The Moreau Quartet: Volume One: 1

by S. Andrew Swann

  Nohar’s left arm, the one with restricted mobility, shot out toward Fealress’ gun hand. Nohar grabbed the weapon and turned it toward the ground. There was a snap of bone before the gun blew a hole in the side of the bus. Fearless Leader had some control. No scream.

  Not until Nohar’s right hand, sweeping upward with the claws fully extended, caught Fearless between the legs. Nohar didn’t simply rake his claws across Fearless’ body. His claws came up, point first, and when they bit flesh, jerked up, hooked forward, and partially retracted. Fearless Leader screamed when Nohar lifted him up. Nohar’s claws were hooked into the flesh of his groin.

  Nohar was jacked higher than the rats now. Fearless Leader’s 50 kilos weighed nothing. Fearless slammed into the bus through a broken window. The gun was still in Nohar’s left hand. Fealress’ hand was still holding it, reaching through the bus window. Nohar yanked the gun away. There was another crack.

  Bigboy was now within reach, swinging his knife. Nohar pivoted and the knife missed. Nohar’s cupped right hand aimed for the eyes as Bigboy passed. Bigboy slipped in the rain before the claws hit him. Lucky. The claws sank in behind the ear and tore off a flap of skin down the left side of Bigboy’s face.

  Nohar’s left arm blocked a chain coming at his head. It wrapped around his forearm. He pulled that rat toward him and upward. He sank his teeth into the weapon arm. A toss of Nohar’s head disarmed his attacker and dropped the rat off to his right. Into the same puddle that had saved Bigboy’s eyes.

  Two others. They spooked.

  Leader in bus. Bigboy huddled in doorway to pizzeria, trying to hold half his face on. Chain trying to stop the bleeding, hand limp, muscle severed. Fight over.

  Slowly, Nohar shut the door on The Beast.

  The comedown was hard. He began shaking. The rats didn’t notice. They had their own problems. That fifteen seconds of savagery had jacked him higher and faster than these ratboys had ever thought of going. The crash would’ve killed them.

  Nohar stumbled across the street and to the door of his building.

  When he staggered into his living room, Cat hissed at him. Nohar was covered in rat blood. He wobbled into the kitchen, opened a cabinet, and spilled Cat’s food all over the counter.

  It would have to do, for now.

  Nohar dragged himself into the bathroom and slumped into the shower. He turned on a blast of cold water.

  Dipping into his reserve as a bioengineered weapon had its price.

  • • •

  When Nohar woke up, the shower was still going full blast. Cat was asleep on the lid of the john, and the only remains of the night’s activity was the taste of blood in his mouth. The bandage on his shoulder fell off the moment he moved. It revealed a puckered red wound where they had dug out Young’s bullet. There was a shaved area around it the size of his hand. The flesh was a pale white, contrasting with Nohar’s russet-and-black fur. Nohar quickly looked away from it. The skin made him uncomfortable.

  The support bandage was still there. At least he hadn’t aggravated the injury to his knee. That was good because there was no way he was going to end up in a hospital again.

  He stood up, killed the cold water, and hit the dryer. He barely noticed when Cat spooked. Nohar stood under the dryer and shook. He tried to tell himself it was his unsteady knee, but he was too adept at spotting bullshit. He knew it was a reaction to loosing The Beast.

  All moreys dealt with The Beast in one form or another. Some, like Manny, lived with it without it making so much as a ripple in their psyche, the techs having let a basically human brain mute the instincts they weren’t particularly interested in. Then there were moreys like Nohar, who bore the legacy of techs playing hob with what nature gave them. This was only the second time he had let out The Beast with no restraint. Nohar was grateful nobody had died.

  He had enjoyed it too much.

  He saw in himself the potential for becoming another type of morey. The one who gave himself over to The Beast and reveled in the bloodlust. The one like his father—

  “No,” he said to his reflection as he left the bathroom. To his practiced ears, it sounded like a lie.

  Forget the rats, he told himself. He still had a job to do. Even if it cost him two days, his run-in with Young had given him something besides a gunshot wound and a sprained knee. If Young was not totally out of touch with reality—no mean assumption—Nohar now had some idea of how Daryl Johnson was killed, if not why.

  First things first—he went to the comm and turned it on. “Load program. Label, ‘I lost my damn wallet!’ Run program.”

  “searching . . . found. program uses half processing capacity and all outside lines for approximately fifteen minutes, continue?”

  “Yes.” It was going to take him that long just to run through his messages. While his cards and Ids were being canceled and reordered by the computer, he perused the backlog.

  There were no phone messages on the comm, but a pile of mail was waiting in memory for him.

  It was early in the morning on Sunday the third. Predictably, bills predominated in the mail. He’d have the comm pay them off as soon as it was done with his lost wallet program. There was the usual collection of junk mail. However, for once, there was something more than those two categories in his mail file.

  “John Smith,” his client, had been true to his word to keep in touch. Two days after their meeting, he had left a voice message for Nohar to meet him in Lakeview Cemetery, for noon on Saturday—when Nohar had been zoned in a ward at University Hospitals. About twelve hours after that little bit of mail, Smith apparently found out what had happened. The slimy voice carried little emotion. “Mr. Rajasthan, I regret this incident with Binder’s finance chairman. I am unable to meet with you personally, but I finance your medical expenses when I hear what happens to you—”

  “Pause.” Nohar was having trouble following the frank’s heavy accent. Nohar, living in the middle of Moreytown, had to deal with, and understand, an incredible variety of unusual accents. A Vietnamese dog not only had an Asian accent, but a definite canid pronunciation. The problem with the frank was more subtle. Nohar didn’t think it was a South African accent—even if that was one of the few countries to have defied the long-standing United Nations ban on engineering humans. Nohar promised himself he’d press the frank a little more closely about his origins next time they met.

  “Continue.”

  “—I hope this does not prevent you from the discovery of Daryl Johnson’s murderer. I increase your fee to reflect your current difficulties. I call to set up meeting when you are released from hospital. There you tell me what you discover.”

  It took Nohar a few seconds to figure out exactly what the frank meant.

  The next item in the mail file was from Maria. Nohar was afraid to play it. Then he cursed himself and told the comm to play the damn thing. It was the same husky voice, much calmer this time. Nohar wished he could see her face. “Raj, I thought you deserved a more civilized good-bye. I still can’t meet you face-to-face, and for that I apologize. I just want you to know it isn’t your fault. We’re incompatible. Maybe it would be easier for me to deal with your wholesale contempt for everything if you weren’t such a decent and honorable person.”

  There was a pause as Maria took a long breath. “I am going through with it. You were right about the money—you always are about things like that—but I’m going anyway. California is a lot more tolerant, and the few communities there aren’t just glorified slums the humans abandoned. I know you can’t appreciate this, but God bless you.”

  Nohar sat, her voice still ringing in his ears, remembering. He had the comm store the message and sighed.

  “instructions unclear.”

  He had sighed too loudly. “Store mail. Comm. Off.”

  She had been wrong about one thing. He could appreciate the blessing. Especially after their last
argument, the night before he had stood her up for that fiasco with Nugoya—

  It had started when she suggested they both move to California. Of course, there was no way they could afford it. She brought up God, and Nohar went off. That damned little bit of pink brainwashing infuriated him. Especially when a moreau spouted it. Religion, pink religion, wasn’t just a form of mind control, but the primary justification for people like Joseph Binder to consider moreys worse than garbage. Why should a morey believe in God, when people like Binder said they were abomination in His eyes?

  Maria was a devout Catholic and Nohar had been drunk enough to think he might be able to talk her out of such stupidity. How could she be secure in her belief when she only had a soul by dispensation of some sexagenarian pink in a pointed hat? A decision that had more to do with politics than divine inspiration.

  Why couldn’t he keep his damn mouth shut?

  Worse, all his money problems had evaporated with the ten thousand Smith gave him. Maria’s message had come in yesterday. Knowing her, she had left town by now.

  Chapter 9

  Nohar parked the Jerboa in front of Daryl Johnson’s ranch. He stayed in the car. Shaker Heights still made him paranoid about cops. It was early Sunday morning and he suspected the slow-moving bureaucracy at University Hospital was just now discovering him missing. Shortly afterward, the cops would be notified. Nohar didn’t know exactly what would happen then. He was a witness to Young’s explosion—they should want a statement from him. But Binder was pressuring the cops. Binder probably wouldn’t want any real close investigation of Young’s empty house, or the records Young had destroyed.

  At least Nohar’s investigation, such as it was, was progressing. He had checked the police records again. The air-conditioning had been going full blast when Johnson was blown away.

  Nohar yawned and raked his claws across the upholstery of the passenger seat. He spent a few minutes picking foam rubber as he looked at the sheathing covering the picture window. His watch beeped. It was eight, Manny would be answering his comm.

  Nohar took the voice phone out of the glove compartment and called him.

  “Dr. Gujerat here. Who—” There was a pause as Manny must have read the text on the incoming call. “Nohar? Where in the hell are you? I got to the hospital during nocturnal visiting hours. You were gone—”

  Fine, his disappearance had been discovered that much earlier. “Manny, I’m fine. I need to ask you something—”

  “Like the percentage of untreated bullet wounds that become gangrenous? Damnit, you weren’t in the hospital just to be inconvenienced.”

  Nohar shook his head. At least Manny wasn’t saying, “I told you so.” Even though he’d been right about getting involved with pink business.

  “I needed to feed Cat.”

  “Great, just great. I won’t even tell you how silly that sounds. You couldn’t have gotten me to do that?”

  Nohar thought of the ratboys. “No, I couldn’t.”

  Manny sighed and slowed his chittering voice. “I know how you feel about hospitals, but you can’t avoid them forever. Things have gotten a lot better. They don’t make mistakes like that anymore—” Nohar knew Manny stopped because of the ground he was treading. Thanks for reminding me, Nohar thought. He was about to say it, but, for once, he managed to keep his mouth shut.

  “You better promise to come over and let me look at that wound. There are a lot more appropriate things to die of.”

  “Promise.”

  “I know you didn’t just call to say hi. What do you want?”

  Nohar caught the dig at him. It was unlike Manny. Manny really was worried about him. “Before I ask you, promise me something.”

  “What?”

  “When this is over, we get out together. No business, no corpses.”

  There was a distinct change in the quality of Manny’s voice that made Nohar feel better, “Sure . . .”

  Damn, Manny was almost speechless. “I wanted to ask you about the time of death. How accurate can that be?”

  Manny found his professional voice. “Depends on a lot of things. The older the corpse, the less accurate. Need a good idea of the ambient temperature and the humidity—”

  That’s what Nohar wanted to hear. “What if they were wrong about the temperature? Fifteen degrees too high.”

  “Definitely throw the estimate off.”

  “How much?”

  “Depends on what they thought the temperature was to begin with.”

  “Thirty-two at least.”

  Nohar could hear the whistle of air between Manny’s front teeth. “Nohar, the time of death could be put back by up to a factor of two. If the humidity was off, maybe more.”

  “Thanks, Manny.”

  “You’re welcome, I think.”

  Nohar hung up the phone and looked at the ranch. All the little nagging problems with Johnson’s death— And it was so damn simple.

  Problem—it took much too long for the local population to notice the gaping hole if it had been shot when Johnson was shot. Solution—the window was shot out long after Johnson was dead. Probably during the thunderstorm that Thursday, so few people would have heard the glass—real glass, expensive—exploding and none would recognize its significance.

  It had taken Young to make Nohar think of that. Young said he had seen a morey kill Johnson. “One of you,” he said. The only way Young could have seen the killer shoot Johnson was if he, the killer, and Johnson were all more or less in the same place when Johnson died. If the assassin was in the house, he could have offed Johnson with one shot—no need for a shattering window to draw Johnson’s attention. Johnson could have remained facing the comm, oblivious enough to be shot dead center in the back of the head.

  Because no alarm, no break-in. That meant Johnson let him in.

  With a Levitt Mark II? Not likely.

  Johnson let in someone else—one of them—and that person let in the assassin. Yes, Johnson let in someone. Perhaps to confront the person with whatever he had found in the financial records. Young lived in the ranch with Johnson, but no one was supposed to know that. So Young would be hidden from the guest. Maybe in a darkened bedroom, looking out a crack in the door.

  The guest—maybe one of the franks from MLI—talks to Johnson in the study. The frank leaves the door open, so the assassin can sneak into the living room and set up the Levitt. The door to the study must remain closed except for the last minute, to give the assassin a chance to prepare. Young would only see the gun when the frank opens the study door to give the morey killer a field of fire.

  The one shot gets Derry Johnson in the back of the head. Young is in shock. The frank and the morey clean up a little and leave.

  It must have been Saturday night, after that fundraiser Young and Johnson had departed early. That would explain Johnson’s state, and why no one could finger Johnson’s location during the week. Young wasn’t thinking right. He freaked, packed his stuff, and ran out to his empty house.

  The corpse was left in an air-conditioned, climate-controlled environment, until the morey with the Levitt blew away the picture window on Thursday. The storm ruined the traces of the assassin in the living room. The killing became an anonymous sniping. The time of death shifted to Wednesday and nobody got the chance to plumb the inconsistencies because Binder clamped down immediately.

  Neat.

  But why didn’t Young call the cops?

  Something had freaked Young. If Stephie was right, something beyond Johnson’s death. From the way Young acted, it was something linked to the financial records. Something Johnson saw and Young didn’t.

  Nohar looked back at the broken window. The police ballistics report was based entirely on the assumption that both shots came from the same place. Now the second shot, the one that blew the window out, no longer had to be in line with Johnson’s head. The
field of fire at the picture window was much wider. The sniper no longer had to be crouching in one of the security-conscious driveways across the street.

  Nohar stood up on the passenger seat of the Jerboa and looked for good fire positions. He scanned the horizon—lots of trees. The Levitt needed a clear field of fire; crashing through a tree could set off the charge in the bullet. Nohar kept turning, looking for a high point, above the houses, behind them, without a tree in the way.

  • • •

  Feeling a growing sense of disillusionment, Nohar parked the Jerboa next to the barrier at the end of the street. He had been pounding pavement and checking buildings for most of the day. Evening was approaching and, while he had found a number of buildings both likely and unlikely to hold a sniper, he was little closer to discovering where the sniper had shot from. He was afraid he might actually cross the path of the gunman and not recognize it.

  Fire position number ten was inside Moreytown, which was a plus as far as likelihood was concerned. Nohar figured you could drive a fully loaded surplus tank inside Moreytown and the pink law would give it just a wink and a nod.

  The name of the building was Musician’s Towers. It was a twenty-story, L-shaped building, supposedly abandoned since the riots. Good spot for a sniper. Hundreds of squatters in the place, but there weren’t likely to be any witnesses.

  There had been a halfhearted effort to seal it up. It’d been condemned ever since a fire took out one wing—as well as the synagogue across the street. Most of the plastic covering the doors and windows had been torn off ages ago.

  He slowly approached the doorway, on guard even though it was still daylight. The entrance hall was in the burned-out wing. The hall went through to the other side, looking like someone had fired an artillery round all the way through the base of the building. He had to climb over the pile of crumbled concrete in front of the entrance, debris that came mostly from the facade on the top five floors.

  White sky burned through the empty, black-rimmed windows at the top of the building. That was the place for a sniper.