much attention as I shut the sliding door behind me. He’s got a walkie-talkie to his ear and a high-powered flashlight trained on a map of San Diego on the patio table.
“President’s new orders,” a voice crackles through the walkie, followed by a bitter chuckle, and I wonder what orders these are. And what part of the conversation I’ve missed.
Struz sighs and says, “I’ll see what we can do.”
The real president, the one who was elected and in office when the world changed, is in a coma, and the vice president is dead. The speaker of the house is now the president, and apparently he’s sort of a joke. It’s supposed to be an election year, which means that in less than a year we could elect a new president, but that would require getting voting methods under control before then, and I doubt that’s going to happen.
It doesn’t matter, though. The government we had doesn’t work for this kind of large-scale crisis. If San Diego had been the only city affected, or even if it had just been California, the rest of the country would be sending us aid and going on with life as usual.
But everyone was affected. No one—no matter who they were or where they lived or what they believed in—was spared.
The first thing the acting president did was suspend habeas corpus and declare martial law. Since then he’s passed temporary acts to give the military the power to absorb every able-bodied member of local law-enforcement agencies in order to keep peace and maintain some sort of structure.
Struz looks at me and says, “False alarm?” There’s hope on his face, like every time he’s asked, but I don’t think it’s as real as it used to be. He’s still hoping but he doesn’t believe in it anymore.
I shake my head.
“You should go to bed. Early day tomorrow. I’ll check out your report in the morning.”
“What about you?” I ask, because now he’s as bad as my dad was. He hardly ever sleeps, and when he does, it’s sitting up with his walkie next to him in case something happens.
“It’s going to be a long night,” he says with a shake of his head.
I know better than to argue so I turn to go back inside. As I open the door, I hear a grainy voice over the walkie-talkie say, “Hey, Struz, we’ve got reports of another one out in Poway. I’ve got a team en route.”
Another one. I don’t need anyone to spell out what that means. It’s always the same thing—more abductions.
More people missing.
06:11:01:03
I head upstairs and slip into my bedroom. The room smells like evergreen trees. We didn’t have a tree for Christmas this year—obviously, since there aren’t exactly trees to go around—so Jared and Struz dug up some old evergreen-scented candles and lit them all over the house.
I light the candle on the nightstand and peel off my jeans and change my T-shirt, then reach under the bed for a manila folder before crawling under the covers. The file is worn and a little frayed from overhandling, but that doesn’t stop me. It was already overhandled before it was passed to me.
Lying back on my pillow, I look at her name—Emily Bauer. The blue ink is faded, as if time is trying to erase her existence completely. For a minute, I imagine what Emily was like, if she was anything like I am now. I wonder where she’d be and what she’d be like if she hadn’t gone missing seventeen years ago.
Then I open it up—the one case file of my father’s that I refused to throw away.
I don’t even need to read it—every word has been burned in my memory at this point.
The file is an unsolved case from 1995, from one of my dad’s first years on the job, back when he worked missing persons—ironically, the same job I’m working right now.
A seventeen-year-old girl—captain of the swim team, with an academic scholarship to USC, a boyfriend, friends, the perfect family with a dog and a white picket fence—went missing from her bedroom. All her possessions were untouched and in their rightful place. No forced entry, no signs of a break-in, no one who heard or saw anything unusual—it was like she just disappeared.
Except for a bloody partial handprint on her wall.
I know the case is cold now; it’s been cold for the past seventeen years while it sat on my dad’s desk, and now that the world is changed, I know