by Unknown
“Thank you,” he said, waving a hand at the viewscreen. The sunny vista disappeared, replaced with a menu listing all the evidence of the case. “I just want to make sure nothing was overlooked. This doesn’t have to take long. I know some of you have things to do.”
Mr. Angry rose from his seat. “I can’t believe two of you fell for this garbage! We could have been out of here by now. These are good kids, they thought she was a vampire, and it turns out she was!”
“They were dead quiet when they were first interrogated,” said Connor. “Check the timeline of the evidence. They only said they thought she was a vampire after they heard from their lawyer, and that was after he had seen the coroner’s report.”
“That doesn’t mean they didn’t know it beforehand.”
“No, but it means that they might only have gotten the idea from their lawyer.”
“You’re full of shit. These are good kids who’ve never been in any trouble. Their moms were sobbing on the stand when they were testifying.”
“And right beside them were the sobbing parents of the victim, so what does that prove?”
“That girl deserved what she got,” said Mr. Angry. “What was she doing in a dump neighborhood like that if not looking for trouble? She was six levels underground, only the worst of the worst spend any time down there.”
Connor brought up a still image of the location where the attack had happened. The courthouse’s level was a kilometer underground, with so many twists, turns, and elevators between it and the surface that it would take almost a full day to navigate to ground. A billion people lived this way; many of them were born and died without ever seeing sunlight. Lack of sun was why there were so many vampires underground, where the government had all but declared open season on them.
“Six-Underground is only one level down from this courthouse. And she ran into your good kids in that neighborhood, didn’t she? If it was such a trouble spot, what were they doing there?”
Mr. Angry didn’t respond.
There was silence around the room as Connor took his seat, shaking his head with disgust. “Nobody deserves what this girl got.”
“Okay,” said the foreman, “so maybe their lawyer told them to say that they thought she was a vampire. It doesn’t change the fact that she was a vampire.”
“She was a vampire when the coroner got to her, that doesn’t mean she was a vampire when the boys got to her.” Connor gestured at the listed evidence. “Look, here’s the blood test we saw in court, the one from the morning before the attack, taken when she applied for a job. That test was negative for vampirism.”
“So you think a vampire saw what happened to this girl and turned her afterwards? What for?”
“To stop her from dying, I guess. To save her life.”
There was a laugh around the table.
“Great,” said Mr. Angry. “Now we have compassionate vampires, biting people in the neck so they won’t die. You know what he could have done to keep her alive? Call a fucking ambulance!”
More general laughter, of approval.
Connor stared at the man until the laughter died down. He stared until the silence grew uncomfortable. He had no problems making Mr. Angry squirm. He knew that he could convince some of the other jurors through logic, some through charm, and some would follow like sheep. He knew that some would need to be humiliated or berated. What Mr. Angry needed was to be afraid, to understand that there was one in this room who was bigger and fiercer. Connor waited until the man swallowed and looked away. “Do you know so much about vampires?” he asked. “Do you know that one of them wouldn’t have behaved that way?”
“They’re monsters,” replied the man. “I’ve seen it firsthand. They don’t feel anything. They’re not human anymore, that’s why they don’t have rights.”
“Then maybe this vampire smelled blood and got hungry, I don’t know, but I bet that they feel more than you think,” said Connor. “And the expert who testified agrees with me. Nobody knows exactly how vampirism does what it does, but victims respond normally to most lines of questioning even if they’re clinically dead.”
“And then they grow ridiculously violent and the cops have no choice but to put them down for good. They can’t even be sedated.”
“That’s right,” said Connor. “Sedatives don’t work and neither do stimulants, but this girl had drugs in her system. If she was a vampire, what would be the point? As for the violence, how would you react if they locked you in a cage without food but you could never die of starvation? What would you do if they left you there for days or weeks until the hunger was the only thing you could think about, until it had torn you inside out, and then they had you interrogated by a giant hamburger, or whatever your favorite food is? You’d lose it, too.”
Mr. Angry had started to sweat, and he loosened his shirt collar with a finger. “We can’t prove whether she was a vampire when they got to her. Nobody can. But we know that when her body was found that she was a vampire. That’s enough doubt for me to say that maybe the boys aren’t guilty.”
If Mr. Angry was starting to argue using logic, then Connor was winning. He turned to the foreman. “Can we do a quick vote? I think I’ve put a small hole in the ‘good kids’ argument, and I’ve given a couple of explanations besides the one where this girl was a vampire before the beating. I’d like to know if we’re going to keep going through the evidence or if nobody agrees with me.”
There were four votes out of eleven to continue re-evaluating the evidence.
“Maybe we should order some food?” The foreman leaned back in his chair, patting his stomach. “It looks like we’re going to be here for a while.”
Connor startled at the mention of food. He hadn’t eaten since the previous day and the hunger was becoming hard to push aside. It was easier to keep at bay when nobody spoke about food. “I’ll pass,” he said. “I had a huge breakfast, and I doubt they have anything here that I’d find particularly appealing.” He waited until all the others had indicated their preference for food and the foreman had given the list to a guard outside the door.
“Okay,” said Connor. “Let’s forget who was good and who wasn’t. Aside from the coroner’s report, what evidence do we have that the girl was a vampire before she was attacked?”
Mrs. Rational chewed her lip, staring at the viewscreen. “The girl finally stopped fighting back when the boys stabbed a piece of wood through her heart. That’s a vampire thing, right? The expert witness talked about that.”
Connor stared at her for a moment, and then leaned over to pick up a pair of pencils from the table, placing them end to end in his palm and closing his hand so that two inches of wood protruded from the top and bottom of his fist. He looked at the woman’s eyes, then to the center of her chest, then back to her eyes. “It’s not exactly ‘a vampire thing’.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I see your point.”
The juror to Mrs. Rational’s right looked thoughtful. “We really only have the testimony of the boys, I guess.”
Connor nodded. “They said she attacked them, but video evidence only shows her standing on the corner while the boys approached. She certainly didn’t back down from them, but she didn’t make the first move.”
“The boys said that she threatened them, and fought like a demon, strong and fast.”
“Strong and fast compared to what?” asked Connor. “People have been engineering their kids’ genes for almost fifty years. Everybody’s strong and fast — bones like titanium, muscles like Atlas. People are living so long that we don’t even know what the life expectancy of a human is anymore! What do vampires have that humans don’t?”
The foreman raised a hand. “Are we sure she was engineered? I don’t remember hearing about it at the trial.”
Connor menued through the options on the viewscreen, stopping at the victim’s basic information. After her name was the indicator M01FF. The last two letters meant that she had been born female and was still female. The e
m meant that she was modded — genetically modified. The numbers indicated that she was first generation modded — that her parents had not been engineered.
The foreman nodded. “They said she was stronger and faster than ‘normal’, that they hit her as hard as they could and she wasn’t going down, not until after a long time.”
“The video shows that,” agreed Connor, “but if she was still a human, that could have been the drugs. The footage shows the boys dragging her body into the alley just before they left. The coroner’s report says that the girl’s death was caused by massive loss of blood. ‘Near-complete loss of blood’ was what he said. And yet the police didn’t find all that much blood at the scene. That’s another argument for her being attacked by a vampire after she was attacked by the boys. A vampire might have tried to drink what was left inside her.”
“The shopkeeper whose sidewalk it happened on hosed a lot of blood away before the cops showed up because he didn’t see a body anywhere,” said Mrs. Rational. “The police had no way to measure how much blood was inside or outside her body when the boys left.”
“I know that,” said Connor. “But bodies don’t bleed out all the blood inside them, no matter how badly you cut them. You’d have to run them through a blender. There must have been some blood left when she was dragged into the alley.”
“So you think a vampire got to her in that alley, sometime between the point at which she was beaten to death and the time the police arrived?”
“That’s what I think could have happened, yes.”
Connor noted six heads nodding at his assessment. With any luck, he now had a majority. Having numbers on his side might even swing some additional votes his way, especially if some were more interested in leaving early than in seeing justice done.
“But you’re not sure?” asked Mrs. Rational.
“How can anybody be sure?” asked Connor. “But the prosecutor-bot sure didn’t bring it up, and it should have.”
“So let’s say,” said the woman, “for the sake of argument, that she wasn’t a vampire when these six guys beat the tar out of her.”
Connor nodded.
“And let’s say, for the sake of argument, that a vampire got to her in the alley after she was dumped there, and it drained all her blood, which turned her into a vampire, but then she was too weakened so it didn’t stick and then she died…”
Connor nodded again.
“If that’s the case, then these kids are still not guilty of murder. Some vampire killed her.” She leaned back in her chair, waiting for Connor to come up with a valid reply. There were murmurings from almost every other seat.
“We don’t have to find them guilty of murder,” said Connor. “At that point we could return a guilty verdict for a lesser charge like attempted murder.”
“But that’s a lot of theory,” said Mr. Angry. “There’s still reasonable doubt that the girl was already dead before they got to her. We have to find them not guilty.”
Mrs. Rational nodded. “It’s not that I disagree with you about vampires; I think we as a society could, and should, find a way to integrate them, but that’s not our job here.”
Connor stared back at her. If he lost her support, then there was no hope for a guilty verdict. Was it enough that he had convinced one person that vampires deserved equal treatment? He had come to see justice done for a girl whose only crime was to have been bitten in the neck, could he live with having altered one person’s perception towards the undead?
No.
“God damn it!” Connor stood up so quickly that he strained the bolts which held his chair to the floor. “Don’t you even care about doing what’s right? Doesn’t it matter to you that these kids beat a girl for no good reason, maybe beat her to death? They punched her, they kicked her, they threw her down, and they beat her with a piece of wood they’d been carrying around since they found it at a construction site. When it broke they jammed it into her chest!”
Blood rushed to Connor’s head, but the flow left him unsteady. He was running out of energy and he could feel his rationality being pushed aside by instinct. He forced down the feelings of confusion and hunger as best he could.
“The girl was a nobody!” Mr. Angry stood too, his face red. Connor could see veins straining against the skin of the man’s forehead, could almost taste the pulse of the arteries in his neck. “And if she was a vampire then she was less than nobody! I’m not saying these kids are angels, but we’re here to uphold the law, and the law says that if she was a vampire then they aren’t guilty. I don’t know that she was, but she might have been, and if we can’t prove for sure that she wasn’t, then we have no choice! It’s not our damned fault that there isn’t enough evidence!”
He swept a hand across the table, sending his pencil flying as he sat back down, one hand rubbing the left side of his chest, under the armpit. “Fuck the girl and the piece of wood to the heart. All of this yelling is making my heart hurt.”
Connor stared at the man, forcing aside thirst and focusing on one coherent thought. “That’s not where your heart is,” he murmured.
“What?”
“I said, that’s not where your heart is.” Connor walked over to the viewscreen in the wall and ordered it to show him the evidence menu again. He selected the video footage of the beating, obtained from a security camera. He skipped to the point where one of the boys thrust the shaft of wood into the girl’s chest. It penetrated on his third attempt.
“You sly bastard,” he said.
“Who’s a sly bastard?” asked the foreman.
“The defense attorney.” Connor jabbed a finger at the image of the girl lying on the bloody pavement. The action brought up a menu with her name and a list of the evidence attached to her.
“When he was questioning the expert witness about vampires, he asked him what was the effect of someone slamming a piece of wood, a stake if you will, into the heart of a vampire. The expert said that that was one of only a few ways of killing a vampire, the others being fire and sunlight. The attorney asked if a stake to the heart would explain someone’s sudden lack of movement when they had withstood a massive amount of damage without falling down, damage that should have been enough to bring down a normal human. He asked if that was a good indication that someone was a vampire.”
“What’s your point?”
“He never once showed the witness the wounds the girl suffered. Not the video, not the coroner’s report, not even the weapon. He never once asked if her wounds were consistent with what was required to stop a vampire.”
Confused faces turned to face him, and they were all starting to look the same to him. He was losing control. A voice in his head told him that he had been stupid to worm his way onto this jury, that he had taken too great of a personal risk. He repeated silently to himself that he needed to finish what he had started. He closed his eyes and steadied his pulse.
“Listen, we know the girl was modded, like most of us are. Her bones were engineered from before she was born to be denser and stronger than normal, many times more so. There’s no way anybody anywhere is driving a piece of wood through engineered bone. That’s why the boy with the wood had to try three times and eventually…”
Connor called up the evidence of the girl’s wounds. Zoomed to her chest. Zoomed to her left breast where a ragged wound was visible between her ribs, to the left of her sternum. To the description beside the wound stating that it did not extend to any vital organs but had severed an artery. Death by blood loss, not by heart trauma.
“That piece of wood never went through her heart. If she had been a vampire, this wound here wouldn’t have stopped her. She just went into shock. She was just a girl. That weasel made sure never to specifically mention in court that the stake went through her heart, meaning that the prosecutor-bot wouldn’t object to the evidence. Everything he said was a fact, but he twisted everybody’s perception so that we would draw our own conclusions and that damned robot was too prehistoric to reason it o
ut.”
He looked at the faces around the table. A few had the decency to look ashamed.
“The prosecutor saw a wound,” said Connor. “The defense saw an opportunity.”
Connor stepped out of the courthouse onto a poorly lit sidewalk. There were few people about and he could hear the constant hum of the underground city’s air circulation system. Someone placed a hand on his shoulder.
“Hey,” said Mr. Angry. “Guilty for murder. I never would have thought.”
Connor nodded. “Well, it was you who pointed out that by abandoning her, the boys were accountable for any attack she sustained afterwards. Are you okay after what happened in there?”
“Yeah, I’ll be all right.” The man’s shoulders drooped as he thrust his hands into his pants pockets. “It just brought up a lot of memories I thought were long gone. Ancient history, you know?”
“I understand,” said Connor. “I’m sorry about your brother.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said the other man, withdrawing a hand from his pocket long enough to gesture dismissively before hiding it away again. “Ancient history, like I said. You should have met my brother. You remind me of him a little, just a bit smarter than everyone else around. Ever thought about becoming a lawyer?”
“Thanks, but no.” Connor could feel his canines pressing into his tongue. His stomach knotted and his vision was shrinking to a tunnel. He knew that he wouldn’t be able to hold out for long. “Hey listen, I need a drink like you wouldn’t believe. You want to join me? You won’t have to pay a thing.”
* * * * *
Michael Lorenson was born and raised in Montreal where he still resides with his wife, two sons, and cat. He recently rediscovered a love for writing after a long hiatus. His work has recently appeared in the Tesseracts 14 anthology of Canadian speculative fiction, and he is looking forward to many more years of letting his imagination carry him where it will.
Outwitted
By Sandra Wickham
I wake to pain in my arm and across my chest that makes me want to scream and curl into a ball, but I can’t do either. Panic rushes through me as I try to open my eyes. They don’t respond.