Free Collecting the Dead by Spencer Kope

woken from a vision of blood and unspeakable horror.
    Ask me then.
    *   *   *
    Little is known about Alison’s disappearance. She worked the evening shift at a Redding take-out pizza joint—not one of the chains, but a local start-up called PizzaZ. She finished her shift at eleven P.M. , said good night to her coworkers, and headed home. The next day she didn’t show up for class at the community college, then was a no-show for work that night; highly unusual for Alison.
    Her parents, also residents of Redding, filed a missing persons report the next morning after a long night checking with friends and relatives and searching for Alison’s car, which was absent from the parking space in front of her apartment. In the four months since Alison’s disappearance, the only real evidence came from the discovery of her car in the Walmart parking lot three days after she went missing.
    “An analysis of the store’s surveillance video showed Alison parking her car and entering the store shortly after eleven the night of her disappearance,” Walt explains. “She bought several small, indistinguishable items from the cosmetics section and the freezer and then exited the store at eleven-fourteen P.M. ” He inserts a DVD into his laptop and queues up two video files.
    “This first video is a minute and seven seconds and shows Alison as she leaves the store and returns to her car.” The nighttime images are washed out and grainy and show the whole abduction … yet show nothing. Still, the video was enough to convince the Shasta County Sheriff’s Office and Redding PD that this was a kidnapping, not just someone who didn’t want to get found or was suicidal.
    While the video is poor quality, we can see Alison as she approaches her car—appearing only as a multipixel blur. As she pauses by the driver’s door, a shadow moves in behind her. With startling speed he’s on her, and they both drop from view, falling to the asphalt between Alison’s Honda Accord and an older white pickup parked next to her.
    The shadow pops up near the truck’s tailgate eleven seconds later, lingering; there’s a blur of activity, and then it moves to the other side. The headlights flash on and splay across the empty parking lot as the truck pulls slowly out of the parking space; in seconds it’s gone, giving no clue to final direction.
    “That’s all we have to go on,” Sheriff Gant says. “Redding PD tried identifying the truck, but there’s just not enough detail.”
    “Can you burn us a copy?” Jimmy says. “We might be able to come up with something.” He’s thinking about Dex, which is fine by me. I have a piece of Leonardo video I was going to have him look at anyway.
    “This next one has us puzzled,” Walt says, queuing up clip number two. “This is right after Alison went into the store. We didn’t catch it at first because we were too focused on her and the cameras inside.”
    When he presses the play button, images of the parking lot begin to unfold but from a different angle from the first video. Alison’s car is in the upper portion of the screen, nestled among shadows broken only by the soft glow of the parking lot lights.
    There’s little activity on the screen for almost three minutes, but Walt lets it play out. “There it is,” he says, pointing to the white truck as it drives purposefully through the parking lot—not up and down the rows but across them—and parks next to the silver Accord; the lights turn off; nothing.
    A minute passes.
    Two.
    “He’s waiting for her,” I say, mesmerized.
    A light appears in the cab, just briefly, almost mistaken for the reflection of a headlight sweeping past the windshield. In seconds it’s gone, leaving an ember behind, a small orange glow that flares up, then settles down, flares up again, then settles down.
    “He’s smoking.”
    “Did your detectives find any discarded butts?” Jimmy asks.
    “That would be Redding PD,” the sheriff replies, “and I