Meta Zero One

by Moss, Martin J

  The thing that stopped him was not a sense of civic duty, nor even a sense of right and wrong, no it was that even in the dark, even lying on the floor with his hands over his head, protecting himself, Elroy recognised the man.

  The man being beaten up was Stanley, the man who had bought him a cranberry juice in the bar.

  And that made him deserve better than a kicking.

  "Time to stop your fun boys," Elroy said loudly, perhaps they could be talked down, perhaps they would see sense.

  The three stopped and turned to face him.

  Elroy grinned, they were obviously low level thugs, and unlikely to have any significant powers, but you could never tell.

  One had a long red beard with pointed ears, one had green scaled skin and looked like he struggled to breathe and the third, who went up a notch in terms of threat assessment was a girl with pale blue skin.

  In gangs, girls were usually more dangerous than boys. Additionally she was armed, she held a knife in one pale blue hand.

  "Go away zero," she said, with a voice which was soft and melodic, a voice like syrup dripping over a warm cake, like an iced beer at the end of the day. Elroy felt himself twitch in response, he felt the urge to leave, to walk away and leave Cranberry Juice man to his own problems.

  "Walk away and don't look back," she said, smiling now, she was surprisingly pretty even with her pale blue skin.

  Elroy wanted so much to please her, he wanted to do just what she said. He felt himself turning away.

  The girl watched and smiled at him, a smile which rapidly faded as Elroy grinned evilly back, turned to face her and took a step forwards.

  "Girl," he said, "I've had freaks like you trying to tell me what to do all my life. The other week Mental Man tried to get me to forget that he had just murdered and raped a teenage girl, and do you know where he is now?"

  Pale Blue girl just looked at him.

  "Do you know where he is now?" Elroy shouted, "no, you don't. And you never will, because he's locked away at the bottom of a very deep dark pit. He is locked away playing hunt the arsehole with all the other crazy fuckers who thought they could make me do anything I didn't want to do."

  Elroy stepped forwards, Pale Blue stayed were she was, Red Beard took a step to his left and Green Scales a step to the right.

  Cranberry Juice stayed on the floor where they had left him.

  "I'm going to give you a chance to walk away from this," Elroy said calmly staring at each of them in turn, "one chance, and one chance only. And that's just because I have somewhere to be in ten minutes and I really, really need to be there. So if the three of you walk away, if you leave now, I won't break your legs and leave you for dead in this alley."

  They weren't going to go for it, Elroy knew it, they knew it, they could not see the very real threat he posed for them.

  Red Beard was trying to circle him with Green Scales, they were boxing him in, cutting of his escape.

  But Elroy did not want to escape

  "Ok," Elroy smiled, "let's play it your way."

  He watched the girl's face closely, she was in charge of the group and she would want Red Beard and Green Scales to attack at the same time. To make this happen they would both look to her for the signal.

  So he ignored them and watched her instead.

  There was always a tell, always a signal, always a message when three people tried to fight together. Elroy had been in enough fights to know what to look for.

  As Pale Blue's eyes flickered from side to side she nodded fractionally, and Elroy moved.

  Taking one long step forwards his right arm shot out and he punched her in the throat as hard as he could.

  She was completely and utterly unprepared for the brutality of his assault. Every instructor he'd ever had had taught him, if you are going to hit someone them hit them hard. You make damn sure that they go down and don't get up, you might not get another chance.

  So he hit her in the throat, on a normal human it was a fight ending strike and he wanted to make sure that she was unable to speak for a long time. He didn't want her attempts to control him to distract him when he was dealing with the other two thugs. From the feel of the impact, and the way she collapsed to the floor he knew straight away that she was out of the fight

  Green Scales and Red Beard were now behind him, still attacking where he had been, not were he was now.

  Elroy spun, stepped right and grabbed Red Beard by his red beard, pulling down sharply so that his head shot downwards to meet Elroy's knee as it moved up. The chin is actually remarkably easy to break if you hit it in the right place with the right force. Elroy felt it shatter and shift as his knee followed through, flinging the man shrieking backwards.

  Green Scales tried to land a clumsy punch, but Elroy grabbed his fist easily. He then held it, while he punched him repeatedly in the face four times, before letting him go, allowing the youth to fall unconscious to the floor.

  The entire incident had taken less than three seconds, and Elroy was not even breathing hard.

  Not bad, he thought, the old skills were still there, he still had it.

  Now, turning to Cranberry Juice, Stanley he reminded himself, he helped him get to his feet. Giving him the once over he could see that Stan was bruised, and shocked, but not really badly hurt. The MAH had not had time to really go to town on him before Elroy had intervened.

  "You'll be ok," he said, holding Stan up by his elbow.

  "Thanks," Stan looked up, he vaguely recognised the man who had saved him from somewhere, but his alcohol befuddled brain could not quite place from where. "Have we met before?"

  Elroy laughed, "Only the once, and we won't again I think. I suggest you go home now, you are not in any condition to be stumbling blindly through Lowtown."

  Elroy dragged Stanley back to the main street, vaguely satisfied that none of the thee assailants were moving, he suspected that Pale Blue Girl might not even be breathing. Their problem he thought, I did warn them. Elroy flagged down a taxi, paid the driver a wad of money, and said "Drive him around until he can tell you where he lives, then take him there."

  With that he shoved Stanley in the back of the cab, closed the door and turned to continue on his way.

  He didn't see the taxi drive off, or see it stop at the next junction, where Stanley got out and stumbled off down the road.

  Ten minutes later Elroy had cut out of Lowtown and was at the office of the Superhuman Liaison Office pathologist. Well he as sitting in the reception of the Superhuman Liaison Office pathologist reading this months copy of Cosmopolitan. He had just finished an article on 'why women loved shoes', and was about to learn the '20 ways to guarantee an orgasm, when the receptionist indicated he could go through.

  Elroy had been here many times before, far too many to be honest. He knew his was around the labs better than he did around his own apartment. So he went straight to the stairs and climbed the 10 floors to the main lab.

  Out of habit he never took the lift, he didn't like to be trapped in any metal box either alone or with someone.

  Elroy smiled at the armed guard outside the main lab door, who he knew from previous investigations and pushed his way through the door and stepped into another world.

  Dr Taggert's lab was a shrine to cleanliness. If, as his long dead mother had told him every day, cleanliness was indeed next to godliness, then Dr Taggert must have sat on the right hand side of the Lord himself.

  Everything was in the right place, everything shined if it should, gleamed of it could and glowed with an inanimate "look at me" satisfaction.

  And that included Dr Taggert.

  She always made Elroy feel slightly dirty, and not in a good way.

  Dr Taggert wore a white, spotless lab coat, was tall and willowy with long red hair tied back in an almost perfect plait. Her skin had the paleness of someone who spent most of her time working under fluorescent light and he would swear that even the freckles which crossed her cheeks and nose were carefully and preci
sely placed.

  If you had watched any CSi, crime scene related drama on television, then you would have recognised Dr Martha Taggert. She was almost a cliche in her visual suitability for the job.

  She looked up as Elroy entered, "There's been a murder," she said in a broad Scottish drawl.

  "A murder," he replied in the same accent. They had once spent an evening watching The British drama series Taggart, on Elroy's huge hd television. Ever since they had mimicked the broad Glasgow accents of the main characters, particularly the way they said murder.

  The evening had almost, but not quite ended with them in bed together, almost enough to be vaguely embarrassing, and not quite enough to mean that they had seen each other naked. They had never discussed it since and now they were firm friends.

  But there were no more evenings watching British crime dramas, which was a shame, Elroy had had to watch the complete run of Prime Suspect on his own.

  "You're late Elroy," she said, the body on the table in front of her was covered with a fresh white cloth.

  "Now Martha we both know you have nothing better to do tonight, and she, well she won't mind." He gave her a gentle peck on the check, which said, I know we've messed around and I enjoyed it, it was a peck that demonstrated a fondness and restricted intimacy.

  "Hmm, you are so right," she looked at his hand, there was a cut across one of his knuckles, "have you been fighting in the playground Elroy? You know you should behave better."

  "I crossed over Lowtown," he replied, letting her lead him to the sink, where she washed and dressed the cut, spraying antiseptic on it, which stung far more than it really should. He tried not to wince and failed.

  "Poor baby," she crooned grinning at him, her perfect teeth flashing.

  "Some MAH's were getting heavy with someone, and I put a stop to it."

  "How many were there?"

  "Three, just freaks really, one had a basic power of verbal compulsion, but I managed to ignore it."

  "You should be careful," she said,"one of these days you're going to run into someone or something that you can't take down with swift kick in the nuts. There are more and more Metas out there, and it only takes one to get lucky and you'll end up on my slab, like this young woman here."

  "I trust that if that happens you'll treat me in death with the same level of disrespect that you treat me in life."

  "Absolutely," Martha smiled, walking back over to the body and pulling the white sheet down, exposing her subject to Elroy.

  The woman was in her early twenties, well built, with the kind of hard muscled body that shouts of hours in the gym. She was naked, her skin very pale, but there were no obvious signs of damage or injury, other than to her face.

  Her face was just not there.

  Someone and taken an extremely sharp blade, and removed the layer of skin and muscle that had once been her face. Leaving behind a sight that was disturbing, even to Elroy.

  "Janet Pascale Devior," Martha said, holding up the clipboard of notes, "aged 25 at time of death, lived in Cheshire England. She was here on holiday, staying at the Grosvenor Hotel on 54th street."

  "Just by Lowtown," Elroy commented, taking the clipboard off her.

  "Yes," she replied, "it's not that unusual, people like to take in the sights don't they, it's a decent cheap hotel, and Lowtown is a huge tourist attraction after all."

  Elroy looked at the file, at the front of which was a picture of Janet Devoir, probably taken from her passport. It wasn't a very good shot, but he could clearly see how beautiful she had been.

  "She was a looker," he said.

  "Certainly was, just like all the others," over the last 2 years a series of murders had taken place, all with the same M.O. The victims were all young women, physically fit, with beautiful faces. There were no clues, no trace evidence, and no sign of a struggle.

  Which was why Elroy and his team had been brought in.

  It appeared that a super powered serial killer was on the lose, targeting beautiful women in the New York area.

  23 victims, roughly at the rate of one a month had been identified.

  23 women had had their faces cut off.

  23 families had had their lives ruined.

  "So it's definitely the Face Ripper," he said.

  "Yes," Martha examined the wound closely, "although you might have to change the name soon. This face has not really been ripped of, it's been cut off, very very carefully and very very well. I've noticed this over the last few victims, the first few were extremely rough, there was more underlying tissue damage, but the last few, and particularly this one have been almost professionally done."

  "Practice makes perfect" he said.

  "I'd say so yes, anyway," Martha ran her hands down the victims arms, ending at the fingers. "There is no sign of a struggle, there are no defence wounds, and I will do a swab but I don't think there will be any of the murderers skin under her fingernails."

  "The only wound," she continued, is on the back of the neck, here," Martha tilted Janet's head, so that Elroy could see the faint red mark. "As with all the others she has been injected with something, I expect it to be the same substance."

  "Unknown Substance X," Elroy said.

  "Unknown Substance X," she replied, every victim had been injected with a substance which the labs had singularly failed to identify. Traces were found in the blood but they decomposed whenever they were extracted and subjected to any tests.

  It was almost as if they were designed to elude detection.

  Which was another reason why Elroy and his team had been called in.

  "So," he said, "the killer identifies his victim, sees her in the street, passes her, meets her in a pub something like that. He then gains access to, or is invited to the victims bedroom, where he injects her with Unknown Substance X. This presumably either knocks her out, kills her or just makes her unable to move, while he cuts her face off and takes it home."

  "Sounds about right, he must be building up quite a collection by now."

  "I don't think so."

  "No, why not, there are 23 faces, so that's 23 he has taken home as you put it. I always assumed he preserved them in some way, as a memento. Unless you think he eats them with fava beans and a nice chianti."

  "I don't think so no. I don't think he eats them, and I don't think he keeps them. Or of he does keep them then they don't last very long. It's roughly one every 4 weeks that he kills. So I think that he is using them, that he is using them up somehow. Whatever he does with them the faces only last for about 4 weeks. And then he needs a new one."

  "So," he continued,"I reckon he's not going to stop, he'll carry on until we catch him, he dies of old age, or he runs put of pretty girls."

  The Face Ripper

  The face ripper watched themselves in the mirror. Janet Deviors face starred back at them.

  She looked as beautiful as she had in life, and the hours the face ripper had spent smoothing the skin, tidying up the edges, had paid off wonderfully.

  It almost fitted them perfectly.

  Mounted carefully on a thin plastic mold, Janet's face moved in conjunction with the Face Ripper's own, mirroring the expression it looked almost alive.

  Almost, but not quite alive.

  Almost but not quite perfect.

  The Face Ripper felt a tear run down their face between their skin and the plastic mold.

  This one would not last, soon it too would fade away, soon, Janet's face would join all the others and have to be discarded.

  Soon the Face Ripper would have to find another victim, another donor.

  Soon...

  To be continued

  (if you liked this, then email me at info@martinjmoss.co.uk)

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1 – Stanley gets engaged, briefly.

  Chapter 2 – Margaret’s life changes dramatically.

  Chapter 3 - Elroy steps in something nasty

  Chapter 4 - Stanley gets very drunk

  Chapter
5 - Margaret meets someone special

  Chapter 6 - Elroy stops a fight.