[The Gang Ripper Case]
09:10, Jalan Mempurong, Sembawang, 04 Jan 2075
Even before the Third and Fourth World War, Jalan Mempurong has been known to be extremely haunted. Not only is it the site of one of Singapore’s sixteen Boundary Gates, the thickets were what was left of a mangrove swamp and forest that used to cover the area during the colonial times of Singapore, a foreboding place where shamans and other magic practitioners used to release their familiars or captured spirits. Even during the day, people travelling down the road have felt a sense of unease, and VOID had placed a curfew around the area due to the number of attacks on the living by the undead: No one is allowed to travel the road from nine-thirty at night to five in the morning.
As Joel carefully maneuvered the department-issued unmarked patrol car down the road, he could already see other uniformed officers securing the scene with a CSI photographer taking pictures of the scene. His colleague, Mohammad Zaihandy bin Ishak or ‘Zai’ as he is referred to by most of his colleagues, was kneeling next to a corpse covered by a white sheet with a police-issue camera in one hand, seemingly looking for something.
There was a slight drizzle ongoing, but not so bad that there was a risk of evidence being lost. Joel exited his vehicle, put on a pair of gloves and made his way to the crime scene to join his colleague. As he did so, he realized Shankar wasn’t kidding about it being reported as a bloodbath: The whole place was riddled with blood smears, stains and splatters.
“You’re late,” Zai said to Joel as he approached.
“Morning to you too, Zai. How did you get here so fast?”
“I live in Sembawang and I was supposed to be on three days’ leave… Well, at least this is the last day of my leave so I have no issue cancelling it. Bad timing, huh?”
“I supposed so. Now, what’s going on here?”
“I’m not sure myself. Dr Moyo’s going to have a field day with this. Judging by the weather conditions, we’re going to have to bring the dead back to base for him to dissect,” Zai replied as he lifted the cover again to show Joel the corpse.
“Oh, that’s bad. Are the others like this too?” Joel asked as he grimaced at the sight of the savaged corpse, once a young Chinese man but now a disemboweled corpse missing a huge chunk of his right shoulder.
“Yeah. Their faces were all disfigured as well. This guy got lucky, his corpse isn’t that mutilated. Can’t say the same for the other four.”
“Four more? Wait, I thought there were only three deceased? Now there’s five?”
“Patrol officers were combing the area and found two more near the site of the abandoned gate about five minutes ago. Same thing with the bodies. Missing parts of the body, disfigured. It’s like whoever or whatever killed them was in some kind of rage. One of the corpses was literally torn into two,” Zai explained as he pointed in the direction of another corpse under a tree.
“Shit… Any way to identify the victims before we resort to DNA testing?”
“They have their wallets with them with identification cards still inside. Nothing was stolen, just their lives and some of their body parts. We got three Chinese, one Malay and one Thai. I don’t know about the others, but I recognized two of them from my time with Central. This fellow here and the Malay victim were members of the Scorpions.”
Joel sighed. Ever since the end of World War Four twelve years ago, new gangs have been rising up all over Singapore. Most of these gangs, like the original ones that existed pre-Third World War that occurred in the 2020s to 2030s, prefer keeping a low profile so as to avoid police interference with whatever it is that they do, but the predecessor of the Scorpions, a huge anarchistic gang known as STING, gained notoriety for brazenly attacking police posts and patrols in broad daylight, publicly peddling drugs on the streets without fear of authorities coming down on them and starting several brutal and often fatal street fights with other gangs, earning them the reputation of being one of the worst gangs in the whole of Southeast Asia.
The firebombing of a hospital and a police station was what finally got STING declared domestic terrorists by the Singapore government and the police and military went to war with STING, unexpectedly aided by other street gangs that were tired of STING's violent antics as well. Sixty-two members of STING, twenty rival gang members, seven soldiers and ten police officers were killed in a three-day conflict while at least three dozen STING leaders and lieutenants were arrested and sentenced to death, finally ending their threat but not destroying them completely. The remnants of STING, reduced back to being an ordinary street gang, renamed themselves the Scorpions and remains one of the most dangerous local post-WW3 gangs in Singapore today.
“Why did it have to be Scorpions? God-damned junkie ex-terrorists would be well at home in the streets of Los Angeles.”
“Yeah, if only we could arrest the whole gang and ship them off to the USA… I managed to talk to one of the pontianaks that haunts the area. She didn’t see the Othersider that killed these guys because it was moving too fast, but she did see it enter the sea and swim off into the distance, so my guess is that we’re dealing with an aquatic Othersider.”
“Majority of Singapore’s Boundary Gates are connected to the Night-Sea on the Other Side, and many Othersiders living in the Night-Sea are aquatic in nature… Identifying which species is responsible is going to be problematic.”
“Yeah… Honestly, though, I would rather take that than deal with Dao Qiang again.”
“Dao Qiang? I thought Cyber Crimes Unit tossed his swindling ass back to Hong Kong?”
“He’s back, same M.O. and everything. Only problem is that CCU are having a hard time pinning him down this time around. Can’t help but get the feeling that he’s getting help from an Othersider. They're relying on public CCTV footage to track his movements.”
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“Well, until that scammer is confirmed to be working with Othersiders and commits a serious offense, he's not our problem. And speaking of CCTVs, are there any around the area? I know there were a few installed due to increasing cases of contrabands smuggling in the Straits.”
“There’s one installed along the road near the abandoned gate.”
“Okay, we’ll check that later- What’s that?”
“What’s what?”
“Look at the wound. There’s something inside.”
To Zai’s instinctive disgust, Joel reached into the gaping hole where the victim’s right collar used to be and pulled something white and triangular out.
“Looks like some kind of tooth. All jagged and sharpened, got a bit of what looks like strings of gum still attached to it,” Zai observed as Joel held up the unidentified object he has just removed from the corpse.
“It’s not the only one,” Joel replied as he pulled another tooth from the wound, and then a third, all of which he placed in a sterile ziploc bag.
“Well, that definitely confirms that our killer’s an Othersider. No human teeth looks like that,” Zai commented.
“Yeah, I doubt it even fits inside a human’s mouth. Let’s check the other victims.”
True enough, Joel and Zai found similar teeth, some fragmented, in the other victims as well, eventually arriving at the abandoned gate where bloodied shoeprints could be seen running down the road. During that time, the local pontianaks that haunted the road were watching the police work from the cover of the dense thicket that surrounds the road. Normally active at night, the massacre that had happened on Jalan Mempurong have indeed shocked them badly, a fact that disturbs Joel given how pontianaks are not only unafraid to approach the living, but can also be aggressive towards them, which is the usual outcome of nearly half the recorded encounters.
“You said the pontianak told you whatever killed these guys was moving too fast?” Joel asked.
“Yeah, she said they were sneaking up on these five men last night, wanting to scare them out of the place because they’ve been dumping drugs and stuff in their thicket. Something rushed in, tore apart the two victims here and chased down the rest. The pontianaks immediately fled the area.”
“She and the others don’t know what it was?”
“Like I told you, she said it moved too fast for them to see. Not only that, this thing was apparently so fast it took a while for the victims to realize they were dead. This guy who is missing a leg and a huge chuck of his left shoulder? Such a wound would have killed him within seconds under normal circumstances, but he took a while to realize what has happened to him before expiring, according to our esteemed witnesses,” Zai replied as he lifted the tarp covering one of the two dead bodies around the area to show the state of the corpse to Joel.
“That’s messed up.”
“Yeah. You know, this whole scene is reminding me of the two cops that were killed in a factory at Yishun, no?” Zai commented.
“Ah, shit, everyone’s still talking about it?”
“Yeah, about how they found a warehouse being used by the Kiba Corps to store pixie dust and other contrabands from the Other Side, went in to investigate without waiting for backup or notifying the Anti-Narcotics Bureau and got ripped apart by the onis that had joined the Kiba Corps.”
“Onis are no joke. Iron-like skin, powerful grip strength and able to lift two-hundred-and-fifty kilograms with one hand on average. Everyone knows you need AP rounds and grenades just to injure them, or an Othersider with abilities that ignores your biological defenses. But this don’t feel like an oni attack. Too savage, even for an oni.”
“Yeah, the teeth we found don’t even look like they belong to an oni. Should have brought Hood along. He would have helped a lot.”
“And why did you not bring our resident ghost with you?”
“Couldn’t find him. He’s probably haunting one of the other buildings around HQ.”
“Well, at least he can do what he does best in the morgue when we get back to HQ. I’ve arranged for the corpses to be brought back so Dr Moyo can uncover anything we missed, which we admittedly always do.”
“What about witness statements?”
“Witness statement from a pontianak? You know they will never get involved in anything related to humans unless it’s a personal grudge. Let’s- Look at this.”
“You found something?”
“Missed it the first time given the mess,” Zai said as he and Joel bent down to inspect the bloodied footprints on the road, pointing out a particular set of prints to his Eurasian colleague, “See these pair? They go from barefeet to some kind of webbed feet.”
“Get a picture? Might help us narrow down the Othersider’s species,” Joel said.
“Definitely,” Zai replied as he snapped a picture of the strange webbed footprints.
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09:30, Blk 38 Marsiling Drive #05-323, 04 Jan 2075
“What the hell do you mean they’re all dead?”
Kim Heng and Ajay flinched as Vance, the man in charge of leading the Scorpions’ northern branch, threw a water bottle across the room while three others in the room kept their heads down.
“Who did it? Kiba Corps? Giim Guun Tang? The pigs in blue? Or is it those KL Megas coming down from Malaysia to fuck around with Singapore gangs again?”
Met with silence to his question, Vance’s anger only got worse.
“No one has a bloody answer? How did we lose five men in a single night and we only find out this morning? Why the hell were they at that ulu place in the first place?”
“Vance, Richie and the others were supposed to be meeting one of Garky’s guys for an exchange. 2 kilos of heroin for the same amount in pixie dust.”
“So you telling me that Garky turned on us?”
“No, Vance, I just called Garky. He said he never made any arrangements and even if he did, he would never do an exchange at Jalan Mempurong. He barely survived a pontianak attack and that place has so many of them-”
“Okay, if Garky’s not involved, then what is going on? Who arranged the trade?”
“Richie said it’s some guy named Fudo. I told him to do a check but I guess he didn’t.”
“And is there someone named Fudo working for Garky?”
“Garky said he doesn’t have any Japanese in his gang, so-”
“He sure or not? My ex-girlfriend is pure Chinese but her name is Yukiko. Garky better not be trying to hide something or I’ll burn his bloody hideout to the ground. No one screws with the Scorpions and get away with it, not even the original gangs or the police. All of you know Garky’s trade routes. Go ambush some of Garky’s delivery boys, see who is willing to talk. But don’t kill them, at least until we confirm Garky is responsible for killing Richie and the others. Go!”
The rest of the Scorpions nodded and left the apartment one by one. As they took the lift down, Kim Heng turned to Ajay and asked, “Does Vance know how Richie and the others died?”
“Yeah, we told him based on what we heard from our contacts.”
“And he still thinks a rival gang is behind it? Pac was ripped into two, how can humans do that to another human?”
“Other gangs are recruiting Othersiders. Garky has a werewolf in his gang, that’s why Vance is still suspicious of Garky.”
“But Garky and his gang has been loyal to us for the last six years. I feel bad about this.”
“Oi, you two are new, but you both also know very well that Vance is not exactly right in the head. The only reason he became lieutenant is because the other Scorpion leaders don’t want him causing them extra problems like how the previous leaders thought it was a good idea to attack government facilities,” one of the other three Scorpions said to Kim Heng and Ajay.
“Yeah. Besides, Vance said to ambush Garky’s boys, he never said we must rough them up. Just get them to come clean,” said another.
“C’mon’ let’s get this done quick,” the third ordered, “Once the cops find out Richie and the others are all Scorpion members, they’re going to start zeroing in on us.”
Kim Heng and Ajay nodded and followed their senior members out the elevator, but both young men were wondering what they have gotten themselves into by quitting school and joining the Scorpions.