Nosferatu s-14

by Carl Sargent

  "Mr. Shamandar," one of them said with a heavy dose of fake sincerity as he sat down uninvited at the table. "I'm Dan McEwan of the Times and this is my cameraman, Randy Simmons." Simmons, grinning like an embarrassed hyena with an outdated mustache, nodded a greeting and hefted a camera from around his neck. "We'd really like to take some pictures for a feature on you while I just ask a few questions. We'll try not to interrupt your meal at all."

  Serrin was about to growl, "Frag off," then realized he wanted more in the way of explanation. "What's this about anyway?"

  "Why, your act of heroism, of course," McEwan said, almost leaving a visible trail of slime on the carpet. "The whole city is still buzzing with it, even after three days. You know, the mystery mage with the haunted eyes?"

  The vidcasts didn 't get your face, Julia's voice said at

  the back of his mind. In panic he shielded his face with a red napkin and ran for the door. Haunted eyes, my ass, he thought.

  "Just get me out of here!" he snarled to the troll driver as he leapt into the back of a yellow cab two minutes later. By now, it seemed like at least a dozen photographers and media reptiles had appeared on the scene. He tried hard not to think about how foolish he must look with the sweaty, ragged remnants of a paper napkin pasted onto various parts of his face. "JFK. Take some detours. Don't worry about the meter."

  "I love people who say that kinda stuff, chummer," the troll grinned, then shot off like a devil rat chipped up on BTL.

  There didn't seem to be anyone waiting for Serrin at the airport when they arrived, but he guessed that somewhere there had to be a hungry stringer roaming around looking for him, just in case. A quick check of the flight board told him there wouldn't be another domestic flight going out for another thirty-five minutes. And nothing to Seattle for two hours.

  "What's the first plane out of town?" he snapped at the woman behind the British Airways desk.

  She gave him a startled look and said, "What? Anywhere!"

  "You scan it, lady," he said, looking around.

  "You in some kind of trouble?"

  "I'm not going to hurt you," Serrin said wearily, his eyes tracking her hand as it ducked under the desk, probably reaching for the security button. Then he noticed the tabloid sitting there.

  "I'm just trying to escape the reporters," he said, pointing to his face plastered all over the cover. She looked at the picture, then back at him, her eyes widening and her jaw dropping open.

  "Frankfurt or Cape Town. Ten minutes," she said as he swiped her Newsday up for a better look. Julia had somehow managed to take some photographs of him seated on her little balcony, relaxed and almost smiling. One of the pics had suffered the attentions of a talented image transformer; the sleazy tabloid apparently had no scruples

  about polishing up the drek it published. Serrin Shaman-dar might not be looking too good, but the picture was still recognizable.

  All his shadowrunner's instincts were screaming that it was time to get out of town and stay out until the whole thing died down some. He just wished he'd brought along his phony ID so that he could have reserved a ticket for Cape Town as himself and then actually made for Germany under the false name.

  "Frankfurt, I think." From there maybe he'd make another hop on to Heathrow, where he'd be able to look up some of his Brit friends; it was certainly a more inviting prospect than a visit to the Azanian city. "Can you get me out of here in time?" he pleaded.

  "If you run like crazy, you might just make it. The last call just went out; gate seventeen."

  "Lady, I can run like crazy when I need to, trust me." He flung her the City Hall credstick and dumped his suitcase on the conveyor belt. Then he was off, head down, sprinting for the departure gate. Halfway there, he almost tripped over a light metal briefcase, which went spinning away. He glanced up at its owner, an iron-faced man with short hair as gray as his own and a triangular scar on the left side of his chin. Shades concealed cybereyes. Serrin mumbled an apology and something about a terrible hurry, but left the task of retrieving the case to its owner as he continued his dash for the boarding gate. Reaching the gate, fumbling for his passport, the elf had no way of knowing that the man's cybereyes were equipped with a state-of-the-art cyberoptic portacam, which had already shot thirty frames of him.

  Serrin just made it to the last boarding bus. As it crossed the tarmac he gazed out over the gray and distant skyline; the coming rain promised to cool New York's hellish humidity to within tolerable limits long enough for the city's denizens to sleep. He stepped into the plane, found his seat, and sank back against the plush upholstery, unrolling the tabloid as furtively as if it was pornography.

  Julia of the dark eyes and lovely smile had used just about everything he'd ever said to her, and she'd done her

  homework too. No wonder she'd become uneasy toward the end. The scoop had almost everything: his murdered parents, the leg shattered during his stint with Renraku, the Atlantean scam, even the story of how he and Geraint and Francesca had helped solve the gruesome murders in London last year. It was seamlessly stitched together, and what must have gotten her a really fat bonus was the personal poop. No wonder everyone had been staring at him in that restaurant. The media had given the attempted assassination of Mayor Small a barrage of coverage, but Serrin hadn't been watching much trid and so hadn't a clue what else anybody might have said about him by now. But certainly not this intimate, private stuff. Maybe he should be grateful to the tabloid's editors for giving their hungry readers a feast to last them at least until the next three-day wonder showed up. Who knew what they'd do if deprived for too long?

  Reading on, he was also grateful she'd spared the revelation of any bedroom secrets amp; then, oh drekWrong again. He just hadn't read far enough. Serrin felt a desperate and wretched sadness, not because the story was savage or brutal, a hatchet job or full of complete lies but because it wasn't. Maybe he'd have found some consolation in cursing her as a lying slitch. But even that she'd stolen from him.

  In his impotence Serrin wanted to tear the pages into a million tiny pieces and throw them out the window of the plane. Instead he stuffed the tabloid roughly into his jacket pocket, then wearily sank back against the seat to try and get some sleep.

  He hit Frankfurt at ten in the morning, local time, jet-lagged as always after a continental hop, even a short one. Copies of Newsday seemed to be everywhere in the terminal, endless racks of red-edged portraits mocking his attempts at escape. In his over-excited state, the elf decided to keep on moving.

  He took a cab to the rail station, which was alive with travelers, all of whom seemed to be either eating or else thinking about it. He saw people ordering croissants stuffed with every filling imaginable, gulping down soykaf and ordering rolls oozing with schinken, pickles, pink beef sizzling fetidly in pools of fat, and salads bathed in mayonnaise thicker than a troll's arm. Such a diet didn't seem to produce many thin Germans, and Serrin worried that his tall elf slenderness would make him too conspicuous. About the best he could do was pull his collar up around his neck and duck his head down into it while he stood waiting in the ticket queue. So preoccupied was he with trying to hide his face that it wasn't until he was almost to the front of the line that Serrin realized he had no idea what would be his destination. Frantically, he looked up at the huge, ever-changing indicator beneath the concourse clock, an enormous thing of iron and brass.

  The first train showing was for Karlsruhe. Studying the string of destinations along the way, Serrin settled, for no particular reason, on Heidelberg. He asked the clerk for a one-way ticket first class again, for the isolation and anonymity and headed for the indicated platform.

  Crusher 495 was one of the most popular bars in the Barrens, the poorest, most godforsaken district in the

  whole urban sprawl that was Seattle. The troll finished his soda water and chuckled over the magazine again, flicking it to and fro in his huge hands. The bar stool beside him creaked as a grizzled, gray-haired ork, weary from another
day working the roads, parked his butt down next to him.

  "Hey, Ganzer. How ya doin'?" the troll said. "Not too bad, Tom. Same as always. Janus chummer, get me a beer, will ya? Whatcha got there?" The ork turned Tom's magazine over to take in the cover.

  "Slot me if that isn't Serrin," he said, looking up with an expression of puzzlement. "Looks like he got some facial work done since we last saw 'im."

  "Not likely," Tom said slowly. "Serrin never wanted any metal in the meat. Wouldn't go anywhere near a scalpel. Why would he change now?"

  The ork drained half his glass and said nothing. It wasn't tactful to talk much about metal in the meat to Tom. It might only get the troll sermonizing again.

  "He saved the mayor of the Rotten Apple from getting shot," Tom said. He knew Ganzer couldn't read.

  "That so? Well, as the tortoise said to the army helmet, guess we all make mistakes amp; But, frag, we haven't seen Serrin in what? Five years?"

  "Five years and two months," the troll said slowly. "I don't forget."

  Ganzer wasn't in the mood for tales of Tom's old shadowrunning days right now. The stories always seemed to end up with the interminable saga of how the troll quit boozing for good, and the ork didn't want to hear about temperance. He wanted a bellyful of beer. Ganzer decided it was a better idea to change the subject. "Say, I hear you're a real hero over in the Jungles these days."

  Tom shrugged, but couldn't help a smile to think that the lot of some of the squatters down there might actually improve. "Yeah, well, getting the mayor to throw some grant money their way made him look good too. Now that the detox has gotten the soil up to growing crops acceptable for animal feed, some of those squatters can start earning enough money to buy themselves somethin' to eat."

  Tom gazed reflectively around the dingy bar, with its boarded-up windows, scarred furniture, and murky atmosphere. The ceiling might once have been white, but smoke from an untold number of cigarettes had long ago turned it a brown only a millennium of sunshine could have achieved if sunlight had ever found its way in here. The Crusher was still enough of a meeting-place for orks and trolls to get hit by Humanis policlubbers now and then, though it had been six months since the last firebomb attack by the anti-metahumans. Tom knew about every one of the attacks, since he always got called in to help out afterward. A Bear shaman was often the best many folks too poor for medical insurance could hope for.

  A heavy hand slapped him on the back, and he turned to see another ork, Denzer, smiling down at him. The joke that went around the Crusher was that Denzer was a troll stitched into an ork's skin, and he was almost big enough for it to be true. He flicked the greasy black hair out of his eyes, and Tom gave him a friendly growl.

  "Buy you a soda water, Tom? Hey, the mayor's running around like he just won the next election. Nice work, chummer."

  The troll smiled again and let himself feel good about it all. No matter how wretched were the Redmond Barrens, it was his home and he was doing what he could to put something back into it after all those years of being on the take.

  He looked around once more at the hard-worked and care-worn faces. Seven years ago, he'd have killed anyone in here for a few hundred nuyen. Now, what was left of him loved these people. From the Plastic Jungles, with their legacy of chemical pollutants all the way down to the street markets of the Bargain Basement. And, down in the Jungles, the seed money grant his group had been able to extract from Redmond's mayor, Jeffrey Gasston, was going to make a real difference to thousands of them. I owe you for all that, chummer, he said silently to the face on the magazine cover. Whatever did happen to you?

  * * *

  He'd chosen Heidelberg almost randomly. Now, after two days, Serrin was beginning to think the choice had been inspired. The city was quiet, even now, in the tourist season, and looked as though it had barely changed in more than a century. Small white boats still drifted lazily down the Neckar, and people still shopped at the street market where he'd bought a sample of neckarfroschen, one of those hand-made green ceramic frogs, a curious, goblin-like creature with a quizzical expression on its face. The market with its jars of homemade preserves, stalls of feathered hats and drinking steins, fish and fruit and schinken, the ever-present dried ham that was obviously a local specialty was as straight out of the nineteenth century as the rest of the town.

  Wandering the streets, Serrin stopped on his way up the narrow one leading to the hilltop castle and gazed idly into the window of a confectionery shop. Some colorful little boxes caught his eye and he bought one, only to find a distressingly heart-shaped chocolate biscuit inside. Accompanying it was a tiny piece of paper, which said that these were "Student's Kisses," sweets sent by one student to a potential sweetheart whose chaperone prevented any more direct expression of ardor.

  We've come a long way, Serrin thought bitterly. Nowadays, your sweetheart boffs your brains out for three days, then sells you to the tabloids. He turned left into the Marketplatz and idled on to the Haupstrasse, hunting coffee and fresh-squeezed juice in one of the innumerable cafes.

  Maybe I should visit the university, he thought idly. Finish some of that work on masking techniques I was trying to do at Columbia. Oh, what the hell, I've had enough work for a while. Let's go see what Frederick of Bohemia left us on top of that hill.

  Kristen ran like crazy away from the multi-colored markets and stalls of Strand Street to disappear into the crowds of Lower Adderley, where she picked her way toward Heerengracht and the waterfront with her scavenger's prize. Today she'd gotten lucky, coming upon the

  scene just as the police surprised the steamers in the act of grabbing the wallet from a man they had doubled up on the ground.

  Kristen wasn't given to thieving, the police were too hard on that, but she knew when something could be had for nothing. While the police took up the chase in the opposite direction and a couple of bystanders bent down trying to help the groaning victim, she'd gone straight for the shoulder bag still lying on the ground where it must have gotten flung in the scuffle. Snatching it up, clutching it tightly to her chest, she was sure nobody had seen her as she made like a devil rat for the Sisulu Markets. But with her height and headful of tight curls, Kristen wouldn't really feel safe until she got there. All she could do was pray that the effects of her morning's dagga weren't too obvious; the weed had been strong, flighty, brightly mellow.

  The builders had modeled it on San Francisco and Sydney, or so they'd said when developing the derelict industrial wasteland of Cape Town's waterfront. And maybe it hadn't turned out too badly after all. The waterfront was her home, one of the few places in all of the Confederated Azanian Nations where you really weren't likely to get shot just for being the wrong skin color, religion, or meta-type. For Kristen, being half-Xhosa, half-Caucasian, that meant a lot. Down here, all she had to worry about was racial prejudice, and not murderous intent.

  She gazed idly out at the huge rusting hulk of the oil tanker beached permanently on the sands of the shallow coastline. Some twenty thousand people lived in the gutted remains of that ship, a ragged army of homeless. Many of them labored on the breaking crews that went out each day to work over the junked ships towed into the bay, huge derelicts whose faceless owners had sold them for scrap to the city council. Using nothing more sophisticated than hammers, the tanker people broke their backs pounding up those hulks for the metal. They got peanuts for the scrap just enough to subsist while the city fathers reckoned the price they paid for the abandoned ships cheap if it kept twenty thousand social misfits from

  preying on the tourists. Kristen knew one or two of the wreckers, but still hadn't fallen so low herself.

  Kristen grinned as she sat down with some kaf and a plate of blatjang, picking at the chicken with one hand while going through the bag with the other. Eighty UCAS dollars, fives and small change; the man must have been using it for small purchases in the markets. No doubt he'd left his plastic and most of his documents back in the hotel security box. Standard tourist precaution,
she thought. But eighty bucks suited her just fine. It would feed her for weeks, even buy her a hotel bed. Better still, she could also get high on it for a month.

  She looked around to see if anyone was watching, if it would be safe to leave the bag and leave. Uncertain, she pretended to be searching for something, a recalcitrant lip gloss maybe, in its obscured depths. The first thing she pulled out was a magazine, which she dropped carelessly onto the table, and had just begun to fish around in the bottom of the bag when the picture on the magazine's cover caught her attention.

  Kristen suddenly felt very cold in the seaside warmth, an unusually balmy, twenty degrees Celsius on this winter day. She wasn't acquainted with more than a handful of elves dangerous, proud-crazy Zulus come to bad times in this city people she knew well to avoid, with their doubled contempt for her mixed race. She had never seen anyone like this elf in her life, of that she was sure. But the image seized her, and wouldn't let go. She flicked the tabloid's pages, saw him seated smiling in the sunshine, then turned the magazine sideways to look at him another way. She knew she'd never seen the bugger. She was also certain she'd known him all her life.

  Maybe she'd seen him on a movie poster or on a plug-ger for a rock concert, or maybe on a police poster or something amp; Frag it, she thought, I wish I could bloody well read. Who is he?

  As if on cue, the Javanese man rounded the corner of the waterfront, the white of his flowing clothes drifting in the breeze like the clouds scudding toward Table Mountain, and gave her a cheery wave of the hand. She gestured him over, waving the magazine rather foolishly above her head.