Found You (11 page)

Satisfied that no one else could listen in, Mendez continued. “Years ago, I was on patrol out in Wexton, filling in for a guy I knew whose kid’s christening was
that afternoon. I got a call to respond to a disturbance on one of the back roads that led out toward Serling Lake. You familiar with that area, up there?”

Steve shook his head.

Mendez frowned, that shade coming back into his eyes for a moment, then continued. “Apparently, from the report of one of the few folks who lives out on that road, an older man, kind of dirty and disheveled, was wandering the road, screaming out a girl’s name and waving a gun. According to the report, he’d even fired the gun a few times into the woods. So, I and another officer, Jenkins—he got me the job over here, eventually—roll down this road, going slow, keeping an eye out for the man in question, and we find him sitting on the side of the road, crying, the gun right there next to his feet.

“So Jenks and I stop the car and get out real slow, guns drawn but down, and approach the man. He’s a wreck; crazy gray hair sticking up all over, dirt worked into his skin. I remember he had his arms wrapped over his head. He was all bent over, crying into his knees. And his hands…” Mendez shook his head. “The old man’s hands were shaking something awful. There was dirt beneath the fingernails, but there was something else. Raw meat, man. He had raw meat all over his fingers, like he’d just squished them all through hamburger patties. I don’t know why it should have struck us as so…” Mendez seemed to search for the right word.“…unsettling. But it was. Unsettling. Very much. That’s the thing we kept coming back to, in spite of every lunatic thing he said after—the raw meat on his
hands, like it backed up every word he said. Like every word of it was true. Or at the very least, that he believed it so wholeheartedly to be the truth.

“He sat there just bawling, his hands shaking, his whole fucking body shaking, and he kept saying something we couldn’t make out. So Jenks and I exchanged looks. We were thinking, likely the man’s just distraught, maybe not even clinical crazy, just at the end of his rope. Didn’t mean he wouldn’t be dangerous, though, so we were careful. But I crouched down, all easy and slow, and I said, ‘Sir? Excuse me sir, I—sir, my name is Officer Mendez, and Officer Jenkins here and I would like to help, if we could. Please—please, if you could tell us—’

“And he picked up his head, Steve, and the look in his eyes, Jesus. It was such a lost look, such a
haunted
look, like he’d lost everything that ever mattered. Which, according to what he told us, he had.

“He rambled a lot, so it was hard to catch everything. A lot of talk about wacky things, mostly. But we gathered that he’d been raising his granddaughter after the death of his son and daughter-in-law, and with his wife gone, the little girl was all he had. The night before, she’d run off into the fog, into the woods. He lost sight of her the minute she’d left the yard, and he’d been searching for her for hours, screaming her name until he’d gone hoarse. It was the first solid, real world kind of thing he said, so we jumped on this, helping him stand, explaining to him that we would bring him to the Wexton station to file a missing persons report. With kids, every minute of those first couple of days is absolutely critical,
you know, so we didn’t want to waste any more time. I assured him I’d recommend the case went to Avery in Special Victims, because Avery had probably the highest recovery rate in the county. And this guy sort of nodded at me, looking miserable, all hope gone from his eyes. He looked down at his hands, turning them over as if seeing the raw meat for the first time, and he said—I’ll never forget this—he said to me, ‘Officer, I’m afraid that when you find her, it won’t really be her anymore. I don’t know if the thing that ran off was her, even then.’

“So I asked him what he meant by that, and, Steve, he laid this crazy trip down on us again, about how the woods and the lake were packed with monsters that ate people. He talked about a whole town being cursed and people being poisoned. He said even the fog—he called it something else, and explained to us that it reminded him of a shredded stomach lining—that even the fog had secrets, and that those secrets had gotten into his little girl and eaten her from the inside out and made her a monster, too. He said that was what the raw meat was for, because ‘they, the secrets inside her’ liked it.”

Mendez leaned back in his chair, the conspiratorial air between them not quite broken. From the look on his face, he seemed to need space between him and the memory to detach, to distance himself. “Jenks told me later that afternoon, when we’d gone back out on patrol, that once, in a grief-driven raving moment, he’d heard a scientist from around the same parts rant about alien creatures as big as whole places, and a language between them and other beings between worlds that
was written only in three-dimensional symbols, that the ‘letters’ themselves actually had three dimensions, and their sound was something like the wind and everything it blows through. And I asked him then, like you asked me now, what went into the report if it ever turned out that these crazies knew what they were talking about. And he said that almost anything crazy could be made to sound sane, depending on how you spin it. It was all about spin. Nothing wrong with quoting lunatic rants verbatim, if it was all just a rant. But if there was ever any truth to it, you went with the spin, John-Hancocked the bottom, and closed the case.”

Mendez searched Steve’s face, shook his head, muttered something in Spanish, and then said, “Let it go. You don’t have to spin or sign nothing if you don’t take those old cases on.”

“Did that old man ever find his little granddaughter?”

“No. Avery told me the search ran dead cold when they found out where the little girl disappeared. There are towns up past Wexton, almost off the Jersey map, where these things happen. Places where they say streets bleed and people disappear going down the block and the woods swallow up children and sometimes, just every once in a blue moon, you see something that maybe backs that shit up and you swear…”

Mendez shook his head, lost for a moment in another time and place. Then he said, “Places where even the cavalry won’t come charging to the police’s rescue. Places where you spin it, sign it, and close it, because if you don’t, things have a funny way of getting worse, of devouring more people, their bodies and their obsessions,
and the only thing that gives a guy peace at night is to accept the collateral damage, cut your losses, and go to bed knowing you won’t lose any more. Avery tried, but that little girl was gone, and after the third bunch of search party cops disappeared, along with three of their best dogs, there wasn’t nobody gonna find her up there, or hell, even help him look.”

Steve took the information in. He’d grown up southeast of the area and although he’d heard a few stories, he had no idea as to the magnitude of them. He didn’t press Mendez further about those. It was one case, one file he wanted. The one weird that he did need answers to.

He nodded at Mendez’s desk drawer, the bottom one where he’d put Feinstein’s file. “That what DeMarco did, spin it, sign it, and close it?”

Mendez followed his gaze to the drawer and returned a stiff smile and a tight nod to Steve. “That’s what I told her to do when she asked me, too. I’m not saying DeMarco made all that up, or that she’s crazy. She’s pregnant, emotional, and hormonal, and she’s damned good with a gun, so I’ll tell you the truth. I wasn’t about to argue. Still, she had that same look on her face that you have now. It’s always been a sticking point, not that those people claimed what they did, but that she believes it entirely. But Lakehaven’s had a couple of cases like that. Call it the fresh New Jersey air, call it something in the water. She told me about those cases you’ve been poking into on your off time, about what people thought they saw. And even if there’s truth to what she believes, at best you’re messing with people’s fragile states here, and you’ll do more harm than
good by connecting the dots. Take my advice—don’t expect to be a hero, upholding justice by bringing in a long-lost perp. Those cases, and whatever connects them, don’t work that way.”

“I know,” Steve admitted truthfully. “I know that. I have more…personal reasons.” Truth for truth, Steve supposed. Mendez had gone out on a limb telling him as much as he had. “I’m not in a position to let this go.”

Mendez looked at him, seeming to accept this explanation. “Yeah, well, that maybe makes it worse.”

“Mendez—”

The other officer held up a hand. “You can have the file, but I’m not going to tell DeMarco. She’s got enough going on with the baby. I won’t put her through more stress for nothing. And if you find whatever it is you’re looking for,” Mendez said, “and it hasn’t found her yet, I won’t give it any fucking reason to do so.” He reached into the desk drawer and handed Steve the Feinstein file. Then he turned back to his work.

Steve got from his tone that the conversation was over, case, as they said, closed.

“And Steve,” the other officer added over his shoulder as Steve made his way back to his own desk, “if you take it upon yourself to bring that mess down on her head, I’ll make it miserable for you here. Threat, promise, I’ll hold to it.”

It found one at the airport.

That was the word the Intended meat used. It meant a place where great conveyances carried the meats from one place to another over a great distance. An airport
was a hunting ground teeming with meats, their insecurities and fears and skewed perceptions screaming in glorious cacophony all around it. The airport was, perhaps, simultaneously the richest and most revolting spectacle it had ever seen.

However, it wasn’t there for culling from an abundance of meats. An Intended, one called Cheryl, had flown in to see the others. It had been following that one for a while, although it had not given her any great thought, separated as she was in many ways from the one called Dave, separated from the herd that might have provided distraction, if not safety. Alone, it could get her at its leisure.

But she was startled—something inside that it could vaguely recognize as a sense or instinct, something which prompted her to find the one called Dave.

It would not have that.

She had thoughtprints—the meats called them “memories,” another
word
—and in them it found the images it wanted. She entered the chamber where the meats coordinated the flying of the conveyances and moved on and off them. With each step further into the chamber, the overhead buzz of sound and words slowed and deepened, grinding to a bass halt.

It perceived her rapid gait slow down, her small oblong (“suitcase,” her mind read) containing outer skins rolling to a stop behind her. She looked up, frowning, and it registered a sick and sinking feeling from her as she realized all the other meats in the airport were gone. Cups of coffee remained on tables. Suitcases lay strewn about the waiting area. The big boxes that showed them electronic
pictures of “tragedy” all over their dimensionworld flickered with static and then went out. The digital red numbers and letters (components, it had discovered, of the things called words) that listed the arrivals and departures of the airplanes—those it made into one repetitive scrolling command, for her to DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE DIE.

It laid an outer skin (in her thoughtprint it was called a “bathing suit”), still dripping with water, over the counter of one of the desks, which it now made to look like a bar counter at the place where she worked. It also dug up another image, a concept it found delightfully grotesque—tiny hard-bodied, dead-shell versions of child-meats, with unstaring eyes and unmoving chests. It understood that these dead-shells, completely devoid of any sense of self whatsoever, were given to other more vibrant child-meats to play with. The word they used for the dead-shells was “doll.”

The doll meant to Cheryl what it perceived as Guilt and Terror and Shame, and so it had propped the doll up on the bar, next to the bathing suit. Then it pulled back out of her view and waited.

When she saw the doll, the awful jelly orbs of her face grew large and wet, and the wetness moistened her cheeks in little streams. She left the suitcase and ran.

It bent up the foundations of the building, smearing the outside beyond the doors so that there was only blackness with stars behind the one she opened and a horrible screaming and wailing behind another, which deterred her from even trying it. She skidded to a stop before falling into a huge chasm where the baggage
claim area had once been, and then flung herself headlong through a door over which a sign read “EXIT.”

It made the outside into a dark alley, with garbage cans that trembled in the wind, barbed wire fences, and homeless, rotting, unsheltered things growling and hissing and limping in the shadows.

By now, the Intended meat was crying, a sound (one of the only) that gave it comfort, which took the edge off the terrible pulling and churning of the voids inside it. She stumbled through the alley, groping blindly, and her fingers closed over the metal chain links of a gate. With some excitement, with some misplaced hope, she pushed it open and stepped through…

…right into a lake, off the warm sand of the shore.

It felt her panic, intense and delicious, as she turned around, splashing, making little kicking gestures with her feet.

It stood there in front of her with the doll on the sand at its feet.

Its aspect frightened her very much; the outer skins it pretended with, the cast of obscurity beneath the hat, the deep chuckling of its voices as it tilted its head to regard her made her whimper. The water it made had already solidified into ice around her feet, an arctic bitterness that bit into her skin, causing thin, watery trickles of blood to spill out onto the thick top layer.

Even the wetness on her face looked frosty, although the rest of the simulated surroundings appeared warm, even balmy, at least as far as it understood such tactile things.

She didn’t say anything at all. It could perceive a hundred different thoughts, most of them about the one called Dave and some of them about a man whose name she didn’t know but who had done things to her once that made her feel more like one of the dead-shell child-meats than a living one.