Nightstruck

by Jenna Black

  The bad news was that a lot of the people who disappeared over those first couple of nights turned up again, changed like Piper. They took to the streets the moment the sun went down, and they were as deadly as any of the magical constructs. Whatever conscience they had had as ordinary human beings had clearly died. They traveled in packs, and unlike the constructs, they had no problem with going inside. They broke into stores and took what they wanted. They broke into houses and brutalized the inhabitants, invariably leaving them dead. They formed human blockades to stop ambulances and emergency vehicles from getting to where they were needed. The media started referring to them as the Nightstruck, and the name stuck.

  Even with all the help the National Guard could give them, the police force was stretched thin as thin can be at night. They mostly left the magical mayhem alone—how do you stop something like a ten-foot-tall bronze statue with fangs from going wherever the hell it wants, whenever it wants?—but they did their best to protect homes and businesses from the packs of Nightstruck.

  It was a dangerous job, more like combat in a war zone than ordinary police duty. Despite their best precautions, officers were killed and injured every single night, so that every day the force was just that much thinner. My dad was lucky if he got home four hours a day, and though he blew me off every time I tried to mention it, he clearly wasn’t eating well. I could see with my own two eyes that he was losing weight, his pants getting baggy even when he cinched his belt up tight.

  Luke’s mom was on an almost permanent night shift at the hospital, so he spent more time at my house than at his own. On the rare nights when she was home, Bob and I went over there, keeping our safety in numbers.

  Within the course of a week, living life under quarantine, under siege, had begun to feel almost normal. I no longer felt quite as awkward around Luke, though I was uncomfortably aware that my crush on him was not going away. If anything, it was growing worse as I got to know him better and realized that, aside from his good looks, he had a seemingly endless list of good qualities. Smart. Nice. Helpful. Uncomplaining. Funny.

  You get the picture. I was crushing on him big time, but I wasn’t willing to do anything about it—even if I’d known how to let him know I liked him without embarrassing myself to death. Besides, I still held out hope that something would happen to turn all the Nightstruck—including Piper—back to their normal selves, in which case Luke was still taken.

  Of course, one could argue that my hope of Piper returning to normal was more of a pipe dream than a true hope. Trailed by a group of other Nightstruck, most of whom looked like they might have been homeless before the night got its claws into them, she stopped by to torment us just about every night. Bob always gave us plenty of warning she was coming, and then she’d start knocking on the door and shouting, telling me to come out and join her. I felt no inclination to open the door for her again, so, like the unseen creature that had attacked the house while she and I were in it, she made a circuit, trying all of the windows. Every night she found them all locked, and even if she hadn’t she wouldn’t have been able to get in. The house had been broken into a couple of times when I was a kid, so Dad had had decorative iron grilles installed over all the first-floor windows. Even if someone broke out the glass, they would have no room to crawl in.

  After the first couple of nights, Piper’s night friends got bored with the exercise and stopped coming, but Piper brought a new friend instead. A small bronze goat, about knee-high to her, which clip-clopped along by her side, metallic hooves giving off the occasional spark.

  As with most of the city’s statues, Billy the goat didn’t look like his daytime self when he stepped off his plinth and started roaming the streets. Ordinarily he stood in a plaza in Rittenhouse Square, and my mom and dad have pictures of both me and Beth playing around his feet and even riding him like a horse when we were little. In the day, he was a perfectly ordinary goat, with a pair of small, almost harmless-looking horns. At night, when he went roaming, his horns doubled in length and came to insidiously sharp points. Curved, wicked-looking claws jutted out all around his hooves, and there was a ridge of spines down the center of his back. And his various horns, spines, and claws were almost always spotted with fresh blood.

  Piper seemed to have adopted the damn thing as some kind of pet. More disturbing yet, she could get it to follow orders. Like the time she had it spend an hour repeatedly butting that metal head against our front door. I was afraid the door would come crashing down. I suspected the goat wouldn’t be able to come inside even if it broke the door, but I knew Bob would feel honor-bound to attack, and the goat would probably gut him. I also knew that there would be nothing keeping Piper from coming in, even if the goat didn’t. So I once again had Luke sit at the table with Bob straining at the end of his leash while I waited in agonized tension in front of the door, my gun at the ready. There was no way I would actually shoot Piper, but I hoped she wouldn’t know that and would keep her distance.

  In the end, all my worries were for nothing. The goat battered the wood of our door all to hell, letting in plenty of arctic blasts, but it turned out the door had metal reinforcement in the middle, and that was too much for the goat to break through. Instead, we had to listen to the impact of its metal head with the metal door. By the time it and Piper wandered away for the night, both Luke and I had pounding headaches from all the noise.

  * * *

  After that, Dad decided we needed to fortify all the second- and third-story windows, just in case. They were all sturdy casement windows, but the panes were bigger than those on the first floor, and it wasn’t impossible to imagine someone being able to crawl through if the glass was broken out.

  He was so exhausted he could barely see straight, and yet he spent most of a day installing towel rods across the windows to serve as bars, because getting someone to install real bars or grilles would take forever. He also nailed some plywood over the holes Billy had left in the front door. He was supposed to be taking some time off to get some rest, but when I suggested that maybe Luke and I could take care of things, he blew me off. He was still feeling bad that he wasn’t home with me every night, and fortifying our house seemed to ease his conscience.

  He was stretching himself too thin, and everyone but him could see it. It was all I could do not to wrench the hammer out of his hand when he hit his thumb while trying to patch the front door.

  “I’ll be fine, Becks,” he said as he shook his hand and waited for the pain to ease. At least he hadn’t broken any bones.

  Shortly after he finished installing all those towel rods—which were noticeably crooked—his cell phone rang, and he got into a heated conversation with someone he kept calling Sir. I suspected it was the mayor, and it turned out I was right. Over my dad’s protests, he’d been ordered to take the night off and try to get eight full hours of sleep. Thank God. I didn’t like the idea of my dad getting into a car and driving to work when he was so tired he couldn’t see straight.

  “You’re going to bed and wearing earplugs as soon as you finish dinner,” I informed him.

  “Yes, Mother,” he said with a weary smile.

  I then did something I hadn’t done in … well, forever, it seemed. I gave my dad a spontaneous hug.

  “I love you,” I told him, squeezing hard. I knew my mom was still giving him hell about not having gotten me out of the city before the quarantine hit. I also knew she kept badgering him to somehow use his connections to find a way to sneak me out—like I should be given special treatment because I was the police commissioner’s daughter. Even if he’d found a way, I’d have refused to go. I didn’t like dealing with our city at night, but the idea that I should be allowed to leave when no one else was went against everything I believed in.

  Anyway, I knew my dad was hearing criticism and general nastiness from every side, every day, and I knew he was trying his hardest. He deserved to be reminded that, even though we’d fought a lot lately, I did still love and appreciate him.
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  “I love you, too, Becks,” he said, his voice suspiciously hoarse. “And I’m sorry I’ve left you alone so much.”

  “Don’t be. You’re doing your job. I get that.” Even if my mom didn’t. She and my dad had loved each other once, but I think even before the marriage went sour, the current situation would have had them at each other’s throats.

  Our moment of father–daughter bonding ended when Luke rapped on the back door, just in time for the evening curfew, but I think my father felt better about things because of it. My mom has the guilt trip down to an art form, and he’s pretty susceptible to it.

  Even though my dad was home, Luke would still be spending the night at our place, because his mother was on yet another night shift at the hospital. As usual, I made dinner. Both Dad and Luke offered, but Dad was supposed to be on R & R and Luke was still a guest in our house, so I considered the cooking to be my responsibility.

  The fact that Luke wasn’t shy about showing his appreciation of my cooking skills had nothing to do with it. At least I told myself that, despite the glow of satisfaction in my belly every time he told me how great dinner was. Liking his praise so much sometimes made me feel a little needy, but hell, I’m only human. Being noticed and appreciated by someone you have a crush on can make for a nice little high, especially when you’re living in a time so full of lows.

  That night, the lows started as soon as dinner was cleared. Dad was halfway up the stairs to his bedroom when Bob suddenly went stiff and bristly.

  “Not again,” Luke groaned, and I silently agreed with him.

  It was probably overly optimistic of me to think we might have a night of peace after Piper’s failed attempt to break in, but I’d hoped for it anyway. I’d hoped Dad could fall into bed right after dinner and sleep undisturbed until morning—something I doubted he’d be able to do if the house was under siege, even if he felt sure our defenses would hold.

  Bob was snarling but not yet in full mad-dog mode, when there was an ear-piercing scream from outside. That set Bob off full tilt and made my stomach curdle. There was a crashing sound, like a bottle being broken, and then another scream. I could tell the person screaming was female, but that was all. I remembered what had happened to Mrs. Pinter, remembered finding her head propped against the side of the house across the way, and my knees went a little weak.

  Luke reached over and took my hand, and I held on gratefully as we both stood there, frozen to the floor in the dining room. Most of me didn’t want to know what was going on outside. But another tiny part couldn’t stand the not knowing, couldn’t stop trying to piece together whatever clues could be found in the sounds that were now obviously approaching our house.

  There were multiple voices, many of them laughing and raucous, taking obvious pleasure in the girl’s screaming. And when Bob had to pause in his barking to draw a breath, I was sure I heard the metallic clip-clop of the goat’s hooves.

  Moments later, my dad descended the stairs at a brisk pace. His service weapon was tucked into a shoulder holster. He was carrying the SIG in one hand and a pump-action shotgun—something I hadn’t even known he owned—in his other. He handed me the SIG.

  “Get upstairs, both of you,” he told Luke and me.

  My dad had an unmistakable aura of command, and Luke responded to that command just like any of my dad’s underlings would. He started toward the stairs, tugging on my hand when I didn’t immediately follow.

  There was another scream from outside.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked my dad, hoping against hope he wouldn’t say what I thought—no, what I knew—he was going to say. The shotgun was not the weapon he’d choose to use inside our house unless absolutely necessary.

  “I’m an officer of the law,” he told me. “There’s a crime being committed right outside my door.” He shrugged helplessly.

  I shook my head, even as Luke tugged on my hand a little more urgently. My dad was the police commissioner. He was supposed to be way past the point when he actively put his life on the line. He was supposed to be safe.

  “Don’t go out there,” I begged him. I knew it was an argument I was never going to win, knew that my dad was incapable of staying safely shut up inside while someone was being hurt practically on his doorstep. But if he was too tired to handle a hammer without hitting himself, then he was in no shape to handle whatever was happening outside.

  “I have to, Becks,” he said simply, then looked over my head at Luke. “No matter what happens, you do not let her come after me. Understand?” He was using his command tone again, and once more Luke responded to it.

  “Yes, sir,” Luke said. I wondered if he would have saluted if he weren’t holding my hand. “Come on, Becket,” he said quietly into my ear. “You know a losing battle when you see one.”

  My heart was pounding, and my chest felt tight with fear. I couldn’t tell how many people were out there, except that Dad would be badly outnumbered. The shotgun might intimidate the Nightstruck—they were still only human, despite whatever had happened to them—but it would have no effect on the goat or any other magical construct that might be out there. A sense of foreboding just about overwhelmed me, but the screaming intensified, and my dad wasn’t about to entertain any debate.

  “Go upstairs,” he ordered once more, then strode toward the door, shotgun at the ready.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Luke and I ran up to my dad’s study and looked out the window at the spectacle that was being staged—quite deliberately, I’m sure—in front of the house. A group of eight or ten Nightstruck mingled about in the narrow street, right under a streetlamp, so we had no trouble seeing them. They had a pretty girl about my age surrounded. Her clothes were torn, and she was bleeding from a split lip and a nasty gash on her forehead. Her sobs were loud and panicked enough to carry over Bob’s barking, and she kept whirling frantically around, trying not to let anyone come up behind her.

  Piper and the goat were both there. The goat seemed larger than I remembered, and let’s just say that it was very obviously male. It threaded its way through the mob, none of whom reacted to my dad’s shouted orders to stop what they were doing.

  The girl tried to skitter away as the goat approached, but all she managed to do was throw herself into the grip of a couple of the other Nightstruck. They shoved her back into the center of their circle. The goat rose up on two legs, and I thought it was going to gore her with its horns, but apparently that horror wasn’t enough for the creatures of the night. Instead, the goat wrapped its front legs around her thigh and started humping her leg like a horny dog. Which would have been grotesque enough without all the goat’s various spines and horns.

  The girl screamed and wrenched herself away. I gasped and covered my mouth when I saw the long, deep slashes in her thigh, slashes that were quickly turning her jeans red with blood.

  Luke made an attempt to draw me away from the window, but we’d spent enough time together by now that the attempt was halfhearted. He knew there was no way to stop me from watching, short of tackling me to the floor and sitting on me. He settled for taking my left hand in his—leaving my gun hand free—and giving me a squeeze.

  If I ended up having to shoot, I would need both hands, but for now I was grateful to have the anchor of his touch. Dread coursed through me, and I might have drowned in it if I didn’t have his hand to hold on to.

  There was a deafening boom as my dad fired the shotgun. He was still standing right on our doorstep, I guess, because I couldn’t see him even when I pressed myself as close to the window as the motley array of towel rods would allow. One thing I did know was that he hadn’t fired the shotgun at the Nightstruck, because none of them went down. I supposed he couldn’t, when they had an innocent victim in their midst. Shotguns are not precision weapons.

  Most of the Nightstruck turned to look, as if they’d noticed my dad for the first time. Piper, however, was looking straight up at me, making eye contact through the window. She was smirkin
g and confident, not remotely rattled by the shotgun blast. She crooked a finger at me, beckoning, but I sincerely doubted she expected me to respond.

  Dad pumped the shotgun loudly, and I finally caught a glimpse of him as he advanced toward the gathered Nightstruck. Thanks to the injured victim, he still couldn’t afford to shoot. I didn’t know if the Nightstruck had enough brains or sense of self-preservation to figure that out.

  For a moment it looked like they were going to call his bluff, like they were all going to stand there like statues until he was close enough that they could grab him. I willed the victim to make a run for it while her captors were distracted, but she had collapsed to the pavement and curled up in fetal position—maybe from pure terror, or maybe because the goat had hurt her so much she couldn’t stand.

  Dad bellowed at the street people to back away or he’d shoot, and he finally seemed to get through to them. The circle surrounding the girl dissolved as the Nightstruck slowly, casually backed away. All except Piper and the goat, who stood side by side.

  “Don’t think I won’t shoot you, Piper,” my dad called. “Back the hell up.”

  “Here’s the problem, Mr. Walker,” she responded, with no hint of concern. “If you shoot me, you might shoot the poor, innocent victim you’re trying to save.” She smiled. “You could put the shotgun down and go for your handgun, but there are kind of a lot of us, so that might not be a good idea.”

  “She can probably survive a few stray pellets,” my dad said as he continued to inch closer. The rest of the Nightstruck continued to back up, but Piper just stood there like she thought she was invincible. “I’m sure she can’t survive whatever you’ve got planned for her, so I’ll just have to take my chances.”

  I bit my lip and squeezed Luke’s hand so tight I was probably hurting him, but he didn’t complain. If Dad could get close enough, he could direct the spray of pellets so that they wouldn’t hit the victim—it takes distance for them to fan out and scatter, which is why sawed-off shotguns are illegal. I wondered if Piper knew that was what he was up to.