The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: The Case of the Calcified Costumer, Part 1 of 6

Once again, Mickey Malloy’s schedule is dictated by the dead. A strange corpse has brought him back to Washington, DC in the dead-center of a sweltering summer. When a mummified, crystalized woman is discovered in a hotel room, they know exactly who to call.

Until Only Roaches Remain is available as a Kindle ebook, in paperback, and as a DRM-free ebook.

The Case of the Calcified Costumer is the final story in The Billy Club Bastard Case Files: Until Only Roaches Remain. It features characters from every other Roaches story, and Old Dead Guy and Devouring Storm should be read first to avoid spoilers.

Content warnings: death, gore, body horror.

FRIDAY AFTERNOON, JULY 2, 1943
THE HAMILTON HOTEL, ROOM 414
DOWNTOWN, WASHINGTON, D.C.

“What in the hell did you call this?” Mickey Malloy asked.

“I was saying that these symptoms appear consistent with tekkotsu dai chōkoku gasu exposure, sir,” Deputy Regional Inspector Walter Ortíz answered. He waited while Mick examined the corpse. The gaggle of D.C. cops they'd barricaded outside were whispering just loud enough to distract them. Mick did his best to ignore them.

The corpse was seated at a table in an armchair in the corner of a swanky hotel room. At one point it had been a woman; Mickey was pretty sure about that based on her hair. By the time he’d been called in, she looked like a mummy. Her skin was shrunken and dry, cracking and flaking off in sections half-an-inch thick even as they watched. She clutched a watered-down cocktail in her left hand, not a drop spilled, and her right hand was wrapped around her own throat.

It had happened gently, but fast.

“And what in the hell is 'tech-o-sue die choke-oak-oo?'” Mick asked. He'd never seen anything have that effect on a body.

“It literally translates to 'iron-boned sculpture gas.' The Black Dragon Society cooked it up.”

Mickey recoiled and clamped his gas-proof handkerchief over his nose and mouth. He'd been in the trenches and learned to not fool with chemical weapons. The official held up a strip of red paper.

“Hostile Substance Battery came up red. Air's safe,” he said. Mick exhaled with relief and stuffed the handkerchief back into his pocket.

“Iron-boned sculpture, huh? Leave it to the Black Dragons to make something like this sound poetic,” Mick grumbled. A stiff clump of the corpse's brown hair cracked off her scalp and fell to the carpet. “No other victims?”

“No, sir, making a gas attack unlikely,” the official said.

“Exactly what I was thinking,” Mick said. It would be tough to gas one specific room of a hotel without someone else getting a taste.

The kid was sharp.

“Where’d Keaton find you?” Mick asked.

“Norfolk City Jail, sir,” Ortíz said. He was young, maybe twenty-five, and a bit shorter than average with a dark complexion. He wore a sharp charcoal and black houndstooth suit, cotton and breathable for the humid weather. He kept his thick black hair restrained with a gallon of pomade, and his thin mustache was as carefully maintained as his hair. Ortíz was leaning on a wooden crutch that supported his right leg, though he still moved with sure, precise steps.

“How’s that leg treating you?” Mickey asked. Ortíz had taken a Nazi bullet through the knee in New York, in the same firefight that had killed George Keaton.

“Every day’s different,” he said. “Today’s not so bad.”

“Good, glad to hear it,” Mick said. He nodded at Ortíz’s crutch: “How much longer are you on that?”

“‘Til I’m done walking, sir,” Ortíz replied.

“Could've been worse,” Mick said. Ortíz just nodded in silent agreement.

It had been six months since the firefight on the streets of Manhattan between the Office and Abwehr assassins. Percie Fredericks, another official, had bought the big one from the same burst of gunfire that had done in Ortíz’s knee. The krauts tried to finish him off with a grenade, but George Keaton jumped on top of it to save him.

Mickey remembered Ortíz at Keaton and Fredericks' funerals, still stuck in a wheelchair. To be back in the field in less than six months was a marvel. If the kid wanted to be on his feet, Mick was going to let him run full speed.

“So if it wasn't gas that did this to her, what was it?” Mickey asked, redirecting the conversation back to the dead body in the room.

“Zoo Base thinks it would work as an injectable liquid,” Ortíz answered. “But if she'd been stuck anywhere, the stretching skin would've pulled the puncture site open as big as a dime.”

“Yeah, I'm not seeing anything like that either,” Mickey said. “You gone over the rest of the room?”

Ortíz nodded, and Mickey took the opportunity to plop down on the foot of the bed.

“Tell me how this chōkoku stuff works,” Mick said.

“Zoo Base is still working on it,” Ortíz said, “But they say it causes the calcium in the body to crystallize, first in the joints, in seconds.”

“So the body locks solid,” Mick said. Ortíz nodded. Mick pointed at her cocktail, still clutched in a claw grip. A single drop still hung off the tip of her straw. “That's how she didn't drop her glass.”

“Yes, sir. Then the same happens to the skin and organs. Death is a race between cardiac arrest and asphyxiation.”

“Ugly way to go. Does it hurt?”

“They don't think so.”

“Could her drink have been spiked?”

“It wouldn't have been as quick, and she'd have made a ruckus if this had happened slow. Had to be direct into her blood stream.”

“So, it had to be injected, seconds after exposure she couldn't move, and the process itself doesn't hurt?” Mick said, looking to Ortíz for the confirmation which he provided. Then Mick asked: “Then why's she grabbing at her neck?”

“Huh,” Ortíz said. He cocked his head to the side to study the dead woman. Her right ear fell off while he watched.

“You ever heard of a Panama prick?” Mick asked.

“A what?”

“Let me show you,” Mick said, then he slipped his switchblade out of his shoe. The oiled knife snapped out eagerly.

“What are you doing?” Ortíz asked nervously.

“You sure everything in here has been gone over?” Mick asked. Ortíz nodded.

Mickey knelt before the woman, eliciting pops from both his knees. Her calcium-infused skin flaked off when he cupped her right cheek, reminding him that he should always bring gloves to a crime scene. He shoved his blade between her locked teeth and pushed down to lever her jaw open. It didn't budge.

“In the thirties, some enterprising guerrillas in Central America needed something to off the assholes still running plantations down there,” he said. He tried twisting the knife, but the woman's jaw was set like concrete. “So what they came up with was a way to poison them that also sent a message. They would... wait, I think it's giving.”

With a final wrench, the woman's crystallized joints cracked and her entire lower jaw snapped off. Powdered blood and saliva erupted from the maw in a choking cloud that coated Mickey's face.

“Gah!” he shouted, then tripped backward and landed heavily on his rear. He scrambled to his feet and rushed to the tiny bathroom.

Ten minutes of vomiting and scrubbing with scalding water later, he was finally satisfied that he'd left the woman's remains gunked onto a pile of hotel towels. He staggered out of the bathroom drying his face, chewing on a handful of breath mints. Ortíz was shocked silent. He'd never seen an official conduct an investigation quite like Malloy did.

“Why in God's name did you do that?” Ortíz finally managed to ask.

“Look in there,” Mickey told him. Ortíz didn't move an inch. “Grab a lamp and look at the back of her throat, kid.”

Mickey's order snapped the younger official into action. Ortíz slipped a small flashlight out of his pocket and eased himself down next to the seated corpse, careful not to step on any of her fallen remains.

“What am I looking for, sir?” he asked as shined his fungal blue light into the woman's gaping face cavity. Mickey continued his story like he hadn't just caught a mouthful of powdered person:

“Cut out that 'sir' crap, Walt. Way back, these Panamanian guerrillas objected to their people doing all the work while the fat cats kicked back for a drink and a siesta. They'd slip a laced dart into the bossman's straw, and when he went to take a sip...”

“Found it!” Ortíz said.

“Slurp! He'd stick himself in the back of the throat. Just like that,” Mickey said. He added: “Careful, they sometimes use double-ended needles to get the doctors, too.”

Ortíz nodded, then gingerly reached deep into the woman's mouth and, with a little tug, pulled out a silver needle. He dropped the poisoned dart into a glass evidence bottle with a clink.

“Damn,” Ortíz muttered. “It would've taken us until the autopsy to find that.”

“You got to think on your feet with this gig, Walt.”

“The chōkoku seems like a lot of trouble for undue attention,” Ortíz said. “Why do it this way?”

“Everything here seems designed to delay an investigation. She got done quiet so no one would find her 'til the maid came through this morning. They hid the needle so that even when she was found, we'd have to cut her open to figure out what happened. And even with the flags this chōkoku stuff would raise, like bringing us in, it is perfect for concealing the victim's identity. We got no clue as to who the vic is.”

Ortíz agreed with every point Mickey had made. He pulled his notepad out and recounted the information he'd already gathered.

“Everything I got is from the front desk ledger. We called the night manager in to get more info, but this is what I got so far: a Gladys Florentine of Woodstock, Virginia checked in yesterday afternoon for the whole weekend,” he answered. “She was in town for a dress fitting. She was getting hitched soon, to a sailor.”

“A squid, huh? Well, nobody's perfect,” Mick mumbled. Ortíz continued his report:

“No records showing any phone calls, though there was nothing regarding whether she'd taken any visitors last night.”

Mick grunted and walked a full circle around the dead dame. He couldn't tell a thing about her physical features, not after what the chōkoku had done to her skin and what he had done to her face.

“Huh,” Ortíz grunted. He cocked his head to the side and looked a little closer.

“What is it?” Mick asked.

“That isn't a country girl's dress.”

“And what would you know about dresses?”

“Austere is in fashion now, old man,” Ortíz explained. “Women are repairing old dresses, hemming and re-stitching their clothes themselves to waste less for the war effort. But this, this is just made to look economical. Professional stitching, brand new fabric.”

Mickey raised a notched eyebrow at the young man.

“My mother's a seamstress,” Ortíz explained sheepishly.

“Irregardless of how you know, you're adding to my theory,” Mickey said.

“And what's that?” Ortíz asked. Mick stalled.

“The front desk give a description of Miss Florentine?”

“They're the ones that found her like this, claimed it was her.”

“So that'd make her white, brunette, late-twenties, thin side of average?”

“Looks that way.”

“Double check with them for me.”

“Sure thing. But why? What's this theory of yours?”

“I'd bet even money that there is no Gladys Florentine,” Mickey replied. “Whoever stayed in this hotel room was here to kill this specific woman, and she went to such extraordinary lengths to conceal the deceased's identity because our killer has now assumed it.”

“Damn,” Ortíz whispered. “We didn't find a handbag or anything else with a name on it.”

“Didn't think you would. Our killer checked in as Gladys, lured the vic here, offed her, then took everything she came with and left as a new woman,” Mick concluded.

“You know your stuff,” Ortíz said with admiration.

“That's what they tell me,” Mick grumbled. “I need you to get access to information on all the female missing persons in the city, and in the surrounding areas in Maryland and Virginia. It's going to be too soon for someone gone missing just last night, so work the case officers.”

“Work them?”

“Try President Hamilton, first,” he said, and handed Ortíz a quartet of rumpled sawbacks.

“Alexander Hamilton wasn't a president,” Ortíz said. He didn't know what to make of Mickey's methods.

“Nobody's going to care about that when they have ten fresh bucks in their pocket,” Mickey said. “And if that don't work, try President Roosevelt.”

Mickey pulled a stamp out of his pocket, a perfect imprint of FDR's signature, and tossed it to Ortíz. Senior officials were issued that stamp to secure local support in the most dire of circumstances, and some of them, like Regional Inspector Earp, tended to just leave them sitting out on their desks. Mick had used his stamp to get out of more than a few jams before.

“Is this... legal?” the younger man wondered aloud.

“Son, in the Office we do what needs to get done,” Mickey said. “We are not the police. We are not brought in to enforce the law. We're here to win the war.”

“So while I'm running around the district making bribes and committing treasonous fraud, what will you be doing?” Ortíz asked. He was clearly not happy to be stuck crutching around DC in the muggy summer heat.

“That chōkoku poison makes our suspect one internationally-connected heavy hitter. I'm going call the Library and see which femme fatales the Office is tracking stateside, then we compare names and faces.”

“They’ll work that fast?”

“I got just the person for the job.”

“So I put a face on the victim,” Ortíz said.

“And I'll put one on the killer,” Mickey concluded. They both looked at the gaping hole in the dead woman's head.

Ortíz chuckled morbidly:

“Makes sense, we don't want you anywhere near the vic's face.”

SATURDAY NIGHT, FEBRUARY 27, 1943
OUTSIDE SMITH MINE NO. 3
CARBON COUNTY, WYOMING

“Everyone, back!” Lynn Beasley shouted from the deuce-and-a-half's tailgate, freezing the scurrying firefighters and miners in place. Her bullhorn sent her voice reverberating through the frozen air. “No one approaches the entrance without full respirator gear!”

“We still got people in there!” a fireman shouted back at her. All the dust-coated men looked alike, washed out in black and gray, and they all grumbled in assent with the objecting man.

“You got dangerous gases leaking down there!” Beasley shouted back. “Anyone who goes in un-masked is another body the rest of us have to drag out. There are forty anti-gas suits the back of this truck. Anyone entering the mine needs to put one on, now!”

The rescuers, scarred and beat from having run in and out of the half-collapsed shaft for the better part of a day, grumbled and held their ground, unsure of whether to ignore her or suit up. They were each exhausted, and unless they kept moving they’d about pass out on their feet.

“There is also hot coffee and soup,” Beasley offered. That got them moving. The rescuers lined up, receiving steaming tin cups of joe and bowls of chicken noodle from Official Leng, and, for those that were able to keep working, a mask and a chemical suit from Official Weiss.

Beasley was exhausted. The Minerva had gotten her all seven hundred miles from South Baldy, but it had ridden rough. Even propellor-driven super trains were susceptible to bumps and warping in the rails. In fact, the faster Minerva went, the worse the bumps got. Beasley’s back ached, and she hadn't even started the hard work yet.

“Where is Quartermaster Pelt?” she asked the closest official, a sweating white woman coated in soot what was leaning against a scorched Buick.

“Dead,” the woman wheezed. American, Midwesterner, an official, younger than she looked.

“Dead?” Beasley asked. “I spoke to him this morning.”

“He went back down to extract bodies,” the official replied. She looked like she was going to collapse. “Something got through a seam in his suit. He died hurling blood.”

She patted herself down and found a pack of cigarettes. Her hand was shaking so bad that she barely get one in her mouth. Beasley didn't watch. If she'd been choking down who-knows-what digging through the collapsed mine, the last thing she'd want was to smother her lungs in smoke.

“What's your name?” Beasley asked her.

“Eleanor O'Connell, Quartermaster Second Class,” the woman said around the jack. She fumbled her matchbook and dropped it, inciting a torrent of tears. “Crap. Shit!”

“Let me help,” Beasley said. She picked up the matchbook, tore one out, and lit O'Connell's cigarette. O'Connell took a calming puff then snatched it out of her mouth and smeared the unwelcome tears from her face with the back of her sleeve.

“Thanks,” she said. “Sorry to blubber, it's been a long day.”

“No apology necessary,” Beasley told her. “Without Pelt, who is in charge?”

“I don't know,” O'Connell sighed. “I'm ranking on site, I think.”

“How can I help?”

“We got as many out as we could, but containment was completely lost.”

“Containment of what?” Beasley asked. She was running down the list of the strange and lethal substances the Office had buried at the bottom of this mine: canisters of irrsinnium tri-carnozone, mustard gas and chlorine gas by the tank, blood gas frozen into blocks the size of trucks, bales of dehydrated razor brine, dormant black smoke spores, grosses of devilthorn kudzu seeds, vats of carnivorous yeast, trapano fly eggs, aerosolized bubonic plague, and worse.

“Of what?” O'Connell chuckled, “All of it.”

“Jesus,” Beasley whispered.

“What do we do?”

The haunted look on O'Connell's face, that of someone pushed far past her edge, froze Beasley in place. She was only there because she had completed the Office's supplemental chemical weapons training in the past month. Any other officials who might be considered actual experts were either buried in the archive and laboratory under that smoking mine shaft, or hours away.

“We need to pull the civilians back,” Beasley finally said.

“But survivors - !”

“Anyone who could have survived has already been retrieved,” Beasley told her. The blast had happened ten hours earlier: most of the substances they stored there for study could kill in minutes. “We buried those things down there for a reason. If anyone else goes in - !”

A panicked scream cut through the shouting.

“My hand!” a man shrieked. “What did you do?”

“Nothing! I didn't do anything!” another one stammered. Firemen, miners, and deputies shuffled over, encircling the men.

“Oh God!” the first man screamed. Beasley threw elbows, forcing her way though the crowd. She found one soot-smeared man sitting up on a stretcher, weeping. Another man, a firefighter, was on the ground, clutching his forearm. His fingers looked like they were withering on his hand. Another fireman was about to wrap his hand in a bandage.

“Don't touch him!” Beasley shouted. “Back away!”

The fireman with the bandage didn't move. Beasley spun and searched the crowd until she spotted someone already done up in one of the chemical suits she'd arrived with.

“You! Apply a tourniquet above his elbow, now.”

“A tourniquet? You're going to take my arm!” the wounded man snarled. His furious look broke in an instant as the skin on his hand desiccated further then split open, revealing raw bones dripping with black ooze. He whimpered, but the men encircling him shouted.

“You don't want to keep it, trust me,” Beasley told him. She pointed at her chosen rescuer. “You, tourniquet, now. Do not touch the arm.”

The rubber-suited man shuffled forward, breathing hard behind his mask. He wrapped a leather belt around the quivering fireman's arm, between the elbow and the bicep, then pulled it tight. The man in the chemical suit stood and stepped back to examine his work. Beasley had more instructions for him.

“Get him some morphine syrettes and then get him inside a suit. Weiss will help you tape the seams. Weiss!”

Official Weiss appeared at Beasley's side.

“We have an early stage black smoke victim here,” she whispered. Weiss' breath caught in his throat, but he kept his face stoney. “We're going to have to contain him in a suit. Help this gentleman tape it up once once he's suited, then hit them both with the blue light.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Weiss said. He parted the crowd so the suited man and the whimpering firefighter with the dissolving hand could shuffle through.

Beasley took a deep breath addressed the crowd:

“Everyone, back up, there is nothing you can do here. I will assign you tasks as needed. There has been a dangerous acid leak in the mine and it is not safe to enter or approach.”

“Acid?” someone shouted. The rest of the crowd immediately started yelling over each other.

“What crock of shit is this?”

“Who the hell are you, lady?”

“We got people down there!”

“Who does this dame think she is?”

“Bill's still missing!”

Beasley lifted her bullhorn and blared over them:

“Unless you want to lose your limbs, too, shut your traps, get some food, and do as I say,” she droned over them. The crowd drifted away, muttering choice pejoratives for her and for the government as they did.

They left the addled man on the stretcher behind with Beasley. His skin was dark with coal dust. She kept her distance.

“Who are you?” she asked.

“Ray. Summers. I'm a doctor. In Billings. They needed some help, so I came down,” he said.

“Doctor Summers, I'm Lynn,” she replied. “Do you know what happened with him?”

“Last thing I remember, I was down in the bottom of the mine, helping someone splint their leg. He was wearing a suit like that one.” Summers pointed to wherever Weiss had taken the two men. “It wasn't a mine down there, it was like a cell, or a vault.”

He thought she might have something to say about that. She did not.

“I was splinting his leg and there was a blast. A hatch burst open and this soot washed over me. Then I woke up here, with that man screaming.”

Beasley stopped breathing and took two quick steps back. What had washed over Summers was not soot. It wasn't soot staining his skin, either. It was live black smoke fungus spores. The things were ravenous. They should have reduced him to greasy bones in minutes. Even touching him would cultivate them in one's body. A single spore could take root, eat flesh, excrete acid, and split into more spores in seconds. The fireman had learned that the hard way.

Raymond Summers didn't have a single spore on him. He was coated in them.

“Stay on that stretcher,” she told him.

“I don't feel - !”

“Do not move!” she boomed. Her hand slipped to the revolver under her coat. He slumped back. She twisted her voice down to an urgent hiss, putting it in terms the doctor could appreciate: “That black matter on your skin is a a dangerous, highly transmissible substance. I do not know why you are alive right now. Getting too close to anyone else will be deadly for them. Stay here. Please.”

Beneath the coating of spores, Summers' face went white. He nodded.

Beasley took a moment to re-center herself. She never got scared, so when she did, she had no experience dealing with it. Any amount above her threshold was overwhelming. The breathing exercises she learned at the Bell Towers slowing her thrashing heart and settled her mind. She knew that Doctor Summers was a repository for the most dangerous fungus ever bred, and he was three minuscule yards away from her. She stopped thinking of him as a threat, and re-categorized him as a puzzle, one she had her own questions about, but also one that could answer questions. She thought about what he'd told her already.

“You said there was a second collapse?” she asked him.

“No, ma'am, a half-dozen. Not cave-ins, though. Explosions.”

“You're sure.”

“I was in France, ma'am, I know an explosion.”

More than one blast was news to her. A series of blasts meant it wasn't a flash in the coal dust, it was intentional and artificial. And it wasn't just someone sneaking a bomb in, this was someone taking their time, setting multiple charges timed to terrorize rescue efforts. And if the blast was in the containment lab, that means the saboteur got in further than just the mine shaft. They knew where they were going.

“Shit,” she whispered.

“What is it?” Summers asked.

“Don't move off that stretcher, I will send someone to help you,” she promised. He nodded again. “Do not let anyone approach you uncovered.”

She hoped he understood. It took her a few seconds to stalk away, muttering and considering. The mine shaft and vault were still burning. They'd be lucky if the other shafts nearby had interconnected seams that could keep the flames going. It almost meant that ninety percent of the horrible things that the Office had hidden beneath Number Three would be neutralized. The remaining ten percent would be invigorated, but that was a whole other problem.

“Leng!” she shouted. The younger official appeared out of nowhere. Leng Tu had been splattered with blood.

“Not mine,” he assured her as soon as he saw the look on her face. He had a distinct New York accent, trained in Chinatown but tempered by a childhood in Beijing.

“We may still have active bombs in the mine,” she told him.

“We'll have Essies on the next truck,” he told her. The ESI, the Office's explosive substance indicator, would sniff out any remaining explosive material. Until they arrived, Beasley would have no idea if there were any more time bombs or booby traps in there without searching every nook herself.

“We can't let anyone else go down,” she told him.

“I have my shotgun in the cab,” he told her. He cut her off before she could object: “Rubber ball rounds. More thunder than lightning, but they'll take the wind out of their sails, if you know what I mean.”

Bone bruises and concussions would do that.

“Where is the security team?” she asked. “I need to get the survivors to block off any further access.”

“They aren't going to be much help,” Leng told her.

“Jesus,” she gasped. “Then I need to examine their bodies.”

“Bodies?” Leng asked.

“Yeah, I assume the saboteur would've dispatched them on his way in.”

“They're alive, but they've been about as helpful as an asshole on your elbow. They're right over there, acting real strange. Shock, I hope.”

Beasley craned her neck to see four armed men sitting in a row on the ground, staring across the frigid hills at the looming mountain range. They looked like abandoned ventriloquist dummies.

“I'm going to talk to them,” she said. “Get suited up and get a suit for Doctor Summers over there. He's been exposed to black smoke and we need him contained.”

“A suit or a sheet?” Leng asked.

“A suit. Lock him in. He is definitely infected, but it hasn't affected him yet. He might have some kind of immunity,” she said. Leng nodded. “Once he's secure, throw whatever you touched him with in the sulfuric vat. Understood?”

“Got it.”

“Good.”

Beasley skirted the terrified, worn out, furious crowd that was gathered around the food tables and approached the sitting guards. They were gazing at the black ridges miles off like they were at the movies.

“Gentlemen,” Beasley tried. None reacted. They were rosy-cheeked and locked in place, unblinking. Tears sat quivering in the corners of their eyes. Despite the mountain winter air, they didn't so much as shiver. Their breath fogged out in short huffs. Beasley tried again, with a little more force: “Gentlemen.”

It was like she was a ghost. She stepped up, directly into their eyeline. Their eyes were moving back and forth, watching an invisible drunk bee or an imaginary tennis match. It was like they were dreaming with their eyes open. Whatever they were seeing, it wasn't her.

She didn't like it.

Easy as she could, she leaned in and slipped each guard's pistol out of its holster. They didn't notice. She didn't want any of them to overreact when they snapped out of whatever was going on with them. She took a quick breath to compose herself, in through the mouth, out through the nose, then lifted her bullhorn and leaned in at them.

“Hello!” she shouted. Her voice bounced off the hills, froze the entire rescue crew in place, and rattled the guards' domes hard enough that they all jumped like the teacher had dropped a pile of textbooks on their desks.

Several hands jolted for holsters but found them empty.

“Where'd you come from?” one stammered. Beasley sighed.

“You see that?” she asked, pointing behind them to the smoking Number Three mine shaft.

“What the hell?” they wondered.

“What can you tell me about that?” she asked.

None of them could stammer out an answer. The veins on their foreheads emerged like worms pushing out of wet dirt. Sweat slicked their faces despite the cold. She leaned in and got a few inches from the one with the sergeant stripes on his shoulder.

“This mine was bombed today, and whoever got in got past you,” she told him. She didn't have the time or patience to soften it.

His eyes darted around and his mouth moved like he was talking, but no sounds came out. He looked like his ankle was caught in a snare.

“The initial assessment puts at least eighty people unaccounted for,” she said. The sergeant turned white, then green. She continued: “There were multiple explosions. Whoever you let in would have been carrying one or more large bags. Do you remember anyone like this?”

The sergeant tried desperately to answer. Whatever frog was clogging his throat didn't let a peep past. He managed a pained nod.

“Was it a man?” she asked. Another nod. He looked like he had more to add.

“More than one?” His head moved woodenly, like a doll's being twisted back and forth by a giant, invisible child.

“A woman?” He froze at that, but nodded when she clarified: “A man and a woman.”

She knew adjectives would be too much to ask just yet, but she had to know who she was dealing with. There might have been more charges waiting to go off. The Abwehr had snipers, bombers, stabbers, poisoners, and worse on their payroll. And to blow up this particular mine, a low-producing shaft in the backwater of Wyoming, was not coincidence. This was someone who knew the Office and knew how much the chemicals and biological weapons they'd buried under the Smith Mine Number Three scared them.

It could only be a Schmidt operation, and among the myriad Schmidts they'd encountered across the country, only one dealt in the kind of horror she was seeing.

“Was he smiling?” she asked.

The guards stopped breathing all at once, all four of them.

Beasley asked again:

“Was he smiling?”

Each guard shuddered. Their breath came out in rapid puffs, like a fleet of backfiring jalopies. Their eyes rolled back into their heads, and each vomited in their own lap, one after the other.

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Copyright © 2024 Daniel Baldwin. All rights reserved.

Written and edited by Daniel Baldwin. Art by Bruce Connors.