Cognitive Deviance

12. Remains

March 31, 2045 - 11:00 AM

Margo was kneeled down on the floor near the sidewalk, vomiting into the storm drain beside the van she arrived in. Crawl Patrol bots were minding their own business scattering around the area like bees in a hive. Carl was busy questioning one of the locals while Andrade and Jack were in the bathroom getting a closer look at the visceral art Whitey left behind.

"So to sum things up," Jack declared, staring at a blood-covered fragment of glass from the mirror. "We got three bodies, all of them teenagers. One is lying dead in the fourth stall with twelve stab wounds in his torso. Another had his throat completely ripped open; unsurprisingly died from blood loss. The third had his head repeatedly bashed into the mirror; now has multiple incisions in his face along with subarachnoid hemorrhage due to severe head trauma."

"He wasn't just slammed against the mirror,"  Andrade chimed in. "There are too many lacerations on his face, even if it was against glass."

Jack took another look at the body. The boy's face was completely disfigured, to the point neither of them could distinguish what he even remotely looked like before. Glass shards were lodged in his eyes and nose, and many more were impaled in his cheeks and gum line. Blood dripped out of the wounds to the floor underneath his head, surrounding Jack and Andrade in a sea of red.

Jack glanced back at the space on the wall where the mirror used to be. A faded trail of crimson ran down the wall like tire tracks, concluding with a few more specks on the sink. However, there was more dry blood at the edge of the counter, a bigger and darker blot formed right at its tip. Jack's train of thought was halted when he noticed the Apath pills scattered all over the sink beside the one he stood in front of. Horrible memories tried to crawl back out of the depths of his subconsciousness, but he shut them out.

"You're right," Jack continued. "The attacker additionally scraped the victim's face against the surface of the broken glass, effectively mangling it beyond recognition. And, evidenced by this little mess at the edge of the counter, he thought a few more hits would finish the job."

"You don't think it was an animal that did this, do you?" Andrade asked.

Jack burst out laughing. "What, you think a wolf came all the way down from Canada to eat three fucking nobodies?"

"I only said that because there are claw marks on the floor near the stall with the first victim, dickhead. So I'd suspect either a wild animal or one of those psychotic bio-hackers. Maybe even a Sentient."

Jack took her word for it and walked over toward the nearest stall, the one containing the boy with multiple stab wounds in his torso. His corpse waded in a large pool of his own blood, and a small stream of it trailed into the drain beside the claw marks Whitey left behind.

"Can't be a Sentient," Jack declared. "Artificial humans have been declared illegal ever since those clone-trafficking incidents, and they only ever happened in the West. And I highly doubt it was a Bod-Modder. There would've been more traces of metallic alloys or random chemicals."

Andrade remained silent as she used her ThoughtControl piece to control some of the Crawl Patrol bots to scan around the claw marks. "No fingerprints," she said. "No chemical traces."

Jack glanced over to the left of the toilet where the boy with the stab wounds lay. A large puddle of dark red water formed beside it, leaking in from the next stall. He apathetically stepped over the other corpses and the Crawl Patrol bots and opened up the door to the next stall.

"I was right, Andrade," he added as he held the door open. "Wasn't an animal. These deaths were way too precise for any creature to do."

"You really need to learn how to take a joke," Andrade replied. "I know it wasn't a fucking animal. Although, anyone willing to do something as bad as this might as well be."