Huntress

“So…?” Chloe greeted me with at work the next day.

I looked up from counting the money in my till, confused. “So what?”

“What was in the box?” she asked, like it was obvious. “I’ve been dying to know!”

It occurred to me then that in the two days since I had dug up my mother’s strongbox I hadn’t actually said anything about it to anyone. And now Chloe had come to give me a ride home, evidently dying to know.

“Oh, right. The box…” I scrambled silently for a lie, something believable. “Just a few cute love letters from my dad, and some jewellery.”

To corroborate the story I reached into my work shirt, emblazoned with the Woolworths logo, and pulled out the locket I still hadn’t removed from around my neck.

“Ooh,” she exclaimed, reaching forward and holding it between her fingers. “Was there anything in it? Like a photo?”

I shook my head. “It was empty. But look how pretty it is – I couldn’t not put it on.”

Chloe nodded in agreement and let it go. I tucked it back under my shirt.

“What’d your dad say when you told him?”

I hadn’t thought of this. “He, uh… got a bit teary,” I answered, trying to think about what Dad would be likely to do. “Read them all, you know. He asked if I minded if he kept them, which obviously I said yes to. I told him the tree fell over by itself and the box was showing on the top. I think he bought it.”

“So no explanation on the hobo?”

“No,” I lied. “Still in the dark on that one.”

“Huh,” she shrugged. “Weird.”

I nodded, hoping she’d change the subject. Thankfully she didn’t say anything else about it as I tallied up my register and clocked off.

“Tris working?” she asked, walking out the door beside me. It was still light – somehow I scored an early-ending shift.

It was a weekday, so I nodded, opening my aviator sunnies and slinging them on. “Yeah, as always.”

We got in Chloe’s red, beat-up ’92 Ford Fiesta and she started it up. “Is the restaurant still ok?”

I shrugged, but it wasn’t because I didn’t know. Chloe knows Tris fairly well generally, which was half the reason she was so into ‘us’ as a couple. She also saw him at band practice last night, so I figured she’d have just as good an idea as I did.

“Yeah, fine, I think. He cooked me dinner the other night when Dad wasn’t home, so he must not totally be over the whole making-food-for-people thing.”

“Cute.”

“Mhmm.” Tris is an apprentice chef, so when I say he cooked me dinner I don’t mean he poured boiling water over chicken-flavoured noodles. A professional kitchen is pretty demanding but he seems to cope alright.

There was a couple of minutes comfortable silence, cushioned only by strains of Alexisonfire playing softly from the stereo. The weather was nice outside – sunny without being too bright, blue sky, a typical spring day.

We rounded a corner and, after a minute or so, Chloe peered out her side window, looking at something on the side of the road. Then she gave a little shrug and leaned back to look straight ahead.

“What?” I asked, looking at the same spot as we passed it. There was nothing there.

She gave a little frown. “I don’t know. I thought I saw someone waving at us. But there’s no one there.”

“Weird.”

“I know.”

For the rest of the trip we chatted about random things – TV, work, future plans. I didn’t think anything of the almost-sighting until it happened again.

“Did you see that?” Chloe demanded suddenly mid-sentence.

I looked in the direction she was pointing, out my window, but didn’t see anything but a flash of dark movement disappear quickly. “Sort of… the movement?”

“Yeah. What the hell?”

I thought she was being a little paranoid but was reluctant to say so. Movement on a suburban city street? What an unheard-of concept…

At the same time it did have a slightly edgy quality to it, and not in a good way. This wasn’t someone putting the garbage bin back down the driveway or pruning the roses. It was… shifty, kind of.

I tried not to think about it, and instead checked my phone for messages. There were none, but considering Tris would probably be neck-deep in unwashed potatoes and Chloe was sitting right next to me I didn’t really expect anything.

No missed calls either. This was starting to worry me.

Soon we turned onto my street and the conversation resumed. As Chloe pulled up out the front of my house I shouldered my bag, opened the door a little and started to get out, a goodbye already on my lips.

That was when the brick hit.

Both of us screamed as the windshield cracked like a spiderweb, making a noise so loud it scared me witless. A small pointed corner of a cinderblock poked through the centre point of the web.

“What the fuck?” Chloe screamed. “Is that a brick?”

As soon as the words were out of her mouth there was another shattering crash, this time from my window. It actually exploded this time in a shower of glass and a smaller brick, household but menacing, sailed in. It grazed my cheek in a straight, painful line and landed on the gearstick.

“Quick,” I yelled, diving into the backseat as Chloe screamed again. I dragged her into the tiny space with me, keeping as low as possible. “Down, stay down.”

We lay, panting and tense and more scared than I’ve ever been, in the gap between the front seats and the back ones. Every thump or bang on the car – and there were several, but mostly on the car body and windshield – made us let out muffled screams, which faded into gasps or whimpers. Tears shone from Chloe’s cheeks and my heart pounded so hard I thought I’d break a rib.

Eventually, it abated. A couple of smaller thwacks sounded, like a smaller rocks, and then stopped completely. We waited a further five minutes, just in case, and then raised our heads tentatively.

“I think they’ve gone,” I whispered, unsure as to exactly who ‘they’ were.

Chloe nodded and raised her head. Three of the windows, including the windshield, were a mess – one shattered, the others a mess of splintering glass. She peered out a clear one and whispered, “I can’t see anything.”

Tentatively, I opened the door a little, then paused in case this tiny movement incited something unpleasant. It didn’t. I swung the door open properly and still nothing happened. Heartened, I climbed out the door and Chloe followed.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” she whispered as she took in the damage to her car.

I had to agree. The bonnet was dented in three different places, a headlight was gone and the windshield was beyond recognition. Glass sprayed the inside front where my window smashed.

“Holy shit,” I muttered, shutting the door. The movement caused the cinderblock lodged in the windshield to crack it further, dislodge and then slide with an inhuman screech down to the wipers.

“Di, what am I going to do?” my best friend asked, once again near tears. “Look at this. I don’t even know if we have insurance.”

“We’ll work something out,” I replied, hoping it was true. “Let’s go inside.”

She nodded and leaned in the broken window carefully to get her bag. Then she paused, and instead of bringing out her bag held the brick that grazed my cheek.

“It’s got something written on it,” she said, puzzled. I took it and read the words scrawled across it with permanent marker.

STAY AWAY

Chloe ducked down a little, craning her head to look at the underside. “There’s something on the other side, too.”

I flipped it over. OR NEXT TIME ILL MAKE SURE YOUR DEAD.

Staring, I checked the rest of the brick’s surface, but that was it. Stay away, or next time I’ll make sure you’re dead. Despite the bad grammar the message chilled me. I’d barely touched the surface of this and already someone knew about it.

But how?

Chloe looked beyond shaken – after all, this would have been totally out of the blue. It was bad enough for me and I had a suspicion about what was going on. I kept hold of the brick and led her inside, then got us both a drink.

After a minute’s thought, sitting at the bench, she shook her head. “That was insane.”

I nodded, and sat down heavily beside her. My cheek was stinging where the brick had scratched it; when I put a finger to the graze it came away bloody. Chloe grimaced and got up to search for the Betadine and a bandaid.

“Here,” she said, putting some antiseptic on a tissue and dabbing the scratch. “God knows what that brick had on it.”

Once it was clean it seemed not to need the bandaid, so she left it. I got up to get us water and sat down again. Chloe took a deep breath and let it out with a shudder. She still looked horrified.

“Di… do you think someone just tried to kill us?”

I didn’t know what to say. Yes? No, only me? I doubted either would go down well.

“I don’t know,” I shrugged uneasily. “But I hope they don’t try again.”

* * *

A crash at the door five hours later made us jump.

“What was that?” Chloe asked, eyes wide. The noise from the TV cut off suddenly when I pressed the Mute button.

The door slammed again but this time we heard a yell. “Di, are you there?”

Relief on both our faces. Tris. I’d sent him a message earlier asking him to come over after work. “In here,” I called, and turned the volume back up.

He appeared, looking adorably dishevelled and a little freaked out, in the doorway. The chef’s shirt was stained with a multitude of finger-streak marks and he was holding something in a takeaway container I knew would be delicious.

“What,” he said to Chloe, setting down the container, “the fuck happened to your car?”

Of course – it must have still been on the nature strip. He would have seen it before he came in. Chloe and I looked at each other, uncertain as to what exactly had happened.

I recalled the bricks, more specifically what was written on them.

“Honestly, I don’t know. Someone – two people, it seemed like – started throwing bricks at us. Bricks. With words on them.”

He cast a worried glance at my face and moved toward me to touch it lightly. “Is that how that happened? Holy shit, you could have been killed.”

I nodded. “I know. I’m fine, though. A little scared but otherwise okay. We’ve been trying to decide if we should go to the cops.”

Tris nodded thoughtfully. “Probably. After all, it was a death threat. But if you didn’t see the guys at all then they can’t do much…”

He had a point. Yawning, I conceded, “True. They’ll probably just say gang violence or something.”

He then sat down next to me, his arm around my shoulders again. I sat comfortably between him and Chloe, contemplating how nice it was to have both of them. The worried knot in my stomach started to loosen a little.

“You guys,” I started, a yawn interrupting, “are great, y’know that?”

Chloe yawned in response. “You sound drunk.”

“I’m not. Just… happy.”

Tris snorted. “The amount of times I’ve heard that.”

I didn’t respond, instead choosing to snuggle into his shoulder. We sat watching TV for a few more minutes and I started to contemplate telling them about the box. I was trying to form the words in my head... it was sort of hard picking the right ones... and slowly, I got sleepier and sleepier. I was so comfortable on the couch it was hard not to nod off…

So I did.