Dragged into Darkness (11 page)

“Good. 
As long as everything’s safe and sound.”
  He paused for a moment.  “Anyway, I’d better get going.  Thanks for your help.  It was nice meeting you.”

The neighbor stood back from the gate, giving Mack room.  He saw himself out and returned to his car.  When he turned into the next street, he was on his mobile. 

“Ben,
it’s
Mack.”  It was
Harker’s
voicemail again.  “Marcus is on holiday.  He doesn’t know about the packages.  He’s in the south of France.  Check with French immigration, find out when he’s returning and detain him.  I don’t want Joan and him coming home to a war zone.  His parcels are with a neighbor across the street.  Address is 87 Hillcrest Road.  A convenient B ‘n’ E is required to get those packages.  I’m sure you can arrange it.”

***

Mack barged through the morgue’s swing doors with two parcels. 
Harker
and Kempton were waiting by three uncovered examining tables.  Body parts were arranged anatomically on the tables.

“These are my recent additions,” Mack announced, placing the boxes on a bench and removing the contents.  “The leg is yesterday’s and the arm is today’s. 
So, which one’s mine?”

“This one.”
  Kempton took the limbs and added the pieces to the second of the three body jigsaws
. 

“And which one is Jack’s and which one is Jerry’s?” Mack asked.

“This one’s from Jerry Manning’s.” Kempton tapped the partial corpse closest to Mack, then the one furthest away.  “And this is Jack Davenport’s.”

“Where’s Marcus’?”

“I’ve decided to leave his
in situ
,”
Harker
replied.  “It won’t do us any harm to leave the packages with the neighbor until we have everything.  We haven’t tracked Marcus down in France but we do know he left by ferry and immigration is going to stop him on his return.  I have someone house sitting at Jerry’s, bringing the packages as and when.”

Mack shifted the boxes out of the way and leaned against the lab bench.  “I suppose all three bodies are identical.”

“Correct,” Kempton answered.  “The cadavers share the same DNA.  These people are, as you say, identical.”

“But that’s not all,”
Harker
chipped in.  “Tell him.”

Kempton frowned and shifted his weight from one foot to the other.  “It seems that the limbs aren’t dead.”

“You’re joking,” Mack blurted.

“The body parts aren’t decomposing.  Haven’t you noticed the smell?”

“What smell?”

“Exactly.
  Decomposition hasn’t started and doesn’t look like it’s going to either.  I don’t know how best to say it, except that these limbs are dormant.”

Mack stared at his partial cadaver.  He studied what he had been sent and the spaces where something should have been.  There was no point speculating.  It was all too ridiculous.

“In six days, we’ll have everything, a complete stiff,” Mack said.

Kempton mulled and nodded.

“What are we going to do in the meantime?  What’s the plan?  Wait?”

“I don’t see what else we can do,”
Harker
admitted.  “We’ve exhausted all our avenues of enquiry.  Nothing’s coming out of Russia.  By the time anyone gets close to finding out, we’ll have all the body parts.  And the way things are going, there’s not going to be a note.

“Because the body is the note,” Mack remarked. 

“
Right,
and we just haven’t understood what they’re saying.  Whoever’s doing this is using technology way beyond us.  The best we can hope for is that the heads will tell us something.”

“And I bet that’ll be the last piece to be delivered,” Mack said.

***

Mack was right.  The head was the last piece to be delivered.  This time, when he strolled into the morgue like he had every day with a new addition, he was surprised to find he had an audience.  In addition to Kempton and
Harker
, the Secret Intelligent Service’s top brass was there.

“Mack, we’ve been waiting for you,”
Harker
said.

“Do you recognize our friend in the box?” Control asked.

“I don’t.  Maybe you will.”

Mack removed the head from the box and held it by the hair.  Everybody examined the face of a man around thirty.  Mack had done the courtesy of closing the man’s eyes.  He had found the sight too disturbing when he had first removed the head over breakfast.

“I’ve got one just like it.”  Jack Davenport entered the morgue with a box in his arms.  “Exactly like it.”

“A clone then?”
Control asked.

“Looks like it, C,”
Harker
replied.

“Shall we try them on for size?” Control suggested.

“What about Jerry’s head?” Mack asked.

“On its way,”
Harker
replied.  “Shall we wait, C?”

“I don’t think so.”

Kempton instructed Mack and Davenport which head went on which shoulders.  They completed the jigsaws. 

Mack felt no elation or sympathy.  There was nothing to feel.  They hadn’t succeeded in discovering what the corpses meant.  They were no further forward than when he had called the dinosaur line. 

No one said anything.  The cream of British intelligence stood and stared, a waste of taxpayers’ money.

“Suggestions, anyone?”
Control asked.

He received a reply from the unlikeliest of sources—the corpses.

The heads trembled, vibrating on the stainless steel table.  Then the eyes snapped open.  Blue-red tendrils flicked out from the necks and blindly searched for something.  The tendrils found their prey, the torso’s neck stump.  Tendrils extruded from the heads and infested the torsos.   When they quenched their hunger, the tendrils contracted and the heads were drawn onto the shoulders.  Flesh liquefied, sealing the heads to the bodies.  A chain reaction proceeded.  Tendrils writhed from shoulders and leg sockets and bonded the arms and legs to the body, then
continued with the hands and feet.

Mack didn’t have to be a scientist to know when he was being fucked.  He’d been set up.  All the old boys had.  He was too old and set in his ways to see it coming.  He thought in the old ways, the dinosaur ways.  They were right to label him as prehistoric.  He’d brought the enemy into the castle.

Kempton rushed forward to restrain one of the patchwork men.  It countered the pathologist’s move.  It sat up, caught Kempton’s flailing arms, spun him around and snapped his neck.

The second creature hopped off the table.  He shouted Russian at the assembled crowd. 

Mack drew his Beretta and shot the creature discarding Kempton’s slack form.  The bullets did nothing.  They were nothing more than an irritation.  He tried a headshot.  It produced the desired effect, blowing its brains out, but not killing it.  Spurred on by the shooting, the creature launched itself at Control. 
Harker
and others fought to stop the creature.  The head of military intelligence was dead before he hit the ground.

Davenport snatched up a surgical tray covered with instruments and smashed it over the   second creature’s head, sending the implements flying.  The creature felled Davenport with a single blow to the throat.

Mack doubted there was any way to kill these creatures.  But they had to try.  There had to be a way.  Nothing was invincible.  Everything had an Achilles heel.  Being human was his.  He fired a round into Davenport’s killer.  The bullet pierced its heart and should have killed it instantly.  But it didn’t.  The creature turned on Mack, snatching him by the throat.

The creature spat Russian in his face.  Mack understood every word.  “The once deposed communist authorities are now in control.  We represent the new regime.  The West will be destroyed.  You can’t stop the inevitable.”

Mack pumped bullet after bullet in the KGB’s super soldier.  The naked soldier flinched but did not falter.  He squeezed Mack’s throat to breaking point. 
And squeezed.
 
And squeezed.

Dr.
Birnbaum
parked his Mercedes.  He didn’t have to check the address to know which house he was supposed to visit.  The front yard landscaped with split trash bags and overrun with weeds told him this was the house.

The consultation was a favor to a friend in Social Services who wanted the situation resolved.  As
Birnbaum
approached the house, he checked his notes on the clipboard.  Charlene Casey, thirty-eight, separated, mother to Marcy, eleven, was technically a hoarder—someone who couldn’t bear to throw anything away. 

Birnbaum
had dealt with several cases before, but his friend told him to prepare for his worst case ever.  Having to use all his weight on the gate to push aside the rotting trash just to gain entry to the front yard gave him fair warning.  

Birnbaum’s
previous experience taught him to hold an aftershave-scented handkerchief to his nose to help filter out the sickly-sweet stench.  He was glad to be called in early spring.  He couldn’t imagine the smell in high summer.  No wonder the neighbors wanted Charlene out.

All in all, it didn’t bode well for the interior of the house.

He rang the doorbell, and while he waited, he surveyed the neighborhood.  He noted the “For Sale” signs dotted up and down the street.  He didn’t hold out much hope for the sellers.

He heard shuffling and put the handkerchief away.  The door opened a crack.  A sliver of face eyed him.  “Yes?”

“Charlene Casey?”  He smiled.  “Dr. Joseph
Birnbaum
.  We spoke on the phone.”

“Yes.”

“Can I come in?”

She hesitated before opening the door. 
Birnbaum
stepped carefully into the hallway strewn with untidy piles of…of…crap.  Heaps of old newspapers
lay
slumped like sleeping down and outs.  Fast food containers were carefully placed inside one another then dropped anywhere there was space.  From his vantage point, the hallway was the tidiest part of the house—he was only knee deep in filth.

“Do excuse the mess,” she said.

Reflexively, he almost laughed.  “Is there somewhere we can talk?”
Birnbaum
said.

Charlene nodded.  The psychologist followed the obese woman through the house, her oversized housedress catching on any trash with a sharp corner.  He had to sidestep plump Hefty bags with every step. 

Something rancid from a pizza box wiped itself against his trouser leg.  His friend at Social Services had warned him to wear an environmental suit, but that didn’t have the makings of a constructive session.  So, he wore clothes that wouldn’t upset him too much if they got spoiled. 

“Okay?” she asked.

“Oh, yes.  Fine,” he replied and followed her into her bedroom.

The bedroom was no different from the rest of the house.  More manufacturers’ packaging from a disposable world filled the room.  Rubbish came flush with the top of the bed.  He caught a scurrying to his right and hoped it wasn’t a rat.  Trying not to show his revulsion, he let his professionalism take over.