The Liar

by Bobby Adair

She gunned the engine and accelerated.

  “Hey!” Tommy yelled, as an impact looked inevitable.

  At the last moment, the walkers jumped out of the way, cursing Summer as she sped by.

  “Rude,” she commented.

  Tommy looked back at the walkers. All were on their feet, and angry. “No blood no—”

  “Who stands in front of a speeding car? That was stupid, right? All they had to do was step out of the way.”

  No point in arguing about it.

  “I’ve never heard of Battalion 704,” she said. “It could be a National Guard unit, right? You’re not an expert, are you? Were you ever in the military?”

  Tommy shook his head. “If it’s the National Guard, how’d they get here so fast?”

  “Pull in your mirror.” Summer rolled her window down and reached out for hers.

  Tommy pulled the passenger side mirror flat against the door.

  Summer turned onto a footbridge of thick oak planks laid between twin arches of rusty steel. The bridge was meant to look historic for the tourists who stopped midway to take pictures of one another with the river burbling wide below them and the mountains standing majestic in the background.

  The arches looked way too narrow for the Jeep.

  Only the second most important question at the moment.

  “Will this hold?” Tommy asked.

  “It holds Felix’s Jeep.” Summer slowed as she rolled onto the bridge.

  The gaps between the boards beat a steady rhythm under the tires.

  The passenger side mirror scraped the steel arch, and the glass shattered.

  “Insurance—you know—on the car,” said Summer. “That’s what it’s for, right?”

  Tommy nodded.

  When they drove off the other end of the bridge, Summer sped onto the path again. “Why is this Battalion 704 thing so important to you?”

  “Somebody painted ‘704’ on my front door.”

  “What? When? Tonight?”

  It wasn’t a question Tommy had asked himself. “I assumed whoever took Faith and Emma.” Logic pushed him hard to qualify his answer. “I’ve been out of town for five weeks. I suppose it could have happened any time while I was gone.”

  “You think those men at the roadblock had something to do with Faith’s and Emma’s disappearance?”

  “I don’t know what to think because I don’t have a clue what’s going on.” Tommy lifted his hand to look at his fingers. They still weren’t steady. “I feel like I’m about to explode.”

  “I have some edibles in the glove box.”

  Tommy shook his head. “I hate feeling helpless. I need to find my daughter.”

  “A little THC might take the edge off.”

  “No.” Tommy clenched his fists. He didn’t want to take the edge off anything. He wanted to put a face to the man who’d taken his wife and daughter and he wanted to beat it through the back of his skull.

  “Maybe,” started Summer, “this 704 thing is a volunteer police support organization. Maybe they went to your house to help. Maybe painting 704 on the door was their way of marketing themselves.”

  “Marketing?” That sounded completely stupid to Tommy.

  “People have done stranger things.”

  The Jeep passed beneath I-70.

  Summer pointed up the path. “There’s a spot up here where I can drop you. It’ll be a walk to the Summit County Sheriff’s Department. We live outside the city limit, so you should file the report with the sheriff. We’re in their jurisdiction.”

  Tommy hadn’t expected such an abrupt end to Summer’s assistance. “Umm. I can find my way back to the house. I’ll get a ride or something. Thanks for your help.”

  “I’m not abandoning you,” she explained. “I’m taking the path to the other end of town, to the hospital. I’ll check there while you… uh… file a report.”

  File a report? Is that all he was doing? Could anything sound less consequential?

  Suddenly kind, Summer reached over and laid her hand on Tommy’s arm. “Listen to me?”

  Tommy turned to her.

  “I’m sure they’re okay.”

  “No, you’re not sure.” God, that wasn’t the right thing to say, no matter how true it was. “Thanks though, for saying so.”

  “Tommy, you’re angry. You’re frightened. Anybody in your shoes would be.” Summer brought the Jeep to a stop. “We don’t know yet what happened to Faith and Emma, all we have are guesses. What you need to keep in mind, though, is that a terrorist set off a bomb downtown. People are injured. Others are dead. Everybody’s going to be on edge. You saw how jumpy those deputies—”

  “—or whatever they were.”

  “Tommy, don’t do anything rash. We’ll find Faith and Emma both, you hear me?”

  He nodded because no words seemed big enough to encapsulate the anxiety wringing his brain.

  “Most of downtown is covered by wifi. Text if you find anything. I’ll do the same.”

  ***

  Smoke from the fires down south fouled the night, hiding the stars and obscuring the moon. The sky glowed dirty orange from Spring Creek’s streetlights. It bled dead red and bruised blue from the flashing strobes atop police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances idling at the center of town or screaming through the dark, hauling broken bodies to the hospital.

  Tommy ran up a spur trail between two creek-side houses and found himself on a cul-de-sac of silent homes and parked cars. No porch light puddled a yellow welcome on any front door. No window glowed life through drawn blinds.

  Something savage was out in the dark, sowing fear down the quiet streets.

  It unnerved Tommy.

  A distant gunshot startled him and he jumped into the shadow of a towering spruce.

  Were there still terrorists about?

  The sheriff at that roadblock had warned he and Summer to go home. Was that the right thing to do? The safe thing?

  Maybe.

  But not for a man whose wife and daughter were missing.

  Tommy ran up the street, passing more silent houses on the way toward the center of town.

  The mechanical sound of an amplified voice Dopplered out of the dark.

  Red and blue lights reflected brightly at the corner ahead.

  Tommy ducked behind an SUV parked on the street.

  A cop car was coming, its PA system blaring.

  Stay off the streets.

  Shelter in place.

  Emergency vehicles only on the roads.

  A curfew is in effect by order of Executive Mayor Lugenbuhl.

  Lugenbuhl?

  The name was familiar.

  The title wasn’t.

  The police car passed, and the sound of the amplified voice changed as it receded.

  Tommy ran on.

  ***

  Panting as he leaned on the wall of a laundromat, Tommy peeked out onto Main Street. If the deputy at the roadblock had told them the truth—truth, a rare commodity these days—he was just nine blocks from ground zero.

  Hundreds of people stood in the road, milling and fretting, staring at a carnival of emergency lights flashing obnoxious and chaotic down the street. Shouts echoed over the heads of the watchers and jumbled into indiscernible human noise.

  Urgency.

  Empathy.

  Confusion.

  And cries, the heart-wrenching kind.

  Terror carried on shrieks.

  Threats looking for a place to land.

  A siren whooped to life as an ambulance screamed off in another direction, racing a victim to the hospital.

  Tommy stepped out from behind the laundromat and headed up the sidewalk. The sheriff’s station was three blocks away. He passed gawkers transfixed by the tragedy. Others were sharing their experience with their phones, shooting video and collecting photos. More people were standing in small huddles, talking and reliving their brush with the reaper.

  Tommy passed a parked police car playing the curfew announcement on a loop
over its PA system. Nobody paid it any attention.

  When Tommy reached the third block down where he should have stopped, he chose not to. The tragedy drew him closer, and the more he saw, the more he had to see, and the more it seemed like a real possibility that Faith and Emma were among the injured.

  He knew Faith was politically active, and now his daughter was, too. Could they have gone to the council meeting to shout at the clouds and bang their heads on the walls with all the other disgruntled voters? As if any of them could find enough magic in their voices to morph the corrupt worm of America’s pretend democracy into a butterfly of good government.

  If Summer wasn’t exaggerating, Emma spoke with just that kind of magic.

  It was hard to believe.

  Emma had always been precocious with her words. She was talking before she could walk, and she was charming grandparents into getting her way before she was out of diapers. By the time she’d started school, she didn’t seem so much like a kid as a little adult. Her orator talent and a passion for fixing the world? Where did that come from? Tommy was still trying to get past the idea that she’d soon be kissing boys.

  Or she already was, and he’d been so busy with work these past four years, he’d been left out of the loop.

  Tommy noticed a tall man splashed in blood, waving away the help of a concerned woman. More onlookers had crimson on their faces, clothes, and hands. People squatted on curbs, under the care of those nearby. Some simply sat in the street, looking dazed.

  No faces looked familiar.

  Through the crowd, men in camouflage walked in pairs and fours, hands on their lethal weapons, telling people to go home, ordering them off the street. A few of the paramilitary types were in a screaming match with a handful of weekend cyclists.

  Nobody was doing what the authorities were telling them.

  Two more blocks down, Tommy spotted an overlooked man in the crowd with blood on his face, holding a towel over a wound high on his forehead. He was wobbling like he could topple. “Are you okay?” Tommy asked, as he came in close.

  The guy looked at Tommy like he was seeing a ghost, but then, he was looking at everyone that way.

  “You okay?” Tommy asked again.

  “I was down there when it went off.”

  “The bomb?” Tommy asked.

  “The first one.” The guy looked up at the mountains standing tall over Spring Creek. “There were others, I think.”

  Tommy reached up for the man’s bloody towel. “Let me see that.”

  The guy pulled his hand away from a gash that looked like it would need a bunch of stitches.

  “What got you?” asked Tommy.

  “A piece of a window maybe? I saw it flying at me like a goddamned Frisbee. I thought it was going to take my head off.”

  “So, not a brick. Nothing like that?”

  He shook his head, and groaned as his face screwed up in pain. “I gotta be careful with that.”

  “You need to get to the hospital,” Tommy told him.

  “Not yet.”

  Tommy took his arm and led him over to the curb. “Sit down.”

  “Other people. Hurt worse than me. They need to go first.”

  “Are you dizzy?” Tommy coaxed him to sit.

  “Just when I shake my head.”

  Tommy looked around for a cop, or an EMT, or even one of the camo-wearing military guys who seemed so intent on trying to be in charge. Of course, now that he wanted one, they were nowhere to be seen. “You stay here,” Tommy told him. “Don’t stand again. I’ll get somebody.” Tommy caught the attention of a man nearby.

  “What?”

  “Keep an eye on him for a minute. I’m going to get some help.”

  ***

  Tommy pushed his way to the barricade. Through strobes of blue and red, emergency responders were hunched over injured people lying on the ground, working feverishly. Others tended those on gurneys as they were being wheeled to waiting ambulances.

  A fire burned in the upper floors of the courthouse.

  Firemen directed streams of water through broken windows.

  Below the fire, at the corner of the building where the town council meeting chamber had been, only ragged holes marked where the windows had once been. Parts of the wall were blown out. Debris lay across the lawn, and bodies covered with blankets seemed to be everywhere.

  Tommy shivered at the thought that his daughter or wife might be among them.

  A haggard city policeman came marching sentry past the barricade.

  Tommy reached out for him. “Hey.”

  The policeman stepped back, hand on the butt of his gun. “Buddy.” It was a threat.

  Tommy pointed back down the street. “A guy back there. He needs help.”

  “You keep your hands on that side of the barrier. You got me?” The anger on the policeman’s face told Tommy there’d be no second request.

  Tommy pulled his arm back. “The guy—”

  “Is he dyin’?”

  Tommy touched his forehead where the man’s wound had been. “He’s got this—”

  “Then you’ll have to hero this up all on your own, buddy. Take him to the hospital.” The policeman purposefully turned to look at a row of bodies being collected at the edge of the lawn. “Goddamned NonCons gave us plenty to do here.” The policeman left it at that, and started walking again.

  In that row of bodies, Tommy noticed a sickeningly familiar pair of shoes sticking out from under a blanket. His voice came out in a croak. “My wife and daughter. They’re missing.”

  The policeman spun, wrestling with emotions and frustrations he needed to shout at somebody before beating them to death with his fists. That somebody wasn’t Tommy, though, it was the people the cop saw as the perpetrators—the NonCons. “I can’t help you. You understand that, right, buddy?” The cop bit his lips, and wrestled with the idea of saying more. “Do you know they were here for sure?”

  Tommy shook his head as he stared at a pair of shoes that weren’t just similar to Emma’s. They were hers. They had to be. Tears started to flow, and Tommy tried to form a word as he pointed. “Shoes.”

  The policeman turned and saw.

  “I think that’s—” Tommy couldn’t get any more out.

  The policeman stepped up and put an arm on Tommy’s shoulder. “All the kids got those shoes. That’s not her.”

  Tommy sniffled as he tried to believe what had to be a lie. The cop couldn’t have that information. Still, Tommy had to see. He had to know. “Can you—” But he couldn’t bring himself to ask the officer to pull the blanket back. He’d seen violent death before, yet he couldn’t bear the horror of what might be underneath.

  “I can’t, buddy. I can’t. You know that, right?” The policeman nodded his head toward the other people at the barricade, all frightened, angry, or crying. “She could be anybody’s kid. Trust me on this, you don’t want to see her, not right now. Not after what they did. Fuckin’ NonCons.” The cop spat on the ground.

  “Please,” asked Tommy.

  “Look.” The officer pointed west. “They’re setting up a command center at the high school. You’ve got to go there to report them missing. They’ll have the names of the victims over there. Okay?”

  Tommy nodded.

  “The high school, okay?”

  Wiping at his eyes, Tommy stepped back into the crowd. He knew.

  He didn’t know how he could be so certain, he just was. Emma was dead.

  He fell to his knees and cried.

  ***

  After the carnage at the courthouse, the high school gym was the most horrific place on the planet Tommy could imagine being. He stood in a line, at least he thought he did, and he didn’t know how he’d gotten himself there. He must have walked over from Main Street, but none of that had registered in his brain, not one moment of it. All he remembered was the sight of his daughter’s lifeless legs on the grass, half-hidden by a silvery emergency blanket. He remembered falling down in the stree
t, and then nothing but tears that seemed like they would never, ever end.

  And then here.

  Hundreds of the worried were in the gym with him. Maybe more than hundreds.

  Mothers wail a peculiar, animal way when a son’s blood is drizzling into a storm drain and his last breath is blowing down the valley with the smoke from a million burned trees. Stoic men shiver and stare until the grief breaks through their bullshit walls. Sisters cry and brothers sob.

  Anger erupts in shouted curses and balled fists. Promises of revenge against faceless people and rumored terrorists.

  Those goddamned NonCons.

  To hell with them all.

  So many people in the gym were anxious with threadbare hopes.

  More were despondent and staring, becoming numb, like Tommy was, overloaded with grief, certain that death had stalked its way through town and mangled their loved ones for the sin of being in the wrong place on a happy fucking Friday night.

  And the stink of it. Sweat and ash.

  And agony.

  Who knew agony had a smell? And if it didn't before, it did now. The stench of the gym was imprinting on Tommy’s brain and tying itself to grief too intense to survive.

  Yet, he kept breathing.

  And standing.

  And shuffling forward with the sad flow of the line.

  People crowded too close to him, pressing in without a care for personal space. Hands found their way onto him for no other reason than people needed to feel the touch of a warm human—anyone, even a stranger.

  He waited with a head full of black thoughts and eyes that wanted to do nothing but stare at the varnished slats on the basketball court beneath his feet.

  Tommy’s phone buzzed in his pocket, and he nearly went into a panic as he tried to fish it out before he missed the call. He prayed Emma or even Faith would be on the other end with news that they were fine—both of them—and that everything was alright, and… and… and… and forever.

  Only it wasn’t a call, and they weren’t fine or anything like it.

  The phone had just buzzed once. It was an incoming text.

  When Tommy saw the screen he gritted his teeth on a foul word. No Emma. No Faith. It was Summer. The message started with, “No luck yet. I’m still… ”