[chapter 1]

[chapter 2]

———-

The school’s front doors weren’t supposed to be unlocked, but they opened freely at Russell Wilson’s touch. The heavy metal doors clacked closed as the QB found himself alone in the atrium of Dove Valley Elementary. Though it was a lively place during the day, the charm and warmth was drained from it without the hum of the fluorescent lights from the drop ceiling, and the rancor of school children flowing from classroom to classroom through the locker-lined hallways. Corkboards hung from the walls at odd intervals, over-stuffed with drawings, flyers, announcements and event schedules. A few random lockers in the many sets of 12 were decorated with nametags and stickers. The manufactured cheer of the decorations were deflected by the cruel functionality of the heavy oak classroom doors with thick, slim, and reinforced windows inlaid slightly too high up for a child to see through.

“Ciara? Baby?” The QB called down the two branched hallways leading away from the atrium. A dull echo of his voice reverberated off the metal lockers, but he heard no reply. A cough caught him off guard, rattling out of his chest like loose change from a can. This time, a muffled knocking answered, far away down the right hallway. He hurried to find where it had come from.

The sporadic knocking clanged bluntly against the lockers that flew by as Russ frantically searched for its source. The dull sound was a weight pressed against his chest. Feverishly he sought the origin of the sound, around corners and down markerless identical hallways. He drew closer to it. The sound’s origin was behind a door marked ‘MAINTENANCE.’ The QB knocked. The noise ceased. Rustling emanated from behind the door. The handle turned, revealing a squat, broad young man in a clean worker’s jumpsuit with an embroidered patch on the lapel. The patch was of a business logo, the text of which read Dove Valley HVAC Repair. His hair was short and blond, not messy but almost child-like in its disorder.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Can I help you?” Said the repairman. His face was friendly, and his eyes were those of someone who had yet to lose interest in the world.

Russ cleared his aching throat. “I’m sorry, I thought you were someone I’m looking for.”

“Who’s that? Maybe I can help.”

“My wife Ciara, and Sienna, our daughter. She goes to school here.” The QB attempted to swallow his anxiety and smooth his breathing.

The young man perked up at first, and then frowned. “That’s an, odd, coincidence.” He withdrew his wallet from the breast pocket of his jumpsuit and removed a photograph from one of its folds. “My daughter, her name is Sienna.” The photo showed the young man with a young girl on his shoulders. They were laughing and the girl had her arms spread out wide as if to hug the world. It was unmistakably Russ’s little girl.

“Excuse me?” Anger pulsed against the QB’s brow. “That’s her. That’s my daughter!” He stepped into the maintenance room, closing the distance between the two men.

The repairman swallowed and tried to hide his fear as he moved back. “I think you’re confused, sir. Why are you here so early? The school, it’s closed until next semester. Sierra wouldn’t be here right now.”

“I saw our car outside…” A haze was growing in Russel’s mind. He fought to draw it back. “Who works at 3 in the morning?”

The young man stepped back again. “The only car in the lot is mine, and I came here alone. Black SUV, novelty license plate. Buddy, do you want me to call someone?” He tried again to keep his distance but his back met the side of the malfunctioning boiler, applying an uncomfortable heat to the ridge of his back.

It only took one punch to put him down. The force of the QB’s right hand blew through the young repairman’s chest like a plow through a snow bank. He crumpled sadly to the ground, sending one last thump cascading down the hallway outside the small maintenance room.

A coughing fit doubled Russ over at the waist. As he struggled to suppress the percussive ache of his throat, he retrieved the young man’s wallet. More photos sat half-removed from a pocket behind some credit cards. Ciara, his wife, posed with a goofy expression next to this stranger. In another, a well staged professional photo of Sienna from last year’s school picture day. It would’ve been funny if it hadn’t been so stomach-twistingly odd. Before he could straighten up and quell his coughing, a new noise rang out from the hallway behind him.

Scraping, clicking, whistling, from multiple directions. The QB stuck his head out into the hall to find the cause of the discord. Multitudes of bodies, short in stature, clad in school uniforms, approached from both ends of the hallway. They clicked their tongues in uncomfortable disunison. They scraped toys against lockers and against the floor, whistling as they changed directions and targets for their awkward bodies to bump against. There wasn’t time to understand if he wanted to keep away from them, but he’d have to choose one of the groups to approach as there was no direction free of their presence.

He chose left. As he approached the diminutive mob, they craned their necks to ‘look’ up at him. They had no eyes to see him with, or mouths to enunciate the tongue-clicks they continued to produce. One of them whistled impossibly in his direction as it banged off the side of a locker and began to move towards him, with its arms outstretched as if to embrace his legs. Russ adeptly avoided the sack and rushed a dozen yards to the nearest corner. He looked back over his shoulder to check if he was being followed, just in time to fail to perceive the change in elevation. His foot missed the angle of the first step down the staircase, and the weight of his momentum carried his flailing body downward, roughly slamming him head-first to the ground. The fall deposited him, unconscious, at the foot of the stairs to the basement.