Returning to the office from the field was always an odd experience for Katya; the badges and smiles on entering the building, the patient queue through security, and the quiet ding of elevators coming and going. Even her desk, her monitor pulsating with expectation, her books, and the photo of her father, leaning down to allow her gangly teenage arms to wrap around his shoulders -- it was the only item of personal memorabilia she had on her desk, and it, along with all the rest, seemed to stand like the Pikevale Psychiatric Sanitarium's illuminated sign had, so blissfully unaware of the other side.
Presently, she heard Avanti's voice. She blinked and turned.
"Good morning," she said, putting her bag down.
Avanti smiled. "How was the trip back? I'm sorry I wasn't able to get you the earlier flight."
Katya waved it off. "It's no problem," she said, pulling her holo-slate out. "It gave me time to think."
She swiped it underneath the monitor and watched as both came to life.
"Could you take a look at this when you get a chance?" Katya stepped over to Avanti's side of the desk and looked over her shoulder.
Avanti nodded, and then, thoughtfully, she spun her chair around and looked at Katya's worn and tired eyes.
"I'm fine," Katya answered gently, "Didn't sleep much but...." she shrugged, as if it couldn't be helped, and then leaned in further towards the monitor. "Did you find anything else? Any other matches besides Warrentown?"
Avanti shook her head, "Not yet. There are so many incident reports to sift through, and a lot of it is just noise. The ones from the Fringelands and the other territories are especially difficult since they don't seem to follow any standard protocols. There’s probably a ton that simply doesn’t even get reported, too.”
Katya pondered for a second and then reached for the projection keyboard. She began to type.
"They still don't fully trust us--those reports are going to be incomplete and likely inaccurate as well. We need to tap into their local nets to capture the feeds directly."
"We’re not allowed to do that though," Avanti said. “Right?”
Katya stopped typing and stepped back, amused at this remark from her Operator.
Avanti understood. "I'll add it to the list," she said, as she turned back to the half-finished query on her terminal and rapidly filled in the blanks.
There was a gentle tremor on Katya's wrist. "Incoming page from Director Revner," said a voice in her ear.
"That was quick," Katya quipped.
Somehow, she always felt less somber after seeing Avanti.
---
She tapped on the door as she opened it. It was purely by habit, as she had never known the director to keep her away, even when he had others in his office. But right now there was no one else.
Without looking up from his papers he waved her in. He was nodding.
She noticed the header on the document he was holding -- it was one of her field reports. He leaned back into his chair and, shutting his eyes, arched his neck back towards the ceiling. Silently, he mouthed the words she remembered entering into her report: "Ten feet in length, 50 to 60 inches in height...."
Katya waited patiently, letting her eyes drift serenely over his austere desk top, bereft of photos and keepsakes from the children the director never had and the wife he never married. Devoid, even, of his Distinguished Service Award, kept, perhaps, in a drawer somewhere, which he never talked about and never mentioned. A calendar hung listlessly on the wall behind him.
"Ok," he finally said. He spun the folio around and nudged it towards Katya, "Walk me through this -- what are we looking at here."
She pulled out a photograph. This would be a good starting point. She motioned for his slate and bringing it over, she waved the photo over it. A video began to play on the screen.
"This is the main hallway," she said, voicing over the slow pan of the video. "You can see from the broken glass that they must have burst in from these windows on either side of the door. There were two of them. They were coordinated, staggering their entrance so as not to stream in one after the other."
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The director nodded. "This is when the guard fired?"
"We believe so. We found three shell casings but no bullet holes. Two, we think flew out the window. The third was found in the main hallway on the fourth floor."
Katya moved the video forward.
"How do you think it got up there?"
She was silent for a moment. "We think the bullet may have somehow been lodged on the body of one of the assailants, and then somehow shaken off during a period of activity later on."
"But you found no identifiers on the bullet."
She shook her head, "No, sir. We found multiple unique blood samples on its surface, but they were all human. Also, on that note, we compared all the collected samples with the sanitarium's records and found that the match was not complete--"
"Obviously picked up as it rolled around in this pool here," the director made a circling motion over the screen. It took a moment for Katya to realize he was still talking about the bullet. Quietly he said, "And they didn't suffer any cuts from the glass when they broke in, either."
Katya nodded and let the video play forward again.
"Jesus." She looked up to see the director shaking his head. With just the slightest trace of discomfort, he said, "It's a slaughterhouse."
She pushed forward, ignoring the comment. She paused the video to zoom in on the bottom-left corner, "Here, you can see one of their prints. You see the forward-facing toes, but far thinner than we would expect wolf or bear paws to be. And they end, as you can see, in claws that extend at least an inch forward. The evidence suggests they're retractable. We believe this print is of a front-leg. The prints from their back legs are about fifty-percent larger and tend to be wider."
She panned the video, "From the bite marks, it seems that their jaw structure is relatively wide, rather than forward-protruding like a canine's. The flesh looks ground here," she said, zooming in on a detail, "--like it was gnawed at. And as you can see from the total separation of the L1 and L2 vertebrae in the victim's spinal column, we can assume specialized musculature in the assailants' jaws and necks."
With a grimace, the director asked, "This is where they fed?"
Katya played the video again, "Yes. By this time they had reached the top floor and had completely neutralized all occupants in the building, so I imagine they felt it was safe to eat. As an aside, sir, I feel I should mention an observation about their feeding pattern that I found particularly strange."
"Yes?"
"The assailants clearly demonstrated a preference for the heart, lungs, and liver, along with muscle meat and fatty tissue. We found streaks on the floors at various levels that suggest that they brought certain victims up to the fourth floor with them, but what was strange was that a few of them--" she paused for a second to find the right words, "--their skulls, uh, were smashed in and the brains, though uneaten, looked to be deliberately--" she hesitated again, "--destroyed and scattered, sir."
"Was this a consistent behavior?"
"No, it seemed to be confined to the patients but other than that there were no other discernible patterns."
Director Revner rubbed his eyes. "We don't have any other video? No surveillance, no security footage?"
Katya shook her head, "As mentioned in the report, there was a power disruption before the attack commenced."
"And we have no record of anybody in the building calling out to inquire about the outage?"
"No, sir. It was a particularly dark night so most of the victims inside might not have even noticed."
"The security guard seemed to be a pretty alert fellow, though. You think he wouldn't bother checking?"
"I'm not sure, sir. The power company was only able to isolate the time of the disruption to within a thirty-minute window."
"Fringelands," he muttered.
As if suddenly remembering something, Katya flipped through the folio until she found another photograph, which she then swiped over the slate.
"There was one other camera in the back. The ward has to maintain life-sustaining equipment so they did have an old back-up generator -- one of those ancient Fringeland models that run on diesel fuel."
She unpaused the video, "Look. The door is open and you can--"
"Wait," Revner had jumped out of his chair. "Go back. Did you see that?"
Katya motioned the video back and stutter-stepped it forward.
"There--" he said, "--that line; a bump, and it's gone."
Katya saw it too now as she followed his finger along the screen. "A third."
Director Revner raised an eyebrow. “Are there more of them than we originally thought?”
Excitedly, she said, "I knew it. All the reports say they’re solo hunters, or at most that they move in pairs. This proves they can move as a group.
"Also," she remembered, "the town's residents didn't report hearing any sounds coming from the building, so they must have been able to somehow stay coordinated noiselessly."
"Nobody heard the gunshots either," the director pointed out.
Katya considered this for a moment, "True, but given the separation of the sanitarium from the rest of the town, the fact that the shots were fired from within the building, and the abruptness and conciseness of gunshots relative to a wolf's howl--not to say that the assailants were wolves, but just as an example of pack communication--"
"Why not wolves?" Revner interrupted. "Don't the locals call them 'hellhounds'?"
"I wouldn't put too much weight on that, sir. The locals know less than we do, and we don't know much," she said.
"Your report seems to suggest otherwise," he grinned as he quipped back.
A faint rush of blood spread across her cheeks.
He looked at her and suppressed a crooked smile, nodding slowly in consideration.
The director eased his chair away from the desk. He turned towards the window and looked at the wintry landscape outside. For a moment, they both sat completely still, in his silent, barren office, watching the snow on the outer ledge of the window pirouette with the distant rumble of a helicopter lifting off.
"Katya," he finally said, "this is a tough job. Avanti forwarded me the images from Warrentown. It was sharp of you to make that connection so quickly. I'll approve your request to go out there, but there's something you might be interested in knowing before you do."
She looked up, but his eyes were still fixed into the distance.
"There was one survivor from Pikevale, but you won't be able to get access to him. Officially, he doesn't even exist." He turned to her, a grimace across his weathered face. "He's a telepath."