“Can we have a look at it?” Kenny asked him.
“Oh, sure. Why not? Come with me.”
The man pushed himself away from his ‘desk’ and struggled to his feet.
“This guy’s a heart attack waiting to happen, man,” I told Kenny mentally and he smiled at me. Our mental quips seemed to be lost, drowned out by the heavy breathing and struggling beats of the man’s heart as he made his way past us.
We followed Mr. Regees out the door and down a narrow dirt path into a wall of trees and bushes just on the other side of the main road. Mr. Regees waddled on fat legs past old rusted refrigerators and practically ancient advertising signs, past old cars overgrown by blackberry bushes and RV campers abandoned thirty years ago or more. That television show American Collectors would love this place, I thought. We walked for another minute or two past much of the same before we came to the wrecked plane.
“‘Junk Row’ is what we call it,” Mr. Regees told us. And it was properly named. We stood in front of a wall of rusted, abandoned engines and parts of all kinds of planes, cars, and tractors.
“Holy shit…” I exclaimed quietly, but both my companions heard.
“Yup. What you want is at the very end down there,” Mr. Regees said proudly and pointed to the far side of the rusted and aging metal of Junk Row. As he pointed with his stubby finger sporting a broken, dirty nail, I saw it. Not the plane. I saw the tree. It was not a huge tree, but it unnerved me just the same. It was like no tree I had ever seen. It wasn’t an oak or a maple. It looked like something from a nightmare.
The tree stood about thirty feet away. It had massive, round limbs that reached out like clawed hands and black fingers tangled in and out of what was left of the plane. I had never before in all my life been so disquieted by the look of a tree. Even as a kid watching horror films with my father, I had never seen a creepier looking tree. But I feared I knew what that tree was.
“Thank you, Mr. Regees. But if you don’t mind I would like for Detective Johnson and myself to continue on alone from here on out. Okay?
“Sure, whatever you want. I’ll be in my office if you need anything.”
“Thank you, sir.”
We stood silently and watched as Mr. Regees waddled like a duck, moving slowly with the sound of his labored breaths trailing behind him. Once he was out of sight, Kenny turned to me and spoke softly.
“What is it, Tim? I can tell that something’s up. What is it?”
“The tree.”
“What? The tree?” Kenny turned and looked at it with a puzzled expression on his broad face.
“Look, man. Something supernatural is going on here. This tree looks about maybe twenty some odd years old and is grown into the wreckage of the plane. I’ve read about this before. And I’m here to tell you, man, things just got a whole lot worse. My mind was reeling just now from all kinds of lore and ancient texts that I have been reading about lately.”
“Okay, tell me,” Kenny said with a sort of frown.
“You won’t like it.”
But he would not look away from the heavy limbs of that warped and mangled tree so I told him.
“A tree like this is called a demon tree. Demon trees often are dead, but continue to grow larger and more menacing with each passing year. It is said that the woods where a demon tree grows is not a friendly place. Reports of such trees have told of voices and ghosts that haunted the area and a lack of plant growth is expected.”
As I said the words we realized it. In a radius of thirty feet around the tree the grass and the plants around the tree were all dead and dried out to nothing. The ground was brown and cracked around the thick roots of the tree. I produced a small folding tactical blade that I got when I left the Army and cut into the tree with a timid slice.
What we saw next froze us to corpses. Our eyes fixed onto the redness of it. At first I couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing. I pulled the serrated knife from the bark of the tree. What turned out to be blood dripped in long, dark red drops from the blade.
“What the hell, Tim. What. The. Hell.”
“Oh man, oh man, oh man,” I repeated as I stared at my blade. “It’s blood, Kenny.”
“The fucking tree is bleeding? It’s alive?” he asked me shakily.
“In a way, it is, yes. As I understand it, the part of the kid that is still here is connected to this tree. It must be his blood.” I could barely believe what I was saying.
“So our ghost is in this tree?” Kenny asked, looking at it warily as if he expected it to explode or something.
“I don’t think so. I think whatever evil is linked to this tree is also linked to our ghost. Maybe even controlling him.”
“What can control a ghost?”
“Something far worse than we have ever imagined before.”
Kenny rested his head against the back of an old ‘50s Chevy pickup truck with no tires. It seemed to have been swallowed by the earth over the years. Kenny sat on the ground, his big hands on his thighs. His face was a concentration of pain and strife while I dug out a piece of the old plane.
My hands were sore and black from the mud as I struggled with the corner of a piece of rusted metal. Long blades of grass and roots from the tree seemed to be holding it back. I brushed off the corner of this metal plate and realized it was the edge of a propeller.
“Kenny! Get your big ass over here and help me! After all, this is for you, man. I can’t do this alone.”
A moment later his big fingers were there gripping the metal, ripping at earth and plants.
“Okay, let’s try and rock it back and forth. Maybe we can break up the earth a little bit more,” Kenny stated as our big hands struggled to grip the metal. It was not easy for us to even reach it. The propeller was wedged between the guts of the plane and the ass of an old Model G John Deere tractor.
“You know, Tim, I’m still a cop. What I mean is that I still think there are down-to-earth crimes and problems out there. I don’t know if I’m ready to throw all that away and give in to all this supernatural shit.” He sighed and sat back for a bit, feeling somewhat defeated.
“It’s not like it used to be, man. I was right there with you. I had my eyes opened too, Kenny. It wasn’t easy but I realized there are worse things out there than crack dealers and murderers. There’s real terror out there, there’s true evil, and part of that evil has you now. We faced it before and we’ll face it again.”
“I keep thinking what Jack would say to me about my fears,” Kenny said. And that made me laugh a bit. Jack Mitchell had had a degree in psychology, and at times he could be very insightful. Sometimes too insightful. He tended to sound a little bit like a shrink and cops generally don’t like people who can get into your head like he could.
“Yeah, I’m sure he’d say something like, ‘Your fears of abandonment and your failure to protect a friend have manifested themselves in your mind. Now you’re unable to see the truth for what it really is.’”
“Holy shit, Tim! That was freaky! You sounded just like him.”
“Well, I spent a lot of time with Jack.”
We got a laugh out of that. Then suddenly the metal came free and I lost my footing and fell back. Kenny, of course, did not. He stood over me holding the long prop blade in his hands. Dirt rained down as he brushed clumps of mud off of the steel. I stood up, staring dismally at the misshapen edge of the rusty blade. I pulled my focus closer and closer to it. Something caught my attention and I stared at the damaged blade of the propeller. I couldn’t look away.
“Let’s set it down over here,” I said as I pointed to a tree stump a few feet from us. I kneeled down to it, pulled the small knife back out of my pocket again and began to slowly scrape flakes of rust and soil off of the surface of the metal. The edge of my knife lifted up a flaked piece of what I thought was rust. I was about to flick it off until Kenny stopped me.
“Wow! Wait, dude. That’s blood. Old blood. Don’t move.”
Kenny then turned and ran do
wn the small dirt path to my truck and I knew where he was going. He returned carrying a Forensic Field Kit. He slowly kneeled beside me and opened the case, careful not to disturb the evidence any more than we already had.
Kenny snapped on a pair of latex gloves and pulled out a Q-tip. He dipped the cotton of the Q-tip in a jar of Luminol solution, a liquid designed for detecting the iron and hemoglobin in trace amounts of dried blood. If this truly was the blade that killed Nesto, blood should be present. He rubbed the solution over the propeller lightly and the Q-tip turned blue almost immediately.
“I’ll be damned,” Kenny said.
He carefully removed the flakes of blood, one flick at a time. And what we found underneath froze my pulse. A very small clump of human hair was embedded in the damaged steel of the airplane propeller. I took out a pair of tweezers from the Forensic Field Kit and lifted out the hair. At first, the clump of flesh and bloody, dried hair would not let go, but after Kenny scraped under it with the blade of his knife, it was released. I put it in an evidence bag and held it up to the struggling afternoon sun.
“Kenny,” I said. “Say hello to Nesto Santos.”
Chapter 29
3:25 p.m., May 6
Joe’s shoes seemed loud on the stairs as he entered a dark corridor near the market. He was conscious of his handgun when he went to a door at the end of the hall and into the warm sun.
Some things have to be done fast. Joe didn’t know if they were the right things. Well, he did, and they weren’t. But at a certain level of importance, the rules get a little muddled, don’t they? The head of the political family that he had sworn to serve went back a couple generations. He’d never been in the public eye but that hadn’t stopped him from being a key figure in a company that secretly ran this country.
Joe hadn’t held a real job in what seemed like half his life. Perhaps he had little practical experience in the world outside of military life, but that was what recruiters like the one that first approached Joe looked for—men that couldn’t acclimate to civilian living and needed the military life in some form.
Agent Joe Tango had come to the Organization a few times already to report, to deliver files, or for meetings, important and otherwise. He had visited most recently to sign on officially as an agent for the Organization, from the office of the CIA. That had been the first time Joe hadn’t had to show his identification or walk through the metal detectors.
Out of habit, Joe did walk straight through the detector that time he had encountered it, but when his weapon had buzzed the u-shaped arch, the guard agent had just brushed him through. The difference in this agent’s behavior compared to most military personnel had been striking to Joe. Like anyone else, Joe felt unsure as how to respond to the change and for a moment he had touched the side of his weapon in his belt for comfort.
Guns were holstered, coats buttoned and long breaths taken as Joe made his way down the long, brightly lit corridor. He did not feel any safer inside as he reached the nameless door on the east entrance. A voice told him that this was where he belonged, this was now his territory, but Joe didn’t want to believe it. This was a home for a kind of political voice of false modesty, and some of the powers-that-be would willingly run over the bodies of those who got in their way. The illusion was real enough for trained professionals like Joe to feel at ease within the persistence of a lie. They said that it wasn’t really all that big a thing, hushing up evidence. But if lies could stain the walls, Joe thought, then that building would have been soaked in smudges and blotted out long ago. How wrong he was.
There were only about six families that secretly ran this country. From the very beginning it was always the same six families. They intermarried and occasionally hired outsiders to look after their interests. Infrequently they would take in newcomers, but not very often. Outsiders who didn’t go to Yale or Harvard and who didn’t ‘summer’ at Mount Desert but still showed great promise were invited in as Joe was.
But now…? Now he was on the outside. Joe no longer felt that he was lucky to have been chosen. The power that they wielded seemed to be never-ending and that was more intimidating than the pettiness of the politics that occurred outside those powerful walls. In truth, no political power ever saw the light of day if it first hadn’t been born in that office. It was there that James Madison had first drafted the Constitution with the backing of nine out of the thirteen states. With the influence of that office the others soon fell in line.
The power of the Organization soon propelled the country into electing its fifth President, James Monroe, who had first circulated the Monroe Doctrine and motivated the country to join the strategic world powers for the first time. It was also in this office that Lincoln held his country together through the sheer power and influence of the men behind those walls. There Teddy Roosevelt had made America a real player in the game of nations. Occasionally in this country’s history, one chosen for power would pull away from the influence and authority of the Organization and ‘decisive action’ would be taken. Decisive action, as it was called, had only happened twice. The first time was on November 22, 1963 and the last was on March 30, 1981. That time, the deserter was not killed but the message was loud and clear. There was an assassination attempt on Reagan on that day, and he got the message: No one leaves the Organization. And with that thought clearly playing on repeat in his head, Joe knew he was going to die.
Cars lined the street and Joe’s eyes were searching for any sign of danger. He reached the doorway and abruptly stopped, listening, as he had barely a moment ago, for the sounds of engaging, attacking agents. There was nothing. Joe hurried down a narrow walkway. He would drive out of town somehow. Find a friend somewhere.
Joe spotted the car easily enough. The perfect one. The curbs were cluttered with parked automobiles. It was somewhat less ostentatious than the other vehicles on the street. A bulky blue and grey minivan. Joe walked to the driver’s side door and ran his hand over the lock while in his other hand he had his lock pick out. It only took a second and he was in. No damage done, of course. He was, after all, a professional.
Joe climbed in behind the wheel and adjusted his position until he was at a good height. The van obviously had belonged to a soccer mom, and a short one at that. That much he could tell by the soccer team sticker of a local high school in the back window. The hand gun with the suppressor in his belt inhibited him. Joe placed it on the seat next to him, careful to make sure he could easily reach for it. Then he pulled his military knife from his belt and forced into the ignition, shattering it. With a hard twist and with the sound of breaking metal, the van reluctantly started. A few quick sparks and its sad engine came to life.
Suddenly the window of his driver’s side door exploded into a snowstorm of tiny showering flakes. The silenced barrel of a gun came at him. Joe didn’t think. He just reacted. He grabbed the weapon and kicked his door out with massive force. The corner of the door caught the agent right in the bridge of his nose, sending him staggering backwards. Then another man came into view, creeping out from the shadows of the building. He had a long rifle in his hands, and Joe knew at once what it meant. He gunned the accelerator of the minivan and sped down the road.
Joe reached an intersection and the traffic light was red but that didn’t matter. There was very little traffic and he drove the van through without slowing down. Several blocks east he could see the north-bound freeway. He swung the van to the left. In that short time frame, he was gone—engulfed in traffic, camouflaged by buses, vans, and cars all heading north in the rush hour commute home. It was the slowest and yet the smartest escape Joe could think of. The radio he had stolen off the agent he killed was coming to life. He reached over and turned up the volume.
“Subject lost. Repeat: Subject has flown and is lost. Request helicopter.”
Joe did not like the sound of that.
“Negative. Repeat: Negative. No birds are authorized at this time.”
Joe knew what that meant. His activitie
s had brought unwanted attention onto this operation and they need him neutralized quietly. That gave him an advantage. Agent Joe Tango took a deep breath.
Chapter 30
4:25 p.m., May 6
The idea of straddling the Seattle wind once more put a slight smile on Fabiana’s face. She remembered the sensations of putting her arms around a brisk north breeze and almost chuckled out loud. The thought of her body pressing close to Tim as she held him…
It was an interesting idea, returning to flight. But could she really do it? And was she ready? Did the ability still reside in her small frame of tissue and blood? Oh how different she found life now that she was human. How weak she felt. But at the same time, strength was growing inside her. Her thoughts of Tim seemed to give her a confidence she thought that she had lost. Soon she knew she would have little choice. Tim and Kenny were heading into dangerous territory and soon she would be needed. After all, this was her doing, her mess. It was at least partly her fault.
Fabiana was in the bathroom of her quarters. The room had no door, no mirror, not even a shower curtain. If she ever wanted to end her life, she sure as hell couldn’t do it in that room. And never again would she try such an act. At the time, it had seemed logical, but now it simply felt unproductive.
Just as she was about to leave and go sit on the edge of her bed, she was attacked. Not physically, but mentally. Violent images consumed her and she fell to her knees. She could see blood spraying over plants and trees, and she heard screaming from what seemed like all around her. A creature that moved too fast to see was slaughtering person after person and their pain and fear was now Fabiana’s. Her hands immediately found her face. Her fingers tore at her scalp as terror consumed her will. Tears were streaming down her cheeks and, just as it was when she was a vampire, her mind was flying outward over the city and beyond. It was as if she was searching for something, but had no control over her actions. She didn’t have control, but someone did and she had an idea who.
The Blood Born Tales (Book 2): Blood Dream Page 16
