As the Worm Turns

by Matthew Quinn Martin

  Jack hopped up, leaving the dog to his well-deserved victory feast, and eyed the van. The Apex Security cover had been blown. Far too many had seen him in the uniform and in action. If he was going to complete this mission, both he and the van would need a new identity.

  He moved through the process quickly and efficiently, just as he’d done countless times before. He switched the plates. He stripped the magnetic signs and decals. Over the years, he’d experimented with different kinds of quick-drying, temporary paint. None was adequate to the task. Rain, dust, and wind soon took their toll. Static adhesive shrink-wrap proved to be the answer. He chose a roll of cobalt blue and fired up the heat gun.

  Done, he chose a new set of exterior decal magnets and a uniform to match. Jack only ever felt comfortable in a uniform of some sort. Civilian clothes made him feel naked and directionless. As if he was back in his daylight life, still vulnerable, still ignorant.

  “What do you think?” Blood looked up from the last dregs of his dog food and barked in approval at the words printed on the van and Jack’s jumpsuit. TOTAL EXTERMINATION.

  He opened the van’s side hatch. Blood made to follow, but Jack stopped him. “Stay. No need for you to see this.” He shut the door on Blood, still sitting at attention.

  He reached into the steel locker bolted beneath his tracking console. He pushed past the beakers, the burners, the burettes, past the Erlenmeyer flask and the evaporating dishes, set aside the compounds—liquid and powder—to get the one chemical he really needed right now. The C2H5OH.

  Greasy black dust smeared his hand as he looked at the bottle. It had been a while since he’d had to take this particular one out. The label read, “Product of Bermuda—Gosling’s Black Seal Rum.” Jack twisted off the maroon cap and allowed himself one slug. The liquor burned sweetly as it slid down his throat, making him think of a time and a place that would never be his.

  He took a quick glance at the snapshot tacked up on the wall. It was the only one of Sarah that he had, a computer printout of their engagement announcement from his hometown newspaper’s online archives. He’d folded it so that his own image was hidden. He couldn’t stand looking at that fool he’d once been, so happy to have that girl on his arm, so complacent, so ignorant of what was to come.

  Next to it was the only other reminder of his daylight life. A yellowing travel brochure for the Bermuda honeymoon they’d settled on. Sarah had fallen in love with photos of the island’s soft pink sand beaches and thoughts of what it would be like for the two of them to lie there in each other’s arms, feeling the warm tingle of the sun on their skin and the cool water as the waves tickled their feet. Jack took one more swig, then put the bottle, and the memories, in the dark corners where they belonged. There was work to be done.

  A can of off-brand beef stew simmered over a makeshift stove he’d fashioned from an upturned butane torch, spitting brown flecks onto the stainless-steel counter. Jack twisted the dial, setting the blue flame to a tiny pointed jet, and used a pair of pliers to remove the stew and set it down. He took a bite—salty, gritty, terrible.

  He ran a hand across his stubbled chin, then glanced at the tips of his fingers. They’d been smoothed to almost nothing, but he could see the faint whorls and arches of fingerprints beginning to form on his scarred skin. In this all-too-interconnected world of Internet links and digital downloads, fingerprints were a luxury Jack Jackson just couldn’t afford.

  He set the torch to full bore and replaced the ceramic wire-gauze square with a thin metal disk. He undid his belt and put it between his teeth, as he waited for the metal to glow red. Then he sucked in a quick breath, bit hard on the leather, and slammed down his hand.

  He held his palm to the metal, held in the scream as long as he could, as the sour stench of burning skin scoured his nostrils. The pain was mind-scrambling. No matter how many times he’d repeated this ritual, it had never gotten easier. The belt slipped down to his lap, and the slightest sigh of relief passed his lips as he peeled his hand up. Smooth, naked, anonymous.

  His hand throbbed, but the nerves were almost dead. He knew that soon the agony would be nothing but a dimly remembered ghost—just like him. He rejected the desire to go for the rum as he bit down again, waiting for the disk to heat red enough for his other hand.

  Twenty-one

  There was a rap on the passenger-side glass. Beth snapped awake, and through the fogged-up window, she made out the shape of a uniformed police officer. He gave her the universal gesture for Roll down your window. She obeyed.

  “Can’t sleep here.”

  “I’m not . . . what?” She rubbed her stiff neck and bleary eyes. She was in Ryan’s car. It was cold.

  “You been drinking?”

  “No.” And for the first time since she could remember, that was the truth. She hadn’t had a drink in days.

  “Miss? What are you doing out here?”

  “Umm . . . I . . .” The events of the last night crashed into her mind. The park. Tek and his gang. That weird security guard and his hellhound. And then Ryan. And Axis. And quitting her job. After the fight, she’d driven to Ryan’s condo, parked there, and waited for him. She must have fallen asleep. She squinted at the sun. It looked as if it had been up for a while. Beth scanned the dashboard clock. Almost eight a.m. It was the most sleep she’d gotten in days. “I’m sorry, officer. I was waiting for my boyfriend. We had a fight.”

  “You know, my grandma always said, don’t go to bed angry. That’s especially true if your bed happens to be in a car.” He pulled out a leather pad and starting jotting on it. “I’m going to let you off with a written warning. Okay? Warning.” He tore off the slip and handed it to her. “Hope you kids work it out.” Then he walked back to his blue and white Electra Glide and puttered off down the street.

  Beth flicked down the sun visor and took a look in the makeup mirror. What a sight. Bloodshot eyes. Bags the airlines would charge extra to check. No wonder that cop had thought she was lit. She stared at the warning slip still clutched in her hand. Hope you kids work it out. The words rang in her head like a tin bell. She pulled out her cell. Ryan hadn’t called. Not even a text.

  She crumpled into the seat. It was time to get real. Ryan’s behavior, his mockery, his insensitivity—it wasn’t ever going to change. He didn’t care about Zoë because he didn’t even think about Zoë. She was gone, and in his mind, that was for the best. Maybe he was right about the fact that no one knew what had happened. But he was wrong for giving Beth the brush-off when she’d tried to find out.

  There was no doubt in her mind that it was over between them. In truth, it had been for a while. If last night was a foretaste of what her future was going to look like, bullied and browbeaten by Ryan into toeing the party line, she knew it was all done but the credits. Sometimes it seemed to Beth that her whole life had just been one long fight. Fight for survival, for respect, for love, for a place at the table. And for what? Scorn, the cold shoulder, and a night spent in a luxury car. If she was going to fight, she might as well fight for something that mattered.

  Right now, that meant Zoë. Her job—her only job now—was finding out what had happened to her. Evaporate—Zoë had said she wanted to evaporate. Those were just about the last words Beth had heard from her. Maybe she had hopped on a Greyhound for parts unknown. Maybe there was a postcard from Vegas sitting in the mailbox right now. Beth had certainly known enough barbacks and coat-check girls who had just disappeared without any notice, off to chase their dreams on brighter horizons. She’d never given any one of them a second thought.

  Or maybe Zoë had decided to leave this life in favor of the one to come. Zoë’s mother had committed suicide when her daughter was still in diapers. She’d parked her car in the garage with a length of hose hooked to the tailpipe when she’d found out that her husband had left for good. It was something Beth had known almost as long as she’d known her best friend, but they�
�d never talked about it. Not once.

  She pulled up Ryan’s number and dialed. Immediately, a muffled ring came from the car’s armrest. She flipped open the compartment, and sure enough, there was his phone. That, at least, explained why he hadn’t called. She’d have to do this the hard way, face-to-face. She looked to the front door of his split-level waterfront townhouse. He had to have seen the car parked here when he came home, had to have seen her sacked out in the driver’s seat.

  Unless he hadn’t come back here. Unless he’d made good on the threat to “get his own bread buttered” and had gone home with someone else last night. Lord knew there would have been plenty of options available to him at Axis. Beth shook her head. So what if he did? He was free now. So was she.

  Beth locked the car and crossed to Ryan’s front door. Her finger hovered by the bell for a moment. If he was there, if he answered, it would just mean another fight, one she didn’t have time for right now. She wrote his Dear John letter on the back of the policeman’s warning slip and dropped it in his mailbox along with his car keys and phone. He could call her if he wanted, but her note said everything his actions hadn’t already.

  Beth flipped up her wool collar as a barrier against the wind and headed back toward downtown on foot. The air tasted of cool saline. Her seventy-two hours had passed, or close enough, anyway. She’d march right to the police station and put that report in. She doubted she’d add in anything about night angels or vampires. But right now, it was time to enlist a bit of professional help. The rest would be up to the vagaries of fate.

  As she approached the Strip, she caught sight of the fliers she’d hung, already starting to show signs of wear. But she noticed something else: at least half of them had been covered up with other postings—about other missing people.

  Twenty-two

  Jack dropped to the floor. He landed on his knuckles but felt little. Once he could play piano with those hands. Not anymore. They’d long ago been pounded into instruments of death like so much of his body, his mind, his soul. He started with push-ups, moved on to sit-ups, lunges, chin-ups. On and on, until he was slick with sweat and his breath was rough and ragged. The dog watched, head cocked to the side, as Jack hoisted a heavy buckshot-filled canvas bag to the ceiling and hung it from a short length of chain.

  He started in. Hammering the bag with punches, jabs, uppercuts, crosses—over and over again. Hammering away the thoughts of Sarah, of what his daylight life might have looked like had things been different. If not for those things, he might have had a family today. If not for them, he might have been driving a son to soccer practice, helping him with long division. He might be fretting over the not-too-distant day when a daughter would bring home her date for the junior prom. But not here, not now. All he had now were the weapons, the chemicals, the hunt. He hammered away the past that never was with each grunting exhale, pummeling the bag, until exhaustion threatened to overtake him and blood from his torn knuckles stained the canvas.

  Blood barked and barked again until Jack stopped. He was right. The fun was over. It was time to move on. He pushed away the dark thoughts. Jack didn’t fear death, just obsolescence. Twelve years. Already, gray flecked his scruff; already, his joints ached worse each morning and his breath grew shorter after each chase. Time, the hungriest vampire of all, had been claiming him second by wasted second.

  He looked over to Blood, then opened the side hatch, sending him outside with a thwack to the haunches. “Keep watch,” he said before bolting the door. It was unlikely that the dog would be able to do much if one of those things arrived once he’d started the process, but this was something he needed to do alone. He reached into a small refrigerated storage cube. Plumes of white snaked around him as he took out a sealed vial. He tilted it to the light. Twenty milliliters remained. He’d have to harvest more soon.

  Jack rolled up his sleeve, looking at the row of track marks marring the length of his arm. He could measure his life by those tracks. Each one told the same story. Each one a trip to hell. Each one a return stronger then he’d been before. Twenty mil. That was a full five more then he’d ever taken. The last time he’d performed the procedure, he’d doubted he’d come back. The paralytic neurotoxin had almost shut down his lungs and heart. As all the while, his mind soared in its lethal bliss.

  It had to be done. There was no question. The regimen had to be followed. His tolerance needed to be buttressed, more so now than ever before. And it would have to be done now, so he could hunt again by nightfall. Better to subject himself to their venom here, in the relative safety of his van, than out there in the field. And better it be done at his own hand than trapped and at their mercy. He’d resisted the toxin that way in the past. He had the scars to prove it, inside and out.

  He looked again at the venom he held. The viscous liquid was the pale yellow of ash leaves in autumn and had a slight milkiness to it. Twenty milliliters it would have to be. He popped a sterile syringe from its blister pack. He drove the needle through the membrane in the lid of the vial and sucked the liquid into the barrel. Any stray air bubbles were expelled with a few taps of his fingernail. He wrapped a length of surgical tubing around his upper arm. It burned with friction as he drew it tight and gripped the end between his teeth.

  Jack pressed the needle’s tip to a raised vein. It wasn’t going to be easy. It never was. Once it took hold fully, he’d be paralyzed. He’d be awake for the first part, while the agony would descend on him like a landslide. But it wasn’t the pain that Jack dreaded. He could handle that. Pain was an old friend; it was a well-worn shoe to Jack by now. It was what came first, the rapturous euphoria, the indescribable ecstasy about to flood through him, taking him to that place of forgetting that he didn’t deserve to visit.

  He plunged the needle in, feeling the cold steel breach his skin, the burning fluid course through his vein as it rushed on its collision course with the blood/brain barrier. The surgical tubing slipped to the floor. Jack eased back into the seat. His muscles began to calcify. Each time he performed this ritual Jack prayed that there would be nothing but the pain. Each time, his prayer went unanswered. The pleasure was his punishment. This time was no different.

  Twenty-three

  The treatment Beth got at the police station was perfunctory at best. They’d logged Zoë’s name and age and the rest of her stats. They scanned a couple of photos. They asked where she’d last been seen and by whom. They rattled off boilerplate questions about Zoë’s family—what there was of that—friends, mental state, and so on. The file clerk typed it all in dutifully. When she was done, she offered Beth a wan smile that all but said, Budgets are tight these days, so that’s about all we’re going to be able to do.

  Now another sun had set and risen again on New Harbor. No postcard from Zoë, no call from Ryan. The latter was odd but likely for the best. The former did nothing but add to Beth’s growing disquiet. She’d papered the town with another round of fliers, but it just felt as if she was treading water. The sight of those other missing-persons posters was icy comfort. It let her know she wasn’t alone, but that only made it worse. She tore down one of each, though. If the police weren’t going to take it seriously, she would have to.

  Back at the apartment, she sat down at the kitchen table and spread out the crinkled fliers. The photos all stared at her with a mournful hollowness. At least four more people had gone missing over the past few days: a single mother from a Docklands housing project, a teen girl whose handwritten posting noted she’d had a history of drug abuse and running away, a mentally handicapped man who’d lived at an SRO mission not far from the Strip, and someone Beth had recognized from Halloween night at Axis: Frat Dracula. His costumed snapshot was plastered right next to one of him in a too-tight polo and jeans. According to the poster, he’d disappeared the very same night as Zoë.

  Beth’s percolator gurgled out. The wafting smell of fine Colombian dark roast beckoned to her. She poured herself
a mug and set to thinking things over. This was bigger than just Zoë. At least five disappearances in less than a week. And that wasn’t counting the drop in the already invisible homeless population that had that street prophet spooked enough to bug out for Fort Red Rock. She would have thought the newspapers would have picked up on this by now or that the police would have mentioned it to her when she’d told them about Zoë.

  One thing was clear: there was a sinister force at work in New Harbor, something evil lying just below the city’s placid veneer. But what could she do? Head back to the police department for some more of their patronizing? Post a blog about it? Try to get the attention of the network news affiliates? Nothing seemed right.

  Her thoughts returned to the security guard who had fended off Tek’s attempted rape. At the time, she’d assumed his motives had been purely altruistic, but what if they weren’t? What if there was more to it? The police rarely went cruising through the residential sections of the Docklands, let alone Fort Red Rock. What business did a private security guard have down there? He certainly didn’t carry himself like any guard she’d ever met. In fact, his bearing was much sterner than that of any cop Beth had ever dealt with. His behavior seemed more like that of a black-ops soldier straight out of a Hollywood action movie—or a robot, honestly.

  She reached into her memory for the name of the company stitched on his cap. APEX. That was it. She punched it into Google ten times and got nothing. There was no Apex Security listed anywhere within a thousand miles. What if the whole security-guard thing was just a ruse? A cover for some dark dealings? What if he wasn’t protecting the enclave down at the fort from Tek but rather eliminating the competition, marking territory? Beth remembered reading someplace that certain serial killers liked to wear police or military uniforms, relishing the sense of power it gave them, and how they would use that illusion to lull their victims into a false sense of safety.