Kade Read online

  “He’s coming tomorrow,” she said. “I’m so scared about what he’ll think of me.”

  “He’ll think he’s too happy to have you back to judge you for what you had no control over.”

  “I hope so,” she said.

  “Have you given thought to taking the training courses, here?”

  “I have,” she said. “If Dad is ok with it, I want the training. No one is going to make me a victim again.”

  I saw the smile on Teresa’s face at the girl’s words. She would make sure the girl knew enough to protect herself.

  You’re only a victim if you choose to be in this Fallen World.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 3

  Teresa had a conference room where she met with future clients who wished to hire the Society for various jobs. I saw a pale man sitting in one of the chairs around the large, round table. He wore dark lenses over his eyes. I recognized the form of dress. I’d met some of the Mardins when I built the escape tunnel from my home. They lived in the Tees, the tunnel system underneath the city. Below them was the sewer, and they kept the system working in return for people from above staying out of their territory. Occasionally, they would hire some people from above to work in the Tees, but never very deep.

  I nodded to the representative. “I understand you would like to hire me for a job?”

  “You come very highly recommended, Mister Kade,” he said. “I have been told you are a very good investigator.”

  “I’ve investigated a few murders over the years,” I said. “Found a few items, recovered a few kidnappings. What can I do for you Mister…?”

  “Fraans,” he said. “There has been a series of deaths in the Tees. We are at a loss as to who is behind them. We would like to hire you to find the one responsible.”

  “To be clear, when I find this guy, do you want him alive to face charges?”

  “We want the killings stopped,” Fraans said. “If you bring him to us alive, we will charge and execute him. If you kill him, the killings stop. Either way is fine with us.”

  “What can you tell me about the murders?”

  “They are particularly violent,” he said. “I have pictures of the latest one.”

  “Pictures?” I asked. “It’s been a while since I saw anyone who had a camera.”

  “You would be surprised by what is found underground in this city.”

  “Not really,” I said. “I’ve seen some pretty odd things up here. The Tees having all sorts of things from the Old World doesn’t surprise me at all.”

  Fraans nodded and lifted a briefcase from beside his chair and set it on the table. He opened it and pulled out a small stack of photos from the case and slid them across the table to me.

  I winced when I saw the first one. There was blood everywhere. Pools and splatter. The body was that of a woman. She was pale like Fraans and, from what I could tell, not much older than Maddy Hale. I’d seen many cuts in my life and these weren’t cuts. She had, literally, been ripped apart. The strength necessary to do the damage that had been done was staggering. This wasn’t a normal killer. I would have thought it was a group if not for the next picture.

  There were footprints in the blood. But it was just one set. I thumbed through the rest of the pictures.

  “Ok,” I said. “I’ll take the job. Twenty-five thousand scrip. Payable when the job is done. I don’t find him, you don’t have to pay.”

  “Very high,” he said. “But the part where we don’t pay if you fail to find the killer is unusual. Most people want their scrip up front. What would happen if you did a job, and the client decided not to pay? The job would have been done already.”

  “Ask Blechley. He crossed me. Ask around.”

  He chuckled. “Just playing the devil’s advocate, Mister Kade. I am well aware of recent events. And events that aren’t so recent. The deal is more than fair. You will have full access to our territory during your investigation.”

  “I need a map of the Tees,” I said. “I have a map of the city, but not the Tees.”

  “We will have an escort for you…”

  “I don’t intend to get lost down there if our escort disappears for any reason.”

  He nodded. “Understood. I wouldn’t like to be lost above ground in unknown territory.”

  “Alright then,” I said as I stood up. “You get the map, and I’ll get my supplies ready.”

  He nodded. “Thank you, Mister Kade.”

  “Save that for when I find this guy.”

  Fraans stood and nodded toward Teresa. “Thanks once again, Matron.”

  “It is the least I can do.” She stood and shook hands with the Mardin. “Your people helped a poor outsider when no others would. I haven’t forgotten.”

  He nodded and left the room.

  “That’s where you hid after The General?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I wondered,” I said. “Figured you’d tell me someday.”

  “It was a dark time,” she said.

  “I’d say so.”

  She stepped close, and our lips met.

  “I’ll go get Michael and Lindsey,” she said as we separated. “I’m sending two Squires with you.”

  “That could be interesting,” I said, with a chuckle.

  “Shouldn’t be boring.” She laughed.

  She walked out of the room, and I sat back down to look at the pictures again.

  See the marks on the torso? The voice in my head belonged to Samuel Gladson, a former homicide detective. Those are claw marks.

  “Some exotic weapon or somethin’ much worse,” I muttered.

  I saw something like this before the Fall. Be careful.

  I could see what he remembered in my head and suspected the detective was probably right. They hadn’t caught the killer back then. The killings stopped when Gladson had gotten too close. If it was the same guy, this fallen world was the perfect hunting ground for him. There’s no telling how many deaths he’d caused in the last twenty years after the Fall. The city was fractured into mini kingdoms, and someone could slip through the cracks much easier than in the Old World.

  “What are the odds this is the same guy?” I muttered.

  I’d say, pretty damn good.

  I stood up and pushed the photos into an inside pocket. I left the room and headed down the hallway to the armory. I wanted some bullets for my pistols. The Society kept one hell of an arsenal.

  As I turned a corner, I almost ran into a human wall.

  “Wilson,” I said. “How’s the leg?”

  “Getting better,” he said. “I hear you’re takin’ on another case. The boss won’t let me come.”

  He looked disappointed.

  “You probably won’t fit in the tunnels anyway.”

  “That’s a nice new coat, there,” he said. “Be a shame if somethin’ happened to it.”

  I laughed. “Wish you could come, big guy. Instead, I get the Tanziks.”

  “Serves you right,” he said, with a laugh.

  “Expected as much,” I said. “So, I’m not disappointed.”

  He laughed again. “Maybe I got that backward. Maybe it serves them right.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talkin’ about.”

  “Hmph.”

  “Got anything new in the armory?”

  “Funny you should ask that,” he said. “I have somethin’ that will probably help in the Tees.”

  I followed as the big man turned and led the way to the armory. He wasn’t limping as badly as I expected. Wilson was a healthy guy, and he had healed pretty fast from the shots.

  We entered a room with weapons in every corner and in racks set up along the center. There were swords, axes, daggers, hammers, clubs, and a cabinet in the far left corner with guns displayed inside.

  Wilson led the way to the cabinet and opened it. He pulled out an old automatic pistol with a long magazine. On the end of the barrel was a silencer. I hadn’t seen one of those since the Fall. I didn
’t even have one in my vault. He handed me the pistol.

  “Nice,” I said.

  “It’s got a sixteen-shot magazine,” he said. “It’s a nine millimeter, and I have three boxes of rounds for it. All yours for the small price of your eternal soul.”

  “They don’t call me a soulless bastard for nothin’.”

  “I thought I might be too late for that,” he said.

  “How about, if you give it to me, I won’t tell your boss you’re tryin’ to sell her stuff?”

  “Sounds fair.”

  “I think we have a deal.” I removed a holster from the case that looked like it was made for the pistol. Looking closer, I saw the automatic’s brand. It was a Sig Sauer, a very good Old World gun brand.

  It took a few minutes to attach the holster to my harness, but it would be handy in the enclosed space of the Tees when I needed a gun. I added the boxes of shells to the pockets of my coat.

  “Keep addin’ weapons to that arsenal, and you won’t be able to move,” Wilson said.

  “Probably right,” I said as I twisted to test movement. “Better leave the other two here.”

  I removed the two .44s and the holsters from my harness. I twisted a bit, and it felt much smoother.

  “I hate to admit it, but there is such a thing as too many weapons.”

  “I know how hard that was to admit,” Wilson said. “Now, if you were a little bigger, you could carry that and a four-foot piece of steel on your back with little effect on performance.”

  “Yeah, but you’re such a big target. You get shot more.”

  “You cut me deep, Kade.”

  “Did I hurt your feelings?”

  “I’m devastated.”

  “I’ll try to live with the guilt.”

  “Hmph.”

  I just stared.

  “I see how it’s gonna be,” he said. “Got any ideas about these murders yet?”

  “Yeah, I got a couple thoughts about them,” I said. “But I need the map of the Tees before I can really tell anything for sure.”

  “Pretty brutal,” he said. “Even for this screwed up world.”

  “Saw something like it before the Fall,” I said. “They never caught the guy back then. There used to be some pretty horrible people. I know, ‘cause I was one of ‘em.”

  “I think you’re too hard on yourself,” he said.

  “Got a lot to atone for.”

  “If you say so.”

  I heard voices in the hall outside the armory.

  “Can’t protect the boy from everything,” a man’s voice said.

  “I’ll damn well protect him if I want to,” a woman’s voice answered.

  “You know what it’s like out there.”

  “He’s four years old!”

  “Never too young to start learning,” Michael said as he opened the armory door.

  “Get this straight, Tanzik,” Michael’s wife, Lindsey, said. “There will not be a sword in that boy’s hand until he’s at least twelve.”

  “But…”

  “That’s all I’m saying on the subject.”

  Michael grunted.

  Wilson looked at me and laughed.

  “Shut up,” I said.

  He laughed again. “Good luck, buddy.”

  He turned and walked out the door.

  “What do you think, Mathew?” the small woman asked. “Shouldn’t a child get to be a child before we start hammering him with training?”

  Michael Tanzik was about average in height and weight, being a couple inches less than six feet tall. Lindsey barely reached five feet. She had flaming red hair and the temperament to go with it.

  “I thought that was the last you were goin’ to say on the subject,” he said.

  “Is your name Mathew?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then I was talking to someone else.”

  “I told you,” he said as he looked at me. “She’s crazy.”

  She pointedly ignored Michael and looked at me, waiting for an answer.

  “Kids do learn quicker than adults…”

  “So, now you’re ganging up on me,” she said. “I’ll go get Teresa, and then we’ll…”

  “On second thought,” I said, “I believe I should stay out of this one.”

  “Probably a wise choice,” Michael said.

  “Hmph,” she said and turned away from us to look for ranged weapons.

  “We’re in tunnels,” Michael said. “Cramped spaces.”

  “Shut your pie hole; I know what I’m doing.”

  “Only pie shuts my pie hole.”

  “My foot in your ass will shut it too,” she said from across the room.

  “You can’t kick that high.”

  “You really don’t want to find out, dear.”

  He chuckled and took a pair of short swords from a rack. They resembled gladii like the Romans used. I think one of my personalities was a history professor.

  “These should do nicely in a confined space.”

  “Should,” I said.

  Lindsey had found a compact crossbow with a quiver full of bolts. She took them and moved down to a rack of blades. She picked a pair of long daggers. They were not much shorter than Michael’s swords. They each donned sheaths and belts, then sheathed the blades.

  “May want to stock up on travel food,” I said. “No tellin’ how long this is gonna take.”

  Lindsey nodded. “Maybe I can find some pie to shut his hole with.”

  “If you’re lucky.”

  “Traitor,” he said to me.

  “Crazy is ok, buddy,” I said. “But crazy with weapons…hell no.”

  “I see your point.”

  “I’m right here,” she said.

  “Wasn’t there some kind of medication in the Old World for it?”

  “It went pretty quick after the Fall when they couldn’t make any more.”

  “I guess the supply got very limited after that,” he said. “We just have to make allowances nowadays.”

  “I’m right here,” she said again.

  “Maybe we can find some sort of natural remedy,” Michael said as he walked out of the armory with Lindsey.

  I laughed as the door closed behind them. People will always be people, and some things haven’t changed much in this Fallen World.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 4

  Fraans returned after about three hours, and I met him again inside the conference room. He had brought a rolled up map with him.

  “I need you to mark the places where all of the killings took place,” I said as I rolled out the map.

  He pointed to a spot on the map of tunnels.

  “This was the first one,” he said. “It was pretty gruesome, but death is common in the world we live in.”

  I marked a red “X” with a brush. “What I wouldn’t give for a Sharpie.”

  “A Sharpie?”

  “Old World stuff,” I said.

  We lost a lot of the little things that made life easier in the Fall. Now, we used things like stylus pens with ink bottles from the ancient days, or we used brushes and paint. If any markers or pens were left, they had dried up years ago.

  Fraans looked at me strangely, then pointed to another spot on the map. “This is the second one we found, although it was an older killing. The room was off the beaten track and seldom visited because of the location.”

  I painted an “X” on that spot as well.

  “This was the third one we found,” he said, pointing to another room in the tunnels. “This is when we began to be alarmed. Death is common, but this was something else.”

  Another “X,” and I was seeing something, or rather, Gladson was seeing something.

  “Two others have been found since then,” he said. “One here, and another here.”

  He pointed the spots out as he spoke, and I marked them with “Xs.”

  “We Mardins pride ourselves on being more civilized than the surface dwellers,” he said. “It pains me to t
hink one of our own is this brutal.”

  “All civilizations throughout history,” I said, “have had their psychopaths. But I don’t think this is one of yours. Look at the spacing of these murders.”

  I moved to our right and unrolled a map of my own. It was an Old World map of the city to which I had added boundary lines of the Zones I knew.

  “The first was here,” I said, pointing at the Zone above the first crime scene. “Then, here…here…here…and the last one, here.”

  “They’re scattered all over the place,” Fraans said.

  “I think he is moving across the city. If you look at the Zones, you see the oldest murder happened in Krell. Krell is a semi-safe Zone. Then he moved up to Platis. If he had headed straight east, he would have been in Royles, and that’s a no-go Zone. So, the choice was north or south. He lived in these Zones for a month or so, then moved on. Platis is pretty big, and the second murder was in the northmost part of the Zone. Then he turned east. The next three Zones to the east are pretty chaotic. So, he traveled through and set up in Morgan.”

  I pointed to the third murder, under Morgan’s Zone.

  “Now, Morgan is also a semi-safe Zone, so he stayed his month or so. Then he killed and headed south. North was out of the question. There are three Zones there that are perpetually at war. You enter one of those, and you’re drafted and put into the meat grinder. You’d think a person could sneak off, but they shoot anyone who tries.”

  My finger traced south from Morgan’s. “Gord is chaotic, so he continued south through Placer and then east to Trilla. He set up there for a month or so and killed this one.”

  I pointed at the fourth murder site.

  “Here’s where the monkey wrench gets thrown in my theory,” I said. “The fifth is in Yarborough. It should have been in either Dunn or Gallis. Considering you have to go through Dunn to reach Yarborough, my guess is there may be a scene you haven’t found yet. Or he killed up top that time. Either way, I need to go and see. If a murder happened there, we have a pattern. We can predict where he may strike next and intercept him.”

  There was a look of respect in Fraans’ eyes. “We would never have put that together. Perhaps we need to take more notice of the surface.”