Birthday...by F. Scott Blair
She was dead when I found her. Still warm... but dead.
No ID, no money, no nothing- somebody'd done for her in a real serious
fashion. She'd obviously been abused, and I'll go out on a limb and say
robbed, before she was finally killed. I guess most people'd call her
young... I'd say she was sixteen, seventeen. About my own age. Human.
Whoever had done it hadn't cut up her face, although they hadn't spared much
else. She had a really pretty face - maybe that's why they left it
unmarked. Still, I'd imagine she was prettier before, though. A damn site
prettier.
I'm not really sure why this one bothered me so much. Wasn't the first time
I'd ever seen a dead body, not by a long shot. I've seen them a lot more
recent, too... and we'll just leave that at that. See, no matter how I try
to explain it away, marginalize it, whatever, I still see her face when I
close my eyes. I'd like to say the bitch of it that I was in a rare good
mood just before I'd turned that corner, seen her there scared-looking,
perfectly still, and mostly red. I'd like to be cavalier about it, but it
just isn't the truth. The worst part of it is her looking so vulnerable,
even though she was already dead... like the abuse just didn't stop. Maybe
that's why I went hunting. Again... I really don't know... and, in the end,
I guess it really doesn't matter much.
I slipped off the jacket I was wearing and wrapped it around her, thankful
for the fact that being 6' 8" means a coat on me equals a short trenchcoat
for normal-sized people. Yeah, yeah, I can hear it already, in a city where
being naked's legal and she's already dead, why bother, right? Maybe I'm
just soft, but it seemed like the least I could do, maybe give her a little
dignity now, dignity that her last moments obviously lacked. And hell, the
coat's leather... the bloodstains'll lift out, mostly. Not like it doesn't
already have plenty of my own staining it, and what I was planning would
just add more, anyways. I picked her up and carried her off to an out of
the way place then, somewhere where the rats, two-legged and four, wouldn't
find her. I set her down gently, and have to admit, I winced when the back
of her head knocked against the ground and I hear her teeth click together.
Yeah, Bokor the battle-hardened killer, that's me.
I worked my way back to where I'd found her, my combat knife cold against my
tailbone where I'd slipped it in the back of my waistband. You can insert
some witty comment about sheathes, if you want, but the truth be told, I
wasn't feeling real witty at the time, and, for the most part, I'm still
not.
It was worse with her body gone. Too much blood. Too much blood for me to
understand the why, the drive inside another person to push them to this.
It's strange, I suppose, for someone to grow up in this city, to make their
living the way I do, and still not be jaded enough to just shrug this off.
I'm not sure that's a bad thing, though.
There's a guy down in the Causeway, nice enough guy, who sells all these
different t-shirts. One of them, it's real simple, it just says "Suffer"
across the chest. I've seen a number of different people wearing them, all
making some kind of statement, it seemed, like it was an order. Now, me,
I'd always interpreted it a little differently. So long as you're
suffering, you know you're still alive, that's how my line of thought went.
Staring at all that blood, feeling a creeping feeling in the back of my
throat as my mind ran through all sorts of possible scenarios detailing
exactly how that poor girl ended up like she did? For the first time in my
life, I made a concious decision to make someone else suffer... and suffer
badly. I've never been a sadist, never enjoyed watching the pain of
others... but this just couldn't go unpunished.
I just sat there for a few minutes, sitting on my haunches, plasma light
shining over the pools of blood, slowly shaking my head. I'd already made
up my mind, but that didn't make it any easier to actually start the hunt,
so to speak. Part of me just didn't want to do it, part of me was scared.
Scared that I couldn't handle her killer, scared that I'd end up just like
her. I'm afraid of dying - I'm not ashamed to admit that. Might sound
strange, a Rager, of all people, admitting he's afraid of anything, but my
denying it isn't going to change the fact, so why bother? My biggest fear
right then, though, wasn't of dying, wasn't of being torn to pieces. Nah...
my biggest fear, right at that moment, was that by going through with this,
I was going to lose something, a part of me that I couldn't get back. If I
didn't do anything, though, I'd never be able to look at myself in the
mirror afterwards, never be able to shake the feeling that when it came
right down to it, I didn't give a damn about anything but myself. I
generally try to do the right thing when I can, try to maybe do my part to
make the world the slightest bit lighter for my passing. If I walked away
now, I wasn't just leaving this particular bit of bad behind, I was leaving
all the future things this guy was going to do, because I knew, in my gut,
that anybody who enjoyed killed, enjoyed mutilating, enough to do what he'd
done to that poor girl... he'd strike again. And again. And again. Yeah,
he'd probably get taken out eventually, and his little reign of blood would
stop... but what about all the people he got to between then and now? Those
deaths, they'd be on my head, and every time I heard about a new murder in
this city, I'd have to wonder, "Is this one of his?"
So, in the end, I did what I had to do.
Tracking him wasn't hard - he'd left a blood trail any 8 year old brat who'd
wandered down from daddy's expensive apartment up on the Skywalk could have
followed. Blood on the ground, blood on the tunnel walls in spots, all so
casually done, I don't think he even realized he was doing it. That just
irritated me more, for some reason, like it yet another insult to that
nameless girl, his refusal to even try to hide his crime, refused to even be
ashamed. He was going to die. Whether by my hand, tonight, or by someone
down the road after I was just three hundred and thirty some-odd pounds of
rotting meat, he had to die. It was just that simple.
I guess I was kind of lost in my own thoughts, or maybe I'm just not worth a
damn on a stalk, because I never even heard her come up behind me. Yeah,
that's right.
Her.
I'm not sure when the killer became a "he" in my mind, but I knew I was
wrong the minute I stopped at a crossroads, shining my plasma light around,
and heard the soft velvet of her voice. I froze.
"My, we're a tall one, aren't we?"
I shrugged, acutely aware of just how exposed my back was.
"You're dressed like a nobody, though... and kinda thin, for a Baby Killer."
That bit deep. I can, and do, shrug off most of the insults you'll hear
thrown at Ragers, because they're just words. Out of all of them, though,
she'd found the one that always, always pissed me off, that never failed to
work it's way under my skin. I spun around to face her, swinging the light
with me - and saw only empty concrete tunnel. A split-second later, I heard
a brushing sound from behind me, just before something slammed into my
kidneys with enough force to send me sprawling face-first against my will. I
scrambled for the plasma light, finally finding it in the dark. It lit up
as soon as I grabbed it - at least it hadn't broken in the fall - and rolled
over on my back, flashing the area behind my previous location. I was fully
expecting to see nothing, or maybe the terminal end of a soon-to-be-death
blow...
Instead, I saw her, half crouched, smiling, covered in blood and damn little
else. There was a certain feral beauty to her, the way she moved, even
crouching - always in motion, rocking back and forth, side to side, head
turning slowly, now canted right, now leaning forward - but that was about
as far as it went. Her eyes were hazel, and bright, too bright - there was
nothing sane, nothing human in those eyes. Nothing but madness and
bloodlust, faintly echoed by her too-wide smile. I scrambled backwards a
little, not so much trying to get to my feet as give myself room to react if
and when she pounced again. Maybe my fear mirrored her insanity, and she
read it in my eyes, or maybe I'm nearly as graceful as I like to think.
Either way, she started laughing and moved forward in a low feline slide,
maintaining what I'd actually bet was the same damn distance between us,
give or take a couple of inches.
My free hand, the one not holding the plasma light, slipped behind me,
reaching for my knife... which wasn't there. At that moment, I distinctly
remembered a friend of mine, a guy named Weevil, telling me how just
stuffing the knife in my rucksack wasn't a good idea, how I should buy a
sheathe, but it was thankfully washed away almost immediately by the wave of
panic that swept through me. She was obviously a shifter, and she'd already
managed to get behind me once, in a narrow corridor, no less, without me
even knowing she was there. I was in trouble, big trouble, and I knew it.
I opened my mouth to say something I can't recall, and she leapt. I hadn't
realized how big she was until then. She was easily six two, six three, and
probably weighed around two ten, all of it lean. That was pretty much the
extent of my observations, as she pounced on me and started clawing at me.
If she'd been shifted, I think the fight would have been over right there,
but as it was, she wasn't. I tried to roll free, but she wasn't having any
of that, using her surprising strength in conjunction with her leverage to
keep me mostly pinned. It didn't have any of the practiced grace and
refined movement of the martial artists I've seen - it was all just reflex
and instinct, near as I could tell.
Maybe that's why she seemed so surprised when the side of my plasma light
slammed into her left temple.
To be completely honest, it was a lucky shot on my part. I was just
swinging at her head, and happened to catch her just right. Regardless, it
worked, shaking her up enough for me to roll to my right and out from under
her.
She started to shift just as I was dragging myself up to my feet, and I
think she was actually changed before I was fully upright. All I know for
sure, though, is that I turned just in time to get torpedoed by a lunging
mass of fur and fury, and if it hadn't been for the concrete wall I slammed
into, I would have been a dead man right then, right there. I felt
something, likely her claws, raking across my stomach - she was trying to
disembowel me. I slammed my hard forward and down, driving my forehead into
some part of her head or upper body, and then crouched down. I heard
something meat smack into the concrete over my head, and a surprised sound,
half yelp, half snarl.
I knew I had to act fast, before she realized what I was doing, so I reached
out and just grabbed double handfuls of her, my fingers digging deep and,
I'm pretty sure, breaking the skin in a few places. The second it felt like
my handholds were secure I lifted her up and drove forwards, trying to drive
her into the opposing wall. It worked - she hit with a loud thud and a
sharper crack, and screamed in obvious pain. I took a few steps back,
intending to smash her against the wall again, but something, maybe the top
her head, caught me under the chin and snapped my head back, hard, making me
see stars and hear a ringing in my ears. Almost immediately after,
something raked across my upper chest, coming dangerously close to the
throat, and I dropped her involuntarily as I staggered back. Something
caught me hard in the ribs then from my left, going deep, and I was gasping
from the pain as I fell.
No sooner did my shoulder hit the ground than I was nailed again, a hard
no-claws shot my left shoulder. She was trying to roll me on my back, I
guess to open up my throat or gut, so I did the only thing I could think of
- I rolled the opposite way, and started belly-crawling away. I'm not going
to lie - it was a desperate attempt to get away from her. I was badly
outmatched, and I knew it - taking down a malfunctioning guidebot in the
park in broad daylight and fighting a pissed off shifter in the dark in a
tunnel are two very, very different things. I just needed to regroup, I
needed to put some space between me and her, I needed to at least even up
the odds a little bit... hell, I'm not precisely sure what, exactly, I
needed. What I got, though, was exactly what I needed - her leaping onto my
back.
I felt her snap at my head and get a mouthful of thick, snow-white
dreadlocks instead of skin and skull. She jerked back on them, but I was
damned if I was going to let her pull my head towards her, exposing my
throat, so instead I arched my back and tried to roll over. I guess the
timing was just perfect, one of those moments of blind synchronicity,
because she was off-balance at the time, and I ended up rolling over and
behind her as we sort of traded places. I tried to snake an arm under
where, in the darkness, I thought chin would be, and instead ended up with
her jaws locked on my forearm. It hurt, and hurt bad, when she bit down - I
think I screamed - but it did give me a point of reference, so to speak, and
at this point, I was in enough trouble to consider that a fair, if
unanticipated, trade. I tensed up the muscles in my trapped forearm as much
as I could, jaws clenched to handle the pain, and with my other hand, found
her throat, driving my taut fingers as far in as I could before tightening
my hand into a fist, trying to crush her windpipe or jugular or anything.
I'm not sure if it worked precisely the way I'd hoped, but it obviously did
something, because she started thrashing around and gagging, releasing my
arm in the process. I wrapped it around her throat, too, shielding the hand
there from anything she might try. I figured, my right arm was already
pretty chewed up, and I'd rather have one good arm than two iffy ones.
She somehow got her legs bunched up underneath her and drove hard with them,
launching us both backwards. I took the brunt of it in the landing, and not
only from the concrete floor - her mass knocked most of the wind out of me
when we hit, and I was seeing stars again as the back of my head connected
with something harder and irregularly shaped on impact, something rung my
bell even through the effective padding of my dreads. She was frenzied now
in her thrashing, although I'm not sure if she just pissed off or
suffocating, and it took me a moment for my head to clear and my mind to
make the connection. I cinched in tight with right arm for a moment and
drove both of my knees up, trying to connect with her kidneys but instead
ramming what felt like her pelvis. Either way, it did what I wanted,
because I felt her back arch hard from the pain and her arms, or front legs,
or whatever the hell you want to call them at that stage, flung out to
either side. I slipped my right arm free, taking a chance on the security
of my grip with my left hand, and reached back behind my head, trying to
find what I'd landed on.
My hand brushed against something cold, flat, and metallic just as she
twisted herself free from my grip. She half-way collapsed on top of me, her
breaths ragged, shallow, and half-choking, just as my hand closed on the
object. I was holding my knife by the blade, and I could feel it biting
into my fingers, but I really didn't care anymore. I'd pretty much written
myself off as a dead man by then, and my only goal was to take the bitch
with me.
I'm not really sure what from this point on. I remember her going for my
throat and instead sinking her teeth into my trapezius, I remember ripping
part of her ear off with my own teeth, I remember the pretty dead girl's
face popping back up in my head, and me starting to drive the spiked pommel
of my knife into her head over and over. It's not a single memory, though -
it's a series of memories, disjointed, no real continuity between them, like
I wasn't quite myself anymore, wasn't entirely in control.
The next clear memory I have is sitting on my rucksack, on the other side of
the corridor, knife stowed away, recovered plasma light in hand. I was
shining it over the corpse of the shifter, and slowly shaking my head. It
was almost like a negative image of the girl in the corridor. The shifter's
body was almost marked, but her head was barely recognizable as such. This
time, though, I was the one responsible.
I felt sick to my stomach as the reality of that set in. I'd done this,
willingly, to another living being. Not just killing, but... mutilating.
Just like her. For a brief moment, I'd become just like her.
Eventually, I just stood up, shouldered my ruck, and bled down the hallway,
stopping to pick up my top hat from where it'd landed after the shifter'd
initially hit me. I took a slight detour to hit an out of the way shop of
sorts, run by an enterprising young dirtgirl. Most of what she has is just
junk she's collected, but I guess she gets by. I bought a shovel from her,
and some rags to use as bandages. Paid double what she was asking, and
wouldn't let her argue. Don't ask why, it just seemed like the right thing
to do... and sometimes, that right there is reason enough.
I headed back to where I'd left the girl's body. She was still there, and
so was the jacket, so I picked them both up and started working my way to
the South Caduceus before coming above-ground. In the end, I decided to
bury her in the park, out by the orchard. A nice, peaceful, pretty place,
maybe something to counter her ugly death. I'd like to think she would've
liked that, but I don't know, never really will know. That fits so many
things, though. Don't know who she was, why she was killed. Don't know
what she liked, where she lived, what she did. For all I know, she may have
been a total Purist in life, and hated me on sight. Doesn't really matter,
I guess - the dead all seem equal from where I'm standing.
I ended up going to the ASA and filing a report. I never mentioned burying
the girl, and they said they couldn't find the body of the shifter, so there
was nothing they could do. The feeling I got was more that they didn't see
it happen, so they didn't care, because nobody high-profile was involved. I
don't even know that I believe they looked for the body at all.
I'm just a nobody, though, and they're the cops, so what the hell do I know?
I still think about it almost constantly, even though it's been close to a
week. At first, I thought I was hunting the killer for her, the victim, but
once the fighting started, I wasn't worrying about anybody but myself until
the very end. So, I really don't know who I did it for. I guess, in a way,
I did it for both of us, and for all the people who might have been the next
victim, or the one after that.
I still see the girl's face when I sleep, looking still and scared, just
like when I found her. I find myself wondering what would have happened if
I'd gotten there just a few minutes earlier. I think I just would have
gotten both of us killed, that only the horror of what had been done to her
gave me the strength, for lack of a better term, to do what I did in the
end. That makes her death, the girl's death, seem so necessary... and I
just don't know how to deal with that.
It steals my hope for tomorrow, makes me feel tired, like I'm getting older
and it's not even my birthday.
______________________
Copyright 1999, F. Scott Blair
