Disclaimer: Not my characters, I'm just playing with them.
A/N: Have I been utterly predictable so far? This chapter was really hard to write, mostly because it's not very interesting, but I had a bunch of things that needed to happen to set up the next scenes—which I promise will have more Zane. But I'm starting to think that I'm being way too obvious. Feedback appreciated!
Scene 7:
"Carter, there's no such thing as werewolves," Jo said firmly.
Taggart looked quizzical.
Dinner was almost over. Jo had been dawdling over her last bites, trying to decide how to handle the inevitable awkward goodbye. The meal had been an oddly mixed pleasure. Taggart was good company, with an endless supply of interesting stories, but Jo felt as if she'd had to work hard to avoid reminiscences of a past that she didn't remember. The ringing of her phone had been a welcome diversion.
"What? Okay, say that again."
Carter's words were finally penetrating her own concerns.
Jo raced down the winding road to GD. Traffic slowed as a line of cars headed into the parking lot, and Jo resisted the urge to lean on her horn and hurry them up. Most were the members of her security team responding to her alert, but she also spotted Henry's truck and Fargo's sporty blue sedan. But Carter was not so patient: lights flashing, his jeep pulled off the road and drove up the grassy verge and around to the front door of GD.
Inside GD, Carter, Fargo, Jo, and Henry gathered in Henry's lab. Carter passed Kevin's bloody shirt to Henry. "We need to test that blood," he said. "I want to know if it belongs to Kevin as quickly as possible."
"All right, Carter, start from the beginning," said Jo. "My team's gearing up downstairs; as soon as we've all got night vision goggles and tranq guns, we're heading to Alison's to start the search from there. But I need to understand this first—you think Kevin is a wolf?"
"That sounds crazy, doesn't it?" Carter rubbed his face. Leaving Alison behind at the house had been incredibly hard, but someone needed to be there in case Kevin came back. "Maybe it is crazy, but this wasn't an abduction. The window was opened from the inside, and Alison and I were downstairs. There's no way that someone got a kid Kevin's size out that window against his will without making any noise. So that says Kevin went on his own. But he broke his collarbone this morning. How does a kid with a broken collarbone climb out of a window and down a roof? And why? It makes no sense. I've sent Andy to check Kevin's room for fingerprints and DNA trace. If someone else was there, he'll find it, but I don't think there was anyone else there. I think…I think that Kevin left under his own steam but that he's not himself."
"You've eliminated the obvious," Henry agreed, "But werewolves, Jack? That's pretty far-fetched."
"There was fur on the windowsill," said Carter, "and a lot of blood. Just like Andy and I saw in the forest this morning. I know it sounds ridiculous, but Fargo, can you check the files? Just see if anyone is working on a project that might conceivably, remotely, in any way, possibly be able to do something like this."
Fargo looked skeptical, Henry doubtful.
"DNA modification?" asked Jo, with a hint of irony in her voice. She didn't believe in werewolves and she was sure there was a simpler explanation for what had happened to Kevin, but she had personal experience with unpleasant DNA transformations. "We might want to see if there are any missing genome spectrometers or intramuscular electrode arrays." She used the scientific terminology with precision-she was far too familiar with those specific items from her earlier experience.
"Point well-taken," acknowledged Henry, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.
"Except Julia works for Google, and as far as we know she's never done any work on DNA," protested Fargo.
"Which doesn't mean that no one has been working on it. If Julia could invent something like that, why couldn't someone else?" said Carter.
"All right, I'll go start sorting through projects. It's going to take a while, though. If it exists, it's not nicely named 'werewolf project.' I would already have noticed that." Fargo warned.
"Henry, if you could test the blood? I've also got the fur sample from the windowsill to test. We didn't try to match the fur sample this morning to the blood we found, but if we could try that with these samples, and maybe also see if they're a match to the samples from this morning?"
Henry was nodding in agreement. He'd get started on that right away.
"And Jo," Carter turned to face her directly. "You've got the most important job. You've got to find Kevin, but you also have to make sure when you're out looking that no one hurts any wolves. I know it sounds ridiculous, but sending a bunch of goons with guns out into the woods when Kevin might be out there makes me incredibly nervous."
"My goons are extremely well-trained, Carter. You've got nothing to worry about. We're on it."
Downstairs, in the security headquarters, Jo gathered her team around her. "Listen up, people, this is important," she barked. "This is a lost child search: our first priority is to find Kevin Blake. I know most of you know him, but we're sending pictures to your phones so you can refresh your memories. We'll start the search from the Blake house. You'll get maps, grids, and search assignments there. If you need the address, you'll find it on your phones."
She looked around the room. There was no way—absolutely no way—that she was telling this group of serious and disciplined men and women that Kevin might be a wolf. Her credibility would be shot forever. But the good news about security people as opposed to scientists? They didn't usually argue. "We're also passing out tranquilizing guns. If you see a wolf, you are to sedate it and call in so we can get it back to GD. Do not—I repeat, do not, under any circumstances—shoot a wolf with anything other than a tranq." She looked at the men and women before her. "If I didn't know that half of you would feel naked without them, I'd make you leave all your weapons here. I won't go that far. But the person who hurts a wolf is spending the rest of their life on midnight to eight desk duty in section 5. And you all know section 5—that life won't be fun and it probably won't be long. Are we understood?"
There were murmurs of agreement and a few chuckles. She fixed one particularly loud laugher with a steely eye, and added, "This is a night search, which is a pain in the ass. It's going to be dark out there, probably pitch-black if we wind up too far from town, and night-vision goggles only go so far. Don't screw up, people."
She looked around the room and nodded. "All right, head on out, and we'll meet up at the Blake house." She glanced at her watch. She needed to change her clothes—she loved her power suit and heels but not for a midnight hike—and grab her own gear. Time to get moving.
Sometime well after midnight, Jo sat down for a break. She didn't want to admit it, but the search wasn't working. The problems had started from the very beginning. She'd arrived at the Blake house just after the search-and-rescue dogs, in time to see them refuse to track. As far as the rescue dogs were concerned, Kevin was still in his bedroom. That left the search entirely up to the human beings. But the humans believed they were looking for a lost kid: that meant the search grids and the focus were limited to a feasible distance for a 14-year old boy on foot to travel. If Kevin really was a wolf, he'd probably moved outside that range in the first twenty minutes that he was missing.
Jo shook her head and pulled out her phone. It was time to get decisive. "Carter," she said when he picked up.
"Anything?" he asked.
"No," she said flatly. "We need to start trying to track a wolf, instead of a lost boy. And I'm going to have to send people home to rest first. It's been six hours—they can't keep going forever. Plus, I can't explain why they should stay up all night to hunt a wolf. We need to change the way we're searching, and treat it as a hunt, not a search."
"I'm sorry, Carter," she added. "We should have done it that way from the beginning."
"No, don't second-guess yourself. At least we've eliminated the possibility that Kevin was feverish and wandered away somehow."
"Oh, so you weren't as sure about the wolf as you seemed?" Jo was surprised.
"Put it this way, I figured there was room for reasonable doubt. I mean, werewolves? It's crazy." Carter's voice sounded tired.
"Has Henry or Fargo found out anything?"
"The blood was similar to the blood in the forest: it had human hemoglobin but unidentifiable DNA. But it wasn't the same unidentifiable DNA. And the fur matches the blood in both cases, but again, not the same DNA."
"So we have two wolves?" asked Jo. "I guess that makes sense. Kevin must have caught it somehow."
"Caught it," Carter repeated, thoughtfully. "Jo, you're brilliant!"
"I am?"
"Fargo didn't find anything but he was looking in the wrong places. This isn't DNA modification the way that Julia did it—if it was, we'd have to believe that someone deliberately wanted to turn Kevin into a wolf and why would anyone do that? This has to be an accident, which means it's contagious, not deliberate. We need to be looking at diseases or viruses or…I'm going to wake up Fargo, he needs to look in a different direction."
"Fargo's asleep?" Jo was a little envious. It had been a long night.
"He fell asleep on his computer a while ago. I hope Alison's sleeping, too—I convinced her that someone was going to have to be awake for Jenna tomorrow. But we're all going to need to get some rest. Go ahead and tell your team to head home. We'll regroup at GD in the morning. Maybe by then Fargo will have found us something."
"I'll let them know. And Carter?" she added. "We'll find him."
As she slipped her phone back in her pocket, Jo gave the orders to the entire group over her communicator. There weren't many murmurs of protests: six hours into the search everyone was tired, and the nighttime search felt futile. But Jo didn't get up right away. The night was still and quiet, especially now that she could no longer hear the distant calling of Kevin's name that had permeated the dark.
Suddenly, out of the darkness, there came a howl. It was plaintive, mournful, and shockingly loud. That wolf was close!
Jo startled to her feet. She slid her goggles back into place and pulled out her tranquilizer gun. Without pause, she headed in the direction of the sound.
