Nashville
Midnight

Taylor was in bed, watching a replay of the late local news. She was fighting sleep, but would succumb at any minute. She’d been awake for thirty-six hours, and even by her insomniac standards, it was time for a rest.

Nashville would never get used to news about dead teenagers. Especially around the holidays and graduation, the nightly news brought stories packed with grief and remorse. Brave girls fighting meningitis. Silly young boys who drank to excess then wrapped their cars around trees. Cheerleaders text messaging their football-hero boyfriends and crashing into oncoming tractor-trailers.

But Nashville had never seen coverage of a tragedy of this magnitude. It was made worse by the extended horrors—nearly two days into the news cycle, when the gaping holes in the collective hearts were beginning to clot and crust, the sweet young face of Brittany Carson, smiling to the masses through the television screen, ripped them open all over again.

Her death had first been reported in a breaking news alert by a teary-eyed rookie reporter, one too young to have hardened to the nearly daily depictions of death and violence that roamed Nashville’s streets. On the 10:00 p.m. news, Brittany’s organ donation was the lead story—some vulture inside the hospital reported that she’d signed a donor registration card during a school campaign and the media seized upon it, getting a confirmation quote from her mother, Elissa, still dressed in the red blouse streaked with her daughter’s blood.

She wasn’t the only one; the entire city had been holding out hope that one of their children would make it through this tragedy alive. Sons and daughters, brothers, sisters, couples, loners, all marked for death. There seemed to be no real rhyme or reason to the victimology, not yet. They had nothing concrete, nothing except the knowledge that a teenage boy gave a teenage girl a pill laced with poison designed to kill her, then masturbated while he watched her die.

Taylor sighed, rolled onto her back to stare at the ceiling.

The images on the screen had been littered with smiling faces, full of hope. It was near impossible to imagine those same boys and girls lying on stainless-steel trays at the medical examiner’s, brutal Y-incisions demarking their virginal flesh.

The ME’s office was overwhelmed. Parents who’d been out of town returned with the knowledge of their children’s deaths weighing heavily on their consciences, needed to say goodbye. They had been camping in the lobby of Forensic Medical until their time came, were ushered one by one into a side room with a closed-loop video feed to identify their dead.

The first official comprehensive toxicology screens were rolling in. All eight victims had high levels of Ritalin, codeine, PMA, MDMA and Valium in their systems, disguised in the small, benign tablet of Ecstasy that Juri Edvin had sold them.

Taylor couldn’t stand it anymore. She flipped the television off. She wished Baldwin was with her, imagined him encircling her with his arms. The blank of darkness enveloped her, and she fell asleep.