Dark moon rising, p.19
Dark Moon Rising, page 19
Jim began to have terrifying dreams again like he had the first night after surgery. He was running on all fours through a chilly, frostbitten forest, dodging in and out of the trees, his nose in the air searching for prey.
The delicious odor of warm blood entered his nostrils and he swerved quickly to the left and sped up. Soon he was on the heels of a small deer, a yearling doe who was running as fast as she could to get away from him, her tail erect and flashing white to signal danger to any of her herd that were nearby.
After twenty yards, Jim leaped and brought the doe crashing down among the leaves and deadfall timber on the forest floor.
Without hesitation he grabbed her head and gave it a quick twist, breaking the deer’s neck and killing her instantly.
With a howl that caused the forest around him to become suddenly quiet, he dipped his head and used his teeth to tear into the doe’s soft neck muscles, rending and tearing until he opened the large neck vein and could suck and drink her still-warm blood.
When he was satiated, he rose and urinated in a ring around the carcass, signaling to any other predators nearby that the kill was his, and then he padded slowly back toward his den and safety. Darkness began to circle and close on him and soon Jim was sleeping peacefully with no more dreams.
* * *
Doreen made a series of random turns on a multitude of small back roads as she sped away from the research base and toward safety.
Two hours later she pulled into a gas station in a small town she didn’t even know the name of, figuring if she herself was lost, then the men who were surely chasing her by now wouldn’t be able to plot her course either. She filled her car with gasoline and then went inside and bought a large cup of coffee and paid cash for everything. Doreen didn’t know just how plugged into the intelligence community General Blackwood was, but it was a relatively easy matter to track someone who used credit cards.
She got back in her car and pulled to the far side of the lot where she was out of the light and couldn’t be seen from inside the store. Opening her laptop computer she connected through her wireless modem to the Internet and checked the e-mail address she’d given Senator O’Donnel’s office.
Sure enough, there was an e-mail telling her how to get in contact with the senator. She smiled when she saw he’d taken her advice and also gotten an e-mail address on Yahoo. She slipped the floppy disk on which she’d copied the Wilcox patient’s files into the computer and attached the files on the disk to an e-mail to the senator. In it she told them that she was fairly sure her cover was blown and that she was going to do her best to disappear until she read in the newspapers that Blackwood and Stern had been indicted or were dead. She added she would keep checking this e-mail address on a regular basis but for them not to expect any further information from her.
Just as she exited the Internet and closed the computer she saw a large, black SUV scream down the road she’d been on. New sweat popped out on her forehead as she realized that Blackwood and Stern had resources that were almost unimaginable and that it was very likely that she would soon be caught.
“Jesus, girl,” she mumbled, staring at her hand that was trembling, “what have you gotten yourself into?”
She shook her head. “Now I know you’re in trouble, girl, talkin’ to yourself like this.” She laughed but her mouth had a sour taste of fear in it as she started the car and drove off into the night, hoping she could find a car to steal soon or she would surely not be free when the morning came.
* * *
It was almost two o’clock in the morning when Syd woke up shivering and shaking, alone in the bed.
She got her robe off the chair next to the bed and went out into the living room to see where Jim was and to ask why it was so cold in the cabin. She saw the fire in the stove was still burning and felt a chilly draft from off to her right. She looked and saw that the glass doors to the deck were wide open and the cold air was rushing in.
She went to the doors and had them half shut when she saw a figure lying on the deck. “Oh my God!” she exclaimed, thinking Jim had gone out and fainted or had a seizure or something.
Fearing he’d frozen to death in the freezing night air, she rushed out to the deck and knelt next to him, immediately feeling for a pulse in his carotid artery. To her surprise it was strong and steady, so she figured he hadn’t been out in the cold too long.
When she pulled her fingers away from his neck, they felt sticky. She held them up in the faint light cast by the moon through heavy cloud cover and they appeared to be covered with some black substance. She sniffed it and almost gagged when she realized it was blood—Jim’s neck was covered with blood!
She knew she would not be able to lift Jim, he was much too large and heavy. She ran back into the cabin and jerked up a throw rug and carried it back out onto the deck.
She lay it next to Jim’s unconscious body and gently rolled him over on top of it, and then she dragged him across the deck and up into the cabin and over in front of the stove as close as she could get.
She flipped on the living room light and almost fainted at the sight of his naked body covered from head to toe with dried, crusted blood. She quickly checked his body for injuries and found none and realized the blood was not his.
Shaking her head at the mystery, she snatched open the stove and filled it with fresh wood and opened the air intake valve so it would heat the room quicker.
Within minutes the heat was pouring out of the stove and Jim’s body didn’t feel as cold to the touch, but still he didn’t awaken.
Syd went into the bathroom and wet a hand towel with warm water, and she knelt next to Jim’s body and began to clean the crusted blood off of him, talking gently to him to try and ease him awake as she racked her brain and tried to figure out how he could’ve gotten covered with blood on his own deck in the middle of the night.
* * *
It was fully thirty minutes before Jim blinked his eyes and came awake. Syd was still sitting on the floor next to him, rubbing his skin and talking to him in a low voice.
He looked at her, gave her a confused smile, and then he smacked his lips, made a face, and got to his feet and stumbled into the bathroom and vomited in the commode.
Syd stood in the doorway watching him as he upchucked large chunks of meat that looked as if it was not only undigested but unchewed as well. The smell of rancid meat finally drove both of them out of the bathroom and Jim turned on the vent fan and shut the door.
“Damn, Syd,” he said, his eyes wide and terrified as he moved to her and put his arms around her. “What the hell is going on?”
She pulled away and sniffed and made a face at his rank, musky odor. “Listen, baby,” she said, “I cleaned you up as best I could, but I think the best thing for you to do is to take a shower and wash your hair and brush your teeth and then we’ll talk.”
He looked down and sniffed, smelling his own pungent body odor, and nodded his head. “Yuk, you’re right. I smell like a donkey.”
“No,” she said, staring at him through narrowed eyes. “More like a wet dog. Now hurry up and I’ll make us some coffee. I think we’re going to have a long night.”
Chapter 27
Senator Jerry O’Donnel looked up from his desk to find Thomas Oliphant standing in his doorway. “Hey, Jere, let’s go get some bagels and lox somewhere where they know how to make a decent cup of coffee,” Oliphant said, his eyes cutting to the file folder he held in his hand.
“Sounds good to me,” O’Donnel said, getting to his feet and stretching. “If I spend another minute on this speech to the Women’s Club of Washington I’m going to put in something really nasty, like why don’t you women get a life and quit hanging around fancy restaurants eating expensive food and talking about all your good works?”
Oliphant chuckled and they left the office and walked down to the Senate dining room. Possibly one of the most secure places in a town of secure places, it was by far the safest place within miles to have a private talk. In fact, it was designed for such, the tables being far enough apart that men could sit and discuss top-secret things without fear of being overheard by anyone at an adjacent table. Also the rules of etiquette for eating there were stringently observed—if the occupants of a table were in deep discussion or papers were out on the table, no one would approach to chat or say hello unless invited to do so.
Once they had their coffee and bagels, which really were the best in Washington, Oliphant slid the folder he’d been carrying across the table to O’Donnel.
O’Donnel opened it without asking what was in it and found himself reading both Janus’s e-mail and the printed-out version of the file she’d sent along. By the time O’Donnel was finished, his eyes had a concerned, almost guilty look in them.
He glanced over at Oliphant. “Is there anything we can do to help protect this woman?”
Oliphant shook his head. “No, not unless she asks for it. I assume we can find out who she is by carefully monitoring female employees close enough to Blackwood or Stern to get the information and who have recently disappeared, but she’d still have to surface and ask for placement in the witness protection program.”
O’Donnel cocked his head. “And you don’t see her doing that, do you?”
Oliphant snorted. “No, I don’t. This lady has balls of steel to do what she did, boss, and I think she’d rather rely on her own smarts to get her out of trouble than take a chance on the government being able to protect her against one of the most powerful men in government.”
O’Donnel nodded and drained his coffee cup and motioned for their waiter to bring them both refills. While they waited, he tapped the folder with his index finger. “What do you think of this file on Dr. Wilcox?”
“Now that’s what’s got me confused,” Oliphant said, leaning forward as he spoke. “Why would Stern go out on a limb to use his experimental treatment on a civilian when he has all those compliant soldiers being supplied to him by Blackwood?”
“I can see at least two reasons,” O’Donnel said. “One, the soldiers all represent a particular mind-set—that of men already used to and accepting of the use of extreme violence as a way to solve problems. Stern probably wanted to check out the treatment on someone who would most likely not be a violent person to begin with.”
Oliphant nodded. “And the second?”
“All of the soldiers he experimented on had intact brains. Perhaps that explains why his success rate with them has only been in the neighborhood of fifty percent. Now he’s presented with a potential subject who’s going to have a significant portion of his brain removed and the parts Stern wants to change are going to be gone, so there won’t be any interference with his newly injected animal DNA.”
Oliphant shrugged. “You may be right, Jerry, but he won’t know much after only one subject, so he’s got to be planning to do the experiment again on some more of his patients.”
“Right,” O’Donnel said. “And that means we have to speed up our investigation before he has a chance to kill or injure or drive any more men insane with his terrible experiments.”
Oliphant leaned back in his chair, his expression thoughtful. “I don’t know, Jerry. If we move too fast before we collect all of our evidence we may lose Blackwood. I agree we’ve probably got enough evidence to get a conviction of Stern, but so far none of what we’ve got ties Blackwood into his schemes or shows the general was knowingly helping him.”
“I know,” O’Donnel said disgustedly. “If we do what we’re supposed to do and protect the citizens against a megalomaniac military monster, we risk letting him go free; if we don’t stop him immediately, we risk the lives and health of more citizens. We’re between a rock and a hard place.”
Oliphant grinned sourly. “Isn’t that the definition of public service, boss man?”
* * *
Jim came out of his shower feeling squeaky-clean. His hair was freshly washed and smelled like an herbal garden, his teeth gleamed from a five-minute scrub, and his mouth no longer tasted like the floor of a meat locker. He didn’t have a robe so he pulled on a red flannel nightshirt with dozens of pictures of moose on it.
When he walked into the living room, Syd covered her mouth and broke out laughing. She was waiting for him on the sofa in front of the stove and had two cups of steaming coffee on the table in front of her.
“Sorry,” she said, her eyes twinkling with delight. “I know we’re supposed to be solemn about this, but you just look so . . . adorable in your little nightshirt.”
“Thanks,” he said sourly. “I pass out on my deck and wake up hours later freezing to death and covered with blood and you’re making snide comments about my nightshirt.”
She handed him his cup. “Here, grumpus,” she said, still smiling. “You’ve got to look on the bright side. You survived, the blood wasn’t yours, and you’re having coffee with a beautiful, sexy woman in an isolated cabin in the Maine woods.” She held out her hands. “What’s there to be grumpy about?”
It finally dawned on him that she was as concerned as he was but was trying to be nonchalant about the situation in order to spare him any unnecessary anxiety.
He sipped his coffee and put his free hand on her arm. “Thanks, babe,” he said, showing her he knew why she was being so cheerful.
“Okay, now we get down to business,” she said, inching back on the couch and turning sideways to face him, holding her coffee cup in both hands. “Tell me what you remember after we went to sleep.”
He thought about it for a couple of minutes. “Well, it’s all kinda vague, but I think I got up to pee and then noticed the light of the full moon coming in the window and stepped out on the deck to look at it.”
She leaned her head to the side. “You went out on the deck naked as cold as it is just to look at the moon?”
He grinned sheepishly. “Hey, what can I say? I’m a romantic that way, and to be honest I didn’t intend to stay out in the cold very long. Besides, it seemed like the thing to do at the time.”
“All right,” she said over the rim of her cup as she drank. “What happened then?”
He shrugged. “That’s when it begins to get very vague. I remember the moonlight made me feel . . . funny. Kinda energized and excited and hyper, and then the next thing I know I’m dreaming crazy, wild dreams.”
“What kind of dreams?” she asked, beginning to get excited now.
He shrugged. “I was running through the forest, but it wasn’t me.”
“What do you mean?”
He sighed. “I was very low to the ground, like an animal, and I was running on all fours instead of on my own two feet. I was chasing something, and I think I wanted to kill it and eat it.”
“Do you remember what you were chasing?” she asked. “Was it an animal or a human?”
He squinted his eyes for a moment, and then he shook his head in disgust. “I don’t know, I just can’t remember. I do remember biting and chewing something and the taste of blood was in my mouth and I felt stronger and more alive than I ever have in real life.” He paused, realizing his voice was getting higher and he was beginning to get excited just talking about what it’d felt like to hunt down and kill his prey. “And then there’s nothing—just blackness until I woke up with you leaning over me in front of the stove,” he finished.
Syd got to her feet and walked into the bedroom.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“To get my instruments. I’m going to check your blood pressure and look at your retinae and make sure nothing’s happened inside that lovely head of yours.”
He leaned back against the back of the couch. “Oh no, not another physical.”
“Yes,” she said, stepping back into the room with her black doctor’s bag in her hands. “Only you can relax. No rectal exam this time.”
He grinned. “What do you mean? That’s the only part I was kinda looking forward to.”
She laughed. “Sorry but that’s the way it is.”
As she wrapped a blood pressure cuff around his arm, he became more serious. “You don’t really think I’ve had a bleed or something, do you?”
She wagged her head. “No, I think this is psychological, not physical, but we’ve got to cover all the bases.”
“Psychological? You think I’m having a breakdown?”
“No, not at all, but we’ve both seen patients react in some pretty bizarre ways to brain surgery, Jim. This could merely be a reaction to the drugs you were given or to the shock of having a significant portion of your gray cells sucked out of your brain.”
He nodded, but his expression was skeptical. “That might explain the fainting spell and the wild dreams, but how does that account for the blood I had all over me and the meat I vomited up when I came to?”
She glanced up at him and her eyes were full of both fear and worry. “It doesn’t, so once I’ve proven to my satisfaction that you’re sound physically, we’ll wait for daylight and then we’ll explore the surrounding forest and see what we can find out about the blood.”
She pumped up the cuff. “Now, be quiet while I make sure your pressure’s not going through the roof.”
When she was done she took off the cuff and pulled out her ophthalmoscope and leaned over to look into his eyes to check for elevated intracerebral pressure.
Jim tried to swallow but his mouth was too dry. “What if... what if we find something terrible in the woods?”
She leaned back and stared into his eyes. “Then we’ll deal with it—together.”
Chapter 28
General Titus Blackwood walked into his office and was startled to find Sergeant Jack Stone sitting in one of his easy chairs smoking a cigarette and bouncing a videotape cartridge in his hand.
Blackwood stopped short and grimaced, shook his head once, and then took a seat behind his desk. “Goddamnit, Jack. I hate it when you just show up in my office unannounced like this without going through security, and for God’s sake please put out that damned cigarette!”
