Nightstruck - Jenna Black Page 0,61

theory is that every single person who’s seen one of these strange phenomena is sick? And that this mutant virus is capable of making multiple people have the exact same hallucination?”

Dad shrugged helplessly. “I have a hard time thinking anyone actually believes that,” he conceded. “But they don’t know what to believe, and they’ll grasp at any explanation they can find.”

“Any explanation except that something supernatural is happening you mean.”

It was the first time I’d fully allowed myself to think of what was happening that way. I’d clung to words like weird and strange and bizarre, but they didn’t fully encompass everything that I’d seen and experienced.

“Can you blame them?” he asked. “If you weren’t in the middle of it, do you think you’d believe it? Because I’m pretty sure I’d be grasping at some of those same straws if I were in their shoes.”

He was probably right. Hadn’t I spent a significant amount of time thinking that I might be going crazy, or that I might have a brain tumor? Had I ever once thought to myself that something supernatural might really be happening? And this even after I’d seen the evidence with my own two eyes. If I were some government official being told that the city itself seemed to be coming alive at night and trying to kill its citizens—but oh, yeah, we can’t actually capture anything we say is happening on camera—I probably wouldn’t buy it.

That realization did nothing to make the prospect of the quarantine any easier to contemplate.

* * *

The city of Philadelphia was a different world when Sunday morning rolled around. The supernatural crap stopped and the city physically returned to normal as soon as the sun came up, but life itself was about as far from normal as it was possible to imagine.

Dad wasn’t comfortable leaving me home alone, even in the daytime—possibly because I was still in a state of shock over what had happened to Mrs. Pinter—so he took me to work with him. I sat in his office with my laptop, but he was in there for no more than fifteen minutes at a time because he was in nearly constant meetings and conference calls. Supposedly I was working on the history term paper, but who was I kidding?

I was worried sick about Piper, and I hated the fact that beneath that worry was an undercurrent of anger and hurt. She had, for all intents and purposes, abandoned me last night. As strange as she’d been acting lately, I couldn’t believe she’d just walked out of the house like that, with no warning or even explanation. Dad and I had spent a while driving around the neighborhood looking for her, but we’d had no luck.

Phone service, both cellular and landline, was still sporadic, the lines constantly jammed, but with a little patience it was actually possible to get through. I called Piper’s house and prayed she had gotten home safely last night. Unfortunately, her frantic parents hadn’t seen or heard from her. Sharing any details about what had happened last night would only frighten them more, so I got off the phone as fast as possible. I thought about calling my mom—she had to be pretty frantic herself—but I didn’t want to tell her about what had happened last night. I knew fear for me would make her lash out, and I didn’t want to listen to some rant about how my father should have dropped everything and rushed me to safety before all hell broke loose.

Mostly what I did was sit quietly and observe and listen to everything that was going on around me—which, considering I was sitting in the police commissioner’s office, was a lot. And I learned a lot of stuff that the general population didn’t know, because it wasn’t being publicly reported. Like that there were hundreds of fatalities from last night’s chaos, and that there were many, many more unexplained disappearances. People like Piper, who seem to have wandered away into the night, against all logic. Many of the friends and families of the missing people reported they’d been acting “strange” lately. Just like Piper, who’d barely been recognizable as herself yesterday. There was an underlying assumption—which people seemed reluctant to state out loud—that all or most of those people were dead, although their bodies had not yet been found.

The homeless population had been hit especially hard, and from listening to people talk, I got the impression that those who hadn’t been safely inside