The "fearsome foursome" were summoned to Denver to investigate a dead construction worker who 'woke up' in his body-bag, chanted something in a strange language, and then went back to being dead. Aside from maybe their ordeal in Baghdad, the Agents hadn't encountered something this overtly supernatural from the outset. Still, no one seemed to be in immediate danger, so the group decided to stick to their regular cautious approach. Jim asked the case officer for a copy of the bodycam footage and headed to the library to try to translate whatever the corpse was saying.
Gabriel arrived late to the briefing room. He'd spent the working group's initial budget on renting a nice silvery-black F1-50. He drove himself to a hotel to check out and secure some rooms, then turned the truck over to Bill and Taylor. They headed to the hospital. Bill casually flaunted his FBI badge, saying that they were interested in whatever had transpired the previous night, as it might be relevant to an ongoing investigation. The hospital wasn't in any trouble, and he was willing to lend the help of a subject-matter expert (Taylor, who raised his hand awkwardly) to get them out of any possible malpractice suit. They were just there to collect evidence to push for an unrelated conviction.
The man at the front desk shrugged, and called for the guy responsible for the hospital's PR department. He helped them find Carlos, the EMT who'd taken the construction worker into the hospital in the first place. Interviewing him didn't turn up any leads, but Taylor said to look on the bright side, "at least that rules out the threat of a lurking ghosts we might've missed."
Meanwhile at the library, Jim discovered that the corpse had spoken in old Celtic, or at least something like it. It also mentioned a very real god, Nodens. The chant seemed to be a message calling anyone who would listen into a never-ending war against chaos. Bill and Taylor got his summary by text just as they were heading into the autopsy. The construction worker was named Eugene Cooper, and the cause of death was pretty obviously a heart attack, though a very nasty one. It had five points of origin, almost like the five fingers of a hand squeezing the life out of the heart. Judging by the position of the fingers, it was either a right hand reaching from behind, or someone's left hand plunged into his chest. While Taylor sat in on the autopsy, Bill interviewed Mary, a nurse who had taken care of Eugene on a few separate occasions. He learned that Eugene had been working at a new construction site building an amphitheater in an abandoned lot, and that ever since then, he'd become a lot more accident prone.
Gabriel paced furiously in his hotel room. During his last operation, he'd been cursed by some mutant son of a sky-god. The curse had since worn off, but the intense feeling of doom stuck with him. He racked his brains, scribbling down possibilities of what phrase the Texas State University astronomy professor had screamed at him. The spell was right on the tip of his tongue, he just needed that crack of madness and inspiration.
After picking up Jim at the library, the rest of the gang stopped by the diner where Eugene had died of a heart attack. Bill was easily able to hack into the WiFi and the unsecured network that ran the CCTV cameras. They watched as an amputee followed Eugene into the building and sat behind him in a booth. He took a few bites of his blueberry muffin before the amputee pressed his forearm stump into the back of the booth. A few moments later, Eugene slumped over. Taylor refused to eat anything until the group figured out what was going on. Bill countered his paranoia with the observation that "hey, if it gives you five heart attacks at once, it probably tastes delicious," and ordered the same muffin. The man had paid in cash, but Taylor was still able to find out his name, Larry King, from one of the cashiers, as he'd used a veteran discount to pay for his own meal. The crew realized it was getting late, and they hadn't heard anything from Gabriel, so decided to check on him at the hotel. They found him sweaty and out of breath, stargazing in the parking lot. Bill recognized the gleam in his eyes of someone who'd just learned a spell.
"Is it relevant?"
"Nah, just...something I couldn't get out of my head."
"We'll circle back to this later. Good job, man." Bill gave him a congratulatory pat on the back while Jim and Taylor looked on in horror.
The next day, Gabriel and Bill went to interview one the cop whose bodycam footage had sparked the whole operation. He told them that he'd had a recurring dream of waking up in a body bag and struggling to get out, only to find himself in a bog in what looked like the Scottish highlands. In the distance, a lightning strike illuminated a massive dog on the horizon, like three times the size of a Saint Bernard. The two Agents wrote him off as another victim of the spillage from an unnatural phenomenon.
Meanwhile, Taylor interviewed Eugene's widow. It turns out that despite his frequent injuries, the man's boss was remarkably reasonable. Eugene had been working at the construction site for about a month prior to his death, and his wife was able to corroborate Mary the nurse's reports of disassociation. She handed him the foreman's business card, Benjamin Hamish. She also told Taylor that Eugene had been suffering night terrors: a recurring nightmare about a one-armed warrior clad in black slaughtering Egyptian slaves.
After surveilling King for a while, the group came to two conclusions: he was building IEDs, and his house out in the middle of nowhere was guarded by a very large dog. Taylor estimated the dog's weight and calculated the exact dose needed to knock it out, and then prepared a sedative-laced steak. He also phoned one of his old buddies in the marines in an attempt to set up a meeting with King through mutual connections. It worked. The two met up in a bar while Jim watched from a corner, nursing a beer. King told Taylor that a "guard dog" was preventing him from carrying out his god-given mission to destroy the amphitheater. He also warned him that the construction foreman had some impossible streak of luck protecting him. The last time he'd tried to kill him, his gun jammed three times in a row.
Meanwhile, Agents Almeida and Bill watched King's house through binoculars, waiting for his dog to take the bait. He did, and sure enough, he wobbled around for a few minutes before passing out. The two Agents quickly swept through the house, confirming their suspicions of bomb-building, and discovering a reassuring lack of bloodstained pentagrams and occult shrines. They did find some blueprints for the amphitheater. Bill snapped some photos, and asked an old engineering professor of his what he thought. He wasn't sure, but he said the drainage system was unusually robust, as if it was built to handle a more viscous fluid than water, like syrup. The group had previously discovered that a few phone calls to the state would be enough to get the amphitheater shut down for a week or two on overdue inspections. However, Almeida cautioned that they should probably take a closer look themselves before they sent some poor OSHA official to get mummified in the storm drain.
No comments:
Post a Comment