Thwup twhup thwup
***
Thwup twhup thwup
This time when Cal opened his eyes, the face he saw wasn’t of a young woman, but of a man in his late fifties, his mouth a thin line surrounded by a network of wrinkles.
Wrinkles that screamed authority and experience without saying anything at all.
“Cal?” the man asked. His voice, like his face, was unapologetic.
Cal groaned and somehow managed to shift himself into a seated position.
“Why couldn’t it be Stacey?” he grumbled. He used his palms to push his back against something hard, supportive, and in the process, came to the terrible realization that he couldn’t feel his hands at all.
He raised them and stared in horror at the mangled trails of flesh, the rawness from popped blisters so complete that it was as if his skin had melted.
And this, in turn, reminded him of the rotting children walking out of the water, their hands outstretched, reaching for Chloe.
His breath caught in his throat and he whipped his face around.
“Who are you?” he snapped, trying to scoot backward, forgetting that he was butted up against something hard. “Who the fuck are you?”
The man reached for him then, and Cal swatted his hand away.
“Don’t fucking touch me! Tell me who you are!” his eyes darted. “And where’s Robert?”
The man’s lips tensed.
“Cal, you’re okay… please, you need to calm down.”
With more effort than he thought he had in him, Cal managed to stand only to bang his head on the low roof, forcing him to stoop. His thighs and calves screamed in protest, but he did his best to ignore them.
There were more important matters to attend to than some muscle pain.
“Robert! Where’s Robert?” he demanded. He tried rubbing the back of his head, but the inability to feel his own body was so strange that he stopped immediately.
The man moved backward and held his palms up, the universal gesture for ‘I mean no harm’.
“You need to calm down, Cal. You’re in a helicopter and we’ve just landed.”
T-minus one-hour-twenty to Mooreshead…
Cal shook his head.
“That’s not what I asked—I want to know where Robert is.”
The man hooked a thumb over his shoulder and Cal followed the gesture with his eyes. Robert was still lying on the travois, but now he was on the grass and another man was hovering over him.
“Get away from him!” Cal snapped. He ducked his head and leapt out of the helicopter. His landing was awkward and his weak leg muscles nearly buckled. Somehow, however, he managed to remain on his feet. “Get the fuck away from him!”
“He’s a doctor, Cal,” the man from the helicopter said as he hurried to keep up. “Robert… he’s in some sort of coma.”
“No shit,” Cal spat as he continued toward the man. “Get away!”
The man, a doctor, if what stern-face said was to be believed, leaned away from Robert and stood.
He looked like a doctor, if there was such a thing, but Aiden had also looked like a living, breathing human being.
At first blush, at least.
“My name is Dr. Simon Transky,” the man said with a nod. “And your friend needs some serious help.”
Cal internalized this information, but didn’t stop his forward progress. As he neared, the doctor stepped back from Robert and the travois.
“I don’t want you—” but before he could finish his sentence, Cal’s legs buckled.
At first, he thought he was going to collapse on his fallen friend, crushing his motionless body, but strong arms hooked beneath his armpits and lowered him backward.
The man from the helicopter gently lowered him onto the grass before darkness once again swept over Cal.
His final thought before things went black was something that less than six months ago would have sealed his fate in an insane asylum: Well, at least they’re alive… at least they’re not vengeful apparitions…
Chapter 33
“You can call me Ames,” the man from the helicopter said. “Officially, I am the Director of the FBI Department of Crimes Against Children.”
Cal put the two pills in his mouth—which he suspected were much stronger than Aspirin—and chased them with a mouthful of scalding coffee.
Dr. Ames… where have I heard that name before?
“And unofficially?”
The man frowned.
“We’ll get to that soon enough. My colleague here,” Ames said, gesturing toward the thin man with the white hair seated beside him, “Is Dr. Simon Transky.”
The man smiled at the mention of his name, revealing a row of perfectly straight teeth. It was a smile that almost completely disarmed Cal.
Almost.
“Call me Si.”
Cal didn’t call him anything, he just stared, his eyes darting from the faces of the men to Robert on the travois resting on the table beside them.
One of the perks of being a Director in the FBI, Cal had quickly learned, was the ability to clean out a diner to host a chat, no matter where they were.
Even in somewhere as irrelevant as Mooreshead.
However, based on the way the paint was cracking and peeling near the ceiling, the smashed linoleum tiles at their feet, and the strange smell that was a mixture of backed up sewage and rancid vegetable oil, Cal wasn’t convinced that they actually had to exercise any sort of authority to empty the place out.
Who in their right mind would eat here?
“I get that you’re skeptical—I get that,” Ames continued. “But you need to trust us.”
Cal took another gulp of coffee, rolling the liquid on his tongue to prevent it from burning. It tasted much like he expected from this place, but it had been hours since his last drink.
He figured that so long as he didn’t see what the coffee pot looked like, he would be able to keep it down.
“How do you know who I am? Who Robert is?” he asked, his eyes narrowing.
Ames folded his arms across his chest.
“The Cloak—”
And with that word, Cal realized why he recognized the name Ames. It was the cell phone… Brent Cherry’s cell phone had rung the last time they were all together, and he had passed it to Chloe, telling her that Director Ames needed to speak to her. And hadn’t Chloe said something about a helicopter?
Cal wasn’t sure, but thought he might have overheard her speaking about one.
Director Ames suddenly stood and leaned over the table.
“Cal? You okay? You need—”
Cal shook him off.
“I’m fine. Why did you call Brett and Hugh away? We… we…” needed them, he wanted to say, but his mind was suddenly flooded with images of Chloe as she was pulled backward, rotting fingers probing her mouth and nose, the mangled orifice slowly filling with sea water.
“Fuck,” he said with a shudder. He ground his teeth and turned his head to one side to try to fight back tears.
Ames’s eyes narrowed.
“Where’s the Cloak?” he asked softly.
Cal shook his head, but couldn’t formulate a verbal response. His reaction was evidently sufficient, as Director Ames bowed his head solemnly.
Silence fell over the group, only to be broken a minute or so later by Ames.
“Hugh and Brett had to take care of something else, something important.”
Cal’s eyes shot up.
“What could be more important than this?” he hissed. “What could be more important than Chloe’s life? Than the life of Shelly and Robert’s child? Their lives?”
Dr. Transky leaned forward.
“I can see that you’re upset, but—”
“Oh, you can, can you?” Cal turned and glared at Ames. “Jesus, where did you get this guy? He’s not just a doctor, but a fucking clairvoyant, too.”
Ames wasn’t impressed.
“There’s no time to get into the detail
s, Cal. We all know what’s at stake here.”
Cal’s vision went red.
“You do? Really? You know what’s at stake? Like the lives of my friends, right? Do you have any friends in the field? Out there?”
Something passed in front of Ames face then, something dark that momentarily broke his calm demeanor.
Aiden… he knew Aiden.
Cal slumped back into the worn pleather booth.
Everyone makes a sacrifice, Cal. Everyone.
“Fuck,” he sighed. “I’m sorry.”
Ames pressed his lips together tightly.
“It’s fine. But the truth is, time is almost up. I know that there is something that you need to do in town, as there is something for us to do elsewhere,” Ames looked out the grease smeared window at the sky, which had started to darken. “I don’t think they’ll make it through the night.”
Cal gaped.
“Who won’t make it?”
Director Ames didn’t answer straight away. Instead, he turned to Dr. Transky first.
Cal tried to snap his fingers, but more skin just peeled away with the friction. He swallowed the nausea that followed.
“Who?”
Ames leveled his eyes at Cal.
“Shelly—Shelly and the baby.”
Cal felt his heart skip a beat.
That can’t be… she couldn’t have been more that three months pregnant. No way the baby’s coming this soon. No fucking way.
“What do you mean?”
Ames shook his head.
“No time. We need to go.”
The doctor leaned in and spoke before Cal could interject.
“We’ll take good care of your friend, Cal. I know this is tough to take in, especially after all you’ve been through, but you need to trust us.”
Cal’s eyes drifted to Robert’s pinched expression, his tightly closed eyes.
“No,” he said simply.
“Excuse me?”
Cal looked at Ames then.
“No—you’re not taking him. He’s staying with me.”
For the second time since stepping into the diner, Director Ames’s face twisted.
“We’re on your side, Cal. And Robert needs—”
“What Robert needs is to be with me,” Cal said flatly. “And with me he’ll stay.”
They locked eyes, and eventually Ames broke the stare and turned to the doctor.
Dr. Transky shrugged.
“It probably won’t make much of a difference,” he said, “Robert’s in a deep coma.”
Ames nodded and then stood.
“We’ll help you get him outside, but then we need to go.”
Cal shook his head and then flexed his raw fingers.
“No, I’ll do it. You just get to where you need to be,” he said with contempt.
And then, without so much as a nod or a hand shake, Dr. Si Transky and FBI Director Ames left the diner.
Cal watched as they jumped into the helicopter and then, seconds later, they were airborne.
He waited until the helicopter was but a speck in the sky before letting out an exasperated, “ahhhhhhhh” and allowing himself to shake his agonizing hands.
It took him twenty minutes to slide Robert off the table, and ten more to work the travois through the narrow space between the booths and get him outside. By that time, however, whatever drugs Si had given him had started to take effect, and the pain that seemed to coat his body like a thin layer of sweat started to subside.
His eyes drifted upward, confirming that night would soon be upon them. Which night—as in the night after he had slept on the beach, or any of the night subsequent to that horrible moment—Cal had no way of knowing.
His gaze shifted to the diner next, and he was shocked to realize that he knew the place.
Not in its present, dilapidated state, surely, but back when he had been a kid.
He and Brent and Stacey had visited here to have chocolate milkshakes when they had been pre-teens.
As had Hank…
Cal shook his head, fighting the deluge of emotions that threatened to follow.
Back in Mooreshead after all this time, after I vowed never to return.
Deep down, though, despite his words, a part of Cal knew that he would come back. Only back then, he thought his return would be for Stacy, not for a strange man in the library.
Not for the man that Chloe had called the Curator. Not with all this pressure on him, pressure for him to do god only knows what.
Please Robert, you have to wake up. I’m not cut out for this shit.
His eyes fell on Robert’s face, which had once again gone flaccid.
Wake the fuck up, Robert. Please.
Chapter 34
Like the diner, Mooreshead library was in dire straights. In fact, the entire city appeared to have undergone a change for the worst over the two decades or so since Cal had lived there.
Store fronts that he had once avoided when skipping school because of the housewives and homemakers that shopped there during the day had been reduced to graffiti covered, boarded up shops.
It was sad, but Cal was also grateful.
After all, he was a haggard looking man dragging a travois upon which lay what, to the outside observer, appeared to be a corpse through the center of town.
If someone saw him, let alone stopped him, Cal would have no idea how to explain what had happened, what had brought him to this point. In fact, if he was approached at all, Cal expected that he would shortly thereafter be sporting a tight-fitting white jacket that buckled in the front sitting in the center of a room made of airbags.
And his doctor wouldn’t be the charming Si Transky with his straight teeth, but a man whose life choices could have just as easily rendered him a sadistic serial killer as a doctor, sporting a needle the size of a Louisville Slugger poised at the ready. A needle that he would just be itching to inject at the mere mention of the Marrow, let alone dead people coming back to life, about gates of Hell that needed to be closed, about a book that he had written decades ago describing a network of tunnels buried deep within the earth that he had neither heard nor seen in his entire life.
The Leporidae burrow is long and deep…
A shudder ran through him as he made his way up the library steps, trying not to smash the back of Robert’s head on each one.
Back when Cal had visited the library in his youth, it had been a deteriorating old building. Now it looked like a building that had already crumbled, leaving only a shell in its wake.
Cal reached for the large wooden door, intent on knocking loudly or calling for the man… for Seth Parsons, the Curator… but when his hand grazed the rough, rotting surface, it swung open.
The air inside the library was stale and stagnant, like a soup warmed and then left to cool in the sink. That’s what it felt like to Cal: breathing in old, thin soup full of alphabet memories.
“Jesus,” he muttered, pulling the collar of his shirt up to cover his nose and mouth. This didn’t smell much better; he couldn’t remember the last time he changed, let alone showered. Still, the familiarity of his own funk was eons better than the library air.
As the light had since faded outside, it only took a moment for Cal’s eyes to adjust to the dark interior. Swatting dust motes from in front of his face, he drew in a deep breath and uttered a tentative, “Hello?”
The echo that came back at him was so loud that Cal instinctively dropped the travois and covered his ears until it passed.
After it died, but while his ears were still ringing, he turned to look at Robert with the faint hope that the sound had awoken him.
It hadn’t.
Loud enough to wake the dead, he thought incomprehensibly.
Cal dragged Robert completely inside the library, then set him down again, gently this time. He tried to close the door behind him, but the hinges were oddly devoid of rust, which made it swing freely. Too freely. The latch was also broken, dangling uselessly from sheared metal threa
ds. The door remained ajar, which wasn’t ideal, but what choice did he have? He was simply too exhausted to lug Robert around with him anymore.
Cal turned to the interior of the library, and he scanned the space for anything familiar. The desks were still there, but the green lamps were long gone and their surfaces, once lacquered and glossy enough to fix a cowlick in, were worn and cracked.
The librarian’s desk was completely missing, the rivets that had once held it in place ripped from their sockets.
Although the wooden shelves that lined the walls were still present, the ladder used to navigate along them was not.
But that wasn’t the only thing that was missing.
Cal felt his heart sink.
He couldn’t see a single book—the shelves were completely empty.
“No,” Cal moaned. With labored steps, he made his way over to the bookshelf, leaning down as he did.
This was the spot, the place where I put my book. The one with the green cover. The one with the diagrams inside.
But there was nothing there. Deep down, he knew that this shouldn’t have come as a surprise, that he should have even expected this given the state of the diner that Ames had taken him to, but it still rocked him to his core.
Coming here, to the library, to find his book, had been his only hope.
And now that that was dashed, frustration overwhelmed him.
Cal slammed his fists down on the wooden shelf in fury and swore loudly.
Regret immediately usurped exasperation, and not only because of the pain that shot up his wrists.
Whatever Dr. Transky had given him, it wasn’t just an analgesic; his hands seemed to swirl upon impact, giving off strange colorful, red and yellow and orange puffs like a superhero in a comic book.
Cal shook his head, trying to clear it, and stood, his eyes scanning the bookshelves a final time for his volume.
Chloe couldn’t be wrong… this has to be the place… the Curator has to be here… my book has to be here.
Only neither of those things was present.
The library, like the entire town of Mooreshead, was empty, deserted.
Shores of the Marrow (The Haunted Book 6) Page 12