CHAPTER 8

The next morning, she was almost afraid to come out of her room and face him. Why she should feel embarrassed, she could not begin to say, but she did. She felt embarrassed and vulnerable.

“Good morning, lover,” he said when she finally emerged. That did not help her condition, nor did the fact that he was cooking breakfast in her kitchen.

“Good morning,” she managed.

“Sleep well?”

Melody did not answer.

After breakfast, she called her folks. “Hi, Mom.”

“Hi, baby! How are you? Good morning! How is everything?”

“Fine, Mom. I’m good.”

“And how’s Doran?”

Melody’s eyes widened a little and she looked over at him. He was reclining on her couch, looking like the cat that ate the canary. What was he looking so pleased with himself for? she wondered. Once again, they hadn’t even done anything.

“He’s fine too, Mom.” He looked over and met her gaze.

“Tell him hello, for us, and we’re really glad he was able to come visit. We really enjoyed meeting him.”

“I’ll tell him.” He grinned.

“Will you be coming back in December?”

“I don’t know yet, Mom. Mom, look, I was calling to ask you…”

“Hm?”

“Did anything… was there anything… did the police find anything with that guy that was creeping around? Was there anything more about that?” Her mother was quiet.

“Mom?”

“We didn’t want to worry you.”

“What is it, Mom?”

“Well, nothing for you to worry about, sweetie. The police said they found something a couple of days later, but there’s been no trouble since then. Whoever it was, they’re long gone.”

“What did they find?”

“Really, it’s nothing.”

“It’s okay, Mom. I want to know.”

“Well, they found some, uh… some blood. And a bit of a shirt, apparently. Not on our property. Some ways down the highway, back in the woods. They don’t even know if it’s related, or if it’s human blood. But there’s been nothing else. We’re fine, Melody. There’s absolutely nothing to worry about.”

Melody felt like a piece of lead had settled into the bottom of her gut. The feeling must have shone on her face, because Doran’s grin faded and he sat up.

“Mel, do you hear me? There’s nothing for you to be scared about. The police took care of it, and searched the whole area, okay?”

“I understand, Mom,” said Melody. “I’m fine. Just as long as you and Dad are being careful.”

“Oh, we are, don’t you worry. I won’t let your father do anything foolish.”

“Okay. That’s good.”

“Yeah, baby. Is that why you called? You were just worried about us?”

“Yeah, Mom. That’s all.”

“Well, there you go. We’re fine. There’s been nothing more about it for a week, so we’re just fine. How’s your project going?”

“It’s fine, Mom. Mom, look, I can’t really talk long. I just wanted to… check in.”

“Oh, okay. Well, I’m glad you called. I love you, baby.”

“I love you too, Mom.”

“Call again soon!”

“I will. Bye, Mom.”

“Good-bye!”

Melody hung up and looked at Doran.

“Well,” he said, when she had relayed the essence of it. “Actually, I think this is good news. It supports the idea that it was just some crazy drifter, doesn’t it? If someone was actually stalking you, there’d be no reason for them to leave bloody rags in the woods a mile away.”

“Yeah…” said Melody. That made sense. That was good reasoning.

He stood up. “How would you feel about checking out the gym I found today? I think they have Sunday hours.”

She thought about it for a moment and then nodded. “Yeah, we could do that.”

“And you haven’t found us a drone, yet.” Melody nodded again. “Look,” he said, “I don’t want you to worry about this too much. All signs say it’s all a big, bad coincidence. That’s even more likely now. So let’s not think about it for now. We can hang out today, and I’ll come over more this week, but I seriously think it’s all going to turn out to be nothing. My sister will be visiting this week, too.”

“Oh, good,” thought Melody. Once again, her face must have told the story.

“Hey, now,” he said. “Get to know her, all right?”

“I will! I’m sorry. She’s a sweet girl. I like her fine.”

They “hung out” that day. The gym was a new experience for both of them, but Melody suspected afterward that her pain was the greater. They went back to her apartment and looked at some multi-rotor kits online. Doran seemed to find the idea of getting one genuinely exciting.

They played Call of Honor again, and she tried to give him some pointers, but she could tell that that was not going over well. That was his limit, it seemed. When he snapped, “Would you just let me do it my way?” she felt the teeth of conflict biting down between them, so she let it lie. It was just a little too much to ask, for him to be her video-gaming protégé as well. Everything else was… more than she had any right to, frankly, so that was a small sacrifice.

That night, she had a nightmare about bloody shirts and shadow demons.

The following week, school went relatively normally, and she and Doran spent more time together than they had in any single week prior. That should have been nice, but a cloud hung over it—a metaphorical cloud, in addition to the gray weather that had rolled in. She was keenly aware in the back of her mind that he was spending time with her to take her mind off her fears, and that kept her fears on her mind. She continued to have nightmares off and on throughout the week.

Friday was a light day with respect to her class schedule. Doran had work, but his sister arranged to meet her for lunch, and so they met. The rain had broken, and the campus glistened. Puddles lingered here and there. With their lunch concluded, they walked together across campus, back to Melody’s car. Adele was still talking.

“—this blouse, which, I dunno. I thought it looked good, at the time? But then I got home and tried it on again, and I was, like, this doesn’t fit me at all! Isn’t that funny? How you can just completely think one thing and then totally change your mind like an hour later?” Adele was a swizzle-stick, a rail-thin waif of a girl with currently blond hair that hung down to her shoulders and curled just so, right at the end. She looked like she could turn sideways and disappear, or fall through one of the cracks in the pavement. Walking next to her, listening to her talk about her fitting woes, Melody felt like a cow.

“Anyway, so I had to take the whole outfit back, just because of this blouse. It was a super pain. What’s going on here?”

Melody looked. “Some kind of protest.”

“Well, yeah, obviously. What are they protesting?”

“I think someone the school invited to give a speech or something,” said Melody. She did not pay much attention to campus life or campus events. Her degree was her campus life. Their signs made references to them being against hate speech, which struck Melody as rather obvious. Who was for hate speech? It seemed to her rather unlikely that the school would actually invite some crazy right-wing bigot type to come give a talk, but who was she to say? Maybe they had.

“You know, this is why we need people like you,” said Adele.

“I’m sorry?”

“Smart computer people. There’s too much hate out there, especially on the Internet. You work on AI, right? Like, artificial intelligence? Imagine if you could write a program that would be able to filter hate-speech on the Internet. Imagine if you could make the Internet safe for people. How much better that would be.”

“A lot of people are already working on that,” said Melody. “The big social media companies do a lot of filtering.”

“Yeah, but obviously it’s not working. Like, they only know when you report something, right? But you could make an AI that could do it a thousand times faster, and probably better. I know everyone thinks of AI as this scary thing, like computers are going to take over the world, but how bad would it really be, if the computers were programmed by good people? If you just used computers to keep people from hurting each other?”

“That’s a nice thought, but how do you make sure the right people run the computers?”

“Well, you could have a government committee or something. People could vote on what’s hate speech and what’s not.”

Melody looked at the protestors, at their color-matched outfits and bandana masks, as she and Adele passed by. She listened to their shouting, saw the looks in their eyes. It looked a lot like more hate, to her. Would those people be the ones voting on what to filter out, and what not? Would the vote be limited to people who had read the thing they were looking to filter? If so, did that defeat the purpose of filtering it? If not, then how could they possibly vote on it? Melody had questions, to say the least. Besides, the whole point of AI was prediction and classification without human assistance. Once trained, it would in theory identify the hate speech on its own, and in theory flag it or something, thereby preventing people from having to read something they didn’t want to read. But to get there, it would have to be trained. It would have to be fed tens of thousands of articles someone had identified as hate speech. So who would train it? Who would come up with the tens of thousands of instances of hate speech for the training and testing data sets?

Not to mention, was this really the way they wanted society to go? Turn it into this nice, pleasant, perfectly cultivated garden of happy thoughts, where nobody ever said anything anybody disagreed with?

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“Anyway, so this outfit, right? I got all the way back to the store—” Yes, thought Melody. Adele could be quite content in a world like that. But then, so could most of Melody’s friends and acquaintances. Her peer group was not exactly renowned for welcoming conflict.

Conflict! What did any of them know about conflict? Try suspecting that one of your friends had been murdered, and then talk about conflict. Melody had a sudden inclination to check out the guest speaker, just to see if he or she was as bad as these protestors seemed to think. Whoever it was, they probably had never even heard the person talk before. They were just protesting because they’d been told there would be a protest, and protesting was cool when you were an undergrad with too much time on your hands. But Melody had other things to deal with, so she left them behind.

Real conflict. Real danger. Maybe. If it wasn’t all in her head.

It was raining again when she came out of the grocery store that night. Adele had departed a few hours prior, and Melody was picking up just a few things she needed before retiring. The weather was supposed to clear up the next day, leaving the weekend mostly sunny and chilly. That would be nice; she was tired of wrestling with her umbrella. One never realized how much one needed two hands until one of them was taken up with umbrella work. Whether it was now, trying to fish her keys out of her pocket while also holding onto her groceries, or on her way to class, trying to manage her backpack and phone, she always ended up awkwardly trying to hold the shaft of the umbrella between her cheek and her shoulder so she could use both hands, and that never worked. She only ended up with a cramp in her neck and getting rained on as the umbrella toppled over backward.

“Oh!” Melody growled aloud, putting her grocery bag down on the wet asphalt and grabbing the umbrella. She held it over herself and her cargo while she retrieved her keys.

“Excuse me. Melody Ritter?”

“Yes?” she said, with some distraction. She looked, and what she saw was a gun pointed at her. It made a pneumatic snap, like a someone popping the seal on a well-shaken soda, and she felt the bullet hit her in the chest.

Her legs gave out, as if all of the strength had been instantly removed from her. As if she had been paralyzed on contact. She collapsed backward against her car. She could still see, though, and something surreal was happening in front of her. Over her.

The man who had shot her was standing with his arm raised to the sky, straight up. She could see his pistol, with its long, fat silencer, still in that hand, pointing to the heavens. He was on the tips of his toes. There was something beside him, but she couldn’t make out what. It was darkness, a void, invisible against the night except where it blotted out her view of the SUV behind it. It was big, and the rain splashed against it, glittering in the lights of the store. It was like a piece of the sky, and the rain, in the shape of a giant. It had its claws wrapped around the shooter’s wrist and was lifting him off the ground, and it had a hand over his face. He flew backward and his head struck the window of the SUV so hard that the glass shattered and he went partly through it. His arm bent. The black, glittering apparition stepped in front of him, and Melody heard more of those pneumatic pops.

She coughed, feeling congestion in her chest and throat.

The thing twisted—or at least she had the impression that it did. It was hard to focus on. It seemed to spin suddenly away from the man lying through the window of the truck, and then it was gone, flitting out of view. There was a rattling, clanking sound, and more glass broke.

Melody realized she was having trouble breathing. She coughed again and tried to push herself up. She succeeded, so she began crawling, toward the light of the store. Help. Help.

“Help,” she tried to say, but only ended up coughing again.

Someone was with her. A person. People. They were shouting for help. That was good. She needed help. She tried to say it again, and again she failed.

“Just lie still,” the man was saying. “Hey! Call an ambulance!” He was pulling at her jacket.

She tried to hold onto him, to tell him that she couldn’t breathe. “Oh, God,” she heard him say, and then he was pressing on her chest, hard.

“Keep pressure on it!”

She was dimly aware of the minutes that followed. Mostly she was aware of her own panic. When they had seen that thing, that demon, in her father’s back yard, she had thought she understood fear. Later, when she had learned of Cookie’s death, she had learned better. Here was true terror, or so she had concluded, as she contemplated a conspiracy of murder closing in around her. Now, though, once again, she found herself with a new perspective, with new frontiers of fear opening before her. Neither of those events compared to this. None of that compared to being unable to breathe. None of that compared to dying.

When the ambulance came, she was, somehow, still some kind of conscious. The pressure on her chest eased and then was instantly replaced, and she felt herself being moved. There was light, and the rain stopped. They put something on her face—and then down her throat. She had no strength to gag. They began working below her face, and neither had she any strength with which to try to move her head, or even her eyes, to look. The world was a haze of lights.

Suddenly, she felt something sharp, and the pressure on her chest eased again, and with it came air.

As no past terror had ever approached what had gripped her over these few minutes, so no past joy or relief ever could have been but a candle next to the bright dawn of elation she felt at being able to take even half a breath.

“…with us? Miss? You’re going to be okay. Can you hear me? That’s it. Breathe. You’re not going to be able to take a full breath for a while. There’s still plenty of fluid in there. Just don’t panic, okay? You’re going to be fine, now. No problem, okay? Easy does it.”

Eventually she felt the ambulance stop. She was aware of it, now, more clearly. With oxygen, life, and with life, her mind, her presence, had begun to return. She was conscious as they rolled her into the Emergency Room. Things were happening around her, but she was restrained. All she could do was wait and try to keep the fear under control. They moved her somewhere else quickly, and she felt herself being transferred to a hard, cold surface in a warm room. There were a number of people around her, now, and more lights, bright and close overhead.

She woke, and blinked. It was bright. She was in a bed, in a bright room—but lit with sunlight, through a window.

Melody felt nausea and groaned.

“Mel!” exclaimed Doran, jumping to her side. “Mel! Oh, God, baby. Are you okay? Can you hear me? Can you talk?”

“Yes,” she said. “I think I’m going to puke.”

“Okay, hold on! One sec, here you go. If you’ve gotta vomit, do it into this.” He was putting a plastic bucket near her face.

It came up. She sat up and vomited. He held her upright and held the bucket for her until she was done, and then he helped her with a bottle of water followed by mouthwash, for which she was extremely grateful. He eased her down onto her pillows again. She was able to see him, now, properly.

It was clear that he had been crying. That realization pained her more deeply than her own nausea.

“I’m okay,” she said. “Really.” She reached up to touch his face and found that she had an intravenous line in her arm and something clipped onto one of her fingers.

He took her hand and held it in his. “Thank God,” he said.

She looked down at herself, but she was covered by blankets, so she could not see her wound. “I got shot,” she said. “Someone shot me.”

“Yes,” he said.

Melody put her head back. “Where’s Mom and Dad?”

“They’re on their way. They called me. The police called them first.”

“Okay. They know I’m okay?”

“I called them when you got out of surgery and the doctor said you were going to be okay. I can call them now and let you talk to them.”

Melody shook her head. She still felt nauseous, and the exertion of vomiting had caused a significant ache in her stomach. Furthermore, she felt slightly out of place. Indeed, almost out of body.

“Am I on drugs?”

“You’re on some pain-control meds, I think. There’s a nurse. I’ll get the nurse.” He let her go and went to the door. “Nurse!” she heard him shouting. “Nurse, she’s awake!”

Melody wondered. Was this awake? Had she really been shot? And if the gunshot had been real—

Doran returned, with a nurse and a police officer in uniform.

“Hey, there!” said the nurse cheerily. “How are you feeling?”

“Sick,” said Melody.

“That’s the anesthesia. That’s normal. It’ll pass. Any pain?”

“A little. My chest.”

“Yeah. A gunshot will do that. You have a broken rib and plenty of other damage. You’re going to be fine. It’ll heal. But it’ll hurt for a while. On a scale of zero to ten?”

“Uh… three, maybe?”

“That’s good. Let us know if it gets bad. We’ll try to control it with medication as best we can.”

“Okay,” said Melody.

“Miss Ritter, do you think you’d be able to answer a few questions?” asked the officer.

“I told them the whole story, Mel. A detective came to talk to me early this morning, and I gave him the whole situation.”

Melody nodded. There was no point in keeping secrets anymore, after all.

“Miss, do you remember last night? Do you remember the attack?”

She nodded again. “Yeah.” She had a headache.

“You were coming out of the store, is that right?”

“Yeah.”

“Carrying your groceries?”

“Yes.”

“Can you tell me what happened? You got to your car, right?”

She closed her eyes. This was going to be awkward, to say the least. “Yeah. I got to my car, and was trying to get my keys. I had my umbrella and my groceries, so I put the bag down. I got my keys, and…”

He waited.

“He said my name. I turned around because he said my name.”

“Did you see him?”

She shook her head. “All I saw was the gun.”

“What did he say to you, exactly?”

“I don’t know. I think just my name. Or maybe he said ‘excuse me’ or something. I remember hearing my name, and then the gun, and him shooting me.”

“What about his voice? Definitely male? Deep? High? Did he have an accent?”

In her mind, she tried to play it back, but she could only vaguely remember the words, much less the voice. “Normal voice. Definitely a man. Not super deep, I think. I don’t remember him having an accent.”

“All right, and then what happened next?”

Melody opened her eyes and looked at the policeman. She could tell by his expression that he knew what came next, and she could tell by his expression that he knew she knew he knew what came next.

“Something killed him,” she said.

Doran, who had backed into one of the bedside chairs, sat up straight and stared at her.

“Something?”

“I don’t know what it was, but I’ve seen it before. We’ve seen it before,” she said, meeting Doran’s eye.

“You mean the stalker who menaced you at your parents’ estate.”

Melody chuckled, which hurt.

“May I ask what’s funny?” inquired the cop.

She shook her head. “Not a stalker.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I don’t know what it is, but it’s not a person. It’s…” Doran continued to stare at her, wide-eyed.

“Can you describe what you saw?”

“It’s what we saw that night. Exactly like that. Darkness. Tall. Kind of shaped like a man, but bigger. Black, like it sucks up the light. But last night I could see the rain on it, and it kinda reflected some of the light from the store.”

“I see,” said the officer. He seemed more quiet than skeptical.

She ignored him. “It’s exactly like what we saw,” she said to Doran. “We weren’t seeing things. It’s real.”

“Miss Ritter…”

She turned her eyes to the policeman again. He was pulling up something on his smartphone.

Eventually, he positioned it and showed it to her. “Is this the man who shot you?”

It was a photo of his chest and arms and everything below. His head was out of view inside the SUV. He lay with his back arched over the lower window frame, hanging mostly out of the vehicle.

“That’s him.”

“The, uh, thing you saw. It did this to him?”

“Yes.”

“You saw it?”

“Yes. It lifted him off the ground by his arm, with one hand, and then put his head through the window with its other hand.”

Doran had jumped up again and was looking at the photo. The policeman let him look and then took it back and pocketed it. “Miss, are you absolutely certain of what you saw? We are trying to investigate, but your description of your rescuer—”

“My rescuer?” she all but shouted.

“Miss, it looks like you were… targeted. The person—or, ah, whoever or whatever interceded,” he said diplomatically, “almost certainly saved your life. And killed your assailant. We want to figure out who—or what—that was, but the description you’ve given me is a bit… fantastical.”

Melody shrugged.

“What I’m trying to say is, in a very scary situation like that obviously was, you can remember things, um, in a heightened sort of way. Larger than life. All I’m asking is, if your memory improves at all, please let us know. Will you do that?”

“I sure will,” she said, “but my memory of that thing is crystal clear. It wasn’t a person. Show me a person who can shove another person through a car window like that.”

“You’d be amazed what people can do under stress, miss. Anyway, if you think of anything else, you can tell me or the officer who relieves me, or you can contact the detective directly, okay? Mr. Cranston there has the detective’s card.” Doran held it up to show her.

“Fine,” said Melody.

The policeman nodded and stepped out. Doran took her hand and stared at her, but he could think of nothing to say.

“I can’t believe I got shot,” said Melody, closing her eyes again.

“This is fuckin’ crazy,” he agreed. “Mel, I’m so sorry I wasn’t there.”

“Oh, please. There’s nothing you could have done.”

He was quiet. She looked at him and saw the hurt on his face.

“Oh, no, I mean…” She sighed and squeezed his hand as best she could. “If you had been there, we’d both have been shot. This guy was a hit man. Imagine how I’d feel if you had died. If you’d been there and been killed.”

“Well, I’m going to keep you safe. I’m not going to leave your side until this is figured out.”

“You’re so sweet,” she said. He seemed still to be in pain, but perhaps that was to be expected. Her parents arrived shortly thereafter, rushing into her room and to her side. Her mother was in tears. Her father was grim. They needed an explanation, so she told them the story, as she had told it to Doran. The only thing she skimmed over was the technical detail. Explaining the AI project to them was pointless. They got the gist of the situation, and that was enough. As it was, they still could hardly believe it.

“Well, the police will find these people. That’s for sure,” said her mother.

“They’ll find ‘em or I’ll find ‘em,” said her father.

Melody sighed. They were dreaming. The police would solve this, or no one would. This was a genuine conspiracy, and they were willing to kill. To murder openly. It was big.

That afternoon, the detective stopped by to introduce himself and to inquire if she had remembered anything new or different. She said that she had not. He left a little disappointed.

A short time later, another man knocked at the door and then came to her bedside. He was shorter than the detective, with a mop of red hair. He was wiry like Doran. Fit. Maybe a bit more muscular. “Miss Ritter?” he said.

“Yes.”

“My name is Robert Constantine. I understand you’ve seen something unusual. I’d like to hear about it, if you don’t mind.”