by Greig Beck
Luckily, he didn’t have to because Karen asked him over for a quiet family dinner with her and Benji.
He whistled as he put his tie on. He had no idea of whether he would be overdressed or not, but if he was, he guessed he could always take it off.
He continued knotting, unknotting, adjusting, and then reknotting his tie as he listened to the radio. The local news was informing them that the search was continuing for the missing families. It seemed that small groups of people were vanishing or leaving, and oddly, not telling anyone they were going. Not even relatives.
Hmm, just like Kenny Hatfield’s family, he thought.
The next report was on the livestock attacks in the outer areas of town, and given there were grey wolves in Missouri, they were high on the suspect list.
Well, at least things were quiet in town, he mused.
Mitch checked himself one last time in the mirror—still looking good, though a little tired around the eyes. Maybe he’d look better if Karen’s lighting was a little dim. He had a bottle of red wine ready which he snatched up as he headed for the door.
She was over on the other side of town, but given Eldon central only covered a few square miles, he’d still be there in no time.
Saturday evening, it was warm and dry, and the streets had a few people wandering to the cafes, restaurants, and probably the only cinema in town. Turning off the main strip, he wended his way to the northern outskirts and quickly found Karen’s neat little two-story cottage.
He pulled up out front and saw that her Jacarandas were in bloom. The South American trees had lilac flowers that when they began to fall created a carpet of crushed magenta in her garden. In through the window, he could see the golden glow of candles making the interior look warm and inviting.
As he stepped out, Mitch sucked in a deep breath, feeling the tingle of butterflies going mad in his belly.
Come on, buddy, you’re 35, not 15, he thought as he straightened his tie, suddenly feeling constricted, which made his face hot.
He walked up the steps, stood outside for a moment to compose himself, and then reached toward the bell just as the door was pulled inward.
Benji was grinning up at him, his hair slicked down, and his probably bestest ever clothes on. He turned and in his most ear-splitting outside voice yelled, “Mo-ooom, Batman is here.” He turned, grinning even wider.
“Coming.” Karen’s voice floated down from upstairs.
Mitch waited. “Is there a password?” he asked.
Benji nodded.
“Gotham.” Mitch lifted an eyebrow.
Benji looked serious for a moment as he seemed to think about it. “Yep, that was it.” He stood aside.
Mitch stepped inside and the boy shut the door. “This way.”
He led Mitch into their living room that was lit with candles, and he looked up at Mitch and rolled his eyes.
“We have lights and don’t always use candles. But for some reason, Mom wanted to do it tonight. Do you like candles?”
“I do. Reminds me of a birthday party,” Mitch observed.
Benji looked around, nodding. “Yeah, it does sorta.” He turned back. “She spent all day cleaning.”
Mitch chuckled. “Best leave some secrets.”
He looked up at Mitch, surprised. “It’s not a secret.” He waved an arm around. “See, look how clean it is.”
“Hallooo.” Karen breezed in wearing a tight cotton dress, hair immaculate, and all finished with a pair of old sandshoes.
“You look magnificent,” he said, meaning it as his heart leaped in his chest.
She lifted a foot. “The ultimate in sensible shoes.”
“On you, they look good.” He chuckled. “And the toe?”
“Much better.” She dropped her foot. “But I desperately wanted to wear nice shoes and got as far as trying some on—painfully bad move.”
He nodded. “Give it another few days.”
“That’s the plan.” She spotted his wine and held out her hand. “For us?”
He handed it over. “Yeah, it’s red, is that okay?”
She looked at the label. “Yes, and very nice.” She turned. “Benji, grab us the two wine glasses from the table.”
He scampered off and came back with two enormous glasses. She took one, and Mitch the other, and then she opened the wine and poured them both a good splash. She held out her glass. “Thank you for coming.”
He clinked her glass. “My absolute pleasure.”
She pointed at the couch. “Sit down while I finish up in the kitchen. Benji, keep our guest entertained.” She vanished down the hallway still holding the wine bottle and glass.
Mitch sat, sipped, and put his glass down. He saw the boy sipping something red as well.
“What’s your poison, buddy?”
Benji grinned and held it up. “Blackcurrant juice. Mom doesn’t let me drink soda, as she says this has more vitamin C and doesn’t make your teeth fall out.” He hiked slim shoulders. “It’s okay.”
“It certainly is.” Mitch made small talk with Benji about school, his friends, favorite holidays, and anything else he could think of. In turn, Benji wanted to know about the grossest things he had ever seen as a doctor.
In another moment, the aroma of chicken filled the air and Karen called them to the table.
“I warn you, cooking is not my forte,” she said with a crooked smile.
He looked at the table and the huge pot in the center, still bubbling with something red and hearty inside. Small, crusty rolls were on each of their plates and the silverware was laid out.
“Chicken and bacon pasta, with spinach and tomatoes.”
Mitch inhaled; it smelled as good as it looked. “Fantastic.” Mitch inhaled again, feeling his stomach rumble.
“Is it your favorite?” Mitch turned to Benji.
“I don’t know, I’ve never had it before.” Benji’s eyes traveled over the pot. “Smells real good though.”
Karen laughed softly. “Yeah, okay, cats out of the bag—we’re road testing a new recipe tonight.”
The meal proved as good as it looked, and Mitch was delighted to only end up with a few spots of tomato on his tie. Dessert was hazelnut chocolate pie and ice cream, which was even more to Benji’s liking.
In between mouthfuls, he kept up his conversation. “Mom, Mitch was telling me about the grossest things he’s seen as a doctor.”
“Probably not great dinner table conversation,” Karen replied.
Benji was undaunted. “Tell her about the old man with the giant wart on his nose.” He looked from Mitch to Karen, his eyes wide. “It was as big as his nose. And when it was cut off…”
Karen sighed. “Gross, stop, no thank you.”
“Comes with the territory, I guess,” Mitch said. “At least it wasn’t as bad as the stuff that came out of the Angel mine.”
Benji frowned. “What?”
Mitch nodded. “Finally got to read old Ben Wainright’s notes. About 50 years ago, seems there was some sort of contamination outbreak that came from kids swimming in the flooded mine.”
“They got sick?” Benji’s eyes were wide.
“Yeah, real sick,” Mitch said. “Not good. He kept the details in a locked filing cabinet and burned them. But luckily, we found copies. It was really horrible.”
“Just from swimming in it?” Benji’s voice had risen.
“Doctor Wainright thought they were swimming in or drinking it.” The boy looked pale and Mitch started to regret bringing it up.
Karen stared for a moment. “I never knew. I guess it’s a good thing that it’s dry now. And has been for decades,” she added.
Benji slowly put his dessert spoon down and stared straight ahead.
CHAPTER 19
The next morning, Mitch arrived at Hank Ball’s place at five past eight after receiving a call from the mayor himself. He’d been told to bring his medical bag—not a good sign.
As well as the mayor’s car, he also noticed Sheri
ff Kehoe’s cruiser pulled up out front—an even worse sign.
He looked up at the two-story house; it needed a bit of work with peeling paint, some wood root in the windowsills, cracked roof tiles, and way too many leaves in the gutters.
He’d met Hank and his son Alfie, and they were nice people, and as Hank’s wife had passed away a few years back, the big guy was managing to raise his son on his own and doing a faultless job.
The front door was open, and Mitch stood just inside. “Hello?”
“That you, Mitch?”
“Yo.” Mitch headed in toward the sound of the voice.
Along the front hallway, he came to a set of steep steps leading up to the attic with both the sheriff and mayor standing at the bottom, waiting.
Kehoe nodded. “Doc.”
Keith Melnick’s normal, gregarious good humor was missing from his expression. Mitch also noticed that the sheriff held a large and powerful flashlight like the ones you usually take camping.
“Thank you for coming out, Mitch.” The mayor exhaled. “Need your professional opinion on something.” He turned. “Sheriff.”
Kehoe started up the steps, followed by Mitch and then the mayor. It was dark in the void above the house and Kehoe turned on the light before they reached the top of the stairs.
“Bulb was out; I replaced it,” he said over his shoulder. “And I mean removed, on purpose.”
As soon as Mitch arrived up in the warmer air of the attic, he smelled the blood and offal—he recognized it immediately, as he’d been on enough battlefields to know the odor of death when he smelled it.
“Over here,” Kehoe said.
Mitch’s shoes made a tacky sound on the sticky floor and Kehoe lifted his light to a mound of ragged clothing in the corner. As they approached, Mitch saw it was more than just clothing with the protruding ribs, pelvic girdle, and the tufts of blood-matted hair that were still attached to a lacerated skull.
“That’s Hank. Or was,” Kehoe said. He pointed his light beam at an object a little further in. “And that was their cat.”
Mitch glanced at the tiny, separated head and flaps of drying skin with fur attached, and then back to the ruined corpse of Hank.
“What happened?” Mitch asked.
“You tell us,” Kehoe said, sounding like he was breathing just through his mouth. “Got a call from the school wondering where the kid was, so I came out to their property. Didn’t find him.” He nodded toward Hank. “Found this instead.”
Mitch crouched. “Jesus, what a mess.” He looked up. “When?”
“About an hour ago, give or take.”
Mitch nodded and turned back to the corpse. He reached into his bag, pulled out a pair of disposable gloves, and put them on. Then he gently took hold of the exposed ribcage.
“Little more light here.”
Kehoe obliged.
Mitch saw then that the internal organs were all gone, which was fairly indicative of a large carnivore —take the soft, high blood-filled organs like the liver, lungs, and kidneys, and then chow down on the heart muscle.
Mitch had seen bad shit before, but poor Hank’s face was hard to look at; it had been obliterated, as the nose and lips were gone, with both the eyes punctured.
“This has got to be a large carnivore.”
“Maybe,” Kehoe replied. “But no black bear around this time of year.” He shrugged. “Maybe a mountain lion, but haven’t seen one of those in years either, even a few miles out.”
“Wolves?” Mitch asked.
“Nope, not anymore. We may get the occasional grey wandering in from Minnesota, Wisconsin, or Michigan. But they’re too rare to be considered a threat.” Kehoe pointed his chin at Hank. “And I’m damn sure this ain’t a wolf kill anyway.”
“Okay.” Mitch looked around. “Where’s the kid? Alfie?”
“Missing. But I found some bedding up here, plus some excrement. If I had to guess, I’d say the kid had been living up here.”
“And he was just shitting on the floor.” Melnick made a guttural sound of disgust in his throat.
Mitch continued to examine the body. There were scrapes on the bone consistent with teeth and claws, and at the lower end of the sternum something was embedded in the bone.
From his bag, he withdrew a pair of forceps and a small plastic jar and levered the shard free. He held it up.
Kehoe squinted. “Looks like a splinter.”
Mitch continued to stare. It did look like a splinter, he thought. But it was shaped like a long talon, was dark brown, and had a grainy texture like wood rather than keratin that hair, nails, and claws were made of.
He dropped it into the jar, sealed it, but continued to stare at the thing. His mind leaped back to Ben Wainwright’s notes and he was reminded of his descriptions of the kids, the wood-like growths covering them, plus their feral behavior.
“We need to find Alfie.” He rose to his feet.
“Priority,” Kehoe replied.
“You think the kid was carried off by whatever did this?” Melnick asked.
Mitch ignored the question. “And we also need to contact the CDC.”
“What?” Melnick’s mouth dropped open. “Why?”
“This reminds me of something Ben Wainright saw back in 1977—an infection from the mine. Gross deformities, abnormal aggressive behavior in children, and also several mutilations and deaths.”
Melnick scoffed. “You got all that from a freaking splinter?” He frowned as he tilted his head. “Hey, wait a minute—you don’t think the kid was carried off, do you?”
“That year, 1977…you’re talking about Angel Syndrome, right?” Kehoe asked.
Mitch nodded.
“Oh, for fucks sake. I wasn’t mayor back then, but my predecessor gave me a rundown on notable events on his watch in the town and he talked about what happened back then in ‘77. The CDC came in, shut everything down, took a few people away for observation, and ruined the tourist trade for a decade.” He shook his head. “So, excuse me if I don’t break my neck to destroy Eldon’s economy over a single wild animal death.”
Mitch turned to Kehoe. “You said yourself it was unlikely to be a bear, wolf, or mountain lion.”
Kehoe tilted his head. “I said it was unlikely, not impossible.” He lifted his chin. “Doc, are you really saying a ten-year-old kid could do this? To his father?”
Mitch thought about it for a moment. “Yeah, I am.”
“Bullshit,” Melnick shot back. He turned to Kehoe. “I want answers, real answers supported by the evidence, and not conjecture based on some old notes from a guy that suffered from depression and was obviously suicidal.”
Melnick turned and headed for the steps but paused at the top. “Sheriff, you run this, but keep it covert, because I do not want a panic. Understood?”
Kehoe nodded. “Of course, Mayor.”
Melnick then faced Mitch. “Mitch, you assist.”
Mitch sighed and watched the mayor disappear down the steps. He turned to Kehoe who just shrugged.
“What now?” Mitch asked.
“Analyse that fragment you found and let me know what you find.” He swung his flashlight around one last time. “I’ll get a team in here to investigate and put out a search on the kid.”
The sheriff turned back and smiled crookedly. “But the mayor is right—we need to be sensible how we approach this. You start yelling deformed kids, contamination, or mutilations, and people get scared. Scared enough to panic and leave. No one wants to see cars packed up and people leaving town at the start of the tourist season. Sometimes they don’t come back, and that’s what kills small towns.”
Mitch nodded. “Yeah, I hear you.” He then pointed to the savaged body. “But a few more of these will kill it even quicker.”
“Sure will, Doc. So, let’s get to work.” Kehoe nodded to the steps. “After you.”
They went down the steps and just before Mitch headed to the front door, he held up a hand. “Wait a sec.”
; “What?” Kehoe called after him.
Mitch headed down the hall checking each room until he found the one he wanted—the washroom. In a glass on the basin were two toothbrushes, a large frayed one, and a smaller one with Iron Man on the handle. He grabbed both.
When he exited, he held them up to Kehoe. “DNA matching.”
“Good thinking.” The sheriff took one last look over his shoulder, pausing for a moment to let his eyes wander over the house’s silent interior, and then shut the door.
CHAPTER 20
Mitch had sent the fragment he had pulled from Hank’s chest off to a buddy in the military. Greg Samson did his training with Mitch, and like him had a medical background. He was in the Special Forces and he was one of the guys who had pulled what was left of him and his group from the battlefield in Syria. Afterward, Mitch left the service, but Greg went on to be retained in the biomedical section of the armed forces.
He joined a team in a hi-tech laboratory that was used to develop vaccines, antidotes, and prophylactics against a range of potential biological weapons their adversaries may or may not be developing.
If anyone could tell him what the hell he was dealing with, it was Greg Samson.
It was late, 9 pm, and Mitch was still in his office and hunched over his desk. In front of him were Wainright’s files about the syndrome that affected Eldon back in the late seventies, and this time he pored over each page with a forensic intensity.
The contamination had come out of nowhere; one minute everything was normal and the next, the kids were getting sick.
He read more about the symptoms and became more and more convinced that the thing that had been hiding in Hank Ball’s attic that attacked him and ate their cat was more than likely his ten-year-old son, Alfie.
He made summary notes as he read the documents, listing anything that he thought might be relevant or worth following up. When he finished, he sat back, used a hand to rake his hair back from his forehead, and read down his list of bullet points:
Kids infected
Angel Syndrome
Symptoms—rash, hardening of epidermal skin layer, loss of appetite, psychotic behavior