Or maybe, as soon as I was gone, he’d stop. Maybe I was the reason he was killing at all.
The hospital was in Crosby, the next town over, larger than Dillon but still rural, still nowhere near big enough that you’d call it a city. The hospital was barely a clinic, with an emergency room and a maternity ward and a handful of other medical services, though it was new enough to have a tiny radiology department. Five or six rooms for patients. It was clean, though. And it was one story, so we could slip out the window and run if it came to that. Maybe it already had, and I was too stubborn to see it. Where could we even go? Dillon was crawling with cops, and everybody would recognize us, so we couldn’t hide there. But I didn’t want to abandon the town, either. If I was the only one who could stop Attina, then everyone he killed before I stopped him was my fault.
My only hope was to convince the FBI, when they finally showed up, to let me go back for another try. My one last wish before … whatever they did to me.
I spent the morning with the door closed. I lit a match, thrilling at the little spark of flame, but the smoke alarm went off almost immediately and the nurse came in to take my matchbook away. So even that was gone.
Somewhere in the afternoon—about six hours into our stay at the hospital—I heard a knock on the door. Whoever it was didn’t wait for an answer, but opened it just a second later.
“Iowa,” I said, recognizing him immediately.
The man who’d followed us through Dallas paused in the doorway, taken aback at the statement. “Iowa?”
“The plate on your car,” I said. “That sneaky black SUV that didn’t look remotely like an FBI vehicle.”
“Technically it wasn’t,” he said, closing the door behind himself and sitting in the room’s other chair. “It was a rental. But I’m stationed in Lincoln, Nebraska, so an Iowa plate isn’t all that surprising.”
“Wow,” I said. “What do you have to do wrong to get stationed in Lincoln, Nebraska?”
“Specialize in serial killers, apparently,” said Iowa. He stood up again and stepped toward me, holding out his hand. “Agent Mills. Big fan of your work.”
I let his hand hang there, unshaken. “What kind of work are we talking about?”
He held his hand out another moment or two, then shrugged and went back to his seat. “John Wayne Cleaver, special advisor to Agent Linda Ostler, and a key member of Task Force Goshawk, charged with a mission so secret I’m not even allowed to state it out loud in this room—though I assure you I’m very familiar with its particulars.”
“Goshawk?”
“Some kind of a bird,” said Mills. “I didn’t name it.”
“It’s better than Boy Dog,” I said.
“Your record with Agent Ostler was sketchy but acceptable,” said Mills. “You talked back to your superiors, you pushed every button and boundary and envelope you ever came across, and you actively antagonized some members of your team, including and most problematically the therapist assigned to your unit, but you always got the job done. You enabled more … how can I put this without spilling state secrets … more ‘apprehensions of nonstandard targets’ than the entire US government had managed to achieve in the several decades prior to your term of service. You were on track for a commendation and a hefty pay bump before Fort Bruce.”
“How much of a pay bump?”
“You keep focusing on the least important part of every sentence I say.”
“My therapist used to say the same thing.”
“I’m beginning to understand a lot of the personnel reports I’ve read.”
“Do I want to know why you’re here?” I asked.
He shrugged again. “Probably. Your personnel reports suggest that you want to know everything.”
“Do I get to?”
“How much time do you have?” asked Mills. “The reasons I’m here are a very long list.”
“Well I’m not going anywhere, as far as I know,” I said. “Start with where I’m going next.”
“I’m afraid we have to start several months before that,” said Mills. “Tell me about Fort Bruce.”
“Nice place,” I said. “Kind of big for my tastes, though. And pretty dangerous now that the entire police force has been slaughtered by a supernatural monster.”
“Can we do this without the sass?” asked Mills.
“I guess so,” I said. “But it’s really the only part I enjoy.”
“The last anyone heard of your team in Fort Bruce was Dr. Trujillo calling to say that a combined operation with local police had gone wrong, and a Withered army was running wild through the city. When we arrived on the scene ten hours later there were more than thirty dead humans and what we surmised to be the remains of two dead Withered. You and Brooke were the only survivors.”