by Scott Sigler
“See, when you talk like that, it makes all this death and despair so much more fun.”
“I’m doing my best to make it more palatable.”
The jokes were automatic for Pookie, but he felt none of the humor. “You said the murder rate didn’t spike when Erickson first went in?”
“It didn’t. Things were normal for several months, then slowly ramped up to the levels I told you about.”
Pookie thought of a stuffed little girl holding a fork and a knife. Erickson probably hadn’t killed her on a whim. Would people like that girl run wild if Erickson was out? More important, were there more creatures out there like the four-eyed bear-thing?
Chief Zou’s words rang through his head. She’d asked for his trust. She’d told him there was more going on than he could know. If only she’d just come out and explain this. But even then, would Pookie have gone along with it? Zou had known he and Bryan might push too far, possibly get Erickson committed again, leave the city open to mass murder. But they hadn’t put him away — instead, they’d put him in the ICU.
“One more thing,” John said. “I have a hypothesis about Erickson and why the killings didn’t go up right away.”
Pookie made a mental note to write that down — two friends using the word hypothesis in the same day? Maybe he was moving up in the world. “Hit me, BMB.”
“Do you know what a keystone predator is?”
“Is it a Pennsylvania pedophile?”
“No, but that was clever,” John said. “It’s a predator that keeps a population in check. Like hawks that hunt lemmings, or sea stars that feed on sea urchins that would eat the kelp roots and therefore kill the kelp, throwing the whole ecosystem into crisis and—”
“Get to the point, Bro.”
“Sorry,” John said. “A keystone predator keeps a prey population in check. Remove that predator, you get a population explosion of the prey species. Let’s say Marie’s Children were responsible for that murder spike. Maybe Erickson is their keystone predator. Take him out, the killers go crazy. Put him back in the ecosystem, he kills them or sends them back into hiding, maybe both. Think about the things you said you saw in Erickson’s basement.”
The bear-thing, the blue bug, the shark-mouthed man. Had those once been lurking around the city, killing people? “You think that seventy-year-old Jebediah Erickson is the keystone predator of goddamn monsters?”
“Yeah,” John said. “We fucked up, Pooks. If Erickson doesn’t get out of that hospital, things could get real bad.”
Could get bad? Like they weren’t bad enough already.
“John, thanks. It’s a shitty picture, but now we know.”
“Computers are my business and business is good.”
“Not just that,” Pookie said. “You really stepped up last night. If you hadn’t come out, Erickson would have come in after us. It could have been Bryan in the hospital, or in the morgue. I’m proud of you, man.”
John was silent for a few minutes. “Thanks,” he said finally. “You got no idea what that means to me coming from you.”
Pookie heard the apartment’s front door open and slam shut. Emma came treading into the kitchen. Ears up, she stared at him with a face that said it’s just you and me, kid.
“Burns, I gotta go. Do me a favor and call the Terminator. He won’t answer, so just data-dump all that goodness in his voice mail. If you reach him, though, you call me.”
“Will do.”
Pookie hung up. He walked to the kitchen and grabbed the half-empty box of dog treats. He was about to drop another handful, but instead just up-ended the box. Emma started eating them like they might suddenly grow legs and run away.
Pookie headed out of the apartment to find his partner.
The Hidey Hole
Rex paced.
There wasn’t much space to do even that; it only took ten steps to cross the room. A damp cold put a moisture sheen on the stone walls, making them reflect the candles that lit the room. The place looked like it had started out as a crack in the rock, then had been chipped away at to make room for a bed, a bookshelf, a table and a chair.
A skull sat on the floor in a corner. A human skull. Maybe someone had put that there to see if it scared him. It didn’t. There were gouges in the skull’s face bones, like someone had scraped at them with their teeth.
Moldy books sat on the shelves. To pass the time, he’d tried to read one called On the Road, but he’d only made it five pages before the spine split and page six crumbled when he tried to turn it.
He didn’t want to read, anyway.
There were no clocks, yet somehow he knew the sun had already set. He could feel it. His whole life he had felt tired and sluggish during the day, had trouble sleeping at night. He’d always felt exhausted at school, felt slow, like the world was slipping by him in a way he couldn’t understand.
Well, now he knew why. The day was made for sleeping. Night was the time to hunt. There was a word for creatures that lived at night and slept during the day — nocturnal.
Rex paced. Sly would be back soon, and he would take Rex home.
Alex
The metallic sound rattled through the white room. Aggie and the Chinaman ran to the wall, put their backs to it, pressed their collars to the flanges as the chains started to rattle and draw tight.
The boy with no tongue was lying flat on his back.
“Get up, boy! Get to the wall or that chain’s gonna yank you!”
The boy’s eyes opened. He looked at Aggie with an empty stare. Aggie had seen that look on the streets many times — the look of someone who’s given up.
The chain snapped taut, yanking the boy by his neck. That got his attention. His eyes scrunched tight with pain as hands flew to the collar. He slid along on his back, spitting up fresh blood. The chain pulled the boy up the wall until his collar clanged against the flange. He coughed and stared out, wide-eyed and confused.
The white gate opened.
Seven white-robed masked men came in: Wolfman, Darth Vader, Tiger-Face, Frankenstein, Dracula, Jason Voorhees and was that the green Power Ranger? Seven of them — and this time, two dragging sticks.
Aggie’s breath lodged in his lungs, stayed there like a rock that kept him from inhaling or exhaling.
Who had the masked men come for this time?
Wolfman, Tiger-Face and Frankenstein headed straight for the Chinaman, who screamed in terror. The other four moved to the big boy — he screeched a mewling, sad sound that tried and failed to form words.
Aggie’s body sagged in relief. A guilty feeling of knowing joy at someone else’s demise once again overwhelmed him, filled him with bottomless self-hate, but there was nothing he could do to help either of them.
The white-robed men closed in on the boy. He kicked out, or tried to, but he slipped and fell, yanking the collar hard against his neck and chin. Before he could get his feet under him, the monster masks were on him, black-gloved hands reaching in, grabbing, hitting, pulling, holding.
The Chinaman tried to fight, but he wasn’t like that scrappy Mexican. The masked men easily overpowered him. Frankenstein reached in with his stick and hooked the Chinaman’s collar. He screamed and cried as they dragged him out of the cell.
Aggie looked back at the boy. Darth Vader hooked the boy’s collar. The robed men wasted no time pulling him toward the door. The boy kicked, he screamed gutteral sounds. Splatters and streams of blood bubbled out with each desperate breath, the red marking his path along the white floor.
They took him out of the white cell.
But this time, the door didn’t close.
Aggie stared, waiting, wondering.
Hillary walked through. No cart this time. No sandwiches. She walked right up to Aggie. She leaned in close. He forced himself not to flinch away, not that there was anywhere he could go. She was his only hope.
She sniffed him. She smiled, showing her missing teeth.
“You are better.”
Aggie shook
his head so violently it rattled the chain in his flange. If he was better, they would take him away like the others.
“I’m still real sick! I need my medicine.”
Hillary laughed, a light sound that anywhere else in the world would have sounded delightful. “You understand,” she said. “You are smarter than most of those we bring down here.”
Aggie kept shaking his head.
She reached out a wrinkled hand and grabbed his jaw, holding him still. He started to talk, but she put a finger on his lips.
“Shhhh,” she said. “Now I show you what happens if you don’t help me. Now we go and see Mommy.”
Loneliness
Robin sat on her couch, Emma’s blocky head in her lap, a half-empty glass of wine in her hand. No lights. Sometimes you just have to sit in the dark. Outside her apartment window, the breeze rippled a tree, making shadows of the branches and leaves weave curving patterns against her linen curtains.
A day’s worth of searching for Bryan had taught her that she didn’t know the first thing about finding someone who didn’t want to be found. She’d checked his apartment, the Hall of Justice, the Bigfoot Lodge — no Bryan. She’d even walked around Rex Deprovdechuk’s house and visited the spot where Jay Parlar had died. Nothing in those places, either.
She’d left at least ten messages. He hadn’t called back, not even when she called to let him know that Erickson had just been downgraded from critical to stable condition.
How much more messed up could things be? Her poor Bryan — what must he be feeling right now? How would she feel if she were the one with that mutation? And as if that weren’t enough, Bryan knew the family he loved so much wasn’t his real family at all.
She took another sip of wine.
The little bit of light filtering through the curtains reflected off Emma’s inner eyes, making them flash a luminescent green. When Robin was upset, Emma always knew and tried to get close. The dog let out a little whimper.
“I’m fine, Sweetie,” Robin said. “It is what it is.”
And what was it? It was going through the rest of her days without the only man she wanted. All the wine in the world couldn’t chase that away. It was living half of a life.
A knock on the apartment door made Emma’s head snap in that direction. The dog scrambled up, inadvertently digging her claws into Robin’s thigh as she pushed off hard and ran for the entryway.
Robin winced, stood up and set the wineglass down on the end table. She followed Emma to the door. The dog had her nose down at the base of the door. Her oversized tail swished so madly her rear end almost toppled her over.
But she only acted like that when …
Robin held her breath as she opened the door.
Emma shot into the hall and started circling Bryan’s legs, throwing her body against him. He reached down and picked her up in his familiar way. Her rear legs dangled limply, her tail pounded against his leg and her pink tongue flicked madly at his face.
“Easy, Boo,” he said. He set Emma down, then turned his green eyes on Robin.
“Hey,” he said.
He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. He looked … hopeless. “Hey,” she said.
He started to talk, then stopped. He looked away. “I didn’t know where else to go.”
She stood aside and held the door open. Bryan walked in, Emma at his heels. He seemed to be in a daze. He walked into the dark living room and sat on her couch. She sat near him, but not right next to him. Emma wasn’t as cautious; the black-and-white dog flopped down on his feet and looked up at him lovingly, her tail thumping a regular pattern on the throw rug.
Robin watched him for a moment, then spoke. “I looked for you today,” she said. “I couldn’t find you.”
“Oh. I was sleeping.”
“Where?”
“Pookie’s car,” he said. “I think. I just kind of … wandered.”
His beard had grown so frizzy. It reminded her she still had his beard trimmer in the bathroom. She had always meant to get rid of it, but found reasons not to. She wanted to touch that beard, gently stroke it and take his pain away.
“I was having some wine. Would you like a glass?”
He stared out into the room, into nothing. “Got anything stronger?”
“Your scotch supply is still here. Talisker on the rocks?”
He nodded in a way that said he’d have taken anything she had. She made him his drink, flashing back to the time they’d lived together when she had loved making him drinks. They’d been equals in most areas of life, but she couldn’t help the fact that she liked to wait on him a little.
Moments later she handed him the glass. Ice cubes rattled as he took it. He liked as much ice as the glass would hold. He drained it in one pull and handed it back to her.
“Want another?”
He nodded.
Emma’s tail kept up its steady rhythm.
Robin refilled his glass, then sat down next to him. She picked up his hand, gently, pressed the glass into it.
“Robin, what am I going to do?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “It’s a bit of an unusual situation, to say the least.”
He nodded, took a small sip. She picked up her wineglass. They sat in the dark, in silence, together. This time, she waited until he spoke first.
“What am I?”
“You’re Bryan Clauser.”
“No, I’m not. That part of my life is a lie.”
She wasn’t going to argue with him about that one. Maybe she could talk to his father later, see if there was anything she could do. But for now, she wasn’t about to feed Bryan platitudes.
“You’re a cop,” she said. “Yes, I know you’re fired, but that doesn’t change the fact that you’re a man who’s dedicated his life to serving the greater good.”
He took another sip. “I used to think that was why I did it. But now, I’m not so sure.”
“What do you mean?”
He finally turned to look at her. The room’s shadows hid his face, took the light out of his green eyes.
“I think I drifted into the job because of what I really am. I think I became a cop because I like to hunt.”
Robin wondered if she looked afraid, because suddenly she was. Bryan had said because I like to hunt, but what he meant was because I like to hunt PEOPLE.
He took another sip. “Some cops kill a guy and it messes them up so bad they quit the force. I’ve killed five men. Five. All in the line of duty, all righteous shoots, okay, but still — I don’t feel bad about any of them.”
He turned away, again looking off into nothingness.
This new Bryan, the one with the emotions turned full on, he was a frightening man. If she didn’t already know him and met him in a dark alley, she’d run the other way. But she did know him. There was so much pain in his face. She wanted to take him into her arms, pull his head to her chest and slowly stroke his hair.
“Bryan, there’s a difference between being a murderer and being a protector. Cops carry guns for a reason.”
He turned to face her again. “But shouldn’t I feel something? Some kind of remorse? Or guilt? Or whatever the fuck the psychologists kept asking me after every time I put someone down?”
“What do you want me to say? If you hadn’t done what you’d done, Pookie would be dead, John would be dead, and you’d be dead. You saved lives. It’s not like you have an urge to go out and eat babies.”
He said nothing.
“Because if you want to eat babies, Bryan, I’m going to have to go ahead and ask you to put down the scotch.”
He kept staring, then she saw the corners of his mouth turn up just a bit — he was fighting a smile. She waited, knowing him well enough to know exactly what would happen next. His mouth trembled once, twice, then he lost his battle with the laugh.
He shook his head. “You have to be kidding me. Jokes? Now?”
She shrugged. “Maybe I’ve been hanging out with Pookie too much.”
Bryan’s smile faded. The sadness returned to his eyes, and in that moment her soul felt like it would splinter and blow away on the wind.
She turned her back to him, then slid onto his lap. He started to react, but before he could say anything she reached one hand up to the back of his head and used his rigidity to pull herself in for a kiss. Her lips hit his. She felt his beard on her upper lip, on her chin. She breathed in the scent of him, felt it spread through her chest. He started to pull away, so she held him tighter.
Her wineglass fell away. She put her other hand on the back of his head, pulling him even tighter, feeling the texture of his hair between her fingers. He resisted, but only for a moment more, then she felt his arms around the small of her back, squeezing her tight, lifting her as if she weighed nothing at all. His tongue — cooled by the icy scotch — found hers.
She didn’t know how long the moment lasted. It lasted a second. It lasted forever. Finally, his strong hands slid to her shoulders, gripped them and pushed her away so that their faces were only an inch apart.
She felt the heat of his breath, smelled the Talisker that came with it. “I missed you, Bryan. I missed you so much.”
Bryan sniffed.
She gently kissed his left eye, let it linger there. “I should have never pushed you away,” she said.
He nodded. “I shouldn’t have let you.”
Her hands slid to his face, felt his beard in her palms, felt the warmth of his skin. “I’m not playing stupid games anymore,” she said. “I love you. I think I have loved you from the first moment I saw you. The genetics don’t change the fact that you’re a good man, Bryan. They don’t change the fact that you’re my man.”
He closed his eyes. “Everything feels so much … just more. Before, all my feelings were kind of, I don’t know, kind of muted. Now they’re on full bore. It’s hard to manage.”