Constant Danger (Book 1): Fight The Darkness

by Westfield, Ryan

  The guy had a strong Boston accent. Sounded like he might have been from Southie. She knew the type. Tough guy. Blue collar. Had probably worked on the Big Dig construction project all his life.

  Well, he might be used to intimidating people, to getting his way. After all, that was the way it was over in Boston. Screw over others to get what you needed.

  Well, she’d give him a taste of his own medicine.

  With a sudden movement of her foot, she let off the clutch completely.

  Her Tacoma jumped backward, the engine revving, the tachometer needle jumping up wildly.

  Her dad said something exclamatory, but she didn’t catch it.

  Her rear bumper with its hitch slammed into the car behind her.

  She felt and heard the impact, and she heard the man’s horn blaring nonstop behind her. She saw in the rearview mirror, her camper shell shaking violently.

  But it was good quality. She’d bought it used, of course, back in Santa Fe. It didn’t pop off or break, the way some of the lesser-quality ones would have.

  She had the space she needed now.

  She kept backing up. She’d knocked the car behind her out of the way.

  She saw the door open. She saw the massive barrel-chested Bostonian stepping out onto the pavement, glaring at her, his mouth open as he hurled curses at them.

  She didn’t care. She had the space she needed.

  Her foot was on the clutch and her hand was on the shifter. She was in first gear, the engine was roaring, and they were jolting forward.

  She had almost maneuvered herself enough space. But not quite.

  Her Toyota’s front bumper slammed into the side of the car in front of her.

  For a long, perilous moment, it seemed like she might be stuck.

  But she was determined to get out of there. She wasn’t going to let this beat her.

  At any other time in her life, this would have been the time to shut down the engine and wait for the authorities to show up, the time to profusely apologize, and the time to hope that her future insurance premiums wouldn’t shoot through the roof.

  But none of that was on her mind right now.

  The way her dad had spoken had instilled a real urgency in her mind.

  She was going to get them out of there. Even if she didn’t fully understand what was happening, she knew this wasn’t the place to be.

  The engine roared. The tachometer needle shot up to the red zone.

  It seemed like she might be stuck.

  The Bostonian with the curses and muscles had almost reached her. There wasn’t time to roll her window up. His hand was reaching inside, grabbing for her.

  Was she going to make it through? Did she have enough torque to push the other car out of the way?

  It was all happening so fast.

  8

  James

  “What can I do for you, officer?” said James as politely as he could.

  Without thinking about it, James found that he was hiding his accent even more than usual. As a kid growing up with television, he’d never had the strong accent of his father or his grandfather.

  But still, his accent had been enough for people to notice it when he’d first arrived to Western Mass this fall. Little by little, with each comment and with each laugh, he’d found himself doing the best he could to talk in a more neutral way, the way TV announcers did.

  And now, talking to the cop, he himself could barely hear his own Floridian accent.

  Perhaps it was some deep regional awareness, some instinctive trait of self-preservation.

  The officer’s face was lit up harshly in his own car’s headlights. They were so bright that it seemed as if the high beams must be on.

  The light partially blinded James and he had to squint against it.

  The officer’s face looked, in the light, as it were made up entirely of harsh, rough angles. Almost as if his face had been carved roughly from stone, by some sculptor who had given up trying to finesse everything and had just gone for the broadest strokes imaginable.

  The officer didn’t speak. His big, tough, clean-shaven jaw remained motionless.

  The silence was deafening.

  To James’s right, he heard his professor squirming nervously in his seat.

  “You from here?” said the police officer.

  It was an unusual first question. James, in his younger days, had been pulled over more than a few times for speeding. He knew how it went. He knew the drill, so to speak. And the questioning never started like this.

  “No, sir,” said James, speaking as politely as he could.

  “I am,” chimed in his professor. “Live right over there.”

  The cop ignored him. Instead, he addressed James.

  Strangely, he didn’t ask for his license or registration. Nor did he look around the truck with a flashlight, searching for something suspicious, for some ticketable infraction.

  “Something’s happened,” he said. “We don’t know what. But we’re...”

  “Something’s happened?” said James’s professor. “What are you talking about?”

  The cop ignored him completely. “Our radios are down. We’ve lost communication. No one I’ve stopped has a working cell phone. My last orders were to come to this neighborhood and the one to the west and warn everyone door to door of some kind of impending attack.”

  “Some kind of what?” said James’s professor, sputtering, practically choking on his own tongue out of shock and surprise.

  “An attack,” shot back the cop. “A foreign attack, most likely. All firearm owners are advised to get ready. To prepare for the worst.”

  The cop was speaking faster. James got the sense he’d said this all before a few times and was sort of getting it down pat now.

  “This doesn’t make any sense,” said James’s professor. “You’re telling me you don’t have a radio?”

  “Sir,” said the cop. “If you live down there, then I advise that you return home. Lock the doors. Arm yourself.”

  “Are you crazy? I’ve never heard anything like this from the police before. It sounds like lunacy. Aren’t you the ones who are supposed to protect us? Serve and protect and all that?”

  “That’s what I’m trying to do, sir,” said the cop. “Now I’d appreciate if you’d let me do my job. I’ve got doors to knock on and people to warn and things to do. Now, son,” he addressed James now, looking him right in the eye. “I saw your Florida plates. If you’re from out of state, and I’m assuming from your age you’re either up here for school or for work ... I’d advise that you head on home. We just don’t know what’s about to happen.... but let’s just put it this way, in all my years on the force, I’ve never heard of anything like this. And I graduated top of my class at the academy, so don’t think that I don’t know what the curriculum is. So believe me when I say that none of us cops get any sort of training as to how to deal with a situation like this.... if our radios and phones don’t come back online, then I don’t see things evolving in any positive direction.... and with the power out, what’s going to happen to the average citizen?”

  “So you’re just advising us that it’s every man for himself?” snapped the professor. “Whatever happened to job responsibility? Whatever happened to the police force that I used to know, the police that would go above and beyond for their community?”

  “Sir,” said the cop, obviously trying to contain his frustration. “I’ve been serving Holyoke for the better part of a decade. I know the people here. I grew up here. My family has roots here. And I know you. And you aren’t from here. Now I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that. Hell, I bet your family’s been in this country a hell of a lot longer than mine has. But here’s the thing, I can tell just by the way you talk that you’re one of those real educated types. I can tell just by looking at you that you’re from some suburb outside of Boston, most likely. Your parents probably had their lives all figured out. They never hurt for money and they had just the right nu
mber of kids. They probably had money left over for vacations, for something fun, for an RV maybe, or a boat to take out when the summer days were nice and Dad didn’t have to head into the city...”

  James cleared his throat. He’d never heard cops talk like this. Never in his life.

  “Maybe you have a job at one of the five colleges east of here.... maybe you work for one of the startups that have popped up in Northampton.... but I know one thing for sure, and that’s that you don’t work here in Holyoke. You say you live here and I have no reason to doubt you. I’m sure that if I looked at your license, it would list your address as right down the street ... but I know why you’re here, and that’s not for the community. It’s not to give back to what we’ve been building here for generations. There are plenty of people who come here and find some way to give back.... but I know your type.... you’re here for the cheap rents, for the cheap house prices ... for the cheap food.... well, you know why the prices are like that? You know why they’re cheap? It’s because it’s what we can afford.... but for you ... it’s just so you can buy a house with more square footage than what you could afford in Northampton where you probably work...”

  The cop sort of trailed off.

  “Uh,” said James, feeling the need to fill the silence with something, but he just didn’t know what to say.

  For once, James’s professor was silent. Probably stunned beyond any point he’d ever been before. Probably stunned that the sort of person he likely looked down on for not having the same sort of “education” that he did had a better and more complete understanding of this part of the world than the professor did himself.

  There was a long pause and finally the cop spoke again. “I’m going off on tangents here again. Now I’ve got a job to do.”

  “Sir?” said James, starting to speak. He felt stunned himself. “Are you really saying that I should head back to Florida?”

  “That’s what I’d advise, son. And, if I were you, I wouldn’t wait around ... things are going to get messy ... and for all I know, they’re going to get messy all over the country.... there was an announcement right before the EMP hit.... warnings from the White House about an imminent foreign attack.... now the only thing that’s safe to say is that we don’t know what’s going on and we don’t know what the future has in store for us.... what I do know is that these are times to be with family ... these are times to be where people know you.... where you’re not a stranger.... either we’ll come together as communities as we have in the past, or we’ll splinter under the pressure and we’ll all be fighting each other ... the way we did in the past...”

  Once again, the cop’s words trailed off into the cold and into the darkness. Into the silence.

  Something about the words resonated with James. Something about them reminded him of something that he couldn’t quite put his finger on, something that perhaps he’d heard long ago.

  “I’ve got to figure out how to shorten this,” muttered the cop to himself. He seemed distracted as he began walking somewhat aimlessly back to his cop car. “Lots more houses to hit. Lots more doors to knock on. Hey, what the hell is that?”

  The cop stopped in his place and spun around. He was staring right at the man that James had knocked out.

  James had forgotten about that problem and now that he had been found out, his heart started thumping once again in his chest.

  Shit.

  What was going to happen?

  Well, James figured he’d better finally speak up. Better own up to it rather than get called out for it.

  “Officer,” he began. “I can explain it.... it’s just that...”

  The officer held up his hand, which was lit up strangely in the eerie harsh light of his high beams.

  “You don’t need to explain anything. I’d recognize that bum at a thousand yards. It’s just Jim Hogan. I can’t count how many times I’ve been called out here for some fight Hogan’s started. He’s nothing but human trash and that’s the truth. If he’s not beating up his poor wife, then he’s picking a fight with someone on the block ... or someone off the block if no one will take the bait.... I figure he deserved what he got and I’m happy that, given the circumstances, given the unknown nature of these times, I don’t even need to take a statement from you.”

  With that, briefly touching his fingers to the brim of his hat, the cop got back into his car.

  But he didn’t leave. Instead he just began repositioning it, parallel parking into a spot nearby.

  “Talkative cop,” muttered James. “Seemed like a thoughtful guy, too.”

  His mind was racing.

  Part of it was relief.

  Part of it was planning.

  A big part of it was trying to figure out what to make of the cop’s warning.

  Obviously the guy had to have some sense of what was going on. But still, he was just one man. One person. One mind. One set of perceptions and assumptions.

  Did James want to flee, head right back down to Florida? Wasn’t that a little extreme?

  After all, James hadn’t been planning on making the drive down, even for winter break. If he left now, it’d be a few days before he arrived home, and while it would be great to see his family again, there were plenty of things he’d been hoping to get done before the next semester started. For one thing, he needed to get a head start on next semester’s reading, since he knew that the workload was going to be intense.

  “I don’t think I really need to head home...” he said, thinking out loud, momentarily forgetting that his professor was still in the car.

  Through the windshield, James could see that the cop had parked his car, leaving the headlights on, and was standing in a doorway, just his silhouette visible. The door hadn’t yet opened and, of course, there were no lights on in the windows. There were, however, two cars in the driveway. They were compact sedans, foreign made, covered in rust. They were each at least twenty years old, as were many of the cars on the block.

  What was his professor doing living here, among honest hard-working people? With his salary, he could undoubtedly afford something in Northampton, where he would be close to work and close to all the restaurant meals his heart could ever desire.

  “Bit of an exaggerator, don’t you think?” said his professor, finally speaking.

  The professor’s voice sounded shaky. As if he were a little nervous. Gone was the pompous nonsense of just a few minutes ago.

  But that was the professor’s personality, always flitting from one personality type to the next. He was the opposite of a stable, honest person, the opposite of the sort of person that could be relied on in times of need and even times of peace.

  “I don’t know what to make of it,” said James, who now was actually glad to have someone older to discuss the issue with. Matt may have been basically threatening legal action against him, basically saying he’d rat him out at the first opportunity, but, still, James was at a complete loss. He didn’t know how seriously to take the issue and any other viewpoint was welcome right now as far as he was concerned.

  9

  Meg

  It seemed like they were going to get her. Like they were going to reach inside the truck and open the door, dragging her out to some unknown fate.

  It was the second time in one night.

  The engine was roaring. So loud that it almost hurt her ears.

  Her dad, all of a sudden, had a gun in his hand. She didn’t know he was carrying.

  He was positioning himself, pointing the gun, apparently trying to get a good line of sight that would avoid him shooting his daughter.

  Just when it all seemed like it couldn’t get any worse, the Toyota truck suddenly broke through, shoving the car in front partially out of its way.

  The pickup crashed through, bumping wildly on its high suspension over something.

  And, then, just like that, they were free.

  Meg gripped the wheel tightly as they roared back down the winding pitch-black driveway leading away fr
om the hospital.

  Her heart slowly began to decrease its wild pace as they left the crowds and the chaos behind them, returning instead to the darkness and comparative solitude of the roads.

  “This is crazy,” she said, feeling like she had to talk, like she had to get it all off her chest. “What was that administrator saying? That everything electronic was destroyed? I don’t get it. What’s going on? Shouldn’t the power come back on?”

  “It’s not coming back on,” said her dad.

  “Not coming back on? What are you talking about?”

  “Take a left up here.”

  “But we’ve got to head to the hospital.”

  “Like I said before,” said her dad. “We’ve got to go home. The power’s not on. And, even if it was, you need to calm down after all this. I can miss one more appointment.”

  Reluctantly, she took a left.

  No lights were on in any of the houses.

  There weren’t many cars on the road, although it was a back road and that wasn’t abnormal.

  “Now look,” said her dad. “I know I talk and I talk. And I know I’m always going on about war and about the true dangerous nature of people. And I know you always roll your eyes a bit.... you don’t think I see you, but I do. And I don’t blame you. The world looks different when you’ve been around the block as many times as I have. I can remember it looked a hell of a lot different back when I was your age.”

  Meg was already mentally rolling her eyes.

  It had been one hell of a day.

  The stress had worn her out.

  And the memory of that disgusting animal of a man trying to force himself on her was still fresh in her mind.

  She wanted to get out of the cold night once and for all, get out of her truck. She wanted to head home, take a long hot shower, letting the steam build up on the mirror and the windows and then crawl into bed, getting lost in her warm comforter.

  Then she remembered that the power was likely out at her place as well. There would be no hot shower. Probably no heat either.