“No! I’m not moving in. I mean she might kill me,” said Dan.
“Oh. Oh. Gotcha.” Ollie nodded. “But I thought you were already dead?”
Dan reached for the handle again. “I can always get deader,” he said, then he left the car and threw the door closed behind him.
“OK, then be careful!” Ollie called through the glass. “I’ll just wait here.”
Dan was almost at the gate when a thought struck her.
“I don’t know where Nedran lives!” she shouted, but if Dan heard her, he didn’t let on.
The Gomos had already been standing at a sort of attentive slouch when the Exodus had pulled up along the street, but as Dan drew closer he could see them both stiffening, their muscles tensing beneath their impeccably tailored suits.
Neither of the creatures carried a weapon. When you were eight feet tall with scales, horns and a lethally toxic overbite, weapons were largely unnecessary. A raised eyebrow was often forceful enough to send any would-be attackers packing.
Dan’s gun was in its holster, but unfastened. Paradise wouldn’t be happy if he killed any of her underlings, and a stun shot would do nothing against these guys. Fortunately, Mindy had a few other tricks up her barrel he could call on, if needed.
He watched the Gomos flick their tongues across their teeth, their eyes narrowing and fists clenching as Dan approached.
Yeah. Those tricks of Mindy’s would definitely be needed.
But not yet.
“Catch,” he said, flicking the parking token towards the first Gomo. Its eyes followed the flash of silver, its head tilting back as the token flipped higher and higher.
They were tough, yes. But smart?
No.
No, not really.
Dan drove a fist into the Gomo’s exposed throat, then followed up with a thunderous knee to its groin. He finished with a powerful right cross to the thing’s jaw as it slumped to its knees, vomited up its breakfast, and fervently regretted not having been born a woman.
The other Gomo lunged, teeth snapping. Dan rammed the more feminine of his forearms into its mouth, shoving it all the way back into the thing’s jaws. It could bite through bone without any trouble, but there was no way it was getting through a Durium rod.
There was the venom to consider, of course, but that required blood flow to move it around the body, and Dan had been out of the red stuff for a while now.
Throwing himself forwards, he slammed the Gomo against the metal fence. Once. Twice. He heard the Durium rod groaning between the thing’s teeth, and yanked the arm free, taking a few molars with it.
The Gomo pounced again. This time, Dan spun around, letting the weight of the reinforced woman’s arm lead the way. It struck the Gomo across the temple with a faint but unmistakable clang. The monster staggered, its eyes glazed.
Dan leapt onto its back and wrapped both arms around its neck. The Gomo quickly found its second wind, and it was Dan’s turn to be pounded against the fence. He held on, hands locked, the Gomo’s throat constricting in his grip.
The guard twisted, driving an elbow into Dan’s ribs.
It reached back over its head, grabbing for him, but only succeeded in knocking his hat off.
It turned. It flailed. It hammered him backwards into the fence again.
Fonk, how long could these things hold their breath?
Not much longer, as it turned out. A second later, it was on its knees, which gave Dan the leverage he needed to squeeze the brute the rest of the way into unconsciousness.
Taking hold of its arm, Dan dragged the guard to one of the imposing brick pillars beside the gate, and pressed its finger against the security scanner. This was more difficult than it sounded, and involved quite a lot of frustrated swearing.
Finally, the panel chimed, and the gate swung inwards.
Dan dropped the arm, then retrieved his hat. It had been partially trampled during the scuffle, and he spent a second or two battering it back into shape, before depositing it back on his head.
That done, he glanced over at the car to make sure Ollie hadn’t moved – she hadn’t – then pressed on through the gates just before they swung closed again with a firm and mildly-threatening clunk.
A number of Tallosh trees lined the driveway leading up to the compound. Dan ducked beneath the first, using the shade and the trees’ long, drooping vines to make his way towards the main building without crunching across the gravel.
The trees were deliberately put there to tempt anyone trying to sneak in, he knew. The spores of the Tallosh tree, when inhaled, induced paranoia and the occasional nightmarish hallucination. By the time any would-be intruder made it to the compound, they’d be clawing their own eyes out in fear.
Inhaling them required breathing, though, and Dan hadn’t felt the urge in a good long while now. He exited the trees exactly as paranoid as he’d been when he’d entered them – just paranoid enough.
He paused beneath the canopy of the final tree, and considered his next move. There was a telltale shimmer over all the windows that told him they were shielded against blaster fire. The windows themselves were too small for a dramatic leap through, although that probably wouldn’t have been the best idea, anyway.
This was the problem, as he saw it: Paradise was somewhere within her compound, and almost certainly in her office, where she spent the majority of her time. From what he could remember of the two occasions he’d been here before – once when alive, once after, and neither time of his own free will – the office sat in the center of the building, next to a small enclosed courtyard.
Getting to the courtyard without going through the building was impossible, and even if he could, he’d likely have the same problems with that window as he had with these. That meant a sneak attack was pretty much off the table.
That left him with two options – a direct assault through the front door, or something else.
He much preferred the idea of something else, but was struggling to think of what that something else might be. If he’d had certain equipment from his storage unit, he might have been able to portal his way inside, although without an accurate diagram of the inside layout, there was no saying where – or who – he might end up in.
“Ah, fonk it,” he muttered, reaching into his coat. Mindy slid from her holster, and he checked the battery pack again, just in case. Still good, although if the next few minutes played out the way he thought they were going to, he’d need to charge it soon.
After a quick check to make sure no one was coming, Dan ran for the ornate double-doors and threw his weight towards them, shoulder-first. They flew open too easily, suggesting they weren’t even properly closed. Off-balance, Dan’s face met a plush carpet, the friction burning off patches of skin on his chin, nose and forehead, all of which had already seen better days.
The clatter of the doors hitting the walls reverberated around the entrance hallway. There were a number of things of interest in the hallway, including some sculptures, a few antiques, and a number of heavily-armed guards. Only one of these things interested Dan at that particular moment, although he was immensely grateful for the presence of the others. Paradise loved her antiques and sculptures, and none of the guards would be keen to accidentally hit one in a shootout.
It was Dan’s only advantage. Eight guards. Eight guns. But none of them likely to start shooting.
Dan got to his feet.
The guards started shooting.
“Son of a—” Dan hissed, hurling himself into cover behind the closest sculpture just as the floor erupted at his feet, and the doors, which had started to swing closed again, were peppered with holes at his back.
As luck would have it, the sculpture was a heavy, chunky twist of metal, which served as a pretty effective shield. Quite what it was supposed to be, he wasn’t sure. Some kind of rodent, maybe? A car? An abstract representation of the futility of existence? Probably one of those.
Useful, though, whatever it was.
He raised Mindy in
front of him. Eight guards, all of various off-world origins. There was at least one Gomo in there, an Igneon, and six other equally capable-looking and violent types. Ideally, Dan didn’t want to kill any of them. He wasn’t ruling it out completely, but it wasn’t his preferred choice. Stun shots would do nothing, slowdown rounds might work, but they took a lot of charge, and he probably wouldn’t have enough power to get through everyone. Besides, the effect didn’t last long, and by then he’d be completely out of charge.
Part of the sculpture hit the floor beside him as a spray of blaster-fire hammered against it. Dan winced. Paradise wasn’t going to like that.
Of course, she wasn’t going to like what he was about to do to her carpet, either.
“Mindy,” he said. “Brown noise.”
Mindy’s cylinder spun and locked. Dan rolled clear just as the expensive sculpture became worthless scrap metal. He fired as he moved, and while nothing whatsoever seemed to happen at the gun end, the effect on the target was instantaneous.
In the middle of the entrance hallway, the Gomo shizzed himself.
And this was no run-of-the-mill shizzing of oneself, either. This was a full-scale eruption. The helpless guard grabbed for his stomach, yelping in wide-eyed panic as his bowels explosively ejected their contents with enough kinetic energy to force it all through the fibers of his suit pants.
Dan fired again. Something tall and fish-like grimaced in horror. It emitted a sound that was somewhere between a howl of anger and a wail of anguish, then a fiery shizz-fountain propelled him a clear foot into the air, before returning him to the carpet as a limp and sobbing mess.
One of the other guards, sensing which way the wind was blowing – and almost certainly smelling it, too - turned away, but a sudden churning in his guts told him he was too late. He staggered forwards, a spray of molten excrement propelling him towards another of Paradise’s treasured sculptures. This one was far less robust than the one Dan had taken cover behind, and shattered beneath the guard’s weight as he fell onto it, shrieking with impotent rage as what felt like everything from his sternum to his hips exited through his ass.
A stray blaster shot caught Dan low down on the leg, and carved a slice of rotten meat from his calf. He gave the shooter a double blast of brown noise, and savored the sounds of his panic as the poor guy practically excreted himself inside-out.
The rest of the guards met a similarly messy fate. Dan stepped between their writhing bodies, carefully picking his way between the hot, steaming puddles of runny sludge. He often lamented the gradual deterioration of his senses he’d been experiencing since returning to life. Right now, though, was not one such time.
“Sorry about that, boys,” he said, tipping his hat to the room in general. “I’m told it passes in an hour or so.”
A chorus of parps, squelches and groans accompanied him across the hallway to another set of double doors. Unless they’d changed the place since his last visit, Paradise’s office lay just beyond those doors.
There was a high probability that she’d heard all the shooting, shouting and shizzing, but from what Dan knew of her, Paradise spent a lot of her day jacked into the networks, brokering deals, ordering hits, and doing whatever else crime lords did to earn a dishonest crust.
If she was jacked in now, she wouldn’t have heard a thing, and would have no idea he was coming.
“Mindy, stun shot,” he commanded, as he approached the door.
Once the gun was ready, Dan listened for any sign of movement from within, then stepped back and aimed a foot at the lock. He was about to throw his weight into the kick when a voice rang out from inside.
“Oh, for goodness sake, Mr Deadman. It’s open.”
The voice took him by surprise, and he awkwardly aborted the kick, mid-swing. He raised Mindy in front of him, ready to fire, then thought better of it and slid the gun back into its holster, instead.
The polished doorknob turned with a faint click, revealing a room dripping with decadence. The floor was a dark wood, polished to a mirror-like sheen. The furniture looked like something from a bygone age. A better bygone age, where people cared about what they made and what they bought.
The window – which wasn’t actually a window, at all, but a glass door than ran all the way from the floor to the ceiling – stood open, allowing a breeze to play across the luxurious purple drapes and the soft lilting of late-evening birdsong to fill the room.
Paradise herself sat in a high-backed armchair, watching the door. Someone encountering her for the first time would be forgiven for thinking she had recently melted. The skin on her face and neck hung in droopy folds, suggesting her head had once been three times its current size. The sagging skin pulled her features down, so the top half of her eyes looked half-asleep, while the bottom part stared with bloodshot wide-eyed intensity.
She had tried to fight the effect by scraping her long gray hair back into a bun that was so tight it raised her eyebrows in an expression of indifferent surprise.
Her body, mercifully hidden beneath a beige leisure suit, was cursed with the same skin-sag as her face, and judging by the rolls and bumps under the suit’s velour material, even more so.
Her right leg was crossed over her left, the furry slipper on her foot bobbing gently with impatience as she waited for Dan to stop looking her over.
He didn’t leave her waiting long. It wasn’t like any of this had come as a surprise to him. He’d seen Paradise before, and had known what to expect.
What did come as a surprise was Paradise’s guest. She sat in a chair that looked just uncomfortable enough for it to be deliberate. She, too, smiled at Dan as he entered.
“Hey!” said Ollie, bouncing excitedly in her seat. “Fancy seeing you here.”
Dan blinked.
He didn’t really know what to do next, so he blinked again.
There was a damp-sounding phurrp from out in the hallway. Dan used his foot to close the door behind him, blocking out the worst of the noise.
He blinked again a few times, as he looked from Ollie to Paradise. The old woman gestured to a third chair. It was a subtle movement – barely a movement at all, in fact – but something about it told Dan it would be wise not to argue.
“Quick as you can, Mr Deadman,” said Paradise. “We were just about to have ourselves a nice cup of tea.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Dan watched a thin stream of glistening liquid pour from an ornate teapot into the first of three cups. The pot was shaped like some kind of animal, or maybe an alien species he was unfamiliar with. The handle was its tail, and the spout its beak. There were two eyes on top of the lid, staring at slightly different angles.
It was fonking hideous, Dan thought. Which, from him, was really saying something.
“How do you take it?” Paradise asked, flitting her heavy eyes towards him. He was sitting in the chair, which was exactly as uncomfortable as he’d imagined. Not uncomfortable enough to make the sitter want to stand up again, but enough to make them carefully consider it and keep them distracted for the entire duration of their time sitting in it.
“I don’t,” said Dan.
Paradise made a sort of, “Hmf,” sound that somehow made it clear he was having tea, and there would be no further discussion on the matter. Sure enough, once she’d poured the first two cups, she moved on and filled the third.
The crockery all sat on a polished silver tray atop a small folding table between Paradise and Ollie’s chairs. The old woman slid one cup a few inches closer to Ollie and gave her an encouraging nod. She passed Dan another cup, but the delicate handle was too fine for him to fit his fingers through.
“Try the other hand,” Paradise suggested. She took a slurp of her tea and watched him over the rim of her cup as he changed hands.
He didn’t give her the satisfaction of asking how she knew about his woman’s arm. She knew all sorts of things. It was the whole reason he’d come here, after all.
“A right job you did on them gu
ards,” Paradise said. “I’ll have bouquets sent to the widows.”
“No one’s dead,” said Dan.
Paradise slurped again. “No one’s dead yet,” she corrected. “I don’t take failure lightly.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I wouldn’t presume to come to your office and tell you how to run your business, Mr Deadman. Please extend me the same courtesy.”
She held him with her droopy-eyed stare for a moment, then smiled and waved the conversation away, as if consigning it to the past. “Your new friend is fun, isn’t she?” Paradise said, tilting her head a fraction towards Ollie.
Ollie, who had been sniffing her teacup and eyeing the dark liquid with suspicion, looked up and smiled when she realized she was being talked about. “Huh?”
“How did she get in here?” Dan asked.
“I invited her,” said Paradise. She sipped her tea again. “She’s very interesting.”
Dan gave a non-committal shrug that suggested the jury was still out. “Just helping her get on her feet.”
“How thoughtful,” said Paradise. “I hope that works out for you,” she added, in a tone that suggested it almost certainly wouldn’t. “You could always leave her here, if you like. It’d be nice to have a young…”
She looked Ollie up and down and smiled, not unkindly. “Person around the place again.”
“I promised a friend of mine I’d take care of her,” Dan said. “But thanks for the offer.”
Paradise nodded, slowly. “How is Nedran these days? Retirement treating him well?”
Dan was caught off-guard by that, but recovered quickly. “Well enough.”
The old woman made a clucking noise with her tongue that suggested some sort of approval. “You haven’t touched your tea,” she said, looking at both Dan and Ollie in turn.
Dan glanced down at his cup, but made no move to drink it. Ollie, on the other hand, brought her cup to her lips and knocked the contents back in one go.
Her eyes immediately went wide and her free hand went to her throat. “Ooh! Ow! Ow!”
“Careful. It’s hot,” Paradise pointed out, a little belatedly, Dan thought.
Dial D for Deadman: A Space Team Universe Novel (Dan Deadman Space Detective Book 1) Page 9