by Dan Wells
“I don’t like being predictable.”
“You’re not going to like anything that happens over the next few days,” said Mills. “May as well get used to it now.”
“I could run.”
“Do it: I have a stun gun which I am practically giddy to try out.”
I sighed. I was exhausted and scared and hopped up on adrenaline, not to mention bleeding from who knew how many gashes in my forearms. “Do you have water?”
“And curly fries,” said Mills. “I stopped at that gas station a ways back to ask if anyone had seen you.”
I laughed drily. “Barbecue sauce?”
“Ranch.”
“Philistine.” I looked back at the bushes. Who was she? How did she fit into all this?
She’d tried to kill me, and, for all I knew, eat me. It was too much.
“All right,” I said, and opened the door. “Whatever cell you throw me into, make sure it has a bed. I haven’t slept in days.”
“Only the finest for my favorite fugitive,” said Mills. I got in and closed the door, and he turned the SUV around in a slow, three-point turn. “Back to Lewisville first, though. We have unfinished business.”
CHAPTER 13
I lay back in the passenger seat, too exhausted to run anymore. The air conditioner was going full blast, and I reached out and turned it off.
“Are you crazy?” asked Mills. “It’s like a million degrees out there.”
“I know,” I said, closing my eyes. “I just came in from it. Let me adjust a little before you freeze me to death.”
“Have some water,” he said, and nodded toward a pair of plastic water bottles in the cup holders. One was still sealed, so I twisted off the cap and drank eagerly. “Who was the girl?”
“You saw her?”
“Of course I saw her, did you think she was a mirage?”
I held up my lacerated arms, which were starting to sting so badly it felt like they were burning. “You know, I’d wondered where these wounds came from. This all makes so much sense now.”
“Is she another victim?”
I opened one eye and looked at him. “You know that too?”
“Who else would you be fighting with in the middle of nowhere?”
I opened my other eye and sat up straight. “So wait. If you knew she was part of the case, why didn’t you stop and try to find her?”
“Operational priorities,” said Mills. “Find and retrieve John Cleaver, above all else.”
“I can’t be that important.”
“I don’t know. How many people have you killed?”
“People or Withered?”
“How about people you thought were Withered?”
“Everyone I’ve ever killed has dissolved into sludge,” I said. “So I’m either innocent or I’m deeply psychotic.”
“Already laying the grounds for an insanity plea,” Mills said, and sniffed away a fake tear. “They grow up so fast.”
“I’m serious,” I said. “You know that I don’t hurt actual people.” I paused, then shook my head. “Obviously not counting Nathan, but that was self-defense.”
“On purpose,” said Mills.
“What? I told you before, it was self-defense.”
“I’m not talking about Nathan,” said Mills. “Screw that guy. Nobody at the bureau liked him anyway. I’m just saying you don’t hurt people on purpose.”
“So now you think I accidentally murdered somebody?”
“I think that Brooke Watson will spend the rest of her life in mental care.”
“That’s not my fault.”
“Not directly,” said Mills. “Those dead kids in Dillon weren’t directly your fault, either. And neither was Fort Bruce. And neither was Marci or your mom.”
“Let me out,” I said, unbuckling my belt in the speeding SUV. “I’d rather take my chances with the stun gun.”
“I know that was a low blow,” said Mills, “and I’m sorry, but that’s the reality.”
“I said let me out.”
“You’re dangerous.”
“I was trying to save people,” I said. “I did save people.”
“Only indirectly.”
“That doesn’t count?”
“Why should the indirect good things count when you don’t want to count the indirect bad ones?”
I glowered but sank back in my chair. My actions, in killing the Withered, had stopped those Withered from killing anybody else, and that was good; it had saved lives. But that single-minded crusade had also endangered a lot of people and left some of them dead. The math worked out in my favor—a couple of dead bystanders versus a thousand future victims—but did that really matter? Did that really make it okay? At the end of the day, people were still dead because of me.
“I’m not trying to hurt you,” said Mills.
“Well that makes it all okay then.”
“Society cannot function the way you seem to want it to,” said Mills. “We have rules and procedures and balances, and when monsters need to be killed—because monsters are totally real, and sometimes they totally need to be killed—we have people in place to kill them. We have police and detectives and militaries and intelligence agencies, and governments and laws to control their use.”
“And before I came along,” I said, “none of those things were remotely effective against the monsters.”
“I realize that.”
“Agent Ostler said that in the entire history of the FBI they’d never actually killed one. I killed one last week, and he wasn’t even the one I was looking for.”
“Being good at something you’re not supposed to do does not make it a good thing to do.”
“You sound like my mother.”
“Well, somebody needs to.”
“Are you seriously saying that it’s better to let the Withered prey on the human race than to break a few rules in order to stop them?”
“I’m saying that you can work within the rules and get the same results.”
“We tried that before,” I said. “We got Fort Bruce. What was the final death count?”
“You’re just as bad as they are,” said Mills loudly. “There, you made me say it. Are you happy now? Does that clear this up for you? You’re running around, loose and unsupervised, leaving death and madness and chaos in your path, and the United States government cannot allow that to happen. Stopping that from happening is, in fact, our entire job. And it doesn’t matter if you have an excuse, or if you’re being effective, or if you’re the lesser of two evils. You’re still one of the evils.” He paused, watching the road ahead. “I didn’t even come to Lewisville looking for you, I was investigating a statistically significant occurrence of mysterious deaths. I was looking for monsters, and I found you. And that should tell you something.”
“They’re raising an army,” I said.
“That’s what you told us before.”
“They’re going to start a war.”
“You said that before, too.”
“And I was right,” I said. “And you know I was.”
“That war has come and gone,” said Mills. “You took out Rack, and you took out his stragglers, and whatever tiny scattering of Withered is left is not capable of mounting a war.”
“You haven’t met them yet.”
“Who could possibly be left?” asked Mills. “Rack recruited all the useful ones, or at least most of them. He never got Mr. Burns, but now you’ve taken care of him, so who’s left?”
“‘Mr. Burns?’”
“The fire guy,” said Mills. “Bureau nickname.”
“That’s a little on-the-nose.”
“They can’t all be the Son of Sam,” said Mills. “Sometimes you have cool names, and sometimes you have Mr. Burns.”
“So, what’s your plan?” I asked. “Bring in another army, like you did in Dillon?”
“And what’s your response?” asked Mills. “Tell us that’s too dangerous because of a mind controller?”
&nb
sp; I rolled my eyes. “Yes, dammit, but that’s … not…”
“Great,” said Mills, “another mind-control monster.”
“It’s not the same one.”
“It’s not any one,” said Mills. “The Withered in Dillon wasn’t a mind controller, it was like a big crazy yeti thing.”
“So, I was wrong,” I said. “I still got her, and I’m still right about this one. That feral woman you didn’t want to look for was one of her victims—her mind was so broken by control that’s she’s barely even sentient anymore.”
“And naturally you have no proof of this.”
“It’s my current theory,” I said. “So far it seems to be holding up.”
“That’s not a theory,” said Mills, “that’s a hunch. You’d know the difference if you’d ever, you know, gone through formal investigative training, or really any schooling whatsoever, past tenth grade.”
“I was attacked,” I said. “A man raving about someone he called the Dark Lady—he said she was forcing him to kill me, and he didn’t want to do it, but there was nothing he could do about it.”
“Coercion is not mind control.”
“This was not coercion.”
“Is that another hunch?”
“He tried to drown me!” I shouted. “Just like he or someone else drowned Kathy Schrenk and Crabtree Jones. Maybe it was that woman back there, maybe it was someone else, but something in this town is messing with people’s heads.”
“And you think it’s this ‘Dark Lady.’”
“It’s obviously the Dark Lady,” I said, “and that’s obviously…” I stopped.
“It’s obviously what?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I just remembered that I’m a prisoner, not a fellow agent.”
“Don’t be a pill about this.”
“You don’t want my help anyway,” I said, “I never had any formal investigative training.”
“Is that what this is? I hurt your pride?”
“Not as much as I apparently hurt yours. Sorry to be so much better at your job than you are.”
“You can still tell me what you know.”
“In exchange for a lighter sentence?” I asked. “Isn’t that how this works?”
“John…”
“I’ve missed the last few seasons of CSI: Demonhunters, but I’m pretty sure I get to talk to a lawyer.”
“And here we go,” he sighed.
“Do you have supernatural lawyers?” I asked. “With supernatural lawyering powers? Maybe a Withered who gave up the ability to tell the truth, and now he can force other people to be truthful on the witness stand—”
“Brooke is doing well,” said Mills.
I stopped. “What?”
“Brooke is doing well,” he said. “She’s in an institution, under twenty-four-hour care, and she has her family, and they’re all making headway.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you’ve gone into smartass mode, and I’m sick of arguing with you,” he said. “We’re going back to my motel, we’re going to rendezvous with the rest of my team, and then we’re going home to DC. You’ll be debriefed, you’ll be arraigned, and you’ll be imprisoned—all in private meetings, of course; this is top secret. And Brooke is going to want to see you, and you’re probably going to want to see her, but we’re not going to let you, and we’re not even going to tell anyone we found you. So, I’m telling you now, as the one beacon of light in this whole disgusting mess, that Brooke is doing well. The therapy is working, and the meds as well, and she’ll be okay. It’ll be a slow road, but it’ll happen.”
I looked out the window, all the fight gone out of me. “Thank you.”
“You made the right decision to bring her home,” said Mills. “Whatever else you’ve done, you did that right.”
I nodded. The adrenaline drained away, and I felt empty and exhausted again. I closed my eyes. “What about…” I stopped myself. I’d almost said “Marci,” but I knew what the answer would be. If Brooke was making headway in her therapy, that meant her other personalities were going away. Marci was disappearing, day by day and pill by pill, like a sandstone boulder at the edge of the sea.
“What about who?” he asked.
“Boy Dog,” I said instead. “You said you’d take care of him.”
“And I have. He’s in a kennel, waiting for you to come back.”
“They won’t let me see him.”
Mills drove in silence for a moment before answering. “No, they won’t.”
It was full dark now, and Lewisville glowed like an ember on the far side of the low desert hills, lighting the sky long before we could see the city itself. I watched the streetlights appear one by one as we rounded the final turn, the small city unfolding like a pocket of stars. We drove through the streets, to a side of town I didn’t know well, and pulled into the parking lot of something called the Moonbeam Motel.
Mills stopped the car in the middle of the parking lot—not parking but just … stopping.
“Mills?”
He was staring at something, his eyes narrowed and suspicious; I followed his sight line and saw one of the ground floor doors hanging open. Was that his room? Or was something else the problem?
He kept the car in drive, not even engaging the parking brake, and pulled out his cell phone. He held it to his ear, but shook his head.
“He’s not picking up.”
“Who?” I asked.
“Hang on.” He ended the call and tapped in another number, and held the phone to his ear again. I looked out the window, not at the open door but at everything else. Most of the area was lit up, but parts of the periphery were cloaked in shadow. I thought I saw a figure by the fence, but it might have just been a tree branch moving in the wind.
“Hey, Sutton?” asked Mills into his phone. “Do you know where Murray is? He’s not answering his phone.”
The car was stopped. I wasn’t even buckled.
I saw movement in the shadows again; definitely a person. Whoever it was, was swaying back and forth, so much like the homeless woman had been swaying by the canal that I couldn’t help but wonder, just for a second, if it was her. But it couldn’t be; we’d traveled too fast.
“The door to my room is hanging open,” said Mills into the phone. “It’s probably just a mistake, like the housekeeper forgot to pull it closed after she was done, but it’s tripping my Spidey-sense, and I can’t get hold of Murray, and this whole thing is freaking me out.”
I opened the car door, and Mills shouted into the phone.
“Now John’s leaving—John! Come back here! Sutton, get over here, he’s getting away!”
Mills revved the engine, jerking the SUV forward, but I jumped out and managed to land without losing my balance. He swore again, slamming on the brakes and throwing the vehicle into park. I walked toward the figure in the shadows, and I could hear whoever it was in the gaps between Mills’s angry shouts behind me; the figure was muttering something, over and over:
“Stay here. Stay here.”
Mills grabbed me from behind, and I felt a cold metal handcuff slam down onto my wrist. “I said stay in the car!”
“Shh.” I didn’t pull away from him, just put my free hand to my lips, and then pointed at the swaying, muttering man.
“He’s a junkie,” said Mills.
“Listen,” I whispered.
“Stay here,” the man repeated. “Stay here. The Dark Lady says to stay here.”
Mills had his stun gun out before I even knew he was reaching for it. “What’s going on here?” he whispered.
“I have no idea,” I whispered back.
“Is that the man who attacked you?”
I crept forward, pulling on the handcuff around my right wrist; Mills kept a firm grip on it, but let me lead. I drew closer and recognized the mysterious figure’s coat. I nodded, signaling Mills, and then raised my voice just enough to carry.
“Simon Watts?”
The m
an in the shadows looked up.
“Simon Watts?” I asked. “Can you tell me what happened here?”
“I don’t have to talk to you,” he said, once again rocking back and forth. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
“Who is the Dark Lady?” I asked.
Watts shook his head. “Everyone.”
Mills grunted, then called out a question of his own: “What did the Dark Lady tell you to do?”
“Stay here.”
“I mean before that,” said Mills. “What did you do in my motel room?”
“Nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing—”
I took another step forward. “Simon,” I said. “Do you recognize me?”
He turned toward us again, leaning forward to get a closer look. He studied my face, and then his eyes opened wide, and then he screamed at the top of his lungs.
Mills fired his Taser, and Watts dropped to the ground, twitching.
“I’m going to need my handcuffs back now,” said Mills, but he didn’t actually take them from me. We stared at the body for a moment before he spoke again. “Are you going to run away from me, John?”
“You know me so well.” I said, “You tell me.”
“An ancient supernatural monster forced this man to do something to my room,” said Mills. “You want to see what it was as much as I do. So no, you won’t.”
I stared at him, then looked at Watts’s unconscious body. After a moment, I looked back toward the row of motel doors.
“I reserve the right to run away later.”
“And I reserve the right to shoot you when you do.”
I nodded and reached out my hand. “Allies until then.”
“Don’t put it that way,” said Mills. “It makes me sound stupid.”
“That ship has sailed.”
He frowned but shook my hand and holstered his stun gun. He took the cuff off my wrist and put it around Simon’s, and then we dragged his unconscious body to the fence and cuffed him to a thick metal post. Once he was secure, Mills drew his real gun.
“Stay behind me,” he whispered, and I dropped back half a step as we walked carefully toward the open motel room. We could smell the blood before we even reached the door.