Final Scream (3 page)

Nick drew his 9mm Glock and split his attention between his unconscious cousin and the patio door. The bullet grazed her right arm, so there was nothing to panic about,
but why did she pass out?
It was really just a scratch.
Was the bullet coated with poison?
He wouldn’t know until the paramedics arrived, but Natalie’s breathing and pulse were both steady, which pretty much ruled out his poison idea. The way he saw it, she would survive in good shape.

His freaked out aunt spoke with the 911 operator as Nick left Natalie and peered out through the patio door’s broken glass. He caught sight of a young Asian man vaulting the next door neighbor’s privacy fence and running hell bent for leather in the direction of the side street a block away.

His Aunt Sue blurted out her address and called to Nick, who bolted for the front door. “The paramedics are on their way!” she yelled.

“Great!” he shouted back as he sprinted for the rented Hummer parked at the curb. His fiancé, Gabriella Wolfe, was behind the wheel. He quickly described the Asian shooter and implored her to capture him. Nick planned to wait for the paramedics to arrive.

Nick wasn’t concerned about Gabriella’s safety.

She was a witch.

And a damned good one.

The shooter didn’t stand a chance of escaping.

The cops showed up minutes before the fire truck and ambulance. A pair of surly detectives pulled out their guns, marched around the back of the house, and entered the family room. By then, Nick knelt beside his still unconscious cousin. The paramedics rolled a gurney to the family room from the front entrance.

“She’s unconscious, even though the bullet merely grazed her,” Nick explained.

The stocky paramedic nodded. “Thank you, sir! We’ll take over from here.”

Nick flashed his FBI identification that FBI Director Rance Osborne had given him when dealing with local law enforcement officers. That official identification would give him access to crime scenes and the authority to direct personnel.

“FBI, huh? Big deal. This is an alleged attempted murder investigation, not a kidnappin’,” the graying La Jolla police detective, Matthew Loughton, blustered.

“This is a matter of national security,” Nick snapped back. Natalie suddenly stirred, and she didn’t appear troubled about her close call with death.

Once the paramedics lifted her onto the gurney, Natalie motioned Nick to her side. “Don’t worry about me, cuz,” she whispered. “Just go out there and find the bastard who shot me.”

“You know I’ll give it my best shot.” He was totally stumped by her hale and hearty appearance. She looked as healthy as a horse.

The paramedics lifted her onto the gurney.

Nick stood. “Where are you taking her?”

“Scripps Memorial Hospital.”

“I'll be there shortly,” Nick said, then spoke to the detectives. “Find anything?”

Loughton smirked. “Only the bullet in the wall behind you.”

The other detective, Kip Sanger, pointed at the oak paneling. “Unfortunately, there’s no bullet in it,” he said.

Their reply sounded like a patronizing cop routine, and Nick didn’t have the time for such nonsense.

“Oh yeah, my bad. There’s a bullet
hole
in the wall, Mister FBI.” Loughton laughed. “Looks like the bullet just disappeared after it hit the wall, unless…”

“Unless what?” Nick demanded irritably.

“Unless you or the lady of the house dug it out.”

“Get out of here right this second, you wiseasses!” Sue Wright fumed.

Sanger smirked at her. “No can do. This is a crime scene now, and we can come and go as we please.”

Sue stomped her foot angrily and looked for assistance from her nephew.

“Leave us alone for a few minutes,” Nick requested calmly.

She harrumphed and tramped into the kitchen.

Nick drew near the leering detectives. “You two heard Mrs. Wright. Beat it, and don’t come back,” he warned them.

Loughton thrust out his square chin. “Just who the fuck are
you
to order La Jolla’s finest around?”

“The FBI, that’s who.”

“Well, we ain’t leavin’, so fuck off.”

A sly grin split Nick’s lips. “Oh, you’re leaving, all right.” He wasn’t exactly a witch or warlock, but he did possess special supernatural powers. His mother had been human, and his father, Hollis Danforth, an outlaw
Destroyer
(evil sorcerer) from Earth’s parallel dimension, Kundze. Nick’s iniquitous sorcerer of a father had been the director of a top-secret government military genetics project in the 70s called
Mortal Eclipse
. His late-father’s prime directive had been to genetically design a super soldier with unearthly abilities to slaughter the enemy behind the battle lines. This was a top secret United States military project. Regrettably, frequent experimental failures produced a host of hideous mutants, several of which were still imprisoned inside the federal Wolf Mountain facility out west. The
Mortal Eclipse
project was eventually shut down and deemed a military failure, but nothing could have been further from the truth.

There had been two successful outcomes.

Before the project ended, Hollis Danforth impregnated his own human wife with his and certain alien DNA without her knowledge, and only six months later she gave birth to disparate twin boys: a seemingly human baby boy named Mark, and a violent, monstrous brute named Thomas, who slayed their mother during its delivery. Two years later, Hollis Danforth considered Mark an experimental failure because he looked human, so he decided to murder the young boy. However, a stranger, Joe Sandlin, intervened on Mark’s behalf and rescued the boy minutes before his father killed him.

This Good Samaritan spirited Mark out of Duneden, Ohio, and drove him all the way to California, where his sister, Joanne Bellamy, happily but illegally adopted Mark as her own. She and her husband renamed their new son Nick to prevent anyone from ever tracing Mark, and they paid handsomely for falsified papers that were used to enroll Nick in school when the time came.

Nick closed his eyes and imagined the two detectives wearing their summer garb, standing on a desolate green mountainside above Anchorage, Alaska. With a quick nod and wide grin, Nick zapped the detectives to that wild location. He opened his eyes. It would be a long hike back to La Jolla, California, from Alaska!

Nick raced after his aunt and caught up with her on the front sidewalk. He told her he had kicked the wiseass out the back door, and she appeared mollified.

Nick hustled back to the family room and inspected the bullet hole in the paneling. At least Loughton was right about one thing: the damned bullet simply vanished after it clipped Natalie. The tip of his little finger explored the small cavity for wetness in case the bullet had been made of ice, but the hole was completely dry. Nick pivoted from the mysterious hole and hoped Gabriella was having better luck with her assignment.

************************

The Hummer 2 squealed onto the side street a block away from Sue Wright’s home. Gabriella immediately spotted a likely candidate for the shooter’s car: a Camaro ZL1parked beneath a Norwalk Island pine. She guided the Hummer forward until it nudged the Camaro’s front bumper, and then ducked out of sight behind a neighbor’s overgrown flowering shrub.

Nick’s fiancée was flat out, knock-dead gorgeous and beguiling. The delicately carved features of her oval face were flawless pearl; the spring frost painted a rosy blush on her cheeks. However, Gabriella was far more than another pretty face. She was a potent sorceress as well.

A brisk ocean breeze ruffled her shoulder length white-blond hair as her translucent indigo eyes studied the tall wooden fence across the street. If she was accurate about the Camaro being the shooter’s car, he should be climbing over it any second now. She swallowed back her escalating fear. Nick usually tackled the dangerous criminals, but since he was obligated to help out his family, the task fell to her.

Gabriella hoped she was up to it. The twenty-something Asian gunman grinned arrogantly as he leaped the final obstacle to a clean getaway. Once he cleared the fence, he strode rapidly toward his Camaro. He was amazed no one had bothered to chase him. What a break! His spirits buoyed.

His smile was steamrolled when he spotted the Hummer touching his Camaro’s front bumper.
What the hell?

The hit man withdrew a strange looking glass gun from his waistband and cautiously advanced toward the sports car. He detected a setup, but his overconfidence overruled his desire to flee and leave the love of his life behind. No, he would tough it out and drive away in his baby.

When he reached out to open the Camaro door, a cute blond popped up from behind a tall shrub.

“Good afternoon,” she said casually, attempting to mask the fluttering butterflies in her stomach.

The shooter raised his gun barrel until it was level with her chest. “Who are you, lady?” the man asked angrily. “Look what you did to my front bumper!”

Gabriella laughed. “If I were you, I’d be worried about what I was going to do to
you
.”

“Who are you, lady?”

She waggled her forefinger at him. “Oh no,
I’ll
do the questioning. This
lady
wants to know who hired you to kill Natalie Wright.”

The Asian was about to fire the glass weapon when he noticed her holding it. The hit man’s bravado sagged. “How … how did you take my gun?”

“Oh, it was nothing, really. Just a little parlor magic,” she replied, honey-coating her reply. She aimed the glass gun barrel at
his
face. “Now answer my question, or I’ll give you a taste of your own medicine.”

The shooter paled. “That’s not a toy, lady. Be careful where you point that thing. It’s dangerous.”

Gabriella’s finger found the ceramic trigger. “You mean this ole popgun?”

The disarmed Asian’s shoulders slumped, and his ego deflated like a flat tire, but he still mulishly declined to answer her question. Somewhere in the depths of his sick mind, a sliver of hope for escape burned.

Gabriella waved her hand, and an invisible force field violently shoved him against the car door and pinned him there. Ribs cracked and blood dribbled from both nostrils while Gabriella waited impatiently for an answer. She didn’t plan to ask the skinny runt again.

“As you can tell, we can do this the easy way, or the painful way. The choice is yours, but you
will
answer my question.”

The hit man shot her a hideous smirk. “Go fuck yourself, lady!”

That did it!
Her patience bottomed out, and his lack of respect tripled her ire. Her curled finger applied more pressure to the trigger, but the glass gun blew up in her hand before she could fire a warning shot over his head.

She threw the trigger aside as a loud air gun hissed behind her. Gabriella instinctively teleported left a few feet, and the musket-ball sized missile that would have struck her hit the Asian shooter’s chest instead. The hit man’s eyes nearly exploded out of their shallow sockets, and he frantically plowed his fingertips into the bleeding wound and probed for the projectile. But he was too late. The pellet’s mysterious contents worked fast, and to Gabriella’s surprise, the shooter slid down the Camaro’s door in a dead heap.

Gabriella nearly hyperventilated at the sight of the corpse, but she retained enough sanity to cast a protective force field spell around her. Only then did she dare turn and look for the person who shot the air gun. But all she saw were a speeding white van’s taillights growing smaller in the distance. Angry, she thrust a spell at the van, and it quickly shrank to the size of a Matchstick Car. Blood erupted in all directions like an exploding crimson skyrocket on the Fourth of July. The driver and air gun shooter were trapped inside when her spell shrank the van, but not their bodies.

Gabriella shifted her distraught gaze to the Asian shooter. His yellow flesh melted quickly, like hot candle wax, leaving his bones exposed to the intense Southern California sun. Suddenly, his molten flesh streamed onto the asphalt, where its smoking acid puddles devoured the pavement and the Camaro’s front tire.

What kind of bullet did that to a person?

Gabriella’s stomach flopped as she watched his throat and chest collapse inward.
How could a single bullet cause such a vile outcome?
Although the sight revolted her, she couldn’t turn away. Her curiosity was fully engaged. After the poor man’s torso and legs finally liquefied, a thick amber gel oozed out the bottom of his dissolved right foot.
What the hell was that stuff?

Gabriella slumped forward, grasped her knees, and tried to stop hyperventilating. What an awful ordeal! She couldn’t help but feel sorry for the Asian hit man, despite him shooting Natalie. It was only natural. Nobody deserved to go through that!

She retreated to the Hummer and started it. Although she didn’t capture the assassin alive, she had done her job. The man would never kill again. And neither would the two in the white van.

As she pulled away from the curb and made a U-turn to head back to the Wright home and pick up Nick, Gabriella mulled over the eccentric glass gun, the equally bizarre bullets, and the grotesque fluid.
Were they all the results of another clandestine defense department venture, like the
Mortal Eclipse
project that created Nick?

If such a renegade needle existed in the Pentagon’s vast haystack, Crow’s supercomputer,
Geronimo
, could most likely locate it. And even if the damned fluid was manufactured by a private sector firm,
Geronimo
stood a better than even chance of hunting it down and identifying it.

Until the supercomputer traced the source of the unusual weapons, it appeared as if all their lives were in jeopardy.

Nick hung out by the curb as Gabriella and the Hummer approached. He jumped inside as soon as she stopped and listened to her strange description of her confrontation with Natalie’s shooter. When she finished, he wrinkled his brows in amazement.

“The blowgun projectile caused the shooter to
melt
?” he asked.

“I guess so. After the bullet struck him, the shooter tried to
dig
it out of his chest, but he was too late,” she explained with a shiver.

“He must’ve known what was coming and tried to stop it.”

“I’ll say.”

Nick nodded his understanding.

“Is Natalie going to be okay?” she asked.

“It appears so,” he replied softly, lost in thought. He told her about the strange bullet hole in the wall.

“No bullet, huh? What do you suppose happened to it?”

“You got me.”

“What if that bullet was similar to the blowgun projectile? Maybe the bullet meant for Natalie crawled out of the wall hole and hid.”

Nick snapped his fingers. “Your theory sounds incredible, but the more I think about the whole attempted murder thing, the more I think magic was somehow involved. Let’s go back and check out the family room.”

But after searching for a half hour, they came up with nothing.

Gabriella grasped his forearm and kissed him lightly. “Nice try, Nick.”

He shot her a cross between a smile and grimace. “Uh huh,” he said absently. “I was sure that you were onto something.”

“So did I, but…” Her hand flew to her lips. “Oh God.”

Nick perked up. “Oh God
what
?”

“What if the bullet found its way back to Natalie while nobody was looking and entered her wound?” she ventured.

Nick chuckled. “Now that’s farfetched. You should have quit while you were behind, dear!”

She slapped his arm. “I suppose my idea does sound implausible, but still…”

“All right, drive me to the hospital, and I’ll check out your premise. This time, I hope you’re wrong.”

“Me, too. So while you’re checking things out, what do I do? Twiddle my thumbs?” she asked with a tinge of hostility.

“No, no. You could get me an appointment for today with Margaret Wentworth, the head of the Oracle Network. I’d be forever grateful,” he answered.

“Nice schmoozing, Bellamy, but I’m not buying it. Why don’t I make the appointment for you
and
me?”

He leaned over and kissed his fiancée hard. “Because you’ve got an important errand to run while I’m meeting with Wentworth.”

She studied him skeptically. “What kind of
errand
?”

“If you get me that appointment, I’ll fill you in then.” He tried to kiss Gabriella again, but all his puckered lips touched were air as she tramped through the house and out the front door. Nick caught up with her after she started the Hummer’s throaty engine.

“Next stop, the hospital,” she announced coolly as the Hummer squealed away from the curb.

************************

Nick sauntered nonchalantly into the Scripps Memorial Hospital lobby as if he was a regular visitor and asked for Natalie Wright at the lobby information desk. The volunteer woman directed him to the surgery waiting room.

He wrinkled his forehead.
Surgery?
For a minor gunshot wound?
Something was way out of whack there, and he planned to get to the bottom of it quickly.

He found his Aunt Sue in the second floor waiting room. He asked her why Natalie was scheduled for surgery for a bullet graze.

“I … I don’t know, Nick. It never occurred to me to ask,” she said, tears welling up in her eyes.

“Why aren’t you with her?”

Sue was near hysteria. “The doctor insisted that Natalie be taken to isolation immediately upon her arrival, so of course she can’t have any visitors. Is something wrong?”

“Probably not.” Nick patted his aunt’s hand. “Just wait here while I look for her doctor. I’ll get to the bottom of this.” Nick had no trouble locating the nurse’s station, and he demanded to see Natalie’s doctor. Since none of the nurses had Natalie’s chart yet, they didn’t know where she was. Isolation was a large area.

He stepped aside, closed his eyelids, and launched a
virtual search
of the isolation floor up one level. It was one of his many magical gifts resulting from his father’s secret
Mortal Eclipse
Project
. The older Nick became, the more magical abilities were revealed. He hated them.
Really hated them.
They reminded him that he wasn’t human. He much preferred to use his cleverness and Glock to solve national security cases, but Fate had decided otherwise for his late twin Thomas and him.

He easily located her in a room directly above him. A myriad of tubes protruded from her left forearm, and several round electrode patches were placed on her upper body to monitor her heart rate.

Nick called back his supernatural roamers. He was more bewildered than before. When the EMTs wheeled Natalie out of the house earlier, she looked to be in good spirits and healthy.
So why the heart monitoring?

He quickly exited the nurses’ station, ducked into an empty patient room, and teleported himself to Natalie’s bedside. Nick was about to check his sleeping cousin’s vitals when a heavyset nurse yanked the sliding cloth curtain aside and glared angrily at him.

“How in the dickens did you get in here?” she demanded with a practiced scowl.

“The nurses downstairs said it was all right to visit her. They even told me where she was. It’s important that I speak to her surgeon before she is taken to the OR,” he declared. “Either that, or this young woman leaves with me without surgery.”

The nurse gripped the clipboard so tightly that Nick thought it might shatter as she contemplated his request.

“I’m not kidding, Nurse,” he added.

“Okay, I’ll go look for him.” She trundled back to the large desk in the Pre-Op area, picked up a wall phone, and spoke rapidly into it. Soon, a middle aged, balding man wearing green scrubs jogged around the corner, spoke with the livid nurse, rushed into the cubicle, and offered Nick his hand. “Doctor Preston. Now what’s this I hear about you taking Miss Wright out of here before I can save her life?” he challenged.

Nick was astounded. “Save her life? That’s a good one, Doc. All she has is a flesh wound in her left arm,” he reminded the doctor.

Preston shook his head and looked up at the taller Nick. “That’s hardly the case now. What she has is a woody fungus that resembles a knotted tangle of wicker on the X-rays. It spread like wildfire up her wounded arm to her shoulder, and if I don’t amputate that arm within the next twenty minutes, the fungus will spread to her heart and kill her.”

“How the hell did it get in her arm from a graze?”

Doctor Preston shouted at one of the charge nurses to bring him Miss Wright’s X-rays. A moment later, he clipped an X-ray on the wall-mounted light box. “As you can plainly see, that wicker looking clump is growing fast. From what I can tell, it bore a hole into the bullet graze and, for lack of a better word,
sprouted
there.”

The size of the entry wound in Natalie’s arm matched the circumference of the empty bullet hole in the family room paneling. Gabriella’s moving bullet theory proved correct, no matter how ridiculous it had sounded. The woody fungus must have sprouted tendrils that carried it across the floor, where it burrowed into Natalie’s wound. The X-ray revealed the spreading fungus tendrils were closing in on her armpit. Their next invasion would be the heart and one lung.

Doctor Preston shook a clear plastic envelope and held it up to the light so they could both examine a slice of the mysterious fungus. Once light fell upon the sample, its tendrils wriggled like small squid tentacles.

“Jesus!” Nick exclaimed, stepping back. He’d never seen anything like it before, and he’d witnessed some weird monsters and spells spanning his career with the FBI’s
Orion Sector
and NNC. He asked Doctor Preston if he could borrow that fungus sample so the FBI could run it through their lab (which was a white lie; he would give it to his partner Crow to be processed in NNC’s ultramodern, underground Ohio laboratory).

The doctor gingerly gave it to Nick, glad to be rid of it.

He hurriedly stuffed the X-rays back into the envelope. “Convinced?”

Nick nodded absently. “Yes, I’m convinced that Natalie needs to have her arm amputated as soon as possible.”

“Thank you. May we take her now?” Doctor Preston asked sardonically.

“Absolutely—but I’d like to make one suggestion before you begin?”

Preston crossed his arms. “Okay,” he replied warily.

“Don’t cut my cousin open until you have a flamethrower in the room. I wouldn’t want that wicker fungus to escape and go after you and your operating room staff.”

Preston’s eyes grew to pool balls. “So you believe we’re in danger, huh? I don’t necessarily agree with your assessment, but I’ll humor you. I’ll order a flamethrower stat!” He turned and raced out of Natalie’s isolation room.

Nick tracked the directional wall signs back to the surgery waiting area, where he found his aunt sitting on pins and needles. He lowered himself into an adjacent seat, explained that Natalie developed a serious infection in her wound, and that Doctor Preston had to operate immediately before the infection spread any further. Sue bought his ambiguous story lock, stock, and barrel.

Nick excused himself once again and bolted from the waiting area. When he was safely out of earshot outside the main lobby, he phoned Crow and described the mysterious, wicker-like brown fungus.

“I’m patching
Geronimo
into our conversation.” There was a pause and a click. “Okay, shoot, Great White Hunter. Any other issues besides the fungus?”

Nick described Natalie’s visit to the Oracle Network offices, reiterated the weird actions of the aggressive wicker fungus, and informed them about Gabriella’s terrifying experience with the melting Asian assassin and the shrinking getaway van. Crow listened without throwing in his customary wisecracks.

When Nick’s narrative ended, Crow whistled. “
Geronimo
, what do you think of all that?”

“My first response would normally be to test your blood alcohol level, Nick Bellamy,” the sassy supercomputer quipped.

Nick was well acquainted with
Geronimo’s
sarcasm. “
Very
funny.”

Geronimo
continued. “What you described is an impossibility. There have been no scientific discoveries corresponding with the aggressive fungus you have described.”

“Well, Know-it-all, I just happen to have a sample of it in my pocket. Care to examine it?”

“My recommendation is to destroy it immediately—preferably by fire. If that sample should escape during shipment to
Old Mother Hubbard’s
, it would pose a realistic threat to mankind’s sustained existence. If that transpired, then I would have to communicate with myself to prevent me from becoming irrelevant.”

Old Mother Hubbard’s
was the name of NNC’s secret operations and intelligence center in Southeast Ohio. Their headquarters was nestled deep beneath the surface in an abandoned missile silo situated on a top secret, government real estate parcel, codenamed
Bobcat Run
.
Bobcat Run
remained a secure military area in the center of the Wayne National Forest outside Marietta, Ohio, even though the facility was abandoned in the late 1970s. Rance Osborne, the FBI Director, called in several congressional favors three years ago, and Uncle Sam clandestinely footed the costly bill for modernizing and equipping the forty-year-old white elephant with the most advanced electronics and security equipment. Thus, NNC’s CIC, Computer Intelligence Center, had been born.

“Okay, you convinced me, Geronimo. I’ll burn the stuff. But I still wish you’d look at it first,” Nick replied sullenly.

“I understand your position, but it’s much too dangerous.”

“Yeah, I got that,” Nick grumbled.
Geronimo’s
haughty attitude was getting under his skin.

Crow noticed it, too, and quickly changed the subject. “Where did that stuff come from? Outer space?”

“You got me. Ask the almighty computer,” Nick muttered angrily, refusing to explain his belief that the fungus was magical in nature. Let
Geronimo’s
disappointed curiosity burn out a few circuits.

Crow realized Nick wasn’t about to be mollified so easily. “I have that intel on the Oracle Network, Jack Brunnel, and Margaret ‘Maggie’ Wentworth you asked for.”

“The network’s CEO and president,” Nick added. “Fire away, Crow.”

“I’m skipping their bios;
Geronimo
already emailed them to you.
Geronimo
hacked Oracle’s private emails and discovered that Wentworth was the one who insisted that Terror Island be the location for this year’s
Final Scream
reality show. She told Jack Brunnel in no uncertain terms that she firmly believed the island location would boost their poor ratings for last year’s fiasco in Scotland.”

“
Final Scream—Mystic Marsh
?”

“That’s the one. The marsh property encompassed three ancient cemeteries, two bogs, and the ruins of a haunted castle.”

“That sounds like a scary setting to me.”

“But the contestants and the show’s writers were boring and unimaginative,”
Geronimo
offered. “The production staff’s scripted scares managed to elicit one scream all season long. The show’s viewers got antsy and voiced their complaints on various social media sites on a regular basis until many of them abandoned ship and became
ex-viewers
.”

Nick chuckled. “I’ll bet
Final Scream’s
advertisers loved that.”

“Oh yeah,” Crow interjected sarcastically. “The big boys loved the ratings drop so much that they bailed on the show at midseason.”

“So I wonder what Wentworth saw in Terror Island that made her so hot-to-trot to choose it? For that matter, how did she ever find the place? There are thousands of islands around there.”

“Rumor has it she never saw the place in person.”

“You’re kidding me?”