She gagged on the mingled stenches of her own waste and the meaty scent of the putrefying body. She struggled not to throw up again. The front of the T-shirt Mom had brought her to wear in the hospital was still caked with dried vomit from last time. She hadn’t been able to clean it up. She couldn’t move.
At least, not entirely. Whitey hadn’t totally paralyzed her when he twisted and broke her neck. She could still rock her head a little bit from side to side. Sometimes this produced a few seconds of bodily awareness. The experience was like being a lamp whose plug hung partially out of an electrical socket: occasionally when the plug was jiggled, the lamp lit up. The experience was frustrating, but it also gave her hope. If she got out of here, doctors might be able to repair the damage.
Most importantly, she could move her entire right hand, wrist, and part of her arm. With that hand, she’d been dragging herself to freedom.
If this had been a carpeted floor, there was no way she could have done it, but this was a standard institutional floor of hard tile. Soiling herself made her passage easier because her waste acted as a lubricant. She estimated she’d moved ten feet. Ten feet toward what she hoped was an exit. Maybe she could get to where a passerby could hear or see her.
But only if Whitey didn’t notice her progress. She stayed utterly still.
At the moment, the man/ape/cat/whatever was hovering over Jan Lee, the woman who’d also been abducted from Daniella’s hospital room. Now that she’d moved, Daniella could see the young woman out of the corner of her eye. Jan was a supine form atop a teacher’s desk, all black hair and disheveled remnants of a hospital gown—and with an enormous pregnant belly pointed at the ceiling. The taut skin lay bared to the air. It now rasped with the repeated passage of Whitey’s tongue across its circumference. Jan didn’t make a sound.
Afterward, the creature began to do the same thing to Daniella.
She was too numb to feel it, but the assault made Daniella want to scream. The first couple times this happened, she did scream. Whitey hadn’t reacted at all—just rotated his cat’s radar-dish ears toward the sound and kept on licking. He licked her so hard that she rocked from side to side. He smelled like death. Daniella preferred the smell of her own feces and vomit to him. The fur behind Whitey’s neck was caked with blood and dirt. It must have been where he couldn’t reach to clean himself.
His tail swished the air as he methodically licked the entire surface of her bulbous belly. She didn’t know why he returned each day to do this. Maybe it was instinctual. Maybe the saliva somehow aided her rapid pregnancy. Each time, Daniella did in fact feel less lightheaded for the next hour or so.
She held her breath and waited for him to go away. And she prayed, prayed—prayed although she wasn’t even religious—prayed he was too stupid to notice she had moved a couple feet since his last visit.
“I’m so hungry,” she whispered through chapped lips. “Can you give me something?”
She didn’t know why she talked to him—she didn’t expect him to understand or answer—but this was her only chance to plead for mercy. Someone was responsible for this. He would understand her and take pity.
Daniella wept as the licking went on and on and on.
She remembered the day the woman lying a few feet away was eaten by the monkey infant that emerged from her loins. Mouth bloodied with its mother’s life, the child had peered curiously at Daniella and Jan Lee. Daniella wondered if they were next. But maybe it had a survival instinct not to eat its pregnant aunts. It slinked from the room. Daniella noted the direction it went and had been crawling there—hopefully toward an exit—ever since.
She went on babbling at Whitey, her mouth disconnected from her brain: “Please give me something to eat. To drink . . .”
Her teeth felt loose and gummy with blood. She breathed with her mouth because her nose was clogged. Her stomach made gurgling sounds in response to Whitey’s endless licking. He stopped for only a moment when her skin suddenly bulged. It was as if the baby was reaching out to it.
“Greg? Is that you?”
It was Jan Lee, croaking to the ceiling with her dry voice.
“I can’t move. Are you dead?” Crying now. “Oh God. . . . Help me.”
Daniella wanted to tell her it’d be all right. The task of counseling the other woman helped her maintain her own sanity. It’s something she had learned about herself since being here: helping people made her stronger. It made her feel good about herself. If she got out of this, she would go into social work. If.
“Greg? Oh God, it fucked me. I can’t go to work now. I missed that deadline.”
Wanted to help her. Really. But at the moment Daniella couldn’t stop crying.
At last, Whitey stopped licking her stomach. Daniella knew that if she weren’t numb down there that her raw skin would be screaming.
Whitey began to move away—hopefully to leave. But then he stopped and looked back at her. He cocked his head to the side, like a dog, and made a questioning whine. He looked between her and where he’d originally deposited her on day one.
Oh, no.
He made an irritated snort and grabbed a handful of her hair. He began to pull. Daniella screamed as damaged cartilage popped in her neck. White-hot pain seared through her head. It arced across her vision like a lightning stroke. She fainted.
When she awoke, Whitey was gone, and she lay in her initial spot from so many days ago. Ten feet farther away from the door.
Worse, her head was pointed in the opposite direction. The door now lay toward her feet. She would first have to rotate a hundred-eighty degrees before she could even begin to drag herself again. And worst of all: she now lay on top of her working hand, pinning it.
“No. No! Oh God, I’ll kill you. No!”
✽ ✽ ✽
Margaret wandered aimlessly down residential streets, trying to decide what to do. She had no idea where to start searching for Daniella or what she’d do if she found her. Despite the urgency of what day this was—Daniella’s due date—she broke into a house and availed herself of the bathroom and then the leftover pork chops in the refrigerator. The power hadn’t gone out, so the food was still good. She stole a cell phone and a butcher knife on her way back out.
She was afraid to call 911 and enlist help. They would just try to evacuate her again.
This was why she was glad to find the beat-up old pickup truck parked in a gutter with its windows down. No keys were in sight, of course; she couldn’t expect to be that lucky. However, a county ADC road atlas just like hers sat on its dashboard. Margaret reached in and took the map. She flipped to the page containing Fairfax Hospital and tried to plot where her daughter might have been taken.
C’mon, be scientific about this. That’s your strength. This isn’t as complicated as a hormone-therapy clinical study. You just have to pick the most logical places to search and start there.
A summer breeze tousled her hair, bringing with it the scent of pine trees and honeysuckle. The morning sunlight warmed her neck and arms. This is just an intellectual exercise, she told herself. No need to panic. It’s just a game.
Gunfire echoed in the distance.
There. Right on that map, right there. That’s where you were before the soldier picked you up and took you to the shelter. The day before, you searched that neighborhood and this neighborhood. You were on this street here, about to check out the old buildings on that other street. . . .
Actually, she was surprised at how systematically she’d managed to conduct her search for Daniella, all things considered. There was always the chance her daughter was in a house she’d walked past today, or in a storm sewer—but in her heart Margaret didn’t feel she’d passed her yet. She had no choice but to believe this.
She flipped pages as she started walking again. She tried to ignore the sounds of snapping twigs and the occasional whiff of something that was either animal shit or rotting meat. Aside from having the butcher knife, she didn’t see the point in taking many more prec
autions. She wasn’t athletic enough to skulk through the environment; she doubted that would make much difference anyway. She didn’t have a gun or a car anymore—although she still scanned each parked vehicle she passed in the hopes of finding keys in the ignition. If a bigfoot was going to get her, then it was going to get her. So she might as well go about her business until something or someone stopped her.
She knew she was going to die while searching for her daughter. But that was okay. There was no point in living without her.
Thankfully, the elementary school wasn’t too far from where she stopped searching the night before the smorgasbord alleys occurred. God, that seemed like months ago. Her stopping place from that night seemed like as good a place to restart her search as any. The location bordered a finger of woods that descended in a straight line from the southern side of the hospital. She’d always felt that the kidnapper bigfoots had gone south when leaving the hospital because that’s the direction in which Daniella’s hospital room window faced.
It was as good a theory as any.
Within fifteen minutes, Margaret reached the wooded lane where she’d lost confidence and turned her car around to head home for the night. To her left lay a multi-building compound with boarded-up windows. It was the old Catholic private school, the one she’d decided she needed a crowbar to break into. A contractor’s sign said it was the future site of the Villages at Fairfax, brought to you by Ricardo Construction.
Her heart sunk. How am I going to get into that? I don’t even know if a bigfoot nest is there. I don’t know what I’m doing.
Daniella was going to die.
Something moved on the far side of the largest building. Margaret instinctively ducked behind the nearest object, which turned out to be a piece of shrubbery. The sudden movement made her back ache in protest, and her heart gave a resounding thud.
Don’t want to die.
She held her breath as a furry head and shoulders came into view. The animal was headed the other way. It was an adult bigfoot with antenna-like ears so tall they were more like a bat’s. It suddenly stopped and looked her way, as if it knew she was watching.
Don’t want to die. Oh, shit.
She knew this one. Dear God, it was the same one that attacked her behind Eric Gensler’s house and later at the hospital: head-to-toe brown fur and a white patch of hair on its chest. Her throat ached at the memory of it holding her aloft by her neck. She remembered the pain of its needle-like teeth sinking into her shoulder.
Its nose twitched as it sniffed the air. That’s what bothered her about it: how human its face looked. Its snout should look more animal-like, she thought, and with bigger teeth. But this one looked mannish in its features. And that enormous penis—how could it even walk with that thing?
Don’t kill me, please.
Her hands went sweaty where they clutched the grass between her feet.
Finally, the white-chested bigfoot began moving again—in the opposite direction, thankfully. Margaret let out a long sigh of relief.
That’s when she heard the sound that made her breath catch again in her throat. It was a voice she held dear to her heart.
“No,” came Daniella’s scream from inside the building. “No! Oh God, I’ll kill you. No!”
Chapter 19
“Daniella?” Margaret whispered.
She lurched to her feet and ran toward the boarded-up school building. She had to be hearing things.
At first, she couldn’t find how the white-chested bigfoot had gotten in and out of there. She panicked. So close, so close. Her daughter was trapped inside a building, behind wooden boards nailed over all the windows and doors.
But she found the opening. It was a smashed-out window of a classroom obviously intended for kindergarteners. Pieces of Bob the Builder play sets lay strewn across a room festooned with posters of Teletubbies and religious figures—sometimes all in the same poster. The one that caught her eye showed Noah, Santa Claus, and Jesus Christ dancing hand-in-hand beneath a rainbow full of alphabet letters and personal computing accessories. Whatever that was supposed to mean.
Like the white-chested bigfoot who established this birthing nest, Margaret stepped through the window onto a glass-covered floor. In her right hand, she carried her butcher knife.
“Daniella?”
She was afraid to yell too loud, but she was unable to keep the excitement from her voice. When there was no answer, she entered the hallway.
“Daniella?”
The answer was weak, uncertain: “Mommy?”
“Daniella!”
Margaret ran toward the voice. She was already crying and didn’t care. Her baby was going to be all right—she was safe—and she’d found her and . . .
When she entered the dim classroom where Daniella was, the stench was like smacking into a curtain covered with diarrhea. She retched and covered her mouth.
No. Oh, God.
The windows had been boarded over from the inside. A couple were loose enough to let in cracks of outside light. What they showed was a classroom about the size of her basement. A blackboard and teacher’s desk sat on one end, and student desks filled the rest. That was standard enough, but past that point the room’s resemblance to a place of learning broke down.
There were . . . piles of feces and other organic byproducts she couldn’t identify heaped among the student desks, which had long since been pushed or heaved out of position. They were like snow drifts, except these were made of congealed clumps of shit interwoven with hair, skin, semen, blood, spittle, and shedded animal claws. Was that an umbilical cord she saw in there? She guessed there was some afterbirth mixed in as well.
She registered this for only a split second, though, as her gaze was soon drawn to three supine forms. The first woman was dead—Margaret saw that immediately. She lay on the floor where she died, her blood-spattered skin ashen, her face a rictus of terror. Her genitals looked like they’d been blown apart with explosives. Where her breasts used to be now gaped grisly holes, as if hyenas had chewed them off.
The second woman—
“Daniella? Is that you?”
Her daughter was emaciated. Her eyes were sunken and dark, her skin a pallor. All vitality was concentrated into one place in her body. The rest was shrunken and starved. Daniella was nothing more than a blister ready to pop with its cargo.
Daniella’s dry lips parted. “Mah—?”
“Oh, Daniella . . .”
She knelt beside her, spread her arms over her, and cried. Thank you, God, I thought I’d never see her again. She assumed the third woman in the hospital gown, lying atop the desk against the wall, was Jan Lee.
But she could see that the situation was grave. A huge, purple bruise ringed Daniella’s neck. She remembered the news reports at the shelter mentioning that the bigfoots broke the necks of the rape victims they hauled off. This was to induce paralysis, presumably to prevent escape.
“Your neck, honey. Can you move?”
“No.”
Margaret could barely hear the answer. It was as if the earlier screaming had robbed Daniella of her remaining strength. The girl closed her eyes, sending rivulets of tears down her temples.
Margaret struggled to assess the situation calmly—clinically. She glanced at Daniella’s swollen stomach and knew she was right to predict that this was the final day. She wanted to check how far Daniella’s cervix was dilated but was afraid the motion of lowering the girl’s sweatpants would jostle her injured neck. She was past worrying how Daniella would react to her mother inspecting her vagina.
I need help.
Putting her knife on the floor, Margaret pulled out the phone she’d stolen. She rummaged through her pockets until she found the scrap of paper with Detective Randall’s cell number.
✽ ✽ ✽
That morning, Randall sat in the police station’s break room and tried to warm her inexplicably cold hands with a mug of coffee. It’d been another uncomfortable, sleepless night on a cot.
The rest of roll call proceeded as normal—at least as normal as one could expect under the circumstances. The fed-tact turned things over to Sergeant Lively, who handed out duty assignments and reviewed the general situation. PFC Adams, Randall’s partner from the last few days, was assigned to a hunter squadron. Randall didn’t receive an assignment or a new partner, which was why she was now sitting in the break room. Maybe they didn’t know what to do with detectives. She expected to sit here, uselessly, for the rest of the day until the trucks rolled in to take her away.
“I bet you wish now you cooperated with me.”
The voice came from behind her. It had a familiar, loathsome, Georgian drawl. Randall turned to see Detective Charles Paisley Baker leaning on a cane as he stared her down. He wore a brown suit that was so wrinkled it was like he’d slept in it. He was unshaven; his thinning hair needed to be combed; and his eyes were bloodshot.
Randall turned back to her coffee. “You’re looking unusually dapper today.”
Baker banged his cane on the floor as he limped into her line of sight. He plopped down in the seat across from her.
“Sure, you can sit down,” Randall said.
“I said, missy, I bet you wish you’d cooperated with me.”
“Oh? I thought you said you’re a pompous asshole who’d better get away from me.”
Interesting what feeling useless can do to your mouth, Randall thought. She shrugged and sipped her coffee.
“If you had deferred to me, we could’ve gotten to the bottom of this whole hullabaloo that much quicker.”
Randall rolled her eyes. This was pointless. “So, did the feds get tired of your mouth already?”
Blood Born Page 31
