by K. W. Jeter
The office door flew open, interrupting Sikes’s meditations. Doctor Quinn rushed into the room; he grabbed Cathy’s other arm, nearly lifting her out of the chair.
“You’ll have to leave now.” The words tumbled from the doctor’s mouth. His face had turned pale, expression distraught. “Immediately.”
“What’s wrong?” Sikes stood and helped Cathy up. He watched as the doctor went behind the desk and hurriedly gathered up the file folders.
“Nothing—there’s nothing wrong.” Quinn’s agitation belied his words. “But please, just go.”
Sikes’s thoughts were fixed so hard upon Cathy and the baby that the doctor’s strange behavior seemed no more than a distraction, like a bird fluttering at a closed window. He let Quinn push him and Cathy down the corridor toward the clinic’s front door.
“What should I do now, doctor?” Just outside, Cathy looked back over the arm that Sikes had around her shoulders. “Do I need to make an appointment or something?”
“Everything will be taken care of.” Quinn’s face was just visible behind the door as it closed. “You’ll be contacted.”
Sikes led Cathy toward his car across the street. “I wonder what the hell that was all about.” He saw Cathy’s car parked farther down the block. He’d have to make arrangements to pick it up; right now, he wanted her to be with him. “He knows his stuff and everything, but he’s kind of a weird guy. Ya know?” He unlocked the passenger side door and pulled it open for her.
A worried expression crossed Cathy’s face as she adjusted her seat belt. “Maybe there really is something wrong.” She touched his arm as he slid in behind the steering wheel. “Maybe you’d better go back and—”
He didn’t hear what else she said. Her words were swallowed up in a deafening roar, the shockwave of an explosion hitting them like a massive hammer, hard enough to rock the car sideways on its suspension.
Sikes shielded her with his body, a rush of flame heat rolling over his back. With one forearm he gathered Cathy tight to his chest. He could just hear her gasp of shock as he looked back over his shoulder toward the clinic.
Or where the clinic had been.
As the first blackened fragments began to rain down upon the car, a tower of fire, churning with coils of smoke, rose into the sky. Shards of broken glass, scattered across the street, glinted like jag-edged sparks.
In the few seconds before the alarm sirens began wailing, he held Cathy even tighter in his arms, trying to protect her from all the darkening world’s harm.
C H A P T E R 7
HE ROLLED ON the throttle and felt the engine beneath him respond. The pure, unmediated force of machinery shimmered up his spine. That, and the sharp wind whipping into his squinting eyes, blurred his vision for a moment as he leaned forward over the motorcycle’s tank.
On the freeway heading east, toward the obscured hills of the San Fernando Valley, a narrow gap appeared between an eighteen-wheeler and a school bus in the next lane. Buck Francisco shot for the opening, the bike’s front wheel jittering on the lane divider bumps. For a moment, the truck’s axle churned at his elbow, a row of kids’ faces gawked and grinned from the bus’s windows above him—then he was through, into a pocket of relatively clearer traffic. He struck the middle of the lane and maxed the throttle, past the motorcycle’s built-in shiver and then into pure smooth sailing, miles and miles of faceless asphalt and concrete and steel in front of him. The gentle, highspeed curves of infinite freedom beckoned him onward.
Buck let everything else fall behind him, like the dust of the warehouse stripped away by velocity. When his shift ended—when the whistle blew, as the old-timer terts said, though there was never any actual whistle to hear—he rarely headed off to the nearest watering-hole with the rest of the Newcomers he worked with, to knock back rounds of cheap sour milk while the humans were getting plowed at their own bar farther down the street. The bike was a better intoxicant, one more to his liking. All that he wanted—just to climb onto the machine, its mingled smells of gasoline and oil and neoprene cables rising into his nostrils like a spread of ripe, raw organ meats. And when he hit the starter and the engine came to life, its first tremor coming up through his hands clutching the ridged grips . . . that was when he could turn his head just a fraction of an inch and see the thin trace of a smile on his own face, his reflection shimmering in the small round mirrors at either side.
Right now, more luck came his way, the only kind he valued when he was on the bike: a mini-van full of commuters, terts and Tenctonese jammed in shoulder to shoulder, changed lanes and moved over toward the exit ramp coming up on the right. The business suits, with their monogrammed briefcases and laptop computers, were heading home to their boring ranch-style houses in another one of the boring subdivisions that kept crawling fungus-like across the scraped-raw desert. Much farther and these poor bastards would be trying to get into their downtown L.A. offices every morning, all the way from Las Vegas.
That wasn’t Buck’s problem. Enough traffic, vans, and station wagons, had peeled off the freeway that it suddenly seemed as if he had the whole road to himself. He didn’t have to see anybody around him, human or Tenctonese. And that was the way he liked it.
He leaned closer to the bike’s tank, his hands on the grips now level with his ear canals. His eyes watered with the sting of the wind in his face. He rolled on another quarter-inch of throttle, the lanes’ dividers blurring into white threads beneath him.
He didn’t have to see anyone, think of anyone. Out here, he could just go. Other people might have their problems, but for this brief, shining, eternal moment, he didn’t have to bother with any of them. He could just forget . . .
The mountains, the borders of the world, silently watched his knife-cut progress across the empty landscape.
The state, in its cruel wisdom, brought prisoners over from the men’s honor farm, to clip the hedges and edge the billiard-table lawns and generally buff up the grounds of the women’s facility. Stupid friggin’ losers, thought Noah Ramsey as the electronically-controlled gate rattled open and he stepped through. With the knot of his necktie tight against his throat and the lawyer-type attaché in his hand, he walked toward the glass booth, straight into the sullen glare of the uniformed guard.
“Special visit, under provisions of the Los Angeles Superior Court, District Ninety-Seven.” Noah slid the envelope with the appropriate paperwork through the scuffed chrome trough beneath the central window. He had gone through this ritual dozens of times—Christ, maybe a couple hundred times by now—and still the head guard, always the same one, had to examine every official scrap of paper as though it were the first time. You’d think they’d have learned by now. Strings had been pulled, from way up on high, and there was nothing they could do about it. They had to let him in.
Bored with the examination of the documents, he looked out across the facility’s manicured grounds. A squad of prisoners—all humans, he noted—were perfunctorily pruning one of the trees set a safe distance from the fence topped with razor wire. He supposed it was a good idea, cool in its way, for these guys to get to come over to the women’s slammer. Even if they didn’t catch sight of any, they could still catch a whiff of what they were being deprived of while they were locked up so they’d be ready when they got dumped back out on the street.
Ready for war, thought Noah grimly. The more pissed-off humans there were, tired of being jerked around for fighting against the parasites in their midst, the better. Every increment of anger was like taking the fire underneath a seething pot up another notch. Soon enough, it would boil over.
“Yeah, all right—these look okay.” The guard folded the papers with the judge’s signature inscribed, stuffed them back into the envelope, and shoved them out to Noah.
“Of course.” He flashed the guard his best nonchalant smile. “Why wouldn’t they?”
The guard had already picked up the phone to ring up the prison’s visitor reception area. His gaze lifted to Noah’s face;
the eyes narrowed and the expression hardened.
“Listen, punk.” The guard spoke softly, one hand covering the phone’s mouthpiece. “You aren’t fooling anybody here. Believe me, whatever you and your jerk-off Purist buddies are planning, it’s not gonna happen.”
Noah looked straight back into the guard’s eyes. A human like him—it was a shame to see a member of one’s own species, made of flesh and blood and guts just like his, who had sold out and gone over to the other side. A tool of the parasites. The guard was easily up into his late thirties, close to twice Noah’s age, and his head was obviously stuffed with lies and Tenctonese propaganda. All that crap about peace and brotherhood between the two species. Yeah, right. There had been a time, when he’d first joined the Human Defense League, when he would have flared up and started arguing with the guy, trying to use words like sledgehammers to pound some sense into this moron’s skull.
That’s what they want you to do, thought Noah as he kept his face a carefully controlled mask. Make a scene so they’d have an excuse to throw his ass out of here and curtail his visiting privileges—they’d love that.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Noah evenly. “There’s nothing we’re doing that isn’t perfectly legal.”
The guard’s eyes narrowed into little slits. Radiating suspicion, he studied Noah for a few seconds longer, then turned away. “Guess who’s here again,” he spoke into the phone. “Yeah, that’s right . . .”
Noah didn’t mind lying to a poor, deluded creature such as this; such things were necessary, if the human species was to rid itself of the parasites. Everything was justified for the Purist cause. Being lied to would be the least that could happen to this fool. If people—real people, human beings and not parasites—didn’t wake up when the time came, then he would have no problem with putting a gun to their heads. It wouldn’t be anything personal with this prison guard; he didn’t even know the man. But there were others . . . like that jerk cop back in L.A. Noah could feel a spark of brooding anger next to his heart as he thought about the man. Always acting so buddy-buddy, like he’d been some kind of true friend. Like it was even possible to be friends with somebody who slept with a slag woman. The spark flared hotter for a moment. Now there was somebody it would be a real pleasure to put a bullet in between the eyes.
The guard’s voice brought him back from that pleasant reverie. “Go ahead.” The steel-barred door buzzed and rattled open. “You know the way.”
Lockups always smelled the same, no matter where they were or who they held. The odor of mop buckets filled with disinfectant solution permeated the corridors, the cinder-block walls painted institutional green and beige. Noah walked toward the visiting area, the fluorescent panels buzzing overhead. He had memories of being in a place just like this—as an inmate, not a visitor—from the days before he’d wised up and joined the HDL. Back then, he’d just been into getting loaded and making trouble. Now he had a purpose in life.
She was waiting for him, in one of the private conference rooms; that was something else the court orders stipulated, along with a monthly security check to make sure that the cops weren’t bugging the tiny space for the benefit of their parasite bosses. A bored-looking female guard unlocked the door and then closed it after him as he stepped through.
“Good afternoon, Noah.” Darlene Bryant’s words were cool and formal, as they were every time he came to see her. She rested her folded hands on top of the small wooden table. Her thin smile emerged. “How are you?”
She always asked that. “I’m . . . I’m fine.” And he was always unnerved by the piercing gaze of her steel gray eyes. He drew back the battered wooden chair opposite her and quickly sat down. He swung the attaché case onto the table and snapped it open.
Without looking up from the papers through which he sorted, he knew that she was still watching him with that same, semi-amused smile. He drew out a thin sheaf of computer printouts and handed them to her.
“Hmm . . .” Bryant nodded slowly as she looked over the neat columns of figures. “Yes; yes, indeed . . .” Her blunt fingernail moved down one of the rows.
Once, that fingernail had been something of a work of art, grown long and then buffed and polished to match the glossy, pearl-like sheen of the others on her hands. Noah had seen the photos, both at the HDL headquarters and in the magazines, of Darlene Bryant in her glamour days. Even with her beauty pageant days long past her, she had still radiated an aura of lacquered perfection. She still retained that icy, regal bearing, though her prison stay had ended her regime of weekly manicures and all the other expensive personal maintenance in which she had indulged. Now, the fingernails and the once-golden hair were cut short; gray the color of her eyes streaked back from her temples. Life in the slams, eased however much by the legal and financial resources of the HDL, had hardened the Purists’ leader, stripped away the fluff and designer gowns and ladylike genteelisms. In the standard prison-issue overalls, she looked to Noah like a machine, as cold and efficient as the loaded automatic he kept under his own pillow. The slag-loving authorities didn’t know what they had created, what they had called into being, by putting her in a place like this.
“These revenue figures from the southwest divisions seem a little low.” Bryant asked for Noah’s pen and he handed it to her; she quickly circled some of the numbers on the printouts and scribbled a note in the margin. She favored him with a slightly larger smile as she folded the printouts back into a tidy stack. “I’m afraid not everybody in our organization works as hard as you do, Noah.”
The smile and the words and the meaning they held, eased the tension along his spine, as though the handle of a clamp vise had been loosened a quarter-turn. He knew that she had ways to get her approval passed along to her lieutenants in the HDL; since she had taken him under her wing, his rise through the ranks had been greased to the max. Just being her chief courier to the outside world—that was an honor that had been bestowed upon him like a blessing.
He’d have to be ready for the next step. It wouldn’t be enough to have mastered the intricacies of the accounting and database systems with which the organization kept track of its worldwide net of supporters. More would be asked of him—much more.
And he’d be ready. He glanced away from the imprisoned leader of the Human Defense League, and down to his own hand resting on the table. He squeezed it into a fist, a weapon hard and crushing as stone.
“Everything else looks to be in order.” Bryant finished glancing over the contents of a set of manila envelopes Noah had given her. “Tell McMann and Petrowski that I’d like to have their quarterly reports the next time you come out here.”
“Okay . . . I mean, all right; I’ll tell them.” A little bit of his initial nervousness had ebbed, as it always did when he made his visits. He stuffed the envelopes and printouts back into the attaché case and closed the lid. He knew what she was going to ask about next.
“Tell me—” Bryant leaned across the table, bringing her cool gaze closer to him. “How’s the . . . development project going?”
Those words were coded, a subterfuge. Even with the security checks on this little room, some things were too important to risk talking about openly. And too dangerous.
He nodded slowly. “All our, uh, monitoring systems indicate that things are proceeding normally. Or at least without interruption. The project appears to be at the stage that the, uh, interested parties expected it to be at this time. Our sources predict that the project’s termination date will be on schedule as well.”
It was the same report he had given her a week ago. And it met with the same reaction: a single nod from her, with that same thin smile and her eyes almost closed, as if nothing could have pleased her more.
Those eyes opened again, fixing him with their steady gaze. “And our initial project? How has the follow-up on that been?”
This time, he couldn’t keep from meeting Bryant’s smile with one of his own. “I don’t really think,” he sai
d smoothly, “that we’ve gotten the proper credit for that. At least, nobody has formally charged—sorry, I mean thanked us for it yet.” His smile increased to a grin. “Even if they’d like to, nobody seems to be quite able to make the connection yet.”
“What a pity.” Bryant leaned back in her chair. “Maybe someday . . . when things are different . . . then maybe we’ll be able to talk about it. And people really will thank us. But in the meantime, as they say, discretion is the better part of valor.” She wasn’t smiling now. “So it’s important that we all stay . . . silent. Understood?”
“Of course.” There was no way he could be made to talk. And as for the others, any HDL members who had actually taken part in the so-called initial project—they weren’t likely to open their mouths, either. Why risk a murder rap?
She stood up from the table and signalled with an imperious wave of her hand, visible through the tiny window behind Noah, that the visit was over; the female guard outside began unlocking the door.
“Take care, Noah.” Bryant looked back at him as the guard led her away. Another thin smile showed on her face. “And don’t forget those quarterly reports.”
Down the long green-and-beige corridor, as he headed toward the reception area, he thought about the things of which he had just spoken with Darlene Bryant. Different words meant different things.
The initial project had been the blowing up of Doctor Quinn’s clinic. He hadn’t been part of the operations team that had done the job, but he knew something about it. The doctor had been a parasite-loving traitor to his own species; he’d deserved to die. There hadn’t been a piece of Quinn left after the explosion that couldn’t have fit into a shoebox. Good riddance, as far as Noah was concerned.
And the development project? There was something developing, all right; Noah’s thoughts turned grim as he watched the reception guard filling out the forms to check him back out of the prison. There was an embryo developing, nearly four months along—he didn’t really know how big that would make it. It was growing in the belly of some slag bitch back in L.A.; she and the government thought it was all such a big secret, but it wasn’t. The HDL had it sources, closer than any of the parasites or their lickspittle human toadies realized.
