The Scroll

Chapter 1

Detective Thomas Rykker was enjoying the first bite of his cheeseburger when the car’s radio squawked alive.

One-William-Sam-Three. Report of a body on or near Six-Seven-Five Mesquit Street. Please respond.

Fuck, Rykker sputtered between pressed lips, trying to swallow a half-chewed lump of greasy meat and cheese, and damn near choking for his efforts. He thumbed the radio’s call button.

Control, this is One-William-Sam-Three. Roger that. Unit in route.

Goddamn it, Rykker thought in annoyance as he plopped the burger down in several days’ worth of carryout bags and paper cups occupying the passenger seat next to him. Never fails. Four hours into my shift, nothing. Stop for dinner, and some crackhead has to stumble over some other crackhead and picks now to be a responsible citizen. Probably not even a dead body. Just some asshole who got royally wasted and passed out.

He was only ten minutes away from the reported location, but by the time he got there, investigated the scene and then waited for the meat wagon to show up — if it actually was a stiff — his dinner would be a cold mass of greasy shit.

As he started up his unmarked cruiser, a feeling like a swarm of prickly-footed bugs crawling over his brain suddenly filled his skull. It was about as unpleasant a sensation as he could think of. Similar ones had plagued him off and on since childhood, starting just after his mother died. Rykker hoped this was only going to be some strung out junkie. Or at worst, a dead one. But the nasty sensation in his head told him different.

Mesquit was in the Arts District, close to Boyle Heights. It was just south of the train yards and west of the huge, mostly dry concrete trench laughingly called the L.A. River, the eastern border of the new city of Los Angeles.

More importantly to him, the far side of the river was outside the official jurisdiction of the Los Angeles Patrol Force. Beyond this line lay a whole different world.

If the same call put the suspected body’s location somewhere closer in, it would have been handed off to a regular Adam unit. But this near to the edge of what most people called the Wilds, someone at Control decided there was a chance it needed his special kind of attention.

Lucky him.

Rykker pulled away from the curb in front of Sammy’s Burgers. It was just past 3:00 AM., and he pretty much had the road to himself. Heading south along Alameda, he passed several blocks of retail storefronts, parking garages and the occasional restaurant before these gave way to row after row of wholesale distributors. Before humanity was forced to bend over and almost kiss its sweet ass goodbye, everything from toys to car parts were sold by hundreds of companies housed in this part of the city. Most of the stuff was made in China, though a sizeable amount came from Mexico and various third world shitholes.

The world had grown very small during the twentieth century. The global marketplace became a bona fide reality. Not anymore. The world was big again. Big and scary as all hell.

Rykker made a left on Sixth Street, which was even emptier than Alameda. He soon found himself surrounded by larger warehouses, cold storage facilities, and manufacturing plants.

In the beginning, a good percentage of the buildings he passed showed signs of being occupied and in business, but the farther east along Sixth he went, the more of them were clearly closed and abandoned. By the time he got onto Mesquit and made the hard right where it turned back beneath the Sixth Street Bridge, not a single structure was in use for the entire length of the night-shrouded block. What was once a thriving commercial area was now an empty wasteland of concrete and brick.

He was not a big fan of this section of the city when it came to his job. Many of the streets, like Mesquit, were narrow little piss-ant side roads that were not much more than glorified alleys. Here and there a derelict van or truck made the lane even tighter. A bad situation to be caught in if something was figuratively and quite literally snapping at his ass.

The address of the reported location put it near the end of the block. Which only added to the warm fuzzies he already felt about the call. Mesquit dead-ended north of Seventh Street. One way in; one way out. Throw in the fact it was the middle of the night and within spitting distance of the city’s borders, and he sensed some very bad juju in the making. For a brief moment he considered radioing in and requesting backup.

Any other time he would have been riding with a partner. It was standard LAPF guidelines the detectives in the Boogeyman Squad always worked in pairs, but Alverson found himself in the emergency room several days ago with severe abdominal pain. A few hours later, Rykker’s partner was having his appendix taken out. Alverson would not be cleared to return to active duty for another two weeks.

Normally, Central would have temporarily teamed him up with another detective while Alverson recovered, even if this meant borrowing someone from another division. But the LAPF, always chronically short-staffed, was currently in deep shit when it came to filling the holes in its general ranks. Worse still was trying to convince experienced officers to join the very unique division Rykker worked in. Potentially taking a bullet or getting knifed was bad enough. Add the possibility of being drained of all your blood or torn to bloody pieces and eaten made it tough as hell to come up with a catchy recruitment slogan.

Rykker glanced out the windows on both sides. This whole section of the city looked like an industrialized ghost town. Nothing moved along the street or in the parking lots he could see, but that wasn’t surprising. Though technically abandoned, the area did house a small but constant community of junkies and addicts, along with a healthy population of well-fed rats. At this hour, however, the human vermin would be holed up inside somewhere, too stoned to appreciate the dangers of living this close to the Wilds after sunset. It would be a mistake thinking being behind warehouse walls afforded any real protection, but humans always felt more secure in their caves, whether manmade or natural.

He caught some movement out of the corner of his eye, turned his head, and saw a rat nearly the size of his boot chewing on something. Rykker grimaced at an old memory the creature caused to burble up from his collection of personal nightmares. Sometimes the night’s menu would include the body of a junkie who danced with the devil once too often. The first and only time he ever blew chunks on the job was when he saw what a swarm of hungry rats could do to a human corpse.

Rykker knew the grim desolation he was driving through was only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Just the other side of the river began mile after mile of the same or worse. True, there were pockets of sanity and order. Little towns — more like old-time villages really — dotting the Wilds here and there. But in the empty spaces surrounding these islands of civility lived the scraggs. It was the impolite but universally used nickname given to those mortals who chose to live without the close comfort of their fellow man. And without all the pesky laws and rules that came with it.

There were other things living in the Wilds as well. They were the reason Rykker couldn’t shake the bad feeling in his head since leaving Sammy’s.

***

After the Bleeds finished thinning out the human population, the powers that be tried to put back together what they could. Los Angeles was a good example.

The city had a lot going for it. Great weather, decent access to water, proximity to harbors and ports, refineries, power plants and other valuable infrastructure critical to rebuilding. The same couldn’t be said for every major city in the country. Some became nightmarish places more dangerous than the Wilds.

But even for the cities that weathered the storm, there were limits to what could be accomplished. First, there was the fact most of the world’s population was dead. By the end of the Bleeds’ three year run, civilization was on the mat and taking a long eight-count.

In Southern California, the result was pretty much everything between the local mountains to the Mexican border, and from the sea all the way to the Colorado River became a post-apocalyptic version of the old Wild West. The rule of law gave way to rule by violence. The edges of this new and dangerous frontier literally surrounded the reborn City of the Angels.

And that was just in the first few years after the pandemic.

Then came the leeches and shapers.

In a concerted act of self-preservation, most of the Southland’s populace migrated towards the center. A new Los Angeles evolved, one whose boundaries and place in the world were greatly changed.

Chapter 2

Rykker looked out the driver side window and knew he must be getting close to the reported location. He turned on the powerful spotlight attached to the car’s A-pillar. Training the beam up at the warehouses’ walls, he began looking for addresses as he slowed the car to a crawl, letting it idle forward. In the good ole days, the car’s navigation system would have told him exactly where to go.

A lot of what people took for granted before the Bleeds had since gone the way of the dodo. Things like the worldwide GPS network, for instance. According to the tech weenies who knew about this kind of modern magic, less than half of the system’s satellites orbiting earth in 2017 — Year One of the viral Armageddon — were even functional in 2039.

While it was probably a cartographer’s wet dream scenario, it was a culture shock to an entire generation who equated reading an actual map akin to having to start a fire with two sticks.

Such neglect and disrepair was not the fate suffered by all major technological systems, of course. Even while the Bleeds was at full throttle, the beleaguered governments of the world along with the rapidly dwindling scientific community tried to hold together what they could.

For example, considerable effort was put into preserving as many facets of the global telecommunication system as possible. Easiest to keep running was the aging but robust landline-based phone system. Next was keeping cellular services up and functioning, though this endeavor met with less success. There was still decent cell service in and around the L.A. Basin, but it got pretty sketchy the further out you got. The most reliable method of communication between the major cities was back to being old timey copper cable. And if you really, really had to reach out and touch someone, your best bet was finding a ham radio operator with a buddy at the other end.

The spotlight’s beam caught some signage attached to a wall fronting the street to the right. It was a good bit of luck just below the company’s name were the three metal numbers 675. If the street address was just painted on, it might have been sun-bleached away or flaked off after all these years.

Rykker moved the spotlight around as he pulled to a stop, keeping the car in gear with his foot on the brake. The entire area was damn near pitch black. The late fall sky was clear, but the moon was only a thin crescent and provided squat in the way of illumination.

Although there were some definite benefits of it not being full.

There were no streetlamps on many of these small side roads. Back in the day, lighting was provided by the huge floodlights that studded the tops of the warehouse walls and high metal poles. Problem was, the ones around here hadn’t been lit up for almost two decades.

The brilliant white beam wove a slow searching pattern as it played over the smooth concrete walls of relatively newer tilt-up buildings and the brick and block walls of older ones. Rykker angled the light down at the road, moving it along the asphalt, but the host of broken down vehicles blocked much of his view.

Some of the smaller warehouses had loading bays right off the street. Others were set back across parking lots half-filled with dirt encrusted metal hulks squatting on rotted out tires, exactly where their long-deceased owners parked them on the day these same owners died.

Taking his foot off the brake, he let the car roll forward until it came to the far side of the building in question. He didn’t like the fact Mesquit dead ended just a few hundred feet ahead of him, but there was nothing to be done about that. If things went south, he would just have to throw the car into reverse, punch it hard and hope to keep it straight enough to avoid crashing.

Rykker braked to a stop and put the car into Park, but left the motor running. Before the Bleeds, a cop would have been far more worried about some idiot stealing an idling police cruiser rather than suddenly needing to beat a hasty retreat. Now, being able to get your ass out and gone as quickly as possible could spell the difference between ending your shift vertical or ending it horizontal.

He thumbed his radio.

Control, One-William-Sam-Three on site. Exiting vehicle. Code Six.

Rykker reached to his belt and retrieved a fairly small yet insanely powerful LED flashlight, then opened his door. Before getting out, he leaned down and pulled a small lever by his seat. He almost winced at the metallic thunk as the trunk’s lock popped open. It sounded very loud to him in the lonely stillness, almost like he was guilty of an impolite intrusion. Who in the hell am I worried about hearing the noise? he berated himself, irritated at his own sudden nervousness. He was in the middle of a goddamn warehouse graveyard. He knew this was almost certainly going to be no big deal, but found himself as jumpy as a toad on a hot skillet.

He got out of the car, keeping his back against the door as he unholstered his sidearm. With the flashlight in his left hand and his gun in the right, Rykker slowly scanned the darkness all around him, eyes following the light. All seemed normal, but he could feel the tightness in his chest as his breathing began to speed up.

The mild scratching at his brain increased in intensity. It wasn’t the first time in Rykker’s life he’d received little mental warnings things might be hinky when all else said otherwise. He learned to trust these inner alarm bells, although he never voiced them as such. It was bad enough the cops who worked in the Boogeyman Squad were looked at sideways by the other divisions. He didn’t need to start any rumors about himself on top of that.

Long before the Bleeds rode into town upon its pale horse, a lot of cops were superstitious, some openly, some secretly. Ever since the world learned real monsters did in fact hide in the shadows, anything remotely smacking of the supernatural was seen as a tainted thing best avoided, including something as innocuous as heightened perceptions. No one wanted to share a beer with a spook head.

Rykker made his way to the rear of the car and opened the trunk. He holstered his pistol and quickly reached in and pulled out his departmental-issued rifle. There was a ring attachment near the front of the handguard made to hold a flashlight, which he clipped in place. He closed the lid and again looked the area over carefully a second time.

His mounting uneasiness was partially soothed by the heavy feel of steel and polycarbonate in his hands. He definitely felt more secure now that he was holding the weapon the detectives in the Boogeyman Squad called Helsing’s Hammer, or just the Hammer for short.

It was a modified AR-15 and was specifically designed for use by officers who worked the Special Supernatural Investigation and Response Division. Twenty years ago, if anyone ever seriously proposed law enforcement would have need of such a tactical weapon, and why they needed it, that individual would have been held for an involuntary psych evaluation. Now, the Hammer was considered by the those in the SSIRD as indispensable as body armor and a high degree of tolerance for the absurd.

The rifle was rigged to hold two clips simultaneously in a side by side configuration, each clip holding twelve rounds. Like the weapon itself, the ammunition was also a modified hybrid. Each .50 caliber cartridge, called Thumpers, were set into a special alloy casing allowing a new higher-energy propellant. The damage caused by a direct hit was catastrophic. Exactly as intended.

The Hammer and its heavy hitting ammunition were created for one purpose: to stop something that first appeared almost unstoppable. Police officers and military personnel in virtually every country learned a hard, deadly lesson when the first vampires were openly encountered.

Centuries of myth and legend, over a hundred years of literature and almost as long a history of movies had gotten some facts fairly close, while others were so far off the mark as to be laughable.

As it turned out, you couldn’t simply stake a leech in the heart to kill it, though kill may not have been a strictly accurate term to use. It took some serious bodily damage to achieve that goal. Decapitation was deemed generally effective, but pretty hard to accomplish when the undead shit was hitting the fan. Blowing a vampire into many smaller vampire pieces usually worked nicely, the more the better. But when all was said and done, the best bet was to blast the cranium to wet mush, no matter what other wounds were inflicted. Complete destruction of the brain, or near to it, proved to be the only sure method of putting a leech away.

Other than inflicting this kind of massive physical trauma, you either needed to burn a vampire until there wasn’t much more than bones left, or expose it fully to direct sunlight for at least a minute or so. Unfortunately, despite what the old legends said, garlic, crosses, holy water and other religious artifacts were about as effective as harsh language.

Assumptions about weapon lethality as it applied to living organisms didn’t apply to leeches, thus the rules of engagement were forced to evolve. The protocol was to sufficiently incapacitate a vampire quickly enough to have the time and opportunity to permanently destroy it from a reasonable distance.

That was the theory.

In practice, vampires weren’t courteous enough to just stand there and be shot to bits like a wooden target. They were vicious, merciless and incredibly strong. Though they appeared to feel pain, it was nowhere to the degree a human did. Rykker had seen a leech be gut shot, lose an arm and most of its face, and still keep coming.

Inhuman strength and extreme tolerance of pain weren’t the undead’s only physical advantages.

Vampires didn’t respire, only drawing breath to enable themselves to speak.

Extreme cold didn’t seem to bother them.

Poisons and toxins in any form were useless.

They didn’t bleed to speak of.

They didn’t need to eat or drink. The only thing they ingested was human blood, and even then, though mounting hunger would eventually drive a vampire mad with thirst, it wouldn’t actually kill it.

Leeches were an enemy with only one major weakness, but thankfully it was a biggie. As long as the sun kept coming up every morning, mankind would always have time to catch a breather between rounds.

Rykker checked the Hammer and then cautiously walked towards the building labeled 675 Mesquit. It wasn’t a huge structure like the warehouse across the way. Its loading docks were set fairly close to the edge of the street, about forty-five feet back.

Swinging the rifle slowly back and forth over the ground, he shined the flashlight behind and around the trucks and vans. Nothing. After making a sweep along the length of the building and finding no body, he approached the dock platform. It was chest high, with seven doors strung along in a row. The top of the dock itself was littered with old debris, but not enough to hide something as large as a person.

Rykker could feel the sweat running down his sides. His head looked like it was on a greased swivel, eyes trying to see everywhere at once while he strained to hear any noise, no matter how faint. He was starting to regret his decision to go out on this call alone. The scrabbling sensation of a million tiny claws was stronger than ever. Something was way off here. He could sense it in his gut as well as his head, but so far the evidence didn’t support his growing anxiety.

In all the years he served on the Force as a uniformed cop and then as a detective in regular robbery-homicide, he had never been what he called truly frightened. The eyes-wide, ready-to-fill-your-boxers kind of scared. Sure, there were times when the immediate situation got tense as hell. He’d been shot at no less than six times, two of those being an all-out firefight with scragg gangs. On two separate occasions some dickhead tried to stick a knife in him. He’d even been attacked with an axe once, though the nut job wielding it was so whacked out, he ended up burying the blade in his own bare foot after taking a wild swing. Which was actually kind of funny. The perp howled like a shaper shot in the ass with a burning arrow before Rykker tased him into a more cooperative frame of mind.

However, since joining the SSIRD, he’d felt cold, gut-squeezing fear on plenty of occasions. Intellectually, he knew a human with bad intentions and a loaded gun could make him just as dead as any leech could, but it was far more horrifying to imagine some cold, soulless thing ripping his throat out and draining him dry like some thirsty fat kid working a juice box.

Rykker shook his head against this dark train of thought, angry for creeping himself out.

Come on, dipstick. Get your noodle back in the game. Let’s find the body, if there is one, get it called in, and then go find a nice, crowded, well-lit place to finish your shitty cold burger and fries.

The adjacent warehouse to his left was fronted by a parking lot butting up to 675 Mesquite’s north side. There were no cars parked up against the wall, giving him a clear view all the way to the back of the lot. He saw nothing resembling a body lying on the ground. The structure to his building’s right was separated from it by a narrow little alley only about twelve feet wide. He sighed heavily when he saw it, his instincts telling him if there was a body, it was going to be in that lightless hole.

Rykker moved slowly towards the alley. He stopped a few feet away from the opening and shined his light inside. The high powered beam showed the concrete canyon ran the entire length between the two buildings.

Fuck me, he whispered to himself, peering with dismay into the black crevice. It seemed to go on for ten miles. No cop liked having to go into a dark, closed-in space that might be harboring a dangerous suspect, but the detectives who worked the Boogeyman Squad were given special reason to fear what they could not see.

He looked at the ground near his feet, then slowly let his eyes travel forward, searching for anything out of place as he swept the light in a slow zig-zag pattern. There was trash strewn across the alley’s floor. Over the years the wind managed to deposit everything from plastic shopping bags to an old broken umbrella.

The light abruptly stopped moving. He leaned forward. Something larger and more substantial was lying in the piles of debris, about thirty feet from the mouth of the alley. To Rykker it looked about a hundred yards away. Ignoring his own jitters, he trained his flashlight steadily on the object. It only took one long look to see it was a body. Another to figure out it was on its back, feet pointed towards him.

Rykker took a deep, calming breath as he girded his mental loins, gave a quick look around him in all directions, then stepped into the slot formed by the pair of buildings. The AR-15 was held up near his chin in a shooting stance, index finger resting on the side of the trigger guard. He kept bringing the barrel up to see further down the alley before angling the light back to the body. Approaching slowly, Rykker began to make out more details as he got closer. Every few seconds he looked behind him to make sure nothing was sneaking up on his flank. His jaw was clamped so tight it was a wonder his teeth didn’t crack. There couldn’t be a worse position to be in: effectively trapped in a dark, long, deep trench with limited exit points.

Several more steps got him to the form lying in the accumulated garbage and rat shit of the past twenty years. He shined his light down. What he saw made his blood run ice cold through his veins. A small part of Rykker’s mind absently registered the skin of his arms rippling with goosebumps.

That it was a corpse and not simply an unconscious person was instantly obvious.

The body was torn open from the base of the throat to the lower abdomen, though the term torn open didn’t really convey the carnage he was seeing. The entire front of the torso looked as if it had been savagely carved out with a giant ice cream scoop. The whole rib cage was ripped away, leaving only broken white stumps poking up at the edges of the cavity. The lungs and heart were gone, as were most of the other organs. Rykker wasn’t sure what pieces might still be here and what was missing. The victim was wearing what was left of a shirt and leather vest. The front of the shirt was shredded apart, while a large section was ripped from the right side of the vest. Rykker assumed the missing section must have been torn away along with most of the torso. On a hunch, he flicked the light a few feet ahead to both his left and right. Not far away lay a large mass of flesh, rib bones and slick globs of what he gathered were the eviscerated organs, all flung about ten feet further down the alley. That answered one immediate question. Though the medical examiner would have to verify, from the size of the dough-colored slab and the number of tidbits lying around it, Rykker would bet all of the stiff’s individual parts could be accounted for. Which eliminated predation as the motive for the attack. This thought suddenly made Rykker look back down at the victim.

He saw there was almost no blood on the ground or even in the body. Given he found almost all of the corpse’s parts strewn nearby, it was a logical assumption the attack happened here, so there should have been a bucket load of blood splashed all over the place. There also were no signs of rats, flies or insects feeding on the remains.

The flashlight’s beam moved up to the body’s head and face.

Jesus, whatever wanted you dead wasn’t messing around, Rykker thought in grim wonder.

The top of the skull was missing from just above the brow. Bits of greyish brain matter glistened dully in the light, clinging along the edge of the ragged hole like old pasta stuck to the rim of a bowl. There wasn’t much of it. Rykker guessed if the alley was more thoroughly searched, the rest would be found splattered about.

He stared at the face. It was clearly that of a young male in his late teens to late twenties. The beam showed the eyelids were only half-closed, exposing enough of the irises to see the telltale red striations radiating out from the pupils. The mouth was open and the lower jaw hanging slack in a certain loose way telling Rykker he was looking at someone who wasn’t ever getting back up. Worse, both lips were pulled back in the familiar rictus of those whose death was a sudden and violent one. Rykker noted how long the upper and lower canines were. He also knew if the thing lying at his feet was still alive, those teeth could become a hell of a lot longer.

This wasn’t a human corpse. It was a dead vampire. Rykker couldn’t have been more surprised if he stumbled upon the mutilated remains of Santa Claus.

What the fuck happened here? What could have killed a leech with such obvious force and violence? Vampires sometimes fought among themselves, just like humans, but they didn’t kill each other in this manner. In some cases a pack of shapers might take down a younger vampire, but this chewed up leech looked like he was attacked by a goddamn t-rex.

Rykker didn’t bother checking for any identification as he would have done with a human victim. There wouldn’t be any, and besides, there would most likely be no family to notify anyway. There was no reliable way to tell how old the leech was. He might