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She took a look at the sheet and saw the facility was in Hainesburg, NJ, just a little more than an hour’s drive from the target’s home. At least she wasn’t going to have to do a long-distance road trip with the Dwarf and the target. She memorized the route and address then handed the sheet back to Lise-Anne.
“I’ll begin my preliminary surveillance on Monday,” she said. “Did you bring my requested items?”
Rand nodded and stood to go into the next room. He returned with a small suitcase which he set on the coffee table before her. He took his seat before she opened the case.
Minkah reviewed the contents to ensure they’d missed nothing she’d ordered. The bottom of the suitcase was foam-lined to securely hold the items in place. She saw the twin SIG-Sauer P229 handguns with a dozen extra clips loaded with hollow-point ammunition. Suppressors for the pistols. Ten throwing knives and two combat knives.
Also fitted into the foam was a burner cell phone for keeping in touch with Rand and three auto-injectors. She pointed to the drug injectors as she looked to Lise-Anne. “Are these calibrated to the target’s body mass and metabolism?”
“While we don’t have information on his metabolism, they’re guaranteed to put him under,” she confirmed, and Minkah nodded.
The top of the case had a mesh net holding packages containing the holsters and straps for carrying the weapons and extra ammo. She saw two more boxes of hollow points and wondered if they thought she was going to war. She understood the omission of the sniper rifle as the mission parameters had changed. She’d do a more thorough review in the privacy of her room. For now, it seemed like she had everything she needed. She placed the target’s dossier in the case and closed it.
She looked to Rand. “I’ll contact you when I’m ready to begin.” She nodded to them both, lifted the case, and left the apartment without another word.
Once she was in the apartment on the fifteenth, she pulled the dossier out of the suitcase then stored the luggage in the bedroom closet. Walking into the dining room, she turned on the small lamp and sat at the card table, and glanced once out the window overlooking the dark park across the street. She plucked the pictures from the folder and spread them out in front of her. She scanned her eyes over them, memorizing Henry Gable’s features so she’d be able to pick him out of a crowd at a glance.
This was shaping up to be the most challenging assignment she’d ever undertaken. Killing the target would be a walk in the park by comparison.
As the night grew late, she sat quietly on her chair, vexed by that one image of the strong, handsome man wearing the expression that didn’t belong on his face. She couldn’t help but get the impression she was looking at a smaller, less confident man somehow hidden inside a larger body.
The fat tire bicycle’s plush suspension absorbed the worst of the bumps on the monstrous city’s dark streets. Roger chuckled to himself at his clever thoughts. New York truly was big, and yes, it contained monsters, too.
Roger’s stomach rumbled as he hadn’t eaten in a while. It was time to find another of the creatures hiding in plain sight. He was discovering there were fewer of them than he first guessed. This made them harder to find, and his meals came farther apart than his appetite preferred.
He was always hungry.
The original owner of this bicycle had been one of the first monsters Roger had killed and consumed.
Before Roger became what we was now, he would never have accepted that he could be a killer. The idea of eating his victims would have been revolting and ludicrous!
That was before he’d discovered how natural it felt to hunt these freaks hiding amongst humanity. He’d once been one of those blind sheep. Now… now he was so much more, and monsters were delicious!
The press didn’t know about the death of the man who’d given Roger more than a meal because he’d been a hermit and apparently had no family or friends. The main reason for the lack of news on this victim was that his body’s remains were sealed in a defunct deep freeze in the man’s home.
Needing a place to stay, Roger stepped into the man’s life. He now lived in the dead man’s grubby ground floor apartment in an abandoned building and used the man’s bicycle to explore the city at night. How he’d come to own such an expensive two-wheel machine quickly came to light when Roger found his apartment full of stolen merchandise and a surprising amount of cash.
He’d quickly learned that it was a truism that no one pays attention to someone on a bicycle. He’d almost been in several accidents as distracted drivers launched their two-tonne death machines across intersections without care. Roger’s new reaction time and strength had saved him each time.
In his favor, he’d been able to ride past his targets, catch their scent, and ambush them without them being aware of him until he attacked.
He enjoyed riding the bike as it let him move almost invisibly throughout the city. The bike’s frame was wrapped in dirty, black hockey tape, perhaps to disguise it and hide it from its original owner.
Using some of the money from his hideout, Roger picked up black track pants and a baggy black hoodie. Granted, in the store, he’d had to pretend to be blind when he bought the clothes as he no longer saw color with his new eyes.
Roger reflected upon his new abilities to finally see the truth. Before that fateful night, he’d been one of the seemingly small number who were aware of a… wrongness in the world. He’d felt it in his being that he was somehow immersed in a vast conspiracy, but he could not make sense of it.
When he arrived at the hospital that night, he’d immediately gone to Tish’s room but was blocked at the door. He’d felt a desperate need to turn away, to leave the area, but his friend Tish was inside, and he had to see her. The other nurses said they’d heard she was permanently crippled. Nothing was going to keep him from seeing her. It took everything he had to push through that door and burst into the room.
He’d been utterly unprepared for what he saw next. The image was seared into his brain and remained sharp to this day.All rights © NôvelDrama.Org.
A large being with curling horns and furry goat legs had been leaning against the hospital bed with his right hand resting on the stomach of a smaller goat-legged being resting on the bed where Tish should have been. The larger goat being’s left hand held a coil of golden hair, which was just part of a considerable mass currently attached to Sandy’s head. More strands of the same hair held a small man with pointy ears suspended above the bed, holding one of his hands to the belly of the being in the bed. Then the incredible strong hair captured him, and he passed out.
When he woke, he was alone, feeling an intense need to get away, to hide. All he could see were outlines, but he managed to rush out of the room and ran down the stairwells faster than he’d ever done before. The hospital seemed oddly quiet, so he snuck out through the workman’s door. He spotted an SUV parked by the hospital’s side door and saw the shape and features of Henry Gable carrying the goat-legged being who’d been in the bed. He now knew that being was Tish. Before Roger was spotted, he rushed off into the night.
The first day at his apartment was difficult. Dealing with his new sight was terrifying, but he slowly learned how to use it. He slipped out that night and found he could easily navigate his way around without the need for any light.
But he was so incredibly hungry! He surprised himself when he caught and ate his neighbor’s cat. It didn’t stop his hunger, but it showed him what he was capable of.
On his way back to his apartment, he spotted a team of creatures casing the place. There were six of them. Two that reminded him of the small man who’d been in the hospital room and four others with wildly different shapes. They were hunting for him, so he’d faded back into the darkness and never went back.
He’d found a quiet place to hide and rest in an abandoned factory. There were plenty of rats to eat, and he realized he wasn’t squeamish about hunting and eating them. While they kept him alive, he found them unsatisfying.
As he hid and learned about his new abilities, making nightly excursions to spy on the people who had once been his friends, he began to put some of the pieces together. Tish had been changed into some kind of goat-legged monster. Sandy now had all that hair, which moved on its own. Dayshia? He wasn’t sure what her change was, and she still intimidated him too much to get close enough to check.
He also learned he had some drawbacks. He couldn’t see through glass, and reading signs and printed material, like money, was particularly difficult. Not impossible, unless the written surface had been laminated.
Glass being opaque to him meant Roger couldn’t drive. Granted, he hadn’t known how to drive before his change, so no loss there.