Chapter 3

Patterns

The first rule of surviving working for the Company was simple enough to learn, but sometimes hard to follow: Always trust Downstairs.

One complication is that their will wasn't always clear. Sometimes it was as clear as instructions frequently appeared on a computer without any apparent input by any of the technical employees. Other times it was more obscure.

Like when, very far out of season, the containment field that held the freaky "dream demons" in check lit up and moved into release position for no apparent reason. People in Delta Facility panicked – they didn't know what to do. They didn't know if they were about to become the victims of an impromptu sacrifice or if the horrors they kept in check there were about to be released on the unsuspecting world at large en masse. The director of operations who had preceded Ann Darvis, Hank Brody, had made the executive decision to tell Delta Facility to let them out, and needless to say the staff at Delta was not happy – it was a wonder if didn't lead to a full-on riot. The ethereal little monsters took off without harming anyone in the facility, but soon became untraceable not long after they were gone from it. Nobody understood where they had gone or what had happened for forty-eight hours … until a new monster showed up on their doorstep, with no sign of who put it there, and was easily ushered into containment. A pitiful thing in it's current form, a charred, blackened dead thing with no detectable signs of life … yet, inexplicably never decayed further and seemed to cause nightmares to everyone in the vicinity if the containment chamber (the same that had held the dream demons) wasn't fully active. There was clearly something supernatural at work with it – but for what of the creatures wasn't that a case? The terror briefly felt in Delta Facility faded, and caused the main North American facility to be the butt of many jokes from those at headquarters and the other facilities.

Epilogue: Eighteen years later, the mysterious charred corpse was (obviously) one of the few monsters to remain behind in the disaster of '82, and was transferred to Beta Facility for the time being.

The first think Frank did after interviewing Marta for details of her – admittedly crazy-sounding – recollection of events was spread out all the news stories Marta had gathered and meticulously highlighted across his living room. He started with the less kooky sources – small town newspapers and the like. They were all disappearances – always exceedingly baffling. They all had the same pattern Marta had noticed.

The stories came from all over the country. Most of them happened around the same time – in late spring. Almost always five high school or college kids, now and again six or seven, and either all disappeared or all of them did but one. The lone survivor, always a girl or woman, often was found with bizarre injuries and an even more bizarre story. One claimed to have escaped a maniac with a sledge hammer after luring him into an old-fashioned steel bear trap, another claimed to have shot a werewolf to death by loading Rosary beads into a shotgun, another claimed to have gotten into their car and run over at least one cannibal hillbilly. But in no case were the bodies of the survivor's friends or the body of the creature they claimed to have killed been found. It all lined up with Marta's story.

As he looked at the stories he added details that Marta had either missed or hadn't thought to tell him. These kids were usually always away from home when this happened – either relatively close, as in the case of Marta and her friends, or clear across the country from home. It was almost always in a rural area. In stories that gave enough detail he could make out these things, some demographic information became very clear. In the by-far most common case of the five missing persons or four missing persons and one survivor, it was almost always three men or boys and two women or girls. If there were extra it could go either way. It was almost always white kids – most of the cases of missing black or Spanish kids were when more than five kids were involved. Black and Spanish girls were very, very rare among the survivors – so far as he could tell Marta was the only one who wasn't as white as the driven snow. The survivors were never exactly the girls you'd expect to survive this kind of thing – most of them weren't athletes, and if they were they weren't exactly the "only girl on the football team" types. All were traditionally pretty, most were described as smart and kind. Which was another thing – there always was an athlete and a super smart kid. He saw now why Highgarden believed her – it was absurdly specific.

Frank couldn't imagine how long it had taken Marta to find these – she must have skimmed every article in issue after issue of random, trashy tabloids and small town newspapers from faraway places that she happened to stumble upon in bookstores and libraries. God only knew how many more were out there.

So what was going on? Kidnappers? Why would they leave one kid – and why did they all have some weird story? He thought back to when he interviewed Marta – she'd come across like either the best damn liar in the world or someone who very adamantly believed her friends had been killed by some kind of fish monster. But she also mentioned that at a certain point things got hazy and it became hard to think. So that would imply some kind of hallucination – drugs maybe? Maybe the kidnappers drugged the kids to make them easier to control – but wouldn't sedatives or something work better than hallucinogens?

Maybe it was some freaky Satanic thing – it definitely sounded like a ritual.

But he was getting ahead of himself, wasn't he? He was basing all of this on stories in the Middle of Nowhere Gazette and UFO News. It could be … some kind of elaborate prank. Somehow.

The former at least gave him an option to verify – he could call and ask to speak to someone familiar with the case. If it seemed legitimate, and it wasn't too terribly far, he might even head out and talk to the girls.

It had taken months to be ready to take back her job, but once she did Marta felt better. Which was ironic – before the incident, if you'd have told her that getting yelled at by drunks because the bowling alley only had their particular brand of rare brewed-in-the-mountains-of-Mexico beer in bottles instead of on tap or because the cooks were taking too long to cook their burger well-done would be soothing in it's own way, she would have laughed hysterically.

She spent long days and nights behind the counter, taking orders, serving drinks, cleaning, and helping cook food whenever she could. When things were so hectic – when there was a line all the way from the bar in front of lane one to the entryway in front of lane fifteen, and all of them wanted some ridiculously complicated thing, and all of them were drunk and grumpy, there was no time to think about the fish man. There was no time to think about carrying Skyler to the boat. There was no time to think about Jenna and Kevin's blood floating to the surface, followed by what was left of them. There was no time to remember Mario's heroic but doomed attempt to charge the creature. There was no time to remember watching the thing biting into Wayne's face. No time to remember Skyler's blood seeping under the door from the bedroom to the balcony … No time to remember slowly opening the door, knowing what was on the other side …

In the asylum that was all she had seen, all she'd been able to think about. But here it was burger orders, pizza orders, pouring beer to just the right point, cutting off drunks and getting cursed at for it, the sound of bowling bowls striking pins, the ever present smell of grease and beer, cleaning the counter, "Electric Avenue" played ad nauseum on the jukebox, and con artists trying to get a free beer or order of fries, and white trash ordering a feast for themselves and two sprites and a small order of cheese fries for their six kids to share. It was exhausting and repetitive and frustrating and infuriating. But it wasn't the fish man.

She'd work her long shift and then go home and clean up, strengthened by the time away from her dark thoughts. The night after a shift or the day after a night shift she could spend hours researching, poring over newspapers and magazines and scouring the library and seemingly every bookstore in the Houston area for books that referenced mysterious disappearances. If she did that all day every day, she'd probably go mad – but the time at work forced her to get out of her head and out of the books now and again.

She had objected very strongly to her boss's plans to add a fish sandwich to the menu.

Frank got started calling police departments bright and early. He had operators put him through to the police department in Tillkeepsie, New York. The girl who said she shot a werewolf was from there, all though the attack had happened elsewhere. The dispatcher confirmed all the relevant details – the paper hadn't exaggerated at all, all though she felt they were a bit credulous of the girl's story. The case was technically open and the survivor, Katie Hawkins, was a person of interest. The dispatcher suggested Frank call the sheriff department in the town where it happened to get more details on the investigation, so that's exactly what Frank did.

By the end of the day, he had called twelve PD's and sheriff's departments, having checked up on eight cases. So far they all correlated with the stories – even the two he followed up on from the tabloids. It would take a while but he should keep calling and try to confirm these details – maybe they'd be able to tell him something useful.

If this was a cult, it was a very well-connected one. The disappearances spread all over the nation and flawlessly executed – Marta's group was one of the very few that left anything at all behind and, well, considering what a big mystery that was, that said something for the efficiency of the clean-up for these incidents.

But they couldn't be everywhere … could they?

It was time to do some work with a map and an atlas.

Tiffany didn't have much contact with "the dangerous ones," for obvious reasons. Most of the patients at Smith's Grove Sanitarium would never hurt anyone, except perhaps themselves. But there were a few patients that the rest of the staff warned them about – a girl who'd burned her whole family to death, a man who'd killed a bunch of dogs …

And Michael.

Objectively, Hannah, the girl who'd killed her whole family, should be scarier. She'd killed all of them in such a horrible way. But they were apparently abusive assholes, and Hannah was found on a street corner in her underwear sobbing and screaming about demons taking her family. Michael …

Michael was cold.

Tiffany had met him in art therapy. She hadn't known who he was or why he was there at the time, but she knew there were two guards watching him like a hawk, so she knew he was one of the criminal ones. She went to talk to him anyway – she wasn't scared of them. Hannah was sweet and timid and would probably never hurt anyone else, Jack the dog killer was a pitiable ranting lunatic. Tiffany and Hannah became fast friends, and sometimes when Tiffany was with her, her memories became something like a word on the tip of your tongue – it was annoying, but she always hoped one day she'd actually remember something. She avoided Jack, but only because she didn't want to cry in front of him. "Hi, what's your name?" she asked the freakishly tall, handsome, dark-headed young man about her age. Presumably, she didn't actually know how old she was exactly. The guards looked up in alarm that she even approached him, which didn't exactly set her mind at ease. He didn't answer, only looked up at her, looking her over like he was making some kind of calculations. He probably was – sociopaths were wired to view other people as math problems, and in hindsight that's likely what he was. It occurred to her he could kill her with his bare hands – he was so massive and she was so tiny it would be easy for him – and a wave of fear ran through her as she realized, with a terrifying certainty, that that was exactly what he was thinking too. He gave her the creeps in a way no one ever had – she was an open, trusting person, and she was certain that even before whatever had happened to her that brought her here, she'd always been the type to make friends easily.

"Um … I guess I'll just go paint over there," she said nervously.

"That's a good idea, miss," one of the guards said warningly, and Tiffany hurried back to her station.

She only found out later he had murdered his older sister when he was just six-years-old, and that he worried the staff and they'd always campaigned to keep him inside the high security wing. He was never in art therapy with her again – she never found out why they changed it, and she never wanted to know.

1979

"How's Delta doing?" Darvis asked as she nursed the black coffee she always drank on the long, uncertain sacrifice nights this time of year.

"See for yourself," Tim Wilson answered and gestured to the big screen. Wilson, a promoted techie, was way too proud of the new, secure broadcast equipment that let them watch the sacrifices live. For most of the employees at Headquarters, it made it all a little too real – it's not that they were in the dark about what the sacrifices entailed, but most of them hadn't had to actually watch teenagers and young adults get slaughtered since they'd been promoted from the local facilities, and what they'd seen there often hadn't been detailed. But they'd adapted, even developing morbid jokes and betting pools with the advantage of seeing it live.

The pig man was more horrifying than one might think based on description – its features were just human enough to trigger every internal alarm about it. That face alone was the stuff of nightmares. To say nothing of its sharp tusks and vicious teeth or the meat cleaver in its hand.

Those vicious teeth sunk into the calf of Herbert West, this particular sacrifice's scholar. "And here we go," Wilson said coolly. "Two birds, one stone." Darvis watched, almost disinterestedly, as the young college student kicked with his other leg, his aim true and striking the monstrosity in the eye, hard enough to make it break its grip. He scurried back from the creature on his elbows, trying to put any amount of distance between himself and his impending demise. It was hard not to root for him – in a different world, a better world, he would have been going to medical school in a little over a year, to earn both a medical degree and a doctorate, to do research in emergency medicine. For all Darvis knew, thousands of patients were about to die with him. That was part of the sacrifice – God only knew what some of the kids lost every year would have gone on to do, the things they would have invented, the laws they would have written, the novels they were going to write, the children they would have had … Not that any of that mattered with West in particular. If it hadn't been the pig man, it would have been an assassin and a bullet.

"Come on, use the cleaver! I've got fifty bucks on scholar third!" Wilson shouted, in the same tone one would use to inform the coach which play they should run, should they hear you through the TV. Instead, the pig-man tried to grab the premed with its awkward, cloven hooves – which would have been comical in any other circumstances. In fact, it was to the jaded Company employees. At a different table, the head of the chemistry department and a cultural advisor giggled and cheered for the scholar to get a temporary reprieve – the chemist had money on scholar fourth and the fool was about to stumble on the scene. It was also odd – Darvis had never known a monster to be this "playful" following the first kill unless they encountered the virgin while the others were still alive. Usually they went straight for the kill, and even if they took their time it was very clear that person was about to die. The whore and the athlete had certainly gotten the cleaver, and the teeth were more than good enough for holding someone in place to inflict it.

And sure enough, the fool, an environmental studies student with a fondness for marijuana by the name of Callaghan, stumbled right into it, somehow having heard nothing of the struggle, while West was reaching for a tire iron that had fallen with a clang from the shelves of the tool shed. The pig-man bolted for Callaghan as soon as he stepped into the tool shed, and the chemist and the cultural advisor cheered while Wilson yelled, "Oh come on!" That was very odd – especially after it had been so hesitant with West. West grabbed the tire iron and the battery he'd come in for in the first place, stumbled to his feet, and bolted for the door, limping on the wounded leg, but making good time all the same. He swung the iron as hard as he could at the back of the pig man's head – and apparently he was stronger than he looked, or else he got a very lucky hit, because the monster went down like glass, falling on top of the now disemboweled Callaghan. West kneeled by Callaghan and took his pulse, but Delta Fourteen A's equipment already knew it was over for the young man – a message indicating he was deceased flashed across the screen. "Shit," Wilson and West both muttered at almost the same time, in about the same tone. West was a pretty cool customer – he'd been surprisingly unfazed by most of this. "Charlie! Charlie! Come on!" West bellowed at the main house, in a tone that said he was not going to wait very long if she did not, in fact, hurry, and glanced around, clearly looking for something he could use to make sure the pig-man stayed down. Failing to find anything, he lifted the iron again and hit the pig-man again and again on the back of the head until he was out of breath, pushing its face further into Callaghan's spilled intestines, sometimes missing and hitting the dead would-be environmentalist instead. By the time he was done, the pig-man's skull was splayed wide open at the back, and the student was covered in blood and gore, both porcine and human. It wasn't getting up – but just wait until the last two saw what Delta Fourteen A had up their sleeves. The little sub-facility had done well for themselves, despite their small size.

"What happened to Todd?" the virgin asked in tears as she stumbled to the toolshed, and then her eyes fell on Callaghan. "Oh … oh my God …" she sobbed, and West shut the door behind him and put her face in his shoulder, patting her back. The helpfulness of which was highly debatable considering he was covered in blood and gore from both their enemy and her fallen friend, but it was sweet nonetheless. Some of the employees had ignored the fact she had a girlfriend and he never had had one in his life to put money on them hooking up before the end. (It highlighted the less-than-literal nature of the "virgin" role that there had been at least one instance of a survivor walking away with something to remember a fallen comrade by arriving thirty-eight weeks later – as long as it didn't happen until after the whore was dead and she otherwise qualified, it seemed to be okay with the Ancient Ones if the virgin got laid before the end. Maybe that kid would cure cancer and they could call that a victory for mankind.) "It's okay. It's okay. It was quick. But we have to go," he said urgently, and broke the embrace to pick up the battery – he never had let go of the tire iron.

"But … but you killed it …" she said in a whimper. "We can take time to take care of …"
"No Charlie, we need to go now. We need to disappear. Well I do. You should go too … I don't know what they do when it fails …"

"Why? Herbert what …"
"I wish I could explain, but the point is I don't think this is over and even if it is … it's not for me. We have to go now," he said over his shoulder as he started limping towards the car.

"Let me get those," she said and took the heavy iron and battery, and let him lean on her to make better time towards the truck, hopping awkwardly on the unbitten leg.

"When's the sow getting there?!" Jordan, a techie with a disturbing taste for blood that went beyond the practiced indifference most of them felt, asked eagerly between bites of popcorn.

"I'm sure Delta Fourteen A's on it," Darvis said calmly. All though she was anxious too – it had already been a relatively short night, but spectacular, and she'd hate to think of those two getting away. West would still have to be dealt with and it would mean the other three lives and all the time, money, and effort made to take them had been wasted.

The first thing West did when they reached the car was open it and take Todd's rifle out of the bed of it and load it with the ammunition he'd taken from Todd's room – another reason for Darvis to be nervous they might actually get away. Construction on Fourteen A had been rushed and they hadn't had time to finish the barrier – she'd been assured by the main Delta facility that it would be fine without it, but now she wasn't so sure, especially given the "two birds one stone" nature of this particular sacrifice.

"Jesus, Herbert, you think it's still going to attack?" Charlie asked.

"I don't think there was just one," West answered as he handed it to her. "If something moves, shoot it." He reached back into the bed to grab the jack and set about jacking up the truck to change the (very) flat tire.

"At least let me help with the battery, when you get to that," Charlie said.

"No – you watch my back," he snapped in response as he worked on.

West had the flat tire changed and almost had the new battery in, and Darvis was about to chew some asses at Delta, when he yelped and jumped back, collapsing to the ground, holding his hands out in front of him.

"Shocked yourself, didn't you?" Charlie asked, mimicking his cool tone, but turning around to look at him in concern, kneeling by his side to look and dropping the gun.

And that was all the time the sow needed.

It charged forward, lunging for the girl … the girl? "Is the damn thing defective?!" Darvis asked aloud in a rage as the sow tore the redhead girl's throat out in one swift, brutal bite, spraying both of the remaining humans with blood. The girl's cry of fear turned into a pained gargle and then she collapsed, instantly dead, against West. This time, the grumbles and groaning at headquarters was in unison – they were already overbudget this year, and now one more sacrifice had failed because some damn defective monster had …

Possibly done exactly what it was supposed to do, Darvis thought as she went over the oddities she'd already noted.

The sow was, somehow, even more grotesque than its mate. Unlike him, it wore no bloodstained apron and carried no cleaver, but its teeth and tusks were just as sharp. It had long, tangled, wild brown hair and distressingly human eyes. Its twelve teats were disturbingly human-like – it was disgusting even to Darvis, but the way she heard Wilson and even Jordan groan, it was probably even worse to people who might otherwise enjoy the sight of bare breasts. The sow turned to look at West almost tauntingly, the blood of his only friend in the world dripping from its snout. It made a show of swallowing the flesh it had torn from Charlie's throat, smacking loudly and licking its lips, while he sat there, finally too stunned to move. For just a second.

And then he was reaching for the rifle, fear replaced by anger on his face.

The sow lunged for him, but instead of going for the throat as it had with Charlie it gored him in the side. He cried out in pain but didn't stop, just grabbed the gun and pointed it at the only part he could reach while being gored – the flank – and fired point blank. Blood spattered everywhere and the thing pulled back in pain – West cocked the gun and fired, this time at its head. It was silent, but to be sure, he cocked the gun and fired again, and then again, and then again, and then again, until he ran out of ammunition.

He used a (very small) portion of his shirt that was free of blood to wipe his glasses, which proved ineffectual. He took off his jacket and put it over Charlie's face and upper body. "Bye Charlie," he said softly, and that was the last emotion he showed.

As Darvis screamed at Fourteen A to get damage control into the area to get him immediately, he slammed the hood closed, put the rifle and the other pack of ammunition in the passenger seat, and tried the truck. It worked – the battery had been installed correctly, even if cost him a nasty burn to get it done. He put the pick-up in gear and backed up, away from Charlie and the dead sow, and all too likely towards freedom. Fourteen A didn't have anyone qualified to deal with an actual human in the area – the pig wranglers probably could have tried but considering he was armed and had a car they weren't likely to succeed and she told them not to bother. Instead she chewed them for not having them on hand considering the lack of perimeter field, all while being furious over the fact that neither bird had been killed with this stone.

Or had it?

"We'll gear up at the main facility for one last try, we've got everything in place but the final invitation," the director of Delta facility said through the phone. Following the debacle, Darvis had retreated to her office to make all the important phone calls. The director had refused to apologize – insisting the defect with the sow was unforeseeable, and she had a point. Everything else had gone perfectly – it was hard to fault Delta staff for something that had never happened before.
"Hold off on that – at least for the moment," Darvis said, on a hunch.

"Darvis – are you crazy? Everyone's going into their last ditch efforts, we can't afford to hesitate if any of them …"

"I didn't say wait that long – set things in motion in twenty-four hours if you don't hear from me," Darvis snapped and hung up.

She remembered what Brody had always said when she had worked directly under him. "Always trust downstairs." That was the motto of everyone in a position of power in the Company, but Brody had believed it more than anyone. He was the only Director of Operations anyone could remember who had actually been excited when mysterious directives showed up in facility computers or something freaky happened like with the dream demons.

Darvis hung up the phone and allowed herself to think it through for the first time. West was almost certainly a literal virgin, if their research on him was at all reliable, and it always was. He'd had multiple plans to get them out, most of them only foiled because of stage hands working against them behind the scenes, and been the originator of the plan that allowed him to escape and would have gotten Charlie out if they hadn't been surprised by the sow. He wasn't as caring as the girls who usually filled the role, to say the least, but no one said that was a hard requirement. He was a slight, darkheaded, conventionally attractive kid who didn't drink or smoke and passed up Callaghan's offer of a joint – which even Charlie had taken. And Charlie, in addition to that joint, was definitely not a literal virgin unless girl-on-girl didn't count for some reason – Darvis was fairly certain their investigators were still passing around the polaroids of her and her girlfriend – and she'd been too frightened to help much. But she was just as smart as West – also a premed, also having dabbled in research, also an honor student. They'd had female scholars before – but had they ever had a male virgin? That was her next call – to archives.

"Johnson," she snapped into the phone.

"I heard what happened – what can we do to help?" Johnson asked. Everyone in the Company got nervous when they had to go into the last stretch before they had a successful sacrifice – it meant they were cutting it close, and also that a lot of kids had died and potentially attracted outside attention.

"Look at all records for Delta and Belta – has there ever been a male virgin or whore? And have someone in linguistics answer this question: Are the instructions in any of the original agreements gender specific?"

"I'll get everyone on it, ma'am."

"Thank you."

And then she called the directors of Gamma, Beta, and Alpha – Alpha had already started so she let them proceed, but she put Gamma and Beta on a brief hold. The directors of the latter two reacted much as Delta had – they thought it was a sign of weakness. But even setting aside the lives at stake, there was also the cost and the attention to be considered – the second lesson Brody had taught her was not to be needlessly bloodthirsty. Callous, yes – you couldn't shed a tear for the kids, no matter what, or you'd go completely to pieces and morale would suffer. But you couldn't enjoy it either – even if you pretended to, for the sake of the underlings.

Within an hour, Johnson called back – the linguists had confirmed all the original agreements were gender neutral, but they were still searching for precedent.

Four hours after that, one more phone call told Darvis what she was hoping to hear. "1937 in Europe was all male, and it was the only one that succeeded that year. I think it's safe to say – we can call this season to a close."

Now there was just the small matter of dealing with West, but it could wait – wherever he turned up, they could have someone deal with him quietly.

Darvis went to her modest home in a nice neighborhood to sleep for the first time in days – coffee was always the only thing keeping her up during sacrifice season.

She slept easily, knowing Earth was safe another year and fifteen kids had been spared the ritual – it wasn't a great year, but better than the year before. She got to sleep a little bit after dawn – she could hear the little neighbor kids playing. Safe another year – that made it all worth it.

Well, she slept easily until …

"They don't want you to kill the boy," the man standing at the edge of her bed said.

"Who the hell are you?" she demanded, pulling the sheet over her chest as she sat up. Had she not been terrified, she might have regretted deciding to sleep nude.

"You don't recognize me? I'm hurt," the man, a fairly ordinary but inexplicably creepy looking fellow, said in a voice full of mock hurt, and then as Darvis watched his face burned and melted away until she recognized the charred corpse currently housed at Delta Facility.

"How did you get out of containment?" she demanded.

The man's face … unburned, for lack of a better word … until he achieved a state of having a horribly melted face but was still recognizably human. "It would appear that your little fields went on the fritz," the man answered gleefully, playing with the …

The knives she had somehow managed not to notice on his hand. "And they say you can't take it with you!" he said and raised his hand, folding his fingers up and down one by one as he examined them for himself. She cowered back into her bed, pulling the sheets over her head instinctively like a small child. "Really? Not even a little fun? I bet it wouldn't even hurt for real …" She peeked hesitantly over the top of the sheets, and saw the burned man looking up and arguing with someone. "She's too old for my tastes anyway," he said with a scoff, then looked back down at her. "Anyway – they say they don't want you to kill the boy."

"They?" Darvis asked, her skin crawling, even though she already knew.

" 'Downstairs,' " the burned man said with an evil grin. "They said the computer would be too slow since most everyone went home … so they let me out." And then, he lunged forward with those knives …

And Darvis woke up with a start before the knives could hit – even in sleep, she hadn't particularly wanted to find out what he meant by not being able to hurt her "for real." But terror didn't stop her from performing her duty. She reached for the phone by her bed and quickly dialed Delta Facility.

"Did containment unit 14572 just go off?" she asked as soon as someone answered, without bothering with the niceties.

"We were about to call – in fact it turned off and then on again," a man, probably Sitterson by the sound of it, answered in a flustered voice.

"Very good. Don't worry about it. Downstairs just found a new way to reach out," she said wearily, and hung up. She certainly hoped they didn't do it often. The next call was to someone in external threat management.

"Director Darvis!" some butt kisser said enthusiastically. Much more enthusiastically then was needed, especially at this hour and given what had just happened. "It's good to hear from you. We have an update on West – it looks like he's getting stitched up in the ER now, using a fake insurance card he got off some poor schmoe, we can have an officer pick him up and …"
"Let him go."
"Excuse me?"
"I just got word from downstairs. Keep track of him but let him go, let him think he's gotten away. Downstairs has something in mind for him."
"But ma'am …"
"Never question downstairs," she said authoritatively and hung up without getting the operator's name – if they knew what was good for them they'd pass it on to their superiors and that would be the end of it.

1983

After working all night and well into the next day, pulling the kind of all-nighter he hadn't since he was working that horrible triple homicide a few years before he retired, Frank Hernandez had used an atlas to find every town where the local PD or Sherrif's department had responded to a survivor or investigated a mysterious disappearance matching the pattern. They were pretty spread out, literally all over the country, but they seemed, oddly, to converge on a single point in the Midwest – as though that were where the pebble dropped into the pond and everything else spread out from it in a ripple, but with a few outliers in distant places like Texas, California, and Florida. And in one case, Mexico – though that was easily the most distant one.

Well, that was a starting place to be sure.

Author's Note

And if the sacrifice West was in was a movie, you know the last shot would be panning to the litter of piglets in the bushes or something.

One of my favorite things about writing this was that it's a period piece. It was such a fun challenge to think about how both Marta and Frank would have done research on these cases before the Internet … today that would be only a google search away, but for them it involves a lot more leg work and even then they're only scratching the surface. Like with Internet they might find out there's a separate but equally weirdly specific pattern for Asia and South America / Mexico and a similar one in Europe, and eventually find a similar geographical pattern for the others (and realize that Marta's was part of the Gamma pattern) – but instead he's pretty much limited to the US and his case which happened to US citizens in Mexico.

I don't think anyone is following this but just in case they are - I'm afraid I'm nowhere near being able to meet my original Halloween goal. I wish I'd had the idea earlier in the summer so I could have had it done ad ready to post, but oh well. This way I can take my time and make sure I do it justice. I will be finishing it eventually but for right now I need to put it on hold to finish some other projects in a timely manner that have been waiting for resolution for a lot longer. See my profile for more details about when you can expect to see more of this story.