Torrent

CHAPTER 17

After a hot shower in Temi’s room at the Motel 6, I almost felt like a normal person again. I dressed in clean clothing and stepped out of the steamy bathroom, expecting to join a lively conversation on monsters, swords, and inhuman motorcycle riders. Instead Simon was hunkered on the floor in a corner, his MacBook balanced across his lap as he stole glances at Temi, who was lying on the bed reading a book. I laughed when I recognized the faded cover of Sex and the Single Girl. That would get Simon’s imagination going. I hoped the book represented a lack of other reading materials rather than an indicator of Temi’s usual tastes, but who was I to judge? I read books about vampires, werewolves, and modern-day magic-flinging druids for fun. Oh sure, I threw in a little Camus and Rand when people could see the covers, but my e-reader was full of paranormal smut. Though oddly this week, I hadn’t felt the need for fiction…

“Who’s next?” I waved toward the bathroom. When Simon didn’t move, I nudged him with a foot and made a point of sniffing. “What I meant to say is you’re next.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He shut the lid on the computer and stood up. “Recently washed people are so sanctimonious.”

He grabbed rumpled but clean clothing out of the canvas Trader Joe’s bag that passed for his suitcase and disappeared into the bathroom. I plopped down on the second of the room’s two double beds. Simon and I had plans to flip for it later.

“Thanks for letting us stay here tonight,” I told Temi. “I’m not feeling that safe in campgrounds, woods, tunnels, or any other outdoor abodes at the moment.”

I wasn’t sure the Motel 6, with its large window overlooking the busiest street in town, was all that safe either, but there was always a chance a monster searching for us would get the wrong room. By now, I believed our “predator” was more interested in showing up where Eleriss and Jakatra were and had little to do with us, but one never knew.

“My posh abode is your posh abode,” Temi said. “Though you have to go to the front desk and pay an extra three bucks if you want wifi.”

“I’m sure Simon has already found a workaround for that.” I waved toward his Mac.

I dug out my own laptop. It was time to do some research. I had blood to find a lab for, a sample of a weird foreign language that needed a program to analyze, and-

My phone bleeped. A message from Autumn flashed across the screen. Ah, I might have an answer to the smudge on my arrow too.

You say this came from an animal?

I texted her back: It came from… something ambulatory. Have you seen the news? About the Prescott killings? And the L.A. ones before?

Let’s talk. Where in Prescott are you staying?

Motel 6, Room 210. Did you drive down here?

“We might have some more information on the creature,” I told Temi.

“I’m not sure I want any more information on it,” she said, “or to see it again. I don’t suppose you’d like to return to estate sales tomorrow? I think I can work up more interest for pawing through dusty boxes now.”

“Losing your enthusiasm for this diversion?” If I were smart, I’d lose my enthusiasm and suggest leaving town, but it would be hard to let go of all these clues without investigating them thoroughly. I wished the monster would disappear-or someone would figure out a way to kill it-so I could focus on the riders, their language, and their artifacts.

The phone bleeped again. Be there in twenty.

Thanks. After a moment I added, I don’t suppose you know a serologist in Prescott who can come too?

I didn’t get a response to that. Either Autumn was driving and couldn’t text or she had no idea how to respond to such a random request. I opened up my laptop to search for a language analysis program. I found something that could listen to digital files, but the price put it out of reach. I had a feeling I was going to have to send this off to someone in the linguistics department at ASU. I wished more of my old instructors and friends weren’t disgruntled with me. Still, I remembered a couple of professors who’d probably be so intrigued by the challenge that they’d forget their disappointment in my career choice. I needed Simon to make me that mp3 file first though.

“Don’t worry,” I told Temi. “This is temporary. Besides, I don’t think monster hunting would be a viable career. It takes a whole team of specialists to get anywhere.” Though technically the language sample wasn’t from the monster; it was from the… whatever our riders happened to be. “It is more interesting than what we usually deal with on a day-to-day basis, I admit. Though I’d never thought of our business as boring. Not like cataloguing rocks anyway.”

“Your friend-or is it boyfriend? — seems quite taken with the entrepreneurial potential in it all,” Temi said.

“He spoke to you?”

“No, but he was muttering over in his corner.”

“Ah. He’s not my boyfriend. He’s my best-I mean he’s a good friend.”

I’d called Temi my “best friend” once. She shouldn’t be surprised if I didn’t any more, but I didn’t want her to think I was making a big deal about it. Not that she would. Erg, why was this awkward? “Simon and I have known each other for more than four years,” I went on. I tapped the wrist rest on my laptop and debated whether I should mention Simon’s interest in her. The shower was still running; maybe I should talk him up.

“He is a little obsessed with making money, but his motivations are well-intentioned.”

“Oh?” Temi asked, taking my bait. Maybe she sensed my awkwardness and need to shift the focus of the conversation.

“He grew up on the Makah reservation in Washington State. Not much in the way of jobs out there, so he didn’t have much as a kid. It’s hard to get him to admit it unless he’s been drinking, which he’s done twice since I’ve known him, but he hated it, the reservation, the rain, the isolation of the area, everything. He thinks it’s a betrayal to his family and his people to feel that way, but he couldn’t wait to escape for college, and he picked Arizona because it was the polar opposite of the Olympic Peninsula. He wants to find a way to help his people so his family doesn’t think he’s abandoned them, and because… Well, he has this older brother who is, according to him, the perfect son, the one their parents loved because he did well in school and sports, and was popular with his peers. He travels across the country for national dancing competitions and has won prize money and a lot of recognition for the family.”

“Dancing?” Temi asked. “I’m picturing those talent-seeking TV shows with snarky judges, but that must not be it.”

I grinned at the notion of some Native American version of So You Think You Can Dance, but shook my head. “No, I don’t think they’re televised unless it’s on PBS. They’re powwows basically, where people from all different tribes compete doing traditional dances. I saw the one at ASU last year. They’re quite vigorous dances, especially the men’s, so it’s like an athletic competition.”

Temi nodded, though she still seemed to be trying to imagine the setup. I’d have to find some online videos to show her.

“Anyway,” I said, “the brother is the star in the family, and Simon has always been-” the sound of the shower water disappeared, so I lowered my voice, “-a little jealous. He wants to become a successful businessman to give back to his people and figure out a way to create some good jobs out there. I’m sure he wants to show up his brother, too, but I gather he truly does care about what goes on back there, even if he can’t imagine himself living there again.”

Temi offered another nod. I couldn’t decide if I’d helped Simon’s case or not. For all I knew, she was imagining this athletic brother now.

A knock came at the door. Even though I was expecting Autumn, I leaped off the bed, ready to fight or flee-probably flee. I noticed Temi watching me. She hadn’t twitched.

“Charlie horse,” I said and shook my leg for good effect, then walked to the door.

Autumn Ingalls waited outside, her fist propped on her hip, her blue-dyed hair gathered into twin pigtails that stuck out to either side. Her eyeliner was a matching shade of blue. She’d added another piercing to one of her ears since the last time I’d seen her, this bringing the total to seven on that side. The other held a mere three, though the adjacent eyebrow balanced things out with a piercing of its own, a barbell with blue balls.

“What do you think a serologist has that I don’t?” Autumn demanded.

“Uhm, a microscope?”

Autumn picked up a black case. “Like this one?”

“I apologize. I didn’t know you’d added forensics to your repertoire.”

“Historical forensics, that’s what archaeology is. Besides anyone can run a blood test.”

“I have a feeling this blood isn’t going to be typical.” I stood back extending a hand. “Come on in though. That’s my friend Temi, and Simon is naked in the shower. If you walk in on him, it’ll be just like old times.”

Autumn snorted. “He wishes.”

At Temi’s raised eyebrows, I explained, “Early morning bathroom incident when Autumn and I were roommates and Simon crashed on the couch one night.”

“Without warning.” Autumn walked inside and laid her case on top of the TV stand. “I’ll look at your blood in a minute, but let me show you your slide first. You say that came off a living creature?”

“I’m pretty sure I hit it. Unless it turned out to be a leaf or branch, in which case I’ll apologize for wasting your time.”

“How about a plastic bottle?” Autumn asked.

“I’m quite sure I didn’t hit anyone’s diet cola.”

“If you say so.”

I hovered while she set up the compact microscope. Simon strolled out of the bathroom wearing his black Inigo Montoya T-shirt.

“Hey, Autumn.”

“Hey, Butthead,” she responded without looking up.

Simon nodded to me. “I remember her now.”

“What did you mean when you said plastic bottle?” I asked Autumn.

“Look for yourself.” She pushed the microscope in my direction.

I peered through the eyepiece. The light below the slide illuminated a patch of entangled strands that reminded me of a bowl of spaghetti noodles. “This was on my arrow?”

“Yup. It’s plastic. There were a couple of crystalline structures too that I identified as salt.”

I remembered the times I’d been close enough to smell the creature and the whiffs of the sea that had accompanied it.

Simon grabbed a Mountain Dew out of the cooler he’d brought in and sat on the end of the bed. “We’ve seen it up close now. I didn’t see anything that looked nonorganic about it, unless its weird black skin is plastic.”

“Its eyes seemed oily,” I said. “Iridescent anyway.”

“Plastic is of course made from crude oil,” Autumn said, “but what you see on the slide represents a final-stage polymer. There shouldn’t have been any hint of its oily origins about it.”

“Is there any way to tell if it’s…” Alien, I wanted to say, but Autumn hadn’t seen all the strange things we had, and she’d think I’d gone nuts if I asked that. She was one of my few college friends still talking to me-I didn’t want to scare her away. “Is there any way to see what kind of plastic it is, where it might have originated?”

“Enh, it’s pretty common.” Autumn grabbed Simon’s bottle of Mountain Dew.

“Hey,” he protested.

Autumn pulled scissors out of her case and cut into the top.

Simon folded his arms over his chest. “I was still drinking that.”

“Now you have another hole to put your lips on.” Autumn handed the bottle back to him, then dug out an empty slide.

Simon accepted his bottle, but he glowered at it. “There are too many girls working on this team now. I need to recruit some men.”

“Maybe Eleriss and Jakatra would like to join you,” I said.

“Real men don’t have glowing eyes. No thanks.”

“What?” Autumn asked.

“We’ll explain later.” I waved for her to finish poking around with the scissors and drop a coverslip onto her slide.

“That should prove interesting,” she said, then placed her new specimen under the lens. She checked it, nodded, then gestured for me to take a look.

Something very similar to the first sample lay beneath my eyes. “So, I’m either mistaken and my arrow lodged in a soda bottle, or our monster is made out of Mountain Dew?”

“Was the arrow lying on the ground when you found it?” Autumn asked. “Or did you pull it out of something?”

“Someone handed it to me, and he didn’t say. It was over in the woods though, not sticking out of someone’s refrigerator, I’m sure of that.”

“Is it possible this… creature-” Autumn’s pierced eyebrow twitched, “-you’ve told me about is wearing some kind of armor or outer layer?”

I ignored the skepticism inherent in that eyebrow twitch-if she’d read the newspapers and learned about the grisly slayings, she shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the idea of a genuine monster. “As in plastic chain mail? No, like Simon said, we’ve had a pretty good look at it now.”

“Technically,” Temi said, “is it a good look if it’s bouncing off the windshield of your van when you see it?”

“I saw it fine in the rear view mirror when it was chasing after us,” I said.

Autumn looked at each of us in turn, probably wondering if we were messing with her.

I held up one of my bags of stained dirt. “Here’s that blood sample if you want to take a look.”

“I believe I would.” Autumn accepted the bag and held it up to her eyes. “This is from the creature?”

“We’re not sure,” I said. “It might be from the interesting men we’ve been following.”

“I’ll check for blood type then. I can’t run a DNA test with this simple setup-” she tapped her case, “-but I ought to be able to tell a few things. This’ll be easy compared to trying to dredge up clues in thousand-year-old blood samples.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it,” I muttered.

After all the weirdness we’d witnessed, I’d be shocked if quirky things didn’t show up in Eleriss’s and Jakatra’s blood. Maybe they’d have phosphorescent cells to match their glow-in-the-dark eyes. Or maybe their blood would be full of nanorobots. Maybe the blood would shoot out rays and blow up our microscope to punish us for looking at it.

I yawned and rubbed my eye. What a week.

“I’m going to do some research of my own.” Simon moved his MacBook to the desk. “I keep forgetting to check on something obvious.”

“Which is?” I asked.

“Where those motorcycles came from.”

Right, we’d recorded the license plate numbers on the first day. “Montana, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, but who are they registered to? Eleriss and Jakatra Something-or-other? Or Butch and Bruno from Kalispell, men who have been missing for the last month?”

“That would be interesting to know, but that information isn’t publicly available on the Internet, is it?”

“Not publicly,” Simon agreed with a small smile.

“Am I going to have FBI agents knocking down the door of my hotel room?” Temi asked.

“I think the nearest FBI office is in Phoenix. We’re probably safe for a while.”

“They’ll never know I was there,” Simon murmured, his face toward the screen, his fingers dancing over the keyboard.

“Uh huh.” I pointed at his MacBook. “When you’re done hacking the DMV, would you mind making an mp3 of that video footage? I’m going to try and get one of my old linguistics professors to run an analysis of it.”

“‘kay,” Simon said without glancing up. I’d probably have to ask him a few more times.

With nothing better to do, I watched Autumn mix a couple of solutions for the blood test. Temi was still sitting on the bed, the book in her lap, her bad leg stretched out before her. She looked like she wasn’t sure if she should be helping somehow. I thought about telling her that the hotel room was help enough and greatly appreciated, but Autumn drew my attention with a hmm noise.

“Find something?” I asked.

“I can tell you that this blood isn’t human, ape, chimpanzee, gorilla, or bonobo.”

“Not bonobo? You’re sure?”

Autumn gave me an amused look.

“I’m guessing those are all the mammals that share the ABO blood group?” I said.

“That’s right. I don’t have the solutions to test for anything else with me. You should have told me you wanted animal blood testing done before I left home.”

“We didn’t have the blood two hours ago.” I thought of the webbed and clawed tracks. “I’m not sure this stuff is going to match up with any normal animals either.”

“You could run it to a vet’s office in the morning anyway,” Autumn said. “They could check for canine and feline, maybe equine and bovine too. Of course, I could take it down to U of A and have my friend run it through their DNA sequencer, but I don’t want to drive all the way down there tonight.”

“I was surprised you came down from Flagstaff as it is.”

“I wanted some sweet potato fries and figured you’d buy if I did.” Autumn winked.

“Ah. I guess that can be arranged.” Maybe the cafe would be more populated this evening, and town in general. I needed to find time to go around trying to sell some of the goodies we had in the van-before something threw a rock through the window and damaged everything. The sale of the antique coffee grinder wasn’t going to keep us in the black for long. “I’d love to see the results of a DNA test though, if you’re up for a road trip tomorrow. It’s Saturday-you’ll be off right?”

“Yes, and I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than run errands for you.”

“Judging from the sarcastic tone of voice, I better be ready to pony up a burger as well as fries,” I said.

“And some beer too. Though I admit you’ve got me curious as to what this came from too. I’m going to be irked if you dragged me down here to analyze squirrel blood.”

“We didn’t drag you down here, you came,” I pointed out. “But I promise it’s not squirrel blood.”

“Would a police crime lab have the ability to run a DNA test?” Temi asked. “Maybe there’s one of those in town.”

Autumn gave her an are-you-stupid look. “Crime labs do basic forensic DNA typing by comparing a sample of bodily fluid to the DNA profiles of people in the government’s database. They look at less than point one percent of the genome. Basically they have the ability to compare genetic fingerprints. Of human beings.” She held up the slide. “I’ve already told you this isn’t human blood. Unless your local vet can come up with an obvious answer, we’ll need to run a full genome sequencing to figure out what dropped this. If there is some kind of Franken-monster out there, that’s the only way we’ll get an idea of what genetic material was used as the base.”

“I see.” The set of Temi’s jaw suggested she wouldn’t have minded the information without the condescending tone.

I gave her an apologetic wave. Autumn had always been brusque and not particularly interested in bothering with social niceties, but she also didn’t care about my unique new career choice.

“I’ll definitely be curious to find out that information,” I said, trying to steer the attention away from Temi. “I’ll be even more curious to find out if this blood belongs to the creature or the interesting men I mentioned.”

“Your interesting men aren’t human?” Autumn asked.

“I… don’t know.”

“They’re a little too pretty to be bonobos too,” Simon said, surprising me by chiming in.

“Got my mp3 sample yet?” I asked him.

“No, but I have the information on those plates.”

“Butch and Bruno?”

“Elizabeth and Maude Somersett from Deer Lodge, Montana,” Simon said.

“Are those lovers or sisters?” Autumn asked.

“The DMV records didn’t mention it, though the Silver State Post does have a blurb on the theft of the ladies’ motorcycles. Apparently, they’re retired grandmothers whose hobbies include crocheting, running a book club, and cruising through the Rockies on their bikes.”

I wasn’t sure what made me scratch my head more, the idea of grannies on Harleys or the idea of our interesting men stealing Harleys from grannies.

“There’s one way we could find out whose blood it is,” Temi said.

“Go ask?” Simon suggested.

Temi nodded. “We could visit their hotel room and see if they’d like to join us for pizza. If one of them is wearing a bandage or limping, we’ll have a good idea that it was their blood.”

Simon checked his phone. “The tracking device is back outside the Vendome.”

“Tracking device?” Autumn mouthed.

“I believe the rules of stalking say that you’re not supposed to actually let your target know you’re stalking them,” I told Temi. “Asking them out to pizza might give us away.”

“Perhaps so,” she said, “but it would give us a chance to talk to them instead of simply guessing as to their plans and motivations.”

“I didn’t know you’d developed that much of an interest in their plans and motivations,” I said. “Or is this only since you decided the older one is striking?”

“Of course not.” With her dark skin, it was hard to tell when she was blushing, but she did avoid my eyes when she spoke.

Simon craned his neck around to frown in Temi’s direction.

Lovely. My best friend had a crush on a former pro tennis player, and a former pro tennis player had a crush on an alien. When had my life gotten so odd?

A firm, crisp knock sounded on the door. We all looked at each other.

“Any chance someone ordered a pizza?” I asked.

Three people shook their heads. The curtains were closed, so we couldn’t see outside without alerting our knockers, but I hesitated to hustle over to answer the door. We weren’t expecting anyone, and at this point, I couldn’t imagine anything good finding us.

Temi slid off the bed and headed for the door.

I nudged Simon. “As the man in the room, don’t you think you should go help her?”

“How?” he whispered.

“You could loom threateningly at her shoulder.”

“She’s taller than I am. I don’t think it’s possible to loom threateningly from under a woman’s armpit.”

Temi fastened the chain, then opened the door the couple of inches it allowed. “Yes?” she asked.

I shifted from foot to foot. Short of jumping up on the bed, I couldn’t see past her to who stood out there. Nor could I hear enough of the soft-spoken voice on the other side of the door to guess at the owner’s identity. I scooted forward, thinking that I wasn’t beneath peering underneath her armpit, but she said, “I’ll check,” and closed the door.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Our interesting men,” Temi said.

“Do they want to punch, strangle, pummel, or otherwise maim us for following them today?” Simon asked.

“No.” Temi gave him a curious look. “They want to hire you.”