<strong></strong><br/><strong><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 1em;"><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: Cambria;">The Cape Café, a small café in the downtown district of Cape Merrin</span></span></strong><br/><strong><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 1em;"><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: Cambria;">November 10, 2010</span></span></strong><br/><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 1em;"><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: Cambria;"> </span></span><br/><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 1em;"><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: Cambria;">The number of emergency response vehicles that the three occupants of the café witnessed racing east along Cape Merrin’s rain-soaked streets finally reached a peak and began to drop off but the sirens and the noise flowing from them continued onward, a swansong for the grungy little pub called Simon’s Bull.</span></span><br/><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 1em;"><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: Cambria;">Outside the café the streets were glittering with wetness, the storm drains sucking up the sky’s outpouring like ravenous mouths belonging to giant fat frogs. Aside from the sirens and the noise of the storm, Cape Merrin was quiet, and the café was as well. Mark was too busy trying to casually steal glances at Fate to pay much attention to either Alice or the racing vehicles. Reluctantly, he offered Alice a refill of the black coffee she drank. He didn’t know how she could stomach the stuff; Daniel, the owner, bought the most bitter coffee grounds he could. God knew why.</span></span><br/><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 1em;"><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: Cambria;"> </span></span><br/><strong><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 1em;"><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: Cambria;">Exterior of Simon’s Bull</span></span></strong><br/><strong><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 1em;"><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: Cambria;">Cape Merrin</span></span></strong><br/><strong><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 1em;"><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: Cambria;">November 20, 2010</span></span></strong><br/><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 1em;"><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: Cambria;"> </span></span><br/><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 1em;"><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: Cambria;">The number of officers outside the bar ballooned as not only fire rescue vehicles but ambulances arrived on the scene, though these latter were mostly too late to help anyone. The young girl in the religious garb who had spent the earlier part of the evening beating a homeless drunk man nearly to death stood slack-jawed and expressionless, staring down at the remains of one of the deputies that had virtually been decapitated by something. She didn’t resist when arriving officers shuffled her away from the corpse and cuffed her, guided her into a squad car for questioning later on. She sat in the back of the car, her breath fogging up the window as hell opened up around her outside the squad car. Demons in uniforms seemed to caper in the rain with blood-streaked faces. Her mind reeled; then she was asleep, her dreams filled with bloated corpses that seemed to reach out for her and ask for salvation.</span></span><br/><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 1em;"><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: Cambria;"> </span></span><br/><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 1em;"><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: Cambria;">The officer who had dragged his downed partner out of Simon’s Bull despite that most of his </span></span><br/><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 1em;"><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: Cambria;">partner’s blood was still inside the bar, being devoured by a cockroach swarm pointed a finger at Det. Michaels and began howling. “She shot Benny!!!! That fucking detective bitch shot Benny!!!” Cori herself did not dispute this accusation; she stood in the rain, having been shuffled outside the bar, the grip of the man’s voice—that wasn’t the right word; that thing was not a man—broken in her mind. Her arms were her own now; she was weaponless, but she lifted her hands to look at them. “How could this have happened? How could she have murdered a police officer? That woman in the bar?” she thought. She could still see the evacuation of the woman’s gray matter from her head, the splatter on the wall. “How could something like this happen?” was all that she could think; her mind came back to that question like her thoughts were on an old 45 record with a crack, and she just couldn’t get past that question. She didn’t resist and she didn’t respond to the taunts that Benny’s partner issued as another officer pushed her against a squad car and cuffed her. She felt dead inside, dirty—raped. That thing, that thing that had done this to her—it wasn’t possible. Shit like that didn’t exist. How many times had she, a detective, a rational and productive member of society, looked at some white trash, broken-toothed abusive sunovabitch and said, “Yeah, right” when the bastard had claimed voices made him beat his pregnant girlfriend to death, or voices made him attack his neighbor. Cori’s sense of reality was unalterably changed after this evening, as was her life. This wasn’t the world of Harry Potter—she couldn’t claim in court that she was under the Imperius curse for fuck’s sake. This shit didn’t happen. This shit wasn’t real. Couldn’t be. If Cori had been less of a woman, the growing realization that her mental rape was indeed real, that this wasn’t some fuck of a conflagration of mad nightmarish fears that too much Chinese food had caused her unconscious mind to belch up into her sleep, she would have pissed herself. But she didn’t. Instead she felt a coldness in her body that only approximated the fear coursing through her blood. And her mind turned back to her work: “If this was possible—what was killing the children? Who was killing the children?” Terror sunk into the muscles of her lower back and Cori was glad to be sitting up inside a squad car with her thoughts, the squawk of the police radio and the drumming of the ran on the car’s roof as her only company; if she had still been on the hood of the car she was sure she would have vomited all over its hood. </span></span><br/><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 1em;"><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: Cambria;"> </span></span><br/><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 1em;"><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: Cambria;">The group of survivors that were exiting Simon’s Bull began to go their own ways, ignoring the calls from officers to please stand near the bar and wait to be questioned, and while normally this would have been cause for police to at least threaten to use force, inside the bar, a symphony of shattering glass and an inhuman wailing floated out into the noisy night street. The shattering glass was the liquor behind the bar, finally heating up enough to combust, and before officers could pursue the bar’s occupants, fire fighters moved forward, issuing a warning to the police officers to fall back and hold off curious onlookers—not that Cape Merrin had too many residences in the vicinity of the bar wherein the occupants were not either too dead tired to be up so late or too high out of their minds to take seriously the noises they were hearing. Before the fire fighters could enter the building, the heavy front door caught flame and lit the wet awning on fire. Anyone who looked at the fire could see it was odd. Fire didn’t continue like this in heavy downpours. The firemen looked at one another, a ghost of fear etched in some of the rookies’ faces; that awning shouldn’t have caught, not as fast as it had, not in this rain. Their pause was not lengthy and the captain led them into action despite the soft squelching explosion that pulsed inside the bar just before the fire hoses got attached to the fire hydrants. The fire fighters had to deal not only with the flames, which seemed oddly resistant to the water they sprayed, but also had to deal with some sort of acidic residue that had formed in the back area of the bar. Most of the men had to replace their boots because before the crew realized the multiple dangers, their outer boots were almost completely eaten away by the acid. It was the weirdest fucking thing the captain had ever come across, which is not saying much given his rather pedestrian life in Cape Merrin. It’s why he retired early. But even five years later, his life at a new level of calm down in Ft. Meyers, where the sun always came out, he would sometimes wake up early in the morning and smell the smell of that acid-bathed bar. Like cooked bile. The forensics had come back and shown not only roach infestation of the bar but some kinda bug juice had been sluiced all over the goddamn place. How’s that happen he always wondered. Where’s a fella get enough acid strong enough to eat through firemen’s boots sprayed all over a bar and mixed up with bug juice? It didn’t make any goddern sense, but for the captain, it didn’t need to—he chose to run away less than a week after it happened. He left the questions to younger men, except for those occasional early morning memories. He never told his wife about the smell; it was something he lived with alone. Something he couldn’t explain. He knew after that night that things weren’t as they seemed always—he knew it, and he ran down to Florida, hoping like hell he’d never encounter any other proof of that again for the rest of his life.</span></span><br/><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 1em;"><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: Cambria;"> </span></span><br/><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 1em;"><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: Cambria;">Otis darted for his pickup truck parked in the lot on the east end of the bar. He moved quickly, not yielding to police, not looking around for Arathel, just knowing he’d be followed. They needed to move, now. Something was definitely up. They needed to find out what the hell had happened at that bar, and so as Otis crawled into his seat, jeans soaked through, he hoped like hell that Micheal would follow him back to the farmstead. They could lock down there. He pulled out onto the road, heading east, away from the police cars and fire fighters and chaos and into the sleek black night that led the way out to the farmlands. There was no real pursuit because while the firefighters were caught trying to deal with a situation for which they were unprepared, the police watched as the back end of the bar appeared to melt, succumbing to the acid rather than the fire before their very eyes. It was like something out of a Dali painting one of the beat cops muttered under his breath. This comment met with mostly blank stares from the other cops around him.  </span></span><br/><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 1em;"><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: Cambria;"> </span></span><br/><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: georgia;"><strong>Cobb Theater, interior</strong></span><br/><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: georgia;"><strong>Cape Merrin</strong></span><br/><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: georgia;"><strong>November 10, 2010</strong></span><br/><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 1em;"><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: Cambria;"> </span></span><br/><span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 1em;"><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: Cambria;">Reggy’s shift came to its typical quiet close. The bullies did not show up again either to taunt or pay him, so he was left blissfully alone among the rows of brightly packaged candies, the smell of once-hot popcorn. The ghosts of people cheerily ordering their show-time treats were his only company until Trebs showed up and was ready to have him cash in his drawer with her in the safe in the office—this was after she’d locked up the front doors, made sure there were no lingering moviegoers kept overly long in any of the bathroom stalls or elsewhere. “Still raining cats and dogs out there,” she commented idly while leaning up against one of the glass top counters that Reggy had already wiped down, her hands under her chin as she gazed into the night pouring in through the theater’s front windows. She turned to face him and said, “I’m ready to get out of here tonight, I can tell you.” As she walked off toward her office Reggy became aware that she’d already switched out the black uniform pants all the theater employees wore for an oddly pieced together wrap skirt. She had probably ten different floral patterns wrapping her from waist to mid-thigh; from the torso up though she was still all professional in her collared Cobb Theater shirt. Daytime management certainly would not have approved of the shortness of her skirt, or the familiarity with which she treated Reggy and her other employees—they were not automatons to her. She genuinely liked most of the kids she worked with, even if she couldn’t get past the fact that she couldn’t keep herself from calling them kids in her head. Reggy especially she liked; he was always so responsible. Thinking of the events earlier in the night though, she amended this in her head, and thought that his seemingly inexplicable disappearance into the rain made him more interesting than the rest of the night shift employees she regularly worked with. And so with mild amusement, she sat down and cranked open the safe while Reggy settled down into a chair across from her, probably trying to decide how to bring up the fact that he knew his register was going to be very short.</span></span>