Our siege would take place at eleven-fifteen, when we believed all officers, apart from Polk and McAndress, had gone home for the night. We’d take them by surprise and lock them in the supply closet. Then we’d have the station to ourselves and we could find Jim’s file.
The first time we attempted it, Officer McAndress—displaying moves apparently learned from a fruitful career moonlighting in mixed martial arts—struck Kip with an uppercut to the face, elbowed Wit in the ribs, then, spinning, back-kicked Cannon’s stomach, sending him gasping to the floor. Meanwhile, Officer Polk had me pinned to the ground, his left foot gouging my back as he zip-tied Martha to a desk chair.
“The Warwick police aren’t actually police,” said Kipling with unabashed wonder the next wake. “They’re the spawn of Satan.”
He wasn’t kidding.
How many times at midnight, at one, two, three o’clock in the morning, did the five of us storm that station? Was it a hundred times? Was it ten thousand?
How many different entry SWAT formations did we attempt, after finding on the Internet the Ground Reconnaissance Operations Handbook, a training manual for marines?
Single file, double file, double file advancement with variation, through front doors, back doors, barred windows, fire escapes, drainpipes, adjacent-building rooftops. We downloaded something called The Criminal’s Guide to Revelry off the Deepnet, a hand-typed, poorly photocopied manual written by Anonymous Doe that detailed strategies for nullifying people who were aggressive, hysterical, or empowered by Superman fantasies, during any raid, heist, or robbery. How many terrifying masks did we try (clown, pig, Clockwork Orange droogs)? How many bullets did we shoot into the ceiling? How many threats and warnings did we scream?
It should have been easy to get our hands on one case file.
As the wakes went on, we transformed from disorganized teenagers acting out a makeshift version of Mission: Impossible into a real five-person platoon. We were able to advance without noise, reading each other’s thoughts and movements with nothing but a look.
Wake after wake, we were thwarted.
This was due not to Officers Polk and McAndress, but to their wild card, Officer Victoria Channing, assigned to Traffic Safety. She was always in the women’s bathroom, and she advanced on us out of nowhere, displaying an eagerness to kill that was psychotic.
“Take that, you little shitheads!” she screamed.
She was terrifying, even if we were immortal.
Though Cannon and Whitley had learned to nullify Polk and McAndress, Channing eluded them every time. She was able to slip like vapor through the back stairwell, the front stairwell, a panel in the ceiling, firing her Glock without warning into Cannon’s chest.
Or Kip’s stomach.
Or Whitley’s forehead.
The time she shot Martha in the temple—as if blithely turning the knob on a gumball machine—I froze, stunned, staring down at her and the rest of my friends lying on the police station carpet, blood gurgling out of their foreheads and necks like water trickling from a hose.
“Hands up or you’ll be joining them in hell!” screeched Officer Channing, aiming at me.
“Death feels like floating in a warm bath,” said Martha, the next wake.
I was always the only one left alive. This was because I wasn’t a natural warrior. I tended to freeze when I needed to act. As a result, Cannon had decided my job was to locate Jim’s case file.
Find Jim’s file. It was all I had to do.
The closed homicide cases were kept in the basement. It was an unnerving, neglected fish tank of a room: humming green fluorescent light, smells of mildew, pipes yowling with steam. Row after row of metal shelves extended, dreamlike, in every direction, floor to ceiling, packed with cardboard boxes. Each box was scribbled with a victim’s name.
Appleton, Janice
Avery, Jennifer
Azella, Robert P.
At every break-in, no matter the hell being unleashed upstairs, I headed straight to the back stairwell and raced to the basement. I’d fling open the wooden doors marked STORAGE and sprint into the labyrinth of shelves, madly looking for the Ms, my footsteps squeaking on the orange linoleum. Every time, Channing caught me and I spent the rest of the wake sitting in a jail cell hearing her tell the other officers a phony story about having to kill everyone else in self-defense.
And yet, each wake, while my friends were dealing with the mayhem upstairs, I was dealing with my own torment in that droning green basement, a trial that had nothing to do with Officer Channing.
It began when I accidentally kicked a box off a bottom shelf.
Hendrews, Holly
The box tipped over, sending a plastic bag marked Evidence spinning across the floor. Inside, there was a blood-encrusted Christmas scarf decorated with snowmen and reindeer, but what struck me—I stopped dead, blinking in alarm—was that the bag was spangled with black mildew.
The box was also leaking.
I kicked it closer, peering inside. An oil-like liquid had pooled in the corners, as if one of the evidence bags had leaked. Glancing up, I saw, stunned, that it wasn’t just this box. There were others. At least four or five boxes had that same black liquid seeping through the bottom.
Then there were the shelves.
They were hulking and metal. Yet sometimes as I raced past them, madly searching for MASON, JIM, the slightest brush of my shoulder would send the giant shelf toppling over as if it were nothing but cardboard. It would land with a deafening clang, sending the one beside it over, the one beside that too, until all the shelves in the basement were falling around me like massive dominos, hundreds of boxes thundering to the ground. All I could do was scramble out of the way, press my back against the nearest wall, pray I didn’t get hit until it was over.
Afterward I’d try to sift through the rubble for Jim’s box before Officer Channing caught me red-handed, as she always did.
I never mentioned to the others what was happening. I was too scared.
“How’s it going in the basement?” Cannon asked me. “Are you close to finding Jim’s file? I heard a lot of banging downstairs this last time.”
“There’s a lot to sift through,” I said. “I’m close.”
The key, I’d found, was to sprint through the shelves as fast as I could, allowing them to fall after me as I kept running and running toward the row of Ms at the very back of the basement. I had just perfected the optimal path through the maze when, once, barreling too fast, I missed the correct row and was forced to backtrack. I was careful not to graze the shelf as I made the turn and slowed to a walk, panting. Usually there was the sound of havoc upstairs, banging and screaming. This time it was quiet.
Too quiet.
Machinsky, Tina D.
Mahmoodi, Wafaa
Malvo, Jed
I spotted Jim’s box on the top shelf at the very end. In a rush of disbelief, I sprinted to it, reached on my tiptoes, tried to jostle it down without sending the entire shelf clattering over.
Mason, Jim Livingston
“Gotcha, you little shit,” a woman hissed. “Put your hands up and turn real slow.”
Channing had stepped out from behind the shelves and was striding toward me, Glock aimed right at my head.
“Don’t shoot. Please.”
Her face was flushed. Her lips twitched. She pulled the trigger.
She never had before.
A giant match lit the wick of my brain. I hit the ground, rolling onto my back, accidentally throwing out my arms, which hit the shelf, sending it flying backward.
“What the…?” Channing screamed in shock.
As the shelves fell, I blinked up at the fluorescent lights, green filaments flickering in mysterious Morse code. There was so much pain it spilled everywhere, then drifted away.
Dying was not as cataclysmic as I’d thought it’d be. Because even though I was in the Neverworld, my body and mind still reacted as if it were the real thing.
There was no white light. There was no tunnel.