H(a)unted

The deaths start in late April. I remember the first case, a girl with her lifeless eyes gazing upward, her stomach completely gone. Forensics sent the analysis a few days after that basically summed up what we saw at the crime scene: something incredibly hot punctured her, causing her to lose a lot of blood at once. Blood toxicity showed an incredibly high level of unknown drugs in her system that exacerbated her heartbeat, causing arrhythmia and finally, a heart attack. Out of all the evidence we obtained, I remember her bright-yellow eyeglasses the most. I managed to give them back to her family after their closed-casket funeral.

It takes a monster to kill a child. It takes a worse one to kill five.

I sigh as I stand inside the decrepit alley, glancing down at the body laying down innocuously on the ground. The alley is famous for high school make-out sessions and experimental sessions with weed, but teenagers don’t often associate with ten-year-olds. No ten-year-old would go willingly to this area. So what was little Tommy Hager doing here, and what turned his body into a carcass?

I count from one to ten before closing my eyes. I hear the tell-tale arrival of the beat-up police car. I place my hand on the pistol and waved over Johnny, my new partner from the city. He looks harried, his blonde hair all over the place. Our quiet town became an overnight sensation after the third murder, and the big bureaucracy bosses sent over a green officer to deal with it to hopefully calm down the media frenzy. No one from home was impressed when Johnny came to town.

“Have you phoned Bill yet? We’ll need reinforcements,” I ask as soon as he reaches me.

“I had to rush over from the doughnut place to get here, you know. But yeah, I have. Got the next town’s sheriff coming here in an hour,” I scoff as soon as his back turns. Whatever Johnny is supposed to stand for, it isn’t inspired public service for sure. I close my eyes as I hear him get close to the body on the ground.

“Know this one, too?” he asks nonchalantly.

“Tommy Hager, aged 10. He’s in Lisa's class, so show some fucking respect, officer,”

I feel more distant from my partner than I ever could imagine. How on earth was he supposed to help, out of all people? I might be the town’s sheriff and the only police officer, but goddamn this kid gets on my nerves. As the murder cases are piling up and our thousand-and-one population drops by the minute, it’s a curse to constantly keep an eye on him and figure out the cases by myself. God knows what Johnny does out of the office, but I don’t have time to babysit.

Johnny straightens from the ground and frowns at me, “I sometimes forget everyone in this town knows everyone. Sorry about this, boss, but it looks like the kid wasn’t following the curfew,”

I check my watch and reply, “Kid, we don’t know if he really was breaking curfew. We got the tip early, and forensics is on the way. Until we know the time of death, we’re not assuming anything,” Johnny shrugs and leans on the opposite wall, his gaze upwards, and drops the conversation.

We hear the morning call of the birds above us. What a great start to the week. The soft fog of the early morning envelopes the alley. For a moment we were at a standstill as if in prayer. Another innocent soul has been taken before their time. Another morning where we’ll have to break the news to a parent or sibling and watch their world shatter right before our eyes. We let the moment slip by. And without speaking, we move outside the alley and sit by the curb.

I sigh again, feeling the weight of the world on my shoulders. I massage my forehead. This looks like a picture-perfect replica of what happened to the four other children: kids in the wrong place, stomachs gone, eyes wide open as if they died in the middle of an adrenaline rush. What am I not seeing? What are we not doing right? A soft shiver from the cold early morning creeps into my spine.

“Do you think that'll ever stop?” Johnny suddenly asks me, his voice somber. “I feel fucking useless, boss,” I look at him in surprise. I'm under the impression my partner has the emotional range of a teaspoon. He notices and frowns, “I’m not completely heartless. It’s kids this shit is happening to, and we’re nowhere near solving this case from where we started three months ago!”

I raise my eyebrow. Suddenly, he doesn't look like a greenie. He stands up and starts to pace, incensed with anxiety, “We know it’s no one from the town, we’ve been screening every car that passes by through the interstate, and we’ve interviewed literally every person with a criminal record within a 20-mile radius! We gotta admit it by now, there isn’t a human capable of this!”

Morbidly, a laugh suddenly erupts from my body. Apparently, his maturity has a limited shelf-life. “Johnny, you’ve been talking to too many locals.” He frowns, his face turning red with embarrassment. “The Kneank is a children’s tale at best and a bar tale to spook tourists. A creature that has a stinger and what – fog? Kid, it’s a legend we have to tell the kids during Halloween to keep them off our yards. No one actually believes in that shit,”

“But the toxicity reports! Unless they inhaled a bunch of uppers which we know for a fact they didn’t, how did their hearts explode like that? How are they always in places their parents know they would never be in?”

I sigh and stand up, “Listen, Johnny. I know the job’s hard. But if we entertain local drunk’s theories, we’re never going to get anywhere,” he looks away as I look up to the sky. It's getting darker than I expected. Six AM skies don't look this dreary in our town. “That’s strange. Did Dave say we’re getting rain today?”

Johnny shrugs in reply, “There are stranger things about this town than some unexpected morning rain." I side-eye him warily. Youth is supposed to invigorate him, but he looks ten years older than me. He notices me staring and says unexpectedly, "Some days, boss, I wanna get in that car and just drive. Don't you?"

"I don't know about you city folk, but we stick together in this town, and I won't tolerate that nonsense," I said off-handedly.

Johnny turns away, disgusted by my sales pitch answer. "Easy for you to say. You're a tired, lonely cop who doesn't have anybody but himself and his fucking groupie town. You're way over you're head, and you can't even fucking see it,"

This kid's gearing up for a fight, but there isn't a fight left in my tired, weary bones.

"You're supposed to be helping me, big shot. Not causing me another headache. If you wanna go, no one's stopping you. But we don't have time for in-fighting when the real fight's out there," I point at Tommy's body on the ground. Johnny grimaces and looks away. "You're right. This town looks up to me. But I'm not telling any of those parents that some fairytale bullshit took their very real kids from them. But you're welcome to try." I watch him lose all his childish bravado in one fell swoop. For a split second, I pity his youth. When I was his age, I was dealing with speeding tickets. He's out here dealing with dead kids he hasn't even met. That no one will ever meet again.

Another sigh escapes me. No matter how experienced or smart you are, nothing prepares you to stare down the ugly underside of humanity. Even though I owe this city kid nothing, it's hard not to feel even the tiniest bit sorry for him. But encouraging words are never my forte, and this kid is being a total bitch so the silence grows between us.

Johnny's back is in front of me as we hear a rumble from the road. We expectedly looked toward the sound, hoping to see even the faintest outline of the forensic team's black cars. Nothing. Johnny looks back at me confused like a lost puppy.

This job. This town. These kids. I check my watch again. Frustration bubbles in my throat.

It’s just negligent to not respond to an active scene. The second hand of my watch seems to mock me. Frowning in annoyance, I say aloud, still following the annoying tick-tock of my watch, "Forensics is usually punctual to a T, especially since the first case. I even remember a few sleepless nights at the morgue," I sighed and closed my eyes dejectedly. "If I have to deal with another thing going wrong this morning, I just might beg the mayor for another job. Call them back, kid,"

Usually, Johnny replies with a sarcastic smugness that makes me wanna punch his face, but this time, I get nothing. Is the kid actually getting soft? An open road greets me when I opened my eyes. My heart thumps in three times faster than it ever should. I distantly remember my doctor’s recommendations from last week: less bacon and coffee, and more spinach of all things. Without realizing why, I see red - if anger was diesel, then I'm a house on fire. If that kid thinks he can just disappear on the job, he has another thing coming. I shout while turning in a circle, “Hey, this isn’t the best time to be fooling around! There’s a fucking murderer on the loose -”

Something knocks me to the ground, and I vaguely hear a splitting sound. I say goodbye to the rest of the world for a bit.

———————————————————————————————————————————————

When I come to myself, everything's a fucking blur. The morning mist makes it even harder to fucking see. Everything's upside down and I blink hazily before I realize why I can't see - my damned glasses are a few feet away from me. I crawl unsteadily until I slide them back on.

Everything comes to focus - and so does Johnny.

I hear a soft wailing sound, and realize it’s coming from me. So this is what they felt. The parents, my brain softly whispers to me. I blink again, hoping I'm hallucinating. But I'm not.

Even later, when I'm being bandaged up and the forensic team does arrive, saying they never received a message, I pray to some god I don't believe in.

Because it should be some other kid they found. But it's the kid. Johnny's eyes have gazed upwards, his stomach blown wide open.

And they found me covered in his blood, smack dab in the middle of two active crime scenes.