The exercise:
Write about: crawling.
Bloody hell, that was a slow drive to work this morning. Thankfully by the time I came home the snow had been properly cleared and I could almost do the speed limit.
At least the boys had fun playing in the snow today. And I got some early morning exercise shoveling out the driveway, I guess?
2 comments:
As I recall you tend to get snow properly in Canada, so I can imagine the difficulties if the roads weren't cleared, or if it was snowing heavily while you were driving. Twenty minutes must turn into fifty?
But there was a bright side, and that is good too :)
Crawling
“Can you talk to them, Sir?” Adams scowled and tapped her radio. She’d been trying to get the central police station to send out SOCO for nearly five minutes now, and her voice had got louder and her eyes wider and she was blinking, Collins noticed, significantly less. “They’re complaining about the number of people we’re asking for.” The Inspectral, who had been crawling around the graves as carefully as though they were unexploded bombs, shook his head.
“Handling bureaucracy is a valuable skill,” he said. “If I let you hand it off to me before you’ve tried every avenue you’ll not learn. And I especially don’t want you to learn that rank beats authority.”
Collins watched Adams mouth “Rank beats…” silently before gripping her radio with a white-knuckled fist and decided he should go and stand with the Inspectral.
“Are the graves dangerous?” he asked. The Inspectral shivered, blurring slightly, and it took Collins a moment to realise he was laughing silently.
“Not for you,” he said. The icy calm of his voice made the hairs on the back of Collins’s neck stand up. “You’re not dead. Yet. But these graves were emptied deliberately and… well, illegally is the wrong word. It is against the law to exhume a grave without the proper paperwork and approvals, but this is… it’s more of a cultural thing. This should not have been done and shouldn’t need a law to tell you that. And because it was done when it shouldn’t have been there are consequences. The graves want to be filled because that’s their correct state – a postiive state. Maybe. So if I get too close, I will be sucked it to try and fill a gap. A vacuum.”
“It’s like physics?”
“Physics? I was never very scientific at school.”
“I mean, physics has laws that you can’t break.” Collins hesitated, feeling out of his depth. “This is like you broke the law of gravity somewhere, and now if you go too close to the edge gravity grabs you and pulls you down to try and fix the break?”
“Possibly,” said the Inspectral. “I haven’t had to worry about gravity for a while so I don’t know if it completely works like that. But – ah, we have results!”
Adams stamped over, and stopped, standing on one of the disturbed graves. The Inspectral flickered for a moment, but Collins was sure that Adams hadn’t noticed it. “There’s been a four-car pile-up in Overton,” she said. “All their wingeing was because there’re teams out there crawling all over that, not because we need a lot of resources. Why that dumb cow couldn’t just say that at the start…! So we’re after them for SOCO but the Ritual Examiner is on his way. Or maybe her way, the dumb cow wasn’t being at all clear. She did say we should wait for the RE though in case they need help.” There was a pause while Adams relaxed a little, her shoulders settling and she remember to blink. “And A&E left a message for you: they picked up six skulls from the beach.”
“And we’ve got six graves,” said Collins, looking along the row. Adams looked down, swallowed, and stepped back off the grave. “It matches.”
“We have seven skulls,” said the Inspectral. “You brought one back with you already. We have a problem.”
Greg - I think 20 turned into 35, but I didn't time it. I'm pleased to report it's not been that bad since, despite the snow not taking any hints to go the hell away.
I like these three together, they make an excellent and entertaining team :)
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