Dead Man Running (3 page)

Except the door of one of the morgue drawers was open.

Six stared at the dented steel. Had someone come in to remove one of the bodies? Then he looked down. If anyone had, they hadn't succeeded – there was a corpse slumped at his feet, half-shrouded in a white hospital gown.

It had once been a man; large, strong, bald. There was a bullet wound in the back of his head, and through an armhole of the gown, Six could see another one in his back, about where his heart would be.

Six wondered, Why would anyone open a morgue drawer, remove the occupant, drag him towards the MRI scanner and then flee? Perhaps there was something magnetic inside him, something that –

The dead man grabbed Six's ankle.

Six shrieked in terror, pulled his leg free and tumbled backwards over the bench, landing on the other side. The dead man followed him, crawling under the bench, long-fingered hands clenching the air. One veined eye was fixed on Six – the other was missing, blasted out by the gunshot.

Six scrambled backwards across the tiles, his pulse thumping in his ears. ‘Uh, sorry!' he said. ‘You scared me. You shouldn't have been locked up in there – we thought you were dead!'

Because how could someone survive being shot in the brain and the heart? screamed a voice inside his head.

The man kept dragging himself towards Six, limbs moving stiffly, mechanically, leaving a snail trail of drool on the tiles behind him. He showed no sign that he'd heard or understood.

‘Ace!' Six screamed. ‘Help!'

His voice reverberated around the soundproofed walls of the morgue. No help was coming. He had no weapons – his backpack was propped against the wall nearby, but the only thing in it was a decommissioned nuclear warhead.

He scrambled to his feet. The one-eyed man was between him and the door. But Six was very strong and highly trained – maybe he could overpower him.

The man stood slowly. He glared at Six.

‘I don't want to hurt you,' Six said. ‘Just stay back, and I'll get someone who can help you, okay?'

The man lurched sideways, smashing his elbow into the glass panel of a wall-mounted box. An alarm wailed as he pulled out a fire axe. Broken glass crunched under his bare feet as he advanced on Six.

‘No, no, no!' Six yelled. ‘Put that down!'

The man swung the axe.

Six ducked, just in time – he felt the rush of air as the blade swept by over his head and shattered some tiles on the wall. As he rose, Six grabbed at the handle, but the man put his hand over Six's face and shoved him backwards with surprising speed and force. His skin was as firm and cold as a refrigerated steak.

Six dived backwards as the man swiped at him again with the axe. The blade sliced his shirt and nicked his skin, but there was so much adrenaline in his system that he barely felt it. Got to disarm him, he thought. Without the axe, I could pin him and wait for help.

And suddenly he knew how to do it. As the man prepared the axe for another swing, Six dug the MRI remote out of his pocket and pushed the green button.

Behind the man, Six could see the bench sliding into the scanner. He heard the electromagnet hum as it was switched on. The axe blade reacted immediately, jerking back as if possessed –

– and shearing through the one-eyed man's neck.

Six choked in horror as the man's head tumbled from his shoulders and hit the ground like a punctured soccer ball. The bloodied axe flew across the room and thunked against the MRI scanner as the headless body tipped over backwards, limbs rigid, and hit the ground with a wet smack. Blood squirted from the neck to a precise rhythm, and an ugly chemical stench filled the air.

I didn't mean to behead him, Six thought. Only disarm him. Some distant, sick part of his brain laughed at the pun.

Ace burst through the door, searching for the source of the alarm. Her eyes bulged as she took in the axe stuck to the MRI scanner, the severed head and the dead body in the growing lake of blood.

‘What . . . how . . .?'

Six pointed at the body. ‘Who is this?' he demanded.

Ace's voice was shaky. ‘I don't know yet. His autopsy is scheduled for the day after tomorrow – I've got a few to do between now and then.'

Six stared down at the bloodshot eye, now fixed upon the wall. ‘Well,' he said. ‘I think he just bought his way to the front of the queue.'

THE LIVING DEAD

‘He died a week ago,' Ace said. ‘One gunshot wound to the back of the head, another to the heart moments later. That was the conclusion from my preliminary examination, and the autopsy bears it out.'

‘Except that he attacked me two hours ago,' Six said.

‘I'm not disputing that,' Ace said. ‘I'm just saying that he wasn't technically alive when it happened.'

They were in King's new office. Six noticed that the old furniture had been discarded in favour of a new couch, a larger desk and a multi-monitor computer set-up. The room was bigger too. Six wondered if King had needed the extra space to fit his new possessions, or if he'd put in the old ones and it had felt too empty.

‘How can a dead man attack somebody?' King asked.

‘He can't. It's impossible.' Ace folded her hands in her lap. ‘But it
is
possible for a machine to attack someone, and it turns out that it's also possible for a machine to use a dead body for spare parts.'

Six said, ‘So that guy . . . was a robot?'

Ace winced. ‘Not exactly. Someone surgically removed the remains of his heart and replaced it with this.' She put a clear plastic box on King's desk. Inside was a wet grey thing made of valves and screws. As Six watched, a sphere embedded in the side oscillated in and out. ‘Artificial heart,' Ace said. ‘Still beating – that's why the body kept bleeding after you decapitated it.'

‘It was an accident,' Six reminded her.

‘I've seen artificial hearts before, but never anything like this. It pumps hard and fast enough to kill a living human, if you were crazy enough to try to put one in. There's also a timer on it – someone didn't want the body to wake up until after I'd checked its pulse. I'm guessing our mystery doctor used it to pump out all the blood through the severed arteries. Then he sewed them up and filled the guy's circulatory system with this.' She placed a jar of dark red goop beside the heart.

‘What is it?' King asked, fascinated.

‘A mixture of about a hundred different chemicals, a quarter of which I couldn't identify. There are salts, antibiotics, vitamins, nutrients and, most importantly, perfluorodecalin, which is used to disperse oxygen throughout the body. Again, the concentration is high enough to kill a living being.'

Six said, ‘Why not just use the guy's own blood?'

‘His blood would have started to coagulate pretty quickly after he was shot, and that's an irreversible process. By the time the artificial heart started up in the morgue drawer, it would have been too thick to move. Plus, I assume this stuff would have made him pretty strong. Right?'

Six remembered the man swinging the axe. He nodded.

‘But of course, blood substitutes and a working heart won't do you any good unless there's a central nervous system to control everything. That's where this came in.' She put down another plastic box. This one held a long, thin rod covered in fine bristles. ‘A CPU which runs at just over three gigahertz, designed to send electrical signals to the remains of the brain. Not a lot of processing power, but enough to keep the lungs pumping, the kidneys cleaning, the digestive tract moving, and so on. It also translated everything the body saw into video files. He wouldn't have been able to use a gun, but he could walk, hear, see. There was even some speech software installed, not that it would have done the guy much good – the first gunshot tore out the roof of his mouth. But it didn't give him the power of independent thought. Just the capacity to follow orders.'

‘Why would ChaoSonic go to all this trouble?' King asked. ‘For the money they must have spent on this, they could have hired fifty live soldiers.'

‘Fifty live soldiers couldn't beat the Deck's new biometric security system,' Six guessed. ‘Right? Whereas a dead body could just be dumped somewhere for us to find, and we'd bring it in in a body bag.'

‘Like a Trojan horse,' Ace said. ‘ChaoSonic wouldn't even need to know exactly where the Deck was for it to work.'

‘A Greek horse,' Six said. ‘The Trojans were the ones who were fooled.'

King said, ‘Is there any way of finding out what the dead body's orders were?'

‘Already did,' Ace said. ‘It was instructed to find Kyntak.'

Six's heart thumped against his ribs. Why would someone send a robotic corpse after my twin brother? he wondered.

It had taken sixteen years for Six to discover that he wasn't the only human being ChaoSonic had created. When he'd found Kyntak, working as a security guard and feeding information and funds to the Deck, he'd discovered that while their DNA was the same, they were very different people. Kyntak had never let his ability to run faster, lift more, jump higher and think quicker than natural-born humans stop him from befriending them. Meeting him had shown Six that his genes didn't need to define who he was, and that no-one could survive alone. If Kyntak was in danger, Six had to help him.

‘He needs to be warned,' he said. ‘Where's his new office?'

King and Ace looked at one another. ‘Kyntak doesn't work here any more,' King said.

‘What? Why?'

‘Since your . . . since you left, he decided that he could do more on his own.'

‘And he might be right,' Ace muttered.

King glared at her. ‘He's not achieving anything, and we are crippled without him.'

‘Where is he?' Six demanded.

‘We don't know,' Ace said. ‘But he's been busy. Twice now the Deck has received anonymous tips leading us to entire buildings full of unconscious ChaoSonic employees, poisoned with an airborne anaesthetic. A few months ago somebody broadcast a signal which stalled the engine of every ChaoSonic company car and locked the doors, trapping hundreds of ChaoSonic workers inside so we could pick them up.'

‘Sounds effective,' Six said.

‘It's a nightmare,' King said. ‘Our cell blocks are overflowing, and we don't know what to charge any of the prisoners with. ChaoSonic has quadrupled their security budget, making it impossible for our agents to do their jobs. Plus, with Grysat dead, Kyntak was our primary source of intelligence. Now that he's gone rogue, there's not much we can do other than clean up the mess he's making.'

‘He might be our best chance to destabilise ChaoSonic,' Ace said.

‘That's not our job! We haven't got the resources to police the whole City. ChaoSonic does. We need them, to prevent society from descending into anarchy. And the people need us, to stop ChaoSonic from making this into a totalitarian state. It's a delicate balance, and Kyntak is screwing it up.'

‘It's practically a totalitarian state already!'

Six had never heard King admit to needing ChaoSonic before. But he got the feeling that King and Ace had had this argument many times. He wasn't interested in hearing how it ended.

‘So you don't have any way of contacting him?' he asked.

King shook his head. ‘If we did, we'd have stopped him by now.'

I have to find him, Six thought. Explain that someone sent a reanimated corpse after him. But Kyntak's as strong, as fast and as smart as I am, plus he has an extra four years experience. How can I find him if he doesn't want to be found?

I can't, he realised. I'll have to find whoever sent the dead man instead.

‘So you know what the orders were,' Six said. ‘Can you find out which division of ChaoSonic gave them?'

Ace shook her head. ‘Whoever it was must have known the body might be examined. They left no trace of themselves on the hard drive.'

‘What else do you know about the dead guy?' Six asked. ‘Why was he in the Deck morgue?'

Ace glanced at King. King looked down at his desk.

‘He was the latest victim of a serial killer,' Ace said, turning her gaze back to Six. ‘Over the last two years, we've been finding bodies exactly like this. One shot to the back of the head, one to the heart. They're usually found in their homes, with no sign of forced entry, nothing to indicate a struggle, and nothing missing. No witnesses. Assuming it's the same killer – we call him Double Tap – this man would be his eighty-ninth victim.'

‘That doesn't sound like a serial killer,' Six said. ‘That sounds like a ChaoSonic hit squad.'

‘That's what we thought, at first. But we recovered most of the bullets, and the striations match. They all came from the same gun.'

‘Then it's an assassin. Serial killers murder people for fun – this sounds professional.'

‘Makes sense – except for the lack of motive. The victims weren't rich. Most of them weren't working anywhere special on anything important. They didn't have enemies. In fact, the only link we could find between them was . . . was that they were all generally well liked.' She bit her lip.

There's something she's not telling me, Six thought. He scratched the back of his neck. ‘If it's not about money, then ChaoSonic isn't responsible. So why aren't
they
investigating this? Since when does the Deck hunt down serial killers?'

King said, ‘Since three of the victims worked here.'

Six's stomach churned. ‘Who?'

‘The Queen of Hearts,' King said. ‘Sammy. And – I'm sorry Six, but Jack's dead too.'

Six was silent for a very long time. He'd only had seven friends at the Deck – six since Grysat's passing. Now just three were still alive.

Jack's dead, he thought.

Six had seen Jack before every mission, when Jack had applied prosthetic makeup and given him infiltration gadgets. His skills had made Six's job possible. And now he was gone, and Six would never have a chance to say goodbye.

‘I'm going to need a list of all the victims,' he said finally. ‘And I want to see the bodies.'

‘We don't have Jack's body,' Ace said. ‘But we have footage of the murder.'

‘I'll need to see that, too,' Six said. ‘And –'

‘Hold on, Six,' King said. ‘Agent Ten is working this case –'

‘Tell him I want to read the case file.'

‘But –'

‘If you're about to say he doesn't need my help, you can tell it to the eighty-nine bodies in the morgue. You'll have better luck convincing them.'

‘I was going to say that we need you to find out which ChaoSonic think tank came up with this.' He gestured at the bloody jars. ‘And we need you out looking for the guy who killed
you
.'

‘I'm alive. No harm done. I can't say the same for Queen, Sammy and Jack.'

‘No harm done?' Ace exploded. ‘Do you have any idea what we've been through?'

Six looked around King's new office. ‘Yeah,' he said. ‘Moving's always tough, even to a fancy place like this. And I hear getting married can be very stressful. Must have been a rough few years.' He regretted the words as soon as they left his mouth. Ace's anger vanished, leaving a wounded expression Six couldn't bear to look at. King stared down at his desk, almost guiltily.

If he apologised, took it back, said he didn't mean it, they wouldn't believe him. They'd heard the truth in his words. So he told King, ‘Get me those case files. For all we know, Double Tap killed me too.' Then he walked out the door.

‘Destination?' the taxi driver asked.

She was a hook-nosed woman with eyes that never left the road. Six probably didn't need to worry about her remembering him, but he gave her an address two blocks away from his house anyway.

The driver swung the wheel and the taxi lurched into the flow of traffic. As they passed the mountain of crushed cars, she said, ‘So where you from?'

‘A long, long way from here,' Six replied. He didn't offer anything else, and she didn't ask.

Six hadn't told anyone at the Deck he was leaving. He got the feeling that King or Ace would have wanted to come with him, and right now he needed to be by himself.

Only a few hours ago he'd been in the middle of the most dangerous mission of his life. Now he'd been told that it was over, and that most of his friends were dead. He barely recognised those who remained. I'm lucky to be alive at all, he told himself. But it didn't feel that way.

The taxi had turned onto a street in his neighbourhood. Six pointed to a house at random and said, ‘This is it, here.'

The driver pulled over and Six handed her a fake ChaoSonic Citizen Card that he'd taken from the Deck. She pushed it into a scanner. It bleeped.

‘Thanks, Mr Oakes,' she said. ‘You have a nice night.'

Six nodded, stepped out, shut the door. He dug around in his pocket as though looking for his keys while the taxi executed a U-turn and zoomed away. As soon as it was gone, Six started walking towards his real house.

I wonder if the soup in my freezer is still edible? he thought. It's never gone off before. But I've never left it alone for four years before.

It will have melted, he realised. There'll be no electricity.