Koontz, Dean R. - Flesh In The Furnace (v1.0)

by Flesh In The Furnace(Lit)

  "Turn back," the idiot said, voicing his first inclination. He was afraid, and he wanted only to recapture the idyll of the last few hundred empty miles.

  "Wait," Belina said, studying the place.

  He waited. He had confidence in her.

  "Maybe he's right," the angel told Belina. "If he gets caught, they'll put him away and uncreate us. It might be years before anyone buys the damn Furnace. Perhaps never."

  Bitty Belina had been watching the city intently, as if it were a mirage that would vanish under a steady gaze.

  It was still there.

  "Do you see any movement?" Belina asked.

  The idiot and the angel turned to examine the city.

  Snow sifted down. A gentle breeze whisked the white stuff in eddying currents over the ice pack.

  Otherwise, all waa still and quiet.

  "Nothing," the angel said. "So what?"

  "We've been on this road for weeks. In all that time, the only thing we passed was the cargo van with the gypsy driver." She looked at Sebastian to see if he remembered the way he had handled her. She could still feel, or imag­ined that she could, the place where her spine had snapped in two, the pain that had fountained through her before the quick blackness of death.

  Sebastian was oblivious to her accusing scowl. He still watched the dead city.

  "I still don't see why we shouldn't get out of here before someone sees us. They can't have many visitors. You've said so yourself." The angel's wings were open. They shiv­ered, as if he would leap into flight, as they always did when he was frightened.

  "Doesn't it seem odd?" Belina asked. "No traffic on such a marvelous road, and now it ends here-as if they built this just to reach one city. There isn't any bypass here like around other towns."

  "So what?" The angel grew more impatient.

  "Think !" She was standing on the folded blankets now, leaning forward to look at the metropolis. "They built this highway to get here, spent a fortune on it. And now no one uses the thing."

  "And we look all the more conspicuous for that," the angel insisted. "They're probably sending the police out for us now."

  She sighed, shook her head, smiling ruefully. "What I'm trying to tell you is that I think the city's empty. Under­stand? No one lives there any more, if anyone ever did. If it was occupied, this road would be in use:"

  "A ghost city?"

  "Exactly »

  Sebastian looked on the place with more interest. Wind. Snow. Clouds shredding across the points of the towers.

  Here and there, on the few large windows in the towers, the racing clouds were reflected. Nothing else moved. It some­how calmed his nerves.

  "Why build a city and never use it?" the angel wanted to know.

  "They probably intended to use it. They thought that when everyone came home from the stars, there would be need for places like this."

  "And no one came home," the angel said.

  "That's right."

  "Pertos did," Sebastian said.

  They turned to look at him.

  "Who?" Belina asked. She was tense, standing on her toes.

  Sebastian looked at her, at her golden hair.

  "I don't remember," he said.

  "That's better," she said.

  They watched the city a while longer, to be sure.

  "Now what?" the angel asked.

  "Drive ahead," Belina told the idiot. "Let's see what happens."

  Sebastian hesitated only a moment, put the truck in gear and drove down the last length of the highway which now seemed more like an avenue as the curbs rose on each side until they became walls higher than the truck itself.

  The road gradually began to descend as they neared the walls of the city. Hidden detection circuits registered the pressure of the truck's air cushion against the roadbed. Photoelectric circuits were interrupted by their passage, and this data was passed on to the city's central traffic computer. The computer woke from the non-think that possessed it most of the time these days. When they were within a hundred yards of the blue stone facade, a section of wall rumbled open before them. Beyond, there was a well-lighted, wide avenue that bored away into the city itself.

  If they continued, there could be no backing out. That gaping entrance was the point of no return.

  "Go on," Belina directed.

  He did not want to.

  But he did.

  The stone walls slipped over and around them. The entrance hissed shut behind as they were bathed in the soft

  amber light of the glowing panels in the ceiling. Their engine was switched off by remote control. They settled to the floor. The rubber parking rim of the truck squealed as it made contact with the black rubber road. Instantly, the mammoth conveyor system jerked to life and carried the truck forward to the maw of an elevator large enough to accept it. Then the belt stopped; everything was still and quiet, as if it were now their turn to do something.

  "Everybody out," Belina said.

  By the time they were on the pedestrian walk, the pup­pets in the cargo hold had also disembarked.

  "Now what?" the prince asked.

  A computer-tape voice spoke to them through the public address system speakers installed in the ceiling of the public walkway. "Please complete the provided form at the arrival desk. Your vehicle will be returned to you when you request, upon identification of fingerprints."

  The truck was pushed into the elevator by the beltway. The lift doors closed behind it. It was gone, along with all their belongings and what food they had with them.

  "You can't do that!" the prince shouted at the invisible speaker, his hand upon his sword.

  It was the prince's fate to be constantly challenging opponents against whom he could never win a battle. Con­sequently, his rashness and bluster made him less formida­ble in the eyes of the puppets he could handle.

  Bitty Belina only smiled. Every time he made a fool of himself, he gave her a firmer hand with the others and ruled out the possibility of making a successful coup against her.

  "Damn!" the prince snapped.

  Wissa giggled behind her hand.

  Belina filled out the arrival form. She knew the idiot would not be with them when they left. Three times the computer requested another chance to register her prints, uncon­vinced that such small fingers could be real. At last it was silent, as if disturbed but satisfied.

  "Now?" the angel asked.

  "Now," Bitty Belina said, "let's explore"

  The city was a palace, though much larger.

  Every street, park and apartment had been designed for gracious living. The wood paneling was dark and well-oiled and generously used. The fabrics were thick and lustrous, the brocades rich in texture and story. The stones were polished or carved in intricate designs that related the tales of Eskimos. Everywhere the eye rested there was beauty, sometimes subtle and gentle, sometimes blaring and bold. There was no dirt wad no sign of corruption to mar the loveliness.

  There were pedways and simple sidewalks, escalators and elevators and inclined plains for transportation.Thoughthe city was large, one could get about in it as fast as one might wish. Or as slowly. The city had been designed both to facilitate commerce and to offer the casualness of less sophisticated eras of civilization. Though the hustle and bustle of modern living might appeal to some, it was anath­ema to others.Thatwas one thing that had driven so many from Earth, into the stars.

  Many restaurants had self-help menus and food delivered by robotic beltway in the walls. Some of these still had food that was edible and served it with a sense of style and culinary finesse. At least they would not starve in all this splendor.

  Most of the stores were empty. The few that contained stock were mostly those which carried nonperishable goods, things that would not decay or go out of style from year to year. There were booktapecenters stocked with classics and proven titles. There were back-projection live­art stores with hundreds of tapes in stock. The only stores with clothes were the sporting-goods houses
where Arctic rigs could be purchased.

  The only life they encountered in the streets of the city were the complex maintenance robots. These came in all sizes and shapes, according to function, and were only minimally conscious. If the metal janitors noted the presence of living creatures, they cared little.

  They were safe here, safe from the authorities and the Furnace. Though the prince disagreed that it was best to settle in, he stayed with them. There was really nothing else he could do. In short order, they had established themselves in the most comfortable apartments they could find.

  Under Belina's watchful eye, Sebastian transported the Furnace frown the truck to her apartment, though he could see no reason for that now. He placed the pieces together in the familiar pattern and was dismissed.

  He was happy these days. There was a slow, eventless routine to life in the city that appealed to him.

  He woke. He ate. He dressed and walked. Sometimes he saw the puppets and sometimes he did not. In the evening, he ate with either the third suitor, the chubby one he liked, or with all of the puppets in some neighborhood restaurant or other. He saw Bitty Belina quite a lot, and if she seemed often to be trailing him as he rambled shout the city, he did not notice.

  There was only one smear on the even beauty of the first two weeks. It was the evening of the fourteenth day in the abandoned city. He had been walking, nosing through the closed shops as he had nosed through countless theaters in his years with Pertos. He was returning to his apartment, sleepy, and heard the argument in Belina's room: small voices raised in anger.

  The two loudest voices belonged to Belina and the little prince. Since the idiot didn't care for the prince and mis­trusted the man, he thought immediately that Bitty Belina might be in trouble again. He remembered the prince's sword and how it had severed Wissa's head from her shoul­ders in so many performances. In the back of his mind, he also remembered the steel sword of Alvon Rudi which had been a danger to Bitty Belina months earlier. The two sword images mixed, fused and became one in the muddled confusion of his mind.

  "Goddamn you!" Bitty Belina squealed.

  He hesitated no longer. Grasping the handle of the door, he swung it inward, prepared to save her again as he had saved her before. He was swelled with anticipation and eagerness to prove his value to her.

  But it was not necessary.

  He stood there, feet spread wide, trying to take in the scene and understand it. There had been an argument about something, but it seemed to have been more verbal than physical. No one was injured or seemed ready to fight. No one was naked. No swords of any kind were visible, except that sheathed on the prince's side.

  All the puppets had turned to look at Sebastian as if he were responsible for their feud.

  "What the hell are you doing here?" Bitty Belina cried. She ran at him, as if she intended to pummel him with her

  tiny fists. "Get out of here! Get out!"

  The others scattered.

  Ashamed of his intrusion, frightened, Sebastian slammed

  the door and ran down the corridor toward his own room. He thought he heard a scrabbling sound behind, the door open again. He could not be sure.

  He opened the door to his own room, closed it behind and locked it. When he flopped on the bed, crying over his

  own stupidity, he thought he could hear Bitty Belina be­ yond the door. She was breathing heavily, a mixture of

  exertion and fury.

  Twice he called her name.

  She did not answer, though she was there.

  An hour later, after she had let him alone and after his hysteria had bled out of him, he realized that there had

  been too many puppets in that room when he had burst in on them. He sat up in bed, wondering what that meant.

  There had been at least a dozen puppets.

  The next day, when he was in the lower levels, looking over the places where the maintenance robots were stored

  between assignments, he saw two puppets he had never seen before. One was thin and very dark-skinned with horns

  growing from its temples. The other was a woman, beauti­ fully copper-colored, with a thin, black tail like the tail of a

  rat.

  He hid and watched them. They seemed to be scamper­ing between the storage tubes in search of something on the floor. He could not tell what. He watched them until they were gone. They each had a small tin can with a plastic lid.

  It was impossible to discover what they carried in them.

  "There aren't any others," Bitty Belina told him.

  "Saw them."

  "You're imagining things."

  "No."

  "Yes, you are."

  Her hair was so lovely, her face so delicate and perfect, that he hated to argue with her. He wanted only to touch

  her hair and her skin, to feel the softness and the golden wealth. But she had long ago refused to let him touch even

  the ends of her yellow curls. The only way left to communi­cate was through words. And he was worst at that.

  "Other night. Your room," he told her.

  "What you saw were reflections."

  "Reflections?"

  "We had taken the mirrors off the walls and had them on the floor. We were playing with them. You know how puppets like to play. When you opened the door, you saw all the reflections."

  He thought about that a while. It did not explain the two strange puppets in the maintenance levels running around with the cans in their hands. He decided against fighting with her.

  "Maybe," he said.

  She smiled. "Positively."

  "I guess so."

  She reached up and touched his cheek then, trailed her slim, quick fingers along the line of his jaw. For a moment of ecstasy, those fingers pressed against his lips. Then she took them away and left him.

  He was happy again.

  Two days later, in the sewer plant, toward the northern end of the lowest level of the city, as he walked between the towering machinery that shone like new despite its years, he saw three puppets that were not from Bitty Belina's story. He recognized all three, but could not tell what play they were from. All three had containers of some sort and growled the nooks and crannies of the place, searching.

  He left there.

  He busied himself elsewhere.

  And he told himself that Bitty Belina had lied to him only because they were all planning a surprise for him and didn't want to have him find out what it was. That would spoil it. He must pretend as if he knew nothing, be quiet and wait.

  He chuckled. It was a mark of esteem when your friends went to such lengths to spring a surprise on you. It would not be fair to them to ruin it all by blundering right into it.

  He was quiet. And he could hardly wait to find out what was up. No one had ever done anything like this for him

  before. He didn't even think he deserved it. But that, of course, was up to them.

  Bitty Belina followed Wissa through the square entrance to the air-conditioning shaft. The access grill had been pried off days before when the puppets began using the hidden metal passageways to structure their plan against Sebas­tian. Wissa carried a tiny flashlight, no larger than one of Sebastian's fingers. In her hands, it was almost as large as a regulation electric torch.

  "If this is a game of some sort-" Belina began.

  "It isn't, honey," Wissa said. "I saw him myself. He's big and has a beard."

  "But what does he want here?"

  "I don't know. I didn't wait to watch him. I came running for you, first thing."

  They didn't speak any more as they ran lightly through the largest of the airshafts. Now and then it was necessary to stoop or crawl where the size of the pipes was reduced. They used rag ropes at certain verticle shafts to descend from floor to floor. The ropes had been placed the same day they first scouted the system.

  They met only one puppet in their journey. He was slim and dark, with horns on his forehead.

  "What's up?" he asked as they went by.r />
  Belina waved her hand impatiently to indicate she had no time for foolish questions.

  The horned puppet followed them. He ran with more grace and with less noise than even the two women.

  A few minutes later they reached, a wide intake shaft that terminated in an aperture that could easily have taken a stooped but full-grown man. The grill had been left intact here, for the area beyond did not figure in the murder plan they had devised. They stood by the steel mesh, the intake fans sucking air past them, gently ruffling their hair and clothes, and they watched the bearded man who had en­tered the city through the south gate, just as they had done a few weeks earlier.

  A long, wide cargo van rested on the black conveyor belt of the avenue. The driver had said something to the traffic computer to keep the vehicle from being parked in the overhead garages that accommodated hundreds of thousands of machines. Now the driver was busy assembling small robotic cargo trundlers and was dispatching them to various points in the city, He had obviously been here before.

  "I know him," Belina said.

  "How?" the black, horned man asked.

  "He's the one that almost found the idiot out. I tried to call to him in the fueling station, weeks and weeks ago Before I could get the idiot to create you, Wissa."

  "When Sebastian . . when he . . ."

  "Broke my back and had to re-create me," Belina finished. The tone of her voice was ugly.

  "But why is he here?" Wissa asked. "He doesn't even know about you. And it wouldn't have taken him all this time to follow Sebastian."

  "I think he comes here often," Belina said. "He's proba­bly looting the place, slowly and methodically. I should have thought of that earlier. The first time I saw him, he was coming south. This was the only place he could have been coming from. Now he's unloaded the last haul, sold it. And he's back for more."

  "Maybe he won't discover us," the horned man said.

  "Wishful thinking, Scratch," the little goddess said. "He's probably been coming here for years. He'll know the place well. He'll notice little things, small signs of us. If not that, then Sebastian will give us away. You can't trust the idiot to be quiet."