by Jim Brown
“The velocity of the glass is consistent with the force of an explosion.” It raised more questions than it answered, but at least it was a start. He smiled, allowing himself a rare moment of pride.
He stopped pacing and held his hands out to the empty room, as if addressing a grand council. “Science. As I’ve always said, everything can be explained by science.”
Click.
The doorknob to the utility closet at the back of the room turned. The hinges squealed as the door was slowly opened.
Dean’s heart forgot how to beat; his lungs, how to breathe. At the back of the classroom a man leaned out of the darkness of the utility closet and into the doorway. A man with white hair and a dark completion. A man untouched by time.
“Then, how do you explain me?” asked Whitey Dobbs.
27
“Over here – those with surface wounds should be on this side of the room.” Piper gestured as if trying to land a 747 – a task, she guessed, that would have been much easier than her current one. The hospital was packed. She had been recruited to help prioritize.
“My shoulder, something cut my shoulder,” whined a large man in an expensive Italian suit. Piper recognized his face but couldn’t attach a name. She guessed he was a businessman, perhaps a lawyer.
She checked the cut. “It’s just a surface wound. It’s not even bleeding.”
“But it hurts,” he sniveled. Piper wondered if he was more upset about the cut or the fact that his suit was ruined.
“You’ll be taken care of.”
“I shouldn’t have to wait. I’m hurt.”
He was at least a foot taller than Piper and he used his height as a weapon, stepping close and looming over her, head down, eyes tight. The young history professor held her ground. “It’s called triage, sir. The nurses are assessing the wounded and treating them in order of need. You’re in no real danger.”
Deep canals creased his face. His lips tightened. “Now, see here, I will not be treated like a – ”
“What? Treated like what? A regular person?” Piper grabbed him by his uninjured arm. Blood from a gash to her forehead had dried and stained her face. Her short, dark hair was alternately spiked and matted. “Tell you what, see that woman over there. Her husband has a two-foot splinter of wood sticking through his abdomen. You go over there and tell her your boo-boo’s worse than his, and maybe he’ll get up and give you his place on the gurney.”
His face slackened. “I didn’t mean . . . I wasn’t thinking.”
“No, you weren’t, so please shut up and wait your turn, okay?”
Piper brushed a lock of hair from her face, then winced at the stab of pain. The three-inch gash in her head had scabbed over but still needed stitches. She worked on instinct, helping the belabored medical staff sort and treat the injured, comforting those in shock and soothing those in tears.
Several inquired as to her own condition, but she ignored them, preoccupied in the immediacy of the task at hand. Or perhaps hiding in it. If she stayed busy, she wouldn’t have to contemplate what had happened and how she had known it was going to happen. More importantly, she wouldn’t have to worry about the nagging feeling like electrified fingernails being raked across her skin – a different feeling, one that no longer meant that something was coming, but rather that something was here.
Lord God, in her heart she knew something bad was already here.
Red and white strobe lights whipped across the ruined building. All three of the city’s fire trucks were in full use – one in the rear of the building, where the charred husk of the once mighty helicopter smoldered; the other two in front, where most of the structural damage had occurred.
John stood on the opposite side of High Street and stared at his department in disbelief. Every window on this side of the complex had been blown out. Even the doubled-glassed entryway was shattered. A lamppost leaned like a broken finger. A Volkswagen Beetle that had been parked by the curb was now flipped on its side and slammed against the brick facade. Gas and oil poured liberally from a dozen ruptures. Firefighters doused the car in a thick, frothy goo to prevent it from erupting. The driver, a nineteen-year-old college student, had been inside the building paying a parking ticket. She and dozens like her owed their lives to Piper’s warning. One of those was John’s personal assistant and good friend, Maggie Dane.
“She saved us, John. She knew and she saved us,” Maggie had said.
But how?
John studied the building. It wasn’t the destruction that held him in a state of incredulity, but rather the lack of destruction. Despite the severity, all of the damage had been limited to an area approximately three hundred feet wide and five hundred feet long. Anything beyond those dimensions on either side, further back or in front, remained untouched.
What the hell happened?
A blast of some kind, but where had it started? There was no sign of an explosion, only the aftereffects. John pressed his left hand into the palm of his right and methodically began cracking his knuckles.
It had come from the north, manifesting itself at approximately John’s location on the opposite side of High Street, dissipating a few hundred feet beyond the building. The old brick structure had provided a rampart, protecting John from the brunt of the blast. The airborne Sirkorsky had not been so lucky.
Three men dead.
Another killed in the shredding storm of glass. All told, at least thirty-five people had been injured. Seven were in critical condition.
The small hospital was filled beyond capacity. Inside, medical staff and volunteers worked to sort the wounded. He was not surprised to see Maggie take part, but he was surprised by Piper. It was her warning that had saved so many lives. And now she was working desperately to save more.
Still, how had she known? What else did she know? And whose side was she really on? John didn’t have the answer, but he knew who did. Whether he liked it or not, it was time for Dean to put his feelings aside and start answering the hard question.
John looked up. It started to snow again.
The impossible man stepped from the cloaking shadows of the utility closet and into the blue mist of the lights. He opened his arms, cocked his head, and offered Dean a smile. Curled lips pulled back, revealing a hammock of teeth bedded in healthy pink gums. His dark skin, a staggering contradiction to his ice-white hair, was smooth, line free, and ageless.
Unembraced by time, no hug, no touch, not even a kiss.
“Miss me?” asked the impossible man. “Been a while.”
Dean’s head throbbed from waves of increasing pressure. His breathing was labored, as if someone or something had sucked all the air from the room and replaced it with a thick, invisible stew. A heaviness fell over his body.
“Don’t you have something to say to me? ‘How are you?’ ‘Where have you been?’ ‘Sorry we killed you?’ You know, something along those lines.”
Dean’s forehead was hot, his extremities cold. Strange barbed tendrils wrapped around his skin and squeezed. His terror-bound voice refused to rise above a gasp, a whisper. “Who are you?”
Confusion, like the light of a fluttering candle, flickered across the man’s face, then was gone. The smile widened. “You know me.” He rapped his chest with a clenched fist. “We’re buds, amigos. Hell, we’ve shared the same women.”
He stepped closer, leaned forward. He was still several feet away, but Dean could have sworn he could feel his breath, a hot-cold mixture of death and pain and onions.
Onions?
“I got to tell you, the tits on that last one –” he shook his hand as if touching something hot – “yow-sir, Triple-D indeed. Know what I mean? Course you do. Hell, not even you would be fool enough to pass up a tour of those Grand Tetons. What was her name? Mary, Martha - no, Mavis. That’s it, Mavis.”
A finger of anger took root and began to
climb Dean’s spine, bringing with it the fortitude necessary to withstand the crashing tide of fear and disbelief.
“I’ll ask you again: Who the hell are you?”
The white-haired man stopped at the first lab table. He picked up a Bunsen burner and pointed it at Dean. “Ka-pow.” He put it back, opened a drawer, and rifled through the contents. Dean could hear the clack of pencils and pens, paper clips and notebooks. “No smokes? What’s the use of having all these fancy-ass lighters if you don’t have a damn cigarette?”
He looked at Dean and arched an eyebrow, “You don’t happen to have a cig, do you? Ha - what am I thinking? Of course you don’t. Unless they’re offering a merit badge in smoking.”
He slammed the drawer shut. The report seemed impossibly loud in the single room. He took a step closer.
The anger that had forestalled a paralyzing fear was faltering. Dean took a step back, his legs touching his desk. He wanted to turn and look, wanted to search for a weapon, wanted to do – something. But he couldn’t. He couldn’t take his eyes off the man with the white hair.
He dry-swallowed, took a half breath, and said, “Whitey Dobbs is dead.”
“Now you’re getting it.” The man looked around the room, his eyes wide, excited. “Course I’m dead. Just like turbo-tits – what’s-her-name, Mavis? Just like Larry Pepperdine and Clyde Watkins are dead.”
Another step closer. Only two lab tables separated them. Again Dean imagined he could feel the other man’s cold, hot breath.
“Just like Judy is dead.”
A bolt of jag lightning stabbed Dean’s chest.
“You remember Judy, don’tcha? John’s little sister. Cute button nose, pouty lips, big blue eyes. Sweet piece of ass. Yes sir, mighty fine piece of ass. Now, that was a woman. Good fighter, better lay. Once you worked the mad out of her.”
He made a pumping gesture with his hands and hips. “Know what I mean?”
Fury ignited. Dean stood straight. This time it was he who took a step toward the other man. “Go to hell, you bastard.”
“Been there, done that.” He shrugged. “Hello, aren’t you paying attention? How else do you explain the fact that I’m here now as baby-faced and beautiful as ever, while you’re – well, Jesus, Jimmy Dean, you’ve gotten old. I mean, you were no stud to begin with, but would it kill you to do a sit-up once in a while?”
Dean forced himself to focus, to examine the face of the familiar stranger. “Plastic surgery – either to make you look younger, or to make a younger man look like Dobbs.”
The white-haired man cawed. It was the same mocking, crow-sounding laugh that had been unique to Whitey Dobbs.
“Surgery?” Another step closer. One table between them. “You ever heard of surgery this good? Huh?”
He turned his head to the right and then the left. “No lines, no scars, no surgery. Again, it’s that dead thing. Turns out dying is very good for the skin. At least for me it was.”
The static sound of fear rose in Dean’s ears. Could it be? No. “Science has come a long way in the last few years.”
Whitey Dobbs gritted his teeth. His hand moved so fast that sound came before recognition of movement. Bunsen burner, microscope, test-tube rack, all hurled off the desk. “Science? I can’t believe you’re singing that same old song. Haven’t you learned anything? Science is to the universe what snow is to Alaska, just a covering. There are some things stronger than science, some things unexplainable with science.”
He had cut the distance to within five feet. His deep brown eyes burned from some internal fire. “And I’m one of them.”
“I don’t – ”
“You don’t know shit.” His face was flushed, his eyebrows furrowed, his nostrils flared. For the first time Dean realized he was looking into the very real face of Whitey Dobbs.
Whitey Dobbs?
The moment hung. Dobbs took a deep breath and held it until his anger subsided. “Been a long time in coming, but payday is finally here, baby, and I’ve come to collect.”
Click.
Flip.
Dean heard a sound he hadn’t heard in twenty-two years but had never truly forgotten. He looked down to see the cherry-wood handle and simmering steel blade of Whitey Dobbs’ infamous switch blade.
The blade? It looked sharper, almost pulsing. Unlike any metal he had ever seen before.
Dobbs smiled again. Dean realized if a shark could show emotion, this was what it would look like. Dobbs held the blade up turning it this way then that. Tiny suns of light flared off the knife.
“You never did get it, did you?” Dobbs said. He was speaking quietly now, almost like an aside. “Never figured it out. Never realized what she really needed.”
“I loved Judy.”
“Loved? Hell, you weren’t even there when she died. What kind of husband are you? Going to school while your wife lies in intensive care, dying from a massive coronary.”
Dean blinked, too surprised to feel the sting in his eyes. “No one saw a heart attack as even a possibility. I rushed to the hospital as soon as I heard.”
Dobbs made a looping gesture over his head like a cowboy with a lasso. “Big fucking deal. You rushed to the hospital, but you were too late, weren’t you?”
Hot tears crawled down Dean’s face. The hum of the lights sounded like a distant wail of moaners.
“You may not have been there, but I was.” Dobbs lay his cupped left hand on the lab table, now just inches from Dean. “She may have died, but she didn’t die alone.”
“What? What do you mean?”
“Course, I ain’t saying it was my fault altogether, but the shock of seeing me again did cause the needles to jump on that heart monitor of hers.”
Anger, fear, disbelief – all collided in a cataclysmic rush of emotion. Dean felt the strength evaporate from his knees.
“Well, mustn’t wear out my welcome just yet. Besides, I have a dinner date.”
A flash of pure white lighting illuminated the classroom, obliterating the shadows and fuzzy blue hue of the fluorescent. Moments later thunder roared. Lightning?
Dean looked at the window. Snow was falling again. Lightning in a snow storm?
When he turned back, Whitey Dobbs was gone.
Dean waited, held in the pregnant pause. Some part of his mind was telling him all that had just transpired was a hallucination, a waking dream. Anything was better than accepting the other option. But when he looked down at the lab table, the one on which Dobbs placed his cupped hand, he knew it was no dream, no hallucination.
Laying on the black, hard top of the lab table was Judy’s missing locket.
28
The entire Black Valley Sheriff’s Department was there: three full-time deputies, Maggie Dane, three dispatchers, two part-time workers, and the sheriff himself. Yet the meeting room seemed empty. Always in the past this contingency of brown-shirted, badge- wearing, gun-carrying men and women had been more than enough to handle whatever situation arose. Today, however, they seemed frightfully small, while the problems before them seemed impossibly large – and growing.
Two nonmembers of the sheriff’s department were in attendance: Mayor Nathan Perkins and history professor Piper Blackmoore, the latter at the insistence of Maggie. After what Piper had done earlier no one questioned her presence. Some even took comfort in it.
Although dressed in his traditional coat and tie, Nathan still wore the frosty-eyed look of a man in shock.
They were meeting in the city conference room, a large, wide room with chairs, tables, and even a piano, available to the public and used for everything from city council work sessions to children’s recitals. All the functioning, pertinent equipment – radios, computers, copier – had been moved there as well.
Still, the room seemed frighteningly empty.
Unlike at other meetings, there was no j
oking, no gossip, no cookies or doughnuts. The room was as somber as a funeral parlor and John’s gaunt, sleepless face had the pallor of a corpse.
“Merciful God, Sheriff, what’s going on?” Coye begged as much as asked, making no effort to hide the raw fear in his voice. “We’re cut off. With the pass snowed under and the bridge out, we’re completely cut off from everybody. Can’t even fly in. Not in this weather. That helicopter, that was one of them big ‘uns. If that can’t make it, nothing can. And what about the stranger, Elijah? See, I told you he got out, Sheriff. I told you.”
“That’s enough, Cheevers.” John’s deep baritone had the tone of command but lacked its usual projection.
The deputy continued. “Now he’s free, out there somewhere, waiting – and we’re trapped here with a psycho serial killer.”
“I said that’s enough,” the sheriff bellowed. The room became quiet. John knew he had stopped the conversation but not the thoughts. He could see it in their faces as each member of his team came to terms with the horrific reality of their situation.
“You’ve got it wrong, Cheevers,” John said at last. “You’re wrong. We’re not trapped here with a psycho. The psycho is trapped here with us. And we are going to catch the son of a bitch.”
“What about the weather?” Nathan asked. “It’s like Mother Nature has gone crazy. Anybody ever hear of wind like that?”
A moment rolled by like a silent caisson.
“I have.” All eyes turned to Piper. She had washed the blood from her face and hair. The thin black line of stitches crisscrossed a cut on her forehead. “It happened in 1845, and again in 1932, as well as something similar in 1968. There was also the microburst in 1974.”
“Micro-what?” Cheevers asked.
“Burst – superconcentrated downdrafts of air.”
“Think that’s what hit the station?” John asked.
“Possibly.”
“Didn’t seem very micro to me,” Jerry said. A tinkle of nervous laughter rose from the group. John smiled, grateful for the break in tension, aware the deputy had done so on purpose.