Free The Vines by Christopher Rice

up quiet residence in one corner of its master bedroom. And that presence hasn’t lingered, even so shortly after his disappearance. But something else does, and it urges him onward, toward Caitlin.
    He finds her on the floor of the solarium, facedown where he saw her fall, one arm pinned beneath her, the other twisted elbow-down. It’s not until he has his hands on her, is rolling her onto her back, that Blake realizes she is shaking. Quivering, as if from a small but sustained electrical charge.
    A seizure is his first guess, but none of the other telltale signs are there. The jerking isn’t violent enough for it to be grand mal, and the timeline is all wrong; after this many minutes, she would be in the clonic phase, her arms and legs jerking sporadically, her facial muscles twitching to a different rhythm. He has seen plenty of seizures over the years, and the physical fits were more irregular than the steady full-body quiver that is turning Caitlin Chaisson into Jell-O.
    He scans her for any further physical injuries, and aside from some light, rosy scars on her wrists—they look like day-old scratches left by plants—he can’t find any. So he picks her up in both arms and carries her toward the bedroom, convinced the answer will be found in her medicine cabinet.
    Her vitals are fine, her lips puffing as if she’s trying to whisper something. The choked whispers sound creepy, but they also mean she isn’t in danger of swallowing her tongue, so Blake chooses to see them as a comfort.
    Caitlin has dabbled in various antidepressants over the years, but she’s never been one for tranquilizers or painkillers, or any of the other highly addictive prescriptions people gobble like candy these days. The ones that might cause this kind of reaction.
    He risks leaving her side for a second and scans the bathroom. But it looks untouched. The medicine cabinet doesn’t have a fingerprint on it. He opens it anyway, and as the mirrored door swings open, it reveals Caitlin sitting upright on the bed, staring right at him with a glaze-eyed expression that says she does not find his sudden presence in her bedroom to be a surprise.
    “A trade,” she whispers.

13
    “So . . . who did it?”
    The three men have been standing inside the ruins of Fort Polk for a few minutes before Kyle Austin decides to break the silence between them. But the joke—if it could be called that—goes over like one of those old Lucky Dog stands in a hurricane, and then the three of them are armored in silence again.
    Wind ripples across the still, swampy waters surrounding the decimated fort where they’ve chosen to meet for the first time in five years, and the crumbling brick walls give way to a night sky laced with low, fast-moving clouds. They’re all staring down at the electric lantern on the dirt floor between them. Scott Fauchier brought the thing, and he’s tried moving it around a few times but it’s no use—every possible angle makes them look like Halloween ghouls.
    “Not funny,” Scott finally says. “Think about it. We’ve got no motive.”
    “Says who?” Mike Simmons asks, and Kyle marvels at how the man’s solid teenage brawn has given way to layers of fat that rival Paul Prudhomme’s. Suddenly he’s imagining Simmons, former football team captain, barking orders at people while he zips around the carpeted offices of his little daddy-financed brokerage firm on one of those fat-people scooters, and he has to bury a laugh in the side of one fist.
    Scott Fauchier, on the other hand, is just as tanned and pretty as he ever was, and he still has a tendency to bat his long golden eyelashes at the rest of them like a cheerleader in search of a date to homecoming. The three men haven’t spoken much of their own volition, not since Troy Mangier tightened the noose around them when they were teenagers. But Fauchier’s pretty mug has been impossible to miss. He’s the poster boy for his own line of health clubs, which means he