Meta Zero One (7 page)

   “He's a nasty little shit if you ask me,” Elroy said, “but he could be useful to us, test him, and see if you can work out how his powers actually work. See if we can recreate that serum? Then dissect the bastard, preferably while he's still awake. I want everything we can get from him. Opportunities like this don't come along that often, for a start that web of his would be invaluable, if we can manufacture it in any quantity”

  “Ok,” Francine looked back at Steven through the window, “shame really, I always liked him, I thought he was one of the best, but obviously not. Anyway boss, something else has cropped up while you were in there. I'm afraid you're needed in the field again. We've got another of those face ripper murders, the 12th this year, and the chief wants you on it as soon as possible. I'll deal with lover boy in there.”

Chapter 4 - Stanley gets very drunk

  Stanley was more than a little drunk. It was not really  surprising, in the last week he'd had to cope with Susie's funeral, going back to work, as well as hours and hours of frustrating meetings with the police.

  Stanley called them meetings, they were really just periods of time when he shouted at the police officers. Police officers who seemed incapable of and even unwilling to help him. Police officers who seemed incapable of doing anything about what had happened to his fiancé.

Since her death, Stanley had been in a stupor, an angry stupor yes, but still a stupor. He went though all the stages of grief at once, and was now working his way back through them again with each stage accompanied by a large Jim Bean.

  When it had first happened he had sat there for ages, holding her hand with a blank and probably very stupid look on his face. It had been a female detective who had finally managed to prise it away from him, bagged it, and then taken him to hospital.

  It was indicative of Stan's state of mind that as the police officer had bent over him to pull his fingers away he had not stolen a glimpse down her shirt.

  Perhaps grasping your girlfriends severed arm did something to your libido.

  Stan had suffered from minor burns, but they were purely superficial, which was remarkable considering the power of the beam of energy that had killed the love of his life.

  He had been released from hospital within a few hours, the only additional precaution being a small, coloured plaster that they had put on his arm. It was green when they first applied it, and he'd had very strict instructions that if it turned blue he was to drink three pints of water and get back to hospital straight away.

  For now it remained resolutely green, just as he remained resolutely blue.

  No one seemed interested in finding out who had killed his girlfriend, the waiter and a large bucket of lobsters. No one seemed to care that his life had ended when Susie's had, and he wanted to find out who was responsible.

  Sure they pretended to be interested, they made all the right noises, but Stan could tell that it was just that, the right noises.

  As far as he could tell, they had assigned no officer to investigate, had made no more than cursory analysis of the restaurant, and had only questioned him because he had insisted on it.

Stan had seen enough episodes of Csi to know how it was supposed to work.

First the area was supposed to be sealed off with yellow and black police tape. Then the deceptively attractive former model turned forensic science officer, shapely in her all in one white coverall walked the area, one step at a time, while the ageing but highly competent  detectives questioned passers by.

  Next they found clues, a piece of hair, a DNA sample, and slowly but surely they pieced together the complicated jigsaw to work out who had done the evil deed.

  None of which was happening.

The first place Stan had gone, after being let out of the hospital, was back to the restaurant. So, just three hours after the incident, the window was back in place, the table had been replaced, there was even a new waiter serving the food Stanley should have been eating.

  Three hours later, Stan had wanted to still be sitting at the table, sipping coffee perhaps, basking in anticipation of the next twenty years of frenzied sex filled marriage. Not standing in the rain, starring in through a window at two people, sitting in his seat, eating his food, having his fucking life.

  No one was investigating, the pieces of the jigsaw had almost literally been brushed under the carpet.

  Shit, shit, shit, he thought. "Another whiskey please," he said to the barman, who dutifully poured him a glass. This glass represented denial, one of the many stages of grief, and one he was revisiting for the fourth time that evening.

  It did not make sense, surely someone could not be killed in a busy restaurant and it not be investigated?

  But that had been that, no one had questioned him again. He had sat at home and waited for the call, but nothing came. In the end he had eventually made his own way down to the police station, and started to ask questions himself.

  Eventually even to his befuddled mind it became clear that no one was interested in Susie's death. When it had finally dawned on him he had been shocked into silence, but when a kindly older detective, no doubt nursing a drink problem, alongside guilt from a hundred unsolved cases, took him to one side and told him that it was out of their jurisdiction he had listened and had begun to understand.

  It seemed that any super powered  death was handled by a specialist branch of the FBi.

The trouble was no one could tell him which specialist branch of the FBi

The police were either unable or unwilling to help, he suspected that it was more like unwilling.

It wasn't listed on the FBi website either.

So he rang them, and after 30 minutes of working his way through an automated voice system he ended up at a dead end.

"Did you say Powdered?"

In the end, when shouting down the phone at the automated system achieved nothing he pressed 5 # for the option to report a powers related crime on their voicemail and the line had gone dead.

  The second time he had tried he had ended up speaking to a lovely woman at the milk marketing board. The third time someone who appeared to be Spanish, and could only say hello, goodbye and chicken in English. Somehow in their desperate 45 second conversation she had managed to use all three words, Stanley was still unsure how.

So he had given up, he had admitted defeat.

Admitted defeat for now at least, with his next drink he was determined to re-enter the angry stage of grief, and then he just wasn't going to let it go.

He had returned to work a couple of days later, and other than a  derisory collection in her name, and two or three stilted consoling conversations no one seemed to care there either.

  People were sorry yes, but Susie wasn't family, so their grief was absolutely limited. And, since only a few people even knew that he and Susie were going out, never mind engaged, their sympathy for him was also decidedly limited.

  His grief was for him alone, no one shared it with him.

  The funeral was short uneventful, and really miserable.

  Stanley stood at the back, trying not to begrudge the complete lack of attention he was getting.

  He knew it was selfish, he knew it was stupid, but he was in the feeling selfish, stupid and sorry for yourself phase of grief at that point.

  He was in fact wallowing in it.

  And, because he had no family, his parents were dead, and his sister imaginary, he wallowed in it alone.

  The crowd were mainly work people, other than a woman who looked achingly like Susie, who it turned out was her sister.

  Stanley had introduced himself but from the blank look in her eyes he knew that Susie had not mentioned him.

  So he continued to wallow alone.

  At one point he had turned away, as the coffin was lowered into the ground, and walked off crying.

  When he came back the ceremony was pretty much over, Stanley stood back and watched the people leaving in dribs and drabs, her sister was one of the first to go.

When they had all left he was just about to go back to the grave when he had noticed a man, standing well back, staring at the grave.

  He had not seen Stan yet, because Stan had been leaning against a large old gravestone, and now for some reason, he ducked down and pretended to be reading the epitaph.

  Stan watched the man out of the corner of his eye as he approached the grave and knelt down beside it. He then ran his fingers through the soft freshly turned earth mumbled something and stood up.

  He was tall, clearly well muscled, and had the chiseled good looking features of someone Stanley would have taken an instant dislike to.

  He looked like the short of man who stood in the centre of a party holding forth.

  He looked like the sort of man who women actively wanted to sleep with.

  He looked like the sort of man who knew what it was like to be in hot tub with three naked supermodels, and to make it worse he knew what to do with them.

  He looked, in short, like the sort of man that Stanley would hate on sight, the sort of man who was everything that Stan wasn't.

  He could have been a former boyfriend, Susie had been very close mouthed about any earlier men in her life. If that was true then she had made a huge step change by going out with Stan, that was for sure.

  If that was true then Stan had been punching massively above his weight.

  The man stood up and strode, he didn't walk, he strode away from Susie's grave, towards the large metal gate and out of the graveyard.

  He was quickly followed by another man, who Stan did not see until he moved out from the shadow of a tree. He was dressed in a grey raincoat, wearing a grey hat and dark sunglasses.

  He looked like a cop.

 In fact if you went to a fancy dress party as a cop, a private detective or FBI agent, then you would almost  certainly have looked exactly like him.

  Even down to the large, telephoto lens camera he had clutched in his right hand.

  On impulse Stanley followed him, and just got to the gates in time to see him get into a dull grey Volvo estate and drive off. It wasn't until the car was out of sight that Stan remembered to look for the number plate.

  Too late, but then he had no idea what he would have done with it anyway.

  Stan had wandered then, for hours and hours, before finally coming to rest in this bar.

  It was a bar that he had been to a few times before so he felt relatively comfortable. Delanies, catered for the offices around about which as far as he could tell was mainly made up of solicitors, marketing agencies and tossers.

  Still, since Stan worked in a marketing agency and had done for years he considered himself to be a tosser as well, and could toss off with the best of them.

  When he felt like it

  Which was not now.

  Delanies had two main areas. the bar, and the tables. Most of the tables were taken up with braying, yipping crowds of young men, all trying to set themselves up as more alpha male than the next one.

  The bar was long, and had rows of stools and at the moment was almost empty.

  The were in fact only three people in the bar area, including Stan.

  As usual they were spread almost equidistantly apart, with 8 or 9 seats separating them.

  There was Stan, wearing a soggy black suit, shirt and black tie, drinking his way through as much Jim Bean as he could manage.

  There was woman Stan reckoned to be in her mid thirties. She was wearing a blue business suit, short skirt and stockings. Stan noticed them specifically, seeing the line of the suspenders through her skirt, not tights.

  She had long black hair was sexy as hell, and was drinking bottles of Budweiser straight from the bottle, one after another. She was either a high class hooker, a solicitor or a captain of industry it was impossible to tell. Either way she was so far out of Stan's league that he wasn't even playing in the same country.

  And at the end of the bar was Samuel L Jackson. Not the actor, no, just a man who, to Stan's eyes looked exactly like him. In that he was a tall, well dressed, well built, black man with short hair and a slightly evil gleam in his eye. He was slowly drinking cranberry juice, which even to Stan in his befuddled state, was decidedly odd.

  The three people ignored each other, no one broke the code of silence that enveloped them.

  Then Stan, feeling more than a little drunk, and more than a little bored with his own company looked over at the woman and said, "Lady, do you mind if I ask you a question?"

The woman looked over at him and to his surprise smiled, she looked him up and down assessing him. She realised quickly that he was clearly not a threat, she was after all taller than him, and she suspected stronger, so she tipped her bottle back, drank some more bud and said, "Just the one?"

"No," Stanley thought for a second, "no, it may be more than one, it may in fact be quite a few, when I get going I have a tendency to just keep going.  So let me rephrase, may I ask you a couple, in fact any number of questions."