by Brian Parker
“So you’re on the side of the clones?”
“Certainly. You may think I’m only one misstep away from Sabatier Island, Detective, but I’m much cleaner than you give me credit for.”
“Hmpf. I doubt it.”
He let the insult slide. “My company has been in the development phase for years. Clones feel; they have emotions, they reason and they seek self-preservation. Seems like they’re pretty human to me, even if they are grown in a laboratory. Genetically, they are one hundred percent compatible with humans and I believe they are a viable option for companionship for millions of lonely people. Part of that is affording the clones certain rights; chief among those is granting them basic human rights—like protection against murder.”
“Companionship. If that takes off, you’d be one of the richest men in America. Maybe even the whole damned planet.”
“Yes, I will be. However, as a compassionate person, I want to see the clones treated fairly, but it’s not entirely altruistic. We’re on the brink of earning billions, maybe even trillions, in the clone industry and I don’t want that opportunity spoiled because the government can’t see the truth and grant the clones rights.”
“Hmpf,” I grunted again. “How many clones did you sell to this Joseph Kleer?”
“Thirty-eight. Of those, we’ve recovered the bodies of four more, all of them mutilated beyond belief. Those, plus the three from Saturday still leaves us with thirty-one unaccounted for.”
“That’s a lot of clones to track down.”
“I know,” Voodoo sighed, making a face like he’d taken a sip of curdled milk. “I swear to you, I didn’t know what these people were going to do when I sold the initial batch. I figured they’d end up as prostitutes or private house servants for people who mistrusted droids. Nothing like this though.”
“Since you know so much about this stuff, please tell me you know where they’re hosting next.”
“I do. And I want you to bring them back to me—alive.”
“You’re shitting me, right?” I asked.
“No. I know the block where the club is located. It’ll be up to you to determine which building it’s taking place in.”
He’d thrown me a softball. If I wanted to put an end to the torture tourism, it was up to me to hit it out of the park.
“Give me the details,” I hissed.
NINE: MONDAY
The darkness concealed me as I stalked toward what I believed was the target building. Out of the four buildings on the block, the warehouse was the logical choice to host the events that Voodoo described. It was a giant, dilapidated building with roll-up doors that the clients could drive their cars into and be hidden from view.
I’d briefly considered requesting official police backup before going in, but since this was so far outside the realm of my responsibilities, I knew that Brubaker wouldn’t authorize it. I settled instead for a drone and my partner. Unfortunately, Drake called out sick, so it was just me and the drone.
“I want you to scan the warehouse,” I ordered as I pressed my back against a building to get under a slight overhang. Heavy sheets of cold rain fell out of the sky above, adding to the concealment that I desired, but made for a miserable experience. “Tell me how many people are in there.”
“Understood,” the drone responded. “Unit One Six Four needs to achieve an altitude of one hundred fifty-seven feet to properly scan the entire building.”
“Uh… Sure. Go on, do your thing.”
The drone drifted upward slowly, the whirring of its rotors the only thing that gave away its presence in the inky darkness. I watched until I couldn’t see it anymore and then slowly continued toward the building.
I didn’t know what I expected to find. Hopefully, we’d make some quick and easy arrests and that would be the end of it. Too bad I’m a realist and didn’t believe my own line of BS; this was probably going to get ugly. There was apparently way too much money involved for the assholes to just roll over and let me take it away from them.
Angling around to the back side of the building, I did my best to avoid the homeless who sought shelter from the elements under the old awnings. They were mostly harmless, like the thousands of other homeless in Easytown, but they could also be used as an early warning system by the people inside. One guy with a phone could ruin the element of surprise quickly.
I stopped in the shadow of the building next to my destination and looked around. The warehouse was made up of two connected buildings. The first was the large storage building where I’d noted the gamblers’ cars could be hidden. Next to that was a small, square two-story building that must have originally been the offices. By Easytown standards, the buildings were ancient; they must have been one of the first attempts at a business in the district when the city built the new levees.
Circling the building was a decrepit chain link fence that had seen better days—I was guaranteed to get tetanus if I even walked near the damn thing. It was down in several places, the fence posts leaning drunkenly and the fence lying flat on the ground. Besides the fear of getting an infection, it wasn’t a deterrent for me to get inside.
Small ventilation windows ran the length of the larger building, set high above the ground, so those wouldn’t be any use to me. I’d probably have to go in through what I thought were offices, either through the door or through a window.
The drone was high above me. I could barely see the red and white navigation lights on the thing. It was scanning the building as I’d requested, but was taking much longer than I thought it should. I wanted to get in, bust these guys and get out.
I was about to leave the damn thing and go on my own when my phone rang. I looked at the display, the goddamned drone was calling me.
“Yeah?”
“Scan complete, Detective Forrest. There is one human inside the office building on the second floor. No other humans are alive inside.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. The way it said that last sentence made me wonder about dead humans.
My phone automatically projected a hologram of the building into the air in front of me. The rain broke up the image and caused a slight distortion that made it difficult to see in some places. Worse, I hated when freaking droids took over my electronics.
“Unit One Six Four detected one human heartbeat on the second floor.”
The hologram shifted, rotating rapidly and zooming in on the second floor where a bright red dot pulsed slow and steady in rhythm with a heartbeat. After a couple of seconds, the image shifted and several green circles flashed across the second floor.
“There are eight masses of organic material that may indicate human remains.”
“Well shit,” I cursed. I got here too late. “What else is there?”
The image flashed brightly with more white dots than I could count. “Hundreds of lesser life forms, likely rodents, are now indicated on the schematic.”
“Rats. I don’t care about them. What else about the building?”
“At this time, there is nothing else significant to report.”
“I’m going in,” I told the drone. I’d hoped to arrive during the betting and get a recording of it so I could legally bust all of these assholes, but it looked like I was too late. Since there was only one person left inside, I could bust them quickly and then figure out what to charge him with. “I want you to provide overwatch. Continue to scan the building and the perimeter to alert me of any threats. Got it?”
“Understood, Detective.”
I put my phone away and inserted an earpiece before running at a crouch from the shadows where I’d received One Six Four’s report. As I ran, I noticed a door on the warehouse that I hadn’t seen from across the street, so I angled toward it. Entering the warehouse at the farthest point from the person in the attached offices would help me maintain the element of surprise.
The downed chain link fence rattled impossibly loud in the night, making me cringe. He had to have heard that, I thought. No time to stop
, I had to keep going.
I made it to the door. Dammit! A heavy padlock secured the outside, plus it opened outward, so trying to kick it in would be useless. I thought about running around to another door, but decided against it and pulled the Aegis from its holster. The end of the barrel made a slight clinking sound as I pressed it against the shackle and squeezed the trigger.
The Smith and Wesson Aegis shot five, tightly-grouped lasers out to one hundred feet. The lasers lost strength over that distance, until they dwindled to a non-lethal effect at max range. Within the first fifty feet, however, the Aegis lasers punched holes through nearly everything in their path.
I caught the padlock before it hit the ground and set it gently on the concrete slab at the base of the door. The door swung outward with only a slight, rusty squeak at the end. When I slipped inside, I saw that the Aegis had melted a thumb-sized hole through the doorjamb and burnt out on the concrete floor.
I slid the laser pistol back into the holster and drew my service pistol as the water sluiced off my overcoat, puddling at my feet. Then, I put on a pair of bulky glasses that amplified the ambient light coming through the high windows to create a visible image inside the lenses. Besides the unnerving sight of near blackness around the edges and to the side, the glasses lit up the room like it was early morning or dusk.
The floor of the warehouse was empty. Long tables, once used to prepare products that came through this place, were shoved to the side against the wall and stacked on top of one another to allow room for vehicle parking.
I wondered where the car was for the man upstairs. It was odd, unless he lived nearby, took a taxi or rode the bus, but the nearest stop was about eight blocks away. None of those options seemed like something a person with a lot of cash on hand would do.
“One Six Four, are you sure there’s somebody in here?” I whispered into the microphone on my collar. “The place looks deserted.”
“Affirmative,” the drone replied in my earpiece. “The human that Unit One Six Four detected eight minutes ago is still in the same location as previously reported.”
“Is he asleep?”
“Unknown. The figure appears to be horizontal.”
Even better. If I could sneak in and get to this guy while he was asleep, I wouldn’t need to worry about a gunfight. Not that I’m worried about it.
I jogged across the open space to a door leading into the offices and slipped inside. There was barely enough light to see anything, so I switched on a micro infrared light on the glasses’ frame. The IR light was invisible to the naked eye, but shown like a flashlight in the darkness when viewed with the lenses I wore.
The first floor of the building was empty, as expected. Whatever office furniture had been here in the past was long gone. All of the refuse I’d expected to see in an abandoned building had been cleaned out; the place looked like it was ready to be used by any legitimate business.
I checked each of the rooms quickly to make sure that I wouldn’t have a nasty surprise sneak up on me when I was going up the stairs. It wasn’t that I mistrusted the drone’s scan, I was a member of the club who followed the old adage: Trust, but verify.
Especially with my life on the line.
The rooms were all empty, except for one which held a trashcan full of bloody bandages, used tubes of antibacterial cream, syringes and empty meal replacement bottles. I’m in the right place.
Thankfully, the stairs leading to the second floor were poured concrete, not wood or metal that would have given me away to anyone in the building. I made sure to place my foot firmly on each step before moving up the curving stairs, there was no room for a stupid error like tripping.
A door at the top of the stairs blocked the landing, so I leaned against it and listened. Everything was quiet inside. The person the drone detected must still be asleep.
Wait! I heard something.
I passed the SIG Sauer into my left hand and wiped away the sweat on my pant leg. It was useless, my pants were already damp from standing in the rain outside. I transferred the pistol back into my firing hand and placed my palm on the doorknob.
I stepped into the room, prepared for the worst. Instead, the place felt more like a veterinarian’s office than a sadistic torture room.
Large metal crates lined the wall immediately to the left. Each had a blanket or pillow, it was difficult to tell through the night vision, but they were empty. The crates appeared to be clean—in fact, the entire place looked and smelled clean. The odor of antiseptic masked whatever had been in here before and what likely happened here on a nightly basis.
It made sense. To keep the clones relatively free from infection, and to keep the fun going, the people running this place would have to make sure everything was spotless. It probably helped them attract a high-class crowd, instead of street hustlers, as well. I could imagine gamblers and their well-dressed dates sitting around watching the events while they sipped champagne eating heavy hors d’oeuvres. Cleanliness was a must for those types of people.
“Detective.”
I paused and backed against the doorframe. “What?” I hissed at the drone.
“When you entered the second floor, an electronic signal began transmitting.”
“What’s it say?”
“Unclear. It appears to be only a warning alarm.”
Well shit. They know I’m here now. “Thanks. Keep an eye out for anyone coming to assist.”
I pushed away from the wall and advanced rapidly into the room. Chairs surrounded a large circular cage in the middle of the main room. This must have been where the fights, torture, or whatever else those sick bastards had in mind happened. I crept forward into the gloom. Dark smudges on the floor showed where blood had been spilled and then left too long to clear away completely.
I glanced at the inside of the cage. A small table holding an assortment of scalpels, pokers, knives, pliers and a blowtorch sat off to one side. Manacles extended from a metal ring set in the ceiling and two pairs of handcuffs were bolted to either end of a stained wooden block, used to keep the victim’s legs spread apart. More handcuffs rested at evenly spaced intervals around the cage, the clones were likely forced to watch what happened to their fellow prisoners, waiting in horror for whatever the sick bastards had in store for them.
Sitting on the floor beside the table was a set of jumper cables attached to a small generator on wheels and several buckets holding different liquids and powders. I wondered which one held the sulfuric acid that had been used liberally on one of the female victims we’d found in the garbage compactor.
“Where is the perp in relation to me?” I whispered, barely audible to the microphone.
“You are in the main space on the second floor. To the north, you should see a doorway. The human is in there.”
I glanced around the room. There were three doorways leading off the main room. I’d gotten completely turned around when I entered the building and went up the curved stairwell. “I don’t know which way is north. Tell me left or right from the way I’m pointing.”
I held out the Sig Sauer with one hand, aiming it directly at the door in front of me.
“To your left is the room where the heartbeat originates from as well as the organic matter which may be human corpses.”
I turned left and walked rapidly to the door. The only sound I heard was a ragged breath.
A well-placed front kick right below the handle sent the door flying inward. “Police! Don’t move!” I shouted.
The wave of odor hit me hard. The small room smelled of raw meat, the metallic odor of blood tickled my nose and made me want to vomit. A naked woman rolled away from me, shrieking. All around her, corpses lay piled up like cordwood, wrapped in plastic sheets. She scooted backward into the corner created by the bodies.
I spun, quickly trying to determine if there was anyone else in the room. “One Six Four, report,” I ordered.
“You are in the room with the only human, Detective.”
I fumbled behind myself until I found the light switch, then winced at the sudden bright light before taking my night vision glasses off. I glanced at the woman. Blood ran from dozens of lesser injuries and one eye appeared to be swollen shut. Nasty red and black welts shown across her fore and upper arm where she’d likely tried to block an object from hitting her in the head. She’d seen better days and judging by the stack of bodies, was lucky to be alive.
“Call emergency medical services and tell them we have a female clone in need of assistance.” I thought for a moment and then added, “Also, secure the perimeter. Nobody comes in until I clear them. I think we hit this place in between events and that signal you detected was an alarm.”
“Wilco, Detective.”
I holstered my weapon and held up my hands. “I’m Detective Zach Forrest. I’m a police officer. I won’t hurt you.”
She stared at me, a wild look in her eyes. I didn’t know if she wanted to flee or try to kill me.
“Do you understand me?” I asked.
I took a step and she responded by screaming. I retreated once again and crouched down. “I won’t hurt you,” I repeated.
“Detective,” the drone called in my ear.
“Yeah?”
“The dispatcher has denied to support your request for assistance since the patient is a clone.”
“What?” I yelled, further startling the woman, who tried to bury herself under the bodies. “What do you mean?”
“Clones are not considered human, nor are they legally alive. The city will not expend precious medical resources to care for a clone.”
“Fuck. Andi?”
“Yes, boss?” she answered immediately.
“I need you to call Dr. Wellington. He owes me a favor and I’m calling it in.”