Nightstalkers

CHAPTER 21

Debbie Simmons woke to the sound of someone pounding on her door.

She found a short terry cloth wrap she used for the complex pool and put it on. The last time she felt this bad it had involved tequila and a bachelorette party. She’d sworn off both after that night: tequila and brides, but unfortunately not vodka. She went to the door and peered through the peephole.

Black suits, dark sunglasses, blank faces. Government, no doubt. Her stomach tightened.

She opened the door, worried and feeling naked and realized that she practically was because the wrap usually covered at least a bikini and it was almost transparent. She couldn’t tell where the men were looking because of the sunglasses, but one of them brushed past her, grabbed an afghan off the back of a chair, and draped it over her shoulders.

So they were looking, but they were gentlemen.

“Debbie Simmons?” one of them asked, as if they might have come to the wrong apartment, but they had an air about them that indicated they didn’t make such mistakes.

“Yes?”

The man who’d asked flipped open a leather wallet briefly showing her a badge, then flipped it shut faster than she could read the ID card below it. “We’re with the government.”

“Is it about the grant?” Simmons asked. A girl had to try.

“No.”

“Is it about that guy who picked up the hard drive?” A girl had to give up in the face of the inevitable.

“Yes.”

Holding the afghan tight around her, Simmons flopped down in a chair and pointed at the narrow couch. The two men sat in unison. They removed their sunglasses also in perfect unison, as if they practiced it. Simmons blinked, not sure she was seeing what she was seeing. The one who’d done the talking and flashed the badge had a solid black left eye, the socket surrounded by scar tissue. He must have been used to the surprise because he reached across his body with his right hand and tapped his left arm, making a metallic sound. “I got a deal on the prosthetics. Black was all they had in stock for the discounted eyes in the package deal.”

Was that supposed to be funny? Simmons wondered.

“So, Ms. Simmons—” Black Eye began, but she interrupted, trying to level the playing field.

“Doctor Simmons.” She usually wasn’t a stickler on that, and technically it hadn’t gotten final approval from the board, but she was half-naked and had just woken up and had a wicked hangover. A person had to hold on to something because she knew this was going to get bad.

Black Eye leaned forward, placing his hands, real and fake, on his knees. Shrink, Simmons thought. That was the universal empathy pose they used. He probably wasn’t even aware he was giving himself away with the movement. Simmons crossed her legs and tucked them underneath her in the chair, then crossed her arms, the universal I don’t want to talk about what you want to hear pose. She stared at him across a wilting hibiscus on the table. He seemed to read her as easily as she’d read him and leaned back on the couch. “Doctor Simmons, my name is Frasier, and good luck on final approval from the board. About the other day with the Courier picking up the hard drive? Can you tell me what happened?”

She succinctly covered the encounter.

The guy who wasn’t a shrink pulled out a small notepad and began writing. Simmons saw a big gun nestled in a shoulder holster and realized the notepad was a charade. He’d wanted her to see the gun. This was going to get very bad.

“And your professor? When was the last time you saw her?” Frasier asked.

“Four days ago. The dean says she’s on sabbatical.”

The two men exchanged glances and Gun Guy wrote something in his notebook.

“The professor’s report is incomplete,” Frasier said. “Do you know why?”

She shook her head.

Frasier got up and went to the sink and brought her a glass of water. She noted it was in his artificial hand, which seemed to be capable of full articulation. You had to look very hard to see it wasn’t real, so that was no yard sale on the prosthetics. She was pretty sure he did the eye for effect.

He handed it to her. “What happened to the professor? She’s not on sabbatical.”

Simmons drank some water and cleared her throat. “I don’t know.”

“Do you know why she scheduled the pickup for the drive a week early?”

“No.”

“Did she schedule it?” Frasier asked.

Simmons squirmed in the chair. “No. When I found out she was gone, I followed the instructions in the binder. I scheduled it.”

“Did you, Doctor Simmons?” Frasier asked, indicating he knew the story was incomplete.

“Debbie.”

He smiled and actually seemed like a human being for a moment. She noticed he had very nice teeth. Government health care wasn’t that shabby, was it? Then she looked at the eye and the arm and realized some of the government people really needed good health care given their job. She wanted to smile back but her gums ached, hell, even her teeth ached. Like she hadn’t flossed in three days. And she knew where this was heading.

“Excuse me,” she said and ran to the bathroom. She heaved into the toilet.

“You okay?” Frasier called out.

She stood straight and washed her mouth out. She pulled the afghan tighter around her shoulders; this would all be so much easier if she hadn’t been naked at the start. She looked at herself in the mirror and started to laugh with a manic edge.

“Simmons?”

She realized she was losing it, so she took a towel and pressed it against her face. Slowed her breathing down. Got control. She walked back out. Frasier was standing near the door, a hint of concern on his face. Gun Guy looked like he could care less.

“Peachy,” she said in a tone that indicated she was anything but.

“Did someone visit the professor?” Frasier asked. “Wanting the hard drive?”

“I thought I was doing the right thing,” Simmons said. “The professor didn’t give it to him.”

“Not directly,” Frasier said. “We found the professor’s body last night. You might consider that a sabbatical.”

Simmons ran to the bathroom again, heaving again, but there was nothing coming up.

Frasier was standing in the door to the bathroom. “Was his face scarred?”

“Yes.”

“It’s strange,” Frasier said. “He could have made you give him the hard drive, couldn’t he?”

She could only nod.

“Instead,” Frasier continued, “he told you to move up the pickup.”

She nodded again.

“And he paid you to do that, correct?”

She started to shake her head, but Frasier reached out and grabbed her jaw. “Speak.” He let go of her. “I have to hear it.”

Simmons licked her lips, swallowed, trying to get some moisture in her mouth. “Yes.”

Frasier glanced over his shoulder at Gun Guy and she realized who was really in charge. Gun Guy cocked his head and looked at her and she got a cold chill and knew the gun wasn’t for show. He’d as soon shoot her as write a note in that pad.

“Go sit back down, please,” Frasier said.

She scooted past him, gripping the afghan tightly. She fell into the chair.

Frasier sat on the couch next to Gun Guy. “Strange that he did that,” he repeated. “There is always a purpose to things. He could have done things so much more directly and simply if he’d wanted the drive. But he wanted a reaction.”

Gun Guy finally spoke. “Your professor is dead. The Courier who picked up the drive is dead.”

“An eighteen-year-old girl was used as bait to kill the Courier,” Frasier added. He sighed. “Few people realize how serious life is. How our decisions, no matter how trivial, can have the greatest consequences. But you got very drunk last night because on some level, you know you did the wrong thing. You knew the professor wasn’t on sabbatical. Your dean was covering for her while she was missing. And all of that would be fine, except you ultimately did it because he paid you.”

Simmons felt as if she wasn’t breathing, there was no more air to take in.

“How much did he pay you?” Frasier asked.

Gun Guy flipped shut his notepad and slid it into his inside pocket, once more revealing the big gun.

“A hundred thousand dollars,” Simmons managed to get out. She looked out the window and saw a bluebird flitting among the branches of the tree. She envied that bird.

“I think I’m going to be sick again,” she said, but she didn’t get out of the chair. She felt that if she could stay exactly where she was, this would all pass.

Gun Guy put on his sunglasses, a not so subtle way of saying we’re done here. Frasier looked concerned, but not overly.

He stared at her a long time, then turned to Gun Guy as he put on his sunglasses. “Let’s go. Nothing more here.” Frasier paused at the door. “Sorry to have disturbed your morning.”

Then they were gone.

Ivar looked like he hadn’t shaved in days, which was odd because he rarely shaved. He was one of those guys, the ones who got a little scraggly here or there, but a full beard would be an impossibility. Today, though, the look was deeper than unshaven: disheveled, slightly crazed, perhaps even manic. He’d been giggling to himself at times, which he found disturbing at first but no longer noticed. Then there was the whistling. He’d never been a whistler, but it seemed that had changed along with a lot of other things.

There was no tune to the whistle, just noise. It would have sent anyone around him climbing the walls, except the only person around was Burns and he didn’t seem to care. He just sat in a chair looking at the monitor with his golden eyes, occasionally telling Ivar what to do.

Ivar sometimes stopped the whistling to look at what he was building. He wasn’t sure what it was. He’d been through every lab in the building pilfering what was needed. The place was empty at night, and during the day he stayed in this basement lair.

He liked that word: lair. Much better than lab.

He’d even taken apart other people’s projects to take what he needed. Probably ruined a few PhDs along the way, but this was big. Very big. Not big in a physical sense, although it did fill the center of the room, but he knew, on a very base level, that this was something very, very different, and that excited him.

Despite Burns, who’d put an explosive collar around his neck.

Despite the gun and the collar and the eyes, Burns was a lot easier to work for than Doctor Winslow. Which should have made Ivar wonder about the career path he’d chosen.

Ivar had felt this same drive as a kid when he’d decided to build the greatest fort ever in the dining room. He snuck into his sister’s room and pulled the comforter off her bed without waking her. He’d pulled down his mother’s new brocade drapes in the living room, something she still reminded him of in the mandatory weekly phone calls to maintain the illusion he had a family. If he talked to her now, he knew he could convince her that they had served a much better function being part of his fort than as curtains.

So the drive was familiar, even comforting because of that, but he wasn’t building a fort. He stopped whistling for a moment and fingered an angry pimple on his neck, a thing growing as fast as the contraption in the center of the room. He saw the beauty in the mass of wiring and tubes and vacuum cases and batteries.

Fortunately someone had left their Prius parked behind the building overnight so he’d been able to pilfer the batteries protected by an orange cover that warned against touching or trying to do maintenance on them, as if they were some magical thing. High voltage, indeed. Of course the voltage was recharged by the brakes, so he’d had to improvise. He had appropriated the bike of Professor Whatever the Hell His Name Was, Ivar couldn’t remember. The professor was known all over UNC for pedaling to and from campus every morning and evening in his spandex, his warning light flashing on the back of his helmet, and taking up his allotted three feet of space in the two-lane roads, causing massive backups behind him, lots of middle fingers and screams, and smiling all the way to and fro.

He’d miss the bike, and that made Ivar happy.

Of course the expensive bike had required some adjustments as suggested by Burns, who seemed to know exactly what Ivar was building, but wasn’t sharing. In that, he was like Doctor Winslow. Ivar had rigged it to pedal backward as he was ordered. He wasn’t quite sure why it needed to be that way, but he knew that there was no going forward anymore. The bike was cabled to the batteries, which were cabled to the mainframe, which was cabled to a huge glass incubator used for newly born rats that he’d had to go over to the psych labs to appropriate. They did some bad stuff in there to those rats, so taking the rats away from them made Ivar feel somewhat better. They used the pretty white ones that were sacrificed for science, not the ugly brown ones that were sacrificed by the exterminator.

The bike technically wasn’t powering the batteries, as it was somehow part of the entire device, in between the batteries and the rest of it, in some way Ivar didn’t comprehend.

At Burns’s order, Ivar had gone back and taken some of the rats, saving them from their fate on the end of needles from grad students studying the latest way to flatten out the brain, get rid of the sine curves, the lows, and the highs, too, because you can’t have one without the other.

He didn’t know why he’d been ordered to get the rats, but like his mother’s drapes, he knew they were essential and would fit in someplace because everything else Burns had told him to get was fitting someplace.

On his own initiative, Ivar had grabbed a large ziplock bag full of dog kibble from a grad student’s locker who thought that if kibble was good for dogs, it must be just as nutritious for humans. Ivar had thought that weird six months ago when he first saw the guy eating it, but now he chewed a handful and tossed a few to the rats, and they seemed to like it, too.

Burns didn’t seem to need food.

The rats, his nonhuman company, were watching him. He was sure that they turned their heads to the door as he left and seemed to wag their long pink tails whenever he returned, dragging a cart full of wires and circuits and whatever else he was told to scavenge.

He’d given a couple of them names although he didn’t know which were girls or boys. The cute one who wiggled her whiskers at his every return he’d named after a girl he’d pined for in high school but had never spoken to: Susan. The one who looked big and strong he thought of as Ivar.

The other two he just thought of as the other two.

Ivar picked up an old half gallon of milk he’d found in the fridge in his old lab and took a big swig, pleased that it was nonfat and not rancid. A bit sour, but nothing he couldn’t stomach.

He giggled again, realizing he was eating dog food and worrying about spoiled milk. Susan, the rat, stood and stared at him as he giggled, and he swore her little pink nose was wiggling and he felt happy. Tired, but happy. He was accomplishing something BIG here.

He had a feeling he was missing something important, between Burns from the government, the collar around his neck, and the thing he was building.

On order, Ivar got on the bike and started pedaling backward. It had been hard at first, but he’d finally gotten the rhythm of it down. He was able to go faster and faster. He heard a low hum. A golden haze filled the incubator.

Burns got up and grabbed one of the rats, one with no name, and tossed it into the gaping mouth of the incubator.

Ivar kept pedaling.

The rat scurried along the bottom of the incubator for a moment, claws scrambling for a hold, then the gold haze became more solid and coalesced around the rat’s head. Which disappeared from sight. The glow moved along the body, as if consuming it, until there was only the quivering tail wagging frantically. Then even that was gone.

“Whoa!” Ivar said. “That was cool.”

“Keep pedaling.” Burns went over to the control panel and made some adjustments.

Ivar kept backward pedaling, faster and faster. The golden haze pulsed. Burns grabbed no-name number two and tossed it toward the incubator. This time the rat snapped out of existence as soon it hit the maw of the glass container.

Then he picked up Susan, her eyes full of trust.

“Not Susan,” Ivar protested.

“‘Not Susan,’” Burns mocked with a strange smile twisting his face, more blood seeping from wounds. “Then Ivar.”

“Oh no,” Ivar said, looking at the rat.

But Burns had his gun up, level, pointing right between Ivar’s eyes.

“Ivar,” Burns said. He paused as the gold pulsed larger than before and a rat came back out, a tiny one, a fifth of the size of the one that had just gone in. As they watched, it scrabbled up on the glass, and Burns, still keeping the gun pointed at Ivar, reached in and took it out of the incubator.

He placed it on a desktop and it expanded, filling out to normal size.

Burns smiled, drawing more blood from his wounds, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“Ivar,” Burns said, wagging the gun.

Ivar blinked, finally getting it. “No way, man!”

“Just put your hand in,” Burns said. “It will do the rest. You’ll be fine.” He pointed at the rat. “It’s fine.”

Ivar swallowed.

Burns lowered the gun and Ivar felt a moment of relief, thinking he’d reconsidered. But Burns pulled a small device out of a pocket and flipped up the lid covering a toggle switch. “I wouldn’t waste a bullet on you,” Burns said. “I’ll just pop your head off.” He rested a finger on the toggle.

Ivar couldn’t get his hand into the opening of the incubator fast enough.

The hand started shimmering and Ivar’s eyes got wide as the golden haze climbed up his arm and then rapidly covered him.

With a flash, Ivar was gone and the golden glow went back to its original size.

Ten minutes later, a tiny human hand came groping out of the golden ball. Followed by an arm, and then a tiny Ivar, a foot and a half tall, stood in the incubator, clearly dazed and confused.

Burns reached in and lifted Ivar out, setting him on the floor.

Ivar’s mouth was moving but no sound was coming out.

Ivar began expanding. He reached normal size in less than twenty seconds. And now he could speak.

“Fracking unbelievable!” Ivar exclaimed, blinking hard and shaking his head.

“Get on the bike,” Burns ordered.

Ivar staggered, still dazed, but did as ordered. He got on the bike and began pedaling.

“What—” Ivar started to say something, but realized he had nothing cogent to say. He kept pedaling.

Thirty seconds later, another tiny human hand appeared out of the gold ball, scrabbling at the glass. An arm followed, then a head and torso.

“Oh frack!” Ivar exclaimed, stopping pedaling in his shock as he stared at a miniature version of himself. Burns helped it get out of the incubator, as he had done with the rat.

As he watched, it grew larger and larger, expanding until it equaled his size.

“Good job,” Burns said. He went to the landline and dialed a number. Ivar only got to hear this end of the brief conversation:

“My friend,” Burns said. “Your investment is working. But it will be threatened.”

Burns listened, then replied. “I will tell you where it is this evening. Be prepared to defend it. There is still a lot of work to be done before it’s truly ready.”

Another pause. “I cannot tell you what it is. But you will be quite amazed.” Burns looked at Ivar, the original, and smiled, more blood flowing, as if the two of them were in on something. Which they were.

“You will see tonight,” Burns said and hung up the phone.

Ms. Jones had Pitr read the report to her one more time about the interview with Simmons.

“What do you think?” she asked when he was done.

“Burns could have made her give him the drive for the money, but he didn’t.”

“He wanted to take down the Courier,” Ms. Jones said, “which means he wanted us to know about it.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Pitr said.

“We have to make sense of it,” Ms. Jones said. “Remember Mister Eagle’s Sherlock Holmes quote. Something is right in front of us and we’re not seeing it.”

“He’s taunting us for firing him,” Pitr said.

“If it were only that.” Her eyes were closed. They often were, as if simply keeping them open drained her energy.

“Why didn’t you make her wet?”

Ms. Jones eyes flickered open. “The girl? That was Mister Frasier’s call. That is Mister Frasier’s unique talent. That girl will never again stray.”

“People are dead because of her.”

“Ah,” Ms. Jones said. “She was only one of seven things in Doc’s Rule of Seven. She did not kill anyone. Burns killed them. For the innocents, they cannot imagine what a man like Burns is capable of. Nor can they imagine what we are capable of. The difference between us and Burns is Ms. Simmons is still breathing. What we must figure out is why is Burns acting this way?” She closed her eyes. “Has Support hacked into Doctor Winslow’s phone yet? Made sense of those papers?”

“Not yet.”

“Let me know the results as soon as they do.”

“I will,” Pitr promised. “Now you must rest.”

Ms. Jones gave the ghost of a smile. “Another line from the team’s favorite singer, Mister Zevon: I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”