and even as I peered through the lens the battlefield cloud was gathering itself into a cottony mass.
I clicked another three or four pictures before deciding the cause was lost, then reached into my pocket to nab the lens cap.
“Hey, look. ” Jamie knocked his arm against mine.
I followed his gaze to the far side of the field, across the street and down at the bottom end of the rectangle.
Several distinct shapes moved through the soupy air, without a lot of caution but plenty of purpose. At a distance it looked like they were carrying things between them, but it was hard to be sure. They were definitely not hiding, though. They stomped along the shoulder of the paved strip, loud and careless, talking among themselves in ordinary voices. It reminded me of a Girl Scout excursion I’d taken as a kid, when our leader had told us to go ahead and make all the noise we could, in order to scare away snakes.
They’re more afraid of you than you are of them, after all.
But I didn’t think the party on the other end of the field was trying to scare off snakes. They had bigger worries to nurse.
“Do they want to draw the attention of every armed lunatic on the battlefield?” Benny asked. “Didn’t they learn their lesson losing a cameraman?”
“Yeah, I think they did,” I said. “Look at them. They’re announcing their presence—making a point of not sneaking up on anybody. ”
“Oh, I get it. They’re giving the crazies time to get out of their way. ”
“Exactly. ”
Jamie raised an eyebrow. “I guess they’re not worried about chasing off the ghosts. ”
I shook my head. “I doubt it. If anything, they probably think the noise might draw them out. They’re killing two birds with one stone. ”
“Why aren’t we doing that?” Benny demanded, louder than before.
I pulled him towards me by his neck and put a hand over his mouth. “Because we aren’t supposed to be here. They won’t get arrested if anyone finds them here. ”
“Oh, yeah,” he mumbled between my fingers.
“Keep it down,” I reminded them both. “Something funny’s going on over there,” I said, pointing towards the cabin. I was certain, the harder I stared, that someone or something was moving, and when I closed my eyes to open my ears and let the night come in, I caught a faint, intermittent electric bleep.
Jamie shifted and rustled into a more favorable position. I put a hand on his arm and one on Benny’s too, holding them both down and still by pure force of will. I needed to listen. I needed to get a better fix on that sound. It was familiar but not common, coming closer, going farther away in four-or five-second intervals.
I pulled them both in, so that our three heads could have nearly fit together in a shoebox. “Do you hear that?” I breathed, hoping they were close enough to read my lips in the dark, even if they couldn’t hear me.
“Hear what?” they mouthed back, so it must have only been me.
It came and went, rose and fell, but not in an up-and-down motion—it made me think of swaying, of swinging back and forth. Or maybe it was something else. My mind wandered back to a sixth-grade science fair and a classmate’s display of Morse code. Dash, dash. Dot. Beep. Bleep. Hum. Whir.
Similar. But not exactly that. This was slower, and less rhythmic.
I wagged my head. “I can’t place it,” I swore.
“Can’t place what?” Benny pleaded.
I shook my head and lowered it. “Don’t know. Hush. ”
“Holy shit,” Jamie muttered. He lifted his arm and flapped his index finger towards the Marshalls and their crew, then over at the field. “You can hardly see them anymore. ”
He was right. In a matter of minutes, the fog had nearly hit its critical mass. It was heavy enough to touch, to brush aside in a cottony swirl if you reached out for it. The cloud was chilly and wet against our skin. I could practically feel my hair frizzing itself into an atomic black puff of humid rage.
Jamie grumbled something else—“Cold sauna of the damned,” I think it was—and he was closer to the truth than he knew.
