– 1 –
Thinking About Not Thinking
She arrives at Fort Denning that day, death and mayhem the furthest things from her mind. Parking her shit-kicker Chevy S-10 a block from the entrance, according to proper protocol, she pauses to clear her mind. It’s a beautiful day on the Atlantic seaboard, the sky a clear and wide expanse of robin’s egg blue over the tide pools and estuaries of eastern Maryland. The sun filters down through palisades of white oaks, dappling the hood of her rust-pocked pickup. The air smells of magnolia and clover. She turns the truck off and then studies her face in the rearview.
She lets out a long breath, clearing her mind in the mode of Zen masters—thinking about not thinking—pushing the ubiquitous white noise from her brain. The constant drone is the occupational hazard of all psychics, and it plagues her on a daily basis. But today, she has no reason to believe that she’s about to encounter a waking nightmare. The message delivered to her this morning at dawn on the secure line gave her no cause to be nervous.
“Command control here,” the flat, officious, blandly pleasant female voice informed her at a few minutes after 6:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time that morning. “Identify yourself, please.”
“What?—what time is it?—wait,” she stammered at first, trying to wake up and fake her way out of an obvious hangover. She had tied another one on last night, drinking herself blind and doing two eight-balls at the club. Feeding the beast. Staggering home like a common derelict. Now she was struggling to sound like a self-respecting Sleeper for the Defense Intelligence Agency. “Oh, sorry, my bad … um, yeah … you got four-three-two-whiskey-zebra here. Go ahead, Command.”
“Four-three-two, we have a red level event in progress, initiated at three hundred hours Greenwich Mean Time.”
“Copy that.”
She waited for the time and place designated for her insertion, finding little to worry about. The last red level event was a colossal waste of time, a scan of some naughty diplomat’s memories. The man had been suspected of being an asset for the Iranians, but the only thing she found in his head was masturbatory fantasies involving some ambassador’s daughter. Now she waited for the details to another piece of government drudgery.
“You will need to provide fast entry at Black Candlestick today at twelve hundred thirty hours. Highest priority, security code blue in effect.”
The call disconnected itself at that point, which seems now like weeks ago even though it was only this morning. She stares at her round caramel face in the rearview, her flat nose with its gold ring in one nostril, and her huge chocolate eyes as bloodshot as tiny scarlet road maps of some tangled interstate system. She takes one last, deep, girding breath and pops the glove box.
A pint bottle of Tito’s vodka rests in there under her registration wallet and holstered .45 caliber DoubleTap ACP pistol. Vodka is her chosen hair of the dog—odorless, colorless, and effective at momentarily satisfying her gargantuan Need. The Need is with her constantly, a salve on the cross she bears as a government mind-reader and dancing monkey, wallowing in the filthy chambers of people’s innermost thoughts.
She takes the pint out, unscrews the cap, and knocks back a third of the bottle.
“Another day, another fucking dollar,” Jasmine Maywell mutters, putting the pint back.
She takes the gun with her.
– 2 –
Remote Viewing
The codger at the guard shack gives her a funny look when she flashes her visitor’s lanyard.
“That’s an old one,” he says, pursing his lips, looking her up and down, pretending to inspect the badge. An old, droopy, graying veteran, obviously regular army from a long time ago, maybe the Napoleonic Wars, he lets his eyes linger just one millisecond too long in the general direction of her chest. She doesn’t have to enter his head to know what’s oozing through his stream of consciousness.
All of which she’s used to, of course, a woman of her shape and size, but that doesn’t make it any less enervating to her. She sometimes gets off on flirting with guys, but not now, not today.
The old man ogles her with a lascivious little twinkle in his eye, lowering his voice, Mister Big Shot, the man in-the-know. “You here ’cause of that ruckus up north?”
She cocks her head at him. “What ruckus is that?”
“Shit that went down at that cemetery outside Pittsburgh? Evans City?”
She gives him her best demure smile. “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”
“Something’s going down inside,” he says, jerking a thumb toward the complex of stone-brick buildings behind them.
“Duly noted,” she says.
He sniffs and nods at her lanyard. “Ought to replace that someday soon, or mark my words, somebody out here’s gonna stop ya.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, Dad,” she says with that flirty little smile, fighting the urge to get him to buy her a drink later. “I’ll get it updated soon as I see the CO.” She winks at him. “Promise.”
She walks onto the base, hyperaware of the old guard eyeballing her booty for the entire trek across the lot. She gives him plenty to look at. A big girl of mixed race with spacious hips and fulsome breasts, decked out today in spandex and knee-highs, Master Sergeant Jasmine Maywell walks with the studied, rhythmic sashay of a fashion model, as though she were balancing a book on her head. She cooked up the walk during her tour of service in Iraq, when her fellow soldiers told her she walked like a grunt.
She heads for the main processing center, which sits on the southern edge of the grounds.
Located in the leafy, middle-class suburb of Frederick, Maryland, Fort Denning is laid out over twelve hundred acres like a big L-shaped college campus, its ostensible purpose to serve as the United States Army Medical Command. At first glance, the place looks so innocuous, so bland, so slate gray and redbrick featureless, it seems to hardly exist. Or at most, it seems to blend in with the strip malls and insipid office building architecture of the DC government corridor with chameleon-like proficiency.
In fact, the mundane, landscaped, motel-building design is a thousand times more sinister when one considers the history of the place. During the Cold War years, Denning was the heart of the military’s biological weapons research program. Everything from mustard gas to weaponized ocean tides were toyed with and implemented. Denning personnel also experimented in the 1950s in the potential use of insects as disease vectors, including ticks, fleas, ants, and lice—but mostly mosquitoes carrying yellow fever virus over international borders. Human subjects were used in the development of biological weapons. It has been rumored over the years that Denning is the place where the United States government “invented” HIV.
Fort Denning also produced Jasmine Maywell’s abusive father. Captain Bertrand Maywell was one of the most gifted subjects in the highly classified Project Sun Streak. As a “remote viewer,” Bert Maywell would sit in Denning’s isolation tank and psychically project himself into the eyes and ears of enemy pilots and soldiers, gleaning incredible amounts of intel and also a slow-growing tumor that nobody knew about until it was too late.
The last years of the old man’s life were a living hell for Jasmine. As his only caretaker, she was treated worse than shit—regularly spat upon, slapped, yelled at, scourged with profanity-laced tirades, and ultimately turned into a ravenous addict. But perhaps the worst thing that Captain Bert Maywell had inflicted upon his daughter was the psychic skill that had ruined his own life, a recessive gene handed down from his mother’s mother, a Santerian witch who was lynched in 1955 in Mississippi. It became a dominant trait in the captain, handed down unceremoniously—like flat feet or seasonal allergies—to his daughter.
All of which had turned Jasmine Maywell’s life into a lonely succession of one-night stands and wasted, narcotic days of not-so-quiet desperation.
Of course, not a single one of these ominous, classified pieces of Fort Denning’s secret history occurs to Jasmine Maywell until she makes her way through the preliminary security checkpoints, showing her ID tag and her tiny two-shot pistol to a succession of nervous MPs. Nobody uses phrases such as “high alert” or “scrambled” until she gets to the final vestibule at the bank of elevators leading down into the innards of the earth.
“I’m sorry, but you can’t go down there today, ma’am,” the guard with the starched uniform buttoned up to his Adam’s apple tells her in a nervous monotone. He stands between Jasmine and the elevators with his M4 up high across his chest, his boyish face as grim and sullen as a golem.
She looks at him. “I got orders.”
“They’re on lockdown, ma’am. Some kinda shit going on down there. It’s under quarantine now. Alarm is sounding. You go down there, I can’t let you back out.”
She sighs, thinking of all the paperwork she’ll have to fill out if she leaves without completing her task. “Maybe I can help.” She digs her orders out of her handbag. “They gave me these at the first checkpoint.” She hands the single typed sheet over to the guard. “I think they might need me down there.”
The truth is, she had only skimmed the classified document. Hadn’t yet studied it closely. It said something about “scanning the memories of a patient zero to ascertain any information on the origins or spread of an outbreak discovered less than forty-eight hours ago in western Pennsylvania.” But Jasmine also knew that in the case of a code black outbreak with unknown origins, the CDC often handed the mystery over to the DIA, who usually threw everything they could think of, including the kitchen sink, at the investigation—SEAL teams, NSA, Interpol, even black ops units such as the Natural Anomalies Group and government-trained psychics. Hence the need for a fast entry specialist such as the illustrious commissioned officer and high-functioning drunk Master Sergeant Jasmine Meredeth Maywell.
She waits for the guard to read the order, dying for a drink.
“Suit yourself,” he says finally, handing the document back to her, and stepping away from the elevator.
“Appreciate it,” she says, pressing the down button. The door clatters open. She enters the enclosure, and the door rattles shut.
The elevator seems to take an eternity to descend into the sublevels.
– 3 –
The Black Oblivion
She doesn’t encounter the first body until she has made her way off the elevator, has moved down an empty corridor with an alarm screaming in her ears, has pulled her pistol, and has passed an unattended guard desk splattered with blood. The atmosphere is charged with static electricity and the coppery odor of gore. She turns a corner and sees the security door to the medical wing hanging wide open and a body lying in a fetal position on the parquet floor just inside it, marinating in a puddle of its own blood. The victim, an older, balding man—whom she’s assuming has expired recently—still wears a white lab coat and security tag. His eyes are closed in the endless sleep of death. Jasmine approaches cautiously and kneels by the body.
Chills rash her arms as the extent of the man’s injuries make themselves known to her in the bright fluorescent light of the hallway and the shrieking buzz-saw din of the alarm. His neck and half his torso are gone, spilling entrails across the tile, chewed away by what looks like a wild animal. She takes a deep breath and against her better judgment decides to do a quick entry.
It’s a process that she discovered early on in her life, sometime around age sixteen, when a boy got a little too cozy with her under the bleachers in the high school gymnasium. What started as a little heavy petting had deteriorated quickly into what can only be called rape. But in the moments before the kid entered her, she grabbed his face, a hand on each temple, fingers pressing in on his skull, and all at once the boy’s innermost secret thoughts flooded her brain—unbidden, inexorable, in Technicolor and high definition. She saw through his point of view not her, but the past, an older boy molesting him, and her cry exploded out of her almost involuntarily. “You can’t excuse this … just because it happened to you!”
She barely remembers what happened after that, the boy skulking away, thunderstruck by her eerie cognition, but the memory will always be with her. Even after years of harnessing the gift for the government, she still thinks of that primal incident.
Now she lowers herself to both knees in front of the dead scientist, the blood soaking into her leggings. She positions his head for better access, and she gently but firmly grasps the man’s skull, cradling it just so, fingertips electrodes on a cardiogram.
She flinches at the violent stream of thoughts and imagery crashing down on her:
(… 7 June, three hundred twenty-two hours, Eastern Standard Time, DOA from Evans City … disposition of remains, pathologist’s notes … the decedent, female, Caucasian, mid-thirties, delivered to Fort Denning restrained in body bag … cause of death unknown … digits on left hand twitching … initial thoughts, postmortem spasms due to residual electrical energy … gases built up within the esophageal walls … anomalous, unexplained … eyelids retracting spontaneously, the corneas exhibiting some kind of patina, vestigial cataracts, milky, iridescent … I see the hands clenching, clenching … rigor mortis? Wait … wait!)
Jasmine winces, sympathetic adrenaline coursing through her, a kind of narcotic, which years ago she dreaded but later started to crave, not at all unlike the acquired taste for a really good whiskey. Nowadays, she could not get enough of that nectar of the gods, that inimitable smoky burn repellant at first, but later in life a salve on her soul. All of which is now overridden in lieu of the heroin-like blast of terrified recall streaming into her:
(… The corpse convulsing, straining against the straps, discoloration around the nose, mouth, and teeth … incisors grinding against rubber guard … swallowed the tongue?)
Jasmine’s hands tighten on the scientist’s mandibles, her knuckles whitening as the dead man’s mind-screen downloads the horrors into her:
(… Straps breaking … decedent slipping off table … now I’m kneeling to administer 100 milligrams ketamine … oh God! Fuck! Pain … searing pain shooting up my rib cage!… The thing has latched on to me!… Dear Lord I’ve been bitten!… Tearing into me!… Mortified teeth like black needles!)
All at once, the screen in Jasmine’s mind contracts into a black void, a single white dot remaining at its center, a TV at the end of the broadcasting day. She loosens her hold and lets out a sigh of exhaustion—memory-scanning can take its toll, a real bitch on the upper vertebrae and joints—when something starts to vibrate in the center of that luminous pinprick emanating from that black oblivion.
Something like a wasp in a jar buzzes in the heart of that white spot.
Jasmine tries to pull her hands away from the scientist’s blood-sticky temples but they won’t cooperate. In her mind she sees the strange alabaster dot swelling, expanding, blazing brighter and brighter, the droning white noise inside it intensifying, a wave breaking on a beach, a tsunami coming straight out of the dead scientist’s mind and heading straight into Jasmine.
She blinks, then looks directly into the face of burgeoning apocalypse.
The eyelids open, revealing orbs of milkglass.
– 4 –
Postmortem
The labyrinth of hallways in the lowest sublevel of Fort Denning glows with a uniform kind of fluorescent light, which gives the place an air of the operating room, walls and tile floors virtually radiating sterile, antiseptic containment. Nothing enters, nothing escapes. Everything is opaque, immutable, airtight, regulated, and scoured clean. All of which is why the blood streaks registering now in Master Sergeant Jasmine Maywell’s peripheral vision on the walls and glass doors as she rises to her feet and begins to slowly back away from the inexplicably animate corpse on the floor strike her as anachronistic, wrong.
The creature that used to be a government scientist named Hanrahan—Jasmine caught a glimpse of the man’s nametag—now sits up with the flaccid, twitchy movements of a rag doll or a puppet. Jasmine keeps backing away as the thing reaches for her stupidly from its spot on the floor, its liver-colored lips peeling back from its teeth with canine ferocity. It makes a sound like rusty hinges creaking inside its mortified throat as it claws its way up the side of the wall to a standing position.
If asked later, Jasmine would not even remember pulling the DoubleTap pistol from its hip sheath. She would not recall raising the gun, aiming it at the creature shuffling toward her now with inebriated purpose—a baby taking its first steps—clawing at the air, drooling black foamy bile. If she were asked to fill out a report the next day, she would have absolutely no memory of firing off a single round at that menacing, lumbering corpse.
The blast hits the former scientist in the chest, between the nipples, sending a plume of blood mist and pink matter out the back of the lab coat.
In her imaginary report—a document that she would, sadly, never get an opportunity to draft—this would be the moment she described as time standing still. All the cryptic information that streamed into her only moments earlier now chimes and flashes in one-hundred-point marquee type font. Words such as “postmortem” and “anomalous” and “unexplained” now spontaneously blaze in her midbrain, exclaiming their portents in fiery revelations as she sees the thing that used to be a scientist unfazed by the catastrophic ballistics of the gun blast.
The creature barely slows down, barely recoils from the bullet’s impact, its pale shoe-button eyes still fixed on Jasmine.
She turns and runs.
– 5 –
The Smell of Gasoline
Her memory of Fort Denning’s lower levels is sketchy and vague at best. She has been down here once before to locate a missing person—a diplomat’s wife—whose single white glove conjured an image of a body-dump, a woman raped, wrapped in Visqueen, sunk into the silt at the bottom of the Potomac. Most of the classified missing-person cases that Jasmine has worked in her career have ended in tragedy. Which seems to be exactly how this day will end for her if she fails to find a way out.
She does remember the place being lousy with dead ends. Everywhere you turn, another airtight, sealed security door with triple-pane, bulletproof, mesh-reinforced safety glass. She turns a corner now, and she runs directly into just such an impediment.
She sees through the impermeable window into another corridor, which leads to another dead end. She can hear the dragging noises behind her, the relentless drunken gait of a dead scientist coming to—what? Sink its mortified teeth into her as some other cadaver had done to him?
Head spinning with dizziness, flesh crawling, blood vibrating in her veins with adrenaline, Jasmine turns and heads down a side corridor.
This hallway leads to the pathology lab. Jasmine remembers the tiled walls lined with metal doors, each one numbered cryptically. The smell of gasoline? Is it disinfectant? One of the burned-out fluorescent tubes overhead flickers back on as though the very current running through the sublevel is nervously reanimating. Something rumbles beneath her. Emergency generators?
She reaches another dead end—a blank tile wall with evidence of black mold in the seams of the grout—her heart hammering. Incredible how quickly all the complicated tasks are reduced to simple survival—fight or flight. She hears the foreboding sounds of dragging behind her, coming around the corner of the side hall, closing in on her, heavy, thick, feral, perhaps additional sets of shuffling footsteps coming.
Glancing over her shoulder, she sees three, maybe four skeletal humanoid shadows appearing at the mouth of the narrow corridor, seeping across the tiles as long and distended as oil spills.
If asked to recount the next few minutes in her nonexistent written testimony of the day’s events, she would now, for the first time this morning, for some unknown reason, have total recall of every minute detail. She would be able to describe her instantaneous decision to kick open the last door on the right—a space she would later learn is the main examination room of the pathology lab—and would have no problem expounding on the single, forceful impact of her right boot-heel on the door. The noise of that bolt snapping is punctuated by the sudden pain shooting up her leg from the impact.
She would be able to give precise descriptions of the odor that greets her in that dark, stainless steel, tomb-like room with the high ceilings, powerless halogen lights hanging down, and banks of body drawers embedded in the walls: The air reeks of gas with a darker accent beneath it, something protein rich and spoiled like old raw meat in a refrigerator that has long ago lost power.
In her report that will never exist, she would make crystalline clear—at this point in the time line—how she madly slams the door, wedges a chair underneath the knob, and searches in vain for the light switch.
Now, at this very moment, as her options run out, she spins and scans the room with eyes still adjusting to the darkness. She grips the DoubleTap pistol in her right hand, a single round left in the chamber. Something moves to her left. She jerks toward a shadow that she may or may not be imagining in her heightened state. With her inherited skills, she is not unlike a psychic medium entering a haunted domicile or a place of historical upheaval, assaulted by the noise of the residual trauma. Now her senses overload with voices and images coursing through her brain all at once, a fractured mosaic of blood, infection, misery, and hate—a great, heaving tidal wave of emotion seizing her.
Something to her left pounces at her in a whirlwind of death-stench.
At first, Jasmine registers only a blur slamming into her as she raises her gun with both hands and involuntarily squeezes off the second round, the barrel pressed against something soft. The creature going for her jugular whiplashes backward—hit dead center in the neck—the point-blank blast sending pink aerosol out the back of its nape. In eyewitness testimony that will never be written, Jasmine would probably describe the moment as instinctual, transpiring so quickly it’s difficult to parse every action and reaction that follows.
One thing is certain: The impact of the bullet passing through its mortified flesh does very little to impede or discourage the thing, as Jasmine learns almost immediately. Instead of falling down, the creature staggers for just an instant, then lurches a second time for Jasmine’s throat. This time, the impact of the creature ramming into Jasmine sends her stumbling.
She trips over her own feet, dropping the gun and collapsing to the floor.
The thing lands on top of her, its jaws already dilating, gaping, its bloodless lips peeling back, exposing wormy gray teeth, some as sharp as X-Acto blades. Jasmine once again reacts reflexively, with involuntary speed, grabbing the thing by its wounded neck one nanosecond before it sinks its incisors into Jasmine’s arm. The jaws snap and clack like castanets. The ratcheting teeth gnash and grind, seeking live flesh, the head attempting to oscillate back and forth, going for the inner parts of Jasmine’s wrists as she strangles the scrawny creature with little or no effect.
The stalemate that ensues practically mesmerizes Jasmine. She stares into the frosted portals of the creature’s eyes, seeing nothing but urgent hunger. There is nothing else there. No life, no blood flowing through its veins, no blush of vitality in the flesh—only pallid dead skin and hunger. Jasmine remembers then what smells like gasoline: embalming fluid.
All at once, the identity of the creature becomes clear to Jasmine—the high cheekbones, the stringy long hair, the emaciated limbs of a former middle-aged rural housewife, maybe a matriarch of a farm. Jasmine realizes on a wave of nausea that this is the decedent. This is the fatality from Evans City, the Caucasian, mid-thirties female delivered to Fort Denning restrained in a body bag … cause of death unknown. This is patient zero.
In the wake of this revelation, a circuit of empathy opens inside Jasmine Maywell—a current crackling through the contact of her fingertips—which erupts inside her like two catalysts crashing into each other.
– 6 –
Eating Disorder
It’s never just booze. It’s sex, weed, food, porn, blow, poppers, tobacco, pulling your hair out, eight balls, masturbating, caffeine, smack, cutting yourself, crystal meth, forcing yourself to vomit after every meal, sleeping pills, huffing, oxy, and playing endless video games.
Jasmine Maywell grew up consuming all manner of substances in compulsive ways. She was a restless child, nervous, bit her fingernails, suffered from eating disorders, overweight by the time she hit puberty, diagnosed early with ADD. Her special talents had been fully formed from birth, but they had caused her only agitation and night terrors until she was well into her teens. Kissing a boy with whom you’re desperately in love and discovering that he just wants to feel your tits was heartbreaking for a sensitive teenage girl of color in the 1980s.
Now, lying on her back in a dark, malodorous lab, in the thrall of patient zero’s cellular memory, she convulses on the floor. Back arching, jaws locking, mind imploding with the force of an epileptic seizure, Jasmine digs her hands into the ex-woman’s putrid, skinny neck as the poisonous narrative flows into her:
(… Daniel! Daniel, where are you?!… Screams coming from the barn … horses shrieking … me running across the back lawn, plunging into the stench of the stable … Daniel crouched on the floor of the barn, awful smell, blood coating his face … horses dead, torn open, guts spilled … Daniel eating … eating the entrails?)
Jasmine shudders, her hands welded now around the collapsed windpipe of the former farm wife. Jasmine’s fingertips adhere to the moldy, decomposing flesh as though super-glued to it as the jaws work and the teeth grate.
(… Losing track of time, Daniel feasting on my blood, my insides … Why, God?… Blackness drawing down over me … Why, Lord? Why have you forsaken us? Why?)
Darkness encloses Jasmine. All the sound and odors and echoes in the underground lab cease. The connection falters, flickering in the back of Jasmine’s mind, a weakening signal …
(… Wandering … aimless … so hungry … hungry for warm flesh … never enough … never satiated … always, always hungry…)
The third eye inside Jasmine contracts into itself, her inner mind-screen reaching the end of its programming block, the images in her head shrinking into a single, luminous, cold white pinpoint.
For a moment, the dot hangs in space, the black void around it deepening, sucking every last iota of humanity into its vacuum. In some distant chamber of Jasmine’s soul, she feels an emptying, a leeching of her humanity, the eradication of her ability to love, to laugh, to cry, to reason, to communicate, to appreciate, to empathize, to remember, to be alive, to be human. She senses the seismic shift inside her as the wasp in the jar buzzes in the heart of that icy white spot.
Jasmine increases the pressure on the mangled, turkey-like neck of the former country wife. The creature writhes and wriggles in her grasp like a fish on a hook. The need to fill the void—to put a salve on the hunger, to chase away the emptiness, to self-medicate, to forget—all of it begins to rise up within Jasmine’s wounded soul. In her mind, that ivory-bright spot swells, expands, blazes brighter and brighter. The hunger, the addictions, the need to consume thunders within her, resonating like a massive chord harmonizing with the diseased alpha waves of a dead woman flooding Jasmine’s brain.
The singularity—the big bang of Jasmine’s condition—now ignites, forcing her eyes to pop open, focus, and fix on what exactly is wriggling in her grip.
Food.
– 7 –
Solitary Exit
Jasmine doesn’t hear the far door burst open, the chair skidding across the floor, the barrel of a Beretta M9 poking into the dark lab, gleaming in the shadows like the tip of a divining rod. Jasmine is preoccupied. She’s too busy eating to notice anything else.
The lower part of the farm wife’s face is the most tender. In a gluttonous, mad frenzy, Jasmine bites off the creature’s lips with the hasty flourish of a famished gourmand slurping tendrils of fresh squid. The creature shudders and quivers in Jasmine’s grasp. The soft palate and sinus cavity are next. She spits out a rotten tooth as though it’s a seed. The truth is, Jasmine has always been addicted to, among other things, shellfish, so the process of greedily burrowing her teeth into the former farm wife’s mouth and hungrily chewing through the tongue, the facial and lingual arteries, and the soft tissues of the nose comes naturally.
The fluids and juices, seeping slowly due to the farm wife’s lack of circulatory functions, ooze all over Jasmine.
Within seconds, the creature’s face has been reduced to pulp. But Jasmine keeps gorging on the dead flesh, gobbling her way up into the orbital sockets. She slurps the eyeballs with the intensity of a Cajun sucking the heads of crawfish, oblivious to the two military police behind her, taking their first steps into the room with guns raised, muzzle sites at eye level, weaver positions, safeties off. Jasmine is too absorbed in her binge to notice, the hunger persisting like an ache, an itch that cannot be scratched.
Covered now in black, oily spoor, she starts in on the neck, gobbling through the creature’s slender, gristly cords, chewing through carotid down to the windpipe, hardly pausing to take lusty breaths. The former rural matriarch continues trembling and quivering beneath Jasmine, an engine that just keeps on dieseling even as it’s being dismantled. Jasmine has no idea that she is now in the front site of a nine-millimeter pistol.
The gun roars.
The single blast strikes Master Sergeant Jasmine Maywell two inches above her left ear, silencing her world forever and bringing an end to her own hunger that she was never quite able to slake.
– 8 –
Into the Dark
The second blast penetrates the farm wife’s mutilated head, sending a putrescent cloud of brain matter and skull fragments out the back of her ruined skull. The farm woman—restored in her gruesome death to her mortal self—collapses next to Jasmine.
The two military cops stand motionless in the cloud of cordite fumes for a moment, staring at the remains. The younger one holsters his weapon, then looks at the older one. “What the fuck.”
It’s not exactly a question as much as a commentary on the whole mess that has dropped in their laps over the last forty-eight hours.
The older one—heavier, grayer, his uniform stained in bloody blowback—shakes his head. “What the fuck indeed. I’m going home.”
“Good luck with that,” the younger MP says. “You see the reports? Nobody’s getting in or out of Frederick, it’s a goddamn shit storm out there.”
“We’ll figure it out.” The older one holsters his piece and walks to the door. “Send for cleanup, will ya? Bag and tag these stiffs.”
He walks out, leaving the younger MP standing there, scratching his chin nervously, pondering the connection between the two females lying in a spreading pool of blood on the parquet floor.
With no answers forthcoming, he turns and walks out, shutting the door behind him, leaving the human remains—as well as the world as a whole—in the dark.