The Darkest Time of Night

by Jeremy Finley

  I could see Teeth Sucker looking at my reflection in the rearview mirror. “Don’t you worry. I have to make a quick stop at the hospital, it’s just around the bend from here. After that, we’ll head right back to the inn.”

  “My ass,” Roxy said, pulling out the mace from her purse.

  “Fuckin’ fuck!” he cried out as she sprayed his face.

  The car veered wildly. Roxy kept spraying as he reached out to block her. “Fucking bitch!” When the chemicals truly sunk in, he started to scream.

  “Roxy!” I cried out, watching the car weave across the road and then take a violent turn towards a telephone pole.

  The impact threw me back, but not before I saw Roxy crash into the dashboard. As Teeth Sucker frantically wiped his face, I sat stunned for a moment, my head spinning. I could hear a hissing sound from the engine, and I closed my eyes to try and stop the vertigo.

  “Roxy! Are you OK—?”

  She moaned and then flinched away as Teeth Sucker reached out for her angrily, his sausage fingers grabbing the hood of her coat.

  My wallet, stuffed with Target receipts, credit cards I’d closed but forgot to throw away, and volumes of my grandchildren’s photographs, was the first thing I threw at him. Maybe it was that I was so close behind him that my aim was so true. It struck him sharply on the back of his head. The metal clasp on the wallet must have hit him in a soft spot as the impact produced another yelp of pain as he continued to wail and wipe his eyes. I started throwing everything I could grasp in my purse: a compact, a small flashlight, pencils, mints. When an eyeliner pinged off his right temple, he reached back for me blindly.

  I fell back into the backseat, smacking his hand with my purse. My eyes were starting to sting from the mace as well. I could hear Roxy fumble with the door handle and she practically fell out the door, her feet momentarily in the air.

  Teeth Sucker lunged in the direction of the sound. He wrestled at his waist and pulled out a gun. Gunshots rang out in the car.

  “Roxy!” I screamed, once again striking him with my purse. He pivoted the gun back towards me. As I bent down, I heard the gunfire and the back windshield shatter.

  The door beside me jerked opened and Roxy outstretched her hand. She yanked me out as he fired again into the backseat. The cushions absorbed the zings of the flying bullets. “You fucking bitches!” he yelled.

  “Sweet God,” Roxy whispered, wiping at her own eyes. “That mace works. Even the residual hurts like the devil.”

  We hustled down the road, hearing Teeth Sucker curse among screams of pain as he realized he was out of bullets.

  “Are you hurt? You’re limping—”

  “Here I pretend to be old for a minute, and now I actually feel like it.”

  I looked back at the crashed cruiser. Teeth Sucker had fallen out now, rubbing his eyes and screaming for us.

  I took her arm as I hurried our pace. “We have to get away from here.”

  “Mr. Black back there didn’t want to dirty his hands with actually having to kill a senator’s wife, so he sent numb nuts back there to do it. I guess the first security guard or whatever he is from the park couldn’t stomach it. Well, we aren’t so old, are we, assholes? Good thing I bought that mace at the airport. Never leave home without it. There, go down that back street.”

  “Who are they? They clearly aren’t police. That teacher tried to warn me. I know why now.”

  The street off the main road was lined with more vinyl-sided houses and empty driveways. “We have to keep heading towards town.”

  “Our only chance now is that Fried Chicken couldn’t open his eyes enough to see where we went. But it’s not going to be hard to find two old women stumbling around. Damn, does my ass hurt.”

  “We have to get to that hospital. If William has lost his memory, then maybe he’s in treatment there. Maybe Joe is at the store. He said he was cared for at the hospital. I guarantee Sarah was a patient too. I’m also sure our Suburban has been seized now. We’ll have to convince someone to take us there.”

  “We can’t get far on foot, that’s for sure,” Roxy said, blinking in surprise at the wetness on her temple. “Jesus. Am I bleeding?”

  I looked over, feeling the same on my face. “It’s starting to snow.”

  SEVENTEEN

  It became clear almost immediately why we’d heard so many repeated warnings; why everyone from the young man at the car rental to Sarah at the inn and even the man who just tried to kill us, had cautioned us about the storm. By the time we reached downtown Argentum, the snow fell not in sheets, but in buckets, camouflaging the storefronts in walls of white.

  Roxy looked over her shoulder, seeing no sign of police lights. “Hope that scumbag gets frostbite to go with the pain in his eyes. If he has a phone, he’s called his boss—or whomever the suit is—to tell what happened. If it wasn’t snowing like this, we couldn’t even walk this out in the open. Watch your step, the last thing either of need is to break a hip right now. Though mine hurts like the dickens.”

  “I knew what that man at the police station meant when he said he didn’t want my family to endure another tragedy. I just didn’t have a plan to get away. Thank God you did.”

  “I knew I had mace inside my purse, and that was the extent of my plan. We’re lucky all they really wanted was our phones.”

  We could barely see the outlines of the mostly abandoned buildings, looming in the snow like gray sentinels.

  “Looks like Joe’s shop is closed. We have to get to a phone. In fact, we need to do that right now, before anything else.”

  “We’ll stop in Scotty’s, use theirs. It should be right here.…”

  The “closed due to snow,” sign on the door was laminated and worn from frequent use.

  “You know it’s bad when the bar closes.” Roxy breathed into her hands.

  “That inn is old. It must have a landline phone somewhere that still works in this weather. We aren’t far.”

  We made to the end of the boardwalk and looked across the street. Even in the pummeling snow, we could see the lights of the police cars parked in front of the hotel.

  “Fried Chicken must have radioed in,” Roxy said.

  “I didn’t see anywhere else open.”

  “I saw a bunch of trash cans out behind the inn. Let’s see if we can sneak in. If not, we’ll find another plan. But right now, we have to get inside somewhere, and it’s the only place open. That’s our first priority. We’ll freeze out here. We were stupid not to buy some kind of parkas at the airport; these coats we’re wearing are made for football weather in Tennessee.”

  I took Roxy’s arm again. We walked across the street and down an alley, the accumulation preventing us from moving as fast as I wanted. As we emerged behind the stores, we braced ourselves to walk directly into the snow, shielding our eyes the best we could.

  There was already an inch of snow on the trashcans and on a maroon Voyager van parked behind the inn. In the ferocious winds, a screened door repeatedly slapped against its wood frame. My face hurting now, I held the screen door while Roxy slowly turned the handle of the main door.

  The hallway inside was dark, and the doors to the other rooms were shut. We listened for sound of voices but heard nothing.

  Roxy immediately tried to open the door to one of the rooms, finding it locked. As she moved on to the next, someone turned down the hallway. I held my breath as the person stopped, and then approached cautiously.

  “What have you two done?” Sarah whispered. “Why are the police looking for you?”

  “Listen, we just need a phone,” Roxy said.

  “The phones don’t work in this weather.” She looked back down the hallway while fumbling with the keys in her hands.

  “Of course phones work when it snows. It only started falling a few minutes ago.”

  “That’s not what happens here. Everything shuts down: phone, internet. That’s why the man who rents this room hoofed it out before the storm for his girlfriend’s h
ouse. He knows there’s no contact after the weather gets bad. I see his van is still out back,” she said, looking over her shoulder and opening the door to her right. “He won’t even know somebody’s been in his room. Come in here.”

  We followed her into a room where laundry sat in piles. “You have to stay in here; they’ve already been up in your room. They’re still here, outside on the porch, smoking.”

  “Your landline phones must work,” Roxy whispered.

  She shook her head. “We got rid of the landline phones at the inn. No use for them anymore. I don’t know anyone who has them.”

  “That ancient technology shouldn’t have been abandoned by your generation,” Roxy scowled. “A good old-fashioned cord would save our asses right now.”

  “The officers won’t even say why they want to find you. What did you do?”

  “We didn’t do anything. I’m here to find my grandson, and my friend is here to help me. And we found him. Today. In this town. But he didn’t recognize me.”

  “Did you understand that?” Roxy leaned in to Sarah. “Her own grandson didn’t recognize her, because he didn’t remember her. He didn’t even know his own name.”

  Her eyes darted back and forth.

  “We have to get to him,” I said, trying to stay calm. “I don’t know anything about you, Sarah, but Roxy said you don’t have much of a memory either. I don’t know what’s happening in this town, but my grandson is just like you. Could he be at the hospital here?”

  “I don’t know, but this is making me too nervous. Stay here, I have to go back up front. Don’t come out. My boyfriend should be over soon. He might know what to do.”

  She slipped out, and Roxy shook her head. “Lynn, we have to get out of here. Now.”

  “I won’t leave him. I can’t, Roxy.”

  “The roads are going to be impassable soon, Lynn. There aren’t any phones. Even if Tom were starting to look for you, there’s no cell towers to trace our phones. We will be trapped here, and they already tried to off us once.”

  I hugged myself, rubbing my hands up and down my arms. Roxy walked over to the desk, rummaging around. She then moved over to the dresser.

  “What are you doing?”

  She slid a pair of keys out from behind an ashtray. “It can’t be that easy.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Our ride is here. At least I hope it is. The van parked out back. It’s a Voyager, and Sarah mentioned that the guy who rents this room drove a van. Don’t you pay attention to this stuff? And these look like van keys. We’re giving it a shot. Let’s go.”

  “You go. But I cannot—I will not—leave here without William.”

  “No one knows where we are, Lynn. We get out, we find a phone, and one call to Tom will have the FBI, the CIA, and maybe even the armed forces here. We know the hospital is here. William must be there. But we can’t just bust in and try to find him, Lynn. It’s too risky. If they find us again—”

  “Please go, Roxy. Please. You’re right. You have to get help. And the roads are going to get worse. Please, go. Go now.” I took Roxy’s hands. “You understand, right? You understand I can’t go without him.”

  “We have to go. It doesn’t make sense to stay here.”

  “It does. I will make Sarah tell me more. I’ll find out the location of the hospital. By the time you get back with help, I’ll have convinced her to spill it.”

  Roxy glared and pointed. “You stay hidden. Lock yourself in here if you have to. I’ll find a phone, and I’ll come back for you.”

  “I know you will. Please be careful. We don’t get a lot of snow in Nashville.”

  “Hell, I drive a pickup with four-wheel drive. I don’t even know if these are his keys. Stealing a car is a new one, even for me.”

  She gave me a quick, fierce hug and went to the door, opening it gently. “Stay in here,” she said, and slipped out.

  I hurried over to the window, parting the heavy curtains. To my relief, I could still see the van through the blinding snow. I didn’t dare breathe as Roxy’s hunched-over form scurried through the snow and held out the keys. The van blinked its lights in recognition.

  She clambered inside and fired up the engine. At first, she clearly gunned it too hard. It lurched and nearly knocked over the trashcans. Then it slowly backed up and quietly moved down the alley.

  “Where’s your friend?”

  I flinched as Sarah stepped through the door. “She’s trying to find a phone.”

  “She went out in this? I’m telling you, there’s no phones that will work.”

  “She took our car.”

  “And left you here? The officers said you would be on foot.”

  “She knows I won’t leave my grandson.”

  Sarah looked back at the door. “The police were gone when I went up front. I … want to talk to my husband about this. Just stay here.”

  She again slipped out, and I turned once more to the window. Thinking of Roxy navigating the unfamiliar streets, I made the sign of the cross. I then whispered the Hail Mary, picturing a boy standing somewhere in this town, maybe looking out at the snow too, wondering about the strange lady who hugged him so tight and called him William.

  How long had my grandson been in this horrible town? How many other people without memories are here, their families oblivious to the fact that they’re alive? Obviously one of the Researchers had enough information about this place to start writing that poem all those decades ago.

  If it was meant was a guide, how it is Steven hadn’t known that, all those years ago? Fast-forward forty years, and he was set to take me here from that hotel room, before the FBI burst in. He’d even created that encrypted map, just in case we were separated.

  Anger churned in my chest. Either Steven was telling the truth, that he’d just recently learned the truth about Argentum, or there had been decades of lies—

  I suddenly looked back at the door.

  Sarah said she wanted to talk to her husband about this. But she had referred to him as her boyfriend when we first came into the room.

  I should have caught on to that quicker. You don’t realize it yet, but you’re going to explain everything to me, young lady.

  I eased towards the door, slowly opening it to the dark hallway. I could hear static of some kind, and then a clicking. The unmistakable sound of radio communication came from down the hall.

  “I don’t know, Mark. I know she’s driving that maroon Voyager. Over,” Sarah said in a whisper.

  “I can’t hear you, Sarah, speak up. Over.”

  Reflected in the window, I could see Sarah leaning on the counter, a two-way radio in her hand.

  “I can’t talk much louder. She’s got to take Singer Street and then Main Street. I gotta go.”

  When she put down the radio, I emerged, my eyes dazed in anger. “How could you?”

  She gasped. I shook my head. “How could you!”

  “She shouldn’t have stolen that van! I didn’t have a choice! They were going to find out, and then they’d know I knew! I can’t go to jail, I just started to have a life!”

  “Don’t you want to know? Don’t you want to know what happened to you? What happened to all of you?”

  “It doesn’t make sense, what you’re saying!”

  “I only want to find my grandson! Don’t you wonder if someone ever came looking for you? And this is what you do?”

  “Please. Stay here and talk to the police, they will help you—”

  I turned and rushed down the hallway.

  “Where are you going?” she cried out, stepping around the counter. “Miss, don’t go out there!”

  I reached the end of the hall and flew through the back door, the snow temporarily blinding me. Without hesitation, I plunged into the white.

  EIGHTEEN

  It took two steps to realize the insanity of what I had done.

  The snow that had swirled and blurred before was nothing to the whiteout conditions that now pumm
eled the town. I could see nothing, not even the trash cans that Roxy had almost knocked down. I reached back to touch the wall of the inn as some kind of proof that the entire world wasn’t lost in white. I used its wooden surface to navigate away from the door. If Sarah was still calling out my name, she was drowned out in the oppressive howl of the winds.

  I reached the edge of the building. Were the security officers on their way? Were they tracking Roxy instead? Was she far enough away by now that they couldn’t follow?

  The temperature felt as if it had dropped ten degrees. I gauged the distance between the inn and the first building on the boardwalk as ten feet at best. But it may have well been a thousand yards away. If I lost my sense of direction, even for a moment, I could wander into the street and never find my way. But the alternative was to stay and wait for the officers to find me.

  I forced myself to imagine William again, standing in front of a window, watching the snow.

  My fingertips left the building, and I stepped one foot directly in front of the other, convincing myself that it was as simple as following a line. I reached out with my right hand, not unlike the way I had as a girl trying to swim from one side of the YMCA pool to the other. I hadn’t been brave enough then to open my eyes, so I swam blindly, holding my breath as long as I could, aiming for the other end. More times than not, my lungs gave out and I surfaced, opening my eyes to realize I was only inches from the edge.

  I’d walked fifteen feet, hadn’t I? I should have reached the stores now. My God, I’d gone off course. I kept reaching, with both hands now. Even with my thick gloves, my fingers ached in the cold. Just touch something—

  I felt it, then, a fleeting surface. I waved my hands wildly, striking the wood post with such force that I gasped in pain. With my other hand I clung to it like a life preserver, reaching out for the wall.

  I leaned against the cold wood and took several deep breaths. I inched along the wall, at last coming to the corner. The blinding wind was just as fierce here. How can it blow in more than one direction?