The Crowsbrook Demons

Chapter 7

The flies were everywhere.

On Mrs. Bastable's Jack Russell's food bowl, buzzing around his head, making him bark incessantly, and aggravating her already splitting headache. Assuming that he needed to go out, she eventually stumbled down to the kitchen and opened the door for him into the garden, not noticing the slipped latch on the garden gate that led to the road until after she heard the screeching of brakes and a short, muffled howl from outside the house.

On Ryan Ogden's newspaper, on his kitchen table, as he flipped a pair of them away to concentrate on the football scores as he digested his breakfast. Enzymes broke down sugars and proteins into their component parts and sent them on their way through his bloodstream to his organs, their cells dividing and dividing, until the right combination of mutations would cause them to divide faster and faster and faster, all unbeknownst to him. He got up from the table and went to brush his teeth

before heading out in the van to visit his first customer of the day.

On the alphabet building blocks belonging to Sally Jenson's daughter, Becky, landing lightly on each one before spiralling away and upwards, just as Becky's temperature would, until her cries interrupted her mother's phone call with her sister, and brought her running into her daughter's room to find her limp and sick and wailing, with something the doctor would later call "a virus" but which she would be oddly unable to shake.

And something was watching. Something was feeding on the misery as it grew.

• • •

Adam was in the kitchen, chopping garlic. It wasn't often that he made it home before Julia, and he was determined to make an effort. He had started early. He was going to make the dinner. He would surprise her, and they wouldn't have to order take-away. Also, he felt that he had to make the most of his new-found energy. Normally, after a day of work and an hour of running, all he'd be able to manage was a hot shower and a couple of hours on the sofa in front of some bad telly, before he was ready to crash. He'd been clocking up twice that on the treadmill, and he didn't even feel like a sit-down. He must have broken through a barrier with his training. He'd never had this much energy before.

He glanced at the recipe book. A lemon. Do we even have a lemon?

The phone rang, and Adam swore under his breath. He washed his hands and picked it up. "Hello?" he said.

"Adam," said a voice on the other end. "It's Felicity. I'm sorry to call you after hours; I didn't know if you'd heard. There was a murder last night. There have been rumours floating around all day, but I just heard it confirmed on the news. They found two bodies down on the site that the Asilida guys are developing for you. Two kids. Seventeen, both of them." Her voice was a little shaky. "Did you know?"

"No," said Adam. He thought for a moment. "Do we even own that site yet? They've only been on the job for a couple of days. Is it our problem?"

Something poked him in the back of the mind, like a thorn. That's not what you're supposed to say.

There was a pause on the other end of the phone.

"I—I don't know; they're taking care of it. It's in the portfolio; hold on." Adam heard her turning pages in the file. "Technically, they acquired the site on behalf of Carpenter."

"How is that even possible?" snapped Adam. "I met with them three days ago."

"I guess they work fast," said Felicity. "The paperwork's all here. It's really weird. It all looks fine to me. I mean, I'm not a lawyer, but there's nothing missing that I'd expect to be here. But... there's no way they could have done it that quickly."