Nightstruck

  I couldn’t stop the scream that tore out of me like a demon trying to escape.

  Propped up against the far wall, where it had come to a stop after bouncing off the window of our house, was Mrs. Pinter’s head.

  I forgot all about my crime scene protocol worries, forgot about moving cautiously in the dark, forgot about making rational decisions. Forgot everything, basically. My mind filled with white noise as I turned and ran for the kitchen door, desperate to get inside. My feet skidded through blood, and I fell down hard on my hands and knees. I managed to keep hold of the gun, but the flashlight was jarred from my grip, and I was too panicked to reach for it.

  Maybe it was just as well I ran the rest of the short distance in the pitch dark. I’d seen enough horror to haunt my nightmares for years already. I skidded and slipped and half-crawled, but I made it to the kitchen door and flung myself through, slamming it shut behind me and throwing all the locks. Then I collapsed in a shivering, hyperventilating heap on the floor, with my back propped against the door.

  Bob whimpered softly at me in the darkness, coming over to nose my hand and then licking the skinned area on my palm from when I’d fallen.

  “Stop that,” I told him, then buried that hand in his thick, warm coat, clinging to him like I used to cling to my stuffed lamb when I was five.

  I don’t know how long it took—maybe five minutes—before I realized that unlike Bob, Piper hadn’t come in to check on me. Surely she had heard me scream, and though she obviously wasn’t the white knight type, once she heard the door close behind me she had to have known she wouldn’t be running straight into danger if she came into the kitchen.

  “Piper?” I called out, but there was no answer.

  I had a brief, horrible thought that the creature had somehow gotten into the house while I’d been outside, that I would find Piper torn apart just like I had found Mrs. Pinter, but I quickly rejected the thought. I would have heard something, and Bob would have sounded the alarm and thrown himself into the fray.

  I forced myself to my feet, keeping hold of Bob’s ruff for comfort as I called out to Piper once more. And once more received no answer. Figuring she must have run off to hide somewhere, I searched the house, room by room, calling for her repeatedly, but I couldn’t find her anywhere.

  It wasn’t until I’d gone through the whole house a second time with no success that I thought to check the front door—and found it unlocked. While I’d been out finding the horror in the back courtyard, Piper had up and walked out the front door.

  She had been adamant that I not open the courtyard door, but then she’d just strolled out the front door herself? With no warning? With no car? Where could she possibly have thought she was going? You couldn’t pay me to leave the house in anything but a dire emergency at a time like this.

  I tried her cell phone, of course, but it would take luck and hours of trying before I had a hope of getting a real live connection. I gathered up every last scrap of courage I could find and stepped out the front door to call her name, but I wasn’t surprised she didn’t answer. It had taken me too long to realize she was gone, and I’d spent so much time searching the house for her that she could easily be a mile away by now. Assuming she was all right. I couldn’t for the life of me imagine what she’d been thinking. The part of me that was terrified for her battled with the part of me that was furious with her, leaving my emotions tangled and confused.

  Struggling to keep all of the pieces of myself together, I sat down once more on the kitchen floor—I feared I would leave blood stains if I sat anywhere else—and started repeatedly calling my dad’s cell, hoping that somehow, miraculously, I would get through.

  * * *

  The cops showed up before I managed to get through to my dad on the phone. Apparently, most of the people who lived around the courtyard had seen what happened to Mrs. Pinter—or at least the aftermath of it—and had been frantically trying to get through to the police. One of them got lucky at phone line roulette before I did, and soon there were red and blue flashing lights everywhere.

  Even though I hadn’t reached my dad on the phone, he showed up about five minutes after the first police car arrived, having been notified about a grisly murder happening right behind his house. When he came through the door, I practically threw myself into his arms, hugging him with all my strength and unable to suppress my sobs. He held me and murmured assurances that everything was going to be okay, and for a brief moment I felt like daddy’s little girl again.

  Eventually I got hold of myself and managed to stop crying, though it was much harder to stop shaking. I had blood on my clothes from having slipped and fallen in the courtyard, but I assured my dad I was unhurt except for my skinned palms. He was on the verge of insisting I let an EMT look at me anyway, but he relented.

  His entire focus since he’d walked in the house had been on me, and when his officers tried to talk to him he was abrupt and dismissive with them in a way I knew wasn’t like him. But despite his focus on my safety, he wasn’t blind. He had to have seen all the damage Bob had done during his protective frenzy.

  “What happened here?” he asked gently, like he was talking to a wounded animal.

  “It’s a long story,” I told him between sniffles.

  “Then let’s sit down.” He guided me toward the couch, but I balked.

  “I don’t want to get blood on it,” I explained.

  “I don’t care about the damn couch,” he said, his tight voice betraying his fear and protective anger. “We can get a new one or get it cleaned. Now sit down.”

  I knew the anger in his voice wasn’t directed at me, so his tone for once didn’t get my back up. I collapsed onto the couch and wondered if I could face the ordeal of recounting tonight’s nightmare to my dad. Not that I had much of a choice.

  “Promise you’ll believe me,” I begged him before I started, and he promised without hesitation.

  And so I told him. Everything. Including Piper’s attempt to set me up with Aleric, the attack of the living pothole, and the unknown, unseen creature that had tormented us so badly before it had finally killed Mrs. Pinter. I ended with Piper’s baffling decision to leave the house while I was finding Mrs. Pinter.

  Dad asked me a dizzying number of questions, and I belatedly realized I was making my formal statement. I suspected having my father do the interview broke about a million rules of protocol, but none of the officers at the scene was inclined to argue with him. Each and every one of them had a haunted, exhausted look that said the night had already stretched them to the breaking point. Big city police officers see amazing amounts of terrible stuff, but nothing like what had been happening tonight.

  If Mrs. Pinter’s death had been a normal murder, we would have had cops and detectives and crime scene technicians crawling all over the place for hours, meticulously documenting every detail, taking a zillion photographs without disturbing the evidence. But tonight the city was so overwhelmed with mayhem—and the mayhem was of such an impossible nature—that the authorities just didn’t have the time to spend hours on the scene. They took plenty of photos and interviewed everyone whose house had a view of the courtyard, and then they packed the body into a medical examiner’s van and were done.

  The cops left, but my dad stayed. Feeling safe with him in the house, I finally changed clothes, dumping the bloodstained outfit in the trash, and took a shower. It was late enough that I could have fallen into bed directly afterward, but I was far from ready to face the specter of my dreams yet, so I went downstairs, where my dad was doing his best to tend to the wounds on Bob’s paws. Our heroic dog had not only nearly torn the house apart, he’d also broken two nails and shredded the pads of his feet.

  I was pleasantly surprised when the lights came back on just as Dad was finishing up with Bob and telling him what a good, brave boy he’d been.

  “Keep the candles in easy reach,” Dad warned as we went to work blowing them out. “I’ll get us some extra flashlights and a coup
le of Coleman lanterns tomorrow.”

  I shuddered. “So you don’t think we’ve seen the last of this.”

  He glanced at me and raised his eyebrows. “Do you?”

  No, of course not. I had no good explanation for what was going on out there, but it seemed overly optimistic to hope it would just stop of its own accord and everything would go back to normal.

  The next words were out of my mouth before I even realized I was going to say them. “Mom wants me to come live with her in Boston until all of this blows over.”

  When I’d talked to my mom on the phone in the afternoon, I had instantly rejected her suggestion. Funny how a few hours, an attack by a fang-filled pothole, and the decapitation of the nice little old lady next door had changed my perspective.

  “Maybe that’s not such a bad idea,” I concluded, though I still hated to say it.

  Dad’s face looked grim, his eyes unhappy, as he turned to face me fully. “I would love nothing better than to have you out of danger,” he said. “But I’m afraid that isn’t possible.”

  I frowned. “Why not?”

  “Because the city is now officially under quarantine.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “What?” It came out as a high-pitched bleat, loud enough to alarm Bob, who rose gingerly to his wounded feet and started looking around for the threat.

  Dad blew out a loud breath and rubbed his face. “No one knows why this is all happening, but the federal government is worried the city may be having some kind of outbreak. We can’t capture any of the bizarre happenings on camera, so people who haven’t personally witnessed something think we must be hallucinating. Until someone is able to prove that we don’t all have some contagious disease, no one’s going to be allowed in or out of Philadelphia.”

  “But … but they can’t do that.”

  My dad nodded. “It’s ridiculous to think they can effectively quarantine an entire city,” he agreed. “The National Guard has been called in, and they’re setting up roadblocks, but there’s no way they can keep everyone in. And even if it is some kind of mutant virus—which I personally think is a theory with absolutely no merit—it obviously didn’t just start tonight. The reports have been coming in for weeks, and the only thing different about tonight is the scale. People have been traveling in and out of the city every day, and if they’re carriers of some sort, it’s far too late to close the damn barn door.”

  I had been objecting on a moral/legal level, but the practical objections were just as compelling. I shook my head in disbelief. “So their theory is that every single person who’s seen one of these strange phenomena is sick? And that this mutant virus is capable of making multiple people have the exact same hallucination?”

  Dad shrugged helplessly. “I have a hard time thinking anyone actually believes that,” he conceded. “But they don’t know what to believe, and they’ll grasp at any explanation they can find.”

  “Any explanation except that something supernatural is happening you mean.”

  It was the first time I’d fully allowed myself to think of what was happening that way. I’d clung to words like weird and strange and bizarre, but they didn’t fully encompass everything that I’d seen and experienced.

  “Can you blame them?” he asked. “If you weren’t in the middle of it, do you think you’d believe it? Because I’m pretty sure I’d be grasping at some of those same straws if I were in their shoes.”

  He was probably right. Hadn’t I spent a significant amount of time thinking that I might be going crazy, or that I might have a brain tumor? Had I ever once thought to myself that something supernatural might really be happening? And this even after I’d seen the evidence with my own two eyes. If I were some government official being told that the city itself seemed to be coming alive at night and trying to kill its citizens—but oh, yeah, we can’t actually capture anything we say is happening on camera—I probably wouldn’t buy it.

  That realization did nothing to make the prospect of the quarantine any easier to contemplate.

  * * *

  The city of Philadelphia was a different world when Sunday morning rolled around. The supernatural crap stopped and the city physically returned to normal as soon as the sun came up, but life itself was about as far from normal as it was possible to imagine.

  Dad wasn’t comfortable leaving me home alone, even in the daytime—possibly because I was still in a state of shock over what had happened to Mrs. Pinter—so he took me to work with him. I sat in his office with my laptop, but he was in there for no more than fifteen minutes at a time because he was in nearly constant meetings and conference calls. Supposedly I was working on the history term paper, but who was I kidding?

  I was worried sick about Piper, and I hated the fact that beneath that worry was an undercurrent of anger and hurt. She had, for all intents and purposes, abandoned me last night. As strange as she’d been acting lately, I couldn’t believe she’d just walked out of the house like that, with no warning or even explanation. Dad and I had spent a while driving around the neighborhood looking for her, but we’d had no luck.

  Phone service, both cellular and landline, was still sporadic, the lines constantly jammed, but with a little patience it was actually possible to get through. I called Piper’s house and prayed she had gotten home safely last night. Unfortunately, her frantic parents hadn’t seen or heard from her. Sharing any details about what had happened last night would only frighten them more, so I got off the phone as fast as possible. I thought about calling my mom—she had to be pretty frantic herself—but I didn’t want to tell her about what had happened last night. I knew fear for me would make her lash out, and I didn’t want to listen to some rant about how my father should have dropped everything and rushed me to safety before all hell broke loose.

  Mostly what I did was sit quietly and observe and listen to everything that was going on around me—which, considering I was sitting in the police commissioner’s office, was a lot. And I learned a lot of stuff that the general population didn’t know, because it wasn’t being publicly reported. Like that there were hundreds of fatalities from last night’s chaos, and that there were many, many more unexplained disappearances. People like Piper, who seem to have wandered away into the night, against all logic. Many of the friends and families of the missing people reported they’d been acting “strange” lately. Just like Piper, who’d barely been recognizable as herself yesterday. There was an underlying assumption—which people seemed reluctant to state out loud—that all or most of those people were dead, although their bodies had not yet been found.

  The homeless population had been hit especially hard, and from listening to people talk, I got the impression that those who hadn’t been safely inside a shelter had been wiped out almost completely, many dead, many missing. About the only good news was that there hadn’t been the kind of rioting and looting one would ordinarily associate with a city in chaos. Most likely because the would-be rioters and looters had either been smart enough not to venture out or had paid the ultimate price if they had.

  Not surprisingly, the city’s residents—and those unfortunate visitors who were now stuck here—weren’t too happy about the quarantine. There was no rest for our weary police officers, who had to take to the streets in record numbers to keep the peace. The Centers for Disease Control had been called in to examine volunteers who appeared to be “infected” with whatever fictitious disease the powers that be thought we all had. I suspected the quarantine would stay in effect even if the CDC doctors gave everyone a clean bill of health. I think the federal government had no idea what to make of the situation or what to do about it, so they were waving their hands like magicians, trying to make it look like they were taking action when they were in fact just as lost as the rest of us.

  All day long, everyone watched the slow progress of the sun across the sky, trying to prepare for whatever the night would bring. Once the sun set, there would be no such thing as an off-duty police officer, and
even those who were retired or still in training would be pressed into action. There was to be a four o’clock curfew, by which time everyone except law enforcement or emergency personnel was required to remain indoors. Every ambulance and fire truck would have a police escort, and teams of utility workers were assigned armed guards who would protect them should they have to roll out to keep the power on.

  At around three o’clock, my dad finally had a brief chance to take a breather. He looked like he needed to sleep for about a week, and the stress was deeply etched into the lines of his face. I wished I’d taken my mom up on the offer to stay with her in Boston, because the one thing my dad didn’t need was the extra stress of worrying about me.

  “I don’t know when I’m going to be able to make it home tonight,” he told me. “I don’t want you home alone, but I know it can’t be comfortable for you sitting around the office all day.”

  To tell you the truth, it was getting pretty old. There was nowhere super comfortable to sit, and I couldn’t just rifle through our pantry and fridge when I wanted a snack. Not to mention that I couldn’t stretch out on my bed or walk around barefoot or sing along with the music on my iPod. Not without embarrassing myself, that is.

  I’d thought Dad’s words were a preamble to an apology, but I discovered he had actually made a plan—without consulting me first, of course.

  “I’ve invited Luke to come over and spend the night in the guest room,” he said, and my jaw dropped open in shock.

  “You what?”

  “I talked to his mother earlier today, and it turns out his dad was on a business trip in Chicago and now can’t get home. And the hospital is going to need all hands on deck tonight, so she has to go in, and she doesn’t want to leave him alone any more than I want to leave you.”

  I was too busy gaping at him to respond. I mean, seriously, could I be hearing him right? Had he really asked my best friend’s boyfriend to spend the night at our house? Talk about awkward. Though admittedly, Dad didn’t know about my secret crush on Luke, so he probably didn’t realize just how epic the level of awkwardness was.