F Paul Wilson - Sims 03 (9 page)

 
          
She swallowed back a surge of bile
and forced herself forward, trying not to step in the dried blood—might be
evidence there—as she moved. She stopped again when her beam reflected off
staring eyes and bared teeth. She’d found the dead
sims
.
Clad only in caked blood, their bodies ripped from stem to stern, they’d been
stacked like cordwood against one of the walls. Their dead eyes and slack
mouths seemed to be asking,
Why
? Why? And she wanted
to scream that she didn’t know.

 
          
Behind her she heard Patrick retch.
She turned and saw him leaning against one of the support columns.

 
          
“You okay?” she said through her
tissue.

 
          
“No.” His voice was hoarse. He held
up a thumb and forefinger; they appeared to be touching. “I’m just this far
away from losing my lunch.”

 
          
“I skipped lunch, thank God.” She
paused, then, “Look, I need to get closer.”

 
          
“I don’t. I’ll stay back here and
guard the steps, if you don’t mind.”

 
          
“I appreciate it,” she told him. He’d
already proved himself as far as she was concerned.

 
          
Turning, she spotted fresh, dusty
prints ahead in the dried blood, leading to the cadavers; one of the cops, no
doubt. To avoid further contamination of the scene she used them as stepping
stones to move forward, knowing all along that it was wasted effort—no one was
going to spend much time sifting this abattoir for clues. But there was a right
way to do something, and then there was every other way.

 
          
Closer now she flashed her beam into
the gaping incision running the length of the nearest cadaver’s naked torso.
A female.
Her ribs had been ripped back, revealing lungs but
no heart. Romy leaned forward and checked the abdominal cavity.
Liver and kidneys gone.
She craned her neck to see into the
pelvis—uterus and ovaries missing too.

 
          
She moved onto another, a male this
time, and the results were similar except that his testicles had been removed.

 
          
Romy straightened. They’d been
gutted, all of them, and the males castrated. She took a quick turn around the
rest of the basement but found no sign of the excised organs. The intestines
had been removed and discarded in a pile because they were valueless and only
got in the way. But all the rest were missing.

 
          
“Let’s go,” Romy said, taking
Patrick’s arm and pointing up the steps toward daylight and fresher air. “I’ve
seen enough.”

 
          
More than enough.

 
          
They hurried to the first floor and
back out to the front yard. Romy didn’t understand the missing ovaries and
testicles—she knew of no use for them—but she understood the rest all too well.

 
          
Furious, she went straight to the cop
and slapped the flashlight back into his palm.

 
          
“Didn’t you notice anything missing
down there?” she said.

 
          
He looked uncomfortable. “Like what?”

 
          
“Like their organs! They weren’t just
killed, they were harvested! And
that ”
—she jabbed a
finger at his chest—“is a felony!”

 
          
HARLEM

 
          
DECEMBER 14

 
          
Beece work ver hard today.
Many cloth
to cut. Boss say,
Faster
,
faster! Beece cut fast as can.
Still boss yell.

 
          
Beece ver hot.
Thirsty.
Go sink for drink. Drink
quick
’cause sink next boss office. Too long drink boss yell.

 
          
Boss door open.
New
man walk
through.
Red-hair man.
Show boss papers. Beece hear talk.

 
          
“I’m from the city
Animal
Control
Center
,
Mr. Lachter.”

 
          
“Hey, I treat my sims
good
.”

 
          
“No, Mr.
Lachter,
that
would fall under the auspices of the ASPCA. We have a different
mandate, and at the moment we’re looking for a lost sim.”

 
          
Beece almost leave sink, now stay.
Lost sim? Could be Meerm? Listen more.

 
          
“I got all mine. I count ’em every
morning.
None missing, no extras.”

 
          
“Good. But from past experience we
know that lost
sims
tend to seek out other sims, so
we’d greatly appreciate it if you’d keep your eye out for any sim that might
wander in.”

 
          
Boss laugh.
“He does, I’ll put him to work!”

 
          
“It’s a female and if she shows up
you should isolate her immediately.”

 
          
“Why’s that?”

 
          
“She may be sick. Nothing contagious
to humans, but she might infect other
sims
.”

 
          
Infect? Beece think. What mean infect?

 
          
“I don’t need
none
of that. I can barely make production quotas now.”

 
          
“If she shows she may look a little
different than the average sim and—”

 
          
“Different? What is she, a new
breed?”

 
          
“No. Same as the rest, but she might
look a little heavier…perhaps ‘bloated’ is a better term. She’s sick and we can
take care of her, but we have to find her first.”

 
          
Meerm! Man talk about Meerm!
Meerm sick but fraid doctor.
Beece feel sorry Meerm. City
Man want help Meerm. No hurt Meerm.

 
          
Beece fraid talk Boss.
Boss yell
all time.
But Meerm Beece
friend.
Must help Meerm.

 
          
Beece step in office. “’Scuse,
please, boss.”

 
          
Boss
face go
mad.
“What the hell you doing here!
Get back to work,
you lazy—”

 
          
“No, wait,” red-hair city man say. He
look
Beece. “Do you know something?”

 
          
“Sick sim come home.”

 
          
“Home?
Where’s home?”

 
          
“I crib them in
Newark
overnight,” Boss
say
.

 
          
“
Newark
?
Why so far?”

 
          
“Because it’s tons cheaper to bus
them
back and forth than rent space for them around here.
Sorry if that’s out of your jurisdiction, pal, but—”

 
          
“Oh, don’t you worry about that. Just
give me the address of this place. I’ll take it from there.”

 
          
Beece happy.
Red-hair city man nice.
Help Meerm. Make Meerm better.

 
          
SUSSEX COUNTY
,
NJ

 
          
“This is good,” Mercer Sinclair said
as he skimmed the reports. “This is very good.”

 
          
Just SimGen’s security chief in the
office with him today. Portero had personally delivered the police reports on
the sim massacre in
Brooklyn
, an unusual courtesy.
Perhaps the man was coming around, learning to be a team player.

 
          
Who am I kidding? Someone like Harry
Carstairs is a team player, but not Portero. He doesn’t know the meaning of the
word “team.” Mercer smiled to himself. Come to think of it, neither do
I
.

 
          
This visit meant one thing: Portero
wanted something.

 
          
He’d never come right out and ask,
Mercer knew. He’d use an oblique
approach,
try to
sneak it in when no one was looking. Mercer was sure he’d find out what it was
before the meeting ended.

 
          
“I thought you’d be upset,” Portero
said.

 
          
Is that why he came?
To watch me blow my top?
Sorry, Little Luca. Not today.

 
          
“I am. I hate the idea of losing a
dozen of our
sims
. That’s something people seem to
forget—they’re our
sims
. No matter what country
they’re shipped to, even if it’s the other side of the world, they still belong
to SimGen. We can barely keep up with demand as it is, so of course I hate to
lose even one.”

 
          
“But you seem almost…happy.”

 
          
“I’m happy that these
SLA
creeps have been exposed for what they are. Yesterday’s discovery shows they’re
not pro-sim activists, they’re murderous organleggers.” He glanced at the
police report again. “They’re sure these are the same
sims
that were hijacked from the globulin farm?”

 
          
Portero nodded.
“Absolutely.
Lucky thing NYPD was able to resuscitate that memory chip from the
Bronx
.
And lucky too these globulin farmers were excellent record keepers: They
scanned the neck bar codes of all their ‘cows’ into their computers.”

 
          
“Then that nails the
SLA
.
When they’re caught they’ll go down for murder and illegal organ trafficking.
Any chance of tracing those organs?”

 
          
Portero shrugged. “Unlikely. They
were probably shipped overseas while still warm. I’ve heard the
Third
World
black market in transplant organs is booming, but…” He
looked troubled.

 
          
“But what?”

 
          
“I know there’s a big demand for
human organs, but sim organs?”

 
          
“They’re called xenografts—nonhuman
organs. Human bodies used to reject them almost immediately, but with the new
treatments that remove his to compatibility antigens, the rejection rate is
about equal to human allografts. Those hearts, livers, and kidneys are worth a
fortune on the black market.”

 
          
Portero nodded and Mercer thought,
You
haven’t a clue as to anything I just said.

 
          
“Hearts, livers, kidneys,” Portero
said. “What about uteruses and ovaries? Are they transplantable?”

 
          
“No value at all. Nor are the
testicles they cut off—unless someone’s developed a taste for a new kind of
Rocky
Mountain
oyster.”

 
          
Just the thought made Mercer ill.

 
          
“Then why go to the trouble to
harvest them?”

 
          
“Maybe they were stupid
organleggers.”

 
          
“One other thing concerns me,”
Portero said. “The chip from the globulin farm shows records of thirteen
sims
housed there right up until the night of the fire. But
only twelve were found in that
Brooklyn
basement.”

 
          
“You’re sure?”

 
          
“We know from the records that a
female sim is unaccounted for. The only reason I can imagine why she wasn’t
butchered along with the rest is that she wasn’t with them.”

 
          
“You think she escaped?”

 
          
“I suspect she was never captured. I
think she fled the raid and the fire, and is hiding somewhere in the city.”

 
          
“Why on earth would she hide?”

 
          
“Maybe she saw the security man
murdered and she’s frightened. She could be anywhere, too terrified to show
herself.”

 
          
A witness, Mercer thought. A sim
could never testify in court, but this one might be able to provide the police
with a lead or two.

 
          
Mercer glanced down at the embedded
monitor in his desktop. Damn near every headline scrolling up the screen this
morning seemed to be about the sim slaughter in
Brooklyn
.
The good part was that the phony “
SLA
” had shown its
true colors; the bad part was the depiction of
sims
as
helpless victims, easy prey for human scum.
Too high a
sympathy factor there.
He needed to counter that, and this missing sim
offered a unique opportunity.

 
          
“I want that sim found,” he told
Portero. “To make sure she is
,
SimGen is going to
offer a million-dollar reward to whoever finds her.”

 
          
Portero looked dubious. “Do you think
that’s necessary? I’m sure my people—”

 
          
“Forget your people. This is strictly
a SimGen matter. We’ll handle it.”

 
          
Yes. The more he thought about this,
the more he liked it. Here was a way to take back the headlines and reassert
SimGen as the true champion and defender of
sims
.

 
          
“Very well,” Portero said, rising.
“Since there’s nothing for me to do in that regard, I’ll get back to my
office.”

 
          
After Portero was gone it occurred to
Mercer that he hadn’t discovered the reason for the security chief’s personal
visit. He’d been sure he’d wanted something.
But what?

 
          
Well, whatever it was, he hadn’t got
it.