by Lissa Kasey
Joe.
Somehow we’d found Joe. Lying in a road in the middle of nowhere. I looked around, trying to determine anything that would serve as a location marker, but didn’t know enough of the outskirts of Houston to recognize more than trees and road.
Sound vanished with a whooshing pop. Not the usual subtle shift to silence, but a full blanket of it. I stared at Alex who was still talking to the operator, but couldn’t hear any of what he said, and the man on ground. His lips moved, but was he actually speaking? Was it him or me?
Only the pounding of my own blood in my ears surrounded me, an echoing rush of my racing heartbeat. It blocked out everything else.
I raised my eyes to the woods in sudden terror as my skin began to burn. Something was there. Shadows lined the trees in the darkness. Hundreds of them, like some sort of Halloween horror movie come to life. They writhed and danced undefined, at least to my eyes, but my skin prickled with a thousand needles. I could have ripped my skin off in that second and felt less pain. Nothing could be as horrific as the feeling of being covered in fire ants, except maybe the wall of moving shadows around us.
Did Alex see them? Would they look like people to him, or light swallowing shadows, like they did to me?
Somehow I’d taken a few steps past Alex and Joe. When had that happened? I didn’t remember moving, but could feel my blood pounding. A throbbing in my chest that made my ribs hurt. Was it just me? I turned back toward Alex, hoping to reach him, touch him and chase away the terror. Only I came face to face with something…
Monstrous.
More than a shadow it towered in front of me like a wall of shifting—people? Emotions? Faces? I wasn’t sure how to describe it. Only that it looked like the monstrosity of multiple people mashed together in a soup of shadows. Dozens of eyes and mouths gaping, screaming, reaching for me.
Hadn’t Alex said he’d seen something like that? A scattering of faces and perhaps the manifestation of a shattered soul? This was far beyond anything I could have imagined from his description. More like Frankenstein’s monster, with parts cut out and sewn together haphazardly, all still moving, dozens of soundless mouths shrieking of horrors.
I screamed, noiseless to my ears, but could feel the strain in my lungs. Couldn’t help it. Instinct and instant reaction as I fell backward, stumbling far enough to tumble off the side of the road and into the shallow ditch. It moved toward me, floating, running without legs?
Whatever it was came at me, a nightmare like I’d never dreamt, twitching and following me. I scrambled backward out of the ditch, rolling to my feet and running in the opposite direction from the road.
The darkness seemed to swallow up everything around me as I fumbled my way around trees and tripped over unseen rocks or roots. I couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t pull in enough air, partly because of the running, and partly absolute terror. It wasn’t fair. I didn’t see stuff. That wasn’t my curse. Feeling things and occasionally hearing things was bad enough. Seeing things like Alex did? I didn’t think my sanity would survive.
I realized in that moment, that while I said I believed him, and tried to assure him he was normal, at least for us, I’d been paying lip service. My own fear kept me from thinking too hard about what he saw, and what would happen if he wasn’t the only one who had a curse of that intensity. But it was a cop out. Alex was a much stronger man than I. He’d have turned around and faced it already, instead of becoming the rabbit like me.
I ran on, not really seeing anything, only darkness and occasionally the sturdy width of a tree smashing into my shoulder to redirect me. I didn’t see the car until I slammed into the side with a thud, bouncing backward with the force and landing painfully on my back, head cracking on the hard ground.
Stars circled my vision. I blinked upward, into a canopy of trees, a car smashed into the woods at my feet. Sound came back with the small plink of liquid falling, a drip like a broken faucet, as the pounding in my ears faded, my ragged breath reaching my ears, and then footsteps, a crunch of leaves and gravel.
I tensed, head still reeling, but instinct screaming at me to get up. I would have if my body cooperated. Instead all I could do was lie there, gasping for air, waiting for the horror to reappear and do whatever to me. Perhaps add me to the mass of terrifying faces gaping and screaming.
“Micah?” Alex appeared above me, his face a welcome sight. “Fuck, you’re bleeding.” He touched my head. There were other footsteps in the dark. Did he hear them? I tensed. “Breathe, baby. I’ve got you. Breathe.”
I struggled for air, chest aching from the effort. Heat trickled down the side of my face and lights began to appear in the dark. Alex didn’t seem alarmed, but maybe he didn’t see them? I gripped his arm, trying to form words when I still couldn’t breathe.
“I think he’s in shock,” Alex said. “His head is bleeding. Is there a medic?” He was looking up toward the lights and not talking to me. “Micah, can you hear me?”
Someone knelt beside me, light illuminating a uniform. “Might have a concussion,” someone said. Fingers touched my head. I knew they weren’t Alex’s because he was holding my chin between both hands.
I must have whimpered or something because Alex whispered comforting things. “Shh. It’s okay. You’re okay. You’re safe.”
Was I? Where was that thing?
The area brightened with dozens of lights and voices now. Cops. I could see the mass of uniforms moving around us, and the EMT crouched beside me.
“Micah?” The EMT said. “I need you to respond. Can you hear me?”
“Yes,” I whispered. The word came out more like a wheeze. I had thought sound returned before that moment, but it all slammed down on me like a bomb of noise. A dozen voices, the crunching of rocks and leaves, Alex’s soft words, the EMT’s questions. And the police examining the vehicle I’d magically found during my escape.
“Is it the missing vehicle?” One cop asked.
“Plate matches,” someone replied.
“Anyone find the girl yet?” Someone else asked.
And that’s where I lost consciousness.
Chapter 17
I wasn’t out long. There was a ride to a hospital, and a trip to the ER, in which they insisted on doing x-rays to check for a concussion. I threw up a couple times, which had them giving me nausea meds. But I sat in a small room in the ER waiting for the nurse or one of the doctors to return. They had already stitched up my forehead. Two whole stitches. At least it stopped bleeding. Maybe Alex and I would have matching scars.
Alex stayed with me most of the time. Though the police arrived and asked him to step out to answer some questions for a while. I wondered when they would ask me. And wasn’t surprised when it was Detective Manning who came into my room, with a nurse behind him, and took the chair Alex had been sitting in.
“Mr. Richards. I’d like to ask you some questions,” Detective Manning said. “Your friend insisted your nurse stay here for the questioning, to ensure it doesn’t stress you too much.”
“He has a concussion,” the nurse said, tight-lipped.
“Mild, from what the doctor said,” Manning pointed out.
“Still a concussion,” the nurse said. “If he starts randomly chatting or spouting confessions, I’m shutting this down in favor of his sanity and freedom.”
Confessions? To what? I blinked at them both. “Okay.” My heart still raced, even though it felt like hours had passed since seeing that monster. I was exhausted and would have preferred Alex to be at my side while I was questioned about something I had no real way to explain. We hadn’t talked about it yet, what I had seen. Hadn’t talked much at all other than to the constant roll of nurses in and out of my room. My head hurt, but it was a dull throb. In fact, my whole face ached. I vaguely recalled smashing into the car at a full run, a bit like a bug hitting a windshield. Only the curve of the car had kept me from major damage, or so the doctor had mentioned earlier. I’d have liked to curl up in bed, wrap myself in Alex’s arms
and sleep for a week until the pain finally faded. Would have been nice to have Jet on my pillow too, protecting me from scary mutated people monsters.
“You saw Mr. Thomas in the road?” Manning began.
Huh? “Mr. Thomas?”
“Joe? Byrony’s boyfriend?”
“Oh. I didn’t see him. Not really. I saw a shadow. Alex must have too because he gasped. Did that press of imaginary brakes thing. I slammed on the brake. Didn’t mean to hit anything.”
“Do you remember hitting him?”
Had I? No. The shadow had run into the stopped car. “No. I stopped before that. Wasn’t going that fast. Was worried about deer.”
“Not a lot of deer in that area,” Manning said.
I shrugged. “Lots of trees, makes me think deer.”
“Do you remember your panic attack?” Manning asked. “Mr. Caine was on the phone with a 911 operator when he said you had an attack and ran.”
I had seen something. My stomach churned again. The nurse gave me one of those blue plastic-rimmed barf bags. I gagged but nothing came up. “Sorry,” I muttered after a moment. “Yes, I remember the panic attack.”
“Most people shut down for a panic attack.”
“And some people run,” I said. “That’s why it’s called fight or flight or freeze. I have training in handling other people’s attacks.” Mostly PTSD, but Sky had them sometimes too, ever since she’d been attacked last year.
“Except your own?”
“Haven’t had one like that in years. Not since…” those first few weeks after I’d returned.
“Since?”
“You know about my disappearance,” I snapped at him. “After I returned I had them for a few weeks, but they faded. Sometimes I still get anxiety attacks, but not full panic attacks like this. People don’t normally find people in the middle of the road on a dark stretch of woods. That freaked me out. Wouldn’t that freak you out? I remember my heart racing, blood pounding in my ears.” Something came at me and I’d run. Would he think I was crazy? Probably. I had no desire to be dragged to whatever nearby psych ward they had for evaluation.
“Mr. Richards, your heart rate is up now. Take a few deep breaths please.” The nurse interrupted. She was a kind African-American woman who gave Manning a hard face, but focused her attention on me after a few seconds. She patted my arm. “No need to send you into another panic attack. Breathe. Another attack will just make your head hurt more.”
“It’s mild?” I asked, vaguely remembering a doctor having stopped in briefly to tell me about my scan. I wasn’t sure the nausea was related to the minor headache, or the memory of whatever that shadow had been.
“Yes. You hit your head pretty hard, but it’s nothing terrible,” the nurse assured me. “Nothing some rest won’t cure. Doctor thinks your nausea is from the panic attack rather than the concussion.”
It struck me then how quickly the police had arrived. We’d been in the middle of nowhere, or so I’d thought. The GPS had us a good twenty or so minutes from the B&B. How had the police arrived so fast? “I ran into a car. Were we by another road?” I couldn’t recall seeing one.
“Nothing but service roads other than the one you were on,” Manning said. “Funny that you found that car in the middle of a panic attack.”
“Is Joe okay?” I asked. “I think it was Joe in the road. I vaguely remember seeing his face.”
“Do you have a reason you drove that way tonight, Mr. Richards?” Manning pressed.
“I was following the GPS on my phone. Avoiding going around on the big highways and coming back inward. The GPS said it was a fifteen-minute time savings.” I said, recalling how my phone had been plugged into the navigation system of the SUV. “I think you can pull up records like that, right? Tell where my phone has been. We did a bit of shopping, then dinner, then the route back. All mapped through my phone since I don’t know the area all that well. Only been here two or three times before.”
“We are pulling your records. And Mr. Caine’s.”
Did that mean he was keeping our phones? I hoped not. It would really suck to have to navigate the city without a phone. I knew people used to do it with printed maps, but didn’t think picking up a paper map while driving was the best of options. “Are you taking our phones?”
“We’ve already pulled the data from them. One of my guys will drop them off with you before you leave the hospital,” Manning said.
“That’s fast.”
“We have a great tech unit and your boyfriend has been very cooperative.” The way he said it made it sound like I wasn’t being cooperative.
“I’ve told you everything I know.”
Manning seemed to think about that for a minute. Finally he asked, “How many people are in your cosplay group?”
That was an odd question. “The one here? I don’t understand. The online group has a couple hundred thousand.”
“I mean the exclusive group. Those of you who do the meetups like this.”
Oh. “The number changes a little. People come and go. Those who came were the main group. Chad, MaryAnn, Julie, Nicole, Jonah, Byrony, Freya, and myself. Melissa, as I said is new to the group. There have been some others in the past. A few I’ve met, but none that I was ever close to. I’ve only been to five or so cosplay group specific meetups myself. Though if they are in a city nearby, I try to meet them for a meal. Sometimes we’d catch up at conventions, but we all used to travel a lot so it wouldn’t often be more than two or three of us at a time.” I tried to recall some names. Most of the group members were women. That was sort of the norm with cosplay. Not because men didn’t cosplay, but because they didn’t really ask for help and network to improve their skills. “There was a girl named Sarah for a while. She was Californian, I think.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“I met her like three years ago, but haven’t seen her in probably two years. She was into the sexy cosplay thing too.” I shrugged. “I had a bit of trouble happen in that time, so maybe I missed when she left.”
“Do you remember any of the others who have left the group?”
My head hurt. “Maybe? There was an Amanda, but she wasn’t in the group long. I recall a handful of names, but no one I really had time to talk to.”
“Do you remember why Amanda left?” Manning asked.
“No. I wasn’t close to her at all, and make it a point not to get into other people’s business.”
“Are you close to anyone in the group?”
“Freya,” I said. “She’s probably the only one I talk to outside group events.”
“How close are you to Miss Pedjic?”
“She helped me get my start as a professional cosplayer. I’ve known her for years.”
“But do you visit her outside of group events?” Manning prodded. “Or she visits you? Since you live in different states.”
“No. We talk sometimes through Facetime.”
“About events not related to the cosplay group?”
“Sometimes.” Though mostly it was related to crafting. Occasionally something came up about our personal lives. I realized in that moment that I wasn’t as close to Freya as I thought I’d been. She, much like most of the other people I called ‘friends’, had been put in a box set aside for one purpose, crafting comradery. “I guess I never really thought about it before. At least not really in those terms,” I admitted. “I keep them at a distance.” I did that with everyone. Or tried to. Some had gotten through my barriers, like Sky and Lukas, and now Alex.
“Why do you think that is?”
“I don’t know. Guess it’s something I’ll have to bring up with my therapist,” I snapped back, irritated that he was pointing out my flaws. “I’ll call you when she has an answer for me.”
“Your boyfriend seems to know you well, if that’s any consolation,” Manning stated. “He pointed out that you keep parts of your life compartmentalized, including acquaintances.”
“Good to know my boy
friend sees my flaws.”
“He said you didn’t seem as close to the group as you were to him, his brother, and your friend,” he checked his notes, “Skylar. I asked him why that was. He seems to believe it’s part of your healing from past events. Do you agree or think there is something else that separates the groups?”
“Again, I’ll check with my therapist and get back to you.”
Manning sighed and got up. “I may have more questions later.”
I blinked at him. “You know where to find us.”
“You don’t plan on going home?” he asked.
“We are here for an event. You might think we are cold and unfeeling to stay, but I really didn’t know Byrony,” I said. Would Alex want to go home? This trip kept getting weirder and weirder. I had so many questions of my own. “Would you stay if you’d arrived for an event and someone who just happened to be at the same hotel went missing? At a bigger hotel we probably wouldn’t have even known she was gone.”
“I might not stay if I knew someone staying at that hotel had done something to her,” Manning said, offering up the most I’d gotten from him the entire conversation.
I frowned. “Did you find Byrony? Do you think one of the group hurt her?” Alex said he thought he’d seen her ghost, but worried something was tricking him. I’d come to think of the supernatural as bad, though Alex didn’t seem to think so, and thought maybe something otherworldly had gotten Byrony. Hadn’t even thought that anyone in the group could possibly hurt her. “I can’t see anyone in the group doing something like that.”
“But you said you don’t know any of them all that well,” Manning pointed out.
“Well no. I don’t. But I guess I don’t look at everyone I know as though they are a potential danger?”
Manning looked me over. “You’re very lucky then, Mr. Richards. Or naïve.” He shrugged. “We’ll be in touch,” Manning said and left the room. The nurse glanced at me and followed him out. A minute later Alex reappeared. He came around the side of the bed and took my hand before leaning close to kiss my cheek.