by Jim Couper
Jane scratched her head thinking the woman might be more psychotic than psychic, but she spoke quietly and had nothing to gain. "Out back is a man with tracking dogs that can't track. Go talk to his dogs. See if you can help."
"We've got work to do," Jane told the remaining police. "When you talk outside this room, when you're on the phone, when you talk to your wives or husbands there are some words you won't use: zombies, vampires, ghouls, undead, Dracula, Nosferatu, Vlad. You know what I mean. These come from fiction, not from factual reports. Hysterical people imagine all sorts of things and then start doing strange things, including hurting each other. Our first duty is to locate our missing officers. Three,in serious condition, have gone by boat to Kelowna General. Three officers still missing. Two men on an ATV are tracking them from the Cream Bay Park and another two are backtracking on foot from the beach towards the park. Let’s get them some help. We'll take the footpath from Mission Hill Winery. Wilson, set that up and take some officers from out of town."
While Wilson selected his helpers Jane scribbled notes about who was in the room and who had left then spoke again.
“Let's be realistic here. We're out of our depth. Parking tickets and domestic disputes are our line. More help is coming. A mobile unit from Calgary is on its way and so is one from Vancouver. Experts are flying in from all over the place. Media are booking hotel rooms by the floor and that isn’t going to help one bit. Let's not try to be super-sleuths. Let's not embarrass ourselves by doing anything stupid. We don't want to look like backwoods yokels from Smokey and the Bandit or Dukes of Hazzard. We are guardians of the scene of the most horrible mass murder in Canadian history. Do not contaminate the scene. I want spot checks and searches of vehicles crossing the bridge. Officer Smith, please set that up. You’ll make people mad. Add traffic tie-ups to their tensions and you don't have many happy faces out there. Look around and get to know each other. Then spread around the town and protect it. Jesse, next in command, will direct you to vulnerable trailer parks and ungated communities."
The sergeant abruptly turned towards her office and a young man in a police uniform started applauding. He stopped when Jane turned and gave him a glare that said, "This is not a Golden Globes performance, you idiot."
She took four steps along a hall that she knew as well as the four steps across her living room and then closed her office door: the quiet surprised her. Alone, she could think clearly and avoid confusing interruptions. With desk phone in hand she started in on a mental list of those who must be contacted, taking not a moment to savor the satisfaction of restoring order to the front of her station.
First came forensics, which had little to add other than a strange, dry mucus had been found on chewed parts of Mary's body. Tooth marks were human, so no marauding coyotes, cougars or bears had done it. She wondered about the dental structure of Sasquatch, but thwarted laughter by not inquiring.
Crime scene investigators had unearthed no new clues and offered no opinions. Tracking dogs still refused to track and their keeper had left a phone message complaining of a gypsy woman hanging around who kept repeating, "I hear dead people."Jane regretted connecting the necromancer with dog handlers.
The officers on the ATV had not reported and neither had the ones on foot. She wanted to go find them herself, but felt she could do more good on the phone. She shouted down the hall to Jesse and told him find a few officers that weren’t busy and get them on the case by taking a fourth route, a different tact. A helicopter would help.
With black phone in hand she called RCMP headquarters in Regina and quickly got the commander. He knew about the situation, but did not know about additional missing officers.
"This constitutes a national emergency," he said. "The premier and prime minister must be informed. I'll do that. A plane with 20 Emergency Response officers takes off from here within minutes. A motorized unit has left Calgary and another has left Vancouver. They’ll reach you in four or five hours. Who's in command there right now?"
Jane didn't have the correct answer to his simple question. So many people came and went that her police station resembled a mall at Christmas. Some were chief of this and head officer of that, but no one had come right out and said, "I'm taking over. I've been assigned to run the operation."
She told the commander, "I'm sergeant, highest ranking officer in Peachland. No one has relieved me. We need a helicopter."
"OK, fine." The voice on the phone sounded frustrated. "This is probably beyond you, beyond anyone local. You sound bright enough. I'm sure it's not your fault the villain hasn't been captured."
"Villains," she corrected. "This is not the work of one person."
"Right. Perps, villains, whatever. You know the lay of the land so keep co-ordinating until I find the right person. Or maybe that person has got there already and failed to introduce himself. If we don't figure this out in the next day or so the prime minister will call in the army and we Mounties will vanish into the background. It's our job to capture the bad guys, not the army's, so let's get on with it. Questions?"
“A helicopter?”
“Search and Rescue has one. We don’t.”
“More questions?”
The commander interpreted Jane's pause as she formulated her next query as a lack of questions and the call ended with an electronic click.
From Jane’s perspective, bringing in the army would not be a slap to the face of the RCMP. She would mobilize them in an instant if the decision was hers. A dozen combat units would scour every inch of land from the U.S. border to the Arctic until they found the murdering marauders who had turned her peaceful Peachland from a tranquil retirement town into an international hellhole. CNN news, Web Query, Disaster Channel and SeeingEye News had already arrived with tons of cameras. A horde of others would follow. Nothing she could do other than arrest the villains, lock them up and close the case would stop them.
Jane shouted down the hall for the secret service man. At least he had a different approach. If aliens were eating her people she couldn't be blamed for not tracking them down in outer space and putting them behind bars. She fingered a report on her desk and when she looked up the agent stood before her.
"I'm Donald Sinclair. Senior agent I guess, although we generally don't use ranks."
"I’m Jane Dougherty, sergeant, we do use ranks. Tell me what you know."
Agent Sinclair pushed a chair to the desk and told the sergeant that unfortunately he still didn't know a lot, but similarities to cases he had briefly referred to were more than chance. “For instance,” he said, “a massacre in Norway. A dozen normal citizens in a small town get disembowelled and have their brains removed. No suspects, no clues: just a mess in the woods and at a cemetery. Winter comes, the place freezes over, never happens again, no repercussions. Locals say an abominable snowman attacked. Some saw big footprints in the snow, others didn’t. So here's the question. If yeti exist why don't they do it again? Just one attack in that Norwegian town. Just one attack in other places. So, think about aliens? Strange electrical charges were known to happen. People reported lights in the sky and aurora borealis exploded with rare colors. In fact, in each case – California, Germany, Romania, Norway, Lithuania, Iceland, Scotland − people report lights in the sky and strange electrical happenings. All cold places, except California, but people there are always trying to start a fad or jump on a bandwagon. My department – just two people really – has been investigating alien landings for several years. We believe that what happens in these instances is the aliens pick an area, dig up the dead for study and collect the brains and organs of living people. Other cases are all pretty similar: small towns, maximum 50 dead."
The man Sgt. Dougherty had perceived as articulate, athletic and sincere suddenly looked mentally challenged as he babbled about aliens and yeti. A bit of drool decorated the corner of his mouth, his ears stuck out and his bulging eyes sometimes looked to each other for support. She wondered if he had a midriff spare tire like her own or if
her old chair forced him to hunch forward so he looked like he packed a few extra pounds. Jane wanted to laugh, but his sincerity prevented it.
"There is one more thing in common."
"What's that?" Jane questioned without a smirk.
"Dead gnomes."
Sincerity be damned. Her laughter erupted so spontaneously that if her mouth had contained coffee or masticated muffin, Sinclair would have been shotgunned.
"A lot of people think it’s funny," Sinclair declared, deadpan. "You think it’s funny until you hold the little lifeless creatures in your arms."
"And your explanation for that is...?" Dougherty questioned, swallowing her guffaws, but not her sarcastic tone.
"We believe they are aliens trying to inhabit an earthly form so they can come to us in secret. They can't get the blood right or the shape right, and sometimes they die, but they get close."
Jane scratched her head. She had run out mirth. "Let me recap, if possible. Every few years aliens come to a small town in the northern hemisphere, dig up some dead and take the brains and organs of some living. They reincarnate themselves as little critters to invade our planet, but some die because they got the blood wrong."
"That's basically what we’re working on," the agent answered seriously. "Do you have a better explanation?"
"Every explanation is better. A motorcycle gang harvesting body parts to sell on the black market is a better explanation and it’s the one I’m working on. Maybe something in the water has driven people mad. Werewolves are on the loose. Hell, I can't think of a worse explanation. We've also had reports of dancing vampires and zombies. Those explanations are better. Do you get paid for this? Like, I didn't know we had a department of alien affairs."
"As I said, just two people. We get paid, but not particularly well. You probably get more. What do you get?"
"We're in the middle of a crisis, I don't have time to compare salaries."
"Oh, by the way, the crisis is over. They stop as quickly as they start. What happens now is I go out and find the dead bodies of little people and gather them up. A clean-up team comes and makes most of the weird evidence go away and the strangest mass murder in Canadian history never gets solved."
“You haven’t mentioned dragons.”
“Of course not, that’s children’s nonsense.”
“Thanks for the clarification. OK, that’s enough," said Sgt. Dougherty impatiently "Bring me some gnomes and you'll have my attention.” With a slight sarcastic chuckle, she added, “Dead or alive."
"I'll do that," Agent Sinclair answered as he silently got out of the chair that usually creaked, then closed the door without a click.
11
On the third night no deaths occurred: not from natural causes and not from unnatural ones. Despite their belief that the worst atrocities imaginable were behind them the uneasy townsfolk still barricaded their doors and windows, gossiped and speculated. Rumors about an Arizona motorcycle gang involved in red-market body-parts trade roared through Peachland faster than a Harley Sportster.
Flesh-eaters and blood-drinkers busied themselves with secretive nocturnal movement. Vibes, less powerful than previously, emanated from a new cemetery in East Peachland, but deep water at the narrowest part of Okanagan Lake separated the town from both Rattlesnake Island and a sprawling new suburb. A one-mile bridge joined the two sides, but traffic moved slowly as police carefully examined every car before allowing passage.
A resurrected personal trainer, who had been buried in her gym suit, tried swimming. She thrashed the water with six ponderous strokes before heavy bones dragged her down. Landlocked salmon nibbled at her as she drifted to the bottom where she walked for a few minutes before settling onto the sediment. A second zombie, a volunteer lifeguard and a slow learner, followed suit and got in eight strokes before sinking. The third, a tad quicker on the uptake, straddled a log, pushed off and the log rolled over. A fourth zombie sat on a windsurfer, pushed off, fell off and ended his second coming atop the others.
A sidewalk ran the length of the bridge and they could be easily captured or even thrown off the bridge if they took it. No foolproof route took them to the alluring echoes on the other side.
Ten of the strongest and most adventurous carnivorous cadavers spent much of the night straddling the grid-work beneath the bridge, painstakingly making their way across. Only one lost his footing and joined the salmon. Following the strenuous crossing the creatures huddled under the end of the span, wrapped themselves in newspapers and blended with a gaggle of street people. After one of the homeless became a meal the others scattered and did not report the death.
While his companions crawled beneath the bridge like inept monkeys Mort felt a compulsion to keep his feet planted on solid ground. A flesh-eater aptly named Mona stood beside him, swaying and moaning. Mort found her few remaining tufts of blonde hair attractive although her rotted blouse and flat chest, over which various insects crawled, could not be construed as a turn-on had Mort been capable of being turned on. His rotted peanut remained permanently downcast.
Adding to Mona’s lack of allure was her odd habit of sticking out her tongue and catching the end of a stalactite of dark snot, the tip of which held one of a team of descending maggots. She drew the morsel into her mouth, chewed laboriously, then swallowed with a pronounced gulp. Mona’s purple shoulder rubbed invitingly against Mort and she tried some sweet talk. Grunts and squawks dribbled from her lipless slit and made no sense. The words that limped past Mort’s own little lips could not have been understood by him either had he not heard them first in his muddled head.
Mona held little appeal as either friend or playmate because Mort harbored a vague feeling of betrothal to someone whose name he couldn’t remember. He didn’t want to be untrue to whoever she was.
Within Mort’s swirling cranial fog and indistinct instincts dwelled a once-sapient, sensitive mind he couldn’t find. To recover his thinking he would gladly have shed his addiction to brains and organs although consuming those delicacies seemed the only purpose to his re-being. Hunger struck as he ruminated about his bad habit. Steak and kidney pie came to mind as did ribs, liverwurst, blood pudding and headcheese.
Vampires detected the same emanations from East Peachland’s cemetery as did zombies. On reaching the bridge they did not give any thought to swimming across. No one owned a bathing suit and why would they? Cold water had no attraction. Why immerse oneself in a big lake and expose a thin white body when a bubbling, multi-jetted Jacuzzi, set to the perfect temperature, waited at home? Vanessa walked to her driveway, got her minivan and loaded another six suckers. She showed her falsified ID to police, explained they were going a Rotary Club meeting, and got a quick okay to cross the bridge. Another straw, Victor, walked to the marina, presented his MasterCard and rented a boat. Vampires climbed aboard, sped across the lake and quickly walked to the cemetery, locating it by instinct and GPS. They arrived before the lumbering, lurching flesh eaters and had plenty of time before sunrise to force open crumbling concrete slabs and help several comrades who gave off signals of energy, animation and thirst. Some had been in seclusion for only a few months since last feeding and were being released prematurely while others looked a tad wan and wasted, despite the new electrical charge: their best-before date approached.
Under normal circumstances dormant vampires worked their way free and headed downtown for a drink or two at the bar. The zombie invasion altered that scenario. Vanessa slowly explained to each newly arisen exactly what had happened and why getting a drink required more guile than ever, due to the zombie plague. As painful sun lightened the sky they had no option but to retreat to the woodland that surrounded the cemetery, pull dark jackets and shawls over their heads and rest for the day. A passer-by would not find them among rocks, leaves and fallen trees.
Just before dusk the cemetery sounded like the tune-up for a kindergarten symphony as creaking bones, moans and groans saturated the air. The strong had dug their way out of their graves
then crawled along the ground to help others. Arms, torsos and tops of heads emerged next to tombstones.
The vampires would have left them alone and let them fend for themselves, except one revenant lurched menacingly towards a straw, who proved tempting with ripe red lips and rouged cheeks. The zomb detected blood rushing through the vamp’s organs and wanted her, all of her. Inexperience with flesh eaters meant the vamp had no fear. She might have stood there and been chewed to bits had Vanessa not rushed over with a weighty rock and planted it in the zomb's face. The rock recipient, a recently-risen undernourished weakling, didn't care about the blow one way or the other. It stumbled forward and got a hand on the startled vamp. Vanessa continued assailing the face until nose and teeth disappeared. That proved fortunate because the zombie gummed onto the surprised vamp’s shoulder and would have torn off a sizeable chunk had its incisors been in its mouth instead of down its throat. Even so, a layer of skin vanished from vamp and bright red blood spouted onto Vanessa’s dark blouse. She whacked a few more times and even when the head looked like a crunched paper bag the thing kept trying to bite. Vanessa spotted a piece of discarded 2 by 4, exchanged it for the rock, and assailed the creature, high and low until it fell forward onto what remained of its face. From a prone position it grabbed an ankle, started gumming it and ripped off more skin. Vanessa dropped the wood, picked up a bigger rock and hit the back of the creature’s head several more times.Victor joined the thumping with a chunk of granite tombstone so weighty he could barely raise it. When it landed the head flattened and its owner crawled off in search of easier meal.
In looking about the graveyard and assessing the wounds inflicted by the gummy jaw Vanessa knew that a policy of laissez-faire would not work. In scanning for more weaponry she focused on what she most feared. From behind a stone slab a pair of shapely, shaking legs, wearing red leather pumps, stuck out and a filthy head splashed red as it bobbed up and down. Every time it rose a crimson tide followed and the air filled with an eruption of stomach, lung, trachea and skull. The zomb pulled apart the vampire, searching for the nirvanesque ecstasy that accompanied the eating of humans. Liver, spleen, pancreas and other normally delectable parts had gone down the gullet then were instantly regurgitated. The horrid taste of fresh vamp had no relationship to the haute cuisine found in regular Grade A humans. Vanessa rushed over and rocked the monster, but her actions came too late and it angrily turned on her and she had to run. Within an hour newly-risen flesh-eaters had chased every vamp. Two who fell included the red-shoed victim and a newly-resurrected vamp who wandered from crypt directly into the arms of a zombie who tore him apart and spat out the pieces.