The Uninvited by Cat Winters

do about the brother?” asked a fellow with the rasp of a smoker, all rocks and sandpaper.
    “He’s not going to be around much longer,” said a man with a voice so smooth, I bet he grinned every time he talked, no matter how viperous the words coming out of his mouth. “He’s going to need a loan if he wants to repair that store, and we’ve already made sure none of the banks lend the Boche any money at this point. Where the hell is Harry? He’s late.”
    “Do we even know who killed the other brother yet?” asked a third voice, a jumpy one.
    “We have a good idea,” said Mr. Smooth. “It had nothing to do with any of our volunteers, so make sure no one goes around taking credit for it. The mayor isn’t happy. He doesn’t want the word ‘vigilante’ showing up in the paper.”
    “Let’s just go ahead and ship the surviving brother to Fort Oglethorpe,” said Mr. Smoker from down in the rockiest depths of his throat. “Be done with it.”
    “Damn that Harry for always running late.” Mr. Smooth must have pulled out a set of keys just then, for I heard them jangle. “I want to do this fucking walk through town before the night gets any colder. My family jewels are already starting to freeze.”
    The other two fellows chuckled, but their coughs and laughter and terrible language disappeared inside the building before I could hear anything more about shipping Daniel to wherever they wanted to send him.
    My legs longed to run back to the furniture store again.
    Should I warn him? I wondered. Should I park myself in front of his door and protect him through the night?
    I wavered. I tapped my fingers against the chalky bricks of the wall beside me and envisioned myself standing guard in front of Daniel’s store with my arms crossed over my chest and no weapons to speak of.
    Ridiculous .
    Resigning myself to my uselessness, knowing Daniel didn’t even want to see me again, I slipped down the side street in an attempt to slink back to May’s house on less visible roads.
    The back of my neck prickled when I rounded the corner down the way, and I feared that if I turned my head, I’d find the shine of Lucas’s spectacles in the lamplight. Or the face of the deceased Albrecht Schendel.
    T W O B L O C K S L A T E R , around the corner from Halloran’s Dry Goods, a new disturbance erupted across town: the sputtering coughs of an automobile engine fighting to spark to life. I recognized the desperate sound from my early days of learning how to turn the starter crank on the family’s Model T truck.
    “Oh, God.” I puffed a sigh. “What now?”
    I picked up my pace, and when the choking ruckus grew louder and shrieks of distress joined in with the struggle, I tore around the bend to Lincoln Street, forgetting my own worries. Another block south, an olive-green truck sat on the railroad tracks—an ambulance. Stalled . A Red Cross emblem marked the wooden enclosure on the back. Patients likely lay inside. Flu patients. Children maybe.
    A train whistled down the way.
    “Oh, God!” I ran toward the vehicle with my feet clapping across the asphalt. “Do you need help? Oh, God!”
    Again and again some unseen person down in front of the vehicle’s grille turned the starter crank, but the ambulance sputtered and rattled and refused to budge from the tracks.
    “Put it into neutral and just push it off the tracks!” I yelled. “Get out of the way so we can push it!”
    The fuzzy glow of a train’s lantern came into sight through a patch of fog down the way. Another whistle keened through the night, this time closer and with an urgency that pierced my heart and quickened my feet. The ambulance stayed stock still, and the person in front of the truck kept cranking and fighting that poor grinding engine.
    “Move!” With the strength of a quarterback, I knocked aside the person at the crank—a blond woman in gray—until she lay in the road, safely away from both the ambulance and the tracks. I shoved the crank