The Pale: Volume One - Jacob Long (10 ebook reader txt) 📗

wished this was indicative of a riskier nature growing within her, because the more likely alternative was that she just didn’t have a consistent reason to use them.

In the same corner of the drawer as the conservative vibrator and the neglected birth control was another clear plastic box. This was also full of pills, but many different kinds, enough to require arranging by type. Adam didn’t know enough to identify them, but the colorful ones were rarely good . . . in a manner of speaking.

Adam exhaled through his nose. The revelation was disappointing, and it made Adam’s head swirl with the same questions. How had Téa become so disconnected from Adam’s family and her own that no one noticed her isolating herself and taking drugs? More aggravating was, Why had no one told him?

Adam dropped the box of pills into the drawer and left without closing it. He strode into the bathroom and opened the medicine cabinet. If narcotics were the end of the story, then it began with the booze, and in the middle . . . the prescription drugs in her bathroom. The labels he read told a story of anxiety and depression. “Why did she hide this?” he agonized. “Why did she have to be alone?” He grabbed every bottle to know exactly what they were for. “Ambien . . . yeesh . . . shit will hit you like a brick . . . Fluoxitine . . . take once daily . . . selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor . . . issued 18 Sept. 17 . . . Do not use after 18 Sept. 18—”

Adam blinked his eyes and reread the information: “18 Sept. 17.” How could that . . .

Suddenly Adam broke off and ran back into the living room. His eyes darted about the room, looking for a calendar, but there was none. He needed desperately to know what day it was, so he lunged at Téa and dug into her front pocket. This disturbed Téa’s rest, of course. She stirred and weakly tried to resist Adam. Adam pulled her hands away in annoyance, ignoring that she may be having some sort of terrible rape dream, and fished out her phone. It was protected by a shape code, but Adam only needed to see the first screen and his heart sank.

The phone read “September 31, 2018.”

Adam’s hand muscles went limp, and the phone slowly slipped from his hand. So much time had passed. He thought he would have a heart attack. It was incredible, impossible . . . awful. In that short time between his death and resurrection, years had apparently passed. Téa . . . she did know he was dead. She’d known for a long time, and she’d aged years since then. Was he the reason behind her fall? Did she never manage to pick up the pieces of her life and move on?

Adam moved to Téa’s side and gently brushed her cheek with his thumb. His eyes stung with the fresh tears that blurred his vision. “What did I do to you?”

Adam’s thoughts swirled around to the others in his life. Where were his parents? How had Christina dealt with his death? How were they living? He clenched his teeth. The pain was incredible. It felt like his heart was giving up, abandoning him. Adam had to cover his mouth to keep from outright sobbing as he sat on the edge of a nearby recliner. He tried to resist his emotions. The tears broke free, and Adam wiped them away, sniffling. Each breath he took came ragged and shuddering.

Five years of time that could have been spent taking care of his family had escaped Adam, and that loss of life made its weight felt in his every shivering muscle. Adam bit the meat of one of his fingers to help hold himself together, and his visible shaking was just the surface. A flood of emotion Adam was unprepared for threatened every passing second to overwhelm him. One thing kept him together. He did not want to do a single thing that would disturb that fragile girl who slept motionless on the couch before him. That ache Adam was feeling was exactly what she felt when he died, taking a part of her with him. Only she actually had to live through those same five years. It didn’t pass unnoticed for her the way it had for Adam. She became miserable and dejected. She’d turned to alcohol and drugs to relieve the pain, but it just kept coming. Five years of feeling like that? Adam understood why she might want to take any sort of trip.

She needed him, and he needed her. He was lucky to have run into her. It was providence. It was his chance to do better just like he’d intended. Téa needed saving, and Adam was getting his chance to stay there and do just that. He would. He would stay by her side until she woke up and however long after that she needed him. Adam wouldn’t sleep. He couldn’t have if he wanted to, so he sat quietly and maintained his vigil. While the sun crept back up, illuminating just the fringe of the horizon, Adam watched. It was a new day for him, and the world.

10

The night wasn’t over for Sgt. Lamont Fisher of the Sacramento Police Department. He sat alone in his captain’s office and waited quietly in the wee hours of the morning, passing his eyes over the assorted binders on the shelves, awards and decorations on one wall, and the bulletin board on the other covered with policies and memos. The desk in front of him had all the usual clutter a man as busy as a captain was expected to have. Meanwhile, the clock on the wall annoyingly punctuated each passing second with a noisy tick that Lamont could have sworn got louder and more insistent as time wore on.

Lamont’s nerves worked hard to convince him he was about to be assigned to a desk or worse. He’d taken mostly the right actions. He stayed with his partner until the EMT’s arrived. He described Gray’s head injury but left out the part where it looked like his soul was getting sucked out of his body. He answered the other officer’s questions to the best of his ability and described the perpetrator, but it was when he got back to the precinct that he may have made a mistake. It came time to give his statement in writing, and he finally told the whole story in unabashed detail, right down to the bright-green fluid light that the perpetrator drew out of Gray’s body. Lamont probably could have left that part out. The perp was guilty either way, and Lamont got a good look at him, but Lamont was nothing if not honest. Any detail could prove instrumental in catching the criminal and saving the lives of any officers who gave it a try.

He just couldn’t stop thinking about that man, if that’s what he was. Literally devouring that energy from Gray the way he had, he could have been anything, like a vampire or a demon. Lamont had never seen anything like that. To his knowledge, no one had. A dozen loony explanations and excuses spun around in Lamont’s head, but some uneducated old-world superstition still prescient in the human mind always brought him back to terms like, supernatural, evil, and devil. Thoughts like that filled him with a steadily increasing trickle of dread.

Tick, tick, tick. The clock on the wall wormed its way into Lamont’s attention again, and he gave it a begrudging read. As loud as it had become, Lamont assumed he’d been musing for an eternity, but only about a minute and a half had passed since he last checked it. It felt like he was going to grow old in that chair.

The office’s only door opened behind Lamont, and his captain bustled inside, carrying more papers to clutter his desk with. Captain Michalis was a middle-aged man with pale skin, wispy red hair, and a bushy red mustache. Years of sitting at the desk he was currently stuffing himself behind had left him with a mounting gut, but Lamont knew him to be a tough old coot. He was a hard man, set in his ways, and morally stout. He was tough on the officers of his precinct and didn’t tolerate funny business. That was what worried Lamont. The captain had, in all likelihood, read his statement. He was just waiting for the shit to roll downhill.

Michalis laid his papers on his desk and slouched in his high-backed chair with his fingers interlaced on his gut like an old man getting ready for a nap in his own house. He sat like that for a moment, and Lamont began to wonder if he should say something. Like, maybe he should get ahead of the problem. Captain Michalis frowned, then grunted thoughtfully, and then sat up. He grabbed his glasses off his desk and slipped them on his ruddy nose. He still hadn’t actually looked at Sergeant Fisher. He was deciding where to start.

Finally, the captain looked pointedly into Lamont’s eyes. After another short time, he spoke.

“Do you—” the captain cut himself short. He exhaled through his nose. “Are you okay?” he asked in his hoarse voice.

Lamont saw that question coming before the captain even knew he was going to ask it. “I’m good.” He indicated his own head with his hand. “I’m fine up here. How is Gray doing?”

“He’s doing just fine up there too,” the captain said. “They have him at the hospital, and they’re letting him sleep. His skull isn’t too roughed up. They say it’s definitely not as bad as it looks. They say he’s just, experiencing a state of lethargy not uncommon for people who have taken a blow to the head like he has. He just needs rest. In a couple of days, he’ll be all right.”

Lamont was relieved to hear it. He sighed and almost smiled, but he had trouble believing that was all he was suffering. “So that’s it? No other symptoms or anything like that?”

“No,” the captain answered. “There’s nothing weird going on with his body.”

Both men fidgeted awkwardly. Eventually, the captain leaned forward and clasped his hands together on his desk. “Fisher . . . I gotta talk to you about your statement.”

“Okay,” Lamont said coyly.

“Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“Yes.” Lamont nodded pensively. “I’m ready to answer any questions you have.”

The captain sighed sharply and picked out one of the papers on his desk. Lamont could tell that it was a copy of his statement. “It starts out with you and Officer Gray discovering the hole in the front door of Tracey’s Boutique.”

“Yes,” Lamont said. “We were on routine patrol and happened to see that the glass had been broken.”

“But you didn’t go in right away?”

“No. I thought it would be better to cover the rear entrance, and then I could funnel whoever was in there toward Officer Gray. Catch them by surprise. I proposed this to Officer Gray, and he agreed. He was actually excited about the idea and wanted to be the one to catch him.”

“So you drove to another alley down the block and dropped off Officer Gray, who proceeded to cover the fire exit?”

Lamont nodded, his eyes indicative of a man trying to remember every detail. “Yes. Then I drove to the front and flashed my lights. The plan was working. The perp saw the car lights and ran for the fire exit. I heard the fire alarm go off, so I hurried to back up my partner. I approached—”

“Is this where you drew your stun gun?”

Lamont was struck dumb by the captain’s question. It would have been nothing for other officers, but for Sergeant Fisher, it portended more probing questions to come. “Uhh, yeah.” He tried to recover. “I drew my stun gun and approached the scene through the store. It was the fastest route. The perp . . . came back inside but then went back out again. I don’t really know why. I think it was to surprise Officer Gray. From what I saw before the door closed, he was trying to gain control of Officer Gray’s gun. He actually shot at me inside the store while Officer Gray was