Parasite (14 page)

There were bodies everywhere.
And it was the sheer number of them, as opposed to the individual injuries—although, in some cases, these were horrible enough—that made Greg’s stomach turn.

Unlike his son, he had seen his share of dead bodies, but this—this was too much.

Bodies were piled four or five deep on top of gurneys that were meant for one person. There were stacks of bodies on the floor, pushed up against the wall like dust or dirt swept to one side.

Greg swallowed hard. As a medical device salesman, he had seen dead bodies before, but not this many and not like
this
.

He tried to compartmentalize what he was seeing, trying to consider the bodies as items and not once living, breathing people. He tried to focus, to try and concentrate on the reason why he was here in the first place.

Kent. Where are you, Kent?

But this seemed a near impossible task. The piles of bodies weren’t inventory like bonbons or rakes or pieces of lumber; these were loved ones. And there were so many of them—so many lives lost.

His mind flicked back to the woman in the lobby, the one that had hesitantly let him in the morgue. She could not have seen this—if she had, there was no possible way that she would have let him in here.

This was… it was
horrible.

Greg saw men, women, even children, their tiny bodies placed—thankfully—off to one side by themselves. It wasn’t really possible for him to count, but Greg thought that the room must have had forty or fifty bodies.

“About time,” a voice from the back of the room sounded. Greg’s blood ran cold. “I need all the help I can get.”

Greg’s mind churned as he decided what to do next.

“Hello?”

Greg finally spotted the woman, and he knew instantly that his defib ‘help me keep my job’ story wouldn’t work with this woman. No, this woman was… different.

She had short brown hair that was tucked behind both ears, and vibrant blue eyes that stood out on her tanned skin. Pouty lips, a small upturned nose, and a figure that he could make out even beneath her lab coat: small and tight, but curvy, too.

She was cute, bordering on beautiful, but she was also smart. Greg could tell this just by looking at her—he could see it in her eyes.

No, the ‘missed my quota’ would never fly with this woman.

And when he didn’t respond immediately, she sensed something was off and her eyes immediately narrowed.

“You’re wearing scrubs… the top at least… but you aren’t a nurse or doctor. And Sheriff White never said anything about another deputy.” She looked him up and down. “Besides, no deputy would wear those filthy jeans in the morgue. So, who are you?”

Greg’s face went slack. He was sick of lying and trying to remain calm. His son, his champ, was dead. And he had meant everything.

“Greg, my name is Greg—I’m just a father looking for my boy.”

The woman’s tight expression immediately softened.

“Did your boy go to the school?” she asked gently.

Greg looked up.

“School?”

“Wellwood Elementary.”

He shook his head.

“No… he was… he was at the house.”

The woman stared at him for a second.

The
house.

Then she nodded.

“I’m so sorry—so sorry.”

Then she gestured for him to move toward her, and Greg obliged, doing his best to avoid the piles of dead bodies. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught strange shapes buried underneath their dead skin, outlines that could only be one thing: crackers.

His breathing was coming in short, terse bursts.

The woman grabbed his hand when he was near, and then pulled him toward a gurney off to one side.

“You shouldn’t be here,” the woman whispered. “But I’m a parent too.”

“Thank you…?”

“Eliza,” she replied, looking up at him with her steel-blue eyes. “Eliza Dex.”

Greg wiped tears from his cheeks and stopped next to the gurney. Unlike the others, this bed only had one form on it, that much he could tell despite the fact that it was covered by a blue sheet.

“I—I can let you look. But that’s it. Eventually the body will be released to you, but for now…” Eliza’s sentence trailed off, which was fine by Greg; he wasn’t really listening anyway.

His thoughts, like the heart thumping in his chest, were racing, scenarios of the horrible things that had happened to Kent passing through him.

Why is there a sheet on him? Why only him? What did the crackers do to him—is it too horrible to show even in this place of mass death?

“The sheriff asked me to look most closely at your son,” Eliza said quietly. “Said he was there first—got to the house before anyone else—and that he might have clues as to where they came from.”

Her hand grabbed the plastic blue tarp, and was about to pull it back when Greg spoke up, stalling.

He didn’t want to see, not just yet.

“Are you a doctor?”

She nodded.

“Pathologist. I get called in sometimes when, ugh, weird things happen. Things that aren’t in the textbooks, if you know what I mean.”

Greg’s heart skipped a beat as he thought of the battle with the crackers at the police station, then out at the Wharfburn Estate.

Weird things.

“Would you like to see your son now, Greg?”

“Yes,” he said dryly. “I’m ready.”

With that, Eliza Dex pulled the sheet back and Greg sucked in a breath, holding the air in before turning to see the horrors that had befallen his son.

Tristan Devon Owens, currently
known as Dirk Kinkaid, didn’t look back when he bolted from the mansion. Even when his biker brethren hollered at him, more surprised than anything else, he kept his head dead and continued to run.

At forty-two years young, he had kept in shape for occasions such as this—well, situations
like
this; situations from which he had to escape, but not to specifically run from crab-like things that chewed you up and spat you out. At forty-two years young, Dirk Kinkaid was his fourth pseudonym, the prior others being Lucas Thomas Wright, Steven “Stevie” Drew, and Elvis Giablini.

And of course, there was
his
name, the Owens name, the one that somewhere out there a woman and a young boy shared. Or maybe not.
Probably
not. If he put any thought to it, he would have no choice but to assume that they had changed their names, that the program had
forced
them to change names. Still, he liked thinking that somewhere out there his wife and son had his name:
Owens.

Dirk was forty-two now, but back when he had been a young man in his mid-twenties, he had been a rising star in the New York detective ranks. So when a chance arose to go undercover as a low-level soldier in one of the most notorious Mafia brotherhoods in the United States, he’d had to say yes—it was a compulsion, driven by some underlying need to strive to be the best, to make sure none of the so-called bad guys ever escaped.

Dirk had known the risks; he’d known that if he was found out, it would not only mean his death, but that he was putting his wife and newborn son in danger.

Besides, he had been told that he wasn’t going to be alone in the ranks, that there was another officer embedded in the criminal enterprise.

Someone with the initials
CD
.

Not much to go on, surely, as the Mafia had numbers in the low four digits in New York alone, but it had given him comfort nonetheless. And besides, he was a star detective, for Christ’s sake; he’d felt confident that he would be able to eventually figure out who his fellow undercover agent was.

The three missing fingers on his right hand ached at the memory, and Dirk rhythmically squeezed his palm as he ran.

Oh, he had found
CD
alright, but the man wasn’t his friend. In fact, Dirk doubted the man was even a detective at all, or something his sergeant had made him up to get him to accept the job, and it was a horrible coincidence to find someone with those initials.

Either way, it didn’t matter; his missing fingers and displaced wife and son were proof enough that
CD
most definitely was not a friend, colleague, or confidante.

Both Dirk and
CD
had been forced to change their names and flee from the Mafia. The only difference being that while
CD
ran away, Dirk ran
after
. First combing the southeast, then slowly migrating north, Dirk had followed the man with the ever-changing name but constant initials, employing his honed detective skills to follow the man’s trail of lies and deceit as he exploited, extorted, and blackmailed his way across the country.

There had been close encounters before, but Dirk was closest
now
; after infiltrating and then working his way up through the ranks of the Skull Crushers’ biker gang, Dirk knew that
CD
was within his grasp.

But now
this
—this fucking freak Walter, who had revealed horrors of the like even Dirk was foreign to, and who had threatened to foil another one of his plans.

Walter had ruined his chances to catch
CD.

Still, Dirk had no choice but to run from what he had seen; his viscera demand such a reaction. After all, staying meant almost certain death—a horrible death—and that would not serve his need for a pound of flesh.

Part of him expected the other bikers outside Sabra’s mansion to follow him as he ran, but no one did. In fact, some men even went the opposite way, back into the palatial home, curious to figure out what had happened to Sabra.

Dirk knew that when they found him, some, if not all, would have the same reaction he’d had: to run. For those that stayed, it would be worse. Twelve years, the first five of which he’d served as an undercover agent, and the last seven as a… well, what was he now, really? No longer an officer of the law—that ship had sailed when he’d stopped his biannual check-ins. And that was more than a half decade ago. But after all this time, he hadn’t seen
anything
like what he’d seen inside Sabra’s mansion.

If twelve years entrenched with bad men had taught him one thing, it was for him to recognize when bad men were about to do bad things.

And this man, this Walter, was one of the worst he had ever seen. Walter was the worst kind of bad man: the kind that had nothing to lose, that cared less about their own wellbeing than even that of others. He was far worse than even Sabra, who was keen on neutering those who didn’t pay up in due time.

Dirk hopped on his bike and drove his foot onto the pedal, and it immediately roared to life.

“Dirk,” a man hollered over the sound of the motorcycle engine. “What the fuck is going on in there? What’s going on with Sabra? And where are you going?”

It was Mickey, one of the few bikers that Dirk had actually formed a relationship with. Like Dirk, the man had his demons, but he wasn’t like the other brutes. For a moment, the two good fingers on Dirk’s right hand simply hovered over the throttle, and he stared into Mickey’s pale eyes.

He was scared, Dirk saw. Genuinely, unabashedly afraid—not a frequent occurrence for bikers, even one with Mickey’s disposition.

Mickey felt that something bad—something worse—was about to happen here, too.

“Take off,” he said as the two good fingers wrapped around the throttle. “Get out of here, Mick. And do it now.”

And then he put the bike into drive, and it shot forward, leaving Mickey, Sabra’s estate, and the other bikers in a trail of dust and dirt.

For a brief second, he debated heeding his own advice: to flee. But as Dirk and his bike put distance from the horrors at Sabra’s house, the visceral sensations that he had felt slowly subsided, and the reality of how close he was, just how very close he was to finding the man who had taken his wife, daughter, and fingers from him, the man with the initials CD, settled in. The man with the silver tongue. The fucking conman, the fucking fake, the phony, the fucking parasite with his deadly sidekick.

C fucking D
.

And yet here he was, on his bike, tearing down Highway 2, leaving behind the bikers that were his best chance of finding
CD
.

Is this it? Has he escaped me again?

Dirk felt a pang of regret and remorse. But unwilling to succumb to these emotions, he cranked the throttle again and set his mind to motion.

Think—how can I salvage the last two years? How can I still use my leverage with the bikers to find him?

Dirk was so lost in thought that he didn’t even see the police car coming toward him, traveling in the opposite direction. If he had, he most definitely would have slowed down, given that the speedometer on his motorcycle was closing in on triple digits. It was only when the police car passed him and then switched on its lights that he noticed.

“Fuck!” he shouted, his words swallowed by the roaring air rushing by him.

A quick glance in the rearview showed that while the cop had turned and was now heading back toward him, Dirk was putting a lot of distance between them, and fast.

He can’t keep up.

Dirk leaned forward, ready to accelerate even more, to leave the officer in his dust, when a thought suddenly struck him like a slap in the face. 

If I can’t use the bikers to catch him, maybe it’s time to switch sides. Maybe it’s time to go back to my roots.

A smirk fell on Dirk Kinkaid’s lips, and although it was barely visible beneath his handlebar mustache, it was there.

I have information they want, and they might be able to help me get what I want.

Maybe they can help me catch
him.

Dirk let go of the throttle and gently brought the bike to a slow, allowing the twinkling red and blue lights in his mirrors to grow until they merged into one ubiquitous purple orb.