Shadows Read online

  Shadows

  American Midnight - Book 1

  David Kazzie

  Grub Club Publishing

  © 2020 by David Kazzie

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales, or organizations is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written consent of the author.

  Created with Vellum

  First, as Always, For My Kids

  May You Someday Think of Me as a Real Writer

  And to the healthcare workers, first responders, grocery store clerks, truck drivers, farmers, food industry workers, and all other essential workers carrying us through the coronavirus pandemic

  Contents

  Also By David Kazzie

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Coming Fall 2020

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also By David Kazzie

  The Jackpot (2011)

  The Immune (2015)

  The Living (2017)

  Anomaly (2018)

  The Nothing Men (2019)

  1

  More than anything, Lucy Goodwin wanted to get home.

  They had been on the train for four hours already, today’s journey from Philadelphia to Washington, D.C., aboard the crowded southbound Acela taking more than twice as long as it should have. The train had been scheduled to leave three minutes past seven, but it was closer to eight before they got underway, and Lucy was already two terrible cups of coffee into this terrible day. And once underway, they could never get up to a good cruising speed. Somewhere in northern Maryland, the conductor had fired up the intercom to inform them that a pickup truck had broken down on the tracks and that cost them another forty minutes.

  Ordinarily, Lucy loved traveling by train, the methodical clackety-clack of the train cars rolling along the steel tracks a welcome salve to the stress of her life. It was soothing, much more so than air travel. For medium-range travel, you couldn’t beat the train. But it had been a long three days at the annual nursing conference in Philadelphia; she had been out of sorts from the moment she set foot in the convention hall, waiting in line for her name badge and her bag of useless swag. What a waste those bags were. Coupons and magazines and stress balls and drink koozies and all manner of junk that more often than not ended up in a landfill. As if the planet didn’t have enough junk to deal with.

  The National Nursing Council’s annual conference was typically one of the high points of Lucy’s year. Although she loved being a nurse, it was nice to get a break from the rigor of her twelve-hour shifts, and the continuing education seminars were always instructive. Plus, she got to catch up with nursing school friends who’d scattered across the country over the years. But by the middle of the first day, she was done with it. She began counting down the days, then the hours, and then the minutes until it was over.

  Instead of dining with her fellow nurses, she took her meals alone, not in the mood to spend a week with five hundred other nurses, drinking, gossiping, complaining. During the sessions, she sat in the back row, doodling in the small notebook that had been inside her tote bag. She missed her patients, she missed the E.R., she missed her dog. She even missed Jack, her pain-in-the-ass brother.

  But it was over.

  She sighed.

  It was finally over.

  It was Friday, and they would be home by dinnertime. Soon, she would be on her couch in her pajama pants and sweatshirt, eating General Tso’s chicken from Peking and binge-watching something mind-blowingly idiotic. Maybe a good reality show about housewives with too much money and not enough sense. She would sleep in, as she wasn’t due back at the hospital for her next shift until Sunday morning.

  Next to her sat Manuel Diaz, her fellow E.R. nurse at the Henrico Doctors’ Hospital, a suburban hospital just west of Richmond, Virginia. He was a nice enough fellow who’d come to nursing later in life. He was a decent nurse but a bit chauvinistic. Rarely showed deference to more experienced female nurses, seemed to think he knew better than them. Patients loved him though, which made him a formidable coworker.

  He’d been asleep since they pulled out of the 30th Street Station in Philly. She’d gone to bed early the night before, but he’d stayed up partying with a contingent of nurses from Tampa. When they’d met at the continental breakfast at five-thirty that morning, he had still reeked of cheap liquor and cigarette smoke. He obviously hadn’t slept. Whatever. As long as he didn’t puke on her.

  The train was moving along at a good clip, finally, after an eternity at a snail’s pace. Outside, the landscape flew by in a flash. They were south of Baltimore now, hopefully no less than thirty minutes from Union Station. There, they would switch engines for the last two hours to Richmond, where Lucy had lived for the last fifteen years.

  She turned her attention back to the e-book reader on her lap; her book club was reading a novel about a teenage boy who loses his mother in a terrorist bombing of a museum and the priceless piece of art that he steals in the ensuing chaos. It was beautifully written, but the story just had not held Lucy’s interest. She flipped through a couple more pages before her attention waned once more. She checked her reading progress. Thirty-four percent into the eight-hundred-page novel. The book club was scheduled to meet the following night. Yeah, well, she didn’t think the other women in the club would read it either. And if they did, she could certainly fake her way through it. Besides, a healthy chunk of any good book club involved drinking wine and gossiping about the women who hadn’t shown up that night.

  “Where are we?” Manny asked, startling her.

  The big man stretched and let out a long breath.

  Yup, still whiskey-tinged, thought Lucy.

  “Just south of Baltimore,” Lucy said.

  “Cool,” he said.

  Cool. Everything was cool to Manny. Giving report on a shift change, cool. Headed out for a smoke break, cool. Asteroid headed toward earth, cool.

  “That was a good conference,” he said.

  “I guess.”

  “You didn’t enjoy it?”

  “It was fine,” she said, anxious to shut off this line of conversation. She closed her eyes and pictured herself on the couch with her carton of Chinese food.

  “You should have come out with us,” he said, yawning.

  “I was tired,” she said.

  He waved a dismissive hand at her.

  “You always say that,” Manny said. “You hardly ever go out with us. You’re such a homebody.”

  This was true. If she wasn’t at work, she preferred to be at home. Out in the country with her dog and the animals and the farm and the trees. In her downtime, she liked to read and drink tea like an old lady. Sometimes, she felt like an old woman. She’d certainly suffered enough for one lifetime. She hoped that she wouldn’t have to endure any more heartache.

  Either way, Lucy’s partying days were long behind
her. She was thirty-nine years old and she didn’t bounce back from a twelve-hour shift like she used to. She envied the exuberance of her younger coworkers, many of whom she had by a decade or more. But that was how it went. You had your time in the sun, and then you moved out of its glare. Or more accurately, you were pushed out of its glare.

  “I’m old and tired.”

  A dismissive wave.

  “I’m older than you!” he replied. “Seriously, Luce, it’s no good for you to just shut yourself off like that all the time. Anyway. We missed you. Had the best cheesesteak at four this morning!”

  And that was Manny. Guy was even older than Lucy was. But he’d only been a nurse for three years, having spent years working as a paralegal for a real estate firm. Then he decided that nursing was his true calling and went through the bachelor’s degree program that the hospital offered. He was relatively new to the profession, but time did not care. Nursing was a tough job in your twenties, and he hadn’t gotten his license until he was almost forty. His downfall was coming sooner than he expected. Especially if he was up eating cheesesteaks at four in the morning.

  “’Best cheesesteak in Philly’, they said.”

  “I’m sure they all say that.”

  “Man, it was good.”

  “I’m sure your body will appreciate that,” she replied.

  “My body is a temple,” he said. Then he leaned back and closed his eyes again.

  She shook her head. Nurses and doctors were notoriously bad at taking care of themselves. She didn’t know if it was a middle finger to Death, the battle those in her profession were constantly fighting and losing, or the stress of the job itself, dealing with people who did not follow their advice or who ended up in her emergency room for the dumbest, most preventable reasons possible. Kids overdosing on prescription medication they had found in their parents’ closets. Young adults who hadn’t buckled their seatbelts rocketing through windshields. Gunshot victims were the hardest, especially the young victims. Toddlers who’d found the semi-automatic pistol their careless fathers almost certainly would have never used in self-defense and blown their faces off. She hated guns; she wasn’t sure if that it was despite the fact that she’d spent four years in the Army as a medic or because of it.

  Stop, she thought.

  You did what you could. You fixed the ones you could fix and you sent them on their way. And maybe they would learn their lesson and see that they’d gotten lucky this time, and change their ways and live a bit more carefully or get into rehab or always wear their seatbelt or pay a bit more attention to their kids and a bit less attention to their smartphones.

  She set her attention back on her book, but once again, her focus faded after just a few sentences. Maybe it was the delivery system. Maybe she just wasn’t one for e-books, no matter how close they came to duplicating actual print with their electronic ink. Maybe if she had a print version of the novel, she would be farther along. Maybe she would even be enjoying it. She loved books; her house was swamped with them. She filled her bookcases as fast as her brother could build them for her.

  She turned her gaze back out the window; the landscape rushing by took on a distinctly metropolitan feel as they drew closer to Washington. They were crossing the Anacostia River; Route 50 ran alongside the river, thick with lunch hour traffic. Waves of heat shimmered in the distance. It was another hellaciously hot day.

  One more chapter.

  She would finish one more chapter before they got to the station. Perhaps she’d bang out another chapter or two at home tonight, getting her closer to the end of a book that wasn’t just a book but award-winning literature.

  She glanced back down at the e-reader; the screen was blank. She hadn’t remembered turning it off, but the thing glitched from time to time. Another benefit of print books. You cracked one of those open and the words would be there every time. No battery to worry about. So she often forgot to charge up her electronic reader. To be fair, the device did have a long battery life, and so it was easy to forget that it did, in fact, have a battery. She slid the device back into her backpack. The author’s scintillating prose would just have to wait.

  Next to her, Manny snored.

  Boredom rippled through her. They were in that phase of the trip where you were almost there, so close, but not quite, which made that last bit stretch on interminably. Like that old math trick–if you kept halving the distance you had left to go, you would never get home. Around her, the other passengers appeared to become restless as well. Muted whispers became loud whispers. In fact, she had to admit, they really weren’t whispers at all.

  The first hint of trouble was the uniformed train attendant virtually sprinting down the aisle toward the locomotive, which was six or seven cars ahead of theirs. He was a tall, thin man; he’d been quite jovial that morning, telling jokes, laughing as he’d scanned the passengers’ tickets.

  He didn’t look jovial anymore.

  As he bolted down the aisle, he did not make eye contact with anyone, his gaze focused on the pass-through to the next train car. Something about the look on his face had unnerved Lucy, sending a chill rippling through her. She wondered if a passenger was having a medical emergency. She rose out of her seat and looked around the train car. A number of animated discussions were underway.

  In the row in front of Manny, catty corner from Lucy, was a young girl, maybe twelve years old, her nose in a book. A print book! Ha! A kid with more sense than Lucy. Next to her was an elderly black woman. They had boarded the train together; perhaps she was the girl’s grandmother.

  “Excuse me,” a voice said, startling Lucy from her daydreaming surveillance of her train car. A man’s face appeared above the seatback in front of her. He was handsome in a traditional sort of way. He wore a suit and had nice hair. A pair of black eyeglasses framed his face just so.

  “Sorry to bother you,” he said, holding up his phone. “My phone just died, and my charger doesn’t seem to be working. Do you have one I can borrow?”

  “Uh, yeah, let me see,” replied Lucy, digging into her bag. Her charger was connected to her phone; she detached it and handed it to the man.

  “Thanks,” he said. “Just need to get enough juice to call my wife.”

  Her gut twisted at that. Not because she had her eye on this man; it was more his life that she was eyeing. And not his actual life. The perfect version of his life—the one that he and his wife posted on social media. Maybe a life that she had dreamed up of whole cloth. The one that filtered out the tedium and boredom of everyday life. For all she knew, this man and his wife detested each other. But it was a life she had been deprived. It was a life she would never have. It was a life permanently scarred with tragedy, a gouge across her soul that would never heal.

  He disappeared back into his seat. She lifted her phone to check her messages, which, to her surprise, was dark itself. Now that was weird. It was fully charged when she left the hotel this morning, and she had used it sparingly since boarding the train. She definitely had not turned it off.

  Before she had time to process this newest development, a commotion at the front of the train car caught her attention. Another conductor, this one a petite Asian woman, had come into her train car, her arms extended, patting at the air with her hands, as if to tell everyone to quiet down.

  “Heads down!” she screeched. “Heads down!”

  A bolt of terror rocketed through Lucy as the train car erupted into panic.

  As the woman passed her row, Lucy reached out and grabbed her by the arm.

  “What’s happening?” Lucy asked.

  The conductor reared back, trying to break free of the grip, but Lucy would not let go. She was at least eight inches taller than the conductor and outweighed her by fifty pounds.

  “Let me go!”

  “Just tell me what’s happening!” she barked.

  The woman relaxed her gyrations and looked Lucy dead in the eye. Beside her, Manuel stirred awake, his eyes wide with confusion.
br />   “The engineer can’t stop the train,” she said grimly. “Nothing’s working. We’re going to crash.”

  Lucy let go of the woman as her words sank in. She disappeared into the next car, shouting her morbid warning.

  “The hell did she just say?” Manuel said.

  Lucy glanced out the window as the city rushed by in a flash. They were going at least seventy miles per hour.

  “My God,” she whispered.

  2

  Lucy’s military training kicked in. Just like that, she was back in Afghanistan, pinned down under Taliban fire, struggling to save a soldier who’d been gut shot. She became hyper-aware of the speed they were traveling, of the train’s mammoth size, of the catastrophe that would ensue if it crashed. Of course, this couldn’t have happened an hour ago, when they were puttering along at fifteen miles per hour. At that speed, the train would have simply coasted to a halt.

  But it was not to be.

  They were less than ten miles from Union Station, the large train station in the middle of Washington, D.C. If she recalled correctly, the track curved sharply to the left just before reaching the station. And if the engineer couldn’t decelerate, they would likely jump the track there; only God knew what fate awaited them once they were loose of the track’s loving embrace.