Tony’s plane got as far as Atlanta before getting turned around this time. When he got the message, they promised him that they wouldn’t call again unless they were sure it was a situation only he could deal with. When he was back on the ground in Detroit, he checked his voice mail and found a message from a number he didn’t recognize. It was a male voice...maybe Detective Peters? He wasn’t sure, but the message was very specific. He was to report to a particular room at Receiving and wait there to speak with Lt. Worth. He wasn’t sure what was going on now. Last he knew, Reg’s house was in Grosse Pointe. But Teresa was a Detroit cop. Maybe he’d better find out where things were at before he showed up at Receiving. At the very least, he wanted to know how everyone else was. As he drove toward Reg’s house, he started working his way through his cell’s phone book. He tried Karen’s phone first, and it went straight to voice mail. He tried Leigh next and the same thing happened. Huh. Both of them seemed OK when he’d left that morning. So did Frank...but he was a Fed. Frank did get them cool toys when he could, but he was still a cop. Tony wasn’t calling him except as a last resort.

Tony tried everyone else’s number, even Aiden’s and Reg’s, though they were both unconscious last he’d seen them, and got voice mail. Damn. If he was going to learn anything before he got to the hospital, he was going to have to talk to Frank. He dialed, and as it rang Tony heard a kind of hitch in the ringing that usually meant the call was being forwarded. He was thinking about hanging up when Frank answered. “Yo, Frank! What’s up?” Frank didn’t go into details, but he told Tony that everyone was going to be OK and that the room number that Tony had been given in the voice mail was the team’s hospital ward. When Tony was sure that he wasn’t going to be arrested the minute he walked in, he assured Frank that he was on his way. He was in Grosse Pointe by now, and slowed down as he turned onto Reg’s street. Hmmm.... The yellow crime scene tape was still stretched across the front gate, and there were a few cars in the drive, a few guys talking in the yard, and two cops standing guard just inside the gate. Maybe he didn’t need to be there just now.... Tony let the Land Rover keep rolling on past the driveway.

In the yard, Philip Morrison was talking with a couple of contractors and the claims adjuster from his son’s insurance agency. He wanted this place fixed up and ready when Reggie was released from the hospital; and since the cops were pretty much done processing it, there was no time like the present. He knew that a couple of Reggie’s cars were missing from the garage, and only ‘Charlie’ had been accounted for. He’d been towed to the police garage for processing, since he’d been used to transport Reggie to the hospital. So Philip was shocked to see the other missing car, ‘Marcus,’ the Land Rover pick-up, rolling past the front gate. He jogged over to the cops guarding the front gate and pointed out the truck. A minute later, a cop car was coming up the street behind Tony. Tony was near the corner and tried to act nonchalant. He turned the corner like he meant to go that way, waiting to see if the cop flipped on his lights. They turned the corner right behind him and Tony saw the roof lights go on. He eased to the curb and turned the car off and waited, his hands resting on the top of the steering wheel. One of the cops came to his window, and the other came up the other side of the car, hanging slightly back from the passenger door.

Tony smiled at the cop as he put the window down, and the cop asked to see his license and registration. Tony handed him his license and told him he’d have to get the registration out of the glove compartment. The cop told him that they’d prefer it if he would step out of the truck and put his hands on the edge of the truck bed. They’d get the registration. Tony did as he was told. He’d gotten his head knocked a few times by over-enthusiastic cops, and he didn’t have time for that now. Especially since he hadn’t done anything wrong. He watched as the cop looked from the license to the registration and back to the license. “So, Mr. Leonetti...or is it Mr. Morrison? Can you explain why the name on the registration doesn’t match the one on your license?” “Oh, sure!” Tony said. He told the cops that his buddy had loaned him the car since his wasn’t working. He’d been about to return it, but it didn’t look like he could get in the gate. So he was just going to go around to see if he could get in the back way. The cops looked at one another and shook their heads. That was the first one they all tried, ‘my friend loaned it to me.’ How stupid did this guy think they were?

“Well, why don’t we just go talk to Mr. Morrison, and ask him if he really did loan you this.” “Sure,” Tony replied. He moved back toward the driver’s door and the cop stopped him. He didn’t want to make a scene in this nice neighborhood after all the trouble that had happened last night. But he’d take this goofball down if he had to. “No, you can ride with me,” the cop told Tony, taking his arm and guiding him toward the back door of the squad car. His partner tensed, expecting Tony to fight. But Tony just went where the cop led him and slid into the back seat of the cop car. Not the first time he’d been in one of these. The cop slid into the front seat as his partner climbed into the truck. He turned the squad car around and headed back to the corner. Tony was a little surprised, though, when he turned not toward the hospital but back toward Reg’s house, with ‘Marcus’ right behind. They pulled in the driveway and stopped next to the crowd of guys on the lawn. The cop opened Tony’s door and led him by the arm toward the grey-haired gentleman at the center of the group.

It only took Tony a second to recognize him. This must be Reg’s dad. He’d seen several pictures around the house, during the couple weeks he’d stayed here, of this guy with Reg. Tony started right in, saying it was nice to meet him and asking how he was holding up and how Reg was doing. Philip was a little surprised that this guy actually knew Reggie, and it must have shown on his face because Tony began to explain how he knew Reg. He’d been here at the house last night, Tony told him, and had helped fend off the attackers and get Reg into ‘Charlie’ to go to the hospital. He’d needed to borrow ‘Marcus’ because his own car had died right in the driveway as he’d been on his way in last night. “So that one’s yours?” Philip asked him, indicating the clunker that had been pushed off the far side of the driveway; “I’m sorry.” Tony saw the hint of distaste on Philip’s face, and explained that he got a beater so he wouldn’t have to replace his car every other week, since he was living in the city. Well, he’d have to replace it now, Philip told him. The cops had taken a look at it and the thing was well and truly dead.

Tony cringed inside. He hadn’t had time to get his ‘toys’ out of the trunk. But nobody seemed interested in him owning the car. Maybe they hadn’t looked in the trunk? Tony explained that he had come over to drop off ‘Marcus’ and get his car; but if he wasn’t going to be able to use his.... Philip told him that it would be fine if he wanted to keep ‘Marcus’ until he got a new car, and Tony thanked him. Now he was going to go down to the hospital and check on Reg and the others, he told Philip. As he went to climb into ‘Marcus,’ Philip waved off the cops, and Tony pulled back out onto the street and headed toward Receiving. He’d no sooner gotten past the gate when Philip pulled out his cell and called the hospital. Frank answered, then passed the phone to Reg. “Reggie, did you loan ‘Marcus’ to a goombah named Leonetti?” Reg was a little surprised that Tony was back in town already, but he confirmed that Tony did have permission to use the truck. His dad told him that he’d just been concerned, since he got the sense that Tony was talking too fast and too much, like he was covering something up. No, that was just Tony, Reg told him. Philip told his son that he had the adjuster and contractors at the house, and they were thinking that they might need to just level the place and start over. They’d taken a look around, and every inch of wiring had caught fire and melted. They might not be able to get the wiring back up to code. Of course, once they got it knocked down, Reggie could always consider selling the land and moving somewhere else, Philip suggested.

Then he paused a second. He was concerned about the people Reggie was involved with, he told his son. First there was the ‘fly incident’ up north, and now this. Reg tried to assure his dad that the two things were totally unrelated, but he wasn’t sure he succeeded. It wasn’t helping that he couldn’t concentrate, between the head injury, the morphine, and the others snickering. Apparently they could tell from his half of the conversation that he was talking to his dad about the house. They couldn’t seem to resist the urge to make jokes about ‘backyard barbeques gone bad’ and raucous neighborhood parties. He didn’t blame them. If it didn’t hurt his head so much, he’d have been laughing too. It was the kind of black humor that kept them all from crying. Reg wondered how the claims adjuster was reacting to the situation, and Philip told him that the poor guy might need some strong spirits. Reg suggested that his dad raid the bar inside the house...if there was anything left in it. Then he asked his dad if the safe was intact and if he needed the combination to get everything out of it when the house was being emptied. Philip told Reggie that he’d figured the combination out himself and already checked; everything in the safe was OK. Reg apologized for him having to deal with it. He’d made the combination the date of his mother’s death, and realized that that might have brought back difficult memories for his dad. It was alright, Philip told Reggie. Then, knowing that concentrating was probably taking a lot out of his son, he told Reggie that he’d be in to see him the next day and said goodbye.

Dinner, though the stuff on the tray could only loosely be considered “food,” was being brought in as Reg hung up the phone. There was the usual grumbling about the quality, or lack thereof, of the meal, which the orderly who was delivering it ignored; and as soon as he was gone, there was a discussion of where to call to have some ‘real food’ delivered. Frank cut that discussion short when he asked Reg if he knew why Stephen had been hanging around in the first place. Frank still was having a tough time believing that the ghost had anything but evil intentions. Reg had no idea; he didn’t even know that Stephen had been around until after Justin and Karen’s reception. And Karen was the one who’d told him. Frank turned to Karen then. All Karen could tell him was what she already had: She had noticed Stephen soon after they met Reg, but he wasn’t around all the time. Every time she did see him, he seemed to be affectionate towards and protective of Reg. He seemed truly concerned about Reg’s safety and happiness. But she’d never actually talked to him until yesterday night. However Weeping Sparrow had, and she might have some idea why Stephen was there. Reg was as shocked by this as the morphine would allow him to be. “Weeping Sparrow talked to Stephen? When?” Karen told him she’d seen the two talking on the roof of Justin’s garage when they’d gone to check out his house. Then Karen looked over at Leigh, who added that, when Karen had told her that Weeping Sparrow was talking to Stephen that afternoon, she asked Weeping Sparrow to ask Stephen if it was alright for her to pursue a relationship with Reg. And Stephen pronounced Leigh acceptable. The look on Frank’s face told them he was mildly irritated that the one person who might have this information was so hard to reach. One more reason for speaking to Stephen directly.

It was 6pm when Tony strode into the room, his arms full of bags. He’d made a stop at the first Coney place he passed between Reg’s place and Receiving, and got a dozen dogs with the fixings on the side. That way, he figured, everyone could fix their dogs the way they wanted. The morphine was suppressing Reg’s appetite, so even if he’d been able to have solid food, he wasn’t interested. Karen and Angie spoke up for some immediately, a good sign for both that they not only had appetites but were willing to dare Coney dogs. Justin really wanted a couple, but he’d been warned by the doctors not to open his mouth too wide or he’d irritate the work they’d done on the right side of his face. Karen fixed him a couple anyway, and cut them into little pieces that he’d be able to eat. Leigh managed to eat the stuff the hospital gave her, at least the non-meat part. She still was avoiding meat after what happened in the UP. But even the aroma filling the room didn’t rouse Aiden from his sleep. He’d really wiped himself out Healing Reg and Angie earlier, and all he could manage now was to roll over without pulling out the one remaining IV before falling back into a deep sleep. At least his body was holding up and beginning to heal itself; he no longer needed the IV of blood.

Frank had been working on the laptop, setting up a search for strange or unexplained disappearances that coincided with times and places where Edward was. Over the top of the laptop’s screen, Frank watched the others as they chatted and ate, and he realized that a couple of them, Karen and Angie, still hadn’t had any real rest since this whole thing began. He’d noticed that every time Karen’s head drooped like she was falling asleep that afternoon, she’d jerked it back up with a gasp as her eyes flew open. He calculated back; if she’d been woken at 3am Monday morning and it was now 6pm Tuesday evening, she hadn’t had any sleep in 39 hours. He could see her hands shaking as she fixed Justin’s food. Something was keeping her from sleeping and it was beginning to affect her ability to function. It was a sure sign of PTSD. If these people didn’t all get some sleep, they wouldn’t be able to think straight or act effectively, and they’d be no help to him at all. He pressed his call button and a few minutes later a nurse came into the room. He spoke quietly to her so the others wouldn’t hear, and asked if Karen could be given something to help her sleep. He couldn’t order the sedative himself because he wasn’t a registered intern at Receiving. He also asked if someone could clear Angie for sleeping. He’d do it himself, but, again, they wouldn’t take his word for it anyway. The nurse told him she’d send someone to take care of both.

A short time later, a woman came in and asked to speak to Karen. She was an intern with the psychiatry department, she told Karen, and she’d been told that Karen was having trouble sleeping. Before she could administer a sedative, she needed to ask Karen a few questions. Karen couldn’t keep herself from stiffening when the woman told her who she was. Her eyes nervously darted from the intern to Justin and back as the intern settled herself in a chair beside her. The intern asked if Karen knew how long she’d been awake and if she could describe what happened when she tried to fall asleep. Karen’s brain was getting fuzzy and she knew it. It took her a minute to figure out, counting on her fingers at one point, that she’d been up for over 39 hours straight. And she knew why she couldn’t sleep. Every time she closed her eyes and started to drift off, the sounds of glass breaking and guns shooting started; and on the inside of her eyelids, the usual flashes of light that came as her eyes adjusted to darkness became muzzle flashes and the colors from the room’s lights shining on her eyelids turned into the blackness of Reg’s great room and the dark black-red of the blood spurting from that poor woman’s neck.

As she finished talking, Karen swallowed hard and tugged at the hem of her t-shirt, forcing down the bile and Coney dog that she could feel beginning to rise as she relived the scene again. The intern knew that Frank was right; classic PTSD. She had the syringe in her pocket and asked Karen’s permission to give her the sedative. Karen managed a slight nod. It wouldn’t put her right to sleep, the intern told her as she gave Karen the injection, but it would relax her and slow her thoughts down enough for her to fall asleep on her own. Karen nodded. She’d had the same thing or something similar before. Then the woman asked if she could make an appointment for Karen to speak with one of the doctors on staff the next day. It would help Karen to deal with the traumatic experience she’d had, she said. Karen hesitated. She wasn’t going back in the hospital again. And talking to a shrink was the first step in them putting her in there. She understood what was wrong with herself now, and she could deal with it herself. Justin would help her. She didn’t need to be hospitalized for this. But this woman wasn’t going to take that for an answer. Karen stammered that she’d already talked to Fr. Colin about it. The intern replied that while she was sure that gave Karen some comfort, speaking with a doctor would still be helpful. Karen studied the brace on her left leg, and said that she’d think about it, but it would depend on her schedule tomorrow. She couldn’t let this woman see the fear that she knew was in her eyes. The intern gave Karen’s arm a slight, reassuring squeeze as she stood. She would go ahead and schedule some time for Karen, and Karen could come in if she felt like it. Then she left.

As the psych. intern was leaving, a doctor came in and checked Angie’s eyes. Finally, her pupils were equal and reactive. She could sleep now if she wanted, and he would highly recommend that she did, he told her. Once all the outsiders had left the room, the conversation returned to the problems at hand. Frank saw several possibilities for what was going on. Either Edward was the bad guy and he controlled the creature from the server; or the creature was the bad guy and it controlled Edward; or the two were completely unrelated; or Edward was a good guy and was trying to fight the creature his own way, and the seminars were a way for him to move around and gather info, while the ‘programming’ of people was his way of covering his tracks after he questioned them. It seemed like Stephen might be the only one who could give them some insight into the creature. Frank stared at Karen. They’d need to talk to Stephen. Karen could already feel the sedative beginning to take effect. Trying to do it now might not be such a good thing, she told him. No, maybe not, he agreed; but as soon as she was able.

Karen didn’t say anything, but she was afraid. Given the way Stephen died the second time, she wasn’t sure just what she’d get when she tried to call him back. Maybe she’d get Stephen. If so, she was afraid that it might hurt him to be pulled back again. Maybe she’d be unable to pull him back from wherever he’d gone this time, and get nothing at all but a headache. Or, and she shuddered slightly at the thought, maybe she’d get the creature that killed him or something worse. If that happened, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to control it, or survive the encounter herself. She thought about what happened to Stephen when the thing grabbed him and she shuddered again. Frank had turned back to the laptop he had on the tray in front of him and pulled some files up. It was some of the suicide cult info that had been hinting at the pattern. Jonestown had happened in ‘78; the French-Swiss cult, The Order of the Solar Temple, which had grown out of The Cross and Rose cult, happened in ‘94; Heaven’s Gate was in ‘97. There had been a failed attempt at mass suicide in the Canary Islands in ‘98; then The Ten Commandments of God sect in Uganda in 2000; and a mass suicide in Beijing in 2004. That one had been hard to trace, since the suicide rate in China was so high that it was hard to tell when the suicides were related or not.

Next, Frank pulled up the website for Edward’s company. As far as he could tell, Edward had never been to Jonestown or Uganda, though he’d been to many of the other places where mass cult suicides had occurred. Justin asked if Frank could get him a map marked with all the places Edward had been and all the places they knew of that had suicide cults. He was hoping that he would be able to find some pattern linking the two, but he needed a ‘visual aid.’ One big question was why Edward was interested in Karen’s mom. Karen tried to straighten up as she asked, “Hey, what’s wrong with my mom?!” Part of her brain knew that Frank was just looking for connections, that he wasn’t commenting on her mom’s desirability as a woman. But the logic portion of her brain seemed to be slowing down faster than the emotional part, and she felt somehow that she should be taking offence at the question on her mom’s behalf. Leigh did try to explain this to Karen, too, but she could tell that Karen’s brain was starting to disconnect. The others began to speculate on Edward’s motives for dating Cathy, and Karen kept trying to interrupt. Maybe Cathy was his test case for a new way of converting people without them going to the seminar? As far as Karen could remember, her mom had never been to one of Edward’s seminars. She’d traveled with him, but it always sounded like she entertained herself while Edward was speaking. ‘That financial stuff’ didn’t interest her. The logical part of Karen’s brain didn’t get it, though. It almost sounded like Karen was trying to defend her mom’s relationship with Edward, when she was the first one to be concerned about it. But every time she opened her mouth, she couldn’t stop this strange stuff from spilling out.

By now, Angie had crawled onto Aiden’s bed and curled up beside him, careful to stay on top of the covers. Karen wanted to crawl in next to Justin but she was afraid she’d hurt him. She knew that one side had broken ribs, and on the other side his face was covered in bandages. She stood unsteadily beside the bed and asked him if she could sleep with him or if it would be better for him if she slept in her own bed. Justin didn’t have to think at all to answer that question. He wanted his wife lying beside him. The only question was on which side. He paused for a second and thought, then decided it would be better if she were on his right. He scooted over and motioned for her to climb in as he lifted the blanket for her to crawl under it. As Karen was curling up (as much as the brace allowed, anyway) with her head on Justin’s right shoulder, Reg asked where Drew had gotten to. Then he felt a movement on his belly. A moment later the little black head, with the unusually-placed white mark on the neck, poked out the top of his blanket and began purring loudly. Reg scratched Drew’s head as Drew looked around to figure out where everyone was. When he saw that Karen had finally settled down, he walked down Reg to the foot of the bed, took one leap to the floor and another back up onto Karen and Justin’s bed, where he crawled under the covers and made himself comfortable on Karen’s hip.

Leigh had been sitting beside Reg and taken the phone from him when he was done talking to his dad. Now she decided to try calling Dee. Dee had a lot more experience with all kinds of things. Maybe she could shed some light on the problem. And maybe Alister, if he was feeling well, could help them with the creature from the server. Karen still wasn’t convinced that the thing had actually been trapped in the Spook Server, and she said so. The others began discussing the possibilities for how all Reg’s wiring, plus the batteries and chips in all their electronic equipment, and even Tony’s car, had all been effected. An EMP didn’t explain everything; but as far as their experience went, neither did the Unknown effect they’d begun calling Haywire. Karen asked if they thought that using Haywire on something like the local transformer could have caused the explosion at the house, but neither Frank nor Tony thought so. And Justin still hadn’t been able to work out how it was able to affect cars the way it did. But that had nothing to do with the comment she made next. Somehow her tired, drugged brain went off on an electrical tangent, and she asked if anyone knew that on July 17, 1902, Dr. Willis Carrier invented the first air conditioner in Brooklyn. NY. Air conditioners were electrical, too, right?

The phone rang a half dozen times before Dee’s machine picked up. “I’m going to be away for an indefinite time,” Dee’s voice intoned. “So I hope you can do OK without me! ‘K? Bye!” BEEEP. Leigh left a brief message that she had some questions she hoped Dee could help with. Alister must not be doing very well at all. She would pray for them both. It was a few minutes after 8pm now, and there was a quick knock on the door and it opened before Frank could get to it. Luckily it was Teresa. She was still dressed in the suit she’d been wearing that morning, and she looked exhausted. She dragged into the room and flopped down into the nearest chair, then set her briefcase on her lap and opened it. Justin pointed out that there was a spare bed available if she needed it, and with a short motion of his head he indicated that Tony should move his butt off the bed he was on if Teresa wanted it. Tony didn’t move, waiting to see if the cop did. He wasn’t going to get up for nothing--he’d had a long day too, what with 2 trips halfway to New Orleans and back and a ride in the back of a Grosse Pointe squad car. All on top of his concern about the stuff in the trunk of his car.

But the bed wasn’t what Teresa wanted just then. She lifted a flask out of her briefcase and took a long pull from it, then offered it to Frank. He shook his head. It wouldn’t do for him to mix alcohol with the pain pills they were making him take. Besides, he was planning on staying up tonight. The others needed their sleep; but he was doing OK and somebody needed to guard them all. There weren’t enough of them in a good enough condition for him to set up watches. “None of them remembered anything,” Teresa said after sitting quietly for a couple minutes, savoring the feeling of the alcohol warming her chest and stomach on its way down. The assailants she meant. She’d just gotten done interviewing the last of them. The last thing any of them could remember was getting a phone call. Even the gang-banger, who’d just been out roaming the streets, had gotten the call, on his cell. They all answered it and every single thing from that point on was a blank. Then, they woke up in the hospital. They had no idea what they’d done, where they were, or why they were hurt. They couldn’t even say who the call had been from or what the caller had said. She’d pulled all their phone records, and it appeared that they all got calls, simultaneously at about 11:50pm, from Reg’s personal, unlisted, home phone number.

Reg had been cutting back on his use of the morphine so he could think more clearly, and had even asked Frank to adjust the machine to cut the dosage, but he thought for a second he’d just hallucinated what Teresa just said. How was that possible? She didn’t think that he.... The jump in the numbers on his monitor told the others that Reg had tensed up, and Teresa was quick to let him know that she did not think he had anything to do with it. It wasn’t even possible for Reg to have done it if he’d tried. Obviously the records had been tampered with. Up until now, everyone had tried not to say much about the assailants, other than that they appeared to be neighbors, to protect Reg. But he was curious about where they’d come from that they all got to his house, armed with whatever was at hand, so quickly. So Teresa told him who they were--all people from within a five-minute walk of his house, except the one kid who just happened to be passing through. The two kids that Tony had had to shoot in the front yard were from the house next door to the west. And the man who’d been killed in the yard (“Yo, that was totally an accident,” Tony was quick to protest), and his wife, were the couple from the house across the street. The really creepy thing was that every one of them gave her the same “Edward is simply wonderful...” speech, when she brought up the name.

Everyone in the room looked at Frank when Teresa told them that. Sure, it was only circumstantial, but it would be pretty hard now to deny that the two things--the electricity blowing out and the zombified neighbors attacking, or the creature from the machine and Edward, if he preferred to look at it that way--were related. Frank hesitated. If they’d killed everyone in the house, he pointed out slowly, and then killed themselves, it would have looked exactly like a mass suicide cult situation. All their faces darkened as the thought sank in. Teresa told them that she did have the forensic accounting guys quietly going after Edward’s records. But that might take time if they didn’t want to spook him. Frank still had Edward’s ‘home page’ up, and he poked around in that and the death cult files a little more. It was Apr. 4, 1955, when the precursor to what became the Jonestown cult became active. Edward would have been 13. He started doing his seminars, at least ones large enough to leave a mark, in Dallas in 1978, just a couple months before the Jonestown deaths. Interesting point, the final death toll there was 909. Frank started looking for personal info about Edward. He’d gone to college in Iowa, and gotten a BS in Electrical Engineering in ‘62. He did not appear to have been a member of a frat or any other extracurricular clubs. He got his MBA from The Wharton School of Business in ‘76. Frank started typing. He was starting a search for people who knew Edward in the years prior to when he began his public speaking career. He wondered aloud if any of them were still alive, since so much care had been taken to wipe out any and all negative references to Edward since then.

“But I still don’t see how he could have gotten to all those people who attacked us,” Karen mumbled. She hated to sound like she was defending him, because she wasn’t. She just couldn’t figure out what kind of hold he’d had over some of those people, since obviously some, like the teenagers and the bike-chain punk, would never have gone to one of his seminars. And what about Reg’s dad? How did he get sucked into this? Frank checked the website. Reg’s dad had been a Big 3 executive, right? Yes, Reg confirmed. He was retired now, but he still did consulting work in the industry. There had been a seminar in late September for GM, which had between 700 and 800 attendees, according to the site. Maybe his dad had been to that one. The one on Mackinac, where Karen’s mom had met Edward, had been for high-level government employees. Everyone visibly cringed when Frank told them this. They looked at Teresa. She’d already told them that she’d had no contact with the guy beyond meeting him at the reception, and they believed her. But what about others in the department or in local government? She didn’t know. The Chief might ask her people to do the impossible, but at least she always stayed out of the way and let them do it without her breathing down their necks. So it would be really noticeable if Teresa just walked into the Chief’s office to ‘consult’ with her about the case, to find out if she’d been to that seminar.

What Frank really wanted to do was get hold of one of the people who’d been to one of Edward’s seminars. Then he could de-program them and find out what went on in the seminars. That might at least tell him which side of the Fight Edward was on. Justin had been pretty quiet during the discussion, but his mind had been busy. Now he asked Frank what he thought of using modified paintball guns as non-lethal weapons. He was pretty sure he could tweak the guns to fire with more force; and if he could figure out something to use instead of the paint balls, something that wouldn’t explode so it would have more of an impact.... At least they were legal, and more easily concealed. Most of the non-lethal rounds they could get on the internet had to be used in shotguns or something similarly large. And it was illegal for them to be shipped to anyone other than law enforcement agencies. Frank could certainly get rubber bullets or bean-bag or gel rounds for them; but if he wasn’t there to vouch for the team when they used them, it would still be a major pain in the keister for them. Teresa told them that she would see about getting them all tasers. Those weren’t a perfect answer either, since they were more limited in their range, number of shots and rate of fire. But they were easily concealed and pretty effective against regular human beings, while being non-lethal and a damn-sight less messy than ‘knee-capping.’

By 8:30pm, Teresa had decompressed enough to consider going home. She closed her briefcase and stood, then looked at Frank. “Muelder, stay off the firing line.” Frank started to object that “they took my gun,” but Teresa stared straight at the lump under the edge of his pillow, where he’d stashed his spare, as he said it and he knew he wasn’t fooling her. Frank took another tack. Maybe Teresa ought to have some protection herself. Whatever was going on, it was linked somehow to doing research on Edward, and she was neck deep in that now too. She promised Frank that she would assign herself a bodyguard, one who hadn’t heard of Edward Harrington. She glanced around the room. “Get some sleep people,” she told them. It was pretty obvious that some of them were most or all of the way there already. “I have a long day tomorrow. Call if you have questions or ideas. Oh, and by the way, Deputy Assistant Director Birkoff will be coming out with the DHS team.” Tony stopped her before she walked out and asked quietly when he’d be able to pick up his car. His concern was written all over his face, and Teresa told him, with a ‘wink and nudge’ obvious in her voice, that “it was empty when I got to it.” Either she’d secured the items he was worried about before anyone else could find them, or she’d left them in place and made sure that no one else would bother with the car after that. But he wasn’t sure which. He’d have to check it out in the morning. Hopefully she would get the cop-guards pulled from Reg’s house the way the others told him she’d had the ones on the hospital room removed.

As Teresa left the room, Justin could hear Karen snoring softly against his side. He was glad she’d finally been able to drift off. He’d been worried that she wouldn’t be able to deal with the PTS. Even he had a tough time with that and had almost ended up in the loony bin. She’d never survive if she had to go through that again. He glanced up, and could see over Karen’s head Angie lying beside Aiden. He suggested that someone put a blanket over her. Everyone thought Reg was asleep, too, but he piped up “That bod is so hot.... No, I’ll stop right there,” He must have been feeling better; he was making jokes. This led to more joking between the guys about Angie being able to kill people in her sleep for their comments. Frank got up and grabbed a spare blanket out of the locker, and unfolded it as he crossed the room. “Angie, blanket,” he said calmly, from a couple feet away. She grunted and lifted one hand to grab the edge of the blanket that Frank dropped over her. A second later she was fast asleep again.

Gradually, the others fell asleep too. But Frank slept lightly, determined to keep watch for anything strange happening. Considering what the electrical creature might be able to do, they weren’t going to be completely safe anywhere, especially the people still hooked up to the monitors. He couldn’t let his guard down again like he had last night.... Nurses came in periodically throughout the night, to check the condition of Reg and Aiden. But they were able to do it without too much of a disturbance, and almost everyone slept peacefully through the night. Only Leigh was disturbed by a nightmare. She was with Reg and he was drowning and she couldn’t save him. It was like he was sinking in quicksand, and though she tried, she didn’t have the strength to pull him free without being pulled in herself. She woke in a cold sweat, and found Reg safely asleep, his hand lightly covering the morphine button. She rolled over and hoped she could get back to sleep herself....

It was about 6am on Nov. 1 when the last of the battered Envoys was wheeled into the ward and put to bed. They were a sorry-looking lot just then. Frank was nearest the door to the right as one entered the room. Now that he’d been cleaned up, he didn’t look nearly as bad as he had when he’d first come in. But he was still sporting a few new bruises where he’d been punched a couple times, and he was plenty sore where the executive type, Derek Vicars if he remembered correctly, had walloped him with the golf club. Justin was next to him, dozing from the combination of the Demerol and the last of the anesthetic. He’d had to have a couple hours worth of plastic surgery done to clean up the nasty rip the bike chain had given him along the right side of his face. And his chest was wrapped tight to protect the cracked left rib he’d gotten from the golf club. Karen had been given a bed next to Justin’s, but she wasn’t in it. Her left knee was wrapped in a brace to stabilize the sprain she’d gotten from being kicked, and there was a pair of crutches leaning against the bed. But she was sitting in a chair she’d dragged close to Justin’s bed, her head lying on her left arm along the edge as she lightly stroked Justin’s forehead with that hand and held his hand with her right.

On the wall opposite the door, next to Karen’s bed, was Aiden’s. He was pale and lying motionless, with 2 IV bags, one a red liquid, the other clear, hanging beside him and the usual battery of monitors beeping above his head. Next to Aiden, along the same wall, Angie was sitting on her bed cross-legged, trying to stay awake. She’d taken a couple solid thumps to the head; nothing that was hard enough to crack her thick skull, but they were enough to give her a serious concussion and the doctors wanted her to stay conscious. Opposite Karen’s bed was Reg’s. He was also lying still, hooked to IVs and monitors. And opposite Justin’s bed was Leigh’s. She didn’t actually need one, since she had only gotten a little shaken up by the ‘flash-bang;’ but it seemed the police had requested that all of them be sequestered together in one room, at least until they had some kind of handle on what had happened at Reg’s house. Tony, the only other team member to have a part in the fight, was supposed to be in the bed opposite Frank’s. But he’d gotten a call just before Detective Peters could escort him up there. He’d gotten the good news earlier, that they got the rescuers out of the collapsed building in New Orleans without needing his help; and he got back to Reg’s just in time to help the others. Now he got the bad news that while he was trying to subdue Reg’s neighbors in the front yard, three more buildings in New Orleans had collapsed. FEMA trumped the local police in this situation, and Tony headed out to the airport in the car he’d borrowed from Reg, with orders from Peters to return to Detroit as soon as he was done.

Reg lay still on the bed and tried to determine if his head was still even attached. “Headache” was an inadequate word to describe how he was feeling just then. He was vaguely aware of the pain, but it felt far away somehow, like it was his but not his. As he lay there, he noticed beeping and followed that thread of thought out until he was able to tie it of to the heart monitor above him. It was kind of comforting and relaxing to listen to the steady BEEP...BEEP...BEEP.... Leigh had been watching Reg carefully, looking for any sign that he would be alright. She hadn’t really said anything to the others, but she knew that she was responsible for Reg’s condition. If she’d been thinking with her brain instead of her hormones, she’d have known better than to separate herself and Reg from the protection of being with the rest of the group. The electrical creature had said that ‘it wasn’t over.’ She should never have dragged Reg away. If she hadn’t, he might not be lying there fighting for his life. She noticed now that his heart rate and respiration readings had gone up a bit. He seemed to be waking up, but she didn’t want to rush him so she just kept watching for some signal that he was “there.” She moved closer, and his eyes fluttered open for just a second. He asked her if he’d died, and she assured him he hadn’t.

There was a TV hanging from the ceiling in one corner of the room, and Frank flipped it on with the remote. Unfortunately, the orderly hadn’t left a listing of what channels were available. As the screen came to life, The Jerry Springer Show blared out from the speakers. Frank turned the sound down and flipped the channel. An infomercial. Great. While Reg might need OxyClean to get all the blood stains out of his carpets, Frank didn’t figure any of them would be ordering it in the next 15 minutes, even if they would get a sprayer bottle thrown in free. In fact...he checked the phone and, sure enough, there was no ring tone. The cops wouldn’t want them having any outside contact until their statements had been taken. In the next bed, Justin started to stir. Karen lifted her head, and everyone who was conscious could see that she didn’t look too well. She hadn’t taken much physical damage, but she was extremely pale. Frank flipped through a few more channels and passed a different episode of The Jerry Springer Show. Across the room, Reg groaned and asked if there wasn’t something better on. And almost anything else would qualify for that except maybe the infomercial. Or had he actually died, he asked, and ended up in Hell? Justin told him that he hadn’t died, though this might be Hell if Frank couldn’t find something better on, and the next push of the remote button brought them the local news.

It just so happened that the big story of the morning was the strange happenings at Reg’s house. The reporter, yet another of Justin’s cousins (a third-cousin once-removed to be exact he told them after taking a minute to work it out in his still foggy mind), was standing in front of what looked like a war zone. They recognized Reg’s yard, which was lit by huge lamps brought in by the crime scene investigators, several of whom were seen moving around carefully marking things on the ground with little cones. The few windows on the front of the house were broken, the driveway had both Grosse Pointe and Detroit squad cars and the CSI van strung out along it, and when the camera focused on the yard behind the reporter they could see ‘chalk’ body-outlines on the lawn. The reporter didn’t have any details as to what happened there at the residence of Reg Morrison, a local businessman and the co-founder of DynaFlow Corp., though she was able to tell the morning anchors that power was out for over a half-mile radius around the house. And she would be staying with the story and would let them know as soon as the police released any more information.

Frank turned the TV off when the report was over. Reg wanted to know what had happened, and Leigh, Frank, Justin and Angie told him what they could. Basically, they’d been ambushed by people, some of them Reg’s neighbors, who seemed to be under some sort of mind control, and he’d taken a sledgehammer to the head. Karen helped Justin sit up as Reg was being filled in, and Justin noticed how bad Aiden looked. Justin’s head and ribs were killing him, but he got up and shuffled over to Aiden’s bed and laid a hand on his shoulder. The knife wound was bad enough, but he figured that what put Aiden over the edge was Healing Angie. So he did what he could to boost Aiden’s strength, then went back and sat down on his bed. Karen didn’t look so good either, but she shook her head before Justin could even make the offer to help her. She wouldn’t object to him helping one of their friends who really needed it; but she could get by for now, and she didn’t want him to wear himself out when he needed his strength right now and some solid sleep was really all she needed. Too bad she couldn’t get it. Every time she started to doze off, she could hear the gunshots again in her head, and see the muzzle flashes freezing the fight into snapshots of Hell.

Angie got up and shuffled toward the bathroom. She was still obviously unsteady on her feet, though she tried to hide it; and she bumped into the door frame as she tried to go through. She put her hand out and felt her way through the doorway and shut the door, not able to trust her still-blurry vision. A couple minutes later, Angie made her way back to her bed. As she was climbing onto it, there was a knock at the door. Worried looks shot back and forth across the room then over to the door as Frank called out that the visitor could come in. They were all surprised when it turned out to be Lt. Worth instead of Detective Peters. She was dressed for work, with a large foam cup of coffee in her hand. She glanced around the room at all of them, then shook her head and told them with a hint of warmth in her voice that they were “one sorry-lookin’ group.” She turned and looked up and down the hallway, then glanced down at her watch and told them that when the nurse was done she needed to talk with them. Then she sat on the edge of the empty bed and sipped her coffee.

A moment later, a nurse came through the door and began checking everyone’s vitals. Angie’s pupils were still uneven the nurse warned her, so she’d need to continue to stay awake. When she got to Reg and noticed that he was awake, she made sure that the button for self-administering the morphine was within comfortable reach for him. He thanked her for the morphine like it was the perfect gift. As she got around to Frank, he was checking his own pupils in the mirror he’d gotten from the night stand beside the bed. “Doctors make the worst patients,” she muttered, not quite under her breath, as she took the mirror from him and checked his pupils herself. When she was satisfied that none of them would die on her watch, she left the room. Teresa waited for a minute to make sure the nurse wasn’t coming back, then she told them that this conversation would be strictly off-the-record. She valued her career too much to put it on-the-record. Once she heard exactly what had happened--the whole truth, she stressed, looking at Frank--she would figure out what would be going in the official reports. In any case, this was going to be one hell of an investigation when a bunch of middle-class citizens got shot while assaulting a neighbor’s house.

Frank, Justin, Reg, and Leigh all began to talk at once, and Teresa sighed. They all got quiet, as if on cue, and Frank and Justin suggested that Reg start the story from the beginning, if he felt up to it. Reg was floating so high on the morphine that he wouldn’t have been able to tell if he was up to it or not, so he began with how he and Stephen had met and continued through to the part where Tony and the others showed up at his door. Then Frank and Justin took up the story, explaining how Stephen warned Karen that Reg was in danger, how they destroyed the Spook Server and all Reg and Stephen’s research, how they tried to recreate the research all that day, and how they were attacked that night by people who seemed to be under some sort of supernatural influence. As they described the attack in detail, Karen stood and limped as quickly as she could to the bathroom, her hand covering her mouth, and shut the door. There wasn’t anything in her stomach to throw up, but she couldn’t think about the fight, about how the blood had squirted black from that woman’s throat, without needing to.... When her gut stopped convulsing, she ran cold water on some paper towels and wiped her face and neck. She didn’t have to look at herself in the mirror to know that she looked like hell--she felt like it, too. Luckily, the description had gotten to the part where the cops showed up, by the time she came out of the bathroom. Then Justin asked if Teresa had heard of Edward Harrington before, and she asked how he was involved. She’d met him only once, at Karen and Justin’s wedding reception. Frank told her that they weren’t sure yet if he was. But Reg had begun doing some research on him at Karen’s request, just a couple months ago, and he seemed to be ‘pinging’ the same radar as all the cult activity they’d been tracking. Justin told her about how Karen’s mom had used the same phrase over and over when she talked about Edward, and how the same phrase came up thousands of times in everything they could find about the guy on the internet, which, incidently, included not a single bad word about him or his company. She agreed that it did sound ‘cultish.’

Teresa had been taking notes, and when the men were finished, she looked back through the notebook like she thought she missed something. First, where was Tony? He’d gotten called to New Orleans by FEMA, they told her. Next...Stephen was dead, but Stephen came to warn Karen; was that right? Justin told Teresa that it was, that Karen had seen ghosts all her life and that Stephen was a ghost and did come to Karen about 3am on the 31st. Teresa looked at Karen, who hadn’t said a word up until now, and Karen nodded that what Justin said was true. Then Frank asked why Teresa was there and not Detective Peters. Teresa glanced down at her suit with a look that said that she wouldn’t normally dress so formally that early in the morning, and told them that she’d already been in the Chief’s office. It seemed that the Grosse Pointe Police were calling in a favor, with the excuse that the Detroit Police had more experience with this sort of mayhem, stabbings and shootings and such, than they did. Of course, the real reason was entirely political. A bunch of upstanding citizens had just gotten shot while attacking a neighbor. If the case got solved, the GP Police could take credit for having called in the ‘right people’ to work it. If it didn’t, the blame would fall on the DPD and it wouldn’t hurt the Grosse Pointe politicians’ chances for re-election. The Chief gave her the case, maybe because she knew that Teresa had worked with Frank and ‘his people’ before, or maybe because she was trying to ‘give a sister a break.’ Speaking more to Frank than the others, Teresa told them that her career had been stalled at its present level for ‘a while’ now, and with a female Chief, solving the case might give it the boost she needed.

She looked almost hopefully at Frank then, as Frank began to explain the ‘official story’ that he would be using--that the team was investigating cult activity, and an unusual EMP killed the power just before they were attacked. He wasn’t sure why they’d been attacked, but he figured that maybe terrorists were using cult activity as a cover and the investigation was getting too close. The attackers must have been drugged somehow, maybe localized tainting of the water supply? Justin asked if Teresa had figured out who the kid with the tattoos was yet, and she told him that she’d be working on that after she’d had a chance to talk to him. She was on her way to talk to the others next, the people who’d attacked Reg’s house. She wasn’t really sure how to refer to them. They weren’t exactly the victims in this case, though some ended up in worse shape than the Envoys. But it was hard to consider them the perps, since they were mostly upstanding citizens. She was almost stern as she looked at Frank and ‘suggested’ that he not get involved in this investigation, at least no more involved than a ‘victim’ should be. Frank just wanted to make sure that whoever was doing the DHS investigation was someone he could trust to do a good job with it. Karen asked if the same agents who they met in New York could do it and Frank told her that they were FBI, not DHS. Then Justin suggested Jared. He was back at work now, Frank said, and since he was Frank’s boss, Teresa thought it might be appropriate. She would call Jared herself and see if he could take on the DHS end of the case. If not, at least he’d know about it and hopefully send someone Frank could trust.

In any case, she needed to know what made Frank think there was something supernatural involved. He pointed out that there was no previously known way to create an EMP powerful enough to take out power over such a large area, and as far as he’d heard, DTE hadn’t found any other explanation for the outage yet. They hadn’t, she agreed, at least not that she’d been told about yet. Plus, Frank continued, it seemed that no one could come up with any other explanation for how those people had been able to attack the way they had. Even when he’d thrown the flash-bang into the bedroom, it didn’t faze them the way it should have if it were just hypnosis or any known drug. Circumstantial, Teresa told him. She needed something more concrete before she was ready to accept that it was supernatural and not just some new drug or device. How about the fact that the people all fell down when Karen raised her Sphere of Protection, Justin suggested. Teresa looked from Frank to Justin to Karen then back to Frank again. Frank shrugged. When they’d first fallen down, he hadn’t known exactly what had caused it, though he’d seen Karen closing her eyes in concentration right in the center of the fight.

It was some ‘trick’ that Karen could do, he told Teresa, and he had no idea how it worked. They could all see the doubt in Teresa’s expression, and each of them who had some skill with the Art tried hard to think of a way to prove its existence to her. At least she could use that as limited proof that they’d all been drugged, she told Frank, even if nothing showed up in the tox-screen. The fact that they’d all collapsed at the same time could have been because the ‘drug’s’ effects all wore off at the same time. Then Justin got up from his bed and asked Teresa to look at the weight marked on the bed’s spec plate. About 400 pounds, she said. Justin squatted at the end of the bed, grabbed the bottom edge and lifted it. He paused a second then jerked it up over his head. Then he set it carefully back down. Karen stood and looked worriedly at him, and leaned heavily on the bed as she tried to take a step toward him. Leigh also noticed that Justin looked a little paler after his ‘exhibition.’ She came over and took his arm and, seeing that Leigh could do more than she could, Karen straightened the sheets while Leigh helped him back into the bed. Justin was trying not to show the strain, and he explained to Teresa that he couldn’t do that kind of thing in combat, that it took too much concentration to channel his strength that way. As Leigh went back to sit beside Reg, she told Teresa that she was able to block mind control of fellow Envoys, at least for a minute or two. And Aiden could heal people with his hands, Angie added. Justin laughed and told Teresa that that was part of the reason that Aiden kept ending up in the hospital, because of the stress that channeling his energy that way put on his body. Teresa looked over at Frank and asked with a smirk if he could “do magic, too.” He shrugged again and said that not everyone could, and Angie added that she couldn’t either.

Teresa was trying to digest all of this and wondering what other things she didn’t yet know about this little ‘group’ she’d become a member of; and Reg studied her, trying to get a feel for what she was feeling right then. The frustration rolled off her in waves, combined with worry and anxiety, and a healthy dose of curiosity. But there was something else, too...something warmer, a deep and abiding affection as she looked around the room at them. As Teresa turned to leave the room, Reg told her, “We like you, too, and we’re sorry you’ve been dragged into this.” He wasn’t talking just about this case. He meant the whole SAVE fight. The corner of her mouth turned up in a half-smile, and she told Reg that she was sorry too. She told them she’d see about having them released, at least the ones who were allowed to leave by the doctors, anyway. Then she walked out, trying not to show the strain of having another unsolvable case on her desk. She passed the meal cart on her way to the elevator. Working this case might not be great, but at least she wouldn’t be forced to eat hospital food.

The team’s breakfasts were brought in only a few minutes after Teresa had left. Karen’s had no sooner been set down on the table next to her than she got up and hurriedly limped toward the bathroom and slammed the door, again. She didn’t even want to think about whether it was the smell of semi-warm food or the sight of congealing oatmeal that made her need to throw up again. She just knew that she would need to get that under control, or she was going to get herself confined to her bed too. Hmmm, control. If only she had a little more of that, she thought to herself as she leaned against the wall. She could’ve stopped the fight sooner if she had had the presence of mind to pop the Sphere right away. How did the others do it? No one else had frozen up like she did. Karen washed her face again, and limped back out to her bed, leaning against whatever was handy along the way. Her knee hurt almost as much as her stomach and her head, and having to maneuver herself onto the floor in that cramped little bathroom repeatedly this morning wasn’t helping. She concentrated on breathing through her mouth and covered the oatmeal bowl with a napkin. Maybe she could at least drink the milk and orange juice....

Justin had taken one look at their ‘breakfast’ and asked the nutritionist who was delivering it if they couldn’t get something a little more palatable. Maybe some fruit or bagels from the cafeteria, Leigh asked. If they had a phone, Justin complained, he’d just call their usual coffee shop and have something sent over. In fact, he’d make sure there was enough to share with EVERYONE, he told her pointedly. The nutritionist smiled and explained to them how the meals were nutritionally sound, and formulated to help build the strength of the patients. But that didn’t stop the grumbling. As she went to leave, the woman told them she would see what she could do about getting the phone turned on. Unspoken but clearly implied was the message that what they did with the phone once they had it was their own business. Frank check the phone every few minutes, and after about 20 minutes he heard a dial tone when he picked it up. Justin asked for it right away, and called the coffee shop. He ordered a variety of bagels and pastries and fruit, and coffee and tea, gave them his credit card number, and asked to have it delivered to their ward. A little while later there was enough food that even Karen was able to find something she could manage to keep down.

Frank got the phone next, and asked someone at his office to bring him a new cell and laptop and gun. When they came to the room a short time later, they had the cell and laptop, loaded with the latest back-up and everything they could get on what happened last night, and had even thought to bring the spare suit that Frank kept hanging on the back of his office door; but they didn’t have the gun. Hospital regs prohibited patients having weapons, they explained. It’d be their necks on the block, if he got caught with a gun they brought him. Once he’d been released, he could pick one up at the office. As Karen sat next to Justin, holding his hand, and Leigh sat next to Reg, reminding him not to roll his head to the right side because that was the side that now had a ceramic plate to replace the shattered bone, Angie noticed something. They must have been rushed last night, Angie told them all, because they put her in the same room with Aiden! Justin asked her to stop making him laugh, because it hurt, and suggested that she not press her luck by getting in bed with Aiden or pointing the situation out to any of the doctors. Reg asked Frank to also call DynaFlow to check on things there. When Frank got off the phone, he told them all that there had been a massive power outage at that building last night, and Reg’s floor had been vandalized. Reg was concerned that the security guards, who should have been the only people there at that time of night, might have been hurt; but Frank said that no one was found there, not even the security guards. No one was sure if that was good news or bad.

A little before noon, a nurse came in with paperwork. Those who were ambulatory were free to go as soon as they signed out. However, Reg, Aiden, Angie and Justin had to stay. Justin and Angie would probably be released tomorrow. They just needed to make sure that Angie’s pupils were equal and reactive, which would mean the swelling had gone down, before she was released, and that Justin’s wound didn’t become infected. They’d really like to keep Frank overnight too, since he’d taken a bit of a beating; but they already knew that, since he was a doctor, he’d give them grief over that plan. Reg they’d probably be keeping for a couple weeks, given all the work they’d had to do on his skull. And they’d re-evaluate Aiden’s condition when he was conscious. They’d be at least keeping him overnight and more likely for a week. When everything was signed, the nurse left. Karen needed to go check on Drew. She’d been gone more than 24 hours now, and she’d need to put out more food and water for him. But before they all started to scatter, she needed to apologize. She stood and leaned awkwardly against the side of Justin’s bed, still holding his hand. She was sorry, she told them, for not using the Sphere sooner. Maybe if she had.... How did they all keep their cool in a situation like that?! She looked from one face to another, her own pale and tense with self-blame and concern for her friends’ injuries. She’d been so scared that she wasn’t even able to think straight. But...they’d all just gotten down to business.... How did they learn how to do that? How could she?

Most of them had been trained for that sort of thing, Angie told her. Karen had never been in the service. The first thing they did with new recruits in boot camp was break them down and build them back up so that they’d react the way the Corps, or the Army she added glancing at Justin, wanted them to. You have to center yourself, be aware of where you are in relation to what’s going on around you, Frank told her. With practice, it can happen almost instantly; without it, it’s easy to be overwhelmed and confused by everything that’s happening. Confused to the point where you can’t do anything because there are too many options. Leigh added that she’d been lucky in a way, since she’d only had to deal with Reg getting hit and the flash-bang, and the couple of thralls who didn’t follow Frank out of the room. Justin squeezed Karen’s hand. “How long do you think the whole thing lasted?” he asked her. “From the windows breaking to zip-tying the people who attacked us?” Karen looked at him and the others then closed her eyes to think for a minute. “Maybe...maybe five minutes?” she answered. Justin smiled at her tenderly. “More like 15 seconds,” he told her. Shocked, she looked to Frank and Angie, who nodded in agreement. It had seemed like forever to Karen. How...?

First of all, Frank told her, you have to stop blaming yourself for things that can’t be changed. It’s over. All you can do is learn from what happened. And recognizing that there are things you could do differently or better is the first step in doing that. Then you need to practice those better responses. That was basically the same thing her old sergeant had told them, Angie agreed. “So you fucked up,” Angie said, lowering the tone of her voice to sound like a gruff older soldier. “Did you learn anything? Then get over it and move on!” She smiled at the memory. “Maybe we should all drill together,” Angie then suggested. They’d never actually practiced working as a team before now. Because they’d had time to prepare for attacks before, it hadn’t been a problem. But if they were going to be caught by surprise, they’d need to know how every one of them was going to act and react. And they had to practice their responses as a group. Frank and Justin both agreed that setting up some training time would be useful.

From across the room, Reg consoled Karen. If he hadn’t been unconscious, he told her, he would have freaked out a little too. The thing she had to remember, Justin told her, squeezing her hand again, was that in the end she was the one who saved all their asses. She nodded and tried to smile at her husband. She still wasn’t sure that she’d call it that, but she felt better knowing that they didn’t all blame her for not acting sooner. She resolved to work hard at learning to control herself in combat, so that she’d do the right thing at the right time. Then Justin blanched. Did Frank have the names of the people who’d attacked them? One of them had seemed really familiar last night.... Frank pulled up what he had on the laptop and recited the list. Rodney Kazmarik...that was it. That was his cousin Rod, who owned a gym. God, he’d had to shoot his own cousin. But if he hadn’t.... The guy had been carrying a fire ax, and Justin knew that he knew how to use it. Rod had been a volunteer fireman for a while before diving into the gym business. His cousin could’ve killed him with that ax and he might not have even known or remembered that he’d done it. Karen rubbed Justin’s arm and brushed a few hairs back from the bandage that covered the side of his face. Justin asked for the phone, then hesitated. He really needed to talk to Uncle Jerzy, but then Marie and the rest of the family were bound to find out he was here and he didn’t want to alarm them.

Justin was just saying this to Karen, who also felt like speaking to a priest, when Fr. Colin knocked and stuck his head in around the door. It was about 1pm, and he’d heard that there’d been trouble at Reg’s. He had news for them and hadn’t had much difficulty tracking them down. It certainly was an awful mess they’d gotten themselves into this time. He’d contacted the Vatican about the files he’d forwarded to them. It seemed that the main server at the Vatican had a catastrophic failure, and the back-ups kept failing when they tried to load them. It was the strangest thing. But he heard someone mention speaking with a priest.... Justin explained the dilemma. Normally he’d speak with his uncle in this sort of situation. But he couldn’t without the whole family getting involved. And Karen agreed that they couldn’t risk that right now. Fr. Colin watched Karen. She looked a little distraught, and it was obvious that she needed to talk. “Will I do?” he asked her. Karen hesitated. No one would ever fill Fr. Andrew’s place in her heart, but Fr. Colin seemed like a nice enough guy. And she could no more talk to Uncle/Fr. Jerzy right now than Justin could. But she needed to get this off her chest. Through her shirt, she fingered the crucifix that laid against her skin. She nodded and stood. “Shall we go somewhere a little more private?” Fr. Colin asked, offering his arm. Karen smiled slightly and nodded, then cocked her head at the crutches before reaching for them. She didn’t want to offend Fr. Colin by not taking his arm, but her knee was starting to throb a bit and she needed to keep all her weight off it for now.

The two went to the chapel and sat, and Karen began unloading the weight that was pressing on her. She shot people last night. Regular people just like herself. She looked at the priest and realized that he still didn’t know what happened, so she started from the beginning. She told him about what had happened to Stephen, and how he’d come to her concerned about Reg’s safety, and everything that had followed from that. The only thing she didn’t tell him in detail was about the fight itself. She couldn’t. Every time she thought about it, her mind went back there, and she made herself sick. All she could tell him was that she’d been scared to death and she’d started shooting without ever considering that there might be a better way to stop the fighting. She’d never even stopped to consider that she might kill someone and how wrong that would be. Fr. Colin assured her that what she’d done had not been a sin. There was nothing else she could have done when she was afraid for her life like that. While it was a terrible thing that people had been hurt, and that some even died, the blame belonged to whatever had caused the attack, not to her. It was no sin to protect herself and her friends, so there was nothing for him to absolve her of or for her to do penance for. But if she felt the need, he would pray with her for God to give her the strength to act in a different way in the future, and to protect her and her friends from harm. He caught the smile that passed quickly across her face, and she told him that she’d been praying for those things every day since the first time she become involved in ‘the Fight;’ but it wouldn’t hurt to have someone else pray for them with her.

Karen and Fr. Colin had been gone for a little while when a nurse came in. There were two people down at the front desk who were insisting that they be allowed to see Reg. But given his condition, she didn’t want to send them up without his approval. Reg didn’t even need to hear her description of the two. He knew it was his dad and Audra. His name and house had been on the early morning news already; there was no way the two could’ve missed hearing about what happened. They were very insistent, the nurse told them, and they could all see from her expression that she was ready to have security haul them out if Reg didn’t want them there. But he did very much want to see them. Leigh offered to go down to get them, and Angie volunteered to go with her. Angie still didn’t look very steady, and Leigh tried to talk her out of it. But Angie insisted. They wanted her to stay awake, but if she kept sitting there she was going to fall asleep. So the two followed the nurse out, Leigh holding Angie’s elbow lightly to guide her through doorways and around any obstacles they might encounter. At the front desk, they met a distinguished-looking older man with grey hair and a beautiful woman. When Leigh introduced herself and Angie, she could see where Reg got his charm. His dad would have been charming even if he hadn’t bent slightly to kiss both their hands as he introduced himself. The warmth of his smile alone conveyed that charm in the same way Reg’s did. Reggie had told him about her, he told Leigh; and Leigh wasn’t sure if she should be worried or flattered. She turned and led the two to the elevator, Angie beside her, to cover the blush that she could feel warming her ears.

Behind her, Audra and Reg’s dad seemed to be continuing an intense ‘conversation’ that must have started earlier, and both she and Angie did their best not to eaves-drop. When they got up to the room, the argument stopped as soon as Leigh began to open the door. The two went straight to Reg’s side, and Leigh made the introductions for the others. The others could see Audra looking Leigh up and down like a tiger checking out meat. But it definitely wasn’t an adversarial sort of attention. The two chatted with Reg for a bit, making sure that he would be fine. They’d get the ball rolling on repairs to the house, they told him; he didn’t have to worry about anything. And he, in turn, promised that he’d explain what happened as soon as he figured it out himself. Even the police didn’t know much right now. During this conversation, Karen and Fr. Colin came back in and were introduced. Fr. Colin went and spoke quietly with Justin for a couple minutes, then excused himself to get on with his other business for the day. And he would be speaking with the Vatican very soon, he told them all with a wink to let them know that he’d been filled in.

Audra and Reg’s dad could see that Reg needed rest more than anything right then and began to say goodbye. Audra purred that she would be looking forward to getting to know Leigh, and the statement was obviously meant to say much more than the words themselves. Reg’s dad leaned in and kissed Reg lightly on the cheek. The surprise on Reg’s face told the others that this must have been very demonstrative for the older man. They could see enormous relief on his father’s face; he must have been worried that he’d find his son a vegetable after being told the severity of his injuries. He would come back again tomorrow, his dad told Reggie. Reg got a little agitated as his father backed away from the bed, and motioned his dad back. His sister and nieces and nephews...if the news had gone national.... Reg’s dad assured him that he would call Reggie’s sister and let her and her family know that Reggie was OK. Audra leaned close then, and warned Reg that he was to call her when he was up and about. Her voice was warm with affection. As she straightened and stepped back next to Leigh, Reg tried to read her emotions. Relief...and a noticeable amount of arousal. Reg wasn’t completely oblivious, in spite of the morphine. He’d seen the look Audra gave Leigh. He’d been surprised by that, since he had no idea that Audra ‘swung that way.’ If it hadn’t been for the morphine, he might have been aroused by the thought, too.

The two left, and the Envoys were alone again. Justin commented on how nice Audra was being to Leigh even though Leigh was kind of ‘the competition.’ Even Karen had to smile as everyone else in the room burst out laughing. Audra was being nice because she was hot for Leigh, they explained. Now it was Justin’s turn to blush. He didn’t know.... “Neither did I,” Reg admitted. Well, Leigh added, ‘three-somes’ had never been her thing really, though she’d been in some with her husband because he’d been interested.... Now Karen blushed, too, though she couldn’t match the shade Justin had acquired. Reg teased the two about not having read very far in the book he’d given them as a wedding gift. Then a look of horror replaced the smile on Leigh’s face. What if.... What if Audra or Reg’s dad were under the control of Edward or whatever was trying to kill Reg? She rushed out of the room, and managed to catch up with Audra and Reg’s dad in the lobby. Had either of them ever heard of Edward Harrington? Reg’s dad had been to one of his seminars he told her. “Edward Harrington is simply wonderful,” he told Leigh. “He’s the most caring, giving, kind, generous man I’ve ever met.” A chill ran down Leigh’s spine. Audra had heard of him, she told Leigh. She’d never been to one of the seminars, but she heard that he was making tons of money and the seminars were very expensive. Anyway, Leigh said, that wasn’t really why she’d come to catch them. (Leigh took a deep breathe to calm herself.) She’d forgotten to get Audra’s phone number to arrange to have lunch tomorrow, and she knew that Reg probably wouldn’t be able to remember it right now. Audra gave Leigh her card and Leigh promised to call her.

Back upstairs, she let the others know what she’d discovered, and they all saw the fear and sadness cross Reg’s face. Leigh would call Audra tomorrow and warn her to stay far away from Edward Harrington and to be wary of Reg’s dad. She wasn’t sure yet how she’d explain it to Audra, but she’d figure something out. The important thing was that now they knew. It was about 2pm, and Aiden was beginning to stir. He got up and grabbed the IV stand like an old pro, and started toward the bathroom. A couple minutes later he was shuffling back across the room, the IV stand in tow. He paused at Reg’s bedside along the way, and before anyone could have said something he laid his hand on Reg’s arm and Healed him. They could all see him pale slightly, but he didn’t collapse. Angie got up and grabbed him by the collar of his gown, and practically dragged him back to his bed. He grabbed her arm as she turned to go back to her own bed, and the others saw more color drain from Aiden’s face as he Healed her too. Judging by the looks the others were giving him, he knew someone was going to chastise him so he beat them to the punch by saying that he was done for the day and that he’d stay put in his bed now. He, Reg and Justin were comfortable in their beds, and Angie was still fighting to stay awake.

But both Karen and Frank had things they wanted to take care of outside. Leigh had volunteered to go with Karen to check on Drew as soon as Karen mentioned it. Frank agreed that none of them should be alone right now since they had no way of knowing when or where the next attack might come. In fact, even he shouldn’t be alone. So the three of them would go out together. The women could drop him off at his office before heading to Karen and Justin’s house. He only had a couple hours worth of stuff to take care of there, so they could come back as soon as they were done and wouldn’t have to wait long for him. Justin gave Karen a list of things he wanted her to bring back, a particular pair of jeans and belt, one of his looser t-shirts, and the small gun and holster that would fit inside his waistband. He didn’t like the idea of all of them being stuck in the hospital with no way to protect themselves any more than Frank did. Then the three left.

Nothing seemed out of place when Karen and Leigh went into Karen and Justin’s house, and Karen breathed a sigh of relief. Once she picked up Drew, she realized that she didn’t have the heart to leave him all alone at the house for another night. She also thought about how soothing it was to fall asleep to the sound and feel of him purring on her chest. She already knew that she’d be spending the night at the hospital since Justin had to stay there. As long as the nurses didn’t catch Drew there.... Instead of putting down more food and water, Karen packed the small bowls and some food and one of the disposable litter pans in a bag, covered it all with the stuff Justin had asked for. When Drew was comfortably settled in an outer pocket, they went back to get Frank. When the three got back to the hospital room about 6pm, Frank made sure to let the others know he had his gun with him, just in case. Karen grinned and held up Drew, and said, “Yeah, well, I’ve got a cat and I’m not afraid to use it.” She still looked dead on her feet, since she hadn’t slept in 39 hours, but she seemed in a much better mood.

Tony was just pulling into the driveway. The strange thing was, the security gate was open. Reg never left that gate open. But Tony didn’t have too long to think about how weird that was. It was chilly and raining lightly, and he heard a noise sort of like that sucking WHOOSH of air right before you saw a wired building implode. Then street lights for at least a block around and every light on the grounds, including his headlights, exploded. And every window on the front of Reg’s house lit up like lightning had just struck inside. It was pitch black outside now, and not even the moon was out to light the yard. As Tony’s eyes adjusted to the lack of light, he realized that he could see several people outside the windows on the front of the house. Then he heard the CRASH of safety glass breaking and watched as the people outside pounded on the house with bats and sledgehammers like demented trick-or-treaters. Even back in the old neighborhood guys weren’t THAT desperate for a piece of candy!

In the bedroom, Reg and Leigh had just reached climax, and Rex asked Leigh, “Did everything just go dark for you too?” The two didn’t have a chance to laugh over the comment. Karen screamed when the lights exploded, and Justin grabbed her and pushed her back against the fireplace as he pulled his gun, putting himself between his wife and whatever was going to happen next. Angie pushed herself up from the floor and pulled her gun as Frank and Aiden stood up. Then windows started crashing in. It was too dark to make out features from across the room, but it looked like a dozen people or more were breaking in using bats and sledgehammers. Angie headed out into the great room, and passed Frank as he headed to check on Reg and Leigh. He kicked the door in just in time to see someone swing a sledgehammer at Reg’s head like it was just another wall that needed flattening. There was a sickening squishy CRUNCH as Reg flew sideways off the bed and landed in a crumpled heap on the floor.

Frank could make out Leigh still lying on the bed, and a half dozen other figures who really shouldn’t have been in there at all. The room was small enough that Frank could begin to make out details about these creatures, now that his eyes were adjusting to the dark. Though they moved stiffly, almost like zombies, they looked like regular people. There was an older Hispanic-looking guy holding the sledgehammer--he was the one who’d just pegged Reg. There was a soccer-mom with a bat, a blue-haired grandmother, a kid who looked about 19, and a couple others. All their faces were expressionless, like they were sleep-walking. Frank threw himself against the wall beside the doorway, and yelled “Fire in the hole!” as he tossed a flash-bang into the room and covered his head with his jacket. Angie, Aiden and Justin knew what Frank’s shout had meant, and each covered their own heads with whatever was handy, Justin half-turning to cover Karen’s as well. Leigh got the idea too, just in time to grab the covers and roll herself off the bed toward Reg’s prone figure.

Once the grenade had exploded, Frank turned back into the doorway to check its effect. He was shocked to find that the people were still standing. They were moving a little more slowly than before, but the flash and concussion had a lot less of an effect than they should have. He watched as Leigh crawled toward Reg and the soccer-mom moved toward her. Frank pulled his gun and shot at sledgehammer guy. Out in the great room, which looked out onto the backyard through a wall of floor to ceiling windows, the dozen or so people who had broken in were of the same sort of mix--young and old, rich and poor, male and female, blue-collar and white-collar. Angie pulled her gun, but Aiden hollered at her before she could shoot. He wasn’t sure what was causing them to do this, but these looked like regular people to him, not monsters. Angie gave him a look that could have melted plastic, then holstered her gun and tackled the guy closest to her. As the two flew through the air, their flight was cut short when the guy’s head cracked against the wall with a soft THUNK. He landed on the floor with Angie on top of him, and he didn’t move as Angie started to push herself off him.

Outside, Tony tried to restart the car, but all he got was the ‘click-click’ of the starter turning over without enough juice to kick on the engine. He got out and popped the trunk and grabbed a shotgun from it, then slammed it shut and started running for the house. Inside, a half-dozen people moved toward Justin and Karen. Justin aimed at the one who looked most threatening, a big body-builder-type carrying a fire-ax. As he pulled the trigger and watched the guy stagger back a little when the bullet hit him, he thought that the guy looked kind of familiar. Fire-ax guy, a cheerleader-looking girl and a granny-type all swung at Justin, the women with fists and feet, and missed him. But an executive-type wielding a golf club landed a hit on Justin’s side. A couple others, including one kid who swung a bike chain like he’d used it that way before, tried to hit Karen and missed too. On the other side of the room, someone kicked Angie hard in the side of the head as she tried to get her feet under her, throwing her against the wall and landing her back on top of the guy she’d tackled. Aiden grabbed his med kit and headed for her. As he knelt and set down the box, someone came up behind him and buried a knife in his back. Apparently medics were fair game in here. Aiden started cursing loudly in Arabic. In the bedroom, Leigh kicked out at the legs of the soccer-mom and sent her flying. She landed somewhere beyond the bed and Leigh didn’t see her get up.

Three of the four people left standing in the bedroom started toward Frank as he turned his back on them and headed toward the great room. Angie shook her head and pushed past the woman who’d kicked her to go after the guy who’d just knifed Aiden. Now she was cursing in Arabic, too. Karen’s eyes had gotten as big as saucers. She had never been in a fight like this in her whole life. The only light in the room came from the muzzle flashes of the firing guns. She couldn’t see where everyone else was, except for Justin, who was right beside her. But people--plain old regular people just like her--were trying to kill them! She understood having monsters attack her. She didn’t like it, but it was what she and Justin and the others were supposed to deal with. But as far as she could tell these weren’t monsters. Why were they attacking her? As she felt the breeze from the bike chain ruffle her hair, she pulled her gun and pointed it shakily at the closest figure that wasn’t Justin and pulled the trigger. In the light of the muzzle flash, she saw what must have been blood (though it looked kind of brownish-black in the dark) spurt out of the throat of a brown-haired woman who reminded her of a school teacher, and she watched as the woman fell to the floor in slow motion. It took her a minute to realize that the scream wasn’t coming from the injured woman, it was coming from her own mouth.

As Frank came into the great room, he saw a man releasing his grip on a knife that was now planted in Aiden back and he saw Angie lunge at the guy. He raised his gun and shot the man, who staggered sideways. Justin shot again at fire-ax guy and he finally fell. In the bedroom, Leigh stood to face the last attacker, a sweet-looking old woman with a pair of knitting needles pointed at her. Leigh swung at her and connected, but the blow only made the old woman pause for a moment to regain her balance before she lunged toward Leigh. Karen was shaking like a leaf now, concentrating more on not throwing up than on her aim, so her next shot missed the kid with the bike chain. Frank turned back to the three following him out of the bedroom and aimed at the knee of the one in front and pulled the trigger. The guy grabbed for the door frame to keep from falling, and just kept coming once he’d regained his footing, in spite of his shattered kneecap. Justin’s next shot hit the cheerleader and she dropped to the floor. Frank went over to where he’d been sitting earlier, and he grabbed the shotgun that he’d leaned against the table his laptop was on. Angie got hit again by the woman who’d sent her flying, and this time when she hit the floor she stayed there. Aiden crawled over to her. He saw Frank raise the shotgun toward the woman who’d kicked Angie and the man who’d knifed him, and he flattened himself across Angie’s limp body. Frank pulled the trigger and a gout of flame poured out of the muzzle--he had the thing loaded with Dragon’s Breath rounds! The man who’d knifed Aiden dropped like a stone, and the woman who’d kicked Angie staggered backward into the wall. “That got her attention,” Frank thought to himself. He was trying to draw as many of them as he could outside, where he’d have room to shoot at them without having to worry about hitting his teammates.

Justin pulled his Mag-Lite with his free hand, hoping a little more light would help him put these people down faster. But the damn thing didn’t work. Whatever had killed all the power must have killed the batteries, too. He threw the thing at golf-club guy in frustration. Frank moved toward the front door, four of the people now following him. The guy he’d knee-capped was moving a little slower, but he was still moving. Now one of the others threw himself at Frank, jostling him, and the third punched him and landed a glancing blow. When she lunged for Leigh, the granny with the knitting needles didn’t see Reg’s feet close below her own. As she stepped forward, she tripped on Reg and fell, and, as if in slow motion, Leigh watched her land chest first on her needles then lay still as her blood soaked into the bedding that covered the floor. In the yard, Tony was getting close to the front of the house finally. He saw the people who had been pounding on the windows turn and come toward him now. He raised the shotgun to his shoulder and, remembering what Fr. Andrew and Leigh had said to him after the fight with the Zombi Master, he aimed at the legs of the two closest to him, one man and one woman. Unfortunately, his aim was off a little in the dark, and as the two fell to the ground he could see that there was a fountain of blood spurting up from the groin of the man.

Bike-chain guy swung again at Justin and Karen screamed as she saw the chain hit the side of Justin’s face. She turned the gun on him and pulled the trigger, and felt her heart jump into her throat as she watched the kid stagger backwards. Leigh pulled out one of the chem-lights that she’d stuck in her pockets before coming over earlier and cracked it as she crouched beside Reg and checked for bleeding, then grabbed a wad of sheet to clean off the blood that had run from his ear. Aiden was doing the same for Angie, pinching her nostrils together to stop the bleeding and turning her on her side so the blood didn’t drain back down her throat. Across the room, Justin saw Aiden leaning over Angie and saw the knife still sticking from Aiden’s back, and he knew that he had to stop Aiden from expending energy to Heal Angie when he was in bad condition himself. Justin grabbed Karen’s elbow and shouted at her to move when he did. He could feel her shaking and could see the abject terror on her face, and he wished that he could just curl up in a corner with his arms wrapped tightly around her to protect her from all of this. But he also saw a light come on in her eyes that told him she was mentally working her way past the fear so that she would have more control over her actions.

Karen’s head was swirling. Everywhere she looked she saw figures clashing in the dark. They were trying to hit her and Justin; she and Justin were trying to shoot them. There was a flash of fire across the room and she saw Frank silhouetted by the muzzle flash from his shotgun. And there were figures...people...lying all over the floor. She was shaking so hard she could barely lift her gun. And then she heard Justin shouting something at her and felt his hand on her elbow. She took a deep breath and concentrated on his voice. Aiden and Angie were hurt and he wanted her to follow him over to where they were. She blinked hard and nodded, then studied the floor they had to cross, trying to make sure she wouldn’t trip over anything...anyone. Then, when Justin moved, she went with him. They got to the other side of the room, and Justin leaned over to talk to Aiden. As he did, he laid a hand on Angie, boosting her energy while he talked Aiden out of spending his own until they’d done something about the knife in his back.

Karen felt movement behind her and began to turn. The people who’d been attacking her and Justin had followed them over here. She felt pain shoot up her leg as someone kicked her in the back of the knee, and she dropped to her hands and other knee as that one gave way. Then she heard Justin grunt in pain as golf-club guy laid the club heavily across his back. Karen looked around the room, trying to get a feel for where all their attackers were. She crawled toward Frank, trying to keep her weight off her injured knee, then she closed her eyes and concentrated on raising a Sphere of Protection. She wasn’t quite sure what it would do to their attackers, but at least it would protect her husband and friends while they tried to end the fight. Karen opened her eyes and saw the remaining attackers begin to fall to the floor. She looked at Frank and Justin and told them that she’d try to keep it up as long as she could.

Now that the fighting had stopped in the great room, they could hear crashing coming from the bedroom. Leigh was attacking a bookcase. And the sound of another shotgun blast, as Tony adjusted his aim lower still and took a shot at the other two figures approaching him from across the lawn. When those two fell, Tony ran the last few yards to the front door and burst in. Angie was still lying motionless, and Justin was checking Aiden’s knife wound. Frank had a couple people zip-tied together, the wrist of one bound to the ankle of the next, to keep them from moving fast when the Sphere went down, and he was moving on to the next set. Karen was on the floor, a look of concentration on her face as she crawled slowly over and zip-tied the body closest to her. Tony ran toward the bedroom when he heard the banging, and he pulled up short and his jaw hit the floor when he saw Leigh breaking down a bookcase stark naked but for a pair of socks.

Justin studied Aiden’s back, and he realized that the knife was probably the only thing keeping Aiden from bleeding out. They’d have to leave it until they could get him to a hospital. But Aiden wouldn’t kill himself if he Healed Angie, either, so Justin finally let him do that. When Karen and Frank had gotten all the attackers tied together, Frank went to the bedroom to check on Reg. He had to push past Tony, who still hadn’t managed to collect himself. Reg didn’t seem to be too damaged, except for the disturbing soft spot in the side of his skull. They could hear Angie resume swearing in Arabic as she came around, and Justin caught Aiden as he slumped to the floor after doing the Healing. Justin worked on securing the knife so it wouldn’t work its way out before they got Aiden to the hospital, and Frank and Leigh worked on securing Reg to the book-shelf ‘backboard.’ He was still naked as well, except for the condom, and Leigh made sure to cover him with a sheet before using the ubiquitous duct tape to fasten him to the board. Frank sent Tony out to get the neck brace he knew Aiden carried in the med kit. Then Tony went to where the car keys were and got Charlie, the Land Rover, started and pulled around to the front door.

When Reg was ready to be moved, Frank got Angie to help Leigh and Tony get him into Charlie. Leigh slipped on a robe before Tony came back in, so that he could help without stepping on his tongue. She was going to stay with Reg and couldn’t go to the hospital naked. Angie wasn’t much help though. It was apparent that she had a concussion, and she was having trouble focusing. Leigh persuaded her to go along to the hospital to be checked out. Angie tried to object, wanting to stay with Aiden, but Frank told her that he’d be taking care of Aiden himself and would get him to the hospital too, as soon as possible. Justin offered to drive since he had more experience navigating the streets of Detroit, and Tony offered to stay at the house and help Frank and Karen with the triage. Once Justin, Leigh, Reg and Angie were on their way, Frank, Karen and Tony started working on the ‘thralls.’ They had to have been under some sort of mind control, Frank told them, or they probably wouldn’t have been able to keep coming the way they did even when injured.

And most of them were just injured. Only three were dead. Tony pulled IDs as Karen followed Frank around with the med kit and a handful of lit chem-lights. She wasn’t feeling very well herself, so she couldn’t watch what Frank was doing; and she didn’t have any first aid skills anyway, so she just handed Frank what he needed from the kit as he went from person to person. The dead were Victoria Hopewell, the old woman who fell on the knitting needles with which she’d been trying to attack Leigh; Emil Porter, who’d been shot through the eye; and Dave Kavanagh, the guy in the yard who Tony’d accidently hit in the femoral artery. The others in the yard were Jill Kavanagh, Dave’s wife; 13-year-old Jenny Smith; and her 16-year-old brother Bobby. In the house were Ignatio Ramirez (sledgehammer guy); Rodney Kazmarik (fire-ax guy), who happened also to be another of Justin’s cousins; JoAnn Whittier (soccer mom); Betty Cooper, the brown-haired woman Karen had shot in the throat (Karen had a very hard time when Frank got to her. She had to have Tony come over to assist Frank, while she limped off to the bathroom and threw up.); Kevin Jacobs; Suzie Mulville (cheerleader); Peter Garver (the teamster-looking guy); Derek Vicars (golf-club guy); Virginia Peoples (the other, rich-looking, granny type); Bethany Rogers (another cheerleader-type, who kicked Angie in the head); Dominic Aldonado (who knifed Aiden); and the kid with the bike chain, who had no ID, but did have gang tattoos that could probably be used to ID him.

Justin had gotten out the driveway and was just turning the corner at the end of the street when he saw in his rear-view mirror cop lights heading for the house from both directions. He’d managed to swing Charlie around Tony’s car and squeeze past the gate, but the 4 patrol cars didn’t seem to want to try the maneuver themselves to get in. They parked their cars behind Tony’s to block the driveway, and pulled on their vests. There’d been reports of “shots fired” and they weren’t taking any chances. The cops moved toward the house cautiously and as they closed in they could see movement inside. Frank had gone back to check Aiden after checking the first few thralls. His breathing was shallow and his pulse a little thready, but Frank was confident that the knife had missed both the spine and the kidneys. Aiden was lucky that he was pretty muscular. It was probably the muscles that were holding the knife in and keeping him from bleeding too much.

Frank had just started on his next ‘patient’ when the three heard a cop yell “Come out with your hands up!” Karen and Tony looked at Frank, who hesitated while he pressed a compress onto the thrall’s wound. The cop hollered out his command again. Then Frank nodded at his companions and told them they’d all better go out before things got worse. As he stood, he drew his ID out of his pocket and held it pinched between the thumb and forefinger of his upraised right hand. Karen was limping, and Frank was covered in blood, some his own but more belonging to the wounded he’d been treating. The cops swarmed the three as they came out the door, some keeping their guns trained on them while the others patted them down and took their weapons. Frank’s ID was handed to the officer in charge, who was startled to find that he had a DHS agent standing in the center of this mess. Frank urged the officer, Detective David Peters, to let him get back inside to tend to the other injured. Peters asked how many there were, and Frank told him 3 dead, 16 injured still at the scene--which included one of his own team--and 2 other injured from his team had already been taken to Receiving by other team members. Peters sent Frank, Tony and Karen, plus a couple of his own men who had first aid training, back inside while he called in ambulances and the rest of his team secured the scene.

As Peters surveyed the house and grounds, he couldn’t get over the fact that people who looked like ordinary citizens had caused this. He could already tell that the crime scene guys weren’t going to be happy with this job, and he was willing to bet money that they’d never make heads or tails of what happened. He was going to have to take Agent Muelder’s word on this one. Frank, on the other hand, was trying very hard to not be included in the investigation. He concentrated on the wounded, and when the last was loaded onto a stretcher, he asked that he and the rest of his team be allowed to go as well. They were, but Peters followed along. Once everyone had been treated that needed it, he went in to speak with Frank.

It was after 2am now, and several things were confusing Detective Peters. Something told him this case was going to give him migraines. First, what was going on with the guy with the knife in his back? When he came into the ER, there was a bunch of laughing and money changing hands.... Frank explained that Aiden was not just part of his team, but was a paramedic and now a resident in the Receiving ER. But his bounty hunting work on these ‘special assignments’ landed him in Receiving on a stretcher more often than he came in on two feet. Hence the jokes and betting. Then Peters asked Frank what he thought was going on; his people told him that power had gone out for almost a mile around Reg’s house, with the house basically at the center of the outage. Frank told him that he thought some sort of new Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) device might have been tested in conjunction with limited drugging of a local water supply done to control residents. At the moment, that was only a theory. But it was the best one he could come up with based on what he’d seen there. Those people were definitely being controlled somehow, and it may have been a test for something larger. The two men traded business cards, since they both knew they’d be working closely on this case. Frank still tried to insist that Peters would be taking the lead. But Peters really didn’t want it, and he let Frank know that he’d be calling...soon.

Tony came in at the end of this conversation to see how Frank was doing. Tony didn’t have a scratch on him, and the staff had already tried to shoo him out a couple times. But he wanted to check on everyone first. Aiden, with his knife wound, and Angie and Reg, with their closed-head injuries were in pretty bad shape. The staff was insisting on keeping those three for at least a few more hours to monitor their conditions. Justin was pretty beat up, too, but Karen didn’t look too bad except for not being able to put weight on her left leg. And Leigh didn’t look too bad either! Tony made this last comment with an obvious leer. He still couldn’t get over Leigh in nothing but socks. What Tony didn’t see was the emotional toll this fight took....

When Karen was done being x-rayed, getting her knee brace and crutches, and finishing with her release paperwork, she went looking for Justin. She hadn’t lost any blood, but she was still pale and shaky as if she’d lost a pint or two too fast. She wasn’t sure she could carry a gun anymore. The thought of even holding one made her nauseous. And she was being very careful not to think directly about what had happened in the past few hours. But she could feel it lingering there at the back of her brain, causing a massive headache that made her gut feel even worse. She’d shot people...REAL people.... Other than the sight of that poor woman clutching at her throat, which replayed itself behind Karen’s eyelids whenever she let down her guard, Karen couldn’t, or rather, didn’t want to remember much detail about what happened. She knew she’d never been so scared in her whole life. So scared she couldn't even think. Screaming and shooting and the feel of people she couldn’t even see clearly attacking her out of the darkness. It was like a nightmare.

She remembered Justin talking, his voice like a rope pulling her up from the depths of her fear. And pain shooting up from her knee and people falling, those that weren’t already covering the floor, when she tried to protect Justin and her friends with the Sphere. Why hadn't she thought of that before? She'd had about as much practice with the Art as she had with her gun. Obviously not enough. Why had she gone for the gun first? Had she been so conditioned by this world, even without watching TV, that killing others had become her gut reaction? My God, no! She had to stop that! She had to fix that! She couldn't lower herself to the level of the things they fought. It was what Fr. Andrew had warned her about. Karen grabbed a waste basket and threw up in it, so wrapped up in her thoughts that she didn't noticed the people rushing around her, in and out of curtained cubicles....

Then, like you’d rub a puppy’s nose in its mess, she’d been obliged to relive it all as she helped Frank get those same people she’d shot at as patched up as he could with the limited supply of stuff in the med kit. Now, sick and weak and shaky on the crutches, the only thing she could think about was finding Justin...and calling Fr. Jerzy when she could get her stupid phone to work again....

Karen was just collecting her things when Tony’s and Justin’s phones rang. Some rescue workers down in New Orleans had gotten trapped, and CDI had volunteered Tony’s services to help get them out. He had to run back to the Bat Cave and collect his things; they’d have a plane waiting for him out at Metro whenever he got there--the sooner the better. And Frank had just gotten the message that Justin had left and wondered what was going on. Justin gave him a very brief rundown and Frank said he’d be right over. As Karen looked around for her own cell phone for the third time, completely missing the fact that it was hanging from her belt until someone pointed it out, she decided she was in no shape to teach that morning. She called the office and asked them to get Jaime to do it. Reg was sitting looking a little stunned at everything that had happened, and half listening to Justin talking to Frank. As the Reader’s Digest Abridged version of their early morning ‘adventure’ was laid out for Frank, Reg suddenly realized that his whole house was wrapped in electrical wiring. Not just the usual lights and outlets, but the elaborate security system, the intercoms, the computer system that ‘ran’ the house. Everything was wired. He tried to be calm as he asked the computer to shut down the security system and almost everything else except the coffee maker and the lights.

The sound of Tony’s muffler had no sooner faded into the distance than everyone heard a knock at the door. It was Frank. He looked more rumpled than usual because he’d spent most of the night on the phone with the Seattle office. They were concerned about the possibility of terrorist threats coming across the Canadian border, and since Frank was currently the ‘go-to guy’ regarding capturing terrorists, they picked his brains for most of the night. He didn’t appear as upset about it as he tried to sound, and he mumbled something about nightmares keeping him from sleeping anyway. Karen couldn’t help but laugh about the idea of Canadian terrorists. First of all, Canada wasn’t really a foreign country; it was just a suburb of Detroit, wasn’t it? Up until the borders were locked down on 9/11, that’s how it seemed to anyone who’d grown up in Metro Detroit, anyway. Secondly, Canadians were just too polite to take seriously as a terrorist threat. “Excuse me. I’m ever so sorry to bother you, but I have to blow you all up now.” It just didn’t sound all that threatening. Oh, Karen understood what Frank was trying to say. It was easier for foreigners to get into the US through Canada because the border WAS so porous and because the Canadians didn’t screen newcomers for terrorist activity the way the US did. (Not that that stopped the terrorists from getting into the US before, and moving freely around it anyway....) So she sat quietly next to Justin and fidgeted while Frank lectured her and the others on the reasons for taking the threat seriously, and she wondered why Frank always made her feel like she was about 10 years old again and being lectured by her parents or some other adult.

Once Frank was done with that subject, he asked about the skid marks on the lawn and why he’d been called at 3am. Reg and Justin filled him in on the night’s events, including Tony’s premature attempt at ‘saving’ Reg, the visit from Stephen, the destruction of everything related to Reg and Stephen’s research on suicide cults, and the creature they’d seen in the explosion and it’s static-y ‘warning,’ which each of them had heard inside his or her own head. The retelling reminded Reg and Justin that Fr. Colin might still have some of the research, in the files Reg had sent him. Reg also gave Frank the back-story on Stephen, how they met, their research and Stephen’s mysterious death. Frank didn’t mention that he already knew the basics of this story; he’d done his research before he teamed up with these people. Frank closed his eyes and rubbed his head like he was trying very hard to fight off a migraine. At the same time, he was also trying to sense if any of the others were being controlled by the Unknown. But all he could feel was that they all seemed to be radiating the ‘heat’ of recent contact with it, no active presence. Then he wanted to know why everyone thought it was such a good idea to destroy years of useful and possibly important research on the word of a creature of the Unknown, the ghost of a man who was killed by a creature of the Unknown and might be, no...probably WAS being controlled by it. Maybe Stephen’s concern was all a ruse to get them to free the creature from the computer.

Karen stiffened, like a cornered animal being forced into a fight. She got the feeling that Frank was criticizing her in particular, for having trusted a ghost. How could she have done any less for Stephen? But before she could say anything, the others explained that they felt saving Reg’s life took precedence over doing a background check on the ‘informant’ and his information. Frank reiterated that information from a creature of the Unknown should be automatically suspect, and Karen asked why. Ghosts, at least for her, were no less people than solid people were, and no more or less corruptible. She’d never yet had a ghost lie to her, she told them. She didn’t mean that they couldn’t, any more or less than a solid person could. Just that Stephen had never given her any reason to distrust him any more than Frank had. Besides, the others might not have seen Stephen step in front of Reg to protect him from the energy creature, but they all saw him get grabbed and tortured, and maybe killed again, by it before he and it disappeared.

Everyone stopped and stared at Karen. What did she mean ‘stepped in front of Reg’? She explained that Stephen had been standing behind Reg with one arm wrapped protectively around him, until the creature appeared in the explosion. When it reached toward Reg, Stephen stepped out in front of Reg, interposing himself between the spectral hand and his partner. Tears rolled down Karen’s face as she remembered the bravery and love in that simple action. Stephen sacrificed himself to protect Reg. Why would he have done that if he only cared about getting the information destroyed, or if he’d known that doing so would release the creature from the computer? And why now, all of a sudden, when he’d been here trying to protect Reg for so long? But what if Stephen was being controlled by the creature, or had been deceived by it, Frank countered. What if it had been trapped, and it knew that destroying the computer was the only way it could be released? Stephen may have been an unwitting dupe for it. It wasn’t the first time they’d encountered that, he added looking pointedly at Karen, Leigh and Reg.

First of all, Karen asked, what made Frank so sure that the creature had been trapped there in the first place? There was no way to know that. Reg had been involved in this research for 15 years now, so what had changed? Maybe it had been free all along and only got interested in Reg because of something he’d done recently. Secondly, the fact that Stephen might have been deceived by the creature had nothing to do with him being a ghost. And even if he had been deceived, that didn’t make him any less trustworthy than a solid person who had been deceived. Just because she and Leigh had been controlled at one time by a creature of the Unknown didn’t mean they could never again be trusted. Or did it? Was that what Frank was suggesting, that none of them should ever trust anyone again? That would make it awfully hard to function as a team, especially if no one could count on the others backing him or her up on their word alone.

Frank sighed. He wasn’t suggesting that they couldn’t trust one another, he told them. All he was trying to say was that maybe they should have taken a little time to study the situation before acting, considered the possibility that the threat to Reg might not have been as imminent as Stephen believed, and waited to get all the facts before destroying years of information. One corner of Reg’s mouth turned up in a slight smile; Stephen always had been a bit of a drama queen, he sighed, his affection for Stephen brightening his features as he said it. The others admitted that, in hindsight, maybe they had overreacted, and agreed to take a little more time to think things through in the future. Karen stared at her feet, working the toe of her shoe into the deep pile of the carpet. She hesitated a second and, talking more to her feet than Frank, told him that she would try to do that in the future too, but she couldn’t stop treating ghosts like real people, even if they weren’t solid anymore. She realized that she probably looked and sounded like a petulant child again, and that was exactly how she felt. Damn Frank!

Frank let the subject drop now that he felt like he’d gotten them all to understand their mistakes. He kept forgetting that most of them had little real experience with the Unknown, in spite of whatever encounters had brought them to the attention of SAVE. Reg and Stephen weren’t the only ones doing research on mass suicide cults, Frank told them. He’d been involved with similar research that the FBI had been conducting, too. Reg explained that break-ins at his company’s office had increased in the 3 years since Stephen’s death. But nothing ever seemed to be missing after the break-ins, and all the evidence that was found, including bits of skin and even, a couple times, fur (!), led nowhere. Justin asked Frank if the FBI had ever ‘investigated’ Reg before, and asked Reg if he’d ever gotten any security clearance for his companies to get government contracts. Reg hadn’t, since most of his work was with the auto industry, though he figured that other companies that his had dealt with probably had clearance of some sort. Frank told them that Reg had been checked out because of the high level of occult investigations he and Stephen had done. But the FBI had never found any reason to keep tabs on him. What he wanted to know now was what Karen had meant about “something Reg had done recently.”

Karen explained that a couple months ago she’d asked Reg to look into Edward Harrington for her. Her mom had been seeing him for more than six months now and she was starting to act a little strangely. Every time she talked about Edward, she used the same phrase...and Justin intoned: “Edward is simply wonderful. He’s the most caring, giving, kind, generous man I’ve ever met.” He’d heard Karen worry about it so many times now that he knew the phrase by heart, too. Frank agreed that the phrase sounded like something that had been ‘programmed’ into Cathy, but he’d never come across the name Edward Harrington in his research. And Reg told them he hadn’t either. But none of that research had been put onto the “Spook Server,” either. So if the creature had been trapped in that machine, there had been no way for it to know that Reg had even been doing that research. Frank asked Reg if he could recreate Stephen’s algorithm then help him get it up and running on his computer. They might be able to re-collect all of the destroyed research if they used the algorithm to search the FBI’s cult files. Those had already had most of the faked or downright goofy stuff filtered out, so the search would go much faster. Reg got a handful of paper and a couple pens, and bent over a table scribbling furiously while Frank got his laptop set up.

As Frank waited for Reg to finish with the algorithm, he noticed that Reg was writing it out on paper, not on his computer. Then, looking around, he realized that the security system was shut down, too. Frank logged onto the wireless network and saw that Reg had turned off almost everything electronic in the house, and he turned it all back on without Reg noticing. Maybe it was what Karen had told him Stephen said, or maybe it was the message that the creature in the machine had left for him, or maybe it was whatever they’d seen when they blew up the server, but something had seriously spooked Reg. Frank glanced around the room. Aiden appeared to be sleeping in the corner, and Karen, Leigh and Angie were clustered around Leigh’s computer starting a general search of the internet for references to Edward Harrington. Justin was making a note to himself on his hand-held recorder, to call his cousin Timmy later (8:30am was way too early in the morning for a computer geek to be up, unless he was still up from the night before) to find out if there was anything ‘odd’ going on in the ‘computer community.’ Then he called Fr. Colin’s number and asked if the priest still had a copy of the information that Reg had sent him a few months before to forward to the Vatican. He did and would bring it by later, he told Justin. Justin told him they’d explain why they needed it when he got there. It figured that none of them had noticed that the security system was down, Frank thought to himself.

Reg had finally gotten everything he could remember about the algorithm written down, and when he handed it to Frank, he did it from as far away from the laptop as he could get and escaped to the opposite side of the room as soon as he could. It wasn’t the entire algorithm, but it was all he could remember. Frank started to input the program into the laptop. When he was done, he asked Reg to help him get into his company’s computer system through the “back door.” That way Frank could search the FBI files to recreate the destroyed information and at the same time, while that program was running, he could also look through whatever Reg had found regarding Harrington. The two things might not be related; but it didn’t hurt to use his time wisely and look for a connection just in case. When he’d gotten both those searches started, he got the algorithm running on Leigh’s computer, to speed the internet search. It took several hours before there was enough stuff coming in for Frank to start printing it out. There seemed to be some unspoken agreement that they’d have as little electronics running in the house as possible that day, and the others would sift through hardcopy output from the search rather than have all the computers running.

Well, most of the others were doing this. Reg wasn’t in much shape to help by now. It was almost noon, and like all of them, he was pretty tired from having been up since 3am. But he’d refused to nap, and had been using ‘spiked’ coffee to keep himself awake. Even for an experienced coffee-drinker, the sheer quantity of caffeine was giving him a mild case of the jitters, and the alcohol was converting what should have been wide-eyed attention into bleary-eyed distraction. Aiden woke suddenly, and announced to everyone that he had to head back to work. It took him a couple minutes and a nudge from Angie before he realized that the previous night had been his last shift before getting 48 hours off--24 now, since he owed the person who’d covered for him this morning. Aiden was just removing his hand from the doorknob when he was startled by a knock at the door. It was Fr. Colin. The priest was there in response to Justin’s earlier call, to drop off a thumb drive with all the files that Reg had sent him. He’d copied these from his laptop. When he’d tried to download the files attached to the original email, they were hopelessly corrupted. But he hadn’t had time to check the files on his laptop. And he didn’t have time to stay, since he had a meeting that afternoon with the Archbishop. Justin and Reg filled Fr. Colin in on what had happened last night, and told him that he might want to warn the Vatican to check the files he’d sent them. It seemed like just having them might be dangerous right now. Then the priest was out the door for his meeting with Archbishop Maida.

Leigh, Karen, Justin, Aiden and Angie had settled down on the couches and chairs and began poring over Frank’s print-outs as soon as they were printed. Each would scan through a few sheets making notes, then trade his or her sheets for someone else’s. The internet search alone was bringing in thousands and thousands of references to Edward Harrington. Karen and Leigh, and Aiden too, with his summer having been spent studying for exams, were used to doing this sort of work and scanned through the material quickly. Justin wasn’t quite as skilled at it, but he was determined to stick with it for both Reg’s sake and Karen’s, since they were all beginning to suspect that Edward Harrington was tied to this situation somehow. But Angie, who preferred more physical work than this, quickly got bored with shuffling paper. So, in order to still be helpful, she hustled around refilling mugs of coffee and tea and water, and ran out for take-out food and gathered whatever snacks she could find in the kitchen that didn’t require much attention when being eaten.

About 6pm, the team took a break from their labor to sit together and eat some ‘real food’ that Reg had cooked up in an effort to stay busy and away from the computers, and to share what they’d been able to piece together so far. Despite having hit hundreds of web sites in the general web search and gone through everything that Reg’s previous search had found, they could not come up with a single negative reference regarding Edward Harrington. Apparently nothing bad had been said or written about the man, ever. The closest they’d come to negative comments were two or three possible references at a site called “The Way Back Machine” that Stephen’s algorithm had found. The posted pages looked like at one time they may have included criticism of Harrington’s financial seminars. But the files had been corrupted so that the commentary was unreadable or at best nonsensical. All that was left were a part of his company’s name and some other tiny items that only a search program as sophisticated as Stephen’s would have picked up on in the first place. And Reg assured them that causing that kind of damage would not be an easy thing to do.

Every picture they found showed Edward smiling, and more recent ones showed him beaming down at Karen’s mom, who stood beside him beaming up at him. There wasn’t even the slightest hint of an eye-roll on Edward’s part as he basked in the glow of admiration from his followers. Karen’s stomach tightened with fear for her mother’s safety, and she found it increasingly hard to swallow the food she was absently putting into her mouth. There were tons of positive testimonials regarding his “Be Your True Worth” seminars and his various corporate workshops. And the phrase that Karen’s mom kept using appeared thousands of times throughout everything they’d found. But there were no transcripts from any of these seminars available anywhere, not even through his company, nor had anyone posted even the roughest agenda from one. It also didn’t appear that the seminars had ever been released or marketed on video, not even pirated ones--which was strange, since most motivational speakers did that sort of thing now as a way to increase revenue. And none of what the team did find had shown up in the FBI files at all. Either the guy and his company never ping’d the FBI’s wacko-radar, which Frank found hard to imagine just based on what he’d seen so far, or the guy had gotten someone to wipe him from the FBI’s files.

As the team got up from the dinner table, Frank let them know one more thing; he’d checked the thumb drive that Fr. Colin brought, and all the material on it was also hopelessly corrupted. He persuaded Reg to take a look at it, and Reg proclaimed that not even HE could reconstruct anything from those files. The computer searches were plodding onward, and every person was doing what they could to sift through the information, but Frank wanted more. He asked Reg if it was possible that he had missed anything at all when he’d collected all his research files to be destroyed. Reg began going through the whole house, practically tearing apart each room for the smallest scrap of paper that might have been missed. Then, in the back of a closet in the study, he came across a box labeled “Stephen.” It was a print-out of everything he had collected when Stephen died. Frank eagerly grabbed the box and passed out portions to the others to be sorted through. And he asked Reg if he thought there might still be any information in the buffers of the printers that had been stored in the ‘safe room’ with the Spook Server. Reg wasn’t sure. The only things that had been printed out on them were the little clues and messages that he now knew Stephen had sent him. But that made Reg realize that there might still be stuff on the hard drives of his home and work computers, files that he’d deleted and forgotten about once he’d transferred them to the Spook Server, since he normally didn’t erase them completely. He might be able to retrieve them.

The team went back to work. Frank was starting to get back results from trolling through the FBI’s data base on genuine death cults, including stuff about Heaven’s Gate, Jonestown and several others, and he began to notice a pattern to the results from a sophisticated analysis program he was running the info through. He couldn’t quite pin it down yet, but there was something about the fatality rates. There seemed to be a number of factors that affected the fatality rates of the true cult incidents, and the pattern appeared to be in the tipping-point in the number of these factors that the incidents had in common and their relation to the total number of fatalities of each incident. In each case, everyone one at the cult site at the time of the mass suicide died. The pattern was in the frequency of the deaths, and though it wasn’t a solid pattern yet, Frank had a gut feeling that the pattern was there. He began tracing the incidents that the analysis said fit the emerging pattern, and they seemed to have been going on since 1944. He started pulling together his sources on numerology and told the others what he’d found.

The numbers that kept coming up were multiples of 3, 7 or 9. And there were also a number of instances of 13 as well. All of these were numbers of heavy-duty occult significance. There appeared to be some overlap between the different cults and across the years. Karen asked to see the data, and realized that there were no incidents of the number 4. That was the primary occult number in Native American lore. She couldn’t really call the absence of a number a pattern, but something told her that this was definitely ‘white man’s magic.’ She asked Frank to check for any Native American involvement in any of these cults and he found absolutely none. Many of the team members had done at least a little research on one or another of the more famous occult religions, and they tried to eliminate the ones that were definitely not involved so they could narrow their search. It was probably not Rosicrucians or Gardnerians. None of them knew much about Kabbalah, but Frank, Leigh and Karen all knew the names of people who might be able to tell them more about the possibility of Kabbalah involvement. It didn’t feel like Discordians, and it probably wasn’t the Church of Thelema.

Now Reg asked Frank if he had any access to Interpol files, to run them through this search program as well. Basically, Reg was wondering if they could connect Harrington’s travel to mass suicide incidents from the past; did the guy seem to be ‘visiting historical sites?’ Frank told Reg to go ahead and set up that search on another computer. By now, it was after 10pm. Frank set up a general search of the entire NSA “total information awareness” data base for info on Harrington and mass suicide cults, and a reference popped up. In 1954, Darren Holmwood, a minor, changed his name to Edward Harrington. Cathy had told Karen, in passing, that Edward was 64. That would have made him 12 years old at the time this happened. It happened in Houston, by the recommendation of Houston Family Services. No reason for the name change was given, it was not an adoption certificate, and there were no birth or death records for anyone named Edward Harrington, so the identity didn’t appear ‘stolen.’ Frank continued to tug at this electronic thread.

A little bit later he’d found a birth certificate for Darren Holmwood from 1942, listing his parents as Kevin and Marjorie Holmwood. A search for them turned up death certificates with an identical date in 1953. The cause of death for both was listed as suicide and both deaths occurred in rural Texas. Frank searched for newspapers from that time period and managed to find a couple articles that talked about a death cult in the Texas town of Redwood. He cross-referenced this with the other info he had on death cults and this cult was one of the ones that was helping define the emerging pattern. The leader of the cult was a man named Abel Pataki. Someone wondered aloud about how big Houston had been back then, and Reg looked online. In 1950, he said, the population of Houston had been about 60,000 people. By 1960 it had exploded to 940K. In 1990 it was up to 1.2 million people.

The clock was creeping past 11:30pm, and Leigh got up from where she’d been sitting and crossed the room to Reg. She took him by the hand and began to draw him away toward the room she used when she was staying there. Given what had happened the last time the others found Reg and Leigh alone in a room together, Justin, Frank and Angie got hyper-vigilant. Justin and Frank even let their hands drift toward their weapons, releasing the safety straps, ready in case they needed them. Angie, on the other hand, had her phone out. Fair’s fair, and Reg had taken a picture of her and Aiden at an intimate moment. Everyone heard the quiet “click” and saw the flash when Angie took a picture of Leigh giving Reg a very passionate kiss. Letting go of Reg with one hand, Leigh flipped Angie ‘the bird.’ As the two maneuvered through the doorway, Reg hooked the door with his foot and pushed it closed. Seeing the guys eye the door warily, Angie went over and sat down cross-legged on the floor with her back against the door. If this was Reg’s last half-hour alive, Angie wasn’t going to let anyone interrupt his and Leigh’s last chance to consummate their relationship.

Frank and Justin fastened the safety straps on their weapons, and Frank checked the security system. Whatever the two were up to, at least Reg wouldn’t be sitting in front of a computer screen at midnight. Justin offered to get Angie a sandwich, and she declined, saying she wasn’t sure she’d be there long enough to eat it. As the numbers on the digital clock flipped toward midnight, Frank double-checked that the computers that were running were heavily protected by firewalls. Karen, Aiden and Justin continued sifting through print-outs. Angie couldn’t really hear much, since the door was pretty solid; but, given the amount of time that had passed since Reg had closed the door, there was definitely some ‘adult recreational activity’ going on behind it. Then, as the clock on the wall flipped to 12:00, there was an ear-splitting screech of unnatural static from every speaker in the house. Sparks flew from every outlet and light bulbs exploded in showers of glass. The house went pitch black....

The rest of the summer passed uneventfully for the team of Envoys, though it took all of them a good month before they stopped flinching whenever their phones rang. And every week or two, some or all of them would meet for lunch or dinner, to keep up with how they were all doing. Frank and Aiden spent their time studying and taking their state board exams so that they could start their residencies, Aiden in trauma medicine and Frank in psychiatry. Once Aiden had passed his boards, he went back to working for Gary for the summer, until he started his residency at Receiving in the fall. Frank had taken a sabbatical from his DHS job while he finished up his course work and studied for the boards, but in what little spare time he had, he still tried to keep up on his paperwork for the DHS, some of it giving Angie permission to spend her time training the DPD on IEDs and working with their bomb squad to create and disarm them for practice. She and Aiden spent what little free time they had together. Tony was in the middle of his busiest season. Construction, and therefore destruction, was at its peak in the northern hemisphere, and Tony spent more time away from Detroit than there. He even complained once that he barely had the time to stay on top of the dusting and cleaning at the Bat Cave, and Reg gave him a brochure for the RoomBa. Tony and Anne spent time together whenever Tony was in town, about once a month, and he occasionally flew her out to wherever he happened to be working, to spend a little down time seeing the sights together. It was settling into a comfortable relationship for both of them. They each had the benefit of a steady S.O. without being joined at the hip.

CJ was out of Rehab, and had gone back to her 20-hour work days and spending most of her time in California. The show was picked up by one of the smaller networks and the name was changed to “Supernatural.” Most of the filming would be done in Vancouver, so she didn’t have much time for trips back to Detroit to visit. No one had seen much of Teresa since getting back, since she was fully occupied by her job with the DPD. Summer was always a busy time for the Detroit Police. Reg was as busy as ever, jetting off to meetings when he wasn’t glued to his computer at home. He’d had the games and electronic equipment that the Weendigo bought while disguised as him sent to the Bat Cave, to help beef up security and to give anyone that went there something more to do to relax. And he and Leigh went out a few times, neither interested in the relationship being more than friendship and snuggling. When Justin and Karen finally found a new house that they picked out together, Leigh took Karen up on her offer of renting the condo. Leigh had been considering the possibility of teaching a class or two at Wayne State that coming school year, and the condo was in a great location for that. But she wasn’t ready for the commitment that buying the condo or some other place of her own would be. Owning property here would also complicate her green card status. So she settled on renting, and got the place already mostly furnished and fully protected with security equipment. She also asked the others to let her know if she ever began acting strangely. She was still bothered by what had happened to her in the UP, nagged by her unwitting cannibalism and the fact that she hadn’t been able to tell that her mind had been controlled.

Justin had found a new shop to move his business to shortly after Weeping Sparrow had been out to see it, with more room than he’d had before. He and Jerry and the guys got the business moved even before the team’s trip to the UP. So when they got home, Justin slipped right back into his routine, working during the day and spending the night with Karen. Reg’s ‘Detroit girlfriend’ Audra had finally gotten hold of Justin and set a time to interview him for an article. He thought it was only because he was making the car (cars, actually, since the show would require several exact replicas to be used for different purposes) for “Supernatural.” But it was really a personal interest piece on a local businessman who happened to be one of the best at customizing cars. And when he had time, Justin also began to look for a new house for him and Karen, one they would pick out together. But Karen wasn’t really herself after getting home from the UP. Two of her students had been killed by the Weendigo, she’d had her mind controlled by it and the dig had been shut down, and she couldn’t find the energy to do much of anything during July and part of August. At first, she allowed herself to wallow in her misery. She knew enough to recognize that it was depression, but she wasn’t ready to let anyone help her. She had gone to Andrew’s and Carmen’s funerals, but didn’t leave the house for days at a time for a good part of the rest of the summer. And even when she did leave, she would only go out was if Justin was with her. When they were together, she would cling to him, sure that if she let go something awful would happen to one of them. When he was gone, she would stay in bed most of the day, or curl up in a chair, with Drew keeping her company and offering what comfort a purring cat could, unable to do more than flip aimlessly through the hundred plus channels on the cable. The house hunting was the one thing that kept Karen from sinking too deeply into her depression, even though the depression kept her from looking whole-heartedly and with an open mind.

Almost everything Karen did during this time ended with her crying. She’d finally felt ready to tell Justin a little about her time in the hospital, and before she’d gotten very far, she was crying. Later, she tearfully told Justin that she’d been keeping a secret from him, that she hadn’t told him how attracted she’d been to the Indian warrior form the Weendigo had taken because she didn’t want to hurt him, then thought better of her secrecy, deciding that that would hurt him more. It had taken her a couple weeks to work up to telling him, sure that Justin would reject her for having not told him sooner. And when he forgave her, explaining that he understood, that she’d essentially been “mind-raped,” as he put it, by the thing, Karen was both relieved that he could forgive her for keeping a secret like that and afraid that he’d be taken from her because she didn’t deserve someone so understanding. She also confided to him that she was afraid that the Weendigo had disguised itself as her to lure Carmen away. Justin felt that she was far too willing to take the blame for everything that had happened up there, and he was worried that she was taking the whole ‘Catholic guilt’ thing to an extreme.

Finally, as the summer began to slip toward fall, he was able to persuade her to talk with Uncle Jerzy. She told him about what had happened earlier that summer, and about how she blamed herself for it even though her heart knew that it wasn’t her fault, and about how she felt like the cannibalism was hanging over her head like the Sword of Damocles. Jerzy told her that she need not worry about it being a sin, since it was done unwittingly. But Karen told him that, sin or not, she felt like she’d been tainted in a way that would never be washed clean. And to make it worse, she could never tell her students about it, though they were all tainted too. She feared even more for them than for herself, since if there were ever repercussions, they wouldn’t know what had happened or be able to defend themselves. Jerzy offered to give her absolution for it, even though it wasn’t necessary, and Karen accepted, saying that it would make her feel better in any case. He also advised her to see a doctor about her depression, and she did. She made an appointment with the psychiatrist she’d seen after being released from the hospital, and he put her on a short course of anti-depressants.

In just a couple weeks, Karen was beginning to feel more comfortable with herself and more optimistic about her future. She began to shake the feelings of guilt and dread that had been dogging her since leaving the UP, and she started taking interest again in her family and friends, in preparing for the coming school year, and in her husband and their search from their new home. She even let Justin bring up the idea of planning their honeymoon, and the two agreed to take it during a couple weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. They began to go look at houses more frequently, and Karen began to actively help with the search, until they found one they both liked. But before they signed the papers, they asked Weeping Sparrow to come down and check the place out. She told them that there were spirits in it, that people had died in the house and that there had been violence there. But there was no abiding evil, unlike Justin’s old house. She could try to persuade the spirits to go elsewhere, but they wouldn’t be able to leave the world completely until Raccoon (“since it is your duty as a Spirit Talker”) helped “them deal with the issues that held them there.” This made Justin wary, but Karen said that as long as the spirits weren’t violent toward them, she had no problem with them sharing the house with her and Justin. Of course, they still wanted Weeping Sparrow and Fr. Jerzy to come out and bless the house before they moved in anyway. Later, when Weeping Sparrow had finished ‘smudging’ the house, Justin asked her if anyone could do that sort of thing, since he wouldn’t mind having it done on a regular basis just to be careful. She explained that, like rituals in any religion, the person doing it had to have true faith in the tenets of the religion. She smiled and tilted her head toward Karen, and told Justin that “even Raccoon, though she tries hard to believe, would not be able to do it since she is torn between two faiths right now.” Weeping Sparrow smiled at Karen then and told her that sooner or later she would have to pick one in which to put all her faith. Karen smiled back and said only “I know.”

And Karen finally noticed something strange. She’d been talking to her mom once a week since getting back from the UP. At first she didn’t notice anything odd because she was too depressed to pay much attention to what other people said to her. But by the end of August, she realized that her mom said the same thing--exactly the same words--about Edward every time he came up in their conversation. Her mom would be telling her about her latest trip with Edward, or about where they were going next, and she’d say “Edward is simply wonderful. He’s the most caring, giving, kind, generous man I’ve ever met.” There was never even the slightest variation in the words or their cadence, every time her mom said it. That just wasn’t right. Karen asked her mom about it once, and her mom hadn’t seemed to notice that there’d been any pattern at all. She couldn’t help how she felt about Edward; he really was “simply wonderful... the most caring, giving....”

Karen called Reg. She didn’t know anyone who was better at finding out information, except maybe Kat. But Kat was gone now. Karen needed him to find out if there was anything odd going on elsewhere that was associated with Edward’s presence. She couldn’t explain odd how, exactly. But she knew that Reg, and Justin too, had noticed her reaction to Edward at the wedding, and they were also uneasy about him, though not to the same extent that Karen was. All she could do was to give Reg a list of the places and times of the trips her mom had made with Edward, and hope that Reg’s computer would find a pattern. The next trip would be to Berlin. Previous trips had gone to Paris, Rio, San Francisco, LA, Denver, Boston, several places in Texas, Hawaii, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Kyoto. And the company’s headquarters was in Monterey, CA, Karen told him; but it didn’t sound to her like Edward went back there between every speaking engagement. Sometimes Karen’s mom called her from one exotic locale only to tell her that she and Edward were on their way straight to another. Reg couldn’t promise Karen anything except that he’d put some spy bots to work on the problem and see what they came up with. That was all she could ask for.

Karen didn’t want to rush Reg in doing the research, since he was doing it as a favor to her, so she resisted the urge to ask him about it repeatedly. Like everyone else, she was glued to the TV in the days after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and much of the western Gulf Coast. In fact, she was so involved in watching the horror unfold on the day the hurricane hit, that she almost forgot that it was her birthday. Because she was finally getting caught up on her prep for the new school year, she wouldn’t let Justin plan anything big. So the two spent a quiet evening together, having a nice dinner out then cuddling on the couch, to celebrate the first year of her fourth decade. A week later, classes started on the day after Labor Day. Karen wasn’t as enthusiastic as she’d always been before, but she tried hard not to let her students see that. When she looked out at all of them, she couldn’t help but wonder what horrible fate she might bring down upon them. She’d have to shut her eyes and remind herself that what fate brought to each person wasn’t her fault and that she had no control over it.

By mid-October, she’d actually convinced herself that that was true. Her doctor wanted her to stay on the anti-depressants a while longer anyway, and for once she was willing to accept his word on the matter. But she felt great and had gotten back into the swing of teaching, and her students could tell the difference. Karen had just spent a wonderful weekend with Justin, enjoying their new house, and when she went to bed on the night of October 30, she was looking forward to the coming week of classes. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knew that it was Devil’s Night, and the next day Halloween. But it had been several years since Devil’s Night meant a long night of screaming fire truck sirens; the police and fire department had done a good job of clamping down on the rampant arson that used to occur. So she wasn’t ready for it when she woke up, wide awake at 3am, not quite sure what woke her.

The next minute, she realized what it was. Even without her glasses on, she felt the presence beside the bed. She grabbed her glasses off the night stand, and Stephen came into focus--at least as much in focus as a ghost could be. He looked very, very worried, and when he saw that Karen was awake, he tried to grab her arm. His hand went right through it, and Karen shook off the chill of his touch. He began gesturing, trying to make Karen understand. When Karen couldn’t make out what his gestures meant, he resorted to writing letters in the air with his finger. He was worried about Reg. Someone or something was trying to kill him, and it would happen sometime in the next day. Halloween. Stephen needed Karen to get everyone over there to protect him. By the time Karen had figured out that something threatened Reg, she got up and started dressing. She wasn’t sure what Stephen wanted her to do, but she wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep now anyway. She woke Justin and tried to explain that Stephen had come to her for help.

A moment later, Justin was up dressing and speed-dialing the rest of the group. Tony was the first to answer. Justin only got as far as telling him that Reg might be in trouble, and Tony’s brain shut down and his body went into action. He had only gotten back into town that afternoon, and his body hadn’t fully adjusted back to relaxation-mode yet. So he didn’t have the patience to listen carefully to everything that Justin said after that point, and he didn’t get the part about the threat not being immediate. His feet were in his boots and he was pulling on his flak jacket as he hung up the phone. A couple minutes later, after he had collected everything he needed to save his friend from danger, Tony was out the door and on his way to Grosse Pointe. Aiden was the next to answer, and a moment later Angie picked up. It was clear that they weren’t in the same place. But Aiden had started his residency, and he let Justin know that he couldn’t leave work until he got someone else to cover for him. Angie listened to what Justin said, and told him that she’d be on her way as soon as she could. All the other numbers, Frank’s, Leigh’s, Teresa’s, even Reg’s, went to voice mail before anyone else answered. Justin left messages as he and Karen finished getting dressed and headed out to the truck.

At 3 in the morning, it’s pretty easy to get anywhere in the Metro area fast, as long as you don’t run into any cops. Tony didn’t. By 3:15, he was pulling up Reg’s driveway and onto the lawn in front of the door, leaping out of the car, and running for the door, ready to bash it in. Luckily for Reg, the ringing of his cell phone had woken him, though not in time to answer it. He saw Tony coming on the security monitor and opened the door before Tony could start pounding on it. Tony pulled up short when the door opened, and when he saw it was Reg standing in it, Tony asked him what the “secret password” was. Reg stared at him like he’d grown a second head. He had no idea what ‘secret password’ Tony was talking about, and he really wasn’t sure what brought Tony to his door at 3:15am on a Monday morning either. Tony told Reg that he was right--there was no ‘secret password!’ Then he pulled out his phone and called Justin. He wanted to know if maybe Justin and Karen had had too much spicy marinara before bed last night.

Justin and Karen were only a few minutes behind Tony, since they had a straight shot up Jefferson to get to Grosse Pointe. No, they hadn’t had spicy marinara last night, Justin explained to Tony. Tony just hadn’t listened to everything he had to say before tearing off across town. Tony was dubious. Reg led him into the kitchen to wait for the others, since it sounded like Tony wasn’t the only one making an early morning visit. Justin was slowing down to pull into Reg’s driveway when a motorcycle went blowing by and whipped in the drive ahead of him. Had to be Angie. Her bike was parked and she was striding through the front door as Justin parked the truck. Tony was coming back out the door a moment later. Reg wasn’t really concerned about the lawn, but he figured his neighbors might object to seeing Tony’s ‘hunk of shit’ beater-car parked there when they went out for their papers. Tony had gotten that car in the first place because he figured no one would want to steal it when it was parked out behind the Bat Cave. Plus, something that looked like it had been abandoned there would draw less attention to the fact that someone was using the building. Reg asked Tony to move it, and Tony didn’t even need directions. He hit the garage-door opener on his way out of the kitchen, and pulled neatly into the one vacant bay and closed the door as he went back into the house.

Coffee was already brewing, and Reg had the tea pot on the stove when Justin and Karen joined him, Tony and Angie. And Stephen. He’d gotten there faster than anyone else, as soon as he was sure that Karen was going to help him. Karen told Reg that she understood that maybe he wasn’t ready to deal with this yet, but that Stephen was there now and had come to her just a little while ago fearing for Reg’s safety. Karen explained what Stephen had ‘told’ her. Tony was already settling back in a chair to go out-of-body to check for danger, and it finally struck Karen like a slap in the face that that would be the easiest way for her to communicate with spirits who didn’t have the power to speak in this world. She settled into another chair and, though it took her a little more effort to leave her body than it took Tony (she really needed to practice that more), soon they were both standing there in front of Stephen. Karen let him know that she couldn’t stay there long, and Stephen told her that Reg needed to stop his research immediately and destroy the server. What research and which server? Reg would know what he was talking about, Stephen told her. The research was drawing too much dangerous attention. If they didn’t destroy it before midnight, Reg might die. Karen saw the pain cross Stephen’s face when he added that it might be too late already. She asked if there was anything else Stephen wanted to tell Reg, and he said “I love him.”

Karen and Tony went back into their bodies, and Karen told the others what Stephen had said. Reg’s face softened when she told him that Stephen said he loved him. They all agreed that maybe it was time for Reg to fill them in on some background. He’d “met Stephen at school in California, on a message board about mass suicide cults.” Everyone followed Reg toward his bedroom, so he could talk while he changed, since he was obviously up for a while. Angie stood squarely in the middle of the doorway, watching appreciatively as Reg stripped. But Karen couldn’t be that bold, and she stood with her back against the wall just outside the doorway. Justin and Tony didn’t care whether they ‘saw’ anything or not. They’d both spent enough time in the military for it not to matter anymore. Reg continued. They’d both had a long time interest in the subject and had been doing research before then, keeping their notes on paper. But when they hooked up, they expanded their search for information. They started computer searches, created some of the first ‘spy bots’ to do the work, and set up a server to hold all they found.

It was a slow process, and not anything that occupied all their time. There would be long periods without any results, and then occasionally something odd would come up. About three years ago, Stephen had come up with a new idea, an algorithm that would increase the power of their search capabilities. Reg smiled and told them that Stephen had always considered himself the smarter of the two of them, and maybe he was. Karen saw Stephen straighten and grin at Reg. Reg continued, saying that he hadn’t paid that much attention to Stephen’s new project until “that Sunday.” (Stephen tried to grab Reg and shake him, though his hands went right through Reg’s arms. It was the first of many times that he did that during the rest of the conversation.) Stephen had gone in to the office about midday to work on this new idea. Reg was the first one in on Monday morning and noticed the lights on in Stephen’s office. When he stopped in there to see how the work was coming, he found Stephen still sitting at his desk....

Reg’s voice drifted off as he remembered what he’d seen. Karen could see the pain on both his and Stephen’s faces, and she finished the sentence for him by softly adding “...like that.” “Yeah,” Reg said. Karen motioned to the others to give Reg a chance to gather his thoughts again. She whispered to Justin and Angie a description of Stephen’s face. Tony had just seen how vacant black holes filled the place where Stephen’s eyes should have been. When Reg was ready, he continued his story. Stephen’s flat-screen monitor had two holes burned in it, as if a pair of carefully-directed beams of energy had blasted out of it from the inside. The holes were precisely where Stephen’s eyes would have been looking as he sat there. On the desk next to him was a notebook filled with notes on his latest ‘side project.’ Reg called the police, but took the notebook before the cops could see it there. The coroner called Stephen’s death the result of a very unusual electrical accident. When the police released the scene, Reg unplugged the server and moved it to “the vault,” the climate-controlled room where all the company’s other servers were kept. Over the next three months, he had a secret room built off the side of the vault--a ‘safe room’ that only he had access to, which was shielded from all the building’s other electrical connections by essentially being contained within a Faraday cage. The only contents of this room were the server, a keyboard, three monitors, two printers, the tables they sat on, and a chair. And the server hadn’t had a continuous direct power link in the time since then.

Tony went to the bag of stuff he’d carried in with him and pulled out a length of some type of rope. He went and stood in front of Reg and asked where it was. Reg didn’t quite understand the question, so Tony explained. He could blow that server up right then. It would only take him a couple measurements and a minute of calculations to wire the thing, and it shouldn’t even disturb the neighbors. That’s when Reg realized that the ‘rope’ Tony was holding was detonation cord! He had to explain to Tony that the safe room he’d described was at the company’s office, which amounted to a single floor of an office building downtown. If he tried to blow it up, he’d likely take out at least the floor under the machine no matter how careful he was. So exploding it in place really wasn’t an option. Then Reg went back to his tale as Tony reluctantly put the det cord away. Every once in a while, Reg would find a random message or info dump lying on one of the printers--from the powerless server! He’d never really figured out what was going on....

Karen looked over at Stephen and the expression on his face told her that he’d had a hand in at least some of that strange activity. She asked why he’d denied having any way to communicate through electronics when she’d asked him to talk to her that way earlier that morning. He indicated that he only had a small ability to do so, and when she told the others what she’d been ‘talking to herself’ about, Tony and Justin reasoned that maybe Stephen was already using too much energy to stay visible to her and he couldn’t manipulate the computer too. He nodded vigorously at this. When Reg went on to say that he’d continued to slowly work on the problem over the years, Stephen tried again to shake him, and then to bitch-slap him as well. Once every other month Reg would power up the server, input some info, then shut it down and unplug it again. Every few months, he’d also run a back-up onto a disk. Karen could tell that Stephen was touched that Reg had continued his work but aggravated that he couldn’t express his displeasure over it too. It was obvious that he thought Reg was an idiot for continuing even after seeing what had happened to him.

Karen smiled gently as she told Reg how Stephen felt. Reg told her that Stephen had always been a drama queen, and Stephen indicated that he wasn’t the only one in the room. Karen couldn’t help but laugh, and when she explained to the others, Justin got hit by a lightning bolt of revelation. THAT was why he’d seen so many guys approaching Reg at the wedding reception! Reg explained that about a third of the phone numbers he’d collected from ‘interested’ people there had been from guys. Justin had misinterpreted what his cousin Jimmy--the brunette, not the blonde--had been doing then. He thought that Jimmy had been mad at Reg for hitting on his sister Michelle; but actually BOTH of them had been hitting on Reg! No, Justin didn’t have a problem with this whole idea, he told Tony when Tony bristled at the thought of someone dissing Reg. It just wasn’t something he’d realized before and he was sort of amazed that he hadn’t because it made so many other things make more sense now.

Throughout this exchange, Stephen wore an expression that was equal parts amusement and annoyance. Now the attempts at shaking and slapping were to try to get Reg back on the important subject, his safety. Karen nudged the three men back onto that subject. Reg described to Tony where there was a secret room off the library. He’d stashed hard copies of some of the research in there. When Tony seemed once again a little too eager to use excessive force and blow up the paper and disks, Angie suggested that they shred and burn them instead. Then Reg remembered that he’d sent about a thousand pages worth of the research (out of what probably amounted to more than 15000 pages accumulated over the 15 years or so of combined research he and Stephen had done) to Fr. Colin to pass on to the Vatican, mostly because he wasn’t sure what to make of the information and thought they might be able to figure it out. Karen looked to Stephen and asked if just the server needed to be destroyed or all the research. Stephen indicated that all of it should be, and he grimaced when he gestured that even the handwritten notes he’d made on the algorithm should go. Karen understood the pain he must have felt as an intellectual, being forced to commit his own work to the fire. But all she could offer him was her sympathy, since they both knew that Reg’s life might depend on this.

Leigh had noticed the message on her phone when she’d gotten up for a drink of water, and she’d dressed and come straight over. She arrived just as Tony and Angie came in from the backyard, Tony looking disappointed at having to burn the shredded materials in the barbeque pit rather than using a shaped charge to send them up in a great ball of flames. As Tony turned to shut the doorwall, Justin noticed that he was still wearing the body armor he come in, which had DHS blazoned across the back in day-glow orange letters. Justin suggested he take it off, since they weren’t in the middle of a war zone and because it was highly illegal for Tony to wear it since it amounted to impersonating a police officer. Tony objected, and it seemed like the tension of Reg’s life being at risk might explode in a fight between the two men over the smaller issue. Karen asked Tony if maybe he couldn’t at least put on a jacket to cover the armor, and when he agreed, both men backed off.

When Reg was sure that he had nothing left of the research at his house, they all piled into the Land Rover for the drive down to his office. Karen quietly filled Leigh in on the way. It was 4am by now, and Aiden had just called to say that he was on his way over. Angie called him back to let him know they were leaving Reg’s house, and Aiden said he’d just meet them at Reg’s office. Everyone was tense on the drive downtown, and Angie and Justin kept eyeing the streets and sky around them for anything that seemed to be following the Rover. There was nothing. Reg explained to everyone that the company was only 55 people total, and since many worked from home much of the time, the office should be quiet at that hour on a Monday morning. Aiden met them in the underground parking garage. Reg nodded to the company’s security guard as they got off the elevator up from the garage, and briefly introduced anyone in the group that the guard might not have seen there before. The guard studied Reg, and when he was sure that Reg wasn’t being forced to bring these people in, he continued on his rounds.

As they passed through a couple more doors, secured by various low and high tech methods, Reg told them that the server hadn’t been back-up in about nine months. In that time, it had only been powered up twice, and once was for that back-up. At each security point, Reg double-checked the system and found no unusual activity or glitches. But Stephen was looking more and more frantic as the group, or rather Reg, passed each point bringing them closer to the ‘safe room.’ Karen kept an eye on Stephen as they reached the final door. As Reg keyed in the codes and waited for the thumbprint and retinal scans, Stephen tried desperately to stop him. And as they heard the locking mechanisms click open and Reg reached for the doorknob, Stephen grabbed at his arms to try and prevent Reg from entering the room. When they all looked inside and saw the monitor glowing softly, the words “BANG! You’re dead,” typed boldly across it, Karen understood Stephen’s fear. She grabbed Reg’s arm and told them all that Stephen didn’t want them, or at least Reg, to go in there.

Tony looked around and grabbed the nearest chair. He picked it up and tossed it into the room, hitting the monitor and knocking it to the floor with a CRASH and the POP of the screen exploding. But beyond the damage caused by the flying chair, no one saw or felt anything disturbing. The small group began to debate if anyone should go in, and Angie, tired of the endless talk, pulled on her work gloves and strode into the room. She picked up the server and shook it. When nothing tried to eat her, she sat it down and began to wrap it in aluminum foil as a make-shift Faraday cage while they moved it elsewhere to be destroyed. The others had held their breath for a second, but when nothing awful happened, Tony went in and began to help gather the rest of the stuff in the room. Together, they stuffed all the equipment, including all the broken bits of the smashed monitor, into a couple duffle bags. When they were done, Angie and Aiden offered to take the stuff out to Aiden’s pickup, while the others went to Reg’s office to collect the back-up disks and anything else related to the research that he might have lying around.

The group met up at the cars, and Angie described to them an open field nearby that she’d noted as a possible spot to do some practice with the DPD bomb squad at some point. There was a burnt out hulk of an abandoned car there that would be perfect for holding the filled duffle bags while Tony wired them. Angie led the way in Aiden’s truck and the others followed. When they got there, she and Tony moved the bags to the car and went to work. Angie stayed to help, not because she thought Tony needed the help but because she wanted to watch him work. The others hung back at the edge of the empty lot, and could hear Angie’s appreciative murmurs from there. When everything was set, Tony offered the remote detonator to Reg to do the honors. “Yer s’posed to say ‘Fire in the hole! Three-two-one’ and hit this button.” Karen watched Stephen stand behind Reg, his arms wrapped protectively around him. She realized that Stephen had been getting more faint as the morning had progressed; it must have been taking all his remaining energy to stay there now.

Reg dutifully repeated what Tony had told him to say and pressed the button. Karen could see the mixture of fear and sadness on both his and Stephen’s faces. There was a WHUMP as the explosives-wrapped bundle imploded, then flames shot into the air, precisely as Tony had planned it to minimize the effects on the surrounding area. Then they all watched as electricity crackled up the tower of flames, and the look on Tony’s face told them all that this wasn’t anything he’d planned. The electricity billowed out from the flames into what appeared to be the shape of a humanoid face and arms. An arm reached out toward Reg, and as it extended across the open field, Karen saw Stephen move around Reg to place himself squarely in its path. Karen reached out toward Stephen and screamed “NO!” as the electric hand grabbed him. Then she and all the others could see the electricity coursing through his body, his mouth stretched open in a silent scream. Stephen’s spirit shook as if electrocuted, and they all watched in horror. The face shifted to stare straight at Reg, and they all heard it say “This is not over.” Then both the creature and Stephen disappeared.

Tears rolled down Karen’s face as she turned to see Reg’s face crumple. Leigh saw it too, and both women wrapped their arms around him as he gave in to his grief. When they felt the tension flow out of his body with the last of the tears, they helped him toward the Land Rover. Aiden had grabbed the fire extinguisher from his kit and put out the last of the flames, while Tony and Angie policed the field for any bits that might have survived the explosion. The server and most of the equipment with it was a massive lump of hot metal and plastic slag. Justin asked Reg what the hell that thing was. Reg stared at him for a second and said that if he had to guess, which was all he really could do, it was “the ghost in the system.” Karen didn’t get the reference, but it really spooked Justin. As Tony and Angie picked up a few scraps of plastic and shredded computer disks, Aiden checked over Reg for electrical burns, then Justin helped Karen and Leigh get Reg into the car, and he took the wheel. No one spoke on the way back to Reg’s house.

The pot of coffee was still hot, and Reg offered it to the others to keep himself busy. Angie suggested that alcohol might be better. Justin wondered aloud if maybe they should try to call Dee to ask Alister what the thing was. Karen wasn’t sure if that was such a good idea. She knew that Alister was a computer hacker of some renown, but she also knew that he was quite damaged mentally by some of the things that had happened to him when he was an Envoy. She couldn’t remember if Dee had ever given them any details about his illness, other than that there were times when he was almost normal, but many more times when he could barely manage the day-to-day chores of staying alive. At times like that (and right now seemed to be one of them since Dee was virtually unreachable), all Dee could do was to take him somewhere far away from the rest of the world for whatever solace the peace and quiet and her presence could offer him. Karen voiced her concern about Alister’s mental health, but Justin seemed sure that he would be the best person to consult given the way the creature presented itself.

As the sun climbed higher across the river, Reg suggested that they continue their discussion out on the patio. The entire house was wired with microphones, and he didn’t want to take any chances at the thing being able to monitor them. As it was, no one was sure exactly how it had known what Reg was doing over the years, since the server was rarely plugged in. This got Reg and Tony into a discussion about Newton’s Laws and how energy could be neither created or destroyed. Nor could information, Reg added, according to Stephen Hawking. This worried all of them, since it had sounded like the only way to save Reg’s life was to destroy all the information he and Stephen had collected. Karen reminded Reg that he should warn Fr. Colin about this, since he and the Vatican had some of the info too and might be endangered by it. Suddenly Karen looked worried. What if.... What if the search that Reg had been doing for her, about Edward, had triggered the creature’s attack on Reg? She described to the other what she had asked Reg to do. She hated to sound self-centered, like everything that went wrong was her fault, because she wasn’t trying to say that. But he’d been working on his other research for many years with no indication that the creature was watching him. But he’d only been doing the research on Edward for a couple months now. Had Reg found anything that might link Edward to his other research on suicide cults? The search hadn’t been going on long enough to find any links like that yet, he told them. But he was using the same sort of bots and search pathways in both searchs.

Karen noticed that it was getting late and that she needed to get to class. She hated to leave Reg, but if she wanted to take time off for a honeymoon later, she needed to work now. Justin decided to go and stay with her. Leigh, Aiden and Angie would be able to stay with Reg for now.

Justin stood there holding his wife in his arms and wondered if he was doing the right thing. He wanted so much to just carry her away from all this, to take her some place safe and warm. But if they didn’t find and kill this thing, so many other people would suffer. And he knew that if Karen were awake, she’d want him to try to find it. He stretched his arm around Karen and keyed on the mike. Maybe one of the others would have an idea what he should do. He had Karen and she seemed to be OK, he told the others. But there had been black moccasin prints, about the same size as the last ones they’d seen, leading into the water near where Karen had been lying. Should he try to follow them, he asked. He didn’t know SCUBA, and he didn’t have any equipment with him anyway. Plus the lake was probably too mucky to see much once he went in and disturbed the bottom. But he felt helpless knowing that the thing was still roaming around loose. Frank replied that the team still didn’t know for sure what to do to kill the thing even if they found it. And Aiden told them that he really wanted to get Angie to a hospital, or at least the motel, but she wouldn’t let him take her anywhere until everyone else was ready to head back. Frank suggested that they all make their way back to the motel to regroup and everyone who could, agreed.

Justin started up the two-track and asked Reg over his shoulder where his Jeep was. He wouldn’t mind carrying Karen all the way back to civilization, in fact he’d do it on his knees if he had to; but they’d get there faster in a Jeep. Justin stepped aside and let Reg take the lead. Aiden actually had Reg’s Jeep. But the one Karen had been driving was still back where she’d parked it. Karen’s pulse and respiration had been at slow, resting rates when Justin picked her up. Now he felt her breathe deeper and felt her arm twitch. She was starting to wake up. Justin told her to just relax and enjoy the ride. She couldn’t quite remember why he was carrying her, or why she was wet and cold, but she nestled her head against his shoulder and let him carry her. When they got back to the Jeep, Karen was still sleepy. Justin put her in the back seat and eased her gun out of its holster. He wasn’t sure what had happened to her, but he wasn’t going to take any chances. He also took her comm unit off. Then he used his handcuffs to cuff one arm to the door and one ankle to the seat bracket. He got a blanket out of the back and started to wrap it around her, but as he tucked the ends behind her, she started to struggle. Shit, that was right! He’d seen her do that before, when she’d gotten herself tangled in the blankets while she was asleep. It seemed to freak her out if her arms were pinned to her sides, and he suddenly realized that it might remind her of wearing a strait-jacket. She still hadn’t told him a lot about her time in the hospital. He pulled the blanket off and draped it more loosely around her shoulders and tried to hide the cuff that was on her wrist.

At the other Jeep, Frank was cuffing Leigh the same way. She was in one back seat, and the other had been laid flat to accommodate Angie on the backboard. Aiden had managed to use a reasonable amount of tranquilizer on her, so she was starting to come around as the cuffs were tightened. She asked if Angie was alright, then apologized for whatever happened to her. Maybe if she hadn’t noticed Angie following her, Leigh reasoned aloud to Frank and Aiden, then “It” wouldn’t have noticed Angie either. Didn’t seem to matter much, Frank told her, since she hadn’t seen him on the dirt bike, but the thing had found him anyway. Then Leigh asked about Karen. They told her that Karen was with Justin and Reg and seemed to be OK. Leigh reminded them that she’d told them that someone should shoot Karen in the leg so she couldn’t be lured away. Frank told her that it might not have mattered. She’d been willing to go to serious extremes to get away; Karen probably would have as well, in spite of a wounded leg. In any case, they were all going to meet back at the motel, Frank told her. Frank was starting to look the worse for wear now, and he suggested that Aiden drive.

Then Reg asked over the radio if maybe they should find somewhere else to stay, so people, especially the cops, didn’t start asking uncomfortable questions. As it was, they would have to pass Angie in through the broken window to keep people from noticing how badly injured she was. Everyone agreed that sounded like a good idea, and Reg offered to find a place while Justin drove them back. Neither Justin nor Karen seemed to notice though, when Reg used the satellite phone to call the motel office to ask about other lodgings rather than using the laptop to do the search. While Reg was concentrating on this, Justin asked Karen what the last thing she remembered was. She couldn’t remember anything at all. In fact, she didn’t even realize how unusual it was for her to have wandered off in the first place. The last thing she could recall was feeling like she ought to go back to Nawakwa Lake. She couldn’t even explain what put the thought into her mind. Maybe she thought that Carmen might come back there? Justin was relaying all this to Frank, and Frank wondered why Karen thought just wandering off alone might be a good idea. Karen couldn’t answer that. But she was suddenly overwhelmed by concern for the students and insisted that Reg call Tony and Teresa to check on them. They were fine. Teresa was kicking Tony’s ass at Halo and all the students were in their rooms entertaining themselves.

In the other Jeep, Leigh was asking Frank why he and Angie couldn’t have just tracked her from further away where they might not have been hurt; why didn’t they just use the tracking tags? Frank started to answer that he wanted her tracked by a couple different methods as a fail-safe, when Aiden realized that Frank was still conscious. He’d been hurt pretty badly and should have been overwhelmed by the pain by now. He asked how much morphine Frank had given himself and Frank honestly couldn’t remember. He’d injected the contents of the syringe over the course of his trek from where Angie had fallen to the hill where Justin had found Leigh. That was all he could tell Aiden. Aiden knew how much he had in that syringe and was amazed that Frank could even walk after taking that much, much less talk coherently. That was why Aiden was the one driving, was Frank’s only reply.

Since Aiden and Justin were driving slowly out of concern for their cuffed and injured passengers, Reg was able to track down an alternative before they got all the way back to the motel. There was a cross-country skiing lodge that had closed for the summer. It was going to cost them, since Reg had slipped and mentioned the fact that the students were essentially being ‘quarantined’ by the cops and might be ‘infected’ with something as yet unknown. But it was large enough for all of them plus the students, and it was remote and not near any water. It was relatively new, a faux-log A-frame cabin with 12 guest suites plus staff quarters, a kitchen, billiards room, sauna and hot tub, and other amenities that might help keep the kids entertained. Frank called the troopers to let them know what ‘he’ was planning. Since he was DHS and had been working closely with them so far, they trusted his judgement. And they knew the place and agreed that it would be a good place to keep the kids out of trouble until this thing was cleared up. They even offered to send a few cops to help guard the kids, but Frank turned them down, suggesting they use the manpower to find Carmen.

Frank, Aiden, Angie and Leigh would go straight there, rather than going back to the motel and getting the kids all excited. Frank didn’t want to bring the kids there until surveillance equipment was up and running, so Reg, Justin and Karen would go to the Radio Shack in town to get more cameras and anything else Reg could think of. Plus more toys to keep the students entertained. Tony and Teresa could bring the kids over after dinner. Oh, and Reg needed to have the owners turn the phones on. They couldn’t risk being completely out of touch aside from the sat. phone, and the kids would need at least dial-up access or there’d be more trouble keeping them inside than there already was. In town, Justin skirted around the edge of town so the students wouldn’t notice that they were back. He went directly to the Radio Shack first. He would stay with Karen in the Jeep, keeping one eye on Reg in case of trouble, while Reg went inside the store and got what they needed.

While Reg was inside piling more charges onto his already heavily-burdened Visa, Karen finally remembered everything that had happened. She’d been just sitting there one minute, and the next she sat bolt upright in the seat. Her sudden movement startled Justin enough that his hand went unconsciously to the taser in it’s belt holster against his hip. She’d felt ‘it’ in her head and it told her to come to him when she could get away unnoticed. So she’d given Reg the reading he asked for, then left the Jeep. She wasn’t sure how she knew where to go, just that when she faced a certain way it felt right to her. It took her a little while to realize that she was heading back to Nawakwa Lake. When she got there, “He” was there. She wasn’t sure what she was expecting or how she knew who he was, but she knew he was the one who had summoned her. He was a handsome Indian brave, and he was standing there on the shore of the lake. He reached out and touched her cheek, cupping it in his hand, and he told her “Soon. For now, sleep and remember nothing.” And she laid down on the beach and fell asleep. The next thing she remembered was waking in Justin’s arms.

Justin had been leaning over the front seat, watching and listening to Karen intently, and he didn’t notice Reg approaching the car. Reg had seen Justin turn quickly in the seat, and since he was almost done paying for the equipment he had come out to check on them. He noticed Justin’s hand on the taser and stopped to get Justin’s attention before getting closer. Justin relaxed and motioned Reg over. A moment later, the store clerk came out to find out where Reg wanted the boxes of stuff. They helped him get the boxes loaded in the back of the Jeep, and when Reg climbed in, Justin drove them over to the hardware store. He’d been thinking on the drive there about what to do with the Weendigo when they found it, and ways to fortify and protect the lodge and the students, and he’d come up with a few ideas. Reg agreed to keep an eye on Karen while Justin shopped. As Justin walked away, Reg asked Karen what had just happened in the Radio Shack parking lot, and Karen told him. She also added something she hadn’t told Justin. She hadn’t wanted to hurt Justin’s feelings by telling him this, but the brave was so handsome that looking at him made her chest get tight the same way it did when she looked at Justin. If it wasn’t exactly love she felt for the brave, then Karen was sure that it could be, given time.

As Karen sat there in the Jeep waiting for Justin to come out of the hardware store, she felt like she ought to disable Justin’s taser if she had the chance. She wasn’t sure what made her think that, but it seemed at the time to be a completely rational idea. By the time Justin had gotten back to the car, he’d bought just about one of everything in the store (and multiples of some things) and had it loaded into a trailer that he’d bought as well. He hooked that up to the Jeep and the three headed to the lodge. Frank, Aiden, Leigh and Angie had been there for some time now. Frank had had Aiden and Leigh carry Angie in on the backboard and take her to one of the staff bedrooms. Aiden decided that she was well enough to come off the board, but she had to keep on the neck brace until he had another chance to Heal her the next day. When Angie was comfortable on the bed, Frank cuffed Leigh to Angie and gave Angie a taser. Her orders were to shoot Leigh if she made any attempt to escape. He knew that Leigh would have a serious problem hurting the wounded Angie the way she had Reg, so it was unlikely she would even make the attempt. But if she did, he also knew that Angie would have no problem shooting Leigh. Leigh joked about how her late husband would have like that scene; but when Angie said, only half-joking, “Don’t make me use this taser on you. I’m too close and I’d get caught in the back-wash, and I would NOT be happy,” Leigh clarified that she wasn’t into that kind of thing herself--she was only trying to make a joke. But by now, no one was really in a joking mood.

Aiden insisted on re-taping Frank’s broken ribs and patching up all the cuts and abrasions he got during his brief attempt at flight. Then the two men explored the entire building. It was made up of a large central room with 12 loft-suites overlooking it. Under the loft were located the staff quarters, office, kitchen and other amenities. In the kitchen, they found some canned goods, but someone would definitely have to make a shopping run back into town tonight. The furniture was covered with sheets, but all of it appeared comfortable. The kids could help uncover it when they got there. There were plenty of clean linens in cedar-lined closets, and plenty of cleaning goods in the custodial closet. Reg had already been told by the owners that the group was welcome to use anything there, but the cost of the supplies would be added to their bill. Next they went outside. Frank wanted to study the windows, to see if or how they could be fastened shut from the outside as well as the inside, to protect the kids from things trying to get in and to keep them from trying to leave. Frank figured that the cross-bars on them could easily be screwed tight to the wall.

Meanwhile, Aiden discovered the rental snowmobiles and skis in the garage and shed, as well as landscaping tools and a standard collection of other tools. Frank came and got a ladder and tools and began ‘tightening security’ around the building. It took Aiden a couple minutes to realize what Frank was doing and order him down off the ladder. With his injuries, Frank really shouldn’t be doing anything at all, much less climbing up and down a ladder and bending and stretching. Besides, sooner or later all the morphine would be processed out of his system, and Aiden had locked the case so no one could steal anything else. Frank teased Aiden that it should only take him a few seconds to pop the lock on the med kit. But when Aiden rolled his eyes and told Frank to go watch the women while he took over fastening the shutters, Frank dutifully went inside.

By 5pm, all the Envoys except Tony and Teresa had made it to the lodge. Karen was taken inside and ankle-cuffed to Leigh, with Angie being given the same instructions regarding Karen as for Leigh. Justin set up the computer for the women to play Halo, but Leigh wasn’t interested. And after Angie managed to kill Karen’s character three times in a row in less than 2 minutes, she opted to play against the computer. Frank brought Karen a Super Mario game on a GameBoy from the pile of stuff Reg had bought, saying it might be more her speed, and he brought Leigh a “Birds of Northern Michigan” book from the lodge’s ‘library,’ then laughed when Leigh realized that the window shutters couldn’t be opened. When he stopped laughing, Frank brought both women the books they really wanted. Reg volunteered to do some grocery shopping, knowing that there was likely to be a good gourmet section at the local store since Grand Marais was a popular vacation spot for gay men. Frank decided to go with him. He didn’t want anyone wandering around alone any more than they already had been; and Aiden wouldn’t let him do anything to help out with setting up the security systems anyway. He and Justin would take care of that work. They figured they could have it done by the time Reg and Frank got back, and those two could also let Tony and Teresa know that they could bring the kids down at the same time.

As he and Justin were finishing up the last of the shutters, Aiden realized that it was about time to get the radio tags out of Karen’s and Leigh’s backs. He went inside to take care of that while Justin worked on some of his other projects, and he had the two women out within minutes with Angie assisting him. When Frank climbed out of the Jeep in the grocery store parking lot, he noticed that the morphine was starting to wear off. Everything from about his forehead down hurt. On the way in, he motioned one of the “cart-kids” over and told him he’d be needing help getting his groceries out to the car when he was done shopping and passed the kid a folded bill. The young man brightened right up since it was the best tip he’d gotten in ages working there, and he told Frank he’d be waiting by the registers whenever Frank needed him. Each of the two men took a cart and began wandering up and down the aisles, tossing in whatever struck them as suitable for themselves or the kids.

When Reg passed Frank on the way to the checkout counter and teased him about the numerous boxes of sugary cereals and lack of milk to pour on them, Frank stopped dead still and stared at the floor. Was the pain beginning to mess with his head? It looked like a trail of grey footprints stretching out behind Reg. ‘Reg’ saw where Frank was looking and tried to tell him that he’d dropped a jar of spaghetti sauce a couple aisles over, but Frank wasn’t buying it. ‘Reg’ took a step toward Frank, but Frank backed up. He couldn’t let this thing near him. Somewhere in the back of his head, Frank wondered where the real Reg was and at what point he’d been replaced. It didn’t matter now, though. He called out for someone to call the police as he reached for his gun with one hand and his badge with the other. ‘Reg’ was trying to convince the manager that had come over that it was Frank that needed help, that he’d been injured and was now delusional. But Frank’s badge and gun convinced her otherwise and she ran for the customer service desk. The cashier and ‘cart-boy’ and the few other customers all screamed and dove for cover behind counters and endcaps. Then, when Frank returned the badge to his jacket, he pulled out his phone. He dialed the sat. phone first, but when he heard ringing from ‘Reg’s’ pocket, he remembered that Reg had had the sat. phone last. So he pulled up the number he’d just gotten for the lodge and hoped someone could answer.

With Frank pointing a gun at him, and any number of others on the way, ‘Reg’ decided that escape would be his best option and he began to turn to run. Frank ordered him to stop and realized that he couldn’t hear himself speaking. With his phone pressed to his ear, he took aim and shot ‘Reg.’ Luckily no one was in a position to see it, either. Time slowed down as he watched the bullet fly straight at the heart of a fellow Envoy. The shear force of it hitting staggered ‘Reg’ backward a few steps. Then he smiled wryly at Frank and moved at him faster than Frank had ever seen anything move. In fact he couldn’t even be sure he HAD seen the thing move, because it was on him grabbing his neck before he could blink. At the lodge, Aiden had been ‘elbow deep,’ as he put it, in Karen’s and Leigh’s backs when the phone rang. He didn’t want Angie doing anything other than sitting still and handing him the sutures, so he hollered for Justin to get it. If Frank hadn’t been preoccupied, he would have hung up long before Justin finally got to the phone. When he picked it up, he heard nothing but the slight buzz that told him the line was open.

Weendigo-Reg grabbed Frank’s neck with strength like that of the Greater Zombi that had been holding Angie the same way only a few weeks ago. The thing lifted him off the floor and squeezed. Frank knew he had only another second or two to act before either he would pass out or the thing would break his neck. He extended his arm down the length of the one the Weendigo was using to throttle him. With the muzzle only a fraction of an inch from Weendigo-Reg’s head, he pulled the trigger. He felt the pressure release immediately, and he could hear Justin comment on the other end of the phone that “There must not be anyone there.” Justin had been just about to hang up when he heard Frank’s voice, sounding pretty scratchy, say that he had an eight-foot bog mummy at the checkout counter. That was really the only way Frank could think of to describe the thing lying on the floor at his feet. The thing was emaciated to the point that it was little more than dark brown, leathery skin stretched taut over bones. It was wearing Reg’s clothes, but its arms and legs stuck out of them awkwardly now, and it wore a necklace of what looked to Frank like human finger bones around its neck. There was a hole in the clothes where Frank’s first bullet had gone in, but the creature’s skin was unmarred by any wounds.

Justin wasn’t sure if he’d heard Frank right, but something up there wasn’t right. He told Frank that he and Aiden would be there as soon as they could and hung up. He hollered in to Aiden to close up FAST, that Frank had run into trouble in town. Aiden did, then moved the phone within Angie’s reach and told her to taser Karen and Leigh if either acted ‘funny.’ He and Justin were in a Jeep racing toward town within a couple minutes. Frank calmly holstered his gun and asked the cart-boy where duct tape would be. Then he began wrapping the Weendigo with it. He wasn’t sure if the thing was dead or not, and he wasn’t sure if the tape would keep it from causing any more trouble, but he figured it couldn’t hurt and might slow it down if it was still alive. The manager was frantically dialing for the local cops, the mayor, the store owner and anyone else she could think of. None of her training had covered anything like this. When Frank was sure the creature couldn’t attack him without him noticing, he called Teresa and Tony to come help, since they were closer. The two got there just before the cops started showing up. Tony got to the doorway and hesitated. He’d been dealing with too many dead things lately, and his stomach just wasn’t up to another, so he offered to bring the Jeep over to load the thing up. Teresa intercepted the cops, and helped Frank ‘explain’ what had happened. They were willing to accept whatever he said on the basis of his badge and the fact that their brains really didn’t want to process what their eyes were seeing.

By the time Aiden and Justin got there, the cops had the situation ‘under control.’ They knew where Frank would be if they had any other questions for him, and they would help get the kids shuttled down to the lodge. It would be just as well if everyone followed the plans Frank had outlined earlier, since they still had some cannibalistic wacko running loose and they hadn’t found Carmen yet. Aiden checked Frank over for new injuries, and Justin and Teresa got the Weendigo loaded into the Jeep that Tony had brought over. Those five headed down to the lodge and left it to the cops to get the kids safely transported, knowing full well that they were safe now anyway. It was getting near dusk when they got there, and Justin and Tony went straight to work on a cage for the Weendigo. It was about the size and shape of a coffin, made of bent rebar and wrapped with a wire that allowed them to zap the thing with an electric shock if they needed to control it. It was locked inside and hidden in the trailer, which was then stored in the garage, to keep the kids from seeing it. They had to keep the kids there until all the health tests could be run, because by now the troopers had let them know that their test results were in--the ‘meat’ in the dig stores was indeed human. And they had to keep the Weendigo contained for seven days, because, as in Frank’s dream, the only way to kill it was to starve it.

It was under a constant watch, so the Envoys noticed when it began to waken the first time after a few hours. They discovered that it could regenerate from the damage done to it, but they could keep it unconscious by damaging it more. This wasn’t much of a problem, since there ended up being a line of people willing to hurt the thing. Even as the sky began to darken for the night, while Angie guarded Karen and Leigh, and Justin and Tony worked, Aiden, Teresa and Frank went out searching and found Reg sitting naked by a small hole in the ground near the south side of Nawakwa Lake. The poor guy was covered in black fly welts, and the look on his face told them that that wasn’t even the worst part. The creature, disguised as an Indian, caught him unaware as he neared the lake looking for Karen. It had told him to sleep until it woke him. When he woke a short time ago, he’d wandered around trying to get his bearings and stumbled upon the cave...another of the Weendigo’s ‘food’ caches. Inside was what was left of Carmen. While Aiden tended to Reg, Frank and Teresa worked the ‘scene’ and collected the remains. Then the four returned to the lodge.

Reg spent as much time as possible over the next week and a half soaking in oatmeal bathes and rubbing himself in calamine lotion. And he had no problem hurting the creature to keep it unconscious; he’d finally found out how much the lodge was going to cost them! Even when no one saw it move, they could tell when it was beginning to wake because Leigh and Karen would begin pleading with the others to not hurt it. And they were both feeling its hunger; it seemed that they were always asking for something to eat, even when they’d just finished eating. So every time Justin heard Karen pray for them to stop hurting the creature, he had an urge to go unload another bullet or two into it. And both Frank and Leigh were having dreams. In Leigh’s, the creature in the cage wasn’t an Indian brave, it was her husband and she needed to save him. In the first dream she remembered after she regained control of her will, she saw herself in a mirror, but all the extra flesh on her body was gone. She was starving along with her husband and the pain in her stomach was almost unbearable. In the next dream she remembered, she was so fat she couldn’t even put her arms down at her side; yet her hunger was still gnawing at her like a weasel eating her from the inside out and she was considering whether she could get her arms close enough to her mouth to chew on them.

Frank’s dreams were worse. He was already unhappy at having to have someone else cover the Freedom Festival for him and Angie; but there was no way they could be back down there in time. At first, he couldn’t quite remember the dreams. Aiden told him that his mind was probably blocking them out to give his body the rest it needed. In the first that he did remember, he’d just shot Reg and there was blood everywhere. The cops closed around him and took him down, and as he laid there pressed to the floor by Enright’s knee, he could see grey paint dripping off the soles of Reg’s shoes only inches from his face. He woke screaming. When he got himself under control, he went down to the garage and put a bullet into the creature’s head. The next night, Frank dreamt that it was him in the cage, naked. Outside the cage, the creature was walking around in his form, and had convinced everyone that it was him. Again, he woke screaming and couldn’t go back to bed until he’d put a round into the thing whether it needed it or not. The third night, Frank found himself chained to the wall in the cave where they’d found Andrew’s remains, and the creature was eating him piece-by-piece, keeping him alive the whole time. And again the others heard a shot from the garage. They were beginning to wonder if they should take Frank’s gun away from him, but figured that might do more harm than good. As it was, Frank was starting to look like death warmed over from the lack of sleep.

By the 6th day, the thing had wasted away until it looked like a crumpled, dried corpse. On the 7th day, the thing crumbled to dust. Frank gathered the dust and put it in a jar, and asked Karen to call Weeping Sparrow to find out the best thing to do with it. By now, Karen wasn’t in much of a good mood herself. She’d been tormented for the past seven days, starving all the time and feeling useless, since they couldn’t trust her to be free until it was dead and she could protect neither her students nor the creature. And no one but Leigh seemed to understand why protecting the thing was important. On that seventh day, all she felt was relief that her ordeal was over and shame that she’d been such an easy target for the creature. The kids had been told that Karen had fallen in the lake and wasn’t feeling well. And that Andrew might have had something communicable that he could have passed to them when he was cooking, and they had to be quarantined until necessary tests had been done. By the time these were done, the cops were ready to attribute Andrew’s and Carmen’s deaths to some transient crazy, as long as nothing more happened in the next six months. They weren’t happy either, but they would file their official reports and not their personal ones (the ones where they point out just how weird all this is and earn themselves psych evals), and let the case go cold. And the dig was over for the season, since not only did the cops recommend Karen close it down for the year, but when she put the question to the students, they voted to do the same. They’d had enough of being stuck in the middle of nowhere on high alert all the time.

When the message had finally gotten to Weeping Sparrow, Karen got a call back from one of her ‘posse.’ Karen explained the problem to her and she relayed it to Weeping Sparrow. The woman then told Karen Weeping Sparrow’s reply: Sink the jar of dust in a large block of wet concrete. Shape the concrete into a planter, and when it dries, place it on the lawn in front of Justin’s house. Karen could hear distant laughter in the background. If she hadn’t been so depressed, Karen might have laughed along with Weeping Sparrow. Instead she merely told the woman that she would let Frank know what Weeping Sparrow had said, and thanked both her and Weeping Sparrow for the help. By now, everyone suspected that Andrew had somehow unwittingly awakened the creature and become its slave. Reg and Justin worried that someone else might stumbled on one of its caches and somehow awaken it or another of its kind. After some discussion, Frank agreed that the caches (they’d found four altogether over the course of the two weeks) should be destroyed. Karen worried that just blowing them up might draw unwanted attention, so Frank and Justin worked out a story that had terrorist weapon caches hidden in the UP. The materials in them, some old and unstable, would be too dangerous to move so they needed to have Tony destroy them in situ. And by July 10, everyone, Envoys and students alike, was glad to be seeing the Mackinac Bridge disappear into the distance in their rear-view mirrors.

When things were under control in Leigh’s room, Karen and Justin did a quick bed check, to make sure that the Weendigo hadn’t taken the opportunity presented by the fight to lure away another student. He hadn’t, and the few kids that were woken by the noise were told that it was Leigh and Reg ‘drunk dancing.’ Justin took a couple minutes to gouge a few marks into the bottoms of Leigh’s boots while she was unconscious. That would make it easier to track her when she was allowed to “escape.” Then Karen insisted that the two go out and continue the patrol that Frank and Angie had had to abandon. Aiden let Frank know that the tranquilizer he’d given Leigh would keep her under for another 3-4 hours, but he wasn’t sure what effect the taser shot would have. And the radio tags wouldn’t go septic for another 24 hours, at least. Frank sent Angie over to check on Teresa and Tony, who were sleeping in one of the rooms across the hall so they’d be ready to take over the day watch. While she did that, Frank put another tag in the lining of Leigh’s boot, and Reg slipped a couple more into her clothing and wallet. So even if she managed to get the tags out of her back, hopefully she wouldn’t know about the others and the team could still track her. As they worked, Frank asked Reg if he hadn’t “said ‘Yes, mistress’ fast enough.” It took him a minute to figure out that Frank was teasing him about being beaten up by Leigh.

Angie knocked several times on Teresa and Tony’s door, and when she didn’t get an answer, she picked the lock. She was lucky both of the room’s occupants were actually sound asleep or she might have been shot. Teresa sleepily confirmed that both she and Tony were fine, then she went back to sleep. The two were due to take over the watch at 8am, so they still had an hour or so to sleep before getting up for showers and breakfast. Reg was almost dead on his feet, so Frank asked Aiden to go with him to keep him from ‘wandering off,’ when Reg asked to go to bed. Angie got back to the room in time to hear Aiden ask if he had to be handcuffed to Reg. Frank told him that if he wanted to sleep too, he’d need to be cuffed to Reg so he’d know if Reg tried to get up. Otherwise no. Angie warned Reg that he’d “better not lay a hand on” her boyfriend, and Reg told her that Aiden wasn’t his type. Aiden feigned offense and said he thought that he was everyone’s type, and promptly got smacked by Angie. Then the two trudged off to another room, Reg to sleep and Aiden to study.

Once everyone else was gone, Frank and Angie sat down to play cards while they were keeping an eye on Leigh. As he shuffled, Frank asked Angie why on earth she invited a non-Envoy along on a trip with a ‘critical mass’ of Envoys. When she replied that she thought it was supposed to just be a ‘vacation,’ he remembered that she hadn’t been an Envoy long enough to recognize the problem. But, since she DID invite Teresa along, and the strange situation had intrigued Teresa enough to dig for more answers, and Frank had been forced to tell her everything and ‘make’ her an Envoy, now Teresa was Angie’s responsibility. If Teresa died, Frank warned Angie, it would be her fault. Angie was feeling sorely chastised now, and Frank laughed and asked if it would be a good time to play a little poker for money. Angie had gotten the message.

Outside, the early morning was cool and grey. The fog was thinning enough that Karen could see the other side of the street, but the clouds let through only weak light from the rising sun. The searchers were assembling in the parking lot to continue the search for Carmen. Enright let Karen know that they’d spoken with the motel’s management. As the other occupants of the first floor had checked out, the manager had agreed not to re-book the rooms, so the whole first floor was occupied by only Karen and her friends and students now. Unfortunately, they couldn’t allow any of the students to leave the premises yet, so the field trip to Pictured Rocks would have to be cancelled. Karen sighed. She knew the kids were getting restless and that they’d been looking forward to the chance to get out and about, even if it was supposed to be ‘educational.’ When Teresa and Tony were ready to take over the watch, Karen called the park ranger and let him know that the trip was cancelled, but she’d like to reschedule it as soon as the police would let them. The ranger told her he didn’t think it would be too much of a problem, and that the day wasn’t looking very good for being out on the lake anyway.

When that was taken care of, Karen and Justin had a little breakfast then waited for the kids to get up. They straggled out in clumps, and when they were all up, Karen broke the news to them. All but Chris and Jaime started to complain about being stuck there with nothing to do, and her two grad students grinned when Karen caught their eyes after a couple minutes of the whining. They both knew what was coming next. Karen told the students that if they were really bored, she could certainly find them things to do right there at the motel. All the stuff they’d found at the dig before it was shut down was still there, packed in boxes in one of the rooms. It needed sorting and cataloguing. Normally what couldn’t be done as it was brought up would be done later, as ‘lab work’ for next year’s classes. But she didn’t mind having them do it now; she’d just need to find something else for her lab students to do in the fall. It was amazing how quickly the kids remembered that they had other things to entertain them, like games on the LAN or emailing friends and family or hackysack in the hallway. Anything to avoid real work. Karen chuckled, and told Jaime and Chris that if anyone really DID want to do some real work, they could go ahead and set it up. Tony and Teresa would be keeping an eye on them all again, and she and the others would be out searching. She didn’t mention that the person they’d probably be searching for was Leigh.

By now, Leigh was waking up. Just in case whatever was affecting her was similar to the “Hound” that had been on Harvey, in needing to have two Mental Shields done to fully dispel it, Karen raised another Mental Shield near Leigh. When the effect had worn off, Leigh made it clear that she still felt compelled to get away from them. Reg handed her some clean clothes (the ones he’d put additional tags in), and Frank, with a hint of a grin, handed her a canteen filled with water and made a ‘shooing’ motion toward the door. She asked if she was allowed to have some privacy in the bathroom, and Frank told her only if she promised to go out the door this time. Then the others left the room and gathered everything they thought they might need for the hunt. In the bathroom, Leigh checked with a mirror, to see if she could tell which cut actually had the tag in it and if she would be able to reach it to remove it. Outside, Frank and the others went over their ‘assignments.’ He and Angie would follow Leigh as best they could, keeping Justin’s tracking skills in reserve in case they lost her. Frank would have with him a dirt-bike that he’d borrowed from the troopers, in case he needed it. Reg and Karen would take two of the directional finders and stay further away to the outsides of a circle around wherever she was, and the third directional finder would stay at the motel with Tony and Teresa, so Reg could have two different moving signals and a stationary ‘registration point’ to triangulate with as Leigh moved. Reg would also have the surveillance drones with him, in case they were needed. Justin and Aiden would ride with Karen, who could drop them wherever they might be needed, allowing Reg to continue tracking. Everyone scattered around the motel, watching for Leigh to come out.

Leigh realized that there was no way she could get the tag out, so she’d just have to be more clever than her ‘hunters.’ She grabbed a flashlight, and headed out to the Jeeps. She knew that they’d planned to have Justin track her; this should mess that idea up. She looked around as she climbed into the vehicle, and couldn’t see any of the others. She started the Jeep and pulled out onto the road, keeping an eye out for the others. So far, so good. She headed south, back toward the airport. When the Jeep was almost out of sight, Angie pulled out to follow her. Frank and the other two Jeeps held back another minute. Reg told Karen to follow the others and try to get to the east of Leigh if possible; he was going to follow M-77 down and stay west of Leigh. The three Jeeps took off. When Leigh got to the old railroad grade, she turned off Airport Road to follow it toward the dig site. As she did, she noticed Angie behind her. Leigh sped up, hoping to get beyond Angie’s sight. She’d figure out what to do next when she’d done that. She turned off the RR grade onto a two-track that led between Blood and Klondike Creeks. She couldn’t see Angie behind her anymore, and she paused after the turn, to listen for the sound of another Jeep. She heard nothing. She continued down to where the two-track intersected another small road. There, she parked the Jeep and got out. With all the other tracks that would be at an intersection, even one in the middle of the woods, maybe it would keep Justin from picking out her tracks.

But Leigh hadn’t actually lost Angie or the others. Reg was having Karen stop periodically and give him readings, and he let them all know that Leigh had stopped briefly. Then he had Karen move out farther to the south, to a spot north of Weber Lake where the map showed two of the trails intersecting. A little while later, Angie found the abandoned Jeep. Reg had Karen move farther west from there, to a spot north of Sitka Lake, and stop again and give him a reading; and he was able to give Angie a general idea of which way Leigh had moved from there. She started out, and when Frank got to the other two Jeeps, he unloaded the dirt-bike to circle around wide of where Leigh was headed. Leigh had been heading roughly east, toward Sitka Lake. Reg checked his maps. There was a slightly larger hillock near there, and another north of Section 17 and Kennedy Lakes. She could be headed for either, or back to the dig site. Frank had Karen take Justin back to where Leigh had left the Jeep, to track her from there. He’d applied some camo paint to his face and hands as they’d driven, and he was ready to go. He grabbed all he thought he’d need from his bag, and when he melted into the woods, Karen went back up and around to the north of Sitka Lake again.

Angie had closed in enough to catch a glimpse of Leigh through the trees, and she was trying hard to keep from being seen and heard. So she was almost frustrated enough to swear out loud when she heard a branch crack under her foot. Angie stopped dead still. Leigh heard the snap of a branch a little way behind her, and she knew that she hadn’t lost all her trackers. She turned more south and started to pick up speed, hoping to lose this one; but her speed kept her from being as stealthy as she thought she was being. Angie let the others know that she’d been spotted, and Frank told her to keep following, that at the very least it would distract Leigh so he could move in from the other direction. Angie continued on in the direction she’d last seen Leigh, and at first the tracks got easier to follow. But Angie missed the spot where Leigh changed direction again to the southwest. She let the others know she’d lost Leigh. By now, Frank had maneuvered around and came up on Leigh from the other side. He’d gotten off the bike and pushed it as he closed in and spotted her through the trees and brush. Reg used the computer tracking from their cells to help Angie get headed in the right direction again.

But Angie moved in a little too fast, and Leigh heard her coming through the trees. She didn’t notice Frank though, and Frank watched her turn and move quickly north. Frank hadn’t felt it at first, but the wind seemed to start picking up just about then, too. It appeared to be blowing away the fog, and Frank hoped that it wouldn’t make it easier for Leigh to spot him. Frank followed Leigh and a minute later got slammed in the face by a howling gust of wind that spun him around. Frank stopped a moment and shook his head to clear it before continuing on. The strange thing was that the trees around Leigh, slightly ahead and to the left of him, didn’t seem to be blowing in the wind. He let the others know that he could still see Leigh, but that he got the feeling something else saw him, too. Leigh stopped a moment. She could hear the wind picking up around her, but it didn’t seem to be blowing right where she was. It gave her the eerie sense that she couldn’t hear what she needed to, and she spun around trying to figure out where the wind was coming from. When she couldn’t tell, she began to climb a tall tree nearby. She somehow knew that if she could spot footprints, she should follow them, that they would lead her where she needed to go.

The wind around Frank continued to pick up speed to gale force. He tried to get closer to Leigh, but the wind was blowing straight at him and he couldn’t make any headway as his feet slipped back a step on the pine needles and dead leaves for every step forward he took. The howling of the wind had increased with its speed, and Frank figured that Leigh wouldn’t be able to hear the dirt bike’s engine now anyway, so he got on and started it. He didn’t realize it, but Angie was finally closing in on Leigh on her other side, too, and the wind around her started to increase. Even on the bike, Frank was barely making headway, and Angie was being blown off her feet. She grabbed a tree, and let the others know that she had to stop moving until the wind died down a bit. Frank continued to keep Leigh in sight, as she climbed back down from the tree she’d gone up and started southwest again. And then, as impossible as it seemed, the wind speed ramped up even further. Frank had been laying low across the gas tank, and he felt the front of the bike lift as the wind picked it up and threw him backwards off of it. Off to his left, he heard Angie scream, but the wind, and his own tumbling, flying journey made it impossible to tell just how far away she was. Over the radio, Karen, Justin, Aiden and Reg heard Angie’s scream followed by a horrific crunch, then her radio went silent.

Frank wasn’t sure what had happened to Angie, or Leigh, or any of the others. He laid on the ground and tried to remember if he’d ever heard of a tornado in the UP of Michigan before. That’s what this had felt like. Then he realized that the wind had dropped off completely and it was as still as it had been when they’d started out. He tried to move and could tell that he had a dislocated shoulder and broken ribs, and probably some internal damage as well. He looked around and spotted the dirt bike wrapped around a tree trunk about 20 feet up. He rolled enough to get to his gun and took careful aim. All the others heard the shot, some over the radios, and Justin and Leigh saw the ball of flame rise from the tree as the bike’s tank exploded. Frank could taste the blood in his mouth, and his jaw hurt pretty bad, too. He opened it carefully and could feel that his teeth had bitten through his tongue. Boy, that was going to hurt later. But right now, he needed to find Angie. She’d been off to the west....

Justin got to where Frank was just as he had pulled himself to his feet using the tree he figured he’d been slammed against. It was obvious to Justin that Frank had taken some serious damage, but Frank told him to keep following Leigh, so he did. Leigh wasn’t hard to follow now. Besides the grooves he’d put in her boots, she was no longer even trying to stay hidden. She’d heard Angie scream too, and they all knew that Angie didn’t scream easily. She felt terrible that her friend, a young woman in love (which made it all the worse for Leigh), had been hurt severely trying to save her. But even as she tried to make herself go toward her friend, she felt her feet turn back to the southwest, in the direction she had an utterly overwhelming urge to go. She knew that she was supposed to stay away from them, but she had no patience left for trying to cover her tracks. She made directly for the hill that kind of pushed the trees up higher than any others in this heavily forested area.

Frank made his way over to where he thought Angie should be, and he knew when he saw her that she was damn close to dead if she wasn’t already. Her head was twisted back and tipped against the ground at an unhealthy angle. And one leg was bent badly in a direction that legs weren’t supposed to bend. When Frank got closer, he could see the bone sticking out through the skin. He told the other three to get there fast, and he started reporting what he could of Angie’s condition to Aiden. She’d need the backboard, and besides the broken ribs and compound leg fracture, he thought maybe her spleen had been punctured because of how rigid her abdomen was in that area. He glanced around as he waited for the others. It looked like the same tornado had thrown Angie against a tree which had then fallen and crushed her again when it bounced on the ground. At least she wasn’t pinned down.

When Reg heard the shot and the explosion, he’d stopped to get a fix on Frank and Angie’s comm unit signals. Then he pulled hard to the left on the steering wheel and gunned the Jeep off the two-track and through a gap in the trees. He kept moving gap to gap as fast as he could manage, and radioed Frank’s coordinates to Karen. Karen took the Jeep as close as she could to the coordinates that Reg had given her. Aiden was out and pulling the med kit from the back before she’d even thrown it into Park. She asked if she should cuff herself to the steering wheel or something, but Frank told her that he needed her mobile in case Aiden needed help with Angie. Aiden’s face blanched when he saw Angie lying sprawled in an unnatural posture on the ground, then he bit his lip and put on his ‘medic face’ and went to work. He glanced at Frank as he knelt beside Angie, and he could tell that Frank wasn’t in much better condition. The only thing that probably helped him was that he was bigger and heavier and had the bike to anchor him a bit. Angie must have been picked up and thrown like a rag-doll. Aiden checked her pupils, which were unreactive--not a good sign. He worked his way up her extremities checking for damage, and went pale when he felt her abdomen. While Aiden was busy with Angie, Frank rummaged around in the med kit, and took out a couple of pre-loaded syringes of morphine and adrenalin. He figured he was going to need them before long, but he didn’t have time to wait for Aiden’s help.

By the time Aiden was done checking over Angie, Reg was pulling up. Now that Reg was there to help Aiden (and he could certainly offer more help than Frank could in his condition), Frank was going to back up Justin. Reg called Karen for a reading on Leigh’s tag. None of the others knew that Karen had just gotten the feeling that she should be going somewhere else. “You will wait until they are no longer suspicious and come to me. Act normally until your opportunity comes.” It wasn’t exactly a voice in her head; it wasn’t that...substantial. She kind of wished now that Frank had let her cuff herself to the Jeep. She vaguely wondered if she would have been able to dislocate her own thumb, like Leigh had done. She was tough enough to take that kind of pain, she supposed, but she wasn’t sure she had the guts to cause it to herself. She heard Reg ask for a reading, and she gave it to him. Then she figured that he wouldn’t be asking for another too soon. It was her chance. She got out of the Jeep and grabbed her canteen. She looked around the inside of it wondering how long this would take. Would she need a jacket? Food? She grabbed everything she thought she might need for a night out in the woods and walked away from the Jeep. She wasn’t really sure where she was going, but she knew she’d know when she got there.

Reg worked out that Leigh was headed for the tallest hillock in this area, southwest of Sitka Lake. He let Frank know, to get him there faster, then radioed Karen and Justin. Justin replied that he got the message, but there was no response from Karen, though she did hear Reg. She knew that she wasn’t supposed to let them know.... Aiden had Healed Angie and stabilized her by now, and he and Reg got her strapped to the backboard and lifted her into the Jeep. Reg ‘pinged’ Karen again but still got no response. Karen could hear them, and knew that they knew she was gone now. But that wasn’t her problem anymore. She had to keep going and stay away from them, and knowing what they knew could only help her. Reg maneuvered his Jeep between the trees and over to where Aiden had left Karen at the other Jeep. As they suspected, she wasn’t there. Reg told Aiden to get Angie out to a hospital. He’d follow Karen using the radio tag, and both Frank and Justin should keep on Leigh’s trail since he couldn’t help them track her with the tags anymore. He looked around in the Jeep to figure out what she had with her. She taken her jacket and canteen, of course, and her pack with food and a bunch of other ‘survival gear.’ But she’d also taken her gun and the comm unit. Those could be a problem when he found her. He headed out tracking her south along the road--the opposite direction from Leigh.

When Leigh got to the hill, she began walking around it. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for until she spotted a small cave that looked to be no more than a slit in the rocks. She climbed up to it and as she got closer, she felt like this was the place she was supposed to be. She got to the mouth of the cave and peered in. She sniffed. There was no smell of animal droppings. She hesitated. Her mind went back to the smells of the cave where they’d found Andrew’s body, and her stomach tightened. But she couldn’t resist the impulse that was forcing her to go inside. She whimpered as she crept in, and she turned on her flashlight as she moved farther from the dimming sunlight. There was a faint odor of old blood, but there wasn’t the iron-y smell of fresh blood and she was glad of that. There was no one else there, and she went as deep in as she dared. She shined the light on the walls as she went and found pictograms on them, more disturbing than the ones on the island. They were little stick figures of people, all being eaten by a much larger stick figure. There was also something that looked like one might draw a swirling winter wind. The cave didn’t feel too cold, and Leigh sat down on the floor. She felt the urge to pray, but also felt something tell her that she shouldn’t be making any noise. So she closed her eyes and folded her hands and prayed silently--for Angie, that she wasn’t hurt beyond repair; for Karen, that she wouldn’t be caught by this thing too; for the kids, that they were safe with Tony and Teresa; and for the others, that they would be able to kill the thing that had led her away, even if it was too late to save her too.

Reg was following Karen’s tag signal, but it seemed pretty obvious that she was sticking to the road. She seemed to be moving faster than him, but maybe that was just because he had to keep stopping to check her signal. He let Justin and Frank know that Karen seemed to be headed for the dig site or the lake, and that she had her gun and the radio as well as other survival gear. Justin’s heart crawled up into his throat when he heard this. He loved her and he also knew that Karen was not a stupid woman. If he was smart enough to realize that she could use their radio chatter to know what they were doing, then she knew it too and was already using it. He started to say that they had to change radio channel and realized she’d hear and change it too if he said it aloud. He paused a second, then tapped the mike button. He was pretty sure Karen didn’t know Morse Code. He tapped out a short message for the other three men to shift 3 channels down. Both Frank and Reg signaled back that they got the message and were switching. When they were there, Justin signaled for them to maintain radio silence as much as possible. Justin was circling the hill now, as Leigh had done, and he spotted the same small cave she had. He was wishing he had one of Reg’s drones right then when he heard someone move nearby. Frank had caught up to him. He looked like death warmed over, and the only reason he was still moving at all was that he’d popped himself with the morphine as soon as he was out of Aiden’s sight and the adrenalin as soon as he felt his own begin to flag. But Justin didn’t have time to be picky about his back-up right now. The sooner they got Leigh out, the sooner he could go find Karen.

Justin pointed out Leigh’s tracks to Frank and they followed them to just outside the mouth of the cave. Frank signaled that, since they had Leigh cornered now, Justin should go help find Karen. Justin started jogging east, and ran south when he reached the nearest road. He’d looked at the maps often enough to recognize that he could pretty much follow roads all the way to Nawakwa Lake from there. He hadn’t gone far when he heard the sound of a Jeep coming up behind him. He stopped and stepped off the road to let it pass and noticed it was Aiden! Aiden was just as shocked to see Justin. He’d been heading for M-77 when Angie woke and asked if they’d found Leigh. When Aiden told her what had happened, she started chewing him a new asshole for leaving the team. He had no choice but to turn back and head for the spot where he’d last seen Frank. Hadn’t he understood the message to change radio channels, Justin asked. He must have missed that, what with Angie yelling at him. He changed the channel, and Justin asked if he remembered his Morse Code--just in case Karen happened to notice that they’d changed channels. And they were keeping messages short and keeping radio silence the rest of the time. Justin told Aiden where Frank and Leigh were, then he took off running toward Nawakwa again.

Aiden turned the Jeep around and headed up to the hill where Frank was waiting with Leigh. When Frank heard no sounds at all from the cave, he got closer to check it out. It didn’t seem like it had had any recent animal occupants, and he crept slowly in, keeping to one wall and listening closely for any movement. When he’d gotten far enough in that the daylight was cut off, he could see a faint glow of light ahead and down to the left. He continued in, stopping and listening more frequently. He noticed the odor of old blood, but resisted the urge to shine the flashlight around to look for traces, so he wouldn’t tip off Leigh and whatever else might be waiting for him. He rounded a slight bend in the tunnel and saw Leigh ahead in the glow of her flashlight, which she’d stood on end to light the small room. Now he could see the pictograms too, but he was too tired and sore to worry about their implications. Leigh heard his foot scuff the floor and she opened her eyes. She whispered just loud enough for Frank to hear her, “I’m waiting.” She didn’t want Angie to die, or anyone else, if she could help it, she told him. It was clear she wasn’t planning on leaving.

It wasn’t unusually cold in the cave as far as Frank could tell, but he offered to build Leigh a small fire, making no move that she could interpret as an attempt to attack her or take her out of the cave. He saw what she’d done to Reg. Frank wasn’t cuffed to her, so he’d be able to defend himself better, but he was in no shape for hand to hand combat right then. He went out and gathered some small sticks and brought them back and built a little fire, not too big since the ventilation in there wasn’t very good.. He asked to see Leigh’s canteen and she passed it to him. He took that outside, in case the Weendigo could travel between one body of water and another. He wasn’t taking any chances. He was about to go back inside when he heard Aiden’s voice calling out his name. He turned toward the sound and heard it again just as he saw Aiden struggling up the hill with the med kit. Normally, carrying the kit wasn’t a problem for him, but normally he wasn’t dragging it over hill and dale through the geographic center of Nowhere! He opened his mouth and hollered Frank’s name again and Frank hollered back “What!” Jeez, looking at him, Aiden figured Frank might be just a little bit more grateful to see a medic.

Frank asked what Aiden was doing there, and he replied that Angie had made him come back to help them. Then he asked Frank to let him check him out. Frank said, “You’re not my type.” The two of them traded barbs as Aiden checked Frank over for injuries. The most pressing at the moment was the dislocated shoulder, since it affected his ability to move more than the broken ribs or jaw. Aiden warned Frank it would hurt, and Frank replied that the morphine would help with that. Aiden glance at the med kit and realized that Frank had taken a couple of things out of it already. Then he popped the shoulder back into its socket. He put his hand on it and ‘committed Healing,’ and told Frank that was all he could do for the moment. He’d go back to Angie and the Jeep now, if Frank didn’t want his help. Frank told him that first they had to knock out Leigh, and he didn’t have the strength to do it alone. Frank went in and started talking to Leigh. When he’d gotten her distracted enough to stand and turn her back more toward the cave mouth, Aiden snuck up behind her and jabbed her with a syringe of tranquilizer. She didn’t even have a second to object before Aiden caught her as she fell and carried her out. Frank gathered some pine branches and took them back inside to toss on the fire. He didn’t know if heavy smoke would be enough to keep the Weendigo from going back in, but maybe it would help.

Reg had continued following Karen’s signal along the road, and he was getting close to the lake now. He caught himself listening hard for the clicking of another signal from Justin or Frank or Aiden, and he realized that he wasn’t hearing anything at all. He opened his mouth and began singing, but there was no sound at all. He started running toward the dig site, sure that the thing was right behind him and had only used Karen as bait to lure him away. He managed to not fall on his face or twist an ankle, and as he stumbled out into the clearing he heard his voice pant out the next word of the song he was singing. He choked off the word after that before it had left his chest, and scrambled back into the tree-line. He could see Karen (or at least, he thought it was Karen) lying motionless on the shore. He checked the directional finder and, as far as he could tell from it, that WAS Karen. He studied her carefully, and scanned the woods around him, sure something would jump out any second.

What Reg didn’t see was Justin creeping up to the edge of the woods a little down the shore from where he was. Justin watched Reg pop out of the tree line then scramble back in. He tapped out a message on the mike, that Reg should stay put and keep still. Justin scanned the area around Karen. Sure enough, he spotted black moccasin prints leading down to the waterline. He looked out at the lake. The was a slight breeze whipping up little wavelets on the surface of the water, but no ripples to indicate something close to the surface that might be watching them. He looked back at Karen. She looked sopping wet, like she’d been in the lake. He had an almost overwhelming urge to run out there and scoop her up into his arms; but he’d see enough things by now to know that looks could be deceiving. He waited there another minute, scanning the area for any movement or sound. Then he got up into a crouch and jogged over to her. She was cold and clammy when he picked her up. He put her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, and Reg watched as he moved toward the road. Reg got up and followed him a moment later, trying to cover their tracks.

At the motel, some of the others were having dreams of their own. At about 4:30am, Tuesday, June 28, Reg and Leigh woke almost simultaneously and tripped over one another trying to get to the bathroom. Being a gentleman, Reg let Leigh throw up first. Both had been woken by seriously disturbing dreams. Reg had been sitting in front of a computer, working like usual. There was only a small pool of light around him from the glowing of the monitor. He was working on something extremely important, though he wasn’t sure exactly what it was, when he felt Stephen there trying to get his attention. Stephen pulled on Reg’s arm like a man desperate to keep from drowning, but Reg was so close to solving the puzzle he was working on that he couldn’t tear his attention away from it. Then Stephen screamed. As Reg tore his eyes from the monitor, he heard a sound like a ‘cherry bomb’ exploding inside a pillow; and when he turned around and looked at Stephen, Stephen’s whole face was missing, like it had been blown off by an explosion inside his head. That’s when Reg woke.

Leigh knew her dream...her nightmare...was related to the ‘case.’ She described it to Reg after they’d both finished in the bathroom and sat next to one another on the edge of the bed. She’d been having other nightmares that night, when she found herself sitting at a rustic wooden table just like the one her parents had. In front of her was a platter filled with stew. It smelled incredibly good and she felt incredibly hungry. She reached out and scooped up a piece of the meat, and it was the most wonderful food she’d ever tasted. She ate more and more, but as she ate she also grew hungrier and hungrier. She didn’t recognize the horror of the dream until she woke. As she laid there beside Reg, she thought about the taste of the stew; it reminded her of something she’d eaten before--Andrew’s stew. It only took her a second to join together the pieces of her dream, the feeling of growing more and more hungry with every bite she ate and the flavor and color of the meat in the stew--Andrew had been feeding them all human flesh That explained why the one body had been butchered Leigh got up and ran for the bathroom.

When she finished describing the dream and told Reg about her suspicion, Reg said, “Oh, shit. Are you certain?” She couldn’t be certain, Leigh told him, since she’d never eaten...that...before. But it was good in a way that turned her stomach in disgust now when she thought of it. Reg slid slightly away from her on the bed when she said it was “good.” A hurt look passed over Leigh’s face, and Reg told her that he wasn’t concerned with her “eating him in the non-pleasant sense....just the thought of eating human flesh at all.” She asked him if there was any of the meat left in the cooler, since Andrew’s latest batch of stew hadn’t been made yet when Reg and the others got to the camp. Reg told her he’d investigate that when it was light out. Then Leigh asked him about his dream. He told her he was just a light sleeper and woke when she got up, and she told him he wasn’t a very good liar. Reg told her that the dream wasn’t really ‘topical,’ that it was just something from his past. Then he told her that he trusted her enough not to look for another room to sleep in, and the two curled up on the bed again and tried to go back to sleep.

Justin was woken at exactly the same time that morning. He was out in the woods, searching for Carmen just like yesterday. But it felt like he’d been tromping through the woods forever. There was a thick fog, and he could barely see his hand in front of his face. Every once in a while, he would see a shape looming through the fog, but he couldn’t tell if it was a tree, another searcher, or something worse. He kept searching and the fog got even thicker. He looked at his watch, but it seemed to have stopped at 3:15. Was it dark? Twilight? Moonlight? He couldn’t tell anymore. He was no longer even sure if he was still in the search-line. All of a sudden his heart was stopped by a gut-wrenching scream. It was a woman in mortal terror, and the voice was...Karen Justin bolted upright in the bed. When he felt around and realized that Karen wasn’t in the bed with him and remembered that she was at the Bay Mills Rez, he fumbled for the cell phone on the night stand and pulled up Karen’s cell number. He was spooked and he had to make sure she was alright. Karen had just drifted off again after her fear had woken her for the umpteenth time since her ‘visitation.’ She heard the sound of her cell ringing as if from far away, and as she struggled back to consciousness, she reached out for it fearing the worst, that Justin or another one of her students had been taken by the Weendigo. It was Justin (“Thank God he’s OK,” she thought to herself), and he was as spooked as he’d been that time he’d woken covered in blood at his house. Karen struggled to slow her own breathing and heart-rate as she asked Justin what was wrong. She was OK, she told him when he asked, at least as OK as she could be given that the same “people she’d seen by the lake” had come to her just about an hour before. As OK as she could be without him there to hold her. The ancestors had come to warn her, and she didn’t want to go into details on the phone when he was there and she was so far away in an unfamiliar place. She’d be on her way back at 10am, and she would explain what she’d learned when she got there. The two hung up after saying “I love you,” each wishing they were together.

About 9am, Leigh, Reg, Aiden, Angie and Justin got together. Frank, Tony and Teresa were still sleeping after standing their watches, and all the kids were safe and just waking themselves. The troopers, sheriff and other searchers had been up since dawn, continuing the search for Carmen. Leigh and Justin told the others about their dreams, and agreed that Karen should be told but the kids shouldn’t. If they asked why they couldn’t leave and go home, the Envoys would refer the question to the troopers. Leigh called Karen, and was only halfway through describing her dream when Karen suddenly understood where it was leading. Leigh heard a sound that she figured was the phone hitting the floor, followed by the unmistakable sound of Karen retching. A few minutes passed before Karen returned to the phone. Now she understood what the ancestors had meant about being “meat.” She told Leigh that she’d try to get the pilot to bring her back sooner and would tell them all about what she’d learned when she got there. Then she told Leigh that she hoped they weren’t serving meat at breakfast that morning on the Rez. Both agreed that they’d probably be sticking to salads for a while.

Reg and Leigh went to the cooler where the dig’s perishable food supplies were now being stored. They found lots of sealed packages of meat cubes, and the meat was definitely not red meat. It looked kind of like raw pork. As they were doing this, Leigh’s phone rang. It was Karen. As she’d been packing her things, she wondered if Andrew had understood what he was doing. Then she wondered about the unusual circumstances of his death. She asked Leigh to have Aiden take another look at the crime scene photos. Did it look like Andrew had been ripped apart or was he shed like a too-small skin? Karen had been so interested in finding out how to stop the Weendigo that she hadn’t considered how it had been created and what part Andrew might have had in that. Reg took a random sample of the meat. Leigh relayed Karen’s request to Aiden, then she and Reg headed off to Munising, hoping the State Police Post had the equipment and supplies to test it right there. They explained to the cops that the meat might or might not be human flesh, and that Andrew may have been the one that ‘collected’ it and he may have fed it to the others at the dig. They didn’t have the equipment to test it there, but they would put it on the fastest plane they had and get it to the crime lab in Lansing. They should have preliminary results within 36 hours. But they would need to notify the Health Dept. and, depending on the results, they might need to test everyone that ate it.

Leigh let them know that occasionally the meat was still rare when the stew was served. It was obvious that the cops were only considering the disease-spreading potential of the meat. Their brains weren’t ready to process the sheer horror of what the meat might be. In any case, everyone would need to stay put until they got the results. They packed the meat in dry ice, and the patrol car carrying it was pulling out for the airport as Reg and Leigh left for Grand Marais. Aiden wasn’t pleased with the prospect of looking at those photos again, but he did. By the time Reg and Leigh got back, he’d determined that Andrew was definitely ripped apart. And he’d turned an unpleasant shade of green again. During the drive, Reg had been pondering ways to explore more territory. If he could just rig up some search-drones.... When he got back, he was on his laptop almost immediately, ordering the parts he couldn’t get there in town and insisting they be shipped immediately, no matter what the cost.

By the time Karen got back to the motel at noon that day, there was quite a bit of activity. With a little help from Angie, Reg had managed to cobble together a couple test-drones out of stuff they were able to find there in town, and Angie was flying one around motel rooms for practice. As she got better, Reg took the drone outside and made Angie fly it using only the visuals on the computer to guide her hand. The kids were getting antsy, and wanted to know why they couldn’t go home. Karen had the troopers call and explain that they may have been exposed to health risks and had to stay until they’d been cleared by the cops. Frank, Tony and Teresa had gotten up, and Karen told everyone what the Lorekeeper had told her and what the ancestors had said to her. As everyone talked about their dreams, Frank wondered if the drinking he’d done the night before had anything to do with his NOT having dreams for a change. Aiden was sitting on his bed leaning against the wall studying. Tony, Teresa, and Aiden would stay with the kids that day, and Karen, Justin, Leigh, and Frank were going back out to join the searchers. Reg and Angie were taking the drones out to search one of the nearby hillocks for signs that the Weendigo might be using it for ‘food storage’ and might have Carmen there.

The search-lines had been set up to go to the northeast and northwest that morning, and since the one going NW was moving slower due to its path through the swamp surrounding Sullivan Creek, that was the one the Envoys were assigned to. Frank volunteered to stay and help man the base camp, and Justin, Karen and Leigh joined the line quickly and spent the rest of the afternoon slogging through the swamp to no avail. Neither of the lines found anything that day, not signs of Carmen nor anything else that might be relevant, like other dead bodies. Reg and Angie had gone to search a small hill northwest of Sullivan Lake. Angie guided the RC chopper around the hill and found 11 small ‘caves’. She carefully investigated each one with the chopper before it got too dark to see to maneuver it. If it hadn’t been for the fun of flying the RC chopper, it would have been as boring as what the others were doing. She found animal bones and nest remains, and she caused a badger to become so irate that it almost took down the chopper when it chased the thing out of its den. But nothing she found was pertinent to the search for Carmen or the Weendigo.

About an hour before dusk, the ground fog started rising again. The search was called off, and the searchers began to make their way back to the base camp in the clearing where the dig camp had been. The fog rose quickly, and by twilight it was so thick that it reminded Justin of his dream. As it thickened, the searchers had tightened the lines until they were nearly shoulder to shoulder; and still no one could be sure that he or she was still in the line. Justin drew Karen and Leigh close to him and got the three of them tied together using the rope from his pack. The troopers called for a head count to make sure that no one had gotten lost. Searching for one lost person was bad enough out here; finding two might be close to impossible. Some of the hunters said that they’d seen fog rise up suddenly like that before, but usually in the spring and fall when the weather was prone to temperature swings. Just before the line the three Envoys were in got back to the camp, they heard crashing around in the brush off to their left. Or rather, Justin and Karen did. When Justin checked to make sure the two women were safe, they found that Leigh was no longer tied to them. With Karen staying put, Justin went out on a tether to search for Leigh. When he found her, she claimed that she didn’t know how she’d gotten separated, but that she must have gotten turned around because she thought she was heading in the right direction to get back to the Jeep.

Justin brought Leigh back to where Karen was waiting, and asked Karen to focus a Sphere on Leigh. It seemed too suspicious to him that Leigh had accidently gotten untied from the knot he’d made in the rope. Leigh didn’t react to the Sphere, but when Karen followed it with a Mental Shield, Leigh suddenly told them that the Weendigo had told her to untie herself and move away from the others. It had tried to get her to ‘come for dinner!’ As the three stood there, they noticed how cold it had gotten in the fog. Leigh continued, telling them that the creature told her that if she couldn’t get away right then, she should do it later. They all knew that the Shield wouldn’t last long and whatever mind control the Weendigo had used would re-affect Leigh as soon as the Shield ended; and Karen wouldn’t be able to do another for 12 hours. Justin retied the rope for the last bit of the hike back to the camp, and let Frank know what had happened when they got there. They made sure that Leigh was in the back of the Jeep, with no easy access to the door in case she would go as far as jumping from the vehicle if she got the chance. But she didn’t do anything unusual during the trip back to the motel.

When they got there, each team shared with the others how their afternoon had gone. When Reg and Angie told them about searching the little caves, Justin wondered if anyone had noticed an area that had no animals in it. That might be one way to know they were getting close to the Weendigo, he figured, remembering how the woods had gone silent that first night after Andrew had been killed, when something evil seemed to blow through the camp. All the kids were still safe at the motel, though bored senseless with the inactivity. Karen asked Reg and Aiden if there was any way to ‘tag’ her and Leigh with a tracker chip of some kind. She wanted something that couldn’t easily be removed, whether she had to swallow it or have it sewn into her skin. If the Weendigo was going to try and lure away one of the people who’d eaten Andrew’s stew, then Karen was going to try to make sure it was her. (She wasn’t trying to be a martyr. In fact she was scared shitless at the prospect of being captured by the thing. But she was overwhelmed by old-fashioned Catholic guilt at having been the one who, however unknowingly, put her students in the middle of this. And if someone was going to have to suffer in the process of killing the thing, she felt that it ought to be her.) But since it was already trying to get Leigh, she wanted Leigh protected too. And she wanted to make sure that the others would be able to use either one of them to track down the Weendigo when it happened. Aiden was afraid that if they swallowed whatever Reg came up with, it would cause internal damage on its passage through their bodies. But he could easily sew it under the skin of their backs with little lasting damage, and they wouldn’t be able to reach it there and remove it. Plus, if they were unconscious when he did the surgery, they wouldn’t know exactly where he put the device anyway.

Reg didn’t have anything fancy at hand, but he thought that he should be able to do the job with the theft-protection strips from CD cases. Frank wanted some sort of surveillance cameras set up as well, for keeping the watch from now on. So Reg and Aiden went shopping. In the meantime, Frank insisted that Karen and Leigh be cuffed together, so that if Leigh did try to get away, the two would be easier to track than one. Justin went and helped the kids get a couple multi-player computer games going across the motel’s computer network to keep them entertained for the evening, since Frank still wanted all of them, as well as Karen and Leigh now, on lock-down. And by 11pm, Reg and Aiden were back and ready to get started. When the magnetic strips were removed from the cases and sterilized (at least as well as Aiden could manage with hot water and stuff on hand in the med kit), Aiden put Leigh and Karen under with a shot of a tranquilizer. Then he prepped them and implanted the strips subcutaneously. When he was done, Reg tweaked one of his gadgets so that it would pick up a reading from the strips and be able to track them from a distance. By 2am, the two were coming back to consciousness, none the worse for the surgery beyond a few itchy spots on their backs. Aiden had made three different incisions on each woman’s back, so that even if they tried to remove the strips somehow, they wouldn’t know which incision was the one the strip had been implanted in.

While Aiden had been working on that, Reg, Justin and Frank got the surveillance equipment rigged up. There were cameras watching the windows on the back of the motel and the doors to all the rooms occupied by the students, which fed into a computer that would be manned by at least one of the people on watch. Reg also set up a laser beam along the hallway that would trigger an ‘alarm’ on the computer if the beam was ‘broken.’ By the time Aiden was done with the surgery, Reg had the system set up and Frank arranged the watches. Since it was so late, he only had two watches planned. Karen insisted on helping with the watches, so Frank had her cuffed to Justin and those two plus Teresa and Aiden stood the first watch from 2-5am. He and Angie, and Leigh cuffed to Reg would stand the second watch from 5-8am. This way, too, Teresa could get some sleep before getting up again in the morning to continue guarding the kids with Tony for the day. The cuffed couples were assigned to monitor the computer while the other two people on the watch would patrol outside. The first watch team quickly realized that the laser beam was almost useless, since other people who weren’t confined to their rooms were sharing the first floor with the students. Luckily, it didn’t matter because everything was quiet for those few hours.

At 5am, the other team took over the watch. About 5:30, Frank and Angie were patrolling the parking lot when, on the computer screen, Reg saw Phyllis leave her room after carefully looking up and down the hallway. She made her way to the door at the end of the hall, casting furtive glances back over her shoulder, and went out. Reg notified Angie and Frank over the comm units. The fog was still pea-soup thick, and Frank and Angie split up, going opposite ways around the building towards the door that Phyllis was coming out. As Frank got to the end of the building, he could see a pinpoint of red light glowing through the fog and he made his way quietly toward it. When he came up behind Phyllis, who was just trying to smoke a cigarette, she jumped nearly 10 feet into the air. “Jesus! You nearly scared the shit out of me!” she squeaked. Frank asked what she was doing outside, since they all knew that they were confined to the motel until Carmen was found and the authorities were sure she hadn’t been taken by the same wacko who killed Andrew. “What? We’re not even allowed to come out for a smoke now?” she asked. Just then Angie came up from Phyllis’s other side and she again nearly jumped out of her skin. Angie snickered, and offered to escort Phyllis back to her room as soon as she finished her cigarette. The tone of Angie’s voice prompted Phyllis to suck hard on the cigarette to finish it as quickly as possible. Then the two started inside.

No one else was aware of it yet, but with Frank and Angie’s attention on Phyllis, Leigh decided to take the opportunity to try to escape again. Reg had woken Justin and Karen, who were in the room next door, when it appeared that Phyllis might be trying to leave. When that turned out to be a false alarm, those two went back to bed. No sooner had Reg and Leigh returned to the room with the surveillance computer and shut the door, than Leigh turned on Reg and struck him in an attempt to knock him out. This led to a fight, since Reg realized what Leigh was trying to do. The two traded blows, neither able to gain the upper hand because they were cuffed together. It was a fair match-up between Leigh’s Aikido skills and Reg’s kick-boxing skills. When they crashed into the dresser against the wall their room shared with Justin and Karen’s, the noise woke those two again. They struggled to disentangle themselves from the bedding, and Justin dug in his pocket for the key to the handcuffs. As soon as they were uncuffed from one another, they ran from their room and burst into Leigh and Reg’s just as Leigh landed a lucky punch to finally knock out Reg.

As Leigh knelt on the floor beside Reg’s prone body, trying to dislocate her thumb to remove the handcuff, Justin came up beside her and tried to hit her with a punch designed to knock a person out. But Leigh managed to deflect the blow to avoid being knocked out by it, and continued to struggle with the cuff. Karen tried to mimic Justin’s attack, but didn’t yet have enough experience with the boxing skills that Justin had been teaching her to land the punch. Leigh finally managed to wiggle her hand out of the cuff, and she stood and turned toward the window. Justin and Karen had been maneuvering around to get Leigh between them, and now Justin tried again to hit Leigh. She again managed to direct the blow away from her head, and with Leigh’s attention on Justin, Karen rushed her, hoping to force her into the wall. Leigh dodged Karen and moved toward the window, leaving Karen to crash shoulder first into the wall, waking Aiden. Angie was just shutting the door behind Phyllis, and she heard the noise. When she looked into the room and saw Leigh moving toward the window with Justin and Karen hot on her heels, she called Frank over the comm unit.

The two circled around the building in opposite directions again, and came together just outside Reg and Leigh’s window. When Leigh dodged Karen, Justin came at her from the other direction and got his arms around her. She struggled a bit, then managed to twist just the right way to wiggle loose of Justin’s grip. Before he could get a hand back on her, she threw herself through the window, crashing out and onto the ground at the feet of Angie and Frank. Angie looked across at Frank as Leigh rolled and pushed herself to her feet, and Angie asked if she should stop the tall woman. Frank looked at Leigh then back at Angie and nodded. “Yeah, we’d better. She’s pretty messed up.” Leigh was cut and bloody from the broken glass, and she was so intent on getting away that she hadn’t even noticed the other two standing to either side of the window. She stumbled forward as she got her feet under herself, then started to break into a run. Frank calmly pulled the tazer out of his jacket pocket and shot her with it. Leigh dropped to the ground and convulsed for a second, then passed out.

As Frank reeled in the tazer probes, Angie picked up Leigh and started around to the door. She came into the room that Leigh had just flown out of, a moment after Aiden had walked in wearing only his boxer shorts and carrying the med kit. He’d been woken by the fight, and figured *someone* was going to need patching up. When Justin realized that Frank and Angie were outside to catch Leigh, he turned his attention to Reg. He put his hand on Reg’s chest and boosted Reg’s energy as he checked Reg for damage. Reg wasn’t badly hurt, but he was going to have a few bruises later that day. With the help from Justin, Reg started coming around and Justin and Karen were getting him up and into a chair as Angie was laying Leigh on the bed. Frank came in, and he and Justin bracketed the bed while Aiden worked to patch Leigh up. First he shot her with a syringe of tranquilizer, to keep her from waking up right away. Then he popped her thumb back into place, cleaned up the torn flesh around it and wrapped her hand tightly to keep the thumb from moving. After that, he had Karen hold a light close, so he could pick out the glass shards and clean Leigh’s wounds. Reg had managed to give almost as good as he got, and Leigh was going to have some bruises of her own when she woke up, as well as the cuts and scrapes from going through the window. When Aiden was done with her, Frank and Justin worked on restraining her so she couldn’t try to escape again when she woke.

Frank gathered the other Envoys together as the kids headed into their tents and the troopers drove away. He’d been thinking on the way down from town that they should set watches during the night, just to be safe. He, Teresa, Angie and Aiden would be the ‘watch captains;’ he just needed to know who else wanted to take a shift. They would run 2 hours each, 10-midnight, midnight-2am, 2-4, and 4-6. Karen would have stayed up all night by herself, if she’d had to, but Frank put her on the 2-4 watch with Angie and Tony. In his experience, that was the time when things were most likely to happen if they were going to at all, so he wanted three of them on the shift. Reg teamed up with Frank for the first shift, and Frank put Justin on the midnight-2 shift with Teresa, and Leigh with Aiden on the 4-6am shift. Karen was almost reluctant to crawl into the tent. She was afraid that if she took her eyes off her students, another would disappear. But it had been a long day and she needed desperately to cry, and she knew she could trust Frank and Reg to watch out for the kids. She curled up tight against Justin’s side and fell asleep crying on his shoulder.

Frank and Reg took turns, one circling the outer perimeter of the camp while the other stayed near the center, keeping an eye on the front of the tents and the person circling. When Reg woke Justin, Karen was so worn out from the crying and the events of the previous day that she never felt Justin crawl out of the tent. Frank crawled into his sleeping bag, concentrating on the question of how to stop the thing that had killed Andrew, hoping that his dreams might help him find the answer. He slowly drifted off to the sound of Justin’s footsteps as he took the first turn walking the perimeter. He wasn’t sure how long he’d been dreaming when he began to focus on the images in the dream. He was looking at a series of blood-covered rooms, each filled with dismembered bodies. All of a sudden the scene changed. Frank found himself standing in the center of an icy white plain. It was almost featureless, and the bone-chilling wind was whipping snowflakes as big as his fist around him. Somehow he knew that he was in the heart of deepest winter, the heart of starvation. He felt hunger tighten his belly, then slowly move up into his chest like a scream struggling to escape. He lifted his head into the wind and sniffed, like a dog looking for a scent or a wolf sniffing for prey. But there was nothing, nothing anywhere. He could feel himself begin to shrivel as his hunger grew, as the sun rose and set, and rose and set, and rose and set. With each cycle of the sun, he felt his body get smaller while the hunger grew, until the hunger was all that was left of him. 7 days and 7 nights, his body shrank and his hunger grew until the hunger consumed him.

When Frank woke, his fingers were ice cold, and when he lifted his head to look down at them, he found them covered with snow that melted quickly in the relative heat of the night. It must have been close to 2am, since he could hear Justin quietly waking Karen, and Teresa waking Angie then coming into the tent to wake Tony. He closed his eyes and pondered the meaning of his dream as he started to fall back asleep. Moments later, Justin came back into the tent to wake him. Karen did a head count as her watch started and she found another one of the kids missing, Carmen. When Frank came out, it was obvious that Karen was barely controlling her panic. The Envoys gathered near the fire, and Karen told them that she was sure that Carmen hadn’t left of her own volition. She’d talked with the girl yesterday afternoon, and she knew that Carmen was concerned about the safety of staying at the dig. But Karen had made Carmen promise that she wouldn’t just leave without telling her, and Karen, in return, promised that she would make sure that Carmen was taken some place safe if she wanted to leave. And she’d watched the girl go into her tent with the others when they’d all gone to bed. Karen was positive that something bad had happened to Carmen, as positive as she was that it was her fault for not sending the kids to town yesterday.

As they tried to quietly poke around all the ‘usual’ areas of the camp that someone might go during the night, the Envoys realized that there was a cold ground-fog that had risen knee high all around them. It was lower towards the center of the camp, where the fire heated the air nearby but not quite enough to burn the fog off completely. Above the fog, the air was still quite warm, having not entirely shed all the heat of the day. In fact, the air was so warm that there shouldn’t have been fog at all. The Envoys knew, even without having to try to sense it, that something Unknown had caused it, probably the same thing that had blown the cold, evil wind through the camp earlier that night. But, in spite of the unnatural fog, all the normal sounds of night filled the air, sounds of smalls animals moving around, bugs and bats dancing through the darkness and the buzz of a few cicadas taking advantage of the heat. Carmen was nowhere in the camp area, and Justin took the hand sun to search for Carmen’s tracks. Others quietly checked her tent; no one on watch had seen her go, it appeared that she’d left all her things behind, and the other girls in the tent were all still sleeping soundly and didn’t seem to have heard her leave.

Justin came back in a few minutes. He’d found a few tracks of a sort, a light shoe print here, on top of the many other prints that had been left during the day, and a smear of dirt on a rock there, that felt a little cooler and fresher to the touch than dirt dried throughout the heat of the day. They led him to the road, where he lost her trail on the gravel. The fog wasn’t helping, either. Justin and Leigh wanted to go check the canoes and the island to make sure Carmen hadn’t gone out there, and they took Aiden along, just in case she had. Frank, Reg and Karen would go and follow the two-track out to the paved road a few miles away, hoping that she’d panicked and tried to walk out alone to safety in spite of her promise. Tony, Teresa, and Angie would stay in camp and keep the fire stoked, in case Carmen had left the road, and wandered away in another direction and gotten lost; and they would radio the others if she found her way back to the camp. They all put on their comm units and headed out.

Justin first checked the canoes that had been tied up on the ‘beach’ nearest the camp, and found all three still there. Then they followed the lakeside trails that led to the boat dock, where they found the other three canoes still safely tied up as well. And they noticed that the fog only extended out about 100 feet from the camp, then thinned until it disappeared. It was hard to tell in the dark, and impossible in the fog closer to the camp, if Carmen might have gone into the water at any point and swum out to the island, so the three climbed into a canoe and paddled along the shore, with Justin looking for any sign that someone had gone into it recently, purposely or not, then out to the island. There, they found no sign of anyone having come out of the water onto the rocky beach, and climbing to the cave, they found no one inside. They radioed the others and let them know this, then paddled back to the dock and retraced their steps, hoping to find some sign that they might have missed on the way out. Nothing. Frank suggested that Justin, Teresa, Aiden and Leigh get some sleep, Aiden and Leigh so they’d be ready to take their watch in a couple hours, and Justin and Teresa so they’d be fresh in the morning for more tracking in daylight; and that Tony and Angie stay up on their watch now.

Frank, Karen and Reg were going to keep searching, until dawn if they had to. Frank and Karen were walking the road, and Reg followed behind in a Jeep with only the parking lights on. Frank had the hand sun and Karen a flashlight, and they swept the beams back and forth in front of them as the walked, looking for any sign of the missing young woman. The parking lights of the Jeep helped cut the glare from the fog, which they confirmed extended only about 100 feet from the camp in this direction as well, and gave Reg a little light to keep an eye on the sides of the road. They walked for hours, to the paved road, M77, and along it toward town, and found nothing. Not a footprint, not a scrap of torn clothing, nothing that might indicate that Carmen had gone that way. They could see the “rosy fingers of Dawn,” as Homer had put it, reaching up from the east, and Frank pulled out his phone to call the police dispatch number. He doubted that they would find the girl along the road at this point, and they were going to need more help to find her if she was lost somewhere in this wilderness. If they were going to get as early as start as possible, he had to make the call now. He could see Karen’s face twist as she blinked back tears, her eyes still fixed on the area lit by her flashlight. Frank could hear the sleep still muddling the mind of the dispatcher he’d just woken. He explained who he was and what had happened, and he heard the news shock the man awake like cold water. He’d get the word out, the dispatcher told Frank, and Frank requested tracking dogs if they could get any. Karen tried hard not to listen. The sky began to lighten enough to see by and when Frank was done talking to the dispatcher, he and Karen climbed into the Jeep. Reg headed slowly back to the camp, the other two scanning the sides of the road for any sign that Carmen had left it at some point. Still nothing.

Thorvault and Enright got to the camp about 6:30am, not long after Reg, Frank and Karen had gotten back. Reg headed straight to his tent. Leigh was just getting the espresso machine ready to go, and she looked like she needed it. She hadn’t slept well, her couple hours of rest having been disturbed by nightmares of being chased by her dead husband through bogs and swamps, some vaguely like those surrounding the camp. She was glad to see that Thorvault had brought a ‘box ‘o coffee’ with him, and sipped some while the espresso machine built up pressure. A short time later another truck pulled up, a pickup with a cap covering the bed. It was the Schoolcraft County sheriff, John Herbert, who happened to own the tracking dogs used whenever someone went missing in this part of the UP. He was older, in his 60s, not in the best shape of his life but obviously not “Buford T. Justice” either. He opened the gate of the truck, but the hounds refused to jump out when he called them to.

There was none of the usual baying of dogs eager for the hunt, either. Herbert tried everything short of physically pulling the dogs out, but they wouldn’t be persuaded to leave the truck. He’d never seen anything like it, he told the others who were nearby. Justin tried to consol him with the suggestion that there’d probably been an earthquake on the opposite side of the world or something that had gotten them spooked. Animals did tend to be more sensitive to that kind of thing. Justin knew it wasn’t an earthquake that had them spooked, but he wasn’t going to ‘go there.’ This made Karen realize that she hadn’t seen Drew since she’d been petting him last night by the campfire. She tugged at Justin’s arm and made him help her search for the small cat. She couldn’t bear to lose him too right now. She searched everywhere she’d ever found him curled up taking a nap, practically throwing everything out of her and Justin’s tent and the storage and supply tents as she looked. Then Justin heard a frightened MEOW near the tree where the bear bag had been hung. Karen let the bag down to find Drew mewing pitifully on top of it. When she went to lift him off, he struggled to stay put. He tried to make Karen understand that it was safer up in the tree than on the ground. So Karen got out the food they’d need for breakfast, while Justin got some duct tape and taped Drew’s filled food and water bowls to the top of the ‘bag’ (actually a hard-sided case, designed specifically for sealing in food for protection from wildlife), before the two hauled it back up in the air and secured it.

If the dogs weren’t going to be any help, they’d need searchers. Sheriff Herbert pulled out his radio and started making calls, putting the ‘phone tree’ to work to gather anyone they could get this early on a Monday morning. Enright suggested that Frank and Karen try to get a little more sleep while they waited for the searchers to assemble, and Frank crawled into his sleeping bag. Karen refused to go back to bed. The other kids were starting to wake up now as the smell of espresso wafted out of the ‘kitchen,’ and she would need to let them know what had happened. The sun had risen enough to start casting rays of sunlight through the treetops and onto the ground below, so Justin tried once again to find some trace of where Carmen had gone during the night. Even the heat of the direct sunlight didn’t burn off the fog completely, though it was no longer knee-high; it still hampered Justin’s efforts and he found no sign of the girl.

People started to trickle into the camp, mainly hunters who happened to live nearby, with a few local ‘militia’ members who had enough respect for their neighbors to help in the search even though it was being organized by the ‘government.’ There would be more searchers coming as word spread of the missing college co-ed. Karen asked the sheriff if he could call the reservation for trackers as well. She had nothing against the hunters who were there, mostly white males and a few white females. But she’d come to inherently trust the skills of Native trackers, and she couldn’t fail to ask for all the help she could get to find this girl. As word of Carmen’s disappearance spread among the other students, their fear became palpable. The troopers, who were firmly in control of everything that would happen in the camp from this point on, suggested that Karen shut down the dig for at least the time being and send the kids to town. Karen didn’t hesitate for a second. If only she’d done that yesterday. The thought was clear on her tired face as she gave the students their assignments--to box what they’d discovered so far and pack the dig equipment, to cover over the open pits to protect them until they were re-opened, to pack up their own things and take down the tents.

As they began their work, the troopers radioed for more help, this time to transport the kids to a motel in town. Tony and Teresa volunteered to go with them, so there would be other ‘responsible adults’ there besides Jaime and Chris (Karen understood the “Envoy” implicit in Tony’s use of the term) and so Karen would be free to remain with the search crew. Karen was grateful for the offer. She was torn between wanting to protect the other students and to search for the missing one. Jaime and Chris both told her to stay, that they’d take care of the others, and she hugged them, trying not to cry or show the fear that twisted her gut--the same fear that creased their faces, too. As the bear bag was lowered for packing, Karen realized that she couldn’t keep Drew there any longer either. She explained to the little cat that it was safer for him to go with Tony. He tried to object to being sent away; but when Karen told him that if he stayed he’d have to do it on the ground since the food container he’d been perched on was leaving too, he reluctantly sat in the Jeep that Tony would be driving, as if he was patiently waiting for his chauffeur. Reg had woken as the noise level in camp rose with the number of people in it. As he was making more coffee and putting out some food for the searchers, he wondered if he might be able to track the girl through her cell phone. He used the satellite phone and tried dialing the cell number Karen had for her. Just then, Karen was also helping the troopers collect Carmen’s things from her tent, to see if her belongings could give them any help. They were particularly wondering how the girl had been dressed when she left the camp.

As they lifted her bag to empty it onto her sleeping bag, they heard her phone ringing inside it, where she’d left it. Karen let Reg know that his idea wouldn’t work. They did discover that Carmen had dressed fully before leaving, in boots and socks, jeans, a t-shirt, and a long-sleeved denim shirt, and she’d taken her canteen. The troopers took this to mean that she’d left on purpose, and Karen tried to explain again that Carmen had promised her she wouldn’t and that she trusted the girl. Maybe she’d been sleep-walking, the cops said; it was amazing what people would do in that condition. But, though she didn’t say it, Karen didn’t think so. She was sure that something had lured the girl from her tent last night, disguising or hiding itself and her somehow as it took her, and she shuddered with the thought that it was her fault, that the thing that had done it was taunting her for her certainty last night that she would be able to protect the kids from harm. As the spaces once occupied by tents and dig equipment were emptied and the bundles packed in the Jeeps and trucks for transport, they were filled again with searchers. Soon, Enright and Thorvault decided that 60 searchers were enough to begin a thorough search. And as Tony and the students began to pull out, the searchers were organized into 2 teams, each team formed into search-lines and the teams sent out to the east and west.

Frank was up now, too. He’d woken earlier with a start, his arms and legs tangled in his sleeping bag after a couple restless hours of sleep. He’d been dreaming again, the nightmares that always seemed to disturb his sleep after he’d had a prescient dream like the one last night. He’d dreamt that he was being eaten by polar bears, and he could even feel the pressure of their jaws closing on his limbs. When he woke, he realized that the sleeping bag was what gave him the realistic sensory input, but he was suspicious that the unnatural fog that still clung to the ground might have had some effect as well. He mumbled that to the others as he hung his hammock between a couple trees to try and catch just a few more winks. Sheriff Herbert agreed that the fog was mighty strange. He’d noticed a cold front move through last night, but the temperature seemed to be rising too quickly for the fog to be hanging around like it was. Frank managed to fall back to sleep, but the crowd of people and the noise that went with it woke him again as the troopers organized the search.

Reg volunteered to help shuttle kids and equipment to town, and Frank volunteered to stay in what was left of the camp to act as ‘search central.’ Reg would join him when he returned after all the kids were safely out of the way. Every hunter close enough to help, from Alger, Schoolcraft and Luce counties, was there. Those that didn’t already have them were issued hunter-orange vests, radios and flares. As these were being passed out, Frank asked if it would be possible to get a chopper or an ultra-light as well, to search from the air. The woods they would be searching were pretty dense and an air search would do no good, but there was plenty of open swampland to search as well, and an air search might cover that more efficiently. The troopers told him they’d do what they could, but choppers were pretty hard to come by. And then the sweep began. Karen, Justin, Aiden, Angie and Leigh were all included in it. It was 3pm by now, and the heat of the day, though it still didn’t burn off the fog, was keeping the mosquitos from being too annoying. But everyone was still waving their arms to swat at the black flies that swarmed over any unprotected flesh.

The lines of searchers moved slowly and carefully outwards from the camp. As one line was moving through a slightly swampy area a short distance from the camp, Leigh put her right foot down in a soft mucky spot. The ‘splooching’ sound of her foot squishing through the muck ended in an unexpected crunch when her foot pressed into something solid. She stopped as suddenly as a soldier who’s just heard the unmistakable click of a land mine pressure-plate depressing under her foot. She quickly hopped backward on her left foot, pulling her right up and out of the muck to find part of a human skull stuck on it. The toe of her boot had wedged between the jaws of the partially decomposed skull, and Leigh hollered for some help. The search halted and, besides Thorvault and Enright, Karen, Justin and Aiden came over. Leigh pointed out the spot where she’d stepped on the skull while Aiden pried it gently from her foot. It wasn’t completely bare of flesh yet, and there was a little muddy hair still clinging to the top. It was short hair, and Leigh wiped clean a piece that clung to the toe of her boot after the skull had been removed, to find that it was a dark color, brown or maybe black. The size and shape of the jaw itself told Aiden that it was from a male--not Carmen.

Enright radioed Frank to bring supplies to their coordinates--evidence bags, a camera and anything else he found in camp that he thought might be useful. Thorvault would stay at the scene, and Enright would get the search-line moving again. Karen began to mark the extent of the scene as Aiden felt around in the mud to determine where the body was lying. It appeared to be a ‘body dump,’ since it was mostly intact and lying as it had been dropped, though the arms seemed to be missing. As he felt around and lifted the body carefully from the mud, Frank came up with the supplies. The most direct route to where the body had been found was by water, so Frank had come in one of the canoes. Thorvault began photographing the scene. The state of decomposition indicated that the man had been dead between 1 and 2 weeks, roughly the time frame when the missing hunter had disappeared Frank told them. All four of the other missing persons had disappeared just within the last 6 weeks. Aiden was pointing out how there was a great deal of the flesh missing from the body when he noticed tool marks on the femurs. The arms could theoretically have been dragged off by a scavenger, but these were the marks of butchering, not just to dismember the body but to slice off flesh.

Aiden was grim and slightly green as he and the others contemplated the implications. Justin called Reg on the satellite phone. The thought of the body having been cannibalized reminded Justin of a movie he’d seen once, maybe 10 years ago. He thought the title was “Ravenous,” and he wanted Reg of do a search for it. Not that it would help them at all, but at least he’d know if he was remembering things right. Karen’s mind went in a different direction. She recalled an Anishinabe myth of a Manitou called the Weendigo. It was the Manitou of starvation and a symbol of self-indulgence, intemperance, and selfishness. It was generally described as a giant, an 8-10 foot tall man gaunt from starvation, whose approach was heralded by a blizzard and who ate only the flesh and blood and bones of humans. It embodied the People’s fear of famine, and the fear that it would cause men to turn to cannibalism to sate their hunger. It was said to be the result of an appetite without end. As the Weendigo ate, it grew larger but as it grew, so also did its appetite increase, such that it could never be satisfied. Unfortunately, Karen couldn’t remember any of the stories about how the Weendigo was defeated.

Thorvault looked a little green as well, when he realized what Aiden was saying. Word began to spread about the ‘cutlets’ that had been removed from the dead man, and uneasiness spread with it. When Karen had done all she could to help with the body, she went to find one of the tribal hunters who’d come to help with the search. If there was a wise man or woman at the Bay Mills Reservation, she needed to speak with him or her as soon as possible. The pilot who’d brought the hunters out to the lake in a float plane agreed to take Karen there immediately. Karen let the others know what she’d been thinking and where she was going, and she and the pilot left for the lake. Aiden continued to excavate the body, with Frank and Leigh helping to’ bag and tag’ it. When they were done, Aiden cleaned up and Frank and Leigh put the remains in the canoe to return them to the camp. Back at the camp, Reg was alone, keeping his ears on the radio chatter of the searchers while he ran a search online for Justin. The afternoon was beginning to wane, and Reg felt a wave of sleepiness flow over him. As he shook it off, he realized that it felt unnatural somehow. He called Justin on the satellite phone and said, “I’m bait.” All Justin said was, “Fuck!” He motioned to Angie, and the two began jogging back to the camp as fast as the terrain would allow. Angie radioed Frank with the news. He found a distinctive tree to tie the canoe to with a bright piece of marker-tape, then he and Leigh got out and ran to the camp, leaving the body to be retrieved later.

Reg was nervous now, and it took him a minute to realize how quiet things had become. It was too quiet; not only had the normal sounds of nature stopped, but so had the sound from the radio...and from him as well! Reg tried to talk, then began singing, hoping to hear something, anything. He belted out songs from the musical “Avenue Q,” and as he got to the words “for porn” in one of the songs, the sound of his voice finally echoed back from the trees. Just then, Frank and Leigh ran into the clearing. Frank teased him that he really didn’t want to know what Reg was singing about porn for. Justin and Angie got back to the camp about 10 minutes later. Justin began searching the area, and about 20 feet from where Reg had been sitting, he found pitch black moccasin prints. He teased Reg about scaring the thing away with his singing, as he tracked the prints and was able to tell that the creature that made them had circled into the camp to that point, stood there, then circled back out of the camp. The prints went all the way around the camp, staying in the tree line. They were made by someone...or something...tall, with large feet, maybe size 12. They were exactly like the prints that had been found on the island except in one respect--they were larger.

Justin, Angie and Frank followed the tracks after they left the camp area. Leigh stayed with Reg. The prints went north toward Sullivan Lake, and straight into the lake as they had when they’d left the island. By the time the Envoys had tracked them that far, the prints in and around the camp had faded away, just as they had on the island. They didn’t bother taking pictures of them this time, since they’d discovered yesterday when they downloaded the photos that Leigh had taken with her phone camera that the prints didn’t show up on the photographs. Frank still needed to retrieve the canoe with the remains the search team had found, so he returned to the camp; but Justin was not ready to give up the search for whatever had left the prints. Reg plugged coordinates for all the prints they’d encountered so far into the computer, and used those to calculate a possible ‘trajectory’ for the path the thing had taken once it crossed Sullivan Lake. He called Justin with the GPS coordinates for the location where the thing had most likely left the lake, and Justin and Angie continued around the lake to the west. But when they got to the spot Reg indicated, they found nothing.

Justin poked around the lake shore until Angie, noticing that the sun was edging closer to the western horizon, insisted they return to the camp. He still found no trace of the thing, and he wondered if maybe it hadn’t continued its path in a straight line and had come out of the lake somewhere else entirely. In case it had been using water to cover its tracks, the two followed Sullivan Creek back down to Nawakwa Lake. They radioed Reg and Leigh that they were coming, and when Frank returned to the camp with the remains, he found Reg standing below one of the taller trees surrounding the camp, gazing up. Leigh had climbed up with binoculars, to watch for Justin and Angie, wondering if maybe she might spot some movement that would tell her that the creature was still watching either the camp or the two trackers. By sundown, the other searchers had returned to the campsite. They’d found no trace of Carmen yet, but they would continue the search tomorrow. In the meantime, everyone that didn’t live close enough to go home for the night was going up to stay in the same motel the students were at. And though the fog had finally dissipated completely, the dogs still would not come out of Sheriff Herbert’s truck.

Karen had stopped briefly in the camp to grab a pack with clothes and a few other necessities, then she and the pilot went out to the float plane and headed up to the ‘Rez.’ They got there shortly before dinner, and Karen called to let Justin know she was there safely. He told her about Reg having been ‘stalked.’ She didn’t have any contacts within this particular tribe, so there was some delay in getting in to see the man they all referred to as “The Lorekeeper.” Not that they were impolite in any way! Karen was asked to join them at dinner--pizza and salad--and she chatted amiably with a number of different people until a young man came to take her to see him. It was about 8pm by now, and Karen was led to another room. There, she was introduced to the Lorekeeper. He was older than dirt, certainly upwards of 90 years old, and his face was shriveled like an ‘apple doll.’ He must have been taller when he was younger, but now he was probably shorter than her, though he didn’t stand up from the comfortable-looking leather wing-back chair he was sitting in before a roaring fire. The young man who had brought her there left and returned with a cup of tea for the older man, then left again. The Lorekeeper’s eyes were tiny sparkling black dots in his wrinkled face, and he had a full head of thick white hair. He nodded at Karen and said, “Please, sit,” gesturing slightly to the chair that sat across from him.

Karen didn’t waste any time with small talk. She explained who she was and told the wise man that she needed information about the Indian myth of the Weendigo. Specifically, she needed to know if there were any stories about how to destroy one. Karen noticed that she was beginning to sweat, between the heat of the day and that added by the fire needed to keep a withered old man warm. The Lorekeeper was evasive as he explained, as if to a small child, that the Weendigo was just a legend, a useful allegory for greed. The way to overcome greed was simply to practice generosity, he told Karen. Karen looked him in the eye when she told him that, allegory or not, something had ripped apart one of her students two nights ago and might have lured away another last night. And during the search for the missing girl today, they’d found remains of a man who may have been cannibalized. He told her that perhaps this was a bad summer to dig by that lake. Then he asked why she thought the disappearances had anything to do with an old Indian legend, and Karen told him about the moccasin prints that had been seen on the island yesterday and again just this afternoon around the camp. He sighed, and told her that he had a story to tell her.

“Once, there was a Weendigo living in the Mille Lacs region of Minnesota. It ambushed Nana’b’oozoo, who had been hunting it. The Weendigo was desperately hungry, but, even so, it put off eating Nana’b’oozoo for a while in order to relish the sight of the so-called human champion crying and shaking in despair. Any other time, the Weendigo would not have considered doing such a thing. But, besides it’s physical hunger, it had another hunger that it didn’t know about, to relish the spectacle of a champion stripped of his pretensions. The pleasure that the Weendigo got from watching Nana’b’oozoo was worth putting off satisfying its hunger a while longer. The Weendigo had never experienced such pleasure before. It watched and listened as Nana’b’oozoo quaked, wondering what people saw in him and how he could continue to assume the role of people’s champion when he was not what people thought he was.

“At first the Weendigo thought that its victim was putting on an act to deceive it, but after watching him for a while, it became convinced that the tears and the trembling were real. The Weendigo decided to prolong its victim’s discomfort and its own pleasure. The Weendigo commanded Nana’b’oozoo to gather firewood for his own barbeque, and Nana’b’oozoo did so more readily than he’d ever done any work. He sweated and groaned as he gathered the wood, carrying stumps and dried poles to the site of his own funeral pyre. Even when he had gathered a huge pile of wood and was near the point of exhaustion, he didn’t think to rest. And it never occurred to Nana’b’oozoo to escape while he was in the forest out of the sight of the Weendigo.

“The Weendigo believed that Nana’b’oozoo lacked the fiber to attempt to escape, since he had not tried despite many opportunities to do so. Besides, the Weendigo knew that it would have had no trouble catching such a weakling if he had tried. To think, that some Anishinabeg considered him a hero, a manitou! So sure and contemptuous of Nana’b’oozoo was the Weendigo that he it decided to take a nap. Nana’b’oozoo would still be there collecting wood until he was told to stop. Before going to sleep, the Weendigo warned Nana’b’oozoo not to try to run away and to have the fireplace, spit and a blaze ready by the time it woke up, or it would eat him alive.

“Many animals saw Nana’b’oozoo working like this and whimpering like a beaten cur, and they had no sympathy for him, except for one. A curious mouse wondered why the people’s champion was chanting a death song when he should have been singing a cheerful tune, and why he collected such a huge pile of wood on such a fine day. Between sobs, Nana’b’oozoo told the mouse that the Weendigo was going to barbeque him and eat him later that day, and he was forced to collect the wood for his own cremation. The mouse asked why he didn’t run away or hide, and Nana’b’oozoo told him he would have if only he were able to outrun the Weendigo or knew where to go. But he could not outrun it and knew of no place beyond its reach. Alas, he had no choice but to do as it told him and accept his fate.

“Why not kill the Weendigo and be done with it?” the mouse asked him. “If only I knew how,” Nana’b’oozoo sighed bitterly. And so the mouse told him what to do. As he was told, Nana’b’oozoo found a long dry pole, hard and stiff with age, and thrust one end of it into the white-hot coals as a blacksmith does when tempering metal. He kept the pole in the coals until the point, which was as long as a man’s forearm, was as white and red as the coals themselves and sent off sparks when it was moved. When it was ready, Nana’b’oozoo pulled it from the fire and went a little way from where the Weendigo slept on its stomach, its rump upraised like a hillock. When he was a hundred paces from the sleeping monster, he raised the pole above his head like a fish spear, and he ran at the Weendigo as fast as he could, like a javelin thrower, to give the pole as much thrust as he could.

“Nana’b’oozoo’s target was the very center of the Weendigo’s upraised rump, and his aim was perfect. He drove the pole as deep and far forward as he could. The Weendigo’s shriek of pain nearly burst Nana’b’oozoo’s eardrums, and it sent ripples scurrying across the top of the waters as the shriek echoed in every direction around Mille Lacs. The next moment, the Weendigo shot up over the trees, screaming and shrieking in agony. Its legs were already in motion the instant its feet touched the ground. Within a short time, the Weendigo was out of sight, and soon after its screams faded away too. And the Mille Lacs Anishinabe were never again molested by a Weendigo, since the Weendigoes were all afraid of Nana’b’oozoo.”

When the Lorekeeper was finished, Karen thanked him for sharing the story with her. She gave him a small gift of peach preserves to thank him, and he in return gave her the gift of a beautiful pair of beaded moccasins. Then, the young man who had brought her to the Lorekeeper came to help the old man to bed, and Karen was taken to another bedroom for the night. She took a moment to call Justin and tell him that she had been told a story that might be helpful in dealing with the thing that had killed Andrew and probably taken Carmen. Then she said good night, wishing that she could be there with him. Justin could tell from the sound of Karen’s voice that the story she’d been told must have shaken her, and he wished that he could have been there for her right then, too.

Back at the motel, the students, the Envoys, and the other searchers entertained themselves as best they could under the circumstances. Many ended up in the bar next door to the motel. That’s where Frank and Teresa had gone. And Teresa finally made the decision to ask Frank for the truth, the whole truth. He had hoped she never would; but when she insisted, he told her exactly what he and the others were, what had happened in all the previous incidents they’d been involved in, and what they suspected was happening now. If Teresa hadn’t trusted that Frank was not the kind of man to make this all up, she’d have thought he had. She realized just how close to the truth he’d let her come before, and she wondered if she’d made the best decision now. But there was no turning back.

Others huddled in their motel rooms, hoping that whatever had happened to Carmen wouldn’t happen to them too. Reg and Leigh took the opportunity to talk about what was going on between them. Leigh asked if he was in a relationship at the moment, since she was attracted to him but didn’t want to intrude where she shouldn’t be. Reg explained that he was in a lot of relationships at the moment, with Jacoba in Germany, Shannon in San Francisco, Roberto in New York, as well as Audra in Detroit. But none of them were exclusive relationships, and he certainly had no objections to having one with Leigh, as long as she understood that theirs wouldn’t be exclusive either. She did, and she was fine with that since she was nowhere near ready to marry again anyway. Eventually everyone went to sleep, though most slept neither soundly nor restfully.

At the reservation, Karen woke about 3am to the smell of tobacco smoke. She opened her eyes to see a crowd of Indians surrounding her bed. They wore traditional Ojibwa clothing, and they were chanting and waving feathers and burning ‘smudge sticks’ of tobacco over her. She realized, looking at the clothing that ranged from 50 years to hundreds of years old, that these were the same spirits whom she’d seen beside the lake, elders of the tribes from many generations. And she had the feeling that they had come to tell her something, come to her here because she’d made the effort to come to their own home for help. As she listened to them, they chanted in Ojibway, “Hunter, prey, if you are not one you are the other. And you have already stepped one foot over. You are meat.” Then they faded from sight leaving behind the faint smell of tobacco. Karen laid there trembling, afraid of the meaning of their message, until she fell back into a troubled sleep only a short time before she was awakened to return to Nawakwa Lake.

Karen was beginning to get frustrated at not being able to see everything that was going on on the island. She relayed what she could to Teresa in whispers so that the kids wouldn’t hear, leaving out the bits of speculation about Unknown causes for what had happened. Both Reg and Aiden suggested that Karen call in the local cops, with Frank confirming that he didn’t really have any jurisdiction in this case. By now, Tony had gotten back from exploring and offered to return to the mainland to guard the kids so that Karen could go out to see the cave. He never said it out loud, but the others got the impression that Tony had seen more than enough dismembered body parts to last a lifetime when he’d been helping excavate Ground Zero. He had no desire to stick around and see any more if he had a choice in the matter. Angie offered to go with him so that they all remained in groups of at least two. The trip went a little faster this time though, since they went straight toward the camp rather than tying up at the dock. As they were crossing, Reg suggested that Karen bring an archival-quality camera, if she had one. She did and she’d already had that packed to go, with all the necessary measuring tools and a notepad and pencil for making notes about each shot.

Justin had lost track of the black moccasin prints when he’d gotten to the top of the island, and it took him a few minutes of searching to find the trail again. He kept in constant radio contact with the others, since he’d preferred to do the tracking on his own so that no one would accidently destroy the trail. Not that they could, since the prints seemed to be part of the rock. It was weird--where there was anything organic lying on the trail, it remained on top of the prints, completely undisturbed, with the prints underneath on the bare rock. There was no sign that the tracks had been covered with fallen leaves or overgrowth on purpose and no way that they could have been covered so completely in any natural manner. Nothing truly corporeal made these prints. Justin followed the trail down the hill to the other side of the island and out onto the rocky shore. By the time he got to the water’s edge, the prints had disappeared completely, as if they’d evaporated like dew, and Justin couldn’t tell if they had continued on into the water or just stopped. He checked around carefully but could find no sign of anything having been dragged on or off the shore. On the other side, where Andrew, and later the Envoys, had pulled up canoes, there were obvious signs of the rocks being disturbed, kicked around or scraped by the hull. There was nothing like that on this side.

By 5am, Karen and Angie were arriving at the island, and everyone could hear the normal morning sounds starting up, birds singing, the occasional splash of a fish jumping on the lake, and the buzz of the first few cicadas waking. If they were up this early, Karen figured this would be another pretty hot day. Karen had called the county sheriff dispatch number she had before she and Angie had started back to the canoe, and then she’d left the satellite phone with Teresa. The one number was basically a clearinghouse for all the law enforcement service in the county, including the CO (conservation officer). They couldn’t tell her exactly who would be showing up, since it would be whoever was closest at the moment, either local, county or state, but someone would be at the camp as soon as possible. Karen told them only that a student had disappeared during the night and had been discovered dead on the island.

By now, a blind person could have found her way to the cave entrance, with the path that had been cleared by so much coming and going this morning. But Karen dutifully followed Angie, using the time to prepare herself for what she had to do. This wasn’t just any archaeological site. Andrew had died in the cave, and from everything she’d heard over the comm unit, the scene was no more pleasant than the death. But if she was going to get a good record of everything she needed from the cave, she had to be able to ignore the rest, for now. And with the cops coming, she didn’t have months to record the site either; she had maybe an hour or two. When they got to the cave entrance, Reg and Aiden were outside it. Justin was still on the far side of the island investigating the area where the prints had disappeared, and Frank and Leigh were inside. Reg offered Karen a breath mint, to fill her head with a better smell than the smell of blood and death in the cave, but she declined. Some Vicks VapoRub for under her nose would have been handy, but it wasn’t anything she’d ever needed on a dig before so she didn’t have any along. She thought about how it might have been for Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon. The story was that Carter had noticed a strange smell when he’d first opened a small hole to peer into the entry chamber of Tut’s tomb. After Carnarvon’s death, the smell had been attributed to “the Curse,” though it was only the smell of air stale from thousands of years of being sealed in the tomb. Which, of course, didn’t prevent it from carrying bacteria that actually could have helped both men along toward their early ends.

Karen took a deep breath of clean air, then began consciously breathing through her mouth as she entered the tunnel leading down to the cave. Carter had been one of the first of a new breed of archaeologists, the breed to which Karen herself belonged, who took pains to record every detail of a dig, no matter how insignificant, so they could be studied not just by the archaeologist who discovered them but by others in the future as well. A breed that was more interested in revealing the past to present and future generations, than in just decorating their private homes with art stolen from some other culture’s historical record, or worse yet stolen from their dead without the least concern for the desecration. When she got to the bottom, she’d managed to convince herself that the things strewn about the floor were just parts of a mummy that some crude tomb robber had torn apart looking for hidden jewels. It was her job to just record whatever was left of ‘the dig,’ the things the robber thought too worthless to bother trying to steal. Leigh and Frank pointed out a few things to her, and she studied the pictograms as she began working her way around the room from left to right, top to bottom.

She asked if anyone had found Andrew’s sketchbook. She couldn’t remember what he used for the drawings, but the re-coloring of the pictograms was fairly recent, maybe days or even hours old. They had found the book, but not the pen he’d used. Karen stopped to scan the floor. There should be evidence of small fires and the remains of the branches that had been burnt to make the charcoal ‘pencils’ used for the pictograms. The floor was covered with a combination of leaf litter and sand blown in over who knew how many years. And over all of this was blood, congealing in some places where it was thicker, fully dried in other places where it had been spattered as.... Karen took a deep breath through her mouth and forced it out her nose as she re-focused her mind on ‘the dig.’ She couldn’t see anything herself, so Frank and Leigh looked while Karen continued taking photos and notes. The two managed to find a few small charred chunks, but they didn’t look like wood, they looked like bone! Karen took her camera over and photographed them. They were, indeed, small stumps of bone, and if Karen remembered correctly what little human anatomy she’d studied, they were from the ulna, or rather ulnas. Not all the stubs were recent, but none were more than a couple years old while others were made in just the last few weeks. She’d never seen bones used in this way, and certainly not human bones. But, sometimes, when she asked tribe members for more information or details about certain rituals, she was gently steered away from those subjects, being redirected in such a way that she didn’t even realize she had been at first. When she asked Twisted Pine about it, he would just say that there were some things she wasn’t ready to learn about yet, or that there were things that they just couldn’t tell her about, and sometimes he would look a little embarrassed or ashamed at having to say it.

As Karen got around to the large stone in the rear of the room, she turned her attention to it. There was a significant amount of blood on it, some very new, but enough old that Karen could tell it had been used as an altar many times in the past as well. She took photos from every angle. She couldn’t see any obvious painting or carving on it, but she hoped that maybe something would stand out in shadows on the photos if there was anything there at all. Then she continued on around the right side of the room. She kept an eye on her watch, moving as quickly as she could. Teresa had taken a call from dispatch shortly after Karen and Angie left, letting them know that someone was on the way and their ETA was about 6:30am. Neither Karen nor Leigh wanted to be around when the cops got there. They didn’t want to have to explain what they were doing at the crime scene. It was a lot easier for Frank and Angie, and even Justin, to explain. At 6:15, Karen took one more quick look around to make sure she hadn’t missed anything, then she and Leigh headed out. Before they left, Frank had Karen transfer the photos from her camera to his Blackberry. He could pass them on to the cops so they’d have no reason to take Karen’s camera. But, just in case, she would also download them to her computer then erase them from the camera. She didn’t need any of the kids stumbling onto them when they were using the camera later, anyway. As the two paddled away, Frank sorted through the photos he’d collected from Karen and Leigh and set up two files for them, deleting from one of the files any that he didn’t want passed to the police, like the now-missing moccasin prints. Angie took up a position above the cave entrance, and Justin waited in front of it.

While Karen was working, Justin had come back and described to the others in better detail what he’d seen. Reg and Aiden wondered if there were any signs on the far side of the lake of anyone having come and gone from there rather than using the dock. The two took one of the canoes, with Reg doing the paddling and Aiden carrying the hand sun to illuminate the shore. They studied both the shore of the island and the shore on the mainland, but could find no sign that anyone had been on either one. No scraping on any of the rocks that might indicate a canoe being pulled up, no obviously dislodged rocks that might indicate that someone had passed incautiously, no prints of any kind. When they were done, they headed back to the dock, so that someone would be there to meet the cops. About 6:30am, a blue Blazer with “Michigan State Police” emblazoned on the sides backed a trailer with a small boat down the ramp. Two troopers got out, one slightly shorter than average for a guy, and the other tall and stocky. The moon had set by now, and there was a thin mist rising from the lake as the sky began to glow pink in the east with the light of the rising sun. The shorter trooper, who had gotten out of the passenger side of the Blazer, trained his flashlight on Reg and Aiden as he approached them. He was male, but until their eyes adjusted to the light, they couldn’t read his name tag. The other trooper came around as the first asked Reg and Aiden for their names. They were surprised to find that the taller cop was not another guy but a woman.

The male cop asked for Reg and Aiden’s ID’s, and Aiden handed over his paramedic ID as well as his driver’s license. The female cop had held out her hand for the IDs, and as she did, she was looking Aiden up and down. It was almost an involuntary action, like she was trying to check him out without seeming to. If she’d done the same to Reg, Reg would have chalked it up to normal cop cautiousness, but she didn’t. This was obviously, to Reg at least, a female assessing a ‘piece of meat.’ But Aiden seemed to take her attention in stride. It happened all the time to him, so it would have surprised him more if she hadn’t done it. The surreptitious examination didn’t turn him on, nor did it turn him off. It was just part of life for Aiden. The tall woman glanced down at Aiden’s ID, then said, “Good. We couldn’t raise the ME.” She paused and grinned, “No pun intended.” Then the male cop introduced himself as Officer Thorvault and her as Officer Enright. Thorvault was only about 5'6", including the heels on his boots. He was compact, with dark hair and eyes, and only years working outdoors had managed to darken his fair skin. He was in his mid thirties and obviously of French-Canadian descent. Enright was broad-shouldered and would have been 6'2" without the boots. She was in her late twenties, tanned, but with blonde, almost white hair.

They looked out at the island then at the boat, and Enright suggested that they might get out there faster in the canoes...less work, since they were already in the water. There were three tied up there. The one Andrew had taken out to the island was still out there, as was one of the ones the Envoys had taken. Karen and Leigh had taken a third directly back to the camp. As the troopers moved toward the canoes, Reg made sure to maneuver so that Aiden ended up in the canoe with Thorvault. No point in allowing any more complications in the guy’s love life. They heard loons calling from somewhere out in the mist as they began cutting almost silently across the lake.

As the two canoes approached the beach, Reg called out “Justin, Angie.” He wasn’t really sure if he had the impulse to keep his fellow Envoys from being surprised at the cops’ arrival or the cops from being surprised at the presence of the other Envoys at their crime scene, or maybe both. Justin had seen them leaving the dock, and he’d made his way down to the beach and was waving them in. He helped pull the canoes onto the rocks, then handed over his ID when they asked for it. The three men led the two cops up toward the cave, and Justin explained that Frank was inside with the body and Angie was covering the entrance. They were shocked when Angie came down and introduced herself as Homeland Security. The two troopers exchanged worried glances at the size of whatever had happened here, if it was big enough to draw the attention of HS. Angie read the exchange and was quick to correct them. She was only there for the Pictured Rocks tour with Professor Riley; this had been a trip for pleasure, not business. “At least we can be sure the chain of evidence is preserved,” Enright said to Thorvault. Enright started into the tunnel, and Thorvault fell in behind her a few seconds later. The two obviously worked well as a team, and had done it often.

When Enright got to the bottom, the others heard her say, “Oh my God.” She swallowed hard but held her ground though both the sight and smell pushed her to leave. Thorvault didn’t do as well. Like Tony and Reg, the overwhelming smell of blood forced him back up the tunnel as quickly as he got down. He went directly to the nearest pine tree, like Reg had, and breathed deeply to cover the smell of the blood. Reg went over with a flask of water and offered the man some, but he waved it off. Enright studied Frank’s ID as she worked to regain her composure, and handed it back saying that, frankly, they’d be glad of any help Frank could give them. They didn’t get this kind of thing often up there...OK, never.... She turned, hand on her gun, when she heard a sound behind her, but it was just Aiden coming down to join her and Frank. Enright pulled a bandana from her pocket and covered her mouth and nose as Aiden began to give her a ‘guided tour’ around the scene. He pointed out each part, and described in clinical terms what he’d found, every bit the professional. And he edited his descriptions for ‘English’ where he could, so that she would understand what he was seeing. “See the anti-mortem bruising here.... There, see the splash patterns.... And the blood pooling here....” He was doing an admirable job covering for the ME, but with every step, Aiden looked a little greyer. As soon as he had finished showing the female trooper all the physical remains, he left quickly. It had been easier being clinical about it the first time in, shutting off the part of his brain that told him that this had been a human being once so that he could study it dispassionately. But there had been time for it to sink in now that this poor kid had been ripped apart by something inhuman and that there was nothing Aiden could do to fix it, and he couldn’t look at it any more. Reg handed Aiden a breath mint as came out. He popped it into his mouth, but it couldn’t cover up the images in his head.

Frank took over the ‘tour,’ showing Enright the pictograms, the charred bones, the altar. And he pointed out the fact, in case she had missed it, that the boy’s heart was still missing. The other organs had been pulled out of the torn-open torso and had been found in various places around the room. This seemed to be a ritualistic killing following some native pattern. Either the perp was an Indian, or he thinks he is or wants to be, Frank speculated. Both her father and grandfather had been cops, Enright told him, and she’d never heard of anything like this before. Maybe someone was trying to emulate some ancient cult? When they got back around to the ‘doorway,’ they found that Thorvault had soaked his bandana in something and tied it around his mouth and nose to cover the smell, and had come down to join them. But his eyes looked sick. “Thought this only happened to ‘trolls,’” he said through the bandana, as he surveyed the scene. It could be a local, Frank speculated again, or someone just passing through. Thorvault dug into his belt and pulled out a camera with measurement cards and tapes. They needed official scene pictures, he told Frank as he started the process. Enright told Frank that he was free to go now, but she’d need to talk to all of them after she and Thorvault had finished processing the scene. She followed him up the tunnel for a quick breath of fresh air. And she would need Aiden to come back down to collect the... body... if he could. If he couldn’t, they’d at least need him to sign the paperwork saying he had.

She told the same thing to the others still on the island, adding that the processing could take some time because they had to be thorough; there was no one else they could call for help with this. Reg asked if he could go back to the camp, since he was supposed to be cooking breakfast. Enright told him and Justin that they could go, but to stick around the camp at least until they’d been questioned. Frank warned her that there was also a Detroit cop back in the camp as well, who she hadn’t met yet. She raised her eyebrows. She and Thorvault had met Karen and Leigh, since the dig was on their ‘beat;’ they’d been by to check on things a couple times since the dig started. And Karen had told them she would be having some friends up. But Enright hadn’t expected the professor’s friends to include 2 DHS agents, a DPD detective and a paramedic. Aiden was looking pretty green by now, so Reg and Justin helped him down to the canoe. Frank and Angie would stay to help out or answer questions if they were needed.

It took a couple hours for the troopers to process the scene. While Angie stayed outside to guard the mouth of the cave, Frank went inside with them and chatted, to take their minds off the fact that the body parts scattered around the cave had once belonged to a kid. It was obvious that both troopers were seasoned law officers, but it was equally obvious that this was the first murder either had ever dealt with. They went about the chore of processing the scene with the dogged determination and careful attention of people who knew that a single mistake would ruin the entire job. When they were done collecting the body, it didn’t take up nearly enough room in the body bag. They got the bag loaded in a canoe, and thought briefly about putting up police tape to secure the scene like they’d been taught to do. But it seemed silly out here on an island in the middle of a lake, beside the fact that it would probably draw more attention rather than deflecting it. So the four climbed into two of the canoes, and they towed the third, the one Andrew had used to get out to the island the afternoon before, back with them. They had already processed it and found nothing but Andrew’s prints, so they left it tied up to the dock with the rest when they got to the mainland.

When Justin, Aiden and Reg got back to the camp, they found that most of the kids were still asleep. In fact, David, who had been awake earlier when he and Penny had been roused by Reg and Tony, had gone back to sleep, as had Tony once Leigh and Karen got back to camp. Penny couldn’t get back to sleep though, and neither could John and Phyllis, who sat on almost opposite sides of the campfire pointedly NOT looking at one another. Though the two had been found and brought back separately, Leigh noticed that the sleeping bag that John had wrapped around his shoulders was actually two identical bags zippered together. Each had brought his or her own bag, but they’d obviously done some planning ahead of time, in spite of the fact that they were doing everything they could now to feign disinterest in each other. The sun was just beginning to peek up over the trees to the east, and Reg went to the ‘kitchen’ to start getting things together for breakfast. After giving Karen a tight hug and a kiss, Justin grabbed a few things from their tent and headed for the lake, to catch fish to go with whatever else Reg planned for breakfast. Aiden picked up one of his books wearily and found a tree to sit against. He opened the book on his knees, but it was apparent that it wasn’t really distracting him from thinking about what he’d seen on the island. Especially since it wasn’t light enough to read under the trees yet and he hadn’t bothered to turn on his flashlight.

Leigh, Karen and Teresa had been sitting near the fire, and Leigh now got up to help Reg with breakfast. Karen and Teresa watched as the other kids, in ones and twos, came groggily out of their tents. Some shuffled toward the tables, where Leigh was setting out mugs and a carafe of fresh coffee, and others toward the ‘bathrooms’ or the shower areas carrying toilet paper or towels and toothbrushes. When the last of the young men had come out of the tent that Andrew had been staying in, Karen nodded to Teresa, and the two went to the tent. Karen stopped along the way to snag an empty box from the ‘storage tent.’ Teresa had pointed out to Karen when she’d gotten back that they needed to box up Andrew’s things to give to the police; but Karen wouldn’t do it in front of the other boys. She didn’t want to do it at all. This was the cops’ job, not hers, she thought to herself almost angrily. But she felt responsible for all these kids, though they were all actually adults; and she couldn’t bear the thought of some stranger going through Andrew’s things right there in front of all the other kids. Most of them still had no idea that Andrew was even missing. She didn’t intend to hide his death from them, but she saw no reason to ruin their day before it had even started.

The smell of scrambled eggs with green onions and cheese started to spread across the camp, and the rest of kids filtered toward the kitchen. Leigh tried to exude a sense of calmness, hoping to soothe the kids and keep anyone from panicking when they noticed Andrew’s absence. Justin came back with a few large-mouth bass, and found that Reg already had a plate of cornmeal and a skillet of hot oil ready to dredge and drop the fish into as soon as Justin fileted them. David sat down and ate ravenously. Penny barely ate a few mouthfuls. She and a few of the other students realized that something was going on, since the ‘adults’ were ‘buzzing,’ huddling and talking in whispers whenever two of them happened to pass one another and breaking off whenever a student came near. Other students didn’t seem to have a clue. Vijay was practically shoveling food into his mouth, and had to talk around it when he told Reg, “You can stay. This is much better than that crap on a stick that Andrew was serving us.” Carmen, who had been sitting nearby and poking absently at her food, said “Oh, shut up, Vijay!” A couple other kids agreed with Vijay about the food quality, and Carmen got up and threw her full plate in the trash and stomped off to wash up.

At the dock, Thorvault and Enright decided that they should probably get the body back to the morgue as soon as possible. The day was supposed to be hot again, and if they left it in the Blazer, it would ‘spoil.’ But rather than waste the whole day, Enright would take the body up to Grand Marais, while Thorvault would go back to the camp and interview everyone. Frank offered to go along with Enright to give her a hand, and she would be able to do his interview while they drove. Angie went back to the camp with Thorvault. By this time, Karen and Teresa had finished packing Andrew’s things, and Karen had moved the taped box to her and Justin’s tent so that it wouldn’t draw attention until she gave it to the cops. She couldn’t bring herself to eat anything after what she’d seen in the cave, but Leigh had made her a cup of tea, which Karen gladly drank.

When Carmen stomped off, Leigh followed her. She found Carmen at the washtub, scrubbing her hands. Carmen didn’t say a thing as Leigh approached her, she just kept scrubbing and scrubbing, but she did acknowledge Leigh with a slight tilt of her head. Leigh didn’t say anything either; she just waited quietly for Carmen to start. Eventually she did. She heard something, she didn’t know what, during the night, she told Leigh; and Andrew wasn’t back. Something had happened to him. She wasn’t sure what, she just had a feeling. She’d been having dreams.... Leigh told Carmen that she had bad dreams too. She’d just had one about her husband, she said. Carmen told her that she was sorry that he was dead. She could never remember her dreams, she told Leigh, but she knew that they were bad. Then she asked what had happened to Andrew. Leigh hesitated. She couldn’t tell her exactly, Leigh started...and before she could finish her train of thought, Angie and Officer Thorvault entered the camp. The two seemed to be in an intense conversation, comparing their experiences and ‘battle scars.’ The others could almost smell the testosterone.

It was creeping toward 9am, and the kids who felt like eating at all were pretty much done and were washing up. Karen tried to behave as if this were any other Sunday morning, though word was starting to spread like dye in water that Andrew was missing. Karen started in on the usual morning routine of opening up the dig, and most of the kids followed along, hoping that following the routine would make everything better. But there was murmuring among the students, about Andrew’s absence and the state cop's presence so early in the morning. Thorvault went to Aiden first, jotting notes in his notebook as Aiden described what he could about the morning and the previous day, leaving out his opinions about what had ripped Andrew to pieces in the cave, and anything else, like the disappearing moccasin prints, that wasn’t easily explained. Thorvault went to Angie next, then Reg and Justin, so that he questioned first everyone (as far as he knew) that had been on the island. Each of them told essentially the same story--being awakened around 3am, possibly by a scream; finding that five kids were missing and recovering all of the ‘missing’ kids except Andrew, who Frank had seen go out to the island the day before; finding Andrew’s body in the cave and calling the police as soon as they did; and several of them searching the island for signs of...well...whatever could have done that to the kid, while others protected the scene until the deputies arrived.

Karen had gotten most of the kids to start in on their usual jobs, making sure that she took care of any of Andrew’s duties herself. Making someone else do them, she figured, would only make his absence more obvious. As it was, many of them had taken little notice of what Andrew did anyway. He’d gravitated toward solitary tasks, like sorting the bits and pieces that others had found and washed, or cooking. Reg had that covered. Karen was still a little irritated with Reg. He’d never bothered to ask what they’d been doing for food, and he’d pushed Andrew out of the one niche that he’d actually volunteered for and considered his own. Karen shook her head. This was no time for her to start complaining, even to herself, about things that couldn’t be undone. She noticed as she went by that, although Carmen was bent over her section with a brush in her hand, she wasn’t moving, except to rub her eyes with the back of her hand. Karen squatted down and squeezed her shoulder gently and rubbed her arm, before continuing on with what she’d been doing. A short time later, she again noticed Carmen crying, and she went over and rubbed her back lightly and whispered that she was there if Carmen needed to talk. Carmen shook her head, and Karen let her be. Carmen would talk to her when she was ready.

When Thorvault had finished with the people who he knew had been on the island, he went to Karen, then Leigh. Neither admitted to having been to the island, so he only asked them about Andrew (his last name was Czarnecki, Karen told him; and she also gave him the names of all the other students in the camp) and the events in camp since the day before. He focused on Andrew’s mood and behavior, and any changes since the dig had begun. Andrew had taken over the cooking a couple weeks before, both women told the deputy; and Karen explained that it wasn’t unusual for one person to gravitate to the job during the first few weeks of a dig, after having everyone take turns at it. It happened with many of the jobs in camp, one person or another finding a task that they enjoyed doing more than other things. Neither of them had seen anyone new around the camp, other than the influx of people the day before, with the Summer term students joining them at the same time as Karen and Leigh’s friends did. Karen had arranged for that so that everyone would have a chance to go on the ‘field trip’ to Pictured Rocks, she explained. He could verify that with the rangers at the park, if he needed to, since she’d made the plans for the trip a few weeks before. When he asked Leigh if anything unusual had happened to Andrew recently, she mentioned how he’d cut his finger while chopping green onions for lunch the day before. He’d stared at the bleeding cut weirdly until Justin insisted on bandaging it for him. Shortly after that, Andrew had wandered away, and that was the last time either woman could remember seeing him for sure.

Officer Enright interviewed Frank during the drive up to Grand Marais, and he told essentially the same story the others did. He’d seen Andrew go out to the island the afternoon before, but it hadn’t seemed to be a problem. Kids appeared to be wandering in and out of the camp all afternoon. No one had noticed that he hadn’t returned because the camp was more crowded than usual. He’d been woken by a scream about 3am and went to investigate. That was when he noticed the canoe still missing, and the head count turned out 5 students short. They found the other 4 near camp, and Andrew, or what was left of him, at the island. That was when they called local law enforcement. The trooper’s first stop, when they got to town, was Marquette Clinic. That was the nearest place that could pass for a morgue. She put a call in to HQ to have the ME come out and autopsy what was left of the kid’s body ASAP. The official county morgue was at the hospital in Munising, the county seat; but better that he had to drive out here than for them to drive over there. The nearest State Police posts were in Munising and Newberry, too. But they did have a small office set up there in town, at the National Park Service offices. That’s where the two went next, to start doing research. And that’s where they spent most of their day.

Enright scrounged around and handed Frank a State Police sweatshirt to wear, so no one would bother them with questions about what he was doing there. Frank repeated his earlier comments, that this was THEIR case, and he didn’t want to step on their toes by offering advice where it wasn’t needed, but Enright insisted that they would be glad to have his help. He had resources they didn’t, for both tracking down and capturing the perps. Frank warned her that he had to be back in Detroit at the end of the week, and she told him that they’d appreciate any time he could give them. Both Thorvault and Enright were building the same hypothesis, that the crime was committed by a small group of ‘druggie sickos’ moving through the area. There was no way a single person could have done that to the body, and there was no way sane people would have done it at all. Now all they had to do was figure out where those sickos went and catch them. Neither of the troopers could have known or accepted the truth, that nothing human had done it at all.

Frank and Officer Enright started looking for other evidence of similar crimes. Of course, there’d been no murders in the county to use as a starting point, so they had to tackle the issue from a different angle--missing persons. VICAP was of no help, since the area was pretty remote, and its biggest industry was tourism, so there was a large ‘transient’ population. They had to work this the old-fashioned way, by calling every local department that might have a record of a missing persons report, and every newspaper that might have reported a similar strange occurrence. By the end of the day, they’d found 4 unexplained disappearances. One was found through a report in the Minnesota system of a man who’d told family he was going camping in the UP and who didn’t return when he was supposed to. Another was a report filed with the NPS about an abandoned campsite. A brand new tent and all the usual camping gear had just been left behind and never claimed. It was little things like this that pinged Frank’s and Enright’s ‘radars.’ There had been no bodies found, but, as Enright explained to Frank, it was an awfully big area that was not well-traveled. All they got was general times for the disappearances, the dates the campsite had been reserved, or the Minnesota man’s vacation schedule. But all four disappearances did seem to be tied to the moon cycle.

Back at the dig, the Sunday progressed almost like normal. But there was a general feeling of dread dampening the usual high spirits, the expectation of bad news. One of the times that Karen stopped to offer a hug to Carmen, Carmen was ready to talk. Andrew had kind of ‘come on’ to her, and she’d blown him off. No, she hadn’t been mean about it; he was an OK guy, just not her type. But maybe if she’d been nicer to him.... The two were sitting side by side on the edge of the pit, and Karen gently pulled Carmen’s shoulders around so they faced each other. It wasn’t Carmen’s fault, she told the girl. Karen shared with Carmen her own feelings of guilt about Andrew’s treatment, and guessed that everyone there probably felt the same way. There were lots of little things that everyone had done that maybe weren’t really nice, comments about the food or about how he wasn’t very sociable. None had been intended to hurt, and none had anything to do with what happened to him. He wasn’t the only student who chose to spend his free time away from the camp. And it could have been any one of them that it happened to. Carmen asked if Karen knew what happened to him; he was dead, wasn’t he? There was no way Karen was going to give her any details, but she did confirm that Andrew was dead and she didn’t think he had suffered. She didn’t add that his actual death had probably happened so fast that he didn’t have time to suffer, or that the suffering would have been from facing the Unknown creature who killed him, not from the pain of dying.

Carmen told Karen that she had a bad feeling about staying there. She’d been kind of thinking about going home, but she was afraid of just leaving. Karen probed her gently about this ‘bad feeling,’ but didn’t push too hard. Karen suspected that maybe the girl had some small touch of the Art, but how would she know? All she could do for now was to let Carmen know that she should always trust her gut when it told her things like that. Karen trusted her as much as Chris and Jaime and would be sorry to see her go; but she would understand totally, if Carmen felt she needed to, she told the young woman. All she asked was that Carmen not just leave alone and without warning. If she decided to go, Karen would make sure that she was driven out to town or the airport, someplace safe. Then the conversation turned to other things, like guys. Andrew hadn’t been her type, but surely Karen must know other ‘eligible’ men that she could invite up to visit. Like Reg...? Karen laughed and warned her that Reg and Leigh were kind of interested in each other, so she might want to stay out of the way of that. Same with Aiden and Angie. She definitely didn’t want to get in Angie’s way! Carmen told her that Leigh had been cursed by being there with Karen. The guys all found her attractive, but all of them, guys and girls, assumed she was another teacher, and you don’t hit on the teacher. The conversation kind of petered out, and Karen gave Carmen another quick hug before getting up to go back to work. Just before she walked away, she squatted down and looked Carmen square in the eye and told her the she was always there for Carmen if she wanted to talk.

By dinner time, the atmosphere in the camp had become that of a subdued wake. All the kids understood that Andrew was dead, and each felt a little responsible for not having been nicer to him. Reg made sure that the alcohol was ‘accessible’ if anyone happened to ‘need’ it, though Officer Thorvault recognized what Reg was doing and was steering the under-aged kids away from it. His presence had also curtailed any pot-smoking that might have otherwise been happening. The dig had been shut down for the night, and everyone was at a loss for how to spend their time. There was none of the usual joking or music or storytelling around the fire that evening, and no one wanted to be the one who brought up Andrew so they all sat poking at the dirt with their toes. Karen had been sitting with her head on Justin’s shoulder wondering if it had something to do with the kid being named Andrew. She still felt the weight of Fr. Andrew’s death, and as she stroked Drew’s fur she hoped he wasn’t going to be dying next.

Finally, she couldn’t take the silence any more. She stood and moved so that all the kids could see her. She knew that they all understood by now that Andrew was dead, she started. And she also knew that, like her, they all wondered if maybe they could have done something to prevent it, if only they’d been nicer or something. What happened to Andrew was no one’s fault but the animal’s that did it. Yah, maybe they all might have been a little nicer to Andrew. But he seemed to prefer being a loner, so he didn’t make it easy for any of them. And chances are that nothing they might have done differently would have changed the outcome. In any case, whatever killed Andrew wasn’t going to get any of them.

Those words had no sooner left Karen’s lips than a cold wind whipped into the camp, wrapping around them all like a cloak of evil. The day had been pretty hot, and the heat had lingered, promising an even hotter day tomorrow. So the cold wind was completely unnatural, and it caused the campfire to dampen down as if some unseen hand was snuffing it out like a candle. Karen’s spine stiffened. She recognized the hot/cold breath of the Unknown. She looked to the others and knew that Reg and Leigh sensed it too. Then she felt the touch of Leigh’s Mental Shield helping her and the others push back the rising fear. She threw back her shoulders and lifted her chin. And she looked each of her students in the eye as she told them that there were people here who could help her protect them and IT WOULD NOT GET THEM.

Then the wind passed out of the camp and the fire flared back up to its normal size, and they heard the engine of the troopers’ Blazer as it pulled up to park near their Jeeps. But Karen would have sworn that she’d felt something laughing at her before the wind left. A moment later, Enright and Frank walked into camp, and when Frank caught Karen’s eye, he knew that something had just happened there. It was about 10pm. Karen nodded at him, and at Thorvault. She’d told him during her interview that she and Teresa had boxed Andrew’s things. All he had to do was get them from her and Justin’s tent before they headed out. The students were starting to get up and head for bed, and Karen warned them that it might be better for all of them to stay in camp at night until they caught whatever had attacked Andrew. She and Leigh caught each other’s eye and they intercepted the ‘couples’ and let them know that there was an unused extra tent, if they ‘needed privacy.’ Both couple feigned blank looks at the women as they headed toward their separate tents.