Final Scream Read online

  Nick perked up. “Oh God what?”

  “What if the bullet found its way back to Natalie while nobody was looking and entered her wound?” she ventured.

  Nick chuckled. “Now that’s farfetched. You should have quit while you were behind, dear!”

  She slapped his arm. “I suppose my idea does sound implausible, but still…”

  “All right, drive me to the hospital, and I’ll check out your premise. This time, I hope you’re wrong.”

  “Me, too. So while you’re checking things out, what do I do? Twiddle my thumbs?” she asked with a tinge of hostility.

  “No, no. You could get me an appointment for today with Margaret Wentworth, the head of the Oracle Network. I’d be forever grateful,” he answered.

  “Nice schmoozing, Bellamy, but I’m not buying it. Why don’t I make the appointment for you and me?”

  He leaned over and kissed his fiancée hard. “Because you’ve got an important errand to run while I’m meeting with Wentworth.”

  She studied him skeptically. “What kind of errand?”

  “If you get me that appointment, I’ll fill you in then.” He tried to kiss Gabriella again, but all his puckered lips touched were air as she tramped through the house and out the front door. Nick caught up with her after she started the Hummer’s throaty engine.

  “Next stop, the hospital,” she announced coolly as the Hummer squealed away from the curb.

  ************************

  Nick sauntered nonchalantly into the Scripps Memorial Hospital lobby as if he was a regular visitor and asked for Natalie Wright at the lobby information desk. The volunteer woman directed him to the surgery waiting room.

  He wrinkled his forehead. Surgery? For a minor gunshot wound? Something was way out of whack there, and he planned to get to the bottom of it quickly.

  He found his Aunt Sue in the second floor waiting room. He asked her why Natalie was scheduled for surgery for a bullet graze.

  “I … I don’t know, Nick. It never occurred to me to ask,” she said, tears welling up in her eyes.

  “Why aren’t you with her?”

  Sue was near hysteria. “The doctor insisted that Natalie be taken to isolation immediately upon her arrival, so of course she can’t have any visitors. Is something wrong?”

  “Probably not.” Nick patted his aunt’s hand. “Just wait here while I look for her doctor. I’ll get to the bottom of this.” Nick had no trouble locating the nurse’s station, and he demanded to see Natalie’s doctor. Since none of the nurses had Natalie’s chart yet, they didn’t know where she was. Isolation was a large area.

  He stepped aside, closed his eyelids, and launched a virtual search of the isolation floor up one level. It was one of his many magical gifts resulting from his father’s secret Mortal Eclipse Project. The older Nick became, the more magical abilities were revealed. He hated them. Really hated them. They reminded him that he wasn’t human. He much preferred to use his cleverness and Glock to solve national security cases, but Fate had decided otherwise for his late twin Thomas and him.

  He easily located her in a room directly above him. A myriad of tubes protruded from her left forearm, and several round electrode patches were placed on her upper body to monitor her heart rate.

  Nick called back his supernatural roamers. He was more bewildered than before. When the EMTs wheeled Natalie out of the house earlier, she looked to be in good spirits and healthy. So why the heart monitoring?

  He quickly exited the nurses’ station, ducked into an empty patient room, and teleported himself to Natalie’s bedside. Nick was about to check his sleeping cousin’s vitals when a heavyset nurse yanked the sliding cloth curtain aside and glared angrily at him.

  “How in the dickens did you get in here?” she demanded with a practiced scowl.

  “The nurses downstairs said it was all right to visit her. They even told me where she was. It’s important that I speak to her surgeon before she is taken to the OR,” he declared. “Either that, or this young woman leaves with me without surgery.”

  The nurse gripped the clipboard so tightly that Nick thought it might shatter as she contemplated his request.

  “I’m not kidding, Nurse,” he added.

  “Okay, I’ll go look for him.” She trundled back to the large desk in the Pre-Op area, picked up a wall phone, and spoke rapidly into it. Soon, a middle aged, balding man wearing green scrubs jogged around the corner, spoke with the livid nurse, rushed into the cubicle, and offered Nick his hand. “Doctor Preston. Now what’s this I hear about you taking Miss Wright out of here before I can save her life?” he challenged.

  Nick was astounded. “Save her life? That’s a good one, Doc. All she has is a flesh wound in her left arm,” he reminded the doctor.

  Preston shook his head and looked up at the taller Nick. “That’s hardly the case now. What she has is a woody fungus that resembles a knotted tangle of wicker on the X-rays. It spread like wildfire up her wounded arm to her shoulder, and if I don’t amputate that arm within the next twenty minutes, the fungus will spread to her heart and kill her.”

  “How the hell did it get in her arm from a graze?”

  Doctor Preston shouted at one of the charge nurses to bring him Miss Wright’s X-rays. A moment later, he clipped an X-ray on the wall-mounted light box. “As you can plainly see, that wicker looking clump is growing fast. From what I can tell, it bore a hole into the bullet graze and, for lack of a better word, sprouted there.”

  The size of the entry wound in Natalie’s arm matched the circumference of the empty bullet hole in the family room paneling. Gabriella’s moving bullet theory proved correct, no matter how ridiculous it had sounded. The woody fungus must have sprouted tendrils that carried it across the floor, where it burrowed into Natalie’s wound. The X-ray revealed the spreading fungus tendrils were closing in on her armpit. Their next invasion would be the heart and one lung.

  Doctor Preston shook a clear plastic envelope and held it up to the light so they could both examine a slice of the mysterious fungus. Once light fell upon the sample, its tendrils wriggled like small squid tentacles.

  “Jesus!” Nick exclaimed, stepping back. He’d never seen anything like it before, and he’d witnessed some weird monsters and spells spanning his career with the FBI’s Orion Sector and NNC. He asked Doctor Preston if he could borrow that fungus sample so the FBI could run it through their lab (which was a white lie; he would give it to his partner Crow to be processed in NNC’s ultramodern, underground Ohio laboratory).

  The doctor gingerly gave it to Nick, glad to be rid of it.

  He hurriedly stuffed the X-rays back into the envelope. “Convinced?”

  Nick nodded absently. “Yes, I’m convinced that Natalie needs to have her arm amputated as soon as possible.”

  “Thank you. May we take her now?” Doctor Preston asked sardonically.

  “Absolutely—but I’d like to make one suggestion before you begin?”

  Preston crossed his arms. “Okay,” he replied warily.

  “Don’t cut my cousin open until you have a flamethrower in the room. I wouldn’t want that wicker fungus to escape and go after you and your operating room staff.”

  Preston’s eyes grew to pool balls. “So you believe we’re in danger, huh? I don’t necessarily agree with your assessment, but I’ll humor you. I’ll order a flamethrower stat!” He turned and raced out of Natalie’s isolation room.

  Nick tracked the directional wall signs back to the surgery waiting area, where he found his aunt sitting on pins and needles. He lowered himself into an adjacent seat, explained that Natalie developed a serious infection in her wound, and that Doctor Preston had to operate immediately before the infection spread any further. Sue bought his ambiguous story lock, stock, and barrel.

  Nick excused himself once again and bolted from the waiting area. When he was safely out of earshot outside the main lobby, he phoned Crow and described the mysterious, wicker-like brown fungus.

>   “I’m patching Geronimo into our conversation.” There was a pause and a click. “Okay, shoot, Great White Hunter. Any other issues besides the fungus?”

  Nick described Natalie’s visit to the Oracle Network offices, reiterated the weird actions of the aggressive wicker fungus, and informed them about Gabriella’s terrifying experience with the melting Asian assassin and the shrinking getaway van. Crow listened without throwing in his customary wisecracks.

  When Nick’s narrative ended, Crow whistled. “Geronimo, what do you think of all that?”

  “My first response would normally be to test your blood alcohol level, Nick Bellamy,” the sassy supercomputer quipped.

  Nick was well acquainted with Geronimo’s sarcasm. “Very funny.”

  Geronimo continued. “What you described is an impossibility. There have been no scientific discoveries corresponding with the aggressive fungus you have described.”

  “Well, Know-it-all, I just happen to have a sample of it in my pocket. Care to examine it?”

  “My recommendation is to destroy it immediately—preferably by fire. If that sample should escape during shipment to Old Mother Hubbard’s, it would pose a realistic threat to mankind’s sustained existence. If that transpired, then I would have to communicate with myself to prevent me from becoming irrelevant.”

  Old Mother Hubbard’s was the name of NNC’s secret operations and intelligence center in Southeast Ohio. Their headquarters was nestled deep beneath the surface in an abandoned missile silo situated on a top secret, government real estate parcel, codenamed Bobcat Run. Bobcat Run remained a secure military area in the center of the Wayne National Forest outside Marietta, Ohio, even though the facility was abandoned in the late 1970s. Rance Osborne, the FBI Director, called in several congressional favors three years ago, and Uncle Sam clandestinely footed the costly bill for modernizing and equipping the forty-year-old white elephant with the most advanced electronics and security equipment. Thus, NNC’s CIC, Computer Intelligence Center, had been born.

  “Okay, you convinced me, Geronimo. I’ll burn the stuff. But I still wish you’d look at it first,” Nick replied sullenly.

  “I understand your position, but it’s much too dangerous.”

  “Yeah, I got that,” Nick grumbled. Geronimo’s haughty attitude was getting under his skin.

  Crow noticed it, too, and quickly changed the subject. “Where did that stuff come from? Outer space?”

  “You got me. Ask the almighty computer,” Nick muttered angrily, refusing to explain his belief that the fungus was magical in nature. Let Geronimo’s disappointed curiosity burn out a few circuits.

  Crow realized Nick wasn’t about to be mollified so easily. “I have that intel on the Oracle Network, Jack Brunnel, and Margaret ‘Maggie’ Wentworth you asked for.”

  “The network’s CEO and president,” Nick added. “Fire away, Crow.”

  “I’m skipping their bios; Geronimo already emailed them to you. Geronimo hacked Oracle’s private emails and discovered that Wentworth was the one who insisted that Terror Island be the location for this year’s Final Scream reality show. She told Jack Brunnel in no uncertain terms that she firmly believed the island location would boost their poor ratings for last year’s fiasco in Scotland.”

  “Final Scream—Mystic Marsh?”

  “That’s the one. The marsh property encompassed three ancient cemeteries, two bogs, and the ruins of a haunted castle.”

  “That sounds like a scary setting to me.”

  “But the contestants and the show’s writers were boring and unimaginative,” Geronimo offered. “The production staff’s scripted scares managed to elicit one scream all season long. The show’s viewers got antsy and voiced their complaints on various social media sites on a regular basis until many of them abandoned ship and became ex-viewers.”

  Nick chuckled. “I’ll bet Final Scream’s advertisers loved that.”

  “Oh yeah,” Crow interjected sarcastically. “The big boys loved the ratings drop so much that they bailed on the show at midseason.”

  “So I wonder what Wentworth saw in Terror Island that made her so hot-to-trot to choose it? For that matter, how did she ever find the place? There are thousands of islands around there.”

  “Rumor has it she never saw the place in person.”

  “You’re kidding me?”

  “Nope. Geronimo and I haven’t come up with one rational reason for Wentworth to claim the island was a surefire solution to the show’s ratings problems.”

  “What about Jack Brunnel? I heard he had a big ego. Did he go along with her suggestion?”

  “Jack was the fair-haired boy at the network before last year’s ratings fiasco. He nearly was canned. So we figure he didn’t have a leg to stand on this year, so he agreed to shoot the show on the island. Live!”

  “That’s what I heard. Again, it appears like Wentworth had an ulterior motive. Either that, or she was power drunk with her strange requests. So what’s Brunnel’s story before Oracle came along and made him a star director?”

  “He has been a television creator and producer for twenty-six years and has a reputation for being a hardass for actors to work with on the set. He demands perfection in no uncertain terms.”

  “Is Jack among the missing Terror Island people?”

  “Yeah, he is.”

  “So what kind of financial shape is the network in?” Nick asked.

  “Shaky,” Crow replied tersely. “They had to borrow a few million dollars from their parent company just to stay afloat until Final Scream—Terror Island aired and started pulling in the advertising revenue. Of course, now there won’t be any revenue.”

  Nick paced along the front hospital shrubbery. “It appears like Oracle has taken a big financial hit since the show didn’t air,” Nick submitted. “So I firmly believe we can rule out this mysterious situation as a publicity stunt.”

  Crow nodded. “That’s an understatement. No people—no show—no dough!”

  “I wonder why they were so anxious to send in a rescue party? Wouldn’t it have been smarter to let the United States Navy or Marines go in first?”

  “Bingo!” Geronimo piped up. “That’s another red flag flying above the state of affairs.”

  Crow scratched his head, and his twin black braids shifted against the back of his neck. “This makes no sense to us either. Pretty soon, the idiotic press and talking heads will quit theorizing and start demanding answers from Wentworth.”

  Nick’s phone chimed, it was a text from Gabriella. “Maybe I’ll beat them to the punch. Gabriella just got me an appointment with Wentworth this afternoon at 3:00.”

  A loud crash, scream, and tinkling of glass from above startled Nick from deep thought. A flailing bald man in green scrubs freefell from a shattered second story window and thudded onto the sidewalk at the left front corner of the hospital. The man was now a bloody blot on the concrete.

  “Gotta go, Crow! All hell just broke loose here!” Nick hissed into the phone. He instantly recognized the bloody lump.

  It was Doctor Preston.

  Natalie’s surgeon.

  But who threw him out the window?

  Nick gazed up at a Wicker figure standing behind the broken window.

  Natalie?

  6

  Lightning clawed the tempest’s turbulence and exposed unnerving silhouettes as Noah Wright and one of his female Lion Heart teammates, Reese Morgan, warily crept between the Koa, guava and octopus trees anchoring Terror Island’s mountain slope. The gale howled throughout the dense jungle, loudly spanked the fronds, and bore scores of fluttering leaves out to sea, along with Reese’s loosely fastened bikini top. Thunder blasts dulled their hearing as they ascended to higher ground for a better view of the surrounding islands.

  Nick Bellamy’s twenty-eight-year-old cousin was six-foot-four, athletic, tough, lean, sinewy, and sported a stubbornly set jaw like his uncle. A shadow of a beard created an even greater virile aura. His scraggly brown hair
fluttered in the squally gusts while he paused to scan the terrain for hidden dangers with his squinting tawny eyes. Dangers like unexpected cliffs that would plunge them a thousand feet onto the surf-battered rocks below.

  Lightning bursts strobed across the immense island, but because the jungle surrounded them, he saw little except for trees resembling crooked monsters. His heart flew to his throat more than once during his search.

  It had been hours since either of them had heard the terrified screams of their fellow contestants, but suddenly a lone shriek for help shattered the night air. The sound curdled their blood and turned their legs to stone. In the tempest, it was impossible to determine the direction where the plea originated, but they waited for another anyway.

  Noah recalled his teammates screaming their heads off as twilight deepened to night. But the brutal terrors were not generated by the Stout Hearts or the Final Scream production staff. They were genuine grotesque carnivores like giant praying mantises with T-rex jaws that were obviously indigenous to Terror Island. These monsters slashed his teammates to pieces while he barely escaped into the jungle with his life. That’s when he nearly bumped into Reese. They didn’t have a clue if the same misfortune had befallen the Stout Hearts or the Final Scream production staff, so they ran away from the cove and the Stout Hearts campsite. All they knew was that these monsters weren’t Final Scream’s network components.

  Survival instinct took control of their mental reins as the storm broke over the island, helping them evade the predators. Noah was never happier to receive a soaking at the hands of a howling tropical gale.

  Another thunderclap exploded nearby and shattered his reverie. During his brief trip down carnivore lane, there had been no further screams. The frightened person mercifully was devoured quickly. This was an unforgiving island.

  Reese tapped his shoulder. “Any sign of the four Stout Hearts?”

  Noah pictured the foursome as they sprinted past Reese and him an hour ago on their way up the mountain slope. Their stalwart expressions gave Noah the impression they were running in the direction of a specific sanctuary, not just away from the carnivorous monsters. So he and Reese tracked their footprints until the rain washed them away. Noah had a bad feeling about their well-being. It was as if the Stout Hearts had simply vanished from the face of the Earth. There were no cries. No blood. No gore.