She started down the hall, searching for a comfortable corner where she could lie down for a while.
Chapter 4 - Judgment
Myra stood over the empty bed, staring at it in shock for a full minute.
Slowly, she became aware of certain things that didn’t make sense, like the fact that the room smelled of piss. And venom.
And the fact that the leather restraints—the restraints that were supposed to be keeping Simone nice and stationary—were still neatly fastened despite the fact that Simone wasn’t in them anymore, as if she’d somehow managed to slip out, which shouldn’t have been possible.
It was weird. It made no sense. It was a disaster.
Finally, deciding that standing there with her mouth hanging open like a dummy wasn’t accomplishing anything, she took her cell phone out of her pocket and called the man she’d put in charge outside.
What was his name?
Greg? Rick?
Didn’t matter. If he didn’t have answers for her, he was going to be very sorry.
The man picked up on the third ring—too damn slow as far as she was concerned.
“Yeah?” he said, and right away, she didn’t care for his tone.
Too familiar. Obviously, this Rick guy—or whoever—really thought he was somebody.
She decided right then that she was going to kill him—she didn’t know when, exactly, but she knew it would happen.
She didn’t say anything to let on about her decision, though. Instead, she just said, “Simone has escaped.”
“What? How?”
“I’m in her room. She’s not here. And neither is the guard I left with her… Can’t remember his name… Tommy? Clyde?”
“Bobby?”
“Yes, that’s right. He’s gone. She’s gone.”
“Oh…”
“Do you have any idea where they might be?”
“I haven’t seen or heard a thing.”
“That’s odd because there were sounds,” said Myra. “I heard screaming, just a few minutes ago. Sounded like a man, probably this Tommy fellow. And someone was laughing at the same time—almost definitely Simone. From what I could tell, the sounds were coming from outside, which means you should’ve noticed them too, if you were doing your job properly.”
“Like I said, we didn’t hear anything out here. Didn’t see anything either.”
“You’re supposed to have guards on every side of the house.”
“I do.”
“Then someone was obviously negligent.”
“Are you sure she’s not hiding in the house somewhere?”
“Do you think I’m dumb?”
“No.”
“I wish I could say the same for you.”
He said nothing.
“Better start looking for her,” said Myra. “It could be bad if you don’t find anything. Heads will probably roll.”
“We’ll look around.”
Myra didn’t like his attitude. Not at all.
She hung up. Then she threw the phone across the room and it shattered.
That was dumb, she thought. I needed that phone. Gotta stay calm…
She sat down on the edge of the bed, closed her eyes, and took several long slow breaths—anger was risky for her. She did stupid things when she lost her temper, and this situation could potentially have devastating consequences, which meant she really needed to behave like a human being.
She needed to be logical.
So she tried. But, after only a few minutes of careful pondering, her anger was already starting to come back. Because it seemed to her that the girl shouldn’t have been able to escape on her own.
The best explanation Myra could come up with was some kind of conspiracy among the men.
Simone was very pretty. A woman like her might’ve batted her eyelashes a little, and made some of the men go softhearted.
She probably cooked something up with them while I was out…
Men were fools, easily manipulated. It wasn’t hard to imagine.
Of course there were other possibilities too, some of them almost as plausible.
For instance, there was always a chance that Simone might have some powerful psychic gift related to mind control… Obviously the girl had to have some sort of overblown superhuman ability—anyone with enough psychic juice to link with one of the great serpents and survive had to be almost unthinkably powerful; that went without saying. But Myra had been assuming that Simone’s talents were probably latent. After all, the vast majority of people with psychic abilities never actually learned to use them. They might trigger their powers involuntarily now and again, generally in response to some sort of external stimuli, but it generally took years of training before a person could learn to use any psychic ability deliberately. And there were no indications that Simone had ever had any exposure to occult training.
Still, Myra had to admit, it was a possibility.
She hated to think it, because if that’s what happened, it meant she’d been underestimating the girl all along.
It means this is my fault.
It would be a hard pill to swallow if it were true, but maybe it wasn’t true. There were definitely tons of holes in the theory. Like the whole thing with the shotgun. If Simone was a mind controller, why bother with that stunt?
She could’ve just made the men drive her away while I was gone to the store? Or hell, she could’ve tried her mind control stuff on me. Probably wouldn’t have worked, but I would’ve felt it happening if she tried, and I didn’t feel anything.
No… Upon further reflection, mind control didn’t fit the facts. Nothing really fit the facts, but the best explanation was some kind of conspiracy among the men. God knows why they would be foolish enough to do such a thing. The girl was pretty but it was probably ridiculous to imagine they’d risk everything just to gain her favor. She might find one who would be foolish enough to do that, but not the whole team.
Perhaps they had learned something about what was really going on, and hoped to use Simone as a hostage. They could’ve approached her about it while Myra was gone to the store. Maybe Simone rejected them at first, and then decided to go along with it after her shotgun scheme backfired.
It was a wild theory, and there were still a few holes (the distant screaming I heard while I was on the phone with Tobias, for starters) but it was the only thing that made any sense at all.
It might even explain how she’d gotten out of the restraints without unfastening them. If the guard was in on it from the beginning, he could’ve purposefully left the wrist-cuffs extra-loose when he put them on.
Probably why the little hussey made such a fuss about how uncomfortable she was. Just a diversionary tactic, to keep me from noticing.
The girl was clever.
Made me look stupid.
Myra was really getting mad now, and her mind wasn’t working well anymore. She had the sense that there were other problems with the theory, obvious ones, but it was getting harder to focus.
Inside her mouth, her teeth started to change.
It’s a disaster. I was stupid!
It was terrible. Everything might fall apart.
She rose from the bed, went down the stairs, walked out of the house.
I need to kill somebody.
She could hear groups of men in the woods coming from both the right and left, but those on the left were the closest, so she started walking that way.
As she went, her fingers started to lengthen and change, gradually forming themselves into three-foot tentacles with sharp metallic spikes on the end. And then a strange inky darkness spread out around her, darker than the night.
And she could feel her face reshaping itself.
By the time she reached the men, she didn’t even resemble a human being at all.
They were confused by the sudden onslaught of darkness, a darkness so deep that their night vision equipment was no help.
She took the first man’s head off with a casual backhand
ed swipe.
Then she wrapped a few of her tentacle fingers around the man standing next to him, raised him up, listened to him scream.
He fired his weapon, and the bullets pierced her body but she barely felt it.
After a few moments she grew bored with his struggling, opened her mouth, which now looked like it belonged on a crocodile, and bit into the man’s tender middle.
His guts spilled out, dripping down onto her chest.
He squirmed around like a wounded insect for a bit, and then he died. She threw him into a tree and heard his spine crack on impact.
There was another man nearby, about 10 feet away. He fired his weapon wildly in the dark, screaming and cursing. She came up behind him, and killed him with less fanfare than the other two—using her tentacles to pierce his chest.
Men on both sides of the house were panicking now—she could hear them talking to each other using their headsets. They had no idea what was happening and were trying to decide what to do.
From the sound of things they didn’t have much interest in fighting back.
She waited, and listened close—her hearing was better than any human’s, so she caught most of what was said.
under the mistaken impression that it would make for a more defensible position, the fools decided the best thing to do was get into the house.
Myra watched and listened from the woods until they were all closed up inside like a bunch of sardines. Then she strolled up, broke the lock on the door, and greeted them with a toothy smile.
After that, she spent a little while playing around in Simone’s living room.
When she finally got bored, she looked around herself and was astonished by the horrible mess she’d made.
Chapter 5 - Tripping
The little plane landed around 10:00 pm at a small private airport in the Virginia wilderness. A glance out the window told Malcolm that the place looked a hell of a lot like the airport he’d departed from, the biggest difference being it’s location atop a mountain. It was a bit too dark to tell much about the surrounding terrain, but he imagined there would be beautiful vistas to stare at if he’d landed here in the daytime.
Enid had arranged to have a large van with plenty of storage room waiting there for him. With the pilot’s help, it took about 15 minutes to get all his gear loaded.
He took extra care with the white box Vivienne had given him—hid it inside another box, which was buried under a bunch of other junk inside an old wooden chest, and then put a padlock on that, and covered it all up with an old piece of tarp.
Once that was accomplished, he decided it was time to determine exactly where he needed to go.
Before leaving Arizona, he’d made a phone call to a former CIA operative he knew named Bryan Lyle, asking him to dig up all the information he could on Simone Copeland, including, especially, a physical address.
Now he dialed Bryan’s number.
It rang four times. There was a soft click as the man picked up. “Took you long enough,” said Bryan. “I was about to hit the hay.”
“At seven o'clock?”
“There’s nothing on TV tonight, so why stay up?”
“Well, if you’re bored enough to go to bed, then I assume you had no trouble finding her.”
“No trouble at all. Found her hours ago. Turns out there are only a handful of women named Simone Copeland in the state of Virginia, and only one with a driver’s license picture that remotely matched your description.”
“Good then. What did you learn about her?”
“Many things, of course. Where do you want me to start?”
Thackery stifled a sigh—Lyle was always so tedious to converse with, forced you to work like a dog for every little morsel of information. “For heaven’s sake, just start wherever you like, Bryan.”
“Yes. Well, she’s 23 years old. Multi-racial—black father, white mother. The father was an army engineer from Alabama who died when she was a child—drove off a bridge, apparently. She was raised by the mother—a nurse’s aid who never remarried. Spent her whole childhood and teenage years in that little place you mentioned—what was it… Reed County, Virginia? Yes… Tiny place, lots of wilderness, not a lot of anything else. She never got in any trouble growing up, was a cheerleader for a couple of years in high school, had an outstanding SAT score, went to Bolton university on a scholarship—it’s a really nice private school just outside of Richmond, very expensive. She was getting excellent grades, majoring in political science, and then suddenly dropped out about a year ago.”
“That’s a bit odd, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“Dropping out with good grades.”
“Pshaw! Of course not! Kids hate school. Everybody hates school. And besides, why should she bother with college when she was making so much money?”
“What do you mean?”
“Eh? I assumed you knew—thought it probably had something to do with why you were trying to track her down. She’s been raking in a hell of a lot of green, especially for a college kid.”
“What do you mean by ‘a hell of a lot?’”
“According to her tax records, she made well over 100,000 dollars for two straight years.”
“How in the world did she make that much money?”
“Hard to say for sure… She filed her taxes as a self employed private contractor. The exact job description was ‘political advice and other services.’ But I think that’s almost certainly bullshit. No sane person would pay a college kid without a degree that much money for political advice.”
“I assume you’ve worked out some clever theory about the truth?”
“Don’t be patronizing Malcolm. And yes, if you must know, I do have a theory. If I had to guess, I would say she was probably involved in something shady.”
“Like what?”
“Well, it’s pretty obvious I think—a girl her age that looks the way she looks… She’s in college, needs money to pay the bills. Maybe she also has a secret drug habit or something. If I had to guess I’d say she was probably involved in sex work of some kind.”
“Isn’t that a bit presumptuous?”
“Well, maybe, but it fits the facts. I guess she might’ve been a drug dealer, or a burglar instead, but from looking at her picture I would guess she found some way of trading on her looks.”
“So you’re saying she was a prostitute?”
“That seems the most likely possibility, yes. Her reported income is perfectly in line with what higher priced call girls make, and prostitutes often invent fake job titles when they file taxes, frequently revolving around some actual part of their educational background. It’s textbook stuff really. Of course, prostitute is just one possibility. It could be something even juicier. For instance, maybe she got some rich married man into bed with her, filmed it secretly, and then blackmailed him—I ran into a situation like that once when I worked for the government.”
As the man spoke, Malcolm found himself growing rather irritated. “Seems to me that you’re jumping to some fairly judgmental conclusions with very little evidence. She could’ve made her money any number of ways.”
“You asked for my opinion, Malcolm, and I gave it to you. I’ve seen this kind of thing before. If you just use your imagination, it’s pretty easy to read between the lines.”
Malcolm bit back an angry retort. He didn’t have time to argue with the man, and wasn’t sure why he was so upset anyway. The young woman might very well be a ruthless vixen blackmailer for all he knew. He decided to change the subject. “Did you get an address?”
“Yes. That was easy. Her most recent place of residence is a swanky apartment building in downtown Richmond.”
“Really? I’m fairly positive she isn’t in Richmond. She specifically mentioned a farm house in the town of Goldbrook when I spoke with her, and I know for a fact that she was in a rural location at the time.”
“Yes, you mentioned that before—I’m guessing she was probably visiting her
mother—from what I can gather, the woman still lives up there in the hill country somewhere.”
“Do you have an address for the mother?”
“Yes, of course. Hold on a moment, I’ll get it.”
- - -
The minutes blurred together for Simone as she searched through the ruined school, going from one hallway to the next, and from one building to the next, checking each room she passed to see if it would suffice for her particular needs.
Dim memories from her elementary school years made the surroundings somewhat familiar, but not familiar enough to be particularly useful, especially since the place looked so much different now: crumbling and empty, bare walls, no desks. This was a dark, colorless place. Moldy and rotten. Nothing at all like her memories. It had become a place where vermin thrived instead of children. There were beetles, and crickets, and termites eating away at the woodwork, and there were rats living in the walls.
At one point after witnessing a furtive tail disappearing into a pile of leaves, she realized she wasn’t even slightly creeped out, and took a moment to think back, trying to understand why she’d always feared rodents before. The whole idea that an animal so small and weak could ever threaten her was suddenly impossible to comprehend.
Of course, there wasn’t much time to consider this—or anything else for that matter. Her need was far too urgent. The transformation had accelerated since her arrival. She could feel her body changing beneath her skin, things happening both deep inside and closer to the surface, affecting every part of her. At times it seemed that her muscles had become coiled snakes, attempting to twist her bones into new shapes.
The process was proceeding very quickly, which meant she had to find a place to hole-up. Soon.
Unfortunately, finding a suitable spot was taking longer than she’d expected. The school had initially seemed like it would be full of fantastic hiding places, but she couldn’t quite make herself settle on any of the rooms she’d investigated so far. They were either too dirty, too exposed, too small, or too big.
The DARK Trilogy: Titan's Song Chronicles Volume 1 (Books 1 - 3) Page 22
