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“Yeah, like I said, it was bound by physics. Whatever kept them attached to the macro plain is probably why they showed up on the videos.” Unlike the last time people filmed the Anubis, there would be evidence. “Fuck.” Reese sloshed the tea again. “People are going to see those videos. They’ll panic. They’ll—”
“We’re removing the feeds from the Internet as fast as they come up.”
Reese laughed. “You never remove anything from the Internet, Colonel. Rule number one of the World Wide Web.”
“We go to the source, and we flood the same servers with video of our own. Well made, computer imagining uncanny enough to discredit all the rest.”
Putting more videos out there that looked so real they couldn’t be believed would damage the validity of the real ones. “I’m fairly confident the conspiracy theorists won’t care.”
“And no one cares about what conspiracy theorists think.”
True.
But this time, the conspiracy was real, and that’s why Reese had to ask. “Was there… was anyone killed? There were a lot of people in my neighborhood, and if they covered as much distance as you—”
“There’ve been no fatalities reported. Considering how dangerous these things are when confronted, I get the impression they weren’t interested in going after people. Except for the one that came to your house. It made a significant deviation from the trajectory of the others to get to you. And from what you’ve said, it doesn’t sound like it tried very hard to kill you.”
When Reese thought back, he had to agree. Slower or not, morenormalor not, he shouldn’t have been able to outmaneuver the creature. Outrun it. Or just plain escape by sheer luck. The only thing he was sure of was killing it with a cleaver.
And its expression: pain and confusion. It had been fleeting, but there.
It had never expected Reese would succeed.
“I wonder why?”
Harrington shrugged. “For the same reason those men took you to Canada instead of killing you in the woods?”
Reese’s shoulder twinged, and he winced.
“I don’t suppose any of those scrambled memories of yours might have cleared up?”
The twinge increased until invisible teeth grazed the bone. “No.” Reese blinked back tears. “No, I still don’t remember.”
Colonel Harrington shifted his gaze.
Reese had been careful not to let anyone see the marks. They’d been healed, impossibly healed, when he arrived at the hospital, so there were no records of a wound.
His heart defect had healed, too. But they had records of that. It’s why Reese refused to return to the cardiologist for fear of what he’d see in a side-to-side comparison.
Because despite HIPPA laws, the Colonel would find out that the doctors in Canada weren’t wrong about Reese's heart being perfectly normal, and their equipment wasn’t faulty and didn’t miss the defect that the US doctors said was there.
Harrington stepped back. “Take a nap. Or at least rest. Andwhenyou remember what happened in Canada, I hope you’ll trust me enough to tell me.” A lilt to his voice sent a wave of worry through Reese.
Like maybe things hadn’t even begun to go downhill.
* * *
Laura Phillips sat in the passenger seat of the SUV, driven by an officer. He’d introduced himself as Private First Class Adams when she stepped off the plane.
Normally, she would have driven herself, but she’d been too tired to argue after flying back from France.
But any fatigue weighing her down evaporated as they turned into the subdivision off the main road. Far enough from the city to keep traffic at a minimum and close enough for people to commute to work in less than half an hour.
The flashing police lights cast patches of red and blue over the fronts of nearby houses. Beyond the uniforms, a half dozen military vehicles and two white vans. The forensic teams stood near the bumper with their equipment unloaded and on the ground.
She’d hoped the cops would have gotten bored and left since the military personnel took over. Apparently, cruising the city had less interesting scenery than watching a house on Maple Street.
At least the forensics team had followed orders and stayed out of Dr. Dante’s house until she could do a walkthrough.
