Blood Born Page 18

  However, she did manage to swing by the information desk in the main building. “I want the status of Officer Joshua Heager. He was brought in yesterday afternoon with a torn-out throat.” She made sure to flash her badge so she wouldn’t get any static this time.

  The receptionist hardly looked up from her computer. The phones around her rang and rang. “He’s just been upgraded out of ICU. Do you want his room number?”

  Randall sighed. She briefly entertained the thought of visiting him. She would squeeze his hand and say as an opening line, “Hey there, I still have your cell phone, and I’m using your gun.” No, that was stupid and not very smooth. A little forward, even. Maybe if she said—

  Stop fantasizing. No time for that.

  “No no, that’s okay. I just wanted to make sure he’s still alive.”

  The receptionist, a pretty young woman with olive skin, blew her bangs out of her eyes. Randall considered asking if she was nearing the middle of her menstrual cycle. Around them, nurses hauled away the main lobby’s furniture to make room for beds. A baby was shrieking.

  The woman squinted at her computer screen. “There’s a note here on his computer file. Him and a bunch of others are gonna be transferred tonight to another facility. It’s to make room for all the patients coming in.”

  “No kidding. They ought to send them to those floating hospital ships the Navy has.”

  The receptionist stared at her. “How did you know?”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  At about four a.m., federal personnel swooped in wearing white jumpsuits emblazoned with medical caducei. A small team of them carted off the bigfoot Randall had bagged in the lobby—without a word of thanks to her, of course. They whisked it away in an honest-to-God black van. Hulking FBI agents like the one she’d met earlier starting barking orders at her and the other Fairfax County cops. Against her better judgment, Randall asked to speak to a supervisor so she could share her findings so far. An agent took down her cell number and said someone would call her.

  Yeah, right.

  She took her cue—and her notes—and returned to the station.

  Whereas the hospital was a portrait of chaos, the police station was equally disturbing because it was so empty. As far as she could tell, every cop was on duty—every cop—regardless of what shift they were supposed to work. The parking lot in the back was devoid of police cruisers. Every last weapon and field kit had been signed out.

  Nobody was in the office area, so she didn’t hesitate to swipe the Frederica Wolford case file off of Baker’s desk. A copy of the medical examiner’s autopsy report had been added since the last time she reviewed it, and she paused for a moment to read his findings. Her toes curled with revulsion at the description of the girl’s prolapsed uterus and partially eaten breasts. There was a pair of week-old bites on her shoulder.

  Randall swallowed and turned to the old case notes on the missing person investigation. She began copying down information about Nick Schaefer, the scientist at the CalPark Fertility Clinic.

  I wish I could remember where I’ve seen that company’s name.

  But her nose was running, and she was crampy, and her head hurt from everything that had transpired. There was so much to do—and now she felt overwhelmed by the slightest task.

  Screw it. I’m no good to anyone when I’m sick. I’m going home.

  But before she left, she forced herself to retrieve her disassembled weapon from the trunk of her car. She returned to her desk and wound up spending the next hour cleaning her and Heager’s guns. As she worked, she debated whether to just leave Nick Schaefer a polite request to come in for questioning—or to take no chances and try for a bench warrant. Probably the first idea, but she couldn’t think clearly enough to decide.

  She stripped off an oily rubber glove and phoned dispatch. She asked the officer who answered to have Detective Baker call her. Maybe that worthless excuse for a cop would know what to do.

  “I don’t think he’ll be calling you back tonight,” said the dispatcher who answered.

  Randall squeezed her phone receiver. Damn, not another one. “Why not?”

  “He broke his ankle while out searching the woods behind Fairfax Hospital. Sounded a bit decompensated when I talked to him.”

  She allowed herself to smirk for only a second. Baker was a prick, but she was relieved he hadn’t been killed. The department needed all its manpower right now. “Did they find the kidnapped women out there?”

  “No sir—I mean, no ma’am. And I heard the K-9s were useless.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They wouldn’t behave. They kept howling and trying to run off. Must’ve smelled the damned bigfoots everywhere.”

  Randall thanked the dispatcher and hung up. Guess I’ll deal with it tomorrow.

  Sighing, she reassembled the guns, snapped off the other rubber glove, and put away her cleaning supplies. She decided to carry both weapons until this was over or until Heager reclaimed his. Why not; something told her she would need the extra firepower.

  In the supply room, she found a spare patrolman’s hip holster and outfitted it with the full array of handcuffs and pepper spray. Then she went to the women’s room mirror and appraised how she looked wearing both guns—one in her shoulder holster and the other in her new hip holster.

  Ha. Rambo Randall.

  After that, she drove home in her civilian car. Her allergies made her feel drugged, but she stayed alert long enough to make it to her parking space and jog up the stairs to her apartment.

  She deadbolted the door and closed her blinds. Then, feeling more tired than she ever remembered in her life, she lay down on the couch.

  I’ll go to the bedroom in just a minute and get undressed.

  She swiftly fell asleep.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Despite the glow of the Beltway and Clara Barton Parkway visible over the treeline, Sergeant Weston Lively finally admitted to himself that he couldn’t see shit. There simply wasn’t enough light in the park this time of night. Unfortunately, this was a raid, and they couldn’t turn on the car’s headlights, which would advertise their presence. At least not yet.

  Furthermore, he was seated in the police cruiser’s back seat—like a prisoner—while Mr. Gastineau and the Montgomery County chief of police sat up front, getting the best view. Oh well, he was out of his jurisdiction anyway. The only reason he’d been permitted to come along as an observer was because Gastineau had arranged it.

  A hundred yards ahead of the car sat a small, century-old building with a pitched roof. It was now being surrounded by a Maryland SWAT team. Lively couldn’t see the team members from this far away—not in this crappy light—but he could make out the structure’s whitewashed exterior and boarded-up windows. The contrast give it the aspect of a decayed tooth. It seemed like an apt comparison.

  The Maryland police chief leaned forward. “Any minute now.”

  Gastineau made a noncommittal noise and continued to peer through his binoculars.

  Tired of hunching forward to see through the windshield, Lively leaned back and closed his eyes. They’d been here half an hour already but hadn’t even stepped out of the car. Too dangerous, the police chief had said. Lively supposed he was right.

  He knew exactly where he was, however, and what he would have seen if this were daytime and he was out walking around. He’d spent most of his youth exploring this area. The white building they were raiding used to be a lockhouse, one of the manned stations along the C&O Canal, which operated along the Potomac River from the 1820s to 1920s. The lockhouse was now boarded up and the Canal was a national historical park, but that hadn’t stopped the bigfoots from appropriating the structure as a hideout . . . or nest. They would know which in a few minutes.

  The lockhouse sat on the Maryland bank of the Potomac River, a half mile east of the American Legion Memorial Bridge. The bridge itself was a massive, eight-lane segment of the Washington Beltway. Lively could hear the rumble of tractor trailers
crossing between Maryland and Virginia. Teenagers camping illegally on Plummers Island had reported seeing a “cat-like man beast” crawl inside the lockhouse through a basement window. An officer sneaked close enough to hear a woman cry and something else snarl in response. He retreated and called for back-up. Soon after, Lively, Gastineau, and the Maryland police chief became cruiser buddies.

  Before lapsing into tense silence, the Maryland chief told them that most of his county’s recent MPs lived along the Beltway and I-270 segments that stretched between here and Rockville to the north. A series of parks and natural forests zigzagged along that same route. Lively could easily imagine the monsters using these green areas as corridors. Go south from here in a straight line, and that took you smack-dab into downtown McLean and Tyson’s Corner.

  He shuddered to think what it must mean that the monsters were here on the C&O, which ran almost 185 miles between DC and Cumberland, Maryland. Assuming they liked to travel along natural thoroughfares such as rivers and forest tracts, the country was in some mighty deep shit. To the east, the Canal Park plunged into the heart of the nation’s capital—where there had been several other bigfoot incidents tonight—to connect with Rock Creek Park. In the other direction, the Canal passed close to population centers like Leesburg. Another city it passed, Harpers Ferry, crossed paths with the Shenandoah River and Appalachian Trail—potentially opening up access north and south to most of the East Coast.

  The Maryland chief raised his binoculars. “They’re going in.”

  Flood lamps snapped on to illuminate the lockhouse and some of the SWAT team members surrounding it. Lively heard the crash of splintering wood as officers threw battering rams through the old doors. The night popped with flashes and gunfire staccato.

  “He just ran past you, Craig!” someone yelled on the radio.

  “I’m on him. He’s headed east into the park.”

  “Get the hairy sonofabitch.”

  The dome light came on as the chief and Gastineau opened their doors. The chief opened the back door to let Lively out.

  Lively drew his gun as he ran behind the chief toward the building. He scanned left and right but saw only the shadows of sycamore and pawpaw trees. They quickly outpaced Mr. Gastineau, who proceeded along at a stately pace, supporting himself with a cane.

  Lively almost threw up when he entered the lockhouse.

  It was a nest, all right, but unlike any he’d ever seen. There was nothing to make it comfortable for its occupants—no straw, blankets, or food.

  Nothing but naked bodies and the fetid stench of human sweat and excrement.

  The SWAT members who entered stood in the middle of the tiny room and gaped, shining their flashlights on body after body. Swatting away flies, a few quickly went outside again.

  Lively could do nothing but stare. He covered his mouth and nose with one hand, partly to filter out the smell, and partly out of shock.

  It was some—but not all—of the missing persons from the past few weeks. Perhaps a dozen altogether, no doubt comprising women from both Maryland and Virginia. Naked and filthy, they slumped along the walls like discarded furniture. Some were alive, their grossly distended bellies showing them to be near the ends of their pregnancies. Their bodies were otherwise emaciated—much, much worse than the photos he saw of the ones at the hospital. The patients at least had been fed; these women had not. Their eyes rolled in their heads as they stared at the men and flashlights. Drool hung from the lips of those not dehydrated. A single look revealed their minds were gone. Around them lay the remains of others who hadn’t made it: the gaping vaginas with the prolapsed remains of afterbirth, looking as if someone had set off grenades inside their uteruses. The gnawed-off breasts . . . the gnawed-off faces.

  And all of them, living or dead, lay with their heads bent at unnatural angles and their throats bulging strangely. The bigfoots had broken their necks.

  A young patrol officer rushed in, breathless. “They’ve found two more places like this, east of here! Chief says to . . .” He trailed off as he took in the scene around him. He swallowed, looking pale.

  “It’s all right, son,” Lively said. “Just slow down.”

  The officer nodded. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-one. “Chief says all SWAT officers should report back to their vehicles. Me and two other units will hold this scene ’til EMS and forensics arrive.”

  “You said there’s two more nests like this?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The implication was so clear and disturbing that Lively almost squeezed off a round into his foot. He’d forgotten he was still holding his gun. He reholstered his weapon and stepped outside for fresh air. The SWAT members rushed past him to their vans.

  Oh, God.

  Three nests like this, and Christ knew how many more. It meant the women abducted from the hospitals were the exception, not the rule. This was how the monsters normally operated, out of places like this. They chose their victims, broke their necks to paralyze them, and then raped them. Then they brought the women back here to be unceremoniously dumped on hard floors, where they would lie for the next week to gestate.

  No need to feed the victims. Just about anyone could survive a week without food and water—even, he supposed, women coming to term in such inhumanly short timeframes. Gastineau’s medical specialists would no doubt calculate the probabilities and pathologies. No, all that mattered was that the victims live long enough to give birth. At that point, they didn’t need to stay alive as they were nothing but a first meal for their newborns.

  Lively watched as Gastineau passed him on the way inside. The old man paused at the door and peered in. He leaned heavily on his cane and looked sad. Lively turned away and covered his face with both hands.

  Somewhere in the darkness, a throaty voice howled its promise of pestilence.

  Chapter 12

  A sandpaper tongue rasped along Daniella’s cheek. A furry head nuzzled her neck, rubbing moist eyes along her jaw and marking her as its territory. Her cat, Gemini, was always so affectionate. She smiled as she woke up.

  But as a dull pain grew in her head, she realized she wasn’t at home. She wasn’t under her pink bedspread with Mr. Big-Ears the teddy bear. And the cat licking her and breathing on her wasn’t Gemini.

  Daniella opened her eyes as hands encircled her neck. The furry face grinned at her. Saliva dripped from its fangs onto her cheek. Daniella screamed. She only had a moment to register the smell of blood and feces—to remember being knocked out by the monster in the hospital. She lay in a room lit by a dim shaft of sunlight. Then the hands wrenched her head to the side.

  Something snapped in her neck.

  The resulting pain drowned her in darkness.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Randall awoke at one o’clock the next afternoon, her body sore from sleeping on the couch and from still wearing the two guns. She groaned as the night’s events came back. She knew the smart thing would have been to strip off her clothes and get a few hours of quality sleep in her bed. But she was hungry, and her mind was already racing with worries about what may have happened while she was asleep. She lurched to her feet.

  A half hour later, she emerged freshly showered, her numerous cuts medicated and re-bandaged, and wearing fresh clothes. She set her teakettle to boil for coffee, then forced herself through a relaxation exercise from martial arts school. She took her time centering herself as it promised to be another supremely shitty day. All the while, she kept a gun within reach.

  Afterward, she pressed the playback button on her answering machine.

  “Chrissy? Chrissy. This is your mother.”

  As if I wouldn’t recognize your voice, Randall thought.

  “. . . I just want to make sure you’re okay. The news is just horrible. Is there—oh honey, I know you hate it when I say this, but is there any chance you could stay with me until it’s over? They say the federal government is handling everything now, so maybe they don’t need you.”

 
The teakettle squealed.

  A minute later, Randall restarted her relaxation exercise.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  It turned out her mother wasn’t exaggerating—about the horribleness, anyway. With a spoon full of cereal poised halfway to her mouth, Randall stared slackjawed at the TV. According to reporters, she wasn’t the only one. Nationwide, commerce had screeched to a standstill as people stayed riveted to their TVs or radios. Every channel had dumped its normal programming in favor of wall-to-wall coverage of the attacks.

  Television being what it was, each network touted its own logo or catchphrase to encapsulate the incidents. CNN’s was simply DC Animal Attacks superimposed diagonally over a slow-motion replay of the bigfoot from two nights ago jumping onto the Metrorail tracks. Fox News kept a stupid box reading Beltway Bigfoot Coverage in the corner of the screen while a ticker feed of headlines marched across the bottom. NBC commentators used the phrase “Jersey Devil” so many times that Randall felt like shooting them. The constant parade of talking heads and jerky film snippets didn’t help her mood, either. The most sought-after interview subjects included the surviving makers of the famous 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film, which showed an alleged bigfoot in the Pacific Northwest, and a Japanese cryptozoologist who claimed to have seen a bigfoot in Asia just a few years ago.

  What it all amounted to was that the capital of the most powerful country in the world had been hit with something it simply couldn’t make any sense of. That the Washington, DC, region was suffering an unfolding disaster was beyond question. Exactly what the disaster was remained in the air. The uncertainty didn’t slow the rampant proliferation of theories, however. Randall was amazed to hear Larry King flatly state that America was under attack from “biological terrorists.” An anonymous but “highly placed” government source to the Washington Post (re-quoted by NBC’s Jim Vance) was equally confident the attacks were related to classified weapons research at Fort Meade, Maryland. The U.S. Army’s refusal to make a statement one way or the other (“We do not publicly comment on classified matters”) was seen as corroboration of this claim.