black markings along his wrist.
“Mr. Monroe is being honored by local residents for saving a group of professors who were nearly attacked outside of the medical university.”
“Tha’s right,” Alvin slurred.
“Tell us what happened, Mr. Monroe.”
“Buncha big dogs came runnin’ along. Looked like they were gon’ hurt those teachers and so I jumped on ’em.”
“You jumped on them?”
“Yes’m,” Alvin said with a nod. “I jumped an’ scared ’em away. I bit one of ’em too. They din’ taste too good.”
The reporter chuckled nervously and asked, “Were they the same rottweilers or pit bulls connected to tonight’s events?”
“Are rottweilers big ’n’ mean?”
“Generally, yes.”
“They got big teef?”
“Yes.”
“Then these were them,” Alvin declared. “Dat’s dat.”
The report shifted back to the studios, where the regular anchor said, “There’s been plenty of speculation about what sort of dogs these were. Preliminary testing on several sets of remains have led examiners to conclude they were canines affected by a disease that may have also led to their feral behavior.” After that, he briefly acknowledged the efforts of a pair of “martial arts enthusiasts” who came to the aid of police during the riots by fending off several of the wild dogs. He then apologized for the correspondent’s comments regarding rottweilers and assured dog owners that the network had no intention of offending them.
“There’s a lot more like that,” Cole said, “but that’s pretty much the gist of it. Check this out, though.”
The next link went to a website that looked as if it had been put together by someone with some tech know- how and a rig in their basement, as opposed to a media conglomerate. After one click of Cole’s finger against the mouse, Paige’s screen was covered with still pictures of Half Breeds running through different sections of Kansas City and the surrounding areas.
“Haven’t we seen enough of these?” she asked.
“These are pics taken by people on their phones or cameras who sent them in to MEG’s site. These,” he said while using the cursor to circle the pictures in the left column of the screen, “are the originals, and these,” he said while circling the right column, “are the ones I touched up.”
The left column was labeled, GOOD TRY. The right was labeled, BUT NOT GOOD ENOUGH.
“Let’s just try an experiment,” Cole said as he clicked to an online search and typed in the words,
Within .28 seconds, several pages of results came up. Some were in the vein of, “Hundreds claim to see monsters in streets of KC” and “rottweilers or werewolves?” while others had labels such as, “Monster pictures proven to be fake” and “Werewolf hoax turns into riot.”
When Paige looked over at him, Cole was beaming and nodding as if he’d just cured a disease. “Nice job,” she said.
“Nice? Just
“KC has been quiet and the press won’t stop talking about sick dogs, but you did a very nice job with adding to the confusion.” She got up and patted him on the head. “Now if you’ll get out of my room, I need to pack.”
“Pack for what?”
“A trip to Kansas City. I want to check in on those Mongrels.”
Cole logged out of his e-mail account and walked toward her door. “You’re going to see Officer Stanze, aren’t you?”
“He was a big help,” she said with a shrug. “And a pretty nice guy.”
“Staying in the good graces of the authorities for a change, huh?”
Flicking her eyebrows up and putting on a dirty little smile, she said, “I guess you could call it that.”
“Wait. What?”
She had more than enough strength in her left hand to shove him out of her room and shut the door behind him. “You stood toe-to-toe with a Full Blood, so you can handle Chicago for a few days,” she shouted through the door. “Check on Stephanie tomorrow. I don’t like the…”
Although Paige continued to issue orders, Cole turned away from her room and walked back through the kitchen. After having been gone for a while, the door to his freezer took some coaxing before it swung open. Once he was inside his metallic, somewhat cool living space, he sat on the edge of his cot and sighed, “Just because I sleep in a freezer doesn’t mean I’m stuck here like some piece of meat.”
He picked up his phone from a stack of plastic crates that served as a table and pressed one of the speed dial buttons.
After two rings the connection was made and a voice said, “MEG Branch 40, what can I do for y—Cole! Sorry about that. Just looked at the caller ID. What’s up?”
“Hey, Stu. Is Abby around?”
“She’s listening to some EVPs.”
“Can I talk to her?”
“Sure. Hold on.”
A few minutes of static was finally interrupted by a click and a tired, vaguely interested, “Hello?”
“Hi, Abby. This is Cole Warnecki. Remember me?”
“Yes.”
“I was wondering if you were free some night. Maybe for dinner or something? I’d like to hear some of your ghost stories. Heh.”
“Like…a date?” Abby asked in a more interested voice.
“Sure. Yeah. That’s what I had in mind. How about it?”
“Welllll…”
Cole pulled in a breath, during which he reminded himself that he wasn’t some nervous kid wringing his hands. All right, so maybe he was a little nervous, but his hands were steady. “Look, I’m not a stalker or anything but you sound really nice and I’d like to treat you to a meal. We can swap weird work anecdotes. It’ll be fun.”
After a pause that stopped just short of unbearable, Abby said, “I’d like to hear more about Digital Dreamers.”
Cole smiled in a way that used muscles he’d all but forgotten about.
“There’s just one thing,” she added.
Bracing for the worst, he asked, “Yeah?”
“Do you even know where Branch 40 is?”
“If you’d like to meet, just tell me when and where. I’ll be there.”
“Really? Wow. How about the diner across the street from me in fifteen minutes?”
“You might have to work with me a bit more than that,” Cole said.
“I know. I’m just messin’ with ya. Got a pen?”
Cole wrote down the where and discussed the when. They talked for about two more hours and then met online in one of the roughest games of
Epilogue
The chamber was so hot and cramped that it might as well have been carved from a living thing. Mud was caked onto the rounded cement walls over layers of mold and multicolored, multilingual profanities. Daylight poured
