by Lewis Wolfe
“Bryce?”
“Psychiatric hospital.”
Arthur gently shook his head. “When we spoke on the phone you said there were other cases like Ethan’s?”
Dr. Stewart nodded. “We actually don’t know what’s happening. These are all normal, healthy people. And then…. Then all of a sudden they’re not.”
Arthur knew the doctor was trying to avoid a specific word. Crazy.
“Before Ethan stopped talking altogether he claimed he was attacked by what I would have to interpret as some kind of zombie. Says his dead friend ate his face,” the doctor said.
Arthur agreed that Ethan’s face looked completely normal. “And the others?”
“All of them completely healthy. Completely sane. Until all of a sudden they weren’t. And they all have their own stories, Arthur, of being chased or assaulted.” The doctor paused before he added, “None of the stories make any damn sense.”
Arthur knew Dr. Stewart as a grumpy man that had aged faster and faster as he had gotten more and more responsibilities at the hospital. Still, at the core, Arthur knew the doctor was a capable and diligent man.
“And they’re not sick? I read about viruses that can attack the brain.”
Dr. Stewart took a deep breath. He didn’t have much patience for people who went on the internet and created their own theories. Of course, he couldn’t say so to a man as powerful and generous as Arthur Toaves.
“There’s something wrong with their brain, alright. The scans show several cognitive impairments, as if they suffered from some strange kind of cerebral event. But what it is that happened to them, I simply have no clue.”
Arthur nodded as he mulled over everything he knew. Last night the young man had arrived at his mansion, screaming frantically for help. Mary had been the first to the door and found the young man rolling around on the ground, trying to fend off an assailant that simply wasn’t there.
Now that young man lay sedated and strapped down to a hospital bed. A danger to himself, quite possibly a danger to others, too.
But the young man had come to Arthur. In his hour of need, crazy or not, Ethan Walker had reached out for Arthur Toaves. And Arthur was not ready to fail Ethan just yet.
“Dr. Stewart, please leave him here for now. I want all of this documented and investigated,” Arthur said.
The doctor threw his hands in the air as he exclaimed, “Look around you, Arthur! This is a small-town hospital! We don’t have the time, nor the resources. You have been generous to us, but there is only so much we can do!”
Arthur turned to face the doctor and gently touched his shoulder. “I understand your frustration, but you must keep Ethan here for now. Are the others still here as well?”
“Two we sent to Bryce. The other two we’re getting ready to send off.”
“Keep them here as well. I can still throw some weight around. May even get the government involved if it’s necessary.”
“The government?”
Arthur nodded. Something dark had come to his town. He didn’t know what it was or how to combat it, but he was dead set on finding out.
DAY 1
October 24, 2019
1
Whenever Caleb sank into an unstable sleep his mind lingered in the turmoil of his past. It wandered and strolled and lurked around the maze of his unconsciousness, only to be confronted with the exact same person each and every time. The monster at the end of every nightmare.
John C. Reilly. The ginger bastard with his buzz cut and retarded grin.
John C. Reilly. The ginger bastard with his tall and muscular body and square jaw and piercing, bright green eyes.
In Caleb’s nightmare he was back in Iraq and Reilly was with him, pretending that his fingers were guns and shooting at him. Shooting at Caleb with that dumb grin and those piercing green eyes.
Reilly’s eyes became bullets Caleb couldn’t dodge and they shot him through the throat and through the chest. Gurgling up his own blood, Caleb fell to the ground, face-first into Iraq’s warm desert sand.
Then Reilly's shadow lingered over Caleb's lifeless body and picked him up from the ground. With one quick movement Caleb was thrown into the air and broke through the atmosphere. He saw the globe from outer space and he could count the stars and the sun felt hot on his skin.
John C. Reilly became gravity and pulled him back down. Down into America. Down into his mother’s small apartment where she was dying of cancer.
John C. Reilly was fucking his mother. Plowing her hard and making her scream sounds Caleb had never heard come from a woman before. He wanted to stop it but Reilly was a giant that stood eight feet tall and he was just a little boy, with little-boy arms and little-boy shoulders.
There was nothing he could do as the ginger giant unhinged his jaw like a snake and shoved his mother all the way inside his mouth. Tearing off her skin and crunching her bones with his great, white teeth. Consuming her.
Caleb knew then that Reilly was the cancer and he could never beat it.
A soft hand reached for his own and when Caleb looked to his right he found Jane Elring looking back up at him. Her dark eyes piercing his soul, the pain relieved by one of her delicate smiles.
He heard her say, “It’s okay, Caleb. Time for you to wake up now.”
Caleb opened his eyes and felt his back leaning against the uncomfortable airplane seat. His forehead was sweaty and his breathing heavier than he liked it to be. To his right sat his client staring out of the window, seemingly hypnotized by the gentle rhythm of the plane.
He had fallen asleep, Caleb thought bitterly. Some bodyguard he was. This really couldn’t happen anymore.
Jane pulled her head away from the window and looked up at Caleb. “You’re awake! Sounded like you had it pretty rough there for a while.”
Rough. Yeah, Caleb thought to himself, rough was an accurate description.
“I thought about waking you. But you looked so damn tired I figured I’d better let you be. Need you sharp when we get to Alabama, though.”
Caleb realized she’d mentioned his failure to him in the kindest possible way and he resented that it brought him some relief.
To ignore his own feelings he asked, “How much longer until we get there?”
“About thirty minutes, give or take.”
“And then another hour by bus, right?”
“Yep. Our contact will meet us at the station in Brettville.”
“Right. You worked with this Agent Bradford before?”
Jane paused only briefly, but long enough for her eyes to betray an uneasiness to her bodyguard. “Special Agent Bradford, yeah. He’s my regular.”
Caleb made a mental note. Keep an eye on Special Agent Bradford.
2
Special Agent Bradford stood at the bus station with his phone planted angrily against his ear. He didn’t have time for this shit.
“Listen, Becky! She’s not going to that damn party!”
“Well, I don’t think that one party….”
“Becky… last time we let her go to a party she came home shitfaced drunk! I’m a government official, for fuck’s sake, I can’t have that happening!”
“But if we don’t let her learn about these things—”
“She can learn about them when I say she’s ready to learn about them. Don’t you forget, Becky, my word is law in that house even when I’m gone!” There was a long pause before Agent Bradford spoke again. “You can tell her I said she can’t go. We’ll talk about it more when I get back home.”
“Okay… call me tonight?”
“Of course.”
“Okay. Love you!”
Agent Bradford hung up.
With a deep sigh, he put the phone in his pocket.
Through the frustration it was sometimes hard to remember why he loved his wife. He hated her weakness with the kids. But then, he realized, weakness was part of what made a woman. It was his responsibility to be strict and maintain the structure his family nee
ded. He couldn’t depend on his wife for that.
He looked at his watch and noticed it was almost noon. She’d be here in fifteen minutes or so.
His colleague had confirmed him that she’d gotten on the airplane with her new bodyguard, so it was only a matter of time before he was confronted with the reality of her deep, dark eyes.
Agent Bradford felt nervous and he hated it. Hated how Jane Elring made him feel. How those dark eyes and that creepy smile mixed into some kind of disfigured hybrid of familiarity and dread. The purity her blonde hair suggested was, Agent Bradford knew, a horribly tasteless joke. He hated how Jane Elring made him feel, so he hated Jane Elring.
Instinctively his hand reached into his pocket and found the little black box with the button on it.
The button. If all else failed, if he lost control over the situation, he could always press the button. Though, in his three years working with her, it had never come to that.
Agent Bradford knew that it was only a matter of time. The girl was a ticking time bomb. He couldn’t depend on a woman to maintain a steady level of self-control.
Brettville’s bus station stood slightly east off the main road that split the town in two. It was only a short walk away from the town’s center and Agent Bradford could smell the cooking coming from Juan’s Mexican Grill across the street.
South of the town’s center stood Brooks Mechanical. Beyond that there were only fields and farmlands touching Brettville’s southern borders.
To the west, east, and north the thick growth of pines surrounded the town, reaching far into the sky, standing as stalwart watchmen over the wellbeing of the townsfolk. As if shielding the people of Brettville against an unspeakable terror that roamed beyond the town’s borders.
As far as towns went, Agent Bradford thought, this place wasn’t that bad. Of course, it did have a lot of black people.
The bus pulled in at twenty past noon and Agent Bradford stood with some measure of anticipation. The doors hissed open and the randoms started pouring out.
Jane Elring was one of the last to leave the bus, followed by a black man that carried the luggage. So this was her supposed bodyguard?
Agent Bradford quickly analyzed the man. He saw a gut, man boobs and a wattle of fat weighing down his chin.
Yet Agent Bradford was experienced enough to look beyond first appearances. The man’s eyes were sharp and astutely aware, his shoulders strong and rounded, and even with all the fat his posture was excellent.
Ex-military, maybe? Agent Bradford knew that this man could have done real damage in his prime. Now? Better to be careful, he decided.
Agent Bradford noticed that Jane noticed him and braced himself as the odd couple walked over to him. He tried to silence his nerves but found that he couldn’t. Her mere presence felt like an understated threat to his wellbeing.
Still, he extended his hand as Jane came within reach and they shook on their greeting, a formality he couldn’t abandon. Her delicate hands were warm and soft, in strong contrast with what he knew she really was.
Agent Bradford repeated this forced formality with the black man that stood next to her. “I’m Special Agent Bradford.”
“Caleb Epps.”
Agent Bradford gestured toward his left as he started walking, his two charges following him closely. “Welcome to Brettville!”
They approached the main road and Agent Bradford said, “This road runs all the way through town. If you ever get lost, though I doubt you will, just remember that it separates west from east. The town center is west off the main road. The only hotel is in the center of town. It isn’t big but it’s well taken care of. I’ve been staying there for the last couple of days.”
They crossed the road and Agent Bradford started to get his nerves under control. If he just kept talking and didn’t look back too often, he thought he’d be alright.
“I’ll show you your rooms. You can freshen up and we’ll get something to eat,” he said. “I’ll brief you then.”
3
Sparky’s Diner was owned and operated by Stevie Dowden. Everybody called him Sparky because he’d liked to play with electricity as a kid.
When he was thirteen he had managed to blow out most of the town’s power by siphoning it all to the supercomputer he was trying to build in his mom’s basement. The supercomputer had blown up, as had most of his mom’s basement, and ever since Stevie Dowden had unofficially gone through life as Sparky.
It wasn’t so bad as far as nicknames went, Sparky figured. In time he decided to cash in on the name and the fact that everybody knew him and started up his diner.
For his interior design he had opted for sharp colors, mostly white, with yellow lightning flashes painted on all four of the walls. The tables had laminated copies of the newspaper article explaining his nickname plastered on to them. Sparky’s little claim to fame.
When people asked him he assured them that his private projects were a lot more manageable now. The truth was that he hadn’t blown anything up in almost two years.
The three strangers at a table near the corner of his diner, Sparky knew, wouldn’t ask him about it. They were too busy shoving their papers around and exchanging uncomfortable glances back and forth.
Caleb felt that the tension at his table stood in stark contrast with the overall smooth atmosphere of the diner. Of course, he did little to remedy the fact. That wasn’t his job. His job was to watch over the young woman sitting next to him, browsing through the papers Agent Bradford had handed her.
Jane’s dark eyes scanned the documents at a rapid pace, occasionally halting and using her fingers as if to underscore certain parts of the text. In between she took bites from the hamburger that was slowly getting cold. Whenever she was done with a sheet of paper she moved it to her side for Caleb to read.
She told him, “Make sure you know what’s going on. It might be useful.”
With some dread Caleb took the documents Jane finished and pretended to read them. He could read, but at an extremely slow pace. The letters tended to jump around whenever he tried to focus on them, or they would blur into shapes that he couldn’t recognize. As a kid he had simply believed that he was retarded, but later he learned that he suffered from dyslexia.
Over the years Caleb had developed several coping mechanisms, most of them so effective that the people around him would have never guessed that he was a poor reader. He hoped to do the same now, pretending to read the papers and planning to gather the general information from the conversations they might have about them later.
Even Caleb’s pretend reading was slower than Jane’s actual pace and soon the young woman had piled up all the documents for Caleb’s benefit. She slurped her Diet Coke through a straw as she waited for him to finish.
When Caleb was done he piled up all the documents and shoved them back toward Agent Bradford. The man had sat quietly picking away at his fries up to that point.
Agent Bradford said, “You guys can keep those. I have copies.” Then he directed his attention toward Jane. “So… what do you think?”
“It’s good that you guys called. This is definitely something I can help with,” she replied.
“Good. What do you need from me?”
Some might have considered Agent Bradford as being to-the-point, a true professional in a situation where every lost minute was one too many. But Caleb knew better. He heard the understated dread in the agent’s voice, registered the uneasiness in his eyes. Agent Bradford was very eager to leave.
Jane said, “I’d like to speak with this Arthur Toaves first.”
“Alright. He knows you’re here.” Agent Bradford hesitated before he said, “I can take you there, of course.”
Jane let him off the hook. “Oh, no need. The directions were all very clear and it won’t hurt to walk through town a bit. You don’t have to come with me.”
Agent Bradford relaxed visibly and it was the first time he took his right hand out of his pocket. Carefully he placed both
hands on the table and folded them into a pyramid.
“Good,” he said, “I have a lot of work to do.”
Jane allowed him this farce and gave him a careful smile.
Caleb distanced himself from the conversation. His interest was only in keeping his client safe. The air had not exactly cleared between Jane and the agent but at least their meeting was nearing its conclusion.
Agent Bradford gestured for the waitress to bring the bill. His movement was tense to the point of being strained, as if his muscles hurt from a hard workout the day before.
After the bill had been paid the three stood up and started toward the door. When Jane noticed Sparky watching them from behind the counter she said, “You be careful now! Okay?”
Sparky nodded with as wide a grin as he could muster. He loved it when strangers took the time to read his article.
4
Caleb left the sandy road behind him and trailed Jane toward the gate of the Toaves mansion. It was open, he noticed, which he thought odd.
Jane didn’t proceed. Instead, she walked over to the intercom attached to the left pillar of the gate and pushed the button.
A static rustle answered. Then a woman’s voice. “Hello?”
“Hello. Jane Elring here to see Arthur Toaves?”
“Yes. Of course! Is the gate not open?”
“It is. May we proceed?”
“Yes, of course! We will see you soon!”
Jane nodded and looked over her shoulder at Caleb. “I guess they were expecting us.”
Caleb followed his client along the road toward the large mansion looming in the near distance.
It wasn’t hard to imagine how a white family in Alabama had amassed this kind of wealth and Caleb wondered if he would be welcome inside. There was still a core group of militant racists in the South, he knew, and they sometimes had big money. This mansion, with its two wings, a big stable and a complex that could only be a large garage, screamed big money.
As they neared the mansion Caleb noticed a young girl leaning against the fence surrounding one of the fields that edged the left side of the building. Her dark hair and slightly tanned skin hinted at some kind of mixed heritage. She had Jane’s build, which told Caleb she could be no older than sixteen.