October 12-13, 2010
Arriving on the scene shortly after the Garden City Fire Department extinguished the remainder of lingering flames, Jack Flag finds that very little of Earl Keegan’s barn is still standing. With a Styrofoam cup half full of lukewarm coffee, he steps from his cruiser and approaches firefighter Jim Foster. Taking a slow sip from the cup, Jack surveys the destruction around the area and then looks down into his cup with bitter disgust.
Piping hot, freshly brewed coffee has always been more than a point of interest for Jack. Coffee is the one thing that always managed to get him through those long grueling nights that often turned into long grueling days. Jack couldn’t imagine anything more enjoyable than a fresh hot cup of joe, except perhaps a quiet uneventful night to go along with his coffee. As he takes in the destruction around him and then peers into his cooling cup of caffeine, Jack realizes it is going to be another long grueling night.
The property belonged to Earl Keegan, a relatively harmless bootlegger known for supplying most folks on the outskirts of Garden City with some of the best rum you could get fifty miles in any direction. Known simply as Hooch by most, Keegan was personally jailed by Jack numerous times for minor offenses that mostly included fencing rum and public intoxication. It came as no surprise that Jack finds one of his distilleries burned to the ground. Still, Jack is a good cop; he does not intend to draw upon assumptions, at least not until he further investigated and gathered the facts.
“So much for a quiet night,” Jack says conspicuously looking around, turning his attention to Jim Foster. “Hey, Jim, what can you tell me?”
“It’s too early for this shit, Jack—that’s what.”
“Yeah, well, you know how it goes. Anyway, what can you tell me?”
“Well… it looks as if Earl Keegan finally managed to blow himself up.” Foster rests his hands along his waist as he addresses Jack. “Although I think the fire marshal is still sifting through the debris to determine the cause of the explosion.”
“Hmm,” Jack murmurs. “We got a body then?”
“Just a partial. Keegan was using a gas stove with an electric igniter to run his distilling rig. The explosion would have incinerated him and just about everything else.”
“So… is it just one body then?”
“So far, yeah, his truck is out front. I was one first on the scene, and I didn’t see any other vehicles, if that’s what you mean.”
“Who called it in?”
“Are you kidding, Jack… Who didn’t? Half the county either saw or heard the explosion. My best guess is everyone.”
“Hmm.” Jack takes a quick look at the ground around him. “It just doesn’t add up.”
“What doesn’t add up?”
“Jim? How long have you known Keegan?”
“Hooch… well, since high school. I suppose twenty—no, twenty-five years.”
“Yeah.” Jack rubs the stubble of his five-o-clock shadow, pausing long enough to connect the dots and take another unconscious sip from his coffee cup. He grimaces and then reminds himself not to take another. “Tell me, in all that time, have you ever once seen or heard about Keegan catching fire to any other distilleries?”
Jim removes his hat and curves his eyebrows downward, brooding over Jack’s question. He repeatedly scratches his short blond hair, trying to recall any incidents prior to tonight that might have involved ole’ Hooch and an explosion. “No. I guess I can’t rightly recall anything like that.”
“Yeah, I didn’t think so.”
“Are you suggesting someone might have blown ole’ Hooch to shit and shinola? He was kind of the harmless type, if you know what I mean.”
“That would be my guess, if the premise didn’t seem skewed.”
“What do you mean?” Foster scratches his head.
“Well, who would’ve had cause to off Hooch? He was harmless, you said so yourself.”
“Shit if I know. Maybe he did blow himself up after all.”
“Right.” Jack flips the rest of his coffee on to the ground and tosses the cup behind him, away from the crime scene. “Well, I guess I’d better get in there and sort through the mess. Holler at me if you come across anything useful.”
“You’ll be the first to know, Jack.”
Jack takes a few steps past the fire truck and then turns back to Jim. Shaking his index finger at the firefighter, he tries recalling a bit of information pertaining to Keegan. “By the way, where is the dog? What was his name?”
“Barney?”
“Yeah, Barney… Was Barney anywhere around?”
“Now that I think about it, no, he wasn’t. That’s somewhat weird. Barney is always with Hooch.” Foster shrugs.
“All right then.” Jack turns and walks into the remains of the barn. “Keep me posted.”
Jim nods, turning his attention to fire marshal Rick Gillespie.
Charred wooden planks and wet soot-covered framework encrust the scorched earth. The smell of burned cedar mingles with wet earth, and it clings heavily to the air. Jack steps into the wet debris, looking around with an arched eyebrow and conservative eye. Looking for more than just the obvious, he searches for clues that might immediately discern the cause of the fire. His eyes fall on EMT Mitch Casper zipping up Keegan’s remains in a body bag.
“Mitch, hold up a second,” Jack says.
He is delicate in his footing as Jack makes his way over to the young paramedic. Hunching down and unzipping the body bag, Jack pulls both side of the bag apart and peers inward. His eyes widen to the mutilated human remains inside.
“Jesus—what the…” Jack pauses, briefly taken aback, and then leans in further to get a better look. “What the hell is this?”
“This,” Mitch calmly states as if nothing ever affected him, “this is what’s left of Earl Keegan.”
“Okay. I gather that.” Jack looks up at Mitch confused. “Now where the hell is his head? You haven’t recovered the head?”
“This is just what was found in the immediate area. Gillespie has everyone sifting through the debris outside.”
To the untrained eye, it looks as if someone had skinned half of Keegan right down to the bone and then beheaded him. Jack glances over the remains, looking for any obvious wounds that might imply foul play, thus giving him what he needed to declare the crime scene a homicide. That is the first thing any good police officer would do—go through the evidence to rule out murder. The explosion destroyed most evidence Jack might have otherwise found; however, on the right side of Keegan’s rib cage, just under his armpit, he notices a wide arched line of tiny perforations. Jack lowers his head flush with the opening of the body bag, studying the wound.
“Mitch, hand me a pair of gloves, will you?”
Mitch reaches into the pocket of his red EMT jacket, pulls out a pair of disposable latex gloves, and hands them over. Once fitted, Jack reaches back into the body bag, running his fingertips along the perforated tissue. Keegan’s arm is mostly gone, presumed blown off during the explosion. He moves the stub of an arm against the outer wall of the bag, getting a better view of the ribs. Jack spots a second set of puncture marks, although they arch in the opposite direction just below Keegan’s ribcage.
“Does that look like a bite mark to you?”
The EMT leans in for examination. Mitch runs his gloved fingers over both sets of perforations while visually inspecting the wounds as well. “It looks like something but definitely not a wound caused by an explosion. If it’s a bite mark, that is one hell of a jaw radius. Nothing like I’ve ever seen.”
“No kidding. It looks like a series of needle marks, except for the inflammation around the holes and its perfect formation—almost like a cookie-cutter perforation.”
“Like I said, if it is a bite, that is one hell of a jaw radius.”
“What could have caused a wound like this?” Jack says quietly and mostly to himself. Mitch shrugs.
“Keep Keegan’s body stationary and find that head and the rest of his arm. I mean it. Earl Keegan doesn’t leave this farm until we have all of his parts.”
* * *
Fire marshal Rick Gillespie and Jim Foster had been rummaging through the perimeter’s remains when they happened upon the gas stove Keegan used to cook his brew. The explosion hurled the stove thirty feet out of the barn, into a crop field that hadn’t seen one seed since before Earl Keegan’s father died back in 1999. Together, the firefighters manage to turn it upright when a noxious smell of acute rot wafts up into their faces, reeling them backward and making them drop the stove.
“Jesus Christ! Where is that coming from?” Marshall Gillespie sounds off, raising his arm to cover his nose, protecting himself from any further rancid assaults. Foster immediately buckles over, trying to contain the urge to vomit. He turns his head in line with the oven’s busted porthole—long thin gray legs and clawed feet hang limply out of the hole. Again, the smell assaults the two firefighters, which now seems to be concentrated around whatever is sticking out of the hole; Foster empties his stomach on the scorched earth.
“Would you get a grip?”
Unable to speak, Jim points to the oven and then purges himself some more. Gillespie turns his flashlight to the porthole. He is immediately slack-jawed as a stream of light shines over the long clawed feet that do not resemble anything remotely human or otherwise.
“Dear god… what is that thing?”
The thing, whatever it was, looked like a flesh bag of leaking pus and blood after the explosion shoved it into the oven with massive force. Its bony charred arms folded inward against its decimated ribs with its skeletal head twisted around backward, facing the back of the oven. Gillespie pulls his jacket up over his nose and leans forward for a closer inspection. Although Jim steps backward, step after step, he kept his pen light shining on the gruesome pair of legs that hung freely from the oven. “Marshal, be careful. We don’t know what that thing is. I mean, what the fuck is that thing?”
“I don’t know, Jim. The damn thing sure does stink though.” Gillespie turns back to where the barn once stood and calls for Jack. “Hey, Jack. You had better come here and have a look at what we found.”
After examining the barn and finding no evidence other than what he initially discovered on the remains, Jack casually walks over to the two firefighters, hoping they might have stumbled upon more of Keegan’s pieces. As the stove comes into sight, Jack can now see something stuffed violently inside the oven. Then as Jack gets a good whiff of the stench, he stumbles backward, assuming the same protective stance the two firefighters now hold.
“Oh… Oh yeah, that’s ripe.” He protests the foul smell and offensively scrunches his face, careening his posture away from the stove. However, as Jack notes the thin legs hanging from the oven’s porthole, he regains his composure and curiously leans down to one side with the beam of his flashlight streaming steadily over the back of the thing’s unmoving head. “So… who’s going tell me just what in the hell I’m looking at?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. I’ve never seen anything like it—a mutant maybe?” Gillespie offers his foolish explanation, and both Jack and Jim shoot him a look of absurdity.
“It does sort of look like something right out of a sci-fi horror flick. Christ, it smells worse than I would have imagined.”
Fearlessly, Jack leans in, resting his arm over the oven’s porthole. A sudden curious notion overcomes him, and he reaches inward, taking hold of the creature’s head. He turns it around, and the neck gives off a cracking sound, resembling that of a broken branch freeing itself from the tree. Some of it disintegrates in his hand. The dead creature’s sunken sallow eyes come into view, and the sight of hundreds of thin sharp teeth exposed through a severely damaged jaw. Almost instantly, fear grips Jack, and he releases the head, pulling his arm to safety.
“That is one ugly son of a bitch,” Gillespie says dramatically.
“I hate to call it, Rick, but I’m declaring this crime scene a homicide.”
“You sure about that, Jack?”
“I found bite marks on Earl Keegan that fit the exact description of those teeth. Whatever that thing is, it looks like it was trying to chew on ole’ Hooch. It’s just a hunch, but I’m guessing that the explosion took place during the attack and not afterward.”
Jim Foster, no longer able to withstand the stench, turns off to one side and, again, empties his stomach. Afterward, with one hand planted on his knee, Jim clears his mouth of any lose bits and uneasily looks up at Jack. “That thing was eating on Earl—like for dinner? Shit…” He says this queasily between a gratuitous dry heave that has Jack feeling every bit nauseous. Jim then releases all the contents of his stomach on the ground.
“Jesus, Jim. Will you please get hold of yourself? It already smells bad enough around here.”
Jack clicks the button on the two-way radio transmitter attached to the shoulder of his brown and tan police uniform, queuing dispatch. Moments later, Carol March’s voice, the police station’s dispatcher, squelches over the radio.
“Go ahead, Jack… over—” Carol recognizes the car number synchronized with Jack’s radio transmitter.
“Dispatch, this is 403 at mile marker 8, south of Highway 83. You may want to wake up Sheriff Byrd. Tell him to get down here ASAP. It looks as if we may have a 187 out at the Keegan farm.”
“Acknowledged, 403… Over—”
“Also, you may want to put a call into the CDC. Let them know there might be a possible 10-29 H as well.” Jack recites the code for potentially hazardous materials on a scene. Carol would later have to look up such a rare and formerly unused code before placing that call to the CDC or waking Dutch Byrd.
“Anything else, Jack… Over—”
“That’s all dispatch, 403 out—”
Marshal Gillespie appears at odds with Jack’s instructions to dispatch. “Jack? You really think the CDC needs to be involved here. If they catch wind of even the tiniest little fart, they’ll have Garden City locked down without a second thought. Come morning, we’ll have feds crawling all up our asses.”
“Marshal, we have no idea what that thing is… and until we do, it’s best to get an authority out here that just might have a few answers for us.”
“But why involve the CDC?”
“You said it yourself, Rick. That thing looks like a mutation. The only reasonable conclusion I can draw here is that maybe it is some kind of escaped government experiment or a potentially undiscovered new species.”
“Yeah, I read about creatures that live so far under the ocean that they have literally gone thousands of years without ever being documented,” Foster offers up his take on the creature’s genus. “I bet it’s the same for deep caves that go way underground. You think it’s one of those, Jack?”
“I don’t know, but both are just a little bit outside our jurisdiction. I think the CDC should to be in on this one.”
“Oh Christ—” Jack hears a startled firefighter shout from somewhere behind him. He turns, seeing the firefighter standing motionless in the barn’s debris. “What the hell is that thing? Jesus. It smells like shit.”
“It looks like we found another one.” Jack turns back to Rick and Jim.
Marshal Gillespie turns to Foster who still looks a bit peeked. “All right, you heard Flag. I want floodlights up fifty feet around the barn’s perimeter. Split the men into teams. If any more of these things are out there, I want them found.”
“As of now, we have the situation contained to the Keegan farm. So for now, no one leaves. At least not until we get clearance from the CDC to do so. And we’re going to need a place to store these things until they get here, so get on the horn and get a tent out here and a couple of generators—some coffee as well. It’s going to be a long night. And, Rick, remember, when everything gets here, no one leaves.”
“Whatever you say, Jack.”
Jack gives the creature stuffed tightly in the oven one last look and then turns back toward the barn and the discovery of the second creature. The firefighters search through the area as specified, and in a fifty-foot circumference, they eventually uncover a third creature hurled into an oak tree just east of the barn.