by Tom Bont
Angela jumped to her feet. “He lives!”
Heather’s eye’s sparkled with joy as she leaned down to give him a hug.
“Yow!” Danny protested. “Watch it…wait…not there either…Is this what passes for bedside manner for city folk?”
“Shut up,” Heather cried with a pillow-muffled voice. “You’re lucky I don’t kill you.”
A nurse came in with a tray of fresh bandages and broke up the reunion. “It’s time to change his dressings, doctor.”
Heather stood and wiped the tears from her cheeks with the sleeve of her jacket. “Good. Make sure it hurts.”
Episode 6: Morstat
“…H appy birthday, Dear Ben. Happy birthday to you!”
Ben blew out the candles on his double-decker, chocolate sour cream cake.
“I thought I was gonna have to pull out the water hose!” Anne exclaimed.
“Glad we didn’t need it!” Ben’s old boss, Allen, quipped. “If the house burns down, he’ll have to come out of retirement. I don’t wanna see that grumpy old fart’s face every morning again.”
Allen’s wife, Cindy, slapped her husband on the arm. “Allen, that wasn’t nice!”
“Don’t you worry none, Cindy,” Ben said. “The feeling’s mutual. I would’ve belly-flopped on the cake first to keep that from happening.”
While everyone fanned the smoke out of their faces and laughed, Ben cut the cake, serving Allen and Cindy first, followed by a few of the neighbors who’d showed up for the party. Heather stood up from Danny’s knee and took over with a quick hug. “Happy Birthday, Mr. H!”
“Thanks, Heather.” His appreciative smile turned sad as he licked the sugary frosting off his fingers. Quickly though, he put up a happy front. “With you here, we’ve almost the whole damned family together!”
Anne stiffened for a moment while she shot Angela a hurried glance, but no one else brought up anything about Chris’s absence. Other than missing him, it was a perfect, happy family gathering. She continued to sit quietly in the corner, eating her cake, while everyone else made small talk and enjoyed each other’s company.
She’d finished scraping the last of her crumbs from her plate when Anne made eye contact with her and pointed her head towards the kitchen. They stood at the sink, looking into the backyard, while Anne twisted a dishrag in her hand. “Heard anything about Chris?”
“No, ma’am.” Angela washed her plate and fork and put them in the drainer. Danny stood in the middle of the backyard, looking at the trees. “I’ve looked everywhere. His P.O. held off as long as he could, but he’s had to list him as ‘Missed Appointed, Pick Up.’”
Anne leaned on the edge of the counter with both hands and bowed her head. A single sob wracked her shoulders.
Angela put her arm around her mother’s waist. “I don’t know what else to do.”
Anne spun on Angela. “It ain’t your fault, you know. Your pa and I blamed you for Chris’s problems. That wasn’t fair. He’s the one got the problems. Testifying against him, I know it was to protect us. Get him some help. We knew it. Didn’t wanna accept it. Forgive us?”
Tears stung Angela’s eyes as she wrapped her mother in a ferocious hug. “Th…there’s nothing to forgive, Mama.”
Dad had told them numerous times he’d done his part, and it was their job to continue the family line. People often thought he was kidding in his ‘family line’ banter, but Angela knew the pain he hid from the world. Through years of prolonged sicknesses and short tragedy, he was now the last Hollingsworth from his line and only wanted the family name carried on. That was the big responsibility and one only Chris could uphold. Sadly, Angela knew Chris didn’t take it seriously. Maybe it’s why she was always protective of him, even taking the blame sometimes as kids for things he did. She didn’t want him to let their dad down. Was it better their parents had finally faced the truth about him? Was it better he’d fallen from grace in their eyes? As she and her mother continued the hug in front of the sink, the cop in her knew it was the right thing. The big sister hated it.
After a few minutes, they broke the embrace and wiped away their tears with smiles.
Her mother gently caressed Angela’s cheek. “This new job of yours agrees with you. You look younger.”
Angela stiffened for a moment and then relaxed. “Thanks,” was all she could muster.
Anne looked out the back window. “Danny doesn’t like cake? He’s still fiddling around out in the yard. Sounds like Mrs. Shoemaker’s angry about something, too.”
“I’ll go check.” She passed through the dining room on the way outside, and her dad winked at her for the first time since the day of Chris’s trial. She smiled back as a loving warmth spread throughout her chest.
Danny was still standing in the middle of the backyard, staring off into the woods when she got out there.
She peered over at a corner of the backyard to where her dad’s first pick-up truck sat on cinder blocks—and people wonder why I hate the country. Mrs. Shoemaker’s caterwauls came from under the rusted-out shell. “You picking on my mom’s cat?”
“Huh?” A sardonic smile crossed his face. “Oh. Maybe a little.”
Angela snickered a bit. “Well, she’s kinda cocky. ‘Bout time she met her match.”
“Allow me,” he said with a grin. His eyes turned pale blue, and he growled lowly, not much, but enough to let Mrs. Shoemaker know cat might be on the menu if she didn’t behave herself.
Message received, the bushes rattling as she disappeared into the woods behind the yard.
Angela’s snicker turned into a laugh. Finally, she asked, “What are you doing out here? Cake’s almost gone!”
He looked at his feet and kicked a small stick. “Nothin’.”
She chided him. “Come on, partner. I know bullshit when I hear it.”
“You’ve got a good life, Ang.”
First time he’s called me that.
“I think all lives look good from the outside.”
“Right.” He nudged the stick again. “Did you know it’s my dad’s birthday, too? He ran off when I was nine. We didn’t celebrate many of ‘em. Left my mother and me alone. If it weren’t for the pack, we’d’ve never made it.”
“Why’d he leave?”
“Don’t know. Some say he killed my Uncle Job for sniffing around mom. Couldn’t ever find a body though. And the both of them just up and disappeared. I never accepted the fact my dad would kill his own brother. I don’t remember much, but I remember them being close.”
“You know we have a thing called an FBI…we could run a search, see if we can find him.”
Danny looked embarrassed. “I already did. No joy. Doesn’t surprise me, though. Any werewolf who wants to hide, can.”
“Hey!” Heather’s call came from behind them. “What are y’all doing out here?”
“Fresh air,” Danny said, a shy, country-boy smile showing up on his face at the sight of Heather. “I can’t believe you didn’t bring me any cake. What kind of girlfriend are you?”
“The feminist type.” She poked him in the ribs. “Get used to it.”
Garry McNeil, FBI Assistant Director in charge of Task Force W, stood up at the large podium. “Can everyone take their seats now, please?”
Angela sat down next to Danny and scanned the crowded room. Twenty-two FBI agents and two consultants: five from Fort Worth plus Danny; four from Chicago; six from New York; seven from LA plus someone who looked more like a yogi than a law enforcement officer. These men and women constituted the entirety of Task Force W. And they were all in Quantico, Virginia for the first time anyone could remember, for a meeting on the findings from the Mobile, Alabama warehouse and Madam Agatha.
“Thank you, everyone, for making the trip out here today. I’ll get right to it. Congratulations to the Fort Worth team. They found our proverbial Rosetta Stone linking a series of events that have been occurring around the world. What everyone here may not know is that each office has been involved
in its own cases that, on the surface, appeared to be isolated. Here at Quantico though, we’ve seen patterns.”
The agents stirred in the seats, sitting up a little straighter. A few of them looked over to Angela and her colleagues, giving them slight nods of acknowledgment.
“We haven’t been sure what those patterns were telling us. However, after going through this—” he held up a large book with raised, astrological-looking symbols on it “—we’re fairly certain we know what’s going on now.”
He scanned the room, making sure he had everyone’s attention.
“The information in this book describes an alternate theory for déjà vu. If we are to believe what’s in here, individuals experience déjà vu as two dimensions come into contact with each other. Like two soap bubbles, when they touch, where they touch, looks the same, smells the same, tastes the same, everything. In reality, they are the same. This is why people think they’ve seen or done something before. They are experiencing it twice, once in our dimension and once in the other dimension.
“There’s some math in the book—the techs are calling it N-Dimensional Quasi-Physics—that proves where these two soap bubbles touch, the dimensional rift is weakest.”
One of the LA crew spoke up. “Quasi? Fake?”
“Yes. Only in this case, hell, I don’t know either. I just know that’s what they’re calling it. Could be all bullshit, but the techs don’t think so. In either case, we have reason to believe that the Forsaken Dweller, whoever, and whatever that is, plans to transition into our dimension through one of these weakened rifts. Why it wants Earth and not some other planet billions of light years away is still a mystery. Maybe Earth is the center of the universe after all. Or maybe we happen to be lucky enough to have the only cultists in this universe stupid enough to want that to happen.
“In either case, if you’ll follow along with me in the attached agenda on page two, I’ll walk everyone through the different cases and how they relate.”
Angela sat back in her chair and listened to the rest of the briefing. As promised, Assistant Director McNeill went through the catalog of cases, Angela’s and Danny’s included. Strange books. Cryptozoology that included chupacabras, a unicorn, a winged lizard, and merfolk. Cultists in abandoned subway tunnels. Talking rocks. Crystal necklaces that turned the women who wore them into Stepford Wives—which she figured should have been advertised in Redneck Times instead of on a television shopping network. And last, but not least, the one case that tied them all together, the raid on the voodoo shop in Mobile, Alabama.
Near the end of the lecture, he threw up some digital scans from the book on an overhead projector. Angela nearly fainted. In the margins of some of the pages were English translation scribblings. “The translations stopped here—” He pointed to the last sheet in the series. “Looks like Fort Worth’s raid interrupted the process.”
The back of her throat filled with bile. She reached for a stick of gum.
Danny must have sensed something was wrong because he leaned over. “You okay?”
Part of her, Chris’s twin sister, shook her head at her partner. The FBI agent in her scrawled a note on the gum wrapper. The twin tried to rip it up. The agent handed it over. Danny looked confused but accepted the gum wrapper and untwisted the foil. If he was working on his poker face, he sure wasn’t doing a great job of it. Reading Angela’s scrawl made his face drain of all color. He looked up at the projector, down at the wrapper, and back up at the projector. Angela caught his attention again and widened her eyes, jerking her head in Kent’s direction. Danny slowly passed the note on while still staring at Angela.
She looked back at the projections, not because she was trying to pay attention, but because she was trying to keep from looking at Danny and Kent. Still, she sensed, more than saw her boss stiffen. He snapped his gaze between her and the wrapper, between her and the note, Chris’s handwriting. Margins. Finally, he put the wrapper in his sports coat pocket and ignored her for the rest of the briefing.
What the hell are you doing in this book, oh twin brother of mine? How was she going to tell their parents the reason she couldn’t find her brother in Texas was because he was now part of some modern-day Mississippi Cthulhu cult? Assuming she could even explain what Cthulhu was to them. The worse part? This dropped the burden on her shoulders to carry the family’s DNA to the next generation.
Wait, what the hell am I worried about having babies for? My brother is trying to destroy the fricking planet! Let’s grab a bit of perspective here, shall we?
Once, he’d hid her backpack their first morning of high school. He’d held his pinky to his mouth, elbow out high. With his head shaved for football season, he was the perfect caricature of Dr. Evil. “I’ll return it for…one million dollars.” In her mind’s eye, she pictured him in a catacomb somewhere, laughing maniacally, holding the Earth hostage for the price of a dark red high school backpack. She stifled a chuckle-snort. He transformed into a Knight of Ni from Monty Python and the Holy Grail and demanded a shrubbery…. Her imagination degraded from there.
By the time a dozen different scenarios had run through her head on what it meant for Chris’s handwriting on the FBI’s Task Force W Come-to-Jesus Meeting wall, McNeill had finished his presentation. Kent, Danny, and she requested a private meeting with him as soon as he adjourned and everyone else had left the room.
“We’d like to examine the book,” Angela said. “I think I recognize the handwriting.”
“Absolutely,” he said, as he shut down the projector. “By the way, Officer McIver.” He stepped up to Danny and offered a handshake. “I’m aware of your lupus heritage. I’ll admit, I had my reservations about signing Hollingsworth’s request, but I’m glad I did. Your performance has been exemplary.”
Danny’s ears turned red as he accepted the offer. “Thank you, sir. I’ve enjoyed the assignment.”
Angela wanted to mock his aw-shucks attitude, but she wanted to get her hands on the book even more. She let him have his moment. McNeill led them through an inner door behind the projector screen and nodded to the agents posted inside. Angela immediately took the lead, putting on a pair of evidence gloves, and slowly flipping pages until she got to the notes in the margins. She turned to Danny. “What do you think?”
Danny leaned over the book and took a deep sniff. “I think it’s him. Faint. It was windy the day he got out of prison.”
“Who?” McNeill asked.
Angela let out a deep sigh. “My brother.” She slowly closed the book.
She hadn’t realized it, but McNeill had been holding his breath, too. “Agent, you don’t know how happy I am to hear you say that.”
She spun on the assistant director. “You knew?”
“Yes. His fingerprints were on the pages.” He placed a folder next to the book.
Kent straightened his back in agitation. “This was a setup,” he said in the level timbre Angela had come to recognize as pointed agitation.
McNeill matched Kent’s gaze less than apologetically. “Yes.”
Angela took her gloves off. “You were looking to see if I was in cahoots with Chris.” She nodded. “I would have done the same thing, boss.”
“Irrelevant,” Kent said, “I would have, too.” He turned his icy glare on McNeill. “If there’s an operation involving my office, I want to know about it from now on.”
McNeill raised his eyebrows at Danny.
Danny nodded. “You know us better than I thought.”
Kent looked at both of them. “Danny works for me. You got a problem, you talk to me.”
“I would’ve picked up your nervousness,” Danny told Kent. “And you,” he said to McNeill, “were testing me, too.”
Kent looked off to the side and back again. Angela swore his scowl dropped the temperature in the office by ten degrees. “Again, irrelevant.”
McNeill returned the scowl, degree for degree. “Your whole office is an incubator for this type of consulting arrangement. We haven’
t had the time to properly implement controls to handle the possibility of a catastrophic or even a partial lupus virus infection. You’re under a microscope, and you’ll remain under a microscope.” He relaxed his shoulders but held Kent’s eyes. “However, you are now let in on the situation. You wouldn’t be if I didn’t have faith in your abilities.”
Kent took the offhand praise as it was intended, as a truce. He too backed down.
Crisis averted.
McNeill smiled and nodded and put the book in a large, leather messenger bag. He handed it to Kent. “Your next assignment is to investigate Dr. Stan Drapper.”
“Who’s that?” Angela asked.
“There’s a reference to him in the book. Supposedly working on parallel dimensions. See why he’s in the book and if he’s responsible for the math.”
Angela and Danny walked into Kent’s office. “Hey, boss,” Angela said. “Good weekend?”
Kent sipped his coffee. “I worked.” He looked at a rolled-up paper in Angela’s hand. “A supermarket tabloid, Agent Hollingsworth?”
“Yes, sir,” she said, holding it up. The first blushes of embarrassment washed across her face.
Shit. Maybe not a good idea after all.
She handed it to him. “I’d like permission to investigate this while we’re in Houston.”
“Roman Numeral Stalker Takes his 12th Victim,” he read aloud. He looked up at her with sincere concern apparent in his wrinkled eyes. After a few moments, he shifted to Danny. Without a smile, he said, “I assume there’s a punchline here, Officer McIver.”
Danny shrugged. “She’s serious.”
Kent gazed at her for a moment and opened the magazine to page two. Refusing to let the rag touch his desk, he read the article silently to himself. “What am I missing?”
Angela sighed with the same exasperation she used when Danny called her nuts. “Twelve disappearances? That’s a high number even for gossip-mongers. Nine of them went missing in the downtown Houston area. The rest, just outside that. The article even lists names.”
“Are you getting your intel from the tabloids now, Agent Hollingsworth?” Kent asked.