EIGHT
***
Jason strode back into his office, feeling an unusual mix of emotions. Fear, certainly, but also confusion and even an unsettling sense of the unreal, as though he had stepped out of Rising and into some mirror image of the town; one where nothing made sense and where the laws of nature no longer applied.
Where did all those damn roaches come from?
Hatty was typing at her desk in the reception area, and the old woman looked over her reading glasses at him as he entered. "Find anything we didn't expect?" she said as she handed him a stack of handwritten phone messages.
Jason looked at her. How was he supposed to answer that question?
Unable to come to a satisfactory way of responding, he chose not to, instead sidestepping the query by saying, "Hatty, could you dial me up the local FBI branch and connect me in the office?"
He went into his office without waiting for a reply. One thing was certain: whatever was happening in Rising, it was beyond him. He needed help, and the fact that there was a missing - though presumed dead - child would be enough cause for him to get it fairly quickly.
He sat down, glancing at the picture of Elizabeth and Aaron that sat in its customary spot, the only thing to detract from the Spartan, almost sterile, neatness of his desk. He looked at his phone. The extension light was not lit up, so Hatty clearly hadn't gotten through to the FBI field office yet.
Jason pulled two papers from his pockets. The first was the sheet that he had taken from Sean's classroom that morning. That thought brought thoughts of Lenore to mind, and he immediately blushed and glanced at the photo of his wife, fully expecting to see her frowning at him in the celluloid. But she still smiled.
He looked back at the paper. The page with no picture, but only four simple words on it:
I wiL be FiRSt.
Then he pulled out the other paper, the one that he had taken from where it had appeared out of thin air on Sean's desk in the little boy's room. Other than the fact that one had been carefully folded and the other was wrinkled and creased from being hurriedly shoved in Jason's pocket, the two were identical.
He felt something skitter over his hand then.
A roach.
Jason threw it from him with a shout, pushing away from his desk reflexively as the grotesque insect drew from him a visceral reaction of disgust and loathing. The roach flew off his hand, Jason's flailing propelling it through the air until it hit a wall and fell into the dark space between two filing cabinets. Jason could hear it scuttling about between the metal cases, its carapace bouncing off the cabinets as it hurried to the darkness that it called home.
Then it was silent. As quiet as though it had disappeared.
Maybe it has.
Jason watched the file cabinets intently for a long moment, more than half expecting a black crayon to come rolling out at him.
But nothing did.
The roach was silent.
The room was quiet.
The only noise was the noise in his heart, which was pumping at a furious pace. Thud-dud, thud-dud, thud-dud....
Then Jason jumped so hard it felt like his skeleton had fractured when the phone rang. He stabbed the speaker button and Hatty's voice came through. "FBI office on the line," she said.
He hit the speaker button again and then picked up the phone. And his heart sank. Instead of the strong voice of a young FBI agent in training, he heard a faraway whisper, interspersed with static. "This is...FBI field...e help you...."
Jason frowned. Perfect, he thought.
"Sorry," he said. "Can you say again?"
Again, the whisper came through. "We got...call about...."
Then the line cut off. There was no dial tone, even, only a strange, high-pitched hissing that hurt Jason's ears within a matter of seconds. He toggled the disconnect button a few times, but there was no improvement, so he hung up and resorted to the ultimate request for aid: "Hatty!"
The woman appeared at the doorway in an instant. "What's going on with the phone lines, again?" he asked.
Hatty frowned. "Don't know, exactly. They've been acting spotty all week. We can call places in town all right, but out of town calls are a problem."
Jason felt fear rise up in his gut, a feeling like ice and fire at the same time. Cold enough to burn, hot enough to freeze. He pushed it down, focusing on Hatty, and felt his fear ebb, morphing into anger. "Really?" he snapped. "Is there anything else I should know before I try to call someone who can actually help? Like, say, the FBI?"
Hatty pursed her lips and squinted angrily, and suddenly his own rage dissipated, replaced by fear for the force of nature that was Hatty Reeves. "Don't you get smart with me, Sheriff," she snapped. "I slapped your ass when you were five for giving me lip and I'll do it again if you keep up that attitude."
Jason tried to keep his anger going, but knew it was misplaced; was worse than that, it was just plain wrong of him to be lashing out at someone who had tried to hold the town together for him in his absence.
"Sorry, Hatty, I just-" he began, but Hatty cut him off.
"Oh, I'm sorry, too, Sheriff. Everything's gone all wrong here, hasn't it?"
Jason put his head in his hands, feeling the dull throb of a headache beginning. "I've got to find him, Hatty," he said.
Hatty patted him on the hand, and he didn't have to see her face to tell she was as worried about him as anything else. "If anyone can, you will, Sheriff." Then she moved back to the doorway and said, "I'll try to get the FBI back on the horn."
"Don't worry about it, Hatty. I'll email them a report and that'll get through for sure. They'll have someone out here by tonight, I imagine."
"We could use the help, couldn't we?"
"Got that right."
Hatty nodded at him and then went back out the door, closing it softly behind her.
Jason turned to his computer, which Hatty had turned on for him at some point during the day. He clicked open the internet application, then clicked his "Favorites" file to bring up the "FBI - Office of Law Enforcement Coordination" website. He clicked a link, opening an email message, and began typing a lengthy email detailing the situation in Rising as far as he knew it. He glanced at the two crayon notes from time to time, but for the most part tried to remain focused on his task, attempting to make the email as concise and to-the-point as possible: he knew it didn't help the process any if the email was perceived as coming from some yokel out in the sticks.
Soon, he was almost finished, and was about to click "Send" when the computer suddenly hissed. There was a faint whiff of ozone.
"What the-" began Jason, and then a large spark leapt from the computer. The email flickered, unsent. "Oh, no, don't you dare!" he hollered.
A popup appeared: "Connection failure. No such domain."
"No such domain?! It's the flippin' FBI!" Jason pounded on the side of the computer, but to no avail: the email disappeared, replaced by a random swirling of dots and colors. Then the screen went completely dark.
But only for a moment.
In the next instant, the screen began flashing with different websites and images. Faster and faster, too fast to make much sense of, but then Jason began to notice: all the sites, all the images, all the videos that were coming through were about one thing.
Death.
Pictures of car-wrecks.
Images of fire, burning people.
Faster they came.
Streaming images of people falling to their death, leaping from a fiery high-rise.
A close-up of a leprosy victim.
Faster, faster.
Shots of a trauma ward, patients frozen in pain.
Faster.
And now it wasn't just images. Sounds started coming from the small computer speakers. Faraway screams, shrieks, and howls. The sounds of the doomed and dying.
Faster, faster.
Images of wars. Video of gunfire.
And now words began to flash between the images, broken letters that swirled around the edges of the computer screen in random patterns before coming together to form words.
Harappan.
Hoer-Verde.
Destruction, death, pictures of diseased limbs falling from bodies, cancerous sores on the faces of third-world mothers.
Chinese Army.
Roanoke.
Death, death, death.
Jason grabbed a felt-tip pen and wrote quickly, noting the strange words he had seen as quickly as he could, before they were lost to his memory. Harappan, Hoer-Verde, Chinese army, Roanoke.
And then the images and the words came too fast to see, a tumbling collage of horror and pain. Jason blinked, his eyes tearing, managing only with difficulty to look away from the computer screen, focusing on the one thing that could give him comfort after such a barrage of mayhem: the picture of his family.
But when he looked, there was no comfort to be had. He did not feel the familiar melancholy of love and sadness, did not feel even the familiar pain that usually gripped him when he thought of them.
Because they were gone.
The photo was still there, the background untouched. But his loved ones had been wiped away from the picture as though they never were. At first he thought it must be some kind of joke in extremely poor taste; that Hatty had somehow Photoshopped the picture. But he dismissed that idea in the same instant that it occurred to him: Hatty, though a woman of consummate skill in many areas, bordered on computer-illiterate. Besides, she would never do such a thing as this.
So what the hell happened to them?
He kept peering at the photo, as though by looking he could draw his family's image back into the frame; could save them from exile into nothingness as he had not saved them from the bullets of a sociopath.
Then something new caught his attention. The computer screen suddenly dissolved into random-pattern flickers of pixilated confusion. Jason tore his eyes from the hideous emptiness of the photo and stared at his computer screen, trying to find something else, something less horrifying than the specter of losing his family yet again, and this time in an even more disturbing way.
He leaned in as the computer picture utterly disintegrated. The screen was just a random mass of colors now, but even so, he thought he could almost make something out. As though there was something behind the meaningless mass of confusion, something struggling to come out; to be born.
He leaned in even closer, almost touching the screen with his nose. Then gasped suddenly as, through the computerized haze, he saw something. It was something completely unforeseen, something that penetrated him to the depths of his soul. Something that could not be, but somehow was.
"Elizabeth?" he whispered.
It was his wife's face, mouth open in a silent scream of pain and terror.
***