Genesis End


 

Chapter Four - What Are Friends For?

I dashed back to robot police headquarters so that I wouldn't be late for the debriefing. I got there with barely time to spare, but the conference table was still, for the most part, unoccupied, with Needle and Hard being the only two others sitting. I smiled grimly at them and took my seat across from Hard Man again. We all knew that if everyone was still investigating, which was the likeliest case given their absence, then the results were not promising. This wouldn't just be an open and shut case.

With less than a minute left before the meeting was supposed to start, the rest of the team teleported to the room and sat down directly, looking much worse for wear than in the morning. There were spots of dried blood on Spark and Mags, and they obviously had had no spare time to try to clean up... they may have been so focused that they hadn't even noticed. Shadow Man was attempting to sit with composure and confidence, but the corners of his eyes wrinkled in what I assumed to be a grimace of exhaustion. Gemini's head was lying on the table and he looked practically unconscious, his body and brain just now catching up with the stress he had put on them in the past hours. Only Snake Man looked unphased, which was not surprising, since his disciplined and hardened form never seemed to divulge weakness or pain. Even I looked a little battered, some minor dents and scratches as evidence of the hysteria from earlier. Even with half of the room looking like they were about to faint - and Gemini looking like he already had - the mood was charged when Shadow stood up to start the meeting.

"Alright guys, I hope you have better findings than we do, because we've got nothing regarding the woman, Hannah Mathers' death. Her apartment is spotless. No fingerprints, foot prints, signs of breaking in, items taken, items left. Gem's sweep of the scene showed no teleportation activity, mystical or robotic, and to our knowledge no spells or summons were used with in the last few days. We don't even have a motive- her life insurance was hardly enough to cover funeral costs, and her criminal record's as clean as soap. No bad break-ups, no debts... she even had a badge on her dresser for a church fund raiser. Like I said, no leads. Just dead ends. Snake, what about on your side?"

"No luck with how it was done, our results very much match yours... no entrances or exits, no spells or summons. We had a bit too much luck with motive, though; he has ties to the mafia and a debt with them to boot. Apparently this guy had a sex obsession too, there were at least fifty condom wrappers scattered around the bedroom, and all of them with recent manufacturing dates. Maybe a cheated husband came after him, or a disgruntled pimp. Still, they're all human grudges, nothing tied to the supernatural, and given the evidence so far, I think it's safe to say we've ruled out your average joe as a suspect in this one. In any case, I can confirm that all of the wounds were inflicted simultaneously, which suggests either multiple attackers or else the wounds weren't inflicted by physical force... but with no spell activity, I don't know how that would be possible."

"I think I do," Spark interrupted. Obviously she'd had a little more luck than the two teams at the crime scenes had had. "The autopsy revealed that the man's body was low on a protein called keratin, which is a substance that strengthens and hardens the skin. Some people suffer from something called hyperkeratosis, which is when the body produces too much keratin, and an unnatural hardening or blistering of the skin can occur. But with this man, the opposite seems to have happened- his skin became so keratin-deficient that it became thin like paper. On top of that, his body wasn't producing the elastin proteins that give skin its elasticity. So... well, eventually, when he moved, his skin couldn't stretch to compensate, so it just... it, well, it tore..." She shook her head as if to shake the image out of her mind.

As usual, Needle was one of the first to catch up, and filled in the blanks. "Wait, so he ripped himself out of his own skin?!" She shuddered with that last sentence, and I found that I had too. It was a little too vivid a picture.

"The doctors said they'd never seen this before," Spark continued after a moment of regaining her composure, "so they did a blood test to see if they found anything out of the ordinary."

"And they did?" asked Snake.

"That's an understatement. There was a viral outbreak in his system that was eating away at the keratin and elastin proteins without affecting the rest of his system. He would have felt weak, and probably would have been much more sensitive to temperature, but besides that, he probably wouldn't have assumed it was anything more than a fever. The virus acted stealthily, precisely, and efficiently, to a mechanical degree."

"So this isn't a regular virus," Snake surmised, "it's been... what, engineered?" Spark nodded in reply.

"So what, we're dealing with biological warfare then?" Magnet asked gruffly. This kept everyone silent for a good moment. Demons, robots, mad scientists, been there done that, but biological warfare was a whole new song and dance. Human politics was way out of our jurisdiction.

"Maybe, maybe not," Shadow said, again taking control of the discussion. "It's possibly an isolated incident, maybe the victim was a lab rat of some kind of experiment. Doesn't mean we're facing an outbreak. Until we know more, we should keep our minds open for all possibilities. Maybe we should focus on what happened with the other body, see if there are any connections."

"There's no point," Spark said flatly. "Apart from the unusual position in which they found her, the body is completely unremarkable to the point that it doesn't even look believable on paper. There were no lesions, no tumors, no organ failure; in fact, there's absolutely no reason for her to have died. She just... did."

"Something was altered," Gemini muttered, his head lying sideways on the table. I had figured that he really had slipped into unconsciousness, since he had been immobile since he sat down, but he was wide awake now and feebly lifted his head into looking forward, perched on top of his crossed arms. "I cannot say what it was, but when I studied the corpse, there was something missing. In the man's, as well. Though I do not know if this is the reason they were murdered."

"The doctors didn't find anything out of place," Magnet said to nobody in particular. His incredulous tone made it obvious that he didn't put much stock into Gemini's abilities to detect paranormal phenomena, and I could tell that he contradicted the Twin Terror's statement less to get the facts straight and more as an insult. From Gemini's bored reaction, I assumed that the Sheriff had been doing this to him all day. Sheriff Mags was an easygoing sort, but he had a lot of doubt in the supernatural. Which wasn't surprising given that he was still pretty new and hadn't encountered even half of the craziness the other Mechs had been exposed to. Shadow, either being more trusting of Gem's abilities or else just wanting to not fuel his temper, ignored Magnet's comment and replied to Gemini directly.

"Could the theft have been a psychic one, like a retrieval of information, or a memory?"

"Perhaps," Gemini Man replied, smug now that Mags had been shot down a little. "Or perhaps some sort of ritual marking of the corpse by the killer, like a signature."

"Serial killers often take a trophy of sorts from their victims' bodies," Snake offered.

"But if it was done on both corpses," Needle interjected, "then that would mean that they were both killed by the same thing."

"Maybe..." Shadow said pensively. Never one to jump to conclusions, he was probably trying to come up with other reasons why two otherwise different murders would have this one aspect in common. "What bothers me more is that none of the possibilities we've come up with suggest that these murders are gonna be a one-time thing. And if we are in fact dealing with a viral outbreak like Mags has suggested, then we need to move fast. As robots, we're unaffected, which gives us an advantage, but time will be against us."

"Maybe I can just retire in my room until you need me," Hard said sulking. "I'm really not one for detective work; I'm more of a smash 'em kind of guy. Besides..." He looked down, dejected. "All this death. It just weighs on you, y'know? I don't think any team I've ever been with has had to deal with killings as gruesome as this..."

Spark Chan put her arm around the large robot master, or as much around as she could reach. "There, there, hun, it's not always like this. You know that. Tell you what, why don't you, Top, and I relax a bit and watch one of the movies you missed while you were 'away'?"

That was a euphemism for "dead."

I had been silent all meeting, feeling like I had nothing worthwhile to add. But at this, I cocked my head up, gave a big smile, and said what any concerned teammate would say.

"Fuck, Hard, do you always whine this much? I bet all your old teams died just so they didn't have to listen to you cry all the time."

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