Without it, I didn’t even know the time. I stared up at the sky, trying to read it like I knew what I was doing. I guessed noon by the height of the sun, but I’d never even been a Brownie as a little girl. I liked camping and the outdoors, but a wild trailblazer I was not. I insisted on an inflatable mattress every time, in fact.
I stood, again expecting the wash of dizziness.
Nothing.
As I cleared the hedges blocking my view, I could see the gigantic parking lot encircling the Set was only mildly full. Saturday morning wasn’t the busiest time—it certainly wasn’t the chaotic swarm of a Friday night.
Something glittered on the asphalt when I moved my head. I looked down. A small revolver sat on the ground, looking pathetic and cast-off. It didn’t even frighten me, I realized—in fact, I smirked. So much for the dream theory.
I knelt, and my bare knee scraped the asphalt. I barely noticed. Against the advice of every TV cop show I’d ever seen, I picked up the little gun and turned it in my hand.
It looked old, out-of-repair. It looked like a dad’s gun, absconded by a punk kid. My old shooting range sessions with my dad, another self-defense insistence, came back to me without too much trouble. I slid the small metal catch toward the grip, and the cylinder popped open.
I pushed the ejection rod, and the bullets all clattered onto the asphalt. Except one. One made a bright, hollow tinging sound before it came to rest. Five little cartridges stood out against the blacktop—the sixth was empty. Sans-bullet.
I touched my stomach again. I pinched the empty cartridge between two fingers and held it up to my eyes. Small, brass, insignificant. It didn’t even smell like powder anymore. I dropped it into my coat pocket, scattered the rest of the bullets with my foot, and kicked the revolver toward the hedges. It didn’t make it, but I didn’t care. The urge to hide my own murder wasn’t particularly strong.
I started walking. I knew I should stop, reflect, think. Check myself again, check more thoroughly. I heard about shock—I knew some people could keep fighting with their guts hanging out or whatever, but this didn’t seem to fit. I didn’t think shock made you hallucinate that you’d healed completely and survived both a gunshot wound and an entire night of unsupervised blood loss.
I kept my eyes forward, and my mind empty.
I left the office grounds and crossed the huge parking lot in a pleasant daze.
When I stepped up onto the sidewalk around the mall, after a Moses-like exile in the parking desert, I realized people were staring at me. The first couple I’d ignored—I had other things on my mind. It wasn’t until the third person passed by, staring at what looked like my chest in naked shock, that I put their confusion together.
I glanced down. My shirt was torn open into a pop star-like midriff-exposing masterpiece. The only thing ruining the image was the smear of dried blood streaking my belly. My eyes popped open, and I tugged my coat closed and buttoned it up to my chest. I groaned—further proof that no dream had taken place, and that no insanity spared my brain from some trauma. Other people were starting to notice it too—a special brand of crazy, if there was one.
I wondered briefly about
hallucinating
that people were staring at me, but that road lead to darkness. If my brain could dream up the people around me, then I was so deep into schizophrenia that I didn’t have to worry about it. Once you become so crazy, I guessed, everything becomes real. No use in nit-picking.
My eyes drifted across the small groups of people wandering through the brightly-decorated alleyways and streets of the Set, an outdoor mall designed as one-part maze, one-part Disneyland, and too-many-parts high school. Most people, this early on Saturday, looked to be married couples angling to beat the crowds. Only a few teenagers wandered the sidewalk, and most of them looked confused and kind of sad, like the zombies in
Dawn of the Dead
.
My second zombie reference in as many days. Both teenage references too. I wondered if I had something going there.
I watched them all with a distant kind of haze creeping through my body—I felt oddly warm, and yet my mouth felt cold, like before a really good regurgitation. My fingertips tingled, and I felt an ice water trickle dripping down my back. The skin of my arms and chest and face radiated heat. When I touched my fingers to my cheek, it felt like I was storing hot coals in my mouth. I pinched my tongue with two fingers, a rather strange inspection, I admit, and it burned, too.
What the hell?
The symptoms began to creep into my body not long after I entered the mall and the further I walked, the deeper into the mall, my feverish heat only escalated. I wasn’t sweating, but I should have been—it felt like the middle of summer had risen from the grave to throw its angry radiance on me and me alone. Some of the people around me were wearing jackets.
I wanted to climb out of my coat, but that wasn’t gonna happen, not with the I-killed-a-hobo blood streaking my body. That and the shirt that I’d torn open was whorish and tacky. A minor concern, I realized, but it didn’t change my mind at all.
The ice water sluicing down my back became colder as my skin began to blaze. I thought about hot flashes, and I snorted. I was a little young for menopause, magic bullet be damned.
My fingers touched the cold brass casing in the pocket of my coat. I felt a very real, very normal chill. I pulled my hand out of my pocket like I’d discovered a snake in my coat.
Before I could ponder my symptoms any longer, a hand seized my wrist and tugged me out of my musings.
“Wuh—?”
My eyes snapped first to the wrist of my assailant, and then to his face. Before the flight or fight instinct could even begin to take hold, the fires of defiance died. Smothered, in fact, by a shiny nickel badge pinned to a dark blue shirt.
“Excuse me, miss,” the cop said. “Can I see your ID?”
He released my wrist almost instantly—I think he counted on his badge to do the rest of the work.
“S-sure,” I said.
I dug through the pockets of my coat, and my mind did cartwheels when I felt the bullet casing. I didn’t think it was illegal to carry an empty shell around, but my hammering heart wasn’t sure.
I fished my California ID, another insistence of my over-protective father, out of my black-and-rhinestone wallet and handed it to the cop. He took it in one hand. His eyes were unreadable under black glass, and his face was stone.
“Lucy Day?”
I nodded.
“Would you mind coming with me?”
“N-no,” I said. The heat inside me blossomed, like I’d just chugged a pot of scalding coffee and jumped into a lobster pot. I bit my lip and tried to imagine what a tub full of ice cubes would feel like.
I followed him through the Set, failing miserably to ignore the stares of a hundred looky-loos. A cop in the mall wasn’t a fascinating concept. A cop dragging an errant, bedraggled-looking teenager to a cop car was always good for a rubberneck.
His car hugged the front curb, and he gestured for me to lean against it.
I did. He looked me up and down, consulted something in his leather-bound notepad, and then handed me a slip of paper.
It was a printout, on normal computer paper. A picture of me and Zack and Morgan all striking ridiculous poses. Morgan’s fingers mimicked snail antenna behind her head, Zack had a growly look on his face, and I was cross-eyed. Benny had taken that picture on his cell phone the night before.
Of course. Of course that’s the picture they gave to the police. I looked like an idiot.
“This is you?” he asked me.
I glanced up at him to see if he was joking. I was wearing the exact same clothes in the picture, and my hair hadn’t changed a bit. I nodded.
“Yes,” I said, with a reluctant sigh.
“Your parents and friends have been searching for you since dawn—they were worried about finding your body in a gutter.”
I nodded, numb. I hadn’t thought about that. The thought of Zack and the others—what they must have thought when I disappeared. They’d all gone into some stupid sign shop, and I’d gone to the bathroom across the way. When I’d run into the Idiots-Five, I’d been alone. None of my friends had any idea what had happened to me.
And Mom and Dad
. I felt my face go white.
“You look afraid,” the cop said. I looked up at his badge—Sykes. Of course. Such a cop name.
“I am,” I said.
“Good,” Sykes said. His granite face hadn’t changed, but the tone in his voice was disgust.
“I didn’t run off,” I said. Despite the worry for my friends and family, I felt a bright red point of anger in my chest. “I wasn’t off with some boy or something. I was attacked. Thank you for your concern.”
Sykes straightened immediately—the casual, teacher-like posture of his body sprang into a soldier’s pose. Still, his movements were measured, without haste, as he opened up his leather notepad again and snapped a pen from his shirt.
“Your name?”
“What?”
“Name?”
I sighed, “Lucy Abigail Day.”
“Age?”
“Don’t you know this?”
“Age?”
“Fifteen.”
It went on until he’d acquired all of my apparently relevant data. Then he picked up his radio, something I thought he should have done a while ago, and spat a series of codes, the fact that he’d found me, and his current location. I sat against the cop car while he sent a request to terminate the amber alert. I recognized that, at least. It meant a kid had gone missing or been abducted. I sighed. My parents were thinking the worst.
But what had happened? Hadn’t the worst happened?
Had I just…recovered?
“Who attacked you?” he asked.
“Aren’t you calling my parents?”
“It’s already been done. I told them I’m on my way with you.”
“What about my friends?”
“I imagine your parents will call them,” Sykes said. “Who attacked you?”
I sighed and painted a loose, watercolor version of the truth. Five guys—I gave him good descriptions of only the guy who caught up with me first, the bald guy, and Fatty. None of the rest of them had stood out, beyond being total creepers. I explained I’d been a little too freaked out to whip out my camera phone, which didn’t exactly quell Sykes’ pissed-off tone. I told him about the gun, and from there I veered into true pants-on-fire territory.
“I don’t think he wanted to shoot me,” I said. “We struggled, and then. He hit me. On the head.”
“Where?”
Panic. I took a deep breath.
“The back of my head.”
Sykes gestured for me to turn around.
“Could you hold your hair out of the way, ma’am?”
I felt for the raw patch, rubbed red by the asphalt, and prayed to Oprah that it would fool him. I split the hair around the back of my skull to give him a better look.
“Hmm.”
“What?”
“And then what happened?”
I shrugged, “I woke up in the parking lot.”
“What parking lot?”
I told him the name of the office building. His pencil scribbled long graceful A-plus penmanship lines into his pad.
“Were you sexually assaulted?”
My breath caught in my throat.
“Wuh…”
The officer’s face softened. He tugged off his glasses and slipped them into the pocket of his shirt.
“Sorry,” he said, pale blue eyes staring into mine. “Were your clothes in disarray, any pain or discomfort?”
“No, no,” I said, and that was true. Not from lack of trying—those bastards probably thought I was too dead to party with. They were like real knights in that way. “I think…I think they freaked out. Thought I was dead, I don’t know. They didn’t seem like experts. Or human. Or subhuman—”
“Anything stolen?”
“No,” I said.
“How does your head feel?”
“Fuzzy,” I said. “But it doesn’t hurt very much.”
He nodded, his pencil flying.
“I think it’s time to take you home, let you rest,” Sykes said. He reached over to pop the back door open. I climbed into it.
He moved around the car and slid into the driver’s seat. I noticed his ink-black glasses were already back on his face, and his
nothing
expression had returned.
“I don’t need to go to the station, or the hospital, or—?”
“Do you feel like you need to go to the hospital?”
“Not really.”
“And I’ve got the information I need. We’ll be calling you with more information or questions.”
Sykes keyed in his car radio and spat out the short version of my story, and the location of the parking lot where I’d been attacked. Another patrolman squawked back that he’d check it out. My chest boomed like a cannon. They’d find the gun in seconds, find it open. Find a bullet missing.
Sykes put the car in drive and pulled away from the curb.
There’d be no bullet casing. I knew they could tell when a gun had been fired, but without the casing they’d have no evidence of anything. And without a bullet, wherever the hell that had gone, they’d just guess the gun had been emptied. At the very least, the story I’d told the cop didn’t seem to break with reality on any major parts. The gun would confuse them, but that’s it.
They’d get my fingerprints off the gun—but that fit my story about the struggle. They’d get Baldy’s fingerprints, too, and maybe they’d catch him. As the police car turned onto the freeway, my mind wandered further.
I felt a cold lake sloshing in my belly. A million doubts, a million worries.
What if I did go to the hospital? What if they x-rayed me and found a little lump of lead in my stomach, with no bullet hole or trail? What then?
The strange heat had died, I realized. It had faded to just a point of warmth in my chest as soon as the car had pulled away from the mall. I wasn’t awash in flames anymore, and I even had a hard time recalling the sensation. It had been like being immersed in warm honey.
The car pulled up to the curb in front of my house. My belly wasn’t going to expel the thick knot of terror any time soon, I realized. Neither of them were outside, but that didn’t mean anything; they were probably inside, making calls, making assurances. Trying to bring my friends back, maybe, tell them I was safe. When the car creaked to a stop, Sykes half-turned in his seat.