Out of the Black Read online

  Malloy was staring expectantly at him. "You okay?" he repeated.

  "Sorry. Just thinking."

  Malloy gave him a resolute nod "We've done a lot of that, too."

  "All the bodies like that?" Ping asked, glancing back over his shoulder.

  "No two alike."

  "Any ID?"

  "We haven't touched anything," Malloy checked his tablet, "forensics should be here in fifteen."

  The other officer joined them as they reached the front of the destroyed car. He was an efficient looking black man in his twenties. An ugly pale scar crawled from the bottom of his left ear to his collarbone- Ping wondered how he'd survived whatever had caused that, and why he hadn't had the scar removed. The patrolman's arms were so corded with muscles that he looked like he could crush the black maglite he held. Black points and curves mostly hidden by collar and short sleeves suggested a hidden mosaic of tattoo beneath his shirt. "Rodriguez" was on his nametag.

  Like his partner, he didn't look like he was used to being afraid. He glanced at Ping's badge and gave a nod of recognition. "Welcome to the twilight zone," he said with a tight grin.

  "I hear it's a dimension of mind," Ping said, glancing at the strings of interlacing automatic weapon craters in the concrete wall behind the car. Bob Marley continued to wail from the damaged car's powerful speakers. The music seemed to resonate in every molecule of the chilled night air. It filled any pause in the conversation, slid around each word. "Let's get together and feel all right."

  "You notice this?" Rodriguez used the maglite to illuminate a spot on the overpass above the car.

  What Ping could make out looked like pieces of the car's roof, mangled and fused to the infrastructurof the bridge. Dark viscous liquid dripped from several protrusions.

  "That's not..." He stopped as he made out the shape of a twisted leg protruding from the wreckage above him. Its black shoe was untouched by the destruction.

  They moved through the minefield of physical evidence, skirting piles of biology and destroyed metal. At last, they reached the car, approaching the driver's door from the front. The roof had been blown off from the back, but about ten centimeters of damaged metal clung to the windshield's upper frame. The windshield was spider-webbed with cracks, most of which emanated from the roughly horizontal cigar shaped hole directly in front of the driver. Jagged shards at the bottom of the frame were all that remained of the car's side and rear windows.

  At the driver's door, the interior of the car appeared for the first time. The first glance revealed two bodies: the driver and a passenger in the back seat. The driver was buckled in, but the passenger was on the floor of the back seat, mostly hidden from view.

  "What's wrong with this picture?" Malloy asked with a sideways glance.

  "What isn't?" Ping answered, but then he noticed: "This wasn't an explosion."

  "Something blew off the top without destroying the interior of the car," Rodriguez said.

  There were several slashes in the seats and blood everywhere, but no burn or shrapnel damage. The passenger side airbag had deployed and now lay spent over the empty passenger seat. The driver's airbag hadn't deployed, but that was likely because the steering wheel was gone.

  The driver was indeed "extremely dead"- slumped forward and to the right in his harness, his head was mostly missing. From the pattern of... tissue... on the passenger's door but not the deployed airbag, it appeared that he had died before the car hit the wall. In his left hand, the driver clutched the detached steering wheel. Upon closer inspection, the wheel was deformed as if it had been wrenched off.

  Ping blinked and shook his head, "Looks like the driver died before the car hit the bridge."

  Malloy nodded, "The shot probably came through the window. What do you make of the steering wheel?"

  "Souvenir?" Rodriguez said around abbreviated breaths. The air was tinged with the smell of the butcher shop.

  Ping blunted his visceral reaction to the carnage by pulling his tablet from its holster and getting to work. He expanded it to notepad size and switched it out of standby. He detached the stylus and brought up a new incident report. He used the tablet's three-dimensional scanners to record the contents of the car. He paused occasionally to scratch notes and diagrams, linking them with the images. "I'll need a download of your raw reports."

  The two officers entered the necessary commands on their tablets. Ping's tablet chirped twice in acknowledgment of the inbound data feeds. He would review and incorporate them into his report later.

  "We already did the full survey," Rodriguez said.

  Ping nodded absently from behind the shelter of his tablet as he finished surveying the front seat and moved on to the rear.

  When looking from the front, he hadn't noticed the damage to the back seat- four holes in a tight configuration at about chest level- definitely bullet holes. They were probably fired from outside the driver's door, from about where he was now standing. On a hunch Ping turned around and looked down. He stood at one end of another bloody skid mark radiating away from the car. At the far end was what might have once been a body- so much for the shooter.

  He snapped some images and turned his attention to the car's second occupant. Not much to see there; at least not much to want to see. Patterns of blood on the seats implied that the victim had probably been standing when he was killed, but whoever had done it had stopped to make very, very sure that he was dead. Ping gritted his teeth and documented. He hoped that he would never get used to stuff like this.

  When his tablet contained all the information he could get about the car, he turned toward the bullet-pocked wall. He was documenting the placement of the shots when Malloy spoke. "We got here 'bout twenty minutes ago. Traffic dispatched us to check out the intersection's Big Brother. It went offline about an hour before and wouldn't respond to remote diagnostics.

  Ping nodded, "Just coincidence, I'm sure."

  "Yeah... Someone didn't want to show up in the background of a traffic violation video. The Bro' took a round powerful enough to scrap it. You'll find a link to its logs and a scan of the scrap in the feed I gave you."

  "Witnesses?" Ping asked, knowing the answer.

  Malloy bit his lip, shook his head.

  "We saw something..." Rodriguez said, eyes lingering on the car's interior, "something fast."

  Ping looked up from his work, giving Rodriguez his full attention; he left the question unasked.

  After a pause, Rodriguez continued, "I didn't get a good look..."

  "Just a good scare, hey?" Malloy interrupted, looking amused, his game face nearly impenetrable.

  With an effort, Rodriguez looked away from the car and faced his partner. "You know, your terror squeak was quite... distracting." His game face was back too.

  "I got a touch of the asthma, Junior!" Malloy came back.

  "Children..." Ping eased into the friendly sparring with the patient-but-firm voice he'd perfected while counseling troubled families. His gaze settled on Rodriguez.

  "Yeah... well, we'd found the bodies there," Rodriguez said, pointing to a ragged crater in the concrete behind the patrol car.

  "Mortar round?" Ping said, staring at the raised lip around the destroyed concrete.

  Rodriguez shrugged, but his eyes better conveyed the extent of his confusion.

  "Not unless the mortar fired people," Malloy said, shaking his head.

  Ping was about to ask him what he meant, but Rodriguez continued, "So we were already... concerned, you know? I had the flashlight and pistol out- sort of easing up on the back of the car. Then there's this sound... and like a blur of motion, and something explodes out from behind the car."

  "Explodes?" Ping stopped scribbling on his tablet in mid-note, "What exploded?"

  "Not like 'boom'," Malloy said, "but moving like it'd been shot out of a cannon... It really freaked him out." He pointed to the overpass, "Rod here took a shot at it- see the h way up there in the bridge?"

  "What freaked me out was that '
asthma' of yours." Rodriguez said as if re-explaining a math problem to an eight-year-old, "I thought maybe you were dyin'. You sure that wasn't the terror squeak?"

  "Asthma." Malloy droned.

  "Terror squeak." Rodriguez's smile broadened.

  "So this guy flew up to the bridge?" Ping asked, unimpressed.

  "Nah," Malloy smirked, "he went off south. Rod here just shot up."

  Rodriguez shook his head, "It was between the car and the wall. It bolted out just as I looked down into the car. I'm seeing all this blood, and there's this blast of sound like a flag in high wind, and I see something jet out from behind the car, out of the corner of my eye. I bring my gun up quick, but then there's this really unsettling 'asthma' coming from the chief here," he gave Malloy a mischievous glance, "Anyway, I lost my footing on some kind of stuff I really don't want to think about..."

  "...and the bridge gets what's coming to it." Malloy gave a knowing nod.

  "You keep saying 'it' and 'something'," Ping said, "do you mean 'he' or 'she'?"

  "All I saw was a blur." Rodriguez shook his head.

  "I just saw a blink," Malloy said, "dark and fast. It coulda' been a man..."

  "Except men don't move like that." Rodriguez finished.

  Untouched, Unknown

  The storm was coming.

  Face turned down against the light rain, Anne plodded homeward under a black canopy of lowering clouds. The tops of the surrounding buildings were already lost in the lowering sky and light showers had darkened the pavement. Nature's latest prank at Anne's expense was all set up and it was almost time for the big, wet punch line.

  When she woke late in the afternoon, the day had been cool and bright, but deep clouds had moved in with the night. By the time she arrived at work, the sky was filled with the promise of rain. Now, walking home in the fulfillment of that promise, Anne trudged through the thousand small aches that any exertion cost her. Her blue sweater, though perfect for the early evening chill, was completely ineffective against the early morning rain. Socks wet, feet itching, she felt just a little sorry for herself. Usually she tried to be positive, but sometimes the funk crept in and ruined her day.

  Normally she didn't waste a lot of time focusing on her long-term issues: like being single at thirty-nine, like having a face only a mother could love- not her mother, but maybe someone else's mother- like tipping the scales at two hundred forty pounds with her lungs full of helium. Thank heaven for metrics! A hundred and ten kilos sounded positively slim compared to her imperial weight.

  Ok, so maybe she thought about the big issues a bit, but right now her most pressing problems were the five blocks between her and the train station, and the sky full of water above her. On the bright side, she didn't have to worry about the rain smearing her makeup- she just didn't wear the stuff. One time in college she'd made an abortive try, but the sight of her round face staring back at her from the mirror with the first hint of blush inexpertly applied made her feel like an inexpertly polished turd. Makeup and design clothes were for some jet set, days-of-wine-and-roses, dating, frolicking-in-front-of-the-cameras subphylum of humanity to which she did not belong. Hospital scrubs and a clean face- this was her lot in life.

  She grinned, part humor, part exasperation. She was big enough to admit her life sucked, but tonight had been something truly special. It had started out as usual with an over-snoozed alarm. She'd missed her train and been late to work, but the most unpleasant part of the commute was the grizzled eastern European cabby that had hurled a stream of poorly assembled insults at her for crossing the street legally in his presence. The part that stuck with her was something like, "box be on your family"- box? She'd probably be dreaming about "the box" tonight.

  She rolled her eyes and let the smile spread across her face as she considered the hundred small frustrations in the workday of a professional vampire. Seriously, she couldn't see how Count Chocula had done it all these years without getting fed up and taking a stroll in the sun- that cartoon bloodsucker had the heart of a champion. Despite her most bubbly bedside manner, every patient at the hospital was not happy to see Anne and her little tray of needles and tubes. She had it worse than most phlebotomists since she worked the graveyard shift. No one liked to be in the hospital, no one liked to have blood drawn, but it really got personal when they had to wake up for their bloodletting.

  Then there was her main occupational hazard: the plague of Harms that started showing up around eleven every night. The ER got between five and ten a night. They were restrained by the time they reached the hospital, but their incoherent verbal assault was always a treat. Eyes dilated before an incomprehensible hallucinoscape, they shrieked and cursed and wept. They were unpredictable, moving from pathetic sobs to merciless violence seamlessly. The police and paramedics who brought them in required first aid as often as not.

  The ironic part was that Harmony was sold as a mood-elevator with mild hallucinogenic effects. It was the first and most effective connectivity drug on the illicit market. Though there was still debate on the subject, the prevailing wisdom was that connectivity drugs affected the areas of the brain that governed empathy and the sense of community. Many starry-eyed psychedelic types believed Harmony was the first scientific step toward telepathy, but Anne knew that speech, writing, and television had already blazed the pre-telepathy trail.

  Harmony had been hot among the party crowd for maybe a decade now, gaining wide popularity with the post-psychedelic subculture. The psychotic incidents hadn't started until a few months ago in New York, but within three weeks, Harms had made their Chicago debut. In another two weeks, there were Harms in every major city in the world.

  Anne understood the desire to escape, to feel like you belonged in a group of strangers, but she was completely mystified why anyone would continue to take a drug once it started leaving people in a state that came in second only to demonic possession in the creepy Olympics. From the number of Harms she saw at the hospital, she didn't need to see any disturbing statistics to know Harmony was a serious problem.

  Drawing the blood of these nuts was the most unsettling part of her job. She usually got to wait until they were sedated, but even pumped full of sedatives powerful enough to tranquilize a carload of game show hosts, a Harm might still wake up cranky. A properly motivated Harm could even break the "unbreakable" plastic cuffs cops used. A month ago, the hospital had received new restraints just for the Harms, but she still didn't

  The crown jewel in her work night came at three this morning. She'd been relieved to take a break from the ER and its swarm of Harms to draw blood from a slightly disoriented 84-year-old inpatient on anticoagulants. Carol was the archetypal granny: thin and fragile, with an easy disposition and plenty of stories of kids and grandkids. When Anne woke her up, she had been sweet, "You just do whatever you need, Dearie."

  As Anne applied the tourniquet and sterilized Carol's arm, they'd had a pleasant conversation about Carol's grandkids. As Anne prepared the needle, she was smiling and laughing. She never saw it coming.

  When the needle went into Carol's arm, she made a small surprised sound. Anne's next clue that something was amiss was the clutch purse that smashed into the top of her head. The old hag was screaming incoherently and repeatedly bludgeoning Anne cross-body with the purse. Anne got the blood sample, but it cost her both bruises and pride.

  Expect the unexpected- this should be the phlebotomist's credo.

  It made her want to start a support group for the vocationally unloved. She could picture it now: listening supportively in the company of depressed IRS agents and dentists. "Hi, I'm Anne, and people hate my job," she mumbled as she trudged through the threatening sprinkle of rain. Humor had always been her shield. When things got tough, she'd go for the cheap laughs. She was starting to feel better when the rain came down like a tidal wave.

  "Aw... crap...ola." was all the disappointment she could muster before the uncontrollable laughter started. She was still splashing and waddling, laugh
ing and crying when she noticed the music- first like the tinkle of an elaborate crystal wind chime, but getting louder with the urgency of an approaching freight train. She didn't have time to process this information before the world exploded.

  Her startled scream came out in a rather embarrassing squeak when the car parked to her left had a Wile E. Coyote moment. It seemed as if an anvil had dropped from some hidden mesa high above. The car's roof crumpled and the windows closest to Anne exploded outwards. A storm of broken glass showered down from above, exploding on the ground around her, tugging at her left arm and back, stinging her right cheek.