Limbus, Inc. Book II

by Brett J. Talley

  She ran so hard. She tried so much to be part of her own future.

  But she could not run that fast.

  Because he could run so much faster.

  Chap. 36

  So, three guys walk into a bar.

  Pint-sized badass of a town cop. Scary jock government agent. And me. Werewolf ex-cop P.I.

  Life has gotten very strange.

  Even by my standards.

  Chap. 37

  We took a table in a corner that was so dark I needed my cell phone light to read the menu. I ordered a Philly cheesesteak, fries, and a beer. Ledger liked that and asked for the same thing. Crow had a Diet Coke.

  “Okay,” said Ledger, “cards on the table time.”

  “That’d make a refreshing change,” observed Crow. “Let’s start with your real name and official status.”

  There was no one seated within earshot, but even so, Ledger lowered his voice. “Captain Joseph Edwin Ledger,” he said. “I work for a specialized group operating under executive order.”

  “Name?”

  “If I told you I’d have to kill you.” Ledger smiled as he said it.

  “Not joking here,” said Crow. “I’m a half step away from arresting you. I don’t care if you could squeeze enough federal juice to beat an obstruction of justice charge. I’m the chief of police and you have to identify yourself.”

  Ledger nodded. “I used to be a cop,” he said. “In Baltimore. Worked homicide and then I was attached to Homeland. Mostly sitting on my ass working wiretaps. Then I caught the tail of something, and when we yanked on it, there was a dragon at the other end. I was in on the bust, which went south and everyone thought it would be fun to be stupid with guns. After that I was scouted by a group called the Department of Military Sciences.”

  “Never heard of it,” said Crow.

  “You wouldn’t. We fly pretty much below the radar.”

  “Part of Homeland?”

  “Parallel. A lot smaller, less red tape and bullshit. We target groups with cutting-edge bioweapons and other tech. Designer pathogens, man-portable nukes, that sort of thing.”

  “Mad scientists?” said Crow, amused.

  “The maddest.”

  “So,” I said, “you’re James Bond.”

  Ledger shook his head. “No laser-beam cufflinks. No ejector seats. And I prefer lagers to martinis.”

  Crow sipped his diet pisswater. “Which doesn’t explain why you’re here. Again. Last time you were here you pretended to be FBI and you brought two thugs with you who claimed to be Federal Marshals. Which they weren’t.”

  “Not as such, no.”

  “You brought a lot of bad people to my town. You turned a farmhouse into the Battle of Bull Run.”

  “I didn’t deal that play. We had a guy in witness protection who did something very stupid. Tried to reach out to some very bad people in hopes of uncovering some terrorists on American soil. Brought a lot of cockroaches out of the woodpile. Things got creative and the good guys rode their horses into the sunset.” Ledger paused. “I never did thank you for stepping in on that.”

  Crow ran his finger around the rim of his glass. “I had no official involvement in that case. There was, I believe, no evidence of my ever having been there. Perhaps you’re mistaken.”

  “Uh-huh,” said Ledger. “Your nose grew two full inches when you said that.”

  They sat there and looked at each other, and I had the impression there was a lot I didn’t know about them. Not sure I actually wanted to know. I was already creeped out and probably way out of my depth here.

  “Guys…going on the assumption that I have no idea what the fuck you two jokers are talking about, how about we circle around to the matter at hand?”

  Crow leaned back in his chair, effectively breaking the connection. “All cards on the table,” he said.

  “All cards on the table,” echoed Ledger. “Tell me about your investigation and then I’ll tell you why I’m here. I think we’ll find we’re working two ends of the same case.”

  Crow nodded and went through it all. The murders in other towns, the deaths here. The lack of any visible federal investigation. Ledger said nothing. He ate his cheesesteak and listened. I noticed Crow glossed over the part about who and what Mike Sweeney was. When he got to the part about Limbus, Ledger began asking questions. He wanted to know everything either of us knew about that organization. Unfortunately, we didn’t know much.

  When it was my turn, I told them about my previous case with the mysterious organization. Naturally, I omitted a few details—namely the nature of the real enemy in that case. I was still having nightmares about that.

  I had my Limbus card with me and he used his phone to photograph it and send the picture to his office. His contact there—presumably the “Bug” he’d been talking to earlier—got back to him and Ledger relayed the information to us. We didn’t like it.

  “The number is fake. My guys traced it and it dead-ends. Understand something,” Ledger said, “we have some pretty nifty toys and we can trace darn near anything. We can’t trace that number. And it’s not rerouting tech. Our pingbacks tell us that there is nothing at the end of that line. Database searches on Limbus came up empty, too. There are some obscure references to various groups using that name going back more than a hundred years, but so far we can’t tie any of it together.”

  “You got all of this that fast?” asked Crow.

  “Like I said, we have nifty toys. My people will continue to work on it. Maybe we’ll come up with something. We have to assume, though, that your office is bugged, Crow. And maybe this Limbus group has some informants in town.”

  It was the logical answer, but Crow shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

  “Has to be,” insisted Ledger.

  Crow shrugged. “Not sure it does.”

  Ledger let it go for now. The fact that he did made me wonder if he’d run up against other stuff that was equally weird. I sure as hell have. Ever since I went into business as a P.I., I’ve found that this world is a lot bigger, darker, and stranger than I ever thought. Werewolves are far from the only thing going bump in the night. And in my day, I’ve met things I don’t understand and things that terrify me.

  Crow had that look, too.

  So did Ledger.

  The three of us lapsed into a brief silence. We ate, we drank, we avoided each other’s eyes.

  Finally, Ledger said, “Super soldiers.”

  Crow paused, his glass halfway to his lips. “What now?”

  “Super soldiers. That’s what we think this is about.”

  “Super soldiers,” repeated Crow.

  “Super soldiers?” I asked.

  “Super soldiers,” said Ledger.

  And when he said it, I could see it.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said.

  Chap. 38

  The killer dragged the girl into the woods and ate her.

  Not all of her.

  Just the good parts.

  He nearly wept for the beauty of it.

  Chap. 39

  “We inherited this case,” Ledger said. “The first attacks happened in a small town near Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Local law was called in when a couple of joggers running back roads to prepare for a marathon smelled something nasty. Mounties checked out an abandoned warehouse and—”

  “Seriously?” I asked. “An abandoned warehouse?”

  “I know. It’s cliché, but you have to respect the classics. Anyway, they found two bodies pretty much torn to beef jerky. Been there about a week. Back door was open, so the locals had to conclude that the corpses had been bitten post-mortem by animals.”

  “Let me guess which kind of animal,” said Crow dryly.

  “Wolves aren’t entirely unknown in Canada,” said Crow. “Even if they’re not exactly common in Saskatoon. The coroner’s report, though, cited blunt force trauma as the cause of death. Murder weapon unknown, but presumably heavy and soft.”

  He looked at me. So did Cr
ow.

  “What?”

  “If you wanted to arrange a crime scene in a way that would muddy the investigation, how would you do it? Specifically, you.”

  I felt my face getting hot. I don’t like to be put on the spot and I have never once in my adult life had anyone call me out for being what I was. Ledger was doing exactly that. It was so fucking weird. What was weirder still was that neither of these guys looked particularly freaked by this line of questioning. They weren’t spooked by it. I was.

  So fucked up.

  I cleared my throat. “Um…well, I guess I’d, you know, change, and you know, maybe, um, hit the guys and, well…”

  Crow and Ledger burst out laughing. They howled. Ledger slapped his thighs. Crow put his face in his hands and his whole body shook. My face was actually burning now.

  In a creaking, wheezing voice, Crow said, “He’s embarrassed by being a were…were….”

  The rest of it dissolved into laughter.

  Joe Ledger began singing “Werewolves of London,” and Crow joined him for the “Wahoooo” chorus.

  “I am going to kill both of you,” I said.

  That made them laugh harder.

  “Seriously. Headshots. Bury you out in the country.”

  There were tears on Crow’s cheeks.

  I glared at them.

  “Yeah, well…fuck you.”

  Then I was laughing, too.

  Chap. 40

  The killer heard something and he raised his head. He’d been cradling the girl’s head, sniffing her hair, but now there was a sound in the woods.

  The killer tossed the head into the bushes and rose to smell the breeze. He was covered in blood, and the smell of the girl’s life was like strong perfume, blotting out most of what was exhaled on the forest’s breath.

  He moved away from the kill, going deeper into the woods, following the sound. Smelling the air. He changed halfway so he had arms but still had claws, and he climbed a tree.

  There.

  Way over there, a mile away or more, was the big red-haired policeman.

  The local wolf, he thought.

  Coming this way.

  The killer shimmied down the tree, turned away from the half-eaten girl, and ran.

  Was this local wolf blunted to the subtleties of the hunt? He wondered that as he ran.

  He dared the wolf to pick up his scent. He dared him to follow.

  He dared this pup to find him.

  Chap. 41

  Eventually Ledger got back to his story. More beer was involved. The other patrons at the Scarecrow moved even farther away from the three loud, obnoxious crazy people in the corner.

  “Anyway, anyway,” said Ledger, bringing it all down to earth, “there was a second set of murders in Manitoba. A third on Prince Edward Island. In each case there were two or more corpses. All mutilated. Each one in situations where there was another convenient possible cause of death. Industrial accidents, car crashes. You get the picture.”

  “Who put it all together?” asked Crow.

  Ledger smiled. “A computer. We have a great pattern-recognition software package. It trolls interagency databases. Mostly used to scout for terrorist activity, but every once in a while, it coughs out something that’s simply weird.”

  “Even so,” I said, “what was the connecting factor? There are a lot of strange, violent deaths.”

  Ledger nodded his approval. “Location, location, location. In each case, the deaths occurred within twenty miles, give or take, of a known—or suspected—lab.”

  “What kind of lab?” I asked.

  “Bioweapons research.”

  Crow shook his head. “Then your computer is wonky, ’cause there’s nothing like that in Pine Deep. Nothing even remotely like it.”

  Ledger gave him a long, hard look. “How much of your pension would you like to bet on that?”

  “Wait,” said Crow, “what?”

  “Yup, there is a bioweapons R&D facility in your own little slice of rural heaven.”

  “Run by whom?”

  “That’s a different question. It’s sure as hell not run by the U.S. government. I know that for a fact.”

  “Are you talking about a private lab?” I asked. “Something attached to a pharmaceutical company?”

  “No. We don’t have those here, either,” said Crow, who was getting very angry now.

  “Then what?” I asked. “Private sector working on something they want to sell to Uncle Sam?”

  Ledger shook his head. “I wish. No, gentlemen, I think what we have here is a clandestine and highly illegal lab. Probably funded by a terrorist group. And one that’s highly mobile. I think it’s been moving around North America doing research on the fly.”

  We digested that, and it was a hard pill to swallow.

  “How sure are you?” I asked.

  “Pretty sure.”

  “Based on what evidence?” demanded Crow.

  “Based on a shitload of supposition and some negative reasoning,” said Ledger. He drank the last of his beer and signaled for another. “Let’s look at the facts, shall we? We have a series of murders in rural areas. Each murder has been orchestrated to look like an accident. Because of the nature of the injuries, they haven’t been able to totally sell it, but enough so that no one in authority has been enthusiastic enough to start an international or even interstate investigation. Right now, there’s too much room for doubt.”

  Crow and I reluctantly agreed.

  “Whoever these folks are, they have access to, or have somehow created, lycanthropes.”

  “Look at you using technical words,” said Crow.

  “I went to college,” said Ledger. “We can suppose that they have more than one because of the nature of the crime scenes. There’s signs of evidence tampering that could not have been done in the absence of hypernormal physical strength.”

  “How did you make the jump from that to, um, lycanthropes?” I asked.

  Ledger smiled. “Rumors in the pipeline.” When it was clear that Crow and I wanted more than that, he explained. “There’s been talk about this for a while now. Ever since Dr. Broussard found the lycanthropic gene and—”

  “Whoa!” I said immediately. “Doctor who found what?”

  “Ah,” he said, “I would have thought that someone of your kind would have known about that. No? Okay, well Broussard is a French molecular biologist working with a team in Switzerland. They’ve been indexing the genes that are known in the tabloids as ‘junk DNA.’ Turns out, they’re not junk. You guys up on your genetics? No? I’ll try to flatten it out for you. In genomics they’ve found that about 98% of our DNA is what they called ‘noncoding.’ Some of this noncoding DNA is transcribed into functional noncoding RNA molecules, while others are not transcribed or give rise to RNA transcripts of unknown function. Follow me?”

  “I have no idea what the fuck you just said,” I admitted.

  “Lost me on the first curve,” said Crow.

  Ledger grinned. “Yeah, a couple of years ago I didn’t understand any of this shit. It’s become a kind of job requirement.”

  “Weird job,” I suggested.

  “You have no idea. Anyway, the amount of this noncoding DNA varies species to species. Like I said, 98% of the human genome is noncoding while only about 2% of, say, a typical bacterial genome is noncoding.”

  “I think I almost understood that,” said Crow.

  “At first, most of the noncoding DNA had no known biological function—emphasis on known—and someone hung the nickname ‘junk DNA’ on it. But there are teams all over the world working to unlock the secrets of those genes. Dr. Broussard’s team has been working on chimeric genes and—”

  “On what?”

  “Chimeric. Genes that change their nature, or that change what they code for. They’re a brand-new branch of evolutionary science. Broussard’s pretty much ready to prove that a lot of theriomorphic phenomena in world folklore—and that means things that change shape—”
>
  “I know.” Crow and I said it at the same time.

  “—are not part of some weirdo supernatural shit,” continued Ledger, “but are evidence that genetics is a much, much bigger field than we thought. It’s Broussard’s belief that werewolves are a genetic offshoot of good ol’ Homo sapiens.”

  We said nothing.

  “And, before you ask, there are other examples of chimeric genes. I had a tussle a couple of years ago with Upierczy.”

  “That’s a kind of Russian vampire,” said Crow quietly.

  “Homo vampiri,” said Ledger. “Now fully documented, though we haven’t released that to the press yet. The Upierczy are some nasty fucks. They call themselves the Red Knights and even though they’re not supernatural, they are still every damn bit as scary.”

  “You don’t believe in the supernatural?” asked Crow.

  “Not really,” said Ledger, but his tone was mildly evasive. It was clear he didn’t want to travel down that side road.

  “How does that connect to an illegal bioweapons lab in my backyard?” asked Crow.

  Ledger shrugged. “Most of the labs doing illegal bioweapons research tend to be either offshore or hidden.”

  “Hollowed-out volcanoes?” I suggested.

  “Close enough. A few are on ships in international waters. Or hidden in oil refineries. Places where they can hide science teams, where people come and go, and where large shipments of supplies are routine. We busted one in a container yard in Baltimore last year and another on a freight train operating out of the Pacific Northwest. We’ve found minilabs in RVs, in mobile homes, and in your generic abandoned or short-leased warehouses. Computer and lab equipment is getting more compact every day and it’s easier to have a grab-it-and-go lab than before. And there are what amounts to virtual labs, where everyone is networked through Wi-Fi so they don’t all have to be in the same physical location. I think that’s what we’re hunting for here. Someone is messing around with lycanthrope DNA. Your basic Homo sapiens canis lupis. Broussard’s term, not mine.”

  “Even so, how’d you get to werewolves?” asked Crow.