Metawars: The Complete Series: Trance, Changeling, Tempest, Chimera (45 page)

Fear does strange things to people.

The alley reeked of stale beer, rotting food, and the general odor of human waste, all twisted up into one great, sickly stink. I bit down on the tip of my tongue, willing breakfast to stay put. I could handle broken bones and gushing blood; bad smells would not get the better of me.

A dozen yards down, past a collection of plastic trash cans and rotting cardboard boxes, stood a trio of people. A well-dressed man in a pressed blue suit and expensive shades hovered nearby, jotting something on a notepad. At his elbow was a brown-haired woman, conversely dressed in jeans and a tight, three-quarter-sleeved blouse. Detective partners we worked with occasionally—Pascal and Forney, if I recalled correctly. Another uniformed officer stood nearby, trying his best to melt into the brick wall. He saw us first, another trio in our own unique uniforms.

After quitting the Ranger Corps and the MHC payroll, Teresa had brainstormed a new idea for our uniforms: simple, slick black pants with a variety of zippered pockets, tank tops in our preferred color, woven through with armored thread, and matching black jackets. My color was orange, Trance’s was silver, and Tempest’s green. The stretchable Kevlar in our tank tops was a gift from the brain trust that was ATF Agent Rita McNally. She could come up with some unusual toys, and it made me glad she was on our side.

Trance approached the scene with confidence in her stride. Tempest and I flanked her, creating a perfect triangle.
My palms were sweaty and not from the day’s heat. I schooled my face into the perfect picture of calm as we approached. The wall of human bodies parted, and I gazed down at my first murder victim.

And almost lost my breakfast.

It wasn’t a body as much as it was a body’s case. Skin, hair, and nails, in the perfect replica of a human being. The pink-and-tan body looked like an inflatable doll that had gone flat, but it wasn’t plastic. The details were too perfect, from the lines around the empty eyes to the warts on the tops of the man’s feet. There was no blood, no gore, no sign of the eyeballs or anything else that wasn’t external.

A human slipcover.

“Oh boy,” I muttered.

“You okay?” Tempest asked, a little pale himself. His good hand squeezed my shoulder.

I tore my eyes away from the graphic—yet, oddly, not gory—sight. “Yeah, I think so. Wh-what could do that to a person?”

“That’s why we called you people in,” Detective Forney said. She wore shockingly red lipstick and matching nail polish. A scar ran the length of her left cheek, from ear to chin, thin as a pencil line, but noticeable in the bright daylight. Heavy makeup covered her face, thickest under her eyes and across the bridge of her nose, which seemed slightly swollen.

“You people?” Trance said, shoulders tensing.

“Yes, you guys, you people,” she said. “Christ, don’t be so touchy. We’re doing you a favor by bringing you into this case.”

Trance squared off with the mouthy detective. “Funny,
I assumed you brought us in because you don’t have a clue what did this, or why, or how you’d fight it if you met it in a dark alley. Am I anywhere close, Detective Forney?”

Forney sneered. Detective Pascal placed a warning hand on her shoulder. A good six inches taller than his partner, he was an intimidating presence, and she backed off. Her hand brushed mine as she swept past and stalked down the alley to the street.

“She’s not very good with people,” Pascal said. “That’s why she works homicide. Gets along great with dead bodies.”

Tempest snickered.

Trance crouched over the skin. “I take it your forensics team will inform us of anything they find? Any indication of how the skin was removed and why.”

“Of course,” Pascal said. “Forney might not like you, but this is far beyond our abilities to solve alone. Maybe if there was some sign that the skin had been cut, some evidence of a knife or scraping tool, but there isn’t. Everything that was inside the skin is just . . . gone.”

Trance studied the scene with more control than I could have managed in her position. “I wish I had a quick answer for you. I can’t recall any registered Bane with the power to do something like this.” The majority of our repowered enemies were still living in Manhattan, on the island that had been turned into a prison at the end of the Meta War, and no one had been reported missing.

“Unregistered Metas have been popping up across the country,” Pascal said. “This could be someone you’ve not encountered before.”

“Possibly.”

Tempest cocked his head to the left. “You have a theory, Trance?”

“Not yet.”

Pascal’s pocket jingled. He fished into it and retrieved a phone, flipped it open with his thumb, and pressed it to his ear. “Yeah, Mike?” Pause. His eyebrows arched. “Where was that again?” He wrote something on his pad. “Who?” Writing. “Okay, thanks, Mike.”

Pascal enlightened us. “That was a pal over in the County Sheriff’s Office. Eight days ago, they found one of these skin jobs in a Dumpster behind a diner out near the foothills. It was partially decomposed, and they guessed the time of death was two days earlier.”

This wasn’t an isolated incident. Someone was out there skinning people. Or sucking their insides out. Neither idea appealed to me.

“Did they identify their victim?” Trance asked.

“Yeah, a man named Ronald Jarvis,” Pascal said, checking his notes. “Thirty-two, divorced, no kids. He worked for a place north of Studio City called Weatherfield Research and Development.”

“Weatherfield?” I said. It was a name I’d not heard in years, and it made horrible, fascinating sense that Weatherfield could be involved, even tangentially, in something like this.

“Ember?” Trance said. “What is it? You look ill.”

I swallowed. “Weatherfield R and D is a biological research center fronting as a hospital facility. They were the
subject of my senior investigative piece. I wrote a thirty-page article on that place and got a failing grade because all I had to substantiate my claims were rumors.”

“What claims?” Pascal asked.

“Genetic meddling, biological enhancement, cloning experiments, you name it. It’s entirely possible, given what they’re known to do, that one of their projects is our skin remover.”

“What do you know, exactly?” Trance asked.

She crossed her arms over her chest, gazing at me like a professor challenging her student. I squared my shoulders, not intimidated by the familiar stance. For the last two years I had fought hard to get my dignity back, to rise above graduating last in a journalism class of one hundred and eleven students because I chose to write the article. I hadn’t started my career writing for gossip rags for fun.

“When I was a junior at Cal State, I dated a guy,” I said, nervous under the gaze of my attentive audience. “His name was Stan. He was an art student who worked two part-time jobs to make tuition. One day close to Christmas break, he answered an ad in the paper. Five hundred dollars cash if you volunteered for a five-day experiment. He didn’t have family, and we weren’t that serious, so he did it.

“He didn’t come back for the winter term, and when I saw him again in the spring, he was different. Nervous, always pale and tired. He stopped eating, stopped doing his art. Eventually he dropped out. Over the summer I tracked him down at a mental hospital in Reno. He’d completely lost it. During cogent moments, he talked about Weatherfield. The
experiment had killed a participant, and they’d all been paid to keep quiet.

“A lot of it was delusional rambling, but it got me interested in Weatherfield in a huge way. I talked to more students who’d signed up, but they wouldn’t tell me anything. No one would go on the record. Weatherfield never returned my calls.”

My heart was pounding faster than was healthy. Adrenaline had kicked in at some point during my story. I hadn’t thought about Stan for ages. He and Weatherfield were no longer part of my conscious mind—just part of my past mistakes. My skin felt warm, flushed, the air around us a few degrees cooler.

“Ember?” Tempest said.

“I know.” I closed my eyes and concentrated on my emotions, squashing the anger back into place. Every time I thought I had a handle on my powers, something took that control away. The flush dispersed. “Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Trance said. She turned to Pascal, who had distanced himself from me. “Did your friend question Jarvis’s employers at Weatherfield?”

Pascal nodded. “He said Jarvis had no enemies at work. No high-priority projects that might incur jealousy among fellow employees. Everyone was surprised he died, and no one noticed him missing because it was a weekend.” His gaze flickered toward the ground. “Mike said he got fingerprints off his vic, so we should be able to get an ID on ours.”

“I hope so, because you don’t have any teeth to check against dental records.”

“You sure you’re not a cop?”

She smiled. “I read a lot, Detective, and I have a lot of smart people around me. I assume you brought us in for a reason, so if we choose to investigate independently, will I have the support of the LAPD?”

“I’ll vouch for you.”

“What about your partner?”

“She will, too, even if she doesn’t know it yet.”

“Thank you. I promise to not abuse your trust.”

Pascal nodded and left the alley, already dialing a number on his phone. Trance squatted over the shell of skin, near the remains of the face. I forced myself to look, to learn and understand what she was doing.

Five holes dotted the face: two eyes, nostrils, and the mouth. The lips were gone, only smooth flesh indicating where they had been. Eyebrows and eyelashes were intact, as was the shadow of an unshaven beard. Nothing about the body was ragged or violated. Everything in perfect order, just empty.

“Did you mean it before?” Tempest asked. “When you said you couldn’t think of a single Bane who could do this?”

“Of course I meant it,” Trance replied. “I have no reason to lie to him.”

“So you would have told him if you could think of a Bane?”

Her violet eyes flashed. “Yes, Tempest, I would have. As much as I want the Banes to be forgiven for their past crimes, that does not extend to present ones. If one of them is killing now, I want them brought to justice.”

“Just checking, boss.”

The near fight ended as quickly as it began, but something had sparked between the pair. Tempest and Flex openly disagreed with Trance’s position on the imprisoned Banes. Trance wanted to see them pardoned, released, and allowed to live regular lives. Many of the Banes had expressed similar wishes over the last few months. They no longer had a leader to fight for; many had established some semblance of a life on Manhattan Island and desired to stay—with freedoms intact and supplies made readily available.

In Trance’s eyes, we were all MetaHumans. She reserved the term
Bane
for those still operating outside of the law, rather than a blanket label for the sixty-odd adults who once opposed our predecessors. A fresh start, she called it.

Tempest and Flex stood in the opposite corner of the boxing ring. Both had been terribly hurt—the former physically, the latter emotionally—six months ago. No one expected the hurt to go away quickly, but they clung to it like a safety blanket. The Banes had not changed, and they never would. In their eyes, evil never died. It only hibernated awhile before rearing its terrible head.

I didn’t take sides in the argument. I never felt I had the right. I could never hope to walk in their shoes. Everything I’d done, every move I’d made over the last six months had been about making my own path.

Rangers and Banes were things of the past. All we had now was the present.

“So what’s our next step?” I asked. “Weatherfield?”

Trance stood up. “Definitely Weatherfield. They’re connected
to this case, even if the killer isn’t from their facility. One of the victims definitely is, and for all we know, there are more than two.”

A sense of triumph settled warmly in my chest. After all these years, a chance to finally set foot inside of the Weatherfield facility; enter the walls that had destroyed Stan’s mind and spirit and left an empty husk in its place.

“We should bring Cipher along,” Tempest said, and Trance agreed. She had her com out and dialing as we headed back to our car.

Three

Weatherfield

T
o save time, we picked up Gage “Cipher” McAllister a few blocks from the house; we still had a good twenty minutes of traffic maneuvering between us and Weatherfield. He climbed into the backseat with me, in his blue-topped uniform, and Trance sped off toward the freeway.

Cipher’s hyper-enhanced senses would make any interrogation expert turn green. He could hear heartbeats a hundred yards away, had a vision range of a quarter mile, and possessed the sensitive nose of a bloodhound. He’d also taught himself to combine his senses and create a unique organic lie detector. Changes in blood pressure, heart rate, sweating, and body temperature were all easy clues in the game of deceit.

Though the heart of the film industry had moved north years ago, music remained a cash cow in Los Angeles, along with other entrepreneurial enterprises. Traffic on the freeways remained heavy as citizens traveled north to south, from Van Nuys and Burbank down to Pasadena, and farther south to Long Beach. Most of the exits to and from West Hollywood,
Chinatown, Inglewood, and Santa Monica saw little use, and sat cracked and empty. The center of old L.A. was for the poor, the hiding, and people like us—outsiders, all.

The Weatherfield compound took up an entire city block. Double rows of chain-link fence ran the perimeter, topped with razor wire and security cameras. A four-story parking structure occupied the north corner. Two large buildings took over the rest. The second and fourth floors were connected by glassed-in walkways. It looked like a hospital or office building, with no outward signs of its sinister interior. A single gate emerged out of nowhere, and Trance had to hit the brakes to avoid shooting past.

She paused at the guard hut and rolled down her window. The guard, sweaty and red-faced in his black uniform and hat, took one look at her, a quick look into the van at the rest of us, and dashed back into his concrete and glass hut. He picked up a phone, said something, and nodded. The phone went back into the cradle and he poked his head outside.