Periodical Cicadas – Chapter 11

Daniel Hebert

I don't know what I'm doing.

I've often been told that this isn't an uncommon sentiment for parents, much less for widowed or single parents of a teenager.

I've often been told many things.

And I don't care to count how many of them were lies.

So I lean back on my swiveling chair, taking advantage of being alone in the PRT office embedded in the local police department to stretch my legs out under the desk, pushing just slightly back, the small wheels rolling smoothly over a plush carpet.

And find myself missing my old office.

The carpet was anything but plush, a lime green thing with both discolored and darkened patches, not to mention the threadbare spots where the rough concrete floor peeked through, and my chair didn't have wheels. It was a solid steel bulk with insufficiently cushioned wood planks, heavy to move and impossible to drag across the carpet without tearing it up.

But I wasn't alone in there.

I had… People. People who kept coming in and out, bringing their problems to me.

Trusting me.

And I thought I could be trusted.

God, I have been such a moron.

I sigh and bend back my legs, dragging the chair toward my desk.

The desk littered with paperwork I shouldn't be working on.

For many reasons.

The first of them being that this was supposed to be a paper-thin bribe, not an actual job. That Lakewood hasn't had a single recorded instance of parahuman crime ever. That this is where careers go to die or wait for an early retirement.

That I should be paid to wait around and do busywork, not to follow Agent Acosta around to study the latest victims of somebody who has decided that the Nine are uncultured Philistines.

Its'…

I don't even know how to process all that.

Once? Years ago? I was acquainted with violence. I was a higher-up in a union going to war for their rights and dwindling jobs, the husband of a woman who used to run around with Lustrum, of all people. I know how a cracked head bleeds, the unsettling ways a leg or an arm can bend, the noises of muted agony strong men can't help but make.

I know violence.

This isn't it.

There's no unrestrained savagery. No loss of control. No overpouring of emotions. This isn't someone caught in a wild fray or losing themselves in the moment. No, this is something entirely different.

Something I don't know. Couldn't know. Shouldn't know—

'You think you're better than me, boy?'

'It's not about—'

'You do, don't you? You always have, getting all those ideas—'

'Dad! Stop and listen—'

'Don't you raise your voice at me!'

I shake my head at the intrusive thought, trying to clear it of the old memory. Of the broad-shouldered man I have always tried not to become.

There's… There's too much of him in me. I let Anette see that once, a single time, and that's the last memory of me my wife took from this world.

I almost let Taylor see it two nights ago.

Maybe she heard it.

And I…

I straighten up, the chair moving back in a way that I didn't intend to before I grab the edge of my desk and drag myself closer.

To look at the paperwork.

'I'm sorry, Kurt, but…' I gestured at the pile of folders, all of them on the same tray.

And then at the empty one.

'Not your fault, Danny boy,' he said with a rueful smile that tried to mask just how bad things were.

How much he needed the job that just wasn't there.

'I… I can loan you a few—'

'Don't. Mixing friends and money is a great way to lose both.'

'That line usually goes for the one lending the money,' I said, trying to chuckle.

But he looked at me, dead serious.

'Yes. I know,' he said.

And that was the end of that conversation.

So I clench my left fist, still angry, but in a different way. Angry at all the times I failed the people looking up to me, all the friends I cared about leaving my office without a way to provide for their families while I still had my desk job salary and widower's pension.

Angry at all the times I was powerless.

'She'll wake up; it's just a matter of days, if not hours,' the frazzled doctor assured me.

And then he took a step back.

Because my shoulders were trembling and my fists were shaking. Because I was looking at him like I would've looked at the one who did this to my little girl, even as a part of me desperately tried to tell me not to, that this man was innocent, just trying to help.

Trying to help.

I had tried. I had tried for years, failing each and every single time, and only learned how badly at that moment, with my little girl lying unconscious on a white bed, her bare arms thinner and paler than I remembered, the transparent tube of plastic stabbed near her wrist seeming to shine more healthily than the dull pallor of her skin.

My little girl.

'Leave,' I said.

'Mister Hebert—'

'You're a good man. You're trying to help. This isn't your fault. So leave,' I said, my jaw clenching tighter after every bitten word.

He took a step back.

And left.

I don't know how long it took for the security guard to get there, but the visitor's chair was already shattered by that point.

And now I'm powerless again, but I can't afford another outburst. Not here, surrounded by cameras, in front of what is now my new work.

Parahumans.

I take the first folder Agent Acosta gave me, the one with the brief breakdown on what they're supposed to be and do, the classifications.

I've only bothered reading the Tinker part because it's that obvious that's what we're up against, but I still go over it once more, trying to see what I could've missed.

They're, like all parahumans, defined by their trigger event, but theirs is supposed to be not a dramatic tipping point but an ongoing problem that keeps building pressure until, finally, something snaps. And then they get a new way to look at the world, to look at problems and come up with solutions.

I look at the second and third folders, the ones filled with pictures and my own clumsy notes to compliment the ones more professionally taken by Agent Acosta and the local coroner.

The ones detailing how two dead bodies became art.

What kind of problem has this solution?

It's… maybe I should focus on the technology rather than the use of it. On the quite frankly over-my-head notes about monofilament wires with a coating that stops blood from flowing down the thin, almost invisible lines, and the other ones, those that use electrically induced capillarity to drain blood at a steady rate and keep it fresh and vibrant during the time it took for the display to get its intended effect.

But there's also the pump.

The tiny, discreet implant that kept the deceased Mister Branson's blood flowing hours after his death, surgically implanted in a way that makes me think about Bonesaw more readily than I would like to.

We don't know their specialty. It could be related to medicine—should be, but that doesn't fit other usages. It doesn't fit the speed with which the display was prepared, or the meticulous arrangement of it all. It doesn't explain the hacking and surveillance technology that must've been used to let the murderer lure the Mayor's daughter or gather all those pictures—

I catch my hand about to clench, and I drop the folder before I crush it in my grip.

A girl. A girl Taylor's age, with pictures of men stuck in her naked body.

Why haven't we made any arrests yet?

I… It's not my job. I'm just an office worker. Just going over all this to help in any way I can while remaining in my purely administrative duties.

I shouldn't even be here. I should be back at my new home, trying to talk to the daughter I'm avoiding—

My phone rings.

It's an unknown number.

"Yes?" I ask, already thinking what this could be about and how I hope it doesn't involve Taylor—

"Hello, Mister Hebert. I'm a friend of your daughter," a garbled voice says.

And I close my eyes at how much I've failed yet again.

"If you've touched a single hair on her head—"

"Oh? How admirable. How ready we are to jump to the defense of the downtrodden. I just wonder where all this fire was while she was being tortured."

Cold rushes just under my skull, and the world darkens.

"I will kill you. I will find you and tear you apart—"

He laughs.

"No, Mister Hebert, that's not what I meant. I meant when she was being tortured for years. While you were supposed to protect her."

I breathe.

"If you have—" I start to say.

"Dad! Dad, help! I'm in a locker, and he's filling it with—I will drown! I will drown in here, Dad!" she says.

Taylor says.

I'm already running, the door to the office slamming shut behind me, the sheriff coming into the station looking at me with bewildered alarm.

I shove him out of the way with my shoulder and don't even look back as I stamp on the wet pavement, the road deserted at this time of night.

"Dad! Dad, I—this is your fault! He says it's your fault! That if you'd been a better father—"

I almost throw away the phone, but I instead roar into it, unable to even word the things rushing up my throat, beating in my chest, as I can only see the broken white line running down the middle of the road.

"Taylor!" I finally manage to yell. To put my horror into words. "Where are you?! Are you at school?! Where?! Where do I go?!"

"Isn't that what we're all wondering, Daniel," an affable male voice says, full of geniality and mild amusement.

I don't answer.

Lockers. The school. It's the only clue, the only—

"Taylor isn't at Washington High, Danny. You can stop running," he says.

And I stop, looking around me, trying to see if anybody is watching me, if anybody is talking into their own phone, if anybody other than the sheriff warily approaching me has anything to do with this nightmare—

"Dad, it's really all right. Taylor is safe right now," my little girl says.

Except her voice turns into the garbled one mid-sentence.

Tinker.

A voice changer.

I…

I drop down, adrenalin crashing all around me, the chill of the night going through clothes soaked with sweat that has nothing to do with exertion.

I am gasping, and my throat hurts.

Then a heavy hand lands on my shoulder, and I almost twist around into a hook punch.

"What the hell—" the man I pushed a moment ago says, but stops when he meets my wild eyes.

"The killer," I mouth, pointing at my phone, and he understands the message because he's taking out his own phone and handing it to me with a recording app already working before he turns around and talks into his radio.

"That's right, Daniel. I am the killer," he says.

"Why—"

"An idle fancy. Mere curiosity. Maybe just checking how far off my own guess was. Who knows how a mind perturbed by madness works, Daniel? I surely don't."

"You—my daughter—"

"Oh, she's yours, is she? How interesting. How little do you care to keep your possessions safe, then. I wonder, if I were to slip into your house and take that lacquered box full of letters that you have secreted away under your bed, would it be easier for me to do that than it was for your best friend's daughter to almost murder yours?"

I want to say something. Something smart, brave, and threatening. Something that will push the nightmare away.

I can't.

I can only think about this monster going through my house, examining the few pieces of our former lives that Taylor and I carried with us from Brockton Bay.

About the monster doing it while Taylor sleeps.

"I will kill you," I finally say, filled with an impotent rage that, this once, burns cold.

"Really? You, the man from out of town, working for the people keeping all those awful little secrets, are going to kill me? And how is that going to work?"

I stand up.

The knees of my jeans are ripped from the asphalt, from when I dropped down, and only now do I notice the sting of my slow, seeping bleeding.

My shirt is still plastered to my chest with sweat that reeks of fear. Of the kind of scent I used to smell after a police charge that left tall men broken and kneeling.

The world sways, my head light with lack of blood as I'm still out of balance, struck with terror and fury, one after the other.

But I stand up.

"I don't know. I don't know how I'll find you, how I'll figure out who's hiding behind that mask you keep leaving behind with your victims. I don't know how I'll match up against a parahuman, a Tinker in his workshop. I just know that you've just threatened my little girl, and nobody will ever again get away with that," I say.

There's a pause on the other end of the line, and the sheriff stares at me wide-eyed.

Then the garbled voice laughs, going from a light chuckle to cackling guffaws loud enough that I feel the need to wince, to take the phone away from my ear.

I don't.

"Danny… I think I like you quite a bit," he says.

And hangs up.

The next hour goes by in a confused blur, with me sitting down on the stairs leading up to the police station with a shock blanket draped over my shoulders and a mug of something that doesn't try very hard to pretend to be hot chocolate cupped in my palms.

I answer questions. All of them. No matter how inane, arcane, or profoundly irrelevant, I tell them everything they want to know until Agent Acosta arrives and takes over, coordinating with his childhood friend to gather any slight clue a Tinker may have left behind during a phone call.

I know it's futile, but I still do it, and the Hispanic man has to push me down on the stairs so I don't stand up and follow him into the building, likely about to make a mess of his procedures.

As my mind drifts, as I make senseless connections from random thoughts and memories, I think back on the pile of folders on my desk. The ones I have only started to take seriously after seeing Taylor stare up at a hanging, dead man turned into a living painting.

The folders I will now study devotedly.

Because there are classifications and threat ratings. Broad tactics outlined to tell a powerless human how to stand up against monsters.

I will study them. I will learn them by heart.

But only as long as it takes me to get a transfer out of here so that I can keep my daughter safe.

"Dad?" she says, making me look up from the dark mug that's no longer steaming.

To see the pale, tall girl standing in front of me on the sidewalk, nervous and scared, the worry masking her anger and indignation for once.

I don't know what happens to the mug when I stand up and the trauma blanket falls behind me. Maybe I settled it back down before I moved.

Maybe I threw it away.

I just know that Taylor is still smaller than I am. That I can surround her shoulders with my arms and bury her face in my chest as I cling to her with sheer relief and mindless desperation.

Then she returns the hug without protest, frustrated tears flowing out of her eyes as she rubs them against a shirt that's wet once again.

I don't know what I'm doing.

But, for her, I'll learn.

================================

So, I wanted to get back to reposting during Halloween to coincide with my little tradition of releasing two chapters of this story at once, but… well, I got carried away by writing a total of 30k words of Halloween-themed specials.

This means I'm still in the middle of writing the second chapter of the planned double release. Which will be the 19th of the story.

Anyway, I'm trying to get back on the saddle with regular reposts, so look forward to not having to wait too many months on end for me to catch up with the general release over here. That being said, I hope that you enjoy this last little bit of the spooky season. It has been an interesting week, no matter how tiring.

As always, I'd like to thank my credited supporters on Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/Agrippa?fan_landing=true): Adad64, aj0413, LearningDiscord, Niklarus, Tinkerware, Varosch, Vergil1989 Crossover King, and Xanah. If you feel like maybe giving them a hand with keeping me in the writing business (and getting an early peek at my chapters before they go public, among other perks), consider joining them or buying one of my books on https://www.amazon.com/stores/Terry-Lavere/author/B0BL7LSX2S. Thank you for reading!