The badge. Silver. Twisted at an angle that made his stomach drop. It was spinning slowly in a puddle of dirty water, catching the sodium lights in stuttering flashes. Ethan had learned to read signs a long time ago, and this one screamed danger.His hands moved on pure instinct, squeezing the brakes hard enough to feel the back wheel slip. The bike fishtailed across the wet asphalt, a controlled slide that came from twenty years of riding these kinds of roads. He killed the engine and had his boots on the pavement before the bike even settled onto its kickstand.
Main Street was dead. Absolutely dead. The kind of dead that comes from something bad happening. All the storefronts were dark—the old diner that had been there since the seventies, the hardware store with the peeling paint, the closed-down movie rental shop that nobody had bothered to remove the sign from. The rain hammered down, cold and relentless, and somewhere in the distance, he heard the tick-tick-tick of an engine cooling down.
He saw the patrol car then. It was wrapped around the cast-iron lamppost like someone had thrown it, and thrown it hard. The front end was accordion-crushed, the windshield spider-webbed into a million pieces, but no lights were flashing. No sirens. No backup screaming down the road.Just silence and rain and the smell of transmission fluid.
Source: Unsplash
A Body on the Double Yellow Line
When he moved closer, his boots splashing through the puddles, Ethan’s training kicked in—the stuff nobody talks about, the stuff you learn when you’ve been around violence long enough to recognize its signature.She was twisted across the double yellow lines like someone had dropped her there. The officer was young, maybe early thirties, with dark hair that was matted dark with something that definitely wasn’t rain. One arm was bent backward in a way that made something in his chest tighten. The other lay palm-up on the asphalt, fingers half-curled like she’d been reaching for something.
Ethan dropped to his knees beside her, rain soaking through his jeans immediately. His fingers found her neck, pressing gently against the artery. For a moment—a terrible, stretching moment—he felt nothing. Then:
A pulse.
Weak. Uneven. Wrong in every way a pulse could be wrong.But there.
She was alive.He scanned the street with the kind of attention that had kept him breathing for four decades. No skid marks. No debris field. No shattered glass scattered in the pattern you’d expect from a crash at speed. The patrol car’s dash cam was smashed clean through, and the kind of force that would do that? That was purpose. That was intention.
