Apocalypse Island (34 page)

“Funny thing is, I believe you.”

“And there was something else,” Wolf said.

“What?”

“Something was following you.”

Behind the wheel Laura frowned. “What? The guy that attacked me?”

“No, not him. It was something different. Something... I don’t know...something that felt bad. I think maybe it was the same thing you were just telling me about that followed you home last night. Somehow you felt it too. So I followed you, and I could tell that it had passed that way, because I could feel it. Like it had left some sort of bad residue or something.”

Chapter 80

“You’re
really
creeping me out now, Wolf.” Laura could not stop thinking about what she herself had seen and felt the night before while walking home from the club, and wondering just how close she’d come to death.

“Sorry but I’m just telling you what I felt.”

“I know. It’s just so creepy, that’s all.”

“So when I got to the vacant lot there you were in the grip of that monster. But when I confronted him I knew that he wasn’t the evil that I’d felt, because by then it was gone. Maybe he knows what it is. Maybe he’s even connected to it in some way. I don’t know. But I do know that it wasn’t him. I certainly can’t explain in rational terms what I mean or even what I felt.”

“I understand,” Laura said. “I was there. I felt it too. Even so, I know there’s got to be a rational explanation for it.”

Actually Laura was amazed that she was sitting across from the main suspect in a series of brutal murders discussing, even entertaining, the possibility that all of this hocus pocus was real, even as she knew that it probably was.

She took a sudden left turn into the parking lot of a family super market, scanning the lot for any sign of police activity. She didn’t see anything.

“What are you doing?” Wolf said.

“We need to stay warm and fed if we’re going to figure this thing out. My mom hasn’t been at the cottage since last summer and there’s probably no food. There might be wood there for a fire but I don’t think there’s anything to eat.” Laura chose a parking space as close to the store entrance as possible and pulled in. “I think it would be better if you stayed here,” she told Wolf. “They’ll have a harder time spotting us if we’re not together.”

Wolf grabbed her arm before she could get out. “Why are you doing this?”

“Because I fucking hate injustice. Because I want to find out what happened to my father. Because I’m in this now all the way up to my armpits and I have to find out how it ends. But I think mostly it’s because I...” Laura paused, blew her breath out with a sigh. “It’s because I feel something for you, goddamn it. I don’t know why or how, but I think it’s real and it makes me both happy and a little bit sick to my stomach. But most of all I’m doing it because I want to help you. Because I believe you got scammed five years ago and I think you’re still being scammed.” She gazed sadly at Wolf for a long moment before sliding off the seat and exiting the vehicle.

Even if Laura had still been sitting there Wolf wouldn’t have known how to reply to her strange comment.
I feel something for you?
What the hell did that mean? It was without a doubt the weirdest profession of love—if that’s what it had been—that anyone had ever made to him. But he couldn’t think about that now. He absolutely could not afford the luxury of contemplating anything even close to love. He had to think. He had to force himself to concentrate. He needed to figure a way out of this nightmare. He put his head back against the seat and closed his eyes in thought. Nothing made sense to him. His life was in turmoil; he was being accused of murder, he was being haunted by some supernatural or psychic force, and he was just one step away from going back to prison.

He opened his eyes and started. Three rows down from where he sat, a police cruiser moved slowly and deliberately along the rows of parked vehicles. They were using a spotlight to check license plate numbers. The cruiser reached the end of the row it was on, turned and made its way down the next one. If they were looking for Laura’s Camry it would only be a matter of minutes before they found it.

Chapter 81

Wolf realized that their only advantage was that it was Friday night and the lot was full of shoppers. He ducked down in the seat and jumped when the door opened. Laura threw several plastic bags of groceries on the seat, got in and started the engine.

“I see it,” she said.  Looking behind her she quickly backed out of the space and drove deliberately toward the store’s exit lane. At the end there were two vehicles in line ahead of her waiting to get out onto the street. Wolf turned around in his seat and saw the cruiser passing by the space they had just occupied.

“Come on,
move!
” Laura said. She kept glancing in her rear view mirror tapping her fingers nervously on the steering wheel. Finally there was a break in traffic and the other two vehicles pulled out of the lot. Laura followed them and headed north. Within ten minutes she turned off Route 202 onto a secondary road that twisted like a snake as it followed the lake shore.

She drove the speed limit and kept glancing in her rear view mirror, certain that at any moment she would see blue flashing lights behind them. But she saw nothing, and half an hour later, in an area where there were few residences she turned left onto a fire road marked solely with the number 746. There were no poles with painted wooden signs identifying cottage owners here. Simply the fire road number. Laura wound the Camry down an unpaved lane for a couple of miles.

It was pitch-dark now and Wolf could see that most of the places in here were seasonal cottages. Some were identified with their owners names, some were not. There were few cars in driveways and even fewer lights on inside residences. Occasionally he got a glimpse of the lake through the trees with a nearly full moon rising in the east.

Five minutes later Laura turned the car onto a small unpaved drive, bordered closely on both sides by tall deep woods. She drove for several minutes along the narrow and winding trail. Wolf saw no other residences along this path. They came out into a small opening and Laura stopped the car in front of a dark residence. To Wolf it didn’t look like a cottage, but he remembered that’s what Laura had called it. In the glare of the headlights he saw that it was a large two-story log home with an attached two car garage. He got out of the car and stretched his legs, looking up at the place. The night air was cold and his breath puffed from his mouth in thick, white clouds. He wore a long sleeved shirt over a t-shirt but no coat. He hugged his arms around him trying to stay warm, remembering that it was late October, only two days before Halloween. Soon November’s bleakness would permeate the land. Out over the lake the moon continued to rise.

Chapter 82

“Sam?” the voice said gently. “Sam, wake up, it’s time for you to eat.”

Sam came awake in a sweat. He’d been dreaming of dead women and crosses and he didn’t feel like doing this anymore.

Nevertheless he heaved himself up off the cot he’d been sleeping on and looked around the room. At first he didn’t see anything, but then his eyes became accustomed to the darkness and he shivered at what he saw.

“We’re going to try again, Sam,” the voice said. “And we can’t fail this time. Do you understand?”

Sam adroitly shifted his huge hands and powerful arms in a practiced and learned pattern. His movements were clipped and angry, however. “I don’t want to do this anymore,” his hand movements told the other person in the room.

“We don’t have a choice.”

“No more,” Sam said, his large, hair-covered hands moving with surprising grace. There were tears in his small brown eyes.

“Danny needs to be protected. Don’t you think Danny needs to be protected?”

Sam shook his head obstinately.

“No? Is that what you really think, Sam? You think Danny doesn’t need protection?”

Sam’s hands moved swiftly. “I think you’re using Danny as an excuse.”

“You’re wrong, Sam. Danny needs to be protected because he doesn’t remember. And those of us who don’t remember aren’t responsible for the choices we make. And until he does remember, someone needs to be on his side. He’s allowing himself to be used by bad people and it’s not right. How long have we been together, Sam?”

Sam heaved a massive sigh before signing the symbol for five years.

“Have I ever lied to you?”

Sam hung his head in a gesture of acquiescence.

“You know where they are, don’t you, Sam? I was watching you sleeping and I could tell you were inside Danny. You were, weren’t you? I think you still are.”

Sam kept his head on his chin and did not reply.

“I thought so. Now tell me where they are.”

After Sam had explained where Danny and the woman had gone, the voice said, “OK, Sam, you don’t have to go this time. We’ll do it without you. But we need to go home afterwards. We need to go back to the blue light. We’ll show them all. We’ll show them they can’t mess with us anymore. We’ll show them they no longer have any power over us. We’ll go back to the source of the power and we’ll use it against them.”

Sam’s huge frame gave a massive shudder.

“We’ll show them we mean business,” the voice said. “I’ll fix you something to eat and then you can rest until we come back for you. Then we’ll all go home. Okay, Sam?”

Sam did not reply. Instead he cried.

Chapter 83

Sitting in a chair across the desk from Robeson was a man Jennings knew but didn’t much like. His name was Spencer and he was some sort of federal agent. Jennings did not know exactly which agency Spencer worked for. It had always been a little vague. He’d assumed it was FBI until he’d had a run in with Spencer on a previous case that had made him think maybe CIA. Didn’t really matter. Jennings understood that the government was not always honest about these things, that there were layers of agencies designed for different purposes that for reasons known only to those at the top, needed to be secret.

Spencer stood and offered his hand. “Good to see you again, Rick,” he said, his smile wide but not sincere.

For a short moment Jennings just stared at Spencer’s outstretched hand, and only reluctantly did he take it and shake it. He knew instinctively that Spencer’s presence here spelled trouble and he absolutely did not feel good about it. Jennings looked from Spencer to his boss. “What’s this about, Red?”

“Nothing like getting right to the point,” Robeson said.

“You’ll excuse me if I’m not all happy smiley,” Jennings said. “I lost a damned good officer this morning and I’m pissed off.”

Robeson gave a sad frown. “The entire force is in mourning today, Rick, No one wants to get to the bottom of this more than I do. That’s why agent Spencer is here.”

“Really,” Jennings said, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

“That’s right, Rick. Have a seat.” Robeson gestured toward an empty chair.

“Thanks I’ll stand,” Jennings said. “What can I do for you, Spencer?”

“I think you already know some of this, Rick, but you’ve been out of the loop for a long time so I’ll take a few minutes and get you back up to speed.”

Jennings frowned.
“Loop?
I don’t know what you’re talking about. I was never
in
any loop, as far as I know.”

“This is related to that case five years ago,” Robeson explained. “You remember, the woman found on the walking trail near the Falmouth shoreline.”

Jennings glared at Robeson. “Yeah, I remember. The one that died of a heart attack. What about it?”

“You knew it wasn’t actually a heart attack, didn’t you?”

“Of course I knew, Red. I also knew the feds covered it up, but I was never told why.”

“At the time it was strictly a need-to-know thing, you understand,” Spencer said. “Now things have changed.”

“What things?”

Spencer sighed. “Have you ever heard of a CIA program called MK-ULTRA?”

Jennings frowned shaking his head.

“After WWII the government ran a small scientific lab on Apocalypse Island,” Spencer explained. “The exact purpose of the lab is still classified, so everything said in this room is confidential. Are we clear on that?”

Jennings nodded.

“The purpose of MK-ULTRA was to do mind control experiments on human beings.”

Jennings face twisted into an ugly sneer. “Why am I not surprised?”

Robeson held his hand up. “Let him finish before you go ballistic on him, Rick. You’ll better understand if you just listen.”

Jennings shut up but he was seething inside.

Spencer continued. “Before WWII some very interesting...let’s say anomalies, showed up in the population of Apocalypse Island. I don’t understand all of the scientific mumbo jumbo but it was discovered that a history of inbreeding coupled with a unique and rare gene pool led to some curious anomalies.”

“What sort of anomalies?” Jennings asked

Spencer sighed. “Different things. Some children were born with physical deformities such as extra fingers and toes, some boys had more than one penis or an extra set of balls; girls would have three or even four tits, and there was an exceptional number of hermaphrodites. These people interbred for decades creating even stranger mutations. Some children grew into giants with lots of body hair, others were stunted and had no hair at all. Curiously some were totally normal. Now these are all typical anomalies within the human race, especially prevalent among groups of people who have lived in isolated communities and have interbred. Before the practice was banned the P.T. Barnums of the world exploited them with their freak show circus acts. Per capita, however, there were a thousand fold more of these kinds of things on Apocalypse Island than in the general population. And that’s what attracted the government.”

“Jesus,” Jennings said. “I’ve been hearing these stories all my life but never thought they were true.”