When The Tik-Tik Sings

by Doug Lamoreux

  The hours ticked by. Ben counted the floor tiles, counted the squares in the panels of the ceiling, counted sheep. He was counting the framed photographs again, to make sure his first count had been accurate, when the door opened and he was once more on display. This time, the oglers were Ron Musselwhite, the police chief, and an elderly fellow with spectacles hogging his face. The old man groaned, nodded to the chief, and left. Musselwhite entered the booking room and closed the door. He plopped down on the bench, heaved a sigh, and said, “Court, you are without doubt, the luckiest son of a bitch I have ever met.”

  “Is that a fact?” Ben asked.

  “It is. And if, just if, you can get through this little meeting with me without cracking wise, by which I mean, saying something incredibly stupid, your luck may hold and you may again breathe fresh air. It's a big if, so mind your mouth.”

  Ben nodded without a word.

  “That gentleman,” Musselwhite said, pointing at the door. “Was Llewellyn Crossbinder, the curator of the river museum. He wanted to get a look at you and, after the night you gave him, I thought we both owed him that.” Ben said nothing. Musselwhite went on. “I don't know where to begin, so I'll just lay out the examples of your luck in no particular order. The feeding tank at the museum where, God knows why, you decided to go for a swim, is undamaged. The Plexiglas was developed for sharks and is bulletproof and able to withstand incredible water pressures. Lucky you.

  “Walter Dunn, the museum security guard, has been released. He didn't have a heart attack. His medical emergency was one-part angina and two-parts anxiety. It's clear your clown act brought it on. But it's also reasonable to assume, if his life was in jeopardy, your response also saved him. Neither the curator nor Mr. Dunn wants to press charges. So instead of a second-degree murder charge, you get a pat on the back. Like I said, you're luckier than shit.

  “I've spoken with Detective Vanderjagt, and with the mayor, and your chief or, as you delight in calling him for some reason, my brother-in-law. With all that is going wrong in this city, nobody wants a headline about an arrested firefighter. Particularly if the screwy details were to come out, which they would if we pressed for them. The bottom line is; you're being released without charges.”

  Ben nodded. “Thank you.”

  “Don't thank me,” Musselwhite said. “I've asked no questions about the museum because we found the knife and, frankly, I don't want to know. I think you're a fool, and I'm not certain you're sane, and I don't give a damn about either. But I'll tell you this, Court, if you ever upset Erin again – like you upset her tonight – your next prank is going to end with a Fire Department funeral.” Musselwhite stood. “Get the hell out of my police station.”

  The air off the Mississippi River was cool and crisp. It tasted sweet as Ben stepped from the Law Enforcement Center where, it seemed, he'd been for years. Dawn threatened an arrival. He started across the lot, stretching his legs for home, when a stranger climbed from a compact car and blocked his path. He was young, thin but muscled, with sandy hair but a dark expression. He said, “Excuse me,” but nothing in his tone sounded polite.

  “Can I help you?”

  “You're Ben Court?” the man asked. When Ben admitted it, he went on. “My name is Tony Vanderjagt. I'm Erin's brother.”

  A second look showed the resemblance; the same thin nose, the same eyes, and a heat behind them identical to the anger he'd seen in Erin's earlier that night. Ben smiled and extended a hand. Tony ignored it and Ben pulled it back.

  “My sister called me, pleaded with me to drive over here to bail you out.”

  “I appreciate—”

  “Don't bother. I came for her. Because she asked it of me, despite my advice to leave you in the can. Turns out I wasn't needed; bail wasn't needed. I don't know the details and, unless Erin chooses to fill me in sometime in the future, I never will. But for whatever reason they've dropped whatever charges they had against you. Great. Congratulations.”

  “I'm sorry you wasted your trip.”

  “It wasn't a waste. I got to see my sister. That happens too infrequently. And I get to warn you… I don't want Erin hurt.”

  “Of course you don't.”

  “No.” He turned, squaring off and balling his fists. He seemed to grow right in front of Ben. “Hear what I'm saying. I don't want my sister hurt.”

  Ben nodded. “I hear you.”

  Twenty – Nine

  Scott Meyers got the bum's rush. On tip-toes, moving backwards, straining for a last glimpse of his wife, Theresa, over the nurse's shoulder, Meyers was ushered from Delivery Room Four. “We'll let you back in a few minutes,” Virginia Silas, the nurse, the sergeant at arms in scrubs said as she maneuvered the nervous father-to-be. “We need to get her ready for the doctor. We'll get you a cup of coffee at the nurses' station.” Silas didn't argue with patients or their significant others. She did her job, friendly but firmly, leaving the door to the delivery room ajar. She'd be back in a flash. Their steps echoed as they disappeared down the hall.

  Delivery Room Three, across the hall, was dark and unused but not unoccupied. The door inched silently open and the occupant listened as the echoes died and the hall fell silent. The door jerked wide and the dark thing pulled itself into the hall. The naked abomination of a human female torso shown sickly green-black in the dim fluorescent light. Leathery wings on its back folded down and in, wrapping the body, as long arms stretched clawed hands to pull it quickly across the tiled floor. Undulating like a paraplegic thrown from her chair, long black hair in riot on its head, the aswang reached the door to Room Four, nudged it open, and vanished inside. Then came an ear-splitting scream.

  Silas stepped from the nurses' station, glaring down the hall, trying to localize what she'd heard. The scream could only have come from one room, that of the new patient, Meyers. But it wasn't a shout of pain, it was a scream of terror. Silas took off for Room Four. Behind her, the husband, holding a Styrofoam cup while a unit clerk poured, watched after the nurse with his mouth open. His wife screamed again. Meyers dropped the cup and ran after the nurse.

  Nurse Silas shoved the delivery room door open. She gawped inside. Then she screamed, too.

  The patient was on the bed as Silas had left her. But there the normality ended. Atop the patient lay some kind of animal or alien creature, the nurse had never seen the like. It had huge wings, wild hair, the upper body of a woman and, from what Silas could see, no lower body at all. The blanket and sheet were pulled down, Theresa's hospital gown shoved up, the mound of her belly exposed. The thing grabbed the patient by the throat, cutting off her screams and pinning her to the bed while, with the other clawed hand, it reached down and massaged her ripe belly. The wings fluttered in excitement beneath the ceiling light, throwing a strobe of shadows about the room.

  With its green eyes glued on Theresa's belly, the creature opened its mouth and extended a glistening red tongue past rows of yellow fangs. It was round, thin, and incredibly long – unlike any tongue Silas had ever seen. It ended in a keen point like the tip of an IV catheter, perfect for injecting or drawing off body fluids. With a hiss, the dark thing drove the tongue into the patient's stomach.

  Silas gasped. Scott Meyers arrived demanding, “What's the matter? What's happened?” The nurse couldn't answer, couldn't catch her breath. He looked past her into the room, heard a ghastly sucking noise, and saw the animal on the bed defiling his wife. The creature lolled its head to the side with only the bloodshot whites of its eyes showing, the irises rolled up and back. The thing fed in ecstasy.

  Meyers added his screams to the chorus. The creature's eyes rolled down, shining green in its filthy head. It saw the husband and nurse gawking and, continuing to feast, hissed around its tongue like an agitated snake. The nurse shrieked again. Meyers pushed past her into the room.

  At the nurses' station, the unit clerk was in a panic. She had no idea what was going on but knew, whatever it was, it had never happened before. She dialed security, screaming f
or help, as a groggy OB doctor joined her from his on-call sleeping room. Both turned at a new shriek.

  Scott Meyers stumbled backwards out of the delivery room like a wrestler tossed from the ring. His arms windmilled on either side of him. He vomited an arc of red through the air in his wake. To the unit clerk, it looked like he'd spit a mouthful of cherry Kool-Aid. The doctor guessed red liqueur. Meyers hit the wall on the far side of the hall and collapsed. Only then did clerk and doctor see the bright deluge down the front of his shirt and realize his throat had been slit.

  Hysterical, the unit clerk started dialing again. Where were those security guards? The doctor ran to the fallen man and, with one look, saw there was nothing to be done. He turned for the delivery room, took a step, then screamed as something scuttled out toward him.

  The doctor saw what you've seen, coming at him at incredible speed, crawling low on the floor, wings folded, torso squirming as it clicked grotesque nails on the tiles, hair flying, gore coated tongue flicking over stained fangs. It hissed, howled, and bit viciously at him. The defenseless doctor's screams lasted mere seconds and he went wherever Meyers had gone. Dripping blood and shrieking, aswang scuttled back into the dark of Room Three.

  Terrified but needing to know, the clerk tip-toed down the hall. The patient's husband, no longer an expectant father, was propped against the far wall. The doctor lay at his feet a few steps away. Their hearts had stopped, but both continued to leak blood onto the polished tiles. Hugging the wall as far from Room Three as she could, the clerk peeked into Room Four. Nurse Silas lay butchered on the floor. Theresa Meyers lay lifeless on the bed, her sheets painted with blood. Gulping air so as not to puke, the clerk hurried back to her desk and grabbed up the phone again.

  The door to Room Three opened and Vong stepped out. The clerk didn't know her. She knew only that a darkly exotic woman, wearing a sun dress and sporting the freakiest green eyes she'd ever seen, had stepped out into the middle of that bloody carnage, stared straight at her, and smiled. Then, despite it being night and their being indoors, she slipped on a pair of sunglasses, turned, and walked away like a tourist strolling down the beach. She stepped over the doctor's corpse and the body of the murdered husband as if they were puddles on a wet sidewalk.

  Vong passed two security guards coming the other way. The unit clerk pointed, screaming, “Her! It's her! It's her!”

  The rent-a-cops spun in their tracks. “Hey! Hey, you! Stop!”

  Though it happened before her eyes, the next few minutes became a mystery the stunned unit clerk would be unable to help the police unravel. She wouldn't remember a thing.

  The larger of the two guards laid his hand on Vong's shoulder. She grabbed it and tossed him from one wall to the other, and back again, like a billiard ball off the table cushions. He collapsed in a heap. She jerked the smaller one over the top of his unconscious partner, carried him to the end of the hall, and threw him against the window. Overlooking downtown Duncan, it was made of Lexan, not glass. Vong smashed the guard into it three times before it shattered to create a wide enough opening through which she could throw him. The drop was only twenty-four feet. But, if the crunch was any indication, the angle of the fall and the quick stop combined to cleanly snap his neck. Vong followed him through the hole, enjoyed the view for a moment crouched on the window ledge, then leapt out.

  Everyone within the clerk's sight was dead. She finally gathered her wits enough to get an outside line and dial 9-1-1. But somebody was ahead of her. Outside the broken window the night was already alive with red and blue flickering light, police sirens, squealing tires, and slamming doors. In minutes, gunshots and screams were added to the list.

  From the radio traffic, it was a good guess all hell had broken loose at the hospital. From the sound of gunfire as Erin approached, the guess was confirmed. She squealed her tires turning onto Williams Park, the street bordering Duncan Memorial to the south, and was fast approaching the first entrance when something indefinable shot across the street, four feet off the ground, in front of her vehicle. Her brain registered something flying, before her eyes had a chance to see what. She hit the brakes, fishtailed, and slid the car into the hospital lot. She grabbed the rearview mirror, trying to find whatever it was she'd nearly hit. Then something huge smashed the front of her car. The windshield popped; the glass spidered. Her airbag exploded in her face.

  Somehow the vehicle came to a stop. Stunned, Erin fell out of the driver's door, pulling her Glock as she staggered to her feet. She turned back to an ear-piercing shriek, and fired at a brilliant explosion of red and black in the air above her squad. She turned, following and firing, emptying the clip at the moving target. Between the god-awful squawks and the barking of her handgun, she caught part of the eerie song she'd heard before.

  Tik, tik, tik. Tik, tik, tik.

  Knocked stupid by the airbag, blinded by the muzzle flashes, her nose full of burnt powder, Erin struggled to see past the parking lot lights to the night sky. The dark thing, whatever it was, had gone. The red thing, whatever the hell it was, had gone too. Both – just gone. But, finally, she had proof the damned things had been there. An oozing black substance which, other than the color, might have been blood, spattered the broken windshield. And brilliant red feathers, a handful of them, were lodged in the windshield frame.

  Wobbling, in a private fog, Erin took in the scene. Four patrol officers, one a supervisor with chevrons on his sleeves, stood in a pool of amber near a light pole at the edge of the drive. Two held smoking guns, looking into the darkness to the east. The other two, also with smoking guns, stared into the darkness to the north. Heading forward, toward the hospital, Erin found three patrol units between parking spaces and a fourth bridging a curb. A hospital guard lay dead on the sidewalk. Four bodies in blue were sprawled at various spots in the lot. Two moved slightly. Two, she discovered, would never move again. One of the dead officers was Parker Traer. Erin collapsed beside him.

  The Obstetrics' unit clerk, the only person left alive on the ward, stood staring out the busted window above, watching Erin cry.

  Thirty

  The tally at Duncan Memorial Hospital was monstrous. Nine dead, including another of Erin's closest friends. Three officers had been hospitalized in critical, stable, and satisfactory conditions. The critical officer, a married father of three, was beyond answering questions. Of the others, both bachelors, stable had no memory of the incident, and satisfactory, who'd been climbing from his squad when the attack came, hadn't seen a thing.

  The havoc in the streets became rage in the corridors of police headquarters and panic beneath the glistening dome of City Hall. In the lead investigator's office, the chief divided his gaze between the board of evidence and the detective as Erin tried to update him on the OB incident and the investigation as a whole. Her report somehow carried more weight as she delivered it with a frightening goose egg on her forehead. There were plenty of witnesses now, including herself, but the descriptions of what were believed to be three perpetrators were as ludicrous as the plot of an old Bela Lugosi movie. The ringleader was an exotic and beautiful dark-haired woman, Asian or Polynesian maybe, with two animal accomplices.

  “Animals?” the chief asked.

  “Right. Both fast as lightning, as they appeared out of nowhere, and both able to fly. One was dark with leathery wings—”

  “You mean like a bat?”

  “If so, it was a damned big bat. But the wings were somehow different. And a second creature, bright red, with a black head, and a murderous beak and talons.”

  “You mean like a bird?”

  “At the risk of repeating myself,” Erin said. “If so, it was a damned big bird.”

  “Can we get sketches distributed to patrol units?”

  Erin tilted her head, looking for a way to field the question. “We can try, if you think it would help. Pictures of a giant bird of prey, a hundred-pound bat with human arms and tits, and their fashion model Asian organ grinder? I don't know what…
” Erin let it trail off.

  The chief hesitated, nodded his understanding. “Skip it. We'll come back.”

  “Right.” She picked up the instant Ice Pack she'd swiped from the First Aid kit and held it to her head. She returned to her list. “I've alerted DMV, car dealerships, and realtors to try to get a handle on the exotic woman.”

  “Could the FBI help with the ID?”

  “Certainly, but you and the mayor wanted to keep the grenades, the gasoline, and Chandler's disappearance out of the hands of the feds. Are you ready to let go?”

  The chief rose, swore under his breath and took a lap around the room. It came to an abrupt end when he met Mayor Light entering the office unannounced.

  “Did I hear my title? And is that any way for a police chief to be carrying on?”

  “When you barge in,” Musselwhite said, returning to his chair. “You get what you get.”

  “Yes, well… We're all stressed,” the mayor said. “We'll let it go. I stopped to say that, following this evening's events, we've arranged a press conference for…” He consulted his watch. “One hour from now. I'll expect you both to be there.”

  Erin exploded. “I don't have time for another press conference.”

  Light looked as if he'd been slapped. “You're going to have to make time, Detective Vanderjagt. It's part of your job.”

  “I'm doing my job. I'm trying to stop a killer. I have no new information to share with the media.”

  “You can tell them that,” Light said. “In the most uplifting and informative manner possible.”