10-50 in Rookton

Alan stands shivering, ankle-deep in snow, and stares at the packages crammed into his mail truck. Is it that time of year already?

He peers closer. All perfectly square and roughly the same size; all addressed in a hand so measured and consistent that it could easily be mistaken for a computer-printed font; all wrapped in coarse brown paper. And all without return addresses.

Alan braces himself against the truck, frowning.

Every winter for the past five years, the sunless snowglobe monotony of rural Rookton has been upturned by the sudden influx of countless packages of this exact description. The packages contain, according to the seemingly-random recipients, unsolicited and bewilderingly mundane objects—earbuds, items of clothing, eyebrow trimmers, the like.

A biting wind howls across the parking lot, herding Alan into his truck. Maybe the packages are harmless, he grouses to himself as he starts the engine. But they create a ton of work for him, and at the worst time of year.

Hell. He putters out of the parking lot. A paycheck is a paycheck.

---

After hours of skidding across black ice and wrangling packages through unshoveled snow, Alan struggles up the stairs of his porch in the rapidly-darkening evening. He looks up as he's fumbling with his keys, and pauses.

A package.

He never gets packages.

He picks up the square box, and his heart drops into his stomach as he examines the brown paper, the printer-perfect address, the conspicuously absent return address.

"Nonsense," he grumbles to himself. None of the packages have contained anything remotely harmless, and neither will this one.

He straightens, unlocks his door, and carries the package into his house.

---

A code 10-50 is pinging on Officer Levitt's decrepit desktop when he rolls in. He blinks in disbelief at the notification, before chugging the rest of his coffee and hunt-and-pecking his credentials into the machine.

He scans the notification. Wellness check for one Alan Telos, 62. Filed by Alan's manager at the post office, a Sophia Goodman, who allegedly hasn't seen or heard from Alan in two days.

Levitt can’t remember the last time a wellness check was filed. He leans past the battered metal wall of his cubicle and yells: “Hey Jen?”

From down the hall, the voice of the dispatcher responds. “What?”

“This Alan guy.”

“Yeah?”

“When’d you get the call?”

“Seven this morning. I know Alan—he passes my place on his way to the grocery store every Thursday at 4:56pm on the dot. Hasn’t missed a week for the past decade, far's I can remember. This disappearing act ain’t like him.”

Jen frequently inserts her expert opinion into her reports, whether it’s written in loopy, heart-dotted letters on a neon sticky note or shouted down the hall. Sometimes it’s entertaining, sometimes it’s even helpful. Today, it only affirms to Levitt that he needs to head back out into the pre-sunrise cold.

He turns his back on his cubicle with an irritated grunt.

---

Alan’s property looks exactly how one might expect a fastidious old man’s property to look—trimmed and clean, but well-worn, bare, with none of the plastic clutter and holiday accoutrements that adorn the other houses. Icicles hang from the gutters like glass blades, and a sheet of day-old snow lies undisturbed on the path leading up to the porch.

Levitt parks a few blocks away and approaches Alan’s home slowly, eyes peeled for anything out of the ordinary. He makes it to the door without spotting anything, and sighs as he knocks.

No answer.

Levitt tries the knob, and the door swings open. He enters warily, trailing chunks of blackened snow across Alan’s spotless laminate entryway.

The house is cold and still, the air stale. A pair of generously-cushioned black sneakers is tucked into a shoe rack by the door. Levitt crouches to examine them. Cold and dry.

A clock ticks somewhere deeper in the otherwise-silent house. Levitt follows the sound, the hairs on his arms rising slowly. He turns into the living room and stops short.

At first, he wonders how the room came to be covered in snow. But he runs a finger through the pale, powdery stuff, and realizes that the texture is wrong.

He rubs his fingertips together. Ash?

Straightening, he spots a dark shape lying in the middle of the room—a cardboard box, opened, sitting pristinely upright upon torn sheets of brown paper.

Something like dread takes shape in his gut.

Time to call in backup.

---

Police Detective Perdua mumbles crossly as she scribbles in a ratty notebook.

“Those fucking packages.” She crosses a ‘t’ with murderous emphasis. “I knew something wasn’t right.”

Rookton police had opened an investigation into the mysterious packages the year they'd first appeared, but had ultimately concluded that the packages were from a brushing scam, advised recipients to exercise caution, and closed the case. Perdua was never satisfied with that outcome. Neither was Levitt.

Levitt sighs. “Get anything?”

Perdua wags her head. “I’ll test the ash for traces of genetic material. But the box…”

“That’s the kicker, ain’t it.”

The cardboard box, sealed now in a giant plastic bag and placed on the evidence table, is, unlike every other object in Alan’s living room, completely free of ash.

Perdua stuffs her notebook into her pocket and carefully maneuvers the box flaps open.

“I noticed a mark at the bottom,” she remarks, squinting. "I can’t make out what it is. Looks like a burn mark.”

“Burn mark?” Levitt crowds in next to her to see.

Perdua points, and Levitt thinks for a moment that she’s pointing at a squashed fruit fly. But, upon closer inspection, he sees that the mark does indeed appear to be a burn—black, puckered, slightly smudged, barely larger than the head of a pen.

“I’m going to take a closer look once we get back to the precinct,” Perdua says. “I’ll let you know if I find anything.”

---

At the end of the day, Levitt is shrugging into his coat when he hears footsteps thundering up the stairs and toward his cubicle. He briefly considers making a run for it, but stops when he recognizes Perdua hurrying toward him.

She slams a photo down on his desk.

“It’s a bird,” she proclaims. “The burn mark is in the shape of a bird.”

The image is grainy, and the temperamental office printer certainly didn’t help matters, but the mark unequivocally resembles a bird, with a sweeping tail and long, elegant wings stretching over its head.

“Weird,” Levitt mumbles. “Mean anything to you?”

“Nope. I’ll keep digging.”

“Did you run a panel on the ash?”

“Yep. We now know for certain that it's ash.”

Levitt sighs. “Well, see you tomorrow.”

He’s halfway to the door when he hears a curious clacking noise behind him, like a pen tapping against a desk. He turns, and sees Perdua standing where he’d left her, staring after him, her head cocked to one side.

“Did you say something?” He asks, uneasy. Her expression clears; she shakes her head, frowns. He watches as she wanders back toward the stairs.

---

Levitt spends the evening on hold with the regional postal service center. He’d barely finished describing the anonymous packages when the representative had cut in and informed him that, sadly, such packages are almost impossible to trace. Levitt had then demanded to speak with the rep’s manager.

That was at 6pm.

It’s past 11pm now, and he’s no longer able to resist nodding off. He plugs his phone into a battered socket, ensures that the call is on speakerphone and that the volume is cranked up, and collapses into his sofa with an indulgent sigh.

He imagines, as he’s drifting off, Alan in his own living room, sitting in his own sofa perhaps, the package balanced on his lap. He wonders distantly how Alan must have felt as he opened the box. Did he feel nervous? Did he feel any sense of foreboding? Or was he simply excited, curious?

As Levitt sinks deeper into exhaustion, he pictures the bird marking, the way it was singed neatly into the cardboard. He pictures fire exploding from the box, a bird stretching its wings high above its head. He pictures his skin bursting into flames, his lungs filling with smoke, his flesh melting from his bones.

He wakes with a start, drenched in sweat.

---

On his way to work the next morning, Levitt pulls up at a red light and puffs a sigh. The nightmare had left him unable to fall back asleep, and he now has a pounding headache which he fears even coffee might be powerless against.

He glances out his window, squinting against the watery morning sunlight, and sees a figure crouched against the brick wall of a nearby building.

On the brick wall is scrawled, in black paint, the silhouette of a bird with a long tail, its wings unfurled high above its head.

The light remains red. He gets out of his car and approaches the figure.

The figure raises her head and stares at him as he approaches. Her insouciant face is webbed with deep-set wrinkles, her beady eyes completely dilated.

She tilts her head, opens her mouth a crack, and makes an odd clacking noise.

“Post office,” she mutters.

“What?”

“Go to the post office.”

Levitt stares at her for a moment longer, before turning and running back to his car. He clambers in and slams the door, just as the light turns green.

---

Levitt swings into the parking lot of the post office and knows immediately that something is very wrong.

The glass of the automatic doors is smashed, and he steps carefully around the jagged edges into the unlit building, gun at the ready. A powdery, pale gray substance covers the floor—ash, he’s willing to bet.

Someone screeches, and he barely has time to turn before a figure barrels through a door and slams into him. He pushes away, gripping the other person by the arms, and glimpses her nametag.

“Sophia?” He says.

She’s panting, terrified, and her eyes are wildly dilated as they slowly focus on him. Levitt thinks he’ll see her eyes in his nightmares for the rest of his life.

“You have to leave. You have to…” She chokes, and then a clacking sound forces its way from her throat. She claps a hand over her mouth.

“What—?” Levitt begins, before arms clamp suddenly around his waist and ankles from behind. His knees are knocked out from underneath him, and he hits the marble floor with a muffled crack, his gun bouncing inches from his nose.

Levitt twists his neck and watches Sophia’s hand drop from her mouth, her eyes now dim, before he’s hoisted off the ground and thrown into a chair, held down by more post office workers than he can count.

His mouth is full of ash, his vision spinning and overexposed. Someone grabs his jaw and yanks, and he finds himself staring into a pockmarked, unshaven, impossible face.

“Alan?” He croaks. Alan Telos cocks his head and makes an enthusiastic clacking sound.

Levitt lunges, and cries out in surprise as sharp points dig into him. He looks down and sees ebony-colored talons protruding from the torn flesh of the workers’ fingertips, digging into his shirt, his skin. Alan, meanwhile, hop-limps out of Levitt's line of sight and returns moments later with a brown paper-wrapped package.

A wave of nausea hits Levitt.

Alan slashes the paper, pries the flaps apart. He lifts his head, unblinking, and takes a step toward Levitt.

“Stay the fuck away from me,” Levitt breathes, digging his heels into the ground, pushing back against the chair. The workers holding him push their talons deeper into his skin; he can feel his own blood pooling in his sleeves.

Alan takes another step.

“Stop!” Levitt shouts, twisting his face away. “Help—”

Alan shoves the open box into Levitt’s face.

Levitt screams.