Chase Baker & the Humanzees from Hell (A Chase Baker Thriller Book 8) (2 page)

The nurses are gone for barely a second before I hear my dead roommate’s voice again. Maybe they should’ve asked me about that instead of trains and bridges.

“….ice…man…,” the man’s corpse seems to say.

I lean over as close as I can to the curtain that separates us. Keeping my voice at a whisper, I say, “Hey, buddy. I’m listening.”

The response I get damn near sends me running from the room as fast as I can.

2.

I like my dead people to stay dead, thank you very much. I’ve seen enough of “the other side” for one mortal lifetime, and as a god-fearing atheist, I’m in no hurry for another preview. Which is why, despite the sin of sloth the painkillers wrought into my body, I have to fight to keep myself in place as this dead guy talks. I’d normally be curious, seeing as how I am Chase Baker, but I’m not in the mood.

“…find…,” the man’s voice says. I figure he’s on the old side, but the parched vibrato in his voice adds another dozen decades.

“Find what?” I say in a hushed tone.

“…missing…”

I string together what he’s told me so far.

Ice. Man. Find. Missing.

My thoughts turn to a missing fisherman from last winter. Read about it in the newspapers. Went out ice fishing and never came back. Everyone figured he went through the ice, but the body never turned up.

Maybe my roommate is saying he’s the missing fisherman? But so what? Why use your last breath to confess to that?

“…moo…see…them…Austin…Texas…”

Ice. Man. Find. Missing. Moo. See. Them. Austin. Texas.

I grab a spare pen and paper from the stand by my bed and write down the words before I forget them.

“Hey, buddy, I’m still not clear on this,” I say. “The only ice in Texas is in the drinks.”

After waiting a minute for a response and hearing none, I reach my hand up to the curtain to get a better look at my roommate. Maybe he can only mouth the words now. But before I can do that, the door opens and a cadre of medical staff walks in. I’m sure the hospital gives them job titles with a more sensitive ring to it, but I can only assume these are the undertakers.

I lower my hand and listen to them prepping the body on the other side of the curtain. It takes a moment for my brain to register how big of a problem that is for my roommate.

“Hey, wait a minute. He’s not dead yet,” I say.

One of the staffers pokes her head around the curtain. “Mr. Baker, I know this may be disturbing for you, but please let us do our jobs for the sake of this man’s family,” she says.

“But he was just talking to me,” I say and immediately regret it. I don’t need another visit from those mental health people.

The staffer excuses herself from her colleagues and steps onto my side of the curtain. She gives me a pitiful smile and leans down over my bed. I don’t mind at all. If she’s one of the last faces you see before dying, I can think of worse ways to go out. At first I think she’s going to whisper something close to my cheek, maybe give me her number, but it turns out I’m more deluded than I even realize. She goes not for a sweet nothing in my ear, but instead reaches for the button that delivers a fresh dose of painkillers into my IV.

“Relax, Mr. Baker,” she says before leaving my side.

And relax I do. The painkillers wash away my protests along with my ability to stay awake. I ride the drowsy tide into a cold sleep against my mountain of pillows.

3.

When I wake, my roommate is gone and it’s seven hours since I last looked at the clock on the wall. Painkillers. They’re a hell of a drug.

After such a long nap – or was it a proper sleep at this point? – the fog in my head is gone. My curiosity, however, is not. I go over my notes once again, half expecting them to be gone when I reach for them.

Ice. Man. Find. Missing. Moo. See. Them. Austin. Texas.

My mind connects the “moo” and “Texas” to cows. If I was anyone but Chase Baker, I might write these words off as the tragically confused ramblings of a dying man. But my life doesn’t work that way. There are no coincidences. Which means there’s a lot more to this than the bovine.

I mouth the words one by one, taking care not to speak them out loud. Helps my brain work through the patterns. “Ice” and “man” roll nicely together into one. “Missing” and “moo” don’t. However, “moo,” “see” and “them” do. I update the notes.

Iceman. Find. Missing. Museum. Austin. Texas.

Now it’s making more sense. If I flip the second and third words around, it’s even clearer.

Iceman. Missing. Find. Museum. Austin. Texas.

In other words, there’s a missing iceman my roommate wanted me to find. It’s either missing from or located in a museum in Austin, Texas. There’s only one question left. What the hell is an iceman?

It’ll have to wait. The schedule on the wall shows I’m due to take a shower. It’s about time. A nurse comes in to offer a snack and to help me free my body from the tangle of IVs, monitors and other alchemy I’m sure will give me cancer later in life. I devour the food, slip out of my hospital gown and follow the wall into the attached bathroom. A few days in bed is all it takes for me to forget my sea legs, but a shower and shave will put me back together.

I’m on the second or third repetition of rinse and repeat when I hear the door to the bathroom open.

Dammit. I should’ve brought the ESEE knife in here with me.

My hand lets the bottle of soap fall to the bottom of the shower. I go for the safety razor resting on the built-in shelf, anticipating the hot caress of an assassin’s pistol. Thousands of people want me dead. I’d be less surprised by an attempt on my life than by finding out exactly which group of scumbags got their shit together to come find me.

I squeeze the razor as the curtain to the shower pulls away. I’m almost disappointed to see the female nurse from that mental health examination looking back at me.
Almost.
She’s not wearing her scrubs anymore. Or anything else.

I start to say something, but she shakes her head, smiles and takes a step into the shower with me.

This might be real life or it might be all in my head, but at least some parts of me are still working.

4.

Having been discharged figuratively and literally at the hospital, I head to the closest branch of the Albany public library system for a little Internet research. It’s not that I’m opposed to smartphones with built-in Internet browsers and apps, but any tech more advanced than a wristwatch gets the death sentence within a week of slipping in my pocket. Sure, there’s insurance for that sort of thing, but everyone else’s rates would hit the ceiling the minute I signed up. You can thank me later.

Chase, the considerate.

I find an empty computer not saturated in job listings or pornography, then run a quick query through a search engine. I type in my notes word for word. “Iceman. Missing. Find. Museum. Austin. Texas.”

Bingo.

The first website that pops up is a news article on the Museum of the Bizarre’s latest attraction: the Minnesota Iceman. Even better, the museum is located in Austin, Texas. I skim the article, searching for word that the Iceman is missing. All I can find are canned quotes about the Iceman arriving at the museum, why visitors should check it out, rules about flash photography, blah, blah, blah. Nothing suggests the Iceman is missing.

However, what the Iceman
is
is incredible, if it not a little hard to believe. In the 1960s, an exhibitor named Frank Hansen displayed a sensational creature in a block of ice at carnivals and fairs in Minnesota and beyond. Although it’s difficult to make out from within its frozen tomb, the Iceman appears to be half-ape, half-human. Some said the Iceman was the missing link between humans and an ancestor species. Others said it was the beast known as sasquatch, Bigfoot or the skunk ape. But everyone from skeptical scientists to true believers agreed on one thing: it’ll cost you a few bucks to see it. That alone cast a shadow of doubt over the Iceman for most people.

Count me as one of them. I’ve dug plenty out of the ground I could’ve charged admission for, and people would’ve lined up around the block to see those artifacts for themselves. But here’s the thing I learned about truly disruptive finds able to change humanity’s view of the world: the money doesn’t matter. If it’s important enough, the power that comes with it is priceless. Money is an afterthought, a formality, an inconvenience. Conspiracy theories often put a group of elites at the very top of the world’s caste, controlling the planet’s money. I always laugh at those ideas. Why would the elites, the forces behind the clock that makes the world tick, need money in the first place?

So when someone makes an astounding claim, such as possessing a man-ape creature in a block of ice, but charges a couple dollars to see it, my built-in bullshit detector goes off like a bomb. If it’s that important, and you’re enough of an asshole to put it behind a pay wall, why not charge $3,000,000 to see it instead of $3? Maybe it’s to bring this discovery to the masses? Then again, why not make it free and turn money some other way? Sell the movie rights to the Iceman movie, I don’t know.

If this Iceman had a solid origin story that became mired in egos, opportunists and politics, I could understand it being forced into the sideshow circuit simply for the sake of preserving the specimen. But conflicting Iceman origin tales don’t help matters. Depending on where you read or who you ask, Hansen shot and killed the Iceman while hunting in Minnesota. Or a wealthy Californian eccentric obtained the creature and hired Hansen to tour North America with it. Then again, the pre-frozen version of the Iceman might’ve been killed in Vietnam and brought to the U.S. for reasons unknown.

The only provenance I can put any stock into is that after Hansen died, the Iceman went to a collector who eventually sold it to the Museum of the Bizarre in Austin, Texas, in 2013. Plenty of gaps exist within that 40- to 50-year stretch, and it’s not unlikely the creature sat in someone’s basement for years at a time.

I lean back in my chair and study my notes again. I’ve got better things to do than head down this rabbit hole. A dying man gurgles a few words that point toward a carnival attraction that at best blew its only shot at attracting serious scientific inquiry and at worst is a hoax. This thing has bullshit written all over it no matter how I squeeze, poke, prod or hold it up to the light. I might be curious to a fault, but that doesn’t make me an idiot. Even if I wanted to jump into this mystery, what’s in it for me? I like my adventures to start with someone writing my name on a check. I’d be better off scrolling through the job listings with the rest of the poor saps in this library.

My notes crumple within my fist. I toss the paper into the trash and head for the exit.

A beer and a burger sound good after all that cat food in the hospital.

I’m almost to the door when someone near the periodicals convinces me I’m headed in the wrong direction.