by Dan Wells
Officer Davis, the one from the church meeting, was yelling at Officer Glassman. “Another one” didn’t refer to the dead body, but to Glassman’s history with underage girls. I glanced at Marci, and she shook her head.
“You want proof the Withered are evil?” she whispered. “It killed the girl instead of the child molester.”
“Listen!” shouted Davis. “I don’t care what excuses you have! I don’t care that you risked your life or got a few cuts or whatever pathetic excuse you’re trying to give me. This town’s ready to explode, and instead of solving their problems now I’ve got to deal with some dirtbag officer and his dirtbag fantasies.” He paused, while Glassman murmured something I couldn’t hear. “Do you think that matters?” asked Davis when he was done. “Of course it was all just gossip—that’s why you haven’t been fired—but this is evidence. If you’re so damn innocent this time can you explain what you were doing with her at 1:30 in the morning?”
“At least he’s as mad about this as we are,” said Marci.
“I’m trying to hear,” I said, but stopped speaking abruptly when another officer walked briskly around the corner, headed straight for us. I looked up, rehearsing my story one last time, but he walked right past us toward Officer Davis’s door. His face was grim, his teeth clenched.
“That’s not good,” said Marci.
The newcomer opened the door, and we caught the second half of Officer Glassman’s muffled argument: “… even talking about this! How is it even an issue? So you don’t believe in bigfoot, fine, neither do I, but then it was a bear, or the biggest wolf you’ve ever seen—the coroner’s report is going to back up everything I’ve said, no matter what you think I was doing with that g—”
“Quiet!” said Officer Davis. I could just barely see him through the door, and he looked furious. I wanted Glassman to keep talking, to say more about the monster he’d seen, but Davis turned to the man who’d opened the door and snapped at him: “I said no interruptions.”
“Unless there was another dead kid,” said the cop at the door. Every head in the waiting room swiveled toward him in unison, and the entire police station seemed to be suddenly on edge, listening. “Now we have.”
“No,” said Davis.
The cop in the doorway shook his head. “A local boy named Corey Diamond just got hit by a truck, in his own bedroom. Dead on impact.”
“Holy mother,” whispered Marci.
“In his bedroom.…” Officer Davis spluttered, trying to find words. “That’s … Dammit. Is it an accident or another murder?”
“That’s the thing,” said the cop. “We don’t know.” He swallowed, like he was nervous. “There wasn’t anybody in it—the truck was completely empty when it hit.”
18
“I think someone’s reading my mind,” I whispered.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” said Marci.
I looked around the police station, as if expecting to see a clawed, hairy monster peeking out from around a corner. “It’s the only explanation.”
The entire police station was buzzing with noise, cops and civilians and even suspects in their interrogation rooms, shouting and whispering and arguing and praying. What was going on? Who was behind it? Why were they doing it? Even Boy Dog was barking, little yips and growls of agitation. I felt a pain in my hands and looked down, realizing that I was gripping the armrests so tightly that the skin of my knuckles, chapped from wind and sun, was splitting open across the bones. Someone was reading my mind.
“We need to get out of here,” said Marci again, grabbing my arm.
I felt a sudden burst of anger—how dare she touch my arm!—and pulled away, feeling furious and terrified and guilty all at once. I shouldn’t react like that; Marci was my girlfriend, I loved her, of course she could touch my arm. Then I remembered it wasn’t even her fingers that had touched me but Brooke’s, and I felt another surge of anger, followed just as quickly by another surge of guilt. I shouldn’t feel like this. I couldn’t allow myself to feel like this.
I needed to burn something.
“Close that door!” shouted Officer Davis. “Let’s keep some semblance of propriety in this station!” The cop with the message stepped into Davis’s office and closed the door behind him, and the noise from the waiting room only got louder.
Marci stood up and grabbed my hand with Brooke’s fingers, trying to pull me out of my seat. I clenched my teeth and gripped the armrests tighter, willing my skin to split open, relishing the sharp, tearing pain of it. “John,” she whispered, and I closed my eyes and tightened the muscles in my neck, flexing them so hard my head began to shake. Get out of my head, I thought, get out of my head! I took a deep breath and tried to calm myself. Whoever you are, I thought, I’m going to find you and tear you apart with my bare hands. Do you hear me? I’m coming for you!
Marci tugged on me again and I stood, feeling nauseated at the sudden change in position. Or the anger. Or the helplessness. How could we fight this thing? Whoever it was had pinned us as Withered hunters the moment we’d stepped into town, had been reading our minds and taunting us with body after body, death after death. What other explanation could there be? The people we met, the people I wanted to hurt, were killed in exactly the way I wanted to kill them. And now our only suspect was gone—
I stopped at the front desk. “What happened to the body?” I asked.
The cop at the desk looked up with a frown, both annoyed by my question and confused by it. “What?”
“Corey Diamond’s body,” I said, “what happened to it? Is it still there?”
“You can’t see the body—”
“But can you?” I asked. “Can anybody? Does the body still exist?”
“The hell are you talking about?” asked the cop. “We’re not going to hide the body, no matter how many pieces it’s in. What are you trying to say about us?”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Marci, “come on.”
I let her lead me toward the front door. “It didn’t disappear,” I said. “It’s not a Withered.”
“He’s not a Withered,” said Marci, though her voice had no passion.
“That’s what I said.”
She pushed the door half open, her wrist limp, and stared out through the glass at the crowd of police in the front of the building. They were buzzing like a hive, talking and arguing as much as the people inside were. Some were running toward their cars, others held back townspeople. Was one of them the killer? A cop or a civilian or the driver of that truck passing by? It had to be someone. What did they say the population was, nine hundred? Add in the state police and whatever other drifters and delivery drivers happened to be in town and we could round it off to an even thousand. How many had Attina killed? How many more would he kill if we didn’t catch him? If we just burned the whole city to the ground and took all of them out, was it worth it if we killed the Withered with them? Was there some formula for acceptable collateral damage? Was there enough math in morality to sacrifice a whole town of people?
I needed to burn something. I needed to scream and cry and hack a piece of meat into hamburger.
Marci wasn’t even pushing on the door anymore. “It doesn’t matter,” she said.
Don’t say it.
“It’s gonna kill us too,” she said.
I screamed in my mind, a long, inaudible howl of frustration, and then I swallowed all my rage, all my tension, all my pent-up emotions, choking them down like an owl in reverse, a ragged little bundle of bones and claws and bile, forcing it back down my gullet and pasting a broad, fake smile across my face. Her problems were more important than mine. “You want some ice cream?”
“I just want it to stop,” said Marci.
“It will,” I said, not even knowing what “it” she was referring to. I put my hand next to hers and pushed the door open, hoping that she would push with me, drawing strength from mine, but instead she just let her hand drop to her side. The summer sun beat down like a furnace, an
d I pulled her gently out into it, one hand on her arm and the other in front of my face trying to shield my eyes from the brightness. Boy Dog shoved past our legs, barking at the sun and heat and noise and everything else, like a tiny personification of the whole town’s restless anger. Marci resisted and I tugged again, whispering gently. “It’s all going to be just fine,” I said. “We’re going to figure out what’s going on—you and me. And we’re going to solve it.” Then, remembering her rage after we killed Yashodh, her indignant fury at the thought that being a good killer was something to be happy about, I changed my tactics. “We’re going to save everybody,” I said. “Three people are gone, but they’re the only ones.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do, because we’re amazing,” I said, leading her down the steps. The cops weren’t even paying attention to us; they were too occupied with other concerns. “I know it because we’re good at this, we’re the best at this; we’re going to save the lives of every single person in this town. All 997 of them, including the cops and the drivers. Everyone. Do you hear me, Marci?”
She started crying.
“Marci, do you hear me? I need you to talk to me. We’re going to save everyone, can you say that? Say it with me: We’re going to save everyone.”
“I’m not Marci,” she sobbed, and she broke away from me and ran.
I bolted after her, forgetting the cops, forgetting Boy Dog, forgetting everything in the world but that one girl, skinny and dirty and afraid. My feet pounded on the pavement, leaping off the curb and onto the dusty asphalt, arms pumping at my sides. Just one girl. I didn’t even know who she was—maybe Brooke, maybe Regina, maybe Lucinda or Kveta or a hundred thousand others I’d never even met. It didn’t matter. She needed my help. She ran toward a car, trying to throw herself in front of it, but it passed too quickly; she ran toward the cinder block wall on the far side of the road, head down like a bull, and screamed a wordless cry as she plowed herself into it, skull first, my fingers just inches too far away to pull her back. She hit the wall with an audible smack and bounced off, reeling and falling. I only just managed to grab her shirt as she fell to the sidewalk, catching her before she hit her head again. She threw up, and I rolled her over to keep the vomit from choking her. Seconds later I was grabbed from behind, half a dozen rough hands yanking me away, pulling me back.
“Don’t take her away!” I screamed.
“Get off her!” shouted one of the cops, and suddenly cops were everywhere, appearing like magic as they caught up to us and surrounded us, misinterpreting Brooke’s sprint and my chase as some kind of abusive scenario.
“She’s a suicide risk!” I shouted.
“Keep your mouth shut!”
“She just tried to kill herself,” I said, grunting as they slammed me to the ground and cuffed me. “If you try to separate us she will kill herself, you have to trust me—I was trying to help her!”
Brooke’s body was still rolling around on the sidewalk, twisting either in pain or a seizure, I couldn’t tell which. She’d hit her head so hard I was amazed she was even conscious. The cops tried to help her, but weren’t sure what to do. I heard one call for an ambulance, and others knelt next to her, speaking in calm, businesslike phrases:
“Are you okay?”
“Was this boy chasing you?”
“Did he hurt you?”
I took another deep breath, trying to calm myself as much as possible. “Please believe me,” I said. I stuck with the name everyone in Dillon knew her by. “Her name is Marci, though she has some mental problems and doesn’t always answer to it. I’m her friend and I was only trying to keep her safe. Part of her mental illness makes her highly prone to suicide.”
I saw someone step out of the shop she’d crashed into, an old man in an apron, and I shouted out to him. “You—you from the store. You’re my witness, okay? This girl is a severe suicide risk, and I have to stay with her, and you just heard me warn these cops, okay? If they separate us, and she kills herself, you can testify it was their fault, okay? Sir, did you hear me?”
“Shut up,” said the cop holding me down.
“Is there anything I can do?” the old man asked the police.
“Just stay back,” said the nearest officer, “we have an ambulance on the way.”
“Bring her some water,” I said, “And all the ice in your store; she probably has a concussion.” The man nodded and went back inside. The cop on my back shoved me against the ground again, frisking me with his free hand.
“He’s got a weapon,” said the cop, pulling Potash’s combat knife from the sheath on my leg. Dammit. “You want to explain this, kid?”
“Officer,” I said, talking to the cop who was trying to help Brooke. “You see her hand? Yes, you—you see her hand? It looks like it’s flailing randomly, but she’s reaching for your gun. Just—just step away, that’s right, and try to hold her down.”
“What’s your name?” asked the cop I’d warned, glancing at me as he grabbed at Brooke’s flailing arms.
“David,” I said. “I’m only trying to help her, you have to believe me.”
“Why’s she trying to kill herself?”
“That’s a very long story.”
“You’ve got time,” said the cop on my back. There were at least six other police officers swarming around us; if Brooke had gotten hold of a gun, she’d be dead. I tried to look her in the eyes, to see how lucid she was, but she was squeezing them shut.
“Just let me die,” she whimpered. “Just please let me die. It’ll all be over and I can start again.”
The cop holding her arms looked at her in surprise, then back at me. “Start again?”
“She’s mentally ill,” I said. “Most of the time she’s fine, but when she gets like this you just have to ride it out. She’ll be okay again soon.”
“She can ride it out in the hospital,” said the cop. “And you in the station, explaining all this.”
The store owner came back outside with a glass of water and a bowl of ice. “Did you hear that?” I asked him. “They’re going to separate us. Remember this when she dies in their custody—you have to testify that I warned them first.”
“Fine,” said the cop, “we’ll take you with us to the hospital.”
* * *
It’s sad, when you think about it, how precarious our lives are. Our ways of living. Everything I’d tried to accomplish over the last year, all the secrecy and the hiding and the coping strategies to try to keep Brooke healthy, it was pointless now, everything lost forever in ten seconds sprinting across an empty street. If we’d been somewhere else, the cops wouldn’t have seen us; if I’d been able to grab her more quickly, she wouldn’t have gotten hurt. If I’d had a better plan, or better reflexes, or been a better person.
Now we were in small, regional hospital, locked in a room with the cops keeping watch outside, waiting for the results of an MRI. I was surprised a hospital this small even had an MRI machine, but I wasn’t complaining. Brooke’s unconscious body lay in a bed, her head bandaged and hooked up to softly beeping monitors. Boy Dog was being held in a kennel in Dillon. And somewhere a state police officer was trying to figure out who we were, and then the FBI would come, and they’d take Brooke away, and I’d go to prison or worse. And Attina would keep killing.
Or maybe, as soon as I was gone, he’d stop. Maybe I was the reason he was killing at all.
The hospital was in Crosby, the next town over, larger than Dillon but still rural, still nowhere near big enough that you’d call it a city. The hospital was barely a clinic, with an emergency room and a maternity ward and a handful of other medical services, though it was new enough to have a tiny radiology department. Five or six rooms for patients. It was clean, though. And it was one story, so we could slip out the window and run if it came to that. Maybe it already had, and I was too stubborn to see it. Where could we even go? Dillon was crawling with cops, and everybody would recognize us, so we couldn’t hide there. But I di
dn’t want to abandon the town, either. If I was the only one who could stop Attina, then everyone he killed before I stopped him was my fault.
My only hope was to convince the FBI, when they finally showed up, to let me go back for another try. My one last wish before … whatever they did to me.
I spent the morning with the door closed. I lit a match, thrilling at the little spark of flame, but the smoke alarm went off almost immediately and the nurse came in to take my matchbook away. So even that was gone.
Somewhere in the afternoon—about six hours into our stay at the hospital—I heard a knock on the door. Whoever it was didn’t wait for an answer, but opened it just a second later.
“Iowa,” I said, recognizing him immediately.
The man who’d followed us through Dallas paused in the doorway, taken aback at the statement. “Iowa?”
“The plate on your car,” I said. “That sneaky black SUV that didn’t look remotely like an FBI vehicle.”
“Technically it wasn’t,” he said, closing the door behind himself and sitting in the room’s other chair. “It was a rental. But I’m stationed in Lincoln, Nebraska, so an Iowa plate isn’t all that surprising.”
“Wow,” I said. “What do you have to do wrong to get stationed in Lincoln, Nebraska?”
“Specialize in serial killers, apparently,” said Iowa. He stood up again and stepped toward me, holding out his hand. “Agent Mills. Big fan of your work.”
I let his hand hang there, unshaken. “What kind of work are we talking about?”
He held his hand out another moment or two, then shrugged and went back to his seat. “John Wayne Cleaver, special advisor to Agent Linda Ostler, and a key member of Task Force Goshawk, charged with a mission so secret I’m not even allowed to state it out loud in this room—though I assure you I’m very familiar with its particulars.”
“Goshawk?”
“Some kind of a bird,” said Mills. “I didn’t name it.”
“It’s better than Boy Dog,” I said.
“Your record with Agent Ostler was sketchy but acceptable,” said Mills. “You talked back to your superiors, you pushed every button and boundary and envelope you ever came across, and you actively antagonized some members of your team, including and most problematically the therapist assigned to your unit, but you always got the job done. You enabled more … how can I put this without spilling state secrets … more ‘apprehensions of nonstandard targets’ than the entire US government had managed to achieve in the several decades prior to your term of service. You were on track for a commendation and a hefty pay bump before Fort Bruce.”
