“Oh please. I’m not a baby, you know.”
“So I can’t call you ‘baby,’ huh?”
Mira smiled at him again.
They reached the basement level hallway. Aside from the elevators, just a single metal door faced them, and upon it were stenciled the words: RESTRICTED AREA. Javier gestured Nhu forward. She produced her card and skimmed it through the reader. Nothing. She swiped it again. Tapped a couple of buttons in the keyboard.
“Dung,” grumbled Tiny Meat, perched behind his larger brother’s shoulder like some foul-mouthed parrot, “this isn’t going to work.”
There was a beep, the red status button on the control strip turned green, the metal door slid open in its grooves, and two gray arms thrust out of the murk beyond in an attempt to seize Nhu by the head.
Another hand caught her by the arm and jerked her backwards, out of reach, with surprising force.
“Blast!” shouted Javier, firing his gun into the onrushing figure.
Nhu stumbled as she was whipped around, away from the open doorway. She spun in her savior’s grip and looked into the skeletal face of Haanz, the spider-limbed Choom mutant. He had put himself between her and the door.
Javier’s bullets had smashed back the first figure, but a second gray-skinned entity plunged out of the doorway and leapt at Satin. He lifted one of his robot-like prosthetic hands and caught the thing by the throat. He held it aloft, its limbs thrashing like those of a man at the end of a noose. Mott raised his gun and fired several shots through the dangling body before Satin could point his plasma-loaded revolver at it. The body went limp in his grasp.
A third creature leapt over the dead body of the first. Nick had a pistol, too, and he and Javier both hit the oncoming being – but its forward momentum caused it to crash into Javier nonetheless. The two of them went flying back to the floor. The gang chief struck his head against the opposite wall.
A fourth member of the Blank People tore out of the room, but now Big Meat and Tiny Meat both launched streams of acid into its face. The creature hit the ground, rolled, flipped up onto Javier, bubbling and steaming and kicking crazily, but Mira and Tabeth had Javier’s unconscious body by the legs and they dragged him back toward the stairs.
“Hit the door! The door!” Nhu was screaming, cowering behind Haanz.
Five, six and seven fought to get through the door at the same time. A flurry of arms like biting hydra heads. Tiny Meat was knocked off his brother’s shoulder to the floor. Big Meat was seized, and pulled into the cellar’s gloom.
“Fuckers!” Mott roared, lunging forward with his gun but afraid to hit Big Meat as he disappeared screaming into the mass of bodies beyond – who knew how many. Then, abruptly, one of the Blank People broke out of the tangle and was jumping onto Mott like a lover, wrapping its legs around him, grabbing his head in its hands, and thrusting its thumbs into his eye sockets. The Choom wailed, went down onto his back, the thing still straddling him.
“Blast! Blast! Blast!” Satin bellowed, and he pointed the Decimator and fired. A gel cap loaded with corrosive plasma burst against the gray being’s temple. Instantly, a luminous green fluid seemed to pour over the thing’s faceless head, and run down the neck and upper chest like a burning lava. By the time the plasma flowed down the thing’s arms and toward its belly, the head and neck were totally eaten away in its wake.
Still dissolving, the dead creature toppled sideways off Mott. But Mott did not sit up when relieved of its weight. Blood streamed out of his crushed eye sockets and trickled from his ears.
Nick was on the other side of the threshold, and made an attempt to stab at the keypad to close the door. He was grabbed by the wrist. Yanked off his feet. Pulled into the cellar. They heard his gun get off two shots before it was silenced.
Tiny Meat had righted himself, stunned, and turned toward the open doorway. “Big!” he screeched. “Big! You fucks! Fuck you, you fucking fucks!” And then he raced straight into the darkness, between the legs of the pressing bodies like a baby too small yet to even be walking. The others heard him continue his cursing, until the screamed curses degraded into just screams.
Barbie, also on the far side of the door, reached out to the keyboard next. She tapped some buttons, and the door began to close. Arms and half a gray body wedged themselves between the edge of the door and its frame, became pinned there. “Stand back!” Satin shouted, and fired several more gel caps. More hungry green fire spread across the reaching limbs and the upper body of the one that had almost made it through. Two arms dropped severed to the floor. In moments, there was nothing left of them but black smudges. The half a creature followed them with a thump, its own glowing green arms whipping uncontrollably. But these limbs shortened to stumps, and by then the thing wasn’t moving anymore. It vanished too, again leaving only a kind of lingering shadow on the carpet.
The door slid into its groove. Barbie, of the five faces, tapped the key labeled, LOCK. They heard the control strip bleep as this was accomplished. The status light went from green to red.
The two gangs looked about them, dazed at their losses. Four of the Terata remained. Four of the Snarlers. And Mira bent over Javier, holding his face in her hands as she had done a mere hour before, when they had been alone in the bathroom together, and she spoke his name over and over.
THIRTEEN: SÉANCES
Janice Poole was sitting behind her desk, and Jeremy Stake sitting on a corner of that desk, when someone rapped lightly on the biology classroom’s door. It cracked open, and a girl of sixteen stuck her head into the room. “You wanted to see me, Miss Poole?”
“Come in, Caren,” Janice told the girl. “I have someone here I want you to meet. His name is Mr. Stake, and he’d like to ask you some questions about your friend, Krimson Tableau.”
The student had already ventured into the room but seemed to pause in a freeze frame at the mention of the missing girl. Caren Bistro was a fairly pretty girl, looking both proper and fetching in her school uniform, but she bore enough of a resemblance to her father Ron Bistro to unsettle Stake. Ron Bistro was the “Punktown Prince of Porn,” the best-known male pornographic star in the city, and only recently Stake had watched a holovid of Bistro in a threesome with two androids, one patterned after the attractive wife of the current Prime Minister, and the other resembling the long-dead actress Brigitte Bardot. (And Ron Created Woman, he remembered the vid had been titled, and Bistro had portrayed a libidinous robotics designer.) Bistro made enough money to send his daughter to the Arbury School and to have bought her the kawaii-doll that presently poked up out of her backpack. Bup Be was its name; a Vietnamese expression for “doll.” Bup Be had two black lines meant to represent its eyes, but no nose or mouth. Its long black hair was constantly stirring in a breeze without an apparent source; maybe it was being blown out of holes in the doll’s own head, Stake speculated.
And her father made enough money to have bought Caren a nice, trendy Ouija phone.
Stake had at first thought to ask Yuki Fukuda to introduce him to this girl. After all, it was Yuki who had given him Caren’s name. But he had feared that Caren would resent Yuki as much as Krimson had, and thus prove to be uncooperative. And so he’d approached Janice for assistance instead, figuring that her presence would intimidate Caren into being helpful.
“I already talked to the police about Krimson,” Caren stammered, looking evasive. Too evasive for Stake’s taste.
“I’m not the police,” Stake told her, but he did not elaborate on just what he was, or who had hired him. “And did you tell the police about the messages from Krimson that you’ve been hearing on your Ouija phone?”
“Wh-what? Who told you that?” Caren said, glancing nervously from her biology teacher back to Stake. She looked like a deer poised to bolt. Bup Be turned its head ever so slightly, as if it were wary itself.
“Please sit down, Caren,” Stake said, while he got off the edge of the desk and stood over her to be more physically assertive. She did as he req
uested, lowering herself into the nearest desk at hand. While he spoke, he tried not to look at the girl for too unbroken a stretch or with too much engrossment, lest he begin to bear a resemblance to Punktown’s Prince of Porn himself, indirectly. “Caren, you know this matter is of the greatest importance; a matter of life and death. Krimson is your friend, and we need to do what we can to – ”
“She’s already dead,” Caren interrupted him.
Stake stopped. Then asked, “So why do you say that?”
“Because of what you just said!” Caren whined. “Because I’ve heard her on my Ouija phone! Of course she’s dead!” Tears began to cap her eyes.
“You recognize her voice?”
“She was my best friend! I know it’s her!”
“And what kinds of things has she said to you?”
“Look, I really don’t feel comfortable talking about this, okay? Krimson was scared of her father. She said he’s a very scary guy. So if she was scared of him, then I’m scared of him, too. If this stuff gets back to him, he’ll be mad at me for the things I know. The stuff Krimson didn’t want him to know!”
“This won’t get back to her father. I’m not working for her father. I promise not to involve your name in this, no matter what you tell me.” Stake glanced at Janice. “You promise too, don’t you, Miss Poole?”
“Of course! Caren,” Janice said, leaning forward emphatically, “we only have Krimson’s best interests at heart. If she is dead, then we have to establish that officially, don’t we? Doesn’t she deserve that? And if someone hurt her, doesn’t she deserve to be avenged? The person who hurt her punished?”
Caren dabbed at her eyes. “Yes.”
“So tell me, dear,” Stake said, compassionate but firm. “What is it you’ve heard on your Ouija phone?”
“Oh God,” Caren moaned, dropping her face into her hands. “The first time, I just heard her say my name. ‘Caren. Caren.’ Maybe that time I wasn’t sure it was her, yet. But the next time I heard her, I definitely recognized her. She said something like, ‘I’m in the void.’” Caren Bistro looked up, red-eyed. “They say creepy stuff like that. All of them.”
“But did she say anything else that only Krimson might say?”
“Yes. The third time I heard her, she said, ‘Caren. Tell Brat...love him. Caren. Tell Brat.’”
“And who is Brat? Is Brat her boyfriend? The older boyfriend she was rumored to be seeing?”
“Oh God,” Caren groaned again, wagging her head, her hair falling about her face as if she might hide within it.
“Caren, please. Remember, your name will not come up, I swear it!”
“Yes,” she sighed. “Brat was an older guy. Nineteen. She knew her father might hurt Brat if he found out about it. I’m the only one she trusted.”
“And you’ve been a good friend, Caren. You kept your friend’s secret like she asked. But if she’s dead now, then there’s no more reason to – ”
“There is reason! I told you, her father will be furious if he knows I was protecting her like that! He already came to me and offered a reward if I knew anything! Do you know how tempted I was? But I don’t trust him!”
“He won’t find out about this. No one will. But please, Caren, what is this Brat’s last name? Where might I find him?”
“I don’t know where he went! I tried to phone him to ask him about Krimson, but his brother said he’s disappeared, too!”
“Do you feel he could have been the one to hurt her?”
“Maybe. I only met him once, for a little bit. He seemed nice, but he was part of a gang, so I don’t know.”
“Part of a gang? Where’d she meet up with him?”
“Um, at the Canberra Mall.”
“Do you know where he’s from? The name of his gang?”
“Oh, um, she said Folger Street. The B Level, in Subtown. They’re the Folger Street Somethings.”
“Huh.”
She sniffled forlornly. “You want to know what I think?”
“What’s that?”
“I think her father found them together. Maybe in bed. And he went so crazy that he killed them both. So now he’s trying to look like he’s grieving, hounding the forcers to find her, while all the time he’s the one who really did it!”
Stake and Janice exchanged grave looks. Could such a scenario be possible?
Regretting that she’d shared her theory, Caren frantically begged him, “Please, please, you can’t tell anyone I said that!”
“I told you, my dear,” Stake reassured her. “Not a soul. But I have to know the boy’s last name. Brat...?”
“Brat Gentile. She called him Brat Genitalia.” She gave a rumpled smile. “And he called her Smirk. It’s Krimson spelled backwards. Partly.”
Stake nodded. “Very good, Caren. You’ve been very, very helpful. And a very good friend to Krimson. But in a way it wasn’t fair of Krimson to put such a burden on you. Don’t you feel better now, for letting it all out to someone?”
“I guess,” Caren Bistro whimpered. She reached behind her for a packet of tissues she kept in a zippered pouch of her backpack. In so doing, she dislodged Bup Be, which fell out of the backpack to the floor. It lay there in a yellow silk Vietnamese ao dai with white pants. As Stake watched, the doll lifted its stubby arms in the air, waiting for Caren to stoop down and retrieve it. Caren did so, and pressed the doll to her chest as if to nurse it. Without meeting Stake’s eyes, she muttered, “There was one more thing Krimson said to me. Just two nights ago.”
“Yes? And what was that?”
“It sounded like she said, ‘Yuki’s Mom is crying.’”
“Yuki’s Mom?” Stake stepped closer to her. “Look, Caren, do you have your phone on you right now? Do you think you could try to-- ”
The girl’s eyes went wide. “No! No more! No more!” And before Stake could attempt to calm her, Caren Bistro fled from the room, clutching the little Asian-looking doll as if rescuing an infant child from danger.
***
Yuki Fukuda had changed into her “Hey Jelly!” pajamas, patterned with the popular big-eyed jellyfish image that had started the current jellyfish craze. She sat on her bed cross-legged watching her wall-sized VT, but her mind was on the man her father had hired to find Dai-oo-ika. Earlier that day he had asked her for Caren Bistro’s name. Yuki wanted to call him now and ask him what mean little Caren had revealed, if anything, about having heard Krimson Tableau on her Ouija phone. But Yuki knew that her father would frown upon her contacting the detective on her own, and involving herself in the investigation unless Mr. Stake approached her for information directly.
Thoughts of Krimson Tableau speaking on Caren Bistro’s Ouija phone put her in mind of her own Ouija phone.
Yuki unfolded her legs, got off the bed and padded barefoot across her sprawling bedroom’s immaculate white carpet. She took the phone off her desk and then sat in the desk’s chair, just swiveling back and forth and staring down at the toy-like little gadget in her lap. At last, swallowing, she activated it, depressed the button labeled SCAN, and slipped the phone through her glossy hair to press it to her ear.
Fizzing static: it was the constant background noise, no matter how much one fine-tuned and filtered with the controls. It could be diminished but not eradicated. Occasional crackles, brief louder spurts that sometimes made her flinch. Sometimes a voice emerged out of such a burst. A miserable wail. An angry inarticulate shout. But so far, nothing. Yuki let the scan feature run on. She would do her searching, and if they were willing, the essences that dwelt within that sea of static would come to meet her halfway.
She closed her eyes. She imagined herself in a bathysphere of sorts, a tiny one-person sub, lowering through the fathoms. Deeper, into an alien realm. With shadowy, amorphous forms like jellyfish floating just beyond the sub’s piercing lights. Deeper.
“Yuki.”
Garbled. A mouth full of sizzling, hissing static. Distorted. Muffled.
But she knew it was her mot
her. She knew it in the little hairs that rose on her arms. She knew it in her cells.
“Mom,” she whispered into the mouthpiece. “Mom, please talk to me.”
“Yuki.”
As always, the tears that could not be locked out slipped from beneath the closed doors of her lids. “Mom,” her own voice quavered, “please tell me how you are. Please, please, Mom, I love you.”
Then, more words, but chopped into fragments by the crackles. Words beaming from so far away, like a sun ray scattered and diffused through the ocean depths. It sounded to Yuki as if the distant voice had said, “You are a...lone.” Alone?
“Mom? Hello? Mom?”
“Yuki.”
This voice was not distant, unclear. Only too close, too loud, too firm. Her eyelids snapped open. Standing in her bedroom doorway was her father. His face immobile, though a demon’s furious snarl seemed to be layered beneath its smooth mask.
“Daddy,” she squeaked.
John Fukuda stepped into her room, tall and sharp-edged in the business suit he still wore. “I’m sorry I ever bought you that thing.”
“Why, Daddy? What...”
“I heard you. I heard what you were trying to do. You’re trying to contact your mother.”
“But I did!” she protested. “Daddy, she’s spoken to me before! I was afraid to tell you, but she has! I know it’s her!”
“How can you know?” he snapped. “You were only a baby when she died!”
“You’ve shown me vids of her; your wedding vid!” she reminded him, her tears flowing copiously now, face half-crumpled like the tissue she gripped in her free hand. “But I just know. I know it’s her! She wants to tell me something.”
“Tell you what?”
“I don’t know. I can only hear her a little.”
He came nearer, held out his hand. “Give me that thing.”
“Please, Daddy!”
“Give it to me!” he shouted.
With a sob, Yuki rose from her chair and handed the device to her father. He pocketed it without a glance, and said, “I was foolish to have bought you this. I don’t want you playing with your friends,’ either. If I learn of it, you’ll be sorry. Do you understand me?”
Deadstock: A Punktown Novel Page 15
