(A/N: Here we are in chapter seven, guys! Lucky number seven! I hope that means this is going to be a good one.
This chapter will be continuing the themes of the previous one. In other words, there is some "Law & Order" inspiration in it. I'm a fan of the TV show "NCIS" as well and I might consider throwing in some elements of that in this too. Yes, I know that NCIS is the Navy and Marine Corps and that it wouldn't make sense since Cora was in the Army, just trust me on this, okay?)
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Dmitri took Cora back to the apartment she shared with her uncle. He stayed with her instead of leaving, John sent him a text message and asked him to wait until he was able to get there.
Cora was still shaken over the events of that day she had to endure. It wasn't long prior to her arrival to New York that she was in a warzone, she had seen many things during that time, some of which would scar her brain for life, but what she saw at the medical examiner building was horrifying. What she saw there was bloodier than most horror films.
She flinched slightly as Dmitri sat next to her with two steaming cups of tea, "Here you go. This will help you relax."
She took one of the cups, "Thank you."
She blew away the steam and drank some of the tea. Tea was occasionally given inside of an MRE and since it was typically flavorless regardless of quality, she had no issues drinking it.
He looked at his watch as he drank out of his own cup, "Shouldn't his shift be over soon?"
"Maybe," she replied. "It's really hard to say. He always says he's going to be home by a certain time and sometimes I'm asleep when he finally does. There are times where he doesn't even come home, he just sleeps at the precinct."
"He does have to work high-profile cases sometimes," he pointed out.
She held her cup tighter, "I get that, but he acts like every case is the homicide of the century. I know that if it's not solved in the first forty-eight hours that it's unlikely to be solved at all. Still, there are other detectives, other homicide units, but he thinks that he's the only one who can. Let his partner do something on his own for once! He can't be a proby forever."
"You sound resentful," he commented, drinking his tea.
She looked down at her tea, "I do understand why he has to be gone all the time. He's a lifer in the homicide unit, he's been there for as long as I can remember, he feels like it's his territory and only his. If I was a lifer in the Army and I had a family that I rarely saw, I would imagine they would feel how I always do when I don't see him."
The apartment door opened and he instinctively grabbed his briefcase, where he usually kept a weapon of some kind for protection. Fortunately, it was only John returning home from the precinct.
He was relieved to see that they were able to get to the apartment in one piece, "Thank you for everything, Dmitri."
He quickly finished his tea and stood up from the couch, shaking his hand with a smile, "No problem, moy drug. It was my pleasure."
"I'll call you if I need you again," John told him.
He picked up his briefcase, preparing to leave, "And I will be happy to help."
Dmitri left, leaving John and Cora alone in their apartment. He sat down on the couch next to her, she didn't look at him, instead opting to gaze down at her cup.
"Is that any good?" he asked her, trying to start a conversation.
"It's tea," she replied, her voice quiet yet slightly hostile. "It's wet and bland."
"And it will help you relax," he mentioned.
She clenched her cup with both hands, the tea rippled with vibrations like the epicenter of an earthquake. Angrily, she slammed the cup onto the table, spilling some of the tea.
"What the fuck do you have to tell me?!" she yelled. "I know how you like to fucking divert someone's attention to something else before you fucking drop a Fat Man sized bomb!"
He never knew her to have such a vulgar mouth, quite the opposite in fact. When she was young, she hated it whenever he used a cuss word, even if it was the most mild one.
There was a code of honor in the military, one where there were no secrets between comrades in arms. They were both in the military, even the same branch, and they were both veterans, that code still applied; not because they were family by blood, but family in arms.
"The detectives that interrogated you were not NYPD," he revealed. "They weren't even police officers."
She was stunned and speechless, she definitely didn't expect him to tell her such a thing. "W-w-what? Who- who were they?"
"Government agents," he answered. "Probably from an agency so secretive, the president doesn't even know who they are."
She couldn't believe it, government agents? What could she have done to be under their radar?
"What? What did I do? Does it have to do with Iraq?" she questioned. "Did I kill-"
"No, no, no, nothing to do with your military record, that much I can tell you," he reassured.
Her head shook with bewilderment, "W- well, then what is it about?"
"From what I can tell, I'd say it has to do with the murders today," he replied.
"But I had nothing to do with them!" she affirmed. "I told you already, I heard a sound and investigated, that's when I saw the bodies."
"I know, and I don't think it had anything to do with them. I believe they wanted to know what you saw at the crime scene," he expressed.
"What I saw?" she repeated. She believed she knew what he was talking about, but she could not imagine how he could. "What are you talking about?"
"You know what I'm talking about," he replied firmly.
Her mouth was open with shock as she struggled to get the words out, "I- I- I did see… something. It was this… creature."
'I knew it,' he thought. "What did it look like?"
"It was… big, bigger than me, taller than me, and very muscular," she responded. It was the first thing that came to her mind.
He had to ask this question, "Was it wearing anything? Anything that you remember specifically?"
"Um, it was wearing a mask or a helmet of some kind and I remember seeing what looked like a gun on the shoulder," she answered.
"Can you remember anything else?" he questioned.
Her eyes looked upwards as she recalled more details, "It's skin was scaly, but not like a snake. It also had these… I don't even know what to call them. They were like dreadlocks, but it wasn't hair, I think it was flesh."
She wracked her brain in an attempt to remember more details, but couldn't recall much. All of the stress and anxiety she experienced immediately after seeing the creature slightly altered her memory. Her brain likely saw her high emotions as an insult and affected her memories as a result.
"I can't remember anything else about it," she told him.
'It's okay, you remember a lot,' he thought. "Well, what about what it was doing? Do you remember that?"
"I believe it was doing something to some body parts. Bones, I think," she replied. "It- it was using this- this chemical on them. It looked like it was trying to melt them or something. It was using the chemical like an acid."
'Melting bones?!' he mentally exclaimed. 'That doesn't sound like them at all. Yet… what else could it be? It has to be one of them.'
"Uncle John?" she snapped her fingers in front of his face. "What's wrong?"
He blinked in shock, "What?"
"You're zoning out," she told him.
"I- I'm just tired," he responded. "I've had a long day, you've had a long day."
He got up from the sofa, but she grabbed him and pulled him back down, "Don't give me any of that bullshit! It's not even six o'clock yet!"
He looked at the clock in the kitchen, she was right, it was barely twenty minutes until six. She was probably staring at it the entire time since she was brought home, waiting for him.
"Tell me what the fuck is going on here?!" she demanded.
He grabbed onto her shoulders, "Listen to me, you have no idea who and what you're dealing with. This isn't just another terrorist in a warzone, this is big, bigger than the president and more secretive than the mob. Trust me when I say, you don't want to be more involved in this than you already are."
Tears dripped down her cheeks as he got up from the couch and this time didn't stop him. Before he left the room, she asked, "Uncle John, just tell me honestly, does this have anything to do with my Dad?"
He was quiet for a little while before he gave her a response, "More than you know."
The next morning, after John had already left for the police station, Cora was wide awake and tired. She had been on guard the entire night and unable to sleep, not with so many questions and bloody memories on her mind.
She was almost wishing she was back in a warzone; there, she at least had an entire platoon to talk to about her problems. Even if none of them were interested, she knew she always had someone who would listen.
Now, she only had her uncle, who was never around and never gave her a transparent answer that she could understand. Any other people she could ask were either too busy or living in another city or state.
One of the questions that she had was the extent of her father's involvement in everything she had experienced. John was unwilling to tell her anything and hardly any of her family friends knew about the type of work he did for the military. If she tried to ask any of them, they would tell her that they either didn't know anything or to ask her uncle about it.
He told her to stay in the apartment until he could sort out everything or come up with a plan. That meant that the investigation she started was already over before it began. The answers she wanted were out of her reach.
"Dammit!" she exclaimed in anger all of a sudden. She was sitting on the sofa and swung her arm in her anger, causing items to fall off the coffee table. "What the fuck is going on here?! What don't I know? What's happening?"
As she held her head in her hands in the midst of her frustration, she noticed her book bag on the floor. She had forgotten about it, her mind had been occupied since the other day.
She got up from the sofa and picked up her bag, taking it to the table to look through it. All that was in it were the notes she wrote when she visited the library a few blocks from her apartment complex.
Thinking about it, she wished she had taken more notes or tried to do more research. She was in the military and you didn't just give up if you were having a problem with something, you couldn't.
She could have written more notes if she had the book she found at the library, but she gave it to her uncle the other day and never got it back. She hardly read one chapter of it and doubted its authenticity and truthfulness, yet she suddenly found herself wanting to learn more about what secrets it could hold.
Truthfully, she didn't know why she wanted it back for her investigation; hell, her 'investigation' wasn't much of one at all. It was nothing but a couple of notes she wrote down because wanted some kind of closure after her father disappeared for twenty years.
She slapped her own cheeks with both hands, "Don't think like that! This is not a chem-light battery!"
She stared at the blankness of her papers, where there was no writing. She put them back into her book bag with a growl in her throat, like an angry animal.
"Fuck it," she uttered, closing it and throwing it over her shoulder. "I'm twenty-five years old and an Army vet. I am not a scared little girl, I can take care of myself!"
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(A/N: I know, it took me forever to finally update this story and I'm very sorry. But in my defense, do you know how busy the life of a student is? (Considering I'm in college.)
Translations:
1. Moy drug. - My friend. (Russian)
2. Proby (also spelled "probie") - short for probationary basis (or period); a person who is under the possibility of extermination at a new job, a rookie.
3. Chem-light battery - a useless object; a journey embarked on by an unfortunate soldier.
Thite doesn't appear yet again, but I can guarantee that he will in the next one. I can't say how much (it could be very little, it could be half the chapter), but he will. I don't give out spoilers to anyone, so don't be asking me to hand them out.
I'm sure you can't wait for the next chapter and, believe me, I can't either. I know I keep making promises that I won't take forever, but I really can't keep it as well as I might have when I first started (I'm in college for Christ's sake). Nevertheless, I will try harder to update sooner and more often.)