She saw something, a shadow growing on the floor beside the futsie's body as though darkness was bleeding out of him in place of blood. Before she could react, the shadow grew larger, expanded and rose up to engulf her. Trapped inside it, it was as though she was blinded. There was no apartment, no wet floor, no open refrigerator with packets of foodstuffs lying broken before it, no futsie, only all-encompassing darkness. Black. Lightless. It was as though she was at the bottom of some limitless abyss.
Then, she heard it: a voice, whispering in the darkness, the words quiet and indistinct. Instinctively, she recognised it. It was the entity, whispering to her as it had whispered to the futsie and Judge Brophy before her. Still blind, she felt shadowy tendrils brush against her in the darkness as the entity reached out to try to invade her mind.
Cassandra Anderson.
She heard it calling to her, the sound a barely audible murmur.
Cassandra Anderson.
It had a strange voice, malign and knowing.
Cassandra Anderson...
Raising her psychic defences, she resisted. Using her mind she erected a telepathic wall around her, blocking out the invasion. On the other side of the wall she sensed the entity as it squirmed against the barrier to test it, attempting to find a weakness. She felt its hunger and heard the soundless workings of what might have been some kind of sense organ moving against the barrier, tasting it. The entity's hunger grew stronger. It pushed against the barrier, searching for some chink or flaw in her defences. It pushed again, harder. Then, harder again. She felt a pain in her mind, as though something hard and sharp was stabbing into her brain. Still, she resisted. The barrier held. The entity could not get to her.
Please...
She heard another voice in her mind. The futsie. The sound of it was small and distant, a waning echo. She felt the entity grow distracted, losing interest in her as it eagerly turned towards the dying man instead. She heard other sounds, not real sounds, she realised, but her mind's attempt to represent the sensations coming to her through her psychic senses. The sounds were indescribable, outside the normal register of human experience. Wet. Hungry. Insatiable. She heard a scream. It was the futsie. She felt waves of terror hit her as he gave out a psychic scream. Horrified, Anderson felt the entity move towards the futsie and heard a sucking noise as the creature began to feed upon him. She heard the futsie scream once more, the sound of a soul in torment as the entity fed on the man's diminishing life force - greedily feasting on the futsie's fear and terror at the point of his death. In little more than half a second it was over. With a despairing psychic screech the futsie was gone, sucked dry, annihilated. It was almost as though he had never existed at all.
But worse was to come.
She heard another sound like a rush of air. No, not air. It was the sound of more screams, dozens of them, shrill and terrified. Feeling an immense surge of psychic energy moving around her, Anderson realised what was happening. It was the futsie's victims - the entity was feeding on their souls just as it had on the soul of their killer. It was pulling them towards it, creating a maelstrom of wailing souls with the entity at its centre. Appalled, unable to intervene, for an instant Anderson heard soul after screaming soul screech past her in helpless despair to be consumed by the entity in turn. Then, as with the futsie, it was over. The maelstrom dissipated. The screams died away. In the aftermath, as the entity was momentarily sated, there was silence.
The darkness receded, her sight returned, and Anderson found herself still kneeling beside the futsie's body in the apartment's kitchen. They were psychic events, she realised dully, staring down at the corpse before her. The sounds, the screams, the darkness, all of them. They had no physical aspect. If it wasn't for my powers, I wouldn't have realised anything was happening at all. Beside her, the futsie's body seemed hollow, empty, a soulless husk. At last, she understood what had happened to the dead perps in the Sector House holding-cubes. The entity had fed on them, absorbing their souls and obliterating every last trace of their memories and emotions. It was the worst fate that could befall a sentient being. Soul death. The ultimate and final demise. When the entity claimed its victims it claimed them completely, utterly destroying everything that had once made them human and leaving nothing but discarded empty shells behind it. It was monstrous. Horrific.
Inhuman.
As the darkness receded further, Anderson saw tendrils of shadow pull back to coalesce and take on a coherent form in front of her. She saw a dark humanoid figure standing over her, black wings at its back, its body made of shadows. Its face was a featureless black oval, though as it stood looking down on her, Anderson had the uncomfortable impression it was smiling. For a moment they stared at each other, then, with a sound like the beating of dark wings, the figure disappeared.
It was over. For what seemed the longest time, she knelt there in silence as questions churned unanswered through her mind. Slowly she became aware of other sensations: the sound of dripping water, the hum of the refrigerator, the damp against her legs where the water covering the kitchen floor had soaked through her uniform. She stood up, casting a last sad glance at the body of the futsie. Her questions would not leave her. Above all else, she found herself unsettled by something she had seen in the brief time when she and the entity had faced each other. She had glimpsed the creature for barely more than a moment. A few seconds at most. It had been long enough for her to see something that had disturbed her. It had been only the briefest of glimpses, and she had no way of knowing what kind of creature the entity really was.
For a moment, she could have sworn it looked just like an angel.
TWELVE
AFTERMATH
"I got Med-Judge Geddes on the line," the Street Judge said, unconsciously cupping his hand to the side of his head as a report came in over his helmet radio. "Says he's found another two bodies in Apartment Forty-nine-A up on the thirty-eighth. What's that make it for confirmed dead so far? A hundred and thirteen?"
"One hundred and fourteen," Anderson said. The number taunted her, bringing with it the subtle accusation of failure. "You forgot about the futsie. He's as much a victim here as anyone else."
"A hundred and fourteen. Right." The Street Judge seemed almost disgruntled, as though including a dead perp in the calculation revealed her as some kind of dangerous liberal. Barely concealing his dissatisfaction, he turned away. "Hell of a mess." He nodded towards the bloody writings covering the hallway walls as Tek-Judges made measurements and scraped away samples for analysis. "Futsies, eh? Grud knows what gets into them."
"Grud knows," Anderson echoed him. Brooding, lost in her thoughts, she hardly noticed him walk away.
Once backup had arrived, order had quickly been restored to Charles Whitman Block. After the slaughter came the cleanup. Standing in a hallway on the thirty-seventh floor, Anderson watched as her fellow Judges went about the routine duties that came in the aftermath of any major incident. The floors of the block where the futsie had embarked on his killing spree had been cordoned off, while the surviving residents had been evacuated to other floors for the Street Judges to take their statements, or to be ferried to hospital to be treated for injuries and shock. Around her, while a team of Med-Judges went from body to body to check for vital signs, Tek-Judges prowled the hallways performing the myriad tasks of crime scene forensics. The positions of bodies and discarded cartridge cases were recorded and marked, bullets were recovered from walls and doorjambs, swab samples were taken from blood trails and spatter: evidence was collected, collated, cross-indexed. Accustomed to living in a city where every citizen was a potential powder keg, to the Judges of Sector 12 it was business as usual. For Anderson though, it now seemed far more than just another case - even granting that it had never been an ordinary case to begin with.
It feeds on human souls. As the memory of her encounter with the entity played across her mind, Anderson found herself forced to suppress an involuntary shudder. That's the reason for all this slaughter. It used the futsie like a farmer planting seeds. It made him kill all these people; then, when the futsie died, it harvested them all. That's what all this was in aid of. A harvest of souls.
Troubled by the thought, she shivered. In the wake of the futsie's death, she had come to a clearer understanding of the scale of the carnage at Charles Whitman Block. So far, the death toll stood at one hundred and fourteen and rising. Two entire block floors had been turned into a slaughterhouse. Worse, when she had tried to scan the bodies of those killed in the futsie's rampage, Anderson found had all her darkest fears confirmed. Every one of them was as blank and empty as the body of the futsie. They were hollow shells, just like the dead perps back at the Sector House. Although Anderson had finally found at least some of the answers she had been seeking, they seemed a scant consolation when compared to the enormity of the human tragedy before her.
I wonder how old she was? Looking down at the bullet-riddled corpse of a young woman lying on her side on the floor, Anderson removed a glove and stooped to kneel beside her. Maybe twenty-one? Normally, I'd only have to put my hand to her head to scan her and I'd know the answer to that question. I'd have known what her name was, what music she liked, what her dreams were. I'd be able to feel everything she felt when she died. What she thought, what she heard, what was the final thing she saw before the lights went out. Normally, I'd be able to know all that and more. But there's nothing normal about this. There's nothing normal about shredding human beings' souls at the point of death to feed on them and leaving no trace of anything behind.
She knew it would not work, but from long habit Anderson laid her hand across the woman's forehead and tried to scan her. It was pointless. She might as well have been trying to read an inscription in a blank lump of stone. No, she thought, sadly, there's nothing left of her. So much for life after death.
Moving her hands to the woman's arm, Anderson tried to bend it at the elbow, only to find the arm was stiff and unresponsive. She tried the other arm, then the legs. In each case the result was the same. The woman's limbs were locked frozen into place and would not budge.
It's just like Henderson talked about back at the morgue. Replacing her glove, Anderson stood and walked away, deep in thought. Premature rigor mortis, just like the dead perps in the Sector House. Nobody burned to death this time, though. Maybe the entity needs to be close to its lair to be able to burn them. Maybe that's why it had to use the futsie as a proxy.
Noticing one of the Tek-Judges using the scanalyser eyepiece on his helmet to take Tri-pics of the bloody messages on the hallway walls, Anderson tapped him on the shoulder.
"Make sure you send a copy of those tri-pics to MAC for analysis," she told him. "I want a complete textual analysis of the content of the messages."
"You think they might find a match with something in the archives?" the Tek-Judge asked. MAC was the Justice Department's mainframe computer and its archives included records of every crime committed in the history of Mega-City One, not to mention the personal details of every citizen who lived there. "That's kind of a long shot."
"Right now, long shots are about all I've got left." Anderson shrugged. "Could be there's some kind of pattern to these messages we're not seeing." She pointed to the wall. "See this one here? 'I am the flame of He Who Rules The Heavens. I am the righteous sword of fire, come to punish the transgressor.' That's not Mega-City One perp-speak. It sounds like it comes from some kind of religious text. If MAC can identify the text, it might bring me closer to identifying the entity responsible for all this slaughter."
"Entity?" The Tek-Judge looked at her strangely. "I thought it was a futsie did all the killing?"
"It's complicated," she shrugged again. It had been a long night and she felt too tired to answer questions. "Psi Division business. Just send the Tri-pics to MAC and let me know if anything comes of it."
"You're the boss." The Tek-Judge's hand went to the comm-switch just inside his helmet as he made an adjustment to his helmet radio to send the Tri-pics digitally to MAC via secure transmission. "It'll take a few minutes. Whole sector's so busy the increased comms-traffic is restricting the bandwidth."
"Busy?" She checked her watch. "I make it after 10:00. Graveyard shift's over. Thing's should have quieted down by now."
"Normally, yeah." This time it was the Tek-Judge's turn to shrug. "Seems nobody told the perps that. Violent incidents are up all across the sector. Must be some kind of freak crime wave. It happens sometimes." He lowered his hand from his helmet and turned away to resume his work. "There. I'm sending the data to MAC now. When I get the results through I'll let you know."
A freak crime wave, Anderson thought. I wonder if there's any connection between it and the entity's presence? If not, it's one hell of coincidence. Maybe I should get in touch with Sector Chief Franklin, ask him to order a review of last night's crime stats to see if there's any kind of pattern to the increase. If there is, it might give me a better handle on what we're dealing with here. Though if the entity is somehow affecting the entire sector, you've got to wonder how it's managing it. Just how powerful is this thing?
Questions. They never ended. It seemed to Anderson that for every question that had been answered following her encounter with the entity, another dozen took their place. Granted, she knew the entity fed on human souls, but she was no closer to discovering its true nature. Just what kind of creature was it? She did not have an answer. All she had were more questions, buzzing insistently in her brain without respite. What was the entity's connection to the Sector House? Why when she saw it did it look like an angel? Why had it started by killing perps, then tried to drive Judge Brophy to suicide, before using the futsie Jeffrey Queeg as its proxy in the killings at Charles Whitman? How could she stop it? Question upon question, and not one of them with anything even resembling an answer in sight.