American Midnight | Book 3 | Daybreak, page 1
part #3 of American Midnight Series
Daybreak
American Midnight - Book 3
David Kazzie
Grub Club Publishing
Contents
Also By David Kazzie
Prologue
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
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Afterword
Acknowledgments
About the Author
© 2021 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
To the millions lost in the Covid-19 pandemic
Our hearts are broken
Also By David Kazzie
The Jackpot (2011)
The Immune (2015)
The Living (2017)
Anomaly (2018)
The Nothing Men (2019)
Shadows (2020)
Nightfall (2020)
Daybreak (2021)
The Rising (Coming 2022)
Prologue
Seven Years Before The Pulse
The girl arrived early for the rendezvous. She got off her bike and leaned it against the stone bench near the escalators descending to the trains. She checked her watch. It was 11:34 p.m., nearly thirty minutes before the scheduled meetup. A cool breeze swirled on this early spring night, making her shiver despite her jeans and sweatshirt. The Ballston-George Mason Metro station was quiet at this hour on a weeknight, mostly deserted but for a handful of drunken revelers and shift workers headed to overnight duty. She was four miles from her home.
Her father would undoubtedly say that this was no place or time for a teenaged girl to be lingering by herself. If he knew she was here right now, he would blow his stack, a display of one of his patented temper tantrums. Not that she could blame the guy. Father to four daughters, ranging in age from eight to her sixteen years. He had a lot to worry about.
But Katie Stone was doing this for her family.
Irony could be a bitch.
Her heart was racing, her breathing rapid and shallow. She had never been as nervous or as scared as she was right now. She didn’t know what was going to happen. But she knew what she was doing was right. Tonight she had a chance to do a great thing for her family, for her parents, Gina and Rick. Especially for her three sisters, Bella, Amelia, and Sara.
It had started about three months ago.
Her mom signed up for tennis lessons with this guy Jack Thompson. He was tall and handsome. He claimed to have been a nationally ranked collegiate player. But Katie had found no record of a player by that name. She mentioned it to her mom, who was angrily dismissive.
“Oh, are you checking up on me now?” Gina had snapped, a glass of Merlot in her hand. A wineglass in her mom’s hand was a common sight these days.
“Mom, I just don’t trust this guy,” Katie had said.
“Let me worry about that,” Gina said.
But Katie could not let it go. Despite her young age, she had a pretty good set of instincts on her. Something about this so-called tennis pro had set off all kinds of alarm bells lurking inside her.
And then it had happened.
One afternoon, Katie and a friend coming off a nasty breakup had skipped their last-period English class. They headed down to the local coffeehouse for big iced mochas, something with as much chocolate and whipped cream as coffee. It was an unseasonably warm day and the outdoor patio was bustling with customers. Katie almost didn’t see her.
Gina was at a corner table with Mister Tennis Pro. Katie stopped dead and gasped. She almost called out to her mother, not really sure why, given that she was supposed to be in school. But what she was seeing was so odd, so outside the paradigm of normality, that her ability to think clearly had simply evaporated. At the last second, the last instant, Katie had choked down her outburst, ducking into the clothing boutique next door with her friend Maya. While Maya shopped, Katie spied on her mother through the plate glass window. Gina lingered at the table with Jack for another ten minutes and then they had parted ways.
Exchanging a passionate kiss before they did so.
Another gasp from Katie Stone. Tears filled her eyes and rolled down her face, splashing her arms, which were crossed in front of her chest. Her mother was having an affair. With this tennis pro. Until that moment, she had assumed her parents were happily married. She didn’t know why she assumed that; maybe all kids just figured they came from normal homes until proven otherwise.
“Katie?” her friend Maya said.
Katie wasn’t listening.
“Stone?”
Katie looked over at her friend, her jaw clenched tight, her eyes hard and teary.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” she said, wiping away the tears with her fingers.
“Why are you crying?” Maya asked. “I’m the one that got screwed here!”
“I know,” she said. “It’s just that I’m so sad for you.”
Maya bought Katie’s ruse.
Katie did not sleep that night. She begged off from school the next day, claiming she wasn’t feeling well. Which wasn’t entirely untrue. She was exhausted and sick to her stomach. She stayed in bed all day, and her parents reasonably believed she was asleep when Jack arrived at their home.
At their home.
Katie cracked open her bedroom door; a discussion was underway in the living room. Jack was talking. Something about an investment. He could triple their money.
She listened a bit longer before it all fell into place.
They were being conned.
Katie didn’t understand the specifics of this so-called deal, but she didn’t need to. The bottom line was that her parents, her dopey mother and her trusting father, were planning to turn over thirty thousand dollars to this man on a promise that he would return their money threefold in a matter of weeks. She didn’t even know where they would have come up with that much cash. They weren’t a wealthy family. Her mom was a substitute teacher. Her father worked as a third shift manager at a bottling facility.
“We can’t lose,” the man had said.
Her mother was blinded by passion, and her dad was gullible and desperate enough to fall for such a scam, especially as he considered the prospect of college for four girls in the coming decade.
“I’ll text you the meetup location,” he said.
“You have my number?” Gina had said.
“You bet.”
He left. Later, Gina and Rick went out to the back porch for a cigarette. While they smoked, a pleasant ding on Gina’s phone announced an incoming text message. The text message that stood to ruin the Thompson family for all time. Katie grabbed the phone from the kitchen counter and read the message.
Catching a late flight. Meet me at the bench at the top of the Ballston metro stop at midnight. Don’t forget your investment!!
There was even a heart emoji, which made Katie want to straight-up puke.
The fact that this shady-ass message wouldn’t send her parents running for the hills raised all kinds of questions about their judgment, but that was a matter for another day.
She typed a reply.
See you then.
Then she deleted the text exchange.
Her dad, who’d worked nights as long as she could remember, had left around ten o’clock. Her mom retired early, watching television in the bedroom. Katie snuck out quietly. With four girls banging around the house, it was easy to disappear into the shuffle.
She checked her watch again. It was ten minutes to midnight.
A flight to catch.
Give me the tiniest break, she thought.
It was a weird feeling. She felt like a parent protecting her children. It made her angry. She shouldn’t have had to do this. Parents were supposed to be wise and careful, to be the shields and swords for their children. But not this time, not for Katie Stone. This time, Katie had to be the grownup, to stand up to this bad man who sought to destroy them.
The evening grew chillier, and a thin fog had rolled in. It lined the lower edges of the apartment complex across the way, swirled down the escalator into the Metro tunnel. Reflecting the light from the various building, the vaporous fog seemed almost alive. Katie pulled her hood over her head, keeping her eyes peeled for the man. She favored her mother in looks and build, enough to draw the man close enough to confront.
Movement in the corner of her eye.
The man appeared out of the
As the man drew closer, she stood up and pulled the hood of her sweatshirt down. He took a few more steps toward her before stopping short. He was dressed in jeans and boots and a light jacket. He was handsome for an older guy, and Katie saw why her mom was into him. There was a certain aura about him. At that moment, she understood why young women could be attracted to older men.
He chuckled.
“Well, well, well,” he whispered.
“This funny to you?” Katie said, louder than she intended. Just standing here within sight of this man filled her with rage. Besides understanding the appeal of older men, she was also understanding the appeal of cold-blooded murder. She could kill this man right now and not lose a second of sleep tonight.
“No,” he said. “Where’s your mom?”
“She’s not coming.”
“So I gathered.”
A beat of silence as they sized one another up.
“Does she know you’re here?”
Katie did not reply. Her finger stroked the barrel of the gun in her pocket. She could do it. She could just kill this man. Lord knew he deserved it.
“Yes, my mom routinely sends me as her proxy to meet with con men.”
There. She’d said it. She had said the words that needed to be said. And now he knew that she knew. Her words fell out of her mouth like hot coals.
He laughed again.
“Your mom was right about you,” he said. “She said you were the brains of the operation.”
Her hand slid down the barrel to the grip.
Now, Katie.
It had to be now. Before she lost her nerve.
She pulled the gun from the pocket of her sweatshirt and aimed it straight at his chest. Her uncle, a cop, had once told her that police officers aimed for the center mass. No headshots, no wounding them in the leg. You always shot to kill.
His eyes widened, and the folksy smile disappeared. She couldn’t be sure, but she thought she saw a flicker of fear ripple across his face.
“Why?” she asked.
“Why what?” he replied.
“Why are you doing this?”
He blinked hard twice, his gaze shifting from the barrel of the gun to Katie’s eyes. The question appeared to take him by surprise. He looked at her for a long time. It was as if he had forgotten he was being held at gunpoint.
The gun trembled in her small hand. It was a .38, which she had gotten from her friend Eric. His dad was very into guns. She told him she wanted to learn how to shoot and was going to spend the weekend at a cabin in the mountains and there was plenty of space to practice shooting. Eric had a huge crush on her, so he didn’t ask too many questions.
She flexed her fingers before wrapping her index finger around the trigger guard. All she had to do was apply a few pounds of force to it, and that would be it. This man would be dead, and he would have paid the price he deserved to pay. She had not planned to shoot him, just scare him a little. But now that she was face to face with him, she couldn’t help but think how good it would feel.
“You don’t want to do this,” the man said.
“I asked you a question.”
He scoffed.
“It’s what I do.”
“It’s what you do?” she echoed. “It’s what you do?”
“It’s not my fault your parents are the way they are.”
“How are they?”
“They wanted a free lunch,” he said. “They really believed that I was going to triple their money.”
Katie’s face burned with shame and embarrassment. Shame that she could have descended from two fools as big as Gina and Rick Stone. Her father, always on the hunt for that home run, that one investment that would make him a rich man. Rick Stone had always struck her as weak. The kind of man unhappy with his station in life even though he had four beautiful daughters who worshipped him. Well, at least three of them did. Always blaming others for his lot in life. He apparently found it difficult to believe that at forty-seven, he wasn’t banging strippers on a yacht he owned.
And her mother. Jesus. A bottle of wine every night. Sometimes she nodded off right at the dinner table. Then she and her sisters would clean up and load the dishwasher while her dad grabbed a nap before work and her mom would scroll mindlessly on her phone, polishing off the last of the Merlot or Malbec or whatever cheap wine she’d picked up at the store. All of a sudden, she hated her father, she hated her mother, but most of all, she hated this man who was like a human blacklight, exposing all the weaknesses and flaws in her family.
She began to cry.
The man blurred in the veil of tears covering her eyes.
“You really want to do this?”
“Shut up,” she said. “You shut up.”
“Go ahead,” he said. “Shoot.”
She pinched away the tears with her free hand. The man remained where he was; he had made no move to disarm her, although to be honest, it wouldn’t have been that hard. He was a big man, severely built. And yet, he seemed sincere in his plea for her to kill him.
She spat on the ground.
It made her feel better. That she was in control. Not her mother, not her father, and certainly not his towering waste of space.
She lowered the gun a hair. This man had ruined so much already; she wasn’t going to let him ruin her too.
Even if he didn’t pay for the damage he had already done.
Someday, though, he would get his comeuppance.
“Get out of here,” she said, her voice trembling. “Don’t ever come around my family again.”
“Take care of yourself,” the man said. He made no mention of Gina.
He turned and disappeared into the darkness.
Katie’s legs buckled, and she crumpled to the ground.
She wept.
1
Solomon Tigner’s words hung in the air.
I know how to turn the lights back on.
Jack Goodwin reared back upon hearing them, the room shifting on its axis before snapping back into place. The clinic fell silent, as though the air had been sucked out of it. Lucy Goodwin stood ramrod still, her palm pressed against her mouth. Her eyes were wide open, fixated on the mysterious stranger before them. The way she stood there like a statue reminded Jack of freeze tag, the game they had played as children.
Solomon was still incredibly weak; it would take time to recover from his journey through the cold and the ice and the snow. He had not said anything since his dramatic pronouncement. He leaned back against the headboard, sighed, and closed his eyes.
Jack had no idea what the man was talking about. There was no context for Solomon’s statement, nothing to suggest that it was anything more than the ramblings of a crazy person. Lucy exhaled noisily, like she had been holding her breath and had just remembered to breathe again. Slowly, time started to move again, and Jack began to process what he had just heard.
Jack sat down in the metal folding chair next to Solomon’s bed and exhaled slowly. A bomb had just gone off in all their lives, and he needed to keep his wits about him. His military training would help, as it had these last five years since the Pulse.
What a day it had been. It had started uneventfully. He rose early, went for a run, and took a quick breakfast. Then Terri had found him in the garage bearing news of a visitor asking to see him. He had been messing with the circuit board of an old laptop computer. He’d always been good at tinkering with things, and although he didn’t hold out any hope that he would suddenly solve the mystery of the Pulse, the still-unexplained event that had plunged the world into permanent darkness, it made him feel better.
