For the past five years I’ve worked for a security firm that contracts with various businesses to provide guards for events and locations throughout the state. It’s not a huge company like Tattersall, but it has been a family business for nearly fifty years and does well enough—I’ve gotten a small raise every year and equipment updates at a faster rate then back when I was a cop.
One of the latest updates was a new body camera system. It’s integrated into our shoulder radio and has a good enough battery and memory card to last through a twelve-hour shift without any problem. Best of all, it’s light and doesn’t require any extra fiddling. I just put on my gear and go. The rest of my gear typically consists of a flashlight, pepper spray, a collapsible baton, and a stun gun. We are sometimes issued firearms, but it is on a special basis involving more insurance and waivers before we’re allowed to work a job carrying one. For the most part, we’re supposed to detect and deter more than fight people or apprehend a criminal. That’s what our cell phones and the real police are for.
Over the time I’ve worked security, I’ve seen some of the trends change. We still work parties and big meetings sometimes, and we have deals with several office buildings to provide round-the-clock guards and surveillance, but in the last few years we’ve actually been dealing more with real-estate companies and banks that want to protect development properties.
Take the place I’ve been assigned to for the last few months. Whispering Oaks. Fourteen years ago it was going to be one of the largest, most prosperous new gated communities on the East Coast. A thousand acres with homes ranging from 2,000 up to 10,000 square feet. At its center was a massive “clubhouse” building with rooms for meetings and parties, its own gym, an indoor swimming pool and movie theater, to say nothing of the tennis courts, three more exterior pools, and a top-of-the-line 18-hole golf course scattered around the rest of the property. It even had a small gourmet grocery store on one corner of a little cobblestone street that I think was going to be filled with fancy cafes and boutiques. I can’t even imagine the money that was sunk into that place, much less how much more the builders stood to make.
There were plans for four hundred homes in the initial building phase, and by 2006 they had already built over a hundred of them. A few were built on spec as model homes to show prospective buyers, but most had been bought and built to order within the confines of the dozen or so approved house plans that were available to new owners. From what I’ve heard, the property was like an anthill back then—the constant flow of workers mixed with people checking on the progress of their dream home being built, if they hadn’t already moved in.
But when the housing collapse happened that year, new house buyers slowed to a trickle. Banks weren’t giving out loans like they once had, and the constant buzz of activity slowed to a hum and then to silence. The sixty or so families that were already out there found themselves surrounded by empty, partially-built houses and bare lots that weren’t being as meticulously maintained as they had been just a few months before.
The “clubhouse” went from being fully staffed and brightly-lit to being closed most of the time. According to a note on the front door, the company apologized for the inconvenience, but assured everyone the reduced hours and services were a temporary necessity during “restructuring”. That was apparently greasy rat-speak for bankruptcy.
Over time, the people who were left at Whispering Oaks figured out it wasn’t going to get any better there. Even if the economy and housing market improved, who was going to buy an overpriced house in a closed off, increasingly run-down and barren ghost town?
So they left. From what my buddy Oscar has told me, the last person was gone by 2014. Two different banks, who had slowly been consuming the property one foreclosure at a time, wound up selling off the whole thing. To who, no one is really sure, other than it is some European company with more money than sense. In the years since, the property hasn’t been altered or improved, and is rarely visited at all other than by guards and those the guards are meant to discourage.
Meth heads wanting to steal copper out of the walls to sell. Junkies and vagrants and kids looking for a place to hang out or spend a few nights. Even with all the time and neglect, the property and the buildings there are still very valuable. Vandalism, theft and arson are just the start of the concerns. You also have to worry about someone trespassing, getting hurt, and then trying to sue. Again, I don’t know who bought the place, but they clearly have an odd way of investing their money from what I’ve seen. All they’ve done is buy a headache and not done anything with it.
Point being, my job—well, my company’s job—is to make sure their headaches don’t get any worse. The clubhouse has been converted into a security office, and every day there is a guard posted there when they’re not out patrolling the property. At night, there’s one guard on Monday through Thursday and two on Friday through Sunday. Because people always want to be an asshole on the weekend.
The typical routine for a twelve-hour shift is as follows: Arrive at the clubhouse and log in to the computer system. Check that the feeds from the security cameras set up outside of the clubhouse, the gourmet grocery store, the tennis courts, and the utility building are all functioning properly. Then, within thirty minutes of arrival, start patrol of one of the Zones.
Our security company has divided Whispering Oaks into six Zones for patrol purposes. Zone One is the central area of the Clubhouse and surrounding buildings including the cobblestone shopping area and staff garage. Zone Two is primarily streets containing smaller (if you call 2,000-3,000 foot homes small) homes in various states of being built but few in a totally finished state. Zone Three contains most of the finished homes big and small, as well as the tennis courts and two of the exterior pools. Zone Four is the golf course and two miles of walking trails woven into the woods at the course’s edge. Zone Five is where the larger parcels of land were being sold. It is mainly empty, grown-up lots, but there are actually three enormous houses that were built to completion before everything collapsed. We call them the Red House, the Green House, and the Grey House, based on their exterior colors.
Finally there is Zone Six, which is pretty much just woods at the back edge of the property. There are paths there, but rather than the wide and relatively even routes you get on the walking trails, we are forced to use crooked, hard to see paths that were cut just wide enough to allow our ATVs through. They are serviceable, but between the uneven ground and hidden tree roots, they are risky at anything faster than a slow crawl.
Every hour we are responsible for patrolling one of the zones. Between travel and patrol time, this typically means we are patrolling for about thirty minutes out of every hour unless patrolling Zone Six, which typically takes almost the entire hour. We mix up the order in which the Zones are patrolled so as to not provide a predictable pattern for anyone trying to trespass, but all Zones are patrolled twice per shift regardless of order.
All in all, it hasn’t been a bad assignment. The most I’ve ever seen on a shift was a methhead pulling a knife on me when I found him squatting in one of the baby mansions in Zone Three. But I kept him back with my pepper spray and radioed the dispatcher at the main office. No big deal. Occasionally its just a group of dumb kids looking for a secluded place to get into some kind of trouble. But mostly its…quiet. Very quiet, and if I’m honest, more than a little creepy.
I’m not a scary kind of guy. I’ve seen a good bit over the years, and while I don’t claim to have ever been some kind of super cop or brave hero, I’ve never been cowardly or skittish either. But Whispering Oaks just has a strange feel to it. Maybe its all the empty houses and streets. Some nights, when I’m riding my four-wheeler around on patrol, I imagine myself in some kind of post-apocalyptic movie where everyone else is gone or hiding. I always hate it when I have the thought, because it is so easy to believe. The black windows staring out at me like dead eyes, the grown up lots filled with shadows…its far easier to start thinking I’m in a dead world than it is to stop.
That’s why I like the weekends. I get a partner to keep me company, and usually that partner is Oscar. Oscar had been with the company for nearly thirty years, and it showed. If he was in charge of deciding the company motto, I’m pretty sure we would soon have “Fuck it” painted on the sides of all our vehicles. That being said, he was a good guy. Just old and tired, and much more content to watch t.v. in the clubhouse and tell me stories than hump it around this expensive graveyard we were supposed to be guarding.
He was the one that told me most of what I know about the past of Whispering Oaks, and I admit I was intrigued. If I occasionally took his patrols in exchange for his entertaining company when I got back to the clubhouse, I looked at it as a fair trade. Not everyone had the same tolerance for Oscar’s casual approach, however.
Jeff Spires was new with the company, having just left the military six months earlier. He wasn’t an asshole…not exactly…but he was very rigid and opinionated. Oscar thought it was due to his time in the Marines, but I wasn’t so sure. I had known plenty of soldiers that were very nice, normal people, and Spires was neither. Rail-thin and twitchy, he often seemed very unemotional, if a little jumpy. But then he would have these strange mood shifts where it seemed like he was caught somewhere between an angry outburst and breaking into tears. Plus, he was constantly making little comments to Oscar about what he should or should not be doing. Like a sixty-year old security guard pushing on the last few months of his pension gave a shit what he thought.
Suffice it to say, neither Oscar or myself like the nights we are paired with Spires. We had seniority, which gave us influence over the schedule, and most of the time we could avoid him. But every once in a while, something would come up. Like last month, when I got sick with a stomach virus that laid me out for a week.
When I got back to work, it was a Thursday night shift. Oscar was getting off, and while he asked how I was doing, he didn’t hang around and chit chat like he usually would if we were switching out at the same time. He also seemed strange, like he was distracted or preoccupied by something. When I asked him if anything was wrong, he just gave me a shaky smile. “Nah, I just need to get going. Want to get home before dark.”
The evening started off quiet. Logged in, checked the cameras, and then I went to patrol Zone Four. It is normally one of the easiest to check. The weeds on the course are waist-high, but there’s usually not much need to leave the ATV except for checking the caddyshack and the small adjoining shed where golf carts were once kept before being sold off. As for the walking trails, they are in surprisingly good shape after all this time, and they make perfectly serviceable roads during patrol.
But while it was quiet, I still felt unnerved. Like I said before, Whispering Oaks can be a bit creepy at the best of times, but this was different. I felt like I was being watched. I even thought I saw someone standing behind a tree while I was driving down one of the trails, but when I stopped and shined my light into the growing darkness between the trees, there was nothing there.
Deciding I was needlessly freaking myself out, I finished my route and went back to the clubhouse. It was three hours later, when I was patrolling Zone Three, that I heard a splashing noise that sounded like it came from the nearby outdoor pool area. That, in and of itself, was strange. Beyond a bit of occasional rainwater, there hadn’t been water in that pool for the entire time I’ve been working the property. But I still had to check it out. I was heading to the gate of the pool patio when something caught my eye in the window of a nearby house.
It was a face. A woman’s face—round and pale like the moon, it hovered in the darkness of a bay window like some kind of spectral balloon, black eyes stretched wide and staring down at me as her lips split open to offer me a grayish-green grin. I let out a small noise of surprise as I came to a stop. This was now the priority, and I needed to call it in.
I punched the button on my shoulder mic, intending on updating the office dispatch before I entered the home. All I got in response was a crackle of static. Cursing, I saw my bodycam was still showing active, so I decided to clear the house and confront the woman before I lost track of her.
I went around to the front porch and reached for my keyring—each house with doors is keyed to be opened by the same master key, and I had one of the only copies on my gear belt. But when I grabbed the knob, I saw it was already unlocked. Not kicked in like we usually found when someone decided to set up camp, and showing none of the telltale signs of having been pried open or even inexpertly picked. I paused then, my stomach twitching nervously as I pulled out my cell phone. No signal. That only made me feel more anxious, both because I couldn’t tell anyone what was going on and because I had never had cell phone issues out there before.
Still, I was wasting time and giving whoever was inside a chance to prepare, which was almost always a mistake. Pulling out my baton, I flicked it out and raised my flashlight to eye level as I nudged the front door open with my foot. I caught a glimpse of something to my right and stepped in, doing a sweep of the front hall with my light before moving on to the room where I had seen something.
The house was pitch dark inside, and my flashlight seemed very meager as it pushed its way into what had possibly once been a dining or living room. On the far side of the room was the large bay window I had seen, and next to it, dimly outlined in the reflection of my flashlight on the window, was a large figure. Its back was turned to me, and it was hard for me to say for sure if it was the woman I had seen or someone else. I stopped where I was and used a command tone to order the person to turn around and raise their hands. I know they began to turn around, but that’s the last thing I can remember from the encounter. The next thing I knew, I was back at the clubhouse.
I felt strangely woozy, and my first thought was that I was just experiencing the aftereffects of having been so sick the past few days. That I must have dozed off or something, even though that was something I had never done during my time as a guard. But then I started remembering being at the house. Seeing the woman turning to face me. And something else…but I lost it again. Looking at my phone, I saw that nearly two hours had passed since I had been patrolling in Zone Three. I also had a missed call from Oscar.
“Hey, man. Sorry to call you so late, but I saw I missed a call from you like thirty minutes ago and I wanted to make sure everything was okay.”
I could tell when Oscar spoke that he hadn’t been sleeping when I called, but he still sounded unsure of how to respond. “Um…yeah. Sorry, kid. I was just up late and thought I’d check in on you. See how things were going…Since you’ve been under the weather and all.”
I frowned at that a little. Oscar was a nice guy, but he wasn’t touchy-feely or overly conscientious. It seemed out of character that he’d just randomly call to check on me when nothing was wrong. Except something was wrong, wasn’t it? And it was looking more and more like Oscar knew something about it.
Still, I hesitated before I spoke. Part of it was pride—there’s always a line of humor with cops and security guards about who’s spooked or getting jumpy. A lot of it may be macho bullshit designed to distract each other from their own fears, kids whistling past a graveyard and all, but there’s a point to it beyond that. It’s a way of checking up on each other. Easing tension. And it was also a way to make sure that the people you relied on in a bad situation weren’t going to crack.
I didn’t want to be thought of as a coward, but worse, I didn’t want to be thought of as unreliable. I liked Oscar, and while I didn’t think he’d make fun of me too much, I did worry he might think a bit less of me. So I was about to just lie and say everything had been fine when Oscar spoke up again.
“Haven’t seen or heard anything weird tonight, have you?”
The lie died on my tongue. Swallowing with some difficulty, I found myself replying in a near whisper. “Yeah. Yeah I have. I was starting to think it was a dream. What the fuck is going on, Oscar?”
His voice was trembling when he spoke next. “I don’t know, kid. But you stay in the clubhouse the rest of your shift, okay? Fuck their patrols. The jarhead twerp is working the day shift tomorrow…well, today…and then I have the night shift with you. We’ll talk more then.”
Gripping my phone harder, I found myself looking at the dimly-lit hallways that led from our station to the shadowy corners of the clubhouse. “No, fuck that. Tell me now. Am I in danger here?”
“I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. I think the clubhouse is safe. I haven’t had anything happen there. But don’t leave it until your shift is over. Or shit, leave the property now if you think its best. I just don’t want you getting shitcanned if there’s some explanation for all this, God only knows what that could be.”
I looked at the monitors showing the security camera feeds. Everything looked normal enough out there. “No, I’m not leaving. I need this job. But why can’t you just tell me what the deal is over the phone?”
His tone was harsher this time, almost angry. “Look, I haven’t told anybody about this yet, not really. Still trying to wrap my head around it. And some of it…well, some of it I need to show you rather than just tell you. So just do what I ask and trust me, okay?”
I could tell I was wasting my time demanding he tell me more, so I just said okay. He was about to get off the phone when he added, “Look at your bodycam footage too. See if there’s anything strange on there. Anything that you don’t remember.”
The bodycam videos have to be played through a proprietary software that is only barely functional at the best of times. On the rare occasion we wanted to review something, we normally did it at the main office. The older computer in the clubhouse, while decent enough for logs and streaming the security footage, groaned and chugged when it tried to play videos through the bodycam software. It took nearly an hour of me messing with it to get the video to play, and even then, it was choppy.
Still, I saw enough to be terrified.
The video showed me entering the house. It wasn’t angled right to record whatever motion caught my eye as I opened the door, but it showed the figure I told to turn around with their hands up. As they did so, I saw that they were wearing what looked like some kind of shiny fur coat or cape. I hadn’t noticed that in the moment I was in the house, or if I had, I didn’t remember it. They had finished turning now, and it was the woman. Her face was still contorted in a wide, fierce grin, but I was beginning to think it was expressing agony more than any kind of manic joy. Her eyes, still gleaming and black, were streaming with what have been blood or some darker liquid as she stumbled forward, lifting her arms in some terrible and silent plea.
As she did so, dozens of glistening, furry bodies fell from her arms and shoulders, her breasts and thighs. Rats. Hundreds of rats had been crawling on her, gnawing at her, burrowing into her flesh through dozens of ragged, bloody wounds. And now they were coming for me.
I heard myself scream on the video, but then the camera was jumping this way and that as I struggled to get them off of me. There was another scream from me as I fell, this one growing wilder and more panicked before cutting off suddenly. Everything was still for several seconds, and then I heard a small voice out of the camera’s view.
“What are we going to do with him?”
Then another. “We are going to wait. He needs to be cured.”
The first voice again, this time with more irritation. “But what are we going to do with him for now?”
---
Credits
Comments