by Platt, Sean
John tapped his temple, reminding the girl of his missing memories.
“Oh yeah,” she said from behind an elongated yawn.
They drove in shared silence as they rolled along a lingering stretch of highway with nothing to offer beyond trees and darkness on either side.
Half an hour earlier, John had asked Abigail about her abduction by the men in the van and was troubled that she couldn’t remember anything after the cop’s murder. Her next memory was waking in the woods. While her recall before the cop’s murder was intact, the parallel to John’s condition was not lost on him.
He wondered if the bald man had something to do with both of their predicaments. If so, he needed to find the man after he found the address on his paper and grabbed whatever answers might be waiting.
He decided not to press Abigail for memories she didn’t have. There wasn’t any point. And sooner or later, he’d find his past — or it would find him.
“I believe,” Abigail said long after John thought she’d drifted asleep.
“In fate?” He wondered how a girl who had lived such a wretched life until now could believe in something like fate. How could you believe that shit piles like this were meant to be, or worse, planned by some unknown architect of misery?
“Yes. I knew you would save me. Don’t you remember the drawing?”
“I do,” he said, treading cautiously. “But I think it’s more likely a coincidence than fate. I was buried alive, running from God knows what, and just happened to stumble into your back yard.”
“Nothing just happens.”
He glanced over at Abigail. Her eyes held a youthful hope he was reluctant to crush with his cynicism. He had to remind himself that he wasn’t dealing with an ordinary child, and couldn’t truly understand the fragility she hid behind her brave façade.
“Profound words for an eleven-year old,” he said, trying to lighten the mood with a jest and a smile.
“I’m almost twelve,” she snapped back.
He looked over to see if she appeared as wounded as her defensive words had sounded and wasn’t surprised by her crossed arms and furrowed brow.
An angry horn split the moment. John glanced up to see that he’d drifted across the center line into oncoming traffic.
“Holy shit!” he blurted, swerving back into his own lane, the truck’s rear fishtailing, its wheels searching for purchase against the asphalt. He expected a tire to come flying off, or for the truck to simply fall apart. Another horn blared, this time from behind, as lights filled his rearview mirror and the truck’s cabin before swerving around them. The car passed, the driver’s middle finger at full mast, all for John.
He looked back to make sure that the law wasn’t behind him. No flashing lights yet, and thankfully a mostly empty road.
“You sure you don’t want me to drive?”
John turned to catch her smiling wide, eyes bright even in the darkness.
“No, I think we’ll wait a few years before you get behind the wheel again.” He wasn’t sure if it was too soon to joke about the earlier incident, and was relieved when she giggled.
Their collective laughter filled the cabin.
Though John had no memory of other children, let alone his own childhood, he wondered if all eleven-year-olds were as articulate as Abigail. If they all thought about things like God, fate, and their place in the universe. He wasn’t sure if her maturity came as a result of her situation, or if her thoughts were normal for someone that age. He couldn’t imagine that other children, held captive and abused for years, would be able to present anything close to the normality Abigail wore like skin. Perhaps, he wondered, she was in a state of shock, and the inevitable breakdown was yet to come.
“Are all eleven … ” he asked before catching her cross look, “er, I mean, all twelve-year-olds as smart as you?”
“I don’t know. The kids in the books I read always seemed pretty smart.”
“Books?”
Abigail went on to explain that Stacy used to bring her books from the local library. She’d read many books during her captivity, such as Harry Potter, The Westing Game, the Paratime series, and most everything ever written by Roald Dahl. She rattled off a long list with every other title seeming vaguely familiar to John. Abigail said the stories offered an escape and allowed her to live through the hell that Randy Webster had plunged into her daily.
“She wasn’t so bad,” Abigail said, looking down, thinking about Stacy. “He abused her, too. Sometimes he made me watch, and her eyes were always so sad. She didn’t want me to see what was happening. And even though he asked her to … do things to me, she never did. It was the only time she was ever brave to him. He beat her up whenever she said no.”
John didn’t know what to say. He simply sat there, eyes on the road, trying not to let welling tears blur his vision.
Abigail continued, her voice shaky. “She was as much of a prisoner as I was. I tried a few times to get her to set us free when he wasn’t home, but she was too afraid. She always said that he’d kill us as soon as he caught us, and that he’d catch us for sure.”
John thought back to when Abigail first learned that he’d killed both Randy and Stacy.
“If you liked her, why did you say ‘good’ when I said they were both dead?”
“I was mad at her,” Abigail whispered.
“Why?”
“She wouldn’t do something for me,” Abigail said, hinting at something he maybe shouldn’t pursue. John wondered if she wanted him to ask what Stacy wouldn’t do, or did she want him to drop it?
Curiosity cut to the front of the line.
“What did you want her to do?”
“Randy got mad at her for not listening to him and told her that she couldn’t bring me any more books. He came into my room and found two I was hiding under the mattress. He ripped all the pages out and then did this.”
Abigail lifted her shirt to an angry red cigarette burn just under her left ribcage.
“Jesus Christ,” John said, dividing attention between the road and the hot tears on his cheeks.
“He had taken the only thing I had. I wanted to die. I begged her to kill me if she wouldn’t set me free … but she wouldn’t. She just cried, and I got mad at her and told her not to ever talk to me again. That was last week.”
John looked over to see Abigail curled into a comma on the seat, elbow on her knees, head buried in the crook as her body crumbled into sobs.
He wanted to comfort her with a hand on the shoulder, a hug, or something, and grew angry at whatever curse prevented him from humanity’s most basic expression.
As despair sank its talons into his heart, something pulled at John’s attention. Ahead lay the street where he needed to turn. A minute later, he found himself staring at the address on his scrap of paper.
312 Hanover Street.
Welcome to the Shady Pines Motel, a sign read, its neon letters now dark, defunct as the abandoned, boarded-up motel sitting before them like some landmark that time had forgotten.
An old, battered van sat solo at the far end of the lot.
John wondered whom he’d find waiting.
Eighteen
Caleb
“A drink, Caleb?” SAC Bob Cromwell said.
Caleb sat at the bar in his boss’s den. “No thanks.”
Bob headed to the garage for a fresh bag of ice, and Caleb scanned the home, a monstrous estate on the river. The kitchen, larger than most living rooms, was outfitted with custom maple cabinets, dark granite countertops, and appliances that shone with the latest in techno-wizardry. The house looked like something from Architectural Digest; its asking price somewhere north of $4 million — a bit more than he figured his boss could afford — but Caleb had learned long ago never to make assumptions about other people’s money.
While the home was gorgeous, it had all the warmth of a museum. The only hints of household personality in sight were the few tastefully framed photos on the fireplace mantle of B
ob’s wife and college-aged daughter, both in Whistler on a ski trip. Bob, with his wide, owlish face and sharp nose, was absent from all but one of the pictures, a Christmas portrait from at least six years ago, where Bob wore an unflattering green sweater with a sickly looking reindeer design. Caleb swallowed the urge to laugh.
Bob returned with the ice, poured himself a glass of vodka, and sat across from Caleb at the bar separating the kitchen from the dining room.
Bob got right to the point.
“How much do you know about Omega?”
Omega was the group that sat just above Caleb’s on the agency chart, the squad assigned to cases that Caleb’s team couldn’t solve. They made sense of the senseless and found natural explanations for supernatural events. Their success rate was said to be 100 percent, though Caleb had little interaction with them. Hell, he didn’t even know any of the members other than Commander Mike Mathews, who’d headed Caleb’s unit for nine years before his promotion. Now they rarely saw one another, given that both men’s jobs kept them mostly on the road.
“Well, I know they get our leftovers,” Caleb joked, “but beyond that, not a whole hell of a lot.”
Bob took another long sip, finished his drink, and poured another before reaching beneath the bar and retrieving a black folder with a blood-red CLASSIFIED stamped diagonally across the cover. Bob slid the folder across the bar.
Inside, a stack of a dozen or so neatly organized black and white photos and nearly forty pages of reports. Attached to the inside cover was a single sheet of paper that read, PROJECT PHOENIX.
Caleb picked up the first photo and noted the handwritten date along the bottom right hand border: July 14, 1947.
In the photo, a black-hooded but otherwise nude man sat strapped to a large chair similar to the type sometimes used to restrain prisoners. His arms and legs were bound by leather straps and large metal buckles; his flesh was pallid and pocked with gray bruises. Caleb had trouble making out the man’s age, as he appeared hairless. Behind him stood a gray wall with a black sliding panel that seemed to conceal a long rectangular window.
Caleb turned to the next photo. A young man with a buzz cut in some sort of unrecognizable military-looking uniform stood behind the prisoner. The military officer carried no weapons, patches, or badges to indicate rank or branch of service.
In the next photo, Buzz Cut had removed the prisoner’s hood. The captive was young, in his midtwenties, hair wet with sweat (or water) and eyes wide in terror.
Caleb felt his own beading forehead. He flipped to the next photo and saw the officer sliding open the black panel to reveal a window behind them. A thick beam of brilliant light spilled through the open window, washing into the room and over the strapped man’s back. Though obviously not possible, it appeared that the shaft of light had sent the prisoner into a writhing fit of pain, his body arched taut, seemingly trying to break free of his restraints.
Caleb gasped, fingers shaking as he went to the next photo.
The man was still in the chair, now consumed in flames. Buzz Cut was no longer in the shot.
The next photo was another view of the burning man. The sequence continued until he was no longer on fire, but rather a charred corpse, not unlike those his killer had been leaving behind. The following photos showed several military and scientist types examining the charred body, closing out with extreme close-ups of the damage.
“Look familiar?” Bob asked.
Caleb noticed a second similarity between his victims and the corpse. Neither the chair or restraints displayed much fire damage at all.
“Christ,” Caleb said. “What is this?”
“We call them feeders, though some of the agents call them vampires.”
“Vampires?” Caleb repeated, wondering if Bob was fucking with him.
“Well, I prefer feeders. And not vampires like you see on TV and shit. But they do burn just the same.”
Caleb tried digesting the new information, assembling pieces to see how they fit into his case. “So are you telling me that my victims are feeders?”
Just saying the word “feeder” sounded like some sort of bad B-movie reference.
“No, but they were killed by one. These things feed via touch. Like in the video all over the fucking TV channels. They drain you until you’re nothing but a husk.”
Caleb cycled through the photos again then started to rifle through the attached paperwork, none of it written in a language he recognized.
“What is this shit?”
Bob laughed. “It’s encrypted.”
Caleb suddenly remembered something that had happened in his department eight years ago to a rookie named Eddie Rienhart. The team hazed him, planting a folder with alien autopsy photos. They had him convinced, too, for a while. For a moment, Caleb wondered if Bob was having one on him, but that was before remembering that Bob was a humorless prick.
Still, he had to ask. “You aren’t pulling a fast one on me, are you, Bob? Because it’s late, and I’m tired as hell.”
“No, they’re quite real, Caleb.”
“So, you’re saying my killer is one of these feeder things?”
“Well,” Bob said with a deep sigh, “technically, I can’t tell you any more right now. I’m afraid you don’t have security clearance … ”
Caleb would have wondered “What the hell?” out loud, but Bob kept right on going.
“Unless … we promoted you to the Omega unit.”
Caleb didn’t even need to say yes.
“I’ll take that drink now, Bob.”
Nineteen
John
John stared at the dingy motel, framed before the van like a perfectly preserved artifact from an abandoned Hollywood set. Though all the rooms’ windows and doors were boarded up, John was sure he sensed movement from somewhere inside the motel.
He wasn’t sure how he knew someone was in one of the rooms but figured it wasn’t much different from how he could sense and connect with Abigail.
They were parked across the street, in front of a rundown strip mall whose only remaining tenant — barely in business — was a lone stalwart from a dying grocery store chain. A dead motel across from a mostly abandoned shopping plaza — John could think of fewer ominous signs to warn him away from further pursuit. He couldn’t help but feel he might be walking into a trap at worst — and danger at best.
“I want you to wait here.”
“No way.” Abigail shook her head.
“Listen, I don’t know what’s waiting for me in there, and I couldn’t live with myself if something bad happened to you because of me.”
“I don’t — ”
“You take these keys. If I don’t come out or you hear something awful, drive away. Just keep driving until you find the police or a busy place where you can call for the cops. Just tell them everything that happened, no lies. You’ll be safe. They can’t do anything to you because a) you didn’t do anything, and b) you’re only a child.”
She began to protest, but stopped just before John’s finger hit his lips.
“Do you trust me?”
She nodded, pouting.
Rather than saying anything, he opened the car door and stepped into the night.
Twenty
Caleb
Caleb was having difficulty parsing the information Bob had just dropped into his lap. Prior to the evening’s events, before seeing the folder filled with old photos, Caleb wouldn’t have bought any of this. Despite his team’s role investigating the supernatural, he was a skeptic, a man of logic.
“Look,” Bob said, “there’s a lot of shit out there that we can’t explain. For the most part, we live with it. Let things lie. And that was the case with these feeders. Yes, we knew about them, and some of them knew that we knew, but they kept to themselves and didn’t leave many messes for us to clean up. You could say we had something of a truce many years back.”
Once the corpses started piling up in public places, the Omega team began seriously inves
tigating the creatures and destroying any evidence that might get people talking. Which was why Bob was so pissed to see footage of a feeder all over the news. They’d have to do some serious spin control if they hoped to contain the story. There was a strong possibility that they’d have to call into question the credibility of some of the witnesses. And if that didn’t work, they’d have to eliminate them. For the greater good, of course.
“So this guy I’m chasing … he’s a feeder?” Caleb asked, still uncomfortable using jargon that belonged in a tattered paperback or a low budget flick.
“Yes.”
“Who is he?”
Bob took a moment, as if still uncertain how much to tell Caleb.
“His name is John Sullivan, or at least that’s the name we know him by. He’s a lot older than he appears, and has killed scores of people we know or. Likely many we don’t.”
“Is this the guy that killed Julia?”
“Yes,” Bob said, carrying the bottle of vodka to a chair opposite Caleb.
“Why is he killing, or feeding, on these people? And why my wife? Why send letters, taunting me?”
“He’s not just a feeder,” Bob explained, “he’s part of a cell, looking to bring this arm of the agency down.”
“A cell of feeders? They’re organized?” Caleb dropped the folder. “How many of these fuckers are we talking about? And why would they target us?”
“There’s enough to make our lives difficult, though we’re thinning their numbers when we’re able to find them. As for reasons to come at us, I’ll get to that in a bit.”
“Is Sullivan the head?” Caleb asked.
“No, he’s more like an enforcer, doing the dirty work for people higher up the chain.”
Something wasn’t adding up for Caleb. If the feds knew of the feeders and the two had coexisted for some time, why would they call attention to themselves? They had to know things would get ugly. And why target his wife? Something was off, and Caleb’s instincts weren’t about to let him leave without better answers.
