West to the End of the World

Bad Sun Rising

    It was a cold, rainy day in May. The world was washed in the gray tint that leaked from the storm clouds. The bitter chill of the breeze elicited the thought of the rain drops freezing in mid-air, bringing all of the noise of the world to a stunning silence. At least, that was what Veronica Tyler thought as she stood before the glass door to the balcony of her seventh-floor apartment. The angle of the cunning winds allowed the rain to elude the awning and pelt hard against the glass. From the scarred leather of the couch cushions, the ears of Veronica's German Shepherd, Axel, twitched with each pelt.

    A fifth police squad car, with its flashing red lights slicing through the fog and the current of rain, raced through the tight city streets in the same east-bound direction as the four before it. Veronica, who was thirty-three and drove one of those squad cars herself, number one-oh-nine, had gotten a call on her beat early that morning that came from the upper east side of the city as well. It was possible that that was one of the worst calls of her life, even outweighing the situations she witnessed in her twenties as a member of the SWAT team in Los Angeles. She wondered how different her day would have been if she and her partner, Officer Miguel Herrera, were not the first responders. But they were, and they saw what they saw, so there was no use in dwelling on it now.

    The grip she had on the now-cold mug of coffee between her hands tightened when a another siren came within range. A sixth squad car shot down her street like a bullet, its lights flashing across her and into her toffee irises. The light emphasized the fit shape of her tanned body: the bulging muscles of her arms that threatened to crush the coffee mug into oblivion, the light dusting of abs through her tight black tank top, and her proportionately muscular legs that strained against her jeans. If it could, the mug would have released a heavy breath when her left hand unwound from its middle to brush a few stray strands of her dark bob from her face. Her lips naturally fell in a slight frown, for she rarely smiled. The only person that could get a faint grin out of her these days was Miguel. He could really be a fool sometimes.

    She was a beautiful woman, but she never thought of herself that way. Really, she never thought of herself in any way. She was much too consumed with her work to ever be vein in any sense of the word. She was the type that would show up to work an hour early, and leave two hours after her shift ended. Even when she left, she never stopped working. Every dispatchment she received was housed in the illusory office cubical of her mind, organized in a file cabinet behind her eyes. There, each detail of every crime scene and apprehension was being ran through the processor that sat in her frontal lobe, and the fax machine beside her cerebellum. Her mind worked like a series of well-oiled machines. That was how she acclimated to the SWAT team so well. And, in a way, she missed it. She missed all of the excitement that came with the terrain. However, that could never outweigh the sinking, perpetually drowning feeling that set into her chest whenever they arrived just a little too late. She was a regular police officer in the beginning of her career, and so she thought rejoining the force wouldn't be as bad. She was wrong.

    Just then, the front door of her apartment burst open with a bang. Her right hand instinctively went to her corresponding hip, where the holster of her gun would have usually been. As soon as her hand made the motion, she remembered that she was not on the clock. Her gun was tucked safely away in the lock-box beneath her bed during the few and far-between hours that she was off-duty. Somewhere near the couch, Axel growled.

    Her hand dropped to her side when in swaggered her sixteen-year-old nephew, Dax. He had not yet reached the pinnacle of his growth, but he was already six-feet tall, just a hairs-length away from grazing his scalp against the top of the door frame. His fair skin stood out against that dark hair that sprung straight up off of his scalp, his light eyes were as bright as the headlights of the passing squad cars, and his mouth was naturally in the shape of a pompous smirk. Everything about him annoyed Veronica endlessly most days. She could not, for the life of her, understand what aspect of him teenage girls found attractive. It seemed as if, whenever she dragged herself home after what felt like an infinitely long night shift, there was some girl or another lounging on her couch or foraging through her personal effects. Veronica always had have a mind to arrest them, until Dax sauntered into the room and introduced the girl as one of his "friends that just so happened to be a girl."