The younger man’s face burned as he felt himself blush in the darkness. Seemed that with every shift he spent with Hankins, he found a new reason to hate him. Thompson vowed that once they were out of this building, he would speak up for himself, and finally ask White for a new partner... and, failing that, he would simply transfer out of White’s unit altogether.
This whole transgenic affair troubled him. He’d been with the program long enough to know that although these human experiments were considered a threat to national security, the transgenics had been engineered to defend this country, after all. So on some level, Thompson felt like his job was to track down and dispose of what might be considered soldiers of his country. He tried not to see it that way, but sometimes it felt exactly like that — particularly when he let himself think a little too much, or on long sleepless nights during which the hypocrisy of his life crawled into his mind like a waking nightmare.
Angrily wiping the sweat from his eyes, Thompson moved deeper into the blackness, punctuating it with sweeps of the flash. At the back of the cavernous space, he found three offices stretching across the rear wall. Two of the doors were completely gone, and the third — its window long gone — hung from one hinge like a stubborn loose rotted tooth, refusing to fall out of a gaping mouth. Of the six panes of glass that had been the top half of the facing walls of the offices, only one remained, a nasty crack running across it diagonally.
Thompson pulled out the thermal imager and slow-scanned the offices without success. Telling himself he was just being careful, he spun in a steady circle, covering the whole first floor again to make sure nothing had skulked in behind him. Except for a few more rats — and what was either the biggest rat he’d ever seen or a small stray cat — the monitor showed nothing.
This left only one thing to do. Since the thermal imager could not see through wood, that meant he still had to check out the offices one at a time.
Letting out his breath slowly, he stepped toward the doorway in the farthest left corner, his pistol and flashlight leading the way. He swept the room quickly once, past the large metal desk, over the peeling wallboard, past the scattered, smashed glass on the floor to the low half wall to his right.
The room was empty.
And he saw no wet footprints on the floor; even the dusty patina of the desktop seemed undisturbed. Still, Thompson played it carefully as he eased around the desk and pointed his gun at the floor behind it.
Nothing.
He let out another breath and felt a little better, and pressed on. His stomach was fluttering, though, and he felt covered in an apprehension as real as his rain-drenched clothes. Middle office, now.
Not only was the door gone off this office, so were the furnishings within: no desk, file cabinets, tables, chairs, nothing but piles of broken glass and fractured wallboard littering the room like the aftermath of a biker party. No transgenics in there either.
Listening intently at the sagging door of the final office, Thompson heard nothing but his own pulse pounding in his ears. Though the whole building smelled of rot and decay — a bouquet emphasized by the night’s dampness — the last office seemed to be the nexus of the putrid aroma. The door groaned as he pushed it open.
The desk in this room had been tipped over, its legs sticking out at Thompson, its top facing the back wall. He shoved the door hard, smacking it off the wall, just in case someone... something... had snugged himself... itself... back there...
Nothing behind it, though. Swinging the other way, Thompson played his light over the floor and saw nothing but broken glass and other rubble. Slowly, he edged toward the side of the desk and shined the beam behind it, and the light caught something, something made not of wood or steel or glass, but flesh...
There, on the floor, lay the skinned carcass of some sort of animal. The body had obviously been there for some time — even the insects had lost interest in it by now — and Thompson couldn’t even make out what it was, between the darkness and decay.
From its size, it at first appeared to him to be a very large dog, or maybe a deer that had wandered into the city; but as the beam crept over the prone form, Thompson realized that what he’d just found was neither deer nor dog.
The body on the floor was that of a man.
Not an animal carcass, but a human corpse.
“Hankins,” Thompson said, struggling to keep his voice calm. “Got something.”
No response.
The smell of the office oppressive now, threatening to send his dinner scurrying back up his throat, he again hissed, “Hankins.”
Finally his partner growled in his ear: “What the fuck is it now, Thompson?”
“Got a body here.”
Hankins’ voice came back gruffly, unimpressed: “The transgenic?”
“I... I don’t think so.”
“Shit. I knew we couldn’t be that fuckin’ lucky. Tell me about your catch of the day.”
“Office downstairs. Last one on the right. Behind a desk.”
Harrumphing, Hankins said, “Jesus, how about a detail that matters? Like is it a man? A woman? Child? What?”
Thompson bit his tongue and kept the obscenity from popping out of his mouth. Discipline, Thompson knew, kept him from being like Hankins, and he wouldn’t allow the F word to slip into his reply, no matter how hard it fought to come out. Taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly, he said, “Frankly, I can’t tell whether it’s male or female... probably adult, and I... I think it’s been skinned.”
“What?”
“Skinned,” Thompson repeated. “It’s a dead body... with no skin.”
“Goddamn... How fresh is that baby?”
How the hell should I know? Thompson wondered, but he said, “Old — there’s not even any bugs. Even the smell’s died down... some.”
Hankins sighed in Thompson’s ear, then said, “Fuck it then. Move on.”
“You don’t think finding a dead body is a ‘detail’ that matters?”
“Sure it is — in the long run. In the short term, we’re lookin’ for a transgenic tonight.”
“Maybe this is the victim of a transgenic.”
“Maybe — but we’ll let the investigative team figure that out, Sage my boy. If you got a kill that ain’t fresh, it’s not going to do us any good now... and it’ll wait until we’ve cleared the building.”
When this becomes somebody’s else’s job, Thompson thought.
Yet, while he would hate to admit it, Thompson knew that what Hankins said actually made sense. Slowly pulling the flashlight beam off the corpse, Thompson forced himself to turn away and walk out of the office.
He climbed the stairs to the second floor. Even darker than the first, this level had been subdivided into smaller rooms which lined either side of a central corridor that ran the length of the building, starting at the freight elevator that squatted next to the stairwell.
Though a thick layer of dust still covered the floor, this level seemed cleaner than the last, somehow — no debris, no shattered glass. He was just about to go up the stairs to the third floor, when he decided to take the time to double check. He turned and played the beam over the corridor in front of him.
At first glance he hadn’t spotted them, but now — on this second, closer look — he saw the wet footprints, running down the hall but close to the wall at right. Were those Hankins’ footprints?
No — his partner was still up on sixth; and anyway, these were smaller than Hankins’ big feet would make, not as wide, and longer. And leading to the third door on the left...
Acid churned in Thompson’s stomach as he considered what it might be like to go one-on-one with a transgenic. They could vary in strength, in abilities, and defects, depending on what animal DNA had been mixed into their personal genetic soup. Some of them were human, even beautiful.