When leg-breaker Hutch Holtz rolls up to a rundown apartment complex in Portland, Oregon, a severed hand is the last thing he expects to find stashed in the client’s refrigerator…
We’re thrilled to share an excerpt from Fever House by Keith Rosson, a genre-bending thriller/horror/noir novel out from Random House on August 15.
When leg-breaker Hutch Holtz rolls up to a rundown apartment complex in Portland, Oregon, to collect overdue drug money, a severed hand is the last thing he expects to find stashed in the client’s refrigerator. Hutch quickly realizes that the hand induces uncontrollable madness: Anyone in its proximity is overcome with a boundless compulsion for violence. Within hours, catastrophic forces are set into motion: Dark-op government agents who have been desperately hunting for the hand are on Hutch’s tail, more of the city’s residents fall under its brutal influence, and suddenly all of Portland stands at the precipice of disaster…
But it’s all the same for Katherine Moriarty, a singer whose sudden fame and precipitous downfall were followed by the mysterious death of her estranged husband—suicide, allegedly. Her trauma has made her agoraphobic, shackled within the confines of her apartment. Her son, Nick, has moved home to care for her, quietly making his living working for Hutch’s boss.
When Hutch calls Nick in distress, looking for someone else to take the hand, Katherine and Nick are plunged into a global struggle that will decimate the walls of the carefully arranged life they’ve built. Mother and son must evade both crazed, bloodthirsty masses and deceitful government agents while exorcising family secrets that have risen from the dead—secrets, they soon discover, that might hold the very key to humanity’s survival.
JOHN BONNER
The medical examiner’s office is two stories of brick and glass. Modern, clean-lined, tucked behind a sizable parking lot that’s sparsely filled at this hour, with high green hedges flanking both sides. The rear of the building butts up against an equally nondescript office building. Were it not for an ambulance and a pair of police cruisers parked amid the rest of the cars, Bonner wouldn’t have a clue. Some part of him really had expected an old Victorian with turrets, maybe a black cat weathervane. You hear about the dead rising, your head goes in a certain direction. Thing was, Bonner had seen the man in his car, buckled in, seen the horrible wound in his throat, the spill of blood in his lap. Bonner would have sworn on his own life that the man was dead as hell, dead beyond any inkling of awareness, dead forever. According to the police radio, that isn’t the case. They’d dropped Michael back at Camelot, and now here they are.
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Fever House
The plates in the flak jacket he’s got on make him feel like he’s wearing a set of phonebooks. He can’t imagine trotting around in the thing, much less running. There’s a beanbag shotgun stretched across his lap. Black ops or not, shortage of agents or not, they certainly have plenty of gear. Bonner has, perhaps not surprisingly, grown more reluctant to hurt anyone as the night’s progressed. Weils has made it clear she doesn’t have the same concerns. She jacks back the slide on her pistol, puts a round in the chamber, then casts a baleful glance at the shotgun.
“Subject’s already dead, Bonner. It’s not like you’re going to hurt him.”
The doors of the office are closed. No sirens, no alarms.
“You sure you heard that there was an emergency here? Everything looks fine to me.”
Weils looks away. Quietly, she says, “If you make it through tonight, Bonner, I’m telling Lundy I want you sent back to Williamsburg. Or wherever. You can do whatever weak-ass filing job some FBI branch in Bismarck gives you. You don’t have the touch for this, man.”
Bonner sits a little straighter under the weight of the flak plates. “You shot a civilian in the face tonight. Tell me more about my shortcomings.”
“A civilian who was aiming down on you.”
“Two civilians!” Bonners says, holding up his fingers. “Three! There was the one in front of the bar, too. And that old man in the hallway. It’s fucking—It’s not even unprofessional, Weils. You’re rogue.”
“I’m rogue,” she repeats, the words like small bitter stones falling from her mouth. “I’m rogue, huh?”
“Four people dead. No hand. I’d say you’re rogue, yeah.”
Weils holds out her phone. “Call Lundy, tell him that. See how it goes.” She waits, and when Bonner doesn’t move to take the phone, she puts it away. “You are either stupid, Bonner, or brutally obtuse, because there is a dangerous lack of understanding of what’s at stake here.”
“Well, it’s going to be a little hard to transfer me from a program that doesn’t exist, Weils. I think that’s the point, right?”
Weils snorts, shakes her head.
“I’m here for the duration,” Bonner says.
She turns to him, and he sees that he’s finally made her furious. “We caught live fire in that parking lot—from two different shooters—and you didn’t fire a single round.”
“It was in the middle of a traffic jam, Weils. I’m not—”
“You did not have my back out there. You’re hurt that I don’t trust you? Shit, I don’t trust you for a second, Bonner. You’re a desk monkey, man. Soft, afraid, unreliable. Makes you dangerous beyond words.”
“Weils—”
A man staggers out of the doorway. He has no face. Just this pulped ruin, a wetness that catches and reflects the lights of the parking lot. Bloody sputum spilling down his shirt, a pair of eyes blazing through it all. Nighttime traffic is right there, forty feet away. The man-shape takes a shambling step onto the pavement and then swivels its head as if scenting the air.
Very quietly, Bonner says, “Is that a cop?”
Weils gently opens the passenger door of the sedan. The man—though a significant part of Bonner is having a hard time considering him a man at this point—just stands there, swaying slightly, as if he were some automaton awaiting further instructions. They hear a scream drift from the inside of the building. Weils sights down, using the top of the passenger door as a stabilizer. The shot rips through the night; Bonner flinches. The man staggers, catches himself on the wall. Weils begins walking toward him and Bonner, cursing, steps out of the car. Weils fires again and the man’s head rocks back. He falls. She trots over, stands before him. There’s a last dreaming twitch from the fingers of the man’s left hand. Even from where he is, Bonner notes the look of howling vacancy in the eyes.
She dumps another round in his skull and Bonner flinches again.
“He was eaten,” he says, running over to her, his voice watery and small. “Look at that, Weils, that’s a fucking cop, and he was eaten, holy shit, look at his fucking face—”
Inside the building comes the near-musical cadence of shattering glass. Someone screams again, and it is so purely anguished that the hair stirs on Bonner’s neck.
Weils nods toward the building. “Watch that doorway.” She pulls out her phone. Calling Camelot.
“It’s me,” she says. A pause. “It’s happened. The ME’s office, yeah. It’s confirmed.” She gives the address of the medical examiner’s office, the very spot where they stand, and Bonner marvels at her calmness. He keeps stealing glances at the cop splayed out in the entrance. His face. His uniform. Has Weils been preparing for this all along? And Bonner just shuttling her around, a good little errand boy.
A shape shifts in the dark of the lobby and Bonner raises the shotgun, then curses and slips the strap over his shoulder, instead drawing his pistol. This, at last, garners the slightest nod of approval from Weils. She keeps her phone to ear and holds her own pistol out, scanning the parking lot behind them.
“Tell Lundy,” Weils says, “we’ve got a fever house. It’s confirmed. We’re at room zero. He needs to let Langley know.” A pause, and someone runs by inside, lit up in the half-light of the lobby. Down a stretch of hallway and gone again.
“Listen to me. Heavy Light is done,” Weils says over the phone. “Every concern about the remnant,” she says, and Bonner can hear the panic in her voice now, the humanness in it, finally, “is realized. It’s worse than we thought. DoD needs to be notified.”
A spill of bodies suddenly burst from the hall and flood the lobby, smashing against the front doors in a shower of glass. They tumble through, falling to the ground, Bonner and Weils backpedaling. It’s two cops and a woman in a white smock and a hairnet, and then, crouched low, there he is, the driver at the pizza place—long, greasy hair, naked body scattered with stick-and-poke tattoos. The last time Bonner had seen him, a few hours before, he’d been wearing a leather jacket and a shattered jaw that hung wrong. And now here he is, cadaver-gray, an incision halfway down his chest. His face freshly slicked in gore, jaw snapping even through its strange lean. The four of them stumble and then sprint toward Bonner and Weils, all four with that same vacuous, deathly glaze on their eyes. One suddenly peels off toward the street and the other three come for them. Bonner fires off a volley of shots—it’s finally happened, he’s firing his pistol. He backpedals and for a second feels Weils’s steadying hand on his back. He manages to land a round in one cop’s shoulder. It spins him but a second later he’s up and sprinting toward them again.
Bonner and Weils turn and run.
Two cops, a criminal, and a medical examiner. Sounds like the beginning of a bad joke. Bonner and Weils jump in the car, lock the doors. The windshield is slapped by pale, bloody hands. The eyes of the dead—if that’s what they are now—are depthless but filled with a certain concentration, a singularity of purpose. Bonner looks at them and understands that you could plead with those eyes the rest of your life and never see anything reflected back at you. One of the cops actually tries to bite the windshield, smearing bloody saliva against the glass.
Bonner sets his Glock up against the window, his chest heaving. An inch separates them. His hand trembles; the barrel clicks against the glass.
“You fire that, we’re dead,” Weils says. “They’ll get in.”
“I know it,” Bonner says. “What the fuck is a fever house, Weils?”
“Just drive.”
A woman runs out of the doorway and through the parking lot. She’s in a green smock. She wears one shoe. Her hand is covering her forearm. She’s alive.
She’s screaming as she runs toward the street.
Oh, now people are starting to scream, Bonner thinks.
Now people are starting to notice.
Excerpted from Fever House, copyright © 2023 by Keith Rosson.
