“So. Reasonably sure this isn’t fake.”
Jane grunted, staring out the open roller door to the greater storage lot, her hands on her hips. She tried to imagine this storage lot when it wasn’t daytime. A lot of grey, a lot of corners. Poor lighting. A crappy place to die.
Behind her, Giselle sat crouched on the balls of her feet, gingerly using a pen to lift the victim’s skull, or what remained of it, from where it hung loosely over his lapel. The man’s head had been crushed like an egg, bone and brains and viscera scattered everywhere across the concrete. Disgusting, though none of the three Legion women present balked at the sight of gore.
“Did we think it was?” Jane grumbled. On the far side of the concrete storage unit, Celeste had taken the form of a bloodhound and was giving each of the corners a prodigious sniff.
“I don’t know,” Giselle replied, tilting her head slightly to peer inside the inner workings of the guard’s pulverised skull, “A girl can dream, can’t she? Someone storing Halloween props. A prank, you know. I’ve seen stupider.”
Equally crappy place for a prank, Jane mused. A nowhere storage facility on the outskirts of some nowhere town which everyone’s eyes glazed over. Real hilarious, what, in sixty years when whoever had put something inside this one particular unit eventually died and their kids came to clear it out.
‘Whoever’ of course was the government, who were not normally known for their high-level pranking skills. Surface level backwoods and boring, the facility was in actuality a collection of inter‑Departmental storage units used to house things classified a little under top secret, stuff which although not quite ultra-deadly was still too hazardous for the public eye. At the end of a shift a couple of weeks ago there’d been some confusion during the guards’ changeover, something to do with a dog. One of the grunts ending their shift, a man named Alfie Holland, had signed out and then gone missing, and for about a week everyone had assumed he’d just headed home. His next shift hadn’t been until the following Sunday, and by the time he hadn’t shown up for the shift after that and it’d dawned on his boss that he might not just be slacking, Alfie’s friends and family hadn’t heard from him in almost a fortnight. Suspicions he might’ve gone camping or taken a spontaneous road trip gave way to more serious concerns. Footage was reviewed, only to find there’d been some data corruption. So in came the sniffer dogs, and finally they found Alfie’s body – a decapitated corpse left lying in a pool of its own viscera, in the wide empty space where once sat a Department of Defence prototype. A little ‘screw you’ card from the robbery. The government called in the Legion within twenty‑four hours.
It did have the hallmarks of supervillainy, Jane conceded. A notch up from what might be kicked over to the police, though it wasn’t quite yet destruction and doom. This machine, whatever it was, this electromagnetic wave blocker, sounded like something capable of paralysing a city proper. It made sense for the authorities to be concerned. A theft like this screamed prelude to a bigger crisis.
Yet it wasn’t the potential danger of what had been stolen that had Jane feeling disquieted, nor was it the brutal nature of the death. It was the run of coincidences. The thieves’ precise timing, the failure of the recording, Alfie Holland’s spaced-out roster, the perfectly balanced stack of delays in this all coming to light. It felt more than bad luck. It felt like there was something someone wasn’t telling her. Something she couldn’t put her finger on. Something off.
Jane shook her head, trying to refocus her thoughts as Giselle took careful photos of the body. She had no idea what the government expected them to do here, other than stand around and look tough. Celeste at least could be useful. Across the empty room the faunamorph rose up out of dog into her human form, only for her head to immediately shift into that of a giant dragonfly. The sight of that was more disturbing than the dead body.
“Nuuuuzzzzinnngggg weird on the colour spectrum,” Celeste said, the words filtering through her insect mouth on the way back to human. Once more a girl, she chewed her lip. “There’s a bunch of smells, but once they go outside they’ve been rained on.”
“How many?” Giselle asked, standing and turning away from the body.
“Six,” Celeste shrugged, “Men. Mostly mid‑twenties, mixed backgrounds. Can’t tell any powers.”
“Any weird dog senses?”
“Only that that body is no longer fresh.”
“On that, we can agree.”
Giselle slowly stepping the length of the room, drawing a careful eye over every detail – not so much for herself, Jane knew, but for camera glasses she wore over her eyes, which were feeding an HD stream back to the Academy and Azleena. Jane watched her go, feeling no urge to join. The unit was maybe 30 by 30 feet, bare concrete, completely empty save for the body and the scuffles where the device had been taken. There was a bit of mold and dust. Great.
It was nice of the government to invite them here, if only as a heads up. Maybe it was an attempt at being friendly, an olive branch in light of recent hostilities. ‘Let’s be friends again, here’s a corpse.’ Personally, Jane was doubtful even Celeste was going to find anything FBI forensics hadn’t. There were no fingerprints on the body – the killer had been wearing gloves.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
Unconsciously she found her gaze drawn back to the headless corpse. It was sitting, legs straight out in an L, as if it had sat down for a picnic before its head exploded. It stank, but surprisingly hadn’t decomposed much. Insulated from the elements a bit, Jane supposed. She wondered why it didn’t disturb her more, staring directly at brutality like that. But for some reason it didn’t. The man looked more life‑like than death‑like. It was as if he’d just sat down and dazed off, how forgetful, sorry. And then somehow popped his head open.
I should probably pretend to be more worried, Jane thought. Certainly if Matt was there that’s what he’d say. Yet by now Jane had seen her fair share of dead bodies, many of them far more concerning than Alfie. He’d just had his head crushed by a strongman without any warning. Quick way to go.
That was odd, Jane realised – why did she assume it was a strongman? Yet she just sort of knew somehow. Maybe it was something about the damage to the body, a pattern she could only subconsciously recognise. Yet even as Jane stared, she could have sworn she saw the eyes of the headless man staring back at her – as if she could see a line extending out of him, forwards and backwards. Like she could see the shape of his face before the incident. How he’d looked at people.
Jane shook her head like a dog trying to clear its ears of water. The images vanished as quickly as they’d come.
“I’ve got the scents,” she heard Celeste saying. Jane forced herself to look up, to focus back in on the other two Legion members and their conversation. “Not much use unless I can cross reference, but they’re there. I’d recognise them.
“Well it’s a start,” replied Giselle, “We’ll have Wally go through the memories and see if he can translate the information out of dog.”
“Oh my God,” Celeste laughed, delighted, “Out of dog.”
“What about you?” the speedster asked, turning to Jane, “Any insights?”
“Into what?” Jane scowled, “Theft? Murder?”
“The floor is open.”
Jane crossed her arms across her white-gold chest and shrugged. “Hard to speak much without a head.”
“Yeah.” Giselle grimaced. Her gaze fell onto the body and her lips dropped in a sad frown. “I feel so sorry for the family,” she said, “Can you imagine burying someone you love like this?”
Yes, thought Jane, that’s what most people would be feeling. She tried to look at the body differently, tried to imagine it was Matt or her Dad sitting there, unmoving, broken in pieces. The image came sudden, unbidden and far clearer than Jane ever would’ve anticipated. She felt her heart abruptly start to race and her arms burn with nervous energy.
“Hey,” said Giselle, looking worried, “Don’t freak out. Take a break if you need to.”
“I’m fine,” Jane spat, the words coming out colder than she would’ve liked. She forced herself to take a deep breath, then tried to change the subject. For some reason the image of dead Matt wouldn’t go away. “So have we actually found anything?”
“Well, I’ve found some dust and a dead person,” Giselle remarked, leaning back on her heels, hands in her pockets. Across the room from her Celeste guffawed. “And I’ve got plenty of footage for Azleena. Az? Want me to swing by anything more?”
“No thank you,” the genius’s voice said over general comms, “I’m good.”
Giselle shrugged. “Well, here’s hoping you see something we haven’t. Honestly though?” The speedster shook her head. “I don’t know how much good it does us being out here. What do they want me to do with a dead body, run at it?”
“You could do the backwards… man running thing,” Jane suggested, “Around the Earth. From the comic book.”
“It is so sad to me that I know exactly what you’re referencing,” Giselle sighed, “And yes, I will admit, we’ve all tried it, and no, it does not work.”
“I was joking.”
“I know,” Giselle laughed, “Matt’s clearly having an influence.”
“Aww, Matt,” Celeste sighed from the other side of the room, “How is he? He’s such a sweetie.”
“You saw him two weeks ago,” Jane replied, fixing her with a scowl.
“Yeah, but that feels like ages. Tell him I said hi.”
Jane’s eyes narrowed, and suddenly the headless person in her vision was a woman. “Tell him yourself,” she said, her voice arctic.
“Come on,” Giselle said, stepping between the two and patting Jane on the shoulder, “Let’s go tell the nice army man we don’t know who killed his colleague. And say thank you for notifying us.” She stood with her hands on her hips, stared back through the roller door and shook her head. “Why do I feel like this is either going to be one of those ones we never solve, or which is going to come back to bite us.”
“Because there is a documented correlation between leadership and paranoia. The Sword of Damocles.”
“Thanks Az. I prefer daggers.”
The three of them strode from the unit and pulled the door back down. Giselle re-applied the crime scene tape.
“Do you think he’s happy?” Celeste asked abruptly.
“Who?” Jane replied. She almost said ‘the dead man?’ but clearly that wasn’t who Celeste was talking about.
“Matt.”
“What?” scowled Jane, bristling, “What are you talking about, of course he’s happy.”
“He just seemed kind of sad the other night.”
“He’s not sad,” snapped Jane, perhaps over‑aggressive, “He’s just stressed. People are trying to kill him.”
“And… wouldn’t that make him unhappy?”
“Yes. No. Why are we even talking about this?” Jane demanded. Celeste shrugged.
“I don’t know. I just feel sorry for him. Stuck at home all day.”
“That’s for his own good,” Jane glowered.
“You don’t worry he’s going stir crazy?” Celeste nodded towards Giselle for support. “I had a cousin once, an astronaut. They made him do all this solitary confinement training. After like three weeks he went bonkers. Filled all the instrument holes with mashed potato. They said if it had been a real mission he would’ve jettisoned himself into space.”
“Matt’s not an astronaut!”
“And from my observations he wouldn’t waste mashed potato.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“I agree isolation’s tough,” said Giselle, ignoring Jane’s visible agitation, one side of her mouth twitching into a slight frown, “But Matt’s not stupid. He’d let us know if there was a problem. And he knows he’s got to stay home for his safety. It’s not like he’s going to be up there, planning something dumb.”