Feverbridge did not answer; he simply continued pacing.
“So doesn’t it stand to reason that you are drawn to the full moon all that much more—that you crave its light, crave the power it confers on you?”
“That’s not so!” Laura protested.
“This ‘energy’ you mention—I imagine it’s more like a well, something that you can tap almost at will. I can only imagine what that feels like.”
“This is crazy!” Laura said. “My father is humiliated, sick at heart by what’s happened, he—”
“That power, that craving—why would anybody want to have it taken away from them?” Logan asked Feverbridge. “I’d think just the opposite: they’d want to hold on to it any way they could. That’s why you dazzled me by demonstrating your earlier research—the research on moon dust—knowing I would not turn you in, but rather, in my ignorance, let you proceed with what now truly interested you—the end you’d always hoped for, but had never been able to achieve…until the Blakeneys came along.” He paused. “All these breakthroughs Laura mentions, the ones that turn out to be dead ends—did you engineer things so they would turn out that way? Is it possible the phenomena affecting you are becoming stronger, rather than weaker? That you are, in fact, addicted to the transformation—and this addiction maintains you through your calmer moments, preventing you from truly finding some way to undo what you’ve caused?”
“No!” Feverbridge cried in a hoarse voice.
“What is it you really do here by yourself, Dr. Feverbridge?” Logan pressed. “When you lock yourself in on the nights of the full moon, refusing to be seen even by your daughter. Are you really cowering in that back room, in the dark, with the tar paper covering the window?”
“Jeremy,” Laura said, her tone changing abruptly. “What are you saying?”
“And that initial violent aspect of the transformation, the one you so conveniently managed to cancel out—even though you’ve made no other progress on your condition—is it really gone? Or is that what you’ve just led your daughter to believe? Because in my job as enigmalogist, I have to suspend my disbelief again and again, take a lot of things for granted—but one thing I never take for granted is coincidence. And the coincidence of your injecting yourself with that resequenced DNA, and the murders starting to take place shortly thereafter, is just a little too strong for me to accept.”
As they had been speaking, darkness had gathered around the laboratory. At that moment, a stripe of moonlight suddenly drifted through the open door—and fell directly on Feverbridge.
“You son of a bitch!” he roared in a strangled voice. “You tricked me!”
Even as he spoke, Logan saw a strange pigmentation begin to spread across the skin of his exposed throat, blossoming like brown food coloring dropped into a basin of water. Feverbridge clutched at his neck, making gargling sounds, and blood-filled weals began to appear on his fingers and the backs of his wrists. He twisted, first this way, then that—and then he dashed out the door and into the darkness beyond.
“Father!” Laura cried out in shock and pain. She rounded on Logan. “My God, what have you done to him—”
“Stay here!” he cried. Then, running out of the lab and slamming the door behind him, he hurried up the path to the main complex. He was just in time to see the shadow of Feverbridge dart past the headlights of the red pickup truck that was now pulling into the fire station.
“Looks like I got here just in time,” Albright said, getting out of his truck. “In the call you made earlier, you did say to arrive at moonrise.” He reached into the front seat, pulled out his rifle. “I knew when you saw me loading this up that I’d hear from you, sooner or later. When you asked me to meet you at the Feverbridge lab, I assumed we were talking about the dogs. But that was no dog that ran in front of my headlights just now.”
Logan did not reply. Instead, he ran to his Jeep, opened the glove compartment, and pulled out his own 9mm Sig Sauer. Then he rushed back to Albright.
“Come on,” he said, gesturing in the direction Feverbridge had gone. “We don’t have a moment to lose.”
37
They began racing down the gravel path toward the highway. Already, Feverbridge had vanished into the darkness ahead.
“What happened?” Albright asked as they ran. “Were you right—about what you mentioned when you called me, I mean?”
“It’s even worse than I thought,” Logan replied. “The resynthesized serum wasn’t administered to the dogs. Feverbridge gave it to himself.”
“Are you saying that was him who ran in front of my truck just now? But he died six months ago.”
“No. He killed a backpacker six months ago, a loner nobody would miss. Threw him off the top of Madder’s Gorge. His daughter Laura misidentified the body to make people think Feverbridge was dead, so the scientific community who’d always scoffed at his work would leave him in peace—that was her explanation, anyway. Ever since, she told me, they’ve been trying to find a way to reverse the effects of what he did to himself.”
“Which was what, exactly?”
“Inject himself with a highly potent and hybrid strain of Zephraim’s moon-sickness.”
“Holy shit. How did he do that?”
“I don’t know all the details. I assume he modified a DNA sequence to introduce new genetic code into his genome—a single gene, or more likely a series of genes. In essence, he managed to simulate the effects of a multifactorial inheritance disorder.”
“A what? How is that even possible?”
“It’s the other cornerstone of his research: introducing a mutation into otherwise normal genetic code, specifically to cause metamorphosis. But we can worry about the details later. Because the most important thing is that he’s not reverting to his old self, as he’d originally intended—if anything, he’s getting worse. He’s behind the four recent murders, and he seems to be getting more violent all the time.”
They reached the road and paused for a moment. “Should we call in the cavalry?” Logan asked as he checked to make sure a cartridge was in the chamber of his gun.
“You mean, Krenshaw? It would take him forty-five minutes to get here.”
“What about those troopers down the road, guarding the Blakeney compound?”
“It would take ten minutes to get them. And they’d just get in the way, slow us down. The longer we delay, the more chance Feverbridge has of killing again. Look, we’ve got a fresh trail to follow—and I can see it from here.” With his torch, Albright pointed across the road, where some brush had been torn free from the surrounding tree limbs.
Albright rushed across the road and plunged into the woods on the far side, Logan at his heels. With the aid of Albright’s torch, and the light of the full moon, they made their way through a maze of branches and heavy brush. More than once, Logan stumbled over an exposed tree root, protruding invisibly from the forest floor.