Chapter 5 - Bad Dream Baby (Patreon)

Carlos hadn’t even glanced at the cargo tucked under Mark’s arm. Either he hadn’t noticed it, or he simply trusted Cass enough to assume whatever it was posed no danger. Frankly, Cass wasn't quite sure herself if the creature was harmless. Part of her expected the night to swiftly morph into something straight out of a horror movie – perhaps the alien would come alive in Mark's arms to take a chunk out of his side or trap Cass in a tangle of mind-bending nightmares created by her own brain.

That hadn't happened, though. The alien had yet to make a single move, even one isolated movement. It hadn't done anything other than blink once every couple of minutes. It made no sounds. Nor did it squirm, flinch, or even adjust its body to a more comfortable position.

Frankly, if Cass had to guess, it almost seemed brain-dead. Either that or completely checked out of the situation. Or perhaps it wasn’t capable of thought? That almost stick-thin body, akin to a child’s scribbles, seemed too impossibly thin for life to fill its frame. On the other hand, there were the eyes. Incredibly detailed, like a professional artist had spent months drawing that singular feature (then of course, letting a small child with a pen and a dream finish out the rest of the body).

The wooden stairs leading up to the second floor creaked, shaking Cass out of her musings as Mark continued on his way to her dad’s office. She hurried to join him. The police station wasn’t large. A wooden building put together at some point in time during the thirties, that due to budget concerns and the fact that it had held up pretty well to the sands of time, almost everything was still original. Wooden walls, cast-iron heaters, no air-conditioning, but rather a rather nice marble tiling on the first floor that ran all the way from the receptionist’s desk right past the entrance, to the open-concept lobby that doubled as an office space, to the few holding cells in the back with their cold bars of iron.

Only the main floor had changed much, with two of the four holding cells being removed about ten years ago to allow more space to accommodate the additional officers added when Carlston was designated a hub town. That year, the police station had gone from holding two officers and the chief, to a total of ten men that could be sent out to handle all the small and medium-sized towns within a thirty-mile radius.

The second floor, however, was completely unchanged from its original function. The police chief’s office, an unused secretary’s desk, and the break room were the main focus of the much smaller floor.

As Cass predicted, a warm light was shining through the crack under the door to her dad’s office. He was still there, burning the midnight oil as Carlos had said. For a moment she hesitated, fist raised mid-knock. This was it. Her last chance to change her mind, to keep her dad safely out of whatever the hell this crazy night was. He was busy. His mind was occupied with important work solving a case a few towns over. Doubtlessly an important one, to have the chief himself working on it as opposed to assigning it to the guys downstairs. Well, they were probably working on it as well, but still. Cass's dad didn't work on every case. His time was limited, with all the administrative junk he had to deal with.

It was Mark’s fidgeting that made up Cass’s mind in the end. She didn’t even need to look Mark in the eyes to know he was still scared out of his mind. The stalwart, tough Mark she’d known when he was still in high school was nowhere to be found. It was just scared, meek Mark now, out of his depth and praying that Cass could get him out of whatever he’d stumbled upon.

Only Cass’s best idea was to ask her dad. Her hand descended on the wooden door emblazoned with her dad’s last name and title – Chief Thomson, Carlston PD.

“Come in.”

Cass closed her eyes once her dad spoke the words. It was done. Her hand found the doorknob and twisted it to allow warm light to spill out into the hallway.

“Cass? Awful late to drop by. Is everything alright?”

A man with blazing red hair looked up from a stack of papers on his desk, his sharp brown eyes peering over the obstacles to look at Cass and Mark with a mix of curiosity and mild concern, though the bags under his eyes betrayed a certain level of exhaustion. He was still dressed in his black police chief’s uniform, his badge pinned in place over his heart and his cowboy hat hanging loosely on the coat rack next to his giant wooden desk. Noticing Cass’s hesitation, he stroked his ginger mustache, neatly groomed and presentable at all times, and stood from his desk.

“It’s three in the morning, you’re still in your pajamas, and Mark has something bulky under his arm. Something’s wrong.” He summarized, his sharp eyes noting every detail in an instant.

“Chief Thomson…” Mark began to speak, but Cass quickly cut him off with a pointed look.

“Dad. It’s better if we just show you. Mark, can I have my windbreaker back?”

Her dad’s eyes, once filled with curiosity and concern, widened imperceptively in a matter of seconds as Mark swept off the windbreaker from around his broad shoulders and handed it back to Cass, who shrugged it back on wordlessly.

For a moment everyone was silent. Cass, Mark, her dad, everyone.

“A movie prop – no, it’s breathing. ‘He’s’ breathing? Or is this an ‘it’?” Chief Thomson’s narrowed eyes dissected the situation as methodically as he would a crime scene, taking in all the little details one by one. Instantly Cass felt a flood of relief. Her dad wasn’t wasting a second. She wasn’t wrong to believe in him. “Explain.” He looked at Cass, eyes boring into her own.

Cass gulped. Her dad was in detective mode. Already he'd glanced over Mark's poor condition. Likely he was mentally connecting the dots by the second.

“Mark got in a wreck with a van a few hours ago. Black in color, headlights turned off. He blacked out and woke up in his bed. His car was in his garage, this creature was standing next to it.”

“So, this isn’t an extremely anorexic child.” Chief Thomson concluded.

“Hasn’t made a peep and its body is too thin. Even if someone was starved for months.” Cass confirmed. “Plus it barely blinks. Like once a minute?”

Chief Thomson circled around his desk, navigating through the staggered chairs and stacks of papers littered around his office. His boots were muffled against the carpet. A small flashlight, more akin to a penlight, slipped out of his back pocket to shine in the creature’s eyes. It did not blink. Not even when the light focused on its pupils no more than a centimeter away.

“But alive.” He muttered, patiently waiting a full minute to watch it blink in Mark’s arms. Then he turned to look straight into Mark’s eyes. “Son, can you give me any more details on that van?”

Mark began to shake his head, but Chief Thomson patted him on the shoulder and leaned in close with a wink. “Think about it for a bit, and I’ll pretend to ignore the alcohol on your breath for a bit longer.”

Cass, meanwhile, moved a stack of papers from the closest chair and sat down, her windbreaker wrapped snugly around her upper body. Her dad was obviously concerned about the people with the van. Just like she was. The question remained, could he figure out any more than she could think of?”

"The body of the van was painted jet black," Mark said haltingly. He set the alien down on the floor and ambled over to the smaller window adjacent to the large wooden desk that dominated the majority of the room. “No headlights. Not even fog lights. Nothing. It was on the highway… I don’t rem… no, it was on the highway a good five or so miles out from Johnson. I couldn’t get a look at who was driving. It shot out of the darkness before I could react.”

Chief Thomson kneeled to look at the alien again. He grabbed one of its stick-thin arms, holding it up in the air and letting go, watching as the limb dropped down like a limp noodle.

“Then you blacked out.”

“Then I blacked out.” Mark confirmed, and then added on with a miserable tone, “I woke up in bed after, blood all over my sheets from my broken nose. I staunched the bleeding, went out to my garage, saw my totaled car, and saw this… thing.”

“Not totaled.” Chief Thomson corrected Mark. “You got back in it. Unless this thing can teleport. It’s already in the realm of some weird sci-fi Twilight Zone madness.”

Mark took a long look out of the window. Cass glanced over at him, turning her attention away again once it became apparent that he hadn’t seen anything interesting, but was instead using it as a way to try and focus his thoughts. “I think I got back in it. The hood was damaged enough to see the engine. It looked… mostly usable.”

“If you were drunk, I could believe that.” Chief Thomson stood up from looking at the alien and walked over to the window next to Mark. “I’ve seen half-dead drunks stumble home from two towns over out of pure instinct. My bet is the crash itself didn’t black you out. How much were you drinking, son?”

Mark's face blanched and he shot a pleading look over to Cass. Cass replied with a look of her own that communicated the unspoken words, 'You got yourself into this, now deal with the consequences.'

“A lot.” Mark reluctantly admitted. “A twelve-pack and change. Lots of change.”

"Blackout drunk." Her dad concluded. A shout of pain rang out, and before Cass could even react, Mark was reeling back clutching the side of his face while Chief Thomson lowered his fist.

“Dad! Y-“

"Son, that was for driving drunk. If it was any other night I'd toss you in the drunk tank for a few days so you could think about your actions. What would you have done if you'd killed someone?"

“I’m… sorry.”

Mark, formidable, bulky, powerful Mark, meekly apologized. It was something that the Mark she used to know would have never done. The Mark she knew would have clenched his jaw, looked her dad defiantly in the eyes, and said nothing. He would've held off his reaction to the strike on purpose, to show how tough he was. Frankly speaking, it wouldn't have been an act. Mark was tough enough to shrug off a punch from a full-grown man.

“The next time you do something as unbelievably stupid and unintentionally malicious as that, I will charge you to the full extent of the law. Right now…” Chief Thomson shot a look at the alien on the floor, “We have bigger problems. If I were a betting man, which I am not because gambling is a sin, I would wager that this thing slipped out the back of that black van in the chaos and into your car. It hitched a ride like a tick falling from a tree to burrow into the back of a hiker’s neck. Given that this is either some strange experiment or an honest-to-God alien, if I were a betting man I would also wager whoever wanted to be unnoticeable enough to willingly turn off their headlights in the middle of the night likely would want this thing back.”

Chief Thomson turned away from the two and picked the phone on his desk off the receiver. One by one he moved the rotary dial to each number with a sense of solid purpose that sent a warm blossom of hope blooming in Cass’s chest. This was it. Her dad knew what to do. He would make things right. Just like he always did.

As the chief methodically dialed the numbers, he continued to speak. “Mark, you’re still driving that flashy Corvette of yours, right? The one your pa gave you?”

Mark wordlessly nodded.

“Providing the driver or drivers of that van were awake, they will have likely seen your car. Even if not, there is a non-zero chance with a collision of that magnitude that an identifiable piece of your car was left on the scene. Assuming they find out a Corvette hit them, all they need to do is head here or to Johnson looking for the sparse handful of people in the entire state who have that kind of car instead of something actually practical. One driver, probably a man riding shotgun, then adding on two more men for caution’s sake. Splitting up into two teams means they can case both towns for a totaled Corvette or someone who looks like they’ve been in a nasty wreck.”

His fingers paused on the last number before moving the rotary dial one last time. A man’s voice, mostly imperceptible to Cass’s ears, answered on the second ring.

“Sorry to disturb you. Yes, yes of course. Would you mind prepping a holding cell? Oh, and send Paul up to my office, please. Thanks, Carlos.”

Chief Thomson patted Mark on the back again and spun him around to face the rest of the office, gesturing toward the alien while he did.

“Son, go ahead and tuck it under your arm again. We’ll throw it in the holding cell with Paul as a guard over it. I’ll reach out to the Feds and negotiate with them to send a team over for retrieval. Then while we wait for them to turn up, Carlos will call all the officers in to take a good long look.”

“So we don’t get disappeared.” Cass’s eyes widened. She truly was right to worry about that.

Her dad’s eyes twinkled. “Sure thing kiddo. Right now, the only officers in the building are me, Carlos, and Paul. Bill’s on patrol and the rest are off duty. Once all the men have seen it, the Feds will likely prefer to make us sign some papers instead of taking us out back. That is, of course, only a concern if this is as crazy as I, and it seems you as well, think it might be. The end thing is, we don’t want to die and they won’t want this getting out. Since we know that, I can take steps to make sure everyone is happy. Compromise. Such a magical word.”

The clumping of boots heading up the creaky wooden stairs heralded Paul’s arrival.

“Chief, Cass, oh hey Mark!” A bearded man burst through the doors like an avalanche swarming over a mountainside. Like Carlos at the desk downstairs, he was dressed in his standard policeman blues, though the badge at his chest was partially obscured by the length of his thick and bushy beard.

"Paul." Chief Thomson let out a short greeting before pointing at the lump under Mark’s arm. “We’ve got an alien on our hands. Put it in the holding cell Carlos is prepping until I get some suits from the government down this way to take it off our hands.”

Paul’s stark grey eyes swept over the creature in question. “Well, this’ll be a night for the books. Come with me young Mark.”

As Cass made to leave following Mark and Paul, her dad’s heavy hand fell onto her shoulder to stop her.

"Cass." He said once the door closed behind the two, "You did well bringing this to me. It would have been reckless to try hiding it away. Now we can take the steps to get this off our hands as cleanly as possible.” Then he swept her up in a hug, one that Cass leaned into, though she was careful to twist her torso slightly so that the sharp edges of his duty belt didn’t dig into her skin.

"Thanks, Dad."

All the while, Cass kept one eye trained on the window Mark had been looking out of earlier. The window, while small, afforded a decent view of Main Street, which included the front side of the bar by default. Neither of the two smokers were still standing outside.

The building itself had mostly cleared out by the look of it, with most of the patrons finally starting to stumble home. Aside from a beat-up Chevie pickup truck parked near the door, which belonged to the bar’s owner, and a beige Ford Sierra car that had just been turned off, the lot was practically empty.

Cass cocked her head as her dad stepped away and said something about going downstairs to check on the situation. The smokers had unnerved her earlier, but the man who heaved himself out of the Ford Sierra looked… well, she hated to profile, but he looked like some terrifying cold-blooded man in a suit, the kind of man that her social studies teacher would also put a picture up of when he would talk about the Soviet Union’s KGB agency.

He wore a battered suit and tie, filled with rips and tears that spoke of either callous neglect or an extreme amount of physical action. The suit was pure black, like a void in the night air. Then in an instant, the man disappeared through the open door of the bar. Cass shivered. A strange character for a strange night, but hopefully it was just some out-of-towner stopping by for a drink. It happened all the time.

Maybe he was a warm man underneath that petrifying visage. He could have a family. Sons and daughters who had spelling bees and school plays for him to tearfully watch. That dent on the hood of his car, it was probably made by a baseball hitting it! His son must have been learning how to play and been careless with his swings.

Still, as Cass made her way out of the office and toward the stairs, she couldn’t quite shake the feeling of dread that there were far too many parts to this night that were left unknown, taunting her in the shadows with what could go wrong.

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Metal clattered against wood as Cathy set the keys to the van on the nightstand. On the floor in front of the bed, between her and the door, Steve fluffed a pillow he’d stolen from her and took off his jacket with a sigh of contentment. Clearly, he was perfectly happy with whatever sparse comfort the floor could provide. Either that or the man was insane. Cathy wasn't quite sure of the answer herself yet.

The unblemished white fabric of his dress shirt was provided a stark contrast by the solid black leather of the holster strapped under his left shoulder, one that saw the utilitarian grey gunmetal color of the man’s Sig Sauer P226 poke out ready to be drawn and used at any given moment. A speck of black poked out from under the collar, the only indication of the bulletproof Kevlar vest concealed under Steve’s clothing.

Her colleague was quite talkative, the drive from D.C. had proved that much. But if Cathy hadn’t been paying close attention those details would have escaped her.

She could live with that, though. Talkative people weren’t the end of the world, even if she had to share a motel room with one. Mr. Moon and Dag were two doors down, though likely their room was quite a lot more stoic. The two pairs had kept away from each other on Mr. Moon’s orders, citing that it was imperative that the groups could not be connected by an outside party. They had even staggered their arrival times to the motel by half an hour. Regardless, Cathy had seen enough of the two to know that they were quite stoic individuals indeed.

“Quite a peashooter you’ve got there.” Steve abruptly spoke up once he’d finished spreading his jacket in an impromptu blanket over his chest. Cathy blinked in surprise, but before she could ask him to elaborate, Steve continued to speak.

“The six-shooter tucked away in your purse. I can see it from here.”

It seemed like each hour that passed, Cathy continued to be surprised by the man’s attention to detail. It was clearly a skill well-honed, though it was hard to say if that skill was acquired through work in his division, or through the experience of life. Perhaps it was both. Nevertheless, Cathy reached over to the nightstand and dragged the topic of discussion out into plain sight. It was an ugly weapon, made of black steel with a polished wooden grip. A six-inch-long barrel, six shots, and a sturdy hammer that needed to be manually cocked back to ready each shot.

“Smith and Wesson, Model 29.” She briskly introduced, holding the gun out so Steve could see it from where he was resting on the floor. The sooner his curiosity was sated, the sooner she could get some shuteye.

Steve let out a low sliding whistle of appreciation. “One hell of a piece. The most powerful handgun in the world, ay?”

Cathy nodded, wordlessly confirming his suspicions on why she chose that particular weapon.

“Good ol’ Dirty Harry. Hell of a movie. Those .44 magnum rounds’ll put a good hole in anyone for sure. You got a specific reason for packing that piece, or was that movie enough of one?”

“I’ll never be mugged again.” Cathy shortly replied, sliding the handgun back into her purse, slipping her glasses off to set on the nightstand next to it, and turning off the lamp to signal that the discussion was over.

“Yeah. No kidding.” She could hear Steve mutter to himself. “Whip that guy out and you don’t even need to shoot. Anyone who isn’t a flat-out tweaker high off their rocker will be running in the opposite direction in seconds.”

------

The plot thickens...

Wow and here's chapter 5. Some might consider it a sort of "landmark chapter" for new stories. Not every story manages to get to chapter 5. Feels good to be here though! So, I wonder, how many of you have noticed each chapter title is the name of a song? It's a little theme I've been trying to keep. The first three titles were the theme songs I envisioned for the three main characters. Mr. Moon with Sunglasses at Night, Cass with Girl on the Moon, and Jack with Stunning. After that, I've been choosing songs that I was listening to while writing and gave me similar vibes to how the chapter felt. Lots of synthwave/vaporwave, lots of 80s rock!

And now for some bad news. No chapter next week as I will be out of town and unable to write. I'll still be around on the discord and all that, but otherwise it is what it is. Hoping to get something released on the 28th once that's all over and I'm back to being settled in.

If for some reason you're a patreon that can see this post and aren't in the discord server, feel free to drop by and say hi! Or if you are and I somehow missed giving you your super sweet discord role, ping me and call me a fool of a leaf!

As usual, thanks to all you lovely patreons feeding my coffee addition and paying for my microsoft office subscription. If we have any ninja editors here, huge thanks to you too. As always if you spot something that looks wrong, please give me a shout so I can take a look at it and get the errors fixed! Oh, and thank you for reading!

The Leaf Club: https://discord.gg/jfRn8j5GaE

Peace