eerieindiana | Eerie, Indiana fanfiction: Egg Hunt (Reply)

The small patch of windswept pines at the edge of Deadwood Park had been infested with Easter eggs. They sprouted in like fungal growths around the bases of the trees, poking out amidst the tangled roots in glittering shades of midnight blue, deep ocean green, and the rich dark purple of Wolf Mountain at dusk.

"They could be for a scavenger hunt," said Simon, hopefully. "Maybe for a Sunday School class?"

"Sure," Mars said. "That could be it."

A black cat, trotting through the long grass on some nefarious feline mission known only to itself, stopped a few feet away from the newly unwholesome growth of evergreens. It's long tail twitched from side to side as it stared, unblinking, at the shimmering Easter eggs. The headlights from a passing car on Front Street made it's eyes flash green in the darkness. Then it was gone, running in the other direction as fast as four paws and a well-developed survival instinct could carry it.

"Could be a coincidence," said Simon.

"It's never a coincidence," said Mars.

Simon sighed, and nodded, and put down the large plastic container he was holding. It was an empty ice-cream tub from the recycling pile behind the World o' Stuff; Foreverware might have been the safe choice for what they were about to do, but this had been cheaper. A similar thought process lay behind eschewing lead-lined radiation-proof shoulder-length gloves in favour of novelty plastic grabbers shaped like dinosaur heads; Mister Radford stocked both, but only one option was actually affordable on the income from a single paper route.

Once gripped in the jaws of a mass-manufactured Triceratops, the eggs themselves proved almost grotesquely malleable, their bright-coloured shells flexing and wrinkling beneath the pressure in a way wholly alien to the fragile chicken eggs which they resembled. They came away from their place beneath the trees with a horribly organic pop of released pressure, an unsettling sucking noise, and trailing strings of translucent goo which left foul-smelling scorch marks in the bright spring grass when it touched the earth.

By the time the box, which had once contained 23 litres of the World o' Stuff's proprietary vanilla-and-caviar swirl, was neatly stacked to the brim with glistening leathery-shelled eggs, both boys were sweating. Part of it was the sheer physical effort of uprooting the Easter eggs from their hiding places, which proved distressingly sticky, but part of it was a nervous reaction to the distinct sensation of movement from inside some of the larger, more dark-hued eggs.

Once the air-tight, freezer-burn-proof lid had been replaced, and weighed down with several small rocks in case of imminent hatching, they towed their discovery back to town in a small red wagon that Harley had previously used for riding down steep hills in an apparent attempt to knock over and irreparably maim as many pedestrians as possible. Simon had liberated it from it's life of crime at the expense of several handfuls of hair and a few bite marks that he hoped might not scar too badly.

The scarred wooden workbench that ran the length of the Secret Spot had been cleared specifically for this latest manifestation of Eerie's weirdness, and soon the dozen varicoloured eggs were laid out atop an old set of towels that had already been stained black during Syndi's short-lived obsession with Sioxie and the Banshees. The towels had begun to smoke and char almost as soon as they came into contact with the clear glistening fluid that clung to some of the Easter eggs, and the small attic window was open in a futile attempt to get rid of the stench of scorched cotton. With any luck, Marshall's mom would assume the tumble dryer was acting up again and not come upstairs seeking the source of the smell.

Simon had a copy of "Small Animals of Eerie" open on his lap, while Marshall examined the eggs with a magnifying glass, turning them carefully with a plastic grabber shaped like a Tyrannosaurus Rex.

"What do you think it is?" asked Simon. Marshall shrugged.

"Dragons?" he said. "Chubacabra? Something gross and slimy from another dimension?"

"Nah," said Simon, turning a page. "Those gestate inside blobs of ectoplasm manifesting within haunted structures, remember?"

"Oh yeah," said Mars, and the two of them shared a horrified shudder at the memory.

In the end, it was nobody's fault. WERD-TV was showing a Commander Cody marathon as a prelude to a holiday weekend special, and the combination of too much chocolate and an addictively good locally-produced TV show would have distracted even the most hardened paranormal investigator.

Besides, as Marshall said much, much later, it wasn't as though candy-golems were the sort of thing you just expected to happen, even in Eerie, even at Easter. And even though a few of the townspeople had been bitten and now sported limbs of living sugar-crystal, nobody had actually died during the outbreak. As long as the affected body-parts didn't get wet, the candy-golem's victims were mostly fine, unexpected cloudbusts and occasional dissolving extremities aside.