Something Terrible

by Wrath James White

  “I think we’ve stumbled our asses into some really deep shit,” Chavez said.

  “Do you think this is some sort of conspiracy?”

  The detective paused, deep in thought. I shifted from one foot to the other as I waited for his reply.

  “It could be. Something ain’t right here. I think the Feds know a lot more than they’re saying.”

  It wasn’t what I was hoping to hear. I was hoping he would tell me that I was exaggerating, that this was all easily explainable, that he knew exactly what to do to make everything right again. One look at his face would have dispelled such naïve optimism. Detective Chavez looked frightened and perplexed.

  “So what do we do?” I had to ask it. Even though I had a feeling Chavez didn’t know the answer.

  “We need to find these guys . . . the guys who kidnapped Daryl’s wife. We’ve got to find out who they are and arrest these fuckers.”

  Really? Kind of stating the obvious. I wondered if he really thought it would be that simple.

  “And how do we do that?”

  “I have no fucking idea.”

  Even though I knew it, I damn sure wasn’t ready to hear it.

  “I’ve been thinking,” I began, “I think we should just sit right here and wait until we hear about another kidnapping or missing child then we go and see if this is some sort of epidemic.”

  “You mean just wait until the next Amber alert?”

  “We’ll listen to your police radio and anything that sounds weird we go check it out.”

  Chavez shook his head.

  “This is Vegas, man. We’ll be rolling out every ten minutes. Do you know how much freaky shit happens in this town?”

  Daryl walked in and sat down at the kitchen table. I took a seat across from him.

  “Then we’ll go to all of them. These things killed my wife. They put that creature inside of her! We’ll go to every fucking call until we catch these bastards!” Daryl said.

  “You guys aren’t going anywhere.”

  That stopped us cold.

  “I can’t have civilians showing up to crime scenes with me. Especially with APBs out on both of you.”

  “You’re off duty,” I said. “We can just go in your car. We’ll change clothes. I’ll even shave my head. We’ll both shave out heads. That should disguise us enough to get a quick look. Besides, no one will expect us to be running around with a cop. You can just say we’re guests of yours from out of town, old college buddies, and we were all hanging out in the area when you heard the call.”

  “That might work the first time, but how am I going to explain showing up at ten or fifteen different crime scenes with you guys?”

  “You don’t explain it. At least not tonight. Who’s going to know how many crime scenes you’ve been to unless all the calls happen in the same police district?”

  “Some of them are going to be in the same district. Same cops. We’ll wind up running into the same guys three or four times in one night. Especially if they’re missing persons cases. There’s not a lot of us over there. We could run into the same detectives on every call.”

  “Then we need to try to get there before the other detectives do so we don’t have to answer too many questions. If they’re already tied up on one call processing a crime scene when the next call comes through it should be easy for us to beat them there. You might have a lot of explaining to do in the morning but hopefully we’ll have some answers by then.” There was a breathless desperate tone to my voice that I hated but couldn’t seem to get rid of. I was feeling breathless and desperate.

  “Yeah, easier said than done.” Chavez grumbled. “There are razors in the bathroom. Shave your faces too.”

  Chapter 4

  Martin James sat in the center of his pentagram surrounded by things. He didn’t know what exactly they were even though he had created them. He had been watching them grow for months and they had become increasingly hideous and terrifying. When they broke out of their cages Martin had hastily drawn a circle of protection, muttering half-remembered spells from The Book of A Thousand Sins and then completing the pentagram once safely in its protection. Then the things had begun to speak to him and Martin thought he was losing his mind.

  “Father? Are you afraid of us, father? Aren’t you proud of us? Aren’t we beautiful?”

  The things surrounded the pentagram, regarding Martin with curiosity and amusement. They shouldn’t have been able to talk, not this soon. They were all less than a year old. And they shouldn’t have been so . . . big! Their physical appearance was all wrong too. They didn’t look human. Martin had wanted to advance human evolution to its next step, beyond race, not create a new species. But these things didn’t look remotely human. They looked like . . . demons.

  Since he’d begun his experiments combining recombinant DNA and sorcery, Martin had found others who believed in his cause. Black militants from the north side of Las Vegas. He had recruited them to help him with his experiments and they had volunteered to find him test subjects—Guinea pigs.

  He had begun collecting semen and eggs, altering their DNA with a genetic virus he’d manufactured in his lab and then mutating them further with spells before placing them in the bellies of crackwhores his friends gathered, bribing them into participation with drugs.

  Then the whores gave birth.

  Their babies looked normal even though they had each killed their mother during birth and displayed a penchant for cannibalism along with unusual strength and dexterity requiring them to be caged. Martin didn’t know if he had succeeded or done something truly awful, but his friends, members of a radical black militant group called the Black Revolutionary Militia, thought he had succeeded just fine. Their leader, Asad, a tall, handsome light skinned man with green eyes, thin lips, and a slender nose, who wore his hair in an afro and sounded like one of Martin’s Harvard professors when he spoke, had decided to continue with the second phase of their experiment and soon he was bringing Martin three, four, five women a night to be impregnated by these things. Martin had argued that they should wait to see what happened with the babies they had in the cages which seemed to be growing at an accelerated rate. But Asad was impatient.

  “We can’t wait. You have done it, my brother. You created a new breed of man. A dominant breed that will take over the world and bring an end to strife and division. This was your vision. One race! Well, you did that shit, man! The next step in the evolution of the species. You created a race that will wash over the globe, replacing modern man the way Homo sapiens replaced the Neanderthal.

  “We tested your little zygotes on Latinos, Caucasians, blacks, Asians, Middle Easterners, Pacific Islanders, and even Native Americans and look! No matter what race or nationality their parents were, no matter what pigmentation their skin is when they are born, they all eventually turn the same color. Black. You have created a new dominant race. A new black race!”

  His eyes were filled with madness and despite his own fears, Martin could feel the same madness boiling within himself. A race of black super humans ruling the planet inspired deep feelings of racial pride within him. So Martin had continued the experiments and he had watched his monsters grow. Now they were slathering and growling just beyond his pentagram. His babies, all grown up. But, though they were black, they didn’t look like his dream of super humans. And though he was sure that they would do just what he had created them to do and replace Homo sapiens, he no longer saw it as a cause for celebration. What he’d created were abominations. He shuddered to think of what these monsters would do to the world once they were unleashed.

  Martin tried to remember how many women he had impregnated with these things in the past months. A hundred? Two hundred? Three hundred? He couldn’t recall. And in the last few weeks Asad had begun taking some of these older monsters with him to impregnate women the old fashion way.

  “What have I done?” Martin whimpered as the creatures began to break through his circle of protection.

  Cha
pter 5

  Without hair my head looked ridiculously pale. Sort of a wrinkled grayish color like something that had been pickled. You could see every scratch and scar standing out lividly against my scalp. Without a mustache and my ever present five o’clock shadow I looked like a teenager. Daryl looked even worse. He had a big bulbous head that looked like a gumball that had been sucked and spit out. With his goatee gone his weak chin just disappeared into his neck. It was hard to suppress the urge to laugh as we drove to the scene of the first call.

  Less than ten minutes had passed from the time we turned on the police scanner to when the first “unusual” call had come in. It was a domestic dispute in the northeast. A man claiming that his wife was possessed by Satan had barricaded himself in his home with his wife and newborn child. It sounded so close to the scenarios we had been discussing that a chill raced up my back as we heard the dispatcher relay the information. Daryl was excited, but that haunted look continued to darken his features. I knew that no matter what happened, tonight that guy was never going to be okay. Maybe none of us would.

  Detective Chavez grabbed an extra clip for his Glock 40 cal. and strapped a snub-nosed .38 to his ankle. I still had my gun, but I was low on ammo. Daryl was the only one of us who remained unarmed. He had asked the detective for one of his guns and Chavez had simply set the burglar alarm and walked out of the house without replying. Daryl didn’t bring it up again which was probably for the best.

  None of us spoke as we headed toward the center of town. The air in the car felt heavy, saturated with dread. Chavez was staring straight ahead at the road, gripping the steering wheel so tight his knuckles were turning white and the veins in his forearms were bulging. His jaws were clenched tight and the chords in his neck stood out prominently. I imagined that NASCAR drivers probably looked much the same way as they lapped the track at 200 miles an hour.

  In contrast, Daryl looked like a man on his way to death row. He was sweating and swallowing hard. His eyes were lowered, staring intently at his own hands as they fidgeted in his lap. Looking at the two of them I felt as if I should have been more nervous but somehow the whole thing seemed so unreal to me. That baby scurrying across the grass at me. The demonic voice that had come out of it after Daryl had tried to cut one of its arms off. It just didn’t seem real. But it did give me an idea.

  “Devil worshippers.”

  “What?” Daryl and Chavez asked in unison.

  “The black hoods, the demon babies, it has to be some kind of occult thing.”

  Chavez scoffed, but he kept his eyes on the road and his grip on the steering wheel tightened. I had seen the prayer candles in his bathroom when we went in there to shave. I knew that he believed in angels and spirits which meant he probably believed in demons as well, even if he refused to admit it.

  “Devil worshippers? But what did they do to my wife?” Daryl asked from the backseat where he’d been sitting in a near stupor.

  “I think they put some kind of demon inside her.”

  “Bullshit,” Chavez declared. “That’s just bullshit. That thing wasn’t a damn demon. It was flesh and blood. You killed one and so did I. You think you can just blow a damn demon away with a few bullets?”

  I shrugged. “I’m no demonologist, but I heard that thing laugh and it wouldn’t be hard to convince me that it came from hell. It kept coming at me even after I’d blown its damn head off!”

  “I think it’s some kind of genetic experiment. Some kind of government biological weapon or something,” Chavez said. He sounded insincere, as if he doubted his own words.

  “The government is kidnapping women, impregnating them, and then sending them back home? That doesn’t make sense. They would do it in an underground lab or a military base somewhere no one would hear anything about it. This is too sloppy, too reckless. Whoever is doing this doesn’t seem to give a fuck if we know or not. They seem to want those things to get out into the population.”

  “So then you think it might be terrorists?” Chavez asked.

  “I don’t give a fuck who or what they are,” Daryl whispered. Something had changed in his voice. It had hardened. It sounded cold now. I turned around to look at him and his eyes had taken on the same hardness that was in his voice. It was that thousand-yard stare that war veterans, convicts, and hookers got after years of seeing things, surviving things, that no one should ever have to experience.

  “I just want to kill every damn last one of them,” Daryl said. “My wife was the only thing I had to live for. I loved her and I never treated her right. I cheated on her. I complained about her weight. I drank too much and yelled at her. Called her names and shit. After she got pregnant I wouldn’t even touch her. I was a fucking asshole and she was never anything but good to me. Now she’s dead and I never had a chance to apologize to her and show her how much I loved her. Those fuckers took all that away from me. They need to pay for that. They’re going to pay for that shit even if I die trying.”

  “This isn’t a revenge mission. We’re going to find out what’s going on and then we’re going to arrest these sons of bitches. They’ll stand trial and go to prison like any other criminal. You hear me? We aren’t killing anybody.”

  “But these aren’t like other criminals are they? I think we can all agree on that. Whoever did that to Daryl’s wife, created those demon-baby-things, wasn’t just some street chemist. Whatever we’re about to find, it’s not going to be anything like any of us have ever seen before.”

  That pretty much ended the conversation. We all sat there trying to imagine what it was we were about to see when we arrived at the scene. We didn’t have long to think about it. Chavez exited the freeway at Washington Blvd.

  We raced down the boulevard, then turned onto a side street, whipping back and forth through a maze of cul de sacs. We were now less than a mile away. We turned onto Raeburn Street where the dispatcher had said the man was holding his wife. Any hopes we had of being the first on the scene were dashed by the black and whites blocking off the street, another cul de sac. This one filled with cops.

  “You guys are going to have to stay in the car. It looks like a full-blown hostage situation.”

  Detective Chavez flashed his gold shield as he drove past the black and white patrol cars. One of the officers pointed him to the house as if there was any doubt which one it was. All you had to do is look which way the guns were pointed.

  SWAT showed up a few minutes after us. I was hoping they didn’t kill the guy. I had to know if his wife had been kidnapped too. Maybe she would be willing to tell us where they had taken her and what exactly they had done to her.

  Chavez parked behind the other police vehicles.

  “Stay in the fucking car. Let me find out what’s going on.”

  He climbed out of the car, popped the trunk, and took out a Kevlar vest and a shotgun. He hung his badge and ID from a lanyard around his neck and jogged over to a group of detectives assembled directly across from the suspect’s house, leaning against an unmarked car.

  Half an hour went by before Chavez climbed back into the vehicle.

  “Was it one of those demon babies?”

  “I don’t think so. The guy is just some speed-freak who thinks his wife has been having orgies with demons. No mention about anything weird with the kid, but we’ll keep checking in. I think SWAT is about to go in. In the meantime we’ve got another call. A guy reported his wife missing, then called right back to say she had come home. No one else is going to look into it so I figured we might. It’s probably nothing, but you never know. Then there’s a call up at Sunrise Mountain. A woman says she was kidnapped and gang-raped.”

  Either one or both of the calls could have been an abduction like the one Daryl’s wife had experienced. They could also have been nothing, just another day in Sin City. Detective Chavez turned the car around and drove us back through the police barricade. We decided to go to Sunrise Mountain first. There was no rush to get to the other call because we would be the only on
es investigating it.

  It took us just over ten minutes to get there. There was a black and white parked out front, but Chavez was the first Detective to show up. We climbed out of the car with him and walked together to the front door. A uniformed officer, a tall Asian guy with hair that looked like it had just been styled at a salon, opened the door for us. Chavez flashed his badge.

  “Detective Chavez. What do we have here?”

  “James Taylor,” I said, offering my hand. I was hoping that Daryl would pick up my cue and make up a name as well.

  “Richard Murphy,” he said, shaking the officer’s hand.

  The officer nodded and never asked me and Daryl for our IDs.

  “Officer Mike Cho. You guys with Sex Crimes?”

  “Missing Persons. We heard there had been a kidnapping?”

  “Yeah, but she’s back now so she’s not really a missing person anymore.”

  “We’ll check it out anyway.”

  In the living room the victim sat on a couch with a small black officer with hair cut almost as short as mine. He looked like a kid barely out of high school.

  “These detectives are from Missing Persons. They want to have a word with Mrs. Ditmar.”

  The young cop stood up and shook all of our hands, introducing himself as Chad Jones. He was the first black guy I’d ever met named Chad and I had to stifle the urge to say so. He closed the notepad he’d been scribbling in and gave us a raised eyebrow and a shake of the head, then cut his eyes sideways in the direction of the victim. He obviously thought she was nuts.

  The woman on the couch looked to be in her late forties or early fifties, but she’d had so much work done that it was impossible to tell her age. She could have even been in her sixties. She had enormous, ridiculous-looking fake breasts that resembled flesh-toned basketballs glued to her chest. Her face was a mask of plastic surgery scars that made her skin look tight and shiny. Her lips were so full of collagen that they looked like two big sausages. She was wearing a sheer nightgown with just a bra and panties underneath and her legs were tan and muscular. She had a six pack, but there was an obvious liposuction scar just above her panty line that I couldn’t help staring at. It was evident that she spent numerous hours in the gym fighting to regain her lost youth. There was something both sexy and hideous about her. The kind of woman you’d fuck if she came on to you strong enough but would gnaw your arm off the next morning trying to get away from.