Shiver: Pandemic Poker (A Night Moves Novel Book 1) Read online

  SHIVER

  * * *

  A NIGHT MOVES NOVEL

  anonymae

  Copyright © 2016 by anonymae. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. First Issue and Edition: October 2016. Published in the United States of America. ISBN: 978-0-692-77854-8 (EPUB).

  Cover art by BookCoverMasterClass.com. Copyright © 2016.

  Table of Contents

  PROLOGUE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  ABOUT ANONYMAE

  Dedication

  To my spiritual guide with love, devotion, and gratitude

  In loving memory

  Lynn, Boris, Carlos, Michele, Alexander, Dave, Anastacia, and Hugh

  Acknowledgments

  This novel would not have been possible without support from Casey Clipper, Michael Mandarano, and Joanna Walker.

  Strange how the night moves

  Robert Clark Seger

  Issue One

  * * *

  Pandemic Poker

  PROLOGUE

  05:24 Sweetwater Mountain Range 07/08/15

  Dangling by her fingertips, eleven thousand feet off the ground, Taleia Edris scrubbed SPF fifty sweat out of her eye with the knuckles of her off hand. Wheeler Peak, a wind-worn, dung-colored escarpment fifty miles from the California-Nevada border, loomed over her.

  She found her next handhold. Looping the calloused fingers of her right hand around the outcrop, she tested its stability with one sharp tug. Satisfied, she continued her climb, trying to clear her mind. She tried. And failed.

  Social media detractors had tagged her Witchy Woman. The one-hundred-forty-character-challenged used “ww.”

  While both had cited her knack for finding clients in national and regional parks, one virulent blogger raged, “…Clients? Isn’t she supposed to be some sort of shrink? Shouldn’t she be working in, oh, I don’t know, a psych ward? Facilitating group therapy for mentally disturbed—sorry—ill patients? Why is she in the woods looking for crazy? I mean, who does that?”

  “Witchy Woman,” chanted angry-faced emoji followers.

  “She’s no better than a huckster,” another blogger ranted, “with a graduate degree from a low-ranked university. What’s worse is her claim of a disease only she can see. A cure only she can administer. If she gets to the infected before Permanence, the last stage of her make-believe virus, she named the Outbreak. And poof, the infected are miraculously cured. The state oughta revoke her license.”

  “But wait—there’s more,” a troll jeered. “Not only does she snatch the infected out from the jaws of Permanence, but she also claims she inhibits Regression, the animalistic effect of the Outbreak. And like a freaking second coming, she returns them to their humanity, whole and unharmed. But we know the truth, don’t we? She’s conning her own people out of money they don’t have.”

  Miniature rivers of sweat trickled down her temples. Cold, hard anger slid down her burning legs. It slithered into the toes of her right foot. Numbed, her toes slipped off the edge. Loose soil and gravel grated under her right instep, and fell eleven thousand five hundred feet. Instinctively, she clutched at the meager handholds.

  “Not a fraud,” she panted. “Not a freak.”

  Hanging by her fingertips. Suspended in midair. She swayed, a human pendulum caught in a midsummer breeze.

  Closing her eyes against stinging sunblock, she whispered, “Let go. Let it go, Leia.”

  Her body relaxed. Her mind did not.

  Misogynoirs, African-American women haters, piled on. Conservatives cited the one-drop rule: one drop of black blood obliterated her humanity. Moderates applied the paper bag test: the hue of her skin determined the entitlements, if any, she deserved.

  But the sun didn’t care; its rays still burned her skin.

  Her proponents turned the epithet on its head, dubbing her Black Magic Woman. Black Twitter, the social network dedicated to the African-American community, followed suit in all caps. “BMW does what the government, science, and the medical communities can’t or won’t do,” they exclaimed.

  Lactic acid vibrated down the muscles of her arms in warning. Get to the peak.

  She pressed a leg against the mountain’s craggy face, inching the tips of her toes along a slim toehold.

  “More importantly,” argued one advocate, “she possesses a unique intellect—crystal-liquid intelligence.”

  She scrabbled the digits of her toes against stone and earth. I see what you cannot or choose not to see. She forced her narrow appendages to grasp the ledge. I process the data and listen to what it tells me. And then to hold the ledge. And use the information without bias. I don’t force the data to reinforce known theories. The right side of her body secure, Taleia dug her left foot into another toehold. Not what you want to hear. Is it?

  During the media storm, Taleia kept her silence. And, like her clients, shunned human contact.

  On a quick exhale Taleia climbed, spider like, the rest of the way up the mountain face, her equipment-heavy GOBAG cinched tight on her back.

  12:24 Wheeler PeakPlateau 07/08/15

  Knuckles on her hips, Taleia surveyed the area. As habitats go, the location wasn’t any more remote than some of the places her other clients had hunkered down in.

  But sure as sin, it is the most desolate.

  The nearest water supply, a hot spring, bubbled a dozen miles away. And husks, the only remains of summer’s stingy supply of uncultivated edible plants and nuts, lay empty and desiccated under the leaching heat of the High Plains sun.

  Doubt, a joint-deforming muscle cramp, locked around her rib cage.

  19:49 Wheeler Peak Plateau Tree Line 09/23/15

  Thick-limbed conifers, and an observation blind perched among them, swayed in an icy wind.

  Taleia nestled within the warm comfort of the state-of-the-art blind. With her legs tucked under her hips, in the traditional Japanese seiza style, she stared through her specially modified Carson 3D Series High Def field glasses, secured to a carbon-fiber tripod.

  Her seventy-seventh day of surveillance revealed nothing until she realized, unlike previous clients, this child preferred to forage at night. A fact she hadn’t learned until she scraped dried mud from a page in an observation notebook her godfather had sent her.

  “Should have known better,” she muttered to the wind, and scanned the deepening shadows of twilight.

  There.

  A hundred twenty yards away, north by northwest, tucked in a stand of edible grasses. Their wheat-like stalks, and the curly mane of her client’s natural, swayed in the unseasonable wind. Something about the texture and color of her client’s hair pricked Taleia’s memory.

  Then her client turned to face her.

  Taleia rocked back, her knees banging hard against the tripod’s legs. She grabbed it, righted it, then clung to it as if it were a floatation device. With trembling hands, she reached for the rounded edges of her field glasses and looked through the lenses. Glaring back at her, across an ocean of withered stalks, snarled her dead sister’s doppelgänger.

  20:00 Wheeler Peak Observation Blind 09/23/15

  Her memories of Jaden’s death remained a kaleidoscope of mismatched fragments. Each a precious gem trapped in liquid amber, twirling, twinkling. Just out of reach. Millions upon millions of shards. Each held a sliver of truth. Slivers of memory too small to see clearly. Too many to collect. With the few fragments she had pieced together, the truth was no clearer.

  And without knowing the truth, Taleia couldn’t escape. The grinding. Gnawing.
Deep in her gut.

  She was sure her insides resembled the stubby-gnawed and bloody end of a rubber chew-toy belonging to a nightmare with big teeth. A good night, with enough meds—her nightmare contented itself by worrying her intestines between its top and bottom lateral incisors. A bad night—the night she had known better than to answer her godfather’s phone call—no meds on the planet could have anesthetized the razor’s pain it teased from her guts.

  “Two days,” her godfather’s river-rock redneck drawl had crooned. “You’re in. You confirm. An’ you’re out.”

  She couldn’t go. Not this time. The tip of her tongue pressed against the roof of her mouth, ready to utter the bittersweet initial consonant of the infamous one-word sentence, when the nightmare pounced.

  “Uh—”

  Shook it into submission.

  “Huh.”

  Then devoured it.

  The next thing she knew, the nightmare and her pain had vanished. And she was on a flight heading to the High Sierras, sorting through a mud-caked, ink-splattered, and oddly stained observation notebook.

  She’d asked her godfather who had authored the notes. All she got for her trouble was a terse, “The writer ain’t as important as what’s written.”

  Written in the strong block letters of a man’s hand, the observer’s notes were meticulous. Describing the child, her prospective client, in every aspect. Including a small pencil sketch, drawn in the margins of a muddy page, its details smeared by a pinkish-brown stain.

  Now staring through her binoculars at her client, a snarling feral child with orange eyes and her dead sister’s face, a riptide of grief washed over her.

  Fingers trembling, Taleia tapped the small button on the side of her specially modified field glasses. Silently the high-resolution electronic camera, embedded in the device, began recording and simultaneously storing the digital file on a local solid-state drive and servers miles away.

  The observer had commented on her client’s stunning inability to forage. Documented the little girl’s peculiar method for finding shelter and water. And gave her client a name, Boi.

  There was no way the observer could have known her client resembled Jaden. But her godfather? He had to have known.

  Another detail he neglected to mention, and she wrangled out of a mutual acquaintance, the observer was dead. Murdered.

  04:39 Complex South Helideck 11/25/15

  At the sound of thundering rotor blades, the heir apparent to the director’s chair of the CDC stamped his booted foot against the metal helideck. Ready to pull the plug. Kill the deal.

  He’d kept his side of the bargain. He’d gotten the witch and the feral child to safety, as he promised. So what if he’d cut it close? He didn’t need the witch.

  Low cloud cover hid the bird from view. A change in its rotor’s pitch told him it banked east. Toward the pad.

  No, he needed the feral—alone. His specimen.

  Feeling the familiar tug of his lips into an ugly grin, Kayd Izmitt couldn’t help but admire the ever-cold, distant, logical part of his mind he called his scientist, plot the witch’s demise.

  The plan was simple. Isolate the witch. Elegant. Keep tabs on her. Career ending. Discredit her.

  The chopper roared above him. Blinded him with its strobe light. Its updraft shoved his close-cut hair helter-skelter around his head.

  Touchdown.

  The witch stepped out from the chopper’s cavity. Wind from its rotors drew her mass of curls up and away from her face. At the same time, morning light sliced a vertical line through the clouds, highlighting her lupine features.

  A pretty woman she was not. Her face—too angular. Her body—big-boned. And her long arms—covered in sculpted muscle and wrapped around a wadded-up blanket—too articulated for his taste.

  Yet a part of him, the part devoid of logic and reason—the part he kept locked, caged, and under control—stretched and yawned. The beast slid one eye open.

  Kayd had never seen anyone like her. Still, she seemed familiar, as if he’d seen her in a different place. A different time.

  Curious, he followed the spectral memory and tried to tug it into the present. But the more he chased it, the more it eluded him. Annoyed, he grabbed its fleeting essence and shoved it into the forefront of his thoughts. A splinter memory. Murky and indistinct, it resolved into view.

  Before his mind could make sense of it, the beast struck.

  And took control.

  Imperceptibly, it lifted his nose. Filling his lungs, it scented the air. Its labored breathing pressed his heart against his ribs.

  The salty taste of pistachio nuts mingled with the delicate flavor of roses and the honey sweetness of nougat on his tongue. The witch’s scent.

  Her fragrance made his mouth water. Made him step closer. Made his hands itch to feel the soft texture of her hair against his calloused fingers and palms.

  Clouds closed in. Propellers wound down. Her wild mane veiled her once more. And an unpleasant icy tingle skittered up his spine, jolting him out of the beast’s control. He shuddered from the foreign sensation.

  His second in command advanced on the witch in a motion designed to bring the her to heel. But the witch failed to read his second’s blatant body language. From the tension riding her shoulders, he knew his second was not pleased.

  His second stepped closer.

  Again, the witch ignored the social cue. The smooth skin of her sharp features remained placid, as if she were wholly unaware of his second’s presence. Curious, his scientist scrutinized the woman.

  Shifting her shoulders, the witch made her body a barrack between his second and the shabby blanket in her arms.

  The women froze, like samurai, the moment before conflict erupted in blood and steel. An errant morning breeze wafted past him and toward them, completing the tableau.

  The witch’s head turned into the breeze. Her nose wrinkled. She breathed in deeply. Once. Twice.

  On the third breath, her deep-brown, translucent eyes found his. Shrugging past his second, the witch made a beeline toward him.

  Standing in front of him, she was at least six-two. Still, she looked up to meet his eyes. Then she smiled at him. And he knew he’d made a horrible mistake.

  When she parted her aubergine lips to speak, the irritating trill of a thousand locust wings drowned out her words. The beast flexed its shoulders against his will, straining to get closer to her.

  She hefted the rough wool blanket to the hollow of her throat. Gently, she brushed dirty wool and snarled brownish-blond hair away from a delicate face. Too late, he realized her intent.

  “Dr. Izmitt, I’m Taleia Edris, and this,” she lifted the dirty bundle toward him, “this is Boi.”

  Sun-kissed, the slumbering specimen turned toward him. Closed eyes darting from side to side in REM sleep. A button nose wrinkling. A faint smile brushed rosebud lips. Seemingly satisfied, the specimen settled back into the witch’s chest.

  “No,” he whispered.

  The witch meant to introduce him to it. As if it were human. Not changed. Not altered. But even altered, he’d know her face anywhere. The specimen was a ringer for one of the students he’d tutored his senior year in high school. His dead student.

  The beast drove itself against his rib cage, wanting, needing to get closer to the witch…to the specimen.

  Kayd shoved the beast into its cage at the back of his mind, and took a step back.

  “No,” he growled.

  He couldn’t let the beast out.

  “No,” he repeated. “You are employee 314159, and this,” he continued, “this is specimen 112358.”

  He couldn’t lose control. Not now. Not ever.

  09:00 Huffington Post 12/31/15

  ABOVE-TOP-SECRET REPORT SANCTIONS COVERT DETENTIONS OF U.S. CHILDREN

  ATLANTA, Georgia. Hot on the heels of yesterday’s unequivocal denial of a U.S.-based epidemic by Dr. Mercer Mewborn, CDC deputy director, RasLekke, an online whistler-blower blog, rele
ased an above-top-secret CDC report confirming a virus of epidemic proportions has infected hundreds of children in the western United States.

  The report recommended the formation of a covert CDC paramilitary squad, dubbed the “Wild Child Unit,” and endorsed WCU collection and quarantine of infected children, known as ferals, for the purpose of developing an antiviral.

  Absent from this report: guidelines on humane capture, quarantine, and treatment of ferals, primarily of African-American descent.

  CDC officials could not be reached for comment.

  ONE

  18:39 Complex Izmitt Lab 09/30/16

  Kayd loved the microplate’s plastic alabaster gleam. The way the minuscule wells interrupted its plane. And the feel of the pipette’s hard plastic grip beneath his gloved fingers as he drew the instrument over the last microtube.

  Slowly releasing its plunger, Kayd watched the last of the specimen’s precious serology sample fill the infinitesimal space. He withdrew the pipette. Released its disposable tip into a nearby biohazard bin. Slid the instrument back in its cradle. Tore off the double-thick latex gloves. Chucked them in the BH bin.

  His facial muscles pulled his lips away from his teeth, in a familiar and unholy grin, as his scientist checked and double-checked the protocol list.

  Almost across the finish line.

  Kayd stood. Placed his palms on either side of his lower back. Pulled his elbows in. Leaned into a stretch. Using the geometry of the motion, he tried to pry apart the braided knots of tension between his shoulder blades. Turning back to the lab table, he ripped a fresh pair of gloves from a dispenser and dragged them on.