by K. W. Jeter
George unlocked the sliding door that led onto the patio and pulled it open. His other hand rested upon the gun in the shoulder holster inside his jacket; it wouldn’t be the first time they’d had prowlers here.
He scanned across the backyard. Nothing, and no one; nothing but the swing and the barbecue and the tamed-jungle landscaping, the leaves of the philodendrons bobbing like big green clown hands. Nothing that wasn’t supposed to be there.
Not a good sign, he told himself as he pulled the sliding door shut. Imagining all sorts of things—if he wasn’t careful, he’d be the one making an appointment to see the police department’s shrink. He rubbed his eyes, feeling them burn and sting beneath the pressure of his thumb and fingertips. Not enough sleep, and bad dreams when he did get any . . .
The kitchen fell into darkness as he flicked off the light switch. He felt so tired now, it took all his remaining strength to pull himself up the steps, toward the light spilling from the bedroom doorway.
The phone rang. Or it had been ringing for a while; she couldn’t be sure. Cathy wondered if she had been asleep, or just so far down in her wordless thoughts that the world outside the limits of her head had faded away and become nothing at all.
It must’ve been sleep, she decided. She sat up on the couch, her gaze slowly taking in the shadowy forms of the unlit apartment. She had been dreaming and she remembered someone calling her name. That same faceless image, silhouetted in light streaming from behind . . .
“Ms. Frankel?”
Someone was calling her name; she shook her head to get rid of the last cobwebs.
The voice came again; it was different from the one she had heard in her dreaming. A woman’s voice: “I’m sorry to be calling you so late, but it is kind of urgent . . .”
A blinking red light by the telephone clued her in. The phone had stopped ringing, and the answering machine’s outgoing message had played through without her being aware of it.
“If you could call us back when you have the chance—”
She reached over to the table beside the couch and picked up the phone. “Hold on,” said Cathy. “I’m here.”
The woman’s voice spoke right at her ear, rather than through the answering machine’s tinny speaker. “Is this Cathy Frankel?”
“Yes, it is.” She hadn’t recognized the woman’s voice. “Who’s this?”
“I’m calling from the Clinic for Exogenetic Studies; I’m the head research assistant for Dr. Anson Quinn.”
“Quinn . . .” The name rang a bell. Then she remembered: Quinn had been the doctor in charge of the intensive care unit, when Susan Francisco and her daughter Emily had been lying close to death from the Human Defense League’s toxic bacteria attack. “He’s not at the hospital any longer?”
“He left about a year ago. He had already been doing some work with the Clinic, and then he came on full time, to take on some of the . . . more important projects here.”
Cathy wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. Quinn was an excellent physician, specializing in Newcomer physiology. He had basically kept Susan and Emily alive long enough for the cure to the infection to be found. There weren’t enough doctors like Quinn around. And she had never heard of this clinic.
“Is there something I can do for you and Dr. Quinn?” She glanced at the clock LCD on the answering machine; the black digits read out well past ten P.M. “I mean, what’s this about?”
“Actually, it’s about you, Ms. Frankel. Your gynecologist gave us a call. He knows about our work, and he told us about your pregnancy.”
“Really?” She sat up straight on the couch. “I suppose you know that’s against medical ethics. There is such a thing as patient confidentiality.”
“We’re very aware of that.” The woman on the other end of the line made an effort to sound apologetic. “Believe me, there would have been no breach of your privacy unless it was absolutely necessary. And in this case it is.”
“What’re you talking about?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss it at this time. But Dr. Quinn would like you to come down to the Clinic’s offices tomorrow morning. He needs to see you.”
The phone conversation was turning weirder, as though it were something left over from her dreaming. “I don’t know . . .” Cathy looked around the end table for her Day-Timer book. “I have a pretty tight schedule tomorrow . . .”
“Ms. Frankel—I don’t mean to make this sound more mysterious than it already is. But it really is a matter of considerable urgency. For both you and your child. We wouldn’t have contacted you otherwise.”
“Oh.” The tone of the woman’s voice, more than her words, settled stonelike against Cathy’s hearts. “All right . . .”
After the woman had hung up, Cathy sat looking at the address she had written down. Somewhere near the university; it wouldn’t be hard to find.
She slipped the paper back inside the Day-Timer, then stood up from the couch and walked over to the apartment’s largest window. She looked down at the cars parked along the street below, clasping her arms tight around herself as she did so. Even with the apartment’s thermostat turned up, she felt suddenly cold. And alone.
She realized what she was looking for, down on the street. Matt’s car.
It wasn’t there.
“Okay,” he muttered. “I’ve got you this time, you sonuvabitch.” Sikes fumbled inside his jacket for his gun. The faceless, silhouetted figure had made the big mistake of coming up on him while he was fully armed. In about two seconds, there wouldn’t be light just streaming all around the figure, it’d be streaming through a 9-millimeter hole in the middle of its head as well. “Just you wait . . .”
Whoever the mystery image was, it kept on calling his name. “Matt . . . hey, Matt . . .” A tapping sound also came to his ear, like a fingernail against glass. “What’re you doing in there, Matt?”
He got his hand around the gun at the same time as he pushed himself up from the car seat; his shoulder brushed against the bottom rim of the steering wheel. The ugly snout of the gun clanked up against the car’s passenger side window. Sikes found himself blinking into, not the eerie ghost light of his dreaming, but the thin, harsh light of a Los Angeles morning. On the other side of the window stood Albert Einstein, the police station’s janitor, gazing with wide, startled eyes at the weapon confronting him.
“Jesus, Albert . . .” Sikes rolled the window down; he had already tucked the gun back into its shoulder holster. “Scared the piss outta me.”
“Skuh-scared you?” Push broom in hand, Albert shook his head. “What about me?”
“Yeah, I suppose. Sorry about that.” He pulled himself upright on the car seat, rubbing sleep grit out of his eyes. He ran his tongue over his teeth; they felt furry, and tasted vile from stale alcohol. A reluctant sobriety had overtaken him, nevertheless. He laid his elbow on the window sill and rolled his head back to look at Albert. “I woulda just winged you, though.”
“Baloney.” The Newcomer janitor still looked resentful and unmollified. “You had that thing pointed at my head.”
There had been a time when he would have considered that to be the most expendable part of Albert’s anatomy; his opinion had shifted over the last year or so. “Hey, I said I was sorry.”
Albert stepped back as Sikes pushed open the door and got out. “What’re you doing sleeping in your car? You have a fight with Cathy?”
If anything, Albert was getting too smart. Sikes nodded as he rubbed the cramp in the small of his back. “You could say so.”
“That’s why guys sleep in cars. It must be a tradition or something here. I mean, on Earth.” Albert picked up the trash container he had just dumped into the bin at the corner of the parking lot. “You wanna tell me about it?”
Sikes followed him toward the station’s rear entrance. “I don’t want to do anything until I’ve had some coffee.”
Albert poured him out a cup from the pot he kept on the hot plate in the store room. The s
pace was the janitor’s little kingdom; Sikes sat on the edge of the rickety cot, the heavy porcelain mug between his hands, and glanced up at the store room’s walls. “Hey, what happened to all your stuff?” He remembered there being layers of brightly colored posters and calendars on the walls and Scotch-taped to the ends of the metal shelving units.
“Oh . . .” Albert set the push broom in the corner. He pointed to an overflowing cardboard box. “Most of it’s in there. The stuff I wanted to keep, anyway.”
“Huh? What d’ya mean?”
Albert wouldn’t look him in the eye. “Well . . . I’m not going to be here at the station any longer.” Albert picked up another box and began filling it, tossing in a dented clock and a little brass-tinged plastic trophy with WORLD’S GREATEST JANITOR inscribed on its base. “I’m leaving.”
“Did Grazer can you?” The coffee turned to battery acid on Sikes’s tongue. “That does it. I’m gonna kick his ass—”
“No, no, I haven’t even gone in and talked to Captain Grazer about it yet. I mean . . . I haven’t told him that I’m quitting.”
“Quitting?” Sikes stared at Albert in amazement. “Quitting?”
Albert nodded, looking slightly embarrassed. “Yeah. May and I talked it over last night. I got another job.”
“Doing what?”
“I’m going to be a picker.”
“Aww, Christ,” groaned Sikes. “You can’t make any money picking fruit. That kinda work’s the pits—literally. I did it one summer when I was a kid, up near Modesto, and it just about broke my back.”
“No, it’s not like that. It’s something else altogether.” Excitement crept into Albert’s voice. “Listen . . .”
He listened, and heard all about it. None of it sounded believable, until Albert showed him the bank deposit slip for the check that the Precognosis people had given him. And then a lightbulb had flicked on inside Sikes’s head, and he remembered a Newsweek article he had read maybe a month ago—he had been waiting for a haircut—and it had been all about this new breed of market researchers. One of the companies’ names had stuck in the back of his mind; he remembered thinking that it sounded like a skin disease—the heartbreak of Precognosis.
He went on thinking about it, sipping another cup of coffee, after Albert had gone to Captain Grazer’s office to hand in his official resignation form. Glancing up at the store room’s walls, now stripped of their accretion of Albert’s stuff, made him feel oddly hollow and sad. That emotion, or lack of it, was layered on top of how he’d already felt from the whole business between him and Cathy. Everything he’d gotten used to seemed to be coming to an end.
Place isn’t gonna be the same without ol’ Albert around. He hunched over the coffee, rolling the cup back and forth between his hands. And right out of the blue—a couple of months ago, the whole world had seemed basically locked down tight. If anybody had told him back then that he and Cathy would wind up splitting, he wouldn’t have been able to do anything except laugh. It would’ve been too ridiculous to even contemplate. He’d been down the turnpike enough times to know the real thing when it came along. Only from the looks of things, this pregnancy and all, he hadn’t. Everything his partner George had told him at the bar was true; he had to admit it.
The coffee had gone too cold to drink. He leaned forward and poured it out into the sink with the mops, then set the empty cup in the nearest of Albert’s cardboard boxes. His eyes ached as he rubbed them.
Really gotta start getting some more sleep. Maybe now that enough shit had descended upon him, the bad dreams would stop. The Irish portion of his blood had already known that they would turn out to be prophetic. Something horrible coming his way, calling his name . . . figure it out. You didn’t need to be a genius like Albert’s namesake to work that one out.
One thing still worried him, enough to make his palms sweat. You’re spooking yourself, he scolded, but he couldn’t get the dismal thought to leave his head.
The worst possible thing had already happened, with him and Cathy. The business with Albert leaving the police station was small potatoes compared to that. The worst had happened . . . and he had still dreamed, last night in his car, about the faceless image with the light streaming from behind, and the voice calling his name . . .
Only it had been louder and closer this last time. So close, that in his dreaming he had almost been able to stretch out his hand and touch the image’s shadowed face.
Sikes shook his head, bracing his spine against the chill that tightened across his shoulders. If the dreams kept coming . . . then maybe the worst hadn’t happened yet.
He didn’t even want to think about that.
C H A P T E R 6
“IT’S REALLY . . . REALLY . . .”
Buck Francisco sat on the edge of the sagging bed, watching his sister Emily struggle to find the perfect word. Dusty sunlight slid beneath the tattered edge of the pull-down curtain, revealing where the floor’s linoleum had been scuffed through over the years, to islands of dingy black.
“Really glotchy.”
He smiled as he leaned back on his hands. “Is that worse than grunge?”
“Oh, way beyond grunge.” Emily spoke almost admiringly. She tilted her head to examine the map of brown-edged stains on the ceiling. “That’s sooo dead. Glotch is . . . glotch is like this.”
“Welcome to Glotch Manor, then.”
“Hey, there’s fur in this sink!”
“Don’t blame me. It came that way.”
Emily dragged the single wobbly chair over from the room’s kitchenette corner. She sat down with her hands in her lap, as though she had been invited to tea. “Well . . . it’s kind of interesting. I guess.” Her gaze moved around the room’s confines once more. “And it is all yours.”
“It’s all mine. As long as I pay the rent every week.” Buck laid his shoulders on the pillow propped against the wall. The room was so small that he could stretch out his hand and touch the stitched leather seat of the motorcycle that took up most of the floor space. At night, the glow of the streetlamps glinted blue off the machine’s hand-polished chrome, like liquid electric sparks seeping under his eyelids as he slept. “Same with this thing, Em. Gotta make the payments.” He flicked a dust speck off the ridged throttle grip.
“That’s where all your money goes, huh?” His kid sister was no fool.
Actually, he knew money wasn’t going to be a problem. Emily could honestly go back to their parents and report—if she wanted to risk confessing that she had skipped school to come here and see her brother—that he wasn’t starving to death. He’d gotten a warehouse job the day after he’d had his final argument with his father and had stomped out of the house. Newcomers were preferred for that kind of work; he could wrestle around crates twice as heavy, for twice as long, as the average tert. As long as he watched himself, the job would pay just enough for this shabby room . . . and the distinctly non-shabby bike.
Maybe a little shady, though. He’d gotten a good deal on the machine from one of the crazed internal-combustion freaks that infested the building. The stairwells were oil-spotted and shiny-slick from the frames and engines and whole motorcycles being pushed in and out of the rooms all day and all night. Behind every numbered door could be heard the clinking metal sounds of hand tools and, every once in a while, the coughing rasp of a freshly-tuned engine cranking gray exhaust out a window. Buck’s machine had been pried loose from a telephone pole, its first owner doing a long stretch in the head injuries unit at the hospital, straightened out, and refitted with even more murderous parts. The frame still shuddered when the speedometer pegged out at a hundred, but one quarter-inch of the throttle past that point and the whole world became glassy smooth, as though time itself had stopped. Nothing but the wind tearing at his face as he laid his chest close to the black teardrop tank . . .
“You’re going to kill yourself on that thing,” pronounced his sister. She regarded him with disapproval. “I know you are.”
“Y
eah, I expect you’re right about that.” Buck watched his own hand smooth along the chrome of the handlebars. “Doesn’t matter.”
“How come?”
He had to think about that; the words had slipped right out of his mouth. “I don’t know,” he said finally, and shrugged. “It’s different for you, Em. You’re smarter than I am—you know how to fit in here.”
“Give me a break.” Emily rolled her eyes.
“No, it’s true.” He had started to figure things out. “Maybe it’s because you’re younger. You don’t really remember any place besides Earth—”
“I do, too! I remember lots.”
“If you say so.” Buck turned his gaze away from his sister toward the window and its bleak view of the decaying buildings that surrounded this one. “Maybe . . . maybe it’s just because you’re a tough cookie. Inside, I mean. You didn’t give up; you’re still fighting for what you think this world owes you. That’s what makes you different from me.”
“Aw, Buck . . . come on. Don’t talk like that.” She suddenly looked close to tears. “You didn’t give up.”
His own smile felt sad on his face. “Yeah, I did. And you know why? Because I don’t care anymore—that’s a big difference right there. I stopped caring a long time ago, about whether there’s a place for me in this world. It’s their world, not mine.”
“That’s stupid.” Emily’s expression was one of disgust. “Just ’cause you had a fight with Dad . . . that doesn’t mean you gotta go kill yourself over it. You had lots of fights with him before.”
He didn’t say anything. Not that there wasn’t more to say—the words were right there on his tongue—but because he didn’t want to make things worse for her. Why should his little sister have the same bad ideas rolling around beneath the spots on her head? What good would that do? Maybe she really was smarter and tougher than he was; smart enough to not know something, to not see this world the way he did. Emily had human friends, the same as he’d once had, before he’d realized the truth.
That was what he didn’t want to tell her. That the terts were nobody’s friends, except to their own kind. In their single, stingy hearts they believed this was their world, and they wanted to keep it that way. They didn’t need alien breeds cluttering up the place, grabbing even the littlest pieces of it for themselves. The terts had had a hard enough time getting along with each other, until the Day of Descent had given them somebody new to kick around.