Nocturnal: A Novel

by Scott Sigler

  Bryan nodded. He closed the folder. “That seems to be the way things are. Pooks, it’s getting dark. You want to come out hunting with me?”

  Pookie had known that question was coming, yet all his well-rehearsed and oh-so-clever answers had vanished. Bryan was made to do this — Pookie Chang was not.

  Pookie shook his head as he walked to the front door. “I can’t. Me and my new partner have to look into a murder in Japantown.”

  Bryan seemed confused at first, then he opened the front door and looked out to the street, to Pookie’s Buick. John Smith waved.

  “Black Mister Burns is your … your partner?”

  “If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’.”

  Bryan stared, then nodded. “Yeah, that’s good. John came through big-time, Pooks. You could do a lot worse.”

  Pookie wanted to say I could do a lot better, if only I was man enough to go hunting with you, but he didn’t.

  Bryan forced a smile. “If you don’t mind, I gotta get ready to go to work.”

  “Say no more, Brother.”

  Bryan held out his hand. “Thank you, man.”

  Pookie shook it. “Thank me? You saved my life for the second time.”

  Bryan looked down. “Yeah, well … I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t stood by me. Now that Robin is gone, you … well, you’re all I’ve got.”

  Pookie pulled him in and hugged him. “Gimme some sugar, you big lug. I’m glad you pinched off that emotional nugget before you go back to being all reserved and resigned and whatnot.”

  Pookie thumped Bryan on the back, then let go. “Good hunting, my friend,” he said, then walked away from Bryan’s mansion.

  Pookie felt like a loser for not backing Bryan’s play, but it was just too much. All that death — Robin, Baldwin Metz, Jesse Sharrow, Rich Verde, all killed by something that Pookie still couldn’t truly accept as real. And what he’d seen in that cavern, how close he’d come to dying himself.

  For now, at least, Bryan Clauser was on his own.

  Holding Hands

  Kissing.

  Two girls, kissing, hands rubbing on backs, soft and tender, hidden in the shadows of Lafayette Park, holding hands.

  Chameleon felt that cold rage churning inside his chest. Why did they get to kiss? Why did they get to have each other, when he had nothing?

  No one could stop him now. Sly said Savior was dead. The police had staked out Ocean Beach and Golden Gate Park, Chameleon’s favorite killing grounds, but the police were just human. One pair of detectives had walked within two feet of his position. They didn’t notice Chameleon because Chameleon looked just like the tree behind which he hid. He hadn’t killed that night, but the next night he had.

  It wasn’t hard to wait. He waited like a spider. If you sat still and quiet long enough, eventually a couple would come to you.

  Then you just took them.

  Chameleon stood at the base of a small tree, his chest and left cheek against the trunk, his arms wrapped around the other side. That was how you hid. You just hugged the tree, then made your skin feel and look like the tree. The shadows took care of the rest.

  The girls drew closer. He wouldn’t have even known one was a girl from looking at her. She had short hair and wore a boy’s shirt and pants. But he knew how women smelled. No matter what she wore, that was a girl.

  A girl who would soon be dead.

  Chameleon thought it was funny to kill in Lafayette Park, so close to Savior’s old house, the house Sly had told him to watch for so long. But Savior was gone. Sly was in charge now, and Sly gave Chameleon respect. If Chameleon wanted to hunt, that was fine with Sly.

  Maybe this time, Chameleon would cut off a head and bring it home for New Mommy. She was changing, changing so fast, but she wasn’t ready to have babies yet. Maybe the reason Old Mommy could have babies was because she ate brains. Maybe New Mommy needed the same kind of food.

  Closer still. Only thirty feet now. Walking, holding hands, smiling, kissing. The cold rage blossomed. The lust to kill swirled through his brain.

  A noise to his left. He couldn’t turn to look, because trees didn’t turn to look. Moving might spook the prey.

  More noise. The smell of a dog.

  Chameleon didn’t worry. The dog would pass by like all the others.

  He watched the girls. Just another ten seconds or so, and he would grab them, pull them into the deeper shadows beneath the tree. Sly liked boy livers better, but he probably wouldn’t mind so much since this was two girls.

  The dog smell grew stronger, closer.

  A growl — low, deep and aggressive, the kind that would make the hair on the back of your neck stand up if you hadn’t made the back of your neck feel just like tree bark. A growl so quiet the girls didn’t even hear.

  Was the dog growling at him?

  He had to take a look. Chameleon slowly turned his head, heard his stiff skin crackling like a bending branch.

  Just ten feet away, a black-and-white dog with something wrapped around its head stared at him. Its lip curled up, revealing long teeth that glowed softly in the pale moonlight.

  Go away, dog, Chameleon thought. Just go away.

  But the dog did not go away.

  For some reason, the dog frightened Chameleon. Dogs weren’t that dangerous, but there was something in this one’s eyes. Not hunger, but hate.

  The dog took a step closer. The lip curled higher. A string of drool swung from the dog’s lower lip. The jaw opened — the growl sounded gravelly, disturbing.

  The girls’ footsteps stopped.

  Stupid dog.

  Chameleon started to slowly push away from the tree. He would have to pounce on that dog and kill it fast, then maybe chase the girls down. Everything was ruined!

  A hissing sound.

  Something punched him in the back, pushed his chest into the tree. Chameleon started to pull away, but found that he could not — he was stuck.

  Then the pain hit.

  It burned!

  He squeezed the tree, as if hugging it might take away his pain.

  The girls’ footsteps quickened, faded away — they had run.

  He opened his eyes to look at the dog again. Now it sat on its haunches. The growling stopped, but its head remained low, its eyes fixed on Chameleon.

  More footsteps, heavier footsteps …

  ba-da-bum-bummmm

  Family! He was saved!

  “Help me!” Chameleon whispered. He couldn’t see who was there. “I … I can’t move and this dog is bugging me. My chest really hurts. I don’t feel so good.”

  The footsteps came closer, from behind and to the right. Chameleon turned to look — a man in black, his face covered by a fabric mask painted with a white skull-smile. Chameleon saw green eyes through the mask’s little eye-slits.

  “You’ve been a busy boy,” the man in black said. The skull-smile didn’t move when he talked. That looked weird.

  Chameleon felt cold. Sleepy.

  “Crap,” the man said. “Emma, I think I nicked his heart. I really have to work on this bow-and-arrow business.”

  That was where Chameleon felt the burning, in his chest. “You nicked my heart? I’ll heal up, right?”

  The skull-smile shook his head. “Not this time. You’re gonna die, right here, right now.”

  “Die? Like … like prey dies? No, please, I don’t want to die!”

  “Please? So polite. Did any of your loving couples beg you to let them live?”

  The man took a step closer. Chameleon reached with his right hand, hoping to grab the man’s throat, but the man stepped back effortlessly. Moonlight flashed off metal. Chameleon felt something hit his right hand, just past the wrist.

  Then he felt a new pain and heard something hit the ground.

  Chameleon looked down to see a hand on the grass, a hand with skin that looked an awful lot like tree bark. He raised his wrist, now a stump gushing blood. Chameleon stared at the stump, disbelieving — it couldn’t be
real, couldn’t be happening.

  The man shook something near Chameleon’s face.

  It was a string of twelve severed hands, six pairs wired together from Chameleon’s victims, all the pairs then wired together in a long chain. The hands at the bottom were blackened, shriveled, crawling with maggots. The ones in the middle were almost as bad. The ones at the top were still fresh — he’d taken those just last night.

  “I found your collection,” the man in black said. “You killed six people.”

  “Help me, please! They aren’t people, they’re prey! You know this, brother!”

  The skull-smile man nodded. The metal flashed again. Chameleon felt a burning sting on his left wrist. The man bent to pick something up.

  Then, the man in black held up Chameleon’s severed hands for Chameleon to see.

  Chameleon’s hands. “Oh, no.” His eyes slowly closed. So cold. So sleepy.

  Another flash of pain, this time in his right cheek.

  “Stay with me,” the man said. “You can’t check out yet.”

  This man, he was family. Family was everything!

  “Who are you? Why won’t you save me?”

  “Think of me as the nasty uncle you didn’t invite to the family Christmas.”

  Man in black. Chameleon thought back to the night Savior was shot. A man in black had done that. But that man hadn’t worn a mask, so it couldn’t be the same person.

  Something tickled Chameleon’s face. He blinked awake — had he gone to sleep? He saw what was tickling his face: the dead, cold fingers of his keepsakes touching his rough skin. It was like the hands of his victims reaching out from hell, grabbing him, pulling him down. Some of the maggots fell free, bounced off Chameleon’s face and fell to the ground below.

  “I was going to torture you, find another way into your tunnels,” the man in black said. “Or maybe you guys have a new home, I don’t know. I figure you have about fifteen seconds or so. Any chance you can tell me where Sly lives?”

  Chameleon had to focus, but he shook his head. When he did, the dead fingers caressed his cheeks even more. Chameleon thought of Hillary. Beautiful New Mommy Hillary, all safe in her chamber, her body growing bigger every day.

  “I won’t tell you.”

  A heavy sigh from behind the mask. “I figured as much. Well, it looks like your time is up. But as you go, know this. I’m going to find your home. I’m going to find your family. I’m going to kill them one by one. All the eyes, all the teeth. But you can keep the hands.”

  Chameleon felt colder than ever. His eyes closed.

  The last thing he felt was the dead fingers of his victims caressing his face.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  While I always strive for as much accuracy as possible in these books, I was forced to modify some aspects of the policies and procedures of the San Francisco Police Department and the Medical Examiner’s Office in order to create a more streamlined tale. Remember, folks: this is a story about a race of monsters lurking beneath the streets of San Francisco — it’s quite possible I made up a detail or two.

  The buried ships of San Francisco, however, are real. The discovery of gold in 1848 generated a migration to the Bay Area, resulting in over six hundred ships being abandoned in the bay. As the city expanded, many of those abandoned ships were buried. Special thanks to Ron Fillion for his map of the buried ships and the historical information available at http://​www.sfgenealogy.com/​sf/​history/​hgshp1.htm.

  “Certainly, there is not any dust of empire sepulchered below, nor is there anything resembling dust in the ooze beneath those bay-born thoroughfares. But we do know, or every San Franciscan ought to know, that that ooze is the winding sheet of many a gallant craft that once proudly plowed the bounding billows of the open sea, and which formed one of the great fleet of vessels that brought the fortune-hunters to the Golden Gate — that made up the Argonauts’ Armada of golden dreams that was soon to be scattered and strewn even as was that maritime pageant once assembled under the management of Philip of Spain.”

  — WALTER J. THOMPSON, “The Armada of Golden Dreams”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  San Francisco Architectural Heritage for their help researching the Haas-Lilienthal House in San Francisco. Yeah, that’s where Savior lives, and you can visit it. See www.sfheritage.org.

  Richard Vetterli of the San Francisco Medical Examiner’s Office for all the fantastic information about how the ME staff deal with the city’s dead.

  Officer Dwayne Tully for his information on San Francisco Police procedures.

  The SFPD Community Relations team for additional research help and fact-checking.

  The Scientific Secret Agents: Joseph A. Albietz III, M.D., Jeremy Ellis, Ph.D., and Tom Merritt, Ph.D.

  Chris Grall, Master Sergeant, A 3/20 SFG(A), Florida National Guard.

  Det. Richard Verde, NYPD (retired).

  Dan “A RaiderFan” Garcia for help with Spanish.

  Glenn Howell, Deputy Sheriff Retired, Jefferson County SO, Golden, Colorado.

  BOOKS THAT INFLUENCED THIS NOVEL

  Carroll, Sean B. Endless Forms Most Beautiful. Norton, 2005.

  Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press, 1976.

  Gould, Stephen Jay. Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Belknap/Harvard, 1977.

  Hölldobler, Bert, and Wilson, E.O. The Super Organism. Norton, 2009.

  Oakley, Barbara. Evil Genes. Prometheus Books, 2007.

  Tinbergen, Niko. The Study of Instinct. Clarendon Press, 1951.

  Turner, Scott J. The Tinkerer’s Accomplice. Harvard University Press, 2007.