Dead Weight Read online

  Dead Weight

  By Matt Casamassina

  Dead Weight

  Copyright © 2016 by Matt Casamassina

  All rights reserved.

  http://mattcasa.com

  Cover by Hampton Lamoureux

  Formatting by Polgarus Studio

  No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, sold, or given away in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  To my wife, Edie, who will never read this, and my kids, Zoe, Fiona, and Rocco, who aren’t allowed.

  Table of Contents

  1 Table for One

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7 Shopping

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15 Best Laid Plans

  16

  17 Going Nowhere

  18

  19

  20 Little Green Men

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25 Crossroads

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32 Alpha

  33

  34 The Golden State

  35 Answers

  36 Gray

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45 Jordan

  46 Going Home

  47

  Epilogue

  1

  Table for One

  She was dead.

  Had to be, Zephyr thought, as he rummaged through her sleeping bag for the third time that morning and found only clothes. The heavy sweatshirt and pink panties. The silver ankle bracelet he gave her when she turned seventeen. A pair of old jeans. All there, still sleeping without the body that wore them. No long, black hair with a red streak. No big, brown eyes to stare right through him. No slender arms to wrap around him. No Keiko.

  Not even the heat of her. The bag inside was as cold as the air outside. Whatever she did, wherever she went, hours had passed, and the thought of her out there in the morning light with the chirping birds and dewing trees and the biting wind, no clothes to warm her, attacked his heart. What did she do? Where did she go? No answer he conjured sufficed, and only the darkest visions surfaced before he swept them away.

  A crumpled ball of tinfoil lay beside an extinguished bonfire. Nearby sat the unused condom package he’d flung from the tent in the night, buzzed and stupid and still too scared to pursue the possibility. Even now, he still didn’t know if she was a virgin — he just couldn’t devise an elegant way to broach the subject — and meanwhile, he thought he might die one.

  He replayed the night’s events. There’d been a fair amount of drinking, some kissing and touching, and a full stop after that. Had she told him that she needed to leave early? No — intoxicated or not, he was sure he’d remember that. No hint of an early departure. He thought they might have dozed off talking about where they wanted to go after the school year ended, although he admitted to himself that his memory lacked consistency and swore off alcohol forever.

  Zephyr searched the campsite and then the dirt path down to the lake where she sometimes bit her nails and smoked. He called after her until his throat felt raw. He tried the stone route back to his car. She wasn’t waiting there, and he knew that he couldn’t either. Whatever was going on, he needed help. From an adult. If she wasn’t home, he’d have to tell her parents everything. That she hadn’t slept at Luca’s house last night.

  His dirty old Volvo was the only parked car — unsurprising given the fact that it was now probably midday on a Tuesday, a ripe hour for work and school, the latter of which was minus at least one and possibly two this afternoon. He tried to power on his mobile, but it hadn’t taken enough electrical juice yet, so he backed up and started down the road again.

  Firefly Valley, population 26,000, his home of seventeen years, waited just beyond the intersection at Brussels Street. A small gathering of local stores and shops — the Durango Market, Jan’s Pastries, Big 5 Sporting Goods, McDonald’s and Smile Rite Dentist — flowed into each other on one side of Ridge Street just past the intersection, and as he slowed for a red light, he saw that something was wrong. Several vehicles were stalled on the road and sidewalk in front of the market. A red F-150 had crashed into a power pole adjacent to McDonald’s and the impact had not only crumpled the truck’s front end, but unhinged the pole, which now leaned to one side.

  A fraction of a second held three connected thoughts. What? Then, where is everyone? And finally, no ambulance? The accident might be fresh, but he wasn’t so sure, and he was just as troubled by the recklessness surrounding the crash. Empty vehicles dead on the sidewalk. Not a single person outside and none that he could see in any shops. No other cars passing by. The whole block looked static, produced – fake.

  He sat there and gawked for what might have been forever. Finally, the light changed color and he drove beyond the intersection, where he rolled the car to a stop in the street – if everybody else can do it, so could he – stepped out and surveyed the wrecked truck.

  The front end was mangled around the telephone pole, the windshield shattered onto the hood and street, and the driver seat’s airbag inflated. It was a mess.

  He peered through the passenger-side window, which had either been rolled down or altogether blown out, and saw no bodies inside. He did, however, find something else — something that caused the tiny hairs on his nape to stand rigid. In the driver’s seat, a weathered cowboy hat, belt and buckle, green flannel and a pair of faded jeans. Not folded, but stretched and worn. Two dirty black boots overturned on the floor mat. The keys were still in the ignition, but the vehicle was off.

  Zephyr Rockwell thought again of his girlfriend, reduced to a pile of clothes in the woods, as anxiety engulfed him.

  2

  His phone finally powered on. He paced between the truck, a blue minivan and some wannabe muscle car, its paint stripped to primer, and made phone calls, but found nobody off or on the line. The cars were empty except for clothes and jewelry — meaningless, he told himself, and yet his heart thumped harder every time he ducked his head into a window and saw no one. Keiko’s house returned an old answering machine recording. He called his mom’s office and it just rang. His dad’s mobile went straight to voicemail. Finally, he mass-texted all nineteen numbers in his address book. The message— Hello?— sought only a response.

  Arriving at the obvious and wondering why it hadn’t occurred to him earlier, Zephyr dialed 9-1-1. It rang thirteen times before he relented, cursed and hung up. His frustration was compounded by the fact that no texts had come back.

  “Zeph, this is not good. Not, not, not good, man,” he said. “Go home. Go. Now.”

  And with that, he raced back to his car and sped away, leaving the wrecks and the mystery lingering in his rear view mirror.

  3

  He exhaled as he saw his parent’s cars in the driveway, pulled in right behind them and ran for the front door. Their place on Fairfield Court was the farthest back in the middle of a gated cul-de-sac. It was a coveted neighborhood — not extravagantly rich, but certainly upper-class — and their house, a two-story Victorian built in the 1920s, was immaculate. He intended to fling the entryway open and burst in, where he imagined he’d discover his dad watching the afternoon news and maybe
his mom tending to something that smelled wonderful in the kitchen. Instead, he realized too late that the handle was locked and couldn’t reverse his momentum before his right shoulder crashed into the door.

  “Come on!” he cried as he fumbled for the key and then unlocked it.

  His dad was not in their expansive living room, home to a wall-eclipsing flat screen television — presently off, he observed. A crystal chandelier dangled from their vaulted ceilings, its lights equally powerless.

  “Hello! I’m here!” he shouted. “Is anybody home?”

  No replies came, but he ignored that little fact for the moment and canvassed the first floor of the house. The dining room, kitchen, den and family room were all parentless, much to his growing dismay. He sprinted upstairs, calling for them, and then stopped at their bedroom door. Please, God, he thought. Please. Please. Let them be here. Please. Please. Please. I won’t ask anything of You again, I swear. I swear.

  He opened it.

  Their television was on, the volume low. The ceiling fan spun around as its pull-string clanked against the side of the light, itself off. The shutters were drawn and the room held the dark, but he could nevertheless see that the bed was disheveled, yet uninhabited.

  His heart pounded in his chest and his vision skipped off track and then back again with each powerful beat. He felt dizzy, but the sensation was fleeting and after a pause he hurried into their bathroom, again hoping to find them at the matching sinks, perhaps prepping for a dinner party. This time, however, he wasn’t surprised when they weren’t there.

  On the television, Judge Judy appeared to be giving an obese black woman a stern lecture about integrity and the importance of returning borrowed items. Zephyr sat on his mom’s side of the bed with a squeak, grabbed the remote off her night-stand, and flipped through the channels for a local station. Some movie starring Harrison Ford – it might’ve been Clear and Present Danger. Then SpongeBob SquarePants. The next channel was black. More cartoons that he didn’t recognize. Then a screen with the words, Please Stand By. That was odd. He searched without any purpose through additional cartoons and movies, the occasional sitcom, and more blank channels, until he finally came upon a broadcast that cut through him like the blade of a sharpened axe.

  “What the—” he whispered.

  It was a live studio newsroom accompanied by a scrolling ticker. Florida Shooter Apprehended After Standoff. Neighbors Say Alleged Shooter Emptied Home. Three Soldiers Missing in Afghanistan. House Healthcare Vote May Be Delayed. The same depressing reports. That wasn’t the issue. Nothing out of the ordinary there. No, the issue was what couldn’t be seen or heard. No news anchors. No voices. And no acknowledgement of these omissions. Just an empty, static, mute room. A camera locked on a neglected desk and two bodiless chairs. Words danced across the screen – nothing else moved or breathed.

  4

  Zephyr was terrified of flying. Every summer he travelled with his parents to his uncle’s house in California, and he dreaded the trip because of the plane ride. It was a reoccurring nightmare. He’d board the airliner, find his seat, buckle firmly in, and in the minutes leading up to take off, drowsiness would fall upon him. He’d close his eyes, begin to drift off, and think, maybe I’ll really sleep this time. I’m so tired. I think it might happen. But the moment the jet engines throttled and the craft gained momentum, he’d perk up, claw into the seat rails like a scared cat and whip his head from window to window. From then on, there was no hope of rest – only sweaty palms and torment— every airborne second a potential disaster. In those stretching minutes, a mild bump, let alone any real turbulence, was all it took to set his mind off again and then he couldn’t focus on anything else.

  Now, with his girlfriend and parents missing, absentee cars littering at least one intersection in his hometown, and an empty, unchanging newsroom on TV, Zephyr felt the familiar calm before the storm sweep over him and embraced it. In some weird way, it was reassuring to know that whatever happened, he was in it, and there was no turning back.

  The sun threatened to take shelter behind a rocky mountain on one side of the valley. Zephyr checked his mobile and saw that it was 4:22 p.m. He also realized, painfully, no missed calls, voicemails or text messages.

  His laptop rested on the kitchen countertop — his mom had obviously kidnapped it sometime recently, which always annoyed him. He powered it and loaded his favorite news site. U.N. Calls for Sanctions Against Iran headlined the page. Underneath an image of an older Middle Eastern man in a white turban were other popular stories. Adam Sandler Takes Weekend Box Office. Will it Snow in Los Angeles? Ticker: House Chief of Staff Dies. And so on. But nothing about any goings-on in his town. Nothing about abandoned newsrooms. Nothing about the fact that 9-1-1 was on vacation.

  He searched for “everybody missing” and got nothing. He tried a general query on Firefly Valley to see if any results explained the predicament and none did. He loaded the website for the local paper and it was grossly outdated. He tried the social networks and surveyed his friends’ news feeds but nothing announced itself as unusual.

  “This is fantastic,” he said.

  A disturbing hypothesis kicked at his mind and he set out to test it, scared of the result. He reloaded the news site, clicked on a headline and scoured the story, finally narrowing in on his target: the timestamp that accompanied every article. And just as he feared, it was old. It was tagged from the day prior. All of the articles were. The other websites, too. Even the social feeds. All stuck in time. Such a possibility seemed so foreign to him that he closed his browser, cleared its cache and reopened it to the same results. Inexplicably, it was all yesterday’s news.

  His stomach growled and groaned, he couldn’t remember when he ate last, and he needed a shower and some new clothes, but all of these truths buzzed like tiny gnats through the back of his mind. Persistent, troublesome, yet ultimately just background noise. Zephyr didn’t know what to do. He pulled a barstool and slumped over the kitchen countertop, his face in his hands. He felt like crying.

  His friends spent most nights prepping for tests, but when he read something once, it stuck forever. And he loved to read. By the time he started middle school, he’d already devoured hundreds of classic and modern novels, understood the fundamentals of advanced mathematics, and was well on his way to speaking fluent Italian — a linguistic preference that annoyed his mom, who would have preferred he learned French. This ability afforded him the time to screw around with friends and Keiko, the latter of whom was a recent obsession.

  So he’d told his parents that he and his best friend Eric were going camping the previous night – a blatant lie. And now he was overwhelmed with guilt about everything. About the lie, but also the foggy drunkenness and most of all for losing his new girlfriend. She could be out there, he thought. You could’ve left her out there.

  The suggestion triggered a wave of nausea that didn’t last. Under ordinary circumstances, yes, he’d be back in his car and retracing his path up Ridge Street to the park by now. But only if he had talked to Kay’s parents. Her younger brother. Anybody. No – whatever was going on here, it involved his girlfriend, yet didn’t revolve around her. The crashed cars. His parents. And the damned newsroom. It was all encapsulating and it couldn’t be explained away.

  5

  He drove around town as the night grew darker, the air colder and his outlook grimmer. The phenomenon was absolutely not limited to the crash at the Brussels Street intersection or the houses on Fairfield Court. A three-mile stretch of Flora Avenue was seemingly abandoned, too. No moving vehicles – just those parked in driveways and the occasional rolled stop or crash. The backend of a green truck poked out from the comfort of a living room it had smashed through. Zephyr decelerated as he passed it, but didn’t even step out to check for survivors – he knew there’d be nobody.

  Nobody was home, anywhere. Not Keiko. Not his uncle. The only signs of life he encountered were the fluttering moths drawn to their porch lights.
<
br />   On Main Street, more stalled cars, crashes, and desolation. Most of the lights were out at the mini mall, but the Taco Bell remained illuminated. He slowed to study it as he drove by and saw nobody inside. It occurred to him that the eatery didn’t close until 2:00 a.m., which probably meant that whatever had transpired — this event, as he had started to think about it — had likely done so before then.

  He felt alone. In the cradle of darkness, the situation seemed bleaker, his fear heavier. Something was going on. He didn’t know what. He didn’t know why.

  6

  Zephyr’s stomach performed backflips as he parked in his parent’s driveway. He was terrified, confused and defeated, and he knew the emotional tidal wave that crashed against his nerves played its part, too.

  Outside, the street lamps continued to spotlight the sidewalks and pavement. The moon, however, had taken refuge behind a thick veil of ominous clouds. He stepped inside, shut the door and instinctively locked it – both the door knob and the deadbolt. He could still hear his parent’s bedroom ceiling fan clanking upstairs and the sound was calming, even if he knew it was a lie.

  In the kitchen, he devoured an apple and some string cheese before gulping down a can of orange soda. When he was finished, he cracked open another and halved it, wincing at the carbonation, before he finally sat back in the chair and considered his options.

  He knew the smart thing to do was to stay put and to wait. Turn the TV on. Sit with your phone. And don’t do anything else, he told himself. Be smart. Even if it’s just this once. It was the logical move and he knew it, but all the same his mind argued that he should do anything but sit still; that he should sprint to his car, find the nearest freeway and floor it all the way to the city a hundred miles out.

  A year ago he’d come down with an inexplicable illness. A pink blotch had appeared on his lower back and he spent the better half of a week fighting off overwhelming nausea and diarrhea. Always an aspiring hypochondriac, he’d convinced himself that he’d caught every disease and virus in existence, including, of course, some new form of super cancer or AIDS or maybe even Ebola. He clearly remembered waking in those bright mornings when such notions seemed absolutely ludicrous. But then, inevitably, the sun would fade into night and as he lay alone in bed, his mental defenses receded, his shields thinned, until those impossible outcomes suddenly seemed possible. In the blackness, they took on crushing weight and became inescapable.