Niklosi's Nightmare (First Wave Book 10) (8 page)

“Where the hell are my prisoners?”
Kyle yelled out in order to wake up the handful people sleeping all over the
room.

BJ jerked herself out of her
pretend sleep and stood abruptly, knocking her chair over behind her as she
wiped haphazardly at her face.

“Who be you?” she demanded as she
pulled up her gun belt and looked Kyle up and down.

“I’m Major Kyle Morris! I sent the
request for hold on your prisoners. Where is the police chief, and where are my
prisoners?” Kyle demanded as he gestured for his team to search the empty cells
he could see in the other room.

BJ smiled wide to show the two side
teeth she’d blacked out with the black wax.

“Well, I’m acting police chief BJ
Markson,” she said with a smile as she looked him up and down in pretend
interest.

“He sure is a purty man, ain’t he?”
Irwin said from right next to Kyle, causing him to move away from the man
again.

“There’s no one here, sir!” Greg
called out, looking around the office in confusion.

“Where are my prisoners?” Kyle
yelled out angrily.

“Well now, sir, there ain’t no call
to be so rude,” Dennis interrupted as he moved to stand near BJ and crossed his
arms over his large chest.

“We weren’t no match for those butterfly
people BJ done found out there in the hollers last night! No, sir! Those butterfly
people, they be slippery creatures,” Mojo told them with a wide-eyed stare that
made him look even more odd with his fluffed and twisted hair and a few
blacked-out teeth.

“They escaped?” Kyle yelled out.
“When?”

BJ scratched at her head, pulling
one of her pig tails even more askew.

“Well, now . . . it was after Momma
had come to feed them. But before you got here,” she said, acting confused.

Irwin fairly danced across the
floor and gently touched Kyle’s hand before the major jerked it away from him
and stepped away again.

“I saw one of them run out of the
door, but Buford said he saw them fly away. That means they ain’t haints, they
be the flying humanoids. You done seen that show on them around these parts
ain’t ya? It was on TV and all! Don’t you worry none. I’ll protect you,” Irwin
said as he winked at Kyle.  

Kyle couldn’t stop the shudder that
ran down his spine at the man, and he moved closer to Greg, feeling better with
more distance between him and the mayor.

“They weren’t haints or the flying
humanoids,” Mojo argued, slapping his hands on the desk. “It was the butterfly
people. Ain’t you heard about them helping out all those people when that there
tornado hit in Joplin? Ain’t no other way they could have gotten the slip on us.”

“What the fuck are you talking
about?” Kyle screamed out as the crazy locals began arguing over things he
didn’t understand.

Bess smiled gently and was suddenly
beside Kyle and gently holding his hand.

“You should calm yourself; stress
kills. I believe what they are telling you is that your prisoners escaped,” she
said calmly.

“When did they escape?” Kyle ground
out as he yanked his hand away from Bess.

“It was still dark! Haints don’t
come out in the day!” Dennis called out.

“It wasn’t haints! It was the
humanoids!” Irwin shot back, clenching his fists at Dennis.

“Butterfly people,” Mojo added
limply, as if uncaring but convinced he was right.

“What the fuck is wrong with you
people?” Kyle asked as he rubbed a hand down his face.

Kyle turned to his men.

“Get out there and comb the damn
town. Look for anything that may help us figure out who was here and where they
went,” he ordered.

When Greg moved to leave as well,
Kyle stopped him.

“Get a team in here. I want them to
go through everything in this damn place and find out what the hell happened!”

“Now, sir,” BJ said with a cluck of
her tongue. “We done been trying to tell ya what happened, but you just ain’t
be listening.”

“I got some homemade tincture that
will clean your ears right out! Want to come to my home, and I’ll show you how
to use it?” Irwin asked as he sidled up to Kyle, fluttered his eyelashes, and
rubbed against Kyle’s arm.

Kyle jumped back from the amorous
mayor and held his hand up in front of him.

“Get the hell away from me!” Kyle
snapped, completely caught off guard by what he had walked into.

If this is a damn joke, I’m not
fucking amused,
Kyle thought as he backed out of the door.

He stood near the SUV and took a
deep breath to try and sift through what had happened.

“Sir, where do you want us to set
up command?” Greg asked, already knowing the answer.

Kyle pointed at the police station
and watched with a smirk of satisfaction as his teams headed into the building
to take it over. He couldn’t be more thrilled to keep the mayor away from him
while he figured out if he had wasted his time even coming to Missouri.

Something isn’t right here
, Kyle
thought as he looked down the street.

Baker’s Creek looked almost exactly
like a movie set for one of those old mountain type inbred movies that sent
shudders down the spines of every man who’d ever heard of the stories or seen
the graphic movies. Women and children wearing worn, soiled, and ill-fitting
clothes openly stared at him and his men. A group of men was hanging out in
front of a white clapboard building proclaiming itself to be the “Diner.”  

Kyle narrowed his eyes and looked
over at Greg.

“Follow me,” he said before he
stormed off down the street towards the men.

He was halfway to the group of men
when he was hit with a smell so pungent and so sharp he nearly stumbled back
from it. Greg continued forward only a few steps beyond Kyle when he stopped
and gagged.

“What the hell is that?” Greg
choked out as he covered his mouth and nose.

“Ain’t you know how to scare the
haints and humanoids?” a little boy with half a mouth of missing teeth giggled
as he ran past them and hid behind the group of men staring at them oddly.

“Aw now, don’t you let a little
varmint sex oils scare ya off! It’ll keep them haints from carrying off wit’ ya
next!” one of the men called out.

Kyle was speechless as his mind
tried to figure out if he was the butt of some elaborate joke. Unwilling to be
drawn into whatever was going on, Kyle held his breath and moved through the
crowd until he got into the diner. Greg quickly followed and shut the door
behind him.

Both men breathed a sigh of relief
when they realized the diner wasn’t engulfed in the foul smell from outside.

They must have been wearing that
shit,
Kyle realized with a shudder of revulsion.

“Would ya like some coffee?
Breakfast?”

Kyle just stared at the small, thin,
and completely toothless old woman holding up the dirtiest coffee pot he’d ever
seen as she proudly displayed her gums with a broad smile. He could see at
least one set of the woman’s false teeth in her shirt pocket.

“What the fuck?” Greg whispered,
standing close to the major as he looked at the motley group of people occupying
the small diner.

Kyle didn’t think he’d be able to
count more than 30 teeth in the whole room of 15 people, and he shook his head.

Every damn stereotype about these
people is the absolute truth
, he thought with disgust.
Stupid,
inbred, toothless mother fuckers still might be able to give me information.

“No, thank you,” Kyle said to the
waiting woman, trying not to flinch in revulsion as she smiled wider and turned
away.

“I was hoping that you good people
could help me,” Kyle began, looking around the room at the suspicious eyes
watching his every move.

Confident that his superior
intellect could make finding out what happened to his prisoners quick and easy,
Kyle smiled at the silent faces. Instead of answering him, one large man with a
predominant bulge in his cheek spit a huge, nasty stream of brown juice into a
dirty water glass on his table.

Kyle cleared his throat and tried
to pretend he didn’t see it.

“Did anyone see the criminals that
your police caught last night? Anyone see where they went? Or see anything
strange or unexplainable?” Kyle asked.

Kyle cursed the shudder that almost
ran through him when the room erupted in laughter that showed missing and
sick-looking teeth and gums all around.

“This be the Ozarks! There be
strange magic all around,” one man said with a laugh.

“It was tha’ howlers, not tha’
haints! I heard ‘em! Been hearing them for weeks now! They hunt ya in the
night, prowling around until ya too scared ta fight ‘em off . . . then they
steal ya soul!” another added loudly.

“The flying humanoids came and took
the prisoners from BJ. I saw a light flash in the sky, then they flew away. You
can’t keep a humanoid locked up. They ain’t like it. Not at all,” another
spoke.

Kyle closed his eyes, trying
desperately to retain control of his fracturing composure. In all his travels,
he’d never encountered anything more stupid than what he was hearing, and he
wasn’t sure how to proceed in getting anything useful out of the hillbillies.

“Sir?”

Kyle turned thankfully at the voice
behind him and looked at one of his lieutenants.

“Sir, we found something at the
station that you should see,” the man said.

Kyle was glad for the distraction
and began to leave the diner without a word.

“Y’all come back now for lunch! We
got a possum stew special today! We’ll even give you a discount since it be
your trucks that ran over the varmints!” a man behind the counter called out as
he held up a dead, beady-eyed animal and cackled with laughter.

Kyle turned back to the door and
almost had to fight Greg to get out first. He cursed the moment he stepped onto
the sidewalk and got another whiff of that foul scent the men outside were
engulfed in. He quickly turned towards the police station and took long strides
to put as much distance as he could between himself and the town’s insane
residents.

Chapter
Seven

BJ looked over at the others in the
room and tried not to grin as the soldiers tore apart her station. She’d leaned
back in her chair, put her dirty boots on the desk, and pushed her stomach out
as she lazily watched the men seize everything they could.

“Where are the fingerprint cards?”
one of the soldiers asked.

BJ lunged out of her chair so fast
the soldier jumped back and she grinned broadly at him. She rubbed her pooched
out stomach and smiled as she batted her lashes.

“I think I could find them if’n ya
want ta come ta dinner tonight?” she asked him.

Mojo almost burst out laughing at
his sister’s fake attempt at seducing the horrified soldier. Her pig tails were
comically cock-eyed, two of her upper side teeth looked missing, her clothes
were rumpled and dirty, and she was making every effort to change her normally
sweet voice to sound crackly and weird. He couldn’t be more proud.

“I’ll find the damn things myself,”
the soldier muttered as he turned away from BJ and began going through a filing
cabinet.

BJ dug her thumbs in her utility
belt and sauntered over to the soldier. She ran a finger awkwardly down his arm,
causing him to jump back from her.

“I’m sure we can skip dinner and go
right fer dessert,” BJ said with a wink.

The soldier dented the metal filing
cabinet as he slammed the drawer closed a little too hard. He held up the
finger print cards in his hand.

“I think I’d rather gnaw my own
dick off,” the soldier muttered with a look of disgust before he walked
outside.

“That can be arranged,” Bess
whispered with a mischievous smile.

Mojo and BJ smothered smiles as
they watched the other soldiers continue to scour through everything in her
office.

“Where are the weapons? The evidence?
You did disarm them, didn’t you?” another soldier asked BJ.

“What happened to this door
handle?” another male called out from the holding area where Traze had broken
in to help Nik escape.

“I done told ya that’s where they
used that there ray gun thingie on it. Never did get to see the ray gun though.
The light was too bright,” BJ replied.

It was really hard not to laugh as
the soldiers muttered, moaned, and whispered to one another about how
incompetent and pathetic BJ and the others were. It was going exactly like she
and Mojo had seen in their visions, and BJ was grateful it would all be over in
another hour or so.

Then Major Kyle Morris came back
into the office, and the whole outcome was thrown into disarray. The major
strode into the room, moving past everyone as he went into the holding cell
area and spoke quietly to the soldier who was looking at the door.

BJ and the others maintained their
casual nonchalance, pretending that the future wasn’t changing by the second.

“What the fuck happened?” Mojo
whispered in BJ’s mind.

“I don’t know. Did we forget
something on the door?” she asked.

BJ’s mind ran through the reasons
why they’d allowed the melted door handle to remain and the points were still
valid. There had to be an extraordinary means in which Nik and Traze escaped
that would be believable enough to make the soldiers go away.

What did we forget?
BJ
wondered as she felt the major’s energy escalate.

Kyle looked down at the door handle
with narrowed eyes before he opened it, stepped outside, and looked at the door
itself.

“Over here, sir,” a soldier said as
he pointed at the bumper of BJ’s car which was parked several feet away.

“And there’s footprints all around
here from the breaker box to the door,” another added.

Kyle looked over the scene and the
hair on his neck stood on end.

Something isn’t right here,
he thought
as he followed the set of large boot prints around the building to the power
cut off box, then back again.

“What are we missing?” Kyle
wondered aloud.

“It doesn’t make sense, sir,” Greg
told him as he knelt down to study the door. “She didn’t mention anything about
putting her car against the door. If they’d already escaped, why would she
bother?”

“Are you kidding me? I can’t
believe she’s allowed to carry a gun! I can’t believe people like this exist in
this day and age,” a soldier added with a sneer.

“How can someone this incompetent
get to be a cop?” another asked.

That had Kyle’s mind thrumming with
suspicions.

“Indeed. How does that happen?” he
pondered. “Greg, get me everything you can on everyone in that room, and get
them out of there. We’re already here, and we’re staying until I know what
happened, so get the men to set up camp for the night in the field behind the
station.”

Kyle ignored his men’s groans as
they set out to comply with his orders.

“What are you thinking, sir?” Greg
asked when he had the men set to their tasks.

Kyle watched dispassionately as the
soldiers pushed the cop and the others out of the office. The odd group stood
in front of the building and looked around blankly as if unsure what to do with
themselves.

“I want you to get the cop, that
Mojo guy, the DA, and the mayor into interviews. Someone knows something.
They’re either hiding it, and if so, why? Or they just don’t realize they know
something, and we’re going to try and help the ignorant fools with that,” Kyle
replied with a feeling that it would be the former and not the latter.

He wasn’t sure how he knew, but
that tingling running through him was always a good sign that he was on the
right track, and he wasn’t going to give up without making sure he’d covered
all of his bases.

“Where do you want me to put them,
sir?” Greg asked as he looked around the sparse town in disgust.

Kyle studied the area, and the
thought of going back into the diner made his stomach churn. He wasn’t about to
go into the other buildings if he didn’t have to since he figured it’d be
varying degrees of the diner all over again.

“Take the cop in the station first.
Let the others go wherever they want as long as they don’t leave town. Keep a
guard on each of them,” Kyle ordered as his eyes narrowed on the tall, thin,
black woman who appeared so out of place among the others.

She had an elegant, almost regal
bearing about her that was completely at odds with the bumbling fools around
her-including her own children.

“Who was the tall woman again?”
Kyle asked Greg.

“That’s Bess Markson, the mother of
the cop and the Mojo guy. Did you notice their eyes? What the hell color do you
call that? It’s like a starburst of all kinds of colors,” Greg asked as he
stared at Bess.

“It’s hazel, I think. Why is she
hanging around?” Kyle muttered aloud, his mind turning with suspicions. “Keep
an eye on her too.”

“Yes, sir,” Greg said before he
headed towards the small group still standing outside the front door of the
station.

Kyle watched the cop shove a
massive wad of chewing tobacco into her mouth and nearly gagged at the thought
of having to interview her with that smell coming from her. He shook his head
and went back into the station through the door with the melted handle.

“Get that handle off, and get it
sealed and sent to the lab,” Kyle told a soldier standing just inside the door.

“Yes, sir!”

Kyle entered the office just as the
cop sauntered into the room and wiped the back of her hand over her mouth,
leaving a small streak of brown tobacco juice on her hand. He repressed a
shudder of revulsion and gestured to a seat at the nearest desk.

“Please sit down,” he said.

BJ flopped into the chair and tried
not to puke from the tobacco in her mouth. She clutched the empty water bottle
in her hands and tried to push away the queasiness.

Oh Lordy, I took this a little too
far
,
she thought as she stood quickly, her stomach threatening to heave right there
on the floor.

“I ain’t eat yet, and I’m feeling
kind of ill. I’m going to hit the shitter real quick,” BJ said, her eyes daring
him to argue with her.

Kyle stood back from her quickly
and watched her run into a closet-sized bathroom near the coffee pot and
fridge. He listened close for any strange sounds but didn’t hear anything
coming from the bathroom that would make him think she was doing anything other
than using the bathroom.

Please, let her wash her hands
, Kyle
thought with a shake of his head.

From what he’d seen so far, basic
hygiene didn’t appear to be high on the list of important things to do for
these people. There was no way he was shaking her hand.

BJ almost gagged out the wad of
tobacco into the trash can and turned on the water to try and rinse the foul
taste from her mouth.

So nasty
, she
thought, trying not to gag as she vigorously brushed her tongue with her
fingers.

“I think you need to be more
careful,” Niklosi whispered into her mind. “You’re too nervous.”

BJ stared into her eyes in the mirror
above the sink with a dark look aimed at the intruder in her mind.

“Go screw yourself. I’m doing
fine,” BJ countered before she rinsed her face and patted it dry.

Niklosi smiled to himself at her
spunk, but it didn’t ease his worry that something was going to go terribly
wrong and he wouldn’t be there in time to save her.

BJ opened her mouth wide and
checked her teeth. She peeled another piece of the black wax from the inside
cuff of her pants and reapplied it to a spot that was wearing off.

“You need to tread more carefully,”
Niklosi warned. “Throwing yourself at them isn’t going to help either.”

BJ quirked a brow at the hint of
jealousy she felt come through her mind when he said the last.

“Oh, shut up,” she countered with a
snort. “I guarantee you those guys will run when they see me coming, which is
what I intended, you buffoon.”

Niklosi was glad she couldn’t see
the blush that stained his cheeks as he watched what was happening inside the
station from the hovering ship above.

BJ was equally glad he couldn’t
feel the thrill of excitement that unwillingly skittered down her spine over
his jealousy and concern for her. It was an interesting, yet not unpleasant
feeling to feel cared for by him, to have someone besides her family be
concerned for her.

“I know you’re doing a good job.
I’m not saying you aren’t,” Niklosi said defensively.

He didn’t want her to think he
believed her to be as incompetent as she was pretending to be. Mate or not,
even he was convinced by her performance, and he knew she was intelligent—and
beautiful.

BJ sighed as she felt his attempt
to make sure she wasn’t offended and keep things friendly between them.

“I know. This is just a really
weird situation. For all of us,” BJ admitted, not wanting to argue when she had
other things to think about. “Show time.”

She checked herself one more time
in the mirror then pasted on a silly grin before she threw open the door and
almost slammed into one of the soldiers standing just outside the door.

“Whoa there, baby, you don’t have
to hunt me in the shitter,” BJ said as she clutched the soldier’s shirt and
smiled at him.

The soldier’s eyes widened, and he
yanked his arm away from her before looking for help from the major.

“Over here,” Kyle said with a
disgusted roll of his eyes as he waved the flirty cop over to the desk.

BJ gave the soldier another smile
before she sauntered over to the major and plopped herself into the chair she’d
sat in before she’d bolted to the bathroom.

“So, general, what can I do fer
ya?” she asked as she picked at her fingernails.

Kyle couldn’t help but notice the
strange contrasts in the cop. She was missing teeth, looked incredibly
disheveled, and talked like an inbred fool. On the other hand, he could still
smell her clean soap when she ran past him to the bathroom.

The nails she was fussing with were
neatly trimmed and clean. Her hair, although a complete mess of a hairstyle,
clearly showed a clean scalp where it was parted. It only reinforced his belief
that something wasn’t right in Baker’s Creek, and it started with her.  

He moved to the desk and sat on top
of it a few feet from her so he could watch her more closely.

“I want you to tell me what
happened—from the beginning,” Kyle told her as he watched her face.

BJ did her best to hide her discomfort
at the nearness of the major and his intent gaze. She knew it was more
important than ever to remain in character so she scratched her head and
scrunched her face.

“I was looking out by Jepson’s
place, hoping to catch that there haint that’s been bothering him at night,” BJ
began.