The Hours

by Robert Barnard

  “Crazy…fucker!” the injured cadet screamed, and he went to fire again.

  “No,” his partner shouted, “she’s down—”

  But, before he could finish his sentence, the wounded cadet fired a sixth time. The bullet glanced past Khloe, scraped against the gasoline soaked cement, and ignited it.

  The injured cadet’s partner burst into flames. He went running towards the front of the Grab-N-Go, screaming, holding onto his face, before collapsing onto the ground and rolling back and forth in terror.

  Jim screamed: “Let me out!”

  Then, his world went black.

  Jim opened his eyes from the back alley of the Grab-N-Go for the second time that night. He looked across the parking lot at the police cruiser he’d been locked in earlier. The rear window had been kicked out. The cruiser was swallowed in flames. The injured cadet sat beside it, motionless, on fire.

  Jim stared down at his shoes. They were covered in specks of broken glass.

  I kicked my way out, he thought. After I blacked out.

  He raised his right hand, examined it. The metal cuff was still locked around his right wrist. The left side of the cuff was locked, too, and covered in blood. It dangled freely from his right wrist.

  But how did I manage this?

  He raised his left arm. At the end of it was nothing but a mangled, black stump that oozed a viscous, dark liquid. His hand had been entirely severed.

  Though he couldn’t recall doing it, he’d gnawed it off himself after he blacked out.

  “Holy…hell!” Jim screamed. Though the stump gushed its syrupy black slime, he felt nothing. No pain. No discomfort.

  His eyes fell on the end of the alley. His hand lay there, contorted, fingers twisted in an awful knot.

  The flames of the gas station grew higher and higher, until one by one the pumps began to burst. A light snow began to fall; each nearby flake turned to steam as it glided towards the burning station.

  Jim hissed at the flames then darted down the darkened alley, just as a police cruiser convened onto the scene.

  FIFTEEN

  “He’s more pissed off than he’s ever sounded,” Hannah said.

  Chloe glared, slammed a button on the police cruiser’s dashboard with her fist. The radio of the vehicle silenced.

  “I don’t care if Fuller wants us back at the station to fill out paperwork and talk about how bad things are getting,” Chloe said. “I’ve seen this before. I’ve prepared for it. We belong on the streets, cleaning up situations as they come. If we stay vigilant—if we can maintain order until a quarantine is put in place—lives will be saved. We’re worthless at the station. The night’s getting busy. Fuller will realize that soon enough.”

  “You’re disobeying your commanding sergeant,” Hannah said.

  “I’m keeping us all alive,” Chloe replied, “and I’m protecting this town.”

  Nolan leaned his head against the rear passenger window of the police cruiser. Outside, trees and homes whizzed by. Little flurries of snow were starting to fall, whipped against the window as they sped.

  He daydreamed of Arabella, somewhere far away, nestled in a warm desert. Surely no one there was worrying of snow, of quarantines, or of viruses.

  “We should have left when we had the chance,” Nolan said. “For Arabella.”

  “For what?” Hannah said.

  Nolan said, “It’s a compound somewhere in the South West. A completely self-sustainable community. We’d have been safe there.”

  “It’s a commune,” Chloe added. “For apocalyptic nut-jobs. More a cult than a community.”

  “A cult of people worried about the world ending?” Nolan laughed. “I’d take that over this any day. The world already ended, once. Until it didn’t. We’ve spent the past two years in purgatory, Chloe, in some awful in-between…pretending it would never happen again. Now look at us.”

  “It won’t happen again,” Chloe said. “At least not as bad as last time. We know how to handle it, now. We contained it once, and we’ll contain it again—”

  The road beneath the cruiser shook. Chloe, Hannah, and Nolan all went quiet from the force of the vibration.

  “What was that?” Nolan asked. “They’re dropping bombs. They’re dropping bombs!”

  “Don’t panic,” Hannah said.

  Chloe hit the brakes of the cruiser and pulled off onto the shoulder of the road. Up ahead, above the tree line, a seventy-foot tall ball of flames shot up towards the sky. It mushroomed out, brought a cloud of smoke behind it. It burned bright hot in the wintery night air.

  “It wasn’t a bomb,” Chloe said. “There’s a Grab-N-Go not far from here, on the corner of Parkview and Green. It was a gas station explosion.” Chloe eased on the cruiser’s accelerator, pulled back onto the road. “See why we stay on patrol? Do you understand why we’re not sitting back at the station, twiddling our thumbs?”

  Hannah rolled her eyes. “Sure, Chloe. We’re disobeying a chain of command while carrying a civilian in the back, but that’s all fine…as long as you say so, right?”

  Chloe ignored Hannah, sped the police cruiser towards the scene of the fire up ahead. The car turned onto Parkview. The three could see the gas station up ahead, engulfed in flames.

  “Oh my God,” Chloe said.

  Hannah said, “What is it?”

  Chloe’s eyes locked onto the black Suburban, double parked in front of the station. Its tires had burst and started to melt from the heat.

  “I think—.” Chloe took a sharp breath. “I think that’s my dad’s Suburban.”

  Chloe accelerated, and the cruiser approached dangerously close to the burning station.

  “Stop,” Hannah said. “You’re pulling in too close.”

  “Just call it in,” Chloe said. “Get a fire crew out here now. Let me worry about how close we get.”

  Hannah picked up a radio, mumbled into it.

  “She’s right,” Nolan said, and he swallowed. “You’re getting too close.”

  “Fine!” Chloe said, and she stomped on the cruiser’s brake pedal and shifted the vehicle into park. “You two wait here.”

  “Like hell we will,” Nolan said. “Are you actually walking near that? Are you insane?”

  Hannah huffed, set her radio handset down. “I called the fire in to dispatch, but…Chloe. They don’t have any crews to send in. Half of Cherry Valley’s Fire Department dispatched to a building fire in Denver. The other half isn’t answering the phone.”

  Chloe had already stepped out of the vehicle, ignored both her partner and her boyfriend. She turned around, and again said: “Don’t either of you leave this car for anything.” Then, she slammed her door shut and shuffled towards the front of the Grab-N-Go.

  The cold air whipped at her hair, and though fat snowflakes had started to fall behind her, her face warmed from the fire before her. She squinted at the scene. There was a squad car, consumed by flames. Two officers lay beside it, burnt to black cinder. The remains of a short, pudgy girl were outstretched a few feet from the officers. Like the cadets, she had been scorched almost to ash.

  Then there was the Suburban. Its rear license plate had been tinged and tarnished by the wild flames, but the first three characters of the plate were still legible.

  Chloe read them out loud: “J…H…3…”

  There was no mistaking it. Those were the first three letters of her father’s license plate number, and that was her father’s Suburban.

  Chloe panted. “Nuh…no…no…” She pressed her palms against the top of her head, felt her stomach sour.

  The Suburban looked empty, but she couldn’t get close enough to be sure. If her father had slumped in the seat, she wouldn’t have known the difference.

  She took a step back, took three deep breaths. Her vision tunneled, her pulse quickened.

  Think...think...think.

  Don’t panic.

  Think.

  Chloe composed herself, examined the outside of the Suburban. There
was an area around the vehicle where the cement parking lot had been scorched, but outside of that the ground was still slick with precipitation. Chloe took a few steps back, studied the parking lot.

  From the pumps and to the side of the Grab-N-Go was a thin trail of…of what? Oil?

  No.

  Blood.

  The trail lead around the side of the building in varying thicknesses. Sometimes the trail was narrow, with short perforations. Other times it was wide, where big globs had fallen, as if whoever was wounded stood still, frozen and confused as they wondered where to walk next.

  Chloe looked back at the cruiser. Hannah and Nolan had stayed inside, just as she demanded that they do. Their eyes were full of fear. They plead with her, begged that she didn’t investigate any further on her own.

  Chloe ignored them, looked back at the trail of blood at her feet. The drops led around the back of the building.

  She clicked her flashlight on. The alley had darkened; power had been lost as a result of the fire.

  The beam of the flashlight followed the black trail of blood through a thin layer of snow before it stopped on a gruesome sight.

  A human hand.

  Chloe gasped, inched forward slowly. The hand was frozen in a horrific, unnatural pose. At the wrist were mangled, torn apart strips of flesh, as if a wild dog had chewed on the end of it. Bits of bone slicked with thick, tar-like blood protruded from the wrist.

  Chloe squatted, pulled a latex glove over her hand, then poked at the mangled hand until it flipped over. From this new perspective came a new discovery.

  Glinting in the flashlight’s beam, on the hand’s knotted ring finger, was a golden wedding band.

  Chloe started to sob. She knew it was her father’s wedding band, she just knew. But before she went dashing back to her police cruiser, before she collapsed behind the alley in grief, before she lost all hope for the world falling apart around her, she had to know for sure.

  She slipped another latex glove on her other hand and picked the severed fist up off the ground. She pulled on the ring finger gently, but it refused to budge. She tugged again, and the digit made a sickening snap sound, extended forward as the bones inside twisted and broke.

  Chloe held the wedding band between her index finger and thumb, gently rocked it back and forth, and slid it up and over the bloated, swollen flesh of the severed hand’s ring finger.

  When at last it popped free, she held it under the beam of her flashlight. The inscription inside read: “My love, forever and after. – Dana.”

  Chloe fell to her knees and sobbed. She let out a deafening wail that echoed off the brick walls of the alley behind the Grab-N-Go.

  In one of the silences between her breaths, when the last cry muffled before a sharp, painful new bellow, Chloe heard a crash at the far end of the alley.

  She looked up, saw the silhouette of a figure standing behind a row of garbage cans. It was completely darkened by the alley, a shadow lurking in the narrow backstreet, all its features obscured except for a pair of glowing, yellow eyes that stared back at her.

  “Who are you?” Chloe screamed, and she fumbled at her flashlight. By the time she steadied its beam on the far end of the alley, the figure had vanished into the night.

  Sergeant Andrew Fuller, of the Cherry Valley Police Department, sat at a dimly lit desk in the rear of the department’s main building.

  Outside his walls, chaos reigned.

  Yet, eerily, the phones within the station were silent.

  The only sounds that flooded the halls of the department were that of shuffling feet and radio chatter.

  Atop his desk was a manila folder, opened wide. On display were three or four fat stacks of paper, messily stapled and paper clipped together.

  Atop the stacks of papers was a four inch by six inch file photograph of Chloe Whiteman. She stood uncertainly, her shoulders slumped, her hair stuffed awkwardly beneath her black cadet cap.

  Her steel blue eyes pierced straight into the lens of the camera, seemed to stare back at the sergeant.

  The photograph had been taken the day the department hired her. She was strong willed, opinionated, loud—but the confidence just wasn’t there yet.

  Not the way it is now, Fuller thought.

  The sergeant traced the tip of his thumb over Chloe’s mouth, like he’d done a million times before. And, for the millionth time, he wished badly that he was actually caressing the girl’s soft, pillowy lips—not a flat photograph of them.

  He grinned, thought: You’ve been so good, Chloe. Such a good girl.

  Don’t be bad now.

  Cadet Stanton knocked at the door of Fuller’s office then let himself in. When the door burst open, Fuller looked surprised.

  “Am I…am I interrupting something, sir?” Stanton asked.

  Fuller leaned up in his chair and shook his head. “Nope. Nothing at all. What have you got for me, rookie?”

  Stanton leaned into the office. “Dispatch has been trying to get ahold of car thirty-two for you all night. Just like you asked. Officers Chloe Whiteman and Hannah Yates, right?”

  “Right.”

  “They fell off the grid a little over half an hour ago. Stopped answering the radio completely.”

  Fuller grinded his teeth. “Well?”

  “A few minutes ago, Cadet Yates radioed to dispatch. Asked that fire rescue be deployed to the Grab-N-Go on Parkview and Green, then hung up again. Figured you’d want to know.”

  “I do want to know,” Fuller said. “Thanks for filling me in, rook.”

  Stanton smiled an uneasy, half smile. “There’s something else.”

  “Shoot,” Fuller said.

  “A lot of the officers on patrol tonight…they’re having trouble filling out paperwork and forms for arrests and crime scenes. As soon as they respond to one, another pops up…all of the paperwork is getting backlogged. They don’t know what to do.”

  Fuller grinned. “Didn’t any of you idiots pay attention to the NYVO training?”

  Stanton shook his head. “I guess not.”

  “The Department of Defense initiated short hand paperwork in the event of another viral outbreak. During such a time, there are abbreviated forms to fill out. So, the ten page report you’d need for an arrest? Scrap it. Use the half page form. Or, don’t use a form at all. I just got off the phone with Washington—they’ve dropped the Steel Curtain Protocol.”

  Stanton nodded. “The Steel…Curt—what?”

  “Have you ever been to war, Stanton?”

  “No, sir.”

  “I have,” Fuller said. “I have. I’ve been in areas of the middle east that would give you nightmares. Ninety-nine percent of every day there was done by the book. Was boring. There was no action. But that one percent of the time? That one percent where bullets started to fly, and the action was far too adrenaline fueled for the mundane moments to keep up? Those were special times. You don’t write a ten page report on why you had to shoot someone when you’re in the middle of a firefight. You write it after the firefight.”

  Stanton leaned against the doorframe. “I don’t—I don’t follow.”

  “Christ, you cadets are dumber than a bag of bricks and only half as useful,” Fuller huffed.

  Stanton swallowed, stood in the doorway silently.

  “We’re in that one percent now, numb-nuts. All of us. ‘The Steel Curtain’ is the DoD’s code word. It means all bets are off. It means shoot fucking first and ask fucking questions later. It means a military level quarantine and curfew is getting dropped across the nation—don’t worry about the goddamn paperwork now, worry about it in the morning. Or tomorrow night. Or whenever we get this thing under control again.”

  “When will we get it under control again?” Stanton asked.

  Fuller drummed his fingers along his desk. “It’s not good. But it’s not bad, either. There’s some major metropolitan areas that were hit. But the quarantines are coming in hard, just like they did for New York City during the NYVO e
vent. Denver got it bad, which is why I think we’re feeling it out here.”

  “Is it terrorists?”

  “Fuck all if I know!” Fuller hollered. “That’s above my pay grade. My one and only mission is to keep you maggots alive and pray to whatever deity is listening that the shit don’t hit the fan so hard here.”

  “The shit’s already hitting the fan pretty hard—”

  “Stanton, get your ass out of my office. Get into a patrol car, get down to the Grab-N-Go yourself if you have to, and kindly escort Miss Whiteman and Miss Yates back to the department. You know. The place they’ve been ordered to report back to, and have refused to return to. Remind them they still work here.”

  “Okay—okay,” Stanton said. “Will do, sir.”

  “And remember what I said,” Fuller added. “All bets are off. Whatever you gotta do, you do.” Fuller stared at the gun attached to Stanton’s hip. “Do whatever you feel is necessary to compel those two gals back here. We’ll worry about tidying up the paperwork later on. You’ve got a free pass, my man. Use it.”

  Stanton turned to leave the sergeant’s office, but before he stepped out, Fuller shouted for him one last time.

  “I want Miss Whiteman safely between these walls within the next hour,” Fuller said. “You’re the man I’m putting in charge of that. And if you fail, or she gets hurt, I will find a goddamn zombie and feed you to it myself. Understand?”

  Stanton nodded, mumbled: “I understand.”

  Fuller stood, waved Stanton out of the room, locked the door to his office, then returned to his desk.

  “You’re a good cadet,” Fuller said, “but you need to learn how to take an order.”

  He brushed his hand over the photograph of Chloe one more time, then brought it close to his face. He unzipped the front of his pants, stuffed his hand into the opening of the zipper, and grunted.

  SIXTEEN

  Chloe charged back towards the police cruiser. Hannah and Nolan waited inside, quietly. Chloe’s face had turned a shade of white lighter than the falling snow, and neither of them could muster the courage to ask what was wrong.