George Foster went home, had breakfast, made love to his wife, plotted how to deal with Charlie Black and Danny Bounds, paid some bills, called his son, took a power nap, made some work-related phone-calls, filled out some paperwork, and prepared for another long night. George Foster knew how to manage his time.
Here’s how Charlie Black spent her day. She chose to forgo her usual three hours of sleep, knowing it would hurt her later and determining to worry about it then. She decided that she wouldn’t be going into her day job. Then she began her real work.
Despite what she’d said to Foster, Charlie studied her vast array of Piper Ridge maps with an eye to finding those five people before sunset. At the very least, she could give the families something to bury. That mattered to some people.
For such a small town, Piper Ridge had an amazing mass of caves. It was a veritable maze. The parks’ cave system was unheard of elsewhere on the east coast, deep and winding and still almost completely unexplored. As per the Chief’s orders, only those with special permission could enter the caves under any circumstances.
Only Charlie had permission.
Besides the caves, Piper Ridge’s sewers made it a geographical oddity. Charlie inevitably thought of them as catacombs. Older than the oldest parts of town aboveground, no one could satisfactorily explain their existence. The sewers spread like a rats’ nest beneath the houses and shops of the town, to the very outskirts where cows and horses still grazed in fields. Despite their age they were so effective at keeping the town clean that nobody had yet seen a reason to improve upon them.
Charlie had suggested destroying them a few times, but stopped when the Chief explained how hard it was to employ someone he was often called in to arrest for disrupting the peace.
The caves and the sewers were the places where Charlie worked. She knew them as well as anyone could. But she had walked the caves the day before and the sewers the day before that, and had seen no new signs of movement. There were no new tracks, no hints of new inhabitants. Her sources had reported nothing new. This bothered Charlie more than any noise would have. A pack big enough to tear through seven people and steal off with five more during a standard run shouldn’t be able to disappear so easily at daybreak.
Charlie sat at her kitchen table, smoking a cigarette and eating toast slathered in raspberry jelly. It was a little after ten in the morning, and she was weighing her options. None of them seemed viable. Though she hadn’t let on to the Chief, this new attack was gnawing at the back of her mind like a hungry wolf.
This attack had surprised her, and badly. Charlie hadn’t been surprised in years. She didn’t like it.
After a quick shower and more coffee Charlie packed up, suited up, and went to the caves. It was a fifty/fifty chance for those people, and the caves were easier to get into than the sewers. They had a tendency to sometimes become a bit tricky in the late summer.
Bypassing the brightly lit and heavily guarded tourist’s entrance, she made her way in through the back door. At least, that’s what she jokingly called it to herself. It was a small entrance, a gap between two rocks you’d never notice if you didn’t already know it was there. Charlie went in.
She didn’t bother with a map. Charlie had been going to the caves regularly since she was twelve. She knew them better than any person alive. As such she also knew perfectly well that there were perhaps hundreds of miles more that she hadn’t yet reached, and probably never would. There were places in Piper Ridge even she wouldn’t go.
She emerged an hour before sunset, cutting it close even by her standards. She was dirty, sweaty, terribly cross, and her appearance frightened a few tourists on her way out of the park. She didn’t notice their alarm. Things were very wrong.
She’d gone into the caves and hadn’t seen a thing. Nothing had bothered her. They weren’t empty – the ground was disturbed with footprints and tracks, and once or twice she’d glimpsed movement and heard noises.
They were there. They were awake and restless, and they hadn’t attacked. Charlie didn’t like surprises.
She drove back to her trailer with grit in her mouth and too much on her mind. There were things she could do. Check the maps and moon charts. There had to be something she missed. Human error. Get the crime scene photos from the Chief. Study them. Ask questions. Talk to her contacts, even the ones avoiding her. Talk to the Chief.
The goddamn Chief. Charlie spat out a mouthful of mud, tasting dirt and small rocks and rotting leaves. She stopped her truck outside her trailer and banged her hands on the steering wheel.
Sure the Chief was old, but he’d always been old, the way town hall and the moon were old. He couldn’t be anything but old. In her whole life Charlie had known only one other Chief of Police, and she’d been barely a child then. George Foster was the Chief. End of story. Anyone else would be an impostor to the throne, a chump playing at things they didn’t understand.
It just wasn’t fair, thought Charlie as she shook a cloud of dust from her matted hair onto the front lawn. Her life and by extension and her relationship with the police force, had worked so well for so long. Foster was a good man. He understood the stakes. He respected her, but didn’t fear her. He made sure she could do her job. And he always paid promptly.
Charlie shook out as much dirt as she could, feeling like a mangy old bitch-dog, before going inside for her third pot of coffee and another shower.
Had the Chief been serious about promoting Bounds? Goofy, oblivious, awkward Danny Bounds? Danny Bounds, who always looked lost, and still put up with her bullshit after all these years? How was he expected to keep this town alive? He couldn’t even stand up to her.
Charlie was a creature of habit. More importantly, she needed the work from the police force to supplement her income. For-hire jobs were few and far between, and her day job couldn’t cover the bills.
Like most things that bothered her, Charlie put the problems of Bounds and money out of her mind, to be picked at and mulled over another day. She showered, ate, checked her supplies, restocked her knapsack, and drove to the police station.
The sun set on Piper Ridge, and the great beasts awoke, licked their chops, and went hunting.
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