The God Machine Page 0,4

them, bounding in their direction, then circling back to hover around his son. Whatever it was that Jack had found was interesting enough to hold not only the fascination of a ten-year-old, but also that of a dog.

"Probably some animal bones," he said to Bethany, who wrinkled her nose in distaste.

"Hey, Jack," Stan called out. "What'd ya find?"

Jack looked up and waved. He was holding a gnarled tree branch, and had been poking at something in the dirt.

"Come here!" the boy cried. "Ya gotta see this." His sister had joined him, picking up her own stick, but it was snatched away by the easily excited Sadie.

"I hope it isn't anything gross," Bethany said as she stepped carefully around the stones and debris that littered the ground.

The couple moved beside the children and Jack looked up from where he was probing with his stick. "It's not gross," he assured his mother, a twinkle in his young eyes. "Just kinda weird."

"Weird," Rebecca echoed in agreement. She had managed to pull the stick away from Sadie and was holding it high so the dog couldn't take it back from her.

"I was looking around at stuff, and these things just pushed right up out of the ground."

"I saw 'em too," Rebecca exclaimed, waving her stick in the air. Sadie sat at attention by her side, eyes on the stick, tail wagging.

Stan crouched down for a closer look and saw five cylindrical objects sticking up out of the earth. They seemed to be made of metal--copper by the looks of them. They reminded him of the old-fashioned batteries he had seen in some of the older houses he'd worked in, but he'd never seen any quite like these before.

He was suddenly filled with an overpowering dread--the kind of feeling that would strike him when the phone rang in the predawn hours and he would be certain, deep down in his gut, that somebody had died.

"What are they, Dad?" Jack asked, extending the stick to tap one of the copper objects.

"Don't, Jack," he barked, somehow knowing that they shouldn't...upset them. "I don't know what they are, but we should get away from here and..."

Bethany moved closer, and Stan wanted to grab the children and run away as fast as he could. But his rational brain overruled his increasingly irrational emotions.

"Look, Mommy," Rebecca said, pointing at the cylindrical objects. "They're like funny plants growing out of the dirt."

Funny plants.

Normally Stan would have laughed at his daughter's ridiculous observation, but he could find nothing humorous about their current situation. The intense sense of apprehension continued to grow.

"They are funny," Bethany said, moving even closer herself.

Stan reached out, grabbed her arm and yanked her back.

"Ow," she said, pulling her arm away indignantly. "What'd you do that for?"

"Sorry," he said, his eyes fixed upon the cylinders.

"Mr. Attwater said there was a barn here a long time ago, and that the people who lived in the house got killed when the people in town set the barn on fire," Jack piped up.

"That's terrible," Bethany said, still rubbing her arm. "Why did they do that?"

Jack shrugged. "Mr. Attwater said that the people in the town didn't like what they were doing in the barn. They had machines and stuff."

"What were they doing, Jack?" Rebecca asked. "In the barn."

"He didn't say," the boy said, then extended his stick and gave one of the cylinders another poke.

"Jack!" Stan snapped, and everyone jumped. "Don't touch them," he ordered as he pulled his son away. But that was all he could say. He couldn't tell them why the objects filled him with such anxiety, why they made him so afraid, for he didn't know himself.

The air grew heavy with the acrid stench of ozone, like being outside after a heavy thunder and lightning storm.

"What's that?" Rebecca asked, her tiny fingers pinching her nose shut. "It stinks!"

The stink became stronger, and the air seemed to hum with an electrical charge. Stan could see that the others were feeling it now as well, looking around curiously for some kind of explanation.

Rebecca began to laugh uproariously. "Look at my hair," she cried, pulling off her hood to allow her hair to stand on end. "It's electric."

Stan could feel a tingle in his own scalp, and the hair on his arms stood up, the skin prickling.

"What's going on, Stan?" Bethany asked, reaching out to pull their giggling daughter closer.

He was about to tell them that they had to get out of there right then, when Sadie began to bark wildly,