Page 140 of Fourth Point Of Contact

I smirked at her. She should know me better than to let her ride in anything so flimsy after the day we’d had. “How about a minivan with armored doors and reinforced glass?”

33

PIPER

I paced the house,my eyes flicking out the window every few seconds to see what was going on. We’d gotten an automated call about lockdown, which neither Debra or I were prepared for. What the hell did lockdown even mean? I ran for the door and immediately flipped the deadbolt, wondering if that was enough.

“If it was something really terrible, I’m sure Patrick would have told us to hide under a desk or something,” Debra said, stirring her cup of tea just as she’d been doing for the past ten minutes.

It had gone cold by now, I was sure, but I didn’t bother to tell her that. She was keeping herself busy while her son was out there doing God knows what. I’d already been on the receiving end of the terror. When he jumped in front of that bear, I was scared, but this was different. Now, I had feelings for him. I’d grown used to living in the same house with him, and I knew his mother and loved her.

What would I do if something happened to him?

With nothing else to do, I marched upstairs and started stripping the beds. I’d do laundry. That would at least keep my mind occupied enough to function. I couldn’t just stare out the window, waiting for him to return.

“Honey?” Debra asked from the doorway.

“Hmm?” I answered, refusing to look at her. If I did, I might break down in tears, and that just wasn’t acceptable.

“He’s going to be okay.”

“Oh, I know that,” I said, flipping the covers off the bed.

“He does this for a living, as much as I like to pretend that he’s really a realtor or in construction.”

“You do that?” I asked over my shoulder.

“Of course. It keeps the fear at bay. When he called me and told me he had a broken leg, I’d actually convinced myself that it happened when a beam fell on him at work,” she chuckled.

That was actually a pretty good idea, but I wasn’t sure it would do anything for me in this moment. I grabbed the fitted sheet at the corner and started to pull when a hideous black spider with white dots on its back and the size of my hand crawled up the wall. Screaming, I released the sheet, jumping back as my heart pounded in my chest.

“What the hell is that?” I screamed, grabbing a shoe off the floor and throwing it at the wall. The spider scurried away, now lost somewhere behind the bed.

“What? What is it?” Debra shouted.

“I don’t know! Some kind of demon spider!”

She gripped my arms just as tightly as I gripped hers, both of us terrified to go any closer to the wall. I was not normally afraid of spiders, but I’d never seen a spider that looked like that before.

“Oh my God! That thing was terrifying! Where is it?”

“Maybe we should move the bed,” Debra said, her voice shaking.

I reared back, horrified by her suggestion. “You want me to go closer to that thing?”

“Only so we can kill it.”

“Kill it? That thing will eat me!”

“But…if we don’t, it could go somewhere else in the house.”

The thought sent chills down my spine. There was no way in hell I’d be able to sleep tonight knowing that horrible beast was wandering around, waiting for its moment to pounce.

“Okay…say we…we move the bed. What do we kill it with?”

“Vacuum cleaner?”

I wrinkled my nose. “I don’t think I’ve seen one in the house.”

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