by Dan Wells
“Specialize in serial killers, apparently,” said Iowa. He stood up again and stepped toward me, holding out his hand. “Agent Mills. Big fan of your work.”
I let his hand hang there, unshaken. “What kind of work are we talking about?”
He held his hand out another moment or two, then shrugged and went back to his seat. “John Wayne Cleaver, special advisor to Agent Linda Ostler, and a key member of Task Force Goshawk, charged with a mission so secret I’m not even allowed to state it out loud in this room—though I assure you I’m very familiar with its particulars.”
“Goshawk?”
“Some kind of a bird,” said Mills. “I didn’t name it.”
“It’s better than Boy Dog,” I said.
“Your record with Agent Ostler was sketchy but acceptable,” said Mills. “You talked back to your superiors, you pushed every button and boundary and envelope you ever came across, and you actively antagonized some members of your team, including and most problematically the therapist assigned to your unit, but you always got the job done. You enabled more … how can I put this without spilling state secrets … more ‘apprehensions of nonstandard targets’ than the entire US government had managed to achieve in the several decades prior to your term of service. You were on track for a commendation and a hefty pay bump before Fort Bruce.”
“How much of a pay bump?”
“You keep focusing on the least important part of every sentence I say.”
“My therapist used to say the same thing.”
“I’m beginning to understand a lot of the personnel reports I’ve read.”
“Do I want to know why you’re here?” I asked.
He shrugged again. “Probably. Your personnel reports suggest that you want to know everything.”
“Do I get to?”
“How much time do you have?” asked Mills. “The reasons I’m here are a very long list.”
“Well I’m not going anywhere, as far as I know,” I said. “Start with where I’m going next.”
“I’m afraid we have to start several months before that,” said Mills. “Tell me about Fort Bruce.”
“Nice place,” I said. “Kind of big for my tastes, though. And pretty dangerous now that the entire police force has been slaughtered by a supernatural monster.”
“Can we do this without the sass?” asked Mills.
“I guess so,” I said. “But it’s really the only part I enjoy.”
“The last anyone heard of your team in Fort Bruce was Dr. Trujillo calling to say that a combined operation with local police had gone wrong, and a Withered army was running wild through the city. When we arrived on the scene ten hours later there were more than thirty dead humans and what we surmised to be the remains of two dead Withered. You and Brooke were the only survivors.”
“How did you know we’d survived?” I asked. “Maybe we’d just been eaten by the monsters.”
“Most of the team assumed as much,” said Mills. “I was the one who noticed that one of the human bodies had received a makeshift ‘embalming’ with eighty-seven-octane gasoline. That didn’t prove anything, but it sure suggested a lot of really wild possibilities.”
“The most lurid of which,” I said, extrapolating the likely story, “was that I had gone full psycho, betrayed my team, and left a gruesome calling card to announce the beginning of my serial-killer career.”
“Now it sounds like you’ve been reading my personnel reports.”
“How true do you think that version is?” I asked. “Measured in the number of armed marines waiting in the hall to ‘apprehend’ me?”
“Three,” said Mills simply. “Plus two more outside. Which is not nearly as many as there could have been.”
Brooke groaned, and we looked at her in unison. She moved her hand—more of a twitch than a conscious movement—and moments later the nurse bustled into the room.
“The MRI results are looking really clean,” he said, studying the monitors and tapping a pen against his cheek. “It’s practically a miracle. Now it looks like your girl is waking up.”
“Woman,” I said. Mostly just to bug him.
Brooke took her time regaining consciousness, and with the nurse in the room Mills and I couldn’t talk freely. Mills caught my eye at one point, nodding toward the door, but I ignored him and looked back at Brooke. If they were going to separate us, they were going to have to do it by force.
“Hey there,” said the nurse, shining a small penlight in Brooke’s eyes. “Are you waking up now? Can you hear me?”
“Where am I?” asked Brooke. Her voice was raw and ragged.
“You’re in a hospital,” said the nurse. “You hit your head pretty hard. Do you remember that?”
“My head,” said Brooke, and she tried to touch her bandage with her palm. A thick leather restraint stopped her hand just a few inches above the bed railing, and she rolled her head to the side to look at it, squinting her eyes in the bright light. She tugged on the restraint again, as if not comprehending its purpose, then tested her other arm and found it was restrained as well. She sighed and closed her eyes again. “Severe suicide risk,” she said. “Yeah, I remember.”
“I’m right here with you,” I said, raising my voice a bit to make sure she could hear me.
She smiled. “John.”
“His name is David,” said the nurse. “Do you remember Da—”
“She’s always called me John,” I said. “It’s okay.”
The nurse nodded, glancing at Agent Mills as if he was trying to put us all together, like a puzzle. He looked back at Brooke. “Okay, sweetie, we’re going to do a few more quick memory tests if that’s all right. You hit your head pretty hard and we want to make sure you didn’t scramble your noodles. You recognized John’s voice and that’s great—can you tell me your name?”
“No.”
“Your name is…” the nurse began, but he stopped talking as a wide, wicked grin spread across Brooke’s face. Her eyes were still closed. The nurse nodded. “I get it, sweetie, you’re just playing with me. Let me rephrase the question: do you know your name?”
“Some of them.”
“Start with the first one.”
“Uh uh uh,” said Brooke, her voice somewhere between playful and taunting. “That’s a secret.”
“You can tell me, honey, I’m a nurse.”
“You’re not going to get anywhere with this,” I said. I’d seen this side of Brooke before, and it wasn’t Brooke at all.
The nurse shot me a glance. “I have to test for brain damage.”
“Physical damage is not her problem,” said Mills. “Put in terms you’re familiar with, she has dissociative identity disorder. Ask her name, her age, where she’s from, any of the standard questions, and you’ll get a dozen different answers. Sometimes more.” He pulled out his badge and held it up, establishing his absolute authority over the situation. “You’re going to go out in the hall and mark this test as done, and you’re going to mark the results as positive.”
“Negative,” I said.
Mills frowned. “Whichever one means she’s healthy and doesn’t have any memory loss.”
“So, negative,” said the nurse.
“This is why I didn’t go into medicine,” said Mills. “You make no sense at all.” He opened the door. “Thanks for your service to the United States government.” The nurse left, and Mills closed the door.
“Would my pay bump have included a badge?” I asked. “Because what you just did looks super fun.”
He slipped his badge back into his suit coat and walked to the side of Brooke’s bed. “So,” he said. “Are you going to tell us who you really are?”
“I’m an innocent little girl,” said Brooke.
“He knows everything,” I said softly. “You don’t have to hide.”
“In that case,” said Brooke, opening her eyes and flashing another toothy grin, “he knows exactly who I am.”
Mills stared at her, trying to
think, and then stepped back in shock as the realization hit him.
Nobody laughed.
“You’re…” said Mills. “I … didn’t think I’d ever get to meet one.”
“I can’t hurt you,” said Nobody, and her grin faded slowly away. “I’ve been dead for two years.”
Mills shuffled backward another half step, and I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of satisfaction at his discomfort.
“You wanted to know what happened in Fort Bruce,” I said. “Now that you’ve met Nobody, you might actually be ready to hear it: the cannibal we were chasing turned out to be a sort of Withered king named Rack. He didn’t have a face or a chest or a heart, but he could use hearts to talk to us the same way Nobody used bodies to get around. They’re like parasites on the rest of the world, using humans as food and tools and even hiding places. He recruited one of our team to his side with the promise of money and power, but I was able to kill him by stabbing that teammate in the chest, filling his heart with gasoline, and then poisoning Rack with it when he tried to recruit me.”
“That’s…” said Mills. He seemed too squeamish to finish his sentence, so I continued.
“We left without telling anyone where we were going because we didn’t want anything like Fort Bruce to ever happen again. We lost that many people because our methods were too obvious: you can’t wage a war against someone without that someone noticing. The Withered noticed us and they fought back. I’d been telling Ostler since the beginning that I needed to do this alone, my way, and then all of a sudden I was the only one left alive so I took my chance and ran with it. Nobody and I have killed just as many without the help of Task Force Goshawk as we ever killed with it, and we’ve done it without anything like another Fort Bruce. You have to see that this is the best way to do it.”
“That’s not the way our government does things,” said Mills.
“Effectively?”
“Unsupervised,” said Mills. “We can’t just have you running around killing people.”
Nobody snorted. “So you’d rather have the Withered running around killing people?”
“A trained agent with decades of experience might earn the kind of autonomy you’re asking for,” said Mills. “Agent Potash might have gotten it. But you’re an eighteen-year-old serial killer and his dead demon girlfriend. Are you crazy?”
“Technically,” I said.
“You light fires everywhere you go,” said Mills. “How do you think we’ve been tracking you? And even if you don’t cause anything on the scale of Fort Bruce, you still cause problems and you still cause deaths. What are we supposed to tell the people of Dillon? ‘It’s okay, don’t worry about the deaths and the arson, our best teenage sociopath is on the job.’”
“Wait,” I said. “What arson?” I’d been desperate to light a fire all day, but hadn’t lit so much as a match my entire time in Dillon. Oh no.
“What do you mean, ‘what arson?’” asked Mills. “The fire you lit this morning. The one that helped me find you so fast—I was already halfway from Dallas when the state police called me.”
“I didn’t light any fires,” I said. “It has to be Attina.”
“Who?”
“The Withered we’re hunting,” I said. “He’s reading my mind somehow.”
“What did he burn?” asked Nobody.
“The church,” said Mills. “Burned it right down to the ground.”
19
Agent Mills kept us in the hospital overnight, locked in the room. The nurse came to visit us every now and then, though he was always accompanied by a cop from the hall, and they never took off Brooke’s restraints. I don’t know how much the nurse knew, but the cops were on edge and that put him on edge. I sat in the corner and ignored them, focusing on the bigger problems: we still didn’t know what Mills was planning to do with us, and meanwhile Attina was only getting more dangerous.
We had to stop him.
“It doesn’t make sense,” I said.
“He’s reading your mind,” said Nobody.
“Probably,” I said. “Can he do that?”
“I don’t know what he can do,” said Nobody. “I don’t have any memories of him at all, just the notes from Forman’s book.”
“What did the notes say?”
Nobody shrugged. “‘Last seen in Dillon, Oklahoma,’” she said. “‘Probably useless.’”
“So far he’s shredded two kids, turned into bigfoot, crashed a truck with his mind, and burned down a church,” I said. “That doesn’t sound useless to me.”
“Because you have no ambition,” said Nobody. “All you want to do is kill loners in dead-end towns, and Attina apparently excels at that. But Forman was working with Rack, and they wanted to raise an army.”
I bristled at her comment but kept my response impersonal. “And you think a telepathic bigfoot wouldn’t be useful to an army?”
“Apparently they thought so,” said Nobody. “We just have to figure out why.”
“Great,” I said. I rubbed my face and eyes, still on edge from last night and this morning, and everything bad that could possibly happen all happening at once. I needed to burn something, or break something, or scream, or cry, or jump up and down. I felt like a soda can that’d been shaken and shaken, relentlessly, for hours. The pressure was building and building and had nowhere to go. I had to let it out somehow.
Except I had to keep it under control, especially now that Mills was here, or the FBI would lock me up and take Brooke away forever.
I stood up to walk around. “Okay then, let’s figure this out. Why does he do it?”
“Kill?” asked Nobody. “Burn things? Read your mind? You’ve got to be more specific.”
“Why does he…” I shook my head. “Let’s go back to basics. What does he do that he doesn’t have to do?”
“You always ask that.”
“Because it’s always important,” I said. “You want to get in somebody’s head, you figure out what he’s choosing to do.”
“That’s why I love you,” said Nobody. “You always know exactly what to do.”
“You don’t love me,” I said. “You’re a fragmented memory trapped in a broken mind.”
“Is that all Marci is, too?”
I clenched my hands into fists. “Don’t talk about her.”
“Or what, you’ll hurt me?”
I gritted my teeth, hating every second of this conversation. “No.”
“Then stop making idle threats,” she said. “It’s the sign of a weak mind. Now start solving this problem.”
“Attina is choosing to murder people that we talk to,” I said. “In exactly the ways I want to do it.”
“And he’s lighting fires you want to light, too,” said Nobody.
“Everything he’s done…” I said. “No, wait. It’s not everything.” I looked over at her. “I didn’t want to kill Jessica.”
“Are you sure? You want to kill a lot of people.”
“I didn’t think anything bad about Jessica,” I said. “Officer Glassman, sure, but he’s not the one that got killed.”
Nobody sat up straighter in her bed, as much as her wrist restraints would allow. “What if he was the target, and she just got caught in the crossfire?”
“So we’re looking at a Withered who can fail,” I said, nodding. This was finally getting us somewhere. “Attina attacks teenagers because he can’t take down a full adult.”
“Maybe he’s small,” said Nobody.
I shook my head. “Officer Glassman said he was bigfoot,” I said. “So he’s either lying to make himself look better, or Attina’s somehow huge and weak at the same time.”
“Maybe he has a weakness that isn’t physical,” said Nobody. “Maybe he’s … I don’t know, afraid of people, or afraid of authority. Or he’s afraid of loud noises—did Glassman get any shots off with his weapon?”
“No guns were fired,” I said, remembering the sounds of the attack. “Just three screams. I … don’t know
why.”
“Maybe he can incapacitate his victims,” said Nobody, “which is how he was able to kill Derek so quietly.”
I shook my head again. “Corey wasn’t incapacitated, just surprised. In fact, all three victims were killed in completely different ways—and if the methods aren’t consistent, they aren’t important. He kills however he can, in whatever method gets the job done. Or, I suppose, whatever methods he gleans from my head. But the point is, we shouldn’t be looking at how he kills, we should be looking at how he chooses who to kill. Why go after people I’ve thought about hurting?”
“To help you?” asked Nobody. “This is a demon who didn’t do anything for decades, at least, and then started killing almost immediately when we showed up in town. You have a very attractive mind, with a strong sense of purpose, and maybe that got his attention. Look at me: I threw away everything I had to be with you—I changed everything I did—”
“You didn’t change anything,” I said. “Your obsession with me was just one more link in a very old chain. You saw something you wanted and you tried to take it, just like you did with Marci and Brooke and all the others. This is different.”
“Don’t brush me off like that,” Nobody growled.
“You’re not real,” I said, pointing at her harshly. “I’ll tiptoe around the other personalities but not you. You’re horrible. And you’re in wrist restraints so you couldn’t kill yourself if you tried.”
“I can break this body, though,” she threatened. “No matter how they try to bind it.”
I stared at her a moment, furious at what she’d done to Brooke, at what she was threatening to do, almost daring her to try something but knowing that anything she did, or that I did to her, would only hurt Brooke worse. Finally I turned away. “We need to talk to Officer Glassman.”
“Why?”
“To find out what really happened. To see if he’s lying about bigfoot. Too much of our knowledge about this case depends on the shouted testimony of a man trying to defend himself from a pedophilia charge.”
“I wish Attina had killed him,” said Nobody.
“Be careful what you wish for,” I said. “Wishes are coming true a lot more often than they should.”