Blood Samples

by Bonansinga, Jay

  The only other thing I can think about, for some reason, is that little bugged Nokia cell phone, plunging and fluttering down, down, down, down... into the darkest, emptiest, coldest place on earth.

  And that's when the little telltale chirping noise pierces my skull.

  Look: the truth is I had no reason to believe there was anything weird going on when I heard my cell phone ringing. I'm a freelancer. I get calls in the strangest places, the most inopportune times. I figured it was some sleaze-bag bail bondsman calling about another skip. But when I finally fish through my pockets, find my cell, dig it out, and look at the caller-ID glowing in the darkness, I jerk backward and drop the phone like it's a hot coal burning my hand.

  "No way," I utter in the silence, my voice sounding hollow and distant in my ears.

  The cell phone continues trilling and vibrating on the deck, creeping across the varnished surface like a beetle, the display sending a tiny beam of sickly light through the fog. I can see the caller-ID number. I can see it. There's no mistake. I needed to memorize that very same number in order to set up the GPS device last week.

  The Freak's number glows on the little LED screen shivering at my feet.

  I turn away from it in a fever of chills. I convince myself I'm just seeing things. My guilty brain has scrambled a few digits. That's it. That's got to be it. The cell phone keeps chirping behind me as I gaze out at the wall of dirty grey cotton encapsulating me. If I ignore it maybe it'll go away. If I just keep staring out at that soupy fog, the thing will stop ringing or my voice mail will pick it up. I'm drenched in sweat and my heart's pulsing in my neck as I stand there, gripping the rail, waiting for it to stop.

  And it does.

  The silence that slams down on me is almost worse than the ringing noise.

  The faint patter of seawater lapping against the hull is barely audible now above the sound of my ragged breathing. I've got that coppery-sour taste in my mouth from all the adrenaline, and I can smell the rank, dead-rot odor of the stagnant tide. The boat is gently pitching, and I've got that woozy, twilight feeling you get when you've just awakened from a dream — that sense of primal relief with the return of mundane reality.

  I turn away from the railing and stagger over to the place I dropped the phone. I kneel down and pick it up. It's blinking — a little mail box cartoon in the display window. Someone has left me a message. I start to retrieve it but I stop, my thumb poised above the message button.

  I don't want to hear it. Whatever it is. I don't want to know.

  The phone rings again and I jerk like I've got a poisonous snake in my hand.

  I hurl the little device across the cabin, and it strikes the windscreen, then bounces to the floor in the shadows under the bonnet. I slam my hands over my ears, and bark at the empty night sky — "I'M NOT HEARING THIS SHIT!!" — and I lose my balance as the boat lists suddenly. I fall on my ass. I see stars and I can still hear that thing ringing in the cabin.

  "Aw fuck it," I say and climb back to my feet and then edge my way under the canvas roof. I find the cell phone, pick it up, and thumb the answer button on the fifth ring. "WHO THE HELL IS IT? THIS BETTER BE GOOD!"

  My first impression is that the sound is coming from a great distance. A burst of static sizzling in my ear. But under that, a faint voice saying something I can't quite make out yet. The closest analogy would be maybe an overseas operator speaking some language unlike any language I've ever heard. Or maybe an ancient wax-disk recording so full of pops and scratches and crackling noises that you can't make out the words but that's not exactly it either.

  "Crrrrrhhhhhhhh — ssuh — crrrrhhhhhhh!"

  "What!? HELLO?!"

  Now maybe I'm in shock or something. I don't know. Maybe it's the trauma of being lost at sea after losing the boy, adrift with my own thoughts after having just committed the unthinkable. In my mind I keep going back to Exodus 20:13 — And God spoke these words, 'You shall not kill!' And I keep seeing the Freak's little Nokia wireless, no bigger than a silver bar of soap, skimming the surface of that obsidian sea where I pitched it, then sinking, then fluttering down and down through the black void, and maybe even coming to rest in the silt at the very bottom of the deepest part of the ocean.

  And now maybe all this overactive imagining has basically snapped my wig, popped the fuse of my sanity like a light bulb flaring out.

  But I swear to God I can hear a familiar voice between those bursts of static.

  CRRRRRRHHHHHHH - somebody - CRRRRRHHHHHH!

  "What?! Who is this goddamnit?!"

  CRRRHHHH - therrrre's sssomebody - CRRHHHHHH!

  "Somebody? Somebody-what! Somebody-WHO?!"

  CRRRHHH — there's somebody here — CRRRRH!

  "Okay, whatever, there's somebody there, but where's there, okay, and while you're at it why don't you tell me just who the fuck this — AAHHHHH!"

  All of a sudden there's this terrible, watery shrieking noise coming over the line, but it's not exactly a scream, it's more like a howl, like something other than human is roaring on the other end of the line, and I just let out a yelp and hurl the phone into the sea.

  The little thing skips a couple of times across the glassy surface of the water, then vanishes, and I'm assuming it's sunk, you know, I'm thinking the thing is long gone. And I'm catching my breath, leaning back against the bulwark, pretty frantic by that point. I'm thinking about getting out of there with any means necessary, maybe using a piece of the boat as a paddle, or finding something to use as a signal, when all at once I see the little silver device floating alongside the boat in the gentle lapping water.

  That telltale chirping sound has started up again, and I don't even have to look to know what number is flickering on that caller-ID display.

  "Heh heh heh heh heh, go to hell, go to hell, nobody home!" I'm raving now in a sing-songy rant, my voice sounding mechanical and garbled in my ears. "Nobody home, nobody nobody, just reading my bible, thou shalt not kill... nobody hommmmmmmmme!"

  The thing keeps ringing.

  I can't resist. I wish I could tell you I could. I wish I could say I resisted leaning out over the keel and fishing that thing out of the water. But then I'd be a liar and I'm only good for one mortal sin at a time, if you know what I mean. So, anyway, what I do is, I reach down and pluck that thing from the black lapping waters, and it slips out of my trembling wet hand, plop, and I reach down again and finally I get a good grip on it and put the dripping thing to my ear and scream: "WHO THE HELL IS THIS?!!"

  And what I hear coming out of that phone, and what I hear in the distance, in the darkness... well, let's put it this way: that's when things go from bad to worse.

  I need to take another drink before I tell you the next part, the last part, the part about the water. And the voice. And what happened then.

  Okay, here goes: I'm standing there hanging over the water with my heart slamming in my chest and my ear pressed to that dripping cell phone and I hear that wet, hoarse voice piercing the static on the other end of the line: "CRRHHH — there's somebody down here wants to - CRRRRRHHHHHHHHH!"

  I'm about to scream another series of obscenities when I realize I've been hearing another sound off in that empty, black distance for quite a while now and haven't even realized it. But something out of the corner of my eye catches my attention then, a blinking light off to my right, on the floor of the boat, a faint beeping sound.

  I don't put the two things together at first, but when I suddenly realize what I'm hearing out in that fog, and what I'm seeing on the floor of the boat, my heart jumps in my mouth and all my sweat turns to ice.

  The GPS receiver.

  "Don't, don't, don't don't do this to me," I mutter with whatever breath I have left, and I go over and snatch it up with my free hand. Now I'm standing there on that rocking bucket of rust with my knees wobbling and heart thumping and that GPS in my shaking hand and the cell phone glued to my ear.

  "CRRRRRRHHHHH - there's somebody down here wants to talk to you - CR
RRH!"

  I can see the tiny glowing dots on the GPS again. I see one of the dots moving.

  Which brings me to the noise I've been hearing. Very faint at first. Like I'm feeling it more than hearing it. But there's something massive out there, gathering energy, moving toward me. Like a fold in the fabric of the ocean rolling toward my boat.

  And I look down at the GPS again, and I see that little glowing spot moving across the little spider web of a grid toward the other one, the stationary one. Impossible. Right? I'm just saying. Totally impossible. But here it comes, the little dot moving toward me. And I'm dumb with terror right then, backing away from the rail with the cell phone still pressed to my ear.

  CRRRH — there's somebody down here wants to talk to you! — CRRRHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!

  Okay, this isn't easy, describing it, reliving it, but I'll give it a shot, I have to, I owe it to all of you. You've seen submarines when they rise to the surface? Or you've seen films of submarines?

  First you just see that vague disturbance in the ocean coming toward you, just a nauseating kind of folding in of the water that seems to gather as the gigantic sub starts to materialize from the deep. Then the water begins to implode into itself as the sub emerges with a great torrent of sound and backwash.

  This kind of thing had been building out there in the fog for what seemed like hours, a kind of low, vast rumble, and that shadowy undercurrent that I'd been sensing, and now it was approaching, coming up from the depths, and it was huge — Huge! — like a mountain rising out of the Gulf.

  "No Jesus no fuck," I'm backing away on trembling legs and I finally fall down the steps into the shadows of the cabin, dropping the gadgets, seeing stars.

  Now maybe this is how those poor son of bitches felt in Moby Dick when that monster came out of that black void, a vast monolith under the surface, displacing a black glacier of sea water as it rises toward you. But I start shrieking like a baby on the floor of that dark cabin, curled into a fetal position, my brain a mess of tangled panic, sparking like an overloading switch board.

  Whatever it is coming out of the sea, it reaches my pathetic little boat on a great WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWHHHHOMPP! of air pressure collapsing and the seams of the universe ripping apart, and I can't describe that last sensation before I blacked out. I've tried to put it into words. I can't do it. Best I can manage is that the ocean itself opened its mouth, a great chasm of festering black bile, a raging aperture of rotting fangs and teeth and poison, and it swallowed me, and that was all.

  Except for one thing.

  One thing.

  Screw it. That's the best I can do. Why bother? Nobody's going to believe it. And what do I care anyway? Obviously I didn't die out there. Obviously I made it back to the shore that night. Somehow. Don't ask me how.

  So here I am in my little flop house trying to tell the story. Jesus. Who am I kidding? What am I going to do, write my memoirs?

  I got the windows painted black, aluminum foil on some of the panes. Nobody can see inside. Which is good since I need to prepare for my work in private.

  I tend to rotate my tools to keep the cops off the scent so I usually have a lot of stuff laid out on work tables. Knives for one, poison for another. Various and sundry handguns. I'm good at what I do. I can clear 50k on a single mob hit.

  Maybe more if some captain of industry wants his loudmouth wife out of the picture.

  Oh yeah. I almost forgot. That last sensation before I blacked out on the boat that night? There was one realization that struck me before I lost consciousness. I realized the Freak's cell phone had fallen right through a hole in the bottom of the earth.

  I realized something else.

  I realized who it was wanted to talk to me.

  GLORY HAND IN THE SOFT CITY

  I woke up in the middle of the night thinking I still had my right hand.

  It threw me for a moment.

  I lay there in a cold sweat, my heart thumping. I brought my stump up in front of my face, waving invisible fingers back and forth. I could feel the twinges of phantom pain, the sharp aching in the knuckles that weren't there anymore, and the hot, itchy sensations like sunburn tingling in the heart of my non-existent palm.

  "What's'matter, Glory?" The hooker lying next to me was stirring awake, gazing up at me through heavy-lidded eyes. She called herself Porsche, and her hair had that bizarre coppery color of laboratory-grown follicles. Earlier in the evening we had humped for twenty minutes, until I had climaxed my routine one and a half fluid ounces of sterile semen and Porsche had fallen fast asleep. I hadn't had the heart to boot her out.

  Now I was telling her I was fine.

  "You're sweating," she insisted, sitting up, reaching for her box of synth-cigs.

  "Nightmares."

  "You're shitting me. You're still sleeping natural?" Porsche lit a syn-stick, sucking a mouthful of pale blue smoke. "I sleep like a baby since I got the alpha implant put in. Word to the wise, Robert: Get an alpha implant."

  "Already tried it — didn't work," I said, flexing my non-fingers, concentrating on the ghostly feelings. The heat, the tingling: They were my first true neural sensations since I had lost the hand in a nasty kendo-fight with a couple of transgenic Sikhs in a juice den last month. I was on a missing person case that had gotten me mixed up with the Indo-Burmese Chimera Triad, and I was trying to fight my way out. It took a pair of emergency techs working non-stop just to save my hand's nerve network and get the thing frozen before the cells shut down. They told me they could probably save the hand and restore the nerves, but I was devastated. My pipeline to true bio-touch had been inexorably threatened.

  That's when I started thinking about checking out of the private investigation game.

  "When do you get that back?" The prostitute nodded toward my stump, toward the cap of surgical mesh and the network of medical tattoos drawn around my wrist for calibration during the reattachment.

  I told her next Thursday, and then I glanced across the shadows of my measly little studio flat. The cracked plastic calendar was hanging by the autoclave, the digital face reading Friday, March 7, 2053, and I realized I had only six days left until my biological hand was done. And then I realized my right hand was all I had left in the world. The rest of my body had been grafted and treated so many times, there wasn't much left with a decent nerve ending. Like most of the regular army, I had lost ninety percent of the skin on my arms and legs during the war in Pakistan. All those new viruses mingling, nasty hybrids surfacing everywhere. Of course, the plague years got the rest of me. My left hand, much of my torso, and a good portion of my left shoulder had atrophied during the Hanta plague in '24; and most of it had to be re-seeded with test tube tissue. Even my ass had ninety percent lab-flesh on it.

  But nobody was smart enough to see the shut-down coming.

  They called it Miller's Syndrome: the gradual atrophy of the nerve endings due to some faulty connection between laboratory grown skin and the natural subcutaneous fascia. In English: The world went numb. Four out of five survivors of the new plagues experienced the deadening effects within a year of being treated. I got it myself. After my discharge, I started going numb. And even throughout my years as a beat cop, I felt the nerve endings closing down.

  Of course, I was lucky. I had fared a lot better than most of the poor schmucks creeping around the HardCity nowadays. Most folks born after the turn of the Twenty-first had a hundred percent reworked tissue, and the closest thing to a real neural sensation for them was jacking into a nerve-net box and letting some virtual Hindu mama jerk them off. I, on the other hand, possessed... well... the other hand. I was one of the small percentage of old timers who still owned a biological hand. A stretch of skin with its original nerve bundle intact.

  And right now I wanted it back.

  "Ouch!" I jerked back against the fiber steel headboard with a start. My unseen fingers were shrieking. The invisible heat was erupting.

  "What is it, honey?" Porsche had managed to slip out of b
ed and climb into her sari. Now she was standing a few feet away, nervously puffing her cig.

  "I dunno — I can — I can feel — OUCH!" I convulsed against the wall.

  My phantom hand was going up in flames.

  "Should I buzz somebody?" Porsche was gawking at me, chewing her lip.

  "No — I'm just — I can feel the —" I climbed out of bed and turned on the halogens. With my numb left hand I managed to pull on my leather pants and guide my feet into my boots. The heat was like a cymbal crashing in my brain. I took a few deep breaths, then walked over to the window.

  I looked out through the grey ozone filter.

  My invisible hand throbbed.

  The HardCity was shimmering in the toxic darkness, the sodium-bright residential blocks glowing sickly silver. At this hour the streets were still humming, the threads of directional lasers still stitching through the haze, looking like cat's cradles. Off in the distance, I could see the blue flames on the horizon, the MicroSoft farms growing bio-circuits twenty-four hours a day. They owned everything. Even me: my skin, my organs. Either Microsoft or DuPont. They owned the patents on everything.

  I started to say, "I think it's just a twitch or something —"

  Then it hit me.

  The phantom pain could be a signal from some remote transmission. A warning. Something happening to my physical hand. My own flesh and blood.

  A distress call.

  "I gotta go check on something," I muttered, heading for the closet.

  "At this hour?" Porsche looked like an apparition, standing there in her coppery hair and ren-gen silk.

  "Help yourself to some coffee, whatever you want," I said, pulling on my ozone jacket, shades and gloves. There was an advisory tonight, and I didn't want to jeopardize my pre-operative sight.

  I walked over to the door, paused and added, "Make yourself at home, Porsche, I'll be back in a flash."