The Ghost in the Doll (Fox Meridian Book 6) (10 page)

‘Mutants? Seriously?’

‘Hey, with the weird bio-shit people are always coming up with, anything’s possible. Maybe not mutants, maybe some crazy government bioweapon or killer cyberframes.’ Royce waved a hand across the room. ‘Steeple there said he found one of their nests. Half a dozen bodies ripped open, parts missing. Said they eat the guts out of ’em.’

Fox looked around in the direction Royce had indicated. ‘Bulky-looking guy with all the crosses around his neck?’

‘Yeah, but if you want to talk to him, you should probably know… Guy’s a total asshole.’

Fox could kind of tell. Steeple was a fairly big man, tall, but also bulked up with synthetic muscle enhancements. Maybe the name came from his height, or from the horn-like spike of hair which sat over his brow. He leered at Fox as she walked over to sit at his table, but then his two drinking companions were leering too.

‘You Steeple?’ Fox asked. Patsy had, at Fox’s request, stayed at the bar and was chatting to Royce while watching what happened.

‘Sure am. You with Patsy? New around here for certain.’

‘I’m visiting, and I hear you found a body dump. Crazy cannibal mutants leaving their cast-offs lying around.’

Steeple grinned. ‘Sure did. Was out… explorin’. Found an old building they’d been nestin’ in. Maybe six bodies in it. Maybe more. Hard to tell what with the mess. Stank too.’

‘Torn open, guts taken out. That’s what I heard.’

‘Oh yeah. Real messy.’ The leering grin came back, as though it was funny, or he meant it to be impressive. ‘Chests ripped open, skulls bust in too. All the soft bits pulled out to feed on.’

‘I have located Mister Church in the NAPA database,’ Kit said into Fox’s head. ‘Brad Church, aka “Steeple.” Imprisoned for sexual assault, petty theft, and carrying an unregistered handgun. That was when he was seventeen. He has spent the last decade off the grid in the protectorate. There is, however, no suggestion of mental instability.’

‘What a nice man,’ Fox replied. Aloud, she asked, ‘Where?’

‘What’s it worth?’

Fox smiled. ‘An unverified story about a few bodies in the middle of nowhere which probably won’t lead anywhere anyway? Not a whole lot.’ She took a tug on her beer, which turned out to be not too bad. ‘I might buy you a beer?’

‘Oh, I think it’s worth more’n that. Tell you what, I’ll arm-wrestle you for it. You win, I’ll tell you where I found the bodies.’

‘And if you win?’

‘There’s rooms in back… Might even tell you anyway. After.’

Fox peered at Steeple, raising an eyebrow. ‘It’s hardly a fair match.’

‘Take it or get the fuck out.’

Changing chairs, Fox waved one of Steeple’s compatriots out of the way. The man pushed his chair back a couple of feet, grinning broadly. Fox rested her elbow on the table, raising her hand. ‘Oh, I’ll take it.’

Steeple shifted his position a little and then took hold of Fox’s hand. He had quite the grip, but Fox had a metal skeleton. ‘On three,’ he said, placing his elbow firmly on the table. ‘Three.’ Fox’s arm shifted a couple of inches and then stopped as she applied pressure. Steeple’s eyes widened and got wider as she pushed his arm steadily over toward horizontal.

‘I told you it wasn’t a fair match,’ Fox said. ‘Where are the bodies?’

‘You a fuckin’ cyborg or something?’

‘I’m not a cyborg. Where are the bodies?’ She squeezed his hand a little harder.

‘The old school building in Owasso, what’s left of it. If you get in there, just follow your nose.’

Fox let go of his hand and picked up her beer. ‘Thank you. Word to the wise, never judge a book by its cover, and show more respect to the fairer sex. A lot of us are
real
badasses.’ She walked back to the bar, smirking just a little.

‘The beers are free,’ Royce said. ‘That kind of floor show is worth a couple of pints.’

‘Thanks,’ Fox said, raising her glass to him. ‘This stuff isn’t at all bad. The old school in Owasso?’

‘I know it,’ Patsy said. ‘North of Tulsa, not far from Stone Canyon.’

‘On the way back?’

‘Bit of a detour, but we could do it.’

‘After the beers then.’

~~~

Kit found an old map of the region with the school site in Owasso shown on it, so getting there was not that hard. There were even a few vaguely intact roads to run along, so it took a little over half an hour to find the rundown, half-demolished building which had once housed some form of learning centre for children. Now it looked like about the only thing it housed was a plentiful supply of rats.

‘You want to stay out here?’ Fox asked. ‘The bug can take care of itself, but having someone here might be better and…’

‘I’ve seen my fair share of dead bodies, Fox,’ Patsy replied. ‘Someone on their own out here is not that safe. Gangs hole up in the old buildings sometimes.’ She patted the heavy semi-automatic strapped to her right thigh. ‘I’ve got this, but I’ll feel better if there are two guns around. Especially as I’ve seen what your pistol does to people.’

Fox gave a shrug and started into the ruins. The only thing she could smell was damp rot, but they continued deeper into the structure. It had been a single-storey building, built of brick and set in the middle of a large, open area. The roof was largely gone and the little statue of what looked like a child on a bicycle which sat outside had lost its head long ago. Inside, internal walls were randomly intact or scattered to the wind, possibly
by
the wind: there were signs that a tornado had hit the place at least once.

‘Did you go to an actual school?’ Patsy asked as they searched.

‘Yeah. High school was only two days a week, but I was full-time until then. Topeka’s not exactly highly advanced in its education methods.’

‘Huh. I came from San Diego, originally. Ordinary school all the way. Worst and best days of my life.’

‘You moved out after the Big One?’

‘Lost my mother to that. Dad moved us east in stages. Somewhere along the way I lost him. Well, I fell for this guy with a road hog and leather jeans. He lasted a couple of months and I hopped gangs to see where it would take me.’

Fox giggled. ‘When did you hook up with Cable?’

‘Uh… We’ve been together almost fifteen years now. He was the last biker in leather jeans I hooked up with. We were both ready for something more stable by then. Started the camp a couple of years later. You smell that?’

‘Uh-huh. I think we’re getting closer.’ Fox pushed through a door which was still more or less hanging on its hinges, one of them anyway, and stopped.

‘Oh shit,’ Patsy said, putting her hand over her nose and mouth to seal her scarf down tighter.

Fox quietly shut off her sense of smell and walked over to the pile of corpses. They were in the corner of what had probably once been a classroom. All the furniture had been stripped out of the place, but there was still about a third of a blackboard on one of the walls, and all four walls were still intact here.

‘Steeple was wrong,’ Fox said, her enhanced eyes scanning over the nearest of the bodies. ‘These weren’t
torn
open. There are a few signs of animals getting at them, but… This guy’s sternum was cut with a bone saw. Same for the skull on that one, and the brain wasn’t touched directly. There are intact intestines there and that’s the first thing animals go for.’

‘You were right, someone’s taking implants out. Even cerebral ones.’

‘Looks like it. You okay?’

‘I will be. Do you need to… I don’t know, examine them or something?’

‘I doubt I could get much out of this with a full forensic kit and the only thing an ME is going to say is that there are missing organs. They’ve been here for… weeks certainly, and the rats have been at them. No, we’ve got all we’re going to get from this lot. Certainly not the answer to the most important question.’

‘Which is?’

‘Who put them here?’

Oologah Lake Camp.

‘There were eight heads I could count,’ Fox said. ‘The way they were piled, I’d say ten to twelve actual bodies.’

‘More than Steeple said there were,’ Patsy commented, ‘but not enough for the number of people missing.’

‘Well, as for the first point, did you notice the patch of stale vomit near the door? I’d say our witness wasn’t paying all the attention he could have to the scene.’

There was a rumble of laughter from Cable and he nodded. ‘Don’t doubt it. Means there’s more than one dumping site, though.’

Fox nodded. ‘At least one more, maybe two. Finding them might be useful, but not a priority. What do you know about this camp at Stone Canyon?’

‘Uh… They’re set up in an old fire station. They put the roof back on it, reinforced it. The leader’s a guy named Ed Curry. Ex-military, like us, but he doesn’t talk much about it. Doesn’t look like special ops, but not all of them do. He’s fairly quiet in general, not especially well liked outside his group, but his men are all loyal.’

‘Huh. When you say men…?’

‘No women out there, that we know of,’ Patsy said. ‘His people go into Tulsa for recreation. Couple would come out here now and then. A couple of the girls here will entertain visitors for suitable recompense… We decided to put a stop to them coming here though. They could get a little rough.’

‘I had to have words with Ed about it,’ Cable added. ‘He said he’d reprimand his guys and we never saw them up here again.’

Patsy frowned. ‘Mind you, one of our missing people was Annaliese, and she was one of their favourites. Went missing on a trip into Tulsa.’

‘I think I should go take a look at Stone Canyon,’ Fox said.

‘Well then, this time I
am
going with you,’ Cable said. ‘I’m not sending Patsy into–’

Fox held up a hand. ‘Just put a hold on that. I’m going to go down and check it out tonight before I go in closer. There’s a full moon tonight. Not ideal, but I can manage.’

‘I’ve no doubt you can, but what do we do if you don’t come back?’

‘Call Palladium and get them to send in an assault team. But if it comes to that, Jackson’s really going to have to go back to the drawing board on these cyberframes.’

Stone Canyon Area, 6
^th
April.

From the look of the place, the old fire station had once had a pitched roof. Some tornado or storm had ripped that off at some point in the past, and the current residents had apparently decided that that kind of construction was either too difficult or not sturdy enough. There was a bit of a pitch in the corrugated iron panels they had put up there and cemented in, just enough to make the water run off when it rained.

There were a few hints of white paint in the broken eaves which had, maybe, covered the whole building, but now it was a uniform, drab brown which tended to make the place sink into the landscape from a distance. To human eyes, it probably showed up really badly in the moonlight, but to Fox, it was highlighted by ultraviolet light and emitting in the infrared, and quite visible.

It was a two-part structure. The larger, significantly taller, section had once been the garage for the fire trucks with three doors on the front and back for the vehicles, as well as a human-sized door beside them on the front. All but one of the vehicle-sized doors had been bricked over. Then there was the lower block which had, presumably, once been offices and an on-call area for the fire crews. That came with a front and rear door and had once had a lot of tall, slim windows, most of which now had heavy metal shutters bolted over them. Getting a look inside was not going to be that easy.

There was, however, a small window in the big door. It looked as though one of the original doors had survived intact or been remounted and there was a viewing window in it. Fox figured it was a health and safety thing, but from her point of view, which was ‘person sneaking around the outside of the building,’ it was just plain useful. Being seen might be an issue, however, so she used the sighting camera on her pistol to look in through it.

There was the expected collection of Q-bugs and one van, but these did not really register. Over the quad bikes, Fox could see something else: cages. Each was just about big enough for a human to sit down in, if they curled their legs up a lot. The thermal imaging on the camera suggested that at least one of them was occupied and Fox lifted her head to look in. Her eyes had better resolution in a wider spectrum than the gun’s camera. Precisely identifying the person in the cage was impossible, but she thought she was looking at a female, and possibly a second person in the cage beside hers. Even if this lot were not carving up people for parts, they had them in cages.

Fox slipped around the building to the shorter section and found one window which had not been covered over. There were mounting points for a shutter, but someone must have decided that light was a good thing. It looked like the room had been converted into a bedroom with a single occupant. Fox could make out body heat through the covers on the bed. There had to be more people inside: Cable had estimated the group at about fifteen-strong. So… They had converted the garage area into a barracks?

Slipping across to the door, she checked it. ‘Bloody conventional locks,’ she said silently. ‘Why can’t people use electronic ones? I can hack those.’

‘I am detecting a wireless network,’ Kit said. ‘It may be possible to access a computer in the building.’

‘See what you can find, but be careful.’

‘Of course… There appear to be three active implant computers and a small server attached to the network currently. Oh!’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Someone has absolutely no clue about computer security. I have gained access to one of the implants. The owner is… Lucien Wood. His implant has no VA and no active login controls. I assume he believes no one would attempt to hack him. Ah, and here we have the unencrypted file he uses to remember his passwords… And I’m into the server.’ Displays began appearing in front of Fox showing the sessions Kit was opening. ‘Some people should be locked up for their own good.’

‘Huh. You’re not wrong… Am I reading this right? This server has a narrowband satellite connection to the internet?’