The April Special Guest Story is by Joe McKinney
Please feel free to visit Joe at: http://joemckinney.wordpress.com/
EYES OPEN
by Joe McKinney
The two Houston police officers sat in their patrol car, watching the homeless guy they’d just stopped. It was late July, the night air dripping with humidity and heat, but the homeless guy was wearing two ratty gray coats, a shapeless brown hat, old boots without laces, the tongues yawning down over the instep, and mud-stained blue pants. The right pant leg was rolled up to the knee. His face was blistered and oozing from exposure. His movements were hurky-jerky, stutter-stop. He’d stamp one foot on the ground or jerk his head around, looking over his shoulder like there was someone there, whispering in his ear.
“Why do you think he’s doin that?” the officer behind the wheel said. His name was Paul Baker, and he was two months out of the Academy. He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, eager but uncertain.
The officer in the passenger seat, a clipboard in his lap, was Jeff Collins. He was overweight and his face was tinted with hypertension. Years of chewing tobacco had given his teeth a yellow coat of varnish. He looked unkempt compared to the spit and polish of the younger officer, but he had the calm, almost bored reassurance of a veteran.
“He kinda looks like the poster boy for Halidol, doesn’t he?” Collins said.
“What’s Halidol?”
“A drug they give people with schizophrenia. Take it long enough and it burns out the nervous system. Destroys the motor functions. Sometimes you’ll see these guys twitching or kicking a leg out for no reason. They can’t control it.”
Baker regarded the homeless man. “You think he’s schizophrenic?”
“Maybe. I’ve never dealt with him before. But if he is, he’ll be hard to communicate with. Keep a safe distance, but be ready to take him down if we need to.”
“You want me to do the talking?” Baker asked.
“No, let me do this.”
Baker nodded, but he looked relieved. “Okay.”
They got out and scanned the area before moving on the homeless guy. The lot was paved with crumbling asphalt and bordered by rangy, knee-high cheatgrass. There was a vast, dark drainage ditch beyond that.
Collins moved around to the front of the patrol car and stole a glance at the billboard above them. It was another of those damned Eyes Open signs - a plain black background with a pair of cartoon yellow eyes leering down at them. It was only a drawing, but there was an ominousness to it that gave Collins an inward shudder.
Lately, they’d been popping up everywhere, but always near the freeway, always near the intersections frequented by the homeless and the panhandlers. Collins had no idea what they were advertising, because there was no writing on them, besides Coming Soon..., but more than once he’d heard the homeless when they gathered around the base of the billboards and stared up at those eyes murmuring the word Nyarlathotep Nyarlathotep Nyarlathotep over and over again, like it was some kind of prayer, their eyes shining with horrified devotion.
Nyarlathotep Nyarlathotep Nyarlathotep
It was the same word the homeless man in front of them had been yelling at cars between long winded rants that prophesized horrible doom by flood, and it was one reason why Collins doubted the man was schizophrenic. Schizophrenic delusions usually weren’t contagious. Schizophrenics, in his experience, didn’t get together and all decide to have the same delusion at the same time - like a sleepover, or a Pampered Chef party.
The other reason he doubted the man was schizo, and Collins almost hated to admit this, even to himself, was that the man’s rambling prophecies had made a kind of lunatic sense. It wasn’t something he was able to put in to words. It was more of a feeling than something he knew and was able to define, sort of like the way a dream makes sense during the dreaming, but fails to translate in the retelling. It was hauntingly familiar, enough like something from his own head that he couldn’t dismiss it as the gibberish of a lunatic.
Collins moved away from the car, about forty-five degrees to the right of the man. He glanced over at Baker and saw the younger officer moving about the same distance to the left of the man, and he thought, Outstanding. The kid’s got good instincts.
The man had a panicked, cornered-animal look in his eyes, and he held up his hands like they were some kind of shield. “Stay back,” he shrieked. “You don’t know...the sea worm... Stay back! It eats the dead floating in the streets. Stay back!”
Sea worm? Collins thought. What the hell?
“What’s your name?” Collins said.
“The sea worm eats the dead. Demon...lurking in the dark. He’s awake. After twenty-seven centuries...you don’t know. Your eyes aren’t open.”
“What’s your name?” Collins said again, his voice implacably calm.
The man lurched. He shook his head and stamped his feet. He screamed, and then he began to weep. It was the weeping of one who is soul sick, who’s been tortured by pain that transcends the body’s ability to suffer.
Baker watched the man nervously, his right hand twitching inches from the collapsible ASP baton he carried just behind his gun. Collins glanced at him and gave him a sign. Easy kid, it said, no sudden moves.
“What’s your name?” Collins said.
This time the man seemed to hear him. He snapped his eyes up to meet Collins’, then quickly looked away.
“Mark,” he said.
“Mark,” Collins repeated. “Your name is Mark?”
The man nodded.
“Mark, I’m a police officer. I’m here to help you.”
Mark shook his head violently. “No. You can’t see. You don’t know. Your eyes aren’t open.”
“Mark, listen to me. Mark. I’m here to help. Can you hear me?”
“Yes.”
“Good, now Mark - ” Mark jerked his head around again, expecting to see someone there, whispering over his shoulder. “Mark,” Collins said gently, “look at me. Are you hearing voices?”
Mark looked at Collins, and suddenly he was crying again. “Yes,” he said, his whole body racking with sobs. “All the time. They won’t...they won’t stop.”
“Mark, let us help you, okay?”
The homeless man collapsed to his knees on the pavement and Collins advanced on him, inching forward with deliberate slowness.
“Mark, I want to take you to a doctor. Get you some help.” Collins waited. “Mark, is it okay if I come closer to you?” Collins continued to inch forward, one hand extended out like he was offering to take Mark’s hand and pull him back from the edge of a cliff or the ledge of a building.
“Don’t touch me!” Mark said.
“I’m not gonna hurt you, Mark.”
“No!” Mark shouted. “If you touch me, he’ll see you.” Mark turned his tear-stained face up at the billboard and met its yellow, baleful eyes. “Don’t let him see you. If he sees you, he’ll open your eyes like he opened mine. You don’t want to see what I do...the other world...where he lives.”
Never, ever, play into the delusions of a mental illness, Collins remembered from his training, the same training he’d given in turn to many young officers like Baker, who was standing nearby, right hand poised over his baton. Playing into a delusion only validates the person’s fears and makes it that much harder to reach them.
Collins remembered that on some level, but the words came out anyway. “Who?” he asked. “Who is that up there? Who will see me?”
“Nyarlathotep,” Mark said in a conspiratorial whisper. “The sea worm.”
That name again, Collins thought.
“Mark, come on. Stand up. Let’s take you to a doctor.”
“Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” Mark asked.
Collins looked into Mark’s eyes, those haunted, insane eyes, and for a terrifying moment, he wasn’t sure.
“Come with me, Mark,” he said.
Mark dropped his eyes to the pavement, then nodded, stood up, and just like that, it was over. Collins led Mark to the police car, put him in the backseat, and then turned to Baker, smiling with a confidence that he did not truly feel.
“Piece of cake,” he said.
*****
Mark was docile as a lamb in the car. His full name was Mark Simmons, thirty-two years old from the date of birth he gave, though he hadn’t come up on the computer when they’d run him for warrants, so there was no way to verify that information short of taking him down to the jail and running him through the booking process. When they’d pulled up on him he’d been out in the middle of the intersection, spouting his doom and gloom about flooded cities and a demonic sea worm eating the bloated and blackened corpses floating in the streets, scaring the crap out of the drivers who had to swerve into the oncoming traffic lanes to keep from stopping near him, so they had enough to book him for “Impeding Traffic” if they needed to…and in the old days, Collins ruminated, that’s exactly what they would have done. But these days the new trend in police dealings with the “mental health consumer” - the new PC term for someone who was a complete nut job - was jail diversion. It was a process designed to avoid using the jails as a dumping ground for those who wouldn’t, or couldn’t, remember to take their medication, and in the process get the wackos the help of a trained mental health professional. One more move towards a kinder and gentler police department. Collins didn’t mind though. Most of the time it was actually faster than booking them anyway, and so, as Baker drove, Collins entered Mark Simmons’ information on a yellow sheet - the field contact information page of the Houston Police Department’s Routine Incident Report - and slipped it into the three ring binder he kept in his patrol bag. It contained everything he knew about all the homeless people in his patrol section, and included Polaroid snapshots whenever possible.
Baker pulled their car into the sally port reserved for the police at the Margaret McCullough Mental Health Clinic and Collins helped Mark out of the backseat.
“Mark, I want to take your picture, okay?”
Mark shook his head violently. He wasn’t angry, just emphatic, urgent. NO, NO, NO!!!!
“Mark,” Collins said, “you’re not in trouble. You’re not getting arrested. What I do is take your picture and keep it in my binder here. That way, I come across you again, I know who you are. Nothing to it. Now come on. Stand there. By the fender.”
Baker came around the front of the car and said, “Come on, Mark. What’s the problem, buddy? You know we’re not gonna hurt you.”
“You don’t know...” Mark said, trailing off.
Collins pointed the Polaroid at him, waited till he looked up, and snapped the photo. It rolled out the bottom of the camera. Collins took it by the thick white tab at the bottom and shook it. He checked it a few times as Mark’s image resolved itself out of the gray field, but Collins could tell almost immediately that the image hadn’t taken. Mark’s head was a blur, like the shutter had stuck in the open position and all the while Mark had been shaking his head NO, NO, NO, NO, NO!!!
Collins frowned at the picture, then chunked it onto the passenger seat with his three ring binder. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”
Baker, his voice sounding like he was trying to coax a scared child onto a rollercoaster, said, “Come on now, Mark. Don’t be scared. Let me help you.”
“Don’t touch me!” Mark said, jerking his arm away and taking a few steps to the side. He seemed to shrink into a ball, even though he was standing up straight.
“Now, Mark,” Baker said. “You be a good boy, okay? That’s no way to act.” He took a step toward Mark, who in turn took a few more steps back.
Collins decided enough was enough and got between them. “Mark,” he said, “go over that way. Through that glass door.”
Mark did like he was told and Collins and Baker followed him, Collins giving Baker a hard look and Baker giving him a confused look back, one that said, What’d I do wrong?
They were inside the lobby now. The room was dark, lit by a small lamp on a built-in wooden desk against the back wall. There was a table off to the right, on the left a maroon couch with a knobby fabric worn to a shine on the arms. Hendrix’s Purple Haze played softly on a radio in a backroom somewhere.
A big black woman with arms that sagged with fat came in and got some basic information from them. Collins let Baker handle that part of it, for training purposes. She tried to get it from Mark as well, but he wouldn’t speak to her. He just stood there, refusing to take a seat, staring off into space.
She left, and the three of them stood there in silence. “Hey, Mark,” Baker said, “why don’t you be a good boy and sit down, okay? There on the couch.”
“Go screw yourself.”
Baker stiffened and his eyes narrowed to hostile slits.
Mark stared back at the younger officer with the defiance of one who’s lost so much he has nothing left to fear.
“What did you say to me?” Baker said, ready to give Mark a slap across the side of his head as soon as spoke again.
“Don’t treat me like a child,” he said. “I’m crazy. I’m not stupid.”
Baker blinked, disarmed by the man’s obvious shame.
Collins said, “Paul, they’re gonna need the mandatory commitment papers. They keep ‘em in the office back there. Go fill ‘em out, okay?”
Baker looked away from Mark, embarrassed now for the hurt he’d caused. “Sure,” he said. “Yeah, okay.”
Baker left and Mark looked at Collins. Collins looked back at him and thought about saying something. He had no intention of apologizing for the younger officer, but he had no idea what else to say.
Mark saved him the trouble.
“Do you know what you’ve done?”
“What I’ve...”
“He can see you now,” Mark said, and when he looked at Collins, his face shone with the cold, clear light of sanity. “He’s marked you.”
“Who?”
“He’s coming soon. You can feel it, can’t you? I can see it in the way you look at me…different than the way that other cop sees me. Part of you wants to call me crazy. But there’s a part of you that can feel him too.” He leered at Collins now. “You know, or think you know. Soon you’ll know more. You’ll see like I do.”
Collins moved his head slightly side to side, but when he tried to speak, his voice faltered. There was a cold, insipient dread moving through him that made him tremble.
“I...don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Your eyes will be opened soon, and then you’ll see. You’ll see.”
And then, with perfectly steady hands, Mark crooked the first two fingers of each hand together and scooped them into his eye sockets like he was digging for coins in wet sand. There was no screaming, no writhing in agony on the floor, just a smooth, ghastly, deliberate motion.
Collins gasped, too shocked by the horror of it to move, and seconds blinked away before he lunged forward and wrestled Mark to the ground. He held him by the wrists, trying to pull his hands away from his eyes, all the while screaming for help.
Baker and the nurse came running, and a moment later Baker was next to Collins, the two of them forcing the homeless man’s bloody hands down on the carpet.
Empty pits stared up at them.
Baker gagged, then stifled it into his shoulder.
Collins was panting in disbelief. He looked up at Baker, then back down to Mark, his gaze catching a trail of gore that led to one of Mark’s upturned eyeballs.
Collins stared at the eye, and for a moment, just a moment, caught the glint of a vile, baleful understanding behind it that hadn’t been there when it stared at him from inside of Mark’s head.
*****
Jeff Collins had Thursdays and Fridays off. The mess with Mark Simmons had been on Wednesday. Ordinarily, on Wednesday nights, he’d be home before eleven pm, where he’d flop down on the couch with a bag of chips and a couple of beers and watch documentaries on the Discovery Channel until he couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer. But Mark Simmons had ruined that. After the horror of watching the man pluck his own eyes out, he and Baker had to go to the hospital and check on the man’s status. Then there’d been the reports, the endless, mind-numbing reports. When he’d finally made it home it was nearly four in the morning, and he’d gone straight to bed, where he’d dreamt fevered dreams of flooded streets, bodies floating on the brackish water, and always, the feeling of something coldly evil moving just below the surface of the water, lurking just out of sight, watching him from the darkened corners of wrecked buildings.
He awoke a little after three in the afternoon, and though he’d slept a long time, he was exhausted. His muscles ached, and his skin felt damp and clammy. He shivered, even though the late afternoon Houston sun had all but overpowered his apartment’s feeble air conditioner.
Collins slipped on an old t-shirt and wandered from his bedroom to the kitchen, where he drank milk straight from the carton. Dead on his feet, he placed it back on the top shelf of the refrigerator next to three beers and an apple and staggered over to the couch.
He turned on the TV and saw the end of a documentary on the Luftwaffe, then part of one about U.S. currency. He changed channels and found another on Brazil. Another on chimps. Still another on the life of Nicola Tesla.
He flipped the channels hurriedly, with a restless agitation, like he was waiting on bad news. And then he stopped, frozen by an image that was at once wearily familiar, and yet so like a nightmare it made his stomach turn, the milk in his gut curdling. From the bow of a metal bass boat the camera’s POV panned across the flooded streets of New Orleans’ Ninth Ward. There were black and bloated corpses festooned in the crotches of trees and dead-eyed zombie looking people staring back at the camera from the porches of clapboard houses, the houses up to their waists in flood water. His feet had been up on the coffee table, but he let them drop to the floor as the images changed to Malaysia after the tsunami of 2004. After that it was Havana in 2002. Then the Playa del Oro Coast of Southern Mexico the year before that.
He swallowed, and closed his eyes.
Collins was born and raised in Houston, and he was old enough to remember the fury of Hurricane Alicia in the 1980s. He remembered the relentless train wreck sound of the wind, the rain striking the glass of his mother’s trailer so hard it shattered all the windows on the southern side - the side that faced the ocean and got the briny scent of the Gulf of Mexico at night. He remembered taking shelter with his mother in a hall closet, she holding him so tightly her grip left bruises on his skin, he trying with all his might to stop shaking, to be brave.
The next morning he’d crawled up onto the roof of their trailer and looked at the wreckage around him. Caramel-colored water had covered everything as far as he could see to a depth of about four feet. The roofs of cars peaked above the water. Long, black, ribbon-like water moccasins glided past the tops of swing sets. He even saw a sixty foot shrimping boat with a massive hole blown in its stern toppled against the crown of a pine tree, and he was awed by the forces that had carried it the seven miles from its dock at the Houston Ship Channel.
When he opened his eyes he was sweating, his t-shirt and boxer shorts stuck to his skin. His hands were shaking, and his fingernails, which he chewed constantly, were a sickly yellow. He felt restless, oddly on edge, and though his head was swimming, he pulled on a pair of blue jeans, some old tennis shoes, and went downstairs to his pickup.
The sky was the color of a fresh bruise. Roiling gray storm clouds moved so low to the ground it seemed they might rip the brass ball from the top of the apartment complex’s flag pole on the opposite side of the lot. But he paid it no mind. He barely saw it. He drove without thinking, no thought to where he was going. The endless urban sprawl of Houston’s east side slipped past his windows. Apartments and fast food restaurants gave way to warehouses and vacant, crumbling buildings. Well dressed pedestrians and joggers gave way to junkies and then to the homeless. Collins took in the change, but didn’t care. His head was a soupy mess, his thoughts still somewhere back in the past, a little boy in a drowned world of urban ruins, the real world around him growing cloudy.
*****
He awoke with a car horn blaring behind him. Startled, he sat up straight and looked around. Night had fallen. He was stopped in the middle of an intersection, an empty, weed-choked lot to his left, a trashed out white cinder block building to his right. Through its broken front windows he could see the inside was scrawled with graffiti and the floor piled with garbage, like junkies had been living there.
A beat up Cadillac with a bad exhaust chugged around him. The driver shouted, “You drunken asshole!” and sped off with his finger up in the air.
A few raindrops hit the windshield, big ones that exploded with a noisy splash against the glass. Through the open driver’s side window of his pickup he could smell the approaching storm, and as he rolled up the window, the rain started coming down. It was on him suddenly, a hard, pelting rain that moved over the street in silvery sheets and sounded like eggs sizzling on the truck’s hood.
He turned on the headlights and ran a hand through his hair, wondering what in the hell had happened to him. He couldn’t remember how he’d got here. He wasn’t really even sure where he was, which was odd, for him. As a policeman, he believed his mental map of the city to be almost infallible, yet he could not escape the fact that he had absolutely no idea where he was, and it made him feel helpless.
The windshield wipers slapped at the rain. He tried to think clearly, but couldn’t. He felt dizzy, disoriented - and then, suddenly, motion! Somebody had walked through the headlight beams of his truck. He sat up straight and blinked.
“What the...”
He tried to spot the man again, but couldn’t. The rain was coming down too hard.
Lightning flashed, and in the fraction of a second that it lit the night around him, he saw what looked like hundreds of people walking through the gaps between the buildings to his right. A momentary wave of panic seized him as the crowd formed out of the rain and walked around his truck like it was a rock in a stream. There were more of them every minute, but they ignored him completely. They walked right by him, oblivious to his presence.
Partly in shock he opened his door and stepped out into the rain. It soaked him through in an instant, and he blinked the water from his eyes. They were the homeless, every single one of them smelling of fetid clothes and rot, their mouths trembling as they chanted the name Nyarlathotep Nyarlathotep Nyarlathotep.
Collins grabbed the first man he could put his hands on and said, “What are you people doing?” He had to shout just to hear his own voice over the roar of the rain. “Answer me!”
But the man wouldn’t, or couldn’t, answer him. He stared off into nothing, his eyes vacant holes.
Collins let him go and the man continued walking like he’d never stopped. He was soaked through now, his t-shirt stuck to him like a second skin, his hair matted to his head. For one fleeting moment he stared at the murmuring crowd and thought of that scene in the movie The Mummy with Brendan Frasier where the wimpy brother of the leading lady wanders into that crowd of zombiefied people all chanting Imhotep Imhotep Imhotep, and he almost laughed. He would have, too, had he not happened to glance in the direction all those hundreds of homeless were walking just as a ferocious snake of lightning tore through the sky directly above him, illuminating the field to his left. In that horrible fraction of a second he saw what looked to be an abandoned lumber yard about three hundred feet away, the shell of an enormous barn at the crest of a slight hill there grabbing his complete attention. Rivers of the homeless were moving into it from every direction, and the sight of all those thousands moving towards it, like the faithful of some strange and horrible religion, so unnerved him, so unhinged him, that he found himself staggering that way, leaving his truck behind in the intersection, the driver’s side door still open to the storm, the headlights staring out aimlessly into the night.
He left the street and entered the field that led up to the hanger-like barn at the top of the hill. The rain needled at his eyes, but he was too stunned, too unfocused, to care. He staggered forward through the debris-choked grassy field, garbage and oddly shaped chunks of concrete everywhere, unaware that he had fallen in with the others, that he was part of the river of the homeless that was coursing its way toward that ruined building.
He felt a strange sense of detachment, like he was under a glass bell jar, all his senses shut off from the outside world, and he was surprised and horrified when he caught himself murmuring along with the others –
Nyarlathotep Nyarlathotep Nyarlathotep
Stop it, he told himself. That part of his mind that was still holding on, that hadn’t gone over completely into an idiot’s bliss where nothing existed but the repetition of the name
(Nyarlathotep Nyarlathotep Nyarlathotep)
struggled to extricate itself from the rest of his mind. And yet he couldn’t stop. He couldn’t make himself step away from the crowd and stop murmuring that accursed name
(Nyarlathotep Nyarlathotep Nyarlathotep.)
And then he was inside the hanger-like barn. It was just a shell, a wooden frame with walls of graffiti-scrawled corrugated tin, but of amazing size. Lightning flashed, illuminating the outside world through the gaps in the tin sheets with a blue, rain-smeared light. The rivers of the homeless poured up the hill, clammoring to get inside. The building swelled with their numbers, and yet still they came, their endless masses.
Ratty men in ratty clothes pushed against Collins, jostling him. Their smell was penetrating, overpowering, the depth of its sour corruption making him nauseous. He felt himself losing focus, his thoughts so muddled he could barely keep his feet.
He tried to breathe, but couldn’t. His chest was a broken pump, unable to pull air in or push it out. Panic flooded through him. The ceiling above him became alive with lightning. It streaked across the rafters, exploding with an endless shower of white sparks, and as he watched them fall he saw the open-mouthed awe on the faces around him, like children beguiled by the slitted eyes of a serpent.
Nyarlathotep Nyarlathotep Nyarlathotep, they murmured, all of them finding a sort of rhythm that made their quiet individual voices a collective crashing cadence in his head.
Something was moving through the crowd, gliding like a snake, but without form. Collins could sense it feeding, taking its strength from the repetition of its name, for he knew on some level that he couldn’t explain that Nyarlathotep was its name.
And then, it marked him. It singled him out from the crowd, and he imagined some impossibly huge snake-like beast, miles long and hungry, turning its head in his direction, taking his measure, picking him out of the crowd as if it could hear one heart beating out of time with the others. He had no idea how he knew this. Only that he did know it was true, and that the thing, whatever it was, was coming, gliding his way through the sea of swaying bodies.
“Let me out!” Collins screamed, and fought his way to the door, fists and elbows flying in a mad, desperate dash for survival. Something was at his back, breathing its hot, corrupt breath that smelled of twenty-seven centuries of sleep and darkness and madness on him, and when he burst through the crowd and into the night the rain hit his face and he did not stop running. He crashed down the hill, tearing his way through the tall grass and knotted rebar and chunks of concrete until the rain and the mud were too much for him and he collapsed.
With his face and his fists full of mud he turned and watched in horrified wonder as blue lightning struck the barn and exploded it in a flash of searing white light. It shook the earth with a force that was almost like a wave tearing at the very fabric of his senses. He felt the impact move through him, and when at last, crying softly to himself, his tears bleeding into the rain on his cheeks, he opened his eyes, he saw the world anew, but horribly new, changed.
Everything was in ruins. Everything was flooded. The Houston skyline, which he knew almost by heart, was a blackened mess of crumbling skyscrapers and gutted buildings, the streets tangled by debris, and everywhere, the black, motionless thickness of water.
But the wreckage was merely the canvass for the real horror. The real horror was the coiling, eyeless worm that - miles long and as thick as the buildings it choked - wound through the wreckage and fed off the dead, the fortunate dead, whose bloated, blackened bodies floated in formless pirouettes in the eddies of the flood waters.
Collins stared at it, crying, dimly aware that this reality was lensing in and out with another reality, a former reality, with its sights and sounds of cars splashing on a rain soaked freeway and sirens in the distance, and everywhere, in his head, from the air, from behind him, as if someone were whispering over his shoulder, came the pulsing chant of the thing’s terrible name...
Nyarlathotep Nyarlathotep Nyarlathotep
*****
The two Houston police officers sat in their patrol car, watching the homeless guy they’d just pulled up on. It was a cool November evening, not yet so cold that the officers had had to break out their winter gear, but still brisk. The Crown Victoria’s heater was set to low, the windows up. The radio was turned down low. It was a Monday night and the calls had been few and far between.
“This is the guy you’ve been looking for?” the younger officer behind the wheel asked. His name was Derek Fenton, a slick, clean cut college grad, part of the HPD’s recent recruiting drive on college campuses across the country to get better educated, more well rounded officers in the ranks.
“That’s him,” Jeff Baker said. Baker was an FTO now, a five-year veteran who had seen a lot and learned a lot about a job that always seemed to turn out surprises. In his lap was a small black nylon duffle bag.
“Who is he?” Fenton asked.
Baker, lost in thought, said, “My old FTO.”
“Get out,” Fenton said. He smiled at Baker, his look saying You’re kidding me, but the expression melted when he saw the sadness in Baker’s eyes.
“You’re kidding?” Fenton said. “That guy...was a cop?”
“A good one,” Baker said. “I heard something he did once. On New Year’s Eve. He got a call for an autistic boy who thought for sure the world was gonna end at midnight. The kid’s Mom couldn’t handle him ‘cause he was getting violent. Most cops, they’d have just told the woman to deal with it. But not him. You know what he did?”
“What?”
“He sat on the kitchen floor with the kid and they picked street names out of a map book till midnight past.”
Fenton went Hmmm, like he had expected more of a punch line, and Baker smiled. The kid had no idea how hard a thing something that really was. No idea at all.
“He was a good cop,” Baker said. “He cared about people.”
Fenton nodded, eager to please, ready to forget about the homeless ex cop and go put his handcuffs on somebody.
Baker fingered the duffle bag, watching Collins in the glare of the patrol car’s spotlights. Collins was moving restlessly from one foot to the other, turning his head every few seconds, suddenly, like he was looking for somebody who whispering in his ear.
“What’s in the bag?” Fenton asked.
Baker sighed. “A new jacket, package of underwear, socks, two pairs of blue jeans, some blankets, and about sixty dollars in cash.”
Fenton squinted at Baker. “You...give him all that stuff?”
“Whenever I can. I need to check his boots. See if he needs another pair. He’s hard on boots. And gloves too. It’ll be getting cold soon.” Baker regarded Collins for a moment, then said to Fenton, “You can stay in the car. I’ll only be a second.”
“Sure,” Fenton said.
Baker got out and approached Collins. Collins wouldn’t look directly at him. He half faced the officer, but the lights were too bright, the glare too much.
“I brought you a couple of things you’ll need,” Baker said. “Winter’s coming soon.”
The words seem to stir something in Collins. He turned pained eyes up at Baker, his expression full of fear and sorrow and hideous knowledge. “No,” he said, and shook his head.
“You’ll need warmer clothes,” Baker said, and held out the duffle bag. “Lemme see your boots. I can bring you another pair next - ”
“No,” Collins said, shrinking away. “Don’t touch me.”
“It’s okay,” Baker said. “I won’t...” He held out the duffle bag. “I just want to give you...”
“No,” Collins said, urgently now. “Don’t touch me. You don’t...want to touch me. You don’t want...don’t want to see.”
“It’s okay,” Baker said. “Really.”
Collins continued to shrink away, but he tripped, and landed in a heap at Baker’s feet. Baker reached for him, dropping the bag and taking Collins’ hands in his in one smooth motion.
Collins pulled away, but didn’t get up. He looked at his hands, then at Baker. He began to cry.
“Are you hurt?” Baker asked anxiously.
“You don’t know,” Collins said. “You don’t...what you’ve done. He’s marked you. I’m so sorry. He sees you. Like he sees me.”
Joe McKinney is the San Antonio-based author of several horror, crime and science fiction novels. His longer works include the four part Dead World series, which includes Dead City, Apocalypse of the Dead, Flesh Eaters and the upcoming The Zombie King, due out in September, 2012. His other books include Quarantined, Dodging Bullets, The Red Empire, The Predatory Kind, Dead Set: A Zombie Anthology and The Forsaken. His short fiction has been collected in The Red Empire and Other Stories and Dating in the Dead World and Other Stories.
In his day job, Joe McKinney is a sergeant with the San Antonio Police Department, where he currently works as a patrol supervisor. Before promoting to sergeant, Joe worked as a homicide detective and as a disaster mitigation specialist. Many of his stories, regardless of genre, feature a strong police procedural element based on his fifteen years of law enforcement experience.
A regular guest at regional writing conventions, Joe currently lives and works in a small town north of San Antonio with his wife and children.
See a list of Joe's books HERE
