But something told him that wasn’t it. It was someone who had vandalized property, and had broken into an area that they didn’t belong in.
The snow was falling quietly on the other side of the windows as Walter slowly walked past them, careful to be as equally silent. He leaned around the corner and peered around it.
The main room was empty. Save for a slight breeze coming in from the broken door, the room was silent.
The lights flickered above him and then turned off.
“Whoever’s out there, best to come out,” Walter said, peering around in the dark, his hands shaking slightly. “No reason to draw this out.”
The silence greeted him.
Maybe he was losing it. The power could have gone out because of the weather. There was a twenty-second delay before the backup generators went up. The sound he heard was probably nothing at all. Before darkness had overtaken his sight, there hadn’t been anything on the ground or anything. He heard things. These James Patterson books he was reading were making him more nervous than he had to be. No reason to think that there was any large conspiracy going on.
He brought his gun to his side and turned back toward the office. He was confident that the lights would be on once he got there.
Purple lights streamed ahead in front of him.
“What—”
Before he could even finish, Walter found himself on the opposite side of the room, the air knocked out of his chest. He felt his heart beating very fast, and his lungs had no air in them. He choked and tried to breathe. This is how it would end, wasn’t it? He most likely had a stroke of some kind, all alone out here in the middle of this storm. By the time anyone could learn what happened to him, he would already be long dead. And he never got the chance to sell his house to Janice from Stewarts.
White and purple light appeared in front of him.
He felt someone reach into his jacket pocket and take out his phone. He tried to stop it, but he could barely stand.
There was a flash of white light. Then the hand was reaching for his radio in his belt. Likewise, they took it, and there was a flash of white light.
“Who’s there?” he tried to say with a weak voice. He rolled over onto his side and was on his knees.
The lights flashed on ahead of him, and the room was once again flooded with light.
A girl stood in front of Walter.
She looked to be an early teen. She was dressed in a thin jacket and jeans. There was snow on it, but she didn’t seem to notice or care. There was blood on it as well, but she didn’t look hurt. She was looking down at Walter.
On the ground in front of her, Walter’s phone and radio, or rather what was left of them. They were both broken in half, seeming as though some great sharp and hot blade had seared through them the way a warm blade might cut through a cake.
The girl brought out a notepad that said “I (Heart shape) LUV NY” and a pen with a similar logo design. She was writing something. Walter wanted to speak, to ask her what the hell was going on, but he didn’t think that that would be a good thing to do at the moment. He didn’t know who or what this girl was or what was going on. The last thing he needed to do was step on her toes at the moment.
She stopped writing and turning the pad toward him.
Is there any other radio or transmitting source on your person? Nod for yes, shake your head for no.
He thought it over and shook his head.
The girl nodded. She took out something from her back pocket. It was Walter’s gun.
The girl looked the gun over carefully.
“Nice Glock 17 here,” she said, not looking at him. “My uncle was a nut about guns. It’s in pretty good shape, too. How many years have you had it?”
Walter shook his head.
I definitely have died, he thought, wondering which strange hell it was that he found himself in at the moment. The girl at least seemed to know how to hold a gun, never pointing it at him or herself, which comforted him only slightly. He would have preferred to be holding it himself.
“What?” he said, his voice sounding much weaker than he would have liked.
“The gun?” the girl said, looking it over. She unloaded the clip and checked the chamber.
“A while,” he said.
The girl rolled her eyes, and she reloaded the gun and flipped the safety off. She walked over and gave it to Walter.
“If I give you this gun, will you use it?”
“Will I have to?”
“Not against me.”
He looked at her. He wasn’t sure what was going on, but he was sure that he was probably dead at that moment, and this was an odd vision that phased through his mind in his last few minutes of thought before everything went dark.
He reached out and took it.
“What is your name?” the girl said.
“Walter,” Walter said. He put the gun in his holster and stood up. His knees were wet and soaked through with water. “What is yours?”
“Rebecca McCarthy.”
“Well, Rebecca,” Water said, looking down at his phone, his radio, and then at all the scorch marks around the entire room. “How the hell did you end up here?”
Rebecca pointed over toward the eating area.
“We can talk there,” she said, not waiting for Walter to reply. She walked over to one of the tables and took a seat.
Walter imagined himself leaving at that moment, running back to his truck and booking it through the snow.
He couldn’t call anyone. There was a radio at both of the other two stops, and he
