F Wilson - Fatal Error

Remembering Veilleur's request to find out about the birth defects, Jack said, "Weezy told me they didn't let you see him?"

"I got a peek." She made a face. "He looked hairy… black hair all over… kind of like a monkey, you know?"

Weezy said, "That could be lanugo. Some infants are born with a lot of body hair."

"I read about that while I was pregnant, but this seemed awfully thick. But that wasn't the weirdest…" She shook her head.

"What?" Weezy said.

"I thought he had… you're so not going to believe this."

"Try us," Jack said.

"Well, it looked… I only caught a glimpse… but it looked like he had… tentacles."

Jack felt queasy as he remembered how they'd been making Lovecraftian jokes about the Order's schemes, but this…

"You mean like an octopus?"

"No, they didn't have suckers or anything like that. They looked more like snakes… like slim little garter snakes."

"Instead of arms?"

"No, he had arms too, although his fingers looked kind of clawish. Two arms with a tentacle coming from… they looked like they were coming from his armpits."

Something stirred and rustled in the back of Jack's mind. Something long buried. He glanced at Weezy and saw she'd gone dead white.

He was about to ask her if she was all right when Dawn spoke again. She was staring straight ahead, oblivious to both of them.

"Maybe he's better off dead-if he's dead. I mean, they say he is, and I kind of wish I could believe them, but…"

Jack felt like he'd just stuck his finger in a live socket.

"Wait-wait-wait! You don't believe he's dead?"

She sighed. "I know it sounds totally paranoid, but you probably already think I'm crazy because of the tentacles, so I might as well go for the gold, right? No, I don't believe he's dead."

"And you base this on…?"

She shrugged. "Mother's intuition? Or maybe the way they wouldn't let me see his body."

"What excuse did they give?"

"Well, he-Doctor Landsman-told me that since I'd already signed the adoption papers, he wasn't officially mine, and anyway, they'd already sent him to the morgue."

Jack glanced at Weezy. Some of her color was back but she didn't look right. What was upsetting her? Had she made a connection to something she'd read in the Compendium?

"Did you mention the tentacles?"

Dawn nodded. "He said I must have been hallucinating from all the stress of the delivery. Well, yeah, I was stressed, but not to the point where I was totally seeing things."

"But why do you think this doctor would lie to you?"

"Ready for more paranoia?"

Jack had to smile. "Bring it on. I eat it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner."

"Okay. Try this: Doctor Landsman always did the ultrasounds of the baby himself, never his tech, and he'd never let me see them. He'd show Mister Osala, but never me. I'm sure he knew about these deformities in advance, and so did Mister Osala. I've done some thinking. I think the adoption papers were fake. I think they've taken the baby themselves."

"Why?"

She shrugged. "I don't know. To experiment on? To put in a sideshow? I don't know. Call me paranoid if you want, but I just know they're lying to me. They are so lying to me."

Jack debated whether or not to tell her about his call to the morgue. As the mother, didn't she have a right to know?

"I don't think you're paranoid, Dawn. In fact, I'm pretty damn sure you're not."

She frowned. "What do you mean?"

"When Weezy told me how they wouldn't let you see your baby's body after he died, I had the same thought: No reason in the world they wouldn't show you unless they couldn't-because they had no body… because he wasn't dead. Now, granted, I've got a suspicious mind that sometimes leads me astray, but more often than not, it's on target."

Dawn straightened. "And this time?"

"Well, you tell me: No death certificate was filed for a newborn with a Wednesday morning time of death."

"I knew it!" She balled a fist. "I'm not crazy!" She looked at Jack and then Weezy. "But where is he? Where's my baby?"

"If I had to guess," Weezy said, "I'd say he's in this Mister Osala's house."

Dawn gasped. "No way! I was just-"

"Kicked out," Jack said, seeing the logic. "You had to go because he was expecting another guest." He ripped the top sheet off the legal pad and prepared to take notes. "First off, how do you spell his name?"

"O-s-a-l-a."

Jack printed that at the top of the sheet. Something about the name… but it wouldn't come.

"Okay, now tell me everything you know about Mister Osala and his place…"

"Jack," Weezy said as he followed Dawn out the door, "I need to talk to you about something."

He watched Dawn disappear into her apartment, then stepped back into Weezy's. The plan was for him to pay a visit to Osala's place and see if he could get in and find the baby, or evidence that a baby was living there.

"What's up?"

"Did Dawn's description of her baby stir up any memories?"

"Should it?"

He did remember a faint reaction, but it had been overshadowed by Dawn's belief that her baby was still alive.

"Covered with dark hair… clawlike hands… and tentacles? Ring any bells?"

"No."

"Back when we were teens… the basement of the Lodge…?"

And then it hit.

"Oh, jeez!"

… the feeling of something coiling around his neck… black-furred paws scraping along concrete… a snakelike thing-maybe a tentacle-waving in the air…

No wonder she'd gone pale. He was probably looking a little pale himself right now.

"You don't think there's any connection, do you? I mean, how can there be?"

"Lately I've been catching references to q'qrs in the Compendium, so they're up front in my mind. Srem doesn't present a drawing of a q'qr-at least I haven't found one yet. Her references are always oblique because, like so many things in the Compendium, she assumes the reader is already familiar with what she's discussing. But that thing that chased us back in Johnson seems to fit what I've put together about q'qrs. And things that Dawn said about her baby fit too."

Jack was having trouble wrapping his mind around that one… or maybe his mind simply didn't want to go there.

"But q'qrs disappeared with the First Age, what, fifteen thousand years ago."

"Maybe not. Maybe some survived the cataclysm."

"But Dawn's baby?"

"Think about it: Q'qrs were created by the Otherness back in the First Age. Maybe 'created' isn't the best word-genetically retrofitted or repurposed from human DNA is more like it. They became the source of the Taint, what we know as oDNA, which everyone carries to varying degrees. So, in a sense, they've never been away. They live on, right here in our genomes."

Lots of them lived on in Jack's genes, and he didn't like it. But he saw where Weezy was going.

"I get it. According to Veilleur, Jonah Stevens's plan was to produce a child-Dawn's-so packed with oDNA that it would be able to replace the One. You're thinking he wound up creating a q'qr instead."

"Not a real, one hundred percent q'qr, but something close."

"But what could the Order want with it?"

She shrugged. "Who knows? Maybe to use it as a mascot. Maybe they plan to supplant the One themselves."

He gave her a look. "What?"

"I don't believe that either. Just throwing things out. Whatever their reason, we should know it, don't you think?"

"Exactly. That's why I'm going to pay a visit to Mister Osala."

Her expression turned worried. "You'll be careful, please?"

"I'm always careful."

For some reason he had a feeling he should be especially careful with this Osala guy.

The lobby of Osala's building had an almost cathedral air about it. High-ceilinged but not that high. Maybe it was the wrought iron affixed to the entry door, or the dark wood and pointed arches within that gave it a gothic feel. Maybe it was a cathedral-consecrated to money and set in the ionospheric rent district.