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dream, something that will fade away by the evening when we sit down to dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Arget, and I wash the dishes while Holly rubs my back in comforting circles.
    Then I see the black and silver light again.
    It's flickering at the edge of the brush, a fleeting burst of color that fades away as quickly as it came.
    “ Did you see that?” Martin asks and seconds later, out of the bushes, a homeless man stumbles, jacket dirty and stained with blood. He lunges for Dawson and pauses only when Holly smashes him in the face with her baseball bat.
    “ Run!” she screams and we all bolt out of the small park and into the street where I'm nearly run over by a bus. Holly kisses my face a hundred times on the other side and then we run. And run. And run.
    Now the four of us are standing outside of my house and my mother's car is parked in the driveway.
    “ That's a good sign,” I tell Holly as we approach the front door and I try the knob. It's locked. I knock quickly and we all wait in tense anticipation. Nothing happens. Moments pass and Holly rings the doorbell. Still, nothing. We both knock again as hard as we can and then we shout and jump up and down. “Let's try the back,” I say finally. I go the way I went when I took my bike yesterday and climb the stairs to the guest room balcony. The door there is locked, too, so I crawl onto the roof with Holly in tow. Dawson and Martin sit at my mother's bistro table and tell us they'll wait. I can only hope that they won't have killed each other by the time we get back. When I reach my bedroom window, I can already tell that something is wrong. There's a bottle of wine on my bed next to several empty bottles of pills. “Mom,” I say as I jump into the room and take off down the hallway. I pause suddenly and I realize that I've left Holly, but when I turn around to go back for her, she's already there, standing right behind me. “Help me,” I say and she nods. We search the upstairs and find nothing.
    When we get downstairs, the house is quiet. That's unusual for my mother. She lives off my father's life insurance and she's always home with the stereo or the T.V. on for company. The fact that daytime talk shows aren't blaring into the room is a sign that something is definitely wrong. I take Holly's hand in mine and approach the garage. Both the door from the kitchen to the garage and the door from the garage to the backyard are open. I move down the cement steps and let Holly sweep the room like a police officer, bat held high over her shoulder. Once she determines that everything is clear, we lock both doors and go upstairs to bring Martin and Dawson inside.
    “ My mother isn't here,” I say, but that's about all I can determine. The wine and the pills suggest that something bad has happened yet there's no body. There's also no signs of blood or of a struggle, no forced entry. Obviously, Mom left of her own accord yet she didn't take the car. I don't know what to make of the situation, so I sit down heavily on the edge of the guest bed and try to take deep, calming breaths. Holly turns on the T.V. and switches to the news before disappearing into the hallway. When she comes back, she has my laptop in hand.
    “ We need to see how bad this thing is,” she says as she sits down next to me. I watch the pretty reporter talk about about a kitten that was rescued from a drain pipe and wonder why the fuck she isn't talking about the hordes of undead monsters sweeping across our city. Watercrest isn't a metropolis or anything like that, but it's no backwoods village either. I watch absently as Holly's eyes scan the computer screen.
    “ There's nothing here,” she says as she shakes her head. “Nothing.” Holly pauses and puts the laptop aside before going for the phone. I realize that none of us have our cellphones and think how useless they really are in a crisis. There was no time to grab one in the heat of things. I thank the universe that my mother likes corded