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Chapter 18: Things to do

For a building that had been torn apart it was straight up weird how devoid it was of any particular life. The farther Cybele walked into the building the more uneasy she felt. There was no one, no employees, nor any of their attackers in sight as they went from room to room at a pace that was near painful. Despite the back wall being torn a new one almost all the interior doors were locked solid and ignoring any override. The only doors the swat team could get through easily were interior offices behind more normal wooden doors, all else was locked taking time to force open. What they were finding was a lot of overturned furniture, smashed up office supplies, and blood stains.

While blood stains were normally a good indicator of where to start looking, these were minor and sparse enough that none of them even approached a lethal amount of blood on their own. The kind of stains one would expect to be left behind by the participants of a bar fight, not the victims of a murder. Then their was the other weird part.

“Got another stairwell ma’am” A swat goon said. It might have been unfair to call him a ‘goon’ but he was basically a formless black walking armor set rather than a guy so…
“Same as the first one I take it?”

Goon nodded, “We’ll work on it, like before.”

“I wager they’ll all be like this” Cybele sighed. The stairwells had locked doors guarding them. same as other internal doors around here, but what bothered her was that once you opened the door you could only go UP. There WERE stairs down but they had a second door somehow even more high security making sure that no one went down. Cybele figured going up wouldn’t help much. Anyone who had gone up had only reported the same as the main level, it would all be catalogued of course, but she needed to go down.

Cybele got on the radio, “I want to know the minute anyone finds a way to get to the lower levels, or manages to force open the blast doors keeping us out. If we need to order explosives to get in just let me know.” Cybele knew that using bombs at a crime scene would be more than frowned upon, but if there were any survivors they had to get to them, “Also any report on the tracks leading to the woods?”

She waited for a response and paced. They had found a security room earlier and found that there were actually very few internal cameras, plenty of external ones though. That is plenty EXCEPT for one particular wall that didn’t have any doors in it to monitor, a wall that no longer existed. Whoever had blasted/pushed/clawed the wall off hadn’t been recorded by any cameras. Techs were examining the tape form the other entrances, she doubted that she’d see much. Whatever this was, was planned.

“Ma’am. A voice responded. The team following the tracks into the woods hasn’t come back yet”

“So, radio them and….”

“That’s just it ma’am, they aren’t responding to radios either.” That stopped her. A whole team was nonresponsive? “How? your radio’s should work in the woods right?”

“For several miles Ma’am. They aren’t responding though.”

Now that concerned her. A team of five officers had gone into the forest following what looked like shuffling steps and dragging marks and weren’t responding. They may have just been the local LEOs and thus prone to goofing off and being unprofessional, but still to not respond at all meant something. Best case it would turn out to just be their radios, likely bought from the lowest bidder, not working as well as they should have. Worst case? whoever, or whatever, had torn down the wall and apparently absconded with the employees had gotten the officers too, and gotten them so fast that they didn’t even have a chance to call it in first.

“What the hell is going on here? How is it all so damn empty?”

Deep in the forest the soft sound of squishing, squelching and a sound that was distressingly similar to the ripping up of carpet echoed amongst the trees before quickly dying in the foliage. The ground was wetter than normal with the blood of the former officers. All were dead now, or would be very soon. Lazarus surveyed the scene as some of the younger demons thoroughly enjoyed peeling the cops like sticky bananas. There was little point in interrupting their fun, not often that a demon gets to have a physical body of their own, and without it their play would be substantially diminished. He was slightly annoyed that they hadn’t managed to turn any of the officers, but to do that they, at the very least, needed to wire up a neural interface into the officers brains, BEFORE their bodies finished dying. Can’t possess a body when the soul’s in the way after all and the soul doesn’t leave a body that still works, and when the body doesn’t work anymore, well, it doesn’t work. Such an annoying little catch 22 preventing them from walking around in physical forms, at least before. Possessing machines works to an extent though, especially simple computers, and computer’s that could control bodies? Demon Christmas.

Lazarus barked a noise from the mic/speaker combo’s mounted in his ears and flashed his face momentarily bright to get their attention. Fun was good and all, but they didn’t have forever and the cops would be missed. “Finish up you lot. we gotta get a new base of operations set up sooner rather than later”

Lazarus could sense something very bad was coming for them in their old home, and not just the cops. Well bad from his perspective at least. The cops along with, whatever it was, would probably deal with the stragglers that had gotten locked in, seal the scar too. Their bodies were still plenty mortal after all, the flesh no more bullet proof than any other. They’d need a way to make more, and reinforce them too. That meant more hardware to make neural interfaces, more sin scars to increase his demon army’s numbers, and more ‘volunteers’ to take over.

Lots of things to do