by Tom Bont
“You’re not going to get fired, are you?” Angela asked. She looked around at the hospital lab.
“Nah,” Heather answered, waving her hand as if to brush off the question. “No one uses these labs this time of night. And the dayshift spills more materials than I’m going to use.” She pulled a pair of rubber gloves on. “You know, I’m an ER doc these days, not a hematologist,” she confessed. “Why don’t you have your FBI lab look at it?”
“Because they’re so backlogged right now,” Angela complained. “It’d be months before I got the results back.”
“You haven’t changed a bit since college. Danny, is she this impatient when she’s not around me?”
Danny’s face turned a shade of red. “She’s not that imp—p—patient with me,” he stuttered. He tried to relax by leaning on the table and ended up flipping a hefty, stainless steel tray loaded with medical utensils off the edge. The clangs, clatters, and smashes grew louder as he tried to catch everything at once and succeeded only in flinging it all in every other direction.
Heather giggled. “Here, I got it,” as she rushed over to help him. She peeked out from her hanging hair, and her eyes smiled brightly at him. Angela knew the look. That boy was in trouble.
Werewolf? Human? Can they even do it?
That was a visual she didn’t need. They finally stood up with everything back on the tray. Heather cradled it with one arm while she placed her other hand on Danny’s chest and slowly slid it over to his bicep. “Why don’t you go sit down on the couch over there.”
He twisted his head back and forth until he spied the couch and rushed over to it.
Angela flipped the top of the cooler back while Heather grilled her. “Where did you find him?”
“He’s on loan from the Redstick Police.”
“They sure grow ‘em nice out there.”
“There’s a whole town full of them,” Angela groaned. “Go help yourself.” She pulled out a rack of chilled test tubes, each with a different blood sample from the church basement. “And don’t say anything you don’t want him to hear. He’s got excellent hearing.”
“817-555-1234,” Heather murmured.
“What was that?”
“My phone number. You call me enough. You don’t have it memorized?”
“Your phone number is ‘Heather’ in my phone.”
They both twisted their heads as Danny ripped a section of magazine cover off, a phone number scrawled across it, and tucked it in his pocket.
“Heather!” Angela whispered harshly, “he’s my partner! Leave him alone!”
“All that means, sister, is that he’s available.”
Danny’s face turned red again. He stood. “I’m gonna go hunt down a soda. I’ll be back.”
As soon as the door slipped shut, Heather squealed under his breath, “Isn’t he just darlin’?”
Angela rolled her eyes. “Are you gonna help tonight or scare off my new partner?”
“It’s my night off. Give me a break, okay?”
While Heather worked in the lab, Angela and Danny watched a Magnum P.I. marathon in the hospital visitor’s lounge. Halfway through a particularly cheesy gunfight, Heather texted, “Done.” Angela shoved the bag of microwave popcorn into the trash, and she and Danny made their way upstairs.
“Are you sure these samples aren’t contaminated?” Heather asked.
“The place we found them was pretty grimy,” Angela admitted. “The whole place was contaminated. Why?”
“I’ve got samples here from three distinct species,” Heather said. “Humans, pigs, and dogs. That’s why it’s taken me so long. I had to triple-check everything. This fourth sample? I’m not sure what it came from. Now don’t try it at home, but I think it would serve as a viable transfusion for all three distinct species.”
Danny scratched his nose. “Why those three?”
Heather leaned against the workbench and crossed her arms. “Well, pig and human? They’re close already. We’ve even gene modified certain pig species to produce type O blood to prove we could use it in an emergency.”
Danny scrunched his brow as he hugged his chest. In a quiet voice, he asked, “Why the dog?”
“I don’t have a clue. It’s possible they were working to combine the human and dog blood too. Pigs and humans are close. Human and dog? The coagulation profiles are way different. Maybe this tri-xeno profile was an accident.” She handed a printout to Angela. In any case, the sample labeled ‘P-9’ is human—and dog—compatible too. Somebody’s up for the Nobel Prize on this if I didn’t screw up my testing.”
Angela and Danny stared at each other for a few quiet moments.
Heather sighed. “I can’t ask where you got this, can I?”
“Unfortunately, no,” Angela muttered. “I can tell you that you’ve made life rougher for me.” She smirked. “Does that make you happy?”
“Yep!”
Angela looked around at the mess. “Are you going to get into trouble? Using hospital resources?”
“Nah.” Heather paused. “They give me quite a bit of leeway as I’m taking the night shift in the ER. They’re hoping I’ll change my mind and move back upstairs to their research labs.” She slipped off her rubber gloves. “All right, kids, get out. I gotta clean up.”
As Angela and Danny walked through the parking lot, he handed her his cell phone. He’d brought up some tabloid news site. The headline read, FBI Werewolf Squad Targeting Outlaw Bikers! Below was a picture of Angela and Danny outside the biker bar, only Danny’s head had been replaced with Lon Chaney’s 1940s wolfman picture.
The steel cage door clanked, and the loud buzzer set her teeth to rattling. The familiar sight of yellow and red lines, gray, chipped paint along the walls and bars, and the Lexan windows at all the guard stations greeted her as usual.
“Today’s not your usual visiting day, Agent Hollingsworth,” the last guard in the gauntlet stated.
Master of the Obvious!
“Official business this time, Morris.”
He took her Glock and two spare magazines from under the window and handed her back a receipt. When he decided she wasn’t going to engage in their usual, friendly banter, he pointed to her hands. “Is that a book? And a carton of smokes?”
“Yeah.” She raised a notebook recovered from the church basement and thumbed the pages while she gripped the carton under her arm. “They’ve been inspected.” She turned and faced the last gate and waited for it to open.
He paused long enough that she considered asking him to open the door.
Just as I thought. Anything out of the ordinary throws this guy off.
Finally. “Opening Five!” followed by another loud clank and buzzer. She stepped into the private visitation room. Her brother waited, secured to the table, only this time with a curious look on his face. A guard stood at the door.
“Hello, Chris.” She didn’t lean down to deliver the standard hug.
“Today’s not Saturday,” he said. “What gives?”
“Remove his cuffs, please.” She delivered a pounding glare to her brother. “He’ll behave himself.”
Chris massaged his unshackled wrists and stared at his sister as the guard stepped back to his position by the door. She always insisted on keeping him chained to the table. She wasn’t afraid of him assaulting her but wanted to hand out the tough love instead. Today though, he was part of her investigation, and he was going to snitch for her whether he realized it or not. She needed him off-balance first, though. He eyed the carton of cigarettes and the notebook as she sat down at the table.
While at the office earlier, she’d tried her hand at deciphering the writings in the notebook. Brad walked by scratching his three-day-old stubble. He looked over her shoulder, and instead of his usual inane attempts at humor, offered a professional evaluation. “That’s Lithuanian.”
She stared up at him. “Really?” She thumbed a few more pages. “How the heck do you know that?”
“My grandmothe
r emigrated from there. I’ve seen some of her letters.”
“Lithuanian,” she muttered.
After seeing the church basement, I’d have figured Transylvanian instead.
She laid it out on her desk. “Can you read it?”
He examined it for a few moments. “Some basic words. Nothing useful. Give Southern Methodist University a call. They got a Baltic humanities group or something. Someone over there ought to be able to help.”
“I know someone else a little closer to home.” Picking up the notebook, she drove immediately to the prison and arranged to have her brother waiting for her.
Chris wrung his hands and twisted his fingers as he continued to eye the cigarettes. Angela suspected he wanted to reach for them, but she knew he knew better. Hands Behine the Yellow Line was etched and painted on the table. Of course, Behine and Line rhymed, so maybe the misspelling was on purpose.
“You studied Lithuanian in college.”
He wrinkled his nose at her and nodded slowly. “So?”
“Why Lithuanian?”
He shrugged. “Easy Credit.” He stared back at the cigarettes.
“You’re just being humble. That’s a hard language to learn. You made all As.” She knew exactly how to stroke his ego. Sadly, it worked both ways. Twins. Sheesh!
“Oh, it is. It’s also one of the oldest languages in the world too.”
“No!”
“Seriously!” He bobbed his head sharply and scooted forward in his seat. And before she knew it, sitting before her, was the brother she grew up with, not the crazed ex-junkie who beat the shit out of their dad. “Fifty-five hundred years with little to no drift in pronunciation or structure.”
“College was a long time ago.” She plucked at a cuticle with what she hoped was a mildly disinterested look on her face. “You’ve probably forgotten all about it.” She stilled her hands and barely raised an eye to his, gauging if she could continue with this dance.
His laughter filled her heart with familiar and long-lost warmth. “It’s hasn’t been that long, Ang. Why you ask?”
“I ran across something at work. That’s all.” She nudged the carton of cigarettes a little closer to the yellow line. “So, why would you take Lithuanian? Seems pretty esoteric to me.”
He glared into her eyes, and the warmth cooled. “Thought it might be something interesting to do. Pretty girls with foreign accents. You know. Besides, I needed some electives. I didn’t really like the class. I would have preferred PE fencing or karate. But I needed…why the interest?”
“So, you could read it if I brought something here?” She elbowed the carton. Just. A bit. Closer.
“For you, no fuckin’ way. For a carton of smokes, you can bet your ass I would.”
“Whew! I thought I was going to have to go see a stranger.” She slid the notebook up against the yellow line and spun it around so he could read it.
He looked over at the guard. “Can I touch the notebook?”
“You know the rules, Chris,” the guard said. “Nothing can go back and forth while you’re unsecured.”
Chris swung back to his sister. “You’ll have to turn the pages.”
As soon as she flipped open the cover, he leaned forward and read the first few lines. “Where did you find this?”
“Some crazy was doing experiments on a young girl and her twin brother. We think he was making notes in here about it.”
“Twins?”
She recognized the flicker in his eyes. They were her eyes. Anytime something about twins popped up in the news, or they passed a pair on the street, their thoughts always skipped to each other. Their twin bond was something their parents could never understand.
Yet, I still sent him away.
“Are they okay?” he asked.
“The girl, miraculously, is still alive. And healthy. Her brother died, though. I want to find this asshole.”
“Yeah, there’s a reference here to blood matching. Felicia has the tri-xeno…” Without warning, his face paled, and he swallowed a lump. “He was giving them pig and dog blood?”
Angela narrowed her eyes. “Yeah, a real sicko, huh?”
He read a few more pages, and with each new one, he coiled his hands tighter and tighter into a ball.
Finally, he sat up straight in his chair and scooted away from the table. “Guard, I want to go back to my cell.”
Panic racked his eyes. And worry. It reminded her of the time she’d climbed a tree and couldn’t get down. He’d thrown their Frisbee up there on purpose, and she’d gone after it because he didn’t like heights after the Rudolph incident. He’d run back and forth between her and the house, unable to decide whether to stay and help or get their parents. He was afraid for her, as she suspected he was afraid for her now. “What wrong, Chris?!”
“The guy who wrote this is whacked. He’s collecting twins.” The unspoken sentence lay on his lips, We’re twins!
She knew what he was thinking because the same thoughts had gone through her head when she found out Ja’son had died. Her heart ached for Felicia. Even with the trouble Chris had caused their family, she wouldn’t have wished anything so grievous on him.
Before she had a chance to say anything else, he stretched across the yellow line and grabbed her wrist, forcing her to look into his eyes. “Stay away from this one, Ang,” he strangled out around a gasp. “This guy is whacked!” Chris’s grip was desperate and painful as he got louder and louder. “Whacked, Ang! Don’t do it! Don’t!” He had pulled her half over the table before chaos burst through the door. As the guard pulled him off her, another one rushed in to help restrain him. Soon, the only sound was the slamming of the metal door on her empty room.
Angela and Danny listened to Dr. Albert Martinkus, SMU’s Baltic Studies chair, read to himself for three hours as he translated the notebook. He had insisted they leave it with him, or at least let him scan it in, but Angela refused both requests. Evidence, however “weird,” was staying in her possession. Losing evidence would put her on the fast-track to the Fertilizer Tracking Office.
He flipped the last page and looked at them with a wide grin and a sparkle in his eyes. “Someone’s got quite the imagination.”
“Why would you say that, Doctor?” Danny asked.
“These are obviously draft notes for a science fiction novel. What’s so amazing is the time the writer spent recording it in Lithuanian.”
“Care to explain?” Angela implored.
“Well, for instance—” he flipped a couple of pages back on his yellow pad “—this reference to blood ‘majic.’ The word the writer used is not the real word for magic. Its more literal meaning is, um, ‘science,’ as in something made by hand instead of naturally occurring. And the references to animal sacrifice and electricity—” he blew a short raspberry “—I’m not a scientist, but I recognize quackery when I see it. This is definitely a work of fiction.”
Angela let out a long sigh. “I don’t suppose the author signed his name, did he?”
“No,” Albert said. “In fact, now that you mention it, I can’t tell what the sex of the writer is. It’s usually a man because women were illiterate back when this dialect was used. But you could tell it was a man writing. Here—” he pointed at the notebook “—the pronouns are all gender neutral. Could be a modern slant, but I can’t say with any certainty.”
Danny shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “What do you think the story’s about then?”
“If I had to guess…a werewolf.”
A flush rushed up Angela’s arms, across her shoulders, and down her spine. “A werewolf?” She stared at Danny.
Danny’s eyelids fluttered, and he swallowed a lump. A bead of sweat formed on his upper lip.
“It’s what it looks like to me.” Albert smirked and handed the notebook across the desk. “Science fiction. For instance, there is a reference here to a barn—” he referred to his notes again “—in the Village of the Hall. That’s where the narrator’s going to conduct
his final experiments before implementing the ‘plan.’ A mad scientist’s lab in the Village of the Hall? I don’t know of a town with that name.”
“Thanks, Doc,” Danny said, standing up. To Angela, he seemed in a rush to get out of there. “And, um, we’re going to need your yellow pad, too. Sorry.” He shrugged in the shy country-boy way she recognized from Redstick.
Angela pulled onto Highway 183, and traffic trapped her in the right lane for over a mile. “This is what I love about Texas,” she griped. “People think speed limits are suggestions and blinkers mean to speed up and cut me off.” She cranked the temperature down a couple of degrees and relaxed back in her seat for the ride to Fort Worth. “So, what was that all about back there?” she asked Danny.
He stared down at his phone. “Village of the Hall” he muttered. He held his up phone and showed her a map. “Hallsville, maybe? Out on I-20, east of Dallas. Barn country anyway.”
“Maybe. But that’s not what I’m talking about.” She poked him in the arm, and he shifted his gaze to the side of the road. “You know something. Spill it.”
He took a deep breath and chewed the inside of his cheek for a moment. “I think someone’s trying to create lupus.” He nervously tapped the cap on his water bottle. “This is the definition of bad.”
Angela shrugged. “What’s so bad about it? You’re lupus.”
“Right. And—” he took another deep breath “—I’m a Frenator.”
“And?”
“Right. It takes years, sometimes decades, to learn how to do that unless you’ve got the mental discipline to do it faster. The Nazis liked the idea of a werewolf super-soldier, but they weren’t willing to wait that long.”
“Nazis?” she snapped. Neither of them said anything for a few moments, but she blinked her eyes and nodded in long, slow arcs. “They tried to create their own artificial version of a werewolf.”
“Right. And Dr. Josef Mengele was ass deep in it. He experimented on death camp prisoners. Worked on a strain of the virus to make Frenatus off the bat.” A dark shadow crossed his face as he paused to stare out the windshield. He radiated a deep uneasiness that wrapped around her like a cold cloak. He took a long drink of water. “He experimented heavily on twins, Angela. One theory he had was that all twins had some kind of supernatural link. Had the crazy idea the link was the key to creating Frenatus. He tried to put the secret to that link in a bottle.” He held his water bottle up to make his point.
