* * *
An hour passed with Cliven loudly moving around the cell trying to get as comfortable as possible and the other three chatting in semi-hushed tones around the table.
“Maybe we should go look for them,” Jeremy said after a while.
“They’ll be all right,” the sheriff said. He idly went through his notebook, going over the events of the night. It was his habit to jot some unofficial thoughts here in addition to the formal notes and paperwork the job required of him. Just little bullet points to keep things straight in his own mind. The current day’s entry was filled with more notes to himself than almost all the preceding pages combined. One stood out, scrawled larger than the rest: “Shot Hayes in the head.”
The only time before tonight that he’d discharged his firearm in the four years since he’d been elected sheriff was to put a deer out of its misery. It’d been hit by a car and half crippled.
Tonight he’d fired seventeen shots and “killed” eleven people, or at least former people who’d died and somehow been reanimated. Tonight was also the only time he’d had to go into the trunk of the cruiser and get extra ammunition.
People often say it felt like “living a nightmare” when bad things happened to them, but this was the first time the sheriff could recall experiencing the sensation himself. Even more shocking was how routine it had become, shooting at another person. Once someone figured out you needed to hit them in the head to keep them down, it’d gone a little easier. Whatever made them like that also made them slow and uncoordinated. Long as you didn’t get too close or run out of ammo, and you didn’t panic, it wasn’t too hard to keep safe.
In a small town like this with everyone owning guns and knowing how to shoot them, they’d eventually been able to clear most of the dead they could find. The sheriff thought the worst of things might even be over for now. When it got light they’d take the municipal van out and start collecting the bodies and try to figure out how the rest of the world was doing. He was pretty sure things would be bad in the big cities.
His thoughts were interrupted by a loud bang from upstairs, and the sound of people struggling. Cindy and Jeremy readied their guns straight off, but the sheriff left his in the holster. He figured it was just Billy and Chris returning with their package.
* * *
“The thing of it is,” he told Cliven through the bars, “that because the forensic tech was in Europe, we had to send Sue Donovan’s body to Summerton County for the autopsy. At least we were supposed to, but they’re backed up on cases so she’s just been sitting in the morgue.”
There were more sounds of struggling upstairs and a crash as some of the photos that lined the main hallway were knocked down. Then there was the loud, meaty thunk of something falling and Chris called out, “Hold her steady, damn it.”
The sheriff didn’t pay it any attention, but Cliven’s eyes were riveted on the stairway.
“You see what I’m getting at?” he asked Cliven.
More noises from upstairs. The rustle of thick plastic, bumps and thuds. You could hear Billy and Chris breathing heavy from all the way down here.
“I’ll go give them a hand,” Jeremy said, more loudly than he’d intended. He bolted up the stairs as more noises drifted down to them. Bump, bump. Thud. Bump.
“I don’t know why you’re going on about an autopsy on some dead girl,” Cliven said.
“Because if they’d performed the autopsy in the normal course of events, they would have taken out her brain to weigh it,” the sheriff explained. “But in this case we didn’t touch her other than some basic measurements and to put her in the drawer.”
Cliven was pressed up against the bars, eyes wide as he waited to see what Billy and Chris were going to bring down the stairs.
“What, you mean she’s … she’s one of them?”
The sheriff nodded.
“Strangulation doesn’t affect them, Cliven. I guess because they don’t breathe although I don’t really know.”
Bump, bump, bump.
“You gonna tell me what that noise is, for Christ’s sake?” Cliven said.
The sheriff stared at him, as if deciding whether he was going to respond. Finally he said, “I think you already know what it is.”
Cliven made a noise that was probably supposed to be a “no” but that sounded like the last breath a man dying of tuberculosis might take. He cleared his throat, tried again. “No, I…”
Just then Chris came down the stairs, walking backward with his arms wrapped around the bottom end of a long black bag that was twisting and bucking. A body bag. Then Billy came into view holding up the top part, with Jeremy following ineffectually behind him.
The bag gave a shudder and the end of it hit the railing, hard, almost knocking Chris off balance and making the metal rail ring with a deep bong.
It finally dawned on Cliven what was happening.
“Don’t you bring that thing down here!” he shouted up at them.
The sheriff gave him a puzzled look.
“I thought you wanted to get closer to her, Cliven? Her best friend, Jenny Jacobs, told me you wouldn’t leave her alone that night. Followed her like a dog in heat, she said.”
“None of that’s true!” Cliven screamed. “None of it! You got the wrong guy!”
Chris and Billy wrestled the slowly writhing body bag down the last of the stairs and dragged it in front of the cell. It slowly flopped back and forth, an obscene sight, and Chris had to step on one edge to keep it in place. Both he and Billy were sweating from their efforts. Jeremy was sweating too, but not from any hard labor.
“A thirteen-year-old girl, Cliven,” the sheriff said. “What’s a man like you doing chasing around a thirteen-year-old girl?”
Cliven backed into the far corner of the cell, putting as much distance between him and the body bag as possible.
“Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you!”
Cindy let out another giggle. “I don’t think we’re the ones getting fucked tonight,” she said.
Jeremy looked like he might throw up.
“I’m … I’m going upstairs for some air.”
Before he left he turned to Cliven.
“I hope it takes a long time, you son of a bitch. A long time, you hear?”
Chris was having a hard time keeping the bag in place.
“We going to do this, sheriff?”
The sheriff nodded, took out his gun and the keys to the cell.
He unlocked the door with one hand and held the gun on Cliven with the other.
“I’m opening the door, Cliven. You try to come out of there and I’ll shoot you for attempted escape.”
The fight had gone out of Cliven, though. He remained cowering in the corner.
“This ain’t right,” he said, mostly to himself. “It ain’t right.”
“Like you ever done anything right in your life,” Cindy said. “I’m going to enjoy this, you piece of shit. I’m going to enjoy every minute of it.”
The sheriff motioned to Chris and Billy.
“Put her in.”
The two men dragged the body bag into the cell, snagging it on the doorframe for a second before wresting it free. The whole time the bag shifted around like it was full of huge, drunk bumblebees trying to get out. Finally, they got it all the way in and Chris stood straddling it.
“Now what?” he asked.
“Open the zipper a little, then step out. Billy, you back out of there now.”
The sheriff kept his gun ready, to use on Cliven or the dead girl as the need might arise.
Chris pulled at the zipper tentatively, like he was trying to snatch hot food off the grill. The zipper only moved an inch. He tried again. Four more inches, then a hand pushed its way out, grabbing for him. The hand had painted red nails that contrasted unpleasantly with its dark blue-gray skin.
Chris yelped and leapt for the cell door, catching his foot on the top of the bag. The hand scrabbled for him and he heaved himself out of the cell t
o avoid it, landing on his ass.
“You clear?” the sheriff calmly asked. When Chris nodded he closed the cell and locked it.
* * *
“You know what I found out?” the sheriff asked Cliven.
Billy and Chris had gone upstairs as the dead girl started to emerge from the body bag like a broken butterfly coming out of a cocoon. Billy said he didn’t have the stomach to watch what was coming next, and Chris had wordlessly tagged along. Cindy, however, watched the whole time, munching on a granola bar.
“They’ll eat anything that lives. A man, a horse, a dog. And if you leave them at it long enough, they’ll eat right down to the bone.”
The dead girl named Sue managed to stand upright, her jaws working silently as if already biting into flesh.
Cliven pressed up against the concrete wall in the back of the cell as tightly as possible, turning his shoulder as if he could somehow block the girl with it. He was talking continuously to himself now, like a scared child might.
“No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no…”
Sue seemed to get her bearings and spot Cliven at the same time. She let out a sort of hissing sound and reached for him.
Cliven panicked, kicked wildly at her, an awkward movement with his hands cuffed behind his back. He missed her entirely and she clutched at one of his legs, getting a momentary grip on it. As soon as her hand touched him he thrashed like he’d been burned, managed to get his leg free and aimed a kick at her head. This time the blow connected, catching her across the jaw. It was a hard hit, but she reacted as if she didn’t feel it at all. She grabbed at his leg again, catching it, and tried to bite through his jeans into his calf.
Cliven’s mumbling turned into a screaming, gasping howl of terror. He pulled his leg back from her and kicked at her head again, but she got his foot, pulling him off balance and sending the two of them to the floor. He twisted around, trying to get back up as she lay on top of him.
The sheriff turned to leave.
“You coming?” he asked Cindy. He had to raise his voice to be heard over Cliven’s yelling.
She shook her head, never taking her eyes off the cell.
The sheriff nodded. He went up to his office on the main floor as Cliven continued to howl and scream below. He pulled out his notebook and flipped to the page about the Sue Donovan case. He crossed off Cliven Ridgeway’s name under the heading “Suspect.” Farther down the page, under the heading “Aid and abet,” was another name, Abel Ridgeway. Cliven’s father.
The sheriff figured they’d have enough time to get to Abel before dawn.
FAST ENTRY
by Jay Bonansinga
– 1 –
Thinking About Not Thinking
She arrives at Fort Denning that day, death and mayhem the furthest things from her mind. Parking her shit-kicker Chevy S-10 a block from the entrance, according to proper protocol, she pauses to clear her mind. It’s a beautiful day on the Atlantic seaboard, the sky a clear and wide expanse of robin’s egg blue over the tide pools and estuaries of eastern Maryland. The sun filters down through palisades of white oaks, dappling the hood of her rust-pocked pickup. The air smells of magnolia and clover. She turns the truck off and then studies her face in the rearview.
She lets out a long breath, clearing her mind in the mode of Zen masters—thinking about not thinking—pushing the ubiquitous white noise from her brain. The constant drone is the occupational hazard of all psychics, and it plagues her on a daily basis. But today, she has no reason to believe that she’s about to encounter a waking nightmare. The message delivered to her this morning at dawn on the secure line gave her no cause to be nervous.
“Command control here,” the flat, officious, blandly pleasant female voice informed her at a few minutes after 6:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time that morning. “Identify yourself, please.”
“What?—what time is it?—wait,” she stammered at first, trying to wake up and fake her way out of an obvious hangover. She had tied another one on last night, drinking herself blind and doing two eight-balls at the club. Feeding the beast. Staggering home like a common derelict. Now she was struggling to sound like a self-respecting Sleeper for the Defense Intelligence Agency. “Oh, sorry, my bad … um, yeah … you got four-three-two-whiskey-zebra here. Go ahead, Command.”
“Four-three-two, we have a red level event in progress, initiated at three hundred hours Greenwich Mean Time.”
“Copy that.”
She waited for the time and place designated for her insertion, finding little to worry about. The last red level event was a colossal waste of time, a scan of some naughty diplomat’s memories. The man had been suspected of being an asset for the Iranians, but the only thing she found in his head was masturbatory fantasies involving some ambassador’s daughter. Now she waited for the details to another piece of government drudgery.
“You will need to provide fast entry at Black Candlestick today at twelve hundred thirty hours. Highest priority, security code blue in effect.”
The call disconnected itself at that point, which seems now like weeks ago even though it was only this morning. She stares at her round caramel face in the rearview, her flat nose with its gold ring in one nostril, and her huge chocolate eyes as bloodshot as tiny scarlet road maps of some tangled interstate system. She takes one last, deep, girding breath and pops the glove box.
A pint bottle of Tito’s vodka rests in there under her registration wallet and holstered .45 caliber DoubleTap ACP pistol. Vodka is her chosen hair of the dog—odorless, colorless, and effective at momentarily satisfying her gargantuan Need. The Need is with her constantly, a salve on the cross she bears as a government mind-reader and dancing monkey, wallowing in the filthy chambers of people’s innermost thoughts.
She takes the pint out, unscrews the cap, and knocks back a third of the bottle.
“Another day, another fucking dollar,” Jasmine Maywell mutters, putting the pint back.
She takes the gun with her.
– 2 –
Remote Viewing
The codger at the guard shack gives her a funny look when she flashes her visitor’s lanyard.
“That’s an old one,” he says, pursing his lips, looking her up and down, pretending to inspect the badge. An old, droopy, graying veteran, obviously regular army from a long time ago, maybe the Napoleonic Wars, he lets his eyes linger just one millisecond too long in the general direction of her chest. She doesn’t have to enter his head to know what’s oozing through his stream of consciousness.
All of which she’s used to, of course, a woman of her shape and size, but that doesn’t make it any less enervating to her. She sometimes gets off on flirting with guys, but not now, not today.
The old man ogles her with a lascivious little twinkle in his eye, lowering his voice, Mister Big Shot, the man in-the-know. “You here ’cause of that ruckus up north?”
She cocks her head at him. “What ruckus is that?”
“Shit that went down at that cemetery outside Pittsburgh? Evans City?”
She gives him her best demure smile. “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
“Something’s going down inside,” he says, jerking a thumb toward the complex of stone-brick buildings behind them.
“Duly noted,” she says.
He sniffs and nods at her lanyard. “Ought to replace that someday soon, or mark my words, somebody out here’s gonna stop ya.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, Dad,” she says with that flirty little smile, fighting the urge to get him to buy her a drink later. “I’ll get it updated soon as I see the CO.” She winks at him. “Promise.”
She walks onto the base, hyperaware of the old guard eyeballing her booty for the entire trek across the lot. She gives him plenty to look at. A big girl of mixed race with spacious hips and fulsome breasts, decked out today in spandex and knee-highs, Master Sergeant Jasmine Maywell walks with the studied, rhythmic sashay of a fashion model, as though she were balancing a book on her head.
She cooked up the walk during her tour of service in Iraq, when her fellow soldiers told her she walked like a grunt.
She heads for the main processing center, which sits on the southern edge of the grounds.
Located in the leafy, middle-class suburb of Frederick, Maryland, Fort Denning is laid out over twelve hundred acres like a big L-shaped college campus, its ostensible purpose to serve as the United States Army Medical Command. At first glance, the place looks so innocuous, so bland, so slate gray and redbrick featureless, it seems to hardly exist. Or at most, it seems to blend in with the strip malls and insipid office building architecture of the DC government corridor with chameleon-like proficiency.
In fact, the mundane, landscaped, motel-building design is a thousand times more sinister when one considers the history of the place. During the Cold War years, Denning was the heart of the military’s biological weapons research program. Everything from mustard gas to weaponized ocean tides were toyed with and implemented. Denning personnel also experimented in the 1950s in the potential use of insects as disease vectors, including ticks, fleas, ants, and lice—but mostly mosquitoes carrying yellow fever virus over international borders. Human subjects were used in the development of biological weapons. It has been rumored over the years that Denning is the place where the United States government “invented” HIV.
Fort Denning also produced Jasmine Maywell’s abusive father. Captain Bertrand Maywell was one of the most gifted subjects in the highly classified Project Sun Streak. As a “remote viewer,” Bert Maywell would sit in Denning’s isolation tank and psychically project himself into the eyes and ears of enemy pilots and soldiers, gleaning incredible amounts of intel and also a slow-growing tumor that nobody knew about until it was too late.
The last years of the old man’s life were a living hell for Jasmine. As his only caretaker, she was treated worse than shit—regularly spat upon, slapped, yelled at, scourged with profanity-laced tirades, and ultimately turned into a ravenous addict. But perhaps the worst thing that Captain Bert Maywell had inflicted upon his daughter was the psychic skill that had ruined his own life, a recessive gene handed down from his mother’s mother, a Santerian witch who was lynched in 1955 in Mississippi. It became a dominant trait in the captain, handed down unceremoniously—like flat feet or seasonal allergies—to his daughter.
Nights of the Living Dead Page 5
