Black Bird

by Greg Enslen

  David was on I-64 just west of Waynesboro, Virginia, just climbing up into the Shenandoah Mountains from the valley. When he got through the mountains and past Charlottesville, he’d turn north onto the back roads and then continue into Liberty from the higher elevations. He just hoped that the roads weren’t washed out, and he was glad that he’d decided not to drive through Shenandoah National Park – this way was faster.

  And he hoped he wouldn’t fall asleep again.

  “One, please.”

  The young girl looked up at the low voice, much lower than the voices of all the kids she’d sold tickets to tonight.

  The man was big, wearing a heavy leather jacket that was dusted by rain from outside the main doors he’d just come through. Tina was set up to sell tickets at a table just inside the main doors to the High School, and she was wearing a jacket to fight the stiff breezes that accompanied every opening of the big double doors. But she hadn’t felt a breeze when this guy had come in.

  “Oh, sure,” she said, momentarily taken aback by his rugged appearance and his weathered, aged face. Never seen him around town before, so he was probably a visiting uncle or grandfather in from out of town, come to see his relative play or sit with family in the stands.

  “You know, all the money is going to charity. That’ll be two dollars.”

  He handed her a couple of wadded up bills, and she saw that the palm of his hand was horribly scarred, like he’d spilt acid on it or something. “Oh, that looks like it must’ve hurt a lot.”

  Jack Terrington looked from her beautiful young face to his scarred palm, thinking back to that sunny day on his bike when he’d played with the fence and lost - and his mother had died coming to see him in the hospital. The sun had been so warm, and the fence had been so close, it had been Right There...

  “Yeah, it did. Broke a glass, a long time ago.” He smiled and took his ticket, heading inside.

  The girl watched him go, her curiosity fading quickly. She turned back to her copy of Seventeen and the article on Bad Hair Days and what she could do about them.

  Jack took a seat off to one side, watching the pre-season basketball scrimmage with little interest. Evidently, the Liberty High basketball team played another rival town every year to raise money for the homeless or some such nonsense – in his opinion, it was too early in the year for basketball. But he was happy they were playing tonight.

  The layout of the gym was familiar, one probably used by many high schools. The gym was a big square room with the basketball court in the middle, the baskets suspended from large metal arms that could be ratcheted up nearer to the high ceiling to get them out of the way by means of a large hand crank on either end of the gym. On opposite walls on either side of the court sat two huge sets of wooden bleachers on metal rollers, and they obviously could be pushed towards the north and south wall to be folded up, getting them out of the way. On the west wall was the entrance where he had come in, a large set of double doors leading out into the hallway and outside. On the east wall underneath one basketball hoop were doors leading to BOYS and GIRLS locker rooms and showering facilities, and during the course of the game he saw team members of the Liberty Fighting Bobcats and the visiting Fredericksburg Sharks going in and out of those doors, probably going to change or to ice up minor injuries. The boys on the Bobcats were using the boy’s room while the boys for the Sharks were obliged to use the girl’s locker room, probably somewhat of an embarrassment. The storm raging outside would keep these kids here in town tonight, probably, and Jack idly wondered if any of them would be attending the meeting here tomorrow night.

  About halfway through the third quarter, at least an hour after he arrived, Jack stood and stretched and headed out into the hallway, checking to make sure he had his ticket stub. He was looking for a bathroom, should anyone ask, but he was also looking for something much more important.

  A left in the hallway would’ve taken him outside, so he headed right, moving north into the main part of the high school. The principal’s office and main office were on his left, and off to the right were a couple of doors - one was marked “Locker Rooms” and the other “Maintenance”. He looked around, but the girl who had been manning the table by the door was gone - too bad, she had been cute. He tugged the Maintenance door open and headed inside.

  A short hallway took him into what looked like a workroom with a desk set up in one corner. A calendar hung on the wall over the desk showing a naked woman with a huge pair of breasts, and Jack wondered if the principal knew the maintenance man had that hanging on the wall in his little ‘office’. Two doors led out of the office/workroom. One was open and led to a room filled with pipes and hoses, probably something to do with the showers and locker rooms. Jack idly wondered if there were any holes in the walls in there to see into the girls or boys shower rooms like there had been in that movie “Porky’s” - might be fun for a laugh or two, except that he had things he had to do.

  The other door opened onto a set of metal stairs that led down under the gym, and he climbed down them.

  The high school’s boiler room was much like other such rooms Jack had seen before - it was almost identical to a boiler room under a Los Angeles high school where he had taken a few of his victims to dispatch, back in the good old days of California. The thought of him getting out of this measly little town and back to Los Angeles and settling down made him feel better, and he quickly searched and found what he was looking for.

  The boiler itself was a huge collection of pipes and tanks and collection ducts, but all of it was controlled by a small panel of lights and knobs near the center of the massive room underneath the gym. He could hear the thumping pounding of the feet of basketball players a few feet above him as he studied the controls, learning what they did.

  The boiler was set for a PSI of around 250. A card taped up above the main knob said that the normal PSI output for heat production was around 200, but evidently the cold and wet weather outside had prompted them to bump it up a little. With the ball game tonight and the town meeting tomorrow, they needed to keep it toasty warm.

  Okay, he knew where and when, now he had to figure out how. It would be too dangerous just walking down here tomorrow. Cops would be around tomorrow, and the janitor or maintenance guy or whatever would be checking on this thing sometime, so he’d have to get in here some other way.

  He moved from the main tangle of pipes and tanks and walked the perimeter of the underground room, looking. There were several high, narrow windows on the walls, up by the ceiling, and any one of them would do, but they were all locked. He unhinged the locking mechanism on several of them, one on each of the three walls and two extra on the East wall, where he would probably be able to enter without any trouble - he could see there was a tennis court on that side, and with any luck he could be in and out of here tomorrow night without anybody noticing.

  Jack headed back upstairs and out, stopping to notice a check-off sheet on the maintenance guy’s desk. Looked like the man checked the boiler once every four hours during school days and twice a day on the weekends, and he had already been in twice today to check it, once at noon and once around 6:00. Jack knew that if he wanted things to go right, he’d have to get in here and set things up and get out quickly - he just hoped that the guy didn’t show at the wrong time. He didn’t have a problem with killing the poor sap that spent his useless days ogling some naked bimbo on his wall, but Jack needed to be able to get in and out quickly, and killing took time.

  Julie Noble pulled into the Motel 6 parking lot at just after 9:30, and grabbed her stuff and headed inside. There was a room waiting for her, and she took a very long and hot shower before unpacking her papers and setting them out to read. She was tired and wanted some sleep, but during the drive down she had done a lot of thinking, and she wanted to confirm a couple facts before she went to sleep.

  She had no reason to notice the large white van parked in the space next to her little Protégé, or notice that the van looked
bigger and older than most vans on the road. It had been lengthened somewhere along the line, and it hung a little further out of the parking space that a normal van would’ve. Dark curtains covered the back windows to keep prying eyes from peeking.

  Julie also did not notice the birds in the trees around the hotel. There were many of them, a dozen different species of birds, and they flapped and fluttered and squawked at each other. They came and went, sometimes flapping off into the night and disappearing before returning to this strange flock.

  Just after midnight, a large blackbird flew in from the west and settled onto one of the bare branches of a tree overlooking the parking lot. Some of the other birds nipped and squawked at the blackbird, and the blackbird hopped and squeaked on its branch, moving gingerly and favoring one leg.

  David‘s vision was bleary and unfocused but his mind was clear as he pulled into Bethany‘s driveway. The lights were off and he was sure she was not expecting him, but that was all right - he’d told her he was coming, and he’d gotten here as fast as he could. The car wheezed as he slowed to a stop - somewhere coming down out of the mountains his brakes had started to grind, and there for a while he wondered if he was going to make it. But the brakes worked and he stopped the car, putting it into park.

  He pulled on his parka and got out, walking up the dark walk to her door. His back was killing him from sitting too long, and his legs felt like rubber, but his heart was pounding in his chest - all he’d thought about for the last 48 hours was this moment, when he would knock on her front door and she would open it and their eyes would meet. Her parents were still on their cruise, and in the back of his mind he remembered all the big plans they had made for the two weeks they would be gone - plans that neither her parents or David‘s Aunt would’ve appreciated too much, plans that had involved a lot of sleeping over. Of course, those plans had gone out the window weeks ago when he’d broken it off with her...funny how things can change over a month or two. David smiled when he’d thought about the things they’d planned, back when things had seemed so much simpler.

  He knocked on her door, and after a few long moments, lights came on inside and the door opened.

  She was standing there in her robe, a robe he’d seen a hundred times before, but somehow she looked smaller, thinner, almost like she was carrying some huge invisible weight on her shoulders. But when she saw him she smiled and the tears came instantly as if she had been on the verge of tears anyway. She stepped out into the cold rain and threw her arms around him, hugging him and sobbing into his shoulder, mumbling something to him that he could not understand. He could feel the warm air wafting out from inside the house, and as he held her tightly in his arms, he swore quietly to himself that he would never hurt her again, no matter what.

  “Bethany. It’s okay, Bethany,” he told her, one of his hands stroking her long dark hair. “Come on, let’s go inside, okay? You’ll catch a cold or freeze to death out here.”

  She pulled away from him a little, enough to look up into his face but not quite letting go of him, almost as if she were afraid to let go of him. “David, I’m so sorry...your Aunt, she was...I mean, we never really talked, but she was your family and when I saw her, I...”

  He moved to her, holding her tightly to his chest. “Don’t, Bethany. None of this is your fault. Can you...can you forgive me for leaving you, for just taking off like that?”

  The words hung between them for a long moment, the only other sound the hiss of rain falling onto the leaves and the roof and the ground around them. She looked at him closely and then smiled, moving to him and hugging him and leaning up, kissing him. Her eyes looked more alive than he could ever remember. “You don’t know how glad I am to see you. It felt like...it felt like nobody cared, nobody.”

  He remembered the mean things he had said to her in that parking lot not too many nights ago, and again he wondered why he’d ever left in the first place. Wasn’t this where he belonged, with her arms around him?

  He smiled down at her. “I do, Bethany.”

  They kissed again, slowly, leaning into each other.

  Part Four

  Landfall

  Chapter 15 - Saturday,

  September 24

  Tony Drayton, a desk officer for the FBI’s Situation Desk, grabbed a cup of coffee before heading down to the ‘Room’ to relieve the late-shift guy. The coffee came out of one of the machines in the break room and was hot but not very good – but this early in the morning, any coffee was better than none. He carefully sipped it down from the rim so that it would not spill as he made his way to the elevators, riding it down four floors. The situation room and several other emergency communications rooms were located in the sub-basement.

  Tony liked to call the Situation Room the ‘Room’ because it sounded a little more ‘official’, but it really wasn’t necessary. The room was impressive enough, looking a lot like Mission Control at a NASA shuttle launch, only on a smaller scale. The room itself was only about 30 feet square, but the room was filled with a lot of very sophisticated equipment and computers. Large television monitors covered one of the walls, each tuned to major networks, civilian news-gathering operations, or overseas broadcasts.

  One of the sad facts of the 90’s and the lower budgets for most of the country’s intelligence-gathering operations was that with their resources stretched so thin by President Clinton and a voracious Congress, many times the civilian new agencies such as CNN or one of the networks broke important news before the FBI got wind of it through official channels.

  That wasn’t true for stories that involved international negotiations or advanced planning such as trade negotiations or presidential visits – the FBI was on top of all of those events, usually – but in cases of natural disasters or plane crashes or the like, the workers in the FBI’s Situation Room got most of their information the way the rest of the country did - by tuning in to Wolf Blitzer or one of the other reporters on CNN.

  Tony passed through security and entered the ‘Room’, walking past other workers to make his way to the Situation Desk. The ‘desk’ was actually a huge workstation with several chairs and covered with phone equipment and computers and monitors, and it was always manned, twenty-four hours a day.

  As Tony walked toward the desk, the 12-8 guy was gathering up his stuff in preparation for leaving. Tony had worked the Late Shift when he’d first come on board three years ago, and he remembered how long and boring the nights could get. He’d gotten a lot of reading done over those several months of late work, catching up on all the Clancy books he’d never gotten around to reading.

  “Hey, quiet night?” he asked.

  The 12-8 guy was just a young kid, obviously a recent college graduate who sported a huge shock of red hair - like Tony, most of the Situation Desk workers were college grads in communications. “Yeah, dead. A lot of stuff on the hurricane and damage from it. And a little plane crash in Jersey, but nothing else. FAA people were working all night trying to keep the air traffic control systems up and running, but the plane crash looks like pilot error, probably the weather. Nothing like flying through soup. How is it out there?”

  Tony shook his head. “Bad. Warm enough, but the rain is really starting to pick up. I thought it was heavy last night, but driving in, I could hardly see anything. The weather guys say anything about when this is going to move through?”

  The kid nodded. “Yeah, they said ‘soon’. How’s that? All those fancy spy satellites and they can’t tell us any more than the National Weather Service.” He finished gathering up his stuff and reached for the mouse on its pad, pulling up a screen on the computer that showed a lengthy list of entries. “Nothing too exciting in the Inbox, or at least nothing that I saw. Mostly reports about the weather, and a smattering of power and phone outages up and down the east coast. Oh, and Cellular One said the cell network is having trouble getting through the weather - looks like the transmission stations weren’t built to stand such high winds. Couple of towers down.” />
  Tony nodded. The weather outside was causing trouble from Florida to Maine. All the reports came in from regional or state FBI offices or from agents in the field, or were taken from television broadcasts. “Okay, sounds good. You can take off, but I would head up to the cafeteria and get something to eat before you leave - traffic is horrible.”

  Red gathered up his stuff. “That’s okay, I took Metro today. Figured it would be easier, and I don’t have to pay to park.” He pulled on his coat and left Tony to study the items in the inbox, listed chronologically on the computer screen.

  The kid had been right. Nothing too interesting. The story on the crash in Jersey had been pulled off the overnight feed from CNN, and the little puddle-jumper looked like it had gone down because of the weather. He forwarded the item to the appropriate people and deleted it from his list, as he did with several other news items. The items could’ve been forwarded overnight to the right computers, but those decisions needed to be done by someone with a little more experience, and very rarely did someone with that much knowledge work the late shift. These messages had been taken down and entered by the red-headed kid or the guy on the shift before, but they had left them for Tony to sort and pass along to the right people - he was the next senior Desk man to come in, and he was the one with enough experience to sort the Inbox entries and send them along. Of course, they had the authority to pass along any emergency items or any critical information to the right people, but the more mundane news items and information waited until a senior person could sort it all out and forward it on.