Hired Killer (Cryptid Assassin Book 1)

by Michael Anderle

  "I’m curious." He laughed despite the slightly offensive edge to the statement. "Exactly how far do you think you can throw me?"

  "That depends. I'm fairly good with my Judo so I could probably throw you a short distance with a flip, but that's not the point. Or, rather, it is the point. I don't trust you to get the job done without any problems and I'm here to make sure that the problems are kept to a minimum. Understood?"

  He stared at her for a moment, then shrugged. "Whatever the hell makes you feel better, Special Agent. So, why the hell am I out here?"

  "Well, I take it you know a thing or two about the Okefenokee Swamp?" she asked and gestured widely with her arm.

  "Well, call me Gator McKlusky and put me on an airboat and I think we might have a Gator sequel. With that said, I can't think of a single reason why Burt Reynolds would choose to return to this insect-infested shithole. I know I wouldn’t."

  "Gator was a sequel, dumbass." She rolled her eyes.

  "I know, but it's the better known of the two films," he retorted.

  "And there weren't any airboats in Gator anyway," she continued. "They used speedboats for the whole damn film. How did you miss that shit?"

  "Thanks, Rain Woman.” He snorted. "My point was that if I were to be Gator McKlusky in any possible sequels, we would use airboats because seriously, how kickass would that be?"

  She rolled her eyes again. "You're impossible. Anyway, do you want to know why we are in the infamous swamp?"

  "Well, on the outskirts is more accurate, which is better than in. Because I have to tell you, while the Zoo is the number one place I want to avoid, marshy swamps infested with insects and alligators is a not all that distant second."

  "Well, I hate to break it to you, but the chances are that you will have to head into the swamp to find the monster we're looking for." The agent tried and failed to hide the glee in her voice. "But that's neither here nor there."

  "What do you have? And why are we doing this out in the open instead of in an office, preferably with air-conditioning?"

  "Well, unfortunately, there wasn't any time to establish any headquarters in the area. Not that it would be necessary since we don't expect to be here for too long. Should you die in the line of duty, though, be assured that the next man would be greeted in an air-conditioned office."

  "The lucky bastard." He retrieved his sunglasses from his pocket and slid them on. "This heat is the fucking worst. Why do people live around here, anyway?"

  "You got me there but we're not here to judge a civilization's choices," she responded dismissively. "As for what we have… Well, it's an interesting one, to say the least."

  Taylor moved with her to look at the papers and pictures she laid out on the still-warm hood of the SUV. It seemed odd that she had elected to run this operation on paper instead of electronically. She didn’t come across as the type who liked to waste time with piles of paper. It seemed out of character, but maybe she did it simply to irritate him. That wasn’t impossible and it did make sense, at least to some degree, but he did have to admit that there was something settling and official about having the actual paperwork in his hands way out in the middle of nowhere when he once again prepared to put his life on the line.

  That wasn't to say it wasn't an antiquated way of doing business, of course. It merely made him feel a little better in the present circumstances.

  "Not too long ago, they originally ran tests on the goop that was pulled out of the Zoo in a couple of labs in this area," Banks explained. "They chose the swamp area mostly because of the lack of human inhabitants. As you can imagine, as more shit started going down in the Zoo itself, the people in charge realized that having goop tested in a dense biome like this one was inviting disaster, so the labs were closed and their test subjects moved out."

  He picked up some of the paperwork on the transfers. It had been done quickly and all three labs were closed and moved out of the area in the space of three days. Obviously, they had taken the possibility of a threat very seriously and acted without delay. He didn't blame them, quite honestly.

  "Anyway, since news began to spread—both about what was happening in the Zoo as well as the fact that there were labs in the area—people started to report sightings of monsters. There were even viral videos of the creatures seen and pursued," Banks continued. "They were all eventually proven to be fakes and that's where the task force closed the file."

  "Let me guess," he interrupted and selected one of the files that had a name attached. "That all changed when bodies appeared."

  "Give the man a cookie," Banks said with a small grin. "Anyway, the whole problem started when bodies were found floating in the swamp by some trawlers. They pulled them out and called the cops. There was a ton of press around the discovery of the two dead girls, who were torn to pieces in a manner that indicated that it wasn't done by the local alligators."

  "They don't leave the whole bodies like this," he concurred. "They like to tear their food up. You'd find pieces, if that."

  "That's what the locals thought too. The assumption was that they were murdered and the killer dumped the bodies in the swamp, but that argument lost weight when more bodies were found."

  "How many in total?" he asked as he sifted through the images.

  "Including the first two, a total of seven. Those that were found, anyway. People were quick to remember the closed labs and more conspiracy theories came in hot and fast until my bosses decided it needed to come to my attention."

  "And you decided it needed to come to my attention." He rubbed his temples to ease the first signs of pre-battle stress that always manifested before a mission. Thankfully, his mind, body, and emotions had long since learned to work in tandem to push him beyond that.

  "The last body was found within the last two days—when I called you, actually. I know you might think I'm yanking your chain with a job like this but honestly, the folks upstairs simply want an end to the bodies. There’s nothing too complicated about that."

  Taylor nodded. "I get that. And you yanking my chain is kind of expected at this point."

  She smirked but he was already too immersed in the information to challenge her.

  "Anyway," he continued. "If the last body was found so recently, I assume there's still a crime scene for us to work with?"

  "You bet." She nodded to indicate a dirt trail heading deeper into the swamp.

  They both climbed into the SUV and proceeded down the trail until they reached an area that was still cordoned off with police tape.

  "The best part about it is that the local cops were so terrified of being attacked by the monster that they left the crime scene almost completely intact," she said. "They brought the body out and left everything the way they found it."

  "I guess that's why they didn't have too many pictures." He studied area with narrowed eyes. The ground was still more or less solid around them, which meant they were still far enough away from the swamp to rule out a water-dwelling creature like an alligator.

  "Something like that."

  Taylor shook his head. "Something's wrong."

  "You mean aside from the fact that a woman was found dead here?"

  "Yeah—I mean, no…there's something about this that doesn't add up." He scowled as he tried to access the instinct that pushed for clarity. "I need to look around more. Do you mind giving me a ride back? I'll feel more comfortable doing my investigation in the suit I brought along."

  "Sure thing." At least, he acknowledged as they began the return trip to his vehicle, the woman didn’t argue when it came to the actual live or die crap.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  "Niki said you thought there was something wrong about all this," Desk said in his HUD. Her sudden appearance didn’t startle him as much as it had done the first time, but it did remind him that he’d never actually tried to find out how she’d hacked his comms in the first place. Clearly, she had skills no one wanted to talk about, but it wasn’t really surprising given who she work
ed for. Now, she’d done it again with a different suit and honestly, if he wasn’t the victim, he’d have been impressed at her hacking abilities. That aside, it still rankled but he shelved it for a later argument, preferably when he wasn’t potentially facing alligators at best and weird Zoo-mutated alligator-nightmares at worst. He merely scowled and ducked under the police line to examine the crime scene more closely.

  "I also said I wasn't sure about what might be wrong. There’s something lurking in the back of my brain that won’t let go."

  "Do you want to talk about it?" she asked. "I've heard that simply talking about something in the back of one's mind could help to get to the bottom of it."

  He shrugged. Banks had elected not to return to the crime scene herself and had simply said he could take it from there, although she would be nearby in case he needed her help, whether he knew it or not.

  It obviously meant that Desk would let her know if he broke any rules and if he did, she would head in before too long, but he honestly didn't care. Desk did seem to have at least some of his best interests at heart and while he didn't trust her, there was the beginning of something he liked to think might be mutual respect between them that would at least allow them to work together—at least for one more mission until he decided whether she was a help or a hindrance. And found some kind of closure on the sense of invasion her uninvited participation stirred within him.

  He tinkered with some of the manual controls on his new suit. Bobby had helped to load them when he realized Taylor had to go hunting again, and they had spent a couple more hours in the evening to hammer out the kinks. There was still a fair number of things that could go wrong, but they had managed to get to it work at a satisfactory capacity.

  Eventually, they had decided that the reduced coordination meant an assault rifle probably wasn't a good idea, which led them to choose the automatic shotgun he had in his small arsenal instead. The sidearm was still the same, although he had one extra, and he’d also added a short machete that could be used if he ran out of ammo, thanks to the smaller storage space of the smaller suit. It occurred to him that he should look into melee weapons that included some kind of spike that might be useful for penetrating hardened carapaces.

  "Like I said, I'm not sure." He continued to fiddle with the controls on his suit. "But…something's wrong. It doesn't fit. Like the beastie we ran into in DC—"

  "Virginia, technically," Desk interrupted.

  "In Virginia then." He pushed the surge of irritation aside in favor of mission focus. "That monster looked like it had assimilated the DNA of the creatures it had killed so it continued to grow and adapt. I didn’t see evidence of human DNA, although the eyes were weird—like it could…uh, see with some degree of human appraisal, which might have been human DNA. That aside, it looked like it randomized its own DNA if that makes sense. There was a rhyme and a reason behind the killing and for some reason, it stayed away from where it could have found a group of humans it would have had no issue with killing."

  "And you see something different here?"

  "Right. And that's not necessarily all that weird. The goop has been anything but predictable but again, you kind of always feel like there's a reason behind what it does, even if the reason is only to tear you about three or four new ones."

  "Gross, but go on," she muttered.

  Taylor narrowed his eyes but shrugged the comment that sprang to his mind away for the moment. "The bodies from the pictures… I don't know how to explain it without sounding like a fucking psycho."

  "Well, I'm well aware of your psychological issues, so why don't you simply go ahead and say it?"

  "It's like the bodies were played with." He shook his head, his mind rebelling about the possible implications even without voicing them. "Pieces were missing but never the same ones. It seemed random and…well, experimental or without reason. Merely…killing."

  He moved around the crime scene, approached the place from which the body had been removed, and tilted his head to study it from different angles. "The blood splatter's wrong."

  "What?" she asked, her tone bewildered.

  "Take it from someone who’s seen enough of it to know a thing or two about it." He dropped to his haunches near where the blood still stained the ground. "The blood splatter is wrong. It’s off. The spray is random and in smaller amounts than it should be."

  "What does that mean?"

  "The blood was spilled over the body after the fact. And that means she was killed elsewhere and the body was dumped here and made to look like it had been savaged at this location, where it would be found."

  "Do…Zoo animals do that?" Desk asked tentatively. She sounded more like she was giving him the benefit of the doubt than actually buying his explanation. Again, he suppressed his irritation.

  "Okay, anything's possible when it comes to the Zoo." He shrugged and the suit overreacted to his movement and pushed him to his feet. "But no. No, they don't."

  He focused his HUD's view on the area near where the body was found and sure enough, the signs of it being dragged through the mud and underbrush were there. Admittedly, they weren’t too obvious, but they were definitely present. Someone knew how to cover their tracks, he thought, and the Zoo didn't do that. Not usually, anyway. It liked to clean up but never played hide the body. That was a very particular human trait.

  He moved out from the cordoned-off area and deeper into the swamp, following the trail that had been carefully hidden. Eventually, whatever—or whoever—it had been would decide it was in the clear and stop hiding its trail. Or slip up and get lazy, which worked as well for his purposes.

  Sure enough, as his surroundings transitioned into an area that had more clay, boot prints could be seen heading toward where a large amount of water had gathered.

  "Fuck me," Taylor muttered and hissed a breath.

  "What did you find?"

  "Either Zoo animals now use boots, or there was a human involved in moving that body." He proceeded to move slowly through the marsh and needed to turn up the hydraulic help from his suit to be able to move through the slushy terrain and follow the tracks toward the body of water he’d noticed.

  They disappeared at that point but there couldn't be too many places for the person to go. There was no place to park a boat. The marshes were too high to allow for an airboat to move through them and too thick for any other kind of vessel. Given that the body had been delivered on foot, there couldn’t be too many options for a human to hide in the area.

  Taylor moved around the marsh and pushed toward firmer ground. He scowled when two alligators eased from the water and began to trail him.

  "Yeah, you see something packing this kind of hard outer shell and you think it makes for good eating?" He pulled the shotgun from his back and fired two rounds, which startled a flock of birds that flew up from where they had perched in the nearby trees. "Fuck off!"

  The rounds had been fired high enough to not harm the prehistoric beasts, but they got the idea that this particular morsel would not provide an easy self-delivered lunch and backed away slowly.

  Of course, he might have alerted his quarry that someone with a gun was on their trail, but he had to take that chance. He didn't exactly have the time to waste in a fistfight with the creatures.

  Moving around the marshes gave him a better view of his surroundings, especially when he pushed toward where the larger trees made for firmer ground. The area he had wandered around in had been the thickest of the marshes. Circling the still water brought him to more open water.

  The kind of open water that would allow a boat to move in. But, when he reached a higher location, he realized it was a land-locked lake from which water flowed out through narrow, shallow streams toward the larger marshlands, but this one was fairly isolated.

  More importantly, though, he located a small cabin built on slats that kept it above the water and likely the alligators that infested the area.

  "Seriously?" Taylor muttered in disbelief. "Who the
hell would make the conscious decision to live here?"

  "The kind of person who likes to dismember women with considerable privacy?" Desk suggested. He wondered if her expression was as deadpan as her tone implied.

  "You make a good point." He shook the water and mud from his suit and started toward the cabin. It was still the middle of the afternoon and the heat could practically be seen shimmering from the overly humid landscape. He sweated copiously but the new suit was far less claustrophobic than his old one, and he had adjusted to worse heat and humidity in the Zoo.

  He approached the cabin cautiously and kept his ear and eye tuned for any movement from inside or the area surrounding it. It wasn't only a cabin, he realized as he moved closer. The abode itself was mounted on the slats above the water, which led to a small jetty where a boat was tethered, but there was a smaller shed built where the land looked like it was a little firmer.

  His careful scrutiny identified a driveway and tracks in the mud around it but no car anywhere nearby, which allowed him to assume with some confidence that the location was currently empty.

  The tracks were fresh enough to tell him that whoever spent time there hadn't left that long before and would probably return soon. It seemed a logical deduction and better than the alternative that they merely liked to waste gasoline in the generator he could hear buzzing behind the cabin.

  "I have a bad feeling about this," Desk said.

  "How bad a feeling?"

  "The serial killer kind."

  "Well, we can't simply make assumptions like that these days." He felt he had to say that, even though he shared the premonition. "It could be they are enthusiastic fishermen in the area and headed off to get more tackle or whatever it is that they need."

  "Haven't you ever gone fishing?" she asked.

  "Have you?"

  "No, but that's not the point," she grumbled.