by Dan Wells
“The last thing we need is to get murdered,” said Nathan. “It could be weeks before we figure out who this guy is, and by then we could all be—”
“Did you ask at the front desk?” I asked. Kelly looked at me, and I turned the photo to face her. “Look at his position there—he’s either just changed directions for no reason in the middle of the room, or he’s walking away from the receptionist.”
The room went quiet, and Kelly studied the image a moment before closing her eyes. “I’m trying to remember the layout of the lobby. Leaving the front desk at that angle would take him toward…”
“The dining room,” I said, and looked at Trujillo. “Did you walk through there?”
“We never do,” said Trujillo. “Too many knives.”
I looked at Ostler. “The dining room is for residents and their guests only; unless he’s accompanying somebody, he wouldn’t even be allowed in.”
“Why does this matter?” asked Nathan.
“Because it means Meshara has a cover story,” said Ostler, picking up my line of thought. “If he was just walking around watching people the nurses would get suspicious, so he’s made friends with a resident. That’s his excuse for being there. And that means he’s been there more than once, which means the people at the front desk might recognize him.”
“It’ll be an Alzheimer’s patient,” I said. “Someone who doesn’t remember anyone, so no one will think it’s weird that he doesn’t remember this guy.”
“How do you know that?” asked Diana.
“I don’t know for sure,” I said. “But that’s the way I’d do it.”
Ostler looked at Kelly. “Ms. Ishida?”
Kelly stood up, taking the better of the two photos with her. “I’ll check it out. Potash, come with me—nobody should be alone now that we know we’re being followed.” The two of them left, and the rest of us looked at each other.
“What does this mean?” asked Trujillo. “Practically, I mean? I’ve worked on serial-killer cases, but never one where the investigators were being hunted. Has this ever happened before?”
“Nobody was hunting John,” said Nathan. “I mean, the Withered named Nobody was hunting John.”
“That’s a weird name for a Withered,” I said. “Is ‘Nobody was hunting John’ also Sumerian?”
“This is serious,” said Diana. “Can you please stop making jokes for five damn minutes?”
“Let me fill in some gaps for you,” said Ostler. “In the process of hunting John, the Withered named Nobody killed four girls John knew, including his girlfriend, then tried to kill Brooke, then burned John’s mother alive. So maybe humor is a defense mechanism, and you need to cut him a little slack.”
So now they knew my history. Judging by their silence, it kind of freaked them out.
Trujillo was the first to speak. “So I take it the answer to my question is ‘yes, we’re in incredible danger.’”
“All I knew about Nobody was her name,” I said. “We know Meshara’s name, face, and location, and we have a good lead on finding more, plus anything else we can get out of Brooke. We can do this.”
“And how many of us die in the process?” asked Nathan.
“Better us than civilians,” said Diana.
“I am a civilian!” Nathan shouted.
“We knew the risks when we got into this,” said Ostler. “Even you, civilian or not. If they want to make this a war, we have the tools, the experience, and the weapons to fight it.”
“Our first step needs to be Mary Gardner,” said Trujillo. “If there’s more than one Withered working together, we have to assume she’s a part of it. If we take her out as fast as we can, we remove one enemy soldier before they have a chance to hit us. That could throw their whole plan into disarray and buy us the time we need to track down this Meshara.”
“We’re not ready to move on Mary,” I said. “I haven’t figured out her weakness yet.”
“She passed the speed-bump test,” said Nathan, “so we know it’s going to be tricky.”
“Maybe the speed-bump test is part of our problem,” said Diana. “If the Withered talk to each other at all, and this suggests that they do, then the fact that each one of them’s been in a major, unexplained car accident recently can’t help but look like a clue.”
“So we don’t speed bump Meshara,” I said. “Make them think we don’t know about him yet.”
“All that does is deny us information,” said Nathan. “Even if it denies them information, too, it’s still a wash at best, and a needless precaution if Brooke has communicated with him in any way. Dammit!” He smacked the table with his hands, like he’d just remembered something terrible. “She’s thinks she’s one of them! For all we know she’s been talking to him all along!”
“She wouldn’t do that,” I said, though I knew it was a hollow assurance. We could never be sure what Brooke would do. I shook my head. “All we have to do is the same thing we always do: get to know them, make a plan, and strike. And we’ve already made good progress, despite barely knowing about this guy for three hours. We know he’s hunting us, we know he’s using a patient as a cover, and we know he can’t shape shift the way some of the others can.”
“How do we know that?” asked Ostler.
“Because Brooke recognized him,” I said, “after what she claimed to be a hundred years. If he could shape shift in that time, he would have. So unless the receptionist throws Kelly some insane curveball down there, we’ve got a good head start on figuring out what he does, and how, and how to stop him.” Ostler’s phone rang. “Speak of the devil.”
Ostler set her phone in the middle of the table. “Ms. Ishida, you’re on speaker.”
“His name is Elijah Sexton,” said Kelly. “The receptionist knew him immediately. He visits a man named Merrill Evans—an Alzheimer’s patient, just like John guessed.”
“Nice one!” Nathan held up his hand for a high five, but I ignored him.
“Now get ready for the weird part,” said Kelly. “He’s been visiting here ever since Merrill Evans checked in. That was almost twenty years ago.” She sighed. “Either that’s a really deep cover story, or we don’t have any idea what’s really going on here.”
3
“I don’t want you in my house,” I said.
“That’s not your call,” said Potash.
We were going back to my apartment; Potash was driving. That was a frustration of its own: I was seventeen and I could drive just fine, but they never let me. I had my own car, but whenever I was with the rest of the team—which was always—I had to let one of them drive. I was a child to them. Worse, though, Potash had a duffel bag in the back seat, full of what he claimed to be the sum of his material possessions. I felt my throat starting to constrict, imagining the invasion of my living space. I couldn’t do it.
“It’s my house,” I said, “of course it’s my call. Why do you think I live by myself—because I love people so much? It’s part of my deal with Ostler: Kelly and Diana share a place; you and Nathan and Trujillo share a place; I live alone. This isn’t up for discussion.”
“You’re right,” said Potash, still looking at the road. “It isn’t.” Now that Meshara and who knew how many others were hunting for us, no one on the team was allowed to be alone, even at home.
“Have you considered that I’m a dangerous psychopath?” I asked. “Sleeping in the same apartment as me could be severely hazardous to your health and well-being.”
Potash glanced at me, a silent, emotionless look that expressed precisely how little danger a scrawny teenager posed to a special forces soldier. “Have you considered that that’s exactly why they chose me to be the one to join you?”
“Even if I’m not a danger to you,” I said, “what about other people? How many guns do you have in that duffel bag? Is it a 50 percent ratio of clothes to weapons, or somehow more than that? I have a very strict no-weapons policy in my house—”
“All the more reason you shouldn�
��t be alone.”
“—and I do that to avoid temptations. I’m trying very hard not to become a serial murderer and the last thing I need is a bunch of guns and knives all over my house.”
“There are no weapons in my duffel bag,” said Potash. “I have a concealed gun on my person, which you will never see or touch. Everything else is stored off site.”
“It’s a one-bedroom apartment,” I said. “I have nowhere for you to sleep.”
“I sleep on the floor.”
“I don’t even—” I stopped suddenly, surprised by what he’d said. “I was expecting you to ask for the couch.”
“I prefer floors. I don’t actually own a bed, even at home.”
I sighed, running out of feasible plans to dissuade him. “You’re insane.”
“Then we should get along fine.”
“Sensitivity training,” I snarled. I closed my eyes, trying to think of the problems this would cause and searching for preemptive solutions. “I’m a vegetarian,” I said, “and rather militant about it. No meat of any kind in the house. You so much as order a pepperoni pizza, you eat it outside.”
“Does fish count?”
“Of course fish counts.”
“Some vegetarians don’t count fish.”
“I do,” I said. “I’m not protesting the American meat industry, I’m trying to not kill anything. Have you ever thought about your meat as an animal? Your teeth biting through the flesh of a living thing that somebody killed and put on a fire? No animals of any kind.”
Potash nodded. “Eggs?”
“Eggs are fine,” I said. I stared out the window, clenching my fist inside my coat pocket. “You can eat all the f—” I stopped and closed my eyes. My apartment was my haven; it was the one place I could go to be away from everyone. In Clayton we’d lived over my mother’s mortuary, so I’d had my own room and the embalming room as my private, silent sanctuaries. Now I had neither. We moved around the country, killing as we went, and all I had to keep myself stable was the knowledge that wherever we went I would always have a place to myself. I needed one.
Now I’d lost even that.
When we reached my apartment I showed Potash the living room: a single chair pointed at a TV.
“I thought you said you had a couch,” said Potash.
“I said I was expecting you to ask for a couch,” I answered. “I was kind of looking forward to telling you I didn’t have one. It’s not as weird as not owning a bed, though, so don’t point any fingers.” I left him to set up his own sleeping area and retreated to the kitchen, where I started making a salad. I wasn’t kidding about my vegetarianism—while I would gladly have made that my diet just to piss him off, I really did avoid meat and had for a few years. I’d come to embrace cooking as a “safe” hobby that helped me keep my mind off of other things. Now, raging at this home invasion, I chopped yellow peppers with my teeth clenched in fury, slicing tomatoes and shredding carrots and ripping chunks of lettuce with my bare hands. I covered the mass of vegetables with sunflower seeds and olive oil and sat down at the kitchen table with my mind still roiling. There was no wall between the meager kitchen and the tiny front room, so I watched Potash in angry silence as he finished his spartan preparations. Maybe if I burned the apartment down they’d let me be alone again. I was only halfway finished with my dinner when he stowed his bag in the corner and sat down across from me at the table.
“I eat alone,” I said.
“You used to do everything alone,” he responded. “Eating is one of many things that will have to change under this arrangement.”
“Or you could just go, and I can keep my routine the way I like it.”
Nathan or Ostler or Trujillo would have sighed, or shaken their heads, or given some outward expression of frustration. Potash only looked at me. “I have trouble believing that while our entire team is being hunted by monsters, putting your life in direct and immediate danger, you care more about your routine than your safety.”
“My routine is my safety,” I said. “I have a specific way of doing things. I have rules.”
“And what happens if you don’t follow them?”
I held myself as still as I could, focusing on the wall so no other images could enter my mind. “I’d rather not be forced into a demonstration.”
“I can buy my own food,” he said simply, “but you’ll have to go with me to the store, or this whole living arrangement is meaningless. We’re always together. It’s late now, so we can go tomorrow.”
“I can be out late,” I said, “I’m not a child.”
“No one ever says that but children.”
I pushed my salad away, suddenly sickened by the idea of food. The kitchen table was mostly covered in papers, and I gestured to them as calmly as I could. “This is where I study—another thing I do alone. I need to figure out how to kill Mary Gardner, so just … back off for a while, okay? Disappear.”
“You only have three rooms,” said Potash. “I either invade your bedroom, which I doubt you want, or I sit in the bathroom all night, or you see me out here.”
“I choose bathroom.”
“I wasn’t offering you a choice,” said Potash, “I was pointing out that full avoidance is impossible.” His voice was maddeningly calm, and I had to exert every ounce of my self-control to maintain a similar expression. I felt like a tornado turned inside out: the windless eye of the storm was on the outside, placid and emotionless, but trapped in the middle was a raging vortex of movement and fury and violence. I took a deep breath, staring at my half-eaten salad and my piles of carefully ordered papers and my living room without a couch. I should move to the bedroom, I knew—it was the only way to work in privacy—but that would mean giving in, and I felt a hot, irrational aversion to even considering it. Better to sit here getting nothing done and making him uncomfortable than to retreat to the back room and let him rule the front uncontested. I tried to think of how to do it rudely, knowing there was no way to just “not move” dramatically, when someone knocked on the door.
Potash and I looked at each other.
“Probably a neighbor,” said Potash softly. “Someone on the team would have called first.”
“The only neighbor I know is dead,” I whispered, standing. “I’ll answer it, but if it’s a Withered I’d better see that concealed weapon you keep bragging about.”
Potash said nothing, only standing to follow me and then stopping just where the opened door would hide him from the visitor. I heard a foot shuffle outside, and a low canine yelp. I frowned and opened the door.
“Oh good, you’re home.” It was Christina Tucker from apartment 201; I’d seen her collecting her mail now and then, and walking to and from her car. She had a white Honda Civic with one missing hubcap and she worked part-time at a bank where she earned just barely enough to pay the rent. She hated her mother and broke up with her boyfriend three weeks ago. At night she slept with a face mask and a white-noise machine, and you probably don’t want to know how I know all of that. “I’m Christina,” she said, brushing hair from her eyes. “I live in 201.”
“I think I’ve seen you around.”
She was bent nearly in half, holding Boy Dog by the collar. “Do you know where Mr. French is?” she asked. “The guy in 202? Nobody really knows him, but I’ve seen you talking to him and I know you take care of his dog sometimes.”
Withered bodies collapse into ash when they die, so there was no decaying body for anyone to smell and get suspicious. We hadn’t reported his death, so unless his boss called the landlord, it was unlikely anyone here would realize he was gone until the rent came due at the end of the month. I looked at the big basset hound, then back at Christina. “I haven’t seen him.”
She tugged on the basset hound’s leash, dragging the heavy dog forward a few inches. “He left his dog with me yesterday and hasn’t come back. I can’t keep him anymore and I don’t want him just running around the complex pooping on everything.” She tugged the leash again,
pulling the dog closer to my doorway. “I suppose we could call the pound, but I don’t really know how that works—I don’t know if he could get the dog back when he shows up again, or if they’d sell him to somebody, or God forbid they put him to sleep.” She tugged again. “Can you watch him?”
“The dog?”
“Yes.” Tug. “I’ve seen you take care of him before, maybe he’ll be better for you. It will only be a day or two, I’m sure.”
I have rules about animals: I don’t own them, I don’t touch them, I don’t even talk to them. I’d watched Boy Dog for an hour or two, twice, so that I could get closer to Cody French and kill him. Now that he was dead I needed to stay as far away as I could. Especially now that I had Potash in the house—adding a dog to the equation would be idiotic. Worst of all, despite Christina’s uninformed promise, I knew that French wasn’t coming back. If I took this dog, it would be forever. It would be stupid and irresponsible.
I started to form a protest, stepping slightly to the side to give Christina a better view of how little space I had, but she seemed to interpret the move as an invitation to let go of the leash. Boy Dog wandered in, walked straight to Potash’s makeshift bedroll, and peed on the blankets. Potash muttered a low curse, and I turned back to Christina.
“I’ll take him.”
* * *
I gathered my papers and retreated to my bedroom, shutting the door to study and letting Potash deal with Boy Dog. He wasn’t exactly a difficult dog—he was a basset hound, which is barely one step up from a furry statue. Give him a warm place to lie down and he’d lie there for hours without moving. The fact that he had claimed Potash’s bed gave me a petty sense of satisfaction, and I turned my attention to Mary Gardner.
I pored through my own notes, assembled over weeks of part-time volunteer work on Mary’s floor of the hospital. She lived under the human guise of a nurse, forty-six years old, competent and caring and boundlessly sympathetic to the parents of those children who died in her care. She was very careful about her kills—we had to give her that. If not for Brooke’s assurance, we would never have suspected that the children under Mary’s care had died from anything other than the diseases they were already being treated for. Many of her victims, we suspected, weren’t under her direct care at all, though we’d been observing the hospital long enough to tie her, at least superficially, to the approximate time and place of most of the deaths on three floors of the building. If she were human, we’d have enough evidence to at least get her fired, but we couldn’t afford that with a Withered. Drive her away and she’d just start killing somewhere else, and we didn’t have the time or the resources to follow her all over the world. We had to kill her here, once and for all, and the sooner we could manage it, the fewer children she’d take with her on the way out. Our own danger from Meshara was a secondary concern for now, though as Trujillo had pointed out, every dead Withered made us that much safer.