Halfway Inhuman -- Chapter 1

             Detective Jim Martin had a nice butt.

Not that I was looking or anything.

I was looking. 

He raided my fancy coffee stash before plying me for genetic information. While Martin waited for the Keurig to finish, I looked at his ass. Fair trade.

“OK, Nat, what about Slater, Justin, 46, male?” Martin asked, coffee mug in one hand, list of names in the other. He walked around the secretary arm of my desk and looked over my shoulder at my monitor.

I entered the name, Slater, Justin, into the Regal Insurance database and snuck a covert glance at Martin’s arms. Nice.

He was in standard garb: Khakis and a polo shirt, with his Bureau of Human Safety badge clipped to his belt. As he pointed, his bicep flexed a little. It was distracting. He worked out.

“By the way, nice cross,” he said. 

I sat a little straighter in the chair, hoping the cross brought a bit of cleavage-attention. I wore a gel-bra – the great boob equalizer – with that very hope.

The computer monitor beeped, which jolted me back to reality.

“He’s as human as we are, Martin,” I said. I picked up the cross from where it was tucked in my pushed-up cleavage, and tried not to blush. “Thanks, I just got it last night.”

I was head administrator for workers compensation screening. Since I had no boyfriend, no friends, no social life, and no hobbies, my work was my passion.

Martin and I dated.

OK, not really.

OK, not at all.

For the past six months, Martin had been my end-of-day buddy. That was it. I just sometimes pretended that he walked me to my car, then helped me into the back seat, then helped me out of my clothes. But none of that actually happened.

Martin worked a night shift, seeing as how monsters usually came out at night. He stopped by right before my office closed to mooch my kickass coffee and get information. I was heavily attracted to Martin’s massive biceps; he was heavily attracted to my massive database.

You work with the cards you’re dealt.

I hungered for the American Dream. The whole shebang: Husband, kids, house with perfect grass, maybe a dog, and a neighbor-best-friend. But after a series of failed relationships, all of which were my fault, I just sort of gave up the dream. I suck at dating. Sex is nice, but it’s not worth the drama I tend to cause.

 I had work. I had books. I had my mom. I had a battery-operated-boyfriend for anything else, and let me just say that B.O.B never left the toilet seat up.

“These budget cuts are killing us, Nat,” Martin said.

The Bureau of Human Safety was the second-most under-funded department in Florida. Schools generally took the biggest beating, but this year cops took a massive cut.  

The Inequity Act of 2021 cut down on violence against humans tremendously. Vampires couldn’t play with their food anymore. Fairies couldn’t enslave you just because they felt your eyes matched their drapes. Violence against humans had one penalty after the Inequity Act, and that was death.

Monsters are not stupid. So they backed off, at least on the surface.

Violence was down, but so was funding. That sort of stuff is proportionate. It’s like punishing the good guys for a job well done.

Martin couldn’t do his job without knowing what something was, and the DNA testing center for Florida had, like, three lab techs for the entire state. If a being was charged with any form of battery, it had to be identified by species. Humans got a trial and sentence. Monsters got a trial and execution.

As it should be.

Martin left my desk area and rummaged through my coffee stash again, probably for another pod. I stared at his rear end and let my mind wander to a perfect little world, where I baked cookies, and Martin mowed the lawn behind our picket fence, and then we had wild monkey sex in the lawn clippings.

I thought we’d make pretty babies together. I had super-pale skin, dark straight hair and almond-shaped brown eyes. He had sandy hair and blue eyes. I could totally see a girl, with her dark hair and slanted eyes, kicking the heck out of her blue-eyed brother.

“Did you say something?” Martin asked.

I froze. Crap. Did I just say we’d make pretty babies together out loud?

“Uh, no?” I said. I got really interested in data input.

He hadn’t made any sort of romantic move, and I wasn’t going to mess it up by making one. Martin was my coffee buddy. That was it.

Still… he had such a nice butt.

 “Seriously, the cuts are unbelievable. I mean, we’re backlogged on DNA testing to the point I’ll be dead before I know if I have a suspect or not,” he said.  

Martin had been promoted to nonhuman crimes. Profiling non-humans was a science he had just about perfected. But, Martin couldn’t run a good profile until he knew what he was after. Since the monsters mostly looked like us, the only way to know for sure was DNA testing. Once he had a species, he could start to develop leads on a suspect.

Some monsters committed crimes because of tradition, machismo or vengeance, and some species were just off their rockers.

I worked for the largest insurance firm in the state, and since we had private-sector dollars, I could access recent DNA test results faster than Martin. Human workers compensation had always been lucrative for most fields.

When the monsters announced they existed in the workplace, our stocks skyrocketed.

 Some employers preferred hiring monsters when they came out of the coffin, or dog house, or whatever the hell monsters hid in.

Premiums for nonhuman employees were triple human premiums. This was great business, because non-humans never filed claims, or visited emergency rooms.

The non-human workers compensation business was a multi-billion dollar industry.

For example: Mason trade, guys who hoist cinder blocks around? Filled with werewolves. Foreman thought having premiums triple was worth it, because once the weres knew they could work at full strength, the workload quintupled.

Vampires ruled in bioscience – because the dead can’t catch Ebola.

Some humans were worthless capitalists. I was always disgusted when a company gave a good job to a nonhuman, especially with so many actual people out of work. My entire company felt the same way. Royal was a leader in humanism, and did in-house rapid DNA testing for all of our clients.

At the end of the day, if you had a legitimate job in the Florida, I probably had your test results, and your employer paid out the wazoo for you if you weren’t a real person. 

My inbox chimed. My daily DNA results were in.

The lab sent the rapid DNA results at the end of the day, right around 5 p.m. It was a pretty great system, because I could get premiums locked in for the next business day as soon as I knew which species something was.

I took the spreadsheet from the lab and compiled the basic stats in a text file, then copy and pasted the data by: Name, employer, residence and type of nonhuman. That compilation was part of my daily mail-out. I sent it to the department heads of our company, and, with my boss’s blessing, I sent it to the local newspaper. The paper printed it every morning, and the paper also posted it online as soon as I sent it and sent out an e-mail alert. They called it the “Who’s Human” corner. The local paper was a very humanist organization.

The Inequity Act of 2021 did away with patient confidentiality in regards to species. Maybe I couldn’t disclose if you had a rare blood disease, but nothing protected a werewolf from being outed.

I knew. I’d gleefully outed my share.

Martin cruised over, slurping his coffee, and looked over my shoulder again. I tried not to blush. 

“Can you print that out before you send it?” he asked.

“Don’t I always?”

 I copied and pasted, pasted and copied. Martin turned on the portable television I kept in the office. When I worked late, which were most nights, I liked to catch the Church of Souls nightly program. I didn’t have a television at home, and the program was glitch on livestream services.  

I paused when I heard Reverend Ezekiel’s voice from the tiny television. “Uh, that’s their new infomercial,” I said. “I’ve seen it a few times. You can change it if you want to.”

Martin shook his head. “Nah, I haven’t seen it. Might as well check it out while you’re finishing up.”

I looked at Martin. His broad shoulders were almost their own entity. I could study his shoulders and write a scholarly article about them. His entire body was a model in fluency. I often thought he’d look delicious in his underpants.

I had a thing for men in underpants. Sue me.   

Martin watched the infomercial, which pronounced monsters as Satan’s spawn, only on Earth as a trial to the righteous. The good Reverend encouraged all viewers to be saved, now, to receive baptism and host, and to buy the All Protector, a blessed cross that had an iron core, and silver plating. It was ultimate protection against vampires, werewolves and fae. 

Martin grinned at me from across the room.

My shoulders slunk in a little. He pointed at the cross I wore.

“You run out and buy everything he’s hawking?”

 The Church of Souls was essentially a Christian monopoly, formed when the Catholic Church joined with other mainstream Christian denominations for the most important crusade in history – to save people from monsters.

The former Catholic Church never deviated from its stance Jesus is the only way to salvation, but it became tolerant of all humans and all faiths. If you were a human, and you were brought close to the door of The Faith, there was a chance you’d walk through, and that was better than damnation-by-monster.

Branches of The Church of Souls formed for Muslim and Jewish faiths. It seemed a blessed Star of David was as good as a blessed cross if you were Jewish.

 Indigenous Shaman and Wiccans connected to the Church collective, because earth and spirit spirituality could do things that Christianity couldn’t figure out by itself, like setting circles.

The world religions all banded together in 1936 under the Humanism Movement. Religion again became the cornerstone of society. People who believed in Earth, Spirit, Goddess, or God, all worked with the same diligence against real evil.

It was the biggest movement in history. Humanity came together, regardless of race, creed, age or religion, to stay safe from the evil menaces of nonhumans.

With this in mind, The Church of Souls sold a lot of safety paraphernalia.

 “No,” I snapped. “I don’t run out and buy everything. But this is guaranteed to ward off just about everything. And, well, some days I need a little more protection than others.”

Martin’s shoulders went back. “Did something threaten you again?”

“Unseelie Fae. Lost her job at Fiera as a model. Shannon-something-or-other. Keeps threatening to blow me off the planet, and then cook my head on a spit,” I said as I pasted a line on the text document. “I had a salt packet from Burger Place, and an iron paperweight. I wasn’t sure if that was enough to keep back an angry fae, so I bought the necklace. It’s better to be safe than nonhuman, right?”

He gave a curt nod.

“Natalie, if you need extra protection, or, you know a place to stay….”

My heart skipped a beat. Me? Stay with Martin?

 “Aw, thank you, Martin,” I said. “If I really get scared, I’ll take you up on it. But for now,” I hoisted my cross. “I think I’m good against most of the oogie-boogies.”

I looked at the computer screen, selected everything on the text document I’d been pecking at and hit print.

“Only one page today,” I said. “It’s on the hall printer.”

I pasted the list in an e-mail document and typed in the newspaper’s address. I blind copied our client list and my boss.

“OK, see you tomorrow, Nat,” Martin said.

I hit send. I got up for some water, and for some reason the back of my neck prickled.

Something wasn’t right.

Something about the list wiggled in my brain. I had been on autopilot and I probably made a mistake somewhere.

Some days I rushed, and I missed a line or two. It wasn’t a huge deal, but it would cost me in time later. I decided to double check the daily list and make sure I wasn’t causing a paperwork bog.

I had been pretty darn distracted ogling Martin’s butt and thinking about the act of making pretty babies.

My e-mail dinged. I opened it, and saw the e-news alert from the local paper listing today’s monsters. I hit delete.

I turned all of my attention to the documents. My eyes scanned the lines. I checked the names on the spreadsheet against the names on the text file.

So far, so good.

Martin came back in. I looked up. He looked pissed. I’d never seen him pissed.

“Something you forgot to tell me, Miss Gray?” he asked.

“Hold on a sec, Martin, I think I missed something,” I said, holding up my hand. I scrolled down the pages and checked back and forth to see what I missed. “I just need to review the list… what the fuck?”

The pricking sensation in my brain turned into a blinding light.

No. Freakin’. Way.

I looked at the line.

Oh hell no.

I heard Martin’s voice but it wasn’t real. This wasn’t real.

“Gray, Natalie, 24, Royal Insurance,” Martin said. “1456 Primrose Circle, Apt. C., Daytona Beach, classification – unidentified nonhuman.”

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