“….and the people will rise up from the ashes….”

            “Okay Vanessa.  She’s all yours,” Lieutenant Minsky pointed to the shredded corpse.

            Vanessa cleared her throat, taking in the bloodied folds of cloth.  The victim’s  Teflon skirt had been roughly slit from waistband to knee. 

            “Take a diamond knife to do that,” Minsky said.

            Vanessa nodded, her lenses capturing the details.  “Recording initial attack parameters.  Premeditated activity, perhaps.  Criminal was, is, prepared.”  She turned to Minsky, “Have there been any others?”

            Minsky frowned, “There was a similar one two blocks away.  Ten days ago.”

            “Two blocks from here.  That was one block east of Thompkins Square Park?”

            Minsky nodded.

            “The Clink’s tough on women.  Record of background details for file.”  Vanessa said, panning the surrounding alley.  Bricks blackened from years of soot–turbine belts should have blown the soot out to sea.  She spoke clearly for the official record, “Lieutenant Minsky, commanding officer–Necro squad.  Location, Fifth Street and Avenue D–two blocks south east of Tompkins Square Park, The Clink, New York City,”  Vanessa paused, her lenses focused on the victim’s open eyes¾retinal scan feedback posted a name and personal details at the bottom of her field of vision.  “Based on retinal scan, victim is Gloria Shampoon, age twenty-two.  Last tax record indicates waitress as primary employment.  Actress wannabe.  Two doses of fresh stardust were found in the victim’s purse.  That the purse was on the body and that the drugs were not touched, may rule out a financal robbery or an addict seeking a high.”  She turned to Minsky.  He was listening to her report¾standard procedure, after all he was the cop, she was just the necrographer.  She cleared her throat, “Was she raped, molested, or dismembered in any sexual manner?”

            “No.  As far as we can tell without official autopsy, the victim was killed for fun or according to someone’s twisted methodology.”

            “And the other woman that was butchered two blocks from the park?”

            “The same,” he answered, “All we needed with this Panther situation.  I can’t keep up.  I haven’t slept in weeks.”

            Vanessa said nothing.  Minsky had two teen-age daughters.  Always painful for him to think of the possibility.  “Let the record state Gloria Shampoon was murdered in a similar manner as the killing ten days ago.  Let the record further state that–”  Minsky began shouting down the alley to his subordinates.

            Minsky turned to Vanessa and said, “We have to go.  Got a triple homicide couple of blocks from here.  I’m going to leave an officer.  Coroner’s team will be here soon.”

            Vanessa was still filming the victim’s body, her eyes focusing, lenses shooting every millimeter of bloody flesh to facilitate the coroner’s inquiry and verify appropriate police procedure, should the victim’s relations decide to sue.  “Need me on the homicide?”

            “No, we can get by without you.  You’ve worked a double shift already and the homicide’s on Filmore’s turf anyway.  Your father would have been proud.  Think the department’s going to hire you soon.  Go home, get some sleep.  It never stops, you know.” Minsky said sadly.

            Vanessa stopped framing and watched Minsky walk to his hover.  “I know,” she whispered and stood up.  They’d been talking about hiring her full time for years now.  And for years she’d freelanced like all necrographers.  Minsky was nice.  He’d worked with her father too.  Back when the Department had necros on the payroll–until he was brutally murdered on the job.  After that the Department laid off all the necros, then rehired them as freelance.  Claimed they couldn’t afford the liability insurance.  Maybe someday she’d…Too much to consider.  She uploaded her record of Gloria Shampoon and caught the Bronx-bound subway.

            By the time the train hit the Bronx, it was crammed with commuters heading home.  Vanessa stared up into the sullen eyes of the Panther.  The criminal was depicted as a well muscled Middle Eastern male standing at a railing overlooking the Hudson River.  Choppy white caps tossed river spray in the background.  The official Wanted display lorded over the train’s passengers as they clung to the aluminum hand holds.  Mohammed “The Panther” Malik was wanted by North American Territorial Justice for crimes committed against the State.  Vanessa couldn’t stop herself from staring into the Panther’s dark eyes.  What exactly was a crime against the State?  As a necrographer, she saw the product of heinous crime six days a week–sometimes more often.  Most perps were never found.  What could the Panther have done?

            A small Chinese boy jostled through the train, shoving his way to the end of the car.  The boy yanked the emergency brake cord and slipped through the door into the next car.  Vanessa winced as steel grated against steel–emergency brake.  She gripped tight to the aluminum hand ring overhead but slammed hard into a grey-haired geronto decked out in a dark trench coat.  The train ground to an unpleasant halt–lights snuffed.  Panic hurled bodies into one another.  Vanessa toggled her lenses to infra sighting.

            With slight trepidation she picked her way through the crowd of accident victims–bodies brilliantly outlined under the infra red filter.  Sickening sounds of broken bone and human cries split the calm.  She reached the cabin door separating her train from the next car and yanked the manual release.  What a crazy boy, she thought, stepping  onto the flexible middle between the two cars.  Smoke filled the air, but she didn’t smell metal or oil, so the train wasn’t burning.  Her stomach sank–drum fires–nomads.  Not good, she thought, proceeding with extra caution.

            Maybe the Chinese boy wasn’t crazy.  Maybe someone wanted the train stopped.  Something bad was going down.  The distant squeal of approaching sirens cut through the hysteria.  She jumped from the train, hit the ground almost two meters below and crawled ten meters, finally bumping into a squat fabricated out of four weathered appliance boxes.  She slipped behind the flimsy structure and caught her breath.  Speed metal crunched the air mercilessly.  She glanced around the boxes, through the soot-covered trash.

            Clusters of hesitant nomads worked their way around the train wreck.  Local cops screaming in on all-terrains.  The angry floods of hover-cycles just coming into view

a kilometer away.

            The speed metal grew louder.  Vanessa looked around, it was coming from inside the box.  She pulled back out of sight, lifted a corrugated flap and peered into the carton home–beady eyes, drug store spex.  Net-linked….kid, head-banging, body gyrating to the  beat, attending a virtual concert–context snake down the front of his ragged pants.  Venessa dropped the carton’s flap and switched off infra.  “Time to go to work,” she said, thinking about doing some freelance padding–not her territory but…. 

            She stood and caught sight of a pair of black clad figures with long hair pulled tight in pony tails.  They hefted a dull carbon hull–diamond gauge missile tube.  “Film, distance, record¾now!” she clipped and flinched as the pair blew back through the air landing on their asses.  Grey rocket exhaust–orange explosion shook the ground.  Target train car rumpled, burning plastic, metal, black clouds billowed.

            She peered through the light orange tracing of her opti-sight.  She framed the two long-hairs in her camera sights and said, “Lock, zoom, refresh.”  Text scrolled over the bottom of her view–opticals needed cleaning.

            “Shit,” Vanessa cursed, opti-sight locked on the long-hairs’ progress, quick fingers ripping at a nylon adhesive flap on her right thigh.  She pulled a tiny spray bottle and shot two quick bursts of cleaning enzymes into each eye, pocketed the spray and waited for an update.  Blurry images of the black clad long-hairs as they climbed up onto the train.  Below their climb, forty or fifty passengers had already jumped, huddling together for comfort as determined nomads circled, toting planks of fiberboard and sewer pipe. 

            The throbbing bass from the speed metal concert broke the quiet between the cops’ strobes and sirens.  The boldest nomads attacked the clump of wealth before the cops settled.  Venessa watched a middle-aged businessman’s head split open under tandem pipe blows.  She stood as the clarity of her image improved ten-fold, the active bio enzyme voraciously digesting the layers of smoke and soot. 

            Vanessa jogged to the discarded diamond gauge missile tube.  She shot the immediate area, hoping to capture some prints.  Sirens–she approached the train, careful to show no weakness, no fear.  Dirty nomads wrenched handbags and briefcases, passing the goods hand over hand to carriers on the fringe of the ring.  Sirens pierced the air as the first of the hovers settled down next to the wreck.  Vanessa’s ops sent a text query–would she like to continue to store locally or upload to her workspace?  “Local,” she whispered, almost subvocal.  Her targets had disappeared into the train, her eyes flicked to a huge bulk of augmented muscle.  “Damn,” she whispered as another necrographer, a seven-foot-tall bald male clad in tight black polylycra, climbed off an unmarked hover.  He scanned the area and pulled his weapon.  She bolted for the train.

            “Hold still!”  ordered the necro, sidearm extended.

            Vanessa was pinned by the pin-point ruby eye of the necro’s laser sighting.  She froze long enough for her bar-code emitter to be read.  Then she slowly turned to face her adversary.  The necro wore opaque spex.  Decidedly low tech.  Her eyes traced the guy’s muscle.  Augmentation for show.  Her own unit processed his code–he was a necro working the Bronx precincts above the mid-town domes.  Would take some tact, but little sophistication.

            “Trying to freelance?  Rip me off?”  Queried the deep bass.

            Vanessa frowned, “I was on this train.  Work downtown, Clink.”

            The necro grimaced at the mention of the Clink.  “My records indicate no upload.  Stay out of my way.”  He turned and stomped towards the circle of frightened passengers.  Cops spilled out of armored personnel carriers, a quarter mile from the wreck–keeping their distance, hoping to deploy a full perimeter ring and seal off all escape and access–standard procedure in a nomad squat. 

            The nomads stepped aside as the necro broke into the cluster of terrified passengers.  He lifted the businessman’s bloody head by the hair and registered the death.  Dropping the shattered skull he turned to another victim and recorded a slow death.  Vanessa had seen enough.  She jogged to the burning train and climbed the rung ladder.

            The inside of the train was nearly deserted.  Trampled bodies lay bloodied on the floor.  She stepped over a crying infant, barely recognizable against the pulp of its guardian.  Swallowing hard, she ordered thermal imaging–pairs of fresh prints, running the length of the dark train.  Hover strobes flickered against the inside walls making readings difficult.  “Corroborate prints,” she ordered and watched the result scroll at the base of her vision¾the prints matched those recorded by the missile launcher–toxic filth of the squatter encampment standing out against the linoleum floor of the rail car.

            Vanessa jumped off the train as the first cops boarded the car.  She followed the trail of tracks through the squatter camp.  She moved silently against the backdrop of fiberboard shacks, stinking latrines and temporary market stalls.  Burning meat sizzled on wire spits–animal life in the squat. 

            After two minutes she reached the nearest exit.  Two wrinkled women wrapped in black cloth threw plastic dice against a checkers board.  They watched her slip through a two-foot hole in the razor wire fence, just as the gauntlet of  police moved in, tossing the women from their plastic crates.  Soldiers kicked their dice board into the night.

            Vanessa swallowed hard–Bronx streets offered little comfort.  Gangs of teenagers wearing painful uniforms of chain grafted to skin.  Derm pushers and nomads skulking the shadows.  Intent, dangerous eyes tracked her as she located the prints, now imaged as long loping strides.  Her secretary unit sent a text update¾she was still recording, buffer running out of storage space.  “Stop recording.  Compress and encrypt,” she ordered.  The prints lead up to and disappeared inside an underground bunker¾a vid den.

            Deep bass thudded over the undercurrent of a neo Zen beat.  Vanessa picked her way through the flickering violet light.  Thirty years of layered black paint lent the vid den a cave-like texture, soft curves, a lumpy floor.  Her targets sat with their backs to her in a corner of the den.  The music shifted to an early millennium astro metal dance mix.  Couples and singles crept from dark spaces to the dance floor.  Vanessa found herself in the midst of a frenzy of sweaty throbbing trancers.  She met the cautious eye of a white bearded man seated opposite her targets.  He nodded and lowered his eyes to the long-hairs.

            Squirming, Vanessa worked her way over to the corner table.  “May I sit?” she asked.

            The long hairs tensed but said nothing, deferring all decision-making to the elder bearded man.  Razor tones, steel laser driven music sent the gyrating crowd into a fit of ecstasy, pushers worked the crowd. 

            “I know about the train,” she shouted at the old man.

            The bearded man looked up into Vanessa’s eyes.  His face tensed with recognition.  He raised his right thumb.  A wide spectrum laser beam emitted from his thumb-nail climbing her charcoal body suit, up her flat stomach, over her chest, falling to rest on her glassy eyes, penetrating the lenses.  He nodded, his left hand cuffing the air, pressing virtual keys.  “Sit,” he said as the laser winked out.

            She sat next the old man, facing the two long hairs and the dance floor.  Through the flailing arms and legs, game players challenged others in virtual and realtime bloodsport.  A naked sexless albino opped a holo field of crisp multi-colored cubes.  The albino stacked cube on top of cube as the supporting matrix fluctuated, throbbing with the trance music’s bass.  She tried to read something in the long-hairs’ faces, Chinese, maybe Tibetan.

            “Speak necrographer,” commanded the old man.

            “I was on that train you shot.  Got it all on record.”

            The old man winced visibly, “Local or space?”

            “Oh, it’s all in private space.  Uploaded.” Vanessa lied.

            The two Asians looked at each other.  Pained expressions crossed their faces.

            “You’re freelance.  We’ll cut you a deal, for discretion, and all copies.  I’m Zamboni.  These are my associates,” he paused, “Sacci and Ghost.”

            Vanessa nodded.  “Call me Vanessa.”

            Zamboni answered, “Very well, Vanessa.  What do you require for the complete surrender of the recording?”

            “Answers.  I just got off work.  I’m very tired–long day, too much blood spilled.  Why did someone crank my train in a nomad squat?  And why did Sacci and Ghost blow a hole through the train’s side?”

            Zamboni started to answer, eyes searching the den, falling on the doorway.

            Vanessa saw nothing unusual through the flail of body parts.

            “You were followed,” Zamboni stated as a fact not a question.

            Vanessa started to protest then saw the cop across the room.  He was undercover wearing a ridiculous black-hooded monk suit.  The monk’s copper rimmed spex panned the room, found no purchase but digested everything.

            “Slowly now.  Slowly.  We’re going to slip away, but slowly,” Zamboni said, lips unmoving.  He rose to his feet, heavy cream colored robes falling like theater curtains.

            Vanessa followed the robed Zamboni through a long hallway to the bathrooms, past a litter of young junkies, plastic shunts grafted to their skin and vein in an obscene repose, fingers plunging synthetic horse.  They entered what might have passed for a men’s room, and stopped at the last stall.  Sacci and Ghost threw a couple out of the stall.  The guy’s penis was an iron testament to the whore’s skill.  Vanessa was tempted to record this for an underground mix, but thought better of it as Sacci yanked her into the stall and through a back door.

            They emerged on the street from the dark two-minute tunnel.

            “What’s going on?” Vanessa demanded.  She was seriously considering dropping the whole deal.

            Zamboni said nothing.  Sacci and Ghost disappeared, running down the crowded sidewalk.

            Vanessa watched Ghost barrel into a pair of geared Siamese twins–knocked to the concrete, they separated.  Aluminum alloy gears spinning, attempting the synthetic union.

            She turned to Zamboni and asked, “Where are they going?”  He didn’t answer–eyes carefully scanning the sidewalk.  A high-pitched whine cracked the crowded streets–Sacci and Ghost threading their way through the sidewalk on a pair of power-boards.  Four barefoot Hare Krishnas danced up to Zamboni, grey hemp robes billowing, tambourines crashing.  Ghost carried a third board. 

            “What’s going on?” Vanessa demanded, impatient to move.  She elbowed a Krishna that smelled of orange and spice.  Sacci squealed to a halt in a patch of black rubber.  Ghost slid to a stop and dropped the extra board.

            Zamboni nodded, hopping on the board.  He looked over his shoulder at Vanessa, “Jump on!” he ordered.

            Sacci and Ghost had already turned tail, their tiny power boards’ wheels spinning, frantically vying for friction.

            “Don’t move!” A shout from behind.

            Vanessa glanced back¾monk cop sprinting towards them.  “Shit,” she said and stepped onto Zamboni’s board, gripping tight to his robes as they sped away, smacking a Krishna on his ass.

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