The Hollow Ones(29)

Odessa nodded. “Thank you,” she said.

With a strange look at her, Mariella stepped past Odessa and strode out of the office. Odessa swiped her own face with her hand, heartened to have her experience corroborated by another…and then newly frightened by the similarity. If it was true…what did it all mean?



Odessa drove back in a daze. Numerous times she blinked and looked at the road ahead of her and realized suddenly she had been driving without thinking about driving for many minutes.

Her mind was pulling her in so many directions. She had to focus.

She texted her friend and fellow agent Laurena to call her. Not sixty seconds later, Odessa’s phone rang. She answered, saying, “Hi, you’re the best.”

Laurena was a second-year agent, but five years older than Odessa, having clerked for a US circuit court judge before applying to the FBI. “Where are you? Are you okay?”

Odessa spent a few moments allaying her fears. Laurena’s concern brought tears to Odessa’s eyes. “Can you do me a favor?”

“Anything, Dessa. I’m not good at cooking, though.”

“I wouldn’t be calling you if I needed a meal cooked.”

“And I don’t clean much, either.”

“I want to see crime scene photos from the Peters home.”

A long pause. “Why would you want to see that?”

“Not the grisly stuff. But—I want it all. Not for the bodies.”

“For what then? Now I’m worried.”

Odessa said, “I can’t get it out of my head. I want to see what was there—what was in the house. Like, the basement, the garage—everything.”

“I don’t know. This seems both unhealthy and unethical.”

“You can put it in Dropbox for me. Copy them in and send me the link separately. I’ll look and I promise I won’t download. No link between us.”

“There’s a link between us if the Bureau needs to look at it.”

Odessa said, “They won’t. Please, Laur.”

Silence except for a tapping sound, Laurena’s pencil against her desk. “I’d rather cook you a meal.”

“Thanks, Laur,” said Odessa, quickly.

“But I didn’t say yes—”

“You’re the best.” And she hung up.





Obediah had been expelled from the town supervisor much too prematurely. There had been so much more to do. Despite the always pleasurable frenzy of ejection, the experience ended unsatisfactorily.

It passed from the Little Brook Town Hall Annex, eager to locate another suitable vehicle. She was a woman in her fifties, carrying a yoga mat, climbing into the driver’s seat of a tan sport utility vehicle. Obediah took the woman, and the automobile, for a fast ride north to Route 495, an east–west interstate. It pushed woman and machine to their limits, achieving speeds of ninety miles per hour, using her manicured hands to weave in and out of traffic on screeching tires.

It was looking for the right place, the right moment. Like a peregrine falcon timing a dive for an unsuspecting dove or a distracted wader.

It swung right, veering hard into the rear left wheel of a small sports car, sending it pinwheeling across two lanes and off the unrailed side of the highway, coming apart upon impact with trees. A box truck was struck and spun all the way around, suffering a head-on collision with a delivery van, both of which were subsequently rammed by a Mayflower moving truck.

The SUV skidded a long arc from left to right across three lanes of highway, still traveling at over eighty miles per hour when it smashed into Jersey barriers made of concrete and stitched together with rebar. Obediah’s human vehicle died upon impact, and the entity was forcibly sprung loose like a spectacular firework exploded from a shell. It was ecstasy.

After the other vehicles skidded to a stop, the silence was pure, smoke rising from the crumpled engines. Obediah felt fulfilled, moved, as from the final movements of a great symphony—only instead of applause, all he heard were car doors opening and anguished voices of witnesses unable to accept the carnage before them.

Obediah wasted no time. It entered the body of a young woman in her twenties, a Good Samaritan standing out of her sporty Jeep. It took her back into the vehicle, starting up the engine, knowing from experience that if it didn’t leave soon, it might be stuck in a terrifically anticlimactic traffic jam for some time.

The Good Samaritan’s boyfriend, caught by surprise, barely made it back into the passenger seat before the Jeep sped away. Obediah’s first inclination was to repeat the event, to experience another spectacular crash. But it became first distracted, then annoyed by the boyfriend’s protestations, his questions, his concern.

Why are you driving so fast? What’s wrong? Why do you look that way?

He reached for her arm, and Obediah lashed out, smacking him across the face, cracking his eyeglasses in two and opening a gash over his left eyebrow. As he was holding his forehead and crying out in pain, Obediah had the Good Samaritan reach over and unlatch his seat belt, then open his door and swing the car violently right, then left.

The irritating boyfriend rolled out of the car and bumped along the highway asphalt until his body, viewed in the rearview mirror, lay still between two lanes, only to be run over by the left tires of an Amazon Prime delivery van.

The sight was oddly satisfying, and for a moment, Obediah considered the same fate for the Good Samaritan, rolling out of the speeding vehicle.