Flock by Wendy Delson Read Free Book Online

scouting for Midas’s bogies.
    Again, the dog strained to keep going.
    “Calm down, boy,” Jack said. “We’ll get there.”
    We started up again, heading for the woods. Taking deep breaths, I told myself that it was the back orchard, not the woods, that rattled the dog. It wasn’t much reassurance, but it kept me from visualizing the trees’ branches as snatching fingers and hearing threats issue down from their heights. As to Midas’s nervousness, I reminded myself that dogs were worriers by nature, operating on some kind of perennial Code Red, where everyone from the UPS guy to the cookie-peddling Girl Scout was up to no good.
    “How long has your family owned this land?” I asked, my voice taking on a breathy quality. This wooded area felt very different to me, as if thrumming with something ancestral. Plus, crazy as it was, I wanted the press of trees to know we were there, as if somehow conversation would quell other forces. Forces that had Midas now howling in some kind of doggy-distress signal.
    “He’s really agitated,” Jack said. Ahead on the path, our lights illuminated the dog’s snout-lifted-to-the-heavens yowl. “Sorry, did you ask me something?”
    “About the property.”
    “Right,” Jack said, coaxing Midas to continue. “We’ve owned it since the late thirties.”
    “And what was here before?”
    “Prairie, mostly. These woods are probably just as they were. Other sections were cleared, of course.”
    Above me, I heard a sudden snap of branches. Underfoot, I stumbled upon an arterial root contorting across the narrow path. As I shone my Maglite down on its tentacle-like spur, I had the creepiest, though fleeting, image of it throbbing.
    I was relieved when, up ahead, the trees thinned and patches of moonlit clouds became visible. I allowed myself a full, lung-expanding inhale. Only then did I realize how sharp and ragged my breaths had been. With the express of air, my ribs rattled.
    Weird.
    Midas howled again.
    Jack, pulled by the dog, increased his pace. They set out across a small open field to where a plot of trees loomed in the distance. I jogged to keep up. The prospect of being left behind made my legs quiver until they ached. It was the oddest response, until I realized that it wasn’t a reaction, that the reverberations weren’t being produced by my legs. They were, in point of fact, absorbing shock waves emanating from the ground.
    I caught up with Jack. He, too, was feeling the vibrations and held his hands up to the sky as if they were something to be caught like raindrops. Midas had begun running in a circle, yapping at the air.
    “What is that?” Jack asked.
    You don’t grow up in California without feeling the earth shake a time or two, but there was something different about this tremor, though I couldn’t have explained it at the time. I took a step past Jack to where a row of apple trees began a neat sentrylike formation and shone my light on their trunks. It was curious the way the silvery limbs were rippling as if themselves in fear. As I touched the rough surface of one, it seemed to shrink away, until I realized it wasn’t shrinking, it was slipping.
    “Jack!” I screamed, now holding on to the trunk and hopping from one foot to the other.
    My light fell to the ground and provided a single swath of illumination into the area thick with apple trees. They were, dozens of them, dropping before my eyes.
    As I clung to the tree in terror, I could hear Midas’s frantic barks as he bounded away and Jack’s urgent “Kat, oh, my God, Kat!”
    Now the ground beneath my feet was rocking like a rowboat. I felt something grab at my jacket collar, and I looked up to see Jack’s hand tugging at me. I released the tree and clasped his arm just as everything beneath me went as liquid as pancake batter.
    “Hold on!” Jack yelled.
    Instantly I was swept down with the collapsing ground. I screamed, though the roar of the shifting earth had me beat by a landslide — a