Serpentine (5 page)

SIX

Five days after the Evans family had unpacked most of their belongings and the U-Haul was unloaded, Joe walked down to the dock behind the house for the first time. While he had done his best to remain grouchy and overbearing, he had found it not worth the effort. Besides, after five days of staring at it through the windows of the house—especially when Mac and his mom were splashing in a raft around the dock—it started to itch at him. There was only so much temptation a fourteen-year-old boy could take.

There was, of course, his mood to deal with. Several moments before he finally caved in and headed down to the water, he had been sitting at the kitchen table and looking through the window. Down on the lake, Mac and his mom were splashing lazily in the water.

Joe was holding his iPhone, reading and re-reading a single message over and over: DEVILSGUT! TONIGHT! ALREADY GOT THE TIX, SUCKA!

The text was from his best friend back home, a boy that neither of his parents cared for. They didn’t care for Ricky Marshall because he was sixteen and had gotten Joe into the thrash metal scene. Because of Ricky’s influence, Devilsgut was Joe’s favorite band. He had downloaded everything they had ever released and often walked around the house growling the lyrics to songs like “Blood Bath” and “Parasite Alley.” When they toured, though, it was usually on the stupid West Coast. They never came east.

Except for now. They were playing New York City tomorrow night, in a venue that was less than half an hour away from Joe’s house.

And here he was, stuck at this stupid lake with his stupid family. To Joe, it almost seemed like he wasn’t meant to enjoy this trip. Every time he talked himself into giving it a chance, something like this happened.

Joe read the text message again and then set the phone on the table, screen-side down. He stared back out the window and watched as his mom playfully threatened to tip Mac’s raft over. The late morning sun sparkled in the water behind them. He could hear Mac’s gleeful squeals through the glass and the itch to get down there and at least try to have some fun grew stronger.

With a thin smile, he shoved his pride aside and stood up from the table. He ran into the room that he and Mac shared and slid on a pair of swimming trunks. As he did, he could hear the soft hum of a synth noise filling the cabin. It sounded like wind coming from the far corner of the living room—the area his father had elected to set up his workspace. This was followed by a melody on his dad’s keyboard that he had been toying with all morning. Hearing that keyboard did Joe a world of good. Back in their home in New York, the sounds of his dad at play on his keyboard had often carried Joe into sleep.

For some people, it was rain. For Joe, there was no better sound to fall asleep to than his father striking the keys and crafting a story with music. He was smiling again as he listened to his father’s music and tied the elastic strings of his swim trunks.

“Dad,” he yelled out as he ran for the back door on the other side of the kitchen. “I’m going out with Mom and Mac!”

“Have fun,” his dad called back. He spoke as if he had been programmed to do so. He had always been great about remaining attentive when he was behind the keyboard, but his voice was usually flat and emotionless when he spoke.

Joe went out the back door, down the back porch steps and across the yard. He was still overwhelmed by the very presence of so much nature everywhere. Back home, he’d had to walk a few blocks to the nearest park just to get in a game of football with his friends. He couldn’t imagine living in a place where you could walk outside and have ample space to do whatever you wanted without the risk of getting hit by a taxi or a bus.

It was nice, although he was hesitant to admit it—even to himself. He was pretty sure he would never be able to live in a place like this (hell, the two months they planned to stay here was pushing it), but he was quickly growing enamored with the forest.

He made his way down the flagstone path that led to the dock. When he stepped on it, Mac and his mom looked up at him in surprise.

“I’m glad you decided to join us,” his mom said. She was wearing her sunglasses, lifting them up above her eyebrows and squinting at him.

“Yeah,” Mac said as she reclined on her circular float. “I didn’t think you were ever going to—”

Joe took two running strides along the dock and launched himself into the air. As he came down, he hugged his knees to his chest. He splashed down into the water with a perfect cannonball. He missed Mac’s float by less than a foot and he felt her splashing into the water beside him, the float having tipped over.

He came up to find his mother giving him a scowl as Mac started angrily slapping at the water, trying to grab on to the edge of her float.

“You turd,” she screamed as she pulled herself up. She sounded angry but it was apparent by the look on her face that she had enjoyed it.

“At least turds float,” Joe said back as he swam a few feet away from the float. “Well, some
do
sink to the bottom. Like you, I guess.”

Mac looked confused but was snickering at the topic of the current conversation.

“Can we not talk like that, please?” Amy asked her children.

Joe swam to the front of the dock and hung on to it. He was surprised at how refreshing and cool the water was. Yes, it
did
look muddy and discolored, especially around the wooden frame of the dock. But it wasn’t as bad as he had been expecting. He pushed himself away from the dock and swam over to where Mac was once again in her float.

He began twirling the float around slowly, making her giggle. He looked over and saw a smile of approval and delight on his mother’s face. It was a look that he had fawned over ever since kindergarten when he’d brought home his first assignment with a big red check in the top corner. The smile within that look reminded Joe just how pretty his mom was.

He thought briefly about the text message from Ricky Marshall and was surprised to find that most of the sting of it wasn’t there anymore.

“How are you doing, Joe?” his mom asked from her float.

“Good.”

“No more brooding?”

“No. I don’t think so.”

She gave him that smile again and then reclined her head back, relaxing and letting the sun soak into her skin.

Joe kept his eyes on her for a bit longer and tried to recall the last time he had seen his mother in a state where she had been able to relax. In the few months leading up to their trip to Clarkton Lake, he’d seen her angry and depressed far too often. To see her like this right now did him more good than he was able to understand.

“Faster!”

Joe snapped out of his thoughts at his sister’s demands to be spun faster in her float. Joe obliged, listening to her peals of laughter. Within seconds, he was laughing right along with her, the sun shining down and the lake glistening in little sparks of afternoon sunlight all around them.

SEVEN

Scott Miles pulled his black sedan in beside the pair of vans and killed the engine. He looked to the house in front of him before getting out. From where he was parked, he could see the front door. The house had no porch, but one of those quaint little archways covering the front door. This one was made of pine posts and an arching row of stone-colored bricks.

The front door was closed but the doorknob was loose, hanging down slightly. This wasn’t something that could be seen from the road, especially considering the row of trees that separated the front yard from the dirt road behind him.

Scott opened his door and stepped out. He approached the first black van and then the second. He performed a quick search of each one and found the exact same thing in each van. They were spotless and nearly featureless. There were no belongings in the glove compartment, not even a vehicle registration. In the back of each one there was a tiny cot-like stretcher. Twin straps hung from each one, hanging down away from the starch white sheet that covered the thin mattress.

Scott turned away from the vans and made his way to the house. He walked along the sidewalk as if he belonged there, maybe someone that wanted to rent this quaint little lakeside cabin for a few weeks. He’d seen only one vehicle on the road since turning off from the main highway and onto the winding series of dirt tracks that spread through the forests around Clarkton Lake. There was no real risk of being seen. And even if he was spotted, all he had to do was flash the badge he carried in his front pocket.

Scott was dressed in jeans and a simple button-down shirt, not in the usual suit and tie get-up the bureau usually had him wear on assignment. He had known from the start that this assignment was different, so he was letting himself enjoy the assignment as much as he could. Part of that included not having to wear the monkey suit.

The
bad
thing about this assignment was that it dealt with something truly bizarre. This was not the usual murder investigation or some underhanded back-room drama to cover up. He could handle those things all day, and he could handle them well.

But this was different…and therefore, he welcomed it.

Scott came to the front door of the cabin. When he reached out to push it open with his left hand, his right hand went to his service pistol. He withdrew his Sig Sauer P220 and inched inside, pushing the door open. As it eased open, the top hinge shrieked slightly. He looked up and saw that the hinge had been popped out from the side of the door. Whoever had come in here had done so with tremendous force. From the looks of the door, a battering ram had not been used. It had been good old strength—probably a well-delivered kick that had popped the front door open like a tin can.

He had been expecting to enter George Galworth’s house to instantly see signs of a slaughter. But as he walked inside the front door and into the foyer, he saw nothing of the sort. The house was clean and quite cool. The only thing that unsettled Scott was the staleness in the air and the sheer quiet of everything.

He’d been told to expect the worst and that was exactly what he was waiting for as he took several steps across the foyer and into a short but wide hallway. A large den sat to his left, but he paid it no attention. Looking ahead, he saw the first signs of trouble.

The hallway stopped at a T-intersection in front him. There, protruding from behind the wall on the right, was someone’s arm. The arm was dressed in a black sleeve, the hand wearing the type of glove that covered everything but the fingers. Scott saw that the fingers were permanently curled.

He quietly approached the end of the hallway, his eyes still on that arm. When he came to the corner, he swept around it, holding his gun out at chest level.

That’s when he saw the carnage he had been expecting.

For starters, the arm he had seen was just that—an arm. It had been severed from its body, which was lying in a pool of dried blood a few feet away. Six other bodies lay strewn about around it. They were all dressed in black outfits that resembled SWAT gear. Military-grade automatic rifles were scattered along the floor, one of which looked as if it had been saturated in blood.

A cloud of flies hovered over the bodies, up and down from the blood-drenched bodies and then into the air.

Scott tried to look past the bodies and towards the room that sat a few feet in front of the bloodbath. As he looked that way, his eyes locked on the face of one of the dead men. His face was frozen in a state of terror, his eyes wide and his jaw set. Whatever had killed him had done it very quickly. Gauging from the look of the man, that death had come in the form of a severely traumatic wound to the chest and neck. His head was barely attached to the rest of his body.

Scott had to take a moment to gather himself. It was by far the grisliest scene he had come across during his decade with the FBI. Even in the last three years, when he had been promoted to the hush-hush position of a “clean-up man,” he hadn’t seen anything this bad.

Once he had his wits about him, he crept through the carnage as best he could. There was no way to avoid stepping in the blood and he almost had to literally jump over one of the corpses.

Scott came to the room at the end of the hall, the doorway of which was partially blocked by the final mangled corpse. The blood from this body trailed out onto the floor of the bathroom beyond, mostly dried on the white tile.

When he looked into the bathroom, it took Scott’s eyes a moment to understand what he was seeing.

There was blood everywhere. It was on the walls, on the ceiling, splattered over the toilet, and covering all of the white porcelain of the tub. There was a body inside the tub, collapsed back against the far right corner where a few bottles of shampoo floated in water that looked like cherry Kool-Aid.

This, Scott assumed, was George Galworth.

The lower part of his face was dislodged from the rest. His jaw had been pulverized and hung down like hot taffy. The corners of his mouth had been torn and a few of his teeth looked like they had exploded from his gums. As Scoot took in the scene, he saw a fragment of one of these teeth standing out in the maroon coating along the tile floor.

“My God,” Scott breathed.

If there were any clues to be found in the bathroom, he wasn’t going to be able to find it in all of this blood. Besides…based on what he knew about what had happened here, it seemed clear to Scott that whatever had been resting in George’s body had come out.

He also knew that there had been seven agents that had come to retrieve the thing that had been in George’s body. The seven massacred bodies behind him in George’s hallway told him that the mission had been a failure and there were no survivors.

That, of course, left the obvious question: what exactly had killed these men and where was it now?

Scott’s instructions had been clear. He was to find out why the team had not reported back and, if there were casualties and the
specimen
was missing, he was supposed to find it. His priorities were to capture it alive but, if that wasn’t possible, to kill it.

Looking back to the seven dead agents behind him, Scott wasn’t sure that was going to be so easy.

He looked beyond the dead men and the mess around them, looking down the hall. He saw a few streaks of blood further down, smeared on the wooden floor. He managed his way back around the bodies, passed the place where the hallway broke into the T-intersection, and walked further into the house. He looked down to the smears of blood and saw that they didn’t seem to be just random splotches of blood that had been strewn during the melee in the bathroom.

There was a pattern to it—a shape, almost.

He followed the streaks down the hallway and into a modestly sized kitchen. On the tiled kitchen floor, it was easier to see the movement and motion to the streaks. To Scott, it looked as if something had been dragged across the floor. Or, based on what he knew of this peculiar case, something had likely crawled or slithered across the floor.

The streaks went around the kitchen island a few times and then seemed to head in the direction of an elaborate screened-in back porch that was connected to the kitchen through a door that stood open. Scott walked out onto the porch and lost track of the blood streaks. The porch was carpeted and decorated with expensive patio furniture.

A single screen door led off of the porch and to a small wooden walkway that led down to the back yard. Beyond the yard, there was an unobstructed view of the lake. A single dock sat on a small crescent of beach. A speed boat was tied to it, bobbing in the water.

Scott started for the door to the walkway outside and stopped mid-stride. He looked to the door and saw what he had feared the most.

A hole had been torn in the bottom of the door’s screen. The hole was about eight inches in length and equally tall. The screen was shredded around it, suggesting that something had torn its way out.

The door was locked from the inside, making that hole seem all the more dangerous. Looking out to the wooden walkway, Scott unlatched the lock. He stepped outside and looked for any signs that whatever had made the streaks on the floor inside had been out here. The wood along the walkway seemed to be untouched. There wasn’t a single streak of blood anywhere to be seen.

This, of course, meant nothing. Whatever had torn its way through the agents and exited George Galworth’s house had probably managed to lose all traces of its victims’ blood while crawling around on the floor.

The ground beneath the wooden walkway was made up of well-maintained grass. If anything had wound through it recently, there were no signs.

The walkway ended in a series of three steps that led onto a small trail. This trail led out to the segment of beach twenty feet further out. Scott checked the stairs (even peering under them) and made his way down the trail, but there was no sign of—well, of
what,
he wasn’t sure.

He made his way down to the water, walking out onto George Galworth’s dock, and looked out onto the lake. The afternoon was bright, the water sparkling and tranquil.

He vaguely knew what he was up against. He had been sent a brief file on the case along with his explicit instructions. Part of that file had been the intercepted e-mails that George Galworth had sent out and received on the day the agents had been dispatched to the lake house.

The contents of one of those mails haunted Scott has he stared out at the lake.

It needs water.

That mail had been sent to George Galworth from KC Doughtry. And thinking of what it implied sent a chill through Scott as he stared out to the huge lake before him.

The report had told Scott that Clarkton Lake covered an area of a little less than ninety square miles. So there was plenty of water, that was for sure.

The question that made Scott uneasy was what, exactly, was he looking for.

He left the dock and headed back up the yard, across the walkway and back to the porch. He looked through the kitchen door, thinking of the bodies just down the hall.

He pulled his cellphone from his pocket and pulled up a number he didn’t want to call. It rang only once before the other end was answered.

“Yeah?” came a voice that Scott had come to hate over the years. It was the voice of Roger Lowry, his direct supervisor. Roger was the type that held his position over those beneath him with an abundance of cockiness and fabricated power. The ideas of compassion and leading by example never seemed to cross Roger Lowry’s mind.

“I’m here,” Scott said. “And it’s bad.”

“The agents?”

“All dead.”

“And George Galworth?”

“Deader than the rest.”

“And what about the specimen?”

Scott paused a beat here, letting the conversation slow down. Roger had a bad habit of running a conversation at such a high speed that Scott would often end up confused and frustrated. From what he had seen in George’s house so far, he knew that either of those emotions could make things harder than they had to be.

“Gone,” Scott said. “Nowhere to be found.”

“Well, then,” Roger said, as if discussing how the weather had negatively impacted his plans to play a round of golf. “I suggest you find it pretty damn quick.”

“I don’t even know what I’m looking for.”

“We’re getting information as soon as it comes to us,” Roger said. “Right now, we know just about the same as you. Whatever it is, it needs water to live. And it’s highly likely that it is the same type creature that killed most of George’s crew on that submarine. As soon as I get new information, you’ll be the first to know.”

“Okay.”
“Anything else?” Roger asked, clearly annoyed that he was being questioned.

“No. Got it.”

“Good. Now go find this thing.”

“Yes, sir,” Scott said, looking back out to the lake.

But the other line was already dead.