As they passed by Al’s house, Wayne saw his friend cast a wary look at the driveway.
“Kathy really doesn’t care much for me, does she?” Wayne asked.
“It’s not like that.”
“I think it sort if is like that. And that’s fine. I get it.”
Al seemed to think about something before finally saying, “She worries about you, that’s all. And because she worries about you, she worries about me when I hang out with you.”
“Does she want you to find some new friends?” Wayne asked with a chuckle.
“No. She thinks I’m good for you.”
Wayne cracked up with laughter at this, slapping at the dashboard. He knew that Al was good for him. Without a good friend to hang out with and rely on after his wife had left, Wayne knew that he would have drunk himself into a stupor. He would have become one of those sad old men that walked around the streets with five dollars burning in their pocket to buy a six pack of cheap beer or a bottle of that disgusting malt liquor from the mini mart. There was a very good chance that’s what his life would have become after retirement and the divorce if Al had not been there.
They’d done nothing more than fish, sit on Wayne’s porch swatting at mosquitoes, and play endless rounds of horseshoes, but it had been exactly what he had needed. Spending that time with Al had occupied Wayne’s time and kept him busy. He was sure this was obvious to Kathy as well. And although Wayne knew that she didn’t like him, he had always been grateful to her for putting up with him.
Sure, a great deal of the time Wayne and Al spent together was spent drinking, but Al had always managed to put a limit on it without coming off as holier-than-thou or like some deranged wanna-be big brother. Wayne had known Al since their early twenties; he respected Al and trusted him more than anyone he had ever met.
Wayne’s laughter, which was a disguise for the sting of blunt truth, tapered off as they reached the end of Kerr Lane. The empty house sat just ahead, its driveway totally vacant just as Wayne had said. Al slowed the truck, killed the headlights, and crept into the driveway.
They sat in the quiet for a moment. They could hear crickets and loons through the small cracks in their windows. The house sat ahead of them, nothing more than a forgotten prop from someone’s summer vacation.
“Now what?” Al said.
Wayne shrugged and opened up his door. He stepped out into the night, the air humid but not staggeringly so. Al followed him, making an effort to keep quiet. The two men met in front of the truck and started walking towards the house.
“What are we supposed to be looking for?” Al asked.
“I don’t know. Anything out of place, I guess.”
But as they reached the house, it began to dawn on Wayne just how pointless this little expedition truly was. What were they supposed to be looking for? If there had been something fishy going on out here, what was the likelihood that the government had left behind any clues?
It was too late now, though. They were here, hidden in the dark, and Wayne felt that they had to at least take a look around.
“Got a flashlight?” Wayne asked.
“Yeah,” Al said. “I keep it in my glove box right beside my lock pick and badge.”
“Smart ass.”
They walked slowly towards the front door, the night humid and thick around them. Wayne tried the knob but found it locked. He then walked to the windows and tried peering in, but it was too dark to see anything.
“You might have been right,” Wayne said. “Maybe this wasn’t the best idea.”
“Of course I was right,” Al said.
Wayne stepped away from the window and looked to the side of the house. If they had indeed over-reacted to the speeding vans on that first day of summer and there really was nothing going on but some daft environmental stuff, there might be evidence of it around the back of the house, maybe down by the water. He figured he might as well check it out while they were here or his big dumb curiosity would keep pestering him about it all summer long.
He started around the side of the house, hearing Al hissing a whisper behind him.
“Where the hell are you going?” Al asked.
“Around back. I want to see if there’s any equipment lying around. Maybe they are just checking water levels or something.”
“How do you expect to see anything in the dark?” Al said.
It was a good question, but not one that Wayne felt like answering. As a matter of fact, as the yard started descending into a slight hill, he started to get antsy. He could see the ground directly in front of him, as well as the faint sparkle of moonlight on the lake several yards ahead of him. But if there was a sudden stop to the yard or some random hole, he was going to break his ankle.
He looked back once to see if Al was following and saw his silhouette a few feet behind him. Good old Al, he thought.
When he found himself standing in the back yard, Wayne felt something very much like doubt. What was he doing? What could he hope to possibly achieve by snooping around the yard of this empty house at night?
He suddenly wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. He wasn’t scared, but felt out of place. And if there was something going on here that involved the government, did he really want to be trespassing?
This thought stopped him as he came to the decorative rock wall that separated the back yard from the small stretch of beach. He peered out onto the lake and was reminded again of why he loved it out here. On still nights when the weather wasn’t stifling hot, there was a simple beauty to moonlight on a lake that was almost hypnotic.
“Wayne?” Al’s voice was soft and ghost-like behind him.
“Yeah?”
“Look at that.”
Wayne turned around and saw Al directly behind him, pointing to the water’s edge.
“I don’t see anything.”
“About three feet from the water, slightly to the right.”
Wayne carefully stepped over the rock wall and trained his eyes in that direction. He saw something there, a weird shape in the sand that was barely visible in the weak moonlight. It looked like someone had dragged a large stick over the sand and had drawn a straight line that was interrupted by a slight curve.
“A snake, maybe?” Al asked, coming over the low rock wall and joining Wayne on the sand.
“That would be a huge snake,” Wayne said. “It would have to be heavy to leave a print like that. It would also be wide as hell.”
As Wayne hunkered down and looked at the vague print in the sand—headed from the sand and into the water, from the looks of it—he thought his friend might be right. Still, he couldn’t think of anything else that might leave such an indentation in the sand.
“It does look serpentine,” Al said, now hunkered down by Wayne. “But the shape isn’t right.”
They looked at it for a moment longer in silence. They two men knew each other well enough to know what the other was thinking…and as it just so happened, their thoughts were identical.
Whatever this print was, it was certainly made much more interesting by the fact that there had been government vehicles parked in front of this house for several days.
Wayne and Al stood back up in unison. Wayne looked away from the suspicious print and then out onto the water.
“Any ideas?” Wayne asked.
“Yeah,” Al said.
“What?”
“That it’s time to get the hell out of here and head back home.”
Wayne didn’t argue. His eyes lingered on the water for a moment longer before they returned to the snake-like imprint in the sand. It was barely there at all and was maybe a few days old if he had to guess. Still, it was pronounced enough to make him feel uneasy.
“Yeah, good idea,” he said, and started back towards the rock wall and the dark yard beyond.
ELEVEN
Scott woke up at seven thirty, feeling more refreshed than he had in quite some time. He had fully expected to have a hard time sleeping in t
he country, with the dead silence of the forest interrupted only by crickets and tree frogs. But the exact opposite had happened. For the two nights he had been renting out the cabin two lots over from where George Galworth and several FBI agents had died, Scott had slept like a baby.
He walked out onto the cabin’s back patio with a cup of coffee and a plate of scrambled eggs. He took a seat at the patio table and looked out onto Clarkton Lake. The sun had been up long enough to evaporate the ghostly mist that rose up from the water in the morning but the scene still looked ethereal. He looked to the right and could just barely see the edge of the little beach that sat behind George Galworth’s old cabin.
He’d gotten a call from the real estate agent yesterday while he’d been inside Galworth’s cabin. The call had come from a boisterous and rather loud fellow named Stephen Collins. Collins had wanted to know when the government might be done with the Galworth cabin, so they could better update their listings and availability. Scott had assured Collins that the government would compensate him above and beyond his usual prices for his full cooperation. While he had spoken to Collins, there had been three other field agents behind him inside the property, taking notes, repairing the front door discreetly moving the corpses of the agents that had come before them, and fixing up all other damages.
Collins had also asked when George Galworth would be able to speak with him. All Scott had said in reply was that it was all classified information and that he would be updated as soon as possible.
The fact of the matter was that Scott had no idea how long this would take. He had no resources, no real help from the outside (except for the grunts that had come to help clean the property), and he didn’t expect to get any. He never really got excessive information on any of his cases. He was a specialist of sorts, coming in to clean up high-profile messes that other agencies had left behind. These were typically messes that had high risks associated with them. He’d been called the Ghost by some, because he was usually in and out in of a case quickly. His work often involved talking to and roughing up witnesses, removing evidence, or finishing a job that those originally assigned to the job had been unable to complete.
But this one was going to be different. For starters, he had no idea what he was looking for. All he knew was that it was highly suspected that George Galworth and the crew he had been working with had been attacked while doing research in the Aleutian Trench. It was being speculated that whatever attacked them had infected (or, rather, impregnated) Jimmy Wilkins and KC Doughtry while killing the other three men on the crew.
Galworth, Doughtry, and Wilkins had died less than two weeks after having been rescued from the trench and cleared by medical teams. From what Scott knew based on the reports he had been given, Doughtry and Wilkins had been killed when a creature had erupted from their bodies like something straight out of a sci-fi movie. The creature had come out of their mouths, shattering their jaws and, in Doughtry’s case, literally splitting his skull with the force behind it.
As of now, that’s all Scott knew. He assumed that the creature that had sprung out of George Galworth had escaped, as evidenced by the blood trails he had seen on the floor. Furthermore, he was also certain that the creature was now living in Clarkton Lake. Scott was keeping his eyes and ears open for any local news about sightings or any attacks in the lake but so far, he had heard nothing.
As if the universe were in tune with Scott’s troubles, his cellphone rang as he ran through all of this in his head. He tore his eyes away from the sight of the lake and headed inside through the sliding glass window where his cellphone sat on the kitchen counter. His display told him that it was Roger Lowry—not someone you wanted to speak to first thing in the morning.
Still, the hope that Roger might have updates that could help him get this nightmare assignment over made him actually happy that his supervisor was calling. He answered on the third ring, preparing himself for Roger’s typical blunt candor.
“Good morning, sir,” Scott said, trying to start on the conversation on a polite note.
“I’ve got some information for you,” Roger said, getting straight to the point. “Based on what we can tell from data retrieved from submarine these poor bastards were working in, as well as the scraps of evidence from the Wilkins and Doughtry residences, we feel that we now have more of a complete story on what this thing is, what has happened so far, and how you can potentially find it.”
“I’m listening, sir.”
Roger started with the bits that Scott already knew: about how their sub had been compromised and something had killed three of the six crew members in a grisly fashion. He then went on to describe how events had occurred in the homes of Jimmy Wilkins and KC Doughtry.
The gentler of the accounts came from Jimmy Wilkins’s residence in Sacramento, California. On the day he had died, his wife had gone to work like any other day while Wilkins remained home, complaining that he felt ill. Sometime before noon PST, Wilkins had died in his bedroom. It wasn’t clear what had killed him first: the rupture to his skull or being suffocated by the creature that had hung three feet out of his mouth. Wilkins’s wife had discovered him in that very state that afternoon—with a portion of the dead thing in her husband’s mouth—and called 911.
About four hours later, the Wilkins residence received a phone call that was unanswered due to Wilkins’s wife not being home. A message was left on the answering machine from KC Doughtry, whom at the time had no idea that Wilkins was dead, asking Wilkins to call him right away.
It still wasn’t clear how Doughtry had learned about the death of Wilkins. But early in the morning nine days ago, Doughtry had sent an e-mail to George Galworth, stating simply: Wilkins is dead.
Sometime after this, Doughtry had locked himself in his bathroom. When his wife had unlocked the door to check on him, she was attacked by the creature that had erupted from his mouth. It choked her to death and, at some point, chewed off half of her right hand. This was all pieced together by the forensics team that had showed up about an hour later, just as their ten-year-old son was getting off of the bus.
“The kid was excited because the following day was the last day of school before summer vacation,” Roger explained coldly.
“What about the creature?” Scott asked. “Was it recovered?”
“Yes. It apparently got confused and tried burrowing into the toilet. It was too big to fit, though. It got stuck and when it tried to attack the team that showed up to retrieve it, it was pretty slow and lethargic. They killed it easily.”
“You think it was suffocating as it attacked?”
“Seems that way. Like a fish out of water for too long.”
“What else do we know about it, sir?” Scott asked.
“There’s nothing concrete, but the marine biologist that we’re consulting has a few assumptions. First, the thing is going to grow very quickly. Based on the two carcasses she’s studying, she believes the creatures are large to begin with, but are sort of compressed to stay inside the bodies they are grown in. The dead one at the Doughtry house was a little over four feet long when they recovered it. The one they pulled out of Jimmy Wilkins was about the same.”
“What else?”
“The good news is that I can possibly narrow your search down. If what you told me the other day is true and this thing is capable of slithering around on the ground for small periods of time, the biologist thinks it might stay close to shore. But, on the other hand, that doesn’t jive with the fact that the thing apparently originated in one of the deepest parts of the ocean. The marine biologist thinks a life form like this one would have hung around the cracks and crevices within the trench. That means your specimen is probably going to try to find the dankest, darkest, tightest places to live.”
“Then why would it come to shore? If it likes tight dark places, wouldn’t it want to stay away from the shore?”
“Yeah. Until it needs to eat.”
Scott looked out to the lake, barely visible through
the sliding glass doors from where he stood by the kitchen counter. To think that something very similar to the creature they were talking about could come upon that shore to kill vacationing tourists and unsuspecting locals was terrifying.
Scott wondered if it had already started and he simply hadn’t heard anything about it yet.
“Another thing that might help,” Roger said. “The experts here seem to think that as this thing gets bigger, it will lose some of its speed. So it might be easier to catch as it grows. But they say it’s likely still going to be strong as hell.”
“Should I get local law enforcement involved?” Scott asked.
“Not yet. Put that off as long as you can. In the meantime, I suggest you keep an ear out for any deaths on or near the water. Even if it just appears to be a simple drowning, I want you on it.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I want updates the moment you get them.”
Scott opened his mouth to give another Yes, sir, but Roger had already hung up. Scott sighed, pocketed his phone, and walked back out onto the back porch.
He looked out to the water, over towards George Galworth’s house again. He started to make a schedule for his day, doing his very best to busy himself with the details.
That way, it was a bit easier to pretend that he wasn’t starting to get a little scared.
TWELVE
Joe had been surprised that his mother had let him take his bike back down the trails without at least some sort of argument. She seemed to be in a good mood when he asked, and that had been another plus. Usually when his mom was in a good mood, it meant that things were okay between his folks. And while he still wasn’t sure what exactly was going on between them, seeing his mother smile always managed to put Joe in a good mood, too.
But it wasn’t his mother’s good mood that he was thinking of as he cruised down Kerr Lane. Instead, he was thinking of Valerie, the girl that he had met for a grand total of eight minutes yesterday—the girl he was somehow already developing a massive crush on.
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