City Under the Moon (3 page)

The hospital cop zipped the video back to the moment when Laurio first approached Dr. Kenzie. She did appear ill, but she wasn’t coming to Kenzie for medical advice.

“See how she approaches?” Tildascow said, studying Laurio’s body language. “She’d wanted to look at Cooke’s chart.”

Kenzie points Laurio down the hall, maybe to that back room where it all started.

“Was Laurio on duty when they brought in Holly Cooke?”

The HR guy nodded.

On the screen, Laurio walks out of the frame a moment before Officer Dougherty approaches Kenzie. Their conversation quickly escalates into a spat. In the foreground, a nurse rises from the desk, looks toward that room at the end of the hall, and then goes off in that direction.

That, thought Tildascow, was probably the nurse who lost her head.

Another minute of heated pantomime between Kenzie and Dougherty follows, and then Tildascow herself enters the scene and steps between them. She moves Kenzie back toward the observation window, they speak for a moment, and then the commotion begins. Dougherty, Kenzie and Tildascow leave the frame, and the screen goes black.

The hospital cop fast-forwarded until the picture returned, dimmer now under the emergency lights.

“Here’s where it gets crazy,” Anderson said.

A plainclothes detective emerges from 424 to investigate what’s going on down the hall. He spins back toward Cooke’s room, where he apparently sees something that scares the hell out of him. He draws his weapon and fires twice, and then he’s struck and stumbles out of frame.

A nurse and a doctor rush toward the fallen detective—and then a dark blur surges out of 424, ramming the doctor with such force that he breaks backward on the desk. The nurse tries to flee, but the creature rakes her back. She spins, hosing the walls red. And then the animal stands on its hind legs.

They could only see it from the elbows down. “This is the best angle we have?” Tildascow asked.

“It’s the
only
angle.”

The creature pounces onto Kenzie and they fall out of frame, leaving only her quivering arm to indicate the moment when it bites into her chest.

Tildascow’s shots come and the creature quakes from their impact, rolls past the camera, and lands on its feet in the bottom left-hand corner of the frame. More shots, and then it smashes through the window.

“Did the doctor die?” Tildascow asked.

“No,” muttered the HR guy. “She’s in surgery.”

Two rooms. Two incidents. Two women,
thought Tildascow.
Assuming they never met before the hospital, they had to have had contact before it all began.

She asked, “Did Laurio work Cooke’s arrival at the ER last night?”

The HR guy nodded.

“And do we have that tape?”

They’d already pulled the previous night’s video. The tech selected the new deck for the monitor’s feed and zipped backward.

At 22:34 on the time code, two emergency medical technicians burst through the back door of the Emergency Department, pushing Holly Cooke on a gurney.

“Let me take over,” Tildascow said. The hospital cop slid out of the way and she advanced the video frame by frame, making a mental recording of the details.

In the counterterrorism business, a hand grenade won’t do when you need a horseshoe. Tracking is about details, and details are about recollection. Outside of spy novels and TV shows, the concept of “photographic memory” is nothing more than hyperbolic bullshit. Sure, a couple of people in the world can remember details from every day of their life, but some of them can’t even memorize their times tables. Even the savants, those with so-called “eidetic memory,” are hit or miss when it comes to immediate and comprehensive recollection. No one can make flawless, on-the-spot mental recordings.

No one except Brianna Tildascow.

In the mad scramble to
do something
after 9/11, the Department of Defense ramped up their super-soldier programs with more aggressive leaps into theoretical science. They recruited elite test subjects from federal law enforcement and the military for their “Prime Program,” next-next-generation therapies running the gamut from chemical and surgical enhancements of the mind and body to speculative prep for futuretech.

Tildascow graduated from the FBI Academy at Quantico in the spring of 2002. For the first time in her life, she’d been in the right place at the right time.

The program unfolded as a series of escalating “educated experiments.” They began with brain stimulant cocktails, which resulted in a lot of quasi-profound philosophical introspection—and the munchies. Soon the docs introduced advanced meditation techniques, which enabled her to pull off some psychophysiological circus tricks like suppressing pain or slowing her heartbeat. Neato stuff, but nothing that martial artists hadn’t perfected centuries ago.

The real breakthrough came when she underwent a procedure called
repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation
(RTMS). The doctors bombarded her brain’s left frontotemporal lobe with low-frequency pulses, dismantling some of its subconscious processes. This allowed her to shift into a mental manual drive called
hyper-systemizing
.

In order to minimize its workload, your mind makes use of reliable patterns to enable quick recognition. In a bowl of fruit, you’ll immediately understand that an orange is an orange—you’ve seen oranges before and you know this one won’t transform into a robot or spontaneously explode. That process is called
systemizing
.

RTMS short-circuited Tildascow’s mind’s automatic systemizing, enabling her to shift her perception into hyper-systemizing, absorbing and storing an unprecedented amount of visuospatial detail. Hyper-systemizing mimics the characteristics of Savant Syndrome, but her ability to shift in and out keeps her from being crushed by the onslaught of details that frequently paralyzes savants.

The Prime Program provided excellent tools, but it didn’t give her a hotline to God, a key to the universe, or an understanding of why people liked jazz. But once she learned how to really use it, all became clear—especially jazz.

Patterns. Mathematics, music, astronomy, sociology… Everything relies on patterns. Especially human behavior.

And Tildascow’s primary interest: hunting.

Even post-RTMS, today’s hunting philosophy isn’t any different from what it was in the stone age:

You start with your prey’s footprints. These days they’re found in biometric passport chips, DNA analysis, SIM card and IP tracing, and telescopic, wall-penetrating satellite surveillance. Marry the technology with the simple psychology of human beings—ego feeding, comfort in repetition, and the distracting necessities of biology—and you find patterns.

Men always fall into patterns.

But Holly Cooke wasn’t attacked by a man.

The surveillance camera in the Emergency Department had a much more useful angle than the one in the recovery ward. The shot had been framed to cover three resuscitation rooms and the ramp leading to the ambulance entrance.

The double doors swung open at 10:34 p.m. on December 29. Holly Cooke’s shredded body arrived on a gurney pushed by two EMTs. They were greeted by Dr. Melissa Kenzie and escorted to resuscitation room number two.

Tildascow’s memorization technique was known as the
method of loci.
Her prime subject, or master locus, was Holly Cooke’s body. She traced its path from ER’s ambulance entrance, through a turn into the second resuscitation room, and into its final position on the room’s bed. Every other person or object would be recorded according to their spatial relationship to the master locus. Nonessential information—a fire extinguisher, an exit sign, the motion of the swinging doors, a janitor standing next to them—fit into pockets divided by “key frames,” which marked the major spatial transitions of the master locus.

Before Cooke arrived, Nurse Laurio had been prepping the resuscitation room. “There’s Laurio,” Tildascow said, and the HR guy confirmed her identity with a hum.

On the tape, the EMTs lift Cooke onto the bed. Her gurney and body board are soaked in blood. Laurio attaches a pulse oximeter monitor and readies an IV.

When Laurio sticks her, Cooke bolts upright and throws out her hands. Kenzie gets an arm under her chest to keep her from toppling over the foot of the bed. The EMTs restrain her arms and legs.

Laurio moves into a corner of the room that’s obstructed from the camera’s view, and then she crosses in front of the bed and washes up in the sink near the door. She seems to specifically examine her arm.

Tildascow jogged the tape backward, shifting her master locus to Laurio for a second pass. She was a good nurse, moving with the speed and confidence of an ER veteran. Cooke had shown no signs of struggle, and the IV insertion was routine. She had no reason to expect—

There.

When Cooke lunges forward on the bed, the doorframe obstructs her hands as they reach full extension. But Laurio recoils, grabbing her arm—

“Cooke scratched Laurio when she was brought in.” Tildascow said, turning to the HR guy. “Did she report it?”

“I’ll have to check.”

“We’ll find out,” promised Anderson, who seemed startled when she turned around. All of the men’s eyes had gravitated toward her ass.

She quietly thanked no one in particular and made her escape. Crossing the hospital’s atrium, she kept her eyes on the floor and quickly re-ran the ER video in her mind, combining the passes for each master loci.

“Tildascow!” Anderson called out.

She quickly shushed him: If the UN guys realized an eyewitness was escaping, they’d retain her for more questioning—and if the EIS decided to lock the place down, she might be quarantined.

He gave her a manila envelope. “All the witness statements. And more.”

“Nice. Good work, Anderson.” She quickly surveyed the contents. The bonus material included files on Cooke, employment records for Laurio and Kenzie, and some photos and video stills. “NYPD just handed this over?”

“Came from way up. They wanted it in your hands. I guess Cooke’s a V-I-VIP.”

“She is now.”

Five

First and 26th

December 30

10:03 p.m.

Some two hundred people were clogging Bellevue’s main entrance. The area was awash in noise and lights. Traffic jams, dueling helicopters, police and fire vehicles, and an endless sea of reporters.

Tildascow jostled through the crowd and walked north on First. The crisp air was refreshing after so long in the hospital. It was a clear night. Bright. The moon loomed heavy in the sky, just a sliver shy of full.

She smiled at the dumb idea that had crept into her head, and walked faster. The cold was starting to set in. She never wanted to see this damn outfit again.

As she crossed 29
th
, something shifted behind a parked car. She heard animal nails skittering across the cement. She made out a glimpse of fur just before it moved into her blind spot.

She whipped out her 1911 and took position behind the vehicle.

Only the one spare mag; what ammo she had left might not be enough to take down one of those animals. But she couldn’t just let it go. And no time to call the police.

Deep breath, and she shifted around the car, looking down the barrel—

—at a possum scrounging in the gutter.

Perfect bookend to this day.
She kept walking, chuckling at herself. It bloomed into flat-out laughter when she heard her stiletto footsteps.

But still, she stretched her neck around every corner. Those creatures were out there. Had Holly Cooke been attacked by one of them? And then there were two in the hospital.

Had the one infected two?

And if so…how many tomorrow night?

She looked up at the moon again. This time she didn’t smile.

A taxi almost hit her at the intersection of First and 30
th
. At least the driver had the decency to stop. Getting out of the cold was preferable to giving him a piece of her mind, so she pulled her hemline below her ovaries and climbed inside. The cab was a modest four out of ten on the stench chart, a significant victory for the long drive across town.

“Chelsea,” she said. The office in Chelsea was the unofficial HQ for the FBI’s counter-terrorism squad. And, essentially, it was Tildascow’s home. She kept an apartment in Hoboken for her off-season clothes, tax records and stale condiments, but she often went weeks between visits.

The cabbie nodded and turned up the yodeling on his radio. She settled in for the ride, looking forward to a hot drink and a warm blanket—but not the phone call she planned to make afterward.

The file Anderson had collected from the NYPD contained 23 eyewitness accounts. Somehow this was the one spot in the city where no one had a cellphone camera handy.

The first statement came from a hippie performance artist who had been on the other side of First while, in his words, “impersonating a tree.”

The windows shattered up there,
his statement read.
I think like the sixth floor
.
A gorilla jump out and lands on top the car. The windshield busted and it was all this noise, people was screaming, and it ran across the street over there. And then another gorilla jump out that other window and go the other way.

Other eyewitnesses described the animals as hyenas, dogs, cheetahs, or “panthros.” One guy, a “clothing designer who blogs on the side,” insisted he’d seen a similar event staged by a spontaneous performance troupe in a San Francisco mall.

The best description of the animals had come from a man who’d been escorting his pregnant wife to the hospital. Just as he stepped out of his taxi, the first animal crashed down on its roof.

It was shaped like a human,
his statement read,
but it was really hairy and big. It snarled at me and ran away on its hands and feet. And the second one was identical. I’ve never seen anyone move like that. I don’t think they were in costumes. I know it sounds ridiculous, but I think they were werewolves.