The Darkening

by Paul Antony Jones

  Birdy made her way back into the living room, turned on the TV, then lay on the sofa, resting her head on the armrest. She pulled her mom's comforter tight around her until she was cocooned within its soft, fluffy embrace. Birdy closed her eyes, hoping that when she opened them again, this would all turn out to be nothing more than a horrible nightmare.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Detective Collins eased the Crown Victoria into a spot behind a coroner's van, about a block away from the Gas 'N Go station where the two cops had disappeared. Single story houses on tiny lots of land lined the street on either side. Some were quite nicely kept, the remains of lawns neatly manicured, the paint only a few years old. Others could have been abandoned decades ago; their lawns dead or overgrown, oil stains on the driveway, rusting cars up on blocks. But they all shared two similarities, he noted: they all had security bars on the outside of the windows, and the curtains and blinds in every single window were closed. There wasn't a soul to be seen cop-watching through any of those windows either, Collins noted. Never in all his years on the force had he ever been to a crime scene and not seen someone watching, either in a gaggle of gawkers behind the yellow perimeter tape, standing on their front lawn, or watching from their porch, cigarette dangling from their mouth. But this morning, despite the flashing lights of the cop cars, ambulance, coroner, and fire department, not a single soul had bothered to come out and see what was going on.

  Collins checked his Timex. It was just after eleven in the morning, but he'd have forgiven anyone for thinking otherwise; the rain and clouds were a wet shroud over this, and every other street he and Mulroney had driven past to get here. A permanent twilight pall had descended over the city.

  The few street lamps that lined the road were all dark. Collins glanced up at the nearest lamppost; the cover that was supposed to protect the bulb was shattered. The remains of the bulb lay in pieces around the base of the post.

  Collins stepped out of the car and stood for a second near the curb, looking up and down the street, his hand raised above his eyes to shelter them from the insistent rain. It was like he was standing in a scene from some fifties noir movie. Everything was a shade of gray, depressing, drab... and deserted. The words of the guy he had met back at the apartment building came back to him: The people. Where are all the people? he had asked. It had hit a note with the detective when he'd heard it. He'd noticed a distinct lack of humans on the street over the past week or so, a gradual but unmissable reduction in the number of busts, the streets were quieter, even before the rain had moved in. But over the last few days it had become even more noticeable as fewer and fewer calls came in to the station. And it wasn't just the civilian population, either. His precinct had had a few no-shows amongst the admin staff, even a couple of cops that had simply not reported for duty; three during his shift last night. But he'd heard scuttlebutt of precincts losing half their staff. If it hadn't been for the corresponding drop in crime, the city would have been well and truly up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

  What was most disturbing, what really got the little hairs all along the length of his spine standing at attention, was how quiet the city had become. If it wasn't for the constant background hiss of the rain, he would have begun to wonder if he'd lost his hearing.

  "Fuck!" Mulroney's slowly exhaled expletive pulled the detective's attention back to the present. "It's like the end of the world or something." She whispered the last sentence as though she were standing in a library, not the middle of some hell-hole of a neighborhood being pissed on from on high.

  Collins gave a half-hearted nervous laugh. "Worried about zombies, Mulroney?"

  The female officer turned and looked him dead in the eyes, her face emotionless. "I've been fighting zombies from the day I started this job," she said. "This..." she nodded first up and then down the deserted street, "this is something new. This is some Stephen King kind of bullshit, right here."

  "Canvas a couple of the neighbors," the detective said. "See if they saw or heard anything, 'kay?"

  His partner nodded, but she didn't look happy. He saw Mulroney's hand drop to her service weapon as if she was checking that it was still there, then she headed toward the next house over.

  The detective walked quickly toward the house, ducked under the yellow perimeter tape and pushed open the creaky iron gate to the path leading up to the front door. The front door was open; a bored-looking cop Collins didn't recognize stood on the porch sheltering as best he could from the rain. Collins flashed his badge to the cop, who nodded.

  "Do we know who owns the house?" Collins asked as he brushed rain from his head.

  "Belongs to some guy named Roberto Hernandez. He works at the Gas 'N Go station where our guys were last heard from. I spoke to the owner of the gas station and he said the guy hadn't shown up for work two nights in a row."

  Collins nodded. Roberto. That had been the name Birdy had given him when he asked about her mother. He had been scheduled to work, but hadn't shown up last night so Birdy's mom was covering his shift. "Do we know where Mr. Hernandez is?" Collins asked.

  The cop gave a grim smile. "Oh, he's in there too, Detective."

  Collins let out a long sigh. "Any relatives?"

  "Nope. Not married. No kids. Lives alone."

  How much of a coincidence, Collins wondered, would it have to be for the bodies of two cops to somehow mysteriously disappear from the very same place this Hernandez guy worked and then end up at his home? Was he maybe some kind of a serial killer? Or maybe Hernandez had just had a bad day, flipped out, and managed to kill the cops in some sneak attack; these crazies could take months to formulate a plan. Wouldn't be the first time it had happened. Couple of years back, some guy had walked into a pancake joint and wasted four cops while they sat around eating lunch. Or maybe Hernandez had gotten caught up with some of the gangs operating around here? Maybe he was an inside man for a heist that had gone wrong? There were so many reasons for why this shit went down, he'd lose track if he tried counting them all. Whatever the reason, he wasn't going to find out standing here with his thumb up his butt.

  Detective Collins stepped into the house and a surprisingly neat living room.

  "Did you turn the TV on?" Collins called back to the cop at the door.

  "No. It was on when I got here. Figured I should leave it that way."

  A small coffee table sat between the TV and a sofa. A TV dinner tray lay on the table, the food untouched. It looked like it could have come right out of the microwave.

  Collins walked through the room and into the kitchen. A few dishes waited in the sink in dirty gray water. It all looked so normal; lived in. Nothing really out of place. No sign of any kind of a disturbance.

  A short corridor led off from between the kitchen and dining room. Collins saw the first splatter of blood on the wall about halfway down the hall; just a trickle, like someone had cut their finger badly. A forensic tech knelt next to the stain with a camera in his hands. The flash exploded, blinding Collins momentarily. Just beyond the CSI tech were two more rooms. The door to the first room was ajar; Collins could see the tiled floor of a bathroom. The second door, which was closed, he guessed led to the home's solitary bedroom. Collins pushed the bathroom door ajar with the end of a ballpoint pen he kept in the breast pocket of his jacket.

  "Shit!" he said quietly. The bathroom was about five feet by ten. A commode on the left, a sink unit with a mirror and a shelf cluttered with a selection of cheap aftershaves directly opposite the door, and to the right was a bathtub that doubled as a shower.

  A body lay in the tub. It was a male, recently dead Collins guessed, by the lack of lividity and the rosiness of the corpse's skin. The hair was cut military short to match the dirt and bloodstained uniform the corpse wore. It wasn't one of his guys, the uniform looked more like military. The body was curled up in an almost fetal position, the knees tucked up tightly to the chest, the arms crossed over them as though the guy had been trying to hug himself when he died. O
r more likely he had been positioned like that by whatever sick bastard had brought him here. There was no sign of how the man had died, but the wounds could be easily concealed behind the dirt and blood covering his body.

  "Notice anything?" a voice asked from just behind Collins.

  "Jesus Christ on a bike!" Collins hissed, his heart jumped at the sound of the CSI tech's voice so close to his ear. Collins turned and gave the guy his hardest stare. The tech was oblivious. He just kept on talking, his jaw working a piece of gum between words.

  "Notice anything out of place, detective?" he prompted, an ear-to-ear grin splitting his face.

  Collins looked around the room one more time. "Nothing that springs immediately to mind," he said, allowing disdain to color his words.

  The tech leaned in close and dramatically sniffed twice. "No stink," he said. "In fact, there's almost no smell at all."

  Collins spun back around and, after checking that he wasn't going to walk on any evidence left on the floor, stepped into the bathroom and leaned over the body. He took a hesitant sniff, then a deeper inhalation. The tech was right, there was no smell of decay, just an odd staleness, like stagnant water, and below that the faint aroma of dried blood and grass from the dead guy's tunic.

  "Hell of a thing, eh?" said the tech.

  "Yeah," said Collins, his eyebrows furrowing. "Hell of a thing."

  "It's like he's been embalmed already. Fucking wacky shit, if you ask me."

  Well thankfully nobody's asking you, Collins thought, but said, "The others in there?" He nodded toward the closed bedroom door.

  The tech drew himself up to full height, his grin widening, the flash of pink gum visible between his teeth. "Oh yeah." He raised both his eyebrows like he was privy to some kind of sordid secret. "I'm done in there. You knock yourself out."

  Collins pushed the bedroom door open and stepped inside. The window blinds were closed and the room was dark. He fished out his mini-flashlight and switched it on, playing the beam around the room.

  He almost gagged at the sight of the uniformed but headless corpse splayed across the bed. This had to be one of the two cops who'd been unfortunate enough to get caught up in whatever shit had gone down at the gas station. Collins tried not to look too closely at the ragged flap of torn neck skin where the head should have been, his eyes lingering only long enough to note that there was no blood on the bed linen.

  "Jesus!" he whispered. He turned his head back to the crime scene tech in the corridor. "Where are the others?"

  "Check the closet."

  "Great," Collins muttered to himself. He walked over to the closet on the opposite side of the bed. Bloody handprints marked the wall near the door. Flakes of dried blood coated the handle.

  Collins pulled a latex glove from his jacket and snapped it on his hand. He reached out and opened the closet door, allowing it to swing all the way open. There were two bodies in the cupboard, one in each corner, both in the same fetal position as the body in the bath tub. The closet was so small their knees almost touched. It looked like they too had been posed very specifically by whoever had killed them.

  Collins took a knee. He played his flashlight slowly over the bodies one by one. The first was the other missing cop. There was some blood on his neck, but that was it. Collins shifted his position, his knees complaining. The second body looked to be of a male Hispanic. Hernandez, maybe?

  Just like the corpse in the bath, neither body showed any sign of lividity that the detective could see, both seemed to simply be asleep. He leaned in and sniffed both bodies one after the other. There it was again, that faint stagnant water smell.

  A throbbing pain had started to pulse just over his right eye about an hour earlier, now it was turning into a full-blown migraine. He massaged his forehead with his fingers but that only made it worse. He needed to get something to eat and some rest, he'd been up a straight nineteen hours, and he hadn't eaten a thing for the last six or seven of those. And all this weirdness, it wasn't exactly helping.

  "Detective?" Mulroney stood in the doorway of the bedroom, doing her best not to stare at the decapitated body on the bed, but her wide eyes betrayed her shock and disgust.

  Collins used the wall to help himself get to his feet, his knees unhappy with the abuse. "What you got for me?" he asked, taking Mulroney's elbow and guiding her into the corridor. He closed the bedroom door behind them.

  "Nothing," she said. "I hit every house on the street. Didn't get an answer from any of them. It's like everyone just up and left."

  Never greet a stranger in the night,

  For he may be a demon.

  ~ The Talmud ~

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Officer Steven Sova eased his police cruiser through the storm and darkness at a steady five miles an hour. He'd switched the car's headlights to high beam, and they reflected off the rain as it fell in sheets across the road ahead of him, turning each droplet into a tiny falling diamond. He glanced at his watch: It was 20:18. The street ahead of him was dark; not the LA eight-thirty-at-night kind of dark that meant lit streetlights and a glow in the windows of every apartment building along the road. It also wasn't the street-light kind of dark that meant you could easily spot those inevitable die-hard civilians who refused to stay off the sidewalk just because of the rain, or chose to sit on their balcony, smoking a joint or barbecuing. And it wasn't the kind of dark you could guarantee someone would be hanging out in an apartment lobby, shooting the breeze or waiting on a pickup. As far as Officer Sova could tell, every lobby on the street was deserted, but it was hard to be certain because not one light, not even an emergency light, lit any of them.

  No, tonight was none of those kinds of dark.

  This was an impenetrable black-as-the-hobs-of-hell kind of dark. The kind of dark that Officer Sova thought might just consume the entire world if he switched off his patrol car's headlights.

  There was not a single hint of illumination visible anywhere ahead or behind him along the street. The residents around here were used to going without power every now and again; maybe a blown transformer meant the power company would have to come out (not something they were in too much of a rush to do most days), or maybe they just couldn't afford the bill that month. Whatever the reason, the residents were always prepared and there would be the inevitable glow of candles flickering through windows or flashlights cutting through the darkness. And there would always be music playing somewhere. He rolled down his window for the second time in as many blocks and listened.

  The only sound was the hiss of his tires on the wet blacktop and the swish-swash of his windshield wipers.

  It made Sova nervous. Really nervous. In his twelve years on the force, he could not recall ever feeling this... freaked out. He thought about calling for backup but decided against it. Didn't want to seem like an idiot and he sure as hell did not want to have to deal with the grief he knew he would suffer from the rest of the guys once he got back to the station. Besides, the shift was stretched so thin right now, he'd hate to take a cop away from a situation where he was really needed, just because he felt nervous.

  Sova switched on his cruiser's spotlight, then maneuvered the beam until it illuminated the front of the apartment block on his right. He moved the spotlight slowly across the building from window to window. Something was out of place. It nagged at him like a mother, but he just couldn't put his finger on what it was. He played the light over each floor, then switched it to the apartments on the opposite side of the street to confirm his suspicion.

  Sova's foot involuntarily hit the brake, stopping the cruiser in the center of the street. He finally realized what it was that was bugging him; the drapes, he realized, it was the damn drapes. He moved the light back to the apartment on his right just to be sure. No doubt about it, in every single window, either the drapes were drawn, or the blinds tightly shut.

  A shudder, like someone had drawn an icy finger down his spine, rattled his muscles.

  Moving the spotlight to grou
nd level, Sova quickly found the entrance to the lobby of the apartment complex to his right. He gunned the engine and pulled in to the curb, then turned on his cruiser's light bar. Instantly the area around his car for a good hundred feet or more was soaked with red, blue, and white light. He waited, watching the windows of the apartments.

  Minutes passed and not one drape twitched, not a single blind was raised.

  Sova pulled the radio microphone from its hook on the dash. "William-Mary-four-two."

  A second passed then a crackly reply. "William-Mary-four-two, go ahead."

  "William-Mary-four-two, show me code three at," he glanced at the fading sign above the entrance to the apartment building, "Benson Apartments."

  "William-Mary-four-two. Do you need back up?"

  Officer Sova thought about it for a second. "Negative," he replied.

  He engaged the cruiser's run-lock, pulled the keys from the ignition and stepped out into the rain.

  •••

  The light from his cruiser provided more than enough illumination for Officer Sova to find his way to the apartment building's entrance, but a hedgerow that acted as a privacy fence between the building and the sidewalk blocked the light from reaching any farther than the steps to the lobby.

  Sova stood at the double glass doors. It was full dark within. He pulled a flashlight from a loop on his belt, switched it on and played the powerful beam over the interior of the lobby. The windows were coated with a reflective material to keep the sun out, so the majority of the flashlight's beam simply bounced back at him.

  He cursed under his breath. He had hoped he wouldn't have to go inside. It was an irrational fear, he knew, but still. He reached down and pulled his Glock from its holster, then raised the pistol in line with the flashlight, pushed the door open with his foot, and stepped through the gap into the foyer.