“Dr. Barron?”
I glanced up, smiling at the stout middle-aged woman ambling towards me, her hand already extended out when she was still some twenty-feet away. Standing up, I stepped forward and shook her hand.
“Mrs. Sellers, I presume.” She gave a quick nod and I went on. “Thank you again for seeing me.”
“It’s my pleasure, Doctor. Right this way.” She led me past a nurse’s desk to a cramped interior office stuffed full with two guest chairs and stacks of paper on every surface. “Please pardon the mess.”
“Oh, not at all. Mess just means you’re hard at work.”
She smiled as she sat down. “Like we discussed on the phone, while I understand you don’t have the time to become a regular referable physician for Shady Grove, I appreciate your willingness to go on our specialist referral list for our clients. They will certainly benefit from your expertise.” Giving me a knowing wink, she added. “And it does afford you access to their medical records without any kind of HIPAA concerns.”
I chuckled. “Yes, I’m very glad to help as I can. My research will require a vast pool of data in order to ascertain any statistically significant anomalies. As I mentioned, my primary focus is the cross-referencing of patients with heart disease and those with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. So every place I can utilize as a source of information is immeasurably helpful, as you can imagine. Thank you again for the access.”
She beamed. “Thank you for considering us. And you did say there would be mention of myself and the facility when your paper on the study is published?”
“Oh yes, certainly. Though I warn you, this will be a long-term research project, so it will be some time before we are ready for the medical journals.”
“Well, we’ll all eagerly await your findings. Now where do you want to start?”
I glanced at the ceiling as though I was pondering my options. “Well, my primary two sources of information are typically the medical records themselves and some staff interviews to develop a feel for any particular behaviors or clinical signs they’ve noted that might be of anecdotal use at the very least. My grandson Jason is actually going to be assisting me in this endeavor, so if he can get with your staff regarding our obtaining copies of the records, I can start talking to some of your staff as they have time.”
“That sounds good, doctor. Who would you like to speak to first?”
“Is your head nurse available?”
Angela Welker was the picture perfect ideal of what a nurse should be. During World War II, my mother would collect propaganda posters and other memorabilia as she was able. I was a baby then, but when I was a bit older I remember going through a phase when I was fascinated by the old war and I would spend hours in our attic, filled as it was with a treasure trove of my mother’s collected posters, photos, and newspaper clippings, and plunder for relics of the past.
One of the posters I saw was an illustration of a nurse leaned over the bed of a wounded soldier. Her face radiated with a beatific glow and was framed by blonde hair like spun gold. She looked down on the soldier, whose bandaged head and somber expression had been turned toward the viewer, and her gentle smile seemed to reassure that he was in good hands.
Welker could have posed for that picture, and in my first meeting with her, her velvety voice and kind demeanor just underlined the schism between what I was seeing and what I was feeling. My stomach roiled in protest before she even reached the door to Seller’s office, and as I left with Welker for the first part of her “interview”, I was already thinking about how much time I was willing to risk before we killed her.
“Damn. She was super hot.”
I rolled my eyes at Jason. We were eating at a nearby restaurant before going back in the afternoon for me to finish talking to Welker and other staff while Jason loaded the remainder of the medical records into the car. He had been out scouting locations most of the morning while I was at Shady Grove nursing home, and when he had come in to get me, I had introduced him to Welker and Sellers. I was more interested in his reactions to them than theirs to him, and I was disappointed when I saw no indication of any kind of autonomic change or reaction to him being in an Outsider’s proximity. Instead, all I saw was him reacting to being in the presence of a beautiful woman.
“Yes, she is. She’s also a monster. Don’t forget that.”
He frowned. “Are you sure she’s the one? It can’t be the other one that looks like Mrs. Doubtfire?”
Smirking at him I shook my head. “I’m sure. But what about you? Did you feel or sense anything being around her?”
His frown was more genuine now. “No. I’m sorry, but I didn’t. Maybe I’ll develop it over time, but for now I can’t sense them the way you do. Maybe the seed changed how the blood works for me, or maybe the blood I drank was just different…” he trailed off as the waitress came to refill our drinks, continuing when she was out of earshot, “…than Salk’s. I don’t know.”
I nodded. “Maybe so. Your strength and healing are definitely far greater than the benefits I had from the seed, but we also don’t know how things might change over time. Which is why you have to be careful and not overly rely on these abilities that we don’t understand.”
Jason sighed as he looked out the window. “I know, I know. I’m going to play it safe.” I saw a look of concern flicker across his face and he turned back to me. “Do you really think the seed is gone?”
“I don’t know, Jason. And I don’t know what it means if it is.”
As soon as I had gotten out of the hospital a month ago, I had run a variety of tests on Jason to determine any measurable changes to his body and trying to locate the Outsider seed that he had swallowed. Most of it had come back normal aside from high numbers for bone density and very low numbers for iron in the blood, though there were no signs of actual anemia or any other health issue.
But what concerned me more was my failure to locate the seed itself. I had done scans repeatedly, studying them myself and sending them out to experts I trusted, but there was no visible trace of the seed anywhere in Jason’s body. So one of several things were true. First, the seed could have just left his body, which seemed unlikely given his sustained physical changes, though the possibility they were all caused by just the blood being consumed couldn’t be entirely ruled out. Second, the seed could be somewhere in his body of similar density and/or composition to the seed itself and it was just blending in. This was also possible, but the odds of it just happening to be in a spot that would hide it seemed very low unless the seed itself had some degree of intelligence and ability to traverse the body, which had its own set of terrifying implications. Third, we could just still be overlooking it, which I thought was the most likely answer until two days ago. Fourth, it could have been absorbed into his body and be a permanent part of him now.
I knew that Jason enjoyed being so strong and resilient, and I could also tell he was worried about what was or might be happening to him. But he didn’t want me to worry, so he tried to avoid the topic most of the time. That included being resistant to more testing. I kept telling him we needed to keep close watch on all these changes, and given how dangerous the seed was, we needed to find it as soon as possible to remove it or at least know it was in a location where it was unlikely to get struck or otherwise damaged, pulling him away to wherever the Outsiders’ monstrous selves came from.
Sitting in the restaurant and seeing the worry on his face, I again debated telling him about the call I had gotten from Church Diagnostics two days ago. I didn’t like hiding things from him, but I still didn’t want to burden him with maybes. And all I really knew was that they had found some strange results they were rechecking before they could say more. The DNA retest and final review should be done in the next couple of weeks, and I decided it was best to not distract him while we were on a hunt. So instead, I changed the subject.
“So did you find any good spots for us to take her when the time comes?”
“So, the idea is that you think the heart disease is affecting the oxygen getting to the brain?” I was back with Welker, this time in her office. My stomach had adjusted to just a low rumble, and I tried to look pleased as I smiled at her.
“Yes, pretty much. As you may be aware, past studies have shown that chronic hypoxia, like we see in heart disease, can lead to significantly lower acetylcholine levels and brain cell damage. My goal is to see what correlation can be found between heart disease and dementia in nursing home and adult day care settings, with the hope of ruling out other factors such as medication and other treatments as possible contributory factors.”
Welker raised an eyebrow. “So you think something we’re doing trying to help them might actually be making things worse?”
I gave a small shrug. “I doubt it, but we have to look at every possibility, or at least attempt to rule them out.”
“Well, whatever you need, Doctor. You have full access, and I’ll help anyway I can.”
Nodding, I stood up. “I appreciate it. I feel sure I’ll be calling on you again when the need arises.”
Over the next two days I became acquainted with the patients’ files and the staffs’ work schedule. I had originally flagged Shady Grove as a possible hunt site based on it being the subject of three investigations in the last two years. Two of those had been by board-certification agents based on strange claims of elder abuse by patients, while the third had been a criminal investigation. In that case, an 83 year-old man who had never shown any signs of violence or dementia suddenly attacked two other patients and a nurse with a butter knife before being restrained. One of the patients died and the nurse lost an eye.
Things like that could happen in a hospital or nursing home, but they were obviously rare. And when I looked more closely at Shady Grove’s numbers, I saw they had a mortality rate that was twice as high as other nursing homes in the area. This was supported by the medical records themselves, which also showed a dementia rate of nearly 90 percent as opposed to the normal range of 50 to 67 percent at most nursing homes. And these jumps in death and dementia had only started after Welker came to work there.
On the third day, I slowly made my way around the nursing home, casually hiding small remote cameras in some of the rooms. I could only bring in a dozen in the large satchel I had with me, but that was enough to cover roughly a fourth of the rooms, and I focused on patients that were in relatively good health and had either no or mild signs of dementia--at least not yet. I made no mention of the cameras to anyone at the nursing home, but if they were noticed I would sheepishly apologize for forgetting to mention they were part of recording behavioral information for the study. Hopefully we wouldn’t need them to stay in the rooms for long in any case.
The cameras had been Jason’s idea and it was a good one. They couldn’t be properly shielded if we were going to watch the cameras remotely, and so they would die if Welker changed near them due to the EMP the change produced. But they could still provide us with good information before they were fried. We were able to set up down the road and watch them after leaving the nursing home for the day. I had spent much of the afternoon doing phony interviews with nursing and caretaking staff, and I was ready to be away and get to the real work. While I didn’t believe Welker suspected anything, I also didn’t think she was doing whatever it was she was doing during the busier daylight hours. Rather, she had three nights a week when she worked from noon to midnight, and my hope was we would gain some insight into what exactly she was and what she was doing on one of those evenings.
That night was one of her nights, and as Jason and I sat in the car, both of us on tablets rotating between the different cameras, a thought occurred to me.
“This is our first stakeout.”
He looked up with a grin. “What?”
“Well, I’ve done this kind of thing so many times before, but it was always alone. It’s a lot more boring, and I don’t think a single guy in a car even counts as a stakeout, especially if he isn’t a cop. It’s just a creepy guy looking to stalk or, in my case, kill somebody. But with both of us here, it’s more fun. Like we’re detectives in a movie. Maybe tomorrow night we should get doughnuts and…” I trailed off when I saw Jason was looking back at his tablet, his expression now serious.
“What is it?”
“It’s Welker. She went into Camera 8’s room. Beverly Sutcliff. And it’s hard to tell for sure with this crappy night vision, but I think she just turned into some kind of spider thing.”
I pulled up the same camera on my tablet and saw a large dark body crawling up on Beverly Sutcliff’s sleeping form. In the washed out monochrome of the camera’s night vision, it was hard to make out any subtlety of form, but the thing looked like it had 10 or 12 long, thick legs all connected to one of several joint clusters along a long, segmented body. As we watched, the thing’s head, which appeared small and oblong like an egg, lowered to the head of the woman. It was impossible on the video to tell what it was doing, but within a few moments the woman began twitching violently in her sleep.
“We have to go now. We have to stop it.” I looked up as Jason was opening his door and I grabbed his arm.
“Jason, no. That’s not how we do things. We have to get it, get her, away from the nursing home. And we have to do it later, after we have been away from this place for some time. At least a few days.”
He turned back and glared at me. “That’s bullshit. We’re going to just let her keep hurting people for another week or two so we aren’t suspects?”
I nodded, my gaze and voice steady. “Yes, we are. Because that’s the job. We don’t expose ourselves, we don’t take unnecessary risks, and we don’t let emotion push us into mistakes. This is bigger than just one person we could help, or even just one Outsider. We don’t have the luxury of being heroes. We’ve got more important things to do.”
Jason’s expression softened a little. “I…I know. I understand what you’re saying, and I agree with you when I look at it logically. But I…I don’t feel like myself all the time now.” He saw my expression and shook his head. “I don’t mean like I’m being overtaken or like you described you were starting to feel before you had the seed removed. It’s not that. But I can tell I get angry a lot quicker, and when I see something like that,” he gestured at the tablet where the creature was clambering back off of the woman, “I don’t feel afraid, I just want to find it and tear it apart.”
I patted his arm. “I get it. I do. It’s hard to sit and wait when someone is being hurt. And it may be that the changes you’ve gone through have affected your emotions. But your mind and your will are always your greatest tools, and with them you can control your impulses. You have to if you’re going to do this kind of work.”
He nodded. “I know. I can. And if…” He stopped and looked at the camera as the creature disappeared and Welker came back into view. “Hey, I have a question. How the fuck are the cameras still working and the lights still on in that place?”
I laughed. “Good. You noticed. It’s something I’ve suspected about her since the beginning. Like we had talked about before, while not impossible, it would be hard for her to change outside the nursing home and come inside as the monster. But if she changes in the rooms like we just saw, she should be knocking out the power at least fifteen to twenty yards around her if not more.”
“Right. So what does that mean?”
“It means that she either doesn’t give off the typical EMP burst or has learned to control it so she can work in this environment. I’ve always said these Outsiders are suited for the tasks they’re performing, and this might be another example of that. Maybe she can dampen the EMP somehow. I don’t know. If we were closer to Yager we could try to transport her there for study, but I don’t want to drive five hours with an unconscious woman that can turn into a giant spider thing if we get the cocktail dose wrong.”
He smiled a little. “Fair, fair. Okay.” Letting out a sigh he looked back at the tablet. “At least the woman isn’t jerking any more. I hope she’ll be okay.”
I felt a swell of pride at his compassion and nodded. “Me too. They’ll all be better when we’re done with that one. Let’s go home. Tomorrow we’ll start studying Welker away from this place.”
I kept running, my lungs feeling like they were on fire. I could feel my age a lot more now, especially in my endurance. But I had to keep going. If I didn’t catch up to Jason quickly, she might get away or hurt him. And it would be my fault.
Over two weeks had passed since we had first seen her change, and since then we had determined that she had a fairly regular routine. Much of her time was spent at work or with friends, but she always spent a couple of hours running several days a week, always in the early hours of the morning and typically after working the night shift the prior evening.
Her path was always the same through the local park, and there were several spots where we could potentially ambush her along her route with a minimal likelihood of anyone else noticing, especially so early in the morning. The plan was that Jason was going to come out in front of her at one of those locations and I would catch her from behind with a syringe full of the cocktail. We’d drill out the seed on the spot and be gone before anyone was the wiser.
At first it seemed that it was going to work like a charm. Jason came walking out, blocking her path but with a friendly expression as though he was going to ask a question or perhaps try to chat up the pretty stranger jogging by. I was crouched down behind a nearby set of unkept bushes, and once I saw he had her attention I began standing up to make my move.
And then my knees popped.
It was a foolish miscalculation on my part. I had tried to remain very cognizant of the changes in my body since the seed’s removal, and on the whole my loss of strength and resiliency, while substantial, had not been as bad as I had feared. I was maintaining the equivalent physical condition of a man in his early sixties in peak health and very good shape. But that didn’t mean I was perfect. I would still have more aches and pains that I was used to, and as I found out that morning, sometimes my knees would pop if I crouched for too long.
Welker turned around, her eyes widening as she saw me approaching. Instead of changing or otherwise attacking us, she ran. Jason almost had her as she cut past him, but she was fast. He glanced at me for a moment and then took off after her, his expression dark. I yelled for him to stop, but he ignored me, heading out of sight around the next corner.
Fear flared across my chest, images of her rounding on him and turning into that arachnoid horror filling my mind as I took off after them. When I made the corner I saw Jason far ahead, but she was already gone around the next bend. I considered calling out again, but I needed to save my air. Instead, I pushed forward and tried to close the distance.
Half a mile later I thought I’d lost both of them. I stopped and looked around, the chill of dread crawling up my hands and feet as I searched for any sign of where they had gone. For several terrible seconds there was nothing. Then I heard something. A strange thudding sound.
Running towards it, I soon realized it was coming from a public restroom in the middle of the park. I followed it into the women’s restroom, afraid of what I would find.
It was Jason, covered in black ichor and slamming his iron baton into the withering and smoking mass of that monstrous creature over and over again. It was clearly long dead, and with each thundering blow, he was doing less and less damage to the remains of the Outsider and more to the tile floor underneath, sending dirty shards pinging off the walls as he continued to work. I was about to call to him when he apparently hit the seed itself, because suddenly the majority of the creature was gone, leaving only the fluids and bits of torn off flesh behind.
He looked up at me, his terrible expression of rage dropping away after a moment. “Um, I got it.”
I rubbed my mouth and nodded. “You did. I’d say you did. Are you hurt?”
Jason shook his head. “No, I’m okay. I know it was dumb of me to run after her. But I couldn’t help it. She tried to get away, but then when she saw I was gaining on her, she ducked into this bathroom. Changed inside and was waiting up near the ceiling to jump me when I entered.” He scrubbed his hand through his hair and then glanced at the gore on his palm with disgust. “I figured she’d try something like that, so I was ready, but she was still really fast. She tried to bite me but I jammed the baton down her…its…throat. So it turned out okay.” He trailed off with an embarrassed look.
I tried to keep the anger out of my voice and failed. “It turned out okay. Except for the part where you could have gotten us both killed. And that’s after I had already made a mistake that put us in that position in the first place.” I grimaced. “I understand we’re both having to make adjustments. And aside from what you’re physically adapting to, you’re still learning how to do all of this. I’m not blind to all of that. But you have to do better. We both do.”
He frowned and gestured to the room. “I mean, I did okay, right?”
I stepped forward, looking down at him. “No, you got lucky. Yes, you are very strong and tough. Like a superhero, right?” I leaned down into his face. “What if EMP wasn’t the only thing she could turn off? What if your newfound power, that you get from something related to them, in case you forgot, isn’t really yours to control? What if they can use it against you or take it away if it suits them?”
Even under the ichor on his face I could see him visibly pale at my words. “Ah, now you get it. Now you see. This isn’t a game. And we don’t have advantages against them unless we create them ourselves.” I put my hand on his shoulder. “Look, I know this is hard, and you’re going to make mistakes. But I’m not going to see you hurt if I can help it. Just try to learn from this and listen to what I tell you. Okay?”
He nodded. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I’ll do better.”
I gave his shoulder a squeeze. “We both will. Now grab some paper towel and let’s make this look less like a slaughterhouse.”
We were back home and eating a late lunch when I got a call. When I saw it was Daniel Church, I excused myself and went into the living room.
“Daniel? How are you doing?”
His voice was light on the surface, but I could hear the tension underneath. “Um, I’m okay, Patrick. I…I got the final results back from that DNA you sent me. Where did you say it came from?”
I gave a small laugh I didn’t feel. “I didn’t. What did you find?”
He cleared his throat. “Well, I’m really not sure. I’ve never seen something like this. It’s identical to human DNA up to a point, but it has extra chromosomes. A lot of them.”
My heart was thundering in my ears as I asked the next question. “Ok. How many chromosomal pairs are we talking about total?”
There was a pause. “Well, as best we can tell, these aren’t in traditional pairs. They’re in groups of three except for the sex chromosome, which is a normal pair. But all told we’re talking 68 chromosomes. We’ve checked and rechecked it, and I still don’t know how it’s possible.”
“I…okay, thank you, Daniel. I’ll be in touch.”
I walked back into the kitchen and Jason looked up, his face concerned. “Everything okay?”
Leaning forward, I gripped the back of the chair I’d been sitting in hard enough that it creaked. “I don’t know. But we need to talk.”
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