Paper Children (Phoebe Harkness Book 3)

by James Fahy

  The only thing our funding doesn’t appear to cover, is air-con. Despite the chilly October air outside, down here in my Tardis-grotto, the air today felt stale and clingy. I said as much to Lucy.

  “Well, it was your choice to come in,” she pointed out. “You could have stayed on the murder scene with Dishy-Dee. That would be more exciting than whatever you’re scrolling through on that boring old screen.”

  “There’s nothing exciting about a dead eighty-year-old,” I clipped. “It was sad and… violent. It’s going to take a lot of Friends re-runs to get that image out of my head.”

  Lucy’s brow furrowed as she came around the desk to peer over my shoulder at the datascreen. “What’s that?” she asked.

  I shook my head, distracted. “Just an old show, way before the war. Mainly about a baby duck and some hairstyles, if I remember.”

  “Not that. That,” she sighed, and nodded at my screen. “What are you reading up on?”

  “The Cunningham Bowls,” I said. “I’ve been trying to get a feel for them. They’re speciest to the bone, but their daughter isn’t to blame for that. I’m wondering who might have had a grudge against them? A business rival, ex-employee, anything like that.”

  “They seem pretty convinced it was something a little more super than your normal natural, from what you’ve told me, Doc.”

  “It doesn’t add up though,” I tutted. “The body of the governess wasn’t drained of blood, so unlikely a vampire. Nothing was eaten or chewed on, so no kind of animal-based GO like the Tribals, it was just…” I struggled to articulate what I’d seen to her. “…very violent.”

  “Dee called in while you were on your way back,” she told me. “Said they’re going to be absolutely hours. The old woman was really tangled in the piano wires. It will take a while to remove the body without compromising it.” She shivered. “I can’t even imagine the sight.”

  “Imagine someone trying to cram a handful of bony chicken feet through a cheese-slicing mandolin, that should do it,” I muttered, only half listening to her. “The wife is just a socialite, but Mr CB? He said he was in R&D for bio-engineering. I looked up the company he founded with his first wife, Physiology Adaptation Progressive Enrichment Research.”

  “Catchy business name,” Lucy raised her eyebrows, leaning in to read with her hand on the back of my seat. “Their business cards must be ridiculously long.”

  “P.A.P.E.R for short,” I smirked a little. Her sarcasm always managed to pull me out of a grim mood. After seeing what I saw today, I definitely needed the light relief. “They’re all about genetic enhancement.” I scrolled through the data. “Lots of pious lip-flapping about curing asthma, helping the hobbled to walk again and the blind to see rainbows…”

  “But face?”

  I glanced up at her.

  “Your face says there’s a ‘but’,” she said, peering at me shrewdly.

  I nodded. “There always is. We’ve been down this road before. Military contracts, weaponisation. The other half of PAPER is less benevolent than the heal-the-lame face of the company. There was a lot of project work, back in the day when dear William was at the helm, focussing on creating the perfect soldier, to protect mankind from all the evil heebies and jeebies of the world, of course. Perfectly noble and above board. Sound familiar?”

  Lucy knew full well that the reason we’d had a pesky apocalypse in the first place was down to mankind’s tinkering. The sentinel program, a vast peacekeeping force of genetically modified super-soldiers, in theory designed as a deterrent, benevolent guardians of humanity. Except things hadn’t really worked out that way. Part of their DNA had been spliced from a master vampire. The master vampire, Tassoni. Our ignorant human scientists hadn’t known that he would be able to control the sentinels. In the name of science, safety and progress, he had been tweaked, tortured and tested for months. Nothing had remained of Tassoni in the end but a hate-filled shell. But when the sentinels went live, he’d had his revenge. Somewhere in his battered ruined body, Tassoni was alive and filled with quite understandable rage against his captors. He had turned the sentinels against the world from deep in his prison. Most people on the planet had died before he had finally been stopped. To this day, no-one quite knew who had stopped him, or how, but by the time they did, it had been too late. The damage had been done. The sentinels had ravaged our world. And without the control of their master, they had devolved into mindless monsters. The creatures we now called the Pale. Cannibalistic zombies filled with hate and rage and designed, by us, to be perfect killing machines. This was their world now. We only had a few cities, oases of civilisation in the dangerous wilderness.

  “Yes, but it’s not likely that we’re going to repeat the same mistakes, is it, Doc?” said Lucy, playing devil’s advocate. “I mean, it’s a pretty steep learning curve, ending the world like the last civilisation did. Cabal’s in charge now, and we have the Bonewalkers keeping us safe with the walls. We know a lot more than we did pre-apocalypse.”

  “People always repeat the same mistakes, my sweet and innocent padawan,” I murmured, looking back to my screen. “Always. It’s called history.”

  Perhaps my opinion wasn’t as objective as a scientist’s should be. It was difficult for me to remain completely impartial, considering that my own father had been on the genetic design team who had engineered the sentinels in the first place. And he’d used his own DNA in the project. I personally shared genetic material with the zombie hordes clawing tirelessly at our walls and roaming the countryside beyond. Family can be so embarrassing.

  I shook my head a little, trying to clear it. “Maybe I just have a bleak outlook. Maybe William Cunningham Bowls really was trying to make people better, who knows? I just think the more we know about him, the better chance we have of finding his daughter.”

  He seemed a bit of a pompous blowhard, but he can’t be all bad, I reasoned to myself. Yes, he was a massive speciest who disliked any being in our city who wasn’t a pureblood human, but that just made him an arsehole, not actively evil. His daughter had been sick when she was younger, isn’t that what they’d said? And he’d given up his active position at PAPER because of it. Abandoning his life’s work eight years back and coming home to spend more time with the family. At least that showed some shreds of humanity.

  The next article as I scrolled through the DataStream was a news clipping, some charity benefit somewhere or other, but the photo attached, a few years old, showed a few familiar faces. Cunningham Bowls, looking fresher and understandably less harrowed, resplendent in a tux and standing with one of Cabal’s very own senior directors, Felicity Coldwater. There were other suits in the picture too, all holding champagne and looking haughty. In the background, the almost shapeless hump of a Bonewalker loomed over them.

  “Is that a Bonewalker?” Lucy crouched beside me for a better view.

  “And Coldwater,” I nodded. “She does get around, doesn’t she?”

  “So this guy’s company has dealings with Cabal?”

  “Everyone has dealings with Cabal, Luce.” I said. “Don’t read too much into it. That’s what Cabal is. We’re not the only lab in this building. God alone knows what else is being tinkered with here at mad-scientist central.”

  It would have been more unusual for me to not have found links between Cabal and this kind of R&D. Cabal had a finger for every pie, but still, I squinted at the photo. Senior Director Coldwater was not my favourite person in the city. Her meddling had almost inadvertently resulted in the death of every GO in the city once, thanks to her secretly funding Marlin Scott’s so called ‘cure for the Pale’. She had come away from the whole thing with clean hands, of course. Senior members of the board were practically untouchable, but it irked me still.

  Plus, she was oddly terrifying. At least with Cloves, you knew you were dealing with a mad dog, full of angry barks and bared teeth. Coldwater was super sweet and friendly… and had the authority to snuff you out like a candle-flame with a bat of her eye
lashes if she chose to. If she was a dog, she was the kind who licked your palm and seemed adorable, right before it snapped your fingers off at the knuckle.

  “I don’t know which of the directors put Cloves and us onto this missing child case,” I said to Lucy, “but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if it was Coldwater. She seems to think everyone is as efficient as her. What’s one impossible child-stealing demon case to add to an already complicated vampire mass-murder investigation, right?”

  Lucy grabbed my shoulders and gave me a squeeze. “Don’t stress it, Doc,” she said. “You deal with this missing girl, Griff and I are all over the rooftop vampire murders, okay? Divide and conquer, right? That’s what a team does. Shares the pain.”

  “Actually, I might have something on that front,” Griff’s voice carried as the glass doors to the lab swished open in an automatic whisper. He had his glasses pushed up on his forehead, keeping his messy hair out of his eyes and looked a little tired. He waved papers at us as he wandered over to my workstation. “I’ve been running specs on that piece of evidence you found at the vampire murder site on the roof of the Jackson staircase. The scrap of material that got stuck under Clove’s shoe. It’s definitely latex, incredibly thin.”

  I had almost forgotten about the dark sliver I’d bagged once the vampire corpse had burned up in the dawn light.

  “Too thin to be any kind of clothing then?” I asked, mentally wondering if we could rule out Batman from our suspect list.

  “Yup, it’s more like…” he shrugged, “part of a burst balloon or something. But much more interesting than what it’s made of, is what we found on it.” He handed me the paperwork, which I scanned with interest.

  “BTE?” I asked. “Human?”

  Griff smiled, proudly. “I’m amazed we could find anything usable on it to be honest. Lucky for us that we plucky underdogs have access to top-spec gear thanks to evil.inc.” He tapped the paperwork in my hands. “But yes, biological trace evidence, extremely scant, but it’s BTE on a molecular level. It’s as good as a fingerprint, in theory. That’s not the odd part though.”

  I raised my eyebrows, patiently waiting for the ‘odd’ part of a violent vampire rooftop massacre that had left the victim chunky soup.

  “Everything I ran, every test, shows the BTE is dead.” He leaned in and tapped the paper for emphasis. “From a corpse.”

  “We know what dead means, Griff.” Lucy rolled her eyes.

  “How old a corpse? Do we know yet?”

  He shrugged, looking perplexed. “That’s even more interesting. I’ve run over everything a few times, but the data I have coming back is contradictory. Making no sense at all. It’s all suggesting that whoever touched this little flap of latex, and it was definitely a human not the victim, that they were not only dead, but somehow both around fifty to fifty-five years old, and at the same time, a new-born, less than a year.”

  “My head is hurting,” Lucy mumbled. “Maybe…a man, and a baby?”

  It wasn’t likely that a man in his mid-fifties carrying a one-year-old just happened to be on a rooftop killing a strong vampire. And more so, it would be quite difficult to take a vampire down if you were dead at the time as well.

  Griff’s findings were baffling. It didn’t make sense on any level.

  “Are we absolutely, definitely sure that the traces are not from the vampire himself?” Lucy wondered aloud.

  “Vampires aren’t dead, Luce, you know that,” I said. “That’s just a weird human myth from before the war, the idea that vampires are reanimated corpses. They’re living creatures, in their own way. Nothing like us, but still.” I pored over Griff’s paperwork. “These results are conclusive. This evidence has come back human.”

  “My first theory, with the indication that the traces were dead cells, was that maybe it was a ghoul?” Griff theorised. He seemed quite excited by his discovery, and twirled a chair around, sitting backwards in it across the desk. Like most people with a calling to my field, he loved finding ways to explain the unknown. It was like crack or mini sausage rolls to us.

  “That would never work,” I argued. “Yes, it’s true that ghouls exist. That a vampire can drain a human to death and then control what’s left, a walking mannequin. We all remember Gio’s talent for that when he infiltrated Cabal with the fat, dead director guy. But ghouls are no stronger than the humans they used to be when they were alive. They’re just lumps of slow-moving, empty-headed meat.”

  Lucy nodded in agreement. “Doc’s right, Griff. There’s no way a ghoul would be able to kill a full strength vampire. And the vampire Phoebe found had been very very killed indeed. I’ve seen the reconstructed holo-graph. And… ew.”

  I handed the paperwork back to Griff. “Good work,” I said, impressed. “As usual, we have more questions than answers so far, but is there a chance we can pull ID from this?”

  “It’s worth a shot,” he replied. “Everyone in New Oxford has been DNA registered since the day New Oxford came to be. You know Cabal has everyone on file. It will take a while to run it through the system, but if this DNA is a match for anyone, we should be able to find them.”

  “Bear in mind, we can’t jump to conclusions,” I warned them both. “Just because this was found at the scene, doesn’t automatically make it the killer. But any lead is a good lead, right?”

  My phone buzzed on the glass worktop, sounding like an angry bluebottle. I glanced down at the screen. The display name read ‘Satan’.

  “Cloves is calling me.” My heart sank. “She’ll want a full rundown of everything that happened at murder-mansion.” I sighed and rubbed my eyes. “Let’s keep this other vampire-slaughter info private until we know what it means. We need to compartmentalise. I don’t need to give her even more to chase us on right now.”

  Griff nodded. He was looking at me with concern. Griff often looked at me with some level of worry. He and Lucy were among the very few people who knew of my rather unique medical condition. “You look tired. Are you taking your meds?”

  “Yes mom,” I drawled, reluctantly picking up my phone. “Don’t fret, I’m up to my eyeballs in epsilon and the… um… transfusion… I had from Allesandro months back is still keeping everything at bay.” Both he and Lucy were still looking at me carefully. I smiled to reassure them. “I’m not in danger of she-hulking in the lab. The only thing making me furious at the moment is the woman on the other end of this phone.”

  I answered the call quickly, not because I wanted to, but because I wanted to cut Griff off. I didn’t want to talk about the fact that I’d contracted the Pale virus, or that the only reason I hadn’t devolved immediately was because I already shared genetics with them. I didn’t want to talk about the fact that at best, my epsilon formula only held it at bay, tenuously, and that the only actual cure I had was apparently drinking the blood of a vampire from time to time, like getting a regular vaccine booster. We didn’t need to address the worrying fact that he wasn’t around anymore to provide it.

  Cloves didn’t bother with pleasantries. She wanted me in her office to report, five minutes ago.

  Chapter 9

  It had taken a hell of a lot longer with Cloves than I’d anticipated. I was chewed up and spat out for causing a forensic three-ring-circus at the Cunningham Bowls’. Cloves was insisting that I was only supposed to be headed there to show moral support and for some gentle probing into the circumstances surrounding their daughter’s disappearance, not to find a rotting corpse and have the full force of Cabal, drones and CSI descend upon the house, trailing their muddy boots all over the pale carpets and photographing and documenting everything. Mr Cunningham Bowls was furious by all accounts, and Mrs Cunningham Bowls had taken to her bed with a debilitating migraine. And for all the fuss Dee and I had caused, we were no closer to finding out what had actually happened to the girl. The way Cloves came at it, you would have thought I’d planted the body there myself in order to cause a fuss. Senior Director Coldwater had clearly leaned on my boss, and the
ass-whooping was making its natural way down the food chain to me. Cloves informed me that Coldwater had made it crystal clear that she wanted this girl found, alive, quickly and quietly. If these rumours of a child-abducting Genetic Other leaked out, there would be even more protest and concern over the up-coming Fangfest Halloween parade than there already was, and that was a fire that certainly didn’t need any more fuel. Cloves impressed upon me that the more rabid factions of the Mankind Movement were only looking for an excuse to riot. I declined, wisely I thought in hindsight, to tell her that Mr Cunningham Bowls had made it explicitly clear that if we failed to find his daughter, he would give them exactly that.

  So after my ear-bashing, by the time I finally got home to my tiny but blissfully quiet flat, it was already late. I didn’t really remember leaving the lab. It had been dark by the time I left, a windy, drizzling October night. I barely recalled my journey home. My mind was so full of murder and mystery that I think I was running on autopilot the whole way. Leaning back against my door and hearing it click closed and shutting the world outside, I sighed with immeasurable relief. The darkness and peace of my own home was bliss. I shrugged bonelessly out of my coat, letting it fall unheeded to the floor and dropped my keys in their little dish. All I wanted in the world was to take my shoes off and have a shower hot enough to melt skin away and wash off the smell of the dead. Nothing clings quite as persistently as the smell of a freshly discovered corpse. Especially a ripe one. It stuck in your nose and throat and hair. It followed you around for days.