Two cars are called to the scene. Dispatch routes the calls with customary unconcern.
The bruise black sky is just starting to bleach an imperfect purple. Chill of early spring. Frost and crusted, scummed snow caking the curbs, alleyways, icing a pile of overstuffed trash bags.
Lertog stares down at the white coffee container in his hands. The cruiser breezes down the empty, frigid streets. A landscape dead and alien; forlorn buildings laced with inscriptions of filthy snow. Interplanetary cold. Stale corpse of winter in the city.
The engine has a faint knock. McKenzie drives absently.
Lertog can see white mist pluming thinly on McKenzie's breath. The car is too cold. McKenzie always leaves the heat off. He's also mouth breathing again. Lertog shivers disgustedly and goes back to staring at the coffee container.
The disconsolate drive climaxes half-heartedly with a rasp of balding tires on gravel, headache-inducing blue-red strobe of cruiser lights. Buller and Wentlock are already out of their cruiser, standing with arms flat to their sides and heads hunched as if making themselves smaller will fool the cold into overlooking them.
Sighing heavily, Lertog heaves himself out of his seat and swaggers over to his companions. McKenzie takes his time joining.
"No sound right now. I don't hear shit."
"Maybe it's over. Call in the cleaners and go home?"
"Come on, fat ass."
The four men trundle across the lot towards the sullen orange lights of the treatment facility. A few vehicles are scattered about, all dark, all shapeless. A battered Buick swims into view, cheerily declaring "Jesus is coming. Look busy" through a shroud of dried slush.
The lights on the towers above pulse on and off, the red eyes of a nodding beast.
A vacant parking kiosk. No attendant. No guard.
The structure looms ahead, all overhanging girders, rusty steel turrets, razorwire fences. The fleshless skeleton of the nodding beast. The men reach a companionway, clatter along it indifferently, not looking at each other, not speaking. Paying attention only to their feet, the darkness, and the cold.
Lertog uneasily eyes the service way ahead and takes another swig of coffee. Lukewarm. Tasteless and brown. He reaches down and checks his gun. The butt is freezing, sucking a little more warmth out of his bones.
The cold and dark make him feel like he is swimming through slushy murk.
Buller suddenly calls out.
"Police! We are responding to your call!"
His voice barely reverberates off the sullen steel and concrete. No answer.
"Is anyone injured?"
Wentlock turns around and looks at McKenzie and Lertog. Mutters to himself before yelling.
"Put down your weapons. We are police officers!"
Still no reply. The shivering quartet continues down the companionway, seeming to shrink smaller into themselves. Lertog tosses his empty coffee cup over the rail.
Even in the cold, the reek of the water treatment vats assaults his nose. Sharp, astringent chemicals. Noxious, lush smell of waste and living things.
A large open bay emerges from the stony gloom. Hulking halfway through, an orange smear in the chilly glow of the arc lamps--a small work truck. Its windows are slimed with fog. The ragged black paint on its utility rack a dull sketch against the scummy chill of the air.
Buller yells out some more, but his voice receives no answer through the gelid cold.
The officers creep in through the bay. Lertog unholsters his gun. Its chill is now vaguely reassuring. The others take it as a signal. Buller looks about to call out again, thinks better of it.
The orange light seems to distort the air inside the facility proper. A confusion of piping and valves, concrete and sheet metal all around them. A sign says "No Unauthorized Access" with grim finality.
Another declares "no smoking."
The smell of sewage slithers around them, punctured sickeningly by bitter chemical odors. Lertog's face screws up involuntarily, a solid reek of chlorine flooding his awareness. McKenzie is breathing hard, through his gaping mouth.
Ahead, a shapeless tangle spread out on the steel floor. Wentlock and Lertog move up quickly, navigating a knot of heavy pipes and yellow safety rails. Several bodies are strewn crazily, a snarl of flung limbs and twisted torsos. Yellow hardhats litter the spaces between them.
Wentlock grimaces. Lertog just stares and chews his lip. "We got bodies. Get the fuck over here, fat ass."
McKenzie heaves up behind, panting like a pig. He takes a step back suddenly. Lertog looks down and sees the blood blooming outward toward his feet. It is dark and gluey in the cold. It spreads leisurely, putting out sticky red tendrils, dotted with little steel islands from the floor pattern.
Lertog moves back, gingerly.
Buller snaps to alertness, somehow dialing up his professional demeanor by another several degrees. His gun straightens, pointing at the ceiling.
"Put down your weapons and come out, now! Police! Come out now! Show yourselves immediately!"
Christ. Submit to the law, submit to the law, Lertog thinks.
He looks down at the bodies. They are riddled with bullet holes. He doesn't understand why someone would shoot another human being with so many bullets. These men are practically spaghetti strainers.
Each one bears several wounds in their torsos and carelessly tossed limbs. They also each have a gaping gunshot wound to the head. Lertog eyes one or two of the discarded hard hats. A few are pierced, dented, cracked.
His eyes search the carnage, following the knotted thread of twisted bodies and glutinous blood. Off to the side is another body. This one different. Lertog hisses sharply. McKenzie steps around him.
"Jesus," he breathes.
The man is ripped to pieces, literally. His intestines form a ropy map of crisscrossing innards on the patterned steel. He is opened all the way up to the rib cage. Part of his throat is torn out, frayed hunks of gristle hanging from the ugly wound, a boulevard of blood painting a wide, crimson lane around his head, like a clotted halo.
Near his left hand is a large caliber handgun.
Peppering the floor around the corpse, stuck in the froth of coagulating blood, are spent .45 cartridges.
"Our shooter?"
"Christ, what did they do to him?"
"Who the fuck did this to him?"
"How the fuck???"
Buller sweeps the carnage with practiced determination. Lertog shakes his head impatiently, irritated. Every hair is standing on end. He just wants to get the fuck out of here.
He begins to finger the action on his gun nervously, looking around. No sounds. Every glint of orange on the surrounding forest of pipes seems to harbor an ambiguous threat.
McKenzie murmurs, his deep voice sticking. "What happened to their eyes?
