by Martin, Indi
“Yeah, but who are you?”
Victor smiled but didn't answer. Keeping his eyes lowered, he turned again and walked back to the table, obscuring it from her view.
“A fucking mosquito,” spat Parker in a low voice Gina could barely hear. She saw Victor wince, even though he was quite out of earshot.
“Somebody wanna brief me on what's going on? What happened? And why the feds are here?” she begged, feeling more disoriented than ever. “Please?”
19
The dark figure walked slowly, treasuring each step, silhouetted against the firelight as he emerged from the smoldering building. The air was thick with smoke, but the acrid fumes felt wonderful to his burning lungs; he inhaled deeply and grinned.
Sirens and lights were approaching. His smile widened and he stretched his arms out wide to greet them.
20
“So, then, why are we here instead of back on the scene?” Harwood frowned.
Parker frowned, too. “I need Yori. He's been through this before. Without him, I'll have to research to see what happens next. That could take hours, or days. So we wait for Yori.” She looked like the confession was paining her tremendously. “I don't know what we do now.”
“Hanagawa's dead.” Snyder could taste iron – his lip was bleeding from where he'd been biting it. “You need to accept that. He's dead. Move on.”
“Well, yes, I know that,” admitted Parker. “We still need to wait for him.”
Morgan felt on the verge of collapse from confusion. “WAIT FOR WHAT?!” he yelled. Something clattered to the ground across the room; the three lab-coats froze and looked at him, accusingly. Gina flinched and stared at the ground, holding her head.
Parker had her hands on her hips and was glaring at him. “I called this. I knew you couldn't handle this shit. You can leave, you know, anytime you want to. Just walk out and don't look back.”
Taken aback, Morgan remained silent.
“It's not that you don't understand, Detective Morgan Snyder, it's that you don't want to understand. Go back home, where everything you see looks ordered and easy. We'll deal with all the really scary shit so you don't have to even know it exists,” she continued in clipped tones. “Gang homicides – oh no!” she clapped her hands to her cheeks in mock-fright. “Affairs gone wrong! Crimes of passion! So dangerous!” Parker lifted her upper lip in distaste. “I don't even know why you came in the first place.”
Morgan searched for words, but Harwood came to his rescue. “He did come, though,” she said, carefully. “That counts for something. We just want to understand, and help. I don't understand what's happening either.”
“Really?” snapped Parker, still staring directly at Morgan. “You just want to help, huh?”
“I want to understand,” he clarified. “Then I'll decide if I should be helping or not.”
“Lay off him, Charlie, he's had a rough day, too.”
Morgan's head snapped to the side so hard he felt a tendon catch, and he grabbed his neck with a gasp of pain. Yori Hanagawa slunk forward, buttoning up a new shirt. He didn't look well, but Morgan supposed a bullet through the body would do that to just about anyone. Slack-jawed, he gaped as the smaller, Asian man walked forward, slightly hunched over, to complete the circle.
“You... you're...” he stammered, feeling lightheaded and unable to finish the sentence.
“Dead, yes,” answered Hanagawa with a sad chuckle. “Trust me, I know.” He rolled up the sleeves to his elbows and examined his arms. “So, where are we?”
“In a barn,” whispered Gina.
“That's not what he means,” corrected Parker, but more softly. Morgan noticed that even she looked slightly uneasy, keeping her distance from Hanagawa. “It's on the loose, we don't know where. Locals got called in for the fire. They just arrived a few minutes ago.”
“Who reported it?”
There was an uncomfortable silence. Morgan saw Chaz shrink back against the wall. The movement wasn't lost on Hanagawa.
“Ah. And why didn't we call them off?”
“We tried,” asserted Parker, glancing apologetically at Chaz.
Hanagawa sighed. “Okay, so they're on the scene. And?”
“Radio's gone dead.”
“Ours or theirs?”
Parker grimaced. “Theirs.”
“Good.” Hanagawa stopped. “Well, bad for them. Good for us. At least no one else should be coming along for a while. How's the boy?”
Morgan furrowed his brow. 'Which boy?' he wondered, realizing he'd lost sight of Chaz. Looking around the small room, the kid was nowhere to be seen. He frowned.
“Stable. Conscious. That...” she took a breath. “Victor... calmed him down...” Parker looked away in disgust.
“Racism doesn't become you, Charlie.” Hanagawa sounded exhausted.
Morgan's head reeled. 'How can a dead man be tired?' he wondered, but then shook his head. He was obviously losing his sanity, he decided. That made the most sense.
Harwood looked much calmer as she quietly observed the conversation. Morgan wondered if she'd come to the same conclusion, and made peace with it already. Shared hallucination? It could happen, he thought.
“It was a bad bite, but he's stable now,” she reworded, pursing her lips.
Hanagawa nodded. “Good. We need to bring him with us.”
“Why?” asked Harwood. Morgan and the others all looked at her, surprised to hear her chime in.
Hanagawa tilted his head, seeming to consider her. “Because if Jake's still around, we need someone who's close to him.”
Morgan didn't even bother asking how Jake could possibly still be around. Considering recent developments, he really didn't want to know.
⇼ ⇼ ⇼ ⇼ ⇼
On the way back to the scene, Parker attempted to explain why it wasn't a bad thing to return to the scene at all, contrary to both Gina's internal concerns and Snyder's very vocal ones.
“It looks less strange to have the FBI show up after a scene rather than possibly as the cause of one, don't you think? Especially now that there are locals.”
“You aren't FBI,” Snyder commented drily.
She shot him a look in the rear view mirror. “That doesn't matter. We have enough contacts high enough in the Bureau that we can be 'called in' wherever we wish to be. Necessary for the job.”
“So, what do we do when we get there? Tell the locals to scram?” Gina looked worriedly at Snyder; she had never seen him so confrontational before. That was usually her job. “Somehow I don't think they'll buy it, especially with a fucked-up twenty-something in the back of our van.” He jerked his head back at Marcus, whose vision still looked hazy.
“He's fine,” she snapped back.
“Really?” Snyder clicked off his seat belt and leaned over the seat to the back, placing his face directly in front of Marcus. Chaz watched him warily. “Hello, Marcus!” he yelled. “You in there? Knock, knock! Anybody home?”
Marcus sniffled, but otherwise provided no response.
Snyder sat back in his seat. “Yeah, he looks fine to me,” he finished in a wry tone. Gina placed a warning hand on his shoulder. He looked at it, then at her, surprised.
“He'll come around,” Parker responded, sounding unconcerned. “Your partner did, didn't she? No worries. The technician,” she spat the title and glared at Yori, who had been sitting silently in the front passenger seat. “...knows what he's doing.”
Yori flashed her a wide smile, but then turned back to the road and closed his eyes, remaining silent.
“When he does, I need you two to calm him down. He knows you. He doesn't know us.”
“We don't either,” muttered Snyder, and Gina threw him another warning look.
“Okay,” replied Gina, turning back to the red-headed, miserable-looking boy who was sitting next to Marcus in the very back. “Your name was...?”
Misery vanished, and he grinned a toothy smile at her. “Chaz.”
“Chaz, right, sorry. Bad mem
ory.” Gina tapped her temple. “Want to switch me places? I don't mind crouching in the back, and that way I'm the first thing he sees when he...” she glanced at him and considered her words. “...comes around.”
“Sure,” shrugged Chaz, climbing up over the seat and squeezing between the two detectives. Gina glanced once more at Snyder, who still had dark clouds hovering over his head, and crawled over the partition.
“Anything I can do to speed this up?” she called out to the front.
“Nope,” replied Parker. “It's up to him.”
⇼ ⇼ ⇼ ⇼ ⇼
Unbeknownst to the rest of the vehicle's inhabitants, Marcus was vaguely aware of his surroundings. He just wasn't sure he cared. His vision seemed to flip between the interior of the SUV, the horrible black-eyed dogs at the farmhouse, his last view of Jake stiltedly walking into the building, and silver eyes boring into his skull, but none of them had the hyperventilating fear he'd felt before. It was as though he were unable to feel...anything, really. Remembering those eyes bothered him the most. They were like a morphine drip, reaching into his mind and dampening the effects of his emotions and thought processes. Or more like a chloroform rag slowly being pressed onto his brain.
Vaguely, he heard Detective Harwood's voice crooning to him. It reminded him uncomfortably of that lower, male voice, the painkiller. Except she wasn't terribly good at it. She sounded impatient. He smiled.
“You didn't come,” he heard himself whisper.
A crushing silence enveloped the car.
“Yes, we did,” argued Gina, but her voice was hushed and Marcus heard a hint of shame in it. He turned to her and blinked away the other visions, concentrating on her face.
“Not soon enough,” he sighed, feeling his lips tremble. Oddly, he felt almost happy at the sadness that threatened to overwhelm him; he had been worried his emotions were gone for good.
“We... we didn't know...” she broke eye contact to look to her partner for help. The other recognizable face was looking intently at the headrest. Marcus tried to remember his name, but failed. The man glanced up and held Marcus' eyes for a moment before turning back around to face the front.
Detective Harwood sighed. “We are going to try to find Jake,” she said, carefully.
Marcus' frown disappeared. “He's still alive?” he gasped, scooting closer to her but then reeling from sudden pain in his leg. He looked down and saw thick white bandages wrapped around his ankle. He must have looked confused, because the detective rushed to explain.
“Your leg, it was hurt when they found you, bitten,” she said quickly, the words tumbling over each other. “Needs to stay wrapped.” She took a deep breath. “As for Jake, we don't know... we're just going to look, okay?”
Marcus cracked his neck to the left, which felt good and terrible all at once. He looked around the car, as though seeing it for the first time. “Who are all these people?” he wondered aloud.
Detective Harwood scowled, but Marcus quickly realized, not at him. “They're...” she sighed heavily. “FBI. They're here to help, too.”
The other detective made an odd sort of snort, but Marcus couldn't see his face.
“Marcus, is it? Good, you're awake!” A compact Asian man called out to him from the front seat, craning around to see him. He smiled strangely, thought Marcus. He couldn't put his finger on it, but it was strange all the same.
Marcus didn't figure the man required an answer, but he nodded vaguely.
“Listen, you're very important here,” the man continued. “If we do find Jake, he may be in a sort of state, like a trance, kind of like the one you were in. Do you know what I'm talking about?”
Marcus didn't have a clue, but he nodded again.
“Excellent! It's extremely important that if we find him, that you do your best to make him recognize you, okay? Think of things you two did together that might...” he paused, appearing to struggle for words. “...might bring him back. Might help him remember who you are. Can you do that?”
“Yeah, sure,” he replied. “Whatever.”
“Shit,” swore the driver. Marcus craned his neck to see what she was swearing at, and froze. The car pulled into the little trail – he was all too familiar with this pathway. Fires had sprung up in several places, and flashing lights cast red and blue colors across the SUV's windows. Marcus plastered himself to the window to try to peer through the tinted glance, but then recoiled; he saw several bodies, uniformed cops lying broken and bleeding hyper-colored blood into the mud. The flashing lights made the liquid look black, then ultra-red, then a purplish color, then black again. Their eyes were wide and staring.
“What the fuck!” he heard himself cry out. “There weren't cops here before!”
The red-headed guy in front of him let out a sort of cry, and clapped his hands over his face. “Oh, man,” he said. “Aw, oh, man. I'm so sorry.”
No one else seemed to notice, or if they did, they didn't seem to care. Marcus winced from a sudden blast of pain up his leg.
The SUV parked beside an overturned cop car and, Marcus noticed uneasily, right behind Jake's Camry. “Let's go,” ordered the Asian man. Marcus looked at Detective Harwood for help, silently begging her not to make him get out of the car. She held his gaze for just a moment, her face struggling to decide on an expression. The back door opened and Marcus felt hands pulling him out of the car and steadying him on his legs.
“You saw it before, can you feel it now?” Marcus swiveled his head to look at the speaker, a beautiful and sad-looking blonde woman staring intently at Detective Harwood.
Confused, Marcus turned back to the detective, who was holding her head and looked about to pass out. She nodded and squeezed her eyes shut. “It's close.”
⇼ ⇼ ⇼ ⇼ ⇼
His reservations about returning to the scene still knocked around at the back of his mind, but they were completely eclipsed by concern. Gina was kneeling in the mud, only a few feet away from a grotesquely broken body; it looked to Morgan like something had bent the firefighter in half, backwards; ribs had broken through the skin and opened to the sky like some gruesome flower in blossom. Her eyes were open but glazed, and though looking in the direction of the ex-fireman, he didn't think she was really seeing him.
“See you at the big one,” he muttered to the corpse apologetically, before kneeling beside his partner, flinching slightly at the cold squelch of the mud seeping into his pant leg. “Gina,” he said softly, hesitating before placing a hand on her thigh.
“Shhh,” she responded. “I'm listening.”
Morgan looked around. Hanagawa and Parker were watching her intently. Chaz was holding up Marcus, who was staring straight up into the sky, looking like he'd rather be anywhere else in the world but here. “Listening to what, Gina?”
“Let her be, Detective,” commented Hanagawa. “She's not cracking up, I promise.”
Morgan bit his tongue.
“I think...god, I don't know, I think it's still here,” she intoned quietly. Morgan snapped his attention back to her, and the two suits inched closer. “In the barn. Yes, in the barn. It hasn't left.” Gina looked up at them. “My head's going to split in two, I can't do anymore. I'm sorry.” Morgan looked down, startled, at her hand covering his. “I'm okay,” she whispered, removing his hand from her leg and standing up, wobbling slightly. One hand fluttered near her temple.
Parker smiled triumphantly, and Hanagawa frowned, thoughtful. “Chaz, bring Marcus. Morgan, bring Gina – she may tell you she's fine, but she's weaker than she thinks right now.” He turned to face the flames. “Charlie... I'm sorry to ask, but we need to get in there.”
Parker's face looked fearful.
“It's big, can you do it?” Hanagawa's hand hovered near her elbow, but it didn't quite make contact.
“Yeah, okay,” replied Parker with a heavy sigh, looking away. Morgan watched as she walked toward the burning building.
“What...” he started, but then she walked into the flames. Morgan
burst forward before Hanagawa raised an arm to stop him. He instinctively recoiled from the man's touch and stopped in his tracks. Hanagawa brought his index finger up to his lips in a “shhhh” gesture, and jerked his head behind Morgan, who turned to see Gina wobbling on her feet. He jumped back over and steadied her by the shoulders.
There was a sound like the rushing of wind and a pop, and the flames licking at the building were extinguished entirely. Morgan gaped. One moment the building was smoldering, burning – and the next second, only a thin hiss of smoke. “Quick,” ordered Hanagawa, jogging forward without waiting to ensure he was being followed. Chaz dragged Marcus along, one arm over his shoulders, tilting slightly to keep the bitten ankle out of the mud, and they hopped along toward the building. Watching them go, Morgan suspected the look on Marcus' face was very similar to his own.
“You okay to walk?” he asked. Harwood nodded tiredly. Morgan steered her toward the SUV.
It took a moment for her to notice they were walking away from the building, where the other members were disappearing. “What are you doing?” she hissed, ripping away from his grasp and stumbling toward the others. She lost her footing and fell on all fours in the mud. “We have to help!”
“I signed on to this to make sure you weren't getting yourself killed,” snapped Morgan.
“Then help me get in there so we don't all get killed,” she snapped back, but her voice was too exhausted to hold much rancor.
Morgan picked her up off the ground and helped her to a standing position. “You're trashed, Harwood. Better to stay here.”
She whipped her head around and her eyes flashed red. “Get me in there,” she threatened, leaving the threat unsaid. Morgan grimaced and shook his head.
Harwood stared at him for a moment, shocked. “Go home, Snyder,” she said, turning away from him and making her way toward the factory, stepping cautiously, off-balance.