by Jacob Rayne
The image stayed with him as if carved into his subconscious.
He limped halfway down the hallway towards the stairs, but turned back.
Grimacing, trying his best not to look at the horror contained in this most mundane of places, he opened the freezer.
He hastily turned the head round, unable to see those eyes for a second longer.
With the image in his mind altered enough to allow him to sleep, he washed his hands thoroughly a couple of times and staggered up the stairs.
He put his bloody clothes into a bin bag with the intention of burning them at a later date.
Then he showered himself for as long as he could bear to stand and crawled into bed.
Nicol was woken by the buzzing of his phone on the night stand.
In his drowsy state he mistook it for a giant wasp and lashed out instinctively.
His dreams had certainly been unsettling and bizarre after the macabre scenes in Laverick’s house of horrors.
He didn’t manage to get to the phone in time, but it soon began to vibrate again.
He already knew who it was so he dispensed with the formalities: ‘Alright, alright. I’m here.’
‘The fuck have you been?’
‘Sleeping. I had a hell of a time trying to get Laverick out.’
‘You did get him though?’
‘Part of him.’
‘The fuck’re you talking about?’
‘You’d best come take a look.’
Nicol pulled himself out of bed, feeling like he’d aged thirty years in the few hours he’d been asleep.
His upper body felt like it had been pummelled for most of the night, but even this paled in comparison to the agony coming from his leg.
The trip downstairs to make coffee was an ordeal but he had a feeling he’d need to be alert when his colleague got here.
He was halfway through his second cup when knuckles struck the door with enough force to dent the outer layer of wood.
‘It’s open,’ he called.
The door swung open and Bennett was there, six-two of sculpted muscle and bad attitude.
‘Jumping Jesus you look like deep-fried dog shit,’ Bennett drawled. He moved into the room, eyes scanning everywhere. ‘So where is he?’
Nicol beckoned him through to the kitchen, handed him a cup of coffee – black, three heaps of sugar – just the way he liked it; no point in even asking, Bennett always had coffee.
He drained a slug of it in one go, grunted in satisfaction, then continued looking around.
‘I’m not seeing him,’ he said, fully aware that he was stating the obvious. ‘What? Is he hiding under the goddamned table?’
Nicol shook his head.
Pointed to the freezer.
His body had already begun to tremble a little in anticipation of Bennett getting the bad news that was coming.
It was not good for his bad leg, sending fresh waves of pain crashing over him.
‘The fuck?’ Bennett’s right trigger finger was tapping on his upper outer right thigh, as it did when he was receiving bad news.
Nicol knew from experience that this was usually the location of his handgun.
Knew Bennett’s impulse was to draw his weapon and blow away the bearer of the bad news.
‘Bottom drawer,’ Nicol said, wincing in anticipation.
Bennett shook his head, already muttering curses under his breath.
He swung the freezer door open with his left hand.
His right trigger finger was still tapping on his leg.
Bennett pulled the drawer open, cursing as it caught a little at the top.
Subtlety, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, was not Bennett’s strong point and he slammed the base of his left fist into the drawer until the blockage was cleared.
‘Careful,’ Nicol said as he noticed the cracks that had appeared in the frosted plastic.
Bennett turned and scowled at him.
Then turned back and yanked the drawer so hard that the front panel came off in his hand.
‘Oh this is some fucked up shit right here,’ he laughed, not seeming to care that he’d just put his hand into the soggy end of Laverick’s severed head.
How can he just have the blood on his hands and not want to throw up? Nicol thought.
Bennett lifted the head out, cradled it to his chest like a new-born.
‘Hey, wanna help me bring some dead kids back to life, Dr Nicol?’ Bennett said in a curiously accurate impression of Laverick’s voice.
‘Stop it.’
‘Lighten up, man. So what the fuck happened here?’
Nicol told him everything.
‘But you thought fast and got his head. Fuckin’ A! That brain contains everything we need to know,’ Bennett grinned, slapping Nicol on the back so hard it made him stagger forwards a couple of steps.
Nicol was surprised. Bennett was certainly not as pissed as he’d thought he’d have been.
‘I like your style, Doc. We take the brain behind all of this clever shit and we bring it back to life using his very own technology. Boy, I wish I’d thought of it. It’s some fucking poetic shit.’
Nicol went to say that he hadn’t actually thought of any of this, that it was just a happy accident, but thought better of it.
Best to let Bennett think he was that clever.
He might survive longer that way.
‘The only problem is that all of the digital children were in Laverick’s house at the time of the explosion,’ Nicol said. ‘So we’d not be able to study their internals to see what Laverick did to re-animate them.’
Bennett smiled, clacked his tongue. ‘Not true, Doc. I already watched the camera feed of Laverick’s street to see where you had disappeared to.
‘There was this car pulled up before the explosion and Josh Walker – the father of Caleb Walker, one of Laverick’s most recent digital children – went into the house. We assume it is he who was responsible for the explosion.’
‘Yes, I figured it was probably him. So what?’
‘Well the footage showed three of the kids shuffling outta the wreckage. They were real sorry looking little motherfuckers, but they should be enough to help us wrap our heads around Laverick’s magic trick.
‘They left in the car with Marsha Walker; she’s Josh’s wife. Caleb’s mother. As far as we know they are still living with her, way under the radar. We find them, we’ll find out what we need.’
‘And how long is that going to take?’
‘Well, you’ll like this bit, Doc. We’ve had the house under surveillance for a while now. I am personally going to breach the property tonight.’
3.8
The cull crew moved in on the Walker house – a picture perfect piece of leafy suburbia if ever there was one – as the clock struck midnight.
Bennett took charge of the operation and put his jack-booted foot through the front door with the bare minimum of hassle – or in his words, ‘Z.F.A.’ (Zero Fucking Around).
The door flew open in a hail of splinters to reveal a house in darkness.
The crews usually watched the houses of their targets for at least a week to learn their habits.
They knew this was the house of a single parent.
Knew they’d be too exhausted from a day of diaper changes and tantrums to put up too much of a fight.
Bennett moved upstairs, hearing nothing to suggest he and his crew were walking into a trap.
Indeed, a look into the main bedroom revealed a blonde woman, late thirties, snoring loud enough to wake the neighbours.
Bennett smiled beneath his visor as he silently crept across to the bed and sunk his knife into her throat.
She woke up, eyes wide, mouth attempting a scream that was strangled by the blood gushing down her throat.
It was a matter of seconds before her eyes flickered shut again.
A gleaming pool of blood began to soak into the white Egyptian cotton sheets beneath her.
Piece of piss.<
br />
This is too fucking easy.
He felt no remorse about taking a mother from her children; the taking of a life was routine to him now, nothing worth losing any sleep over.
As he moved out of the room, his arm brushed against a heart-shaped collage of photographs on the wall.
Some of them showed the woman who bled out in the bed.
There were photos of her with a man and a kid, most of them with huge grins on their faces.
‘I miss you Caleb and Josh,’ the legend said, decorated with a kid’s painted handprints in a variety of colours.
‘Well you’re reunited now,’ Bennett muttered, snorting in amusement. ‘You’re welcome.’
A sound from the next room distracted him from his examination of the photographs.
But when he got to the next bedroom, the little blonde girl was peacefully asleep.
She looked perfect, except for her missing eyes.
Even while she was sleeping, it was obvious the sockets were empty.
The eyelids folded in where the eyeballs should have been.
‘That’s sick as fuck,’ he muttered to himself.
He knew this was the main target, Josephine Bull, the most sophisticated of the three digital children that had been taken in by Marsha Walker after the explosion at Laverick’s home.
There was one other kid in the room, he too was snoring soundly.
One of his legs stuck out of the bed, a strange metal calliper wrapped around it.
‘Where’s the other kid?’ Bennett mouthed.
He looked behind and Webb had just reached the top of the stairs.
His helmet gleamed in the dim light of the upstairs hall.
Suddenly there was the creak of a door and Webb went down, a hatchet stuck in the top of his helmet.
‘The fuck was that?’ Bennett said, spinning to survey the scene.
A kid with a horrifically distorted face came from one of the other rooms.
He had another hatchet in his hand.
Webb lifted his shotgun to blow him back to whatever hell he had come from, but the kid knocked the gun from his hands.
He let out a sickly giggle as his jaw clacked up and down.
Before anyone could react, the dummy kid had lifted the shotgun and used it to flip Webb’s visor up.
He found himself staring into the gaping dark twin bores of his own twelve gauge.
The muzzle flash lit the air, the blast deafening at such close proximity.
Webb’s head was turned into confetti and blasted against the back of his helmet.
He lolled forward, blood gushing from the open visor.
Bennett’s shotgun blast hit the kid full in the face, blowing away most of the right side of his face in thick spatters of blood and pulverised bone.
The clacking jaw was shorn in half, but still the laughter came.
He ducked behind the door, seemingly not in any great distress.
Bennett had two more men – Jones and Davies – with him and he knew by now that they’d have woken the rest of the house.
Indeed he heard panicked cries coming from the girl’s room.
Bennett darted in, stunned to see the little girl with no eyes had grabbed two eight-inch butcher’s knives from somewhere.
She was flailing them around with extremely bad intentions.
The knives raked the arms of his suit as he raised them in defence.
They were made of knife-proof material, but still it hurt, even if the blades couldn’t draw blood.
His orders were not to hurt any of the children, as they were to be studied back at the lab.
Grudgingly, he lowered his shotgun.
Instead, he planted the sole of his boot in her chest and shoved.
She flew back, smashing her head into the side of the bed.
Without a flicker of distress, she got up and came for him with renewed vigour.
He realised he wasn’t going to put her off, so he aimed low and took out her knee with a shotgun blast.
Her knee disintegrated in bloody splinters of bone.
Still her attack showed no sign of relenting.
Another shotgun blast went off behind him as the dummy kid let loose again.
‘Fucking hell,’ Bennett muttered.
The eyeless girl was crawling along the floor on her belly, slashing at his legs.
He lashed out with his boot, turning most of her teeth into jagged shards.
Still she came.
‘Give me a hand in here,’ he shouted, feeling slightly ridiculous.
The calliper kid was awake by now, but he was curled in a ball in the corner, sobbing his little heart out.
Davies ran in and he and Bennett set into Josephine with their boots and the butts of their guns.
Still she fought on, almost slashing a hole in Bennett’s throat with her wild attacks.
Davies grabbed her legs – which was much easier said than done – and Bennett managed to prise one of the knives from her hands.
The calliper kid had pulled round now and he too was armed; swinging a wooden baseball bat around recklessly.
It was clear they weren’t going down without a fight.
A shotgun blast hit Bennett in the back and he turned to see the dummy kid standing there, half of his head missing, blood pissing out onto his sharply pressed blue pyjamas.
Despite all of this, he was laughing like a fucking maniac.
The shotgun blast didn’t damage Bennett due to the protective properties of his suit, but it was like being hit with a sledgehammer.
He’d have bruises for weeks afterwards.
He turned, furious, and lashed out with his foot, hitting the dummy kid full in the face and taking him off his feet.
Still the laughter didn’t stop.
In fact it got louder as the calliper kid decked Davies with a wild charge.
The calliper kid was straight in, moving with a speed that belied his decrepit physical state.
His baseball bat met the back of Davies’ skull with a horrific crack.
Davies’ eyes rolled back in his head a little.
The bat came down again, making Davies go limp.
The eyeless girl moved in cautiously, her hands groping around until they found the zip on the back of Davies’ suit.
Bennett’s eyes grew wide.
If they got the zip open they could…
Too late; her blade opened Davies’ throat, spraying her face and lending her an appearance of sheer insanity.
Bennett knew they were on the losing end of this confrontation, and thanked someone up high – he didn’t believe in God per se but figured that something had to call the shots up there – that he had chosen a team of three to accompany him instead of the customary two man team.
The calliper kid swung a wild blow that slammed into the side of Bennett’s right thigh and gave him a dead leg.
He staggered forwards, hitting the calliper kid full in the face with the butt of the shotgun.
His jaw jumped a full three inches to the right with a sickening crunch.
He fell on his ass, not out but subdued for now.
‘Get the girl,’ Bennett shouted over the cacophony of the dummy kid’s laughter and the sound of blood racing from the twitching corpses of two of his colleagues.
‘Orders were to get all three, Sarge,’ Jones said.
‘Fuck that. We won’t survive long enough to get all three,’ Bennett snapped. ‘Now help me get the fucking girl before they recover.’
The dummy kid darted at him, biting at his arm like a rabid dog.
The articulated jaw had some serious power in its bite; he could feel it crushing the bones in his forearm together.
He turned, rammed the back of the kid’s head into the wall hard enough to make clouds of plaster fly out of the wall, then forced his forearm further into the jaws until they sprung open.
He gave the kid a hard elbow to what remained of his head, then ran in and grabbed the girl around the upper
body.
Jones grabbed her legs and they started trying to get her out of the room.
It was hard; even for two well-built men.
But they got her downstairs to the car just as the two other kids came racing down the stairs.
Bennett paused a second to fire a shotgun blast in the general direction of the two other kids and bundled the eyeless girl into the boot of the car.
Jones hurled himself into the driver’s seat.
‘Go! Go! GO!’ he bellowed as the dummy kid’s blood-covered face appeared at the window.
His tiny hands left smears of blood down the glass.
His insane laugh echoed round the car until Jones gained the sense to speed away from the scene.
‘Excellent work,’ Nicol congratulated Bennett as he delivered the sleeping child.
‘Do you have what you need?’ Bennett asked.
Nicol nodded.
‘Fuckin’ A! Time to take a peep behind Laverick’s curtain.’
3.9
‘Ah, this is interesting,’ Nicol said, upon staring into the open skull of Josephine Bull, the digital child that had been taken from Marsha Walker’s house. ‘Now I understand why what we were doing hasn’t been working. Just a slight twist on an idea,’ he said, tapping his pen against his tooth as he mentally joined the dots.
He almost fell over his own feet in his haste to get to his notepad.
‘Oh, Hank, you clever bastard,’ he muttered. ‘But I got here in the end.’
He chuckled smugly to himself, keen to apply the final piece of the puzzle.
Despite the lessons Nicol had learnt from studying Laverick’s modification of Josephine Bull, it still took him almost a year to obtain the result he craved.
He felt humbled by Laverick’s work.
And the reason that Laverick had begun this seemingly insane and impossible quest stayed with him always.
The unbreakable love a father had held for his stillborn son.
At times it brought a lump to his throat thinking about it.
But he had so much to thank Laverick for.
He was looking forward to finally expressing his appreciation.
And of course to picking his brains for the best way to continue his research.
Nicol followed Laverick’s lead and made a few dozen prototypes, to ensure that he had the procedure perfect before he began to mess around with Laverick’s head.
