Out of the Shadows (3 page)

My instincts told me that the man at the door was a threat in some way, even though he had not yet stepped over the threshold. I felt the urge to assert myself, to display my authority over him, to make him respect me and the weapon I wielded, forcing him to stand still and answer any questions I had.

I glanced at the fellow officer, and I saw the terrible fear in his eyes, clasping his hands over his mouth as if he would be unable to keep quiet without the self-applied gag. I crouched in the shadowed corner of the dark, moonlit room, staring unblinking at the open doorway, following Billy’s lead and staying quiet.

I remained, my P228 trained on the threshold’s blackness, afraid to lower my gun for fear the silent movement of muscle would alert him of my presence. Even though my eyes had adjusted to the near darkness, it still took a minute for me to notice it:

Dangling, slowly lowering itself mere inches from my face, a small black spider rappelled down its silky filament, its rear legs lackadaisically releasing the strand from its sack, closing the distance between itself and my outstretched arm.

Despite my blue jeans and gray hoodie, I shivered. I’m not one to be afraid of bugs; I am accustomed to squashing them when they’re in my house. But that doesn’t mean I’m fond of them and welcome them crawling on my body. The presence of this arachnid was a nuisance, and I wanted it gone. My shallow breaths made it sway to and fro as it continued to lower itself and land on my arm.

And then it turned and crawled toward my face.

I’ve seen the incredible speeds at which insects like this could travel, but this one moseyed, toying with me, testing me to see how long I could hold still in the face of danger.

“Hello?” the hollow voice rang out once more from beyond the open doorway.

“There’s no one here. Let’s go,” came a female’s voice from deeper within the office. There was something wrong with her tone, but I couldn’t quite pinpoint the oddity. It was like there was no feeling, no subtext.

The man stood silent, not responding to the woman’s request. The spider was now only six inches away, tiptoeing one leg at a time – all eight of them – leisurely strolling toward my cold and clammy face.

In the same emotionless manner as before, the man said, “I know he’s here. Somewhere. His truck is outside.”

A chill cascaded down my spine.
My truck?
I thought, wondering what they could possibly want with a drunken bum like me.

Darting my eyes over toward Billy, I was afraid he was in the process of giving himself a heart attack, or shitting himself at the very least. He was frozen, leaning back against his cell wall, and from what I could make out, he looked as though he hadn’t taken a single breath since the door had crawled open and the man had uttered his questioned salutation.

An excruciating few seconds of silence passed before the man said, “Let’s look upstairs.” And he pulled the door closed.

As quickly as I dared, for fear of making too much noise and drawing the man back, I swatted the spider away from my face and exhaled forcefully, gasping for large breaths that I dared not take a moment before. I flipped on my flashlight and caught up with the insect, smashing it vengefully under my shoe.

“Jesus Christ, Billy,” I panted in a whisper. “Who are these people?!”

When he didn’t immediately respond, I turned toward him and flashed my light at his face. His eyes were open wide, his hands clasped against his mouth, his skin gray and bloodless.

“Billy?” I inched closer to his cell bars.

His eyelids slowly lowered, and his hands released, falling limply to his sides, and then his body crumpled to the ground in an unmoving heap. My panicked heart leapt into my throat when it dawned on me: a minute ago, when I saw him frozen and leaning against the wall, he wasn’t remaining still from fright.

He was dead.

What the hell killed him?
I wondered. I had been in the room the whole time. There’s no way it was a heart attack; cops have to do intense physicals before they’re hired. I wanted to get in there and investigate, but looped on his fingers far from my reach were the keys to his cell.

Dumbfounded, I lowered my gun toward the floor and stared at nothing. My brain filled with thoughts of nonsense, unable to make sense of anything that had happened in the past couple of hours. I was coming unhinged, knowing that this couldn’t possibly be real.

Suddenly, I slapped myself hard across the face. When nothing happened, I did it again. And again. I was convinced that this was all some sort of bad whiskey dream, or the world’s worst hangover. Or maybe this was what happened when you went through intense alcohol withdrawal. Regardless, I decided it would be best not to have a drink until I knew I was safe. Maybe I would quit drinking altogether, but probably not.

When I didn’t wake up from my nightmare, I sighed and resigned myself to the fact that it was time to leave. Not that I really had any idea where to go. I didn’t even know what it was I was trying to escape from. I placed my ear against the door that led out into the office, listening for signs of movement. Soft creaks echoed from the floor upstairs, and if I closed my eyes and listened hard enough, I could faintly hear the bugs crawling in the walls and ceiling.

It’s crazy the things you hear when you stop and listen.

I decided this would be the best time to make a break for it, get to my truck, and drive off into the unknown, hoping I would have enough gas to take me there. I reached my hand down to the door handle.

“Oh,” came a voice from behind me. “Hello, Nick Barren.”

Startled, I turned and had my gun aimed at the target in less than a second. When I saw who it was, I began shaking, my eyes growing wide: Billy. He stood and walked to his bars, grasping them with both hands and pressing his face in between them. “Please don’t leave, Nick. We have so much to discuss.” His voice had lost its southern laziness, and it carried in such an unnatural way that reminded me of the man and woman from before – cold, eerie, and emotionless.

I didn’t know how to respond. I wasn’t really accustomed to seeing people rise from the grave. I suppose, perhaps, he hadn’t actually been dead before, but something about him now was different, and I knew deep down that I was talking with a deceased man. “Um… I’m sorry, Billy.”

Billy’s face showed no expression, no sign of emotional response. “Don’t be sorry. Just stay and talk with me.”

I slowly reached down behind me and turned the knob, pulling the door open and backing through the threshold. “Sorry, I can’t. I… I gotta go.”

Billy spoke plainly as if to me, but his words were: “I have Nick Barren. He is here. He is here. I have Nick Barren.” He continued speaking these words over and over, and I dreaded the obvious. He had just sounded an alarm, and somehow, the other people heard his quiet speaking.

A stampede of footfalls pounded across the upstairs floor and began trampling down the flights of steps to the office where I now stood. I thought briefly about shooting Billy in the face but realized I may need the extra bullets.

I ran.

Through the office, around the desks, leaping over chairs. And as I pushed through the door into the lobby, I saw a group of people barrel down the stairs and through the office, following me. I blasted through the entrance vestibule, my footsteps echoing off the high ceiling, and I charged out the glass doors into the night, my heart racing. I sprinted for my truck, still parked crookedly at the curb. Fumbling in my pocket for the keys, I managed to unlock the door and leap inside, slamming and locking it just as the group from inside the station plowed into the truck, like they had never intended on stopping in the first place.

There were five of them, all dressed normally, looking like everyday citizens of Angelwood. I even recognized one of them from the supermarket. They were all pounding on the window, muttering “Nick Barren. Nick Barren. Listen to us, Nick Barren.” There was no anger on their faces. Only placidness.

I jammed the keys in the ignition, but the truck just turned over repeatedly, the engine unable to start. “Come on!” I yelled, continuing to turn the key.
“Come on!”
And finally, the engine revved to life.

“Stop!” yelled one of the men at my window.

The five of them stepped back and grew silent, and I was compelled to face them. We all stared at one another, the thick air ripe with anticipation. Their pupils seemed darker than normal, and I swore I saw a fleeting image of something flash past the whites of their eyes. Then I yelled through the closed window, “What do you want from me?!”

A man in a business suit spoke calmly. “We don’t need any trouble. And you’re a man that tends to cause trouble, Nick Barren.”

I was baffled by their assumptions of my character. “You don’t even know me!”

“I see you at the bank every other Friday.”

Then the woman spoke up. “I see you leave Gravediggers every morning on my way to work.”

The man I recognized from the market: “Every Saturday evening, I see you at the grocery store.”

“I see you roam the halls of the hotel where you work.”

“I see you at the McDonald’s drive-thru.”

“At Wal-Mart.”

“At the gas station.”

“The liquor store.”

“I saw you at your daughter’s funeral.”

All of their voices speaking in tandem had thrown my head into a nauseating spin. These were not the people of my town, and I needed to remember that, but keeping anything straight in my head right now seemed impossible. As they continued to rattle off locations where they’d seen me, I felt I was losing my grip on reality, the cacophony of voices growing louder with every passing second.

Trembling and near hysterics, I hollered,
“You don’t know me!”

The group of them fell silent from my outburst, considering me through the closed glass of my window.

“What
are
you people?!” I pleaded for answers.

The woman remained passive and answered plainly, “We are the future.”

This non-answer merely infuriated me. “Whose future?!”

Instead of the woman replying, the lead man spoke. “We don’t need any trouble, Nick Barren. Join us of your own free will.”

For the first time, I noticed a small bit of dried blood on the corners of his mouth, like he had taken a bite of a messy chicken wing at dinner and forgot to use his napkin. With what I assume was fervent disgust, I spat at him. “Go to hell.”

The man’s fist punched through the window, shattering it to pieces as he grasped my throat, squeezing the life from me. Billy had been right: my flak jacket would be worthless in this crisis, not to mention uncomfortable. My hands grappled at the man’s taught fingers around my neck, not an iota of anger in his face. I needed to defend myself, or I would be dead in thirty seconds.

I put my gun to his face and pulled the trigger.

In that moment of shock when his fingers released their grip on me, and he fell backward onto the concrete, the other four in the group stared at me, showing no signs of anger or fear. Just looking at their faces creeped me the hell out, so I yanked my gearshift into drive and peeled out down the road, leaving the madness behind.

*     *     *

I sped more quickly than I should have down the empty forest road, tall trees reaching up into the black sky on either side, my headlights haphazardly illuminating the winding path before me. My mind couldn’t get a grasp on the events of the past few hours since I had awakened and showered away last night’s hangover. This was all something out of a bad horror flick; zombies, vampires, mind control,
whatever the hell was going on
.

There was no reason to stay in Angelwood any longer. I hoped that maybe
somewhere
far away from my small town was still normal. I had turned on the radio in my truck, letting it automatically scan through stations. Static had filled them all. I had stopped at a gas station payphone and tried calling my ex-wife Sarah, but I’d received a default message about high call volume and to try again later.

Now, nothing felt right anymore. Even the trees looked odd, like there was a slight sheen glistening over them that was gone the second the truck’s headlights passed them. As I drove, I realized another oddity about the evening: there were no animals to be found. Not anywhere. I remembered back to when I left my house to go to the store and found it odd that the sounds of bird chirps weren’t echoing through the trees. In my gut, I knew that they weren’t all dead. They had surely left,
knowing
what was about to take place. An animal’s intuition placed them higher than people on survival skill, but these emotionless human husks that were born from today’s chaos were underestimating me.

I entered the familiar suburban neighborhood where I used to live with Sarah – back when things were wonderful and Annie giggled everyday. Unpleasant emotions rose to the surface as I pulled my truck up to the front of my old house. Shortly after Annie was killed, Sarah had kicked me out, which was all for the best, because I couldn’t stand the place without my daughter’s laughter.