314 Book 3 (Widowsfield Trilogy) (30 page)

“No, she’s back in Widowsfield.”

Alex noted the way the woman responded. She cringed at the name of the town, and that was all Alex needed to see to know that this was definitely who he’d been sent to dispose of. This was the woman that had accompanied Rosemary to
Widowsfield in 2007, and she was one of the last loose ends Rosemary had yet to deal with.

“Who are you?” asked Terra again, but Alex didn’t need to talk anymore.

He raised his pistol and shot her in the head. Next he would spread the gasoline through the apartment and burn away the evidence before blowing his own brains out. That’s the way this had to end. That had always been the plan.

Widowsfield

February 24
th
, 2007

Oliver was staring at the CORD that had been built in the basement of the Cada E.I.B. offices in Widowsfield. The room was dark, except for the glow of a single halogen lamp that was placed in front of the expensive machine. He’d spent nearly twelve years of his life preparing for what was supposed to occur in just eighteen days, but now everything had fallen apart.

Vess
had wanted Oliver to perform the experiment using Nia as his sacrifice inside of the machine. Vess’s health had deteriorated to the point where he rarely visited the facility anymore, and he wanted to use a new subject inside of the machine to see if that made a difference. He planned to bring Lyle along as well, but hoped to use Nia as a sacrifice instead. This would be the first time this particular CORD would be activated, and Vess wanted to make sure it was working properly before he emerged from wherever he was hiding. But Oliver had ruined that plan by having his assistant, Lee, murder the psychometric from Chicago.

The cellphone that was clipped to his belt began to vibrate, and he looked at the screen to see who was calling before flipping it open.

“This is Oliver,” he said.

The voice on the other line was garbled due to the poor reception Oliver was getting in the basement.

“Alex? Say that again, I didn’t hear.” Oliver walked out of the CORD’s room and back into the hallway where his reception improved.

“We found blood,” said Alex, one of the guards that helped patrol the area.
“Quite a lot of it.”

“Where?”

“Right at the edge of the cliff,” said Alex. “Just like you said.”

Oliver placed his back against the wall and then slid down so that he was sitting in the hallway. He pressed his left hand to his forehead in frustration.
“On the scenic overlook by the reservoir?”

“Yeah,” said Alex.
“Right next to where that lady tried to kill her daughter a while back.”

“Amanda Harper,” said Oliver. “And she did kill her daughter. They both died.” Oliver massaged his temple as he contemplated what this meant. He and his assistant had murdered two girls to prevent them from leaking information about
Widowsfield to the public. There was no doubt in his mind that they had to die, but now he couldn’t remember why. He’d hoped the event on the cliff overlooking the Jackson Reservoir had just been a dream, but the two girls were missing, and now their blood had been found. He no longer had any doubt that his memory was correct. Lee had shot those two girls.

“We can hire a team to come out and dredge the reservoir if you want,” said Alex. “Will The Accord be upset that we’ve stopped construction?”

“I’ll call Vess and try to figure something out,” said Oliver. “Just keep looking for Nia. But don’t call anyone, Alex. No one else can know what happened out there.”

“Okay,” said Alex before ending the call.

Oliver closed his eyes and silently cursed as he contemplated the call he was going to have to make to Vess. How could he explain that the psychometric that they’d been using to put Widowsfield back together was dead?

Oliver flipped his phone back open and started to scroll through his contacts in search of Lee. He needed his assistant’s help now more than ever, but Lee was nowhere to be found. Oliver had even managed to accidentally erase Lee’s contact information from his phone. He slapped the phone shut and screamed a curse that echoed through the empty hallway.

“Eleven fucking years,” said Oliver as he pounded his fist against the wall behind him in anger. “Eleven years down the God damn drain.”

After the event in 1996, The Accord and the United States military began working together on the CORD project. The Accord feigned a complete willingness to cooperate, and the Eldridge had been taken, along with the original CORD, to a military base in New Mexico where further experiments took place. However,
Vess and Oliver kept silent about the theory that the entity in the Eldridge had passed to the town of Widowsfield.

Cada
E.I.B. purchased the land in and around Widowsfield, and the military helped accommodate the silencing of any angry townsfolk to prevent the story from getting out. The cover-up had been easier than expected. As it turned out, people across the country were more than willing to accept that a small town like Widowsfield could be corrupted by the illegal drug trade. The marketing strategists employed by the military did the same thing with Widowsfield that they’d managed to do with several other stories that should’ve made the headlines world-wide. They allowed information to be disseminated to the public through false third parties, and cooked up a conspiracy that the government was trying to hide the fact that they’d put so many people into a witness protection program.

The American public will almost always dream up conspiracy theories to explain even the most mundane of government activity, and the strategists had learned that the best way to deceive the public was to cook up the conspiracy for them. The government continued to deny involvement with the
Widowsfield meth-ring investigation, but the internet exploded with supposed interviews with former residents who were speaking out about how they’d been moved to a new town in Florida, or California, or some other state far from Missouri. To add fuel to the fire, these fake witnesses vanished following their statements, and conspiracy theorists were quick to insist that the government had killed them for talking. The rabid public was sated with a faked conspiracy, and the truth about what really happened in Widowsfield was known only to a few.

The Accord placated the military, and while the CORD experiment never proved fruitful for them, there were several other projects that
Cada E.I.B. had funded that were handed over to the military as recompense. Everyone was happy, except Vess.

Since the experiment in 1996,
Vess obsessed about duplicating the results. However, it wasn’t as simple as just turning the CORD back on again. The military had taken Tesla’s machine, so Vess and Oliver set out to build a new one. That process had been far more difficult and expensive than either of them had anticipated. The CORD was a delicate machine, and the addition of uranium made it much harder to complete. The Accord had access to such material, but Vess had taken over communication with them, severing Oliver’s ties with his former employers. From that point forward, Vess oversaw everything.

The years following the 1996 event had not been kind to
Vess. The old man’s age was finally catching up to him. He became frailer as time passed, and eventually admitted to Oliver that the telomerase levels in his blood had begun to fall. While he still produced more of the valuable enzyme than the average person, his cellular structures were no longer immune to the degradation of time. He was slowly dying.

The acquisition of enough uranium to power the CORD became their largest hurdle. Oliver had expected that The Accord’s ties to the military would’ve made the process of securing the radioactive material easier, but
Vess insisted that wasn’t so. Instead, they were forced to capitalize on the collapse of the Soviet Union to secure their goods. The arms race was long over, but the extent that the Soviet Union had gone to in an attempt to compete with the United States had left them with an overabundance of uranium and plutonium. By the early 2000’s, their stockpile of radioactive material had made it to the black market. Vess was able to get enough uranium to power the CORD, but it had to be delivered in small amounts to avoid detection. This process ended up taking years, and during that time Oliver was left to manage Widowsfield.

In late 2004, Oliver and
Vess completed the construction of a new CORD. The machine was hidden in the bowels of the Cada E.I.B. facility, but it was wired directly to the town’s power grid, which was fed by the hydroelectric dam on the Jackson Reservoir. Oliver argued with Vess about the need for the Eldridge to be rebuilt in the reservoir, but Vess insisted that the ship was of no consequence any longer. The entity had moved into the town itself. Vess believed that in the original experiment, in 1943, the entity had moved from one of the sacrificial relics he was carrying and into the Eldridge. Then, in 1996, the CORD allowed it to move from the ship to the town itself.

Great care was taken to ensure that
Widowsfield was isolated from neighboring towns. The electric grid was severed, and connections to outside counties destroyed. The only power coming into Widowsfield was supplied by the dam in the Jackson Reservoir, and Vess believed that this would help contain the entity once they built a new CORD and activated it.

On March 14
th
, 2005, they attempted to use the machine with Lyle Everman inside. It didn’t work.

Vess
was convinced that their new CORD had been built incorrectly, and he insisted a new one be constructed. That had been two years earlier, and now their new device was ready to be tested. Unfortunately, Vess was too ill to attend, and he asked that Oliver find a new psychic to be placed within the machine. During their last experiment, the introduction of radioactive material hadn’t produced the tell-tale green electricity that meant the machine was working, and Vess wanted to know that the new CORD was functioning properly before he attended an experiment.

When Oliver found Nia in Chicago, he tried to call
Vess to tell him the good news. However, Vess’s illness had worsened and his communication with Oliver had been sparse. He was excited to hear that a replacement for Lyle had been found, and he told Oliver that The Accord would happily fund whatever Oliver thought was necessary to get the experiment moving in the right direction. Oliver continued his work with Nia, and never sought permission from The Accord or any other part of Cada E.I.B. for the massive expense. It wasn’t until Vess’s illness had passed that the old man discovered how much Oliver had spent.

Vess
had lied to Oliver about The Accord’s involvement with the Widowsfield project. It turned out that Vess had been funding the project on his own, and Oliver’s overspending nearly bankrupted the dying man. But Oliver was convinced that what Nia had discovered at the murder scene was evidence that the entity could be placated by any sacrifice, and that they didn’t need to use a psychic in the CORD to contact it.

Oliver and
Vess knew that a woman named Terry had been murdered at the house on Sycamore at around the same time that the CORD had been activated. That was also where they found the catatonic child. Oliver proposed that the CORD be activated at the same moment that a new sacrifice was offered in the house, but Vess insisted that the most important part was having a psychic placed within the machine.

Unfortunately, Nia and her friend had to be killed before the experiment could come to fruition. Though Oliver couldn’t have explained why, he knew it was the right decision.

He knew he would have to call Vess and explain what had happened, but he delayed the inevitable. Oliver got up and walked back into the CORD’s room. He stood in the threshold and stared at the machine that had become the focus of so much of his life. He knew that if he called Vess with nothing to report other than that Nia was dead, and that all the money they’d spent over the past couple months had been for nothing, that Vess would likely shut down the entire operation. It seemed criminal that all that work would go to waste.

None-the-less, he had no choice but to close the book on the
Widowsfield project for the time being. Oliver turned off the only light in the room, shrouding the CORD in darkness once again, and then locked the door on his way out.

It would be years before he went in the room again.

Inside
Cada E.I.B.’s facility in Widowsfield

March 13
th
, 2012

Shortly after 5:30
AM

Oliver was standing in front of the CORD as its door stood wide. He’d nearly finished dragging the body of the young nurse into the machine as the silver rings began to spin on the pillars that bookended the steel box, but it was more difficult than he’d anticipated. He panted from the exertion of dragging her through the hall and to this room. He’d rerouted power to the machine, and the process of powering it up was nearing its end. The next step would be to cut the cord, and release the uranium from the stopgap to allow the CORD to be fed the radioactive material.

The handle of the butcher knife was slick, and he passed it over to his other hand so that he could wipe his right palm off on his pants. He’d never murdered someone before, but this was in the name of science. The nurse’s death might facilitate the greatest discovery in the history of mankind. Just like a war general had to accept that he might be sending thousands of soldiers to their deaths in the interest of winning a battle, Oliver had sacrificed the nurse to reach a similar end.