The Unwanted Winter - Volume One of the Saga of the Twelves (46 page)

Video
conference
, she reiterated in her mind.
Who would’ve thought that just a little less than twelve hours ago,
the Event had begun? Her life had changed forever now.

She shook her head at the
sudden shift in her life. After twenty years of the same monotony,
the same routines, it was nerve-wracking to experience. This was
all unexplored territory. Denise didn’t like change all that much.
Having turned forty-three over the summer, she was fairly set in
her ways.

She didn’t have any
children of her own, though she was a loving aunt to the eight
babies born to her sisters. They were sprinkled between her three
younger siblings, an equal peppering of boys and girls she’d grown
to adore over the years. Yet, she hadn’t pushed out any of her own.
This was mostly due to the fact she’d divorced her High School
sweetheart at twenty-seven. She’d been married to the man for six
years before he had finally got the courage to tell her, he was gay
and he’d fallen in love with someone else. It was possible the very
idea this other person was a
man
might’ve turned off Denise to the whole “family
thing”. Or, maybe, it had just confused the crap out of her to the
point where she now sort of meandered through her life, content to
bounce from boyfriend to boyfriend, from late night booty-call to
long-lunch liaisons, birth control at the ready. She had a hard
time trusting the opposite sex nowadays.

It wasn’t as though she’d
lost her appeal to the opposite sex. She was still pretty at
forty-three with shoulder length wavy, caramel-colored hair – her
own. She abhorred hair dye. It framed her narrow face in long
locks. She was Caucasian, had washed-out, emerald eyes, surrounded
by just a smattering of Crow’s Feet. She bore a prominent forehead,
chiseled cheekbones and a pointed chin.

None of it though was her
most becoming feature. It was her height that usually caught the
attention of the men she walked past. Denise Miller was an
impressive five foot eleven inches tall, though not overly tall and
gangly looking as some women who as tall as her. Her height had
always garnered genuine interest. It was her long, lean legs and
narrow waist (no more than an inch or two thicker since she’d been
in her teens) and her narrow hips rounding into what was a cute
butt that made men turn and stare.

However, the uniform she
was currently wearing hid most of that.

Still
, below her work clothes, the truth remained “the truth”.
Take off what she was wearing; put her in some heels and a little
black number and she’d look like a model, ready for the runway in
Milan or New York City, or maybe even Paris.

That made her grin in
spite of herself.
Well, maybe if I were
fifteen years younger or so…

No, it wasn’t her looks or
her body keeping a serious relationship at bay. It was she,
herself. She just didn’t allow her boyfriends to develop into
something else, something more serious. She never entertained the
eventuality her relationships could lead her down the road to
marriage and quite possibly children. Kurt was the only man she
ever
really
loved
and he… well, though he did care for her, it was merely in a
fashion she hadn’t foreseen. It was a possibility she’d never
gotten over it completely.

Yes, I am scarred for
life
, she mused, stopping abruptly when
she saw her car parked under the only cherry tree growing in
parking lot. Every other tree was a magnolia or an oak. She had
parked there so she would remember.
Park
where you can easily find your car,
she
had figured
.
Instead, it appeared as though she had outsmarted herself in
the process.

She stepped down the five
wide steps at the front of the building and onto the concrete
walkway in between the line of very large, very heavy steel
reinforced planters circumventing the parameter of the
Communications Center. They’d been put there to deter the odd
terrorist truck-bomber.

She stepped off the curb
and onto the black-top of the lot itself, her rubber soled, “cop”
shoes making very little noise as she made her way through the
small patches of snow and ice blanketing to ground.
Snow, here in Los Angeles! Of all things, who
would have ever thought of that?
She sure
as hell wouldn’t have. She had lived in Southern California her
whole life and not once had she ever seen it snow in the city until
a system of extremely low pressure had settled in overnight and
brought with it a million, million little miracles –
snowflakes.

She crossed through a few
lines of parked cars, fishing her keys from her purse. As expected,
she found them in the small inner pocket where she always kept
them. Absently, she began to finger for the small remote that would
disable her alarm as she walked the final few steps, looking left
then right to make certain the way was clear of traffic as she did
so. She approached the driver’s side, disengaged the tampering
system and unlocked the vehicle with two quick pushes on the
“unlock” icon on the remote. She swiftly rushed her way inside her
bright red Dodge Nitro, slamming the door without intending to, in
an attempt to get out of the cold as quickly as possible. She put
the key in the ignition and started the medium-sized SUV, deftly
turning on the heat. She gripped the steering wheel, waiting for
the inside of the car to warm before she drove off. She hated
driving when she was chilled. It distracted her too much, so she
believed.

Man, what a
night
, she thought as she squirmed in her
seat, shivering again when she realized how cold the seat was upon
her rear end.
Crap, it’s really freaking
cold out here!
She wrung her hands before
her lips and blew on them, staring at the temperature gauge before
her. It depicted how hot the engine of her car was at the moment.
It was hard over on the wrong side of the letter “C”.
This is gonna take a while and here I am already
freezing off my tits!

She sat back, breathing on
her hands a few more times, admonishing herself for not bringing
any gloves, still staring at that gauge. Her thoughts invariably
shifting to what she’d gone through the night before.

The Event…

*****

It had started like most
incidents during the course of her 6 pm to 6 am graveyard shift –
with a phone call. The time had been automatically stamped into the
streamed recording, logged into the vast database the moment she
had spoken into her headset with the ubiquitous, “911 Operator,
what is your emergency?”

She would never forget
what the digital display on one of the three monitors before her
had indicated: 6:47 pm.

It was burned into her
brain.

It had been a woman on the
other end of the phone call. She was a frantic, older sounding,
who’d been screaming and yelling that
all
of her grandchildren had been
kidnapped from her backyard. Denise had kept asking questions as
per protocol, but the woman wouldn’t let her get in a complete
sentence in edgewise. She had kept screaming through the phone
about a gang of men had stolen her beloved grandbabies. She
explained through ragged gasps of breath that the assailants had
smashed through the fences surrounding her backyard and had taken
the children while she was in the house. Denise continued to try
and get a description of some of the men from the woman, but the
woman was hysterical. She was beyond the ability to coherently
answer any query Denise might’ve asked. So, seeing the woman’s
address blinking on the screen to her right, she immediately opened
a line to the Los Angeles Police Department and had units rolling
toward the woman’s home within seconds. She’d done the same with
the LAFD as a precaution, because at that point she really couldn’t
afford to be anything but thorough.

She kept on repeated
herself to the woman that help was one the way and continued to try
and garner as much detail from the lady. It was almost seven
minutes into the call when the woman actually answered one her
questions directly. “Ma’am, ma’am!” she had spoken forcefully,
trying to get her attention. “What are the names of the children so
we can issue an Amber Alert! Ma’am, please calm down! This is for
the sake of the children. Can you please give me their
names!”

The woman had stopped
hollering and was sobbing into the receiver. Her nose was so
plugged with mucus; it was hard to comprehend what she was saying
at first. Denise had to ask her to repeat herself, so she could
pass on the information correctly.

The woman had breathed
deeply, steadying herself, focusing her mind. Then, “…Anthony
Herrera, he is the oldest. He is sixteen. Elena Herrera, she is
nine and…” She had been unable to continue.

Denise didn’t waste any
time. “Ma’am, what is the name of the third child?”

“
Mikalah Herrera – Oh my
god, she is only eight years old! Please don’t let anything happen
to my babies!” Then she was wailing in despair, unable to
continue.

“
Don’t worry, ma’am. Help
is on the way. I am forwarding the information for a nationwide
Amber Alert as we speak. We will do what we can to get your
grandchildren back to you safe and sound.”

She had remembered saying
it, attempting to put herself on “automatic”.
Keep the emotion at bay, Denise. It’ll only clog your ability
to work efficiently.
Still, she could
taste the ashes in her mouth at how completely inadequate her
response had been. She knew, full well, she herself would’ve gone
completely out of her mind if one of her nieces or nephews had been
abducted. Being a 911 dispatcher, she knew a lot about what really
goes in the world behind closed doors, in basements, in abandoned
buildings and in the middle of parks. She had come to know a lot in
the past twenty years. She knew if they didn’t find those children
fast, there was very little hope any of them would survive the
night. The world was no more than a meat-grinder of the young and
the innocent.

She had stayed on with the
woman until the police arrived, trying to get as much additional
information from her as possible. Then, she heard the police in the
background and confirmed help had indeed arrived with both the
police dispatcher and the officers on site. She succinctly
exchanged all she knew with the officers and promptly terminated
the call, saying another “comforting” line from the manual. It had
fallen flat, even in her ears.

She realized the
dispatcher sitting at the station next to her was dealing with a
similar case only this one was a little different, which
immediately peeked her interest. It involved a kidnapping, a child
abduction and a terrorist bomb
together.
She had leaned back in her
chair craning her neck to see the location, thinking it was just a
random coincidence. Her eye widened when she saw on her colleague’s
LCD screen the second phone call was coming, not only from the same
area of Los Angeles, but from the same goddamned
neighborhood.

The two incidents were
less than a mile apart!

She had listened in for a
few minutes, a one-way tap allowing her to hear only.

To her astonishment, it
was yet another grandmother calling in to report her son and
grandson had both been taken. What was strange was the terrorists
had left a bomb on the front porch, subsequently destroying the
entire front portion of the house to hide their getaway.

This woman sounded even
older and spoke with a heavy Mexican accent, so it was harder to
make out what she was saying. A third of the time she was speaking
Spanish, then a third in English and the last third in some sort of
bastardization of the two languages neither she nor the dispatcher
handling her call could understand. She seemed just about as scared
as she was angry. She was able to give detailed descriptions of
both her son and her grandson, but unfortunately, she hadn’t seen
their abductors. She had been at the back of the house sewing and
watching Jeopardy! on “her new flat chingatheda TV” her son had
bought for her birthday back in August.

Denise had figured she was
talking about an HDTV or something along those lines and let it
pass, still intent on getting more details of the call when her
line rang. A dull, low-pitched tone sounded in her ear. She had
quickly killed the “piggyback” tap of the other conversation and
answered the incoming line.

“
911 Operator, what is
your emergency?”

Her mouth nearly hit the
top of her desk when yet another frantic woman spoke in a rush,
“You have to send help someone just took my son!”

For the first time in
nearly twenty years, Denise actually stammered. Her mind was struck
numb with shock as her eyes darted over to the time stamp attached
to the call.

6:59 pm.

Had it really only been
twelve minutes? Was it true, really, that they had three separate
kidnappings incidents in only twelve minutes?!? Had that ever
happened before? Her mind was racing. She was vaguely aware of the
woman on the other side of the line, now screeching at her to
answer. She saw the address next – 6342 Tipton Way, Los Angeles,
California 90042 – and her eyes nearly popped completely out of
their sockets. She couldn’t believe it. Could it be
possible?
Could it?