by C. J. Sears
These were questions Donahue wasn’t sure she wanted explained as she fidgeted in her chair.
“As I was saying,” Rhinehold interrupted, clearing his throat, “we were in the middle of planning our escape. With your help, we should have what we need to get it done.” He gestured toward her officers. “These two have told me that with the power outage the radio no longer works, and before that I myself saw those things bring our only cell tower down. Without outside contact, we don’t stand a chance. But with what I have in mind, we should be able to get a hold of someone who can help us out.”
He pulled out a permanent marker. Starting from his left, where Donahue now sat, he drew a crude road map from the station to a building several miles east of their position, north of the lake. The sheriff recognized it even with his basic penmanship. “The Forestry Station? Why go there?”
Rhinehold pointed to the waitress. “Amy here has been dating one of the rangers for the last couple of months. She says that they have a satellite phone on hand in case of emergencies. If we can get there in one piece, we should be able to get a hold of the proper authorities.” He traced the simplistic drawing with his finger, through his recreation of the woods near the lakeside cabins rented out by tourists during the summer months. “We can get there before the sun is up if we hurry and use the forest for cover. But in case we can’t, we need weapons.”
That’s why they needed her. She was the only one who had the key to the armory. “So you need me to get the guns, I get that. But there won’t be enough for all of us, and even if we left right now a convoy of vehicles is going to attract attention.”
Aside from that, taking a detour through the woods didn’t set well with her. The crossroads weren’t much further. It would be better to lead the parasite men out into the open rather than find themselves confined on a mountain trail in the forest.
When she told Rhinehold her alternative, he shook his head. “We can’t do that. If we leave town and they follow us−and they will follow us as you’ve suggested−then we risk endangering other towns. We have to trap them here as best we can. We have to contain it.”
His words intensified her headache. Contain it? How did he think their small force would quarantine Lone Oak long enough for the National Guard to step in? “There is no containing this situation, Mr. Rhinehold. If our town is as screwed as we think, then the only thing to do is make sure that everyone knows about it. Trapping ourselves in a cabin in the woods is easily one of the worst ideas I’ve ever heard. And for what? A satellite phone. Nonsense.”
The singer blinked his eyes and sighed, the exasperation he felt evident to Donahue. He sauntered over to the door, shut it closed, and turned back to face the rest of the group.
With one hand gripping the latch, he said, “It is plain to me, sheriff, that you don’t understand. You lack clarity. You lack vision.” The tone of his voice had shifted, becoming altogether softer yet somehow demanding. “This town is a blight. It must be cleansed of the filth.”
Donahue couldn’t believe the words she was hearing, couldn’t believe their sinister familiarity. “What are you saying? Are you even listening to the horse hockey spilling out of your mouth?”
She looked to the other people in the room, could see they were fixated on Rhinehold. Some seemed worried; others nodded along to what he’d been saying. To her right, Officer Plinkett fingered the trigger loop of his gun, his eyes never leaving the gospel singer.
Rhinehold smiled; it was an ear-to-ear grin unflattering to the man dressed in his unusual leather jacket and denim pants. “As you said, sheriff, our town is lost. Leaving by the crossroads will only spread this disease further. The National Guard won’t be enough on its own, not with just a few platoons. No, I’m afraid we need something a little more expedient. Something permanent.”
He walked over to her, placed his hands on her shoulders. She tensed up as he leaned in to whisper in her ear. She could feel his sickly hot breath as his next words washed over her skin. “I’m afraid that a purge is necessary.”
She sprung to her feet, elbowing Rhinehold. He howled in pain as confusion exploded around her. Bodies leapt from their seats and across the table in both directions. Travers, Amy, Evelyn, Michael: they blurred together to create an indistinguishable mass of violence. Robinson cowered in the corner. Officer Plinkett pointed his gun at Rhinehold, who clutched his bleeding nose. Officer Wilkins rushed to separate the other four.
Donahue watched as Travers ducked a punch from Evelyn, then kneed her in the gut and threw her into Michael, doubling him over. Wilkins shoved him against the wall as Amy continued her assault, pummeling the couple with her boots while they were on the ground. The sheriff ran to pull her off of them as Rhinehold made to grab her. He stopped when he heard Plinkett cock his pistol and threw up his hands in surrender.
She yanked Amy away, slipped her arms underneath the waitress’s and behind her neck in a half nelson chokehold. The woman kicked at the air in front of her. She was a fair brawler; the sheriff had to give the girl that much. Amy attempted to bite at her captor’s arms and her breathing slowed. When she relaxed, Donahue let her drop to the ground unconscious.
Helping up Evelyn, she saw Rhinehold wipe the blood under his nose with the sleeve of his jacket. Despite his injury, he no longer appeared to be angry with her. His lack of worry unnerved her more than she cared to admit.
As Wilkins continued to subdue Travers, Donahue drew her pistol. She kept it trained on Rhinehold as she approached, noticed that Robinson was no longer trembling in the corner. Her focus remained on the man whose words had penetrated the comfort she’d felt in her own police station.
“That was a mistake,” the singer said, straightening his jacket. He glared at Plinkett. “One that you won’t live to regret.”
A strange, almost soothing whistling pervaded the room, but Rhinehold never opened his mouth. The tune was melodic and soulful like the music of a pan flute, yet Donahue couldn’t help but shiver at the otherworldly noise. Like a wisp of color in an endless white space, it traveled along the walls of the room. The cloistered, heated air of the room broiled to a fever-pitch.
Donahue gasped as Wilkins let go of Travers, who no longer fought back against him but stood still, his eyes glazed over. Sweat poured from her dirtied red bangs down to her chest. Her heartbeat became so fast she thought it might tear through flesh and bone to escape its ribbed prison. In a fraction of the time it would take a normal man, the person she once knew as one of her most trusted officers raised his pistol and fired.
Plinkett crumpled to the ground, gun dropping from his hand. Rhinehold snatched the weapon before Donahue could blink much less register what had happened. Her ragged breaths were all she could hear now, the gunshot so close to her ear having deadened her senses. Evelyn, Michael, Robinson, all of them were rooted in place, either out of fear or because of whatever the singer had done to Wilkins affecting them.
“Now that we’ve cleared that up, it’s time to begin our little walk in the park,” Rhinehold said as he marched toward her, confident she wouldn’t shoot with Wilkins’ gun aimed at her back. “I had hoped that you could be convinced in a more…friendly manner. But I guess I should’ve known that you were too stubborn. You’re just like your father. You don’t understand the meaning of Justice.”
He pried her pistol from her hands and stepped back. Motioning with his own weapon, he said, “Wilkins, if you don’t mind?”
The butt of her officer’s firearm slammed into the back of her head. The floor rushed up to meet her face. She saw stars and felt the singe of her headache return. Darkness swelled and sleep took her once more.
* * *
The anxious face of Kruger stared down at Finch as he lowered his empty gun. The coroner offered to help him up with the hand that wasn’t holding a bent bedpan. After being pulled to his feet, he shrugged off the man’s apologies as unnecessary. “I could have been an infected. I’d probably do the same if I were you.” He holstered
his weapon. “Next time though, make sure the man you attack isn’t carrying what he thinks is a loaded gun.”
Kruger agreed, but when he saw the blood leaking out the side of Finch’s head he insisted on sitting him down in his office to inspect the wound. Finch wanted to refuse. Head wounds always looked worse than they were, in his opinion. Here he wasn’t willing to take that chance.
The office was small, the size of an enlarged broom closet, but somehow it suited Kruger. An aged filing cabinet lined the back wall, grime-covered slides and locks giving it a busted appearance. A CRT monitor and a dusty computer sat atop an efficient, inexpensive desk that reminded Finch of a relic a famous archaeologist might embark on a quest to find. The singular light fixture wasn’t eco-friendly by any means and he imagined that this was one of the few corners the hospital had been willing to cut. Altogether, the character of the room fit Kruger to a T.
As the coroner patched him up, Finch what had happened at the hospital. Kruger explained that earlier in the morning, before lunchtime, several doctors had been summoned for what he assumed were house calls and left in a rush. But, only fifteen minutes later, they came barging back in, demanding a complete evacuation of both patients and staff.
When he’d questioned one of them about the absurd orders, the look in that man’s eye had been so foreign that Kruger knew something was wrong.
“What happened next?” asked Finch, holding a bag of ice against his bandaged head wound.
“I saw a nurse try to explain to one of the doctors that a patient couldn’t be moved off the machines this early in his treatment. I watched as the doctor shoved her down, walked into that room, and pulled the plug on that poor man. I watched as he left and knocked the nurse out cold when she attempted to go into that room. I watched as a thing wriggled underneath the back of his shirt and knew that my worst fears had been realized.”
“So you hid.”
“So I hid. I didn’t spend as much time with the parasite as you might think, but nothing moves quite like it does. When I saw that he was infected, that all of them were, I got as far away as I could. There must have been thirty of them in all, doctors and infected patients alike. We don’t keep a full staff at all times. There’s a lot of rotated shifts and temp work for nurses, and people around here are not often in dire need of medical care.” He threw a nervous glance at the door, must have heard something that spooked him.
Finch processed the information, trying to make sense of everything that had happened since he came to Lone Oak. There must have been something he’d overlooked in his investigation, some small detail he’d tossed aside because it hadn’t seemed relevant at the time. Try as he might, he was sure he’d inspected every aspect of the case, interviewed all of those involved. When Black’s death and the impending closure of the quarry hadn’t been the end of it, he’d lost faith in his own talents.
In truth, he’d been on the wrong foot from the beginning. Waltzing into town, he was confident that the Church of Divine Promise had played a role in the victim’s death. Confronted by falsehoods and foibles, he trudged headfirst into a wild theory about a book and an author. He’d interviewed a man based on the vague idea that his initials meant something. The parasites slithered over everything in Lone Oak, from the mines to the beer to the people themselves. When Black’s handwriting matched the writing on the wall and in the book−
−but how did he know that it was a match? The flourishes in the book were similar, but he was no handwriting expert. Black had died without any sort of verification and some of his words had been hollow and vague, noncommittal even. But it had to be him, the bootlegger had pointed right to him, given him all the details he needed to put together Rhinehold’s story and Black’s.
Rhinehold’s story. The man was a successful author, a teller of tales. Finch remembered now, the odd spindly fingers with gaudy rings as they pranced across the tablet. No pen, no paper, all electronic, no trace. It would have to be such a simple thing he missed. He was wrong, there was no queen parasite. There was only a king. A patriarch. Patrick.
The initials had meant something although their owner never intended for them to play a part. The answer had been in front of him from the start. The words were specific, the message clear. His dream had led him to his assumptions for a reason. There was a reason he’d found them in a book about religion in Lone Oak. There was a reason Rhinehold reappeared in town only after the family he’d feuded with vanished and someone tried to strike their name from the record. Rhinehold wasn’t a man of faith; he was a man of revenge. Years after his family’s misfortune, he still sought to end everyone that had wronged him.
Anna had given him the answer, had tried to tell him from the beginning. In his dream, the cultists were singing. Rhinehold was the leader of the choir and a pastor. What better position to lead a flock, to indoctrinate followers than to preach to them every Sunday? Rhinehold and McAlister were much more alike than he’d imagined.
Dropping the bag of ice, Finch relayed what he’d realized to Kruger. The coroner was skeptical but the absurdity of it had passed the point of impossible to believe back to being stranger than fiction. “Sounds as plausible as anything I’ve heard or seen this week. But none of this changes that we’re deep in the bowels of this thing with no clue where to go. Rhinehold’s your prime suspect, okay, but you don’t know where he is. You don’t even know if he’s controlling the parasite the way you think he is.”
Emboldened by his success, Finch’s thinker was firing on all cylinders. “He wants to cleanse the filth, right? He’ll want to round up whoever’s left and ‘purge’ them all at once. With our communications out, he has no way to do that.” He envisioned a map of Lone Oak in his mind, trying to parse out any location that would help Rhinehold accomplish his insane goal. He’d spent four days in this town, not enough time to get to know its ins and outs.
Maybe the coroner had a few ideas. “Albert, is there any way that you know of to get a message out to the whole city?”
Kruger drummed his fingers on the desk and Finch started to think Morse code might be a possibility if it could somehow be broadcast. “There’s a satellite phone at the Forestry Station,” he said, “but that wouldn’t let him contact survivors on any larger scale.”
This was news to Finch; why had Donahue not told him about it? Was it something that had somehow been kept from her? “How do you know this?”
“I have a friend who works there. Says it doesn’t see much use, but it works.”
“Anything else he could use?”
Kruger brightened. “There’s also an old air-raid siren not too far from there. It might take some doing, but with the right help he could configure it to transmit his voice across the entire town.”
Finch struggled to think of a better plan. It was a long shot, but if Rhinehold wanted to gather everyone in one place, it was his best bet. “That’s where we need to go. Come on.” As much as he didn’t want to put another man in the line of fire, Kruger wouldn’t be any safer at the hospital.
The sun had risen as he and Kruger made their way back to the central building of the complex. The police car was where they had parked it, but Sheriff Donahue was still missing.
Her absence magnified the pit in his stomach, like a rat chewing its way into his innards. He preferred not to think about her corpse lying spread-eagled on the floor like Susan Edwick. Or burnt to a crisp like Jane Harley. Or mangled beyond recognition like all victims of the infected. He would as soon not think of her at all, but it was all he could do to keep her image on the edge rather than at the forefront.
Descending back to the first floor, the breeze swept over Finch before he saw the opening at the bottom of the stairs and heard the alarm. He bolted down the steps two at a time, lamenting his complete shortage of ammo and for leaving Mason unattended. He saw the busted glass of the entrance, followed the trail of blood that led to the open door of the emergency room.
His mistakes continued to mount. The deputy’s b
ody was gone. The ringing of the alarm drowned out everything but a single sound. The wail of the infected broke through. They were coming.
Running faster than he believed possible, Finch and Kruger hopped in the car. The keys were still in the ignition. Not looking back, Finch slammed his foot down on the pedal and drove.
A HEART OF DARKNESS
The dirt path that carved through the woods was too narrow for their vehicles to pass through. On either side of the police van, inches from the tires, deep trenches as high as his chest plunged into the ground. Past the ditches endless troves of pine trees and the occasional birch molded the landscape. Uncanny darkness shrouded the road despite the time of day. Earlier he’d bypassed a wider road that would’ve been promising had it not dead-ended at a cliff. That left only the path in front of him, designed for ATVs and similar off-road vehicles.
Rhinehold cursed the forestry commission and the town for their lack of foresight, a reverberation he was all too familiar with. Typical of them, to focus on preservation where it suited them. Their only god was themselves and how to maintain the status quo. They had no time for Truth. No time for Justice. He’d witnessed that fact firsthand.
Donahue’s body was heavier than he expected for someone of her relative size, but he was plenty capable of hauling her out to the Forestry Station on his own. Behind him, Travers and Wilkins led a cavalcade of forty people, many of whom seemed nonplussed about the state of their sheriff. And why shouldn’t they be? They didn’t understand what had happened at the police station, had only heard a single gunshot ring out in the night. With armed persuasion, they needed no other convincing that Rhinehold’s plan was their best option for survival. Idiots. Filth.
He continued up the trail toward the Forestry Station. Ahead of him, the greens and browns of the woods became less muddled, their shapes more distinct as the gap widened and the sun made itself known. He saw the civil defense siren as he crested the hill.
