Savage (19 page)

She continued to think, going through countless scenarios, but nothing really felt right. They were all easily picked apart.

“This is why Doc Martin is our best bet,” she said. “She can take a look at the specimen we have, and maybe we can learn something.”

She looked through the windshield to see where they were and saw that they weren't that far from the center of town.

“We'll head by her place first,” Sidney said. “If she's not there, she might still be at the hospital and—”

“There's someplace we have to go first,” Cody said, staring straight ahead.

“Someplace first?” Sidney questioned. “Where?”

Rich was leaning over in the seat, waiting for the answer.

“The marina,” Cody said. “We're going to pick up my dad.”

Sidney was going to argue but quickly realized if she did, she'd sound like a total bitch. Of course he wanted to pick up his dad.

“Yeah, good idea,” she said, nodding in agreement. “And then we'll go get mine.”

Doc Martin pulled the clear plastic shield down over her face and picked up the rotary bone saw from the table.

She remembered how her staff, Sidney included, had laughed when she'd told them that she wanted to invest in the equipment.

“What the heck for?” Sidney had asked. “Are we going to be filming
CSI: Benediction
here?

They'd all had a good chuckle, but then Doc Martin bought it anyway. One never knew when a good necropsy might be in order. And even though she already had adequate tools for the job, an electric bone saw was just so damn sexy.

Now it would prove its weight in gold.

“
CSI: Benediction
my ass,” she said, hefting the saw in her rubber-gloved hands. She flipped the switch to on, and the battery-operated motor hummed softly.

“Sorry about this, big guy,” she said as she leaned over and touched the spinning blade to the side of Bear's head.

She couldn't help but remember Bear when he was alive, a gentle giant of a dog. Even as a puppy, he was huge, and she used to joke that he must have been given some sort of growth hormone or been exposed to nuclear radiation to grow the way he did. There had been talk among the office staff of charging for rides on the huge mastiff's back at the next school fair.

But the good memories were warped with the recollection of the usually gentle giant attempting to tear out her throat.

Doc Martin chose to believe that it wasn't Bear's fault at all, that something else—some unknown malady—was responsible.

A malady that she was hoping to discover and perhaps be able to cure.

The circular cuts around the dog's skull finally met end to beginning, the acrid smell of burning bone and blood filling the air of the cramped operating room space. She leaned over and flicked a switch to turn on the ceiling fan to suck out the lingering dust and odor, again grateful that the emergency gas-powered generator had kicked in as it was supposed to.

She set the bloody saw down on the metal table beside her and reached over to peel the layer of fur and skin away from the dog's head to expose the skull. Doc Martin then grabbed a thin chisel and hammer from the tools on a stainless-steel tray. Leaning over the dog's corpse again, she wedged the end of the chisel into the bloody line around Bear's skull and gently tapped it with the hammer. She did that all around the dog's skull until the bone cap lifted with a wet sucking sound.

“All right then,” she muttered as she set her tools and the skull cap down upon the instrument table. “Let's have a look.”

At first perusal the brain looked fine. Doc Martin touched the tips of her fingers on each of the cerebral hemispheres; they were squishy, spongelike, just as they were supposed to be. Carefully she reached down into the skull with both hands and gently lifted the brain so that she could see beneath it.

An icy cold finger of dread raced up her spine as she saw it.

“What is this?” she asked herself.

To the untrained eye it would have looked like just another part of the brain, but Doc Martin knew better.

It appeared to be some kind of growth. A tumor perhaps. She leaned in for a closer look, noticing the tendrils that spread out from the mass to other parts of the brain. Remembering the silvery sheen that covered Bear's right eye, she paid special attention to the occipital lobe and saw that it was permeated with thin, capillary-like growths that appeared to weave together to form a thicker connection that disappeared into the gray matter.

Doc Martin tugged slightly on the brain, pulling it farther back from the front of the skull to observe the optic nerve. The thick, silvery tendrils were completely wrapped around the sight nerve leading to the dog's right eye. It reminded her of an old telephone cord—before phones were cordless and could fit in your pocket.

The doctor was stumped. In her many years as a veterinarian she had never seen anything like this.

Setting the brain back down inside the skull, she turned her attention to the mastiff's right eye, still hanging from its socket. She gently lifted the orb, holding it between forefinger and thumb, and looked directly into it.

She was shocked to see the pupil suddenly dilate beneath the shiny membrane, opening and closing, reminding her of the lens of a camera as it tried to focus.

“How is this possible?” she muttered. The dog was dead; there shouldn't have been any activity in the eye, or any other part of the animal for that matter. Carefully she put the eye back on the table and lifted the brain for another look at the growth. It might have been a trick of the light, but she could have sworn that it had pulsed with life. She stared, and it did not move again.

She returned to the eye. It too showed no further signs of function, appearing as it should have, dead and lifeless.

But Doc Martin knew what she had seen.

The eye had focused.

Watching her.

It continued to pour as Sidney and her friends drove through the storm-wrought streets. Nightmarish scenarios, half glimpsed through the rapid passing of the wipers over the windshield, told them that all of Benediction was experiencing the same horrors.

Houses were on fire, shapes that could very easily have been bodies were lying by the sides of the road, packs of wild things—dogs, cats, raccoons, and whatever else called the island of Benediction home—were emerging from the thick of darkened woods to chase them as they drove past.

It was like a nightmare, but Sidney didn't think she'd ever had one so terrifying.

“It's gotta be the end of the world,” Rich said as he gazed out through the windshield.

“Don't be ridiculous,” Sidney snapped, not even wanting to think about the possibility of such a thing. There had to be a logical explanation for what was happening, and once they figured it out, it would be fixed

“You don't think that's possible?” Rich asked. “What happened at the house, never mind what's going on out here?”

“I'm sure there's a logical explanation for all of it.”

“The whole freakin' town has gone nuts, Sid.” The pitch in his voice was climbing.

“I know what it looks like,” she said, trying to be calm. “But it's not going to do us any good to make crazy assumptions before we know all the facts.”

She saw the shape before anybody else did, a lone figure stumbling out from a swath of total black on the left and into the road.

“Cody, look out!” she cried, grabbing his arm as he pulled the wheel savagely to the right and slammed on the brakes.

The tires squealed as the truck skidded sideways across the wet road, whipping around the trailer with the sailboat. The trailer disconnected with a wrenching snap, and both trailer and sailboat flipped over, sliding several feet before coming to a stop, blocking the road.

It was silent in the truck except for the
swish-thunk
of the wiper blades moving across the windshield, as they waited for the next horrible thing to happen.

“Is . . . is everybody okay?” Sidney finally asked, quickly checking out Snowy, who appeared to be fine.

“Yeah, I'm good,” Rich said, looking around. “What the hell was that in the road?”

Without a word, Cody opened the driver's-side door.

“What are you doing?” Sidney asked, grabbing his arm again. “You can't—”

“That was a person we almost hit,” he yelled, then yanked his arm from her hand and got out of the truck.

“Be careful,” she called, already sliding across the seat to follow.

“Sid!” Rich exclaimed.

“I've got to make sure he's all right,” she said, turning toward her friend, who rolled his eyes with exasperation but reached for the handle of the passenger door.

Snowy jumped down beside Sidney, who placed a hand on her back, signaling for the dog to stay by her side. She stood in the pouring rain for a moment, eyes scanning the darkness for Cody and for any animals that might be coming to attack them. She spotted him a short distance away, walking down the center of the road.

“Look at my friggin' boat!” she heard Rich cry out. Glancing over her shoulder, she watched her friend as he approached the sailboat resting on its side, then she turned and ran after Cody, Snowy at her heels.

“Cody, wait up!” she hollered.

Up ahead, lying in the road, was a body.

“Oh my God,” Sidney said, immediately taking the phone from her pocket and dialing 911. As with the other calls that they'd attempted, it didn't go through. Whatever was happening on the island was wreaking havoc with cell phone signals. “There's still no signal,” she said, looking at the phone's illuminated face.

Snowy whined as they grew closer to the figure lying so very still in the dampness of the road.

“Hello?” Cody called out. “Are you all right?”

He knelt down on the road beside the figure, a man lying on his stomach. Cautiously Cody reached out to turn him over, but something didn't feel right to Sidney and she reacted.

“Don't,” she ordered.

Cody's hand stopped mere inches from the man. He looked at her, a glimmer of annoyance in his eyes.

“I just want to see if . . .”

She was about to explain herself when the figure began to move, but not in a way that was at all natural. “Cody” was all she could manage, her eyes locked on the body.

“What?” he asked, looking from her terrified expression to the man.

The man's clothing was moving—
no
—something was moving under the man's clothes.

Cody fell backward, startled by the writhing layers of cloth. Sidney grabbed him beneath the arms and tried to haul him to his feet, just as multiple rats emerged from the back of the man's collar.

The rats paused and looked around, noses twitching as they sniffed the wet air, until their gazes fell on Sidney and Cody.

Then they opened their bloodstained mouths together and bared their nasty teeth.

Nearby, Rich stood before the wrecked sailboat and wanted to cry.

Scenes from summers past played out before the theater of his mind, followed by what was sure to be the echoing voice of his father in the not too distant future:
What the hell did you do to the boat?

Yeah, this'll be fun to explain, if I ever get the chance,
he thought.

The trailer was trashed, and the sailboat was lying on its side in the middle of the road. If a car was to come along in the gloom . . . He didn't even want to think of the repercussions.

Rich remembered the emergency equipment in a white metal box on the deck of the boat and went to look for it. It was slippery in the driving rain, but he managed to climb over the side and up to the deck of the steeply pitched boat. He found the box, still intact, near the wheelhouse. It was held closed by clips that he quickly undid, causing the lid to drop open, spilling the contents out over the side of the deck and onto the road below. Thankfully, the green plastic lantern he was looking for was secured inside the case, and he reached in to remove it. Taking his prize, Rich clambered down awkwardly from his perch and back onto the road. His fingers searched the buttons, and he managed to first turn on the lantern and then the flashing safety beacon.

The beacon pulsed brightly in his hand as he began to walk around the wreckage of his boat to place it in the road.

Sidney's scream cut through the wind and hissing rain like screeching brakes. Rich spun around, eyes searching through the gloom for his friends. Down past the truck he saw Sidney, Cody, and Snowy reacting to something that at first he could not see, but then he did.

Rats.

And lots of them.

Still holding on to the safety lantern, he started toward them and nearly lost his balance as his foot slid across something on the ground—a road flare that he remembered putting in the emergency box a few summers before.

And as he looked at the flare, he got an idea.

The number of rats that were flowing out from beneath the man's clothing was obscene.

How is it even possible?

It reminded Sidney of the clown car from the circus that her dad had taken her to see in Boston when she was little. She remembered how hard she had laughed when the little doors opened on the tiny yellow car and the clowns had just kept coming and coming.

But she wasn't laughing now as the rats kept coming and coming.

“Get back to the truck,” she found herself saying as she started to back away. Snowy was already on the move, romping forward to snatch one of the gray-furred rodents up from the ground and giving it a shake so quick and savage that its neck was broken at once.

Cody was closer to the man's body, and a few had managed to crawl up onto his legs, even as he furiously backpedaled away. He yelled like a wild man as he reached down to tear the fat-bodied rodents off of him, throwing them into the road, where they simply rejoined the writhing mass of furry bodies that was on its way toward him.