He nearly seized on the spot. Exley, crammed into a sleeveless red tunic and gray slacks, his eyes clad in red-framed Porsche sunglasses, pushed through the door and made his way inside.
Walken stared at Exley's murderous bulk as he rolled on toward him and then past, as if he had been invisible, to the bar where Hammond waited. She greeted Exley with a friendly smile and leaning up said something to him. Walken turned around and slouched hurriedly out of the bar. No point in spitting on good fortune.
As he stepped out into the hotel lobby, however, Walken felt it — the prickling of the hairs on his neck standing up, telling him that someone was after him. The inner voice growled a low alarm. He put his hands into the pockets of his coat, found the handle of the faithful prog-knife. The C-J was the wrong tool, too large, a siren for the police; he felt the knife's pressure-sensitive handle shudder under his grip as he kept the blade's blunt tip pushed in with his thumb.
If it was Exley, of course, he didn't have much of a chance. He'd have to try cut a major artery, maybe and then empty the C-J up close where nobody could see the flash. Who knew? Maybe he could actually kill Exley before the fucker could take him apart. Walken remembered again how Exley's voice sounded - like mech talk, some distant computer broadcasting through him.
Yes, Walken thought wildly as he did the quick, hunkered march out into the open air and down the sidewalk, that night he sounded very much like some elaborate machine. All manner of questions rose to his mind, rose and were tabled with great effort under the weight of adrenaline and alert instinct.
He made his way back down into the commercialist sea of the Waters crowd, shouldering through the masses. With every step, a foaming head of anxious paranoia continued to build inside him. He wanted not the anonymity of his new face but the sheer oblivion of the camo, to be invisible, unknown to this world and every tainted thing under its poisoned skies.
But he was not invisible and the gallery of faces that comprised the endless crowd shifted and swam before his eyes. A girl with a white face and violet-painted eyes passed him, then a young man with a forest of multicolored spines for hair and then an elegant woman with this year's iconic Penny Ridgely jacket brushed him almost too close for him to keep calm. Potential assassins seemed everywhere, creeping up on him with knives out. The voice inside his head was screaming for him to get the hell out of the crowd.
And then he was there in the dark, wet space between two hulking mall towers, pressed up against the alley wall, puking out his fear behind a blue plastic dumpster. He let go of as much of his fear as his searing gut would offer, gulping in air between mouthfuls of acrid vomit and let the rest settle down into a manageable pool in the pit of his stomach.
"There he is." Walken heard a girl's snide voice from the mouth of the alley and he looked up. Two forms filled the mouth of the alley. Perhaps 'filled' was not the proper word for it, for they certainly did not have the bulk; two women, thin and tall even before the high heels of their boots propelled them still higher, stood ringed with the bright nimbuses cast down by the lights of the street behind them. They were upright gazelles in matching tan jumpsuits and red Augustine Savi jackets, their boots needle-heeled hooves. "Not much, is he?"
The first was the one who spoke. The other laughed, her voice softer, silkier. "He'll do," the second purred.
Walken wiped his mouth. The foam of paranoia began to rise again. "I'm not looking for company, girls," he said roughly. "But thanks."
The first gazelle sighed. The second giggled and produced from the pocket of her jacket a thing that looked like a thick oblong of gray metal with a grip attached at one end. He recognized it and turned, his nerves firing at once all over and then he turned to lead and fell senseless into a puddle. Staring soaked and open-mouthed into the stained sky, Walken felt a heavy curtain fall over his eyes.
The dream-city returned.
The Sound had already drowned it and receded, though it remained composed of liquid silver. The green mist had turned into a fog, luminous mint-electric vapor that hung over the surface of the water. The remade city, teeming with its black needles and glittering angles, stopped in a tangle of pipes and vast industrial structures at the shore of the Sound.
Walken stood on the edge of a vast metal porch overlooking this, enclosed in glass, staring down into the shifting skin of chrome. Before, when he had dreamed about the mercury sea, he had been first horrified by it, then disturbed. Now, however, he found a certain dark fascination filling him as he looked at it. The sea drew him, pulled at something inside his breast, shone bright and beautiful in a way he could not easily explain. He looked at it and time seemed to stop.
His reverie was broken only by a flash of green in the corner of his eye, the sound of distant thunder. Walken looked up, peering through the thin glass at what lay on the far side of the ocean. There a storm brewed, though it was like no storm he had ever seen before. Boiling across the dark sky were thick, rolling clouds the same mint color of the fog; they glowed as they came, crackling with bright fury and as they did, the Sound picked up their colors. Then suddenly the light was building, glowing, a vast corona of hellish green fire filling up his vision, then his eyes, his brain and then...
A scream filled his ears, high and thin with agony and terror and Walken was only dimly aware that it was his own.
Walken woke, sealed in the wet cement tomb of nervelessness. His vision was a phosphorescent sun at first, flaring through to the back of his eyes, a sun that fluttered and dimmed as he blinked it away. It took the form of a white LED lamp glowing overhead, an old industrial fixture, surrounded by equally old and mottled concrete. His eyes flicked about, saw the corners of walls disappearing into shadow, rusting pipes, yellowed trunks of plastic conduit forming maze-works at their borders. As best as he could tell he was alone.
He tried to move, but his body seemed as inert as the ceiling above. The girls had hit him with a short-range disrupter, probably a nerve crusher from the vivid dreams he'd experienced; black market neuroelectric inhibitors were blunt-force devices whose effects on the brain were often unusual, pushing you into sudden REM sleep or otherwise playing tricks on top of knocking you out. An ache bloomed in the back of his head as the numbness faded and he began to feel the coldness of the slab on which he lay, the wooden sensation of his limbs. He grunted and tried to pull himself up.
Walken managed to get up on an elbow, bracing himself on the table that he now saw he had been placed upon. He saw several of them here, old hospital jobs on rickety ball casters. He also saw a battery of rust-peppered stainless steel hatches set into the far wall. He squinted at them, tried to identify their function and then realized, with a sick feeling descending over him that had nothing to do with the fading nerve crush, that he was in a morgue.
It wasn't a black clinic, at least none that he could identify. Most black clinics were very much like Lionel's, sterile and in good repair if not bristling with the latest medical technology. But though the room was corroded it wasn't messy, so he figured it didn't belong in a murder house either. If some crazy had run it, Walken reasoned, the whole thing would have been drowned in blood and he'd be dead already.
It was more likely that the gazelles were bodysnatchers, agents in pay of a black clinic. They were all over the place, in the New City as much as the Verge, rounding up healthy specimens. The generally low state of health and the abject fucking batshit nature of some of the natives kept them from collecting in the Old City. Walken thought grimly of the ferals he had tangled with as he swung his legs off the edge of the slab, found his footing and rose unsteadily to stand.
He went through his pockets. His gear was intact, save for the C-J. Maybe he had woken up far faster than they'd had anticipated. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out the prog-knife with one hand. He took out Bobbi's minicomp with the other and booted it up. As he'd expected, the Sony's phone package got no signal. Something up in the superstructure around him, probably, scattering plates or just dense la
yers of metal foil. Walken frowned, put the thing away and squeezed the knife's handle. It oozed out into its hard, fanglike shape, the blunt head narrowing into a tanto point as it manifested. The nanomachine tooth gleamed in the light of the morgue lamp and was fortified against the fear.
Walken took out the palm-light from his coat pocket and strapped it to his hand, squeezing a beam of ghostly light out into the morgue's dim shadows. There was nothing else here, just the cooler hatches and the slabs and a thick steel door set into the far wall.
He crossed to lay the back of his knife hand against one of the coolers. The chilly metal nipped at his skin, buzzing with the hum of refrigerator motors. He flipped the knife around in his palm, point down and with his other hand took hold of the handle and pulled it open. Empty. He opened another to find the same. On the third attempt he found something and the breath caught in his chest as he saw what filled the steel drawer.
Empty specimen bottles lay spread out in cooler shelf, clear plastic cylinders of varying sizes with thick sealed plates on either end. He stared at them for a moment, wondering if they were meant for his own innards or merely surplus, but curiosity changed into alert surprise as the sound of a bolt working rang from the other side of the door.
A spike of adrenaline drove itself into the back of Walken's head. Hurriedly he slid the drawer shut and ducked under the nearest slab, huddling in its shadows. He hoped that between the dim lighting of the morgue and his own black coat he would have a chance to at least hide long enough to get the drop on whoever entered. The diamond-patterned grip of the prog-knife seemed to gnaw at his palm in anticipation of the moments to come.
The door swung open. One of the gazelles arrived, followed by a man in a dull gray surgical gown and smock. She was beautiful, Walken saw from where he crouched under the table, pale and thin and porcelain smooth. Her high cheekbones and serene face struck him as very much like Ghia Merducci's, complete with the styled platinum hair. Her eyes were bright and silver as well and she'd applied a horizontal bar of black paintstick across them to make them truly stand out. There was something sharp about them, however, something predatory. Hers was a cruel beauty.
The surgical tech was nowhere so elegant. Where the girl's eyes were marked with paintstick he had no eyes at all. Instead, an oblong visor of gleaming black steel and carbon had been plugged into the sockets. It was part of an Indonesian implant system utilized by surgeons in the East, an imaging peripheral for the computer that had eaten up a good deal of space in his skull.
They had barely taken three steps beyond the doorway before the pale woman drew his C-J from the pocket of her jacket, calm as water and scanned the room with alert eyes. "Tran," she said and Walken shivered as he heard her use the same bizarre chip-flat tone as Exley had, "Your little stunner doesn't appear to have worked this time."
"I told you that disruptors were unstable things, miss," the medic replied, respect edged with anxiety in his voice. "Paralytic neurotoxins are much— "
"Enough," she hissed, waving a hand. "Next time make sure you boost the power. I don't mind occasional brain damage if it means they stay down until they're harvested." She wore a haughty crown around her tongue, flat as it was, like dark nobility — Walken could not help but feel a certain fascination with her. Here, up close, she was an unearthly creature.
The medic bowed his head. "Of course," he said and there was fear and submission in his voice. "Of course."
The pale killer nodded. The gun was light in her grip, held like a professional. "All right," she said and from her volume Walken knew that she was talking to him, "I can smell you in here, meat. I've got plans for you and there's nothing you can do about that. You can try to run, of course, but I suggest that you come out and be a good boy. At least then, however pointless your life has been up to now, your body can still render some constructive service."
In the darkness, adrenaline had dissolved the last of the lead that weighed his limbs down. His nerves stood crackling under his skin, muscles taut, his fingers slowly wrapping themselves around the legs of the table next to him. A snarl echoed from the back of his mind, instinct turning murderous. How the hell was he going to get to her, to put the knife into her beautiful body?
"Don't make me wait, meat," she called out as she scanned the room again, pistol still hanging in her grip. Walken's mind whirled, clicked, went through a thousand different scenarios to try and find the one that didn't end with him dead and bleeding on the floor. He sidled around the back of the table, his palms wet against the flecked steel and, giving it a hard shove, dove behind the next one.
The morgue rang instantly with the C-J's thunder and the weird, warped twang of perforating steel. From the corner of his eye Walken could see a dull flash as the table took a burst of the uranium slugs, its forward progress arrested with their impact. By the time the table Walken crouched behind went spinning he had left it behind, running low, the prog-knife flashing between the long shadows cast by the LED bulb. As he moved he tried to weave, to press himself between the tables in front of him and the darkness behind, followed always by the twanging chorus of the dense slugs blasting at his cover from all around.
She'd been the third person to try and kill him in the space a month, but she was nowhere near the marksman that Exley had been. As Walken slid around the head of the row of blasted tables he knew his gambit had paid off. The C-J was very powerful, but its ammunition was quite limited compared to more modern firearms; it roared only a few more times in her hand before its slide clicked open.
Empty. I got you, bitch. Walken's thoughts flared red and feral as he leapt over the last of the tables, the prog-knife held blade-down in his hand and charged her with blood in his eyes. A bellow of rage he did not remember summoning escaped him, low and loud and he hurtled toward her.
Between the surprise of the emptying pistol and the sudden fury of Walken's charge, the pale creature hesitated. Her eyes widened slightly as he came at her, but she recovered in a fraction of a second and spun into a high roundhouse kick.
Her gleaming red bitch-boot sledge swung into the side of his head, connecting just as he fell upon her. Stars of pain exploded in his skull as he moved drunkenly forward, brought the knife down toward the gazelle and felt his hand come away without it as he staggered back in the shuddering wake of her blow. Walken reeled and braced himself for another of those nasty sledgehammer kicks.
But none came. He opened his eyes and saw the gazelle lying on the floor, eyes open, staring up at the concrete ceiling much as he had but minutes earlier. Her breathing was shallow, the strangest guttural sound escaping from her lips. Walken stared at her and, as sense returned to him, realized that the knife was protruding from the collar of her jacket, deep in the hollow of her throat. Artificial blood, white and stark against the red leather of her Augustine Savi, pulsed slowly out across her chest and onto the dingy floor.
The gazelle lay expiring amid the pallid sea of her ebbing life, unnatural and strange. A pang of sadness, something foreign that he could not explain, stabbed at him from some secret place as he watched her. Walken watched the silver eyes grow unfocused moment by moment, the litany of all the things that she had ever been draining away, until her gurgling became a last rattle and the terrible thing she had been was gone.
"My God," he heard the tech gasp breathlessly behind him and he returned to the world. Walken turned to regard him with flat, cold eyes reflected in the other man's glossy visor and held out a hand splashed with the gazelle's blood.
"Give me the visor," he said, his voice as cold as the morgue air, "And I'll let you live." The medic had pulled the thing from his face almost as soon as the words left Walken's lips. Walken caught sight of gleaming steel ports, the eyelids removed, before he dropped the thing and smashed it beneath his heel. "Good boy. Now sit down and I'm sure someone will come and get you soon enough."
He crossed to the gazelle and plucked the prog-knife from her, shook it clean and stuffed it into a coat pocket befo
re searching her. He took back the C-J and the magazines she'd taken from him, slapped one into the gun and stuffed the rest in after the prog-knife.
At the sound of the magazine slamming home the medic shuddered. "Wait," he suddenly simpered, "The locks are DNA coded. You'll have to take her hand."
Walken looked at the medic's quailing form and grunted in disgust. "So eager to please," he spat as he crouched down by the dead woman, sat the gun down by the inside of his foot and produced the prog-knife again. He was grateful for its sharpness as it pushed down through her skin, which seemed to give the laser-sharp blade a good deal more resistance than he would ever had expected. A few more moments of sawing and the hand was free. He carried away his grisly trophy, wrapped in one of Bobbi's mesh handkerchiefs and left the medic to rot.
Walken found himself in a hallway similar to the room he'd just left, stained concrete and broken nonslip tiles steeped in flickering gloom. He peered into the dark, lifted the C-J to meet it and banished it back with a low-level beam from the tactical spot. Down the corridor he went, caution in his movements, the spot lancing shadows away. He kept his finger on the trigger, ready for whatever security forces were on staff and felt the paranoia foam over his brains again as he made the circuit, foot by foot, toward where he hoped an elevator would be.
He realized after a few minutes navigating the crumbling maze that he had been taken to some sort of abandoned hospital. Peeling wallpaper and faded literature made him place it as having been abandoned at least twenty years ago. The hospital smell, antiseptics over old death, had not quite left the decaying halls. His footfalls rang with echoes off the greying white walls; every fixture that still burned flickered with the last pulses of life that still clung here.
Walken moved through the moldering place, his nerves still bristling. Tension ruled him, a pulse that rang in his ears even more loudly than his footsteps. The corridors twisted like angled intestine; it occurred to him that it had not at all been a hospital, this place, or at least nothing legally medical. He might have thought that someone had built the place to purpose had it not been just as old and stained as the morgue that he had left, though he wasn't certain as to what there could have been that required such construction. Ghostly thoughts of past administrations loomed in his head, remembered scraps of conspiracy theory. There had been rumors, long ago, that the Fed had built secret shelters for personnel during the European War in the case the whole thing went nuclear. Maybe there had been some truth to it.
Shadow of a Dead Star (The Wonderland Cycle) Page 24