I rolled my eyes. “Thanks.”
I closed the door gently so as not to draw any unwanted attention, and then I set about walking toward the police cars. My first impression was that they were empty. One of the back doors in the middle cruiser hung open on the other side. I picked up my pace, realizing there was no one here and decided to do a little more investigating.
As I approached, my eye caught on a stockpile of ammunition and three guns. They were sitting on the back bench seat. My heart fluttered with an odd combo of hope and fear. Hope because we had no defense against the creatures; and fear because in my twenty-seven years on this earth, I had never held a real gun, let alone shot one.
Living in sketchy neighborhoods, I had seen them before. I'd even had one pulled on me at a local park when I was a teenager. Three guys had jumped a few of my friends and myself while we were playing basketball. They stole our shoes and the new basketball I had gotten that Christmas. It was safe to say that guns scared the living shit out of me.
But I found myself no longer scared of them then. Instead of an accident waiting to happen, it was possible protection against the thing that had caused so much physical and mental harm to us.
First, I tried the doors on my side. They were locked. Then I vaulted the hood and went around to the open one. There was a pistol of some sort, a standard issue Glock or something, I’m not sure; a shotgun pointed at the ceiling; and a snub-nose revolver lying on the seat. Scattered among them were a few boxes of ammunition. I bent over and reached for the goods, but my height didn’t help me much, and I had to crawl almost all the way in.
Just as I stretched my arm, I heard a honk. I lifted my head and saw Tommy frantically motioning in the front seat of my SUV. I squinted, unsure of what he was freaking out about as he kept on honking.
Now that I think about it, if he hadn’t honked, I might’ve heard the person sneaking up behind me, and by the time I caught the scraping of their soles against the concrete, it was already too late.
When I turned, I was staring down the barrel of a rifle.
11
A blonde woman in a cop uniform was standing behind the gun. Her face was severe—cheekbones high and razor sharp, eyes sunken in. My heart dropped so hard and so fast, I went lightheaded with fear. She kicked me with one of her boots. The blow was powerful and caused my tailbone to tingle in a way that reminded me of when your hand goes to sleep. Since I was already off balance, I went face-first into the glass on the other side, cracking my head pretty good. Then the door I’d entered through slammed shut.
I scrambled like a trapped wild animal and faced the woman.
She was grizzled in a weird way, as if she had seen a lot of bad shit go down in a short amount of time. Something we apparently all had in common. Frizzy strands of hair stuck out from her once-tight ponytail. There was a gash across the bridge of her nose, which stretched below one of her eyes, gummy with drying blood. I also noticed red smeared over the knuckles of her left hand. Her uniform looked wet and was torn in some places, offering hints of her tan skin beneath.
“What the hell do you want?” she shouted.
It was a loaded question. There were a lot of things I wanted at the time. To see Clem, to make sure she was all right, food, sleep, and to know what in the holy hell was going on. But most of all I wanted safety for my family, friends, and myself. I had been so caught off guard by the question and by the situation that the only answer I could give was a croaking noise from the back of my throat.
“Are you one of them?” the woman demanded. “Are you one of the beasts?”
The way she said beasts added more fuel to my fear-fire.
I shook my head, finding my voice. “I’m not. I promise.”
“How do I know for sure?”
I thought about it for a minute. Was I really that ugly? Or…could these things shape-shift and I hadn’t known?
Finally, I said, “You’d be dead already if I was one of them.”
Her brow creased. The realization that I was right, I think, registered in her mind. She lowered the rifle and stepped away, weighing my words.
“Please,” I said, “I’m just trying to get my friend back to her family and figure out what the hell is going on.”
“You and me both, pal.” She flicked her eyes over my shoulder. I heard my SUV slowly approaching us. Then the cop raised her gun again. “Stop!” she shouted. “And step out of the vehicle with your hands in the air!”
“We’re not dangerous,” I said.
“Everyone is dangerous now.”
I didn’t like the sound of that. I also didn’t like how true it felt.
Tommy got out with his arms up. There wasn’t one speck of fear on his face. If anything there was just exhaustion, like he was done with all of this bullshit.
“What’s going on?” he said.
“Sir, stop moving,” the cop replied. “Now.” Her muscles were shaking. I watched the finger resting on the trigger closely. All it would take for her to fire on my best friend was the slightest bit of pressure. Tommy wasn’t stopping either, and people had been shot for much less.
“Ma’am, please,” I said. I glanced at the weapons on the seat, nudged one of the ammo boxes with my right hand. It was empty. The guns were too, no doubt. What the hell was I going to do?
Tommy finally came to a stop within reach of the back door handle. He said, “Listen, lady, I’ve been through the wringer over the past few hours. We all have, okay? And looking at you, I’m pretty sure you have too. My buddy here has a daughter he needs to get to, and I have an appointment with my bed soon after. I don’t know for sure, but I think it’s a safe bet that law and order is dead, or damn close to it. You can arrest us, throw us in a jail cell, but then what? We’re not your enemy. I think you know that. Now, c’mon, just let us pass through.”
For a long time, it seemed like Tommy and the cop were staring each other down, neither of them ready to wave the white flag. I kept watching the woman’s finger, waiting for the pull of the trigger and the death of my best friend. Sweat plastered the shirt I wore to my shoulders—it must’ve been a hundred degrees in the car—but a coldness went through me in spite of this heat. I thought it was over. I thought this was how we ended up dying. Not from the evil creatures that had haunted our night, but from a cop who had lost her mind during the storm.
But I was wrong.
The cop, arms still shaking, let out a deep breath, and the rigidness her body had taken on relaxed. She lowered the gun and started to cry.
“They took everyone,” she said. “So many people. Gone.”
Tommy and I exchanged a look. He raised both his eyebrows at me like he was saying he didn’t know what to do. Emotional comfort has never been either of our strong suits. That probably wasn’t hard to believe when you considered our way of showing affection to one another was a punch to the arm.
Luckily, Stephanie was there. She could sniff out emotional unbalance like a K-9 officer could sniff out a brick of marijuana.
She left the SUV with no fear, same as Tommy, and approached the woman.
“Hey, hey,” she said in a soft voice, “it’s okay.”
The cop was bent over, most of her hair in her face now, and she was sobbing. The rifle was on the ground beside her.
“Tommy,” I said, “I’m roasting in here.”
“Yeah, and nobody wants to eat that meal.”
“Don’t be a dickhead. Get me out!”
“Oh, wow, with that attitude? I don’t know, I think I’ll let you sweat it out a little bit longer,” he said.
I stared at him blankly, not smiling or laughing, and he sighed and finally opened the door. The rush of morning air was a godsend.
“The things…they took them. They took so many of them!” the cop repeated.
Stephanie was patting her back, and suddenly the cop pivoted and wrapped her up in a hug, crying into her shoulder.
Tommy and I watched in awe. Autumn stepped toward us a mom
ent later, her arms crossed, and said, “She has a way with people, doesn’t she?”
“You can say that again,” Tommy said.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Stephanie was saying. “Just sit down and tell us about it. Get it out of your system.”
“I’ve always told her she should go into counseling or something. Maybe grief counseling,” Autumn whispered. “She never took my advice, though.”
It hit me then that I had no idea what Stephanie or Autumn did for a living. Not that it really mattered now, anyway. But it showed how little I knew about their personal lives, which I found weird, because I felt like I had known them for years. Whatever the case, I doubted either of them would be going back to work come Monday morning, or whenever their next shift was.
Things had changed.
Stephanie guided the cop toward the sidewalk and eased her down on the curb. The cop’s nose was running. She wiped it with the sleeve of her torn uniform and then took a deep, steadying breath.
After a moment of silence, she spoke in an uneven voice. “They’re from the storm. I don’t know how many. It was a lot. Dispatch was telling us to go all over town before comms cut out. I was sent over somewhere by Ridge Street with my partner, Davis, and then all of a sudden I’m hearing the worst noise I’ve ever heard and Davis is talking about seeing his nana, who I know lives down in Florida—because her bad knees can’t take the cold—”
“The hallucinations,” I said.
The cop looked up at me, surprised, as if she didn’t know she was talking to anyone but herself. “Y-yeah, I guess you’re right, because Davis, he went out into the storm after her, who definitely wasn’t there, and he didn’t come back. I heard…I heard him screaming, though, and when the sun came up, I found his badge.”
“I’m sorry,” Stephanie said.
We echoed her.
“But during the storm I went out and headed back to the car. I wasn’t staying there to die, plus I wanted to find my partner. That’s one thing you don’t do. You don’t leave your partner behind, no matter what. So I went to my car, and that was when I saw one of those things. Big, like a professional basketball player, but rail-thin. Except…it wasn’t human.” She shook her head, then bowed it, pinching the bridge of her nose. “Its arms and legs were so long and strange looking. Don’t even get me started on its hands and fingers.”
“Did you see its face?” Tommy asked.
Again, the cop looked up like she had forgotten we were there. Once the surprise had passed, she said, “No, I didn’t see its face. I didn’t see its face because it didn’t have one.”
Stephanie looked at us and grimaced. This confirmed it: Ruby was right; there was more than one.
“No face,” the cop said. “But it had a mouth, and that mouth stretched to fuckin’ Timbuktu.”
“What do you mean?” Tommy asked.
“I mean, its damn mouth opened as wide as a doorway…somehow. Only…there was nothing but blackness in that doorway. No teeth, no tongue, nothing. It was some kind of weird blackness I've never seen before or could even imagine.” She chuckled, the sound eerie in the stillness of the morning. “But I never had much of a big imagination.”
Chills erupted down my spine.
“How’d you survive the night?” Autumn asked.
“I-I’m not sure,” the cop said. “I’m here and everyone I know is gone.”
She broke down again. We did our best to comfort her, but such horror is a hard thing to accept, let alone get through.
Taking a deep breath, the cop met our eyes. “Maybe we’re the ones who were taken and we just don’t know it. Maybe this is our purgatory.” She sniffled. “Or our Hell.”
The cop calmed a few minutes later. She told us her name was Emily Gertz. She was forty-two, divorced with no kids. Her parents were dead, but she had a grandfather she loved dearly down south, about a hundred miles away. He, too, had been a cop for over twenty-five years before retiring and teaching criminal justice at a local college. He was pushing ninety now, but she wasn’t worried about him. According to her, he put whiskey in his Wheaties instead of milk and could shoot like Wild Bill Hickok, even if his hands got a little shaky sometimes.
It would’ve been nice not to have to worry about someone, because I was losing hair by the second constantly thinking about Clem, wondering if she was safe or not. And here I was more than an hour away, lost in an area I’d known most of my life.
“I need something to eat,” I said, and excused myself from the others, mostly because I needed space and a moment to clear my head.
There was a gas station on the corner of the street. I walked over to it and went inside. It was empty. Untouched. Perfectly preserved. I grabbed a handful of snacks and drinks. Feeling guilty and without any cash, I took a flyer from the checkout counter and a pen from behind the register. I wrote my name, number, address, the date, and what I’d taken with a note saying Can’t pay with card for obvious reasons, but I will pay you when I can. Thanks! Then I brought the snacks back for all of us. We ate in the shade of a tree. The world was quiet enough for the unwrapping of my candy bar to be heard throughout the whole city.
“Do you know anything else?” I asked. “You know, about other places where these things attacked?” I was thinking about Clem and Julia, wondering how far this shitshow stretched.
The woman didn’t give me an answer.
Tommy took a sip of his energy drink and said, “You had communication, didn’t you? You said the radio lasted longer than everything else.”
“It did.”
“So, is it the entire county? We know it’s happened in at least two nearby towns.”
She shook her head.
“What?” Tommy said. “The entire state?”
Now she averted her eyes, looking at the toes of her boots.
“The country?” Tommy’s voice was getting smaller. So was the hope I was holding on to that Clem and Julia were all right.
Emily shook her head. “Last I heard it…it was happening all over the world. That was the word before communication went down.” She paused, swallowed, her throat making an audible clicking noise. “People were either getting taken by those things, or going insane and killing themselves. That’s why me and my partner got called out here. Some lady took a dive out of that apartment.” She pointed down the street toward a four-story building.
I squinted, imagining someone’s grandma or great aunt crashing into the sidewalk because of these creatures. Then I looked away, tears stinging my eyes. It was all surreal. In a matter of hours, the world had been reduced to this—this silent, empty place.
I stood and began pacing.
“It’s okay,” Tommy said. “Clem is fine. I’m sure of it.”
“I have to go,” I said. “I can’t wait around anymore.”
“I wouldn’t get your hopes up,” Emily said. The others stared in dismay. “What? I’m sorry. I’m just being logical. After what I saw last night…I’m surprised I’m still here. I hid in my car for, I don’t know, hours, and it was like my gun was whispering to me, telling me to blow my goddamn brains out.” She paused. “I’m not going to do that, though. I’m not a coward. I’m gonna fight until I can’t fight anymore.”
“I’m not a coward either,” I said, anger burning inside me. “I made a promise to always be there for my daughter, and I intend to keep that promise.” I looked at Stephanie and Autumn. “Are you ready? I can drive you to your parents’ house before I go.”
I had already spent more time here than I wanted to, but only because I thought the cop might have more information about what had happened. She did…only it was what I had expected. The creatures were all over, and things weren’t looking good.
“I can take the girls,” Emily said. “Don’t worry.”
I looked at Stephanie. “Is that okay?”
Stephanie nodded.
“You’re right, though, kid,” Emily said. “You go get your daughter. Just know it isn’t gonna be a cakew
alk. But you at least have to try.” She smiled. It was the first time I’d seen her smile, and it was quite nice. It made her look youthful. She pulled herself up and walked to the cruiser parked across the road. She opened the back door and grabbed one of the pistols. When she came back she handed it and some ammunition to me. “I could lose my badge for this.” She chuckled. “But who’s left to take it away?”
“Thank you.”
“Thank you,” she replied. “All of you. For helping bring me back to reality. If I hadn’t seen someone before noon, I think I would’ve killed myself. No way I could deal with another night like that alone.”
It filled my mind with dread to think the monsters would be back when the sun set. I guess their work wasn’t finished.
But neither was ours.
We said our goodbyes. We wished each other the best. It hurt to leave Stephanie and Autumn. They already felt like family to me. That’s the thing about tragedy—it brings you closer to the ones you experience it with. Maybe that was a silver lining.
I lost Ruby. I lost the world I was so used to. But I had gotten to know two more extraordinary people. People I could call friends.
As I was walking toward the car, Stephanie called after me. I heard her footsteps echoing off the sidewalk behind. When I spun around, she threw herself into my arms, grabbed my face, and kissed me full on the lips.
I stiffened at first—no, not like that, you pervs, although I’m sure that probably happened too—before I relaxed and just went with it.
It had been a long time since I kissed anyone. I had forgotten what it was like. The way my body felt all electric. The way my heart sped up. The way the butterflies fluttered in my chest.
We parted, and she stared at me for a few seconds before saying, “Oh God…I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have—”
She never got the rest of the sentence out, because this time I kissed her.
After Tommy finished oooooooo-ing, Stephanie said, “I hope your daughter is all right. I really do. And I hope you stay safe.”
The Whispers: A Supernatural Apocalypse Novel Page 12
