The Smiling Man Conspiracy (Evils of this World Book 2)

by C. J. Sears

  Bastard was separating them again. He never wanted to leave Evelyn. But what choice did he have? Those spikes would impale him if he hesitated.

  “I’ll be okay, Mike,” she said, kissing his cheek. “Just do as he says. We’ll meet back up soon.”

  Michael prayed she was correct. The thought of losing her—no, he wouldn’t let that happen. They survived Lone Oak. They’d live through this, God willing.

  *

  The man known as Cranston took up so much space that Zachary was sure the elevator would bust like the Overlord warned. He and Evelyn were compact, but the muscle-bound dunderhead Ortiz had called “Supes” more than made up for their lack of size. Compared to him, they were stick figures.

  The rhythmic strain of the cable against the counterweight and pulley system numbed Zachary to anything but his thoughts. He wasn’t sure what to make of either of his companions. Cranston was a complete unknown, but Evelyn…why had the Overlord kidnapped three people from Lone Oak? Was it coincidence or did he know something about what happened?

  Before being captured, Zachary investigated the disappearance of a young couple not unlike Michael and Evelyn. He was no private dick, but the sheriff claimed nothing was afoot. She told him that the teenagers had run off to do typical sweetheart nonsense. She was naïve. Or stupid.

  Willow Donahue should never have been appointed to the job. Her father was an excellent cop, always kept the peace, but she was different. She lacked the policeman’s burning passion: the drive to protect and serve. One of the other officers should’ve gotten the nod. Like him.

  Nepotism won out. It always did in Lone Oak. Even Zachary’s own father hadn’t been above ignoring merit in favor of his own children. His sister was made lead physician at the hospital even though he’d studied to become a doctor for years.

  Two failed careers, and he ended up at the newspaper. Boring work, but at least he could parlay that into questioning Sheriff Donahue’s methods. When she ignored the missing persons, he took advantage.

  Once again, he’d made the wrong decision, the wrong assumptions. He should’ve never gone into those woods. He wished he’d never heard those gunshots, never followed them to that creepy symbol that looked somewhat like a nine-pointed star.

  Then some asshole cold-cocked him and he woke up in a cell soaked with nasty water. Fast-forward to the present and he was still getting his ass kicked by life. Funny how that part always turned out.

  “Mr. Zachary, are you in there?”

  Evelyn’s words broke him from his stupor. He needed to focus if he was going to stay alive.

  “I’m here,” he said, “but I wish I could pinch myself and wake up back in my bed. I hate it, but Lone Oak is a shining star compared to this dump.”

  Even his mediocre two-room apartment sounded like heaven compared to being stuck in this mess.

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Two months. Maybe longer. Why?”

  “So you don’t know what happened?”

  “The missing persons? You know something? Is that why we’re here?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know about that. But there’s no Lone Oak to go back to. It’s dead.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Evelyn scrunched up her nose, trying to decide how best to break the news. Whatever that was.

  “Spit it out, girl.”

  She breathed deep. “Okay. This will sound crazy, but bear with me. Lone Oak’s people were taken over by a parasite. I’m not sure of the specifics. But a man named Patrick Rhinehold controlled them somehow and used them to murder a bunch of people. He tried to kill me and Mike and a dozen others but we escaped. At least, we thought we did. These masked men saved us, but they weren’t heroes. They drugged us, locked us away in this place.”

  Was she on medication? She sounded grade-A, loony-toons, bat-shit insane. But she mentioned the masked men. The same ones he’d seen continuously in his dreams: vague black shapes in military or elite forces uniforms. They must’ve been the ones that snatched him.

  The rest of her story made little sense to him, but maybe she was telling the truth. At least as she saw it. He supposed it didn’t matter if he had no home waiting for him on the other side. His priority hadn’t changed.

  “I believe you.”

  She relaxed. “I figured you ought to know. It seemed important.”

  He nodded, waited for the elevator to reach the bottom. Zachary peeked at his monitor. His heart rate was higher, but not too far above normal. At least he wasn’t scared shitless. Yet.

  He had a watch, and he still didn’t know the time. Figures.

  The elevator ground against the grooves, coming to a halt.

  Evelyn chewed her fingernails. Cranston remained silent. Zachary scratched at a rash on his neck and took the first worrisome step into the chamber.

  *

  The Overlord knew the girl and her boyfriend were picked up during the Tragedy of Lone Oak, but he wasn’t sure how much information she had. He’d read the reports, but Patrick Rhinehold’s name had been redacted from the files.

  It wasn’t a family he thought to hear about after all this time. They should’ve stayed dead and buried. When Rhinehold came back in the 1990s playing the part of celebrity preacher, he’d thought nothing of it. A fad, that’s all. Lone Oak had been abandoning tradition for the latest trend for decades.

  Sad. The founding families had a wonderful utopia built to be everlasting. But life was no fairytale. When that damn drought hit, it all went to hell. Then the war took their young. Few survived the cull.

  The Bradfords were the best of them. It was natural they endured the longest. But they went stupid. Got cocky and stooped to that fool feud with a Mormon family. They paid the price with their lives.

  So Rhinehold discovered the secret of Lone Oak’s origins, had he? That explained the moonshine ring the Overlord kept hearing about. Bastard must’ve spread the parasite spores via the drink. Clever, but it was also time-consuming. Direct inhalation was the best method for induction by far.

  He was dead now. The bombing would’ve taken care of that. Good riddance. A more deserving death there never was in the Overlord’s opinion.

  Code Omega cleanup operations were always so thorough. He admired the gumption it took to erase an entire town from existence while lying to the rest of the country. No one but the government could ever pull that off. It was a headline Wayland Zachary would’ve killed to stamp on his front page.

  Unlike the former editor, he had the inside scoop.

  THE MONSTER INSIDE

  The six-seater plane touched down on the runway at Fairvale Municipal Airport after nightfall. In spite of everything, seeing the transformation of the land from packed cityscapes to rolling hills and then mountains and forest filled Donahue with nostalgia. This was what home was supposed to look like.

  She hadn’t expected them to be able to book a flight during a dangerous lightning storm. Kasey’s charms proved to be the difference maker. That girl could talk a monk out of celibacy.

  The equipment they smuggled on board consisted of the Glock, Llewyn’s Browning, the Smith & Wesson, a pair of gun harnesses, and three clips of ammunition for each pistol plus spare rounds for the revolver. Donahue wanted Kevlar vests, but they didn’t have the means to acquire them before leaving town.

  “What do we know about this experiment we’re trying to stop?” she asked the blonde as they packed the weapons bag into the trunk of their rental car.

  “Not enough. We know the test is designed to perfect something they’re calling the Founder’s Formula. We know they’ve been kidnapping people for two years. And we know the Lone Oak parasite is something they’ve recently obtained.”

  “You said they’re making super-soldiers, right? They think these tests will somehow trigger the correct responses needed to gauge what level of control they can exert on a subject. The parasite isn’t a part of the tests?”

  Kasey shrugged. “We don
’t know every detail. My guess is that after isolating the control gene, they’ve cloned it and attempted to replicate its effects with little or no success. Before the parasite, they utilized a host of different vectors trying to accomplish something similar. The result, according to Conroy, is a selection of genetic freaks. Monsters.”

  Donahue sighed. “Fantastic. I love things that go bump in the night.”

  She closed the lid of the trunk and got in on the passenger side. Kasey knew their destination, so she drove while Donahue thanked herself for bringing along the magnum. If anything could stop a monster in its tracks, it was the power of a loaded Smith & Wesson revolver.

  It was strange leaping headfirst into certain trouble. She’d done it before, but her record wasn’t great. The couple she’d rescued the night before Lone Oak burned to the ground had died at the hands of Rhinehold. She herself had been captured and forced to watch her brother mutilated by the infected.

  This time would be different. This time, she knew who was friend and who was foe. If these so-called genetic freaks got close, or if more of the Smiling Man’s henchmen showed up, all Donahue had to do was pull the trigger.

  Her thoughts shifted to Llewyn. She prayed he was getting the help he needed at that church in the boonies. Pastor Hartman seemed like a nice guy and a decent theologian. Odd that she found it so easy to trust him considering the damage done by the last preacher she met.

  It didn’t hurt her that Llewyn had been sneaking off to church. His problems were documented and stamped with a seal of ‘this man needs desperate aid’ and she couldn’t fault him for seeking an answer. She believed too, even though her faith had wavered because of Lone Oak.

  No, what bothered Donahue was that Llewyn thought he needed to hide the truth from her. Not about where he went on Sundays, but about his past, about Kasey. Didn’t he realize that she would’ve understood? There was nothing he should’ve felt uncomfortable sharing. Didn’t he see that she trusted him with her life?

  Those first nights after the tragedy, when all they had was each other, Donahue knew Llewyn better than any man she ever had in her life. Not just his likes or dislikes, not only his body, but his every feature, stumbling block, and error.

  He told her about his dreams, when they started, what he thought they meant. He told her about his plans for the future, how he joined the agency because he wanted to make a positive difference in the world and they were the only ones who made use of his gift.

  Llewyn experienced disgrace like no other person she knew. For him, shame was a living entity that embellished his faults, plagued his memories, and rent his soul apart. It was an internalized animal, a fictitious wolverine with a rabid bite and insatiable hunger.

  Kasey claimed he had wanted to marry her, but she had said no and he broke off their relationship. The reality that Llewyn concealed from Donahue was his shame to have loved someone before her. He couldn’t cope with the knowledge of his failure to wed the woman of his dreams.

  His solution? He covered his disappointment with a cloak of half-truths and stashed it inside a chest of lost desires. He tucked away the remnants of his dashed hope, rationalizing and compartmentalizing them as the vain wishes of a different man.

  Perhaps that was the reason he’d asked for her forgiveness. If so, he already had it. Saddened as she was by Llewyn’s reluctance to admit the truth about Kasey’s presence in his life, Donahue supposed she couldn’t sustain any ill will over it.

  A white lie wouldn’t break the bond they’d forged in a nightmare two months ago. A man and a woman, reeking of death, walked hand-in-hand out of the flames. They were bruised, bloody, and beaten, not fractured but whole. He was hers. She was his.

  That was all that mattered.

  *

  The buck not only stopped but died in that room. The undeniable smell of festering animal meat preceded Zachary’s visual confirmation of the corpse. Deer were gross enough when they were alive, always covered in ticks. A dead one was worse, but not by a large margin.

  They were in a replica of a log cabin, but the animal wasn’t stuffed. The body was in the center, its intestines strewn across the floor. To the right, a grated vent did nothing to alleviate the stench. Two doors—one in the northeast, the second to the southwest—presented as viable exits. A series of wooden squares with different symbols drawn on them lay on a small table to their left. All of it was in direct sight of another camera.

  Zachary and Evelyn tried the doors first. Locked. It would’ve been too easy. He examined the lock A curious cloud-shaped etching adorned the knob.

  “This door has a marking on it,” Evelyn said.

  “Mine does too. Looks like a kid’s drawing of a cloud. What’s yours?”

  “Some kind of biohazard warning. I don’t get it.”

  Neither did Zachary. He reasoned that it had something to do with the panels on the table. They looked conspicuous.

  “I could break one of them,” Cranston suggested, flexing his muscles.

  There was no way the Overlord would allow it. He probably had a backup plan if any of the test subjects tried something to circumvent the rules. He’d already threatened them with spiked ceilings and nerve gas; what else did he have up his sleeve?

  The speaker under the camera crackled to life. Right on time.

  “Welcome to Test Chamber 1A. Your objective is simple: escape the room. I will leave the how to you. Suffice it to say that you should not discount your surroundings. You have twenty minutes.”

  “What happens if we fail?” Zachary inquired.

  “I should think it’s obvious. You die. Naturally, this is a depressing thought. Try not to worry about it as you work to solve this riddle. Goodbye. For now.”

  The Overlord ended his short instruction. How helpful. Bastard.

  “Well, if the clock’s ticking, I guess we’d better step it up,” said Evelyn, inspecting one of the wooden squares.

  Zachary joined her at the table. Cranston ignored them, sizing up the door to the northeast.

  There were five different symbols in total: a crown, a staff, a sword, a bow, and a woodwind instrument. None of them gelled together in a way that Zachary could comprehend.

  He studied the staff likeness. It was golden with ruby depressions and a religious icon at the top. A priest’s staff, maybe. It looked familiar, but Zachary couldn’t place where he’d seen it before.

  He picked up one square after another. The sketch of a typical monarch’s crown didn’t scream solution. A distinctive curved hilt distinguished the blade drawing from pictures of its real brethren. Zachary counted the thirteen tubes on the pan flute mockup. An Andean model. The modern crossbow contrasted with the storied imagery of the other pieces, but nothing else stood out.

  “We’re missing something,” he said, putting the last square back in its spot.

  “Like what?”

  “There are two locked doors. We have no keys and five wooden boards. But we don’t know which ones matter. There’s nowhere to put them. Either the game is rigged—”

  “—or there’s something we haven’t considered. Something else that’s in this room,” Cranston said, finishing Zachary’s train of thought.

  He was smarter than they gave him credit.

  Evelyn groaned. She had come to the same conclusion.

  “He wants us to stick our hands in the corpse,” she said, voicing what all of them were thinking. “I bet there’s a clue in there. Yuck.”

  Sickening, but it made sense. He had said not to discount their surroundings. That included the dead deer.

  “Which, uh, one of us is going to do it?” asked Evelyn, squeamish and trying not to vomit.

  “I’ve seen worse. I’ll do it,” said Cranston.

  The big man crouched low to the floor and thrust his hand unceremoniously into the eviscerated stomach of the felled beast. He shoved aside the contents of the animal’s bowels, digging his fingers deep into the putrid carcass.

  Evelyn faced the corner, una
ble to withstand the sight of the gruesome search. If Zachary’s father hadn’t once forced him to learn the art of skinning and cleaning wild game, he’d have done the same as the girl. Even so, he had difficulty keeping himself from retching.

  A yellow-green pustule burst as Cranston extracted his hand from the dead deer. Evelyn had turned around at the wrong time. She gagged, unable to quell her nausea.

  Cranston showed them his prize. It was a cylindrical black tube with a key attached via a beaded silver loop. He handed it to Zachary and wiped his arm on the jumpsuit.

  The key didn’t have a symbol carved into it, but the tube was suspicious. He shook it. Something that sounded like paper rattled inside the hollowed tube.

  Zachary twisted the top, and it came loose with ease. A rolled-up message was inside. He unfolded the paper and read: Seek me above the mountains high else you’ll surely die. In that sacred place we kept our vigil. Up the pace and select the right sigil.

  This children’s rhyme crap wasn’t the straight answer he wanted. Obviously, they needed to open the door with the cloud symbol. Beyond that, there’d be another room with more pieces of the puzzle. Time was not on their side if this was the winding path they had to deal with.

  Something primal growled through the ventilation shaft. Zachary knew it must be the consequence if they didn’t solve the riddle in time.

  Wherever their elevator landed, he wondered if Michael and Ortiz were having better luck with the task the Overlord had given them.

  *

  It was an underwater viewing tube, like the kind found at a fancy aquarium or an aquatic park. Dark water and mossy rocks surrounded Michael and Ortiz every which way they looked. It didn’t exactly invite them in for a relaxing swim.

  There were no cracks in the glass; that was the one positive takeaway from his point of view. It was bad enough running through some creep’s funhouse of traps. He shuddered at the possibility of drowning.

  That was assuming the creature he’d glimpsed in the water didn’t eat him first. Michael hadn’t gotten a good look, but it wasn’t a dolphin or a seal or anything friendly. It almost appeared human, but that couldn’t be; it wasn’t wearing any scuba gear as far as he could tell.