Going from his dresser drawers to the closet, he pulled out a few t-shirts and jeans; no need for professional attire for this trip. He stuffed everything into the duffel bag that he’d bought to take to the gym, and it had seen more time collecting dust in the top of the closet than trips to that sweat factory. After Ben was born, Grant vowed to get in better shape after letting himself go. It was easy to do when the nine-to-five dictated your day, coming home exhausted. Christine craved so much junk food during the pregnancy, and he found himself munching on late-night burgers, tacos and milkshakes along with her. But, after the kid popped out, a healthy eight pounds, nine ounces, Grant started going to Fitness Farm, riding the elliptical, lifting weights and soaking his t-shirts in sweat. The extra pounds came off and he did begin to like how he looked. That was nearly three years ago now though, and what weight he’d lost, he’d since put back on, plus a few extra for good measure.
He still had the Fitness Farm membership. He watched the thirty dollars get drafted from the bank account every month and Christine called it his fat tax. She was one to talk, with her jiggling thighs, though looking down at his gut now, he couldn’t disagree.
He carried the duffel into Benjamin’s room and stuffed a few outfits for him into it, the little boy’s clothes taking up far less space in the bag than his own. Grant made sure to pack in a few pullups diapers as well. Benjamin’s accidents were very few and far between at this point, but not knowing how long they’d be away from home, he wanted to be prepared.
Going back in the master bedroom, Grant went to his closet and, on the top shelf above the clothing rack, he pulled down the heavy green metal box that resided up there, hidden from the other occupants of the house. Unlocking the clasp on top, he opened it up to observe the contents. He hadn’t even touched the box in so long that his fingers left clean trails as they picked up the dust that covered the top.
Christine hated guns. She didn’t even want him to have this one, and after Benjamin was born, she asked him to put the thing away, out of reach. So he kept the little matte black nine millimeter locked away in this dust-covered box. He took the weapon out, along with the holster and, pushing a full clip into the butt of the handgun, shoved the thing into the waistband of his pants, pulling his polo shirt over to conceal it.
The little boy played with his action figures, his bedroom his own imaginative world, when Grant told him that it was time to go.
“I don’t want to go anymore,” the boy whined. “Stay home!”
“We get to go see Uncle Glenn!” Grant said, his voice full of false chipperness.
“Okay! And see the elephants?” The word came out of the boy’s mouth as el-funts.
“Yes, we’ll get to see the elephants, but we have to go right now.” The summer before, they had spent a hot and humid Saturday at the zoo in Houston. Benjamin fell in love with the large gray animals. And right now, Grant would have told his son anything to get them out of the house and on the road as quickly as possible.
With his son cradled in one arm and the duffel bag in the other, Grant deposited both in the car and started out the driveway. As he drove away, he could see the three Lester boys standing in their doorway, watching him leave them and the rest of the neighborhood in his rearview.
In a few minutes, Grant was on the highway and driving south toward Houston. His son was already asleep in his car seat, head tilted and drool dripping from the corner of his mouth. He’d always fallen asleep quickly in the car. Out of habit, he turned on the radio, getting nothing but static. He switched it off and drove in silence. But, God, he wished for the old days of tape cassettes and compact discs. When he was in high school, he’d collected hundreds of discs and kept a binder of his favorites underneath the front seat of his jalopy Mitsubishi Montero. The only redeeming quality of that money-dump of a vehicle was the sound system. It felt like a lifetime ago, and he longed for those days more than he’d care to admit.
Now, pushing the Lexus upward of eighty miles per hour, calculating how long it would take him to get to his brother’s house, Grant gripped the steering wheel and fumbled with the controls for cruise. After setting the cruise control, he pulled out his phone, and keeping one eye on the road, scrolled through his contacts until he landed on his brother’s name. He pushed the call button, getting the this number is out of service message. Out of frustration, he threw the device onto the center console, where it bounced off the leather and into the floorboard. No tunes and no service.
He reached down for the device as he came over a slight hill and set it in the cupholder. Looking back up, he gasped and slammed on the brakes. His tires squealed as the car slid on the asphalt, leaving twin black skid trails on the road, eventually grinding to a halt in the middle of the highway.
In front of him, at the bottom of the hill, a police cruiser was parked in the middle of the highway. Its roof-mounted lights spun red and blue, bouncing against the dark cloud hovering in front of the highway. He could see nothing beyond the blanket of fog, the dark gray clouds impenetrable. He’d seen fog before, especially this time of year when the low clouds would roll over the hills and into the valley, usually on cold autumn evenings. This was different, however. The fog, rolling and boiling and folding in on itself had an energy that felt ominous and other-worldly.
Grant slowly brought his vehicle to the shoulder of the highway and, checking his son in the back, still soundly asleep, put it in park. The police officer stood in front of the fog in front of his vehicle, inspecting it. Grant walked up to the officer.
“Hey, officer?” Grant said as he cautiously approached. The officer seemed as if he’d not heard Grant’s car squealing as he came to a stop nor when he called out to him.
“Officer?” Grant repeated, still to no answer. As he got closer to the man in front of the fog, he could hear the officer mumbling, the words quiet and under the man’s breath. Grant was standing no more than a foot from the man when he could hear him.
“One. One. Two. Three. Five. Eight. Thirteen. Twenty-one.” The officer repeated the numbers over and over, quickly and succinctly.
Grant tapped the police officer on the shoulder, but he continued to stare at the blanket of fog, the cloud hovering in place just millimeters from the tip of the officer’s protruding and hooked nose, repeating the number sequence over and over. Grabbing him by the shoulder, Grant turned the man away from the fog, and the officer blinked and came to. The nametag on the front of the officer’s shirt read BARNES.
“Who are you?” the officer asked, confused.
“I’m Grant Oliver. I live in Decker. What are you doing?”
“I…” Barnes started and then trailed off. “I don’t know. My head...” His words were slurred and the officer sort of swayed on his feet. Grant reached out, steadying the man from falling on the road.
Grant’s head had throbbed all day with a hangover, but standing next to the fog, the sharp pain in the front of his skull was so strong it made him nauseas. He walked Officer Barnes back to the cruiser in the middle of the highway, and the pain quickly subsided, the spike lowering to the dull ache he’d nursed since waking up on Craig’s couch. The officer sat on the ground and leaned against the driver’s door. He panted as sweat beaded on his forehead and he wiped it away with the sleeve of his dark shirt.
“You want some water?” Grant asked as the man settled into a heap on the asphalt. “I’ve got a couple of bottles in my car.”
“No,” Barnes replied. “Just give me a second. I feel like I was...” he trailed off. After a beat, he said, “Hallucinating.”
Grant looked back at the hovering cloud, the dark gray mass sending a shiver down his spine.
“Chief McMillan sent me out to check the shipments from San Antonio,” Officer Barnes said as he leaned against his cruiser. “This is as far as I got. I tried to radio back to the station, but it’s just static. I got out of the car and walked up to that.” He motioned to the fog, boiling in place, held at bay by what Grant assumed could
only be an invisible barrier. He’d never seen fog just hover like that. “I felt this splitting headache and then…” the officer trailed off.
“You were saying some numbers,” Grant said, turning away from the cloud. “Repeating them over and over.”
Officer Barnes cocked his head, confused. “Numbers?”
“Yeah. One, Two, Three, Five, —”
Officer Barnes cut him off, “Prime numbers?”
“I have no idea what that means,” Grant said. “You were just saying them over and over. Really creepy shit.”
“I’m going to head back to town,” Officer Barnes said. “I don’t think anything is coming from San Antonio. Or anywhere else.” He nodded at the dark cloud hovering on the road. “What about you? Where are you going? Or, were?”
Grant didn’t know why, but the lie came quickly, as if he’d had it rehearsed. “My wife is visiting family in Houston. My son, in the car,” Grant pointed to his vehicle, still idling, “and I were going to see if we could find her.”
“I think it’s best to head back to town,” Officer Barnes said. “I don’t think there’s going to be anything or anyone getting through that.”
Grant looked at the fog again and then agreed hesitantly. “Yeah,” he said, a lump in his throat. “Back to town.”
Barnes lifted himself from the hood and got in his vehicle, pulled a u-turn through the grass and started down the northbound lane, back to Decker.
Grant walked to his car and he could see Benjamin was awake now, the boy staring at him through the passenger window. Grant got in the driver’s seat, gripping the steering wheel tightly, feeling the faux leather rubbing against the calluses on his palms. From behind him, Benjamin’s voice broke the silence. “Daddy. Aunt Catherine is not waking up.”
Grant’s head snapped and he looked at his son, who he could see had been crying, streaks from tears running down his cheeks.
“What do you mean, buddy?” Grant asked.
“Aunt Catherine is not waking up. She is bleeding. Bad man hurt her.”
“What makes you say that?” Grant asked the boy nervously.
“The cloud told me,” Benjamin said, pointing to the gray fog.
“She’s okay, Ben,” Grant tried to reassure the boy. “I think you were having a nightmare.” His heart pounded in his chest, beating so hard he felt it might leap out and land in a bloody mess on his windshield. He’d give anything for a drink now, something to calm these nerves.
He peered back at the cloud, rolling and moving yet stationary. The officer, in a trance. And little Benjamin. Had it really shown him Catherine? Bad man hurt her.
“Hey buddy?” Grant said. “Did you see the man that hurt Aunt Catherine? In your dream, what did he look like?” He looked back at the boy in the rearview mirror, but the child was asleep again, his head tucked against the carseat.
Grant threw the car in drive and had no choice but to go back to the last place he wanted to be. Back home, back to Decker.
CHAPTER 11
JEM | 12:45PM
THE SCENE AT Central Market, despite Chief McMillan’s words to the crowd outside city hall not even an hour before, was, as Jem would artfully describe, a total shitshow.
After leaving the TechMedix parking lot, Jem nearly drove all the way home. He flipped a u-turn in the middle of 26th street when he determined that he was neither ready to be there alone nor had much of anything in the fridge that he could cook. He needed a few days’ worth of food, he surmised, and an empty nest has little in the way of extra food. When you don’t have kids demanding Spaghetti-O’s and ramen every day, the nonperishable rations are slim to none.
At Central Market, metal grocery carts were overturned in the parking lot and men were banging on the front glass doors, which had been shut and barred. Jem stared at the scene from the end of the parking lot in fascination and disbelief. The mob at the store’s doors—bowing and creaking from the force of the gathering crowd pushing on the barrier—continued to push, the collective mentality now focused solely on getting in and grabbing whatever they could.
Jem, feeling that cooler heads needed to prevail before someone got hurt, ran into the crowd and pushed his way into the middle. “Gentlemen, let’s be calm,” he yelled, though his words were met on deaf and angry ears. The throng of men who gathered at the front doors of Central Market pressed into the glass barrier, pounding on the glass.
“We need to feed our kids, Holcomb!” one of the men shouted at the door while the grocery store’s general manager, Rodney Holcomb, stood behind the doors. The grocery manager shrugged his shoulders as if to say can’t help you but all this did was anger the mob even further.
“You heard what I said at the meeting. We didn’t get a shipment!” Holcomb said from behind the plate glass doors. “I can’t help you.”
“Bullshit, Holcomb!” one of the men retorted. “You can’t horde all that shit in there for yourself! Chief McMillan said you have to open your doors!”
Holcomb brandished a shotgun as if to dare the men to continue at his doors. “I’m not letting anyone in!” he said.
Jem repeated his cries of calming the men down, “Men, please,” he pleaded. “We won’t solve anything like this!”
Someone, unseen to Jem, grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and threw him to the ground. “Oh shut your mouth, money boy!” he heard. As Jem fell to the ground, he was shoved into another man, eyes full of rage behind a shaggy brown beard, who turned around and raised his fist. The man with the beard punched the man standing behind him, who fell to the ground, and an all-out brawl began.
Jem covered his head with his hands and crawled on his knees, avoiding the boots of those above him as fists flew. A young man in a John Deere hat hit the concrete next to him, knocked out cold, his eye socket immediately swelling.
Two hands, knuckles wrapped on his collar, lifted Jem up from the concrete. Jem was prepared for a fist fight, but realized quickly that it wasn’t a random assailant but Steve Jones. “We need to get out of here, son,” he said.
Two other men began shouldering into the plate glass of the store’s doors, at first separately and then synchronized. The sound of bodies crashing into the glass at first sounded like a thud, then a crack. One of the men started clawing at the cracked glass, pulling away shards with his bare hands, leaving behind red streaks running down the doors.
And then the sound of gunfire echoed through the parking lot.
The throng dispersed like cockroaches under a sudden light, though two more blasts rang through the air. Jem was knocked back to the ground by the sudden disbursement of men from the doors. He covered his head with his hands, hoping to protect himself from the absolute chaos. He immediately regretted coming over here, thinking that the men of the town would remain calm under the circumstances. He wished he’d just gone straight home. Like the threat of an incoming storm, he thought he’d need supplies. Sustenance. The sheer idea of not having food for one day was enough to make all these men here go crazy with rage. Chaos reigned over all sense of civility.
Jem crawled away on his hands and knees when another body landed with a thud next to him. He’d barely registered the blast of the gunshot when the man hit the ground, a bloody mess of flesh where his face once was, though Jem immediately knew, with a pit in his stomach, who it was.
“Steve!” Jem shouted as he took hold of Steve’s shirt, pulling him away from the dispersing crowd. He dragged Steve’s convulsing body into the parking lot away from the sidewalk in front of Central Market.
Two other men tackled another. “He’s got a gun!” one of them yelled.
Jem saw the weapon, a silver revolver, get kicked away from the assailant, whose face was pressed into the asphalt by two large men.
“Help,” Jem muttered. “He’s…” his voice trailed off. He already knew. Steve was gone.
The man on his stomach, being held by the two larger men, yelled incoherent obscenities, spit flying from his mouth.
Absol
ute rage took over Jem’s senses. He got up from the asphalt, ran over to the gunman and punted him in the face. Blood and teeth flew into the air. Jem lifted his leg to kick again, but two burly arms wrapped him and pulled him away before he could inflict more pain on the man.
Sirens filled the air now, getting louder and closer. The man who pulled Jem away from the gunman said, “Get out of here, Mr. Taylor. McMillan’s men won’t go easy on anyone left here.”
Suddenly sober, Jem looked down at the man he’d kicked in the face. He couldn’t have been any older than twenty-five. Just like Jem, he’d come down to the grocery store to try to provide for himself and his family. He immediately felt sick to his stomach, that he’d allowed himself to give in to the chaos and rage.
Jem took another look at Steve Jones’s lifeless body. “No, I’m going to stay. Someone needs to tell the police what happened here.”
CHAPTER 12
CHIEF | 12:50PM
“CHRIS!” HOWARD MCMILLAN called out as he opened the front door of their home. “Get your ass in here!” From the front door, a rectangular stream of light illuminated the otherwise empty, quiet and dark house. In the kitchen, McMillan saw the Chinese takeout boxes left over from the night before on the counter. Chris hadn’t even bothered cleaning up, and the chief wondered if his son had even climbed up from the basement at all today.
Life now without Penny, without the matriarch of the home, was different. She’d roll in her grave if she saw the amount of takeout these two men ate on a regular basis. She’d been the glue that held the family together. And Chris was always a momma’s boy. Somehow the McMillan blood in the kid’s veins wasn’t as pronounced as he’d wished. After Penny died, Chris went off the deep end. Howard tried to give his son space, however. Time. He wanted his only son to be okay. But, hell, it had been nearly a year and a half now. The boy needed to buck up.
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