Out of the Black - Lee Doty [171]
Detective Ashok Brown was really beginning to despise his job. Now it was only the camaraderie of his fellow officers that kept him going... that kept him together.
There was a time when Vice held a certain black charm in his mind. He had to admit, moving like a hidden torpedo through the darkness of the city's party scene seemed a little cool in concept, but now he saw too clearly the sadness and desperation. Vice was about irony- it was the shortcut to joy that led to destruction. Vice was the domain of lost children of all ages, a dark Neverland of warping corruption.
He dropped from the driver's seat of the van and into the familiar streets of the night. The perhaps thirty sprinters were long gone. He'd never seen anyone move like that. Before him were perhaps seven people who looked like they were in the process of not surviving a chemical weapons attack. One man swayed on his feet, hands on his knees as he coughed and wretched. A scantily clad woman in her early twenties screamed incoherently as she used her arms to ward off unseen attackers. Another man seemed to be trying to flee on his hands and knees, but his shaking limbs eventually deserted him and he curled into a fetal position on the sidewalk.
The worst part of the desperate scene was the screaming. It was unhindered by pride, ego, or any other check- it was elemental and unrestrained. These men and women screamed like children alone and in desperate trouble.
Behind him, he heard the van's other doors open and the other officers pile out.
"Do you ever get used to this?" Rodriguez asked from his left side.
"Never... but maybe that's because it's getting worse."
Empathy added speed to his steps as he moved toward the victims of tonight's good time. He wished he could help them, but he knew he couldn't and it made him angry- angry enough to shoot the next dealer he saw. He wanted to reach out and hold these people until the ambulances came. He wanted to tell them it was going to be all right. But since this wasn't his world and things didn't work the way he wanted, he reached for the riot cuffs.
He used two of the riot cuffs to secure the screaming woman's wrists and elbows together. He used another two pairs to bind her knees and ankles together. He hated his job.
Then the screaming stopped so abruptly he thought he'd been deafened. Before he could be reassured by the return of the thousand small sounds of the night, seven voices bellowed out a single word... or maybe just sound, "Gruumen!"
Ashok jumped. The girl whose ankles he was now binding had participated in the shout. He looked up into her face, but was unprepared for what he found there.
Her eyes had gone completely dark, with only a thin rim of white visible around the edges when her eyes shifted to the side. Her fear had evaporated, along with every other sign of humanity. She looked dead but for the fact that she was still moving. Her waxy skin looked like it would crack with every motion as a smile spread across her face. The smile didn't stop when it should, but kept growing, showing seemingly all her clenched teeth, splitting her lips.
"Release me!" She shouted in a voice that sounded like the devil's proctologist.
"Sure." He said, backing away. To his dismay, he noticed that the clear plastic riot cuffs binding her elbows were turning white under the strain of her shaking limbs. This was a feature designed into the cuffs to provide warning before they broke. Of course, nobody was supposed to be able to break these cuffs. They met the more stringent requirements for Harms, but Ashok had a feeling that those standards needed to be upgraded again.
His fascination with the changes in the bone structure of her face finally yielded somewhat to the demands of his experience and his pistol came out. He pointed it at the girl struggling against his riot cuffs. Her black eyes fixed on the gun like a starving man might look at the last cocktail wiener. "Gruumen!" She shrieked in that same grinding voice. The riot cuffs binding her elbows snapped.
Shouts and gunfire