Tracking Blood: Episode 1

An apocalyptic serial

Table of Contents

Note: The main story is free to read for everyone, however paid subscribers will have access to many longer episodes that include extra scenes, characters, and sub-plots. Consider subscribing to enjoy the expanded story, as well as to support the author.

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Washington D.C.

Central Detention Facility

Stanley walked out the double doors of D.C.’s notoriously crummy prison. The air was damp, and yet the sky was sunny and cloudless, from the parking lot all the way to the horizon over the Anastacia River. A chill went up his spine. He zippered his jacket up to his chin, wishing he’d been arrested in something a little warmer.

He hadn’t even taken three steps out of the building when he saw the familiar man coming toward him. If his shaved head and glasses hadn’t given him away, his stuffy gray coat and bad shoes would have. Stanley sighed. He had just suffered through the tedious process of being released on bail- he wasn’t in the mood to deal with any more pricks.

“Good morning, Special Agent Pittman. Did you come here to shove the tracking device up my ass personally?”

The man frowned. “Watch it, Sharpe. You’re lucky you even made bail, considering you committed treason.”

Stanley continued to cross the facility’s courtyard while Agent Pittman kept pace. He didn’t bother correcting the man. They had accused him of sharing sensitive information with enemies of the state, and no amount of explanation would change the agent’s mind. This was the struggle with trying to liberate the indoctrinated. “Nice move arresting me on a Friday, by the way. I had a really restful weekend waiting for the court to open. It’s an old trick, but a good one.”

“I didn’t force you to break into government servers,” the agent shot back.

“Didn’t you?”

The man cocked an eyebrow. “Is that an admission of guilt?”

Stanley stopped and put a finger in the agent’s face. “You. You’re the guilty ones. The public has the right to know about the criminals they elected.”

Agent Pittman smirked at him. “You act like a crusader, Sharpe, but you’ve done nothing for anyone except yourself.”

Stanley scoffed. “Have you ever taken a dog to the vet, Agent Pittman? They cry to be let out of the car the whole way. They look at you like you’re the bad guy, and you know why? Because you can’t make them understand that you’re doing it for their own good.”

Agent Pittman shook his head. “I have to hand it to you, Sharpe- you’ve been lying so long, you’re almost starting to believe your own bullshit.” A forest green van with missing hubcaps pulled into the lot. It stopped at the curb and waited.

“It’s amazing what a bit of denial can do for a man,” Stanley said, shifting on his feet. “You, for instance. Eight-and-a-half years from retirement, ten years left on your mortgage. You’ll do anything to protect your pension plan- not to mention that little nest egg you saved up.”

Agent Pittman’s face went red. It was the same expression they all had whenever Stanley made them realize they weren’t safe behind their white picket fences. “They never should have let you out,” the agent growled.

“Have a little faith in your system,” Stanley said with a grin. He approached the van and opened the door. Marco’s round, bearded face nodded at him from behind the taped-up steering wheel. Stanley looked back at Agent Pittman. “The sad thing isn’t that someday you’ll see I was right- it’s that I won’t be there to rub it in your face.”

Pittman walked to Stanley, his eyes deadly serious. He looked like he was about to knock Stanley’s eyes down to his lungs. Instead, he leaned around him and addressed Marco. “Make sure he stays a hundred feet from a computer. It’s a condition of his bail.” He looked back at Stanley. “I would hate to see him screw up and land back in jail.”

“Yes, sir,” Marco replied nervously.

Stanley climbed into the passenger seat and shut the door in Pittman’s face. As they pulled away, he looked at the tan concrete building in the rearview mirror. He had no intention of going back to it, or any building like it.

“I don’t think that guy likes you,” Marco noted as he pulled out of the parking lot and turned onto the street.

“Do you have it?”

Marco nodded. “Your van sucks, by the way.”

“Yeah, I know.” Stanley reached between the seats, pulled the heavy backpack onto his lap, and unzipped it. The laptop’s chrome case shone up at him in the soft morning light.

It was time to get to work.

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Washington D.C.

Downtown

The Oasis

Will dropped a quarter in the meter and spun the dial. Even though it was Saturday, and the posted signs promised he didn’t need to pay for parking, he wasn’t a man who liked to take chances.

He tucked the pepper spray into his vest pocket as he looked across the street at The Oasis. It was just past noon, and the strip club’s neon blue sign was still sleeping above the rounded awning. The street was unusually quiet for the time of day, but Will wasn’t about to complain. Like all red-blooded Americans, he had a particular hatred reserved just for traffic. He checked that his truck was locked, in case someone tried to steal the pile of books in his backseat, then looked both ways and crossed the street.

“We open at one, buddy,” the bartender said from the far end of the room. The place was longer than it was wide, with rows of tables on either side decorated in art déco tablecloths and glass candles. Even this early, the pink and purple lighting gave it an atmosphere of permanent nighttime.

Will passed the empty dance pole and crossed to the bar. “I’m looking for Crystal,” he said.

“Everyone’s looking for someone.” The bartender was a young guy with bottle-black hair and a matching soul patch. He looked up from the martini glass he was cleaning. “Ah, shit, you’re not gonna propose to her, are you?”

Will tapped the ring on his finger. “Not likely.”

The guy chuckled. “Ninety percent of the guys I see in this place are married. Wedding rings are more of a polite suggestion around here.”

Will stared at the guy without saying a word. After a few seconds of staring back, the bartender’s shoulders sagged. He put down the glass and the cloth and said, “I’ll go get her.”

“Thank you.”

The bartender slipped through a door and out of sight. Will looked around at the club. He didn’t fault guys for frequenting these kinds of establishments, but he never went in for it himself. Strip clubs always seemed like a poor solution to the problem, like being hungry for a steak, then going to a fast food place and asking them to rub a burger on your face.

“What can I do for you, sugar?” Will turned to see the girl addressing him. She had the dark eyes and widow’s peak of an Eastern European girl, and wore little more than a few strips of pink lace over her impeccably pale skin. Around her shoulders was a cover-up in the loosest sense of the word. “You’re kinda cute. Are you a cop or something?”

“Or something. I’m a Bail Enforcement Agent.” He pulled the chain around his neck and showed her the badge. It wasn’t necessary to show, and most states didn’t even require having one, but he found it helped establish legitimacy.

“What’s that, like a bounty hunter?”

“That’s a somewhat derogatory term. It’s not the Wild West anymore.”

“I don’t know, you might change your mind if you saw my cowgirl impression.” She pretended to wave a rope over her head, letting out a soft giggle.

“I’ll take your word for it. Have you seen Theo recently?”

“Who?”

“Theodore Weaver.”

She chewed her lip. “Hmm … it doesn’t ring a bell.”

People often pretended not to know the person Will was looking for. Concerned friends, protective family members, or just folks who didn’t trust anyone with a badge often played dumb to his questions. With strippers, he was more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt. They operated in a fake world. Fake people with fake bodies doing fake things with fake names.

“He’s a skinny guy. Tall. With a scar on his lip.”

“Oh, Teddy. He usually comes on Sunday nights.”

Now he was getting somewhere. “Not in the last two weeks, though.”

“Wow, you really are a bounty hunter,” Crystal said excitedly. “So what did he do?”

“It’s what he didn’t do, which is show up for court.”

“I mean what did he get busted for, silly? It wasn’t any sexual-predator-type stuff, was it?” She frowned, and for a split second she dropped the naughty girl act. It was all Will needed to know that she wasn’t as ditzy as the image she put across. In her line of work, that image was the same as his badge- it had as much power as people gave it.

“Nothing like that. You’re safe.” Theo had been arrested for drug possession, like so many of them were. But Will didn’t like to share details with people in case they made the mistake of empathizing.

“I bet I am, so long as you’re here to protect me.”

He handed her his card. “If he comes in, call me at this number. I’ll make it worth your while.” He caught himself. “With money, I mean.”

“Darn.” She smiled at him as he turned to leave. “Hey, why don’t you come back later when we’re open? I’ll give you a dance on me. Or, you know- on you.”

“Just make sure you call me if he shows. Discretely.”

“Don’t worry, cutie- discretion is my middle name.”

He glanced down at her see-through outfit. “Clearly,” he said.

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Washington D.C.

Brentwood

The apartment had no phone and no TV. A court summons hung on the dying refrigerator. Black blankets covered the windows in the tiny living room, blocking out most of the light, but they did nothing for the police sirens crying in the distance, or the rattle of trains passing by.

The glow of the laptop lit up Stanley’s gaunt features. He looked like he’d been staring at the screen for hours, and for good reason. It had been a long few weeks, and it was taking its toll on his eyes. He was accustomed to computer screens, but he was only human.

It had been almost a week since Stanley had ventured out of his apartment. Aside from getting lost in the work, he found he was getting more nervous around other people as the court date got closer. Twice he felt he was being followed. One was on the way to the dry cleaners. A guy in a hoodie walked about twenty feet behind him for three blocks, whispering into a cell phone. Stanley turned and went back the way he came, but the guy didn’t follow. The second incident was a black Chrysler that trailed his van for three whole minutes, including two left turns and one right, before Stanley lost him by blowing a red light.

He was used to being in trouble, but this time he was in over his head.

The problem had started more or less innocently, Stanley and his associates breaking into servers to learn anything they could about an experimental drug called Armatol. There were all kinds of rumors in the conspiracy scene circling Armatol. Some said it was a more potent version of the Fluoride that government groups had pumped into the water supply since the days of Truman, to reduce the people’s power to resist domination. Others claimed it was actually Armatol, not LSD, that was used in MKUltra, the CIA’s infamous experiment that involved everything from mind control to astral projection.

Stanley had a different theory. He believed Armatol was more akin to quinuclidinyl benzilate- BZ for short- an incapacitating agent with psychotomimetic properties. Test studies involving BZ had backfired gloriously. In short, it turned its subjects into maniacal, cold-blooded killers who couldn’t be stopped, let alone controlled. For the longest time, BZ had been dismissed as movie bunk, until declassified documents revealed it had been the source of human experiments for close to twenty years at Edgewood Arsenal, in Aberdeen, Maryland. BZ had induced confusion and violent hallucinations in many of the people who were unlucky enough to ingest it, and more than a few subjects had either overdosed on the stuff or killed themselves trying. If Stanley was right, Armatol was like BZ cranked up to a hundred.

And, if he was right again, it was to blame for his father’s death. Private William Sharpe of the U.S. Marines had died alongside every member of his platoon in Kuwait during Operation Desert Sabre, leaving behind a wife and two sons. The official explanation was that they’d been ambushed during an assault on an enemy stronghold, though William’s wife, their mother, never believed it. She was a changed woman, obsessed with learning the truth about her husband’s death, an obsession that followed her to an early grave.

Several years ago, though, one of Stanley’s fellow hackers uncovered documents detailing a failed drug experiment, one that caused all of its subjects to tear each other apart in a murderous frenzy. Ever since that revelation came to light, Stanley had been like a hunting dog who’d caught a scent.

How he searched for information was simple- he would crack into government servers and sniff around for specific keywords. Two months ago, on his yearly hunt, he’d gotten a new hit on Armatol. Someone high on the military food chain had apparently relaunched the years-old study of the drug in some very hush-hush maneuvers.

The trail ran cold after that, but whatever Stanley had stumbled across was big enough- and bad enough- that someone tried to take him out. They’d made him out to be a terrorist. They villainized him and slapped him with the threat of a very long, very hard sentence. He’d been trying for the last six weeks to figure out who it was that was after him, but he couldn’t nail down a name. Every turn he made kept coming back to the same two words.

Something called Warehouse Alpha.

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