A twenty something Paul Young walked into the diner that was frequented by members of law enforcement. He was dressed well, and specifically for the occasion. He was determined to ask Darlene out on a date and he would take her from her shift at work if she let him, just to see her outside of the element of the diner. It was about time, he had decided. They had been flirting for months, and then he disappeared for a while, and he was finally ready. He had missed her in his time away, and he had more than one dream about her sitting in the distance and him too distracted to catch up to her.
“I thought you fell off the Earth,” Darlene said to him coldly as she went about clearing plates from the top of the bar.
“Some heavy things happened at the academy,” Young explained more relaxed than he had ever spoken to the beautiful young woman with curly hair past her shoulders that she kept back with a rubber band. “But it’s good to know you was thinking about me,” he said with a smile.
“We just had a lot of tomatoes and don’t nobody put ’em away like you do,” Darlene said and disappeared into the back with all the dishes. When she returned, she put Young’s usual in front of him. “That’s for dressing up so nice for me.”
“Can we go somewhere?” Young asked softly, leaning over the counter to be closer to her, and she pressed her stomach against the counter on her end, fighting the urge to be close to him. “Anywhere. I just want to spend time with you.”
“I get off at six, you can drive me home. Now get out of here and stop distracting me,” she said playfully and walked away to get lost in her work.
Young ate his breakfast and the two smiled at each other when Darlene stole glances at him as she went about her work. He left the diner on a cloud.
Young is at the Knoxville Police Department. He stands at his desk looking at everything on top and it makes him sigh. He has a lot of typing to do, but he had pulled relevant cases that he wants to review and incorporate into the work he was doing. Young is hoping to create a special task force dedicated to the scary corpses he’d come across, but that required careful review of the files that were still available, the ones that hadn’t been taken by the CDC. He has to present the case to his superiors, convince them of an imminent threat that deserves a special allocation of resources.
He gets to it, and soon he is lost in the work. He doesn’t have all of the evidence to prove the connections he wants to make, like connecting the mangled corpses he had first happened upon in the summer of 2016 to the zombies discovered in Wilmington, North Carolina a year later, but he works diligently and he manages to draw a clear line through to the present that saw many dead at a local meth lab. The cases involving zombies or people with transformed bodies were always traced back to either medical experiments or mysterious drugs that were likely the result of medical experiments. It seems apparent enough to Young that there is a twisted individual or group out there running tests on civilians of vulnerable communities that are easy to explain away or ignore completely in the news.
When he breaks for lunch, he eats quickly at the nearby diner where he had met his now ex-wife a lifetime ago, then he heads out in search of the woman that had been spotted at two recent crime scenes and possibly a third at the local bus station. He starts there. He hasn’t had the chance to interview any of the witnesses first hand, he had only read reports, and when he arrives, he finds employees of the station who were working that day.
“It was crazy. I still can’t believe I saw that shit. His head popped like a balloon. I don’t know if somebody shot him or something, but he was growling his way across the room, and stopped over there. Oh shit, I forgot, it was a girl over there. That bitch was standing in the wrong place, she was covered in blood. He stood right in front of her.”
“Did he say anything to her?” Young asks.
“If he did, I didn’t hear it.”
Many of the people reported the same thing and Young eventually left. No one could ID her, though at least one of the employees is sure that she had seen the young woman before.
“I don’t know, it was a while ago. She a bad white bitch, I noticed her ’cause she cussed out this dude that touched her butt or something. Funny stuff. I think she met a older guy, but it was so long ago.”
He walks the other crime scenes, at the race track and then the house that contained the meth lab. The house is in a cul de sac that has enough trees to keep most of the community cool under intense sunlight. Young parks in front of the house on the curb. It is still lined with police tape that he ducks under. There are still faint blood stains all over the carpet inside and Young finds himself unconsciously stepping around them, like he is walking through a graveyard and avoiding stepping on graves out of respect.
The house is typical, tv and couch in the living room, family pictures on the walls. The kitchen floor above the basement is completely gone, though; there had been an explosion that alerted authorities to the bodies, and eye witnesses had identified a young woman leaving the scene right before the back half of the house went up. It is strange to stand in the living room of a home, in the doorway to the kitchen that has no floor. He kneels and peers in at the lab equipment that had survived the explosion in some sense of the word, and he curses that most of the physical evidence had been incinerated.
It’s a doozy, he thinks to himself. But I’ve seen doozies.
Lately, Falon has enjoyed time in seedy bars among the chaos of the patrons. She can relax there, and she is drinking a lot more than usual. When Falon drinks, she loses her restraints and her buzz is prolonged and intensified by mixing it up with people and making them do her bidding. She likes when guys buy her drinks, it means she could likely talk them into buying her anything, and that means she will never have to struggle for the things she needs.
Falon is in a bar right now, one of her heels buried into the thigh of a gruff looking biker and her elbow rests on the elevated knee. The man’s leg is bleeding, and every now and then, Falon grinds the heel deeper, and the man grunts and fidgets, but does not move. There is a group of bikers around and they all pay attention to her. They all want her, they listen because they know her cruelty and her propensity for pop quizzes about the things she had recently said.
“So who has news for me? Who am I talking to about them dead men at that meth lab?”
“We been asking around,” the man with the heel in his leg says. He lifts her foot and stands before her. “We got some names but you dealing with manufacturers at that level. Them boys is rich and they got security, they ain’t the type to be interrogated. And we can’t back no move against something like that. We ain’t biting the hand that feed us.”
Falon shakes her head. “I had a feeling y’all was bitches.” She tosses her drink in the man’s face and he swings at her. She sees it coming and maneuvers out of the way and she pulls a gun that she aims at his temple. “Just point me in the direction of somebody who know what happened in that house. I don’t want to kill nobody.”
Falon leaves the bar annoyed. Always more people to meet to get to the thing she’s after. She is losing her patience, but she still hasn’t spoken to her father and she is worried. She won’t find him by worrying, she knows that, and she heads to a nearby trailer park, hoping for more answers.
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