“All this evidence lines up with what one of my informants told me,” Erik mentioned. “And another informant mentioned this might involve the Scar. He said the Militia was stepping up patrols.”
“Yes, and that’s what worries me. The Shadow Zone’s not as huge as Uptown, but it’s still a big place. If we’re finally starting to see bodies, there are probably a lot more that we haven’t found yet. They might have the Militia guarding it, but most people don’t go to the Scar since they’re afraid of contamination. I can see someone getting through the patrol lines without much trouble if they really want to. Everyone likes to pretend they’ve got it locked up tighter than it actually is.” Captain Ragnar reached to his right and killed the hologram. “I know you’re going to do your best, but we got lucky on this one. I don’t want to bother you with the politics, but even though there were some higher-ups pushing our way, there were others who wanted this to go straight to CID agents.”
“Why?” Jia asked. “A murder, even a brutal murder, isn’t something that calls for them right away. Do they have other information about who might be behind the murder?”
The captain shrugged. “I don’t know. Not every turf war is a conspiracy, but let’s try to wrap this up as quickly as possible before someone above us decides that us metro cops should stay in our lane. Agreed?”
Erik and Jia nodded.
“Good,” Captain Ragnar replied. “Now, do what you do best, and be careful out there. I’ve got a bad feeling about this one.”
A couple of hours later, Jia and Erik walked down a cracked street in the Shadow Zone. They were on their way to a small, rundown apartment building.
Jia considered calling something “rundown” in the Zone redundant.
By the standards of the area, the building was of a decent height, but the entire population of the apartment building would fit on one or two levels of a newer residential tower.
They had parked the MX 60 up the street. Emma could keep it safe, and this was one situation where they didn’t want to stand out. The line between rumor and reality remained blurred.
Jia coughed a few times. She could never adapt to the thick, gritty quality of the air in the Zone, a product of the ever-present miasma permeating the air down here. Humanity was terraforming worlds, but they couldn’t guarantee perfection on Earth.
Her stomach churned as she remembered the images of the victim. Erik and Jia had examined them before heading to the Shadow Zone. The victim looked like he’d been shredded by a rabid animal. Forensics was processing the body and scene evidence while the detectives interviewed potential witnesses.
“Some of the Tin Men we fought before had claws,” Jia commented on her thought out loud. “They could have easily mauled a body like the pictures. It has to be them. That’s the only explanation that makes sense.”
“True.” Erik pointed to an alley. “Unless it’s Zitark Special Forces, deep behind enemy lines.” He looked down the alley before turning to her, face serious. “Nasty claws, too.”
“Very funny. Zitarks have weapons,” Jia commented. “And the bodies were mauled but not eaten, from what we saw.”
Erik laughed. “Are you saying we can rule them out as suspects, then? What if they’re just terrorists?”
Jia eyed him. “I think it’ll be a while before we have to worry about Zitark terrorists.”
“It’ll happen someday.” Erik pointed to the sky, but the smog blotted out any features. “Maybe some of those politicians the colonel was telling me about are right, and it’ll unify humanity. Everyone will stand against the hungry reptilian menace.”
“Do you believe that?”
He spoke over his shoulder as he continued to look around. “You don’t?”
“I used to.” She shook her head. “Not anymore.”
“I don’t either,” he admitted. “Look at any war in human history. There’s somebody trying to screw somebody else over, even when they’re allied against the other guys.”
“A true optimist.” Jia’s gaze followed a small child skipping down the street with a carefree smile on her face. She didn’t care that she lived in a slum.
“Not optimist, realist,” Erik suggested.
Jia ripped her attention away from the child and surveyed the area. She looked for anyone too interested in a muscular man in a duster and his suited partner. People strolled up and down the street, not paying them any special attention. Drones flew by, always potential spies, but there was no way to tell.
A dark realization fought against the paranoia. People trying to hide their schemes didn’t tend to leave behind shredded bodies.
With our luck, Jia thought, it is a hungry Zitark.
They walked up the stairs and tapped the access panel. Their police credentials overrode the lock, and the lobby door slid open with a soft hiss.
Jia wrinkled her nose as a sour fruit odor assaulted her. “What’s that smell?”
Erik pointed to a half-closed garbage vent. Half a couch was jammed inside, backing up the rest of the garbage. Gnats and flies swarmed the vent. “Whoever owns this place likes to save on maintenance. Let’s find our witness.”
Jia knocked lightly on the door to the third-floor apartment. At least they had escaped the stomach-churning smell in the lobby. Part of her change in life would be accepting small mercies and appreciating them.
A quiet voice came out of the intercom. “Who is it?”
Jia pulled out her badge and tapped her PNIU to transmit her police ID verification. “Detectives Lin and Blackwell, NSCPD. We’re looking for Theo Tilson. We were told he has some information about the murder of Rudy Varan. We’d just like to ask him a few questions.”
“That’s me. Do I have to testify?” The man’s voice shook.
“I don’t know, Mr. Tilson,” Jia admitted. “It’s unlikely, given the nature of the case.”
The door slid open. The slender man on the other side was so pale and thin, he might have been mistaken for a spirit wandering free during the Ghost Festival.
“I’m Theo Tilsen.” The man licked his lips and gestured them inside. His spartan apartment fit his appearance. A single chair stood under a long shelf on the wall. A dull yellow tatami with a thin blanket lay in the center of the room. Although there was a kitchenette, there were no obvious appliances.
The detectives entered, Erik looking left, Jia right.
“You’re here to track down the Zitark, right?” Theo asked.
Jia raised an eyebrow. Were they wasting their time with a nutjob? “You believe Rudy Varan was killed by a Zitark?”
“That’s what they’re saying, and I’m convinced it’s them Zitarks. They only eat meat. Humans are a delicacy to them.” Theo licked his chapped lips again and rubbed his wrist. “My cousin said he heard the Army’s bringing all sorts of soldiers and hiding them at the edge of the Zone. They’re going to burn out the Zitarks. Them space raptors know they can grab us Zoners down here.”
Jia took a deep breath. They were following up on what were supposed to be the more promising leads. She would give Rudy credit for picking up on the Militia reinforcements, but that didn’t mean anything else he said was true.
“My understanding is that you found the body, Mr. Tilson,” Jia continued. “And you called it in, but you didn’t want to give a statement to the on-scene officers. That’s why we’re here to follow up. The NSCPD is concerned about these murders.”
Theo sat in his chair and gripped his legs tightly. “I thought they’d blame me. That’s why I didn’t want to stick around. That’s how things work in the Zone. They grab someone and blame him so they can say they took care of the problem.” He swallowed. “I know things are changing, but I was nervous, and I also didn’t want the killers after me. We thought it was just a new gang trying to scare people, but now we know it’s them aliens, and things make more sense.”
“You’re saying you saw a Zitark?” Erik asked. He didn’t sound amused, but he didn’t sound doubtful either.
“I didn’t see it.” Theo pointed at his ear. “I heard it.” He shuddered. “I was gathering salvage in one of the reclaimed areas. It can be dangerous there, between the gangs and the crazies, but the cops don’t much bother you. I was near a building when I heard the hissing.”
“Hissing?” Jia didn’t remember seeing anything about hissing in the initial reports.
“It weren’t like anything I’ve ever heard in my life. I heard that man screaming. I was going to run, but I thought, ‘What if I was getting killed and no one was there to help me?’ I had a stun rod with me, so I ran over there. And when I found him, he was…” Theo dry-heaved. “I’m sure you’ve seen him by now. Blood everywhere, an’ all cut up. Hissing not of this Earth, and all those cuts. If it’s not a Zitark, what is it? They’re getting braver, them Zitarks. I heard they got scared out of invading with an army, so they’re sneaking in now. Before, they didn’t leave the bodies to be found. There must be hundreds of them hiding in the Zone.”
Erik frowned. “Other people have mentioned murders, but Rudy’s was the only one that was reported. Can you tell us about some of these other alleged killings?”
“Alleged?” Theo stared at him like he was an idiot. “What, do you think Rudy was the first one they killed? No. He’s just the first one they left for someone to find. People have been disappearing for a while now. A lot of us wondered about it, but we didn’t want to say anything. You ask the wrong question in the Zone and piss off the wrong people, and you disappear.” He nodded as if it was dark knowledge he was sharing. “It’s gotten worse the last couple of weeks. Now we know the truth.”
“If people have disappeared, we can track their PNIUs,” Jia suggested. “We have his body. You found his body.”
“This is the Zone, Detective.” He gestured to his belt. “A lot of us don’t have PNIUs. Why do you think the Zitarks came here instead of Uptown? They knew they could get their human meat here and get away with it. They’ve been studying us. I bet they bought information from them Leems, and they’ve been waiting for their chance to have a delicious human for dinner.”
Jia folded her arms. Pointing out that the body hadn’t been eaten didn’t seem helpful.
She nodded slowly. “You heard unusual hissing and found the body right after the murder. Did you see anything else? Another person near the scene? A shadow? A drone?”
Erik added a moment later, “Any small clue might be helpful.”
He shook his head and turned back to Jia. “Nothing like that. I didn’t expect to. A lot of people don’t like going to the reclaimed areas. They’re afraid of getting poisoned because they’re too close to the Scar. That’s another thing people thought was happening with the others who had gone missing. Now we know the truth.”
Erik and Jia exchanged looks. They didn’t need a flashing arrow to make the connection.
“Do you have the names of the missing people?” Jia asked.
Jia’s eyes darted back and forth as she skimmed population records on a small data window in front of her.
She sat in the passenger seat of the MX 60 as they sped away from the Shadow Zone. They’d interviewed several people after Theo. Although he was the only one near Rudy Varan’s murder site, other people reported strange noises or scratches in unusual places.
Some also reported finding evidence they considered pointed to aliens, including strange fluids and flaked-off skin, as well as scales and feathers. Oddly enough, they had all settled on the Zitarks as the most likely suspects.
It would have been easy to dismiss one man’s interpretation as delusion, but multiple pieces of evidence pointing the same way were harder to ignore. Something strange was going on, and even if it wasn’t aliens, it didn’t sound like cyborg Tin Men.
So what did that leave them?
“Some of the people mentioned as missing have been reported as missing,” Jia explained. “Others haven’t, and we can’t track their interface with commercial and governmental systems.” She leaned back. “We can’t find anything.”
Erik nodded. “If they were mostly off the grid anyway, it would look like they were missing from the beginning.”
“That’s the problem.” Jia sighed. “A lot of our investigative assumptions are based on how things are supposed to work, but Uptown and the Shadow Zone might as well be different planets. The only commonality we have is that everyone disappeared close to the Scar. That has to mean something.”
“We’ll have to see what Forensics has to say, but there’s definitely something weird going on. We can’t ignore the Militia reinforcing the Scar, and they were even thinking about bringing in Special Forces.”
Jia turned to him, raising an eyebrow. “You can’t believe it’s Zitark hunters?”
He shook his head. “Nah. I’ve been all over the UTC, including the frontier, and I’ve never seen one in the flesh. Even if the Zitarks somehow managed to sneak onto Earth without anyone knowing, I doubt they’d waste their time snacking on people in the Neo SoCal Shadow Zone.”
“I don’t know,” Emma chimed in. “If I were a hungry alien, that’s exactly what I’d do.”
“You can’t even predict human behavior all the time, and now you’re predicting aliens?” Erik asked.
“That’s my advantage,” Emma insisted. “I’m not bound by human biases.”
“Whatever you say.” Erik opened his mouth to add to his comment but shut it.
“Tin Men, then,” Jia concluded. “It doesn’t seem likely, given what the witnesses are saying, but the wounds support that theory.”
Erik furrowed his brow and pondered the possibilities. “Maybe. That doesn’t explain the hissing and some of the other noises, but, yeah, they’re the most likely suspects.”
“Other than Zitarks?”
Erik shrugged. “Things are impossible until they happen. Aliens weren’t real until we found them, but there’s another possibility that doesn’t require forward-deployed hungry space raptors.”
“Care to share it?” Jia asked.
“It’s funny when you think about it,” Erik explained. “Fair number of intelligent races. It’s mostly them, or planets and moons that need domes or a lot of terraforming for someone to live there. What little we’ve seen of the other races is the same, but that’s not the case everyplace. Every once in a while, we’ve found a rock that hasn’t been claimed by one of the local neighborhood races, and we find weird things that are more impressive than microbes, like the heliokites on Diyimeinu.”
He gave her a wan smile. “It’s not the same reading about them. The planet itself is nasty as hell. Everyone lives in a dome, and the terraforming’s not going to be done until we’re long dead, but the heliokites are something to see. I was always flying around looking for trouble with a squad anyway.” He cut through the air with a hand. “The pictures don’t do them justice. They’re like rainbow-shaded giant manta rays the size of a whale, and they have all those tails. They fly around with this swarm of glowing young. Until you see something like that in person, you think Mother Nature is sane, but after something like that, you begin to wonder. Who knows? Maybe someone smuggled something to Earth.”
Jia side-eyed Erik, every bit of her skepticism obvious on her face. “That’s just the thing. Even if someone did somehow smuggle something here, let’s say much smaller and much hungrier than a heliokite, it wouldn’t be able to survive. The conditions are just too different.”
“Keep an open mind.” Erik grinned. “It is a truism that youth fail to believe…”
“Don’t you dare finish that comment,” Jia announced. “Or…
Erik kept smiling but didn’t complete his thought.
Once she saw he wasn’t going to continue, she nodded. “So, our current choices are a brutal gang trying to intimidate people, a secret organization that uses full-conversion cyborgs, or smuggled alien animals?” Jia mused. “Oh, wait. Hungry Zitarks.”
“That about sums it up.” Erik raised an eyebrow. “This case is getting in
teresting.”
She turned to watch the traffic outside. “Interesting, yeah. That’s one word for it.”
Chapter Forty-Five
Erik burst out laughing when he read the forensics report. They had notified Erik and Jia a few minutes after their return to the station. “Emma was right.”
“I always am,” the AI insisted.
Jia hadn’t sat down at her desk yet or opened a data window to read the report. “If you say they found evidence it was a Zitark, I’m going to hide under my desk in the fetal position.” She pointed under her desk to make sure Erik knew where he would be able to find her. “There are only so many paradigm-changing hits I can take this year.”
He shook his head. “It’s not that. I was talking about having an open mind and biases because I didn’t consider a more likely possibility than smuggled alien animals. I was thinking too much like an Uptowner.” He pointed at his data window. “Forensics pulled something a little closer to home—modified terrestrial-sourced DNA. It’s not a Zitark or a baby heliokite. It’s a damned yaoguai.”
Jia hissed in disgust. The Purist Movement had established cross-UTC taboos against the heavy genetic engineering of most lifeforms beyond microbes.
Where taboos failed, the law stepped in, with the UTC making the extensive modification of animals illegal. Tweaking a few genes here and there for disease resistance was one thing, but in most cases, if a modification made something unrecognizable, it was illegal.
Criminals and terrorists weren’t ones to obey the law, and it was far easier to get away with creating animal monsters than human ones. The mythological monsters of ancient China gave their name to these genetically engineered nightmares, and like their namesakes, they varied in appearance and deadly abilities.
Despite that, the penalties for their creation were so severe that most people avoided risking their future. You rarely saw one on Earth, or even in the Solar System. They were more the tools of desperate frontier terrorists.
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