Intercepts: a horror novel Read online

  His throat clenched up.

  His hand trembled as he clicked on one of the folders.

  “Police Body-Cam Footage.”

  CHAPTER 18

  The video started so fast that Joe struggled to orient himself to what exactly was happening. The camera, clipped to the chest of a police officer, whipped around as the officer opened his car door and stepped out into a sunny afternoon in a middle-class neighborhood.

  Almost immediately, the sharp snap of gunshots — Bang! Bang! Bang! — rang out from one of the houses. The camera shook violently as the cop ducked back behind his car and drew his sidearm.

  “I got shots fired! Shots fired!” Joe heard the man shout into his radio.

  The video then stabilized as the cop took a moment to gather himself. The camera filmed from his crouched position as he aimed his handgun over the hood of his car toward the small ranch-style house.

  The yard was green but the grass had grown tall and the weeds slightly taller. Untrimmed shrubs hugged the house, their stray branches poking out like a bad haircut. Kate didn’t want to hire a gardener, partially to prove to Joe that she could handle all the man work by herself, he suspected. She did a fine job, but the maintenance occasionally got away from her.

  The cop rose from his crouch and scooted his way around the front of his car, advancing on the bright red front door. The same door where Joe would stand, arms crossed and eyes rolling, as Kate berated him for bringing Riley home after midnight on a Sunday. Don’t you know she has a pre-calc test tomorrow? And she hasn’t even started her Scarlet Letter project. It’s all on her calendar. You never pay attention to what goes on in her life!

  The red door opened. The cop backed up and retook his defensive posture behind the front of his car.

  It was then that Joe saw her.

  Kate stumbled backwards out of the house.

  Joe couldn’t believe how different she looked. He had seen her only a week or two ago, and at the time, he admitted to himself that she still looked as beautiful as ever. The single-parent lifestyle, which tended to age most people, actually made Kate appear more youthful. He never asked her about her dating life, but he knew she wouldn’t be single for long.

  This was not the same woman. She seemed to have aged twenty years in the last week. For a moment, the difference was so pronounced that Joe assumed she must have been caught testing out some Halloween costume. This must be a wig and pale-face makeup. She always had a fair complexion that stood out against her wavy black hair, but now her face seemed positively white. Her hair wasn’t combed or even pulled back. It just sat tangled and bulging on her head in wispy knots.

  She turned to face the cop. Her mouth was twisted open, as if it had frozen mid-scream.

  This wasn’t a costume. It was a transformation.

  “What do you want?!” she yelled, but not at the officer. She was shouting back into the house. “Get out! Get out!”

  “Police! Drop the weapon!” the officer commanded.

  That’s when Joe saw the gun in Kate’s hand. It was a slim, black semi-automatic handgun. He couldn’t tell the make-and-model from the shaky footage, but it was the small type of gun that could conceal easily in a purse or in an ankle holster. Joe was sure it must be a toy, or perhaps some household object that simply looked like a weapon. Kate hated guns. She refused to keep one in the house. Where the hell did she get this?

  “I said, drop it!” the officer commanded again.

  Kate didn’t seem to hear or even notice the police officer. Her attention remained focused on whatever she saw inside her house.

  “Leave me alone! Just leave me alone!” Her screams were frantic and crazed.

  “This is the police,” the officer announced again, even louder this time. “Drop the weapon, now!”

  Kate finally turned and faced the cop, seeing him for the first time. But her eyes didn’t stay focused on him for long. They began darting to the left and right. Judging by the way her mouth hung open and her eyes widened in fear, everywhere she looked, she saw something.

  She made heaving, gasping sounds as tears began to stream, uncontrollably, down her face. The tears of some horrible realization.

  “She’s everywhere… she’s everywhere…” Kate cried out.

  “Calm down, ma’am.” The cop seemed to realize that the situation was more a mental disturbance than an active shooter. He kept his weapon trained on Kate, but his voice adopted a negotiating tone. “You’re safe. The police are here. But I need you to set the gun on the ground.”

  Kate continued to ignore him. She stared off. Her breathing slowed and the muscles on her face relaxed. A deep calm seemed to settle inside her body.

  “She’s only in my head… she’s only in my head,” Kate repeated, as if it were her new mantra. “She’s only in my head. She’s only in my head.”

  She went silent. Her gaze became fixed and firm. It was a look of deep determination; it was a look Joe knew well. Kate had made up her mind to do something. There would be no talking her out of it. Without any hesitation, Kate raised the gun to her temple.

  “No! Don’t—” the officer began to shout.

  Bang!

  Joe jumped at the sight.

  Even with the shaking, distorted video from the body cam, he could see her head jerk to the side as a plume of red mist sprayed out of her left temple, accompanied by a few larger chunks of skull and brain. He could plainly see her blood splatter over the yellow siding of the house and then her body crumple down onto the front step.

  The camera shook violently as the cop ran from the safety of his car toward the body that lay uncomfortably draped half on the front step and half on the front bush by the door.

  Bile rushed to fill Joe’s mouth. His stomach felt as though it had merged with his lungs. Air couldn’t get into his body fast enough, and when it did, it made him nauseous. He stood, forgetting that his earbuds were still firmly lodged in his ears. The cord pulled his keyboard to the floor with a clatter and yanked the earbuds from his ears. He barely noticed.

  Pacing the room, he forced himself to take deep, calming breaths. His hands formed fists. And then released. And then formed fists again. Within moments, he felt his body settle down. The nausea had passed, but a new emotion quickly replaced it.

  A deep sadness seemed to pull him toward the floor, threatening to submerge him in an inky blackness. He wanted to lay down and close his eyes.

  That emotion also passed.

  He sat back down at his computer and opened up more of Kate’s files.

  CHAPTER 19

  Riley felt numb.

  Her experience at the park had rattled her. She had almost slashed an entire soccer team of little girls, all out of fear of the woman. Riley had been able to explain her situation to the police at the park. She put on quite a show, tearing up as she explained how she couldn’t sleep after her mom’s suicide and needed to take a walk but passed out in the park. She told them that the soccer team had simply startled and disoriented her, but she was alright now.

  The lucidness with which she was able to lie to the cops surprised Riley. Maybe she hadn’t gone crazy. A crazy person couldn’t wave a knife at children in a public park and then talk the police into giving her a ride home. Not to the hospital. Not to jail. They took pity on her and drove her all the way to her father’s house.

  The woman had been there in the police car for that drive.

  She sat right beside Riley, twitching and chattering her teeth as her head lolled on her shoulders. The woman talked about goats and phone numbers, or something. But Riley ignored her. The cops told Riley to be good and get some rest, and then they let her out and drove away.

  When she arrived back home, the woman followed her in. She screamed and lunged and clawed at her own face until her flesh peeled off into her fingernails. Riley tried to ask the woman questions but, between her screams, she only muttered things about guns and street intersections.

  At one point, Riley took out her pho
ne and filmed the woman. At least she would have evidence, something she could show to the police or to her father. But the pictures and the video played back with only a bare shot of the living room. No screams, no blood, and certainly no woman.

  After that, the woman vanished for a while.

  In some ways, this unnerved Riley more than having the woman screaming and lunging at her. As much as she thought she had regained control over her fear, she realized that she couldn’t sleep, couldn’t eat, couldn’t do anything as long as she knew that the woman might appear.

  It was then that she considered that there was only one potential sure-fire way to rid herself of the woman. One way for her to sleep. One way to see her mom again. She envisioned pressing a knife against her wrist. She imagined the cuts opening wider, ever wider, until they were deep and expansive enough for the woman to flow out from Riley. All the woman’s darkness would drip down into the bathtub. And Riley would be free.

  It seemed to be the only solution. Like leeches sucking out poison, Riley could drain the woman from her system, her mind, her body. And then she could sleep. A quiet, black sleep.

  The fantasy was so attractive that it scared her. She called her dad. He came home quickly. Quicker than she ever expected. Time seemed to be moving at an unsteady pace these last few days. Riley could sit in silence for hours, looking around her for evidence of the woman, and then glance at the clock to see that only a few minutes had passed. At other times, her mind seemed to drift into a fog and when something finally jarred it back to reality, she would realize that an hour had slipped through some crack in time.

  It was a while ago that her dad came home and walked through the door.

  Time had played a funny trick on her again. It had skipped forward. Now she sat at the dining table with her dad’s coworker, Hannah. Their conversation together had clipped along. Riley liked Hannah. She always did. And, if anything, that fondness for Hannah made the conversation about Riley’s own mental state all the more uncomfortable. It sucked to have someone you respected diagnose you as a whack-job.

  “This woman you saw today, is it the same woman you saw last night?” Hannah asked.

  Riley nodded.

  She wasn’t looking at Hannah, instead keeping her gaze fixed off to Hannah’s side. The screaming woman had appeared in the seat beside Hannah early in the conversation. She was gone now, but Riley could still feel her presence. She couldn’t really define the sensation, but she could feel a sort of “pressure” squeezing at her brain whenever the woman was near. It took her the last two days to really link the two together. She originally thought that it was a sleep-deprivation headache, or maybe dehydration.

  No.

  It was the woman opening some door into Riley’s head.

  Riley was sure of it.

  “What does this woman do?” Hannah asked.

  Riley sat silently.

  “You can tell me.”

  “She used to scream at me. I stopped responding to that. And now she’s trying other things.”

  “Other things?”

  “Making me see stuff.”

  “What kind of stuff?” Hannah leaned forward.

  But Riley barely acknowledged Hannah’s presence.

  “Riley?” Hannah repeated. “What kind of stuff? What is she making you see?”

  “My mom,” Riley said.

  It was true. The woman no longer sat in the empty seat to Hannah’s right. Instead, it was Riley’s mom. She looked good, Riley thought. She wore one of her mustard-yellow tanks-tops that had a big pink heart in the center. Her mom had found that shirt on the clearance rack at Target and ended up buying five of them.

  Riley didn’t remember her mom being frugal back in the day, but ever since the divorce, her mom made an effort to clip coupons, buy clearance clothes, and save, save, save.

  It embarrassed Riley that whenever she had friends over, they would see her mom wearing the exact same yellow tank-top, as if the woman only owned one shirt. Riley’s friend Silvia theorized that all this newfound frugality was simply Riley’s mom’s way of taking control of her life again and decreasing any reliance she had on Riley’s dad.

  And yet, seeing her mom sit at the table now, wearing that stupid yellow tank-top, made Riley’s chest throb with a deep pain. Her mom was beautiful. Riley always knew that and always hoped that she too would have the good-fortune of aging so gracefully.

  Her mom only wore makeup for special occasions and made no effort to hide the crow’s feet that had grown around the edges of her eyes. The same with the laugh-lines that formed on her forehead and her cheeks whenever she stretched her face into that wide grin, often accompanied by a howling, unrestrained guffaw when she found something amusing.

  Those loud laughs often burst out at inopportune times — dinner, the movies, even Uncle Dan’s funeral — and were often met by a glare from Riley. Her mom would then try to swallow the laugh, which only resulted in a gagging, snorting sound. At which point, much to Riley’s mortification, her mom would laugh even louder.

  The person she saw seated next to Hannah was exactly how Riley hoped to remember her mom. It was the image she wanted to carry in her mind of her mother forever. Yellow clearance tank-top be damned.

  Hannah turned and joined Riley in gazing at the seat. But Hannah’s eyes continued to roam around, scanning the room for any trace of what had grabbed Riley’s attention.

  Apparently, Hannah saw nothing.

  It was then that the edges of her mom’s smile seemed to pull themselves higher and tighter. Her mom’s gentle, strong mouth had morphed into a wide, unnatural grin. Her toothy smirk ascended past the level of her cheekbones into a monstrous smile that was too big to be humanly possible. Her eyes grew large. The whites of her eyes filled with blood, as though someone were pouring red paint into a glass orb. Those blood-eyes stared at Riley. Her left temple fell away and blood spewed out the wound and splashed onto the dining table.

  And then she laughed. That whooping guffaw of a laugh, as natural and familiar as Riley remembered it. Only now, instead of seeing her mom’s age-lines wrinkle up in joy during the laugh, the sound was formed from somewhere within a convulsing head that drained blood from its eyes and temple.

  The laugh continued. Longer and louder than Riley ever remembered it, as though it were a record, stuck in a hiccupping loop.

  Riley clenched her eyes shut and angled her head down toward the table.

  She felt someone grasp her hand. A warm, tender grasp.

  It was Hannah.

  “Listen, grief can be a mind-fuck,” Hannah said, patting Riley’s hand. “Sometimes our minds are like reservoirs. More and more gets poured into it, and they fill and fill. And our little emotional reservoirs have always held, no matter what shit we’ve dealt with. We think we can deal. But grief is this fucking monsoon. And it just doesn’t stop. And it fills our reservoir. And fills it. And fills it. Then all those dams and dykes and levees and locks or whatever, all those things we’ve built to keep our reservoirs from overflowing… they burst. And when one of them bursts, they all burst. Like dominoes. And it can be debilitating. But it’s okay. It’s normal.”

  Riley took a breath and opened her eyes.

  Her mother was gone.

  But there was something new instead.

  A purplish, lumpy mound lay in the center of the table.

  The bright dining room light, shining directly down on the lump, made it hard for Riley to make out what it actually was. It took her eyes a second to adjust, and when they did, she could see a foot protruding from the mound. And then she saw a hand with little fingers.

  It all clicked together. This strange, unmoving purple mass was — or had been — a baby.

  It was small, probably only a few months old. Its entire body, from its toes to the crown of its head, was wrinkled. The way it was curled on its side made Riley initially think that it must be cold. It needed a blanket to shelter its naked, frail body. But its purple, blotchy, unmoving skin s
aid otherwise.

  Riley couldn’t look away. She stared at its face. Its eyes were closed and its mouth had pursed up and frozen in a look of discomfort, as if its life had been plucked from it mid-cry.

  The baby wore an orange tag on its wrist which stood out brightly against its dull-purple skin.

  For a moment, Riley feared that if she leaned in to read the tag, the baby might spring to life. She pushed that thought out of her mind. Somehow, she sensed that the woman had placed this baby here for a reason. To tell her something.

  Riley slowly rose from her seat. She barely registered Hannah’s concerned face, curiously observing her. Riley leaned over the table. There was a name on the tag.

  “Riley? What’s going on?” Hannah asked. “What do you see?”

  “Ashley,” Riley said, reading the baby’s wrist tag. “Ashley… Chao.” She looked over at Hannah whose face had twisted up in confusion.

  “What did you say?”

  “Ashley Chao,” Riley repeated as she settled back into her seat. “Did you lose a baby?”

  Hannah gulped. She stiffened in her seat, but she maintained eye-contact. Her voice stayed steady and professional. “That was, um, that was probably ten years ago, or so. Ashley had a fever. My husband and I took her to the hospital. It was only about twenty minutes later and she just… um… she just stopped breathing. It was devastating. But it does happen.”

  They sat for a moment. Riley felt Hannah’s eyes studying her. She had to look away.

  “Who told you about Ashley?” Hannah asked.

  Riley glanced back to the table. The baby was gone.

  “Riley?” Hannah said. “How do you know about Ashley?”

  As Riley was about to answer, the dining room door swung open. Riley’s dad stepped into the room. He stood there for a moment, watching Riley and Hannah. Riley opened her mouth to say something when her dad suddenly walked over to the table.

  Hannah stood and silently greeted him.

  They stared at each other, both oblivious to Riley’s presence. Riley could only watch as her dad cupped Hannah’s face in his hands and pulled her in for a kiss. The sensual sweetness of the kiss quickly gave way to an eruption of passion. Hannah reached down into his pants as his lips worked their way around her neck. His hands, in their hurry, struggled to undo the buttons on her shirt.