The cruiser turned from Harrison Street onto Damen and then into the parking lot of the hospital, where it stopped to let off its driver and rolled away into the parking lot. Frank walked through the front entrance and into the elevator, trying to think of a way to present the detail of this case to his mending partner.
To Campanelli’s surprise, Marcus had been allowed to leave the constraints of his anti-bacterial hospital room. Frank found him on the same floor, walking the hallway, escorted by not one, but two young nurses. Neither of them were the nice blonde from the previous visit.
“At ease, Lieutenant,” Frank chided from behind them.
Marcus stopped his shuffling walk as his spine stiffened. Warily, he turned around to see the speaker. “Jesus, Frank,” he exuded and chuckled with relief.
The two nurses smiled, but Campanelli could tell they would rather have been left to their duty. “Good morning, Marcus. Ladies,” he greeted them with a tilt of his hat. He introduced himself and asked them for a moment of the patient’s time. Cheerily, but reluctantly, they granted it and wandered off.
“Gee. Thanks, Frank.” Williams shifted his weight from one leg to the other, holding tightly to his wheeled I.V. tree.
“Sorry to piss all over your road to recuperation, my friend,” Frank said lowly enough not to be overheard. He smiled crookedly. “You are looking surprisingly well. Now I understand why.” He glanced over his shoulder as the nurses disappeared around a corner.
“I’ll catch up to them later,” Marcus dismissed with a wave of his hand. “You scared the crap out of me when you called me ‘lieutenant’. I thought you were from the recruiting office.”
Frank gave a short chuckle. “Where you headed?” He gestured in the direction the big man had been walking.
Williams nodded and resumed his shuffle. He regarded his older, shorter partner with what Campanelli judged to be a tired smile. The two made their way past closed doors of the other hospital rooms until they reached a small sitting room at the end of the hallway. Marcus grunted as he took a seat in a large overstuffed vinyl chair. His left arm was still immobilized in a sling and shoulder rig, making it difficult to lean back and be comfortable.
Frank stared at the diminished skyline of the city to the east. He removed his black fedora and sighed.
“Did they bring you in on that murder from Monday morning?” Williams inquired.
Campanelli knew better than to be surprised at his partner’s intuition. He flashed his crooked smile once again. “Yeah.”
“So…what’s the big deal?”
“You looked up the victim’s name in the CPD computer, right?”
“You know I did.” Williams smiled. “Who brought you in?”
“Kirby McLain.”
“Ah. So, what’s the problem?”
“Rothgery’s DNA modeler is blocked from coming up with an ID.”
“Shit,” Marcus grumbled. “Military man.”
“Yeah.” Frank dropped the old black hat to the couch across from his partner and took a seat next to it. He studied Marcus’s face as he went on. “Werner was cut out of his vehicle and propelled into the air. He landed on his head from such a height that it fractured his skull, broke his shoulder, and a few ribs.”
Marcus cussed in wonder, but did not seem overly surprised. He sat back in the thickly padded chair and ran his left hand over the stubble on his chin as his eyes lost focus.
Frank glanced up the empty hallway before continuing. “He was cut open and his heart and liver were removed and eaten.”
Marcus looked back into Campanelli’s eyes and nodded. “I saw the news that he had been bitten, but nothing about that.”
“The media liaison left that out, thankfully.” Frank leaned forward and lowered his voice to just above a whisper. “Lincoln and his people have noted several indications that the DNA was modified, military-style. But, the best the modeler can do is speculate to a degree. They can tell it’s a male and heavily tinkered with. It gives them a different result every time.”
Williams nodded in understanding and just listened.
“Werner’s car was stolen after the assailant left him dead on the south end of the Ashland Avenue Bridge. It was found at the bottom of a foundation a few miles north.”
“He ditched it?”
“No. It was driven at a high rate of speed when a tire blew. We think it hit the barrier at about eighty or higher and crashed onto the concrete floor, nose-first.”
“And?” Marcus pressed after a moment a silence. Frank had gone quiet as he stared into his partner’s eyes.
“No trace of the driver.”
“No freakin’ way,” Marcus whispered.
“Yeah.”
“Certainly not without being hurt, Frank,” the retired SEAL insisted.
Frank nodded and sat back. “Oh, he was hurt. There was blood in the car. In addition to the victim’s, that is.”
Both policemen were quiet for more than a minute. They looked to each other, to the city beyond the window, and the hazy blue sky beyond that.
“Marcus, I need to know something,” the Captain of Detectives said, and again checked the hallway. “As a former SEAL and an officer, do you have any insight…any clue…as to what this thing is?”
Williams looked back at Frank for several heartbeats. His eyes darted up the vacant corridor, but even then he hesitated. Clearly, he knew something, but for a moment, Campanelli was convinced that his partner would remain silent.
Marcus leaned forward and spoke in a near-whisper. “About four years before we, the SEAL teams, were formally retired, there were rumors that we were going to be replaced with a new kind of unit. It was supposed to be cutting edge in genetic technology.”
“Well? What happened?”
“That’s just it. I thought nothing happened. It was all rumor, Frank. Look, there’s no way the federal government could have afforded any advancements and I doubt if there was anyone still Earthside that could have improved on us.”
“So, you never saw any examples of a…well, person that resulted from this…program or whatever,” Frank surmised.
“No. Never.”
“Damn it.”
“Perhaps there’s other explanations for this crime,” Williams said.
“Like what?” Campanelli wondered.
“I don’t know…how about an ex-soldier traveling with a doppelganger?”
“An automaton with the strength to throw a man up into the air?” Frank scoffed.
“McAllen Industries had that military model…the, ummm…Model Eight,” Marcus recalled with a snap of his fingers.
“What about it?” Frank asked, exasperated. He spread his hands in front of him and looked to his partner and friend with an annoyed expression.
“The Eight had the strength to do heavy lifting. That’s what it was for.”
“I’m aware of that model, Marcus,” Frank added with both hands up. “That unit did not have the agility to do something like this.”
“Are you sure?”
Frank tilted his head to one side and regarded Williams with barely contained anger. “Give me a little break, Marcus. I’ve only been in the detective business for two and a half decades!”
Williams held his right hand up. “All right, all right, Frank. Just let me think.”
Campanelli sank back into the couch and ran his hand over his flushed face. The two went silent for a few moments while each considered the other’s words. Frank stood from the couch and gazed at his city to the east.
“Kirby hopes that…whatever this creature or person is, that he’s moved on,” Campanelli spoke onto the glass, fogging it faintly.
“What do you think?”
“I don’t think anything’s that easy. I think that thing’s still out there,” Frank went on as he turned from the window. “I don’t know. In any case, all we can do is wait. McLain’s alerted units to its presence, but without a physical description…” He trailed off, shaking his head.
<
br /> At that moment, one of the nurses entered and informed Marcus that his lunch was waiting in his room. As the three of them headed there, Frank and Marcus linked implants.
“You should contact the FBI on this one, Frank,” Williams transmitted in an audible message.
“It may be a bit early for that,” Campanelli replied in like fashion.
“Perhaps, but if this is one of those super-soldiers, you could get someone on the Federal level a heads-up.” Williams slowed his pace and studied Frank’s face. His eyebrows were slightly raised as he locked eyes with his senior partner.
The nurse was a teenager, born too late to enjoy the benefits of bio-electronic implants, but she recognized the body language of the two older men and understood that they were conversing. She walked closely on Williams’s right and helped him watch his step. To Frank, she looked like a large child’s doll on a date with Frankenstein’s monster. The disparity in height was almost humorous.
“You may be right,” Frank sent, then added vocally, “I’ll see what I can find out about that. Have a good lunch.”
“Thanks, Frank,” Williams replied as he stepped inside his room. “Talk soon.”
The man was recovering quickly, there was no doubt. The nurse escorted him inside without donning the anti-bacterial suit. Frank smiled as he walked away, happy to see his partner on the mend.
He placed his fedora on his head as he entered the elevator. He rode down to the lobby, thinking of his partner’s fast healing. He knew that genetic alterations made that possible, and considered the fact that such things were old hat. Marcus’s words rattled around in Frank’s mind as he walked back to his cruiser. “Rumors”, the man had called them.
Campanelli sat in his car, thinking for several minutes before leaving the facility. He imagined the genetic capabilities of healing had advanced since Marcus’s time. The Captain of Detectives wondered what other advancements had been made and shuddered when he thought of the destroyed sedan. Marcus had used the term, “super-soldier”, which sounded like something right out of a twentieth-century B movie.
Frank grunted in thought and ordered his cruiser to drive. Out of habit, he set the destination as a favorite Chinese restaurant not far from home. The car pulled out onto the street casually, leaving its driver to contemplate.
He wondered if the ex-SEAL was holding something back in the name of national security or some other outdated reasoning. Frustrated, he roughly tossed his hat to the passenger seat and shook his head. Frank Campanelli knew that it would be a restless night ahead.
***
As night fell, the hungry predator stepped from the empty office building in which he had slept for most of the day and stood for a long moment, watching, feeling and listening for indications of life. He inhaled the cool air through his widening nostrils deeply and soundlessly. The first thing he could discern from the intake was the aroma of cooking meat. Beef, if he was not fooled by seasoning. His eyes danced upon the apartment building directly across from him and, like most structures of Chicago, it was sparsely lit. The soft glowing electric light gave his prey’s presence away, more effectively than a campfire in the wilderness.
He glanced in either direction and, noting the absence of vehicles, the naked male sprinted to the other side of the street. As most of the street lights did not function, his pale skin was adequate to do so with a low possibility of being spotted. After all the energy his body had spent in the healing process, he needed to be conservative. Changing pigment took calories and resting for a day could only do so much.
The mishap with the old and worn out vehicle had left him with a grocery list of injuries, most of which had been greatly improved upon since then. The broken nose had been set and was healing well. The hairline fractures in his ribs had mostly healed, though the yellow and purple contusions from his subcutaneous tissue on his face and chest would take a few more days. His headache from the concussion had faded that morning, though the skull fracture would take days to repair as would the broken fingers. All of this healing sapped much of his energy, and it would progress agonizingly slowly if he did not feed.
He had expected to be pursued further by the city’s police force, but surprisingly, it had seemingly ended after he left the stolen vehicle behind. He had perused the old building only briefly before settling down to sleep behind a citadel of unused and dusty office furniture. The incessant hunger he felt had kept him from sleeping further. The rest of daylight had been spent meditating and being aware of the area around him.
Seeing no one to challenge him, he scratched his fortified claws into the small glass window of the apartment building. As his wrist twisted one way then the other, the grating, screeching sound echoed down the silent street. Quite soon, the outer layer of glass was ground away, ceasing the intermittent squealing. In just over a minute, the outer pane was cut free.
His pale yellow eyes searched frantically for signs of discovery, but there was none. He pulled the roughly shaped circle of glass from its place and silently set it upon the concrete slab by his feet. His claws worked on the next layer immediately, carving out another, similar circle. The task was delicate, making his limbs stiff with the effort of remaining as quiet as possible. With the inner layer cut free, he pushed it through. The glass struck the carpeted floor with a muted thump.
Reaching his arm inside to the elbow, he felt for the locks and undid them. He turned the knob and swung the door out of his way. Once inside, the aroma of cooking meat was maddening. The humanoid spat his excess saliva onto the rug and closed the door silently. Following the scent of food, he quickly deduced that it was coming from the apartment on the second floor. The other seven inhabited dwellings, if the telltale lights were any indicators, were on the third and fourth floors.
The foyer and stairway were unlit. Adjusting his vision, the hunter scaled the steps casually, though stealthily. The hall was equally dark, but a beam of light scattered against the carpeted floor marked his target. Adjusting further, he studied the light coming from under the apartment’s front door. Though his augmented hearing picked up sounds of movement and an electronically generated voice, there was no shadow cast to disrupt the light. Taking a moment to listen through the wood, the predator quickly determined there was a great possibility that his victim was not within visual range of the door.
He flicked his long, black strands of hair from his eyes and gave the knob a turn. It was locked. Though he was ravenous with hunger, he called upon his calm to fortify him in his moment of need. He took a deep breath as he felt through one of his belt’s pouches for his lock pick, a tool he had made himself out of a strip of an automobile’s decorative trim, the design for which had been supplied in his implant’s survival manual.
In the blink of an eye, the lock was disabled. He opened the door and gave it a nudge. It stopped after traveling only a few centimeters. He listened for signs of discovery, but there was none. Peering through the gap between the door and the frame, he found the problem and smiled.
It was only a brass chain. The predator pressed his weight against the door at intervals. The framework popped and gave a crack. He halted and listened again. There was nothing but the sound of a holovision program. More applied pressure stretched the mount from the doorjamb. Once he reached inside and pressed upon it with the heel of his hand, it came free.
He smiled over his exhilaration. The hunter loved this part of the game. He thought to spend a little energy to turn himself charcoal black as he scanned the living space. The majority of the light came from the living room’s lamp, directly across from the door he had just breeched. The sounds of the occupant, the cooking meat, and the holovision emanated from the kitchen area some three meters in and to the left. A darkened hallway lay to his right, leading to the rest of the rooms.
His footfalls along the carpeted floor resulted in no sound, no vibrations, and very little disruption of the air. The victim was an old man of medium build and height, standing in front of his stove while
he dutifully watched his miniaturized holovision set mounted on the east wall.
The predator lightened his color just a few degrees, for something as dark as night can be easily spotted in the light. Soundlessly, the bayonet slid from the hunter’s belt.
Now, the fun begins.
“Hoo-aack!” the victim exclaimed and went rigid with surprise and pain. The sound was short, but sharp, louder than the predator had planned on when he decided to thrust the blade into his target’s back. Being so far from another human’s ears, however, the killer had decided there was room for such an error.
Blood pooled at the dying victim’s spine and covered the murderer’s right hand. More blood erupted from the triangular carbon fiber blade’s exit at the front of the old man’s chest. A metal spatula struck and rang crisply against the marble tile as the body went limp around the bayonet like a shrimp on a skewer.
The killer used his wounded left hand to keep the body upright, holding the dead man up by the collar of his shirt. He did not wish to get human blood on the cooking bovine meat. It would change the taste.
Tilting the tip of the bayonet, the dead man slid from it and dropped heavily onto the kitchen tiles with a splattering thud that shook the floor and the utensils on his table.
The hunter dropped his blade to the kitchen counter and grabbed up the filet mignon from the broiling pan with no regard for the sizzling heat. Madly, he chewed and savored the nearly forgotten flavor. Steam left his mouth as he chewed frantically. It was a fatty cut of the delicacy, but it went down ever so smoothly. Hunger persisted.
After moments of crude and frantic clawing and cutting, the heart and liver of the predator’s victim lay on the broiler. He took a seat at the kitchen table, downed a glass of water, and casually watched holovision while he waited for the rest of his meal to cook.
He rose to give the sizzling heart a turn and as he did, the news show flashed pictures of the crime scene at the Ashland Avenue Bridge. The killer dropped the heart from the metal tongs and stepped back to take in the view of the holovision. His mouth dropped open in surprise, for he had not realized that such a small act would gather such media attention.
Campanelli: Siege of the Nighthunter Page 5