Operation Blackout

by J. L. Middleton

  “And I haven’t heard from her since that night,” Sone added.

  She shook her head and sighed heavily. She was not quite convinced—it would take more than a quick verdict, even if she trusted Sone’s judgement—but she did not want to continue the conversation. “Okay,” she acquiesced. “Then we’d better find Aaron before they do, if that’s the case.”

  Their search had been frustrating so far. Aaron hadn’t left a forwarding address at his last residence—the duplex that they’d shared and she’d just departed—and after she’d left, she hadn’t kept tabs on him like she should have. She racked her brain for mutual acquaintances who might still be in town and hoped that they’d maintained contact with him. The closest contact lived five minutes away, so she turned the car and headed there.

  - - -

  The gunmen from the store had followed Aaron home, and he didn’t know why. He may have confronted the girl, but he hadn’t really meant to; she had been about to shoot those people, and he’d needed to escape. It had simply been a moment of opportunity, and he’d purposely avoided heroics. Now the two of them had decided to stake out his house instead of fulfilling their plan for the pharmacy, and he didn’t know what to do.

  Sweat was dripping off him, running in rivulets from his brow and across his chest and soaking into his clothes, and his endless pacing across the living room to check the opposing windows was making his discomfort no easier. He could not be placed in this situation again. He could not confront the two student shooters again.

  Looking between the slats in the blinds, he could see the two dark figures. They were pacing slowly on the lawn like guards, and yet their demeanor was oddly calm, as if they were waiting for something. The girl, whose face had become obscured by an ever-thickening layer of grime, took something out from her vest and raised her clutched fist high into the air, where he could see it clearly. It was a signal. It must have been, for other figures began to draw toward her, taking form from the shadows as they came closer. Children—laughing, cherub-faced children. But when they directed their gazes toward him, their eyes harbored the same accusatory rage as the girl’s.

  Aaron flinched under their collective anger and drew away from the window. Belatedly, he realized how foolish he was acting: He’d tried to ration his medication out until he knew he’d be able to cultivate the courage to confront the outside world, but he now had only three pills left. The pharmacy may have been anxiety-inducing, but it was ultimately harmless; there had been no incident there, aside from his panicked flight. There were no shadows collecting outside his apartment, just like there were no such things as ghosts. He knew this place—he knew Scotts Ridge—and this was why he’d returned here. His familiarity with the area made it easier for him to differentiate between his reality and his hallucinations.

  His therapist, whom he couldn’t afford to see as often as he needed, had provided various techniques for his attacks when they came. He inhaled deeply, counted to ten, and then did it again until his heart rate slowed and his agitation decreased. He reminded himself of the facts he knew. He was Aaron Jason Grimm. He was thirty-two, and he lived alone. His mother had died when he’d been young, and his father had passed last year in a car accident. He lived at 4 Meadow Lane in the guesthouse behind the Primrose Bed & Breakfast, where he worked as caretaker. He was good with his hands and had taught himself several skills.

  As he recited abstract concepts about his life, he also busied his hands. There was a repair job—several, in fact—that needed to be done before the bed-and-breakfast could be reopened. There was a short in the electricity, and after consulting with the owner, they were going to replace the wiring for the whole house. The owner could have hired a professional, but Aaron had shown his competence by remodeling the place, and he was allowed to undertake this job as well. He’d replaced most of the old-fashioned wiring, and work was coming to its completion. Only the living room and foyer remained, and this was where he was now headed. The single-mindedness of the task allowed him to stroll past the shadow children and not acknowledge their hateful, spectral presence on his way into the main house, where he now knelt on the floor with his hands on the wires and his tools at his side. He was fine, and in a few hours, he’d be able to attempt another expedition to the pharmacy.

  - - -

  True to form, Connor made Orion speak to the desk clerk when they arrived at the police station, and though he stumbled at first, he gained enough confidence throughout the exchange to realize that the experience hadn’t been nearly as harrowing as he’d kept telling himself. Connor had assisted by flashing his badge, proving that he was a special agent, and Orion had been able to negotiate an interview with an officer. While they were waiting, Connor smiled and gave him an encouraging pat on the back, which he tolerated sheepishly. Orion knew that his partner’s social attempts were genuine, but his attention, positive though it may be, still made him uncomfortable. It was the inverse of his parental relationship, and he preferred the quiet that he’d experienced earlier in their case when Orion had merely existed.

  When the sergeant came to greet them, Orion almost didn’t realize that she was an officer. Due to her short stature, she appeared young, but the lines etched into her face indicated experience. She led them back to a private office and offered them seats; in the city, she would likely have been allotted only a desk. Her nameplate introduced her as Alejandra Luna. “Brown says you boys are federal, but you just need an ID on a suspect?” she said, adjusting her glasses. “That’s a bit unusual. Pardon me, but normally when you boys roll into town, you want to take over the investigation.”

  Connor nodded and straightened his posture to speak. “We came to town because of the incident, but we’re not going to get in your way or anything. Wouldn’t want to intrude on your investigation.” A bit of sarcasm crept into his tone, despite his best efforts, but he pressed ahead. Although he had been raised to have a healthy respect for the law, it was hard to maintain this reverence when the local police and even other federal agents dealt with only the mundane and were often skeptical or unhelpful when he needed help tracking down Others. “We’ve got our own leads to follow,” he said, hoping candor would help grease the wheels. Headquarters had worked quickly and had isolated the best still of their person of interest to send to him. He pulled up the snapshot on his phone and showed it to the sergeant. “We just want to talk to this guy.”

  As soon as she saw the picture, Luna’s expression changed from civil disinterest to brief surprise before her face set in a disapproving scowl. “What do you want with him?” she asked, an edge suddenly in her voice.

  “We think he might know something,” Connor replied calmly. Recognizing the building tension, he leaned back, allowing her to continue holding the phone, and added amenably, “He’s not a suspect or anything. We just think he might have seen something the others didn’t.”

  She sank back into her chair, folded her arms, and spoke grudgingly. “You boys should really just leave him alone. Anything he knows probably wouldn’t be worth anything.” She shook her head and added, “It definitely wouldn’t hold up in court.”

  Orion frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “Well, that’s Aaron Grimm,” she explained, identifying him reluctantly. His case was a sore point for the department, not because of something he’d done—they all respected him—but due to his discharge from and subsequent treatment by the government. “I’m pretty sure he’s been diagnosed with schizophrenia, but with health insurance being what it is, it’s probably an unofficial diagnosis. I know he’s definitely got PTSD. We all tend to look the other way when he gets his prescription filled, or we get called to escort him home because he’s caused a disturbance.” She explained that the pharmacy charged him a nominal fee, mostly to keep their records in order for inventory and tax purposes, but the town provided the rest of the funding through sporadic donation drives.<
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  Orion risked a sidelong glance in Connor’s direction, attempting to ascertain his reaction, and saw that he was troubled. In lieu of taking notes, Connor twirled his pen in tight, controlled motions as he tried to formulate a line of inquiry. Thankfully, Luna continued her story without being prompted. “A few years ago, when school shootings weren’t quite yet the norm, he was the first cop on the scene. He managed to secure the area and even subdue one of the shooters, all without his sidearm, but these were different from the normal rampaging shooters.” She seemed to age visibly as she added, “They had a plan. They were going to ensure there were no survivors by blowing up the school.”

  Orion winced and shifted uneasily. “Oh yeah, I remember. Sarles Elementary, right?” he asked. When Luna confirmed, he turned to Connor to explain since the incident had been quickly and regrettably preempted on national news by the Deepwater Horizon spill. “They rigged the whole school with explosives. One of the shooters had a jacket with a dead-man switch. When she died, her body blew up, and she took half the hostages with her.” He shuddered at the memory. Cassie had been the same age as the victims, and though she’d attended a private school—a place that his absentee parents had deemed safe—the attack had been on the heels of a car bomb that had been detonated in Times Square. It was the first time that he’d realized how fragile their lives were, and he’d also firmly comprehended how little he and his sister meant to their parents because they refused to return early from a work trip to comfort their anxious children. “I was scared to let Cassie go to school for a week after that,” he admitted. Then, he addressed the sergeant. “Didn’t the officer get crucified?”

  Luna’s frown deepened. “He did his best under the circumstances, as far as we were concerned. It was the media who put him on trial,” she replied bitterly. “No, he stayed on for a few weeks afterward, but I guess it was too much for him, and he ended up quitting. He started having his episodes a couple weeks later.” She sobered, making eye contact with each of them separately. “That’s why we look out for him now,” she said deliberately. “It could have been any one of us.”

  Connor nodded sympathetically. “Do you know where we could find him?”

  “He works as a caretaker for the old bed-and-breakfast up on the hill,” she replied, picking up her pen and writing the address and directions on a notepad. “Folks say it’s haunted now, which is a load of nonsense. Nothing’s ever happened up there—no murders, kidnappings, or any of that ‘violent crime’ garbage. It keeps him employed, and I guess it keeps him busy. Phil—he runs the hardware store in town— Phil says he’s been doing a lot of repairs to the place, maybe even remodeling. Maybe they’ll reopen someday. It always looked like a nice place to live.” She held out the address and then snatched the paper away as Connor reached for it. Grimly, she warned, “Now, you two better be nice to him. He gets disorientated easily, and if I hear that you’ve upset him, I can make your stay in town very unpleasant. I don’t care what your jurisdiction is here.”

  Connor smiled winningly. “Of course. We’ll be perfect gentlemen,” he promised, and she relinquished the paper. He glanced at it before tucking it in his pocket and asking casually, “Say, why do people think the place ‘s haunted?”

  Her initial response was a dubious look, as if she wanted to recheck their credentials; while a fair share of people in the state believed in the supernatural, in her experience, most professionals eschewed those beliefs, and she certainly didn’t think anyone at the federal level had the mental wherewithal left for it; surely they spent all their intellectual capacity coming up with new bureaucratic ways to interfere with state jurisdiction. “Folks who spent the night there claimed to hear children laughing. A few said they saw shadows or strange visions,” she explained, her skepticism clear. “It’s a load of hooey. It’s an old building. It settles at night, and people have overactive imaginations, especially when there’s no one else in the building.” She shook her head. “Bunch of trespassing kids with nothing better to do.”

  Connor cast Orion a significant glance before smiling and offering his hand to Luna. “Thank you, officer,” he said, excusing himself. She nodded curtly, and the two men quickly exited.

  - - -

  The car stopped, and Naught put on the parking brake, but she found herself unwilling to move and placed her hands on the steering wheel again. Apart from her initial view of the building as she’d pulled up, she couldn’t make herself look at the Primrose Bed & Breakfast. Afraid that she might catch a glimpse of Aaron through the naked windows, she instead opted to stare ahead through the windshield. “We didn’t really break up,” she confessed finally. “I was a coward, and I left in the middle of the night. I just didn’t want to risk a confrontation. He tended to get unpredictable… sometimes violent.” She’d been woken up several times to the bed shaking or to screaming, and she’d had to coax him awake from his nightmares to calm him down. Other times, she’d turn over and feel how cold his side of the bed was and realize that he’d been there only long enough for her to fall asleep. Just as often, she’d hear him sobbing softly, only for him to deny it had happened when she’d inquired about it. Once, she hadn’t been careful enough in rousing him, and he’d slugged her for her trouble, giving her a black eye. He’d apologized profusely, but it had nevertheless pushed her toward the breaking point. “I just got tired of dealing with it… with him,” she admitted, and her whole body felt weary. “His episodes were exhausting.”

  “Can you still talk to him?” Sone’s tone was ambivalent; they shared a bond—one that he wished to develop—but they also had a job to do, and that came first. He wished that she’d informed him of this complication prior to their arrival so that he could have devised a contingency plan.

  “Yeah,” she replied. She pressed her palms into her eyes, paused, and then rubbed them before favoring him with a sad smirk. “I mean, we both knew it was ending. I just made the first move.” She swiftly slid her palms across one another, mimicking a jet taking off, to emphasize her point.

  He hesitated unexpectedly as a thought occurred to him. Naught didn’t seem like the kind of woman who would meekly suffer abuse, but he knew nothing of her past, except that she’d had a difficult life. It was possible that there was something more to the episode with Aaron, including her apparent reluctance to confront him now. Then again, she’d practically begged to come on this mission, and that action wasn’t consistent with his new hypothesis. “Are you sure?” he asked uncertainly.

  “Totally,” she replied, her somber tone shifting toward lightheartedness. “You’ll see. You ready?” She paused, steeling herself against the steering wheel, and plastered a smile on her face as the two of them exited the car.

  In decades past, the Primrose Bed & Breakfast had been a vast estate, and it still maintained echoes of that majesty. The front of the house sported a beautiful view over the valley, as well as the front yard. The garden, which had once been carefully manicured, had been portioned off and sold to developers, who had created smaller residences with similar views along the switchback street that led up to the place. The guesthouse windows were bare—the drapes that formerly adorned them had been stashed safely in storage while renovations were underway—and it was visible through the windows that scant pieces of furniture had been thrust against the walls and covered in heavy canvas. Gypsum dust and debris peppered the emptied floors alongside toolboxes and various electrical cords.

  The veranda had been partially refurbished and expanded into a receiving area complete with a trellised overhang; in the summers, its vines would flower, welcoming customers as they dropped off their luggage, but only a specter of its majesty remained as winter inched closer. The sidewalk had retained its original patterned stones, and Naught stopped to admire its intricacy. She was lingering intentionally, delaying the inevitable as she tried to piece together what she would say to Aaron when she saw him. The video had
n’t revealed much change, though he had grown thinner, and she had only the information that her friend had provided. How would Aaron react after all this time, and what if he hadn’t taken the breakup as well as she’d assumed?

  There was no point in speculation, especially when she and Sone were standing on his doorstep. She gave herself a once-over, running her fingers through her hair and adjusting her clothes, and then knocked boldly on the front door before stepping back. Sone stood behind her, ostensibly to give her some privacy, but he didn’t seem like he was willing to avert his eyes and instead seemed ready to intercede if the reunion turned sour.

  They didn’t have to wait long; Aaron was soon peering hesitantly through the door. “Aaron!” Naught greeted cheerily, outstretching her arms.

  “Samantha… ?” He opened the door wider and accepted her embrace reluctantly. She held him tight, as if the interceding years hadn’t occurred. “Are you real?”

  “Of course I am,” she replied, her smile faltering slightly. “Can we come inside?”

  “All hallucinations say that,” he stated, yet he still stepped aside to allow the two of them entrance, and a feeling of unease bubbled up from her stomach. He regarded her skeptically from head to toe, inventorying differences, before his eyes settled on her face. Gingerly, he touched her whitened locks. “You’ve changed.”

  She forced a smile as she covered his hand with hers and moved them both toward her cheek. “Only a little,” she said sadly and squeezed before relinquishing her grip to introduce her companion. “This is my friend Sone. We’re here to help you. We’re part of this organization—”

  “I should get back to work,” Aaron interjected. Grudgingly, he dropped his hand from her face and then curtly shut the door behind them before walking deeper into the house.