Nemesis: Box Set: Books 1 - 3 (11 page)

W
ill took
a napkin from his pocket and wiped his forehead. He pulled it away, knowing the sweat would appear again soon, knowing that he was going to need more napkins. They were getting nowhere—less than nowhere, they were actually losing ground. The past six hours…he didn’t even want to tell Rigley about it. She would lose her shit, worse than she already was. He hadn’t ever thought Rigley would be out of her league with something, but it nagged at him now. Will couldn’t really blame her though, because he thought he might be too. The more he searched, the more he realized that this thing might have simply disappeared. That whatever came into those woods, falling down from the sky like some furious monster, could have just dissolved into air.

He picked up his phone and dialed Andrew’s number.

“Andrew,” he answered.

“Where are you?” Will said.

“Quadrant one, finishing up interviews for Six-B.”

It was pointless, what they were doing, but it was the first step in a long list of protocols to follow when contact hadn’t been made. Bolivia hadn’t needed this long list of protocols because that place contained more than enough contact for every human in the entire world. Here, though, interviews were important. Or they had been, years ago, when these protocols were developed. Will wished he could meet the person that created them:
assess area’s infestation through local interviews.

They still hadn’t invented a technology that could replace this piece, nothing to save them the time of door to door conversations.

There’s technology, William, it’s just not the kind you want to use. It’s a technical device called the hammer.

No. Protocol was better than that. And there was some technology, though he didn’t know how it worked. Andrew and Lane wired him up, all of the wires hidden, but supposedly relaying information back to them.

It’s going to detect differences that we won’t be able to,
one of them said.

What differences?
Will asked.

Chemical composition. Things like that. If there’s a match, and even if there’s not a match, we’ll know something is different.

That had been the end of Will’s questions.

“My wires showing anything?” He asked.

“Notta.”

“You found anything?”

“Notta. Everyone here is clean so far.”

“Same here,” Will said. “This is pointless. We’re wasting time.”

“What do you want to do?”

Will didn’t say anything, just sat inside his car, listening to the air conditioning trying to keep up with summer’s last struggle. What did he want to do? A stupid question. He wanted to eliminate whatever had landed here unannounced and with no line of communication. The question Andrew meant to ask was, how do you want to do it? And Will had no answer for that. Were they missing something here? Was there something he hadn’t seen, something that might be hiding?

He kept going back to whoever had been at the crash site. Someone had been there, someone that he hadn’t found. They combed the entire place, him by himself, and then the three of them, looking for anything—any scrap that might contain a clue, or DNA, or a goddamn letter that said, “I, XXX, was here.” Anything that might help. They found nothing. So now they were searching door to door, acting like they were geological surveyors. Idiotic, and Will knew it.

“Who the hell would have been in those woods?” He said into the phone, not really talking to Andrew, but more to himself.

“Hunters?” Andrew answered.

“No,” he answered, still thinking. “There weren’t any stands out there. Hunters have stands.”

And then it clicked, like a rusty train finally listening to its commands and shifting tracks, the metal falling into place just like it should.

“Have you asked anyone if they know who goes out to that field?” So stupid. So incredibly stupid that he hadn’t been asking this question.

“No,” Andrew answered. “I’ve mainly been relying on the data coming back.”

Will ended the call and then quickly dialed Lane’s number. Hopefully someone in this group wasn’t as dumb as him, or hopelessly addicted to data.

“Yeah?” Lane answered.

“Have you asked anyone who is hanging out at the field?”

“Yeah, everyone. I’ve heard a couple different things, and was going to check it in with you when I finished. Most people have no idea, a few parents said their kids go out there sometimes, and one person said he thought demonic rituals were done out there because of the fires.”

Kids. That’s who it had done it. Kids. Kids. Kids. Will had seen the remains of the fires himself, but it hadn’t clicked that teenagers were out there drinking. He was too old to think about that kind of stuff; he hadn’t been camping in twenty years, and he hated it when he had, let alone built a fire to sit around and drink.

Will hung up the phone.

They didn’t need to be out here hustling door to door like vacuum salesman. They needed to be inside the school.

T
hera parked
her car on the street, just in front of Bryan’s mailbox. She was alone because that’s how she wanted it. She talked to Julie the night before, and Julie said that Bryan was sick, and wasn’t going to school. Sure enough, he hadn’t been there. Julie didn’t buy it, and when she talked to his parents, they both said he was acting strange too. Bryan told Julie not to come over, something about not getting her sick, and Julie told Thera she hadn’t wanted to fight anymore, so she stayed away the past few days.

Julie was worried.

Michael was worried.

And from the sounds of it, Bryan’s parents were worried too.

Yet only Thera and Michael knew about the site. Thera felt the pressure growing to tell someone, anyone—to let someone older than her know what they saw out there. She was the responsible one, the one that did what needed to be done, despite popularity or fun. Yet here she was, parked in front of Bryan’s house, not doing what she should. Not calling the police. Not telling his parents.

“If this doesn’t go right, I will,” she said aloud, her hands in her lap, looking past the driveway to the front door. She said it for herself, to solidify the ideas rolling around her mind—crystallize them so that they wouldn’t break when she left this place, so she wouldn’t fall back into the trap of keeping everyone on an even keel. If this went bad, people needed to be upheaved.

She opened the door to her car and stepped out, scared. Genuinely fearful of what was going to happen when she got in there. Had she ever been scared of Bryan before, ever scared of any of her friends? No, not a chance, but she couldn’t deny it right now. Maybe Bryan wasn’t in there. Maybe the strangeness everyone spoke about was actually everyone else. Something else.

“Shut up,” she said, whispering now. This wasn’t a science-fiction novel, some Stephen King nonsense. Her friend wasn’t possessed by an otherworldly alien. He was sick, and if it wasn’t all physical, then some kind of psychiatry could fix whatever else was going on. She wasn’t walking in to some alien’s den. There wouldn’t be a gray man waiting for her inside, with long arms and huge eyes.

Thera walked up the driveway, forcing each step. It didn’t matter what she told herself, the fear still lived inside her.

Bryan’s car was in the driveway; his parents’ weren’t. She had come right after school, hoping that this situation would present itself. Now it had, and yet she just wanted to get back to her car.

She rang the doorbell and waited, the same as she and Michael did the other day. She rang it again, but heard no movement from inside.

“Fine.”

She opened the glass door and twisted the knob to the inside one, fully expecting it to be locked. It wasn’t. She stood there for a second, feeling the knob in her hand. Is this what she really wanted to do? Go into this house, alone? A house in which someone was inside, but wouldn’t answer the door? But all those questions were pointless. This was Bryan. She pushed the door open.

“Hello?” she said as she stepped inside. “Bryan?”

No voice answered her, just the soft sound of the air conditioning blowing through the vents. All the lights were off, furniture casting shadows across the living room floor.
To his room then,
she thought.

She moved down the hallway, it darker than the rest of the house because there were no windows to allow sunlight in.

“Bryan?” she said again, not slowing her footsteps, but increasingly wondering why no one answered her. Was he asleep? Had none of this woke him?

Thera reached his door, and saw it was ajar. No light inside either, just the same gloom as the rest of the house. She pushed the door open and stepped inside. Her eyes went to the bed where Bryan lay, fully clothed except for shoes. Dressed as if he had been about to go to school, but decided against it at the last moment. His eyes were closed and he lay on his back, his hands crossed on his stomach like a corpse at a funeral.

“Bryan?”

He opened his eyes, but didn’t sit up, just stared straight up at the ceiling. Thera didn’t say anything else; she didn’t know what to say, but she immediately understood what everyone had been talking about. The weirdness. The whole room, the whole house, was strange. And now, him lying there like some kind of dead person.

She breathed out, not realizing that her breath had caught in her lungs.

Bryan sat up, not using his hands at all, but just straight up as if he had the strongest abs in the world. His legs didn’t move an inch, and Thera would have bet a sizable amount of money that Bryan couldn’t have done that if asked before now. She didn’t think anyone could do that. He looked at her, his eyes locking onto hers.

“You okay?” she asked, the words sounding infinitely stupid to her.

“I’m good,” he said, his voice an imitation. A copy of a copy. One of the hundreds of pulp writers doing their best to imitate Hemingway.

Thera knew right then, without any doubt, that she wasn’t speaking to Bryan. That Bryan was gone.

B
ryan hadn’t stopped screaming
since he heard Thera’s voice. He was shrieking inside his own head, trying to disrupt whatever the hell Morena was thinking. Trying to communicate with Thera. Trying to convince himself that this wasn’t real, that it couldn’t be happening. Trying anything and everything, but none of it worked. She just kept coming to the room, and Bryan felt Morena waking up. She had been in some kind of deep sleep, though sleep wasn’t the right word, just the only one he could think of that hinted at what she was doing.

Waiting might have worked too—she was waiting on that thing which came out of his hand, those
things
. It had taken a lot out of her, but Bryan didn’t know how or why. When Thera entered the house though, Morena woke. It didn’t take her long to understand who Thera was and why she was here. She identified Thera as an interloper—everyone in Bryan’s life was being classified as such. Interlopers, those that were trying to get involved in something they had no business with, as if this wasn’t Bryan’s life. The difference between now and every other time an interloper showed up, was that they were alone. It was only Morena and the interloper, and the moment Bryan saw that thought pulsing through Morena’s mind, he started panicking.

He could do nothing, though. Nothing but watch.

Thera entered the room, her eyes wide, scared, but not running away. Not going anywhere. She had showed up by herself to check on him, and that meant people were worrying. Bryan listened as she called his name, listened as she asked questions, and he unable to answer a single one.

Morena sat up on the bed and that’s when Thera knew. Bryan saw it in her face, in the way her body both tensed and seemed to sink in, to try and hide from whatever was on the bed. She didn’t run though, not even then.

Morena stood from the bed; Bryan hoped her legs would give out, that whatever fatigue she felt would rise and take over, causing her to fall down and giving Thera a chance to run. It didn’t happen; his legs stood like iron poles, strong underneath the weight of his body. She walked to Thera, and Bryan saw everything he needed to inside his friend’s eyes. He saw exactly what he must have looked like, standing over her—taller naturally, but seeming to tower now. Pure fear resided in Thera. Fear of him, or rather, what he had become.

Morena’s head tilted slightly to the left, staring at Thera’s face. She was curious. The fucking monster was curious about Thera, about the way she looked, about who she was—wanting to know more about the interloper. And still, Bryan felt the threat inside that look, a threat because Morena didn’t care about this life—curiosity like a sick child, pulling the wings from a butterfly.

Morena reached forward, her hand grabbing Thera’s face.

Bryan listened as Thera screamed out, but it lasted for less than a second. He felt the tiny needles poke through the skin on his hand and then he saw the blood spurt from of Thera’s face.

W
ill looked
at the school as he walked across the parking lot. There were a few trailers to the left, meaning the town was growing quicker than builders could build. The school was newer, built within the last ten years or so, he thought—it looked nice. Probably full of good kids, kids without arrest records. Kids who would go to college. Kids who would end up having kids of their own, most likely remaining married, if not out of love for their spouse, then out of love for their kids.

Not anymore,
Will thought as he walked through the front doors, the green color of the school’s mascot jumping out from the walls and posters hanging around him. He stood in a large lobby, open space before him, signs hanging about the importance of education and the school’s mission. After a few seconds of taking it in, he looked down at his feet—a lone man standing in an empty auditorium. Why did he care about this? Why was it affecting him now? How many towns had he gone through just like this without a thought for the people inside it? Countless. Thirty years worth. And yet with this one, standing in this auditorium, he found himself considering the people in this school. The kids. From thirteen to eighteen years old, and all of them going to die soon.

If they died, he died too. That’s what he was really saying, that all of this was coming to an end. Did he believe it? Truly? Or did he think he could get out of this? In Bolivia, he was worried about dying, but only if that pink shit reached up and took ahold of him. If it did that, there wasn’t any chance he made it out, but that was the main danger. Avoid the pink shit and you’d be fine. Now, though…he had nothing to avoid, rather, he had to beat the clock, and it ticked on, regardless of what he did.

And what about all these people in here? These kids? Do they matter?

That was an odd thought to have, now, standing in this school with that clock still tick, tick, ticking away. Did they matter, though? No. Not really. They could die or live, and it didn’t matter to Will. What did matter to him, what had always mattered, was the larger group—humanity. These kids could die, Will could die, if it meant that whatever was crawling around this town didn’t get out. Didn’t try to take over the world, or simply feed on the inhabitants, or whatever it was wont to do. That had always been the rule, the reason for this.

So why stand here thinking about them?

Just let it fucking go.

He didn’t have time for it, any of it. The truth was that they would die if he didn’t do something. That he would die.

Will walked on, seeing an empty lunchroom to his right. Lunch was done by this time, the day about to wrap up. Will found his way to the front office, the door standing open and a middle-aged woman sitting behind a desk. Heavy, though not as massive as Will thought people should be when they didn’t move for the vast majority of their days.

“Hi,” she said. “Can I help you?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’m Dennis Gables; I’m with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and have a few questions about some of the students at this school.” Will pulled a badge from his back pocket, one that had been shipped to him on the way down here, one of many that he might need.

“Oh goodness. Dennis Gables, you say? I hope it’s nothing too serious,” the woman said, standing up from behind her desk. She didn’t move, only stared at him as if she wanted an answer to her question.

“No, nothing too serious, just a few questions is all,” Will said, smiling—a smile that grew naturally across his face, one that he had practiced thousands of times in a mirror. The smile that said,
You can trust me. I’m your friend and I’m here to make sure things keep running as they should, and even if I have to discipline someone, I promise it’s for their own good and that it won’t be harsh.

She smiled back, as everyone did when he flashed his teeth, unable to keep his smile from possessing them briefly, to fill them with a sense of security.

“Let me get the principal, Mr. Gables,” she said, turning from the desk and walking down a hallway behind her. Will waited alone for a couple of minutes, not sitting down and not picking the badge up from the woman’s desk. He glanced around the office, taking in the motivational posters and plants around him. There weren’t any kids in here, no one in trouble, no parents irate with the school. It reminded him of his high school, only with more technology, given the flat screen television hanging from the wall and broadcasting the school news on an endless loop. He had gone to a school like this. He had grown up in peace like this.

Goddamn it, STOP
.

He wasn’t going down that road. He wasn’t going to sit here and entertain all these nostalgic and sentimental thoughts.

“Come on back, Mr. Gables,” the woman appeared, from the office in the back, waving her hand and smiling still. She had bought his grin without getting a receipt, so convinced that law enforcement was here to protect her—that while someone might have done something wrong, it wasn’t her, and she would assist in making sure the world was made right again. That grin brought Will back to the here and now, to the mission. That grin reminded him of how stupid all the people in this place had to be, how they believed whatever anyone told them and kept moving on with their lives. The woman didn’t have a single questioning neuron in her whole brain, just a blind need to follow. That’s why this school didn’t matter. Why the people inside it were secondary to eradication. Why if they needed to die, it wouldn’t be a huge loss to the planet.

“Sure,” he said, smiling again and picking up the badge but not putting it in his pocket. He walked the few feet and then turned the corner to see a good sized office with a desk, a table, and chairs around both. A woman walked out from behind the desk with her hand extended.

“Hi, Mr. Gables. I’m the principal, Jill Broje. How can I help you?”

Will shook her hand, showing the same smile.

“Dennis, please,” Will said. “Here’s my badge just so you know I am who I say I am.”

The woman looked down and gave it a cursory look before finding Will’s eyes again, still smiling.

“First, I want you to know this isn’t too, too serious,” Will said. “However, the GBI has had some complaints about students drinking out at a field on the west side of your town, and we want to come talk to the kids. No one’s getting arrested, but we thought it would be a good idea to, you know, scare them a bit to keep them from going there.”

Jill shook her head and looked down at the floor, smiling. “I thought that was happening.” She looked up at him. “Have a seat,” she said, gesturing to the chairs in front of her desk, before she turned and walked to her own seat. “What would you like to do? We could set up something in the gym and you could talk to the group as a whole—would that work?”

Will shook his head and pursed his lips, “Ehh, not really. We find it’s a lot more impactful to have one on ones with the students that are actually committing the offense. And, it will keep from wasting a bunch of the kid’s learning time by doing it that way. They really need to know that
we
know who they are, and that we’re watching. Do you have anyone that I might be able to start with, to ask them a few questions?”

Jill looked at him for a second, appearing to think. “I do, most likely, but I think their parents should be there for the questioning, don’t you?”

Jesus Christ
. He hadn’t even thought of that. To him, he would come in here, corner whoever was out there, and talk to them while the tech on his body registered whatever it registered. He didn’t have time for parents. He didn’t have time for a big formal process. He wanted to march through the kids, one after another, and see what he could find—but he couldn’t tell this woman that.

“Actually, since none of them are being accused of crimes, there’s no legal reason for their parents to be here. Also, a lot of times, when kids are in trouble for drinking underage, they tend to hide behind their parents instead of actually taking the blame and understanding what they did wrong. I promise, this isn’t going to be the Spanish Inquisition. I’ll probably only need to speak to two of the leaders, and they’ll push the message down to the rest of the crowd. We’re talking an hour tops.”

Will smiled and leaned in over her desk, whispering, “To be honest, I don’t really want to be here. There are a lot of crimes in Georgia, and this isn’t a huge one on my list, so the quicker we get it over with, the better, you know?”

Jill nodded. “Of course, of course. Let me pull Jonathan out of his class and you can have a chat with him. If anyone’s the ringleader of this sort of thing, it’s him.”

“Thank you so much,” Will said, leaning back in his chair and smiling the smile of the innocent.

T
he kid was clean-cut
. No facial hair, no piercings, no visible tattoos. He looked like the All-American teenage guy. His hands were shaking, folded over the table he sat at. Will stood, the door closed behind him. If this kid was in that field, he certainly hadn’t been infected, unless this species could somehow mimic perfectly. Will didn’t care right now, either way—if this was the guy they wanted, then Lane and Andrew would be able to tell Will almost immediately.

“You got paper?” Will asked, pointing to the kid’s bag.

Jonathan nodded.

“Pull it out and get a pen. Write down every name that you think might have been out there with you guys over the last few days. Every single one, you understand?”

Jonathan nodded again.

“You don’t tell anyone what we talked about in here. Not a soul. If you do, I’m coming back, got that?”

Another nod.

“Now get to writing and stay the fuck away from that field.”

T
he first good
news Will had brought, though it wasn’t even that good.

“The list is forty-two names long. The kid didn’t know if everyone was actually there, but he knew that everyone he wrote down had at one time been there.”

“How long’s it going to take you?” Rigley asked.

“I think it should be wrapped up by tomorrow at noon.”

“That’s twelve hours over the forty-eight hour deadline,” Rigley said.

Silence came back across the line, a silence that said everything.
What do you want me to do? Drop the hammer, then, but noon is when I’ll be done
.

She waited, wanting him to say something, but still nothing came. Who was in charge here? That’s what the silence seemed to be deciding, and this was the first time she ever felt like it might be Will. Before, what she commanded, happened. No questions. No delays. Will was
the hammer
, or had been for years. And now, for the first time, he hadn’t met his deadline. Even in Bolivia, he’d met the deadline. Every other country, every other situation—he met the deadline. Twelve hours over and not a single excuse or word of regret.

“This is serious, Will,” she said, doing anything to break the silence. “Forty-eight hours was enough time. Now I’ve got to make a decision.”

“That you do,” he said.

“Is this thing going to get out? I mean, we don’t even know what it’s doing down there. Grayson is a black box, and you’re supposed to be the one opening it. Now you’re telling me you can’t fucking do that?” She hoped her words spit through the air waves like snake venom, scaring Will into action. She hoped that the anger she portrayed came off as sincere, that the underlying…but she didn’t want to name it. She didn’t want to say it out loud because then it might be real.

“No, I’m not saying I can’t do that. I’m saying I need a bit more time. If we go through these kids, we’re going to most likely find whoever went out, whoever saw that thing drop.”

“And what if it’s not one of them, Will? What’s your plan then?”

“Then you know what decision you have to make.”

Twelve hours. That’s what he was saying, that’s all that separated America from dropping a bomb on one of its own cities. Granted, the bomb wouldn’t be nuclear, they had different kinds of weapons now, but it would still kill every single person living in that town. How had it gotten this far along? What had she done wrong, to be twelve hours away from issuing something like this. She needed to tell her superior, to tell John, but what would he say to her? Probably ask the same question she was asking herself right now. How did this happen? If she dropped that bomb, her career was over. For all intents and purposes, her life would be over.

“Will, you have to find this thing,” she said. “Whatever it is, you have to find it.”

He didn’t say anything back and that’s when she thought he knew. Thought he understood the frantic pace of her mind, her almost paralyzing fear. He saw it, and would be the first of many if this thing didn’t reach a resolution soon. That was the death knell for her, when people understood she was out of her element—and Will saw it now; he had to.

“Anything else?” he asked.

“No, that’s it.”

Will hung up the phone and Rigley pulled hers down slightly from her face. She looked at it for a second, the flat touch screen, black now—and that summed up this whole operation. Darkness falling across it.

She dropped the phone to the wooden table, and looked at the screen on the wall. It was a map of the town, this Grayson. Black dots sprung up all over the map, places that the three in her team had hit today. They made it to a lot of houses, a hell of a lot for three people; Rigley wondered if they had talked at all of these, or just let the trackers pick up abnormalities. A quick glance told her around three hundred houses hit in fourteen hours. And now they had a list of kids that Will felt would lead them to who saw the thing fall. He said that they had a party out there the night it came down, so at least one of them probably saw it. Three hundred houses and not a single movement on any of their trackers, no sightings.

She knew that she needed to call this in, knew it the way a bear knows when it’s time to begin hibernation. When the hammer was a possibility, she was supposed to let someone know, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it, not yet. She wasn’t going to send it up the chain, because if she did, then there wasn’t any chance of stopping the entire town from being obliterated. There wasn’t any hope that anyone in that town lived. There wasn’t any hope that she didn’t break that promise she made.