Will the Sun Ever Come Out Again?

by Nate Southard

  Jenkins lifted the barrel from the thing’s forehead. Slowly, it nodded.

  “Very well. Thomas, would you please come in here and lift the heavier half?”

  He hears Simon yowling before he even slides his key into the deadbolt. The cat desperately wants to be obese, and Ben often wonders when the yowling for food starts, if maybe his cat cries out all day, hoping a stranger will come in and give him another bowl of food. Despite his fatigue and the gnawing worry that remains on his mind, he grins as he unlocks the door and enters the apartment.

  Simon scampers, racing him to the kitchen and winning by a landslide. Grumbling, Ben tosses his backpack onto the couch and follows. He tries to remember if there’s an open can of food in the fridge, but the thought vanishes when he sees the paper sack sitting on the kitchen counter. The world falls into shadow around him, and all he can see is the bag. It waits like a soldier, perfectly still and patient, only this grunt is made of crinkled brown paper.

  Shivers crawling up his back, Ben approaches the bag. He reaches out slowly, as though he fears it might attack. Only when his fingertips come within inches of the bag does he realize what he’s doing. He snatches his hand away. There’s no need for him to touch it, not when it might have evidence the police will need.

  Another yowl from Simon fills the kitchen, and Ben nods. As he checks the refrigerator and grabs the can he finds inside, he fishes the cell phone from his pocket and calls the police again. A part of him thinks this is almost funny. There’s a bag containing God knows what on his kitchen counter, and he’s making a call and feeding his cat at the same time like it was an average weekday. If the rest of him weren’t a broken, crackling wire of fear, he might laugh. Jesus, whoever left the bag got inside his apartment!

  “911, emergency.”

  “Yeah. I’ve had an intruder.”

  “Are they still present?”

  The question freezes him as he digs a fork into the brown sludge Simon eats. What if whoever delivered the bag hasn’t left? Slowly, he turns and inspects the apartment around him. He sees the closed doors of the bathroom and bedroom, the tiny closet that could also hide a person. For a second, he hates that he leaves the doors shut through the day. Otherwise, he’d know someone had closed them.

  “I don’t know,” he answers when the operator asks again.

  “Sir, I need you to exit the residence, please.”

  He nods, forgetting the operator can’t see him. When she tells him again, he says, “I’m going,” and he scoops up Simon with his free arm. The cat fidgets and tries to wriggle free, but he’s not letting him spend any more time alone until the police arrive. He almost makes it to the door before Simon’s cries remind him of the food he left open on the counter.

  “Shit.” He looks at the cat squirming in the crook of his arm, at his big eyes and the hunger he sees in them.

  As quick as he can, he rushes back to the kitchen and grabs the can. Then, he leaves the apartment, the emergency operator asking questions the entire time.

  “What do you mean we have to get rid of it?”

  Jim stared at her like she sported a baboon on her head. “I don’t get what you’re not understanding. We’ve got to take that fucking skeleton, and we have to get rid of it somehow.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to explain it to me, because right now it just looks like you’ve flipped a goddamn switch. Why on God’s green earth do I need to go down there, touch a fucking skeleton—one with fangs, might I add—and move it somewhere?”

  Jim heaved a sigh as though he were dealing with an especially difficult child. When Rose heard it, she rolled her shoulder again. The guy might deserve a right hook after all.

  “I looked it up. I mean, I looked it up the best I can. If there’s more information out there, I don’t know what to look for. Thing is, there’s something close to a dozen state agencies that’ll be interested. They’ll fucking swarm this place.”

  “Not the restaurant. They’ll be screwing around in the lakebed. That’s down there, and we’re up here.”

  Jim shook his head. He looked frustrated, like it was somehow her fault he wasn’t making sense. “Look, if the right agency swoops in and thinks that skeleton is a hazard of some kind, we’re looking at a nasty word, and that word is quarantine.”

  The word did send a hot current of anxiety through Rose’s system, but she thought most of that might have been the powder. She eyed her boss, looking for any chink in his terrified armor. There had to be some spot she could hit that would make him see reason. All she saw was fear though, and the more she thought about it, the more sense it made. What he’d found in the lake wasn’t an old grave site. It was a body wrapped in chains with a goddamn rock in its piehole.

  “Jim, come on. It’s down there. Even if they decide it is a hazard of some kind, they’ll keep it contained down there. They won’t even bother us.”

  “You can’t guarantee that.”

  “There’s no fucking flesh left on it! It’s just a skeleton. Whatever was on it, fish picked clean years ago. They’re not gonna shut down the entire lake.”

  He pointed at her, his mouth popping into an expression that said it all. I told you so.

  “Don’t, Jim.”

  He clasped his hands in front of his chest. When he spoke, the paranoia had left his voice. All that remained was sadness and the sincere weight of dread.

  “Rose, I’m serious. You’ve seen what the drought has done to this place. I’m scraping by. Another few months or another kick in the balls, and we’re done. I’m not talking letting a few servers go, either. I’m saying this place will die. You might be fine after that, because you’re real fucking good at what you do. This place is all I have, though. You wonder how I saw that thing at two in the morning? It’s because I fucking live in this office, now.”

  Rose nodded, because she’d been keeping quiet about that little fact for weeks. On several occasions, she’d noticed spare clothes lying around Jeff’s office. She’d even seen the sleeping bag tucked under his desk. Still, she couldn’t quite believe things had become so dire.

  “Let’s just breathe for a second, Jim. When this shit wears off, you’ll feel—”

  He cut her off by slamming both fists against his desk, the sound like a cannon in the tight office. “Dammit, we can’t wait that long! By the time this shit is over, it’ll be daylight outside. Somebody else is gonna see that fucking thing, and then it’s out of our hands.”

  “It’ll be okay!”

  “You can’t promise that! Goddammit, I wish you could. I really wish to hell and back that I could say everything is going to be fine. That’s just not the case, though. The truth is, I don’t know, and I can’t take the risk of things coming down on the wrong side. Rose, I need this place. Please.”

  He dropped to his knees. Tears shined in his eyes. “I need your help, Rose. Please tell me you’ll help me get rid of it.”

  Rose looked at her boss. The way he waited, his hands clasped and pleading, his expression desperate, she thought she’d never seen somebody look so honest and afraid. Before she realized what was happening, her resolve crumbled and she nodded.

  “Okay. I’ll help.”

  Thomas concentrated on breathing. In and out, in and out. It was the only thing keeping him from passing out or getting sick. He wanted to close his eyes, but he feared Jenkins would see him, and then there would be hell to pay. So, he kept watching. Even though it made him want to run screaming out of the room, he kept watching.

  “What did you see?” the old man asked. “I would really like to know.”

  Loretta Davis had no idea her answer didn’t matter. She didn’t know the questions were just another way for the old man to amuse himself. Watching her thrash on the couch, he couldn’t guarantee she even heard the question. She kept shrieking, swatting at her skin. A part of him wondered what Jenkins had made her see. Ants? Beetles? Snakes? He didn’t know, and he had no intention of asking. With so little time on the job, hi
s questions would probably be answered with a demonstration, and he didn’t want to wind up like Mrs. Davis.

  The old man leaned forward, stroking his bony chin as if deep in thought. “You see, Loretta—do you mind it I call you Loretta?”

  No answer. Of course not.

  “You see, Loretta, I know what you saw. You saw something you weren’t meant to see. There are...we’ll call them things. There are things out there that the general public just doesn’t need to know about. In fact, knowing about some of these things could cause a really big problem. Panics and such. It’s all nasty business, really.

  “What I really need to know is if you told anyone what you saw. Now, if you can answer that question and make me believe you, I’ll make all this stop. If you don’t tell me, however, it’s only going to get worse. Do you want this to get worse, Loretta?”

  Tears streamed down her face, black lines of mascara marking her features like terrible scars. Her mouth formed into a shape like a hole, and a keening note escaped.

  “Loretta?”

  “No! I did’t tell anybody, I...I swear!”

  The old man clapped. Thomas thought the sudden celebration was almost horrifically childlike.

  “That’s very good, Loretta. It pleases me to hear that.”

  “Puh...Please.”

  “Please what? Make them go away?”

  “Yes?”

  Thomas suppressed a shiver as the old man turned to him and winked.

  “Very well.”

  Jenkins snapped his fingers, and Loretta Davis froze, her entire body suddenly rigid. With a sound like a noise maker, her head whipped to the side, her neck cracking several times. When her body fell limp, she was looking almost directly behind her. Silence dropped over the room like a heavy curtain.

  The old man stood, smacked his hands against each other as though he were brushing away dust.

  “One down. Who’s next?”

  This time, Ben knows damn well the detective’s name is Edwards. His partner goes by Randolph, and he busies himself by inspecting the apartment while Edwards starts the second hour of questioning. Again, Ben has no clue who might have left the body parts, which turned out to be a tongue and two ears. The officers who arrived first on the scene gave a good yelp when they found those particular prizes.

  “I need you to really think,” Edwards says. “Is there anybody you know who could do this? Who would want to do something like this?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t answer right away. Think about it a minute.”

  The suggestion hits him right on the annoyance button. He doesn’t need a minute to think about it, because no one he knows—friend or acquaintance—is a total psychopath. Sixty seconds won’t make a difference. He won’t suddenly remember his friend Derrick is a medical examiner with access to body parts and an axe to grind or anything else so convenient. All he’ll think about for that minute is how wonderfully normal his friends are, and then he’ll probably think about how he met most of them through Melissa.

  “There’s no one,” he says after what he hopes is an appropriate amount of time. “No one suspicious. No one with a grudge. I really have no clue.”

  Edwards nods, his eyes both grim and frustrated. “All right. We’ll see what we can pull in the way of prints and such. Hopefully, we’ll find out who’s doing this. In the meantime, I’m going to have a car on you at all times.”

  “What?”

  “Yeah. This is twice now, and even if they are just a sick prank, we can’t ignore the nature of it. Believe me, it’s for your safety.”

  Ben listens, and the detective’s words make sense. The sacks have worried him, and he feels a healthy amount of fear roiling in his chest. Still, he thinks of the problems it will cause, the least of which being the fact that he’s almost out of weed. Surely, the police wouldn’t sit idly by as he scores. It’s a terrible inconvenience, because if anything’s ever made him want to smoke, it’s the horrific shit that’s happening to him right now.

  In the next moment, he imagines a squad car sitting outside the office and the questions it will inspire. Sooner or later, it will all circle back to him, and everyone will know something weird’s happening, that his life’s taken a turn past pathetic and grown scary.

  But then he thinks of coming home to find another brown paper sack full of human pieces. Or what if he finds one on the bedroom floor when he wakes up? Finding the most recent bag inside his apartment has made everything too close, too ripe with potential for…what? Horror? Violence? There are too many unanswered questions, and he doesn’t know where to start.

  “Okay,” he tells the detective. “That would be great.”

  If Rose felt sure of anything, it was that she wasn’t about to touch a skeleton that might just land them in a quarantine. She rummaged through the kitchen, grabbing garbage bags, the gloves only the newest of newbies wore, and one of the industrial rolls of plastic wrap they used for covering the prep racks. After she’d laid everything out on one of the tables, she gave it a long look, searching her mind for anything else they might need. The nerves along her spine fired like warning shots. She tried to exhale her fear, but it didn’t help. How had everything turned so bizarre so fast?

  Before she could stop herself, she rushed across the kitchen and ripped open the drawer where they kept the spare utensils and implements. With a shaking hand, she rummaged through the spatulas and whisks until she found one of the cheaper, rubber-handled kitchen knives. The blade wasn’t terribly sharp, but it would do damage if she needed it.

  “Why would I need it?” she whispered.

  “Hey!” Jim slapped a hand down on one of the steel counters. “We’re not exactly flush with time.”

  “Right. Grab what you can from that pile, and let’s go.”

  Without a word, Jim scooped up the plastic wrap and garbage bags. He left the gloves behind, so Rose grabbed them as she moved past.

  “What’s with the knife?”

  “It’s only about a thousand percent better for cutting the wrap.”

  “Right, but if we wrap the entire thing, will it sink? What about air?”

  She waved the knife a little. “It pokes holes, too.”

  “Okay, yeah.”

  She let her boss lead, sticking close as they left the restaurant and made their way to the docks. Jim insisted on no lights, and she had to admit it was a good idea. Getting caught moving a skeleton sat at the bottom of her favorite things list.

  “How much time do we have left?” she asked.

  “Hour and a half. Maybe a little less.”

  “Shit. And we have to row this thing out?”

  “Yeah. Sucks, don’t it?”

  Rose tried to picture the two of them in a damn canoe, paddling out into the middle of Lake Travis while sharing space with a dead body. She hated thinking about the cramped quarters, because she didn’t care that there wasn’t so much as a scrap of tissue left on those bones. She didn’t care that they planned to wrap it in plastic so they wouldn’t have to make any real contact with it. At the heart of it all, they’d be spending time with a corpse, and that was something she could barely comprehend, let alone stomach.

  Climbing the ladder down to the lakebed was a challenge. The darkness felt thicker as dawn approached, and her jangling nerves made the process of feeling for the next rung with her toes something close to a thrill ride. When she finally dropped to the ground, her breath came in ragged bursts.

  “You okay?” Jim asked.

  “Fine. Let’s just do this.”

  “Right. Once we grab things, we won’t worry about the ladder. We’ll take the long way around and just climb the bank. Probably be easier.”

  “Whatever. Let’s go.”

  Jim’s footsteps trailed away. She followed, and she reached for the knife’s handle. Her fingers tightened, and she felt a little better. At least she had a weapon.

  “Please tell me it’s still there,” she said.

  “It is.”
r />   Jim stood over the bound skeleton, and Rose found herself staring at the skull. She wondered if it had belonged to a man or woman, if they’d been alive when the stone was shoved past their teeth. It must have felt terrible. The thought of experiencing that kind of horror made her eyes water. As she dried them with the heel of her hand, she thought about the fangs. Could they be real? If they were, could the skeleton really be human?

  “Jesus.”

  “Nope,” Jim answered. He sat the box of plastic wrap beside the skeleton’s legs. “Afraid he ain’t here to help. Now, let’s get this over with.”

  By the time they reached the last house, Thomas thought every breath tasted like cold dirt. He could only look straight ahead. For several moments, he examined the street and the curb, hoping Jenkins would remain silent, maybe even show some kind of mercy.

  The truth stared him in the face: he wasn’t cut out for the job. In the hidden corners of his mind, he’d always known, but he’d done a good job of lying to himself. For months now, he’d told himself falsehood after falsehood, each fiction a piece of the façade that showed the old man and everybody else he was meant to be a fixer. He wasn’t sure when the cracks had started to show, but he knew the moment the entire work had shattered.

  Thomas closed his eyes. He knew his fingers were iron around the steering wheel, that he was all but shaking in the Lincoln’s seat, but he couldn’t control it. Theresa Davis had been the third name on the list, and her voice still reverberated in his memory.

  She’d said, “Please.”

  “Please.”

  The first time, he’d barely been able to understand her. She blubbered, and the wet sound of her pain and terror transformed the word into something more sensation than speech. One hand reached for them, palm up, the flesh raw and pulpy, portions of it still lodged in her teeth or hanging in slick clumps around her lips. She said the magic word again, this time her voice almost a shriek, and then she pressed the hand to her mouth and took another bite.