Nightstruck (9 page)

“Just because I don't know what I want to do, that doesn't mean I don't have ambitions,” I said. My ambitions were vague ones—get a good job that paid decently in a field I enjoyed—but that wasn't the same as not having any.

“I know. You might not know what you want to do, but you know you want to do
something.
I guess I realized this weekend that I … don't.”

“What does that even mean?”

“It means my parents will support me no matter what I do, so I might as well do what makes me happy. Hell, I might not even go to college at all, although maybe if I find a good party school I should go for a couple of years just to have that experience.”

“So you're saying your big goal is to mooch off your parents for the rest of your life?” I asked incredulously. I'd thought I knew Piper pretty well, but it was beginning to look like I didn't. Or like something had happened over the weekend that had fundamentally changed her outlook.

“Basically, yeah.” She shook her head. “How many times have I told you that you should live your own life and not the life your parents want for you? I can't believe you never pointed out what a hypocrite I was being.”

I had no idea what to say to that. As far as I could tell, Piper had never cared what her parents wanted her to do, had always gone her own way with barely a second thought.

She glanced at the clock on the wall. “You'd better hurry if you want to get to homeroom on time. I'm cruising to get
myself
in trouble, not you.” She winked at me.

I felt like I was standing in the presence of a stranger. Piper had always been wild, but nothing like this. I was also surprised that she'd bothered paying attention to the time. Maybe this was another bizarre “incident,” another hallucination or manifestation of my brain tumor.

Obviously I wouldn't be talking over my situation with Piper after school, because even if she was somehow miraculously not sent home, I wasn't sure I could have a heartfelt conversation with
this
Piper. No, I was just going to have to keep all my worries buried deep inside and try to ignore them.

Hopefully all the weird Twilight Zone stuff was over now, and one day I would look back at this time and laugh.

Ha-ha.

*   *   *

Piper wasn't the only one in my life acting kind of strange. My dad seemed to be a little bit more tense and distracted every day. He'd always worked long hours, but his super-overtime was usually sporadic. For the past week or so it had been constant, and it seemed like even when he was at home his mind was still at work.

“Crime spree still going on?” I asked him on Tuesday night.

It was almost nine thirty and he'd just gotten home. I'd fixed myself some spaghetti for dinner and was reheating the leftovers while he slumped at the table and looked exhausted.

“What?” he said, rubbing his eyes and blinking, his mind still lost in whatever was troubling him. “Oh, the crime spree. Yeah. It's…” His voice faded out and he shook his head.

“It's what?” I asked with a chill of unease. I didn't like seeing the haunted expression on his face, the uncertainty in his eyes. His duty had been behind a desk for years now, but before that he'd been a homicide detective, constantly faced with the worst humanity had to offer. He'd seemed to me to be psychologically bulletproof. Maybe everything he'd seen had been damaging to his psyche, but if so, he'd hidden it from me and my sister, and maybe even my mom. Certainly he'd never looked then like he looked now.

Another shake of his head. “I don't know. It's like there's a full moon, only times ten. The moment the sun goes down, the weirdos come out of the woodwork.”

I frowned as I retrieved his dinner from the microwave and set it down in front of him. He'd shown himself to be surprisingly self-sufficient since Mom moved out—I'd had no clue he was capable of cooking before then—but tonight he was obviously just too exhausted for the effort and accepted my offer to feed him.

“Isn't that normal, though?” I asked. “Isn't crime and stuff usually worse once it gets dark out.”

“Sure. Just … not like this.”

I pulled up a chair as Dad idly stirred his spaghetti around without eating it. He still had that distant look in his eye, like he wasn't quite in the room with me.

“Not like what?” I prodded.

He sighed and gave me an assessing look that I assumed meant he was trying to decide how much to tell me. Mom had never let him talk about his job in much detail—she said she didn't want my sister and me to be subjected to the ugly reality of police work, but I think she was protecting her own sensibilities more than ours—so he was really used to censoring himself.

I met his eyes and tried to look as mature and prepared as possible. Whatever was going on out there, whatever he was having to deal with, I wanted to know about it. I figured it couldn't be as weird or upsetting as the crap I was dealing with, after all.

I must have looked like I could handle it, because he nodded and started to talk, still choosing his words carefully.

“Usually when there's a crime spree, it's small stuff and it's kind of the usual suspects. Like during that heat wave we had a couple years back. People were crankier than usual, so there were a lot of fights and domestic disputes. Most of the people we arrested had records already. But this one…” He shook his head. “It's not small stuff, not bar fights and domestic violence. It's murder and assault and perfectly ordinary-seeming people helping themselves to stuff that isn't theirs. And a constant stream of people calling 9-1-1 with ridiculous shit we're required to respond to, no matter how obvious it isn't real.”

I suppressed a shiver, thinking of my own fateful 9-1-1 call a couple of weeks ago. If I'd told the truth about what I'd seen, my call would certainly be counted with the rest of the “ridiculous shit” that had been reported lately. Dad must have thought about that call, too, because he suddenly averted his eyes and dug into his spaghetti.

Now was the perfect time for me to come clean about that night, to tell him that I'd seen something impossible and had been too embarrassed to tell the truth. I could tell him I was worried, and he would take me to the doctor and I would find out if there was something wrong with me. He'd opened a door, and I could choose to walk right on through.

But I just couldn't do it. I told myself I didn't want to burden him, that he was already too tired and dispirited, that maybe it was all over and I'd never have to think about it again. But I think the truth was that I didn't really want to know what was going on with me. The way I saw it, there were three possibilities: something was physically wrong with me (i.e., the brain tumor theory); I was going crazy; or it was some bizarre anomaly that was all over now. Option three was probably a pretty fragile possibility to hang my hopes on, but options one and two were both too terrible to contemplate. I would face them if and only if I had no other choice.

*   *   *

Jill Jameson had forgotten to bring her umbrella when she'd left for work this afternoon. She'd specifically checked the weather report and had seen there was an eighty percent chance of rain, but it slipped her mind when it was time to leave, and the rain hadn't started yet. No rain had fallen for the entirety of her shift at the restaurant, but when it came time to walk home at just after midnight, a light drizzle started.

Jill turned up the collar of her coat and tucked her hands in her pockets, hunching her shoulders. Raindrops spattered on her glasses, creating artistic blurs and prisms out of the city lights around her. She tried wiping them off once, and then the rain started in harder, and she stuck the glasses in her pocket. Now everything was a consistent blur, but her eyesight wasn't so bad that she couldn't make her way home.

Cold water seeped down the neck of her coat, making her shiver. Her breath fogged the air, and she cursed herself for being an airhead. She should have left the umbrella right in front of her door as soon as she'd seen the weather report, instead of trusting herself to remember it later.

The rain came harder and harder, chasing all but the hardiest of pedestrians indoors. Jill was getting thoroughly drenched, and water was collecting in the gutters, flowing like a white-water river. A taxi raced by, sending a huge splash of dirty water her way, with no sign of apology. Jill cursed the driver and groaned as the water started to penetrate the thick padding of her sneakers.

Hurrying her footsteps, Jill reminded herself she'd be home and warm and dry in less than ten minutes.

Up ahead of her a section of sidewalk right near the curb was blocked off with sawhorses, traffic cones, and yellow caution tape. There was still room to get past, but it required walking over one of the city's ubiquitous basement entrances—a pair of metal doors set flush with the sidewalk. Usually those doors led to freight elevators or stairs that made it easier for businesses to get supplies, but these particular doors were situated in front of a vacant lot.

Doors like these opened outward, and people walked over them all the time without a second thought. Jill, however, always tried to avoid them when possible. It was a silly superstition, but she always felt as if the doors might give way beneath her.

She hesitated for a second, thinking about going around on the street side of the construction, but a blocked drain had created a virtual lake in the gutter and she decided the metal doors were the lesser of two evils. Her feet were wet, but short of squelching, and she hoped to keep it that way.

Jill plunged forward, figuring she'd be past the metal doors in two steps, but she tripped over something and came down hard on her hands and knees. The impact on those metal doors was startlingly loud, and though they held her weight, there was a hint of give to them.

Cursing again, Jill turned to see what she had tripped over and found her foot had somehow gotten tangled in a straggling end of caution tape that stretched between a pair of sawhorses. It was true she couldn't see all that well without her glasses, but the tape was bright yellow. She wasn't sure how she could possibly not have seen it when she'd hurried forward. She glanced briefly around for a Good Samaritan who would offer her a hand up, but the only people in sight were on the other side of the street, their heads invisible under hoods or umbrellas.

Jill tried to shake the tape off her foot, but it was wrapped all the way around her ankle. With a grunt of frustration, she sat on her butt and reached down with both hands to disentangle herself.

It wasn't until her hands were inches from the tape that she noticed it wasn't normal caution tape. She should have been able to pick out the word
Caution
from the black markings on the tape, but instead she saw what looked more like a pattern of streaks and spots. She pushed rain-soaked bangs out of her eyes and looked again, but the streaks and spots didn't resolve themselves into letters. Actually, they looked kind of the like the markings you might see on a snake's skin.

As soon as that thought entered Jill's head, the band of yellow around her ankle tightened, and the loose end of the tape raised itself up from the sidewalk.

There was no wind. No explanation for the movement. None that made sense, anyway.

Jill wouldn't quite say she was afraid, not yet, because she was sure there was a logical explanation for what she was seeing. But she would admit to being unnerved, and she gave her foot a hard yank, hoping to break the tape.

It didn't work, and the metal doors on which she was sitting gave an ominous creak. Whatever she'd gotten tangled up with, she'd be more comfortable extricating herself if she were sitting on the actual sidewalk instead of the doors.

She tried to stand up and work her way over to the sidewalk, but before she'd even reached her feet, more tape wrapped itself around her other ankle, tugging her off balance.

Jill fell once more, her butt hitting the doors with an echoing clang. Now she
was
scared, because there was no logical explanation in the world for what had just happened.

The caution tape oozed free of the sawhorse, both ends now moving on their own, wrapping themselves around her legs. She'd handled a boa constrictor once, had felt the strange undulations of the muscles in its body as it moved, and the tape felt exactly like that.

Jill tried to scream, but her throat was tight with fear and very little sound came out. Certainly not enough to be heard over the roar of the bus that passed by in the street. She tried to wave to the passengers for help, but they probably couldn't even see her with the sawhorses and tape and orange cones in the way.

The tape was now twined around both her ankles, and its coils squeezed tighter and tighter until she couldn't feel her feet.

She tried again to stand, or at least to get to her hands and knees and crawl. She didn't care about the metal doors anymore, just wanted to get out from behind the construction so somebody could see her and help her.

She made it to her hands and knees as the tape continued to squeeze. She lurched forward, pulling with her hands because her legs didn't seem to be working at all. She was almost to the edge of the doors, almost onto the sidewalk on the other side of the construction. She was convinced she'd be safe if she could just get to where someone could see her.

The doors groaned again, as if straining under a great weight, and then—impossibly, because the hinges weren't angled that way—they started to open inward.

Jill screamed again, louder this time. Maybe loud enough for someone to hear, although she couldn't see anyone running to the rescue. The metal was slick from the rain, and even the slightest incline was enough to send her sliding back into the center, where a gap was forming.