Dead Men Tell Tales - SCP Foundation

Anorrack

Dead Men Tell Tales (2855 words)

Author: Anorrack

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Miami, Florida, 07:45, 2014

A Florida politician had been kidnapped, the Miami UIU Field Office buzzed like a kicked hornet's nest, and it swarmed over the premises looking for whomever had stirred the hive. Radio chatter and voices overlapped into a cacophony of sounds and noises inside of haphazardly parked vans and around the perimeter.

"PMC reps by the cordon, sir!"

"His brother on line three, waiting for a response."

"Tell forensics we need those prints ASAP!"

"He's waiting in the foyer, Law."

Special Agent Quinn Law ducked under the faintly cognitohazardous police tape, meant for civilian areas where it was necessary to ward off prying eyes. The neighbors were already evacuated, being assured by soothing professionals that the commotion was nothing more than a gas leak, aided by something in their badges that made the edges of their words drip like honey. She made it to the front of the cookie-cutter townhouse, gingerly stepped over the shattered remains of the front door, and escaped the muggy Miami weather into the cool, quiet interior. Special Agent in Charge Isaac Carter was waiting for her in the foyer.

Law ran a hand through her frizzy hair, she didn't have time to tame it this morning. "Who was it? Columbians? Neo-Nazis? Episcopalians?" The leaking faucet of Prometheus subsidiaries was the gift that keeps on giving, the paratech equivalent of Fisher-Price nukes used by players across the board. Cartels armed with particularly volatile paratech had become a particular thorn on this side of the Gulf.

SAC Carter's voice was hoarse. "We don't know."

"Motives, any ransom notes or demands?"

He locked his baggy eyes with hers. "We don't know."

She ran her hands through her hair again and looked at the expensively-decorated interior. "What do we know? What makes this our department?"

He wordlessly gestured for her to follow, and he entered the house proper.

Evidence of a struggle littered the house. They passed shattered vases, piles of ash, broken furniture, and several bodyguards crumpled against the wall, riddled with bullet wounds and burns, all carded and photographed by forensics. A suspiciously realistic marble statue of a Kevlar-clad spook leaned on a bookcase, shock and terror on its stone face. She glanced at Carter, who shook his head.

"The stiff you want is in here."

They entered the garage, which was in absolute disarray. Bullet holes peppered the walls, the concrete floor was gouged as if by giant claws, and the garage door bent and twisted off its rails, with a large hole torn through its center. There was a corpse, or rather parts of a corpse scattered about the garage, none seemingly in as much as the same postcode as the others, viscera and gore splattered across the walls, and intestines partially hanging from a vise on the work bench.

Forensics had checked out this part of the house as well, each bloody chunk diligently carded and numbered 1 through 23 for her perusal. No possible murder weapon lying around, bar maybe a chainsaw or cannon hidden somewhere.

Law felt a prickling on her limbs closest to the remains, and as she approached a torso wearing the shredded remains of Kevlar, she was suffused in the sensation. Law raised her arm to the horizontal and flipped her hand palm-down. Instantly, the hairs on the back of her hand stand straight-up, aligning with the field lines like iron filings near a magnet. A source of EVE, and a strong one at that.

Quinn turned to Carter. "Talk to me."

His bald head shone with sweat, reflecting the bright LED strip above. "Two AM, a neighbor reports shouting coming from the residence. Thought it was a domestic dispute, but then he heard sustained gunfire. Fairly uncommon in this neck of the woods. Dialed 911, but by the time that the police arrived, the perps had gotten away with ex-governor in hand. The wife was in hysterics. They thought she was talking nonsense until their blackboxes started chirping in the garage. Turning people to stone, she said. So they washed their hands of the whole thing and kicked the can to us."

"His family?"

"In custody, nothing but the wrath of God can touch them now."

"Who knows about this?"

"Just the local PD and the UIU. Along with everyone else this side of the Veil."

"News travels fast, I guess."

"Have the interns working over time on the PR. Lucky the bastard was out of office or else we would have had a reckoning on our hands with the civvies."

"As for this guy?" She nudged the torso with her toe.

"Well, that's for you to find out, isn't it?"

She crouched down and dipped her finger in one of the pools of blood, and rubbed it between her fingers before wiping it off on her pants' leg. Type AB. "Have the lab boys already gotten everything they can out of this?"

"Yeah, I had them do the whole nine-yards before you got here. Let them take some prints, samples and photographs, but everything else is there. You should be free to do anything you have to."

Quinn patted down the torso, and felt a lump in a breast-pocket. Feeling around a bit more netted her a wallet and driver's license. Brett Campbell. Along with the license she spotted a veteran ID. Ex-military as well. Quinn stood back up. "Great. That's all I needed to hear." She unslung her bag and grabbed some rubber gloves from her coat pocket. "You might want to leave, it could get nasty."

With that, Special Agent Quinn Law, federal necromancer, withdrew a knife from her bag and got to work.

Necromancy is oft depicted as anything and everything to do with the raising of the dead, zombies and skeletal legions and the like; Hollywood made sure of that. But necromancers—Quinn included—mostly just communed with the spirits of the violently deceased, whether through animal entrails or seances, to obtain information about the past, present, or future. Which is why necromancers were perfect for the field of forensics. The UIU almost black-bagged the writer of Pushing Daisies over it.

Quinn stripped the fluid-stained gloves from her hands as she surveyed the results of her work. Thirty minutes of delicately winding intestines around a pile of viscera and organs had created a knotted septagram, blood- and serum-inked sigils lined the slimy cords and the concrete floor. Quinn had swept the majority of the entrails into the ritual circle—those parts that were large enough to matter, anyway—and grounded the working with a larger circle made of a length of silver wire, electrified by a car battery she had in her purse, as part of her summoning field kit.

She twisted her back and received a satisfying series of pops, before reaching into her bag and drawing out a tripod and camcorder, which she angled to focus six feet above where the ritual circle laid. She pressed the record button.

Beep. Red light means go.

She began to chant in a long dead language, the grammar weighing heavy upon her tongue. The Enochian written upon the septagram flared a navy blue as the taste of frost and B-flat filled the air. Blood and flesh levitated within the summoning circle, skin sloughing off of muscle to form looping Mobius strips, viscera smearing against the containment field put off by the grounding wire.

Enochian. <Brett Campbell, come to my Voice. Follow the wending path laid by the Orphics before you and heed my call.>

Skin unbound and flesh and bone came together, loosely held by the winds of magic and sheer will, towering over Quinn in the shape of a hollow man. Eyes of blue fire pierced from behind the empty folds of empty skin into Quinn's soul.

<You call. I answer.>

She lowered her hands and fished her badge out of her pocket, flashing it to the homunculus. "Special Agent Quinn Law, FBI-UIU. Could you please answer a few questions?"

The blue fires flickered.

English. "…Yes?"

"Okay, good. Firstly, are you aware of your current… condition?"

It looked down at itself, hovering a foot above the ground, loose hairs and veins floating in the air like seaweed in a fish tank. "Yes."

"Good. Secondly, what would you do if I ordered you to spin and sing 'I'm a Barbie Girl'?"

The oscillating Mobius strips of flesh froze in place, and the entity cocked its head quizzically. Brett took a beat before responding. "Tell you to go fuck yourself?"

Law sighed with relief. Type-A. Awareness and Agency. Perfect. "Great, that wasn't a threat or anything, just gauging your cognition. Do you recall the events that transpired last night?" She was cautious not to mention 'murder.' She didn't want to push him too hard right out of the gate. Even Type-A spirits could get a little volatile when confronting their own mortality—or lack thereof—fresh from the grave.

A skein of loose flesh lazily orbited around the homunculus' head, suspended in the containment field. The spirit spoke in a strained, halting tone as it recalled events that happened seemingly an age ago, its voice distant and ragged, sound created from vibrations of congealed nothing. "Governor reported a tail, hired us to do bodyguard work. Goons broke into the house, looked like they weren't expecting us, playing cards in the dining room. Tapped one of them before they reacted, but the other pulled out a gun…" Pause. "Nothing I've ever seen. Sci-fi. Handled like it weighed nothing, tiny thing, but packed a kick, fried my men good. Shot… what's the word. Beams of light.

"Lasers?" Frowning, Quinn rubbed her cuticles with her thumb in frustration. Partial memory loss could impact the interview.

Yeah, those. I got nicked, but managed to down one that was holding a duffel. Duffel was unzipped, and out came… the governor. Something that looked like him, anyways."

"Body double?"

"Realistic, if it was. They weren't expecting a fight, but they came prepped anyways. In the crossfire the double got fried. My men were KIA in seconds, I fell back to the garage."

"Which is where we—" Quinn bit her tongue. "Right, go on."

The homunculus shivered violently, his body drifting apart for a moment before he pulled himself back together. Dangerously on the edge of the forbidden subject, Quinn quickly steered to a much safer topic. "Rewind a bit. Any identifiable features? Languages, faces, plates?"

"Don't remember, dark during the shootout—" The apparition snapped its analogue fingers, the coiling skin violently unwinding from the force of the gesture, revealing red-stained phalanges. "Tattoo on the forearm, I saw it perfectly, but… Damn it, I don't know the word for it. I forgot."

"Could you draw it for me?"

Brett hesitated for a moment, but dipped his hand into his body cavity, and scooped out a small quantity of blood and entrails. Dipping his appendage in the blood, he then daubed it on the interior of the containment field, the EVE-laden fluids sparking and hissing on contact with the cylindrical invisible cage, the rainbow oilslick-sheen of the field burning into a black charcoal as he quickly sketched out a crude drawing of the tattoo.

As he finished the sketch, Quinn did a double take, and made sure the sketch was in frame of the camcorder. "Are you sure?"

He nodded his head, the unfurling more pronounced, his body plan becoming looser, less defined. "On my life."

What the hell would they want from an ex-governor? Quinn dreaded to push him, but the answer was worth too much now to not risk it. "This is very important, think back to your most recent memories. How did you die? Who killed you?"

His skin-bindings unwound from his body, looser, his silhouette barely a man now, the ends of the skeins of skin whipping about violently in a nonexistent wind. Recalling events of death is very traumatizing to stable spirits in prepped environs, not to even mention those summoned at the scene of their death mere hours after the fact.

"It wasn't a weapon, wasn't even a blade. I couldn't stop her. She did it with her bare hands. She didn't want witnesses."

"Who?" Quinn knew this was her last question.

His blue eyes of baleful fire were guttering as he destabilized, but they leapt to blazing life, if just for a moment, spite and rage shining like two newborn stars.

"The Spider."

Brett spasmed, and a rib rocketed out of his chest to ricochet off of the field. The twin fires within his eye-sockets spread to cover his entire body, wreathing him in flame. The apparition began to contract, furled skin pulled tighter and tighter as his ectoplasm underwent cascading destabilization, bone and tendons tenderized and crushed to powder as his body condensed into a screaming, floating ball of viscera and skin. A liquid slurry of memories leaked from his pores as his personality matrix self-destructed.

The fire turned to a bright cherry red as the flesh was vaporized and turned into liquid plasma by the decaying ectoplasm. Finally, as the last of the ghost burned itself out with pure internalized intensified emotion and shell shock, it exploded, contained only by the silver wire, the car battery sparking from the sudden power surge. Law instinctively shielded her face, the red plasma shone through her eyelids for a brief second before fading away.

In place of the corpse and septagram was a perfect circle, four feet across, of seared blackened concrete, all trace of the corpse scrubbed away in cleansing fire. The car battery was scorched, and the silver wire ashy with soot. Law had to blink several times before the spots in her vision cleared, and stared at the spot where Brett used to be.

"Fuck."

Law grabbed the camcorder, stepped through the hole rent in the garage door and shoved the camera into the hands of a passing agent. "Give this to forensics, say it's evidence for the case from Agent Law." She flagged down an intern. "Send me all the files you got on the Lighthouse Mafia's East Coast operations, as well as any reports of recent activity. They're connected to this." Quinn ran her hands through her hair, noticeably less kempt now.

Carter spotted her crossing the green lawn and walked up to Law, worry twisting a long scar across his forehead into a knot. "Heard the screaming. Did the interview go alright?"

Law pursed her lips for a moment. "Didn't release the binding in time, he went critical. Pushed him too far. He saw a tatt on one of the goons that took the governor. Lighthouse Mafia material. I asked who murdered him, and he said 'The Spider.'" She bit her knuckle in thought.

Carter frowned. "Thought they went to ground in 2011 when Burke got nabbed."

"They did, and Jenny hasn't been seen for almost a decade since the whole Wodin fiasco in Portlands. What the hell does the Mafia want with an ex-governor?"

"If I had to hazard a guess, ransom?"

Law shook her head. "There are better and safer ways to secure a ransom than kidnapping a former politician in a state where you don't operate in. The cartels wouldn't allow the Mafia to step a toe over state lines, they are risking all of their necks for this one job. Plus the stiff said they brought a body double. Probably wanted to kidnap him and set it up to look like he died in a robbery gone wrong. No, they want him to do something for them."

They both stood there silently for a minute, the morning dew glistening with the rising sun, the chirp of sirens and murmuring of crowds constant in the background.

Law turned to face Carter. "Put me on the case. I spent two years working on the Pandora sting, I know the Lighthouse Mafia better than anyone else in the office. I'll report all of my findings to you, as soon as I get them."

Carter worried his lip, then nodded. "Of course." As Law went to leave, he grabbed her arm. "Don't do anything too hasty, alright? If you were them, think. What would be your next move?"

Quinn crossed her arms and started rhythmically tapping her foot. "Well, they have a roughly four hour head-start on any manhunt, but that's still not enough time to get comfortable. They wouldn't stay in-state, Miami has the third-biggest UIU office in the country. Can't go out to sea, that's just more cartel territory, so the only option would be to go out-of-state." She saw Carter nod encouragingly, took a breath and continued. "Have to go north, probably have safe houses along the East Coast. But since she kidnapped a governor, they would want to keep moving."

Quinn rubbed the back of her neck and exhaled. "So we don't know where they went, just that they probably went north. Nothing but that, not even a motive."

Carter smiled kindly, not quite reaching his eyes. "It's a good start." He clapped her on the shoulder. "I'll tell the desk jockeys to put the suspects' files on your desk by noon. Happy hunting."

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