City Under the Moon Read online

  “It’s a terrible sin.”

  Ding! “With God’s help, we’re trying to find the man who took him.”

  “I don’t think it was a man,” Kenzie replied. “Her wounds were the result of an animal attack.”

  “An animal?” Tildascow feigned surprise.

  “No question. Probably a large dog. She had a bite mark on her torso, just below her rib cage.” With a conspiratorial whisper, she added: “I hate to say it, but I think it’s possible that the animal…” She shook her head, unable to speak the words.

  Yeah, there was a good chance that the kid was currently working his way into something’s lower intestines. Tildascow had considered that, but she liked her read on those blood patterns—the kid had been taken with care. And there would’ve been some evidence if an animal had eaten the kid, even if it took him somewhere else for a quiet snack: a shoe, a sock, maybe a drumstick.

  After a moment of silence, Tildascow whispered, “God forbid.”

  “God forbid,” Kenzie agreed, waving her medal in the sign of the cross.

  And then a colossal crash shot through the ward.

  It had come from an open room further down the hall. A woman’s shriek followed, and then a wet, heavy thunk.

  Officer Dougherty was the first to head toward the commotion. Kenzie followed, her white coat billowing like a superhero’s cape.

  A heart monitor launched from the doorway crashed through the plasterboard on the opposite wall. It must have hit the power line, because it ignited a fire and took out the breakers.

  The overhead lights went out. Alarms blared. Confusion and fear spread through the crowd.

  And then someone leaned out from that doorway.

  He was large, hunched over, and moving deliberately, a shadowy wraith in the dim, flickering light. His eyes sparkled orange as they reflected the flames.

  The emergency lights kicked in, dropping a sickly blue tint on the hallway. The man in the doorway was gone.

  Dr. Kenzie continued toward his room. Tildascow caught her by the arm. “Stay here!”

  “There’s a patient in there!“

  And then a howl echoed through the hallway.

  Everyone froze, listening intently, as it diminished in slow, melancholy waves and finally drowned beneath the alarm.

  Kenzie backed away.

  Tildascow drew her Springfield M1911A, the FBI’s standard .45. Fuck the wimpy Glock they dumped on female agents at Quantico.

  Officer Dougherty approached the doorway, motioning for her to cover him. She nodded and crept in his tracks.

  Behind them, the plainclothes detectives had emerged from Cooke’s room. One of them yelled, “Everyone get into a room and close the door!”

  Tildascow threw her back to the wall next to the doorway and dropped to one knee. Dougherty took the door, weapon ready.

  He fired with no hesitation.

  At the same moment, something large and pink whizzed past Tildascow’s head, hammering Dougherty backward into the electrical fire.

  Keeping clear of the doorway’s line of sight, Tildascow pulled Dougherty free of the jagged machinery. Shards of glass and metal had embedded in his back, but he’d escaped serious burning.

  The pink projectile fell off and rolled across the floor, and then Tildascow realized it was a body—a mangled, decapitated torso in nurse’s scrubs. Blood sputtered from the severed throat.

  What. The. Hell?

  The door slammed shut with enough force to dislodge the metal frame. A bellowing roar emanated from behind it.

  Was it a fucking bear?

  Through the thickening haze, Tildascow realized another commotion was brewing at the far end of the hall. Most of the hospital workers and patients had already fled, but something was happening in Holly Cooke’s room. One of the detectives rushed back inside.

  But Tildascow had to focus on the room in front of her. She threw her back next to the doorframe. The handle turned. The latch clicked.

  Now wild screams from Cooke’s room, followed by gunfire. Crashes and clangs throughout the dark hallway. Blinding smoke.

  Glass shattering behind this door. The window?

  She threw the door open and took the turn.

  The room was clear. And devastated. The window had been shattered. One remaining fluorescent flickered off shards of glass clinging to the pretzeled frame. The other light fixtures dangled wires and plastic, and the heavy bed frame had been twisted silly. Blood everywhere. Syringes, swabs and tongue depressors floated in the red pond on the floor.

  And yet, it was oddly still.

  Tildascow raced to the window, shuddering as her bare feet splashed in the muck. The night air pricked her face as she scanned First Avenue four stories below. Traffic had stopped; motorists were out of their cars.

  But the whatever-the-fuck was gone.

  More screams from the hallway—there was still another crisis.

  On her way out, she saw the nurse’s severed head sitting lopsided in the sink. The poor woman’s blank eyes were still popped in shock.

  The hallway was a chaotic jumble of gore. Near Cooke’s room, a—

  a dog?

  —had Kenzie pinned down, with its massive paws on her shoulders. As it bit into her chest, Tildascow fired five shots from her 1911.

  The beast jerked from the impacts, taking all five before rolling off. Maintaining momentum, it sprang up to—

  to its hind legs?

  —and turned to Tildascow.

  The smoke was thick, but this thing was only twenty feet away, looking right at her, and she still couldn’t figure out what the fuck it was.

  It roared, and she answered with three more shots: good, upper-body hits, knocking the thing back down to its knees. But it was still plenty vital.

  Clip empty, she dropped her spent mag, stocked her spare, slid the rack—

  But the animal had had enough. It pounced at the picture window and smashed through the reinforced glass.

  She raced after it, stepping over bodies and limbs to reach the window. Leaning out over First Avenue, she searched now for a second animal.

  Gone. The gathering crowd was still reacting in its wake.

  She retreated from the window, and the magnitude of the carnage inside hit her. A doctor had been broken backward over the nurses’ desk, a nurse impaled on the metal guts of an overturned gurney. One of the plainclothes cops sat slumped with his ground-meat face in his lap.

  In the middle of it all, Dr. Kenzie lay on her back, gaping at the ceiling like a dying fish. “She needs attention!” Tildascow yelled.

  Officer Dougherty staggered to her side, dazed and bleeding himself. Kenzie looked like a goner, but at least she had the presence of mind to keep pressure on her chest wound.

  Heads emerged. Screams followed. Two hospital cops arrived from the stairs. Their faces went pale as they surveyed the floor.

  “Don’t touch anything,” she yelled. “Nobody touch anything!”

  She looked into Holly Cooke’s room, searching for a bandage—gauze—something to dress Kenzie’s wounds.

  One of the plainclothes detectives who’d been questioning Cooke was face-down in a bed of his own guts. The other was slumped in the corner.

  The only sign of Holly Cooke was the imprint she’d left on the bedsheets.

  Four

  Bellevue Hospital Center

  December 30

  9:23 p.m.

  Tildascow spent the better part of the next four hours giving statements to various law enforcement officers. But no matter how many times she recounted the events, the police were never going to be able to make sense of it. She couldn’t make sense of it. Scenario after scenario played through her mind, and the only conclusion she’d come to…

  Well… There had to be another conclusion.

  The NYPD had cordoned off the intensive care ward and moved witnesses to a nearby cardiology department for interviews. She’d stuck around and jumped through hoops to hear some of the other witn
esses’ statements, but it was time to get back on the move.

  Ostensibly looking for the rest room, she slipped through the throng of UN, CDC, hospital, state, city, and federal investigators on her way out of cardiology. Passing one door, she caught a glimpse of Dougherty gesticulating wildly with bandaged hands.

  As she took the turn toward the restroom and elevator cluster, she altered her persona from witness to investigator, resetting her ponytail, throwing her shoulders back and moving with purpose, and kept going until she reached the IC Ward, where CDC Epidemic Intelligence Service Officers—the “Disease Detectives”—had taken over for the shell-shocked NYPD officers.

  From the smashed window at the elevators to the scorch marks from the fire, the carnage stretched thirty feet. At least half a dozen mangled bodies lay scattered in the hall, and left far too much blood to distinguish individual patterns. The closest corpse was the plainclothes detective with the mangled face. As Tildascow passed, an EIS forensic scientist swabbed its shredded flesh and peered at the sample for some kind of clue.

  Hey, honey—I think we know the cause of death.

  She scanned the crowd, looking for the hospital official—he’d be the thunderstruck guy thinking “What is all of this going to mean?” When she found him, a short man in a K-mart suit, the only word he said was “Christian”—no indication whether that was his first name, his last name, or his brand of God. When she asked to see the surveillance tapes, he nodded emptily and escorted her back toward the elevator.

  As they passed the second floor, he cleared his throat and muttered, “We have a no-animal policy.”

  She failed to cover her giggle with a half-assed cough.

  The little guy sulked, like she was laughing at the end of his career.

  They arrived at the first floor and she followed Shorty to the security office, a nondescript alcove barely worthy of a broom closet. A couple of NYPD plainclothes were waiting outside, their badges hanging from their necks. Their emasculated frowns meant the feds already had the room. She flashed her own badge and left them with a sympathetic nod.

  The “command center” was a suffocating room with loud fluorescent lights and no windows. It stunk of stale coffee and lunchmeat belches.

  Four agents were huddled in front of the monitors. They’d boxed out a hospital HR guy, who was trapped between a coat rack and a water cooler.

  “Special Agent Tildascow?” asked one agent. “It’s an honor to meet you. I’m Anderson. Matt Anderson. I’m a fan.”

  Respect was nice. His brown suit was not. “Nice to meet you, Anderson.“

  “You want to see it from surveillance?”

  “Please.”

  The hospital still used industrial three-quarter inch video tapes for surveillance, resulting in low-rez images that suffered even further on their tiny black and white monitors. A hospital cop at the controls reversed the jog wheel and the image rolled back, undoing all of the gore the animal created.

  The tape began with a view of Doctor Kenzie shouldering her way between the uniformed cops to reach a chart on the wall next to a patient’s room.

  “That’s 424, Holly Cooke’s room,” Anderson said.

  “Do we have another angle on this?” asked Tildascow. This camera’s giraffe’s-eye view only covered the lower quarter of 424’s door; the dark window in the walkway corridor dominated most of the frame. And the whole thing blurred here and there as the camera tried to focus on an exit sign. “And any sound?”

  Anderson shook his head.

  On the tape, a nurse approaches Kenzie from the observation walkway. The woman seems unsteady on her feet, maybe feverish. They speak for a moment before Kenzie directs her down the hall.

  “Who is that?” Tildascow asked.

  “Another nurse, a Nancy Laurio,” Anderson said, reading his notes. A confirming nod came from the HR guy. “This is the last we see of her. Looks like she’s sick or something. Kenzie sends her to lay down.”

  “Back it up,” Tildascow requested.

  The hospital cop zipped the video back to the moment when Laurio first approached Dr. Kenzie. She did appear ill, but she wasn’t coming to Kenzie for medical advice.

  “See how she approaches?” Tildascow said, studying Laurio’s body language. “She’d wanted to look at Cooke’s chart.”

  Kenzie points Laurio down the hall, maybe to that back room where it all started.

  “Was Laurio on duty when they brought in Holly Cooke?”

  The HR guy nodded.

  On the screen, Laurio walks out of the frame a moment before Officer Dougherty approaches Kenzie. Their conversation quickly escalates into a spat. In the foreground, a nurse rises from the desk, looks toward that room at the end of the hall, and then goes off in that direction.

  That, thought Tildascow, was probably the nurse who lost her head.

  Another minute of heated pantomime between Kenzie and Dougherty follows, and then Tildascow herself enters the scene and steps between them. She moves Kenzie back toward the observation window, they speak for a moment, and then the commotion begins. Dougherty, Kenzie and Tildascow leave the frame, and the screen goes black.

  The hospital cop fast-forwarded until the picture returned, dimmer now under the emergency lights.

  “Here’s where it gets crazy,” Anderson said.

  A plainclothes detective emerges from 424 to investigate what’s going on down the hall. He spins back toward Cooke’s room, where he apparently sees something that scares the hell out of him. He draws his weapon and fires twice, and then he’s struck and stumbles out of frame.

  A nurse and a doctor rush toward the fallen detective—and then a dark blur surges out of 424, ramming the doctor with such force that he breaks backward on the desk. The nurse tries to flee, but the creature rakes her back. She spins, hosing the walls red. And then the animal stands on its hind legs.

  They could only see it from the elbows down. “This is the best angle we have?” Tildascow asked.

  “It’s the only angle.”

  The creature pounces onto Kenzie and they fall out of frame, leaving only her quivering arm to indicate the moment when it bites into her chest.

  Tildascow’s shots come and the creature quakes from their impact, rolls past the camera, and lands on its feet in the bottom left-hand corner of the frame. More shots, and then it smashes through the window.

  “Did the doctor die?” Tildascow asked.

  “No,” muttered the HR guy. “She’s in surgery.”

  Two rooms. Two incidents. Two women, thought Tildascow. Assuming they never met before the hospital, they had to have had contact before it all began.

  She asked, “Did Laurio work Cooke’s arrival at the ER last night?”

  The HR guy nodded.

  “And do we have that tape?”

  They’d already pulled the previous night’s video. The tech selected the new deck for the monitor’s feed and zipped backward.

  At 22:34 on the time code, two emergency medical technicians burst through the back door of the Emergency Department, pushing Holly Cooke on a gurney.

  “Let me take over,” Tildascow said. The hospital cop slid out of the way and she advanced the video frame by frame, making a mental recording of the details.

  In the counterterrorism business, a hand grenade won’t do when you need a horseshoe. Tracking is about details, and details are about recollection. Outside of spy novels and TV shows, the concept of “photographic memory” is nothing more than hyperbolic bullshit. Sure, a couple of people in the world can remember details from every day of their life, but some of them can’t even memorize their times tables. Even the savants, those with so-called “eidetic memory,” are hit or miss when it comes to immediate and comprehensive recollection. No one can make flawless, on-the-spot mental recordings.

  No one except Brianna Tildascow.

  In the mad scramble to do something after 9/11, the Department of Defense ramped up their super-soldier programs with more aggressive leaps
into theoretical science. They recruited elite test subjects from federal law enforcement and the military for their “Prime Program,” next-next-generation therapies running the gamut from chemical and surgical enhancements of the mind and body to speculative prep for futuretech.

  Tildascow graduated from the FBI Academy at Quantico in the spring of 2002. For the first time in her life, she’d been in the right place at the right time.

  The program unfolded as a series of escalating “educated experiments.” They began with brain stimulant cocktails, which resulted in a lot of quasi-profound philosophical introspection—and the munchies. Soon the docs introduced advanced meditation techniques, which enabled her to pull off some psychophysiological circus tricks like suppressing pain or slowing her heartbeat. Neato stuff, but nothing that martial artists hadn’t perfected centuries ago.

  The real breakthrough came when she underwent a procedure called repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (RTMS). The doctors bombarded her brain’s left frontotemporal lobe with low-frequency pulses, dismantling some of its subconscious processes. This allowed her to shift into a mental manual drive called hyper-systemizing.

  In order to minimize its workload, your mind makes use of reliable patterns to enable quick recognition. In a bowl of fruit, you’ll immediately understand that an orange is an orange—you’ve seen oranges before and you know this one won’t transform into a robot or spontaneously explode. That process is called systemizing.

  RTMS short-circuited Tildascow’s mind’s automatic systemizing, enabling her to shift her perception into hyper-systemizing, absorbing and storing an unprecedented amount of visuospatial detail. Hyper-systemizing mimics the characteristics of Savant Syndrome, but her ability to shift in and out keeps her from being crushed by the onslaught of details that frequently paralyzes savants.

  The Prime Program provided excellent tools, but it didn’t give her a hotline to God, a key to the universe, or an understanding of why people liked jazz. But once she learned how to really use it, all became clear—especially jazz.

  Patterns. Mathematics, music, astronomy, sociology… Everything relies on patterns. Especially human behavior.