Distant Worlds Volume 1 Page 19

  “You insolent fool!”

  Jed tried to scramble out of the way as the Reverend lunged for him.

  Korvin opened fire again, the impact of the bullets driving the fetid thing backward and onto to the ground.

  Jed watched in disbelief as the Reverend got to his knees and hurled a ball of green flame at Korvin. The gunman dove out of the way, but he dropped the sphere as he rolled onto the ground.

  “The sphere!” the Reverend said, calling out to his slavish mob. “Get the sphere!”

  The crowd surged forward as Korvin drew his second revolver and leveled it at the sphere. One of the shambling citizens snatched it off the ground before he could fire and Korvin adjusted his aim to shoot the man in the arm. He stumbled, but kept his grip on the sphere.

  “Dammit!” Korvin said, hesitating for a split second before he squeezed off another round. This one caught the man square in the chest and knocked him off his feet.

  The sphere flew through the air and splashed into the mud near Jed. He struggled off the ground and reached for it. A second blast of green fire drove him back, but not before he snatched the sphere out of the mud. Its smooth surface was so cold that it nearly burned his hand.

  By the time Jed got to his feet again, the ravening townsfolk, all of whom he recognized, had reached him. Gill Fisher raised a shovel to crush his skull, but Korvin’s roaring revolvers sounded before the blow could land and bullets tore his face apart. Another shot took Tom Lewis in the chest before he could impale Jed with his pitchfork.

  Something jerked Jed away from the mob and thrust him in the direction of the saloon.

  “Run!” Korvin said. “Get back to the saloon and burn that thing!”

  His wounded leg slowed his pace, but Jed ran as fast as he could manage as the gunman opened fire on the crowd again.

  “Run, Jed! Don’t look back!”

  Dale held the saloon door open until Jed hobbled inside and then slammed it shut behind him.

  “What the hell’s going on out there?” Dale asked. “Everybody just stood up and walked outside a few minutes ago like they was in a trance or something!”

  Jed remembered the sphere in his hand and held it up for Dale to see.

  “Ugh!” he said, recoiling. “What the hell’s that?”

  “It’s a…ah, hell, I ain’t got time to explain. Korvin said to burn it.”

  “What the hell good’s that gonna do?” Dale asked.

  “I don’t know, dammit!”

  Jed noticed the glass of scotch Korvin had left sitting on the bar counter.

  “Dale, you got a match?”

  “Yeah,” Dale said, fishing a small box out of his pocket and handing it over.

  Before Jed could ready a match, the saloon door exploded, flinging pieces of splintered wood all over the room. He turned to find the Reverend looming in the doorway, his eyes ablaze.

  “You have something that belongs to me, mortal.”

  Jed took one of the matches from the box and set the sphere down on the counter.

  “Alright, you want your damn magic ball?”

  The Reverend laughed.

  “Bring it to me now.”

  Jed struck the match across the counter’s uneven surface and it blazed to life. With a quick motion, he snatched the full glass of scotch, dumped it on the sphere, and touched the match to it.

  “Get it yourself, you rotten bastard!” he said, knocking the burning sphere behind the bar.

  “No!”

  The sphere burst into flame as it fell. When it hit the floor, it shattered into charred dust and extinguished itself.

  “You fool!”

  The Reverend gathered his power and produced another ball of green flame in his hands. Jed closed his eyes.

  The roar of gunfire forced his eyes open in time to watch the Reverend drop to his knees. In the doorway beyond, he saw Korvin limping into the saloon, badly wounded. As he approached the Reverend, he holstered his revolvers and drew the dagger from his coat. He whispered something to the blade and the symbols upon it glowed, sheathing the blade in blue light.

  Korvin reached the Reverend just as he staggered to his feet and plunged the dagger into his back. A blast of light leapt from the wound when Korvin twisted the blade. The Reverend’s skin cracked and peeled before his flesh ignited, and his dying scream caused Jed and Dale to cover their ears. A second later and the Reverend’s body crumbled into a pile of ash.

  Korvin dropped to his knees. He was wounded in many places and his left arm looked burned, but none of his injuries seemed serious. Somewhere outside he had lost his hat and his long hair hung loosely over his shoulders.

  Jed looked down at the pile of ashes on the floor.

  “Is it…uh…dead?”

  Korvin smiled.

  “As dead as his kind is likely to get.”

  Jed almost asked what, exactly, the Reverend’s “kind” was, but he thought better of it. Instead, he helped Korvin get to his feet and guided him over to one of the bar stools.

  “My thanks,” Korvin said. “For everything.”

  Dale, who had been staring dumbly at the pile of ashes on the floor, finally turned to look at them.

  “Is one of you gonna to tell me what the hell just went down here?”

  Korvin shrugged.

  “Afraid we don’t have the time. You’ve got some neighbors that are going to be waking up soon wanting to know why they’ve been passed out in the mud. Maybe you ought to be seeing to them before they come to.”

  Dale gave Jed a puzzled look.

  “Go on, Dale,” he said. “I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

  Dale got up slowly and made his way over to the broken door, leaving Jed alone with Korvin.

  “Think I’ll have that scotch now, barkeep, ” Korvin said.

  Jed reached absently for the bottle, and his hands trembled as he poured out a drink. He tried not to think about the murderous, glazed over faces he’d seen outside. Even if they’d gone back to being themselves, he wondered if he’d ever feel safe around any of them again.

  Korvin downed the scotch in one gulp and gestured for Jed to pour him another.

  “So what’ll you do now?” he asked. “You gonna hole up here till you’re all healed?”

  The gunslinger shook his head.

  “When those folks outside come around, they’re going to want to know who put a few bullets in some of their loved ones. Reckon I’d rather not be around when they come asking.”

  Jed poured him another drink.

  “What then? There more towns out there like this one? You got a list of fellas like that devil you’re looking to find?”

  Korvin shrugged.

  “Like him? No, not like him. But there’s always something else out there. I expect I’ll keep heading west. Heard a strange story or two on my way here. Imagine they can’t all be idle chatter.”

  He swallowed a second helping of scotch and pushed the glass across the counter.

  “Much obliged.”

  Jed reached out to steady him as he stood, but Korvin waved him off.

  “You’re a brave man, Jed,” he said, extending his hand. “I’m glad to have met you.”

  Jed gave him a firm handshake.

  “Pleasure’s mine.”

  Korvin smiled and started toward the door. He stopped just inside the threshold and half turned to look at Jed.

  “One more thing, Jed.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Soon as this rain lets up, you best burn that goddamn church to the ground.”

  The 88th Floor

  Original version published in Techno-Goth Cthulhu (Red Skies Press, 2013).

  Originally written in 2007 for a themed Cthulhu anthology about the Great Old One Nyarlathotep, “The 88th Floor” languished on my hard drive until I saw the submission call for Techno-Goth Cthulhu. It was a rare instance of a story written for a themed anthology actually being a better fit for another themed anthology. I mean, really, what were the o
dds that my cyberpunk Cthulhu story would be a perfect match for anything? The original story is still available in Techno-Goth Cthulhu, but the version included here is the expanded novelette edition from 2014. Almost twice as long as the original short story, the 2014 version introduces new characters and settings that provide more nuance and context for the story.

  “What a fucking mess.”

  Rees nodded and took a drag from his cigarette.

  “Where the hell is forensics?” he asked.

  “They’re on the way, sir. Still running behind after that bombing on Highland this afternoon, I guess. You heard anything else about that?”

  Rees hadn’t.

  “Everybody’s saying it’s another terrorist attack,” the patrolman said. “I hear the SICA guys aren’t letting anyone near the blast site.”

  “Figures.” The city’s intelligence agency had a well-deserved reputation for not playing well with others.

  Rees checked his phone.

  3:26 AM.

  “You ever see one this bad, sir?”

  Rees looked at the mangled, bloody corpse sprawled across the floor just a few feet away. He drew deeply from his cigarette again.

  “Why don’t you go see what’s keeping the lab boys?”

  “They already said–”

  “I know what they said. Just humor me, okay?”

  The patrolman nodded and walked over to where a few other officers were busy blocking off the area. It wasn’t a difficult crime scene to secure, considering they were eighty-eight stories above the streets inside the unfinished Sircotin Technologies building. The night work crew had already been sent home.

  Rees knelt beside the victim. All that remained of the face was a twisted clump of flesh and bone that was fused together as if the head were partially melted. The hands and feet weren’t much better, little more than misshapen stumps. Then there was the blood that had poured out from at least half a dozen bullet wounds.

  “Poor bastard. What the hell happened to you?”

  “Detective Rees,” a cool, monotone voice said, “please step away from the victim.”

  Rees stood up and raised his hands.

  “Relax, Morgan,” he said. “I didn’t touch anything.”

  He turned to face Doctor Morgan, one of the department’s more experienced forensics experts. The digital pupil of his left eye narrowed, focusing intently on one of Rees’s hands.

  “You are contaminating my crime scene, Detective Rees.”

  Rees glanced at the cigarette and quickly extinguished it.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Old habits, you know?”

  “I am quite afraid that I do not. Now, if you would kindly step away from the victim I can begin my examination.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Rees said. There was no use trying to say much of anything to Morgan these days. Rees had known him for years, but even he had a hard time telling where the man ended and the machine began.

  The doctor’s face betrayed no reaction to the disfigured corpse.

  “Interesting… ” he said.

  Rees could do little but wait patiently as Morgan activated his sensors and data recorders to examine and catalogue every minute detail of the scene. His gaze strayed away from the corpse and took in the details of the unfinished room.

  “When was the victim discovered?”

  “About an hour ago,” Rees said, still examining the room. For such an expensive project, the workmanship was awfully shoddy. He wondered if the crew had something against straight lines. “We got an anonymous call and a patrolman dropped by to check it out.”

  Morgan didn’t indicate whether or not he heard the answer, but Rees knew he had. The bastard could listen in on every conversation within five blocks if he wanted to. Rees knew better than to take being ignored personal and was surprised Morgan had even bothered to spare the miniscule processing power required for simple conversation. It really didn’t bother him since most of his attention was still on the layout of the unfinished eighty-eighth floor. The more he looked at it, the more he thought he discerned a pattern to its odd angles and edges. Something kept tugging at his peripheral vision, an image that almost took a definite form before flickering away when he looked at it directly.

  Morgan analyzed the corpse for some time, running thousands of calculations inside his cybernetic brain. He then injected a small vial of nano-bots into the body that were designed to crawl through the bloodstream and transmit a detailed analysis of its condition. Lastly, he opened another vial of nano-bots beside the corpse and allowed them several minutes to spread over and scan the immediate area.

  Rees was getting drowsy by the time Morgan spoke to him again, his whirring servos and humming circuits lingering just beneath his voice.

  “I have completed my examination, Detective Rees. Quite a remarkable case, I must admit.”

  “Remarkable?” Rees asked. “How’s that?”

  “As of this moment, I am afraid that I still have yet to identify the victim.”

  “What? You didn’t get anything from a DNA scan?”

  “No,” Morgan said. Rees wasn’t sure, but he thought he detected frustration in the digitized voice. “While it is not unheard of to occasionally encounter an individual whose genetic code is not registered in the national databanks, I have never seen a sample returned as completely negative.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means, Detective Rees, that your victim’s DNA does not register as human.”

  That was definitely something Rees had never heard before.

  “How is that possible?” he asked.

  “I do not know.”

  That, as far as Rees knew, was also a first.

  “There are, however,” Morgan said, “a number of unidentified toxins in the victim’s bloodstream. It is possible that these toxins could have an adverse affect on the DNA scan. I will need to examine the victim more thoroughly and subject its blood to a number of tests before I can tell you more.”

  Rees didn’t bother to ask about the implications of the corpse not being human.

  The case was already weird enough.

  “What about the injuries to the hands and face?

  “To put it simply, Detective Rees, they are the most unusual I have ever encountered, but they did not cause the victim’s death. He was shot eight times, with two bullets puncturing the heart, two hitting the stomach, one in the skull, and the three remaining bullets becoming lodged in the spinal column. Standard sidearm nano-rounds.”

  Rees couldn’t believe there were still people stupid enough to commit murder with a modern gun. Every firearm manufactured within the last fifty years fired a caseless, computerized bullet that recorded the time and location from which it was fired. The bullet also carried the registration information of the gun that fired it and the DNA coding of whoever pulled the trigger. There were still a few antique lead-spitters floating around on the streets, but most of them had been confiscated and melted down as part of the government’s crackdown on illegal firearms.

  Morgan continued.

  “The first bullet was fired at precisely 2:33:21 AM and struck the victim’s heart. The next six rounds were fired quickly, within a span of ten seconds, but the bullet to the skull was fired a full five minutes later. All eight rounds were fired at point blank range. The weapon was fired by a Sircotin Technologies executive named George Vandum, Vice-President of Optics Research and Production.”

  That certainly wasn’t the kind of suspect Rees had expected, but considering that the case involved a body with melted flesh that might not even be human, he wasn’t about to let anything surprise him.

  “Do we have a current address on him?”

  “Yes,” Morgan said. “I have already transmitted my report to headquarters and filed a warrant for his arrest.”

  “Oh,” Rees said.

  “Do you have any further questions, Detective Rees?”

  “No, I can get anything else I need from your report.”


  “Do you require a hardcopy?”

  Rees nodded and felt fortunate that the department hadn’t yet made it a requirement for all officers to have datachip implants. He was one of only a handful who weren’t wired in any way.

  Morgan reached up to the tiny computer drive plugged into the back of his skull and produced a small piece of plastic that he handed to Rees. He looked at it.

  Case #4563367-6638 Dr. L. S. Morgan.

  “Good night, Detective.”

  As the doctor left, his assistants entered the room, each one snatching up something Morgan had indicated was worth taking back to the lab, including the body. They were finished in less than five minutes.

  When the elevator door closed behind them, Rees slipped the chip into his coat pocket and lit another cigarette.

  “Right to the point, aren’t they, sir?”

  Rees glanced at the patrolman and thought he seemed a little too eager for his own good.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Have to beat them to the scene to get a decent look at anything these days.”

  “So what do we do now?”

  “It’s out of your hands. Go get some sleep and try to forget about it.”

  “What about you, sir?”

  “Me?” Rees took a deep drag from his cigarette and then shrugged his shoulders.

  The patrolman made his way to the elevator and Rees’s gaze drifted back to the jagged corners and uneven walls of the eighty-eighth floor.

  “Hey, let me ask you something,” he said.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “This floor look strange to you? Like they didn’t put it together right or something?”

  The patrolman looked around a moment and shook his head.

  “No, sir; looks pretty solid to me. Maybe you should think about getting some sleep.”

  The patrolman’s eyes shimmered as the light struck them. Artificial, Rees thought. Maybe it was time to trade up, after all.

  “Yeah, maybe you’re right.”

  It was nearly dawn by the time George Vandum was taken into custody and brought back to the station for questioning. Rees had tried to get some sleep at his desk after getting back from the crime scene, but the constant activity around him made it difficult. He felt horrible. It was getting harder for him to keep up with the department’s eighteen-hour work shifts, especially since he stubbornly refused to get a neural regulator nanochip implanted when the workday was officially increased. He still found the notion of putting different parts of the brain to sleep throughout the day a little too unnatural to be of any good.