Shay continued, obviously having realized Xander was right—the police would be no help and could actually cause more problems. “They would start to look at all of us and realize pretty quickly Xander has a record and some less than savory friends. You have an assault record…”
Xander looked up surprised. He had never known Zak had a record. Damn, Shay is good at secrets.
Zak looked defeated. “Then what do we do?”
Xander was surprised that he was willing to help. He had never been particularly close to Sydney. “You don’t have to get involved,” he offered softly.
Zak scoffed. “I’m not going to let a friend just be kidnapped, or leave my family to deal with it on their own.”
Shay stood and hugged Zak and even Xander offered him a small smile. Zak could be an ass, but he had been adopted into their family years ago. When his father found out he was gay he decided to beat it out of him, giving him a dose of his homemade cure every time he was drunk, and that was a lot of the time. Zak’s mother was too timid and beaten down to protect him so he had spent a lot of time at Shay and Xander’s house.
“OK,” Shay stepped back. “What do we do first?”
“I don’t know?” Xander shrugged. “Try to find clues?”
“How did They find us anyway?” Zak wondered out loud. “There is nothing that connects this place to you guys.”
“Could we have been followed to the garage?” Shay asked Zak.
“Maybe,” he conceded.
“I don’t think it matters if you were,” Xander shook his head.
“Why?” Shay looked at him confused.
“The stalker guy has been watching Syd and the garage. He probably saw you arrive.”
“And he knows who I am?”
“It wouldn’t be hard to find out. Your services are listed on Shay’s website.”
“But what about this cabin? How would he connect it to me?”
“I don’t know?”
“Could They have followed us from the garage to here?” Shay asked.
“No…” Xander rubbed the back of his neck. “I checked the whole way here. There was nothing weird behind us...Wait a minute.” Xander sat up straighter.
“What?” Shay asked, looking hopeful.
“Maybe they have some kind of tracking device on her.”
“The tracking device makes sense,” Zak agreed. “If I was studying someone I would want to be able to find them.”
“How does this help us?” Xander wondered out loud.
“Maybe if we could find another person like Sydney we can find the tracking device.”
“And then?”
“I don’t know, figure out a way to use it in reverse. Use it to find the people doing the tracking,” Zak grinned, feeling proud of himself.
“Is that possible?” Shay asked.
“It sounds possible. We just need to find someone capable of doing it,” Xander nodded.
“And find someone else like Sydney,” Zak reminded them.
“I know they are out there,” Xander got up to retrieve the laptop from their bags. He just hoped they had time to put their plan into action. Xander ignored the voice in his head telling him that the guy who took Connor’s head only seemed interested in that part of him. And he didn’t waste any time in getting it. Their only saving grace was that they hadn’t found Sydney’s headless body anywhere and the guy didn’t seem to care about hiding his work.
Chapter Forty-Three
Seated at the breakfast counter, Sydney watched Doc pour them both coffee. “First,” he said. “I need your history, please. As far back as you can remember.”
She sighed, and narrowed her eyes at his back as he retrieved cream and sugar. “The first thing I remember is waking up in Michigan next to the Lake, with no memory.”
Doc interrupted her story. “Fascinating.”
His interest was clearly intellectual, and it took teeth grinding and several deep breaths before Sydney could continue but he didn’t appear to notice her anger. By the time she finished her story their coffee was half drank. Luckily, he had managed to remain silent for the rest.
“You are an incredibly resourceful young women,” he smiled at her, his soft voice grating on her nerves more than usual.
“Well, when you don’t have a lot of options…” she trailed off.
“I do apologize. By the time I found you, you seemed to be adjusting fine and I decided observation was more important than containment.”
She took a few more deep breaths. “I see,” was the best she could do in terms of a response.
“And please, what sort of side effects have you experienced?”
“Side effects to what?”
He nodded apologetically. “I’ll explain momentarily. But I would really like to hear your experience not colored by any sort of...bias.”
Doc was jotting notes and it took a lot of Sydney’s patience to not snatch the pen from him and jam it through his eye. “Besides the memory loss?”
“Yes, besides that.”
“Can you at least tell me if the memory loss is a result of whatever you did to me?”
He considered the question for a moment. “Yes. I think so. Indirectly.”
She had no idea what that meant, but she forced herself to continue. “The amnesia is the only health concern that I noticed until about two weeks ago.”
“What happened two weeks ago?”
“I had a dream.” Doc smiled as if he was expecting that answer. “It was the same dream a bunch of other people had.”
“Yes. What happened in the dream?”
“I was wandering a city I didn't recognize. And no one could understand me. And everything was so...distorted. It was terrible.”
Doc excitedly scribbled more notes. “Please go on.”
“After the dream I started having nosebleeds. Headaches. I have been feeling paranoid…”
“And?”
“Recently, I started hallucinating.”
“Really?!”
“Yeah.”
“When did it begin? What were you doing when it happened?”
Sydney told him about the truck stop and seeing Randall come at her from the bathroom. Then about seeing herself huddled on the porch last night. Sydney rubbed at her face. Despite her shower and her coffee, her eyes were still grainy from the lack of sleep.
“And those were the only times?”
“That I know of.”
“And you didn’t have any of these symptoms before the dream?”
Sydney searched her short memory for any medical oddities other than the amnesia. It was only then that she noted the lack of medical issues. In the months before the dream she had been perfectly healthy. No headaches. No colds. She remembered Don getting sick while she lived at his shop. She’d had to run the shop for a couple of days while he fought the cold. “No. There was nothing before the dream.” She paused. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Did you kill Don because he helped me?”
Doc looked into his empty coffee mug and stood up to retrieve the carafe. He filled his cup and offered her more. She accepted, giving him a chance to stall until he was ready to answer. Play nice, she reminded herself.
“I really am sorry about Don,” Doc told her as he returned to the stool across from her. “But I did not kill him.”
That drew Sydney up short. “Then who did?” she asked.
“I think that was Randall.”
Her mouth fell open. “How long has Randall been following me?”
“I think he found you a couple of days after you ran away.”
Sydney ran her hands through her hair. It was dry now and she was upstairs in the heat of the cabin, but she still felt chilled to the bone. “How the hell did he find me? And why was he following me? Why did he kill Don?”
“Well,” Doc began. “I don’t think he really ever knew why he was following you. He just felt compelled to do so. As for how he found you...wel
l that’s altogether more fascinating.”
“Oh, do tell,” she wasn’t entirely successful at keeping the animosity from her voice.
“You, and those like you, sense each other.”
“What?”
“Well, I guess I should refine that statement,” he rubbed his chin thoughtfully and made some more notes. “I don’t know if you can sense the others. But they can sense you. That’s how Randall found you. That’s how I found you. It was how I found you in Wisconsin.”
In Wisconsin? Does that mean we aren’t in Wisconsin anymore? “How do...They...sense me? You don’t mean smell? Psychically?”
“No, no, nothing as silly as something paranormal,” Doc scoffed.
Oh, because everything else has been within what is “normal,” she grumbled to herself. “Then what? How?”
“I think it is pheromone related. In all the brains I have collected and studied, the hypothalamus seems to function differently than the normal gland.”
“Normal?” She wanted to strangle him over his evasive dialogue.
Doc ignored her interjection. “And they only seem to be able to locate each other, narrow down to pinpoint, when they are nearby one another. Randall wouldn’t have been able to find you, or recognize you, if he hadn’t crossed paths with you accidentally. Once he recognized you as being like him, that’s when he was compelled to follow you.”
“Why though? What purpose does it serve?”
“Your kind are drawn to each other in a...hive mentality.”
“My kind?!” Her heart was beginning to beat roughly.
Doc still ignored her and continued speaking, almost to himself. “What I need is a way to test scents. Or set up an experiment to test accuracy and distance…”
“Hey!” she snapped and Doc jumped but paid attention to her again. “If we are drawn together, why did he and Connor attack me then? Why did he kill Don?”
“Oh! It’s just fascinating!”
Sydney stared at him, his blatant disregard for her as a person was remarkable. “I guess so,” she bit off the words.
Doc looked contrite. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I’m being insensitive. It seems that abnormalities in your kind inspire animosity. My theory is it’s an instinctual desire to purge what they consider defects from their gene pool. I think he killed Don because he confused him for you.”
Apparently, his explanation was supposed to be comforting to her, according to his gentle smile anyway. She wasn’t sure how to react to anything that she had learned. She had been told that she was a part of some “kind” that apparently separated her from humanity. But she was also different from those whose “kind” she was supposed to belong. Where did that leave her relation to humans? Was she being hunted by humans or by...whatever They were? Her head spun and she felt dizzy and sick to her stomach. “I don’t understand any of this,” she muttered feeling pitiful which then made her feel even more resentful towards Doc.
He patted her hand and it took enormous willpower to not jerk away in disgust. “I understand. I do. And I’m sorry.”
“For what? What did you do to me?”
“Let me start at the beginning.”
“Please do,” she tried to meet his eyes, but he wouldn’t look at her directly. She didn’t know if his aversion was based on shame or guilt, or maybe even fear but she felt it gave her a tiny advantage, not that she knew what to do with that advantage yet though.
“I will try to make it as uncomplicated as I can. It’s a long story and I won’t bore you with the technical details.”
Just get on with it, she wanted to snap.
“Two years ago I was a researcher at a university. A friend of mine, an anthropologist, was working at a Quimbayan archeological dig.
Sydney’s skin prickled in excitement. I knew it! Doc didn’t notice her reaction because he was still staring into his coffee.
“His name was Andrew Horowitz.”
Was? Sydney wondered, but didn’t say anything out loud. She had a feeling she would find out soon enough.
“The site dated approximately 10th century B.C. and they found something unexpected in one of the unearthed structures. There were human remains, but something else too. Something that inspired him to call me. Given the artifacts they found and some symbols on walls, it was a clearly a place of worship. There was evidence of human sacrifices—not an uncommon find in ancient South American ruins. There were multiple bodies laid out with unusual care. That, in itself wasn’t too alarming. But when they exposed enough of the remains they found something that set off many alarms.”
Doc paused to sip his coffee. Sydney was, literally, on the edge of her seat. She had been sure the Colombian issue was related to her situation. She just didn’t know if she was happy about being right.
“The first body they removed had damage to its skull. They would have passed it off as natural decomposition, but then they extracted the second skull and found the same kind of damage.” Doc stopped talking and made a note.
“What kind of damage?” Sydney’s tongue felt like sandpaper.
“There was a hole in the back of all the skulls.”
“A hole?”
“Yes.” Doc sighed and refilled his coffee cup.
“And your friend called you…” Sydney was trying to get him talking again.
“Yes. He thought I seemed like the most logical person to call, of the researchers that he trusted enough to call anyway.” Doc smiled humbly.
“Why?”
“In all the skulls found—six in that room—there was a hole in the back of the head,” he repeated. “At first they assumed that they had been struck or stabbed in the head instead of the normal methods of sacrifice. Most of the methods used by the Mayans and Aztecs involved stabbings through the heart or the cutting of the throat. But, after finding bone fragments on the ground, Andrew realized he was wrong. The victim had not been stabbed in the head. Or struck.”
Sydney realized she had been holding her breath and forced herself to take a deep breath. Her coffee had long since went cold, but she still clutched the cup so hard her fingers hurt.
“Andrew and the archaeologists there performed a cursory examination of the skeletons. They couldn’t do a lot in the field, but they were able to find enough to scare the shit out of themselves.” Doc barked out an awkward laugh, apparently at his use of vulgar language.
“What did they find?”
“If the victims had been hit or stabbed in the head there would have been bone fragments inside the skull as pieces would have embedded themselves in the brain. Finding fragments outside the body indicates that nothing went into the skull—something came out of it.”
Chapter Forty-Four
Sydney felt like the air had been sucked out of her lungs. “What?” she gasped. She had known—on some level—but it didn’t change the ice water shock of hearing it. Since finding the search history on Connor’s room she knew this was a possible outcome but it still sent bursts of panic throughout her body. It was all she could do to not run screaming for the door.
“Something had exited the skulls of the victims,” Doc repeated animatedly.
Since he first appeared at the cabin, he had been calm and pleasant except for his moment of anger in when she asked about his profession. But now he was on his feet and gesturing grandly with his hands. “No one had any idea what to make of it. Andrew convinced the authorities to let him call me, but they wouldn’t let anyone else get involved. Especially not the media.”
“Why?” she croaked, trying to play along.
Officials thought it would be bad publicity. Colombia gets enough of a negative portrayal, they didn’t want to add to it. Not to mention the fear. The public could panic. The whole world would.”
“What kind of doctor are you?”
“A parasitologist.”
Her throat squeeze painfully and her head was pounding. “So it is a parasite.” It wasn’t really a questions, but it sounded like one to Doc.
“No.”
“No?”
“It’s not a parasite in the traditional sense.”
“What does that mean?”
“Let me back up. I’m getting ahead of myself,” he practically shivered with excitement. “They widened their search in the burial chamber and found another body…”
He trailed off and Sydney new it was for effect. She didn’t know what kind of reaction she was supposed to have so she tried to remain neutral. Whatever her look indicated, Doc must have found it sufficient because he grinned and continued.
“They found a skull in the remains of an altar of sorts. The altar was gold plated and had, at one time, been flanked by golden statues. The Quimbayan people were goldsmiths. They created beautiful statues that adorned their most holy sites.”
Sydney didn’t care about gold statues and had to bite her tongue to stop from telling him to get on with it. “OK,” she nodded.
“The skull was on the altar,” he refocused and got back to the point. “And they may never have found the most important find if it weren’t for an accident. The graduate student lifting the skull dropped it.” He shook his head over the student’s incompetent mistake. “The skull broke and inside were the fossilized remains of whatever had broken out of the skulls of the other subjects.”
Sydney noted his switch in language. Once he arrived at the point of his story that directly affected his work the victims became subjects. Bile was rising in Sydney’s throat. She didn’t want to hear anymore, but she couldn’t have stopped him any more than she could escape from the cabin.
“Inside were the fossilized remains of something that Andrew had never seen before. Of course he assumed parasite so he called me. It took me forever to make it to Colombia. So many hurdles to jump and so much paperwork to fill out. In the end, Andrew was only able to get the Colombian government to grant me access because he convinced them I was another graduate student of his. Even Colombia cares about cultural preservation,” he snorted with derision.
“What did you find?” Sydney asked.
Doc grinned. “I found the greatest discovery since penicillin.” Syd raised a brow but didn’t interrupt. “Organisms are classified through taxonomy. Biologists study the body and categorize the organism based upon shared characteristics. Parasites belong to the kingdom of Animalia. From there are multiple phyla to which a parasite can belong. Phyla are characterized by body plan or genetic similarity. This particular specimen was drastically different than any parasite I had ever seen before. Its body plan resembled both animal and plant...”
Don't Let Them Find You Page 28