She nodded and returned her gaze to the spot where the body had been found. “That actually makes sense. I wish a camera or something existed that could take pictures of what you are seeing.”
“How does this make sense?”
Alex shook her head. “I try not to share theories until I am at least partially sure I’m right. Let’s go check the parents’ room.”
I nodded and followed her down the hall. The complete revulsion faded, replaced by anger and even curiosity. What did Alex know? What had killed these people?
How could I stop it from happening again?
I peeked in each of the rooms as we passed down the hallway. To the right, a bathroom, no obvious residue. To the left, another room that appeared to be a spare. Nothing in the hall seemed to point to anything having happened here in the past day. Pictures of the family hung on the walls. Abby had a younger brother that had been away. Lucky for him. Of course the other side of that was he was without a family now. I imagined I sympathized a little more than others. I paused at one picture showing the whole family together on a park bench. I didn’t recognize the area. They all looked so happy. It was one of those pictures that caught the family at the perfect moment where they’d all been about to break into laughter. I didn’t have any of those pictures with my family.
I forced myself to glance away from the family portrait and walked through the door to the parents’ room where Alex waited. I could tell from the look on her face she purposely chose not to say anything about my thoughts, even though she’d been listening.
She moved back so I could enter the room and gave me a look of encouragement. I tried to keep any sarcastic thoughts from my mind.
Where Abby’s room should have prepared me for what I might see, the scene still hit me like a punch to the face. Like the other rooms of the house, this one was a wreck from the police scavenging for evidence. On the bed a residue image of Abby’s mom—I didn’t even know her name—lay face down with one arm hanging off the side. I was seeing with more than just my eyes. I sensed what had happened to her. She’d been thrown there, cast aside like a…like a chicken bone with all the meat picked off. A purple stain pooled around her head and dripped down the side of the bed, spreading on the floor. At least the image was clothed. It wasn’t one of those types of murders.
Abby’s father’s image slumped in a corner, head lolling to the side. He had some marks on him suggesting he had put up a struggle. I could see the afterimages of scratches on his hands and face. A similar pool of psychic residue dripped from his ear to the carpet beneath him.
Something about his ear seemed odd. It sported a wound of some sort.
“Explain the wound to me.” Alex had read my mind.
I walked closer to the image and stared at the ear where the residue had leaked out. I caught myself reaching out to roll the head to the side to get a better look. A dumb impulse. If this had been a real body I would have expected to find some sort of gunshot wound or something to explain the bleeding out. Around the front of the ear, and presumably circling around behind, were a series of small puncture wounds. Not real ones, but psychic.
They reminded me of teeth.
Oh man.
“Teeth,” I said quietly. “Like something latched on to the person’s ear and…sucked.” I swallowed hard. This was wrong. I was sickened, but I wanted nothing more than to make whatever had done this pay. “I’d bet the other afterimages have the same marks, but I can’t tell because of their positions. Were any of those marks visible on the actual bodies?”
“Not that were reported,” she replied. “I’d have to examine the bodies myself. Might be kind of difficult, but I think I can swing it. You see anything else? Sense anything else?”
I shook my head. “I think the images I noticed before were like a left-over scream. An echo or something. I saw Abby’s screaming face as clear as day outside the door. Maybe she witnessed what happened to her parents after she called 911, then whatever was in the house got her. The residue on the walls before seemed so frantic.” I sighed, frustrated. “I’m not explaining this very well. How can I explain what I barely understand?”
“You’re doing fine.”
“Those images I saw were temporary,” I said, struggling to find a decent explanation. “Just an echo, or like the afterimage when you stare at a bright light for too long. The residue resembling each member of the family is more like a stain or a tattoo. But is more than a mere visual copy of their last…poses. They have the emotion behind their deaths. Some of the cause. So when I study those images, I don’t just see. I experience too. It makes viewing them a hundred times worse.”
“So what are you feeling?”
I gazed again at the residue stains, and their faces etched in agony. “Whatever got them wasn’t feeding off blood or anything. It fed off their psychic energy. Their soul or whatever you want to call it. Whatever did this was starving like it had been locked…” I didn’t finish the sentence before things clicked into place.
“What got loose the night my dad was taken?” I asked.
Alex broke eye contact first, appearing embarrassed, guilty even. “An experiment. One of the first ones. The thing had been locked in a holding cell at Helix since before we were born.”
“What is it?”
“It used to be human,” she said. “I think I’ve told you a bit of this before. Maybe not. The original idea came up during the Cold War. Helix was contracted by the government to devise a way for a person to siphon secrets from people who were thought to be spies. I guess everyone was super paranoid back in the day.
“The inception of the idea came from vampires,” she continued. “Vampires are virtually extinct these days, so this was taken more from concept than actual DNA. Somewhere in the process the idea of vampirism merged with sucking out a person’s thoughts. The bosses thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to get that same sort of ability in a human? But psychically? Then no one could hide anything from us.’ Your grandfather said it was possible. A person can have some success at hiding thoughts on the surface, but not on a psychic level. So they began experimenting.”
The images from my friend Barry’s head flooded my mind. I understood exactly what Alex was describing. I’d witnessed it first-hand. There was no hiding from that type of thing.
“All of this is from historical records, so I’m not sure how accurate the information is. They spliced some different creature DNA into the guy who volunteered—some CIA guy. The technology they used wasn’t great at the time. It still isn’t, except for the process used by Whyte Genetics. Apparently Whyte can somehow make any sets of differing DNA bond. Anyway, the experiments mostly involved injecting the host with genetic material from a random creature and from other humans with gifts. It went well at first.”
The room around me vanished. I focused entirely on her words. The idea was completely nuts, but completely amazing. This wasn’t science fiction. This had become science reality. “What do you mean ‘at first’?”
“He went crazy.” She shrugged. “He became totally addicted to the process of psychically pulling the truths from a person. He stopped being human. Became an…‘it’. He—it—began feeding on people’s psychic energy rather than examining it. Then the stuff it’d been injected with started physically changing it. I only saw the back as it escaped, but I’ve seen a picture. Its teeth are all pointy now. Not like they’ve been filed down, but like they grew into that form. Looks like a demented kid. A kid and a Leech of sorts. That became the name for it. Leech.”
“And this is the thing that got free?”
“It was set free,” she corrected, pointing at me. “Don’t forget that. Someone wanted this thing out and about.”
“I need some air.” I walked out of the room.
“Head towards the back of the house,” Alex said behind me. “I want to look around back there anyway.”
Like most homes in Calm Waters, this one had a sliding glass door opening to the backyard. I unlocked and slid open t
he door, then walked outside, taking a series of deep breaths.
It was hard to believe just weeks ago I lived an average life. School, homework and friends. And now things were as far from average as possible. Monsters, psychic abilities, and a complete lack of family. People were being murdered in my town. Sure, Calm Waters had a few murders every year, but they were always distant. I would casually flip past them on the news or ignore the article in the newspaper.
Now I stood in a home where three people had been killed. I’d seen the residue imprint left behind. They had died, and they had done so in horrible pain and fear. A kid my age shouldn’t be worrying about this stuff. I should have been thinking about my school’s upcoming Homecoming Dance, or what I was going to do with my friends this weekend. Hanging out with friends now felt unimportant. I had bigger things on my mind.
Could I actually help stop this thing? This Leech?
Could I find my dad?
“Why this house?” I asked.
“No idea. The police have been killing themselves over that question.” She pointed around the yard. “But we really aren’t far from the forest edge. The Leech was probably hungry like you said. Maybe this was the first place that got its attention.”
“A random choice?” Somehow the idea made it worse for me. No reason or rhyme. Wrong place, wrong time.
“The report put together by the police said they found some tracks out back,” Alex said from behind me. “They assumed they were some old ones belonging to Abby.”
“But you aren’t so sure?” I didn’t glance back.
“Only one way to find out.” She walked past me. “Let’s check out the back-yard.”
Trying not to sigh, I followed her out to an average grass yard lined on the sides with a fence and some trees and bushes.
“The tracks were over by the bushes at the back of their property,” she said, pointing to a waist-high shrubbery. “It backs another house. The neighbors were questioned but didn’t see anything.”
The bush she pointed to seemed different somehow. I walked towards it slowly, my eyes scanning the ground for any sign of residue. I almost missed it. If I hadn’t been so used to seeing the color, I would have wrote it off as a trick of the light. I crouched down and studied the bush and the ground below. The tracks there were small, facing out from the bush towards the back of the house. Up close they looked kinda like a little girl’s footprints, so it would have been easy for the police to assume they belonged to Abby. But I saw them differently.
The area inside the prints was a dark and inky purple. I thought of the wounds I had observed on the afterimage of Abby’s dad. We needed to find this thing. I needed to find this thing. But how could I find this Leech-thing when I couldn’t even begin to understand it?
“Take a picture of the tracks,” I said. I had an idea. “Just in case I mess them up.”
“Police already did.” Her eyes narrowed as she took in what I was thinking. “You sure you want to do that? If it works…”
“If it works maybe I can give us an advantage.” I shivered. “We need to find my dad, and this thing is somehow related to his disappearance. Alex, I don’t know how else I can look for him. We’re at a dead-end. If we find this thing and put it out of commission, maybe that will give us some more answers. I’ve got do something. I can’t just sit around.”
Before I could think about it too much and talk myself out of it, I stepped on the pair of tracks. My thought was maybe I could get some sort of insight. Something more than just a pair of tracks to follow.
And did I ever.
As soon as my feet settled, I saw a whole different scene.
It was night, and light from Abby’s home shone through the sliding back door. Laughter drifted from inside like an echo. Abby walked in front of the glass door holding a phone to her ear. The scene was surreal. I saw the expression of joy on her face in every tiny detail, such a contrast to the afterimage of her, screaming her throat raw. This was a happier Abby. It was kind of weird, but it made what I had seen earlier a bit easier to take. My last image of her wasn’t going to be of her death, but instead of her life in a moment of happiness.
I found myself crouching down, like the thing that had stood here by the bushes watching the family. Alien thoughts drifted in and out of my head. Thoughts filled with naked hunger. The Leech was ruled by its need to feed. It had been deprived for so long. Alex had been right. Abby’s family was the first set of living people the Leech had seen since it had been set free. The creature had hidden in the woods, hunger gnawing in its belly. But even then, the Leech didn’t want to rush in. It wanted to watch its victims. Observing them made the anticipation grow, sucking out their essence would be that much sweeter.
It was disgusting.
It was addicting.
This was the sensation I had felt when I touched Barry, but on a whole new level. This was taken to the extreme.
The images shifted. Sped up like I’d hit fast-forward on the vision. No, not a vision, a memory similar to that of my grandfather’s I lived in my dreams. Soon the lights in the house went out. The stars above me moved in their paths. The sun began to rise. The creature walked to the house. I watched as it walked slowly to the sliding door I knew would be unlocked. I felt myself being dragged after it. That was the last thing I wanted. I didn’t want to see the murders committed. I didn’t think I could handle it.
I forced myself to lift my feet and step out of the foot prints.
It was day again. I took a deep breath. The house in front of me looked so much emptier than it had in the memory, like it too had lost its soul.
“What did you see?”
I related everything to her as detailed as possible. She never interrupted me once.
“If you see the tracks here, why don’t we see any others around that have the same residue in them?”
“Not sure.” I shook my head. “But it had been waiting here the whole night, fantasizing over what it was going to do to them. How they would taste. It was hungry, Alex. Maybe that’s why. So much emotion over a long period of time burned the memory to this place. The steps in between weren’t important to it, just right here.” I waved back at the house. “And in there.”
“If you could relive that memory, what about if we went back inside—”
I cut her off. “No. Not going to happen. Don’t even ask.”
Alex held up her hands in surrender. “Sorry, I won’t ask. I thought maybe we could get some more information.”
“You don’t know what it feels like, Alex,” I said quietly. “I felt the thing’s emotions—every filthy and horrible desire. But the emotions felt good to me because I was the Leech standing here watching the family. Imagine how it would be if I were to go in and touch those dead memories. I can’t. I just can’t.”
She let out a long breath. “I shouldn’t have even asked. I’m sorry, Jack.” She glanced around. “Let’s take another look around the yard. See if we can find where the Leech left.”
“Sure.”
Alex took the side opposite the bush where I stood, and I continued searching the area. Our paths naturally took us to a back gate which led into an alley of sorts between two other homes. Alex opened the gate.
“How much you wanna bet this is where…” She trailed off as she stared down at a new set of tracks. They were odd, to say the least. Yet horribly familiar.
I bent down to get a better view. A person’s hands and feet, but with something extra coming off of them. Claws. “Alex, these look like the same ones I saw in the forest where my dad was taken.” An odd sound made me glance at Alex.
From somewhere she had produced a small pistol, and she was screwing a silencer on it. She tightened it with a final twist, then held one finger to her lips. The expression on her face immediately quelled the questions on my lips. On my lips. I had an idea.
What should I do? I asked in my head.
Alex reached inside her jacket and pulled out a knife. With a quick flick of a
finger, a four-inch blade flipped out from the handle. She held the weapon out to me, and I really had no choice but to take it. She motioned for me to stand behind her with a wave of her hand.
I peeked down at the track. There was the slightest hint of purple in it, and I glimpsed a faint trail to and from the fence line leading back to the alley. The alley itself was filled with large, black, plastic garbage cans and matching green ones for recycling. The trash wouldn’t be picked up until the next day, so it was hard to get a clear view due to the mess. Those odd tracks led right into the cluster of garbage cans.
Alex lifted her pistol, keeping it aimed into the alley. It was a practiced motion, and looked completely natural on her. I was no gun expert, but it was pretty easy to tell Alex was completely comfortable with a gun. I guess she hadn’t been joking when she had been talking about guns earlier. I let myself fall back a few paces, giving her space. Just in case.
Of the several garbage bins, only one was completely closed. I half expected her to lift the lid and jump back all dramatic like they do in the movies.
Instead, she approached the garbage bin in silence. She pointed her pistol at the bin, angling the barrel downward. I jumped as she pulled the trigger twice in rapid succession. Her gun made a chuffing sound with each shot. The noise seemed loud in this quiet alley, silencer or no.
Alex stood staring at the garbage can for a few moments, her face completely absent of emotion. She leaned forward, one hand stretching to lift the lid. A slight movement above us caught my eye. If I hadn’t edged myself back earlier I wouldn’t have even noticed.
I didn’t have a chance to shout a warning, but I didn’t have to. Alex heard it in my head clear enough. She threw herself to the side in a roll as something pounced down where she had been standing a moment before.
The creature resembled a hairless werewolf crossed with a boney porcupine. The human shape the thing had been made out of remained, but it wasn’t human any more. Its front arms were longer than a man’s, and its hands ended in claws. That explained the odd tracks.
A forest of quills like sharpened bones protruded from its back. They didn’t look like they had been grafted there. They looked natural, like they had grown out of the creature’s spine.
Residue Page 12