“All right. Uh, what about number three, downstairs?”
“We’ll have Jones talk to him and send him away, when he wakes from his nap.” Stake knelt down and used Jones’s own manacles to cuff his wrists behind his back. He then patted him down and took two pistols and a switchblade knife off him. “Jeesh,” he said to himself. “Fucking Clone Ranger.” He rose to face Fukuda again.
“I can’t say you didn’t warn me that Tableau might make a move, but I guess I still couldn’t believe he’d go this far.”
“Look, Mr. Fukuda, I told you I talked to the brother of Krimson’s boyfriend. I told you the boyfriend didn’t know where she went off to. But I didn’t tell you all of it, maybe because it sounds crazy.” Stake then went on to relate the circumstances of Krimson Tableau’s disappearance from the Gentile brothers’ Subtown apartment. All the personal belongings, clothing included, she had left behind. Finally, he described the ventilation grille that had been bent open behind the bed where Krimson had been resting with her lover.
Fukuda furrowed his brow. “I don’t see where you’re going with this.”
“Now we know for certain that Krimson made off with the doll initially, yes. But later, I’m thinking the doll made off with her, in a way.”
“What?”
“I think the doll escaped through that air duct on its own, after it did something to Krimson while she slept right there beside Brat Gentile.”
“Did something? Did what – eat her?”
“Who knows? How does that thing feed, anyway? Like an ameba?”
“What are you talking about? It gets what little nourishment it needs through photosynthesis. That doll could hardly consume a human being, then climb down from the bed, tear open an air vent, crawl away God knows where. None of that. The best it can do is wriggle and squirm a little! You met Yuki’s friend Maria, remember? And you saw her kawaii-doll, Stellar. I created that doll, too. Dai-oo-ika is no more advanced a life form than that! A slug would be more active – and sentient.”
“But Dai-oo-ika wasn’t made in the same way Stellar was, isn’t that right? You used a different approach for him, didn’t you? Something sort of radical?”
Fukuda became wary. “What do you mean?”
“Hey, look over there, Mr. Fukuda!” Stake barked. “There’s a dead man soaking his twelve pints into your nice expensive love seat! I did that, and now I can expect Adrian Tableau to make my life interesting. I guess you didn’t think I needed to know about it before, and I guess I didn’t think so either, but now I need you to tell me everything! Dai-oo-ika...you created him with information you inherited when you bought up Alvine Products, didn’t you?”
Fukuda touched his lower lip, split by Jones’s elbow, and studied the blood on his fingertips. “Even if I get Dai-oo-ika back, I don’t dare return him to Yuki as a harmless toy. If I’d known from the start the danger I might have placed her in...”
“So it’s true, then. And it wasn’t just about your poor sad daughter, or even about a costly kawaii-doll. You can’t let Tableau or anyone else get their hands on your special research.”
Fukuda lifted his head and smiled at the detective with something like defiance. “If I can believe what you’re saying, then maybe he even did something to Tableau’s daughter out of anger. Knowing she’d taken him from Yuki.” He almost sounded proud of the creature for that. His surprising prodigy.
“I can’t believe you’d be so irresponsible as to use that fanatical cult’s data to make a toy for your child.”
“It was an experiment! But I didn’t expect anything extreme to happen. The designer I put in charge of the project didn’t anticipate any danger, either.”
“I thought you were supposed to be the practical brother, and it was James who had the crazy schemes.”
“James wasn’t crazy!” Fukuda said. “Just more creative than me. More daring.”
“Well, being daring and being reckless are two different things. Your best bet, if we can even hope to catch Dai-oo-ika now in this whole blasting city, is to just destroy him.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First, as before, we find him. Whether he walked away on his own or not.”
“I’d like to talk to your designer. Just on the small chance that he might come up with something useful in tracking the thing down.”
“His name is Pablo Fujiwara. He used to work for Alvine Products, in fact.”
“Lovely.”
***
Stake and two of the security crew from Fukuda Bioforms rode down in the elevator with Mr. Jones. Knowing the martial training Jones had been instilled with from his conception, Stake kept the manacles on him and his Darwin .55 leveled at his back. Shortly after Jones had awakened, Stake had instructed him to call the third Blue War clone and tell him to go fetch their vehicle and wait outside. And to be sure not to try anything stupid when their party arrived in the lobby. Stake had also inquired about the apartment complex’s guard. Jones had related that the man was drugged unconscious, but basically unharmed, in the security office. Fukuda had then said he would offer the security man some financial persuasion for not forwarding this whole matter to the law.
“What are you going to do about Mr. Doe?” Jones asked now, as they descended.
“I took your two guns. One of them has plasma bullets, I see. So I’m going to melt him.”
“You’d be wise to melt yourself, too, because that’s the only way you’re going to be able to escape me, Corporal Stake.”
“Just doing my job, Mr. Jones. Like you.”
“My job will be done when your skull is cracking between my palms. I should have killed you at your flat, but I guess I got all soft because you were a vet. We’re all permitted the occasional lapse in judgment, right?”
“I suppose.”
“And your lapse of judgment is letting me live, now.”
“Yeah? Time will tell.”
The elevator reached the ground floor, and Fukuda’s three men watched the clone cross to the front doors, looking as dignified as he could in his pricey suit and bowler hat, despite his wrists being cuffed behind his back and the incongruous coloration of his flesh. At the doors, he turned to give Stake a nod that was not polite, not friendly. It was an assurance. We will conclude this business another day.
Stake nodded back at him.
TWENTY-TWO: THE CONVERTED
The trash zapper behind Steward Gardens gave the appearance of sinking into the drifts of autumn leaves that were ever accumulating as winter inched nearer like a glacier. The dead pig-hens heaped on the ground nearby were utterly buried now, as if under piles of another species of dead creature. No new pig-hens came to roost on the heliport atop the building’s roof. By now they had learned that it was not safe for them; dangerous things might appear, fast and predatory. The huffing, snorting sounds their little tapir snouts made were no longer heard. Just distant traffic surging and beeping, and the leaves rustling whenever a gust of breeze stirred them. But presently there came a noise to break that calm. It was a metallic squealing sound; loud, rasping, screeching. The two retracted mechanical arms of the zapper had unfolded and were stretching upwards toward the overcast sun. Straining, their talons spread wide, as if to tear a hole in the sky and reveal another dimension lurking beyond its fabric. As if to tear the veil off the face of a god.
In the basement of Steward Gardens, the huge tank in which fermented the bacteria-based generic soup that supplied the building’s food fabricators began to rumble and shudder. From every fabricator in every apartment came loud liquid belches, and then a sudsy and foul black muck was disgorged, running across marble counter tops to plop onto the kitchenettes’ floors. The rotting substance was like the many advancing pseudopods of one vast, amorphous organism.
As Mira Cello had told Javier Dias, on the third floor of A-Wing there was a little movie theater. For four years it had been languishing in darkness, but at last its wall-sized vidtank flickered to life. At first, the holographic
screen only contained static, like a raging sandstorm trapped inside an aquarium. Then, fragmentary images started to take shape from the storm. These images coalesced into 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, all in one voice of adoration.
The door to the theater opened, letting in a bit more light. A dark figure walked down to the front row, and stiffly took a seat. Following closely came a second figure, which seated itself beside the first. Another figure. Another. The next row began to be filled.
Soon, every seat in the theater was filled with an identical gray figure that gazed upon the screen raptly, in spite of its lack of eyes.
***
Dai-oo-ika had grown impatient with the irritating busywork of the nanomites; it was redundant for the most part, anyway. So he commanded them all to file through his swelling body to that special cabinet where he stored inorganic trash, and crawl back inside Dolly’s syringe. However, they couldn’t find their way into the device again, so he had them gather in one of her compacted shoes instead. There he ordered them to die, which they obediently did.
But the wires in his body he liked. The wires linked him with the building’s systems, so that it became an extension of his body like a protective exoskeleton. The wires even linked him with the net. He tested the net’s waters with curiosity, sent his thoughts out like spiders along the invisible strands of its web. He watched a man and woman in a naked tangle on their bed, gazing at them through the cyclopean eye of their computer screen. Through another such window he saw a woman seated at her computer but sobbing into her hands; she, too, didn’t notice him staring at her. Sad, desperate, frail little creatures, these. Though the woman’s tears made him feel a pang for his mournful child mother.
There was one man seated at his keyboard who did look directly into Dai-oo-ika’s face on the screen. The man screamed, fell back from his chair, staggered to the door. But there he stopped. And when he turned slowly around again, he was smiling and his burned-shut eyes oozed mercury tears.
There would be more time later for such exploration, experimentation. Maybe he would even be able to extend his consciousness along multiple – countless – strands of the web simultaneously, instead of only one at a time. Like a god who can hear the prayers of millions at once.
For now, he had his current flock of new followers to finish converting. Before he converted them in another way, in his own unholy communion.
***
The five of them had their guns in their hands. Satin checked the six plasma capsules in the cylinder of his cannon-like Decimator .220. Even Mira held Brat’s gun, which Javier had given her. Javier had succeeded in awakening her, but knelt down low beside her with an arm around her waist, as if to comfort a child roused from troubling dreams.
“You okay there, baby?” he whispered.
“Aside from a killer headache. I think I need a foot rub.”
“Ha. Next time we’re alone,” he told her. “And nice guy that I am, I’ll rub everything else, too.”
“I bet you didn’t do that to your Mom.”
Javier returned his eyes to the floor indicator, his demeanor becoming serious once more as the elevator descended for a final time toward the basement. “Be ready to move,” he told the others. “Ready, now.”
The cabin touched down. This time, they did not jab the keypad again to send it back toward the upper levels. This time, they waited for the door to automatically slide open.
They had already noted that there were no hands slapping or pounding against the outer security door, but when it slid open they were too surprised – and too wary – to feel real relief that there were no Blank People outside the door waiting for them.
Javier emerged first, whipping his gun this way and that, followed by Satin. Up and down the hallway, there were none of the bio-engineered entities to be seen. Patryk moved quickly to the door to the basement proper, but Mira put a hand on his arm before he could hit the button to open it. She looked to Javier and whispered, “It knows we’re out here.”
“But what is it, Mira? The Blanks?”
“No. Something else.”
“The brainframe?”
“I...yes. But something more. I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“You called it ‘Outsider’ before, when you were in your trance.”
She scrunched up her face. “I don’t remember.”
“We have to go,” Barbie cut in, looking around wildly with her multiple sets of eyes. “Before they come back.”
Javier held Mira’s nervous gaze, but he nodded to Patryk. “Do it.”
There was a beep, the red status button on the control strip turned green, the metal door slid open in its grooves, but this time no gray arms shot out at them to drag them inside. There was only silence beyond. And an odd, unpleasant smell, almost rotten but almost like burning plastic.
Again, Javier led the way, followed by Mira and Barbie, with Satin and Patryk bringing up the rear. Patryk closed and locked the door after them.
“Where did they all go?” Satin hissed to Patryk.
They crept through a room with metal workbenches along the walls, maintenance tools hanging from racks above them. Machinery hummed softly, and the brightness of overhead emergency lights only made the shadowy areas seem darker by contrast. Across the room gaped a doorway like the entrance to a cavern. Was there a kind of deep, liquid burbling coming from in there? Maybe the tank that supplied the raw material to the apartments’ food fabricators, because that foul rotting smell was becoming stronger.
Mira took Javier by the arm to stop him. “We should go back. Go out the front door.”
“But aren’t all the Blanks still up there?”
She seemed to stare off into the ether itself. “Yes...yes. I can sense them clearly, because they’re all in one place. But they aren’t moving.”
“Because they’re waiting up there to ambush us,” Satin said. “Come on, come on, we can’t risk it!”
“We’re close now,” Patryk told them. “The maintenance chute is in the room just beyond this one. We get through that, and we hit the town sewer system.”
“Mira,” Barbie said, “that big brain in there is messing up your thoughts. It’s glitched. Just try to shut it out!”
Mira glanced at the black maw of the doorway, and back to Javier. She tried on a tremulous smile. “Okay. Okay. Let’s just do this.”
Javier touched her hair, then turned toward the doorway.
There was only a single emergency light that had not extinguished in the largish room beyond, but even that one was flickering. The only steady light came from banks of monitors, these showing a tempest of static through which a city skyline struggled to appear. The pale, bluish glow of these screens shone weakly on a glistening dark hulk that appeared to dominate the center of the room. The stench emanated from it, and Barbie cupped a hand over one of her faces’ nose and mouth but the others had to suffer. “What is that, there?” her dual voices whispered in different tones.
Another rumbling gurgle. Then the slithering rustle of movement, as if an immense anaconda had just shifted its coils across each other. Javier thrust out an arm to bar the others.
“It’s something alive,” he hissed.
Patryk had been wearing the goggles his father had once used in his work, pushed up on his head, and as soon as they’d entered the grotto of a room he had slipped them down over his eyes and adjusted them for night vision. As he brought up the rear, only he could clearly see the mountain of flesh that sat at the center of the room.
“Jesus Christ,” he said.
Only he saw the faceless head turn slightly at the sound of his voice. The sprawling, swollen creat
ure withdrew part of its consciousness from the teaching of its acolytes. From its plucking at the strands of the net. It focused on these tiny intruders. Without eyes, with its mass of silver and black tentacles swarming, it looked directly at Patryk specifically.
He screamed.
Javier swung his gun up and fired blindly, into the heart of the silhouette. “Run! Run! Run!” he shouted. “Go around it! Behind it! Go, go, go!”
Satin caught Patryk under one prosthetic arm and dragged him along, extending the other arm to launch a plasma capsule from his revolver. He missed what he took to be the thing’s head, the corrosive green plasma spreading over some equipment behind the creature. Sparks sputtered into the air and a row of monitors went out. Abruptly, the vague cityscape vanished from every screen, replaced by static alone. What the green incandescence of the plasma might have illuminated somewhat, the black smoke from melting gear only further obscured. Satin kept moving, afraid to fire again lest he hit Javier or Mira in the darkness and the pandemonium. The leader of the Folger Street Snarlers was holding off in front of the vague creature and blasting shot after shot to cover their escape.
Javier pushed Mira to run after Barbie and Satin. “Hurry, baby! Go!”
His gun clicked empty at last.
At the rear wall, behind the mountain of flesh, Barbie found the maintenance chute already unblocked for them. Enough light from the utilities tunnel beyond shone through to make the way clear. Just before she scampered through on hands and knees, wheezing from exertion and fear, she glanced over her shoulder and saw the back of the behemoth in the pallid radiance from the open hatchway. She saw two projections that might have been ribbed fins like the dorsal fin of a sailfish. Or wings. If the latter, they were far too small and fragile to ever lift such a dinosaur in flight. But they frightened her. They made her think that what she was seeing was a demon.
Deadstock: A Punktown Novel Page 23
