by Nick Cutter
When Garvey arrived I braced for more of the same. But he surprised me by pulling up a chair next to me. He carried a fresh hint of superiority. He had a bottle of murky yellow liquid, which he drank off before slapping my knee in a gesture of camaraderie.
Doe came in last. Her skull had been shaved. The sight stirred a fleeting panic—they’ve cut out a piece of her brain. But there was a reassuring clarity in her eyes, and when her head swivelled I saw no incisions or catgut. She went to the cistern and poured a cup of decaf.
“Anyone got anything to say?” she said. “Pipe up now, fellas.”
Doe spoke with her back to the room. She turned and held her left hand in front of her face. The stump of her pinkie finger was inflamed. Staring through her remaining fingers, she regarded each man in turn. Nobody said a word.
Hollis entered to offer the daily debriefing.
“First off, let’s welcome back Doe and Murtag.” When nobody said a word, Hollis rapped his knuckles on the desk. “I said, let us welcome a pair of fellow officers back into the eternally forgiving bosom of the unit.”
After a round of halfhearted applause, Hollis went on: “Here’s the skinny, lads: you’ve all been officially detached from whatever priors or unsolveds you were working and attached to the bombings. We need every shoulder to the wheel on this. Applewhite, you were first on the scene at yesterday’s bombing in Little Baghdad. What have you managed to ascertain?”
Applewhite stared at his notepad.
“The target was a Republic-run bottling plant. They bottled Purity Purge, mainly; also Sin Burner with ephedra and Soul Glow, a raspberry-scented detoxifying facial cream. Aside from management, the workforce was Islamic. Death toll stands at fifty to fifty-five—”
“Spare us the numbers,” said Hollis.
Applewhite flipped a page. “The quarter-acre plant was levelled. CSI’s preliminary findings indicate a nitrate-based explosive compound is not feasible. It would’ve taken somewhere in the neighbourhood of five-hundred square cubits.”
“Why is that not feasible?” Hollis’s lips pressed into a thin bloodless scar. “Back a cube van up to the front door and blow yourself to Kingdom Come.”
“The blast pattern suggests the explosion was triggered inside the plant. The northern and southern walls are intact. There’s a scorched crater at the heart of what was the bottling line.”
“All of which means . . . ?”
Applewhite cleared his throat nervously. “The bomber or bombers were armed with a more potent and concealable incendiary compound. The blast went off near a pressurized vat of liquid chromium—the active skin-lightening agent in Soul Glow—and set off a secondary explosion. This means the initial detonation was hot enough to melt metal.”
Hollis rubbed the back of his neck, as if a pebble had set up shop at the tip of his brainstem. “Anyone remember the days when all the loons could get their hands on were match-head pipe bombs? Used to be part of a loon’s moral fibre. How are they laying their hands on high-level gear?
“That’s . . . undetermined,” said Applewhite. “We’ll need to—”
“Stuff it, lad,” Hollis cut him off. “The real question is, why are the bombers bombing themselves?”
A pall settled over the squad room. The question struck at the heart of an uneasiness that gripped us all. On one hand, this was a scenario we had always envisioned: Muslims were war-loving, sword-waving fanatics whose lunacy was so directionless that they would eventually become outraged with even their own kind, falling upon, cannibalizing, and ultimately destroying themselves. But that should only happen once they had achieved their goal of wiping all infidels off the map.
Unless the bombers weren’t Muslims, spoke an insistent voice in my head. Unless they were . . . Followers.
An accident report chittered off the Teletype machine. Garvey tore off the printout.
“Traffic wreck outside of town. A semi full of animals pegged for the shrines run off the road. Says here the driver was murdered.”
“Rank-and-file can handle it.” Hollis said. “It’s a hijacking gone awry.”
“Sacrificial animals?” I said. “It’s an odd shipment to hijack.”
Hollis looked flummoxed before easing into a grin. “Acolyte Murtag, so nice to see your investigational wheels spinning again. And while I believe they’re spinning in mud with this one, you and Garvey go check it out.”
Hollis then turned his attention to the remaining Acolytes.
“Applewhite, you and Doe head to Little Baghdad; canvas the neighbourhood, find out if anyone saw or heard anything to give pause. Everyone else fan out and bring back leads we can work with. Dismissed.”
Garvey signed out a prowl car from the auto pool. We headed south. Garvey drove. He shot me a distracted glance, drumming his fingers on the wheel.
“You should have kept your mouth shut. You don’t dictate what assignments we pick up anymore. Now we’re driving all over hell’s half acre chasing this wild hair. It’s a waste of time and gets us no closer to Eve’s killers.”
The streets were all but deserted. We passed a billboard for Sinless Sheen shampoo. Tagline: Lather, Rinse, Repent.
Garvey stopped in at a Puritan’s Pantry. Returning to the cruiser, he tossed me a bottle of water and a packet of Hallelujah Energy Boost powder.
“Mix that up for me, will you?”
I eyeballed the ingredients: life-enriching flavonoids, age-defying spiritual compounds, vitamin V for Vitality, secret spices, guar gum, dye #29 for robust colouration.
Garvey cut down a side street, goosing the horn to scatter foot traffic, merging onto Falwell Memorial Boulevard. The on-ramp arched past St. Mark’s Cathedral, home of the Sacred Whores. Young women lounged in opulent glass-fronted picture boxes strung round the turreted church at eye level. Crimson spots backlit each box. Beautiful and untouchable: their availability was restricted to top-ranking officials; one-time use by Republic-affirmed servants was also permitted in recognition of exemplary public service.
Garvey slugged back his Hallelujah Energy Boost. “That’ll put lead in your pencil. As The Prophet says: healthiness is closer to Godliness.”
The odometer had clicked off 162 furlongs when we pulled up to a tractor trailer lying half-on, half-off an uninhabited rural route.
The rig’s rear wheels were mired in the soft muck of the ditch. The trailer portion had smashed through a barbed wire fence and lay overturned in a weedy field. Huge curls of vulcanized rubber lay across the tarmac.
A pair of legs jutted behind the left front tire.
“Highwaymen,” Garvey said, surveying the scene. “Ten to one.”
The Highway Patrol had been decommissioned years ago due to budget cuts. The “zone of guaranteed public safety” terminated at the city limits. Out here was the Badlands: so named not because of any geological traits or scarcity of vegetation, but because the people who roamed it lacked the correct faith.
Highwaymen—some heathens, some once-devoted Follow-ers who had forsaken the path—now patrolled these empty stretches of highway. Nomadic, they lived in tents or makeshift shanties or vacated farmhouses. They preyed on unescorted shipments cut off from the safety of a convoy. Truckers fought back by outfitting their rigs with self-sealing tires and bulletproof glass and by bolting cowcatchers to their grilles to bust through claptrap roadblocks. The roadsides were littered with the hulks of flame-eaten, bullet-riddled vehicles.
The air was clean and bracing as I stepped from the car. I hadn’t been this far outside the city in a long time. The breeze shifted and a new smell hit me, raw and ripe and bloody: as if I’d stumbled downwind of a slaughterhouse.
Dr. Calvin Newbarr, an old saw with the CSI team, had beaten us to the scene. Now in his late sixties, Newbarr had been a county coroner in the days before the Republic. A genteel throwback, he always dressed impeccably: crisp dark-sa
ble suit, Windsor-knotted tie, a brushed felt hat. His unkempt eyebrows hung like silken draperies before his eyes.
“Prophet’s blessings,” he greeted us.
“From the Lord’s lips to His,” I said. “You shouldn’t be out here on your own.”
He shrugged. “What would a highwayman want with an old string like me?”
The legs sticking out from the back of the rig belonged to the trucker himself. He was fully clothed and lay facedown on the road. His head had been run over. The pressure of the five-ton truck had flattened his skull. His scalp had been lifted off and was stuck in the tire treads. His stark white skull had the look of a plate that had been stepped on and broken into pieces.
Newbarr removed his hat and held it at his belt buckle for a moment before replacing it on his head.
Garvey said: “You got a spatula, doc?”
The coroner unsnapped his medical kit. “Poor taste, son.”
“Lighten up.” Garvey spat into the nettles. “Not like he’s bound to register the insult.”
Garvey wandered up the road to reconnoitre the outlying scene. Newbarr tugged on latex gloves and did some exploratory feeling around. He made notes into an old-style Dictaphone. I heard: “Massive depressed skull fractures.” I heard: “Cranial epidermis removed as a result of blunt force trauma.” I heard: “Identification via dental plate match not feasible.”
“Wipe my brow?” Newbarr held up his bloody hands as a plea. With my handkerchief I dabbed sweat from under his hat brim.
“I heard what happened with The Prophet’s daughter,” he said. “I’m very sorry to see you in such poor shape.”
I waved it off and said: “Doesn’t it seem a lot of needless trouble?”
“Meaning?”
“This trucker was a big guy. Liable to put up a fight. Why not just shoot him? As it stands, must’ve been one guy driving the rig and two-three others holding the guy down so they could run over his head—why bother?”
Newbarr pushed his hat up to expose a liver spot. “You’re saying it was a gang?”
I shook my head. “Highwaymen generally act alone. It’s their misanthropic nature that drives them out here in the first place.”
Newbarr nodded. “Even if it was only two men, one of them had to be freakishly big and strong.”
“What I’m saying is, what if it wasn’t a highwayman at all?”
“Who else?”
I came back with another question: “Sacrificial animals? How do you offload them? It means heading into the city, exposing yourself. Any licenced shrine requires paperwork, too. It’s hardly worth the risk.”
I clambered into the cab while Newbarr chalked an outline. A ragged hole was blown through the passenger-side floorboard. I spotted a hand grenade in the cup holder.
In the glove box I found insurance papers with the trucker’s name: Irvine B. Coughlin. Address in New Nazareth, 1,500 furlongs southeast. I flipped the visor down: smiling photos of a boy and girl paper-clipped to the sun-bleached felt. Above them a snippet of Matthew 28: I am with you always, even to the end of the age.
When I swung down from the cab, Garvey was making his way back.
“The driver’s side door is back over that hill. A pair of punctures in it.”
“Bullet holes?”
Garvey shook his head. “No, punched from the inside out. I’m guessing someone chucked a grappling hook through the window and ripped the door off.”
“Anything else?”
“Skid marks of differing widths. More than one vehicle was involved in the hijacking.”
Having wrapped his preliminary investigation, Newbarr said, “Nobody’s certain this was a hijacking. For it to be a hijacking, something has to have been taken.” He threw an apprehensive glance at the overturned trailer. “Let’s hope it’s been ransacked and everything’s gone. At least that would make some sense.”
As bad as the driver had gotten it, his trailer got it worse.
It had broken free of the rig and skidded across a field wet with morning dew. The undercarriage had dug a twisting scar into the earth, now filling with groundwater.
We stepped over snapped fence posts and snarls of barbed wire. Garvey had a shotgun; Newbarr and I carried flashlights.
The trailer rested on its side; one of its cargo doors lay open like a drawbridge. Sunlight slanted through low-lying clouds to highlight the patina of blood on the door, the weeds and grass, still soaking into the dirt. Feathers—white, brown, yellow, most bloody—dotted the scene.
The head of some animal, a goat or sika deer, lay where it had been hurled in a thatch of cockleburs. The ragged neck wound indicated its head had not been cleanly sliced but rather wrenched and partly torn off. Its hide was stuck with burrs and its eyes gone filmy: they looked like marbles rubbed with sandpaper.
Coming from inside, their origin obscured by darkness: rustling sounds, scrabbling sounds, the odd peep. I pulled my revolver from its shoulder rig. It felt ungainly in my pinkie-less hand.
The second cargo door hung down like a flap of skin. I bent underneath it, easing myself into the trailer. The stink hit me like a closed fist: not decay, as not enough time had passed—just the high, giddy smell of death.
My flashlight beam was joined by Newbarr’s. They illuminated wholesale slaughter.
It looked as though a wind of razor blades had blown through the trailer. The compartment was crammed full of animals. Goats, deer, rabbits, guinea pigs, birds of many species. Most had been caged but some had obviously been roped to the walls; when the trailer flipped on its side these ones—goats, a few llamas—were strangled on their leads: they hung in the muggy darkness like heavy bags for boxing.
The cages had been forced open, steel rods bent and mangled, the animals plucked out and subjected to far worse than the goats got.
Someone had fed rabbits into the trailer’s cooling fan—it had remained operational even after the crash, judging by the red spray on the walls. The whicker birdcages had been stomped to splinters, birds and all. The hanging deer had been gutted and their chest cavities stuffed with dead guinea pigs.
A bluebottle bounced against my head, rendered sluggish by this bounty. Thousands of them created a maddening buzz. Below the buzzing, other noises: confused and pitiful.
“Who?” Garvey was seething. “Who would commit such sacrilege?”
He snatched Newbarr’s flashlight and stalked deeper into the trailer. I staggered back and heard a brittle, jaw-clenching crack. Training my flashlight down, I saw I’d stepped on the skull of a pale blue budgie. I blessed myself and inspected the ground for footprints, finding not a single one—how was that possible?
A fresh realization stung me. These animals hadn’t been killed outright: most had only been mutilated. Birds with wings torn off, rabbits with their feet snipped off, all left to bleed out and die. The mutilations were careful, meticulous; it must have taken hours. A wingless dove lay in a pile with several others, still horribly alive. Biting back a sob, I stepped on its head, too.
“How much more do you need to see?” Newbarr said softly. “This all seems nothing so much as . . .”
“Some sort of a message,” I finished for him.
Garvey let loose a scream. His shotgun blew a ragged hole into the death-box, and another, and another. He stormed the length of the trailer and shouldered past Newbarr out into the field.
When I took a hesitant step forward, the old coroner gripped my elbow. My ears were ringing from the shotgun volleys but I could read his lips well enough:
“You don’t want to see it.”
And he was right: I didn’t want to. But I needed to.
The flashlight reflected tiny glassy eyes, piles of wings and paws and hooves, lit up a decapitated llama head with its mouth stuffed full of bullfinches. The air was so thick with blood the feeling was narcotic; I swanned
into a suspended carcass and gaped in horror as severed rabbit heads tumbled from its stomach to patter at my feet. I swung around, revolted, heartsick, and saw what had set Garvey off.
Two deer sat in a shaft of sunlight coming in through the holes Garvey’s shotgun had punched in the trailer. One young, the other older: a mother and fawn. The young one was dead: someone had almost but not quite sawn its head off. The older one was licking its neck as if this might somehow resurrect it. Licking tenderly but obsessively: the hair on the little deer’s throat had been licked clean off.
I chewed the air to stave off the deep rootless panic rising in my chest. The deer stared around aimlessly. Did it see me? Could it see anything? Sunlight streamed through the holes and touched its soft brown coat. It was then I noted, with the kind of sick attention to detail peculiar to only the most profound nightmares, that all four of its legs had been broken. Bones shorn through flesh as if someone had snapped each one over a knee like kindling. It scrabbled on those useless legs, inched itself forward, shielding the little dead deer from me. It licked and licked and licked and it licked.
I cocked the revolver’s hammer. I didn’t know that my bad hand would be strong enough to handle the kickback. It had better be.
Afterwards I heard a frantic chirping outside the trailer.
Off to my left in the long grass and dandelions: a fitful flash of blue. I knelt and saw what it was: another blood-spattered budgie. It didn’t look hurt; the weight of blood on its feathers merely prevented it from flying.
I covered it with my hands. Its wings beat against my fingers. I picked it up, let its head poke through the circle made by my thumb and pointer finger. Eyes bright and alert. Twittering away. I laid it into my wide duster pocket.
Garvey knelt in the field, head bowed, gripping his skull with both hands. Newbarr stood nearby trying to light a cigarette but his hands were shaking so badly he couldn’t touch flame to the tip.
I touched the back of Garvey’s neck. “Garvey, it’s okay. I . . . I took care of it.”
Newbarr joined us. He’d managed to get his cigarette lit, but it jittered between his lips. “Those animals will go to Heaven,” he assured Garvey. “They deserve that.”
