VERONA POLICE STATION

SUNDAY, 20th OF JUNE

APPROXIMATELY 2:30 A.M.

“What happened after Roman Montague died?”

Silence.

“Mr. Lawrence?”

The boy didn’t move a muscle. He stared into space, as if no one else was in the room.

“Peter?”

Peter Lawrence seemed to suddenly remember he was alive. He started up in his chair, dark eyes wild, darting around to all the corners of the room, until they settled back on the police officer sitting in front of him.

“What?” he said, his voice raspy, as if he hadn’t used it in a while.

Deputy Sheriff Olivia Sanchez looked carefully at the teenage boy sitting across from her. There were a number of things about Peter Lawrence’s current condition that would have alarmed a casual onlooker, the most glaring of which was his clothing. His worn T-shirt had been yellow once, but at this moment in time it was a sickening sort of reddish-brown, the color of the blood which had been spattered on him from head to toe when he arrived, and which had by now dried to that unmistakable pallor which Deputy Sanchez had seen many times at scenes of the worst kinds of crimes. The blood was everywhere: his shirt, his jeans, his shoes; when he had been led inside hours ago he had actually left bloody footprints through the halls of the station.

Deputy Sanchez stared into the boy’s hollow eyes and asked, “Do you remember what happened after…the last thing you told me?”

Peter shifted slightly in his chair. His hands were gripping the armrests, so hard that his knuckles were white as bone under the minuscule drops of blood that covered his hands and arms. Deputy Sanchez’s first thought had been that it would be kinder to let him shower and get a change of clothes before interviewing him, but the sheriff had been adamant that they were on the clock. If there was a killer, whoever it was had to be caught before there was another scene of carnage like the one Peter Lawrence had just survived.

He had been offered a plastic cup of water, which he had downed in one go like a shot of alcohol, and then refused any more. It had taken some time for Deputy Sanchez to coax him into answering her questions, and after two and a half hours she had finally managed to get most of the story out of him. He spoke only haltingly, in a quiet, cracking voice, and several times he had trailed off in the middle of a sentence and just stared at her, stared with the look of a young deer caught in the headlights of a car hurtling toward it at bone-breaking speeds; and more than once Deputy Sanchez had had the frightened, uncomfortable feeling that Peter Lawrence was looking at her, but he did not really see her. She speculated that though it looked like the boy was looking at her, he was actually looking right through her, staring into a kind of landscape she could not fathom and which she hoped to God she would never have to enter.

Deputy Sanchez looked at her watch as surreptitiously as she could. It was 2:35 A.M. She had been rousted out of her bed somewhere around midnight by the sound of her phone ringing, and been told to come into the station immediately to assist the sheriff with a case. Grudgingly, she had pulled herself out of bed and gotten dressed, and made it to the station in under five minutes. She was prepared for something serious to be going on, considering the time of the emergency call; she had even been prepared for the beginning of a murder investigation; somehow she had not been prepared for the sight of three or four pairs of screaming parents and a teenage boy standing, deathly silent, in the middle of it all, the entirety of his skinny form covered in fresh blood. The sheriff had delegated Deputy Sanchez the task of interviewing the boy, while the rest of the police force tried to deal with the droves of hysterical family members.

It was these people who unnerved Deputy Sanchez the most. Assembled in the waiting area of the police station, a collection of many different desperate griefs, they made something in her stomach squirm, and something in her heart contract painfully. One couple, along with a young woman who couldn’t have been older than eighteen--their daughter, perhaps, a sister of one of the victims--sat dejectedly in the hard plastic chairs that lined the waiting room walls. They were the most silent out of the whole bunch. The man sat with his entire body leaning so far forward that his face was touching his knees, and he looked to be in danger of falling out of the chair entirely. He made no sound, but his shoulders shook violently with sobs. His wife sat next to him, one hand on her husband’s trembling back and the other wrapped tightly around the fingers of the girl sitting next to her. Upon closer inspection it was obvious they were mother and daughter. The girl cried nearly as hard as her father did, knees pulled high up to her chest, tears staining her face. The mother stared blankly into space, with eyes that seemed bruised from the bags underneath them, shining like flashlights through the dimness. Deputy Sanchez couldn’t tell if the woman was crying, or if the pain she felt was too great for tears.

“I ran,” said Peter Lawrence.

Deputy Sanchez started in her chair; she had nearly forgotten he was there.

“I’m…I’m sorry?” she said, looking at him again.

For the first time in two hours and nearly forty minutes, Peter met her eyes and stared straight into them. His pupils were like deep, dark wells that hadn’t carried water in centuries.

“After Roman was dead. After--after they were all dead. I ran. All the way here.”

He stared, not through her, but into her.

“Peter,” said Deputy Sanchez, and she felt her stomach clench from nerves…and something like fear. “Did you kill your friends?”

There was nothing for a moment, and then he said, “They aren’t my friends.”

“Okay,” said Deputy Sanchez, and tried to hide her frustration. Her heart was pounding. After what seemed like an eternity, she was finally on the verge of getting to the heart of the matter. “Peter, do you understand what I’m asking?”

“It wasn’t me,” he said quietly. Blood matted his hair, sticking it to his forehead.

When Deputy Sanchez spoke, it was in a voice nearly as quiet as Peter’s. “Then who was it?” she asked him.

He said nothing, and stared at the space just above her head. Deputy Sanchez had the sudden, ridiculous thought that the boy had turned to stone, like a victim of the beast Medusa from Greek myths. All his muscles had stiffened like wood, his hands gripping the armrests of the chair again. He did not even appear to be breathing.

Deputy Sanchez sighed and opened her mouth to ask him again.

“It was the people,” Peter whispered.

“The people?” the Deputy repeated, whispering along with him.

Peter Lawrence nodded. Then he began to tremble, first his hands, and then the rest of his body.

“How many people were there?” Deputy Sanchez asked.

“Lots,” Peter said. “A hundred. A th-thousand.” He looked like he might soon be sick. At least the trash can was sitting right next to him.

“They c-came…from everywhere.” For the first time, Peter’s eyes began to fill with tears. “I saw them. I s-saw through them. Th-they were…everywhere. We all tried to r-run…we tried to run and they caught us.”

He was hyperventilating, and tears began to stream steadily down his cheeks. It occurred to Deputy Sanchez that she needed to call for another few officers, in case Peter got it into his head to attack one of the two of them, as had happened more than once before while Deputy Sanchez was on the job. For some reason, however, she couldn’t move. She knew it was cruel to sit here and watch him suffer; watch him cry and gasp for air around the horrors he was describing to her, but they had switched roles. Now the Deputy was the one who had turned to stone, and Peter Lawrence became increasingly more hysterical as he tried to talk through his sobs.

“Th-they took her and…and t-took her apart, and then they got Roman and…he--he tried to get away--they d-didn’t let him. They did…there was blood…he screamed, he screamed so loud. He tried to get away. He--he screamed for me…he screamed so much…and I ran away. I--I ran away from them…”

He suddenly stood up, startling Deputy Sanchez enough that she jerked violently back in her chair. Peter Lawrence looked at her with eyes like a demon’s.

“You don’t understand,” he said, and his voice was hoarse, mangled; tears traced pinkish tracks through the dried blood on his face. “You don’t get it--you don’t--”

He seized chunks of his matted hair and began to tug, howling and thrashing his head around like an enraged bull. He began to tear at his clothes, digging his fingernails into his arms, and Deputy Sanchez actually slid her chair backward. She did not know why she felt such a sudden need to be as far away from him as possible; all she could hear were Peter’s desperate cries, and all she could see was the image he had conjured in her mind of Roman Montague, held down by many unseen but terrifying hands, screaming as blood sprayed, as someone--something--some things tore him apart, screaming, screaming, screaming--

“I’m sorry!” Peter cried out, but who he was apologizing to, Deputy Sanchez could not fathom. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

Finally coming to her senses, the Deputy leapt out of her chair, broken out of whatever trance the boy’s story had put her in. She scrabbled for the radio clipped to her uniform, but her fingers felt oddly wooden. She thought of blood dripping, pouring, from a swiftly cooling body onto the hard ground, and her stomach rolled dangerously. Maybe she would end up needing the trash can.

Peter Lawrence had sunk to his knees, still whimpering and tearing at his hair and clothes, sobbing out continuous apologies to whomever he thought he had wronged.

Deputy Sanchez finally got her radio unclipped from her uniform, and with shaking hands she lifted it to her mouth: “This is Deputy Sheriff Sanchez; I need backup in room--”

“Don’t tell them I’m here!” Peter screamed suddenly. He stared up at her from the floor, eyes no longer the demonic dark holes that had frightened the Deputy so deeply. He didn’t look like a crazed teenage boy, as he had been seconds before; he looked like a terrified child, desperate for rescue, a little boy crawling into his parents’ bed after having a bad dream.

“Please…” he said. He was still quivering all over. “Please…it’s all my fault…they’re coming for me. They’re angry, they’re--they’re so angry…please…”

Deputy Sanchez could hear footsteps in the hallway. The backup she had called for was coming.

She stared down at Peter. Tears ran freely down his face, dripping onto his bloodstained shirt. She wondered once again if he was simply insane, if he really had murdered all of his friends, and his diseased brain had made up the stories about invisible killers which he had told her.

The door swung open, and two officers strode into the room. They took in the bloody boy on the floor and the shocked deputy standing next to him, the two locked in some sort of haunted staring contest.

“Is everything okay here?” one of the officers asked. When he got no response, he looked at the Deputy. “Deputy Sanchez?”

“They’ll catch you,” Peter Lawrence said quietly, still staring Deputy Sanchez straight in the eye. “They’ll catch you. They will.” His eyes gleamed. “And when they catch you…they’ll never let you go.”

Deputy Sanchez looked at him for one more long moment, and then she turned to the officers. “Find his family,” she told them. “And for God’s sake get him some new clothes.”

The officers stepped forward. When Peter didn’t move, they each took one of his arms and pulled him to his feet. He didn’t struggle. He was completely silent as the officers pulled him along, the expression on his pale face almost peaceful, a far cry from the hysterics of only moments before. Deputy Sanchez looked at him one last time just before the door closed.

Peter Lawrence caught her eye, and she knew she was not looking at the survivor of a massacre; not someone who would live for many years and tell the tale to his grandchildren.

The eyes looking back at her were those of someone already dead.

He smiled at her--

and the door closed with a soft click.