COLONEL AUDREY S. HIGGINS stands at the edge of the newly created crater on the face of Dagger Hill. The earth is churned and charred, black with ash and peppered with debris. Gnarled lengths of metal jut from the softened ground like the limbs of half-buried robots. It’s an apocalyptic sight, but nothing so strong as to haunt her dreams. Or at least, it shouldn’t be. But ever since arriving in this shit-speck of a town two days ago, Colonel Higgins has had some trouble sleeping.
Out in the woods, she can see the beams of flashlights bobbing in between the stiff lines of the trees. Some of the people out there are her own soldiers, some of them are volunteers from said shit-speck, which sits down in the valley, streetlights winking to life in the evening gloom. Regardless of whose people they are, everyone in the search party, wading through the damp heat, getting eaten alive by gnats and mosquitoes, they’re all yelling the girl’s name.
“Kimberly!” Over and over. “Kimberly Dowd!”
There’s a ghostlike quality to the way their faceless voices float down from the top of the Hill. A song with no melody. Higgins wishes she had a way to drown out the sound. It’s been a long weekend, and she’s tired.
Around the crash site, big arc sodium spotlights run on generators, washing cold light across what’s left of the wreckage. More of her crew are hustling hither and thither, like a colony of ants—she’s had bugs on her brain recently—carrying away the remnants of a picnic.
They’ve hauled most of the smaller chunks of the plane out of the clearing already. They’ve had a harder time getting trucks back here to take care of the bigger pieces, like the back half of the fuselage, which rests near the tree line, looking like a crumpled tube of toothpaste. The air smells of grass and char and jet fuel.
The colonel is unbothered by the circumstances—the plane crash, the missing girl, the repercussions of both—which have left some people in the lovely town of Windale feeling angry and rebellious. The chief of police, for instance. His son, too. But Higgins has dealt with her share of overconfident men, and Chief Albright is just another one of them, reactive to his own vulnerable masculinity.
No, what really bothers her is that through all this, across every inch of the destruction that this disaster left behind, both literal and figurative, she has seen not a single dead body. Not one cadaver to be found among the ruins of the aircraft—no cargo, no pilots. Not even the Dowd girl has turned up, dead or otherwise.
What the hell happened up there? she wonders. Thinking, not for the first time, that it was the smartest decision she’s ever made to send the plane away from Windale without her and her men on board. They almost didn’t make it to TerraCorp to begin with. Captain Rinaldi was none too pleased. Called her a coward. But who else would have the balls to clean up this mess?
And why the hell can’t I get a decent night’s sleep? Higgins thinks, adding to her lengthening list of questions. Her dreams are filled with voices and the ticking scratch of insect legs across the inside of her skull. Sometimes there’s a face, covered with a gas mask. It speaks to her, but not with words. More than once, she’s seen a glove-coated fist giving her a thumbs-up.
“Colonel?” somebody says behind her, jarring her out of her thoughts.
Higgins stiffens but doesn’t flinch. She never flinches. “Yes?” she says, not bothering to glance at who it is. It’s the voice of one of her soldiers, the sound of it vaguely recognizable. It doesn’t matter who he is. The information he has is more important to her than his name. Hopefully those damn teenagers have finally been spotted somewhere. She refuses to think about what happened at the Gutierrez house—the good doctor’s private office broken into and ransacked, the trackers left sitting in little puddles of blood on the kitchen counter. Higgins’s temper begins to flare.
“Uh, ma’am,” the soldier says, stumbling. “We have some … strange reports coming in from town.” He pauses.
“Are you going to elaborate?” Higgins says with a bite in her voice. “Or did you want to draw me a picture?”
“Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am. Three MPs making rounds in town are seeing some odd activity. The chief—Albright—was spotted at Kimberly Dowd’s home less than an hour ago.”
This is not news. Of course the chief of police would follow up with the missing girl’s family. Higgins is only surprised that it’s taken him this long to get around to it.
“And?” she says.
“One of the MPs is certain he saw the chief’s son and Dr. Gutierrez’s daughter leaving there with Chief Albright,” the private goes on. “There was something else happening over at the video-rental store, too. Ricky’s Rentals or something like that. Our men couldn’t get too close, but…”
“But what, Private?”
“It looks like the kid who owned the place might be dead.” The private seems perplexed by his own story. “And there’s one other thing. A senior resident was spotted in the town square—I guess they call it the Triangle—with one of the chief’s other deputies. That deputy escorted the old lady to the police station for some reason.”
Higgins whirls on the private, who takes a nervous step back. “Why do I care about what happens to some old woman, Private?”
“Because the sergeant who reported it says that only fifteen minutes after the deputy took the old lady into the station, the station’s secretary came running out, screaming for someone to help her. There was no one else around, so the MP went in to investigate.”
Higgins is losing interest in this part of the story. She’s still hung up on the part about Albright and Gutierrez leaving with Albright’s father.
But the private surprises her. “The MP found the police deputy dead inside one of the holding cells in the basement,” he says. “The old lady was in there with him. Just sitting there, listening to the radio. It … it looked like the woman choked the guy to death.”
Here we go, Higgins thinks, not without a little macabre satisfaction. Now we’ll get a handle on this thing. The dead don’t know how to lie.