The crowd grew frenzied. A crooked stick appeared from nowhere into Thomas’s hand as he stepped down from the RV. The trick momentarily silenced the small assembly. He drew an inverted cross with a half-circle connecting the horizontal line to the vertical in the soft dirt. The ends of the horizontal line were tipped down. He closed his eyes and chanted in an ancient language.
Before the mob recovered from the reverend’s mysterious actions, each was struck down with a curse. Gray-red tore off his clothes, curled his fingers into claws, and began scratching at invisible sores, which he was destined to do without eating, drinking, or sleeping until he died.
The plain, plump woman jammed her fingernails into her eye sockets, plucked out the gelatinous orbs, and ate them one at a time. “I’m blind! I’m blind!” she sang happily, as she danced around like a schoolgirl, bumping into the others who struggled with their own cursed misfortunes. Her blind shindig led her into the river where the current swept her away into death’s arms.
An elderly man belched loudly and apologized to his neighbors. Moments later, he collapsed, belching broken glass and shotgun sprays of blood. A bright green fungus sprouted across a middle-aged woman wearing a low-cut tank top and way too much make-up. It spread rapidly, creeping over her flesh until she no longer resembled a human being. The woman ran screaming into the trunk of a thick maple. The collision split her skull, and her eyes rolled white as her life retreated from the nightmare.
The fate of the others was much the same, and Thomas didn’t wait around to observe their individual ends. He entered the RV, but instead of starting the engine, he muttered a brief chant. The RV gradually faded from sight, and the Reverend Elias Curtis’ Mobile Revival traveled magically to an RV park east of Cincinnati.
Later, at the sight of so many twisted, mangled bodies, the local sheriff, his three deputies, several state highway patrolmen, and fifteen EMT’s from a tri-county area could only scratch their heads at the tragedy, unable to get a handle on why so many people had gone berserk and killed themselves in such strange ways.
Within thirty minutes of the grisly discovery, news teams from Cincinnati and Columbus arrived on the scene to report the gruesome deaths. Their live reports of this were then fed to the national networks and cable news channels, which spun the story as a national calamity. The story line was that this was yet another senseless tragedy brought on by mass hysteria.
Hollis Danforth pounded his fist into the contorted face of that day’s dead lover and swore at the television screen. This looked suspiciously like Thomas’s work, and his antics were getting out of hand. It was imperative that he be found and eliminated. He had outlived his usefulness.
But the question, as always, was where to find him. He squeezed the young stripper’s blue, cold hand as if she were able to share his displeasure, and then abruptly let it freefall against the bedside. He had an idea. A damned lethal idea.
And if he were really lucky, he would kill two birds with one plan.
Chapter 51
Rance Osborne stared at the television monitor of Orion Sector’s war room. He sat in disbelief as the CNN reporters recounted the mass carnage in the Southwest terminal in the Columbus airport with grave faces, but then he realized their reports were accurate when the cameras swooped in for a tight shot of Nick Bellamy emerging from the catastrophic terminal.
Rance leaned forward as a heavily armed SWAT team hurried Nick, two women, and a white cat away from the swarming, screaming reporters. It was at this point of the national broadcast that he realized if Orion Sector was to remain a viable intelligence group, he had to pull some strings to extract Nick from the scene before some bureaucratic bozo twisted the facts and blamed Nick for the bloodbath.
From the sketchy details that the Columbus police fed to the ravenous press, it appeared obvious to Rance that this was the work of the Creeper, but the question worrying Rance was why the Creeper was now working out in the open after decades of invisibility. And it was fairly evident that the assassin had attempted to exterminate Nick, disguising his real target among the airport carnage. No one would suspect the truth except an old, hard-line Orion Sector director who was a suspect in the FBI Director’s murder.
Again, the question of why agitated him. Why now, to be more precise. The Creeper could’ve taken Nick out any time in the past twelve years, like he had done to Laura and Jimmy Bellamy.
Rance rubbed the prickly stubble on his chin. The entire airport episode didn’t make any sense to him.
He picked up the scrambler phone and dialed the one person who could bail Orion Sector out on this potential public relations nightmare. Even though Rance wasn’t the most popular man in Washington these days, he had stockpiled enough political markers during his thirty-one years with the Bureau to pull Nick and Orion Sector out of harm’s way. The phone was answered on the fourth ring.
“Mr. President,” Rance said, “this is Rance Osborne. I need a small favor, sir.”
Nick and Jill were escorted to a secure airport office for interrogation while the unconscious Gabriella was taken to the airport medical clinic where EMT’s attended to her wounds. Airport brass, Columbus policemen, and FAA officials bickered over jurisdiction of the disaster and who should preside over the questioning. Nick waited impatiently.
“Don’t tell them anything about what happened back there,” Nick whispered to Jill. “Tell them that you hit your head or something and missed the whole thing.”
“Why?” she snapped, still upset with Nick.
“Because you’ll be called to testify every time there’s a hearing, which means you’ll have to be on call over a period of years,” he elucidated, ignoring her unfounded anger.
She sniffed and folded her arms across her breasts. “I’ll think about it.”
“Do it quick.”
Through the glass-connecting wall to the outer office, Nick watched the bickering agencies rant and gesture as the dispute raged on. The phone rang beside Nick, and the airport chief of security plucked the phone from its cradle in the adjoining room. The tall, balding man nodded, dipped, and nearly genuflected as he hung-up the receiver. After an excited exchange with the others, he opened the door between the offices.
He cleared his throat. “You are free to go,” he announced with a tinge of disappointment in his voice. “When we need your testimony, Agent Findlay, we’ll contact you through the NSA. And Miss Sandlin, we have your phone number and address where we can reach you.”
Nick suppressed a grin. That would take some doing since the NSA didn’t have a clue who Agent David Findlay was. The police begrudgingly returned his weapons and allowed them to pass.
As Nick and Jill entered the crowded terminal again, two burly EMT’s burst through the throng and hailed the airport security chief.
“She’s gone!” they both shouted at once.
“Who?” the security chief replied irritably. So far, this just wasn’t his day, and he had a nagging notion that it was going to get worse before it got better.
“The lady in the wheelchair!” the EMT responded. “Vanished from a guarded room.”
The security chief turned to Nick. “Who was she?”
Nick shrugged. “Just one of the survivors. I didn’t get her name. She was unconscious by the time I found her,” he lied.
“Damn!” His face was livid. “How did she escape in a wheelchair for Godsake?”
“Hey, chief, how about an escort out of here?” Nick asked, pointing to the frenzied press contingent beyond the yellow crime scene tape.
The harried man nodded at a couple of his security men, and they blazed a path through the shouting, lunging reporters to the parking garage where Crow and the blue SUV rental were waiting. Nick pushed Jill into the front seat, jumped in, and ordered Crow to step on it. The SUV’s tires squealed and left the security escorts in a contrail of dirty gray, choking smoke.
“Welcome back,” a voice said from the back seat.
Nick craned his neck toward the
back. The voice belonged to Crow’s smiling grandfather, and the unarmed old man had managed to detain Bustillo in the backseat the entire time.
Nick’s reply caught in his throat. Gabriella and her wheelchair were in the back, too, but she remained unconscious.
“How did an unconscious witch manage that trick?”
Crow spoke up. “Grandfather has a few tricks up his sleeve, too.”
“What about Bustillo?” Nick asked, unable to fathom the seemingly impossible feat.
“He carried the wheelchair,” the grandfather replied, pointing to their Florida guest.
“Bustillo?” Nick was incredulous. “How did you guys get past the security and the press with a woman in a wheelchair?”
Bustillo threw up his hands. “Hey, super fed, some things are best left unsaid.”
“Right.” Nick settled back in the seat beside the hostile Jill Sandlin, closed his eyes, and dozed.
After exiting I-71, the roads leading south to Duneden serpentined through the rolling countryside around farms, fields, and pastures. The hot July sun created wavy water mirages on the steaming asphalt roads, and after awhile, the skeletal framework supporting the miles and miles of power lines resembled matchstick men to the weary eye. The scent of freshly mown grass and hay filled the sticky air, and cows and hogs crowded into the black pools beneath the shade trees to escape the scorching heat.
Each small town that they passed resembled the previous one. An outer grid of brief roads was lined with spreading maples, sycamores, and oaks as well as dilapidated, pillbox houses with exteriors of washed out red brick and dingy white peeling paint. The town squares centered around green parks bounded by sooty storefronts with grimy windows, twinkling neon signs that hinted of more prosperous days, gigantic silos resembling ghost ship masts, and shuttered factories lost in a sea of weeds and cracked pavement.
Nick slowly awakened from his nap and squinted into the merciless sun. He slipped on his sunglasses and discovered that the other passengers were asleep. Crow glanced over and grinned.
“It lives,” Crow said quietly.
“Yeah. Barely.”
“Want to talk?”
Nick surveyed the passengers again to ascertain that they were sleeping. “Let’s do it.” He yawned. “Earlier this morning, you mentioned that Geronimo had discovered some wild things about our friend the senator.”
“I’m talking way wild here.”
“So talk.”
“Geronimo completed his reconstruction of the deleted information in the Mortal Eclipse government file, but we already knew most of the missing details. What we didn’t know was that Hollis Danforth had an alias. Dan Ford.”
Nick yawned again. The passing countryside had an hypnotic effect on him. “Okay, but I’m not hearing way wild here.”
“Dan Ford owned a traveling carnival of freaks.” Crow paused to let the information sink in.
“Hollis Danforth ran a freak show?”
“That’s not the freaky part,” Crow said.
“Cute.”
“Geronimo traced Ford’s freak show back to the early eighteen hundreds.”
“To his great-grandfather’s carnival?”
Crow pulled a folded stack of computer printouts of old carnival posters from his shirt pocket and handed them to Nick.
He perused each one. “Unbelievable,” he said at last.
“That way wild enough for you?”
“Is Geronimo certain about this?” he asked.
“Ninety-nine percent.”
“How’s that possible?”
Crow shook his head. “Got me.”
Nick studied the carnival posters again. The crude pictures and sketches were surprisingly crisp despite their age. There didn’t seem to be any doubt. “I wish we had hair samples to do a DNA check, though.”
“Well, skeptical white man, I knew you’d want harder evidence, so Geronimo traced all American historical carnival paraphernalia collectors, and I made some calls.” He stopped.
“Don’t leave me hanging here, Crow.”
“I found one who had items from Dan Ford’s Carnival of Freaks. Stuff that’s never been cleaned or refurbished. Just shrink-wrapped tighter than a squaw’s . . .”
“Okay, I get the point. So?”
“This guy lives in Omaha, so grandfather and I paid him a little visit yesterday. After negotiating a fair price, I opened the items one at a time until I found the one I was looking for.”
Nick scowled in exasperation. “What constituted ‘the one you were looking for’?”
“The one with a perfect fingerprint, of course.”
Nick perked up. “And?”
“Take a way wild guess.”
“It’s a perfect match to Danforth’s prints.”
“Not bad for a crazy white man.”
“That would make Danforth at least . . .”
“One hundred and ninety-three years old.”
Chapter 52
Menacing black and gray thunderheads on the western horizon consumed the mid-afternoon sun. Angry towers mushroomed like bursting bombs as Crow guided the SUV into a neglected Clark filling station about a half-hour from Duneden. A stiff, muggy breeze carrying the smell of dry dirt, corn, and clover greeted Nick and Crow as they climbed from the vehicle and stretched. The others preferred the coolness inside.
Nick entered the small retail area and inspected their meager selection of candy, chips, Slim Jims, and cigarettes. An antique chest cooler painted red and emblazoned with an old Coke logo rattled in the corner. Nick dropped the correct change into the slot, slid his Coke bottle around the track, and pulled it up and out. He popped the cap on the bottle opener and took a long pull.
A man wearing greasy blue and white-striped overalls and a matching railroad cap appeared in the doorway separating the office from two murky car repair bays.
“Storm’s a’comin’,” he said, then spat a glob of chewing tobacco into a bucket at his feet. “Where ya headed?”
“Duneden,” Nick replied. He drained the eight-ounce bottle and pulled another from the cooler.
The man regarded him strangely for a moment. “Ya know that’s a witch town, don’t ya.”
“So I’ve heard,” Nick said.
Crow entered the office and grabbed a pack of Slim Jims. The old man rang up the sale and headed back into the bay without another word.
“Not much for small talk,” Crow said, as they stepped outside. The wind had increased, and windswept dust created a yellow haze across the road.
“We better get a move on,” Crow said. “I don’t like the looks of that storm. I don’t want to be stuck out in the middle of nowhere in an electrical storm if the car breaks down.”
Nick glanced at the dusky sky. Crow was right. The storm looked nasty and was coming up fast. A sudden movement registered in the corner of his eye. He pulled his gun, pivoted, and targeted it.
He abruptly lowered the barrel. A gray and white farm cat crossed the road, but for an instant, he imagined it was Siamese. The Siamese cat. He thought of the white cat and wondered if the gargoyle had exhausted its nine lives. Only Gabriella would know, and she wasn’t in any shape to talk at the moment.
He replaced the gun and climbed into the SUV where Crow gave him one of his patented stay cool looks. Nick responded with one his patented buzz off glares.
The tempest was nearly upon them as they turned off the highway toward Duneden. Lightning fractured the onyx sky and speared the earth. Muffled thumps grew to cannon shots as the thunderstorm drew closer. Everyone in the car was on edge, hoping that they arrived at their destination before the storm did.
Fat raindrops pelted the SUV with a staccato cadence. The wipers barely shoved them aside fast enough for Crow to see the headlight beams.
“Stooooooop!”
Crow’s foot crushed the brake, and the SUV came to a sliding sideways rest across the road.
Gabriella’s sudden cry nearly shriveled Nick’s flesh. He craned his n
eck toward the witch. Her eyes were rolled white in their sockets and her body trembled, but although she spoke and moved, Nick was positive that she was not aware of her actions. She appeared to be dreaming.
Her hand rose, ghostlike, toward the rain-streaked windshield; her index finger pointed past Nick’s head. Lightning crackled and exploded in the direction Gabriella pointed, and Nick got a quick read on the landscape.
“What the thunder . . .” Crow let his voice trail.
Gabriella fell back against the seat, asleep.
“What was that all about? She nearly killed us!” Bustillo’s frightened voice quavered.
“I don’t have a clue.” Nick’s voice was barely audible as he continued staring out the windshield.
“She was warning us,” Crow’s grandfather said quietly.
“About what?” Crow asked.
Jill turned to the old man. “Warning us about what?”
“Danger,” he replied mysteriously.
“Why didn’t she just tell us?” she asked.
“She is still unconscious, but somehow an intuition – I guess you would call it that – by-passed her consciousness and used her body and voice to warn us.” He shrugged. “It’s just an old man’s speculation.”
Jill looked at Gabriella and shivered. “Weird.”
“This is all nonsense!” Bustillo insisted. “Let’s get going before this damn storm really hits, and the road floods or something.”
Crow looked at Nick for assistance. Without explanation, Nick grabbed the MP5K, patted the M9 holster and the extra clips in his jacket pockets, and unsnapped the leather strap on his combat knife sheath.
“I’m going out,” he said simply. “Back the car into that old factory parking lot behind us and wait for me. If I’m not back in an hour, turn around and head back to Columbus.”
“You’re going out there alone?” Jill asked nervously.
“Yeah, she’s got a point,” Crow echoed. “You’ll need my help, of course.”
Nick shook his head. “Not this time. You’re the brains and I’m the field agent, so sit tight.”
Mortal Eclipse Page 29