Fletcher (5 page)

#0895

“I was right. It is one of those days. Someone spiked my breakfast with
angel-rage
, and before I know it I’m knee deep in flaming hospital, laughing my eyes out and reeking of petrol. Thank god I came down before the charges detonated. I’m not even in the right bloody city. Not today, not ever. “Everything looks strange here... Everything that isn’t charred rubble, that is. I’m used to that.

“Speaking of things I’m used to, a military helicopter seems to be on its way here. I’m guessing that’s my exit cue. Over and out.”

7: Screwloose

A week passed. Vincent disappeared as he always did, with Clive Jackson and his apartment getting consumed entirely by a vicious gas explosion. There was a funeral, with family. His sister even cried. Later that day, I sent him a message congratulating him on his convincing demise.

“No more undercover for a while,” was the curt response. I didn’t know whether to trust it, but I had more important things to do than crack his disguise again. From my nest in the Helix I started marking down the life of Alexander Sturrock, while concurrently sending out feelers to track down leads on the murder-suicide.

Ideally, they’d turn up with something. Practically? I wasn’t hopeful. This city had seen very little German violence, even during its 2012 heyday, and the modus operandi of this case just seemed totally out of sync with the sleeper cells. They were all about explosions and fiery displays of aggression, but this didn’t even make a newspaper.

RailTech involvement seemed more likely, but they were good. They were really good. Looking into RailTech was like looking for a black spider in a dark box, in a cellar, at midnight. Except instead of a dark box, you’re actually holding an irate crocodile with high-tech night vision goggles and an appetite for faces. I had decided to keep my investigative distance from RailTech unless absolutely necessary after one of my contacts was found in several garbage bins.

The most likely source of information was from the friends and family of the two deceased. I’d already scheduled time with some of them—nothing threatening—and I hoped to get something valuable from my recalcitrant human contact.

The murder-suicide, no matter how puzzling, was not at the front of my mind. I finally had something tangible to attach to my object of interest—the mythical, mysterious boy who only I ever seemed to notice.

I first saw the boy in 2007. I had just returned home from one of my more exotic cases, having successfully led the Russian ФСБ on a merry chase through Damascus. It was on a train where I saw him: cold eyes set in a tanned face, with a slash of white hair curling out from under his hood. He must have been eighteen at the time, and despite his age I’ve only ever known or referred to him as ‘the boy’.

There was something about him that didn’t quite fit in, as if he had been photoshopped onto the train scene. As I looked at him, the sullen eyes rose and met mine. We had silently stared at each other until the train ground to a halt, and he stood and left just as quietly. Two days later, he was dead. Car crash; gone on impact.

Despite the interest he had sparked, I thought little of it. People make eye contact with me. People die. There had to be some intersection. It’s also not an unnatural occurrence; that is, people seem more likely to die after coming into contact with me. I’m just the Typhoid Mary of Bad Karma.

I had completely put it out of my mind when I met his gaze again, one month later, across a crowded airport terminal.

My first reaction was disbelief. But it was definitely him: the same ice-blue eyes, the same tanned face and the same peroxide hair. He maintained eye contact unblinkingly as my mind went through the next stages: suspicion, self-doubt and finally confusion, and he was gone again before my mind finished whirring.

Twelve sightings and twelve deaths later, but I finally had a lead to follow up. Alexander Sturrock.

***

The view from Sturrock’s bedroom was expansive. In a better time, it would have bordered on breathtaking, but the lush greenery of the city park had long since withered to neglect.

I spent a long time standing in the moonlight before he spoke to me. I’d heard the change in breathing a while ago, as he woke, but remained at the window.

“Who sent you?” he asked.

“Interesting way to start. Don’t bother pressing your emergency button again, I’ve disabled it.”

I didn’t tell him that I disabled it by re-routing the wires into his doorman’s eyes. Some things are best left for the morning.

“Were you expecting someone? You’re...calm?”

“I’ve been waiting for this for a few weeks now. A little surprised it took you guys so long.”

You guys?

I nonchalantly put a hand on the knife in my belt, trying not to betray my puzzlement.

“What you’re looking for is in my bedside drawer. I don’t want trouble.” He sounded genuine; not defeated, but resigned to whatever fate he thought I had in store for him.

I stepped out of the moonbeam, but didn’t reach the bedside. I’d seen no guns in Sturrock’s record, but his strange behaviour worried me. The drawer could be trapped, or it could hold a weapon. I drew the knife and pointed it towards him, while getting a better look. His grey hair was thinning beyond his years.

“Open it. Just open it. If you reach inside, I—”

“It’s not primed to explode. And I’m not armed. Like I say, I don’t want trouble.”

He leaned over and slid the drawer out. I stepped closer—knife still trained on my target—and reached inside. I found a large envelope, and drew it out.

“What’s this?”

“It’s my report, of course. Why else would you be here?”

I tore off the top and pulled out a paper booklet, then jumped across the room to read by moonlight. Sturrock waited patiently.

The cover was pretty simple. “Autopsy Report,” it read, “Decedent: James F Crawford”. I rolled the name around my head, trying to get a feel for it. It wasn’t nearly as exotic as I’d expected, and I realised it was more familiar than it should be. I skipped ahead on the text and glared at the photos.

It was Sturrock’s turn to be surprised. I flung the paper across the room and hissed at him, knife rising like an angry cobra.

“What the hell is this?”

“It’s—it’s exactly what you want!”

“Some stupid report about some stupid police commissioner?” I was hurling my vowels like darts. Alex’s calm demeanour broke upon the tirade and he shrank back into his bed.

“You have a daughter, she lives on the east side and I will send you her head if you keep this up.”

“I don’t know what you want!”

“You know damn well. Sweet Elizabeth, I wonder what she’ll say when I tell her that Daddy’s the reason her fingers are getting pu—”

“Please, stop!”

His plaintive cry somehow drowned out the rest of my sentence, leaving the trailing syllables of “incinerator” hanging dreadfully in the air. The silence began to accumulate tension; I condensed my intent into a hateful stare until he spoke again.

“Please. I’ll do whatever you need.”

Crushed: every neuron in his brain was critically focused on the potential consequences of his actions.

“Please.”

I leashed my venom back in and tried to calm myself. I could feel my pulse in my eyes and I realised I was still holding the knife out. I lowered it and spoke.

“You had a boy. A boy in your morgue. Platinum hair, blue eyes, tanned. Slightly shorter than me. He came in after this—”

              —I kicked the paper pettily—

                            “—commissioner. Before the old couple. I want to know everything.”

Confusion fought with fear and apprehension, gaining a foothold in his eyes.

“Boy?”

“The boy. He was between the police commissioner and two decrepits. You do run this morgue, don’t you?”

Desperation filled his eyes. Coughs racked him as he tried to form a response, but all that spilled out was a stutter. I rolled my eyes.

“If you don’t use your tongue, I’ll cut it out. Take a breath, and save your daughter.”

That focused him. For all the foulness of my current state, I couldn’t help but enjoy the kick of hijacking family emotions.

“Okay. Okay. I know this isn’t... Isn’t what you want to hear. But there was no boy. I don’t know what you’re talking about. There was no boy.”

The eyeball-pulse jacked itself up another notch. I was breathing heavily; oxygen rushed through my blood and made me feel dizzy.

“There was no boy.”

Confusion saturated the air. If there was a boy, he’d know. And if he knew, he would have told me. Because if he didn’t tell me, his daughter... He would have told me. He would have told me.

He would have told me. But he didn’t.

A voice started eating through the mist. It was Sturrock.

“—to hear, but you aren’t well. I can get you help. Just...put the knife down. Please.”

He had moved from his spot on the bed, and was standing beside me. His hand lightly touched mine; something triggered and I struck out. Alex fell to the floor. I heard gasps, but they were high-pitched and might have been my own.

Fragments of time passed before I struck again, steel-toed boots driving into the body below me. Sturrock tried to lift himself, but after a second kick he stopped struggling and lay still. Three times, four times, five times I lashed out, stopping only when I heard the ribs crack. I dug into my coat and threw the first pill I could find down my throat. Bitter:
straitjacket
. The night was just starting.

I plundered the medicine cabinet, devouring a handful of painkillers and stowing the rest in my pocket. Pausing to try force the doorman into the oven, I settled for the liberal application of a fancy corkscrew. The night was young, and the horror was loose.

***

Blink.

I spindle-crept from a windowsill. A man was sleeping; he had an attractive jawline, I remember. Two minutes were spent hovering a hair above his face, before his eyes opened. My teeth unsheathed and I pounced.

I shook the body like a ragdoll. When I dropped it, it wasn’t the man anymore: I must have moved on. Tiny, frightened, red-flecked eyes stared into my own before the darkness swept in again. My ears rang from the shrieking.

The ringing intensified. Shots screamed past my head. I wasn’t in the safe zone anymore, and my clothes were drenched in residual person. In my right hand nestled a red rock; in my left, a lock of platinum blonde hair—
oh god what have I done never mind ha ha ha
. I dashed through the debris, giggling like a schoolgirl before rounding a corner and deploying my weapon to devastating effect. Once he stopped choking on the hair, I crushed his skull for good measure.

Blink.

I was dragging something heavy through the doors of the Helix Institute. I spat. Something tinkled against the floor like glass or porcelain. I dropped my prey somewhere on level one, before the freezing seizures took over and I collapsed in a corner around a Bunsen burner.

Bliiii-

My face was glued to the cold floor. Some of the skin below my wrist was scorched black where my sleeping hand had lingered by the fire. The pain was waiting in the wings. I spent a long time staring at the flame before I could move.

I peeled myself away, leaving a red outline on the tiles. I stumbled around the institute and gathered my wits before I found a scalpel and dug the dead flesh from my wrist. A gleam of white smiled merrily back at me before I emptied a bottle of ethanol over the wound. The pain took centre stage, and the empty halls swallowed my screams.

#0813

“Strange. I came to this morning. It’s one of those days—the one where you wake up missing an entire week, with the taste of vodka and blood in your mouth and a hunger that could scourge the planet. I feel like I haven’t eaten since Friday, and I’ve somehow managed to snort so much
screech
that I release a plume of pink mist every time I sneeze. My throat is also in agony. I may have been eating glass again.

“Mornings like these make me ask the important questions. Am I off the rails? Do I need to check these self-destructive habits? Why are there three bodies nailed to my ceiling? What’s for breakfast?

“Wait. What?”

8: Recovery

It took a few days to piece myself together. A call came through on day one, rousing me from my chemical Xanadu. I recognised the unique caller tone before I hit the speaker key.

“Fuck off, Vincent.”

“Are you out of your goddamn mind?” He sounded pissed. He sounded extremely pissed.

“Not now, V. Kind of in the middle of something.”

“I’m hoping you mean literally, and the two walls of a garbage compactor.”

“If you called to trade barbs, I’d rather marry a screwdriver to my eardrums and have them consummate it.”

“We have six dead and four more in the hospital, K. The youngest was twelve.”

I tried to laugh, but it came out a painful cough.

“Four in hospital? That’s what I get for not pacing—”

“Two are in a coma—”

“—self. Ah, that sounds more like it.”

“Are you serious?”

“Are you rhetorical?”

“Goddammit K, I can’t believe you—”

              “Haven’t hung up yet?”

“I swear to God.... This is worse than the time you commandeered a US drone to hunt pheasants.”

I muted him, absentmindedly examining a track of bite marks down my flank.

“Look, Vincent. I would say that I can understand why you’re angry. But that would be a lie. I’d also tell you I’m sorry but, again, lie. Your lead on Sturrock was worth a wax tampon. I just needed to vent. Not like you’re so saintly. Remember Prague?”

I laced my fingers behind my head and grinned. A few seconds of silence passed before I remembered that the mute was still on.

“—king insane. Do you have any idea what kind of heat this is going to bring down on your hea—”

“Muted again! Stop buzzwording. It’s not helping my headache.”

I sat up and rummaged through my bedside drawer and started pouring myself a screwdriver, but then realised I was out of orange juice, and glasses.

Lifting the bottle with one hand, I switched the mute off with the other.

“And you’re back on the air.”

“I’m done, K. When Sturrock comes to—”

              “He survived?”

              “—and gives a portrait—”

              “That man must be made of iron.”

              “—you’re screwed beyond reasonable—”

              “I should probably visit him.”

“You’re an idiot, K. I would tell you to watch yourself, but forget it. Forget it.”

The line went dead. I considered calling back for a second, but he sounded like he was in one of his moods. He always got like this. ‘Murdering innocents’ this and ‘reckless insanity’ that. Admittedly, I hadn’t gone on a rampage like this in months. That still didn’t excuse his rudeness.

I polished off most of the vodka before tackling the mess of the previous night. A crimson trail snaked its way through the upper labs, leading all the way past the pneumatic doors and out into the sun. I followed it in the other direction to find Victim Number Seven.

I was impressed. Normally I’d have been unable to pull a larger person any reasonable distance. I congratulated myself and checked for a pulse. I knew that I wasn’t going to find one, but the physical confirmation of this fact sent a shiver of ecstasy through my body. Dragging him by the feet—good God, he was heavy—I hauled him down to the service floor and flicked the incinerators on. These things were designed to reduce medical equipment to cinders; a corpse wasn’t a problem.

Back on the first floor, I scrubbed the barely-congealed liquid from the tiles. It was definitely best to get it out now, before it stained. The Helix might, technically, not be mine, but I took some level of pride in where I lived.

Because you’re all about impressing the guests. Best hostess ever.

I thought about the absurdity of my choice of words, and chuckled. Something twigged in my mind: a vague recollection of platinum blond hair. I searched the Helix, but I couldn’t find any. Had I dropped it outside? Had I imagined it?

No, you choked someone to death with it.

I grumbled to myself as I crawled back under the sheets. Typical: go on a psychotic rampage and destroy valuable evidence.

No use crying over spilt blood.

***

Day two brought fresh horrors along the phone lines. This time it was Valerie. Less contempt and more curiosity than Vincent; apparently I’d paid her a visit, spending half an hour whispering evils through her intercom before tumbling through her skylight. Things had gone sultry from there; this much explained the bite marks. Then there was a crashing in the background and her voice faded from the handset: “If I have to restrain you one more time, I’ll do it with ketamine.”

I smiled. She’d be okay, of course. This wasn’t the first time a patient had gone wild on her watch. Example one: yours truly. I made a mental note to inquire about the ketamine, and went to sleep again.

***

Energy returned on day three. I spent most of the morning scrolling disinterestedly through newsfeeds: bloodsports across the Suez Barrier, panic in Queensland due to a catastrophic laboratory failure and reports of Russian constructions on the Georgia and Azerbaijan borders. The speculation was a bit fantastic; it seemed pretty clear that the Russians were just making their own version of the Suez Barrier. Ironically, the collapse had vastly improved relations between Russia and the USA; while the latter scrambled to put out its own fires, Russia consolidated its position and made concrete efforts to deal with the infection. Of all the countries in the world, Russia had weathered the storm and stayed driest. Sure, Moscow had been wiped out, but the scale and quickness of the Russian reaction had saved millions. America no longer had the time to care about Russia, and Russia no longer had the inclination to care about America.

Local news was less interesting. I was on the second page (“Grisly murders linked, say officials”), shunted down thanks to some asinine story about a girl being possessed by demons while sleeping (“I fall asleep, someone else wakes up”). Ugh. The world falls apart at the seams and guess what survives? Goddamn tabloids.

Guess I’ll just have to try harder next time.

Nothing new in my inbox, save for something Vincent-scented (Vinscented?) warning me to keep a low profile. I clicked my tongue in irritation. I knew how to take care of myself. My many scars twinged in disagreement at the notion.

I’m still alive, so shut up
.

For the first time in three days, my stomach reminded me of the necessity to eat properly. I didn’t feel like washing dishes and pans, so I made do: tuna omelette, cooked in a glass beaker over a Bunsen burner. That’s not something they teach you in home ed, that’s for damn certain.

Nourished, rested, ready for action. Back to work?

Back to work.

***

Man does not live by bread alone, nor by alcohol and designer drugs. As such, the rest of the morning was spent bushwhacking through the dank corners of an abandoned strip mall. Ex-junkies had taken over the basement, turning the parking space into a wasteland of dusty Persian rugs and heaps of moth-eaten clothes. The collapse had crippled the production of the old narcotics; those dependent on the stuff had rapidly degenerated into insanity and withdrawal. The survivors did what they could in the grimiest reaches of the gutterages, abusing stores of codeine and stolen designer drugs to keep the itching at bay. They weren’t dangerous, usually, unless
angel-rage
was involved. I’d come to an agreement with the group here. They left me alone, and I didn’t put any heads on a spit. Again.

I dragged the back of the knife against the wall as I descended into the parking lot. The grating was faint, but the scrabbling sounds told me my message had been heard. The reek of faeces met me and my eyes watered as they grew accustomed to the darkness.

I felt eyes watching me from all angles. I traversed the few hundred metres to the service stairs, taking care to watch where I stepped. Every few seconds there was the telltale sound as a rug shifted. My shadowy acquaintances were moving around me.

“Remember the arrangement,” I said, indifferently. The shifting stopped.

Sunlight flooded the stairs through the broken skylight. I stopped at the door, turned around and spoke. This time, with more authority.

“If it smells like this next time, I’ll torch the lot of you.”

Silence. I backed into the light and took the steps two at a time. Most of these places had been devastated during the panic, but the rioters and looters never managed to get everything. There were always a few cans of assorted imperishables—beans, sardines, tomatoes and meat. Better yet, other parts of the strip had been left untouched: detergents, toiletries and hardware could be found in abundance. I restocked on freeze spray and gas cartridges from a camping shop, as well as drill bits and screws. I also bagged a new claw hammer. My last one had broken off at the handle after a particularly nasty assignment.

I caught the glint of gold as I was prying a pack of batteries from a set of skeletal fingers, almost missing it beneath the grime and muck. The ring made for a nice trophy. Finally, I took to the escalators, two steps at a time, and started the climb to the top of the dome.

***

Heavy winds shepherded my hair into my eyes when I got to the top. This was the highest point in the gutterage, and one of the highest in the city. Rain clouds boiled over the countryside to the west, but the landscape was dry for now. It had been an arid summer, and it showed in the ruined buildings.

This was one of my favourite spots. I could relax, I could watch and I could think. I scanned the area with binoculars as I slowly ate something resembling lunch.

To the west, past the gutterage, farmlands rolled onwards to the base of the mountains in the distance. An armoured truck—likely part of some surveillance patrol—drove out onto the winding roads. I couldn’t catch the license plate, but I noted the make.

The Helix Institute lay in full view, solar panels soaking up energy in a black array. In the early mornings the dome cast a shadow over the complex, but after that it basked in the sun until it set on the mountains. My heart jumped slightly as I picked up movement—two men and a woman slinking around the walls. I watched them intently, but they thought better of intruding and loped off into the shadows.

Closer to where I sat, a plume of dust—or smoke?—snaked through the roads. I pressed my form to the bricks as a bike curved into the street below me, nipping around broken cars and debris before gunning for the quarantine cordon. Someone was in a hurry.

To the north-east, the city jarred the broken landscape. Despite the dry season, the river still flowed, passing the RailTech office block and the Riverside Mercy hospital. Sturrock was probably there, which meant I should probably make plans to be there too. Through a third-storey window I saw someone retching violently.

Vincent’s cover-house was being swarmed by construction workers. I could see straight into his living room, blackened and blasted as it was.

‘Gas explosion’. Realistic.

The RailTech offices always pulled my eye while I was up here. It annoyed me and distracted my thoughts and musings. I’d considered burning it to the ground, but my self-preservation instincts overpowered my appreciation of aesthetics every time. An upward tilt of the binoculars caused the floors to flash before me, until a figure caught my eye.

He was beautiful: sleek brown hair, hard blue eyes and a razor-sharp jawline. A scowl carved his face as those eyes—intense beyond dreaming—glared over the perimeter walls. As I drank him in, he shifted and—for a strangely harrowing second—I stared into those narrow slits.

I twitched, repressing an urge to press myself into the bricks again. There was no way he could have seen me, but the full intensity of that gaze was unexpected. The slightest flush had found my cheeks, spawned from the desire of something new. I found myself wondering what it would be like to strangle that neck.

Slowly, deliberately, he opened the window and extended his arm into the wind. We both breathed deeply. The scowl deepened and he retreated, leaving my line of sight.

Dammit.

I flitted over the adjacent rooms in the hope of catching him again. No such luck.

Suddenly bored and no longer hungry, I flipped the tin can over the edge with my foot. Beans and sauce splattered against the wall and started creeping, gradually, away from the winds. A voice coughed in my head.

Red drips. You’ve seen that recently.

I had. I pulled out the pictures of the murder-suicide and leafed through them until I found the one I wanted. Blood drops on the window: the trickle flowed straight down, then tilted to the right, and finally straight down again.

Razorjaw was jettisoned from my mind at orbital speed. Sturrock could wait. Right now, I had to get across the cordon and into the flat. I looked at the window in the photograph one last time.