Forests of the Night

by S. Andrew Swann

  The doors on the elevator opened and Nohar held his breath. They had made it all the way to the garage. Again, no one in sight.

  Nohar turned to Stephie who looked and smelled of confusion. "If you want to talk about what happened, you better come with me."

  He stepped out on to the cold concrete. He finally felt comfortable breathing through his nose. The only strong smells down here were the slight ozone smell from the cars, and Stephie's smoky-rose scent.

  She choked back a few monosyllables and started walking after him. "Just tell me why, please."

  He almost gave her a curt answer, but he decided she deserved something of an explanation. "I need to get back home. Checking out and getting whatever the explosion left of my clothes could take a long while, and they might just decide they want to keep me for a day or two. Besides, I hate filling out forms. They can bill me."

  "What's so important?"

  "I don't have anyone to feed my cat."

  That got her. "You're not kidding, are you?"

  Nohar shrugged and started toward the entrance of the parking garage. His claws clicked on the concrete.

  She called after him. "Where's your car?"

  "I suppose it's still parked outside my office."

  "You're going to—" She paused. "Of course you intend to walk home like that. Come back here. At least let me give you a lift so you won't get arrested."

  Nohar turned around. He didn't know what to make of the offer. "Can I fit in your car?"

  "A Plymouth Antaeus? What it cost, you better fit."

  "Sure you want to do this? My neighborhood—"

  Your neighborhood. We need to talk about Phil Young

  Nohar silently agreed they needed to talk about Phil. He allowed himself to be led to the brand-new Antaeus.

  Chapter 8

  The Antaeus pulled up behind the Jerboa, splashing a deep puddle by the curb. The barriers prevented Ste-phie from driving any closer to Nohar's apartment.

  When Stephie parked, she turned to face Nohar. She seemed to be making an effort to keep her gaze fixed on his face. "It doesn't sound like Phil."

  "It's what happened."

  "The cops called it a suicide. Detective Harsk said

  Phil shot you."

  Nohar reached up and rubbed his left shoulder. "Can you explain what happened?"

  Stephie turned toward the windshield, shaking her head. She was silent for a few seconds. Finally she said, "He bought that house so he could have a separate address."

  So, it was a sham. "He lived with Johnson?"

  "Five years now." She still looked out the window. A street lamp shone through the cascading rain and carved rippling shadows on her face. She spoke slowly and deliberately. "I can't believe Phil would kill himself."

  Nevertheless, that's what Young had done, as surely as if he had pointed the gun at his own head. Nohar could still picture Young saying they all—Nohar presumed Young meant moreys—were with them. Nohar suspected they were in MLI.

  "How'd he feel about moreys?"

  "I don't know—"

  Very few people do, thought Nohar.

  "I didn't talk to him much. I knew him mostly through talking to Derry." She sighed. The sound seemed to catch in her throat.

  After an uncomfortably long pause, she changed the subject. "I don't think Derry's death would make him….."

  "What would it take?"

  "More, just . . . more.” Stephie turned and looked Nohar in the eyes. Her expression seemed to show bewilderment and she smelled of fear, nerves, and confusion. "Do you think I'm a bad person?"

  What the hell brought that on? "Of course not, why?"

  “I feel terrible about what I said about Phil snubbing the funeral—"

  Nohar restrained the immediate impulse to ask her why she was telling him that. Instead, he tried a close lipped smile. "We all say things we end up regretting. It doesn't mean we're thoughtless."

  "It's not just that. My whole life has been a hypocrisy—"

  "You don't mean—"

  "I know exactly what I mean. I never even was a Binder supporter—I despise the man." She sucked in a shuddering breath. "Me, Phil, and Derry—we were all playing the twisted charade. All of us hiding because Binder was signing our paychecks."

  "What were you hiding?"

  The look in her eyes changed for a moment. Nohar felt like he had let his mouth make a major mistake again. Instead, she smiled, even let out a little laugh.

  "I was hiding myself, I guess."

  Nohar realized he was only going to get that cryptic comment. He nodded and opened the rear door to let himself out into the rain. The damp soaked into his fir in a matter of seconds.

  “Thanks for the ride.” Nohar didn't know why he felt obliged, but he added, "I'll give you a call later on, if I find out anything." Nohar shut the door and she looked like she still couldn't quite believe he was going to walk home without any clothes.

  "Nohar?"

  He paused and looked back into the Antaeus, "Yes?"

  "Forget it, never mind. ..." She shook her head and drove the Antaeus into the darkness without an explanation.

  Nohar stood and watched it go for a while, wondering. Moreytown pressed around him. He had three blocks to go, so he started walking. He was safe from the cops here. Moreys were so casual about clothing that trying to enforce pink exposure laws in Moreytown would be impossible. His lack of attire would only be noted because of the rain, and the time of night. Now all he had to worry about were how many eyes had seen him with the pink female. He nearly made it home — A ratboy bumped into him. No, they wouldn't be that stupid. He was on the wrong side of the street. He was between the abandoned bus and a boarded-up pizzeria. His usual alertness had failed him, and he realized the hospital smell was still clogging his nose.

  The familiar-looking ratboy, brown fur and denim cutoffs, rebounded from Nohar's side.

  "Lookee—"

  Now Nohar could catch the rat's musk. The ratboy was flying a wave of excitement, reeked of it. It was Fearless Leader, and he was jacked about as far as a rat could go.

  "The stray just ruffed my fur!" Footsteps, two sets at one end of the bus, two at the other. Subordinates. From the look and smell of it, Fearless' boys were jacked worse than he was. Bigboy was there, and he snicked a blade, Nohar should have taken the knife when he had the chance.

  Bigboy made a few ineffective waves with his switchblade. "Let's shave the kitty pink."

  A chain rattled from the other end of the bus. "Teach some respect for the coat."

  Great, they were that stupid. So much for the Finger of God.

  Fearless Leader pulled a gun, a twenty-two. Fortunately, he wasn't doused in gasoline. "We don't like pink moreys. We goina mark you. You move and we veto your pretty kitty ass."

  Nohar always held his fighting instinct under iron control. Both nature and the Indian gene-techs had designed his strain for combat, for hunting, for the spilling of blood. Almost always, that part of his soul was at odds with his conscious mind. Nohar thought of it as The Beast.

  When Fearless pulled the gun, Nohar felt a shock of adrenaline. His heart began to pound and he felt the rush in his ears and his temples. There was the anticipatory taste of copper in his mouth. His breath like a blast furnace in the back of his throat.

  The Beast wanted out. It was scratching at the mental door Nohar always kept locked.

  Nohar opened the door and let The Beast take over.

  The night snapped into razor-sharp monochrome. The smells erupted into a vivid melange. He could hear the ratboy's heartbeat as well as his own. Time crawled.

  The Beast roared.

  Nohar roared. The sound bore no trace of his speaking voice. It was a scream of rage that tore the skin from his throat. The ratboys hesitated at the sound. Fearless smelled of fear now, fear that told Nohar he had never seen a morey turn wild before.

  Nohar's left arm, the one with restricted mobility, shot out toward Fearless' gun hand. Nohar grab
bed the weapon and turned it toward the ground. There was a snap of bone before the gun blew a hole in the side of the bus. Fearless Leader had some control. No scream. Not until Nohar's right hand, sweeping upward with the claws fully extended, caught Fearless between the legs. Nohar didn't simply rake his claws across Fearless' body. His claws came up, point first, and when they bit flesh, jerked up, hooked forward, and partially retracted. Fearless Leader screamed when Nohar lifted him up. Nohar's claws were hooked into the flesh of his groin.

  Nohar was jacked higher than the rats now. Fearless Leader's 50 kilos weighed nothing. Fearless slammed into the bus through a broken window. The gun was still in Nohar's left hand. Fearless' hand was still holding it, reaching through the bus window. Nohar yanked the gun away. There was another crack.

  Bigboy was now within reach, swinging his knife. Nohar pivoted and the knife missed. Nohar's cupped right hand aimed for the eyes as Bigboy passed. Big-boy slipped in the rain before the claws hit him. Lucky. The claws sank in behind the ear and tore off a flap of skin down the left side of Bigboy's face.

  Nohar's left arm blocked a chain coming at his head. It wrapped around his forearm. He pulled that rat toward him and upward. He sank his teeth into the weapon arm. A toss of Nohar's head disarmed his attacker and dropped the rat off to his right. Into the same puddle that had saved Bigboy's eye.

  Two others. They spooked.

  Leader in bus. Bigboy huddled in doorway to pizzeria, trying to hold half his face on. Chain trying to stop the bleeding, hand limp, muscle severed. Fight over.

  Slowly, Nohar shut the door on The Beast.

  The comedown was hard. He began shaking. The rats didn't notice. They had their own problems. That fifteen seconds of savagery had jacked him higher and faster than these ratboys had ever thought of going. The crash would’ve killed them.

  Nohar stumbled across the street and to the door of his building. When he staggered into his living room, Cat hissed at him. Nohar was covered in rat blood. He wobbled into the kitchen, opened a cabinet, and spilled Cat's food all over the counter.

  It would have to do, for now.

  Nohar dragged himself into the bathroom and slumped into the shower. He turned on a blast of cold water.

  Dipping into his reserve as a bioengineered weapon had its price.

  When Nohar woke up, the shower was still going full blast. Cat was asleep on the lid of the John, and the only remains of the night's activity was the taste of blood in his mouth. The bandage on his shoulder fell off the moment he moved. It revealed a puckered red wound where they had dug out Young's bullet. There was a shaved area around it the size of his hand. The flesh was a pale white, contrasting with Nohar's russet-and-black fur. Nohar quickly looked away from it. The skin made him uncomfortable.

  The support bandage was still there. At least he hadn't aggravated the injury to his knee. That was good because there was no way he was going to end up in a hospital again.

  He stood up, killed the cold water, and hit the dryer. He barely noticed when Cat spooked. Nohar stood under the dryer and shook. He tried to tell himself it was his unsteady knee, but he was too adept at spotting bullshit. He knew it was a reaction to loosing The Beast.

  All moreys dealt with The Beast in one form or another. Some, like Manny, lived with it without it making so much as a ripple in their psyche, the techs had let a basically human brain mute the instincts they weren't particularly interested in. Then there were moreys like Nohar, who bore the legacy of techs playing hob with what nature gave them. This was only the second time he had let out The Beast with no restraint. Nohar was grateful nobody had died.

  He had enjoyed it too much.

  He saw in himself the potential for becoming another type of morey. The one who gave himself over to The Beast and reveled in the bloodlust.

  The one like his father—

  "No," he said to his reflection as he left the bathroom. To his practiced ears, it sounded like a lie.

  Forget the rats, he told himself. He still had a job to do. Even if it cost him two days, his run-in with Young had given him something besides a gunshot wound and a sprained knee. If Young was not totally out of touch with reality—no mean assumption—Nohar now had some idea of how Daryl Johnson was killed, if not why.

  First things first—he went to the comm and turned it on. "Load program. Label, 'I lost my damn wallet!' Run program."

  "searching . . . found, program uses half processing capacity and all outside lines for approximately fifteen minutes, continue?"

  "Yes." It was going to take him that long just to run through his messages. While his cards and IDs were being canceled and reordered by the computer, he perused the backlog.

  There were no phone messages on the comm, but a pile of mail was waiting in memory for him.

  It was early in the morning on Sunday the third. Predictably, bills predominated in the mail. He'd have the comm pay them off as soon as it was done with his lost wallet program. There was the usual collection of junk mail. However, for once, there was something more than those two categories in his mail file.

  "John Smith," his client, had been true to his word to keep in touch. Two days after their meeting, he had left a voice message for Nohar to meet him in Lake-view Cemetery, for noon on Saturday—when Nohar had been zoned in a ward at University Hospitals. About twelve hours after that little bit of mail, Smith apparently found out what had happened. The slimy voice carried little emotion. "Mr. Rajasthan, I regret this incident with Binder's finance chairman. I am unable to meet with you personally, but I finance your medical expenses when I hear what happens to you—"

  "Pause." Nohar was having trouble following the frank's heavy accent. Nohar, living in the middle of Morey town, had to deal with, and understand, an incredible variety of unusual accents. A Vietnamese dog not only had an Asian accent, but a definite canid pronunciation. The problem with the frank was more subtle. Nohar didn't think it was a South African accent—even if that was one of the few countries to have defied the long-standing United Nations ban on engineering humans. Nohar promised himself he'd press the frank a little more closely about his origins next time they met.

  "Continue."

  "—I hope this does not prevent you from the discovery of Daryl Johnson's murderer. I increase your fee to reflect your current difficulties. I call to set up meeting when you are released from hospital. There you tell me what you discover."

  It took Nohar a few seconds to figure out exactly what the frank meant.

  The next item in the mail file was from Maria. Nohar was afraid to play it. Then he cursed himself and told the comm to play the damn thing. It was the same husky voice, much calmer this time. Nohar wished he could see her face.

  "Raj, I thought you deserved a more civilized good-bye. I still can't meet you face-to-face, and for that I apologize. I just want you to know it isn't your fault. We're incompatible. Maybe it would be easier for me to deal with your wholesale contempt for everything if you weren't such a decent and honorable person."

  There was a pause as Maria took a long breath. "I am going through with it. You were right about the money—you always are about things like that—but I'm going anyway. California is a lot more tolerant, and the few communities there aren't just glorified slums the humans abandoned. I know you can't appreciate this, but God bless you."

  Nohar sat, her voice still ringing in his ears, remembering. He had the comm store the message and sighed.

  "Instructions unclear."

  He had sighed too loudly. "Store mail. Comm. Off."

  She had been wrong about one thing. He could appreciate the blessing. Especially after their last argument, the night before he had stood her up for that fiasco with Nugoya—

  It had started when she suggested they both move to California. Of course, there was no way they could afford it. She brought up God, and Nohar went off. That damned little bit of pink brainwashing infuriated him. Especially when a moreau spouted it. Religion, pink religion, wasn't just a fo
rm of mind control, but the primary justification for people like Joseph Binder to consider moreys worse than garbage. Why should a morey believe in God, when people like Binder said they were an abomination in His eyes?

  Maria was a devout Catholic and Nohar had been drunk enough to think he might be able to talk her out of such stupidity. How could she be secure in her belief when she only had a soul by dispensation of some sexagenarian pink in a pointed hat? A decision that had more to do with politics than divine inspiration.

  Why couldn't he keep his damn mouth shut?

  Worse, all his money problems had evaporated with the ten thousand Smith gave him. Maria's message had come in yesterday. Knowing her, she had left town by now.

  Chapter 9

  Nohar parked the Jerboa in front of Daryl Johnson's ranch. He stayed in the car. Shaker Heights still made him paranoid about cops. It was early Sunday morning and he suspected the slow-moving bureaucracy at University Hospital was just now discovering him missing. Shortly afterward, the cops would be notified. Nohar didn't know exactly what would happen then. He was a witness to Young's explosion—they should want a statement from him. But Binder was pressuring the cops. Binder probably wouldn't want any real close investigation of Young's empty house, or the records Young had destroyed.

  At least Nohar's investigation, such as it was, was progressing. He had checked the police records again. The air-conditioning had been going full blast when Johnson was blown away.

  Nohar yawned and raked his claws across the upholstery of the passenger seat. He spent a few minutes picking foam rubber as he looked at the sheathing covering the picture window. His watch beeped. It was eight, Manny would be answering his comm.

  Nohar took the voice phone out of the glove compartment and called him.

  "Dr. Gujerat here. Who—" There was a pause as Manny must have read the text on the incoming call. "Nohar? Where in the hell are you? I got to the hospital during nocturnal visiting hours. You were gone—"

  Fine, his disappearance had been discovered that much earlier. "Manny, I'm fine. I need to ask you something—"