The rest of the day felt very long. Daniel could barely believe it when he looked up from his desk, expecting that it would have been thirty to sixty minutes since the last time he’d checked, only to find that it had only been twenty seconds.

Such is the downside of working a twelve-hour shift, especially when you’re a police officer.

Possibly the worst part of the job was not that nothing was happening, but rather that something could happen at any moment. And then he’d have to spring out of his chair as though it were a trampoline, don his uniform, and race to the location of the emergency.

After the initial shock of Mrs. O’Leary’s plight, the succeeding hours were agonizingly slow, and not a single 911 call was placed to the Wildebush precinct for the rest of the day. Daniel fought the urge to sleep.

Eventually, mercifully, he was allowed to go home. Pat, on the other hand, refused to.

“I’ve got to spend another night with Lisa,” Pat insisted. “You two are grown men - you can leave well enough on your own, can’t you?”

Shawn didn’t protest, but Daniel was tempted to. We’re brothers - that’s why we stick together. That’s what he wanted to say, but knew he couldn’t. After all, he was not the boss of Pat; if anything, it was the other way around.

“Fine,” Daniel muttered. “Shawn, do you have the keys?”

Daniel’s younger brother (though still older than Daniel himself) nodded, brandishing his civilian pair of car keys, then motioned for his younger brother to follow him.

“I’ll see you at work tomorrow,” Pat promised. “I just have to make things up with my girl, you know?”

On the contrary, as a chronically single 21-year-old, I do not know.

During the drive back to the Morris brothers’ rented home near the town center of Wildebush, Shawn never took his eyes off the road. While this was a good thing for the sake of responsible driving, it also meant he was silent. Come to think of it, Shawn had been silent for most of the day.

So Daniel just sat in the passenger seat, picking his nails, until the unexpected happened just a few blocks from their house.

“Dammit!” Shawn bellowed, honking the horn. “Outta my way!”

Daniel, who had been in a semi-trance prior to this, was suddenly rapt to attention. Peering over the windshield, the sun right in his face, he saw what bothered his brother so much.

A large, fluid crowd of people in a variety of shapes, colors, and skin tones stood in the street, blocking the road ahead for Shawn. They shouted slogans that were unintelligible from behind the windshield, and many carried signs containing slogans like Defund the Police or No Justice, No Peace.

“Of course,” Shawn muttered, “it has to be those college kids who don’t know what they truly need!”

Daniel did not comment, but he couldn’t help but notice the sheer agitation in his brother’s voice. Shawn gripped the steering wheel so hard his knuckles were cracking, and he seemed to be trying hard not to let his foot off the brake.

“If they lived in a crime-ridden inner city,” Shawn continued testily, “they’d wish there were more of us!”

Daniel shivered. Yes, Shawn was his brother, but sometimes he crossed a line beyond which a dark world lay, even if “defunding the police” would cost both of them their jobs.

Shawn rolled down the driver’s-side window and shouted the following: “In case you people don’t know, I’m a police officer! You don’t know where you’d be without us!”

Far from being intimidated by Shawn’s outburst, the crowd kept chanting “No justice, no peace!” and pumping their fists in the air. Rolling the window back up, Shawn muttered something so quietly, he probably didn’t even mean for Daniel to hear it.

“If I could run these people over, I would.”

Daniel shivered again. It had to be an idle threat - Shawn had known Daniel literally his whole life, and he wouldn’t seriously consider driving his vehicle into a crowd of civilian protestors.

But then Shawn cleared his throat. “We’ll have to take a bit of a detour.”

A few minutes later, the brothers pulled into the driveway of their small ranch house. It had been the cheapest one on the market in Wildebush, and even then they could only rent it. But as long as they had a roof over their heads in Greater Boston, they had little to complain about; that’s how Daniel saw it.

Daniel went to take a shower, then dressed in his pajamas. When he returned to the living room, he saw that Shawn still stood there, staring off into space.

“Do you want to order pizza?” Shawn suggested.

“Sure, I guess,” Daniel said. After witnessing a Lycanroc - a fictional character from Pokémon! - on the video from Pat’s body camera, pizza sounded like the perfect detox from the shock.

“Good, because I already ordered pizza. One sausage, one pepperoni and pineapple.”

“Thanks,” Daniel replied. And he was thankful, but he still couldn’t quite get over the way his brother had spoken to the protestors.

That’s not worrisome, though. That’s just Shawn being Shawn.

After lounging around in the living room for a while, Daniel suggested that they turn on the TV. Maybe something good would be showing for once rather than those cheesy infomercials and sporting events. (With regards to the latter, Daniel only cared about the outcome insofar as that his colleagues would be in a better mood if the Boston teams won).

As soon as Shawn agreed to this, however, Daniel regretted the decision to tune to MSNBC. Really, he rued the day he’d caved to Pat’s desire to purchase a cable package - wasn’t streaming the promised land of the future?

The MSNBC anchor, a middle-aged woman with long, flowing blonde hair, sat at her desk in front of the image of a legislative building. But it was not the U.S. Capitol, but rather Beacon Hill. That was the first red flag.

However, the chyron was the real cause for concern, as it read as follows: SUBURBAN HOME BROKEN INTO BY FICTIONAL CREATURE.

Daniel’s stomach dropped like a freight elevator whose chains had been cut. He didn’t want to believe his eyes - maybe Shawn would shake him until we woke from this nightmare.

“We have some news from this morning” the news anchor announced, showing her unnaturally white teeth with each word. “Officers from the Boston Police Department responded to a home invasion in the early hours of this morning. One such officer was dispatched to the scene.”

Maybe they’re not talking about Mrs. O’Leary, Daniel thought desperately. I hope they aren’t. Home invasions happen all the time, even if there isn’t much crime in suburban Boston.

If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

“We will play the body camera footage on the screen” the anchor announced.

As they say, denial wasn’t just a river in Egypt. Daniel could only watch as the first-person view of Pat entering Edna O’Leary’s Victorian house was plastered all over the screen. The audio had been removed, so the woman’s screams were not present, but that didn’t make Daniel feel much better.

After Mrs. O’Leary stepped out from in front of the closet, the Lycanroc burst out of the closet and started attacking Pat. Following a tug-of-war over the baton, the creature was subdued.

“Joining us now to discuss this footage is Elias Brody, the Essex County Sheriff. His precinct is based in the town of Wildebush.”

Daniel gulped as the screen split to find Sheriff Brody standing in front of the police station. The sheriff’s eyes were bloodshot, as though he’d just been awoken from a deep slumber and wasn’t thrilled about it.

“So Mr. Brody…” the anchor began.

“That’s Sheriff Brody,” the sheriff muttered.

“Sheriff Brody, from my understanding, you ordered one of your officers to respond to the call surrounding the home invasion. Is that accurate?”

“It is,” Sheriff Brody replied. “I called up one of my youngest, fittest officers to come to the station. And just like those minute men from the Revolutionary War, he came the minute he was called.”

“Are you able to name this officer, or must he remain anonymous?”

Please don’t tell the world who he is. That’ll just lead to a ton of reporters in our faces, and we don’t want that, do we?

“I’m afraid that information should not be disclosed right now,” Sheriff Brody said. “If he wishes to come forward, then he will. But in any case, the beast was able to bite the woman.”

The anchor gasped. “She was bitten by this creature that looks like a wolf? Sheriff, that sounds like it would warrant a rabies shot.”

“I cannot speak to the type of treatment the victim has been receiving, because I do not know myself. Hospitals tend not to release that information, for…understandable reasons.”

Fair enough.

“There’s another aspect to this story too,” the anchor told the sheriff. “I am talking, of course, about the identity of the creature.”

“Well,” Sheriff Brody responded, “the dispatched officer claimed that the beast who invaded this woman’s home under cover of darkness was in fact a Lycanroc, a species of Pokémon. Now, I don’t know the first thing about Pokémon, but that sounds pretty far-fetched, doesn’t it?”

Not when you’ve lived it, Daniel thought bitterly. They’re just dismissing the footage, aren’t they?

The anchor nodded. “I mean, it seems hard to believe. Pokémon is a fictional franchise created by Nintendo and GameFreak. I should know, because I have three kids who all love it. But to think that it’s real…”.

Daniel seized the remote and squeezed it with his fist so forcefully he almost snapped the damn thing in two.

“Well, my officer knows what he saw,” Sheriff Brody replied. “At least, he thinks he does. I didn’t believe him at first, and I’m still not sure I do. But…”.

The sheriff trailed off, shaking his head. Then, the anchor cleared her throat with a little cough that was probably intended to sound cute, but just irked Daniel more.

“Sheriff, have any tests been conducted on the wolf-like creature?” the anchor asked.

Oh boy, Daniel thought. This is the moment of truth.

“Because the wolf - the Lycanroc - is not a human, the hospital was not obliged to respect its medical privacy. We can have debates about whether that ought to be the case, but for now it is not.

“Blood tests were run, and it was determined that the Lycanroc carried no diseases that hospitals typically screen blood for. It does not have rabies, for one. Nor does it appear to carry any other blood-borne ailments. And it doesn’t seem to be related to any other creatures that have been observed in Greater Boston - or anywhere else on Earth - in the past.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” the anchor responded with a slight sigh. “What would you urge the public to do? Is there any risk that there are more Lycanroc in the world?”

“The risk to the general public remains low” Sheriff Brody muttered. “But if there’s one thing I’m sure of, it’s that we will be ready for anything.”

The anchor pursed her lips. “I think all of us can remember an instance when we were told the risk was low, but it ended up being far more serious than expected. That was only four years ago, as much as the world seems not to discuss it anymore.”

“They’re talking about that damn pandemic!” Shawn bellowed, the first time he’d spoken in a while. “I swear, it broke everyone’s damn brains and made them protest!”

You’re not wrong, Shawn, you’re just an asshole when you say that.

On the TV, Sheriff Brody nodded. “I mean, the American public should remain vigilant and call the police whenever their home is invaded. But I would say that even if a novel creature hadn’t shown up.”

“Fair enough.”

The anchor and the sheriff kept talking about the news, but Daniel tuned their conversation out after that. Instead he paced back and forth around the room, hoping that the pizza would arrive soon and serve as a distraction.

And then he had an idea.

Daniel picked up his iPhone and dialed the number of the nearest hospital. Most likely, that was where Mrs. O’Leary had been sent after receiving the Lycanroc bite. Maybe she’d been able to give more details to the police that weren’t publicly available.

Hey, I’m part of “the police.” Is there really anything more I could glean from this that I don’t already know?

Still, it felt good to be doing something, so Daniel hit the call button. He received the following message:

“Thank you for calling Wildebush Central Hospital. If you are reporting an emergency, please call 911. If you wish to speak to a representative, press 1. If you wish to schedule an appointment…”.

Daniel pressed the 1 button.

“How may I help you?” announced the representative.

“Yeah,” Daniel muttered awkwardly.

“That’s not an answer to that question. When we’ve got patients to treat, we don’t appreciate those who would waste our time.”

I’d better cut to the chase.

“Is Edna O’Leary in your hospital?” Daniel replied in little more than a squeak.

While he obviously couldn’t see the woman on the other end of the line, Daniel could picture her frowning. She sounded downright displeased as she replied.

“I cannot divulge any details about patient identities. For the sake of confidentiality, I’m not allowed to. I’m surprised you do not understand that.”

Daniel grimaced with disappointment. Then he realized: There might be a way around that rule.

“Could you at least tell me if there are any patients here with Lycanroc bites?” It was what the devout (and even the less devout) called a Hail Mary play, but it was an idea at least.

“I’m afraid I cannot,” the representative snapped. “We’ve had to beef up our security, along with all other hospitals in the area, to protect against those conspiracy theorists who might storm us claiming it’s all a hoax. We are not going to divulge this information to the general public.”

“Okay” Daniel said.

“So I’m going to hang up now. Don’t waste our time until you actually need us, okay?”

Once the call was over, Daniel made his way back over to Shawn. The older brother frowned.

“Who were you on the phone with?” Shawn asked.

“The nearest hospital,” Daniel sighed. “Asked them if Mrs. O’Leary was there.”

Shawn’s blue eyes glinted angrily. “Why did you think that’d get you anywhere?”

“Just wanted to try something,” Daniel replied softly. “But you’re right - they couldn’t tell me anything.”

“That’s understandable,” Shawn muttered. “As soon as they find out what hospital she’s in, it’s going to be the center of the universe for the news vans.”

“Right.”

“I suggest you sit back and enjoy your pizza when it comes, Daniel. It’s been a long day, and we’ll have another one tomorrow.”

Daniel grimaced at the thought of eating right now. He suspected the pizza would taste little better than cardboard.