The Mission Is Never Over—Dead On the Fourth of July

Rex

"It's a good thing we caught it when we did, while there's still time to do something about it."

That was how Dr. Jones described the results of Rex's MRI scan. Worried about what Dr. Santorini might have cruelly forced him to do to his own brain, Rex wanted to be sure nothing had changed about him. But there it was, a nascent tumor in the center of his brain. Growing at a rapid clip. Full of unnatural vitality.

 

The MRI machine began to rumble. To shudder. To spit sparks.

 

Suddenly Rex was adrift in the primordial sea, the standing stones of Indian Rocks far across the water. The seaweed that wasn't seaweed ensnared him, tugging him towards the mountain that was his Mother. When he reached it, he melded with it and ceased to be Rex. He knew she was Shub-Niggurath, the source of all life. A source of great knowledge. An escape hatch from his mortality.

Rex woke up on the floor in a pool of the extremely headless Dr. Jones's blood.

Malachi

Ash had given up video games for clogging, and the hunt for the Chiropractor had taken Malachi away for so long he'd missed his son's recital. Fixing that relationship could wait, though. The first thing he did when he got home was treat his wife to an evening out for dinner. And when her birthday came up a few weeks later, he took the family on a trip to the Smoky Mountains.

Wren

Wren sent Aaron a link to the Dream Syndicate to see what he made of it, and together they scanned one of the "core scenarios" that recurred across multiple dreamers. Aaron, a self-described witch, suspected Wren of having some magical power she refused to talk about, and he pressed her on hanging out with people who saw real events in their dreams. But she talked her way out without admitting anything.

July 7

Rex returned to his lab the Monday after the fourth of July to find a new body waiting for him. A prisoner had died at Denver County Jail over the weekend, and the county medical examiner's office had transferred it to Rex, along with a note from Heidi that there was no next of kin. Hint hint.

The body had suffered injuries as savage as anything he'd seen on the Glenridge Chiropractor's victims. Burns had melted the sweatpants into the skin, a 12-gauge shogtun had punched holes through the chest, but neither of those were the fatal wounds. In fact he was already dead at the time. What had killed him had been in his lungs... which were now hanging from his mouth, the remnants pocked with impossibly aggressive cancer.

It was here Wren and Malachi arrived with their orders from the Program. Two days ago, on July 5, Radomir Reznik had walked out of Colorado State Penitentiary a free man, only to be rearrested and taken to Denver County Jail within hours. The next morning, a Friendly with the US Marshal's Service was inside the jail when he glimpsed an "alien worm" emerging from Reznik's body on a security monitor, right before the guards threw a concussion grenade at it. The DOJ had contacted the jail with records naming Reznik as a confidential informant with Task Force HOLIDAY, a joint DEA/FBI drug trafficking investigation Wren had just been assigned to. They were to drive over, learn more about Reznik's death, and determine whether or not he posed an Unnatural threat.

On the drive, Malachi spoke with Detective Sykes of the Denver PD about Reznik's arrest. He had been hanging around some food trucks outside a local brewery, vaping marijuana and harassing the customers: the cops had taken him in on public intoxication, disturbing the peace, and theft (he'd been in possession of a stolen handbag). Malachi asked for a copy of the arrest report to be faxed to Denver County Jail, and Sykes did him one better: he could go to Lindsey-Flanigan Courthouse and take the evidence if he wanted. With Reznik dead, there was no case to pursue anymore.

At the jail, the team found a line of upset people waiting at the front security booth. Officer Miller, a guard from the women's side, was working the booth and waved them in, apologizing for the disarray. The staff was running thin between those taking time-off for the holiday and a bad case of the flu going around. But they all noticed that the duty roster for that day and the day before—the day of Reznik's death—had both been torn out, and they reflected on how Reznik's body had wound up in front of Rex. They had clearly walked in on a coverup, and a half-baked one at that. The guards must have been sure no one would ever question how Reznik had died: he'd spent his whole adult life in prison and had neither a fixed address nor next of kin. But knowing nothing about the Program, they hadn't counted on the Friendly telling someone what they'd seen; news that the DOJ would be sending people to investigate triggered a panic, and everyone in charge had jumped ship.

Officer Miller told them "Radds" Reznik had been a prisoner at the jail before. He'd been transferred there on two different occasions, staying for a few months each time due to overcrowding at the penitentiary. She'd never worked with him directly but heard he had a reputation as a "malingerer" and a drama queen. Sgt. Pelaez knew Radds better than she did: he was the ranking officer on duty and was currently down on cell block 2. And he'd been present during the fire.

It was quiet on block 2. The cell doors were open for recreation time, but none of the prisoners would leave their cell or even look up as Wren and Rex passed by. The Agents passed Cell 201, roped off with yellow caution tape and stinking of smoke and bleach: the site of the fire. They stopped to examine it and determined the fire was started by some kind of alcohol accelerant; the guard confirmed that, saying Radds had been making "toilet shine" with fruit and smuggled rubbing alcohol. When it caught fire, fwoosh! They continued on to Sgt. Pelaez, who greeted them by demanding his union rep and a lawyer.

Meanwhile, Officer Miller let Malachi into the office wing to get the faxed police report. It lined up with everything Det. Sykes had said on the phone, with two extra details. First, Reznik had vaped three cartons of marijuana distillate outside the brewery. That should've left him insensate on the ground, yet it only pissed him off. And second, he'd started showing signs of "respiratory distress" while the officers were cuffing him. 

 

Malachi also realized the jail's security staff had cleared out so quickly that multiple computers were still logged in, so he helped himself to one. First things first: security cameras. Except the footage from yesterday was all gone, just like the pages from the duty roster. It must be some kind of glitch.

As usual, Wren was cornered into playing good cop by Rex's enthusiasm for playing bad cop. He ordered Pelaez to tell him about the worm, and the bulky Pelaez squared up with Rex and seized a medical tool he'd been getting prodded with. But Wren managed to talk Pelaez down from his aggressive front, convincing him they just wanted to understand what happened rather than assign blame. He accused Reznik of being a "malingerer," playing up his coughing fits when the guards all knew he was just high. Budget cuts meant the jail had no nurse on weekends, so they would've had to call EMS to check him out, and nobody ever died of a weed overdose.

Next Malachi went looking for the jail's incident report on Reznik's death. It asserted multiple lies:

• Reznik had lured Pelaez into his cell under the guise of having trouble breathing and asking for medical assistance.
• Then he'd attacked Pelaez and killed a K9 unit named Keller when the dog tried to defend Pelaez. (In addition to the other wounds, Rex had found scratch and bite marks on Reznik's body consistent with being attacked by a large dog.)
• After Pelaez escaped, Reznik had destroyed the security camera inside his cell. (If the Friendly's story was correct, and it had been so far, the guards had destroyed the camera assaulting Cell 201.)
• The guards threw in a concussion grenade to subdue him, accidentally igniting an alcohol still and starting a fire that killed Reznik.  (However the fire started, Reznik was already dead by that point.)
• Finally, Reznik's body was sent to the county medical examiner's office for autopsy. (The body had likely gone there first, then been transferred to Rex under pressure to make the body go away.)

Malachi also managed to find state records on Reznik. He was originally from Maryland, but in 2002 budget cuts shuttered the orphanage where he'd been staying and was sent to a Denver-area mental health facility for at-risk youth. From there Reznik had gone to a juvenile rehabilitation camp, then to juvenile detention until he turned 18, and finally to Colorado State Penitentiary up until the day before he'd died.

Rex kept pushing Pelaez. Going off a text from Malachi, he insisted on seeing the body of the dog Reznik had "killed," but Pelaez just told him to fuck off. Wren kept the conversation focused on what had happened in the cell. Pelaez couldn't describe it but could show her, pulling a flash drive from his pocket. He kept saying no jury in the world would convict him after seeing the footage on it. Wren realized that, knowing the other guards had positioned him as a scapegoat, on top of his brush with the Unnatural, Pelaez's angry bluster was keeping him together; if he lost that, he was at high risk of self-harming. She gave him the card of a therapist she trusted, encouraging him to talk with them: he scoffed but kept it.

Up in the office, the team gathered around a computer to watch Pelaez's footage. They saw Reznik thrown roughly to the floor of the cell, coughing violently. Outside the camera's view, guards shouted at him, cursing at him for causing a scene, which got the other inmates to start shouting too. Then they brought in the dog. They watched it lunge for Reznik, sometimes held back (the hand holding the leash had a tattoo resembling one on Pelaez), but sometimes not; Reznik was forced to cower between the wall and the cell's toilet to get away. The camera could see, but the guards could not, as Reznik coughed up blood, then stopped breathing. It took them too long to realize it, and things started to quiet down. But only briefly.

Reznik's corpse spasmed and vomited up his lungs in a mass of black ropy matter. Then the mass sprouted legs like a spider's, or a spider crab's, but too many of them, and launched itself at the dog. They fought, but the dog was badly losing, blood splattering the camera lens as it was dragged up the wall.

 

Then a baggy of some kind of liquid flew into the cell, coating the dog and the lung-spider and Reznik.

Something like a soda can flew in after it.

And everything went white as the camera was destroyed.