He’d read all the baby books for new mothers and fathers along with Denise, but he couldn’t recall reading a chapter in any of them about one of the parents turning into a homicidal maniac. He’d thought nothing could prepare you—truly prepare you—for becoming a parent, other than becoming one. And, slowly, he was adapting to a new worldview with a helpless infant at the center of it. But what had just happened to him was something he would never understand because there could be no rational explanation.
Had Denise experienced some kind of psychotic break? She had no history of psychosis or any mental problems.
Or was there a dire medical reason for the violent episode? Could a brain tumor turn a normal forty-something woman into a murderer?
Answers were beyond him, so he picked up the phone and called 911.
As soon as he hung up, Denise awoke, pushed herself up and looked at the broken coffee table before focusing on him. “I had the weirdest dream… did I have an accident?”
“What do you remember?”
“Putting Gabriel to sleep—oh, no! I hear him crying.”
Lost in thought, the sound hadn’t registered with Gary. But it was Gabriel’s displeased cry, not his five-alarm-fire come-get-me-now hysterical shrieking, so Gary had to cut himself some slack. He stared at Denise. “You don’t remember shoving me down the stairs?”
“What!?”
“Or cutting my hand with broken glass?” he asked, raising the bloody towel wrapped around his hand as evidence.
“No!” Denise stood up, looked at her own hands, the trickles of blood on her own palm from gripping the glass tightly as she fought him. “How did I—? Gary, what’s going on?”
She hurried to the downstairs bathroom and grabbed the first aid kit.
“You had some kind of… episode,” he said. “Like a seizure, but violent.”
She wrapped gauze around her own hand after applying antibacterial ointment, then she looked at his more severe wound, grimaced in sympathetic pain, and began to apply ointment and gauze.
When she was done, she stood and glanced toward the stairs. “I should get Gabriel,” she said. “Might need to be changed again.”
“No!” Gary said abruptly. The thought of her flipping into her Mrs. Hyde persona while caring for their child terrified him. “I’ll take care of him.”
“I’m perfectly capable of—”
The doorbell rang. “Emergency services!”
“It’s okay, I called them…” Gary’s voice trailed off as he saw Denise’s eyelids fluttering, nothing but the whites of her eyes showing. “Come in!” he called frantically. “It’s happening again!”
* * *
Several miles away, Alan Crane, Melissa Barrows’ father, opened the door to her house and urged Assistant Chief Cordero to come inside. The older man had a knot on his forehead and a split lip. “I really don’t know what’s gotten into her,” Alan said. “She’s never been violent a day in her life.”
“She attacked your wife?”
“Both of us,” Alan said. “We were sitting at the kitchen table, talking about arrangements for Kevin’s funeral. Not a pleasant topic, to be sure, but then she stood up so abruptly she knocked over her chair. She grabbed a ceramic cookie jar off the table and… and smashed it against Barbara’s head.” He pointed to the lump on his forehead. “Got this when she chucked a drinking glass at me. I was too stunned to duck.”
“Where is Barbara—Melissa’s mother—now?”
“On the sofa. She was dazed. I put a cold compress on her head. Worried she might have a concussion.”
“Melissa?”
“On the floor,” Alan said, chagrined. “She passed out. I made her comfortable. Put a pillow under her head. But she’s had two of these episodes. I don’t know what to do. Fortunately, Noelle—the baby—is upstairs, out of harm’s way. For now.”
They walked into the living room.
Mrs. Crane waved at Cordero. “Pardon me for not getting up,” she said. “Still feel a bit woozy.”
“That’s fine, ma’am,” he said. “I’ll call an ambulance. You’ll need an X-ray, possibly a CT scan.”
As expected, Melissa Barrows was unconscious on the floor, but she had begun to stir. In a moment, she would be fully awake. Instinctively, Cordero’s palm fell to the butt of his gun. Frowning, he moved his hand away. He was not about to shoot a recent widow with a newborn child in her care. Instead, he unsnapped the leather pouch on his belt that secured his handcuffs.
“If it’s like last time, she’ll be normal for a couple minutes,” Alan said. “Then something happens to her eyes and they roll back. First time, I thought she was about to faint, but then she attacked.”
“No warning otherwise?”
“Just screaming and cursing at us,” Alan said. “Weird thing is… well, it’s all been weird, but when she threw that glass at me, she called me Ronnie.”
“Who’s Ronnie?” Cordero asked.
“I have no idea.”
* * *
When Castiel arrived at the Green residence, he raised his fist to knock on the front door but heard a baby crying, a man and woman yelling and the sound of glass and ceramic shattering. He tried the doorknob, but the door was locked. Though it was within the powers of his remaining Grace to blast the door off its hinges, he couldn’t risk injuring Brianna, Malik and baby Kiara. Instead, he thrust his elbow through the windowpane closest to the deadbolt, unlocked the door and entered the house.
“Malik,” he called, “Agent Collins, FBI.”
“In here!”
The angel followed the sound of his voice, crossing through the dining room and edging through the archway to peer into the living room.
Malik crouched behind the sofa, which faced the open kitchen, huddled over his crying niece, who was bordered by a ring of throw pillows and mostly covered by a baby blanket with a rainbow design.
Brianna stood behind an island counter in the kitchen, grabbing ceramic plates from an open cabinet and hurling them at her brother. Most of the plates had smashed into the wall behind him, but one had hit its mark, judging by the cut on his cheek. “Son of a bitch!” she yelled and flung a ceramic teacup at him. He dipped his head to the left and the cup struck the wall and broke on the hardwood floor.
“What happened?”
“Agent Banks said tie her up next time she passed out,” Malik said, unable to look away from his sister lest she hit her target when he was distracted. “Found clothesline in the garage and tied her hands. Kiki finally woke up while Bree was out cold and started screaming, so I got her. Bree woke up and went berserk sooner than before, found a knife and cut herself loose before I came down.”
“Bastard!”
A saucer shattered above his head.
Face twisted in rage, Brianna’s eyes had rolled back in her head, showing only the whites, no pupils. In that state, she couldn’t see anything. Something or someone else guided her hands—with dangerous precision.
“I had the baby with me, man,” he said. “Ducked behind here to wait for help.”
Brianna noticed Castiel peering into the living room and swiveled, hurling a full-sized plate at him. Her aim was true. If Castiel hadn’t whipped his head back at the last instant, the plate would have shattered on his skull rather than the side of the archway.
“One of your stupid friends, Ronnie?” she yelled.
Castiel looked at Malik. “Her behavior is irrational.”
“Was that your first clue?” Malik said, eyebrow arched. “We gotta get this situation under control before she hurts Kiki. She’d never forgive herself.”
“How long do these episodes last?”
“Never this long,” Malik said. “She’s getting worse.”
Having run out of plates, saucers, glasses and cups, Brianna grabbed a blender off the countertop, yanked the power plug from the wall and raised it over her head with both hands. Before she took aim at her brother, Castiel noticed her nose had started to bleed.
* * *
When Dean first stared down into the darkness, he had the odd sensation that he gazed into a bottomless pit, an abyss that consumed the souls of all who entered. But the disturbing thought was fleeting, the product of an imagination so often exceeded by the terrifying reality of a hunter’s life. He followed Sam down the steep staircase and almost sighed in relief when he realized the passageway was only fifteen feet underground. The walls and ceiling were made of plywood painted a dull red—though maybe the red had been bright crimson once but faded over time—with loose boards on an earthen floor. A secret passageway carved in the earth and supported with the simplest DIY building materials.
With his shotgun resting against his right shoulder, Sam swung the flashlight in his left hand back and forth to expose any side passageways that might branch off from the main one, which was almost wide enough for two people to walk abreast. Nevertheless, Dean brought up the rear, armed with the machete in case anything came at them from behind while their attention was directed forward.
He took out his cell phone, but not simply for the extra illumination. Before they went any deeper underground, he called Cordero to warn him the new mothers might exhibit violent tendencies. Castiel was headed to the Green house, but he couldn’t be everywhere at once. And if one new mother had flown into a murderous rage, Dean had a feeling the others might follow suit.
Cordero knew about the bouts of temporary rage and was currently dealing with Melissa Barrows, who had attacked and injured her own parents. Moreover, Cordero told him Captain Sands had gone to the Atherton house to stop Denise from trying to kill her husband.
“When will this stop, Agent?”
“Soon,” Dean said. “One way or another, this stops soon.”
Next Dean called Dr. Hartwell, to check on Chloe and Olivia, since he’d directed Castiel away from LMC, and to tell her about the attacks by the new mothers.
“Nothing’s changed here,” she said, clearly worried. “No response from Chloe or Olivia to any stimuli, their labor is arrested, and their heart rates are slowing down. They’re not reacting to any treatment. As I told Agent Collins, I may need to perform C-sections on both women the minute I detect any distress in the babies.”
“Agent Collins had to respond to another emergency,” Dean said. He described what was happening with the other women: bouts of rage, followed by a period of brief unconsciousness and calm, followed by another bout of homicidal rage. “All patients at LMC. Were they given any kind of experimental drug? Anything with side effects? Like the world’s worst case of postpartum depression? That might explain…?”
“No,” she said definitively. “Nothing like that. I don’t experiment on my patients with unknown or dangerous drugs.”
“Didn’t think so,” Dean said, all but convinced the episodes were also linked to the pontianak, which was not something he could explain to a medical doctor.
“It’s curious, the timing of these violent episodes,” Dr. Hartwell said.
“Curious how?”
“Think about it,” she said. “A period of rage, followed by a period of calm, coming in waves, one after another.”
“Labor pains,” Dean said, nodding. “The violence is the contraction, followed by the calm between contractions.”
“But why?” she wondered. “Obviously these women aren’t pregnant anymore.”
“No.”
“Women in labor may curse and scream, but…”
“They don’t become homicidal.”
“Dean,” Sam called. “I’ve got something.”
“Gotta go, Doc,” Dean said.
“Agent Banks,” she said before he could disconnect. “These women are slowly dying. If we can’t discover the cause I won’t let their babies die with them. Time is running out.”
THIRTY
Dean tucked his cell phone back in his pocket and looked ahead to where Sam shone the flashlight beam. Unlike the crude underground passage braced with planks and plywood, the door at the end of the passage could have been found inside a typical home—except that it had been painted black.
Taking a moment, Dean looked up at the boarded passageway ceiling and tried to visualize how far and in which direction they’d walked since descending under the barn. “We’re under the burnt silo.”
Now Sam paused, pointing the flashlight toward the crude stairs and back again, making the mental calculation. “Maybe that fire wasn’t an accident,” he said. “Debris left to conceal the excavation.”
“Of what?” Dean wondered.
“Whatever’s behind this,” Sam said as he redirected the light forward to examine the door. Over time, the doorjamb had warped, pinching the top right and bottom left corners of the door. Sam passed the flashlight back to Dean, turned the knob and pushed to no effect.
“Locked?”
“Stuck,” Sam said. “Back up.”
They both took a step back. Sam raised his right foot and struck the door. It shuddered but held. A second kick and the lock popped free of the dislodged strike plate. With a squeal of protesting hinges the door swung inward, revealing an open space much wider than the passageway. Since Dean held the flashlight, he took the lead, shining the beam back and forth, up and down.
After the makeshift red passageway and the ominous black door, Dean had not expected to find a large room, painted white, approximately twelve feet wide and fifteen feet deep. Though the hallway appeared haphazard and unfinished—a means to an end—this room was relatively complete, though the construction was basic, consisting of sections of plywood nailed to a two-by-four framework, judging by the give in the floor. Utilitarian and quick to assemble once the space was excavated. In its original condition, nothing other than the lack of windows would have hinted that the room was underground, a space carved out of dirt. Since then, somebody had smashed through the bottom of the back wall, while years of moisture, mold and rot had taken their toll on the untreated surfaces of the wood. Here and there, sections of plywood bulged where the rotted wood had popped free of nails, and the lines of the room seemed out of true, though the floor remained level.
In the center of the room, at a skewed angle, stood a narrow, military-style hospital bed with low side rails and two welded IV drip poles rising from the head rail. At the foot of the bed, permanently welded to the frame, were two crude gynecological stirrups. The thin mattress, pillow and bedding were all stained and moldy. Dean suspected the darker stains were blood. The flashlight beam illuminated a metal ring attached to the side rail.
“Sammy,” he said. “Look.”
Sam stepped around him and lifted up the other dangling metal ring attached to the first by a short length of chain, rusty but easily recognizable. “Handcuffs.”
“They don’t leave until they pay the bill,” Dean said, walking around the other side of the creepy hospital bed.
The right side of the room looked as if it had been struck by a whirlwind. A metal stool lay on its side, along with a large bucket, and pieces of a shattered enamel wash basin spread out from an overturned small table. In the near right corner, also on its side, near a severely cracked section of plywood, lay a wheeled baby crib. The metal tubing was mangled, with two wheels missing, the crib split in half.
Against the back wall, a large wooden cabinet had toppled over, leaning away from the wall at an awkward angle, one leg broken, shattered door panels scattered, along with broken jars, an assortment of pills decades past their use-by dates, and medical instruments, including a stethoscope, blood pressure cuff, a half-dozen crushed syringes, a black handheld inhaler that looked like a small gas mask to cover the nose and mouth, and freaky obstetrical forceps. Pinned under the forceps was a torn paper chart depicting Friedman’s curve for estimating cervical dilation over time.
Dean moved on, inspecting the hole in the corner of the back wall. The broken section of plywood had burst into the room, as if something from beyond the wall had crashed inside. And what he found beyond the wall looked like a small
addition to the original room, an unfinished storage area with some tattered black cloth in a hole about the size of a…
“Shallow grave,” Dean said. “Somebody was buried here.”
“Dean—I got something,” Sam called. “Under the cabinet.”
Sam laid his shotgun on the hospital bed. He crouched, gripped the front edge of the cabinet and lifted it upright, but not before a drawer fell out and dumped a worn leather-bound journal on the floor. The shattered cabinet balanced precariously on three intact legs, but the Winchesters directed their attention downward, at what—or who—had been under it.
The flashlight beam revealed the desiccated corpse of a tall man in a torn white lab coat, brown trousers and black leather shoes. Most of his dark hair had fallen out and what remained looked like a fright wig. His face was gaunt, stretched into a horrified rictus. The skin around both eyes had been shredded, the bone underneath scored, the sockets dark and empty. Further down, the body’s midsection had been ripped open, ribs shattered, pelvis cracked. Dark stains discolored the white lab coat from the corpse’s sternum all the way down.
“Grave you found over there wasn’t his,” Sam concluded. “Looks like he was thrown against the cabinet, killed right here and left to rot.”
“Pontianak victim zero,” Dean said. “My money’s on Calvin Nodd.” He kneeled beside the body, checked the pockets, and came up with a billfold containing forty-two dollars and a faded Indiana driver’s license. “Bingo! Doctor Nodd never left town.”
Sam glanced toward the shallow grave. “Was the pontianak here all along?”
“She rises from the grave and kills Nodd. But why?”
“Dean, she was returning the favor,” Sam guessed. “He handcuffed patients to that bed. This was his kill room.”
“Why the operating room if he planned to kill them?”
Sam picked up the leather-bound journal, opened the cover and read a name. “This belonged to Nodd,” he said and started flipping through the early pages. “He’s writing about events that happened during the war, when he was in the Philippines… It’s a recitation of atrocities Nodd witnessed directly or after the fact. Dean, I think this journal was his attempt at self-therapy.”
Supernatural--Cold Fire Page 22
