It was twenty minutes before his parents came to collect him.
***
Seth's dad drove a Cadillac STS, black on the outside and the inside, with satellite GPS, a built-in telephone, and a radar detector mounted on the dashboard. Seth usually enjoyed riding in it, because he could imagine it was the Batmobile.
Tonight, he wasn't enjoying anything. He sat in the back seat and watched the interstate mile markers whip past. His parents sat in the front, not talking. He felt like he was very small in the back, and that a huge chasm of empty space separated him from his parents. Their silence, added to the fact that nobody had turned on the stereo, left him feeling completely alone. The ride was long and miserable. Rain spattered the car as they passed through south Georgia on the way to Florida.
Though his dad drove around ninety miles an hour, slowing only when the radar detector began to beep, it was hours before they reached the Opawassee County Sheriff's Department. The glowing blue numbers on the dashboard read 3:48 AM. Barely a dozen words had been spoken the entire way, and then only when Seth's dad announced he was stopping for gas, and asked if anybody was hungry. Nobody was.
The sheriff's department was a low cinderblock building, with a couple of annexes built onto the back. One of them had barred windows, and Seth guessed that was the county jail.
Seth followed his parents into the grungy police station, which had a dirty linoleum floor and harsh, flickering fluorescent lights that made everybody look like walking corpses. Seth's dad spoke in a low voice to the uniformed cop at the front desk, while Seth and his mother sat on one of the hard wooden benches in the waiting area. A few feet away from Seth sat an old man with long, tangled gray hair and a matted beard. His bloodshot eyes stared into empty space, and he stank like urine.
After a few minutes, Seth's father returned. “Iris, come with me,” he said in a low voice.
“What about me?” Seth asked.
“Just wait here,” his dad told him.
“But I want to see Carter!”
“I said wait.” Seth led his mother away, and an officer escorted them through a door, away from the front area and out of sight.
Seth glanced at the strange old man beside him, but the old man didn't seem aware of Seth, or of anything much that was happening around him.
Seth trembled, wondering what his parents were doing, and what Carter looked like after the accident. He thought about the bird he'd healed, about four years ago, and how Carter had told him to keep it secret.
Seth felt his hands growing hot. He could do it again, he realized. Maybe he could heal up Carter and bring him back. Then everyone would know about Seth's secret, but who cared? He had to bring Carter back, or it would be his own fault that his brother was dead.
Seth jumped to his feet. Nobody told him to sit back down, so he walked toward the door through which his parents had left the room.
“Hey, kid,” the cop at the front desk said. “You can't go back there.”
“But my brother's back there. I have to help him,” Seth said.
“Sit down and wait for your parents. Now.”
Seth hesitated a moment—you were supposed to do whatever the police told you, but this cop wouldn't understand what Seth could do. Seth charged through the door.
“Hey!” the cop shouted after him.
Seth ran down a corridor, ignoring the desk cop's shouts. He hurried past a group of cops who were talking in low voices, and one scowled at him.
He reached an intersection with another corridor and hesitated. Fortunately, signs were posted here. One of them said “MORGUE” with an arrow pointing to Seth's left. He gulped. The morgue sounded like a scary place, full of dead people and maybe zombies and other monsters that might grab at him. But that was where he would find his parents and his brother.
Seth moved down the hall, which was dark from so many overhead lights being burned out. Those that remained were flickering, creating an unsettling strobe effect as he ran towards the big double doors labeled MORGUE.
Seth pushed a door open and ran inside, holding his breath—he expected to be surrounded by dead bodies immediately, corpses piled up to the ceiling and staring at him with cold, sightless eyes. And maybe their heads would turn toward him, and their hands would reach for him, like the undead in those horror movies on cable that Seth wasn't allowed to watch, but sometimes did anyway.
The first room was just an office, though, with filing cabinets and two desks. A heavyset black woman dressed like a nurse sat at one desk.
“Excuse me?” she asked. “What are you doing here, kid?”
“I gotta find my parents.” Seth looked around the room. Only one door led out of the room, besides the one he'd just stepped through. That had to be where everybody was.