Chapter Four – Carter

 

Night had settled over Shamrock a few hours before I finally rolled into town. It was nothing more than a sleepy little bedroom community of Chicago, really. Part suburb, part country. The kind of place people had moved to back in the sixties in their flight from the cities, and the kind of place that some still flocked to because the schools were decent enough, and your kids could still ride their bikes on the street.

Now, though, as I cased the closed-up Stop & Shop gas station, with its dark windows and no outward signs of the fire that had engulfed one of its customers only a few weeks prior, my stomach began to sink. Something about this town wasn’t right. Subtly off. Like there were deeper things at work here, things that had stayed somehow hidden from the regular townspeople.

I checked up and down the street before slipping out of the shadows and crossing over to the little convenience store. The traffic signal one block down switched from green to yellow, then finally to red. No cars were at any point of the intersection, though, and the lights just went through their automatic motions.

It was like a microcosm of this whole little town, I thought, as I stepped into the parking lot and headed up to the front door. A tag on the front notified me, and anyone else stupid enough to try and break into the gas station, that this was the scene of an ongoing investigation. Below that, another notice read that the structure had not been deemed safe for the public yet, but that a follow-up inspection was pending.

Yeah, this was definitely the place, all right.

With another look each way down the street, I tried the door. It just rattled in its frame.

Locked.

But that was to be expected. This was more or less a crime scene, after all. I pulled out my snap gun and tension bar from inside my coat. I placed the tension bar into the bottom side of the lock, applied some light pressure, and then slid the pick into the door’s lock.

Snap guns are sometimes called automatic lockpicks, but that’s not really accurate. They don’t necessarily “pick” the lock, like you would with a pick and tension bar. It was more like bumping, which was less subtle and involved a special kind of key that you lightly hammered into the lock to cause enough force to hop the cylinders into place. The snap gun, though, was quieter, if more obvious. Even with my PI license, I didn’t want to get caught with this thing.

I squeezed the hand trigger seven or eight times, popping the pick until all the tumblers were up at once, and I could turn the lock with the tension bar. All in all, it only took me about ten seconds from the time I’d walked up till I was past their security. Time flies when you’re committing petty crime in the name of protecting the innocent.

I opened the door and let myself into the darkened structure.

The smell of old smoke hung stale in the air. Not the good kind of smoke, either, like hickory or mesquite, or the fresh smell of pine. This was from flesh, plastic, hair. A noxious smell, the color of sickly greens and putrid yellows as it hung thick in the store. Beneath that smell was one of spoilage, of dairy products and other refrigerated items having gone bad. The power had probably been cut when the fire happened, meaning it had been over two weeks since the freezer or refrigerator had had any power.

To my left, the cashier’s counter stood, rows and rows of cigarettes stocked across the back wall. The rest of the store was really just two sets of free standing shelves that ran down the center, with two side aisles and a center one. Bags of chips, strips of jerky, candy bars. All the conveniences you expected to find in a store like this.

But, still, that smell seemed to saturate everything. I imagined even a nose not as sensitive as mine would be trying to recede in its owner’s head at one whiff.

Trying to ignore the stench as best I could, I narrowed my eyes and looked around, stepping away from the front doors so I’d be out of sight from any passing cars. I headed down the center aisle, my boots booming in my head with each step on the tiled floor.

We’re so inundated by noise now, that you only seem to really notice all the background noise of modern life when it’s gone. A building like this would have normally had humming refrigerators, neon lights, a carbonation pump on the fountain drinks. But, now, with the power disconnected, the silence was almost oppressive. In nature, at least, you had the sounds of insects and birds, other living creatures that seemed to add their own small part to the symphony.

In the city, though, silence like this was unsettling. Like you were creeping into the tomb of the victim who had died here. Like you were walking among the tombstones, instead of the Fritos and Ruffles.

Down at the end of the aisle, I saw the blackened smudge on the ground. The markers around the edges, signifying points of interest. A tiny pile of ashes that had been left more or less undisturbed. And, of course, there wasn’t a chalk outline. No decent police or investigative force actually did that kind of thing. It was just something for the movies and cheap crime fiction. Beyond the mass of numberings, a pile of undisturbed groceries had been left, spilled out across the floor near the cooler doors.

Marissa Hawkins. Local woman, married, early thirties. Her husband said she’d gotten a craving for a soda out of the blue, even though it was late, and decided to just pop down to the corner store and grab one. She hadn’t come back.

I stopped at the edge of the scene, careful where I was stepping. I squatted down on my haunches and examined it more closely.

She must have caught fire nearer to the freezer section, just a few meters ahead of me. I could see a marker there, just inside the door. Maybe she’d had the glass open, her hand resting on the sodas? Deciding the age-old question of whether she wanted Coke or Pepsi. As Marissa had begun to realize that something was happening to her, something she couldn’t control, she’d reeled back, knocking down the display of chips and bottled water behind her.

She’d come back down the aisle, confused. The two-meter long, black smoke smudge down the ceiling tiles were evident even in the darkness of the deserted gas station, and indicated she’d been on fire while heading this way. Her steps had likely been slow, uncertain, hence why the smudges were so thick for such a short fire.

Because, according to witnesses, it had been short. She’d fallen, grown unresponsive before the cashier made it from the front of the store with the fire extinguisher. A thin dusting of white fire retardant lay on some of the bags of chips to the right, missed when they swept up the rest.

Still, though, the extinguisher hadn’t helped.

Just a few minutes had passed, at best, before she was completely consumed down to the bones. Clothes gone, jewelry melted, bones scorched. By the time the fire department had gotten there, she was gone.

“What a way to go,” I murmured, my voice breaking the silence like a gunshot in an empty field. “Possessed by a demon, and not even knowing it. Poor lady.”

Because, riding below that smell of burnt meat and clothes, was a smell I’d grown to loathe during my time in the PRB. A smell that, no matter what other place the creatures came from, they always seemed to carry like a sick calling card of their passing.

Sulfur. Brimstone.

I could smell it just as plainly as I could see my reflection in the cooler glass.

I ran a hand down my face, scratching idly at my beard. The only question now, was how she got infected, and whether or not the other victims had had that same scent at their crime scenes. Once I could nail down the evidence, and figure out if, and how, all of them were connected, I could perhaps begin to find the source.

There was something else, though, beneath it all. A faint odor that seemed to grow stronger the more I focused on it. A familiar scent. A scent I knew well. One that I’d lived my entire life with.

A shifter?

I sniffed more deeply, my eyes widening a little. Not just any shifter, either…

And that was when I heard it.

The sound of a semi-automatic pistol cocking.