“I couldn’t sleep all night. The sun was rising before I finally drifted off. In the morning I woke up and the bed was saturated with blood. My wife was dead. She had bled out during the night. Then I looked beside the bed and Naima was sitting there with blood smeared all over her face. I kept thinking about what I’d heard the night before while I watched the guys from the coroner’s office take my wife’s body and I just snapped.”
I thought about John Brown pointing a gun at his daughter’s head. Perhaps I had misjudged him. That made two women who may have been kidnapped and impregnated and if there were two there may have been more, perhaps even many more. Dozens? Hundreds? Thousands? Las Vegas was a big town.
“I need to make some calls. I’ve got some friends on the force.”
“Cops? They’re not going to believe you! They’ll lock your ass up and mine!”
“Cops are people too, Daryl. If I believe you maybe they will.”
“But you don’t believe me!”
“I told you, I believe you about the abduction and the impregnating. I’m just not sure we know who or what it was that did this. I’m just not ready to say they were little green men from Mars.”
Daryl shook his head and then dropped his forehead into his palms, drawing his knees up to his chest and continuing to shake his head back and forth.
“No. No. You only believe me because you saw it! They won’t believe shit!”
I turned to look at Daryl.
“If I saw it maybe one of them has seen something weird too. I mean, I doubt you’re the only one this is happening to. They might know something.”
Daryl paused. He was rocking back and forth in the seat with his knees still drawn up to his chest, nibbling his fingernails and staring out the windshield.
“Okay. Okay, but don’t tell them where we are.”
I dialed my friend Detective Ramon Chavez. He worked in Missing Persons and had been on more than a few child searches with me. We’d had beers together a few times when the searches had turned up something bad. He answered on the first ring.
“Hello, This is Chavez.”
“Hey, Chavez. It’s Spencer.”
“Spencer? Fuck, where are you, dude? Everyone thinks Daryl Thompson kidnapped you. You okay? Why did you take off like that? They found the Thompson kid dead.”
“I know. Daryl is sitting right beside me.”
“Oh shit. Is he holding you hostage? Where are you?”
“I’m not a hostage. You need to listen to me. I saw something today, something that has me all freaked out. I think I’m losing my mind.”
Chavez paused on the other end of the line. When he finally spoke he sounded tense.
“What exactly did you see, Spencer?”
There was a tone in his voice that I couldn’t quite put a label on. It sounded almost threatening, as if he were warning me not to continue. I dismissed it as my own paranoia. I told him everything. His response surprised me.
“Shit, then they’re real.”
“What do you mean, they’re real? You’ve seen them too?”
“I was on a call last week. A couple that worked at one of the software companies downtown hadn’t shown up for work in weeks. The woman was out on maternity leave, but the husband should have been at work. She’d had her child a month before, at home, with a midwife. Nobody had seen or heard from her since. Her parents lived out of town and when they didn’t hear from them and couldn’t reach either of them at work, they called us. We knocked a few times and nobody answered so we kicked down the door. It was fucking terrible.”
I swallowed hard. All the saliva in my mouth had dried out. My voice cracked when I spoke.
“What-what did you see?”
“Bones. That was all that was left of the three of them. Just bones, man. And by the time we busted in there it had already started cracking them open and sucking out the marrow. The floor was tacky with congealed blood.”
“It?”
“You know what the fuck I’m sayin’ here! The goddamn baby! It was eating its parents and the damned midwife.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“Fuck. So what are the cops doing about this? Are the FBI involved?”
Chavez snorted derisively.
“The goddamn feds swooped in and took over the whole case. They tried to make me and my partner look like we had imagined the whole thing.”
“What happened to the baby?”
“I shot the damn thing. It came after me. The thing jumped onto the wall and was sticking to it like a damn spider. It came scrambling toward me and then it leapt off the wall and attacked my partner Dave. I kicked it off of him and put ten bullets in the thing. I blew its head off and it kept trying to get at me. There was nothing left but the bottom part of its jaw. The top half of its head was gone, but it was still clawing at my ankles and trying to gnaw at my shoe. I started shooting it in the chest. I nearly cut the thing in half before it finally died. I called it in and I had half the damn homicide unit there in about fifteen minutes. The CSU guys showed up and started taking pictures of everything and filling their little fucking ziplock bags. The homicide boys started interviewing me and Dave and that’s when I realized that I was now one of the victims. Some techs showed up from the coroner’s office and began collecting pieces of the thing’s skull and sticking it into one of those little body bags they use for kids along with the rest of the corpse. Then the damn Feds showed up and locked the whole thing down. They kicked everyone out. They took the case over before we could even get the body to the morgue. The M.E. never even got a chance to look at it so it was me and Dave’s word against the Feds. Dave had these bite marks on his face where the thing had tried to tear his cheek off. Its teeth had broken the skin and a chunk was missing, but they all acted like it was none of our business.”
I shuddered as a chill ran through me. Feds? Was this some kind of government experiment that had gone wrong?
“And I’ll tell you what’s weird as fuck,” Chavez continued, “normally, when there’s an officer involved shooting, there’s all kinds of paperwork, an investigation, a visit to the shrink. I killed a kid, man, and there was none of that. The FBI did this bullshit little interview with me to verify my story. They didn’t even write anything down. I felt like they were just trying to find out how much I knew and when they realized I didn’t know shit they just started ignoring me again. My office, didn’t ask me a single question. Nothing. They didn’t even want me to write a report. I didn’t have to justify the bullets I fired. My captain just handed me ten bullets to replace the ones I used and told me to let it go and get back to work.”
“Weird.”
“Yeah, weird as fuck. They just made the whole thing disappear. There wasn’t a word of it on the news or anything.”
I had to think about this. Maybe it was some sort of experiment but that didn’t seem likely. Not involving US citizens in the middle of a major metropolis. Maybe Daryl was right and this whole thing did have something to do with aliens. Some sort of government cover up. Some Area 51 type shit.
“Hey Chavez, this thing has got me completely freaked out. Can you meet with us? We need your help. Right now Daryl is accused of kidnapping and I’m going to be facing a murder charge if I can’t get some answers. I just killed a kid, dude, and unless I can prove that it really was some sort of alien or something, I’m going to prison or the damn gas chamber.”
“My shift isn’t over yet, man.”
“Fuck that, I need you!”
There was silence from the other end of the phone. I could hear Chavez covering the phone and cursing out loud.
“Listen, do you know where I live?” Chavez asked.
“No. I mean, I was there once when we watched the fights together, but I can’t remember.”
“I live in Green Valley. Warm Springs and Eastern. It’s a gated community called The Pinnacle. The gate code is 6673. My address is 126 Legendary Drive. Go there and wait for me. Just park in the driveway
and wait.”
“All right, I can do that. How long will you be?” I asked.
“Does it matter? What the fuck else do you have to do? Just sit there and wait. I’ll be there when I’m done and we’ll figure this all out.”
He hung up and I told Daryl what he said as I continued south on the 15 freeway toward Green Valley.
“Well, how long do you think he’s going to be?”
“I don’t know and he’s right. It really doesn’t matter. We’ve got nowhere else to go.”
Chapter 3
We pulled through the gates of The Pinnacle. It was a small gated community of single family homes. The builder had been more creative than most in Vegas and had designed it so that no two homes would be alike. There were at least eight different floor plans with three different elevations and apparently the exterior paint color and stonework was optional as well. With all of those choices it was a bit of a letdown when we pulled up in front of Chavez’s home.
His house was a single story with gray ceramic roof tiles, gray paint, and purple, blue and gray slate stonework around the garage and front door. His driveway, which was composed of red cobblestone, was the most colorful thing about the house. Even his landscaping was composed of a tan stone the color of the desert sand with yucca, sage, and rosemary planted here and there. Not a dash of color anywhere. Either Chavez was colorblind or had some sort of aversion to vibrant colors.
I pulled the car to a halt and sat there trying to put together some kind of plan.
“Hey, Spencer?”
“Yeah?”
“You believe me now, right? I mean, this cop pretty much confirmed everything I said and everything you saw back there.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Then how about taking that gun off of me?”
I hadn’t realized that I had still been pointing my pistol at him the entire time. I lowered the weapon.
“Thanks. So what now?”
“Do you have any idea how this happened? I mean, your wife? Her pregnancy was normal and everything? They didn’t see anything unusual on the ultrasound?”
Daryl shook his head.
“Everything was normal. We had regular checkups. We even did one of those 3D ultrasounds. She just looked like a regular little girl.”
I hesitated a second before I asked the next question. Daryl noticed my apprehension.
“What?”
“I hate to ask this but why didn’t you have an abortion? I mean, if you knew they had put an alien or something inside of her then why did you go through with the pregnancy?”
Daryl looked out the car window and shook his head.
“We didn’t know for sure. It could have been my baby inside of her. Besides, we’re Catholic. We don’t believe in abortion.”
“Better to give birth to a monster?”
“I told you, we didn’t know anything was wrong with it. All the tests came out fine.”
“But even if there was a chance . . . ”
“If there was a chance it was my kid I wasn’t going to murder it.”
There was no sense in arguing with him. It was a matter of faith and that was something I didn’t understand. If there was a chance in hell that my wife might have been carrying a baby that was implanted into her by aliens or demons or something there would have been no power on earth that could have persuaded me from getting her an abortion. But I am not and never have been religious and after years of hunting for lost children in my spare time, I was running short on hope and faith.
We sat in silence for a while. I stared out one window and Daryl stared out the other. I kept seeing that little infant scampering across the grass on all fours and then leaping at me. I could still see it charging forward with half its skull blown apart. I reached out and turned on the radio.
There was a hip-hop song playing, violent, misogynistic, just what I wasn’t in the mood for. I turned to a soft-rock station and wallowed in my own misery as some whiny annoying band like Journey or Air Supply sang about love. I wanted to shoot myself, but I just wasn’t in the mood for anything hard. After another three minutes and a Queen song, I turned to a jazz station. Ten minutes later Chavez showed up.
He was dressed in a sweaty blue shirt that looked like someone had used it as a napkin. His red tie looked only slightly cleaner. There was a big yellow stain on it that looked like old mayonnaise.
The detective walked by our car and waved for us to follow him as he marched up to his front door. I tucked my gun back into its holster and left the vehicle. Everything felt surreal, like some clandestine meeting between spies or underground revolutionaries. What was worse was the way Chavez hadn’t even looked in my direction when he walked past the car. It made me feel like a criminal, something I had never been or ever wanted to be. It almost felt like we were going to do a drug deal and I began to worry, perhaps irrationally, if maybe Chavez was wired and after we’d told our stories the Feds would come busting in and arrest us all for kidnapping and infanticide.
Daryl and I followed Detective Chavez to his front door and waited as he turned off his alarm system and put his Rottweiler outside. The dog hadn’t made a peep the entire time we were parked outside or even when we walked up to the door with the detective. That creeped me out for some reason. It was like the dog was lying in wait to ambush us had we been foolish enough to try to break in.
Chavez looked Daryl and I up and down. He paused on Daryl and stared at him for a long, hard moment. He looked at my holster and his eyebrows furrowed. I know it sounds weird but I had never really thought of Chavez as a cop until that moment. Not like the assholes that stop you for going a couple of miles over the speed limit or having an expired registration. Chavez was just a guy who was committed to finding lost kids just like I was. I had always looked at him almost as a social worker. But now I was seeing him as suspects saw him and it was intimidating.
“Sit down.”
We took a seat on the couch and Chavez sat across from us on a recliner. He didn’t recline but leaned forward, staring hard at both of us.
“So, you said that some guys in hoods broke into your house and kidnapped your wife?”
Daryl nodded slowly.
“But you didn’t call the police? I checked and there’s no report.”
“I didn’t file one.”
Chavez leaned forward.
“Now, why would a man watch his wife get carried out of their marriage bed by men in hoods and robes and not call the police?”
“They paralyzed me. I couldn’t move. Then I passed out and when I woke up my arms and legs felt all weak and goofy. I tried to get out of bed and fell right on my face. Then Jessica came out of the bathroom. She was crying, but she refused to talk about what happened to her. A month later her OBGYN told her she was pregnant.”
“So, she never told you what happened to her that night?”
“No. She would yell at me and burst into tears whenever I tried to bring it up. She was terrified when she found out that she was pregnant though. She told me that it was them. They had put a baby in her, but when I asked her what she meant by that she locked herself in the bathroom. After we had the ultrasound and they did some sort of DNA test for down syndrome and everything looked fine she relaxed. But then the thing killed her.”
Daryl’s eyes were filled with tears but they didn’t fall from his eyes. It looked as if he was starting to run out of tears.
Chavez’s features relaxed a bit. He reached out and put a hand on Daryl’s shoulder.
“I know this is hard, but can you tell me about the birth?”
Daryl looked as if Chavez had splashed water on his face. He sat straight up. His eyes widened and his mouth dropped open.
“It tore her apart!” It was exactly what he had told me. I shuddered to think what he meant by that.
“I’m so sorry. I know this is tough for you, but I’m going to need to hear all of it, all the details.”
Now the tears spilled from Daryl’s eyes. I felt
a tightening in my gut. Something fluttered in my stomach. I didn’t want to hear this. My imagination was already doing a number on me. The last thing I wanted was to hear the gruesome details.
Daryl closed his mouth then opened it again but nothing came out. His eyes looked far away, filled with horror and dread. He shook his head slowly as more tears raced down his face.
“I need to hear it.”
I wanted to tell Chavez to leave Daryl alone. The man was obviously hurting. Recalling what happened to his wife was destroying him.
“I was in the hospital with her. I watched that thing come out of her. I didn’t know what was normal and what wasn’t, but it just looked like too much blood to me. Her . . . her vagina . . . it just ripped. It tore open when the baby came out. She hadn’t dilated enough, but it just came anyway. It tore open her cervix, her vagina, even her rectum. After she died they said that there had been massive internal damage that the doctors hadn’t caught. The coroner’s report said that some of her organs had been eaten from the inside. She just bled to death. She was in so much pain. That week before she gave birth she was in terrific pain all the time and even after the birth. She just never recovered. They tried to stop the bleeding at the hospital. They stitched her up and packed her full of gauze and then they . . . th-they just sent her home to bleed to death.”
He fell into a fit of sobbing and weeping. I didn’t know what to do. I felt like I should have hugged him or something, but I didn’t really know the guy. I patted him on the shoulder and so did Chavez. I looked up at the detective and he motioned for me to follow him into the next room as he rose from his recliner.
“Take a moment and pull yourself together. I’m going to brew us some coffee. I don’t think we’re getting any sleep tonight.”
I stood and followed Chavez as he walked into the kitchen. I felt nervous as if I was a school kid being called to the principal’s office.
“What do you think?”
Something Terrible Page 17