Midnight.

The clock turned over to zeroes and another day crept into town under the still shadows of darkness. At this instant, nothing was moving in the city of Tucker, Ohio and the quiet was uncanny. Almost certainly unnatural.

The machine began to move.

Just off Main Street, in a tired, sagging mobile home, Cindy Dupree started awake to the sound of her husband, Mark, stumbling around in the living room. It didn't take a genius to figure out he was drunk. Even from their bedroom in the back of the trailer, she could smell the mixture of beer and cigarettes wafting off him in waves. She flicked on the lamp and hopped out of bed to meet him.

"Where you been?" she demanded. "You told me you was comin' home right after work and now it's past midnight and you got the nerve to come in smashed out of your skull?"

Mark stood, a little unsteadily, and stared at her with glazed eyes. Ordinarily, he would have been happy to argue back...hardly a day passed without a high-volume screaming match between them. Their heated arguments were a fixture of the trailer park, largely ignored because they never got more serious than just yelling, breaking shit, or slamming doors.

Tonight was going to be different. Mark's hand closed into a fist and he slung a big, looping punch that caught Cindy right below the eye. She practically flew over the coffee table, landing hard against the couch. In the instant it took for her eyes to refocus, pawing at the blood flowing freely from her cheek, Mark was already on top of her, hitting her again. And again.

The last thing Cindy Dupree remembered was looking up at his eyes and seeing that they had lost that glazed look. Mark Dupree's eyes were empty, a dark void in space. That was when she knew she was going to die.

When the domestic disturbance call came in to the Tucker police station, Alan Davis was just getting ready to leave. In the next room, the phone rang, but the other half of Tucker's police force, Randy Boyd, wasn't answering.

He was dead.

Officer Davis was busy gathering his things from his cluttered desk. Ten minutes ago, Chief Boyd had informed Alan that he would be fired and, pending an investigation into the "deal" he had arranged with the Mueller girl so she could avoid a DUI, would probably go to jail for a long time. Five minutes ago, Alan had offered Randy his rebuttal. A single shot. Who was fired now, Randy, ol' dog?

Alan paused on his way out the door. The phone had stopped and started ringing two or three more times while he was cleaning out the gun cabinet and the petty cash. He was going to simply leave without answering it, but picked it up, almost as an afterthought.

"Davis", he said.

"Alan? This is Bruce down at the 'Park. You better get over here. The Duprees are goin' after it pretty hard."

"Aw, give it a rest, Bruce," he replied, "they're fighting all the damn time. We almost never have to go break it up."

"Not this time. Alan, it sounds like he's killin' her."

"Shit. You go see if you can get his attention off her and I'll be right over."

"Thanks, Alan. You're a good g..."

Alan punched the button on the phone, but left it off the hook.

"I ain't no good guy," he said to the station house as he left. "I'm fired."

He stepped into the parking lot toward his car.

In her car in the lot outside the police station, Ann Mueller waited with the motor running. She had spent the day watching the horror of Alan Davis' attack sink into her daughter Erin's eyes. It was like watching her die. Worse, actually, because Erin still had to live with the rape for the rest of her life, a shadow forever darkening the vibrant, happy girl she had once been. But Alan Davis was the police in this town. Who could she go to? What was a mother to do?

Ann Mueller knew. As Davis stepped into the parking lot, she dropped her car into gear.

Throughout the city of Tucker, the chain of events continued to gather steam as the day wore on. An early-morning robbery at the Q-Mart turned into a bloodbath, with the convenience store clerk and robber killing each other and another customer in a hail of bullets. A disagreement over an auto repair job broke out at the local car dealer and the mechanic beat his customer into a coma. A group of middle school bullies, rather than simply picking on Sheppard, a mildly-retarded fixture of Tucker, who rode his bicycle everywhere, tortured him slowly to death over the course of several hours.

Mark Dupree, covered in his wife's blood, was shot to death by his neighbor Bruce as he stumbled out of his trailer carrying the broken remains of a lamp. Later, after spending the day of agonizing over what she'd done, Ann Mueller would swallow a bullet out of her husband's revolver.

Day slipped into red night.

Something was not quite right in the city of Tucker, Ohio.

At 11:59, the machine reset. Cindy Dupree slept soundly in her bed, but this time Mark would plow his pickup into a carload of kids returning from a late ballgame. Outside Cindy's window, her neighbor Bruce peered in with evil on his mind. Alan Davis was still going to die at Ann Mueller's hands, but Ann did not count on Randy Boyd, who would spend the rest of the day and most of the night beating her with his nightstick in a cell at the station.

The last few seconds of the day ticked away in dead silence.

At midnight, the machine started to move and it began all over again.

A new day began.

And the machine needed blood.