“Well, you’re in luck because he said it’s all right,” the waitress said. But she didn’t clear out of the way. She reached into her pocket, where Moni recognized the outline of a cell phone. Moni heard her think, Don’t call the police in front of them. Go to the back first. She gave a warm smile. “If you give me just a minute, I’ll be right back with your receipt and change.”
She plucked the cash off the table and walked away, drawing her cell phone. Overpowering her would risk infection and attract too much attention. She could do it without touching her, without saying a word. Mariella had done it to her. Simply project her thoughts into the woman’s head, but disguise them as her inner voice.
Moni closed her eyes, envisioning the people in the restaurant not by their appearances but by their trains of thought. They felt like dots on a radar map. She instantly recognized the waitress’ mind, another antenna ready for her signal. “I was just seeing things. That wasn’t the woman from the TV,” Moni projected into her head, mimicking the waitresses’ inner voice. “If I call the police over here for nothing, all it’s gonna do is scare away my customers. Kiss all those tips goodbye.”
Moni opened her eyes and waited. A perplexed Aaron watched her without any idea what was on the line here. The waitress’ mind went silent. Would she accept those thoughts as her own or recognize them as words imposed by a stranger? Maybe the voice of the devil trying to confuse her?
The waitress hurried out from the back and handed Aaron his receipt and a few coins. “Have a safe drive, you two.” She grinned as she made eye contact with Moni, who returned the smile, relieved that she had only manipulated a nice lady instead of hurting her.
Moni shuddered to think how she would have to deal with a person if they recognized her and she couldn’t persuade them to back off. Her thoughts flashed back to her ex-boyfriend Darren with blood running down his chest, and his windpipe in Mariella’s slender, not-so-delicate hands.
She watched her hand push open the diner door, leading her into the sweltering morning air. The long road awaited her.
2
Brevard County Sheriff Detective Nina Skillings loathed being late, especially with the FBI counting on her, but it took her extra long putting on her uniform for the first time since leaving the hospital. The neck and back braces made getting dressed strenuous, and they turned sitting at the table to eat into a chore as well. Another gift from Moni Williams and her so-called child.
Skillings had often heard her father mumbling in his sleep about his war in Vietnam, warning his fellow soldiers about incoming fire from across the river, but she never truly understood post-traumatic flashbacks until her accident. No, she shouldn’t call it an accident. It was an attack by the supposedly innocent little girl, allowed by Moni’s gross negligence.
As she marched through the halls of county lockup, the guards struggled to avoid staring at her face – the bandages across the bridge of her nose, black and blue swelling around her eyes and stitches on her forehead. Several inmates called her a zombie bitch. Her fingers, hardened by calluses from weight training, clenched into a fist. She held back, saving it for the woman who deserved it.
The guard unlocked the solitary confinement cell and swung open the door. Harry Trainer, known as the Lagoon Watcher due to his environmental fervor for the now-dead estuary, flinched from the light. The glare reflected off the bald spot that his long, wispy blond hair couldn’t conceal. The stench of his salty hide wafted through the doorway. The Lagoon Watcher sprang up and lurched his gangly body toward them.
“Sit down,” the guard ordered.
“It’s unconscionable that you leave me in here one moment longer,” Trainer barked. “By now you should have evidence from Dr. Swartzman clearly showing this is an invasion by a highly advanced civilization. My attempts to take the girl were intended to protect the lagoon from her minions, but your goon squad got in the way. If you don’t let me go right now, the lagoon will be ruined.”
“Swartzman’s dead,” Nina said. His sun-withered face went white as he absorbed the news about his fellow marine scientist. “And your aliens, they’re real.” He probably deserved an apology for his arrest on child kidnapping charges when he was only trying to stop the infected girl, but for the purposes they needed him for, better to keep him under pressure.
“What happened to Herb?”
“Your friend was studying the lagoon in his boat just before the attack. No one on the water survived except his graduate assistant Aaron. Hundreds on and near the water were killed.”
“What happened to my lagoon? More than 50 threatened and endangered species live in the saltwater estuary. The manatees feast on its sea grass beds. That water is their life. They can’t survive without it!”
Nina bit her tongue to avoid chastising him for lamenting the damage to his lagoon before the murder of hundreds. She reminded herself that this was a man who spent the last few decades as its self-appointed environmental guardian.
“I warned them this would happen. I sounded the alarm weeks ago that the levels of toxicity in the lagoon were reaching a tipping point and the animals became aggressive. Did they believe me? Did they listen to me? No. The big sugar, and wealthy cattle ranchers and the…” As he rattled off name after name of co-conspirator, Nina had no doubt why they ignored the unemployed scientist. Finally, he locked eyes with her and, as if seeing her bandages for the first time, started gawking. “Don’t I know you underneath there? You’re Nina Skillings, right? The officer who chased me and crashed?”
Nina couldn’t forget the night that was nearly her last on earth. She was driving. She had the Lagoon Watcher, a suspect at the time, in her sights. Moni’s car tapered off the pursuit as she carried the possessed child in her back seat. Out of nowhere, her windshield shattered and her car caromed off the road into a wall. She came to with a sharp beak picking at the flesh on her face. In between strikes, a pair of purple eyes glared at her with the intent to rip out her brain through her eye sockets. She later found out it was a pelican, infected by the same aliens that controlled Mariella. Instead of exposing the child as a fraud, Nina was confined in a hospital bed during the invasion. She could only fume as she watched the ravaging of her county unfold on TV.
“Don’t worry, I’m not after you anymore,” Nina said. “I know who’s responsible for what happened to me, and for all of this.”
“You were attacked by a possessed pelican? Nasty little critter, I heard,” the Lagoon Watcher said.
“Not as nasty as gators and horses, and what followed them, they told me.”
“So you missed the action, huh?” Her steely stare answered his question. They nearly chained her to the hospital bed to prevent her from fighting with her fellow officers. Instead, she watched them dragged into the toxic water on TV, even some people she shared a patrol car with.
“Where’s Detective Sneed? He promised to spring me once they confirmed my findings.”
She let out a heavy sigh, unable to face him. “Sneed is dead.”
“Oh, one of the monsters got him?” he asked with only a moment of hesitation at hearing the news.
Did this man have any compassion for humanity, she wondered. Nina hadn’t cried in years, but when she got the call from the sheriff about the hardnosed Sneed found bled out in the road like a possum, she bawled for hours. Only taking target practice in the gun range – her first stop after getting released – rebuilt her nerve.
“It was a different kind of monster. He was shot twice, once in the head. Three other officers were shot dead at the scene. They were on their way to arrest Detective Moni Williams and the alien girl. Your friend Swartzman’s assistant, Aaron, was riding along with the officers at the time. He hasn’t been found.”
“You don’t think the student is hurt? He followed up on some of my research.”
Nina’s blood ran hot at the Lagoon Watcher brushing off the deaths of four officers, especially her mentor Sneed, in favor of his research. She was the most trusted office
r in Sneed’s inner circle and he made sure she earned every opportunity. Sneed was spot on, especially about Moni. He knew her overly sympathetic treatment of victims would spoil the case and, holy shit, did it ever. As much as Moni warned him to leave the girl alone, he should have pushed harder. When Sneed finally made a forceful move for the girl, when her alien infection was obvious, Moni must have shown her true allegiances.
I’ll make both of them pay, but I can’t do it unless I convince this whack job to help.
“Since you don’t seem to care about the men who laid down their lives to save your skinny ass, I’m sure you’ll be so relieved that we salvaged as much of your research from your home lab as we could,” Nina said. “The FBI and the military brought in their best scientists, but they’re unfamiliar with the aliens. They’d have to start at square one and it looks like you’re far advanced. You will brief them on what you know.”
“Oh, this is real good. Now the stuffed shirts in Washington actually care what I think.” The Lagoon Watcher puffed out his scrawny chest with a wheezing laugh. He continued on, nearly losing his breath. “I mailed them hundreds of letters, thousands, about the pollution in the lagoon. You know how many letters I got back? One. A worthless form letter, ‘We take your concerns very seriously, blah, blah, blah.’ They treated me like a crackpot. I had a professional lab until the government got me fired to silence me. And now, now that they ignored me after I uncovered the biggest environmental threat in the history of our planet, they’re all of a sudden asking me for help? No way.”
“Mr. Trainer…”
“Absolutely not. I’d rather rot in this cell.” He scrunched down in the corner like a spoiled child.
Nina stormed into the corner and seized his wrist hard enough to numb his hand. She dragged him to his feet, forcing him to look her in her bruised and swollen eyes. Her back throbbed with pain, but she supported his weight until he finally planted his feet. “A lot of brave men and women died out there. Police officers. Firefighters. Soldiers. One of those men meant a lot to me. So when you tell me no, you’re saying no to all of them.” He tried speaking up, but she cut him off. “That’s not acceptable.”
“If you had listened to me in the first place, maybe they wouldn’t all be dead.”
She shoved him into his corner and turned her back on him. For a second, she thought about spinning around and delivering a soccer-style kick to his head. No, the FBI agent said they needed him, and if she wanted to track down Moni and Mariella, she better put up with his eccentric nature as well.
“Cuff him,” she told the guard outside his cell. “We’re taking a little field trip.”
During her rookie year with the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office, one of the officers Nina had gone through the police academy with was paralyzed in a shooting during a traffic stop. Jeff Greer did nothing wrong approaching the vehicle. He just pulled the wrong card from the deck – an ex-con with a brick of cocaine in his trunk. Nina was on shift the same night, patrolling a few miles away. She couldn’t sleep for several days, wondering why it wasn’t her.
When she told her father she planned to drop out of the force, he didn’t argue. He limped to his closet on his one good leg, unlocked a safe and showed her an old brown binder she’d never seen before. It contained photos of the men he served with in Vietnam. The fresh faced young men stood confidently in the jungle with rifles in hand. “This one stepped on a land mine”, he said. “This one got riddled with bullets after taking out three Viet Cong.”
“And this guy,” he told her. “Scurried off into the jungle at the first gunshot. Broke his hand on purpose to get sent home. All of them are my brothers but him. He’s the only one who doesn’t show up at the VVA Chapter meetings. If he did, I’d slit his damn throat.”
Nina stuck with the police. She needed to borrow some of her father’s sobering touch with the Lagoon Watcher. He didn’t value human life like a normal person, but she knew what he loved more than anything.
She swung open the door of the corrections van so Trainer could see it. What once had been the emerald green waters of Florida’s majestic Indian River Lagoon were an acrid translucent yellow, revealing a scorched seabed. From the coast of the mainland where they stood, to the edge of the narrow beachside strip, the formerly mighty body of water now resembled a canyon of sulfuric desert soil. No life stirred in the waters, only bare skeletons of fish, manatees, birds and all the other animals devoured by the toxins unleashed by the alien bacteria. Nina pulled the mask over her mouth and nose to block the overpowering stench of rotten vegetation.
“Ohhh, my poor baby! What did they do to you?” Trainer wailed in agony as he stumbled out of the van. Nina stuck a mask in his face, but he brushed it off and lumbered toward the water.
She seized his spindly arm. “Don’t go in there. The water’s still full of sulfuric acid. It’ll burn off your flesh. Trust me, I’ve seen the videos.”
“The sulfuric acid killed everything,” the Lagoon Watcher said with tears welling up in his eyes. “The dolphins. The sea turtles. The endangered manatees.”
“And people,” she reminded him. “Dozens of cars were on the bridges when they exploded and fell into the water.”
“What? How many bridges?”
“All of them from Cape Canaveral down south until the Sebastian Inlet, which the aliens didn’t cross. Problem is, now that the alien activity stopped, the contaminated water is seeping further south through the rest of the lagoon. They’re afraid it’ll get into the ocean.”
“If they could do this in a lagoon, imagine what they’d do in the ocean…” He hunched down with his hands on his knees and gagged. She handed him the mask and he finally slipped it on.
“Now you’re seeing it,” Nina said. “We stopped them here, I don’t know how, but we did. What if they moved on looking for an even more vulnerable area to inhabit? People aren’t safe.”
“And neither is the environment,” Trainer said. She shook her head at him missing the point again. “The aliens attempted to alter the lagoon to mirror their native ecosystem. For some reason they failed, but you can bet they’ll try again. The question is, where? Imagine if they tried this in the Everglades or in a coral reef?”
Nina didn’t much care about losing scenery. The thought of Moni and Mariella wading off into the swamp and emerging with another army of mutants frightened her a lot more.
“If they’re going to try this somewhere else, the aliens need a host to transport them, right?” Nina asked. The offbeat scientist nodded. “That’s why we need you. We can’t tell who’s infected. We need to find all the animals, and people, who might be carrying the alien bacteria.”
“It’s more like a biological nanobot. Bacteria are the byproducts that convert our natural water into the water that suits their species. Once they establish a stable ecosystem, they can produce the real thing.”
The Lagoon Watcher treaded to the edge of the estuary he had enjoyed for decades. She heard how he spent most of his waking hours on his boat, which was one of the few vessels spared because it was in county lockup as evidence. He dug his fingers through the blackened grass, decayed by the toxic water lapping over it. He scooped up a stone and tossed it over the water. Instead of skipping, it sunk and fizzled in the sulfuric acid bath.
“If you want my help, I demand this be fixed,” Trainer said. “Drain the toxic water. Remediate the soil. Restore the natural water flow, and for God sake’s, stop the pollution runoff from farms. I don’t care if it costs more than the Iraq War. This crime against a national treasure must be rectified.”
Rubbing her forehead in frustration, her first instinct was to tell him that she wasn’t Congress. Billions in funding was a promise she couldn’t make by herself, but she needed to tell him something that he wanted to hear.
“If you help me catch who’s responsible for this, I’m sure the president will award you a Medal of Honor and grant any request you have,” Nina said.
&
nbsp; “A medal’s as useful as a tin can,” he replied, making Nina wince as she recalled how her father wore his Purple Heart proudly. “But the president’s ear I could use. Where do we start?”
“By finding the trail of Officer Williams and her little friend.”
3
Aaron gripped the wheel with anxious hands as they sped down the interstate. Moni had been slumped down in her chair beneath the window line since a patrol car had shadowed them for few miles. It had trailed off without any trouble.
“You can sit up now. They’re gone.”
“What if they don’t leave next time? Even if they don’t see me, this car will eventually be reported as stolen, if it hasn’t already.”
“No worries. We lifted a Prius. They’ll never catch us in this hot rod.”
Moni shrugged. The owner of this car melted in an acid bath behind his lagoon-front home. She failed her duty to protect him and all the invasion victims of her home town. At least his car took her away from Florida so she’d never hurt them again. Instead, she’d just deliver this plague to another doorstep.
“You better learn to drive this hybrid like green lightening. If the police recognize me, I don’t want to think about what I’ll have to do. If they’re stronger willed than that waitress and I can’t manipulate their minds…” She sat up and checked the rearview mirror.
Reluctantly, Moni had shifted the driving burden to Aaron today. After her jaunt through Mississippi that morning, she knew it was safer this way. Every time she saw a body of water alongside the road, whether a lake or a canal, Moni had fought the urge to jerk the wheel and plow into it, surely killing Aaron in the process. Moni’s stomach had ached when she sped by the water as the horde inside her rioted. Her skin cried out for immersion in warm liquid…scalding liquid…the ecstasy of acid burning. Without it, she felt like a beached dolphin peeling in the sun.
Silence the Living (Mute Book 2) Page 2