A lone permi-glow rod swung slowly back and forth above, as the sound of traffic rumbled by overhead. Detective Remi kneeled beside one of seven corpses that littered the room. With clinical detachment he lowered the dead man’s jaw and shined a flashlight into his mouth. All of the bodies had extensive bruising, and had suffered blunt force trauma. Most of their necks had been broken, but the man he was examining now had died from suffocation. His trachea had been crushed. Spent shells of firearms littered the ground and tech specialists were collecting the bullets from the surrounding walls. There was still no sign of who had attacked the group of thugs and cases that had little evidence resulted in a detective being called in. About ten years ago it seemed that the standard detective was going to be an obsolete thing of the past. Some research team had developed collector drones that would sweep a crime scene putting together the data and have a conviction within forty-eight hours. Luckily, for Remi’s paycheck, some scientist trying to turn a quick buck sold the formula for a chemical residue that would scramble the sensors on a drone. Now the police force had several swarms that cost them several million dollars, and they only proved useful about twenty percent of the time.
Remi stood up, and began contemplating how seven men could be dead without any clues to who could have done killed them. A camera had been set up outside, but the only people entering the basement level of the building were now dead. The tech crew was leading around a swarm of the insect-like collector drones that were making their way through a pile of stolen electronics in the corner. They wouldn’t find anything relating to the murdered men. Remi stood up and began walking around the room tracing the gunfire on the walls with his thumb and forefinger. When he got to an electric socket he found the wall scorched in a rising arc.
A tech had come up behind him while he was examining the burn. “It seems to be recent.” He smiled and gestured with his thumb to the dead bodies behind him, “They could have had a real nasty electrical fire on their hands.”
“Could this have anything to do with the murders?”
“Not likely. You know, unless an electrical discharge just decided to pop out the wall and break these men’s necks.”
“Shit, I’ve never heard about any electrical current that could crush a man’s throat.” Remi stepped away from the tech and headed towards the door.
As he walked up the stairs outside, and headed towards street level, he pulled out a small cylinder device that was glowing green. He leaned up against a plastic lamppost on street level and watched vehicles rumbling by. The cylinder rocked back and forth in his hand as he contemplated the lack of evidence in the crime scene. He pushed it against his wrist and the light shifted slowly to red. As the drugs pulsed through Remi’s veins, he laughed to himself. The main culprit in this case is an electrical current, and for some reason that made a lot of sense. He looked up at the tall buildings all around him and saw a black cloak whipping in the wind far above. Closing his eyes, Remi rubbed the temples on the side of his head wearily, and then looked back up. The only thing that he saw flying in the sky was the wisps of steam boiling up into the night air off the city streets around him
“Shit, I think I’m going crazy.”
***
Jerad held the knife against the pale skin of her stomach, admiring his reflection off the blade’s surface. His eyes were filled with the madness of absolute power, and this discovery sent a chill of excitement down his spine. The woman’s whimper was muffled to near silence by the cloth gag filling her mouth. Putting the knife down on the dirty mattress, Jerad straddled her slight form. The woman struggled against his weight, and the plastic cords trapping her wrists and ankles. He could feel her scream vibrating up through his loins as he ran the blade along her ribs. The headboard slapped heavily against the wall as she jerked away from the cold metal. The hard scent of fear mixing with the smells of a cheap hotel filled his nostrils. Smells of mildew, urine, and sex were muted by the overpowering sickly sweet smell of air freshener spray.
He had only been teasing her with the touch of the blade before. Jerad’s smile became even more sadistic than before as he made the first cut on her milky skin. It was only a small incision, but it was deep and blood started welling up along her abdomen. The blood was hypnotizing to him. It held his insane eyes as it began trickling off to either side of her waist. Jerad ran his hand through her silky blonde hair, and admired her tear filled blue eyes. Both traits were chemically altered, and exaggerated to attract attention. She had stopped struggling now, and was pleading with him to let her go. Every tear spilt from her eyes to run down her cheeks and soak the gag was a prayer for mercy. This was the look that he had been waiting for. The sense of absolute power came over him again, and he knew that he decided when she died.
He was her god.
The sound of shifting weight caught his ears and he turned around quickly to see a man sitting behind him on the uncomfortable plastic chair next to the table with an ashtray lying on top of it. A thin trail of smoke was still coming up from the cigarette Jerad had been smoking moments before. The man was wearing all black and had solid black hair that contrasted with his white face, and irisless eyes. His eyes were empty of color, and held no compassion either. Those empty eyes scared Jerad, and he began to tremble under their gaze.
“Go ahead,” said the man in black, “Finish up, and then we will have some business to settle.”
The man smiled, but the smile seemed wholly unnatural to his face. His eyes were those of a killer, and Jerad knew the look very well. He had seen the same mad contortion in mirrors, and admired it in the reflection of his knife. This man knew that he was in complete control, and he decided who would live and who would die.
Jerad forgot about the trembling woman that he was straddling. “Who the fuck are you?”
“You will have a long time to work out that little riddle.” The man in black blinked. “Where I’m sending you, you’ll have nothing but time.”
Jerad bolted off of the bed and went for the door as fast as he could. The knife clattered on the floor as he struggled with the latch, and tried to wrench the door open. It was too late for him though. The man in black stepped forward and grabbed Jerad by the back of his head. The man pulled Jerad close and forced him to look into his soulless eyes. A sadistic smile replaced the calm look on the man in black’s face. This smile seemed right at home.
***
Remi sat back in the comfortable fake leather chair that was the only item of luxury in his near bare office. He had turned off the lights and was listening to classical music turned really low. None of the facts came together. Usually, if he could only just relax, the pieces of the puzzle would fall into place. The pieces didn’t seem to even be from the same puzzle. He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a small key. Trembling slightly he unlocked a drawer on his desk and pulled it open. Inside there was a picture of a woman and a young boy hugging each other and smiling. Beside the picture was three metal cylinders two were red and one was green. He picked up the green one and placed it against his wrist. The light changed to a red color and Remi let out an audible sigh.
“That stuff will kill you.” A dark figure was standing on the other side of the room.
The cylinder hit the ground and Remi let the chair lean back. His left hand casually reached for his firearm that was hanging from a holster on the back of the chair. The man on the other side of the room moved slowly forward and sat down on the plastic chair on the other side of his desk.
“Who are you, and how did you get in here?” Remi asked while undoing the strap on his holster.
“Who am I? That is a question that I have been asking, and many people have asked me.” He brought his booted feet up to rest on the desk. “I am the ghost of a mad machine. I am an avenging angel of damnation. Maybe you made me up. I’m your fragging imaginary friend! I’m what goes bump in the night.”
“How about just giving me something I can call you.”
“Call me Specter.”
“Why are you here, Specter?”
“I’m here to give you what you have been praying for.”
“Which is?”
“Murder.”
Remi had looked into the eyes of mad men before, and he looked into this man iris less eyes he realized that they were probably both insane.
Specter put a gun on his desk and smiled wickedly. “They never found out who murdered your wife and kid.”
Remi massaged his wrist and slid the drawer closed. “They died in an accident.”
“They were murdered, Remington. I know who killed your family, and I know where he is going to be in three days. This gun won’t be traced back to you.”
Remi closed his eyes and began to laugh at the man who was offering him the peace that he had been looking for. He had spent too much time blaming himself for his family’s death, and it felt good to think he could blame someone else. When he opened his eyes, he found that there was no man in front of him anymore and he was only laughing at the darkness. Glancing down he noticed that he had dropped his vial of Brain Drain, and the red light was staring up at him. Remi picked up the metal cylinder and opened up the drawer that he kept them in. Inside was the picture of his wife and kid. Beside that was a gun laying on top of a data chip. He palmed the chip and gazed at it for a while before placing it into his desk viewer. Then the footage of a brutal murder began playing in front of him. He recognized the victims all too well. They visited him in his nightmares and asked him why he didn’t protect them.
***
An aged gentleman picked up a news chip from a street vender, and passed his palm over the man’s credit reader. The reader beeped to signify that there were sufficient funds in his account. This had become a ritual for Simon once he had lost his job and had the time to take walks from his small apartment down to the city street below. He had been a frugal spender his entire life, and had saved most of the money that he earned. This was paying off now that most people in the city had become unemployed, and homelessness was becoming an epidemic. He passed three men in rags, and plastic wrappings as he made his way back up to his apartment. Echoes of his steps, on the real stone floors, followed him back up to his room. The door closed behind him, and he slipped the news chip into his viewer.
Images began pouring from the screen as he sat back in a moderately comfortable plastic chair that creaked under his weight. One of the headline news stories featured a series of vigilante murders. The viewer began showing criminals who had been executed brutally by an assailant that police had not been able to identify. But, they assured the public that they were using all resources available to bring the culprit to justice. Police tend to over react when an amateur starts showing them up. They had been having a rougher time since spoofers, a chemical compound that would make drones give false readings, had become an available resource to even the common criminal. What had caught his eye? There.
“Freeze image.” The old man said calmly to the viewer and it stopped playing.
On the back wall he saw an electrical outlet that had a huge scorch mark running along the wall. Not uncommon for the older buildings that had trouble taking the new forms of energy output. He reached down and manipulated the controls for the viewer on his chair. The images backtracked until he was looking at the image of another crime scene in the series of murders. It was harder to see in this image, but on the far side of the screen he made out another outlet with a large scorch mark. There seemed to be a pattern.
“Interesting that the evidence had nothing to do with the crimes.” The old man mused before prompting the viewer to go on to the next news story.
***
Remi sat in the darkened car watching the entrance to the skyscraper. His heartbeat wildly in his chest and he began ritually checking the gun’s safety to make sure it was off. The windshield began to fog up, and he reached over to turn the air on. Specter was sitting beside him in the car even though he hadn’t noticed him there before. He rapped his hairless knuckles against the dashboard, and was humming some tune that sounded like a funeral dirge.
“You know murder is wrong, don’t you?” Said Remi as he flicked the safety on and then off.
“I punish murderers.”
“You murder them.”
“There is something wrong with that?”
“I guess I’m just saying ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’. Or, something like that.”
“Trust me when I say that sometimes that equation makes perfect sense.”
They were both silent for several minutes. Specter continued to hum under his breath and Remi was about to ask him what it was. Then he saw the man from the pictures walking towards the building they were parked across from. The man he had come for.
“It is now time for you to extract your vengeance, Remington.”
Remi holstered the gun Specter had given him and walked across the street. He followed the older man up the stairs until they reached an apartment complex and the man walked into one of the rooms. Checking the room number he finished his way up the stairs and knocked twice on the door. The killer opened the door and Remi pushed his way inside. Remi grabbed the man and looked into his eyes. He didn’t have the eyes of a murderer anymore. Drugs and time had dulled his eyes to a near lifeless stare. The pistol found it’s way under the man’s chin and the killer’s drug dimmed eyes were diluted with fear as the door slammed shut behind them. Remi kicked the man’s legs out from under him, and stood over him with the pistol aimed at the man’s chest. Everything that Remi ever wanted was just a pull of the trigger away. Redemption for his family’s death.
He couldn’t do it.
“What do… do you want?” Asked the gutter scum at his feet that Remi had once considered a killer.
As a law enforcement officer, he knew that the right thing to do was to send him to prison. Revenge would be his, but he would not have this man’s blood on his hands. He relaxed his grip on the gun and reached into his coat to pull out a set of handcuffs.
“You’re wanted for the murder of Allison Remington, and Jacob Remington.”
The man at his feet stopped shaking and his eyes began darting back and forth. He seemed to be trying to remember something.
“Allison.” He whispered under his breath, and then he smiled. “The whore I had.”
Remi heard the gun shots and wondered where they were coming from. Then he saw the body at his feet jerking violently with each bullet that slammed into his chest as he pulled the trigger again and again.
Until the gun was out of bullets, but the redemption never came.
