by Dan Wells
I realized I was gripping the table edge so tightly my fingertips were turning white from the pressure. I couldn’t let myself think about Marci anymore. I counted my number pattern, a mental exercise that helped me calm down: one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four. Deep breath, in and out.
“This is definitely a gun,” said Kelly, still hunched over the photos. “That’s a good catch, John. I’ll call the others.”
“What does that tell us for sure, though?” asked Nathan. “She works late hours in a bad part of town; maybe she wants to be able to defend herself without morphing into a monster every time.”
“That’s entirely possible,” said Kelly. “On the other hand, our records say nothing about a concealed weapons permit, and yet she’s wearing one in a hospital. That’s two laws she’s breaking, which seems a little unnecessary for standard self-defense. We’ve had her under surveillance for weeks and we didn’t know anything about this gun until now. That means she really, really wants one, and she really, really doesn’t want anyone to know she has it, and those two together seem like a pretty good sign that something weird is going on.”
“That’s a lot of reallys,” I said.
“Sensitivity training,” said Nathan. I raised my eyebrow and he scowled. “Everyone else got to say it.”
The door to the conference room opened without a knock, and Linda Ostler stepped in: the woman who’d organized our team and the de facto leader of the US government’s secret war against the supernatural. Her file listed her as fifty-three, which made her older than even Trujillo, and she had the force of will to back that age up with an aura of hard-won experience and authority. Kelly stood up immediately; some remnant of her training as a cop, I assumed.
“Agent Ostler,” said Kelly, “I was just about to call you—we’ve found something new in the Gardner case—”
“Thank you, Ms. Ishida, but I’m afraid it will have to wait. Agent Potash called, and we’re moving on Cody French.”
“Now?” asked Diana.
“Immediately,” said Ostler. “Potash is observing him, and we have reason to believe that our window of opportunity is about to open. If John’s analysis is correct, we have about three hours to kill him before that window closes again, possibly for weeks.”
“Everybody suit up, then,” said Diana, already walking to the door. “I’ll meet you at the car in ten.” She brushed past Ostler and disappeared down the hall.
Kelly looked at me. “Are you ready for this?”
“I’m jumping for joy.”
“Do you need me for anything?” asked Nathan. “I’m not a field agent, but I’ve been training in firearms and I—”
“Guns won’t help on this one,” said Kelly. “Diana won’t even be much use, unless it goes wrong, at which point having extra people there will only makes things harder.” She looked at me. “This one’s all John and Potash.”
“Then why are you going?” asked Nathan.
She turned back to him, her gaze icy. “I’m going because, unlike you, I am a field agent, and I’ve actually finished my firearms training, and I know exactly how the plan is supposed to go down. We may need you in the future, Mr. Gentry, but until then we need you to stay here.” He fell silent, and I followed Kelly and Ostler into the hall.
“He’s actually ‘Dr.’ Gentry,” I said, “and it’s very rude of you to forget his title. Do you know how hard he had to work for that? He pulled himself out of the ghetto in Philadelphia—”
“Dr. Gentry is a good model of where you could be in a few years, John,” said Agent Ostler. “Put your natural intelligence to good use and get a real degree or two.”
“And annoy everyone around me.”
“You already annoy everyone around you,” said Ostler. “At least Nathan doesn’t do it on purpose.”
I had a plan to kill Ostler, too. I looked forward to it with relish.
* * *
I lived in a small apartment two doors down from a demon named Cody French. Becoming his neighbor had been my idea: we’d come to Fort Bruce to study him, after all, trying to find a way to kill him, and what better way than by interacting with him directly? That was what I’d brought to the team, more than anything else: not so much my expertise as my approach. The US government had been peripherally aware of the demons for decades, just as many other nations over the years had been. But knowing about them and hunting them were two different things. Whatever the Withered were, they were supernatural, and that made them hard to predict, hard to track, and hard to kill. How could you plan for something that had the power to do or even be something completely unexpected? Ostler had inherited an investigation team with a long history of fleeting glimpses and near misses, and meanwhile I’d killed three of the things, all on my own. There wasn’t any real trick to it—I planned their deaths the same way I planned my teammates’. Spend time with them, figure out their weak spots, and then push on those weak spots until they die. I make friends with them, and then I kill them.
Being my friend is not, statistically speaking, very safe.
We knew about Cody French the same way we knew about all the other Withered: Brooke told us. Brooke was a childhood friend of mine, the girl next door, and I’d had something of a crush on her for years. I say “something” because sociopaths don’t have crushes the way normal people do. Looking back, through the lens of counseling, I can say more accurately that I had an obsessive fixation on the idea of Brooke, an idea that had very little to do with Brooke herself. I’d wanted what Brooke represented—some Platonic ideal of innocence and beauty—not because I wanted to share it but because I wanted to possess it. Not exactly the basis for a stable relationship. She, as it turns out, had a much more normal attraction to me—I almost said “healthy” in that sentence, but that’s kind of laughable, isn’t it? She’d thought I was nice and asked me out a couple of times, and ended up chained to a chair in a madman’s kitchen. She was eventually possessed by a suicidal demon named Nobody. With any hope of a normal life destroyed, she’d joined Ostler’s team the same time I did. I don’t know what her parents thought she was doing, but I bet they imagined it as a lot more glamorous and heroic than it was.
But even a statement like “she joined the team” wasn’t really accurate. I joined the team; Brooke was more of a tool that the team used. She wanted to be more when she was lucid, but honestly, she had several thousand years of suicidal, homicidal, everything-o-cidal monster memories trapped inside of her head. Most days she could barely dress herself.
I told you it’s not safe to be my friend.
So Brooke’s job was to comb through Nobody’s memory for every scrap of Withered-related information she could find, and once we put together enough of the pieces we’d move to their city, trying to be as quiet and unobtrusive as we could, and set up a temporary office. We interfaced with the police, using Kelly as a liaison, but mostly we kept to ourselves—the mind-wrecking secret that the world was infested with supernatural monsters was not the kind of thing people took to easily, and we’d found it was simpler to work in the shadows than to try to train a different police force in Withered-hunting tactics every few months. We’d settle in, start our surveillance, and then it was my turn: Brooke found the Withered, but I was the one who figured out how to kill them. Albert Potash did most of the actual killing, with Diana as backup, and Kelly, Nathan, and Dr. Trujillo helped out with whatever else we needed.
I probably need to explain how the Withered work. We still didn’t know exactly where they came from—Brooke’s memory was selective, to say the least—but somehow each of them gave something up in return for greater power. The first one I’d ever met, my neighbor Bill Crowley, had no identity of his own—no face, no body—but he could steal the bodies of others. He’d lived for centuries, for millennia really, hopping from body to body, sometimes as a king, sometimes worshipped as a god, but eventually just hanging out in Clayton, trying to get by. I think they got tired after so long, a
fter seeing so much and being so constantly on the fringes of the world. They never really belonged anywhere, and I can tell you that gets old fast, and I’m only seventeen. To spend thousands of years not belonging … it’s no wonder Cody French ended up in a one-bedroom hole with a ragged old dog and a dead-end job. Whatever zeal he’d once had, whatever ambition, had run out ages ago.
Cody couldn’t sleep. It’s not that he didn’t need to, he literally couldn’t do it, not with sleeping pills or even pummeling himself unconscious, and I was fairly certain he’d taken both to a dangerous extreme at various points in his life. Think about that for a minute: all the other Withered were falling apart at the mental seams after so much relentless existence, but they’d only been awake for, on an average human sleep schedule, two thirds of it. Cody had experienced every minute of every hour of every day, day after day after year after century. What do you do with all that time? How do you not go insane? Cody had chosen books, and he was one of the most well-read people I’d ever known, but that can get you only so far. He’d filled the rest of his time with drinking, using alcohol to create a mindless stupor that wasn’t exactly sleep, but filled a similar role. It helped him to forget, to relax, to turn off his brain for just a few precious minutes here and there.
And sometimes he took it a little farther.
“He’s knocking on your door, Cleaver,” said a voice on the radio. Albert Potash—I’d guess you’d call him our team’s muscle—was not a patient man. I enjoyed pushing Nathan’s buttons, but Potash I just tried to avoid altogether. I had no idea how to kill him.
“We’re coming as fast as we can,” said Kelly, keeping her hands firmly on the wheel. “The roads are icy. Keep your shirt on.”
Cody French was a hard man to hurt: he had the reflexes of a wild animal, a mind that never relaxed, and the combat training of a man who’d spent thousands of years trying to find something to do with his time. On top of that he had a shocking level of regeneration, having passed our “speed-bump test” with flying colors. That test was more or less what it sounded like: the second step of every hunt we went on, after we’d picked up some basic information about who the target was and how they worked, was to hit them with a car. If that took care of them, easy peasy; if not, we dug in for the long haul and tried to find a way around their supernatural healing. Our second week in Fort Bruce, Potash had run a red light in a diesel trailer and broadsided Cody French’s car while the Withered was on his way to work. The car was totaled and the inside was covered with blood, but Cody had been essentially unharmed when they pulled him from the wreck—he’d healed before the bystanders had even been able to reach him. So we needed something more personalized, and we spent a long time studying him from afar, looking for a weakness. And then Cody asked his neighbor, the quiet, unassuming John Cleaver, to watch his dog for a few hours.
Just hours? That dog spent all day alone sometimes, so what could a few hours possibly matter? Sure, he had a girl there, but he had girls all the time. Why was this time different? Turned out that girl landed in county lockup a few days later, raving and delusional, though with no signs of outward abuse. That’s the kind of thing that sets off all our alarm bells. Animals made me nervous in general, and under any other circumstance I would never have even touched his dog—I’d hurt some animals very badly as a child and I had rules to keep myself away from any similar temptations—but this was my in, so I’d smiled and nodded and said yes, and Cody had introduced me to his basset hound, named Boy Dog—and no, I have no idea why anyone would choose such a stupid name. Cody only laughed when I asked him. I petted Boy Dog as calmly as I could, played the friendly neighbor, and stepped into the life of a damaged monster. Over the course of the next month or so I’d figured it out: When Cody French’s life got too bad, when he just couldn’t stand being awake anymore and all he wanted was a rest, he’d pick up a girl—usually a hooker, someone desperate and already a little shady—and take them back to his apartment and pour everything he had into them. Not his memories, but his awareness. The part of his brain that could never turn off, that could never stop or slow down for even a second, he dumped into someone else. Then he slept, and she went mad.
“The dog’s with another neighbor,” said Potash. “How close are you?”
“Five minutes at the most,” said Kelly, “unless you want us to die in a car accident on our way there.”
“The dog’s not part of the plan anyway,” I said. “Better to have it somewhere else, so I’m free to move around.”
Potash’s voice crackled on the radio. “This girl looks younger than you are.”
“Probably a runaway,” said Kelly. “Someone who won’t go to the cops, and who doesn’t have anyone taking care of her. Twenty bucks says she’s already got a drug problem, so her hallucinations won’t look out of place if anyone looks too deep at her case.”
Diana spoke up from the back seat. “If we take him out fast, can we save her?”
The car was silent.
“I don’t know,” I said at last. “I don’t know exactly how he works. Killing him might end the transfer early, or it might make it permanent.”
“So then we’re damning her with the same curse he has?” asked Diana. “What good does that do?”
“She can’t transfer it to anyone else,” I said, “and she can’t live forever.”
“Better to just kill her in the same hit,” said Potash.
“Absolutely not,” said Kelly. “Better to take her into custody and observe her—maybe she’ll be fine.”
“She won’t be,” I said.
“And you don’t care about her?” asked Diana.
I stared out the windows, the world flying by as Kelly sped through the city, and clenched my hands in a fist while I recited my number sequence: one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen. Dr. Trujillo would be so proud. I took a deep breath and thought about Diana’s question again, more calmly this time. I turned her words back on her: “What good would caring do?”
“This entire thing is your plan,” said Diana. “You couldn’t find any way of hurting him without also destroying an innocent girl?”
“It’s not like I’m happy about it—”
“But you’re not sad about it either,” said Diana. “We’re about to straight up ruin someone’s life, all in the interest of killing someone else, and you don’t care the least, tiny bit about either one of them.”
“What good would that do?” I asked again. This was my plan, like she said, and I’d thought it through from every possible angle. Caring about the target could get us all killed, and going in soft to avoid collateral damage could be just as dangerous. “He can recover from damage faster than we can deal it,” I said, “which means we have to deal a hard, precise blow that he can’t recover from. That means cutting his head off, and that means we have to get him while he’s incapacitated, and that means we have to wait until after he starts the transfer. It’s the only time he can’t defend himself. We have to do this, and we have to do it this way, and I could spend my energy being sad about that or I could spend it making sure it works, and that we get him, and that after this one last girl he never hurts anyone else again.”
Diana growled. “Normal people don’t just turn off their human nature every time it gets inconvenient—”
“Sucks to be them, then,” I said.
“We don’t need to argue about this right now,” said Kelly. “Sometimes you have to turn off your empathy to get the job done—I learned it in the force, you learned it in the military, John learned it … I shudder to think where John learned it. Let’s just get the job done.”
A limp body in a bathtub full of blood. A broken mirror. A burning car and a twisting scream.
Twenty-one. Thirty-four. Fifty-five. Eighty-nine. One hundred forty-four.
Turn it all off and don’t feel anything.
“It’s about time,” said Potash, spotting us from his window as Kelly pulled into the apartment parking lot. There were two rows
of buildings and a parking lot between them, with crumbling, open-air walkways, and stairs leading up to the apartments. It was winter, and the curbs were crusted with dirty, jagged ice. Kelly pulled to a stop behind the high, cinder block wall around the Dumpster, concealing us from anyone who might be looking out of Cody French’s window. Diana got out without a word, carrying the duffel with her disassembled rifle. “Give Diana five minutes to get in place,” said Potash, on the radio, “and meet me at the door.”
“Three minutes,” said Diana, her whisper barely audible on the shared frequency. “How incompetent do you think I am?”
“Radio silence,” said Kelly. “Go.”
We all had our jobs and we’d gone over them a dozen times at the rented office space, getting ready for this exact situation whenever the opportunity appeared. Kelly would stay in the parking lot, her badge in hand, ready to deal with any questions or nosy neighbors. Ideally we wouldn’t need her at all. Diana would be perched in the other apartment we’d rented, directly across from Cody’s, with her rifle aimed and ready to shoot anyone who chased us out his door. Ideally we wouldn’t need her either. I had a stolen key to Cody’s door, and as the one who’d planned the hit, it was my job to observe the situation and make the call to proceed or pull out. I’d go in, make sure he was as helpless as we needed, and then …
… and then I wouldn’t kill him. Potash, with a stainless-steel machete, would wait for my signal and take off Cody’s head in one clean stroke.
I could feel that machete in my hand, feel the grip and the heft and the sudden, perfect resistance as it severed the spine. This was my plan. I’d practiced it a hundred times in my head. A thousand times. Sometimes in my head I had to kill the girl, too. You never knew what complications might arise.
But I never got to do it for real.
I got out of the car and walked to the stairs, pulling the key from my back pocket. Albert Potash timed it perfectly, arriving at the door from the other direction exactly as I got there. He was an older man, lean and fit, his graying hair still trimmed to the short, military cut his kind never seemed to let go. I didn’t know exactly where he’d gotten his training, but he was some kind of ex-special forces supersoldier, the kind of man a government creates, uses, and then denies all knowledge of forever. I wasn’t surprised, when I’d looked in his file, to find it completely empty. I’d spent my short life dreaming of death, of ending one life after another, stabbing and choking and poisoning and more. He’d spent his life actually doing it. I hated him passionately.