CHAPTER ONE
For Lorna Winters the twenty-second century arrived early. With a promotion to Lieutenant she fell to the bottom of the seniority list with last choice of shift and days off. She inherited ‘mornings’, four am to one pm with Tuesdays and every other Wednesday off. The old crowd in vice, where she worked for the last twelve years were a merry bunch. The new group, Major Case, was more formal and a lot less friendly.
Few were sorry to see the twenty-first century end. It began well enough. Then came the Great Plague in 2021 and the financial panics of 2022 and 2045. Climate changes made summers hotter and winters colder giving both sides of the Global Warming theory cause to believe they were right. Large parts of the world experienced perpetual drought. The southwest quarter of the United States became a dessicated wasteland. When America defaulted on a debt, Mexico took most of it back and few among the American citizenry cared. All of the countries in the world except for the smallest, like Luxembourg, broke into smaller parts. By 2080 the United States of America was five major regions and dozens of smaller territories, some no larger than a few square miles. The consensus was the world gave back in the twenty-first century all the gains it made in the twentieth. The only measurable advances came in the area of electronic surveillance spurred by the anti-terrorist wars. The advances spilled over into computer and information technology. For the average person food and goods were in short supply but there was plenty of news and entertainment.
Lorna lived in Orlando, Florida, capital of the Southeast Confederacy.
She knew she would regret staying up to see in the new century but how often does it occur? She drank rarely, no more than a glass of wine. It made her kind do inappropriate and irresponsible things like bite humans. Still, lack of sleep was more than enough to fog things up. A shower and cup of coffee was what she needed. She jabbed at the dark shape beside her.
“What?” grumbled a sleep besotted voice.
‘Time to get up Jerry,” she said to the immobile lump under the covers and bumping him with a hip added. “It’s Monday. Our Monday anyway.” Actually it was Saturday, but for the Bottom Dwellers it still meant another work day. “The party’s over. Time to get up.”
“For you, maybe.” Came the groggy reply. A handsome head with thick sandy hair pushed into the open. “I’m off today.” And he started to roll over.
Lorna skimmed long sinewy fingers across his naked abdomen savoring the feel of smooth skin stretched across solid muscle and meandered toward the waistband. He snuggled closer, noticeably more awake. She smelled his building arousal as he turned and drew strong hands across the creamy tan of her face. Two oversized chocolate colored eyes watched him. A quick shake and dark brown hair fell into a page boy cut. It framed an oval face in a tight bubble with short bangs turned in on the ends, in strict compliance with police department female grooming standards. She leaned across to see the time. Jerry admired the display of slim square shoulders tapered to narrow waist and flared back to small round hips. Firm white buttocks hid just out of sight under the covers.
“Keep it in your pants buster,” she said. “It’s already quarter to three.”
“That still gives us fifteen minutes,” He tentatively proffered, accompanied by soft back rubbing congealing warmth in a different, lower part.
She turned toward the sharp featured man. “Morning breath be damned.” She uttered and pressed her face to his.
Lorna Winters worked the Orlando Florida Police Department, or OPD. Last November she completed twenty-six years. Were she a human she could take early retirement in four years, but she was on Subspecies Time. The Subspecies were werewolves and vampires. Since their lifespan was about 250 years, eligibility for things like retirement and social security went by another calculation. As a werewolf, or Lycan as they preferred to be called, she had another thirty four years to go. Plenty of time since she was only sixty, prime of life.
Despite the unplanned dalliance with Jerry, she arrived at work with a good five minutes to spare. On Saturdays the Utility Allowance for hot water was thirty seconds. In January it barely warmed the pipes. She skipped the shower. The scent of sex covered her but only another subspecies could smell it and she was the only one in OPD.
A Happy New Year banner arced over the double doors leading into the squad room. It was left over from the impromptu party that began the day before at the end of day shift. She passed the rows of worn and battered desks the sergeants and detectives used, an area called the bull pen. A procession of tired and glum faces returned her wordless morning greetings. On this morning they all had someplace else they wanted to be.
Welcome to the Major Case Squad.
The door to the Captain’s office was partially open. The springs of his chair groaned when she walked by as he checked her arrival time. Captain Gregg was not happy about Lorna’s promotion. She suspected he was a closet subspecies bigot. Either that or he didn’t like to see women move up, but his boss, Watch Commander Bell, appreciated what Lorna brought to the department. He thought the OPD was lucky to have her considering there were only three thousand subspecies in the world. Most were tied in some way to their corporation, and eschewed low paying and mundane occupations such as police work. A superior sense of smell, hearing, and sight not to mention physical strength made for a useful asset.
Lorna proceeded directly to a glass enclosed office cubicle. The desk was newer and the computer was hers. She immediately drew the blinds, shutting out the world and sat for a moment to organize the day. She had taken about five breaths when a commotion erupted in the bull pen.
“He’s free!” shouted a male voice over a din of shouts, scrambling feet, and chairs falling over or slamming into desks.
Lorna opened a blind. Displaying astounding agility, a young man with handcuffs dangling from a wrist jumped from desk top to desk top, evading the grasp of twenty detectives and uniformed officers. Detainees in the holding cells along the far wall cheered him on, but those cuffed and awaiting booking did their best to stay out of the way. A couple of file clerks stood agape on the edge of the commotion.
The fugitive was not a serious offender. The night before, Vice caught him in a sweep of underground Raves. Since their holding cells were full, they sent him to Major Case where there almost always was space. He was high on Gap, the latest designer drug. It made some users immune to pain and go berserk. In this situation both happened. The man’s free hand hung crushed at his side, having felt nothing when he squeezed it through the handcuff to free himself. He raced aimlessly around the large open room in a frenetic desperation powered by a paranoid fantasy the drug conjured up in his mind.
Captain Gregg stood frozen at the doorway of his office. A sheen of sweat gleamed on his bullet shaped bald head. His lips moved but no words came out. As the next senior officer Lorna took charge. Subspecies are known for their poise in a crisis, another reason Watch Commander Bell liked having her around.
“No guns!” she shouted out. With thirty or forty officers, detainees, and secretaries running in all directions the last thing anyone needed was some cowboy popping off with a glock in the crowded space.
Lorna morphed into lycan form, evoking a collective gasp among those present. Most didn’t know she was subspecies. She exploded out of her clothes, which fell in rags on the floor. An instant later she was a foot taller, and covered with dark coarse hair. She presented a fearsome square face and fanged snout even a Gaphead must know brooked no foolishness. In her present form she couldn’t speak but the body language told him all he needed.
With fellow officers scrambling to get out of the way Lorna set sights on the Gaphead who gathered his wits enough to break for the exit, but she covered ground three times faster than he, even in his hyperactive condition, and cut him off. Blocking the exit she grabbed his arm in a yellow nailed paw. The smell of blood from the mangled hand stirred an urge imprinted on The Subspecies for two millennium. She coveted the raw and bleeding flesh. For nearly a hundred years no subspecies tasted human prey except for the occasional Feral that surfaced in the most backward and primitive parts of the world. The Corporation laboratories developed compounds. When added to animal flesh and blood products they provided complete nutrition, yet buried deep within each subspecies lingered the compulsion to hunt and kill. The corporation spent millions on rehabilitation centers, Twelve Step Programs, and research to improve the additives and offered them free to any member of the community. The programs made abstinence easier but could not eradicate an urge born in the genes.
“What are you?” the Gaphead incongruously demanded. Lorna heard that a lot. The three thousand subspecies on the corporation rolls lived quietly and rarely divulged their abilities. There were pictures and video streams of morphs that popped up on television and the internet from time to time but seeing one in the flesh was rare and always a shock to the human.
The answer was a stare of lethal deliberation. She dueled with the urge to tear into the young man’s arm. In the limited cognitive abilities of werewolf persona she knew the only way to resist was to return to human. There was a problem. She would be naked in front of the whole squad room.
Another collective gasp swept the crowd as a lithe richly tanned female form materialized from the brutish hirsute apparition filling the room only seconds before. Several of the men assumed nearly anatomically impossible postures to get a better look at the small polished buttocks and pert uplifted breasts with a vividly erect nipple on each. The Gaphead didn’t move. In human form a female lycan possessed the strength of a young gorilla. She grasped his throat with fingers like steel.
“Quick,” she commanded, “Some plastic ties.” She knew he wasn’t slipping out of those. Then she turned to the pouch of dazed flesh feebly squirming beneath. She tightened the grip. “Lie still or I’ll turn you to hamburger.”
With large eyes, he lay still until two uniforms took him away.
A female officer slipped a blanket over Lorna’s shoulders. A chill ran through her at the first touch of the coarse material .She pulled it close and stood up. “The party’s over,” she said. “Everyone back to work and I better not see any cell phone pictures of my butt floating around the internet.”
Lorna retreated to her office. She redrew the blinds for privacy and changed into a spare outfit kept handy for these situations. She morphed on the job before but this was the first time she returned to human form in public. The other times she had the benefit of slipping off alone somewhere. The squad might have an eyeful but the bad guy was put away, and that was the most important thing, wasn’t it?
The desk phone rang. She reached for the receiver as she tried to pull a sweater into place over her boobs. It didn’t work well.
“Hello,” she snapped into the phone while wrestling the garment down her torso.
“Lieutenant Winters, this is Marta in Autopsy.” Said a young female voice, “You said to call you when I knew something about the Gomez murders.”
“Yes? What have you found?”
“Your detective was correct. The wounds were not made by a weapon. A subspecies, lycan most likely, did it. I’ll know for sure after DNA results come back. You can come see for yourself.”
“I’ll be right there.” Lorna said snatching up her purse. She stepped into the bull pen, and surveyed the scene. “Geurin, you’re with me.” She shouted.
At the far end of the room a paunchy middle aged man stood up. Mike Geurin was her first partner. In those days he was a young dedicated uniform and she, a rookie, was lower than whale shit and that was at the bottom of the ocean. She learned a lot in their time together. For a time they were lovers, but when the wave of his idealism broke up on facts of the real world he became disillusioned. Bitterness and cynicism took over and he began to drink. His behavior alternated between caring and loving, and crazy and violent. When they were together, Lorna never knew which Mike would show up. Life was too short to have to cope with this crap and she didn’t want to hurt him. They went separate ways. She earned a degree in Criminology and a detective’s shield. For him it was another twenty years in uniform as he battled alcoholism and general anger issues. Three years ago he joined AA. Last year he quit smoking and made Class Three, entry level detective. Even though his impertinence and general bad manners irritated her every nerve, she was glad to see a familiar and loyal face at the new job assignment. She respected his opinion, but more important, the case in the morgue was his.
He disengaged from the company of a pretty female clerk who filled him in about the incident with the Gaphead. Mike had been in the canteen getting a doughnut to go with his third cup of coffee when it happened. He approached wearing a pair of blousy trousers hanging loosely on his frame. For him, sobering up included losing twenty pounds but not a new suit.
“I’m ready when you are, Princess.” He retorted. She hated when he said that and he knew it. No one else in the squad dared, but former mentors had privileges. He picked up a well worn and stained plaid jacket, strapped on his shoulder holster and firearm, and pulled alongside on the way to the elevator. “I hear you had a little show and tell up here.” He said by way of making conversation in the wise guy tone of his. “And me without a camera.”
“Don’t you think with anything besides your little head?” And Lorna punched the button for the morgue basement.
They stood together in silence for a moment. Then Mike said. “Seriously, Princess, good job on handling the Gaphead.” Watery blue eyes, showing the irreparable results of too much booze and late nights, looked at her. She smiled at him. His compliments still meant something.
They finished the ride in silence. When they stepped out into the morgue Lorna explained the reason for the trip. “Your victims out in Pine Hills were killed by subspecies.” She said.
Mike’s face lit up. “I knew it!” he said with an effusion of coffee breath and a broad smile that showed large tobacco stained teeth. His last cigarette was over a year ago but the nicotine refused to budge. “It had to be a bunch of Feral Woofers.” ‘Woofers’ was the derogatory term applied to subspecies. Then, realizing Lorna’s origin he tried to smooth it over. “What I mean to say is…”
“Can it Mike,” she viciously snapped cutting him off with the finality of a slammed door. Almost immediately she regretted using the tone. No question he was out of line, but against that was the weight of their years together. He protected a naive rookie from the most extreme hazing and abuse commonly administered to new recruits and taught her how to get along in the streets. He was one of the keenest investigative minds on the force, and freely shared his knowledge, contributing in large part to the success she later achieved. Over time, she outgrew him in the sad way one passes by and outgrows a mentally challenged older sibling. He could be insensitive and even downright offensive but he was still Mike. Always, remained the image of them working cases in the early days. The ubiquitous cigarette balanced between two tobacco stained fingers emitting a blue spinner of smoke. He looked at her with frosty blue eyes that were a lot clearer back then, saying in a voice both comforting and enlightening. “The evidence, Princess, let the evidence speak. And when it does, listen.”
Marta Brown met them at the door. Dressed in a tight medical jumpsuit she immediately caught Mike’s lascivious and roving eye. It may be why he was married and divorced three times. “I’d still do you, Princess.” he once told Lorna over drinks at The Hideout, a popular cop bar. Watered down cola for her; club soda for him. She looked him over, at the sagging jaw and sagging rest of him.
“I love you Mikey my boy,” she answered with a feigned brogue. “And always will, but the time for the two of us sweating up the sheets is gone.”
They passed a steel wall of slide trays. Marta stopped about halfway down. “They’re here,” she said and slid the first one out revealing a sheet covered bundle. Lorna shivered because of the cold in the room, and pulled the cover back.
_
© 2010 - 2015. All rights reserved and no exceptions. All personal works on this site are the exclusive property of Mike Arsuaga. Work may not be transmitted via the internet, nor reproduced in any other way, without prior written consent.
© 2010 - 2015. All rights reserved and no exceptions. All personal works on this site are the exclusive property of Mike Arsuaga. Work may not be transmitted via the internet, nor reproduced in any other way, without prior written consent.