Plane of the Godless

by Peter Hartz

  After the fifth near miss, an enraged Borysko had told his boss to investigate everyone in the traffic center, to see if they had any ties to organized crime or a criminal record, but nothing had come up. Regular updates to the background checks they were required to undergo when starting the position ensured that no one was working the other side of the street.

  Then the unthinkable happened. The truck left the country. They weren’t sure how, but it was possible that they paid off the border guard in advance who just waved them through. The truth was much simpler, though. He worked a predictable, regular shift. The slavers had made an effort to always send their truck through at the times when the same guard was on duty, and familiarity with the driver and what he was hauling had caused his attention to detail to wane. Had he figured out that all the previous trips the truck took through that international checkpoint were designed to put the guards at ease, he might have been more vigilant, but the ‘special cargo’ the truck had carried lately had only been on the last two trips, long after the guards were convinced that the nice older farmer delivering produce was on the up and up.

  For the most part, he was, too. He owned a farm, and sold that produce at farmers markets in Georgia. No one really asked him why he would travel an extra three days to sell his product, but if they had, he would have told them they paid more in Georgia for his somewhat exotic cargo. Which was also true. It just so happened that he had an arrangement with a distant cousin to earn some extra money that his farming business desperately needed.

  The rest of his team had turned back reluctantly at the border, wishing they could continue. Yevtukh understood their feelings. They would be quite far out of their jurisdiction. One or two vowed to come with, until he ordered them to return. The going was slower after that, but he got lucky a couple times. Once at a petrol station, where he told the clerk that the truck had backed into his car, and another time at a restaurant where the truck had delivered a small load of squash and green beans.

  He knew that he had fallen much too far behind to just continue rushing onwards, so he had stopped just over the border, and called his supervisor. Several senior members of the special police force for fighting organized crime had convened a hurried ad-hoc meeting, with Borysko involved by cell phone. He had listened patiently while several people dredged up the latest intelligence information they had on movements of the kidnappers and slavers that had been seen, and the pattern and information they had so far matched one particular group, a Georgian crime group known for kidnapping young girls, and forcing them into prostitution. There were a few other possible places that they might go, but for the most part, almost all of the girls ended up in an illegal brothel in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia. With a whispered prayer to God above, he continued on the trail, hoping it was the right one.

  The trail had led him here. He wasn’t sure how far behind his daughter’s kidnappers he was, but was certain that it was no more than 24 hours. Seeing the police presence, his intuition told him that something might have happened here concerning his daughter.

  Now he turned the Georgian inspector, and said, “My daughter was kidnapped four days ago in Sebastopol. I think she may have been brought here.”

  Gnezy couldn’t keep the wince from his face. “Can you identify what she was wearing?”

  “What do you mean?” Fear gripped him; fear, and something else only a father of a teenage daughter might recognize.

  “We found some clothing a teenage girl must have been wearing, given its size and styling. There is no sign of the girl, however,” he added hastily as the light in the Ukrainian’s eyes suddenly blazed.

  Borysko sighed. “Yes, I should be able to.” He tried to keep his emotions in check, but the fear was winning.

  The ripped and torn clothing in the evidence bags handed to him by the Georgian inspector was definitely what his daughter had been wearing four days ago when he’d seen her last. He looked up at Gnezy, and his worry and concern threatened to overwhelm him. “I am almost certain it is hers. You say she is not here? What happened? Why are all these police officers here?”

  Gnezy paused, considering his next move carefully. Borysko Yevtukh was a father whose daughter had been in the crime scene at some point, this was true, but he was also one of the most respected law enforcement specialists in the entire region. If anyone could make sense of what had happened here, it might be the middle-aged Ukrainian in front of him.

  That last thought drove his thinking, and he found himself speaking before he knew it. “Come with me. We have no idea what happened. I think that we may never really know. I must warn you, though; the scene is a house of horrors. I have never seen anything like this before. Never seen anything this… bad.”

  As Borysko looked at the other man, he saw revulsion in his eyes, and suddenly wondered if that greyish-green sheen had been there all along, or if it had shown up as the man spoke. He had no idea what to think about that, but nodded his head. His daughter, his beloved Svetlana, named for his own dear grandmother on his mother’s side, had been here. Steel filled him as he knew he could endure anything to find her, and he had a career of seeing crime scenes and witnessing first-hand the horrors man could inflict on his fellow man behind him. That, and his complete professionalism and experience, would get him though what he was about to see – would get him through to find his little girl. He knew this as well as he knew his own name.

  He was wrong. It was indescribable. The first room he was taken to, where his Svetlana’s clothing had been found, was bad enough. The destroyed remains of what had once been a big, strong, young man lay strewn on the floor in front of the crude bed, and blood had sprayed everywhere. The most was on the floor under the… parts, but it was everywhere and on everything, even the ceiling. But the most horrific assault on his senses was the smell of blood, flesh, gore, and the contents of the dead man’s intestines.

  Borysko was pale and shaking as he backed out of the room, and a tiny, detached part of his mind was inanely happy about not stepping in anything… bad.

  Gnezy looked at the other man, and waited for him to recover his composure. When Borysko looked up at him, he said, “You do not have to see the rest, if you wish. It is up to you.”

  Borysko shook his head. “I must know. I can get through this. I must, for…”

  Gnezy merely nodded. He had two daughters, who would a few years younger than the missing girl must be, based on the size of the clothing they had found and Borysko had identified.

  He turned, and walked further down the long hallway. Borysko noticed the smashed-in doorway, and it made him wonder. Then he looked down at the floor, and for the first time, noticed the bloody footprints leading down the hall from the room.

  They had obviously not been made by anyone wearing shoes, and his breath caught in his throat as he realized that whatever had torn apart the criminal in the other room must have made them.

  He bent down and studied them, and was very surprised when he realized that they were very unusual. If it was a tiger or bear or some other predator, the print in front of him would not look this way. They were almost man-shaped, but there was a pattern to the blood left behind that made Borysko think of snake scales, or something similar. But the most shocking thing about the imprint was the gouge marks in the floor at the front of the print.

  It was hard to notice in the subdued lighting of the environment, but once looked at in the proper angle, he could tell that they were there. The claws had to be razor sharp to dig into the hardwood floor like that, and there was blood left in the indentations. They were also laid out similar to the position of human toes, with the furthest-forward indentation on the inside, and the rest slanting out and back towards the outside of the foot.

  He grimaced at the puzzle the bloody tracks represented, then stood, following the Georgian Senior Inspector further down the hallway to the smashed-open door. Gnezy paused, warning Borysko with his eyes that this was going to be bad, and he took a deep breath to steady hims
elf. He immediately regretted it. The smell was unbelievably worse here. He held his breath as he stepped into the room and glanced around.

  His professionalism warred with the contents of his stomach, each trying to assert itself as the pinnacle that demanded the most attention. For the moment, his professionalism was winning, but he knew that his guts would win if he stuck around too long. A brief glance around the room, and his eyes locked onto something that his mind could process. Tracks, identical to the strange ones in the hallway, led beyond the slaughter to another door that was hanging half off its hinges, exposing a stairway that also had bloody prints from the mystery being on it. The light in the stairwell to indicate that it led directly to the outdoors, and he glanced at Gnezy, who simply said, “We can take the other way around.”

  Borysko nodded, and stepped around the puddle of someone else’s lunch that he only now just noticed on the floor outside the kitchen that was now a small pocket of hell.

  He knew that he would not shed a tear for the animals that had kidnapped his daughter, and wondered secretly inside what had done this. Nothing came to mind.

  Just as the Georgian officers before him, he had no idea what had turned the illegal business into a slaughter house, then left those impossible, bloody, clawed footprints everywhere and in the narrow back alley behind the building. Gnezy pointed out how the footprints ended, but the drops of blood continued for a few meters beyond, getting more spread out the further away from the end of the prints, and the evidence did not spur any great insights of his own.

  “I can think of nothing and no one that be able to have done this. Certainly, nothing comes to mind. I can contact my department back in Ukraine to see if anyone else has heard about this, if you wish.”

  “I need to confer with my superiors before doing so, but I expect that this will not present a problem. I have no idea how to explain any of this, either. I suspect that we never will be able to do so with any success,” Gnezy offered, and his sincerity came across clearly in the slowly alley darkening as the sun set in the west.

  Chapter 19

  Most police calls, even ones where a body was discovered, are somewhat similar, and yet there are elements that are completely different to each one. No murder was exactly the same. Whether the method of death, the scene, the surroundings, the amount of blood and gore; no two were the same in that regard. But there was always a body. Once in a while, there were some living people there, either those that lived at the location, family members or friends, or a possible perpetrator or perpetrators. But as always, the deceased would never be able to tell what had truly happened.

  Officer Danielle Corrigan had been to several crime scenes involving a deceased victim over the nearly twelve years she had spent with the Chicago Police Department. It went with the territory in a metropolitan area with one of the highest per-capita murder rates in the country. Her partner, however, had graduated from the Chicago Police and Firefighter Academy barely three months ago.

  Danielle was rather fond of her partner, in a strictly professional way. He was a great young man, a former Military Police enlisted man from the Air Force. By his own previous admission to her privately, he had never seen a dead body. She could see on his face as he drove up to the scene in the late afternoon sun that he was a little pale.

  “You gonna be ok, Mike?”

  He kinda smiled back at her. “I can get through it. No worries.” She wasn’t sure if she believed him, but that was ok. He would survive.

  Danielle thought back over the call as they turned down the last street. Someone called in to report the sound of gunshots in a quiet part of town. A person, possibly male, was seen running away from the house afterwards. Whoever had called it in said they looked into the house, and saw blood and a body in the kitchen. But they didn’t want to get involved, so they said they weren’t going to wait for the police.

  She pulled up and stopped, the emergency lights on the top of their patrol car dancing off the neighborhood houses and trees in the late summer midday sun, and they stepped out, making their way up the walk. On the off chance that whoever may have done this was still in the area, they both had their hands near their still-holstered side arms.

  Clearing the house had been relatively straight forward, after confirming that the person was in fact dead. The officers came back to the kitchen, and called in an update to the dispatcher, who said the crime-scene technicians were on their way, along with a detective to start the investigation.

  The deceased was laying on the tile floor next to the table just outside of the main portion of the kitchen, with a counter-top separating the appliances and sink from the rest of the area. The thirty-something Caucasian male was laying on his back, obviously dead with what appeared to be three gunshot wounds to the chest. His short hair, well groomed appearance, and dress shirt and slacks indicated someone who worked in a white-collar profession. There were no signs of struggle anywhere.

  Danielle was looking around to see about the crime scene, when a slight movement caught her eye.

  Standing quickly, her weapon just seemed to teleport to her hand, and she faced the form she saw standing in front of the stove, on the far side of the counter that bordered the cooking area of the kitchen.

  “Don’t move! Hands up! Come forward!” The commands came easy, and Officer Mike Dunphy stepped to the side to bracket the person while also keeping Danielle’s field of fire clear. The figure’s hands went up, but his face was not clearly visible in the darkened kitchen. Danielle had a sense of a male, probably the same age as the victim, and seemed to be dressed similarly.

  “What happened?” The voice sounded muffled and confused, as if the person was standing behind a thick cloth or curtain.

  “Sir, you need to step forward into the light. Do it now.”

  The figure looked at her, then stepped tentatively forward – passing through the counter on his way into the lighted area next to the body on the floor. And as he passed into the lighted area near the table, Danielle gasped as she got a good look at him.

  The person that had just walked through the counter top and cabinets was a perfect match for the man on the floor, which made Danielle’s mind start to skitter like a deer on an icy lake.

  The figure looked down at the body on the floor, and a gasping sob came from him. He suddenly blurred slightly, and the officers both inhaled sharply as the figure became indistinct to the point that they could see through him.

  “Oh no! Sandra! My children!” He fell to his knees next to his body, and sobbed uncontrollably.

  Shock froze Danielle, but Mike somehow shook himself free of the paralysis they both found themselves under, and holstered his gun as he knelt on the floor next to the… man? Ghost?

  “Sir, is that… are you… uhh…”

  “Yes, that’s me. I... I must be dead.” The sound came out barely audible, in between sobs.

  “Do you remember what happened?” Danielle almost laughed hysterically at her partner’s question, but kept her wits under control.

  The man started to speak, when they all heard footsteps coming down the short hallway from the front door.

  Brad Dennisov had been a detective and investigator for several years in the Chicago PD, long enough to know that he should never believe he’d seen everything because that was when the next shocking thing would pop up and remind him of his insignificance in the grand scheme of things.

  But when he turned the corner to the kitchen, he was initially confused. Why were these two uniformed officers letting a civilian contaminate the crime scene?

  “What’s going on here? Who is this man, and why…” He broke off when the man looked up with tears in his eyes, and shimmered, appearing to go somewhat insubstantial and see-through. Shock froze him in place at the impossible happening.

  “Sir,” the younger male officer spoke up, “It appears that this is the ghost of the man who was killed here tonight.” The tone of his voice was somewhere between strangled by stress, and hysteric
al.

  Brad looked over to the man kneeling next to the corpse, noting that other than the bloody gunshot wounds on the dead man’s torso, the two were dead ringers for each other. Then he winced internally at the sick pun he had just unintentionally thought.

  “Is that true, sir?” Brad’s voice was calm and gentle, the voice of someone used to dealing with distraught relatives on the worst day of their lives – when they had just lost, or even, God forbid, witnessed the death of, a beloved family member or friend.

  “Yes. I remember now. He shot me, and then he ran out the back door.”

  “Wait, let me try something.” The senior female officer pulled out her smart phone, then held it up sideways. “Recording video. I want to see…” She trailed off as she did something on her phone, and nodded a few moments later. “We can record him and what he says.”

  “Good idea, officer.” Brad turned back to the ghost. “Can you tell us what happened? Who did this?”

  “Yes. It was my younger brother. He wanted money from me he claimed that I owed him. I have no idea what he was talking about. I don’t owe him any money. I don’t think my wife Sandra owes him anything, either. I make… crap. This is impossible.” A hoarse sob came from him again. “I made good money. I have never been in debt; well, other than the mortgage, the cars, that sort of thing.” He took a deep breath, and seemed to shimmer again, before disappearing completely for a few seconds. Then he came back, seemingly more substantial, as he took in a deep breath and held it before letting it go.

  “Do you know why I am still here? Have you ever seen this happen before?” His pleading eyes bored into Brad.

  “No, sir, I haven’t. I am really glad you are, so we can solve who did this, and make it right.” Brad took a breath in as the totally impossible situation slowly became a little more normal, whatever that was. “Can you tell us your name, and the name of the person that shot you?”

  “My name is Henry Allen Tomlinson. My younger brother, James David Tomlinson, killed me. He had a gun. I can remember it better and better now.”