Page 43 of Fire
The first few minutes were black and grainy. The Director waited, idly running through plans on how to eliminate the small but persistent threat that Waverly represented. Then the picture came into focus, the audio picked up, and his thoughts shorted out abruptly as he realized what he was seeing.
The video was homemade, maybe by children playing with a cheap recorder. He watched as a boy and a girl in swimsuits chased each other with water pistols, shrieking and laughing, while another child’s voice called to them from behind the camera.
A battered green pickup truck pulled askew onto the driveway in the background. He watched three men, clearly hunters to his practiced eye, emerge. To confirm the identification, the first one had an ASC ID in one hand, pairing it with an (illegal) sawed-off shotgun in the other.
The Director watched as the hunters planted themselves on the front lawn and began shouting toward the house. Watched as the children realized that something was wrong.
“Get your freak-loving asses out here!”
“Where’s your mindfucking little bitch?”
Less than a minute in, the hunters opened fire on the accused psychic—a girl, maybe eight years old, blonde and pretty—while the other children screamed. The recorder fell, sending the world spinning on its axis, while the parents rushed out of the house, screaming the children’s names.
As she lay motionless on the ground, another child screamed in raw anguish. The pickup lurched forward into the hunters as though lifted by a giant hand. Two men went down. The parents threw themselves between the last child standing and the remaining ASC hunter, but not in time.
The video ended on a close-up of two dead children and a lifeless hand reaching out to protect them. The camera lingered there for more than a minute until an engine exploded in the background, and the image cut to black.
The Director stared at the screen for several minutes after it went dead. He took a deep, slow breath, held it, and let it out.
“Shit.”
He ejected the disc and picked up his phone to call Alice.
* * *
Mall food courtsweren’t Tobias and Jake’s favorite joint, but you gotta go where the case takes you. This time, the case required checking whether a series of vandalism incidents making the rounds of department stores was supernatural trouble or just a bunch of teenagers with a twisted sense of humor.
As they sat down at one of the few free tables, Tobias gave Jake’s tray a deeply skeptical look.
“These cheese curds are for us both,” Jake said. “I can share.”
“Did you really need to get one at every place that had them on the menu?”
“Dude, we’re in Wisconsin. Cheeseville. ’Course we gotta sample them everywhere, see where they make ’em best. The difference between Sbarro and A&W may be the difference between a flavor celebration and flavor ruination.”
“Of course,” Tobias echoed, smiling at him in a tolerant way that Jake felt sure was hiding a bigger version. “How could I forget?”
Jake rattled the baskets together. “Seriously, Toby, sometimes they don’t make the fried ones with the good stuff, especially at a chain. They call them cheese curds, but they’re basically glorified mozzarella sticks. You’ve got to go with the authentic cheddar ones. On the other hand, fried is the way to go. The fresh cheese curds around here are awesome, but I don’t trust food that squeaks when you bite it.”
He could’ve gone on for a while longer on the finer points of cheese curd tasting, but Tobias’s attention had focused somewhere over his right shoulder.
Jake took a quick look over his shoulder, but all he saw was tired parents, screaming kids, brightly dressed fast-food workers, and a bank of large televisions against the wall, showing the evening news and a local college football game.
Jake glanced back to Tobias, whose eyes were still locked on a point beyond him. “Case?” he asked.
Tobias didn’t even take his eyes off the TVs, just shook his head slightly.
Jake blinked. When Tobias didn’t say anything, he turned around in his chair, one hand reaching for another cheese curd.
If the TVs had any sound, it couldn’t be heard over the clatter of the food court. Jake could see a news anchor speaking seriously, her brow furrowed. The chyron “ASC-INVOLVED SHOOTING, UNKNOWN NUMBER OF FATALITIES INCLUDES CHILDREN” took up the bottom third of the screen. The shot of the news anchor cut away to grainy footage that would have looked at home onAmerica’s Funniest Home Videos. At least until a truck pulled up and three heavily armed men jumped out. The one in the front flashed an ASC badge before the video cut back to the newsroom.
Even the news anchor’s professional mask had a few cracks. The closed captions beneath her included the words “extremely disturbing” and “children killed” and “no explanation.” For a second, the screen showed a suited man mobbed by reporters just outside a black, government-issue SUV. Hair thinning, eyes cold and flat, he kept his lips compressed as he pushed through a crowd of microphones. With a shock, Jake recognized Jonah Dixon.
No one in the food court was paying attention. The high pitch of laughter, arguments, and chatter carried on, oblivious. It was suddenly near-intolerable to Jake.
His own ASC license felt like a brand burning through his wallet. He and Tobias had been asking questions for the case. Nothing that would immediately mark them as hunters, or as ASC, but Jake could imagine eyes on them, the taste of their suspicion (real or imagined) in the back of his throat.
He spoke quietly. “Can you tell what happened?”
