Everyone else that we rescue can’t wait to get out of town and put this behind them, but she wanted to stay and help. I couldn’t make her go.”
I nodded. “She wants to be here for her mom, and to save her father. You know there’s no cure?”
“I don’t know that, but I’ve seen the inside of one of those things. Shot one no further than me to you one night with my twelve-gauge. One minute Rob and I are standing in somebody’s azalea bushes in the dark-this was about a month before we rescued Mazie-and the next thing I knew it was right in front of me. Almost tore my head off before I could get the gun up. What came out of the hole in its chest still gives me nightmares. You don’t come back from that. It’s not even the worms or snakes or whatever, it’s all the eating that they do on the inside.”
I nodded and stared into my coffee. “I found one pinned under a rolled-over jeep once a long time ago. My men and I tried to save the guy. We doped him up with morphine, which made him thrash around a lot less, but it didn’t knock him out, and then our medic cut him open, real careful-like. Every one of these things has a momma worm inside, much bigger than the other ones. We pulled it out and killed it.”
“What happened?”
“The little worms went crazy and the guy died.”
“Not good. You said “my men.” Are you military?”
“I was a long time ago. Not now.”
“So, then, the government knows about this stuff? Maybe we can get word out for help after all.”
“Nobody inside the government knows about this kind of thing any more. The group that I worked for was a secret to begin with, and they were shut down in a budget scandal claiming that they were making up ghost stories to get funded, in a time when everything related to the war was getting money. Better to just call the cops and claim organized crime.”
Greg leaned back in his chair and folded his hands over his belly. “It’s been tried. Back when the world was all nice and normal, my wife Valerie and I used to be friends with another married couple. We had known each other for years, and we used to get together every weekend. Now, Beth and Rick were good people, but they were also into conspiracy theories and all that stuff. My wife was always more interested in that kind of thing than I was, but they were fun to hang out with, and they weren’t fanatics about it.
“So, about a year ago, they showed up as usual with a casserole on bridge night, and they were all excited about a cover-up right here in Belmont. The government was snatching whole families right out of their houses for secret experiments, right under our noses. You know the kind of stories the conspiracy nuts talk about.”
“At least it wasn’t aliens.”
“At this point, I’m not ruling out anything. Anyway, we laughed about it at dinner, and Rick said he was going to check it out for himself. He and Beth came back not two days later in the middle of the night, all flushed and breathless with excitement. They had located the houses of some of the missing families and broken in. They found houses standing empty of people but full of their possessions, even their cars were still in the garage. Well, as you can imagine, this shook us up pretty good. Rick said that he was going to get the sheriff down to one of the houses the next day.”
“Well, no offense, but if it was a government conspiracy, wouldn’t the cops be in on it? Going to the sheriff would just be sticking your neck in a noose.”
“I said the same thing, but Rick and Sheriff Cloyd grew up together. Rick was convinced that they would help him expose the whole thing to the media, and the secret government agency would have to shut down. Exposing secret government projects is kind of a thing with that crowd.”
“Greg, it’s not a government conspiracy.”
“Hold on, I’m not done yet. He goes to Cloyd, says his piece. Cloyd’s not convinced, but he agrees that if Rick can get the news interested, he’ll follow up and put some credibility behind him. So, sure enough, Rick gets the attention of a TV news show that sends a crew in to interview him all the way from Cheyenne.
“Rick is strutting around like the cock of the walk, I tell you. He tells everybody he knows to come to his house the next day, the whole interview will be filmed outside on his lawn. So we go. There’s about fifty people all rubbernecking in a big circle around the film crew. They have a pretty blonde holding a microphone, two guys with cameras on their shoulders, and one of those vans with the dish on top. It’s the real deal. Rick even gets the star treatment with makeup and everything.
“Now, Rick’s plan was to talk about the disappearances and take the crew to four or five of the empty houses. He even had dates from when they stopped going to work and stopped collecting their mail. He was pretty shrewd and he didn’t want to sound like some crackpot, so he implied he was talking about some surge in small- town crime or a serial killer or something like that. He had it all worked out.”
Anne gasped. “Oh my God, I know what happened. It was all over the news.”
“What was?” I said. “I haven’t kept up with things the last couple of years.”
Greg looked at me. “You really don’t know? Rick walked out and started talking, just like he had planned, with Beth standing proudly beside him. But instead of his plan of giving the facts and letting the reporter be the one to come to a conclusion, he started going on about secret government assassination squads and spaceships and every other conspiracy theory cliche you can imagine. I’ve never heard anyone sound crazier.
“Then, with a grin, he pulled out a gun and killed Beth, right in front of the cameras. No warning at all. Then it was random people in the crowd, and finally himself, right in the head. They called it the Belmont Suicide Pact, and made out like Rick and Beth had planned it all from the start.”
“Sounds like the sheriff tipped off the bad guys and Rick got turned into a bag.”
“Well, no shit. I’m just glad that Rick never mentioned me to the cops or the news people, or I imagine that this house would be standing empty right now as well.”
“I’d think that after seeing all of that happen, you’d have been convinced that your friend really was crazy.”
“No, sir. I knew Rick for twenty years. He was a kind, thoughtful man, and even if he did like to talk about the occasional Man in Black, he wasn’t exactly the murder-suicide type. I knew something had happened to him, so I went checking around myself. I connected with his other friends and looked at the houses myself. Funny thing, the ones that he told the police about, maybe half of his list, were stripped clean, as if the families had moved out. The others were just like he described, empty of people but with all of their things still in place. Like they just up and left. Or were taken. So that’s what I do now, try and get the people out before the house ends up deserted like the rest.”
Anne spoke up. “I get that you’re helping people who are being held captive by bags and all, but how are you finding them? I mean, this isn’t a big city, but it’s still a whole town. There must be thousands of houses and apartments here.”
Greg put his mug down on the table and leaned back in his chair. “I think that’s enough free information from me tonight. Chuck said he brought you here because you claim to be able to help, and you’ve obviously run into these things before. Now it’s your turn. What do you know?”
I smiled. “I know that we’re lucky to have found each other, Greg. You know the battleground and where the enemy is, and I know who the commander is, and why the battle is being fought in the first place. The man behind it all is Piotr Rafal Ostrowski.”
Greg laughed. “Pete Ostrowski? I don’t think so.”
“You know him?”
“Well, not personally, but I know plenty about him. He’s a sweet old man and everybody loves him so much they call him Saint Peter. You practically need an insulin shot after shaking his hand.”
“Everybody knows about him?”
“I guess so. I mean, after all, he is the mayor.”
30
Greg went to the fridge, popped a round magnet off the door and tossed it to me. On the front was a cartoon picture of an older man with a halo around his head, sitting on a fluffy white cloud against a baby blue background. In rounded yellow balloon letters underneath the figure it said, “ST. PETER FOR MAYOR!” I recognized the face. Even as a campy drawing it gave me a chill. Anne took it from me to have a look.
