A stigmata-like hole opened in his palm of its own volition. The coiled brain matter started to unravel, to be sucked into the hungry mouth in his hand. It diminished in its frame as more and more fluid splashed free.
Like a dead parent’s belongings packed away in an attic steamer trunk, Dai-oo-ika had compacted the inorganic material he could squeeze no sustenance from, but which he had not yet bothered himself with ejecting as waste product, into a cavity inside himself. This tight bundle included Dolly’s clothing and crushed shoes. But Dolly’s nanomites he had not quite figured out what to do with, being in that gray area between organic and inorganic, so as much as they had made his mind itch with their busywork he had tolerated them, accepted them as part of his evolving condition.
Now, they seemed to sniff the encephalon, and it aroused them in its abundance. The microscopic machine-animals raced through Dai-oo-ika’s system, through his arm and into the brain tissues even as he drew them into himself. Then they began racing back and forth between the two entities, as if to help facilitate his absorption of the huge organ, a nest of eager worker ants. He had subconsciously altered their programming, or was it they who had gnawed away the membranes clouding his own programming? In any case, the nanomites worked at a frenzied pace to marry the two bodies together at the cellular level, a corps of wartime surgeons, incising and cauterizing, transplanting and mending with their tiny mandibles, tiny tool limbs.
The wires plugged into the brain were sucked into Dai-oo-ika’s hand, as well. As with the other inorganic material he had drawn in, these were not dissolved and digested. Even when the last of the encephalon was gone, and only a little fluid pooled at the bottom of the frame, the wires still streamed out of his palm.
He slumped down heavily to the floor as if in a swoon, sitting in the puddle of amniotic solution like a drunken Buddha. His arm was still draped inside the frame but he was unmindful of the fangs of glass that pinned his wrist there. The other ends of the wires ran into relays that communicated with the little room’s various computer stations. And now, all the monitors that had been showing colorful data or fizzing static or dead blackness flickered and revealed the same image. It was grainy, streaked with scratches and blips like damaged celluloid, but beneath this clutter Dai-oo-ika could see a burning and mostly flattened city, stretching out black and twisted to all horizons. Below were thousands of upturned faces and arms lifted in praise. The faces were a mix of human and nonhuman, but all were charred black, blistered by fire and deformed with radiation. Silvery pus ran out of heat-sealed eyes. Yet despite the pain these people must be feeling, they were singing to him, all in one voice of adoration. And he looked down upon them from a great height. For he was huge. He was their god.
Dai-oo-ika understood the cosmic web of Fate then. He understood that he and this brother/father had needed to become united (was it, reunited?) in order to both realize their potential. In order to fulfill their destinies.
NINETEEN: INTERVIEWS
On his vehicle’s sound system Stake played a jazz piece called “Yesterdays” from Twentieth-Century trumpet player Clifford Brown. It was melancholy, and melancholy music from any era or planet, for that matter, was all right by him. He was piloting the hovercar down a wide, multilane ramp into Punktown’s subterranean sector.
Caren Bistro had told him that Brat Gentile belonged to a gang down here in Subtown. The B Level of Folger Street. “The Folger Street Somethings,” she had said.
Above him now, a solid sky with clouds of steam hissing out of the crisscrossed network of pipes up there. Stake slowed the car as the ramp fed into a grid of streets and the early morning traffic along this one congealed to an ooze. Among the work-bound pedestrians walking along the sidewalk he spotted several that glowed a luminous blue. Each of them turned its head to smile directly at him. One of the translucent blue figures stood at the curb with her thumb sticking out as if to hitchhike, her long hair blowing dreamily. It was then that a whispery voice spoke to him inside his vehicle.
“Open your world to SÈance Friends – for the strongest, clearest Ouija channels in Paxton.” He had left the holographic hitchhiker behind him a moment ago, but now she stepped up to the curb ahead of him again, her eyes seeming to look into his. The voice went on, “Make a special friend who can tell you about the long past, or even about your own future.”
“Bastards,” Stake said. It was legal for such advertisements to intrude into one’s sound system, justified as “ambient sound,” like hearing someone else’s radio blast from another car. The ad didn’t replace his music, but overlapped it, and that was invasive enough. It continued with a testimonial; the voice of a young girl.
“My spirit guide told me I’ll die before I’m twenty, so your next ghost friend could be me!” She giggled.
Stake shut his sound system off altogether.
Further along, he made his way through a neighborhood of gray-skinned, blue-turbaned Kalians. Tenements and shops had hung black banners outside, and there was a group of protestors that shouted at the passing vehicles. Several helmeted and armored riot forcers made sure they didn’t overflow into the street itself to block traffic. Stake glanced out at their furious, black-eyed faces. “What’s their problem now?” he muttered.
He remembered what Janice had told him about the Kalian deity called Ugghiutu. “Sort of the Kalian God and Satan in one body.” One of the so-called “Outsiders,” exiled from this dimension but waiting to return to power. He thought of the former owners of Alvine Products, their lunatic plan to design and grow a horde of giant monsters to reclaim the universe.
Despite the strict religious beliefs of most Kalians, Stake had never encountered a neighborhood that didn’t have its street gang, and he soon noted a cluster of Kalian boys who wore blue satin jackets to match their turbans, which they wore facing backwards. But these were not the gang kids he was searching for. He continued on, until he arrived at last on Folger Street.
Stake cruised along the entire length of the extensive street. When he finally reached what appeared to be its end, he turned around and came back from the other direction.
He didn’t spot a single gang kid. That is to say, he saw no apparent gang outfits, and what was the point of being in a gang if you didn’t flaunt it, announce it in some way, brazen and proud?
Stake didn’t know the full name of the gang Gentile belonged to, but he thought he knew gang graffiti when he saw it. On the face of one tenement building, in between two windows, someone had sprayed a very large, stylized dog’s head baring its fangs, in red paint that glowed like neon. Though they didn’t exhibit any obvious gang peacockery, there were three tough-looking kids sitting on the tenement’s front steps, apparently in no hurry to be off to school.
Stake found a parking spot along the curb a little ways up, and then backtracked to the tenement building on foot. With animal-keen instincts, the kids noticed his approach right away. He hadn’t been able to think of any guise he might have called up, seated in his car and browsing through the faces on his wrist comp, so as to gain their confidence. Couldn’t think of an actor’s role he might adopt. And so he figured he’d just jump right into it without pretense.
“Hey,” he said in greeting as he came to the steps. The preteens looked a little too young to be in a full-blown street gang; maybe a tadpole gang. But you never knew. The adolescent gang called the Martians – after the god of war – was one of the deadliest in Punktown. “Do you guys know a kid named Brat Gentile? I’m a friend of a friend and nobody seems to know where’s he got off to.”
“Oh, please, officer,” said one of the three, a Choom girl with her spiky hair dyed a metallic silver, her long mouth in a smirk. As young as she was, she’d had her eyelids surgically altered so as to look exotically slanted.
“No, no, I’m not a forcer. I’m a friend of Brat’s girlfriend, Krimson. Krimson’s gone missing, too.”
“I don’t know who the hell you’re yakking about.”
“Brat’
s in a gang from around here, the Folger Street Something-or-others.”
“Snarlers,” said one of the two boys seated beside the girl. “The Folger Street Snarlers.”
“Snarlers. So do you know Brat?” he asked the boy.
“I’m sure I’d know his face if I saw him. But I haven’t seen him or any of the Snarlers in a while.”
“What do you mean?”
The second boy spoke up. “It isn’t just your friend of a friend that’s missing, Mr. Forcer. Nobody’s seen any of the Folger Street Snarlers for days.”
***
“Mr. Gentile?”
Stake almost said Genitalia, because it had been running through his mind that Caren Bistro had said that was Krimson Tableau’s playful nickname for Brat. Caren had also said, in Janice’s classroom, that Brat had a brother whom she had contacted while trying to find out what had happened to her friend. Stake had been grateful to find his phone number listed on the net.
“Who is this?” asked the face on the hovercar’s console screen. Theo Gentile appeared to be in his mid twenties, and wary didn’t begin to address the look in his eyes.
“My name is Jeremy Stake, sir. I’m a hired detective. I’m looking for a girl named Krimson Tableau, and I understand that your brother...”
“I don’t know anyone by that name!” Gentile snapped.
“I’m told he calls her Smirk. She’s your brother’s girlfriend.”
“I don’t know where she is. I don’t even know where my brother is! Who hired you?” Stake began to stammer a reply, but Gentile cut him off. “I just got back from Miniosis. You go tell your boss – I don’t know anything!”
Theo Gentile disconnected. With a sigh, Stake started up the vehicle and pulled out into traffic. In his earlier cruising he had already established where the local police precinct house was located.
***
“It wasn’t my turn to babysit the Folger Street Snarlers today,” growled the beefy forcer behind the counter, not even bothering to look up at Stake. “Why don’t you go earn your dirty money, gumshoe, instead of asking us to do your work for you?”
“Gumshoe?” Stake murmured to himself with a disgusted smile.
But a woman at a desk behind the burly officer looked up and said to him, “Eric mentioned something about the Snarlers not being around.” Then to Stake: “Want to talk to Detective Moudry, sir? He’s had a lot of dealings with the gangs around here.”
“Yeah,” said the first forcer. “He even took a bullet in the neck from one of the Snarlers. He had to kill the blasting punk.”
Stake ignored him, said to the woman, “Yes, please, if it isn’t too much trouble.”
She got the plainclothesman on the phone, and a minute later he stepped out from some inner office and gestured for the woman to buzz Stake through the security door. Stake followed him back toward his office.
“Yeah,” Moudry said, glancing at Stake with a cop’s appraising eye. “It’s funny. I’m hearing the Snarlers haven’t been seen, and a couple of their family and friends are starting to get edgy.”
“What do you think about that?”
“I don’t think they’ve all been killed in some big street war; that’d be hard to keep from being noticed. I just been figuring that they’re lying low for some reason. Maybe they’re keeping their heads down because some other gang is gunning for them. They had a bad scuffle with a Tikkihotto gang called the Morlocks last year.”
“It just seems funny to me, because I’m looking for the girlfriend of one of them and she’s missing, too. A girl by the name of Krimson Tableau, nicknamed Smirk by her boyfriend.”
“Don’t know her,” Moudry said, opening his door for Stake, “but wherever they’re hiding, I guess she must be hiding, too.” They both seated themselves. “What’s her boyfriend’s name?”
“Brat Gentile.”
“Gentile,” Moudry echoed, doing a search through his computer files. “Hm. I don’t have an arrest record for him, but I do have his name here on a list I made of the current gang members.” Then a light seemed to come on in some dusty back storage room of the detective’s mind. “Ohh, Gentile. Yeah, yeah. I know his brother, Theo. Theo was in the Snarlers himself for years. These kids come and go, so it’s hard for me to keep up with all of them. But we got a history, the Snarlers and me.”
“The man up front said you got shot in a scrap with them one time.”
Moudry waved it away like it was all just part of the game. “That was nine years ago. Javier Dias wasn’t even the leader back then.”
“He’s the current leader?”
“Yeah. Not a total scumbag, as far as these things go. But I had him in not too long ago on suspicion of a warehouse fire. These punks get thrown a bone sometimes for torching places in insurance scams.” He punched some keys. “This is him.” He swiveled his monitor for Stake to see. An interrogation room vid played on its screen.
The camera showed Moudry standing, sipping a coffee, while a young man sat behind a table with a water bottle in front of him. The camera zoomed in close on Javier Dias; wiry, tightly wound, with a pompadour of curly black hair, and wearing a white leather jacket. When he spoke, he talked out of one side of his mouth and through gritted teeth in an effect that seemed as much like partial paralysis as it did toughness.
“You’re wasting your time bringing me in here about this dung, Moudry,” he said to the detective with familiarity. “Why you got to be harassing me all the time? You still hurting from that slug in your neck? That wasn’t me, remember?”
“I remember. And I remember putting a slug of my own through Banshee’s skull for it.”
“Yeah, yeah, all in the past, right?”
“Exactly. I’m talking about now. I’m talking about the fire in the old Magog Industries warehouse.”
Moudry stopped the vid and started to say something, but Stake asked, “Would it be okay if I saw a little more of that?”
The plainclothesman shrugged, and continued playing back the recording.
Earlier, while pretending to adjust his shirt collar, Stake had covertly captured some still shots of Detective Moudry on his wrist comp, thinking that his face – familiar to the Folger Street Snarlers and perhaps their kin – might come in handy. But now, he started taking a new series of shots, from the screen in front of him.
***
Brat Gentile didn’t have an address of his own listed in any current directory, but when going on the net for his brother’s phone number Stake had found that Theo Gentile and his wife lived on Folger Street themselves.
On the front steps of Gentile’s tenement building, Stake depressed the key for his apartment number until a familiar face appeared on the monitor screen, warier than ever. “What?” it barked.
On his own monitor screen right now, Theo Gentile would be seeing the attractive face of a young man with high cheekbones, who talked out of one side of his mouth and through gritted teeth in an effect that seemed as much like partial paralysis as it did toughness. “Hey man, let me in, quick. It’s Javier.”
But both the picture and sound would be shot with distorting static. It was not a malfunction, much as Stake hoped that would appear to be the case. He owned a cheap multipurpose scanning device that he had brought with him from his car’s glove compartment. He was holding this instrument just below the security system’s lens. He had used it numerous times before so he knew its field, as presently adjusted, would disrupt the image with snow and distort the audio as well. Gentile would be able to see his transfigured face – but not too clearly. In addition, he wore a ski hat over his hair and stood close to the lens so it wouldn’t be noticed that he did not possess the trademark white leather jacket of the Folger Street Snarlers.
“Wh...Javier?”
“Javier Dias, you stupid fuck!”
Gentile’s wariness didn’t seem to be assuaged much. “Javier, man, what the blast? Where’s my brother?”
“That’s what I want to tell you. Hurry up befor
e somebody sees me out here. There’s this creepy guy going around who says he’s a private detective, asking about me.”
“Yeah, yeah, that wanker called me, too!”
An indicator light went from red to green and with a click the door came unlocked.
Gentile had opened the door to apartment 12 on the second floor and Stake had stepped inside before the young man could take in that, in addition to being without his leather jacket, this Javier was several inches taller than he should be. Stake saw the pistol in Gentile’s other hand and went for it immediately, seizing his wrist and spinning him around in a move he’d learned in combat training, then slamming Gentile’s front against the closed door. Gentile cried out, tried to pull the trigger in an attempt to at least shoot Stake in the leg, but Stake bent his wrist back almost to the point of breaking and the pistol clattered to the floor. Stake drew his own weapon, the Darwin .55 that Mr. Jones and his men had considerately returned to him before leaving his apartment, and let Gentile feel its touch behind his ear.
“Wanker, huh?” Stake said.
“Javier, please, man, please,” Gentile blurted.
“Calm down,” Stake told him, no longer imitating Javier Dias’s voice as he recalled it from the police vid. “I’m not here to hurt you. I only want to ask some questions, then I’ll leave.”
“You’re not Javier.”
“And you’re not your brother, but you’ll do. Where’s your wife?”
“At work!”
“Good. I’m going to let you go, and you’re going to sit. You sit nice and I won’t have to be impolite anymore. Got it?”
Stake kicked the dropped pistol away, then stepped back to retrieve it and to let go of Theo Gentile. He turned around, furious and frightened and confused. He repeated, “You aren’t Javier.”
Deadstock: A Punktown Novel Page 20
