Headlights(13)

Three in one week. This one in the bar we’re in.

I stop. Stare out into the night through the rain. Open road stretching in both directions from the parking lot, nothing but black beyond.

This one bringing the crime to us.

There’s nothing out here.

I grab my pistol from the car and head back to the front door that the Drifter just walked through, minutes before me. Through the front window, I see him. See Josie too. I slow. He doesn’t even know she’s there. In the light of the bar, pink-red lights twinkling above them, surrounded by the cold wet night.

The man’s fallen to his knees, no longer screaming. He’s sobbing. Like Pete. I’d bet like the highway patrolwoman too. Josie kneels beside him, speaking low and soft. The man who had an identity of his own before tonight, who was a person with people who loved him and dreams and wants and needs.

Just as the sirens reach my ears, the man’s anguished cries become words.

How did I get here?





6



Red and blue flash over Josie’s face, in the Mama Tried parking lot, talking to Jack. Both of them dealing with DPD. The rain has paused. Left the ground slick and the air thick, but allowing us all a moment to convene. The screaming man is no longer screaming. Wrapped in a space blanket and shut in the back of a cop car. He’s a university professor. His name is Everett Brown, and the last thing he remembers was over forty-eight hours ago, thirty miles outside of Boulder.

All the rest of the killers blacked out for twelve hours or less and walked less than thirty miles during the night. Everett’s feet are raw and bloodied, torn open from what very well could have been thirty miles of walking, but part of me wonders if it might have been even more. I don’t know how he could have walked during the day without being seen. In the vomit pile, we found a long hair tied in a knot. Someone from forensics took it in for testing, along with the skin.

“Stansfield, with me,” Jack says, and I follow him into a car, two others with us. “Say hello to your team.” It takes me a moment to realize he’s said this to me. My team. Jack tells me their names. I don’t hear him. I’m not staying. Still, I know Garcia, and I give her a silent nod. Not typical for her to come, but this case … She looks just the same as she always does—black hair slicked back, clothing pressed and perfect, efficient no-nonsense look on her face. Another agent I don’t know. Josie in the parking lot. Who I was just sitting across from, and the killer, and— We’re moving. Driving.

The rain ruined any chance of us chasing footprints, but the couple in the bar said they saw Everett coming from the west so that’s where we’re headed.

Red and blue lights in the dark of night, the sweep of our headlight beams. All of this, some kind of dream, a great black avalanche.

We hit a three-way intersection and plug Everett’s last known location into the map. If he fits the pattern at all aside from the differences we’ve already identified, the body should be back closer to where he started. But which road did he arrive here on? He could’ve come from the one straight ahead or the one veering north. We’re assuming he only walked the roadways, assuming that, like the other murders, we’ll find the body beside the road in a drainpipe. We’re assuming a whole fucking lot.

We head north, stop at intervals. Every drain, ditch, dip in the ground. The night is balmy, unusually humid. The rain’s still holding off, but we feel it there, hovering. Letting us know it’ll be back and we won’t know when. My clothes are still wet, the night clinging to my skin.

People from here aren’t suited to moisture. You can see it, in the cracks and joints of elbows, hands, crow’s feet. Us who belong to the mountains, the high plains. Hearty and craggy as red rock. But in the moisture, we soften and sweat. In the moisture we break.

Jack is quiet. I am quiet. The others are quiet. Everything feels wrong.

Bad Feeling.

“Clear. Nothing over here,” someone says. “Let’s move.”

The wind pushes through the grasses on either side of the road. Outside the car, I pause. Another empty ditch below us. But …

I glance over to Jack, to the members of the team—my team. They walk through the night with their flashlights. The new one shivers. She must not be local. So many people moving in all the time. New suburbs built every day, the city expanding faster than anyone can keep up with.

They don’t feel it, the others. The thing pressing in on my skull, scratching at the back of my brain. Not that it’s real. I don’t have some special power, and I certainly— I turn. I can’t help it.

The black of the fields. The road stretching behind us, darker than usual. It’s not normally this dark. The moon and stars blotted out by this strange humidity, hanging around us, dampening the world. Sealing us in.

Someone’s here, in the field. I can feel it.

I grasp my gun and the cold barrel of the flashlight, take a careful step forward.

I sweep the beam slowly through the grass. Blade after blade, miles of it sprawling ahead. I hear Jack’s faint voice ten or fifteen yards behind me. I take another step, away from them. Another. Deeper into the night.

More pressure. An ache.

A throbbing, disordered pulse.

VOOM.

A sound like hawk wings in a metal barn. Like a vacuum purge in space.

VOOM.

I take another step. My eyes unable to see anything outside the range of the flashlight beam.