Dawn of the Mad (20 page)

“Hell no, are you crazy? No, no one but me knows. Luckily, I’m alone here. All your cop buddies took off, but I can’t keep it quiet much longer. I rigged some restraints, so the body should stay put. Either someone stole the first one, or it came back to life too and is walking around somewhere. Who knows? Maybe the same guy who kidnapped the doc stole the body. It sounds like
Day of the Dead
. Get your ass down here, fast!” Fontenot hung up the phone. Roman ran down the last few stairs, taking two at a time.

First day on the job and I’ve got walking corpses at the coroner’s office
. He got in his car and gunned it out of the parking lot.

CHAPTER 16

Half a block before Roman reached the parking lot of the coroner’s office, his cellular phone vibrated. He quickly pulled to the side of the road and parked his car and fished the phone out of the right pocket of his worn leather jacket.

“Roman,” he answered, a lit cigarette in his mouth.

“Roman, this is Maynard.” Fontenot’s voice than began to waver. “Uh, look. Plans have changed. I need you to meet me at the corner of Hickory and St. Paul, at the Williams Chicken.”

“What the hell for?” Roman almost shouted in the phone.

“Look, you can’t go inside now. Just get over here. I am not playing around, OK?” The line went dead and he threw the phone in the passenger seat.
Jackass
, Roman thought to himself. He looked down the street at the building housing the coroner’s office. He noticed three fire engines and an ambulance, and at least three police cruisers.
What the hell?
Either the vehicles had been there for a while, or he had been so deep in thought that he hadn’t noticed their flashing lights.

He threw his Crown Vic in reverse, backed up enough to leave enough room to turn, checked traffic, and pulled a fast U. He hit the accelerator and turned a corner before he was noticed.

A few minutes later, he pulled into the parking lot of the Williams Fried Chicken on the corner of Hickory and St. Paul, as Fontenot had instructed. He parked his car, grabbed his cell phone, and entered the restaurant. The place almost came to a standstill as he walked in, but he was quickly ignored. He saw Fontenot in the back, stuffing his face as fast as he could.

“What did you do, man?” Roman said as he slid in the vinyl booth across from Fontenot.

Fontenot wiped some gravy from his mouth as he replied. “It’s what
didn’t
I do, you know?” He resumed eating. “Look, that homeless guy that you sent in—he got up not five minutes after I got off the phone with you, and he walked out and tried to come after me. He busted right out of those restraints.” He dipped another chicken tender into his little Styrofoam cup of gravy.

“What? You mean to tell me that dead guy got up and left?” Roman replied as he leaned closer.

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m telling you. You deaf, or what?”

“No.” Roman sat back down in the booth. “I’ve seen some weird shit too.”

Fontenot wiped his mouth on his shirtsleeve and took a big swig of Fanta orange soda out of his Styrofoam soft drink cup “All right, like I said, I hung up the phone with you, and I heard this bloodcurdling scream, like the ones you hear in movies.”

“Go on.”

“Anyway, I go over, thinking maybe he is alive or something and he gets off the table, charges me, and sends me flying into the wall. Anyway, he takes off out of the autopsy office. I have the cleaning crew freaking out. They see me and think I’m doing some weird sex acts or something; I don’t know, so I bolted. I didn’t know what else to do. I followed the guy over to Old City Park in my car before I lost him. He ran fast, man. You’d think a jacked up looking guy like that would stop traffic and someone would call 911. Wrong. What kind of sick town do we live in?” Fontenot paused, taking a gulp of his Fanta. “Anyway, it looked like he ran into a nearby junkyard maybe, I don’t know. Anyways, that’s it. I can’t show my face now, I know that. If I would have hung around, I would have gotten jammed for sure. That’s two bodies gone now, plus the coroner missing.”

“A junkyard?” Roman asked.

“Yeah, a junkyard. I can’t be sure, but it looked like he went in through a hole in the fence. He hardly hesitated looking for it; it was as if he knew where he was going. I didn’t go in after him. He could have lost me easily in there, or he could have ambushed me. I’m not crazy, you know.”

“All right. I believe you, man. I just shot this big guy like thirty times, and he kept going. Maybe it was PCP or something.”

Fontenot ate the last of his tenders and reached for his corn fritters. “I have two bodies that are gone, and the coroner. I am so screwed. I know they’re all connected. You got to check out that junkyard.”

“Where are you going to go?” Roman asked.

Fontenot wiped his mouth as he finished the last corn fritter. He took his last swig of Fanta and sat back in the booth. “I don’t know. I got a couple places I could go. This is heavy, man, real heavy. You’re the police— you help me.”

Roman looked out of the window toward his car and saw a police unit going by, running code 3, lights and sirens. He looked back and stared Maynard directly in the eye. “I need this, trust me. I’ll do what I can. I’m going to check out that junkyard before it gets dark. Stay out of sight and keep your phone on.”

“Yeah, all right. You call me, OK, Roman?”

“I’ll call you.” With that, Roman got out of the booth and headed for the door.

CHAPTER 17

“Matthias, report.” Colonel Chuikova’s crackling voice was barely audible over the headset.

“Colonel, another human has entered the perimeter. This one is not emitting a heat signature either. It is a very abnormal reading. No sign of any other activity inside the perimeter.”

“OK. Keep surveillance, Matthias. What happened to the main target you and Cruwell were following?”

“Sorry, sir. We tried following a policeman, but vehicle was too fast. We could not keep up.”

“Understood. I’ll leave it up to you to follow your instincts. You need to get a faster vehicle it would seem.”

Matthias was about to reply in the affirmative when he noticed a black vehicle pull off to the side of the road and stop. “Wait a moment, sir, we might have something. Stand by.” Matthias observed a lone figure exit the vehicle and approach the same hole in the junkyard fence as the two other humans had entered just moments before. Matthias noticed that the figure approached methodically and took what appeared to be some sort of weapon from within the confines of his jacket. Cruwell pulled the monocular up to his eye and looked out of the window. The figure looked around a few times before entering the hole.

“Colonel.”

“Go ahead,” crackled the reply.

“Colonel,” Cruwell replied, “I have just observed another person enter. He appears to be different. I think it is the policeman we tried to tail from earlier. The heat signature is normal. He appeared to be brandishing a weapon.”

“Stay on target. I am sending Scotts to back you up. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.” Cruwell resumed his observation of the hole in the fence. He could see Corporal Scotts down the road. He had just opened the door of the policeman’s vehicle and was examining its interior.

“Captain, this is Scotts.”

“Go ahead.”

“This vehicle appears to belong to be the policeman you were following. There is a radio, which is active, and what appears to be a slug thrower here,” Scotts replied. He had exited the vehicle and taken up a concealed position behind the burned out remains of a liquor store, adjacent to the vehicle.

“OK. Recover the weapon. In case we have to engage him, I don’t want him having any advantage. I am sending Matthias on foot to cover the junkyard hole and observe the policeman if he comes into contact with our alien or those other two anomalies.”

“Understood.”

Cruwell observed Scotts quickly go back in the vehicle and emerge with the weapon. Matthias silently exited the old Mustang and ran across the street to the junkyard entrance. He looked around for a good cover position before finally deciding on some nearby bushes growing out of control. Scotts hit his position on the opposite side of the street from Matthias and concealed himself as well. Cruwell slid into the driver’s seat of the Mustang and turned the key, hoping it wouldn’t backfire. It started with no unusual noise, and he began to circle the block slowly. His holographic map showed no heat signatures within the fenced in area, except for that of the policeman.

Scotts drew his sidearm and rechecked the ammunition magazine. About two minutes later, he heard six loud reports from within the junkyard. Matthias and Scotts observed the policeman emerge, with his weapon raised. He was also carrying another object, in his other hand. The policeman fired three more shots through the hole in the fence before running to his car. The vehicle fired up and sped away, right past their concealed position. Sergeant Matthias and Corporal Scotts resumed watch on the hole and observed nothing more. The duo, upon seeing no other activity, exited their positions. Cruwell put his monocular back inside his pants pocket and emerged from around the corner in the Mustang, and they all piled in, with Cruwell relinquishing the driver’s seat to Matthias. Scotts was still holding the recently acquired projectile weapon. An eerie quiet set in around the junkyard as the three sped off. A steady rain resumed from the cloudy gray skies.

“What’s our play?” Matthias asked. “You want me to try to catch up with him, or are we going in the fence?”

Cruwell watched the policeman’s vehicle on his holographic map. “No, let’s return to base. We can monitor his location from there, and we probably won’t be able to catch the policeman anyway, in this vehicle. We already lost him once today.”

“There is one other thing I failed to mention, Captain.”

“What?”

“The policeman’s name is Johnny Roman. I intercepted his voice communications. He apparently has upset his boss.”

Great
, Roman thought angrily as he sped away from the junkyard.
Who jacks a police car?
He was still on an adrenaline high, but now he was getting just plain pissed as he kept glancing at where his shotgun used to be.
Most officers never fire their service weapons in the span of their whole career, let alone twice in two days!
He also began to wonder if he should even bother to call it in. He was supposed to be training on the job with Detective Seebolt, but his instincts got the better of him.

After going through the hole in the junkyard fence 20 minutes ago, he had wandered around for a few minutes trying to see if the owner was around. The junkyard appeared not to be under good care, and he wondered if it had been abandoned. He could not remember ever seeing the place before. He saw nothing out of the ordinary, just stacks of crushed cars, rusting shipping containers, lots of trash, and overgrown weeds, accompanied by a stench of dead animals. He stopped suddenly, seeing a large structure. He thought it could be the junkyard office. He would not have noticed it if he hadn’t caught a glimpse of a shadow moving in that direction.

The object, though large, was well camouflaged in the context of the junkyard. He approached the object, which was nestled between stacks of crushed cars on either side. Instead of an office, it looked like an inverted shipping container partially buried in the ground. As he got closer, he could tell it was something different. There was an opening on one side; just low enough to that he could look in. The opening appeared to be into a room of some sort. He drew his surefire flashlight from his belt holster and activated it, carefully hoisting himself up into the doorframe.

The flashlight beam illuminated a small compartment containing four seats. There appeared to be a windshield at the end that was buried in the earth. A nauseating stench, much worse than outside, immediately hit his nostrils as he stepped inside. He shined his light around the compartment and was briefly frozen with awe. Lights blinked on and off near the windshield. He noticed two figures lying at awkward angles across the windshield, seemingly lifeless. They appeared to be wearing uniforms of some sort. He inched himself forward from the doorway for a closer look, and his foot kicked something. He shined his light down and saw the remains of a dog wedged behind a forward-facing seat. Its insides had been savagely pulled out from a gaping hole in its midsection. The head also appeared to have a large chunk of flesh removed, as if it had been bitten by a large animal. Roman drew his hand over his nose and pointed his pistol in the direction of the two figures slumped against the windshield.

“Police,” Roman said weakly, his voice barely audible. Sensing no movement, he carefully entered the confined space and made his way down toward the front. He poked one of the bodies with the barrel of his Glock. Its neck was savagely broken, and the body looked as though it has been dead for a couple of days at least. Roman noticed that the eyes were wide open, as if the poor bastard died from fright before being so savagely attacked. Dried blood covered most of the face, but Roman could see chunks missing from the face and throat, as if someone or something had gnawed off pieces of it, much like the other two bodies from earlier. Roman could not determine the cause of death of the other body, but its face also was covered in dried blood, with pieces gnawed off.