“Thank you…?”
“Eliza,” she replied, looking up at him with her steel-blue eyes. “Eliza Dex.”
Greg wiped tears from his cheeks and stopped next to the gurney. Unlike the others, this bed only had one form on it, that much he could tell despite the fact that it was covered by a blue sheet.
“I—I can let you look. But that’s it. Eventually the body will be released to you, but for now…” Eliza’s sentence trailed off, which was fine by Greg; he wasn’t really listening anyway.
His thoughts, like the heart thumping in his chest, were racing, scenarios of the horrible things that had happened to Kent passing through him.
Why is there a sheet on him? Why only him? What did the crackers do to him—is it too horrible to show even in this place of mass death?
“The sheriff asked me to look most closely at your son,” Eliza said quietly. “Said he was there first—got to the house before anyone else—and that he might have clues as to where they came from.”
Her hand grabbed the plastic blue tarp, and was about to pull it back when Greg spoke up, stalling.
He didn’t want to see, not just yet.
“Are you a doctor?”
She nodded.
“Pathologist. I get called in sometimes when, ugh, weird things happen. Things that aren’t in the textbooks, if you know what I mean.”
Greg’s heart skipped a beat as he thought of the battle with the crackers at the police station, then out at the Wharfburn Estate.
Weird things.
“Would you like to see your son now, Greg?”
“Yes,” he said dryly. “I’m ready.”
With that, Eliza Dex pulled the sheet back and Greg sucked in a breath, holding the air in before turning to see the horrors that had befallen his son.
26.
Tristan Devon Owens, currently known as Dirk Kinkaid, didn’t look back when he bolted from the mansion. Even when his biker brethren hollered at him, more surprised than anything else, he kept his head dead and continued to run.
At forty-two years young, he had kept in shape for occasions such as this—well, situations like this; situations from which he had to escape, but not to specifically run from crab-like things that chewed you up and spat you out. At forty-two years young, Dirk Kinkaid was his fourth pseudonym, the prior others being Lucas Thomas Wright, Steven “Stevie” Drew, and Elvis Giablini.
And of course, there was his name, the Owens name, the one that somewhere out there a woman and a young boy shared. Or maybe not. Probably not. If he put any thought to it, he would have no choice but to assume that they had changed their names, that the program had forced them to change names. Still, he liked thinking that somewhere out there his wife and son had his name: Owens.
Dirk was forty-two now, but back when he had been a young man in his mid-twenties, he had been a rising star in the New York detective ranks. So when a chance arose to go undercover as a low-level soldier in one of the most notorious Mafia brotherhoods in the United States, he’d had to say yes—it was a compulsion, driven by some underlying need to strive to be the best, to make sure none of the so-called bad guys ever escaped.
Dirk had known the risks; he’d known that if he was found out, it would not only mean his death, but that he was putting his wife and newborn son in danger.
Besides, he had been told that he wasn’t going to be alone in the ranks, that there was another officer embedded in the criminal enterprise.
Someone with the initials CD.
Not much to go on, surely, as the Mafia had numbers in the low four digits in New York alone, but it had given him comfort nonetheless. And besides, he was a star detective, for Christ’s sake; he’d felt confident that he would be able to eventually figure out who his fellow undercover agent was.
The three missing fingers on his right hand ached at the memory, and Dirk rhythmically squeezed his palm as he ran.
Oh, he had found CD alright, but the man wasn’t his friend. In fact, Dirk doubted the man was even a detective at all, or something his sergeant had made him up to get him to accept the job, and it was a horrible coincidence to find someone with those initials.
Either way, it didn’t matter; his missing fingers and displaced wife and son were proof enough that CD most definitely was not a friend, colleague, or confidante.
Both Dirk and CD had been forced to change their names and flee from the Mafia. The only difference being that while CD ran away, Dirk ran after. First combing the southeast, then slowly migrating north, Dirk had followed the man with the ever-changing name but constant initials, employing his honed detective skills to follow the man’s trail of lies and deceit as he exploited, extorted, and blackmailed his way across the country.
There had been close encounters before, but Dirk was closest now; after infiltrating and then working his way up through the ranks of the Skull Crushers’ biker gang, Dirk knew that CD was within his grasp.
But now this—this fucking freak Walter, who had revealed horrors of the like even Dirk was foreign to, and who had threatened to foil another one of his plans.
Walter had ruined his chances to catch CD.
Still, Dirk had no choice but to run from what he had seen; his viscera demand such a reaction. After all, staying meant almost certain death—a horrible death—and that would not serve his need for a pound of flesh.
Part of him expected the other bikers outside Sabra’s mansion to follow him as he ran, but no one did. In fact, some men even went the opposite way, back into the palatial home, curious to figure out what had happened to Sabra.
Dirk knew that when they found him, some, if not all, would have the same reaction he’d had: to run. For those that stayed, it would be worse. Twelve years, the first five of which he’d served as an undercover agent, and the last seven as a… well, what was he now, really? No longer an officer of the law—that ship had sailed when he’d stopped his biannual check-ins. And that was more than a half decade ago. But after all this time, he hadn’t seen anything like what he’d seen inside Sabra’s mansion.
If twelve years entrenched with bad men had taught him one thing, it was for him to recognize when bad men were about to do bad things.
And this man, this Walter, was one of the worst he had ever seen. Walter was the worst kind of bad man: the kind that had nothing to lose, that cared less about their own wellbeing than even that of others. He was far worse than even Sabra, who was keen on neutering those who didn’t pay up in due time.
Dirk hopped on his bike and drove his foot onto the pedal, and it immediately roared to life.
“Dirk,” a man hollered over the sound of the motorcycle engine. “What the fuck is going on in there? What’s going on with Sabra? And where are you going?”
It was Mickey, one of the few bikers that Dirk had actually formed a relationship with. Like Dirk, the man had his demons, but he wasn’t like the other brutes. For a moment, the two good fingers on Dirk’s right hand simply hovered over the throttle, and he stared into Mickey’s pale eyes.
He was scared, Dirk saw. Genuinely, unabashedly afraid—not a frequent occurrence for bikers, even one with Mickey’s disposition.
Mickey felt that something bad—something worse—was about to happen here, too.
“Take off,” he said as the two good fingers wrapped around the throttle. “Get out of here, Mick. And do it now.”
And then he put the bike into drive, and it shot forward, leaving Mickey, Sabra’s estate, and the other bikers in a trail of dust and dirt.
For a brief second, he debated heeding his own advice: to flee. But as Dirk and his bike put distance from the horrors at Sabra’s house, the visceral sensations that he had felt slowly subsided, and the reality of how close he was, just how very close he was to finding the man who had taken his wife, daughter, and fingers from him, the man with the initials CD, settled in. The man with the silver tongue. The fucking conman, the fucking fake, the phony, the fucking parasite with his deadly sidekick.
And yet here he was, on his bike, tearing down Highway 2, leaving behind the bikers that were his best chance of finding CD.
Is this it? Has he escaped me again?
Dirk felt a pang of regret and remorse. But unwilling to succumb to these emotions, he cranked the throttle again and set his mind to motion.
Think—how can I salvage the last two years? How can I still use my leverage with the bikers to find him?
Dirk was so lost in thought that he didn’t even see the police car coming toward him, traveling in the opposite direction. If he had, he most definitely would have slowed down, given that the speedometer on his motorcycle was closing in on triple digits. It was only when the police car passed him and then switched on its lights that he noticed.
“Fuck!” he shouted, his words swallowed by the roaring air rushing by him.
A quick glance in the rearview showed that while the cop had turned and was now heading back toward him, Dirk was putting a lot of distance between them, and fast.
He can’t keep up.
Dirk leaned forward, ready to accelerate even more, to leave the officer in his dust, when a thought suddenly struck him like a slap in the face.
If I can’t use the bikers to catch him, maybe it’s time to switch sides. Maybe it’s time to go back to my roots.
A smirk fell on Dirk Kinkaid’s lips, and although it was barely visible beneath his handlebar mustache, it was there.
I have information they want, and they might be able to help me get what I want.
Maybe they can help me catch him.
Dirk let go of the throttle and gently brought the bike to a slow, allowing the twinkling red and blue lights in his mirrors to grow until they merged into one ubiquitous purple orb.
27.
The gut-wrenching reaction that he’d expected to feel never came. Instead, Greg Griddle was beset with a sort of calm that defied the situation.
It was probably the fact that the horror, the devastation that he had prepared himself for, simply wasn’t there. In fact, if Kent hadn’t been buried beneath a sheet in the basement of some shithole hospital lying on a cold metal gurney, Greg might have thought him sleeping.
And then his mind pulled a fast one, forcing him to stand there and watch his boy’s chest, to wait for the rise and fall that accompanied every breath, even though in the back of his mind he knew it wasn’t coming.
He counted in his head.
One, two, three…
When he got to twelve, he forced himself to stop counting. With a trembling hand, he reached out to Kent and laid his palm on his unmoving chest.
Feeling the cold hardness of his skin, reality overcame Greg and he was struck with a deluge of emotions.
“No,” he croaked. “No. No. No. No. No.”
His strength drained from his limbs and he collapsed onto Kent’s body, his back hitching with each and every one of his sobs. He tried to force these movements back into his boy, to give him the rhythmic up-and-down movements of his own body—the natural, organic movements of every living, breathing thing.
But that wouldn’t work. His son was dead and gone, and that was the end of it.
It isn’t fair.
Still crying, but with reality injecting him with some semblance of control, Greg pushed himself back to his feet, and was surprised that Eliza was behind him now, offering him not only emotional support, but physical as well. Her hands that gripped his waist were strong, much stronger than he would have thought given her average stature.
“I’m sorry,” he blubbered, not sure if the apology was aimed at Eliza, himself, or Kent.
The young pathologist rubbed his back, but said nothing.
Greg wiped the tears away, clearing his vision. And then he stared at Kent.
The boy’s skin was pale and thin, and there was a smattering of burst vessels around his eyes. His cheeks were also a strange blue tone, and there was an indentation around his throat. But as far as he could tell, there were none of the impressions of the crackers, which had become almost expected in this place—in Askergan.
Greg pulled the sheet down a little more, down past the waist of his boy’s jeans and to his thighs. Only then did Eliza reach out and lay her hand on his, stopping him from moving it further. The boy’s arms were clear—pale, dead, but he still couldn’t see any crackers.
He hated the question, didn’t want to ask it, but he had to know.
“What happened to him?”
Eliza replied almost robotically.
“Kent was asphyxiated.”
At first, Greg didn’t think that he had heard her correctly. Surely she hadn’t said ‘asphyxiated’; surely she had meant some other technical term that meant killed by a parasite… a fucking cracker, whatever the hell that was.
“What?”
Eliza nodded.
“Asphyxiated.”
Greg turned to the doctor. For a brief moment, he thought that maybe her eyes were watering too.
“Asphyxiated?”
“Yes. Do you want a moment to say goodbye? I can’t—you can’t be in here. I’m sorry for your loss, but I can only give you a minute with your son.” She waved her hand over the dead bodies in the room. “I can’t even guess when his body will be released, so I suggest you say goodbye.”
Greg swallowed hard.
Asphyxiated? What the fuck is going on?
“But you said asphyxiated? Like someone choked him? Who?”
Eliza shook her head.
“I’m sorry. Even if I knew more, I wouldn’t be at liberty to say.”
But Greg’s thoughts had already turned to the girl in the basement with Kent when he had died. The girl with the artificial leg.
Corina Lawrence… did she…?
It was almost unthinkable, but who else? Who else could have killed… no, not killed, murdered… his son?
Rage began to usurp sadness and dismay.
Somehow, he managed to nod at Eliza, then he turned back to Kent, eyes blazing.
“I love you, son. I love you more than anything.”
He glanced quickly over to Eliza, who had taken a step backward and was averting her eyes; she was giving him as much privacy as she could manage in this room of dozens of ghosts. He leaned in close, and pressed a kiss on his son’s cold blue forehead.
“…and I’ll find out who did this to you, champ. I’ll find out and—”
And what?
Greg didn’t know. But he would find out, if it was the last thing he did.
“—and I’ll make them pay. I’ll make them fucking pay for what they did to you,” he whispered.
The anger in his voice surprised even himself, and he took one last look at Kent before pulling the sheet over his face again.
Then he left the room without even looking back, without even so much as a thank you for the woman who had done him the courtesy of allowing a final moment with his dead son.
A single thought ran through his mind.
I’ll make them pay, champ. They will pay.
28.
Greg was so caught up in what the pathologist had told him—asphyxiated—that he nearly tripped as he exited the morgue. The woman who had granted him access was still at the desk, but when she spoke, he didn’t even hear her.
It wasn’t until she was nearly shouting at him that he took notice.
“Mister! Everything all right?”
Greg looked up at her with red eyes.
“Corina Lawrence,” he said, although he wasn’t sure why. It was the only thing that was burning through his mind now, the only thing that made sense.
“What? You okay? What happened in there?”
When Greg didn’t answer, she immediately turned to the phone behind her. She punched a few numbers, and then a second later started speaking.
“Hey, everything all right in there? What happened?”
Greg kept his head low and kept walking. Even when the nurse turned her attention back to him, he
ignored her.
“Mr. Griddle? Mr. Griddle, come back here!”
Greg didn’t stop—he didn’t even look back.
Less than ten minutes later, he found himself in an absurd situation, driving toward the Askergan police station in a stolen SUV. This was not lost on Greg Griddle, only it didn’t seem to matter to him as much as it should have. The only thing that mattered now was finding out what had happened to Kent. And although he was sure that it had everything to do with Corina Lawrence and not the crackers, the best way to find her, he knew, was to confront the man that only hours ago he had stood side by side with and fired bullet after bullet into a frothing sea of crackers.
Greg wasn’t familiar with Askergan County, and the SUV that he had stolen didn’t come equipped with a GPS, but what he was good at was retracing his steps. He simply ripped down Highway 2, taking pretty much the same route that he had taken with Reggie when they had raced to rescue the sheriff and his deputy.
And this is how the sheriff repays me for standing with him—by lying to me, by keeping this from me.
He was driving too fast, way too fast, but he didn’t care.
Somewhere in the back of his mind, he registered the fact that there were far fewer crackers on the road than the night—or was it two nights? Three?—prior, and that the firemen were still hosing down what was left of the gas station. As he turned onto Main Street, he also caught sight of several bikers, more than a dozen, parked at the side of the road. He passed several more of them on the road, and on several occasions he had to swerve to avoid them.
But none of this mattered.
A few minutes later, he pulled into the ACPD lot—or at least he tried to; the parking lot was jammed full of cars. In fact, there were so many cars in and around the police station that he had to park nearly a block away, and even then he did so in an area that was clearly marked as a tow-away zone.
Greg exited into the warm summer air, not bothering to lock the vehicle. Then he made his way quickly to the front of the station. The front window that had been blown inward by the crackers was covered with a patchwork of plywood, a tangible reminder of what he and the sheriff had been through together.
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