The Easytown Box Set

by Brian Parker

“Sounds like the legend of Cthulhu to me,” the cameraman interrupted our conversation.

  I glanced at the man. It wasn’t Ben Roberts, our normal forensic photographer. “What’s that?”

  “The Cthulhu. It’s an old legend about the end of the world. The creature is the destroyer of worlds. He’s gigantic, man-shaped with an octopus face and the wings of a dragon.”

  I snorted in derision. “Where’s Ben?”

  “Ben’s sick, so they had me come over from the Lower Ninth for the evening. I’m Teddy.”

  I shook the photographer’s hand and said, “Nice to meet you, Teddy. Were you drinking a little bit before you came to work?”

  “I’m not saying I believe in it,” he defended. “I had to learn about it in college. There are a lot of people who prescribe to a supernatural being of some kind that will destroy the world. In fact, all major religions do. This one is just one of many of the pantheon of gods who’s supposed to do it.”

  “I can’t put that stupid shit in my report. Thanks anyways,” I stated, glancing back at Drake. “So this was a female?”

  “Yeah. Hard to tell until you look at both parts. Whoever—whatever—did this ripped off her arms and legs while she was alive according to the tweaker, then her head, and finally it ripped her right up the middle.”

  “That’s a gruesome way to die,” I said, eyeing the blood splatters on the ceiling. “Wonder what she did to deserve it.”

  “Mmm hmm,” Drake mumbled. We had differing opinions about violence. I prescribed to the belief that truly random acts of violence were far and few between. There was usually some type of connection between the perpetrator and the victim, or at least a motive as to why the perp did what they did. My partner, on the other hand, believed that random violence was the majority of humanity’s problem. I was right in about seventy-five percent of our solved cases, whereas his theory took up the rest. We still had a metric shit ton of unsolved cases.

  “So, there was a kid that lived here. Any word where they are?”

  “No sign of them.” Drake pointed at the garbage. “But he could be right here and we wouldn’t know.”

  “The tweaker give any motive for why someone would’ve done this?”

  “Nope. He kept screaming about the octopus demon until they shot him up with tranquilizers and he passed out.”

  “They take him to New Orleans East?” I asked, referring to the nearest hospital.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Hey, fellas,” Teddy the photographer interrupted. “What do you take this for?”

  I pushed my way through the garbage, wishing I’d taken the time to put the thick leather armor on my lower legs. I didn’t need to get tetanus, or worse.

  Teddy used the blue laser pointer on his camera to circle a spot on the wall. The spot became clearer as I got closer and I realized it was some type of metal imbedded in the wall, only allowing me to see less than half of it.

  “What the—hey, Teddy, make sure you take pictures of this before I contaminate the scene.”

  The camera flashed repeatedly as I dug in my bag for a pair of needle-nosed pliers and an evidence baggie.

  “Alright. I got it,” Teddy said.

  I switched the flashlight and baggie to one hand and used the pliers to dig the metal out of the wall. When I had it free, I held it up in the glow from the light to examine.

  It looked like a miniature circular saw blade. The thing was less than a half an inch across from tooth to tooth and solid metal of some kind. I twisted my wrist a few times, turning it over, and then dropped it into the baggie. It was much heavier than I’d thought when it was clasped in the pliers.

  “What is that thing?” Drake asked over my shoulder, startling me.

  “I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it.” I paused, thinking for a moment. “Hey, Teddy, are you done photographing the torso halves?”

  “Yeah. I’m basically finished here, Detective.”

  “Help me out for a second, Drake.”

  I knelt beside the half of the body I’d stepped over earlier and had Drake hold the light. Four small rectangular wounds ran up one side and I held the baggie with the miniature saw blade next to each of them.

  “Son of a bitch. This is a weapon of some kind.”

  I pulled on a pair of gloves quickly and pried open the top wound. I wasn’t exactly shocked to see the dirty carpet underneath the corpse; the wound went completely through the body.

  “Let’s go to the other half,” I suggested.

  There weren’t any exit wounds where the blades came out. I flipped the meat over and checked inside where they would likely be, but there wasn’t anything inside.

  “The killer tore her body apart to collect the blades,” Drake said.

  It made sense. If I had some new type of ammunition or weapon that gave me an edge over the competition, I’d probably try to keep it hidden for as long as I could as well.

  I held up the baggie and looked at the disc inside. “Why were you left behind?”

  “Probably ran out of time to find it,” Drake answered. “It’d take a while to tear that body apart searching for all of the blades. The police showed up and ruined the killer’s search. He had to go.”

  “I need to talk to that tweaker.”

  “Shouldn’t be a problem. Depending on how much of that shit he used, it could be a couple of days until he comes down.”

  “I can wait,” I murmured while I sealed the baggie and placed it in a lined evidence box.

  Not much else of interest came out of the site, except for a few bottles of a liquid that field-tested positive as synthaine and several eyedroppers that they used to administer the shit. Everything went into the box with the disc. Add a shredded corpse and an odd tweaker sighting of an ancient mythical god and this scene was a wrap.

  I wondered what the part about the creature meant. It was likely a mask of some kind, but without talking to the guy, I could only imagine what he thought he saw. As I packed up my kit and Drake finished securing the back door from the inside, my eyes wandered over to the discarded children’s toys.

  Where was that kid?

  FIFTEEN: THURSDAY

  It was another night on The Lane, walking slowly, trying to lure the Paladin out of hiding or be lucky enough to be in close proximity to him when he made his move. The uneven sidewalks were unusually crowded due to a break in the rain. The lines outside of the thumper clubs stretched for hundreds of feet, while men, and the occasional woman, stood in gaggles waiting for their turn in the pleasure clubs.

  Nearby, a shout of alarm rose from several throats as a hovering police drone electrocuted a pickpocket in the middle of a crowd. Men and women edged as far away from the writhing kid as they could. The drones were good for killing and subduing, but not at arresting, so it gave a small jolt every few seconds to keep the suspect down while a call went out to any uniformed cops in the area.

  I sighed and pushed my way through the crowd until I stood on the inside of the circle. Thin wires snaked down from above and imbedded into the youth’s pale skin. Two blossoms of red marred the back of the brown coat he wore where the barbs disappeared into the fabric.

  “Citizen, please stand back so you are not harmed,” the drone stated.

  I took off my hat and pulled my badge out of my coat. “Detective Zach Forrest,” I answered. “I’ll cuff the suspect and wait for transport.”

  “Detective Zachary Forrest, you have been cleared to arrest the suspect on the charge of larceny. I am ordered to assist as necessary. Do you require assistance at this time?”

  “Stop juicing him and let me put the handcuffs on,” I ordered.

  I waited until the hair on my arms stopped tingling and knelt on the kid’s back while I wrenched one arm up to slap the cuffs on his wrist. Once he was cuffed, I pulled the barbs out of his back and the drone retracted the wires back into its body, causing more gasps from the crowd.

  “What were you thinking, kid?” I asked. />
  “That I’m hungry and all these rich bastards waiting to spend their money to fuck a tin can had enough cash to go around.”

  “There are programs—”

  “Don’t, man. Just don’t. You don’t know what it’s like down here on the streets. Fucking creepy things are happening.”

  “Creepy things are always going on in Easytown,” I scoffed as I pulled the perp roughly to his feet. “Now you don’t have to worry about it. You’ll be nice and warm on Sabatier Island before the sun comes up tomorrow.”

  “They’re probably already there.”

  “What are you on?”

  “Nothing. I’m clean. I don’t use that shit,” he protested. “There are machines hunting the alleys for the Paladin. They turned people into machines to find that guy, except their brains can’t handle it and they’re going fucking crazy, man.”

  “What? Who’s turning people into machines?”

  “The dealers. They dumped a ton of tech into their top soldiers, now the damned things have gone nuts.”

  “Humans with tech? Do you mean cyborgs?”

  “I don’t know what they’re called.” The boy shrugged and then winced when the cuffs cut into his wrists. “They kill whatever comes across their path.”

  The tweaker’s words from the night before came back to me. “What do they look like?”

  “They’re all different. They got outfitted with whatever tech was sitting around.”

  “Do any of them look like an octopus?”

  “Octopus? Nah, man. Hey, since I’m helping you, are you gonna let me go? I have two sisters that I take care of.”

  “Nice try…” I thought about how a cyborg would appear to someone high on a drug that is administered by dropping liquid chemicals onto their eyeball and came up with a question. “Do they have wires and things like that sticking out of their heads?”

  “I guess so? I’ve only seen one of them closer than a block away. Most people avoid them because they are so messed up.”

  It was the first I’d heard that the crime lords were building some type of cybernetic-enhanced hunter to take out the Paladin. Maybe the guy was doing more good than we gave him credit for.

  The circle of the crowd around us had collapsed, so I pulled him hard through the people until we stood on the outside.

  “Hey! My wallet!” a man shouted.

  I reached inside the kid’s jacket and produced two wallets and a nice watch. Inside one of the wallets was an ID of the man who’d called out. “Over here, Mr. Stensen.”

  He rushed over, thanking me profusely and talking about pressing charges.

  “He’ll be booked within the hour, sir. You can go down to the NOPD Easytown Precinct station and file a complaint against him.”

  Mr. Stensen mumbled something about being in town for business and faded back into the crowd. He obviously didn’t want it documented that he was in line at a pleasure club.

  “How long have these hunters been around down here?” I asked the kid.

  “I saw the first one a couple of days ago— Maybe Monday or Tuesday?”

  “Where have you seen them?”

  “They’re all over the alleys at night looking for that Paladin guy. He’s been cutting into the profits and making a lot of drug runners scared to go out at night.”

  A cop car pulled up to the curve and the officer flipped on his lights. The red and blue strobes added to the garish scene as the lights from the clubs shone brightly in the rare clear night.

  “This the larceny perp, Detective?” the uniformed officer asked.

  “Yeah. The drone, uh…” I glanced up and read the service number. “Zero Eight One deployed electroshock wires and apprehended the suspect. I happened to be the nearest officer on The Lane.”

  “Got it. I’ll take him off your hands, sir.”

  “Thanks.” I released the pickpocket and waited while the other cop put new handcuffs on him so I could get mine back. “Hey, kid. Stay safe out here once they release you. Alright?”

  “Man, as long as it’s outside of Easytown, I’m staying wherever they drop me off.”

  The uniformed cop handed me my cuffs and I watched him put the kid in the car with disinterest. He’d given me a lot of information and I wished there was a way I could assist him, but the drone camera footage was all the evidence they’d need to put the kid away for at least a year.

  Come to think of it, maybe that was best for him. I had the feeling that Easytown was about to become a war zone.

  After the pickpocket was safely in the car and gone, I began the steady, meandering walk that I’d developed over the years as a plain-clothes detective. It helped me to get a feel for the population and customers of Easytown. More times than I could count, I’d gleaned information just from walking around. Sometimes, it was the clarity of being outdoors, other times it was the human interaction and overhearing people say things when they thought nobody was listening.

  Lieutenant Cruz, the second homicide detective in the Easytown Precinct, thought I was crazy to walk around like I did. The residents knew who I was—or at least the ones who were up to no good did. He said it was a pointless endeavor and stuck to informants coming to him in the safety of the police station or what the forensics lab told him. There was a reason my arrest rate was higher than his, by a wide margin.

  I stayed close to the lines of people, avoiding the street side when possible. An enterprising ganger could do a snatch and go on a cop paying more attention to the people than the rest of his surroundings. The murder rate for officers was already high enough, no sense in making myself an easy target.

  Of course, having an increased presence of police drones hovering twenty feet off the ground helped to ease my fears of a kidnapping. I’d be more likely to die in the drone’s gunfire as it attempted to stop the vehicle than by the gangers in the van. The drones were both a godsend and a problem for officers. The fear of getting completely obliterated by the guns had helped to drive the crime further away from the parts of the city where the drones patrolled, but any time those guns spun up, we were almost guaranteed to have collateral damage and sometimes innocent deaths. Each casualty resulted in more paperwork and less trust in the police force.

  A familiar voice stopped me in my tracks. Chris Young’s manicured southern accent announced over the megavid screens above that his feature story was so shocking that the network had granted him five entire minutes on the big televisions normally reserved for advertising and national news broadcasts.

  I tilted my head toward the nearest megavid screen and saw the words, “BREAKING NEWS” blinking in red over the black screen while Chris spoke the voiceover. Then Sadie appeared, her unkempt auburn hair framing the bruised face and her eyes staring hauntingly into the camera. Murmurs of curiosity erupted from the crowds, who weren’t used to the unscheduled interruption in their daily lives.

  “This is Sadie,” Chris said. “That’s not her real name, that’s the name she was given by the city’s hero police officer, Detective Zachary Forrest.”

  The screen cut to a vidfeed from Jackson Square when I fought against the drones that the Sex Club Killer had hacked. I flipped up the collar on my coat and scrunched my hat down closer on my head. The fucker was supposed to keep me out of this.

  Sadie reappeared and Chris continued the voiceover. “Detective Forrest rescued Sadie from the most hellish conditions known to man. She, along with eight others—and countless more that we may never know of—were beaten, tortured, burned, raped, sodomized, and abused in every imaginable manner. All of it was for the enjoyment of gamblers, betting on the outcome of whatever horror the captors inflicted. It’s called torture tourism and the industry is worth billions—and our politicians know about it. More on that in a moment.”

  The video synched up with Sadie’s voice as she described, in detail, some of what she’d endured, things that made the weaker-stomached patrons in the crowd blanch.

  She ended her story with, “I am the only su
rvivor. All the others were already dead by the time Zach found me.”

  “Dead.” Chris let that word hang for a moment as the camera zoomed in on Sadie’s haunted eyes.

  The video reset and the symbol that Sadie had shown Dr. Jones and me a few days ago faded in over her face, then cut to the outside of a building somewhere on the southwest side of town that boasted the same symbol.

  “This is the headquarters for Biologiqué International, a company that specializes in genetic engineering and is majority-owned by Thomas Ladeaux, who also owns the Marie Leveau Shipping Company and approximately half of the businesses in Easytown. Biologiqué International is the world’s leading researcher for human cloning and they have perfected the technique. Sadie is a perfect example; she’s a clone.”

  The murmurs rose to shouts of anger and rumblings about people playing God. The crowd was not happy about what Chris said as Sadie dipped her ear for the camera, showing the serial number printed there.

  “Biologiqué’s clones are so advanced,” Chris continued, “that they are indistinguishable from humans. In fact they are human.”

  A man wearing a suit replaced the image of the headquarters building. “This is Dr. Henry Grubber from Scitech Engineering, a nonprofit laboratory that conducts medical research. Dr. Grubber is the world’s leading geneticist who isn’t on a corporation’s payroll.”

  “I’ve examined the DNA sample sent to me of the Sadie subject,” Dr. Grubber said. “And she is completely indistinguishable from a human, everything about her is an exact replica. In fact, if I hadn’t been told that I was looking at a clone, I would have assumed she was simply another sample, like what I see hundreds of times a day. The clone may have been grown in a lab, but Sadie is human.”

  “So you disagree with the government’s current stance on clones?” the reporter asked on screen. “Right now, in the eyes of the law, a clone is property that can be bought, sold, treated as the owner wishes and disposed of at any time.”

  “I disagree with it one hundred percent, Mr. Young. I’m a scientist. I tend to see the world in absolutes. Any harm done to that woman, or others like her, should be prosecuted under the full extent of the law—just as we do for humans carried in a woman’s uterus and born through various means.”