Because it’s coming for all of us.
We institute a check-in system: if anyone finds themselves isolated, one of us will immediately come over. It’s our only chance at survival.
We hang at Sonya’s until her brother Jerome gets back from work, and then we escort everyone home, creating a caravan of cars zigzagging across town. Frankie is first, then Rob, who crashes at Terrence’s since there’s no one at his house. Finally, Jack drops me off.
I desperately want Jack to come in, but as we round the corner onto my street, we see my dad’s patrol SUV parked in the driveway.
“Do you think he’s home for the night?” Jack says, pulling up in front.
I honestly have no idea. “Probably.”
Jack takes my hand. “Promise me you’ll call me if he leaves. You can’t be left alone.”
“Only if you promise to text me as soon as you get home,” I counter. “You’re the only one without an escort.”
He smiles his lopsided grin. “Promise.”
He waits until I close the front door behind me before he eases his truck from the curb and roars down the street.
The TV is on in the living room, tuned to a twenty-four-hour news network with the volume on low. My dad, still in uniform, is stretched out on the sofa, fast asleep.
I hesitate. Maybe I should call Jack, have him pick me up and take me to his place? I don’t see any whiskey bottles or smell the telltale spicy scent of my dad’s favorite self-medication, but I’m not sure asleep vs. passed out really matters at this point. Graham’s mom was asleep when he was killed. Should I be worried?
You’ll be fine.
My dad stirs, shifting his legs. Maybe I’ll just let him sleep for an hour and then wake him up. My brain is probably right: I’ll be fine.
I head into the kitchen, suddenly realizing that I’m famished. My stomach is cramping, it’s so hungry, sharp pains stabbing at my insides like I’ve eaten a box of nails. I rummage through the cupboards, though I know there’s little to find. No one’s gone grocery shopping in a week at least, and in the end, I settle on breakfast cereal.
I pour a giant bowl and top it off with whatever milk is left in the carton, then I shovel massive spoonfuls into my mouth like I’m afraid it’s going to disappear. As I sit on the bar stool, chewing noisily, I realize that something’s bothering me, niggling at my brain. Something Rob said earlier.
Well, what the fuck else do you think the killer is doing—sewing together Frankenstein’s monster?
Dr. Frankenstein’s monster needed a brain in order to be reanimated. A fresh brain of the recently deceased, to replace the long-dead brain from his pilfered corpse. Whoever attacked Greer tried to rip into her skull, and Graham’s body had brain tissue missing.
I take another giant mouthful of toasted oats and corn flakes. What if our killer was doing the same thing?
I hurriedly scoop the rest of the cereal into my mouth, then hold the bowl to my lips to suck down the remaining milk. My arms quiver from the weight of the bowl as I think of the other body parts that have gone missing on recent victims: Weller’s eyes and tongue, Peggy Cadwallader’s leg. What if those weren’t random choices? What if the killer needed those pieces?
The Man of Squaw Creek. Never aging. Forever young.
“It’s replenishing itself,” I say out loud. “Keeping itself eternally young through its victims.”
I drop the bowl to the counter and race to my room, pulling Weller’s scrapbook from my desk drawer. The evidence is here, documented in all the partial bodies recovered around the lake since the dam was built. I grab a pen and paper and start jotting down a list of the victims. Before long, a pattern emerges. It’s the major organs that were missing from most of the bodies. Heart, brain, lungs, liver—things that would be most affected by the body’s normal aging process. And maybe the limbs are to repair injuries.
Maybe.
An eternally young serial killer that cannibalizes its victims. I think of the photo of Benjamin Cooper, the face that hadn’t seemed to age a day between then and when he attacked me on Slaughterhouse Island. Eternal youth.
But Cooper wasn’t reported missing until 1982 and the deaths and disappearances go back way before that. How could Cooper have been the killer all along? Wouldn’t someone have noticed that he never seemed to age?
Unless it wasn’t always him.
I flip back in the scrapbook to an account of a mysterious body found in 1948, described as “in an extremely dehydrated state.” “Sounds like a mummy to me,” I say to myself.
The next entry clipped was a missing persons case. Victim last seen just a day before the dehydrated body was found. I flip forward, passing over a dozen or so reports of half-eaten bodies discovered around the lake, and pause on the next mummy report from 1969, just days after Camaro Romero is reported missing.
Whose body was discovered in 1982.
The same time Benjamin Cooper was reported missing.
Romero had to be identified by his dental records because there wasn’t enough of his body left. Could he have been a mummy like all the others?
I sit up in my chair, my hand shaking, as I realize what’s happening. A shriveled mummy—the old host. Renewed killings in the new host. “It’s a parasite.” The Anamet jumps from person to person. That’s what the Wintu meant: the creature was human, but not.
And Benjamin Cooper is dead, his body found at the mouth of Bull Valley Mine, which means the Anamet . . .
“Oh my God.”
The killer could be any one of us.
THIRTY-FOUR
I GRAB MY PHONE, OPEN A NEW TEXT MESSAGE, AND START filling in everyone’s numbers. I need to warn them.
You’ll be warning the killer.
I freeze. It’s true, as much as I don’t want to believe it. The Anamet must be one of us. No one else who’s been in the mine is still alive.
Aren’t they?
I’m remembering a comment that didn’t seem important at the time but suddenly . . .
At Weller’s funeral, Deputy Flynn suggested that someone had built a wall to keep something inside the mine. That wall was thirty feet beyond the mine shaft. How could he have known about it unless he’d been inside?
I dial Jack’s number, impatiently waiting for him to pick up. Instead, the call goes straight to voice mail. Dammit.
“Jack, it’s Deputy Flynn. He’s the killer. Call me.”
I hang up and stare at the screen, waiting for it to light up with Jack’s face on an incoming call. But the screen is dark. I call again, but still voice mail. Then again. And again. Where is he? Why isn’t he answering?
Oh my God. He didn’t text me when he got home.
I picture Jack’s body ripped apart in the cab of his truck.
There’s a handgun in my dad’s safe. I’ve never pointed a firearm at a living, breathing target before, just human facsimiles at the end of a one-hundred-yard shooting range. But if my friends were in danger, would I kill to protect them?
Yes. I would. I’ll get the gun and take my dad’s car over to Jack’s. And if Deputy Flynn is there, I’ll kill him.
I poke my head of out of my room and listen for my dad. The bluish glow and low murmur of the television tell me he’s still sacked out in the living room. Quickly and silently, I tiptoe down the hall, glancing over my shoulder to make sure he hasn’t gotten up from the sofa.
But as I turn back to his bedroom, I catch my breath. Standing in the corner, hunched over the hamper, is my dad.
He rifles through his dirty laundry, so intent on what’s he’s doing he doesn’t even hear me enter. It should be a relatively humdrum thing—my dad looking for a shirt or a pair of pants in the laundry that’s been stacking up for days—but something about his movement seems strange. He digs down through the layers of soiled clothes like he’s digging for buried treasure with an energy that borders on panic, and I can hear his labored breaths from across the room.
“What are you looking for?”
<
br /> He whirls around, blocking the hamper with his body. His eyes are bloodshot—more so than usual—and there are deep purple half-moons beneath them.
“Annie!” he cries, then licks his parched lips. “I thought you were sleeping.”
I slowly shake my head. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” He glances back at the hamper. “Fine.” Then he pauses. “Can we talk?”
It’s the tone of my dad’s voice that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end, not his usual stern you’re in trouble, Missy voice that instantly transports me back to age eleven, when I got caught sneaking out to play flashlight tag in the park after dark, and more like I need to tell you something. Which actually makes me more nervous because if he’s going to spill his guts about the affair he had while my mom was dying, or tell me that the skank bartender he’s been dating is going to be my stepmom, I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to handle that tonight.
“Sure,” I say, trying to remain calm. “What’s up?”
My dad swings his hand around from behind his back. Grasped between his fingers is a facecloth, stained dark red with blood. “What is this?”
I stare at the rag, mortified. It must be from my night with Jack, but how it got in my dad’s hamper, I have no idea. Does he know what it is? Does my dad know I’m having sex with Jack?
“I . . .”
My dad swallows, and I can see that he’s shaking. “I forbid you from leaving the house. Do you hear me? You are grounded for the rest of the summer.”
“What?”
He shoves the facecloth into his jacket pocket. “It’s for your own good.”
I don’t have time for this. Jack needs me. I turn down the hallway. “I’m leaving.”
He grabs me roughly by the arm and spins me around. “Annie, this isn’t a democracy.”
“You can’t control who my friends are or who I have sex with. I can make my own decisions.”
“Sex? You think this is about—”
I cut him off, lashing out with months of pent-up anger. “I know what this is about. You hate Jack. You hate that he’s Mexican and you think he’s a bad influence. You’re a fucking hypocrite.”
“Annie,” he says, his grip tightening on my arm. “What are you talking about?”
“When mom was sick, where were you every night?”
He lets go of me. “My job required a lot of—”
“Don’t give me that bullshit. I followed you. One night when mom was passed out on morphine. You weren’t answering your phone, so I took mom’s car and drove to the station. Caught you just as you were leaving and I followed you to her house.”
All the color drains out of his face. “I can explain.”
“Don’t bother,” I say, tears welling up. I hate that I’m crying. I hate that I feel anything other than anger toward him. “I don’t give a shit what you have to say. Mom was dying and you were fucking someone else.”
His brows crinkle above his nose as his face tenses. “It had been years since your mom and I . . . I mean, we hadn’t been . . .”
“Right, because that’s a good excuse for cheating on your dying wife. You disgust me.”
I’m not sure if it’s my words or the look of utter revulsion on my face, but suddenly, my dad’s anger flares up. He grabs my wrist. “None of this is important right now. You’re still confined to quarters until further notice.”
I’m wearing sneakers. No jacket, but it’s summer, so it should still be warm. My phone’s in my bedroom, but I’ll just have to live without it for now. “Go to hell, Dad.”
Then I wrench my arm free and run for the front door, disappearing into the night.
THIRTY-FIVE
“ANNIE, GET BACK HERE!”
Never.
I sprint down our street and duck behind the enormous elm tree in front of Mrs. Arrechia’s house, shimmying past her garbage cans, neatly arranged between the house and the fence. Her large backyard, which opens onto the park, has been the local kids’ neighborhood shortcut since before I was old enough to roam suburban Redding without parental supervision. The loose board at the southern corner of her property has never been fixed, allowing easy access to the old soccer field with one push.
Right about now, my dad is either firing up the SUV to come after me, or cracking open a bottle of Tullamore Dew. Either way, he won’t be able to find me.
I’ve taken this shortcut so many times that the outlines of soccer goals and baseball backdrops, bleachers and jungle gyms should be soothingly familiar, even in the half-light of the moon. In middle school, we’d play flashlight tag on summer nights in the vast expanses of the park, groups of preteens running around with Maglites and raging hormones, screeching and giggling until we all got texts from our parents calling us home. I found myself wandering through it at night after my mom died, relishing the solitude and the silence, and the escape from my father’s ever-present weeping. Was it from guilt? Mourning? Relief? I was too afraid to ask, too afraid to know the answer. And so I fled to the park, a place where I’d never been afraid.
Until now.
I’m not supposed to be alone.
I hurry past the snack bar, shuttered until the weekend, holding my breath as I tiptoe across the concrete. I’m being ridiculous, I know. There’s no one within a two-block radius who could hear me.
Except the killer.
Stop it. I just have to get to Jack’s. It’s eight minutes by car, maybe fifteen on foot if I run.
I’m passing the netless outline of the last soccer goal when out of the corner of my eye, I think I see something move in the darkness over by the jungle gym. Something I’ve seen before: a shadow, large and amorphous, moving quickly as it stays just out of sight.
I break into a run, not caring if it’s my overactive imagination, pumping my arms like an Olympic sprinter as I head for the relative safety of the well-lit street. Are those footsteps I hear behind me, matching me stride for stride just like they did in the mine? Or is it just the pounding of my own heart? I don’t dare look back, and force myself to run even faster, block after block, until I reach Jack’s neighborhood.
There are two cars parked in the driveway—Jack’s red pickup and a silver BMW—and a black Charger across the street, but it’s the Lake Patrol SUV parked directly in front of Jack’s house that sends a shiver down my spine.
Deputy Flynn.
Without any thought to what I might find inside the house, I race through the unlocked front door.
“Jack!” I scream. The lights are on, but the living room is empty.
Am I too late? Is he already dead? My lungs seize up, as if they’ve filled with smoke, and I gasp for breath, fighting to keep the panic at bay. “Jack, where are you?” I sputter.
“Annie?”
A wave of relief washes over me as the spiky outline of his Mohawk appears in the kitchen doorway. I rush through the living room and tackle hug him. “You’re not dead,” I sob into his shoulder.
“I’m okay.” He laughs lightly and holds me tight. “You’re soaking wet,” he says, running a hand over my hair. “Is it raining?”
“I . . .” I pant. “Ran.”
“Calm down,” a voice says from behind him. Frankie’s standing in the kitchen. “No need for the drama.”
“What’s she doing here?”
“I asked her over,” Jack says, his hand on my shoulder. “I called everyone, but your dad answered your phone. Said you’d run away. I was about to go look for you. Deputy Flynn wants to talk to us.”
“Hi, Annie.” Deputy Flynn sits at the breakfast nook in Jack’s kitchen, a steaming cup of tea steeping on the table in front of him.
I look from Flynn back to Jack in confusion. “Jack, don’t trust him. He’s . . .”
“The Anamet?” Flynn says.
I start. “You know about the Anamet?”
“Sadly, yes.” He sighs. “But I’m not the one behind the murders.”
“I don’t believe you.” I turn to Jac
k. “The Anamet is a parasite. It jumps from host to host. It could be in anyone who’s been in that mine. Including him.”
“Yes, in theory,” Flynn says. “But I was nowhere near the mine between when you saw Cooper and when his body was discovered, and the Anamet can’t survive outside the mine without a host for very long.”
“Oh.” I’m not sure I trust him.
“I thought it might be in one of those college students Weller and I arrested last weekend,” Flynn continued. “When they went missing, I was sure I had it right. One of them could have gone back to the mine after they were released from custody, drawn there by the Anamet.”
“Yes!” I cry. That has to be it. Because the alternative is too terrifying.
He shakes his head. “Two bodies were found in the Dumpster of the apartment building where they were last seen. The Anamet already got to them.”
My damp skin prickles as the list of possible suspects narrows.
“How do you know all this?” Frankie asks, eyebrow raised.
“Deputy Weller and I were compiling the notebook together.” His smile deepens into a youthful, impish grin. “And while, professionally, I can’t condone tampering with a crime scene, I am glad to know the notebook is safe. It’s all of our research.”
“You’ve known about the mine all along?” Jack asks.
Deputy Flynn takes a deep breath. “Wellsie and I realized at some point that we were the only two people still around who’d been inside Bull Valley Mine. Seemed like just a coincidence at first, but then Wellsie found that everyone else had died under bizarre circumstances. That’s when we started the notebook, and when we realized that the mine was the Anamet’s den, we decided to build the halite wall to trap it inside.”
“Halite,” Frankie says smugly. “Told you.”
“Salt is supposed to repel evil,” Flynn continues. “And there’s evidence the Wintu used it to protect their villages. So we imported the rock salt bricks and tried to seal the mine.” He grips his mug with both hands. “We didn’t know the wall had been tampered with until it was too late.”
Relic Page 17