And yet, as if to distract him from that great destiny, as if to hold him back, there was that echo growing more and more familiar with each reverberation. He could not hate it, however much it impeded him. In fact, it inspired a perplexing emotion in him. A confusing yearning, as he heard the voice inside his mind say, “Please...why don’t you try to talk to Krimson on a Ouija phone? Why don’t you just ask her what happened?”
And he flinched – a quivering vibration that radiated throughout all his sprawling flesh like the ripples from a stone flung into a lake – when that same voice sobbed, “Please...don’t!”
Suddenly, he not only heard the voice (mother, mother, mother’s voice) but saw the speaker as well; through gauze or a fog, but he saw her. The sweet face that had once leaned over him, planted kisses on his chubby belly. His god. The god’s god. And he saw other creatures, somewhat like her but different. He saw one of these creatures pointing an instrument at the mother-goddess. A hurting instrument, like that creature had fired into his belly in the city below the city, when he hadn’t yet understood his hunger.
Mother.
Dai-oo-ika flexed his muscles again. Began to soften, so as to reach out further this time.
***
“You’re unemployed now, Jones!” Stake shouted, as he struggled to get his legs under him. He only fell onto his back again, and a wave of grainy black static passed over his vision. His next comment, little more than a gurgle between his clenched teeth, barely carried across the lobby. “This is over!”
“I don’t happen to like being unemployed, Corporal Stake,” Jones called back, and he increased the pressure of the gun barrel inserted in James Fukuda’s ear. He threw a quick look at Smithee, who still had his handgun trained on Yuki’s beautiful face. “Maybe you’d like to become unemployed, too, huh? I think that’s only fa–”
The first beam, a blue so intense it left a brief afterimage on Stake’s eyes, entered the rear of Mr. Jones’s skull and emerged from his forehead, like a ray blazing from some mystical third eye.
The second blue beam went in one of Mr. Smithee’s ears and came out the other, as if he were merely an insubstantial, holographic image in its path.
“Christ,” Stake hissed, his eyes going from Jones to Smithee and back to Jones again, in time to see the security chief’s own eyes roll up white and his body go slack, falling away from Fukuda like a marionette with its strings cut.
The gun flipped over in Smithee’s hand, the trigger guard still looped around his finger, and swayed there a moment before it slid off and clunked to the floor. Black wisps curled out of both ears, and his nostrils besides. Then he crumpled and lay curled at Yuki’s half-unshod feet.
Stake rolled onto his side in another effort to regain his footing, for an unthinking and instinctual moment desperate to reach the cover of the hallway again – expecting a third sapphire ray beam to come streaking his way next. And this person, whoever it was, was an even better shot than Smithee. This time he wouldn’t get it in the side, but straight through the melon. Someone outside those open front doors; a damn good shot...
...a trained sniper...
Stake snapped his eyes at those open doors. His mind clicked into focus.
...an Earth Killer.
Despite his agony, and inspired by his intuition, Stake managed to get onto hands and knees, and from there shakily to his feet. One hand now pressed against the hole burned through him and the other lugged the Darwin, which felt much heavier than it was. His eyes were on the front doors as he began trudging toward James and Yuki Fukuda, but he saw no one outside in the darkness of falling night.
That cab, he thought. Number 23.
The sound that Jones’s keen ears had heard out there.
“Thi,” Stake whispered, staggering, trying to maintain consciousness.
Yuki rose from her chair as if invisible ropes that had bound her there now dropped away, severed. She stepped around Smithee’s fetus-curled shape as James Fukuda rushed to her, and he seized her in a painfully tight embrace. Kissed the top of her head again and again.
“Daddy,” she wept against his chest.
“Baby,” he chanted, as if more to himself than to her. His own falling tears slid away into the midnight river of her silken hair. “Baby. My baby.”
Stake saw them and held off from approaching any further, letting them have their moment. Despite being doubles, impostors, shadows of their true selves, their emotion was as real as anything he had seen or ever was likely to see. He envied them for it.
At last, Fukuda loosened his arms from around her, and smiled wearily over at Stake. He began to say something, but a look of concern came over him when he saw Stake weaving there unsteadily, his hand clamped to his side, his complexion almost gray. Fukuda’s concern for the man was mixed with another disturbing emotion. He saw the barest reflection of his own features still clinging to the private investigator’s countenance, as a result of their conversation over their vidphones.
“You’re hurt,” he said, taking a step toward him.
Fukuda’s eyes were on Stake – on his brother’s fading, possessing spirit – and Stake’s eyes had turned again toward the open front doors, the camouflaging darkness of night. Was she watching him still? Watching over him?
Neither saw the silver/black-striped appendage until it had lashed out of the gloom and slapped itself around Yuki’s waist. Her cry, however, quickly regained their attention.
None of them could understand what it was, at first; not the two men who saw it or even the girl in its embrace. A gigantic python, coiled around her, was the first thought that came to Stake in his delirium. The great tentacle ran almost the full length of the lobby, from where it had emerged: the same hallway from which he himself had entered the lobby just a little bit earlier.
Then he recognized the silver and black bands on the appendage, though he had never seen the kawaii-doll itself before, only in pictures he’d been shown. Stake understood, and was in awe. A god is owed awe.
The tentacle pulled Yuki backwards. It did not crush her delicate body. It did not lift her off her feet. But it was immensely strong, and insistent. She had to dance backwards to keep from being dragged on her heels. In starting toward Stake, Fukuda had let go of her, but he managed to leap forward and grasp one of her out-flung arms. Father and daughter wailed to each other. For a few seconds, they were able to hold on to the other’s hand.
An amorphous form began squeezing itself into the far end of the lobby, bulging through the narrow hallway entrance. A shapeless, gray and glossy mass. More and more ballooning out of the doorway. Fluid but weighty. The python-like extremity was rooted in it.
Yuki and her father only held on to the ends of each other’s fingers, now. And then, their hands were torn away from each other. Fukuda howled, falling onto the floor with the momentum.
Stake leveled his gun past Yuki, at the mounding tissue that was oozing into the far end of the room. Steadying his aim with both hands, he fired shot after shot into it. Even in his lightheaded state, the thing was hard to miss, and every projectile found its mark. But were there even any organs to hit? Nerves to feel pain? The tumor-like flesh barely rippled. It leaked just the thinnest trickles of clear, viscous fluid before the holes closed up, disappeared.
Fukuda scrambled to his feet. Stake lowered the Darwin and rushed at his employer, as swiftly as his pain and dazedness would allow.
The serpentine arm retracted or shortened. It was withdrawing into that billowing storm cloud of raw flesh. Yuki was pulled back...back...arms reaching, mouth and eyes wide.
Stake collided with Fukuda, threw his arms around him, before he could charge at the creature. “Let me go!” Yuki’s father protested.
Yuki was pulled back...back...until all of the arm but the coil around her waist had vanished into the gray flesh. Then, her body impacted against it, as if she had fallen onto the mass from high above, fallen into a pool. She broke the surface. A slow-motion sinking away into tha
t pool’s thick gray waters.
“Yuki!” her father called.
Her face with its wide beseeching eyes was swallowed. Just her slim arms now, her splayed fingers. Then they, too, submerged.
“We have to get out,” Stake said in Fukuda’s ear. “We have to get out of here.”
“We have to save Yuki!”
“She’s gone. It has her. And it will get us next.”
He would come back here later, maybe with Pablo Fujiwara in tow, or at least armed with whatever advice Fujiwara could give him. Or perhaps he’d even have to involve the authorities. The police or the Colonial Forces, of which he had once been a member. But for now, particularly in his current condition, there was nothing he could do but get his client safely out of this place.
Stake wrestled Fukuda toward the door. The Darwin fell from his hand in the struggle but he ignored it. The black static had lowered in a curtain over his vision again. He felt his arms around Fukuda weakening, slipping away.
Strong arms lifted Stake up again. Fukuda? Fukuda, coming to his senses and realizing that they had to get out. Fukuda dragging him backwards toward the open front doors.
Before he passed out, Jeremy Stake let his head fall back and stared at an upside-down face with blue skin and black eyes that flashed a laser red.
TWENTY-EIGHT: DAY OF THE DEAD
The Folger Street Snarlers’ regular contact was not there when they met the new arms dealer, but he had forewarned Javier Dias to expect a KeeZee. Thus, Javier knew to be looking up high before the motel room’s door even opened to admit them. The KeeZee was almost seven feet tall, but that was only part of his ominous aura. The being’s jagged-jawed head looked like a monkey wrench with a thin, grayish-black skin vacuum-formed to it. His long hair had been woven into thin braids decorated with glass beads, which reminded Javier of his dead friend Mott. The alien’s three tiny black eyes gleamed down at Javier lidlessly. The body under the black jumpsuit was a solid mass of muscle.
Javier had never heard one of them speak before. The jaws barely moved, but the muscles and tendons in the thing’s throat seemed to knot and twist with a tortured effort. Even then, what reached Javier’s ears was a translation as filtered through a device pinned to the breast of the alien’s jumpsuit.
“If you already have weapons on you, you’d better hand them over first,” the towering being told them. “I’ve got a scanner rigged just inside, so it will know if you’re hiding even a penknife.”
“I thought Rabal told you we were trustworthy,” Javier said, referring to their regular dealer, a Kalian. But he obliged by slipping out and passing to the KeeZee the gun that had belonged to Brat.
“I don’t even trust Rabal,” the KeeZee told him. “That’s how I stay out of prison. And how I stay alive.”
Next into the room came Patryk, wearing dark glasses to protect his still red and sensitive eyes. He handed over a pistol as well. Then Barbie, of the five faces, entered the rented room. She relinquished her own handgun, followed by a boot knife nicely balanced for throwing. Lastly, in stalked Satin in his new cybernetic pony, though it was actually far from new. It was bulkier and more awkward than his previous sleek black model, its yellow enamel paint chipped and blistered, but at least it moved his pupa-like body from here to there. Scowling suspiciously, he directed one of his mechanical limbs to turn over a stubby little pistol-like submachine gun.
“Your iron could be better,” the KeeZee remarked, locking the weapons inside a suitcase resting atop a bed too short to accommodate his looming frame. “Interested in upgrading?”
“Maybe next time,” Javier told him. “Our finances are limited. Right now we want to concentrate on the stuff that Rabal said you could get for us.”
“As you wish.”
The KeeZee knelt down to drag two larger suitcases out from under the bed. The mattress creaked from their weight when he set them down. He flipped both lids open, and took a step back to let the others see around him.
“Huh,” said Satin.
“Whew,” two of Barbie’s faces said. Her largest face just gurgled and dribbled some saliva.
“That should be enough for what Rabal talked about,” the KeeZee said.
“Anything we should know about this?” asked Javier.
“Yeah,” the KeeZee’s fabricated voice grunted. “Be careful.”
Money changed hands. Satin’s powerful cybernetic arms hoisted both pieces of luggage, as if he were a bellboy employed by this seedy establishment. Confiscated weapons were returned. Seeing his guests out, the KeeZee asked Javier, “So what are you folks, a street gang or something?” His tone, even translated, sounded a bit derisive – but people of his vocation made their living off street gangs. Javier suspected the derision had to do with the two mutants. Javier wasn’t happy about that. Nor was he happy about the being’s lack of discretion in asking him such a personal question, but he answered anyway.
“Yep,” he said. “We’re the Folger Street Terata.”
***
It was well into night, but better than that, it was raining hard besides. Even the most ambitious worker at the office block next door had gone home hours earlier. Except for Quidd’s Market and some notable theaters and restaurants in Beaumonde Square proper, this was not an area that seethed with nightlife. During the working week, the moneyed took themselves straight to the safety of their upscale apartments – such as, had it ever opened, Steward Gardens would have provided.
Safe from the stabbing cold of a pounding, late autumn rain. Safe from the criminals, the addicts, the gang members that might venture as far afield as Beaumonde Square if boredom or curiosity or restlessness compelled them, hoping to score one extra-fat wallet to pay for a larger than usual measure of seaweed or purple vortex, buttons or beans, kaleidoscopes or red shockers.
Javier Dias had tried all those substances and more in his twenty-five years. But tonight, his blood was pure. His mind was clear. It was not the first time he had been focused on avenging fallen comrades; he’d been doing that for over ten years. Yet, tonight it felt different. He felt much, much older now. By decades. By centuries. It was both a bad and a good thing, in ways he was only beginning to understand.
Javier had bought the hovercar they rode in from his cousin Santos, at a great discount. In addition, this week Santos had given Javier a job doing such odds and ends as polishing the outsides of the pre-owned vehicles, and sometimes cleaning the blood of their former owners (often gang members, drug dealers, pimps, and low-level gangsters) from the interiors. Santos promised to take his younger cousin under his wing, to have him selling the used and repossessed cars himself within the year.
As had been a popular style for a number of years, most of Santos’s vehicles sported elaborate artwork on their hoods and sometimes on their flanks and bonnets as well. The reproduction of a mural by Diego Rivera or painting by Frida Kahlo, or a whimsically disturbing engraving such as El fin del Mundo by Jose Posada. A lot of Day of the Dead motifs, rich with skulls and skeletons in sombreros, and a lot of blood-soaked crime scene photos from ancient tabloids such as Alarma! Years ago, when visiting Santos at his lot – his fat cousin’s face ever hidden under a brightly colored wrestler’s mask, different every year – Javier had fantasized about owning a vehicle with this latter type of embellishment: the glassy-eyed or shotgunned face of a murder victim filling the whole canvas of the car’s hood. Now, strangely, he found these vehicles distasteful. Now, he only wanted something cheap but reliable.
So the five of them rode in a battered hovercar with vividly purple Day of the Dead figures cavorting all over its lime-green body. It was not exactly nondescript, particularly for the Beaumonde Square area, but again – it was night, and raining in torrents of near biblical proportions, as if the sky had been rent open to reveal a strange sea hiding behind it: the inverted sea of another dimension.
There was the sound of a gun’s slide in the car, as a first round was fed into the chamber. Javier knew it was Brat Gent
ile’s gun, which he had given to his brother, Theo. Theo had heard about the reappearance of the last of the Folger Street Snarlers. Theo had sought them out. And when Javier had told him his story (the real Javier this time), Theo had asked to come along tonight. With the gang again, just like old times.
“Steady there, man,” Javier advised him.
Theo grunted. The fear that had filled him lately had been eclipsed by his bloodlust. He stared out his window as Javier pulled into the lot to the right of Steward Gardens.
Earlier that evening, before the rain, there had been a vehicle parked here. They did not know that. They didn’t know that a woman with blue skin had forced the vehicle’s owner to help her carry another man, who was unconscious, to this vehicle, and then drive the three of them to a hospital. The vehicle’s owner had resisted at first, because someone he loved had disappeared inside the building, but the blue woman had persisted, and the man had given in, knowing that there was nothing to be done. Javier and his friends were not aware of any of this. And because of the dark and the downpour, they had not spotted the helicar abandoned in the lot atop the building, either.
All Javier knew was that he had to come here tonight...tonight. Oh, he had planned on coming back. But there was something about tonight. Something that had alerted him, something that drew him. An intuition? An instinct? It was probably the dream he had had the night before. As he cruised the hovercar around to the rear of the building, where it would be best shielded from the street, fragments of the dream floated to his consciousness like the debris from a ship sunken in lightless depths. The fragments began to coalesce. The sunken ship of his dream arising, as if a film played in reverse.
Deadstock: A Punktown Novel Page 28