Fletcher Read online

  My own dose was beginning to kick in. My choice of the night was straitjacket; I was in the mood for chemically induced psychosis. Unlike angel-rage, which altered your experiences of pain and pleasure, straitjacket actually induced full sensory hallucinations by making neurons fire at intermittent rates. It was almost like a controlled, directed seizure, turning your perceptions into a cataclysmo of strange sounds, nonexistent colours and bizarre sensations. It had the occasional side effect of inducing a psychotic break from reality. I relocated upstairs to the Wasp Gallery, scanning the sprawl of dancing, thrashing writhers below with a noxious glare.

  I felt the signature chills up my spine and closed my eyes, waiting for the drug to take ef–

  #0966

  “Ugh. This is why I never take hostages. They cry and moan and scream through their gag, and they make such a noise scrabbling in circles on my nice tiled floors. I was in no mood this morning. To stop him from crawling in circles, I nailed his other hand to the floor. Didn’t really fix the noise problem, but it was fun, at least.

  “I also saw the boy today. He was outside the library while I was hiding razor blades in the books. He looked nervous.

  “He’s going to die again.”

  4: Special Kindness

  There was a sharp, probing pain in the back of my head. My face was pressed onto a cold steel plate, and I knew from experience that I was on a gurney. My eyes opened as the needle punctured my scalp again.

  “Are you poking around for fun, or do I actually need stitches there?”

  “Take a look at your fingernails. To put it mildly, a lot of that blood is yours.”

  I gingerly moved my hand in front of my face, taking care not to shift my head. My nails were encrusted with a thick layer of red. I tried to pick some of the blood out with my thumb, before I realised that my thumbnail was, in fact, missing.

  Regardless of the dazed state I was in, it hurt.

  “How was I when you got me?”

  “Curled up, shivering, hugging yourself for warmth. The usual. You managed to send someone else to me after that blue girl: seems that you convinced him to open up his wrists on a broken bottle. You were also apparently running around dripping angel-rage into the throats of the hypno users, or so Dante tells me.”

  A memory tumbled out of the blackout. Valerie was right: I’d spent a large portion of the night trying to trigger more seizures.

  “So I kept you busy?”

  “What? Not really. Just the two. Hardly out of character for you.”

  I smiled, head still fuzzy. “I aim to please, Valerie.”

  I received an abrupt stab to the back of my head.

  “While I’m fixing you, it’s Doctor Gravewood. Jesus, K, how sharp are your nails? This is worth about eight stitches alone.”

  Alone?

  I mentally mapped out the rest of my body. There was a throbbing in my thumb, and the dull pain at the back of my head. What else?

  “If you’re trying to work out what else I had to patch up, you’re fresh out of luck. Your right leg needed about twelve: I had to remove a hook from your thigh. It’s been anaesthetized for now: a special kindness.”

  She finished her work, tightening the weave with a brief tug. I rolled over, finally meeting with her eye to eye.

  Valerie Gravewood was weird. Few other words describe her so fully. She was abjectly odd in ways that could never be reconciled with normal society. Long before 2012, she had worked in a morgue, until she eventually had her medical license revoked for carving poetry into the rib cages of cadavers. She paid special tribute to the works of Edgar Allen Poe, as I recall. Annabel Lee was her favourite, by far.

  Personally, I thought the entire thing was a riot. Unfortunately for Valerie, her superiors thought very differently of her desecration. Little did they know the full, wonderful extent of her crimes.

  The lack of a license did very little to keep her away from the medical field. She began to flit between shadier organisations and mercenary groups, working as a field doctor during missions and operations. She eventually settled down—to use a phrase loosely—in a quiet part of town, working as a no-questions-asked surgeon. Need a bullet extracted, but your face is all over the news? Valerie can help you out. A friend is overdosing, but you don’t want to go to the hospital? Dr Gravewood is your girl.

  I met her in a professional context. I’d been involved in a shoot-out with three bodyguards and one of the CEOs of an international munitions company. While I had both eliminated my mark and gunned down two of his personnel, the third guard managed to get me in the shoulder. With my situation getting desperate, and the law closely monitoring any hospitals in the area, I turned to the rumours of this enigmatic surgeon working out of sight and under the radar.

  One quick operation and a hefty fee later, I was dosed up on enough morphine to put a small mammal down. Scalpels seem to be a conversational aphrodisiac for personalities such as ours, and we got to talking.

  Three years later and here we were: best friends (relatively speaking), partners in crime (of more than I’d care to mention), occasional lovers (in the most masochistic sense of the word) and sporadic confidants (generally through tales of conquest and glory).

  In short, we worked well together.

  She grinned at me. At least, I assumed she was grinning: her medical mask kept that part of her face hidden. The eyes gave it away, though. I knew exactly what that calculating green glint meant.

  “So. Now that I’ve stopped you from bleeding out: how can I help you?”

  I rolled my eyes. Valerie always knew when I needed something. She also never held back in explaining how she knew. I let her continue.

  “High levels of degraded livewire in your system, low levels of glucose. Means you’ve been awake for a long time. Not only awake, but working: no time to eat properly. So, you’ve been on the job. You’ve been busy.

  “Your coat is clean, relatively speaking, but you’ve definitely been wearing it for a day at least. That means that whatever job you’ve been on hasn’t been hands on. So, the job is an investigation of sorts. Murder, theft, surveillance. Something that takes time but not strenuous work...”

  I zoned out. Valerie was prone to these rants. It was her way of strutting, and I never thought to take that away from her; my own special kindness.

  “Finally, your abuse is always proportional to whatever’s on your mind. During the bank security case, you force-fed an epileptic hypno and put a hook through his hand. I think he’s still in a coma. During the hit on the Minister of Defence, you bit off someone’s ear before collapsing from alcohol poisoning. Last night? You send a girl to me on a stretcher, practically overdose on straitjacket and get a suitor to open his wrists, all before the sun rose.

  “Something’s up. Now spill.”

  I smiled. Despite her rambling, she was good.

  “Take a look.”

  I handed her the photographs from the house. She paged through them with an air of indifference, but I could see she was interested.

  “There’s only so much I can do without getting my hands on the bodies. What I can tell you from these is limited, but here goes:

  “They had a good marriage, and have both been happy for at least a few months. The double-tap to her chest is very executioner style. Close to the heart, you see? Despite his rage, or whatever, he wanted her to go quickly.”

  “But why not shoot her in the head?”

  “Because you don’t shoot something you love in the face.”

  “So he definitely loved her?”

  “That’s how I read it. He was also scared, or shocked, or some level of emotionally compromised at the time. Weak wrists gave rise to the interesting shot to his own head—upwards trajectory, entering his temple and erupting out the top left side of his head. Anger stiffens up the body, which would level the shot. Not here.”

  She handed back the photographs, a puzzled look distorting her features.

  “Why did he turn away?”
<
br />   “I was hoping you would tell me.”

  The expression persisted.

  “This certainly isn’t your standard murder-suicide. Nice catch. Any background information on the victims?”

  I had done a small amount of searching at the start of this case. Born and raised in Germany, in the years before 2012 the husband had worked at a foreign distributing branch representing a small German munitions company. When Berlin burned and the entire country went belly up, it did very little to take the wind out of his sails. Three months after Germany was abandoned by the rest of the world, the distributing branch had been repurposed under a far larger munitions company—RailTech. This name had instantly set off alarm bells for me. RailTech was dubious in its dealings at best. Aside from their incredibly vicious marketing cycles and technology releases, which rendered previous RailTech technology obsolete at a rate of knots, they had ascended to the position as largest munitions supplier through multiple ruthless takeovers, sabotage, extortion and a surprisingly long string of well-concealed corporate assassinations.

  Naturally, they were one of my more common clients. No fewer than three members of the Department of Defence have met their end because RailTech tapped me on the shoulder and pointed, and as many opposing factories have suffered tragic—and spectacular—equipment malfunctions by my hand.

  The wife, on the other hand, took a far more simple life working as a consultant dietician for schools and sporting institutions. Very little in her history raised any alarm—born in France, 1982; met her husband at a marathon in 2005; married four years later. Stone dead in 2014, shot to death by the same man who beat her by one place in 2005.

  Valerie took all this in with a half-smile, while she tended to a comatose female in the gurney beside me. When I was done, she was quiet for a few minutes, and only once she had finished extracting shards of glass from her patient’s eardrum did she speak again.

  “Three theories so far; none particularly good. First, some German-French vendetta. The frogs were the first to drop the krauts in 2012; could be that John Rourke here was pressured into offing his wife by a group of pissed-off survivors.

  “Secondly, RailTech could have had a hand in this. From what you tell me, if a tree falls in a forest, chances are RailTech was responsible and has already stolen its shares. Maybe John knew something. Maybe he was planning something. Either way, the big plotters get wind of it, deal with the wife and set the husband up. Husband chooses acute lead poisoning over jail.

  “Finally, what if she cheated on him? Works as a dietician, spends her time around good-looking sportsmen. Sure, not so much anymore, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t. Husband finds out, flies into a rage, double-taps her and then realizes what he’s done. Great love works both ways, unfortunately.”

  I sighed. “None of those address the silencer. Or the fact that he turned around.”

  “The silencer is circumstantial, K. This is 2014. Gunshots are hardly uncommon. The likelihood of someone reporting gunfire these days is fairly slim. Bring the gun to me and I’ll be able to judge for certain. As for the turn... I have no idea. You always get something you can’t explain, especially with murders.”

  “This isn’t it. A man doesn’t gun down the love of his life and then turn a hundred and eighty degrees before blowing his brains out, for no reason.”

  Valerie bit her lip, and I turned away. I could see that neither of us particularly liked her theories. The chances of a vengeful German survivor cell operating anywhere were small at best, while I still held the third theory with an air of doubt. The only theory which held water was the one that implied that, somehow, RailTech was involved. This didn’t help at all. RailTech was almost always involved, with everything.

  “Get me the gun; that will clear up the silencer issue. If you’re going to pursue this, we need to get out of the cul-de-sac. Look around for anything interesting in the month before their death. Oh, and K—”

  I felt the prick of the needle in my neck before I could turn around.

  “Get some sleep. Lord knows you need it.”

  There were sweet narcotics, and sweeter darkness. Valerie loved her morphine.

  #0954

  “Valerie... Don’t wait for this to finish playing... Start fixing me up right away... Just pulled a practical joke... on the leader of one of the bigger... gangs in the gutterage. Made him think... his food was poisoned... Looked so smug that he’d worked it out. Then I shot him... in the face. Heh... Guards couldn’t take a joke though... opened fire almost immediately. Got out... still running... took a bullet to the gut... Another to the hip... Stapled together to stop the bleeding. Just fix me up... I swear to god, if you leave... another piece of steel... inside me, I will kill you. Happy... April first.”

  5: Exposition

  Few things act upon my mind as bizarrely as morphine. Other than an occasional aid to sleep, I choose to avoid it, preferring to run with more mainstream pleasures such as murder, arson and digital piracy. It gets in my head and stays there, like a Russian ice-pick. I don’t think straight (do I ever?); instead, my mind follows strange patterns and fluxes.

  When the world started burning, Germany burned brighter than everyone else. Maybe it was the political tension; maybe it was the suffering economy and rising taxes. It could have been anything, really. Maybe Germans are just extra-flammable. Whatever the reason, where England and France had widespread anarchy, Germany was pitched headfirst into something resembling a civil war. The world just dropped them. France was the first to shut off all borders to the refugees, and the rest of Europe followed suit. Nobody in, nobody out—a desperate attempt to keep the mindless German violence out of the rest of the mindless European violence. Needless to say, there were consequences. German relatives outside of the nation—many of them already involved in or affected by the chaos—became even more angry and disillusioned. Bombs went off in public spaces, adding to the terror. Proud landmarks which had withstood the wild population fell to concentrated attacks. It took months to root out the German terrorist cells, and in that time they successfully bombed the Louvre, the Eiffel Tower and the Houses of Parliament, to name but a few. The casualties were enormous, but to the world they were just another statistic in a rising tide of statistics.

  I guess the most critical effect morphine has on me is that it stops me from focusing. On small doses—ones that don’t render me unconscious—I turn dazed and distracted. It regularly seems like I’m about to change—

  —topic, but usually it’s just a bait-and-switch. The double-vision and strange feelings of affection get in the way too. It’s like my mind is on vacation, and my mouth is–

  Before Germany, there was Africa. In particular, South Africa. Appropriate, right? The cradle of humankind was also the resting place of Pandora’s Haemorrhagic Box.

  May 25, 2012: the National Institute of Health shocks South Africa and the world by announcing the finalisation of a full cure to HIV.

  May 26, 2012: the National Institute of Health shocks the world again, this time by getting ransacked by a desperate population.

  May 29, 2012: the initial raiders start developing fever symptoms.

  June 1, 2012: four hundred bloody deaths herald the coming of worldwide anarchy.

  The Red Masque Fever—named due to its virulence—lived up to its moniker. Created under laboratory conditions by extrapolating the evolution of other common haemorrhagics, Red Masque made Lassa fever, Ebola and the Marburg virus look like a bad case of the sniffles. The National Institute of Health had samples kept under the strictest of procedures, but wild mobs are never the best at following protocol.

  There ain’t no fever like a haemorrhagic fever.

  For three days, Red Masque lurked in the bodies of the desperate looters, unseen but still contagious. On the third day it rose again, in accordance to its epidemiology, and began to systematically ravage their internal organs, manifesting in feverish temperatures, vomiting, intercranial pressure, haemorrhaging, cell necrosis
and convulsions. By the end of the fifth day, every single initial infectee was dead.

  The world had watched their bloody seizures in terrified silence. Some countries reacted quicker than others, immediately shutting down all airports and denying flights from Africa. For most, it was far too late. All it took was a single returning tourist to cough in a crowded airport, and within days the city would be wiped off the map. Naturally, South Africa was hit the hardest, with a death toll in the millions. The rest of Africa suffered sequentially, with border controls unable to stop infected refugees.

  It was in late 2012 that new complications started arising. Through their quarantines and their military and their cutting-edge protective gear, Red Masque Fever was all but eradicated in developed countries. Naturally, there were mistakes: misdiagnoses triggered false alarms over the world, and with those false alarms came panic and fear. Eventually, all it would take was the sight of a pressure-protective suit in a neighbourhood to trigger all-out chaos. And thus the gutterages came into being—monuments to panic without due cause, and chaos for the simple sake of chaos.

  More complications swarmed in from Africa. Without advanced technology and equipment, Red Masque continued to scourge across the continent, and with outbound planes getting shot down by UN-endorsed fighter jets the ways out were severely limited.

  With the death toll in the thousands of millions, a massive exodus of uninfected citizens had sprung up. Initially, they had formed huge groups for safety, but the larger groups never made it for more than a few weeks before statistics alone beat them. It was always safer to travel in smaller packs, avoiding marauders and cities in an attempt to get farther north. For them, north meant hope; it meant first world countries with their friendly doctors and their friendlier vaccines.

  Of course, there were no vaccines or cures, only containment and quarantine. Africa had depended on first world emergency aid for far too long, but instead of finding Europe with arms open, they found the Mediterranean as dangerous as Africa. Any boat attempting to cross was boarded by special forces in containment suits. If the tiniest trace of infection was found, the boats were sent straight to the bottom. It didn’t have to be any more than a sneeze or a minor temperature.