Sally's Story (1.5-12): Overkill

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	Vincent la Fontaine panted to himself in the confines of his car. The rush of adrenalin was fading into the background of his endocrine system, the detective increasingly aware of the painful spray of shattered lead polluting his ankle. Gritting his teeth he leant into the wheel, holding the radio handpiece ready to guide the other officers in when the time came. Distant chatter between other responding cars painted the air with quiet, warbling noise as the radio gave in and out, responding officers no doubt weaving between obnoxious, radio-confounding buildings on their way west. Sighing, Vincent fussed with the fluted cuff of his pants. The bleeding had stopped itself but not before soiling the disco-white slacks with a sickening brown stain.
	“Fuckin’... thing,” he messed, popping his head back up over the dash. The wail of sirens was finally close now, Vincent stepping out of the car again. The cord stretched behind him, taught and uncoiling as he stood behind the open car door, waiting to start waving officers around and organize a cordon. The night deepening around him he breathed, clearing his head. Expanding little puffs of condensation fogged around him, joined the chatter of teeth as Autumn deepened around him. The sharp, cold air assaulted his lungs with each shaky breath, nervous eyes watching for the bounce of red and blue lights. Hands tapping at his jacket he pulled out a cigarette to chase the one he’d just stomped out. A crackle from the radio distracted him, no curls of smoke drifting up to warm his arm as he pulled it up.
	Taken care of he turned to the building, awash in the baneful sodium-yellow glow of the streetlights around. Taking an idle drag he watched the building, silent now, fuming a little stream of bitter ashy smoke into the air. A flicker of a breeze caught in his thick hair, stirring it, tiny peepholes broken in the sheet metal siding of the warehouse where stray shots had gone off and winged the containers beyond them. A catch of light danced through one of the holes, sharp eyes singling out a little wick of flame like Vincent's, his hand reaching up to re-light his struggling cigarette. All at once Vincent was washed in an impenetrable, radiative fog of heat, burning and clawing at his skin like dry, desert air. A rapturous blast cacooned him in sound, throwing him backwards and onto his rear. A roar of flame called his head back to distant memories of dropped ordnance, his singed eyes open again to see the billowing, chemical inferno consuming the building. Jumping up he scraped his hand around for the radio handset, a scream of chatter running through the line.
	"Fontaine here, he choked, shit's fuckier now, got a fire going on there." He clicked his thumb to the broader dispatch network, calling desperately for a fire truck to come and join the fray, Vincent barking new orders to sweep around the building and towards the waterline. Wherever Sally was inside she was caught in the flames, the drums on drums of chemical filth erupting into the sky in a spew of acrid, choking fire. The whole harbor area was awash in baneful orange light, the blur of red-blue police lights smothered as they swerved away. Vince guided the trickle of officers left and right, squads sent to the waterfront to sweep for the last crewmates from that barge. Sighing Vincent slumped over the dashboard, radio in hand as he watched the fire helplessly consume the building with Sally in it. Between spits on the radio and drags at his cigarette it was all he could do, the helpless robot trapped somewhere inside in the brewing inferno. All he could do was wait, the honking cry of the approaching fire department doing little to still his nerves.


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	"Pull it around, and careful in there!" One of the commanding firefighters swung his hands around in the air, the peak of dawn filtering through the soggy, smoldering remains of the warehouse. The adjoining little bar spared save for the fire-blasted bricks facing the ruins beside it. A gaggle of jacketed men ferried back and forth, rubble displaced and small, fuming puddles extinguished piece by piece. The haze of water-logged construction and chemical stink filled the air, Vincent sleepily watching the men deconstruct the scene piece by piece. The coroner's office had already arrived with their piece, ferrying bodies away from the wreckage as the detective slumped onto his wheel.
	"Vincent," a voice poked, "wake up man."
	"Whuh- C-Captain?"
	"Yeah, this was big enough for them to haul my ass out here, so wake up and get back to the station. They pulled your robot outta there about an hour ago."
	"Sh-Shit, right," the detective breathed, slapping his face awake. "Thanks, cap." Curling his way out of the harborside Vincent weaseled his car left and right, choppy suspension bouncing in potholes as he shook himself awake again, gunning the accelerator back southeast to his home precinct. Waggling his head to the radio he shook away the last hours chaos, a distant, foggy memory in his head already save for the still-stinging rash of steel spalling in his cheek and ankle.
	Pulling up to the curb he tumbled out of his car, slamming its doors behind him as he brushed past the doors and fellow officers to snake his way to the deeper offices of his home precinct. Scurrying through to the basement-level maintenance offices he swung from door to door to the robotics room, Sally's home whenever she got banged up. Reserved originally for the often-ignored radio-controlled tools of the department the singular precinct machinist found new work with their latest, aware arrival. Sprightly as always she'd hop up on the back counter of the room to have a bullet pried out from her chest or back plate, the space swabbed clean of the pulverized ceramic grit before the old cell of dense, vitreous carbide was replaced by one of the sparingly few hexagons of it on hand. Fit to fight again she'd be whipped outside in an hour, two tops, back on duty. Today though there was no robot sitting on the bench outside, waiting for her partner to fill her in. Just a silent spot beside that steel door which, with a cold knock, Vincent pressed open.
	"Hey, uh-"
	"Heya Vince," the man grunted, fiddling with a number of his finer tools as he turned to the detective. "How're you holding up?"
	"Fine enough, s'pose. Is she gonna be, well-" Vincent gulped, turning to see the immobile robot laid flat on her back and horribly singed. "Usually she's, well, up."
	"Well that's the trouble, yeah? Nandroids like her are designed to shut down into a low power mode under high temperature- they focus on cooling and protecting their systems is all, and then when the danger's gone they can wake up." The man pointed for effect. "It's that she's not coming out of it. I think that that chest plate fused together in the fire, and now I can't get it off to free up the insides and get her moving."
	"Other than that?"
	"Well... Took a nasty winger to the shoulder so we'll have to order a new joint and arm assembly, fully," he mulled, furrowing his brow. "Several rounds flattened into that plate, too, though that's no biggy. Probably some water damage from the fire department, heat damage, clothes ruined, hair's singed. List goes on, sadly."
	"Well, what can I do to help you out for now?"
	"Huh, well... I'm thinking if I can just force the plate off that'll help clear some of the gunk and so on that's in there and get things moving again. If you hear that," he added, lending an ear o the violent whirring behind them, "that's her fan working, so you can rest assured she's still kicking."
	"Well, let's hop to it then."
	"'Ere we go then." The man handed Vincent a surly prybar, pointing out he nail-thin line where Sally's chest plate joined her body, contorted together and clinking as Vince wedged the prying end in the small crack. "Alright, I'll hold her steady while you pry, and let you know when to stop, good?"
	"Good." Groaning the plate deformed under the stress of the bar, Vincent's sleeves rolled up for maximum leverage as he pressed the bar harder. Crackling the plate started to separate, beads of carbide glass sticking to the composite-aramid underside and skittering over the countertop. "Phew, sheesh."
	"'s just the start of it, but thanks for the muscle."
	"That's it?"
	"It for you, frankly. Best you wait outside Vince."


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	Far off in some other, removed office of Beacon City a doctor was preparing himself. The latest batch of dead had been portered to the city morgue for evaluation, five unidentified men laid nude and slid away into refrigerators marked grimly with John Doe, numbers one through five. The man rinsed his hands a second and a third time, a neurotic sense of cleanliness stirring his mind for the grisly work he had to do. A sniffling medical student filed in behind him, arms full of tools and implements and the five packets they'd need for the next several hours of work.
	"Recorder." Taking the proffered tape recorder the man slipped a tape in, snapping his gloves on after and laying the thing on table. With a click it spun to life, overlooking the cloaked cadaver sitting idly on the metal table. Its back arched uncomfortably around the rubber block buoying its rigid spine, the rapidity of recover and the initiation of the postmortem an unwelcome surprise for the man. "This is Dr. Colin R. Greene, attended by Mr. Javier Contreras. Time is 8:19 AM, tenth of October 1983. This recording will preside over the autopsy of one unidentified and recently deceased John Doe One, caucasian, recovered three days ago from the scene of a major police-involved shootout and subsequent fire."
	"Eugh..." The student shivered, doffing the cadaver of its cloak and exposing its gnarly, burnt-black skin to the air.
	"The decedent's body is warped due to fire damage and pursuant shrinkage, with his skin heavily burnt. There is a heavy presence of soot about the whole body. The field autopsy reported a death by gunshot in all five decedents, this autopsy will ascertain that as such and gauge the damage from said gunshots. Scalpel please." Taking the shimmering blade in his hand he started his initial incision, starting at the shoulders, left and right, and guiding down and under the pectoral muscles to a union in the center of the body's trunk. Sliding the blade through the black, damp skin towards the pelvis he joined he incisions into the stereotypical Y-shape, satisfied with the depth of the cuts as he scouted along the outside of the body. "Noting a pronounced abrasion collar, heavily burnt with skin cracked around it, on the left side of the decedent's torso," he droned, sticking a grisly pinky into the hole. "Noting for the record the abrasion collar leads to a channel angled upwards towards the heart." Fetching a saw from the unnerved student he began to grind his way through the bone of the man's ribcage and sternum before pulling the plate of bone out of his chest.
	The breadth of his insides exposed the pathologist waggled his nose, blinking at the track of damage he could trace across the corpse's chest. Sticking his fingers in he started to ply he shrunken organs apart, noting for the record the severe fire trauma and loss of volume. The student behind him scribbled nervously on the paper, so far the key injury the singular hole punched into the victim's side, a grim black dot and it's adjoining line of trajectory on the sprawled human outline on the form. His hand wormed deeper, removing the shroud of epithelial tissue as he cut the tightened abdominal wall open to expose the lungs and chest. Like a black, leaded beacon in the mess of gore before his eyes there was a shimmer of metal lodged in the man's beefy aorta, the thick muscle smashed apart by the flattened round impacted there.
	"Forceps." Reaching in he plucked the bullet out, poking and pulling around in the exploded heart tissue for the stray bits of jacket that glimmered like bits of confetti from inside. Plucking each bit of ruddy metal out he let it twinkle onto their tray of artifacts, the student noting with the trajectory line the round's terminus in the decedent's aorta. "The bullet has the rough mass of...," he weighed it on a small scale, "five-point-one-five grams, approximately. Odds are a pronounced amount of mass were lost as the round dejacketed inside of the decedent, as noted by several pieces of recovered copper jacket. This suggests the use of a full-metal jacket or jacketed hollow point round, pistol caliber, consistent with present police sidearms. Specific caliber identification will be privy to further forensic investigation. The round guided its way through the lung tissue, grievously injuring the decedent before severing the aorta, killing him by exsanguination. It is my own professional opinion that all injuries aside from this wound were inflicted post-mortem and did not have anything to do with the decedent's death." He then sighed, clicking the tape to an end.
	"Seems a bit... quick, no, Dr. Greene?"
	"Javier," he turned, careful to put his clean hand on the young man's shoulder, "we've got four more to do of these. It's better that we move quickly. I don't want you hurling in here."
	"Doctor, I-"
	"It's fine, let's just get this all taken care of. Have them wheel this one out and the next one in."
	"Do I have permission to add an additional note?"
	"What is it?"
	"W-Well, the initial report listed that all subjects were wearing high-grade ballistic armor, and all were killed by shots not striking this armor. That feels painfully deliberate, to me."
	"Eh, sure, go for it. Gonna get a drink."
	"Additional note from the observing party," the student added, the recorder snipping to life again. "Given the angling of the shot, ballistic protection of the victim at the time of the shooting, and the placement of the rounds it is my opinion, agreed with the senior party Dr. Greene, that this was a shot deliberately meant to kill. This concludes the post-mortem examination of John Doe One, time being... 9:02 AM, same date." Sighing he put the tape to a stop. Plenty of space for four more autopsies, he mused, thoug they'd need a fresh one each time. He slipped out of the theater, its bright lights pounding at his head as he fetched an assistant to return the cadaver to its place resting, frigid, in the morgue. John Doe Two would be next, then Three and Four and Five all together. He didn't know, or care to know, what state they were in. If it were anything like the first, though, he'd just be repeating the same notes over and over for Doctor Greene, scribbling the same diagrams on the forms. Four more bodies, four more bullets (at the very least), four more shots in the side and up through the lungs and into the chest cavity. All conscious, all chosen, all designed and approved by the officer behind the gun.