Torrent(52)

“Enh, it’s pretty common.” Autumn grabbed Simon’s bottle of Mountain Dew.
“Hey,” he protested.
Autumn pulled scissors out of her case and cut into the top.
Simon folded his arms over his chest. “I was still drinking that.”
“Now you have another hole to put your lips on.” Autumn handed the bottle back to him, then dug out an empty slide.
Simon accepted his bottle, but he glowered at it. “There are too many girls working on this team now. I need to recruit some men.”
“Maybe Eleriss and Jakatra would like to join you,” I said.
“Real men don’t have glowing eyes. No thanks.”
“What?” Autumn asked.
“We’ll explain later.” I waved for her to finish poking around with the scissors and drop a coverslip onto her slide.
“That should prove interesting,” she said, then placed her new specimen under the lens. She checked it, nodded, then gestured for me to take a look.
Something very similar to the first sample lay beneath my eyes. “So, I’m either mistaken and my arrow lodged in a soda bottle, or our monster is made out of Mountain Dew?”
“Was the arrow lying on the ground when you found it?” Autumn asked. “Or did you pull it out of something?”#p#分页标题#e#
“Someone handed it to me, and he didn’t say. It was over in the woods though, not sticking out of someone’s refrigerator, I’m sure of that.”
“Is it possible this... creature—” Autumn’s pierced eyebrow twitched, “—you’ve told me about is wearing some kind of armor or outer layer?”
I ignored the skepticism inherent in that eyebrow twitch—if she’d read the newspapers and learned about the grisly slayings, she shouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the idea of a genuine monster. “As in plastic chain mail? No, like Simon said, we’ve had a pretty good look at it now.”
“Technically,” Temi said, “is it a good look if it’s bouncing off the windshield of your van when you see it?”
“I saw it fine in the rear view mirror when it was chasing after us,” I said.
Autumn looked at each of us in turn, probably wondering if we were messing with her.
I held up one of my bags of stained dirt. “Here’s that blood sample if you want to take a look.”
“I believe I would.” Autumn accepted the bag and held it up to her eyes. “This is from the creature?”
“We’re not sure,” I said. “It might be from the interesting men we’ve been following.”
“I’ll check for blood type then. I can’t run a DNA test with this simple setup—” she tapped her case, “—but I ought to be able to tell a few things. This’ll be easy compared to trying to dredge up clues in thousand-year-old blood samples.”
“I wouldn’t bet on it,” I muttered.
After all the weirdness we’d witnessed, I’d be shocked if quirky things didn’t show up in Eleriss’s and Jakatra’s blood. Maybe they’d have phosphorescent cells to match their glow-in-the-dark eyes. Or maybe their blood would be full of nanorobots. Maybe the blood would shoot out rays and blow up our microscope to punish us for looking at it.
I yawned and rubbed my eye. What a week.
“I’m going to do some research of my own.” Simon moved his MacBook to the desk. “I keep forgetting to check on something obvious.”
“Which is?” I asked.
“Where those motorcycles came from.”
Right, we’d recorded the license plate numbers on the first day. “Montana, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, but who are they registered to? Eleriss and Jakatra Something-or-other? Or Butch and Bruno from Kalispell, men who have been missing for the last month?”
“That would be interesting to know, but that information isn’t publicly available on the Internet, is it?”
“Not publicly,” Simon agreed with a small smile.
“Am I going to have FBI agents knocking down the door of my hotel room?” Temi asked.
“I think the nearest FBI office is in Phoenix. We’re probably safe for a while.”
“They’ll never know I was there,” Simon murmured, his face toward the screen, his fingers dancing over the keyboard.
“Uh huh.” I pointed at his MacBook. “When you’re done hacking the DMV, would you mind making an mp3 of that video footage? I’m going to try and get one of my old linguistics professors to run an analysis of it.”
“‘kay,” Simon said without glancing up. I’d probably have to ask him a few more times.
With nothing better to do, I watched Autumn mix a couple of solutions for the blood test. Temi was still sitting on the bed, the book in her lap, her bad leg stretched out before her. She looked like she wasn’t sure if she should be helping somehow. I thought about telling her that the hotel room was help enough and greatly appreciated, but Autumn drew my attention with a hmm noise.