Nightstruck - Jenna Black Page 0,60

father do the interview broke about a million rules of protocol, but none of the officers at the scene was inclined to argue with him. Each and every one of them had a haunted, exhausted look that said the night had already stretched them to the breaking point. Big city police officers see amazing amounts of terrible stuff, but nothing like what had been happening tonight.

If Mrs. Pinter’s death had been a normal murder, we would have had cops and detectives and crime scene technicians crawling all over the place for hours, meticulously documenting every detail, taking a zillion photographs without disturbing the evidence. But tonight the city was so overwhelmed with mayhem—and the mayhem was of such an impossible nature—that the authorities just didn’t have the time to spend hours on the scene. They took plenty of photos and interviewed everyone whose house had a view of the courtyard, and then they packed the body into a medical examiner’s van and were done.

The cops left, but my dad stayed. Feeling safe with him in the house, I finally changed clothes, dumping the bloodstained outfit in the trash, and took a shower. It was late enough that I could have fallen into bed directly afterward, but I was far from ready to face the specter of my dreams yet, so I went downstairs, where my dad was doing his best to tend to the wounds on Bob’s paws. Our heroic dog had not only nearly torn the house apart, he’d also broken two nails and shredded the pads of his feet.

I was pleasantly surprised when the lights came back on just as Dad was finishing up with Bob and telling him what a good, brave boy he’d been.

“Keep the candles in easy reach,” Dad warned as we went to work blowing them out. “I’ll get us some extra flashlights and a couple of Coleman lanterns tomorrow.”

I shuddered. “So you don’t think we’ve seen the last of this.”

He glanced at me and raised his eyebrows. “Do you?”

No, of course not. I had no good explanation for what was going on out there, but it seemed overly optimistic to hope it would just stop of its own accord and everything would go back to normal.

The next words were out of my mouth before I even realized I was going to say them. “Mom wants me to come live with her in Boston until all of this blows over.”

When I’d talked to my mom on the phone in the afternoon, I had instantly rejected her suggestion. Funny how a few hours, an attack by a fang-filled pothole, and the decapitation of the nice little old lady next door had changed my perspective.

“Maybe that’s not such a bad idea,” I concluded, though I still hated to say it.

Dad’s face looked grim, his eyes unhappy, as he turned to face me fully. “I would love nothing better than to have you out of danger,” he said. “But I’m afraid that isn’t possible.”

I frowned. “Why not?”

“Because the city is now officially under quarantine.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“What?” It came out as a high-pitched bleat, loud enough to alarm Bob, who rose gingerly to his wounded feet and started looking around for the threat.

Dad blew out a loud breath and rubbed his face. “No one knows why this is all happening, but the federal government is worried the city may be having some kind of outbreak. We can’t capture any of the bizarre happenings on camera, so people who haven’t personally witnessed something think we must be hallucinating. Until someone is able to prove that we don’t all have some contagious disease, no one’s going to be allowed in or out of Philadelphia.”

“But … but they can’t do that.”

My dad nodded. “It’s ridiculous to think they can effectively quarantine an entire city,” he agreed. “The National Guard has been called in, and they’re setting up roadblocks, but there’s no way they can keep everyone in. And even if it is some kind of mutant virus—which I personally think is a theory with absolutely no merit—it obviously didn’t just start tonight. The reports have been coming in for weeks, and the only thing different about tonight is the scale. People have been traveling in and out of the city every day, and if they’re carriers of some sort, it’s far too late to close the damn barn door.”

I had been objecting on a moral/legal level, but the practical objections were just as compelling. I shook my head in disbelief. “So their