Bloodletting (17 page)

"I smell smoke," he whispered when he climbed back in. The closing door brought it to Begay's attention as well.

They drove slowly. Even the soft grinding of sand under their tires was uncomfortably loud. Eventually, the house emerged from the darkness, and beside it the smokehouse. There were no lights on in the house, and barely a faint glow seeping through the cracks between the slats in the old smokehouse.

"You try the front door," Begay whispered. He allowed the truck to coast to a halt to save the flash of red from the rear. He eased down the emergency brake, and left the engine idling. "I'll go right for the smokehouse."

Benally handed him the bolt-cutters from the floorboard and silently opened the door. He drew his gun before he even reached the wooden porch.

Begay slipped out the other side and ran at a crouch toward the smokehouse. The weak glare flickered, causing the shadows from the shrubs to shift on the ground like living things. When he reached the outbuilding, he pressed his back flat against its face and watched Kent join Benally at the front door. His partner raised a fist and knocked softly.

Time passed with a gust of wind and the yipping of a startled coyote in the distance.

Benally knocked again. Harder.

Still no answer.

Benally stepped away from the door and gave Begay an exaggerated shrug of his shoulders.

Begay nodded, lined up the bolt-cutters, and snipped the lock. The clash of metal made the sound of a bullet ricocheting from a highway sign. He quickly removed the lock and cast it aside. Deep breath in. Steady the nerves. He jerked the door open with his left hand and drew his pistol with his right. A fire blazed straight ahead, built from compressed mesquite pellets in a brick stove. Smoke swirled across his vision and rushed past him through the open door. There were shadows but no movement. The salty smell of a ham shank. He coughed and entered the room, treading carefully on the dirt floor, which was slick with liquefied fats. All around him the clapping of droplets dripping into metal buckets, scattered around him on the ground.

The smoke was trapped above against the roof, nearly impregnable. He fanned at it with his free hand. The vague outlines of dark shapes took form, suspended from the rafters. Unfastening the MagLite from his utility belt, he clicked it on and pointed it up into the smoke.

"Á´nt'ï," he gasped, dropping the light to grasp his gun in both hands.

The MagLite rolled away, spotlighting a churning circle of smoke.

"Benally!" he shouted, backing out of the smokehouse. "Benally! Call it in! Call it--!"

There was pressure on his neck, and then it passed. Acute pain rose in its stead. He felt warmth on his chest, heard the patter of fluid on dirt. The gun fell to the ground and his hands sought his throat, fluid sluicing through his fingers. There was a high-pitched screaming sound he realized too late was his panicked inhalations through his opened trachea.

He turned around and staggered out the door. The earth tilted from side to side and he collapsed to his knees, struggling with both hands to hold the wide wound closed.

He saw two boots on the ground before him, the rush of blood from his neck spattering them, turning the dust to mud.

A hand grabbed the back of his shirt collar and yanked him forward, slamming his face into the dirt. Sand filled his eyes and his arms fell to his sides as he was dragged back into the smokehouse. The shifting light from the fire faded and a wet tearing sound trailed him into the cold darkness.

VIII

Rocky Mountain Regional Computer Forensics Laboratory

Centennial, Colorado

Marshall drained the last of the coffee and cracked a Mountain Dew. He was really onto something now. He hadn't been this excited about his work in as long as he could remember. Granted, he was truly saddened by the fact that so many children had died to unlock this mystery, but the challenge was exhilarating. Stumbling upon the animal genes had been a stroke of luck, a product of essentially throwing up his arms in exasperation, a coincidence no less monumental than Newton sitting under the right fruit tree in the exact right place at precisely the right moment. This was science beyond his wildest imagination. He had isolated the specific loci on the chromosomes that had been altered, and now it was time to figure out their function.

"Hey," he called over his shoulder, holding up his broken mug. "Who's on refill duty?"

The lab behind him was dark and empty. He looked up at the clock on the wall. 10:28 p.m.

"Damn," he whispered. How long had he been sitting there alone?

He set the mug down again and adjusted his position in the chair in an attempt to relieve some of the pressure on his bladder.

On the screen before him was a map of the third chromosome, breaking down the known function of each locus on the strand. Perhaps the specific performance of each locus wasn't clearly defined, but anomalies at certain points could be attributed to the manifestation of disease processes. Thousands of individual base protein pairs combined in helical fashion to form a locus, seemingly random combinations of Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine, and Thymine that when taken as a whole produced quantifiable genetic expression. At the 3p14 locus, abnormalities could produce the condition of nyctalopia, night blindness. In the case of Jasmine Rivers, she now possessed the genes of a timber wolf. What could a wolf offer at that particular point on the chromosome that Jasmine wouldn't have had otherwise?

"Night vision," he said aloud. "No freaking way."

Unfortunately, now that she was dead, there was no real way of knowing. Of course, they could always dissect her eyes and evaluate the shapes and density of the rods and cones in her retinas, but even that wouldn't be conclusive without further testing.

He tapped the mouse and switched to the map of the twelfth chromosome. At the 12q11 locus, Jasmine's DNA had been replaced by that of a northern short-tailed shrew, a small gray rodent roughly four inches in length, with the notable distinction of being one of the only venomous mammals on the planet. Mutations at the 12q11 locus could trigger abnormalities of the endocrine glands: hyperthyroidism, hyperpituitarism, and all nature of glandular disorders leading to the overproduction of hormones. The northern short-tailed shrew produced specialized neurotoxins released through its salivary glands capable of stunning predators ten times its size with its bite, and though it was small, it was fast and aggressive. Was it possible her salivary glands had been stimulated to produce venom, or had her numerous endocrine glands been altered to produce staggering growth akin to Grave's Disease or acromegaly? Were her hormones now capable of driving her into fits of aggression? There were so many possibilities. Then there was the eleventh chromosome, and seemingly the strangest alteration of all. It had been changed at the 11q21-q22 loci to reflect the DNA of the black bear. That was where significant abnormalities led to deficiencies in the release of melatonin, the natural chemical agent secreted in the brain to regulate the body's sleep cycle. Could variations in the amount and composition of the chemical lead to over- or under-production, sleep deprivation or hibernation? Again, there was no way of understanding without being able to make a guinea pig out of a girl who was already deceased.

So what were they looking at here? An overly aggressive little girl capable of seeing clearly in the dark and staying up for days at a time? A venomous human predator designed to hunt at night and then disappear into a state of hibernation for months at a time? There were more possibilities than he cared to contemplate, including the off-chance that he might be wrong about the whole thing. Precious little made any sort of coherent sense. The only fact in which he had any confidence was that the retrovirus hadn't attacked the chromosomes at random. It had been genetically engineered to pinpoint specialized loci on specific chromosomes to produce the desired effect, but what exactly was that effect? The most troubling part about this mess was that this wasn't the kind of experiment someone could formulate on paper, feed into a virus, and expect to come out as planned. This was a process of trial and error, a carefully monitored test conducted over many, many years by someone with the kind of inhuman patience it took to wait more than a decade to evaluate his results. How long ago had this bizarre experiment begun? How many people had been unknowingly subjected to this retrovirus in various incarnations?

That brought him back to the girls. In scrutinizing their medical records, he had learned that all of them had been seen at an after-hours Children's Hospital clinic in northwestern Denver between March 14th, 1997 and January 8th, 1998. Each had been treated for an aggressive RSV lung infiltrate, but the drug with which they'd been treated was absent from their records. Each had had several follow-up appointments that demonstrated the infiltrates had been resolved. What struck Marshall as odd was that the parents had consented to allow their daughters to be treated by an unknown drug, forcing him to evaluate them. They had all been rural, lower-income families, suggesting by inference lower intelligence. That was a somewhat judgmental stretch of logic, but an assumption under which he was comfortable working. That implied a willingness to allow the doctors to perform their healing magic without argument or question.
Just do whatever you have to do
, he could remember his own mother saying at his childhood appointments. He cringed at the thought, remembering long needles and cans of pressurized liquid nitrogen.

Of course, a rural upbringing often led to a rural adulthood, meaning the odds of the children moving too far, or into a larger city where they could become lost, were small. The girls could be fairly easily monitored. Only Ashlee Porter had moved from her childhood home, and even then, only forty-some miles to the north to Cheyenne, Wyoming.

But why girls? What differences between the sexes would make one more valuable than the other? Males were better equipped to handle a possible increase in aggression, but both were ultimately at the mercy of their genes. It wasn't as though one sex was more susceptible to the expression of mutation than another. Besides, neither the X nor the Y sex chromosomes had been affected. Males were more likely to spread their seed far and wide. Females were more protective and nurturing when it came to their young.

Marshall could feel he was onto something there, but couldn't quite grasp it.

And then there was their age. If his assumption of the source of exposure was correct, then all four were exposed within a ten month span, and each carefully selected. None had been the exact same age: the youngest only six months old and the eldest fourteen months. All had been exsanguinated and butchered between eleven and thirteen years of age.

Marshall slowed his thoughts and took a swig from the Dew.

"Puberty," he said, brow furrowed.

What was the significance? Increased levels of hormones coursing through the blood, the ability to reproduce and pass along the genetic alterations, ovulation, menstruation.

Physical changes.

"Holy shit."

Development of breasts, widening of the hips, changes in contour and the chemical composition of the brain. These little girls were on the precipice of womanhood, their bodies beginning an almost butterfly-like physical metamorphosis.

"They were starting to express their genes," he gasped, knocking the Mountain Dew onto the keyboard. He turned it upside down, shook out the fluid, and left it face down with the cursor going nuts on the screen.

Jasmine Rivers had been the youngest, and the only one whose entire body had been found. It was possible she had only just reached menarche and had yet to begin to show her newly expressed phenotypes. Only various portions of the other girls had turned up. What would they have found had they been able to examine Ashlee Porter's head? Had her appearance changed or were there chemicals in her brain someone didn't want tested? Was it possible she'd developed unusual salivary glands or nocturnal habits? All of them had been robbed of their blood so no one could find or isolate the retrovirus. Yet the various parts had been left so that they would be found and studied. They were calling cards meant to torment someone who would know what they meant, but who could do nothing about it.

Whoever did this was taunting them, letting them know that he was capable of manipulating the retrovirus, custom-tailoring it to individual preferences and exposing his victims in what should have been the safest of all environments. Telling them that this was only just the beginning. Showing them that he could reach any person at any time.

Marshall was suddenly well aware of the fact that he was alone in the dark building.

He thought of little girls with the ability to see in the dark and saw images of larger things that could do the same, venomous things that never had to sleep, and turned on his radio to hear any voice other than the one inside his head.

IX

Flagstaff, Arizona

Ellie sat on the edge of the bed, flipping from one channel to the next. Each of the local affiliates showed the same footage from slightly different angles, the reporters preaching doom and gloom, doing their best to incite irrational fear in their viewers. Despite their efforts, there was no solid information to purvey. All any of them knew was that multiple bodies had been discovered in shallow graves in the middle of nowhere. Not how many or their precise condition. Just that the victims appeared mummified, though not in a classic Universal kind of way. They bandied about words like "serial killer" and "mass murderer," but she found herself unable to clearly focus. She chewed unconsciously on a meal she couldn't even taste until she found her hands empty and no longer knew what to do with them.

Twenty-four hours ago she had been thirty-five thousand feet over Mexico, preparing to descend into what promised to be the discovery of her career. Now, here she sat in a motel room occupied by the FBI, a dozen feet from a man she had once loved but to whom she hadn't so much as spoken in years, trying not to think about her former professor, whose violent death was merely an aside to the chaos in the desert. What had the world come to that the tragedy of death was weighed in numbers? No longer did entire societies gather to mourn and remember a single individual, parading his body through the town, displaying his remains for all to celebrate his life and achievements. The deceased were now hurriedly interred in an effort to rush their loved ones down some sort of grief checklist on the schedule of a funeral home run by slick men who profited from the dead, shysters with an eternal stream of clients they could take advantage of in their weakest, most vulnerable moment.