The Object: Book One (Object Series) (2 page)

In a moment doors would fly open all up and down Main Street and hundreds of working folk would spill out onto the sidewalk and swarm the parking garages and go back to their apartments and studios and homes, their normal lives with families and health insurance and tickets to Cardinal basketball games, while Sherman weathered the outdoors, keeping the streets clean of cigarette butts.

Sherman
scanned the street corners for police and then pulled a bottle of KG from the inside pocket of his denim jacket.  He took a swig and returned it quickly.  Across the street, a heavyset man dressed like a lawyer made eye contact with him through the plate glass window of a coffee lounge.  The man wiped his chin with a crumpled napkin and then looked away.

A block to
Sherman
's right, an enormous steel replica of a baseball bat lay against the side of the
Louisville
Slugger
Museum
.

"Gonna knock that buildin' over y'all,"
Sherman
muttered.  It's what his mother had said the day he took her to see the commemorative bat set in place back in '95, six months before she died of a degenerative muscle condition.

Sherman
took a drag from the cigarette dangling between his lips and began to swagger up the red brick sidewalk.  All around him people poured out of the buildings.

"Excuse me, sir," a voice called from across the street.

It was the big man from the coffee shop.  He stood at the curb waiting for a car to pass and adjusting the seam of his trousers with his thumbs, suit jacket unbuttoned and open, tie flapping in the breeze.  When the car passed, the man jogged across the street, one hand pressed against his jiggling belly.

Sherman
backed away a few steps as the man hopped up on the sidewalk and approached him.  He cleared
Sherman
by a foot, and his big bald head eclipsed the sun.  When he spoke,
Sherman
realized he was still chewing his last bite of food.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm just headin' home, sir,"
Sherman
said.  He kept taking steps backwards, and the suited man pursued him.

"What happened to your arm?"

"Donated plasma today.  Just doin' my part to save the world."

"You do that for money?"

"Yes sir."

The man shook his head and smirked.  "You're in the wrong part of town, buddy."

"Says who?"

"Says me."

"You a cop?"

"I'm an attorney, and you need take your stinking ass back to the west end."

"I don't live in the west end."

"Where do you live?"

Sherman
stopped and raised his arms out to his sides.

"All over, Mr. Attorney, sir," he said.  "Wherever I am--that's where I live."

"If you're homeless you have no business north of Broadway.  This is the one part of
Louisville
that's managed to remain unblemished--hey, are you listening to me?"

They stood under a tree next to the
Main
at 7th Tarc bus shelter, behind which lay a shady little garden area with a trickling fountain.  At the intersection on
Main
, a police cruiser idled in the left lane, waiting on the traffic light to turn green. 
Sherman
looked all around for a way of escape.  His eyes stopped at the building across the street and the red statues perched upon its second story ledge--more on the roof.

"Are those penguins or Virgin Marys?" he said, pointing.

The man's face contorted into an angry, confused grimace and he turned to look at the Proof on Main building, an upscale restaurant and art gallery, a place people like Sherman never dared to enter.  Then the light changed and traffic started moving. 
Sherman
's new lawyer friend waved at the police cruiser, not to flag him down but as though he knew the officer inside.

Meanwhile
Sherman
had backed away to the Tarc pavilion.  The lawyer glanced back to where
Sherman
previously stood, then spun around, spotting him.

Sherman
dashed across
7th Street
.  A car turning right off
Main
screeched to a halt and the driver slammed his palm on the horn, drowning out the lawyer's exclamations.

People stepped aside and some even ducked into entryways or jumped off the curb as he ran past.  After all, to run is indicative of guilt. 
Sherman
might well have just committed the most heinous crime this town had ever seen, and to catch a waft of his scent was to absorb his evil--or be absorbed by it.

Before the next intersection he cut between two parked cars and crossed the street, then veered right at South 6th, coming around the corner and tearing through caution tape onto a section of soft concrete.  Luckily the city workers who should have been guarding their work were nowhere to be found. 
Sherman
didn't stop to see how deep of an impression his shoes had left.  He kept running.  Up ahead was a nine-story parking garage--a great place to hide, wait it out, just in case someone came after him.

He made it to the entrance just as the sky went black.

~ ~ ~ ~

The rock struck Mike the stalker just above his left eyebrow.  For a brief moment his body stiffened.  Then his legs turned to noodles and he collapsed, hitting the ground like a sack of potatoes.

Then something strange happened.

It was as though Lillia shared Mike's consciousness.  In anticipation of her accuracy--and fear of what might befall her if she missed--she'd hardly noticed, and in the ensuing moments she reeled in confusion.

When the rock struck Mike in the forehead, everything went dark.

Not completely dark.  She could still see the yellow sky out on the southern horizon, but the houses in the foreground--and her stalker's crumpling body--were nothing but dark silhouettes, and suddenly a strong, erratic wind blew her skirt up and whipped dust in her face.  Tin cans rolled around and rattled on the ground and vines scraped against the wooden fence at her back.

Lillia shielded her eyes, peered up at the sky, and gasped.

She wandered out from behind the bench, past her stalker, who lay with his arms stretched out to his sides and his knees bent slightly, like a frog pinned to a rubber mat for dissection.

Lillia paid no mind to her flapping skirt.  No one was around anyway, except for Mike, whose condition she hadn't had time to ponder.  He wasn't moving, which meant he was unconscious--or worse.

The object in the sky looked like a moon, only it was close.  Really close.  Within the atmosphere, even under the clouds.  Perfectly round, enormous--probably several miles in diameter--most of it cloaked in its own massive shadow but its edges touched by sunlight.  The color of desert sand, the texture of sepia.  A great and ancient stone hovering in the
Louisville
sky, enveloping the city in darkness.

For a moment she wasn't afraid.  She couldn't be.  This thing, this object--it was astonishing.

She was ten paces away when her stalker began to moan and roll around on the ground.  Without thinking she went to him, knelt down, and began to shake him.

"Hey, Mike, wake up.  You have to see.  It's amazing.  It's the craziest thing--"

Mike opened his eyes--two glints of light in the blackness.  He sat up, groaning and mumbling to himself, and touched the bloody wound on his head.

She could smell the alcohol on his breath, the sourness of his clothes.  Body odor and cigarettes.  Mrs. Wilkins's husband smelled like that all the time--at least for the two days of the month he spent at home.  Mr. Wilkins was a truck driver, and Lillia didn't imagine he smelled any better out on the road.

The waft of that smell drove her back several steps.  It made her nervous, as Mr. Wilkins had always made her nervous, especially when he and Mrs. Wilkins started yelling at each other--or when she'd wake up in the middle of the night and find him standing in the doorway, watching her.

Suddenly Mike lunged for her.

She screamed and dodged his advance, staggered, almost fell.  Then she ran across the lot and made a wide turn out onto the street just as a police cruiser popped around the corner with its headlights off.

~ ~ ~ ~

Meredith cut to the left and overcorrected and the back end of the cruiser fishtailed.  She slammed on the brakes and the car made a one-eighty spin in the middle of the road, skidding to a stop directly facing the young girl, who stood now with her arms at her sides and her head down, shaking, hair blowing in the wind.

"Jesus," Meredith said.  She gripped the steering wheel with both hands and sat there a moment, taking deep breaths.  The radio droned with the voice of dispatch calling all cars back to the precinct.  Something had darkened the sky.  She didn't know what.  She was too afraid to look up.

It happened right as she pulled away from a traffic stop.  Some dimwit had run the red light at
East Hill Street
, almost hitting a cyclist, and a fight nearly ensued before she talked the cyclist down and sent him on his way.

Three days working at the precinct, each of them filled with adventure.  On Day One two kids with semi-automatic pellet guns sprang up from behind a fence and shot her six times.  She returned fire.  Two bullets she was certain would haunt her for the rest of her career.  Luckily she'd missed, but when the boys ran she didn't chase them, and now she would have to explain two empty shell casings to her superiors.  She'd cried for an hour in her car that morning.

On Day Two she was first response to a double homicide.  A young white male and female, both striped with track marks, swollen and infested with maggots, holding hands on the floor of some run-down apartment building amidst their own blood and feces.  You couldn't walk across the floor without your shoes crunching on needles and crack pipes--small glass tubes, always blackened on one end.

Today was Day Three, and so far there'd been no gunfire, no forthcoming paperwork, no death.  She'd written three tickets to three nervous, irritated drivers.  She'd also responded to a request for back-up at a domestic disturbance call, which turned out to be non-violent, only verbal.

Then in an instance the lights went out.  Not like a storm cloud passing over the sun, dragging a shadow across the city.  One moment all was normal.  Then she blinked, and it was as if she'd suffered a blackout and came to late in the evening.

Not a minute later she almost mowed down a young girl with her car.  What an auspicious beginning to her career that would have been.

Meredith flipped on the headlights--something she hadn't thought to do in the moments after everything went dark, something that might have prevented this incident.

She threw the gear shift in park and stepped out of the car, one hand gripping her holstered firearm.  Leaving the door open, she took out her flashlight and pointed it at the girl, then slowly approached.

"Hey," she said, "are you okay?"

The girl nodded.  Meredith couldn't tell if she was crying or not.  Her hair was in her face, along with several strands of red and white fake dreadlocks.

"What's your name?" Meredith asked.

"Lillia."

"Do you live close by, Lillia?"

"Yeah."

"How close?"

"Two blocks."

"Okay," Meredith said.  "Why don't you come get in the car and I'll take you home."

Lillia pointed into the vacant lot from which she'd sprang.

Meredith shined her flashlight in that direction and found a young man climbing to his feet, face bloody, grumbling.  If not for the wind she would have heard him.

"He was following me," Lillia said.  "I threw a rock at him."

"Does he have any weapons?" Meredith asked, drawing her gun.

"I don't think so."

"Go stand by the car."

"Okay."

She waited for the girl to move away.  Then she locked the flashlight in line with the gun barrel and stepped up to the sidewalk at the entrance to the vacant lot.  The man was spinning around in circles, leaning forward, searching for something.

"Sir, can you come over here, please?"

"Lookin' for my phone," the man said.

"What's your name?"

"Goddamn bitch."

"Excuse me?"

"I said I'm looking for my phone!"

Meredith stepped into the lot.  She approached the man slowly.  Behind her, Lillia said something, but her words dissolved into the wind.

"What's your name, sir?"

"Mike, and I didn't do anything.  I gotta get back to campus before they stop serving dinner."

"Why were you following that girl?"

"She's lying," Mike said.  "I was just taking a walk and here she comes throwing rocks.  What time is it?"