SINthetic

by J. T. Nicholas

  The second shed stood empty. It was small, barely four feet on a side and six feet tall, looking more like an ancient outhouse than anything, with a bare wooden floor. Though it wasn’t locked, there was a magnetic seal on the outside, so it could have been. “Shit,” I muttered, as I swept the walls with the light. The wood of the walls, floor, and ceiling was scratched. Gouged, really. In neat parallel lines. Like fingernails would make. There was no trace of broken nails or blood that I could see, but I had little doubt that a person or people had been kept in here at some point. Fortunately, the gouges had had time to fill in with dust and grime and were far too big to be from a child’s hand. Not Arlene, then.

  Shed number three was a nauseating repeat of shed number two. Bare and relatively clean, though with evidence of anxious prisoners who had desperately sought escape. Any escape. “Would a synthetic have done this?” I asked, shining the light over more fingernail marks.

  “It depends,” Silas replied. “If ordered to stay here and be quiet, most would have little choice but to obey.”

  “He wasn’t keeping synthetics, then,” I said.

  “Not necessarily, Detective,” Silas said. Something in his voice made me turn to look at him. His pale features held a measure of disgust that I hadn’t yet seen, despite all we had been through. “But there are many subtler ways to cause us pain. If a synthetic was ordered to wait they would have no choice. If they were ordered to do everything in their power to escape, they would also have no choice. I would not put it past a man like Fowler to issue such orders. Even if successful, the poor soul would have no real recourse but to escape and then go report the results to Fowler, likely to be locked up all over again. Perhaps with a better lock.”

  That thought hadn’t occurred to me. I was more acquainted, I supposed, with the straightforward aspects of physical torture. But if a victim had no choice but to obey, to what depths could the depraved mind sink in order to feed their dark passions? Annabelle’s existence had been a hellish cocktail of sexual and physical abuse. How much worse could it have been, had her nominal parents been more of Fowler’s ilk rather than their run-of-the-mill psychosis? “I’m glad that fucker’s dead,” I said.

  “Me, too, Detective,” Silas replied. “But he is one among many. One of the worse ones, I’ll grant you, but by no means unique.”

  “Fantastic.” I slammed the door on the shed, closing off the sight, if not the images, of the nightmares contained within.

  We continued our search, moving to the Quonset hut. It was a largish structure, probably a thousand square feet with rounded sides, like a soup can that had been cut in half lengthwise. The building was made of steel, and no effort had been taken to give it a more homey appearance. It would have looked at home on a military base or in an industrial yard. Within the confines of Fowler’s estate, it looked out of place. It felt wrong.

  The door was once again possessed of a modern magnetic lock. Silas immediately placed his hand upon it.

  Nothing happened.

  “That’s unusual,” he said.

  “What?”

  He didn’t answer, his attention focused on the touch screen. He was tapping away at it, fingers flicking and swiping. A frown started on his face and pulled down into a scowl. “It’s not connected to anything. No network connection at all. It requires a pass code, but there are no overrides. It may as well be a padlock.”

  Padlocks got a bad rep. Sure, they were old-school technology, but these days, more people could hack a computer than pick a mechanical lock.

  “Can you open it?”

  “I don’t know, Detective. I’m trying.”

  “Fine. Keep trying. I’ll clear the barn.”

  I headed to the building, which, like everything, seemed neat and well maintained from the outside. No locks on the doors, big sliding affairs that, when I shoved against one, moved with surprising ease. The dim interior revealed six stalls, which, rather than being home to horses, seemed to be used as storage. There were stacks of plastic bins, the lids wrapped round and round with duct tape. Each bin had a valve sticking out of the top, sealed around with caulk and more tape. There were dozens of them, all unprepossessing gray plastic encircled with gray tape. There was something about them that was disturbing, almost ominous. The entire place stank. It was a musty, acrid odor. It reminded me of roadkill, not at the height of stench, but at the point when the decomposition is mostly done and the air has an aftertaste of decay.

  I reached into my pocket, drawing forth the knife that I’d taken from one of the attackers back at the docks. I should have been berating myself for forgetting to turn it over into evidence, but instead I flicked open the blade, and moved to one of the bins.

  The steel sliced effortlessly through the tape. The lid made a sound like Tupperware as I popped it from the edge of the box. The smell of death hit me like a hammer, ten times—a hundred times—worse than how the barn itself smelled. I staggered back, gagging and coughing, fighting desperately to choke down the bile that was rising in my throat. Panting and gasping, swallowing the rush of saliva, I leaned against the wall of a stall and tried to recover my composure.

  It took a good thirty seconds before I regained control.

  I drew a deep breath. The smell of rot and decomposition and worse wasn’t gone, but it had decreased to the point where it didn’t induce the immediate urge to vomit. Day-old roadkill. I approached the bin again and, using the tip of my knife, pried the lid off.

  I was expecting to find a body. What I found was more like a soup. Or maybe stew was a better word.

  It had been a body, at some point. There were identifiable bones visible here and there, poking up out of the morass of...something. I couldn’t identify it, except to call it slime, or maybe ooze. Bodies do strange things when they decompose. Under the right conditions, they liquefy. The purpose of the valve on top of the box was suddenly clear—a release valve for the gasses produced by decomposition. And the source of the smell in the barn.

  I backed away and forced my mind to other places, other pastures. I couldn’t think about what I was breathing, about those boxes—those dozens of boxes—all with their duct tape seals and outgassing valves. I had known Fowler was insane, but I’d believed him to be a sort of manageable insane. The kind of crazy that was bent to a purpose—in Fowler’s case, the purpose of cleaning up Walton Biogenics’ mistakes. Hired by the company to take care of any “factory defects” or whatever the fuck the suits called them. But those bodies, those “mistakes” were discarded, left to be found and destroyed by the various cleanup crews. This was something different. This wasn’t Fowler’s job. It was his personal collection. He wasn’t just some corporate hit man. He was a killer, a predator who hunted for sport. Maybe the remains gathered in the bins were all synthetics, which would make him a psychopath, but under the strictest interpretations of the law, not a murderer. But I doubted it. There was no way someone who could do this would be content with those who could never offer even a token resistance.

  Either way, this was someone who had needed to be put down.

  I wanted to find Arlene safe and sound and—God forbid—not in one of these boxes. But a secret part of me was glad I’d ended Fowler’s miserable life. I wasn’t proud of it. It actually brought more of the nausea rushing back. But as I surveyed Fowler’s macabre sepulcher, I couldn’t shake the thought.

  I did a quick look into the other stalls. Four were filled with the same boxes. I revised my count of Fowler’s victims upward again. There might well have been hundreds of boxes stacked there. They had to be synthetics, at least most of them; if that many “real” people had disappeared it would have popped on the NLPD’s radar. How many Fowlers were out there? How many synthetics had been slaughtered for sport or to assuage the dark hunger of their masters?

  None of this was helping Silas get the door to the Quonset hut opened. If Arlene, or whomever Silas was aft
er, were in here, they were past helping. The final stall, however, was not filled with boxes, but rather housed a compact Kubota tractor. It was a newer model, powered by a hydrogen cell rather than a gas engine, but it looked to have all the trimmings, including a small bulldozer blade attached to the front.

  Time to try a different key.

  Chapter 28

  Silas was still working on the door.

  “Out of the way!”

  He looked over his shoulder, and then his eyes widened in surprise and his jaw actually dropped.

  When I saw that look, I laughed. Hard. Tears-in-my-eyes, doubled-over-the-steering-wheel, fighting-to-keep-my-seat kind of laughing.

  I must have looked like a fucking train wreck. Guy in a suit, dirty, bloody, beaten, with bags under his eyes riding a bright orange tractor and laughing like a wild man? The mental self-image made me laugh all the harder.

  Silas probably thought I’d cracked. Hell, maybe I had. But when you’ve got a ton or so of crazy-driven steel coming your way, you move. Silas got out of Dodge.

  Right before impact, a horrible thought flashed through my head. What if Arlene was standing on the other side of that door? I took the pedal off the metal, but it was too late.

  I was thrown forward against the steering wheel. The fact that I’d been hunched over it with a debilitating case of the giggles probably helped, at least insofar as the steering wheel was driven into my gut rather than having me go careening over it into the door. The sharp force drove the air from my lungs and cut my laughter short.

  I sat gasping for breath like a landed fish while staring through tear-blurred eyes at the Quonset hut.

  It had a very good door. I couldn’t be entirely sure, but I didn’t think the tractor had done more than scratch the paint.

  Fortunately, that marvelous door had been set into a wooden frame that had, in turn, been bolted to the steel of the Quonset hut. I hadn’t hurt any of the steel, beyond maybe bending a bolt here or there, but the force had been enough to tear the entire wooden frame from the rest of the building and send it crashing to the floor, along with the door it housed.

  “Have you lost your mind, Detective?” Silas demanded.

  I couldn’t answer. Still didn’t have the breath. I waved a hand at the now open door and fumbled with the pedals until I managed to back the tractor up a few feet. I felt the meaning was clear enough: mission accomplished, now get your ass in there. He gave me a long look, but then hurried into the building.

  I didn’t wait for little things like being able to breathe again. I toppled off the tractor and staggered in behind him.

  And then stopped. And stared.

  The Quonset hut was all one open room, probably a thousand square feet of usable floor space. It had been tiled—floor, sloping walls, ceiling—in a stark white ceramic that reminded me of a cheap public restroom. There were four stainless steel tables, of a kind I’d seen all too often at the city morgue. Two of the tables were occupied.

  One held a girl at that awkward age between childhood and the first blush of adulthood that seemed all elbows and knees and insecurity. It was Hernandez’s daughter. She was strapped down to the table, without a stitch of clothing and staring at the door with stark, wide eyes. My first panicked thought was that we were too late, and I was staring at a body, but no, her chest rose and fell and those doe-like eyes were still bright with life. She was alive. And she was absolutely terrified.

  But that wasn’t what had made me stop.

  The second occupied table held a woman. Young, probably in her later teens. Her face was turned away, as if she did not want to see whatever might have come crashing through the door. Her head had been shaved, and I could quite clearly see the skin tag that marked her as a synthetic. She, too, was completely naked.

  She was also very noticeably pregnant.

  Which was impossible.

  “Yes,” Silas hissed, with an exultant note of satisfaction.

  It occurred to me that we were both standing in a destroyed doorway leering at a pair of naked, helpless girls. OK, not leering. More staring in stunned shock. But from their perspective, it probably looked like leering. And one of those girls was a scared kid. For the moment, I put the entire idea of a pregnant synthetic—impossible, cannot happen—out of my head, and rushed to the table where Hernandez’s daughter was strapped down.

  “It’s OK, Arlene,” I said. “I work with your mom, OK? I’m Detective Campbell.” I flashed my badge out of habit, but I was already looking around the room for something to cover the poor girl. The bloodied and befouled rag of my suit coat was clearly not an option.

  “My mom?” The words were barely above a whisper, but there was a note of longing and hope that was, quite simply, heartbreaking.

  “That’s right, Arlene.” She was held to the table with canvas straps. They were cinched down tight enough to leave red, irritated-looking indentations in her skin. The only thing she could move was her head.

  “Let’s get these off of you, OK? Don’t be scared now. It’s over.” I could hear Silas speaking softly with the other woman, too softly to make out the words. I didn’t hear any fear or panic, though.

  The straps probably had some sort of catch or release, but I wasn’t going to make a scared little girl wait while I fumbled about her naked body looking for a release mechanism. Instead, I flicked open my knife.

  I hesitated for a moment. Those straps looked tight. Maybe tight enough to restrict circulation. “Are your arms and legs asleep? Numb feeling?”

  She nodded.

  “OK. This isn’t going to feel very good, Arlene. Pins and needles like when your foot falls asleep and you try to walk around on it. You know what I mean?”

  She nodded again. “I’m ready. Please. Just get me out.”

  “Here we go.” With a few quick slices I severed the straps.

  She gasped and immediately tried to curl into a ball on the table, numbed arms moving in an awkward attempt to shield her nudity. “Just a minute more, Arlene, while I find you something to wear. Then we’re getting you out of this hellhole.”

  “Detective.”

  I turned to find Silas offering me a white, hospital-style bed sheet. The pregnant synthetic was sitting up on the edge of her table, a similar sheet draped casually around her shoulders, but doing little to hide her nudity as she rubbed at her own arms and legs in an effort to restore blood flow.

  “Thanks.” I took the sheet and covered Arlene. She clutched it tightly around herself. Then she looked at me with fear and hope and the tiniest bit of shame all warring across her face. “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  It was such a normal thing to say or want or need that I almost smiled. But I knew that smiling would be the exact wrong thing to do. “Can you walk yet?” I asked instead.

  In response, she levered herself up on the table and tentatively eased off the edge. For a moment, she teetered there, and then took one tottering step. She nodded. “Can we maybe hurry? That asshole put us there a long time ago.” She hesitated. “You maybe don’t need to tell my mom I said ‘asshole.’”

  I did laugh at that. “Special dispensation, kid. I think she’d be OK with it. And we can hurry just as much as you can. Unless you want me to carry you?”

  “No!” she said immediately and with feeling.

  I nodded. No doubt she’d had more than enough of strange men picking her up. “But maybe I could lean on your arm?” she added. I smiled and offered it to her.

  Silas had the other woman up as well. “Are you OK?” I asked.

  “I can walk,” she said. Her voice was soft, musical. Pretty. As were her features, with that eerie symmetry that said she had been either a toy or someone slotted for the service industry. I didn’t ask about the pregnancy, not yet.

  “Let’s get you ladies into the house. There are bathrooms, food, and water and, with
a touch of luck, we’ll find something a little warmer than bed sheets.”

  “What if the asshole comes back?” Arlene asked.

  “He won’t be coming back, child,” Silas said. “Not ever again.”

  She tilted her head in thought. “Good.” She smiled, and it was like the sun coming up.

  * * * *

  Fowler’s house had three bathrooms. I helped Arlene to one while Silas escorted the young synthetic to a second. Then I made my way to the third.

  I needed to clean up. Wash off the blood. Bind my wounds.

  I needed to sleep.

  Fuck. I needed to call Hernandez. Arlene was probably desperate to see her mother, or at least hear from her, and God knew Hernandez was probably climbing the fucking walls by now, since no ransom request had come in to her.

  I couldn’t though. Not yet. I knew she had to be freaking out. I knew she’d be pissed when she found out I had waited to call. But as soon as I made that call, half of the law enforcement officers in the parish would descend upon Fowler’s lair. And then they’d find the pregnant synthetic. I couldn’t let that happen, so Arlene and Hernandez both would have to wait for an hour or two more.

  I wasn’t sure what would happen then. And I needed to talk to Silas about it. And the girl. And Arlene.

  I shook my head and stripped off my jacket and shirt, leaving me in a plain white undershirt. The blood from the slashes on my arms had dried and scabbed, and pulling the scabs away with the cloth sent sharp jolts of pain across the wounds. I welcomed it, since it worked better than caffeine to clear the haze of exhaustion.

  There was hydrogen peroxide in the medicine cabinet. No gauze, but a little rummaging revealed a box of butterfly bandages. I took both and set to work. Pulling away the scabs had hurt. Washing the slashes with some hand soap and one of Fowler’s towels was unpleasant. The hydrogen peroxide was a special kind of fun. I managed, just, to keep from screaming. The butterfly bandages couldn’t quite cover the slashes, but they helped press the wounds closed. I didn’t bother to put the shirt or jacket back on—both were ruined anyway, and there was a certain adolescent satisfaction in leaving them lying on Fowler’s floor. The evidence techs would want them anyway. There was no hiding the fact that I’d killed Fowler, and no way I could mask where I’d found Arlene, either. Besides, the techs needed to comb through the…remains…in the barn. Try to identify them. Since I doubted Fowler was only murdering synthetics, maybe give closure to some poor families out there.