Them That Chase

Rex The lights flipped on in Rex's lab. The team started out cleaning a dead agent's home of evidence. This time the dead agent was one of their own. A spider sadly watched from a terrarium as Wren and Malachi bagged up Rex's souvenirs from his nights at the opera. Clyde Baughman's spray bottle of colorless fluid; Marlene Baughman's severed finger, the nerve endings grown and branching out to the walls of its jar; multiple vials of ai-apa's gray sludge; and Audrey III, the marijuana plant recovered from Dakota Knight's apartment. Malachi spoke first, suggesting they burn all of it. He flicked a lighter open and shut while he said it, but he didn't seem to know he was doing it. Wren, concerned, thanked him for saving her life right before Doug found them. Doug resisted understanding what they tried to tell him. They must be wrong; Rex couldn't possibly be dead. He tried to prove it by calling Rex's phone... which Malachi held out to him, the scree...

From the movie Smile .   (See the previous post, The Knight of the Round Table , for a map of Avalon Gardens.)   The fire engine pulled into the Avalon Gardens parking lot and plowed up the gravel drive alongside the building. Three firefighters jumped out, but a group of employees had already extinguished the brush fire they'd been called to deal with. Confusion abounded. Voices started rising.   And then the employees stopped, stupefied by a rustling only they could hear.   One of the gardeners smashed his fire extinguisher into a firefighter's head. A second firefighter screamed, but John Bellamy silenced them with a gunshot to the face. The third firefighter ran to grab a fire ax from the truck, but a second gardener tried to pull it away from him. They struggled on the ground, the firefighter raised it high, prepared to slam it down into the gardener's face... and then John Bellamy shot him twice in the back.   While the gardeners dismembered their victims,...

The full map of Avalon Gardens HQ. July 8 (con't) Wren and Danny had lunch at a cafe across town from the Avalon Gardens HQ. Danny was former SWAT with the Denver PD: all the guards with Instant Deterrent were either former cops or former military. Danny hesitated upon learning Wren was with the FBI, but he was too charmed to push back and relented with no more than a promise not to talk about his work at Avalon Gardens. Danny didn't relax, though, until he got up from the table and went to the curb to vape. Wren noted he was in a hurry, like he was rushing to the bathroom. There was an expectation of embarrassment, of pain, if he wasn't fast enough.   He'd left his phone case behind, and his case had a pouch with his credit cards and Avalon Gardens security badge, marked with the code K3. She lifted the badge and a few cards, hoping he wouldn't notice until later and mistake them as a random robbery. Sure enough Danny didn't notice when he got back to the table...

A map of the Avalon Gardens HQ as the Agents have scouted it. July 7 (con't) A clerk at Lindsey-Flanigan Courthouse set the team up in a conference room with the evidence in Radomir Reznik's now-shuttered case. Wren and Rex took note of a handbag and wallet with a driver's license, credit cards, and member card for the Missouri state teachers union in the name of "Suzanna Carmichael." That lined up with a receipt from Demver Greens Dispensary. with the memo line "Suzy." for a vape pen and four cartons of juice. A call to Ms. Carmichael quickly satisfied Wren that she wasn't a person of interest she had been visiting Denver over the holiday and, though she wouldn't admit it, had clearly bought some weed to take back home. Reznik must have been waiting outside the store and snatched her bag, and she was more worried about her employer learning about her weed habit than having her ID and credit cards stolen. Malachi took a closer look at the vape di...

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 giv...

Art by Dennis Detwiller. April 25 (con't) Driving back from the dive bar, Wren noticed something in the rearview mirror. A gray shape like a cloud blotting out the stars in the night sky... except the red glow around its edges meant it was way too close to her tail lights. She swerved and managed to avoid getting dive-bombed by the Chiropractor, luring it towards isolated roads outside town. Eventually it broke off, but Wren stopped and shouldered her rifle. BANG! It was near ly out of sight, flying straight up and getting smaller and smaller. But gray sludge fell, splattering against a nearby tree. Back at the motel, Wren and Malachi caught each other up. Devon Malouf's corpse had been dumped in a nearby salt marsh, but Dr. Santorini was dead too, and Rex was semi-conscious. They decided Rex would have to stay at the motel: admitting him to a hospital would raise risky questions, and they could keep Doug busy nursing him back to health. Rex would've exposed ...

From the movie Sca n ners .  April 24 (con't) An unknown number called the Agents' burner phone. "MELANIE" identified herself as a friend of MARCUS and wanted to speak with them ASAP about the "birthday cake." She directed them to a military hangar at Francis S. Gabreski Airport., where they found eleven young airmen doing pushups while their CO watched. They seemed too young, too well-rested and well-adjusted to work for the Program... or maybe to know they worked for the Program. The CO ordered his men to their feet and out the door when he saw the team. At the other end of the hangar was a woman in officewear and combat boots typing at a laptop. "MELANIE" introduced herself as Dr. Rebecca Thornhill. She got right to it: the Program believed the Chiropractor was some kind of "EBE" with volatile tissues, and the remains must be recovered for study. She provided the team with biohazard suits, body bags, and a metal coffin-like device that...