by Jeter, K W
“Fine,” said Limmit, withdrawing the gun and swinging it to one side. “Then nobody’s going to come looking for you here.” He reached into his boot and, before the other could move, brought his blade up, into, and across his throat, the terrified gasp of breath bubbling through a flow of blood. No need risking another shot anyway, thought Limmit. They’ll probably think the first one was just some of their own partying on a rooftop. I hope.
Mounting the stairs back up to the walkway, the rifle cradled in one hand, Limmit listened to the body’s last thrashes and gurgles, feeling the adrenaline high drain from his body. You’re so fuckin’ ruthless, he said to himself, satisfied. Sticking that poor dumb asshole like that. Reminds me of Spec. 4 Jetsam.
Inside the cubicle, Adder opened his eyes slowly and looked up at him. “What was . . he whispered, the voice light-years away, “... the noise ...” The eyes closed again.
Doesn’t miss a thing, thought Limmit, impressed. “Pleasant dreams, Doctor,” he said, and exited from the room and its two consciousless bodies.
He sat himself down in the chair on the walkway and propped the rifle against the guardrail. Now I can watch the show with my mind at ease, he thought, wiping a spot of blood from his hand. That pays him back for getting the assassin. He angled the television between his feet up at himself, switched it on, and leaned back in the chair. All this futzing around, he thought, in L.A. and Orange County even and I’ve never yet been able to catch one of Mox’s broadcasts. At last I’m going to see what His Gray Eminence looks like. His farewell performance, too: last chance. You can do it, Adder—go, team, go. I must be going delirious, he thought as the television image swam into focus.
The broadcast had already begun. For some reason the set had no sound. Even without it, Limmit stared, suddenly transfixed, at the ancient yet immensely powerful-looking white-haired visage, precisely mouthing his words. Limmit rose trembling to his feet, his heart slamming frantically within him. He staggered against the guardrail, gripping it in both white-knuckled hands. Convulsed with fear, he vomited with great shuddering heaves, spattering the corpse below, the salt taste of the sweat drenching his face seeping into the corners of his mouth and mixing with the vomitus’ acridity.
He turned around weakly and faced the television again. It was the first time in his life he had ever been this afraid—afraid of more than death. “It’s him,” he whispered, his voice a panicky vibrato. A rapid interior flash of a face in a helicopter looking down at him, a child. He whirled around and yelled at the entrance of the cubicle where Adder and the girl lay. “It’s him—it’s Gass! My father!”
He raced into the cubicle and knelt beside Adder’s cot. “You don’t have a chance,” he babbled into the unconscious face. “He invented this stuff—Gass did, my father! Can’t you see—” He pulled himself away with a jerk. Oh Jesus shit, he thought, shaking. Maintain.
He stared at the television beside Melia, the strips of tape running across Mox/Gass’ face. My father, he thought, the high peaks of panic subsiding, leaving the sharp undercurrent of fear. That only I could have recognized. No wonder he wanted to kill me. Limmit hoped it was not too late to stop Adder.
He pulled his blade out of his boot and bent down to the surgical tape binding Melia’s hand to the flashglove. As soon as the point was inserted beneath the edge of the tape, the flashglove emitted a high-pitched whine, the metal fingers curling into a fist. Limmit saw the small red dots of the sensors, like points of blood, glowing. He withdrew the knife and placed it against the tape holding Melia’s other hand against the television by her side. The glove whined again, lifting slightly off the cot. There was the same response when Limmit stepped across to the other side of the cubicle, to the cable outlet. Some part of Adder’s subconscious, it dawned on Limmit, must have felt I’d chicken out. An electronic watchdog—it’ll kill me if I try to stop him. On the television screen a ripple of distortion passed over his father’s face like a wave of heat. Adder and Melia had already penetrated that far.
He stared at the blood-red dots of the sensors, trying to order his chaotic thoughts. Maybe, he thought in near-hysterical despair, I could find a phone and call the station. Long distance to Orange County—would you mind telling the two poltergeists in your circuits that the beloved John Mox is really the infamous Lester Gass?
He shook off the lunatic thoughts: realizing there was only one way. He bent down and picked up the leatherette case containing the ADR from where he had dropped it before.
After he had bound one arm to the limp flesh arm of Adder, he took the filled hypodermic and injected its contents into the crook of his elbow. He lay down on the floor beside the cot, the image of the three connected bodies reminding him absurdly of a chorus line. Feeling the cubicle slowly begin to fade away from him, he thought, Either the flashglove will set itself off anyway and kill me, or Azusa’s Rattowners will come back and find us here unconscious and shoot us all. Or the likeliest: my father will crush us all like gnats inside his skull, leaving these three empty husks to rot in an abandoned warehouse in the slums. My warning will be too late, he realized dismally. For Adder. Or any of us.
“How come you never got your side panel replaced?”
Edgar Endpoint one-handed the car into another lane, cruising slowly through the early evening traffic. He shrugged without looking at his companion seated beside him. “Aw, too much hassle,” Edgar said. “All the parts houses know me—they might have turned me in to my father.” He accelerated in a sudden spurt, then slowed, moving to the rhythm of the other cars. “Besides,” he said softly, “who cares?”
His friend nodded slowly, absorbing this information. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s about how I feel nowadays.” He reached into his jacket and drew out a sheaf of dirty, creased papers. “I tried to keep these out of the light, hoping they’d last longer. But they faded anyway.” He threw them down on the console between the bucket seats, where they fluttered limply, the breeze not enough to lift them.
Edgar took his eyes from the traffic ahead and looked at the sheets. He recognized them as one of his Adder-paks, now wilted and completely blank. The sight depressed him beyond endurance.
After he had left his friend off at his residential complex, Edgar sat brooding in the motionless vehicle. Maybe I shouldn’t have told them all, he thought. But they would have found out anyway. And it was a weight—like carrying his corpse around on my back. The last thing keeping us alive in this mortuary world. Mox’s video-men can come film my life now—I Was a Teenage Corpse. He sighed and started the car up.
He left it in his old parking space beneath Casa del Solituda, and took the elevator up to his family’s conapt. His key still worked. The old fart, he thought, didn’t even change the lock. He probably knew I’d be back—after he found out what everyone else’s kids were talking about. About Adder.... Yes, Dad, I’m ready to go get my lobotomy now. I’ll be right out of the bathroom—soon as I’m done with this razor blade.
Searching the rooms, he found the conapt empty except for his mother in her usual coma in the bedroom. He yelled at her horizontal figure, getting no response. He contemplated bouncing the alarm clock ofiF her forehead, but decided finally that he preferred her this way. Peeking in his own bedroom, he saw that nothing had been changed.
Wonder where my father is, he thought as he sat down in the living area before the television. Probably out kidnapping more runaways for the SPS. He switched the set on, settling back in the upholstered chair as the familiar gray face of John Mox faded in. All I need, he thought grimly. Maybe I’ll appreciate it now. With a little help. From a cut-glass candy dish on the coffee table he picked out several of his mother’s pink barbiturate-analog capsules and downed them.
On the screen, Mox blathered on. A ripple like heat waves or some viscous liquid over the screen appeared. Never saw that before, thought Edgar, as the fog started to roll in. Technical difficulties, blah blah. Maybe it’s the ghost of Dr. Adder come back to haunt you, John Mox, he
announced melodramatically inside himself. We should be so lucky. It’ll go away in a second.
It didn’t.
“Sieges come and go, but whores remain. Right, Leslie?”
“That’s why I didn’t go into the siege business, Mr. Endpoint.” You fat, intoxicated asshole from Orange County.
The three men stopped in the dimly lit hallway, outside a door familiar to two of them.
“The usual, Leslie?” asked Endpoint, his voice as sloppy as his rumpled hair and clothes.
“That’s right,” said the young pimp coolly, extending a limpid palm. Endpoint fumbled bills onto it from his wallet. The pimp pushed the shabby door open for the two straights, then disappeared graciously down the hallway.
“Wait’ll you see her,” chortled Endpoint, dragging his staggering companion into the room. It was dark except for a soft blue-gray glow from a rectangular area in the ceiling over the bed. “These long trippers are somethin’ else,” continued Endpoint, not noticing his friend sinking, slack-faced, into one corner. “I use ta think double amputees were my thing—loved the way you could roll their little legless asses any way ya wanted. But now it really gets my rocks off to see these chicks so absorbed in their vizh-ee-unz while I’m reamin’ the shit out of ’em. It’s like they’re—not even there! Dead or somethin’. This one’s the best.” He waved an erratic hand at the motionless, naked figure on the bed. “Nuts about TV—sees things, I guess. Haw! Leslie even had a TV placed in the ceiling”—he gestured up at it—“so’s she could watch and fuck at the same time. Wow.” Swaying slightly and sweating, he contemplated the angle-distorted face of Mox in the overhead television. The screen was reflected as two gray dots in the unmoving eyes of the girl on the bed. He reeled around, nearly falling over in the process. “Wan’ first crack at her, Art?” he asked, then saw his companion crouched unconscious in the corner.
“Mmm,” mused Endpoint. “It appears you’re a smedge too coshed for this right now. ‘S all right—got all night.” He loosened his pants, dropping them into a puddle at his feet.
The girl’s eyes flicked into his face briefly as he pressed his weight onto her. “Daddy!” she whispered, her voice trailing off as her eyes wandered back to the screen, visible over Endpoint’s sweaty shoulder.
“Dream on, kid,” he grunted. “You’re no kid of mine, dead bitch.”
Above his back, a liquid shimmering passed over Mox’s face on the screen.
He was walking down the Interface, passing through the swirling crowds of pimps and whores, straights and hustlers, like a silent knife through flesh. I belong here, thought Limmit with satisfaction, moving with the flow. Suddenly, he stopped in his place on the sidewalk; the strangely yielding crowd parted and flowed past, unnoticing, on all sides. Wait, he thought, remembered: the Interface is over—this is the ADR. Someplace out of Mox and Adder’s minds. Got to find Dr. Adder. But how? He grabbed someone, a pimp passing by one side, halting him. Christ, thought Limmit in dismay, peering into the blank, zombielike face. This guy’s dead. He released the figure and whirled around, facing the others walking toward him on the sidewalk. They’re all dead, he thought. He noticed suddenly how silent it was: the constant shrieking babble he remembered from his first nights in L.A. was absent. Alarmed, he pushed his way through the walking figures to the curb. He stopped short at its edge, sick again with fear.
The street was filled with the corpses from the Raid. But not dead. Their blood-soaked and shattered bodies writhed in a shallow river, filled with a repellent white substance. Pus, thought Limmit in nauseated horror. Their faces, or the remains of them, held the same blank expressions as the figures on the sidewalk. The corpses nearest the curb would reach up and attempt to snare the ankles of the walkers; if successful, more dead hands would reach out for the tripped figure and pull it into the street, where the thick white fluid seemingly transformed the figure into one of its numbers, reaching out in turn for others on the sidewalk. After a moment, Limmit saw also that some of the slowly churning corpses would pull themselves out of the street, lifting themselves out onto the curb. There the pus and blood melted off, the body became whole, and the figure rose and walked on, as if nothing had preceded or interrupted his zombielike progression. The numbers of those leaving and entering the street’s mire of dead bodies seemed equal; a constant cycle in and out of the corpse world’s tributary.
Limmit looked down suddenly at his feet. A pair of red-spotted hands had encircled one ankle. A girl’s face, missing the lower jaw so that the throat cavity gaped open at him like an enormous, misshapen mouth, stared up at him, dead eyes registering nothing. More hands reached up from the white fluid for him. In revulsed panic, his heart thudding wildly, he kicked free and staggered back into the center of the sidewalk. The corpse hands snared another figure, toppling it, then pulling it headfirst into the street.
There was nothing left inside Limmit to vomit, so he doubled over in dry spastic heaves. He stood up again, dizzied. I’ve got to find Adder, his mind repeated obsessively. He’s somewhere, behind all this. But how can I find him?
From nowhere a thought struck him. Jostled on all sides by the figures on the sidewalk, he reached inside his jacket and pulled out the small yellow plastic radio Droit had given him. His hands trembling, he switched it on and spun the dial. An impassioned tenor voice burst out into the pseudo-interface’s oppressive silence. Not that, thought Limmit, shaking the radio in frustration. He felt like he was going to burst into tears. Abruptly, the music ended.
“Friends,” said the smooth, humane voice of KCID, “I know a lot of my listeners will get a chuckle out of this one. How many of you out there know a certain E. Allen Limmit? How many of you are him? Well,” he went on, clucking like a mother hen, “I want to tell you that it takes a certain kind of dumb to stand on the sidewalk of L.A.’s main drag and not be able to find Dr. Adder. Am I right, folks? And after he already found him once before, not too long ago. Ah well, I suppose it takes all kinds. Now, how about Wunderlich doing the first movement of Das Lied von der Erde? Ein Aff ist’s, heh heh.” The music swelled back on.
Limmit switched the radio off, the silence rushing back up to him like a thick wave of air. His office, he thought, replacing the radio in his jacket. The black iron gates. Where else?
He pushed his way through the somnambulent crowd and, after a moment’s hesitation, up to the curb. He looked around till he located the well-remembered gates. They were on the other side of the corpse-filled street.
Kicking away one dead hand reaching for him, he sighted either way to see which end of the street lay closest. There were no visible ends to it. The pseudo-interface appeared to stretch toward infinity in both directions, a limitless river of writhing corpses bounded on either side by endlessly walking resurrections of pimps and whores.
As he tried to shout across the street to the building behind the black gates, he could feel his voice dissipate only inches from his lips, the sound not even penetrating the sludgelike atmosphere. It’s no good, he thought despairingly, exhausted by his strangulated yelling. I can’t get across—the corpses will start to pull down more than can leave, until the sidewalks are empty and the river of pus spreads and swallows everything, me and the buildings; then that’ll be the end.
Nothing to lose then, he decided, and stepped off the curb into the street.
The white fluid sloshed gluily to the top of his boots. The effort required to pull them free and take another step was immense. The arms of the corpses mired around him reached up to his thighs, grasping and pulling him down. God, he screamed in sudden panic to himself, anything’s better than this! He swung frantically at the corpses, knocking off their clinging hands. The curb he had left seemed miles away when he looked back; no hope of scrambling back to it. The bodies behind pressed him forward inexorably into the center of the street. He was no longer able to see either side from here. Sobbing, he batted away the hands reaching from below, his own hands and arms spotted with their blood.
/> I’m dying, he realized fearfully. There was no sensation in his feet; they’re dead, he thought, submerged among the corpses. He tottered and fell upon his knees, amidst the tangled, writhing bodies. The hands pawed at his chest and shoulders as he whimpered and inched forward through the thickening fluid.
When the feeling was gone from his legs, he fell forward on his hands. How long, he wondered in horror, has it been? Dead feet, dead legs, dead cock: how long until I’m all dead. He pulled himself forward, through and over the corpses, feeling the rigidity of their skeletons and the yielding softness of their spilled innards. His hands died. As he pitched forward on his chest, he saw dimly the curb of the sidewalk before him, the feet and legs walking upon it. I can’t reach it, he thought, gripped in paralyzing fear and nausea as the blood-drenched hands pawed and clutched at his head straining to keep above the white fluid. He felt the hands leaving smears of the street’s slime upon his face, the surface skin starting to die and then decay.
Dead, he thought dully; this is how it feels to be a corpse. He saw the arms of the corpses around him reaching up to the feet on the sidewalk—saw hands that he recognized as his own catching hold of a pair of ankles. My hands, he thought. Part of the corpse world now, moving to its laws.
The figure on the sidewalk resisted being pulled into the street by Limmit’s corpse. The dead hands held as if rigor mortis had set in, as the blank-faced figure stumbled back, pulling Limmit partially up onto the sidewalk.
He felt his hands and forearms coming alive, as if blood were being pumped into their tissues. He held on to the figure’s ankles, trying to gain a purchase on the sidewalk with his elbows. Suddenly the figure tripped and fell; Limmit felt himself being pulled back into the street. I’m still partially alive, he realized, so they want me back. Other corpse hands had grabbed hold of the figure he had tripped and were pulling it in by its arms. Limmit let go of its ankles and scrabbled to one side. He clawed at the sidewalk desperately, the pus-filled street sucking at him from behind. “Please,” he whispered hoarsely, twisting his head up agonizingly at the unnoticing figures, “somebody help me.”