Deadstock: A Punktown Novel

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “And you saw what happened to Clara,” Tabeth reminded her. “Almost all the Blank People are still outside. That much is for certain.”

  “But it’s only a short run to the street. Do you think they’d all take the risk of leaving the property like that? By the time they responded, we could be on Beaumonde Street already!”

  “Maybe they won’t stop there,” Tabeth argued. “Maybe they don’t care if they tear us apart right in front of the whole street. And we might not make it that far, anyway. These things move fast.”

  “Mira,” Javier said, in a thoughtful voice. “You said you think you’ve been hearing the thoughts of the computer brain in here, a little.” He motioned toward the door marked RESTRICTED AREA.

  “Yeah. The encephalon. But I told you, I’m not powerful enough to tell it what to do.”

  “Could you at least try to concentrate on it, and see if you can find out how many Blank People might be left in there? If it’s their server and they’re linked into it, maybe you could count the connections?”

  Mira nodded slowly. “I could try. I’m closer to the brain down here.”

  “Give it a shot.”

  “Don’t even think about going in there again!” Nhu said. “Look, when we first came here and Patryk broke us in, did all the dozens and dozens of Blank People attack us outside then? No. Only when we stepped inside did it trigger their programming. When you Terata broke in, I bet it was the same. You approached the building, and they didn’t wake up. But once you broke in, they did. They poured in, and you fought them back and locked them out. But think about it! They want to get in here and kill us because we’re inside! If we’re outside, they’ll lose interest. Even Clara – think about it – Clara wasn’t outside when they killed her. They pulled her out from inside.”

  “A good theory,” Javier said, “but what about Brat? They killed him outside.”

  “Mira said the trash zapper did it.”

  “What’s the difference? The brain is linked up to that, too.”

  Mira said, “Look, you can’t predict these things – they’re too erratic. Their programming is shot; it’s like they’re insane. Okay, maybe they didn’t react to us at first, until they knew we’d broken inside. But now they have us targeted as criminals. If we go outside, they won’t ignore us this time.”

  “Fine. Fine. Don’t listen to me. Open that door again and die like the others did.” Nhu stormed off down the hallway, threw open the door to the stairwell. They heard her clomping up its metal steps before the door swung shut again with a clang.

  “Go after her,” Javier told Tabeth. “Keep an eye on her.”

  “I’ll go, too,” said the cadaverous, quadrupedal Haanz, and he crawled off for the stairs like a daddy longlegs.

  Mira approached the metal door that led into the basement, laid her small hands upon it. Then she rested her forehead against its cool surface as well, and closed her eyes. The others hushed as they watched her. Javier thought that the veins at her temples looked darker, maybe even thicker. He thought he even saw the flesh pulsing there subtly.

  “Mm,” she grunted distantly, as if dreaming.

  ***

  “Are you on gold-dust right now?” Tabeth called, chasing after Nhu down the first floor hallway. “You are, aren’t you?”

  “It keeps me sharp, and I seem to be the only one around here whose brain is working right, if you ask me.” She walked with brisk determination, turning into the lobby at its far entrance. At the lobby’s back wall was a door into the maintenance area, which – like the basement – the Terata had not been able to access. At the front of the lobby were, of course, its double glass doors.

  Tabeth saw that Nhu was heading straight for them, and reached out to snatch at her arm. “Stop it! Hey!” To Haanz she cried, “Go get Javier – quick!”

  Nhu broke into a run, but called back, “Haanz, if you’re smart you’ll come with me! Come on!”

  Haanz’s expression had been one of desperate concern, but now the desperation took on another quality. A desperation not to be left behind by pretty Nhu. One of his long-fingered hands grabbed Tabeth by the ankle, and he caused her to fall forward onto her elbows. Then he was leaping past her, loping after the small Vietnamese woman.

  Scrambling back to her feet, Tabeth began to draw her handgun. “Stop it!” she yelled. “You’ll get us all killed!”

  Nhu almost collided with the doors, stopped herself with her palms against them. There was a control strip alongside the frame, and she immediately jabbed at the big green button with the word OPEN stenciled on it in white. The security glass had been tinted an opaque black on the outside, but from inside she could see the fountain in front of the building. And beyond that, at the end of the wide walkway, distant hovercars gliding along the street. A short run. She could flag a vehicle down. She was attractive, someone would stop, and then she’d pull Haanz along after her.

  At the touch of her finger, the double doors had begun to part open with a whisper, sliding along their tracks. Nhu was greeted with the smell of outside city air and the chill bite of autumn. And then, like a diver into a pool, she plunged through. She was aware of Haanz galloping through the opening doors in her wake.

  Tabeth charged after them, pistol in her hand. But now she was less concerned with calling them back, and more intent on hitting the big red button labeled CLOSE.

  Haanz heard Tabeth running behind him, running surprisingly fast, almost catching up. His head turned on its long, serpentine neck to see the gray figure sprinting after him. And launching itself into the air.

  Nhu heard Haanz’s cry, looked back, stumbled on a few more steps until she was at the scummed fountain. Haanz was howling now. The gray creature had him pinned to the walkway, one arm locked around his neck. Behind her, Nhu heard a hovercar beep its horn at another on the street.

  “Dung,” she hissed, ripping her pistol out of its holster. Even as she did so, she saw the Blank People popping out of their niches in both wings. On all three floors. One here, two there, three more on this side. Leaping down to the overgrown lawn.

  She met Haanz’s eyes, wide in his skull-like face, his Choom mouth opening huge to cry, “Nhu...run!”

  “Fuck that,” she said, and shot the being who had pinned Haanz through its faceless face. Its head jerked back, and its arms slipped from around the mutant. His head fell forward, his neck drooping limp. Broken. Haanz’s eyes and his mouth did not close as his face thudded into the walk.

  “Blast, blast, blast,” Nhu sobbed, whirling to run toward the street again.

  From inside, Tabeth saw her friend go down in the middle of a dozen gray bodies. Nhu got off a few shots. Two of the Blank People rolled away, dead. The rest hunched around her obscured form like vultures over a lion’s kill.

  Tabeth had not touched the button to shut the doors. Instead, she had entered a marksman’s stance, extending her gun in both hands. She began picking off the Blank People around her fallen comrade. She didn’t realize she was weeping and shouting obscenities at the same time. But when she saw the heads of the hunkered Blank People begin to turn her way, and more and more of them drop down from the balconies, icy terror overrode her concern for her fellow Snarler and she reached out to the red CLOSE button.

  The man-like creature that stepped around the edge of the doorway to stand face-to-no-face with Tabeth was exactly like its many brothers, except for the number engraved into its forehead: 12-B. And the giant red penis spray-painted onto its front.

  It seized her by the throat, and began walking her backwards. Tabeth fired her gun into its mid-section, the muzzle pressed right up against its gray flesh. The creature flinched with the detonations but kept walking her, and kept squeezing. Finally, though, it loosened its hold and slumped dead upon Tabeth as she herself fell onto her back, half unconscious from lack of oxygen.

  The dead being with its mock phallus lying atop her like an incubus, Tabeth lifted her head to see the flood come crashing through the op
en front doors. A flood wave of gray, living flesh.

  Then, before she could raise her gun again, the living wave descended upon her.

  ***

  Above – outside – the Snarlers and the Terata on the basement level heard the distant crackle of Nhu’s and then Tabeth’s gunfire. At once, Javier and Satin had their own guns out and were moving toward the stairs.

  “Don’t!” Mira screamed, jolting back from the metal basement door as if an electric shock had gone through her. Eyes bulging, she panted, “I was connected to the brain; I heard it. They’ve come through. The front doors are open. The Blank People are coming through.”

  “What about Nhu and Tabeth?” Javier asked.

  “Dead. I felt their screams. Haanz, too. And now the Blank People are coming.”

  “All of them,” Satin said, eyes hard and ready for a fight.

  “All of them,” she confirmed.

  Even as she said it, they could hear the thunder of their footfalls upstairs. They heard the stairwell door fly open with a boom. The metal steps start to clang.

  “Get into the elevator!” Patryk yelled, rushing to the nearest one and stabbing its OPEN button. The door slid aside without hesitation. He shoved Barbie inside, then Mira, and ducked in after them. Javier followed, and Satin last, whipping around to fire a few shots from his Decimator revolver as the first of the Blank People reached the basement level and flung open the stairwell’s door. Splashed with hungry green plasma, several of them went down and impeded the others long enough for the elevator door to slide shut.

  They heard hands without fingernails, hands without fingerprints, claw and bang at the closed security door as the elevator itself moved upward.

  SEVENTEEN: THE VETERANS

  “Hey, it’s the Man of a Thousand Faces,” Lark slurred from the bar as Jeremy Stake entered the Legion of Veterans Post 69. “And all of them ugly.”

  But that was pretty much the extent of the Blue War vet’s taunting, and when the Choom bartender Watt pulled a Zub draft for Stake, he explained, “He doesn’t know that you helped him hit his head on the bar that time.”

  Stake smirked and took his drink to one of the tables. And it was as he sat down that his wrist comp alerted him to an incoming call. Stake checked its origin: Captain Richard Henderson. He took the call immediately, bending over the little device to let his mind become the computer’s screen. There, he saw his old friend’s face smiling at him, but with a somewhat leery look in his eyes.

  “I found her, Jeremy.”

  Stake stared back at his friend a long few moments, but shook himself when he felt the sly crawl of his nebulous flesh. “That was fast.”

  “Things have opened up more on their world. And she’s on the net now, where I guess she wasn’t before. I contacted her myself, Jer. Her English has improved. I told her you’d be calling.”

  Stake nodded. “Thanks, Rick. I owe you.”

  “Well, she spared my life that day. I can’t forget that. But are you sure you really want to do this? I mean, it’s not my business, but just out of concern. You sure you want to go back like this?”

  “There are some things I have to know.”

  “I understand. I think.” Henderson craned his neck as if to peer over Stake’s shoulder. “Looks like you’re in a veterans’ post. They all look the same. I should know – I got one as my hang-out, too.”

  “When you’ve been in a war,” Stake said, “you live in the past as much as the present.”

  “I don’t think it’s just us vets,” Henderson said. “I think all people do.”

  ***

  Stake had taken his hoverbike today, and he rode it back toward Forma Street, not wanting to call Thi Gonh from LOV 69. He was in his casual attire, not undercover, not on the job. A black sports coat over a white T-shirt, baggy khakis, beaten sneakers, and on his head a black porkpie hat. The silly little porkpie hat was, at least to his own eyes, an object of individuality. Something almost defiantly him, as if to compensate for the anonymity of his tenuous features. Something to paperweight his elusive self so it wouldn’t blow away in the wind. He wore it even inside his apartment, sometimes. As he rode, he found himself reaching up to hold it down if the breeze gusted too much. Afraid to lose it.

  However casually he was dressed, though, under his coat he still wore his favorite pistol in a shoulder holster. It was a Darwin .55, “the height of firearms evolution” as the ads proclaimed. On the job or not, this was still Punktown.

  Coasting astride the bike, he again remembered being stationed in the city of Di Noon, with its streets flooded in bikes. And he remembered gaping up at Thi, riding astride him but leaning back with her smooth blue belly pumping fast, her own face composed with strength and control as she looked down at a more helpless likeness of herself, watching his transmuted face sadistically for the pleasure she was inflicting, and asking him, “Ga Noh like? Ga Noh like?”

  Lizard atop lizard. It was the most primal of all impulses. The need of cells to lie alongside other cells. And he ached for her, even now. As if some vital part of him had been severed. Or never attached in the first place.

  He arrived at his little tenement house at the end of the infamous street, jutting at its very corner like the prow of a ship pushing on through a glittering sea of vehicles. Rather than leave his hoverbike on the sidewalk, he got off to glide it into the lobby and store it under the stairs. He took the elevator to his top floor flat.

  As he let himself into his apartment, Stake instantly took in how its air was heavy with a high-priced cologne, such as someone might overindulge in just to show that they could afford to do so on their salary.

  A hand appeared from around the door to seize him by the lapel, almost dragging him off his feet. This person’s other hand jammed the barrel of a snub-nosed Decimator revolver under Stake’s jaw painfully. A second man closed and locked the door. Out of the corner of his eye, Stake saw that this man had a pump-action shotgun in his hands. He recognized it as his own, in fact. The man had found it in the corner between his computer desk and the wall.

  Both men wore pricey and priggish black suits, bowler hats on their heads. And the flesh of their faces and hands was leopard-spotted in a camouflage of blue-on-blue.

  The first man let go of Stake’s jacket, instead slipped his hand inside it to relieve him of the Darwin .55. “Nice,” he said, smiling and tucking it into his own waistband.

  As Stake stood there between the two clones, a third one stepped into view from the bedroom. He was of course identical to the other two, but somehow Stake could tell that this one was Mr. Jones. The clone nodded courteously. “Mr. Stake.”

  “How did you get in here?” he demanded.

  “That would be me,” said the man with his shotgun. Was this one Mr. Doe, the clone who had driven him back to the Center for Missing and Exploited Children after his meeting with Adrian Tableau? “Skeleton card,” he explained.

  “So what do you want?”

  “You’re a Blue War vet,” observed Jones, strolling about the room now, and pointing to a case containing several medals that Stake had mounted on one of its walls. They were largely barren otherwise, and he particularly refrained from hanging photos or paintings of people, lest he begin to look like them. In his private lair, he wanted only to be himself. Whoever that was. To that end, there was only that one photograph of himself, should he need to stare at it upon his arrival home.

  “Why do you ask?” Stake joked drily. As if, from the clones’ appearance, it wasn’t apparent.

  “Very funny,” said the one with the shotgun.

  Stake smiled, feeling a bit smug. These men didn’t remember him from his visit to Tableau’s company; he was sure of it. But then, that returned him to his question. “I asked you what you’re doing breaking into my apartment?”

  “We work for Adrian Tableau, Mr. Stake,” Jones explained. “He’s the owner of Tableau Meats.”

  “I see. And?”

  “And, you apparently wor
k for John Fukuda. Owner of Fukuda Bioforms. A business competitor of Mr. Tableau’s.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “We have our sources,” purred the one with the revolver barrel prodding his throat. Its blade sight was scraping his skin.

  “It’s come to our attention,” Jones went on, still pacing, “that Mr. Fukuda suspects Mr. Tableau’s daughter Krimson of stealing his daughter’s expensive kawaii-doll. And its value seems to be increased by the fact that the doll was created using unconventional research that Mr. Fukuda obtained after he took over the former Alvine Products. It’s possible Fukuda even suspects Mr. Tableau of coveting that research, and hence encouraging his daughter to steal the doll for him.”

  Stake’s mind was racing. He could see that this information had come through his own lips, in the guise of caseworker Simon McMartinez. But still, how had they learned of him – Jeremy Stake, the private investigator hired by Fukuda? They had their “sources,” the one with the Decimator had said. Who would that be? He doubted Janice would have betrayed him. Had Caren Bistro overcome her fear of Tableau? But then, she hadn’t known that Stake worked for Fukuda. Was the source someone who worked under Fukuda, then? Stake could envision Tableau paying for the eyes and ears of such a person.

  “What’s your point?” he asked Jones.

  “Our concern is that Krimson Tableau has been missing now for about two weeks. Our employer is worried that John Fukuda, suspecting Krimson of this crime, may be responsible for her disappearance.”

  “What? No...no. Fukuda hasn’t done anything to her.”

  “And you wouldn’t do anything to her, on Mr. Fukuda’s behalf? Kidnap her, perhaps? Or something even worse?”

  “Don’t be crazy! Yes, okay, Fukuda hired me to find that doll. And yes, he thinks Krimson might have something to do with it, because Krimson hates Yuki Fukuda the way her father hates John Fukuda. But Fukuda did not kidnap Krimson Tableau. And I would never do something like that for any client, or for any money.”