This wasn’t how he had envisioned his moment of triumph, but he should have expected that the Deputy Under Secretary would want to keep his hands clean for culpability’s sake. He smiled his broadest smile and gestured for the man to go ahead and make the offer they both knew was coming.
Two more men stepped into the room behind him. Trofino didn’t recognize either of them, but he definitely recognized their uniforms. Olive green. Bulky utility belts. Side arms. Muscular physiques. The brims of their caps worn low over their eyes. Both of them had bands around their right biceps that featured two letters.
MP.
Military police.
“What’s going on here?” Trofino asked.
He tried to rise from the chair, but the man with the glasses dissuaded him with a shake of his head. That was fine by Trofino since his legs were trembling so badly that he wouldn’t have been able to stand up anyway.
Something was wrong. Something was terribly, terribly wrong.
“Dr. Amon Trofino,” the man said. His voice was surprisingly high-pitched, but not lacking in confidence or authority. “Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Davis Walls, Chief Security Officer. And you are under arrest for suspicion of murder in the first degree.”
“What in the name of God are you talking about?”
“Those samples you brought us?”
“What about them? Surely you understand the significance of what’s contained within them.”
“That we do, Dr. Trofino. We ran the standard battery of tests several times. The results were indeed conclusive. Those samples were taken from a former Marine First Sergeant Katherine Newland, honorably discharged. We were able to ascertain with just a few phone calls that she was listed as MIA in a recent DoD-sanctioned mission. And now you bring us proof that at least someone might actually know what happened to her.”
“You’re wrong. Those samples…”
The words died on Trofino’s lips. In all of the chaos before the lab was destroyed, Carla had run off with the case to collect the various tissue, blood, and genetic samples. She hadn’t been gone long enough to have made it to the cryogenic freezer. He should have realized it at the time.
“Anything you want to say before these men read you your rights, doctor?”
Trofino closed his eyes. He could almost see Carla running into the adjacent room and sweeping all of the samples from the cooked body Spears had brought back during the night in an effort to deceive them into the case. All of the ordinary human tissue samples that they had used to determine exactly what these men just had. And if these weren’t the samples from the creatures, then he himself had incinerated every bit of corroborative evidence when he initiated the self-destruct sequence.
He was screwed.
Walls slapped him on the cheek and he opened his eyes in shock.
“Nothing to say for yourself? Fine. Then I’ll have the last word. I hope they lop off your nuts and shove them straight down your throat. I served with First Sergeant Newland in Afghanistan. She was worth a dozen men like you. I will make it my life’s mission to make sure that you pay for whatever you did to her.”
Trofino shook his head back and forth and whimpered. This couldn’t be happening.
“Get him out of my sight,” Walls said, and turned away.
“Dr. Amon Trofino,” the first MP said. “You have the right to remain silent…”
* * *
Seattle, Washington
3:45 p.m. PST
Elena Sturm leaned on the railing at the end of the southernmost commercial pier, staring across the cresting waves to the south toward Salmon Bay. The entire waterfront renovation had been sealed off from public view following the assault of negative publicity and the resultant investigations by every law enforcement agency from the state to the federal level and undoubtedly beyond. She had watched the aftermath on the news from her hospital bed. Officially, a lone militant, former Air Force Brigadier General Franklin Spears, had waged a one-man war of terror on his own country, a country he felt had failed him along the way. It was speculated that the death of his son had pushed him over the brink. He had taken his revenge on society as a whole by opening fire on its elite, killing a senator, the mayor, and a half-dozen other guests. He’d even shot a police officer, which was about the only part of the sanitized story that was actually true, but if even the medical examiner insisted that they’d been killed by the same 7.62 x 51 mm NATO rounds that had hit Sturm, then who would ever argue that the wounds looked more like ferocious bites. Spears had killed the power and the lights. No one had seen a little girl with fangs, but everyone had definitely seen the muzzle flash and heard the repeated gunshots. Too bad no one could ask Spears or examine his weapon. They had both been either incinerated in the blast or lost under tons of debris. He was being compared to Timothy McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski. No one from the FBI to the DoD had any knowledge of his plans or his deteriorating state of mind leading up to that fateful night, when he had obviously snapped. Or so they said. The same agencies had visited her to make sure she said the same thing. None of them knew anything about a girl living in the ruins. Neither did she, they said. And what did it matter anyway? The girl had been vaporized in the explosion that had dropped more than two acres of land into the Pacific, along with the western half of the Bertha Knight Landes Cultural Center. From out on the ocean, one could see straight into the building like the back side of a doll house.
Sturm had no idea which entities actually knew the entire story, but they had doled out different versions of the truth to each of the different agencies that had participated in the investigation. The FBI had led the raid of the Phobos compound, but had found only sublevels that had been sterilized by fire and chemicals and Spears’s demolished office. And a rambling, psychotic tirade detailing his plans for vengeance, which he had apparently typed before setting off for the shootings. The CSRT had been convinced it had been a mutated man-eating tiger from the Sunderbans region of India that had killed the crews of the Scourge and the Dragnet, and the homeless man with the green eyes. Lord only knew where they procured the tiger they dragged out from the rubble, live on CNN, or how they altered its teeth to match the cast that Sturm herself had created. All of the killing had been blamed on a tiger, not a little girl. Or so they told her to remember. Not that she could ever forget. They’d described the consequences in explicit detail should she ever remember it differently. She had asked for two concessions in return, with which they had readily complied. She had asked that none of them ever come near her again or she would tell the truth to every journalist who would listen. She hadn’t so much as sensed their presence since. The second request would have to wait until the center was razed. Once it was, the city would create a homeless shelter where it had stood, surrounded by a park with playgrounds and trees, and the statue of a little girl that would be sculpted to Sturm’s exact specifications.
Her arm was still immobilized in a sling, and the Erector Set the surgeon had used to cobble her scapula and shoulder girdle back together felt like it had been fitted to her bones with railroad spikes. It hurt like the dickens, but she was tired of taking painkillers. She wanted to think clearly and, most of all, she wanted to be able to feel.
She’d barely been discharged an hour ago, and here she was already, with no idea of what she was supposed to do. The little girl had been a monster, no doubt. She had killed people in the worst possible ways, and yet at the same time there was no denying her humanity. Maybe this area was safer now that she was gone, but Sturm couldn’t help but think that they, as a whole, had gotten what they deserved. They had taken a child who had been lost and alone, who had watched her mother die, and turned her loose in a frightening land where her survival instincts had been the only thing she could trust. Sturm could only hope that wherever she was now, the girl had found her mother and the peace that every child should know at all times.
Sturm removed the roses she had bought from the florist on her way out of the hospi
tal from inside her sling, unwrapped them, and scattered them upon the sea.
“Godspeed, little one,” she whispered, and wiped the tears from her eyes.
“I thought I might find you here,” a voice she immediately recognized said from behind her.
She leaned back into Porter and he wrapped his arms around her. He had been right there by her side throughout her convalescence. Holding her hand. Laughing with her. Crying with her. Joking that she could finally catch up on her sleep. He was the one good thing to come from this whole mess. More than anything, she looked forward to finding out what the future held for them.
“What do you say we get the largest cups of coffee we can find and take a stroll on the beach?” he said.
“It’s like you can read my mind.”
She took his hand and leaned against his shoulder. Soon enough they would have to determine what was left of their professional lives, but, for now, they fully intended to enjoy every moment exploring each other.
They walked down the pier toward the early morning hustle and bustle. They were nearly to the fish market when Sturm stopped and stared down toward one of the smaller berths at the bottom of a slanted walkway.
“Do you see that?” she asked.
“What?”
Sturm tugged him by the hand down the walkway toward a line of pylons crusted with barnacles and whitened by salt. Had she really just seen—?
There.
She released his hand and ran across the planks toward a vacant commercial dock. She dropped to her knees, leaned awkwardly over the side, and nearly toppled into the ocean as she tried to get a better look at the fresh carvings on the post, near the water line.
The wood was lighter on color where it had been carved with a sharp nail by someone hiding beneath the dock, waiting for the right moment to arrive. She recognized a pattern. It appeared to be one symbol, repeated over and over.
She glanced back over her shoulder at Porter and smiled.
* * *
Seattle, Washington
5:00 p.m. PST
“Are you certain?” Porter said into his cell phone.
“Without a doubt,” Perriera said.
Porter ended the call and stared out across the sea toward where a bank of thunder heads swelled against the infinite horizon.
“Well?” Sturm asked. She allowed the steam piping from the lid of her cup to tickle her lips and nose. “Are you going to tell me or am I going to have to beat it out of you?”
Somewhere out there, bad things were about to happen.
“What?” she asked again. She walked over and hugged him from behind. “What does it mean?”
“It means ‘home,’ Layne. She’s trying to go home.”
* * *
Pacific Ocean
86 km North-Northwest of the Washington Coast
10:58 p.m. PST
The able seaman thundered down the stairs into the hold. There was definitely something wrong with the engines, and they hadn’t been able to raise the engineer on his com link. They weren’t slowing down fast enough. If they didn’t decrease their speed in a hurry, they risked running aground in the San Juan Archipelago, which would peel the underside of the ship open like a sardine can.
He sprinted down the corridor toward the engine room, his heavy tread echoing in the close confines.
From somewhere ahead of him, he heard the captain’s static-riddled voice shouting for the engineer.
He burst into the room and stopped. A pair of legs with black galoshes stretched across the floor from underneath a workbench. What looked like oil was spreading in a pool around them. He took a single step forward and caught movement from the corner of his eye.
“Jesus. You scared the crap out of me.”
He took a step closer and reached out for the poor child. She was naked and shivering, and drenched with a dark fluid that shimmered crimson under the lights on the console beside her.
“How the hell did you get on this boat?”
She looked up at him when he neared and golden spheres reflected in her eyes, like those of a dog. Her skin was blistered and webbed with thick scars, as though she’d been badly burned, but he didn’t fully realize how much trouble he was in until he saw her teeth.
About the Author
Michael McBride is the bestselling author of Ancient Enemy, Bloodletting, Burial Ground, Innocents Lost, The Coyote, and Vector Borne. His novella Snowblind won the 2012 DarkFuse Readers Choice Award and received honorable mention in The Best Horror of the Year. He lives in Avalanche Country with his wife and kids.
To explore the author’s other works, please visit www.michaelmcbride.net.
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