by K. W. Jeter
Buck was out the sliding glass door and onto the patio as he heard a key sliding into the lock in front of the house. A moment later, he had scrambled over the back fence and through the oleander bushes on the other side. With a glance over his shoulder—no one appeared to have seen him—he started walking, hurrying toward his motorcycle down the street.
“Where did you go?” The little girl looked up at him, from where she sat on the building’s wooden front steps.
Noah hesitated before answering. “Who says I went anywhere at all?” He knew he had to be careful.
“Nobody.” The girl named Aalice shrugged, her shoulders lifting inside the faded shirt that was slightly too big for her. “I just know you did. I see everything that happens around here.”
“I bet you do.” He looked around the fenced compound to see if any of the other HDL members were nearby. As far as he could tell, they were all still over at the main building, grousing and grumbling about the duty roster he had instituted just a few hours ago. It didn’t seem to have gone over too well, that their slobbed-out vacation was at an end per the orders of this young upstart who had been put in charge of the operation. Noah had caught some pretty venomous glances shot his way, along with some muttered comments that came close to mutiny. By this point, he didn’t care. As long as they were too afraid of Darlene Bryant to actually do anything about their supposed grievances, he was in the clear. At least for a little while longer . . .
He sat down on the step beside Aalice. The building was the smallest one in the compound, in such bad shape that it had no official use; Aalice had taken it over for her private hideaway and make-believe castle. Noah had checked it out—the little girl had actually invited him inside, to show it off—and had found, underneath a roof so full of holes that the bright sunlight made an abstract checkerboard across the warped and dusty floor planks, a dirty blanket in one corner and a pair of dolls in outfits even more ragged than hers. The HDL members who had been assigned the cake job of guarding the world’s first hybrid human/Tenctonese child hadn’t busted their asses making things pleasant for her here.
From this angle, he could see across the compound to one of the uncurtained windows of the main building. Inside, Nurse Eward was visible, moving around as she prepared the infant’s formula. She at least was going about her tasks in an adequately professional manner; if anything happened to the baby, it wouldn’t be from lack of care.
If anything happened . . .
The phrase chilled Noah’s thoughts. He’d already had a peek inside the heads of some of his fellow HDL members, the ones who had been on the hospital raid team and the ones who had already been stationed up here at the camp. It had been more of a view than he’d really wanted, or been prepared for; first that crack about it being better if he’d allowed the infant to get blown away back at the hospital, and then some other remarks equally repellent. If he’d known he would be working with guys as irrationally bloodthirsty as these, he would have asked Bryant to give him any other assignment besides this one. It was one thing to put a bloody cross up on some Newcomer’s front lawn, or throw a few punches in a demonstration that just happened to turn into a riot, or jump some slag who was on his own and rough him up enough to put him in the intensive care unit—all slags were scum anyway, who deserved that kind of treatment. Even assassinating the big important parasites, the ones who were masterminding their species’ takeover of the planet . . . that was just defending one’s own species, the human race who were the rightful owners of this world. Even the big scheme, the one that the legendary Marc Guerin had died in, that had wound up putting Darlene Bryant behind bars—that one had been so big that it still seemed abstract and theoretical to him. He knew that if that one had gone off the way it had been planned, every Newcomer in the Los Angeles basin would have been killed, but it was hard to translate that into specific, one-by-one deaths; he had never even really tried to work it out in his thoughts. But to sit around and cold-bloodedly speculate about killing this particular baby, even if it was half slag, or this particular little girl sitting next to him on the step . . . a sour taste seeped under his tongue. He was beginning to wonder if the other HDL members were right in their heads. The one comfort was that he knew Bryant wasn’t as cracked as some of her troops. She was too smart to order innocent children’s deaths. What good would murders like that do for the Purist cause? The HDL was still struggling to bring the rest of humanity over to their cause, to get them to see the dire necessity of driving the parasites off the planet once more. Killing off kids would be a public relations disaster; it would make the HDL look like a bunch of bloodthirsty maniacs. That’s why Bryant picked me, thought Noah. She knows she can trust me. I can see the big picture, just like her. It was up to him to keep these thugs in line.
“Did you go out there?” Aalice pointed toward the raw landscape beyond the compound’s fence. “I wish I coulda gone with you. It’s boring here.”
He looked over at the little girl sitting next to him. She didn’t seem like the hybrid monster that he would have expected from the mating of humans and Newcomers. More like a kid with funny ears—they didn’t look weird or anything, just different—and a wild case of freckles that were just visible underneath her fair blond hair and down the back of her neck. And a bit of a mouth on her—he wondered where she had gotten that from; it certainly couldn’t have been from having deep conversations with a bunch of HDL members who seemed to be more into drinking beer and cleaning their guns than anything else.
“Yeah, you’re right.” He nodded. “This place kinda sucks.”
Compared to the other places she had been in her brief career, this was probably the worst. Noah had already heard most of her life story, or at least as much of it as Aalice could remember. She had latched on to him almost as soon as he had shown up with the rest of the hospital assault team and the baby; it couldn’t have taken much for her to figure out that he wasn’t as mean as the others at the camp. Since then, she had been chattering away to him at every opportunity. That showed how lonely it was for her in this out-of-the-way dump.
There had been other places that had been more fun for her. She remembered a house with a big backyard, that had even had a swimming pool and a fence so high that nobody could see over it. She had been there a long time, with Dr. Quinn coming to see her a lot and checking up on her. That Nurse Eward had been there a lot of the time as well, but Aalice had never liked her much. She had never gotten to go anywhere, but at least it had been more interesting there than in this place.
“And he’s the one who gave me my name,” she’d told Noah. She seemed oddly proud that it was spelled with two A’s. “That’s ’cause I was the first one.” She knew all about being a human/Tenctonese hybrid, the only one until this new baby had shown up; Quinn had explained it to her. And in his research files, she had been labelled as “Case AA.” Noah supposed that if Quinn had started a file on the infant before he’d been killed in the clinic bombing, it would have been labelled ‘Case AB.’ But a real live kid couldn’t be called something like that; thus the “Aalice” name. “Like in Wonderland,” she’d told Noah. “But different.” She had then glanced around the compound and the desert beyond the fence. “This isn’t Wonderland, either.”
There wasn’t much else to the story. She didn’t remember her mother and father. Dr. Quinn had told her that they were both dead. He had been about the only family she’d had, or anything close to it. “He was always real nice to me,” she had told Noah, her voice turning sad. It had been typical of the HDL members at the compound to have taken some sadistic pleasure in telling her that the doctor had been killed. She had cried and cried, huddled up by herself on the blanket in this empty building, so they wouldn’t see her. Still red-eyed and wet-cheeked, Aalice had crept back over to the main building to find something to eat, and had overheard her keepers talking some more about Dr. Quinn’s death.
“They didn’t do it,” she had told Noah. She meant the Human Defense League.
“They came in and took me away. That nurse lady told them where I was at, but they didn’t, you know, blow up that clinic and stuff. That was those other people, the ones they call the rich slags—you know, the ones that the doctor was always getting money from, for the clinic—they’re like real rich Newcomer businessmen; that’s what they say.” She had pointed over to the compound’s main building. “They were talking about it, about how they had, like, sent pictures of me and stuff over to the businessmen, to show they had me and the doctor didn’t anymore. So it was those businessmen who went and blew up the clinic and killed the doctor, and everything.” Aalice had frowned, trying to work that last part out in her mind. “I don’t really understand why, though. He was real nice.”
Noah had understood. He had already heard, from Bryant herself, about how Quinn had been getting the funding for his research from the Sleemata Romot, and how the wealthy Newcomer businessmen didn’t like the notion of human/Tenctonese crossbreeding any better than the HDL did. So to steal Aalice from Quinn’s safekeeping and then tell the Newcomers about it had been a neat way of getting them to do the HDL’s dirty work. There was a disturbing irony in the notion that this interaction between the rich Newcomers and the Purists who hated them so much would result in the death of the one person who had been doing the most to bring the two species together. At one time, Noah would have thought that the doctor had gotten what he’d deserved; now he was beginning to wonder about that.
He was also beginning to wonder what he was getting into, sticking up for Aalice and the baby. The muttering from the other HDL team members had been getting louder and uglier. He had started worrying if he would be able to hold everything together until Darlene Bryant’s orders reached them about what to do next. A little panic attack had set in, triggered by something he would never have expected to happen or to have such a major effect on him. Noah had wound up taking one of the Jeeps from the ones parked in the corner of the compound; he had told the other men that he was just going out to get familiar with the surrounding area . . .
But he hadn’t done that.
Something had happened, something unforeseen, and he had taken the Jeep and gone out the gate topped with barbed wire, and he had driven the five miles down the narrow asphalt road to the nearest town, a hole-in-the-wall crossroads called Vindoma. There wasn’t much more than a post office and a gas station with a little store attached. But there had been what he was looking for, an old-style phone booth hooked up next to the pole on the other side of the town’s single street. It took him a few minutes to get the information he needed from the Los Angeles directory assistance operator, but he had managed.
He had been afraid to get Matt Sikes’s number and call him up—how could he, when he’d just helped steal the man’s baby?—but he remembered that Sikes’s partner was a Newcomer named George Francisco. That was the number he’d dialed, but he’d gotten an answering machine rather than a living voice. That had rattled him, but Noah had gotten even more unnerved when he’d glimpsed out of the corner of his eye another off-road vehicle rolling down the street; he’d had a quick stab of fear that the other HDL members from the camp had followed him out here and had spotted him in the phone booth. He’d realized his mistake—it was just a pickup truck with one of the local townspeople at the wheel—but by then he’d already slammed the phone back onto its chrome hook.
Driving back to the HDL compound, he had shouted at himself inside his head. What the hell were you doing? Jeez, what were you thinking of? It had all been too weird, as though somebody else had stepped inside his skin for a few minutes, making him think and do things that he never would have otherwise.
That had all happened a couple of hours ago, and now he was back here inside the compound’s fence, sitting on a splintery wooden step with this strange little girl. She leaned her head against his arm.
“You’ll take me out there, won’t you?” Aalice gazed at the bleak landscape past the gate. “The next time you go, I mean.”
It took a little while for Noah to find his voice. The weird feeling came over him again, of being somebody else, somebody who wasn’t a Purist, somebody who didn’t want to kill all the slags in the world.
“Sure,” he said finally. “I’ll take you out there.”
The little girl was silent, and he remembered what had happened, the small event that had preceded his taking the Jeep and driving out to find the phone booth in the small town. He closed his eyes, thinking about it.
He had gone inside the main building to check up on how Nurse Eward was taking care of the stolen infant. Everything had looked fine; she was over talking with some of the others, and the baby was making little gurgling noises where it lay in the hospital cart that now served as its cradle. Noah had stood beside the cart, looking down at the baby, aware of the other HDL members’ gaze on his back, their silent watching. He had reached down and pushed aside the edge of the blanket next to the baby’s face. And that was when it had happened . . .
One of the tiny hands had seized hold of Noah’s finger. Just a newborn, with barely enough strength to grasp anything—but it had.
The baby’s hand had held on, with the soft yet insistent force of a living thing, a life that had just started.
“I was told that I’d find you here.”
Sikes turned, looking back toward the door of the shabby room. “Here” was a crummy flophouse room with a single-burner hot plate on top of a battered dresser. The faded blooms on the peeling wallpaper looked as if they had died in a previous century. The room was the end of the trail that the late Dr. Quinn had left behind him. The rent receipt had been found in his wallet when the coroner’s office had finished with the body.
Standing in the room’s open doorway was Sikes’s partner. Ex-partner, he thought with more than a trace of bitterness. It had been a while since he had last seen George, and a lot had happened since then.
Sikes turned back toward the room and its dense clutter. He stood with his hands on his hips, feeling as though the tension inside him were about to snap his spine in two. He didn’t have time for whatever loony trip George might be into now. “Look, whatever your problem is, I can’t deal with it now. There’s lots heavier shit that’s come down, so why don’t you just take a hike back to your wacko friends, and stay out of my way.”
“Matt . . .” From the doorway, George stepped into the room. “I know about your child. I know that it was kidnapped from the hospital—”
“Yeah, well, you were always were a great detective, weren’t you? So you know as much as was already reported on the TV news.” Sikes shook his head in disgust. “That’s really bright of you.”
“I know more than that,” said George softly. “I know how it came to happen, that you and Cathy were able to have a child together. I know more about that child than you do.”
“Like what?” He snapped his gaze back around toward the other man. A wild anger rose inside him. He was almost at the point of vaulting across the room and throttling the answers out of George. “What’re you holding out on me—”
“As I believe your words were meant to indicate, there isn’t time right now for a lot of discussion. Perhaps later, when the child has been located and returned safely to you and Cathy—then we’ll have a lot to talk about.” George walked to the center of the room, next to Sikes, and looked around. “If there are any clues to be found here, the two of us will be able to dig them out faster than you would on your own.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? You’re done being a religious fanatic and now you’re a cop again?”
George looked straight into his eyes. “I don’t know if I’m anything at all, Matt, other than somebody who was once your friend. And as for being a fanatic, religious or otherwise . . .” He nodded slowly. “That’s one of the things we’ll have to talk about when the time comes. There’s more to that story than what I previously led you to believe. If it’s any comfort, you weren’t the only one to whom I lied. My wife, my children—but ther
e were reasons for what I did. And they’ve let me try to make it up to them. That’s what I’m asking from you.”
Silence filled the room. The impulse to shout at George and order him to get out was still inside him, but another feeling had opened as well. Sikes wished it were true, that George saying it and his believing could make it that way, could make them partners once again. He needed George, now more than ever. The rage in his heart, that could have burst loose and struck down the bastards that had stolen his son—that rage was mixed with fear as well. A fear that he would have to return to a different room, one that was all in scrubbed and soothing tones of beige, shuttered against the light of day; a room that held a sobbing woman, the mother of that stolen child, his own Cathy. The time might come when he would have to go back there to the hospital and tell her that there was nothing he could do, there was no way to bring their son back, it was already too late . . .
It would be simple to believe him. Not just because Sikes wanted to, but because the voice and the words had sounded like the old George, as though his partner had come back from the dead. Not all zoned and drifting off into some vague ethereal trance, but locked right into real time and the real problem in front of him.
In front of us, thought Sikes, nodding to himself. That did it. He’d made his decision.
“Okay.” He looked straight back at George. “You’re on. Let’s get started.”
George pulled off his jacket and laid it over the back of a rickety chair. “What exactly are we looking for?”
“Beats the hell out of me.” Sikes prodded an empty cardboard box with his shoe. “There’s already BNA agents swarming all over the hospital and at some burned-down garage they figure was used for the raid’s staging area—they haven’t found anything yet that’ll tell us where those sonsabitches headed. I came here just hoping that there might be some clue in Quinn’s stuff. He had more of a line on what was going on behind the scenes than anybody else.”