by Kris Ashton
“Some of us can control our urges, Sheriff.”
“So I can see,” Bert said, gesturing to the body on the floor between them.
Barkley closed his eyes as if to stymie an overload of input. When he opened them again he said softly, “Look, I wasn’t interested because…I’m gay.”
“You’re gay about what?”
“No, I mean…I’m queer. I’m a homosexual.”
Bert looked long and hard at Barkley. “Okay, let’s assume you are a queer. That doesn’t give you the right to murder a girl for trying to come onto you—not even a promiscuous or aggressive one.”
“No, you’re right,” Barkley said. He seemed somehow relieved, as if a splinter had been surgically removed from his brain. “But this is where it gets weird. Carrie took her pants off and spread her legs, like she was going to do yoga or go to the bathroom. The next thing I know, this…thing drops out of her.”
A chill ran up Bert’s back. “What sort of thing?”
“It’s under the desk here,” Barkley said, pointing furiously.
Bert slowly got down on one knee, keeping half an eye on Barkley and preparing to smash his shin with the nightstick if it all proved to be a ruse. But Barkley did not move, he only looked on expectantly. In the desk’s shadow Bert saw the egg, its reflective surface almost night-sky black in the minimal light. “Holy Christ.”
“She started to chase me with it,” Barkley said, his pitchy voice reflecting the absurdity with which he regarded his own recount. “It looked harmless enough, but I didn’t want to find out the hard way that it wasn’t. We went around the desk a couple of times and then I picked up the paperweight and just lashed out at her. I didn’t do it with the intent to kill. I didn’t do it with any intent. I was just frightened and—”
“I believe you,” Bert said.
Barkley looked flabbergasted. “You do?”
“These eggs or whatever they are have been cropping up all over town.”
“What are they?”
“I haven’t the foggiest idea. There was a report of one…well, never mind that. You’d better come back to the station and give me a full statement.”
“But I can’t—someone has to look after the plant. It doesn’t just run itself.”
“You have a second in charge, don’t you?”
“Well, yes. But—”
“Then you can ring him from the station—”
“He’s a she.”
Bert rolled his eyes. “Fine, you can ring her from the station and tell her what’s going on.”
“I can’t just tell her! My God, she’ll think I’m—”
“You don’t have to get into specifics. Just close the blinds and lock the door and say someone broke in last night.”
Barkley smiled. “Of course. Good idea.”
Bert told Barkley to wait where he was and then went downstairs to get some police tape from the trunk of his cruiser. That sense of losing control had returned. He affixed police tape across Barkley’s office door with a feeling of utter futility.
“Okay, Mr Barkley. Follow me back to the station in your car.”
As Bert took his caravan of one across town, he couldn’t help but notice not a single store had opened its shutters. Not all businesses in Bald Eagle operated on a Sunday—in fact only a few did—but usually you could sense the activity behind the scenes. By eight o’clock traders milled back and forth organizing things, unloading stock, preparing for the day. Today, that sense of busyness was absent. In its place were those unminded children playing their games on municipal property, and a man standing next to his beer delivery truck and looking bemusedly at the Eagle Eye Tavern, which was locked up tight. As Bert moved further along Main Street he saw another tyke, this one standing alone on the edge of the pavement and crying to anyone who would listen…which appeared to be no one. Bert also noted a dearth of traffic in both directions, and those cars he did pass he didn’t recognize.
He fought off an urge to pull over and investigate. His town might be out of kilter but he was escorting a killer (murder, manslaughter or acquittal on the grounds of self-defense, it didn’t much matter, that was what Barkley was) back to give evidence and that had to be his top priority.
Now and again small glare caught his eye—on sidewalks, in grassy fields, one even in the crook of a tree. They could just be old soda cans or cigarette foils or even discarded bottles. Some of them had to be, surely. You’re not usually looking for them, he thought.
He pulled into his parking spot at the station but did not get out until Barkley’s car beetled up beside him. Before Barkley could ask some sort of stupid question he skipped up the steps, implying that Barkley should follow.
He found the door locked, although it was not unusual for Martha to lock herself in if she was alone. Bert let himself in and had not taken more than five steps before he stopped. Martha’s desk was unattended, her chair still tucked away beneath it and her stationery aligned with military precision, ready for a new day’s action. Cody’s desk, in its usual state of organized mess, had not been disturbed either.
Cody could have fielded an early call-out, but Bert’s gut told him otherwise.
“Martha? Cody?” Bert called out, thinking one of them could be in the bathroom (even if their cars weren’t present—stranger things had happened).
“Sheriff?” Barkley said, picking up on his vibe.
“Martha, you here?”
“…here, Sheriff,” came someone’s faint voice—but it belonged neither to Martha nor to Cody.
Bert strode into his office and opened the cell room door, vaguely aware that Barkley was scampering after him like a puppy. “What did you say, Brolin?”
“I said they’re not here, Sheriff. Martha and the deputy never came in. I’ve been sitting here starving my ass off and listening to that goddamned phone ring all morning.”
Bert considered for a moment and then went to fetch the cell key. He inserted it into the lock. “This isn’t over between us, Brolin. You may not have had anything to do with”—he gestured into thin air—“whatever’s going on, but you were still supplying Sharna with drugs and doing God knows what else. I won’t forget that.”
“I can tell,” Brolin said.
Bert could not figure if this was meant as a wise-ass remark or not, and he guessed under the circumstances it didn’t matter. He turned the key and slid back the cell door.
“Don’t go anywhere, yet,” Bert said. “I have a feeling I’m going to need your help. There’s bread and some other breakfast things in the kitchenette just through there. Fix yourself and Mr Barkley here something to eat.”
“I wouldn’t eat anything he touched,” Barkley said.
“Go without then, I don’t care.”
The phone in Bert’s office cursed in its jangling strains, demanding attention.
“Christ almighty,” Bert said, wiping moisture from his brow. He made a harried line for his desk. “Don’t go anywhere!” he barked back over his shoulder.
He answered the phone.
Deputy Director White knocked on Richard Warland’s office door and walked in carrying a sheet of teletype paper, with its hypnotic pattern of blue and white lines. Only two things ever arrived printed on teletype paper: very good news and very bad news. Richard had not been handed much teletype paper in recent weeks and the previous day he had committed the cardinal sin of wishing things would liven up a bit—a reckless temptation of fate not dissimilar to Gee, we got nice weather for our picnic or There’s no way the Broncos can lose from here.
“What have you got for me?” Richard said.
“One of our whirlybird scouts has picked up a silver funnel, sir,” White said, presenting the teletype page to his superior.
Richard scanned the page for the longitudinal coordinates and estimated them to be somewhere in the mid-north-west. “What sort of population are we talking about?”
“We’re researching census figures now, but the reporting flyboy said it
’s fairly remote—mostly forest and only a single small community involved.”
“Well, that’s a break,” Richard said, resting back in his seat to take in the rest of the telegraphed capital letters. So far the United States had been spared a metropolitan incident and he prayed it would stay that way. “What’s the name of the town?”
“Bald Eagle,” White said.
The print-out crumpled in Richard’s hands. “Bald Eagle? As in Bald Eagle County, Colorado?”
“I believe that was it, sir, yes.”
“Oh, sweet Jesus,” Richard said, looking away. “What are the fucking chances…”
White shifted awkwardly from one foot to another. “Is there something I can do, sir?”
“Yes, you can get out of my office,” Richard said, shooing him away.
“Uh, sir?”
“What?”
“I need to know your initial orders.”
Richard rubbed his face, as if trying to sand it back and find the solution in his skull. “Implement full quarantine measures, but there is to be no eradication until I give the word. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Repeat it back to me.”
“Full quarantine measures but no eradication until you say so.”
Richard nodded. “Get cracking. And shut the door on your way out.”
White followed these orders to the letter, leaving Richard closed up in the complete silence of his soundproofed office. He sat motionless for some time, his slightly sweaty hands pressed down on the teletype report, thoughts tumbling through his head like acrobats.
Finally he opened a desk drawer and took out an address book, using the thumb tabs to open it up at the right letter.
Wishing he could be in the sunroom of his house with a glass of scotch instead, Richard dialed the number.
“Holy cow! Richard!” Bert said, a shaft of pleasure beaming into his dismal day. “Boy, are you a sound for sore ears.”
Bert and Richard had first met as young men when they attended the police academy in Denver. They had got along well, as men of different minds sometimes will when their disagreements fit together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Richard had always been ambitious; he saw the police force as nothing more than a way station, a place to get the experience he needed so he could move onto something bigger. Bert, on the other hand, only wanted the necessary skills and powers to preserve the town he loved and the Denver academy could provide that. Their political leanings differed too, but neither man much cared for politics—not such as they were played out in Washington, anyway. They clicked on the things that mattered most: a love of football and baseball, a few quiet beers on an idle summer afternoon, a belief in the importance of decency and protecting others. They had met their wives at the same dance (two friends who had been on the prowl for a husband apiece, as they learned later).
Their divergent adult lives had split them apart, but Richard had always flown back to see Bert and Dana at Thanksgiving or Christmas and they corresponded by post every few months (more often since Dana had passed away). Bert couldn’t speak for Richard, but he still cherished every letter he received and avidly consumed whatever details his friend chose to divulge, pedestrian or otherwise. He had a feeling Richard did the same. Certainly, whenever they got together around the holidays, Bert felt like he was eighteen again.
“How the hell are you, anyway?”
Richard hesitated and a lancet of foreboding punched into Bert’s gut.
“I wish I were calling under happier circumstances, Bert. But I’m afraid if you already have sore ears they’re about to get a lot sorer. I’m actually calling you in an official capacity.”
Bert puzzled over this for a moment. He knew Richard worked somewhere high up in a government agency, but because of its top-secret nature they had never discussed it. Then all at once he got it. “You know what’s been going on in Bald Eagle, don’t you? All this weird stuff with the eggs and what have you?”
“I’m sad to say I do, Bert.”
“So what the hell is it?”
Richard paused again. Bert hated that pause; he knew it all too well from his meetings with the town selectmen. Bureaucrats implemented such pauses when they were adjusting the truth or trying to decide how much of it the sheriff needed to know. “As we speak, a team of ADETI operatives and some members of the National Guard are on their way to Bald Eagle to quarantine the entire county. I’ll be following them in a chopper as soon as I get off the phone to you. I promise I will explain everything—or as much as I know—as soon as I get there. In the meantime, it would really help matters if you could set up roadblocks at all entry and exit points to Bald Eagle.”
“For God’s sake, Richard… ADETI? What the hell is—”
“Bert, I’m scheduled to land in Denver at midday and a chopper will have me in Bald Eagle half an hour after that. I guarantee I will answer every question you have then, okay? But for now, it’s imperative that you do as I say.”
“Just tell me this at least: how bad is it?”
“We’re talking about an incident on a national scale. Possibly global if it’s left unchecked.”
“But Bald Eagle is only a speck of a town. How could…”
“Bert? Please?”
“Okay, roadblocks. No one in or out, right?”
“Right. Thanks Bert. I’ll see you soon. Oh, and two things to remember—although you’ve probably figured this out for yourself already. Number one, don’t touch the eggs. Number two…don’t trust anybody.”
“The government’s motto,” Bert said sardonically.
“I’m sorry, Bert, I really am. I’ll see you soon.”
Bert hung up the phone and realized Brolin and Barkley were standing side by side, staring at him. God, a rebellious, daughter-wrecking hippie and an officious, whining homosexual. Bert tried to comprehend how his life had arrived at this terminus.
“As of this moment,” he said, “you two are my deputies.”
Brolin and Barkley turned to each other in astonishment and then looked back at him.
“I don’t know anything about law enforcement,” Barkley said. “I’ve never even handled a gun. How am I supposed to—”
“You think I like the idea?” Bert said, standing up and towering over him. “If I had my pick of deputies in any normal situation, you two would be at the bottom of the list. But this is not a normal situation. You”—he stabbed a finger at Brolin—“you’ve been locked up nearly the whole time. And you”—he switched the finger to Barkley—“you killed one of…of them. That doesn’t make either of you completely trustworthy, but my alternative is to try and do everything on my own, which would be impossible. So for better or worse, it looks like we’re a team.”
“You mean you’re actually going to do something?” Brolin said. “It’s about fucking time.”
“There’s no justification for speaking to the sheriff like that,” Barkley said, trying to stare imperiously down his nose even though Brolin was half a foot taller.
“Hey, Barkley, why don’t you go—”
“Just shut up!” Bert said. He seemed to fill the room and Barkley actually cringed at the power of his voice. “When this is over we can go back to our grievances—God knows, I plan to—but right now we’re on the same side. We’re Us and there’s a Them out there. I have no idea who They are, but apparently they’re dangerous enough for a government agency to assume jurisdiction. Now, I’ve been ordered to set up roadblocks at all entry and exit points to Bald Eagle and you’re going to help me do it. Are we clear on that?”
Brolin and Barkley nodded in unison.
“Okay, here’s what’s going to happen. Barkley, you’re going to take the keys to my cruiser and drive Brolin to Deputy Benson’s house on Applewood Street, number twenty-three.” Bert opened his desk drawer and took out a second set of keys. He tossed them at Brolin, who caught them with a non-athlete’s awkwardness.
“I imagine the deputy’s car will still be parked in
the driveway or in his garage. When you’ve picked up the car, one of you will go to the western end of Main Street and the other will go to the eastern end. When you get there, turn on the lights and park your cruiser across both lanes of the road. If anyone tries to get in or out of town, send them back from whence they came. No excuses, no exceptions. Understood?”
Again Brolin and Barkley nodded as one. Bert gave a curt nod in reply and then went to the wall safe built into the corner of his office. He twiddled in the combination and took out two service revolvers. Brolin and Barkley looked at them wide-eyed, Brolin with a fearful distaste, Barkley with the awe of a teenager contemplating a pornographic magazine. Bert gave them a five-minute crash course in the usage of firearms, thinking afterward he’d be lucky if they didn’t blow their feet off.
“I don’t want you to even take off the safety unless you think you’re in mortal danger. The line between murder and self-defense is smaller than you’d think.”
Both men nodded.
“Okay, let’s get going.”
“I need to eat something first,” Brolin said. “I haven’t eaten since six o’clock last night and I won’t be any use to you if I faint from—”
“All right, all right—get a tin of something and a spoon out of the kitchen and eat it on the drive to Deputy Benson’s house.”
Brolin scuttled away.
“Where are you going to be, Sheriff?” Barkley asked.
“I’m going to drive around town and warn every resident I can that they should go home and lock their doors.”
Bert lowered his voice. “And while I’m at it, I’m going to try and find my daughter.”
Derek had found two tins of tuna with their own keys and as Barkley reversed the cruiser out Derek rolled back the lid on one of the tins. He had never cared for tuna and he cared for it even less eaten with a teaspoon and unaccompanied by so much as a dash of pepper, but it would keep him going.