Lost Cargo (27 page)

But Lexie must have heard the soft sound, too, because she went the other way, slipped inside the closet and peered around the door, frantically gesturing at him to join her. There was no way he could leave her by herself. He silently swore, squeezed in beside her, and left the door ajar since they’d found it that way.

The walk-in closet turned out to be surprisingly large. Jane Fogg was a packrat who’d jammed it with coats, hats, boots, weathered luggage with stickers from foreign airports, a small dresser, umbrellas, and other flotsam and jetsam, but the suitcases bore claw marks and the coats had been ripped from their hangers. So many clothes lay at the back of the closet that they couldn’t see the floor. The cat had disappeared.

He stiffened at another faint sound from the balcony. Sleet hit the windows and gusted across the floor.

A terrible shape moved behind the drapes. When the storm gusted again, the shape came through the billowing fabric into the room. Past a lamp, brushing it aside like doll furniture. Glass tinkled as the blub shattered on the floor. Past the shadowy chairs, dwarfing the couch and tables.

The drapes floated outside again. Travis held his breath. The creature’s blank eyes didn’t seem to see them. In the next moment her crablike gloves rose to her collar. Going to open the cape, his terrified mind rattled. Going to uncover the body she’d been hiding for days.

The creature squatted by the couch and gurgled deep in her throat. Then in some unearthly sorcery, the cape itself began to swell. It bulged near her head. Folds and creases smoothed themselves out like hot wax. Fleshy buttons grew to the size of mushrooms and dissolved into underlying flesh. Buttonholes shrank, became shallow dimples, and disappeared as fleshy seams strained and bubbled away. Skin that mimicked cloth rippled into mounds of muscle. The edges of the pretend collar oozed into huge shoulders. Fat fingers merged together as her hands disappeared.

Her arms changed shape, grew longer, swept back.

She grew a fan-shaped tail.

The alien gurgled again. Thousands of tiny bumps erupted from the uppermost membrane of skin. The bumps lengthened into ridges. More ridges appeared out of the spines of the ridges, thousands upon thousands, dividing and growing, until the creature writhed with transformation.

The ridges sharpened. Long quills emerged. Layers of gray feathers formed. Broad wings sprouted from impossible shoulders. The half-formed creature flexed her claws, still growing, swelling over eight feet high.

Her skull shrank, lost its forehead, became a stump.

Beady eyes formed behind a sharp bill.

She grew the breast of a great bird, a broad breast covered with dusky, slate-colored feathers.
A hawk
, he thought, stunned. Her scaled legs and murderous claws fit her new shape. When her bone structure completed itself, she flapped her long wings, hopped on the couch, and sank her claws in the cushions. As her final feathers emerged, the last pieces of the puzzle fell into place.

That’s how she flew to the housetops. She grew wings. I couldn’t see in the dark
.

Jane Fogg, the real one, the adventurous birder, must have stumbled on the terrible creature after she photographed the crash, or the creature pursued her, chased her through the trees, killed her, assumed her identity, and kept little bits of her memory, enough to figure out where she lived. It moved into her home and took her name and her clothes and her life. So far it had mimicked her with great success, a bad version of a human being in a city where strangers didn’t look twice at each other.

And the thing must have come across a gray hawk in Rock Creek Park, or killed one. Mesmerized, Travis stared at the monstrous imitation in front of him. What else had she killed? He couldn’t bear to think about Ian’s fate.

The creature gurgled. More tiny feathers spread across her head. Maybe, just maybe, if they were quiet, she would leave the way she came, fly on her terrible wings down the side of the building into the night.

The cat hissed behind them, knocked over a small suitcase, and bolted out of the closet. The alien whipped her head in their direction and made a low, reedy shriek.

“No, damn it, no,” Travis shouted. He slammed the door and shoved the dresser over. All the air seemed to leave the closet. Seconds later, the door shook with a bone-jarring thud. He pulled the string for the light and a bare bulb clicked on overhead, lighting up the terror in their eyes.

“Oh, my God,” Lexie gasped.

Another horrible thud hit. The door trembled. When it shuddered again, Travis braced himself against the dresser. He was completely inadequate to stop what was going to happen. The pecking began. Merciless, relentless pecking, pecking, pecking the door. The cruel beak broke through, splitting the grain, coming after them.

Peck, peck, peck, coming to peck you to death
.

“Help me hold the door,” he shouted.

“I’m trying!” Lexie screamed, striking the beak with a boot.

The door groaned. “It’s going to get me first,” Travis said between his teeth. “And whatever happens next, I’ll be waiting for you on the other side.”

“Travis, no.”

The door split open. They both screamed. The horrible bird head forced itself through the split, stabbing at the wood, stabbing at the air, stabbing at their arms, stab, stab, stab. Splinters flew. The split widened. The head pressed in, one heartless yellow eye staring at them, and then the shattered door fell away. The monster blotted out the light in a mass of gray feathers and beating wings as she squeezed her flesh inside.

Lexie screamed and threw herself under the hanging clothes into the farthest part of the closet, but with another sudden shriek, she disappeared feet first through the floor. The beak stabbed again. Just as the creature forced her whole body into the closet, Travis rolled after Lexie and landed in a pile of boots below, jarring his teeth and smashing his shoulder. They’d fallen to the eighth floor.

Incredibly, they found themselves in another dark closet jammed with coats and suitcases. The bird head burst through the ceiling snapping her beak. They scrambled to their feet, jammed a chair under the doorknob, and ran through a living room Travis immediately recognized. A wall hanging with three elephants hung above overturned lamps, ripped furniture, and smashed Hindu sculptures. Gupta’s place.

Lurid lights flashed across the walls. Travis wheeled around to the window. A tow truck was pulling a car away from the hydrant.

He grabbed Lexie’s arm. “There goes your car.”

The closet doorknob shook.

“It’s in the closet,” Lexie gasped.

They fled the condo as the closet door gave way. Down the long hall, past walls of locked doors, toward the elevator. As they ran toward an ornate mirror, they could see the alien coming after them, beak outstretched, gigantic wings sweeping the walls. Around a corner, around a second corner. Their lives were dwindling to a few fragile seconds. Travis wrenched off his shoe, threw it down the stairwell, and pulled Lexie into the empty trash room, clasping his hand over her mouth, terrified to let the air out of his lungs, terrified the thing would sense his pounding pulse. The trash room was a miserable, lightless closet that stank of grime, old newspapers, and disinfectant. Enveloped in darkness, he held her close and watched the slit of light under the door.

The shoe tumbled down the stairs.

Then silence.

A low gurgle.

Claws moved past the door.

Don’t move
.

Metal hinges groaned. The creature had fallen for it. Heavy wings rustled. Another low reedy sound. Looking for them down the stairwell. The stairwell door shut with a heavy click. Seconds later, a distant purling shriek sounded as the creature flew down to the floors below.

Travis met Lexie’s eyes. “The elevator,” he whispered. “Lisa and Ian’s car is in the garage.”

They cracked the metal door to an empty hall and crept to the elevator under the glaring lights. Travis pressed the button, a soft bell pinged, and to his relief the doors slid back. Once the heavy doors closed, their frightened, disheveled images filled the mirrored walls. He pulled up her coat’s bloody sleeve. The creature had ripped open the muscles in her arm.

“We’ve got to get you out of here,” he said.

“You should have helped me all along, helped me get more photos, gone back with me. None of this would have happened to us, none of it.”

“I was going to call the cops tonight,” he said. “I had this whole plan to set her up. That’s why I came in here by myself. Nobody was going to get hurt. That was the main thing, to be smart about it, to outthink her. I thought I had the condo where she was hiding, but I was wrong. I didn’t know she broke through to another floor.”

“Why didn’t you tell me that?”

“I couldn’t take a chance it would go wrong.”

“Everything went wrong, Travis.”

“Where’s your cell phone?” he asked her.

“I left everything in the condo. All I have is the camera.”

He took the camera bag off her shoulder and pulled the tracker from his coat. The tracker changed in his hand. Light glimmered across the surface for twenty seconds and died out.

“What’s that?” She pushed her hair back with a bloody hand.

“I stole this from the black triangle,” he said. “I think it’s a tracking device, some kind of a
GPS
, but something happened to it. It should show us where she’s hiding if I can get it to work again.”

“I thought you were making that up. I didn’t believe you.”She reached out to steady herself and smeared blood all over the brass rail.

When he put his arms around her, she leaned against him and squeezed her eyes shut. “I don’t want to fight with you,” he said. Whatever stood between them, with a nightmare outside the doors, it didn’t matter anymore. The elevator began to descend.

The bell gave a soft ping when they reached the lowest level. Travis felt his heart turn over, but he couldn’t do anything about the sound. Seconds later, the doors slid open with a mechanical hum and threw a rectangular patch of yellow light across the gloomy concrete floor. The garage was bigger than he’d expected. Cavernous. Dark windshields as far as he could see. The ceiling was so low it gave him an irrational urge to duck. Anything could be hiding behind the pillars.

The elevator doors slid shut. Deep quiet settled over the garage.

The painted numbers on the parking spaces matched the condos, but where did Lisa and Ian park their car? Then he thought he saw their silver Honda by the far wall and began to cross the long corridor with Lexie. He kept his arm around her and wondered how much blood she’d lost.

Their shadows lengthened and shortened under the fluorescent lights. They were less than fifty feet from the car now. The quiet magnified the scuffs of their shoes and became so oppressive it seemed to take on a life of its own. Deeper shadows lay between the cars.

Travis braced himself, expecting the creature to spring out at any moment, but the quiet only grew. Twenty feet from the Honda. He was right, he realized with frightened relief. The condo number was on the concrete. He could see the university parking decal in the window, Ian’s travel mug from Barnes and Noble in the front, and Lisa’s hunter green fleece jacket where she’d tossed it over the seat. Ten feet away, he unlocked the car. The orange parking lights flashed as the door locks popped open.

They got in and locked the doors.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said, starting the engine. He shook the tracker, still hoping it would work, but the device glimmered and went out.

Headlights off, he crawled toward the second level. The walls amplified the low rumble of the engine. Maybe the alien would fly into the windshield or rush from behind a car, but as he peered into the shrouded light, he had a wild thought. The alien couldn’t be in the garage. She would have heard the elevator, heard them cross the floor, heard the car start.

She had to be in the stairwell. She didn’t come down this far.

“We’re going to make it,” he said. “We’re going to get out of here.”

Lexie reached for the rearview mirror and smeared blood on the ceiling. First thing out of here, he was going to get her to a doctor, the nearest damn one, ice storm or no ice storm.

“You’ll be all right,” he reassured her. “We’re going to a hospital.”

They drove on through a floor full of dull concrete pillars. The ramp rose. He followed the incline, crossed another deserted corridor, and reached the street level. A whole building full of people and nobody was awake. They would be outside soon. He could almost smell the fresh night air.

Lexie threw her hands on the dashboard.

“Stop, there’s a pillar,” she shouted.

Thrown off guard, he slammed on the brakes. He could see it now, a squat concrete pillar like every other pillar holding up the low ceiling, but it was in the wrong place, in the middle of the corridor. He stared at the pillar’s rusted metal hardware, the pitted indentations in the concrete sides, the stained top. It made no sense for a pillar to be there. Rows of cars on the other side continued all the way to the elevator.

“We’re blocked in,” Lexie said.

“The way out must have been to the side,” he said. “Some drunks must have parked there and everybody parked around them. Or we missed the exit.”

She shook her head. “There’s only one ramp. We didn’t miss anything.”

“We’re screwed then. We can’t get around it.”

“The elevator’s on the other side. It’s not that far.”

He looked at her. “You mean get out of the car.”

“The alien’s not down here,” she said. “We can make it to the lobby and call 911 and run out through the front of the building.”

“We’ll have to get out of the car.”

“We have no choice,” she said.

Travis knew she was right, but he dreaded taking her out of the safety of the car. The upholstery where she was sitting was soaked with blood. He pulled into a parking space, made sure the windows were up, and put the car in park. The car didn’t have anything he could use as a weapon, so he slipped the camera bag over his shoulder. The lenses gave the bag some weight. He could throw it in the thing’s face if she came at them.