No Dogs in Philly (7)

A Cyberpunk Horror Noir | Chapter 7: Sacrifice

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The girl had been bound and gagged, trussed up like a turkey, no signs of a struggle. They’d slit her throat and then let the blood run into a trench about four inches deep, two feet wide, and four feet long. Now the trench was a rectangle of black, crusty, mud, like a giant chocolate bar. They’d scooped out the girl’s eyes, cleanly, and then laid her down, spread her legs and arms, and unraveled her veins to make a blood angel in the dirt.

But all Saru could feel—aside from an urge to fill the trench with vomit—was relief. This wasn’t the girl; this wasn’t her girl. She knew because of the flower in her hair. This was just a poor, sad, desperate woman who happened to have unusually bright blue eyes.

Hemu had given her the flower—plucked it seemingly at random from the chapel wall and placed it in her hair. She’d tossed it, of course, and ground it into the pavement with her boot. The memory of the night made her angry, each step away from the communion place had made her angrier and angrier.

What were they playing at? What was this? More smoke and mirrors, more scams, more drugs and ploys to drill inside her brain and manipulate her. At the time it had felt real, believable, nice even. But back on the streets, away from the silent vagabonds and the city sky all lit up like stars, it seemed like she had been played again, given just enough information to make her look like a sap, hooked, landed, and flayed.

And the damn flower wouldn’t go away! A tiny white bell on a thin green stem and in the morning it had appeared in her hair again, exactly where Hemu had placed it, lovingly, reverently almost. The thought filled her with disgust and a self-loathing that was warm and comfortable like an old sweater. She’d crushed and burned the flower, flushed it down the toilet and tossed it off a rooftop—but always it came back.

It was a glitch in her memory—her whole brain, her whole setup was glitched. There was no flower but for whatever reason her brain had fixated on it, forgotten to delete the memory when the flower itself was gone, and so she was haunted by it.

That and other things.

Her vision still flickered from time to time, she’d lose minutes and forget where she was, and sometimes she heard the laugh, the hyena laugh of Friar’s death. She needed to find a saw jockey she could trust, someone to go into her brain and reset everything to factory settings. But she couldn’t afford it now, couldn’t afford the downtime of having her mind rebooted, the drooling, the potty training, the learning to walk all over again.

“The odd thing is,” someone was talking. She’d zoned out, let her thoughts take her away. She brought herself back to the moment, back to the mutilated girl in front of her, the mounds of reeking garbage, the obnoxious cackling of crows, and the spindly man in a saggy gray uniform trying to make sense of it all. McCully, a vulture, private forensics and body auctioneer. Made a living as a squire to PIs and selling found corpses back to their families—if they cared enough to pay.

“…is that it looks like she didn’t suffer. There’s no trace of stress. The scans show her calm, like she blissed out but there ain’t no drugs in her. And then…this here. The injury to the throat should have been fatal but…then she moves over here. Maybe the killer picked her up, but the signs are it looks like she stood up and walked over…could be some kind of mod, but I dunno.”

“What are you thinking?” Saru said, mechanically. She didn’t really care; the girl was dead, it wasn’t her mark, time to move on. There were no clues here, not so much as a hair or a drop of foreign blood or even a sign of a struggle. The girl had no traces of identifying drugs, no bullet holes or darts. Yes, her record said her eyes had been blue, and they had been scooped out, but that was still hardly evidence this was tied to her case. It was entirely possible the murder was just a lark for some psychopath.

But she didn’t believe it. Too much coincidence. And there was that damn flower.

Deep in her gut, the part of her really steering the ship, she could feel it, feel the flower. It was like a windchime in a warm breeze. Now it was tinkling, metal pipes gently knocking against each other as she looked down at the eyeless corpse with her veins spread out like angel wings. It touched her just enough to tell her this was important, but it wasn’t the clanging she’d feel if this were her girl. A dumb game of Marco Polo. Marco! Polo! Marco! Polo!

“…I’d say she died late last night, early morning. Lucky that none of the elzi got at her, strange even, because this place is crawling with ‘em.” McCully gestured grandly at the panorama of garbage. “They love this place, there’re piles of ‘em here—are you listening to me?”

“Yeah,” Saru said.

He squinted at her. His face was wrinkly, like a walnut. “I don’t like this,” he said. “Too dramatic. Big flashy killing like this—if word gets out the cops’ll have to get involved.”

That would be the end of her case, ruined. They’d storm the slums, kick down doors, round people up, chase every lead—not that too many were presenting themselves as it was—into a rat hole and then find some poor foreign schlep to take the fall and execute him on the evening news.

“What do I owe you?” she asked, wearily. When the six-digit sum had landed in her entity-disguised anonymous bank account, half a million dollars had seemed pretty close to infinite money. But now, having to pay out half the city for tips and leads, Net tracks, thugs, pimps, vultures, and mercenaries, she was pissing cash.

“Two thousand.”

She counted it out. “You gonna take the body?”

“Family’s got nothing. I’ll dump it at the kiln.”

“How much’ll that net?”

“Fifty square. I always wondered why the Gaespora paid to incinerate bodies. Thought it was some kind of public health thing. But now…”

“They’re not a charity. That’s for sure. You know, the second you get word I want you to call me.”

“You expecting more like this?”

“Yeah.”

He glanced around nervously at the piles of trash. A vulture didn’t spook easy, didn’t go well with poking at corpses and lugging them around, but McCully seemed downright frazzled, like whoever did the girl was going to pop out and lop off his schnoz. Fat chance; he had about the grayest, blandest eyes you could imagine, grayer than his drab vulture onesie.

“Walk away,” he said. “Whatever you’re doing, whatever they’re paying you, walk away.”

“Can’t.”

“You’re in over your head.”

“Boy, don’t I know it.”

He glanced around again, conspiratorially, and then leaned in close. “Saru, whoever killed this woman knew what they were doing. They pulled her apart like an animal in some sick science experiment…” He kept glancing around. Who did he think was listening? But he’d gotten her attention at least. “It’s not normal.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, this is something to do with the Uau. It has to be.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I know I’ve never seen a corpse like this before and I’ve never seen a corpse left alone all night that some elzi didn’t chew on. They’re staying away from it. That ain’t normal.”

“Maybe they filled up on garbage and spoiled their dinner,” she said crossly, and started walking away. “Keep this quiet,” she yelled over her shoulder. “And let me know when you get the next one.”

***

An elzi was lying on the hood of her Cadillac, basking in the midday haze like a lizard. She pulled a rusty pipe from a trash pile and used it to pry him off her hood. He fell to the ground and then crawled away on hands and knees, stopping to lick a gum wrapper he’d found. The Caddy was a piece of crap and she hated driving it—stuck in traffic, vulnerable—and paying $400 to fill the tank, but cabs wouldn’t run to the city outskirts. Too many cabbies had been called out to nowhere land only to be tapped in the back of the head and have their cars chopped up.

She grumbled the car to life and careened down the dirt path to the exit and onto something resembling a street—more potholes than anything. Halfway to the city center she got a call from Jojran. She switched the Caddy to auto and put Jojran up on the windshield. He used an avatar, an electric blue tiger-man in some sort of Egyptian-looking spacesuit. His avatar sat in a chair like he was commanding a starship and there were stars flying by in the background. What a joker, but he was good at what he did.

“I’ve found something,” he said. He used his own voice, squeaky, like a ball forgot to drop. It was ridiculous coming from the ultra-masculine tiger body he’d chosen for himself.

“What is it?”

“Come over and I’ll show you.” Always trying to get her to come over.

“Just patch me in.”

“Bad idea, this is a heavy download. Might hurt.”

“I can take it.”

“Come on over, it’ll be fun.”

She sighed inwardly. If it was anything interesting it was probably a bad idea to just feed it to her over the Net. Glitched out as she was it could cause her to blow a neuron or if she really was being hacked then the hackers could lift it off of her. Besides, Jojran always had good booze. She’d raid his bar and skedaddle.

“Alright. Be there in an hour.”

She kicked it back into manual and revved up to ninety, flying onto the highway and zipping in between the SUVs and trucks, Hathaway chem tankers, minivans, motorcycles, and techie sports cars. Mentally she accessed her account and dropped a few thousand bucks into her ticket exemption fund just in case a copper was lurking somewhere. Half the cars were cops in disguise, and she’d already gone through the hassle once of being caught and having her Caddy seized. She’d had to drop almost ten grand in bribes to get it back—she would’ve let it rust if there hadn’t been about forty grand worth of contraband implants hidden in the secret case she’d installed in the fuel tank.

First exit to downtown she screeched to a stop and got out. She ordered the Caddy to go back to the garage and prayed it found its way this time. Last week she’d sent it home and it went exploring instead—a typical GPS malfunction—and wedged itself in an alley ten blocks away with blood all over the grill. The dash cam showed an elzi skipping into the highway. Three grand to clean the thing and hammer out the dents.

Jojran lived in a fancy apartment building off Washington Park. The security guard wouldn’t open the door for her.

“Listen,” Saru said, pressing the com button and gritting her teeth. “I have an appointment with Alex Ramirez.” She wasn’t sure if that was Jojran’s real name or just an identity he’d stolen for the real world, but it was the name he was using to live in this nice place and she did have every right to be there, and this guy was pissing her off. She could see him through the glass, talking to his sneering compatriot, shaking his head. He wasn’t even responding to her.

She knew there was an auto-rifle pointed at her somewhere, loaded with tranqs or rubber bullets or hell it could even be lead. It wouldn’t do her any good to throw a tantrum outside but it might give her some emotional satisfaction. How strong was that glass? Mentally she rifled through the ammo in her holster—she had a few Bob’s Big Boys that were closer to cruise missiles than bullets. Would that do it? She started calculating what her sentence would be. That was the problem with crimes against the rich—they could always outbid you. Not if she solved this case. She could shoot anyone she wanted then. But first she had to get into this damn building.

She called Jojran.

“These little pig men won’t let me in,” she said, wishing she could blame them.

“I’ll talk to them,” he said, self-important. She got the strange sense that he had arranged this in some ill-conceived plot to impress her. She saw the one guard’s eyes go unfocused for a second, taking a call, and then he reached down to his console and she heard a buzz as the door unlocked. She strolled in and flashed them a smile.

“Thanks,” she said.

“Sorry for the misunderstanding,” he said. It was clear he still thought she belonged on the other side of the glass.

The lobby was so clean and bright and had abstract paintings on the wall. All the brass was polished and shiny, the uniforms crisp and clean. The guards themselves looked competent—tall, fit, poised, close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair and hard eyed—not the pudgy houseplants you normally saw parked behind a reception desk. The guard’s eyes watched her sign in; she saw the twitch in his jaw as her thumbprint came up as Susan Greere, CPA, CFO, Meadow Media. He knew it was fake as a tan but she was a guest. He walked her to the elevator and stood glaring at her. She glared right back and resisted the urge to flip him off just as the doors sucked closed.

Jojran lived in one of the top quarter suites, an open two-floor affair of dark wood, brushed steel, and wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling windows with a breathtaking view of the city below—away from the filth of humanity it almost looked nice. The view was a waste as Jojran spent 99 percent of his waking life on the Net—a self-titled super-user, uber, elite, professional masturbator, whatever you called it. He greeted her in a leopard-print silk bathrobe that did little to distract from his height deficit and surplus fat. She hoped to god there were silk boxers on underneath—and why was he wearing just socks?

“Welcome,” he said, dramatically, squeakily. “To my humble abode.”

“Lovely,” she said. She pushed past him and went to the bar, an actual bar in the corner, and began rummaging for the most expensive thing she could find. Dimly it occurred to her that if she solved this case then she could afford to live in a place like this, to stare out the windows at the little people below and drink vodka swirling with pulverized diamonds. She poured herself a glass and drank.

“Can I get you anything?” he asked, dumbly, as she finished the first glass and started on a second.

“What do you have for me?” she asked.

 “Oh, right. Yeah. It’s interesting.” She could tell it was. He was torn between sharing his news and delaying to try…something with her.

“Show me.”

“Or…”

“Now.

“Okay. Okay.”

He sat down on the small couch facing the floor-to-ceiling windows and patted the seat next to him. She poured herself a mix of everything at the bar and sat. He clapped his hands and the room went dark. There was the ozone feel of a Net wave and she found herself standing in Jojran’s vik, his virtual kingdom, which appeared to be some sort of spaceship. He sat in the command chair as the electric blue man-leopard, and she sat at his side. In front of them was a screen that showed stars flying by. She’d been in viks before—most people had some form of escape—but they were usually patchy affairs, phoned-in, cardboard-fake theatre sets that did little more than disguise the ugliness of a sad-sack studio apartment. She’d considered building one herself, putting up some virtual wallpaper or a window or two but she didn’t like the viks; they made it too hard to snatch truth from fiction.

Jojran’s vik was especially unsettling. She knew she was sitting in the dark of his apartment on a too-cozy couch listening to him wheeze. But it took concentration to keep herself there. If she relaxed, let herself drift, she was back on the starship—she could feel the hum of the futuristic engines, the gentle murmur of the virtual crew and the faint blips and beeping. She could see the addictive factor, the power of controlling your reality that made so many poor saps into Net heads, working dead-end jobs, slogging through life just to get enough to pay the connection fee and stay logged in.

“Do you like this setting?” Jojran asked, anxiously. “If you don’t we can change it. I have a whole bunch. We could go to a forest or I’ve got some abstracts, and one where we fly around in a big feather bed.” He seemed to be hoping for the last one.

“This is fine,” Saru said tersely. Just being here was making her uneasy. She was pretty sure her hardware was glitched but if it was a hack then sitting in an open connection like this was dangerous. Of course Jojran had security measures and he could protect her, but she didn’t know what she was up against. Even Jojran had never gone farther than peeking through another person’s implants. He’d never tried seeding thoughts or mind control.

“Okay, so I looked up the ID of the dead girl you gave me.” The victim’s face appeared on the view screen—her real face, thank god, from varying IDs, not the mutilated one. Her eyes were blue but nothing special. “And it was pretty much a brick wall. No grudges or vendettas. Nothing about the UausuaU or feasters. At least nothing online.”

“I know all that.”

“Right, but then I started looking for other blue-eyed girls with similar characteristics. Natural blue eyes, XX chromosomes, ages ten to forty. Blue eyes doesn’t mean your iris is blue, by the way. It just means the epithelium, the top layer lacks melanin and reflects blue light. I’ve been doing my research.”

“How is that relevant?”

“Blue eyes are the result of a mutation. All blue-eyed people share a common ancestor from about twelve thousand years ago. So you and this girl could be related.”

“And millions of other people.”

“Not quite. About six percent of the city has blue eyes. Cut that in half for sex and we get three percent of the population. Factoring in the age range, Philly skews young, so we’re down to one percent. One percent of a city of thirty million people, give or take, is three hundred thousand.”

“This had better not be your big news.”

“No. It’s this.”

A sphere appeared on the virtual screen, like a knot of hundreds of pieces of yarn all tangled together. It was absolutely meaningless to her.

“What am I looking at here?”

“A program rendered visually, an AI or a bot, or maybe a bunch of hacked implants networked together. It’s a hunter-seeker. Net rangers use them to scrub the Net, search for targets, even attack them…but this, this is wild. Usually these’ll have one or two strands but this has hundreds, this is a piece of work, like, artistry right here. I’ve been trying to unravel it and it’s had some pretty nasty surprises. It tried to send electrical feedback at me once and stop my heart—managed to dodge that bullet. And half of these are to hide it, to mask its presence. But everything leaves a trace.”

“So, what does this have to do with the girl?”

“This is the connection,” he said excitedly. “I found this when I did a search for her. Like, I found almost exactly what you would expect to find in a textbook search—the birth records, school transcript, taxes, driver’s license, job IDs, advertisements for sexual services. It was about as ordinary as you could get. Except I saw that all the records had been accessed recently and the access trace had been almost perfectly scrubbed. Almost. Someone else had been searching for this woman, and after some digging I found this hunter-seeker, tons of them running these searches. You know what that means, right?”

He couldn’t contain himself anymore. With an audible whoosh the virtual world vanished and they were sitting back in the living room, squinting in the light. Jojran was practically bouncing up and down with excitement.

“Someone made a list, Saru! A list of blue-eyed girls. And I found it. I found it!”