Brian Freeman - The Voice Inside

“Maria!”

This time, he heard something. Muffled. Not far away. A woman screamed. The voice rose in a shrill wail and then cut off sharply. The eddies of the wind made it impossible to tell where it had come from.

Frost drew his gun into his hand. He crept forward into the missile complex. Weeds sprouted through the cracks in the stone and trembled in the breeze. The cement platforms, like the buildings, were covered in graffiti. He saw drawings of alien heads. Peace signs. A beatnik with black, empty eyes. Long ago, someone had painted a warning on the ground in bold capital letters:

WE ALL MUST MEET OUR MOMENT OF TRUTH.

That was exactly how Frost felt.

He climbed the cracked steps into the first building. Most of the roof was gone. The interior was dark, and when he cast his light around the space, he saw fallen rubble and the remnants of people who had come here to party in the ruins. Broken bottles. Needles. Moldy food picked apart by birds.

But no one was here.

He returned into the growing darkness. There wasn’t much time.

“Cutter!” he shouted into the wind. “Give it up! I know you’re here. I know about Hope and the sketches. I know everything . You’re done. It’s over. Don’t make it worse.”

He made a slow circle, trying to peer through the fog. Nothing moved, other than the fragile weeds. He felt mist on his face. Leading the way with his gun, he crossed the trail onto a circular cement platform in the middle of a spiderweb of dirt trails. Whatever had been housed here was gone. There was more graffiti. More loose stone. The bushes grew taller here, partially blocking his view of the next building in the missile complex, which was fifty feet away. Behind the waving branches, as the fog blew in and out, he saw rusted vent grills on top of the cinder-block wall and wild red-and-orange graffiti letters spelling out the word RIOT .

He could see the shell of a doorway, too.

And there was Rudy Cutter. Alone.

Frost saw no sign of Maria Lopes. For a long, frozen moment, he stared at Cutter, and Cutter stared back at him. The man’s face was a mask, a mystery, without any happiness or sadness. As Frost’s gaze followed the line of the man’s body, he saw something else, too, secured in the man’s hand.

A knife.

Red blood dripped from the blade to the dirt.

Frost leaped forward through the tangle of vines rooted in the ground. The brush trapped him, making it almost impossible to move. As he ran, he couldn’t see. The weeds were as tall as he was. He dragged himself through a sharp, tight web that scratched his face, and then he finally burst out onto the cracked pavement in front of the building. Cutter was already gone. The darkness had swallowed him up. Frost lit up the walls and the hillside behind the missile complex, but there was no sign of him.

He sprinted for the building and threw himself inside. His flashlight reflected a shiny spattered blood trail across the debris on the stone floor. It led him under the rotting wooden timbers in the ceiling and toward a huge open window frame that was bordered with peeling green paint. In the next abandoned room, he saw a plastic mannequin, its body crusted with dirt, its head cut off, its arm pointed straight ahead, as if it were beckoning him.

He ran to the window frame and climbed through to the other side.

At the feet of the mannequin was Maria Lopes.

Seeing her, Frost felt his heart seize. Her blood was everywhere. Her blood made a lake. Rudy Cutter had slashed her throat deeply and ruthlessly. Frost ran to her and held her, but her eyes were closed, and each breath she drew was labored and long. He called 911; he alerted the paramedics and police; but he knew he was already too late. The hillside was too remote. There wasn’t enough time. He ripped the sleeve off his coat and wrapped her neck and applied pressure, but he was holding back a heart pumping its life into the cold air with each beat.

This woman, this lovely woman, had been alive when he met her hours earlier. A mother. A wife. And then, like the others, she’d crossed paths with Cutter, and he’d stolen all of it away from her.

It made Frost want to scream. It made him want to cry. He’d been too late for Katie. Too late for Jess. And now too late for Maria, too. Cutter had won again. He always won.

Frost murmured lies into Maria’s ears as the two of them waited in the dark ruins. It’s okay, hang on, help is coming, you’re going to be fine. But she wasn’t going to be fine. Her eyes never opened. All the while, her ragged breaths came further and further apart, until only a few minutes later, they stopped altogether. A breath went out; nothing came back in. The silence was awful as she died in his arms.

One of the other detectives at police headquarters gave Frost a new shirt to wear. He changed in the bathroom. His own shirt was soaked in Maria’s blood, and when he took it off, he saw that blood had seeped through onto his arms and chest. He cleaned himself at the sink as best as he could, but when he was done, he still saw remnants in the seams of his skin and under his fingernails. When he looked in the mirror, he saw gruesome red highlights in his hair.

It was already past midnight. The hunt was on. The police had converged on the missile complex at Sweeney Ridge, but Cutter was nowhere to be found. He’d disappeared into the sprawling hills. There were police helicopters overhead, shining spotlights on the trails, but he was either hidden in the forest or he’d escaped back to the city. Every cop in the Bay Area was looking for him.

Frost waited for Pruitt Hayden in the captain’s office. He’d already been waiting a long time. He hadn’t realized how tired he was until he sat down. The room was warm, and his head swam. He found his eyes blinking shut, and without realizing it, he drifted to sleep. In his dreams, he saw ten long, jewel-encrusted daggers dangling from his living room ceiling at home, tethered by silver threads, all of them dripping blood. He saw identical gleaming platinum watches on both of his arms, five on the left, five on the right, all of them set to 3:42 a.m.

A woman stood directly below each knife. All the victims. Nina, Rae, Natasha, Hazel, Shu, and Melanie. And now Maria, too — and Jess — and Katie. They seemed unaware of the lethal danger just over their heads. Slowly, one by one, as he shouted to warn them, the knives fell, burrowing into their skulls and vanishing. One by one, the women calmly lay down on his living room floor. With each victim, a watch disappeared from his wrist and appeared on the wrist of the woman at his feet. There was no rush. It was leisurely and horrible and silent. A knife fell. A victim died. His watch became her watch.

One, two, three, four, on and on. He couldn’t stop it.

Soon it was Maria’s turn. Maria in her red sneakers. He called out, but his voice didn’t make a sound. The knife fell, and she was gone. Then Jess. His deep track. She stared at him in the moody and intense way she always did, but she didn’t say anything. The knife penetrated her skull, like all the others. She sank to her knees, and she toppled sideways, and she lay still.

He had two watches left on his wrist, but there was only one victim left in the room. Katie.

His sister grinned at him. She held a pizza box and stared around with wide blue eyes at the Russian Hill house. She called out to him, in the familiar Katie voice he hadn’t heard in years.

“Hey, did you order this pizza? Because I think I’m in the wrong place.”

Frost tried to answer. He tried to scream at her: Go, go, go, go, go. But he was too late. He was always too late. He was too late for every one of them; they were all gone; they were all dead. The thread broke, and the knife fell. His pretty, sunny sister put down the pizza box carefully on the floor and then stretched out beside it, as if she were no more than a child taking a nap.