Nightstruck (19 page)

“But … but they can't do that.”

My dad nodded. “It's ridiculous to think they can effectively quarantine an entire city,” he agreed. “The National Guard has been called in, and they're setting up roadblocks, but there's no way they can keep everyone in. And even if it
is
some kind of mutant virus—which I personally think is a theory with absolutely no merit—it obviously didn't just start tonight. The reports have been coming in for weeks, and the only thing different about tonight is the scale. People have been traveling in and out of the city every day, and if they're carriers of some sort, it's far too late to close the damn barn door.”

I had been objecting on a moral/legal level, but the practical objections were just as compelling. I shook my head in disbelief. “So their theory is that every single person who's seen one of these strange phenomena is sick? And that this mutant virus is capable of making multiple people have the exact same hallucination?”

Dad shrugged helplessly. “I have a hard time thinking anyone actually believes that,” he conceded. “But they don't know
what
to believe, and they'll grasp at any explanation they can find.”

“Any explanation except that something supernatural is happening you mean.”

It was the first time I'd fully allowed myself to think of what was happening that way. I'd clung to words like
weird
and
strange
and
bizarre,
but they didn't fully encompass everything that I'd seen and experienced.

“Can you blame them?” he asked. “If you weren't in the middle of it, do you think you'd believe it? Because I'm pretty sure I'd be grasping at some of those same straws if I were in their shoes.”

He was probably right. Hadn't I spent a significant amount of time thinking that I might be going crazy, or that I might have a brain tumor? Had I ever once thought to myself that something supernatural might really be happening? And this even after I'd seen the evidence with my own two eyes. If I were some government official being told that the city itself seemed to be coming alive at night and trying to kill its citizens—but oh, yeah, we can't actually capture anything we say is happening on camera—I probably wouldn't buy it.

That realization did nothing to make the prospect of the quarantine any easier to contemplate.

*   *   *

The city of Philadelphia was a different world when Sunday morning rolled around. The supernatural crap stopped and the city physically returned to normal as soon as the sun came up, but life itself was about as far from normal as it was possible to imagine.

Dad wasn't comfortable leaving me home alone, even in the daytime—possibly because I was still in a state of shock over what had happened to Mrs. Pinter—so he took me to work with him. I sat in his office with my laptop, but he was in there for no more than fifteen minutes at a time because he was in nearly constant meetings and conference calls. Supposedly I was working on the history term paper, but who was I kidding?

I was worried sick about Piper, and I hated the fact that beneath that worry was an undercurrent of anger and hurt. She had, for all intents and purposes, abandoned me last night. As strange as she'd been acting lately, I couldn't believe she'd just walked out of the house like that, with no warning or even explanation. Dad and I had spent a while driving around the neighborhood looking for her, but we'd had no luck.

Phone service, both cellular and landline, was still sporadic, the lines constantly jammed, but with a little patience it was actually possible to get through. I called Piper's house and prayed she had gotten home safely last night. Unfortunately, her frantic parents hadn't seen or heard from her. Sharing any details about what had happened last night would only frighten them more, so I got off the phone as fast as possible. I thought about calling my mom—she had to be pretty frantic herself—but I didn't want to tell her about what had happened last night. I knew fear for me would make her lash out, and I didn't want to listen to some rant about how my father should have dropped everything and rushed me to safety before all hell broke loose.

Mostly what I did was sit quietly and observe and listen to everything that was going on around me—which, considering I was sitting in the police commissioner's office, was a lot. And I learned a lot of stuff that the general population didn't know, because it wasn't being publicly reported. Like that there were hundreds of fatalities from last night's chaos, and that there were many, many more unexplained disappearances. People like Piper, who seem to have wandered away into the night, against all logic. Many of the friends and families of the missing people reported they'd been acting “strange” lately. Just like Piper, who'd barely been recognizable as herself yesterday. There was an underlying assumption—which people seemed reluctant to state out loud—that all or most of those people were dead, although their bodies had not yet been found.

The homeless population had been hit especially hard, and from listening to people talk, I got the impression that those who hadn't been safely inside a shelter had been wiped out almost completely, many dead, many missing. About the only good news was that there hadn't been the kind of rioting and looting one would ordinarily associate with a city in chaos. Most likely because the would-be rioters and looters had either been smart enough not to venture out or had paid the ultimate price if they had.

Not surprisingly, the city's residents—and those unfortunate visitors who were now stuck here—weren't too happy about the quarantine. There was no rest for our weary police officers, who had to take to the streets in record numbers to keep the peace. The Centers for Disease Control had been called in to examine volunteers who appeared to be “infected” with whatever fictitious disease the powers that be thought we all had. I suspected the quarantine would stay in effect even if the CDC doctors gave everyone a clean bill of health. I think the federal government had no idea what to make of the situation or what to do about it, so they were waving their hands like magicians, trying to make it look like they were taking action when they were in fact just as lost as the rest of us.

All day long, everyone watched the slow progress of the sun across the sky, trying to prepare for whatever the night would bring. Once the sun set, there would be no such thing as an off-duty police officer, and even those who were retired or still in training would be pressed into action. There was to be a four o'clock curfew, by which time everyone except law enforcement or emergency personnel was required to remain indoors. Every ambulance and fire truck would have a police escort, and teams of utility workers were assigned armed guards who would protect them should they have to roll out to keep the power on.

At around three o'clock, my dad finally had a brief chance to take a breather. He looked like he needed to sleep for about a week, and the stress was deeply etched into the lines of his face. I wished I'd taken my mom up on the offer to stay with her in Boston, because the one thing my dad didn't need was the extra stress of worrying about me.

“I don't know when I'm going to be able to make it home tonight,” he told me. “I don't want you home alone, but I know it can't be comfortable for you sitting around the office all day.”

To tell you the truth, it
was
getting pretty old. There was nowhere super comfortable to sit, and I couldn't just rifle through our pantry and fridge when I wanted a snack. Not to mention that I couldn't stretch out on my bed or walk around barefoot or sing along with the music on my iPod. Not without embarrassing myself, that is.

I'd thought Dad's words were a preamble to an apology, but I discovered he had actually made a plan—without consulting me first, of course.

“I've invited Luke to come over and spend the night in the guest room,” he said, and my jaw dropped open in shock.

“You
what?
”

“I talked to his mother earlier today, and it turns out his dad was on a business trip in Chicago and now can't get home. And the hospital is going to need all hands on deck tonight, so she has to go in, and she doesn't want to leave him alone any more than I want to leave you.”

I was too busy gaping at him to respond. I mean, seriously, could I be hearing him right? Had he really asked my best friend's boyfriend to spend the night at our house? Talk about awkward. Though admittedly, Dad didn't know about my secret crush on Luke, so he probably didn't realize just how epic the level of awkwardness was.

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You're inviting a teenage boy to spend the night alone with me at our house.”

Dad waved his hand dismissively. “This is Luke we're talking about. I know he's trustworthy. And I know you are, too. Dr. Gilliam will feel a thousand times better knowing he's not alone in their house while she's at work.”

“And you think I'll be safer with Luke there. No disrespect to Luke or anything, but we have Bob. And we have a gun.” I could see from the look on his face that Dad was surprised by my resistance. I knew I was being unfair, making things more difficult, when that was the last thing he needed. I was being a selfish brat. But the idea of being trapped in the house all night with Luke had me near panic. “Isn't it a bit patronizing to think I'll only be safe if there's a male in the house?”

He blinked at me, totally taken aback. Which was fair enough. I wasn't sure what had driven me to say such a thing. My objection to being alone in the house with Luke had nothing to do with feminism.

“Honey, I suspect you'd be perfectly safe in the house all by yourself,” he said. “For all the crazy stuff that happened last night, we don't seem to have a single credible report of a supernatural attack inside anyone's house. I don't think that's a coincidence. I think whatever is happening is outside only. But do you think you'd feel just as safe in that house alone as you would with someone else there? Imagine how you would have felt last night if Piper hadn't been there with you.”

Piper had pretty much been no help at all, but if I was perfectly honest with myself, I had to admit that her presence had made me feel better. Her very helplessness had helped calm and steady me, if for no other reason than that I felt like I held her safety in my hands. If I'd been by myself, the terror might very well have overwhelmed me.

“And I'm not just doing it for you,” Dad continued. “Luke doesn't have a dog or a gun. I don't think asking the two of you to buddy up for defense is remotely unreasonable. It'll make both his mom and me feel a lot better about not being able to be there.”

He was right, of course. I was channeling Piper, thinking only of myself, of my own comfort. Just because Luke had a Y chromosome didn't mean he wouldn't be freaked out by being alone at night if some supernatural beastie tried to get into his house. And of course his mom would be worried out of her mind. She'd no doubt be seeing all kinds of horrible injuries in the emergency room. How could she not be terrified that something like that might happen to her only child while she wasn't there to watch over him? Never mind that her “child” was almost eighteen and outweighed her by like eighty pounds, all of it muscle.

“All right,” I agreed, though in reality I didn't think my agreement was required. My dad and Luke's mom had already agreed to the arrangement, and I doubted either one of us had a say in it.

*   *   *

I'd suffered through more than my fair share of awkward, uncomfortable moments in my life, but the moment my dad closed the door behind him, leaving me and Luke alone in our house, was the new number one on my list.

It wasn't that I'd never been alone with Luke before, but somehow knowing he was spending the night raised the stakes to a whole new level. At least in
my
eyes—I saw no sign that Luke was even aware of the awkwardness, much less bothered by it. But, of course, he didn't have a crush on me and didn't know how I felt about him, so why would he?

“Have you heard from Piper?” I asked him, but I would probably have fainted from shock if he'd said yes. I would never have admitted it out loud, but there was a part of me that was convinced she was dead. I was doing my best to shore up my emotional defenses, to prepare myself for how I would feel if my suspicions were confirmed, but honestly, how prepared can you be for something like that? The only real loss I'd ever been exposed to was the death of Sadie, a retired K-9 dog my dad had taken in because her handler died in a car accident. Sadie had lived with us for two years, and most of her second year had been a slow decline from cancer. I'd had months and months to prepare myself for the eventuality of her death, but it had done nothing to lessen the pain when it happened.

If it had hurt that much to lose a dog, especially one who wasn't with us all that long, how much worse would it be to lose a person? My best friend?

“I haven't heard from her since she left for the rave,” Luke said. “She was pretty mad at me for refusing to go with her.”

I didn't know exactly how much Luke knew about the events of last night, but I knew my dad had told him that Piper had been with me and that she'd wandered off. I wondered if he blamed me for it, if he thought I somehow
let
her leave, but I didn't know how to ask him.

I shook my head. My crush on him notwithstanding, I had no right to feel awkward around him. Not now, when his girlfriend was missing, presumed dead. He was more unavailable than he'd ever been, and I should treat him like I'd treat any fellow human being, instead of like a boy I'd been crushing on forever.

It was almost four when Dad left, and though we still had about forty-five minutes until sundown, I went ahead and double-checked the locks on all the doors and windows. I also made sure our supply of flashlights, Coleman lanterns, and batteries would be in easy reach even if I was fumbling around in the dark.