Very soon after he met Darlene, things got hectic for Young. He tried to frequent the diner as much as possible to flirt with her, and he did for a couple weeks before one of his fellow recruits at the academy turned up dead. The young man died in his apartment in the city and no one suspected foul play; it was an apparent suicide and the recruits were encouraged to seek counselling. Young took advantage of it and he spent a lot of his free time exploring his anxieties about the life he was choosing for himself.
“I’m excited to do the work,” he said in a session, “but I want to make sure I’m doing it for the right reason. It’s not enough that I’m doing the family business, but I don’t wanna get lost in the pipe dream of making the world better. One man can only do so much, I know that. It is more than a paycheck, though.”
Darlene was busy at the diner, but she found herself looking for Young to show up to order his unusual breakfast. After a while she figured that he had changed his mind about becoming a police officer and went back home. She smiled at the thought.
As Falon drove away from her house sitting job, in the car she had stolen from a thief, she got a call on her cell phone. It was a cryptic call but she recognized the voice.
“Come see me, I got something for you.”
It was her father and he hung up before she could answer. The man was very skeptical of phones of any kind and she rarely ever talked to him for more than a few minutes at a time unless she met him in person. He spent most of his time in Tennessee and Falon always met him at the same place.
After she switched cars, she made her way to Knoxville, Tennessee where she waited for her father to show up at the Greyhound bus station. She stood under the board that showed the schedule and she looked around nonchalantly at the people passing by.
Then there was a commotion and Falon saw a man who looked like a diseased bodybuilder tear through the crowd in the station. He growled like an animal as he swung and knocked people over; Falon swore she saw someone fly through the air after he hit them. And then the monster of a man saw her; they locked eyes and Falon was suddenly frozen with fear. The man charged at her and Falon could see bubbles in his skin like he was boiling with the rage that fueled his growls. Falon was sure she was going to die, but the man stopped in front of her.
“Find your father!” he yelled at her and Falon cowered. “Deejay, racetrack, find Deejay!” He yelled as the veins in his body seemed to swell like thick pythons were writhing under his skin. And then his head exploded and Falon was covered in the viscera.
There was commotion in the station and Falon wandered away from the scene just as police arrived and witnesses described the crazed man whose head had spontaneously exploded. She was in shock, but her body moved on instinct. Her father had taught her to never stick around for the authorities, “They try to rope you into something that ain’t got nothing to do with you,” he told her when she was a girl. She could sense police, or other law enforcement, like a preternatural ability, and in the moment when the image of a head exploding was all she could see, her body moved her easily out to her car and she found a motel room, the cheapest she saw off the highway where she was sure no one would ask questions about the blood on her face and clothing.
As she showered, she allowed herself to process the scene she had witnessed and she collapsed in tears. She was confused. That man wasn’t her father, but it seemed that he had met her just like her father usually would. She wondered if her father was in some kind of trouble, and if he was, he definitely wouldn’t use a cell phone to contact her. She couldn’t imagine that he would send a man in a rage to deliver a message, and Falon knew that something was very wrong.
She got dressed quickly when she was done with the shower and she had wiped her tears away. She wasn’t sure which racetrack the crazed man had been referring to, but she headed in the direction of the first one that appeared on her phone in her search results. She found herself in a neighborhood and decided to ask someone, or she saw the old man in his yard and thought he looked interesting enough to talk to. Or something else made her stop, something that she could not describe in the moment, but it felt good to put on her most affable face and make nice with a stranger after the encounter she’d had earlier. The old man was nice and he pointed her in the direction of the racetrack that she was headed toward.
When she arrived at the track, she put on a different face. She relaxed her instincts that made her alert and gave the impression to others that she was tough and unapproachable, a look that served her well as an attractive young woman in a world full of men who would try to take advantage, and she allowed herself to appear softer and vulnerable. She looked lost and that invited men to offer their help with the hope of offering more, and in no time, a man was on her asking if he could do anything for her.
“I’m supposed to be meetin a friend, his name Deejay, but he ain’t answerin his phone.” She had her phone in her hand and she looked at it like it confounded her.
“Deejay?” the man said surprised. “You don’t look like the meth type.”
Falon was unfazed, “Did I say I was trying to buy from him? If I was lookin for meth I’d have it by now, y’all pass it around like candy out here.”
The man laughed and pointed Falon in the direction of the stands that overlooked the track near the finish line. “He usually takin bets over there, but I ain’t seen him today.”
Falon smiled and walked away before the man could continue talking to her and she walked up the stands to sit among the sparse crowd gathered there. She was sure to sit in the earshot of an older man who cheered along with each result.
A race finished on the track soon after she sat and Falon cursed herself loudly.
“I gotta find somebody to take my bets, I woulda won that.”
The man looked at her and smiled, “You can make bets inside.”
“Even if i ain’t got cash on me?”
“Yeah, they don’t usually take those bets. Deejay usually around for those, but I ain’t seen him around today. Hang around, he usually come out.”
Falon smiled, but inside she was a bit upset that she’d have to wait around the track for him.
And then there was a loud scream, and then more screams joined it into a chorus, and Falon was stricken with panic. Could it be happening again? She left the stands, and wandered away from the commotion, away from the track and across the street toward the woods. As she gets closer to the woods she sees something like a man or a monster cower into the leaves.
“Stay back!” she heard the man growl. “Stay back. I need help but I don’t want to hurt you.”
“What’s wrong,” Falon asked, trying to hide her fear. Though the man screamed, he sounded very afraid.
“Something happened to me. I don’t know. I didn’t mean to hurt him, I was trying to warn him, but then…” the man screamed in pain and Falon got close enough to see the man’s horrible transformation. His limbs were growing and his skin did not, and she screamed when his flesh ripped open. “I was trying to warn him. I didn’t mean to hurt Deejay,” the man said in his agonizing screams. “It was gonna happen to him too if i didn’t kill him. Everybody at the house is dead.”
Falon yelled at him, realizing he might have some connection to her father. “Where is the house?”
He gave a street and Falon yelled at him until he gave a number, and then he died.
Falon walked away briskely as she pulled up the home on her gps. She was shaken but the encounters had made her desperate to see her father, that he wasn’t dying like the men she had seen.
But when she made it to the house, and she pushed into the half open door, she vomited at the grisly scene inside, and she ran away crying, confused how her father factored into all the grotesque strangeness.
Falon is still in Knoxville, but she has been laying very low. She’s been asking around about her father, but she notices people noticing her and that makes her skeptical of most of the people she sees around town. She’d found out a few things about the strangeness she had endured; apparently the house where she had found the dead bodies was a meth lab, and everyone who had died inside were killed by contaminants from a batch of meth that had been cooking in the basement. She worried that she had been contaminated, but she had drummed up symptoms to go to the emergency room multiple times and casually brought up the news story that was constantly developing on local news and in the papers, and she charmed the doctor into reassuring her that she wasn’t in danger of her body ripping itself apart.
She stays at the same motel where she has been since she arrived. It is cheap and she is used to level of shady character that she encounters there, they are like kindred spirits with the community that had raised her. She watches the news a lot, and that is what she is doing when the white spider crawls onto her bed and then quickly up her back, and then into her ear. She doesn’t even feel a tickle. She’s lost in the TV as the news updates on the dead bodies at the meth labs; “Authorities want to assure the public that the awful fate of those found in the meth lab is not something that they should worry about, though if you are a meth user, there is a possibility that the drug is contaminated and could be an immediate danger to the user…”
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