Authors: Ben Hopkin
Tags: #General Fiction
“Darc?” Mala called out to him, hoping to elicit a response. Darc lifted his head to stare at her a moment, then went back to contemplating the asphalt. “This is… odd.”
“Tell me about it,” Trey answered back. He leaned in and whispered, “He changed his mind when I told him you might get upset.”
Mala heard the words coming out of Trey’s mouth. She even could put them together and mostly make sense of them. But when she tried to place them in the context of having to do with Darc, her mind short-circuited.
“I can hear you when you whisper,” intoned Darc. “And yes, that is correct, but only to a certain extent. In measuring the possible benefit of entering alone or waiting for help, the latter seemed to yield stronger results.”
“Say what you want, dude, but that’s not how it went down.” Trey stretched his shoulders and cracked his neck. “So… is Janey taken care of?” he asked Mala.
“Yeah. I asked Pyper to pick her up from school.” She saw the look on Trey’s face. “Don’t start. There was no one else.”
“Hey… what’s a little pot between friends? Did you call the cavalry while you were at it?”
“Yes. They should be right behind me. I called Captain Merle the second…”
She trailed off as the sound of sirens approached.
“Speak of the devil,” Trey muttered. He took a long whiff of the air. “Smells like bacon. And you know how I love me my breakfast meats.”
He jumped off the hood of his car and sauntered over to where the first of the police cruisers was pulling into the lot. Waving his arms, he directed the rest of the cars in, keeping his body between the cars and Darc.
Once the uniforms started piling out, Trey called out to them. “Okay, everyone. Here’s the deal. We’ve got stuff going down in the forest.”
One of the cops raised his hand. Trey pointed to him.
“This young man has a question. Which shows his lack of experience here in this precinct. I don’t have any answers. So don’t bother.” He glanced back at Darc, almost as if he were making sure his partner hadn’t hightailed it into the forest on his own. “You know the drill. I’m like the anti-answers guy. You ask me something, you’ll know less after I’m done with you.”
“But are we dividing into teams, or what?”
“Hey!” Trey shouted back at the sarcastic cop, then seemed to think better of it. “Actually, that’s not a bad idea. Darc?” He turned to his partner, looking for approval, or maybe just a reaction. Mala watched as Darc just peered back at him.
Darc may have capitulated on the backup, but he seemed to be fighting himself about it every step of the way. The likelihood, in Mala’s mind, was that Darc wasn’t even aware of that fact himself.
“Ooookay…” Trey stretched out the word, maybe hoping Darc would step in at some point and take over. But that wasn’t happening. “Yeah. Groups. I want three uniforms with Darc, Mala and me.”
That seemed to catch Darc’s attention. He looked at Trey, then at Mala, then back at the ground. What was troubling the detective so much?
“The rest of you guys divide yourselves into groups of… let’s see…” Trey did a quick head count. “Five. That should give you four more groups with one cop left over. Squeeze him into one of those teams.”
“Should we search in a grid pattern?” Mala asked. “Or would a spiral pattern be better?”
“Grid,” came an utterance from Darc’s general vicinity.
“Grid it is,” Trey chimed in, pointing to three of the teams. “You guys head over that way as far as you can and go north-south. The rest of us will go east-west from here.”
The groups divided up, and Trey clapped his hands together. “I love it when a plan comes together,” he chuckled, then stopped. “Why am I getting such a strong sense of déjà vu?”
Mala could only hope that it was all in his imagination.
* * *
Officer Katy Burchfield followed her team out into the forest. At least it was still dusk. Mostly. If they were doing this search in the middle of the night, it would be so much creepier.
Just as she said that, the sky grew darker. The sun must have dipped further down below the horizon, or maybe gone behind an even thicker grouping of clouds. Now the typical Seattle grey sky had turned a much darker shade. Just her luck.
She pulled out her flashlight and pushed past a grouping of what looked like ivy. One of the plants she’d heard was an invader, or something like that. Non-native, anyway.
She’d been with the force for seven years. Starting off, she’d had a husband, Chad, and no kids. Now she had no husband and a son, Jake, that split his time between her and his newly out-and-proud dad who had decided to move to San Francisco.
Yeah, that wasn’t stereotypical or anything.
Good thing his new life-partner… no, that wasn’t true. Fiancé. They were getting married two months from now. Good thing Chad’s almost husband was a sweet guy.
The feelings surrounding the divorce were complex for her. She had loved Chad… still did, in fact… and wanted to be supportive. It just sucked. Bad.
At least she was dating someone now. Nights had gotten pretty lonely once Chad had left, and there was only so long you could convince your six-year-old boy to sleep in your bed before it started feeling weird. She figured she had another year of that. Maybe two, if she really stretched it. More than that, and his friends would probably find out. Or worse, her new boyfriend. Not that he would be an ass about it or anything, but it would be kind of embarrassing to admit that she couldn’t sleep well by herself.
She glanced over at Officer Kyle Laughlin and caught him looking back at her. Giving him a quick and secret smile, she swiveled her head left and right, making sure no one else had seen. Two cops dating wasn’t unheard of, but if people started finding out about it, it might end up in front of HR. That would not be such a great idea. The head of HR was a real prick.
Kyle didn’t look like much, but then again, Chad had been almost painfully handsome. She’d had her fill of boys who were prettier than she was.
He was a man’s man. Liked to camp, loved sports of all kinds, even went out fishing. He even enjoyed monster truck rallies. He’d taken Jake to his first just a couple of days ago. He was so good with her son.
Luckily he wasn’t a hunter. That would’ve been a nonstarter for Katy. She’d never gotten over watching
Bambi
as a kid.
And wow, was Kyle good between the sheets. She felt her skin flush as she thought about last night. It had been a long time since she’d felt wanted as a woman, but Kyle was making up for lost time.
Looking up ahead, she saw that they were entering a large clearing that was surrounded by five large trees, almost evenly spaced. She jogged to catch up and almost got a branch in the face that had been bent back by the officer in front of her.
“Hardy!” she yelled up at him. “What the hell! Watch what you’re doing.”
“Ah, shaddap, ya pussy.”
“That’s sexual harassment, Hardy. I’ll have your badge,” she joked.
“Hey, I got ya sexual harassment right here,” he said, spinning around and grabbing his crotch.
“Classy.”
She was about to say something about his obvious lack of heritage when Hardy tripped over something and fell over backwards. His limbs flew out in every direction, and Katy couldn’t help but think he looked like a clumsy starfish.
And then a bright white flame ignited in front of her, burning her retinas and forcing her to look away. But the afterimage engraved on her eyes included something else. Some kind of dark rectangle…
Her world exploded in a flash of superheated light and sound. There was only one thought that flitted through her mind.
At least Jake would still have his father.
* * *
The last thing in the world that Officer Tom Forrester wanted to be doing was trudging through a forest right before dark on a chilly October evening. He’d never been the outdoorsy type, much to the chagrin of his step-dad, Craig, who made it a point to go out hunting some kind of horned animal at least twice a year.
The chill in the air, the snap of twigs breaking under his team’s feet, the uncomfortable feeling that you couldn’t see what was coming from more than ten feet away… all of it brought back memories of trips spent trying to convince the half-drunk Craig that his step-son wasn’t a total wuss. Not really times Tom wanted to reminisce about any time soon. He blew out a breath, watching it mist in the air in front of his face.
At least he mostly liked his team. There were some good guys in this group. Well, all of them, really, except for his new partner, Officer Stick-up-his-ass Harper. Harper. At least his name was apropos. He liked to harp on pretty much anything he thought was out of line. Which seemed to be pretty much everything.
“Officers, we are starting to veer off of our east-west line,” Harper called out, his nasal tone cutting through the dense foliage.
“Aw, shut it, Harper. We’ve got to get around the trees somehow, don’t we?” one of the other officers yelled back. Tom couldn’t agree more.
Was the captain trying to punish him for something? Why saddle him with the one guy on the force who thought of getting a discount on donuts at the local bakery as some kind of a bribe? Tom wasn’t dirty, but according to Harper, he might as well be.
Even his partner’s speech pattern bugged Tom. Who talked like that? These were men you risked your life next to. Call them something other than
Officers
.
Didn’t matter.
One more hour or two and they would be out of here. Then he could head over to Rachel’s place, see if she’d let him in. It’d been weird between them ever since her roommate had come on to him when they’d all been out together at a bar. He hadn’t done anything about it, but he hadn’t told Rachel, either. Figured he didn’t want to ruin her relationship with her roommate.
Great idea. Too bad the roommate had gone and confessed. And somehow in her “confession,” Tom had come out looking like a total two-timing asshat.
It was fine. They’d been together for three years, and even Rachel knew that her roommate was batshit crazy. It might take a while, but they’d figure it out.
Peering ahead into a clearing of trees, Tom thought he might be seeing something. A form spread out on the ground… some kind of a…
“Hey, guys!” he called out. “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?”
It was a man, naked and spread eagle on the ground. Tom rushed forward to get a better look, when his foot snagged on something. A root, maybe? He tumbled forward and lifted up his head just in time to see the world ignite in a nightmarish chiaroscuro of extreme white light and sharp black shadow.
Right before a blossom of white heat hit the back of his skull, Tom saw the imprint of dark black curved lines. It was the afterimage of what the burning lines had imprinted on his sight.
From what he could tell, it looked like the flame had turned a sharp corner.
Strange.
Fire wasn’t supposed to do that.
* * *
There was a thud that Trey felt in his chest and then the ground seemed to move a bit underneath him.
“What the…?”
A searing white light was moving toward them at an angle, tracking its way through the forest, igniting everything in its path. And by
everything
, Trey meant
every single thing
. Even the greenest of the trees was igniting under the heat from that blaze.
Darc spotted the light and one word fell from his lips.
“
Move
.”
Trey spun around, grabbing Mala’s arm. “Everyone back the way they came. Now!” He sprinted through the forest, pulling Mala along as best he could. Well, pulling may have been the wrong word. He was attached to her, certainly. Who was doing the pulling was up for some amount of discussion.
“The hell was that?” yelled Sanchez, one of the uniforms from their group.
“What did I say about asking me questions?” Trey snapped back. There was no way of knowing how far they needed to go to be safe and he didn’t want an extended conversation stealing the breath he needed to keep his legs pumping up and down.
“We need to warn the other teams,” Mala panted. Sanchez heard and lifted his radio up just as another explosion rocked the woods.
“Shit!” he cried out as he ducked his head. He barked into his handset, “All units, pull back. Pull back!” Turning back to Trey and Mala, he spoke again. “We’ve got to get firefighters in here. Look at it! The whole place is going to light up. What is that?”
“Thermite,” came the answer from Darc’s direction. “And water will cause it to explode.”
“Wait,” Trey inserted. “Is that what’s going on over there?”
“It is an 86.3 percent probability that there are receptacles of water encased in metal along the path of the thermite.”
“So, like, water bombs or something?” Trey peered out into the gloom of the forest. Every so often, he would catch a glimpse of white-hot flame peeking in between the branches and trunks of trees. What was more disturbing was the orange-yellow glow that was starting to accompany it.
He pulled out his cell phone. Maybe the firefighters couldn’t do much without having access to water to put out the blaze, but Trey was going to give it a shot, regardless.
A squawk came over Sanchez’s radio. A voice issued out from the handset, sobbing, “We’ve lost three of our team! They were caught in the blast. Came out of nowhere.”
“Two from ours,” came another. “We’ve got a body here. The whole place is on fire!”
“Get out,” Sanchez called back, his tone rising in panic. “Get the fuck out of there!”
Trey looked over and saw Darc staring at him. There was no expression on his partner’s face, but he knew exactly what the bald detective was thinking.
“It was the right decision, Darc.”
“Was it?” Came the response. And damned if Trey didn’t have an answer for it.
Then Darc got an expression on his face. One that Trey had seen too many times before. His head cocked to the side. His fist clenched.
Dammit.
“He’s about to move, people,” Trey called out to the team. “I don’t know where he’s going or what he’d going to do, but it’s going to happen. Real fast.”
Trey just hoped that it wasn’t going to be in the direction of the fire.