10,000 Bones

by Joe Ollinger

  I count seven syringes, including the one in my hand. The stuff must be fake.

  “Where did you get these?” I ask. Trying not to sound hostile, I add, “I can help you, but I need you to help me first.”

  I hear something creak behind me and look over my shoulder. The old man is stepping through the door, an axe in his hands.

  I drop the syringe and turn to face him, nearly tripping over my own feet. He brings the blade up over his head and swings it down hard, and I throw myself aside. The killing stroke barely misses. The sharp edge digs into the floor just centimeters away from my arm.

  “No!” the little girl rasps. “Grandpa no!”

  The miner pulls at the axe handle, trying to get the blade free from the packed-clay floor. I sit up and grab his left wrist. I hit his forearm hard with my own, and I feel the bone snap like cheap fiber board. He shrieks with pain but grimaces to stifle it, refusing to give up. I try to pull myself up, but he leans in and rams me hard with his shoulder, knocking me back down.

  He pulls at the axe with both hands. I draw my sidearm. “Back up!” I shout, “Hands off the weapon!”

  The blade jerks free. Stepping toward me, he heaves it high and swings.

  I fire.

  The crack of the gunshot fills the little room with echoes. The bullet cuts a tiny hole in the front of the man’s neck and a big hole in the back, spackling streams of blood and bits of flesh out onto the dusty wall behind him. I jump up, scrambling to avoid the axe as it tumbles out of the miner’s hands. The old man’s lifeless body tilts forward and collapses face-down on the floor.

  I catch my breath for a second, hoping that the little camera at the end of my gun—the one they put in the barrel of every Collections Agent’s firearm—got a clear image. Either way the paperwork will be hell; there’s always a suspicion of corruption when an Agent offs somebody.

  I take a blanket from one of the empty beds and toss it over the body to cover the ugly, ragged wound gushing blood from the back of the neck. The little girl in the bed stares at me, wide-eyed. She says nothing, but she is shivering and sweating. I put my hand on her, trying to comfort her, and this time she doesn’t thrash at me.

  “It’s okay,” I say. “I’m going to do my best to get you help.”

  “Grandpa . . . ”

  “You saw I didn’t have a choice.”

  She nods, afraid.

  I pick up one of the syringes from the floor and show it to her. “Where did this come from?” I ask, trying to sound calm. I give her a few seconds to respond, but she doesn’t. “You need to tell me, so I can try to help you.”

  Slow breaths issue heavy from her weak lungs. “Doctor.”

  “Doctor?”

  She nods again.

  “These are not government issue. What doctor gave these to you?”

  “My brother . . . ” she says, weak. “My brother was sick. Grandpa took him to a doctor.” Tears well up in the little girl’s eyes. “He didn’t come back.”

  I glance at the body on the floor. A dark red stain is growing on the blanket. “Your brother didn’t come back?” She nods, crying. Trying to put the pieces together in my head, I hold up the syringe again. “Where?” I ask, “Where is this doctor?”

  “More,” she says, “I need more. I need it.”

  “Where can I find him?” Lying to her, I add, “If you help me, maybe we can get you more.”

  “He’s from in the city.”

  “Where?”

  “Next to the spaceport.”

  I attempt a reassuring smile, undoubtedly failing badly. “Hold tight. I need to go, but I’m calling in people who can help you.”

  “Don’t leave me,” she rasps.

  “I have to.”

  I do. I need to act right now, or the suspect and evidence could slip away. I pull the little girl’s blanket up to cover her, then leave the house.

  Out on the exposed, dusty plains again, I turn away from the winds as I dial my phone and put it to my ear.

  Myra answers. “Taryn, you discharge your sidearm? We got a ping.”

  “Yeah. One dead, but clear now.” I hope the wind covers up the waver in my voice. As I walk toward my ride, I add, “I need a medical crew out here. There’s a sick little girl.”

  “She’s not gonna get free calcium, Tar—”

  “Just send a crew. I think there may be something else wrong. She’s been shooting counterfeit currency.”

  There’s a pause on the other end as Myra punches in the order. “Crew’s on the way. You coming in?”

  “Not yet. I’ve got a lead, need to follow up.”

  “You pulled your trigger, Tar. Protocol says you gotta come in for de-briefing.”

  “There’s an exception for risk of loss of evidence or recoverable material. Check it. I’m heading to a doctor’s office near the spaceport. Trace my signal.”

  Before she can argue any further, I hang up, pocket my phone, strap my goggles on, and get on my ride. The engine starts as I grip the handlebars. Turning hard away from the mine, I hit the juice and speed back toward town. The setting sun to my right casts long shadows below the mountains as I race across the desert, back toward the skyline of Oasis City.

  Dusk is washing the last light from the sky when I arrive at the doctor’s office closest to the spaceport. Near the eastern edge of town, this is an industrial and commercial area, well-kept, not poor, but not designed for aesthetics, either. The buildings are blocky and utilitarian, in a presentable but cost-effective state of repair.

  Parking my ride in the otherwise empty lot, I glance at the rocket on the launchpad, which sits across a wide, flat tarmac behind a high wire fence. I’ve got no time for dreams right now, but I let the thought that some day I could be on the other side of that fence motivate me as I walk to the front door of the office. It’s still a few minutes before the close of business hours, and sure enough, the door opens, and I find myself in a little, empty waiting room.

  The receptionist, a reedy man in his twenties, greets me from behind his desk. “Can I help you?”

  “I need to see the doctor.”

  The guy steals a glance at my sidearm in the holster on my hip. “He’s out. Care to schedule an appointment?”

  “I need to look around. Collections business.”

  “I’m sorry, miss, I can’t—”

  I’ve had enough of this. The things I’ve seen today will pile upon my own buried issues and will wreck me emotionally as soon as I stop focusing on my work, and I’m not ready to let that happen, so I try the door next to the reception desk. Locked. On impulse, I pull my sidearm, step back, and shoot the knob. The bullet punches it off clean.

  “Hey! Hey! Are you insane?” the receptionist is yelling at me as I lean into it and kick the door in.

  It leads into a little hallway with an open, empty exam room and a closed metal door. “Doc? You here?”

  No response.

  Panicked and livid, the receptionist approaches in a huff. “What the hell are you doing? This is an illegal search!” he says. “You need a warrant.”

  I actually don’t, not in these circumstances, but I don’t feel like explaining why. “Get out of my way.” I shove him aside and search the exam room, rifling through the drawers and finding only ordinary medical supplies. Nothing incriminating. I come back out into the hallway and try the knob on the other door, the metal one. Locked.

  In the corner of my eye, I see the receptionist lifting something. Instinctively I whirl around, and I find myself facing the nasty end of a rifle.

  Panicked, I shoot from the hip, firing off a few reckless rounds. The rifle blasts off two shots. The flare from the broad muzzle blinds me as the smell of burnt propellant stings my nose. I fall into the wall and duck down in fear, dizzy and expecting the end to come at any second.

  But it doesn’t. The first sight that hits my recovering eyes is the receptionist on the ground, bullet wounds in his b
elly and forehead. Dead. I nailed a lucky shot.

  Still trembling with adrenaline, I stand and approach the body, but a voice behind me says in an even voice, “Stop.”

  I spin around and aim my gun at the newcomer. He wears a white lab coat and holds a pistol in each hand. Late forties, short, balding, and paunchy, pale of skin but otherwise healthy, he stares at me, his beady eyes unblinking through thick glasses. “Stop,” he repeats, his voice calm. “Put your gun down.”

  I keep my sidearm trained on him. My heart pulses quick inside my chest. “You put your guns down,” I order through clenched teeth, with not a drop of irony. “You know you can’t shoot me.”

  “I will if you don’t drop your pistol.”

  “The Agency can trace my gun or my ride parked outside.”

  “I just turned a jammer on. No signal in or out.”

  I can’t help but let out a sigh. He probably thinks the jammer protects him. Even cheap AI can usually blank out any kind of signal—radio, laser, maser, encrypted, you name it. It’s made hundreds of years’ worth of advancement in automation worthless, if someone close enough feels like interfering with it. It’s why drones are unreliable, why starships have actual pilots, and why nearly all vehicles have a manual mode. “I shot somebody half an hour ago,” I tell the doctor. “I called in my status, and Dispatch traced my ride. If I don’t report in, backup will be here in twenty minutes, tops.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “Nope.”

  He glares at me, trying to hide the fact that he’s rattled. “Twenty minutes,” he says, “plenty of time for me to disappear.”

  “And go where?” A long, tense moment goes by as he refuses to flinch. “What’s going on here, Doctor?”

  Left with no way out, he sneers at me. “Fine,” he says. “You win.”

  Before I can stop him, he turns around and steps through the metal door. My only choices are to cover the outside of the building and call in backup or follow him. Hesitantly I choose the latter, ready to fight off some kind of trap as I step through the door, but none comes.

  A thick, warm mist blankets the little room, spouted by a humidifier. The doctor stands at a metal work table on the far wall with a few metal briefcases sitting on it. I step closer. Body bags are stacked like rolled-up carpets in the corner. Four of them, all full. This doc can’t have them here legally, and my cut of a calcium haul that big will be worth around two years’ pay. A little bit of greed cuts against the revulsion and the horror.

  “What the hell is this?”

  The doctor doesn’t answer. He simply places his two pistols on the table, presses his thumb to the fingerprint lock on one of the briefcases, and opens it up, motioning for me to look inside. I keep my gun trained on him as I step close enough to see into the briefcase. It contains neat little racks of syringes, all full, all marked with thin gold stripes.

  “A bribe.”

  “Cal gluc in the front, cackel in the back,” he says referring to calcium gluconate and calcium chloride. “Take your pick of forty in exchange for your silence.”

  I lean closer to read the lettering on the plastic. Fifty percent solution, five milliliters each. A bribe with some bite to it, if the markings are accurate; well more than my take will be from the corpses. I glare at the doctor, who stares back at me with the cold professionalism of someone who has done this before.

  “Ten thousand units,” he says, “What’s that, like a year’s salary for a Collections Agent?”

  I pull the calcium test kit from the pouch in my belt and toss it onto the table. “You know what that is, don’t you?”

  “I’m a doctor.”

  “Use it.”

  “These are each—”

  “I don’t care what they’re worth,” I cut him off. “If you want a deal, use it.”

  He shrugs and reluctantly plucks one of the syringes from the briefcase, snaps the cap off the needle, and squeezes some liquid onto the surface of the table, then opens my testing kit, takes one of the thin, blue strips, and swabs it over the liquid.

  It turns pink.

  So he’s not selling fakes. But I have no intention of taking a bribe from this man, and I’m left with the feeling that something is wrong here. Something more than a doctor buying or selling bodies on the black market.

  “Satisfied?” he asks, anxious.

  It’s legit calcium, so why was that little girl in such terrible shape? What happened to her brother? “Take the rest,” I tell the doctor.

  He blinks. “And do what with it?”

  “Inject it. As one does.”

  He stares at me for a long, silent moment, the dose resting in his pudgy fingers. He finally places it down on the cold metal surface. “No,” he says, staring at me with a cold gaze that cuts through the damp air between us, even as his right hand still hovers over the syringe.

  “Take it. Now.”

  Growing more and more nervous, his eyes dart for a fraction of a second to the twin pistols resting on the table. “I said no.”

  “Why not?”

  “I didn’t say you had to use them,” he pleads, glancing again at his weapons. “They’re marketable. You’ve seen that they’ll test.” He adds, “I’ll up my offer, even. Forty-five doses.”

  “Pick them up,” I whisper, challenging him.

  He stutters. “Ss-sorry?”

  “The guns. I can see you itching to get your hands around the grips. Why not pick ’em up?”

  “I’m trying to negotiate. Trying to be reasonable.”

  “Those stiffs,” I answer, motioning to the four black rubberized bags stacked against the wall, “they all die from whatever’s in these?”

  “Payment. You can understand that.”

  I’m not sure what he means by that, other than the jab at my profession, but at this point I care little. “Pick them up,” I say again, nodding toward his guns, my voice soft and syrupy with false reassurance. “Just put your hand on one of them.”

  His stare stays frozen on me, and for a long, icy moment, only hate and resentment pass in the silence between us. His eyes waver, coming to rest again on the twin pistols on the table, which are begging to be lifted and fired. Slowly, he moves his hands upward. “Easy,” he says. “You win.”

  But then he lunges for the guns.

  In a blur of motion, he grabs them and spins, raising them to shoot. Quick reports clap like thunder as we both fire.

  Thrown by the impact of my bullets, the doctor’s shots are wild, ricocheting off the metal walls. They leave only muffled, tinny echoes behind, dissipating into the mist along with the gun smoke wisping from the end of my sidearm.

  He staggers and falls, landing hard on his side. One of the guns slips from his hand and clatters across the floor, but I keep my aim trained on him, cautious. As blood spreads out in a dark pool on the cement floor underneath him, he rolls onto his back. Arms trembling, he struggles to raise the other weapon to shoot.

  “Nope.”

  That’s the last word he’ll hear. I feel nothing but focus as I sight him down and pull the trigger. My gun flashes and kicks to the crack of the shot. The doctor deflates into a limp sprawl, a neat hole punched in the middle of his forehead above his still-open eyes.

  I hold my aim for a second, still alert, but then the shock and horror of this place and what just happened hit me. As I holster my weapon, I suddenly feel trapped here in this tight, hot, humid chamber. The danger is gone, but now the silence grabs at my lungs, suffocating. I try to calm myself, try to remind myself of the proper procedure for this situation. But my eyes come to rest on the other briefcase. The one the doctor didn’t open. I realize that I should call Dispatch, wait for forensics to get here, play it by the book, but I want to know what’s in there. Son of a bitch, I need to know.

  I step over the pool of blood beneath the doctor, lift the unopened briefcase off the table, and place it beside the body. Gently lifting the slack right hand
of the dead man, I press his thumb to the lock. The mechanism issues a mechanical click, and the case eases open.

  I recoil at the sight of its contents. I can’t be sure what I’m looking at, but the implication of it clutches me somewhere deep inside and twists. Neatly packed in the case, alongside the empty syringes marked with their gold stripes and the clean closed vials of calcium serum, is a bottle of fine, dark powder. A powder I recognize from only one place. A powder that cannot possibly be here.

  Chalk weevil eggs.

  Maybe it’s not. It’s got to be something else. A poison, maybe.

  Standing up and stepping back, I see the stack of body bags in the corner. Again, I know I should exit the room, secure the crime scene, call in backup and forensics and wait like a good little soldier. But my curiosity pulls me toward that stack of bodies like the dark bottom of a well.

  A knot forming in my gut, I pull down the airtight zipper on one of them, just far enough to see inside. Expecting the horror doesn’t prepare me for it. Inside the bag is a decaying corpse, flesh eaten away, down to and through the bone in some spots, the remains being picked over by thousands of tiny black insects.

  I close the zipper quickly before any of them can escape. Backing away, reeling and nauseous, I rush out of the room, into the hallway, then outside into the open air.

  The setting sun streaks the sky overhead with red and orange, striping through air thick with dust wafting in with the plains winds. I sit down on the pavement for a minute and focus on breathing normally, trying to calm myself. Emotions press up in my chest like steam in a boiling kettle, searing and urgent. How can I do what I do? How can I profit from what’s happened here? So many years and nothing has changed, at least not for the better. Never for the better.

  Stop, Taryn. Breathe. You’re a professional. If you let this world and what it’s done to you get a grip on you, it will swallow you whole. You can still get away. You’ve got to work so you can get away.