Intercepts: a horror novel Read online

  There was a long pause on the phone.

  “The police haven’t called you?”

  “No. Should they?”

  Another long silence. Joe could practically hear the principal’s throat go dry on the other end.

  “What’s going on?” Joe asked.

  “I, uh… well, we, uh, we got a call from the police…”

  “And?”

  “Well… they responded to a call to Riley’s mother’s house… Katherine Gerhard… or I see here she goes by Kate…”

  The principal paused as he collected his words. It might have only been for half-a-second, but time didn’t seem to be moving in the normal sense for Joe. Each breath, each pause, each delay allowed enough time for a hundred-thousand thoughts to flood through Joe’s brain.

  “And?” Joe said again.

  “She, uh, she had a gun. And the, uh, the details are hazy. I didn’t get the complete story. So, don’t quote me on any of this. You might want to contact the police. The officer who called us… his name was, uh… oh, I have it here…”

  “What happened?!?”

  “Your ex-wife shot herself. In the head.”

  Joe didn’t move.

  “She’s, um, she’s dead. Suicide. I’m so sorry to be the one to tell you this. It was, um, about two hours ago.”

  After all the thoughts and scenarios that had run through his brain just moments before, Joe somehow didn’t have the computing power to process what had just been said. And so, Joe simply sat, the phone pressed firmly against his ear. All of the sweat that had been forming along his body turned an icy cold.

  The principal seemed unnerved by the silence. “I thought they would have called you by now. That is your ex-wife, is that, um, is that right? Kate Gerhard?”

  “Yeah,” Joe said, his voice robotic.

  “And you’re Riley’s biological father?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, so Riley’s been sitting in the school office since we found out. We don’t want to send her back to that house now. There’s no telling what she might see. And if she sees any reminders of her mother at this time… well, gee…”

  Joe stared off. Kate? Dead?

  “But you live so far away. And we’re closing up shop here soon. Are there any other relatives that can come pick her up? Aunts? Uncles? Grandparents?”

  “This here’s what we’re gonna do,” Joe said. His voice found itself as his mind switched into work-mode. He’d handle this like any other problem he faced on a daily basis.

  “Riley shouldn’t be hanging out in some old high school office being comforted by secretaries and guidance counsellors and the like. She needs to be comfortable. Her best friend’s name is Silvia Vargas. I’ve met the family at all sorts of barbeques and birthday parties. Good folk.”

  Joe paused for a breath, then went on.

  “Mrs. Vargas works from home. Call her up. I’m sure she’ll put up no fuss if she’s asked to come pick up Silvia and Riley. You have my full permission to send Riley home with the Vargases. The girls can play games and hang out. It’ll be the best environment for her. I’ll get into Linville soon as I can, pick her up from the house. Sound like a plan?”

  Principal Green seemed caught off-guard by the directness of Joe’s statement. “That, um, that sounds like it’ll work.”

  “Thank you for letting me know,” Joe said.

  Joe hung up his phone, not even waiting for a response.

  He leaned back in his desk and stared at the bare concrete walls.

  The room spun slightly. His eyes struggled to focus. He didn’t know if he should cry or even could cry. A numbness had settled into his bones and he struggled to will his muscles to move.

  Part of his brain, the logical part, recognized that he was in shock.

  Kate was alive this morning.

  She was alive when he picked Riley up last Friday and she was alive when he brought her back late Sunday night. Very late Sunday night. Kate had yelled at him. They fought on her doorstep. Like old times.

  But just like that, with the suddenness of a two-minute phone call with a high school principal… Kate was dead.

  She had taken her own life.

  Joe couldn’t wrap his head around that.

  That wasn’t the kind of thing Kate would do.

  He pushed himself up from his desk. He walked to his office door.

  After a single step, he leaned over, grabbed his garbage can, and vomited.

  ***

  Ding!

  Joe stepped out of the elevator and into the Facility’s lobby.

  He was now above ground for the first time since he punched in at 7 a.m., but it sure didn’t feel like it. The lobby, like every other area of the Facility, was windowless.

  The lobby was relatively small, functioning solely as the elevator’s guarded entrance and exit. The door that led to the outside world stood on the far side. To get there, one had to walk alongside long glass partitions that encased the guard booths. A dozen or more well-armed guards monitored both the lobby and the extensive security camera footage of the outside area.

  The center of the lobby split into two paths — a metal detector/x-ray machine for all employees who were arriving and a similar set-up for all employees who were departing. Helpful footprints were painted on the concrete floor to act as a guide.

  Joe swiped his ID card at a console. A screen mounted to the ceiling flashed his name — “JOSEPH GERHARD, CHECKING OUT: 17:32.”

  With a green light signaling him to proceed, he stepped into the x-ray machine. He spread his legs and raised his hands above his head. A scanner twirled around him, taking a 360-degree image.

  An armed guard waved him through. “Good evening, sir. You’re all clear.”

  “Thanks, Dave,” Joe said as he nodded his head. He waved to the guys behind the glass wall as he passed, “G’night, boys.”

  They waved in response.

  Joe walked up to a bank of lockers by the front door. He pressed his thumbprint onto a pad and a locker clicked open. Joe reached inside and pulled out his wallet, cell phone, and keys.

  Then he walked to the door which unlocked with a bzzzzz as he approached.

  He stepped outside.

  The late afternoon sun made him squint. He wasn’t used to leaving work this early, especially considering the situation that had just unfolded on Level Two. The evening frogs had begun croaking in chorus from wherever it was that they lived. Their belching mixed with the rustling of the wind stirring through the spring leaves. He could detect the sweet fragrance of blossoms on the air, as well as the rustic scent of grass that had grown tall during the winter rains and, now that late spring had arrived, had begun to dry into an earthy-smelling hay.

  Moments like these reminded Joe how much he liked the location of his work. The smells and sounds reminded him of his summers in Boy Scout camps as a teen. Back then, he thought that he might like to become a professional scout leader, or maybe work for the Forest Service. He couldn’t pinpoint the moment he veered away from those goals, other than the fact that such careers couldn’t pay the bills.

  With a sigh, Joe trudged his way to the parking lot.

  The gravel of the unpaved path crunched beneath his feet.

  The Facility wasn’t much from the outside. Its above-ground portion looked like a concrete box in the woods, smaller than many single-family homes. Hills rolled off to either side of it, causing Hannah to once joke that they worked in the literal butt-crack of West Virginia. About a football field’s length to the south, atop one of those hills, rose an array of antennas and dishes.

  If a foreign satellite were to take an image of the Facility — and they most certainly did — it would look like any number of similar listening stations or relay stations scattered throughout the globe. However, judging by the dozens of vehicles in the unpaved parking lot, they might surmise that this particular location housed something special.

  Joe had actually once put in a request to obscure t
he number of employees at the Facility by constructing an underground parking lot, or at least by hanging canopies so the vehicles weren’t visible to the world. (It was actually Hannah’s idea because she didn’t like her car getting too hot in the summer sun. Dust also tended to settle on the morning dew, making everyone’s car perpetually filthy.)

  The request sat in circulation for three years before someone at HQ quietly deleted it and sent Joe a standard reply: Thank you for your idea. We will take it under advisement.

  That’s how it went. It was impossible to get anyone in the Company’s bureaucracy to sign off on new spending. Joe didn’t know where the money for any of this came from, but he assumed that it was all secretly cobbled together from various branches of the military and government. A little from this pot. A little from that pot. To a degree, Joe understood that altering these streams of funding was a complicated affair, but come on, how hard would it be to install a canopy for the cars?

  Joe climbed into his hot, sun-heated pickup and immediately turned on the A.C. He slipped it into reverse and pulled out of the lot.

  Time to go get his daughter.

  ***

  Joe usually enjoyed the drive to pick up or drop off Riley from her mother’s house.

  For most of it, the two-lane highway stayed nestled in a tall tunnel of oak trees. In the fall, the red and yellow leaves came down so thick that it was sometimes impossible to see the lines on the road. The highway did some switch-backs up the Allegheny Mountains. The view, whenever it managed to peek out from the tree line, became only more impressive as one ascended.

  Near the summit, Joe passed the High Knob Trailhead.

  As he often did when he passed it, he made a mental note that one day he should actually hike that trail. Maybe with Riley.

  Riley.

  What would he say to her?

  What could he say to her?

  He hadn’t had time to really process this all for himself.

  His truck reached the peak and then descended the Virginia side of the mountains.

  The sun set behind him, throwing the long shadow of the Alleghenys onto the farmland below. Joe realized that it would be dark by the time he and Riley began their journey home. As much as he enjoyed the trip in the day, the road became long, twisty, and narrow the moment the light wasn’t there to showcase the beauty of the area.

  He didn’t like driving in the dark.

  But it was what he had to do whenever he dropped off or picked up Riley.

  ***

  Joe pulled to a stop, climbed out, and walked up to the house of Riley’s best friend, Silvia Vargas. He rang the bell.

  A moment later, Silvia’s mom answered.

  “Uh, hey,” Joe said, suddenly feeling uncomfortable. “I’m, uh—”

  “Riley’s father, yes I know,” Mrs. Vargas said. She clutched a hand over her heart and her eyes teared up as she stared at Joe. “I am so, so sorry for your loss.”

  “Uh, thanks,” Joe responded. It was all he could think to say.

  “If you need anything…”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “Anything at all.”

  Joe looked past her and into the house. “Um, can I see Riley?”

  “Yes, yes, yes. Please, come in. You can keep your shoes on,” Mrs. Vargas said as she stepped aside and waved Joe into the house.

  Joe walked through the entryway and into the living room.

  Facing away from him, two teenage girls sat on the couch and played some first-person shooter game. All those games looked the same to Joe. He never understood the appeal. But, then again, he just spent his afternoon surrounded by guys-with-guns and blood-and-guts; maybe that was why he never wanted to spend his free-time with more of the same.

  He watched for a moment. Riley’s dark hair was the exact same shade that her mother’s had been when Joe first started dating her. Today, Riley’s hair had been pulled back into dual braids that ran behind each ear. For the life of him, Joe had never been able to figure out how to do French braids like that. Kate was a pro at braiding hair, though. It was the one reason that she said she wanted a girl instead of a boy.

  Riley always wore her hair like that for softball practice and games. It kept the hair out of her eyes. But now the braids frayed. Dozens of stray hairs escaped the rubber band.

  A wave of sadness hit Joe.

  His daughter must have woken up that morning and done her hair expecting for a normal day of school and softball. Between the moment when she did her hair and now, everything in her life had changed.

  The girls didn’t talk and didn’t gesture wildly with their controllers. They seemed almost robotic as they moved their avatars around the screen, shooting at enemies. The volume was turned up loud. Excessively loud. Joe wasn’t sure if the loud game was a legitimate excuse for why Riley didn’t seem to be aware that he had arrived.

  Or maybe she was purposefully ignoring him.

  “Riley,” Mrs. Vargas said. “Your dad is here.”

  Riley put down her controller. Immediately, bullets thudded into her character on the screen. She didn’t seem to care.

  Silvia paused the game.

  Riley stood and looked at Joe.

  He was surprised at how normal her face looked. The same beautiful, freckle-faced girl he always knew. Her eyes weren’t red or teary, but there was an emptiness in her gaze, not too different from the empty face of her dead character on the screen. She seemed detached and drained, like she had just stepped off some long red-eye flight.

  They looked at each other for, perhaps, a single second, but it felt much longer.

  “Hey, Riles,” Joe said.

  “Sup, Dad.”

  Something about saying that word, his name, seemed to un-pin some emotional grenade in her. Her legs wobbled. Her mouth twisted into a mix of shock and complete despair. Before Joe knew it, he had his arms wrapped around his daughter, who suddenly felt smaller and more fragile than any teenager should feel.

  She pressed her eyes into his shirt and sobbed.

  Silvia and Mrs. Vargas stepped off to the side and silently left the room.

  Joe guided his daughter to the couch.

  They sat down together.

  He held her as she cried.

  CHAPTER 5

  Riley stared out the window of her dad’s pickup as they sailed past miles of rolling farmland.

  They were going back to his place.

  The sun had finally retreated behind the western hills, and the world clung to its last hour or so of blue, dusk light for the day. In the distance, Riley could make out shadowy black cows, ambling along as they munched on their evening grass.

  They passed the occasional farm house and church, but Riley mostly kept her gaze focused on the powerline poles, zooming by one at a time. She sometimes marveled at the infrastructure in this country, how each of these poles was essentially a tree that had experienced decades of life, only to be cut down, soaked in some sort of resin, and then jammed in the ground to hold up maybe a hundred feet of cable. It was a lot of work to bring power and roads to everyone.

  Why doesn’t this country build big, ambitious shit like that anymore? she wondered.

  She could feel her dad glance over at her from the driver’s seat. She knew he wanted to say something, to reassure her somehow, but there wasn’t much to be said. Besides, her dad was many things, but a comforter was not one of them.

  At this particular moment, Riley wanted nothing more than to stare out the window and pontificate about the lifespan of telephone poles.

  Anything else might make her cry.

  She already felt a bit of shame that she had cried so hard in front of her father. Her father had always been so strong, so cool, so collected under pressure — and, yes, so detached emotionally — that Riley felt she had somehow betrayed him by shedding those tears.

  “You wanna listen to music?” her dad asked, his voice cracking a bit in his attempts to soften it.

  Riley shrugged. “Whate
ver. I don’t care.” She truly didn’t.

  He reached toward the radio but hesitated a moment, then he withdrew his hand. “We’re, um, we’re going to be heading into the Quiet Zone anyway,” he said, almost apologetically.

  “It’s cool.” Riley kept looking out the window.

  What her dad said was true. Just over the West Virginian border was a vast area of restricted radio signals. Radio stations had to decrease their range. TV was practically impossible to receive over the old rabbit ears. It was one of the area’s many secrets/not-secrets. It was the kind of bizarre intrusion that people shrugged away and accepted as part of life living near major NSA facilities and military installations. The residents of the small town near the Facility simply paid for cable TV and moved on with their lives.

  “If you want to talk about anything…” he said, letting his voice trail off.

  “It’s cool,” Riley said.

  They sat quietly for another full mile or two of road.

  Riley sensed her father’s mind churning, trying to figure out something to say. At that moment, she wished that they did have music on because the quiet hum of the tires on concrete created an emptiness that her father somehow felt obligated to fill, even if neither of them wanted him to.

  Pretty soon, she was sure that he’d start pointing out the trailheads as they passed and talking about how they should do a hike together. Then he’d veer off into some story about Boy Scouts and how he always wanted to be a forest ranger but had a job to do and a family to raise.

  Her father didn’t bring it up as some sort of intentional guilt trip. It was just the small talk that his mind circled around to on these long drives between Riley’s two homes. She knew he wasn’t allowed to talk about his work, not that Riley cared about his work even if he could have talked about it. He seemed proud of what he did, though. So, instead of talking about the job he had, he talked about the job he didn’t have.

  But Riley didn’t want to talk. There was nothing to say. She simply wanted to stare out the window at the cows and fields and telephone poles.

  Her dad cleared his throat. “I reckon that over the years, I mighta said some things about your mom that weren’t very nice,” he said in a steady, low voice that made Riley wonder if he had been hashing this little speech out in his mind during the past few miles. “But I respect the hell out of her and you should too.”