Halfkinds Volume 1: Contact (4 page)

We walk past the lobby and head
towards the elevator.  I had been to the Las Vegas branch before, but I still
have a hard time navigating myself around.  It’s a grand office building, and
when I enter, I see steel colored walls reaching to the roof.  Giant screens
adorn them with the day’s news.  The lobby is quite a sight, and there are
several agents walking about.  I politely make my way through the crowd as I
follow Agent Leons to the elevator.  He presses up, and we wait for it,
standing next to each other in an awkward silence.

The elevator opens, and we walk
in.  He finally speaks.

“So you ready for some strange
shit?” he asks me.

“I’ve seen a lot, don’t know if
what you plan to throw my way is really going to surprise me,” I respond.

“That’s what I thought too, but
once I got the details, I was pretty shocked.”

“You could’ve given me a small
briefing on the phone.”

“If I did, you might have had
second thoughts.”

“Have you ever known me to not
accept a mission?”

“No, but I can’t be certain I know
anyone that well.”

“What’s with the rush anyway, Don?
“

“It’s time sensitive.  You’ll
probably only have until the end of the night to prepare.”

“It’s already 6:00 PM.”

“Yup.”

“That high priority, eh?”

“Yup.”

The elevator opens and he makes a
right, in the direction of one of the debriefing rooms.  They all look the
same, so I follow him to prevent myself from getting lost.  He opens the door
and I enter a large conference room with a beautiful polished desk in the
center and a humongous screen on the wall.  It looks like a standard debriefing
room, but much nicer than what I am used to.

“Have a seat,” he says.

As I sit down and make myself
comfortable, he tosses me a thin tablet device.  I turn it on and see an image
of a brunette woman.  Judging by her appearance she looks to be in her fifties
or so.

“That is a picture of Maya
Lawton,” Agent Leons says.  “She’s currently fifty five in that picture, but it
was taken about twenty five years ago.  Quite the looker, eh?  She probably ran
the racket on clients, don’t know why she got into the shit she got into with
that face.”

“What did she get into?” I ask.

“You’ll see.”

He turns on the screen and
immediately a hologram of a corpse flashes from it.

“This is a more recent image of
her,” he says smugly.

“You want me to investigate the
death of this woman?” I ask Agent Leons.

“Hold off on the questions until
after the briefing,” he says.

“Okay.”

“Maya Lawton was also known as
Maya Howl, a prostitute who was a member of this man’s stable of hookers.”

The screen shows up a hologram of
a fat man, well past his hundreds.  He is bald and disheveled looking.  He’s
wearing a loose shirt and his neck is adorned with various pieces of jewelry.

“This is Eddie David, grade A
asshole, low level pimp.  He had a small operation down in Primm.  Eddie was
incarcerated for running an illegal prostitution ring there.  The judge
sentenced him to life without parole in 3014.”

“Life without parole?  That seems
pretty harsh for just running a prostitution ring.”

“The ring specialized in
interspecies prostitution.”

“Ahh, I see.  So he’s currently
sleeping in a prison pod right now?”

“No, he’s dead.  Before he could
carry out his sentence, someone murdered him during his transport to Mojave
Penitentiary.  Files say it was a former rival that arranged his hit.  Man,
sometimes things are easier when you let these scumbags take each other out. 
Makes it less messy for us members of the law.”

Agent Leons is never one to shy
away from his opinions.

“I see,” I say dismissively. 
“What happened to Ms. Lawton?”

“She was sentenced to ten years in
a correctional facility.  They didn’t put her to sleep.  She only served two
until she got released for good behavior.  However, with Eddie gone, her source
of income was limited.  She stayed off the radar and eventually vanished, or so
it seemed.  The only thing registered to her was a broken down house and some
energy and wireless bills.  In actuality, she was still servicing other
species.”

“So no one ever found out?”

“No, she was actually pretty good
at lying low, other than the whole whoring herself out to animals part.”

“How long did she do this for?”

“We don’t have conclusive
evidence, but we’re guessing she stopped doing it by 3024.  Thank God.  This
brings us to today.”

Another hologram emanates from the
screen.  This time it is a man with scruffy hair, aged probably into his
eighties as well.

“This is detective Scott Marsden. 
Last morning, he received an anonymous tip about the residence of 1523 Chakming Drive.  It was where Maya lived.  When he entered, he found her body in the
kitchen, as I had showed you in the previous slide.  He also encountered this.”

The screen renders a hologram of
something I’ve never seen before.

“What the fuck is that?!” I yell.

It’s an image of a human, except
he doesn’t look completely like a man.  He has green skin, big bulging black
eyes on the sides of his head and a large, wide mouth.  His face looks like a
frog.  The rest of his skin is green as well.  But as I examine the photo more
closely, I see that he has thumbs, hands like a human.  He is wearing human
clothing.  He’s much too large to be a normal frog, yet he definitely doesn’t
look like anything I’ve ever seen.

“That, my friend is what the folks
around here are calling ‘halfkinds’, that is what this is all about,” Agent
Leons says.

“Halfkinds?” I ask Agent Leons.

“Well that’s what these beings
are, half mankind, half animal-kind.  From the bio scanners and medical analysis,
we’ve determined that thing has both human and frog DNA.  And guess what, the
human DNA was a match to Ms. Lawton.”

“But that’s impossible.  There
have been no successful cases of animal human splicing so far.”

“That’s true, but we also had the
medical team look at Ms. Lawton, and from their analysis it seems to suggest
this wasn’t the work of a rogue faction of splicers, this was something else. 
We’re guessing this thing was her son.”

“You’re saying she gave birth to it?”

“Indeed I am.  The medical team
did an autopsy on her and they found tons of illegal tech in her body.  Biotics,
biological robotics, stuff that works inside you.  It looks like she wasn’t
only whoring herself out to other species.  She was whoring her body out to
some black market implanters.  Mix both of them together, and I guess this is
the end result.  People will do anything for cash.”

“What did they put in her?”

“We can’t determine yet.  It’s
kind of a jumbled mess of bionic and robotic implants in her uterus.  It’s hard
to determine what kind of tech we’re dealing with since all of it seems off the
market.”

“Do you know the purpose of the
implants?”

“Not exactly, but early word from
the science lab is that all the implants are related to birth enhancements.  Makes
sense.  Genetically engineering a half man half animal creature would no doubt
be on the radar of the United Species Alliance.  This group needed something
less detectable, so why not have a bunch of paid whores do it the old fashioned
way?  It’s kind of just a hypothesis, though.  We won’t know until they have
more time to research.  It’s only been a day after all.”

“Well your team does work fast.”

“They do think that it attributed
to her early demise.  All of that biotech had traces of synconium in it.”

“Isn’t that stuff poisonous?”

“Sure is.  I’m surprised she lived
so long considering what was in her.  But since synconium poisoning happens in
a flash, she probably had no idea she was going to die so soon.”

“I can’t believe she agreed to put
that stuff in her body.”

“She was desperate, and I’m pretty
sure the last thing that tech went through was any kind of safety test.  She
probably didn’t even know what was in her.  With all the shit she willingly did
in her life, I would guess she wasn’t the brightest bulb in the bunch.”

Agent Leons walks to the other end
where a water dispenser lies.  He takes a swig of the liquid and goes back to
the screen.

“We don’t know who did it either,”
he continues.

“Maybe a group of fanatics? 
Perhaps, they’re trying to manipulate the evolutionary process, kind of like
what happened about a few hundred years ago?”

“That’s what we think.  This is
definitely some underground work.  Our information is sparse and it’s pretty
shitty.  We don’t even know if Maya was the only person involved with these
implants.  I suspect she wasn’t, but that information is up the chain.  I can’t
get access to it.”

“So to wrap up what I’ve learned
so far, we suspect that there’s a rogue group of biologists out there that are
working with women like Maya to breed half human half something else species?”

“That seems to be the case.”

“Is there any evidence to suggest
that Maya is still involved with this group?”

“That’s the thing, we don’t have
any messages or records that suggest it.  They, or she, probably cut ties with
each other after this one was born.”

“That’s why I’m here then, huh? 
You want me to find this renegade group, find out who’s performing these
operations?”

“No.  Right now that trail is
cold.  All of this is theory.  We haven’t had enough time to sift through the
evidence that we found at her house to determine what the story is exactly. 
When we do get something concrete, we’ll go after the group responsible for
this.  For now, what we need you to do is find the others.”

“Others?”

“This guy right here, this frog
thing, his name was Leonard.  I find it kind of funny she gave them such normal
names.  I would have given these freaks freak names to match their appearance. 
When our team completed searching the Lawton residence, we discovered that he
has brothers and sisters. ”

“What?”

“After Detective Marsden subdued
Leonard, he investigated the house and stumbled upon the basement, a very large
basement, with several rooms built underground.”

He goes to the next render and it
shows a hall with ten or fifteen corridors.

“All this was constructed below
the surface,” Agent Leons says.  “This was where his brothers and sisters
lived.”

The structure impresses me.  The hallway
is quite spacy and, from what I can tell, the rooms look rather roomy.  I can’t
believe all of it was built underground.

“How many are there total?” I ask
Agent Leons.

“A lot,” he responds.  “Including
Leonard, eleven.”

“Are they all half human, half
frogs like Leonard?”

“Not quite.  It’s kind of a
potpourri of species mixing.”

He goes to the next hologram.  It
is of a creature, a large one.  He has the face of a human, but it’s covered
with fur, striped orange and black.  His eyes are round and yellow, like a
cat’s.  He has long, bushy white hair flowing from his head.  His body is
bulky, but muscular.  The same striped fur adorns his arms and legs.  His hands
are like a human’s, but the fingers a round and stocky.  They look like paws.

“We were able to gather quite a
bit of evidence from the rooms in the basement.  That’s how we created these
renders.  There were documents, pictures, personal effects, all of them helped
piece together the information you are about to receive now.  This one’s name is
Tiago,” Agent Leons says.  “We’re guessing his father is a Bengali Tiger.”

“Good guess.”

“He appears to be the oldest of
the group.  From what we can tell, he’s roughly twenty two years old.  I’m
going to show you the profiles in order of age, if you don’t mind.”

“No problem.  Anything else you
can tell from him?”

“Not really, but since he’s the
oldest and one of the biggest of the group, we’re guessing he’s a natural fit
for leader.  You’ll have time to go over our findings later on.  All the
documents should be in that tablet I handed to you.”

“Okay.”

Leons pulls up the next image. 
It’s another massive creature, much larger than Tiago, teetering on the obese
side.  His body is covered with a light brown fur.  His fingers are long and at
the end of them are claws.  His face is round and a large snout protrudes from
the center.  On the top of his head are two fuzzy ears.

“Father was a bear?” I ask him.

“From the looks of it.  Grizzly,
you think?” he asks me.

“I guess, I can’t really tell.  Not
exactly an expert on this stuff.”

“His name is Oscar.  We figured
his age is twenty two as well.”

“How’d she give birth to him so
quickly when she just had Tiago?”

“The frog, Leonard, he was
sixteen, and he was the youngest.  We’re guessing she kept pumping them out. 
The implants in her body also might have expedited her pregnancies to a few
months each.”

“I see.  What do you think this
one’s role in the family is?”

“We’re not sure exactly.  We think
he’s big enough to be the muscle of the group, but from his personal writings
and journal entries that we found, we get the sense that he’s somewhat of a
pacifist.”

“What did you find from Tiago’s
writings and personal effects?”

“He’s more hostile.”

“Did all of them have private journals?”

“Almost all of them.  The ones we
confiscated are the only way we could figure out their personality profiles.”

The next hologram morphs on the
screen.  It’s of a hulking creature.  He is big, like Oscar, but muscular,
rough looking.  His skin is grey, eyes small and beady.  He is bald and has the
ears of a human.  Oh, and there is a giant horn sticking out of his face where
his nose is supposed to be.  He is in full scowl mode in the image I see.