It must have been some sort of blast door it was so thick. An armed guard was waiting for them right inside. Dolph and the man said nothing to each other and the guard turned and began walking quickly. Nick struggled to keep up without running as they both had long strides, the guard looking like he hovered somewhere around seven feet tall. There were several doors to their left; some of the small offices had windows, and some of those offices had men or women with headphones sitting in front of computers. Nick wondered what they were doing. This whole place was a mystery so far as he was concerned.
Eventually, they came to a security door. The guard waved a card in front of a reader and there was a click before he pushed the door open. They went down a long flight of unlit stairs and Nick lost sight of the two men ahead of him when the door swung shut. He held onto the rail as he descended, hoping they wouldn’t stop suddenly and he crashed into them before his eyes could adjust. It smelled like old oil and metal down here. A light flickered on before he reached the bottom. They were in a small, rectangular room with two concrete walls and a glass one. A security guard who could have been a twin of the first by his lack of facial expression stood on the other side. Their guard gave some sort of complex wave to the other one, too quick for Nick to really catch.
Something overhead made a loud, metallic ca-chink sound and Nick looked up in time to see the twin gun turret turn away from them.
Whatever this place was, it was seriously secure.
It felt about ten degrees hotter in here and he didn’t think it was because of his nerves. He thought he could feel the thick oil smell permeate his skin. A glass door on the other side of the room swung inward. Nick followed the two men and glanced over his shoulder at the second guard. The man hadn’t blinked or even moved the entire time.
They went down some more steps, this time lit from overhead, and the guard swiped his badge one last time. The door slid open and they stepped into a small room with an overhead light. The door shut and Nick wondered what was next.
Then the small room began to descend.
Elevator, Nick thought, trying to coax his stomach out of his chest. Just an elevator.
There was no bank of buttons to be pushed, which indicated to Nick there was only one destination. He knew there was no possibility he was about to get shot, they could have done that at several points well before right now (most notably the turrets), but he felt like a mouse walking into a giant trap.
They stepped off the elevator and Nick’s knees buckled. He managed to stay on his feet, feeling for a moment like he’d walked back into the Pens.
“Walk next to me,” Dolph said. Nick recuperated quickly, his stomach dancing a jig inside him. There were big holes in the ground, perhaps where dinosaur-like car-making machines had been once upon a time.
They walked for about five minutes, until they came to a makeshift office about eight feet by ten. Their guard rapped twice then stood back at attention.
A man in army fatigues with sharp blue eyes and five o’clock shadow came out. He gave the soldier a halfhearted salute and dismissed him.
Dolph saluted him and the man stuck out his hand for a shake.
“Colonel Stone, nice to finally meet the man behind Desert Rain. I’m Lieutenant Leonard.” His eyes narrowed even more when he looked around Dolph at Nick. “That him?”
“Yes,” Dolph said. Nick’s sense of curiosity had overgrown his fear, but being the sudden subject of conversation set his heart racing again.
Leonard stepped around and stood in front of Nick, placing his fists on his hips.
He had a neat landing strip of black hair, almost like a Mohawk, until Nick spotted the crescent of hair to either side midway back on the top of his head. His electric blue eyes scanned up and down Nick and then he nodded.
“Yeah,” he said. “I think this one’ll do.”
“Do what?” Nick said. Dolph shot him a dirty look.
“All right. Right this way.” Lieutenant Leonard brushed past Dolph, heading toward a cordoned off area. Two armed guards saluted him and he snapped off a two-fingered one back to them. “They’re with me.” He pointed at Dolph and Nick with a thumb over his shoulder. Apparently, that was enough to let the two of them pass down here.
The smell of death was pungent. Nick covered his nose with the flap of his jacket. He seemed to be the only one bothered by it. The corpse of a naked woman lay on a table, her skin unbelievably white. Then Nick saw the neat hole in her neck, or rather, holes. Two small ones separated a little more than an inch apart. Dolph and the lieutenant stood to the side and let Nick pass between them. Everything in him was saying to turn away. To not see, to not smell. This was dead flesh.
Nick steeled his face as best he could. He looked at both men on either side of him, hoping they would give some indication of what he should be doing, not wanting to reveal he had no idea. He looked at the body again.
It was terrible. The body looked plastic, unnatural. That predator thing inside him curled up into a tight little ball at the top of his stomach and he felt like he was looking from outside his body. He’d seen pictures of naked people and thought he was familiar enough with the human form. He didn’t know if he’d actually seen one in person before and this felt intrusive. He tried his best to avoid looking at anything that would have been hidden by a bikini, though what was left didn’t relieve him any. It was so real, like any moment the woman’s eyes would snap open and she’d swing her legs off the table, sitting up and covering herself as best she could with her hands. Those holes in her neck, though…
He decided to focus on her face, trying to lose himself there. He could convince himself she was only sleeping, that whatever had brought her to this place had been peaceful.
That when she woke up, they would let her go home.
Wait a minute. She did look familiar…? Was she someone he knew from the Center or someone he had known from before? Neither of those felt true. The more he studied the contours of the face, the more certain he became. He had seen this woman, and recently. His first thought was that she was someone he might have passed by on the street somewhere. No, that wasn’t right either. His acquaintance with her was more intimate, more… animal? That was wrong and right at the same time.
Nick forced his hands onto the table, careful not to let his fingers get within touching distance. He leaned in, took a deep sniff. The acrid smell of her churned the oatmeal in his stomach.
There was something… the smell of somebody else. Also familiar.
He had no face to put with the smell and the same sense of intimacy passed through him.
“Do I know this woman?” Nick asked. There were two doctor-types who were standing on the other side of the table. They looked at each other, said nothing. Nick looked at Leonard. He couldn’t read anything off the man. He looked at Dolph who was equally inscrutable.
Details swam to the surface of his mind in pieces, like remembering a dream. Then Nick realized he had dreamt this. It had been while he was staying at Lucky’s. Or rather, the house where Lucky had been staying.
He was almost afraid to ask; it had to be the reason Dolph had brought him here, though.
“I think I dreamed about her.” Nick stepped away from the table and resisted the urge to wipe his hands off on his pants.
“When?” Dolph growled.
“Two, maybe three nights ago?”
“Interesting,” Lieutenant Leonard said. He placed a hand beneath his chin. “Go on.”
“I remember a guy in a panel truck. He called out to her… with his mind, and she came.”
“What color?” Leonard said. “The truck?”
“White?” Nick wasn’t entirely sure.
“You sure, son?” Dolph fixed him with his eyes.
“I think so. I mean, everything was through his eyes. I don’t remember him looking behind him when he got out.”
“Behind him…” one of the doctors said. Nick turned to look and saw the woman with glasses writing furiously on
a clipboard.
“Alright, people.” Leonard clapped his hands to indicate expediency. “Let’s get an APB out on a white panel truck.”
“What are you doing?” Dolph stepped closer and asked. “You know that truck is stolen.
“That’s right,” Leonard said loud enough for the room to hear. “We’ll find all kinds of trace evidence and ID this creep by his DNA. He’s a vamp, he’s been in a pen, and we got a file on him. He’ll be locked back up in a pen by the end of the week. Thanks for coming out, Adolphus,” Leonard said. “We’ll take it from here.”
Adolphus? Nick thought. The name almost rang a bell. He got a good look at Leonard and the man had a smug, holier-than-thou look all over his face.
“Happy hunting.” Dolph nodded and they shook hands. Nick hurried ahead of him, sweeping the black curtain aside. Dolph’s face was a big angry knot and growing tighter by the second. The guard was still waiting for them and he walked ahead of them. Instead of taking them back the way they’d come, he took them through what felt like a winding maze to a steel door marked ‘Exit’.
“You have a good day, sirs,” the guard said. Dolph didn’t stop. Nick felt like he should say something.
“Yeah, you too. Thanks for having us.”
It felt wrong, incomplete somehow. He should have said something more… official. Dolph was getting ahead of him with those long legs and Nick had to hustle to catch up.
He could hardly believe it, but the man looked even angrier in the daylight.
“Sanctimonious prick!” he said.
Nick only listened while he vented more choice words, no doubt about Lieutenant Leonard. Nick had no idea where they were. It seemed like they were going to have a long walk ahead of them. Leonard had seemed a little jerk-ish, though not enough for Dolph to be this angry.
He dared to ask.
“You don’t have any experience with post-Conflict military from the inside,” Dolph replied. “‘Officers’ like that are the reason I retired.”
“I kinda don’t get it. What happened in there?”
“He power-played me. We weren’t in there two seconds before they were showing us the door, and the idiot is chasing a dead end. Of course the panel truck is stolen. The likelihood this guy is on any kind of registry is probably fifty percent at best.”
“This guy—the killer— is like me, right? I mean, he had to come from the Center too, right? Or the Pens?”
“Remember that one percent we talked about?”
“Yeah. You said it’s a rough estimate.”
“Right. But the exact number of vamps—sorry, I don’t know if that word offends you—who have been processed is known.”
A light came on in Nick’s head.
“He may never have been at either place.”
They rounded the building and were greeted by several aisles of cars. The big Hummer was farther back right where they’d left it.
“The guy’s a killer, though. He probably has a juvenile record or something, right?”
“Possible. With the knots the legal system is in that’s anyone’s guess.” Dolph seemed to be calming down. “It’s a good lead, but it’s just that: a lead. That idiot Leonard seems like he’s hanging his hat on what you told him.”
“I didn’t think I’d given him a lot to go on. I mean, for all they know I could be the killer.”
He expected Dolph to at least chuckle, maybe the man was physiologically incapable. He gave Nick a very sober look.
“You better not be.”
There were a lot of words Nick felt could have come after those four that he left hanging in the air between them. They made it to the Hummer and climbed in.
“A guy like Leonard will never catch this killer,” Dolph said, starting the mighty diesel engine. “He can’t deviate from his playbook. He has no vision. No guts to trust.”
Dolph was getting upset again. Nick knew just the thing to head this off.
“Adolphus?”
“Dammit!” He slammed the side of his fist into the steering wheel. “Anyone who knows that name, knows I hate it. That bastard researched me.”
“Is that such a bad thing? That he looked you up?”
“I don’t expect you to understand. It’s an old guard, new guard thing. The rivalries between the armed forces are more of a ‘mine is better than yours’ kind of thing. There was still fraternity between us. There was always still cooperation across the board, at least most times. These post-Conflict types more often than not want their way to be the only way. He probably got the word from on high to reach out to me and decided to do it in a way to humiliate me to keep me out of it.”
Nick decided not to press any further. He could understand a person not liking being called by his given name; Dolph's reaction was on the extreme end of dislike. And there was something more to it than simply disrespect.
They rode a while in silence, Nick remembering the occasional landmark for reasons other than them passing the other way a short while ago. There was so much of him that was either gone or simply had never been there, like he wasn’t a complete human being. Or human whatever he was. Nick had heard the genus and phylum for vampires, homo vescus, but he didn’t know if a new one had been determined for people with his condition.
He longed for the family he couldn’t remember. Brief snatches of a mother sitting with him, reading to him, stroking his hair. And a father, a single image of him sitting at the breakfast table, a big cigar in his mouth. Nick could recall no interaction with the man. He only assumed he had loved him. He certainly missed them both. Nick wondered what had happened to them. Had they died? Did they contract the same disease as him or been part of the collateral damage of the Conflict?
“Where can I drop you?” Dolph asked. Nick was jarred from his thoughts.
“What?”
“Your home. Where do you live?”
“I… the Pig. You can drop me at the Big Pig.”
Dolph grunted. Whether it was in disappointment or how the man laughed, Nick couldn’t tell.
They pulled into the parking lot of the Big Pig a few minutes later. Before Nick climbed out of the Hummer, Dolph turned to him, pulling something out of his pocket.
“You did good work yesterday. I can’t pay you for that consulting debacle, though. It didn’t go the way I wanted and I’m going to have to pursue this a different way.”
“So you’re still going to help out on this?”
Dolph nodded. “There’s a killer out there. And so far, only a gaggle of idiots have been looking for him.”
“Gaggle. Nice word.”
“You like that, huh?” Dolph looked out to the street then back to him.
Nick opened the door and slid out. For some reason he felt hurt. He had expected to go back home with Dolph for some reason. To his home. Then he remembered Dolph didn’t know he lived there and wasn’t supposed to. He would have to call Phoebe to find out when this whole thing was going to be over.
“One other thing,” Dolph said before he closed the door. “People like Leonard are famous for taking other people’s ideas. I found you, but I don’t have a single doubt that now that he has discarded me that he won’t come back for you. Be on the lookout. And whatever you do, don’t go with him.”
Nick nodded. “Why?”
“You’re a disposable asset,” Dolph said. “We used vampires, actual vampires, during the Conflict. People who had been infected against their will who still had loyalty to humanity. These new guard types would pump them for information and stake them.”
The idea chilled Nick on top of the cool air. He wanted to say that kind of thing wouldn’t happen, that he was human even if his genus and phylum were still indeterminate. Dolph wasn’t the one who had slept through the Conflict, though. Nick had a pretty good education of the things that had happened during and after, however had no firsthand knowledge.
“Take out your cell, I’m going to give you my number.” Nick took it out of his pocket and turned it on. He’d
made a habit of turning it off when he went to bed so his sleep wasn’t disturbed, but usually forgot to turn it back on. Dolph recited his number and Nick saved it. “You see Leonard or even suspect somebody in army fatigues is following you, you call.”
They shook and Nick shut the door. Dolph’s Hummer roared off, heading in the direction of home. Nick’s home.
He realized he was as frustrated as he was afraid. He couldn’t go home because… why? Because Phoebe’s Pop-Pop might throw a fit? If that had been all it was, he might go home anyway and tell him to deal with it. However, Dolph was ex-military and this morning had been enough to show Nick that, however tenuous, he still had connections inside. Could he pick up a phone and have Nick taken back to the Pens? Would he do that?
Nick couldn’t kid himself on that last one. The man had been pretty solid on being protective of his granddaughter. Even if for no other reason, he could be sure Dolph would get rid of him to minimize the risk he exposed to her and Randy. It wouldn’t matter that they’d been cohabiting for the last three months or that Dolph liked him. Well, that part was just a guess.
His cell phone chimed as he made his way into the Big Pig. Nick checked it and saw he had a message from Lucky. It was just in that moment, even though he was here to see him, that he realized Lucky must have been waiting to hear from him.
Now that he had his phone in his hand, Nick realized he had the perfect opportunity to get in touch with Phoebe without having Dolph looking over his shoulder.
He called her and the line rang four times before she picked up.
“Hello?”
“Hey, it’s me.”
“Oh, my God. Are you still with my grandfather?”
“No, he just dropped me off at the Pig.”
“The Big Pig? Why are you…?” And then, as if she had answered her own question internally, she said, “Oh.”
That’s right, ‘Oh’. Because I can’t tell him to take me to my own house.
“When is he leaving, Phoebe? Funds are a little tight right now, you know.”
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