by Kate Danley
The door in the back wall opened and Wilson staggered out, looking like he’d just been through a nasty fight. “They gave up the password. My dog had to get kind of rough with them.”
Wilson sat down on the arm of the sofa, exhausted. Matt crossed into the back room for a minute. When he came out, he put his hand on Wilson’s shoulder.
“They were rotting. They were evil. You did the right thing.”
Wilson sighed. “My dog got a little carried away. I’m afraid…that he’s starting to like it.” He looked up at Matt with baleful eyes. “If my dog turns evil, you’ll put him down, won’t you, Matt?”
“It won’t come to that.”
“But if it does. Promise me.”
“I promise.”
Matt looked to the others. “We have what we need. And we have to move now.” He turned to Tanis. “Are you with us?”
Tanis seized the grip of her hammer for reassurance. “Why not?” she said.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Somewhere in the Pacific Ocean
Heather Paxton was dreaming again.
She was on board the dromon, and the only way she knew she was dreaming was that it was night. She’d been over to the Byzantine ship a dozen times in the past few days, but never once at night.
Not that Heather was afraid to be there when the sun was down, just that Captain Marco, in his wisdom, refused to send the dinghy over in the nighttime. Besides, what would be the point in going over to the ship when she couldn’t see anything?
Still, she was over there now, on the open deck of the ship, the moonlight gleaming off the oarlocks, the broken mainmast blotting out the stars above her in a straight line, as if it was leading her in a path to darkness. She turned to see Captain Marco by her side and felt doubly sure she was dreaming. He would never set foot on what he called “this hellish ship” after dark.
The whole crew of the science vessel was there, wandering around, as if they had some job to do but couldn’t remember what it was.
“Do you hear it?” Marco whispered.
Since it was a dream, Heather didn’t hear it until Marco pointed it out, but once he did, it was as if she had been hearing it for hours. Time plays tricks in dreams.
A splashing sound. The sound of water sloshing to and fro. Not at all an odd sound to encounter on a boat. But she knew what it meant. She’d had this dream many times before.
The sound wasn’t coming from waves beating against the prow of the ship. The sound was coming from the forty crates that lined the deck. The forty crates that contained the bodies of the dead Byzantine lords, packed in seawater to preserve them from the corrupting influence of the air. And the hundred crates belowdecks that contained the bodies of the slaves, also in a stunning state of preservation.
All at once, the sloshing sound stopped. Heather held her breath. On good nights, she woke up before it happened. On bad nights, she had to experience what came next.
They heard a hollow pounding next, like the beating of a hundred drums, coming from the crates. Marco looked around, frightened. He wasn’t usually in the dream, so he didn’t know what to expect.
The forty crates began to vibrate, to rock back and forth on the deck. The lids flew off with a clatter. The forty dead lords sat up, their white robes gleaming. They turned their heads as one towards Heather and Marco.
“My God,” Marco whispered. The crew stood speechless at the sight of the resurrection.
The dead lords’ eyes opened. A wondrous yellow glow beamed from them towards the carvings that decorated the ship. The carvings began to glow, too. In the glowing light, as bright as daylight, Heather could see the dead lords reach to their sides and draw their swords.
Then the slaughter began…
Heather woke up.
She’d had the dream so many times before that she wasn’t panicked, wasn’t drenched in sweat, the way she had been the first time.
The dream was almost comforting.
That thought sent a shiver down her spine. She turned to the clock. It was almost five. Time to start the day.
# # #
The sun and moon were out at the same time.
The moon was a sliver but shone clearly in the sky next to the blazing sun. The ocean was calm, deadly calm, so that the moon and sun were reflected in its gunmetal-gray surface.
Heather climbed into the dinghy and sat down next to Captain Marco. It had been a week since they had been able to receive any communications from the outside world. Heather had continued sending messages faithfully to the university, but she didn’t know if they had gotten through.
“At the rate we’re traveling,” Marco said, “the ship should arrive in Puget Sound in two days.”
“That’s impossible,” Heather said. “When are you going to face the fact that our instruments are compromised?”
“When are you going to face the fact that we’re never going to see land again?”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you ever hear of the Flying Dutchman?”
“Yes. It was Dutch. Not Byzantine. And you said we would be in Seattle in two days, not wandering forever. Make up your mind.”
“I said the ship would be there. I didn’t say anything about us.”
They cast off for the dromon.
Heather wanted to get as much footage as she could of the hieroglyphs, just in case something happened to the ship before she could get it into the harbor outside Seattle. Before she could present it to the university with a big bow around it. She decided to equip most of the crew of the science vessel with cameras linked by satellite to the university, so they could wander about and film every square inch of the vessel again and again. There would be so much footage of this ship that not a millimeter of it would be left undocumented.
She laughed when she thought that the image of the crew wandering aimlessly around the vessel in her dream had given her the idea for this maneuver. Even in her dreams, she was working.
The hours passed slowly as Heather oversaw the slow digital recording of the Byzantine ship. She glanced over now and then to Captain Marco as he stood in the dromon’s prow, watching the sky and sea as if waiting for some unforeseen disaster to strike.
Let him wait. She had work to do.
“Dr. Paxton,” Marco said, “look up.”
“In a minute, Captain,” Heather snapped, annoyed. Not that she was so busy that she couldn’t have looked up. She just didn’t want to give Marco the satisfaction.
It grew dark.
At first Heather thought a cloud must have passed in front of the sun. She looked up.
The moon was traveling in front of the sun, so that it looked like a crescent had been cut from the yellow orb.
An eclipse?
How had she not known an eclipse was forecast? How had this taken her by surprise?
“Did you know this was coming?” she asked Marco.
“It wasn’t coming. It wasn’t predicted. It just is.”
The sky grew darker. The stars started to come into view. Heather swallowed, trying to quell the fear that was coming up from her gut.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “An eclipse can’t come out of nowhere.”
Then she heard it. The sound of water sloshing in the crates that lined the ship’s bow.
Her first thought, as she walked towards Marco, was that this must be a dream. The dark of night. The wandering crewmen. She would wake up anytime now in her bunk on the science vessel and laugh this off. But she barked her shin against one of the crates, and the sharp pain told her that this was no dream.
The pounding began. Faster than in her dream. More impatient.
The sudden night around her was pitch-black and the crew was frozen in place, their cameras recording the darkness, possibly sending it back by satellite to the university.
The cover on the crate next her to began to split open from the inside.
Heather ran to the rail of the ship. Towards the rope ladder that led to the dinghy
. Her eyes began to adjust to the darkness just in time to see the dinghy drifting away from the ship, bobbing up and down like a child’s toy. There was no way off the dromon.
Then the lids flew off the crates.
Heather didn’t stay to see the dead lords rise. She had seen it often enough. She ran to the gangway and went down into the depths of the ship.
She heard the screams of her crew being slaughtered as she ran into what should have been the dark bowels of the dromon. But the light from the glowing carvings blinded her, as did the piercing yellow eyes of the hundred corpses of the slaves as they rose from their crates.
Try as she might, Heather couldn’t wake up. This was no dream. This was a nightmare.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Bremerton, Washington
The view from the Seattle-to-Bremerton ferry was strikingly beautiful, but Tanis didn’t see any of it. She slept the whole way. When the ferry was coming into the landing and she woke up, she found her head slumped over on Matt’s shoulder. She sat bolt upright and saw Carrie sitting across from her, looking annoyed.
“Sorry,” she said to Matt.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, getting his duffel bag
The weather on the flight from New York had been too rough to allow Tanis any sleep. She had been crammed into a seat next to Wilson for that long flight, and what with his incessant talking and constant scratching, rest was impossible.
Evidently Wilson had never been on a plane before, and he commented, loudly, on every detail of the flight, got up to pee frequently, and insisted on hinting, but not outright saying, that he and Jake had “appropriated” the entire group’s airfare by holding up several liquor stores throughout the greater New York area.
“You gotta fund Freaks Incorporated somehow, if you get my drift,” Wilson had said with a wink. “And we’re in a hurry to get to the Emerald City. We only got a three-day hall pass to that university.”
What with that and thinking about where they were headed, Tanis slept not a wink on the flight, and she hardly thought she’d fare any better on the boat ride across the Puget Sound. She’d been happy to sit next to Matt in the large cabin of the ferry—she had a million questions for him. So she was surprised and disappointed that she’d nodded off and slept like a baby for the whole hour.
She rubbed her eyes and caught her knapsack when Jake threw it at her. She walked onto the ferry landing with Jake, Lowell, Carrie, Wilson, and Matt and was greeted by the lowering gray skies of the great Northwest. Rain, as always, was imminent.
Matt took a deep breath. “Smells like home,” he said.
They met a very tall, middle-aged man whose gentle voice belied his huge physique. “Hello, I’m Dr. Vincent Mendelsohn. Welcome to Bremerton.”
# # #
Mendelsohn’s house was a little clapboard bungalow on a dry patch of ground on McKenzie Street. The remnants of a once-lovely garden lay scattered about the front yard, like a reminder of better times.
The living room was littered with newspapers and books and leftover plates from many leftover dinners.
“Sorry,” the doctor said, throwing books and magazines off the sofa to make room for the freaks. “I don’t entertain much. My wife was quite the hostess, but she…”
He left that comment hanging and went to get them coffee.
“The doc seems kinda preoccupied,” Wilson said.
“Wouldn’t you be?” Matt said.
“Remember me?” Tanis spoke up. “I don’t know what’s going on.”
“The doc used to work for a company called Pavlov and Kirk,” Matt explained to her. “They developed chemical weapons.”
“Lovely,” Tanis said.
Matt went on. “They created a particular chemical weapon—”
“We call it Virus X,” Wilson piped up.
“Only you call it that,” Matt said, annoyed.
“Well, you gotta call it something!” Wilson said.
“The virus made whoever contracted it a mindless killing machine until the virus passed, but by then, everybody is dead. It was a way to wipe out the enemy from within. Get them to kill one another for us. But it had another side effect. It made the infected who happened to survive immune to Mr. Dark’s touch. I’ve seen it, and Mr. Dark has, too. It terrified him.”
“No shit?” Tanis said.
“No shit,” Matt said. “If we can get hold of the virus, there might be a way for Dr. Mendelsohn to purify it. Remove the killing strain and leave the immunity intact. We could beat Mr. Dark for good.”
Tanis took this in. “But Mendelsohn used to work for the big, bad company that made it. What makes you think that Dr. Mendelsohn will help—”
“It’s because of my wife,” the doctor said, coming from the kitchen with a tray of coffee and cream, like a good host. “You see, she was…different.”
“She was a freak,” Wilson said.
“The way you mean it, I guess she was, yes.” Dr. Mendelsohn put the coffee tray on a corner of the table that wasn’t covered with notebooks and texts. “She had a green thumb. Anything she touched sprang to life.”
“The garden outside?” Tanis asked.
“There was that. And other things. How old do you think I am?”
Tanis considered, with a sinking feeling in her gut. “Fifty?”
“Oh, dear.” He looked perturbed. “I’m eighty-five. While Amelia was with me I could pass for thirty. She’s been gone for two months now. Time passes.”
“The university?”
“Yes. I tried to keep her abilities a secret, but, well, I couldn’t help but draw attention. Even if we moved every ten years and changed our names. I could only get work in the same field. Virology. I had to take whatever job came along. Even Pavlov and Kirk.
“Eventually the university tracked us down. They took her. I have to get her back.”
“Or you’ll grow old and die.”
Mendelsohn looked surprised. “Oh, I suppose I will. But that’s not why I have to get her back. You see, I love her.”
They sat in silence for a long time. Then Matt spoke.
“The password’s only good for another six hours. We have to get moving.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Seattle
The promenade leading to the campus was a flat lawn, lined with maple trees and dominated by a mirror pool, reflecting a 1930s streamlined rectangular edifice with the words “Fort College” inscribed over flat columns. The building was white, but, bathed in green lights, it glowed like a jade gemstone in the night.
If Seattle was the Emerald City, this was Oz.
“Fort College went under a few years ago,” Dr. Mendelsohn was saying. “The economy. The university bought the campus up cheap. They use the facilities for their research. They have a genetics department, a virology department, an archeology department—”
“Like Indiana Jones?” Wilson asked, excited.
Mendelsohn shot Wilson an irritated look.
The gang of freaks was loitering underneath one of the maple trees in the gathering dusk, and Matt turned up the fleece collar on his dusty barn coat as a soft rain started to fall. They made a rather suspicious crew, Tanis thought. Hardly the typical gathering of folks on a college campus. She and Carrie could pass for students, she supposed. And Mendelsohn looked like a professor. But Wilson and Matt? They looked like they’d never seen a textbook. Lowell, in his black gloves, looked like he was going to rob the place. And Jake? One didn’t often see a man disrobing on a college campus. Except during fraternity rush.
“Building C houses the Medical Research Department,” Matt was saying. “That’s where the Virology Department is based. We think.”
Tanis was only half listening to him. She was distracted by Jake’s striptease. He had, she marveled, a magnificent body. And she noted that he was totally shaven. She guessed his body hair didn’t change color, so it made sense that he shaved it off. All of it. She made a note to ask if Jake was seeing anybody after all t
his was over.
“What’s the plan?” Lowell asked Matt.
Matt pulled his ax out of his knapsack. “We go in. We find the virus and Mrs. Mendelsohn. We get them out.”
“That’s the plan?”
“You got a better one?”
Lowell shrugged as he pulled off his gloves. “Not really.” He hands glowed red.
Matt nodded to Jake. “Go for it.”
“My dog’s gonna like this!” Wilson said.
Tanis wasn’t exactly surprised when Wilson shook and shivered and transformed himself before her eyes into the dog she had seen in the Garden of Happiness. She had suspected that Wilson and his dog were one and the same, but still, seeing his bones twist and turn, seeing the fur sprout from his skin as it remodeled itself from man to animal, was disconcerting to say the least. The dog shook itself free from Wilson’s clothes and snarled.
She pulled her claw hammer free from the loop in her pants and thought, This is all I have. I hope it’s enough.
Jake approached the building. Tanis saw a security camera pointed at the front door, but as Jake came into its view, he blended with the green light on the white marble, so that he was as near to invisible as could be.
Tanis turned to Carrie. She expected Carrie to light up. Instead her skin turned translucent so that Tanis could see her bones and veins gleaming through, like the old model of the Visible Girl she’d had in high school. She couldn’t help but stare.
Carrie looked self-conscious. “It happens when I get excited,” she said.
“When I’m excited, I get the hiccups,” Tanis said, and Carrie laughed. It was the first sign of friendship from Carrie. Maybe they’d have a cup of coffee and share stories of old boyfriends. If they lived through the night.
Jake crept to the keypad by the front door and entered the password. He tried the door. It opened.
The freaks moved in.
# # #
Karl Neumann didn’t want to be where he was. He wanted to be with the DEA, chasing drug smugglers on the Mexican border. But Karl Neumann was color-blind and, in the infinite wisdom of the U.S. government, the Department of Justice wouldn’t take you if you couldn’t tell red from green.
