Helga smirked at him, gorgeously contemptuous. “No, but it’s what initially attracted him to me.”
“Cugok. Who is he really, and where?”
“An actor. He’s gone now, far away. He was only an actor.”
“Who?”
“Clem Zazone. He went to school with Manny at P.U..”
Manny, thought Monty with disgust. “Why the companies? Did he have a taste for money, too?”
“Doesn’t everyone, Mr. Black? Manny likes his comforts. Money is power and power is intoxicating, yes…but it gave him the resources to fulfill his vision. He’s an artist. The companies were mine, primarily—I inherited money.”
“Him—an artist?” Monty barked a laugh, jittery with energy. He stole a glance at the baby with its fungoid greenish flesh. “A psychopath. A mass murderer, maybe. He’s no fucking artist. Artists don’t kill their audience…they entertain them.”
“No—they manipulate them. The old Earth film director Alfred Hitchcock said actors are cattle. Manny says that’s not so. It’s the audience who are cattle.”
“Yeah, see what I mean? He doesn’t care about his audience, or want to move or inform them…he just wants them to know how supposedly better he is than they are. It’s as much an ego and power trip as money obsession. As rape is. He just wanted to see how many people he could overpower and rape at once. He’s just a self-fascinated sociopath who likes to see his face in the papers, like any serial killer.”
“You’re a limited man, Mr. Black,” Helga said, pale eyes blazing, their liquid sheen gone. She looked scary again. Feline. “Manny is unlimited.”
“An artist cares. He doesn’t hate his audience…”
“You’re naive. Manny is aware.”
“An artist reflects the human condition.”
Helga smiled frighteningly. “Manny does.”
Monty fell silent a moment, chilled. His extended guns were getting heavy.
He went back to gathering information, filling the gaps. “He had himself cloned only up to his twenties and had his face changed from Greenberg to his Loveland incarnation.”
“Naturally.”
“Dwork died and couldn’t complete the last clone. Now you need Teeb.”
“Westy. He had become quite troublesome…”
“How is that?”
“He was supposed to have finished the cloning so that Manny would be here already just before The Big Frown opened…Manny’s latest piece.”
“I’m familiar with it.”
“Manny would come back and open The Big Frown himself that very day. But Westy had become rather enamored of me. In fact, he wanted me for himself. He threatened not to revive Manny unless I agreed to leave Manny for him. I told him that was impossible. He wanted me, then, to at least go to bed with him. I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t do that—he was my husband’s best friend.”
“How honorable of you.” Monty suddenly grew concerned. “His memory is there in the computer, isn’t it? Dwork didn’t hide it…”
“It’s there. But I’m not mechanically inclined, Mr. Black. I needed Westy to finish the clone and restore its memory. He would have done it—I knew he couldn’t bring himself to shut Manny down. He knew he was being irrational. He knew if he didn’t give in soon I’d have him killed and find someone else…”
The door opened behind Monty.
He spun, the blaster aiming first. He saw a gun pointed at him already…
“Hey, easy!” Beak said.
“Christ. Learn to knock, huh?”
Beak glanced at Helga, tensed in her chair to flee. She lowered herself fully down again. “Hello, little girl…what’s your name? Helga?”
“Go to hell, chicken-face.”
“Sweet.” Beak looked to Monty. “Seen Vern?”
“You didn’t?”
“No…” Beak’s expression became wary, full of dread.
“He’s dead, pal,” Monty told him. “The other Stem. I nailed it. I’m sorry, man.”
Beak switched his bright rage-filled eyes to the forty-three-year-old twelve-year-old. “I should kill you now, you fucking piece of shit!”
“Easy, man—come on. We got her. It’s over.”
“And that…that’s him?” Beak gestured at the baby.
“That’s our man. Cute, huh?”
“Blast him, Monty.”
“No!” snapped Helga.
“Shut up!”
“No, Beak.”
“Why not? It’s an illegal clone! We’re health agents; we can shut this shit down!”
“Wait until Neptune Teeb’s boys get here. Vern said two are on their way to complete the clone.”
“They’re here. One’s drugged in the guard shack, and I locked the other one in the bathroom downstairs when I saw that dead girl in the kitchen.”
“Good. Go get him up here.”
“Why?”
“Go get him.”
Beak shot a glare at Helga and departed.
“What are you going to do?” Helga hissed.
“Quiet.”
“You promised you wouldn’t hurt him!”
“So I did.”
“Oh—I see. You won’t hurt him, but the Teeb man will!”
“I keep my promises. I won’t hurt him or let him be hurt.”
They waited tensely for Beak to return. Soft gurgling sound. Helga watched the eyes on Monty’s skull pin flash rhythmically, the grinning teeth gnash.
Beak reappeared, pushing the ashen-faced technician Chaz ahead of him. “Want me to uncuff him? He’s a noodle…nothing to worry about.”
“Go ahead.” Monty moved closer to the baby in the bubble.
“What do you want me to do?” Chaz stuttered, rubbing his wrists. His testicles still ached and he was very, very frightened. There was also the anger of Neptune Teeb to consider, now that he had been caught and confessed his mission here.
“Take that clone’s memory chip out of the computer and give it to me,” Monty said.
“No!” Helga shrieked—a child’s horrified scream—and dove from her chair onto the nearby divan.
Beak shoved the Teeb technician to the floor. “Don’t!” he roared, leveling his pistol.
Half-sprawled on the divan, Helga lifted the handgun she had tossed there, pointing it at Monty…
Manny…floating behind him in the bubble. She couldn’t shoot…
Rising to one knee, she shifted the gun to point at Beak.
“Don’t!” Beak shouted again, crouching to fire.
The bullet from the pink semi-automatic, a solid chunk of metal, ripped into her long slender neck. Out the other side. Tile cracked. Helga flipped over the back of the divan…out of view…
Beak looked over at his partner. Chaz looked up from the floor.
Monty still held the semi-auto extended. His expression was blank.
Beak glanced back at the divan. He heard her bare heels drumming the floor and saw an arterial jet of blood squirt the tiled wall above the divan.
A pool of blood already began to emerge from under the divan, vivid against all the whiteness.
Beak went stealthily toward it, weapon ready. He pointed his gun down at what he saw—then lowered it. He knelt, came up with Helga Greenberg’s pistol. Monty could still hear the thumping, but winding down…like a heart.
Then nothing. Beak still stood over her, maybe transfixed by her long, blood-soaked, dark blond hair. Maybe her eerie blue eyes stared open, gorgeous and terrifying. Maybe in death she looked like a child and nothing wiser, nothing more evil. Monty was glad he couldn’t see her.
But he could still see her long bare legs flashing as his bullet tossed her over the back of the divan. He swivelled to stare at the baby suspended placidly in its aquarium.
In a quiet voice, he told Chaz what to do.
*
Monty watched his urine, a twinkling glassy rope, cascade into the handsome black toilet off Helga Greenberg’s master bedroom. He still felt numb.
Opal. The
rest. Over a year of his life. Over…
He watched his urine trickle away and stop.
He reached his hand into the pocket of his turquoise jacket.
The chip was tiny—less than a poker chip. As featureless as one, however. A blank white disc. Monty held it up in front of him.
“I wish I could have seen you face to face, my man,” he said to the chip softly. He fantasized about going back with it…instructing Chaz to complete the clone, imbue it with the memory program. He would then face Emmanuel Greenberg as a man. And shoot him.
But even still, this was better, wasn’t it? More…artistic.
“My statement,” Monty said, but then changed his mind, remembering the critic Yancy Mays. “No. This is my critique, Toll…”
He dropped the memory disk into the toilet with his urine. All that Emmanuel Greenberg—Toll Loveland—was. His identity. His essence. Turning over and over in slow motion in the urine-yellowed water.
Montgomery Black flushed the toilet, zipped his fly, and washed his hands.
*
Captain Nedland came. The forcers came. Ambulances for the bodies. In his call, Beak had told Nedland about the fate of Vern Woodmere.
“Fuck,” Nedland had hissed in genuine anger and sorrow into the vidphone.
Nedland clapped Beak on the arm when he saw him. “Damn good work, Beak…damn good work. Commendation for certain.”
“Thanks, sir. But I just wanna go home to my kids.”
“Fill out your reports tomorrow and you got two paid weeks. Where’s Monty?”
“In the bedroom down that hall, there.”
Nedland noticed the hole burned through Beak’s recovered ski hat. “Christ. Buy a new hat on your vacation, will ya?” No longer—at least for the moment—his usual funereal self, Captain Nedland bounced as he strode down the corridor.
“Monty?” He peeked in. He saw Monty sitting on the edge of a vast canopied bed.
Monty looked up. “Captain.”
“What the Christ?”
The health agent held a newborn baby in his arms and lap, cozily bundled into a thick white bath towel. It was squinting and sneering, a little disgruntled to be out of the womb, as babies tend to be, but was pink and healthy looking. Monty held a tiny hand between thumb and forefinger.
“Cute, huh, Captain? Innocent. Make somebody a nice adopted son, wouldn’t you say?”
Nedland realized the truth. Fucking bizarre…
“Not you, I hope,” he said.
“No,” Monty said, smiling a little. “Good Christ, no. Not me.”
TWENTY
One day they spent browsing around the Canberra Mall, and another at Quidd’s Market and its surrounding stores, Christmas shopping, but Monty stayed in their apartment for the bulk of his two-week vacation. Much of his time was filled by the new vidgame channel he had subscribed to.
He would sit on the very end of the couch, leaning so far forward that only the barest necessary amount of his rear was still on the cushion, playing with an intensity that amused and amazed Mauve. At first. His favorite game was an extremely elaborate and difficult sword and sorcery quest, the many monsters so real and vicious that they often startled Mauve. Thank God it wasn’t a hologram game with the things swarming throughout the apartment!
He would often swear out loud in frustration, and told Mauve his heart thumped heavily whenever he engaged in a challenging battle over a particularly important bit of treasure. In his enthusiasm (if she could call it that—were his exhausting struggles fun?) he tried to encourage her to play, but they got in a fight one time after she continued to bungle her way to an early death while he hovered at her shoulder coaching her tensely, sometimes snapping at her bad choice of strategy.
The longest single period of play she witnessed was ten hours straight. Usually it was only half that…but even that was something. When he wasn’t playing he was taking two- or three-hour hot bubble baths with a thick paperback collection of short horror stories.
At last, toward the end of the vacation, he had come up against the vidgame’s primary villain. Mauve noticed how Monty shut the game off when she neared, so she couldn’t see what it looked like; he said he wanted her to be surprised, should she decide to keep trying the game.
Her curiosity about the villain’s appearance overcame her. While Monty slept one morning (having stayed up all night, well past dawn) she accessed the game and punched up his recorded information, cut into the latest level he had achieved. In order to see what was going on from that point, all she knew how to do was go into the game itself, and did so with Monty’s character—who looked exactly like him, reproduced from a holographic picture fed into it, though dressed in chain mail and a white smock with a Crusader’s red cross on it.
She was killed in under half a minute, though she fought furiously. Her effort was admirable, considering her shock. The leader of the forces of mythical evil looked exactly like Toll Loveland. Monty had fed a photo of him to the computer. To see Loveland moving, talking (laughing sadistically), and killing the Monty character (until he could return in the next round) was profoundly unsettling. In fact, she was left scared by the experience, shut down the game.
While brooding over a cup of tea, she seriously considered erasing the villain. Substituting another nemesis, something from a horror movie or from the game files, in Loveland’s place. But she didn’t dare, knowing Monty’s love of the game, or at least its hold on him…picturing his intense face in her mind.
Should she even bring it up at all?
She decided against it. For now. He needed a little more time. He still had to come down all the way. Work it out of his system. And, she realized, he needed to battle and kill Toll Loveland face to face at last…if only in the arena of his mind.
*
The day after Monty plunged his magic sword through Loveland’s throat (blood burst from his mouth like vomit, his eyes bulging in very satisfying terror and pain), he waited until Mauve went out to do a little grocery shopping, and then—after pacing the apartment for half an hour—at last went to the vidphone…
Her mother was home, thank God. She looked more surprised than hateful to see him again. She even spoke with him for a few moments.
“You killed him, huh?” she said. She’d seen it on VT.
“Yeah, I guess I did.” He told her what he wanted. She nodded and punched the message up for him, once again, from the beginning…
“Monty. There’s a few things…I want to tell you…
“Please listen to me…”
He lowered his eyes. Didn’t want to catch a glimpse of her again when she leaned forward out of the shadows. This time he let the recording play to its very end…
“I…it’s wrong for me to be mad at you…I know. I’m scared.
“I know you didn’t do this to me on purpose. I know it isn’t your fault. I’m mad at you because…I’m so scared…
“I was looking for him for a while. I thought maybe…I don’t know…
“I traced him back to his various identities, but I never got far with any of them. But I found out something weird…that happened when he was…when he was…at school. Paxton Polytech. When he was Manuel Hung. I went down there and spoke to people…they told me a funny story. During his stay at school some animals disappeared from the labs. They pinned it on him, but I guess…charges were never brought. He paid for their replacement…
“I never could trace his identity back to his childhood. HAP and the police can’t trace him. Who knows where he came from. I’m too…I can’t do anything any more. I’m dying.
“I got it real good, huh?
“If you find him before it gets you too, kill him for me. But try to hang on. A cure is just around the corner—right?
“I’ve got to go…
“My poor mother…
“Best of luck to you, Monty. God bless you. It wouldn’t hurt you to look for just a little faith…even if it’s just a painkiller…
“I’m s
orry—I was selfish not to see you in person while I still could. This is the best I could do. I had to be mad at somebody. Please understand…I wanted to say goodbye but this is the best I could do.
“Monty…
“I guess I really did love you, after all. Too bad I didn’t give it a chance…huh? I’m sorry. I’m sorry…
“Okay. That’s enough. That’s all I can say.
“Goodbye, partner. I miss you…
“And I forgive you. Okay? I forgive you…”
Monty put his head down on the table edge and cried—and laughed a little—for a good long time.
And when Mauve came home he asked her to go outside with him for a walk in the brisk city streets, where the last vestiges of Eric Hughes’ black snow were finally fading away.
About the Author
Jeffrey Thomas has set a series of books in the milieu of Health Agent, such as the novels Deadstock, Blue War, Monstrocity and Everybody Scream! (the latter from Raw Dog Screaming Press), and the collections Punktown, Punktown: Shades of Grey and Punktown: Third Eye. Those books of his not set within the Punktown universe include Letters From Hades, Voices From Hades, Ugly Heaven Beautiful Hell, Boneland, Thirteen Specimens and Doomsdays. Thomas lives with his wife Hong in Massachusetts.
Also Available for Kindle from Raw Dog Screaming Press
Everybody Scream! by Jeffrey Thomas
Isabel Burning by Donna Lynch
Vacation by Jeremy C. Shipp
Sheep and Wolves by Jeremy C. Shipp
Discouraging at Best by John Edward Lawson
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