The Smiley-Face Witches

  He stepped back to let Deneese attend to her cuts, giving him the chance to study her at a distance, something that made her uncomfortable. “You don’t work for the hospital.”

  “Duh…”

  Deneese wiped the dried blood from Jagger’s cheek. “Ouch! That stings…”

  “That shot you gave me,” Drew said. “That weren’t no flu shot.”

  Jagger winced in pain. “It was an RFID chip. The signal let us track you, then put you to sleep when the time was right.”

  “What’s Frost want with me after all this time?” Drew asked.

  “Don’t know who that is,” Jagger said.

  Her answer confounded him. “Then who’s running all this?”

  “All I know is what I pieced together,” Jagger said.

  Drew knelt beside her. “Then tell me.”

  “I think after the project got cancelled, bits and pieces got sold off to the highest bidders.”

  “What project?” Deneese asked.

  Jagger paused before answering. “Project Chimera.”

  “What’s that?” Deneese asked.

  Jagger nodded at Drew in acknowledgement. “He knows.”

  “They put Enzyme Seven into our school water supply,” Drew said. “They was trying to make better soldiers by changing our DNA.”

  “Did it work?” Deneese asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I mean no. I mean it’s something I don’t wanna get into.”

  Deneese turned her attention back to Jagger’s wounds. “These cuts are gonna heal, but you’re gonna have some deep scars left behind.”

  Drew pretended not to hear her. “If the feds cancelled the project, then you ain’t workin’ for the Army.”

  Jagger shook her head.

  “Then what do ya want from me?”

  “Not me,” she said, “them.”

  “Alright, them.”

  “I don’t think they ever really wanted you,” she said. “You were just the bait.”

  “Bait?” Drew repeated.

  “Yeah, the bait. They wanted to get their hands on Susan W-w-olfesleg...”

  “Pronounced Kraft,” Drew said. “First thirty letters are silent.”

  “Whose Susan Kraft?” Deneese asked.

  “Anyway, if they got you, they thought she’d come out of hiding,” Jagger said.

  “Why?” Drew asked. “Why do they want her?”

  “All I know is that they need her help,” Jagger said. “Runyon let that slip one day.”

  “But who did all this?” Drew asked.

  “Don’t know for sure,” Jagger said. “The Enzyme Seven research is valuable. Could be anybody trying to get it.”

  If they were after Enzyme Seven, he wasn’t the target; he was collateral damage. That made him, made them, expendable.

  Deneese finished wrapping her arm. “That’s the best I can do.”

  “I know why you’re here,” Jagger said to Drew, “but what I don’t know is why you’re here.”

  Deneese stepped back like she was offended. “I don’t know either. Was kinda hoping you’d tell me.”

  Jagger looked her up and down. “No. But then again, they only told me as much as I needed to know.”

  Drew helped the Doctor to her feet. “Can you walk?”

  “I’m alright,” she said. “I can walk.”

  “If you can walk, you can cut,” he said. He handed Jagger the Swiss Army knife. “Take the chip out.”

  ***

  Deneese rummaged through the lab, checking the damaged equipment for anything they could use to help them dig out. She pushed a toppled bookshelf out of the way, uncovering a steel security door she couldn’t open. “What’s in there?”

  Jagger didn’t say anything. Instead, she put the knife down and finished wrapping Drew’s arm in gauze.

  “Answer her,” Drew said.

  “It’s restricted,” Jagger said.

  Drew grabbed her by the arm and dragged her to the door. “Open it.”

  She punched her security code into the adjacent keypad and the door whooshed open.

  Reinforced concrete kept the interior intact, limiting the damage in comparison to the rest of the installation. The power remained, though dimmed by reliance on the battery back-ups.

  “What is all this?” Drew asked.

  Twelve glass pods stood in a circular array, connected by a tangle of wires and hoses to monitoring equipment built into the modular walls. Stainless steel cages framed each transparent canopy, providing the ten foot by six foot eggs added structural support.

  “I think they’re the reason we were hit,” Jagger said.

  Drew recognized the pod’s inhabitants from the book in Lazy-Eye Susan’s library. “The Transylvania Brigade.”

  Pods one through eleven held a single Crypto suspended in some kind of translucent blue fluid. Their anatomies fused reptilian with mammalian, mammalian with aquatic, and aquatic with insectoid characteristics in abhorrent combinations.

  “What about number twelve?” Deneese asked.

  Drew checked for an obvious mutation in the soldier but saw none. “She looks so…”

  “Normal?” Jagger said. “She wasn’t. She was special, though not unique.”

  “Special how?” Drew asked.

  “She could see things we couldn’t see, hear things we couldn’t hear,” Jagger explained.

  “Then there’s two kinds of Cryptos,” Drew said.

  Jagger agreed. “Type A and type B. She’s type B.”

  Deneese pressed her face against the pod glass casing. “They alive?”

  “No,” Jagger said, “they’ve been dead for a long time.” She wiped the dust off of the control panel in front of her. Each pod was wired for vital statistics, though none of the twelve pods showed any activity.

  “Then why keep ‘em?” Deneese asked.

  “To study them,” Jagger said.

  “Study how?” Drew asked. “Study why?”

  “After all these years they still don’t know what Enzyme Seven really is,” Jagger said.

  Drew remembered Lazy-Eye Susan’s experiment years before; “You keep calling it an enzyme, which ain’t quite right—strictly speaking,” she’d said. “It’s a living thing. Like a parasite.”

  “Don’t look like nothing’s wrong with ‘em,” Deneese said.

  “A side effect of the treatment protocol,” Jagger said. “The specimens are...”

  “Specimens?” Drew muttered. “They’re people…human beings…soldiers.”

  “Are there anymore?” Deneese asked.

  “These are the only Cryptos on site,” Jagger said.

  “Why’d ya say it like that?” Drew asked.

  Jagger pretended not to know what he meant. “Like what?”

  “These are the only Cryptos on site,” Drew said.

  Jagger opened up one of the cabinets and pulled out a thick white binder with ‘CONFIDENTIAL’ stenciled across the cover. The binder held a dozen or so eight inch floppies inside laminated dust jackets like a photo album.

  “What are these?” Drew asked.

  “Names,” Jagger said. “Names and addresses of survivors…”

  “What survivors?” Drew asked.

  “Almost all of the original members of the Transylvania Brigade fell victim to the treatment protocols,” Jagger explained.

  “Almost all?” Drew said.

  “A small percentage survived and didn’t exhibit any outward mutations,” Jagger said.

  Drew turned back toward number twelve. “Like type B?”

  “Like type B,” Jagger agreed. “Enzyme Seven remained dormant until activated.”

  “Do they know they got it inside them?” he asked.

  “No,” Jagger said, “but they kept track of them.”

  She reached for the binder but Drew handed it to Deneese instead.

  “Wouldn’t it be easier to keep this stuff on a thumb drive?” Deneese asked.

  “The technology??
?s archaic by design,” Jagger said, “not many machines come with eight-inch disk drives anymore. Makes the system that much more secure.”

  She turned and headed for the broken doors expecting them to follow. She wasn’t surprised when they didn’t.

  “Whoever hit us will be coming to make sure the job is finished,” Jagger explained. “And even though you got no reason to believe me, I wanna help you get outta here.”

  Drew didn’t trust her, but they still needed her help to get out. He flashed the gun just to remind Jagger he still had it. “Lead on.”

  CHAPTER 9

  The General Manager was already checking his watch by the time Molly made it back to the editing suite. He almost didn’t recognize her in her jeans and college sweatshirt, though with her refined bone structure, she never needed much make-up, which was the exact amount she was wearing.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she apologized, “just getting some coffee.”

  Dan’s posture straightened when she entered the room. Even in his wingtips she was almost four inches taller than him, and she always got the feeling he resented her for it.

  “You been here all night?” he asked.

  She took a gulp and rubbed at her eyes. “Yeah, but it was worth it.”

  She’d given him six months when he arrived convinced the year-round tan and pinky ring wouldn’t play in the Midwest. But that was three years ago, and here they were.

  He pulled his chair up next to her while she scrubbed through the traffic cam footage. “What are we looking at?”

  “You tell me,” she said.

  He studied the clip for a second. “Is this the Texas video?”

  “No. This happened the day before outside of Mobile, Alabama.”

  “Tornado?”

  “Not this time of year.”

  “What then?”

  She paused the playback. “Still not sure…but what does this look like?”

  He took his glasses off, and put them back on again. “A…black…rainbow kinda zagzigging across the sky.”

  “See how it’s casting a shadow across the landscape beneath,” she said. “But it disappears right about…here?”

  “Hmm…So it’s only on that one frame. Glitch?”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Except we had the same thing on the Texas footage earlier.”

  That was puzzling. “Is there anything else about this on the network site?”

  “No mention of it, even on the local affiliate,” she said. “And then there’s these guys with the berets again.”

  “Yeah, I remember you mentioned them before,” he said.

  She reached into her messenger bag and pulled out a 78 RPM album.

  “What’s this?” he said.

  “The Zero Album.”

  “Who’s the band?” he asked.

  “The Smiley-Face Witches,” she said.

  The faded art work, which must have been controversial in its time, showed a gathering of women wearing Mardi-Gras style masks and nothing else, posed in front of an elaborate sandcastle sculpture. “Kookie. Where’d ya get it?”

  “Some girl was selling ‘em at a booth inside the convention center,” Molly said.

  He wasn’t there when she broke the Crypto-Punk story the first time, but he knew her history like everyone else at the station. “Didn’t I have to twist your arm just to get you to cover Cryptopalooza?”

  “What can I say, you were right and I was wrong,” she admitted.

  “You can say it more often,” he said.

  She unplugged her headphones and turned up the speakers. “Had PBS digitize the album during lunch.”

  The music was atypical of the progressive rock bands of the era, keyboards and wailing guitars echoing pretentious lyrics describing epic battles and mythic kingdoms in the most flowery way possible.

  “Guess I’ve heard worse…Does it all sound like that?”

  “Yeah, except for the last song,” she said. “Track thirteen.”

  He checked the liner notes and counted the tracks. “Only twelve here.”

  “Track thirteen is unlisted,” she said.

  “Then how’d you find it?”

  “By accident,” she said.

  “Accident?”

  She switched tracks and hit play. “It’s not on the album, it’s underneath the album.”

  He listened for a few seconds. “Sounds like robots doing karaoke.”

  “That’s the song,” she said. “They recorded it at a lower frequency and layered the other songs on top. It’s one continuous loop running the length of the album.”

  She rewound the Texas footage, but this time isolated the audio.

  Dan listened for a second but didn’t hear anything, so she adjusted the pitch and frequency until he could. “Same as the album, same as track thirteen.”

  She nodded. “It’s on the Mobile footage, too.”

  “I don’t remember hearing…”

  “You wouldn’t,” she said. “You couldn’t. It’s below the human auditory threshold. The only reason we can hear it is that PBS boosted the levels.”

  “Play it again,” he said.

  “A lot of these towns have their traffic cams on-line,” Molly explained, “And the song is on all the footage.”

  He sat there a moment making the ‘face,’ one eyebrow arched, the other one down, one eye open-wide, and the other focused into a squint. And there was the mouth, lips puckered like he’d been sucking lemons.

  “Why?”

  “Why what?” she asked.

  “Why is someone blowing these schools up?” he said.

  “That I don’t know…yet.”

  “Alright,” he said, “then who is blowing these schools up?”

  “Don’t know that either.”

  “A buncha dusty records with secret messages on ‘em ain’t news, kid.”

  “That same song is playing every time one of these schools blows-up,” she said.

  He mirrored her movements, using techniques he’d no doubt gleaned from the last management seminar he’d attended. “You remind me of a reporter I worked with.”

  “Who?”

  “Jack McGee.”

  “Don’t know him.”

  “A legend,” he said, “but he had the same problem as you.”

  “Which is?”

  “He couldn’t connect the dots.”

  Her expression hardened. “What do ya mean?”

  “He couldn’t connect the dots,” Dan said. “And because he couldn’t, the audience couldn’t either.”

  “I know our audience,” she said, “I’ve been here almost...”

  “I don’t think you do. This is the golden age for dummies,” he announced. “Not that I’m complaining, because that’s our core audience.”

  “But they’re the…”

  “Used to be a pterodactyl or a wooly mammoth would take ‘em out of the gene pool, but not anymore. There’s all kinds of safeguards to protect ‘em. And helmets, lotsa helmets. Helmets for everybody. And because stupid parents can only have stupid children, there’s more and more of them every day.”

  “What does any of…”

  “Conspiracies are tough enough for someone of average intelligence to follow, so you can forget about our audience. You know where most kids get their news?”

  “No…”

  “The Daily Show,” he said. “And that’s hosted by a second-rate stand-up comic.”

  “But…”

  “I’ve seen our ratings,” he said. “Our audience would rather watch shows about urine-soaked prostitutes and the midget rappers that love them than in-depth investigative journalism.”

  “Yeah, but…”

  “Remember the cheapskate Spider-Man? Or the guy in a white suit ordering spaghetti? Or the optometrist who thought he’d been turned into a cat?”

  How could she forget? She’d covered them all.

  “That’s what the audience wants,” he said.

  “Yeah, but…” r />
  “You’re instincts are off, kid. And every good reporter needs good instincts.”

  He got up to leave, but paused in the doorway. “You know who’s got good instincts? Debbi.”

  “Debbi? The weather girl?”

  “Don’t typecast her just yet,” Dan said. “We’re trying her out on some human interest stories. I gotta feeling she’s just starting to spread her wings.”

  Molly’s frown turned to a full-blown pout. “Yeah, I saw her spreading her wings at the company picnic. Behind the bleachers with…”

  His cheeks flushed and he had to clear his throat to continue. “She’s got more on the ball than you give her credit for…You should see the story she’s working now.”

  “What story?”

  Dan stepped back into the suite, lowering his voice to a whisper. “Somebody might be poisoning candy bars…The kind of candy bars schools sell for fundraising.”

  “What?”

  “I know, I can’t believe it either,” Dan said, “but she’s done her homework. She’s gonna be one crackerjack little journalist.”

  ***

  It was half-past five and already dark by the time Spider made it to Goodale Avenue. He’d kept the Botkins busy all afternoon, pedaling across town and back before finally shaking them only a few minutes before.

  He turned his bike into the botanical park, passing through the wrought iron arches welcoming the general public. Bushes ran along the street-facing fence, providing a natural barrier against noise and traffic and a good place to hide.

  He tucked his bike into the foliage and got comfortable.

  “What ya looking at?”

  Grady’s sudden materialization startled him. “Where’d you come from?”

  He pointed to the willow on the other side of the park entrance. “My bike’s chained to that tree.”

  He’d always been light on his feet, no doubt because of the time spent on his skateboard, but it could be creepy on occasions. “You need to wear a bell ‘round your neck like a cat.”

  “Dude, wasn’t sure it was you so I didn’t say nothing.”

  “Who else would be hiding in the bushes?” Spider asked.

  Grady pointed to the homeless guy relieving himself in the distance.

  “That a box of wine strapped to his back?” Spider asked.

  “Yeah, dude,” Grady said, “and he’s got bendy straws running from the box to his mouth like some kinda wino astronaut.”

  “Get down,” Spider said.

  Grady trained his eyes on Lazy-Eye Susan’s hundred-year old fairy tale Victorian across the street. “Dude, where’d she get the loot for the castle?”

  “Drew said she won the lottery a buncha times.”

  If he’d have said that about anybody else, Grady wouldn’t have believed him, but this was Lazy-Eye Susan. “What we doing here?”