by K. W. Jeter
“Go! Move it!” The group leader pushed Nurse Eward, the baby still clutched in her arms, toward one of the other corridors branching away from the station. “Get ’em outta here!”
One of the assault team backed slowly behind the others, keeping Sikes pinned down with a few more shots. A moment later, he heard the man turn and run after the rest of the team. Sikes scrambled to his feet and broke for the nursing station, diving behind its counter as one more bullet pinged against the wall an inch from his head.
A couple seconds of silence, then he lifted his head above the level of the counter. The HDL assault team was nowhere to be seen; at the far end of the corridor, a heavy security gate had rolled down, blocking the exit. Nurse Eward stood on the near side of the gate, beside the alarm system’s control panel.
Gun in hand, Sikes ran up to her. “Where are they?” Before she could answer, he bent over the control panel, studying the array of lights on its surface. The green sections on the chart of the hospital’s floors showed the sections that were still unsecured; if the assault team reached one of those points, it would be a straight shot to the outside of the building.
He heard a noise of metal next to himself; he turned and saw Nurse Eward scooping a discarded assault rifle from the floor. She raised and pointed it at him. “Don’t worry about them,” she said with a thin smile.
Eward’s finger tightened on the rifle’s trigger. The weapon emitted a sharp click, but nothing else. Her expression changed to one of fury. She gripped the rifle by its muzzle and swung it clublike against the side of Sikes’s head.
One shot was all he managed to squeeze off as the rifle butt slammed into his skull. The blow knocked the gun out of his own hand. Through a shockwave of white light, he saw the outside edge of the nurse’s sleeve rip open, a flower of blood springing from the wound. But it wasn’t enough to stop her from crashing the rifle down upon him once again, an impact that pushed him to the edge of fading consciousness.
His darkening vision caught Nurse Eward slapping her open hand down upon the security controls. The alarm system cut off in mid-scream, the lights on the panel flashing to complete green. The gate rattled back up toward the ceiling.
With the last of his strength, Sikes rolled up onto his knees. “No . . .” He could see Eward running toward the HDL assault team, waiting for her just a few yards away. The leader held the infant, Sikes’s son, in the crook of one arm; he wrapped the other around the nurse’s blood-spattered shoulder and hurried her away with the rest of the team. “Don’t . . .” Sikes stretched his hand out toward them.
He collapsed, pitching forward into blackness. His chest struck the floor, his fingertips still clawing at the unyielding surface.
C H A P T E R 1 3
THE TV WAS on down in the lobby. It sat on a platform made of scrap plywood and bits of two-by-fours hammered together with more violence than skill; the maladjusted set shone through the screen made of chicken wire. Every face that popped up looked green, standing next to its own wavering pink ghost.
“Man, these bastards oughta get cable.” One of the hotel’s long-term residents slumped down in a broken-bottomed chair, the upholstery so dirt-greasy that it shone like imitation leather. “This shit sucks.” He lingered the dog bottle inside the paper bag propped on his lap.
All the lobby regulars nodded or murmured agreement. The group included a couple of terts so old they looked like they were made of crumpled-up paper that had been smoothed out over skeletons of wire coat hangers. Buck got the creeps every time he caught sight of one of them clanking down the hallway with a chrome walker wrapped with duct tape, or hunched over a paralyzed checkerboard with his equally senile buddy. Most of the lobby regulars gave off enough of an air of slow decay to make them seem like semi-animate pieces of the crumbling building itself.
Man, who wants to end up like that? Buck had stopped blowing every spare cent of his paychecks on his motorcycle, and had begun putting away a little bit from each toward the deposit and first-and-last on an apartment of his own. He knew that places like this were more like roach hotels than ones for people; if you weren’t careful, you could wind up checking in and never getting around to checking out.
An empty beer can hit the TV’s protective mesh and fell clattering to the lobby’s worn-through linoleum floor. With his foot on the first of the stairs, Buck glanced over his shoulder at the noise. In the crook of his arm was a small bag from the corner liquor store, with his usual lunch of micro-waved spleenfurters and liver chips.
“Hey! Knock it off!” A warning voice shouted from the clerk’s window, covered with the same chicken wire. “No trouble!”
The parolee who had thrown the can—there were a lot of those, both tert and Newcomer, in the hotel as well—turned and scowled at the cage-like opening. “So change the channel already, Ab-dool.”
With a shrug, the clerk picked up a remote control and aimed it at the TV. Nothing happened. “Batteries dead,” he announced. “Watch the news. Might learn something.”
“Aw, man . . .” The parolee slouched down in disgust. “We could be watchin’ some good-lookin’ stuff over on the stories . . .”
Buck could see that the early news broadcast had come on. Out of habit, he stopped and watched. A moment later, he had walked away from the stairs and back toward the center of the lobby, where he could get a better angle on the set.
“Who the hell are these jerk-offs?” The dog-bottle man gazed with bleary hostility at the screen overhead. “Whuz their problem . . .”
“Hey, shut up.” The food in the paper bag was growing cold, but Buck didn’t care. “I’m trying to listen.”
“Yeah, well, you can go and . . .” The other’s drunken mutter faded away.
The voice of the newscaster—it was that same obnoxious tert that he had seen before, talking with his father about that weird new cult—crackled and buzzed out of the TV’s minuscule speaker. Buck could just barely make out what was being said. But the face on the screen was quickly identified by him, even through the smeared, streaky off-colors. It was his dad’s former partner on the police force, the human that Buck’s sister Emily called “Uncle Matt.” He didn’t look happy—in fact, Sikes looked really pissted-off, scowling darkly as he shoved away the microphone that the newscaster thrust in his face.
On the TV screen, the image cut back to a full-face angle on the newscaster; behind him was a milling crowd of other reporters, cameramen, and police officers. “That was Detective Matthew Sikes of the Los Angeles Police Department—” The newscaster spoke with one hand cupped to the earpiece at the side of his head. “Obviously a very angry man, angry and upset over what has happened here . . . if we could just get another shot . . .”
With the newscaster’s rapid-fire voice as counterpoint, the camera lens swung over to a multi-story building; it took Buck a moment to recognize it as one of the downtown hospitals. Something heavy had obviously gone down. A big section of the fence surrounding the parking lot had been knocked flat, and the guard booth at the entrance looked as if it had taken a mortar round. Pieces of metal and wood were scattered all over the asphalt, along with the broken length of the barrier arm. Lengths of shiny yellow tape, with the words Police Investigation—Do Not Cross were strung all around the scene. Flashes of red from the squad cars’ roof-mounted gumballs pulsed like open wounds.
The camera zoomed in for a close shot on the front of the hospital. Sheesh, thought Buck, the newscaster’s squawky voice fading from his awareness for a moment. They had creamed the place. Serious damage was apparent: a side entrance to the hospital had been completely blown open, leaving a big gaping hole framed with twisted girders, like something from old file footage out of Beirut or Bosnia. The camera angle tilted, moving up the side of the flank of the building, showing a section of windows on the fifth floor that had been blasted out, with dark scorches and smoke marks all around the frames.
Static from the TV’s ancient innards rendered the newscaster’s words indeci
pherable. Buck turned to one of the lobby regulars slouched in a chair. “So what happened?”
“Eh, some kinda stupid horseshit.” The man shrugged. “Somebody like blew up this hospital or something, just to steal some baby. Like a kidnap thing.”
“Whose baby?”
“That dude’s.” The man lifted a raw-knuckled hand and gestured toward the screen. “No, not that guy; the other one they showed. The cop.” A scowl crossed his face. “Man, I remember that bastard from back when he was in uniform. Chased me down an alley and caught me with a whole cash register till. Shit, I was just outta the slams, and he still wouldn’t cut me a deal. Sonuvabitch . . .”
One of the older regulars chimed in. “Yeah, it was that detective guy. It was his girlfriend or something, she was in the hospital to have their kid, and she did, and then all of a sudden there were all these masked guys with bombs and guns and all, and they snatched the kid right out of there. And now they’re gone, man.”
“Huh.” Something about all this didn’t make sense. Buck knew that Sikes’ girlfriend was Cathy Frankel—and she had been his only girlfriend for a while now. The last time he had seen the two of them together, back at his parents’ house, Cathy and Sikes had been giving off serious couple vibes, Monogamy City. It was hard for Buck to believe that his dad’s partner would have been keeping some human number on the side. But then who else could Sikes have had a baby with?
The TV’s sound cleared up for a few seconds. “. . . police spokesmen have so far refused to release the name of the woman . . .” The camera angle was back to the newscaster with his microphone, dramatically posed with the damaged hospital in the background. “. . . still unexplained . . . why such extensive security arrangements were already in place . . .” Static blotted out some of his words. “. . . or who the still unidentified group of attackers . . .” Pause. “This is Mike Bollinger, signing off from . . .”
On the screen, the station’s anchor desk popped up, with a human female and Newcomer male looking concerned and well-groomed. “Thanks for that report . . .” The camera closed in on the woman. “Police investigators have released a portion of videotape from the hospital’s internal security cameras . . .”
The screen went to blurry black-and-white, showing a skewed cubist scene, an intersection of corridors viewed from above and to one side. Numbers showing the date and time flicked by in the corner of the tape’s image. Two men wearing cliché terrorist masks seemed to be wrestling over a small cloth-wrapped bundle and a high-powered assault rifle. Suddenly, the bigger of the two men fell back, his neck spattering blood as it was struck by a bullet that came from somewhere out of the image’s frame. His clawing fingers caught the other man’s mask, tearing it open as he collapsed toward the floor. The other’s gaze snapped toward the point that the shot had come from; at that angle, the security camera had a perfect three-quarters profile of the unmasked face.
“Hey . . .” The murmured word escaped from Buck’s lips as he watched the TV in the hotel lobby. Wait a minute—His thoughts were louder inside his head. I know that guy—
The screen went back to the anchor desk, a woman holding a sheet of paper, the freeze-frame shot of the young human male floating in a box to one side of her. “Police request anyone . . . information . . . contact . . .”
“Speak up, bitch!” A wadded-up hamburger wrapper bounced off the screen. “Can’t hear ya!” The lobby regulars, or at least the younger ones, sounded a chorus of guffaws. A few seconds later, the station’s weatherman was standing in front of a big map, poking at smiling sun emblems.
“What’s the matter, son?” One of the old guys in the chairs turned and looked up at Buck. “Look like ya seen a ghost.”
It was worse than that. He had seen a memory.
Noah . . . Slowly, Buck nodded to himself. That’s who it is. The face on the TV screen that had been revealed when the terrorist mask was pulled off. He and Buck had once been friends, a long time ago, in what seemed like another world by now.
“Here.” Buck dropped the bag with his uneaten lunch into the lap of one of the lobby regulars. “Chow down.” He didn’t even notice whether the guy was human or Newcomer, into raw organ meat or not. Around the end of the month, when the public assistance checks ran out, some of the hotel’s residents were grateful for anything to eat at all.
Zipping up the front of his jacket, Buck headed for the lobby door and the motorcycle he’d left parked out at the curb. He had business to take care of.
The door to the office closed behind him, silently and inexorably. Across a sea of perfect oyster-shell carpet, Albert looked toward his boss’s desk, a shining mahogany yacht afloat in all that space. The yacht’s captain didn’t look too happy.
“Albert.” His name was spoken by Mr. Vogel with all the weight of disappointment that the ancient Earth deity Jehovah might have shown when He’d discovered that his first two sentient creations had been picking fruit off the wrong tree. More sorrow than anger, though enough of the latter to be scary, Vogel even looked like an Old Testament illustration out of the textbook they’d used in Albert’s Intro to Human Culture night-school class. “Thank you for making the time to come in and talk with me.” Vogel heaved a sigh, shoulders lifting and then falling. “Have a seat.”
“Is there . . . anything . . . wrong?” He had to fight to keep himself from cringing as he perched on the edge of the chair in front of Vogel’s desk. Of course there’s something wrong! he shouted at himself, inside his head. He even knew what it was, why Vogel had called him in here. What was worse, he had known a long time ago, from the beginning, that it was all going to wind up like this. And there had been nothing he could do to stop it from happening. It was like being bolted hand and foot to the ground, and helplessly watching an enormous stone, that he himself had winched up into the sky, falling toward him.
Vogel slowly shook his head, not to indicate No, but to further display the tonnage of the griefs that oppressed him. “Albert . . .” The gaze of the sad eyes shifted to his hand softly tapping a single sheet of paper on the desk’s surface. “How could you? How could you have done this?”
“Wuh-what?” But he knew.
“Let’s not play any more games, Albert. It’s too late for that.” Vogel picked up the sheet of paper in both hands; by the expression on his face, he might have been looking at the death sentence of everyone he had ever known and loved. He lowered the paper to look straight at Albert. “G . . . I . . . T.” He slowly spelled out the initial letters. “The Grazer Intellinomics Training. The tapes and everything else from your old friend, Captain Grazer.” Another shake of the head. “That was wrong, Albert. You shouldn’t have done that.”
“I duh-don’t know what you mean . . .”
“Come on.” The underlying thread of anger rose in Vogel’s voice. “I sent you all the figures on that project. The sales, the projected sales . . . the projected losses.”
“Well . . .” Albert shrugged nervously. “Haven’t there been other things that I predicted, that didn’t work out? I mean, that didn’t make money? You said my track record, it was like ninety-nine percent or something. So don’t there have to be times when I’m wrong?”
“Oh, sure; we’ve never expected you to be perfect, Albert. Though we’ve always been glad that you almost were. But what happened with this GIT thing isn’t just a matter of being wrong. It’s much worse than that.”
Vogel was right, of course; Albert remembered wincing when he had looked at the figures that had arrived in a slim Federal Express envelope. You didn’t have to be a genius—you could be a binnaum, in fact—to see that that multi-digit numbers with minus signs in front of them added up to a lot of red ink. His wife May had looked over his shoulder at the financial report, and he had heard her give a small gasp of shock and dismay. She didn’t know everything about his involvement with GIT—how could he have told her?—but she at least knew that he had recommended Grazer’s tapes and books to his employers at Precognosis, so they had so
mething at stake in their success. Or failure.
“Maybe,” said Albert, “you could take something out of my salary until it’s all paid back. Muh-maybe you could take everything you pay me.” He supposed he could always get another job as a janitor, to tide him and May over until it was all sorted out, however long that would take.
“We pay you an awful lot of money, but we don’t pay you that much. It’s not just the money that Precognosis invested in this GIT project, it’s the guarantees and indemnities that we gave to the cable and satellite broadcast companies, the publishing houses, that CD-ROM group we brought in on this. We made assurances to a whole slew of people and organizations about the absolute profitability of this venture. Essentially, because of the predictions you gave us about the future of your friend Grazer’s stuff, we put ourselves on the line for everybody’s start-up and operating costs. And those people are just now sending their bills in to us. The deficits that have shown up in the accounting are nothing compared to what we’re going to be hit with in the next few months.”
Albert shifted uneasily in the chair. “My wife and I have some money saved up. And there’s that car you gave us—we could sell that . . .”
“Forget the money, Albert.” Vogel gazed at him from beneath the dark, overhanging storm clouds of his brow. “The money isn’t even the real issue—though it’s bad enough. There’s a bigger problem involved. We trusted you, Albert. We did everything we could for you. And this is how you pay us back.”
He couldn’t say anything in reply. He wanted to be dead, to have disappeared from this room and completely off this planet.
Vogel picked up the sheet of paper again, though he had obviously read it through many times already. “This whole business with the GIT stuff—it’s not a matter of the sales performance coming up to your predictions. You weren’t even close; your forecast was one hundred eighty degrees off. We can’t even give these goddamn tapes and books away. They’re a dead dog; the market for them is zip. And the video stuff? They test-ran the first half-hour segment in Pittsburgh and it came in last for its time-slot, behind a Venezuelan soccer match and a public-service documentary on how to floss your dog’s teeth!” Vogel shook his head. “But let’s not get started on the grisly details. Let’s just say that we here at Precognosis were so shocked by how off-the-mark your predictions were, that we decided—no, we were forced—to have some outside investigations done. And what we found out . . .” He emitted another sigh, even deeper and more tragic. “It was definitely not to our liking.”