Blood Moon Knight

III

Some artifacts were still in the lab, but they were innocuous, none appearing to have primum runes or moon-god imagery. Donna had mentioned an NDA, but Marco figured covered artifacts would still be studied in this well-equipped lab. If that was the case, it appeared those artifacts, and therefore anything of value to his investigation, were gone.

Marco poked through some filing cabinets. Inside were primarily catalogs of older finds, again nothing to do with the runes or moon-god sites. That wasn't surprising ... the old Indiana Jones method of writing in a notebook was also gone; everything was now stored in computers just as with any other modern endeavor.

Walking over to where the lab computer used to be, Marco found a bare desk. The area was kept mostly clean to keep the computer functioning even in that dirty environment, but he could still see an outline of dust and dirt, which had been disturbed when the computer was removed.

Marco's parents had kept some written field notes and computer records at home, but the ones covering their recent work were not very extensive. He figured the data he needed were on the computer that was now gone. He knew there'd be backups, but he was willing to bet they would be found missing.

Marco felt a twinge of despair. Swallowing it, he looked carefully around the room, looking for anything anomalous ... other than the uncharacteristic orderliness and cleanliness. His eyes finally alighted on a picture of himself hanging above what he recalled as his mother's main work station. A cherished photo in and of itself wasn't strange, but, generally speaking, at work his parents' preferred keepsake photos that were related to work. This photo couldn't be related to work even in the wildest imagination. It was a photo of Marco, standing in front of The Rose Bowl, with a foam "number one" finger pointing up.

After contemplating it for a few seconds, Marco grabbed a chair, mounted it, then felt around the ceiling and wall above the photo. In a void at the top of the concrete block wall, Marco felt a small box. Pulling it out, he stepped down, then carefully opened it. Inside were thumb drives and SSD cards.

Marco exited the lab, locking the door behind him. He walked slowly toward the parking lot and his car, ruminating on his find in the twilight, the box nestled carefully in his arm. Can't get my hopes up, he thought, but why else would

Marco groaned. He rolled over, looking up at the clear night sky. The back of his head felt strange, and when he grasped it, he felt his hair stiff and sticky. The knuckles on both hands throbbed, and when he pulled back his hand and looked at it, he saw it was covered in blood. Examination of his other hand produced the same result. He stood shakily to his feet ... noticing, for the first time, five bodies lying on the ground, three men and two women. They were covered in blood and did not appear to be breathing; when he bent over to check one body for a pulse, his stomach lurched as the world began spinning.

- OoOoO - O - OoOoO -

Marco walked into the emergency room of School University Hospital. He walked with a stagger, no doubt the result of whatever blow resulted in the blood-matted hair and the blood-soaked back of his shirt. What it didn't explain was the swing of his hips when he was able to put together a few normal steps.

Yelling at the staff, Marco called for the Royal Healer, and demanded they muster the Queen's Guard to find his attackers and put those traitors to the sword. The nurses attempted to calm him, and get him to sit, but he would have none of it, shouting that nobody told the queen what to do. Finally, security managed to grab hold of him long enough for a nurse to jab a syringe full of knock-out juice into his butt.

Marco shut off the TV. The video had been up for only a few hours but had already garnered tens of thousands of views. He remembered none of what he watched.