Some primal instinct or muscle memory made him put his hands on the floor and try to roll clear, but the boot on his head pushed harder. Another soundwave blast filled his head with a burning fog and his mouth with cold vomit.
His hands were wrenched behind him. His wrists were bound together. Someone stamped down on his back. Once. Twice. He felt none of it. He didn’t even notice his skull cracking as a baton smashed against it, and so was mildly surprised – and, if he were honest, a little relieved – to find the shadows darkening behind his eyes as everything faded into black.
* * *
Pain. That was the first thing Dan noticed.
It was closely followed by noise, the taste of vomit, and more pain, though not necessarily in that order.
He only listed pain twice, despite the countless individual aches, throbs, stabbing sensations and general unpleasantness that currently seemed to have set up camp all over his head. For simplicity’s sake, though, he sectioned the pain off into the two areas of his skull that hurt the most – a single spot on the back being one, and every other inch of his head and face being the other.
The noise was uncompromisingly annoying. It was somewhere between a high-pitched eeeeeee and a tooth-shuddering sort of drilling sound, as if something was trying to bore through his cranium.
Which, he realized, would explain at least one of those two pain points he had identified a moment ago.
Someone was drilling through his head.
Great.
Dan opened his eyes, but the level of darkness didn’t change. The pain and the noise continued. The taste of vomit was starting to fade. It was remarkable he’d been able to taste it at all, given the state of his taste buds. It must’ve been particularly pungent for them to have taken notice.
The darkness bothered him. His night vision would usually have been able to pick out something – some detail or suggestion of an outline that would help give an indication of his surroundings.
But no. Nothing.
He thought back to a moment before, when he’d opened his eyes. He decided he probably hadn’t actually opened them at all, and so he put some more concerted effort into doing so now.
They were stuck together with something. Possibly glue. Probably puke. He tried to peel the lids apart with his fingers, but his hands were tightly bound behind him.
This was getting better and better.
With a lot of scrunching and stretching, he managed to force one eye open. To his amazement, he saw himself squinting back at him. His brain, which had its hands full with the pain and the noise and everything, took a moment to figure out that he was looking at his reflection in the polished glass of a riot goon’s helmet visor.
Fonk. He looked rough. Admittedly, he always looked rough, but today was definitely not one of his better days. He’d lost his hat, too. That was annoying, although nowhere near the same league as the pain and the noise. More so than the diminishing taste of vomit, though, which was now pretty much just a memory.
Using the reflective visor, Dan was able to check if anyone was indeed standing behind him and drilling into his skull. They weren’t. Or, if they were, they were invisible, too small to see, or had no reflection. Any of those things were possible, he knew, but unlikely.
Ish. Unlikely-ish.
The noise and the pain had both begun to ease off. Or, more accurately, he’d become vaguely accustomed to them, and so was able to dedicate a small portion of his brain power to the task of figuring out where he was and what the fonk was going on.
It didn’t take him long to realize he was in a Lock-n-Talk. He’d been in plenty of these featureless interrogation chambers over the years, although until now had always been where the Tribunal grunt was sitting.
No, not a grunt. The guy’s helmet insignia suggested someone high ranking. Dan didn’t know enough about the riot squad’s levels of progression to be able to identify where exactly the officer stood in the internal pecking order, but it was somewhere nearer the top than the bottom.
“Holy shizz,” said the helmet. The voice was deliberately distorted, but the amplification settings had been turned down to normal conversational levels, as opposed to their usual megaphone screech. “It is you. Isn’t it?”
“Who?” Dan asked. The rumble of his own voice made fingers of pain burrow through his skull. If it could, his brain would almost certainly have punched him in the face to stop him saying anything more.
“There were rumors. I’d heard them, but… I mean… How was I supposed to believe it?”
“Believe what?” Dan uttered, much to his brain’s dismay.
“You died, Slam. I mean… You died.”
Dan’s eyes widened, forcing the previously stuck-shut one to open. Slam.
“How do you know that name?”
“Because I know you, Slam Ripley,” said the helmet. It let out a hiss as the locking clamps disengaged and it rose upwards on the officer’s head. The scaly green face that was revealed was one Dan knew only too well. “Because we were partners.”
Dan felt his jaw start to drop, but caught it before the other man could notice. “Noops,” he said, as matter-of-fact as he could manage. “Been a long time.”
“Been a long… what? Are you fonking kidding me?” Noops hissed, lowering his voice to barely above a whisper. He leaned in closer, then drew back a little when Dan’s smell hit him. “You’re alive, Slam! You’re alive. I mean… How is that…? How can you…?” He shook his head, as if trying to clear out all the wrong questions, leaving only the right one. “What the fonk is going on here?”
Dan raised his eyes to the ceiling. “You got me a Lock-n-Talk,” he said. “That’s about all I know. Fact is, I was about to ask you the same thing.”
Noops leaned all the way back until he was almost reclining in his seat. His eyes took Dan in, looking over every inch of him as if the answer to it all was written somewhere there.
The Lock-n-Talk shuddered just slightly, but enough to tell Dan they were moving. The movement seemed to make Noops’s mind up about something. He leaned forwards, and this time didn’t flinch at the smell. “Look, like I say, I’d heard rumors you were… still around. Or, you know, back, or whatever. They said you’d changed your name. That you’re some kind of investigator of weird shizz now.” He tilted his head sideways, listening to something, then turned his attention back to Dan. “That true?”
Dan ignored the question. “Who did it, Noops?”
The scales on Noops’s forehead creased. “Who did what?”
“You know, don’t you? You know who killed me.”
This was one of two questions Dan had been itching to ask from the moment his ex-partner’s face had been revealed. He wasn’t ready to ask the other question yet. Or, more importantly, to hear the answer.
“What? No!” Noops protested, his voice climbing higher around the edges.
Dan grunted. “I always knew when you were lying.”
The box shuddered again. Concern flashed across Noops’s face. “We don’t have long. They’re taking you in. They’ll kill you for what you did to Shornack’s guys.”
“Good luck with that,” Dan said.
“Slam, listen to me,” Noops said.
“That’s not my name.”
“Well… whatever the fonk you’re calling yourself,” Noops whispered. “I’m going to get you out, OK? They don’t know who you are – your prints brought up two different matches, both dead – so I’m going to get you out.”
“Why?”
“Why? Because that’s what friends do, that’s why! Holy shizz, man, after everything we’ve been through? Why? Fonk!”
Reaching under his seat, he tapped a series of buttons. The restraints pinning Dan’s hands to his back retracted. Now free, he lunged across the box, his hand wrapping around Noops’s throat, his face twisting into a snarl.
“You know, Noops,” he spat. “You know who did this.”
Noops pulled free and shoved Dan away. “So what if I
did know?” he asked. “You think you can do something about it? You’re not an idiot, Slam. You know how this works. You knew what you had to do. You poked around in the wrong people’s business. I warned you, man. How many times did I fonking warn you? But you didn’t listen. You never listened.”
Dan wanted to try the lunging throat grab approach again, but even those few moments of exertion had made his headache return with a vengeance. The Lock-n-Talk was orbiting around him now, bringing with it the very real possibility of another vomit-related incident.
He contemplated the other question he wanted to ask.
But no. He couldn’t. He daren’t. Not yet.
The box leaned a few degrees backwards for a couple of seconds, before straightening up again as the vehicle it was attached to slowed to a stop.
“We’re out of time,” said Noops. “I can either open the door and you can make a break for it, or you can go face the music. Your choice, partner. What’s it to be, but the clock is ticking.”
Dan tilted his head towards the featureless wall on his right. “Open the door,” he said, grudging every word. “Let me go.”
“Wise move,” said Noops. He pressed some other hidden button and the wall on Dan’s left slid open. “Kind of gives you a different perspective, doesn’t it? Sitting in that seat.”
Dan said nothing as he ducked out through the opening. A cold breeze flavored with a thick aroma of salt slapped him in the face, and he knew he had to be somewhere near the shore. As the shore ran all the way around the whole of Down Here, though, that revelation didn’t narrow the list of possible locations down by all that much.
Once outside, he saw that his Lock-n-Talk was just one of a dozen or more attached to the back of a hovering flatbed vehicle. It had pulled up at a tall fence, and a gate was sliding aside up ahead to let it through to the bleakly officious-looking building beyond. A Tribunal Vault – the final destination for anyone caught, or even suspected of, carrying out a criminal offence.
“Slam, wait,” said Noops before Dan could slink off into the night. Dan kept close to the box to avoid being spotted by the vehicle’s driver.
“It’s Dan now,” was all he said.
“Dan? Right. Dan. OK,” Noops said. He unsealed one of the front pockets on his armored jumpsuit and withdrew a rectangle of card. “Is it true what they say? That you’re investigating weird shizz?”
Dan didn’t respond in any way at first, but then nodded. “Sometimes.”
“Right. Right,” said Noops. He turned the card over and over in his hands a few times, studying it.
Dan almost lost his balance as the truck began to cruise through the open gate. “Why do you ask? And, in case you need reminded, clock’s ticking.”
Noops’s lips moved as he read the card, then he nodded as he came to a decision. He held the little white rectangle out to Dan between two gloved fingers. “This one came in a couple of hours ago. Got ‘weird’ written all over it,” he said, smiling grimly. “You ask me, I reckon it could be right up your street.”
CHAPTER SIX
Dan stood in the center of the room, trying to visualize step-by-step what had gone down here. It was an old detective trick he’d picked up somewhere along the way. Unfortunately, he wasn’t very good at it. All he had been able to figure out so far was that two people had died here, and the only reason he could be completely sure of that was because their bodies were still lying on the floor.
He’d thought about ignoring the address Noops had given him at first. Come damn close to it, in fact. He should have gone back to the office, made sure Ollie had made it home safely, then maybe had her patch up some of his more gaping wounds. His head still felt like it’d been on the wrong end of an Unglarian orgy, and while the drilling noise had dropped by a few dozen decibels it was still making its presence felt. He should’ve been resting.
But he didn’t want to go back to the office. He didn’t want to sit down and take time to recover. If he did that, he’d start to think about the question he hadn’t asked, and the answer he’d been too afraid to hear. And so, he’d read the card, found the address, and was now standing slap bang in the middle of a murder scene.
His detective skills might not have been up to much, but Dan was certain neither of the bodies had died of natural causes. Had they passed away peacefully, their torsos wouldn’t have been split open down the middle the way they were, and their internal organs would most likely still be where they were supposed to be rather than…
He looked around the room, but it was completely devoid of guts, hearts, or purple knobbly bits in general. That’s probably what Noops had found odd about the case, although it was the kind of thing Dan was finding himself becoming increasingly familiar with. At least their eyes had been left in place this time.
The apartment was on the first floor, at the bottom of a squat stack of other homes, and opened up onto a small rectangle of concrete that technically qualified as a garden. The bodies, he’d been able to find out from poking around in drawers, were Tock and Sanarok, a father and son originally from… elsewhere. He didn’t recognize the species. Mostly humanoid, but with pointy ears and devilish downwards-sloping eyebrows.
After some searching, Dan had found their ID cards. The father’s was faded, his age hard to read. The son’s was easier. Thirteen.
Dan clenched his jaw.
Thirteen.
A floorboard creaked behind him, and Dan spun, fists raising, ready to swing.
“Whoa, whoa! It’s just me!” said Ollie. She smiled and waved as Dan lowered his hands. “Hi!”
“What are you doing here?” Dan demanded.
“I followed you,” Ollie said. “Again.”
Dan’s eyes narrowed as he thought this through. “I told you to wait in the closet. You followed the truck.”
“It was dark and boring,” Ollie said. “So I followed you.”
Dan took a sudden step closer and caught her by the skinny upper arms. He wanted to shake her, to make her listen, but settled for just squeezing her arms and hitting her with both barrels of a meaningful glare.
“I want you to listen, kid, and listen good. You have no ID, which means you have no job. Either of those things on their own are punishable by death Down Here. Do you understand me? If the Tribunal catches you and finds out you’re not a productive citizen, they will kill you. This is not a game. You screw up, people die. Starting with yourself.”
He tightened his grip. Ollie let out a little hiss and something flared behind her eyes. Dan watched it burning deep in her pupils, then released his grip. The fire faded away almost as quickly as it had appeared.
“Also, you can’t just keep blowing people up.”
“What if they’re bad people?” Ollie asked.
“We’re all bad people, kid,” he said, turning away. “Some of us are just worse than others.”
Dan regarded the grisly scene before them in silence, trying his visualization thing again. Two people dead. No organs. So, what had happened here, and why?
“I have no idea,” he muttered.
“About what?” asked Ollie, stepping up beside him.
“Any of it,” Dan admitted.
She looked down at the bodies for a while. “Are they dead?” she whispered.
Dan shot her a sideways glance to try to gauge the sincerity of that question. From her face, it was one hundred per cent genuine. “Yes. They’re dead. They have no internal organs.”
“Oh. Right. Why do they have no internal organs?” she asked. “Did something eat them?”
“No. I mean, maybe. But it’s all a little too neat,” said Dan. “Someone extracted them. Probably took them away to use in some sort of ritual.”
He blinked. A ritual. That made sense. A lot of the more intricate Malwhere-summoning stuff involved body parts.
“Are there only two of them?” Ollie asked.
Dan was about to confirm that when he remembered the photo in the bedroom. He’d only half-noticed it while c
hecking to make sure whoever had killed the apartment’s occupants weren’t still here, but now it rose up from his subconscious like its time had come to shine.
“Three. There was a woman. But she’s not here.”
“Where is she?” Ollie wondered.
“I don’t know. You’re asking a lot of questions.”
Ollie nodded. “Do you want me to stop?”
“When have you ever done what I want you to do?” said Dan. “But no. No, keep asking.” He pointed to a shelf unit in the corner that he’d rifled through earlier searching for ID cards. “There’s a… like a gadget thing in there. With a screen. Make some notes.”
He squatted to examine the bodies again while he waited for Ollie to find the datapad. Something about them was odd, beyond the obvious lack of innards. He couldn’t quite place what it was, though.
“The window’s broken,” Ollie pointed out. “That’s how I got in.”
“I used the door,” Dan said. “You know, like a normal person. But yeah, it’s broken.”
“So, someone broke in?”
“Guess so,” said Dan, but something niggled at him, just like the picture had.
“Even though the door was open?”
“It wasn’t open when I arrived. I unlocked it.”
“You have a key?”
“I have a shoulder.”
He stood and turned to the window. Ollie had come in that way, and yet he hadn’t heard her until she was right behind him. “No glass,” he said, examining the stretch of floor between where he was and the window.
Ollie regarded the mostly empty frame. “There’s a bit down at the bottom there. It almost cut me on the way in.”
“On the floor, I mean. There’s no glass on the floor.”
He crossed to the window and leaned out into the cool night air. The blue glow of the Up There engines reflected off a carpet of shards that had been strewn across the concrete.
“No-one broke in. Someone broke out,” Dan realized.
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