The Faithful

by S. M. Freedman

  “What’s the deal?” the sheriff asked, placing his duffel bag on the ground at his feet.

  Officer Lahoya stepped forward. “Pink bike, child’s size, white basket with a pink flower. Matches the description Ms. Jervis gave us. There’s a Care Bear on the ground about five feet away.” The officer swallowed hard. “I don’t have a good feeling about this, boss.”

  The sheriff pinched the bridge of his nose, wincing. “Officer Metcalf, you find that photo?”

  “Right here, boss.” Josh handed it over.

  Holding out the photo, Sheriff Lagrudo said, “Okay, people. Listen up! We’re looking for Ryanne Jervis, age seven. She’s three feet ten inches tall and weighs about fifty pounds. Her mom’s not sure what she’s wearing, but she has a pink My Little Pony backpack.”

  The other officers pressed forward to get a look. It was a glossy eight-by-ten school photo. Ryanne perched awkwardly on a stool, her hands clutched in her lap. Red hair flamed in a cloud around her pale face. Her denim dress was several sizes too big and had a red strawberry on the breast pocket. Scabbed, bony knees poked out from the hem of her dress, and dirty lace socks circled her ankles above scuffed, black patent-leather shoes. Most notable were her eyes, which seemed to take up half her face. They were Coke-bottle green and rimmed with dark circles. She looked like a girl who didn’t get much sleep.

  “Detective Smythe,” Lagrudo continued, “canvass the businesses along North Main; check if anyone remembers seeing her after school. Start with Enfield’s and move north.

  “Sergeant Grant, get ahold of the school administration. I want to talk to her teacher, and as many of the faculty as possible. I want to know everything that was going on with Ryanne, and if anyone suspicious has been hanging around the school.

  “Officers Lahoya and Perkins, I want a grid search done of the surrounding neighborhoods.

  “Sergeant Nicholson, head back to the office. Issue a ‘be on the lookout’ to the surrounding counties. Contact the police in the neighboring states. I want everyone on red alert.

  “All right, let’s stay in contact; I want to hear any news immediately. Got it?” They all nodded.

  The sheriff picked up his duffel bag and turned to Josh. “Come with me, rookie. We’re going to have a look at that bike, and then we’re going to cover every square inch of the area around it.” He lifted the tape and stepped underneath, and Josh followed.

  The bike was on its side, the rear tire sticking out of the scrub. The sheriff pulled a Nikon out of his bag and took some shots, explaining what he was doing as he went. Josh listened with solemn intensity.

  Once the sheriff was satisfied, they slapped on gloves and pulled the bike out of the tangled vegetation. They wrapped the bike in a large plastic sheet for transport back to the office.

  There was a dirt-covered teddy bear facedown on the hardpack, half a dozen feet from the bike. Sheriff Lagrudo took several shots and then slid the bear into an evidence bag.

  When both pieces of evidence were stowed in his Ford Econoline, they split up and began a grid search of the brush surrounding Papillion Creek.

  It was Josh who spotted it. “Boss!”

  “You all right there, officer?” the sheriff called from somewhere upstream.

  “You’d . . . you’d better come see this.”

  He listened to the rustle of the sheriff’s progress through the brush, unable to move.

  “What is it?” Sheriff Lagrudo’s voice had a hitch in it. Josh couldn’t find his at all, so instead he pointed toward the water.

  The sheriff slid down the embankment, and with shaking legs, Josh followed.

  A My Little Pony backpack was caught in the shrubbery at the creek’s edge, bobbing gently in the current. It might once have been pink; it was hard to tell. Now it was streaked and splattered with red, like a Rorschach made with blood.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I awoke in a flood of tears and sour sweat, clawing my way out of the same damned dream I had been having since my early twenties. Occupational hazard. I should have been used to the dreams by now.

  They occurred in many different ways, yet they were always the same. Whether I was sheltered among the red cliffs of Bryce Canyon, or running through a corn maze, or fleeing on horseback through a crisp pine forest, or trapped a thousand feet up in the Willis Tower, or stumbling up the Oregon Dunes in a hopeless quest for higher ground, it always ended the same way.

  New York had sponsored the latest version of the dream. The Big Apple. Also known as the Big Melting Pot. Ironic, indeed, since New York was definitely melting.

  The smell of warm urine and unwashed bodies slithered up the stairs from the subway platform. The air was so humid, my damp T-shirt clung to me like the eager hands of a teenage boy.

  In my dream state, it seemed perfectly logical to be walking barefoot through the litter that swirled in the fetid air blasting out of the subway vents.

  Ahead of me a woman was walking, also barefoot, her pale arms stretching toward the sky. Her dirty red hair hung in limp ropes down the back of her grubby dress.

  Perhaps that’s what caused my urgency. That red hair, so much like my own. I was desperate to catch up with her, desperate to see her face.

  I labored forward through an endless swarm of angry New Yorkers. Again and again the crowds tripped me up, shoved me back, battered me with sharp elbows. I pushed and fought my way through them.

  Eventually the damp bodies gave way to a blistering wind. I leaned in, my hands sheltering my eyes. The wind assaulted me, sucking the breath out of my lungs and clobbering me with Coke cans, empty candy wrappers, and cigarette butts.

  Bit by bit, I closed the gap.

  “It’s coming!” she screeched. “It’s coming!”

  What was coming? What?

  And then I saw it: A blue-white ball of fire. A raining inferno. It tore a path across the sky, unzipping the heavens.

  The sonic boom ruptured my eardrums, and the world went silent. The ground rocked and trembled. The city shattered, showering glass and metal.

  She turned to me. The she that was not me, after all. She was older. Wider in the hips and chest. Her eyes were muddy brown instead of my green. But she shared my red hair and pale skin, and the same high cheekbones and delicate curve of the mouth. It was like seeing myself in a carnival mirror: familiar, and yet different. And of course she was familiar. She was a frequent visitor to my land of dreams.

  Shards of glass rained down upon her, opening up gash after bloody red gash on her face, her arms, her chest. She pointed one long, trembling finger at me. And though I couldn’t hear her, I understood.

  “See . . . what . . . you’ve . . . done!”

  On the last word, the world exploded. The woman went rag doll, flying up toward the boiling sky.

  Impact.

  My smartphone on the bedside table read 3:12 p.m.

  Perfect.

  There would be no more sleep for me that afternoon, and I would be dog-tired when I reported for work at 8:00 p.m. I pulled myself out of bed with a groan, tossing the twisted sheets aside, and pulled open the blackout curtains.

  The stark New Mexico daylight slapped me in the face. It was a good start, and a pot of coffee would do the rest. But first I needed a shower. A long, hot, use-up-the-entire-tank kind of shower.

  I ignored the image of my naked body in the bathroom mirror as I crossed the cold tiles. As a general rule I avoided mirrors. Vanity wasn’t worth the risk of facing the other people I often found staring back at me.

  If I didn’t look, I wouldn’t know there was a bloody-haired little boy reaching for me, or some creepy dude ogling my breasts, or a woman trying to untangle the noose from around her neck so she could talk to me. Definitely not a conversation I wanted to have.

  The first thing I did after buying the house was remove the mirrored tiles from around the l
iving room fireplace. I also replaced the mirrored closet doors with shuttered ones, and changed out the large bathroom mirrors for small oval ones. They were just big enough to make sure there wasn’t greenery stuck in my teeth.

  The second thing I did was purchase some extra lamps. Lamps were important; they did battle against shadows and dark corners.

  The shower was restorative, and I trooped into the kitchen in flannel lounge pants and an old Kiss T-shirt, my hair hanging to the small of my back in a heavy wet sheet. While the coffee brewed, I cleaned up the empty ice-cream container and box of Oreos, embarrassing evidence of my nutritionally deficient dinner-slash-breakfast some six hours before.

  As part of my daily routine, I vowed to start doing better. To eat more salads, and cut back on the coffee and ice cream. I would even exercise—start jogging again or something. Just as soon as I unearthed my expensive Nikes from the shoe mountain piled on my closet floor.

  In my weeklong attempt to become a runner, I had learned a few things: Blisters hurt. Chafing happens in the most embarrassing places. Jogging is incredibly mind-numbing, and really hard work. Maybe I would take up yoga instead.

  Not to be dissuaded from healthy pursuits, I chose the strawberry Pop-Tarts instead of the s’mores.

  “Fruit!” I cheered.

  “Rowan, I think we’ve got a fast mover,” Dan said as I pushed into the trailer, balancing two takeout coffee cups and a box of doughnuts. As usual, his belongings were scattered from door to desk chair, eager to trip me up. I kicked his gym bag out of my path and dumped the coffee and doughnuts on the desk, pushing aside a pile of paperwork with my arm.

  “What’s the velocity?” I asked, moving to the bank of monitors.

  “It’s looking like zero-point-five degrees a day.”

  “Whoa. Okay, convert it to MPC format and send it off with an NEO flag on it.”

  Finding an NEO, or Near Earth Object, with that kind of speed was not a nightly occurrence. It would be processed at the Minor Planet Center as a high priority. The lower-velocity asteroids were observed for several nights before they were sent to MPC for categorization.

  “You got it, boss.” Dan turned back to his computer and started pecking away at the keyboard.

  Standing in front of Bertha, our largest computer monitor, I tracked the fast mover and sipped coffee. After several minutes the newest CCD images of the night sky came in, demanding my attention.

  I ran through the standard detection algorithm, which included registering the images, suppressing the background, and clustering and filtering by velocity.

  Once the newest detection list was ready, I went through the star catalog match and made my final observations. The nightly results would be sent to Hanscom AFB Lincoln Laboratory at the end of my shift.

  I left the trailer to check on the two GEODSS, or Ground-Based Electro-Optical Deep-Space Surveillance, telescopes. The night air was silky against my skin, and I paused to take a few deep breaths. The sky was completely clear, stars twinkling above my head. It was a perfect night for capturing CCD images.

  The telescopes were owned by the US Air Force, and as such were located behind the security checkpoint on the White Sands Missile Range, or WSMR. It was a quiet place to work, when they weren’t testing missiles.

  MIT’s LINEAR program, or Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research program, was charged with doing large-coverage searches for Earth-crossing and main-belt asteroids. In other words, we searched for near- and deep-space asteroids that posed a risk to life on Earth. We were funded through NASA and the US Air Force.

  Both telescopes were functioning well inside their metal domes, so I headed back to the trailer. A chocolate cupcake with a single lit candle was waiting for me on the desk.

  “What’s this?”

  Dan turned away from his computer and smiled. His hair was a mess of curls in which brown and silver fought for supremacy. He had docile brown eyes surrounded by smile lines, and charmingly crooked teeth flashed white inside his bushy beard.

  “Don’t you think we should celebrate, Doctor?”

  To my dismay I felt the prickle of tears, and my words clogged in my throat.

  He sighed theatrically. “Don’t get all girly on me, Red. Blow out the candle!”

  I giggled, wiping a fist across my wet cheeks, and then did just that.

  “Dan . . . thanks. Really,” I managed.

  “Are you kidding? I’ve been waiting for this day forever. Please tell me I’ll never have to hear another word about the Phenomenology Analysis of Experimental Prototype ISR Systems? Talk about a buzzkill.” He rolled his eyes, and I laughed.

  “Okay, I promise.” I pulled out the candle and licked the icing off the bottom. “Share it with me?”

  “What? Take chocolate away from you? I’m not suicidal.” He turned back to his keyboard, and then grinned over his shoulder at me. “There are five more in the fridge. By my count you’ve only had two doughnuts tonight. Gotta keep those sugar levels up.”

  I had just shoved the last bite into my mouth when my gaze fell on a small envelope with a Hallmark logo. It was half hidden within a mountain of paperwork, and I wondered how long it had been there.

  “What’s this?”

  Dan glanced in my direction. “A card from Lincoln Labs, I guess.”

  “They sent flowers to my home.”

  “Dr. Rowan J. Wilson” was typed across the front. No address, no stamp, nothing else. Had it been delivered by hand? Who had made it past the armed guards?

  I slipped a fingernail under the seal and pulled the card free. It was a simple piece of white card stock. In bold black letters were two words:

  RICORDARE

  RITORNARE

  “What in the world is that?” I hadn’t heard Dan come up behind me.

  The card fell from my trembling fingers. It floated and flipped in elegant circles, a butterfly testing its wings. I watched it land at my feet.

  “It’s Italian.” My voice sounded very far away. “It means ‘Remember, Return.’” My vision was going dark. I watched in astonishment as the floor thundered up to meet me.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The last leg of Sumner’s journey back to hell began with a Great Lakes flight from Denver to Cheyenne. The flight itself was uneventful and over way too quickly. He spent the forty-five minutes nursing the one glass of Jim Beam he had allowed himself, monitoring his alarmingly unsettled intestines, and wishing for an in-flight emergency of the crash-and-burn variety.

  Sumner shook his head and swallowed the last trickle of courage, letting it sear his throat and tickle his nostrils. They called for him and he came running, like a good little soldier.

  “You’re a chickenshit patsy,” he grumbled, crunching ice between his molars and steadfastly ignoring the raised eyebrow of his seatmate. He was making quite the impression on her. She was blonde and frighteningly thin, buffed smooth by expensive surgery. She smelled like oranges and had no sense of humor. Certainly not his type, but he wouldn’t have complained. Any port in an emotional storm.

  Initially, she’d sized him up with a predatory hunger reserved for Desperate Housewives–type females approaching the wrong end of forty. But any chance he’d had at joining the mile-high club had vanished when his stomach gave a very ill-timed, threatening rumble. There was only one thing he was going to be capable of doing in the bathroom and she clearly didn’t want to join him for it. Rather than bask in her wide-eyed look of disgust, he beat a hasty retreat to the front of the cabin and christened the blue water.

  Upon his return, he saw that she’d pulled a lipstick-pink e-reader out of her purse. Sumner noted the title on the top of the screen, How to Snag a Husband in Ten Simple Steps, and found his mouth opening against his will, a not uncommon occurrence.

  “Any woman determined to make one poor bastard miserable instead of many happy has lost my good
opinion.”

  Her cool blue eyes focused on him, causing him to stammer.

  “It’s, uh, John Wayne . . . in North to Alaska.”

  She obviously didn’t share his obsession with late-night TV. Perhaps she had better things to do between midnight and 4:00 a.m. Like sleep.

  Without reply, she turned back to her e-reader. For the rest of the flight she pointedly ignored his existence.

  As the plane angled down for its final approach, he took the last few chunks of ice into his mouth and crunched hard, avoiding her sharp glance and trying to ignore the churning anxiety tightening his gut.

  But his intestinal distress was becoming alarming. Like a freight train roaring toward its destination, there was no stopping it. By the time the plane touched down and began its roll toward the gate, he was in a sweaty stew of agony.

  Thunderous noises erupted from his belly, causing his seatmate to wrinkle her nose in disgust. She turned to him with her best bitch-face, probably expecting him to get his rioting intestines under control. Damn, he wished he could. But her rudeness couldn’t go unpunished.

  He leaned toward her and lowered his voice seductively. “So, can I call you sometime?”

  Her jaw dropped unbecomingly and her cheeks flamed. That only encouraged him.

  “Come on, sweetheart. You can’t deny the chemistry between us.” With excellent timing, his stomach chimed in with a threatening gurgle. That did it; she turned away, her gaze fixed on the window.

  The plane eased to a stop and he watched the seat-belt sign with desperation. The moment it went out, he grabbed his satchel and plunged forward.

  “Looks like you missed your chance, sweetheart!” he couldn’t help but call back to her. He pushed past a couple of old biddies, paying no heed to their angry squawking, and threw himself through the doorway and down the stairs to the tarmac.

  Like Jerry Rice on his way to a touchdown, he clutched his satchel against his chest and weaved around the slower passengers. Pushing his way into the airport, he said a silent prayer that he would find the men’s room before he soiled himself.