The nightmare in this garage-sized box makes the three corpses in Topeka seem pleasant by comparison. Where the other bodies were largely untouched, other than the cut skulls, this one has been mutilated grotesquely. The entire skull is missing, along with most of the spine. His back is split open, the cuts forming a V on the backs of his ribs. The hair and face are resting a meter away. From the amount of blood splatter, he had been alive when the cutting started. Even looking at it through the bot eyes, my stomach churns.
I’ve killed before, but only people that deserved it. People like Father, who had murdered quite a few people in his time. Or the folks who were trying to figure out new ways to make my family’s tech into killing machines. This guy, he just flicked the wrong direction on the wrong profile while looking for a good time.
“Are you sure?” Lin’s voice says in my ear.
I see the tattoos on his arm, the one saying “Never Be Daunted” is turned upwards.
“Blond hair, fit but slim build, white guy quotes on his arm. Yeah, it’s him,” I confirm. “Jeff’s gone, but the body’s fresh. There are a couple of big blocks of dry ice in there with it. From the packaging, they started as twenty pound blocks and they’re still mostly solid. The body isn’t even cold yet. He can’t have been gone long.”
I turn around.
“Come on man,” I tell Evan. “Another autopsy won’t help.”
He nods. We head back to the car, where I sit and navigate a cluster of bots into the office for the place. No computers or security screens here. Shit. There are cameras, and they’re connected to something. I trace the wires back to a router in the office, they must outsource their security and the feeds go somewhere else.
“Hey Lin, find out who runs security for this place and get camera feeds for that and everywhere that sells dry ice nearby. There can’t be that many. We’re so close, we can’t lose him now.”
I disregard caution and reach out desperately with my cloud, stretching it as far as I can. I push past the limits of sanity by turning every possible feedback mechanism as high as it can go. The last time I pushed this hard I broke my brain for the second time, but I can’t let Jeff continue like this. I feel cars, buildings, people, birds, trees, bugs, and vast stretches of asphalt. My mind is flooded with the sensations, but I’m getting nothing useful. Nothing that feels like the comms channels that the medical bots use, or Jeff, or our stolen gear.
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A splitting headache begins to throb in my skull with every heartbeat. I turn on the diagnostic display to make sure that I didn’t rupture any blood vessels. I’m OK. Blood pressure in my brain is high, but there’s no immediate danger of a stroke. I can do this. I redirect my bots and just check the main routes out of town. The morning rush is thankfully still slowing things down. I ignore any vehicle too small to pack our stolen supplies into. Nothing.
Wait.
There. Getting on to the bridge, just about to reach the Mississippi River.
A gray minivan.
It’s got faint signals from the same frequencies that the medical bots use emanating from it. I pull the tendrils of bots back from all the other routes and focus on the minivan. I don’t have a lot of bots there yet, but I have enough to press some eyes and mics onto the glass of the windows, giving myself sight and hearing on it.
Jeff is behind the wheel.
WARNING! NOREPINEPHRINE/SEROTONIN LEVELS INDICATE MURDEROUS INTENT! THINK CAREFULLY BEFORE YOU KILL ANYONE!
Damn straight I have murderous intent.
Jeff looks terrible. Eyes so bloodshot they’re almost pure red where the whites should be, hair greasy and unkempt, clothes looking like they’d been slept in for a week. The seats in the back have been removed and our stolen gear fills most of the empty space. There's something else in there wrapped in the same kind of plastic sheeting that lined the walls of the storage unit. It’s about the right size for the missing parts of Theo’s corpse.
Traffic is slow. I can probably stop him without anyone getting hurt too badly.
“Drive man,” I tell Evan. I form a couple of new eyes near Jeff to read a street sign. “New Chain of Rocks Bridge. As fast as you can. Lin, nevermind what I said before. I found him.”
I’ve almost got enough bots by Jeff’s new van to start breaking things. I just need a few more seconds. I hear a beeping through the mics on the minivan and see Jeff look at a tablet on the passenger seat. I hear snarled curses and watch him reaching over to tap something on the tablet.
Then nothing. My connection to the bots around him is gone.