Red Cells

by Thomas, Jeffrey

  “Shit,” Stake muttered.

  “Good thing you kept the monster distracted in the chapel, guys.”

  Jesus threw back his head then, his mouth elongated in a howl, but the three men only heard an ear-piercing screech like feedback. And then the vidscreen walls, floor and ceiling of the chapel turned entirely to grainy, hissing snow.

  Fourteen

  Abandon Ship

  At all times, four transdimensional pods were docked at the Trans-Paxton Penitentiary, but each one could only carry fifty passengers maximum. There were over three thousand inmates, and then the staff. Stake figured it would take about seventy pods of this size to evacuate the whole prison in one go. He supposed it had never been too much of a concern, evacuating dangerous criminals in the event of an emergency. Then again, the pods could make multiple trips to and from Punktown’s Theta Transport Station, and more importantly there were the pods the Colonial Forcers would be arriving in any minute now. Hurley said there would be eight pods carrying four hundred soldiers.

  Ploss had gone on to join Conant and Dr. Zaleski in the operations center, while Hurley had escorted Stake to the recreation yard. This would be a staging area for the first group of prisoners to be evacuated back to Punktown. Men from Orange Block were already filing in, under the eyes and guns of only organic guards. Hurley had told Stake that Klaus and his team had been ordered to direct all the automatonic guards into the warehouse, shut them all down, and lock them in for good measure. Another detachment of guards had accompanied the team in the event that any of the robots became possessed during the process.

  Stake had fallen into a long and barely moving line, looking out of place in his red uniform among all those dressed in orange. Some of the prisoners close by him asked him what he knew about all this, or simply why he was in their ranks, but he kept his eyes straight and his mouth shut. When a man covered excessively in muscles and tattoos ahead of Stake in line became loud in his demands for answers, one of the helmeted guards left his post by the exit the inmates were filing toward and came to the back of the queue.

  “Shut your hole and keep your eyes forward,” the guard snapped. It was Hurley, of course.

  “This little mutie your buddy now, Hurley?”

  “I told you to shut your hole!”

  When the prisoner begrudgingly complied, Hurley turned to Stake and explained, “In case you hadn’t guessed, Ploss figured you should be in the first batch to leave since this thing had targeted you specifically, and sounded like it still wanted to.”

  “I appreciate that, but hopefully we gave it sufficient cause to doubt whatever Cirvik told it,” Stake replied. “So where are three thousand prisoners going to be moved to until this can be sorted out…if it can be sorted out?”

  “Not sure where, ultimately…maybe they’ll split you all up across Punktown’s prisons, but I have my doubts they could handle that. Maybe they’ll have to ship you all to other cities. But for now, they’re going to secure some hangars and warehouses at the old Phosnoor Shipyard.”

  “Huh,” Stake said. Long-range teleportation had rendered Punktown’s once bustling shipyard obsolete, and Stake knew the area well; for a time he had rented some rooms within the hull of a decommissioned spacecraft, converted into apartments, on the shipyard grounds. “Going home,” he murmured to himself.

  “To be honest, I’ll be as relieved as anybody to be out of this bubble we’re in,” Hurley confided. Then, after a thoughtful pause, he asked, “Did you really care what was happening to these bad guys?”

  “I don’t know every man’s story. I know they’re criminals. But for me, not doing my job right is a kind of crime, too.”

  “Your job? How did this become your job?”

  “Guess it’s my calling. But some of my fellow prisoners asked me to look into it. And after all, I’m one of them now.”

  “I know you aren’t one of the bad ones, Stake,” Hurley said. “You shouldn’t be in the company you’re in.”

  “Thanks for that.”

  “Whatever time you end up getting after they look at your case, I hope when it’s finished you can get your life back on the proper track.”

  “Thanks for that, too. I sure intend to.”

  Hurley nodded, then left Stake to saunter back to his post by the exit.

  When the guard had turned his back and walked a sufficient distance away, two of the inmates farther back in line left their place and moved up toward where Stake stood. Stake knew this when he heard another prisoner complain half-jokingly, “Hey, no cutting, you two.”

  He turned and saw the nearer of the two men bent forward and lunging with a crude weapon in his hand: a sharpened plastic shank with a taped handle. Stake wasn’t surprised that it was one of the Tin Town Maniacs—the jug-eared one with blond hair cut in bangs—or that the youth wore a dizzy smile.

  It was so easy for Stake to catch his wrist, trap his arm, and redirect the shank’s blade into the hollow between the boy’s collarbones that he almost might have felt guilty for it. The youth obviously felt that with a life sentence, he had nothing to lose in taking this shot at Stake before possibly missing any future opportunity. But Stake did have something to lose, his very life, and so he had not held back. The boy stumbled backward and fell comically onto his rump, eyes wide in wonder and making a wet sucking sound as if he drew on a bong, the shank’s handle still protruding from his throat.

  Stake turned again, to meet the oncoming second Tin Town Maniac. This one held a plastic dowel with a long metal spike seated in it. Again he caught the young man’s arm and rerouted its thrust, but in this instance it made more sense to punch the spike into his thigh. Stake hoped it struck the femoral artery, but the spike was slim so just in case he slammed his elbow into the boy’s trachea. He too hit the floor with bulging eyes.

  Guards came running, and Stake stepped farther out of line with his hands held up, waiting for them. The Tin Town Maniacs were hoisted up and rushed off toward the infirmary, the one with the constricted trachea squirming desperately for air and the other one so slack Stake suspected he was already dead.

  Hurley appeared in front of him and Stake said mildly, “Maybe I won’t be free to pursue the right track for a much longer time, now.”

  “It was self-defense, I have no doubt, but I think it wasn’t such a good idea to mix you in with the Orange Bunch, after all. Come with me.”

  As Stake let Hurley take his arm and lead him away, he looked behind him and saw Edwin Fetch standing in line. His former twin stared at Stake with an ashen face and disbelieving eyes, as if he couldn’t draw in a breath himself. Stake nodded at him in a courteous good-bye and called, “Maybe I’ll see you in court, Ed.”

  Fifteen

  The Rage

  Stake looked to Hurley as they walked toward one of the cavernous chamber’s alternate exits, and said, “So where are you taking me? If you put me in my cell, I’ll be backed into a corner if that thing decides to come for me again, after all.”

  “I’m going to put you in an isolation cell for now. A change of scene if it does decide to look for you.”

  “I’m not sure how much good that will do. There’s no telling when it’s watching…where it’s watching from. The individual animals, like those fishy types, look like they move through air vents and things like that. Take physical routes in and out of the prison. But the way the assembled being appeared in my cell, and how Blur described the attack he witnessed—bonded together they seem to be able to apport from one spot to another through a channel they generate, like their own little temporary wormhole. From outside the prison to inside.”

  “You won’t be in there long, okay?” Hurley said impatiently. “Just until we can get this crazy damn Orange Bunch boarded on their boats.” He switched from speaking to Stake to addressing several of his fellow guards over his helmet mic. “Anderson, Grau, Pulver—I’m taking Stake to solitary for now until we can ship him out with the rest of Red Block. I’ll be right back. You got things
covered okay?”

  “Make it fast, man,” Stake overheard one of the guards respond. “We’re already short of people now that we’ve got men taking those two injured prisoners to the infirmary.”

  “Dead prisoners,” someone else corrected, cutting in. No doubt one of the guards who had been conveying the bodies of the Tin Town Maniacs. “You watch yourself with that one, Hurley.”

  “I got it under control,” Hurley replied.

  The two men had almost reached the exit, located at the opposite end of the great room from the doorway the prisoners were filing through, when a sudden uproar caused them to halt and whirl around.

  The prisoners at the end of the line were looking above them and pointing at a ghostly white ribbon that circled overhead like a tatter of ectoplasm.

  “Hey!” Stake started to call out.

  And then, a figure the general size and shape of a man, but resembling more the animated skeleton of a demon, seemed to step straight out of the air. No flare of light or puff of smoke; it suddenly just was. Its blank face, armored as if with chitin, framed by wriggling millipede legs like a flower of bone.

  As the prisoners at the tail of the queue cried out in surprise, the eel-like harbinger shot down to the figure’s head and joined its streaming mane. Became part of the whole…its job done, as if it had helped open the way, a key in some unfathomable lock.

  The prisoners near the phantom spun away to scatter. Hurley slapped his hand to his gun. Yet they were all too late.

  The demon thrust out its arms to either side, and just as quickly as Stake had caught hold of both Tin Town Maniacs, it seized two prisoners by enclosing their heads in its long fingers. Between those bony fingers, Stake saw the blue eyes of one of the men gone wide in horror.

  But a second later, all three of them were gone. The entity vanished in a blink, just as it had manifested. The departure of the two trapped prisoners, however, was more messy. Twin detonations of vivid redness made Stake shut his eyes and turn his face to the side involuntarily. Even from this distance, he felt fine drops of blood and a few nuggets of flesh reach the skin of his face.

  When he looked back, there were two great splatters on the rec yard floor where the men had been standing. Other prisoners closer to the scene than Stake and Hurley looked as though they had just emerged from swimming in a lake of blood.

  A scream echoed in Stake’s mind, dwindling slowly like a siren down a long tunnel. At first he had thought it was a half-blurted cry from the throats of the two prisoners, but they hadn’t had time for that. He knew it was the cry of the entity, instead. Not heard, but felt in the very folds of his brain like ricocheting electrical impulses. Alien impulses…not his own…

  The last of the cry of rage faded away into nothingness.

  From the doorway Hurley had just been about to usher Stake through, a stream of men suddenly trotted into the rec yard: Colonial Forcers, helmeted and dressed in gray and black urban camouflage, boots clomping, carrying bulky assault engines in their arms.

  But the monster was already gone.

  Epilogue

  Serendipity

  Due more to overcrowding at the Paxton Maximum Security Penitentiary than benevolence, Jeremy Stake only served three months for his impersonation of Edwin Fetch at the Trans-Paxton Penitentiary. His killing of two fellow inmates was investigated, but dismissed as justifiable. That the victims had been the reviled Tin Town Maniacs worked very much in his favor—as did the eyewitness testimony of prison guard Omar Hurley.

  Some of the Trans-Paxton prison gangs, such as the Orange Bunch, fragmented and were shuffled into other gangs. The Muties, however, naturally melded with the larger mutant gang at Paxton Maximum Security. Stake stuck close to Null and Hassan Billings for the duration of his sentence, in case of further trouble from Fetch, but none arose and he seldom even glimpsed the man. Blur he never saw again, nor did Null and Billings know where he’d been taken. To another prison? A hospital for the mentally ill?

  They liked to believe he had gotten his shapeshifting gift under control long enough to masquerade as one of the guards, and had strolled out the front door to disappear into Punktown.

  As for the abandoned Trans-Paxton Penitentiary being dismantled, destroyed, or shifted out of its pocket, and the pocket closed up—none of this happened. Stake wasn’t surprised…nor by the news that the prison would now be utilized as a remote outpost for the scientific study of interstitial life.

  * * *

  Two months after his release from prison, Stake found himself working on the assembly line at SynthLife Automatonics, helping create highly realistic androids in what was called the Little Gravure line (individual models bearing such names as the Saaya, the Meiki, the Hikaru). Too expensive for anyone but the most affluent to privately own, the adorable Asian-styled machines were more commonly utilized in legal brothels.

  But Stake’s factory gig was not because of a continuing difficulty in obtaining assignments as a private investigator. It was, in fact, one such assignment.

  SynthLife’s owner had summoned Stake personally, with the request that the detective pose as one of his workers so as to look into a very vexing problem. For several months now, a number of his expensive finished or near-finished androids had been acting very strangely, erratically, when it seemed nothing could be wrong with their programming. In fact, three of them had managed to vanish from the plant altogether. When Stake asked if they’d been stolen, the owner told him that didn’t appear to be the case. Security cameras had shown the first of the valuable missing androids simply walking out of the building, escaping as casually as could be, after work hours. Following that night, though, the security cameras throughout the plant had been malfunctioning, probably hacked into.

  A newly hired security guard had intercepted the last runaway sex doll. He had ended up unconscious with a concussion and broken arm. That was when the owner had decided to try another approach to the dilemma, focusing on sorting out its cause.

  He suspected industrial sabotage, perhaps from a competitor. An inside job, some of his own workers taking money in return for causing havoc. Stake took the assignment, but he thought it might get messy if the problem turned out to be a syndicate boss—such as Punktown’s foremost crime lord, Neptune Teeb—at a disagreement with SynthLife over pricing or such. After all, the syndies were behind those brothels that acquired the Little Gravure models.

  Well, Stake decided, it still beat another gig in prison.

  * * *

  Stake was not involved in covering the delectable automatons in their soft realistic flesh, but in constructing their inner frameworks, and the work was often surprisingly manual and greasy. At least, the tasks they gave him to do. His instructors were two human workers named Brook—short, huge-bellied, and bug-eyed—and the taller, thinner, and sunken-cheeked Nolan. Neither of them had much patience for training a newbie, and they picked up on the mutant’s subtly unfinished countenance. One of them would grouse, purposely loudly enough for Stake to hear, “Look at this guy, huh? Tell me he isn’t a clone. I think the company’s bringing in clone labor now to replace us. They can work clones for peanuts.”

  The other worker would reply, “Clone? I say he’s an android. SynthLife must be testing out a new line. But yeah, I think we should tell the union to have a look at this guy while we still have our jobs.”

  Stake ignored them during such exchanges, keeping to his work. Days went by, and he took in everything around him, even his coworkers’ little rituals. Every day, grizzled dwarfish Brook would greet Nolan in his gruff voice, “Hey…how’s your tighty whities?”

  “Pretty damn mighty,” Nolan might reply.

  “I’ll tell you what’s mighty. Your wife’s mouth. She’s a regular Black and Decker pecker wrecker.”

  The next day the exchange might go: “Hey, how’s the tighty whities?”

  “Eh…today they’re pretty shitty.”

  “Yeah? You know what’s really shitty? Your wife’s titties
.”

  Today when Brook ambled in late from the cafeteria and began keying a template change into an automated welder, without looking up from his own work table Stake asked on a bored impulse, “So how’s your tighty whities?”

  Brook whipped around with his already protuberant eyes bulging, looking like a startled bulldog. “I don’t wear whities. I wear boxers. Why are you so interested in what I got under my jeans, man-lover?”

  Stake looked up at Brook slowly, but held his tongue and returned to his assembly work.

  “Yeah, you better mind your mouth, android,” Brook told him.

  Later on in the shift, Stake reached up with both hands to adjust the baseball cap all of them wore as part of their uniform, and surreptitiously took a few shots of Nolan on his wrist comp. Then he waited for a time when Nolan was off on an errand to another department, quickly ducked into the nearest men’s room, and studied the best shot of Nolan on the wrist comp. He might not be able to reproduce Brook’s body type, but Nolan was within his range, and he could assume a sunken-cheeked appearance nicely.

  When Nolan—Stake—emerged from the restroom, he walked right up to Brook, cupped the smaller man’s crotch in his hand, and said, “I’ve always loved you.” Imitating someone’s face was no good if you couldn’t do their voice, too, and Stake was a master of mimicry.

  Brook tried to push him away but Stake was already skipping off like a gleeful little girl, vanishing behind warehouse racks reaching halfway to the high ceiling. Then, out of sight, he darted into the men’s room again.