Chapter 2 #3
From the entrance, Alice could see three bodies.
A woman (presumably the same one who had been shot through the door), a man, and a teen who had been halfway into some kind of transformation when he died.
By the way the bodies were clumped together, the man had probably gone down trying to protect him.
Two hunters were digging through shelves and cupboards. One tossed books casually onto the floor after shaking them out, and the other was opening the kitchen drawers, occasionally dumping a tray of utensils or a pile of plates. It looked like they were tossing the place for the damn family silver.
“What the hell happened here?” Alice said, her voice loud. It did not shake, did not reflect her growing horror.
One of the hunters jerked and went for the knife at his hip. His eyes flickered from her, to the hunter behind her, and then back to her.
“Who’re you?” he asked testily. “Max, what the hell you doing? Who is this bitch?”
“Excuse you,” Alice said, cold fury clenching her teeth together.
It was easy to focus her disgust and fear and horror into anger.
“My name is Alice Dixon, and I represent ASC headquarters. I work directly with Director Dixon. I asked you a question, and you had better answer me without bullshit if you want to keep your hunting license another hour.” And your kneecaps intact, she didn’t add.
The hunter glanced over the destruction and death sprawled over what had once been a very nice home.
“It was a mess from start to finish. Sorry about that.” He didn’t sound very sorry.
“Sometimes the fucking freaklovers get in the way and it just goes south, you know?” He picked up a knife from the counter area, tested its weight, and dropped it in a bag at his feet that she hadn’t noticed before.
“You didn’t have to take the trouble to come down.
Max there didn’t have to call you. We were gonna take care of it. ”
Two dead civvies, one dead freak, and a couple of hunters robbing the place after.
If she hadn’t known what was going on, Alice would have called it a triple-homicide robbery.
Even knowing, she could feel the rage building in her chest that she usually reserved only for politicians who slashed veterans’ cars or for stupid assholes who didn’t believe in monsters.
“How exactly were you going to take care of it?”
“Torch the place,” he answered.
She could feel her face tightening. That was a logical solution to an awful mess, and she didn’t like how it sounded like one he had taken before.
“Who saw you in town?” she asked brusquely.
“Who did you talk to?” She continued with all the questions that she was paid to ask, figuring out how deep a hole these disgraces had dug for themselves, and gradually working out how to get their sorry asses out of it again.
Who would remember they had been sniffing around this family?
Had they left their prints anywhere? Had they used weapons that could be traced back to them or the ASC?
Jackson, the first one to talk and the ringleader, did most of the talking.
They’d had solid leads before they arrived in town and hadn’t (as far as they remembered) asked any pointed questions that might make them stick in someone’s mind.
Alice would have taken that with a grain of salt, but Max agreed, and she was inclined to accept his assessment.
After grilling them for another fifteen minutes and a careful fingerprint sweep of the outer doors, she fixed them with a look that had made tougher men than these do what she said.
“Put all this shit back where you found it,” she said, indicating their loot bags, “and drag the bodies over to the couch. Don’t take your gloves off until you’re a hundred miles away.
This is never going to look like an accident, but we can make folks ask the wrong questions, and if we’re lucky, no one will ever know we were here. ”
Freaks died (that was pretty much the point of the ASC, no matter what the C technically stood for), and sometimes there was collateral damage, but it wasn’t supposed to be like this. It wasn’t supposed to be easy, and casual, and a good excuse to rob a house before you lit it on fire.
She was going to get these thugs (“hunters” was too damn good a word for them) out of the field and somewhere they couldn’t take human life so damned casually.
Alice wasn’t sure she had the authority to force that and make it stick, but she could talk to the Director.
He might need some kind of frame to justify the step, but she could help him put together something about bad publicity and dead civilians and make it work.
If he were here, in this house with a slaughtered family and two shitbags profiting from it, he would be as outraged as she was.
But for all her advances in the family business, Alice wasn’t yet as effective as he was.
He could take care of this problem without breaking a sweat.
“This doesn’t happen again,” she repeated. “Do you know what would have happened if the press got here before I did? Can you imagine?” It was hard not to shout.
“Never happened before, did it?” Jackson said with a sneer.
An hour later, Alice Dixon drove away from that town, the glow of the burning house a distant haze in the rearview mirror.
She stopped for that coffee as the first tentative edges of dawn began to creep over the horizon.
Espresso cradled in one hand, she walked to the edge of the deserted parking lot before calling Jonah’s personal number with her cell.
He answered on the third ring. “Director Dixon.” He sounded as alert as though he’d been up and working for an hour already, which of course he had been.
“Good morning, sir,” she said. “There are a couple of incompetents we need out of the field and somewhere their stupidity can’t do us any damage.”
A month later, Alice was reassured to see on the ASC intranet an employee ID photo of Jackson wearing a FREACS guard’s uniform and a pinched expression.
Much as she had wanted to see both of those hunters get a bullet to someplace that would hurt like a bitch, at least at FREACS she knew they wouldn’t be a continued threat.