One of them abruptly spun sideways, his face torn away by a bullet that went on to strike a glass cylinder. The glass shattered in a spray of jagged pieces and gushing water. The occupant of the tube tore loose of the wires and fell heavily to the floor.
I saw this only peripherally as the second creature slammed into me.
He was enormously strong and he drove me ten feet backward and nearly crushed me flat against a concrete wall. Even with the impact I managed to keep hold of my gun, but the monster twisted its head and clamped its jaws around my forearm. Blood exploded and I heard my wrist-bones break. Pain burst with inferno heat inside my arm and I almost blacked out.
But there is a part of me that is as cold and inhuman as these monsters. It’s the part of me that survived the trauma of my childhood by being too vicious to die. It’s the part that somehow allowed me to complete the mission that Grace had died to accomplish, even though it meant facing impossible odds. It was the part of me that could kill despite idealism and compassion. It was the part of me that, on some level that I have never wanted to examine with total clarity, enjoys all of this. The pain, the violence.
The killing.
As my flesh ruptured and my bones broke, that part of me shoved the civilized aspect of my mind to one side. In that moment I stopped being a man and became the thing I needed to be in order to survive this encounter.
I became a monster.
With a snarl as inhuman as the thing that attacked me, I drove my knee up into its crotch, then head-butted the thing so hard I could hear cartilage and bone shatter. I drove my stiffened thumb into its eye, bursting the orb. Then I kicked its screaming, writhing body backward.
My right arm flopped bloody and limp, the fingers feeling like swollen bags of blood. My gun was gone — I had no idea where.
I ran at the monster that now lay twisting on the floor, hands pressed to its bloody eye-socket. Its other eye stared at me with uncomprehending horror. It had killed the scientists in this room. It was a predator thing, designed for slaughter, and now it was hurt and helpless and being stalked by something that did not fear its power.
It raised one hand in defence and I kicked it away, then stamped down hard on its throat.
Without even pausing to watch it die, I whirled toward Felicity.
But she was not there.
Instead I saw the third Merman sprawled in a growing lake of blood, its whole body torn apart so savagely that its arms and legs were attached by strings of meat.
Something bulky and gray shot past me, brushing close enough to strike my uninjured arm. It moved so fast I could barely see it.
It plunged into the water and was gone.
It was not a woman, that much was clear. It looked like an animal.
Almost like an animal.
Its gray fur was criss-crossed by jagged cuts and streaked with blood. Within a moment all that was left was a stain of blood on the eddying waters.
I stood alone in the cavernous lab.
Twenty feet away, the Merman who had fallen to the floor when my bullet smashed its tube was beginning to stir.
I bent and picked up the pistol dropped by Felicity Hope.
With blood falling from my shattered arm, I walked over to the creature as it struggled to get to its misshapen feet.
I raised the gun.
Fired.
For a long, long time I stood there. Arm cradled to my body. Pain and adrenaline washing back and forth through me like tidewaters.
There was no sign of Felicity Hope.
I knew there would not be.
Though… I did not understand why.
As the monster in my mind crept back into its cave and the civilized man staggered out again, the mysteries of this place — of this afternoon — rose up above me like a tsunami and threatened to smash me flat.
In my mind I could still hear the echoes of her voice.
“Joe… it stops here.”
I looked around at the computers. And at the tables piled high with equipment.
And chemicals.
And reams of paper.
With my good hand, whimpering at the agony in my arm, I reached into my pocket for my lighter.
-10-
The fire burned the building to black ash.
I leaned against the fender of the ATF agents’ Crown Vic and watched it burn. They both yelled at me, demanding to know what happened, threatening to arrest me, trying to get me to react to them in any way. But all I did was watch the place burn.
When the firemen and cops asked me how it started, I spun a bunch of lies.
I was taken in an ambulance to the hospital where they had to do surgery to repair my arm. The doctors had a lot of questions about my arm. I told them that there had been a moray eel in a tank and that I was dumb enough to put my arm inside. They didn’t believe me. Mostly because they weren’t stupid enough to accept that story. And because the wound signature was wrong for an eel. Then Mr Church showed up and people stopped asking me questions.
The only one who heard the real story was Church.
He listened the way he does — silent, without expression, cold. When I was done, he used his cell phone and, with me sitting right there in the ER, ordered a full battery of physical and psychological tests for when I got back to Baltimore.
Even a lie detector test.
Our forensics people lifted blood samples from my clothes. Dark brick-red blood from my shirt. The blood of the Mermen.
And brighter red blood from my sleeve.
Her blood.
They also lifted a full handprint from the back wall of the bathroom. The techs promised DNA and other lab work back as soon as possible.
Dr Hu spent days picking through the ashes of the Koenig building, his face alight with expectation, hoping to find something he could play with, but I’d built a very hot fire.
He finally gave it up, defeated and mad at me.
The doctors and the shrinks ran their tests.
I passed them all. No hallucinogens or alcohol in my system.
The shrinks ran and then re-ran their tests, and when they got the same answers they began looking at me funny. Then they stopped making eye-contact altogether.
On a warm summer evening ten days after the fire, Mr Church called me into a private meeting. There was a plate of cookies — Nilla wafers and Oreos — and a tall bottle of very good, very old Scotch. There was also a stack of folders colour-coded from different departments. I didn’t touch them, but I could see that some folders were from other agencies.
After we sat and ate cookies and drank whiskey and stared at each other for too long, Church said, “Is there anything you would like to add to your report?”
“No,” I said.
“Is there anything about the report you would like to amend?”
“No.”
He nodded.
We sat.
We each had another cookie.
Church picked up two FBI fingerprint cards and handed it to me. I looked at them and read the attached report. The conclusion was this: “Both sets of prints are clearly from the same source. They match on all points.”
I sighed and set the report down.
“Fingerprints can be faked,” said Church. “There are various polymers which can be worn over the finger tips, and even the whole hand, that can carry false prints.”
“I know.”
“The FBI report is therefore inconclusive as far as we’re concerned.”
“Okay,” I said. He studied my face but I was giving him nothing to read. My face has been a stone since the fire. I didn’t want to show anything.
Church removed a report from a DNA lab that we often used. He studied it for a moment but didn’t pass it to me.
“The lab says that the blood sample from your sleeve was contaminated. They pull two blood types from it, one human and one animal.”