Trinity River Levee District

  Lyfjaberg Outpatient Annex

  1 Healing Drive

  Dallas

  Friday

  7 April 2050

  13:43 CST

  Lauren was suddenly very glad that she hadn't eaten more of her brisket sandwich, pushing her way past Sally and the throng of beat cops that filled the inside of the Lyfjaberg facility and out into the hot, but fresh air. She leaned against the massive front tire of the Hummer, feeling the gurgle in her gut threatening to escape. She doubled over, then, realizing her proximity to Sally's cherished behemoth, retched anyway.

  "It's bad," Derek said as he approached, taking her place against the tire. Lauren held up a finger, silencing the man, before retching again. She spit, then stood, facing the smiling cop.

  "Bad is an understatement, Jablonski." She reached up to the door handle and tugged. The door didn't budge. "Shit. Got any gum?"

  "Fresh out. Sorry." Derek raised his hands apologetically. "They've got bottled water in the waiting room. I'm sure there's at least one that isn't covered with blood."

  "Isn't that tampering with a crime scene?"

  "I won't tell if you don't."

  Derek smiled broadly, watching Lauren spit into the street again.

  "Keep flirting with me and I'm going to report you to your little reporter girl."

  Derek's smile faltered, his gaze falling back to the Lyfjaberg building. "I'm not scared of her."

  "Yes. You are."

  Sally emerged from the front door, hat off and fanning her face with it. After a moment, she looked up, scanning until she found Lauren, then strode over.

  "Yeah. But, not as scared as I am of her."

  Sally stepped around Lauren's puddle of ick, wrinkling her nose, stopped and looked at her wheel.

  "You couldn't have moved three feet before you just--" Sally pointed at the splatter on the wheel. "Really, Lauren?"

  Lauren shrugged. "Sorry. But look who's here."

  "Hey, Dauntless," Sally said absently as she pulled the tear-stained napkin from her pocket and kneeled, gingerly brushing away a tidbit of partially digested brisket from the wheel's bead lock ring. "How's Chellie?"

  "She's good. Great, actually. She's been pushing me to become a Trooper."

  "Start now and you could be a Ranger by thirty-three," Lauren said. "Unlock the door for me, Sal."

  Sally held out the napkin between her fingers and reached into her pocket for the key fob. "Then you can hang out with your favorite mother hens. Grab one of the plastic wrapper things from the dash while you're in there."

  "So, where is Miss Chellie Bhel 'as in Bell'? Chasing ambulances or stalking celebs?" Sally asked, holding the napkin away from her.

  "She's out covering the Greenbelt body we found this morning. Looks like no one missed him and he was out there for at least 24 hours,"

  Derek beamed. "She's already dug up a lot of dirt on the guy. Pretty scummy stuff. "

  "Sounds like he got what was coming to him," Lauren muttered as she climbed up into the Hummer, grabbing the wrapper and her Dr. Pepper. She took a sip and passed the plastic packaging over before spitting again. "What the actual fuck happened in there?"

  Sally looked at the contaminated napkin ensconced in honeybun wrapper with a wrinkle-nosed expression, then shoved it into her pocket.

  "I was hoping you'd help me piece it together before Aethelgard shows up with their security team. Think you can handle a walkthrough?"

  "Do I have a choice?" Lauren groaned.

  "Badge says no."

  Lauren pouted. "Fine. But if I puke again..."

  "Looks like they didn't have anyone on the schedule today." Derek said, holding up a bloodied clipboard, flipping through the sign in sheets. "Four patients yesterday, six on Wednesday, three on Tuesday and one on Monday. They're pretty steady, but today? No tengo pacientes."

  "Why does a clinic have four armed security guards?" Lauren asked as she kneeled over the body of a middle-aged man in a tactical vest and Aethelgard's pale blue jumpsuit, now stained black in a pool of his stale blood. Another man in identical gear lay just a few feet away, crumpled by the main entrance.

  "Six," Sally added from the admittance door that separated the waiting area from the rest of the facility. Another body held the door open. "There's at least two more back here."

  Lauren stood, slowly, feeling another gurgle. Then stepped over the man, avoiding looking at the third that was bent over the front desk, his legs and arms bending in ways that a human can't bend. Derek watched from the other side of the dead man, laying the clipboard back into the puddle it had been resting in.

  Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

  Lauren looked up at the ceiling, avoiding the horror of the waiting room as she moved toward Sally.

  "This doesn't look like a corporate hit job. That guy over there." She pointed to the space between the two men on the floor. "He didn't look like he was trying to keep someone out."

  "What about Gumby?" Sally asked, spinning Lauren around to face the broken man on the front desk.

  Lauren gagged, but didn't run. "Stab wounds. A lot of them, and a slit throat, like the rest."

  Sally turned to look down the hallway where another blue-suited man had been embedded in the drywall. Not leaning against it. Embedded. The crater in the sheetrock suggested he had been thrown with the force of a small car.

  "Nothing about this feels right," she said, following a trail of bloody footprints that trailed from around the hallway corner, stopped at the wall art man, then out the main entrance. "Anyone find the receptionist?"

  "Up here," Derek called out, prompting Sally to stomp her way into the waiting room. Lauren peeked over and turned green, instantly regretting her decision. "What's left of her, anyway."

  The receptionist was still seated in her office chair, now lying on its back behind the desk, a pair of ivory white legs extended up through a black pencil skirt. A slender ivory arm extended outward, terminating in equally slender fingers. A dark swath of hair covered a doll-like face; pretty, but not quite human. Dark marks surrounded the synthetic woman's eyes like dried runny mascara.

  "Figures that Aethelgard would have a Synth receptionist." Sally spat. "What's the damage here?"

  "Techs say she was fried from the inside out," Derek said, gesturing to her face. "That's not mascara. Those are burn marks."

  "Goddamn synths give me the creeps," Lauren muttered from her safe spot near the broken guard.

  Sally's eyes fell back to the trail of blood, following them back down the hallway then off to the right, passing the legs of another body. She had to know.

  Lauren followed her, desperate to get away from the non-human receptionist despite her queasiness. The sixth guard was female, her body had slid down the wall to crumple at the corner, her head lolled at an unnatural angle. Sally wondered why she had been the only guard that had been given a quick, bloodless death.

  Lauren gasped, pulling Sally's attention to the opened door of Exam Room 1 at the end of the hall. She stomped toward the room, stepping over a burnt-out synth nurse and the two ruined jumpsuited corpses that had fallen at the doorway, both reaching for whoever was exiting.

  No. Escaping.

  But it was what waited inside that forced Lauren to freeze, the blood draining from her face.

  The pale blue walls of the exam room were streaked with the brown of dried blood, the floor was thick with the black of blood gone stale. The smell of copper and antiseptic cleaner clashed in Sally's nostrils.

  Sally chose a spot in the floor that wasn't a pool of congealed blood and stepped into the room. Her heart stopped as she saw a severed finger, then another, on the floor. Then more, an archipelago of detached digits in a sea of blood, pointing to the man that sat against the wall.

  The doctor sat with his legs splayed out on the floor, surrounded by his stained lab coat. His head lolled forward as if he were looking at the opened expanse of his belly and its contents spread across the floor.

  Sally swallowed hard, forcing herself to maintain control of her own body. She had seen worse. The ruined bodies of girls, all dragged through the streets in coils of razor wire before being brutalized further.

  But this...

  This was the work of someone with a score to settle. This was purposeful. It was hate at its most intimate.

  "Stay out there, Lo. You don't need to see this."

  Sally pulled her eyes away from the disemboweled doctor and scanned the room. Aside from the high-resolution holographic display and the bank of computerized hardware that Sally wasn't even going to try to understand, the exam room looked like any other she had been to, right down to the exam chair.

  The chair.

  It sat in the center of the room. At first glance, there was little to notice aside from the spray of dried or drying blood. But it was the restraints that made Sally step closer, her boots sticking slightly to the tackiness of the floor.

  "Restraints?" Sally breathed to herself.

  The heavy leather cuffs on the left armrest hadn't been unbuckled. They hadn't been cut.

  They had been snapped.

  The thick leather was torn clean through, the steel rivets that held them to the frame popped and twisted like scrap metal. Sally ran a gloved hand over the ruin of the right armrest. The metal frame itself was warped, bent outward as if the person sitting in it had simply decided they no longer wanted to be contained.

  "Jesus," Sally whispered.

  This wasn't just a murder. It was a breakout by something that could bend steel with its bare hands. It explained Gumby in the lobby. It explained the man embedded in the drywall. Whoever this was wanted out and the laws of physics had politely stepped aside.

  She looked down at the floor near the chair's base. Amidst the shattered remains of a plastic head restraint, a crushed syringe lay in a small puddle of clear liquid.

  Then a bloody footprint, clear against the white of the floor. It was at least a size smaller than Sally's 8.5 boot.

  Sally spun--carefully--and picked her way into the hallway, leaving the doctor to stew in his own karmic juices. Not that she believed in any of that, but the shoe fit.

  The shoe. Sally's mind raced as she tried to rationalize the carnage against the potentially tiny package that delivered it. The math didn't math.

  She stopped at the front desk where Derek was poking at the synth receptionist.

  "Why did it take this long for us to get the 99?"

  "Huh?" Derek looked up distractedly, standing and wiping his hands against the dark blue of his uniform. "Oh. The tech boys said that all of the systems here were stuck in a loop. Someone hacked into the system and looped it."

  "Everything. Phones. Net access. WiFi. Security feeds. As far as the world was concerned, everything here was copacetic. What's more is that the loop extended out to every business and security camera in a four-block radius."

  Sally frowned.

  "That explains why Aethelgard Security hasn't buttoned this place down tighter than a nun's habit. So, how did we find out about this shitshow?"

  Derek stepped around the front desk, watching Lauren hyperventilate outside the front door.

  "Pure dumb luck. The lady that runs the nail salon across the street came over to ask if they were having problems with their phones. Walked into this."

  Derek gestured to Gumby.

  "She was shaken worse than Lauren is. We had to put her on a bus to Medical City. Why?"

  "Shit." Sally led Derek out and into afternoon heat, letting out the breath she felt she had been holding since they arrived.

  "We need to canvas the area. Whoever this is, someone has to have seen her."

  "Her?" Lauren glanced up at her with a pained eye.

  "Her," Sally repeated, her eyes focused on the shining glass buildings that loomed behind the levee walls across the Trinity River. "And we can narrow the description down to 'petite'."

  Derek frowned, but nodded. "Copy that. I'll see what the 'Plex's finest can drum up."

  None of this sat well with Sally, and somehow, she knew that Aethelgard, that the people in that tall tower across the river, knew more. Bad things were coming.

  And that made her angry.

  Worse. It made her scared.

  "Hey, Derek," she called out to her retreating friend. "Please promise me that you won't let Chellie chase this one, okay?"