Lindsay Buroker - Torrent

Temi offered another nod. I couldn’t decide if I’d helped Simon’s case or not. For all I knew, she was imagining this athletic brother now.

A knock came at the door. Even though I was expecting Autumn, I leaped off the bed, ready to fight or flee-probably flee. I noticed Temi watching me. She hadn’t twitched.

“Charlie horse,” I said and shook my leg for good effect, then walked to the door.

Autumn Ingalls waited outside, her fist propped on her hip, her blue-dyed hair gathered into twin pigtails that stuck out to either side. Her eyeliner was a matching shade of blue. She’d added another piercing to one of her ears since the last time I’d seen her, this bringing the total to seven on that side. The other held a mere three, though the adjacent eyebrow balanced things out with a piercing of its own, a barbell with blue balls.

“What do you think a serologist has that I don’t?” Autumn demanded.

“Uhm, a microscope?”

Autumn picked up a black case. “Like this one?”

“I apologize. I didn’t know you’d added forensics to your repertoire.”

“Historical forensics, that’s what archaeology is. Besides anyone can run a blood test.”

“I have a feeling this blood isn’t going to be typical.” I stood back extending a hand. “Come on in though. That’s my friend Temi, and Simon is naked in the shower. If you walk in on him, it’ll be just like old times.”

Autumn snorted. “He wishes.”

At Temi’s raised eyebrows, I explained, “Early morning bathroom incident when Autumn and I were roommates and Simon crashed on the couch one night.”

“Without warning.” Autumn walked inside and laid her case on top of the TV stand. “I’ll look at your blood in a minute, but let me show you your slide first. You say that came off a living creature?”

“I’m pretty sure I hit it. Unless it turned out to be a leaf or branch, in which case I’ll apologize for wasting your time.”

“How about a plastic bottle?” Autumn asked.

“I’m quite sure I didn’t hit anyone’s diet cola.”

“If you say so.”

I hovered while she set up the compact microscope. Simon strolled out of the bathroom wearing his black Inigo Montoya T-shirt.

“Hey, Autumn.”

“Hey, Butthead,” she responded without looking up.

Simon nodded to me. “I remember her now.”

“What did you mean when you said plastic bottle?” I asked Autumn.

“Look for yourself.” She pushed the microscope in my direction.

I peered through the eyepiece. The light below the slide illuminated a patch of entangled strands that reminded me of a bowl of spaghetti noodles. “This was on my arrow?”

“Yup. It’s plastic. There were a couple of crystalline structures too that I identified as salt.”

I remembered the times I’d been close enough to smell the creature and the whiffs of the sea that had accompanied it.

Simon grabbed a Mountain Dew out of the cooler he’d brought in and sat on the end of the bed. “We’ve seen it up close now. I didn’t see anything that looked nonorganic about it, unless its weird black skin is plastic.”

“Its eyes seemed oily,” I said. “Iridescent anyway.”

“Plastic is of course made from crude oil,” Autumn said, “but what you see on the slide represents a final-stage polymer. There shouldn’t have been any hint of its oily origins about it.”

“Is there any way to tell if it’s…” Alien, I wanted to say, but Autumn hadn’t seen all the strange things we had, and she’d think I’d gone nuts if I asked that. She was one of my few college friends still talking to me-I didn’t want to scare her away. “Is there any way to see what kind of plastic it is, where it might have originated?”

“Enh, it’s pretty common.” Autumn grabbed Simon’s bottle of Mountain Dew.

“Hey,” he protested.

Autumn pulled scissors out of her case and cut into the top.

Simon folded his arms over his chest. “I was still drinking that.”

“Now you have another hole to put your lips on.” Autumn handed the bottle back to him, then dug out an empty slide.

Simon accepted his bottle, but he glowered at it. “There are too many girls working on this team now. I need to recruit some men.”

“Maybe Eleriss and Jakatra would like to join you,” I said.

“Real men don’t have glowing eyes. No thanks.”

“What?” Autumn asked.

“We’ll explain later.” I waved for her to finish poking around with the scissors and drop a coverslip onto her slide.

“That should prove interesting,” she said, then placed her new specimen under the lens. She checked it, nodded, then gestured for me to take a look.

Something very similar to the first sample lay beneath my eyes. “So, I’m either mistaken and my arrow lodged in a soda bottle, or our monster is made out of Mountain Dew?”

“Was the arrow lying on the ground when you found it?” Autumn asked. “Or did you pull it out of something?”

“Someone handed it to me, and he didn’t say. It was over in the woods though, not sticking out of someone’s refrigerator, I’m sure of that.”

“Is it possible this… creature-” Autumn’s pierced eyebrow twitched, “-you’ve told me about is wearing some kind of armor or outer layer?”

I ignored the skepticism inherent in that eyebrow twitch-if she’d read the newspapers and learned about the grisly slayings, she shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the idea of a genuine monster. “As in plastic chain mail? No, like Simon said, we’ve had a pretty good look at it now.”

“Technically,” Temi said, “is it a good look if it’s bouncing off the windshield of your van when you see it?”

“I saw it fine in the rear view mirror when it was chasing after us,” I said.

Autumn looked at each of us in turn, probably wondering if we were messing with her.

I held up one of my bags of stained dirt. “Here’s that blood sample if you want to take a look.”

“I believe I would.” Autumn accepted the bag and held it up to her eyes. “This is from the creature?”

“We’re not sure,” I said. “It might be from the interesting men we’ve been following.”

“I’ll check for blood type then. I can’t run a DNA test with this simple setup-” she tapped her case, “-but I ought to be able to tell a few things. This’ll be easy compared to trying to dredge up clues in thousand-year-old blood samples.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it,” I muttered.

After all the weirdness we’d witnessed, I’d be shocked if quirky things didn’t show up in Eleriss’s and Jakatra’s blood. Maybe they’d have phosphorescent cells to match their glow-in-the-dark eyes. Or maybe their blood would be full of nanorobots. Maybe the blood would shoot out rays and blow up our microscope to punish us for looking at it.

I yawned and rubbed my eye. What a week.

“I’m going to do some research of my own.” Simon moved his MacBook to the desk. “I keep forgetting to check on something obvious.”

“Which is?” I asked.

“Where those motorcycles came from.”

Right, we’d recorded the license plate numbers on the first day. “Montana, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, but who are they registered to? Eleriss and Jakatra Something-or-other? Or Butch and Bruno from Kalispell, men who have been missing for the last month?”

“That would be interesting to know, but that information isn’t publicly available on the Internet, is it?”

“Not publicly ,” Simon agreed with a small smile.

“Am I going to have FBI agents knocking down the door of my hotel room?” Temi asked.

“I think the nearest FBI office is in Phoenix. We’re probably safe for a while.”