Dickory

A Written Demand

More than a week had passed. More than a week and most of the children had been found. The human children had been first, likely because they required more care. The very day that the bus had been taken, it had turned up parked outside the city on an abandoned road. The human children had been found locked inside. Alone and unharmed. Connor and Hank had been called to deal with the body of the driver a day later. The uniformed man had been found shot in the head and tucked away in an alley near the very first stop. No one had noticed him in the dim alleyway, hidden between two dumpsters under a few bags of trash. The dustmen had found him while emptying bins the next morning.

It seemed the assailant had approached the bus at the first stop. He must have either lured the driver off somehow with a ruse or taken him at gunpoint. The children would have been easy enough to scare into silence. A threat to their families. A threat to them. Settle down or I'll kill your Mummy likely worked wonders on an eight or nine-year-old. They probably hadn't heard the gunshot. He would have used a silencer, and Connor was quite certain it was a he. This murder didn't match up with a feminine crime. Point blank to the head? Too messy. Too personal.

Once the driver had been dealt with, it had been an easy matter for their assailant to step in and take over. He'd had the keys to the bus and a group of terrified children who wouldn't dare step out of line. It seemed he'd even taken the driver's hat and jacket since they hadn't been found at the scene or on the bus. The deceased driver had worked for the school for around ten years, driving the bus every day. He had no criminal record, so he clearly hadn't been involved. This had been a planned out crime, targeting that specific bus at that specific time. Connor's gut turned every time he thought about why.

Sixteen of the twenty students on the bus had been found. All the listed humans. They'd been a little traumatised, and they were hungry and dehydrated, as expected after such an event, but were otherwise unharmed. They'd been questioned by the FBI and child services about the ordeal. Connor didn't know all the details, but they had a description. A tall, scary man with light brown hair wearing denim. They hadn't noticed an LED, but it was a familiar description to Connor. It sounded like the android they'd chased at Aaron's ceremony. The one who'd been spotted near the Hickory Killer's last crime scene. Not to mention he'd turned up at one of the copycat crime scenes before then, too. It had to be linked to the Hickory Killer. He's never gone so young before, though...

After the human children and the driver had been found, one of the android children had been retrieved. It had been a male YK400. Smaller than Niles, with cropped blonde hair. His model was quite outdated, and he'd suffered severely from stress during the encounter. As a result, his memory files had corrupted, and the technicians had no choice but to erase them. Aside from the mental trauma the boy had returned unharmed. He'd even been taken care of prior to his release. His thirium levels had been replenished, and he'd been recharged. He'd been left alone in the middle of a park in the afternoon. He'd been surrounded by people, but no one recalled noticing anyone out of place. They'd been more distracted by the small android child wailing hysterically. It's likely they would have noticed a distressed child entering the park, so he was probably placed in stasis and carried inside. He was found beside a bench, so perhaps he was set down with his schoolbag and people thought it was just a parent carrying their sleeping child. Unfortunately, this meant they gained no leads or evidence from this boy.

A couple days after that the next android child had been found. This one had been a YK500 female model. She had a sharp blonde bob and big blue eyes. Connor wasn't sure if looks played a factor, but he'd noted it down as something to consider anyway. Unlike the YK400, this girl was a child of Jericho. Josh had been over the moon that she'd been found safe. They all were, of course, but it seemed this girl had formed somewhat of an attachment to Josh. Her memories hadn't been corrupted by stress, but they had been tampered with. Any footage relating to the identity of her captor had been cut out via a forced interface shortly before her release. She'd been left stumbling through the Plaza with a mishmash of scattered memories of where she'd been and how she got there. She was understandably scared. She'd managed to stumble her way into a small café and ask for help.