Story code: ST-001873
Part 2: Dead Air
Greg’s trigger finger tightened, taking up the slack. Four pounds of pressure separated the intruder’s chest from a hollow-point round. But years of force-on-force training had ingrained one absolute rule in Greg’s mind: shoot to stop a threat, never shoot a man trying to commit suicide on your barrel. The man wasn’t attacking; his hands were wide open, his eyes focused entirely on the space behind Greg.
At the very last fraction of a second, Greg snapped his weapon back into a compressed high-ready position and pivoted hard on his left heel. The drenched man flew past him, carried entirely by his own desperate momentum. He collided violently with the edge of the kitchen island. The heavy impact rattled the pots in the overhead rack, but the intruder didn’t even groan. He scrambled wildly across the linoleum, his steel-toed boots slipping in the puddles of his own slick, dark fluid.
Greg spun, tracking the man with his front sight post, shouting for him to get on the ground. But the intruder ignored the weapon completely. He lunged back toward the open doorway-not to escape, but to grab the heavy wooden inner door. With a panicked, wet slap of his hands, he slammed the solid core door shut, sealing them inside. He fumbled frantically with the brass deadbolt, sliding it home with a sharp click, and then pressed his entire back against the wood, sliding down to the floor.
“Hands where I can see them! Palms up, spread them!” Greg roared, his voice cutting through the ringing silence of the kitchen.
The man complied immediately, throwing his hands out flat against the linoleum. He was hyperventilating, his chest heaving under the ruined fabric of his work shirt. Now that the man was stationary under the warm glow of the kitchen’s recessed lighting, Greg could finally process the horrific state of him.
The fluid coating him wasn’t just blood. It was a bizarre, viscous mixture of dark red biological matter and something that looked exactly like used heavy-grade machine oil. It smelled intensely of raw copper, scorched ozone, and pulverized hydraulic fluid. The man’s hands were shredded, the fingernails broken off at the quick from tearing at the aluminum screen, but his forearms bore a different kind of trauma. The sleeves of his shirt were torn away, revealing deep, symmetrical bruising that looked like the uniform marks of a heavy industrial vise.
“Who is out there?” Greg demanded, keeping his sights fixed firmly on the man’s chest. “Who is chasing you?”
The intruder gagged, coughing up a spatter of the dark, oily fluid onto the floor tiles. He stared up at Greg, his eyes wide and unblinking. “Turn off the lights,” he wheezed, his voice trembling so violently his teeth chattered. “Please. You have to turn off the backyard lights.”
“I’m not turning off a damn thing,” Greg said, his voice flat, projecting total control. “I have the tactical advantage as long as that yard is illuminated. You are going to tell me exactly who you are running from, and then I am calling the police.”
“No cops,” the man sobbed, a sound of utter, broken despair. “Cops can’t stop it. Guns can’t stop it. It tracks the light. It sees the heat. If you leave those floodlights on, it’s going to know I’m in here.”
Greg refused to let the man’s panic break his own focus. He took a calculated sidestep, maintaining a strict twenty-foot distance, and positioned himself where he could see both the trembling man on the floor and the edge of the kitchen window. The heavy blinds were still drawn, but a narrow sliver of the glass was visible. The backyard remained bathed in the harsh, blinding white glare of the halogen security fixtures.
“Nothing is out there,” Greg said steadily. “The motion sensors haven’t picked up any additional movement. It’s just you.”
“It doesn’t move like a person,” the intruder whispered, pulling his knees to his chest and leaving bloody, oily smears across his pant legs. “It doesn’t breathe. It just grinds. You have to kill the breaker. You have to plunge this house into total darkness right now or we are both going to die in this room.”
“Stay on the floor,” Greg commanded. He kept the gun leveled with his right hand while reaching back with his left to pull his cell phone from his pajama pocket. He dialed 911 using only his thumb, never taking his eyes off the intruder. The phone clicked, dialed, and immediately dropped to a flat, dead dial tone.
Greg frowned. He looked at the screen. Zero bars. That was impossible; the cell tower was less than a mile down the highway, and he always had full coverage. He tried again. Dead air.
“It jams the signals,” the man on the floor whimpered, curling into a tighter ball. “It creates a field. When the phones die, it means it’s within a hundred yards.”
“Shut up,” Greg snapped, his tactical calm finally beginning to fracture under the weight of the bizarre circumstances. The smell in the kitchen was becoming suffocating-a toxic, metallic reek that tasted like pennies on the back of his tongue. He stepped closer to the window, keeping his body armored by the drywall, and peered through the narrow gap in the blinds.
The backyard was dead quiet. The manicured lawn, the wooden privacy fence, the edge of the deep woods-all of it stood frozen under the halogen glare.
Then, the air pressure in the kitchen subtly shifted. Greg felt a strange, low-frequency vibration travel through the floorboards, up through his bare feet, and into his jawbone. It wasn’t a footstep. It felt like a massive, subterranean tremor, rhythmic and incredibly heavy.
*Thud.*
The water in the dog bowl across the kitchen rippled.
*Thud.*
Outside, the leftmost halogen floodlight suddenly exploded in a shower of sparks and shattered glass. There was no gunshot. No projectile. The heavy metal housing of the fixture simply crushed inward as if squeezed by an invisible, massive hand, plunging that third of the yard into absolute blackness.
The intruder on the floor clamped both hands over his ears and began to scream.
Greg brought his weapon up, centering it on the thick wooden door. For the first time in his life, the cold, textured grip of the 9mm pistol in his hands felt entirely useless. The second floodlight began to flicker.