A shriek sounded above as if the atmosphere was ripping in half. David startled where he stood beside his truck. Overhead, two F-22 Raptors screamed past and out of sight to the north.
“Boy. The birds sure got you that time, didn’t they, sheriff?”
David snapped himself back into reality. The truck was parked beside old pumps in front of a metal building with a weathered sign advertising prices for unleaded, regular, and diesel. Beside him, a hunchbacked man worked at the truck’s windshield with a squeegee. He wore black pants and a ragged, grease-stained shirt with a sew-on patch that read “Jimmy.”
“Suppose so. I think I’m asleep on my feet here,” David replied.
He’d been thinking about the case since leaving the scene. The dead man on the ground. That arm still sitting on the desk, as if the fingers might start typing again at any second. Puzzling through the possibilities of who might have committed any given crime was so much simpler before, a matter of thinking through the town’s seven hundred residents, their histories and animosities, tumbling all those pieces about inside his head until some started to connect. Now there were too many variables. Too many people. A mountain of puzzle pieces—more than he could possibly hope to hold in his head at once. What he’d learned over the past two years was that most crime traced back to drugs and to look there first. Addicts stealing something to sell in order to get another high. Gun battles between rival dealers. Meth heads turning violent. Maybe . . .
Not his case to solve, he reminded himself. The state police—or the FBI—had it under control. Let it go.
“You doing okay?” David asked.
Jimmy turned from his work and grinned.
“Can’t complain. Wouldn’t do a bit of good if I did.”
Jimmy had been giving that same response since he was a kid, since they all were in school together. Back when Jimmy’s dad ran the Pump-and-Go, and it was the only gas station in town. Now there were plenty of other places with cheaper fuel, but David still came here. Habit. Loyalty. Or a combination of the two.
The pump clanged, alerting them that the tank was full. Jimmy retrieved the nozzle.
“Put it on the department tab?” he asked.
“Thanks, Jimmy.”
“You get some rest, sheriff,” Jimmy said as he limped off.
Just then, a Humvee skidded to a halt on the opposite side of the pumps. The ding ropes barely registered both sets of tires. Dingding. Soldiers in camouflage jumped out, and one started pumping gas. None so much as made eye contact.
As a kid, David had been obsessed with the military, memorizing vehicles and weapons. Now the town was crawling with an army presence. Humvees racing up and down the streets. Transport trucks hauling troops or Lord knows what. The massive wall around Gulliver, thirty feet high with sniper turrets every hundred yards. The jets overhead. On the far side of the giant, out of sight to the west, a sprawling army base had grown, holding the tens of thousands of soldiers that kept watch over the massive corpse. Any awe David felt for this had long since diminished. They were an occupying force in his land.
David climbed up into the truck and shook his head to snap himself awake. The sun would start setting behind the giant before long, but that only meant it was late afternoon. He could still make it to his apartment for a nap before the night shift, when the calls always started to pour in from New Town. But he needed fresh batteries for his radio first.
He turned onto Main Street and parked in the shade of a towering blue spruce behind the three-story yellow brick county courthouse, what had for decades been the tallest building in town. A line of people stretched outside—outsiders waiting on driver’s licenses and voter registration. Soon enough, the county would belong to them. In the parking lot, he saw his cousin Jason’s car, a black Audi.
Instead of going down to the sheriff’s department in the basement, David went up to the second floor, to a door labeled: “Jason Blunt, County Assessor.” Going back to when their grandpa took over the town’s bank, the Blunt family had served as leaders in the community, on the village council and in the county offices. There were good-natured jokes about the “Blunt mafia.” David’s uncle, Dale, now ran the bank and had bought the local newspaper. While David became sheriff, his cousin Jason—Dale’s son—split time between working at the bank and the county assessor job, overseeing any real estate deal.
Inside the office, terrain maps covered the walls, each shaggy with stickie notes. Land marked off to become another strip mall or condo. Above Jason’s desk hung a ten-point buck’s head and, below that, a rack holding a shotgun. Jason was on the phone, his feet up on his desk, wearing his usual cherry-red Converses.
“Uh huh. Uh huh. Well, you’ve got to get zoned first. And before that, we need to do an inspection. Soil tests. All that shit. When? Shoot. Looking at two months.” Jason looked at David and winked. “Sure, sure. I’ll see. Maybe I can sneak you in early.”
He rang off and dropped the phone in its cradle.
“Shit, cousin. I’m starting to think it’s time to pursue an earlier line of work. What do you think?”
David sat into a wooden chair that was too uncomfortable for there to be any risk he might doze off.
“Bull riders?” David ventured.
“I’d take being a rodeo clown at this point,” Jason said.
On the desk was an old framed photo showing four adolescent boys. David had his own copy of it back at his apartment. Standing in front of a rickety tree house were the three cousins—David, Jason, and Ben Junior—and their friend Spady, who might as well have been blood. Since they’d been toddlers, the four of them spent most every waking hour together. At least, they had until senior year of high school, when one day Ben Junior was suddenly gone, run away, his parents said. Then no other news until five years later, when Ben Senior and Bonnie quietly told the family that their only child had died, in circumstances they had no inclination to discuss.
David looked from the photo to the maps on the walls.
“You know a real estate guy named Sanjay Kapoor?” he asked.
Jason pulled his feet off his desk and leaned forward.
“Just that he’s dead. Word spread pretty quick. You go to the scene?”
Again, the image of the disembodied arm appeared before David. He nodded.
“Fuck,” Jason said with a grimace. “Was it bad?”
David nodded again. He couldn’t say any more. Couldn’t talk about the gaping wound or the severed arm. If he told Jason, then Jason might tell someone else, and soon the whole county would know. And if everyone knew all the grisly details, the police wouldn’t be able to sort good tips from bad ones.
Jason exhaled hard.
“I helped him with a couple of deals, but I wouldn’t say I knew him at all. He was a real hard charger. Going around, knocking on every door, offering to buy out locals, then flipping the land to developers. Seemed like maybe a bit of an asshole, but I can’t imagine that gets you killed.”
David shrugged.
“It doesn’t seem like it. But I can’t say I understand why any person kills someone else. Anyway, I don’t think they have anything to go on.”
“State police took it, then? Good. Let it be their problem,” Jason said.
Jason searched his memory.
“I’m trying to think. Last time I talked to Kapoor was the Dalton deal. He got them to sell their acreage.”
David startled.
“The Dalton farm? No. That land has been in the family for four generations.”
“Cash. Enough money to go live in Florida. Sid says he’s going to buy a boat, spend every day out hooking marlins. Shit does he know about marlins? Anyway, it’s going to be divided up for mixed-use. Retail at ground level, apartments above. Should be real nice.”
David was too tired to restrain his reaction.
“And you just signed off on it?”
Jason leaned forward, and the chair groaned beneath his weight.
“I signed off because that’s my job, cousin. The Daltons have been living off the food pantry since we were kids. Now they’re rich. How is that a tragedy?”
David had no response.
“Listen. I know I shouldn’t even say it, but you could take that same road. Your folks’ place is just sitting there. I could get you seven figures. Easy. You could give up this bullshit. Ride bulls. Hook marlins. Whatever the hell you want.”
David tilted up his hat, so that his cousin could see his eyes.
“It is not for sale. Not now. Not ever.”
Jason pushed out his jaw and nodded.
“Yeah. Fine. Just don’t come in acting like I’m some villain here. This town was dying. No jobs. No people. And now we have everything. The whole world came right to us, thanks to Gulliver. You want to go back to being a small-town sheriff, you’re going to have to find another town.”
“I’m not leaving,” David said.
Jason leaned back. The fight had gone out of him.
“Yeah, well, you just keep tilting at windmills, then.”
David grinned. It was an olive branch, the line about windmills. Their grandma had been the town’s librarian and forced all the cousins to read Don Quixote one summer, an assignment Jason still complained about.
“Suppose I will,” David said.
A knock sounded at the door and it opened almost immediately, before Jason could respond. A woman charged through, and David instinctively stood. Her intense eyes shone brightly amid the olive skin of her face. She wore a floral-patterned scarf as a hijab, black slacks, and a thick sweater; a lanyard around her neck immediately marked her as one of the feds at the Countryman Building. It seemed as if every agency had a presence here. FEMA came in the immediate aftermath of landfall to tend to “survivors”—their term for the locals. Homeland Security. Department of Energy. The Centers for Disease Control. NASA. And for whatever arbitrary bureaucratic reason, the task of wrangling it all fell to the Department of the Interior. The woman’s name was Aaliyah Bakhtiari, and because she ran Interior, she was in charge of the giant.
“Ma’am,” David said.
He told himself he was being polite, but deep down he knew he was just worried he would butcher the pronunciation of her name. What was she doing here? The feds had never messed with county business before.
Then David remembered. The mosque. It was marked on one of the maps up there on the wall. A parcel of land amid a housing development to the northeast of town. Aaliyah was part of the group that bought the land. But they still needed county approval to build, and the locals were like a colony of bees that had been poked with a stick. Garden County had never had a single Muslim resident, let alone a mosque. All that the locals knew of Islam came from cable news—wars and terrorism and refugees.
“Hey, Aaliyah,” Jason said comfortably. “My cousin here was just leaving. Have you met David?”
She extended her hand and he took it.
“Sheriff,” she said. “I was hoping I’d see you, too. You’ll be at the city council meeting tomorrow night?”
“Village council,” he corrected.
“Right,” she said, taking back her hand. “We’ve had some threats. We hear there are people planning to protest. We would appreciate it if there was some security.”
David looked to Jason, who nodded.
“I’ll be there. Me and my deputy.”
He left them to whatever business they had. Downstairs, the sheriff’s department consisted of one small room, a closet-sized bathroom, and a single jail cell that they’d taken to using as a supply closet, now that the state had built a lockup outside of town to the east.
There was only one desk, which was actually a folding table that sagged under the weight of an ancient desktop PC, a stack of paperwork, and a bank of phones and radios and black wires that coiled and looped in great piles, as if they were hibernating snakes. The desk belonged to Andrea, as did the whole office, really. She was a monolithic presence, her body a near-perfect sphere. She wore her hair buzzed down to almost nothing, which she said was on account of the phone headset she barked into all day. She had served as dispatcher for the previous sheriff and the one before that. David wasn’t sure when or if she ever went home or slept. Each day, she sat there and fielded every call that came in, relaying it all to David and his deputy. She never seemed to eat, instead drinking from two liter-sized thermos cups that she filled daily with diet cherry soda.
“Hey, boss,” she said, not looking up from the computer.
David grabbed two batteries from a bank of chargers. He replaced the one in his radio and swapped out the extra in his belt.
“All quiet?” David asked.
“Mostly. Just trying to catch up on forms and reports till the next round of crazy. You handed off the body?”
“Yeah. Let the Staties have it.”
“Good. I don’t need any more paperwork.”
David was halfway out the door, fantasizing about the hour, maybe two, of sleep that lay ahead.
“Only thing,” Andrea said, freezing him. “The Tonys marched again yesterday. We had a bunch of calls complaining about it. I know they have a permit for morning marches, but . . .”
She left it at that. David sighed, motionless in the doorway.
“Call Brooke,” he said finally. “Tell her to meet me there.”
The theater building looked more than anything like a barn, with a sloped metal roof and wood siding. It had shown its last films in the 1970s, so David had never seen a movie there, only grew up hearing stories about it. It sat mostly unused for decades until landfall, and all at once someone had bought it and put up a metal privacy fence around it before the locals had noticed. And by the time they had, it was too late. Some goddamned doomsday cult had taken residence right in the heart of Little Springs.
Brooke stood waiting for him beside the large gate in the fence, tall and athletic in her tan deputy uniform, her blond hair tied up in a loose bun.
“Shit, boss. You look terrible.”
“Thanks,” David said. “Great to see you, too.”
He felt like he barely saw Brooke anymore. The job had grown so big, it was all they could do to divide up the county and the hours and sprint in opposite directions. She was a year younger and, though they weren’t related, had always been like a younger sister. Then she had started dating Spady, and so they’d spent most of their lives around each other. Now he mostly felt guilty. It was bad enough that this job was killing him. It didn’t need to kill her, too.
“You holding up?” he asked.
“Nothing too crazy. Car crash on ninety-two took a bit to clear. So, what the hell happened with the body?”
“State police have another murder on their hands. Victim is Sanjay Kapoor, some out-of-town realtor, come in to flip land. It reminded me a little of the Jim Holly case.”
Brooke looked off, remembering. “The helicopter tour guy. Right. Huh. You think it’s a racial motive?”
It hadn’t occurred to him. Holly was Black. Kapoor was Indian American.
“God, I hope not,” David said. “Things are wound so damn tight already. Anyway, I don’t know for sure that they’re related. They just had similar wounds. Both cut all to hell. And Kapoor’s arm was hacked off. He also had a big wound right here.” David tapped his sternum.
“Christ. Sounds almost ritualistic or something.”
He nodded.
“I thought as much. Part of why I wanted to rattle their cage a bit.”
He looked through the metal bars of the gate, at the theater building, every inch of which had been painted black. Beside the gate was an electronic doorbell. David pressed the button, and it chimed.
“I thought it was a state police show,” Brooke said.
David grinned back.
“No harm in poking around. Now, when they come out, I’m going to take lead. But when I nod at you, you ask them about the murder.”
“You sure?” she asked.
“Here they come,” David said and tilted his hat low over his eyes.
The theater doors opened. It was too dark inside to see anything. Above the doors, the marquee that had once held movie titles and show times now proclaimed, “ANUM HAS FALLEN, ANUM WILL RISE AGAIN.” Two tiger masks appeared, seeming to float in the shadows. Then the rest of the bodies emerged trailing black cloaks. Average height. Probably men, David guessed by their shoulders and because the Tonys supposedly had a rule against women speaking.
They made their way to the gate but didn’t open it.
“Do you choose to follow the one true path to the heavens?”
The voice hissed through the perforations in the mask. David shook his head.
“All good on the salvation front. Just here to serve you this.”
David thrust a sheet of paper through a gap in the gate. With black-gloved hands, one of the robed figures took it.
“Citation,” David explained. “Failure to register to demonstrate. You’re all square on mornings, but you never cleared it with me to march in the evenings.”
The same masked figure spoke again. “We do not march. We prostrate ourselves in the shadow of Anum. We must show him that we offer ourselves. Freely. For Anum’s return nears. Even you can feel it, sheriff. He will awaken. Already, he stirs.”
Though David could only see the man’s eyes through the mask, he was certain it was Quentin Breda. He’d pulled an FBI file on him after the cult settled here. Breda was in his late fifties, born and raised in a Florida swamp, the son of a Pentecostal minister. Had some kind of split with that church, then took to prophesying about the apocalypse. Started a few new churches. Arizona. Utah. He claimed to have special knowledge of a true faith, something that came before Christianity or Judaism, inspiration pulled from the mad British poet William Blake. “Tyger, Tyger, burning bright.” That was the reason for the tiger masks, or at least that was the assumption. Twice before, Breda had predicted that a giant being would appear and hasten the end of the world. Twice before, his predicted dates came and went. Then Gulliver fell, and some crackpots found Breda’s theories, and his flock grew. And then they showed up here.
David maintained his smile. Of all the outsiders, these were the worst. Some goddamned perversion. And right here. Right in the middle of Old Town. Right on his doorstep. He couldn’t force them out—at least not yet—but he’d take any chance he could to spit in their cereal. Technically, he should have given them a warning.
“Flip that paper over, and there’s information on the back about paying your fine.”
David caught Brooke’s eyes and nodded.
“One more thing,” she said. “A man was killed today. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you? Maybe some Tony the Tiger got out of the cage and went on the hunt?”
The second man stepped forward, his voice loud and echoing against the mask.
“Don’t you talk to him! Women do not speak to him!”
It would’ve been awful satisfying to punch the man through the gate. Instead, David pointedly rested his hand on his holstered pistol.
“Calm. Down. Should I take that as a ‘no’?” David asked.
Quentin exhaled hard against the mask.
“Anum’s followers do not stray.”
With that, the two men receded into the theater, and the doors closed, swallowing them.
“What do you think?” Brooke asked.
“Hell if I know,” David said. “All I know is that anyone who wears a mask is obviously hiding something. There was something else . . . the second guy. His voice sounded almost familiar.”
“A local? Mixed up with that bunch? No way.”
David shrugged. “Could just be I’m exhausted. I’m going to go stare at my eyelids for an hour, then I’ll take evening shift tonight. You go home to Spady.”
“You got it, boss,” Brooke said.
“And tell that one-armed asshole that we need to grab a beer.”
The two of them walked across the dirt street toward their trucks. Behind them, the small blue light on the electronic doorbell blinked steadily, transmitting all that had been said back into the black building.