Deadstock: A Punktown Novel

by Jeffrey Thomas

  “That’s something of Fukuda’s down there,” Jones said. “It has to be.”

  Tableau finally dragged himself back to his feet. “He can tell us what it is when he gets here,” he panted. “Right before I shoot his blasting eyes out.”

  “No,” Yuki Fukuda bawled. “No...nooo...”

  ***

  Even as he called Krimson Tableau’s flesh ghost back to him, Dai-oo-ika couldn’t be sure if he had sent her out, or if her own absorbed essence were responsible. In his present state of flux, he was still something of an alien to himself. Whatever the case, he had modified one of the Blank People he had assimilated so as to render the girl’s form. But now that form came walking back to him, dragging behind its umbilicus – which was actually one of the tendrils that composed Dai-oo-ika’s face, much attenuated.

  The female figure crawled up the hillock of his great belly, then embraced him as her new father. And began to sink away into the primordial ooze of flesh from which she had come, in a kind of reverse birth. He broke off the end of his tentacle from her spine, and the appendage contracted to the same length as the rest.

  Another figure entered the room. One of the last remaining Blank People. This creature, too, approached its master so as to add its flesh to his own. Its contact as it crawled upon him was an irritating distraction, however, and he almost swatted his supplicant off him like an ant. He was being bombarded with too many confusing feelings, sensations. He had previously sensed the creature above him named Adrian Tableau, the one that his extended essence had just ventured forth to meet. And now he sensed another familiar presence up there. Not familiar to some ill-digested splinter of another creature’s mind, embedded in his own. No, this presence was familiar to him. But it was an echo from another, earlier life or incarnation. This echo was as distant and muffled as the voice of a child’s mother as heard from beyond the womb, a voice remembered by a mere fetus of the god-like being he was close to becoming.

  Still, the voice Dai-oo-ika had heard inside the muffling womb of his head haunted him deeply.

  “No,” that familiar voice had bawled. “No...nooo...”

  ***

  As the four of them made their way toward the smaller lobby structure that connected Steward Gardens’ two wings, they passed the last few mannequin beings walking in the opposite direction. On impulse, as the last creature approached him, Adrian Tableau lifted his handgun and fired three rounds in rapid succession into its rubbery gray head. The two clones were startled and Yuki yelped. The thing dropped at their feet and flopped in a dying convulsion.

  Tableau glared at his companions. “All right – come on!” With his pistol he motioned for them to continue onwards. “Fuck Fukuda’s toys.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN: REUNIONS

  James Fukuda parked his hovercar to the right of the building. His was the only vehicle in this lot, which curved around to the apartment complex’s rear – though he had seen one lone helicab perched atop the roof, as he had approached Steward Gardens along Beaumonde Street.

  It had been quite a while since he had entered these grounds, and their neglected state depressed him. Some small animal scurried ahead of him through a tangled underbrush that had once been a neat row of hedges, geometrically perfect in shape. He recalled the plans for these gardens as designed on computer, and as they had appeared when finished, back when Steward Gardens had had a future. In a way, it had never even had a past. It was a stillborn thing. Something that made him feel sadness, embarrassment, even loathing. Could Tableau really appreciate the humiliation of forcing him to come here and face this place again? Face who he truly was, and why he had locked that person away for the past four years, just as the doors of this place had been locked up?

  But they were not locked, he saw. The front doors were wide open, as was every window of both wings, gaping blackly like rows of eye sockets in a titanic skull. But stranger still was that every one of the bio-engineered “stewards” was missing from its nook between the apartments’ outer doors. When had that happened? Could thrill-seeking youths be responsible for spiriting away so many of them?

  The side path he had taken from the parking lot joined the main walkway to the front doors. When he came to the fountain he paused to glance back at the street, the traffic flowing past, cars containing people bent on their own destinations, troubled with their own problems. He did not know that when a gang girl named Nhu and a mutant named Haanz had recently died in this yard, none of the people speeding by who had happened to look over and glimpse their strange deaths had bothered to call the forcers, even with communication devices right before them on their consoles or around their wrists. This was Punktown, after all.

  Still watching the distant movement of the street, Fukuda felt that this was the last time he would ever see the world outside this building again. All along he hadn’t realized the true destiny for this place, but now he understood. He had built Steward Gardens like pharaohs had once built pyramids for themselves. As a tomb.

  He smiled bitterly when he recalled his brother John’s mockery, comparing James with his army of quasi-alive statues to the Chinese Emperor Qinshihuang, who had filled his tomb with an army of 8,000 terra-cotta warriors. No wonder the encephalon had never worked right, no wonder this place had been cursed, when John had agreed to help him but had done so without faith, without enthusiasm, without the support he should have shown for his twin brother.

  James shook his head. Shook away the anger. Hadn’t he left it in the past yet? Hadn’t he accepted that the anger should only be at himself? Couldn’t he learn that lesson at last, before he went inside to meet his punishment?

  Before he could will himself to go inside, however, someone came outside to meet him. Perhaps the person had been watching him from within, and grown impatient.

  Though he was dressed in a forcer’s uniform, and though the Blue War clones with their blue-mottled faces all looked the same, Fukuda knew from past experience that this was Adrian Tableau’s top security man, Mr. Jones. The one who had tortured him, and the one he had tortured in turn.

  Jones had a gun in one hand, and beckoned Fukuda with the other. “Mr. Fukuda,” he said calmly, “would you please come this way? We’ve been expecting you.”

  ***

  Once he hit Beaumonde Street, it hadn’t been hard to find. There was a name on the large plaque outside the structure, its letters deeply recessed into a slate-gray background, like an epitaph carved in a tomb: STEWARD GARDENS.

  Jeremy Stake noted that there was one vehicle parked in a lot to the right of the building, and a helicar on its roof. It didn’t surprise him that Fukuda had reached this place before he could, but he swore under his breath anyway. His hoverbike had been delayed by the snags in traffic, but he prayed that Fukuda’s larger vehicle had been delayed even worse, shortening the time between their arrivals.

  Stake overshot the building and continued on to an office block next door. He left his bike in its lot, thinning out as evening set in, and jogged back toward the apartment complex on foot. He entered its unruly grounds as warily as if he were creeping through a jungle of blue vegetation, bent low and darting from cover to cover. He moved in on the left flank, not wanting to come straight at the front doors. Every window stood open. That was odd, but it would grant him a stealthier entrance.

  As he got closer to the building, he glanced up at the darkening sky several times, expecting to see a helicab with the number 23 on its belly floating above him, but he had lost sight of it when he had entered Beaumonde Street. So, had he only imagined that it was following him? Paranoia, perhaps, but he couldn’t blame himself for that.

  The Darwin .55 was out of its holster and nosing ahead like an anxious bloodhound.

  When he reached the building itself, Stake squatted below the window of one of the apartments, poked his head up gingerly to peek into the unlit room beyond. Judging the room to be empty, he hauled himself over the sill. He was inside.

  The door leading out of the apar
tment and into the hallway was open. When Stake stepped into the murky corridor, he saw that every one of the inner doors for the apartments had come open, like the windows. Open like the eyelids of a corpse. He detected a distant shouting that the hollowed-out husk of the building caused to echo.

  He ran lightly in that direction.

  ***

  “Let me go to my daughter!” Fukuda exclaimed, as Jones held him back. Tears had filled his eyes at the sight of her, sitting in one of the front lobby’s chairs, again unbound but with one of Mr. Smithee’s hands resting heavily on her shoulder. “If you’ve hurt her in any way...” he began.

  Smithee grinned. “You’ll do what?”

  “Daddy,” Yuki was sobbing, holding out one hand to him. “Daddy.”

  “Did you check him for weapons?” asked Adrian Tableau.

  Jones nodded. “Nothing. Not even the syringe he injected me with last time.” Jones showed an unsettling smile to the man whose arm he gripped.

  “You injected me with it first, you fucking belf!” Fukuda snapped back at him. He saw a look come into Jones’s eyes like that of a leopard before it springs onto its prey, but he shifted his anger to his business rival. “I’ll tell you what I told your toy soldiers the last time, Tableau. I had nothing to do with your daughter’s disappearance! I hired a man to look for Yuki’s kawaii-doll, as I’m sure these thugs have told you. And I admit my investigator did track your daughter down to an apartment in Subtown, on Folger Street. The apartment of her boyfriend, named Brat Gentile. He was the last person to see her, not me. They slept together, his brother told my man, and when he woke up your daughter had disappeared.”

  Adrian Tableau came close to Fukuda, his lower jaw thrust forward. “I’ve heard this boyfriend dung before. If my daughter had a boyfriend I’d have found him by now. And even if she did, who’s to say you didn’t snatch her as soon as she left this alleged Subtown apartment? Or are you suggesting this boyfriend did something to her?”

  “You ask him about it! He’s gone missing now, too, so he’s the one you need to be looking into.”

  “Oh, I’ll look into it, all right. But right now I’m looking into you.”

  “I’ll talk to you all you want, but you have to let Yuki go. She’s a child! She’s innocent!”

  “A child, like my Krimson?” Tableau suddenly bellowed, spittle flying in the other man’s face. “An innocent, like my daughter? Oh, we can’t let anything bad happen to your daughter, can we?” Tableau looked past Fukuda toward Smithee, gave a barely perceptible nod. Fukuda turned his head to see Smithee drop down into a crouch beside the weeping teenager. He removed the shiny black shoe from her right foot, as gently as a shoe salesman. He then pinched the edge of her navy blue knee sock, and began rolling it down, exposing her hard youthful calf.

  “Stop it! Stop it, you fuck!” Fukuda roared, trying to throw himself at the man, but Jones pulled him back and now took hold of his other arm as well, wrenching them both behind him.

  “Don’t,” Yuki cried, but she only watched helplessly as Mr. Smithee pulled the balled-up sock off her foot.

  “Mm,” Smithee said, running one finger along her wrinkly sole as if to tickle her. “Cute.” Next he wiggled each toe, starting with the biggest. “This little piggy went to market. This little piggy went home.” When he came to the last and tiniest toe, he didn’t let go, held it by its plump end. From his holster he drew his pistol, which he pointed at the base of the toe, the muzzle brushing cold against her skin.

  “No, no, no, no!” Fukuda screamed.

  “Oh, it won’t bleed much,” Smithee assured him. “The beam will cauterize the wound. But her foot won’t be so pretty afterwards, I’m afraid. Especially if the next little piggy goes to market. And the next. And the next.”

  “Please,” Yuki begged, “why don’t you try to talk to Krimson on a Ouija phone? Why don’t you just ask her what happened?”

  “Yes, yes, do that!” Fukuda blubbered. He wished he hadn’t stomped Yuki’s phone to pieces after all. Wished he had it in his jacket pocket right now.

  “I’m not here to play with blasting toys!”

  “I know you don’t want to try that approach, because then it means she’s dead. But if she is dead then you’ll want to know why, and you could hear that from her own lips!”

  “Her own lips? Her own ectoplasm, you mean? Listen to you, Fukuda. And here I thought you were a man of science.”

  “I was skeptical about them before, too, but...”

  “Enough about the damn séance phones or whatever the blast they call them!” Tableau began to pace. They all waited, watching him. When he faced Fukuda again, he said, “Krimson is dead; I have no doubt about that now. I saw her ghost a little while ago, in fact, right here in this building. It was some kind of belf thing with no face. But it was her. Her spirit was inside it – I felt it. Now I think it’s time for you to explain that to me.”

  “Explain? I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “Your brother owned this place, correct? That’s what your kid told us.”

  “Yes, but...” Fukuda broke off, and then he opened his mouth and nodded. “Oh, wait. What you saw, it wasn’t your daughter. I designed a whole crew of belfs for these apartments. They were to be servants and bodyguards. Some of them must still be around. They look like the thing you describe. Gray, with no real face. That’s what you saw, not your daughter.”

  “Yeah, yeah, we saw those things. This one was different. And I heard my daughter’s voice up here!” He tapped his temple with his fingers.

  “You’re distraught. You imagined it. You have to calm down and think rationally, Tableau! What you’re doing here is not only dangerous to me and my daughter; it’s dangerous to you! Look, you haven’t hurt either of us yet. I swear to you, I won’t tell a soul that you took us here. Why don’t you go to the forcers and tell them your suspicions about me? Let them handle this, as you should have from the start. They can give me truth scans, memory scans, I’ll consent to anything. They’ll prove to you that I’m innocent! And if I’m not innocent, then they’ll punish me, won’t they? I’ll go with you willingly – right now!”

  “Forcers,” Tableau snorted. “I did a little time as a kid. I’ve had my share of forcers. And I know too well that truth scan or no truth scan, if you put a little padding in a forcer’s wallet he’ll tell me your Grandma built a time machine and assassinated what’s-his-face, James F. Kennedy.”

  Mr. Jones spun around, eyes hardened. He had released one of Fukuda’s arms in order to pull his beam gun out of its holster. The others all looked at him and saw that he was facing the open front doors. Upon entering the lobby they had tried to close them, but the keyboard hadn’t responded. The building’s power system was apparently out of joint.

  “What?” Tableau asked.

  “I thought I heard something out there,” Jones said in a low, ominous voice. He kept Fukuda close to him, in case he needed him as a hostage. Or a shield.

  Tableau glared at Fukuda again. “You did come alone, didn’t you? Because I’d hate to have to tell my man Mr. Smithee, there, to slice off your little girl’s nose instead of her toes.”

  “I came alone, I did, I swear.”

  Because the clone called Smithee held a gun against Yuki’s flesh, Jeremy Stake had intended to shoot him first. But it was Adrian Tableau whose eyes abruptly turned in his direction. Adrian Tableau who spotted Stake at the far end of the gloomy lobby, by the entrance to the rear hallway of A-Wing.

  “The fuck you did!” Tableau snarled, swinging his gun around to point across the room.

  Stake’s gun was already pointed.

  Tableau was a veteran of the streets. But Stake had also, in his way, been a soldier of the streets before becoming a soldier in another dimension. Their guns seemed to fire simultaneously, though the hired detective actually got his shots off first.

  Two of the Darwin’s solid .55 slugs struck Tableau in the head; one through his left eye and out
the back of his skull, the other crushing his nose and deflecting downward to emerge through his lower jaw. Virtually faceless, he still managed to squeeze off one last wild shot into the ceiling as he crumpled to the lobby floor.

  Smithee had maintained his crouch beside Yuki, and in fact she sat between him and the gunman. He hunkered down even more, but lifted his pistol from her foot and began firing across the room.

  Stake had started to duck back around the corner of the hallway entrance, but the clone had had his military training before he was even out of his nutrient bath. One of the ray bolts hit the detective in the lower left abdomen and went straight through his body like the solid shaft of a spear. Stake fell before he could make it to the entrance, going down hard on his back. He growled at the searing pain, but had still managed to hold onto his pistol.

  Smithee had tracked Stake’s falling body with his gun, but before he could fire more ray bolts a bare foot stomped him hard in the temple. In his squatting position, the blow actually sent him off balance and knocked him onto his side – dazed despite the genetically engineered thickness of his skull.

  “Back off, Stake!” Jones yelled across the lobby, jabbing his own handgun’s barrel into James Fukuda’s ear.

  Mr. Smithee lifted his head, quickly regaining his senses, and his eyes blazed up at Yuki Fukuda. “Bitch!” he hissed, moving his gun to aim at her again. But not at her foot this time.

  At her face, glistening with tears.

  “Please,” Yuki sobbed, “don’t!”

  ***

  Dai-oo-ika had been flexing new muscles, reaching out with all the new flesh he had nourished himself on. Not the many pairs of gray arms; those were no more. He was reaching out with all of his body at once. He had found he could make his entire substance soft or firm at will. He could flow almost like a fluid, boneless, and then go solid as stone. He extended himself in all directions simultaneously, until no one room of the building’s basement contained him. He now filled every room, like a flood of concrete that had been pumped in and then hardened. But he was not something to fit a mold, to be contained. This was just an eggshell. Soon he would reach out beyond its fragile barriers, shatter and emerge from it. A temporary coffin beneath the earth, from which he would arise, reborn, as his worshipers had predicted.