Wampa Attacks and Burials

*First Published in Issue 17 of Black Rock and Sage

“We want to get in shape this summer so we’re gonna start riding bikes like we used to,” Peter, Rachel’s older brother, announced.

Rachel and her younger cousin, Wes, looked away from The Twilight Zone episode they were watching. Leave it to Peter to come in right at the best part. After watching the whole episode and hearing about the woman’s numerous attempts at surgeries to be beautiful, they didn’t even get to see her run screaming through the halls after her final surgery is a failure. Rachel was always very unsettled by the revelation that the world in the episode actually found pig faces beautiful, and people who were considered beautiful in the real world were deemed horrendously disfigured.

“Rachel and I don’t need to get in shape,” Wes said. He pulled up his shirt to show his lean torso and glanced over at Rachel. She shrugged and lifted her shirt just a little to show her belly button. Rachel started to add that they hadn’t ridden bikes since she was in fifth grade eight years ago, but Wes’s older brother interrupted her.

“Hey, asshats, some of us have man boobs we want to get rid of, and you’re going to join us for cardio,” Connor said. Connor was only four months older than Rachel, but he was two years older than Wes, two years younger than Peter, and had the foulest mouth of anyone in their family. His insult fell a little flat though because he was still in his Shopko uniform from when he got home from work about twenty minutes earlier.

“I kind of like your man boobs. They suit you,” Wes said.

“You bastard.” Connor kicked his brother’s legs off the coffee table.

“So, what do you say, Rach?” Peter asked, completely ignoring their cousins. She looked back at the T.V. to watch as the “disfigured” woman was escorted away by an equally “disfigured” man. “It’ll be fun. Something to make this summer memorable before you flee the country.”

“Study abroad,” she corrected, but didn’t argue.

So, they pedaled their way through the neighborhoods every Sunday night after it got dark, the air finally cool enough for them to actually do anything without drowning in sweat. Rachel and Peter would meet their cousins in the church parking lot on the corner. The four of them would then ride off with no destination in mind, often riding until well after midnight and splitting ways in the same place but miles later.

Her bike was light blue, and she hadn’t ridden it since her dad had taken it out of the shed to surprise her on her birthday in the fifth grade. She only looked a little funny riding it now at nineteen. Peter’s bike was a yellow Huffy from the eighties, and the chain slipped every fourth time he pushed down on the left pedal. Her cousins had the nicer bikes out of the four of them, but Wes’s light was held onto the handlebars with a particularly tenacious piece of Juicy Fruit, and Connor’s bike sounded like it had square wheels.

Rachel called the little posse a biker gang because that’s what they were. They were a literal biker gang. Well, in the biking aspect. They weren’t very gang-like. The worst they did was yell back and forth at each other later than it was probably acceptable to be yelling. They’d also sing the Star Wars score extra loud and off-key as each of them tried to make the sound of every instrument with their mouths.

Sometimes Wes would do tricks on his bike. They’d all be riding along, Wes would say something to get their attention, and they’d look over to see him with his shirt off, standing on the seat of his bike, bent over holding onto the handlebars with one leg extended behind him. It was during one of his tricks that he kicked his light off his handlebars, and they had to circle back around to pick it up from the middle of the street. They spent the rest of that night trying to reattach it using the same piece of gum he’d used before. He had replaced it with Hubba Bubba by the next week. Nobody ever asked him why he never figured out a different way to attach his light.

Peter supplied most of the conversation topics. He always had some new idea to talk about from a documentary he had just watched or a conspiracy theory he read about or heard about from one of the regulars at their dad’s pizza parlor where he worked. His favorite topics were the documentaries that detailed conspiracy theories. He was still fully convinced that Courtney Love hired people to kill Kurt Cobain and that Paul McCartney actually died in 1966.

“No, seriously, look it up. Paul McCartney, like the real Paul McCartney, was in a car accident and died while in surgery. Because The Beatles didn’t want to break up yet, they replaced him with a look-alike. Eventually they felt guilty so they started leaving clues to tell their fans that Paul had actually died. You can hear John Lennon say ‘I buried Paul’ in one of their songs,” Peter said when the rest of the gang met his theory with skepticism.

“But how could they find someone who looked so much like him that nobody would notice?” Wes asked.

“People did notice. You can look at pictures side by side of Paul before the crash and ‘Paul’,” Peter said, using air quotes, “after the crash and see that there are various facial differences, like major things too, not just little differences.”

Connor made a sound of disbelief.

“That’s bullshit and you know it. It’s normal for someone’s face to look different after they’ve been in a serious accident. Just look at Mark Hamill and the differences in his face between A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back. Remember? That’s why they had the wampa attack Luke at the beginning of the movie. His accident didn’t even sound as bad as what you’re saying Paul McCartney was involved in, and he had to have his whole nose and cheek reconstructed,” Connor said. Rachel wanted to add that even the information surrounding Luke Skywalker’s accident was shrouded in mystery, but the boys were already arguing. And so it usually went. Peter would propose a conspiracy. Wes would ask the questions. Connor would provide the argument against it, and Peter would always have an answer.

Rachel rarely contributed with words. She’d pedal along with the boys, laugh at their stupid jokes, and sing her own parts in whatever music they were trying to create, but she didn’t offer anything new. She was also the only one leaving at the end of summer to start her sophomore year of college studying abroad in Paris. It was a great opportunity…it really was…she kept reminding herself every day. She had never experienced living anywhere else. Even going to college she had chosen to just go to the university in town and live at home. Going to Paris was going to be the experience of a lifetime…

“Hey Rach, take a right at the corner,” Peter called out to her from his spot at the back of the group.

“Right, right, right,” Connor shouted as he sped past her and zoomed around the corner. They all followed, but Rachel recognized the house on the corner and hoped she was wrong about where they were.

“Take a left,” Peter yelled to Connor. They all went left, and Rachel was the first to come to a stop. The road in front of them had a large sandstone marker in the middle of it, signifying the beginning of a new neighborhood. The rock said “Brenda Estates.”

They had found themselves in Brenda Estates on one of their first rides that summer and had quickly deemed it a place they never wanted to go again. It wasn’t that it was a bad neighborhood, not like they feared they’d be jumped or shot or anything like that. Actually, Brenda Estates looked like a very nice upper-middle class neighborhood.

It was a single street with multiple smaller streets branching off of it. The houses that lined the street were all two stories tall, and the lawns seemed strangely green and had been that way all summer. They had ridden through a couple times on accident after that first time, and nothing had changed. Now, at the end of the summer, all the lawns were still exactly the same. They were all freshly cut with no wheel marks or patterns left from a lawn mower. In the dim light of the streetlights, they still looked unnaturally perfect.

“It’s like that episode of The Twilight Zone,” Peter whispered.

“Which one?” Connor asked.

Rachel thought she knew which episode Peter was talking about. It was in season five and was basically a glorified “don’t drink and drive or something bad will happen to you” message. After a night of partying, a couple wakes up in a strange town that has no inhabitants, just fake trees, animals, and houses; and no sound except for a little girl’s giggle. They try to leave the town on a train; but the train just goes in a circle, and they end up back in the quiet town, unable to escape.

“The one with the couple in Centerville?” Rachel asked. Peter tapped his nose as if they were playing charades.

“Do you think if I go touch that tree it’ll fall over?” Wes said, pointing to a nearby tree. “Or maybe there’s a stuffed squirrel that I can pet and then be horrified that it’s actually dead.”

Rachel grinned at Wes’s references, remembering the over dramatized reactions of the actors in the episode.

“All it’s missing is the creepy little girl laughter,” Peter said.

“Oh come on! We were not captured by aliens and put in a model town. That was the stupidest episode ever,” Connor said, his voice rising above everyone else’s. Wes, Peter, and Rachel turned and glared at him.

Brenda Estates was quiet, and it felt wrong to talk above a whisper if you even had the nerve to talk at all. Sure, the rest of the neighborhoods were quiet because it was late, but there was always noise in the neighborhoods: sprinklers, dogs, cars driving by on the main roads. Always some sort of noise. Not in Brenda Estates. It seemed like every time they found themselves there, all the noise in the world was sucked into a vacuum, and all Rachel could hear was her own breathing and the sound of her tires on the asphalt.

“Whatever. Are we going in?” Connor asked, shaking off the glares. Rachel looked at him like he was crazy, and then she looked at Peter. He looked just as uneasy as she felt.

“No, man. I feel like if we were in a movie, we’d be destined to die here. We better turn around,” Peter said. Since he was the oldest, he was allowed to make the final call. He turned around, and Wes did the same. Connor looked down the street as if he was going to go ahead anyway, but finally turned and pushed hard on his pedals to propel him past Peter and back through the neighborhood they had been riding through before.

Rachel still stood there straddling her bike. She looked down the street to where the first off street started and saw the little white bench. It wasn’t anything menacing, just a little white metal bench set up next to a pot of dark purple flowers, waiting. As she stared at it, her chest seemed to get tight and her fingers went numb. She got that prickling feeling on her skin that comes around whenever it feels like someone is watching, but there was nobody else around.

“Rach, let’s go. Wes and Connor are leaving us,” Peter called to her. Rachel slowly turned her bike around, hesitant to turn her back on Brenda Estates, just like she’d always been hesitant to turn her back on the bathtub with the shower curtain pulled closed when she was a little girl.

Peter and Rachel rode together in silence, following the whoops of their cousins up ahead.

“Do you think something’s really off with Brenda Estates or is it just our imagination?” Rachel asked finally. Peter’s bike chain slipped, and he grunted, “You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. This bike’s just a piece of crap,” he muttered. “There’s definitely something strange about that neighborhood, but you are talking to someone who will get behind any conspiracy theory he can because that makes life more interesting.”

“That’s true,” Rachel conceded. They were silent again, and Rachel could see their cousins. They rode past a house with the garage door open and a man leaning against the house with a can of soda or beer in his hand. He looked away from the car parked in the driveway with its hood popped and watched as they rode by. Peter waved to him.

“You know what I’m wondering about Brenda Estates?” Peter asked. Rachel looked at him. “Why don’t we ever see anyone?”

“It’s late,” Rachel offered.

“Yeah, but we still see people like that guy in these other neighborhoods. It’s summer. People are out and about until all hours of the night. Where is everyone that lives in Brenda Estates?”

“There isn’t a person or thing alive in this town, and yet, we’re still being watched,” Rachel muttered, quoting the woman from the episode. Peter looked at her questioningly. “Nevermind. Why do you think we keep ending up there?”

“Because we keep taking the same damn turns,” Connor said as he circled around from his place in front and rode between them.

“No, I’m with Peter. I think we’re gonna die there,” Wes said. Rachel wobbled a little on her bike, as Connor accidentally got too close to her. Wes’s comment threw them all off. He was usually the skeptical one that asked all the questions. Why was he agreeing with Peter so fast? Wes was busy trying to follow the cracks in the asphalt with his front tire, so he didn’t notice everyone looking at him until the silence made him uneasy. “What? Did you guys not see that creepy Uncle Sam decoration on the front porch of the second house? It’s August. Put your horrific Fourth of July decorations away. The thing had no eyes.”

“That’s hardly an argument for believing we’re destined to die there,” Connor said.

“And I said that if we were in a movie— a movie, Wes, not real life— then we’d die there,” Peter said.

“How do you know we’re not in a movie?” Wes asked.

“We’d be better looking if we were,” Rachel muttered to herself.

Wes rode ahead of them a little bit, raising his hands in surrender. “All I’m saying is that we seem to end up there a lot no matter how hard we try to avoid it, and there are a lot of scary movies where inanimate objects come to life and kill people.”

“Whatever. I want to ride through there sometime,” Connor said.

Peter rode through the middle of their group humming the first few notes of the cantina song from A New Hope, and it was only a matter of time before the rest of them joined in, and all talk of Brenda Estates was forgotten for the night.

***

That night, as Rachel was brushing her teeth, she felt her skin prickling again and she couldn’t help glancing over at the shower curtain pulled shut, hiding the bathtub from her view. Out of habit, she reached over and yanked it open, the metal rings screeching against the curtain rod. Of course, there wasn’t anything there. There never was.

Her fears originated years and years and years ago, and the rest of her family thought they had gone away a long time ago. Her dad had been watching a black and white movie one night, but she only saw one part of it before he ushered her out of the living room and back to her bed. She remembered the shadowy figure appearing through the translucent shower curtain, the screams and the screeching music. She remembered the knife and the darker liquid running down the drain with the water. Years later when she got her first period and saw the blood mixing with the water, she thought of that movie and hurried through the rest of her shower, her heart racing and skin prickling with the sensation of imaginary eyes watching her. It didn’t help that a couple years later she saw an episode of a T.V. show where people were running around a house during a storm and popping out at each other in pig masks, one of those places being the bathtub with the shower curtain closed.

Needless to say, bathtubs and pigs, especially together, were not high on her list of things she was okay with. She could not see why those people in that episode of The Twilight Zone she loved so much thought the pig faces were beautiful, but why were there so many scary things that used shower curtains and pig faces?

Did they have scary bathtubs and pigs in Paris? She’d have to Google it.

“You’re still up?”

Rachel jumped, jabbing her toothbrush into the roof of her mouth at the sound of Peter’s voice.

“Oh, sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you,” he said. Rachel spit and rinsed her mouth.

“Ouch.”

“Too busy thinking about all the fun you’re going to have in Europe in a couple weeks?” Peter asked. Rachel watched as he closed the shower curtain.

“Something like that.” She felt the urge to yank it open again, convinced something had appeared in there when Peter had closed it.

“I can’t believe you’re going so far away and leaving us all behind,” he said. Rachel’s chest tightened. “Don’t forget to write us. Or you know, Skype, email, phone call, even a text. Not like you’ll even have time to care, but we’re all going to miss you, and you know Mom and Dad would go out of their minds with worry if they didn’t hear from you.”

He started brushing his teeth and Rachel stood there, trying to breathe. She looked at the closed shower curtain again.

“You’re gonna be so wrapped up in life over there I wouldn’t be surprised if you forgot Wes’s birthday next month.” Toothpaste foamed out of Peter’s mouth and dropped into the sink as he tried to talk. “So what do you think you’ll do first when you-“

“I was just going to bed. Goodnight.”

***

“Wait, so who did we have for Jane again?” Connor asked. They were discussing their recasting of Tarzan for the eightieth time as they took a break during their bike ride the week before Rachel was supposed to leave. Connor, Peter, and Rachel would recast each role, and Wes would say a couple lines from that character using voice impressions of whichever actor they had recast in that role. It really was an impressive game of memory and skill on Wes’s part.

A car passed them, the lyrics of “Here comes the Sun” pouring out the open windows. Rachel raised her bike seat again. It had started continually sliding down the past couple weeks, and she was constantly readjusting it. She checked her tires to make sure they were still holding air and then they started riding again.

“I think we said John Hamm,” Peter supplied.

“Oh yeah, and we had Billy Dee Williams as her dad,” Rachel said, trying to hold back her laughter. They all looked at Wes and he laughed before clearing his throat.

“His eyes were intense… and focused, and…I’ve never seen eyes like those before,” Wes said in his solid John Hamm voice before switching to his perfect Billy Dee Williams to say the professor’s line. “Shall I leave you and the chalkboard alone?”

“Who knew Lando Calrissian was such a supportive father,” Connor said.

They all burst out laughing, but as they turned the corner, the weight of immense silence cut them short. Peter’s bike skidded to a halt, sending gravel everywhere. Rachel and Wes pulled up next to him while Connor stopped just a foot short of the Brenda Estates rock.

“What the hell? Why are we here? I was deliberately taking us in the other direction,” Peter said.

“We’re supposed to go through,” Connor called back to them. Rachel looked at Wes and Peter. Wes had gone white and was violently shaking his head.

“Oh no, it’s calling to me. Must. Resist. The call.” Connor inched his bike closer while dramatically leaning his body away from the neighborhood.

“Don’t even joke about that,” Peter said. Connor started laughing.

“Stop being such a pussy,” Connor yelled. Peter started to get off his bike, and Rachel rolled her bike in between Peter and Connor.

“Stop it, you two. It’s easy to get turned around in these neighborhoods,” she said, looking at Peter. She shot a pointed look at Connor, “and nobody is being a— God, I hate this word— a pussy.” She looked between the three boys. “Maybe we should just go through.”

Peter and Wes stared at her, shocked. Connor made a noise of triumph.

“Yes! I’ve got Mom on my side,” he said.

“Rach, we can’t go through. You know that. It’s a dead end. We’ve gone down there before, and we all freaked out. This time won’t be any different,” Peter said.

“Yeah, but what if there’s a way through that we didn’t see? What if we need to go through in order to stop coming back here?”

“No, don’t make me go. That thing is staring at us,” Wes said. He pointed to the Uncle Sam statue on the front porch of the second house in. Rachel stared at it and had to admit that it was quite scary. It was a life size man wearing a patriotic suit and top hat holding a fake sparkler. He had a wide smile plastered across his plastic face and two dark pits where his eyes should have been.

“That’s just an old decoration. Maybe they forgot to put it away. Let’s go!” Connor yelled at them.

“No, I’m not dying tonight,” Peter said. He turned his bike around. “Come on, Rachel.” Wes followed his lead, and Connor just stared at them for a moment. Connor looked down the street and then back at them. He screwed up his face. He looked at Rachel.

“Rach, come on, let’s go. Let’s just go to the end and then catch up with them. This is our last chance this summer,” Connor pleaded with her.

“She’s not going, Connor. Drop it. I’m not letting my sister ride off somewhere out of my sight at night,” Peter said from where he had stopped several feet in the opposite direction. Connor pedaled over to him.

“Why are you so scared of a stupid neighborhood? It’s just a bunch of houses and a stupid bench and a stupid decoration,” Connor said. “And why are you so worried about Rachel and me going down there? She’s gonna be gone next week— out of the country if you don’t remember. What, are you gonna go with her and keep her in your sight every minute of every day?” Rachel didn’t move. She hadn’t even turned her bike around. She could hear their voices behind her.

“She’s my little sister. I’m supposed to keep her safe,” Peter said. His voice was rising in anger. “It’s my job.”

“What the hell does that mean? I thought we were just trying to get in shape this summer and here you are going off about being in charge of Rachel. She’s a grown-ass woman. Why are you so concerned now?” Connor asked.

“Guys, calm down.” Wes tried to intervene. Rachel looked down the street at the bench. Waiting. Peter and Connor’s voices grew in volume, something else about her going to Paris. Something about Peter’s gap year turning into two shitty unadventurous years and ending in a dead end job at the family business. Something else about keeping Rachel safe. Something else about Brenda estates.

“Have you ever even seen Taken?” Peter said.

“That shitty movie with Liam Neeson in it? What the hell does that have to do with anything? This has nothing to do with Brenda Estates!” Connor interrupted. Rachel looked over her shoulder and saw Connor and Peter red-faced, Wes looking panicked.

“I don’t know. Never mind,” Peter said. “We’re not riding down there and that’s final.”

Rachel looked away, clenched her jaw, and pushed off, pedaling furiously in the opposite direction, toward the rock, toward the silence. Her tires began to whir against the asphalt.

“Rachel!” Wes yelled. Connor and Peter stopped shouting and she could imagine them watching her ride away.

“Yeah! Go, Rach, go!” Connor shouted. She heard his tires coming after her, but she wanted to be first. First to reach the end. She was the first to leave the country, the first to face the unknown. She’d be damned if she let anyone…

She zoomed past Uncle Sam and was rapidly approaching the white bench. Her skin felt eyes watching her, but she didn’t know where they were. She half expected someone in a pig mask to be waiting for her, but when she reached the corner with the bench, it was still empty.

The first to move somewhere new, to live on her own, away from everything she knew. She looked around her as she sped down the street. The houses seemed closer, the street smaller, her chest grew tighter the farther she went. Her legs burned with how hard she was pedaling, but she wouldn’t stop until the end. She couldn’t hear Connor following her anymore, and Peter was no longer calling her name.

The first to have to decide who she was going to be, how she was going to introduce herself, how she was going to fit in with new people. The houses around her seemed to be growing one moment and shrinking the next, their proportions all wrong. The lampposts were too big. The houses were too small. The street was too narrow. Brenda Estates was closing in on her like a box.

She couldn’t breathe.

A flash of movement crossed her path and she jerked her handlebars to the right, swerving too fast, her tires losing traction and sliding out to the side. She yelped as the road raced to meet her. Brenda Estates went dark and then she rolled and it slowly came back, looming over her. Pieces of asphalt jabbed into her bare arms and her raw face as she turned her head to the side and saw a black cat running off between two houses.

“Damn cat,” she murmured. She could feel wetness all over her face, but she couldn’t tell if it was tears or blood. Just pain. She tried to kick her bike away, but her leg was still under it and hurt with the movement.

“Rachel!”

“Rach!”

“Is she bleeding?”

Peter, Connor, and Wes all skidded to a halt around her and threw their bikes to the side. Rachel tried to sit up, but Brenda Estates started spinning. Peter knelt down next to her and pushed her back down. Someone else pulled her bike off her.

“Whoa, hold up. Lay still.”

She tried to push his hands away, to say she was fine; she could do it on her own. Her words couldn’t come though, and her head was throbbing. Peter easily pushed her hands away and held her down.

“Hey! What’s going on out here?” Doors opened and slammed. Footsteps.

“My sister-“

“Oh my gosh, is she okay?” More doors, more footsteps.

“What happened?”

“Honey, call someone.”

“Who should I call?”

“Why aren’t you guys wearing helmets?”

“Screw you. We’re adults. Give us a break.”

“Poor thing.”

“Hey, what was all that yelling about? Was that you guys?”

“You’ll be okay.”

“Rach, look at me. It’ll be okay.”

“You guys have been disturbing this neighborhood all summer.”

“Peter, your mom’s on her way.”

“Rachel, why did you do that?”

“Are you the kids that have been riding through here all summer?”

“Trying not to.”

“Wes, give me your shirt. I want to clean up some of this blood.”

Brenda Estates was no longer quiet, but all Rachel could think about was Paul McCartney and Mark Hamill.