Evan pockets the keys and gets out of the truck. My stomach grumbles a little. We haven’t eaten since breakfast, but neither of us were up for eating anything all day after the gruesome scene we’d witnessed earlier with our cloud eyes. I say goodbye to Lin and leave the phone and earpiece in the car. I doubt anyone will be sweeping through all the mobile phone records, but on the off chance that someone in law enforcement here is really on the ball, I don’t want anything tying us to the crime scene if we can avoid it. We get out and walk the distance under the dim crescent moon.
I’ve got a good grip on the security system by now. Sixteen video cameras are stationed among the rows of identical garage doors covering the sides of each long, squat building. I can feel two people that I guess are the acting security guards. They don’t have any kind of uniform on, so they’re probably regular employees of the place doing double duty keeping an eye on the cameras. They’re sitting in the front office of the place jabbering about last night’s game and occasionally glancing at the pair of screens that rotate through the camera views. A big male doberman roams the fenced off set of narrow asphalt roads. The dog should be the only tricky part.
The cameras are easy. They’re an old model, simple and stationary. I form an eye near each one, capturing an image of what it’s looking at. Then I form a small bot screen in front of each one that displays the same scene. It’s a simpler version of a technique that my sister Andrea has perfected. She can do moving cameras or motion on the screen, which is way beyond my skills. My eyes in the office show me that the transition was nearly seamless, just a tiny blurring that the two on duty there didn’t notice at all. The RV dealership on this side of the storage units has a couple of cameras pointing in the direction of the storage units. I blind them as well, just to be safe.
We’re still walking and half a block out from the chain link fence surrounding the storage units. I muzzle the dog as gently as I can with the bots, forming a snug wrapping around the animal’s jaws. That should keep him quiet. He whimpers quietly as I lift him over the fence. Glancing around for a safe place to keep him while we work, I see an enclosed parking area at a warehouse across the street. It’s empty at this late hour. Perfect. I check that there’s no traffic, then float the bewildered animal over and release him inside the fence, keeping the muzzle in place. I don’t want him to freak out and draw attention until we’re done here.
To Evan: Security handled, we’re good to go in.
From Evan: Thanks. I’ll get the fence.
We cut away from the road through the grass separating the storage unit fence from the parking lot of the RV dealership. We talked about just flying over and in, but we figured if we stay low we’ll reduce our chances of getting spotted. Evan extends his cloud and cuts a slice through the chain link, neatly bending the fencing back to make a hole big enough for him and way bigger than what I need. After we pass through, he bends the wire back, closing it enough that no one will notice it.
We walk to unit 47. The lock is a standard padlock, easily opened with a key made of bots that exactly matches the tumblers in the lock’s cylinder. I slip my hands inside my pockets to help me remember not to touch anything and leave fingerprints, then lift the door. It’s cold inside, much colder than the spring air we’ve been walking through. I kind of expect the smell of rot to overwhelm me, but instead it smells more like a butcher shop. My overlay alerts me that the carbon dioxide content in the air inside is much higher than normal.
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From Evan: I think he left a bunch of dry ice in here with them. Kept them from decomposing for a while. Gave him plenty of time to get out of town before the smell got people curious.
To Evan: Makes sense. Jeff always was a smart kid.
We step inside and Evan pops open his box of medical bots. He gets a distant look on his face and stands still. I glance around at the half-hearted attempt at plastic sheeting on the walls and the horrific rusty brown splatter on the walls, floor, and ceiling. The bodies are a gruesome sight, even in the dim light from the sconces between the garage doors. For once, I’m grateful for my deteriorated mind. The less I remember the details of this, the better. I record every detail I can, then I put a note in the index entry for this warning my future self not to access it unless I really need the memory.
After a wait that seems like hours but is actually minutes, Evan finally snaps back to himself.
From Evan: Let’s go.
Hands still in my pockets, I close the door and click the padlock closed. We make our way out and I help Evan to spot weld the wire of the chain link where we came in. Even under close examination, you would be hard pressed to see that it had been cut and repaired. With as careful as we’ve been, I doubt anyone will be checking the fence.
The dog is still frantically looking for a way back to his home. I carefully envelop his body in a harness of bots and lift him back across the road and inside the Eazy-Stor’s fence. I release the screens blocking the cameras, but I wait until we’re nearly a kilometer away to release the muzzle. I hope I didn’t cause him too much lasting trauma. He immediately starts barking frantically, causing the two men in the office to come out to investigate.
Perfect.
I surge a group of bots into the office. As soon as they close the office door behind them on the way out, I disconnect the computer receiving the video feeds. I cut away a computer sized hole in the front window of the office and float the box out, then carefully replace the glass and fuse it so that no one could tell without careful inspection it had ever been tampered with. The computer hurtles down the street past Evan and I and settles gently into the back of our pickup. I just hope they have their surveillance footage for the last few days captured on there. Some systems just stream it live to the screen without storing it, or feed the data to an offsite server for storage. This place looks like it runs on the cheap though, so the most likely thing is that this computer is their whole security system.
We get most of the way back to the truck when Evan slows.
“You OK?” I ask him.
In response, he falls to his knees and retches all over the ground. He waits a moment, then heaves again. I’m so glad we didn’t eat dinner. He gets up, spitting and wiping his mouth.
“Sorry. I’m OK now,” Evan says as we resume walking. “I think we can call those failed tests. If they’d been showing signs of success, he would have run them longer. My best guess is that they’ve been dead for a little over a day. He would have killed them some time in the afternoon yesterday.”
“So that didn’t give Jeff a lot of time to get in, set up, find them, experiment on them, and kill them. Just a day to do everything?” I ask.
“Yeah. Tight timeline,” Evan confirms.
“So where did he go? And where’s all our gear?”
“Dunno man. Let’s watch the surveillance videos and get Lin clued in on what we found. Hopefully she’ll dig something up.”
He turns, bends over, and retches again.
“Sorry, man,” he says, wiping his mouth. “That whole scene was just bad.”
“I know, brother,” I reassure him. “I know.”