Gray Widow Trilogy 1: Gray Widow's Walk
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Janey didn’t dare put any weight on her left leg, but she used the crutch she had pulled from the basement and struggled to her feet.
Simon Grove’s body had lost most of the features that define human beings. The blood on his skin moved, rippled and danced like tiny red flames. A sickening thought clamped down on Janey’s mind: Is this what Simon truly is? And if that’s true for him—if he’s really not human—is it true for me, too?
It didn’t need to end like this. There was so much to say, so many questions to ask. So many experiences to share. All the information and knowledge they could have accumulated together, gone, all gone, shoved into the trash. Pointlessly.
Simon hitched forward another few inches.
Janey thought of Tim.
When he reached her and reared upright, Janey braced herself with the crutch and wrenched the katana out of Simon’s body. He screamed again, his blue-green forked tongue flailing around his neck and shoulders, and Janey swung the katana with every bit of strength she had left.
Simon’s head hit the floor and rolled a few feet. His body spasmed, crumpled backward and landed on the concrete with a wet, spongy smack.
Janey watched the corpse, expecting all the scales and tendrils and barbs to shrink or withdraw, like in the movies, the way they always did on monsters when they died, so that Simon Grove could be found in the morning and identified. So his perverse truth could be kept a secret.
That didn’t happen. The body on the floor in front of her, especially now that it was dead, didn’t seem even remotely human, didn’t seem ever to have been human. The eyes in the severed head darkened, the alien light dying, until the eyeballs looked blank, like burned-out light bulbs.
All the blood, both on Simon’s skin and the floor around him, abruptly congealed and turned a rank brown.
Janey tried to think of something to say, like a eulogy of some kind, but couldn’t.
Biting her lip to keep from crying out, she maneuvered herself over behind an unused, slightly battered writing desk that had once served as a prop in a children’s program called “KidzNews.” She figured it would provide shadow enough. She knew she’d have to come back very soon to dispose of Simon’s body, but she also knew that if she didn’t get medical attention even sooner, she stood a good chance of succumbing to shock. She’d vomited twice more, and the room had a good spin on it now that showed no signs of slowing down.
She had just pulled her good leg under the desk when the studio door burst open. Janey froze and stared out through the space between the desktop and the modesty panel.
Six men in white hazmat suits rushed into the room, two of them carrying a stretcher. Two of them hoisted Simon’s ruined body onto the stretcher and carried it out the door. The remaining four produced cleaning materials and began mopping up both the brown, crusted blood and the small pools of Janey’s vomit.
A seventh man, not wearing one of the hazmat suits, stayed back near the door, leaning against a wall and watching. He carried a cane with a silver head.
One of the men cleaning the floor noticed the smeared blood trail leading to the desk. He jerked his head up and stared straight at Janey, who needed no further prodding and flickered away.
EPILOGUE
8:30 p.m.
Two days later.
A tiny article had appeared in the Chronicle, providing sparse information about an unidentified woman found dead on the shore of Lake Lanier. The article only made the paper at all because of an unusual feature of the corpse. “Worst case of frostbite I’ve ever seen,” were the words of the medical examiner. “Like she’d been locked in a freezer.”
Lying in bed in a shabby motel room, very close to the middle of nowhere, Scott Charles set the paper down beside him—no using the Web, not yet, too easily traced—and used the remote to click on the TV. An old Wheel of Fortune had just started. Maybe that would keep his mind off how hungry he was.
Vessler was out at the moment, gone to get Chinese food. Scott had never had Peking chicken before, but he’d agreed to try it on the strength of Vessler’s recommendation. His stomach growled.
They won’t find us, Vessler had said. I’ve got plenty of tricks up my sleeve yet. Scott couldn’t really wrap his mind around everything Vessler had promised. He’d used the term “normal life” a lot. Scott wasn’t entirely sure what Vessler meant by that, but he was certainly willing to find out.
A heavy truck roared past the motel. It made Scott shiver, and for a second he thought about jumping down and crawling under the bed. But only for a second. The sound wasn’t really that bad. Not really.
A key turned in the lock, and Garrison Vessler walked in, holding a small cardboard box filled with white cartons and Styrofoam cups.
“Hi...Dad,” Scott said. Dad. The word tasted strange and good.
“Hello, son,” Vessler replied. “Do you like duck sauce?”
“I don’t know.” Scott smiled. “But I guess I can try it.”
* * *
Detective Zach Feygen leaned back in his chair and eyed the thick stack of paper on the corner of his desk. On the first sheet was scrawled a name in Feygen’s writing: Jane Sinclair. Below that a horizontal line, and below that, again in Feygen’s writing, the words Gray Widow.
For forty-five minutes Feygen stared at the papers. In that stack he had what any jury would consider proof of the Gray Widow’s identity, where she lived, what she did for a living...for that matter, who her parents had been and how much she made in a year. As a painter. Feygen laughed a little, but his shoulders slumped.
He remembered the night in the Hargett Theatre when Janey Sinclair prevented Maurice Tell from making hamburger out of him. He remembered the Latino clerk in the hospital, and how he said the Gray Widow saved his life. But foremost he remembered Laura Jean Troland, shackled there in her parents’ cellar like an unwanted dog, with big blue eyes that sparkled up at him over the thick rusty chain.
Janey Sinclair was making a mockery of the American criminal justice system almost nightly. She was taking everything Feygen had been taught to believe, everything he’d sworn to uphold, and tossing it in the toilet. She was thumbing her nose at the Atlanta PD.
With what he had there in that stack of papers, Zach Feygen could put the Gray Widow behind bars for the next two hundred years.
Heather’s voice came to him. I know what she’s doing is illegal. But is it wrong? Then Sinclair’s, from that ballsy TV appearance: No one can stop me. No cell can hold me.
Feygen knew a lot of cops who’d taken that as a challenge, but he figured Sinclair was probably just telling the truth.
And none of this even touched what he’d heard Garrison Vessler say, in the ruins of the theatre. All of that about augments and signals and freaking aliens.
“Jesus Christ,” he said to the empty air. “I need to have my head examined.”
Feygen picked up the papers, opened the bottom drawer of his desk, set them far in the back, and covered them with two ancient telephone books and a box of crackers. He locked the drawer, picked up his jacket and left the office.
* * *
Dressed in a baggy sweatsuit, wearing a thick cast on her leg and walking on a pair of crutches, Janey flickered into Tim’s room at Gavring Medical. His step-mother, Kay, back from Cincinnati, had left only a short time before, most likely to get some much-needed sleep.
Tim lay still on the bed. They’d put a body cast on him, his left arm hung in traction, and bandages covered most of his head. An IV sprouted from his right arm. Janey could tell his thick, wavy hair had been shaved. His eyes were closed.
The room was mostly dark. A small light burned in the bathroom near his bed, just enough to drive away Janey’s night vision, so she couldn’t see him as well as she would have liked. Squinting, wincing from the pain in her leg, Janey moved carefully to his side. He lay so still.
Janey felt the tears accumulate, and didn’t try to stop them as they ran down her welt-covered face. Tim’s lips had taken on a gray cast, his cheeks were sunken, and both his eyes were severely blackened. Bandages covered his nose. Janey balanced herself on one crutch, reached out and let her fingertips brush his face, barely enough pressure to feel. He gave a small sigh and turned his head.
Janey’s leg ached, and twinged hard enough to make her grunt.
She hadn’t been able to ask a doctor about Tim’s condition, but he was placed in a normal room, not in ICU. That was something, at least. It must at least mean his condition was stable.
Footsteps padded down the hallway outside, probably a nurse, and Janey watched the door, ready to vanish in a second if it began to open. The footsteps faded.
“Tim,” she said softly. “Can you hear me? It’s Janey.”
Tim stirred, slightly, and after a few seconds his eyes opened just a fraction of an inch. His lips parted, and he tried to moisten them. Janey saw a plastic cup with a giraffe-neck straw beside the bed and poured some water into it, held it to his lips. He drank a little.
When he released the straw his eyes opened wider, and Janey saw panic as they darted around the room.
“He’s gone,” Janey said. She took his hand. “He’s gone. He’s dead. I killed him.”
His eyes closed again, and his face relaxed. He whispered, “I thought you would.”
A tremor moved through Tim’s body, and Janey watched as he used the big toe on one foot to scratch the instep of the other. Oh thank God. He’s not paralyzed. Thank God. Thank God.
“Tim...I’m so sorry. All this is my fault, and I never meant...I never meant for you to get hurt...I’m so sorry...” One of her tears splashed on the sheet next to him. “I wanted...I wanted to protect you...I’m so sorry...”
Tim squeezed her hand, a tiny, trembling pressure. “We’ll talk...” He swallowed carefully. “...We’ll talk about this. Later.”
His hand eased in hers, and she said, “I love you,” but he had already fallen back to sleep.
Janey stayed there by his bed, watched him sleep, listened to his steady, shallow breathing, until a nurse came to check on him. As the door opened Janey flickered away into the dark.
* * *
High in the sky, past the border of the atmosphere, the Sender plummeted in freefall. He had maintained the low orbit around Earth for many years, and the parts of his cognitive apparatus that still functioned made sure the orbit continued. Every so often, carbon-fiber muscles relaxed, jetting gases out in the precise ways needed to keep him falling, ever falling, just past the curve of the planet below.
The Sender’s body had no true parallel among Earth’s fauna. His asymmetrical physiology, a combination of organic tissue and super-dense metal, most closely resembled that of a whale. A series of parabolic protrusions along his axis rendered him functionally invisible. No Earthly instrument could detect him. Light bent around his body to prevent him from being seen with the naked eye, and he modified his orbital path as needed to stay away from any manned space flights.
A communications array near the Sender’s cognitive apparatus sprang to life, and as the Sender glared down at the surface far below, words came to him across the vastness of interstellar space.
You have missed your last two message points. Report.
The Sender fell, ever forward, ever down. He made no response. The array flared again.
You have missed your last two message points. Report. We require details of the experiment.
The Sender remained silent.
A third of his cognitive apparatus had gone dark, thanks to the ragged hole punched through it by a fist-sized meteor destined for Earth. His orbital programming hadn’t accounted for that random factor, and hadn’t been able to evade it. Now the Sender could still see the tiny organisms squirming across the planet’s surface, could still monitor them and select suitable specimens to receive the mutagenic signal, could still fire the signal and record the results.
But he could no longer follow the protocol. The meteor had struck him, scrambling the signal, shortly before he targeted the specimen designated “Simon Grove.” Instead of modifying the subject’s DNA to conform to one of the military archetypes he was supposed to create—as he had done, so effectively, with the specimen designated Janey Sinclair, who had become a near-perfect Scout—he had, in effect, scrambled Simon Grove’s body on a molecular level, transforming him into an abomination wholly unsuitable for the experiment.
Exactly as he had done for eight other subjects since then, with varying results.
The Sender had no idea he had done any of this, thanks to the devastating trauma his cognitive apparatus had sustained. Neither could he communicate. The array lit up one last time.
Your status must be verified. A unit has been dispatched. Expect arrival in one hundred eighty local days.
The Sender did not acknowledge the message. He plummeted, watching and falling, ever falling, ever falling.
To be continued in
GRAY WIDOW’S WEB
About the Author
Dan Jolley started writing professionally at age nineteen. Beginning in comic books, he has since branched out into original novels, licensed-property novels, children’s books, and video games. His twenty-five-year career includes the YA sci-fi/espionage trilogy Alex Unlimited; the award-winning comic book mini-series Obergeist; the Eisner Award-nominated comic book mini-series JSA: The Unholy Three; and the Transformers video games War for Cybertron and Fall of Cybertron. Dan was co-writer of the world-wide-bestselling zombie/parkour game Dying Light, and lead writer of the Oculus Rift game Chronos. Dan lives somewhere in the northwest Georgia foothills with his wife Tracy and a handful of largely inert cats. Gray Widow’s Walk is his first original adult novel.
Learn more about Dan by visiting his website, www.danjolley.com, and follow him on Twitter @_DanJolley
Gray Widow’s Walk
Gray Widow’s Walk
Gray Widow’s Walk
Dan Jolley
Dan Jolley
Gray Widow’s Walk
Dan Jolley
Gray Widow’s Walk
Dan Jolley
Gray Widow’s Walk
Dan Jolley
Gray Widow’s Walk
Gray Widow’s Walk
Gray Widow’s Walk
Dan Jolley
Gray Widow’s Walk
Dan Jolley
Gray Widow’s Walk
Dan Jolley
Gray Widow’s Walk
Gray Widow’s Walk
Gray Widow’s Walk
Dan Jolley
Gray Widow’s Walk
Gray Widow’s Walk
Dan Jolley
Gray Widow’s Walk
Dan Jolley
Gray Widow’s Walk
Dan Jolley
Gray Widow’s Walk
Gray Widow’s Walk
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