by Layton Green
Streetlights blurred as Grey accelerated to eighty, ninety, one hundred on the Henry Hudson Parkway, the wind screaming in his ear, Death clutching his waist like a thrill-seeking passenger.
He slowed when he entered Washington Heights. The night came alive around the homeless shelter, drunks and pushers hovering around the dilapidated brick building, the smell of piss and vomit fouling the air.
After parking his bike by the door, he nodded at the night watchman and stepped inside. Cockroaches scattered as Grey strode to the front office. The drip of water echoed down the hall.
Downstairs, single mothers and their families stayed in cubicles with plywood walls and no doors. Male teens and children resided on the first floor, girls on the second. Volunteer adult monitors provided a modicum of security. When they turned eighteen, the orphans and runaways and abandoned teens had to seek shelter elsewhere, usually at the more dangerous adult shelters.
Grey glimpsed the sign taped to the office door.
TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS NEEDED FOR CITY-MANDATED REPAIRS.
PLEASE DONATE!
He peeled off the sign, re-taped it to the leather pouch containing the prize money, and shoved the pouch through the mail slot. Reverend Dale would be the first person inside. Grey trusted him with his life.
Outside, he sat on his rumbling bike, deciding what to do. He wanted to leave Manhattan and keep on riding, drive until city lights and the babble of crowds fell away, until civilization itself had faded, stripped to the barren desert his heart had become.
In the end, it was Charlie, not Viktor, who kept Grey from bolting. The trust in her young eyes. Again he applauded his employer—and cursed him—for his foresight.
Thunder rumbled. A raindrop splattered and ran like mercury down Grey’s forehead.
He eyed the card Viktor had given him, then gunned his bike for the Lotte Palace hotel.
-3-
Grey outran the rain.
He ripped through the canyon-like streets of Midtown Manhattan and parked in front of an imposing Italian Renaissance façade. The beige bricks of the hotel glowed golden in the ambient light.
A recessed courtyard opened into a marble lobby with a few well-heeled guests waiting for the elevators. No sign of Viktor or Charlie. On the back of the business card, Viktor had scribbled Rarities.
Grey asked the concierge if Rarities was a restaurant on the property. The balding porter looked at him as if inspecting a stain on his sport coat. “It’s a members-only cocktail lounge on the mezzanine level.”
“Thanks.”
“I assume you have an invite?”
Grey didn’t bother to respond.
The doorman at the Rarities Lounge afforded him the same snooty stare. “May I help you? We closed at midnight.”
“Then why are you standing here?”
The doorman looked flustered. “We have a . . . special guest.”
“If it’s Professor Viktor Radek, he asked me to meet him.”
The doorman’s haughty expression crumbled. “Ah . . . Dominic Grey? Yes, yes. I’ll take you inside.”
The lounge was a mélange of plush carpet, ornate wood paneling, and bottles of rare liquor displayed in glass cases. Grey found Viktor and Charlie sitting in high-backed chairs next to a stained-glass window. The somber, dark-suited professor and the street kid in secondhand clothing, a Mets sweatshirt and baggy camo pants, were as incongruous a pair as Grey could imagine. The concierge must have aged five years when Viktor bullied his way through.
Charlie looked up from a steak as thick as the professor’s forearm. “What’s with the beard, Teach? You look like Aragorn after a month in the forest.”
Grey pulled up a chair and didn’t bother to ask Viktor how he had convinced the staff to work overtime or the kitchen to serve steaks in a drinks-only lounge. Grey’s employer hailed from a wealthy Czech family—minor nobility—and he tossed around money like it was free.
“You must be starving,” Viktor said.
“A beer would be good,” Grey said, as the waiter came over. “Whatever lager’s on tap.”
“We have three. Brooklyn—”
“Just pick one.”
“A steak?” Viktor asked. “Burger?”
Grey waved a hand in dismissal. He drank his beer when it arrived and watched Charlie eat, enjoying her relish the meal. After polishing off a giant chocolate brownie, she got the hint and stood.
“I know you all got important business to discuss. You need some help saving the world, you let me know. I know people.”
Grey gave her arm an affectionate squeeze. “It’s good to see you. I’ll come back to class soon.”
“You better, or I might join a gang and end up in the coop. And yo, take the Prof up on that burger, unless you trying to slip through a sewer grate.”
After Charlie left, Grey cupped his beer between his palms and avoided Viktor’s eyes. “I’m listening.”
He felt the weight of Viktor’s gaze, watching before he spoke. Analyzing. The two men had saved each other’s lives on numerous occasions and shared a fierce mutual respect. Their bond was an unspoken one, however, and Grey hoped it stayed that way.
Because there was nothing much to say.
“Two days ago, I received a call from Jacques.”
Grey lifted his eyes. Jacques Bertrand was their Interpol contact. Viktor consulted for a variety of employers, from private individuals to police chiefs to espionage agencies. Though Interpol did not have field agents or direct jurisdiction, Viktor operated in a gray area that everyone accepted because he produced results.
That was half the equation. The other half was that Viktor was a renowned professor of religious phenomenology. His services were valued because the cases on which he consulted invariably involved religious, mysterious, or unexplainable phenomena—and no one had more experience in these matters.
The waiter brought Viktor a dusty bottle of absinthe, a Pontarlier glass, a carafe of water, and a small wooden box.
Grey nudged his head towards the glass. “Already?”
Viktor lifted the lid and extracted a slotted spoon, a cube of sugar, and a long silver lighter. “Let us say I’ve come to believe my recent addiction stemmed from personal issues, and not the wormwood.”
Grey shrugged.
Viktor poured absinthe the color of melted emeralds into the curved well at the bottom of the glass. He used the slotted spoon to dip the sugar cube in the absinthe, then set the spoon and the sugar atop the glass. “Our assistance has been requested on an unusual matter.”
“When isn’t it?”
“Over the last month,” Viktor continued, unperturbed, “three reports of mutations have surfaced, in three different countries: the United States, South Africa, and France.”
“Mutations? Of what?”
Viktor ignited the cube of sugar with the lighter. When it flamed, he dunked the sugar into the glass and trickled cold water into the mixture, clouding it. “Of human beings.”
Grey took a swallow of beer.
“An African American man in Atlanta, a South African boy, and a Muslim woman in Paris,” Viktor said. “The mutations started with hair loss, an unexplainable increase in muscularity and agility, thickened skin, protruding veins, and clawed hands. By that, I mean rigidity in the fingers and expansion of the fingernails into dagger-like growths.”
“It sounds like they turned into . . . monsters.”
“Within roughly seventy-two hours of the appearance of the first symptom,” Viktor said, “the two adults began hemorrhaging. Death followed within hours.”
“Why hasn’t this been on the news? Not that I would have noticed,” Grey muttered.
“Autopsies are ongoing, and the various authorities are working hard to control the situation.”
“Maybe they need to let it get out.”
“That’s not for us to decide,” Viktor said. “But publicity is inevitable.”
“So how does this involve you? Why aren’t they using labs
to figure this out?”
With a sigh of pleasure, Viktor took a sip of absinthe. “They are. The CDC in Atlanta is leading the medical investigation.”
“Is there fear of more mutations? Something contagious?” When the professor nodded gravely, Grey tapped the table with his fingers. “You said medical side of the investigation.”
“The South African victim, a sixteen-year-old boy, was found with an odd symbol tattooed in blue ink on the back of his left heel. The letter T piercing an ouroboros.”
Grey knew what an ouroboros was: a depiction of a serpent eating its own tail, the eternal cycle of nature.
“The vertical portion of the T,” Viktor continued, “was represented by an unalome, the horizontal portion by a double helix.”
Grey had a flash of remembrance from his childhood in Japan. “An unalome . . . the Buddhist symbol of the search for enlightenment?”
“Correct. There was also a dash and the number thirteen beside the symbol. I have to say, something about it feels familiar. I’m still researching.”
“Did the boy’s parents not recognize it?”
“They’d never seen it before.”
“Meaning he might have been part of an experiment?” Grey sat back. “That’s why they called you?”
Viktor set his absinthe down and interlaced his fingers on the table. “That, plus the circumstances of the boy’s death, which were unusual compared to the other two victims. Unusual for anyone, in fact.”
“Those circumstances being?”
“He was already dead.”
Grey paused with his glass in midair.
Viktor continued, “He died of a MRSA infection a month ago today. Both parents identified the body and attended the funeral. Two days ago, they identified it again. The boy stumbled into their township after dark, searching for his parents, exhibiting similar mutations as the other two cases. Someone shot him to death after the boy threw a grown man into a shack and ripped down a bundle of live power lines.”
“Jesus.”
“Numerous people saw the boy. The tabloids even picked it up, though no one really believes it happened. I don’t believe it. Still, no one is sure what to do. There’s a local officer handling the case, but Jacques wants me to go to South Africa and conduct my own investigation.”
“And you want me to go with you?”
“No. If something sinister is behind these mutations, then the cases are related.” Viktor picked up his glass again and eyed Grey as he took a drink. “I want you to go to Atlanta and conduct a parallel investigation.”
Grey looked away, bitter that Viktor had asked so soon, thinking about actions and consequences and the darkest of tunnels to which his last case had led.
When he looked back, he found the professor still staring at him, layers of meaning in his gaze.
“Will you help me?” Viktor asked.
-4-
Grey woke early, before first light. He preferred mornings now. Nights were too long and empty, too full of trapped memories.
He grabbed the case dossier, stuffed a few things into a backpack, then slipped on jeans, an old black sweater, and his motorcycle jacket. Before he left his brick studio loft in Hudson Heights, he pressed his palms against the bathroom counter and gave his sleep-deprived eyes and unkempt beard a skeptical stare.
He wasn’t ready for this.
He wasn’t ready for anything.
Yet he had agreed to go to Atlanta, mostly because he didn’t want to disappoint Charlie. She needed an anchor in her life, at least one adult whom she did not have to fear, report to, or explain herself. Someone who wouldn’t treat her like a leper or a charity case, but a human being.
Someone who was not struggling more than she was.
Grey had also agreed to go because something Viktor said had rung true: there were people out there who needed the kind of help Grey could give.
Maybe he would realize he couldn’t do the job any more, and this would be his last case. If so, then fine. At least he had left his apartment to find out.
It was still dark as he walked to the subway, the streets slick and quiet. By the time he arrived at Penn Station, emerging to the surface to pick up a coffee and an egg and bacon sandwich from a favorite vendor, the sun had risen and the rain had stopped and people poured through the streets like Class V rapids through a high-walled sluice.
Before re-entering the station, Grey took a long look at the city, trying to imagine the chaos a true pandemic would cause in a metropolis of this size.
On the plane, Grey pored over the dossier, cementing the details in his mind.
Five days before, local police had responded to a 911 call in Dekalb County, Georgia, just outside of Atlanta. They arrived to find a hysterical young woman, Cora Thomas, claiming her father had returned from a fishing trip, gone insane, and was trying to kill her. She had tried to calm him, but he ran outside and attacked someone, raking him across the chest with claw-like fingernails.
By the time the police arrived, Cora’s father had hemorrhaged and died. The police report chalked the mysterious symptoms up to “drug abuse and an unknown medical condition, possibly acquired from an animal bite or polluted water.”
After a watchful Interpol analyst connected the three incidents, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention was contacted, and handlers sent to examine the bodies. Whatever they had discovered was not in the report.
Grey found it odd the local police had let the case go so easily.
And maybe they hadn’t.
Jacques had already arranged for Grey to meet the CDC doctor in charge of the medical investigation later that night. Before that meeting occurred, Grey decided to pay a visit to Cora Thomas, the daughter of the victim.
Draw some conclusions of his own.
From above, Atlanta resembled a fishbowl of skyscrapers rising out of a flat green forest. As Grey’s plane descended, he caught glimpses of the New South sprawl that housed over six million people and a bundle of Fortune 500 companies.
After renting a Jeep Cherokee at the airport, Grey swooped into town on a massive interstate that cleaved the city in two, driving past a series of billboards hawking everything from mega-churches to strip clubs, Chick-fil-A to local sports teams. He continued east on I-20 and exited twenty minutes later in a gritty suburb full of traffic lights and fast food restaurants.
Four lanes became two. Commerce morphed into farmland. After passing a rib shack, an abandoned gas station, and a clapboard church, Grey turned onto a dirt road called Carver Lane, shocked it had shown up on the GPS.
The Cherokee kicked up a cloud of dust as it rolled into a cul-de-sac that looked like something out of the Third World. A collection of clapboard houses with sheet metal roofs sprinkled an overgrown field behind the cul-de-sac. Hardwoods choked by creepers loomed over the yards.
Now Grey understood why local police hadn’t put up a fight when the CDC intervened. Communities this poor didn’t rate very highly on the priority scale. If at all.
Grey spotted the right mailbox, parked the car, and shooed away a skeletal cat that rubbed against his leg when he left the car.
Stillness. Dry rural air. A crisp November sky.
As Grey approached the house, he noticed an elderly African American woman eyeing him from a porch rocker next door, bundled inside a shawl and smoking a cigarette like it was the last one on planet Earth.
The creak of a screen door snapped Grey’s attention back to the victim’s house. A woman in her twenties, black skin carved from onyx, opened the door wearing pink jeans and a hooded white sweatshirt. Droopy eyelids gave her face a sleepy appearance.
“Are you selling something?” she asked. A headscarf swept a bundle of braids off her narrow face. “Cuz I ain’t got any cash to spare.”
“I’m not selling anything. My name’s Dominic Grey. Are you Cora Thomas?”
“That’s right.”
“If you have a minute, I’d like to ask you a few questions about your father
.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You more police?”
“I’m someone who thinks what happened to your father was very strange.”
She lit a cigarette with a shaky hand, inhaled, and pointed it at him. “Strange?” She barked a laugh. “Mister, it was unnatural. You’re a reporter, I take it.”
Grey didn’t contradict her, since she seemed ready to talk.
“Look,” she said. “I just want someone to tell me what happened. Something killed my father, and it wasn’t no rabid dog or bad creek water. If it was, then every Geechee in Georgia be dead by now.”
It took Grey a moment, but then he got the reference. He remembered a recent article in the national news about a land battle between the state of Georgia and a Gullah community. Geechee or Gullah referred to isolated communities of slave descendants who lived mostly in the low country of the southern Atlantic states.
He didn’t realize any lived this far inland. But he didn’t know much about them.
“I’ll do what I can,” Grey said. “And I’m sorry about your father.”
“You know,” she took another drag, “you the first person to come in here and say that to me.”
“I’m sorry about that, too.”
“Yeah, well. That ain’t gonna change. What you want to know?”
“Just your side of the story.”
She pressed her lips together and waved him into a living room just inside the door. Grey sat on a cloth sofa with an old quilt draped across the top.
“You want some tea?” Cora asked. “Coffee?”
“No thanks.”
She flopped into an armchair and placed her ashtray on a coffee table. “Not much love lost between daddy and me. He only came back a year ago, after momma died, to lay claim to the house. But he was still my daddy.”
Raised by an abusive father, Grey struggled with that sentiment himself. Grey had left home at sixteen, a year after his mother died of cancer. Every year he told himself he would look up his father, but every time he picked up the phone, the rose-colored lenses of time would shatter, regret would turn to rage, and another year would go by.