Ashley Fox - Ninja Orphan
Chapter 30 – No Rest For The Wicked
The courtyard in front of the meeting hall was packed with emergency vehicles; the fire and police departments, the coroner, forensics, ambulance crews and curious bystanders crowded the small area. Most of the investigators silently went about their work, cataloguing every pebble and cigarette butt in the area. Reporters pushed their luck with the cops and strained to overhear anything worth hearing.
A sergeant spoke into his radio, "Dispatch, we've got a real mess down here. We're going to need another meat wagon ASAP.”
At the perimeter, a uniformed officer raised the police tape separating professionals from spectators. Chief Del Toro nodded his thanks and ducked under.
"How bad is it?" he asked the nearby lieutenant.
The officer gestured to the forensics investigators, who hovered over the corpses. "We've got eight dee-bees, three kids right out front here. One died of a stab wound to the chest, two others were gunfire, two more critical, by gunfire.” The lieutenant gestured to the inside of the hall. "It’s a mess. We've kept a lid on it so far, but we've got an OIS. We're not sure how it went down yet, sir, but it's Detective Cole. He went missing last night. Looks like he's been held hostage, tortured. We sent him and the two critical juveniles out to Saint Andrew's.”
The officer lowered his voice. "Sir, in addition to the detective, there's a District Governor in there. She's been burned pretty badly. One of the guys shot out back is her security chief.”
"Who else knows about Cole and the Governor," Del Toro asked.
"As it happened, I pulled their IDs, so as of this moment, just you, me and God.”
Del Toro gripped the man by his shoulders and looked him in the eyes. "Keep it that way, Lieutenant.”
"No worries, Chief."
The light drizzle thickened into actual rain and began pelting the crime scene, making further documentation impossible.
"Talk about a shit storm, huh?"
Chief Del Toro sorted through the mess in his head. Cole had been rooting out a vein of corruption on District 13. He'd connected Dunkirk to the orphanage but D13 was something of a black hole when it came to jurisdiction.
Crimes against non-citizens, even though they might be children, were hardly a priority when it came to law enforcement budgets, especially if citizen parents weren’t present to force the issue.
Del Toro's mind raced. Cole had believed Governor Maime was directly tied to the Mayor.
This was it: Cole's big case, the whole enchilada, and even though there was plenty of beans, cheese and sauce, there was no meat. There were plenty of dead bodies, but more questions than answers.
Del Toro walked through the scene. He watched the investigators transfer the deceased victims into body bags and into the back of a truck.
Later, sitting in his car, Chief Del Toro dialed the Mayor's office and explained the situation: "Governor Agatha Dorchester Maime, Warden Keller and homicide Detective James Cole have been involved in an incident.”
"A what?" Secretary Waltman asked. “What kind of incident?”
"A shooting incident; they're dead.”
"And?” Waltman asked.
"There was another suspect killed along with them.”
"And who might that be?” Waltman asked.
"We think it might be Martin Dunkirk,” Del Toro replied.
"How long till the story breaks?”
"That's your first question?”
"For the Mayor's office? Yes, chief, this is politics. How long?”
"It might stay quiet over the weekend. Guess it depends on what happens tomorrow.”
“What happens tomorrow?”
“I have no idea,” Del Toro replied.
"I’ll let the mayor know, thanks for the call. Good night, Chief.”
"Good night." Del Toro terminated the connection and squeezed the bridge of his nose.
A governor, a mass murderer and a cop in a meeting hall… It sounded like the beginning of a bad joke.
Chief Del Toro programmed a route to St. Mark’s and hoped no one had heard about his critically injured, but very much alive Detective Cole.
Mayor Westbury, frustrated by the Chief's news of the meeting hall massacre, took a deep breath, dialed a number and waited. The call was answered by the California State Governor's Office. The Mayor identified himself and asked for the Governor. The secretary asked what the call was regarding.
"Project 7982," he replied. The sharp intake of breath on the other end of the line confirmed that Westbury had struck a nerve,
Inside the medical transport, corpse-filled body bags lie on their shelves. Morgenstern, Warden Keller, Governor Maime and the others rested in their eternal slumber. The vehicle drifted with the twenty-four-hour congested traffic, knotted around downtown at ten thousand feet.
In his darkened apartment, Lieutenant Grey's phone rang. The young officer took his time about it, but answered.
First Sergeant King explained that Detective Cole had been shot. Chief Del Toro wanted to keep Cole's status, and the subsequent investigation into D13, off the record.
"What do you mean investigation?”
"I need you to come down and meet me at the hospital. We needs people we can trust. Someone on the inside sold Cole out. If they find out he survived; well, he won't.”
Grey agreed, hung up and climbed out of bed.
Ashley opened the gate and moved down the leaf-cluttered walk toward her family's front door. The dollhouse her father had made for her lay broken and smashed across in the overgrown lawn. Her bedroom drapes hung out of the broken window.
It had only been a week or so, but it felt like months.
She waved at the front door and it slid open. The birthday decorations were still in place, faded and sagging. The presents too, stacked against the wall, sun-bleached where the windows permitted.
The door slid closed behind her. Ash approached the table of presents, but hesitated. She turned and went into the kitchen instead.
"Mono." Ashley called him several times, but the giant cat did not appear. Suddenly starving, she opened the refrigerator.
In the downstairs living room, she ignored the fine layer of dust and collapsed onto the couch, her snacks in a pile on the table. Ash triggered the vid stream by remote and fell asleep.
Malik Watkins finished prepping the several bodies for autopsy. He'd removed the plastic body bags and the victim’s clothing and sent them to the hair and fiber lab upstairs. He'd then covered the bodies with thin linen sheets. Once finished, he'd taken a break, leaving the rooms to Bill Martinson, the junior assistant on duty.
Doing his paperwork at a front desk, Bill heard the unmistakable sound of someone moving behind him. Despite his knowledge that everyone behind him was dead, he stood and turned to investigate.
To his surprise, one of the John Does was sitting up, the sheet rumpled about his waist.
Martinson was struck by the physical size of the man. Even from the back, he was huge, a giant. His broad shoulders sported several fresh gunshot wounds, and those were the new one. Scars crisscrossed over each other, some red and thick, others white and faded.
The dead man stood and turned. He rolled the gurney to the side.
Martinson panicked, his heart raced, he couldn't move.
With his one good eye, Morgenstern looked at him.
The giant pathologist was suddenly wracked by a series of violent coughs. He doubled over; something had lodged in his chest. With a deep breath, a final cough ripped the obstruction free. It caught in his mouth. He spit it into his hand and dropped the chunk of lead onto the table.
Bill stumbled backward out of the room.
Morgenstern smiled. He tied a sheet around his waist and grabbed another to cover his shoulders. He pulled the sheets from the other corpses and quickly found Keller and the Governor.
In the next room Morgenstern discovered the attendant on the telephone, describing the situation. He looked up and his words ceased.
>
Morgenstern was carrying the heavy body of the Colonel over his right shoulder and the Governor's frail corpse under his left arm.
He briefly set Governor Maime against the wall and lifted a set of keys from the peg next to the door. He then carried Keller and the Governor from the morgue to the department transport and placed them in the back.
Dunkirk woke a bit later to find himself in the fatality cooler. He noted that he could breathe and leapt from the table. He was still in considerable pain, but conscious and angry enough to move.
In the next room, Martinson explained the missing bodies to Watkins.
"You're sure he was dead?" Martinson asked his superior.
"Yes. I'm sure," Watkins replied. "Dead is dead. They don't get up and walk about.”
Martinson showed the Watkins the bullet. He'd put it in a Petri dish, where it rattled against the plastic.
"Fuck. Fucking zombies, man." Watkins shook his head.
"He wasn't a zombie. He was alive,” Martinson said.
"How do you know?”
"Well, for one thing, he didn't try to eat my brains.”
"They do like the brains.” Watkins smiled.
"So I've heard.”
Dunkirk, the skin of his face and neck burnt to a blackened crisp, his teeth exposed in a hideous grin, opened the door and dragged himself into the room.
Malik's jaw dropped open.
Bill was closer. Dunkirk charged and crashed into him, biting at his head and neck. They collapsed into a tangle of limbs.
"Zombies!" Malik ran for the door, but Dunkirk was there, biting at his neck, digging into the soft tissue.
The man cried out as his life's blood splashed down Dunkirk's throat. The last image his brain processed was that of Bill Martinson, his colleague and friend, murdered by similar bite wounds to the neck.
Dunkirk stood over his victims, burnt and covered in fresh blood. He stripped the larger Watkins of his clothes and dressed.
A couple of minutes later, Dunkirk stumbled out of the morgue. He wore pants, stolen off the dead attendant and an EMT jacket over his shirtless chest. He was barefoot, his charred skin cracked and oozing fluid.
There were no vehicles nearby.
The ruined killer charged up a nearby stairwell to another part of the facility. He found himself on the emergency tarmac. His mind recognized the irony, but his mouth and lips were already twisted as close as he was going to get to a smile.
Here, on this level, there were several vehicles idling at the curb, the closest being a taxi and a mid size SUV. Nurses and EMTs worked near the entrance, wheeling patients from ambulances and private vehicles into the reception area.
Dunkirk used the canopy support pillars to conceal his movement until he saw his opportunity. Lurching from the shadowed lee of a support, he sprinted toward the driver's door of a waiting family vehicle. The owners, a pregnant woman and her husband, in the atrium with nurses and doctors, completely missed the burnt Dunkirk climb into their sport utility.
He pulled away and streaked toward the nearest freeway cable. The husband and wife summoned hospital security, but it was too late. The security staff asked if they knew where he'd come from. The couple directed them toward the far stairwell, the only possible source of his approach.
"The only thing down those stairs is the morgue," one guard remarked without thinking.
A nurse, also accustomed to plain speaking said, "Some one broke out of there about an hour ago.”
The wife's contractions began again and they were taken into the emergency room.
The guard was left to investigate the stairwell.
A minute later, he stood in the open doorway of the morgue, shocked at the sight of the murdered attendants, Malik Watkins without his pants. Nauseated by the gruesome murder and the implications of the missing pants, he turned and tossed his last meal over the railing.
Once he'd cleared his stomach, and then the rooms, the guard notified his duty officer and stood his newly designated post, outside the crime scene, waiting for whomever it was that would investigate the homicides.
In the back room, the Reverend sat up. He found a locker full of hospital clothes and quietly dressed. As he approached the door, the guard spun and staggered backward. The Reverend was dressed as if he might be any hospital employee, but the guard had checked the rooms and they were empty, excepting the dead.
Reverend Luther Wolfe walked past the guard and up to the railing. He climbed it and leapt from the edge of the building, twelve thousand feet above terra firma.
The guard ran the three steps to the edge and looked over. The jumper hadn't been caught in the hospital's safety nets. He was just gone. The security guard crossed himself, as the night moved into its darkest hour, just before dawn.