by K. W. Jeter
"'Harmless' — that's a good one." Holden's gaze narrowed. "Nothing's harmless in this universe. That's one thing I've learned. You should've learned it by now, too."
"Maybe I did. Maybe I forgot."
"Well, that's where you went wrong, then. That's how you got all screwed up, Deckard. Falling in love with replicants…" Another shake of the head. "Trusting them. You're a fool. What you should've realized a long time ago is that the only person a blade runner can trust is another blade runner."
"Then I'm off the hook. I'm not a blade runner anymore."
"Correction. Once a blade runner, always one. There's no quitting this job-not while you're alive, at least. Look what happened when you tried."
He could see where this was going. "I get the impression you're about to ask me to trust you."
"As I said-I'm the only one you can trust."
"I don't know…" Seemed a grim prospect. "If I'm going to break this trusting habit of mine, maybe I should go one-hundred-percent cold turkey. Starting with you."
Holden peered around the edge of the kitchen's doorway, making sure that Sebastian or any of the others wasn't listening in, then turned back to give Deckard a hard stare. "Joke away, asshole. Long as you don't mind laughing in your grave. Because that's what it comes down to. There's somebody who doesn't want us blade runners alive. Probably more than one somebody; a whole conspiracy. High-level and mean. Whoever they are, they've got the resources to take us out, one by one-until they're aren't any more of us."
"Maybe you'd better get that gear inside you checked. Lack of oxygen to the brain can trigger paranoid delusions."
"Equipment's running fine." Holden dug out a pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket, lit up, and took a drag. A moment later blue smoke hung in the kitchen's air; some filtering mechanism inside his chest could be heard revving up. "What needs adjustment is your brain. You don't seem to understand yet: somebody's gunning for us. For all the blade runners. They set me up last year for a hit, they got our boss Bryant… and this whole business of you being dragged back here to L.A.; that's probably got something to do with it as well." Holden's gaze shifted as he followed that line of thought. "Probably because as long as you're running around alive, even up north in the boonies, you're still a loose end for them. The conspiracy isn't just to kill off the individual blade runners, it's to shut down our whole operation. Wipe it off the books completely."
"Come on." A wearied sigh escaped from Deckard. "Easier ways to do that, Dave. Christ, every year Bryant had to fight to keep our unit alive in the departmental budget. If these conspirators are so high-powered, why couldn't they just pull the money plug on us? Every blade runner in town would've wound up washing dishes down at the nearest noodle bar. Not like we've all got exactly ace job skills."
"Speak for yourself-" The cigarette nearly dropped from Holden's hand as he started coughing, a nicotine hack that doubled him over for a moment. He looked old and grey when he straightened back up, the pump in his chest visibly laboring for air. "Look, that's all beside the point, anyway. How should I know why they want to kill us rather than just dumping us out on the street? Maybe there's something we all know, something that's part of the job, and as long as we're alive there'd be the possibility of us spilling it. Maybe they want to eradicate the blade runner unit right out of human memory, as though it never existed-they can't leave us walking around, then. Christ, Deckard…" The cigarette made a fiery comet trail as Holden angrily gestured. "If I knew what they wanted, why they're trying to kill us off, I'd goddamn be in on the conspiracy."
"There's something else you don't know, Dave." During the other's rant, he'd looked up at what had been one of the kitchen's walls; now he brought his gaze back down. "About me."
"What's that?"
"I don't care." Deckard looked him straight in the eye. "I don't care if there's a conspiracy to kill off all the blade runners. Maybe there is, maybe there isn't; I don't know. But I've got my own business to attend to. I left this city with somebody-and it was easy to do it. Getting killed was just about the only thing left here for me. Somebody's still trying to kill me? I'm shocked, Dave, really shocked. Get real." He folded his arms across his chest. "I've been dragged back here, and I've got one more job to take care of. All I want is to do it and get the hell out of here again. Somebody's waiting for me."
"A job, huh?" Holden studied him. "The only thing somebody would want you to do is to hunt down replicants. That's all you're good for. This little job… it wouldn't have something to do with another one of that batch that escaped before, would it? A sixth replicant?"
"What do you know about that?"
"Oh…" Holden shrugged. "Maybe all kinds of things. Things that you don't know, Deckard. That's why you should come in with me on this. You don't stand a chance, otherwise."
"Forget it." He shook his head in disgust. "I've got a better chance of finding and retiring it than I would have with a patched-up loser like you hanging around."
"Wait a minute-"
"No, you wait. Because I don't have time for your bullshit, Holden. You're not even interested in finding any sixth replicant. You've got this conspiracy trip-wired into your head now, and you can't get it out. That's not my problem. I'm not interested in breaking up conspiracies, saving the blade runner unit, whatever. That's all stuff in your world. Mine's not big enough for that sort of thing. Not anymore."
"You stupid sonuvabitch." A carrier wave of pity, mixed with a higher cutting frequency of loathing, radiated from Holden. "It's not as if you have a choice about what world you live in. What makes you think they'll let you go crawling back to whatever hole you've dug in the ground? Even if you manage to ice their missing replicant for them. You'll know too much; they won't let you go."
Deckard hesitated, then pulled back from the needle that the other man had inserted into his thoughts. "I'll make it. Whether they want me to or not. Like I said: somebody's waiting for me."
"Big talk, Deckard." A sneer twisted the corner of Holden's mouth. "And a long walk. The only spinner outside is the one I came here in. Don't-" His hand darted into the same coat pocket that'd held his cigarettes, this time extracting a small chrome gun. He smiled. "Just in case you had some idea about-shall we say? — borrowing it from me."
"Thought had crossed my mind." Deckard looked closer at the weapon in the other's hand. "Where'd you get that? Not your regular piece."
"I'm making do with whatever I can find these days. It belongs to a mutual acquaintance of ours-the same one I got the spinner from. He left it in the cockpit." Holden nodded slowly.
"You'd be amazed if I told you who it is."
"Don't bother. I told you already. I'm not interested in this stuff."
"You're screwing it up, Deckard. For all of us." Holden's voice tightened. "We've got a chance if we stick together. If we don't, we'll get picked off, one by one."
He shrugged. "You look out for your ass. And I'll look out for mine."
"Okay, jerk-" The machinery that'd been stuck inside Holden sent an angry surge of blood into the man's face. "Don't say I didn't warn you."
Eyes closed, leaning back against the up-ended kitchen counter, Deckard listened to the other's racketing exit from the safe-house apartment. A few minutes later he heard the distant noise of a spinner lifting from the rubble outside the building. Then everything was quiet again.
For only a moment. The silence was broken by a knock at the apartment's front door.
No one came inside. Deckard waited until the knock sounded again. He pushed himself away from the counter. Making his way through the tilted rooms, he grasped the doorknob and pulled.
Rachael stood in the corridor outside, bending her head down to look past the top side of the doorway.
No — He pushed the memory trip out of his brain. It's not Rachael.
"I thought he'd never leave." Sarah Tyrell turned her head to look down the dark, empty corridor, then brought her gaze back to his. She smiled. "May I come in?"
They came to burn.
Nothing fancy; wood and rags didn't require anything more than a simple flammable liquid, an accelerant to get things started. "Put them over there-" The leader of the team pointed to a clear space several yards away from the cabin. "There's some other things we have to take care of first."
The other men, in coveralls marked on the shoulders and breast pockets with the Tyrell Corporation logo, began stacking the red canisters on the ground, their boots crunching through the layers of dead pine needles. An owl, startled from its diurnal slumber, flapped noisily away, its broad wings drawing a curtain across the sun for a moment.
Shading his eyes with one hand, the team leader watched the bird's flight; the creature disappeared under the denser canopy of the forest farther down the mountain ridge. The trio of spinners in which he and the others had come up from the south reflected sunlight from their metal flanks. No effort had been made to conceal the corporation's emblems; up here, there was no need for a covert operation. The one person who might have seen, and noted their identities, was engaged elsewhere, down in the city where they had received their orders.
"Should we go in?"
A voice beside him; the team leader turned and saw his second-in-command, patiently waiting. The gasoline cans had been arranged in a neat, shiny pyramid. We brought too much, thought the team leader. He'd known how small the ramshackle cabin was, but hadn't worked out in his head the practical consequences of that fact. A tiny space, bound by thin, mossy walls and a sagging roof; barely large enough for the lives it'd held. The plural was somewhat inexact, he knew. A life, the man's, and a partial one, the woman's, constricted by sleep and death intertwined. A single can of gas and a match would've been enough. Like torching a doll house, a fragile plaything, a bubble in the great, hard world that surrounded it.
The inside of the cabin's window was covered by a tattered cloth. He'd already gone up to it, right after they'd first brought the spinners down from the sky, and brought his face close enough to the cold glass to catch a glimpse of the interior darkness. And the objects therein: an out-of-date calendar on the rough-splintered wall, a wooden chair toppled over on its back, an ancient stove black with soot. And something else, even blacker, an oblong shape resting on crude, low trestles: a glass-lidded coffin, its occupant unviewable from the window's angle.
He knew she was there, though; he had seen her the last time he'd been in this place, when he'd been the second-in-command and Andersson had been the team leader. They'd all worn unmarked gear then, just their name tags, no Tyrell logos on themselves or the spinners. And they'd come at night, shadowy predators, waiting until their employer had finished her business with the man inside the cabin, then swooping in and carrying him away, as the owl did with the mouse in its claws.
"There's nothing left to do out here," said the second-in-command. The other men stood around, waiting. Patiently-they were regular Tyrell employees, security division, paid by the hour and not by the mile.
"All right." For a while, it'd seemed to him as if this place, the small forest clearing with the cabin at its edge, were deep in some sort of magic time, without clock or event. Suspended, like the living and dying of the woman in the transport module, between one sleeping breath and another, this day's heartbeat and tomorrow's. "Might as well get it over." Maybe if he'd come here alone he could've taken care of everything that needed to be done, by himself. As it was, with all these others around him, there was no way the spell could remain unbroken. "Come on."
The team leader pushed the cabin door open, letting the afternoon sunlight spill across the bare planks of the floor. He stepped inside, letting the rest follow him.
Now he could forget their presence. In hers; he stood beside the black coffin, looking down at the woman who rested there. Under the glass, the curls of her dark hair spread out across the silken pillow. Eyes closed; lips slightly parted, as though waiting for the few molecules of oxygen that sustained her or a kiss; hands pale with stilled blood, folded beneath her breasts.
He could have kissed her. The impulse to do just that, to lean down and press his lips against the cold glass, a few inches away from hers, had moved inside him before. When he'd come up here with Andersson on that other job, just a couple of days ago, when they'd taken the sleeping woman's true lover away with them and back to L.A. He hadn't done it then, because he'd known that Andersson wouldn't have understood. Or worse, would have-he knew that Andersson had loved this woman, but in another form; the same face, but not mired in death.
That'd been while Andersson himself had still been alive. of course; he'd been among the security detail back at the Tyrell Corporation headquarters who'd scraped Andersson's broken body from the base of the slanting towers. He knew what had happened, though it wouldn't be mentioned in the official explanation. Andersson had loved the living woman, and had died for that sin. That mistake. Maybe those who loved the dying, the dead, would find eternal life thereby. In his own motionless heart, the team leader wondered how poor Deckard was doing.
For a moment longer he stood gazing down at her. Then he stepped back and gestured to the other men. "All right. Pick her up and take her out of here." It was what he wanted, but it was also part of the orders he'd received from the sleeping woman's double. He watched as they picked up the black coffin by its recessed handles, lifting it from the knocked-together wooden trestles. "Careful…"
They carried her outside, away from the cabin, toward the spinners. A moment later the men returned, this time with the canisters of gasoline in their hands; the team leader hadn't had to tell them to do that. Or the rest; they were on program now.
When the cabin's interior was soaked, the men splashed more gasoline on the outside, then poured a trail on the ground to where the team leader stood. He lit a match and dropped it at his feet. The fire, a hot shimmer in the daylight, ran from him and dived into the darkness behind the cabin's open door. A moment later the fire shouted from the single window, its bright fingers spreading apart the walls and roof.
They watched the cabin burn, until the charred boards collapsed in upon each other. It took only a few blasts from the extinguishers they brought out from the spinners to end 'the fire's short life, grey smoke unfolding into the sky. Then they finished up the rest of what they had to do.
From the cockpit of one of the spinners, the team leader looked down at the black mark on the earth's surface. The spinner lifted higher, and the cabin's burned remains were lost among the surrounding trees. He turned around in the seat, closing his eyes, keeping them that way until he could see the sleeping, dying woman's face again. All the way back to Los Angeles.
"Quite a place you've got here." She looked around, as though completing a realtor's assessment of a valuable property, estimating its worth on today's market. Sarah had stepped into the room, the disorder of its sideways condition having no visible effect on her. She radiated a cool assurance, money more powerful than gravity. "Distinctive."
"We like it." Deckard as gracious host. "It's those homey touches that're so important."
"I can imagine." Swathed in her coat, the fur collar turned up against her bound hair, she seemed insulated from the still heat collected between the safe-house apartment's inverted walls. She turned her inspecting gaze toward him. "For Christ's sake, Deckard-you look like a scarecrow." She reached over and fingered the torn sleeve of the stolen uniform. "If the LAPD decided to go into beanfield management, they could stick you on a cross out there. You could frighten off the birds all day long."
"There are worse jobs."
She followed him into another section of the apartment, ducking her head to get past the sides of the doors. To one of the bedrooms; it must've been a child's at one time, before the seismic events that had turned everything around. Faded curtains with a still visible pattern of baby ducks and chicks hung askew over the boarded-up window. He felt Sarah watching him as he lowered the door of the closet and dug out some of the clothes he'd st
ashed there. Spares; operations in this zone had often taken days to complete. Holden had kept some clothes here as well, his finicky tailored suits carefully hung in a plastic garment bag smelling of cedar extract. He didn't see the bag now; he pulled himself back out of the closet, his own things draped over one arm.
Keeping his back to her, he stripped off the uniform jacket and the shirt beneath, things of cloth and leather, stained with his own blood. He didn't flinch, as though the nerve endings were already dead, when he felt her hand touch the wounds across his shoulders.
"You should take care of those," Sarah's voice had softened just a little. "You wouldn't want them to get infected."
Somehow the apartment's bathroom had wound up not just tilted onto one side, but turned 180 degrees around, the ceiling light fixture now in the middle of what had become the new floor. Deckard knelt down by the remains of the sink, letting a trickle of water fall away from the cracked porcelain and into his cupped hands. Carefully he sponged away the dried blood from his torso and arms, using the wadded-up rag of the cop's shirt to dry himself. A piece. of the broken mirror was large enough to see himself in: a face made lined and older-looking by exhaustion, eyes even older by witnessing. The water was translucent pink on his hands when he took them away from his brow and deepened sockets.
He dressed in the bedroom, knowing that she was still watching him. The new clothes were only slightly musty from their long stay in the closet; he buttoned the tight-checked shirt's collar up against his throat, the top button digging at his abraded fingertips. The long coat was identical to the one he'd worn before; he'd bought them both at the same time, from a Paraguayan haberdasher working out of the dense warren of linty cubbyholes in the old Cooper Building downtown. He slipped it on, though he knew how stifling hot the safe-house apartment, and all the Santa Ana-battered world outside, was right now. The blood he'd lost from all the tiny marks on his skin might have been enough to take his core body temperature down a couple of degrees. Or else it's from her, thought Deckard. The woman brought her own winter along.