He reveled in it. He was alive.
The creature once known as Moloch walked towards the door, eager to escape the confines of the dank, stone structure where he’d been imprisoned. He moved with steady deliberation; the first steps slow and awkward, the joints in his knees and hips seemed rusted tight with disuse. After a few more steps the tissues began to remember and established the proper rhythm.
Where his movements had at first been disruptive, jerky, they now became fluid, composed and filled with a savage, feline grace. He walked the circumference of the room. Once, twice, three times, each step renewing his familiarity with physical motion and the laws that governed it.
As he walked he worked his arms, swinging them back and forth at the elbow and rotating them in their shoulder sockets, flexing the muscles of his biceps. He clenched and unclenched his fists.
Moloch opened and closed his jaw several times, snapping it shut to hear the sharp click of his teeth, force enough to crush bone to a pulp.
He delighted in the tension and release of the muscles in his back and legs. The sound of his claws scraping the rough stone underfoot sent a shiver of pleasure through his frame.
Moloch strode across the chamber. With a shove from one muscle-laden arm, he swung wide the door. It crashed against the outer wall with a loud metallic clang. He was barely aware of the sound, so entranced was he with the sight through the open door.
There, just steps away, lay freedom.
Sounds were assaulting him from all sides; the whisper of the wind, the trip-hammer of tiny hearts in the shrubbery.
He laughed, the sound welling up from the depths of his throat in manic glee and echoing into the night.
It was a sound that was less than human.
Lights gleamed off in the distance. Spying them, the beast’s thoughts turned to the terrible, gnawing hunger that had awakened deep inside. Too long he’d been locked inside that stone, imprisoned and left to die alone in the darkness. Too long he’d existed in that twilight between this world and the next, his life extended by the dark forces that had imprisoned him there.
Now he was free; free to act and to feed.
He extended his arms. The leathery wings that lay smoothly against the surface of his back extended with them, rustling in the breeze like the sound of a quickly snapped sheet. Bunching the muscles in his scaled legs, Moloch gave a powerful downward shove and cast his body upwards into the dark night.
Chapter Nine: Explanations?
Edward Strickland, Medical Examiner for Porter County, stepped into the chill confines of the morgue and switched on the lights. Though it was late in the evening, Strickland was preparing to perform one last task for the night, a task he had saved until the end, so that other duties would not prevent him from giving it his complete attention.
Strickland was an agreeable man in his early sixties, and had been M.E. for the last sixteen years. Despite his constant joking that the only reason he’d been able to retain his post was due to the fact that nobody else wanted it, he was a competent professional who got the job done and got it done right the first time. He was nearing retirement, but was in no way ready for it.
His work was a constant intrigue to him, and he pursued it with an almost fanatic devotion. To find him working far into the night, as he planned on this occasion, was not an unusual occurrence. The silence in the morgue after-hours was deep and peaceful, soothing, vastly different from the hectic pace that enveloped the facility during regular hours.
Brilliant fluorescent lights illuminated the room in which he was working, washing across the institutional green walls and slick linoleum floor. A body lay on the mortician’s table before him, its flesh a sickly shade of gray, the color of death. A wide white tag was tied to the big toe on the corpse’s left foot, giving the deceased’s name, age, and proximate cause of death. Strickland gave the tag a quick glance.
'Halloran, Kyle, Caucasian male, age 26, probable overdose,' he read to himself, humming aloud to the strains of Mozart that wafted through the room from the speakers set in the ceiling above, just loud enough to be heard.
His rubber-soled shoes made barely a sound as he circled the body before him, carefully looking it over for any obvious telltale injuries, dictating his findings aloud so the microphone above the table could pick them up for transcription.
When he thought he’d seen all there was to see, he moved to the tray of instruments that was set up alongside, and picked up a scalpel. The cool metal of the blade glinted sharply in the light.
'Now, my dead, young friend, ' he said to the corpse as he reached out and made the first incision in the slightly rubbery flesh, 'let’s see what secrets you’re hiding.'
Three hours later he was finished. When he’d first read the tag, Strickland had expected the post-mortem to be a rather straightforward piece of work. But now that he was finished, he realized that this was anything but a straightforward case. He discovered a number of things that just didn’t make any sense, and while they bothered him, they also sparked his professional curiosity; something that didn’t happen all that often anymore. In over thirty years of forensic medicine, he thought he’d seen it all. The body on the table before him proved him wrong. Determined to get to the bottom of things, he dialed Detective Wilson’s office extension.
'Hello?'
'Damon, its Ed. Figured I’d find you there. Don’t you ever go home?'
Wilson laughed. 'Sure, right around the same time you do.' The two men had known each other for years, from before Damon had gone off to Chicago. They’d gone to the same high school together, had even dated some of the same women. Their friendship had picked up again once Damon had returned home.
'What’s up?' Damon asked.
'I just finished that autopsy on the young fellow you pulled out of that crypt over on the Blake family plot.'
'Halloran. Kyle Halloran.'
Ed grunted. 'Yeah, that’s the one. Thought you should know that it wasn’t your everyday, run of the mill experience. Some of the results I got are pretty strange.'
'Strange funny or strange weird?'
'Strange weird.'
'Like what?' Damon asked. Hell, it was an open and shut case. Witnesses said the guy had been drinking and snorting enough cocaine earlier in the night to flatten an elephant. Too much physical exertion after all that and you ended up in cardiac arrest.
'Well, for one thing, it wasn’t an overdose that killed him.'
Damon laughed. 'Yeah, right. Try telling that to his heart and respiratory system. They’re still trying to figure out what hit them.'
'That’s just it, Damon. The toxicology tests showed high traces of benzoylecganine, so the guy had been doing cocaine earlier that night, enough to send most people straight to the moon. Combine that with a blood alcohol level of 1.8, and you can be damn sure he was as high as a kite when he went. Probably didn’t feel a thing. But it wasn’t the drugs or the booze that killed him.' Ed paused, and then said, 'He bled to death.'
'What?' Damon asked, shocked.
'You heard me,' Strickland replied. 'He bled to death.'
'But that’s not possible, Ed. There were no wounds on the body, and we certainly didn’t find anything to indicate that at the scene. For a guy that size to lose enough blood to kill him, we should have found a lake of the stuff. We didn’t; the place was as dry as a bone.'
'Didn’t you tell me the floor of that tomb was just dirt? Could it have simply seeped into the ground and whoever was at the scene just missed it?'
'C’mon Ed. My men are better than that. Besides, I’m the one who answered the call. There wasn’t any blood. Nada, nothing, zippo. Catch my drift?'
