A few steps in and he saw the blood pooling thick on the floor. A few more steps and there were legs. Woman’s legs…
He swung around a counter, aiming his gun down at the body.
It was the voluptuous, coppery-haired maid who had admitted them that time, the one Vern had been so enamored of. Linda, Monty recollected. Well, Linda was as sexy as ever from the neck down: black uniform, black stockings and heels, cleavage looking as powdery soft as a baby bottom. And a face like a huge ragged mouth framed in frizzy red hair soaked in blood. Vern. Not so enamored now.
She had a small pistol in her hand, Monty was a little relieved to note. Hopefully it had been self-defense.
Monty stepped over her to a swinging door, cracked it open a sliver.
A dining room. Monty stole into it, his eyes snapping furtively from here to there to there with a bird’s darting paranoia. The long table and the wood of the chairs was a pale polished green, like a fungus varnished over. A realistic oil painting of three women making love, at the end of the room. Their long braided hair was knotted around each other’s ankles and wrists. Patron of the arts. A fine, realistic painter, the late Mr. Greenberg.
A long, very narrow hallway was beyond this; murky, low-ceilinged, like a tunnel. Black glossy tiles. A few potted plants with vivid red fern leaves.
Monty floated through an arched doorway. Steps. He took them upwards. Stairwell and stairs were glossy obsidian black, dimly lit.
There was another narrow hall. A closed door near to hand. Monty turned the knob.
It was a bedroom. But an odd one. The decor was black, with furniture made of strange black metal pieces fused weirdly together. On a table against a wall was a red crystal statue of that monster from the bas-relief.
Monty knew what kind of furniture design this was, and recognized the idol at last. One of the mysterious gods of the Bedbugs. This was a guest room suited to their tastes and needs.
The Bedbugs, or at least a renegade band of them—most likely the gang called the Dimensionals—had helped Loveland construct his teleporter. He had become cozier with the beings than Monty had guessed.
The next bedroom along the hall seemed to have been Linda’s. Yes, Monty determined, finding a photograph of a red-haired child with two adults, no doubt her parents. Monty continued down to the end of the hall.
More stairs. He ascended stealthily, pistol’s nose tilted up as if to warily sniff.
Another claustrophobic hallway. Monty moved into the first room.
Had to be the master bedroom. Helga’s mesmerizing smell was here. A vast bed, canopied, the canopy and bedcovers a heavy black velour. The furnishings were black, the fireplace was black marble with red swirling cloud patterns. The wall tiles were glossy red, like the tiles in Red Station but without the trapped faces.
A soft clicking sound; Monty whirled.
The Bedbug lunged through the doorway.
*
One man was an Earth human, the other a Choom, both nattily attired. The Choom gave a rambling suave grin. “Hello…could you please buzz Helga Greenberg and let her know we’re here to repair her climate control? She’s expecting us.”
“Ahh,” said the woman guard, looking toward her partner, “that could be a problem.”
“She’s busy today—come back tomorrow,” said the burly guard.
The Choom reversed his grin. “She’s expecting us, sir…could you please call her? She’d be extremely disappointed if we couldn’t come.”
“There’s been an emergency; she’s not available. I can’t let you go up, sir, so you’ll kindly have to leave.”
“Can’t you just call her, for God’s sake?” said the human.
“No—sorry.”
“Come on, Chaz,” said the Choom, “my phone’s in the car. We’ll call her ourselves and tell her to have these morons let us up.”
“Who are you calling a moron, ass-lick?” snarled the male guard.
“Bite me, pudge.”
Chaz took the Choom by the elbow. “Easy, Pulf…let’s go to the car.”
“Yeah—get the hell out of here before I call the force on you.”
“What’sa matter, pudge, can’t deal with us yourself?” sneered Pulf.
The guard came out from behind his counter, hand on his holstered gun. “Out!” he boomed. “Now!”
“What’s going on?” asked a newcomer, stepping into the guard shack, snow blowing in with him. He was a black-beaked, tall and thin Enisku with a purple ski hat on.
“Nothing,” said the guard. “Go on in, man, your partner’s waiting for you up there.”
“Partner?” said Chaz. “Is there some kind of problem in Helga Greenberg’s apartment?”
“You might say that,” Beak said. “Who are you?”
“Climate control repairmen. We can come back.”
Beak took in the men’s sporty dress. “Where are your tools?”
“In the trunk. If there’s a problem we’ll give her a call tomorrow.” Chaz reached for the door.
Beak didn’t like it. He moved his hand to his gun. “Hold it a minute…”
Pulf’s gun slipped out first. A blue ray bolt tore through the empty top of Beak’s hat, pulling it off his head.
Beak fumbled his gun. Dropped it. There was another shot.
The Choom crumpled, a sleep dart in his temple. The burly guard turned his gun on Chaz, the human.
Chaz held up empty hands. He was a technician, not a soldier. “Don’t shoot!”
Beak scooped up his pistol and slammed Chaz backwards into a wall. The human blurted, “Who are you, fucker?”
“Who the fuck are you?” Beak kneed him in the crotch.
“Ah! Shit! Don’t!” the man sobbed.
Beak pressed his gun muzzle hard into the ear of his doubled-over prisoner. “I don’t have time for games, slime! Talk!”
“Teeb,” the man whimpered. Definitely not a soldier.
“What are you here for?”
“To help Helga…Helga Greenberg.”
“Do what?”
“Clone somebody.”
“Clone who?”
“I don’t know!”
“Okay, cry-baby.” Beak handcuffed the man’s wrists behind his back. He addressed the security guards. “Cuff sleeping beauty and stash him someplace. Don’t call the police yet.”
“I know, I know,” the burly guard grumbled, holstering his dart gun.
*
Though only as tall as a child, the Bedbug drove Monty back into the bedroom, onto the bed. It clambered on top of him.
There were six whip-like tentacles. Two had his right wrist and his gun firmly coiled. One had encircled his left wrist. Another slipped around his throat and two went into his mouth.
Monty gagged. He bit down hard and pushed his feet off the floor, doing a backwards shoulder-roll off the bed.
They fell to the floor on the opposite side of the bed, Monty on top now. Whipping his head from side to side, he kept the tentacles out of his mouth but they slashed his face and the one around his neck tightened.
Black ameba-like things swam on his eyeballs. Multiplying.
Monty pressed his knee down hard on the being’s underside, and it was chattering wildly now, but it was so armored he knew it was crying out in fury rather than pain. If only he could angle his gun a little bit, or switch it to his left hand suddenly, but as if anticipating this strategy the extra-dimensional coiled a second tentacle around his left wrist.
The black amebas were fusing together. No; snow. That’s what it was. Black snow. Deepening…burying him. Suffocating…
Monty saw metallic gold slippers through the snow.
The Bedbug’s chittering reached a higher pitch just before there was a flash and a violet-blue ray beam struck it in the head. Viscous green blood bubbled free. The tendrils released Monty and he rolled onto his side, almost losing consciousness.
He heard chattering beside him; madly thrashing tentacles slapped him and he squinted, cove
red his face with one arm. Around the shielding arm he saw another lightning flash. No more chattering or thrashing tentacles. Slowly Monty lowered his arm.
Vern Woodmere loomed over him, his bulky black pistol loosely pointed down at him.
“See, man? If I wasn’t here that fuck would’ve killed you. Now are we together on this or what?”
“All right,” Monty rasped, rubbing his throat. He was shaking.
Vern offered a hand, hoisted Monty to his feet.
The insect-like being was cracked open as if stomped by a giant foot, oozing green sap. Vern kicked at a tentacle. “Good thing it didn’t have a weapon. So were you really gonna cuff me or what, boy?”
“I don’t know. Come on—she may have heard us and be trying to escape.”
They entered the hallway together. “I haven’t seen her yet but I wasted that redhead bitch.”
“I noticed.”
“She had a blaster, man. So where’s Beak?”
“Still on his way, I guess.” Monty felt steadier now, though still shaken up. “Thanks,” he told Vern as they moved down the hall.
“Forget it, partner.”
They came to another room, looked in, and Vern saw a blur duck behind a billiards table. “Hey!” He leapt into the room in a wide stance and opened fire with his jumped-up blaster.
Beams ripped through the billiards table with its paisley-patterned baize, and a Bedbug popped up into view with a green spatter. “Die, you fuck!” Vern snarled, eyes blazing as if it were they shooting the ray beams. Bolt after bolt drove the Bedbug backwards into a massive fireplace. It almost succeeded in scrambling up the flue despite its great blasted wounds, but it dropped and did a mad dance in the fireplace’s maw as Vern’s short ray lances hammered it to pieces. At last it was still, a shattered black egg in a puddle of green yolk.
“Come on,” Vern snapped, setting off down the hall again.
“Take it easy,” Monty urged, skipping to catch up with him. “We want her alive!”
“They didn’t want us alive, did they? Opal? Beak’s wife? You and me?”
“I mean it, Vern.”
“Agency boy, is that what you are, Black? After all you’ve been through? You Nedland’s little doggie all of a sudden?” They had come to a door at the end of the hall. Vern aimed his gun at the knob without even trying it first to see if it were unlocked.
Violet flash. There was a blasted hole in the door, and the impact sent it swinging open.
The Stem was there, and it lifted its tubular black weapon and discharged it into Vern’s face from only three steps away.
Vern spun, bounced off the wall, screaming, both hands up to his face. Black crystal spears burst between his fingers. A large one plunged out of his mouth, stretching it until the corners tore back to the ears, out of which more were stabbing. A huge spear thrust up through the top of Vern’s skull as he slid down the wall and his spasming hands fell away. A black crystal chunk now instead of a head; and that toppled away from the shoulders, rolling a little bit. No blood came from the headless body.
This all in seconds, and Monty didn’t watch. As soon as Vern fell out of his way he opened up with his pistol, shot after shot. He wasn’t really shocked. It was as if he’d expected it to happen.
A solid bullet caromed off the Stem’s gun, perhaps the easiest target to hit. The black tube flipped away through the air. Emitting an ear-skewering whistle, the red stick-creature surged forward at him.
It had on a belt-like thing from which it had pulled its weapon; Monty ducked under its swinging arms (he heard them cleave the air with a whump) and tucked a full magazine of plasma bullets there. Then he somersaulted in a tight ball between its tripod legs.
The Stem whirled to face him. Monty came up in a crouch.
He fired. At his plasma clip.
An explosion of plasma. Monty dove into a somersault again, scrambled on hands and knees across the room. A safe distance away, he looked back over his shoulder.
The stick-creature had split in half through the middle. The three legs kicked in mindless nerve spasms. The upper half dragged itself across the floor a few feet toward him, whistling. Monty jumped to his feet and backed against the wall.
It stopped. Still sizzling, melting. The hook jerking up at his heart loosened and gave him some slack. Glancing around the room, he slapped a fresh clip of solid bullets into the semi-auto, then went back into the hallway.
Vern. “My God,” he breathed, shaking again. “My God…”
He tore his eyes away from the crystal chunk that had been his friend’s head moments before. His eyes lighted on the dropped blaster. He knelt and picked it up in his left hand.
Monty slowly turned back into the room he had killed the Stem in…
It was an art studio.
It had more windows than any of the other rooms he’d seen, though two were fully obscured by green vines. Black snow falling out there. There were realistic oils hanging on the walls.
One was of Ferule Cangue. The dwarf was unmistakable.
The paint stains on the palettes were dry, there was no work in progress on the easel. But this room had been used long after the death of the artistic Mr. Greenberg by the hideous Garland Syndrome.
A door beyond. Monty went to it. He leveled Vern’s blaster at the lock.
Flash. The door flew open. Monty stepped through.
Helga Greenberg extended her gun in both hands and fired.
Monty crouched and fired the blaster. His skull pin’s eyes blinked redly.
The bolt burned into the wall near a clear plastic globe. There was a greenish liquid burbling inside. The baby in the bubble looked like an embryo in a bottle of formaldehyde, one of those freak babies one might see in a carnival. Only it was a very normal, attractive-looking baby. And although its eyes were shut, it was alive.
“Drop your gun or I’ll kill him!” Monty yelled.
Helga Greenberg straightened up slowly, hesitated.
“Drop it!”
“Don’t! Don’t!” She tossed the pistol onto a divan. Holding up empty palms, she slowly came out from behind the single white marble pillar in the center of the circular, white-tiled room. “Don’t shoot him.”
Monty straightened up also, but didn’t lower his gun from aiming at the blissfully floating baby. Monty smirked, his face flushed red.
“I’m feeling a little better than the last time I saw you, Helga. That was over a year ago—remember? I had M-670 then. Remember?”
“I remember.”
“You were sympathetic about the death of my partner. You also hinted that you’d like to get together with me some time…if I ever recovered…remember? You wanted me to hold on so I could. Well, I did. So I guess this is it. Our date.”
Her beauty was nearly as hypnotic as then. The wide-spaced, eerily too-pale blue eyes, sultry and mysterious under fleshy, somewhat Asian folds. Button nose and full sullen lips. She wore a black dress (in keeping with the unusual holiday, perhaps), cut low to a shallow chest and baring her shoulders, her waist-length tangle of dark blond hair parted on the side to half-cover one side of her face. Nearly as hypnotic. Most of her effect, her natural beauty aside, hinged on her confident composure, and that was faltering though she clung to it bravely. She looked more like a child, despite her sexier attire, than the last time he’d seen her.
And though he acknowledged her beauty, he didn’t ache to fuck her this time. He wasn’t that pathetic. Besides, he was strangely more afraid of her than he had been facing the Stem back there.
“Sit down in that chair. Keep your hands on the rests.”
She complied, lowered herself into a white round-edged chair with chrome trim. She crossed one bare leg demurely, but she was barefoot, her feet delicate and cute. Monty glanced away, around the room, his pink semi-automatic pointing toward her and the blaster at the baby in the softly gurgling fish bowl.
It was a lab. Adjacent to the art studio. Part of the art studio, actually—wasn’t it? Ther
e were shelves filled with old machine components, labeled boxes. Semi-circular work counters along the walls, covered with machines…some stacked atop each other, some hooked up to computer monitors. A low humming. Constellations of lights, some flashing rhythmically. Near the baby’s globe there was a concentration of equipment, tubes running in and out of the green liquid, lazily snaking wires affixed to the baby like multiple umbilical cords.
“Your husband, Mrs. Greenberg?” Monty jerked his gun at the globe.
“You’d better just arrest me, Agent Black, and let me call my lawyer. I won’t talk to you.” She was trying to sound composed but her voice trembled under the surface, and he saw how her fingers clenched the armrests.
“You’ll talk or I’ll put a ray bolt through your husband’s head.”
“He isn’t my husband.”
“Don’t fuck with me!” Monty bellowed, and let off a bolt from his gun. It missed the container by a foot; blackened white tiles clattered to the floor and shattered.
“No, don’t!” Helga cried out, almost rising. Nails digging.
“I’ll do it.”
“You can’t touch anything until I call my lawyer!”
“Fuck you, lady—I’m a health agent. I’ll tear this fucking room apart and get a medal for it. I want you to tell me your story, and if you do I’ll leave things intact until you call your lawyer. Fuck with me and I’ll give your husband a well-deserved abortion.”
Helga turned her head in profile, pouting like a model. Monty saw the water filming her eye glisten, but still she held her dignity. Haughty as a teenage princess.
“He is my husband,” she muttered.
“He cloned a double and gave it Garland Syndrome to fake his death, just like he cloned himself and gave his double M-670 to fake his death again. So he could come back later as a new person.”
“Yes,” she sneered.
“He arranged the chem spill at Greenberg so you could supposedly sell your plant to Cugok.”
“Yes.”
“Is Greenberg his real name, or does it go back beyond that?”
“Greenberg. Emmanuel Greenberg.”
“Emmanuel. Manuel. Manuel Hung,” Monty said to himself. “And you. Is your condition natural or did he do something to keep you this young?”
Health Agent Page 29
