Train
Tracks
The assassin
grunted, dropped the body, and then watched it roll and sprawl on its back.
Empty eyes stared at the dark and cold Montana spring night sky. The assassin
laughed.
He’d killed him.
He scratched at
the chemical reactive burning inside his robotic chest. Hissed at the scald of
the toxins pulsing in his neck and right arm veins. Silver and the metals that
only resided in Eli—a race of humans who, along with the Crea, had taken refuge
on Earth five hundred years ago when their own planet Ecreal died—merged with
the contaminants in his body with caustic results.
At his veins, the
silver he should see as a fine bright line, pulsed dull bronze—aged, corroded,
diseased. The toxins tasted of rusted steel and burned his mucus membranes.
He kicked the
body. “Fucker.”
Retribution was
sweet, even if it had taken him fourteen years. He’d removed the male’s clothes
so the trains and wildlife could more easily eliminate his father’s killer. No
remains, no ritual burial. Sinclair deserved no such honor.
Here the body
would be hacked into easy to eat pieces for the animals to feast on and, since
nobody ever came near these tracks, Sinclair’s remains would never be found.
Bliss skidded to a
halt on the clearing’s spring grass, tipped her face to the sky, and gulped
air. Clouds, in an oppressive charcoal blanket, smothered most of dawn’s light.
She grimaced. Ah damn, a storm. No wonder it’d been so gloomy in the forest. Time
to cut her run short and take the train tracks home.
To add speed,
Bliss edged out her Eli genetics. Many times the speed of an Earth human, she
dashed through a wind whipped meadow. At the train embankment, she lunged up
the steep gravel siding to the top then adjusted her stride so each step fell
on a recycled cement and plastic cemeplas sleeper. A flash of blue light, a
clash of thunder’s deepest bass exploded, vibrating the surrounding air. Eek,
come on legs, go faster. She rounded Death Bend. What the hey?
Bliss stumbled
over the dismembered body of a dead man. A scream ripping free, she spun and
fell to her knees. Eli metal thundered in her veins, silver bloomed on her skin
and swirled in her eyes.
Gene—oh my fates,
Gene cut into slices as if laid out in macabre banquet portions.
At three hundred
miles an hour, freight trains with six carbide wheels per axle tore along this
trio of tracks. Crusted blood and the starkness of bones exposed by the
severing suggested multiple trains travelling on differing tracks had sliced
through his corpse in gruesome precision.
Bile seared the
back of her throat as her metals formed a light exoskeleton over her human
skin. Bliss flung herself sideways and vomited down the embankment.
She forced down
her remaining stomach contents, calmed her Eli, and did what she didn’t want to
do—turned back.
A neon blue flash
highlighted the gore. She jumped as the clap of thunder thickened into a rue of
pine and ions. With their blood ten percent liquid metal, lightening liked to strike
Eli and Crea dumb enough to remain exposed. Being fried wasn’t high on her list
of ways to die. She had to get home, out of the storm, and phone the sheriff.
She looked at
Gene’s body. God, this was…dang—she couldn’t think of a word bad enough. Death
Bend was so sharp, animals didn’t always have time to jump to safety. But an
Eli with his enhanced senses—it made no sense.
Near the
decapitated head she noted a sweet scent. Great now she’d have to see what that
scent was. Feeling as if someone had wedged a shoe in her throat, she peeled
her lips back, braced herself for what she was about to do to, leaned forward,
and sniffed near the decapitated head.
Bourbon fumes
wrinkled her nose. She turned into the cold wind to cleanse her nostrils of
booze and death. Crap cakes. Had he come for a run, fallen, and been too drunk
to get up? Fallen and knocked himself out then the train came? Drunk or not,
why was he out here? His lodge on Eli Clan reserve was on the other side of
Katoom, an easy twenty miles from this bend.
She blinked back
more tears. “What happened?”
Yeah, she didn’t
expect an answer.
She went to close
the dead eyes, so unlike the laughing ones she remembered, and stopped an inch
from contact. Oops, she better not contaminate him with her scent. Peter, the
sheriff, would give birth to a bear if she touched the body before he’d
processed the scene and gone through all the correct procedures.
Katoom’s small
population was a mix of Earth humans and the alien Eli and Crea. This
Subspecies cohabitation was rare. Even in large cities, the species tended to
live in separate suburbs but, usually, the Eli and Crea preferred to live on
large tracts of land.
All regions of
coexistence were constantly scrutinized by the ever vigilant feds, the
sensation hungry media, and the alien haters who wanted the return to old world
wars and Subspecies genocide. They prayed for infractions and spied on all
alien clans.
To keep focus on
Katoom minimal, Peter crossed his T’s with precision to all laws. She hadn’t
taken her personal link on her run so she had to wait till she was home to
contact him.
She ran her palms
along her cooling thighs and stared at the body. She went to stand to head
home. Hang on. She half crouched and peered closer at Gene’s neck. Two inches
above where his head had been severed from the rest of him, a jagged cut gaped
and a large portion of flesh hung, joined to the whole by a thread of pale
bloodless skin. She glanced at the other body pieces, and her chest ratcheted
from tense to tenser.
The torso slices
had been cut with almost laser precision. No torn flesh. No ragged edges. No
chunks cleaved from the whole.
But the throat had
been hacked and didn’t come near to separating that section of neck in two.
She gusted out a
horrified gasp and dry heaved, flung her hand to her mouth and kept it there.
She would not vomit on Gene. She peered closer and saw a windpipe and carotid
artery. She flicked her gaze to the gravel to calm herself. That was odd. Gene
was big, six-feet-seven tall, and two-eighty pounds of muscle. Yet, she
couldn’t see much blood and barely any metal dust. Not much blood at all. Even
little rabbits bled more than these few trickles.
Where the hell
could all his blood have gone?
She rocked back
onto her heels. A squall whipped her hip length hair around her body. Heart
ricocheting around her chest like a well hit racquetball, she shot to her feet.
Shit, shit, shit.
Gene hadn’t died here.
She swallowed hard
and surveyed the surrounding tree line, flinched when a dark shadow moved, when
the light shifted with the clouds.
Someone sliced his
throat, bled him out, then moved and dumped his body.
Her metal rose so
high, she tasted its metallic sourness on her tongue. She had to scent the
murderer, to know who did this. She dropped to her knees again. Head close to
the ragged wound, she inhaled deeply. From deep within Gene’s massacred throat,
the faintest waft of a foreign scent bit at the back of her throat.
The killer? Of
course, it’s the killer, stupid. What other scent would be inside Gene’s flesh?
But why was it so weak? It hadn’t rained to wash it away. She shook her head,
took another draw of air, rolled the aromatic molecules of the alien scent over
her tongue and scent receptors, and sifted through the data of stored scents in
her brain.
Please don’t be
someone I know, please. No buzzing and no internal recognition. No one she
knew, thank the gods. But now she’d be able to identify the scent’s owner if
they came near. Forensics would use a scent collector to gather the killer’s
scent then load it into the national database and seek a match.
She turned, ran
for home, and prayed a killer didn’t watch or know she’d scented him.
