“Holy mother of . . . for God’s sake, doc, why do you have that?” Jamie clasped a hand to her chest as if to still a racing heart and shook her head at the figure in front of us.
A cascade of fluorescent lights hummed to life from above, and I blinked at the large circular tank in front of me. Inside, the Puppet hung from black nylon straps under its arms, suspended in a light blue fluid that seemed to act as a preservative, the black moldy hair as greasy as the day it had crawled out of the forest. Clear tubes ran into its slightly parted mouth, among more that led to other places on its nude body. I remembered that I’d seen this before, on my first night at the reserve, when O’Brian had left the metal door open as she went to check on me. I’d been too startled by my circumstances to question it at the time, but now it started to make sense.
“Scientific progress sometimes relies on discretion.” Dr. O’Brian strode deeper into the hidden room and sat down behind a lone computer. “I can’t study these creatures without something to put under the microscope. With how backward the others can be about such things, I knew keeping fresh specimens wouldn’t go over well. Sean would throw a fit if he knew, but it’s perfectly safe.”
The room seemed to be some kind of converted storage area, longer than it was wide, with all sorts of tables and cabinets crammed together, each full of lab equipment. A well-worn swivel chair sat behind the chipped desk at which Dr. O’Brian worked, and an array of tools filled a rack on the wall beside her, everything from medical instruments to radio components. Multiple unfinished projects lay in various stages of completion, a disassembled green army-surplus radio in one corner, a shallow round dish full of some oily roots in another, with the Puppet in its tank being the most profound of them all.
Jamie inched closer to tap on the glass like it was a fish tank at the aquarium and roamed the motionless Puppet’s physique with a curious eye. “Is he still alive?”
“Yes and no.” Dr. O’Brian navigated an array of folders on her computer desktop to pull up a specific word document, though I couldn’t make out the title from where I stood. “What you’re seeing is a type of synthetic amniotic fluid that I helped pioneer in my university days. We breathe fluid like it in the womb as infants, until our lungs develop properly. With it, and a helping hand from an oxygen ventilator, I can keep the specimen in sedation without causing further decay of vital tissue.”
I shivered, the air-conditioner over the doorway blasting a rather icy gust down the back of my neck. “So, it is alive?”
“The body is. Unfortunately, almost all the neurological activity ceased after prolonged submersion. If the creature’s consciousness is still in there, it’s buried so deep that I doubt he’ll ever resurface. Still, it makes taking samples easier.” Turning in her chair, Dr. O’Brian looked to me with her spidery fingers poised over the keyboard, a blank section of the document waiting on her screen.
So now it comes to it. Alright, stay calm. Let’s start with the easy truth and see where to go after that.
I opened my camera case and unfolded the little screen at the side. “Just after our hunt this morning, I found this on one of our trucks. It was less than fifty yards from our positions. Jamie and I thought it best not to tell anyone else, since this is more of your kind of work.”
Handing her the camera, I pushed the play button, and let the video crackle to life.
Dr. O’Brian held the device with careful hands, Jamie and I peeking over her shoulder with anticipation. I watched myself stumble back to the door with panted breaths, saw the lens focus in on the crude black symbol, but when the part came where the strange tall figure should have turned its head, the screen glitched just like it had at the site . . . and the painting didn’t move. Instead, the video ended with me spinning around as Jamie came up behind me, and my thumb accidentally hit the end button.
“No.” I gasped in bewilderment.
Dr. O’Brian blinked at me, puzzled. “Sorry?”
My face burned, but I jabbed an accusatory finger at the camera. “I saw it move. I swear, the stick thing in the middle moved.”
She flicked a sideways glance at Jamie, and Dr. O’Brian’s voice took on a skeptical tone. “Did you see it move?”
At that, Jamie folded her arms, and dug the toe of her boot into the solitary mat on the concrete floor. “Well, no. But This wouldn’t be the first time Hannah’s seen weird stuff. I mean, back on the lake she . . .”
Jamie caught herself, but it was too late.
“She what?” As if she could smell our secret, Dr. O’Brian cocked her head to one side, a curious gleam in in the depths of her corneas.
With an apologetic sigh, Jamie leaned against a nearby table laden with various laboratory equipment and gestured to me. “You want to say it, or me?”
My intestines knotted together, and I winced.
Now she’s really going to think I’m nuts.
Our adventure in the southlands had brought us across the path of a group of orphan children that had fashioned a life for themselves as pirates aboard an old sailing ship. We’d been their prisoners for a short time, and during that interlude, I’d encountered a creature of massive size that swam beneath the waters of Maple Lake, which had led me to a terrifying discovery.
Some of the Breach-born could speak through unknown psychic channels . . . and I could hear them.
It had only been through extreme luck, and the surprise arrival of a mysterious stranger that had kept me alive in the events that followed. I hadn’t told the other officials, only Chris and Jamie knowing the extent of my ability, since I still didn’t understand it myself. At last, I might finally get some answers, but at what cost? If I hadn’t wanted Dr. O’Brian to think I was stupid over religion, I certainly didn’t wat her to think I was insane, or flighty over a grainy video.
Focus on the big picture, Hannah. Chris’s life might be at stake. I can’t leave any stone unturned.
I scratched at the back of my head and took a deep breath to steady myself. “You remember how you told me once that psy-organics are the most dangerous mutants there are?”
Dr. O’Brian nodded.
Looking down at my boots, I picked at a tear in my coat sleeve. “There was another psychic mutant in Maple Lake, big as a whale, with crocodile teeth. When it surfaced, I . . . I could hear it, inside my head, just like the Brain Shredder. The pirates were freaked out; I guess everyone else that looked the Leviathan in the eye died. I never said anything because I didn’t want you to think I was crazy, but I heard more voices when I filmed that painting on the door. It spoke to me in the exact same way.”
Her skeptical half smirk faded, and Dr. O’Brian swiveled her head to stare at Jamie. “You were there?”
“I was.” Jamie rested both hands on the desk, adamant in my defense. “I mean, it makes sense, doesn’t it? She survived a Brain Shredder on her first night, then the Leviathan. If there really was something to see or hear from that symbol, wouldn’t she be the one to catch it?”
Silence filled the room, nothing but the hushed sigh of the doctor’s computer fan to break the tension.
Snatching up the camera, Dr. O’Brian pressed play again, and poured over the short video with intense eyes. Once it ended, she replayed it over and over at least five times. Part of me wondered is she did it to find a way to disprove me, but at this point, I didn’t care, so long as we could use this moment to gain her trust.
“There.” She stabbed a finger into the pause button and Dr. O’Brian held the camera up so Jamie and I could see.
I squinted at the blurred colors, frozen at the last possible frame of the video. All I could see was a world half upside down, the camera held at my side during recording, aimed at the nearby trees.
A shape caught my attention, and beside me, Jamie sucked in a breath.
They stood hidden within the trees, three figures that peered from the shadows with eerie stillness. The white eyes, peg-toothed grins, and grey skin was unmistakable, but one horrifying detail stood out sharply despite the pixilation.
All three Puppets stood upright.
“Wha . . .h-how . . . why are they doing that?” I raised my eyes to meet Dr. O’Brian’s and found her watching me, her mouth formed into a grim line.
“Do you know where Puppets come from?” She folded both hands in her lap, and leaned back in her chair with quiet patience.
Confused, I rubbed at the bandage on my arm, the skin under it itching with nervousness. “The Breach?”
Dr. O’Brian reached down to the bottom drawer of her desk, which she unlocked with a key from her keyring. “And if I asked you to find the Breach on a map, could you?”
Truth be told, I’d never thought about it, and once again, I had no answer. “I didn’t know anyone could.”
“Technically, you can’t.” Pulling a folder from the locked drawer, O’Brian opened it to spread a series of photographs across her desk. “As a hole in reality, the Breach opens and closes its entrances at random locations, usually in coincidence with an electrical storm, so it can’t be marked on a map, or seen by satellite. Like gravity, it is invisible, but its presence is felt all over Barron County. Only a handful of our number have ever found their way inside, and none of those who ever made a trip into the Breach are alive today. Randy was one of the few who had gone in and out successfully, and he died before I could get a comprehensive record of his past experiences. However, I did manage to get some information from him before the air raid . . . most of it revolving around a name.”
At that, she laid a rough drawing before me, scratched onto a piece of notebook paper with inexperienced, heavy pen strokes. It was definitely not the best illustration, but I didn’t have to look very hard to make out the looming silhouette of the four-fingered being with no face, and a jagged head. Written underneath it in scratchy printed letters were two words.
Tauerpin Road.
My entire body flushed cold, and instantly I was back inside that beat-up gray car again, with Matt teasing Carla about cops, and the rain pattering on our windows as we drove into the night. I remembered that sign, rusted green and white on a bent metal pole in the weeds, barely illuminated in the glow of Matt’s headlights. I remembered the narrow strip of gravel, straight and flat as could be, stretching on and on into the abyssal night. But most of all, I remembered the figure, that slender human-sized shadow that had stepped out to watch us drive on, how it stood there in the rain like a statue.
I looked up to find them both staring at me, and I realized I’d started to shake.
There’s a reason it wasn’t on Google maps.
“I saw it.” It came out as a whisper, my throat tight with recognition of what we’d narrowly avoided that fateful night. “I saw the sign, the night I first came here. It wasn’t on our route, so we didn’t take it but . . . I saw the road.”
Jamie’s face paled, and Dr. O’Brian went stiff with shock, as though I’d admitted to murder.
“No way that was by accident.” Jamie raised an unsteady finger to point at the image and took a small step back as if the picture would reach out to grab her. “It knew. The Breach knew you were there. Maybe it could sense that you were different, that you were, I don’t know, sensitive to this kind of stuff? Like a clairvoyant for mutants.”
“It would explain why the Brain Shredder couldn’t completely paralyze you. If certain people are in fact immune to this sort of thing, then it only stands to reason they can also find the Breach on their own as well. I wonder . . .” Dr. O’Brian turned the sketch over in her hands, her face masked in a contemplative expression.
Had anyone told me a few months ago that I might be ‘sensitive’ to some kind of psychic energy, I would have rolled my eyes and tuned them out. Even now, I was more than content for things to stay the same; to go on patrols with Jamie, have dinner with Chris, and keep up a regular routine as a ranger until someone else found a solution to the Breach. The last thing I wanted was to be different, to stick out from my new friends, or to push the boundaries of the unknown into dangerous territory. Yet, just like that first night, when I’d almost died to a floating ball of shoes, I found myself thrust into the path of this dilemma without much of a choice on the matter.
‘You are different.’
The words shot from the recesses of my memory like bullets, and I could see the stranger in the yellow chemical suit all over again, his kind grey eyes looking down at me as he carried me through the poisoned ruins of Collingswood. He’d come from nowhere, saved me, and then vanished like a ghost in the fog. I hadn’t seen him since that day, but even now the stranger’s voice remained as fresh in my mind as if he were standing right behind me.
‘That’s why you’re here, Hannah.’
Wrapping both arms around myself to stave off a cold, sinking feeling, I glared at the figure on the paper. “But what does that thing have to do with the Breach?”
Dr. O’Brian began to lay out a series of sketches, photographs, and notes one-by-one, studying my reaction the entire time. “The Breach is as old as Barron County itself, yet to my knowledge, we never had an outbreak of mutations until now. Something had to have changed, or rather, something was removed from the equation . . . something that had been holding all the other mutations back. A creature so intelligent, so powerful, that it could bend the forces of the void to its will and create minions to do its bidding.”
Out came more pictures of Puppet markings, made with sticky reddish brown clay mud, black clotted blood, and even bright crimson viscera of their latest kills. They had been smeared on abandoned houses, smashed vehicles, or large rocks where burrows had been dug underneath by the foul creatures’ hands. Handprints were a common theme, but there were squiggles that were too orderly to not be some kind of indiscernible script, and crude drawings of animals that I recognized; towering Echo Spiders, slinking Birch Crawlers, and Bone Faced Whitetail. However, in almost every case, there appeared the same symbol nestled amongst the others; little people surrounding a tall figure, with trees everywhere and a long set of lines, like a road, under their feet.
“They were made to look like anyone; loved ones, strangers, passers-by, so perfect, so lifelike, that they could trick normal humans into believing they were real, thus luring them into the Breach.” Dr. O’Brian dropped more pictures onto the growing pile, her eyes never leaving my face. “Bound to the apex being, these lowly copies would have been psychically intertwined with their maker, perhaps even sharing a collective consciousness. There’s a reason they look so much like us, Hannah. There’s a reason we call them Puppets. At one time someone, or something, controlled them all.”
Whispers rippled through my brain, a chorus of hushed voices in the recesses of my mind, and I stared at the last hand-drawn sketch, a more intricate design that displayed an enormous being twice as tall as the trees. It bore a vague resemblance to a human, but with rounded tree-trunk legs, four fingers on each arm, and gray skin patterned like tree bark. Its head rose like an old stump, ringed with that same crown of twigs, and its face was a mass of interwoven branches and roots. Whoever had drawn it had done so with feverish strokes, and I noted a few places on the paper that were wrinkled as if they’d gotten wet, almost like the residue of saltwater droplets.
At the bottom of the page, an inscription had been etched in neat, but shaky handwriting.
It killed Mark.
“What the hell is that thing?” I gasped, unable to tear my eyes away from the paper, as if someone had put a magnet into my head and reeled me in like a fish on a line.
“That, my dear, is an Oak Walker.” Dr. O’Brian picked up the paper to look at it herself, which broke me free of its intoxicating pull. “It was the largest, deadliest, most intelligent creation of the Breach. Earliest accounts from our old security logs indicate the Puppets worshipped it as a god. All sightings that I’m aware of only referenced one of these species, and unfortunately, everyone who has ever seen it is dead or missing. None of the Ark River folk can remember much from their past, but every time I showed them similar images, they all get migraines. Whether it vanished, or died, it is reasonable to conclude that the Oak Walker was the last of its kind . . . and now that it’s gone, we’re stuck dealing with the environmental chaos of its absence.”
Jamie gnawed at her thumbnail, a nervous tick in her right leg. “And now the freaks are getting smarter. I mean, why else would they target us without attacking? Maybe somehow they’re starting to remember.”
“Or something is helping them remember.” Dr. O’Brian mused, running a finger over one of the depictions of the Oak Walker, deep in thought. “Without their master, the Puppets seem to have fallen into disrepair, their minds and bodies rotting like dolls left out in the rain. If they have indeed found another Oak Walker, or somehow the old one returned, then it may only be a matter of time before they ‘heal’ enough that they’re indistinguishable from real people . . . and then we’ll never be able to see them coming.”
Tap, tap, tap.
Light knuckles rapped on the metal door of the miniature lab, and Sandra’s voice called from the other side. “Doctor, the lab report is in from the Lantern Rose tests.”
“I’ll be there in a second.” Quick as a flash, Dr. O’Brian swept everything back into her drawer and locked it, powering down her computer in the same fluid motion.
Once on her feet, she handed me back my camera. “Duty calls. I know I’ve probably given you more questions than I’ve answered, but the old-timers really did a good job of keeping the Breach a secret, so I’m still in the dark about a lot of this as well. All the same, I think its best if we keep this conversation just between us three. We don’t want rumors going around about a potential Oak Walker in the area causing mass panic. If you find anything else, let me know.”
“Absolutely.” Jamie hooked her thumbs into her pistol belt and adjusted where the thick leather sat on her hips. “We’ll keep our eyes peeled for anything else we can find.”
“Do that.” Shifting her gaze to me, Dr. O’Brian wagged a motherly finger in my direction. “And from now on, you come tell me when you hear voices, see things, or have any kind of anomaly-induced psychic episodes, understand? I want to make sure we monitor this, in case it would become a health risk.”
Great. That’ll give me something to think about. So much for sleeping tonight.
Doing my best to avoid looking at the Puppet in the tank, I scooped up my camera and headed for the door alongside Jamie. “Thanks doc.”
“Of course.” Pausing at the door, she let us back out into the busy foyer of the main ward and made an amicable nod. “This is my job, after all. And for the record, when it’s just us three, you can call me Alecia.”
With that she strode off down the right-side hallway, leaving Jamie and I to walk ourselves out. Left out in the cold periphery of the vast room, I couldn’t help but feel restless, now that the first stage of my ‘idea’ had been completed and pushed through the glass double doors to the outside.
“So, what now?”
I swung my head around, shocked that Jamie had been the one to ask, her eyes on me with patient expectation. She still didn’t have the full picture of what was going on, and if I was honest with myself, nether did I. For her to place such faith in me both warmed my heart and sent needles of anxiety through my brain.
Gnawing at the inside of my lip, I took in the surrounding area, bathed in the feeble glow of the autumn sun, and felt the pinprick of the key stick me beneath my shirt.
That’s step two, then.
“I need to find a map.” I stretched so my lower back would pop, and the two of us started off down the road toward the lodge. “One we can take with us.”
“Take with us where?” Jamie kicked at a rock in the path, never losing pace with me.
Shoving both hands into my jacket pockets, I refused to meet her eye, already dreading what would come next. “I don’t know.”