The Shadow Fixer by Matthew S Cox

Author:Matthew S Cox [Cox, Matthew S]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781950738243
Publisher: Division Zero Press
Published: 2020-03-21T04:00:00+00:00

16

Too Many Unknowns

Seventy-eight minutes after leaving The Cat House, Kirsten flopped into the chair behind her desk.

Two back-to-back 21-47s had come in, both within twenty miles of Sector 2888, the area she’d calculated as the epicenter of the ‘ghost storm.’ At least being on the small side let her change into her uniform relatively easily in the patrol craft on the way there. Both spirits had been more mischievous than dangerous, making noise, breaking things, and generally acting like drunk college students at an off-the-rails party. The first guy ignored every attempt she made to talk, behaving as though he had earbuds in at max volume. When he caused a PubTran kiosk to explode, showering people with sparks and shattered glass, Dorian grabbed the guy and slammed him into the side of a building—as much as a ghost can be slammed into a solid object.

As soon as Dorian shook him, his entire demeanor changed from limitless drunken energy to a bewildered stare. He’d said, “Damn music” and dove into the ground, seeming angry.

The second call came in before they even made it back to the patrol craft. A ‘wailer’ as Kirsten unofficially called them, created a scene in a residential apartment tower. The ghost of a young-twenties woman parked herself in the landing of the stairway between the second and third floors, wail-crying like she’d recently witnessed her entire family murdered. Her clothes looked quite dated, a T-shirt with the faces of two men above the words ‘Tears for Fears,’ jeans, strange sneakers with strings hanging off them, and lots of bracelets.

She’d been cautious, since the spirit gave off serious energy as if quite old, sitting there and trying to talk to her. Nothing she did got the ghost’s attention. Eventually, the spirit looked up from her sobbing, made a ‘what am I doing here?’ face, and walked off. Kirsten asked her what happened to make her cry so hard, and she mumbled something about a song hitting her real hard.

Kirsten added two more Inquest records to the ever-growing pile, one for each 21-47.

Lacking the motivation to finish the reports, she drummed her fingers on the desk. Her mind wandered from feeling horrible for the crying ghost to utterly freaked out at Clover enjoying being chained to the wall by the neck to imagining Evan would be working on cit points at the moment, cleaning classrooms. He’d gotten a ton of them for trying to ‘free’ Abernathy, the old ghost who’d been haunting the PAC for years. Upon learning the man’s brain sat in the Archives, he assumed the spirit needed help. Unfortunately, the kids broke a statuette containing a poltergeist and made a bit of a mess. Evan demanded to be given Shani’s allotment of citizenship points since she wouldn’t have participated if he hadn’t begged her to. To Kirsten, it seemed like they gave him too much for what amounted to a well-intentioned accident. Kids who’d done bad things purely for fun because they enjoyed doing bad things didn’t get hit so hard with points.

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