Please Try Your Call Again Later

Everything was going fine…until it wasn't. Human history in a single line. The story of my life.

Sitting in my broke-down car on the side of a two-lane Appalachian road, those words hit home.

Always, always check the air in your spare, folks. When I left college to spend the first two weeks of vacation with my boyfriend and his parents at their South Carolina beach house, tire pressure was the last thing on my mind. I had a strawberry smoothie and two donuts in the console, good tunes on the radio, and the early-summer breeze in my hair; exams were behind me and the future was looking up.

Now the watery remains of the smoothie had become my only source of water and the donuts were a distant memory. Out here, there was nothing but static and hellfire sermons on every station, and the air was so humid it felt like I'd grown a second skin of sweat.

To make matters worse, my son Max was terrified of something outside in the woods. He screamed at me every time I tried to put the windows down, even though the car was an oven. Max's eyes darted back and forth between the trees, his face and hands pressed tight against the glass…

What had he seen out there?

More than ever, I wished he could just tell me. But Max has nonverbal autism, and while in most ways he's just like any other seven-year-old, communication can be a struggle sometimes.

I looked at my phone again and frowned. 9-1-1 is supposed to work no matter what, right? Then why do I keep hearing this weird message..

"We're sorry. Your call cannot be completed at this time. Please try your call again later. Goodbye."

Click.

It was the tenth time I'd listened to that message. Suddenly, I just had to get out of the car. The sticky heat, the staticky radio, the absolute inability of my phone to reach my insurance or the police–it was just too much.

"NO!" Max wailed as I reached for the door handle. It's one of the only words that Max knows…but he hardly ever uses it. Not unless it's really, really important.

"What, honey?" I tried to smile. "Mommy's just gonna stretch her legs for a minute, k?"

"No…" Max whimpered–but I couldn't take it anymore. I pried his hands off, put down the windows in spite of his protests, and stepped out of the car. I let out a deep breath and paced along the gravel shoulder to calm myself down.

I kept one eye on the woods–

But the only indicator that anything other than my son and I were alive on this godforsaken stretch of road was the chirring of about a billion insects. For a little while, anyway.

At first, I thought the pickup was a mirage. But the scratchy country music and rattling muffler changed my mind as it grew closer and closer. I jumped, waved my arms…I didn't care how stupid I looked…as long as they stopped.

The truck threw gravel in my face as it blasted by at double the speed limit. Thanks for nothing, I thought, and dialed 9-1-1 again.

"We're sorry…please try your call again later…"

I had to hold in the urge to throw my phone. Eight years ago, before Max was born and I quit work to go back to college, I probably would have–but I was a parent now. I had to set a good example for Max…

…Where was Max?

The passenger door hung open. A staticky sermon still poured out of the radio…but my son was nowhere to be seen.

"MAX!" I sprinted toward the car. Child-sized footprints in the gravel led down the embankment…

And into the forest.

Cursing, I went in after him–and walked face-first into a giant cobweb. A spider that I couldn't see but that felt about the size of my hand scrambled through my face and hair in its hurry to escape. Learning my lesson, I started swiping the air in front of me with a stick…but I always missed a few. The feeling of tiny legs skittering across my thighs and neck became a regular occurrence as I trudged into the sea of trees.

It was gloomy in the undergrowth, but somehow it wasn't any cooler. The car was uphill and the deep woods, downhill; at least I hoped it would be hard to get myself lost. I wondered what could've possessed Max to come down here. If my little man just had to take a whizz, there was no need to go so far…

And hadn't he been terrified of these woods in the first place?

Then I saw him, in the shadows of an enormous oak up ahead. He stood perfectly still, his back to me, staring straight ahead at the oak's trunk, which forked upwards like a serpent's tongue.

"Max! I grabbed his shoulder and spun him around, half-relieved, half-furious. "Don't scare me like that!"

Max's eyes were round and marble-white. Drool dribbled onto his bright-red Pokemon T-shirt. His clothes were filthy…

"Don't scare YOU?" My son spoke–or something spoke through him–in a rumbling voice. "But you SHOULD be afraid."

Max had never said more than one word at a time. Even that had been a struggle, but now suddenly his syntax was perfect. I took a step backwards and nearly tripped over the tree's gnarled roots. My jaw dropped as my seven-year-old son scrambled into the high branches with monkey-like agility. "Come." Max hung by a single hand twenty feet above the ground. "It isn't safe on the ground during the conjoining."

I felt my fists clench on their own. "I don't know who you are, or what you want. But you're going to give me back my boy. Right. Now."

Dangling above, Max shrugged. "Come and get him." He climbed higher.

I couldn't remember the last time I'd climbed a tree. The bark was rough beneath my sweating fingers, the moss slick. Twice I felt my foot slip off a branch, and only clinging like a shipwreck survivor to the foliage kept me from a nasty fall…but my son kept moving upwards.

The thing controlling Max walking him out, puppetlike, along a lightning-struck branch that extended over ten feet above the canopy. It was like he was being made to walk the plank.

The thin limb wavered dangerously as I crept along it.

"Max." My voice shook from the effort of keeping my balance. "It's your mother. I…I can't go out any further. Please."

"Stay where you are, then." Max turned, his footing perfect despite the dizzying height, and pointed toward our car. "Look."

The sunlight glinted on the windshield. Even from all the way up here, it was the only vehicle visible for miles. But something else was coming down the road from a town that I could barely make out on the horizon. As it grew larger, I realized it was a person…

Or something like one.

No person moved that fast, with such enormous, jerky strides. No person had arms and legs that stretched like gummy candies or a head that could turn fully backwards.

No, whatever it was, it only looked human from a distance…but its razor-sharp smile was so wide I could see it even from the treetop. The face around that face-ripping grin was smeared with gore.

It stopped when it reached the car. Twisted its neck, made a rattling, cicada-like sound that made even the insects go quiet.

Then it slammed its face through the windshield.

Fistful by fistful, heedless of the damage to itself, it destroyed my car: tearing out the foam inside the seats, snapping off sun visors, flinging all it could rip into the street.

Until another vehicle appeared on the horizon. The grinning man skittered, cockroach-like, beneath my car…and waited.

I opened my mouth to shout a warning–but my white-eyed son was there, holding it shut with his hand. Forcing me to watch as a pair of guys not much older than me slowed down, doubted for a moment…then pulled off in front of my ruined car. They got out, inspected the damage, exchanged a look.

I couldn't just let that monster get them. I slipped a hand into my pocket and dialed 9–1-1.

Please oh please oh please…

I think the taller, bearded one was about to read my license plate number when an arm shot out from beneath the car.

It was strong and boneless as a squid's tentacle, and it dragged him under with a scream. After a few chomps that I could hear from my hiding spot on the tree branch, the thing under the car scurried after the second guy, who was running for his life–

But the grinning man could crawl faster than he could run. This time, I could see as well as hear the effects of a person's throat being torn out by teeth. He quivered and was still.

Then, impossibly, he jerked himself to his feet. As did the man beneath the car.

"We're sorry. Your call cannot be completed at this time. Please try your call again later."

The electronic voice sent birds fluttering up from the canopy. All three things snapped their necks in our direction. Only then did I notice the black rottenness of their eyes–lit only by tiny pinpricks of light, like diamonds sparkling in lumps of coal. They took big, jerky steps…

Toward us.

Max was pushing me backwards, keeping me from falling with a hand still clamped over my mouth; he was impossibly strong. He didn't stop until we were hidden by the green shadow of the canopy.

The things were fast, despite their erratic movements. Moments later, I saw their dark shapes below us.

It was only a matter of time until one of them looked up.

Suddenly, all three of them froze. A low, rasping sound–so loud it seemed to come from every direction at once–filled the forest. The things were still as scarecrows…then, carefully, they began to back off. It took me a moment to realize that the sound was breathing.

A dark shape snuffled in the ferns below us. It was enormous, but moved through the trees like poured black ink.

Those heavy, wheezing breaths got faster. It had picked up a scent. With a noise like a hurricane it crashed through the undergrowth–in pursuit of the three grinners.

"W-what was that?" I panted, when it finally felt safe to breathe again.

"THAT was what Max saw in the woods." The thing possessing my son explained. "Your son is a very special boy. You are lucky that he could hear my call. You are especially lucky that not all of us who cross over at the conjoining enjoy the same forms of pain."

"What's this 'conjoining' you keep talking about?"

"When the stars are right, the barriers between your world and ours become THIN in some places. This is one of those places. It will pass."

Pass, it did…but slowly. The summer solstice is the longest day of the year–and evening took forever to come. The tree branch wasn't exactly comfortable, but it beat being down the ground. Apart from the occasional fleeing car or freakish shape darting across the road, barely anything moved. 'Max' stood stock-still, observing the lengthening shadows like they were something he might not see again for a thousand years.

"We will not be safe up here much longer. A storm is coming."

Sure enough, tower-like cumulonimbus clouds were advancing across the landscape. The sunset turned their peaks pink and gold, but there was nothing beautiful about the looming darkness underneath them.

In occasional flashes of lightning, I glimpsed the ragged black behemoths swimming through the air beneath the storm like sharks through water. I could also see the vehicles advancing down the road beside my ransacked car. They looked military, except more futuristic than anything I'd ever seen and without any insignia.

The pops and flashes of gunfire and artillery burst from some of them…until then they were swallowed by the storm. In just a few minutes, it would be over us as well.

"Come down." My toes kept slipping off of the branches and I scratched myself up pretty badly–but I made it. Down to the roots and damp black earth and whatever might still be hunting in the undergrowth. "Lay on your belly. Cover yourself with dirt. Try not to think. It will pass, and we will be gone." The thing in Max's body paused.

"Your son loves you very much. It hurts him very much that he cannot tell you. I know…because I have been feeding on his pain. I cannot describe to one of your kind how delicious it is. Perhaps he will have less of it when I go. Or perhaps not. Come down. Cover yourself. Do not think! It will pass."

"Why are you helping me?" I hissed, digging into like an animal and pressing myself into the mud. Sheets of strange azure rain were already blasting through the trees.

"I want to save you…" the thing wearing my son's face said "...for later." It looked at me with an expression of predatory hunger completely out of place on the face of a seven-year-old before worming down into the black mud beside me.

Maybe those huge ragged things I saw swimming in the clouds were just a figment of my imagination; maybe it was just an ordinary storm.

I wouldn't know. I lay on my stomach, the rain on my back and the mud in my face, and didn't look up once. I tried not to hear, smell, or even think.

That's why I couldn't say when the mental exhaustion finally struck. At some point, I fell asleep…and when I woke, Max was snoring lightly beside me.

The nightmare was over.

Almost.

Max must have understood, somehow, what had happened to him. There was nothing I could do but hold him when he grabbed his head, sobbing, and repeated "NO NO NO" without stopping until his throat was too hoarse to go on. I thought about what the voice inside of him had told me and squeezed him tighter.

When he finally calmed down enough to get back to the road, we found a police roadblock a less than two mile ahead. Beyond them, more of those strange black paramilitary vehicles.

The weary-eyed officer tried explaining to me how we could get a tow to a mechanic a few towns back and continue our journey from there, but Max just shook his head.

"Ma," he squeezed my hand. "Home."

​