Those Who Walk in Darkness so-1

by John Ridley

  It happened.

  So MTacs don't show up in modified Suburbans. MTacs roll in carbon-fiber APCs rated to withstand temperatures of up to l, 200°F and pressure up to 3, 000 psi. And since its exterior isn't metal, a metal morpher can't put a hand to it and simply make the vehicle collapse, killing all the cops inside.

  That happened too.

  So, most times, the carbon-fiber APC was enough to get the MTacs to the call in one piece. After that, they were on their own.

  Bo led Yarborough, Vin and Whitaker from the APC to a squad blocking off the intersection on Flower. Down the block was another squad doing the same. To the officer in charge, Bo gave his standard greeting.

  "Whatcha got?"

  "Guy flagged a patrol down. Says he saw a shape-changing freak."

  Bo looked up the street. Low-rise brick buildings. A couple of parked cars. A motorcycle. Garbage cans. Pay phone.

  Bo asked: "He thinks he saw a shape-shifter, or he saw one?"

  "We hit the scene, there were three or four guys, baseball bats, beating the shit out of the thing. One second it's a bear, then it's a… like a lion. Thought it was gonna turn into an elephant or something, trample the hell out of those guys."

  "They can change shape not mass." Halfway up the block an alley."It'll maintain its relative size. How big was the guy?"

  "Caucasian male about six-one, maybe two hundred pounds. It was for a second. Then it was a lion again."

  Six-one. Two hundred pounds. That left a lot of possibilities.

  Yar, Vin and Whitaker were already fanning the intersection, weapons ready, looking up the block for likely targets: something that should be still but was moving slightly. Something that should be inanimate but was bleeding from taking hits from a Louisville Slugger-armed Neighborhood Watch.

  Bo to the sergeant: "Your guys chased it up the street?"

  "Yeah. The other squad cut it off. It headed down the alley, but it dead-ends. They kinda looked for it."

  "Kinda?"

  Direct but not trying to be harsh: "Their job's to lock the scene down and put in the call. You got the call. You take out the freak."

  The freak.

  It probably wasn't, couldn't be, one of the cars. Could easily be a garbage can, the pay phone stand. But maybe it'd blended with the stoop of one of the buildings. Maybe that bit of wrought iron was really just a mutie in disguise.

  Or maybe it was none of that. Maybe it'd managed to slip past the uniforms.

  Or maybe that newspaper vending machine was going to do everything it could to end an MTac's life.

  "Mike check. One."

  "Two."

  "Three.""Four."

  Gripping his. 45, Bo took point, started down the block. Yar, Vin and Whitaker followed.

  Yarborough yelled: "Bo!"

  Bo whipped around. Bo saw a section of brick wall of the alley moving toward him. He had a split second to do something.

  The split second passed.

  Bo did nothing.

  The wall was nearly on top of him. The wall was about to come crashing down on him. The wall was going to kill Bo.

  And then the wall was raked with a steady stream of automatic gunfire spat hot and loud from a pair of HKs. The wall jerked back, twisted in response to the hits. Couple of its bricks went flying as the slugs tore divots from it.

  The gunfire stopped.

  The wall seemed to steady itself as if its masonry and mortar were marshaling; readying up for a surge forward.

  Whitaker's Benelli took care of that.

  The shell of the shotgun ripped away a huge chunk of the wall. The wall staggered, collapsed—not collapsed, more like slumped— down to the ground.

  Yarborough, Vin and Whitaker eased for it, weapons ready to do some more graffiti work if necessary.

  The wall didn't move. But it changed. It contorted and contracted. The bricks turned from red to the pinkish tone of flesh. The wall took on the shape of a human. Naked, bullet-riddled, absent some body parts where bricks had been blown off in its previous form.

  The four MTacs watched the transformation without expression. Just another changeling. Just another freak. Now it was just another dead one.

  Yarborough looked down at the all-but-smoking carcass."Got you, mutie." To the others: "Shape-shifter. Hate 'em the most. Sneaky bastards." To Bo: "What's the matter, Bo? Didn't read 'em?"

  "Must've missed it."

  "Got your back, man. Tough mo-fo, huh? You even hit him, Vin?"

  "Blow me. Shoulda thrown your Pleather jacket at it. That would've scared it off."

  "Hell, bet if we had a piece like Bullet's we coulda put it down in one shot."

  Whitaker nudged the shape-shifter with the muzzle of his Benelli. The shape-shifter responded by flopping a bit, then lying still some more.

  Vin said: "Heard around she doesn't like to be called Bullet."

  "Yeah, well, you don't tell her I said it, she don't gotta find out."

  "What's she like?" Vin wanted to know."I can't get two words out of her."

  "You ladies want to form a stitch 'n' bitch," Bo cut in,"do it on your own time. As long as you're on the city's clock, how about you sweep the rest of the alley; make sure there aren't any more muties hiding out while I get a wagon out here for the meat?"

  Yarborough and Vin" yes sir"-ed that, started down the alley. Whitaker nudged the shape-shifter one more time. One more time the shape-shifter flopped, then lay still. Maybe they were superhuman when they were alive, maybe there wasn't anything they couldn't do. Dead they were just as dead as anybody. Whitaker tagged along behind Yarborough and Vin.

  Bo stayed back with the body, looked down at it, then looked at his left hand. He curled it into a fist, held it that way for a second, a second more. Uncurled it. He did the same again.

  No difference. The action had no effect.

  Bo couldn't stop his hand from shaking.

  Not that she knew what to expect other than what you see in movies and on TV shows, but the morgue at Cedars-Sinai was different than Soledad figured it'd be. It was cold, yeah. Had to be cold to keep the dead from rotting. And it was empty of smell except that it smelled well scrubbed. It smelled clean. What it didn't smell like was death, however death was supposed to smell. Rancid. Stale. Soledad was pretty sure death didn't smell like Pine-Sol.

  Mostly the morgue was a whole lot louder than she figured it would be. Should be. There was, even at the late hour, nothing but people—living people—in the morgue. MEs and cops examining bodies, giving them a close and careful once-over, pushing paper; turning lives into forms to be filed away. Grieving family members come to ID loved ones, gather loved ones. And regularly, very regularly, new bodies making their way down from above. The dead didn't stop coming. Morning. Noon. Night. Los Angeles kept on manufacturing fresh corpses.

  Bodies in, bodies out.

  It took a bit for Soledad to flag down an assistant assistant ME. Upstairs, somewhere else in the hospital he would have been an orderly. Down there, where the people weren't so particular, he had a title and owned just enough self-importance to ignore everyone around him. It was basically Soledad's flashed badge that got his attention.

  "What yah need, sistah?" He was a black guy, young, with long dreads—well kept, not the raggedy-ass kind a lot of Rastahs sported—with more than a little accent from somewhere in the Caribbean.

  "I'm looking for someone."

  "Name?"

  "Bannon, Reese."

  The AAME repeated the name a couple of times to quick-fix it in his memory. He looked over some papers, then flicked a finger for Soledad to follow him.

  A back room. Tables. Lots of tables. Stainless steel. A whole bunch of no-longer-living people all congregated, all draped in sheets.

  Bodies in, bodies out.

  The AAME went down a row checking toe tags…

  Soledad shook her head. They really used toe tags.

  He flipped one over, read it. Flipped another over, read it. Flipped another… He
stopped at the table.

  Looking to Soledad: "Ready?" He was already pulling back the sheet to reveal the body. Asking was just a formality.

  Reese.

  One time a guy called death the Big Sleep. It sounded good, clever, and it stuck. Reese didn't look like she was sleeping. She didn't look like she was sleeping or moving to a higher plane or in a better place. She looked dead, and she looked like getting that way hadn't come easy. Muscles atrophied. Pale and gaunt from months of coma, of being fed by tubes and kept breathing by machines. A chest wound that had been worked on every way doctors knew how but in the end would slow-kill her. Reese looked like life had been back-alley-beat from her. And Soledad figured that would've been about the only way Reese would go: not gentle into the night, but only after a long, nasty, bitter, violent fight. But not so much of one that Death wouldn't chalk the victory in the end. Nobody, not even BAMF Reese, was that good a warrior.

  "Look aht daht shit, huh." The assistant assistant ME ticked his head at the stitched and stapled defect where Reese's sternum used to be."An' she duhn't die right away? She a tough sometin', huh?"

  He said what he said oblivious to Soledad, to her feelings. He said it with no respect for Reese. Forty-plus-hour weeks in a morgue had long since desensitized him to the dead. They weren't people anymore, weren't even bodies. Just inventory to be sorted and stored and just-in-time-delivered to a destination six feet due south.

  Bodies in, bodies out.

  Meat in, meat out.

  A row across and a couple of tables up, three people, a family, stood near the badly charred and mangled remains of someone. They cried profusely. Some other assistant assistant ME kept saying to them over and over: "I need you to identify the body. Please, could you just identify the body? Is this, or is this not…"

  From her little backpack purse Soledad slipped a Kodak Fun Saver camera.

  Yeah. Right.

  She circled around to Reese's right shoulder and lined up a shot.

  "Dhis for ahn invesTIgation?" the dreadlocked assistant assistant asked.

  Soledad snapped a picture, then snapped a couple more to be safe.

  "If daht's not for ahn invesTIgation, yah have tah ask de family fhurst. I can't jhust let yoou be comin' in here takin' pictures of de bodies."

  Sure, now he cared.

  Soledad tucked the camera back where it had come from and started from the room, let the dead get back to their business.

  "Hey," the assistant yelled after her."I'm goin' tah have tah report dhis, sistah. I duhn't wanna have tah geet yah in trahuble."

  "Take a number," Soledad said."Get in line."

  I know you believe what you're telling me. But what I'm starting to think… look, you can't blame me if this—all of this—is starting to sound a little fantastic."

  Soledad flashed anger. Gayle, the lawyer who'd come around uninvited, talked Soledad into letting her work her case, was calling Soledad a liar?

  Verbalizing her anger: "You're saying I'm making things up?"

  "No, I'm not."

  "You said it was a fantasy."

  "I said it was fantastic."

  "Same thing." Big gesticulation. Dismissive."How's that not the same thing?"

  A guy at the next table with good hair and bright but vacant eyes stared at the arguing women.

  Gayle caught his look, said: "We want an audience we'll sell tickets. Turn your head, drink your mochaccino."

  The guy did as told, was good about taking direction. Probably he was some variation of actor or unemployed actor or wannabe actor come to LA to give a go at being a superstar. The town was sick with them. The cafe—Kings Road, on Kings Road in West Hollywood—was full of them. Soledad didn't care for their kind, didn't like being around them, but Kings Road cafe was walking distance from her apartment, and Gayle had complained enough about meeting in the fumy Beverly Connection Soledad figured she'd make an offer of meeting in the coffeehouse. Now, thinking she'd been called a liar, on top of the fact Gayle was half an hour late for their meeting, Soledad was sorry she'd made the gesture.

  Gayle calmed things down, stepped Soledad through the situation."You told me that two years ago you submitted a proposal on your gun to the PD."

  "Yes."

  "Well, there are no records of it. None that I can find."

  No hesitation, strong in her conviction: "That's impossible."

  "So it's okay for you to say it's impossible, but if I say it's fantastic…"

  "You need to check with A Platoon and the Department of the Armorer."

  "I did. No record anything was ever received. You send your work blind?"

  "No. Well, not… I'd talked about it with the Sergeant. He told me I should submit my work to the Lieutenant."

  "And you did that?"

  "Yeah, I did."

  "Did you get a receipt?"

  "A receipt? I wasn't buying groceries."

  "So that's a no."

  "If I had something like that, I'd give it to you."

  "So you sent your work to the lieutenant, then what?"

  "After I didn't hear anything for about…" Soledad gave careful thought, confirmed the time line with herself."It was almost four months. I sent a follow-up letter. Three more months I sent a letter to the sergeant of MTac Operations, told him about what I was working on, that I'd already sent proposals to the Department of the Armorer. Sent another letter two months after that."

  Gayle took a drink of her tea. Black and strong."What about the lieutenant of MTac?"

  "Rysher?" A shake of Soledad's head."Figured it be better to start lower, have somebody rabbi me up the chain. When I made MTac, I sent the lieutenant commander a query, asked if my submissions had anything to do with my selection. That was just a backward way of trying to get someone to go back, look at my work."

  "So, at least, what, five times you made some kind of communication regarding your work."

  "At least that. Yeah. I did everything I could to get people on board with what I was doing."

  "Not that I can prove."

  Shrugging all that off: "So there's no paper; so what?"

  "The so-what is: If there's paper, you're a conscientious cop who at least tried hard as she could to get people to listen to her. If there's no paper, no proof you tried, then you're a liar who doesn't give a damn what other people think and just does whatever the hell she pleases." Hand up, cutting Soledad off before she could even get going: "I'm not saying you are, so let's not even start that again. But you're saying there are these documents out there, and I'm telling you if they exist, I can't find them."

  "How is that possible?"

  "It's possible if somebody makes it possible."

  Soledad's head ticked; the idea she was about to speak, her mind couldn't quite grasp."Somebody got rid of the documents?"

  "Somebody's lying. If it's not you…"

  "That doesn't… Why would anybody…"

  "Here's something else: Cop's involved in a shooting, let's say he puts a bullet in the back of some unarmed innocent. Every time, the same thing: The department does everything it can to make it look like the cop's in the right; the guy who got shot wouldn't follow police instructions, made a sudden move, looked like he was holding a gun. They back the cop's play best they know how; keep everyone from looking bad, keep the department from getting buried under lawsuits. What they don't do is put a spotlight on the fact the cop screwed up.

  "You take out a metanormal, even I admit he was a bad one. The department ought to be hanging medals all over you; show the world what a great job MTacs do. But they're acting like you going in with your piece is the next worst thing to Mai Lai."

  Soledad, trying to logic things out: "What I did… I look back,

  I see how I was wrong. The department has to try and protect itself."

  "Man, you're a good soldier; throwing yourself on their grenade for them. Who's the department protecting itself from? And from what? The voting majority that's got no problem with metanormals getti
ng shot in the street? Amnesty International filing some useless lawsuit? Would anybody even have any idea what happened in that warehouse if the department hadn't started an investigation? And if the charges that you're facing are so god-awful, you're a vigilante who used an unapproved weapon, why does IA need to investigate you at all? Why not just go with things as they stand?"

  Gayle was talking… what she was talking were lies and deceit and conspiracy, and Soledad didn't know what to make of any of it. She didn't know what to do other than to say: "We should… we should go to Rysher."

  "That's no good."

  "He's my lieutenant. If something's going on, he can help."

  Between her palms Gayle rolled her tea mug, the liquid so black it kicked back a fluid reflection of herself, of herself saying: "He's got no desire to help. Soledad, where do you think this IA investigation came from?"

  She didn't know. But what Soledad couldn't believe…"The lou… No. Since I've hit MTac, he's been there for me."

  No response from Gayle.

  The lack of engagement pushed Soledad's conviction."He has my back. He's treated me solid from day one. Told me he'd do what he could to help clean all this up. Why would he build something against me?"

  "You really are the good soldier. All the questions I ask, as far as I can follow things, it started with him. More than that, I think he might be poisoning the well against you."

  Lies and deceit and conspiracy Gayle was talking.

  The actor guy got up to leave. He was replaced by another just like him only Asian.

  "Why are they doing this to me?"

  Gayle shook her head.

  Soledad asked, desperate: "What do we do?"

  "If all you had to face down was the law… the law I know, I know how to work the law. What's going on now… I don't know what's going on now. I don't know how to fight it, don't know if I can. So what we do now… what do you want to do?"