CONTROL HQ - RUSHM
AD 3999/AE 1999
Adam slapped his hand down on the console, a nearly silent display that was the only hint of his anger and despair.
"Sorry, sir," said Jason.
He studied the wall monitors, looking for any sign of the missing man. Each inhabitant of Loston was there, represented by a prismatic holo that could be instantly enlarged to show where each person was and what he or she was doing. But Adam was not interested in the population as a whole. He only wanted to know about one of them. Casey had disappeared from the screens a few hours before. There were several things that could mean, none of them good. Adam feared the worst.
"No reading at all on him?" he asked.
"None," answered Jason grimly.
"So he’s gone. "
Jason shook his head. "He could be just out hiking or something. We have trouble picking up signals in the mountains." But his face didn’t seem hopeful.
"For two days?" Adam shook his head, as well, somehow making the movement bleaker than when Jason did it. "No, Casey’s dead. And that means they’re inside Loston. Somewhere." He paused, thinking. "What about Devorough?"
Jason hesitated. Then said, "He still hasn’t turned up, sir. Neither has his...daughter."
Adam glanced at Jason, and saw that his right-hand man must be thinking the same thing he was: Devorough couldn’t have a daughter. It was impossible.
Wasn't it?
Adam felt things surging out of his control. He had to get things back together again. Soon.
"God," Adam whispered. He finished the prayer in his head. Please, God, don’t let the world end here. Out loud, he said, "We have to find them."
"Should we go in?"
"Not yet," he answered. "But get a squad ready."
DOM#67A
LOSTON, COLORADO
AD 1999
5:45 PM MONDAY
The office was deserted; had been empty for the last hour and a half. The light was dim, the setting sun casting its last rays of orange through the frosted glass windows.
John stepped out of the bathroom, where he’d hidden while waiting for everyone to leave. He had a bad moment when he heard Janice, the woman who served as part-time janitor, come in the room. Luckily, Janice was a bit lazy as a custodian. John heard her check the soap dispensers, load paper towels by the sink, and then leave without checking the stalls.
An hour later he came out of the stall, waiting that long to make sure he didn’t bump into the principal or anyone else trying to put in a bit of extra work. He didn't know why, exactly, but something told him that what he wanted to do would not be well-received by the staff of Loston High.
Once in the office, he went directly to the filing cabinet. It wasn’t locked, but then there was no real need for it to be locked.
Was there?
He opened up the second shelf from the top, fingering through Mertyl's neatly-arranged files until he came to the right one: Devorough, Kaylie D.
He pulled the file. Grades, transcripts from several other schools, and a photo all spilled out. John pushed them aside, looking for her address. He found it on a mailing slip: 1089 Sherman Street. He knew the area, had probably actually passed by the house numerous times, but couldn’t remember exactly what it looked like.
He replaced the information, then put the file back in its designated spot. Mertyl, as careful with her system as she was with everything else, might notice tomorrow that it had been pawed through, but John hoped that by then it wouldn’t matter; that he’d have resolved the questions that held sway over him. He hoped that would cure the strangeness that had infected him and seemed to be slowly spreading to his closest friends in Loston.
He glanced at the wall clock: 5:45 p.m. Sherman Street wasn't too far.
If he hurried, he could get this taken care of and be at Fran’s on time. Assuming nothing went wrong.
DOM#67A
LOSTON, COLORADO
AD 1999
5:55 PM MONDAY
When they had first entered the house on Sherman Street, Todd and Jenna had raged. It was empty. Nothing, not a scrap. They saw a child’s doll in one of the two bedrooms, but it was the only article in an otherwise empty house. It sat against the wall with its arms folded, like a little girl sitting reverently in the front pew at a funeral.
"What are we going to do now?" asked Todd. "She’s gone."
"Maybe she hasn’t arrived yet," said Deirdre. Once more, Malachi appreciated her quiet, self-contained confidence. She was far more controlled than Todd and Jenna.
"Then what’s that?" asked Jenna, pointing to the doll. She had a point. Malachi believed that Fran would not visit this house again, if she had even been permitted to get here. Still, perhaps something could be learned.
"We wait," said Malachi. He stepped into the other bedroom and closed the door, leaving it open a crack, so that they could see into the hall. "If she hasn’t arrived, we’ll kill her as soon as she steps in the door. And if she left, we wait for whoever comes her next - and someone will, I promise you, they always come in to make a last sweep - and make him tell us where they’ve taken her."
He smiled, a tight-lipped grimace that transformed his thin features into a death’s head.
***
John stepped up to the house, checking the address to make sure he was at the right place. 1089 Sherman. This was it.
It was a small enough house, not large like some of the big family homes that squatted outside Loston.
No lights were on inside, but he knocked anyway. No answer.
***
"Wait," said Malachi when they heard the knock. "Wait until whoever it is come in. We want this to be private."
***
John put out a hand, touching the door handle. It didn’t turn. Locked.
He stood for a moment, asking himself if he really wanted to do what was coming next. But he knew that he had already decided. He walked around the side of the house, stopping in front of a window. It was closed, a screen over the glass, and curtains drawn within. He figured it belonged to one of the bedrooms.
He withdrew a small penknife and popped out the screen, then pressed his fingers against the window, pulling at the glass. A lot of the houses in Loston didn't even have latches on the windows. And often the ones that did weren't engaged, their owners assured that no one would dream of breaking into a house in a place like Loston. With luck, John could open the window, hop in and look around, and no one would be any the wiser.
He pulled, and the window slid open without a sound.
His lucky day.
***
Malachi and the others tensed as they heard, not so much a noise, as a feeling that seemed to precede sound. An intake, as if the world itself waited with baited breath to see what would happen next. A rasping noise. Someone was entering the house.
***
John slid silently through the window, dipping his head below the curtain and seeming to glide to the floor, like a legless phantasm in a haunted house.
He closed the window behind him, then looked around the room. It was empty, save a tiny doll sitting against one wall.
John walked noiselessly into the hallway. He looked across the corridor, where a closed door waited. The other bedroom. It was open a crack, he saw, and headed to it.
Then he veered down the hall, deciding to check the front rooms first and finish with the bedroom. Though he had come in through a window - and such an action was so completely unlike him that he couldn’t really understand where it had come from - he didn’t like the idea of possibly violating the sanctity of someone’s bedroom if he could help it. Perhaps the front rooms would turn up the answers to questions he didn’t even have formed in his own mind.
***
They saw the flash as someone walked by their room. It startled them; they had heard sounds, but had not heard anyone actually come in the house.
Todd looked at Malachi, mouthing the words, "What now?"
Malachi was about to answer when they heard the front door open. Distracted by the presence of a stranger in the hall, they hadn’t heard the latch disengage.
Now there were two people in the house.
Malachi decided to wait and see what happened next.
***
John stepped into the living room at the same exact time someone else entered through the front door. It registered on him that this room was as bare as the other had been, but that was before he locked eyes with the man who had stepped in.
"Skunk Man," whispered John.
Devorough stared blankly at John, his jaw slack, as though he were some patient in a mental hospital, too doped up to recognize anything around him.
John and the man both waited, a frozen tableau, before John broke the silence. "Mr. Devorough?" he started.
Devorough seemed to animate a bit. His mouth closed for a moment, then in a dreamy voice he said, "She forgot her doll. I came back for it. The place has to be clean."
John didn’t know what was going on; was too confused and frightened by half to make any sense out of Devorough's strange words. He pressed on, though, wanting more than ever to pierce the shroud of mystery that had suddenly wrapped around his life.
***
Malachi held up a hand. They could hear the conversation in the next room. They might find something out. One of the men had mentioned a girl, and he wanted to hear what he could before going in and blowing both of them back to Hell.
The first voice came through the door. "Mr. Devorough, I’m Kaylie’s teacher, and...."
Teacher? Malachi frowned. No matter what false name the Controllers had given her, why would Fran have a teacher? This wasn’t sounding right.
"...well, this is gonna sound crazy," the first voice continued, "but were you ever in Iraq?"
There was a long pause. And then a sudden, violent crash.
***
John expected several things. A laugh, perhaps, with an accompanying "What are you talking about?" If not that, then a mere "I’m calling the police" was also something he would have been ready for. He even felt fairly prepared for Devorough to rip off his face and reveal an insect-like alien beneath the skin that would grab him and take him aboard some mothership hovering a few miles above the earth, undetected by NASA’s best scientists, there to be anally probed and made to mate with the bug women.
But he did not expect Devorough to attack him.
The man screamed, a crazy, ravaged cry that seemed to tear out of him, and John instinctively threw up his hands as Devorough rushed him, the other man's hands curled into vicious claws that would rend and tear.
John suddenly found himself in the fight of his life. Devorough’s hands were like flesh-sheathed pincers that felt more as though they were powered by pistons and steam than by muscle and tendon. John pushed the man away, kicking him in the groin and forking at his eyes automatically, old training surging up to take control of his reactions.
Devorough defended against the eye-gouge. John’s foot, however, connected. It was a solid hit, slamming Devorough’s genitals straight on. It should have dropped him, but the guy kept coming. He didn't even slow down, in fact. He pushed into John, punching him back into the wall hard enough that he felt his ribs bend and the air whoosh out of him.
In the movies, such a hit was always a chance to hear the good guy scream in rage and then come on with renewed vigor. Reality was different. John couldn’t breathe; for an agonizing moment he couldn’t even think about breathing. Then his body recovered enough to suck in a huge gasp of air.
Too late for further action, though. Devorough had the upper hand, and he kept it, pressing John into and up the wall, keeping John’s feet off the floor, keeping him from getting his balance. Both Devorough’s hands were occupied, though, so this time when John’s two fingers stabbed out, it was a success.
One slammed into Devorough’s cheek, bruising John’s knuckle. The other slammed home, plunging into the gooey mass of Devorough’s eye, ruining it forever. John felt no immediate qualms about the action: he knew instinctively this was a fight to the death, with no second place award. But still, in a place in the back of his mind, he knew that he would later agonize about the move; would replay it over and over in his mind to see if there might have been some other way of dealing with the situation.
If he survived, that was. If he was dead he wouldn’t have the luxury of feeling guilty.
Devorough stepped back - without a sound, though he should have been screaming! - and John found his footing again. He grabbed hold of Devorough’s neck and pulled, throwing his hip under Devorough’s and swiveling his feet as he simultaneously yanked on Devorough’s head and neck. It was a hip-toss, and John planned to throw the other man down as hard as he could, adding his own body weight to gravity’s taut pull and hopefully crushing Devorough’s ribs into pudding.
It didn’t work. Devorough pulled himself high, defying physics and leverage to yank John into the air again. It wasn’t form or technique, it was sheer brute strength.
John had never felt such power. It was as though a monster, a juggernaut, a leviathan was attacking him. He had fought large men before, and his training allowed him to win. Technique provided him with enough advantage to come out as victor. But here, it seemed that training was nothing. And technique was just a silly fairy tale that evaporated in the face of rough, brute strength.
Devorough slammed John into the ground, a throw that seemed almost clumsy in execution. For all its lack of smoothness, though, the move was effective. John landed on his tailbone, bruising and perhaps fracturing it as he landed. He cried out, a staccato yip that was broken off as Devorough’s hand wrapped itself tightly around his throat.
For a moment, John thought he was going to be slowly strangled, the oxygen and life crushed out of him. Devorough’s grip changed, though, and John gasped quickly as the other man’s hands left his trachea, inhaling with relief. The relief quickly fled, however, as Devorough switched his hands to a firm hold on his chin and the back of John's head, and began twisting.
He’s going to snap my neck, thought John.
And there was nothing he could do about it. The pressure was slow, even, utterly unrelenting. And inescapable. John could actually hear the vertebrae in his neck popping and crackling as they struggled to maintain themselves under stress which nature never intended them to feel.
He heard a bang, a loud clattering sound that he knew must be his neck breaking. John thought the pain would cease with the noise, but miraculously it didn’t. It got worse, a sheer agony that ripped through his muscles and set them afire.
Then he felt Devorough’s hands loosen and the man’s body fell next to John. A hole the size of a cat was punched through the Skunk Man's torso. John could actually see through the gaping wound to the wall behind as Devorough fell.
John looked behind him, and recognized the four strangers he had bumped into at Casey’s coming in the bedroom door. They held guns.
The one in front, the oldest one, smiled. He looked at Devorough’s body and whispered, "Thou shalt fear no evil." He aimed his gun at Devorough’s body, which was still twitching.
Do bodies twitch that much? he thought. John had seen bodies before, and they’d never convulsed like this one was doing,
The older man pulled the trigger of his weapon.
John threw himself to the side as the shotgun blasted. He felt the heated shot whiz past him as he hit the wall under a large window, but wasn’t harmed.
He looked at Devorough, whose head was splashed all over the room, body ending in a mutilated, ragged stump of a neck that dripped blood everywhere.
Devorough was no longer twitching. Once again, the Skunk Man was dead.