by Devin Hanson
Sam nodded. “You’ll be on hourly. Just keep track of the time you spend and send me an invoice every Sunday.”
I heard Ryan go through the lobby and head out front. The Fire Station 76 lettering on the street-facing side of the building had been removed, but the sun-faded outlines were still clearly legible. It would be good to have that finally painted over.
“Ryan will be fine on his own. You want a ride, or would you prefer to drive yourself?”
December was a bit cold to be riding a scooter for long distances. “Your car has a heater,” I said with a grin.
“Do you need to get anything before we leave?”
I eyed Sam. “You’re in a rush?”
He forced a smile at me, but there was no humor in it. “Lara is holding the CSI techs at bay with a stool and a whip while I bring you in.”
I nodded. How bad was it? Sam might not believe my explanations of the supernatural, but he was tolerant, willing to overlook them because of the results I’d proven I could achieve. Lara viewed me as little more than a crackpot scam artist. It said something that she was willing to break from routine to let Sam collect me.
“Okay. Um, no, I’m good to go. Let me grab my jacket.”
“Good idea. It’s starting to look like rain. I’ll be outside.”
I hurried back to my bedroom, grabbed my jacket and picked out a scarf, six feet of cloud-soft, blue cashmere. I had gotten a new jacket after the events of October had left my old one as little more than leather confetti. With my scooter still being my primary means of transportation, I needed a new one just so I wouldn’t get hypothermia any time I went for a ride after dark.
I was still winding the scarf around my neck when I pushed out through the front door. I drifted to a stop and froze with my hands raised, halfway through throwing the last loop around my neck. Ryan was on a ladder leaning against the front of the building, stretching up to do the edgework under the eaves with a paintbrush. He had stripped down to his jeans and his chest was bare to the cold December morning air.
Sam cleared his throat behind me and I turned my back on Ryan’s muscled torso, using the motion of finishing my scarf wrap and tugging my hair free to cover my embarrassment at being caught staring.
“I’m sure he’ll be fine painting without supervision,” Sam said with a grin.
I glanced back at Ryan and watched him stretch out his shoulder. The muscles on his back and shoulders stood out in sharp definition for a moment. I cleared my throat. “Yeah, you’re right.” Louder, I called, “Ryan, I’m heading out with Sam for a few hours. Do you have enough to keep you busy?”
Ryan leaned away from the ladder to wave at me. His abs rippled and sunlight caught on the light sheen of sweat on his chest. “Don’t worry about me, Alex.”
Sam snorted. “Come on. Lara is waiting.”
Chapter Two
Sam Friday pulled to a stop when we were still half a block from the police tape strung up around a strip mall. In the mid-morning sunlight, the spinning lights on top of the pair of ambulances were barely noticeable. Nobody was rushing about, so I assumed the ambulances weren’t there for any survivors.
“Let me do the talking,” Sam said quietly to me as we got to the police tape.
He held it up for me and I ducked under. A man and a woman in black CSI uniforms hurried up to us and squared off on Sam, their shoulders set belligerently.
“What’s so important you had us waiting out here for nearly an hour, huh?” the man demanded.
“This the specialist Lara was referring to?” the woman sized me up and sneered. “I doubt she’s a specialist in anything but shoes.”
I started to open my mouth, all kinds of wonderful comebacks filling my head, and Sam grabbed my shoulder painfully tight. “Alexandra might have insight we’re lacking,” he said firmly. “Though I’m sure you wouldn’t mind telling the captain you don’t have any leads for the third time in a row.”
“Hey, it’s not our fault you’re still wet behind the ears and can’t chase down the evidence we do collect,” the man said with a nasty chuckle.
“Is there a problem?”
The two CSI techs dropped the confrontation with muttered curses as Lara came out of an auto shop stripping gloves from her hands with practiced motions.
“Alexandra is here on my request,” Lara continued. She was a good four inches taller than me in her conservative heels, with greying hair lacquered into a professional bun. The senior detective moved with a casual surety that belied her evident age as she stepped up to join Sam in facing down the CSI techs. “I asked you a question, Ramsey. Is there a problem?”
The male tech dropped his gaze. “Just want to make sure you’re not wasting our time, is all,” he muttered.
Lara eyed the woman until she dropped her gaze. “We will call you when the scene is ready for you,” Lara said icily. “Alexandra, come.”
I followed meekly as Lara stepped off toward the auto shop, her long legs making me almost have to trot to keep up. “Sorry about that, Detective,” I said once we were out of earshot.
“Don’t let Ramsey scare you,” Lara said dismissively. “He’s a prick, but he’s good at his job. He’s only up in arms because he can’t make heads or tails out of these scenes either.”
She pushed open the door to the shop and a bell over the door jingled merrily. The raw scent of wet iron hit me and I felt my throat lock up. Blood.
“Here, put these on,” Lara handed me a pair of disposable gloves from a box and tugged on a fresh pair herself. “Don’t touch anything unless you ask first, and try not to step in it.” Without waiting for a response, she moved off through the shelves toward the back.
“Step in what?” I asked Sam.
Sam finished putting on his own gloves and offered me a little tin of ointment that smelled sharply of mint. “Put a little under your nose,” he suggested quietly. “It will help with the smell.”
I followed Sam’s advice. The menthol made my eyes smart, but after a few seconds it seemed to normalize and faded to the back of my awareness, taking the scent of blood with it.
“What happened here?” I asked as we set off after Lara.
“I was hoping you might be able to shed some light on that for us,” he shrugged. “We have security footage of the front,” he nodded his head to the side.
I followed the gesture and saw a middle-aged man slumped back against a stack of tires. Most of the man’s head was gone, splattered up the wall. A poster advertising synthetic oil had shards of skull and twisted strands of hair splashed all over it. I jerked my eyes forward and concentrated on not throwing up.
“What we can’t figure out,” Sam continued, “was what happened in the back.”
We reached the back office and Sam pulled open the door for me. I steeled myself for more gore, but the little cubicle room was clean. I caught the smell of ashes through the menthol, and saw a log book, of the type used to record sales or maybe gambling records, burned down to the spine. Next to the book, a sawed-off shotgun lay on the desk. There was a computer on the desk, and a few filing cabinets. Other than that, the room was empty.
Or nearly so. Lara was brooding over a man stretched out on the floor. He was naked, and seemed to have fallen asleep on the cold tiles.
“There’s no sign of trauma,” Lara grumbled. “Take a look, Alexandra, maybe your field of experience will tell us something we don’t see.” She stepped back to the doorway and folded her arms, giving me free access to the room.
I glanced at Sam and he gave me an encouraging nod. Okay. I looked back to the man and tried to quell the feeling of disquiet that gripped me. Careful not to step on him, I moved around the little office, looking for… something, anything that might explain what I was looking at. I had no idea where to even begin, but if this was a case that could be solved by standard police work, Sam wouldn’t have needed me to step in.
That meant there was probably something supernatural going on, and that gave me a place to s
tart. I pointed at a ballpoint pen on the desk. “Can I touch that?”
Sam glanced at Lara, who nodded. I picked up the pen and used it to prod at the guy’s mouth, lifting his lip up to check his canines. They were normal. A little uneven, maybe; he could have benefited from going to an orthodontist, but his canines weren’t oversized, nor had they been filed or replaced. I used the pen to prod at the skin next to his nose and verified that there wasn’t any makeup or plastic surgery there.
The man was human. I tossed the pen back on the desk and circled around again. There was discoloring on his feet. From about the knee down, the flesh was swollen and dark with bruises. On his right big toe, an abrasion circled the digit just behind the first joint. Blood had caked and dried around the cut, and the sole of that foot was stained with blood.
I glanced back toward the shop and Lara nodded. “There are faint footprints of blood crossing the floor. From the right foot only.”
“Do you have an ID on him?” I asked.
Sam cleared his throat. “Michael Fenwick.” I could see he wanted to say more but was staying quiet, waiting to see what I could come up with.
“The blood on his toe looks clotted. That’s not normal, is it?”
This time Lara shook her head. “No. I appreciate that you’re not a medical expert, Alexandra. What you’re looking at is livor mortis, blood pooling in the extremities after the heart stops beating. It usually isn’t visible until several hours after death.”
“We received the call about a gunshot at six,” Sam added. “It’s now eight.”
I did the math and puzzled over what that meant. “You’re saying… he was dead when he walked in here?”
“Michael Fenwick died of a temazepam overdose on Sunday night,” Lara said.
“Sleeping pills,” Sam clarified. “He was missed at work on Monday, and police found him in his bed that night. Bloodwork shows he took four times the recommended dosage and chased it with a fifth of vodka.”
“A suicide.” I felt ill. Suddenly the walls of the office seemed too close, the air stifling.
“County records have him interred in the morgue, awaiting out-of-town family to verify the identity.”
“Do you have video inside the morgue?” I asked. I wanted to get outside where the air was fresh, but that would mean I’d have to walk by the guy with his head blown off. I didn’t think my stomach could handle that right then.
“No,” Lara sighed. “There was a fault in the surveillance footage. The hard drive storing the feed crashed and nobody bothered to replace it.”
“Wait, you said this wasn’t the first time?”
“The other morgues didn’t have surveillance.” Lara shook her head. “That’s being rectified, but it’s a process.”
“We do have footage of Mr. Fenwick here gunning down the clerk, though,” Sam interjected. “We can have a look at that.”
“Yeah.” I swallowed. “Let’s do that.”
Sam jostled the computer’s mouse and the screen woke up. They had already been playing the video and now Sam dragged the slider back. The clerk was puttering around the store, setting up a display of windshield wipers. The video quality wasn’t great. It ran around two frames a second and even full screen, it didn’t show much more than vague blobs of pixels shuffling around.
The door opened and a naked man that had to be Michael Fenwick walked into the store. Without hesitation, Mr. Fenwick sung the shotgun up. I closed my eyes and turned away from the computer. I didn’t need to see what happened next.
“Fenwick walks into the back room,” Lara said, her eyes fixed on the video feed, “and shuts the door. We assume he burns the book, then, well…”
“Dies,” Sam finished for her. “Again.”
We all looked at each other for a few moments in silence.
“That’s not normal,” I said finally.
Lara rolled her eyes. “Well, good thing we have an expert around to tell us that.”
“And you’re sure this isn’t, I don’t know, some kind of trick?” I waved a hand at Fenwick. “I mean, it looked like him walking into the shop, but it could have been someone else.”
“We’ll be doing testing on the bloody footprints leading in, of course,” Lara shrugged. “Given the results of forensics from earlier incidents, let’s operate on the assumption that the video you just saw was indeed Fenwick. Apparently alive, killing the clerk.”
“So, what do you think, Alex?” Sam asked with a grin. “I’ve been telling Lara it’s zombies.”
“Zombies aren’t real, Sam.” I shook my head at the crestfallen look on his face. “But I’ve been wrong before.”
Sam’s guess that Fenwick had risen as a zombie might have been fueled by watching too many movies, but in the Middle East they went by a different name historically. Ghouls were one of the families of djinn, like the marid and the hinn, and to a layman they might as well be indistinguishable from a zombie. Except ghouls were slaves to the vampires and there shouldn’t be any in America.
“I know that look,” Sam said, leveling a finger at me. “You know what this is!”
Lara look at me in surprise. “Really? Not more bat-apes, I hope?”
“The servitor wasn’t a bat-ape,” I sighed. “No, this is something else. And potentially much worse. Can we… go outside?”
Sam nodded. “Yeah. Of course. Do you need to see anything else here or can we let the CSI techs in?”
“Yes.” I shook my head. “No. I’m done.”
Lara stayed behind, brooding over the body, and Sam escorted me outside. I turned my head away as we passed the clerk, swallowing down the bile that rose in my throat. I don’t know that I’d ever get to the point where death wasn’t horrific.
The bright sunlight washed over me and I hardly noticed the two CSI techs brushing past us. I closed my eyes and leaned against the wall.
“So, what is it then, if not zombies?” Sam asked quietly.
“The servitor was an agent of a European… faction.” I couldn’t explain to Sam that vampires had been trying to find a foothold in Los Angeles. He wouldn’t believe me even if I tried.
“And this… not-a-zombie?”
“They’re supposedly slaves.”
“Supposedly?”
I opened my eyes and looked sideways at Sam. “Look, I don’t have all the answers yet. I think I have a lead to follow, but it’s not much more than myth.”
“Okay.” Sam scratched his head. “Is this like a mafia thing? Do we need to get the FBI involved?”
“Involved in what? They wouldn’t believe me any more than Lara does.”
“Lara is… practical. She may not believe you, but she won’t argue results. But… fine. No FBI for now. If they’re not zombies, what do we call them?”
“Ghouls.”
It took another twenty minutes of back and forth before I was able to convince Sam that I didn’t have any more answers for him. I promised to do research to find out more about the ghouls and he drove me home. My thoughts were so involved with the ghouls that I had completely forgotten about Ryan until Sam pulled to a stop at the curb and I saw the fresh paint on the walls.
“You going to be all right?”
I forced a smile and nodded. “I think so. I’ll be able to handle Ryan.”
Sam laughed. “I wasn’t talking about him. I suspect he’s in more danger from you than the other way around. I mean about what you saw at the shop.”
“Oh.” I grimaced and swallowed back the sick feeling in my throat. “Yeah. That’s not the first time I’ve seen a dead body. I’ve never seen anyone who had been…” I trailed off and gestured helplessly at my head.
“Yeah, that was a little rough.” Sam’s humor faded away. “I would rather you didn’t have to see that.”
“I’ll be okay, Sam. I appreciate it. I’ll call when I have something more for you.”
“All right, Alex. Take care. And, you probably don’t need me to tell you this, but time is of the essence.”
“I’ll get started right away,” I promised.
I climbed out and headed for my front door. I had research to do, and I hoped having Ryan around wasn’t going to make things awkward. I paused for a moment to take in the fresh coat of paint on the front wall. It had done wonders toward making the building feel like a home instead of an institution.
The front door was unlocked and I walked through the lobby to the living room. The distant sound of a shower running made me stop in my tracks. Unbidden, the memory of Ryan stripped to the waist sprang to mind.
“Shit.”
Part of me wanted to get naked and join him in the shower and find out if he was as strong as he looked. I knew that wasn’t a great idea. Ryan was going to be having a hard enough time sleeping under the same roof as me without compounding it with sex.
I grabbed my laptop and went to go sit on the couch in the living room. After moving in, I had done my best to furnish my new home without emptying out my bank account. My prize acquisition had been the couch, an overstuffed leather monstrosity. The previous owner’s cat had destroyed the leather, but it was cosmetic damage only. I ended up getting a five-grand couch for fifty bucks.
I fired my laptop up and settled down for a stint of research. After a few minutes, Grim jumped up next to me and curled up a foot out of reach. The cat liked company, but not being pet.
I started my research with a simple Google search. As I clicked through the articles, I developed an understanding of the myths surrounding the name. Most referenced the ghouls as graveyard-dwelling monsters that ate the flesh of men. There were a few articles that mixed up hinn with ghouls, calling them shapeshifters or humans with animal features.
Then I left the search results behind and jumped to forums that had intentionally removed themselves from the sight of common search engines. It wasn’t the dark web, whatever that was, more a subset of the internet that existed out of sight.
The way the internet works, for a website to be found through Google, Yahoo, or any other search engine, it has to have another page linking to it. A new website has to tell Google it exists in order for its contents to be indexed. If those steps are skipped, and if there are no external links to the website, it is impossible to search for the hidden website.
