The Dark Master of Dogs

by Chris Ward

  Urla rolled her eyes and shook her head. ‘These people never learn. 14.2 should have taught them something but they continue to cause upheaval. The time is coming when they may find themselves savaged by a most brutal crackdown. However, I prefer to warn them first. I have a task for you.’

  ‘Of course, Ms. Wynne. Anything.’

  Urla smiled. ‘Check the prisons. Select me a handful of bright young things, those most likely to be missed. I will have them publically executed. It is time that a standard is set.’

  ‘Ms. Wynne … is that ethical?’

  Urla smiled. Dear Justin, so hopeful that things might improve. His innocence was just one part of him she found delightful, particularly the way his morals were shed like a snake’s skin when she pulled him down on top of her.

  ‘I’m afraid that sometimes one has to be tough in order to protect the greater good. The people don’t seem to understand that we’re only trying to protect them. They should be shouting their thanks, but instead all we get is protests and terrorist violence. It’s time to stamp it out once and for all.’

  Justin nodded. ‘As you wish, Ms. Wynne.’

  Urla smiled. ‘And when you are done, please return. We will … talk on this further.’

  Justin was clever to allow just a hint of a smile. Urla felt a warm glow spreading out from below her lower waist.

  ‘As you wish, Ms. Wynne.’

  The feeling regrettably died as he went out. Urla walked to the window and peered out on to the street four floors below. It looked like a normal, peaceful town. Perhaps the absence of vehicles beyond public transport, a couple of parked DCA vehicles, and a few more with special permit stickers her keen eyes could spot from here, but what did it matter? The air was so much cleaner since the reduction of private ownership regulations came in. People were healthier being required to work. The insane number of stumbling lard buckets which had plagued the country had clearly decreased. Smoking was almost unheard of, drinking was down. Illegal drugs were a treat enjoyed by those with money who could find them on a black market her DCA agents were slowly squeezing out of existence.

  It was the dawn of a new golden age, and when this year’s elections finally ousted those remaining of the old government, things would get even better.

  She glanced down at a promotional poster on her desk. It simply said “Vote Maxim Cale: For a New Beginning”.

  A light tap came on the door. Justin opened it without waiting to be asked, his face beaming.

  ‘I found some,’ he said. ‘A young couple who appear to know each other, held for disorder.’

  ‘Disorder?’ Urla frowned. ‘We need something stronger than that or we’ll start another riot.’

  Justin shook his head. ‘That’s just what they were arrested for. The girl is also the daughter of the disappeared robotics magnate Stanley Carmichael-Jones. At the moment, all evidence suggests that he’s left the country. With a little embellishment, she could be charged with conspiracy to escape, which itself carries a charge of treason, and her friend could be charged as an accessory.’

  ‘And treason already holds a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.’

  Justin nodded. ‘Which, as I’m certain you know, could soon be obsolete when the government’s restoration of the death penalty motion is passed in the next couple of weeks. We’d only be pre-dating it by a short time, and with news moving so slowly these days….’

  Urla smiled. Justin was right. As much as a decade ago, those in power had realised what a terrible waste of finances it was to keep prisoners who would never be released in already-crowded prisons. It was counterproductive situation that finally, with the gradual fall of the old government and its outdated, steadfast rules, was becoming unstuck. Within a year the prisons could be cleared out, the new space used for harsher punishments on petty criminals, and the saved costs spent on better policing.

  ‘You’ve done well.’ Urla smiled as she went to the windows and pulled the curtains closed. ‘I think you deserve a little bonus. Lock the door.’

  Justin smiled as he turned, flicking the internal door lock with one hand, and then advanced toward her. Something about the way he moved, like a predator on the hunt, drove her to near madness.

  She was breathing hard even as he got his hands on her, and by the time he shoved her back against her desk, his body like a rising wave, she was ready to give herself over in total submission.

  8

  Tommy

  With each new change in the law, a fresh round of claims, questions, and requests would inundate Tommy’s office as the downtrodden and the needy sought out the help of Somerset’s best known civil lawyer. And with the change in the Freedom of Speech Act last year, Manda had struggled to find time to make tea or polish his boots.

  It was a grave situation indeed.

  As she stood in the doorway, the phone held to her chest as she mouthed something about a civil claim on a forced redundancy, Tommy shook his head and drew a hand across his neck.

  There was no point. They would all fail. The cards were stacked, the deck loaded. Twenty years of bad decisions and now the government was closing in like a pack of hounds. He had seen it coming, but few others had. Now it was too late. All that was left to do was prepare for the descent into the underworld when the time came.

  Tommy’s list of underground contacts was now longer than his office one. All that was left to do was play the game a while longer then bail at the right time, before the DCA came knocking at the door for all the wrong reasons.

  His secretary was back at the door, holding up a sheet of paper. ‘This could be big,’ she said. ‘It appears Carmichael Industries has changed hands.’

  ‘So that bastard did jump the country after all,’ Tommy said. He remembered what Patrick had said about his girlfriend. Stuck in the DCA lockup, accused of conspiring to leave the country illegally along with her father, who was apparently already gone.

  ‘And the new owner has laid off eighty percent of the workforce. They’re requesting a joint claim for damages.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Sixty-four people. Including every member of floor or control management. He’s kept on a handful of the lowest level workers as though he needed people to sweep the floors, but everyone else has gone. Fired with immediate effect. They were given half an hour to collect their things and get off the premises.’

  ‘Strange. This could be worth pursuing. Do you have the name for the new owner?’

  ‘The deal has been registered with the local authorities under the name of Mr. Crow.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  His secretary nodded. ‘“Mr.” was given as a first name.’

  Tommy reached for his jacket. ‘I’d like to meet this person for myself.’

  He was one of the last people on his street to own a car. It was electric, getting around the current ban on combustion engine vehicles for private use, but he had still needed a special permit. That it was in good condition was another bonus, but that the recharging stations were slowly being pulled down was not. He had a year at best before he would be walking everywhere along with the rest of the masses.

  The law was supposed to be restricted to urban areas, with a promised mass increase of public transport as the result. That, however, had so far failed to materialise, leaving the majority of workers with long walks to work. Even bicycles were of little use, because most of the roads outside the main centre had been pulled up, the asphalt hauled off somewhere, and gravel left in its place. Of course, there had been protests and riots at the outset, but like everything, after a few months of resisting change, the people had settled down and the government had carried on.

  The road bumped beneath him as the car left the last section of asphalt. He dropped his speed, following the wheel ruts that had already developed, heading out to the industrial estate beyond the town populated by a couple of dozen blocky warehouses, more than half of which were now abandoned and empty.

  Carmichael Industries sto
od in the back corner, set against the encroaching woodland. Tommy pulled up in a space outside, his car one of just three in the wide car park. The tyres were flat on the other two, and most likely they had been there some time, perhaps only noticed now that the rest of the workforce had gone.

  Tommy climbed out and shut the car door. He picked a piece of lint off his suit and gave the bulge under his arm a quick pat. He was packing lead—a revolver he had bought on the black market years ago. It was an offence that would get him twenty years, but as a lawyer he could usually brush off any DCA searches with a few lines of legal spiel, and when he was out of lawyer mode they would never get near him. Even so, he rarely carried the gun anymore. Today, however, he had felt a prickle of nerves he hadn’t felt in a long time.

  The factory stood silent. He walked to the main entrance, noticing how the security cameras no longer followed him. For all the world the factory looked abandoned, but as he reached the doors they slid open on sensing him and lights came on in the small customer lobby.

  Everything looked as he remembered the last time he’d had cause to come in through the front door. Framed prints of random faraway cities on the walls, a cheese plant in a pot next to a desk calendar showing pictures of old motorcycles. The only sign of a new owner was a little solar-powered nodding crow toy. It bobbed its head at him, grinning inanely as he went to the reception desk and pressed a buzzer.

  On the occasions he had visited previously, the factory had always been filled with the sounds of industry: the hum of machinery, the thud and clunk and press of systems operating in the vast warehouse space beyond the front lobby. Only last year, Carmichael-Jones had signed a government contract to begin the building of prototype defense robots: Tommy himself had overseen the deal in a legal capacity. It wasn’t a negotiation but a requirement; Carmichael-Jones had faced closure without it. What it had achieved, though, was to preserve his company a little while longer, and with it the safety of his family.

  For him to disappear, selling the company off to a stranger, made no sense.

  And even if it had, he would surely have told Tommy.

  His own contacts across the channel were starting to panic about their delayed robotics shipments.

  ‘Damn you, Carmichael, you jelly-bellied fuckwit,’ Tommy muttered under his breath. ‘We had it going good until you went tits up.’

  As if on cue, a door opened at the back of the reception desk and a short figure shuffled through, barely five feet off the ground, its face entirely covered by the hood of a cloak. Tommy lifted an eyebrow in surprise. Quite the change. Carmichael-Jones had always employed decent local pussy for his front desk, women who’d been prepared to do what it took to keep even the lowliest of jobs. The times really had changed.

  ‘Yes?’ the figure said—no, hissed—not looking up. ‘How can I be of assistance?’

  ‘My name is Thomas Crown,’ Tommy said. ‘I was the legal counsel for Stanley Carmichael-Jones. I’d like to speak to your boss, if I may.’

  An unusual sound came from beneath the hood. At first Tommy thought it was laughter, but it sounded more like sobbing. With a sudden jerk, the figure’s hands appeared, gripping the edge of the reception desk. Tommy flinched at the sight of overlong fingernails at the end of digits that were more claws than fingers. The tips dug into a surface made of plastic and left score marks as the figure dragged them away.

  ‘I’ll go to see if he’s free,’ came that same hiss again. ‘Wait.’

  The figure retreated out through the door. Tommy had an urge to run, but he resisted, instead taking a couple of steps closer to the door in case it became necessary to make a hasty exit.

  The strange figure was gone a few minutes before abruptly appearing again, seemingly stooped even lower than before. ‘The master will see you,’ he said, in a way that might have been comical were it not so sinister. Tommy hesitated a moment before nodding, allowing the creature to lead him through a side door into the warehouse space.

  Where once there had been production lines filled with hissing, shunting machinery, now there was nothing but silent lines of machines slowly collecting dust. Tommy looked around, peering down a gloomy side aisle toward where Carmichael-Jones had kept his research laboratories. While much of the factory floor had been automated, there had always been lab coat-clad scientists wandering about, hugging clipboards, tapping on handheld computers.

  Now … nothing.

  ‘My apologies if the lack of light hurts your eyes, sire, but I’m afraid the opposite is true of mine. And mine being singular, it works best not to question it. Is it not true that with all of science’s advances, we are yet to create from scratch a working human eye?’

  Tommy made a couple of turns before ascertaining from where the voice came. At last he realised the man stood above him, not on a walkway, but in a metal brace hung from the ceiling by wires. Against the gloom of the factory’s tall roof it was hard to make out any features of the man’s face, but he wore a top hat and a dinner suit with pleated lapels. Something gleamed on his face, attached to a length of string fixed to his belt: a monocle.

  ‘I wanted to stop by to see what was going on,’ Tommy said, struggling to contain a growing unease. ‘I used to work closely with Mr. Carmichael-Jones. In many respects we were … partners.’

  ‘Ah, yes, you would be the infamous Tommy “the Chisel” Crown, wouldn’t you, sire? Something of a local legend or a local thug, depending on who you ask. And I, for what it’s worth, keep my keen ears to the ground. They haven’t yet betrayed me the way my eyes have. Or should I say … eye?’

  The man—if that was what he was; Tommy wasn’t sure—began to laugh. In other circumstances Tommy would already be thinking about whether to break this person’s arms or his legs, but all he wanted to get was get back outside.

  ‘It appears you have changed the course of Mr. Carmichael-Jones’s business model since your acquisition.’

  ‘Out with the old, in with the new, isn’t that what they say?’

  ‘I’m not—’

  ‘I’m just a traveling man, sire. Passing through. This little abode will serve me for now, but who knows which way tomorrow’s winds may blow? I may be gone by the spring, or I might one day be sitting on your grave, depending on how long we have to wait. I’d suggest, based on your country’s recent decisions, that it may not be so long, but that could be true of any of us, could it not?’

  ‘Sir, uh, Mr., ah, Crow?’

  ‘Kurou,’ the man said. ‘A slight lengthening of the first syllable, although I’ll forgive you for your assumption. I’m afraid these days I keep things simpler on the surface than I might once have done.’

  Tommy was tiring of the man’s rambling. ‘I thought we might have a proper discussion as to how we can help each other,’ he said. ‘But if not, I have work to do.’

  He turned toward the door, but the little robed figure stepped in his way. One clawed hand snaked out and turned a key in the lock. Tommy reached for his jacket, but a shriek from overhead made him pause. He looked up to see Kurou gliding toward him, the wires contracting and expanding on remote-operated pulleys set back into the factory walls.

  ‘I’m afraid our discussion is just beginning,’ Kurou said. ‘I think you asked what I was doing here?’ He began to laugh again, then spread his hands. ‘I believe Carmichael-Jones had a contract with the government to create machines for defense, is that not correct?’

  ‘So I believe,’ Tommy said.

  ‘Well, I intend to honour that contract,’ Kurou said. ‘I’m something of an inventor, don’t you know?’

  His harness system whizzed, turning him around. He faced back up the long aisle, put a finger into his mouth, and whistled. A door opened and something stepped out, a tall figure, much taller than a man, but wearing a brown monk’s habit and hood. It walked into the aisle’s centre then stopped. In one slow movement it made a ninety-degree turn to face up the aisle toward where Tommy stood.

  ‘I have been creating works
of breathtaking beauty since before you were born,’ Kurou said from overhead. ‘Yet this, this masterpiece, is perhaps my greatest achievement. Divan, show yourself.’

  The figure’s hands lifted to pull back its hood. Tommy gasped as the snout of a dog appeared, then the eyes of a man. Glittering wires, electrodes, and flicking LED lights gleaned from the crown of its head.

  ‘I call it a Huntsman,’ Kurou said, his voice soaked with pride. ‘And I think it might be time for a test run. Laurette, enter your harness, please. It’s best to be on the safe side, isn’t it?’

  Tommy glanced back. The figure called Laurette had climbed into a brace hanging in the dark by the door and with a whirr of machinery it lifted him up above Tommy’s head. Panic rising in his throat, Tommy looked back at the creature facing him.

  Its lips drew back in a snarl.

  ‘I’d get moving,’ Kurou said. ‘I keep him just the wrong side of hungry. If you can keep away from him for an hour, we can do business. If not … well, at least someone will eat well tonight.’

  With a growl the creature lurched into a run, its arms held rigid at its sides like some kind of mannequin. Tommy stood rooted by terror for long, wasted moments, before some internal mechanism of survival cajoled him to turn and break for the nearest production lines, running for his life while a laughing maniac swooped and spun through the air overhead.

  9

  Suzanne

  Suzanne was sure the guards had only put them together to repeatedly break them apart. Three days in a row she had been dragged out of Patrick’s arms and taken down to an interview room. She had watched a wall camera be covered with a black cloth then was raped by two DCA men.

  The first time, aware of what was about to happen, she had smiled sweetly and offered complete compliance. The idiots had believed her, and the first man had lost his two front teeth to her heel as a result. After they had added a few fresh bruises to her face, they had then tied her down. The first man had repeated, ‘This is for Seth,’ over and other as he fucked her, as though thinking about his colleague instead of the girl beneath him. At least the other, drooling and grinning like a happy dog, had seemed to enjoy himself. Suzanne had studied his face as he grunted and groaned, memorising every detail for when she could find him again and cut out his eyes.