by Seth Patrick
As she got out of the car and got a nose-full, Lex closed her eyes. ‘No way,’ she said. ‘Are we going to have to work in that stench?’
‘You’ll stop noticing in five minutes,’ said Never. ‘I guarantee. Besides . . .’ He pointed at the bulk of the house, which was almost untouched by the fire. The husband had kept the garage door closed and the fire hadn’t spread. ‘The wife was shot in the bedroom, far end of the place.’
He went to the back of the FRS car and took out a forensic coverall, putting it on quickly as Lex got her own and did the same. Then he unloaded two of the equipment cases. ‘Grab those other two,’ he said to Lex, and she did.
‘This is the first one of these I’ve had since I joined the FRS,’ said Lex. ‘A head-shot, I mean.’
‘They’re not much different to others,’ said Never. ‘From what I’ve heard.’
She gave him a look. ‘I’ve had the training, Never. Actually doing it is a different matter.’
A white screen had been erected to shield the contents of the garage from onlookers, and as they walked past it, Never had a peek around the side. The husband’s remains were still there. ‘Yikes,’ he said. ‘The report said he didn’t shoot himself, you know. Most people who take that route light the fire with one hand and have a gun in the other, to make it quick.’
‘What the hell makes somebody do something like that?’ said Lex.
‘Time to find out,’ he said, and they went inside.
*
The woman’s name was Patti Trent, thirty-one. She was lying on top of her bed, fully clothed, legs straight, arms by her sides. The detectives in charge of the case described her as looking posed, and Never thought so too – neatened up, after she’d been shot in the head. The bullet had entered her left temple, but it hadn’t emerged. The gun, it transpired, was her own. The working hypothesis was that her husband John had shot her, then had taken his own life in the garage.
‘What do you reckon?’ asked Never.
Lex frowned. ‘It doesn’t look too bad,’ she said. ‘Depends if the bullet hit the back of the skull and bounced back a bit. Fingers crossed it didn’t.’ She took a small meds box out of her pocket and opened it, taking her revival meds out. She dry-swallowed them. ‘Call me when you’re ready and we can get started. I don’t want to get back to Richmond too late, if I can help it.’
She left Never to get on with the equipment set-up.
There was a dining room close to the bedroom, which he decided was ideal for observation – he would sit in there with the two detectives and monitor the camera feeds, while Lex got on with the revival without distractions. Once he’d set up a workstation, he took the cameras through and placed the three tripods. Recording protocol required three viewpoints: one wide-angle, taking in the full room; one that captured the whole body and the reviver; and one close-up.
It didn’t take long to prepare and hook everything together. Most of the time was spent on testing the configuration. Problems during a revival were rare, but incredibly distracting.
When he was done, he fetched the detectives and Lex. She went into the bedroom, wary and silent as most revivers tended to be, while Never took the detectives into the dining room.
He’d put a small folding chair next to the bed for Lex to use. She sat in it and took the woman’s hand, while Never watched closely. There wasn’t much to see, of course, but he needed to be ready in case she needed help. If it turned out to be harder than expected, it was entirely possible for her to lose consciousness and slip from the chair.
She was fast, though – twenty minutes in, and Never saw a telltale tremor in Patti Trent’s cheek.
‘She’s coming,’ said Lex.
‘Good work,’ said Never.
The dead woman took a long breath. Time for questions.
‘Patti? My name is Lex Turner. Do you know what happened to you?’
Patti was silent, but after ten seconds or so Lex raised her left hand and did a thumbs-up. A reviver could sense a huge amount about their subject, even when there was no speech – she must have thought Patti understood the situation, and it wasn’t going to be a problem. That was one of the key failure-points in a revival, if the subject failed to come to terms with their own death.
Patti finally spoke. ‘John shot me,’ she said. ‘He killed me.’
‘Case closed,’ said one of the detectives, and when Never looked at him he shrugged. ‘Well, it is. With no third party involved, this is just a coroner’s case. No police investigation needed.’
‘Fine,’ said Never, keeping the irritation he felt out of his voice. ‘But let her do her job, please. Keep it down and sit still.’ He switched on the audio feed to Lex. ‘Lex? The police are happy for you to lead the questioning as you see fit.’
Lex looked at the camera and raised a sarcastic eyebrow. She knew exactly what that meant.
‘Yeah,’ said Never. ‘I know.’
She turned back to Patti. ‘I’m a reviver with the Forensic Revival Service. I’d like to ask you some questions about what happened. Do you know why John did it?’
‘He was under stress, I think. He’d been acting strange for months.’
‘In what way?’ asked Lex.
‘Is he . . . did John shoot himself?’
Lex winced. She looked to Never again. Telling her the truth might make Patti fall silent and halt the revival, but lying to her could easily breed mistrust, and again that could bring things to a stop.
‘Your call,’ said Never. ‘Sorry.’
Lex shook her head with frustration. ‘John took his own life, yes. How had he been acting strange?’
A good compromise. She didn’t have to tell her he burnt to death, and getting another question in right away was a smart tactic.
Patti took another slow breath. ‘Distracted. Angry. He’d been drinking.’
‘He’d started to drink?’ said Lex. ‘Is that why he’d changed?’
‘No. He’d been drinking today. He was more like his old self when he drank.’
Lex looked to camera and wrinkled her nose. Huh?
‘A new one to me, too,’ said Never.
‘Schizophrenic, maybe?’ said one detective. ‘Some self-medicate. Helps their symptoms.’
‘I thought that was nicotine,’ said his colleague. ‘Not alcohol.’
With a hand wave, Never signalled for them to be quiet.
‘Did John say anything to you, Patti?’ asked Lex.
‘He said he didn’t want me to be around for the silence. He said he wanted to spare me that.’
‘What did he mean, Patti?’
Another breath. ‘I don’t know. He said he was sorry. Before he took out the gun and shot me. He was sorry.’
There was very little else that came. Patti hadn’t been afraid, as such – she’d been concerned that he was having an affair, and certainly wasn’t worried for her life. Lex let her say what she needed to say, and then she let Patti Trent go.
‘What the fuck was that?’ she asked Never as he started to pack away the equipment.
‘Don’t let it get to you,’ said Never. ‘The Coroner’s Office will sort it out. When they talk to his work colleagues, and see if he’d been to a doctor. As of now, it’s none of our business. Old case, been and done. There’ll be plenty of them.’
‘Don’t you ever follow up old cases?’ she said.
He thought about Daniel Harker, Annabel’s dad. That had been an old case, and he and Jonah had certainly followed that one up. ‘It’s a bad habit to get into,’ he said. ‘Let’s leave it at that.’
5
Jonah’s Monday morning started with Annabel heading off to work.
Before she’d met Jonah, Annabel had been forging ahead with a career in journalism. She’d inherited wealth from her father that meant she didn’t need to work; it was her father’s death that had led to her meeting Jonah in the first place, and she’d dropped everything to investigate the background to his death. That investigation had led to Mic
hael Andreas, the man who had inadvertently freed the entity they’d faced at Winnerden Flats.
Andreas had owned a hugely successful biotech company, but it had been his own fascination with cryogenics that had been his pathway to catastrophe. Now, he was dead. Andreas Biotech had been quietly broken up and the pieces sold off to other firms. Continuing to investigate in the aftermath of what had happened at Winnerden Flats was deeply risky, she knew, and Kendrick had made it absolutely clear to her – she had to keep away from it to stay safe.
She had also decided that she needed to keep herself busy, so she’d taken on a range of stories that were as far from Andreas and his followers as she could get. After some soul-searching, she’d wanted to do something useful with her time, and had settled on political and business corruption, posting articles through several news sites under aliases. Some old contacts gave her leads that would take more time and money than they could justify spending, and Annabel dug around, occasionally finding something that had meat on it. Her work consisted of a vast amount of drudgery, and there was a hell of a lot of lunches in DC, forging friendships and connections.
Jonah was entirely happy about it, though. It was hard and satisfying work, and the kinds of scandals she’d been uncovering had been very much in the mould of good old-fashioned investigative reporting – where those caught out hung their heads in shame, rather than attempting to assassinate those who’d caught them.
Once she’d left the house – for yet another lunch in DC, with yet another contact – Jonah tidied up the breakfast dishes and had a second coffee. The weather was warm, so he decided to get some sun, thinking of how Never had made more than one pointed reference on Friday night to how pale he looked. He was the first to admit Never was right, though. He’d spent the first six months terrified of being outside, even though the property had a large proportion of its grounds walled off with a garden that verged on overgrown. It had taken one of Kendrick’s rare visits for him to be convinced that there were no drones flying over them, spying on the house. Kendrick, usually one to hedge his bets, had been entirely confident that Jonah’s supposed death had done precisely as intended. Andreas’s followers didn’t regard Annabel as a person of interest beyond her relationship with Jonah, but the danger of them targeting her to get to Jonah was very real. Once Jonah was ‘dead’, that danger passed.
Iced Coke in hand, Jonah wandered around the garden, starting to think that he should spend some of the time he had keeping the place under control. They certainly weren’t about to get gardeners in, so it really fell to him to do something about it before it got out of hand.
Not today, though. Today, he would top up on vitamin D and try not to think about his notebooks, still hidden down in the shelter.
He failed entirely on the latter. He’d started writing in those notebooks with a vague notion of planning, but all he’d managed was to catalogue the images that stalked him while he slept. When he was being the most rational, he told himself that Tess had known no more than he did about what was coming. With her final words, she was just being open about it – the powers that had been unleashed weren’t going to be stopped forever. Sooner or later, the Beast he dreamed of would try and rise, ready to destroy, ready to consume. The creature had told him what it was – the souls of a thousand worlds, corrupted and twisted, drawn together into a being that despised those who still had life. It wanted them to join with it, because that was the only thing it understood. At its heart, Jonah believed, the creature was mindless hatred.
Be ready, Tess had said. Perhaps she simply meant be ready to survive it. The last world the Beast had taken had managed to imprison it for untold millennia, so it definitely had vulnerabilities. Maybe the best Jonah could do was stay alive until those vulnerabilities led to its downfall again.
But perhaps Tess had known more.
Those who had imprisoned the Beast had used their own souls to create the prison, and it was those souls that Andreas had stumbled on. Lost in the dark for countless eons, they’d forgotten who they were, or what purpose they served. Andreas had expected these ancient beings to reveal truths that would transform human knowledge. He discovered a way to bond each of these lost souls to a human host, but in doing so he dismantled the Beast’s prison.
There was no way Andreas could have known. When the last of the souls was freed and the prison was breached, the Beast took Andreas as its vessel, and sought to use his body as a conduit to draw out the unimaginable power that it had once possessed.
The secret to defeating the Beast was surely known to those souls who had trapped it before, but most of them had perished along with the humans they had been bonded to. The only survivor was Tess, yet the soul she carried with her was traumatized to the point of madness. Instead of answers, all Tess got were nightmares that threatened her own sanity, horrifying visions that plagued her constantly.
So, perhaps she had known more – glimpses of knowledge just out of reach, enough for her to think that Jonah could fight the creature when it came back.
Tess had been tormented by the possibility that the secret to defeating the Beast was within her grasp, if she could just have the wisdom to see it.
Lying in the sun, Jonah felt the same torment.
*
After a while, he dozed.
He was roused when he heard a car on the road and thought he recognized the sound of Annabel’s vehicle. It was early afternoon, but that morning she’d said she might not be out that long. He sat up, pleased that he’d not be alone all day after all.
Then he heard brakes squeal, and locked tyres grind through dirt. Their house was in a valley with half a dozen other scattered properties, and the road was raised in places above steep gullies. In his mind he saw Annabel crash down into one. He was up in an instant and running to the front gate. He hesitated, realizing he’d not been past that threshold for a year, but the thought of Annabel in trouble propelled him out, pounding down the private lane until he reached the road.
There was a huge cloud of dust in the air further down, obscuring everything. When he was close enough to see the car, skewed across the band of stony dirt that ran alongside the asphalt, he saw that it wasn’t Annabel’s after all.
‘Shit,’ he muttered.
Someone was slumped over in the driver’s seat; nobody else was in the vehicle. Either he had to help them or leave. He looked around, but there was no other sign of activity; there were no other cars coming.
What choice did he have?
He went to the driver’s door and opened it. Inside was an older woman, perhaps late sixties. She was breathing, her eyes closed, a look of distress on her face.
‘Ma’am?’ said Jonah. ‘Can you hear me?’
The woman’s eyes flickered open. ‘Steven?’ she said, visibly struggling to focus.
‘No,’ said Jonah. He thought for a second. ‘I’m . . . Rob. I live nearby.’
She gathered herself and sat up, then rubbed at her face. She noticed the entrance to the driveway up ahead. ‘Are you staying with Annabel?’ she said. Jonah felt his eyes widen. ‘I live further on,’ she said. ‘Annabel introduced herself a while back but I don’t get to see much of her. She didn’t mention anyone else.’ She smiled at him, with a little mischief. ‘I’m Cathy,’ she said, and Jonah knew she was about to offer him her hand to shake. He was adept at avoiding that. He’d already moved away from the door and was pretending to check the car for damage. Contact between revivers and non-revivers was typically accompanied by something called chill, which was a sensation that ranged from a sense of cold – people often compared it to someone walking over their graves – to a feeling of extreme fear and a taint of death. With Jonah, it was always at the severe end of the scale. And although it didn’t happen with everyone – Annabel and Never being two examples – it was the norm.
Hence the reason he needed to avoid shaking Cathy’s hand.
‘Your car seems OK,’ he said, and he went to the other side of it rather than return t
o the open door. The moment would pass, he hoped, but if he went back now Cathy might still hold out her hand. Then he’d have to pull out some feigned illness and decline. I’d rather not give you this flu, perhaps. An old favourite, that one.
‘I’ll be fine,’ said Cathy. ‘I get light-headed when I panic. I’ve had it for years. I should’ve known better and taken a minute before I left the house.’
‘Panic?’ said Jonah. ‘Is something wrong?’
She nodded. ‘My grandson’s five. I just got a call from my son-in-law that he was injured in an accident. He’s at Loudon Children’s Hospital, so I’m on my way there.’ She gave him another smile, but now Jonah could see the panic in her eyes. She still looked pretty foggy.
‘You sure you’re OK to drive, Cathy?’ he said.
Cathy nodded, but Jonah could see that she wasn’t up to it. He made a decision. He looked up and down the road again, hoping that someone – preferably Annabel – would show up. Being seen outside on his own road was one thing, but going further afield . . .
‘Look,’ he said. ‘Just let me drive you there, OK?’ ‘Really?’ she said, obvious relief flooding her.
‘Sure. Someone would be able to give you a ride home, right?’ Cathy nodded. ‘Come on, then. You shift over, I’ll move your car outside our drive. OK?’
She agreed. Once he’d parked up, he ran to the house and hunted for keys to the four-by-four. He wasn’t certain where they were, not having used either of the two cars since they had come here, but Annabel had hung a set up in the kitchen. He grabbed them, got to the car, and drove out to where Cathy was waiting.
‘I really don’t want to be any trouble, Rob,’ said Cathy. For a brief moment Jonah had to wonder why she’d called him ‘Rob’.
‘No trouble at all,’ said Jonah. ‘What are neighbours for?’
The drive to the hospital took an hour, and Cathy stayed close to panic the whole way. At times, she started doing breathing exercises to calm down. Other times, she tried conversation. Jonah preferred the exercises.
