Thirst to Kill

By Kae Bell

Novel is 3/4 done! Here are chapters 1-32:
Two escaped convicts being chased by the FBI. When the daughter of a local family goes missing, the FBI uncovers a connection between the girl and the convicts. Then a dangerous creature kills an agent and destroys a truck at the County Fair and the FBI's investigation takes a frightening turn to the unknown.

Conclusion in Spring 2018

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kae Bell
• Release date: Oct 18, 2017

Kae Bell

Kae Bell lives in Texas. She is seeking representation or, even better, a buyer for the film rights...

Book preview

Chapter 1

Wander, take this.

Dr. Munkenbeck handed the full 500-milliliter glass beaker to her laboratory tech Wander Camps. A rubber stopper prevented the liquid from spilling.

At six foot four, Wander Camps towered over Munkenbeck, who looked even smaller than her five-foot three in her long white lab coat. Camps took the beaker and gingerly added it to his tray of glassware waiting to be washed.

Should I dump it and wash the beaker with everything else?

"No. This one needs to go to the oven. On the burn tray.

OK. Camps set aside the glassware. I’ll do it now, before it gets busy down there. Grabbing the beaker, he walked to the hallway, checking that he had his security pass around his neck. The toxics disposal oven was in the basement and every door between floors required a security code or badge.

At the end of the hallway, he saw that the light above the stairwell door was green, indicating a safe passage down the three levels to the basement. To the oven.

Camps started down the metal stairs, worn by decades of scientists and lab techs bringing waste to the basement. Decades of failed experiments burned to cinders right here.

Camps did not like it down there. All that biological waste, waiting to be destroyed. It was creepy.

He looked at the beaker. The markings on the glass were bright white. The liquid inside was almost luminous. Beautiful.

If it were that toxic, Munkenbeck would have made him wear safety gear to even hold it, let alone carry it outside the lab. They had gone over that on his first day two weeks ago.

Wander reached the basement level and stared at the solid door to the oven. The light above the door was green. Open for business.

Wander studied the beaker. Seemed like a waste of perfectly good glassware. Plus, he was curious about this liquid, the way it coated the glass and reflected the light. It almost spoke to him.

Camps looked around. No one else was here. He shook the beaker, watched as the liquid shimmered. Without entering the oven, he turned around and started back up the stairs, the beaker still in his hand.

Chapter 2

By acreage, it was not a large farm, 300 acres, plus or minus, depending on whom you spoke with at town hall.

Mr. Banks liked things small. He knew his ninety milking cows by sight, when they stepped into the milking parlor in the early morning, smelling of grass. He knew which were excellent milkers and which were mean bitches one poorly timed crap away from hamburger.

Most of all, Banks knew his land: Every acre of the rolling New York hills. Posted and patrolled. The fields that each season begrudged him a crop. The dusty roads that crisscrossed his farmland. The woods where he hunted deer on freezing autumn mornings, his hot breath rising out of the blind like smoke.

Today, in the lifting morning fog, Mr. Banks made slow progress, seated on his tractor, cutting hay in his largest, eastern-most field bordered by the state land. This was the season’s second cut. Behind him, the mower whirred as it chopped the thin stalks. Banks squinted into the low sun, rising into a cloudless sky. He hoped the day was hot as predicted. Hay needed the heat.

Behind him, the mower’s metal blades turned, slicing with razor-sharp edges. The engine droned like a snoring beast. At the row’s end, Flint turned the tractor around to mow in the other direction. He was ten feet in when he heard a thump from behind.

It was a sound he knew. Thirty years on the tractor and you heard a few things in the field. Some sounds were welcome. This one was not.

Metal against flesh.

Banks braked, a hard stop, and looked around. No sudden movement in the field. Only the hay, swaying in the wind.

But he’d definitely heard a thump, the mower blades hitting solid flesh. In his experience, that sound was usually followed by a distraught and injured animal trying to run away. But the mower inflicted horrific injuries. Banks had seen a fawn taken down one morning a few years back. And once, a stray dog. Banks carried a pistol for such occasions. He didn’t like animals to suffer.

As Banks surveyed the row behind him, the tractor engine chugged away. In the fresh cut, he saw no movement.

Banks turned the ignition off. The engine sputtered then went quiet. Now Banks could hear it. A feeble, hopeless complaint.

Uuuuungh!

Whatever he’d hit, it was injured. Badly.

Banks couldn’t identify the animal from the moan. Lots of critters in these woods beside deer. Fox. Turkey. Bear. Coyotes had recently taken up residence in the forest but they traveled in packs in the forest and mostly at night. It wasn’t likely a bear. The bears in these woods wanted little to do with people. It would have run once it heard the tractor motoring up the hill. Smaller animals, the rabbits and woodchucks that lived in the fields and regularly ravaged his wife’s garden, wouldn’t have made a dent on the mower.

The animal cried out again. The sound, a high-pitched wail, rose into the soft morning light, until it ceased, swallowed by the bright sky.

Banks stepped down into the field. The golden hay reached almost to his knees. He saw it was near ready to flower.

He squinted and, scratching his bristly chin, walked toward the mower, stopping by the mower’s intersecting curved blades. Banks rested hand carelessly on the mower’s blades, still warm from the morning’s work. The blades reflected the rising sun. The air smelled like cut grass. Birds sang high in the pine trees lining the field.

Banks studied the loose piles of cut hay. He could not see what lay beneath.

Standing up straight, the rocky soil beneath his feet, he realized he knew. Like knowing when the rain would finally come. When a crop was ready. When a field needed to lay fallow for another season. When a cow needed to be put down. For a farmer, knowing was survival. A man needed to heed his gut, to grasp the pollen on the wind, the direction of the sparrows, the howl of the coyote.

But sometimes a man needed a moment before moving forward, to steel his self against the knowledge, to enjoy a moment, before the truth.

Finally, Banks compelled his feet forward, one step at a time, thinking as he often did that that a farmer was of the seasons, that which lived and died. His slow footfalls crunched against the ground as he walked, breaking the dry hay.

Here he was. He inhaled and looked down. In his newly cut windrow, mixed together with the fresh hay, was a tangled pile of limbs, blood, flesh, and bones. It had been alive but from where he stood, Banks could sense it was no longer. What had been the torso was deeply sliced into, long clean cuts from the sharp mower blades. Watching the torso, Banks saw no rise and fall of inhalations. Heard no heartbeat, save his own.

The warmth of the body wafted upward and Banks caught the scent of the blood. His stomach clenched and he swallowed hard.

The bloody mess had been a human. Banks stared at it but it seemed as if he was looking at a thing from a great distance and was struggling to make out the details. He took a step forward, leaning down this time. The mess came into focus. He could see the entire body, including a head and a face. The forehead had been sheared off. Blank eyes stared at the sky. It was an adult male. Banks didn’t recognize him, at least not in this current state. The body, sliced into neat ribbons of flesh, was still. Silent.

The nausea hit him like a thunderclap and Banks turned away, his chest heaving. He felt the heat congeal in his throat, as acid burst up his esophagus. Bending over, he lost his breakfast of scrambled eggs and dry toast with homemade jam.

Upright, he wiped his mouth on his shirt and looked to the field’s edge. Above the trees, puffy white clouds had appeared, playing hide and seek with the sun. Banks turned away from the body and the blades.

The uncut field stretched before him. But his work in this field was done.

What a shame, he thought, to lose this cutting.

He walked through the uncut hay to the road and then down the hill to his farmhouse and his wife.

Chapter 3

At the four-way stop near the Bank’s farm, a different tractor stopped to turn right down the dirt road. The sports car behind it revved its engine and bolted through the intersection, its alloy wheels kicking up grit. A hand appeared from the driver window to give the farmer the finger.

Already halfway down the lane, and preoccupied by other thoughts, Banks was unaware.

Meg watched this from the wood’s edge, her back set against a tree trunk. From here, she could see everything: the fields sloping down the hill to the paved road to town, the farmhouse and the barn, at the bottom of the hill.

From the farmhouse, the fields extended up the hill and east, to the edge of the dense state land, heavily wooded forest where coyotes yowled at night, dirt road on both ends. The fields themselves were especially lush this summer, flourishing in the heat. Fluffy brown cattails grew in the ditches. Flowers too. Purple, yellow, and orange wildflowers lined the fields’ edges. Clover, Buttercups, and Paintbrush. Drunk from pollen, bees stumbled among the blossoms.

From this spot, Meg could not see her own house, which was farther up the road, at the top of the hill. A thick wood separated the two properties. And happily, she thought, her parents could not see her. Specifically, her mother.

Concealed in the shade of this tree, Meg felt like her family was a thousand miles away.

She wished they were.

Nor could her stupid brothers.

Meg’s stomach growled. She’d missed lunch. Dinner was a ways off and breakfast, cookies she’d had in her pocket from yesterday, was hours ago.

It had been two hours since Meg had heard her mom call her for lunch. Sarah Flint had even walked down the hill from the house to the Bank's farm, in that slow way she had, every limb registering the annoyance of having interrupted an otherwise delightful and carefree life to have three wayward children. She’d called for Meg several times, each time the name growing shrill. Hidden by the hay, Meg had watched her mom’s head turn left and right, her eyes seeking movement. Finally, her mom had shrugged and walked back up the hill to the house.

Meg had felt a twinge of guilt at her non-response.

But she was still angry.

Her brothers had arrived last night, after five weeks at sleep-away camp. Filled with bravado from campfires and night hikes.

Meg had been told (‘asked’ her mother said) to give the boys her bedroom, since it had the two twin beds. The summerhouse was cozy, with only two bedrooms for the family of five. In summers past, the boys had slept outside in a big tent. But the arrival of the coyotes had put an end to that. So Meg had moved out to the sun porch, which was fine with her - it had windows on three sides, a sofa bed, and a TV, which Mom had said she could watch whenever she wanted, if she kept the volume low. Best of all, Meg could watch the moon rise and listen to the bugs, so loud this deep in the country, as she fell asleep.

Still, last night, she had been annoyed, seeing her brothers’ smirking faces as they closed the door to her old bedroom. She had heard the click of the lock, an added insult.

She didn’t feel guilty for wishing the twins had stayed at camp all summer. She loved the cabin without her brothers crashing around in it, destroying or shooting everything in sight. The days were sunnier in the silence.

Mom had insisted that the boys return for the last two weeks of summer vacation before school began, when Daddy took his vacation.

Her brothers had not waited a minute to begin their pranks.

When Meg had woken up today, her neck itched. She scratched it and felt around her pillows. There, in between the pillows, her hand closed on a thick chunk of hair. Meg pulled it forward into the dawn light.

It was her hair. Six jagged inches of it.

Staring at the shorn strands, her summer highlights, Meg knew her brothers had planned this at camp. Had been waiting all summer for this. Sneaking out onto the porch after she was asleep, scissors in hand, concealing their snickery laughter.

Only half awake, Meg had heard muffled giggling from behind the door to the main house.

Her brothers were hiding. And watching her. Waiting for her reaction. She knew from past experience, they hoped she would cry. Or scream. And, of course, tell Mom. They’d started calling her ‘tattle tail’ a year ago.

Meg clutched her cut hair. She would not react. She would not.

She must not.

Instead, Meg had slid off the bed. Grabbed scissors from the sewing basket. With jerky motions, the angle awkward but effective, she sliced off her remaining long hair. Golden strands littered the floor like autumn leaves. She’d felt the back of her head. Her bare neck. Good.

Then she’d slipped out the porch, closing the screen door gently.

Outside, she’d seen the farmer Mr. Banks already mowing in the field. Stop his tractor and hop down. Not wanting him to see her, Meg had hurried down the dirt road to her favorite hiding spot by the thick tree.

She’d been gone since.

She was hungry. Her stomach growled. In the morning, she'd noticed the blackberry bushes on her way down the hill. Heavy with fruit. Meg pictured the berries, could almost taste their dusky sweetness. She didn’t want to be found. So she’d have to wait. Her mouth watered. She should have saved one of the cookies.

From her perch, Meg watched the tractor drive along the curve at the bottom of the road where the