“Was born out of the body of a woman,” Janea said, her face firm. “The worst possible sort of rape, the highest violation of the credo of my goddess. If Freya had a fraction of the power of the White God, she’d be turning up in person to kill this Old One.”
“The worst part is that they can, in turn, reproduce,” Germaine said. “They can only reproduce by…the term means ‘breaking selves,’ which is assumed to be fission. But that means they are able to once again flood the planet with their minions. And the skru-gnon are, of themselves, powerful and fell creatures. However, there has not been a child of foulness found on earth since the very dawn of history. There are indications that, yes, the Old Gods battled the Old Ones for power on this planet and won in the very dawn of man. Gods versus the Titans is the most commonly known myth. If so, there should be no skru-gnon on earth: they would have never allowed them to remain. But now there appear to be at least two.”
“Which means that someone has managed to bring the Gar back,” Janea said. “And if so, we are all in serious trouble. That means that the stars have aligned: the Old Ones are returning.”
“We need to figure out where these things are being produced,” Barb said.
“That’s pretty tough,” Randell replied, thoughtfully. “Okay, I’m trying not to get totally weirded out by the conversation, but here goes. Let’s say that this was your run-of-the-mill serial killer.”
“We could wish,” Janea said.
“They’re bad enough,” Randell replied, darkly. “But this is about that sort of investigation. We’d look for specific clues as to the person’s identity. DNA, trace materials like fibers, car tracks.”
“Well, the thing makes tracks,” Barb said. “Problem being, you have to follow it through caves. I’m not sure how many more cave teams I want to lose.”
“At one level, I’m thinking as many as it takes,” Randell said. “But that’s not the point. The point is, there would be clues as to where they came from. Who they are. Where they live.”
“But with these things…” Janea said.
“Yeah,” Randell said. “They don’t have fingerprints. They don’t have ID. They don’t use cars. I think we’re just going to have to go through as many cave teams as necessary to find the lair.”
“Maybe not,” Barb said. “Look, Janea, what do we know about the Gar?”
“Not much,” Janea said. “And I’m working off of rusty memory. I’ll get Chao Lin to send me a full download on it. But…It’s large. I mean really big. The size of a mansion or maybe even a factory. It’s going to be noticeable if it’s above ground.”
“Does it eat?” Barb asked. “Drink? Defecate?”
“I’m not sure if it defecates,” Janea said, smiling slightly. “But it eats. That’s one of the things that is mentioned. It was mostly fed captives but it is generally carnivorous. Very carnivorous. One of its alternate titles translates as something like the Stomach That Walks.”
“So it has to be getting food from somewhere,” Barb said, musingly. “How did it get here?”
“That’s a puzzler,” Janea said, shrugging. “There’s a summoning spell in De Voco Turpis, but I know it doesn’t work. It’s been tried, trust me.”
“Who would try to summon something like this?” Randell asked, angrily.
“Who would kill a dozen, a hundred, women?” Janea asked. “The Gar gives its earthly acolytes power. Power over others, money, you name it. Anyone crazy enough and ambitious enough. And smart enough. There have been attempts to summon the Gar for centuries. Someone finally managed.”
“They’d have to have some pretty serious occult knowledge,” Barb said, crossing her arms and looking at the far wall. “That’s the point. The Gar doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It was summoned by someone with serious occult knowledge and access to some pretty obscure texts, at a guess. That’s the first point. Second, they’ve got to be somewhere in the vicinity. These things didn’t travel here from California. Third, it has to eat. A lot of food, probably meat, is going to nowhere.”
“Okay,” Randell said, nodding. “Now we’re cooking. You’re getting to our meat, if you don’t mind the pun. So we need to start looking for large food stocks going nowhere, who has been accessing obscure occult texts in this area and who in this area, has that sort of occult knowledge.”
“And I’m thinking that the ichor might tell us something,” Janea said, musingly. “I mean, it’s biological trace material. There’s all sorts of things you guys do with that these days. Right?”
“True,” Randell said, then frowned. “The good news is, I know who the samples got sent to. We’ve got our own local lab, which isn’t normally the case. And our blood sample guy is a real wizard at anything along the lines of biological samples.”
“Your body language is screaming that there’s bad news,” Janea said, smiling.
“Yeah,” Randell said, grimacing. “The bad news is, it’s Stan.”
“Stan, tell me you have something,” Randell said as the threesome walked into the lab.
Most FBI offices, even regional offices, which Knoxville was, do not have a major forensics department. Knoxville was unusual for two reasons. The first had to do with its proximity to Oak Ridge. During WWII, keeping German spies away from the Manhattan Project was a major priority for the FBI. And during the Cold War the priority was nearly as high.
With the thawing of the Cold War, it would have only made sense to dial back on some of the facilities in Knoxville. However, a combination of bureaucratic finesse and long-term congressmen had kept the Knoxville office at nearly the level of its heyday.
The second reason was less political and much more mundane. The University of Tennessee, also based in Knoxville, had one of the premier forensics departments in the United States. The Knoxville office could, therefore, draw upon top-flight students from the UT department and worked as a cross-pollination point with UT forensics.
The Knoxville FBI forensics department was, therefore, second only to Quantico in its level of knowledge and skill. And it arguably had a slight advantage in pure biologicals.
Unfortunately for the field members of the local office, the advantage rested mostly on the slightly stooped shoulders of one Stan Robertson, PhD.
“What complete moron sent this foul stuff to my lab?” the lab tech shouted, waving a vial in the air. “Blood, yes! Epithelials, of course! Saliva, urine, body parts, naturally! But it would take a moronic Republican-oh, sorry, oxymoron!-It would take a Republican to send this idiotic hodge-podge to me! And I note that the sample bag is signed by one Special, as in ‘I took the short bus to school, Agent Randell Smith!’ So you would be the moron, ey?”
Stan Robertson was five foot seven, sixty-ish, with thinning light-brown hair going gray and a lean, muscular figure. His face also turned beet red when he was angry. As he was much of the time.
“That would be me,” Randell answered evenly. “So you don’t have anything?”
“What is this stuff?” Stan shouted. “It is not, let me make this plain, any of the above, ey? It’s not even degraded human biologicals. Nor any mammal. I haven’t gotten through the full spectrum of reptiles, fish and amphibians, ey?”
“We were hoping you could tell us,” Randell said. “By the way, Stan Robertson, PhD, Mrs. Barbara Everette and Doris Grisham. Dor…Miz Grisham prefers to be called Janea.”
“Whatever,” Stan said. “There are two distinct samples. Very distinct. If I was to make a bet, they’re two different species! The DNA is just bizarre. The cell structure is as alien as anything I’ve ever seen.”
“There are cells?” Janea asked.
“Yes, there are cells,” Stan snapped. “If you can call them that.” He walked to a monitor and flipped up an image. “You want to tell me what that is?”
The cells on the monitor were stellate in shape and appeared to be almost jet black.
“That was in this junk,” Stan said, waving the vial again. “Then there’s this!”
The second picture was of more cells, but curved like a banana. The only similarity was that they were, again, black.
“That was from the first sample I got,” Stan said. “And those were really weird. They were reproducing like mad. I was afraid I had a pathogen on my hands but they weren’t infectious in any normal test. But as long as they had a food source they continued to reproduce. They would consume just about anything, proteins, agar, sugars, but they had a real fondness for potassium enhancements. Don’t get me into doctrine of types, I’m not a Christian
