Apocalypse Island (40 page)

The pain in Wolf’s head is screaming with such ferocity now that he wishes for death. Then, without warning, something happens. The light inside the dome-shaped room begins to brighten and pulsate, the low-frequency hum ramping up to a nearly unbearable level.

“Jesus, God, what’s happening?” says one of the techs who slaps his hands over his ears, leaves his chair and begins to back away. “I’ve never seen it do that before.” Every man in the room has turned and is staring in awe at the strange spectacle. Now jagged and angry licks of electric-blue lightning are flying away from the light and ricocheting around the great room.

“I don’t know,” says Boss Man, “but you’d better unhook him. Do it now, and get this little piece of shit out of here. He’s been nothing but trouble from the beginning. Bring in the girls. I promise you they’ll tell me what I want to know.”

Wolf hears what Boss Man has just said but he suspects that he is bluffing. The light is angry and Boss Man knows he’s gone too far. But Wolf is certain that he will try again later, once the light has settled back down.

In that moment Wolf sees the other children in his mind’s eye. He sees their individual beds lined up in neat rows on the shiny tiled floor of a dorm-like room. And each bed is occupied by one of the chosen. Some are sitting patiently waiting their turn, some are crying and others are lying there looking up at the ceiling.

The children are not all normal. Some are normal, but some are far from normal. One child is small and his body is twisted unnaturally, his skin the color of parchment paper. His eyes are pink and he has no hair. Wolf knows him by name. Wolf knows all the children by name. This one is Eli.  Eli comes from a family on the opposite side of the island. At least that’s what he told Wolf. Wolf is the only child in the home that has befriended Eli. Although Eli is highly intelligent, he has never been popular. Wolf knows it is because of his deformities. When Eli is not with the doctors he spends most of his time alone and brooding and talking to himself.

Besides Eli there is a very large but gentle boy with a huge head and hands like baseball gloves, and he is completely covered in hair from head to toe. Although he is not stupid, he cannot talk; he makes grunting noises when he wants to communicate with the other children and Wolf knows that he is being taught sign language. Wolf feels a strong kinship to this big compassionate boy he knows by the name of Sam. It strikes him that he knows why this is so. He and Sam are brothers. They have come here to the orphanage together after some terrible tragedy claimed the lives of their parents. At least that’s what they were told.

And there are others. Wolf sees them now in his trance and he knows all their names and he remembers their faces and most everything about them. Johnny is there, and Shaun, and more. He recognizes another child, a few years older than the rest, and wonders now, considering that he is immersed in two separate realities, if it is just bleed-over from the other reality or something else entirely. All of these children are special in their own individual way. Some are physically superior, like his brother Sam, while others are special in intellectual and emotional ways. That’s why they are in this group. They have been chosen because they are unique, because they are all connected to the light-thing these terrible men want so desperately to understand.

There is another dorm room beyond the one that houses the boys. This is where the girls live, and Wolf can see them now just as clearly as he sees the boys. There are just two girls left; there were more in the beginning but some have gone away, and the talk amongst the children is that they have died. Wolf knows both of the surviving girls and he loves them like sisters.

But Siri is special. Although Wolf is only eight years old and he cannot yet articulate the idea of romantic love, he holds a special place in his heart for this sad and beautiful little girl named Siri. Siri is crying. She is both frightened and angry and his heart nearly breaks because he wants to kiss all her tears away and tell her not to be afraid anymore. Siri is one of the most gifted students in the school and she is crying because she has been chosen to be the next subject of these experiments.

He needs to do something to save her. He needs to do something to save all of these kids but he doesn’t yet know what that will be.

“Please, father, don’t let them hurt us anymore. Don’t let them hurt Siri.”

Wolf was totally unaware that he’d come back to the present and that he’d spoken those last few words out loud.

“Danny?” Laura asked in a tentative voice. “Danny, wake up!” Wolf was completely still now, his face as white as a bleached bed sheet. She was kneeling beside him staring intently into his face.
Oh, God, no, don’t let him be dead.

Then she saw movement; his eyelids fluttering, the color returning to his face.

Wolf heard Laura’s urgent plea but he could not immediately act upon it, caught as he was between two totally separate realities. Ever so slowly, as the present world began to come into focus, he opened his eyes and saw the young woman leaning over him, her face twisted with fear.

“Oh, God, Danny, what just happened?”

“I just remembered something. No, that’s not entirely true. I just remembered
everything.”

“Everything?” Laura said, exhaling a lung-full of pent-up air.

“You were right,” he said, easing her out of the way and getting up. “They screwed with our minds and our bodies and then they threw us away like so much trash.”

“You just said, ‘Please father, don’t let them hurt us anymore. Don’t let them hurt Siri.’ My God, Danny, was Siri in the orphanage with you?”

“Yeah, I think she was.”

“And you didn’t remember until now?”

Wolf shook his head.

“Are you okay?”

Wolf was standing now, bent over, hands resting on his knees to support his weight, breathing in harsh rasps. “No, I’m not okay. I’ll never be okay. Not until this is over.”

“What are you going to do?” Laura sensed a resolve in Wolf that had been absent up until now and it made her uneasy.

“I need to go there. I need to settle this once and for all.”

“Go where, Danny?”

“Apocalypse Island. You were right, there’s something over there.”

“What is it, Danny?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure I can trust my memory. I have to see for myself.”

“Please, Danny.”

“It’s something that made me the way I am. Something that shaped us all, something I don’t fully understand, but if it’s real, it’s something amazing.”

“That’s why the place is still off limits, isn’t it?” Laura said. “The government is trying to hide it from the public.”

Wolf nodded. “Yeah, I think so.”

“I felt it the day I went there,” Laura said. “It was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. The government’s been hiding more than what it did to you kids.”

Wolf nodded.

“I’m going with you.”

“No you’re not—”

Wolf was cut off by sudden darkness as all the lights in the house went out. The only illumination left was the small fire guttering on the hearth.

“Damn,” Laura said, leaping from the sofa. She spun to take in the entire room, but saw only moving shadows. She turned back to Wolf, her expression stark and afraid in the dim illumination.

“Someone’s out there,” Wolf said.

Laura’s expression turned angry. “And the bastard just cut the power to the house.”

In that moment Laura’s phone went off. She sprang into action and dove for her purse.

Chapter 98

Sufficient enough illumination bled in from the outside for Jennings to see clearly what he thought he’d seen through the window. Kate Cavanaugh hung on the wall like some sort of macabre Christ thing, naked, tied to spikes that had been driven into wall supports. Her body had been stabbed multiple times and a large cross had been carved on her torso. On the wall above her, scrawled in her own blood were these words:

Cross my Heart and Hope to Die, Stick a Needle in my Eye.

“Oh, Christ,” Jennings whispered crossing himself. He’d been raised Catholic but had never been very good at it. Other things always seemed to get in the way of religion. Like trying to figure out why people butcher other people. Now, looking at the brutally murdered body—the second one he’d seen today—of a woman he’d known for almost two decades, he wondered if this was a good time to renew his faith. He dismissed the thought almost immediately.

He strained to take in as much of the scene as possible in the dim light. The woman’s eyes looked like those of a demon. They were rimmed with black that ran down her cheeks like rich ink. She looked sad and gothic and very dead. As far as he knew Kate was just a normal everyday American woman. Not some fashion vampire or club goth. So why did the killer make her look like one? Why did the killer insist on making all his victims look this way? Exactly what kind of message was he trying to convey? Christ, he hated serial killers. Why did the fuckers have to be so cryptic? And what the hell did Cross my Heart and Hope to Die, Stick a Needle in my Eye mean?

He could not see well enough. He moved toward the light switch, but hesitated. What if…?

No way was this place rigged with explosives. Just the same, he moved furtively away from the light switch deciding not to touch it. He was keenly aware of the fact that he’d lost an officer today because a similar crime scene had been rigged with explosives. But of course this wasn’t really a similar crime scene. This was the home of a fellow officer and friend, and his dead wife was hanging from the wall like some sort of religious icon. These killings were so brutal, so surreal that they bordered on the absurd.

Jennings reached in his pocket and extracted a pencil flashlight, flipped it on, scanning the body and the room around him. A noise that he could not immediately identify startled him. He pulled his gun from his holster and did a quick three-sixty of the room. He felt his skin crawl with gooseflesh as he searched for the source of the noise, which now sounded to him like snapping electricity or perhaps frying bacon.

The sound receded. He stood very still, waiting. For what, he did not know.

He wanted a cigarette very badly.

The snapping electrical noise returned, and along with it, a low-frequency humming sound, like that of a running engine. The room began to twinkle with some sort of blue phosphorescent light causing Jennings’s internal compass to go awry. He felt dizzy and disoriented, like he might fall over any second. Inconceivably he felt as if he was being watched. None of this could be possible because he did not believe in hocus pocus. But believe or not, his eyes were seeing things and his ears were hearing things and his instincts were conveying things that he could not deny.

A ghost materialized out of nowhere and she was the same one Jennings had seen at the two previous crime scenes. And this time he recognized her. He reached in his pocket and extracted the old grainy photograph he’d taken from the archives beneath police headquarters. He pointed the light at the image on the paper and then looked back at the ghost. There was no doubt in his mind that this...ghost was her.

“I get it,” Jennings said to the ghost. “You’re Siri Donovan and you’re dead. But what the fuck do you want? What are you trying to tell me?” She did not respond. Jennings swore in frustration. She stared at him, her hands held out before in that same gesture of appeal she’d exhibited each time he’d seen her, as though she were trying to convey a message.

A warm breeze began to blow from a place in the room he could not determine, buffeting his hair and his overcoat. Impossible too because it was late fall, all the windows were closed and there were no fans in the room. Nevertheless, the wind came in a steady flow, warm and clammy and sick, like the wind from some dead alien planet. All the while, the engine noise became more insistent and the strange blue light brighter.

A series of leaflets appeared out of nowhere, tumbling like errant autumn leaves on the tepid wind, and Jennings did not have to look at them to know what they were.

Not soon enough the wind abated. The air became still as death and the blue light pulsed. Beneath Jennings’ clothes his body had become saturated in cold sweat. He reached out and tentatively touched the place where he’d seen the leaflets appear.

And felt nothing.

Just sick and weary and afraid. The ghost stared.

“What?”
he asked her in frustration. “What do these leaflets have to do with you? What do they have to do with Wolf and these murders? And why now, after all these years does a photograph of you suddenly materialize? Did Wolf kill you? Is that what you’re trying to tell me? Did one of the other guys in the band kill you? Was it somebody else?” The ghost did not react.

Bad fucking Medicine, all right,
Jennings thought, as the anger began to swell in him like a tide.
There’s something very wrong with this band.
There’s something very wrong with this entire fucking case.
He remembered investigating the brutal murder of their original lead singer, Johnny Redman earlier in the summer. He’d been found knifed to death in an alley behind one of the downtown clubs.
Knifed just like the body of Kate Cavanaugh and all the other victims.
Johnny had been a junkie and although the crime was still unsolved it was widely assumed that the murder had something to do with drugs.

Now Jennings wasn’t so sure.

After what he’d learned from Spencer and Robeson today he wasn’t sure of anything anymore. Redman and Wolf had both been in the orphanage together, along with others who might be relevant to this case. They’d all undergone mind altering experiments by a CIA program called MK-ULTRA. They’d been fed drugs, and radiation, been injected with evil concoctions of God-knows-what, had electrodes hooked up to their bodies and undergone electro-shock therapy. Now he was supposed to believe that some of them possessed the ability to read minds and transport things with their thoughts and maybe even become invisible. ‘Cloaking’ is what Spencer had called it.