Salvage: A Shadow Files Novel

by A. J. Scudiere

  For all full drawers in the lab, for all the bones it held, it still had many empty boxes with no labels and drawers with no tags on the end. GJ began searching through these first. Sure enough, thirty minutes later, she discovered one of the untagged drawers held a full, clean, fresh skeleton that likely had been in the kettle when she'd left. She couldn’t be certain, as she’d never seen the body before it went in, and had no information other than something large had been in the kettle the last time she was here.

  She frowned at it now but dismissed what she was seeing. She had to check everything first. As the body was already laid out in anatomical form, she did what she'd been trained to do. This meant first she looked it over and made certain her grandfather had gotten it right. Were all the carpals in the right positions for the hands? Had any of the feet bones been mixed up or swapped? Had he been going too fast?

  She didn't expect mistakes from her grandfather, but she'd seen enough from undergrad students and even the occasional careless error from other scientists that she always checked first. What she saw wouldn’t mean anything if it was a mistake. In a moment, she assessed that the skeleton appeared to be laid out correctly. Knowing she couldn't fix any errors if she did see them, she began taking catalog-style pictures with her phone. Though the power was out, she worked in the eerie silence, filling the air with the soft bumps and thuds of opening and closing drawers, the slide of wood on wood, and the sound of cabinet doors. With the camera, she added a technical sound—the fake whirring sound of the shutter that didn't actually exist on her phone camera.

  Even as she continued snapping photos, her eyes darted back and forth. This was another skeleton that had the same anomaly. She’d started at the feet and worked her way up, not pausing. She had to complete her round of pictures. If she heard anyone from upstairs coming down this often unused hall, she'd have to stop, be quiet, and make sure no one heard her. But nothing sounded from overhead and she continued clicking away.

  Eventually, she was able to look at the weird thing she’d spotted first. Though the maxillary plate had a fissure that normally was fused on humans at a very, very young age, in infancy even, this one remained in separate pieces. Though the limbs and torso and head were all in the right places, her grandfather had altered the skull. Using putty and wires, he'd moved the maxillary plate out. The jawbone had more than an average cleft. In fact, it appeared to have cartilage between where the two sides of the jawbone had come together during formation in early fetal development.

  Much like a cleft palate, sometimes jawbones—which grew simultaneously from both sides and met in the middle—didn’t fuse in the center or fused incompletely. When they met and grew into one piece but failed to do it fully, it was called a Staphne Defect and was considered the only aesthetically acceptable birth defect. In fact, most people simply called it a “cleft chin.” This skeleton had far more going on than that. Though it appeared nothing would have been noticeable on the live person, the mandible was very different. It wasn't just that the jaw hadn’t fused, it was that she could see a very thin line of cartilage down the center holding together what were now two separated pieces of bone together.

  The way her grandfather had wired the skull and mandible, the whole front of the face jutted out. She noted again how the jaw, while thicker than an average human jaw, was possibly narrower across the base as well as longer front to back. She thought of Agent Donovan Heath’s physiology. She could see that his jaw wasn’t narrower, but it was longer front-to-back than average.

  Could it jut out this way? She looked at the temporomandibular-joints, where the jaw rested into the skull, and noticed more, smaller anomalies in the otherwise standard anatomy there.

  Yes, it was possible Donovan Heath could do this. She frowned. This was more than just double-jointedness. This meant the entire front of the face could move forward. Then she looked down at the skeleton’s arms and noticed something even more startling.

  8

  "Sir, tell me about your wife." GJ spoke into the microphone sitting on the desk in front of her. Next to her sat three different open notebooks detailing the situation she was trying to talk her way out of.

  "No," the voice replied into the headset she wore. He sounded like he was so close, just like he would in a real scenario. Both their voices also transmitted to the room at large, so everyone could hear everything—every word, every tone, every inflection in her voice—as she negotiated the faux hostage situation. The man in question had taken his entire family into their home, boarded the doors and the windows, and informed everyone that he had multiple weapons at hand. He threatened to kill his own children if his demands weren’t met. But GJ had noticed he made no threats made specifically against his wife, though she could hear the woman crying and screaming in the background.

  "Isn't your wife the reason that you're doing this?" GJ prodded. "Wouldn't she want you to—"

  She was cut off by the sharp retort of a gun into her right ear. She startled, dropping her pen and almost knocking her seat over.

  "You failed," her instructor announced sternly. "He just shot himself."

  She looked up into the stadium seating of the classroom, finally seeing the faces of all her fellow NATs as they watched her try to work the situation. Yes, they were all looking at her like she'd done exactly that—failed. Big F. She was wondering if, however, the loss was a complete failure when she saw a hand go up from the back of the room.

  Lauren, a fellow NAT who'd been nothing but kind—although not overly friendly—asked the instructor, "Is it truly a failure? Sure, he shot himself, but he was the one holding everyone hostage. He was the terrorist. His family is okay, aren't they? Isn't that the goal?"

  This time the instructor turned narrow eyes onto Lauren and responded with a criticism just as harsh as the one's he'd previously leveled at GJ. Though GJ was grateful to be out from under his stare, she didn't think things were going to get any better after Lauren was taken down a notch or two.

  "What was the assignment?" the instructor asked Lauren.

  Sounding less certain, Lauren replied, "Talk the man into throwing his weapons out the door, then talk him into coming out the door with his hands over his head, with his family intact and unharmed."

  "Exactly. Did agent Janson achieve this?"

  "Well, no," Lauren said, "But—”

  "No. There are no buts. We do it again. Who's next?"

  No one volunteered. Shocking, GJ thought.

  The fact of the matter was that GJ seemed to have a natural knack for this. She'd been great in their interrogation classes, practically able to climb into someone's lap and pretend to become their best friend. It had disturbed her how easy it was to talk to agents posing as child molesters, serial killers, and all the dregs of humanity that she’d once thought she'd never have to deal with. She tended to work with humans in their skeletal forms more often than as live human beings. Particularly live, awful human beings.

  The instructor simply pointed, pegging his next victim by that move alone. This brought Hank down to the front of the room. His swagger was unmistakable, even if GJ was still shaking a little bit from the gunshot that had been fired. It still sounded so close. Shaking, she removed the headset, closed the folders, and happily vacated the hot seat.

  Hank put on the headset, obviously confident that he could do better than she had. Three minutes later, he'd managed to get the man to shoot his entire family and himself. Well, at least she hadn't failed as heinously as Hank.

  Sitting calmly next to her, Walter leaned over and whispered, "You know, Hank blew it even harder than you did. And to be fair, he had your example of how to at least get the guy to not kill his family, so that's pretty epic. Can't be sad about that."

  On the one hand, GJ agreed. It was a fake situation; no real children were harmed in the making of this failure. However, out in the real world, they would all have to perform better. One by one, the NATs went through different scenarios, and one by one, most of them managed
to get everyone killed.

  Quantico sucked. Lunch was usually relatively jovial, but today it was a somber affair with most of the trainees thinking over their failing grades from the morning. GJ looked around the lunchroom. This was a class full of overachievers. You didn't really wind up at Quantico being a lazy ass, that was for sure. But all these overachiever/Type A personalities were now stuck in one room sucking down the spate of failures from this morning and no one was doing anything other than chewing and swallowing. Even GJ was grateful later that day for the punishing five-mile run.

  She was at the point where she thought maybe if she spoke to anyone at all, they might take other people hostage and kill themselves. The instructor had ended the class by informing all of them they'd have another chance the next day. That didn't make anyone any happier.

  Still later that afternoon on the range, GJ found she was disturbingly soothed by the ability to shoot bullets out of a nine-millimeter Glock. This was not the life she'd chosen. And in bed that night, staring at the ceiling while Walter slept softly—in fact, like a baby—on the other side of the room, GJ contemplated all of it. Walter probably slept better because the people she'd killed today were merely fictional. She’d shot and killed live humans before. Probably often. However, fictional deaths were the closest that GJ had ever come. Previously, she had zero responsibility for the deaths of any of the bodies she dealt with. She was always there after the fact. Never at the tipping point.

  As a forensic scientist, she considered herself a warrior for justice. She was often the only voice a dead person had. She was the one who found evidence and sought justice for the crimes committed against them. She was the one who proved that the person on the floor was not the killer, so that they could be buried in peace with the rest of their family rather than their family dealing with the shame of believing they had a criminal in their midst. She proved the perpetrator was the one who caused it all and deserved to be dead on her table.

  Coming to Quantico had seemed, to a certain extent, a natural extension of that soul-deep need she had for justice. However, after today, she was beginning to think maybe she'd taken a wrong turn. She was shooting targets that had drawings on them of actual human beings. She was training to kill people. Previously, it had been the bad guys they were training to kill. She knew one of these days, it was going to be the good guys, because today, she'd killed someone in the middle. Today’s death lay somewhere in the wide gray line that so much of Quantico training was about. The hostage-taker wasn't truly one of the bad guys. He was troubled. He was frightened, and she hadn't been able to save him.

  She was wondering if she would be able to save her own family. Her grandfather was into something strange, that—the more she looked at it—the more concerned she became. The more she learned, the more illegal it appeared.

  Her parents didn't even know where she was. Most everyone else wrote home excited. They called and told their parents, and even had parties when they got accepted into FBI training. She'd lied. And here she was in the middle of the night, when she was supposed to be getting sleep for the brutal day that faced her tomorrow, and instead she was staring at the ceiling. She'd washed actual human blood off herself before, but this was the first time she'd understood the real meaning of "blood on her hands."

  Walter stood at the edge of Hogan's Alley, Quantico's training grounds for the NATs. It was built to look like a real town, and to be fair, aside from the fact that nothing in the town worked, it looked pretty good.

  She felt like she'd stood here a thousand times before. Training simulations were absolutely the name of the game, and when she’d been in theater overseas, they'd done them even in the areas where they might actually wind up walking out the door and fighting insurgents. In closed spaces, they'd trained against each other, so that they would be ready. She stood now, her fake gun at her side, waiting to hear her name called. The instructors appeared to be pairing people at random.

  GJ stood next to her. In rapt silence, they listened to the sound of gunfire coming from inside one of the buildings. It had been staged for some particular purpose they still didn’t know. The trainees were sometimes let in on what that purpose was. The first several rounds of action they’d worked on here, in the early weeks, had been relatively simple. Clear a room. Find a bad guy. Cuff him. Read him his rights. Kill him if you had to.

  Lately, things had gotten much more intense. Sometimes they were given only the briefest rundown of the situation. Sometimes they were sent into buildings with no instructions whatsoever. Then they had to walk in, guns on their hips or in their hands, and try to figure out what was going on. Sometimes, it got ugly.

  Silently, the NATs standing at the edge of the simulation watched as Hank and Olivia came out from the building. According to the rounds of simunition—simulated ammunition—fired and the marks on them, both of them were badly wounded. By the expressions on their faces, they were actually dead.

  In previous rounds, the NATs left outside had been given live camera feeds into the action so they could learn from what their fellow trainees had done or failed to do. Now those were gone, so while Hank and Olivia had been graded and set free, the others were still waiting their turn with no idea what they were facing.

  "Fisher, Janson," the instructor called out, pointing then holding up two fingers in case they couldn’t count. "Two of you, head in."

  Walter got a bit of a funny feeling. Just two nights ago, GJ had asked before they fell asleep, "Do you notice how they put us together more than the others?"

  "We're roommates," Walter shrugged it off. "They often pair up the roommates. They're training to make us partners."

  "No, I know that," GJ said, "and they do pair up the roommates more often than other pairs, but they also put the NATs in a variety of other pairs. They're trying to get us to work with other agents. They're trying to throw us into new situations. But the fact of the matter is, I've been collecting data, and you and I are put together far more often than the other roommate pairs are."

  Walter hadn't noticed, but then again, she hadn't been collecting data. Since GJ had said it though, she'd been keeping a silent score for herself, and it looked like her partner was correct. They walked to the front door of the schoolhouse wondering what they were facing. Then the instructor opened the door and simply ushered them inside. Weapons drawn, ready for simunitions fire, they slowly entered the space.

  They called out, as they had been trained to do, using short, barking phrases in authoritative voices. Even GJ could now scare the piss out of anyone they ran into with only the sound of her words. Just two weeks ago, they'd gone through pop-up training where they ran, jumped, crawled, and rolled through a staged scenario where good guy and bad guy targets popped out. The trainees had to make split-second decisions whether to shoot or not. Wrong decision, you killed a civilian. Right decision, you scored a point. Wrong decision, you were dead. There were places to duck and obstacles to jump over or roll under. This was the part where Walter had most feared being anywhere near GJ Janson with a gun. Instead, GJ had surprised them with a nearly perfect score. It turned out, she was using her tiny frame to her advantage, fitting into places others would never be able to. It gave her a slight advantage in decision time, as it made it much harder for the “bad guys” to get a clean shot at her.

  Later, as she looked at her partner, Walter realized something. While no one had been paying attention, GJ Janson had bulked up a little bit. She'd become slightly less klutzy, definitely more coordinated, and a lot safer with a firearm.

  Inside the school building, they called out into the empty space. And Walter had to admit that, while there were other NATs in their class that she might have preferred to be on the range with or that she might have wanted to take notes off of more than GJ these days, when it came to having someone at her back, she considered Janson a pretty damn good ally.

  They walked together into the empty space, and though they continued hollering out, no one hollered in return. T
ogether, back to back, they cleared the room. Walter knew her own stride was slightly less than human. She didn't limp the way she had in the beginning, when she'd first learned to work with the prosthetic. She’d learned to twitch her muscles in certain unnatural ways to make her gait appear more natural. She could walk, run, and jump, but while she did all of this—and while she did it now without thinking—she still didn't have quite a normal stride.

  What she noticed though, was that GJ had matched her stride. Walter couldn't match to GJ, so GJ had fixed the problem. Together, they opened a door. Standing clear of it on either side, they swept in, checking angles with their guns. No longer did GJ swing her gun to mistakenly aim at a live human being, but now brought it up just shy of the mark, swept her angle, and cleanly entered into the room.

  They didn't yell out, "Clear." There was no one to yell it to.

  By the time the fourth room turned up empty, Walter had begun to wonder what they'd gotten into. That was when all hell broke loose. Five armed assailants, actually some of their instructors, popped up from behind well barricaded positions in the room, each of them holding a nasty-looking firearm. Because they were FBI agent instructors, they knew what they were doing. Walter and GJ ducked, covered, and rolled. One of them would lay cover fire while the other ran in a short burst, and then took turns retreating out of the room piece by piece.