If you’ve never hunted a ferocious stalker from inside a high-tech tomb, I don’t recommend it. There were no rotting corpses or rattling skeletons, but there were spiders. I hate spiders. I was covered from head to toe in a space age fabric so strong it made Kevlar look like cheap aluminum foil, but I’d have gladly traded it for a good old-fashioned can of Raid.
I stared through the mausoleum’s monitors out onto a scene that made my spider-infested sepulcher seem even spookier. Sinclair Park is built on a wooded hillside, with a little valley slashed right down the middle. The cemetery lies at the top of the valley, and the playground is at the bottom. When the sun goes down, it looks like something out of a horror movie. Not the new kind, where the vampires are hot. The old kind, where they have bloodstained fangs and smell like road kill on an August afternoon. Mist flowed down from the trees like a shadowy stream, washing eeriness from the tombstones and depositing it on the playground in the hollow below. If a werewolf (again, the scary kind, not the kind that looks awesome with no shirt) had stalked across the lawn, it totally wouldn’t have surprised me.
In the midst of that Tim Burton-ish setting, a small group of children played. Sans parents. What was up with that? You’d think after a series of creeper sightings, there would be parents. And even if the whole town hadn’t been freaked out by a rampant stalker, what kind of mother lets her child play alone in a cemetery after dark? Even birds guard their young. And they have smooth brains.
“Sound,” I said. Instantly, the clamor of children laughing and playing came across the mausoleum’s hypersensitive audio receivers. The floodlights cast an eerie yellow glow around the children. I scanned the tree line for what seemed an eternity. Nothing. No vampires, no werewolves, no stalkers. As first missions went, this one was rating a low five. If there had been a full moon, I might have given it a six. Andy’s voice echoed over my mask’s radio. “This could get very dangerous, very quickly.”
“Hey, ‘Danger’ is my middle name. Grave danger. Get it?”
“This isn’t practice, sweetheart.”
I scanned the monitors, but couldn’t find Andy. Trees, swings, monkey bars, kids. No masked vigilante. “What good is all this high-tech bad guy hunting gadgetry if I can’t see you on it?”
“Hold on,” Andy’s voice came back. “Look now.”
An orange-ish glow appeared on the monitor. It took the shape of a stick figure waving. I said, “Enhance,” into my mask’s microphone. The stick figure blurred and refocused. Andy popped onto the screen with amazing clarity, dressed in his bone-white mask and black armor. “Where were you?”
“I came out of Shimmer.”
Shimmer is like stealth mode. A nice feature Andy built into our armor.
“Forgot your cloak of invisibility?”
“Get serious. This guy is deadly.”
Normally, Andy is a total goof, so his uncharacteristically somber mood caught me off guard. This was my first real mission, but it’s not like I’m a total newb. I pressed a button on the side of my mask. Low voltage current tickled my throat, and I felt my vocal cords thicken. “So am I,” I said, pleased with the venomous sound of my electronically altered voice.
“This is not a game!” Andy’s voice was stern. “Children’s lives are at stake. Stick to the plan.”
The plan was for Andy to capture the stalker without any witnesses. My job was to watch him while Andy took him down. Okay, sticking to the plan. Slight problem, though. “I don’t see him.”
“Repeat?”
I tapped my mask. “Do you see him?”
“You’re breaking up. Switch to infrared. Look along the tree line. By the big oak.”
“Red,” I said. The monitors instantly glowed with night vision. I scanned the trees above the playground. There he was, just like Andy said. He lurked about fifty yards from the children, outside the range of the floodlights, hiding himself in the shadows of a massive oak. “Enhance. Zoom.” Wow. The ghoulish night vision didn’t do the stalker justice. Once the high res color enhancers zoomed in on him, I got a close-up I wasn’t quite ready for. I only saw the back of his head, but that guy had some serious fashion issues. His hair was huge, bright red, and looked like he had used a ten million volt Taser for a straightener. Had to be a mask. “What’s he dressed like this time?”
“Not close enough to tell.” Andy’s figure moved swiftly across the monitor. “I’m switching back to Shimmer. Keep your eyes open. He’ll be out of my line of sight for two minutes. I’m coming in from the north. Warn me if anyone heads his way. And don’t move. No matter what. Got it?” Andy vanished from the screen.
“Got it.” Suddenly, I couldn’t see the stalker. I quickly scanned the monitors, but found nothing with weird hair. “Wide,” I said, switching out of night vision into wide mode. Only trees. “Red,” I said, as panic started to set in. The screen went back to night vision, and I saw movement. “Enhance. Zoom.” The sicko was back in view, slinking nearer to the children, careful to stay in the shadows. He settled into a small recess in the landscape surrounded by heavy brush and trees. The perfect hiding spot—impossible to see from the playground. This guy was good.