Fabian still didn’t understand. “What does the cop have to do with it?”
All he wanted to do was get back to counting his money and going to sleep. It had been a long day, and now this encounter made him want to forget it all.
“We’ve been thinking too small, big brother. Didn’t you hear me? Opportunity. That’s the name of the game.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about…”
Iggy slipped a bottle out of his back pocket. It was one of Fabian’s favorites. A cask-strength bourbon straight out of the Kentucky back country. Expensive and ridiculously hard to find. His mouth watered. Iggy grinned.
“It’s time to celebrate,” Iggy said. He wrapped an arm around his brother and pulled him into the store. “Come on. There’s a lot to talk about.”
“Like?”
Iggy’s smile did not waiver. Not a millimeter. His confidence set Fabian off kilter. But it pulled him in too.
“Fabian, my boy,” Iggy said, putting a hand on his brother’s shoulder, “I’m gonna tell you how the Moon brothers are gonna take over this town. We’re gonna have everything that this crap world owes us.”
Chapter Eleven
Chuck Yarling
Consciousness came slowly. He’d been in this spot before, tied down and ordered not to move. But he did move this time. His toes first and then his fingers. What was that strange sensation? And that smell? Oh, Lord, had he messed himself? He wasn’t that old, was he?
He tried to roll to one side in order to get his bearing, but he found he couldn’t move that way. He tried the other side. Same thing. Something was blocking his roll.
Peeling his eyes open felt like taking a potato peeler to his eyelids.
There was a garble of formless color. And then that smell assaulted his nose again. What the hell was it?
He didn’t remember going home. The last thing he remembered was going for a ride. Had he crashed? Was he on the side of the road?
No. Too quiet for that. And it didn’t smell like the outdoors. It smelled like something else. A faint whiff of antiseptic, enough to invade his senses and start really tickling his nose.
He reached up to pinch it and felt the crust of something…
He looked up. Just visible in the gloom was a rectangular shape, like one of those windows in a warehouse. Careful now, he let his eyes adjust. More ceiling windows. He was in some sort of warehouse. But how?
He did a quick check of the rest of his body. His back was sore, but the rest of him felt fine. Surprisingly, rather good. If he had fallen, maybe he’d landed in a pile of pillows. The absurdity almost made him laugh.
Oof, that smell. He reached a hand between his legs to make sure. Nope. Not from him. Thank the Lord. That would’ve done it.
The smell was really ramping up now. Bad. Like open sewer bad. He’d had burn duty in the Army when he was in Vietnam. Talk about a smell. This was like that, only without the potpourri of gasoline.
That’s when Chuck started putting two with two.
He felt his chest first. His expensive biking shirt, the baby blue he’d gotten at the beach, was ripped right down the middle. Damn. He’d liked this one. There was crust on his chest too. And on his arms when his hands got there. And crust on his legs.
The hand-on-body scan done, he moved on to his surroundings, since it was still too dark to see to either side. There was a kind of cloth. He pressed and it gave a little. A cushion maybe? He pressed again, and something made his hand fly back to his lap.
It was the memory.
Oh, Lord, that memory. A week in the jungle. Enemy ambush. Lots of boys killed. He was the new guy. The platoon sergeant put him in charge of stacking the remains, the Americans first to take home, and then the Vietcong in a pile to burn.
That was the feeling, the soft press of dead flesh. Just to make sure, Chuck reached over again, slid his hand a little higher now.
A chin, mouth, and nose.
Chapter Twelve
Chuck Yarling
He ran blind now, heart hammering. He fell time and time again, sometimes face-to-face with the bodies lying all over the floor, sometimes in the neat rows he could pick his way around. Other times he fell in piles of discarded human lumber.
How he hoped he picked the right way—the shortest way. He tried not to breath the air. It was painful, each lungful of death. It felt like he’d been running for hours when he smacked face-first into a wall. The jolt woke him up, slapped the panic out of his senses.
Hands searched, scraping his way along the perimeter, trying in vain to find a door. He’d break a window with his head if he had to.
So much death...
He thought he saw their faces now, following his every move. He heard them calling. “You’re one of us now, Chuck. Come back to us.” He bit his cheek and stifled a moan.
His hand slid over the unmistakable outline of door.
Thank you.
He groped for the handle, gripped and twisted.
Locked.
He gripped and twisted, twisted and pulled, until his arms felt like they’d pop out of their sockets.
He had to think, even though every millimeter of his body wanted him to scream until he blacked out.
Think, dammit!
Maybe if he pushed...
He grabbed the handle again, said a desperate prayer, twisted, and pushed.
The night air wafted over him like an island breeze.
And now he ran. He ran until his lungs felt like balloons about to burst. He ran until he fell to the ground, too spent to move. Once again, he did his body scan. Weeks in a hospital had honed that skill. Head: good. Upper body: heaving but strong. Lower body: tired but there.
He looked back the way he’d run and could just make out the building, huge and forbidding in the night. No lights on, like a body dump left for ghosts.
Clouds parted and the moon cast down its pale glow. He looked down and saw that his shirt was indeed torn. No, cut. The crust was there, and on his legs. Some on his arms. And then he saw it, written in black probably, just above the wrist.
X-99.
Chapter Thirteen
Chuck Yarling
Morris greeted him at the front door and almost bowled him over on his way to relieve himself on the front lawn. Chuck was so thrilled to see a friend that he bent down to hug him when he finished his business.
“How’ve you been, bud? I’m sorry if you were scared.”
Morris was all wagging tale and sniffing nose. He liked the tear in Chuck’s shirt the best and took a couple of licks.
“Hold on, let’s get you some grub, okay?”
After feeding the dog and double-checking that the front door was locked, Chuck went to the bathroom, his step tentative and unsure. He flicked on the light and gasped at the reflection in the mirror. He was a bonified mess. He picked the crust off his chest and gave it a tentative sniff.
It wasn’t mud.
The realization made him nauseous and he barely made it to the toilet when his stomach’s contents spewed out. He retched until his throat hurt.
Chuck stood up and looked at himself in the mirror again, this time a little saner. The X-99 in black marker on his arm. The white hair matted with dried blood. The shivering.
Then he looked closer, more of a clinical observation. His eyes were clear. He expected his features to look gaunt. He was a trim man, some would say thin in a painful way, but while he didn’t look filled out, he looked… different.
He turned the shower to full hot and stood under the stream for a long time. He kept his mouth closed, not wanting to let even a trickle of that dried blood to splash onto his tongue. There wasn’t a scratch on him. It was someone else’s blood. He scrubbed hard. The X-99 tattoo was proving to be almost indelible.
He flexed every joint. Still in one piece. His neck wasn’t as stiff as it usually was, and that seemed strange. Not as strange as waking up in a warehouse full of dead bodies strange, but something to note.
&
nbsp; He barely remembered the trek home. He’d quickly gotten his bearings once he hit the highway—roughly ten miles from home. He stuck to the far edge of the grass outcropping. There weren’t many cars out. Mostly big semis chugging off to their destinations.
He’d run the whole way. Had it really been ten miles? No. That couldn’t be right. He hadn’t run even two miles since the accident.
No. He had to be wrong. Hallucinations, maybe.
He scrubbed himself down three times to be sure. His skin prickled when he was finished. Now when he looked in the mirror, he saw a just-showered old man who looked no worse for wear. Another normal day that was a hundred light-years away from normal.
That’s when Chuck Yarling looked down at his arm again, the temporary tattoo barely faded. And it hit him. He’d been exposed. Not only exposed, but he’d probably been lying in a cesspool of X-99 for hours. Goosebumps rose all over his body. He ran to his bedroom, slammed the door and dove under the covers, shivering.
Chapter Fourteen
Dottie Roth
Visions flowed in and out of her sleeping landscape like leaves on a river, passing by without significance. This was how it always was. Nothing much to grab her attention. At least it wasn’t like the chemo dreams, which were lucid nightmares on black wings. Dottie didn’t miss them one bit. She thought, on more than one occasion, that someone was pumping the dreams into her brain at the same time they pumped her body full of cancer-killing drugs.
No nightmares tonight. Just a stroll of leisure down memory lane. Her mother rocking on the front porch of the old farmhouse her grandfather had left to her uncle. Her brother, a fullback with legs the size of tree trunks, barreling through a defensive line.
A man by the name of Jeffrey Singleman who wound up becoming her first love, and then her only love. The way he brushed stray hairs behind her ear with the back of his finger. The way he hummed while he ate. And the scent of something like tobacco beneath his neck when she pressed her head against him. Dottie tried to hold onto that one, but it floated away on dream currents unseen.
She was sitting on the bank of this dream river, feet tickling the water, when the tremor made her turn. Nothing back there but a blur of trees and green. Dottie didn’t know for certain that it was a dream. She felt it.
The tremor shook again, this time making the trees sway. The river gurgled a little, like a sink unclogging. Dottie stayed right where she was. It was too lovely a day. Or a dream? Which was it?
The third and final tremor shook her hard, like a tumble in the dryer. What a sensation. Still, she wasn’t afraid. Why should she be? She was still on the river, waiting for the next memory. It would come. Dottie had faith in that. It was hard to have faith when you’d been through all that Dottie had. But she did.
There was no tremor next time. It was a squeezing on the arm, just above the elbow. “Ouch,” she whispered, though her voice sounded like it was coming from under the ripples in the river. A stray log floated by and she watched it. She wanted to jump in the river and grab hold to see where it would take her. That would be nice. A fine adventure. She was about to reach out, maybe even slip into the water, when the pain became so intense that she finally woke up. It was coal cavern dark.
Dottie blinked. She was in her room, lying on her single mattress. But she felt a presence and looked right toward her window.
Two wide eyes were staring, pleading. It was a child, and he was rapping at it with tiny knuckles. Dottie went to the window and opened it.
She tried to find the words. “Are you ok?”
The kid was silent.
“It’s ok,” she said, her tone disarming. “I’m not mad.”
“Someone’s in my house,” came the plaintive voice.
“Are you from next door?”
The boy nodded.
“I need help,” he said. “There are men in my house.”
“Ok,” she said. “Let’s go see.”
She reached under the bed and grabbed the old, leather case, the one from Israel, the one full of painful memories. Then she went outside.
The child didn’t say a word as he dragged Dottie from her own house to the one next door.
“Who’s in your house?” she tried to ask again.
He answered by pulling her forward. The kid was all business. He seemed worried but not overly afraid. A strange thing to see in a child in the middle of the night.
The lights of the boy’s house were all out.
“Over there,” he said at last, pointing to a van in the driveway.
The van was right next to the family sedan. White without a single mark. The plates were in state and didn’t look new.
Dottie turned to the boy. “Why don’t you go back to my house? I’ll have a look and come get you when it’s safe.”
The boy shook his head hard. “I wanna make sure my brother’s okay.”
He inched in closer and that’s when she noticed it. His body was hot. Not the kind of hot you get from running a cool mile. The other hot. The kind of hot they told you to watch out for—fever hot.
“Hold on,” she said.
The boy looked up at her. His eyes held a hint of glaze.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Xavier.”
“Like the professor.”
He nodded.
“You didn’t think an old lady like me knew comic books, did you?”
A hint of a smile. “I like the movies.”
Dottie smiled back. “I like them too. Wolverine’s my favorite.”
The sound of muffled voices cut their conversation. Xavier tugged at Dottie’s hand.
There was no way she was taking the child in there.
An idea occurred to her. She crouched down and took him gently by the shoulders. “Which do you like better? Ice cream or Snickers bars?”
“Both.”
“Ah, well, that’s good news because I happen to have both in my freezer. Here’s the key to my front door. If you go back to my house and let me check on your family by myself, you can have as much as you want.”
After a moment’s deliberation, the child said, “You won’t tell my dad?”
“I promise.”
She could tell he was torn. Then again, maybe he was more scared than he let on.
She watched to make sure Xavier made it back to her house.
Now that she was alone, she reached inside her case and took out the thing she hoped she wouldn’t need.
The pistol was heavy in her hand, but it fit there like she’d been born with it.
Chapter Fifteen
Dottie Roth
She debated for a solid minute whether to go in through the front or the back. There could be someone in the van. It was hard to tell in the low light. The risk with going through the back was the fence gate. Hopefully, it wouldn’t skreak.
It didn’t.
Dottie made it to the back window, carefully picking her way inch by inch until she could see inside. Her eyes adjusted to the gloom in there. She waited. Two figures walked by dragging something through the kitchen and toward the front door. It was impossible to see what they had. She needed to get a closer look. Only one way for that to happen.
The back door was unlocked. She let herself in, placing one foot quietly in front of the other, judging for floor creaks. She stuck to the wall, noting hiding spots should she have to drop behind one. Whoever it was must have night vision because it was too dark for precision. Luckily, Dottie was used to the dark.
Dottie made it to the living room. Here she caught the smell of a well-lived-in home. One part musty and three parts bodies living in close proximity. There was a faint lingering of a vanilla candle or a plug-in scent.
She heard them in enough time to duck behind a leather recliner. The two forms hauled something larger. You could hear them breathing. It was strange sounding. They were breathing through masks. Dottie could make out more of their form now. They were wearing baggy suits; the kind people wore to battle
Ebola. Only these looked like a stealthier version.
Lord. What had she stepped into…?
When they deposited whatever it was they were dragging by the front door, one of the forms flicked on a red-lens flashlight. It was enough light to see what they’d pulled to the front of the house: three bodies encased in clear plastic bags.
Oh no. No, no, no.
What could she do?
She slipped the pistol from her pocket and lay it against her leg. If the two forms were from a local hospital or the government, she might as well stay hidden. Best to leave them to their business. But what if this was something else? What if this was bad men taking advantage of a horrible situation? Dottie knew it was coming, but she hadn’t expected it to come knocking so soon and next door.
No. That couldn’t be it. Her imagination running wild again. Get a hold of yourself, Dottie. Think factual, not emotional.
She weighed her options as the biohazard blobs opened the front door and hoisted the first body out. Stay or run? Run or stay?
Her decision was made before the two forms returned. The illuminated red dot hovered on her chest, wiggling like a bee.
“Make one more move and I shoot,” said the bodiless voice from somewhere across the way.
Dottie had no choice but to wait for fate to take the reins.
Chapter Sixteen
Dottie Roth
“Raise your hands. High,” the voice said.
Dottie raised her hands. The pistol still lay on her leg, balanced perfectly. Maybe the guy hadn’t seen it.
“Stay right where you are.”
The little laser beam never left her chest as the man spoke into his radio, voice muffled so Dottie couldn’t hear. It didn’t take long for the response to come. The two bio blobs returned.
The Next Dawn Page 4
